Well I never did nothin' But I was framed

Here at the Riddled Designer Drencrom Distillery we adhere slavishly to the principle of "Sticking to the point" and "Avoiding irrelevant digressions" and "Not enticing one's mind from another subject of almost equal importance while wandering unchecked through a garden of bright images". That is why our recent coverage of "journal-shaped jizzmops edited by Marco Ruggiero" (a microcosm of the wider world of parasitical and predatory publishing) was tightly circumscribed. Much potential material was rejected; any number of scenes and out-takes tumbled on the cutting-room floor, look-a-likes fell on the cutting room door...
SORRY we're getting some interference from the Radio Riddled Goth Hour Broadcast, too much energy leakage into the sidelobes again. Where was I?

Out-takes. Rejectamenta.

Ah yes. It is time to return to those disjecta membra. Back down the rabbit-hole!

Rabbit-hole, with two bunnies
playing Invisible Cats-Cradle

Behold this compendium of nescience from Lauer and Shelton -- contributing to the income stream of Madridge Journal of Epidemiology -- from which we learn that epidemic diseases in African are really the fault of epidemiologists. It is absolutely condamine fishsticks mandible:

Fortunately we are unbending and adamantine in focus so we will not be distracted by co-author Joan Shenton's academic credentials, notable for her mockumentary movies... in particular "Sacrificial Virgins", as promoted on official Russian conspiracy TV, all about the satanic evil disguised as a vaccine for Papilloma Virus.

Equally calenture fritillary is this exercise in Ebola denialism from David Crowe, deposited in the bottomless honeybucket of the Journal of Ruggiero Studies American Journal of Immunology (which is actually based in UAE and relies on human stupidity to enrich its owner):

Artist's impression

Had it been a prize-winning marrow or the Empress of Blandings herself, Mr Crowe could not have thought more highly of his academic fruit and its paid-for-publication by a lowlife Gulf-State grifter. He could be found at the "Rethinking AIDS" Faceborg page, holding it aloft for admiration... admitting in the process that it was really a trollish provocation, intended to goad experts in Ebola prevention into taking him seriously enough to respond. Experts were warned; didn't respond.

All this is a gradual circuitous approach to a question which has been bandied around the Riddled office lately (for values of "office" that include "The Wigglesworth Lounge at the Old Entomologist"), i.e. "Whatever happened to the hard core of 'HIV ¹ AIDS' retrovirus rejectionists?" Among these nay-sayers we number David Crowe, erstwhile cellphone salesman and now President of the "Rethinking AIDS" lobby-group; Lauer and Shenton; and Robert Leppo, Libertarian venture capitalist and sugar-daddy to the group.

Tragedies of Global Warning: Rabbit-
holes flooded by rising sea levels

Our man Marco Ruggiero is a valued member of the Movement; this is why his co-members gravitate towards the mockademic journals he helms, much as [insert the distasteful simile of your choice]. Indeed, he was tergiversating about the etiology of AIDS long before he discovered the greater profitability of curing cancer with blood extracts and Magic Yoghurt -- the gig that brought him to the attention of Riddled. However, Ruggiero is too Post-Modern and above-the-fray to say anything vulgar or unambiguous, preferring to Just Ask Questions. In the absence of forceful espousal of principles, it may be that the Movement embraces him in the belief that his name confers lustre and academic credibility. We should not confuse him with the trained and highly-accomplished flea of the Keats-&-Chapman joke.

Scholarly analyses of the whole AIDS-Denial social phenomenon (like Nattrass 2012) have noted the role within it of "Living Icons"... temptation-defying personifications and paragons of renunciation, Jeanne-D'Arc-like martyrs-in-the-making... diagnosed as HIV+, they eschew antiretroviral drugs to prove that the presence of HIV is not the actual cause of AIDS (or that the diagnostic tests are meaningless). The "Living Icon" ideal bears more than a small resemblance to the Perfecti of the Cathars. Anyways... one of the challenges for the Movement -- contributing to its Relevance Deficiency problem -- is the non-livingness of its Living Icons.

Mechanisms of Crank Magnetism

So the answer to the "What happened to?" question is that denialists are broadening their ambit to wider gyres of germ-theory denial. Such are the inexorable workings of Crank Magnetism (it is possible in theory to allow oneself a single domain of paranoid ideation while remaining otherwise reality-based, but this seldom happens). AIDS denial was a gateway to the more general Alt-Med Antivax worldview, populated with concealed truths and genocidal conspiracies. Our friends have been seeking other viruses and bacteria to classify as fabrications of the Medical / Pharma complex (either the link to a disease, or the infectious agent itself): dreamed up to terrify the masses into a state of sleeping-sheeple vaccine compliance. Hence the headline-chasing Ebola denials.

Scary virus [R. Crumb]

So the band got together again last year for a reunion tour: Fiala and Duesberg -- familar from the Rethinking-AIDS dramatis personae -- featured in Shenton's straight-to-Youtuba film-shaped exercise in anti-Gardasil grifting. Crowe pimped it through FaceBorg. Leppo, source of funding for previous AIDS-related mockumentaries, contributed here as well.

One can only speculate whether the sexual-transmission associations of AIDS and HPV provided the link from one to the other. Even the title "Sacrificial Virgins" sticks to the rhetorical strategies of the Movement, with the emphasis on Living Icon embodiments and on purity sullied by medical interventions.

Oglaf: Always relevant

To be fair to David Crowe, he was trying to reductio his germ-theory-denial absurdum At A Time When It Was Neither Profitable Nor Popular. Way back in 2007 he was already advancing the theory that Poliovirus was framed, and that the disease known as "polio" is really a form of DDT poisoning, and if Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit.

Most people believe that every disease on the following list has an infectious cause:
* HIV/AIDS
* SARS
* West Nile
* Mad Cow, CJD and other Spongiform Encephalopathies
* Foot and Mouth
* Hepatitis C
* Polio
* Avian Flu
* the 1918 ‘Spanish’ Flu
There is considerable scientific evidence that these disease do not just have non-infectious co-factors, but that they are almost entirely non-infectious.

He has since progressed to a conviction that bacteria are equally benign, and that Yersinia pestis could not possibly be responsible for outbreaks of bubonic plague (because medieval and Renaissance physicians had no idea about Y. pestis, offering all manner of weird explanation instead). Therefore the "Black Death" was in fact Pellagra. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP; here is Crowe's presentation to the "Avaricious Viral Paradigms" conference a few months ago.



No-one from the Riddled staff were able to attend so we cannot report on the fascinating and not-at-all scamladen program, with such presentations as

10:00 Dr. Tal Schaller – “How wholistic medicine has helped patients to heal and free themselves of AIDS myths” (no slides)
15:30 Mohammed Aziz – “Fear of the Light: How vitamin D science supports HIV/AIDS scepticism”
16:30 Dr. Marco Ruggiero – “Challenging Viral Paradigms”

I like to think that Vers-Pont-du-Gard was chosen as the venue for this 2018 Conference as a homage to the Cathars.

Uncle Smut, you forgot to tell
the Keats-and-Chapman joke.

Oh very well. Nag nag nag.

[H/ts to Dora and Snout, who were following this stuff right from the start]

UPDATE: Historians of Pagga from the Past should consult Snout's 2009 post, dating back to the first Rethinking-AIDS conference, It involved the Perth Group ("Perthites" for short) of harder-line denialists, the Bolsheviks to Crowe's Mensheviks, who felt disinvited to the 2009 Conference, or at least invited with insufficient enthusiasm. They were unhappy with Crowe for leaving open the possibility that "HIV" is an extant entity (rather than a laboratory artefact, or a fraudulent hoax), and things escalated quickly.

Much of the material was made public by a Perthite by the name of Brink, who had sworn to tear down the pillars of the temple and burn down the Movement (and sing comic songs on the ruins) if Crowe persisted in his counter-revolutionary compromises. Brink's underlying issue with the R-AIDS crowd was their failure to recognise his superior knowledge and skill in every field of endeavour.