Courtesy of Gweilo Diaries, this shows us all that the post-SARS Chinese have wised up and now possess the maturity and compassion to deal with its ticking time bomb, the ballooning AIDS crisis.

Below is a cut and paste of Conrad’s entire post.

Mainland Government Infects, Robs, Attacks and Arrests AIDS Sufferers

Chinese police, accompanied by clubwielding “hired thugs”, raided the AIDS stricken village of Xiongqiao in Henan province, destroying property and beating up and arresting villagers.

Up to a million rural residents are believed to have contracted HIV after selling blood in unsanitary government-approved blood stations in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s.

The attack, which happened at 23:00on June 22, is the most extreme known case in central China’s Henan province of a police crackdown on farmers, who are devastated by an Aids outbreak and are demanding more government help.

Some farmers also refused to turn over portions of their harvest as required.

A great review of Coulter’s latest screed by a neocon, no less. Sample:

In Coulter’s world, there are two types of people: conservatives and liberals. These aren’t groups of people with competing ideas. They are the repositories of good and evil. There are no distinctions among conservatives or among liberals. To admit the complexity of political discourse would immediately require Coulter to think, explain, argue. But why bother when you can earn millions insulting?

I wasn’t able to web surf in the hospital, so I missed this post by Orcinus, the most intelligent and articulate summary you can find on the breadth and audacity of George W’s lies, documented and incontrovertible. Just read it. Why haven’t these sins been mapped out this clearly in the major media?

Alarming article in Time Asia on just how precarious Spore’s economic situation is. Especially disconcerting is the trend, still in its infancy but bound to pick up speed, of multinationals’ sidestepping Singapore and moving their headquarters straight to Shanghai.

The piece also highlights the city-state’s increasing liberalism and an easing up of the oppressive laws that for years characterized it. This is not due to any new-found enlightenment, the article says, but rather is a somewhat desperate move on the government’s part to do absolutely anything and everything it can to attract and keep foreign firms and the jobs and spending that come with them.

Speaking from the front lines, I can safely say that everything it says is true.

I expected to come home from the hospital yesterday, but the pain was just too acute. Lucky for me, while there I had this state-of-the-art morphine dispenser; whenever the pain made me want to scream, I just pushed a little button. At that point, the little machine started to make this grinding noise for about a minute — it was pumping extra morphine through a catheter in my neck. About five minutes later, my hands would go numb and soon the excruciating pain vanished, and I’d luxuriate in a gentle, weightless drowsiness.

Unfortunately, they wouldn’t let me take this gadget home with me as a souvenir. So now when the pain sets in, I have to take these opiate capsules and a bunch of other tablets and wait as long as 20 minutes for the relief to come. It’s so 20th century.

The food was good, the hospital was preternaturally clean and efficient, and all in all it wasn’t as awful as I feared. Yes, the day after the operation, as the anesthesia wore off it got pretty intense, but seriously, that morphine machine kept me content.

I did a lot of reading in the hospital. I finished a book called Grass Soup, a diary of a Cultural Revolution prisoner whose staple food for years and years is….grass soup, of course. Witty, downright funny at times (in its insanity), and utterly tragic.

I also made my way through the first 200 pages of Wild Swans, a 700-page family history of a three generations of a Chinese family, spanning from around 1910 to the Tiananmen Square massacre.

I have been spellbound by this amazingly personal account of how one of the world’s greatest nations was slowly and deliberately suffocated to the point of being altogether brain-dead. It really is as chilling, as bizarre and surreal as the worst nightmares conjured up by Asimov and Orwell…. More when I feel better.

I’m off to the hospital. Hopefully by the weekend I’ll be up to blogging (though I sincerely doubt it). Wish me luck!

Only 3 more hours before I go to the hospital. I have to admit I am getting extremely nervous, just a little short of being totally freaked out. It’s disconcerting to know I’ll be wearing a sling for the next month or so, and that the coming week will be exceptionally unenjoyable. Also, the doctor tells me the operation is unsuccessful in about 5 out of of every 100 cases. Will I be one of the lucky five?

I am taking a stack of books with me but that may be unrealistic. I think with all the drugs I’ll probably just want to gape at the television all day. I have to stay there for three nights, maybe longer depending on how I feel. It’s hard for me to think about anything else, so pardon me for whining about it.

…to me. Another year older and much deeper in debt. Feel free to wire me cash.

Links are working again.

I just read Spinsanity’s magnificent debunking of Ann Coulter’s new screed, Treason, in which she warns us on the very first page, “Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy. This is their essence.” And it’s all downhill from there.

I can’t urge you strongly enough to read this shocking, witty, supremely insightful article. It surgically dissects Coulter’s argument, not in terms of ideas but simply in terms of misuse of quotes and bold-faced lies. At times it’s downright hilarious:

[Quoting Coulter] “Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America’s self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant. Fifty years of treason hasn’t slowed them down.”

Of course, Coulter must engage in a complicated set of rhetorical tricks to accuse liberals of “fifty years of treason” (in a 2001 column, it was only “twenty years of treason” — did inflation set in?).

If you don’t know Spinsanity, be sure to check it out. It is the only site I know totally dedicated to identifying and unravelling misleading media spin, be it from the left or the right. They go after all the spinmeisters with merciless honesty, and their analyses are cited by intelligent bloggers on all sides, from Andrew Sullivan to Orcinus to me.