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**ProudPersian** · 07-14-2005, 03:25 PM

Another 2500 years or another 2500000000000 years, Iran will not change. It doesn't matter whether his name is Mohammad and the Arabs, Mohammad Reza Shah, or Ayatollah Khomeini, they all have worked to destroy our Iranian culture and constrict our nation. Look Iran is the birth place of Algebra (the arabs like to take credit for this), many other branches of math, the first battery, zoroastrianism, baha'i faith, and many sciences. Iran has more poets and carpets than the rest of the world combined. Iran is where great leaders like Kuroush and Dariush emerged. Leaders who first minted coins, who set up banks, built the first Suez Canal which the Egyptians never could. AND LOOK WHERE IRAN IS TODAY!!
As Bill Gates said, if the operating system is inefficent then the whole system will not function properly, not matter how good it is. If Iran could unite under a strong, secular and nationalist leader it could rebuild itself. Like I always say, if the will of an entire natin is there, nothing will stop them from prospering. BUt AIDS is exactly why Iran never has prospered, Iranians deny it. Most Iranians I talk to say that the Islamic Republic is only a phase in the history of Iran. I wonder am I the only one who wants to change Iran.
And whats with all the BS around with, Persians, Azeris, Armenians, Kurds, Gilanis, Gilakis, Qashqai's and so on. These ethnic groups emerged later in Iranian history, mainly as a result of the alienation caused by invaders. At heart we are all Iranians, descended from the Aryans of ancient Iran. If we let all this sectionalism split Iran up, what will we have left?

**Rasputin** · 07-14-2005, 04:59 PM

ProudPersian said : As Bill Gates said, if the operating system is inefficent then the whole system will not function properly, not matter how good it is.

100% is true.!

**ProudPersian** · 07-14-2005, 06:30 PM

thx Red Wine, chegad topic e jaleb hamash mezari

**Rasputin** · 07-14-2005, 06:36 PM

Originally posted by ProudPersian

thx Red Wine, chegad topic e jaleb hamash mezari

Khosh halam keh dosst dari.

barayeh man,mohem ineh keh share konam un chizi ro keh midoonam ba to va baghieh va khodam ham chizi yad begiram.

**Rasputin** · 12-03-2006, 09:15 AM

AIDS Is A Politic Problem ?

I WAS recently part of a group of 200 people attending the VII Asia-Pacific Regional Confer-ence of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies hosted by the Singapore Red Cross Society in a hotel ballroom just a little distance away from the twinkling Christmas lights and window displays of Orchard Road.

I was there as part of the Malaysian delegation.

Before the opening ceremony, a roll call confirmed that in all 44 countries were being represented.

Notably missing was a delegation from Iraq. Notably present – for the first time – were Palestine, Israel and Timor Leste.

I was awestruck that such a gathering of people from so many nations around the world were in that ballroom.

Despite the friendly banter and the odd burst of laughter, this was actually no social event.

I realised that this was a serious meeting after I had flipped through the literature in our (very heavy) delegates' bags and read that:

“The global challenges confronting the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies are mounting every day. HIV/AIDS is killing over 8,000 people a day. More than one billion people live on less than US$1 (RM3.59) a day. Every day, 30,000 children under the age of five die. Far too many of them are killed by preventable diseases. Access to basic health services and clean water is still a dream for the majority of the world’s population.”

I tried to read on but the lights were dimmed. Slowly, little girls carrying tea lights walked in. The Singapore Red Cross choir sang two songs and then the little girls gave the tea lights they were carrying to the VIPs in the front row.

It was a simple gesture but full of symbolism: we can - together - bring light and hope to those whose lives are filled with darkness and misery.

The plenary sessions were focused on serious topics but lunch was an opportunity to relax.

On the first day, I sat at a table with Fatima, a delegate from Afghanistan. There were so many things I wanted to ask her.

When a woman delegate from Iran joined us, Fatima told me that many Afghan women of her generation were educated in Iran. Her eyes flashed fire when she spoke about her country's proud history.

At the first day of the conference, “the Federation” was mentioned many times and although I tried my best to be serious, a part of my sillier mind wandered far enough to remind me that the only other time I had heard references made to “The Federation” and where citizens from different places sat together in council were in the Star Wars movies. Except that in Star Wars, the different “peoples” had fish-like heads atop their shoulders, or, like Queen Amidala, had strange make-up and hair.

The women I saw around me weren't the sorts who would spend hours at their dressing table mirrors, but they were among many at the conference who would have had extraordinary experiences.

The more serious side of me did note that what was truly amazing about this conference were not the impressive-sounding titles that the speakers held: For example, Margareta Wahlstrom, the UN Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs; Dr Ta-keshi Kasai, the Regional Adviser on Communicable Di-sease Surveillance and Res-ponse from the World Health Organisation; Gerard Ee, Chair-man of the National Kidney Foundation of Singapore; or Lady Keith from the Inter-national Federation Health and Care Commission.

It was obvious that there was no place for egos here. It didn't matter what our professions or social standings were.

Here we had common goals. Here we were learning about ways to serve our communities at home or help others far from us.

I remember looking around at lunch, as people from different countries sat together at the tables, and wishfully thinking if only we could capture the magic of just that one moment, put it in a bottle, and send it to countries where there is so much anger, hatred and intolerance.

Unfortunately, magic doesn't exist, reality does.

As Lt-Gen Winston Choo, Rtd, Chairman of the Singapore Red Crescent said in his message: “Our 100 million members and volunteers enable us to reach out and meet the needs of the most vulnerable in our region and beyond ... we are from the most diverse, populated and disaster prone regions ... the Final Conference Document shall hopefully express our collective resolve to make a significant difference ... to those we serve.”

The words “to those we serve” reflect one of the goals that all Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies hope to achieve. It was also reassuring for me to know that one of the fundamental principles of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is “Impartiality,” which is defined as making “no discrimination as to nationality, race, religious beliefs, class or political opinions. It endeavours to relieve the suffering of individuals, being guided solely by their needs, and to give priority to the most urgent cases of distress.”

After the conference, I walked past the hotel where I had spent many hours talking to people from other countries. When I saw the brightly-lit Christmas tree in the lobby, I felt a certain sadness as I reflected on being part of a wonderful group of people from around the world who shared one common aim: to serve humanity.

**donsaeid** · 12-03-2006, 10:04 AM

thanx for article

AIDS - HIV = http://www.tapesh.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3430

**Khorsheed** · 12-03-2006, 10:31 AM

yup! i posted this there

**Rasputin** · 12-03-2006, 10:33 AM

Is ok here. anyway i wanted to post more about that and his relation with islamic akhounds in Iran politic system !

**Rasputin** · 12-03-2006, 10:48 AM

Maia Szalavitz: Addicts Fight AIDS: China, Iran Beat NJ and US Feds at Moral AIDS Pol

Twenty years ago, in 1986, I started injecting drugs. First it was cocaine, then heroin. Unbeknownst to me at that time, it had already been five years since public health officials first identified the disease we now call AIDS. My ignorance almost killed me.

And it was abetted by the media, which even now covers IV drug use-related AIDS as an afterthought, despite the fact that it drives the fastest growing epidemics in the world today and was almost entirely responsible for giving the virus a foothold in American minority communities. Though "down low" homosexuality has lately gotten media attention as a source of HIV transmission to heterosexuals, in fact, this has only become important as IV-drug use related AIDS declines.

In the 80's and 90's in New York (the IV drug use capital of the U.S.), 80% of heterosexual infections and a similar proportion of pediatric AIDS cases originated in infections acquired through IV drug use.

But activists pressed to educate addicts and to make clean needles available and saw remarkable success. In the 90's in New York city, 50% or more of the city's roughly 200,000 drug injectors were HIV positive. Today, the city estimates that only between 7 and 20% [pdf] are infected.

When I was injecting, so-called "addiction experts" claimed that addicts wouldn't protect themselves, that it was useless to provide clean needles or instructions on avoiding needle-sharing because addicts were always reckless and desperate. We were also supposed to be selfish pigs when it came to drugs-- but somehow simultaneously, peace- and-love hippies who enjoyed sharing needles as a "sub-cultural ritual."

Because I was shooting up myself, I knew that this wasn't true. The moment a health educator who happened to be visiting from San Francisco taught me about AIDS, I changed my behavior. I already avoided sharing when possible because it's icky (kind of like using someone else's tampon applicator) and because a fresh needle gives a better high because it's sharper.

After I learned about AIDS, the times I did share, I cleaned the needle with bleach extensively first. Though this has now been found not to eliminate HIV risk, it does dramatically reduce it-- and given how many addicts were infected in NYC when I was using, I do believe that outreach worker may have saved my life with her advice.

Tragically, however, the U.S. still bans federal funding for needle exchange and education programs-- and tries to prevent other nations and its own states from doing it. Research published in the Lancet suggested that 20,000 HIV infections in children, addicts' sex partners and addicts themselves could have been prevented with earlier and more widespread clean needle programs here.

Nonetheless, despite the fact that every scientific and academic body that has ever looked at the needle exchange research has concluded that clean needles save lives, despite the fact that clean needle programs are one of the best-supported practices in public health, the U.S. continues to oppose them. Even China and Iran are doing it now-- but America still places superstition higher than science.

And across the river from New York, New Jersey remains the one state in the union that bans even private organizations from carrying out needle exchange programs. In New Jersey, just under half of the state's infections (45%) are related to IV drug use, which is twice the national average. More than three-quarters of these cases are amongst ethnic minorities.

So, if you want to do something meaningful for World AIDS Day, give a New Jersey legislator a call or email and tell him or her to support Senate Bills 494 and 823 and their counterparts in the Assembly, Assembly Bills 1852 and 2839-- or donate to the Dogwood Center, which has done a great deal of important activism on this issue.

I managed to recover from my addiction-- but only because someone thought my life was worth saving before I was ready to stop using. How many others aren't being given that chance? And how can anyone think that it is "moral" to deny it to them?

**Rasputin** · 12-03-2006, 10:49 AM

**Rasputin** · 12-03-2006, 10:49 AM

Therefore, the United States effort had to be twofold:
● Provide accurate information to captive peoples, and
● Counter hostile propaganda abroad with truthful information about the United States, its people and its policies.
In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the U.S. Information Agency, or USIA, which was given responsibility for coordinating and arranging official American public affairs activities overseas, to include cultural centers and libraries, exhibitions, magazines and pamphlets, audiovisual materials, educational exchanges and other visitor programs, speaker programs, book translations, cultural presentations, and foreign media contact.
After suffering from increasingly low budgets following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the gutted remnants of USIA were absorbed into the State Department in 1999. The information agency director was transformed into an undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs. However, the undersecretary has no operational control over the personnel who actually work on public affairs overseas.
Today, U.S. global public opinion campaigns do not exist. Regional campaigns lack resources. Our former cultural centers and impressive libraries overseas have been closed. In short, our most effective voice overseas has been stilled.
Recommendations
The United States should acknowledge that a substantial amount of the ill will flowing from abroad is based on disagreement with our policies, not misunderstanding of them. Moreover, stains on our image such as Abu Ghraib cannot and should not be defended.
None of that means that our fundamental policies are necessarily wrong.
Islamic terrorists and their supporters will not agree with our policy to kill them before they kill us, and some countries will never acknowledge a serious threat from abroad until it engulfs them.
These are my recommendations to our government:
● Re-establish the U.S. Information Agency, because it possessed the capabilities to defend the U.S. image abroad and engage effectively with foreign publics.
● Failing that, gather all of the elements and personnel of public diplomacy/public affairs at the State Department into one entity, and give the undersecretary real authority to plan and implement public-affairs strategies worldwide.
● Target emotions in the Islamic world and do not shy from symbolic expressions of faith and brotherhood.
● Focus substantial time and effort on repairing our ties with publics in the democracies and emerging democracies. When the democracies are genuinely united in purpose and moral vision, the rest of the world falls into step.
The United States cannot go it alone in international affairs. Other countries will not follow the U.S. lead, or not for long, if they do not respect our ideals and internal moral strength at least as much as they respect our military power.
If we follow Thomas Jefferson's advice to pay "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind," we will surely find that mankind will repay the compliment.

**Khorsheed** · 12-03-2006, 11:22 AM

I am glad dear redwine is bringing aids to the light .. .

**Rasputin** · 12-04-2006, 04:22 AM

PayPal's Thiel Scores 230 Percent Gain With Soros-Style Fund

One morning in 1998, at Hobee's coffee shop, near Stanford University, a young money manager named Peter Thiel decided to gamble on an Internet startup.

Thiel ended up investing $240,000 in the company, which eventually became PayPal Inc., the giant of online payments. Thiel ran PayPal, took it public and, in 2002, sold it to EBay Inc. for $1.5 billion. Thiel, then 34, walked off with $60 million. He bought himself a Ferrari 360 Spyder and moved into a condo at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco.

Thiel had managed to pilot PayPal through the biggest financial bubble in history. And yet, the way he saw things, that bubble had never really popped. To Thiel, the Nasdaq Stock Market frenzy of the 1990s had simply morphed into a U.S. housing frenzy and other economic dangers. People still believed the good times could last forever.

So a few weeks after selling PayPal, Thiel set out to beat the bubble a second time. He opened a hedge fund firm called Clarium Capital Management LLC in his three-bedroom apartment at the Four Seasons.

Since then, Thiel, now 39, has emerged as one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the country. He's parlayed an initial $10 million fund into a firm with $2.1 billion in assets under management -- and more than tripled investors' money.

As of Oct. 31, Clarium, now tucked away in futuristic, glass-walled offices near the Golden Gate Bridge, had returned a cumulative 230.4 percent.

Libertarian

A self-styled freethinker and avowed libertarian, Thiel has had a hell of a run. A graduate of Stanford Law School, he's practiced securities law, traded derivatives, led PayPal and built a multibillion-dollar hedge fund -- all before the age of 40. He's also bought 7 percent of Palo Alto, California-based Facebook, a social-networking Web site for high school and college students that turned down a $1 billion offer from Yahoo! Inc. in September.

Along the way, Thiel has co-authored a book decrying political correctness at Stanford, backed a Nascar magazine (it failed) and executive produced the 2005 movie ``Thank You for Smoking,'' a satirical look at today's spin culture in which the hero, Big Tobacco spokesman Nick Naylor, defends the rights of smokers and cigarette makers. In September, Thiel pledged $3.5 million to Aubrey de Grey, a Cambridge University-based gerontologist searching for the key to human immortality.

Now, Thiel has set out to concoct a 21st-century version of the Quantum Fund, the freewheeling macro hedge fund that George Soros used to run. Macro funds trade crude oil, Eurodollars, Japanese bonds, sugar futures -- you name it. The macro part comes from managers' attempts to use macroeconomic principles to spot winning trades.

Betting on Deflation

Back in 1992, Soros made a killing wagering that the British government would devalue the pound. Today, Thiel is buying U.S. Treasury bonds and energy stocks, betting on deflation and higher oil prices. With annualized returns of 26.3 percent in the three years ended on Sept. 30, Clarium ranks among the world's top macro funds, according to Hedge Fund Research Inc., a Chicago- based firm that tracks the industry.

For years, billionaire macro managers such as Soros, 76, and Julian Robertson, 74, dominated the hedge fund scene. In 1990, about 71 percent of the industry's then $39 billion in assets were stashed in macro funds, according to HFR.

Then, as the tech boom ignited the longest bull stock market in U.S. history, hedge fund investors deserted the macro men to chase high-flying Nasdaq stocks.

Macro Reckoning

The same forces that made Thiel a multimillionaire ended macro funds' reign. Soros lost big when the Nasdaq bubble burst and eventually passed his New York-based Soros Fund Management LLC to sons Robert and Jonathan. Robertson shorted tech stocks during the runup, lost billions and quit managing other people's money, telling clients he no longer understood the markets. Today, macro hedge funds collectively sit atop $146 billion, or less than 11 percent of the industry's $1.34 trillion in assets, according to HFR.

These days, Wall Street firms and fund managers control more hedge fund money than Soros or Robertson ever did. The 20 largest hedge fund firms collectively manage $316.1 billion, or 24 percent of total industry assets, according to HFR. The largest, New York-based Goldman Sachs Group Inc., manages $29.5 billion. Westport, Connecticut-based Bridgewater Associates Inc., the second largest, has $28 billion. No. 3, New York-based D.E. Shaw & Co., manages $23.2 billion.

Seismic Shift

These giants exemplify a seismic shift taking place on Wall Street. During the 1980s, hedge funds catered mostly to rich people. Today, insurance companies, endowments and pension funds have invaded the market in hopes of earning the investment returns they'll need to keep their promises to clients and retirees.

Many institutional investors don't want to take the risks that managers like Soros did.

``Larger investors would rather make a little and risk a little than make a lot and risk a lot,'' says Sol Waksman, president of Fairfield, Iowa-based Barclay Group, a hedge fund consulting firm.

Thiel, by contrast, is a throwback to the days when managers like Soros and Robertson made -- and sometimes lost -- vast fortunes by staking everything on their views of the world economy.

``We are trying to pursue a systemic view of the world like that which Soros and others said they pursued,'' Thiel says.

Big Bets

Thiel has wagered all of his clients' money on his conviction that aftershocks from the go-go '90s will jar the U.S. His vision of the future isn't pretty. The housing bubble will collapse and economic growth will stall, he says. An oil shock will add to the pain.

Few money managers are prepared for the turbulence ahead, Thiel says. Clarium is ready, he says.

``The hedge fund's mission is to make sense of an extraordinary moment in time in the world -- a time of retail sanity amid wholesale madness,'' Thiel says.

On a sunny September morning, Thiel and his 10 traders and analysts are at work in Clarium's offices in the Presidio, the former U.S. Army post, now a national park, on the edge of San Francisco Bay.

It's an odd place to find a hedge fund. Like most San Francisco money managers, Thiel used to work downtown, in the city's financial district. Then, last June, he moved Clarium to the Presidio, where Star Wars director George Lucas has built a gleaming new headquarters. A statue of Jedi master Yoda gazes over one of the courtyards.

Death Star

Star Wars happens to be Thiel's favorite movie. That's not why he came here, though. Thiel has built his hedge fund on the premise that people follow the herd. Swept up in the crowd, they lose sight of reality. Thiel moved from the Bank of America Center downtown to keep his team away from other money managers and investment bankers who might cloud their thinking.

Yoda would feel right at home here. Press a button, and the doors hum open -- BRRRMMMM! -- as if you were boarding the Death Star. The 22,000-square-foot (2,044-square-meter) digs include a library stocked with leather-bound works of Charles Darwin, William Makepeace Thackeray, Guy de Maupassant and Leo Strauss. Every few months, Thiel brings in eminent scholars from the worlds of math, psychology and economics to address his troops.

Ralph Ho, Thiel's chief operating officer, says Clarium is part hedge fund and part think tank.

``We are trying to repeat the George Soros of the late '90s and learn from his mistakes,'' says Ho, who was PayPal's treasurer.

**Rasputin** · 12-04-2006, 04:23 AM

French Guru

Thiel's view of human behavior -- and the markets -- was shaped by French literary critic Rene Girard. Girard, now a Stanford professor emeritus, maintains that people essentially borrow their desires from others. To Girard, our longing for a certain object is provoked by the desire of another person for this same object. Girard calls this ``mimetic desire.''

Such behavior often drives financial markets, Girard says. Sometimes, people want to buy a stock simply because they see everyone else buying it.

``The market is a quintessential mimetic phenomenon,'' says Girard, who had dinner with Thiel's team at Clarium this past August.

By the time Thiel arrived at Stanford, America's culture wars, smoldering since the 1960s, were flaring on campus.

Political Correctness

Students were complaining the curriculum was skewed toward the European canon of great books -- Aristotle, Shakespeare and the like -- and gave short shrift to non-Western cultures, women and minorities. Students debated whether to impose a speech code prohibiting racist, sexist and homophobic remarks.

Thiel says the shift toward political correctness troubled him. Students weren't just attacking Chaucer or Kant -- they were undermining academic rigor and the freedom of speech, he says. So, in 1987, as a sophomore, Thiel founded the Stanford Review, now the university's main conservative newspaper. The Review's motto is Fiat Lux, which is Latin for Let There Be Light. Several of the paper's former editors, including Ken Howery and David Sacks, later joined Thiel at PayPal. Clarium General Counsel Gibney was also a Review editor.

``The Review stood for free speech, no speech code, admission on merit and great works in the curriculum,'' says Sacks, who later got Thiel to help him produce ``Thank You for Smoking.'' Sacks is now president of Los Angeles-based Room 9 Entertainment.

Provocateur

The Review set out to provoke and offend, says Rachel Maddow, a former Stanford activist who is now a host on Air America Radio, a progressive talk station.

``They took a particularly mean-spirited and juvenile approach to the consequences of their actions,'' Maddow says. ``They were very good at generating an uproar.''

Thiel graduated in 1989 and went on to Stanford Law School. He hung out with Sacks, playing chess and debating the finer points of Leo Strauss, the political philosopher who is considered a father of U.S. neoconservatism.

In 1995, the pair wrote an op-ed essay in the Wall Street Journal poking fun at Stanford's curriculum. The piece prompted a letter to the editor from then Stanford President Gerhard Casper and then Provost Condoleezza Rice, now U.S. Secretary of State.

``[They] concoct a cartoon, not a description, of our freshman curriculum,'' Casper and Rice wrote.

Later that year, Sacks and Thiel made headlines with a book entitled ``The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Political Intolerance on Campus.'' One of the examples of political correctness that Thiel and Sacks cite in their book involves a law student named Keith Rabois.

Outrage

In a misguided attempt to assert his freedom of speech, Rabois yelled ``Faggot! Faggot! Hope you die of AIDS'' outside a lecturer's home. He was hounded out of Stanford, Thiel and Sacks say. Rabois later joined PayPal.

Rabois's behavior was offensive and stupid, Thiel says. He says he still thinks the incident was overblown.

``The extreme reaction to it was not quite proportionate to what happened,'' he says.

After collecting his law degree, Thiel clerked for U.S. Federal Circuit Judge Larry Edmondson in Atlanta and then joined Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York. He lasted seven months and three days before quitting out of boredom, he says.

He jumped to CS Financial Products, a unit of what's now Credit Suisse Group, where he traded derivatives and currency options for a little more than a year. Then he went home to California, raised $1 million from his friends and family and started his first macro fund, Thiel Capital Management.

Hedge Fund Beginnings

With no track record, Thiel struggled to drum up investors, he says. By early 1998, he had more than $4 million under management. That year, he hired his first employee: Howery, who'd been managing editor of the Review.

By this time, Internet stocks were on fire, and Thiel was insisting that his fledgling firm get an office on Sand Hill Road, the venture capital hub in Menlo Park, California.

Silicon Valley real estate developer Tom Ford eventually rented the duo a utility closet in his office at 3000 Sand Hill Road, headquarters of Sequoia Capital, Sand Hill Advisors and Mohr Davidow Ventures.

``There were two desks and no windows, so Peter brought in pictures of outdoor scenes to put on the wall,'' Howery, now 31, says.

It was about this time that Thiel happened upon a young software engineer named Max Levchin. What followed would change both men's lives forever.

PayPal Opportunity

It was a sweltering August day, and Levchin -- who was dreaming about an Internet startup -- was milling around campus looking for a place to escape the heat. He stumbled into an air- conditioned building where Thiel was lecturing students on international finance. The two hit it off and agreed to meet for breakfast at Hobee's, a Palo Alto institution known for its blueberry coffeecake.

There, Levchin, then 23, asked Thiel to invest in his idea for a startup to develop a secure way for handheld computers to communicate. Thiel bought in.

``We thought we would only be there for six months to help the company raise additional financing,'' Howery says.

Instead, Thiel ended up putting his hedge fund career on hold and devoting the next four years to the company, which grew into PayPal.

His quick decision to back the company was typical Thiel, Levchin says. ``Peter is very fast. He usually decides in 1.5 seconds,'' Levchin says. A few months later, in December 1998, Thiel himself joined the startup as chief executive officer.

Announcement

AIDS Is A Politic Problem ?

AIDS Is A Politic Problem ?

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