Sarah Palin has read the local campaign literature and decided to endorse the brilliant Star Parker for California's 37th congressional district. So, Star Parker: what lovely thoughts does she have about the connection between gay marriage and AIDS, for example?

Crazy ladies fear AIDS! Vuvuzela dangers! Tuberculosis rampant! Cell phone radiation! Skinny blood! Skinny sex! Sexy diets! It's your Wednesday Health Watch, where we watch your health—while smearing ourselves with disinfectant!

In 1983, to keep HIV out of the blood supply, the Food and Drug Administration banned any man who had sex with another man after 1977 from donating blood. Next month they might finally strike the discriminatory law.

South African President Jacob Zuma has announced that he's HIV-negative.

Never underestimate the buying power of a day on Craigslist. New furniture? It's there. Old furniture? It's there, too. Scalped tickets to the Bowery Ballroom at four times face value? Oh yes. But this...is something else.

"Earlier, the cartoonist... posted the original version of the cartoon on his blog. In this version, it shows the punch line as 'AIDS' instead of 'a baseball bat.' The paper, he claimed, preferred 'not to make light of fatal diseases.'"

Here is how he did it:

BBC News reports today on AIDS charities coming out in full force against the AIDS-As-Hitler ad being put forth by German awareness group Regenbogen e.V. now that condemnation is coming in internationally. What's with all the insensitive FAIL-worthy advertisements?

After a female porn actress tested positive for HIV this week, health officials in LA disclosed a bunch of other previously unreported HIV cases in porn, and now people are getting vaguely freaked out.

"Kevin De Cock, director of the World Health Organisation's HIV/AIDS department, said there is no scientific evidence showing that condom use spurs people to take more sexual risks." De Cock should know. [Reuters]

A Dallas man has been sentenced to 35 years in prison for spitting at a cop. He was charged with assault with a deadly weapon, because he's HIV-positive. So his spit is made of death!!! Except, uh... we were taught many years ago that much as you can't get pregnant from oral sex, you can't actually get the AIDS from fucking spit. Look, here's the CDC:

PosOrNot.com, conceived as a public education campaign about HIV/AIDS, apes HotOrNot, asks visitors to the site to guess the HIV status of those pictured, based on photos and social network-style profile excerpts. Look, even professional hater Perez Hilton donated his image to the viral antiviral effort! Then again, encouraging testing using a faux dating site is probably wiser than a campaign to get Web-cruising users to disclose their status on a real hookup site, where everyone is allegedly very good looking.

This, from the Columbia Spectator, is a truly beautiful correction. Turns out there's no evidence to support the claim that "one Dalai Lama" had sex with hundreds of men even though he knew he had AIDS. The fact that the current Dalai Lama has held the position since 1950 certainly narrows down the candidates there, doesn't it. Beautiful. [Spectator]

Were you stopped in traffic in SoHo yesterday? You can thank Suzanne "Africa" Engo! But she had a good reason: she was stopping AIDS! How the hell was she doing that? We're not quite sure ourselves, but it involved $5,000 in (RED) Products, a 48-pound weight loss, and fabulous socialite Kristian Laliberte. We'll try to sort out the reasoning behind this insane and pointless self promotional stunt/ noble good cause for you, after the jump.

Down in Miami, Art Basel and its retinue of smaller art fairs are gradually destroying that city's sun-addled stale-air mind. Here in New York, however, it's just another reason to party. Gawker videographer Alex Goldberg (not the horrendously messed-up NoLIta child Alex Goldberg) was there to ask why the assembled art lovers had taken the time out of their busy schedules to attend a party called Bazel Shmazel.

Sub-Saharan Africa had between 1.4 and 2.4 million new HIV infections in the last year, according to the most recent UNAIDS report—back in 2001, new infections were higher, between 1.7 and 2.7 million. HIV prevalence in adults is estimated at 5% in sub-Saharan Africa, down from its almost-6% estimate in 2000. That's one reason why there's something really, really odd about the conclusion of Michael Specter's fascinating piece on viruses in the New Yorker.

A grad student at NYU's Steinhardt school, working on a project called "The New York Institute for the Humanities", recently sent friends and colleagues a letter alerting them to her group's upcoming workshops. It is a letter in which she coined and employed the wrongest analogy we've heard in, like, a week (the internet equivalent of years).

Europeans seem to be cultivating an emerging talent for oddly surreal AIDS awareness campaigns (see the tarantula and scorpion from last year). A new German series runs with the motto of "It's easy to lose your head when you're horny," in the sense of not using prophylactics in the heat of passion. Hence you have a disturbing gallery of headless copulation, complete with video version as well. The only thing that would make this better is a morning-after shot of the couples reattaching their heads and suddenly experiencing all their attendant regrets.

Today is, as we hope you know, World AIDS Day, and it's as good a time as any to remember that, two decades into the pandemic, millions of people worldwide are still dying and there is still no cure. This year, AmFAR chairman and lefty shoe designer Kenneth Cole created the "We All Have AIDS" awareness campaign. While it has goals we share and a King Christian of Denmark sensibility we admire, we're entirely unconvinced that selling this particular t-shirt is necessarily the best way to raise money for the cause.

Thoughts on two consecutive nights of Broadway theater: