Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

I did not see Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. I probably won’t ever. I’m not big on what I call “humiliation humor.” It’s not new, Candid Camera was a brand of this, Punk’d and Crank Yankers are more recent incarnations of the same genre.

If you want to step up to the camera and make an ass of yourself (Jackass/Divorce Court/Judge Larry Seidlin) that is your business. However, if you are under the impression that you are going about your business or doing your job and are deceived into making an unwitting ass of yourself, I don’t find this especially funny.

I'm personally a little curious as to the reason Sacha Baron Cohen chose Kazakhstan as the country of Borat's origin. Kazakhstan has an incredibly high literacy rate for the locale and historically has been one of the more peaceful regions in Central Asia.

Unnecessarily demeaning humor is bad, unnecessarily giving millions of unnecessary blood transfusions is another ball of wax.

It seems that some Kazakh physicians, while trying to make a little extra scratch have been making a profit on blood transfusions for children with pneumonia and other non-blood related infections. The Centers for Disease Control Central Asian Bureau found during an investigation that, in fact, 100 children were infected with HIV through tainted blood.

At $20 bucks a pop, those transfusions were incredibly expensive. Though 21 physicians are being tried and the health minister has been fired, Amangeldy Shopaer, deputy chief physician at the Shymkent Infectious Diseases Hospital where all of the children were transfused, insists that the cause of the outbreak is not clear and defending the practice of transfusing the children, saying, "In some cases it is required," adding, "It depends on what kind of pneumonia."

Talk about making an ass of yourself.