That's a fair point.  Doesn't change the fact that AIDS is not a population control measure and that there's no evidence that it was ever intended to be.

It's a silly notion. THe world was taken completely by surprise by AIDs for two reasons. One, it is so clever. It has 10 genes and finds its way around virtually every defense mechanism the body can offer. Because of Rev and the RRE, it can transcribe introns into long mRNA for packaging into capsid without being destroyed inside the nucleus despite still having hnRNP bound to the mRNA. It can switch between lytic and prophage very fast and the bastard is so hard to find when it lies low, especially because it can manufacture spliced viral proteins without producing the genetic material necessary for the assemblage of completed particles in the eukaryotic cytosol. The other reason the world was taken by surprise is because a disease like AIDS should not be so contagious. Some diseases are very contagious under certain conditions. Y Pestis is vector-borne, but it become as deadly rapid as an airborne pathogen in large, unsanitized urban centers with many rats that host the fleas that carry the plague. But, HIV, by rights, shouldn't be contagious. It cannot spread by air. It cannot even spread by saliva. It can only spread by blood and sexual fluid. From an epidemiological standpoint, it shouldn't really work, the same way there are no massive outbreaks of syphillis or chlamydia.

Second of all, the notion that AIDS was invented is ridiculous for another reason. AIDS originated in the 1950s. Even today, we cannot simply "construct" organisms, and we certainly couldn't fine-tune them to such a degree. When AIDS emerged, we barely understood Watson-Crick base pairing. We knew nothing of introns and exons and SINEs and homologies and Gene regulatory proteins. It would be like trying to build a skyscraper with duct tape and spit.

I agree it was not constructed by the government. It is not unheard of for the government to take advantage of situations presented to them.

I'm trying not to be a tinfoil hatter but this current crop of religiously insane people running the government makes it difficult to not acknowledge conspiracies.

Which is bizarre since in most of the world, HIV is vastly more prevalent in the heterosexual population. In Africa, HIV makes a nasty combination with warfare and economic destruction. This forces the women into prostitution, and so they become HIV bombs. Since the men in turn believe it a sign of virility to have sex very promiscuosly...the results are the efficiency of HIV in spreading in the heterosexual population which make the disease burn through population like wildfire. It's prevalency among homosexuals is principally in the United States gay communites and is not a trend across the world.

There are those, specially in the Catholic Church, who believe that teaching "abstinence" is the solution. Worse, they try to block the dissemination of safe-sex education and condoms. I utterly despair at this idiocy. It will not work. It's exactly like the Catholic Church's attitude toward the 40-years-doubling population of Latin America, a highly Catholic region. If the Catholic church truly desires a natural method of population control, then they shall get one: Starvation. Likewise, if they are so determined that AIDS spread should be combatted without employing safe-sex education and condoms, and again by only employing natural methods, then they shall get another natural method: By the time the disease burns itself out, everyone will be dead and there will be no one to pass it on to. No matter how much the twisted ethical notions of the Vatican try to enforce their methods of population control and disease spread, Malthus will always win. He has never lost. Whether it is by starvation or mass-death by pandemic, the ethically bizarre attempts to preserve the mere possibility of sperm fertilizing egg will always find the damage these beliefs wreak undone swiftly and by brutal Malthusian controls on the symbiosis between organisms and resources. 

Now to say something nice about the Church. The AIDS conspiracies reminds me of the 1340s, when Y. pestis would kill one European in every three, and when the Europeans believed that the Jews were poisoning wells across European urban centers in a massive, evil, conspiracy. The only voice of reason was the Pope, Clement VI, who wrote "It cannot be true that the Jews cause the plague...for it afflicts the Jews themselves". Clement was also responsible for eradicating the Flagellants (which is good).

The contrast between the same institution 700 years ago and now is embarassing.

South Africa?

They told me that, too.  Does anyone know who came up with that?

I first remember hearing it in 1992 on conservative talk radio.  Well, overhearing it, to be honest.

Hell,  my last real biology class was in the early 90s.  Aren't there tons of viruses that are crazy small... like 80 or 90 nanometers?  HPV isn't exactly huge, is it?  Geez... is it capsid diameter that you're worried about?

Will someone who knows what they're talking about save me from displaying any more ignorance?  I guess I just don't understand whether the whole "Condoms don't stop AIDS" thing was made up from nothing, or if someone read a page or two of a science book before saying it.

Oh, yeah.  Chemtrails.  That idea's been around for a good twenty years, I think.  I always thought that would be a really convoluted way of introducing chemicals into the environment, but then conspiracy theories aren't known for their falsifiability.

I'm guessing you also know about the H.A.R.P project.  Lots of good movie plots in that one.  One of my favorites from the old Art Bell days was called Reverse Speech.  You see, when you lie, your subconscious makes you say the truth backwards, kind of like the back masking on old Black Sabbath and Blue Oyster Cult albums.  When Clinton was saying, "I never had sexual relations with that woman," he was apparently saying, "I like to smoke marijuana" if you played it just right in reverse.

Then there are the monuments on Mars... the hidden cures for cancer... remote viewing (Now there's a great conspiracy theory)... and the ever-so-popular New World Order/Illuminati/Mason connection.

There's no shortage of crazy shit to believe if you like your reality evidence-free.

The big difference between a conspiracy nut and a skeptic is simple.  A conspiracy nut uses the same (il)logic as a theist -- "Since something is beyond our knowledge, it's probably true."

What I mean by that is that someone can look at a real project, say, the military looking at nonlethal sound weapons, and take it to an unscientific extreme.  "If they're telling us about how sound can knock you out, then what they really are doing is using subliminal codes corresponding to our DNA structure, and imbedding them in the sublingual neurocortex with special microchips, and they can make us think whatever they want."

Nevermind that subliminal messages and DNA have nothing to do with each other, and nobody knows what the hell "sublingual cortex" is supposed to mean.  There's this idea that the government hides all this stuff from us that is super-duper technology, and it ignores science.

As for the OP, the government couldn't possibly have manufactured a virus before anyone on earth knew about base pairs.  If you believe the government knew about base pairs before the science community, well.. um... geez.... I know this young earth creationist I'd like you to have a debate with.

AIDS is not a conspiracy...the tuskegee experiments, the trail of tears, LSD experiments did show a government willing to play GOD with people's lives without telling them, but they did not have the know-how to create, introduce, and disseminate AIDS to certain people. That is ridiculous. If it weren't for Tuskegee Experiments and the like, retarded memes like this would not readily stick to pliable brains looking for reasons to back up their hatred. Wright has been denounced, but we will still have to endure his fucking "God Damn America" clip ad nauseam.

As for chemtrails, they are real...just ask Luminon(jk Luminon, I have no idea if you believe in chemtrails).