From: STella@thelema.uucp (STella)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban,soc.culture.african.american,sci.skeptic
Subject: Re: AIDS and the CIA (was Question)
Date: 12 Nov 92 22:26:32 GMT
Organization: Idiosyncratic Anarchic Order

In article <ZhB=S1-@engin.umich.edu> dem@engin.umich.edu (Darryle E Merlette) writes:
>I still stand by my claim: in light of the facts behind the Tuskegee 
>Experiment, the Violence Initiative, and known chemical/biological warfare 
>capabilities, one would have to be naive and/or stupid to consider the
>possibility of AIDS being genetically engineered as totally without merit.

I agree completely.  I don't think I'm THAT stupid, and I
search-and-destroy naivete whenever I can.  If our government had had
the technology, it's entirely possible it would have used it, but I
simply cannot believe the stories as currently told.

I was in junior high school in 1960.  I had been in school when
Sputnik triggered a new interest in science education.  I _remember_
my 7th grade science teacher, Miss Barlow, spending a couple pre-class
hours telling me why this was important while she assembled a new
tagboard model of DNA in September of 1960.  (I had a TERRIBLE crush
on that woman....  Glaaah.)

To credit the current conspiracy theory, I would have to believe that,
during the '50s, while public science seemed to be coasting down a
slope of benign neglect, there was a vast underground doing science,
and that not ONE of these presumed thousands of workers decided to
grab a Nobel prize by leaving the US, moving, say, to the USSR, and
publishing the results Crick and Watson later took credit for.

Yes, if it had been possible, I could believe that the government that
did the Tuskegee Experiment would consider using a tailored disease.
No argument there -- and no argument with the idea that the
Reagan/Bush administrations would have taken a great deal more
interest in the disease if its first wave had not occurred among
queers, niggers, and junkies.

But while the will to eliminate black, gay, and otherwise undesirable
Americans was certainly there, my readings suggest that the technology
necessary was NOT available in the fifies, as it would have had to be
to trigger the current epidemic.

Dammit, I've lost too many friends already to this disease.  I spend a
part of my summer vacation sitting in circle each year, and wondering
who of us will be dead, sick, or newly-positive NEXT gathering.  I
want to hit back and there's no-one TO hit back (now that Bush is on
his way out) -- I'm tired of watching friends die.  There's a part of
me that would LOVE to believe this theory, because it would provide a
TARGET for my hate.  But angry as I am, and it's been hard not to be
angry these last years, I simply cannot reconcile my first-hand
recollections of the state of science in the '50s with an invented
disease being launched in the late fifties.  Or even the
mid-sixties....

In 1943, Axis medical research was dumping people into icebaths and
failing at cross-specific organ transplants.  The Allies were standing
soldiers under a-bombs.  There was no vaccine for polio -- I REMEMBER
being at risk for polio, and had as friend one of the last cases of
polio in my city.  There are limits to my credulity.  If biotech that
would have stopped polio (which seems a necessary precursor to being
able to create and launch HIV) had existed, some mother or father in
that program would have broken the story in hope of saving hir child.

>And even if it is a naturally occurring virus, there is still evidence that
>it is being used against what the government considers "undesirable 
>populations".

No shit!  Lifestyle changes <spit!>?

>The following article is from the _NY Daily News_, dated *July 15, 1962*
>-- although it speaks specifically about bacteria, it is easy to see
>an extension to viruses occurring over the past 20 yrs:

1962?  The epidemic was already under way, doubling in its slow
fashion.  And the first squares of the chessboard don't seem like a
problem... a few odd cases reduced to frozen samples....

They were working with anthrax, with plague, with _bacteria_, at Fort
Dietrich.  Being able to build viruses is a much more difficult task.
If they were working on BACTERIA in 1962, they were unlikely to have
had a working magic-bullet queer&nigger virus in the late fifties.

Darryle, please understand that I am not denying that Reagan/Bush have
been, at the most charitable, criminally negligent.  Nor do I believe
that a government, even ours, would never do anything like THAT!
(Wanna nice blanket, redman?)  But with isolated examples of the
disease predating a time when the government had the technology to
create it, I simply cannot make a case.  Not even to my queer and
angry self.

STella@xanadu.com	1016 E. El Camino Real, #302, Sunnyvale, CA 94087
aka stella@glg.ucs.dec.com -- ping there if you can't find thelema
Don't blame me, I voted Libertarian!