Sorry for being a bit quiet around here. Between the lead-up to the Christmas holiday and a lot of overlapping work deadlines, I’ve been ass-out.
Nothing too deep to share for my return, except to say that I’m instituting a new rule: If you claim that HIV/AIDS was a government creation as either a biological weapon that escaped the lab or an attempt to wipe out certain populations, you are instantly debited 20 IQ points and relieved of any credibility when you attempt to claim you have critical thinking skills.
It’s not that I don’t think the government does nefarious things. It’s not that I don’t believe conspiracies on a grand scale can exist. I mean, I’m willing to concede that crack cocaine might have been promoted secretly by the CIA or something to ruin the inner cities. But HIV and the disease it causes…AIDS…nah?
And here’s why…
The government is capable of monumental stupidity. But when it comes to weapons, it tends to be pretty good at going for either a big bang or supreme accuracy. When the government is looking to kill, it does so pretty efficiently. And when you are dealing with engineered pathogens, you need scientists, and they tend to be smart.
Which is why no one, not even someone as batshit crazy and nasty as the late Kim Jong Il, would weaponize HIV.
You don’t weaponize a sexually transmitted disease. Hell, that has got to be one of the least focused and least efficient ways to disseminate a disease. It’s never going to stay within the community you target, and it won’t infect or kill quickly (the latter item being one of the reasons it won’t stay contained).
Given the effectiveness of the Plague in the Dark Ages, and the deadliness of influenza, not to mention things like smallpox and flesh-eating bacteria, there are any number of way better ways to kill people biologically than to use an STD. I mean, you don’t send out a weapon against people that pharmaceutical science will be able to begin addressing long before it does serious damage to your target population. No, you pick something that gets spread easily by coughing and that kills quickly.
A virus that you have to fuck someone to pass on, and that takes away your immune system?
That’s like trying to kill someone by hammering a bullet into their skull.