Charlie

How did you tell that he was the same guy in the photos? Was he wearing one of those outfits?

I stopped watching pro football when I no longer lived in a city with its own team; it's hard to get excited about any team in southern California. Tomorrow is Monday in Australia, so I will be watching the first day of the Australian Open on Tennis Channel.

I thought it was "B to C" ("na" is "to" in Czech)

VaniaX only joined rent.men on Xmas Eve, but his old ad showed him in NYC. Yordan has been on the site for a couple of years. If you use the "Map me" function, you can see that Yordan is located on 18th St in South Philly, while VaniaX uses the generic City Hall location. I have no idea whether they are working together.

VaniaX only joined rent.men on Xmas Eve, but his old ad showed him in NYC. Yordan has been on the site for a couple of years. If you use the "Map me" function, you can see that Yordan is located on 18th St in South Philly, while VaniaX uses the generic City Hall location. I have no idea whether they are working together.

Like Lucky, I have answered this before (some topics on this site never seem to get old). Charles is my middle name, so my college roommate used to call me "Cheerful Charlie," an ironical reference to my inclination to study rather than party with him and his friends. Some of his friends thought Charlie was really my name, and frequently called me that. When I joined this site back in the last century, I needed a handle, and Charlie was simple and easy to type (I am a very slow typist).

Some people will continue to believe a conspiracy theory about AIDS for the same reason that some Trump supporters will continue to believe the election was "stolen." Even though they have no evidence, and can't give credible explanations of who did it or how it was done, it just feels right to them, because it fits their preconceived suspicions about vague forces like "government scientists" or "socialists." Religious beliefs often have the same effect: when a natural calamity occurs, it must be that "Satan" wants to torture the innocent, or "God" is punishing sinners. It seems to be an inherent factor in human psychology.

Some people will continue to believe a conspiracy theory about AIDS for the same reason that some Trump supporters will continue to believe the election was "stolen." Even though they have no evidence, and can't give credible explanations of who did it or how it was done, it just feels right to them, because it fits their preconceived suspicions about vague forces like "government scientists" or "socialists." Religious beliefs often have the same effect: when a natural calamity occurs, it must be that "Satan" wants to torture the innocent, or "God" is punishing sinners. It seems to be an inherent factor in human psychology.

Whose "political intent" are you referencing? You are suggesting something that happened during the Carter administration, which was not notably anti-gay.

Whose "political intent" are you referencing? You are suggesting something that happened during the Carter administration, which was not notably anti-gay.

Thanks. I am sending this info to her.

Thanks. I am sending this info to her.

Yes, but Agent Orange was never intended to be used against American citizens. There is a difference between a government experiment that has unintended consequences and one that is intended to harm the government's own citizens, as your scenario posits for AIDS.

Yes, but Agent Orange was never intended to be used against American citizens. There is a difference between a government experiment that has unintended consequences and one that is intended to harm the government's own citizens, as your scenario posits for AIDS.

Actually, I don't think it is a wedding ring, because he moves it back and forth between hands and on different fingers.

The President is a "responsible individual" in the technical sense, not in the sense of necessarily behaving "responsibly." Likewise, his appointees and other civil servants are "responsible for" their actions. Words can have more than one meaning, which is why I used the wording "the responsible individual or committees" rather than just "responsible individuals."

The first time I voted for a President who was younger than I was. A colleague of mine used to start one of her standard lectures about how memory works with, "Of course, we all remember where we were when Kennedy was shot...." A student tentatively raised his hand and said, "Excuse me, professor, but I wasn't born then." She never used that line again.

I do get tired of writers referring to "the government" as "they," as if "the government" were a human being or group of people who all thought alike, which is a logical fallacy. Decisions about government actions have to be made by the responsible individuals or committees, and when one ascribes particular activities to "the government," they ought to be prepared to name names and back it up with evidence, or with at least reasonable deductions. The assumption that "the government" wanted to perform an experiment which they expected would harm or kill a specific group of citizens, and that those who would perform the experiment were capable of inventing the agent and carrying out the execution, undetected at any time by any other members of "the government," is pretty far-fetched, especially at a time when many homosexuals who worked for the government were closeted. They would need at least one willing and able scientist (probably many) to produce the agent, plus the cooperation of those whose responsibility it was to carry out the transmission of the agent to the intended target, and someone capable of monitoring the result. That scientists would be incapable of recognizing the likelihood of serious collateral damage, for which they had no remedy, is also unlikely (they didn't know that gay men had sex with non-gay men and women, or that they might be drug-users who shared needles?!) There is also the matter of finding a medication that was only given to gay men (?), and finding a way to "taint" it with the virus so that it would work to infect the gay men who got it. This whole experiment does not in an way resemble the "Tuskegee Experiment," except in that the subjects did not know that they were being used in a way that the experimenters knew would be harmful to them. Of course, if you can believe in the above conspiracy theory, you can probably believe that Jewish blue lasers caused the California wildfires, which is based on the same kinds of assumptions.

He's actually in Trenton.

+1!

And you are way too quick to leap to conspiracy theories without reading your sources carefully. "Government malevolence" is a combination of two vague concepts. The links you have provided are not about malevolence, but about secret actions the federal government took to test out scientific theories. Most of the actions were not expected to harm anyone, and in most cases they didn't. When they did cause harm, it was unintentional, and was not directed against any specific group of people. The purpose of the interview with Leonard Cole was not to talk about a government action but a crime committed by a person unknown, the sending of the anthrax-laden letters through the mail to specific individuals. The major exception in which people were deliberately harmed, mentioned briefly in one of your links, occurred almost a century ago, in which black men were used without their knowledge as subjects in a test of the effects of untreated syphilis, at a time when there was no cure for the disease. It was totally unethical but was not recognized as such by many American scientists at the time; government scientists would not be able to get approval for the same kind of experiment today. What you are suggesting about AIDS, however, was not an experiment but a purposeful act by "government" (which you don't define), acting our of hatred and ill will, to harm gay men.

You are comparing two very different things: an attempt by bureaucrats to stifle information that was widely known within the scientific community from reaching the general public, to a secret plot by the "government" to kill a specific group of citizens, with a weapon which was somehow engineered by a scientist or scientists within the government. There has never been any scientific evidence that HIV could have been invented in a lab, or that it could somehow be used to "taint" a medication that would somehow transmit it to gay men.

And did/do you also believe that the evil government scientists, who were smart enough to invent the virus and had the means to introduce it into the gay male community (without anyone else in the scientific community knowing about it), were not smart enough to realize that it could be easily transmitted by gay men to their unsuspecting wives, unborn children, hemophiliacs and patients receiving blood transfusions? By the way, what were those medications used only by gay men that they were "tainting" with the virus?

I remember that article, since at the time it was written I was on the board of directors of a gay health clinic, because I was working on an AIDS information hotline, so I was reading everything I could get my hands on. The conclusions did not surprise me, because I knew sexually active gay men who had died as early as 1980 of strange infections, including a doctor who kept treating himself; he felt certain that his illnesses were connected to the STDs he had contracted, but he couldn't find doctors who understood what was happening to him. It was also clear that not everyone who had the disease was symptomatic, because I knew men who had obviously been exposed but didn't appear to be ill; my best friend admitted that he had shared a needle with three other men at a party in SF in 1978, all of whom were dead of AIDS by the early 80s, yet he had no symptoms until 1993. Of course, it is possible that he got HIV from another source, but he was pretty careful after the means of infection were discovered in the mid-80s. It makes me wonder whether some of those who test positive for COVID-19 now but have no symptoms will have effects from it in the future.

The ad now says he is 35, but he claims to have been a "nude and glamour model" for twenty years. ?