Right, what drivel shall I write today?

Well, it seems safe enough, after all; no-one reads this vacuous rubbish anyway. Suits me. Half my lessons for the day were cancelled because the relevant teachers were off, which has to be a good thing, hasn't it? I spent one of them arguing; a friend of mine was expressing his conviction that AIDS was created by the US government as a weapon against black people. Using genetic engineering abilities that we don't even have now. Ah yes, came the rejoinder, but the research was done in secret labs, you see. Right, so how come they were that far ahead whilst keeping the entire world in the dark? How did they get that much expertise? Or that much money - I know the US government is rich, but not rich enough to develop technology that is still decades away, officially, I suspect. There are few things that money cannot buy, but time travel is probably one of them. In any case, the technology behind this would be too profitable to be kept secret - why keep it secret when you can make a killing out of licensing at least some of the more basic stuff out? i was informed that it wasn't really the US government behind all this, but the Illuminati. I was then informed that I was a pawn of the media and grossly naive for choosing to read widely around many relatively trustworthy sources rather than obtaining my views from conspiracy theorist web sites. Hmm... is there a flaw there? I'm not sure...
Let's get this straight - I do not believe everything the media tells me, I do read independent sources, and I'm pretty good at analysing the relative merits of information that I come across. The argument "you can't prove that the world isn't run by the Illuminati" carries no weight whatsoever. I can't prove that it isn't run by invisible mutant hamsters, or that Blair isn't an alien (might be something in that one, actually). When it comes to it, I cannot even prove the existence of anything around me. Including myself. But without hard evidence - and it would have to be pretty hard, given the huge claims being made - Occam's razor compels me to believe in the simplest hypothesis; that everything is how it seems, for a given value of "everything", and a given value of "how it seems". Everything should be read critically and intelligently. If you're inclined not to believe something, go and have a closer look, that's wonderful. There's nothing worse than complacency and sheepish conformity. But inventing what is effectively a belief system on the basis of, at best, circumstantial evidence from questionable sources, is pathetic and arrogant. There are many things we don't know about. But I suspect these things have more to do with governmental subterfuge or corporate shennanigans than hyperadvanced evil geniuses in secret labs, or the Illuminati for that matter.