Eye on the sky

In the brilliant, mind-bending dark comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once, Michelle Yeoh plays (to absolute perfection) the laundromat owner Evelyn Quan Wang, who finds that the universe has been shattered into hundreds of parallel time streams, and her job is to get all of reality back on the rails.

Along the way, Evelyn discovers that in these different timelines, she had many other possible fates, including a martial arts master, an award-winning dancer, and an acclaimed movie star.  At one point she asks why she (the laundromat-owner version) is being asked to save the universe, and receives the hilarious answer that of all the possible Evelyns, she is the one who is the biggest failure.

So basically, whatever she decides to do, there's no way she can fuck things up any worse.

Oh, and the wonderful Ke Huy Quan and Stephanie Hsu also have fantastic roles, and Jamie Lee Curtis just about steals the show as an absolutely fed-up IRS agent named (I shit you not) Deirdre Beaubeirdre.

If you haven't seen it, put it on your list immediately.  It's that good.

The reason it comes up is that I have to wonder if we're all actually trapped in the stupidest of all possible timelines.  Just in the last couple of days, Donald Trump threw a major temper tantrum because people are telling him he can't have Greenland to play with.  Trump's response to everything is always one of three things: belligerent social media posts, lawsuits, and tariffs.  He selected the last-mentioned, threatening tariffs against any nation that sides with Denmark and Greenland, because there's nothing like raising the price of imported goods paid by your own citizens to make a point with the rest of the world.

Unfortunately, that point seems to be summed up in psychologist Abraham Maslow's pithy line, "When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail."

If you needed another example of how ridiculous things have gotten, look no further than my home state of Louisiana, which recently enacted a law establishing an agency (a branch of the Department of Environmental Quality) to handle reports about "weather modification."  How ordinary, untrained laypeople would recognize weather modification if they saw it is an open question, but that hasn't stopped them from making hundreds of reports, because apparently a founding principle of the United States is (to swipe Isaac Asimov's phrase) "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge."

So I had a look at a few of them.  And...

... yikes.

One from my hometown of Lafayette describes "multiple chemtrails crisscrossing the sky."  Another, from New Iberia, says (and I quote), "There was a large fog that covered New Iberia within the past few weeks; materials (nanochip/bacteria) were dropped into the fog causing parasitic infections (per a medical source).  Who is authorized to poison citizens?"  Then there was the one from Covington, which I reproduce here verbatim, because you can only write [sic] so many times:

I haven't noticed especially this past Sunday and Monday on a clear sky clear blue sky.  Small Plains will appear.  This is not the first time there's several up to three and they will make a Chris cross pattern in the sky, admitting white substance and it clouds the sky when they're done the sky is cloudy before it was a clear sky.  I don't know what they're admitting.  I don't know who's doing it.  I don't know who's paying for it.  I don't know why it's being done, but I want answers to all of my questions because of this should not be happening in Saint Tammany Parish and it happens all the time.

Then, from Thibodaux we have:

Obvious they are not naturally occurring clouds but remnants of the last spray.  They take hours to dissipate where regular jet trails disappear immediately.  Also the rippling effect caused clearly by frequency emission should be looked into.  Hmmmm wonder what towers emit those.

Last, we have the guy from Lake Charles who said that there were chemtrails all over the place, and he would be happy to show anyone who was willing to come to his house, but first, visitors must prove that they are"not robots."

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the National Weather Service]

Okay, let me just make a few clarifications for any yo-yos who think all this makes sense.

The combustion of jet fuel produces two main waste products: carbon dioxide and water vapor.  When water vapor is released into the (cold) upper air layers, it condenses into a line of tiny water droplets called a contrail.  How long it takes a contrail to dissipate and/or evaporate depends on a variety of factors, including temperature, windspeed, turbulence, and humidity.

In particular: the higher the humidity, the slower the evaporation.  And the air down in Louisiana is really fucking humid.

I grew up there, remember?

Also, allow me to point out that if there was some sort of nefarious program to poison U.S. citizens, adding toxins (or nanochips and bacteria) to jet fuel so that the remnants in the exhaust would settle, and then hoping the right people would be outside to breathe in the Bad Stuff and die, has to be the all-time stupidest idea I've ever heard.  Despite this, these wingnuts filing all the reports seem to picture a bunch of Boris-and-Natasha-style villains mwah-hah-hahing and gleefully rubbing their hands together over what a brilliant and devious plot this is.

Although now that I come to think of it, this is actually not a bad comparison.  Chemtrails are about as plausible a superweapon as Goof Gas, which was Boris's invention that (if inhaled) makes the victim suddenly much stupider.  (It didn't work on Bullwinkle, you might recall, because he was already so stupid there was nowhere else to go.  A little like the people filing all these reports.)

What galls me the most about the chemtrails agency, though, is that every single one of these claims has to be investigated by agents who are getting paid by taxpayer money that could be used for something more worthwhile, which is, oh, just about anything.  Say, the education system, so the next generation grows up smart enough to know that "frequency emissions" don't create clouds.

Me, I'm torn between laughing and flipping my desk.  I don't know how Evelyn Quan Wang managed to keep her sanity, but I'm getting worn out from living in the stupidest of all possible timelines.  I mean, I guess you have to try and find some humor in it, like the guy who posted the pic of Donald Trump as a crying, messy-faced toddler in a high chair, and his mother is saying to him, "No, Donald, you can't have any Greenland until you've finished your Venezuela."

But at the moment, I'm just shaking my head over the whole thing.  Maybe I can appeal to Michelle Yeoh to help out.  If she's not up to the task, I'll settle for Rocky and Bullwinkle.

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Vinegar FTW

The frustrating thing about woo-woo ideas is that they never really go away permanently.

Take, for example, the Ancient Aliens thing.  It really came into the public eye with Erich von Däniken's 1968 bestseller Chariots of the Gods.  Buoyed up by his book unexpectedly catapulting him into fame, he followed it up with a number of sequels, including: Gods from Outer Space; The Gold of the Gods; In Search of Ancient Gods; Miracles of the Gods; Signs of the Gods; Pathways to the Gods; and Enough About The Fucking Gods, Already, Let's Talk About Something Else For A Change.

Ha!  I made the last one up, of course, because von Däniken is currently ninety years old and still talks about The Gods all the time, raking in huge amounts of money from conferences and keynote speeches (as well as book royalties).  And that's the difficulty, isn't it?  When there's money to be made (or clicks to be clicked -- which in today's social media world, amounts to the same thing), you can never really be confident of saying goodbye to an idiotic idea.

Which, unfortunately, brings us to "chemtrails."

Chemtrails -- known to us Kool-Aid Drinkin' Sheeple as ordinary jet contrails -- got their start in 2007.  A reporter for KSLA News (Shreveport, Louisiana) was investigating a report of "an unusually persistent jet contrail," and found that a man in the area had "collected dew in bowls" after he saw the contrail.  The station had the water in the bowls analyzed, and reported that it contained 6.8 parts per million of the heavy metal barium -- dangerously high concentrations.  The problem is, the reporter got the concentration wrong by a factor of a hundred -- it was 68 parts per billion, which is right in the normal range for water from natural sources (especially water collected in a glazed ceramic bowl, because ceramic glazes often contain barium as a flux).  But the error was overlooked, or (worse) explained away post hoc as a government coverup.  The barium was at dangerous concentrations, people said.  And it came from the contrail.  Which might contain all sorts of other things that they're not telling you about.

And thus were "chemtrails" born.

Since then, the Evil Government has been accused of putting all sorts of things into jet fuel, with the intention of spraying it all over us and Causing Bad Stuff.  Mind-control chemicals, compounds that can alter our DNA, pathogens (anthrax seems especially popular), chemicals that induce sterility.  Notwithstanding the fact that if you want to get Something Nasty into a large fraction of the population, sneaking it into jet fuel and then hoping that the right people are going to be outside when the jet goes over, and then will inhale enough of it to work, has to be the all-time stupidest Evil Plot I've ever heard of.  I mean, this one makes Boris and Natasha's Goof Gas thing seem like unadulterated genius.

Oh, but don't worry; this time the Good Guys are way ahead.  Chemtrail your little hearts out, Evil Deep State Operatives, they're saying.  Because they have a secret weapon in their arsenal that will neutralize all chemtrails.  You ready?

Vinegar.

And not even special magical vinegar; ordinary white vinegar that you can buy from the supermarket.  You're supposed to "gently heat (not boil)" it, and the vapors rise and do battle with the poisonous chemtrails.  How this supposedly works adds a whole other level of facepalming to the discussion.  "White vinegar is acetate acid [sic]," said one YouTuber.  "It eats alkaline metals which is [sic] what they spray to create the geoengineered clouds."

The problem here -- well, amongst the myriad problems here -- is that dissolving a chemical element doesn't destroy it.  If there really were alkaline metals in jet contrails, vinegar might react chemically with them, but the metals would still be there (and presumably, still be just as toxic).  It's like the claim I've seen about pillbugs (isopods) being our friends because they "remove heavy metals from soils."  Now, isopods might well be tolerant to soils with heavy metal contamination -- I haven't verified that possibility -- but if they do consume plant material laden with heavy metals, where do you think those contaminants go after they're eaten?  They're now inside the isopod's body, and when they isopod dies, the heavy metals leach right back into the soil.  Barium, cadmium, lead, arsenic, and so on are elements, and if you are unclear on why that point is relevant, I refer you to the definition thereof.

Notwithstanding, the anti-chemtrail people claim that simmering vinegar in your back yard can "clear contaminated chemtrails in a ten-mile radius in a few hours."  Which would be a pretty good trick, if it weren't for the fact that jet contrails themselves always disappear completely on their own in fifteen minutes or so.

The whole issue hasn't been helped by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who in between sessions of Congress seems to spend her time doing sit-ups underneath parked cars, proposing a bill prohibiting "geoengineering and weather modification," which includes chemtrails.

But of course, the bill conveniently says nothing about the carbon dioxide released by burning jet fuel, which actually is modifying our climate.  Can't mention climate change and piss off the corporate donors, after all.

So once again, we're confronted by a conspiracy theory that keeps rising, zombie-like, from its shallow grave.  At least in this case it'll keep the woo-woos busy simmering (not boiling) vinegar in their back yards, which is fairly harmless.  And it'll give a boost to the vinegar manufacturers.  Me, though, I'm kind of pining for the Ancient Aliens to come back around again.  At least they keep people interested in stuff like history and mythology and archaeology, even if their conclusions aren't any more grounded in reality than the vinegar/chemtrail people.

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The ideologue

I told myself that I wasn't going to do another political post so soon after Tuesday's, but dammit, my good intentions got blasted to smithereens by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (53427511876) (cropped), CC BY-SA 2.0]

Let me open by stating my bias up front.  My considered opinion, as a 32-year veteran science teacher with fifteen years of experience writing on science-related topics, is that RFK is a certifiable lunatic.  He combines the worst of the alt-med nonsense -- the kinds of things promoted by Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams and Vani "Food Babe" Hari -- with outlandish and debunked conspiracy theories, then dishes it all up as if it was peer-reviewed science.  Here are the three stories that destroyed my resolve to stay away from politics for at least a few days:

• In a town hall moderated by "Dr. Phil," he was asked by an audience member what he was planning on doing about "chemtrails."  You probably know that "chemtrails" are a completely discredited conspiracy theory claiming that The Bad Guys are putting stuff into jet fuel -- the "stuff" varies from heavy metals to radioactive isotopes to pathogens like anthrax -- so that when the exhaust is released into the upper atmosphere, it settles down on all of us and poisons us.  Notwithstanding that this has to be the absolute stupidest idea for a poison-delivery method I've ever heard of, it's been studied (I can only imagine the eye-rolling done by the scientists assigned to the research), and... nothing.  Contrails are almost entirely water vapor, with small amounts of soot from incomplete burning of jet fuel.  That's it.  But did RFK say that?  Of course not.  He's all in on chemtrails.  "It’s done, we think, by DARPA [the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency]," he said.  "And a lot of it now is coming out of the jet fuel -- so those materials are put in jet fuel.  I’m going to do everything in my power to stop it.  We’re bringing on somebody who’s going to think only about that, find out who’s doing it, and holding them accountable."

• An article in Ars Technica provides evidence -- in the form of RFK's own words -- that he doubts the basis of the medical science of infectious disease, the "Germ Theory of Disease."  Which claims that many diseases are (1) caused by pathogenic viruses, bacteria, fungi, or protists, and are therefore (2) communicable.  You'd think this'd be beyond question by this point, right?  Wrong.  RFK believes that any disease involving a pathogen is caused by having a weakened immune system -- i.e., all pathogens are opportunistic.  Get enough clean water, food, air, and sunlight, and you'll never get sick.  This is the basis of his anti-vaxx stance; if you live right, you shouldn't need 'em.  If this was a rational stance -- which it is not -- I'd ask him why, then, did childhood death rates go down so dramatically during the 1950s and 1960s, when mandatory vaccination programs against diseases like measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and polio were instituted?  Did all the kids suddenly start eating right, or something?

• He stated outright that it was reasonable that religious people would shun the MMR vaccine, because it contains "aborted fetus debris."  Needless to say, this is untrue.  Vaccines against viral diseases are cultured in cell lines grown in labs, not in aborted fetuses.  If this were true, it'd be kind of funny that some of the most anti-abortion people around -- the leaders of the Catholic Church -- have no problem with vaccines, and in fact, strongly recommend that children get all of the critical childhood vaccines on the schedule recommended by most doctors.

Look, it's not that I'm against the idea that we need good food and clean air and water.  I'm also well aware that Big Pharma has a lot to answer for in how it produces, vets, and prices drugs.  But going from there to something I saw posted on social media a couple of days ago -- a 32-point-font banner saying, "BIG PHARMA HAS NEVER CURED A SINGLE ILLNESS!" is blatant idiocy.  To give just one example, a friend of mine, who was diagnosed with leukemia at age eighteen and is now a happy and healthy young woman in her late twenties, would not be alive today without the chemotherapy developed and produced by "Big Pharma."  

But under RFK, cancer research -- and also research into Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, ALS, Parkinson's, and most recently, Ebola fever -- has been defunded in favor of spurious projects to "stop chemtrails" and "look into the connection between vaccines and autism."  (tl;dr: There isn't one.)

In short, RFK is a dangerous ideologue who shouldn't be allowed within hailing distance of our national health policy.  His continued occupation of the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services is going to result in irreparable damage to the American health care system.

But a man like him is never going to step down, because he can't conceive of the possibility that he could be wrong.  An attitude which, of course, is endemic in our government right now.

I wonder how many people will have to die before anyone will step in and fire him?

****************************************

Holy chemtrails, Batman!

If there's one thing I've learned from nine years of writing here at Skeptophilia, it's that there is no idea so weird that someone can't alter it so as to make it way weirder.

On Saturday, we looked at the woman in Japan who is convinced that the way to get rid of pesky ghosts is to buy a high-quality air purifier.  This would put ghosts in the same class as indoor air pollutants and that greasy smell left behind when you fry bacon, which is not how I'd like to be remembered by my nearest and dearest.  "Gordon's back!  Turn on the air purifier!" is not what I'd want to hear, if I was a ghost.

But according to a Roman Catholic bishop in Colombia, there's another way to get rid of evil spirits.  Have an airplane fly over and create a "chemtrail"...

... out of holy water.

I'm not making this up, but I kind of wish I was, because I did some repeated headdesks while researching this post while trying to find out if it was actually true or the result of someone trying to trap me (and others) in Poe's Law.  Sadly, it appears that the whole thing is real.  Monsignor Rubén Darío Jaramillo Montoya, bishop of the city of Buenaventura, is distressed by the unpleasant stuff that goes on down in this port city of 340,000 inhabitants.  So far this year there have been 51 murders, says Monsignor Montoya, which is double what occurred during an equal-length time interval last year.  So the only answer is to douse the entire city in holy water, to "take out these demons that are destroying the city's port."

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Amazingly enough, the powers-that-be in Buenaventura are all-in on this idea, and plan on spraying the city on July 13 or 14.   "In Buenaventura we have to get rid of the devil to see if we return the tranquility that the city has lost with so many crimes, acts of corruption with so much evil and drug trafficking that invades our port," a church representative told reporters.

There's no doubt that Buenaventura is kind of a mess.  Besides the murders, which are certainly shocking enough, there's the fact that it's a major hub of the drug trade (especially of cocaine) heading north to the United States.  Efforts by the government to clean the place up have been largely ineffective, and a lot of the city is controlled more by the Cali cartel than it is by law enforcement and elected officials.

On the other hand, mass exorcisms to get rid of crime and drug trafficking have been tried before, and the results were fairly unimpressive.  Back in 2015, Mexican "renowned exorcist" Father José Antonio Fortea organized an "Exorcismo Magno" to evict the demons that were behind all the murders and mayhem and drug trade, and as far as I can tell Mexico is still as dangerous as it ever was.  So as far as I can tell, exorcisms aren't that great a solution to crime and drug trafficking, ranking right behind building a wall to stop the Bad Hombres from getting in.

So sadly, loading up holy water in a crop duster isn't likely to do much, either.  I suppose it falls into the "no harm if it amuses you" department, although it must be said these sorts of "thoughts and prayers"-type solutions are problematic in that they give people the impression that you're doing something when you really aren't.

But that's not going to stop Monsignor Montoya and the rest of the Holy Chemtrails Squad from doing their thing the second week of July.  I'm just as glad I won't be there when it happens.  If I got sprayed with holy water, I'd probably spontaneously combust, which would be unpleasant for me, even if it might be entertaining for any onlookers.

***************************************

Richard Dawkins is a name that often sets people's teeth on edge.  However, the combative evolutionary biologist, whose no-holds-barred approach to young-Earth creationists has given him a well-deserved reputation for being unequivocally devoted to evidence-based science and an almost-as-well-deserved reputation for being hostile to religion in general, has written a number of books that are must-reads for anyone interested in the history of life on Earth -- The Blind Watchmaker, Unweaving the Rainbow, Climbing Mount Improbable, and (most of all) The Ancestor's Tale.

I recently read a series of essays by Dawkins, collectively called A Devil's Chaplain, and it's well worth checking out, whatever you think of the author's forthrightness.  From the title, I expected a bunch of anti-religious screeds, and I was pleased to see that they were more about science and education, and written in Dawkins's signature lucid, readable style.  They're all good, but a few are sheer brilliance -- his piece, "The Joy of Living Dangerously," about the right way to approach teaching, should be required reading in every teacher-education program in the world, and "The Information Challenge" is an eloquent answer to one of the most persistent claims of creationists and intelligent-design advocates -- that there's no way to "generate new information" in a genome, and thus no way organisms can evolve from less complex forms.

It's an engaging read, and I recommend it even if you don't necessarily agree with Dawkins all the time.  He'll challenge your notions of how science works, and best of all -- he'll make you think.

[If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]

Literal antennas

That loony people have loony ideas is kind of a tautology.  But what amazes me is when other people listen, and continue listening, once the person has established himself as a raving wackmobile.

Today we're referring to Mark Taylor, the self-styled "firefighter prophet," who has already appeared twice here at Skeptophilia.  The first time was back in 2017, when Taylor appeared on the radio program Pass the Salt, and gave us a terrifying warning that the Freemasons and Illuminati are controlling our DNA by making orchestras tune to A = 440 hertz, with the result that we get sick and dislike Donald Trump.  Then last year, he announced that Hurricane Michael was sent to Florida by the Democrats because they were angry over the fact that Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice, despite the fact that Kavanaugh wasn't anywhere near Florida at the time.

So there's no reason we'd expect that anything Taylor is saying would be correct, or even make sense.  Despite that, he's still a frequent flier on programs geared to right-wing conspiracy nuts and evangelical Christians, who seem to eat this stuff up.  In fact, last year some people at Liberty University made a movie about Taylor called The Trump Prophecy wherein we find out that Taylor struggled with persistent nightmares caused by the fact that one of his ancestors had been a Freemason, so he had to "rid himself of the generational curse" before he could throw himself into helping to fulfill God's will that Donald Trump had to win the election.

Oh, and the border with Mexico is the site of a "demonic gate" that will only be sealed if Trump builds his border wall.

So a pinnacle of reason and logic this guy isn't.  But this time, he's outdone himself.

Because he appeared last weekend on the evangelical radio program Blessed to Teach with his latest warning, which goes something like the following:

Everything gives off frequencies.  So does God.  When you pray, you're tuning into God's frequency.  But now Satan is using chemtrails to "block God's frequency" so that humans turn into "giant antennas" tuned in to Satan's frequency instead.

How does he know this?  Because, he said, he was researching chemtrails, and he found that they are primarily composed of barium and aluminum.

"The chemtrails, all the spraying is to detract us from hearing God’s frequency," Taylor says.  "They are spraying aluminum and barium in the chemtrails and if you look on the periodic table—barium is BA, aluminum is AL; it spells BAAL.  That’s deep.  That’s no coincidence."

He's right that it's no coincidence.  The symbols for barium and aluminum are "Ba" and "Al" because that's the first two letters of each of their names.

For fuck's sake.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

But Taylor never lets anything like logic get in his way.  "We are literally walking antennas because we’ve been breathing the aluminum, we’ve been breathing the barium," he says.  "We are literally giant antennas, which was intended.  If you want to get really deep on this, these entities that the devil has put down here that these satanist worship or tap into for this knowledge, if you will, they have told them how to do this stuff.  They’ve showed them how to do this stuff for decades, for thousands of years, but they’ve tapped into this stuff about how to clog up man’s ears and eyes to be able to sense and feel God every time you’re walking around."

I hesitate even to lend him any credence by refuting his claim, but the origin of the whole chemtrails idiocy was a guy in Louisiana who collected some dew in a bowl, claimed it was from a jet contrail, and had it tested.  Then he notified a television station, and the reporter mistakenly stated that the amount of barium contained in the water was being measured in parts per million of barium instead of parts per billion, with the result that it appeared the water had a thousand times the amount of barium it actually did.  (The minuscule amount of barium it did contain almost certainly came from airborne dust.)

And that's how chemtrails started, which continueth lo unto this very day.

But the good news is you don't have to worry about "literally turning into a giant antenna."

Anyhow, that's the latest, but almost certainly not the last, from the "firefighter prophet."  Even writing about this is making me wonder if the contrails over my house might be contaminated with beryllium and erbium, because it leaves me feeling like I need a beer.

That's BeEr, you know.

And that's no coincidence.

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I grew up going once a summer with my dad to southern New Mexico and southern Arizona, with the goal of... finding rocks.  It's an odd hobby for a kid to have, but I'd been fascinated by rocks and minerals since I was very young, and it was helped along by the fact that my dad did beautiful lapidary work.  So while he was poking around looking for turquoise and agates and gem-quality jade, I was using my little rock hammer to hack out chunks of sandstone and feldspar and quartzite and wondering how, why, and when they'd gotten there.

Turns out that part of the country has some seriously complicated geology, and I didn't really appreciate just how complicated until I read John McPhee's four-part series called Annals of the Former World.  Composed of Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, and Assembling California, it describes a cross-country trip McPhee took on Interstate 80, accompanied along the way with various geologists, with whom he stops at every roadcut and outcrop along the way.  As usual with McPhee's books they concentrate on the personalities of the people he's with as much as the science.  But you'll come away with a good appreciation for Deep Time -- and how drastically our continent has changed during the past billion years.

[Note:  If you order this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]

Acceleration causation station

You might have heard that a while back, there was a recall on Toyotas because of a problem with stuck accelerator pedals, a malfunction that cost several lives and had one man unjustly imprisoned for vehicular manslaughter.  Toyota was accused of covering up the problem to avoid the cost of a recall, and ultimately paid out $1.2 billion in repairs and reparations to avoid prosecution.

What you may not know is that the entire problem was caused by...

... HAARP.

Yes, HAARP, the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, the array of creepy-looking antennas out on the Alaskan tundra that has been blamed for everything from the Fukushima earthquake to Hurricane Katrina.  

Okay, I know HAARP shut down in 2014.

That's what they want you to believe.

HAARP [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So now here's another thing to lay at the feet of the Illuminati, who are (of course) the ones who operate the research station.  At least, that's the contention of the people over at the David Icke Forum, which acts as some kind of clearinghouse for loonies who don't think that anything happens by chance.

Here's the actual quote:

There seems [sic] to be a lot of accidents happening lately because of electronics failure. Many aircraft have fallen out of the sky due to autopilot error, etc. 

Trains have collided because switching stations have failed. 

Now the Toyota accelerator problem.  Truth is, GM, Ford and Toyota have all had the problem for years. 

I suggest that the nanoscale particles of silver released from the Chemtrail program in the form of silver-iodide that allows electrically charged ions to be directed and controlled through HAARP technologies is getting into electronics and reeking [sic] havoc by "tricking" (shorting) electro-mechanical switches.

Well, that's definitely the first thing I think of when I have car problems.  A while back, my 2007 Honda Element, which I love even though it looks kind of like a blue toaster on wheels, started making a weird grinding noise that seemed to come from the rear passenger side.  I immediately took it to my mechanic, Rick.

"Rick," I said, "I think something's wrong with the suspension or brakes back there.  Or, possibly, silver iodide nanoparticles released in the form of chemtrails by an atmospheric monitoring station in Alaska are tricking my car's electro-mechanical parts, thus "reeking havoc."

Turned out it was a stuck brake caliper.  Or at least that's what Rick told me.  There's always the possibility that he might be a secret Illuminati member himself, in which case I've now revealed to Them that I know what they're up to.

So now that I've given myself away, I guess I better watch myself.  Who knows what they'll beam silver iodide into next?  Maybe my computer at school.  Although considering that it already takes twenty minutes just to boot up when I turn it on, maybe that'll make it work better.  Heaven knows nothing else the IT guys have tried has made any difference.  My own contention is that the problem is caused by the fact that my school computer is powered by a single hamster running in a wheel, and that it's as slow as it is because the hamster's kind of pooped out after all these years.

But I digress.

In any case, let me say it as clearly as I know how: HAARP was shut down three years ago.  Any problems you have with your car, up to and including a stuck accelerator, are caused by mechanical failures, not by "silver iodide particles," which you can't "direct and control" using some kind of magic laser beam from space anyhow.  So just relax, and go back to chewing at the straps of your straitjacket, or whatever it was you were doing before.

In any case, I'd better wrap this up, because I've got to get showered, get some breakfast and coffee, and head on out to school.  Turn my computer on, and then wait twenty minutes to see if the hamster is in the mood to run today.

Making the sky great again

It's been a while since we've heard from the contingent that believes the best way to dose a population with nasty chemicals is to put them into jet fuel, so that the residue coming from the engines would waft about and settle on our unsuspecting heads.  Which, and I must point out at this juncture that amongst other things I write murder mysteries, has always struck me as the worst way to deliver poisons I can think of.  Anyhow, it was with great anticipation that I checked out a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia in which a fellow named David Hodges takes Donald Trump to task for not clearing the skies of chemtrails.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Hodges starts out pretty positively:

Donald Trump has made good on a lot of promises.  He's stood up against the free trade agreements.  He's battling to secure our borders against the entry of unknown terrorists into our country.  He's battled the mainstream media with their incessant lies and propaganda.  He's all in all done a really good job.  He's also moving churches away from the 501(c) restrictions against political comment.  I love what he's done in many ways.

But then we hear that there's a big "if" in Hodges's mind:

But President Trump, sir, there is an issue that you're not dealing with, and it's an issue of paramount and critical and immediate importance: it's the issue of chemtrails.  I fully expected by now that the sky over America would be devoid of chemtrails.  You, sir, as the Commander in Chief, have the authority to make this happen.  Read the reports, President Trump.  Barium, chromium, magnesium, aluminum, causing early-onset dementia, Alzheimer's, causing autism in the young, lowering crop yields because it reduces sunlight by as much as 18 to 20 percent, messing with the weather patterns... I could go on, and on, and on.

As, in fact, he does:

This is a depopulation movement by the globalists.  Donald Trump has the ability to stop this, at least territorially.  And I cannot believe that he has not ordered the grounding of these transports that lay down these chemtrails.  This is a litmus test, sir, of your administration.  If you care about the American people as you claim, you cannot make this claim with 100% steadfast honesty unless you are willing to stop chemtrails and stop them now.

Oh, and I forgot to tell you the name of Hodges's YouTube channel:  It's called "The Common Sense Show."

I find it wryly amusing that here we have a Trump supporter who is ready to rescind his approval of the new president if he doesn't find a way to get rid of perfectly ordinary jet contrails.  Of course, this really shouldn't be surprising, as this sort of thing seems to be all too common in the folks who voted for Trump.  The whole administration has its support from people who evidently feel like if they click their heels together and wish hard enough, reality will suddenly conform to their wishes -- Jeff Sessions won't have lied under oath about his connection to the Russians, Betsy DeVos will be the best thing ever to reform public schools, Kellyanne Conway will suddenly become capable of telling the truth, and Trump himself will be a good family values Christian instead of a serial adulterer and probable sex offender whose most notable religious accomplishment is embodying all seven Deadly Sins in one individual.

So I thought the whole thing was pretty ridiculous until I started looking at the comments section, and yes, I know that no one should do that because it's simultaneously risking valuable brain cells and also whatever shreds of confidence remain that the human race is salvageable.  But I did it anyway, against my better judgment, and here's a sampling of what I found:

• Please stop overspraying us with chemicals like we are bugs!!!!
• It's one of my top concerns as well. Here in Central FL, they are greatly diminished since the inauguration, but not eliminated. Call in the Air National Guard.
• Here's my question.. Who is piloting these planes and what airports do they use? They are not passenger planes that are spraying. We must get to the bottom of this.
• Trump is in charge of the Navy and the Navy runs the Chemtrail program. When's he going to do what's right.
• It’s now apparent that the U.S. government has implemented Teller’s theory by spraying megatons of particulate heavy metals and chemicals like aluminum, titanium, barium, strontium and sulfur hexafluoride into the stratosphere.
• Trees and forests are DYING ALL OVER THE WORLD DUE TO CHEMTRAILS AND HAARP.
• I'm so sick of never seeing a sunrise or sunset. It's been literally a year since I remember seeing a clear sunset. They cover up all the stars, too.

No, you moron, those are called "clouds."

What has me worried is that someone will actually get President Trump alarmed about this, and he'll start trying to do something about it, which will mean he'll propose making some kind of damnfool changes to the rules surrounding airplanes, despite the fact that he clearly knows nothing about them.  Look what happened when he got wind of the whole vaccine/autism nonsense; he jumped right on the bandwagon and now is blathering on about creating a commission to make sure vaccines are safe (there's already such a commission, and in fact it's been around since 1987).  Worse still, in the last months he's met with noted anti-vaxxers Andrew Wakefield and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and seems to be turning a deaf ear to the thousands of doctors and medical researchers who have written to him explaining that there is no connection between vaccines and autism.

For fuck's sake.

So I'm perhaps to be pardoned for having very little confidence that Donald Trump will take the scientific stance on "chemtrails," namely, that they're water vapor.  Of course, I have to admit that it might be entertaining to see what he'd propose doing about them.  Maybe build a wall around every airport.  Or, in an analogous move to all of his other appointments to key government posts, just hire someone who knows absolutely nothing about airplane engines to Make Jets Great Again and call it done.

Chemtrail survey

One of the problems with scientists being understood by laypeople is that they don't speak the same language.

I'm not just talking about technical vocabulary, here, the ability to throw around words like photophosphorylation and anisotropy and eigenstate.  I'm talking about how they each use fairly simple words -- words like theory and hypothesis and proof.

As an example, consider the kerfuffle over the activation of the Large Hadron Collider, instrumental in the search for (and ultimately discovery of) the Higgs boson.  There was concern, mostly on the part of non-scientists, that the energy released by the collisions within the LHC could cause some untoward effects.  Since one of the metaphors used to describe what was happening therein was "recreating the conditions that were present at the Big Bang" (a statement that in any case is incorrect by several orders of magnitude), people wondered if the activation of the machine might generate mini black holes -- or possibly a new universe, which would expand and tear our universe apart from the inside.

So looking for reassurance, the scientists were contacted, and asked if this was possible.  And that's when the trouble started.

Scientists, for the most part, are extremely careful to differentiate between the words "possible" and "likely."  So they said, sure, it's possible.  Given that we haven't ever achieved collision energies this high, lots of things are possible, including some we probably haven't foreseen.  You can't rule out an eventuality that depends on data we don't have yet.

Well, at that point, the media was off to the races.  Headlines saying "Scientists Admit It's Possible the LHC Will Destroy the Universe!" began to appear.  Only after the hue-and-cry began did the scientists say, "Now, wait just one minute.  We didn't say it was likely.  In fact, it's extraordinarily unlikely."  But by that time no one was listening, because most people were too busy wailing about how we were all gonna die and it was the physicists' fault.

I'm happy to say, though, that not only did we not die when the LHC was activated, the scientists are beginning to learn how to talk to the rest of us.  Witness, for example, the rather annoyed-sounding paper that appeared in Environmental Research Letters a few days ago, entitled, "Quantifying Expert Consensus Against the Existence of a Secret, Large-Scale Atmospheric Spraying Program," by Christine Shearer, Mick West, Ken Caldeira, and Steven J. Davis.  If you're thinking, "wait, this can't be about what it sounds like," well, yes, it is:

Nearly 17% of people in an international survey said they believed the existence of a secret large-scale atmospheric program (SLAP) to be true or partly true.  SLAP is commonly referred to as 'chemtrails' or 'covert geoengineering', and has led to a number of websites purported to show evidence of widespread chemical spraying linked to negative impacts on human health and the environment.  To address these claims, we surveyed two groups of experts—atmospheric chemists with expertize in condensation trails and geochemists working on atmospheric deposition of dust and pollution—to scientifically evaluate for the first time the claims of SLAP theorists.  Results show that 76 of the 77 scientists (98.7%) that took part in this study said they had not encountered evidence of a SLAP, and that the data cited as evidence could be explained through other factors, including well-understood physics and chemistry associated with aircraft contrails and atmospheric aerosols.  Our goal is not to sway those already convinced that there is a secret, large-scale spraying program—who often reject counter-evidence as further proof of their theories—but rather to establish a source of objective science that can inform public discourse.

So this brings up a couple of points.  First, these folks are going about this the right way.  None of this pussyfooting around about how "we can't prove it" or "without evidence, we can't say it's impossible;" Shearer et al. are saying, "No, you loons, there are no such things as 'chemtrails.'"

Second, didn't you just love the comment about how conspiracy theorists "often reject counter-evidence as further proof of their theories?"  That, I believe, is what is referred to in scientific circles as a "mic drop moment."

But third, I have to wonder who the 77th atmospheric scientist was, the one who had found evidence of chemtrails.  I'd like to talk to that guy, wouldn't you?

Be that as it may, I think the scientists are figuring out that you can't just assume that everyone gets the way evidence and proof (and disproof) are used in science.  They're becoming bolder about saying things like, "Evolution is a fact," "Anthropogenic climate change is happening," and "Homeopathy is pseudoscientific bullshit."  Unfortunate though it may be, using the more cautious diction that is necessary in a scientific paper just doesn't work when communicating scientific findings to the masses.

Anyhow, that paper cheered me up immensely.  Given that common-sense considerations -- such as the fact that jet contrails would be a really crappy toxin delivery device -- don't seem to dissuade the True Believers, it's time for the scientists to come together and say, "Um... NO."  Not, as they pointed out, that it will convince the True Believers -- but because it will let anyone still on the fence know that there is no discussion about this amongst people who aren't certifiable wackos.

Prince, chemtrails, and conspiracies

If you needed any further indication that the woo-woos of the world have no particular concern whether there's any evidence to support their views, witness the fact that there are already conspiracy theories floating around regarding why Prince died two days ago at age 57.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

First, we have Alex Jones, who more and more is looking like he's spent too many hours doing sit-ups underneath a parked car, claiming that Prince died of the "chemtrail flu."  Whatever the fuck that is:

The artist known as Prince has died suddenly of a mysterious illness, just like Merle Haggard, and both men previously spoke out against chemtrails many have suggested are responsible for a surge in respiratory illnesses...  A mysterious illness has been spreading across the U.S., coinciding with massive chemtrail spraying – and it’s possible the two are linked.

Sure.  "Possible," even though the flu is different from chemtrails in that the flu actually exists.

Then we had anti-vaxx wacko Gary Barnes over at the dubiously sane site Truth Kings claiming that no, it wasn't the flu that killed Prince, it was the flu vaccine:

The medical emergency which caused the plane to land [following one of Prince's concerts] remains unclear, but suspicion is now high that Prince was potentially given a flu shot injection or heavy doses of Tamiflu.  Prince suffers from epilepsy, and the flu shot can be deadly for those suffering from that illness.  The key will be the discovery of Prince being given a flu shot, which isn’t clear as of yet.  However the situation seems to reflect such potential.

Right!  There's always the potential for the world to change itself in order to conform to your lunatic views!

But no Parade of Wingnuts would be complete without a contribution from Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams of Natural News, who says that Barnes et al. are crazy -- Prince did not die from a flu vaccine, because Prince was way too smart for that, and knew that flu vaccines are deadly:

I find it highly unlikely that someone who holds a concern about chemtrails would allow themselves to be injected with a flu shot. In his interviews, Prince comes off as extremely well informed about certain agendas, meaning he almost certainly knew full well how vaccines carry an increased risk of autism for people of African-American descent.

Of course.  The way to dispel one crazy rumor is to replace it with an even crazier rumor.

Can I just point out one thing, here?  As of the writing of this post, Prince has not even been autopsied.  All we know is that he was feeling ill for a week before his death.  We have no information about what he was suffering from, nor whether it was potentially life-threatening.  In fact, we have no information at all.

But wait... isn't that suspicious in and of itself?  No information means... a cover-up!  And chemtrails and deadly vaccines and conspiracies!  *pant pant gasp gasp*

Okay.  For fuck's sake, people, can't we wait and actually have some evidence, any evidence, before we start sailing off into the ether?  Oh, never mind; evidence might contradict what they've already decided is true, and we can't have that.

So anyway.  The sane ones amongst us are mourning the passing of another extremely talented and innovative entertainer, the latest in an all-too-long list of inspirational people we've lost in 2016.  As for the rest of the yammering conspiracy theorists out there: just shut up, will you?

Moronocracy

Here in the United States, we have a fine old tradition of electing people to public office who are entirely unqualified to fulfill their duties.

Several of those have been frequent fliers here at Skeptophilia.  We have Lamar Smith, who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, despite being a rabid climate change denier who gets off by finding new and creative ways to cut the budget for NASA.  We have James "Senator Snowball" Inhofe, who somehow ended up in charge of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, even though he calls anthropogenic climate change a "conspiracy" and has vowed to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency.  We have individuals like Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Louie Gohmert, and Rick Brattin, each of whom alone would be sufficient evidence that having an IQ lower than your shoe size is not necessarily an impediment to winning a majority of the votes in an election.

In fact, I'm beginning to think that there's some kind of mathematical rule of politics in which (vote count) x (IQ) = a constant.

So I suppose it should come as no great surprise that this week, Sylvia Allen was appointed to be the chair of the Arizona State Senate Committee on Education.

[image courtesy of photographer Gage Skidmore and the Wikimedia Commons]

Allen's been here before, too.  Regular readers might recall her statement from March of this year, in which she interrupted a hearing on concealed-carry laws to offer the following puzzling insight:

I believe what's happening to our country is that there's a moral erosion of the soul of America.  It's the soul that is corrupt.  How we get back to a moral rebirth I don't know.  Since we are slowly eroding religion at every opportunity that we have.  Probably we should be debating a bill requiring every American to attend a church of their choice on Sunday to see if we can get back to having a moral rebirth.

What this has to do with concealed-carry laws, I have no idea.  Probably Senator Allen doesn't, either.  After all, this is the same woman who posted on Facebook that she believes in chemtrails and weather manipulation:

Ok, I do not want to get into a debate about weather.  However, I know what I see weekly up here on the flat where I live outside of Snowflake.  The planes usely [sic], three or four, fly a grid across the sky and leave long white trails streaming behind them. I have watched the chem-trails move out until the entire sky is covered with flimsy, thin cloud cover.  It is not the regular exhaust coming from the plane it is something they are spraying.  It is there in plain sight.  What is it they are leaving behind that covers the sky? 

Things are happening all around us that we see everyday and just don't get what it is.  I think we throw the "conspiracy theory" at people when we don't understand or have the information they have so we try and explain it that way.  Plus we just don't want to believe that our government would do anything terrible to us.  Well, just a few examples, the IRS attack on the Tea Party, Benghazi, wire taping [sic], Fast and Furious just to name a few and we think that they would not manipulate our weather?

It almost goes without saying that she's also a creationist:

The Earth has been here 6,000 years, long before anybody had environmental laws, and somehow it hasn’t been done away with...  We need to get the uranium here in Arizona, so this state can get the money from it.

And this, dear readers, is the person the Arizona Senate chose to lead the oversight of education in the state.

I keep thinking we're getting to a point where we're wising up, that we're figuring out that when we elect idiots, they (surprise!) do idiotic things.  But I guess we're not done yet.  Sylvia Allen, a woman who not only knows nothing whatsoever about science but is apparently functionally illiterate, is now in charge of such issues as school funding, curriculum oversight, and assessment reform for an entire state.

I'd like to end on a positive note, but I don't see one here.  All I can say in conclusion is that some days, it's hard to remain an optimist.  Lately, I'm more sliding over to the "we deserve everything we get" camp.

99 red balloons

In today's episode of "Studies in Confirmation Bias," we have a story in The Examiner claiming that someone captured a UFO refueling in a chemtrail.

What cracked me up about this one is the way the author of the story, Tom Rose, seems to take it as given that (1) chemtrails exist, and (2) UFOs exist, so clearly they must have some connection.  Here's how Rose introduces the topic:

An incredible UFO video was uploaded to YouTube on Oct. 12, showing what appears to be an unidentified flying object "refueling" itself in the chemical contrail of a jet flying high above it.  The strange object, which resembles no known aircraft, and flies in a decidedly non-aerodynamic manner, seems to intentionally head directly into the chemtrail of the passing jet and hovers for a moment before moving on.

The "chemical contrails" of jets are made almost entirely of water vapor and carbon dioxide, so it's a little hard to see how the UFO would be "refueling" itself with them.  Rose is right, however, insofar as water vapor and carbon dioxide are both "chemicals."

He goes on to write:

The nearly two minute video shows the original, unedited footage, without enhancement, in the opening segment, before switching to a magnified and slowed down version, which doesn't help to clear up the mysterious behavior of the unidentified aircraft.  In fact, the closeup reveals that, although there seems to be a flashing, navigational beacon on the UFO, its shape and configuration resembles no known aircraft, such as a helicopter, airplane or even a drone.

True, and there's a reason for that, which I'll get to in a moment.

He finishes up with a bang:

The chemtrail controversy has been raging for a few years now, with conspiracy theorists arguing there must be some secret meaning behind their sudden proliferation.  Could this incident explain the phenomenon?  Is it possible that alien aircraft are using the chemical exhaust fumes of high flying aircraft to refuel spacecraft in Earth's atmosphere?

 The last sentence would be the odds-on favorite in a contest for the statement that caused the fastest simultaneous guffaw and facepalm.  But let's not be hasty, here.  Here's a still from the video, showing the strange, non-aerodynamic craft, of no known configuration, sucking up chemtrail fumes:

But to get the full effect, you should definitely watch the video, which is in the article I linked.  I watched the video twice through, because I was pretty certain I knew what the UFO actually was by twenty seconds in, but I wanted to be certain.  I'm no video analysis expert, mind you, but I'm still pretty sure.  You ready?

It's a red mylar balloon.

The first thing I noticed is that the "UFO" is clearly much lower in altitude than the jet is.  Rose even seems to have noticed that, and let it slip in his first line, in which he states that the jet is "flying high above" the mysterious craft.  So even if Rose is right that chemtrails exist, and UFOs exist, and chemtrails have some sort of mix of chemicals that could be useful to the pilots of UFOs, this particular UFO is probably a couple of miles too low to accomplish its goal in any case.

Second, the "UFO" isn't so much flying as it is drifting.  As balloons do.  The flashes you occasionally see are when bits of it are turned at the right angle toward the sun, and reflect some glare back toward the guy with the videocamera.  They're not "flashing navigational beacons."

So anyway, watch the video yourself, and see if you agree with me.  I'm willing to admit that there may be other explanations, even though I seriously doubt that there's any alien mischief (or, for that matter, evil chemtrail mischief) going on here.

On the other hand, perhaps it's the red mylar balloons we should be watching out for.  Those things are probably up to no good.

Chembombs and rain dances

I find the general anti-science stance of a large percentage of Americans completely baffling.

I know you can go back to the Cold War, and cite the tired old "scientists gave us the nuclear bomb" trope.  But for cryin' in the sink, people, isn't it obvious that on balance, science has been a positive thing for society?  Science has revolutionized technology, medicine, transportation, information transfer, energy systems.  How many Americans use daily something we would not have without scientific research?

And yet on topics where it would cost us economically, or force us to alter our habits, all of our trust goes right out the window.  I'm talking, of course, about climate change, especially the recent shot across the bow from Charles Krauthammer on Fox News, who should win some kind of pretzel logic award for the following, when asked about the 97% consensus amongst climate scientists regarding anthropogenic climate change:

99% of physicists were convinced that space and time are fixed, until Einstein working at a patent office wrote a paper in which he showed them they are not.  I'm not impressed by numbers.  I'm not impressed by consensus...  These are things that people negotiate… the way you would negotiate a bill, because the science is unstable [and] because in the case of climate, the models are changeable…. The idea that we who have trouble forecasting what's going to happen on Saturday in the climate could pretend to be predicting what's going to happen in 30-40 years is absurd...  What we're ultimately talking about here is human sin, through the production of carbon.  It's the oldest superstition around.  It was in the Old Testament.  It's in the rain dance of the Native Americans.  If you sin, the skies will not cooperate.  This is quite superstitious and I'm waiting for science that doesn't declare itself definitive but is otherwise convincing.

Let me just say a few things about Mr. Krauthammer's analysis:

1. Einstein was a scientist.  You, Mr. Krauthammer, are not.
2. "I'm not impressed by numbers" implies that you're also "not impressed" by data, i.e. facts.  This is called being "a dumbass."
3. Consistency amongst the climate models is why scientists are now largely in consensus about the cause, extent, and results of climate change.  It may be harsh of me, but I strongly suspect that Charles Krauthammer would not recognize a climate model if it bit him right on the buttocks.
4. For the 584th fucking time, weather ≠ climate.
5. I defy you to find one scientist who equates "production of carbon" with "Old Testament sin" or "rain dances."
6. What the hell does the last line even mean?

As if this wasn't bad enough, loyal readers of Skeptophilia sent me just this week two new salvos from the conspiracy-theory cadre, who apparently are our alternative here in the United States to actual scientists.   The first of them says that okay, maybe the climate is changing, but it's changing because the evil government is deliberately doing it to kill us all:

Finally the public at large is beginning to realize there is something very wrong with the weather.  Freak cold spells, heat waves, droughts, floods and tornadoed [sic] haven’t gone unnoticed by even the most conservative mainstreamer these days.  Hardly a day goes by that somebody doesn’t mention something strange, unusual, even frightening about recent weather...  Is “global warming”, aka “climate change” a diversion from weather modification by geoengineering, including HAARP, chemtrails, and microwave pulses? 

While the “scientists”, the US military, and numerous other governmental agencies, continue to deny the reality of the massive global geoengineering programs, the enormous machine that runs these ever expanding programs continues to grow in plain sight.  Those that are attempting to expose the truth regarding the planetary weather/climate modification aerosol spraying are still marginalized by the state sponsored main stream media which is all to willing to do as it is told by those in power. 

In spite of the concerted and powerful effort to hide the reality of the ongoing geoengineering programs, the masses are beginning to awaken to the fact that we are all being subjected to a horrific global experiment.  An experiment that is quite literally putting all life on Earth in the balance. An ever growing mountain of evidence already proves beyond doubt that global geoengineering is an absolute reality.  Any that do an objective evaluation of the available evidence can come to no other conclusion.

Because scientists, obviously, aren't "objective."

Then, to ramp up the fear and distrust even more, in the second source we hear from the aptly-named site Aircrap that there's a new thing out there to kill us, even worse than a chemtrail... a chembomb:

NEW CHEMBOMBS – THE LATEST HI TECH SECRET CHEMTRAIL GEOENGINEERING AND IT’S HAPPENING NOW ALL AROUND THE WORLD, OVER YOUR CITY, AND OVER YOU !

And then, we're shown photographs... of a bunch of cumulonimbus clouds:

[image courtesy of photographer Simon Eugster and the Wikimedia Commons]

Because scientists obviously don't know anything about those.

The whole anti-science thing is really starting to concern me, because I strongly suspect that if we still have time to get out of the ecological mess we're creating, the scientists will be the ones who will figure out how to do so.  As I've said so many times: science isn't perfect, and scientists aren't infallible.  But c'mon, people; they have the advantage of knowing what they're talking about, unlike yammering blowhards like Charles Krauthammer and the other bloviating windbags on Fox News, not to mention the chemtrail/chembomb wackmobiles.  We've had fifty-odd years to get over our distrust of science, and move past the Cold War ideology that spawned the whole "evil scientist" stereotype.  I have the feeling that we'd better start listening, and learning, from the people who are trained in research and analysis, and stop paying attention to the talking heads who excel at telling us what we want to hear.

In other words: it's time to grow up.