Thursday, September 1, 2016

Chemtrails Classes Canceled

Here in Minneapolis, we have a lot of community education classes. Just about anybody can sign up to teach anything, within reason. Every so often I consider trying to put together some sort of magick class and see if there's any interest, but I'm not sure whether or not it would be approved since paranormal stuff is controversial. on the other hand, I do see things like meditation classes, so maybe there would be a way to write it up so that it would be accepted.

So somebody managed to sneak classes on "chemtrails" into the fall schedule. For anybody who doesn't know, chemtrails are a conspiracy theory put forth by people who don't understand that contrails - the streams of exhaust produced by jet engines - are sometimes visible and sometimes not, depending on weather conditions. The idea is that when they are visible, it's because the planes are spraying mysterious chemicals into the atmosphere. Depending upon who you're hearing it from, those chemicals could be for anything ranging from climate engineering to mind control.

Once the course was brought to the attention of the community education folks, it was canceled because basically the whole "chemtrails" thing is nonsense. It might as well have been a class on playing the banjo with Bigfoot. But mysteriously, nobody had any idea how they got approved in the first place.

Likely not included in the planned class was this: In a study last week, 77 scientists looked into the conspiracy theory. Seventy-six of them said there’s no evidence of it, Smithsonian reported. The identity of the holdout isn’t known. But he/she won’t be teaching a class at Jefferson.

How did the classes get scheduled in the first place? The adult education office reported that they don’t know. The hiring coordinator who was in charge of finding staff to teach the class resigned over the summer.

In a letter to those who objected to the class, MCE said it was unable to insure a balanced presentation around the topic, so it decided to cancel the classes.


I'm sure die-hard believers will try to argue that said hiring coordinator was silenced by the government, or the community education people were threatened, or whatever. But the fact is that if an all-powerful government organization intent on poisoning the atmosphere couldn't even stop a course from being listed in a community education bulletin, that says a lot about how good it could possibly be at keeping something like this under wraps.

I suppose it's technically true that contrails affect the climate. They contain carbon dioxide, just like exhaust from other engines, and jets do produce a lot of it. But there are no mysterious geoengineering chemicals added, let alone mind-control drugs. You might be able to make an argument for the former being more effective at high altitudes, but the latter is just ridiculous. Any drug would need to reach group level in sufficient concentrations to deliver an effective dose.

Geoengineering is a subject of quite a bit of debate among climate scientists, and if they ever do decide to do it, there are far more effective ways than tacking tanks onto passenger planes - or whatever it is that the chemtrails people think the government is supposed to be doing.

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