Some people are questioning the motives of government bringing back an old cloud-seeding program in California–here’s what has them so nervous.
The term “conspiracy theorist” has such an ugly ring. It is a cheap way to dismiss out of hand not only a person’s particular beliefs about a particular subject, but also to render anything else that they might say as somehow beneath contempt, certainly beneath response. It is a weapon, really, a bludgeon to club someone with differing views into mute paralysis.
The implication contained in the term “conspiracy theorist” is that the person espousing a different view is some sort of dangerous lunatic. And it is a demeaning, dismissive and unproductive.
So when headlines scream “Conspiracy Theories” in regard to a new California initiative to seed clouds in response to a record drought, it raises my hackles.
But let’s move past that. Here’s what’s happening: in the fifth year of a historic drought, California, desperate for relief and frustrated with waiting for nature to do something about it, has revived a cloud-seeding program with a Utah-based company that once performed similar function in the early 1960s.
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Works in January awarded a $500,000 contract to North American Weather Consultants (NAWC), a Utah-based cloud-seeding company in order to attempt to goose the region’s rainfall.
The principle of cloud seeding is remarkably straightforward: particles of silver iodide or potassium iodide, liquid propane or solid carbon dioxide (dry ice) are deposited into a saturated cloud to boost cloud condensation. This is the process whereby particulates act as hubs or nuclei that attract super-cooled water vapor. This vapor then freezes into ice, which, once its particles get heavy enough, fall from their clouds, melting on their way to earth and thus turning into rain.
Enter chem-trails. The Pentagon has long been rumored to be seeking means to control the weather as a way to hinder enemy troops in combat, and there is plenty of documentation to demonstrate that they have pursued this right up to the present. Hence, people who see “chem-trails” left behind by airplanes as part of these experiments.
There isn’t enough space here to go into that, but here’s how it ties in with the recent cloud seeding in California: the LA Department of Public Works announced the program in a really bizarre and secretive way. They placed a classified ad in an obscure Pasadena newspaper announcing the move.
So when so-called “conspiracy theorists” started calling out the government for quietly announcing the undertaking of a “secretive weather-modification” program, were they wrong?
No they were not.
But this is the way anyone with any sense of distrust toward the government is marginalized and has his or her arguments instantly walled off into a virtual lockbox. These ideas are thus rendered moot and unworthy of discussion.
Conspiracy theories.
Shame on mainstream media sources for resorting to this cheap tactic to avoid discussion on this or any topic.
http://www.alternet.org/environment/why-southern-californias-new-cloud-seeding-project-putting-conspiracy-theorists-frenzy?akid=14107.108705.meojdF&rd=1&src=newsletter1052893&t=6