Finally got that Freemason invite!

Hahahahaha! This blog was always destined to FAIL! No posts or comments in over a year. Maybe the annoying little boy that started this blog actually grew up?! They all do eventually and figure out how immature & futile their pursuit of “professional argumentativeness” actually is. Ce la vie. Yet another in a long line of silly hobby “debunking” sites bites the dust while actual truth moves on as ever… gone AND forgotten!

So sayest the fantastically named ‘NutbarsnzRtheRealNutbars’ in a typically considered, thoughtful comment from the conspiracy theorist side of the fence. (And I’d be impressed if the email address they commented with really was ‘nutbarsnzyousuckbigones@andyouhaveatinypenis.com’.)

Anyway, as NutbarsnzRtheRealNutbars has pointed out, this site has been put on indefinite hiatus. As the site byline states, I’ve been banging my head against various conspiracy theories for a few years now, and you can only point out other people’s mistakes for so long before realising they’re never going to (or will never want to) learn. The chemtrail hoax is pretty well dealt with by other sites (notably Metabunk and Contrail Science) for anyone who’s at all confused about the science behind contrails (and the non-science behind ‘chemtrails’).

Elsewhere…

And smashdracs! I’d've put you at the top if you’d just asked!

Oh and on another related sidenote that some here may find amusing… before I stated adding any comments in these forums I did a little back-reading and followed a few links. One that I visited only a few times was this rather silly little debunking blog called nutbarsnz. I laughed raucously at the massive amount of spamming they were receiving from one commenter in particular before the blog pretty much dried up (and blew away) just over a year ago. Cut a long story short…

Oh, come on Karmakazi Angel!? Surely you’re not accusing our favourite commenter – Biblical Prophet – of being a ‘spammer’? He just made, um, ‘interesting’ points. Unlike, say, MysteriousNZ, Clare Swinney or The Contrail, I’m not in the habit of deleting comments or banning people whose views disagree with my own.

Rightio, leaving the chemtrail hoaxers to their paranoid little delusions … now.

But is it divisible by 3?

The fascination with ‘significant’ numbers is another thing I can’t get my head around. All the ‘divisible by 3‘, ’666′, 33 malarkey that people are into is just baffling.

In a comment over at mysteriousnz, farside notes…

Hey guys, I thought you’d be all over the Osama execution… Killed by 6 seals on the 66th anniversary of Hitler’s death and shot through the Left eye?

Do these guys even check their facts before making such statements? For starters, there weren’t six seals involved, the number was more like 79 (and a dog). (I think farside is getting confused by the name of the operational unit, which was SEAL team 6 – the navy equivalent of the army’s Delta Force).

Bin Laden was killed on May 2 (Pakistan time). Hitler’s death was the 30th of April.

Undaunted, farside turns to the recent royal wedding…

I don’t even see a mention of the royal wedding coincidentally on the same weekend where 660 guests a 6 bridesmaids & groomsmen assembled to see the pair get married.

There were, in fact, somewhere around 1900 guests at the ceremony.

And eight people in the bridal party: four bridesmaids, two groomsmen, the best man and the maid-of-honor.

However, Kate’s dress did have a 270-centimetre train.

And 270 is divisible by 3!

Make of that what you will.

Worst. Depopulation. Plan. Ever.

While belief in ufos, ghosts and other hard-to-prove-either-way phenomena is (vaguely) understandable, the ongoing insistence from some people that vaccinations are some sort of insidious plot is, to put not too fine a point on it, completely insane.

It’s not just all the scientific evidence that’s been compiled over the last hundred years or so, which shows that vaccinations are not only safe, but have greatly improved (and extended) the lives of millions of people, and virtually wiped out what were some of the most common and insidious childhood diseases of yesteryear (measles, whooping cough and polio, to name but three), it’s also the practical reality of your own life experience. When did you last hear of someone dying or being crippled from measles? How many childhood friends did you lose to whopping cough? How many people in your workplace are handicapped by polio?

But, the ignorance continues. Over at uncensored, for example, we’ve got a fairly typical example of anti-vax madness going on.

Why argue the point?

Craego, a commenter over at Northland NZ Chemtrails asks a good question of those of us who spend time debunking chemtrail believers [edit: comment has now been deleted, presumably in another bout of site 'cleansing' by Clare] …

LMFAO now WHY would anyone with half a brain waste their time creating a webpage trying to PROVE that something they believe doesnt exist, does not in fact exist??

Yes indeed, a question that requires a LMFAO and a two question marks! (And no apostrophes). That aside, why do we do it?

Now, my ‘debunking’ days started when I was browsing through YouTube one evening, and stumbled across a video showing what it purported to be ‘chemtrails’. To me, they looked like normal contrails, so I asked the poster why they thought they were ‘chemtrails’. The answer: ‘because real contrails don’t persist for more than a few seconds’. I was pretty sure this wasn’t right, so I asked a meterorologist and a commercial pilot about the science behind contrails. Of course, the fact of the matter is that contrails can persist for minutes, or even hours — it all depends on the conditions at the time. The evidence for this (both scientific and observational) is irrefutable.

But, browsing around the (many) sites dedicated to chemtrails, it quickly became apparent that this piece of misinformation (that persistent contrails = chemtrails) is deeply entrenched in the chemtrail believers’ community. However (as I quickly found out), if you point this out to them, you get labelled as a ‘shill’ or ‘disinformation’ agent. Here’s a fantastically representative example of this happening over at uncensored, where the “persistent contails = chemtrails” meme is repeated (again), and when I point out the inaccuracy of this statement, the original poster (surprise surprise, Clare Swinney), starts shouting ‘disinformation agent’ at the top of her voice, whilst completely avoiding the actual mistake she’s made (again).

So, why continue? I’m never going to change the mind of someone like Clare, so why persevere?

The thing is, not everyone is like Clare, and there are probably plenty of people (like myself) who do catch a whiff of this thing called ‘chemtrails’ on the internet, and then do some ‘research’ to discover what it’s all about. And if you’re the type of person who believes what they read, then if the only type of site you find when googling up ‘chemtrails’ are the likes of Uncensored, Northland NZ Chemtrails and Pacific Chemtrail, then you’d very quickly start to believe that a persistent contrail is a chemtrail, that the presence of aluminium and barium in water samples is somehow unnatural, and that a pretty sunset or a 22° halo indicates the presence of man-made chemicals in the atmosphere.

Chemtrail believers often decry ‘disinformation’ agents who spread incorrect facts, but are amongst the worst perpetrators of such behaviour themselves. Hence the desire to add some balance (i.e. facts) to the discussion. Hopefully people doing some online reading on the ‘chemtrail’ phenomena will also stumble across sites like this one, Contrail Science and Contrails North NZ that will let people realise that those long white clouds formed by planes are nothing but condensed water vapour and nothing to worry about.

After all, there are plenty of things that are worth worrying about in this day and age, so having one less thing on that list is surely a good thing.

Shocking revelations! Alcohol can kill you.

And it seems to kill a lot of people. You see, there’s a chemical in there called alcohol, which the body can deal with in small amounts, but, which in larger quantities, is really quite dangerous, in quite a lot of different ways.

Coffee? Dangerous. Caffeine (by the uncensored measure) is thus a ‘poison’.

Table salt? Dangerous! ‘Poison’!

Even vitamin supplements, which are often purported to be good for you (and, actually, probably are if you’re not getting enough from natural sources), can be dangerous if you take too many.

Which makes this post over at Uncensored — Queensland Health caught out on Fluoridation! — (exclamation mark not added by me, I should point out) a little puzzling. To sum up, someone has dug up a document from the Queensland Health Department, warning workers (who are presumably dealing with the fluoridation of the water supply there) to be careful of not getting too much of the stuff into their system.

Well, that’s very sensible, isn’t it? Too much of the stuff is toxic. A tiny little amount in your water is good for your teeth. As Mike points out in the comments…

It has never been news that fluoride is toxic in high enough doses … You’d have to drink several thousand glasses of water at a single sitting to get to 2 grams of NaF!

Indeed. As usual, the ‘article’ itself is a mish-mash of sources that don’t really make a solid argument. Presumably the idea is to present us with examples of how toxic fluoride can be (and, no debate, it can be), and thus, by association, damn the practice of fluoridating our drinking water. From the aforementioned Australian document – Review of Water Fluoridation and Fluoride Intake from Discretionary Fluoride Supplements (NHMRC, 1999):

Fluoride can exert acute toxic effects … and the lethal dose in the range of 2-5 g NaF for an adult …

From The Merck Index (Encyclopedia of Chemicals, Drugs and Biologicals)

Severe symptoms have occurred from ingestion of less than one gram; death from 5 to 10 g.

…and there’s several reported instances of people getting sick and/or dying from ingesting too much of the stuff, eg.

In 1973 a fatality occurred in Queensland with a 2-year old child. It had swallowed almost fifty 2.2 mg sodium fluoride tablets. Five days after admission to the hospital it died.

But, you know, I reckon if I swallowed the equivalent of 50 tablets of just about anything you’d find in your average medicine cabinet (nurofen, aspirin, cough medicine, etc.) then I’d probably be expecting to get pretty sick (at best) as well. It seems that this is, in fact, the case. That aside, the common theme there is that it seems you need to be working in the realm of whole grams of the stuff to make you sick.

Anyway, the level of fluoride in Australian drinking water is in the range of 0.7 to 1.2 mg/L (with the optimum concentration being 0.9 mg/L), as outlined in the Australian Drinking Water Guidelines. As per Mike’s comment above, you’d need to drink a vast amount of water before you started to get anywhere near a toxic dose (and you’d probably risk dying of hyponatremia before you got there — it even turns out that water can be a ‘poison’).

As an aside, it’s interesting to note that Queensland has the lowest rates of fluoridated water in Australia, but the highest rates of tooth decay (warning: PDF file). From the same document we learn that Townsville, which has had fluoridated water since 1964, has 45% less tooth decay than Brisbane. You could nearly draw some sort of conclusion from those facts, couldn’t you?

Persistent contrail = chemtrail?

WWII American bombers on a, errr, 'chemtrail' run.

The assertion that you can tell a contrail from a chemtrail by watching how quickly they dissipate (contrails disappear ‘within 30 seconds’, chemtrails last for minutes or even hours), is a fairly common and widely disseminated ‘fact’ amongst the chemtrail-believing community.

It is, of course, completely wrong. Visit contrailscience.com’s page on the ins-and-outs on the science of persistent chemtrails for a good overview. It’s just a matter of physics: given the right combination of temperature, humidity and air pressure contrails can persist and (depending on wind) even spread out and form clouds. It’s just water vapour, after all.

Most chemtrail sites avoid the topic, or regurgitate the incorrect “persistent contrail = chemtrail” meme, but at least one chemtrail site does acknowledge the reality of the situation, at chemtrailcentral.com they write…

… it is scientifically accepted that normal contrails may persist for hours and spread … the speed of dissipation of a contrail can be from a few seconds to hours. This varies with differing atmospheric conditions due to seasonal, daily, and frontal weather changes as well as global placement as varying local temperatures and humidity at flight levels provide differing ranges of persistence.

But, for the most part, it’s something the chemtrail-believers, once they’ve grasped, seem completely unwilling to let go. On this discussion over at uncensored, we have the usual recipes for contrail/chemtrail misdiagnosis.

1. The original photos shown are, as per usual, nothing out of the ordinary. They could be contrails. There’s nothing about the photos that would make you think they were anything else.
2. In order to support the argument, commenter CCCP claims that aluminium is being found in Christchurch rain water (the photos are from Auckland, but, whatever…), and then links to a Youtube video, made by none other than Clare Swinney, in which the persistent contrails = chemtrails meme is repeated, and the presence of aluminium (and, for good measure, barium) in the rain water is pinned on the ‘chemtrails’.

Astonishingly, in her video, Clare Swinney has actually resorted to some genuine science to try and support her claims. She’s sent off her rain water sample to a lab, and received back a nice breakdown of the elements found within. The numbers shown are…

• Aluminium - 0.058gm/m³
• Arsenic – 0.0011gm/m³
• Barium – 0.0025gm/m³
• Boron – 0.0166gm/m³

So, yep, there’s some aluminium in there, but is it suspicious that a (tiny) amount of aluminium (and the other stuff) should be found in a rain water sample? Short answer: no. The World Health Organisation point out that…

Aluminium is the most abundant metallic element and constitutes about 8% of the Earth’s crust. It occurs naturally in the environment as silicates, oxides, and hydroxides, combined with other elements, such as sodium and fluoride, and as complexes with organic matter … The concentration of aluminium in natural waters can vary significantly depending on various physicochemical and mineralogical factors. Dissolved aluminium concentrations in waters with near-neutral pH values usually range from 0.001 to 0.05 mg/litre but rise to 0.5–1mg/litre in more acidic waters or water rich in organic matter.

If we convert 0.058gm/m³ to the mg/litre (it’s ends up being the same, but just so we’re measuring oranges with oranges) we get 0.058mg/litre. So, ever so slightly into WHO’s ‘acidic or rich in organic matter’ range. And that’s actually less aluminium than you’d find in the drinking water of some areas…

In a large monitoring programme in 1991 in the United Kingdom, concentrations in 553 samples (0.7%) exceeded 0.2 mg/litre (MAFF, 1993). In a survey of 186 community water supplies inthe USA, median aluminium concentrations for all finished drinking-water samples ranged from 0.03 to 0.1 mg/litre; for facilities using aluminium sulfate coagulation, the median level was 0.1 mg/litre, with a maximum of 2.7 mg/litre (Miller et al., 1984). In another US survey, the average aluminium concentration in treated water at facilities using aluminium sulfate coagulation ranged from 0.01 to 1.3 mg/litre, with an overall average of 0.16 mg/litre (Letterman & Driscoll, 1988; ATSDR, 1992).

And the barium? It’s not surprising to find a (very small) amount in a random sample. Here’s WHO’s factsheet on barium. Again, the levels found in Clare’s sample are well within normal ranges. And from this site we learn (emphasis mine)…

Barium is surprisingly abundant in the Earth’s crust, being the 14th most abundant element … Because of the extensive use of barium in the industries human activities add greatly to the release of barium in the environment. As a result barium concentrations in air, water and soil may be higher than naturally occurring concentrations on many locations. Barium enters the air during mining processes, refining processes, and during the production of barium compounds.

Refining processes? Clare Swinney just happens to live down the road from New Zealand’s largest oil refinery. You’d surely be more surprised to find no trace of barium in any sample taken in the area.

Anyway, my point?

Just because a contrail persists, doesn’t make it a chemtrail.

Just because there are some ‘chemicals’ (ie. naturally occurring elements) in some rain water, doesn’t mean they came from a ‘chemtrail’.

There are normal, rational explanations for most things in life, and the existence of persistent contrails and the presence of chemicals in water are two of those things that can be explained quite easily with a solid scientific basis, without having to resort to a massive worldwide conspiracy.