Sunday, February 9, 2014

ERMAGHERD, NEHNERBERTS!

Via Tengrain, here's a great insight into the mind of the conspiracy theorist- a bunch of nutters believe that the government blanketed the South with fake snow. My favorite theory is that the faux snow, or snaux, is made up of nanobots. Here is a hilarious video from a conspiracy maven:





My favorite part of the video is when he exhorts his slack-jawed sidekick to smell the blackened snowball- the butane from the lighter is a commonly abused ("huffed") substance.

Meanwhile, in the reality-based community, it is known that snow that is exposed to flame doesn't melt, it sublimates- the ice transitions immediately from a solid to a gas. In the case of these videos, the snow sublimates and is blackened by carbon from the butane lighters.

Conspiracy theorists have long had serious problems understanding the water cycle. One of the longest-standing conspiracy theories posits that the condensation trails left in the wake of an airplane's engines are a global conspiracy to achieve a nebulous, nefarious goal. Funny how simply conflating "contrails" with the made up word "chemtrails" has achieved such longevity. My go-to authority on aviation is Major Kong, a man I have had the pleasure of meeting in real life. As a former USAF and current commercial pilot, this was his terse take on chemtrails:


Chemtrails!
Yeah, like we’re going to give up valuable cargo space so we can spray chemicals.
We could put a lot of chickens where those chemical tanks would have to go.



It's one thing when the nutters claim that the government is using a weather-smurfing machine to create storms, but it's an entirely different stratum of wrongness when they believe that countless nanobots were dumped across a wide swath of the U.S.

Of course, I could be in on the conspiracy...

Cross-posted at Rumproast.

7 comments:

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

Dang it!

That snaux is what stopped me from returning to W.V.
~

Mandos said...

If YOU could control minds by spraying chemicals from airplanes, ...

Dream said...

The rise of nanobots

mikey said...

The secret power in the world is clearly not the Illuminati, it is Hillbillies. Hillbillies know all the deepest secrets, and even understand physics at a level well beyond any mere scientist. Hillbillies are the ones who meet the aliens face to face - or face to anus in some cases, I'm given to understand. Hillbillies discover the crop circles (at first I typed 'cop circles', but that is an entirely different thing) and fire on the giant mutant creatures that live in the deep woods.

If we'd just give them some righteous funding, I'm sure hillbillies could solve all (or most) of our problems in no time...

E.A. Blair said...

This was also covered by Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer. Actually, the snow does not sublimate - the water from first melt is wicked up by the rest of the snow until it becomes saturated. The effect, however, is similar.

Smut Clyde said...

a nebulous ... goal

If I were mentally nimbal I would a cumulate some bad puns.

Smut Clyde said...

countless nanobots were dumped across a wide swath of the U.S.

What is actually sprayed from the planes to create Chemtrails is a mist of of very small turkeys.