Chemtrails
I’ll usually hear someone out when they go on and on about how something is a cover-up, or how the government is up to something devious. A large part of my willingness to entertain these ideas is that I’m intelligent enough to know that governments tend to attract narcissistic, contemptible, cunty types, who are by no means above being completely despicable human beings. They lie, they steal, they cheat. They’re generally sociopaths who are great are convincing less intelligent people to vote them into office, where they spend their terms engaging in actions to increase their own wealth and status at the expense of tax dollars and the well being of the country. Why bother actually fixing a country, when you can network with billionaires, write autobiographies, and set yourself up for hundred-thousand dollar speaking engagements after your term is up.
One of the few government conspiracy theories that I’ve never been able to take seriously though, is chemtrails. Nothing about chemtrails adds up or makes sense whatsoever. Let me get this straight: The government is sending up planes that spray us with something to make us all more susceptible to manipulation, despite the fact that everyone in the government would be getting sprayed as well, and that most of the population has a history of voting for unqualified politicians who slowly run the country into the ground anyway? What exactly are we being brainwashed into doing? People are alarmingly easy to manipulate into giving up their rights already, merely by using fear. The U.S. government has passed countless unconstitutional bills simply by convincing the populace that terrorism is actually a problem. (It’s like #43 on the list of problems in this country) Every time there is a shooting (as long as the victims are white), people gladly hold it up as justification to start crossing things off of the Constitution. There are even groups of people who feel it’s justifiable to limit freedom of speech if people’s feelings get hurt. With this kind of intellect running rampant in this country, why would anybody need to be manipulated?
Other conspiratorial reasons for why chemtrails are being used include weather modification, and population control. As far as the former goes, weather modification via plane already exists. It’s called cloud seeding and has been used since the 1940’s. Governments the world over have used cloud seeding to increase rain and snowfall during droughts, and to clear the air of pollution before large events. As far as population control goes, chemtrails would be an ineffective way of facilitating this. China was faced with a perceived overpopulation problem, and enacted the “one-child policy”, which lasted 35 years. No chemtrails were needed to get this policy off the ground. If a government were actively trying to sterilize people, doing so through heavily consumed beverages or food would probably be the most covert way to go about perpetrating this. A partnership with Starbucks or McDonalds would have 95% of the population sterile in no time flat, then only people like me would be able to breed, America would flourish, and we’d be number one again within 2 decades. The problem is, both of our political parties thrive on the less intelligent procreating. The less intelligent are the ones you can easily sell your bullshit disguised as hope and change to.
Another conspiracy theory that is closely tied to chemtrails is water fluoridation. This is yet another case of something that has been used for years (about 70; since the mid 40’s) that some folks continue to believe is somehow just now being used for mind control. The only legit scientifically proven negative effect of water fluoridation is dental fluorosis, which results in tooth discoloration if the fluoride content of water is too high. As a matter of fact, you’re doing more harm to your body by drinking soda, or even coffee, which has no nutritional value and actively dehydrates the body, all at the expense of obtaining a little “energy” that could be gained by getting decent sleep and being in good physical condition. I drink water almost exclusively, I’m completely resistant to any and all forms of mind control, and just so happen to be the 1,543th smartest human being in the world [citation needed]. So drink more tap water and get on my level.
Gluten Is Bad
Gluten is the carbs of the 2010’s. It’s something in food that people who know absolutely nothing about nutrition are thoroughly convinced that they need to cut out of their diets because a blog post somewhere said to. It’s 2015 and people still put all their faith into diet fads instead of actually following tried and true dieting guidelines that have been working for top-of-their-game athletes for like half a century. A gluten-free diet is not much different than that pointless Atkin’s Diet that was brought to you by a man with a history of diet fads stretching back to the 70’s. Both are largely adopted by white folk who have that itch to live healthier, without actually doing something productive like exercising instead of sitting around watching Netflix all evening.
The only reason to cut gluten out of your diet is if you have Coeliac Disease, which is quite hard to actually be diagnosed with, since evidently you can have this disease but have absolutely no side-effects. This begs the question: If something has absolutely no side effects, is it even a problem? If I have lung cancer, but don’t have the side effects of lung cancer, namely the cancer, do I actually have cancer, or is somebody simply trying to milk some cash out of me? The primary symptoms of Coeliac disease are loose, greasy bowels. Has everyone hopping on the gluten-free wagon been secretly shitting their brains out all day, every day? All the secondary symptoms are things like fatigue and failure to gain weight, which could be due to countless other things. How exactly it’s determined that amongst the myriad diseases that exist out there, these symptoms definitively point to a gluten issue is beyond me.
I’m gonna go a little T.M.I. (too much information) on you right now. I too used to have Coeliac disease. I had it back in the day before it became a fad disease for everybody to get diagnosed with. I was ridiculously skinny up until my early to mid twenties, and hardly ever gained weight. I also had loose bowels on a regular basis for the longest time, perhaps years. I’m not plagued with either of these problems anymore though, thanks to cutting gluten absolutely nothing containing gluten out of my diet. What I did cut out of my diet was caffeine, excessive sugar, and fast food; all things that the body doesn’t particularly want excessive amounts of inside of it, despite all the advertisements on T.V. telling you otherwise. In short, I started to eat healthier. I also started to exercise on a regular basis. I’ve put on about 35 pounds (mainly muscle) since then, and have nice healthy adult poops. I can also breathe underwater and kill bears with a single well-executed round house kick, but your results may vary.
So if you have stomach and bowel issues on the regular, I guess it’s worth a shot to cut out the gluten. There are a whole host of things you could probably change to sort yourself out though, much as I did. I have no doubt if I went to the average doctor with those symptoms I would have been told to go gluten-free despite the fact that I solved those problems via other measures. Diagnoses tend to be very one-size-fits all with doctors who are more interested with quantity of patients over quality of care. Doctors are also not infallible, and can make glaring mistakes at times. I was once diagnosed with Pneumonia by a doctor, only to find out I actually had bursitis in my shoulder, upon getting a second opinion. Those are two completely different ailments with two very different treatments. The second doctor was obviously more thorough, and less apt to jump to a diagnosis. The second doctor probably wouldn’t have immediately assumed I had Coeliac Disease, and he would have been right. Thank you, second doctor.
The Pay Gap
Yes, you are a conspiracy theorist if you believe this nonsense. There are countless sources out there that debunk this myth, yet certain people love to cling to it like a warm, fuzzy blanket. Perhaps this belief is due to some pervasive wave of anti-intellectualism sweeping the U.S. (There are other countries where wide-spread pay gaps no doubt exist), or perhaps it’s a product of the current trend of self-imposed oppression that seems to be the hot new fashion right now. “I’m like, sooo oppressed, because it makes me a special snowflake and makes me the underdog even though I am actually the most privileged demographic in the world currently. Please give me thumbs ups and likes. Thanks!” Pay discrepancies are bound to exist in rare instances, but the people who hold onto this pay gap notion legitimately think they are somehow being paid less as a barista at Starbucks, or as a cashier at Target, and this notion isn’t remotely true at all.
I’ll explain away this theory here, despite the fact that it has been disproved time and time again elsewhere, because people that believe this sort of thing tend not to engage in things like “reading” and “research” and “critical thinking”. So… President Kennedy passed the Equal Pay Act of 1963 in, you guessed it, 1963. That’s 52 year ago for anyone keeping track of the math. This act makes it Illegal for employers to pay workers different wages based solely on their sex. “Illegal” means a worker can take an employer to court over being payed a lower wage based solely on their sex, which as you might have guessed, never actually happens because the pay gap is a myth. (Obama even passed an amendment to this Act in 2009 to make it easier for an employee to take legal action) Sure, it took time for the gap to close, but as of 2015, only the most unscrupulous of employers would try to get away with paying a woman a lesser wage for the same job. This doesn’t happen at legit, registered companies. (They have the most to lose by getting caught doing this) Anyone who works independently and pays under the table could easily get away with utilizing a pay gap, but perhaps you shouldn’t be working for Skeeter, painting sheds out in the boonies anyway.
The reason this myth refuses to die off, is that organizations with agendas continue to spread misinformation and market manufactured oppression to their gullible readership. Getting fair and balanced information about topics relating to sex from a one-sided company like Jezebel, is like getting fair and balanced information about race from a one-sided company like WhitePower4Lyfe.com. You can be sure most of the information contained within is propaganda, largely based on confirmation bias, targeted to an audience who are merely looking to reinforce what they already believe to be true. (Typical conspiracy theorist behavior) Some news sites have even published multiple articles disproving the pay gap, all the while continuing to run articles proclaiming it to be a huge problem. So which is it Huffington Post? Oh wait… you’re a “news” site that posts cat videos, top ten lists, and clickbait articles. Never mind. Carry on.
What these sites do, is take statistics and grossly skew/inflate them, or misrepresent them to meet their own agendas. The pay gap stats these sites use were obtained by taking the average income of all men and comparing it to the average income of all women, regardless of position or hours worked. All the fortune 500 CEOs in the country who make those obnoxiously inflated multi-million dollar salaries were thrown onto one side, and all those women who clean up hotels for low wages were placed on the other. As you can probably imagine, the average of all the salaries of men and women didn’t exactly come out as equal.
This would be like having a class of 20 students (10 men and 10 women) wherein everybody scored a 93 on a test, except for one guy who scored a 100, and one gal who scored a 34. If you were to take the mean value of those students separated out by sex, as opposed to median or mode, the men would have a score of 94, and the women would have a score of 87. An unethical news source could report this data as: “Women score 7 points lower on tests than men”, when the fact of the matter is that one woman scored 59 points lower than everybody. One woman, not all women. The median and mode of these scores for both sexes would be 93, which would be a far more truthful and accurate number to put forth. If you were trying to push an agenda of all women scoring lower, then obviously you would choose to use the mean and completely ignore the median and mode.
I’m not saying websites like Jezebel who push this kind of data to drum up fervor over inequality are dishonest or unreputable, but you certainly can’t consider them to be accurate sources of info. They have a history of pushing misinformation and bias. (They blindly side with the accuser in just about every rape case that ends up being debunked, i.e. University of Virginia, and mattress girl) The fact of the matter is, you don’t need to be knowledgeable on a subject, or even engage in fact-checking to write blog posts for a well-know website (or this one), so always take this kind of info with a grain of salt. If you read something, and it seems a bit sensational, chances are that it is. Being sensational gets more views and brings in more ad revenue. (except for this site)