“Chemtrails” Don’t Exist and Idiots Are Really Easy to Fool, Dennis Mersereau, The Vane, May 22, 2014

Have you ever run into someone so stupid that you just had to play a prank on them? Welcome to the life of meteorologists who have to deal with “chemtrailers,” or the people who falsely believe that airplanes are spraying chemicals because DA GUBMINT wants to kill you.

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Well, as with all conspiracy theorists, chemtrailers won’t take science for an answer. The true explanation behind contrails — the warm, moist jet exhaust meeting the extremely cold air of the upper-atmosphere and condensing into a thin cirrus cloud — is just the World Government’s smoke-and-mirrors to deceive the population from The Truth.

Government Treating Peaceful Left Activists Like Terrorists–Again, Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, May 23, 2014

Both liberals and conservatives spend time arguing that the other side contains people who are nutty, highlighting extreme statements in an attempt to convince people that there’s something fundamentally troubling about their opponents. There are many differences between the extreme right and the extreme left, perhaps most importantly that the extreme right has a much closer relationship with powerful Republicans than the extreme left has with powerful Democrats. When you find a crazy thing a liberal said, chances are it’s an obscure professor somewhere, or a blogger with twelve readers, or a random person at a protest. The crazy people on the right, in contrast, are often influential media figures or even members of Congress, people with real influence and power.

The Real Power of Clients: Ethical Consumerism and the Sex Industry, Kate D’Adamo, SWOP-NYC, May 16, 2014

The role of consumers and clients in any industry is a powerful one in terms of changing and reforming an industry. Fairly recently, public divestment from the browser Firefox over the recently-appointed CEO’s financial contribution to homophobic policy change directly led to the ousting of that CEO. The sex industry is no different, and just like the criminalization of workers, the criminalization of clients only creates additional barriers to effective change.

Photo credit: derekdavalos [CC BY-SA 3.0], via deviantART.