what possible preconceived ideas could I have about something like weather manipulation, I'd never heard of it until Alex Jones reported on it and at the time you could get very little information from other sources because anyone else mentioning it was mentioning it as a 'look how crazy this guy is' article. Now it's acknowledged as being something that has happened of course you can find plenty of articles which contain a lot more actual info than his original piece. hindsight is 20/20 after all...
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What sort of weather manipulation?
It's been known for decades that for example you can potentially cause rain to fall
earlier by "seeding it" with certain materials (basically to cause the moisture to join with the material and thus fall earlier than it would have done), the Soviets and Chinese were using it in the 50's and 60's to try and stop it raining on their parades (literally), but it only works under specific circumstances (IE the rain is going to fall, you just cause it to call a few miles early*), and was very expensive and obvious to do (IIRC it used a fleet of converted bombers).
There are all sorts of other theoretical ways to affect the weather, but pretty much all of them are massively obvious and either impossible to do with current tech or basically, like cloud seeding not worth it except maybe for vanity or demonstration purposes (there is no earthquake ray, or hurricane gun mounted on a 747).
Jones like moist CT peddlers who make a living out of it tend to have just enough plausibility in their nonsense to make it seem possible, and often there might be a few minor truths that they take out of context and exaggerate (for example the whole "people die around the Clintons" is on a par with the old "the filming of the Poltergiest is cursed, look at this list of people who died"**).
The weather manipulation is a good example, they take the "ooh they made it rain early" (when it worked) and turn it into "they direct hurricanes to attack the poor people in X" or "they cause a drought", as is whole chemtrails nonsense "you see those white trails after jets, they're spraying mind control chemicals, you can tell because it looks like my pappy's crop duster did when he used to fly over our house spraying pesticides whilst I ate my wheetos"
*For example if you've got a huge parade in Moscow and it's forecast heavy rain you might try and seed the clouds so it rained 20-30 miles away.
**Claims that invariably turn out to be without an ounce of truth, or turn out to be based on a complete misunderstanding of normal events, for example when making a film there will be a vast number of people involved, simple stats say X number will die of various things, Y number will likely get married/divorced and Z number will have kids (the Poltergeist myth from memory claimed they had a lot of unusual deaths, when in reality they were within the statistical norm for the number of people, type of jobs and time period involved).