Brownstone Retreat

Mrs. Ryan and I had a WONDERFUL experience last month at the Brownstone Retreat at Polyface Farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.  The weather was gorgeous and the 400 participants mingled casually with the featured speakers, who spoke at the LLC, the Lunatic Learning Center, an oversized open-air pavilion at the farm.

The two-day event featured a stellar lineup of speakers including our host, Joel Salatin, Dr. Robert W. Malone, Dr. Ryan Cole, and Brownstone founder Jeffery Tucker, a brilliant columnist for the Epoch Times.  Joel led us on a tour of the farm in which he explained his methods of regenerative farming.  Joel showed us a sloped pasture and explained that it had been a rocky outcropping in his childhood in the 1960s due to centuries of erosion.  Within his lifetime this land was restored to a grassy field atop a deep bed of topsoil, showing the potential of his method.  

The retreat was like the outdoor parties we used to have back in high school, everyone was relaxed and wearing jeans and hanging out.  The 400 participants mingled casually with the speakers.  We enjoyed several one-on-one conversations with Joel, Dr. Malone, Dr. Cole and their wives.  And we made many new friends who we hope to see again.

One of our new friends was Dr. Irene Mavrakakis, who is one of the co-authors of this paper, along with covid frontline doctors -- Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Aaron Keriaty, Dr. Paul Marik and Dr. James Thorpe.  Title notwithstanding, this is a very thorough summary of everything learned since the covid debacle, including the origins, the suppressiion of information, and all of the many harms now documented to have arisen from the jabs.  The article is easy enough to follow overall, though it includes a lot of technical jargon.  Follow Irene at @IreneMavrakakis.

COVID-19 Injections: Harms and Damages,  a Non-Exhaustive Conclusion

The Brownstone Institute has been leading the charge for health and American freedom since the covid debacle.  I visit their page every day and enjoy the columns.  Brownstone's claim to fame was in launching the Great Barrington Declaration and is a big voice in the MAHA movement. It was a wonderful gathering of folks from different backgrounds, beliefs and politics, united around good principles, including a great number of Christians.  Almost all the participants were in their 50s or older but were stunningly healthy.  I've never seen so many trim, fit, attractive mature people in one place.  

Jan Jekielek from The Epoch Times was also there and we also enjoyed chatting with him. He taped several segments of his excellent American Thought Leaders show.  I'd encourage everyone to watch the following videos, including Brownstone speaker sessions and ATL episodes:

Joel Salatin at the Brownstone Institute Polyface Retreat   

Why Small Farmers Are Disappearing | Joel Salatin

Dr. Ryan Cole: NIH Should Fund Research into Rise in Cancer

Congressman Thomas Massie at Brownstone Institute's Polyface Farms Retreat

The Heartland Self-Reliance Conference  

I'm happy to report that I've been invited to speak at The Heartland Self-Reliance Conference in May, 2026 in nearby Millersburg, Ohio.  This event is for homesteading and preparedness and generally for anyone seeking to acquire useful skills.  I'll be delivering two presentations on natural methods of telling time and finding direction from the Sun, Moon and stars.  I'm excited to reach out to this new community after working excusively with homeschoolers for decades.  Most homesteaders and preppers are also homeschoolers so hopefully this will be a win-win for everyone.  If you're in Ohio or would like to visit, I'd love to see you there!  More details to follow in the coming months. 

Health Corner

As reported in previous newsletters, my health odyssey continues and am learning so much.  Since the last newsletter in July I have heard SO MUCH from SO MANY different directions of people touting the benefits of "morning sunshine."  This seems like a move of the LORD, that so many different voices are discovering the same principles and sharing the same message.

A reader of this newsletter encouraged me to check out the site of Dr. Jack Kruse, one of the many voices promoting natural health.   I found the site hard to navigate and in bad need of editing.  But there is some worthwhile content if you can dig it out.  The aforementioned reader sent several articles including this one which was helpful:

UBIQUITINATION #24: ARE MYOPIA, LIGHT, AND AGING LINKED?

Dr. Kruse rambles a lot and makes the same points over and over.  But he's onto some good principles, especially concerning eye health, a big issue of mine.  Dr. Kruse contends that various eye conditions are related, so that myopia (nearsighteness) can be connected to retinal problems and other aspects of eye health.  I've found this to be true in my own experience and am intrigued by his ideas.  

Dr. Kruse encourages people to get morning sunshine and not to wear sunglasses.  He's one of the many voices I've lately heard warning that sunglasses urge the body into sleep mode and that it's natural that our eyes endure the full brunt of daytime sunlight.  After years of scares about the dangers of ultraviolet, he posits that morning UV exposure is actually good for our retinas, that our bodies are adapted for it, which makes sense.  After all, the LORD deposited us on this planet and called His creation good so it only follows that our eyes should be adapted to natural sunlight conditions.  Dr. Kruse also warns that eyeglasses in general are designed to block UV and should be removed during morning sunlight.  

I tried an experiment on myself that had good results which convinced me to continue experimenting with his methods.  I have an ongoing problem where my eyes spontaneously tear up for no apparent reason.  At one point this summer it got bad and I'd wake up with gummy eyes that felt like they were becoming infected.  So I went on an early morning two-hour bike ride without wearing glasses.  My face was turned in the general direction of the Sun.  Long story short, the eyes felt better that same day.  It was a wonderful morning time, a blessing in many respects.  My eyes cleared right up after that ride and did not bother me anyore.  Since then I've made a point of going outside without glasses for morning sunlight and have quit wearing sunglasses.  So far, so good.  

It's becoming clear that the LORD made the Creation for human benefit, and we need to spend most of our time out in that Creation.  We do ourselves harm by living inside the fake, artificial manmade environment.  America is the wealthiest nation in the world but Americans are having some of the worst health outcomes globally, both physically and mentally.  We swim daily in an ocean of fake chemicals in our food, air and water.  Any resulting health problems are treated by more fake chemicals in the form of pharma.  I'm daily coming to realize we need to disentangle from technology and the modern world as much as possible and live closer to the Creation.  

There was another topic scheduled for this newsletter related to timekeeping.  I'd intended to further explain the analemma, briefly mentioned in the previous newsletter, which creates a variabilty in the times of sunrise, noon transit, and sunset over the span of the year.  I decided to preempt that topic.  There was a timely news item that presented an opportunity to explain the topic below.  I hope to get back to the analemma in another upcoming newsletter sometime before Thanksgiving.    

Cirrus, Chemtrails and Sun Dogs

There's a lot of bad information going around these days about cirrus clouds.  These are a perfectly normal cloud type that forms under certain conditions in the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere above the troposphere, where all our weather occurs.    

Cirrus clouds can form anywhere at any time, depending on location, season, time of day, etc.   Sometimes you see little wispy cirrus in a clear blue sky.  But other times you see cirrus that grows thick and can turn into a haze that covers the sky.  This can especially happen on the leading edge of a cold front with rain to follow.  For centuries, before modern meteorology, cirrus clouds have been a traditional farmer's sign of rain.  The Old Farmer would spot cirrus in the sky and know that the rain would fall by the next day. 

The image below shows a good example of mixed varieties of cirrus clouds -- the thin, wispy types on the right, and the thickening cirrus on the left, indicating the weather system moving in.  You don't always see them together in the same sky like this.  These types can be separated by hours or even most of a day.

Cirrus clouds are formed of tiny ice crystals that solidify around airborne specks of dirt in the upper atmosphere, which are condensation nuclei.  Water and ice can only condense on a solid surface, like a glass with a cold drink on a hot day, where the humidity condenses and puddles up on the table, requiring a coaster.

Cirrus clouds only form if there is both 1) a quantity of available condensation nuclei, and 2) a corresponding quantity if available water vapor.   For anyone who took chemistry class back in school, the precise correspondence of quantities is generally called stoichiometry (pronounced "stoy-key-ometry").  It's like following the recipe in cooking or baking, which are also chemical processes.  If you use too much flour, your cookies are dry and crumbly.  Too much butter and the cookies are flat and greasy.  Stoichiometry means that you need the perfect "Goldlilocks" amount of ingredients according to the recipe.  Same with clouds which require a proper recipe of vapor and nuclei in "stoiciometric" quantities. 

In a balanced fossil fuel combustion reaction, as with cars, trucks, and airplanes, a stoichiometric reaction of fuel and oxygen produces carbon dioxide and water vapor.  Combustion does not work well if there are imbalances in fuel and oxygen, and you don't get a stoichiometric combustion reaction, and the engine sputters and can stall.

There are always impurities in fossil fuel which function as condensation nuclei in vehicle exhaust.  For cars and trucks on the ground, the exhaust is invisible at warm temperatures, but in the wintertime the water vapor in the exhaust can briefly be seen as steam exiting the tail pipe, where the vapor in the exhaust condenses atop the impurities.  Similarly, our human breath is briefly visible at cold temperatures as exhaled water vapor which condenses around impurities in the air. 

Most of the time, even in the cold, vehicle exhaust and human breath vanish quickly.  This is because the air is basically dry, and the relative humidity is low, which disperses the vapor.  But sometimes the air is moist and humid and the condensed exhaust can persist as a mist.  Other times the humidity is at the dew point, which is 100% humidity, and fog forms and condensation hangs in the air indefinitely.  The same thing happens up in the sky with clouds, which are nothing more than visible condensation.  So the persistence of visible clouds is a function of humidity in the sky.

The same happens with jet airplanes that form contrails, a type of artificial cirrus cloud visible in the sky where water vapor from jet exhaust condenses around impurities.  Sometimes you see contrails that quickly disappear or maybe don't form at all.  This suggests that the humidity is low at cruising altitude and disperses the vapor.  Other times humidity can be higher in the upper atmosphere and the contrails can persist for a long time after the plane has passed.  Other times the contrails can accompany normal cirrus.  Still other times contrails can form on the leading edge of a cold front and the sky thickens with cirrus, becoming hazy, usually followed by rain the next day.

Sometimes you see a jet contrail "turn off" in mid-flight  The contrail can stop abruptly or taper off slowly over a distance.  This happens when the plane goes through pockets of air having differing conditions of temperature, pressure and/or humidity.  It's like being outside in the cold seeing your breath and then coming inside the warm house where you can't see your breath anymore.  Sometimes the contrail can turn on and off as the plane flies through different air bubbles, leaving a dot-dash contrail pattern like Morse Code in the sky.    

Chemtrails

I've been following clouds most of mt life, since my teen years in the 1970s.  Most people I've known over the years thought this was "weird" and never bothered to notice clouds themselves.  But lately there's been a new crowd of rookie cloud watchers who misunderstand and miscontrue normal cirrus formation.  This seems to be behind much of the current worry over chemtrails.  According to the popular narrative circulating on the internet, the government is using airplanes to spray aluminum, strontium and other harmful chemicals as part of an elaborate scheme to contaminate the air, water and soil of the American people.  (This may or may not be the case, but please bear with me while I unpack the concepts one by one.)

We had a hot, humid summer here along the wind-swept shores of the Great Lakes.  But the heat finally broke in August and we enjoyed two months of very pleasant, sunny, mild weather.  Most of October was especially beautiful.  Clear blue skies with very low humidity prevailed over much of the USA.  This glorious weather just so happened to coincide with the current government shutdown.  For weeks my TwiX feed was full of memes like this from chemtrail enthusiasts....

The above is an example of anectodal evidence where one's fuzzy recollections are considered to be ample enough proof of a premise.  This is not the same as direct scientific research where data is collected on a regular basis and compared to create charts and graphs that show trends and establish solid scientific evidence to support or refute a premise.  This is also an example of confirmation bias where one "cherry picks" selective recollections to support the premise and ignores everything else.  Now these fallacies are normal human behavior, everyone does this, but it's important that we try to be candid and objective and delineate between our warm and fuzzy memories of the "good old days" and objective fact.

The October weather trend of clear blue skies had to come to an end at some point, which is what weather always does, especially in the fall.  So when normal cirrus clouds returned to the skies, the newbie skywatchers on social media concluded that the government must have somehow found some funding to continue the chemtrail program, so that the clandestine posioning of the skies could continue.  The following pic is from a person on social media who will remain unnamed, whom I respect and admire, and to whom I feel indebted. 

It saddened me to see this person getting all upset at a perfectly normal cirrus sky, not even criss-crossed by contrails or chemtrails.  This is an example of the power of suggestion, where one gets all worked up and talks oneself into feeling sick for no good cause.     

Conspiracy Theories

Now let me just say at this juncture that I am not a great fan of conspiracy theories.  It's fine if you are since I have a large number of close friends who are devout conspiracy theorists.  Having been trained in the sciences, I try to ask a lot of questions and hold a healthy skepticism of most things.  Long time readers of this newsletter recall that I spent a lot of effort debunking various Christian astronomy hoaxes, including the Gospel in the Stars, the "Blood Moon" fiasco of 2014 and 2015, and the so-called Revelation 12 sign, the latter two of which came and went quietly without the predicted apocalyptic events.  Christians should always "prove all things" (1 Thess 5:21) and apply critical thinking lest the Name of Jesus be brought to scorn and ridicule from a mocking world by our foolishness.

That being said, when I was 14 I did a book report on "Rush To Judgement" by Mark Lane, which questioned the "lone gunman" theory of the JFK assassination, a view I've always held since, contrary to the official narrative.  I had a brief dalliance with conspiracy theorism in my early 20s involving "the usual suspects" -- the Illuminati, the Rockefellers, the Freemasons, the Council on Foreign Relations, etc.  I let all that go when I decided that, if there really is a secret plot to take over the world, why are there only a few people who know about it including "that guy" from church and the kookie dude from the trailer park down the road?  Even if these theories are true, what can I do about it but just simply live my life unto the LORD?

Lately the above lineup has expanded to include the likes of Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum.  But for years now, the "bad guys" have made no pretense of secrecy.  The "Bond villains" openly gather at Davos every winter and plot their nefarious plots.  Since covid, it seems blatantly obvious that there is something "hinky" going on in the world.  Notice how AI is suddenly the "flavor of the month" though no one asked for it.  And now "climate change" and EVs are suddenly out of news after 40 years, coinciding with the 20% boost in electrical demand required by AI data centers.  So just because you're paranoid, it does not mean they're NOT out to get you.

For my own part, I don't know what to believe in the news.  Maybe the government is somehow poisoning our skies with chemtrails, but maybe not.  I have no way to verify other than the same lying mainstream media and flaky social media as information sources.  Like Winston Smith in Orwell's 1984, I can only rely on my own experiences and memories.  

I've had a greater concern than whether or not airplane contrails are dastardly devices of destruction.  For the last several summers, we've been told here in Cleveland that "Canadian wildfires" are the cause of the noxious chemical haze which truly does pollute the skies, making the air actually hard to breathe and a sunset-looking Sun appear high above the horizon, as in this shot from 2023.

I've lived in Northeast Ohio for six decades and never heard of "Canadian wildfires" until the 2020s, and now they are an annual occurrence.  If there were some "secret plot" by the government or Bill Gates or Klaus Schwab to poison the population, this would be more my idea of a phony pretext for a crime against humanity.  I get physically ill from this foul air with headaches and labored breathing and have to stay inside and sleep.  It's not just the power of suggestion since friends and loved ones have similar reports.  But everyone else is fine with swallowing the official narrative of wildfire smoke, including all the chemtrail devotees in my life.   What if the chemtrail story is a deflection promulgated by the bad guys to distract the suspicious segment of the public from the real poison plot?  What's really going on in the world?  Who's really in charge?  Everything seems like a house of mirrors these days. 

The point being, I have no way of knowing whether or not the government is spraying our skies with chemtrails or otherwise deliberately poisoning us.  But I have no doubt that the media and other bad guys are lying to us so I would not put it past them to do their worst, whatever their actual capabilities might be.  But if you believe in chemtrails, more power to you, but I choose to remain skeptical.  

For a tutorial on chemtrails and related issues, check out the documentary Frankenskies.  While you're at it, take a look at God Complex, about the censorship cabal that wreaked havoc on America and the world during and after the covid debacle.  Fake conspiracy theory or the real deal?  You decide.

Geoengineering

It was public knowledge during my childhood in the 1960s that the government was trying to control the weather.  This was a staple of futurist science fiction back then, and even turned up in Back To The Future II where a rain shower in the "futuristic" year 2015 ended right on schedule.  Cloud seeding is a known technique where condensation nuclei are dropped from airplanes into clouds.  But this can only cause clouds to drop their water vapor prematurely so that it'll rain in a certain place but not rain in locations downwind where the rain would have fallen naturally.  And back to "stoichiometry."  Only a certain quantity of rain can condense and fall in response to a given quantity of nuclei dropped from the plane.  Cloud seeding is not some magic switch that, when flipped, can cause endless "atmospheric rivers" of rain to fall.  The quantities are fixed by stoichiometry.  

Some influencers on podcasts and social media are teaching "geoengineering," that the government can even inflict earthquakes and create hurricanes, like the recent disastrous floods in Chimney Rock, NC and Kerrville, TX.  There was a cloud seeding operator in Texas who was suspected of creating the Kerrville disaster. But this guy was on the podcasts explaining that his cloud seeding efforts could only have produced thousands of gallons of rain, not the millions of gallons that occurred in the flood.  Again, stoichiometry.  You only only drop so much condensation nuclei from an airplane and once that's used up, no more rain.  

As for chemtrails, airplane fuel tanks hold thousands of gallons of fuel. In order for jet engine combustion to occur, most of that needs to be actual fuel, or else the plane will stall and fall out of the sky.  So only a tiny portion of volume of the fuel tanks can be devoted to aluminum or strontium or whatever "chemtrail poison."  And the volume of the atmosphere is on the order of QUINTILLIONS, a staggeringly large volume compared to jet fuel tanks, making the sum total of daily jet exhaust miniscule in comparison.   And 70% of the Earth is covered by water so any chemtrail chemicals would fall into the ocean and not on land.  And as long as the chemtrails float up in the sky, they cannot fall to the ground, so they're safe where we can seen them. 

So according to stoichiometry, there is no way that a trivial quantity of posionous aluminum or strontium or other toxic material sprayed out as an airplane chemtrail can cause cirrus clouds to multiply into a solid haze that covers the entire sky.  It's not magic, it's cause and effect, a one-to-one relationship of nuclei to the resultant clouds.  

Sun Dogs

This is now finally the astronomy portion of the newsletter so thanks for reading this far!  The same person on social media mentioned above also posted this image, showing a glowing patch within a "chemtrail."  This pic was what finally prompted me to change the subject of this newsletter.  That little shiny patch is an example of a sun dog, or parhelion, a perfectly natural optical phenomenon caused by sunlight refracting through cirrus clouds.    While sun dogs do naturally occur within the articifial cirrus clouds resulting from contrails, they are not themselves some geo-weapon deployed against the public by our globalist overlords.  But I agree with the caption insofar as we did not evolve.

The pic below from Wikipedia is a nice example of a solar halo that can form within cirrus clouds under the right conditions, including two sun dogs (parhelia) at the 9 o'clock and 3 o'clock positions.  The sun dogs are within a full parhelic circle.  There are many other types of halos that are more rare, such as a circumzenithal arc, supralateral arc, upper tangent arc, and many more.  

While you might not see the rare halos, it's very common to see at least one sun dog in a patch of cirrus cloud, sometimes both, one to the north and the other to the south.  It's one of those astronomy things where, if people never look at the sky, they never see these things.  And when they do somehow notice them, they get all troubled like there is something wrong in the world.  So the solution is to always take a moment out of your busy life to notice all the amazing stuff going on every day above our heads.

As explained above, cirrus clouds are formed of hexagonal ice crystals that form in the upper atmosphere, given the proper conditions of humidity and condensation nuclei, forming in stoichiometric quantities.  Sunlight hitting the surface of the crystals reflects off, appearing as white cirrus clouds.  But some solar rays enter along the edges of the crystal where they refract and have their spectrum dispersed like in a prism, creating a rainbow spread of colors that are bent within the crystal and exit through another edge. 

The sunlight is refracted through the ice crystal at an angle of 22 degrees from the direction of the incident light rays.  Thus, the refracted sunlight appears to originate from a different direction in the sky than the Sun.

Due to the refraction though the atmospheric ice crystals, the sun dogs appear at an angular distance of 22 degrees away from the Sun, a little bit more than one hand span held at arm's length, the separation between the tips of your thumb and pinkie.  You can usually see a washed out rainbow spectrum within the sun dogs, with the red color closer to the Sun and the other shades faintly emanating away from the Sun.

Sundogs can be seen at any time of day but are most prominent when the Sun is close to the horizon.  At times the Sun can appear as a fuzzy orange patch along the horizon with two fuzzy orange patches along either side, appearing as three suns in a row.  Under such conditions, it can be hard to tell which fuzzy patch is the real Sun.  Such sightings have been seen since ancient times.

Many suns have been seen at the same time, not above or below the real Sun, but in an oblique direction…. Our ancestors have frequently seen three suns at the same time…. – Pliny the Elder (circa A.D. 70)

A solar halo can also accompany a sun pillar, where the Sun can appear as an elongated shaft of light.  Such a halo complex might have been seen by the Emperor Constantine, which ultimately led to his conversion to Christ.  

About that part of the day when the Sun after passing the meridian begins to decline towards the west, he saw a pillar of light in the heavens, in the form of a cross, on which were inscribed these words, BY THIS SIGN CONQUER. – Socrates Scholasticus (circa A.D. 440) 

Sun dogs and the parhelic circle are all formed by ice crystals, but the sun dogs themselves are areas of greatest light density.  This is because the crystals tend to lay flat in the air so that those directly horizontal to the Sun shine in the direction of your eye.  All the other crystals oriented at random angles tend to form the parhelic circle, and are of lower density, hence lower brightness.

All of the Sun's rays are radiating in parallel directions from the Sun but only those rays that are deflected 22 degrees hit your eyes in order to appear to be emanating from directions encircling the Sun, with the largest quantity of rays making the sun dogs.