
A chemtrails conspiracy theorist hawks his wares outside BOS meeting. Photo by R.V. Scheide.
In a shocking scientific discovery that could upend the global commercial aviation industry, microscopic amounts of an antioxidant used as a gum inhibitor in jet fuel have been found to cause the deterioration of the brain’s frontal lobe in mammals, including humans.
In a three-year study, scientists working at the DYOR Institute in Shanghai, China injected mice, fruit bats, spider moneys and finally humans with nanoparticles from the compound benzolottadrama. They also experimented with shredded sheets of aluminum foil. The effects on humans were profound to say the least.
“The frontal lobe enables logical thinking and the target human cohort showed an almost complete collapse of these faculties,” the institute reported. “The subjects were tormented by feelings of persecution and victimization, and the content of their complaints arises totally from their delusional beliefs, which are often bizarre and in a constant state of flux. As a result, it is often impossible to define, let alone resolve, their complaints.”
In a corresponding national survey, the scientists found a constellation of similar symptoms in inhabitants of rural flyover areas.

Typical view of Shasta County sky.
“Ironically, the belief in the chemtrail conspiracy theory is higher in rural areas,” DYOR reported. “But these study results that apparently confirm chemtrails are real, that governments are poisoning their populations with jet exhaust will offer little solace to the conspiracy theory’s adherents, since the organic damage to the brain is irreversible.”
Sounds crazy, right? It is. I just made all of that up. As whistleblower Edward Snowden said about his deep dive through U.S. intelligence databases in search of the conspiracy theory, “Chemtrails are not a thing.”
That didn’t stop Shasta County Board of Supervisors Chair Kevin Crye from inviting noted chemtrails grifter Dane Wigington to lead off Tuesday’s Shasta County Board of Supervisors meeting.
Wigington and other chemtrails conspiracy theorists have been given new life, thanks to our failure to deal with the climate crisis. Some scientists have desperately revived the idea of saturating the earth’s atmosphere with microscopic reflective nanoparticles to cool down our overheating planet.

Shasta County CEO David Rickert.
More about Wigington later, and don’t miss Benjamin Nowain’s investigation of the geoengineering topic in the next episode of North State Breakdown.
Return of Chriss Street, Rabid State Secessionist
Shasta County CEO David Rickert spoke so softly during his board report I almost didn’t register it when he said he’d granted Chriss Street, the former Orange County tax collector who has a murky relationship with Chair Crye, a $40,000 consulting contract.
“The board directed me to hire a consultant to explore solutions to our lack of health care access in Shasta County,” Rickert said. “I completed my interviews of possible candidates and based on their criteria, the board approved. Chriss Street was selected from among the pool of consultants.”
“He has put forward the most comprehensive proposal and will be hired at an amount not to exceed $40,000 for the term of the contract,” Rickert said. “In addition to being a local resident, he has health care management experience along with extensive financial experience.”

Chriss Street lands $40,000 county consulting contract.
Speculation that Street would land some sort of position with the county has been rampant for months, and there’s already chitchat that Street’s seeking a permanent high-level administrative position. A News Café profiled Street in March 2023, during his failed attempt to land the county CEO position.
Street’s major red flags include a litigious past and membership in New California State, the secessionist movement that seeks to carve a 51st state out of central California, from San Bernardino to Redding. Street serves as CFO of New California State. He’s also an editor at Mountain Top Media, the local Mustache Party news organization founded by Jon Knight, who was also in the audience to support his longtime friend Wigington.
Street’s capable of performing the analysis, but should we really be spending $40,000 to investigate why Shasta County lacks health care access, when the answer is staring us straight in the face?
Professionals, including doctors, just don’t want to move to Shasta County. After four years of board turmoil, that remains true now more than ever.
Crye Goes Down the Chemtrails Rabbit Hole

Shasta County Board Chair Kevin Chair. Photo by R.V. Scheide.
The last supervisor to bring Wigington to the board was Pam Giacomini, who preceded Mary Rickert as District 3 Supervisor. That was around a dozen years ago. Giacomini recently passed away; condolences to her friends and family.
During Wigington’s introduction Crye explained why he invited Wigington to speak about chemtrails.
“I was told that this rare form of cancer, there’s actually three children below the ages of 6 in Shasta County that have it,” Crye explained. “So I went and talked to Dr. Mu, asked him to pull some data, what he could, and my thing was, and what I found, was this type of cancer really only affects, I mean, for it to affect three children, it would really, the statistics would be, it would be like double the size of Sacramento for three kids to have that, and even that would be extremely rare. So to have three in Shasta County really bothered me.”
Crye is implying that Shasta County is a geographic hotspot for some rare horrific form of childhood cancer, which is rather reckless considering he doesn’t have a medical degree, but never mind. He had to get to the bottom of it!
“So it led me down a trail …” Crye said.
Let’s stop there for a second.
It’s not a trail Crye went down, it’s the chemtrail rabbit hole. If there truly is some sort of cancer cell here in Shasta County, bring in Public Health Officer Dr. James Mu to discuss it, not a conspiracy theorist.

Dane Wigington speaks while Jon Knight (black T-shirt) listens.
When I worked at the North Bay Bohemian in Santa Rosa 20 years ago, I had a fan who frequently called me up to warn me about chemtrails. “Go look at the sky!” he’d say. I’d go outside and contrails were crisscrossing the sky, jets coming and going from the Bay Area. “You see that?!” he’d yell.
The spiel he’d then tell me hasn’t changed much over two decades and was presented in a short preview of Wigington’s low budget documentary “The Dimming.”
“Atmospheric particulate testing has now conclusively proven that the jet aircraft dispersed trails and haze in our once deep blue skies is not condensation, as we have been told. They are absolutely not contrails. Contrails do not linger, dissipate, and go into cloud coverage, period.”
False.
“What I found was a lot of people were pretending it wasn’t happening. It was kind of like it was not socially acceptable to, you know, we’re all going to pretend this is not really happening. And I thought, oh, this is very bad.”
Paranoid.
“Climate engineering fallout is completely contaminating our waters, our soils, our crops, and every breath we take, thus impacting every aspect of our health. Geoengineering particles are nanoscale, so small they go straight through our lung lining, into our bloodstream, and adhere to cell receptors like a plaque. Once absorbed, they are almost impossible to expel from our systems.”
Fantasy.
“I never wanted this job, never,” Wigington said. “This is not what I ever imagined doing for the last 20 plus years of my life, but if we can’t inhale without breathing in what’s being dispersed in our skies, how is that not an immediate priority?”
In the bit of satire I wrote at the beginning of the column, I cribbed the phony chemtrail symptoms from the description of querulant paranoia, a topic of research for me recently since so many people in Shasta County seem to exhibit its signs:
“From the early 18th century, a small but significant group of the unusually persistent complainants and litigants brought psychiatry and the law together. The earliest forensic psychiatrists were exposed to litigants who did not simply complain, but who were relentlessly driven by a ‘pursuit of justice’ which seriously damaged the individual’s economic, social, and personal interests, and disrupted the functioning of the courts and/or other agencies attempting to resolve the claims. The cascade in type and target of complaints over many years inundate the courts and also devastate the lives of the complainant.”
Sound familiar? Currently, as geoengineering techniques gain more scientific credence as a potential solution to the climate crisis, chemtrail proponents have helped introduce anti-geoengineering bills in Tennessee, New Hampshire and Arizona.
Dawn Duckett, a frequent speaker at board meetings, wasn’t falling for Wigington’s act.
“I was clerking the Planning Commission back in the day when Mr. Wigington tried to peddle this junk science on Shasta County, the Air Quality Board, the Board of Supervisors, and Planning Commission,” Duckett said during the public comment period. “Much of the science and data analysis that was done in the movie, The Dimming, has been debunked, much like the Mesa pattern of fraud. And I just would urge the Board to focus on matters that are within their jurisdiction that they can fix.”
It’s a shame chemtrails have been debunked. It might explain why Shasta County has such a high level of querulant paranoia, as demonstrated by the majority of the speakers voicing their support Wiginton’s conspiracy theories and election denialism who stretched what should have been a three hour meeting to nine and a half hours.

Corkey “Cowboy Way” Harmon says he’s his own man.
Corkey Pops Cork Over Mosquito Board Vote
The last time the Shasta County Board of Supervisors voted in a new member for the Mosquito and Vector Control Board, Jon Knight, the aforementioned founder of Mountain Top Media and grow-store owner who attended the Jan. 6 insurrection, was the controversial pick.
I’ve only chatted with Knight once, he was friendly enough. I asked him the obvious question: Why didn’t he join his comrades in storming the Capitol? His answer was something along the lines that crimes were obviously being committed and he has a family to feed (but who knew then that Trump 2.0 would pardon them all?!).
Knight was an especially controversial selection due to conspiratorial comments he made about mosquitos during his interview. As A News Café’s Shawn Schwaller reported:
“Knight said he knew a lot about pesticides and the environment because he’s sold pesticides for 18 years. Knight also said that despite not having done a ‘deep dove’ into mosquito research, he knew a ‘lot of stuff’ about them. During his comments, Knight spoke of ‘Bill Gates’ programs,’ and claimed that Japanese scientists have created mosquitos that act as ‘flying syringes’ to ‘mass vaccinate the population.’”
- Richard Gallardo
- Philip Cramer
- Ted Lidie
The three candidates vying for a Mosquito and Vector Control Board seat on the five member board this time were Mustache Party member Rich Gallardo, Philip Cramer, an Anderson native and senior environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife; and Ted Lidie, a firearms trainer, retired Army vet and Crye campaign donor.
I’ve been hoping Gallardo might get selected for some position, dog catcher perhaps, so he’ll settle down and stop raving about transgender confusion at school board meetings. No such luck, as Gallardo withdrew himself from the contest, but not before taking a shot at Cramer, who dwarfs his competitors in actual experience with mosquitoes.
“The reason I do not recommend Mr. Cramer is he is one of almost 4,000 environmental scientists employed in the state of California,” said Gallardo, a confirmed meganumerophobic. “Why are there 4,000 environmental scientists in California?”
Actually, there are 12,590 environmental scientists working for the state of California, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That may not be enough, considering the environmental hellscape that’s coming our way.
When it comes to experience, this decision was a no-brainer. Cramer displayed a phenomenally deep knowledge of the subject material, and never waivered once under detailed questioning by District 4 Supervisor Matt Plummer and District 1 Supervisor Allen Long. That’s to be expected considering Cramer’s profession and four years on the Mosquito and Vector Control Board as Redding’s representative.
Cramer is also an incredibly nice guy who admitted the board job didn’t really require technical knowledge of the subject and he’d be happy to be on call should the totally inexperienced Lidie get the nod and need help on the job.
Experience or no experience? The MAGA movement has made great hay about restoring meritocracy to America. Crye mentioned Trump several times throughout the meeting, suggesting that federal money will soon be flowing Shasta County’s way, not realizing Trump’s golden age will be a golden shower for rural America.

District 4 Supervisor Matt Plummer: Too smart for his own good?
Plummer reminded Crye that the last big decision the new board made, to break protocol and elect Crye to a second year in a row as chair earlier this month, was based on Crye’s experience compared to newcomers Plummer, Long, and District 3 Supervisor Corkey Harmon.
“We as a board had a discussion two meetings ago around the board chair,” Plummer said. “There we heard that experience was very important to being able to execute the functions of that job successfully. I would argue that board chair is a much more generalizable skill than sitting on the board of something highly technical.”
“I think if we’re going to say that experience is important for seating people on the boards for this county, and I think that is a fair qualification, then we should be consistent in that,” Plummer said, dropping the mic.
It has to be said that intellectually, Plummer and Long simply outclassed Crye, Harmon and District 5 Supervisor Chris Kelstrom the entire meeting, asking poignant questions while their opponents resorted to the stale Crye tactic A News Café publisher Doni Chamberlain branded, “Look! Squirrel!”
In this case the squirrel was a drone.

Watch it fly at Squirrel Steals Drone.
“When I was made aware that Mr. Cramer voted in favor of flying drones over private property to look for stagnant pools of water, that was a hard no,” Cringey Crye proclaimed.
Cramer proceeded to explain, in the most painstakingly nicest way possible, that the drone program Crye was referring to is in its formative stages, involves the dispensing of insecticide on stagnant pools on public and private property and does not conduct surveillance.
That saying about nice guys finishing last? It’s true. Both Crye and Kelstrom, citing their entirely bogus 4th Amendment concerns, shunned Cramer and indicated they were voting for Lidie. Once again Harmon was put in the position of making the deciding vote, the Cowboy Way.
Just like he did when he made the deciding vote to appoint Crye to a second year as chair, Corkey blew his cork, losing his cool with the few hecklers in the audience calling him a sell-out and the mosquito vote a done-deal.
“I’m mostly explaining this to the people out there because I know what’s going to happen when we get done here,” Harmon snarled, with a malevolent gaze toward the left side of the chambers that thankfully skipped over the top of my skull. “I appreciate Mr. Lidie stepping up and I appreciate your background and your service just like I do Mr. Cramer. I don’t want drones flying over my place.”
For those keeping track: The Cowboy Way now includes making decisions based on entirely fictitious arguments, choices that could expose the entire population to mosquito borne illnesses such as West Nile Virus and Dengue Fever.
“Just so the people know, I don’t make a decision based on what he does or he does or he does or he does, I make a decision based on how I feel and what I think,” Harmon said. “That’s how I’m going to make this decision.”
I’ve retired my nickname for the former board majority, Los Tres Pendejos. This new board majority, Crye, Kelstrom and Harmon, is quickly on its way to earning a new sobriquet: Los Tres Payosos, The Three Clowns.

New State California Secessionist Patty Plumb
The Shasta County Elections Commission is a Cancer
Matt Plummer knows what he’s doing, and at the beginning of the meeting he masterfully swapped R4, Harmon’s resolution to appoint Patty Plumb to the Shasta County Elections Commission, with R5, his resolution to “discuss the actions and accomplishments of the Shasta County Elections Commission.”
Plumb is Shasta County’s representative in the New California State assembly, the same secessionist organization Chriss Street belongs to. I’ll start worrying about New California State when they begin producing better swag than the State of Jefferson, but it can’t be denied that their “screw Sacramento” rhetoric appeals to Shasta County’s Trumpers.
This writer has an unbroken record of opposing this bogus election committee staffed by election deniers who refuse to work with anyone whose frontal lobes are intact. It’s almost as if their brains have been melted down by aluminum oxide nanoparticles ejected from jet engines.
As Plummer pointed out, this committee has so far spent $120,000 and has produced zero results, unless you count the decrease in Shasta County’s confidence in its elections a positive development.
It is indeed a positive development for Plumb and her two election-denying cohorts on the bogus board who will broach no difference of opinion for anyone daring to fill the two empty seats on the commission. I have a long standing policy of not repeating the names and the claims of these folks who make you wonder if their minds are gone, perhaps because chemtrails are real.
They’re not of course, but Plummer’s resolution, founded on basic return-on-investment analysis, took an unexpected turn. Rather than eliminate the commission because it’s a complete waste of taxpayer dollars, Plummer proposed increasing the size of the commission in the hope of producing better results.
TBH this was a total WTF meltdown moment for me. Plummer left Long, who favored eliminating the commission based on the same return on investment argument, hanging in the breeze, with Plummer voting 4-1 with Crye, Kelstrom and Harmon to expand the size of this looney tunes commission in the hopes of achieving different results.
Just like chemtrails, election denialism is a fraud and a grift. The fact that the Shasta County Board of Supervisor is now endorsing this freak show doesn’t bode well for the future.
It’s all up to Shasta County District 3 Supervisor Corkey Harmon, who’s known Patty Plumb for 40 years. Somehow I have the feeling the Los Tres Payosos label is going to stick.
No clowning.
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