Naomi Wolf was once an icon of feminism. Now she’s devolved into a crackpot, railing “skeptically” against masks and vaccines on Twitter and declaring that COVID lockdowns could well turn out to be the “worst policy decision outside of perhaps the Vietnam War, wars, of the 20th and 21st centuries.”
She’s especially cranky about masks. While she admits to wearing a mask in certain circumstances herself, she doesn’t like them on kids; indeed, she seems to think that making kids wear masks outdoors is a form of child abuse. (She at least retweeted someone making that claim.)
In one recent tweet she suggested that kids wearing masks are literally forgetting how to smile.
Hey kids, Naomi Wolf thinks you’d be so much prettier if you smiled.
Her “skeptical” stance on all things COVID-related is a bit weird, coming from someone who used to be at least mostly rational. But just wait until she starts going on about clouds.
When you or I look at the sky on a typical day, we see clouds and maybe contrails; Wolf sees a “geoengineered” nightmare of fake clouds with square edges and discolored rainbows generated by secret weather-manipulating machines funded by Bill Gates and others.
She festoons her tweets with photos that might look to you like unexceptional snapshots of perfectly ordinary clouds but that she sees as PROOF that someone is fiddling with our skies.
Yeah, get right on that, Governor Cuomo.
You too, DiBlasio!
But it’s not just New York city that has the weird clouds. The perpathetic Dr. Wollf wants you to know that the clouds in Gettysburg, PA, are also real pieces of shit.
She’s so obsessed with this cloud stuff that she’s finds herself pondering artificial weather while at the beauty salon: If little lasers can tighten your skin just imagine what big lasers could do in the sky!
Some of her friends seem to be telling her to op-stay ith-way e-they oud-clay ictures-pay.
Mr. Blue Sky, please tell us why you had to hide away.
The following tweets, suggesting that there are stationary clouds that don’t move with the wind makes me wonder if perhaps Dr. Wolf is on acid.
Apparently all this cloud-fiddling makes Dr. Wolf depressed. And possibly the rest of us too?
Well, we didn’t evolve to have cars and skyscrapers either, but evidently it’s the sky here that’s bad.
MORE SQUARE CLOUDS:
Stay safe, folks! don’t accidentally poke yourself on that cloud’s sharp corners.
H/T — @Caulimovirus on Twitter
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It’s times like this that I sometimes wonder if people like her end up getting drunk on their own fame and become so desperate to hold onto it that they end up destroying their own reputations just to try and stay relevant.
It does seem like she got worse after her most recent book got its publication cancelled due to major accuracy problems. I wouldn’t be overly surprised if her older works eventually prove to be suspect as well.
She makes this claim at least twice, but assuming that most biofuels are oil-like, I would imagine they don’t absorb water at all. Or does she think clouds are giant tanks of fluid in the sky?
Frankly I’m less worried about her cloud obsession and more worried about how she’s anti vaccine/anti mask and brags about doing dangerous stuff to spread the virus.
She’s also an Assange apologist.
She seems to be yet another person who never looked at the sky until introduced to the chemtrail conspiracy theory. None of those clouds are in any way odd.
This is horrifically depressing. She used to be worth reading. Now? Pass.
I wrote Naomi Wolf off about a decade ago when she accused the women who made the rape allegations against Julian Assange of being a part of a conspiracy to bring him down. So feminist!
It sucks, because the Beauty Myth did legit help me get over my eating disorder 15 or so years ago.
I didn’t see any square clouds in her photos. I did used to lie on my back in the grass as a child and find animal shapes, people, flowers, etc. in clouds with my imagination.
@Katherine
I also did that a lot as a kid. Never once did I decide that the clouds were being manipulated with biofuels, though.
Does… does she not know how the water cycle works?
Someone show this woman the magic school bus episode where Ms. Frizzle teaches the kids about the water cycle. I think it will help her a lot.
Nothing whatsoever to do with clouds, but this comment did bring back memories of when I was a kid and would lie really still in the backyard and feel what I imagined to be the motion of the earth rotating. But what it really was, was that I lived 3 blocks away from an interstate highway and was feeling the vibration of the traffic on I35W.
@Elaine the Witch:
Another teaching tool might be the Steven Universe episode where Steven uses a glass-lidded pot of soup to teach Peridot (a space alien panicked by her first encounter with rain) about the water cycle.
There’s a ton of scientists that on their later day embrace a bunch of unscientific bullshit, often because their area of expertise is much smaller than one would think.
I highly suspect it’s what happening here. Naomi Wolf don’t realize she has 0 clue about biology (or at least the biology around oxygen level and contagious diseases) nor on cloud making.
Yes. Turns out that clouds sometimes take on weird shapes. They always have.
Planes don’t just fly randomly around the sky. They fly from airport to airport along standard routes. Many planes going in the same general direction is exactly what you’d expect.
Just because the wind is blowing at street level doesn’t mean it’s doing the same at 10,000 feet. Haven’t you ever seen layers of clouds where one layer is moving and another isn’t?
This is how our reality works. It’s how it has always worked. If you didn’t know, you haven’t been paying attention.
If Naomi thinks contrails are suss, she’s gonna really lose it if she ever sees a lenticular cloud.
I like that one cos it looks like the volcano has a hat. Very dapper.
Does she think that smog and clouds are the same thing? Some of her tweets seem like it.
Was Dr. Wolf not aware of the existence of cirrus clouds until recently?
Also:
Can your science explain why it rains?
To a degree, she was always like this. The Beauty Myth is full of scientific claims that don’t check out. A few years ago, her academic buddies caught on that she was really sloppy about her research & drew unjustified conclusions & quit hanging out with her & her remaining friends were conspiracy nutters. She’s been fitting right in.
She really seems disproportionately scandalized by the phenomenon of a day starting out clear and then having some cloud cover move in. I guess it might be disappointing if you were enjoying the sunshine and it came to an end mid-day, but as conspiracy “evidence” goes, it’s kind of the ultimate “Huh?” If I were the nefarious head of a weather-altering conspiracy, I’m sure I could think of something a little more dramatic and purposeful than “Clear skies in the morning, turning a little hazy by noon, possible showers overnight.”
@Karalora:
So the cryptic language of the BBC Shipping Forecast is, in fact, encoded instructions to the Global Weather Conspiracy?
@ full metal ox
OMG! The music for that is Sailing By, by Ronald Binge.
And that’s an anagram for Aliens bob grindingly!!!!
We’re through the looking glass people!!!
Volcano has a sombrero!
It looks like the other mountain is a volcano, too, but a little the worse for wear, with a large caldera and fourish peaks around its rim. It’s been dormant a long time and if it does become active again expect a sizable boom. The sombrero volcano looks like it’s been very active recently with numerous smaller eruptions, making for a highly symmetrical cone covered in visible streaks of lahar deposits and lava flows.
That’s one way to get a stationary cloud though: even as the wind goes through it, it forms at one side and dissipates at the other. It’s like ripples in a river above a rock. The water flows through and onward but the ripples stay in the one place.
Abbreviation, not encryption. I’ve seen similar stuff out of NOAA full of cryptic jumbles of letters. Only, they don’t even try to make it secret how to interpret it all. For example:
Turns out “ZCZC” is just a common start-of-message signifier for things that are, or back in the day were, sent out by telegraph or radio Morse; MIA means their Miami office issued this particular bulletin; TCPA means it’s a tropical cyclone public advisory. So it’s a hurricane warning for the Gulf/Florida/GA/Carolinas area, basically. A California coastline one would have different codes.
AT1 ALL TTAA00 identifies the particular advisory, KNHC means the National Hurricane Center issued it, and 141527 is a timestamp. I think the AT1 in particular means it’s about the season’s first (1) tropical storm in the Atlantic (AT) basin. (This was copied from the start of a bulletin about a Tropical Storm Ana, which would have been the first in that year since they gave it an “A” name.)
MIATWOAT instead of MIATCPAT1 would be a Miami-office issued Tropical Weather Outlook for the Atlantic basin, so not about a specific storm but about future storm development potential in the same areas.
Every profession is full of jargon and shorthand like this, to make for more rapid and efficient communication among the people working in the field. You can usually (with some effort) find information about what all the bits and pieces mean online, often at the proverbial horse’s mouth (e.g. the NHC’s website). There’s no attempt at secrecy, just not much of an attempt sometimes at making it easy for random people to understand, either. When the same people communicate to the general public, you hear a siren or an alert tone and they show you a forecast cone saying that this, this, this, and that municipality should evacuate to higher ground because Tropical Storm Ana is going to clobber that area in another 24 hours or whatever.
No conspiracy here. Just something that maybe isn’t immediately understood by the lay person. A little Googling will find an innocent explanation for pretty much any such “code” you come across in most contexts. Unless it was issued by the CIA. 🙂
As a long time member of the Cloud Appreciation Society, with a badge and everything, I am sorry to read this! A friend and I enjoy spotting the sort of cloud that, if in a painting, would look totally unconvincing. But we don’t have a conspiracy theory about them…
@ Lizzie
Just to make you envious, I used to walk past this house fairly regularly!
I used to always make the same joke to myself about “This is Barry the cloud, and that’s Trevor the cloud….”
Someone concerned about how we “didn’t evolve” to have artificial clouds in naturally going to be drawn to anti-medicine conspiracy theories, since we didn’t evolve with modern medicine.
It just turns out that humans with health care are a lot healthier than “organic” humans.
In a way I’m glad she’s spouting the cloud nonsense, as it might make people tempted to listen to her position on masks think twice about it.