contrails

I've had a Polish cleaning lady, Helena, for maybe the last twenty years.  I hate cleaning my house and I do a crappy job of it, so it's worth the money to get the job done and furthermore to get it done well.  She gets here sometime after 7:30 every other Monday morning, and is usually gone by the time I get back at 10.  I don't want to be in the apartment while she is cleaning so in the winter I go to the Barnes and Nobles and page through books while I sip one of those Starbucks in a bottle and in the summer I just walk around downtown.

Anyway the last couple of times she was still here when I got back.  The first time she was telling me how the Jews were responsible for the Holocaust, or maybe it didn't happen, Her English isn't so good and I didn't press her for details.  The Poles have a problem with anti Semitism and their current strongman (anybody else notice how many countries have strongmen at the helm these days?) has made it against the law for his people to say that the Poles had any part in the Holocaust.

Yesterday she was even more excited,  She borrowed a pen and wrote on a paper, chemical trails.  It turns out that she was talking about contrails.  There is a whole world of conspiracy theories involving contrails, with different sinister effects attributed to them.  Her particular version had England and some other country poisoning the air over Poland with their flying machines.  "Oh booshwa," I said (or something of that ilk) and waved her away, but she kept at it.  Due to her limited abilities with English and my knowledge of Polish not going beyond yok shamas and dupa, a calm and reasoned discussion, like the kind I like to think we have here at The Institute, was out of the question.  We both parted ways thinking what a deluded loser the other person was.

I guess if we were both proficient in the same language.  I could have mounted a pretty good argument against her contrail theory using science and logic (what gas could this be, why would anybody do that?), but these conspiracy theories are maddeningly free of hard details.  They are mostly along the lines of this and this and that and isn't it all fishy, and then they jump to some conclusion that is barely connected with the fishy stuff.

It got me to thinking about  the problem we have here at The Institute of given the wealth of information out there how do you know who to believe?  Like source A says this and source B says that, how do you choose which one to believe?

I'll leave that for the dawgs to gnaw on, if they so please.