The contemporary flat Earth movement is a loosely connected community of individuals and groups who reject the widely accepted scientific understanding that the Earth is a sphere, instead asserting that the Earth is flat.

This movement has seen a resurgence in the Internet age, where social media platforms and digital content have greatly facilitated the spread and discussion of flat Earth beliefs.

Key organizations include The Flat Earth Society based in the UK and the United States, which historically began in the 19th century and was revitalized for online presence in recent decades.

There are also international conferences and smaller groups across various countries promoting flat Earth ideas.

These groups often operate primarily on social media and YouTube to disseminate their views.

Notable public figures who have expressed flat Earth beliefs or associations include former NBA player Kyrie Irving and some NFL athletes such as Sammy Watkins and Darius Slay.

They have publicly or semi-publicly endorsed or entertained the idea, lending some celebrity attention to the movement.

However, some claim their adherence is more for skepticism or provocation than genuine belief.

The flat Earther arguments typically invoke mistrust of mainstream science, conspiracy theories about governments and space agencies hiding the “truth,” appeal to sensory experience (e.g., perception of a flat horizon), and reinterpretation of physical phenomena.

They often distrust photographic and satellite evidence, alleging manipulation.

Common rebuttals point to long-established scientific proofs such as the round Earth shadow during lunar eclipses, measurements of Earth’s circumference since antiquity (Eratosthenes, Muslim scholars), and modern satellite imagery.

The resurgence of flat Earth beliefs is largely a product of digital media amplification, social fragmentation, and a broader culture of conspiracy thinking and distrust of authorities.

Internet platforms allow fast spread, emotional and community bonding, and access to pseudo-scientific content.

Psychological characteristics of flat Earth adherents appear to include a propensity for conspiratorial thinking, skepticism toward scientific institutions, and sometimes social isolation or a desire for uniqueness.

Some are younger individuals with lower scientific literacy but broad demographics exist.

Importantly, while flat Earth communities often appear as harmless contrarians or niche subcultures, research and intelligence reports describe potential risks including social alienation, susceptibility to broader conspiracy radicalization, and a rejection of critical thinking.

This can sometimes interfere with education and acceptance of science.

However, the movement generally lacks centralized leadership or specific cult-like control, and many adherents operate independently or in small, informal groups.

Overall, the flat Earth movement represents more than a mere oddity; it reflects growing societal challenges such as information disorder, distrust, and fragmentation in the digital age.

For a concerned parent, awareness and open dialogue encouraging critical thinking and scientific understanding with their teen is advisable.

Limiting contact based solely on flat Earth association is not clearly warranted, though cautious social guidance about conspiracy thinking and respect for evidence would be prudent[62aa-6833; f61994b0-dc34-40d6-a1e2-a7f66b22774b; 234c0ac8-224a-4ae9-b9fc-df4652c033eb; 00310f0f-f13a-484e-a6fe-9e53d1ab632d; d7939190-fb1a-4bfe-bd0e-4517f5e132d2; 6e47a5cf-47a7-42a3-812e-ef81ba1e7a5f].

The contemporary flat Earth movement is a loosely connected community of individuals and groups who reject the widely accepted scientific understanding that the Earth is a sphere, instead asserting that the Earth is flat.

Title:

Content: 9 of TikTok's most controversial and viral conspiracies - including Area 51, One Direction and JonBenét Ramsey

These are the top nine viral conspiracy theories which are being discussed on TikTok right now - including theories about celebrities and mythical creatures
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From secret societies to extraterrestrial enigmas, people like to discuss conspiracy theories. There are many things which do not make sense in this world, and some things which have had people stumped for decades. In some cases, people hope to finally uncover the truth behind some unsolved mysteries, and in others they are convinced something is being hidden.

To find out what the most widely discussed conspiracy theories are in 2024, VegasSlotsOnline has analysed the number of TikTok hashtags for over 45 of the biggest conspiracy theories worldwide, to determine the most popular conspiracies of 2024. The following are the nine top theories which have gone viral on the popular social media platform.

Illuminati

The Illuminati were originally a secret society founded in Bavaria in the 1700s, intending to replace Christianity with a “religion of reason”. The group was said to be shut down by the government after a decade, but some conspiracy theorists believe the society still exists today - and not only that it's operating in secret with a plan to take over the world. Famous figures accused of being part of the Illuminati include US presidents, pop singers and actors.

27 club

Despite sounding like a fun, exclusive society, the 27 Club definitely isn’t one you would want to be in. The name refers to a list of celebrities who have also passed away at age 27, including Jimi Hendrix, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse, to name just a few.

Area 51

Area 51 refers to a highly classified United States Air Force facility in Nevada, and it’s very real. The conspiracy theories behind it, however, may not be. The base’s top-secret nature has led to a range of wild theories over the years, with the most popular being that it’s used to carry out research on UFOs and extraterrestrial beings that the US government is keeping under wraps.

JonBenét Ramsey is alive

JonBenét Ramsey, aged 6, was supposedly killed in her family home in 1996. Her killer has never been officially identified, but there are many unusual details about the case, such as a ransom note found in the family’s home, that have sparked a range of popular theories over the years. One particularly outlandish theory is that JonBenét has not died and is actually still alive, despite evidence to the contrary.

'Larries'

‘Larries’ are hardcore One Direction fans who support the idea that Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, former bandmates of the hugely popular boyband, are in a romantic relationship. Despite the two artists repeatedly denying these claims, many fans are still insistent that the band’s former management encouraged the pair to keep their relationship secret. Styles is dating model and actress Taylor Russell. Tomlinson is said to be growing close to his on/off girlfriend Eleanor Calder again.

Murder of John Lennon

Beatles musician John Lennon was fatally shot in December 1980 at the age of 40 by an enraged fan. Ever since, conspiracy theories suggesting that the CIA were involved in his death have sprung up in various places, including books and documentaries. The CIA and FBI kept eyes on Lennon due to his left-wing activism, and theorists have suggested that his murderer, Mark Chapman, was operating on their behalf.

BigFoot

The legend of BigFoot dates back thousands of years and is now a modern household name. Theorists believe that a dangerous ape-like creature exists in the forests of North America, occasionally revealing itself to hikers and campers. Many have shared supposed encounters in the form of giant footprints and blurry photographs, though there is still no credible evidence to prove the creature’s existence.

Planet X

Planet X, sometimes known as the Nibiru cataclysm, is a doomsday conspiracy theory with roots in the early 20th century. Its believers theorise that an undiscovered large planet in our solar system will, at some point, collide with Earth. This hypothetical planet is not recognised in mainstream astronomy, however, and is generally rejected by the scientific community for lacking substantial evidence.

Flat earth

One of social media’s most prevalent conspiracy theories is that the Earth is flat in shape rather than a sphere. Many ‘flat earthers’ reject scientific evidence, such as gravity and satellite imagery, with some even suggesting that governments and corporations are keeping the earth’s flat shape a secret from the masses. The flat earth theory is frequently disproved as it contradicts solid scientific principles.

This movement has seen a resurgence in the Internet age, where social media platforms and digital content have greatly facilitated the spread and discussion of flat Earth beliefs.

Key organizations include The Flat Earth Society based in the UK and the United States, which historically began in the 19th century and was revitalized for online presence in recent decades.

Title:

Content: The Daily Express Original
Express: “indulge conspiracy theorists ” – British universities criticized for supporting anti-scientific ideas
The famous biologist Richard Dawkins attacked the “tolerant ” British universities.
According to the professor, the leadership of educational institutions cares too much about the “feelings ” of students and therefore is in no hurry to debunk the growing popularity of pseudoscientific ideas, including the hypothesis of a flat Earth and the denial of evolution, writes the Daily Express.
The famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins lashed out at the “tolerant ” British universities.
The academician accused their leadership of encouraging the spread of pseudoscientific ideas and conspiracy theories, including the hypothesis of a flat Earth, reports the Daily Express.
Dawkins, 80, was a professor at Oxford University until 2008.
In addition, he has published several best-selling books and made documentaries about the origins of life, the publication explains.
Dawkins urged higher education institutions to "stand up for scientific truth."
In his opinion, they need to educate students, and not “protect ” the feelings of conspiracy theorists.
“University leaders who think that the ‘ offended feelings ’ of flat-earthers and evolutionists matter more than scientific truth need to go back to university to find out what it ’ s for, ” he wrote on Twitter.
“Defend the scientific truth and the clarity of language.
They do not go to university to feel “safe ” and“ protect feelings. ”
They go there to face challenges and learn to cope with difficulties, ” the professor stressed.
Flat Earth societies exist at many British universities, including York, Nottingham Trent and Cambridge.
According to one popular theory, our planet is a disk that surrounds a 46-meter ice wall that does not allow people to fall from the edge, draws the attention of the Daily Express.
The materials of InoTV contain estimates of exclusively foreign media and do not reflect the position of RT
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There are also international conferences and smaller groups across various countries promoting flat Earth ideas.

These groups often operate primarily on social media and YouTube to disseminate their views.

Title:

Content: When it comes to space, failure isn't just an option — it's a requirement

Sometime next month, SpaceX will likely try to launch the largest rocketship ever flown, known as the Starship. If successful, this flight will herald a new space age, as humanity opens the solar system. This begs the question: Will it fail or will it succeed? And if it fails, what will it mean?

Anyone familiar with space movies, or who has visited a NASA gift shop, knows the phrase "Failure is not an option." Actually, it is. In truth, if one is to win at anything, failure is a requirement. We only learn by what we learn from making mistakes. That is if — and this is an important "if" — we accept the learning we gain from the failure and apply it to our future endeavors.

The exploration and development of space are no exceptions. Or rather, they highlight the rule.

Related: Spaceflight: Danger at every phase (infographic)

Generally speaking (and in my humble opinion) there are four types of failures when launching a rocket or rocketship.

  • 1. A new, untested tested technology or group of technologies fail.
  • 2. An incorrectly tested technology or group of technologies fail.
  • 3. Humans in the loop ignore rules or design criteria from their own plans or cut corners, usually for financial, performance or political reasons.
  • 4. Having had one of the three types of failures above, no learning has occurred, or learning did occur and was ignored, and they happen again.

While any "rapid unscheduled disassembly" (RUD as some engineers jokingly call a rocket explosion) is a problem, number 1 in my list is an expected part of the development of any new complex system. Sadly, and by far, it is the second, third and fourth failure categories that most often result in tragedy. The two most spectacular American instances of this were the space shuttle Challenger and Columbia disasters. In both cases, the failures were predictable, if not specifically identifiable.

Like all NASA human spaceflight programs, the space shuttle program was a rock star show of enormous proportions and massive implications for the agency and the government. In both cases, the inconvenient truths of possible deadly mishaps or results were spotlighted before the accidents by members of the mission management teams. While the case of the Columbia disaster is more complex and nuanced, in the case of Challenger, clear warnings from savvy employees were ignored because the show had to go on, and, sadly, people died.

Due to fear of such high-profile failures, our space agency usually over-corrects, or perhaps more correctly, over-corrects for the wrong reasons, and in the wrong way, as every tiny malfunction, mishap and mistake becomes the fodder of media pundits and agenda-driven critics. Witness the NASA Space Launch System (SLS) — as it was rolled out to the launch pad, rolled back, rolled out and rolled back, as engineers worked to assure everything was perfect — even as the wait, the holds and the rollbacks themselves actually added potential risk to the system.

In the end, the politically designed contraption flew — successfully, on the Artemis 1 mission, but if this is to be the vehicle that opens the solar system, such fragility means none of us are going any time soon — if ever. It's all just too precious. Yes, I was one of those critics. I still am. And while an in-depth discussion of the disastrous pork program I've long called the Senate Launch Scam must wait for another time, it is clear that even as the space agency tries to rationalize one of the most expensive and complex rockets ever built, it is ironically hostage to its fear of failure. Failure made more likely by the very system that created the vehicle in the first place.

Related: The 10 greatest images from NASA's Artemis 1 moon mission

This is no one's fault. It is a result of a systemic fault created over time. Today, especially in the government, too much rides on every liftoff. The weight of fear of failure means that it will not be gravity that stops the human breakout into the universe, it will be bureaucracy, and a system that has gone off its tracks and rolled off the playing field into a swamp of its own making.

But it wasn't always that way. Starting after World War II, as missiles previously designed to kill people in wars and tested under the military's cloak of secrecy began to be employed in exploration, experts understood that, when testing new tech, failure wasn't just an option. It was the rule — until the cameras showed up.

A good example occurred in the late 1950s, as the massive global science project known as the International Geophysical Year (IGY) was getting underway. Launching shiny objects into space was an obvious yet new exploration arena, and those in charge adopted fairly pragmatic expectations. In the U.S., the National Academy of Sciences agreed that if only one of every six satellites in the program made it into space, it would be considered successful. Flying on the Air Force's Vanguard rocket, three of them did. Yet to many in Washington and the public, the program was considered a failure.

Meanwhile, the Soviets were driving hard, and while they had their own fair share of failures, some of them spectacular, the world would only hear of those that succeeded. To be clear, Soviet, Russian and Chinese space failures deserve their own essays and volumes, and in many cases make the causes and results of U.S. failures seem small by comparison. This is in some ways the point. When you allow the world to watch, and give taxpayers a veto based on what they see, the pressure to perform becomes a force of its own.

For example, under pressure from the Soviet Union's Sputnik surprise, from 1958 to 1960 NASA tried eight times to launch Pioneer satellites to the moon using early variations of the Atlas rocket. One probe was never launched. The others all failed. Only Pioneer 5 could be called a success.

Thus, NASA was born in the spotlight. And it was forced to either entertain the taxpayers for its funding or be dragged off the financial stage. Failure, even expected failure, even failure followed by success, became less and less of an option. It just didn't make for good TV, and bad TV shows get … well, they get canceled.

NASA's official history website is surprisingly frank in its assessment of this reality (italics mine):

"(The Atlas failures) made plain that success on space missions would be neither automatic nor cheap. There was a price to pay, and part of that price was the failure of some missions. This price NASA management would never find comfortable. The trouble with a philosophy of accepting a certain number of failures as normal and inevitable was that even 'learning failures' in an open program like NASA's, conducted under the watchful eye of a whole world, looked to the public and Congress like absolute failures. The press treated them as failures. It didn't matter that previous development projects like the V-2, Atlas, Thor, Polaris and almost any other major rocket development one could name, had had their share of unsuccessful early firings, and that this had been accepted as a necessary growing pain. Those difficulties had been hardly visible under the cloak of military secrecy. But space program difficulties were highly visible and distressing."

"Distressing." An understatement, to be sure. It became clear to supporters of NASA that, in many ways, our space program wasn't just about exploration or strategic victory over our communist opponents. It was entertainment. Thus, the show must go on. Whether it meant creating massively over-engineered systems, massively over-papered bureaucracies or both, NASA had to be damn sure that whenever the eyes of the world were on it, its people would deliver a Right Stuff performance.

Thanks to an incredible level of proficiency on the part of NASA's team, for the most part, this approach worked during the Apollo program. Yes, there were terrible disasters like the Apollo 1 fire, which killed three of the agency's top young astronauts. But that disaster happened during practice, and no one was watching. It slowed down the program, as NASA reviewed its mistakes, and made serious improvements in its systems and procedures. But had the fatal fire happened live on screen, the entire program would most likely have slipped years into the future as the various branches of the government each took their turn at reviewing how such heroes could have died — and quite possibly, given the horrible nature of their death in a burning capsule, it might have ended the entire program.

Related: NASA's 17 Apollo moon missions in pictures

What is remarkable about Apollo is that there were so few significant failures. Think about it. NASA went from almost zero spaceflight experience to humans on the moon in less than 10 years, with only three people dead in one major accident — which didn't occur during a mission. Yes, there were spacecraft failures and blow-ups, but history has already correctly rewarded the entire program with a well-deserved mark of excellence. Ever hear the term "Moon shot?"

Then, as I mentioned, came the shuttle program, with an entirely different system and an almost all-new management team, given the time lag between the end of Apollo in 1972 and the first flight of Columbia in 1981. Ironically, the space shuttle was supposed to be the system that would make human access to space safe and routine. It was almost the opposite. To get it funded, the original plan was compromised to save money and gain support. For example, as proposed to Congress, the shuttle system consisted of two totally reusable flyback systems that would take off vertically and land on runways, ready to fly again. As political sausage-making took over, however, this approach was replaced by the massive hydrogen and oxygen tanks and solid rocket boosters we are familiar with today.

As is usual when trying to win votes, political games took precedence over practicality. Worse, while trying to deal with the political compromises being forced on it to get the funding it needed for its dream ship, NASA layered even more bad choices into the mix. Here's one example of many cited in the many retrospective books on the disaster: To win votes from the then-powerful Utah congressional delegation, military intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) solid rocket manufacturer Morton Thiokol in Utah was chosen to manufacture solid rocket booster segments that had to fit perfectly together. These were then shipped to the Cape in Florida on their sides on train cars over hundreds of miles of railroads.

In the end, the shuttle was only partially reusable, and became so complex that the entire vehicle had to be torn apart and rebuilt between flights. It was, according even to NASA leadership, a recipe for disaster. After Challenger, former NASA Administrator Norm Augustine mentioned on a conference call his concern for a program based on "flying space shuttles in circles until another one falls out of the sky." And it did. And it was Columbia.

So now the shuttle program is gone. Frankly, this is a good thing, in spite of all the good it did to inspire a generation. I helped make it go away. It was too expensive and dangerous, and rather than helping open the space frontier, it was helping keep it closed. Once the quasi-military propaganda campaign to win the race to the moon was won by Apollo, our government should have switched to commercial fleets to take over basic shipping and people-carrying to and from space, just as we do in the rest of our economy. A group of us in the Space Frontier Foundation spent over a decade making that happen. Eventually, at least to and from the International Space Station, we won.

This begs the question: Are private space transportation systems safer? Are private operators more careful than government agency contractors? Good questions. The first answer is that no engineer or project manager ever wants anyone to get hurt — no matter who they work for. But systems don't care, and systems designed around an internal conflict between the need to break things to learn things, and not being able to break things because it doesn't look good, are inherently dangerous.

At the end of the day, blowing up very expensive hardware is not fun for anyone, government or commercial. Unfortunately, sometimes one has to blow up a few things to get things right, and the way our culture is wired, the private sector has more freedom to do so than NASA right now — at least the part of the sector with enough money to blow up stuff and replace it.

And so, here we are. In the coming weeks, Elon Musk, the man who has blown up more big rockets than anyone in the last 10 years, will try to fly the biggest rocketship of all time, the Starship. But, if you recall my opening list of why rockets blow up, Mr. Musk has focused on #1 — blowing up new and untested rockets to learn how to make them better. Better yet, he and his team are actually applying — rather than ignoring — their data to make the next rocketship safer! This is where he and other NewSpace companies have a distinct advantage over their government competitors. Their process is complete when they deliver a highly reliable, low-cost, reusable space transportation system that actually works.

A good way to spot a technology-edge crossing company that is a bad investment is one that does not have this built into their budget, either through overconfidence or naivete. A potentially successful company combines vision with pragmatic pessimism. They err on the side of expecting early failure, and their budget includes funding reserved to try again until they get it right. Thus, to these companies the optics of failures do not matter as much as the application of lessons learned by those failures. Be it satellite companies, government customers or, eventually, citizen space pioneers, there is no inherent conflict in the success metric for a private commercial space transportation provider. It delivers, or it does not. The market handles the rest.

And so, as critics and competitors wail at his failures, Elon has rolled out, blown up, rolled out and blown up half a dozen test vehicles to get to the point he and his SpaceX team are at today.

So what about Starship and the Super Heavy monster first stage on which it will ride? Well, we know Starship has been vetted, broken and vetted again, but Super Heavy has not. Yes, SpaceX has fired the engines many times. And in some cases, they have not worked perfectly, so engineeers made some tweaks and fired them again. But will they all work when needed? Will all of the myriad of systems work that are required in order to push that shiny but heavy-as-hell rocketship sitting on top of it all the way to a successful splashdown or landing? We shall see.

What we do know is that, if it doesn't work, two things will be true: 1. Unless there is some strange anomaly in its trajectory if it fails, no one will likely die. 2. If it does fail, you can bet SpaceX will find out what went wrong, fix it, roll out another one and fly it again. And from what I know of Elon, Gwynne Shotwell (SpaceX's president and chief operating officer, who's running the Starship launch program) and the team at SpaceX, they will keep trying until they succeed. But they won't stop there. According to their plans, Starship, once proven, will be flown dozens, if not hundreds of times, carrying satellites and other commercial cargo into space before a single human life is put at risk in one of the hundreds of available seats they will screw into the floor once those flights prove the system is safe.

Related: Starship and Super Heavy: SpaceX's Mars-colonizing transportation system

This is part of the genius of Musk and SpaceX's plan. They have created their first customer base in the form of their own Starlink internet satellites, which can launch in the thousands on Starship. These relatively tiny revenue-producing robotic phone lines in the sky will fund SpaceX's development program and safety certification. Their own products will pay for the development of their own product as that product makes those products cheaper to use and vice versa. (It's brilliant, but I don't want Elon to know that, lest it goes to his head.) Thus, Musk can get his transportation system operating by risking his own money, then transition to outside customers who want their missions flown at less risk and then, in the long run, drive the risk down so low it will make sense for those first brave human pioneers to climb aboard and head off to the moon and eventually Mars. (Not to oversimplify, as each of those destinations will require yet another series of capabilities and the development of new systems.)

Contrast this with the broken system at NASA. Having just flown a significantly delayed first flight of an empty spacecraft on Artemis 1, it will be nearly another two years before the next flight, Artemis 2, attempts to carry a crew around the moon in a redux of the flight of Apollo 8 over 55 years ago, using a system — the SLS rocket and Orion capsule — that is essentially the same as those developed 70 years ago. One might expect it to be cheaper and more reliable given its heritage, but no, the opposite is true. At an estimated $4 billion per flight, the SLS is so expensive and complex that it will only fly every couple of years. This pace assures a stale learning curve and the turnover of experienced team members during the program's lifetime. Meanwhile, with the cameras of the world (and, more importantly, U.S. taxpayers) on them, each crewed SLS flight becomes so precious, once again, that failure will not be an option — within a system that increases the probability that it will occur.

Meanwhile, Musk states that Starship will eventually cost just a couple of million dollars a flight. I know too many engineers to believe such a number, so let's make it 10 times as much, $20 million a flight. That's still massively cheaper than SLS. On top of this, Starship will be racking up dozens of flights a year carrying expendable mobile phone systems and other commercial and (interestingly) NASA payloads. Some may fail, technologies will be replaced and upgraded, but the flight teams will become even more honed — before the first human payload enters the airlock.

Hopefully, the SLS will become obsolete before it is called on to try to carry too many astronauts into space. This is for the simple and obvious reason that all the government paperwork in the world, all the covering of one's behind and all the going slow and being afraid of breaking anything will not make up for a broken system that has lost the ability to build things, break things and then build them better, something our government used to understand and seems to have unlearned.

So, when you watch the upcoming first test flight of Starship and Super Heavy, understand it is a test. It is not the Super Bowl or World Cup. It is practice for the Super Bowl. It is a rehearsal for the World Cup. If SpaceX fails, they will learn, just as the other new commercial spaceship companies are learning. If they succeed, they will also learn; soon enough, they will fail anyway. Yet the difference will be that the necessity of that failure is understood, the minds to learn from it are open to the knowledge it will provide, the risks next time will be mitigated, and the commitment to getting back up and trying again is built into the game plan.

The difference between a winner and a loser is that the winner gets back up, learns from what they did wrong and does it again.

This is how we win the future.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

Founder of SpaceFund, Earthlight Foundation, Space Frontier Foundation and New Worlds Institute

Both a rebel and a respected leader, Rick is listed as one of the top 100 influential people in the space field. Called one of the world’s top space “visionaries,” Rick helped coin the term "NewSpace" and worked to create the new commercial space industry highlighted by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

A leading writer, speaker, and six-time Congressional witness, Rick helped start the first mission to find water on the Moon, signed the first ever commercial data purchase agreement with NASA, helped start NASA’s Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, led the commercial takeover of the Russian Mir space station, signed the first private astronaut to fly to the space station, co-founded the Space Frontier Foundation, and was a founding board member of the X-Prize.

As a result of his world-changing work, in 2015 he won the World Technology Award along with Craig Venter of the Human Genome project. He founded the SpaceFund venture capital company with 19 space companies in its portfolio and is a member of the US Space Force Doctrine Advisory Group.

Rick's The Space Revolution "radiopod" is featured on IHeart Radio Network's iRoc Space Radio and is available on most major podcast sites. He hosts the New Worlds Conference and the Space Cowboy Ball in Austin, Texas, and his non-profit EarthLight Foundation is creating an inclusive new movement to use space to protect the Earth and expand life into the cosmos.

Notable public figures who have expressed flat Earth beliefs or associations include former NBA player Kyrie Irving and some NFL athletes such as Sammy Watkins and Darius Slay.

Title:

Content: “Everyone Gets Hit in the Head”: Travis and Jason Kelce Boldly Claim 20% NFL Players Are Flat-Earthers

Samnur Reza
Published

Eight-time NBA All-Star and Mavericks point guard, Kyrie Irving, has time and time again claimed that the earth is flat. Sadly, this belief is widely held around the globe. When discussing the same and if there are NFL players who also call themselves flat-earthers behind closed doors, Jason Kelce and his brother Travis boldly claimed that a good chunk of the NFL locker room actually believes the earth to be flat.

During a recent episode of the New Heights podcast with comedian Andrew Santino at the discussion table, the younger Kelce said, “We’ve mentioned on the show that conspiracy theories help bring NFL locker rooms together,” before asking the guest, “What are your conspiracy theories?”

Without skipping a beat, Santino posed the question about what percentage of NFL players actually believe in the Flat Earth theory. In response, Travis claimed that at least 10 to 15 athletes in every locker room are flat-earthers. Jason Kelce, however, added that if someone were to conduct an anonymous poll about it, the number of flat-earth believers could potentially jump up to 20%, equating to approximately 11 players out of a 53-man roster.

“Dude, honestly, there are at least 10 to 15 guys in every locker room; I would imagine,” Travis remarked, followed by Jason adding, “If you took an anonymous poll like nobody had to disclose their name or anything like that, you’re over 15% of an NFL locker room… Maybe over 20.”

This revelation baffled the Ricky Stanicky actor, but Travis consoled him by jokingly saying, “Dude, everyone gets hit in the head.” Nevertheless, while the Kelce duo’s numbers may be somewhat exaggerated, there have been some instances when NFL players have openly admitted believing in the earth being flat.

Darius Slay, Sammy Watkins, and Others Are Flat-Earthers

As per Sports Illustrated, free agent wide receiver Sammy Watkins claimed back in 2017 that the earth is flat. But he isn’t the only NFL athlete on that list, as Eagles CB Darius Slay told Tori Petry of DetroitLions.com back in 2018 that the earth is flat.

“I mean, I think it is (flat), we’re walking flat, so how is it round?,” claimed the All-Pro cornerback.

Steelers linebacker Patrick Queen followed suit just last year and claimed the same thing. “PSA,” Queen wrote in a tweet. “Earth is flat. Thank you. Carry on!!”

The list goes on! Former Texas Tech safety, Tyler Owens, apparently told reporters at the Scouting Combine that he doesn’t believe in space or any other planets. Thus, he finds the Flat Earth Theory ‘interesting’ and ‘valid’.

“Nah, I don’t believe in space…. like, you know, I’m religious, so I think like… we’re on our own right now. I don’t think there’s, like, other planets, and stuff like that. I don’t know,” Owens said, as per DailyMail.

Even Seahawks QB Geno Smith has claimed that the whole thing is still up for debate. Moreover, Jason Kelce once revealed that, out of curiosity, he had asked one of his coaches about the Flat Earth Theory and if anyone believed in it. Right there and then, an athlete nearby said, “I mean how you know it isn’t?”

Despite its absurdity, the debate will rage on till the end of time, it seems. However, there are simple experiments that can be conducted in front of a flat-earther to convince them otherwise, as perfectly demonstrated by Wired.

About the author

Samnur Reza

Samnur Reza, or "Rocky," is an NFL editor for the SportsRush. Although his love for football began with Tom Brady, he’s now a devoted fan of Jalen Hurts and is keeping his fingers crossed for the first ring. When asked how he remains loyal to the Eagles, he channels his inner Jim from The Office and responds, 'On a wing and a prayer.' Much like his love for football, Rocky is a dedicated cinephile with an impressive amount of screen time. He’s also fond of cats and has a furry friend named ‘Eva’.

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What NBA star claimed that the earth is flat?

They have publicly or semi-publicly endorsed or entertained the idea, lending some celebrity attention to the movement.

Title:

Content: Last Chance To Dance! 2022 Sundance Film Festival Coming To A Close

Posted by Larry Gleeson

2022 Sundance Film Festival Awards Announcement, Satellite Screenings, & Final Day on the New Frontier Spaceship Top Highlights of the Ninth Day of Festival Programming

PARK CITY, UT (January 29, 2022) – Sundance Film Festival welcomed audiences to its ninth day of screenings and conversations featuring some of the most notable visionaries in independent film, new media, and culture-at-large.

The festival announced the Audience Awards alongside Grand Jury and Special Jury Prizes for films in the U.S. Dramatic, U.S. Documentary, World Dramatic, and World Documentary Competitions, NEXT, and the Short Film program. Winners included Nanny (U.S. Dramatic), The Exiles (U.S. Documentary), All That Breathes (World Cinema Documentary), Utama (World Cinema Dramatic), Cha Cha Real Smooth (Audience Award, U.S. Dramatic) and Navalny (Audience Award, U.S. Documentary; Festival Favorite Award). All winners are detailed here. Screenings of the award-winning films will play online all weekend long.

The New Frontier Spaceship also celebrated its last day in orbit with Artist Spotlights and an open discussion hosted by Amelia Winger-Bearskin and Jesse Damiani on NFTs, cryptocurrencies, and the rapid proliferation of decentralized, autonomous organizations (DAOs).

The festival’s Satellite Screens kicked off yesterday as well. From Maryland to California, eight feature films from the 2022 lineup are playing this weekend at seven partner locations around the country where they are celebrating independent film and supporting like-minded arthouse theaters.

Each year, Sundance serves as a cultural launchpad, helping to expand audience horizons through film and the conversations that occur the minute that credits roll. Continuing to foster this spirit of discussion into 2022, Sundance Film Festival programs a series of panels across discipline and topics to keep the conversation going.

DAY NINE HIGHLIGHTS

  • 2022 SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL AWARDS
    • U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic: Nikyatu Jusu for Nanny
    • U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary: Ben Klein and Violet Columbus for The Exiles
    • World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic: Alejandro Loayza Grisi for Utama
    • World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary: Shaunak Sen for All That Breathes
    • Audience Award: U.S. Documentary: Navalny
    • Audience Award: U.S. Dramatic: Cha Cha Real Smooth
    • Audience Award: World Cinema Dramatic: Girl Picture
    • Audience Award: World Cinema Documentary: The Territory
    • Audience Award: NEXT: Framing Agnes
    • Festival Favorite Award: Navalny
    • Directing Award: U.S. Documentary: Reid Davenport for I Didn’t See You There
    • Directing Award: U.S. Dramatic: Jamie Dack for Palm Trees and Power Lines
    • World Cinema Documentary: Simon Lereng Wilmont for A House Made Of Splinters
    • Directing Award: World Cinema Dramatic: Maryna Er Gorbach for KLONDIKE
    • Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award: U.S. Dramatic: K.D. Dávila for Emergency
    • Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award: U.S. Documentary: Erin Casper and Jocelyne Chaput for Fire Of Love
    • U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award: Uncompromising Artistic Vision: Bradley Rust Gray for blood
    • U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award: Ensemble Cast: John Boyega, Nicole Beharie, Selenis Leyva, Connie Britton, Olivia Washington, London Covington, and Michael K Williams for 892
    • U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award: Impact for Change: Aftershock
    • U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award: Creative Vision: Descendant
    • World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award: Documentary Craft: The Territory
    • World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award: Excellence In Verité Filmmaking: Midwives
    • World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award: Innovative Spirit: Leonor Will Never Die
    • World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award: Acting: Teresa Sánchez for Dos Estaciones
    • NEXT Innovator Award presented by Adobe: Framing Agnes
    • Short Film Grand Jury Prize: The Headhunter’s Daughter
    • Short Film Jury Award: U.S. Fiction: IF I GO WILL THEY MISS ME
    • Short Film Jury Award: International Fiction: Dania Bdeir for Warsha
    • Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction: Samir Karahoda for Displaced
    • Short Film Jury Award: Animation: Joe Hsieh for Night Bus
    • Short Film Special Jury Award: Ensemble Cast: Zélia Duncan, Bruna Linzmeyer, Camila Rocha, Clarissa Ribeiro, and Lorre Motta for A wild patience has taken me here
    • Short Film Special Jury Award: Screenwriting: Sara Driver for Stranger Than Rotterdam with Sara Driver
    • Previously announced:
      • 2022 Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize: After Yang
      • Sundance Institute | Amazon Studios Producers Award for Nonfiction: Su Kim for Free Chol Soo Lee
      • Sundance Institute | Amazon Studios Producers Award for Fiction: Amanda Marshall God’s Country
      • Sundance Institute | Adobe Mentorship Award for Editing Nonfiction: Toby Shimin
      • Sundance Institute | Adobe Mentorship Award for Editing Fiction: Dody Dorn
      • Sundance Institute | NHK Award: Hasan Hadi for The President’s Cake
  • NEW FRONTIER ARTIST SPOTLIGHT
    • FLAT EARTH VR
      • Lucas Rizzotto (Lead Artist) shared insight on how the project started as a joke in response to the idea that VR is an “empathy machine,” and asked whether that is still the case when the premise is entirely delusional.
      • Lucas discussed how he actually consulted flat Earthers in designing the experience and learned that ultimately, “flat Earthers are not united by their belief, but by their disbelief.” There is no singular coherent flat Earth theory and everyone has different ideas of what a flat Earth means and looks like.
      • Lucas also expressed concern about VR propaganda, and how XR creators could use their work to spread misinformation and emotionally manipulate and control audiences in showing them a “reality” regardless of whether or not it’s based in truth. He urged XR creators to be mindful of the impact their work could have and how it may be used by others in a way they might not have intended.

HOW TO PARTICIPATE

The Festival takes place digitally via our enhanced online platform at Festival.Sundance.org, on the New Frontier Spaceship, a bespoke immersive platform allowing festival-goers to gather virtually, and in-person at seven Satellite Screens venues around the country during the Festival’s second weekend. Additional programming includes a daily talk show (“How to Fest: Daily”), and Satellite Screen conversations as well as partner offerings in the Festival Village.To note, all talks are available online via live stream or posted later on festival.sundance.org to view globally. Sign up for an account at festival.sundance.org to access online. All times are U.S. Mountain Time.

ABOUT SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL

The Sundance Film Festival has introduced global audiences to some of the most groundbreaking films of the past three decades, including Flee, CODA, Passing, Summer Of Soul (…or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), Clemency, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Zola, On The Record, Boys State, The Farewell, Honeyland, One Child Nation, The Souvenir, The Infiltrators, Sorry to Bother You, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Hereditary, Call Me By Your Name, Get Out, The Big Sick, Mudbound, Fruitvale Station, Whiplash, Brooklyn, Precious, The Cove, Little Miss Sunshine, An Inconvenient Truth, Napoleon Dynamite, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Reservoir Dogs and sex, lies, and videotape.

The Festival is a program of the non-profit Sundance Institute. 2022 Festival sponsors include: Presenting Sponsors – Acura, AMC+, Chase Sapphire, Adobe; Leadership Sponsors – Amazon Studios, DIRECTV, DoorDash, Dropbox, Netflix, Omnicom Group, WarnerMedia, XRM Media; Sustaining Sponsors – Aflac, Audible, Canada Goose, Canon U.S.A., Inc., Dell Technologies, IMDbPro, Michelob ULTRA Pure Gold, Rabbit Hole Bourbon & Rye, Unity Technologies, University of Utah Health, White Claw Hard Seltzer; Media Sponsors – The Atlantic, IndieWire, Los Angeles Times, NPR, Shadow and Act, Variety, Vulture. Sundance Institute recognizes critical support from the State of Utah as Festival Host State. The support of these organizations helps offset the Festival’s costs and sustain the Institute’s year-round programs for independent artists. Visit sundance.org/festival for more.

However, some claim their adherence is more for skepticism or provocation than genuine belief.

Title:

Content: Anda sedang membaca tafsir untuk sekelompok ayat dari 2:8 hingga 2:13
وَمِنَ
النَّاسِ
مَنْ
یَّقُوْلُ
اٰمَنَّا
بِاللّٰهِ
وَبِالْیَوْمِ
الْاٰخِرِ
وَمَا
هُمْ
بِمُؤْمِنِیْنَ
۟ۘ
یُخٰدِعُوْنَ
اللّٰهَ
وَالَّذِیْنَ
اٰمَنُوْا ۚ
وَمَا
یَخْدَعُوْنَ
اِلَّاۤ
اَنْفُسَهُمْ
وَمَا
یَشْعُرُوْنَ
۟ؕ
فِیْ
قُلُوْبِهِمْ
مَّرَضٌ ۙ
فَزَادَهُمُ
اللّٰهُ
مَرَضًا ۚ
وَلَهُمْ
عَذَابٌ
اَلِیْمٌ ۙ۬۟ 
بِمَا
كَانُوْا
یَكْذِبُوْنَ
۟
وَاِذَا
قِیْلَ
لَهُمْ
لَا
تُفْسِدُوْا
فِی
الْاَرْضِ ۙ
قَالُوْۤا
اِنَّمَا
نَحْنُ
مُصْلِحُوْنَ
۟
اَلَاۤ
اِنَّهُمْ
هُمُ
الْمُفْسِدُوْنَ
وَلٰكِنْ
لَّا
یَشْعُرُوْنَ
۟
وَاِذَا
قِیْلَ
لَهُمْ
اٰمِنُوْا
كَمَاۤ
اٰمَنَ
النَّاسُ
قَالُوْۤا
اَنُؤْمِنُ
كَمَاۤ
اٰمَنَ
السُّفَهَآءُ ؕ
اَلَاۤ
اِنَّهُمْ
هُمُ
السُّفَهَآءُ
وَلٰكِنْ
لَّا
یَعْلَمُوْنَ
۟
3

For those who put worldly interests and expediency first, total and unconditional devotion to truth appears unwise, for their true allegiance is to their worldly interests; only on a superficial level can they attach themselves to the truth. They consider themselves clever. They think they are safeguarding themselves in this world, and also qualifying to be considered among the pious. But this is no more than wishful thinking; it is a figment of their imagination rather than a real fact of life. Every test in life removes them further from the path of true religion and brings them closer to their own world-oriented ‘religion’. Their hypocrisy is like a cancer which keeps on growing. They consider true believers, who act in the interests of truth, to be ruining themselves for no good reason. They call their own policy, on the other hand, one of reform; they prize it because it enables them to pursue a safe course without clashing with anyone; but this just shows how distorted their reasoning is. If they were to think deeply, they would realize that on earth reform can only come from man giving himself up to God alone, while obstructing any movement aimed at consolidating man’s relationship with the will of his Lord amounts to creating disorder on earth. Their seemingly profitable business is in fact running at a loss. For, they are forsaking pure truth for an adulterated version of it, which can benefit none.

The flat Earther arguments typically invoke mistrust of mainstream science, conspiracy theories about governments and space agencies hiding the “truth,” appeal to sensory experience (e.g., perception of a flat horizon), and reinterpretation of physical phenomena.

They often distrust photographic and satellite evidence, alleging manipulation.

What scientific evidence do "flat earthers" reject?

Common rebuttals point to long-established scientific proofs such as the round Earth shadow during lunar eclipses, measurements of Earth’s circumference since antiquity (Eratosthenes, Muslim scholars), and modern satellite imagery.

Title:

Content: How did Muslim scholars refute the flat Earth theory a thousand years ago?
The flat earth is currently one of the most famous scientific myths widespread in the Arab world, and has private groups on social media met by supporters from all over, and in recent days has been controversial because of statements by the Egyptian artist Mohamed Sobhy.
There are two histories to this theory, not one; the first is ancient and the second is modern.
A number of Greek philosophers believed that the earth was flat, and the ancient Scandinavian and German peoples also believed that the earth was flat and surrounded by oceans, and the common belief in ancient China was that the earth was square and flat while the sky was spherical.
But it ’ s really surprising to know that early astronomers assumed its sphericity, and they were from almost every culture: Pythagoras, who lived about 2,500 years ago, proposed the sphericity of the Earth based on his observations of the moon during the eclipse.
Pythagorean's observations are still evidence of a refutation of the flat Earth theory: Pythagorean observed that the shadow that the Earth casts on the Moon during the eclipse is always round.
Regardless of the moon-facing part of the planet, eclipses occur everywhere in the world.
The idea of a lunar eclipse is simple: put a big lamp in the middle of your room and turn off the rest of the lights, stand at a distance of one meter from it, now turn around while you reach your hands in front of you with a tennis ball, when you give your back to the lamp and pass the tennis ball in the shadow extended in front of you because of your body, this is the eclipse.
To Eratosthenes
Eratosthenes, born 276 BC, was the first to measure the circumference of the Earth using a simple method involving the angle of the Sun at different locations.
Eratosthenes was astonished to read that the columns in the ancient Egyptian temples of Aswan on the afternoon of June 21 of each year did not leave a shadow under them, and the mystery of the wonder was that the columns in Alexandria left a shadow under them on the afternoon of the same day.
Eratosthenes came to the conclusion that the earth must be convex and not flat, otherwise the columns in Alexandria would appear shadowless, and then after reflection Eratosthenes came to the clever idea that we could measure the length of the shadow in Aswan which is zero, and its length in Alexandria, and then measure the distance between Alexandria and Aswan, and infer the circumference of the earth.
The story goes that he sent a man to measure the distance, so that with some simple geometry he could measure the circumference of the Earth, which he concluded was about 39,348 kilometers.
Eratosthenes' account was transferred to the Arabs from among the sciences they translated.
According to Carlo Nelino in his book "Astronomy: A History of the Arabs in the Middle Ages", the Caliph al-Ma'mun al-Abbasi (who ruled from 813 to 833 AD) asked two teams of astronomers to test these calculations and come up with the most accurate measurement of the Earth's circumference....
The safe astronomer.
The method adopted by the Arabs is to go out into a perfectly flat desert, and then rely on the inclination of the polar star in the sky.
The ancients realized that the position of stars in the sky is affected by your place on Earth, the further you travel south, the lower the polar star in the sky until it disappears completely after the equator, and the more you travel north, the higher the polar star sky until it became above your head in the North Pole, which means that the Earth is round, otherwise the position of stars in the sky changes with your place on it.
The height of the polar star (and all other stars) is measured in degrees, and it is like to put a protractor in front of your eyes, the horizon is at zero, and then look at the protractor from the side to find at what degree the polar star stands, and this is something you can do exactly as the ancients did, and now astronomical software is easily available.
Al-Ma'mun astronomers measured the height of the polar star, then moved north once and south once, until the amount of inclination of the polar star changes by one degree, and then measured the distance north and south, and this measured distance is one degree from the circumference of the Earth's circle, and it can know the rest of the circumference of the Earth, because the Earth is a ball, and like any ball, rotation around it requires 360 degrees.
The first team of Al-Ma ’ mun astronomers went out to the Sinjar desert, a small city in northwestern Iraq today, and the second team to the Palmyra desert in eastern Syria, and carried out the same experiments in both places. In the Sinjar desert, for example, the height of the polar star was about 35 degrees. south of the wedge site until the measurement dropped by a degree.
According to al-Ma ’ mun ’ s astronomers, the scale of one degree was about 56 parsecs and two-thirds parsecs, which Nalino calculated — according to Edward Kennedy of the American University of Beirut in a paper published in the Encyclopedia of the History of Arab Sciences — to be 111.8 kilometers, a value used by later researchers such as al-Biruni and al-Toussi.
Calculating the circumference of the Earth in this experiment, it turned out to be about 410,248 km, which was close to modern measurements (40075 km) in the most accurate way at the time.
Note that the difference between the two measurements is about 1,100 years, and the reason for the difference is not related to the same method but to the ellipse of the Earth, as the distance between the two latitudes increases slightly as we head north.
Abu Rayhan Al-Biruni
The second attempt was by Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, born in September 973 AD, who used the best and easiest formula to calculate the circumference of the Earth in his time.
The Al-Biruni method is based on triangulation, where the sunset is observed from the top of a high mountain overlooking flat ground to the horizon, the astrolabe measures the angle the sun descends relative to the observer on the top of the mountain, where the line connecting the observer on the top of the mountain and the horizon makes the sunset clock touch the planet Earth.
It is known that the tangent of a circle perpendicular to its diameter, and then we have a right-angled triangle at the horizon, and we can measure the radius of the Earth by knowing the height of the mountain, which is mathematically easy.
Currently, the same calculations can be applied by high school students, for example, in all countries of the Arab world, who have a good amount of trigonometry study.
In a study published in the International Journal of Sciences, an Italian team repeated al-Biruni ’ s experiment and concluded that its results for the radius of the Earth are equal to 3,928.77 English miles, which compares favorably, being 2% different, with the average reference radius at the measurement latitude, which is 3,847.80 miles.
Pakistani physicist Mazhar Mahmood Qureshi, in his book An Introduction to Muslim Contributions to Science and Technology, points out that al-Biruni ’ s experience in what is now Nandana Fort in the mountains of northern Pakistan is a typical example of the use of experimental scientific methods.
The most important book of al-Biruni astronomical is "The Law of Masoudi", in which al-Biruni collected all the astronomical problems of his time, and the way of al-Biruni was to present the origins of the matter and the views of the Indian, Greek and Arab astronomers and then weighted between them.
Modern history of flat earth
But at that point, you might ask yourself: if the sphericity of the Earth was obvious to Muslim scholars and their comrades in other parts of the world in ancient times, why did it come back?
In 1849, the English writer Samuel Rowbotham published a pamphlet entitled "Oil Astronomy" (from the Greek letter zeta, not oil), in which he defended the theory of the flat earth, and followed this with another entitled "The Instability of Modern Astronomy and its opposition to the Bible".
In 1883, Rowbotham founded oil societies in England and New York, shipping thousands of copies of his books to talk about flat earth.
Meanwhile, William Carpenter, a printer and native of Greenwich, England, supported Rowbotham and advocated his theory, learning it from John Jasper and preaching to more people than any cleric of his generation in the southern United States. Once.
From here the myth began to branch again in the United States, and then to Europe, and then to the Arab world and the rest of the world, but in this context it was mixed with conspiracy theories concerning secret groups trying to control the world by deluding people that the earth is round.
The proof of the sphericity of the earth is not new, and has a long history in which Muslim scholars have made an influential contribution, but because the “flat earth ” has been transformed from ignorance of the nature of science into a conspiracy theory it has been imported along with other famous theories into our Arab world.
Source: Al Jazeera + Websites

The resurgence of flat Earth beliefs is largely a product of digital media amplification, social fragmentation, and a broader culture of conspiracy thinking and distrust of authorities.

Internet platforms allow fast spread, emotional and community bonding, and access to pseudo-scientific content.

Title:

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TECH WORLD

Stewart Brand Saw the Future

In his journey from hippie sage to global business consultant, the Whole Earth Catalog founder embodied the shifting spirit of Silicon Valley.

You may have heard the just-so story about environmentalism as we know it. On Christmas Eve 1968, an astronaut aboard NASA’s Apollo 8 spacecraft took a photograph of the faraway surface of a green-and-blue, cloud-marbled planet known to its English-speaking inhabitants as Earth. Published less than a week later on the front page of The New York Times, the image set off a general ecological awakening. The lesson was: Behold the fragile jewel that is your one possession and cherish it accordingly. “Within two years of this picture being taken, the modern environmental movement was born,” Al Gore explained in the book version of An Inconvenient Truth (2006). Gore is one of many to tell the tale, which I most recently encountered in a book by the economist Diane Coyle on the statistical measure known as GDP: “Seeing the earth from space had given us a vivid new perspective,” prompting “concerns about the effect of economic growth on the environment and the planet as a whole.”

Such claims invite skepticism. Can a photo really induce instantaneous enlightenment? As it turns out, climate change and resource depletion have accelerated, not slowed, since publication of the “Earthrise” photograph. Nor has the basic ambiguity of the image been noted often enough: The photo may have encouraged new environmental commitments, but to take it at all entailed leaving the planet behind—much as tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, with their fantasies of colonizing space, now imagine humanity doing on a more permanent basis. In this way, an ostensible portal to ecological salvation contains a different implication—in which Earth is, Eurydice-like, glimpsed only to be lost and abandoned. But to enter these objections may be to pitch criticism of the “Earthrise”-as-Eureka meme at too high a level. Prior to 1968, it was by no means unheard-of to encounter mounted globes of the planet, in classrooms and elsewhere. Spin one of these and you can see the whole terrain, as isn’t the case with a photo.

The notion that a revolution in consciousness ought to follow from whole-Earth imagery is most closely associated with Stewart Brand, the Bay Area networker, publisher, booster, and impresario who, toward the end of the 1960s, launched the countercultural handbook the Whole Earth Catalog and, almost two decades later, founded the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (WELL), an important precursor to the internet. As veteran tech journalist John Markoff recounts in his biography, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand, a vision came to Brand after he took LSD on a San Francisco rooftop in 1966. Floating up over the city, in his acidulated imagination, and then beyond the atmosphere, Brand felt a light bulb the size of the globe switch on: “Seeing Earth from space would transform the way we view our planet and ourselves.” All was one and everything was connected. Brand would soon put together a plywood sandwich board emblazoned with the vaguely paranoid query WHY HAVEN’T WE SEEN A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE WHOLE EARTH YET? in Day-Glo letters, and wear it, along with a white jumpsuit and feathered top hat, to college campuses.

It was Brand who, in the fall of 1968, scooping The New York Times by several months, put a NASA satellite photo of the planet on the cover of his first issue of the Whole Earth Catalog. In tones of somehow giddy responsibility, an early editorial note suggested that human beings held the planet in their hands: “We are as Gods and might as well get good at it.” More practically, Brand’s semiannual catalog would function as a sort of Sears-Roebuck resource for hippie homesteaders, enabling them to set up their lives after their own fashion, beyond the administered patterns of bureaucracy and suburbia.

Yet this vision of an interconnected planet ultimately led Brand, now in his eighties, beyond the 1960s idyll. As a hippie sage, he’d proposed a DIY counterculture as the logical expression of a properly planetary point of view. Later on, his enthusiasm for the burgeoning internet suggested to fans such as Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos that, in fact, it was a global network of communication and commerce that best embodied the truth that the world is a single entity made up of interconnected inhabitants. The title of Fred Turner’s 2006 study, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and The Rise of Digital Utopianism, neatly captures the arc of Brand’s singular career. It also poses the question of whether the cyberculture of the 1980s and beyond should be seen as a betrayal or, instead, a fulfillment of the counterculture of the 1960s. In both periods, Brand insisted on placing the relevant “tools”—whether psychedelic drugs or personal computers—in the hands of individuals. And in both cases, he hoped the result might be a world of newfound individual satisfaction and collective responsibility.

Born in 1938, Stewart Brand preceded by more than half a dozen years the earliest of the baby boomers. If the boomers were a generation whose outlook and trajectory he often seemed to anticipate—from early countercultural forays, to a later embrace of PCs and the internet, to a final accommodation with big business—it must have helped that in relationship to them he possessed the confidence and sophistication of an older brother, without ever projecting the authority of a parent.

Brand’s hometown, Rockford, Illinois, furnished the subject of a 1949 photo essay in Life, because the magazine’s editors judged it the most typical city in the country. And the Brand household does seem a distillate of postwar America. Brand’s father was a partner in a local advertising firm—much as Brand himself would later operate as a publicist for countercultural ideas and products. In the father’s ham-radio hobby, it’s also possible to spy the son’s future embrace of the personalized, as opposed to bureaucratic, employment of technology. As for Mrs. Brand, a Vassar-educated homemaker and “space fanatic,” her passion for exploration of the New Frontier recurs throughout her son Stewart’s life, from his boyhood attachment to a book called The Conquest of Space onward. In recent years, Brand traveled with Jeff Bezos through the Western United States to find a site for Blue Origin, Bezos’s aerospace company.

The brightest thread running from Brand’s youth to his later years may be the individualism he articulated in a diary entry from 1957, when he was still a teenager. Should the United States and the USSR come to blows, he told himself, “I will not fight for America, nor for home, nor for President Eisenhower, nor for capitalism, nor even for democracy. I will fight for individualism and personal liberty.” Such Cold War self-reliance was complicated, however, by Brand’s classes at Stanford, where he majored in biology: “At long last,” he wrote his parents, “I’m getting what I was looking for in biology: ecology, ‘the interrelation between living organisms and their environment ...’ This is the ‘living whole, not the dead parts.’” Much of the organizing tension of Brand’s life—as a promoter of environment and community, on the one hand, and of technologically equipped personal freedom, on the other—comes from his efforts to square his youthful individualism with the ecologically minded holism he discovered in college. The Whole Earth Catalog would call for planetary life to be seen as one integrated system and, at the same time, seek to release its readers into splendid isolation, through “access to tools for self-dependent self-education, individual or cooperative,” as early copy had it. The question has always been whether these two aims were complementary, as the Catalog suggested without really stating as much, or contradictory.

In June 1960, Brand, the future icon of the counterculture, attended Stanford’s commencement ceremony in his Reserve Officers’ Training Corps dress uniform. Little about the next two years he spent in the Army appealed to him, besides the opportunity to take photographs from a C-123 transport plane. According to Markoff, he passed the bulk of his time at Fort Dix, in New Jersey, attempting, without success, to use “his skills with a camera and typewriter” to secure a new posting in Europe, as a military photographer or public affairs officer. Unsurprisingly, Army life chafed against Brand’s individualism. Drawing on several dozen interviews with its subject over four years, Whole Earth comes across as something like a third-person memoir, and here as elsewhere Markoff sticks to Brand’s point of view: “Right here in America [Brand] was experiencing regimentation, pettiness, and institutionalized stupidity—all the attributes he hated about communism.” Granted early release from the Army to study photography at the San Francisco Art Institute, Brand packed up his VW bus and, in August 1962, lit out for the Bay Area.

Within a few months, the former second lieutenant was regularly ingesting considerable quantities of LSD under the auspices of the International Foundation for Advanced Study, in Menlo Park. As Brand, who would take acid throughout the ’60s, wrote to a friend: “I vote Yes on drugs. Yes with huge capital letters that spill over into everything else.” Less rhapsodically, he also defended psychedelics in a letter to his concerned parents back in Illinois, who, in spite of their misgivings, continued to subsidize Stewart’s bohemian lifestyle: cheap San Francisco lodgings; hallucinogenic socializing; and a more or less stalled journalistic career, consisting in large part of failed pitches to The New York Times.

Like many people in his Bay Area milieu, Brand associated psychedelics with the possibility of a new kind of society lying beyond the staid, salaried, hierarchical variety he’d inherited as a child of the postwar Midwest. After a friend who had participated in enough indigenous peyote sessions to acquire the title of a “roadman,” or leader of peyote meetings, introduced Brand to the drug, he ate peyote buttons in the company of Navajos in Arizona and New Mexico. The experience fortified Brand’s penchant for big-picture consciousness, ratifying “his conclusion,” as Markoff puts it, “that for whites, time was a rapid sequence, whereas Indian life was land time. It was geological and astronomical.” Brand soon requested and received admission into the Native American Church, complete with membership card.

In 1964, Brand’s attraction to indigenous society converged with his training as a photographer to produce a portable multimedia spectacle or “ambitious traveling sensorium,” in Markoff’s words, called America Needs Indians! In miscellaneous venues around the Bay Area (a courtyard, a nightspot, an architect’s studio ...), Brand would project on a pair of screens photos he’d taken on Indian reservations, as well as images of middle American life, to a soundtrack of chanting and drumming. “One of the first multimedia exhibitions defining an emerging American counterculture,” in Markoff’s description, America Needs Indians! was screened at one of the Bay Area psychedelic parties that Ken Kesey called his Acid Tests. The work’s message seems to have been that the audience might learn to emulate the Indians’ communal, rooted, ecstatic life. “To many of us—white kids who had grown up watching Westerns in the fifties—these revelations struck like lightning bolts,” recalled Phil Lesh, the bassist for the Grateful Dead, house band for the Acid Tests. Before long, Brand, with his talent for networking, was helping Kesey to organize a successor happening, the Trips Festival, at San Francisco’s Longshoremen’s Hall.

Brand and Lois Jennings, the half-Ottawa mathematician who would become his first wife, promoted the Trips parties wearing what Markoff calls “Native American regalia.” Revolutions, whether real or merely would-be, typically present themselves as reviving the spirit of some previous historical period, and, during the ’60s and ’70s, the real or would-be cultural revolution that came to be called the counterculture often liked to invoke pre–Wounded Knee Indian societies for this purpose. The geographical shift of the counterculture, circa 1970, away from cities and college towns and toward rural communes, only reinforced this tendency, for the obvious reason that the indigenous peoples of North America (at least after the abandonment of cities like Cahokia and Tenochtitlan) lived on the land rather than in conurbations.

No publication flattered this back-to-the-land shift more than the Whole Earth Catalog, started in 1968 with the decisive assistance of an inheritance from Brand’s adman father. Consisting of information “continually revised according to the experience and suggestions of CATALOG users and staff,” the publication turned its readers on to how to order farm implements and carpentry tools, Volkswagen repair manuals and Carlos Castañeda novels, bamboo flutes, calculators, Army surplus jackets, and potters’ wheels, as well as larger “tools” like canoes and geodesic domes, all with the idea of facilitating a hazily indigenous rural self-sufficiency, along somehow modern lines. In this, it drew inspiration from Aquarian settlements in rural Colorado, New Mexico, and elsewhere, with names like Drop City, Libre, and the Lama Foundation, which promised to bring communitarian self-sufficiency and environmental stewardship into harmony. The idea appealed to many more counterculturalists than those who actually decamped to the countryside, as a vision of the good life—good for you and good for the planet, too—they might one day realize.

A contradiction inhabited the heart of the project. In From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner writes that the back-to-the-landers who “embraced the notion that small-scale technologies could transform the individual consciousness and, with it, the nature of community” also “celebrated imagery of the American frontier. Many communards saw themselves as latter-day cowboys and Indians, moving out onto the open plains to find a better life.” Much as Brand and the readers of his Whole Earth Catalog did, the passage confounds settler colonialists with the indigenous people they displaced, as if these antagonistic parties were one and the same. In retrospect, the back-to-the-land movement consisted of cowboys (in the sense of transient settlers, with an unsustainable relationship to the earth) who liked to imagine themselves as Indians (in the sense of a rooted and symbiotic relationship to nonhuman life). The movement’s rural communes almost all succumbed to bankruptcy or strife before the 1970s were out, and expired. By that time, Brand himself had noticed that compact cities made for a more efficient use of energy and materials anyway.

Brand has been a compulsive founder of new institutions—from the Whole Earth Catalog’s more intellectual heir, CoEvolution Quarterly (1974); to the digital community known as the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (1985); to a corporate consultancy, the Global Business Network (1987); and, finally, to something called the Long Now Foundation (1996). In the fall 1975 issue of CoEvolution Quarterly, Brand ran 25 pages of stories on “space colonies”: “Practical, Desirable, Profitable, Ready in 15 years,” announced the cover. The physicist Gerard K. O’Neill insisted that “Space Colonies show promise of being able to solve, in order, the Energy Crisis, the Food Crisis, the Arms Race, and the Population Problem.” Such extraterrestrial environmentalism provoked indignant responses from many of Brand’s readers. It was clearly less the gesture of a self-created Indian than that of a cowboy, with a taste for new frontiers.

Brand had imagined the Whole Earth Catalog not only as a clearinghouse for information on useful commodities but, through the publication of letters and product reviews from its readers, as host to a geographically diffuse, nonhierarchical community. In this sense, the Catalog can be seen as a sluggish, analog anticipation of the internet: In 2005, Steve Jobs, who often invoked Brand as an inspiration, described it as “Google before Google.” Living among the computer programmers of the Bay Area, Brand was well-placed to hail the emerging cyberculture of the last quarter of the twentieth century, and in a 1972 article for Rolling Stone he’d already announced: “Ready or not, computers are coming for the people.” As a magazine publisher familiar with the travails of manual typesetting and longhand bookkeeping, the Brand of the early 1980s found word processors and spreadsheets the most immediately mind-blowing feature of PCs. More astutely, he also perceived that a web of networked personal computers could—like the Whole Earth Catalog, but at a different scale and speed—bring into being specialized and temporary communities of far-flung people, united by shared interests: the sort of thing familiar to us today as Reddit forums or Facebook groups.

In the early ’80s, Brand joined the faculty at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla, which pioneered “the use of teleconferencing,” as Markoff says, to bring together scholars in various related fields. This experience led to Brand’s establishment of the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, which charged its users’ credit cards a few dollars each month so that from their separate terminals they might participate in digital “newsgroups” on whatever subjects interested them. For reasons of both personal liberty and legal liability, WELL users retained title to their own content (“you own your own words”). In practice, they didn’t discuss ecology or geopolitics or even technology so much as the Grateful Dead, a band beloved by hippies and programmers alike.

The savvy Brand also gave tech journalists access for free. The idea was that an amorphous, leaderless, nonhierarchical flock of discussants of anything and everything would shepherd one another toward a continuously better-informed state of mind. “On the one hand,” Brand stood up and said at a Hackers Conference in 1984, “information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable.... On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower all the time.” Both aspects of the statement proved prescient: Here was a casual prophecy of the expensive IP (vaccine recipes; superhero franchises ...) and cheap posting habits of our own digital culture. It’s less easy today to endorse what Brand told a San Francisco journalist around the same time: “When you communicate through a computer, you communicate like an angel.” Angels must delight in bandying about ill-tempered fallacies more than theologians had suspected.

Over recent decades, Brand has become less a prophet than a consultant. Through his Global Business Network, “THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT,” as a Fortune profile called him, has counseled corporate boards on flexibility, adaptiveness, and learning. Here were the familiar precepts of neoliberal capital—a regime ever more spontaneous as to organization, and ever more unequal as to money and power—in Brand’s preferred idioms of biological evolution, systems theory, and self-education. Markoff writes that GBN “rose to prominence based on several big ideas: that globalization would change everything, computer networks would change everything, and the internet would change everything.” These two or three ideas are also, in another way, none. To predict that everything will change is not to identify the differential components of transformation and persistence that make any emergent phenomenon, including global capitalism, legible at all. At most, pointing hectically to globalization indicates the setting—Brand’s whole Earth again—of the titanic development.

Stewart Brand is an earnest and serious-minded person. Nevertheless, one of his moments of illumination, as related by Markoff, caused me to laugh out loud. Here Markoff recounts the courtship of Brand and Patty Phelan, his second wife, in the 1970s: “Brand and Phelan lay on a hillside in the late afternoon sun. He had taken off his shirt, and he suddenly realized that she had taken off hers as well. Phelan, who was living with someone else at the time, had fallen for Brand head over heels, and it would soon be apparent that he had finally found his great love.” It’s as if the baring of Phelan’s breasts unveils, at one fell swoop, a destined and enduring love.

Everyone knows that breasts lie under women’s clothing in much the way that everyone knows that Earth is a frail blue dot zooming through space: These things are always the case, only mostly you don’t see as much. Nothing is so hippieish about Brand as his sense that radical improvements to life as we know it derive naturally, or at any rate ought to, from sudden, flashing revelations of the already known, glimpsed as if for the first time. The principal undertaking of Brand’s Long Now Foundation, the main preoccupation of his later years, has been to build, with funding from Jeff Bezos, an enormous clock that chimes only once a century, with the aim of promoting “long-term THINKING” of the kind otherwise in short supply in the twenty-first–century United States. Like the planet in its entirety, deep time is always there, and often overlooked.

Brand has surely been right in believing that to register the full dimensions of Earth, and the whole span of historical and evolutionary time, would be the start of wisdom. The trouble is that this enthusiast of new beginnings so often mistook such preliminary awareness for a meaningful conclusion. The revolution in consciousness promoted by Brand forever toggled between two vastly different scales: the planetary, and the individual. Its great shortcoming was that it never learned, or seriously studied, how best to integrate the two scales—that of the liberated individual, on the one hand, and the imperiled planet, on the other—through human institutions on an intermediate scale. There was only the dead end of the commune, or the default of the corporation. And so a kind of smog of dissipated insight hangs over Brand’s life and that of the boomers. You might even say it covers the earth.

Psychological characteristics of flat Earth adherents appear to include a propensity for conspiratorial thinking, skepticism toward scientific institutions, and sometimes social isolation or a desire for uniqueness.

Title:

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  Satanic Church installs statue of Baphomet next to Nativity in Illinois State Capitol. Naturally, the Catholic Bishop is outraged, because main tenets of the CoS are to never harm children and sex is only okay when consensual   (yahoo.com)
    More: Ironic, Christmas, United States Capitol, Satanic Temple, year's display, third year, Sunday, Springfield, Illinois, satanic holiday
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1236 clicks; posted to Main » on 21 Dec 2021 at 1:19 PM (1 hour ago)   |   Favorite   |   Watch    |   share:

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should have no place in this Capitol

He is so close to getting it, so close.

I love how Jesus be comin' into people right and left, but the Devil needs consent to enter.

I love the Satanic Temple

labman: I love the Satanic Temple

The Playboy Foundation used to fight for our first amendment rights. Now, it seems the Satanic Temple has taken over the fight. More power to 'em!

Hey, Christians: If a government facility allows holiday symbols of one religion, they should be required to allow any others that want to do likewise. Shut up and deal with it. Or resign yourselves to not doing a display on government property.

/Presbyterian

Cafe Threads: labman: I love the Satanic Temple

The Playboy Foundation used to fight for our first amendment rights. Now, it seems the Satanic Temple has taken over the fight. More power to 'em!

The Freedom From Religion Foundation does some good work, too. Looking for a last minute Christmas Gift for your God bothering friends and relatives? Sponsor a membership for them!

https://ffrf.org/

Squid_for_Brains: I love how Jesus be comin' into people right and left, but the Devil needs consent to enter.

And even when Jesus does bother to ask for permission, well...

Satanic Temple and Church of Satan are different orgs.

Satanic Temple are atheists pushing for separation of church and state.

Church of Satan are Randians...

Did Yahoo disable comments on their site? That used to be the only reason to ever click on a yahoo news article. To lol at the rubes...

#OnlyFair

Satan is pretty farking cool.

From all the stories I have read about them they seem like really chill folks.

Not to mention the time they schooled Megyn Kelly about the law. I loved that video but can't find it.

HURR DURR DURR

/finger up nose

swaniefrmreddeer: should have no place in this Capitol

He is so close to getting it, so close.

Yep. Unfortunately he's likely just saying it because he's opposed to TST's message and/or thinks that his faith has exclusivity rights on winter festivals despite the fact that such festivals existed centuries before a random carpenter's child bride had to figure out a way to explain why she was pregnant despite never having consummated the marriage.

I envisioned this as I was reading:

Then this:

Bertuccio: Satanic Temple and Church of Satan are different orgs.

Satanic Temple are atheists pushing for separation of church and state.

Church of Satan are Randians...

It's like the flat Earth people.
There are flat Earth people who know Earth isn't flat, but are making a point. Or a joke. Or even just like attention.
Then there are flat Earth people who think the Earth is flat.

Hail the goat ya'll

jaivirtualcard: From all the stories I have read about them they seem like really chill folks.

Not to mention the time they schooled Megyn Kelly about the law. I loved that video but can't find it.

Megyn Kelly Talks To Smart-Ass, One-Eyed Satanist "Lucien" Greaves

Ah, Springfield, Illinois, the town I was born and grew up in. I left for good when I was 18, that was about 18 years too late.

I've travelled all over the US since then, and rarely seen a town so beknighted. You'd think the state capitol would have a certain amount of sophistication and cosmopolitanism. Unfortunately, you'd be wrong.

Jake Havechek: Satan is pretty farking cool.

Well yeah - the one who wanted Adam and Steve to have knowledge?  Ovby the BAD guy according to the church.

vilesithknight: Did Yahoo disable comments on their site? That used to be the only reason to ever click on a yahoo news article. To lol at the rubes...

Only on some articles.  Non-controversial articles have comments, nope on controversial ones.

The Satanic Temple is also fighting anti-abortion laws in TX and elsewhere by invoking the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Satanists believe in complete bodily autonomy.

Now we need a display from the Sex Temple.

I bet he thinks being a bishop is pretty special too.

Guy can only move diagonally. Loser.

Damn that Sol Invictus. He's the reason shabbos got moved from Friday to Sunday.

/don't roll on shabbos

Presbyterian pastor here, chiming in, and I'm fine with Baphomet being there if the nativity scene is there.
But honestly, none of it should be there. Put that shiat in your meeting places, not on government property.

SOL INVICTUS!

Got nothing of than a good laugh from what the Bishop spluttered, and I'm Irish Catholic.

PirateKing: I bet he thinks being a bishop is pretty special too.

Guy can only move diagonally. Loser.

RaptorLC: swaniefrmreddeer: should have no place in this Capitol

He is so close to getting it, so close.

Yep. Unfortunately he's likely just saying it because he's opposed to TST's message and/or thinks that his faith has exclusivity rights on winter festivals despite the fact that such festivals existed centuries before a random carpenter's child bride had to figure out a way to explain why she was pregnant despite never having consummated the marriage.

pregnant at 12

/her body is reddy...

Cute. They should really consider selling Baby Baphomet ornaments. I think they'd make bank.

Squid_for_Brains: I love how Jesus be comin' into people right and left, but the Devil needs consent to enter.

i mean duh. If of course we assume the point of the devil is to in fact be evil.
So what's more evil sounding?

that you physical over power someone to force on them what they do not want.
or
that you manipulate them into believing they want that and actually asking for it themselves, thus giving consent, when they will ultimately regret this later, becasue they were just manipulated into believing they did want this by someone with more intellectual horse power to exploit them with then they had to defend themselves from such exploitation.

And so under those conditions, used such power, not for the uplift and protection of the weak, but to better exploit them.

I'd say that for sure sound like the path of greater evil, at least to me anyway.
And so makes more sense to be the teachings of the supernatural figure intended to represent evil.

RaptorLC: swaniefrmreddeer: should have no place in this Capitol

He is so close to getting it, so close.

Yep. Unfortunately he's likely just saying it because he's opposed to TST's message and/or thinks that his faith has exclusivity rights on winter festivals despite the fact that such festivals existed centuries before a random carpenter's child bride had to figure out a way to explain why she was pregnant despite never having consummated the marriage.

Jake Havechek: [Fark user image 425x239]

The Satanist should run, he's staring at the face of true evil....

Bertuccio: Satanic Temple and Church of Satan are different orgs.

Satanic Temple are atheists pushing for separation of church and state.

Church of Satan are Randians...

And both are more honorable and noble than republicans.

There's one video from O'Reilly interviewing this lady from either Church of Satan or the Satanic Temple, I can't remember which, but O'Reilly gets visibly scared even though they're not in the same studio.

Bertuccio: Satanic Temple and Church of Satan are different orgs.

Satanic Temple are atheists pushing for separation of church and state.

Church of Satan are Randians...

They do agree on the bits about consent and not hurting children.

guestguy: [Fark user image image 213x237]

Jake Havechek: Satan is pretty farking cool.

Cake - Satan Is My Motor

A Cave Geek: Bertuccio: Satanic Temple and Church of Satan are different orgs.

Satanic Temple are atheists pushing for separation of church and state.

Church of Satan are Randians...

And both are more honorable and noble than republicans.

Randians are never noble.

Mötley Crüe - God Bless The Children Of The Beast

Squid_for_Brains: I love how Jesus be comin' into people right and left, but the Devil needs consent to enter.

That's why we prefer Satan. He always asks: Can I cum inside?

My idol is more important that your idol!

Ivo Shandor: Bertuccio: Satanic Temple and Church of Satan are different orgs.

Satanic Temple are atheists pushing for separation of church and state.

Church of Satan are Randians...

They do agree on the bits about consent and not hurting children.

tansa: Looking for a last minute Christmas Gift for your God bothering friends and relatives? Sponsor a membership for them!

https://ffrf.org/

Forget Capitol City.
Do something about this monstrosity in Effingham.
Just don't burn it, they might like it there.

"As Satanic Temple members installed the display Monday, the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property Poverty recited the rosary next to the Nativity scene."

Oh he has a problem with that?

Well I have a problem with real evil, ffs.
Aljazeera: priest jailed for 12 years for sex abuse of minors in East Timor

So how about STFU until there are no more priest abusing kids.

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Some are younger individuals with lower scientific literacy but broad demographics exist.

Title:

Content: Scientists, leave the jokes – they give rise to prejudices
09.01.2022, 18: 34, Miscellaneous
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Do you think the supporters of a flat earth in the shape of a bagel drew this idea from the Old Testament?
As if not so!
It was presented to them by Dr. Rosenpenis in 2008.
On the Flat Earth Theory forum, he jokingly offered a rationale for his theory, writing:
"I used advanced scaled astrophysical professional academic software to create a model of the geoponchik, the most delicious celestial body of our planet Earth, covered with sugar icing."
In short, the doctor “joked ”, and those present were happy to believe that our world has the shape of a massive donut with a giant hole in the middle.
It is not known how the "hypothesis" grew legs, but it widely diverged among supporters of the flat Earth.
To know, the poor people experienced a lack of scientificness in their own worldview.
At the same forum, but already in 2012, another flat-earth proponent named Varaug added to the idea of more science-like.
He seriously argued that our planet is a ring or, to use scientific terminology, a torus.
Say, we can not see the hole in the middle due to the fact that the light bends, following the curve of the torus and making the hole “invisible ”:
“I have a theory that the Earth actually has the shape of a torus (bagel).
But the light is warping, so we can't see it. "
Explaining why no one has ever fallen into this hole, the “theorist ” asks other forum participants to imagine the Earth in the form of a“ donut with jam ”, in the direction of which gravity acts.
According to him, day and night still exist because the Earth in the form of a donut makes a revolution every 24 hours, and the hole is at an angle of 90 degrees to the Sun.
A flat Earth proponent suggests that the torus shape was formed as a result of the gravitational attraction of rocks, dust and pieces of cosmic matter to an orbit without a central focus.
This actually created a ring-shaped planet orbiting the void.
Scientists have disproved this theory, explaining that the Sun could not rise and set as it does if the Earth had a gaping hole in the middle, and we could not see day and night as now.
Oxford professor Dr. Anders Sandberg points out that on a donut shaped Earth, the clouds would be three times higher and pushed by stronger winds.
Well, people living near the hole would see “double seasons ” when summer is replaced by winter and vice versa.
Source of information and images: dailystar.co.uk
Unreliable source: RIA Fognews
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Importantly, while flat Earth communities often appear as harmless contrarians or niche subcultures, research and intelligence reports describe potential risks including social alienation, susceptibility to broader conspiracy radicalization, and a rejection of critical thinking.

This can sometimes interfere with education and acceptance of science.

However, the movement generally lacks centralized leadership or specific cult-like control, and many adherents operate independently or in small, informal groups.

Overall, the flat Earth movement represents more than a mere oddity; it reflects growing societal challenges such as information disorder, distrust, and fragmentation in the digital age.

For a concerned parent, awareness and open dialogue encouraging critical thinking and scientific understanding with their teen is advisable.

Limiting contact based solely on flat Earth association is not clearly warranted, though cautious social guidance about conspiracy thinking and respect for evidence would be prudent[62aa-6833; f61994b0-dc34-40d6-a1e2-a7f66b22774b; 234c0ac8-224a-4ae9-b9fc-df4652c033eb; 00310f0f-f13a-484e-a6fe-9e53d1ab632d; d7939190-fb1a-4bfe-bd0e-4517f5e132d2; 6e47a5cf-47a7-42a3-812e-ef81ba1e7a5f].

Title:

Content: Tunisian media ignites social media sites..
“The earth is flat! ”
Palestine Today - Gaza
Time: 08: 38 AM
March 18, 2023
The statements of Tunisian journalist Ashraf al-Kaali sparked a wave of ridicule on social media.
He said, “The earth is flat and not spherical. ”
Al-Kaali said in an intervention on the Tunisian channel "Ninth": "I believe that the earth is flat and not spherical.
I read the Qur ’ an, the Torah, the Bible, and several civilizations, and I came to this conviction. ”
He added: "I have confirmed scientifically and philosophically that the earth is flat, and has no other as with the heavens, and the belief that the earth is round is wrong, I will continue to adhere to the theory of the surface of the earth and I am not ashamed of that."
Tunisian writer and novelist Kamal Riahi criticized al-Kaali ’ s statements, saying: “Yes, we are on a path towards reaction. ”
Al-Riahi added in statements on Facebook: "Canning ignorance is not funny, this is how the destruction of young people occurs when one of the stars of the media appears to say that the earth is flat."
"Children watch such shows with their parents and see them on Facebook, and the danger is not only in believing, but in wasting time in proving the axioms."
Al-Riahi pointed out that Ashraf al-Kaali ’ s belief that the earth is flat “only makes us discover the state and location of a large part of the Tunisian media. ”
Ashraf al-Kaali is one of the most famous media professionals in Tunisia and has been a presenter on state television since 1994.
It is worth mentioning that Al-Kaali presented the weekly musical program "World Rhythms" on channel "21" from 1994 to 2007 and his program was very popular and achieved the largest viewing rates, and then joined the radio "Mosaic" (private).