The contemporary Flat Earth Movement is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon marked by a resurgence primarily fueled by psychological, social, and technological factors.

Although the notion that the Earth is flat was widely disproven through empirical observation by ancient scholars in Greek and Islamic traditions, the belief never entirely disappeared.

It experienced a notable revival in the 19th century through figures such as Samuel Rowbotham, who founded societies promoting flat Earth ideas mixed with conspiracy theories that global powers deliberately conceal the "truth" about the Earth's shape to maintain control over populations.

This ideological fusion of distrust in authorities and unconventional cosmology has been greatly amplified in the internet era, where online echo chambers allow for isolated communities to flourish and reinforce shared but factually incorrect beliefs .

Flat Earth community groups today do not represent a monolithic theory but instead encompass diverse, often conflicting viewpoints united principally by their rejection of the spherical Earth consensus.

This diversity reflects a broader disbelief framework rather than a single doctrinal set of ideas.

Online, flat Earth adherents employ social media, forums, video platforms, and increasingly virtual reality experiences to propagate their beliefs, raising concerns about digital manipulation, misinformation, and emotional persuasion intended to spread alternative realities detached from empirical evidence .

Globally, organized flat Earth societies exist but tend to be decentralized.

Major organizations are primarily found in the United States but have international analogues.

These groups organize conferences, produce multimedia content, and maintain online communities promoting flat Earth theories and associated conspiracies.

Their methods leverage modern communications tools to create a sense of community and "exclusive truth" that resists external scrutiny.

Certain notable public figures, particularly in professional American sports, have publicly or privately endorsed flat Earth views, significantly amplifying the movement’s prominence.

For example, NBA star Kyrie Irving has openly discussed belief in a flat Earth, while NFL players including Darius Slay, Sammy Watkins, and Patrick Queen reportedly support or have questioned mainstream scientific consensus about the Earth’s shape.

Anecdotal reports suggest the movement has penetrated locker rooms, with up to 20% of NFL players possibly sharing flat Earth sympathies.

Such endorsements lend the movement cultural visibility and help recruit younger followers influenced by these celebrities .

The core arguments used by flat Earthers involve dismissing photographic and satellite evidence as fabricated, accusing governments and space agencies of conspiratorial deception.

They invoke alternative interpretations of religious or ancient texts and question the validity of scientific methods and institutions.

The arguments are intentionally framed to appeal emotionally and spiritually rather than logically, promoting secret knowledge and a belief in hidden truths accessible only to insiders.

These arguments are widely disseminated via online content, including videos, memes, specialized forums, and social networks, where reinforcement by peer groups solidifies belief .

Psychologically and sociologically, flat Earth belief attracts individuals grappling with social isolation, alienation, and deep mistrust of mainstream institutions and authority.

The movement fulfills a human need for identity, belonging, and a sense of control in chaotic or complex modern societies.

It provides adherents with exclusive "truth" that differentiates them from others perceived as misled or deceived.

This shared narrative fosters tight in-group cohesion but also promotes dogmatism and social separation from those outside the movement.

The flat Earth worldview can be understood as a form of cognitive and emotional coping mechanism in response to perceived social disempowerment or existential uncertainty .

Demographically, contemporary flat Earthers tend to be younger adults who may come from a variety of educational and socioeconomic backgrounds.

They generally exhibit low scientific literacy and a high level of internet engagement, which exposes them to conspiracy and misinformation networks.

Many are motivated either by religious belief systems incompatible with modern cosmology or by skepticism toward authority and mainstream media.

The internet’s role is critical, as it provides accessible pathways to like-minded communities and immersive experiences that strengthen commitment to these beliefs.

This online connectivity has significantly facilitated the global spread and normalization of flat Earth ideology .

In conclusion, while the flat Earth belief system may appear at first as a harmless oddity or fringe quirk, its characteristics suggest it is more than mere eccentricity.

It involves a complex interplay of psychological needs, social identity, and distrust of conventional knowledge that can lead to insular worldviews and resistance to factual information.

The movement’s endorsement by influential public figures increases its appeal and visibility, especially among youth.

For a concerned parent, awareness of the group's ideologies and appeal mechanisms is important.

It is advisable to engage in open, non-confrontational discussions with your teen about critical thinking, scientific literacy, and the importance of questioning claims but also evaluating evidence rigorously.

Limiting contact with a friend solely based on flat Earth beliefs may not be necessary, but guidance on navigating misinformation and fostering open dialogue would be prudent.

Understanding the emotional and social reasons behind such beliefs can equip you to support your teen in maintaining a balanced perspective.

The contemporary Flat Earth Movement is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon marked by a resurgence primarily fueled by psychological, social, and technological factors.

Title:

Content: "The Lost Earth Truth 1": The level of the earth seems to be the "gold rush" of our time.
Photo Credit: iStock
What we want you to know is
Through the multi-dimensional advanced high-tech "heterogeneous meta-helmet", scientists learned that the earth is full of four-dimensional entrances, the third dimension of the material plane and the fourth dimension of the etheric plane are originally "twins".
Written by Radu Cinama
Tiping said it was the "gold rush" of this era.
Based on a reference to the House of the Cabal, which hides the door to multidimensional interaction, I found an informative note that I had never seen before, floating among dozens of notes on my desk.
In general, I prefer to work in electronic form or wait for notes or files in digital format, but given my particular interest in the Dimension Portal, I decided to check everything on my desk, including the latest events.
I do not know the reasons and methods, but the information I found was ignored.
After reviewing notes and data summaries, I discovered an event called “Ground Floor – References ”, a“ movement ” that I ’ ve heard has made waves among people, but I never thought it would become a theme for our department.
The illusion of this idea is obvious, especially for those who have good judgment and personal experience of our planet from the perspective of outer space.
I was a bit confused and didn ’ t know if I should read a few pages of summaries about the ground floor.
I went to Lieutenant Nikola and asked him about it.
He told me that the information came from the operations department of another SRI division, an acronym for the Romanian Intelligence Agency, which has the status of a second level notice.
The lieutenant made it clear that the only reason this information reached our department was because it triggered an abnormal "phenomenon" in the world, but in our country, the number of "followers" is relatively small and the proportion is reasonable, and the level seems to be the "gold rush" of our time. It makes you speechless, even in a state of “shock. ”
I can understand that the paranoia and other obscure interests of hundreds of years ago amplify the lack of knowledge, which may occupy the minds of a relatively small number of people, but it is unreasonable to allow it to develop to the level of the international movement of the 21st century.
From a heavenly point of view, I wonder if human stupidity can rise above that level, but I don ’ t quite believe in that prospect.
However, even the most bizarre phenomena must be taken into account, at least taking into account the crowd and their opinions, which is one of the Secret Service's tasks.
I did read the summary, which revealed the main points of the problem very clearly, but did not give any conclusions.
Severe retrogression into the Middle Ages
On the same night, I took advantage of Cesar ’ s free time and shared the ground level problem with him, more as a social case than a research direction.
Cesar laughed loudly, talked about the topic for a while, and then suddenly turned to some very interesting questions.
He told me that three or four years ago, the issue was introduced to him and discussed with other colleagues in the intelligence department because there were signs that the idea was trending toward a consensus.
Out of respect for readers, I don ’ t usually include such a discussion in my series.
It requires only a little wisdom and minimal scientific training to understand, and arguments in support of this theory are tantamount to ignorance and fanaticism.
Beyond this, however, Cesar reveals some psychological cues that seem to be of some importance to general knowledge and social experience.
When discussing topping with Cesar, the first point involves a large number of followers.
“The mechanism for this strange theory of increased follower numbers is related to human isolation, ” says Cesar.
“It ’ s as if the population is divided into two distinct categories, but this separation is actually based on each person ’ s level of consciousness, which is directly related to their vibration frequency. ”
“But, ” I replied,“ I don ’ t know what caused this outbreak, and more and more people are insisting on these ‘ arguments ’ without meaning. ”
It's more like a stupid virus. "
“This major shift in thinking patterns is not at the same wavelength as what is commonly understood in the world today.
In other words, such new ideas have nothing to do with the knowledge of our time.
This is an effective method, because the earth is flat, and the idea is strongly supported by mystical factors, as well as by those who are keen to see things stagnant and not progressing.
This is the best way to control it: take people away from reality, let them dream nonsense, support their fantasies, and encourage them to project.
Therefore, it is controlled by imposing on the masses what they want.
Followers of earth thought, firmly believing in it, will seek to meet others, gather, and even separate themselves from others, because they will see others as fools deceived by lies.
In other words, they will be convinced that they are the ones who “discovered ” the truth. While it is sad to hear the news, unfortunately, the situation is quite real. ”
“Although I have this report under my nose, I can ’ t believe it has reached this point.
I feel like this is an ugly dream, as if some people in the world have voluntarily gone back hundreds of years.
That's how I feel.
Incredibly, people ’ s minds today are still influenced by delusions that defy not only decent intelligence but also scientific reasoning, making everything frenzied.
Look at the results! ”
I showed Cesar ’ s estimated numbers and charts.
"I know.
We've talked to other colleagues, "he said.
“Your surprise is evidenced by the huge difference in conceptualization and vibration frequency that people are beginning to feel.
This is a reality that has become increasingly prominent over time and cannot be ignored.
This is part of the isolation I told you about.
In principle, people interact with those who are evolving and those who prefer to stay in purely physical, crude or involuntary groups.
Those in the first category perfect themselves, recognize the changes that are taking place on Earth, and experience certain emotional states and specific sensations.
That ’ s why it ’ s incredible for some people to think about problems in a medieval way, such as followers of the Earth Theory. ”
Cesar saw the astonishment on my face and hurried to prove what he said again.
“Yes, I ’ m not exaggerating.
This is a return to the Middle Ages, because these people cannot evolve; instead, they return to a more archaic state of consciousness, closer to their true level of consciousness. ”
“Why can ’ t they evolve? ” I asked in surprise.
Of course, I know the answer, but it ’ s always a pleasure to capture Cesar ’ s explanation.
In addition, there is always a new element that can enrich my knowledge.
“Because the current state of things they attract has nothing to do with the higher vibrations of the Earth, this feature is becoming more and more apparent. ”
“For the followers of the Earth Plane, their consolation lies in the frenzy of these primitive ideas, which are maintained as free spirits and ideas are blocked.
The same was true during the Inquisition: a set of foolish and erroneous ideas was raised into law, and any violation of those ideas was enforced. ”
When I think about it all, I hope I ’ m wrong.
“Are we back in the Middle Ages? History has set off a wave of extreme ideas.
Ancient people already knew that the earth was round, but the situation deteriorated in the Middle Ages, when there was a revival of modern science, but was this only to take us back to the Middle Ages now? ” (The author undoubtedly refers to the knowledge shared by Pythagoras and Aristotle, who both asserted that the earth is round, and the argument made by Eratonius in ancient Alexandria.)
Cesar calmly replied, “We don ’ t; but for the part that has degraded, yes. ”
Several factors contributed to this.
Followers of the Earth ’ s theory are indignant at their opinionated views, their refusal to think logically or rationally on the basis of real arguments and evidence, their denial of evidence, and their deceitful defense of their position.
In general, this is a kind of missionary covering up fanaticism.
The psychological factor of the earth level, the mind pulls people's distance
We note that whenever fanaticism prevails, society is confronted with a lack of insight and the limitations of personal freedom.
Cesar gave me an example that better explains how this dilemma can be achieved in the context of a relatively developed civilization.
"This phenomenon is the same as in quantum physics.
If there is enough energy, the electrons can jump into higher orbits.
If there is not enough energy, it can be kept at a slightly higher level and relatively stable; but at some point, the remaining energy will be released in the form of photons, and the electron will return to the orbit where it was originally found, back to where it started.
In quantum physics, this is the basic orbit of electrons.
In other words, electrons with these characteristics will return to the level where they have a safe orbit. ” I interjected, clinging to the subject.
“I know that throughout human history, the idea that the earth is flat has long existed in some religions.
Modern astronomy has developed extensively since then.
Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto have only been discovered for about two hundred years.
In this sense, the ground floor is actually not very old, its memory is still fresh.
Perhaps that is why some humans return to the state they once knew. "
“This is another factor, ” Cesar acknowledged,“ in any case, human society is changing from ‘ possessiveness ’ to ‘ feeling ’, that sense of possession, egoism, competition, and violence tends to be gradually replaced by pure and positive emotions and feelings, which are fundamental to love, altruism, and compassion. ”
I have some doubts.
“It ’ s hard to believe, because almost all of us are seeing the spread of these negative manifestations. ”
“At first glance, it might be so.
Remember, however, that most people on Earth are uneducated, and they ‘ resort ’ to this illusion of competition, money, commerce, and lack of spirituality.
A large number of people who are addicted to this dream, tend to oppose those who are guided only by spiritual values and seek a pure life with a clear meaning, and have achieved a balance at this point.
This is what we call isolation. "
In fact, what Cesar wanted to say is that everyone is invited to participate in the great spiritual transformation of humanity and our planet, with the desire and dignity to demand that his life be the germ of light, spirituality and hope that we can enter a bright future.
This is an excellent ideal, but so far too few people have followed this ideal.
Book Introduction
This excerpt is from The Lost Earth Truth 1: The Hidden History of Holographic Time Travel, published by Daxi Culture.
Written by Radu Cinamar
Translated by: Sandra
• momo online bookstore
• Enter TNL83 at Pubu E-Bookstore checkout to enjoy 83% off sitewide (excluding some items, such as physical, adult and designated items, cannot be combined with other offers)
• If you purchase the book through the links above, Key Review Network will receive a score profit from it.
Radu Cinamar became famous after revealing an unprecedented and mysterious collaboration between the US and Romanian militaries.
American and Romanian troops have made an expedition under the Romanian Sphinx in the Bucegi Mountains and discovered the greatest archaeological discovery of all time: a mysterious chamber about 50,000 years old, containing a holographic record of human history of the Earth, biological resonance imaging technology, and three mysterious tunnels that lead to secrets deep in the heart of the earth.
Despite the political intrigue, confusion, and restrictions surrounding this great discovery, the expedition leader allowed Radu Sinamar to visit and explore the artifacts.
Since then, Radu ’ s life has been a labyrinthine adventure, filled with strange events, secret connections, and unusual people and things.
This book delves into ancient history in an unprecedented way, through the interaction of advanced technology ’ s “heterogeneous helmets ” with the author ’ s cerebral cortex and intuition, presenting more than 70 stunning images of the scene, the result of which is holographic projection, explaining and illustrating the DNA changes that took place over thousands of years and how humans evolved into what they are today.
Reveals the mystery of how multiple alien civilizations influenced and guided human DNA to evolve to a higher level.
Some of the hot spots in human history, which in the past either remained unknown or were only considered from a mythological point of view, include: Atlantis, Troy, Shambhala, and Huppelburia.
Disrupting the myths of the past, this book provides rich and accurate communications from the actual scene of holographic technology, combining esoteric knowledge and some scientific factors.
Special emphasis is placed on the "intersection" between the physical dimension and the etheric dimension and on the cracks or entrances between the dimensions.
In addition to revealing the ancient history of mankind, this fascinating work also describes a time out to see the origins of humanity and its hope for the future.
Book Features
Time-lapse decoding! The beginning of important human change
Through the multi-dimensional advanced high-tech "heterogeneous meta-helmet", scientists learned that the earth is full of four-dimensional entrances, the third dimension of the material plane and the fourth dimension of the etheric plane are originally "twins".
And you can see the "cosmic record" in the holographic image!
You can also overlook the cross-section of the earth, covering the deep human genetic technology and high-dimensional cosmic civilization, and no book in its amazing history has been exposed so far!
Editor-in-Chief: Weng Shihang
Editor-in-chief: Bohan Pan
Tags:

Although the notion that the Earth is flat was widely disproven through empirical observation by ancient scholars in Greek and Islamic traditions, the belief never entirely disappeared.

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

It experienced a notable revival in the 19th century through figures such as Samuel Rowbotham, who founded societies promoting flat Earth ideas mixed with conspiracy theories that global powers deliberately conceal the "truth" about the Earth's shape to maintain control over populations.

This ideological fusion of distrust in authorities and unconventional cosmology has been greatly amplified in the internet era, where online echo chambers allow for isolated communities to flourish and reinforce shared but factually incorrect beliefs .

Title:

Content: Getting off the ground is not necessarily the fault of scholars - contemporary philosophers talk about artificial intelligence
Noam Chomsky ｜ Photo Credit: GettyImages
What we want you to know is
Few experts and scholars willing to appear, their discourse on the one hand affects (the weak version of the meaning of brainwashing) part of the public, on the other hand, it is also regenerated, and people find practical examples to rationalize, mythologize its explanatory power.
The mainstream discourse of elite depiction, slowly absorbed, and widely used to understand the social / universal characteristics of the era, has become a lot of people understand their own way, which further produces the role of self-evidence prophetic, so that the expert scholar's speech, using the principle of leverage, snowball, into what seems to be a very iconic, highly consistent truth with reality.
Renowned contemporary philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky wrote in the New York Times about artificial intelligence and what is not human: cognition that stays at the pre-human or non-human stage.
Its biggest flaw is the lack of any of the most critical capabilities of intelligence, “not only to say what the situation is, what was in the past, and what is going to happen — it ’ s just description and prediction — but also to say what isn ’ t the case and what may not be. ”
These are the ingredients of interpretation, the signs of true wisdom. ”
But for ordinary people like me, the search for explanations is probably not for truth in the eyes of philosophers, but for peace of mind in a chaotic and uncertain world.
In the past and present, why have so many people prayed to the gods and diviners, or asked for the future, so that today's scientific prosperity, this phenomenon can only see an increase, but not a decrease?
In addition, what are the factors that make the Internet Age facilitator KOL-led public opinion culture phenomenon, without bringing about a civil society ethos of deliberation and deliberation?
I believe that what many people crave is a way of understanding / interpreting the world that is easy to master, replay, and regenerate (ChatGPT specifically meets this psychological need of the masses and, as it evolves, will make people embrace it more meaningfully).
Even if it has obvious mistakes, but it does not matter, find the bullshit to cover it with another bullshit, which can muddle the past and make yourself continue to feel at ease (just as the market fundamentalism can always be said, the reason why there is a counter-example that is not consistent with its dogma, is that the market is still subject to certain constraints, to solve the problem thoroughly, and must be further regulated).
In addition, the network replacement is rapid, strengthen the goldfish memory, what has been said in the past to pursue what? Rather than spend the brain to understand the problem, it is better to be greedy / fast.
True wisdom is too demanding for ordinary people, and this kind of counterfactual, Chomsky does not know whether he has seriously thought about it.
If not, it is likely that the people he usually contacts are not those of me who are traffickers and pawns. They are smart people who are good at finding mistakes and correcting mistakes from existing explanations, and they know how to rationally consider various possibilities and distinguish a set of theoretical possibilities from the impossible.
The popularity of social media has led to decentralization or fragmentation. In the past, people who lack the right to speak have access to voice opportunities and efficient communication platforms that were originally only available to the mass media.
Among them, some people who make good use of human weaknesses find the audience they need in the public opinion market divided into different categories and levels. The female / male groups rise together, each occupying the top of the mountain, and different matching creates a thousand kinds of KOLs, and she / they compete with each other.
Before the advent of the fragmented era, the voice of social issues was concentrated in the hands of a small number of media, and they would use a group of experts and scholars to explain and introduce new social phenomena.
This group of experts and scholars have a halo on their heads, and even if some of them (some of them may have the potential to become KOLs, but they cannot emerge) disagree, they can only become a member of the silent public because they are not favored by the media.
Few experts and scholars willing to appear, their discourse on the one hand affects (the weak version of the meaning of brainwashing) part of the public, on the other hand is also regenerated, people find practical examples to rationalize, mythologize its explanatory power (the Lion Rock spirit that teaches people to fish is better than teach people to fish is a good example).
The mainstream discourse of elite portrayal (such as people are self-interested and rational, or Hong Kong people are flexible and flexible, and it is the road to success in Hong Kong) is slowly absorbed and widely used to understand the characteristics of the society / general people of their era, becoming a way for many people to understand themselves. An emblematic truth that is highly congruent with reality.
The advent of the fragmented era overthrew (or at least greatly invalidated) this (relatively) static way of understanding the world, Pandora ’ s box has been opened, and the words of experts and scholars have been widely divided (but the accumulated old money is still there, and the public opinion market is still dominant), while at the same time, it is necessary to cover and briefly discuss the common points of society / era / universal people in a concise and seemingly powerful way. It has become very difficult (just as TVB can no longer be a big platform), the “people ” in the eyes of the top elites (such as Chomsky) – rational people with a proven spirit – are only suitable for certain classes, cannot be spread by the secondary elites (such as the media executives), and are easy to be questioned or marginalized by ordinary people.
In objective reality, it is impossible to produce a powerful leverage effect, which also causes it to distance itself from the specific phenomenon described, that is, the so-called off-ground.
But this is not necessarily the "fault" of these elites, it is the world that has become dynamic, making its discourse and reality have a sense of alienation that would not have existed before.
The article is authorized to be reproduced, the text and title are slightly modified by the editor, the original text can be seen at
(Join the critical review network member) Daily wonderful articles sent directly to your mailbox, each week exclusive editorial selection, current affairs selection, art weekly newspaper and other special electronic newspapers.
You can also leave comments with authors, journalists, and editors to discuss the content of the article.
Join now for free!
Posted by: Alex
Edited by: Alvin

Flat Earth community groups today do not represent a monolithic theory but instead encompass diverse, often conflicting viewpoints united principally by their rejection of the spherical Earth consensus.

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.

This diversity reflects a broader disbelief framework rather than a single doctrinal set of ideas.

Online, flat Earth adherents employ social media, forums, video platforms, and increasingly virtual reality experiences to propagate their beliefs, raising concerns about digital manipulation, misinformation, and emotional persuasion intended to spread alternative realities detached from empirical evidence .

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).

Globally, organized flat Earth societies exist but tend to be decentralized.

Major organizations are primarily found in the United States but have international analogues.

Title:

Content: The Prosecutor General ’ s Office of the Russian Federation recognized the WWF as an undesirable organization.
recommendations
The Prosecutor General ’ s Office of the Russian Federation said that the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) is implementing projects that “form threats to security in the economic sphere ” and create obstacles for the Russian development of Arctic territories.
In addition, the WWF Foundation was accused of supporting organizations that are recognized by the current legislation of the country as so-called “foreign agents ”.
Judging by the definition of the term itself, a “foreign agent ” or“ foreign agent ” in Russia in 2023 is a status assigned to persons receiving foreign support or persons who are under the so-called “foreign influence ”.
Apparently, not only international organizations and global funds fit under this definition, but also any bloggers who receive at least a penny of money from international platforms such as YouTube, which encourages creators of interesting content with part of the proceeds from the “monetization ” of platform videos.
The quote from the statement of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation is as follows.
advertising
The World Wide Fund for Nature is a transnational public organization whose scope includes the study and study of the environment of the entire planet "Earth", as well as the preservation and restoration of this environment and nature.
The headquarters of the organization is located in the city of Glan (Fr.: Gland), Switzerland.
In the past, the fund was called the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) called the decision of the Prosecutor General ’ s Office of the Russian Federation unreasonable and promised to challenge it in court.
The organization said that its activities are aimed at preserving biological diversity, and the Fund will continue to protect rare species of animals in Russia.
The mission of the World Wildlife Fund is to eliminate the degradation of the natural environment of the planet and achieve harmony between man and nature.
The main goal of the Fund has always been and continues to be the preservation of the biological diversity of
The Foundation is charitable and has connections with almost all states on the planet.
The slogan of the fund is the famous phrase - "For a living planet".
Earlier, the department recognized the undesirable activities of another organization related to nature on the planet.
At that time, the list of foreign agents was Greenpeace (Greenpeace * *, translated into Russian as "Green World").
Subsequently, Roskomnadzor banned access to the website of the organization.
Apparently, soon we will not be able to go to the site of the World Wide Fund for Nature.
In the meantime, we have such an opportunity, let ’ s look into the eyes of a fluffy panda on the Russian version of the WWF website, located in the domain “wwf.ru ”.
For those who believe in the requirements of the Russian authorities for the labeling of a “foreign agent ”, we specifically satisfy your requirement in the text below.
For each organization recognized by the current law as a foreign agent, we indicate its status.
I need to make a small reservation here.
If you are told that you need to jump into a well, it is not always necessary to rush to jump into this well.
In other words, common sense and universal laws can not be overturned by any mortal earthlings, no matter how hard they try.
*: The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) is an organization that performs the functions of a foreign agent.
* *: Greenpeace is an organization whose activities are recognized as undesirable in the territory of the Russian Federation.
May the cosmic mind of the universe and the unfathomable power of nature come with you.
recommendations
For the post accrued remuneration
This material is written by a visitor to the site, and a reward is accrued for it.
+
Popular news

These groups organize conferences, produce multimedia content, and maintain online communities promoting flat Earth theories and associated conspiracies.

Their methods leverage modern communications tools to create a sense of community and "exclusive truth" that resists external scrutiny.

Certain notable public figures, particularly in professional American sports, have publicly or privately endorsed flat Earth views, significantly amplifying the movement’s prominence.

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’.

Read more from Samnur Reza

Share this article

For example, NBA star Kyrie Irving has openly discussed belief in a flat Earth, while NFL players including Darius Slay, Sammy Watkins, and Patrick Queen reportedly support or have questioned mainstream scientific consensus about the Earth’s shape.

What NBA star claimed that the earth is flat?

Anecdotal reports suggest the movement has penetrated locker rooms, with up to 20% of NFL players possibly sharing flat Earth sympathies.

What could be the estimated percentage of American football players who believe the Earth is flat?

Such endorsements lend the movement cultural visibility and help recruit younger followers influenced by these celebrities .

Title:

Content: The Economic Book / World Children ’ s Charter on Earth Enlightens the Perpetual Concept
King Charles III of the United Kingdom, who has long been concerned with the issue of sustainability, proposed the “Terra Carta ” blueprint for sustainable development during the reign of the monarch, and personally wrote the preface in the book“ Our Decision – The Earth Charter for the World ’ s Children: Protecting Nature, People and the Planet ”.
This book has received the response and exclusive support of TSMC, hoping to inspire children to love the concept of sustainable development of the planet through book subscription donations and joint initiatives.
Our Decision is a graphic book based on the concept of the Earth Charter. Written by renowned British science writer Christopher Lloyd, it brings together 33 of the world ’ s leading award-winning artists and illustrators to create a beautiful, lyrical and thought-provoking journey.
In the book, the reader can appreciate the long and precious nature, and can also see the various threats we are facing, which leads the reader to reflect on the feasible action plan for the future.
Charles III said in the preface: “Children have a unique curiosity about nature and the wonderful planet we call home.
Because one of the characteristics of children is knowing that we are part of nature. “I hope that the story told in this book, combined with the amazing images drawn by illustrators from around the globe, will inspire you to discover and celebrate the natural world around you, to learn from nature, and to explore what you can do to protect it.
What the world needs is for all children to seriously imagine what kind of future they want to build.
I don ’ t know if you like painting as much as I do, as many of the illustrators involved in this book.
I ’ d like to challenge you to take out a blank sheet of paper and start drawing or writing down the future you want to see, putting nature at the heart of everything we do.
That way we can share our ideas with as many people as possible, working together to help keep our planet healthy and strong for generations to come. ”
The Earth Charter is the blueprint for sustainable development proposed by Charles III as Prince, including TSMC, and has received responses from more than 400 well-known companies around the world.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has also decided to use the Earth Charter as a tool for education in the Decade of Sustainable Development.
In response to our environmental sustainability initiatives, we printed this book using eco-friendly soy ink and FSC certified paper.
As the only semiconductor company in the world to be certified by the Terra Carta logo of the first Earth Charter, TSMC will also jointly support the publication of this book, in addition to the subscription of books, and will be commissioned by United Publishing to provide secondary and primary school libraries throughout Taiwan, and will also support a series of initiatives such as education training and postcard solicitation.
TSMC ’ s Senior Vice President of Human Resources and Chairman of the ESG Committee, Li-Mei Ho, said: “TSMC is committed to green management in its daily operations by introducing many innovative technologies in climate and energy, water management, resource recycling and air pollution control. In addition, through the publication of the Biodiversity Declaration, we commit to jointly protect and deepen biodiversity with stakeholders. sexual integrity.
We are very pleased to be able to promote this belief through the publication of our Decision, to plant the seeds of caring for the earth in the minds of school-age children, to promote the early enlightenment of the concept of sustainability, and to promote the vision of people and nature, people and society to grow together. ” (This article is based on “Our Decision ”, co-published by HKEJ)
TSMC illustrators
Extended reading
Will William and Kate be willing to consider reconciling with Harry and Meghan?
Kat ’ s cancer treatment: like going to hell.
British royal expert reveals the truth William is jealous of Harry "for this"
Harry and Meghan have no way of knowing that Charles is sick, and they're locked down.
Related News
Double B luxury electric car new round of Mercedes-Benz "Supercar" Q3 debut
The luxury electric car battle heats up, the double B enters a new round of competition, two "supercars": the G series Mercedes (G Car) off-road car, the top sedan Maybach (Maybach).
Idea Farm / Three Lee Kuan Yew
A company was founded 60 years ago, and employees made $400 per person per year in productivity 60 years ago, and $160,000 per person per year 60 years later.
Singapore ’ s GDP per capita is...
Electric vehicles environmentally friendly, comfortable, strong horsepower to attract buyers
Mercedes-Benz top luxury off-road car big G and Maybach pure trams, will be introduced into Taiwan, big G this off-road will be "electrified", fell below many people 's glasses, the key lies in the mountain peak people "...
Biomedical 1 billion revenue club to increase to 23 trees $4.2 billion title
The Health Policy Council recently announced the results of the first quarter of this year. Among the listed companies, there are 23 companies with revenue of more than 1 billion yuan, an increase of 5 over the same period last year.
Two major areas of innovation in biomedicine
According to the latest statistics of the Health Policy Council, in 2024, the total revenue of Taiwan's listed (including emerging) enterprises in the first quarter of this year was 75.88 billion yuan, an annual growth rate of only 3.1%.
However, the area of innovation...
Smart Management / Family Chairman Yeh Jung-ting looks at the "long trend" to "fast change"
In recent years, the competition in the retail industry has become more and more fierce, and the supermarket closest to the consumer is like a transformers. All kinds of functions and store types are constantly added and reorganized, bringing consumers a variety of surprises.
Product recommendation
udn Forum

The core arguments used by flat Earthers involve dismissing photographic and satellite evidence as fabricated, accusing governments and space agencies of conspiratorial deception.

What scientific evidence do "flat earthers" reject?

They invoke alternative interpretations of religious or ancient texts and question the validity of scientific methods and institutions.

The arguments are intentionally framed to appeal emotionally and spiritually rather than logically, promoting secret knowledge and a belief in hidden truths accessible only to insiders.

These arguments are widely disseminated via online content, including videos, memes, specialized forums, and social networks, where reinforcement by peer groups solidifies belief .

Psychologically and sociologically, flat Earth belief attracts individuals grappling with social isolation, alienation, and deep mistrust of mainstream institutions and authority.

The movement fulfills a human need for identity, belonging, and a sense of control in chaotic or complex modern societies.

Title:

Content: In 1976, it was the first bullet in the hash chart.
29.03.2023 10: 54 AM
Books: Awad Abdel Fattah
“Land Day ” can be considered the first shot fired at the apartheid system, specifically at one of the most important pillars of the apartheid system, which is fragmentation or division; geographical, demographic and cultural.
This means that the famous strike carried out by the forgotten Palestinians of the 1948, and the subsequent unprecedented confrontations in terms of their breadth and intensity, prompted the Palestinians in the occupied territory in 67, to join the strike, in the first unitary action, since the Nakba, including the historic Palestine divided, between the sea and the river.
This major event, instigated by those Palestinians who survived the eradication plan, placed the first brick in the path of awakening and awareness of the unity of Palestine and its people.
It is not necessary that those who planned or made Land Day in the squares, streets and alleys of Palestinian towns, inside Palestine occupied in 1948, did so with prior awareness of this actual result, namely the breaking of psychological and cultural barriers, conceived and implemented by the Zionist establishment.
They, who were outside the institutions of the Palestinian national movement and the decision-making process, did not expect that their decision to challenge and implement the decision of the comprehensive strike would turn into the makers of a national day for all the Palestinian people, passing through fragmentation and division.
The immediate aim of the strike was to defend their land, which was being rapidly pulled from under their feet and threatened their livelihood, survival and development.
There is no doubt that the accumulation of the consequences of the policies of repression and looting and the practices of internal colonialism, on the one hand, and the interaction of the elite, political, educated and educated, with the issues of politics and the developments and rise of the Palestinian national movement in the places of refuge, on the other hand, produced a state of public anger that turned into violent confrontations throughout the Galilee, the Triangle, the Negev and the coast.
The term apartheid was not prevalent among people, not even intellectuals; people in general, although adapted to the reality of life, viewed Israel as an invading, alien entity that came from abroad, and that the question of its existence was temporary.
As for the politicized elite, it was divided in its view and definition of the State of Israel, between those who distinguished Israel, which was established on 78% of Palestine as the embodiment of the right of self-determination of the Jews, and the Zionist movement, and those who viewed it as the embodiment and extension of a settler colonial movement.
Perhaps the 1965 book Zionist Colonization in Palestine, by Palestinian academic and member of the Palestinian National Council, Fayez al-Sayegh, was unique, at the time, in comparing Israel to the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Even after the United Nations passed a resolution condemning Zionism as a racist movement in 1974, the term apartheid rarely appeared in Palestinian political and cultural discourse.
After the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967, even the original and accurate definition of Israel as a settler colonial regime began to disappear after the international and Arab players, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), accepted a state in that small part of Palestine.
The term "occupier or Israeli occupation" has become dominant in the official discourse of the PLO, on the assumption that the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is contrary to international legitimacy and is therefore temporary, and therefore they thought that the state was coming and only needed to abandon all Palestinian aspirations.
Thus, the definition of Israel as a colonial entity from which an apartheid regime was born was effectively dropped.
Land Day did not stop the plan to seize the land, nor the Zionist expansionist project, although it succeeded in recovering about 20 thousand dunums, the Zionist establishment had planned to turn it into a closed military zone.
But this historic day, and the subsequent escalation of the days of struggle and popular resistance, and the birth of national political movements and popular and student frameworks, put a lever in the wheel of the project of colonial fragmentation and fragmentation, specifically in the field of identity and belonging.
It does not change this fact that political circles and social strata have adapted to the pressures and temptations of the Zionist establishment, which disavows the association and belonging to the Palestinian people, some of which have descended towards its shameful alliance with a Zionist government.
Today, the reports of international organizations, thanks to the Palestinian unitary and popular struggle, come to put the points to the letter, and define Israel, since its establishment, as an apartheid regime, and that this regime is not limited to the 67 areas, but was born with Israel since 1948.
All of this would not have happened if this part of the Palestinian people, including the refugees, who were the first victims of the Nakba, were silent on this injustice, which continues to escalate with the escalation of forms of rejection and adherence to identity and belonging, and the idea of one Palestine.
Separation has been carried out from day one through the crime of ethnic cleansing, separating people from their homeland and turning them into refugees, besieging those who survived the crime of expulsion, and subjecting them to military rule.
This is legally enshrined through the Absentee Property Law, the Law of Return, 1950 and 1952, and other laws that continue to form the basis of the Zionist apartheid regime, the separation regime.
The Palestinian demographic presence, the Palestinian struggle and steadfastness, and despite the crisis of the Palestinian national movement, have put this racist regime in front of an existential dilemma, which will continue to worsen until it falls, when a renewed national movement with a capable leadership linked to its people and not as an agent of colonialism develops and matures.
All articles express the views of their owners and not the views of Watan News Agency
Design & Development

It provides adherents with exclusive "truth" that differentiates them from others perceived as misled or deceived.

This shared narrative fosters tight in-group cohesion but also promotes dogmatism and social separation from those outside the movement.

The flat Earth worldview can be understood as a form of cognitive and emotional coping mechanism in response to perceived social disempowerment or existential uncertainty .

Demographically, contemporary flat Earthers tend to be younger adults who may come from a variety of educational and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Title:

Content: Kyrie Irving’s Flat Earth Theory Revisited: How Did Scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson React to It?

Tonoy Sengupta
|Sun Oct 16 2022

Kyrie Irving has some rather interesting theory on the planet we live on

Kyrie Irving sure is an interesting guy.

Of course, his ability on the basketball is a sight to behold. However, his thoughts and ideologies off it are something the NBA community has had its eye on for a long time too.

Over the years, he has come to be known as the man who is absent from the team for about half the year tending to one cause or another. Though it must be noted that there is a massive amount of exaggeration at play in all the conversations regarding them.

But frankly, his tendency to take holidays off work isn’t exactly weak either.

However, this is Kyrie during his most recent years in the league, a stark contrast to how he was at the start of his career. But it had to have started somewhere, right?

Well, apparently it did. And frankly, fans should’ve known the kind of person they were in for after this little incident was revealed.

Also Read: When Dennis Rodman teared up after his friend North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un met with former US President Donald Trump

Kyrie Irving once believed the Earth is Flat

There are shockingly a whole bunch of Flat Earthers on this planet of ours to this day. And apparently, Kyrie Irving was once a part of that army.

Now admittedly, the original clip of him admitting he believes in the Flat Earth theory can no longer be found. However, there are several clips of him justifying his stance on the matter, one of which is right here, below.

There are also clips of him claiming that he was only joking when he spoke about believing the flat earth theory, so frankly, he may deserve to be cut some slack here. Furthermore, even if he believed it several years ago, there is a strong chance that his beliefs have changed completely.

However, if the man still believes in the theory, that is quite something, isn’t it?

At this point, even most scientists would probably just find themselves chuckling on the matter, rather than be exasperated.

But until Irving announces his current beliefs, one can only speculate.

Neil deGrasse Tyson once shared his thoughts on Kyrie Irving’s backing of the Flat Earth theory

When it comes to scientists, Neil deGrasse Tyson is probably the most well-liked one out there, on the face of this planet.

Whenever he is brought on a show of any kind, he has been asked questions about space, aliens, and even some questions on theoretical physics concepts, such as the Multiverse theory.

But never had he been asked to react to a basketball player in any kind of way. Or at least, that wasn’t the case, until the Kyrie Irving incident.

And here was his reaction.

While he does seem to be speaking facts, and trying to go about this in a logical manner, he does seem a tad bit snarkier than usual.

We can’t imagine Kyrie Irving being the biggest fan of that.

Also Read: Michael Jordan, Who Refused to Back Black Political Candidates, Appreciated ‘Bishop of Brixton’ Jimmy Rogers’ Communal Work

About the author

Tonoy Sengupta

I've always been someone surrounded by sports. At 15 though, Basketball was brought to my attention, and I absolutely fell in love with it. At 21 now, I look to share the joy I feel with the world through my articles.

Read more from Tonoy Sengupta

They generally exhibit low scientific literacy and a high level of internet engagement, which exposes them to conspiracy and misinformation networks.

Title:

Content: Scientists, leave the jokes – they give rise to prejudices
09.01.2022, 18: 34, Miscellaneous
Subscribe to Telegram channel
Subscribe to Google News
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
View commentsNo comments
Privacy Policy - GDPR
Site map →
For information cooperation, advertising and publication of ads, write to the address: [email protected]
Support the project:
Yandex.Money - 410011013132383
WebMoney – P761907515662, R402690739280, Z399334682366, E296477880853, X100503068090
18 + © 2002-2021 RYBINSKonLine: All you wanted to know...

Many are motivated either by religious belief systems incompatible with modern cosmology or by skepticism toward authority and mainstream media.

The internet’s role is critical, as it provides accessible pathways to like-minded communities and immersive experiences that strengthen commitment to these beliefs.

Title:

Content: You are using an outdated browser.
Please upgrade your browser
and improve your visit to our site.
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.

This online connectivity has significantly facilitated the global spread and normalization of flat Earth ideology .

In conclusion, while the flat Earth belief system may appear at first as a harmless oddity or fringe quirk, its characteristics suggest it is more than mere eccentricity.

It involves a complex interplay of psychological needs, social identity, and distrust of conventional knowledge that can lead to insular worldviews and resistance to factual information.

The movement’s endorsement by influential public figures increases its appeal and visibility, especially among youth.

For a concerned parent, awareness of the group's ideologies and appeal mechanisms is important.

Title:

Content: Tear gas documentary "Earth Trek" today (25) announced by the Golden Bell Award host Huang Zijiao as a publicity ambassador, for the film, star voice, Huang Zigao said: "This documentary is very real and there are many cases around us, each story is not the same but there are some commonalities, after reading it feel very moved and I hope you and I understand these friends, ordinary life may have But through the director's perspective and the interaction between parents and children, you can have a clearer grasp of their ideas or life patterns. Although it is a documentary, it is also a kind of textbook, and we can enter the world together and understand the different souls and different children around us."
Director Lin Cheng-sheng brought the unique artistic talents of autistic children to the big screen. The four children from the stars Chen Shuwei, Xue Hui-lun, Han Pei-hsien and Chen Lanting Wei each have amazing talents, so the publicity ambassador Huang Zi-kao lamented: "The most impressive part of the film is the part of the star playing the piano, and usually sees many musicians in front of the piano. I didn ’ t expect to see it in the documentary. It ’ s definitely a competition. I hope there will be more stages for them to play after the documentary is broadcast. I ’ m sure I won ’ t let everyone down. I hope they have more opportunities to be heard and seen. ”
Huang Jiao also came to the school "Dopao Art School" co-founded by director Lin Cheng-sheng and teacher Han Shu-hua for autistic children, close to the autistic children, saw the children 's exquisite piano skills and a number of excellent painting works: "Today I came to Dopao Art School and saw the stars in the movie, I just saw a star painting his own universe. I will never lose to an international artist! Those works bring me a lot of emotion, inner admiration, and the piano player is too strong, and I just listened to the live performance, I just sat next to him, he looked so cool, he clapped his hands after playing, these are all the feelings I got at the scene. Thank you very much. ”
Huang Zijiao also generously revealed that Lin Zhengsheng director is in fact his real matchmaker with Meng Gengru: "Thanks to the director who made the" world's first wheat square "let me know Meng Gengru, I was in the heart of that premiere, in the end of the acting circle Gengru private message my Facebook to express my gratitude, we talked and finally got married. If director Lin was the real matchmaker, if director Lin hadn't made the play, if Geng hadn't acted, how would I have been at the premiere, how would I have married him, how would I have known her?
Even more praise Lin Zhengsheng director has never stopped spreading love and warmth: "In recent years, I have seen Lin guide what he is doing is not the same, when he told the story of the world champion bread to everyone is very moving," the world's first wheat square "I cried so hard, did not think that now filming" Earth Trek ", Lin guide uses his talents to tell a more real and more moving story. In the movie to see the interaction of Lin director Han teacher with these stars, they really seem to be a family very admire, I also hope in the future have more and more ability to be like him, assuming we all have some creative skills, maybe we are at a certain stage to think, in Taiwan around us there are so many issues worth sharing or worth reporting, we will do our best. Director Sheng and Teacher Han Shu-wah have seen what they want to pay their respects to. Thank you for showing us that talent can be used to the fullest and in the right place."
The film exposes both beautiful and cruel facts, and truly presents the plight of autistic families, Huang Zigao said: "In fact, many stars have a kind of talent, and they can extend these talents, may be parents for their love of all kinds of inclusive love, before we are often talking about heart, empathy, I think I will never be able to understand these star parents' mother." Faced with problems and troubles, but their energy and smile are so strong, the film to a few groups of parents, especially a lot of mothers interviewed, talking about crying, but talking and laughing, as if facing life or the world to give them the task, it seems that they can get a good balance, this is very painful and admirable, in fact, everyone has a lot of life. I believe that the star must have full of love, maybe he can't say it directly, he uses music, maybe he can't export like us, then he uses painting, and I feel full of love. "
The Golden Horse Award Best Supporting Actress Ding Ning, who has three children, also felt very deeply after watching, he said, "When the mother has a very deep feeling that I want my children to be different from ordinary people!
All fear comes from not understanding, all love comes from mutual understanding.
After understanding all this, people are not surprised how normal I am, only the presentation of life is so colorful and unpredictable.
Thank you for being there.
This is a film that must be filmed and must be seen by many people, leading the moviegoers to glimpse the beauty of another planet without leaving the earth.
The film was officially released in Taiwan on November 5.
# Meng Gengru # Huang Zi Jiao # Director # Lin Cheng-Sheng # Talent

It is advisable to engage in open, non-confrontational discussions with your teen about critical thinking, scientific literacy, and the importance of questioning claims but also evaluating evidence rigorously.

Limiting contact with a friend solely based on flat Earth beliefs may not be necessary, but guidance on navigating misinformation and fostering open dialogue would be prudent.

Understanding the emotional and social reasons behind such beliefs can equip you to support your teen in maintaining a balanced perspective.