The contemporary flat Earth movement, inspired by 19th-century figures like Samuel Rowbotham, has found renewed strength in the Internet era.

Unlike its historical incarnations, the movement today is characterized by decentralized, transnational communities that function primarily online.

The United States, parts of Europe, and the Arab world feature significant clusters of activity, but most organization occurs through private digital groups rather than traditional societies or physical institutions[ f61994b0-dc34-40d6-a1e2-a7f66b22774b_548175167].

Occasional conferences and local meetups are arranged through digital forums, but there are few formal organizations of any size.

Online, flat Earth followers coordinate, share arguments, and validate skepticism of mainstream science.

There is no single accepted flat Earth “model”—the movement is held together mainly by shared disbelief in the scientific consensus, rather than unified alternative theories.

These communities offer a sense of belonging, particularly attractive to those who feel socially or culturally isolated, and function as replacements for mainstream group affiliations.

There are no universally recognized international organizations dedicated to flat Earth belief.

Instead, the movement consists of numerous private online forums, social media accounts, and groups, such as the Flat Earth Society (UK/US) and other web-based collectives[ f61994b0-dc34-40d6-a1e2-a7f66b22774b_548175167].

Public support from celebrities is rare, but some high-profile cases have drawn attention.

In the United States, NBA player Kyrie Irving has espoused flat Earth views since 2017, prompting widespread discussion, although he has periodically retracted or downplayed his statements[ f6eb21b5-aefb-47b5-a467-cf0ff072bc84_615722827].

Additional US sports figures who have publicly echoed flat Earth sentiments include NFL players Sammy Watkins, Darius Slay, Patrick Queen, Tyler Owens, and Geno Smith.

Internationally, Tunisian media figure Ashraf al-Kaali invoked religious and philosophical grounds for his belief in a flat Earth, sparking debate and ridicule in the Arab world.

Russian singer Yuri Loza is another example, voicing support for flat Earth ideas while questioning space exploration reports.

Such cases remain limited and are generally criticized or dismissed by broader society[ f61994b0-dc34-40d6-a1e2-a7f66b22774b_548175167].

Flat Earthers’ arguments rest largely on rejection of scientific evidence including satellite images, gravitational theory, and astronomical research.

Mainstream photos or footage of Earth from space are dismissed as fabricated by governments or corporations intent on covering up “the truth”.

Common claims reference the absence of visible curvature in day-to-day life, the apparent flatness of water or landscapes, and appeals to “common sense” observation, while disregarding established physics and scientific explanation.

Rather than offering direct scientific support for flatness, adherents focus on undermining the legitimacy of scientific authorities and institutions.

The spread of flat Earth beliefs is closely tied to the structure and algorithms of modern social networks.

Platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok facilitate the formation of insulated communities, often using recommendation systems that lead users into increasingly fringe or conspiratorial content[ f61994b0-dc34-40d6-a1e2-a7f66b22774b_548175167].

YouTube in particular has been identified as influencing viewers’ exposure to extreme content, including flat Earth theories[ f0932c14-bf26-4a29-a8e3-cbacb4a1a279_599324161].

These online spaces act as echo chambers, amplifying fringe views beyond what would have previously been possible[ f61994b0-dc34-40d6-a1e2-a7f66b22774b_548175167].

Young people, especially adolescents and frequent users of social media or video platforms, are particularly vulnerable to exposure and persuasion due to their higher media consumption and often underdeveloped critical thinking skills[ f0932c14-bf26-4a29-a8e3-cbacb4a1a279_599324161].

A decline in critical-thinking education further contributes to the appeal and persistence of conspiratorial beliefs, as individuals lack the tools to analyze or debunk misinformation.

Demographically, flat Earth believers come from diverse backgrounds without a clear majority by age, gender, or formal education.

However, adherence is often higher among those with lower levels of scientific literacy and among frequent users of online media platforms.

Flat Earth engagement is also higher in areas where science education is less robust and social media use is prevalent.

Psychologically, believers tend to share high distrust of authorities and experts, an attraction to countercultural ideas, and a need to feel part of a select, knowledgeable group.

Isolation—social, psychological, or cultural—also plays a role, fostering a turn toward alternative explanations and tightly-bonded online communities.

The risks associated with flat Earth communities are mostly indirect.

For most, involvement is a curiosity.

However, immersion in tightly-knit conspiratorial groups can promote generalized distrust of science, authorities, and mainstream information sources.

This environment may also facilitate adoption of related conspiracy theories, such as anti-vaccine or political radicalization movements, increasing the risk of further social isolation and science denial.

Such groups can also become echo chambers that reinforce belief-driven narratives over logic or evidence.

In summary, while the belief itself is not typically dangerous, engagement with flat Earth communities, particularly for young or isolated individuals, can foster broader conspiratorial attitudes and skepticism of science.

For parents, the recommended approach is not necessarily exclusion but fostering dialogue about media literacy, critical thinking, and scientific reasoning.

Providing a supportive environment and encouraging open discussion can help ensure resilience against the influence of online conspiracy subcultures[ 6e47a5cf-47a7-42a3-812e-ef81ba1e7a5f_46222320].

The contemporary flat Earth movement, inspired by 19th-century figures like Samuel Rowbotham, has found renewed strength in the Internet era.

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

Unlike its historical incarnations, the movement today is characterized by decentralized, transnational communities that function primarily online.

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.
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Edited by: Alvin

The United States, parts of Europe, and the Arab world feature significant clusters of activity, but most organization occurs through private digital groups rather than traditional societies or physical institutions[ f61994b0-dc34-40d6-a1e2-a7f66b22774b_548175167].

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TECH WORLD

Stewart Brand Saw the Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Occasional conferences and local meetups are arranged through digital forums, but there are few formal organizations of any size.

Online, flat Earth followers coordinate, share arguments, and validate skepticism of mainstream science.

Title:

Content: SPIEF
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Scandalous divorces of football players
Secret stories of Moscow bunkers
Secret stories of Moscow bunkers
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The author of the essay “How to kill your husband ” killed her husband
The author of the essay “How to kill your husband ” killed her husband
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It is necessary to protect oddballs: the developer of a quantum computer Ilya Semerikov about what strange ideas are needed for
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FIAN researcher Ilya Semerikov poses against the background of his "brainchild" - a universal four-qubit quantum computer / Photo: Natalia Feoktistova / Evening Moscow
We continue our column “Simple questions ”, in which we ask professionals about what we do not know for sure.
What came first: idea or matter?
What is the hadron collider for and why can all points of view exist at the same time?
The answers to all these questions are known by one of the most promising young scientists in Russia, the developer of a quantum computer Ilya Semerikov.
Ilya Semerikov ’ s quantum computer occupies almost half a room in one of the FIAN laboratories.
There is some irony in the fact that a device that works with the smallest particles needs such a huge body.
At the same time, the “heart ” of the aggregate, the quantum traps in which ions are encoded, are small.
The rest of the “skeleton ” is needed to service these traps.
While the computer resembles a watch from "Eralash", which was accompanied by two suitcases with batteries.
By the way, this series was filmed in 1991 - a year before the birth of Ilya.
The young scientist is only 30 years old!
The other day, he was included in the Forbes list “30 to 30 ” for his great services to the industry and the country.
Ilya and I discussed quantum qubits, career culbits and other metaphors of our lives.
— Ilya, why do you need a quantum computer?
Today, a quantum computer is much worse than usual.
A modern quantum computer can do almost nothing useful.
So far, this development is not a practical, but a scientific field.
But potentially a quantum computer can solve some problems that are beyond the control of a conventional computer.
For example, factorization is the decomposition of a number into prime factors.
So, 525 decomposes into 5 * 5 * 3 * 7.
The task of factorization is to bring the object to the “main building blocks ”.
On a classical computer, it is virtually impossible to factor a sufficiently large number - it will take a very long time to calculate.
During such calculations, the sun will die out.
A quantum computer will be able to perform such calculations in a few minutes.
But in order to solve such problems, we need not two qubits (the qubit is the smallest unit of information in a quantum computer, by analogy with a bit - "VM") and not even ten, but hundreds, but preferably thousands of qubits.
Quantum computers all over the world today work in fact with units.
In order to go from tens of qubits to thousands, new physical solutions, fundamental science, research are needed.
In this case, not only the number of qubits is important, but also their quality, since all operations on qubits must be very accurate in order to get the right results.
It is believed that the development of quantum computers will bring the emergence of superartificial intelligence closer.
When do we expect intelligent robots?
— There are studies according to which quantum computers can surpass classical ones in the field of artificial intelligence.
But for them to be useful, you need not ten qubits, but at least a hundred.
Here the requirements are lower than to the decomposition of numbers by factors, but still it is a lot.
I am not in favor of the idea that the results will come soon.
Tomorrow nothing will happen unless, of course, someone from under the floor gets a breakthrough idea.
I am so pessimistic because I stand behind these pens every day, collect bolts and screws, and understand the complexity, painstaking experiments in the field of quantum computing.
According to an optimistic estimate, it takes another ten years to do something really useful for applied tasks.
One step in quantum computing experiments, if done quickly without the constraints of finance and staff, takes three to five years.
New ideas are also needed.
And no one can predict the speed of the generation of new ideas.
This is a moment of creativity.
The more people are engaged in one idea, the more likely it is that someone will guess how and what to do.
Yes, we have our own ideas for research.
But three to five years usually go from idea to implementation.
In the world ’ s leading labs, it ’ s faster — they ’ re easier with equipment and staff, but it ’ s still not a week-long step.
Do sanctions affect developments in the field of quantum computers?
- It's a big influence.
More than 90 percent of the equipment was supplied to us from Germany, the United States and Japan.
These countries imposed sanctions.
I am very skeptical about the idea of import substitution in the field of high technologies.
For example, we need precise lasers for a quantum computer.
We can't order it now.
Where can I get them?
Yes, we can develop these lasers, but then who will deal with the quantum computer?
The number of employees in any industry is limited.
In order to educate a new employee in such knowledge-intensive areas, it will take from three to five years.
And it makes life very difficult.
Yes, even before the last massive sanctions, we bought a new set of equipment with which we can finish our ideas.
But these reserves will be enough for a year or two.
It is impossible to build a sovereign science.
For example, people from dozens of countries are working on an ordinary smartphone.
In the Congo, cobalt is mined, which goes to China.
That's where they clean it, then this cobalt is used in the lithium batteries that are in the phone.
Chips are made in Taiwan, and lithography machines are made in the Netherlands, optics for them are made in the United States.
All countries are woven into a large international cooperation.
No country can do everything by itself.
Photo: Pexels
— What is the Hadron Collider for?
In the collider, small structures are examined.
So, there is an inverse relationship between energy and the scale of distance: the more energy a particle flies, the smaller pieces of matter you can look into.
We must understand that the development of humanity is not only about technologies and things that bring benefits.
When Kepler studied the motion of planets and stars in the 17th century, he did not think about how it would be used later.
But after him came Newton, who generalized knowledge and formulated his laws.
On the basis of these laws, most of the mechanical devices work.
But this does not mean that all the knowledge of mankind is converted into technology.
Some things exist simply to understand how the world works.
The Hadron Collider is an important thing to move forward. Why?
Because we're human.
People are different from animals in their curiosity.
We can generate abstract knowledge.
The benefits of Collider are the same as the benefits of music.
It is an art that allows to see the beauty of the world.
I wish it was more widespread so that people could watch this beauty.
I think we need to look for some form of conveying this information to a large number of people.
Is there a matrix like in the Wachowski films?
It seems to me that there are no matrices in the form of the film, but there is a much more interesting structure.
Life is more exciting than any movie.
We create within ourselves the matrix in which we live.
There is such a thing as an echo chamber.
We get information from sources that are close to us.
And those things that are far away, we try to ignore.
We choose a world in which we feel comfortable.
It looks like a social media feed customized for us.
We build our information bubble, which often does not coincide with what is really happening.
How do I perceive the matrix?
Yes, there is an objective reality, but we live inside our comfortable picture of the world and do not look around.
It turns out that we live in a matrix, but we do not want to get out of it.
And when different worlds collide, sometimes terrible things happen.
When people from one echo chamber begin to communicate with people from another echo chamber, it seems that both are deaf and blind.
Where did the 404 error come from?
I don't know, I guess there was some sort of numbering of these mistakes.
You can open Wikipedia and see it.
This is a thing that I recommend to everyone.
You need to look for answers to questions in the sources, and ask yourself these questions more often.
A scientist is different from a non-scientist in that he asks himself questions.
It happens that people put something of their own in such things, for example, in some kind of joke, but here, I think, there is no subtext.
What comes first: idea or matter?
I think these things are inseparable.
What is an idea or a thought?
When we think, electrochemical reactions occur in the brain, currents flow.
The current creates a weak magnetic field.
The magnetic field has energy.
Energy has mass.
The magnetic field created by thinking has mass.
It is already matter.
What is matter?
Something that has mass.
Thought has mass on the physical level.
Thought is material.
Another example.
What came first: the atom or the idea of the atom?
There was a time in the universe when there were no atoms.
And then the first atom appeared, and at the same moment the idea of the atom appeared.
All these things are inseparable and their description depends on the point of view.
The guys from the idealist and materialist camps existed in their echo chambers, but in fact this separation is not.
Photo: Pexels
One of the popularizers of science compared our world with a superconductor in which we all live.
Is that true?
Metaphors about the structure of the world can be very different.
This is also a story about a point of view.
I have never heard of this metaphor before.
Maybe there are people who look at our world this way.
With metaphors in general, you need to be extremely careful.
In physics, there are limits to the applicability of any theory.
For example, if the speeds we work with are less than the speed of light, then classical mechanics apply.
And if the speed is approaching the speed of light, then we need the theory of relativity.
To work with large objects, classical mechanics is necessary, and with small ones, quantum mechanics.
Everything has its limits of applicability, including metaphors.
And here, on the one hand, you need to try not to go beyond this border, and on the other - to look at the problem from different angles.
There is the principle of “Occama ’ s razor ” in philosophy, which says that it is not necessary to produce entities where they do not exist.
But if Occam's razor had been used indiscriminately, most of the physical theories would have been circumcised.
A lot of them look crazy at first.
It is necessary to protect heretics, but not to accept their ideas as something that is not subject to doubt.
There are people who believe in a flat earth.
This is not without meaning, because in many everyday situations the Earth really seems flat.
But if you look at this issue not from the side of a person who walks in the forest, and connect satellite navigation, we will see the failure of this idea.
It is necessary to treat human thought carefully - on the one hand with tenderness, and on the other - with criticism.
If someone claims that the Earth is flat, do not immediately tell him that he is an idiot.
Let ’ s try to figure out what a person means.
— Do our physicists often offer to move abroad?
The question is what is “offered. ”
No one will come to you and say, “Come work with us. ”
Rather, on the contrary: it is necessary to offer oneself, and after that the discussion begins.
It ’ s a matter of aesthetic perception: what we want from life.
People used to go to America not because they wanted to be on the other side of the world.
They went to specific positions that had prospects for them.
Personally, it is important for me to be able to do what I am interested in.
Quantum computers are interesting to me.
If I have the opportunity here to do them, I will gladly continue to do it, and if not, I will think about what to do next.
Maybe there's something more interesting.
Now I am thinking about education.
For example, how to build such an education so that people can do what is interesting and understand what is interesting to them.
For me, creating such a system of education is no less interesting than quantum computers.
An echo chamber is a concept in media theory, which is a situation in which certain ideas are reinforced or reinforced by the transmission of a message or its repetition within a closed system: a party or a circle of like-minded people.
At the same time, such messages drown out other similar information flows.
So, any statements lead not to discussions, but to the giving and support of like-minded people.
Addressees in such a “closed ” system create messages, listen to themselves and agree with themselves.
There is no alternative information in this closed system.
DOSSIER
Ilya Semerikov is a highly qualified researcher at the Laboratory of Optics of Complex Quantum Systems of the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
He graduated from the Department of Physics and Astrophysics of MIPT in 2015.
He entered the postgraduate course of FIAN.
In 2015, Ilya Semerikov joined Kolachevsky ’ s group “Precision Quantum Measurements ” at the Russian Quantum Center.
All Semerikov ’ s projects at the Russian Quantum Center are related to ultracold ions. Based on these studies, scientists have developed a universal ion quantum computer.
Semerikov became its leading developer in 2020, and already in 2021 a group of scientists demonstrated Russia ’ s first universal four-qubit ion quantum computer using quarts.
REFERENCE
A quantum computer is a computing device that uses cable phenomena to solve problems: cable superposition and cable entanglement.
Technologies created on the basis of cable-based computing can be multifold superior to lasical computers in solving a number of tasks, for example, in the field of riptoanalysis and modeling of complex systems.
In 2020, a road map for the development of cable-based digital technology “cable-based computing ” was developed and adopted in Russia.
One of the most important issues in the development of cable-stayed computers is the choice of a physical system, with the help of which the cable-stayed analogues of their bits of information will be implemented.
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There is no single accepted flat Earth “model”—the movement is held together mainly by shared disbelief in the scientific consensus, rather than unified alternative theories.

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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.

These communities offer a sense of belonging, particularly attractive to those who feel socially or culturally isolated, and function as replacements for mainstream group affiliations.

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)
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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:

There are no universally recognized international organizations dedicated to flat Earth belief.

Instead, the movement consists of numerous private online forums, social media accounts, and groups, such as the Flat Earth Society (UK/US) and other web-based collectives[ f61994b0-dc34-40d6-a1e2-a7f66b22774b_548175167].

Title:

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

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

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

Illuminati

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

27 club

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

Area 51

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

JonBenét Ramsey is alive

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

'Larries'

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

Murder of John Lennon

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

BigFoot

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

Planet X

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

Flat earth

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

Public support from celebrities is rare, but some high-profile cases have drawn attention.

In the United States, NBA player Kyrie Irving has espoused flat Earth views since 2017, prompting widespread discussion, although he has periodically retracted or downplayed his statements[ f6eb21b5-aefb-47b5-a467-cf0ff072bc84_615722827].

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

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What NBA star claimed that the earth is flat?

Additional US sports figures who have publicly echoed flat Earth sentiments include NFL players Sammy Watkins, Darius Slay, Patrick Queen, Tyler Owens, and Geno Smith.

Internationally, Tunisian media figure Ashraf al-Kaali invoked religious and philosophical grounds for his belief in a flat Earth, sparking debate and ridicule in the Arab world.

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).

What does Tunisian journalist believe in?

Russian singer Yuri Loza is another example, voicing support for flat Earth ideas while questioning space exploration reports.

Title:

Content: Tsargrad
5,816 followers
Singer Loza as a supporter of “flat Earth ” rejected the existence of space
Singer Yuri Loza as a supporter of the unproven theory of flat Earth questioned the fact that actress Julia Peresild was in space on the set of the film “Challenge ”.
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Which Russian celebrities support the flat Earth theory?

Such cases remain limited and are generally criticized or dismissed by broader society[ f61994b0-dc34-40d6-a1e2-a7f66b22774b_548175167].

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Content: 21 years after the September attacks.
US experts dismantle Al Jazeera Net reality of "counter-terrorism"
Some experts believe that the US dedication of all its resources to fighting "terrorism" has made Russia and China able to surprise it repeatedly in recent years, especially because of the scarcity of strategic intelligence officers.
Although the threat posed by what the United States calls “international terrorism ” has declined over the past two decades, it remains a major concern in the minds of 58 percent of Americans, compared to other international threats.
By the 21st anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, a Chicago Council on Foreign Relations poll of 3,106 Americans in the second half of July found that their level of anxiety about so-called “foreign terrorism ” was the lowest in the last two decades, after 2002 reached its highest level when 90 percent expressed fear of the“ threat. ”
Al-Jazeera spoke to a number of senior security experts and former intelligence officials about the measures and policies that the United States has taken over the past 21 years, leading Americans to believe that they are safer in the face of what it calls the dangers of "international terrorism."
The discussions touched on the consequences of the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the battle of ideas with groups classified by the United States as "terrorist", in addition to the repercussions of successive Washington administrations' support for "authoritarian" regimes in the Arab world on their efforts in what they call "combating global terrorism."
Bruce Rydell is director of the Intelligence Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Rydell was in the White House Situation Room on September 11, 2001, when he was President George W. Bush ’ s special assistant on the Near East and North Africa on the National Security Council.
Riedel worked for 30 years at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) until he retired in 2006.
During those years, he served in several Arab countries and Pakistan, as an adviser on South Asia and the Middle East to four US presidents (George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama), and as an adviser on “international terrorism ” at NATO in Brussels.
Riedel told Al Jazeera Net that his country is much safer than it was before the September 11, 2011 attacks, and that America ’ s “counterterrorism ” infrastructure is much stronger and more integrated than it was 21 years ago.
The same goes for the capabilities of its allies in this regard, “all of us have evolved tremendously. ”
Riedel noted that what he described as the "catastrophic withdrawal" from Afghanistan left this country with an opportunity to renew the Taliban alliance with al-Qaeda, and this was evident in the case of the presence of the leader of the organization, Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul before his liquidation at the hands of US intelligence, and added: "Fortunately, the strength and capabilities of al-Qaeda have diminished significantly, but the danger is real."
On the war of ideas with these organizations, Riedel said that the intellectual and ideological battle has not been resolved until today, and will continue "because many Muslims believe they are under attack from Israel and America.
The failure to deliver justice to the Palestinians is a major rallying cry for extremism. ”
This, he believes, essentially led to the “radicalization ” of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
"There is a direct and substantial American connection with dictatorial regimes, and that is driving many Muslims to join the struggle against America," he said.
Eric Dahl, former intelligence officer and faculty member at the Pentagon Naval Graduate School
Dahl joined the faculty of the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in 2008, and his research focused on the field of “counterterrorism and homeland security. ”
Dal retired from the Navy in 2002 after serving 21 years as an intelligence officer.
The United States is safer today than it was two decades ago.
But he said groups such as al Qaeda, ISIS and others remain a threat, and it is important that we do not feel too good about ourselves.
Dall noted that ending U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan opened the door to "some increased risks from Afghanistan in particular, as it could once again become a safe haven for what he called 'terrorist groups'."
The killing of al-Qaida leader Zawahiri by a drone in Kabul last July can be seen in two ways: first, it is an indication that the threat from al-Qaida remains, but it is also a sign that the U.S. national security establishment still retains the ability to fight terrorism despite the lack of troops on the ground.
On the failure of the United States to win the battle of ideas 21 years after the September 11 attacks, Dahl said, “Unfortunately, terrorism is a chronic problem that can only be managed and dealt with, and never eradicated. ”
The battle of ideas has been going on since the beginning of creation, but what is different today are “extremist ideas ” that can spread across the world instantly because of technology, meaning that conflict with them“ can happen in our homes and communities, not in a foreign country. ”
Professor Jonathan Akov of the Department of Intelligence and National Security Studies at the University of Carolina Coastal
Akov previously worked as a military analyst at the National Bureau of Asian Research and served as a reserve officer in the U.S. Army for several years.
His research interests include the analysis of intelligence and strategy, the study of military doctrines, revolutions, and the failure of states.
“Yes, the United States is safer than attacks by organizations outside the United States, and we have a better mechanism today to warn against these kinds of attacks.
It is essentially impossible to eliminate all this threat, because if I may repeat the words of Professor Richard Bates of Columbia University, surprise attacks are inevitable.
Akov said the end of US "military intervention" in Iraq and Afghanistan had affected Washington's "global counter-terrorism" policy.
"The U.S. intelligence community has been working to slow down the drawdown of its counterterrorism capabilities for several years now.
"But the departure of the United States from Afghanistan has made this shift seem surprising."
“For years, hundreds of contractors with top-secret permits have been laid off, their services deemed unnecessary as attacks on U.S. troops, diplomats and aid workers in Afghanistan have declined, ” Akov said.
Because “Washington has devoted so many resources to counterterrorism, ” Akov believes that one reason Russia and China have been able to repeatedly surprise the United States in recent years is due to the scarcity of strategic intelligence officers, and the“ transformation of the CIA into a drone organization. ”
On the battle of ideas that the United States did not win with the renewal and spread of organizations in innovative ways, Akov said, “If the United States and its allies had fought a battle of ideas with greater sincerity, perhaps more progress could have been made in this regard. ”
Many of the grievances of people exposed to terrorist belief systems have not been addressed and, unfortunately, will not be, ranging from ongoing U.S. support for authoritarian regimes in the Middle East to efforts by U.S. oil companies to try to control energy sources and foreign markets.
In the battle of ideas as well, Akov says that to a lesser extent “there are some basic, incompatible claims made by extremists regarding modern life that cannot be addressed under any circumstances, including the treatment of women and the role of religion in modern societies.
Although such differences have been greatly exaggerated by many American academics and commentators, they are rather significant.
Source: The Island

Flat Earthers’ arguments rest largely on rejection of scientific evidence including satellite images, gravitational theory, and astronomical research.

What scientific evidence do "flat earthers" reject?

Mainstream photos or footage of Earth from space are dismissed as fabricated by governments or corporations intent on covering up “the truth”.

What scientific evidence do "flat earthers" reject?

Common claims reference the absence of visible curvature in day-to-day life, the apparent flatness of water or landscapes, and appeals to “common sense” observation, while disregarding established physics and scientific explanation.

Rather than offering direct scientific support for flatness, adherents focus on undermining the legitimacy of scientific authorities and institutions.

The spread of flat Earth beliefs is closely tied to the structure and algorithms of modern social networks.

Platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok facilitate the formation of insulated communities, often using recommendation systems that lead users into increasingly fringe or conspiratorial content[ f61994b0-dc34-40d6-a1e2-a7f66b22774b_548175167].

Title:

Content: Taiwan has been the champion of "false information" for nine consecutive years. Children are the main target. Is critical media literacy education the solution?
Photo Credit: Shutterstock
What we want you to know is
Research shows that children often start believing unproven conspiracy theories at the age of 14, and more than 80% of middle school students mistake “sponsored ads ” for“ news stories. ”
But what exactly should the media literacy curriculum teach?
At present, there are still divergent views......
Text: Yu-An Lai
According to the 2021 V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) report by the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, Taiwan has been the champion of “false information ” for nine consecutive years, making it the most frequently attacked country in the world by false information.
The government of Taiwan will invest 11.7 billion yuan in 2023, aiming to enable primary and secondary schools across the country to comprehensively promote digital improvement projects, so as to achieve "class has the Internet, there is a tablet", this policy is aimed at strengthening students' ability to use digital technology, but if children use it inappropriately, it will be counterproductive.
In the pursuit of the popularization of the Internet and the teaching of digital technology, we also have to think about how to teach children to distinguish between trustworthy news information and news when the huge amount of fake information on the Internet is overwhelming.
The younger you are, the more likely you are to be a primary target of false information.
Science magazine Scientific American reports that children are the primary targets of disinformation disseminators.
According to a 2019 study by the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, children usually start believing unproven conspiracy theories at the age of 14, and many contemporary teenagers have difficulty judging the credibility of online messages.
Researchers at Stanford University also found in a 2016 study that more than 80 percent of middle school students misidentified “sponsored ads ” as“ news stories. ”
Fake messages are often delivered to young internet users, directing them to misleading content.
A 2018 Wall Street Journal survey also found that YouTube ’ s algorithms push personalized recommendations for different users, but they tend to recommend videos that are more extreme and far-fetched than what users originally watched.
For example, when researchers search for “eclipse ” as a keyword, they are directed to a video whose main theme is to imply that the Earth is flat.
YouTube is one of the most popular social media sites for young people, and for such extreme algorithms, Zeynep Tufekci, assistant professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, called it “one of the most powerful radical tools of the 21st century. ”
The influence of false information and false information cannot be ignored.
In response to the spread of false information, UNICEF provides the following 10 insights and recommendations
1.
Misinformation and disinformation on the Internet is an urgent public issue.
The power of fake information must not be underestimated. For children who are now active on the Internet, fake information is an important part of their daily lives.
Fake messages on social media are often more powerful, farther, faster, and deeper than the right messages, especially when the issues involve divisive, highly controversial, and highly emotional topics, such as immigration, gender politics and equality, and vaccination are hot topics.
2.
The impact and consequences of errors and false information on the real world
Misinformation and misinformation have been used to incite violence and crime against ethnic minorities (which can lead to the death and displacement of children), while misinformation and misinformation have reduced vaccination rates for children with Covid-19, undermined trust in news and science, and drowned out marginalized voices.
3.
Algorithms play a more critical role, even though misinformation and misinformation are often transmitted through people
Algorithms deliver personalized messages and news stories through users ’ digital footprints, but sometimes they can also recommend content that is inaccurate, misleading, sensational, and conspiracy theories.
Therefore, we can say that the algorithm may be a key carrier for amplifying the spread of false information.
4.
Children are vulnerable to errors and false information
Because children are in a developing stage, they do not yet have the ability to distinguish between reliable and unreliable information.
Not only will they be harmed by errors and misinformation, they may also continue to pass on the wrong information to their peers.
For younger children who do not use social media, they may also be exposed to false or false information through their parents, caregivers, or classmates.
5.
Still, children can challenge and debunk mistakes and misinformation
Now that they have become the primary targets and targets of misinformation, children can still actively fight them.
Children can contribute to fact-checking and deification efforts, such as the Covid-19 pandemic misinformation for Nepal.
The UNICEF Mission in Montenegro ’ s “Let ’ s decide what we want to watch ” programme provides young people with the opportunity to train in media literacy and journalistic skills to improve the quality of reporting on children ’ s rights.
6.
Education is especially important.
In order to help children to judge whether information is true or false, they should develop the ability to read and think critically from an early age.
Make sure that children have critical thinking skills, not only online, but also offline, in everyday life.
7.
It is necessary to take collective action to protect children.
Politicians, civil society organizations, technology companies, parents, and educators must all work together to avoid the harm that misinformation and misinformation can do to children.
There is no reliable data and research on how to slow down the spread of false and false information.
8.
Policymakers should develop norms of misinformation and misinformation based on children ’ s rights
UNICEF recommends that policy makers develop regulations for children to protect them from the effects of error and false information, while ensuring that they can access content safely.
Regulation should be based on the classification of content and ensure transparency and accountability.
This is a very significant policy challenge between the protection of rights on the Internet and speech.
9.
Tech companies can help combat errors and misinformation
UNICEF recommends that tech companies actually implement their declared policies and invest more in people and technology.
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YouTube in particular has been identified as influencing viewers’ exposure to extreme content, including flat Earth theories[ f0932c14-bf26-4a29-a8e3-cbacb4a1a279_599324161].

These online spaces act as echo chambers, amplifying fringe views beyond what would have previously been possible[ f61994b0-dc34-40d6-a1e2-a7f66b22774b_548175167].

Young people, especially adolescents and frequent users of social media or video platforms, are particularly vulnerable to exposure and persuasion due to their higher media consumption and often underdeveloped critical thinking skills[ f0932c14-bf26-4a29-a8e3-cbacb4a1a279_599324161].

A decline in critical-thinking education further contributes to the appeal and persistence of conspiratorial beliefs, as individuals lack the tools to analyze or debunk misinformation.

Demographically, flat Earth believers come from diverse backgrounds without a clear majority by age, gender, or formal education.

However, adherence is often higher among those with lower levels of scientific literacy and among frequent users of online media platforms.

Flat Earth engagement is also higher in areas where science education is less robust and social media use is prevalent.

Psychologically, believers tend to share high distrust of authorities and experts, an attraction to countercultural ideas, and a need to feel part of a select, knowledgeable group.

How do flat Earthers perceive themselves?

They believe they know a lot, though their knowledge is minimal

Isolation—social, psychological, or cultural—also plays a role, fostering a turn toward alternative explanations and tightly-bonded online communities.

The risks associated with flat Earth communities are mostly indirect.

For most, involvement is a curiosity.

However, immersion in tightly-knit conspiratorial groups can promote generalized distrust of science, authorities, and mainstream information sources.

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Content: Birth of Opposition
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Nadjib Belhimer
I constantly follow the writings of prisoners of conscience who have spent varying periods in detention, and I heard the testimonies of some of them about their diaries in prison, and I pass by the comments of many of those who have been prosecuted for their opinions, and every time I wonder what the authority gained from resorting to the imprisonment of peaceful demonstrators?
To be sure, the prison has been more solid activists whose conviction of the need to fight for change, and many of them feel proud of his sacrifice and show willingness to continue the peaceful struggle in order to embody the demands of peace, and more importantly, the prison has established the relationship between them on the one hand and their relationship to the cause they are fighting for.
For society, many people have discovered the misinformation of the media and the tools of propaganda on the Internet, and the smear campaigns have rebelled against those who launched them.
The reputation of the judiciary has been damaged by acquittals, which have raised questions about the defect of an innocent person serving nearly two years in prison without due process, the reputation of the state abroad has been damaged when it has been questioned by UN bodies and human rights NGOs, and even amendments to the penal code have become a pretext for politicizing legislation to use the law against peaceful political activists.
Political arrests, regardless of the legal characterization of the charges, are helping to create a new generation of activists with wider horizons, and crystallizing a new understanding of the reality beyond the detainees and those prosecuted to their wider surroundings.
We may not see these results clearly now, but the effect of this accumulation will be felt in a while.
To be sure, the card of fear has been exhausted, and keeping dozens of detainees in prison simply means that the PA is continuing the process of forming dissidents of another kind who are not distracted by ideological conflicts from the real goal of change or lured by the struggle of salons, closed halls and empty statements.

This environment may also facilitate adoption of related conspiracy theories, such as anti-vaccine or political radicalization movements, increasing the risk of further social isolation and science denial.

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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

Such groups can also become echo chambers that reinforce belief-driven narratives over logic or evidence.

In summary, while the belief itself is not typically dangerous, engagement with flat Earth communities, particularly for young or isolated individuals, can foster broader conspiratorial attitudes and skepticism of science.

For parents, the recommended approach is not necessarily exclusion but fostering dialogue about media literacy, critical thinking, and scientific reasoning.

Providing a supportive environment and encouraging open discussion can help ensure resilience against the influence of online conspiracy subcultures[ 6e47a5cf-47a7-42a3-812e-ef81ba1e7a5f_46222320].