Fisking "Flat Earth NASA are Liars part 1"

 Another day, another video by a flerf.  This one was sent to me by someone who posts on Facebook under the name Sean Angelo Mchugh.  Its name shows up on Facebook as "Nasatan exposed part 1". He also sent me a part 2, which may get its own post, and added "They are my videos so they don’t give opinions rather just raw facts" and went on to say that these facts are "all referenced".

Let's start by seeing if these are his videos.  I didn't find any photos of him, just memes on his Facebook profile, but his About page on Facebook says that he works at ARTSTOPSeany and Sean Angelo Mchugh artist and both of those have photos of possibly the same person

The YouTube channel the video is on is called CUBESMASHER and the description on the channel's About page says "Exposing the lies of the luciferian Freemasons".  There's no name, but the person speaking in the video is on screen most of the time, and this does seem to be the same person.

And this also appears to be the same person in this article, Artist Sean Angelo McHugh vows to clear his name after being charged with historic child sex abuse but since we're not meeting him in person, let's leave that for the courts to decide.

This is not the former American football player Sean McHugh or the accused US Capitol rioter, whose trial seems to be ongoing, I found details about him in Inside the Statutory Rape Conviction and Domestic Violence History of the Accused U.S. Capitol Rioter Who Taunted Cops as ‘Protecting Pedophiles’ and California Man Accused of Unleashing Can of Bear Spray on Cops Loses Bid to Move Jan. 6 Case from D.C. to Wolverine State

But back to Sean the flat-earther.  Let's watch his video.

As I write this it's got ten likes and 377 views, so maybe all he wanted from me is  more views.  He's "absolutely gobsmacked" that anyone would believe NASA, who, he says have been repeatedly proven liars.  On the screen is a quote from Albert Pike having something to do with Freemasonry.  According to Wikipedia, Pike wrote a book, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry in 1871.  Flat-earthers and conspiracy theorists of all sorts often display a great deal of paranoia about Freemasons, I don't know why.

Anyway, he's got a quote that drones on for a while, but I think can be summed up in saying that high-ranking Freemasons are supposed to believe that Lucifer is god, but not tell the lower ranks.  It's not found in the copy of the book at Project Gutenberg, however.  His copy seems to come from Amazing Discoveries which looks like a site of more conspiracy theorists with a section on Prophecy News.

He moves on to Wernher von Braun.  There's a photo of von Braun with Walt Disney, another 33rd degree Mason.  Is that the only evidence he's bringing of either of them being Freemasons, that they are standing together?  The photo is from when they met about Disney films on space exploration.  Or is it that von Braun was a Nazi, Nazism is Satanism, Satanism is Freemasonry? 

In an aside he says that we "lost the technology" to go back to the Moon.  This is a standard flerf misinterpretation, we no longer build the rockets and spacecraft used in the Apollo missions.  They think it's suspicious somehow.   There's more technology on a phone today, he says - yes, but there's no Saturn V rocket at the bottom of it.  He runs the clip of astronaut Don Petit saying "I'd go to the Moon in a nanosecond.  The problem is we don't have the technology to do that anymore".  As ever, flerfs suddenly trust NASA (remember the title of this video, NASA are liars?) when they say something they like. This is stuff I've seen in endless flerf videos, it's been dealt with.  He changes the color and slows down Petit's voice as if that demonstrates anything.

Now he's back to von Braun and Disney, who he says are connected to Aleister Crowley.  A quote from Gregory Garett says that Crowley, in addition to those two, was a member of "the NASA Dream Team".  This should be good, seeing how Crowley died in 1947 and NASA was founded in 1958.  There's a very small photo of the cover of a book in which it seems Garett wrote this, but it's too small to read.

He goes on to talk about Crowley and bands, The Beatles, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin.  Loads of them, all satanic.  He's done a previous video about that.  Is Paul still dead?  He doesn't say people are satanists if they aren't, it's all researched.

Oh wait, I figured out what this guy is doing, he's got a blurb about that book that mentions Crowley, but doesn't say he was a member of NASA.  Is he saying he is?  Or that someone else had some connection to him?  I think this and all the other blurbs are part of Google search results. 

Now he's talking about Jack Parsons, who was kicked out of Jet Propulsion Labs in 1944 due to following Crowley.  And Parsons died in 1952, six years before NASA was founded.  Another blurb from an also unnamed book by Gary Cartwright mentions, without context, Albert Einstein, Werher von Braun, Lyndon Johnson, Fidel Castro, Karl Marx, and Mao Zedong.  I'm pretty sure that neither Castro, Marx, or Mao worked for NASA.  I don't think he has any idea what he's even trying to insinuate here.

Now the blurb from the Parsons book is talking about "satanic-influenced mind-control experiment, supposedly run by the federal government" and then continues listing the names starting with Einstein.  Now he's reading a quote about "not understanding oneness is satanic" and then there's an ellipses meaning text has been skipped over, and von Braun's name.  He doesn't like evolution either and found another blurb mention evolution and von Braun.  But all these blurbs say is that the same book discusses Crowley and NASA, or evolution and von Braun.

"They're laughing at you guys" - actually he's right here, he's hilarious.

NASA, he claims comes from a word "nasatan".  Once again there's a small blurb from some book, but not an entire quote, so I have no idea what this word is or even in what language.  And NASA means "to deceive" in Hebrew (no, it does not, he didn't prepare, but I already blogged about it).  And the red part of the NASA logo looks like a snake's tongue.  What research skilz!  Repeating something every other flerf says.

Now he discusses "how many astronauts are masons"  And it's another of those book blurbs.  Which lists eight.  Googling how many people have been in space, one finds numbers in the 500's or 600's.  But it's worse, Lewis and Clark were masons!   A photo of masonic emblems is I suppose intended to be scary as he reads a few more astronauts' names.  Most of the Apollo astronauts were masons (no evidence of this presented).

There's an Orange Lodge where he lives, and the word orange, when you "put it through a numerical calculator" (he means some sort of Gematria) has a value of 33. It's the only color in the world that does that! And there are 33 degrees of Scottish Rite Masonry!  And one third of the angels fell from heaven with Lucifer!  Jesus died at age 33!

Buzz Aldrin took a Masonic flat to the Moon!  And brought it back.  Except he didn't go!  Norman, coordinate!

Most famous people were masons.  Area 51 - voice trails off.  The (unnamed) head of NASA was "knocking around with Aleister Crowley".  All famous songs are satanic. Masons are charitable because Satan gives them lots of money!  He's getting bored.  But he's still droning on.  Freemasons freemasons freemasons.  Charles Darwin was one.  He wrote that people evolved from rock.  His grandfather was, too.  And half-wrote a book for him, all he had to do was go to the Galapagos Islands and look at some finches.

He doesn't watch TV, but he hears there's a series about Leonardo (da Vinchi) who was another one and "just propped up as this genius".  And another Google search blurb says he was a freemason. 

Now that we've established that all astronauts are masons (by finding partial quotes from books that say that some were, without seeing their evidence)  And that masons are luciferians (with a quote from a paranoid website), if you disagree, please argue with him in the comments (all I see is one "really enjoy this" more comments from Craig McNeil from the FTFE channel on YouTube trying to set up a debate with him).  He can keep going all day and there's another half hour of this.

French people are all masons.  It all comes from there.  And Scotland.  The Jesuits are behind it.  Please do not forget this.

Now he's going to show some clips where NASA admits they cannot leave low Earth orbit.  But first, he's sorry that took so long.  But he's going to repeat some of it again, after which it's going to become interesting.  But not quite yet, he's going to compliment you for a while for watching this far.  And tell you again that NASA lies, quod erat assertum.  And rant a bit against theoretical physics, which means it isn't real.  

Maybe we're getting near those clips, there's a diagram that correctly shows you that Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is indeed low.  What a surprise!  It shows the height of Yuri Gagarin's, Alan Shepard's and John Glenn's flights and the International Space Station (ISS) and Hubble Space Telescope.  And the Moon is much further away (right again).  So it looks like he's going to show some clips saying we currently have no spaceships for leaving LEO, therefore we never did, and never went to the Moon.  But he's not going to tell us where to find these videos.  Well no need, I'm sure everything on YouTube is as reliable as every book from which Google search can provide excerpts.

Well the first, from flat earth channel ODD TV, says, in that annoying slow playback that NASA has admitted that we can't go beyond LEO.  Someone on the ISS says "right now we can only fly in earth orbit" (slow replay).  Again, that doesn't mean we weren't able to during Apollo. This goes on for a while.  It's just one repeated lie.

And the Buzz Aldrin cherry-pick.  Aldrin was asked why we didn't go back to the Moon, and he's clearly explaining that we did go, but haven't been back. It's a longer excerpt than usual, so there are some new cherry-picks.  He says that before Apollo, we hadn't sent people to the Moon.  This is replayed in slow motion to give the impression that he's saying we never sent people to the Moon.  Until today I had never watched this steaming pile of shit, but that is no longer true.  Aldrin goes on to correctly describe how earlier Apollo missions first went around the Moon, and then practiced landing (Apollo 10 descended from lunar orbit but did not go all the way to the surface before returning to orbit).  For no discernable reason "practice everything but landing" is repeated in slo-mo.  And then Apollo 11 made an attempt (repeated in slo-mo) to land.  And we did.  

Maybe repeat that in slo-mo?  Instead, a picutre of Aldrin making the "OK" sign over his eye.  I think that this is supposed to be something masonic but he spares us that.

So if they haven't been to the Moon ...  This is another standard flerf tactic, assume the result you want, and then make up reasons why "they" are lying about it.  Oh, the "hide God" nonsense.  Aldrin took Communion on the Moon.  The read from Genesis on Apollo 8.  If they're trying to hide God, they're really doing a terrible job of it.

But not everyone is in on the scam.  The people making the parts are really doing that.  Only the 33rd degree folks know this is cartoons for adults.  Disney animators don't know, either (what they don't recognize their own work on TV?)

35 minutes in, he starts part three, where he's going to make the usual flerf lie that there are no real photos from space.  And, this is another standard flerf tactic, ask why there isn't evidence, in this case a real-time video from launch to high enough orbit to show the whole globe.  Which of course he would also reject as false.

And he then wants to zoom in on Australia and see people upside down.  Has no idea what cameras are able to see at what distance.  Maybe he'd also like NASA to read the license plate on his car and tell him where he left it.  

NASA admits there are no real photos from space, says they have to be photoshopped.  As "evidence" he shows yet another unsourced video about the 2002 "Blue Marble 2.0" image which is indeed a composite.  And the video explains why this one image had to be photoshopped.  But if something is called 2.0, there was probably a 1.0, and in this case that's the 1972 Blue Marble.  And then there's the 1968 Earthrise, both of which were taken on film, using a camera.

He then takes a photo of a salt lamp, masks out all but a circle, and claims it looks like a planet.

But what about satellites?  In September 2021 there were 4,550 satellites.  Well, a screenshot is evidence, right?  But he did by some chance land on something not made up by a fellow wongle, here.  And he posts this.

Here's a map of Starbucks locations in Manhattan.  Is much of the island covered completely with Starbucks?  No, if the coffee shops were to scale, they would be hard to spot, on an island that is 13 miles wide at most.  Same goes for satellites around a 7,917.5 mile planet.

Why don't they crash into one another, he asks?  Why don't all those Starbucks merge into one giant one, with an exceedingly long line to get your coffee, but enough tables for everyone in the Tri-State area?

And 99% of the internet travels between continents via underwater cable.  But did anyone tell him that all those satellites are for satellite internet?  (What Is a Straw Man Argument?)

Satellites are not in space, they're on high altitude balloons.  But I thought we could get into LEO?  And then he says that some are in LEO, but only for the military (as usual, no evidence, not even a screenshot).  And now, after saying there are some in space, he says there aren't any. There are no real pictures of satellites on the internet (he's lying).  All satellite dishes point to the east (proof - one photo).  Well it could be to the west, too.  But never up.

NASA's livestream (I suppose from the ISS) is both made in a studio, but also never shows satellites.  Well then why can't they bring a model of a satellite into the studio?   And he lost the video, but he says he saw a hand adjust a lens from outside the ISS, and since he's presented no evidence up to now, why should he suddenly start?  And there are bees in space (bits of debris, that don't look like bees at all).  The internet has pulled all this down, well isn't that convenient?  You won't find these videos (but somehow his video of these supposed bees is still there).  There are bubbles in space (Eric Dubay lie #163).  Astronauts are on harnesses, which he talks about while not showing you.  Things disappear (because videos are shortened or frames get dropped)

Rockets don't go straight up, they are going into the ocean (no).  The Red Hot Chili Peppers sung that the Moon landings were faked in a Hollywood studio (the actual lyric is “Space may be the final frontier but it’s made in a Hollywood basement” which isn't terrible from memory but can't he look shit up before lying about it?)  And they're Satanists.  And why are they telling you what you think is the truth?  Because "it's part of their decree to tell the people what they're actually doing" (huh?)

Conclusion: this is all the usual flerf lies, misunderstandings, cherry-picking, and paranoia.  He's discovered not one thing himself, every bit of this has been posted by other flerfs, some of which got enough views to make money, unlike him.  And he thinks he's done research.

  

A conversation with a religious Jewish Flat-Earther

It's a standard flat-earth claim that rainbows are semicircles because the dome that they think is above the flat Earth is a hemisphere.  In fact, rainbows are circular, but the bottom is only seen at high altitudes.  See How to see a full circle rainbow, from which this photo is taken.

But I found someone on Facebook who seemed to be making an additional claim that double rainbows are the result of "The sun and the moon and the stars are set in the second firmament. What you see is the reflection\projection of them" and when I asked where he got it from, he posted this image of Hebrew quote.  Only a bit more back and forth did he ask if I understand Hebrew (fortunately I do)

I was too busy to read it then, he identified it as coming from Bereshit Rabbah, I only replied that it is not a physics textbook.  Tonight, I posted a longer response, which I'm slightly changing here because Blogger has more formatting options than Facebook. for example you can only have one image per post or comment and hyperlinks are harder to enter.

Only an עם הארץ (ignoramus) quotes a source without a מראה מקום (precise reference, how this is done varies depending on the source, in Midrash Rabba, of which Bereshit Rabbah is one, it's generally by chapter and paragraph). I don't know why you post images of text instead of text. Just in case you think it makes it hard to find the source that way, it doesn't, all I had to do was right-click, search in Google Lens, select some text, and found it Bereshit Rabbah 6:6  Of if you prefer your text vocalized, here 

So let's see what it says. I'm working from the second copy and not comparing to see if there are variant readings, Sefaria doesn't have English translation for this yet, so I'm doing it myself.

In what sphere are the Sun and Moon located? In the second רקיע (the Hebrew word translated as "firmament" or "expanse" or just "sky". As it is written (Gen 1:17) "And God set them in the expanse of the sky ..." (Rashi, explains this to mean the expanse above the sky)

I'm going to paraphrase to attempt to make it a bit clearer, a similar derivation is made from (Nechemia 9:6) "... You (God) made the heavens and the heavens above the heavens, and all their hosts ..." and again, reading this as that there are at least two layers of heavens and the "hosts", e.g. the stars, are in the second one.

And from the Earth to the expanse is a journey of 500 years, and the thickness of the expanse is another 500 years, and from one expanse to the next is one more 500 years. None of the commentaries at Sefaria explain this distance, but I read it as, the distance it would take to walk (or perhaps ride) in 500 years,

How far is that? Well there's a unit of distance in Jewish law called a parsa (unrelated to parsec), whose name comes from the Persian parasang. Herodotus (source in link about parasang) said that an army could travel five parasangs per day and it's believed to be between 3 and 3.5 miles. In Jewish law it's 8,000 cubits (about 2-2/3 miles) and an average person can travel that far in 72 minutes. Well maybe an army moves slower than a pedestrian, or stops more often.

So let's say our traveler walks for 720*8 minutes or 9.6 hours a day, using 3 miles per parasang, that's 21.36 miles. Let's give our traveler a lunch break and round that to 20 miles. Note that I'm assuming that the 500 year journey is made of days' journeys and not how far a person could travel if they never stop. So 20 * 365 * 500 is 3.650,000 miles. And we need to triple it to get to the second expanse.

That's a bit of a problem for FE's "local" Sun and Moon. In reality, the Moon is an average of an average of 238,855 miles away and for the Sun it's 93 million.

Well back to the Midrash, on the first day of Tekufat Tammuz, the summer solstice, nothing has a shadow, as it is written (Psalm 19:7) and nothing is hidden from His Sun. This is true at noon on either Equinox and is dangerously close to how Eratosthenes measured the size of the globe.

And the sphere of the Sun has a sheath, as it is written (Psalm 19:5, four verses after the one on Werner von Braun's tombstone) "... He placed in them (the heavens) a tent for the Sun". And a channel of water is before it, when it goes forth, the Holy One blessed be He reduces its strength with water so that it does not burn the world, but in the future He will remove it from its sheath and burn the wicked as it is written (Malachai 3:19) "... and He will burn them, on the coming day".

I once saw, in a program of short Israeli animations, a Claymation where a rabbi was explaining this verse from a podium, adding a commentary that this will not hurt the righteous, and then the camera pans to the audience, who are all melting.

There is then a debate about the nature of Hell, is it only what will happen on that day, is it a place that already exists, or does fire emerge from the corpses of the wicked and burn them (rather than an external source)

The passage ends saying that had God placed the sun in the first heaven, no one would be able to withstand the heat of the day.

The same guy also provided another image, this time from a commentary, the Or Hachaim.  This time it almost gives a reference, Verse 20.

Well I didn't need Google Lens for this one, it was obviously on Gen 1:20 (but only because that's the first chapter in the Bible, it's either laziness, or an attempt to make it hard to verify, to not put the full reference when quoting something), and this time Sefaria has translated it into English, so I'll just post the relevant parts of their translation.

It's about the creation of  "birds that fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky" and this commentary explains that the odd wording "expanse of the sky" by referring to the previously discussed midrash.  What's even the point?  If you take Midrash literally (which according to Maimonides makes you a fool), how does it contribute that a commentary quoted the Midrash?  Either you already believed it, or you didn't, but how does source 2 quoting source 1 help?

I asked him if his own private Torah study convinced him of FE, or he was taught it in a religious framework (yeshiva, shul, etc.) he ignored my question and just kept sending me more religious sources.  Eventually he sent me a list of flat-earth videos in Hebrew, but it's still not clear if this is in answer to that question or he just did a search for "flat earth" in Hebrew on YouTube.  I may watch and discuss them later.  Meanwhile I'm just adding them to a private playlist (Flerf rabbis) and translating the titles. 

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zW7BxMrauo Rabbi Chen Shaulov - Flat Earth?  True or False 

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsPMixoRJq4 Rabbi Daniel Asor about the Flat Earth (this is on an Israeli flat-earth channel with lots of videos)

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6QMHif7LlE The Flat Earth - a photo of Mount Hermon from the Dead Sea, nothing is = hidden = no curvature, no sphere by Rabbi Chen Shaulov part 2 (this one is from Shaulov's own channel)

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhGR1gRa-lI part 1 of the previous

5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kaZv64ueXQ And what is the connection between Jesus, Martin Luther, René Descartes, Copernicus and flat earth?  (this is by Rabbi Dov Berkovits)

6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kaZv64ueXQ (this is the same link as the previous one)

In #4 and #5, the rabbi is referred to as "the gaon".  In Modern Hebrew, this word means "genius" and comes from a Biblical root meaning "pride".  Classically, it was used to refer to the heads of the two major yeshivas in Babylonia in the post-Talmudic period, Wikipedia says between 589–1040, and more recently was used to refer to a small number of exceptional figures such as The Vilna Gaon.  More recently just about any rabbi can be called "gaon" and the title has been rendered meaningless. 

And then there's this image that he posted.  

At the bottom of the image are the words "Daat - Emet".  And a search for the text, finds that it comes from a website by that name.  Unfortunately for him, going to the homepage reveals that this is "the movement for liberation from religion".   Oops.

Rabbis against the Moon Landing

This post came out of a photo at that’s too much woo for this Jew

MEMRI is, depending on who you ask, "publishes and distributes free English-language translations of Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Pashto, and Turkish media reports" or "aims to portray the Arab and Muslim world in a negative light through the production and dissemination of incomplete or inaccurate translations and by selectively translating views of extremists while deemphasizing or ignoring mainstream opinions" (both quotes from Wikipedia) 

But that's not what this post is about.  I decided to look for rabbis who deny the moon landing . So I did some searching. I came across a blog from 2012 (referring to an earlier one from 2009) that said "the Satmar Rebbe believed the moon landing must have been faked". So I looked for sources, and there, in the comments, was someone who asked for sources. Oops, that was me.

The blogger replied with two links. One is to a site hashkafah.com which was active at the time but has since gone offline, I wish there were archives somewhere, I may have been involved in the discussion, there, too.   Another is to imamother.com, where an anonymous poster wrote in 2007 "'Science' tells us that men have walked on the moon. The Torah tells us that above the earth is the Yesod of Aish and that anything that passes through it would burn up." and someone responded (at the bottom of page four) "Is the one about not having landed on the moon from the Satmar Rebbe? As far as I know, he's the only one to have said that."

Yesod means element and aish means fire, she's referring to the classical Four Elements and probably to Hilchot Yesodei Hatorah 3:10 or some later source based on it, which puts the "sphere of fire" below "the sphere of the Moon"  Also the thread at Imamother goes on for quite a while. mostly about other aspects of science, not the moon landing.  Also it was later discovered that two of the posters, TammyTammy and Sue DaNym were the same person, arguing with herself.  Because reasons?

But I haven't found a source for that claim or its attribution to the Satmarer or anyone else.

Josh, the blogger at Parshablog, referred to a different blog, about a different rabbi (Yaakov Kamenetzky) watching the Moon landing, and a commenter there wrote "Perhaps R’ Yaakov Kamenetzky Zt”l should have prayed to Hashem for extra guidance and sided with RaMbaM? Then he might have sensed that the "Chazon" - television broadcast, images, etc.,- was more than likely "faked" - part of Alma de Shikra" (the world of lies) and linked to a Moon landing conspiracy site that isn't working anymore (or at least not this second)

And there's this, from the Not the Godol Hador Archive (the blogger was later revealed to be Gideon Slifkin, brother of Nathan Slifkin, which is relevant because the blog entry begins by mentioning Nathan) "Reliable sources in Israel tell me that one of the kannaim, part of the group behind the Slifkin ban and intent on delegitimizing the Kamenetzky family (which is what the drive behind the Slifkin ban was actually all about), has been showing people a Foxtel documentary proving that astronauts never landed on the moon and it was all faked by NASA!"

I also once found and downloaded a copy of a "kuntres" (pamplet) about the Moon landing in Hebrew, but that was several computers ago.  I probably still have a copy on a backup, but don't know where.

With apologies to Arlo Guthrie

"Kids, this-piece-of-paper's-got-666-words-17-sentences-23-words-we-wanna-know-details-of-the-derp-time-of-the-derp-and-any-other-kind-of-thing-you-gotta-say-pertaining-to-and-about-the-derp-I-want-to-know-youtube-guru's-name-and-any-other-kind-of-thing-you-gotta-say", and talked for ninety-three-million minutes and nobody understood a meme that he posted, but we had fun creating spam events and eating the crayons on the bench there, and I filled out the mudflood with the four part harmonics, and wrote it down there, just like it was, and everything was fine and I put down the pencil, and I turned over the piece of paper, and there, there on the other side, in the middle of the other side, away from everything else on the other side, in parentheses, capital letters, quotated, read the following words:

"Kid, have you unindoctrinated yourself?"

Fisking "Nikola Tesla - Limitless Energy & the Pyramids of Egypt

 Another video sent to me by a flat-earther.   I'm writing this as I watch it.  Text in quotes will be from the video, possibly paraphrases.  The rest will be my responses

"We don't know who built the pyramids" - It was the Egyptians.

"Stones cut with laser precision" - a unit of measurement might be more helpful but let's just say that's a figure of speech, stones can be smoothed without modern technology.  

"Stones weight as much as 80 tons from over 500 miles away" - heavy things can be moved without modern tech, too.  It takes a lot of people.

"There must have been a good reason to go to all this trouble" - probably, but I have a feeling a great leap of illogic is coming to explain that.

"We now know it was certainly not a tomb" - we do?  Or is the video merely asserting that?

"Tesla believed they served a higher purpose" - OK, he was a smart guy, but he also fell in love with z pigeon.  Hopefully just another figure of speech. "considering that Tesla is directly responsible for 80% of the technology we use today" - drawing shows a radio, light bulb, something marked AC which is probably a generator or motor, x-ray, laser, cellphone, tower with a some unspecified thing on top, and car. Tesla did claim to have invented a death ray, which is what comes up when I google to see what he had to do with lasers, but details are scarce, there's no way to know if it involved lasers, which as far as we know were invented in 1960, 18 years after his death.  Or did the death-ray use x-rays, discovered by W.C. Röntgen in 1895. Tesla described a communication device that would fit in a vest pocket in 1926, but did he build one?  Radio?  Many people were working on radio at the time  Or even earlier, Tesla filed for a patent on wireless telegraphy in 1897 but Heinrich Hertz first produced and detected radio waves in 1886 and Marconi submitted his patent application in 1896. 

"Perhaps we should view his theories with a more open mind" - OK, but even really smart people's claims need to be tested.  There's a story about Richard Feynman visiting a research facility where they were testing one of his predictions, at a cost of thirty seven million dollars.  "What, you don't trust me?" he asked.  But this was his humor, Feynman knew it needed to be tested.

"Suspend your disbelief" - no, I think I'll go on fact-checking.

Tesla is quoted as talking about non-physical phenomena" but did he mean some sort of handwaving "energy" or things like radio and energy transmission that don't use physical media?  The very next thing in the video is a 1905 patent application of his for transmitting electrical energy through the natural medium.  His design was called an "electromagnetic pyramid"  A voice, not the narrator's says that he thinks it was shaped like a pyramid because of his interest in the ancient ones.  Or was it a good way to build a sturdy structure, just like the originals?  The speaker appears but is not named.  Oh, my bad, it was underneath closed-captioning, he's Jack Cary, a former Naval Intelligence Officer.

He goes on to say that while pyramids "exhibit fractal energy" efficiently, citation needed, also what is "fractal energy", other than something that sounds science-y? "But what he discovered was it was the location of the pyramids that created the power" and he built his two pyramids "according to the laws of where the Pyramids at Giza were constructed" - laws?  Will we hear what those laws are?  "it had to do with the elliptical orbit of the earth" - remember how this was sent to me by a flat-earther?  But anyway, aside from these were special places somehow, no details of those laws.

"Tesla's device disappeared after his mysterious death in 1943" - a newspaper clipping on the screen helpfully lists his age at the time - 85.  We do remember that humans are mortal, right?  But the devices didn't disappear then, they were torn down earlier.

By the way, here's a photo of Wardenclyffe Tower, from 1904.  Doesn't look that much like an Egyptian Pyramid much, does it?  It was torn down for scrap in 1917 to cover his debts.  The same year this photo was taken, the same thing happened to his other location, in Colorado Springs although the scrap was only sold off two years later.

A new voice, "According to Nikola Tesla 369 is a key to the universe".  His name is Billy Carson, a researcher (into what?). "Tesla became so obsessed with this 369 that he would drive around a building three times before going inside" - this was probably easier when construction was less dense, as you can see from the illustration above, the tower arose from a detached building..  "He cleaned his plates with 18 napkins" - this is OCD, not science, or even numerology.  I have heard of people who are scared of the number two, and if they need an even number of something, will buy one more.  "lived in hotel rooms only with the number divisible by three" - this is attributing some sort of significance to a meaningless measurement, the hotel could just as easily used a different numbering system, or letters of the alphabet.

Skipping more examples of his obsession with three, Carson claims he was "trying to make us understand that we did not create mathematics, we discovered them".  A quote of Tesla saying that might be useful to help us decide if this is what Tesla was doing, or what Carson thinks he was, if it exists it's not here.

Back to the first narrator "Could it be possible that ancient humans created monuments like the great pyramids to remind us of these truths?"  Or did they already know enough math, sufficient for collecting taxes and constructing labor-intensive structures?

New speaker, Graham Hancock, author, Fingerprints of the Gods.  Sumerian texts talk of "seven antediluvian sages".  antediluvian means "before the flood", the biblical story of Noah's flood is similar to the flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh but the sages seem to be from other ancient inscriptions.  They're depicted in fish costumes, holding bags, and similar bags turn up in other ancient carvings.

Back to unnamed narrator, "could the sages have reemerged after the flood to teach the knowledge of the universe?" and "Egyptian depictions of gods are not holding a bag but an ankh"  "Could these carrying devices be transmitting the same kind of energy?"  Well there's a leap of logic that could use some evidence.

New speaker, Anton Parks, author, Eden and Researcher of Ancient Civilizations who believes "the great Pyramid was built by Isis .. to reincarnate Osiris into Horus.  It is quite complicated".  I can't tell if he believes the pyramid was built by humans, in light of their beliefs about Egyptian Gods, or that Isis et. al. really existed and she personally built the pyramids.  But wouldn't the latter mean that there weren't ancient humans with advanced knowledge, there were creatures of a different sort who had it (or perhaps were just had those abilities)?

A lot of Egyptian and Sumerian mythology follows, which I'm going to skip until it gets to some point.  OK, Isis lives underground,  nd there are underground passages in Giza, where the pyramids are.  He superimposes modern knowledge and claims that Isis used Osiris's genetic codeto reincarnate him.  "The Great Pyramid allowed Isis to find Osiris's soul again". There's a big citation needed, unless he's only talking mythology and the video maker is the one taking it as history.  "She would have put Osiris's genetic code in the pyramid" - nope I he's speaking literally.

Back to first narrator, "there is evidence that below the [pyramid] something existed there that was much older".  Robert Schoch, Ph.D, professor of natural science at Boston University says the site was "a a sacred mound"

Back to first narrator, who asserts that the resurrection story is connected to how the pyramid is "connected with the afterlife" - yeah, kings were buried in them, but they didn't come back to life and leave, their corpses were removed, either by grave robbers or archeologists who put them in museums (I'm not saying that there's not an element of grave robbing involved in that, too).

I've lost track of who is speaking, "the pyramid is an attempt to create a three-dimensional model of the afterlife realm"  But (original narrator) "could there be another hidden message?" - wait, what's the first message, "Resurrections performed here, inquire about rates?"

Andrew Collins, author, From the Ashes of Angels talks about geometry, "music of the spheres"  and this has to do with "the perfect fourth which has a ration of 4:3 and the perfect fifth, 3:2" - do we get to the the minor falls, the major lifts,  and the baffled king?  I tried to find a video from the Tel Aviv show in 2009, there were a lot of cellphone videos, but none were very good, so here's one from London, I think from the same year.

OK, so where we're going here is numerical pareidolia, if a musical ratio is 4:3, and something else has the same ratio, they must be connected.  Original narrator says "if the Great Pyriamid is indeed a construction to harmonize creation" (but is it?  and what would it mean to harmonize creation?) "wherein lies the code to such a great power?" (how many watts?)

Robert Bauvel, author, The Orion Mystery, "it has a very slight concavity on each side making it eight sided .. produces a bizarre geometry  .. when we analyze it it produces numbers: that shouldn't be there", examples are the universal constant (maybe I misheard and it should be plural, and it means constants like the Gravitational Constant (sorry again, flat-earthers), or maybe he meant the Fine Structure Constant phi (connected to the Golden Ratio), Euler's number.  "Could this geometry produce a message?" - or could it just be cherry picking, if you get to play with what units you measure things in and perform random operations, you can get rather close to any number you want.

"The Great Pyramid is  [close to] latitude 30" and it seems "the latitude choice was derived from astronomy".  It's unexplained how some lensing effect made them think it was exactly 30 so I can't check if that was true, 30 is "one third of the way between the equator and the North Pole" and this "speaks to our planet" - but does the planet speak back?

And there's a tiny deviation from facing true north, "thee sixtieths of a degree, almost eerie" and once again it is "speaking to the Earth" - what's it saying, "Oops?"

But there's more, if you multiply the size of the pyramid by 43,200, it "give you the dimensions of this planet".  Sorry again, flat-earthers.

"So in all those centuries and millennia when our ancestors went through the dark ages and didn't even know that they were living on a planet let alone the dimensions of the planet, all the ever had to do was go accurately measure the Great Pyramid, multiply those numbers by 43,200 and the have the dimensions of our planet"  This is nonsense, but it's still fun that a flat-earther sent this to me.  Did he even watch it or did he just read the title?

"Egyptologists are aware of this but they say it's a total coincidence, no significance to it whatsoever"  Well it is, but his reason for multiplying by 43,200 is that the number comes from "a key motion of the Earth" - more bad news for flat-earthers, the precession of the Earth's axis, and he now talks about another thing flat-earthers don't like, how the pole star changes.

Now he talks about the "constellation that houses the Sun on the spring equinox" which is currently Pisces, and that's why early Christians used a fish as a symbol, the Age of Pisces having just started at the time.   So the Zodiac moves one degree every 72 years and multiply 72 by 600 (why?) to get 43,200.  Wasn't that obvious?  Osiris was killed by Seth and 72 conspirators, that's the number of syllables in the Rig Veda and it's in Norse Mythology, "it can't be an accident".

Back to Tesla, lots of multiples of 3.if you play games.  This isn't terribly exciting, if you randomly pick whole numbers, look at the first N numbers or any N numbers starting anywhere, one third of them will be divisible by three.

But there's even more! Angkor Wat is exactly 72 lines of latitude east of Giza.

Back to Robert Bauvel, who says that in the future we will speak in mathematics.  More bad news for flat-earthers!

In the next video, the Great Sphinx, which Robert Schoch says is from at least 10,000 BCE.  Sorry to you too, biblical literalists.

Fisking "Moon Landing Hoax- NASA Scientist Admits We CANNOT Go Through Van Allen Belts!"

A flat-earther posted this video, by someone who only identifies himself as Agent S.  It's only five minutes long, so let's take a look.

The title mentions "NASA Scientist" - will we get to hear from this scientist?  Well, it opens with an image of Wikipedia's entry on Van Allen Radiation belt. He didn't include a link to this or anything else, because he doesn't want you to read the article.  If you did, you might notice section 7, implications for space travel, that discusses how the Apollo missions did travel through the belts.

He then switches to this image  (from that same Wikipedia entry) and describes the belts as "impenetrable layers" and then displays an article, NASA's Van Allen Probes Spot an Impenetrable Barrier in Space

But if you look at the text right after the title, right there in his image, this "nearly impenetrable barrier" stops "the fastest, most energetic electrons", not spaceships or astronauts.  Oops!

Well he moves on to discussing Orion missions to Mars, and a scientist (the one from his title?) says something he doesn't understand.  He shows an unsourced video, with an unnamed person (that scientist from the title?  ETA: his name is Kelly Smith, see photo at bottom, from another video.  But I don't see any identification, perhaps this is a spokesperson.) speaking "We are headed 3,600 miles above Earth.  Fifteen times higher from the planet than the International Space Station.  As we get further away from Earth, we';ll pass through the Van Allen belts".  And a screenshot from this other video shows the words "high radiation", he stops it to make sure you saw it

Resuming (and rewinding a bit), the NASA speaker says "It will pass through the Van Allen belts, an area of dangerous radiation.  Radiation like this can harm the guidance systems, onboard computers, or other electronics on it".  He pauses the video again, because he wants us to really pay attention.  Resuming again, "Naturally we have to pass through this danger zone twice, once up and once back.  But Orion has protection. Shielding will be put to the test as the vehicle cuts through the waves of radiation.  Sensors aboard  will record radiation levels for scientists to study.  We must solve these challenges  before we send  people through this region of space".

"Whoa whoa whoa whoa wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute" he interjects.  Kudos to scriptwriter.  He replays it twice and repeats it himself.   But didn't we already do that with Apollo 11 and enumerates each mission?  Yes, but evidentially he didn't read the Wikipedia entry with which he opened his video - "The astronauts had low exposure in the Van Allen belts due to the short period of time spent flying through them," with two footnotes. Oops again.

1. "Apollo Rocketed Through the Van Allen Belts". 7 January 2019.
2. "Apollo 14 Mission Report, Chapter 10". www.hq.nasa.gov. Retrieved 2019-08-07

Well why do we need to redesign shielding for a new spacecraft?  For one thing, even if nothing else had changed, we still would want to test it.  But transistors have gotten a lot smaller since the 1960's and 1970's which while on the one hand makes computers more powerful, increases their sensitivity to radiation.  And if we can further reduce exposure of astronauts to radiation, that would be good, too. 

In another video, cherry-picking from the same clip, I found a frame identifying the scientist.

 

Reviews of The Next Level (2022)

MCToon:

Planarwalk:

Dead Kennedy in Space (5 parts, NSFW language)

SciManDan (in several parts):

Here's my own post about the short clip, included in the film, that it claims is a boat being prevented from traveling to Antarctica.  I included the original, longer, video, and show that it wasn't headed there, and why it was turned back.

For reviews of the other "Level" films, see Reviews of Level (2021) and Reviews of Level With Me (2023)

R Chaim's last miracle (until the posthumous ones begin)

This one is making the rounds today.  If you want to honor R Chaim, I recommend learning something from one of his books.  Please wait until after the shivah before tossing a rock into Yanky Kanievsky's window. 

Three Days Before His Passing, Rav Chaim ZT”L Did Something Unusual

[COMMUNICATED]

News spread quickly last Friday afternoon that the Gadol HaDor, Rav Chaim Kanievsky zt”l, had passed away from a major heart attack. Just three days before his passing, however, the Rav was in the news:

For several years now, Rav Kanievsky has been the face & voice of most of Vaad HaRabbanim’s charity campaigns. Thousands of people rely on help from Vaad HaRabbanim to cover their most basic needs. Last week, Rav Kanievsky revived an ancient tradition: The writing of a kamia.

Rav Kanievsky created a limited number of copies of a handwritten letter originally composed by Rav Yeshaya of Kerestir, a rabbi whose students experienced “miracles beyond the limits of nature.” A limited amount of those who donate to Vaad HaRabbanim’s fund (link removed) will receive their ‘kamia,’ as a symbol of protection and success.

The demand for the kamia has shot up since Rav Kanievsky’s passing as this was the last charity campaign the Rav zt”l was involved in, after decades of lending his support.

Frum Charity

I just saw an ad with the title, "I want to win this war. With your help, I can live".  It's all over the sort of sites for people too frum to use the Internet but are here anyway.  It begins "Right now, we’re all feeling what it is to watch war unfold—the fear, the uncertainty, the anxiety. Never knowing what tomorrow or even the next hours will bring…"

Well if you are living in a future where WW III did not break out, you may have forgotten the Russian attack on Ukraine of 2022.  This link will probably remind you of the details, assuming the Internet and Wikipedia survived.  But back to the ad.  If you were reading it during the invasion, you were intended to think this was an appeal from someone trying to escape the war zone.  And who wouldn't have clicked on an ad with a boring title like "Six Year Old Child Needs Liver Transplant" because you can only care about the One Biggest Problem.

Now this child didn't write any of that, nor the glurge at the site that the ad links to, where some adult wrote "In the last month, I heard lots of whispers about my “condition dee-tee-ree-or-ating. I don’t know exactly what it means, but I’ve been feeling really sick lately"  I hope that he recovers, and by the time he's old enough to not be allowed on the Internet himself, all copes of the ad, the fundraising site, and the videos have been scrubbed.  To that end, I'm not linking to any of them.

One Biggest Problem is also why, IMUHO, the anti-vaxxers are upset about the invasion of Ukraine, they don't want anything distracting the public from their favorite conspiracy theory.

For more on Frum fundraising campaigns, see Nathan Slifkin's How I Helped Yanky Kanievsky Buy His Luxury Home 

The Evil Eye and the law firm

 There are ads that run on Haredi websites, with titles like "Remote Removal of Ayin Harah: Now 178 Yeshuos! 52 Verified By Law Firm!".  "Ayin Harah" is Hebrew for Evil Eye, and "Yeshuos" means "salvations, e.g. Evil Eye removed with success (how does one know?  I suppose by whatever problem going away, possibly by the placebo effect).

But what is a law firm doing in this story?  Is The Evil Eye a legal matter?  Is a Devil's Advocate involved?  Is this an updated version of "The Devil and Daniel Webster"?

How do they verify the claims of success?  The ad claims 

ALL(!) the emails published on his website (until 03/9/20) confirming his accurate reading of the lead, AND the emails people have sent him about the yeshuos they had after the procedure- ARE VERIFIED to be 100% genuine by an independent law firm!

But if you read the letter, it says that emails were sent by satisfied customers, and the law firm does "state unequivocally" that between certain dates, there are "indeed genuine emails from clients" and others "are 100% accurate quotes from emails".  How the law firm verified even this is not made clear, but it turns out that rather than verifying that someone's ill-fortunes improved, all they do is verify that someone sent an email saying so. 

The service offered by this ad "involves pouring molten lead into a pot of water (with various other ingredients)".  Success is not guaranteed.  But you have to pay first, because the Evil Eye, very conveniently, " is known to return if payment is not made."  Amulets are also available, which "protect not only from ayin horah- but "from ALL HARM" and have been  "tried and tested a thousand times".  The Evil Eye guy uses them himself, he "used to regularly become ill after doing the procedure of pouring the lead until he started to wear this". 

Prices: $130 for Evil Eye removal, $140 for an amulet (plus $10 for shipping).  

For more information about this alleged magical cure, see the Wikipedia article on Molybdomancy  The website being advertised is here.

Jam Sessions in Jerusalem

It's been a while since I updated my list of music venues and jam sessions in Jerusalem, I'll start with the jam sessions. i don't make it to every jam every week but when I do I post an album of photos on Facebook with a link to videos on YouTube.  I also included directions for places that are had to find with just the address.  They are all within waking distance from one another.

Most of these jams will have guitars, an electric bass, drums, and maybe a keyboard or a piano, if you want to play something else you'll probably need to bring it, and people frequently bring things like violins, double bass, and wind instruments or their own guitar, electric bass, maybe some elements of a drum kit.

Sunday

There used to be nothing much happening on Sundays.  Shuka Bar (which used to be inside the Shuk, and now is right across the street from it) was the only place with live music, but they're not doing that anymore.  They do have performances on other nights once in a while, however.

Now there's a Jazz Open Stage at Avraham Hostel (67 HaNevi'im, at the bar up one flight of stairs) from 8:30 PM to around midnight or a bit later, whenever they decide to stop it so people at the hostel can get some sleep (I think the only food they sell is pizza, I usually buy a soup at Alma at 70 Rechov Yafo and take a shortcut through a parking lot to get there).  It's hard to find my photos, I post them to the hostel's page, but I don't see them there, so go to my Avraham Hostel category on YouTube, there's a link from the videos to the photos.  The music tends to be jazz standards, some vocal.

And there is a blues jam at Blaze Rock Bar, its address is 23 Hillel St, but you won't find that address, go down Darom St and when you see a longish passage on the side opposite the Cinema Hostel and Dublin, but closer to Hillel, it's at the end of it.  It starts at 9 PM (which probably means 10, I try to give the actual starting times) and goes for two or three hours.  Sometimes after the blues musicians leave, the stoner rock jam which can start up at any night there might start, see Wednesday for more info.  The group for updates and my pictures is Bluesin @ Blaze on yom rishon  I don't get there every week, it depends on when the jazz jam ends.  

Monday

Besarabia.  Under the leadership of Daniel (Jesus) Azuelos until recently, it's now run by different jam regulars each week.  Starts at 11PM, goes until the musicians get tired, or owner or bartender wants to go home which can be 2 or 3 AM.  Sometimes there's a pre-jam show.  For updates and my photos, join JAM SESSION at Besarabia.  The music can be jazz, rock, pop, reggae, middle-eastern, really whatever people want to play.  Sometimes a singer will ask to sing a song, sometimes they will scat along with the jam.  If the songs get too pop-music I call that karaoke with live musicians.  And sometimes, the owner will perform his original songs. Sometimes, when Birman was open, the band that was playing there would come by, and Dan Birron, the owner of Birman, might come after his bar closed for the night.

Besarabia is in the basement of Migdal Ha'ir.  The address is 24 Ben Yehuda street, but the entrance is down the stairs at the corner of Ben Yehuda and King George.  These stairs used to lead to the Jerusalem Comedy Club and the supermarket that could also be reached from inside the Mashbir. take a left turn when you get to the bottom of the stairs.  If it looks dark, just go through the gate, and if the gate is shut, rattle it until someone opens it.  The horseradish vodka is an acquired taste (I still haven't acquired it).

Tuesday

John Smith (the bar in the Cinema Hostel, over the McDonalds, the non-kosher one on Shammai Street, not the kosher one on Ben Yehuda).  But the entrance to the hostel is on Darom St, right before Dublin if you're coming from the direction of the McDonalds. There's also a staircase on Shammai from the parking lot that leads there.  Runs from about 8PM until midnight or so.  Some of the same jazz musicians from the Avraham Hostel and Besarabia jam come, the music is a mix of jazz standards (again, some vocal) and some pop songs if someone wants to sing something that the musicians know.  I post my albums to the events each week, and for now I'm posting them on YouTube under Assorted Venues, but I may eventually make a category just for that.

I want to say a few words about a now-defunct jam.  I don't remember anymore where it started, for a while it was at Haozen Hashlishit, a record shop, but it had to leave because it was close to a residential building and noise from the jam, and from people taking a break outside, disturbed the tenants.  Now the former location Haozen Hashlishit is a gym.  Then the jam moved to Pergamon, which still has the occasional performance, but no jams.  And then it ended, leaving a hole in my Tuesday nights.  But there's usually a live show at Blaze, and the jam at John Smith, so once more, I don't have to go to sleep at a reasonable time.

Wednesday

Blaze Rock Bar.  I put directions on Sunday.  The jam starts at 11 and can run until whenever, depending when the musicians go home (once in a while there will be a show before),  Most of the performers are the people who can be found at Blaze any night of the week (unless there's a metal show somewhere else) and is often stoner rock which Wikipedia calls "a rock music fusion genre that combines elements of doom metal with psychedelic rock and acid rock".  Or someone could show up and play something else.  This jam can break out at Blaze any night of the week after the scheduled performance ends and it can take a long break on Wednesday before resuming.  I post my albums on BLAZE ROCK BAR group

Saturday

Birman used to have a jam session, but they closed.  It moved to Roxanne, and I was at the first one, but I stopped in there sometime in January, and the bartender told me it was taking a break.  Roxanne has rebranded as Hagoren that has Israeli music shows on Tuesdays.  For a jazz jam session, see above, under Sunday.

Sin Repair

 For years, I had been seeing ads like this on bulletin boards around Jerusalem about repair of sins and repair of "the foundation".

Eventually I figured out that what they meant by "the foundation" was one of the Sefirot of Kabbalah, Yesod (whose name translates as "foundation") and is related to the genitals, if the Tree of Life from Kabbalah is overlaid on a human body (ignoring that there's only one Sefira for two feet), Yesod winds up there.  I remember a woman giving a religious lesson about Joseph, who is associated with Yesod (I think because of his refusal to commit adultery with his master's wife) rather bashfully mentioning "the male sexual organ"

So I saw one again last week, I was walking home from a usual late night listening to music at a bar, and there was a break in the cold and rain of Jerusalem winters (it was a balmy 46F), and passed this poster.  So I decided to go and see what it was about.  The instructions said to fast from dawn, and to declare one's intention to do so the following day, but I didn't do that.  I didn't go to mock, just to observe.  Amateur anthropology.

So with a full stomach and well-caffinated, I headed to Yeshivat Hashalom, which is very close to Jerusalem's open-air market, Machaneh Yehudah.  The room looked like it could comfortably seat about 100 people with tables between the rows and was already overfull, and people kept arriving over the course of the afternoon.  In the back of the room there were special prayer-books that the yeshiva had printed, bags of ten-agorah coins (worth 3.1 cents apiece), and there was a certain number of coins in the bag which had some numerological significance that I had missed, there was an amplification system but I couldn't make out all the words sitting in the back which I think people were exchanging for the value of the coins, pieces of electrical wire (the color code in Israel is blue, brown, and green/yellow but there was no blue), and strips of cloth.  An employee of the yeshiva, would occasionally bring up more chairs or supplies in the elevator.

The ritual with the coins involved a text found in the prayer-book, broken up into sections, two people would do it together, each would say one line, put some (I think it was two) coins in the other's hand (as a form of giving charity, it was explained) who would toss them into a basin, basins had been placed on all the tables, and the basins would be passed back to the employee who would empty them into buckets, to the sound of pouring coins.  It struck me that if I tried to guess what an anti-semite imagines goes in in a synagogue, it might be something similar to this.

Some of the prayers were penitential ones, used on fast days and around the High Holy Days.  One, which lists sins, one per each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, was in the prayer-book with explanations of what each sin was in parenthesis, the rabbi read the parenthetical parts as if they were part of the text.

The cloth strips turned out to be "sackcloth" which most people turn on over their clothes.  I did see one person put it under his short, but I felt one, they were only as coarse as industrial carpet, and wouldn't have been painful.  The strips had Velcro at one end for easy fastening.

I don't recall if it was before or after the sackcloth, but then the rabbi said that he wanted everyone to give some some of money that was much larger than what they had paid for the coins, and anyone who didn't have that much cash could write a check, or fill out a form to their credit card company or to their bank to do it in payments.  I'n not positive that I heard the number, but I think I heard that in monthly payments it would be 202 Shekels for 26 months, which is worth $1,619.85.  There was also a numerological explanation for the amount, and I think it had to do with a number of fasts that a person should do to atone for sins, but they could replace it with a payment.  I think it was during the part encouraging people to pay that the rabbi told the story of a righteous man who told his family to avoid visiting his grave for the first twelve months after he was buried, as he would be tormented by demonic forces then for his sins, and it was best if they stayed away, and I think the point of the whole day was not merely to repent for sins, but to save oneself from punishments which even those who repented would be subject to, unless they either did the large number of fasts or payed to be excused from fasting.

After the money and forms were collected, people would walk to the front of the room to hand them in, they began to read from the special prayer-book.  There were different sections that would "correct" various sins. Many, but not all, were sexual, for example having sex with a non-Jewish woman, another man, maturation, a menstruating woman, bestiality (the title listed domestic animals, wild animals, and fowl for some reason, maybe just in case someone was unsure) and one which I would think would be rather rare, with one's brother's wife after his death.  And there were some other sins, violating the Sabbath, eating unkosher food, anger (the rabbi told of a righteous man who would immerse himself 150 times, that being the numerological value of the Hebrew word for anger), but one that stood out was writing an amulet for a pregnant woman to give birth before her time, I can say with great certainty that I had never even thought of doing that.  And there was one that repeat "may sins", it wasn't clear if that meant many different sins that had no specific prayer of their own or just a large number of sins.  Some people arrived only at the end of this, and I was thinking that they missed all the good sins.

At one of the prayers, I don't remember for what sin, people were instructed to wrap the wires around themselves, I could see that people near me were doing it around their legs.  I kept one of the wires as a souvenir, and wound it into a coil.  The rabbi referred to them as iron wires, but they were copper (I checked)

Two notes about the elevator, one is that it had a strip of cloth covering the optical sensor, so the door would stay open and it wouldn't return to the ground floor until the cloth was moved.  The other is that it had a mezuzah, which elevators do not need.

The rabbi also mentioned one sin, I think it was insulting a dead person, for which one should undress and roll around in thorny plants, and there was also something for which people should roll around in the snow.  People who didn't do this last month when we had some snow in Jerusalem, he said, could substitute splashing cold water on each arm eight times and their foreheads three times.

By this time it was time for Mincha, the afternoon prayer, which the rabbi's elderly father led in a very scratchy voice.  There was a long extra prayer at the end, and I watched what people were reading from their special prayer-books (I put on my glasses to see better) and there were many pages with a short prayer at the top, but most of the page was covered with things that were written but looked more like amulets than texts to be read, one example was the name of God, "I am" from Exodus 3, arranged seven to a line, in two sets of three lines (42 isn't just found in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but is a mystical number in Kabbalah, there is said to be a name of God containing that many letters) or other names of God arranged in patterns, for example instead of writing the name Shaddai in three letters, it would spell out the name of each of the letters.

Then there was a very paradoxical prayer, it made reference to Maimonides by addressing God as "the cause of all causes", but was a prayer to be spared the punishments that would visit one's corpse in the grave, something which Maimonides would have called nonsense.

By this time I was cold and hungry, so I skipped Arvit, the Evening Prayer, usually recited soon after the Afternoon Prayer, despite wanting to see the ritual with the cold water in place of the snow.  Around when I left, someone asked when that would happen and the rabbi answered, "snow after Arvit".  There was also going to be food, but I didn't expect that to be very exciting (I sort of expected the ritual where food is passed around, everyone recites a blessing over the food out loud, and everyone else answers "Amen", and then a different food, on which a different blessing is recited follows, and so on, which I believe is the source of "Amen parties"), and the market I mentioned earlier is full of restaurants, both fast-food and sit-down, so I fed myself, went home, and took a nap before heading out for the next night's entertainment, but when my alarm clock went off I was still tired and went back to sleep until the next morning, I slept for 13 hours.  I don't know if this was from standing for several hours (I had a seat at the start but gave it up to get a better look) and being cold and wet (during Mincha I went outside to the balcony where it was cold and drizzling) or from the two nights earlier that week that I had walked home, or the one that I stayed at a jam session so late that by the time it ended, a friend caught a taxi home, and I walked to the bus stop, they were running again because it was morning.

I don't think I'll go to the whole thing again.  Maybe I'll come back another year to see the "snow" and leaf through the prayer-book.  This was the last one for this year.  Some Jewish communities have special penitential rituals during the winter when the first six portions of Exodus are read, their Hebrew names, SHmot, Vayera, Bo, Beshalach, Yitro, Mishpatim, spell "Shovavim" (the same Hebrew letter can be pronounced either V, O, or U) which in the Bible means sinful (translations say "rebellious", "backsliding" or "faithless, in Modern Hebrew it means naughty, Dennis the Menace is "Dani Shovavani" in Hebrew) and in Jewish leap years, which this is, two more weeks are added, for the portions Terumah and Tetzaveh and then it's called Shovavim-Tat although Tat doesn't mean anything in Rabbinic Hebrew (in Modern Hebrew it's the equivalent of the prefix sub-)  

Some Jewish groups only perform special rituals on leap years, others do it every year.  I think Yeshivat Hashalom does it every year.. In any case, the next Jewish leap year is in two years.

One more souvenir that I took was a pamphlet addressed to people observing Shovavim (which mentions redeeming, e.g. replacing with a donation, 84 fasts) that is raising money for an organization to help religious women receive draft exemptions. In the Haredi world, women being drafted is considered a cardinal sin ("one should perish rather than transgress", a phrase that appears in the pamphlet) and in the Religious-Zionist sector, some women do National Service instead of being drafted and some serve in the armed forces.  There are five draft offices in Israel, three of which are somehow (details are absent) handled by this organization, and they are raising money to do the same at a fourth, in Teveria, if enough people donate 100 shekels (about $31) a month, which will still leave Haifa without their proection.

Haredi internet sites (which exist, despite the community's objection to the internet) frequently feature horror stories of women who, they claim, deserve to be exempted from the draft, but were turned down, here is one example.  The only one here is a woman whose request was denied because she left her cellphone (also forbidden by these communities) on over the Sabbath but did not use it.  I don't know what anyone else does, but I put mine in mute, so it won't make noise in case there is a wrong number or a social media notification, but leave it on to use as an alarm clock.

Reviews of Level (2021)

Since the flerfs are posting a trailer for "The Next Level" (and links to crowdfunding), here's a collection of reviews of last year's "Level".

MCToon:

Greater Sapien:

Dead Kennedy in Space: (this one has some NSFW language and a few insults I wouldn't use myself)

SciManDan: (This was originally released in three separate videos, here are all of them combined)

And here is what narrator of the film, Eric Dubay, thinks about a historical figure he admires

For reviews of the other "Level" films, see Reviews of The Next Level (2022) and Reviews of Level With Me (2023)