Jazz Open Stage @ Abraham Hostel, Feb 12 2023

I'm blocked from posting on Facebook (temporarily, I hope) so I'm trying to put photos on my blog for now.  These are from the jazz jam session that takes place every Sunday at Abraham Hostel in Jerusalem (and on Monday at their Tel Aviv location).

Click here for the videos.

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What flat-earthers believe in place of gravity

 1. The Earth is accelerating upward at a constant 9.8 m/s²

This claim was made by The Flat Earth Society (I haven't found a source for this).  Flerfs get very angry about this explanation and typically say things like "The Flat Earth Society is controlled opposition".  I suppose this means that they think that the FES is trying to deliberately make flat earth look ridiculous, as if it needs help.  

A typical criticism of this claim by debunkers is, if this were true, Earth would have long ago exceeded the speed of light, but this is mistaken - length contraction and time dilation would prevent an constantly accelerating body from reaching c. 

2. Electromagnetism

This usually involves a large amount of handwaving and word salad, and still fails to explain why electromagnetism both attracts and repels, but gravity only attracts, and why a Faraday cage can block EM but not gravity.  But flerfs don't deny gravity because they want flying cars, they deny it because gravity tends to make planetary-sized objects roughly spherical, explains why water isn't flung into space like a spinning wet tennis ball, and why the atmosphere doesn't need a dome to keep it contained.  So if EM is why we aren't floating, why wouldn't it also make big masses spherical and keep water and air on them?

3. "Density and Buoyancy"

Flerfs will repeatedly mock gravity, saying that if it was real, it would cause objects to "stick" to Earth, but and post photos of oranges in water, or metal floating in liquid mercury.

They ignore that buoyancy requires gravity.  Repeat these experiments in zero-gravity, and buoyancy vanishes.  And one doesn't need to go into orbit or even an airplane simulating weightlessness.  Just dropping something off a building will suffice.  It's probably safer to try that with the two oranges than an anvil and mercury

Fisking "Planet Flat Earth | 2020 Documentary II"

A flerf on Facebook offered to share a video, "And whoever want a flat earth documentary i will share. We dont share it openly on YouTube is because it get deleted due to the monopoly of nasa as they dont want ppl to know truth."

So I asked, "is it better in some way then the FE videos that are available on YouTube?" and he replied "it made me a flat earther. I used to moke them. Sending you in messenger" - note, he never sent it to me.  I neglected to ask him if he used to mock FE videos, make them, or smoke them.

Well that didn't answer my question, so I tried to clarify and asked him for ".. what other FE videos, et al, you previously saw but were not convinced by and what about this one you found more persuasive.  His response, "this one you cannot find by search. Its a private link."

So I asked him if it was being unsearchable that made it persuasive, and he said "the facts in make it convincing".  When I asked him what facts those were, he said "you should just watch it and you’ll know. I dont wanna give spoilers" which in flerf means "I don't want to defend this steaming load, I just want to increase the view count"

But he posted a screenshot somewhere else in this very long comment thread.  This group rejects links in posts, I also couldn't post videos by They Might Be Giants there.

Well let's see how hard it is to find.  I typed the title into the YouTube search bar, and there it was, the first result.

So let's get down to it, here's the video if that was too hard to do yourself.  And remember, is BIG secret!

It opens with a clip from a Hibbeler productions video, sounds like Eric Dubay/Dubaz droning that "it is flat as far as we can tell" motionless, too.  Is this Level or a different Hibblefest?  He cherry-picks photos that don't show the curve, ignoring those that do.  He also repeats the chestnut about the horizon rising to eye level, only this time it's the eye of the camera.  No, that's just where you're looking or pointing the camera. 

A different voice says that everything from NASA is fake.  They like to harp on NASA, ignoring that we have known the Earth is a sphere for millennia before NASA was founded in 1958.  The voice asks that NASA point the Hubble telescope at Earth, ignoring other probes that were designed to do just that,   Complains that the 2002 Blue Marble has the same clouds more than once, something NASA does not attempt to hide.  This is what flerfs do, this one image is photoshopped, therefore everything is.

This is all standard flerf propaganda, nothing new hear, I'm going to move faster.  The crock about "eight inches per mile squared".  "Longest bridge in the world"  A clip from "Men in Black".  Horizon is flat.  Experiments (unnamed) show no rotation

You can't see Japan from California because the air is too thick.  The endlessly repeated dramatic music is getting to me, enough kettle drums, I'm muting and just going to look at the subtitles from now on.

Bill Nye on watching a boat disappear over the horizon.  Claim that this is due to "perspective"  "Bringing back" a boat that hasn't gone over the horizon yet.

Flerfs sweem to watch much more Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson than any other sector of the viewing public, and in the next clip, sound-bites from Neil.  Flerfs love to quote him saying the Earth is wider at the Equator and then show an image from space, ignoring that the widening is very small.  It's 12,756 km at the Equator and 12,725 at the poles, but flerfs have stopped listening by now, because numbers are involved.  The clip even quotes Neil saying "slightly".  Same derp about "pear shaped".

A flerf saying "we don't know shee-it".  Well yeah, they don't.  A video of a camera attempting to auto-focus on a planet or star.  "How the fuck did you figure out ..." I call this phenomenon "flerfsonal incredulity"

Stars should do "strange motions" but move in circles.  Someone ranting about a frozen moon whose name he can't remember.

"Local sun". "Do you really think the sun is going down?"  Salt flats

Chicago seen from "across the Great Lakes" (they couldn't be bothered to look at a map and see which one Chicago is on?) ignoring how the bottom is hidden by the curve of the Earth.

Clip from TV news saying it's a mirage, their intelligent response is a big red button labeled "BULLSHIT".  Great refutation, as always.

Back to the repeated clouds in photos of the Earth.  And someone saw "sex" in the clouds.  And the continents are different sizes!  Tens of thousands of satellites, animation that makes them look much larger than they are, just like Manhattan is completely covered in Starbucks, so much so that they have apparently merged. 

There are no close-ups of Earth (and I suppose they want to see the whole thing at once, too) or upside-down buildings in Australia. 

OK, 18 minutes into an hour and 6 minutes, I give up, this is the same old same old.

For What it's Worth(less)

Pareidolia strikes deep
Into your feed it will creep

It starts when you listen to flerfs

Ask for proof, memes come and drown you in derp

Fisking a flat-earth meme

 I found this meme in two groups yesterday, by the same poster.  I didn't check to see if he posted it in more places.  Below is my response.

How to tell someone else has learned all their science from YouTube (even though that if they looked, they would also find videos explaining this there, too.

* They can't predict what the effects of Earth's rotation would be but they repeat "1000 MPH" instead of plugging that into the the formula for centripetal acceleration together with the radius of the Earth.

* They refuse not only to believe other's measurements of curvature, but refuse to try to measure it themselves. They will probably use an incorrect formula for how far an observer can see which does not take into account the height of the observer or observee. They may ignore that they cannot see the bottom of the observee. Or claim that a telescope can "bring it back".

* They use "perspective" as an all-purpose answer without knowing what it means.

* They don't understand aviation

* They don't understand how the distance to the Sun was measured. They certainly haven't tried to do it themselves. When asked how far it is, they will either refuse to commit to anything other than "local". They may show photos of crepuscular rays through clouds or ones that they claim show the Sun lower than clouds.

* They dismiss all photos from space are fake, whether from NASA or another source without explanation. They don't understand photography.

* The proofs have gone over their head, instead of asking for help to understand them (which they don't want, because their minds are already made up) they just say "no proof"

And one more:

* They respond with claims that anyone who disagrees with them is "indoctrinated", insults, meme dumps, laugh emojis, or simply don't respond.