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)

30 Flat Earthers who returned to sanity

I don't know if the couple in the first photo are flat-earthers or just t-shirt models, they're not the subject of this post, only the claim on their shirts is.
 
You frequently see things on forums like "once you go flat, you never go back" ...

.. so even one counterexample refutes that.  One often sees responses to these counterexamples (for example, in a comment to this post), that these people were never really flat Earthers, but they never post any evidence other than their having left flat Earth, see the No true Scotsman fallacy.  

To save having to look for the details each time someone claims this never happens, I'm putting them here.  

The first two former flat Earthers (FFEs) appeared on the SciManDan Podcast but they also show up again in the FTFE playlist at the bottom of this article.

1. The first is Craig Bryan Pennock, Seek Truth Speak Truth (STST)

I had previously written that his name was  Frank DiLeonardi, but Craig corrected me in a Facebook comment.  Now I'm wondering who Frank is and where I got his name and whether he has anything to do with this at all.

2. And this is Ranty (Flerfspective, this channel isn't available now, I don't know what's going on) who describes himself as a recovering flat Earther.  

3. Here is a video about a FFE who goes by the name "Johnny Orbital"

(not counted) Here's an article, Ex-Flat Earthers share the moment they realised the world is actually round, based on a thread at Reddit.

4-8. Here's a playlist, Interviews with Ex Flat Earthers, by FTFE (Fight The Flat Earth).  In addition to the previously mentioned STST and Ranty, it also has discussions with four more FFEs, Clear Cognition (Adam Doughty), Sean G, Blu, Jose G Gonzalez, and Promethean Kitchen.  Update: since I last looked at this playlist, added short clips if Rachie 00000 (see next paragraph)

9. YouTuber Rachie 00000 is another former flat-earther.  Here's a sample.  

10. This is an interview between Will Duffy from The Final Experiment and Amorel Lerner who used to support Eric Dubay on Patreon and got a tattoo of the Gleason map, but later left FE after Dubay refused to go to Antarctica to see if the sun would set even for free.

In contrast to people who used to really be flat-earthers, Noah Fox Burley (FOXX) was never a flat-earther, but used to pretend to be one.

Here's the Ex-flerfs category at Flerf Wiki.  I suppose I'll have to keep that list in sync with this one.

11. On January 7 2025, not long after returning from The Final Experiment, Jeran Campanella announced on Telegram, "I am no longer a flat earther"  Follow the link for his entire post

12. Nick Havok also was convinced by The Final Experiment

13. YouTuber MellowDome (Austin Thompson) switched sides in 2024 due to sun observations he made himself as well as those from The Final Experiment.  See his post on YouTube and on Facebook.

14. This is a post from Feb 24, 2025 from Robbie Davidson who ran four Flat Earth International Conferences and the YouTube channel @Celebrate Truth

in another post, he said "Once you go flat, you CAN globe back!"

15. Patrica Steere, she's left FE since The Final Experiment but doesn't call herself a glober.  She sent a letter to Mark Sargent, which he didn't read, but sent a copy to Jeran, which he read in this video at 9:40

Mark if you have a minute, I'm having serious issues regarding Flat Earth, I'm going to have to bow out of it. I know I've done this before and probably sound crazy, please don't be mad, let's just remove me from Strange World for good, not for a break.

My reason is that I have doubts about flat earth now. We thought in the past we had science and now it appears we don't. After 10 years there's no actual working model. Joe Hanvey's model is great, he's also a really nice guy, but it relies too much on speculation. There is a 24-hour sun in Antarctica. The AE map is toast. It only works some of the time, that's not good enough, I can't stand behind it anymore.

After looking into this for a while, I don't solidly believe the Earth's flat. I could be wrong of course, I don't want to cause a commotion and create drama, this isn't about me, so I'm not not doing anything but pulling out of being a spokesperson for Flat Earth. I'm not going to be a promoter of the globe or flat now. 

The southern pole system shows the globe. The sun is moving in Antarctica like it would on a globe. In Antarctica the sunspots were in the globe-predicted positions, the sun even moved right to left. These are things formerly that I didn't believe were true. The Antarctica trip showed me otherwise, especially with the 24-hour sun. 

I went over rocket launch video Jeren did February 10th that I sent to you and Chris Van Matre who is a land surveyor and often on Globe Busters Tech and was a good friend of Bob Knodel and Cammy. He is respected in the community and does long distance photography. He measures things for a living. We both can't justify what happened in the video. I'm not saying Chris went globe, I don't know his position on the issue. I haven't forgotten what I've learned about lasers, how we see too far, etc and how water is flat but I think there's some other explanation for that. As I said before I could be wrong. 

So please remove me from your show lineup, I'm not coming back, I've been thinking about this for a while, searching my heart to find a solution to this. All I can find is I was wrong and it's my fault no one else's. That's a decision I have made for myself, and I won't push on I won't push it on any anyone else. I'm going to privatize my old Flat Earth videos on my channel and turn it into something else. I wish to act with integrity. I have changed my opinion based on new information that has been presented. If you want you can say I did a globe flip. I'm okay with that. You can read this on air if you wish, I think it would be a great idea. You can share this with David Weiss or anyone. I'm not a glober I'm still me but with new information. I'm a truth seeker, I don't want to simply believe anymore. I've not been paid threatened or compromised in any way.

Your friend, Patricia Steere

16. Paul Lindberg (@Paul on the Plane), who had been inactive for about four years, also recently left flat earth. 

17. Lealan Corbin (710_extracts6 on YouTube, 710_extracts2 on Instagram)

reac

More FFE's from flerf.info - no more info, some have screenshots

18. Craig, one of Jeran’s VIPs
19. DonnaAnne Truth 

20. Don't Follow Crumb
21. IMTHE... Craig (ould this be the same Craig as #18?)

22. Joshua Stewart

23. Kole Knack-Broos

24. Rose777

25. Ryan Hiser

26. ShiftyEyes Shady

27. Space Pope

28. Obsessed Patriot

29. Tiger Dan

30. Tamar Lightbourne

∞ - not that I hold out any hope of Jenny/Stephanie/Lisa/Callie/... ever leaving FE, but if they do, remember

Why and How I Post Gibberish on Debate Forums

Another post in my series of "I am tired of answering this question and wrote this so I can just paste a link to it. 

The why is, I am mocking something.  Very often I will have taken some @*#$*@ nonsense and transformed it into worse nonsense.  To put it another way, if you say something willfully ignorant, I assume that your native language is gibberish am trying to talk to you so you'll understand.

Now to the how.

The simplest method is just to hit keys at random. 

A method that generates texts that almost look meaningful is to use my phone's predictive text and just accept one of the suggested words or emojis at random.  If a phrase emerges from the randomness it may be because my phone has learned to recognize frequent word-pairs, e.g. personal incredulity.

Sometimes I'll copy the text to which I'm responding, paste it, and mangle the words.  I will sometimes free-associate into song lyrics, pick similar-sounding words, any meaning you think you detect is probably apophenia.

And then there are gibberish generators.  Lorem Ipsum generators. general gibberish generators, scientific nonsense generators.  The disassociated-text command in Emacs or websites that do something similar.(these also take the text I'm mocking as input).  Sometimes, if what I'm satirizing is in a language other than English. I'll see if I can find a nonsense generator in that language, here's a recent French one that I used. 

And for when what I'm replying to made overuse of emojis, a Random Emoji Generator

Some new ones: Jabberwocky produces nonsense that looks like isaþsai ve nnåenesoho ytæetuþn wåheau ebalà and The Cut-Up Machine that re-orders words.

Reactions tend to be

• are you drunk/stoned?  (Maybe, but that's not why)
• are you OK? (I'm possibly in better mental health than the person I'm mocking, but feel free to decide for yourself)
• are you schizophrenic? (No, but see the link for apophenia, the term first appeared in a study of early stages of the disorder)
• the shock/wow reaction emoji (I don't know if you're scared or impressed)
• attempting to interpret the gibberish as meaning something (ok ...)
• religious screeds or quotes from scripture (I'm sure you won't be offended if I apply the same procedure to your latest comment)
• Why bother?  (I enjoy it)

No, NASA doesn't mean "to deceive" in Hebrew

I've gotten tired of retyping this, so here's a copy to post the next N times I see some flerf claim that it does.

First of all, even if it did, it would matter no more than what the Chevy Nova means in Spanish (also, that didn't happen, see Snopes on Did the Chevrolet Nova Fail to Sell in Spanish-Speaking Countries?).  But if we were going to try to interpret its acronym in Hebrew, it doesn't mean "to deceive" but something much better.  Keep reading.

They usually refer to The Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible by James Strong (often called Strong's Concordance), it's a useful reference work, and it's found on many sites that deal with the Bible, e.g Bible Study Tools, Bible Hub or Study Bible, which I'll link to below about the particular words in question.  It has an entry for every word in the Bible, words labeled with H are Hebrew or Aramaic, those with G are Greek, and that letter is followed by a number.  Words derived from the same root are found under the same entry.  The concordance is old enough to be in the public domain, and there are many printed versions.

A slight digression, there are two Hebrew letters, Sin (nothing to do with the English word) and Shin.  They look very similar, Sin has a dot on the left, שׂ, and is pronounced 's', Shin's dot is on the right, שׁ‎, and is pronounced 'sh'.  

Now the word the flat-earthers refer to is H5377, and while the preceding link transliterates it nâshâ, there seem to be some printings that wrote š which is used to represent the sh sound.  There's probably an explanation of all the diacritical marks (that one is called a caron) somewhere in a printed copy.  This image of that edition often accompanies the claim.  So it could be that the first person to make it was confused rather than lying.  

The word that sounds closer to NASA, as it's got an s rather than a sh sound in it, is H5375.  And while, once again, it doesn't matter what an acronym in one language sounds like in a different one, this one meaniing (among other things), wait for it, "to travel" and "to lift up".  I would know this even if it wasn't at the link because I speak Hebrew, but even if I didn't, I once saw that my rabbi had an outline of a wedding sermon in the little book he carried to diverse ceremonies, weddings, funerals, et. al., listing those two, as well as "to marry" (Strong lists that, but I don't think it's used that way in the Bible) and "to forgive".  You can probably reconstruct the whole sermon on your own.

In other news, COVID spelled backward doesn’t mean evil spirit possession in Hebrew

ETA: Usually posting this gets silence or someone just repeats one of the claims, but here's a reply it got in 2018Flatearth: "The Acronym N A S A was taken from the Hebrew word Nahash which means serpent (snake emoji) hence the serpent tongue in the logo."  I responded that the letter in Nachash is a hard ch, not an h, and NASA sounds even less like that than it does like Nasha.'

NASA's own explanation of the red shape is "The red v-shaped wing represents aeronautics"

Fisking the anti-semetic "The Kenite Files Episode 101: Who Are The Sons Of Cain?"

A flat-earther (or perhaps a bible-thumper who took a wrong turn at Albuquerque and wound up in a group where flerfs post their nonsense and are mocked for it) posted this gem at me, by a user who goes by MARK13RECORDS.

It starts with an entry from Strong's Concordance, a serious work of Biblical scholarship, most often seen online with flerfs lying about what NASA means in Hebrew (short version, they confused H5375 with H5377, NASA isn't spelled like either of those words in Hebrew but is נאסא, but if it was Hebrew, ignoring how it's spelled, it would mean "to lift up" or "to travel").  This time we're dealing with H7017, Kenite (well that's at least the correct entry in Strong's) which is the name of a tribe in the Bible, and if you click on the previous link you'll see all the times it appears in the Bible).which Strong seems to be saying is the same *name* as Cain, the archetypical murderer in Genesis, or maybe that the founder of the tribe had the same name.  It seems rather unlikely that a tribe that was around at the time of Moses would be descended from the original Cain, only Noah and his family survived the Flood, and they were dependents of Seth, not Cain.

Well there's a Jewish source identifying Noah's wife with Naama (at 22:00 or so he mangles that as Nāyama), the sister of Tubal-Cain, and a descendent of the original Cain, but tribal identity is patrilineal.  Also, if Noah's wife was a descendent of Cain, and one takes Genesis literally, not just the Kenites, but all of humanity is descended from her.  Of course if one does not understand Genesis to be historical, none of this matters.

The sons of Cain, the video says, without a source, carry out the negative parts of God's plan, and in direct contradiction to Genesis 4:1, claims Satan, not Adam, was Cain's father.  Always nice when a bible-thumper lies about what their favorite book says.

And he lies again, when he claims that in John 8:44 Jesus said to the Kenites "ye are of your father the devil".  Here, read the whole chapter and find the word Cain or Kenite.  

Now he tries to prove that Satan is Cain's father.  He identifies Satan with the serpent of Genesis, let's give him that one.  So in Genesis 3, the serpent convinces Eve to eat the forbidden fruit (not identified as an apple, by the way).  As part of their discussion, she says that God commanded not to touch the tree (not true, but we don't know if that's her mistake, or what Adam told her) and String H5060 says that this is a euphemism for sex.  Well, that probably works in any human language.  And most of times the word appears (again, full list at the link) it means simple touch.  But still, no one had sex with the tree.  Although Rule 34.  And the old dirty joke about the minor who was told to practice with a tree.  

Hold on, somehow Satan is not just the serpent, but also the tree.   There's a quote from 2 Corinthians 11 about Satan beguiled/seduced Eve to eat the not-an-apple, but he thinks that means he had sex with her.  I'm sure there's Groot porn but I will not look for it.   He does notice that Adam also ate, but somehow spares us Satan and Adam sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. 

I'm skipping a bunch of verses that don't have anything to do with the paternity of Groot Jr, but he's got something against new biblical translations.  Well why doesn't he just learn Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek and read it all in the original?  There aren't many Kenites these days but they use technology to corrupt people, which is why I suppose this guy made a YouTube video.  And somehow counting the seals in Revelation has something to do with pebbles (huh?) and counting (is this another Strong's ref?  he didn't give a number) has to do with stones, maybe the stones are being used to keep track of the count, and 666 is a number, so the stones are the Kenites, the offspring of Cain.  Got that?  I didn't.

Satan, he says, is called the king of Tyrus in Ezekial 28, but even in his favorite King James Bible, that's the actual ruler of the city of Tyre whose name does actually mean "rock".

Well he does get to Genesis 4, and actually quotes it.  It says, in the KJV, that Adam knew his wife, she conceiver, and bore Cain.  So he thinks the Bible is lying here, Cain was already conceived in the previous chapter?  He goes on lying that the explanation of Cain's name, " I have gotten a man from the Lord" but the text on his screen has the word "against" in place of "from".  In a different font, conveniently.  He says this is from the Hebrew, but that's another lie.  What it says in Hebrew is "I have acquired a man את the Lord".  The Hebrew word את generally means nothing at all, it's just used before a definite article, for example, were I to say in Hebrew, I fisked this video, I would put את before the word meaning "the video" (in Hebrew, the definite article is a prefix, not a separate word).  It can also mean "with", and that is how his inerrant, except when he thinks he knows better, KJV translated it.  I suppose I'd have to invent a Hebrew verb for fisking, it's got the right number of consonants, but which conjugation-form to use?  It also does have a lot of other meanings, we'll get to it later on when he gives its Strong's number.

There's a slide here about heteropaternal superfecundation, which is when twins have different fathers.  It's the only explanation of what happened here, he asserts without evidence.  The Bible doesn't even say Cain and Abel were twins.  It does use the word "twins" about other pairs, Jacob and Esau, and Peretz and Zerach.  

So after Cain slays Abel, he becomes a wanderer and vagabond and the mark of Cain and the mark of the Beast are somehow the same. And the first thing Cain did was build a city, so cities are bad.  Some hilarious attempts to read how Cain's descendants names are transliterated follows at around 19 minutes in.  Despite that city,, they're still vagabonds (all it says is that one of them, Jabal, that's how the KJV translates it) was a cattle-raiser  who lived in a tent. But cities are bad?  And leaving them to raise sheep is also bad?  "Cattle" is what the Kenites call the "so-called gentiles".  I know (and don't use) a number of pejorative terms in Hebrew and Yiddish for people who aren't Jewish, none of them mean "cattle".  Oh, he knows one of them, too, at 20:20.  But it doesn't mean cattle.  The actual tribes of Israel, he says, think the Kenites are God's chosen people.

I wonder who he could possibly mean ....  Oh, just in case it wasn't obvious he quotes Rev 3:9 about the "synagoge of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not".  But he doesn't preach hatred of Jews, just count those stones (still not getting that reference).

After some more fulminating about Lamech being another murderer, h's back to the slide with the spurious word "against" pasted in  Now he's trying to support this lie with a slide giving various things the Hebrew word את can mean, let's see if it's Strong, again.  Yep, H854.  So out of 809 occurrences, it means against 36 times.  And this isn't one of them.  If the KJV translators thought it did in Gen 4, they would have translated it that way. 

So, pulled straight from his ass, "the scribes and Pharisees" that Jesus opposed are the Kenites.  Still no explanation of how they survived the Flood.   Also the one-world government, the Illuminati.  Wait, are human-serpent people lizard people?  The horn of the he-goat is the United Nations.   But there's more, the lion in Daniel is the Christian nations, the bear is the Communistic (sic) and Islamic ones, the leopard is the Kenites.

Physics for Flerfs 4, "Motion Under the Action of Gravity"

By the time of Newton it was already known that the planets revolve around the sun, with measurements, and it was possible to predict where they would be in the future (flerfs just say "nuh-uh" but can't predict the location of planets, even if they are just "lights on the dome"). What Newton added was an explanation of why it works like that.

Starting with the First Law of Motion, since objects move in straight lines unless acted upon by a force, there must be a force acting on the planets, directed towards the Sun. The same is true of the Moon orbiting around the Earth. Newton tried various models for this force, the only one that could produce results consistent with observations was proportional to the masses of the two bodies and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. The equation for this is F = Gm₁m₂/r², where the m's are the masses of the two object, r is the distance between them, and G is measured by experiment, not predicted.

As it's always been measured to be the same, it's known as the gravitational constant and was first measured by Henry Cavendish in 1798 in an experiment that is often discussed in this group. Since gravity is a very weak force, it's necessary to use heavy weights as the two masses and eliminate air movement and vibrations. The book gives a measurement of G from 1942 as 6.673E-11 N m² / kg². That N stands for newton, the measurement of force in the metric system

(You've really made it in science if they don't just name the law after you, but also one of the variables in that law is measured in you's. This reminds me of how in Jewish sources, authors are sometimes referred to by the name of their book, rather than their own name, and a story about a professor who said that you may use the textbook on the final name, but he said the name of the author instead of the textbook, so one student got help from the author. For example, I've got a copy of "Bueche" in front of me right now, but if someone said you could consult Bueche (before 2015, when he passed away) it could be understood to mean either his textbook or the agent, settler, or even the person. I couldn't find that story, but I did find one of a student who was allowed to bring notes on a 3x5 card, and he did, only it was measured in feet rather than inches. I had a roommate in college who was allowed a single piece of paper, so he used a piece cut from a roll of paper that was intended for a computer plotter, which may have displayed less ingenuity than the friend in highschool who owned a photo enlarger and would make really tiny cheat-sheets. I'm not going to name you, even though I think the statute of limitations has run out)

Back to physics, once we have measured G, we can calculate the mass of the Earth. Without putting it on a scale in front of your eyes. The other values we need are the acceleration of falling objects and the radius of the Earth (thanks Eratosthenes).

Next is a section on how the laws of motion apply on an incline, but that's just trigonometry so I'm going to skip it.

Finally, projectile motion. This is for trajectories short enough for the curve of the Earth not to be noticeable. I suppose we should be glad that flerfs aren't trying to lob projectiles many miles and see where they land ...

For example, a baseball player (this reminds me of an exam I was one involved with in college, the had set up one of those "Physics for Poets" (in this school it was probably pre-laws and pre-MBAs, as pre-meds had to take standard science courses, and I didn't get an A in inorganic chemistry and the associated lab just to mess with the curve, that was just lagniappe) and there was a probability question involving playing cards and some students who got the wrong answers tried to blame it on that they didn't know how many cards were in a deck or suit) throws a ball, it is accelerated downward, and travels horizontally at a constant speed (these calculations will be simpler if the wind isn't blowing, and we can ignore friction from the air over the distances baseballs can be thrown, and this is why Superman should umpire rather than play) until it hits something.

So we use linear horizontal motion to compute the horizontal motion, and uniformly accelerated motion for the vertical part and can compute things such as how fast the ball is moving at any point, where it hits the ground, and how much time it takes until that happens.

Fisking "Gleason Flat Earth Map-True!"

 So this video was posted to Official Flat Earth & Globe Discussion. 

It happened like this, a member posted this diagram, which points out that FE maps are not useful for navigation in the Southern Hemisphere.

  

And a flerf responded with that video, saying How to use Gleasons why it's correct. You gotta use that maths stuff and not the purple stuff.

So I watched the video. Here's my response.

One fisk, coming up So we've got a YTer who calls himself Immune2BS. On first thought, is he also an anti-vaxxer? Well looking at the rest of his channel it would seem no, he's a one-conspiracy guy. So let's hear what he has to say.

He says he will explain why the Gleason map is accurate. He compares Australia on Gleason and Google Earth, or the globe if you will. They look different (we noticed). But the features of Australia are the same on each map, and he points to something near the Tropic of Capricorn meets the west coast of Australia, and everything has the same coordinates (yes, Gleason has the same coordinates for everything, it wouldn't even be a map projection were that not true). And the same thing happens where the tropic "exits out" on the west coast (he sounds surprised). And this also works where 135°E meets the south coast. How can that be?
Gleason looks like a clock and there's that think in the center that moves and indicates latitude. He superimposes circles every 15° from the North Pole (but takes a lot longer to say that, because he mentions the value of every stop from 90°N to 60°S when there's a skidding sound) Whoa! What happened here? There's more Earth the further south you get, and "when somebody decided to create a globe out of the flat earth" they had to elongate and stretch to make it work because there's 15° missing of latitude.

(I really don't know what he's going on about, 75°S is on the Gleason map. I listened to that part twice to make sure he was saying it. The lines of latitude aren't marked around Australia, but they are along the line of longitude that runs thru Greenland, which Gleason labeled 2PM. 75°S passed thru Antarctica on both his map and on the globe as well as any other projection on a map., see image below, it's from a better image of the map, but the very same map with the Boston Public Library stamp on at 3PM it that I found online. And it's hard to see in the blurry image that YouTube displays, but HIS map also has the same numbers at 2PM, he just didn't notice them)

From what he can tell, and this is just conjecture (his word) they started from the top, the North Pole area and everything got stretched as they got down to the quote unquote South Pole. Everything about this map makes sense. It is a clock and so is the world because the day is 24 hours. Even time zones make sense. He shows an image of the actual time zones and asks which makes more sense, that or this (but fails to explain why he thinks Gleason makes more sense).

Here are two details of the Gleason map, found here. In the first image I added a red arrow pointing out where he can't find 75°S on it, the second is a bit further zoomed out to show the library stamp, this is the same map as in the video.

Now he switches to a map made by someone called Tiger Dan (this video was made in 2016 so perhaps people who followed this debate then knew what this was, all I can tell is it has some airport codes added to it and Mr. BS calls it a fiasco) but it looks like Dan tried to make landmasses from a globe or some other projection work on a Gleason map.

Then there's someone named Brian Clark who supposedly found a flat earth map from 1920 in the Library of Congress (supposedly? Here it is on the Library of Congress site and it has latitude lines all the way out to 90 (once again, so does Gleason, but what's he saying, the LoC map was faked?).