Idiot America by Charles Pierce

Charles Pierce is a frequent guest on NPR‘s “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” though I didn’t know this until after I read this book (go figure).

Despite the inflammatory title, Idiot America isn’t a criticism of the country, but rather a condemnation of the way in which idiocy or nescience has become something to be proud of; it’s a sort of extension of Thomas Frank’s question of authenticity. And it troubles Charles Pierce to no end.

I was a little surprised, immediately, at how meandering the whole affair was. I had expected path and acerbity—more like a series of caustic essays than anything else. But Pierce invariably prefaced every point he wanted to make with a long (comparable in length to the point itself) story about a historical figure or situation which paralleled something contemporary. Unfortunately, few of these stories were particularly elucidating, but served as distractions: by the time Pierce got around to making his point, I had forgotten what he was talking about.

Here’s how Pierce himself describes “Idiot America” as a concept:

The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise. It’s not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites that Richard Hofstader teased out of the national DNA, although both of these things are part of it. The rise of Idiot America today reflects — for profit, mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know the best what they’re talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

This is how Idiot America engages itself. It decides, en masse, with a million keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. And the words of an obscure biologist carry no more weight on the subject of biology than do the thunderations of some turkeyneck preacher out of Christ’s Own Parking Structure in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an “expert” and therefore, an “elitist.” Nobody buys his books. Nobody puts him on cable. He’s brilliant, surely, but no different from the rest of us, poor fool.

Most of Pierce’s examples are stock criticisms of the conservative right, such as the Terry Schiavo (wherein Bill Frist, if you’ll remember, diagnosed Terry’s condition based on a video montage provided by her mother and father….), and in themselves unconventional: I’ve read whole books about darn near each case, in fact, from the Dover Trials to lobbyist-funded scientists to to right-wing radio demagogues. Pierce then compares them infavorably against historical “cranks” such as Ignatius Donnelly: the point, as I take it, is that people with crazy ideas are an integral part of the American cultural fabric, so long as these crazy people are marginal. When you put a tie on them, stick them in front of CNN’s cameras, and pretend as though their opinion matters because they have a crazy idea and are willing to appear on TV, you’re beginning to talk about the disintegration of culture as we know it.

To phrase it contemporaneously (and surely Pierce himself would have mentioned it had it been a televised matter when he was writing the book), consider the issue of Orly Taitz, a dentist/realtor/lawyer who is leading the mad rabble known as the “Birthers,” who insist Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen. The perfect example of a “crank” whose ideas would normal be entertainment for those of us with functional brains, Ms. Taitz is instead put on TV as though she has equal footing with normal reporters or people without tinfoil hats.

But I disgress: Idiot America has its own set of examples. Some, I feel, are somewhat laborious. I’m unsurprised, given that the book is really an extended version of a essay Pierce wrote several years ago. Its padding, I think, I somewhat deleterious to its aims. You could easily read Idiot America and enjoy it; by that same measure, though, you could also read the original article and come away on about the same footing. The choice is yours.

While much of its initial incarnation focused on debunking the oldest of the old—”escaped serial killer with a hook” kind of stories, for instance—it has evolved, especially in the last 6 or 7 years, to be an invaluable resource for debunking all the nonsense emails that get forwarded around. I know I use it to rebut these sorts of emails all the time, especially during election years when my conservative extended family forwards these sorts of spurious rumors. It was only a matter of time, then, before Snopes itself came to be labeled as liberal.

Snopes is not always telling the truth.

Check it out at ( http://www.truthorfiction.com/)

Please forward this to all on your E-mail list.

I have suspected this for quite some time. I often check the source of Snopes’s verification. Many times it is a liberal source. I have just accessed truthorfiction.com and believe it is a good alternative to Snopes and will be giving it a try. You might want to check it out and decide for yourselves…

A good freind sent me this Email

I have suspected some problems with snopes for some time now, but I have only caught them in half-truths. If there is any subjectivity they do an immediate full left rudder. I have recently discovered that Snopes.com is owned by a flaming liberal and this man is in the tank for Obama. There are many things they have listed on their site as a hoax and yet you can go to Youtube yourself and find the video of Obama actually saying these things. So you see, you cannot and should not trust Snopes.com….ever for anything that remotely resembles truth! I don’t even trust them to tell me if email chains are hoaxes anymore.

A few conservative speakers on Myspace told me about snopes.com a few months ago and I took it upon myself to do a little research to find out if what they were saying was true. Well, I found out for myself that they were correct. Snopes is backing Obama and is covering up for him. They will say anything that makes him look bad is a hoax and they also tell lies on the other side about McCain and Palin.

Truth or fiction.com http://www.truthorfiction.com/ is the better source for verification, in my opinion.
Anyway just FYI please don’t use Snopes.com anymore for fact checking and make your friends aware of their political leanings as well. Many people still think Snopes.com is neutral and they can be trusted as factual. We need to make sure everyone is aware that that is a hoax in itself. Please pass this on.

As most of its followers can attest, the site is impeccably researched: each entry has citations listed at the bottom. Unlike some of the other popular debunking sites, like the listed TruthOrFiction or BreakTheChain, Snopes generally goes to extra mile to add context to the rumor; they pull in additional quotes, they call companies and individuals for verification.

This quoted email forward is another example of spurious email forwards with no basis in any sort of reality. Note the tell-tale signs:

• The language is extreme (note that the owner isn’t simply described as left-leaning, but rather is a “flaming liberal”)
• It was sent by “a freind” [sic] whose identity remains a mystery
• It mentions “research” but doesn’t actually cite any sources or examples

What seems obvious to me is that the same sorts of nescient people who still persist in believing that Obama is Muslim (and that he recently said as much in an interview with George Stephanopoulous) simply don’t like that Snopes continues to undermine their happy delusions. If you really believe that any news source besides Fox News Channel is liberal, then I suppose you really can’t trust the citations on Snopes, which, after all, are from well-known Leftist organizations like the Associated Press. The hysterical conservatives who will continue to point to an edited YouTube video and scream that it uncovers the “truth” about Obama (or whomever else you use an as example) are the same sort who look at Snopes, see the whole video put in context, and shout themselves hoarse about how Snopes is run by Obama apologists, or a secret cabal of gay atheist Communist Jews trying to undermine America by covering up evidence of Obama’s faith-hating or perhaps Bill Clinton’s murders.

And of course TruthOrFiction will tell you much of the same things as Snopes, though it’s a tremendously ugly site and it doesn’t cite its sources.

For all this hue and cry, what we have here is little more than one idiot spilling forth his mental offal into an email, and then far too many entirely credulous conservatives forwarding it because they very much wish it to be true. Nothing apparently gives such people greater satisfaction than to label something anathema and then tell all their friends about it. It’s an impulse I will never understand.

Let me reiterate in case you’ve skipped most of the explanation:

1. Snopes is not inaccurate, nor is it biased (though it’s been baselessly accused of just about every bias under the sun, by moronic liberals as well)
2. That email forward (any email forward) you just got? It’s probably wrong.

You’ll pardon my bluntness in the title, but I find it concise and to the point.

My entry “Sam Vaknin’s Self-Love” remains one of my most popular entries, and continues to attract a dialog/argument between refugees from various fora and user groups pertaining to narcissism and NPD. From commenter Derek comes word that Vaknin has seen fit to throw his hat into America’s current political ring by penning an amazingly obtuse and ridiculous article about Barack Obama.

Narcissism, not politics

I should pause here to point out that Vaknin’s article isn’t necessarily the usual political scree offered by such sites as TownHall, where one is likely to find the hysterical, obnoxious bloviating of a range of the Right’s rabble. He doesn’t persist in the sinister rumors of Obama’s Muslim faith, or throw about the canard of Obama qua socialist, or really delve into many of the G.O.P. talking points/whisper campaigns at all.

But he (I’m talking about Vaknin again) does try to frame Obama in a context he understands: Narcissism. Namely, he thinks that Obama is a narcissist (it’s the first line of his article).

Vaknin’s mess of an article begins by enumerating some of the qualities that may indicate NPD: these are, you may realize as you read them, so very general that anyone with confidence or a dominant personality may be labeled as such. The all-important consideration in diagnosing mental illness is whether such characteristics interfere with the subject’s life. I, for instance, maybe exhibit some signs of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder; I do not have it, however, because I prefer things neat and tidy, and messiness does arouse in me some level of distress, I am perfectly capable of having a messy apartment, or passing a crooked picture without straightening it, or ignoring any such impulses which I feel are destructive or harmful to myself. Vaknin himself not only realizes this, but states as much in his article, going on to explain—badly—why he thinks Obama falls in such a category.

In this, we may consider Vaknin’s article farcical on its face, then, since it seeks to indict Obama for qualities which he is clearly not only not suffering from, but in which he is in fact thriving. And, as I will illustrate momentarily, are common characteristics of politicians—this, if you even recognize that Obama has these characteristics, which of course he likely does not.

Newsflash: politicians are egotistical!

Here are the charges that Vaknin levels against Obama (which I’ve reformatted to be somewhat readable):

Obama displays the following behaviors, which are among the hallmarks of pathological narcissism:

• Subtly misrepresents facts and expediently and opportunistically shifts positions, views, opinions, and “ideals” (e.g., about campaign finance, re-districting). These flip-flops do not cause him overt distress and are ego-syntonic (he feels justified in acting this way). Alternatively, reuses to commit to a standpoint and, in the process, evidences a lack of empathy.
• Ignores data that conflict with his fantasy world, or with his inflated and grandiose self-image. This has to do with magical thinking. Obama already sees himself as president because he is firmly convinced that his dreams, thoughts, and wishes affect reality. Additionally, he denies the gap between his fantasies and his modest or limited real-life achievements (for instance, in 12 years of academic career, he hasn’t published a single scholarly paper or book).
• Feels that he is above the law, incl. and especially his own laws.
• Talks about himself in the 3rd person singluar or uses the regal “we” and craves to be the exclsuive center of attention, even adulation
• Have a messianic-cosmic vision of himself and his life and his “mission”.
• Sets ever more complex rules in a convoluted world of grandiose fantasies with its own language (jargon)
• Displays false modesty and unctuous “folksiness” but unable to sustain these behaviors (the persona, or mask) for long. It slips and the true Obama is revealed: haughty, aloof, distant, and disdainful of simple folk and their lives.
• Sublimates aggression and holds grudges.
• Behaves as an eternal adolescent (e.g., his choice of language, youthful image he projects, demands indulgence and feels entitled to special treatment, even though his objective accomplishments do not justify it).

I think it unnecessary for me to explain to my readers how very generic this complaints are, and will simply rebut them as they relate specifically to Obama. It would be far to easy to point out that Vaknin, as an obvious narcissist himself, is naturally prone to finding such a condition in others. Politicians, who in some ways survive on an inflated sense of their own self-importance, are easy but misleading targets to an obviously disturbed man who leaps at the opportunity to find his own disorder in others.

Subtly misrepresents facts and expediently and opportunistically shifts positions, views, opinions, and “ideals[.]“ Assuming for a moment that Obama does opportunistically shift positions for political expediency, and that he feels no obvious distress over these. Does that not make him a politician running for office? And what exactly does “Alternatively, reuses to commit to a standpoint and, in the process, evidences a lack of empathy” even mean? It seems to me a nonsense phrase.

“Obama already sees himself as president because he is firmly convinced that his dreams, thoughts, and wishes affect reality[.]“ Is Vaknin accusing Obama of some sort of solipsism, wherein his reality, controlled by himself, is the only confirmable one? Perhaps Obama sees himself as president because (1) the polls show him likely to become as much, and (2), he really wants to be president. Unless Obama has a secret condition, hidden from me, wherein he truly does believe himself to be sitting in the Oval Office, surrounded by his willing subordinates, then I’m afraid Vaknin has mistaken narcissism with ambition. But my favorite part of this criticism of Vaknin’s is this: “Additionally, he denies the gap between his fantasies and his modest or limited real-life achievements (for instance, in 12 years of academic career, he hasn’t published a single scholarly paper or book).”

This, I think, is perhaps one of the most telling lines in Vaknin’s article. Take a person like Obama, who aspires to be the President of the United States. Granted, you may take issue with his relative inexperience in politics, but Obama’s professional career as a lawyer and politician has been a storied and productive one. What Vaknin takes issue with is the fact that Obama (a lawyer) has never published a scholarly article or book. Obama has published books, mind you, and was editor of the Harvard Law Review, but what Sam Vaknin the Narcissist would like you to realize, please, is that Obama has never published an awful, pseudo-scholarly book about NPD like Sam Vaknin has.

Let me see if I can sum this up for you in a phrase:

Sam Vaknin wants to be more important than Barack Obama (but he never, ever will).

Have a messianic-cosmic vision of himself and his life and his “mission.” I’m sure that Obama campaign likes to cultivate the image of Obama as a Jesus/Che/rockstar, but whether or not Obama actually views himself as a messiah is hard to pin down. Likely not, given his ability to make fun of just such a characterization (see Obama’s speech at the 2008 Alfred Smith dinner).

Displays false modesty and unctuous “folksiness” but [...] the true Obama is revealed: haughty, aloof, distant, and disdainful of simple folk and their lives. Wait, what? I don’t think Obama’s the one you have to worry about cultivating “folksiness.” In fact, before Sam Vaknin opened his stupid mouth, I’d never heard such a word spoken with respect to the Obama campaign. If what Vaknin means is that Obama really doesn’t so much care for [insert local delicacy, e.g. cheese-steak] but eats it anyway within [location], then yes, there’s probably plenty of that in any political campaign. Let’s immediately disabuse ourselves of the notion that politicians are proletariat: on the national level especially, politicians tend to be well-educated, rich, and not a little snobbish. They may share your predilection for school prayer or play “folksy” when they have to talk to blue-collar workers, but let’s not have any illusions that politicians, regardless of alignment, are generally cut from the same cloth. That being said, there’s no reason to believe that Obama, more than any other, is “disdainful” of the lives of ordinary Americans. This line of thinking would lead one to believe that his entire political career, even back when he was a lowly community organizer, was little more than him putting up with the common rabble until such time as he could become president and exert the full measure of his narcissistic control over the country.

Sublimates aggression and holds grudges. What?

Behaves as an eternal adolescent (e.g., his choice of language, youthful image he projects). It’s no surprise that Obama, as one of the younger candidates for presidency, would emphasis his youth, at least when talking to a younger generation of voters. Every politician aspires to play the youthful, inspiring populist, McCain included, but Obama has the relative benefit of actually being relatively young and populist; that he would use some of this (tempered to allay associations with inexperience) is no surprise whatsoever.

Conclusion: Sam Vaknin is an idiot

Perhaps the title of this article (and section) are misleading: Sam Vaknin is not, in all likelihood, an idiot. Were he a mere simpleton submitting his wrongheaded drivel to the latest blogging service, I’d pay him no heed; after all, the internet has a surplus of very stupid people, and one more is hardly a notable figure. No, when I say that Sam Vaknin is stupid, I mean that he’s clearly a narcissist himself, and he goes to any length to spread his nonsensical writing, like a virus, to any site that will take it. What’s more, his writing is awful in every imaginable sense, and perhaps he even knows it. My guess would be that, were Vakin to read this entry, it would only fuel the fire in his sick little head: he could imagine himself a True Intellectual™, henpecked by illiterate rabble such as myself, who clearly don’t understand his genius (he published a “scholarly book,” donncha know…).

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to take the typical Republican talking points about coastal elitists sipping soy cappuccini and focus them into a singular obsession with a particular disorder, you’ve essentially understood the latest work of Sam Vaknin—replete with zero credibility, politically or academically. Part of me wants to be sorry for this pathetic little creature, but then I remember how truly obnoxious he is, and I don’t necessarily feel guilty for wishing upon him all the scorn and scrotum-ablating contempt that stupidity of his magnitude may engender.

In his latest article, he pontificates that the recent economic downturn is a death knell for community-supported or community-built programs/sites/&c.

So how will today’s brutal economic climate change the Web 2.0 “free” economy? It will result in the rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with cash; it will mean the success of Knol over Wikipedia, Mahalo over Google, TheAtlantic.com over the HuffingtonPost.com, iTunes over MySpace, Hulu over YouTube Inc., Playboy.com over Voyeurweb.com, TechCrunch over the blogosphere, CNN’s professional journalism over CNN’s iReporter citizen-journalism… The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren’t going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some “back end” revenue. “Free” doesn’t fill anyone’s belly; it doesn’t warm anyone up.

There are really two broad fallacies that need addressing here. The first is Keen’s use of the word “open source,” which here is a misnomer. He never mentions Linux, Apache, or other open source programs which always have and will continue to have a dedicated base of programmers, most of whom work on it in their spare time, without any remuneration except personal pride and the esteem of their peers. It need hardly be noted that an economic downtown is likely to increase interest in open-source software, as it likely reduces operating costs for businesses.

No, what Keen means when he says “open source” is free-as-in-beer services, often serving liberally-licensed content; Wikipedia’s content is not open source (there’s no source to open), but it is available under the GNU Free Documentation License, which is something like a liberal Creative Commons license. Perhaps Keen has a sheet of words vaguely associated with Web 2.0 and just likes to throw them around in case his readers are too stupid to know better.

But then comes the bigger fallacy—i.e. in an economic depression, the things that motivated people to contribute to social sites and content servers will vanish entirely. Nevermind the fact that most of these services don’t necessarily imply the forfeiture of copyright; or that many already include ways to monetize one’s content. No, Keen fundamentally misunderstands why people contribute to things like Wikipedia. This isn’t a recent phenomenon borne on the largess of the Web 2.0 bubble; people didn’t start contributing to Wikipedia simply because they were so rich from their day jobs that they felt like giving something back. No, people like being a part of something. They like attaching their name to good work, free or not.

This is all a very roundabout way of saying that Keen couldn’t be more wrong; he apparently is crass enough to believe that anything one does can and should be tied to monetary compensation. I imagine he gets paid for his articles for Internet Evolution (if he was doing them pro bono, it would certainly speak volumes about his argument); perhaps he overestimates the value of his labor.

The International Olympic Committee failed to press China to allow fully unfettered access to the Internet for the thousands of journalists arriving here to cover the Olympics, despite promising repeatedly that the foreign news media could “report freely” during the Games, Olympic officials acknowledged Wednesday.

Since the Olympic Village press center opened Friday, reporters have been unable to access scores of Web pages — among them those that discuss Tibetan issues, Taiwanese independence, the violent crackdown on the protests in Tiananmen Square and the Web sites of Amnesty International, the BBC’s Chinese-language news, Radio Free Asia and several Hong Kong newspapers known for their freewheeling political discourse.

The restrictions, which closely resemble the blocks that China places on the Internet for its citizens, undermine sweeping claims by Jacques Rogge, the International Olympic Committee president, that China had agreed to provide full Web access for foreign news media during the Games. Mr. Rogge has long argued that one of the main benefits of awarding the Games to Beijing was that the event would make China more open.

Everybody put on your shocked expressions: a country with a well-documented history of human rights abuses and draconian censorship has not ceded those habits at the wishes of the international community. Well, kiss my grits!

On Saturday, Joseph Manzanares stormed into the Hollywood Video store where his girlfriend worked, threatened to kill her and knocked over several video displays and even a computer, Commerce City police Sgt. Joe Sandoval said.

His girlfriend told police that they had been arguing about the upbringing of their son and which gang he should belong to. The teen mother, who is black, is a member of the Crips. Manzanares is Hispanic and belongs to the Westside Ballers gang, the woman said.

That’s so sad I can’t even think of anything funny to say.

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

The Da Vinci Code has been making headlines ever since it inexplicably crept up the best-seller list. It’s a controversial book, which does nothing to harm the author and everything to help his bottom line. Knowing it was likely utter pabulum, I wanted to read it so to better understand the author’s ineptitude, but hadn’t been able to force myself to read it. No more; after a long delay, I finally read the book that Stephen Fry so aptly describes as “arse gravy of the worst kind.”

How exactly does one begin a review of The Da Vinci Code? At almost 500 pages, it’s far too long, and its mistakes, errors, and weak points are too dense to list. It begins with the death of a prominent art curator by a hulking, monosyllabic killer taken straight from a hackneyed B-movie. Enter an “expert” on “religious symbology” and a young, attractive French cryptologist, and continue to bluster for the rest of the book about expertise in various fields.

Here’s the rub: everybody in the book is an “expert,” but from the way Dan Brown writes it, it seems as though he spent maybe a couple of minutes skimming Wikipedia articles (and misunderstanding them) and decided that was good enough.

I knew even before I started reading the book that it would contain a lot of nonsense. I had girded my loins, so to speak, by constantly reminding myself that the work was fiction, based on an alternate history—here I give Dan Brown the benefit of the doubt, since he hasn’t exactly said this, but the alternative would make the bullshit:accuracy ratio too high to contemplate. It’s a play on the conspiracy theories involving alternate histories of Jesus: that he married Mary Magadalene, and had a family, and that the entire 2000-year history of the Church is a big cover up. Add to that a secret society and hidden messages in famous artwork, and you make for a ripping good plot—that is, if it weren’t so excruciating. If I had to come up with a ballpark figure, I’d say that 95% of Brown’s content is utter nonsense.

But wait! There’s more! Even if you manage to suspend your disbelief and accept wholeheartedly that either Brown was knowingly writing an alternate history (you’re an optimist) or that he’s correct in his conspiratorial assertions (you’re a twit), you still have to deal with one incontrovertible truth: Dan Brown is an awful, atrocious, abominable writer.

Brown’s writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad. In some passages scarcely a word or phrase seems to have been carefully selected or compared with alternatives[... h]e writes like the kind of freshman student who makes you want to give up the whole idea of teaching. Never mind the ridiculous plot and the stupid anagrams and puzzle clues as the book proceeds, this is a terrible, terrible example of the thriller-writer’s craft.

There are two levels to Brown’s bad writing. The first is mechanical, approaching stylistic:

A voice spoke, chillingly close. “Do not move.”

On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly.

Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His irises were pink with dark red pupils.

Just count the infelicities here. A voice doesn’t speak—a person speaks; a voice is what a person speaks with. “Chillingly close” would be right in your ear, whereas this voice is fifteen feet away behind the thundering gate. The curator (do we really need to be told his profession a third time?) cannot slowly turn his head if he has frozen; freezing (as a voluntary human action) means temporarily ceasing all muscular movements. And crucially, a silhouette does not stare! A silhouette is a shadow. If Saunière can see the man’s pale skin, thinning hair, iris color, and red pupils (all at fifteen feet), the man cannot possibly be in silhouette.

While a book full of this would be enough to fell any sane person, the torment doesn’t stop there. There’s also the fact that Brown has perhaps the most irritating narrative style in the history of written language. He narrates in a semi-omnipotent third-person, but this changes whenever it becomes inconvenient for Brown. The really irritating part is the constant use of “thoughts,” which tend to punctuate just about every block of narration. Brown qua Narrator tells the reader something, and then the character will chime in with something totally extraneous or dumb, phrases that would have been better left narrated—occasionally phrases so academic or complex that they would sound awkward spoken, much less thought.

Brown careens from cliché to malapropism to ridiculous dialog, a drunk behind the wheel of this jalopy of a book. I find myself at a loss of words to describe how utterly dreadful this book is. I think perhaps Stephen Fry has it right: “arse gravy of the worst kind.”

My favorite? The flat-earther:

What is called ‘Science’ today and ‘scientists’ consist of the same old gang of witch doctors, sorcerers, tellers of tales, the ‘Priest-Entertainers’ for the common people. ‘Science’ consists of a weird, way-out occult concoction of jibberish theory-theology… nothing good has ever come from ‘science’ — In fact, technology is not in any way related to the web of idiotic scientific theory. ALL inventors have been anti-science. The Wright brothers said: “Science theory held us up for years. When we threw out all science, started from experiment and experience, then we invented the airplane.” By the way, airplanes all fly level on this Plane earth!

The Fact the Earth is Flat is not my opinion, it is a Proved Fact! While all we need to know is that the Bible says the Earth is flat (Is.40:22, Ez.7:2, Dn.2:35; 4:10-11,20, Mt.4:8)… but for a second can you imagine what these so-called ‘scientists would have us believe — If the earth really was round, that would mean there arre people who are HANGING DOWN, HEAD DOWNWARDS while we are standing head up? But since the theory allows to travel to those parts of the earth where the people are said to hand head downward, and still to fancy ourselves to be heads upwards, and our friends whom we have left behind us to be heads downwards! LOL! What foolishness! TheWHOLE THING IS A MYTH – A DREAM – A DELUSION – and a snare, and, instead of there being any evidence at all in this direction to substantiate this popular theory, it is plain proof that the Earth is Not A Globe!

Also, be sure to know the Sun and Moon are about 3,000 miles away are both 32 miles across. The Planets are ‘tiny.’ Sun and Moon do Move, earth does NOT move, whirl, spin or gyrate (1 Sam.2:8, 1 Chr.16:30; Job 9:6, 38:4-6; Ps.96:10, 104:5, Is.13:10, Mic.6:2). Australians do NOT hang by their feet under the world… this is a FACT, not a theory! Also a Fact the Spinning, Whirling, Gyrating Ball World Planet, Globe Idea is Entirely 100% now and at all times in the Past, a RELIGIOUS DOCTRINE… a Blind Dogmatic Article of Faith in the Religion for the Blind unreasoning beast of prey. No earthly reason for a Sane, Upright Member of the Elite True Christians to subscribe to it. Also a Fact, today the Elite of Earth ALL live on the Flat World. Only the illogical, unreasoning “herd”… prefers the way-out occult weird theology of the old Greek superstitution earth a spinning ball! Both Copernecious and Newton, the inventors of the “modern” superstitions (400 year OLD modern) have said: “It is not possible for a Sane reasonable person to ever really believe these Theories.” Thus sayeth Newton-Copernecious. What sayeth THOU?

Or the KJV blowhard:

The word of God has been in heaven forever. The KJV has always been there. The so called Hebrew words like Alleluia are English words. The English did not borrow them from the Hebrew but rather the Hebrew borrowed them from the English. If the KJV has always been there and is the original word of God then there is no other conclusion. The same can be said for any so called Greek words that were borrowed from the Greek or transliterated. It is a matter of what bias you approach this particular subject.

Oh the humanity.