The War on Reality

Bible Belt Skeptics Podcast

Flat Earth Researcher Told He Can't Blast Himself Into the Sky at 500 MPH on Public Lands

https://gizmodo.com/flat-earth-researcher-told-he-cant-blast-himself-into-t-1820735736

https://apnews.com/9d8e5e8e9245412ab80f5a1f58d885b7/Self-taught-rocket-scientist-plans-to-launch-over-ghost-town

Hughes is a 61-year-old limo driver who’s spent the last few years building a steam-powered rocket out of salvage parts in his garage. His project has cost him $20,000, which includes Rust-Oleum paint to fancy it up and a motor home he bought on Craigslist that he converted into a ramp.

Hughes plans to launch himself some 1,800 feet up at 500 miles per hour in an untested homemade steam-powered rocket over the Mojave Desert ghost town of Amboy, California in some sort of gambit to prove the Earth is flat.

“If you’re not scared to death, you’re an idiot,” Hughes said . “It’s scary as hell, but none of us are getting out of this world alive. I like to do extraordinary things that no one else can do, and no one in the history of mankind has designed, built and launched himself in his own rocket.
“I’m a walking reality show.”

“I don’t believe in science,” said Hughes, whose main sponsor for the rocket is Research Flat Earth. “I know about aerodynamics and fluid dynamics and how things move through the air, about the certain size of rocket nozzles, and thrust. But that’s not science, that’s just a formula. There’s no difference between science and science fiction.”

He's having issues launching on public land, the rocketeer has decided to delay the launch date and move the location “three miles down the road.”

If he doesn't die he’s going to announce his plans to leap into the race for governor of California. Watch it on his YouTube channel

The War on Reality - Rich Lund

Let's talk about fake news. To begin with here we're not actually going to talk about actual fake news. What we're going to start off with is actual factual news, or even just information, that is being openly discredited in a way that should be obvious to anyone, yet isn't.

The other day the president said that Time Magazine had approached him about being the person of the year. He said he decided to pass on the owner because he didn't have time for the interviews. Time Magazine then tweeted that he was "incorrect about how they chose person of the year."

Clearly, someone is lying here. If everyone were rational about this the response you would expect would be for the consensus to be that Donald Trump is obviously lying and to call him out for that.

Instead, we get people trying to explain away his trivial lying as if it doesn't matter.

I would argue that a disregard for reality when it serves your side, or your tribe is not a new thing. What is new is the willingness to lie about such trivial and obvious things. The fact that people are willing and able to go along with such obvious lies is cause for concern.

We've reached a place where we can't even have an actual conversation because we can't even agree on reality. For a useful discourse to take place you must first degree upon the premise. If you cannot even get past that first step then no good can ever come from talking.

The only real solution to this in my mind is to unravel the root source of the ability to believe something that you must deep down know is false. In my mind this root issue is the strong Primal desire to be apart of a group. Finding the safety of your tribe is so important 2 the still somewhat poorly evolved human psyche that we will openly ignore reality in order to stay in our group. We will go out of our way to Blind ourselves to reality in order to stay within our group.

The fact that everyone has a voice, and increasingly everyone's voice is equally loud means that it is less and less obvious whose opinions are thoughtful. Which opinions should matter and which opinions are straight up lies.

Disclaimer: A great deal of this was dictated and has not been proofread..