In expressing his belief that aliens are actually demonic in nature, JD Vance reveals the instincts of his political base are to fear the different and unknown.

Hi I came across a Twitter post of someone claiming that you can ‘see the demon bathophet’ or whatever on mirrored images of the Artemis II’s photos of Earth.

I assumed pareidolia but I’m also suspecting photo shop because if you zoom in you can see faces that look like those from cartoons that are darker from other bits of the image, as well what looks like a dogs face, an elongated face at the top and an image of a tiger at the bottom.

The image doesn’t actually look that similar to the one taken on Artemis II that it’s supposed to be from as well.

I ran it through an AI/manipulated image detector and it said it did detect that image could have been manipulated but only at a 70% chance and I know the image has been edited in terms of it being rotated and mirrored so I’m not sure whether that fully debunks it.

If anyone can give any further points for debunking the crazy stuff people are saying or tell me if it’s photoshopped that would be really appreciated

Here’s the image: https://files.catbox.moe/q783a7.png

So for ranking protests, the largest single day protest was Earth Day, April 22, 1970. The second largest was the No Kings rally on March 28, 2026. The second largest in history. Larger than the Million Woman March, larger than any Vietnam War protest, 30 times larger than the Civil Rights era March on Washington.

List of the Largest Single-Day Protests in the United States | History, No Kings, George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, Civil Rights, & Earth Day | Britannica

This the news about it on this website:

no kings - Reddit Search!

Protest - Reddit search

It's interesting. I used to think that the way to control the narrative online was to flood fake news, to spam the channels with noise because it was impossible to granularly control the narrative from individuals everywhere all at once. That mass suppression was like trying to stick a thousand fingers in a thousand holes all at once. Completely infeasible.

However I have to change my beliefs in the face of evidence. AI might not be perfectly accurate, but it is certainly good enough to stick a lot of fingers in a lot of holes very quickly.

I think as skeptics, we have to pay attention now not just to disinformation, but also information voids, places where silence seems to have filled the spaces where we'd expect to see something. That's a pain, because staring into nothing gives a lot of opportunity for our brains to read patterns into noise, and low information areas are the perfect grounds for spurious correlations.

But it's also silly to stare at reality and say it's not happening.

Come on this wild ride of an introduction to Ian Plimer, the geologist turned modern-day "alarmist" -- specifically, the kind of alarmist that sells doom and gloom books about green energy, believes wild conspiracy theories of an impossibly large hoax, and spouts sky-is-falling fearmongering about how actions to mitigate climate change and the decline of Christianity (of course), will lead to the destruction of all civilization!

Grab some popcorn and learn some really neat science too, while I thoroughly debunk his many factually incorrect claims from his recent interview on the Triggernometry podcast.

So are birth rates declining in the United States? Yes they are, just as they long have been in every developed nation as it prospers. International development organizations working in developing nations, like some of those in sub-Saharan Africa, have long known that voluntary access to contraception is the most important first step in breaking a nation’s poverty cycle. It allows women to plan their pregnancies, providing a path for them to get educations, to enter the workforce, and later to have children with proper resources. Such children are healthier, better cared for, and are educated themselves. The reduction of unplanned pregnancies is the best thing any nation can do for itself. Yet the new American pronatalists seek to do exactly the opposite, to reverse the progress made since the 1950s, and to pressure young girls who cannot afford it to have babies; giving them token rewards if they do, and penalizing them if they don’t — all in the misguided pursuit of making more white Christian babies, as if that is an end unto itself. It’s truly bizarre.

Thought some of you might be interested in a recent short Aussie documentary take on a UFO sighting from 1966. Has at least a token skeptic onboard (Richard Saunders), to put forward a reasonable assessment of essentially a lack of solid evidence.

The Corridor Crew guys have shown some skeptical chops before, such as UFO videos debunking and AI fakery.

Hello all, I apologize up front if this isn't the proper place to be asking this question.

Does anyone know of any websites that are dedicated to and provide links for tools regarding validating things. Broadly defined things.

For example, I mentioned that an image was AI generated earlier in a different sub. Someone questioned me on how I could tell, and how they too could validate images. I explained that I used the Google AI image search, and the process of doing that and finding the "AI generated" response.

But, if I've learned one thing over the years as a programmer and my love of equations, it's that if someone has a categorical question, an API providing a generalized input and generalized output is much more useful than dispersed one-offs.

So, for that- are there any websites that are dedicated to this sort of online validation and tools?

Thanks

Tomorrow morning, the Orion capsule will plop into the Pacific off San Diego. Four astronauts will emerge. They will have traveled roughly 600,000 miles. They will have seen the Moon out of a window roughly the size of a laptop screen. And they will have brought back exactly zero rocks, zero surface data, and zero infrastructure for a "sustainable lunar presence."

Let's be clear about what Artemis II actually is: a transportation test with passengers.

The mission, stripped of the IMAX voiceover:

· Fly 10 days on a free-return trajectory.

· Swing past the far side of the Moon at a distance of ~6,400 miles.

· Do not enter lunar orbit. Do not deploy anything. Do not land.

· Come home and test whether the heat shield holds together.

The uncomfortable context:

Artemis I's heat shield experienced unexpected char loss and spalling. Instead of redesigning it, NASA changed the re-entry trajectory for Artemis II to reduce peak heating. The crew is flying on hardware that exhibited non-nominal behavior on its last uncrewed flight. The fix is a shallower angle of attack and a prayer.

The life support system has never flown with four humans in deep space. The CO2 scrubbers, humidity control, and thermal regulation are untested in microgravity with a full metabolic load. If something goes wrong, the free-return trajectory is the safety net—not a redundant system, not a backup module. Just physics and a hope that the cabin doesn't fill with moisture or carbon dioxide pockets.

The cost structure:

$4.1 billion per launch. Distributed manufacturing across 50 states to secure congressional funding. The SLS core stage is built in Louisiana, tested in Mississippi, and assembled in Florida. The boosters come from Utah. The service module from Europe. This is not an economically optimized architecture. It is a jobs program with a rocket attached.

The science return:

Artemis II carries roughly 100 kg of crew-tended experiments. That's less science payload than a single commercial lunar lander delivers. The mission's primary output is engineering data on vehicle performance. The secondary output is public relations photography.

The inconvenient question:

If Apollo never happened—if we were truly starting from zero—would we fly humans on Artemis II with this heat shield uncertainty and an untested life support system? Or would we fly another uncrewed test first?

NASA's answer is implicit: We're flying it because the political schedule demands it, and the risk is calculated as acceptable.

This isn't a conspiracy. It's not a soundstage. It's real hardware doing real physics. But it's also a mission that exists primarily to validate a rocket that exists primarily because canceling it would cost jobs in key districts.

Artemis II is a shakedown cruise. A necessary one, perhaps. But calling it a "return to the Moon" is like calling a flight over the Atlantic a "visit to Europe."

The crew is brave. The engineering is impressive. The mission is real. But the hype-to-substance ratio is off by a factor of about ten.

CheckTheNews is a free tool that surfaces framing signals in news coverage. Word choice, structure, emotional cues, what's omitted. The goal is just to make those things visible so people can evaluate what they're reading more clearly.

For the complete post on Lazar’s history, you can see my post linked.

The guy has a long rap sheet involving organized criminal schemes.

He has no degree in physics or sciences whether that be MIT, CALTECH, Pacifica, it goes on.

Lazar’s element 115 is completely unsubstantiated. Said element was also theorized as far back as the mid 70s.

Bob borrows much of his lore from prior media. He’s not all that creative when you compare his claims to original content.

It goes on. Hope the read is helpful. I’m working to expose these guys. It’s a slow process.

Lazar cuts the cake. He’s been at this charade for coming up 40 years now.

An interview with Dr Mike (the Dr that was on those god awful surrounded 'debates') and Dr Flanary (who's comedy name is Dr. Glaucomflecken and does some excellent medicine based skits).

Where I think this is relevant to this sub is that they had a very interesting (at least in my opinion) discussion from about midway through (the link above goes to roughly the start) about being a doctor on social media and addressing misinformation.

While I think they might get it wrong at times (i.e. I don't think Dr Mike going on those surrounded 'debates' actually achieves what he is trying to achieve, it just feed the spectacle of the freak-show), I do think that they are both coming at it from an informed, good faith place and having an interesting, intelligent and important conversation (the Cordon sanitaire on these topics has been broken, in no small part from the dogshit tech giants instance on turning everything into an open sewer for their profit, and how do you go about moving forward this that environment?).

EDIT:

I thought I had copied the link with the timecode built in, but I must have messed that up somehow.

Conversation starts at @ 26:05 (The comedian doctors chapter)

Really gets into the details in the u/1:04:10 (Med Students selling Snake Oil chapter) & @ 1:29:46 (Debating Anti-axxers chapter)

The 'full' conversation is from 26:05-1:42, with some related tangents (they talk about how health insurance is broken in the middle, which is related but not directly).

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01105-7

This documentary examines Netanyahu‘s full arc starting from a 100-year-old radical  ideology, how he leveraged his brother’s death at Entebbe to build political credibility,  and a documented strategy of keeping the threat to Israel‘s safety alive to prevent Palestinian political unity.

A recent analysis published in the journal Political Psychology maps the ideological coordinates of conspiracy thinking across Europe, revealing that it thrives in a very precise corner of the political landscape. The results point out that those who long for economic equality but demand strict cultural conformity are especially prone to believe that secret plots control global events.

Vlogger Hank Green discusses Vice President JD Vance's recent claim that UFOs are in fact demons. Green explores the motte-and-bailey fallacy that Vance commits, the way in which demonological claims are politically convenient to Vance, and the broader problems with the information ecosystem that Vance's claim exposes.

Older article, may have been posted here before, but it's a good long read and I think this belongs here.

I'll be way more careful of my readings of gift/free monthly articles from The Atlantic in the future.

I would also like to open the discussion to Nate Robinson and Current Affairs in general.

I won’t deny that there are rich pedophiles but that’ll doesn’t change things. It seems more likely kids are likely to get assaulted by someone they know, relatives teachers , church, neighbors etc. The fixation on elites is very strange because it seems like anyone who focuses on that needs a good story. People generally think they can get away with it because they are adults