I figure the business about South America and Australia being "opposite" means being opposite on the Polar Azimuthal Equadistant (=PAE) map (the UN flag map). I am not sure of the flight routes from South America to Australia but on a Round globe one might suppose they'd either cross over or skirt the Antarctic Circle to take a short route rather than go over the North Pole (actually, they don't do it quite that short because, among other things, there's a lack of emergency landing airports around the Antarctic Circle). Using non-FE thinking, namely thinking of the earth as round, the enormous distance between South America and Australia on the UN flag map is the result only of the distortion of trying to depict a round earth on a flat page, and that distance does not exist in a round earth reality.. Using various flight time calculators, which were not always entirely congruent since some airlines or routes are not direct or involve the same airports or comparable jets, etc., Buenos Aires, Argentina to Sydney Australia flight takes 15½ hr, JFK NY to Buenos Aires Arg. takes 12¾ hr, Moscow Russia to Johannesburg South Africa takes 12½ hr. So the apparent distances/nearness on the PAE map doesn't work out the same in actual flight times and air distances.
I would like to call attention to an unpleasant pair of characters, Texe Marrs, a prolific shortwave/internet "preacher" with an ugly anti-semitic fixation, and Edward Hendrie, a lawyer who churns out books with anti-Catholic and anti-semitic theories. Hendries has churned out a book,
The Greatest Lie on Earth: Proof That Our World is Not a Moving Globe, arguing for (1) a flat earth of the UN flag configuration which (2) is the immobile center of the universe, and Marrs featured him on his weekly radio/internet broadcast and is helping sell his book.
" class="bbc_link" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> It's also been picked up by another notorious anti-semite, so I suppose a round earth is now regarded as Jewish in some way.
http://henrymakow.com/2016/02/Edward-Hendrie-Flat-Earth-Defense.html The particular bit of fakelore these guys are peddling as part of the UN flag map business is that Antarctica must be the outer edge of the Flat Earth and somehow ALL the govts of the world are blocking people from finding the edge by forbidding visitors to the South Pole, overflights, etc. This story works - only as long as there have been ABSOLUTELY NO overflights or no circumnavigation of Antarctica. But, no, there have been explorers, overflights, satellites over the South Pole, and voyages around the coastline of Antarctica, etc., quite a lot of them. It turns out that Antarctica has, first, been divvied up among various countries, not always amicably, and ostensibly for scientific research ....
http://astro.uchicago.edu/cara/vtour/ant.cia.gif .... and each research station gets understandably edgy about strangers, especially non-scientists, tramping through their research fields and maybe contaminating their stuff with stuff from other people's research fields. Also, Antarctica, unlike the North Pole, doesn't have a native human population, and the only people there to stage a rescue are the scientists themselves, who really feel ill-prepared and disinclined to do this for tourists, and since the Antarctic environment and landscape is so very hostile, allowing marginally prepared tourists there is just begging to spend enormous amounts of time thereafter rescuing the same marginally prepared tourists.
Edward Hendrie (who is, believe it or not, a lawyer in the DEA and an expert on criminal evidence!) actually insists that the Earth is flat and immobile - in accordance with his very literal reading of the KJV Bible, that it is configured like that Polar Azimuthal Equidistant Projection map used in the UN flag {and, by the way, that particular projection, abbreviated PAE, goes back to maps showing only one hemisphere or less in the 16th century including one by Postel in 1581, and a world map by Jacques Cassini in 1691:
http://www.artwis.com/articles/all-the-world-within-a-circle-some-unusual-world-maps-on-a-single-polar-projection/3/ }, that the Antarctic ice walls are the edge of the Earth and the various govts are combining to prevent anyone from finding out.
Further, since the Earth is unique in being both flat and immobile, the sun and all the stars and celestial bodies are spinning around the Earth, no matter how distant they may be, and somehow they always seem to be in the same positions relative to each other. I will point out that, for a least a few decades in the 16th century there was the geocentric notion that while the Earth was round, and turned at 24 hour intervals, it was the center of the universe and the planets orbited around the Earth (this notion of a turning Earth as the center was associated with Tycho Brahe) - unlike Hendrie's notion that the Earth doesn't even turn and therefore even the sun and all the stars and planets are moving around the immoble Earth in a 24 hour cycle; astronomical calculations could be done with Brahe's theory - but they required incredibly cumbersome "corrections" that were not necessary when heliocentric calculations were made. Hendrie offers no particular explanation what the Earth is resting on, what might be over the edge, etc. Proof that you can go to a real college and then a real law school, and associate with other people who have done likewise, and still not quite understand why the Empire State Building observation deck can't see all the way to Europe.
Hendrie supposes that the "fraud" of a round earth, revolving and rotating in space, is the work of a mostly Jewish conspiracy, which he dates back vaguely about 15 centuries (not supported by anything specifically astronomical, just his extremely bad attitude about Jews) ... except that the notion of a round earth goes back very much farther, and to civilizations that had no Jews, and to periods when Jews were very badly persecuted. In
The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades by John Kirtland Wright (American Geographical Society, Research Series nr. 15, NY, 1925) page 15: "Nearly all scholars of antiquity after the fifth century before Christ thought that the earth was a globe." - and he names several Greek and Roman scholars such as Aristotle and Pliny. (There are some clues that the Chinese and Hindus may have tumbled to the realization of a round earth even earlier in history.) Further,
some ancient scholars were willing to accept the notion that the spherical earth was not immobile. It is not at all clear what advantage comes to Jews, Catholics, Communists, or others for promoting the notion of a round and rotating earth, if false, and there are so many competing scientists and hostile ethnic groups in the world over the centuries that it seems impossible that every last one of them has been, not merely informed but entirely persuaded and convinced to continue the "round earth fraud" when exploding it could undoubtedly win them fame and fortune.
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