An Iowa man has kicked off controversy over religious freedom in the small town of Ottumwa, Iowa by opening a city council meeting with a prayer to Satan, which then kicked off a debate about the proper time in the meeting agenda to undo the “curse.” 

On Tuesday night, Ottumwa resident, satanist, and former city council member Matt Dalbey took the podium to read an invocation to start a routine meeting of the council. “Thank you mayor, council. Let us pray,” Dalbey started. “Dear dark father, let us stand now unbowed and unfettered by arcane doctrines born of fearful minds and darkened times. Let us embrace the Luciferan impulse to eat off the tree of knowledge and dissipate our blissful and comforting delusions of old.”

The prayer is a common one used by the Satanic Temple of Iowa. “Let us demand that individuals be judged for their concrete actions, not for their fealty to arbitrary social norms and illusory categorizations,” he continued. “Let us reason our solutions with agnosticism in all things, holding fast only to that which is demonstrably true. Let us stand firm against any and all arbitrary authority that threatens the personal sovereignty of one or all. That which will not bend must break. And that which can be destroyed by truth should never be spared its demise.”“It is done. Hail Satan,” he finished.

Another citizen, a pastor named Rick Bick, rushed to the podium. “Let’s just reverse that curse that was just put on our city,” he said. “That ending with hail Satan and hail dark god. That’s not welcome here.”

“Mayor, that should be done at the end,” city councilor Cara Galloway said.

“It needs to be done now, OK.” Rick said. “I appreciate what Ms. Galloway is saying but that was a curse put on our city when he said ‘Hail Satan’ and the dark god and most of you know that. And we need to just stop and reverse it.”

“So what I’m gonna do now…I’m just gonna invite us into a 30 second time of prayer — time of silence.”

“No,” Galloway said. “We are at the consent agenda. I’m sorry, but it’s time to move forward. The invocation happened.”

“As mayor of this city…I’m going to ask right now that we do a moment of silence to reflect on whatever it is we need to reflect on at this time. And then we will move to the consent agenda,” mayor Benjamin Foote said.

Galloway spent the moment of silence with her head up and her arms crossed. An hour later, she spoke up. “Opening with an invocation means allowing viewpoints that may not reflect our own and responding to someone’s invocation is a slippery slope to putting a financial liability on the taxpayers and allowing others to object or respond. This is exactly why I had concerns about having an invocation when we first talked about it.”

Dalbey told 404 Media he was a sincere member of the Temple of Satan but stressed it’s “an organization of nontheists, people who don’t believe in any deities or supernatural beings.”

He served on the city council for eight years and has largely stayed out of local politics since leaving the council in 2021. But when the city council passed a new rule earlier this year that allowed city council meetings to start with religious invocations, he decided to do something. “I’m a constitutionalist,” he said. “And when I see this, the implication I got was that we were again starting to mix religion into the government.”

At the Tuesday night council meeting, the audience stood up to recite the Pledge of Allegiance the moment Dalbey finished. 

Ottumwa has only been reading invocations at its meeting for a short time. The city council passed a resolution allowing the practice on January 20. Galloway was the only person on the council who voted against it. At the time, she said Satanists might show up and read a prayer and that everyone would have to be OK with that. Readers of 404 Media may remember Ottumwa, Iowa because it is the place we aired our Super Bowl commercial.

Anyone who wants to show up to read an invocation before a city council meeting needs to fill out an electronic form. The form asks applicants to list an organization they represent, but allows people to say “none.” Dalbey has signed up to read invocations three times this year. He’s listed as representing “none” each time on the schedule. He was supposed to read a prayer on September 1, but couldn’t make the meeting because of his work. He’s on the schedule to read an invocation on November 3rd. “I plan on being there in November, absolutely,” he said.

Dalbey said he’d be happy to see the invocation policy rescinded. “When I was on the council [...] we were approached several times about doing an invocation, and the very reason that we didn't was because our attorney had warned us that when you do, you open the door to any and all people who want to present. That's the law,” he said. 

The invocation to Satan in a small town in Iowa is just the latest salvo in a 10-year-long battle over religious freedom of expression in the state. In 2016, a religious liberty group installed a Christian nativity scene at the state capitol in Des Moines. Later that year a group of atheists installed its own nativity scene honoring the Bill of Rights. In 2023, The Satanic Temple put up a pentagram built from red ribbon and topped with a mirror-mask ram’s head that invoked Baphomet in the capitol rotunda. The group also began holding winter celebrations in the Rotunda. A man vandalized the display, police arrested him and charged him with a hate crime.

In 2024 — the same year Governor Kim Reynolds signed a state law meant to protect religious freedom — officials blocked Satanists from holding their winter celebration. The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request looking for records about the incident and, earlier this year, sued Iowa on behalf of the Satanic Temple for violating federal free speech laws.

“I think we're seeing you know a big shift in our politics. I think we've seen a rise of Christian nationalism in this country [...] and I think it's trying to grasp and get a hold of controlling our politics, our laws and our government, and I find that highly troubling,” Dalbey said. “And I think anytime we let any religion dominate our politics, we revert right back to where we were 250 years plus ago: a monarchy where the church ruled the country, and that was bad for everybody. That's one of the reasons our founding fathers decided to form a new nation. And I think if we are not careful, you know, we're going to slide right back into that scenario.”

You can set your watch to it.

Major media companies insist they simply have to merge to create all manner of amazing new “consolidative synergies.” The debt from the acquisitions then result in brand and company cannibalization as labor and consumers are forced to carry the load. The net result is mass layoffs, higher prices, and shittier products from corner cutting. Typical enshittification.

It used to be that after a major acquisition, executives would spend six months to a year at least pretending there were no labor downsides to consolidation. Now they don’t even bother.

The Ellison family and Paramount/Skydance/Warner Bros executives are already warning staff of major impending layoffs as “redundancies” are eliminated and workers are forced to pay off $82 billion in debt.

But worry not, in a memo to staff by Skydance CEO David Ellison and co-CEO Ynon Kreiz, the duo states that coming mass terminations will be conducted “thoughtfully and respectfully:”

“Integrating two companies will bring change, including difficult decisions that affect our workforce,” the execs wrote in the memo, a copy of which was obtained by Variety. “We are committed to handling this process thoughtfully and respectfully.”

The mass firings are, employees are told, part of “building a culture” where people feel “supported” and “empowered:”

“We must never lose sight of what matters most: our people. We will build a culture where people feel respected, empowered, supported and proud of the work they do.”

It’s important to recall that Skydance was first created years ago by Larry Ellison as an avenue that would allow his son David to pretend he was an actor. Like most extraction-class brunchlords, David has just failed upward ever since, to the point where he’s now in charge of most of Hollywood’s biggest studios.

Paramount execs say they’re aiming to create more than $6 billion in annualized cost savings over three years, most of which will come from layoffs (despite claims to the contrary by deal architect and RedBird Capital Partners boss Gerry Cardinale). Recall that when AT&T bungled its dual, doomed acquisitions of DirecTV and Time Warner, more than 50,000 employees ultimately lost their jobs.

This comes after numerous rounds of layoffs caused by the previous merger between Paramount and Skydance. Further layoffs will come next year as bumbling Paramount execs struggle to adapt to shifting demand across traditional film and television. We know this because this is literally what happens every single time major media companies (especially Warner Brothers) pursue “growth for growth’s sake” consolidation.

The risks here are so bad, even normally pro-consolidation and pseudo-growth obsessed Wall Street is getting cold feet about how this all ends:

“TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz wrote in a note Wednesday that investors should hold their shares of Skydance as the firm remained “quite cautious on the ability of the company and its management to avoid integration and execution problems that have bedeviled other major media mergers.”

“The risks (leverage, integration) of the combination with WBD are high; we remain skeptical that SKYD management will be able to create value from this deal when so many other major media deals have failed,” the note read.”

And again, this could have been potentially prevented if California Democrats like Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, and gubernatorial nominee Xavier Becerra hadn’t pressured state AGs to settle their antitrust lawsuit against the company. What’s worse is they couldn’t even be bothered to affix meaningful conditions to the deal; most were simply empty gestures Paramount suggested itself.

Garth Brooks is coming back to Kansas City, Missouri, next month for two nights at T-Mobile Center, with shows set for Friday, Nov. 6, and Saturday, Nov. 7, 2026. Tickets go on sale at noon Central time on Friday, Oct. 16, priced at $155 before taxes.

The Kansas City dates mark the first November stop on Brooks' Blame It All on My Roots Arena Tour, according to garthbrooks.com. The $155 price includes a $140 ticket, a $5 facility fee and a $10 service charge, and the listed total does not include applicable taxes, per the same announcement.

Brooks has deep roots in the city — his mother was born there, and his first gig as an artist was at the Kansas City Opry, according to the same announcement on his website. He has said Kansas City “kind of gave me my life,” and that he feels comfortable as soon as he arrives. The Music Universe described the Blame It All On My Roots tour as Brooks' full-scale return to arenas.

A Chiefs Home Game Turns the Weekend Into a Party

The timing lines up with the Kansas City Chiefs hosting a home game on Sunday, Nov. 8 — the day after Brooks' second T-Mobile Center show. Brooks has said that pairing his concert weekend with a Chiefs home game “makes this a PARTY!” according to his website's announcement.

A History of Sellouts in Kansas City

This won't be Brooks' first big moment in the building. In 2007, he helped open the arena then known as Sprint Center with nine sold-out shows, and per IN Kansas City Magazine, that run spanned nine shows in 10 nights, selling nearly 18,000 tickets per performance, with all nine shows selling out within an hour. He returned in May 2017 for seven more sold-out shows, bringing his total to 16 sold-out performances inside the same building he'll play in November.

Brooks' connection to Kansas City ticket records goes back even further. In 1996, he broke a 14-year-old Neil Diamond ticket-sales record in the city, according to the garthbrooks.com announcement. His pull in the market extended beyond the arena, too — more than 74,500 tickets had been sold for his GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium show by late July, far surpassing the 58,600-ticket record Taylor Swift set there in September 2018, per IN Kansas City Magazine. KSHB 41 Kansas City reported that show drew more than 70,000 fans to Arrowhead.

Prices have climbed since Brooks' March 2017 Kansas City concert. Tickets for his March 2017 concert totaled $74.98 including tax, facility and service charges, according to a prior announcement on garthbrooks.com — roughly half of what fans will pay for November's shows before taxes are applied.

To go along with my recent post about control rooms, here’s the Control Panels group on Flickr, containing almost 3000 photos of control interfaces for all kinds of things.

You’ll see some of the same photos as in the Control Rooms group, but when you get past the first couple of pages, there’s more variety: fiddly knobs, entire walls of nearly identical switches, dials, inscrutable gauges, soda machine interfaces, bump it and you might die buttons, computers with switches, Swinging Fingers (!!), and many more…

How much Gorton did you spot?

Tags: design · photography