Evolution Is Not Debatable

It's a fucking scientific fact. You can't "believe" in evolution any more than you can "believe" in gravity. Evolution exists, regardless of your "belief."

There is nothing about evolution to debate.

The only debate should be over how much evolution deniers should be restricted from access to freakazoids, repugs, children and other easily-deluded groups.

Bill Nye is a genuine hero. But by "debating" this freakazoid, all he is doing is lending credibility and respect to ideas that should get anyone laughed out of modern society.

As the creationist moron knows perfectly well.

"Having the opportunity to hold a cordial but spirited debate with such a well-known personality who is admired by so many young people will help bring the creation-evolution issue to the attention of many more people, including youngsters," Ham said in a release Thursday.

Precisely. Don't do it, Bill.

The Irony of Evolution Denial

It's a testament to both the extreme ignorance and extreme arrogance of the young earth creationist morons that Ken Ham erected his creation museum monument to intellectual child abuse barely 20 miles away from the very site whose discovery 79 years before Charles Darwin was born blew the biblical myth of creation to smithereens.

Mike Rutledge, Kentucky Enquirer:

UNION, KY. — The gigantic bones found long ago in southwestern Boone County shook the minds and beliefs of top scientists east and west of the Atlantic Ocean in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Europeans and Americans had never seen the likes of the massive skeleton of extinct mastodons until French Capt. Charles Lemoyne de Longueil came upon them during a 1739 military expedition at a place called Big Bone Lick.


The bones, molars and tusks that belonged to vanished mastodons and woolly mammoths forced the country’s future third president, Thomas Jefferson, and scientists around the world to recast their beliefs about the workings of nature and the very concept of extinction. Jefferson and others couldn’t comprehend that God, in creating the perfect world of nature, allowed a type of creature to vanish forever.

SNIP

Today, the 525 acres of Kentucky’s Big Bone Lick State Park are a quiet area of hilly woods where breezes from the Ohio River, more than a mile to the west, carry the music of songbirds. Even the big signs and impressive bronze markers don’t fully reveal to visitors the impact this place had on the national consciousness and on the evolution of scientific thought.

 Science always wins, and mother nature will get. you. every. time.

Flintstone Truthers Insult Kentucky Supporters

Christian homeschoolers of Kentucky: Do you know that the builders of the great Ark Encounter think that you all are a bunch of drug-addicted, alcoholic, anti-war, fucking (literally) hippies? That you are as bad as war criminals?

Do you really want your tax dollars going to people who think you are as bad as war criminals?

Media Czech:

Looks like the son of Flintstone Truther and intellectual child abuser Ken Ham is a chip off the old block.

Nathan Ham comes to the defense of his dad against the folks at the Great Homeschool Convention who have banned him from their convention for being too flamboyantly hateful and intolerant of those who don't share his belief that humans rode saddled T-Rexes a few thousand years ago.

Who are those young earth Christian homeschoolers like? Dope smoking fornicating hippies!

Some Christians today are like the hippies of 50 years ago who used the word “love” to justify their fornications and sins against the word of God. The hippie culture is often pictured as a group of drug-addicted, fornicating drunks whose catchphrase “make love, not war” gave their movement a false sense of piety.

Read the whole thing.

The Ark and the Czech

If you are not reading Media Czech's blanket coverage of the mushrooming Flintstones Truther Park story, you are missing the best entertainment around.

Because each day brings a new revelation that is even more ridiculous than the last. Just when you think it can't get any more ludicrous, it does.

You thought dinosaurs were absurd? That's nothing! How about fire-breathing dragons? No, still not enough. Now we've got unicorns!

This is rapidly becoming an inescapable pool of quicksand for up-for-reelection Governor Steve Beshear. Any move he makes either toward or away from these freakazoid con artists just drags him closer to political death.

The Numbers Expose the Lies

If you are too young to remember nuts-and-bolts journalism, in which a local reporter would dig into a public document and examine each piece for veracity and logic, then you're in luck. Newspapers may no longer be doing that kind of journalism, but one Central Kentucky blogger is:

Media Czech exposes the numerical fantasies behind the proposed Flintstones Truther Park.

The creationuts claim their abomination will draw 1.6 million visitors per year, a number that even the New York Times swallowed without blinking. Only Media Czech did the math.

"These projections in these studies"? Is there more than one, Governor, or is that just a slip of the tongue? You've "looked at the numbers"? Does this mean that your staff has actually read the ARG feasibility study, or have they just read their summary on a piece of paper, and therefore "looked at the numbers"? Do you take at face value numbers created by Ken Ham's business partner for the benefit of Ken Ham receiving $37.5 million in tax breaks?

Again, one might consider these valid questions for Governor Beshear. Unless you work at the Courier Journal or Herald Leader.

But speaking of "feasible numbers", let's take a look at other parks in the area, and whether ARG's estimates seem feasible.

The Creation Museum averages over 300,000 visitors per year. And this is an all year round attraction, as the exhibits are inside no matter what the weather, unlike Ark Encounter. In fact, the major differences between the two are:

1) Ark Encounter is an outdoor attraction, meaning that this will be a mostly seasonal attraction
2) Ark Encounter has a giant boat, whereas the Museum has animatronic dinosaurs. I wonder which one kids will like more.
3) The Creation Museum is right next to 2,000,000 people. Ark Encounter is in the middle of nowhere.

Yet "ARG" expects us to believe that Ark Encounter will get 6-7 times the visitors that the Creation Museum gets. Interesting.

He makes the same comparison with King's Island amusement park in Cincinnati, Kentucky Kingdom amusement park in Louisville and the Cincinnati Zoo.

So what will it be, Herald Leader/Courier Journal? Do we ask our Governor specific questions about this feasibility study and the $37.5 million in tax breaks (and national ridicule) that have sprung from it, or do we just take these crazy people and their crazy numbers at their word?

Read the whole thing.

The creationuts are lying, and Governor Beshear is either too stupid to realize it or too corrupt to care.

And the cowardly transcribers at the Herald and the Courier are beneath contempt.

Even More Dangerous Than It Is Funny

PZ Myers draws the broader picture of the damage the creationism promoted by the Flintstones Truther Park is already causing.

While we're busy playing in the Creationist Theme Park … take a look at the depressing state of American education. This is the gloomiest article I've seen on the American future.

Add to this clear evidence that the U.S. education system, that source of future scientists and innovators, has been falling behind its competitors. After leading the world for decades in 25- to 34-year-olds with university degrees, the country sank to 12th place in 2010. The World Economic Forum ranked the United States at a mediocre 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly half of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are now foreigners, most of whom will be heading home, not staying here as once would have happened. By 2025, in other words, the United States is likely to face a critical shortage of talented scientists.

That hasn't even gotten to the predictions yet. That's a description of our current status.

You know, in ten years the Chinese tourists will be flocking to the bargains and sights of an economy in the toilet, and they will be booking tours to the Ark Encounter. And they will point and laugh and laugh and laugh. While proud Kentuckians will be scrabbling to sell them cheap plastic souvenirs in their new, low-paying jobs in the service industries.

It doesn't help that national media are treating the creationidiots as if they are rational human beings.

Ken Ham is humbly appreciative of the coverage his Giant Wooden Box project is getting.

We were notified late this morning that AiG's latest project, the Ark Encounter, will be featured tonight (Monday) on ABC-TV's evening newscast, World News with Diane Sawyer. Check your local listings for the ABC affiliate station in your area and the time of broadcast. (See the ABC-TV news site.) Also, here is a link to the article about the Ark project that appears in the New York Times today.

The website for the Ark Encounter is ArkEncounter.com.

We are grateful to God for all this media coverage.

And well he should be. I looked at the NY Times coverage, and was appalled.

I have to explain something to the Times. Some guy building a little theme park in Kentucky is not news. It's something for the state and local news, sure, but not something that warrants a good-sized spread and a big image of the proposed park in the N freaking Y frackin' Times.

So why is it given that much space and a purely vanilla description of the events and people involved, as if it is simultaneously a big deal deserving national attention and a weirdly blasé occurrence that requires no investigation — how can it be both controversial enough to warrant attention and so uncontroversial that the reporter can't even be bothered to mention how ridiculous and anti-scientific this endeavor is?

It is an astonishingly insipid article. The only good (?) thing about it is that finally the NY Times breaks its bad habit of "he said, she said" journalism and didn't even bother to contact a scientist to get the "other" side. You know, the rational, accurate, honest, scientific side.

I don't have much hope for the Diane Sawyer story going on the air tonight, either. Anyone want to bet on whether Ham gets pitched some softballs and the park that encourages children to be stupid is treated as purely an economic development issue?

As Media Czech notes in disgust, the NYT and other national coverage ignores the Menace to Civilization aspects of the project, like the dinosaurs.

More Than Just Freakazoid Stupidity: The Ark is a Fraud

Media Czech is still all over it.

When Steve Beshear announced his plans to give $37.5 million in tax breaks to a group so that they can build a theme park telling kids that humans rounded up dinosaurs onto a boat several thousand years ago, he said that a "feasibility study" showed that "Ark Encounter" would bring in 1.6 million visitors and over $200 million in it's first year. Sounds great, huh? Here's what Beshear's press release said about the study:

A feasibility study by the renowned America's Research Group has indicated that the Ark Encounter may attract 1.6 million visitors in the first year and is expected to employ up to 900 full and part-time staff.

Turns out the "renowed" America's Research Group is owned by a guy who co-authored a freakazoid book with none other than Ken Ham, the perpetrator of the Creationuts Headquarters of Intellectual Child Molestation and the con artist behind the Dinosaur Ark.

But the feasibility study is as scientific and objectively true as the Dinosaur Ark itself, I'm sure.

This story is growing, not fading. Follow it all here.

New Facebook group: Keep Kentucky Ark-Free.

Cell Biologist Robert Bevins for Governor

Via Media Czech, a letter so passionately rational and creatively brilliant it should make Cowardly Waste of Oxygen Steve Beshear shrivel up and disappear.

Georgetown College biology professor Robert Bevins writes:

Dear Governor Beshear.

It was with great sadness that I learned of the severe injury done to the Commonwealth of Kentucky’s reputation. It is a sad day when Kansans can look down on Kentucky, that at least Kansas is not trying to attract an amusement park catering to the unscientific concept of young earth creationism.

Worse still, Kentucky is offering tax incentives to attract further development by Answers in Genesis, a group that can only further decrease our reputation as a state that values higher learning. All this in a state that is home to such treasures of paleontology as Big Bone Lick and the rich history of hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary history are visible to anybody who bothers to look at every road that cuts through a hill.

It wouldn’t be a slap in the face to all of my fellow alumni of the University of Kentucky, devaluing the doctoral diploma that I proudly display in my office and denigrating the verifiable and evidence based science taught in our land grant universities and private colleges if Kentucky wasn’t looking to help fund an ethically bankrupt amusement park. The presence of the Creation “Museum” is embarrassment enough, but to know that my tax dollars may help to fund its expansion, when researchers at UK and University of Louisville face tight budgets while performing ground breaking scientific research, it is simply too much.

Today, you helped to tarnish my hard won degree with the scorn of the academic community. In an instant, my years of scholarship became worth a tiny little bit less. I will have to defend my state as I once did as a child. “Yes, we wear shoes,” becomes, “No, we aren’t all stuck in a scientific stone age.”

What hue and outcry would there be if Ken Ham’s execrable organization was teaching children that God’s way was to learn that left and right are actually right and left? And if you don’t follow the Ham’s specific and narrow interpretation of biblical direction, society will collapse entirely. This is the scientific equivalent of creationism. Students come prepared to ignore anything taught in biology classes, and no level of evidence will convince them that learning about how life evolves is of value, but will guarantee their damnation.

Imagine then, students unable to read their English texts from left to right, as their interpretation of those directions means that no book can make sense to them. Students walking through a line in the cafeteria, gathering their food in their hands and finally depositing it on a tray. Students inoculated against evidence don’t even know that their educational skills are stunted until they are faced with an honest presentation of evolution at the college or university level.

Perhaps saddest of all of this is that the tens millions of dollars already spent on this monument to prideful ignorance goes not to feed the hungry or clothe the poor (or even to clothe the hungry) but to enrich the purveyors of a plainly dishonest interpretation of all types of scientific evidence, biological, chemical, physical and astronomical.

Read the whole thing.

KY Governor Endorses Intellectual Child Molestation; Promises Tax Breaks

Fuck you, Florida: Kentucky is THE WORST.

Atheistliberalabortionist blessings forever on Media Czech for covering this abomination, so I don't have to.

From the first announcement of the Beshear-Ham Axis of Stupid ...

through the revelation of tax incentives ...

and the press conference video ...

all the way to the photoshop contest ...

it is the How-Low-Will-Supposed-Democrats-Seeking-Re-Election-Sink-to-Solicit-Freakazoid-Votes-They-Will-Never-Get Irresistible Train Wreck of the year.

Louisville Credit Union Partners with Freakazoids

Ordinarily, I am a strong proponent of credit unions. As member organizations rather than corporations, they usually avoid the Big Bank fees, frauds and failures.

But when a credit union steps forward to announce its support of freakazoid lies, superstition and war on reality, you probably shouldn't trust your money to them.

PZ Myers:

Kentuckians! Have you got money in the L&N Federal Credit Union? Do us all a favor and yank it out and invest it elsewhere. L&N is partnering with the Creation "Museum" in a 5K run. I have no objection to Ken Ham endorsing healthy exercise — presumably being a creationist dolt doesn't interfere with the functioning of your limbs — but jebus, respectable businesses should be embarrassed to be associated with those kooks.

That would be kooks who spent millions to advertise to the world that they think The Flintstones was a documentary.

Cowardly Creationist Bullies

The least surprising anti-muslim stupidity in the country is in Florence, Kentucky. This is the same county that for years has promoted a bastion of religious hatred, intolerance and fear.

PZ Myers:

Bernadette Barton provides an interesting perspective on Ken Ham's wretched little palace of ignorance. The Creation "Museum" is not a happy place.

Particularly nerve-wracking were signs warning that guests could be asked to leave the premises at any time. The group's reservation confirmation also noted that museum staff reserved the right to kick the group off the property if they were not honest about the "purpose of [the] visit."

Because of these messages, Barton said, the students felt they might accidentally reveal themselves as nonbelievers and be asked to leave. This pressure is a form of "compulsory Christianity" that is common in a region known for its fundamentalism, Barton said. People who don't ascribe to fundamentalism often report the need to hide their thoughts for fear of being judged or snubbed.

At one point, Barton reported in her paper, a guard with a dog circled a student pointedly twice without saying anything. When he left, a museum patron approached the student and said, "The reason he did that is because of the way you're dressed. We know you're not religious; you just don't fit in." (The student was wearing leggings and a long shirt, Barton writes.)

The pressures were particularly tough for gay members of the group, thanks to exhibits discussing the sinfulness of homosexuality and same-sex marriage. A lesbian couple became paranoid about being near or touching one another, afraid they would be "found out," Barton writes. This "self-policing" is a common occurrence in same-sex relationships in the Bible Belt, Barton said.

I felt it when I was there. I didn't fit in, either, and having guards with dogs wandering about isn't exactly welcoming. I suppose if you were a fundamentalist Christian with a finely honed persecution complex, you might appreciate visiting an armed camp where conformity is enforced, but it really wasn't my favorite atmosphere.

The article does get the creationist's side of the story.

The signs and warnings, he said, are because people will occasionally come to the museum to hand out anti-Creationist materials, disturbing other visitors.

"We know that the nature of the subject is controversial," Lisle said in a telephone interview. "It's just one of the things that we have to deal with in a fallen world."

Lisle defended the anti-gay messages in the museum as part of the museum's goal to stay true to Biblical teachings.

Funny, isn't it…creationists come to real museums all the time, hand out their literature, even lead tour groups through and babble stupidly against the message of the exhibits, and no one patrols the place with police dogs to suppress the free expression of dissent. I wonder why?

If you're not familiar with Ken Ham's con job, read this classic from Media Czech.

Ken Ham's Creationist Masturbation Closet a National Embarassment

PZ Myers brings us yet another well-respected national magazine exposing Kentucky's public idiocy.

A good take-down is a thing of beauty. A.A. Gill visited the "museum" in Kentucky, and gets right to the heart of the matter: it's not a museum, it's a national embarrassment.

The Creation Museum isn't really a museum at all. It's an argument. It's not even an argument. It's the ammunition for an argument. It is the Word made into bullets. An armory of righteous revisionism. This whole building is devoted to the literal veracity of the first 11 chapters of Genesis: God created the world in six days, and the whole thing is no more than 6,000 years old. Everything came at once, so Tyrannosaurus rex and Noah shared a cabin. That's an awful lot of explaining to do. This place doesn't just take on evolution--it squares off with geology, anthropology, paleontology, history, chemistry, astronomy, zoology, biology, and good taste. It directly and boldly contradicts most -onomies and all -ologies, including most theology.

It's also ugly, cheesy, and stupid. People often try to excuse faith by claiming it inspired a lot of great art…but here is the evidence that god is dead. All his rotting corpse seems to inspire any more is cartoon kitsch. And Christian rock.

I spent a lot of time in the Eden picnic area, trying to wrest some sort of spiritual buzz, a sense of the majesty and the mystery, but it's conspicuously absent. Literally beaten to death. This is Ripley's Believe-It. It is irredeemably kitsch. In fact, it may be the biggest collection of kitsch in God's entire world. This is the profound represented by the banal, a divine irony. (The penchant for kitsch is something that gay men and born-again Christians share.) This tacky, risible, and rational tableau defies belief, beggars faith. Compare it to the creation story in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, Masaccio's expulsion from Eden, or any of the thousands of flickering images, icons, and installations based on faith rather than literalist realism. It truly makes you wonder, Is all this righteous ire, all this money, all this Pentecostal flame-throwing the best they can come up with? This cheap county-fair sideshow--this is their best shot? It may be more replete with proof than a Soviet show trial, but this creation is bereft of any soul.

We've criticized Ham a lot for the inanities of his museum, but I wonder if the accusation that he's a cheap, tasteless rube will sting a little more than harping on the fact that he's ignorant and irrational (which he considers virtues). We'll have to see if a response appears on his blog.

By the way, Ken Ham reads Pharyngula, even if he never links to us or mentions us by name. He has a blog post that quotes me and commenters here, to show how evil we are. You should check it out to see if he found you worthy of damnation.

Ken Ham and people who believe his shit are allowed to drive, reproduce and vote. That's what's wrong with American democracy.

Scientists at the Creationist Play Park

On August 7, the Secular Student Association, PZ Myers and 300 friends toured Ken Ham's Creationism World O' Superstition in Northern Kentucky.

A scientist who scoffs at those who believe that men and dinosaurs cohabited the Earth rode a saddled triceratops last weekend. Paul Zachary Myers, an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, Morris, was on an unlikely field trip to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky.

Here is PZ's description of the tour, and here is another glimpse of the weirdness.


Here are videos of the tour.

Here is proof that the freakazoids are so intimidated by facts and reality that they threw out a visitor who was doing nothing at all, just to prove how big and strong their invisible sky wizard is.

Here are PZ's responses to Ham's desperate lies about what happened and what's in the World O' Superstition:

First.

Second.

Third.

And what happened after PZ left.

Another Victory for Liberal Reality

Media Czech brings us the victory of liberal bloggers and reality-based outrage over freakazoid idiocy.

One day after Media Czech and others exposed a joint holiday promotion between the infamous Creation Museum and the supposedly science-based Cincinnati Zoo, the Zoo cancelled the promotion.

Media Czech has been doing yeoman's work exposing the creationuts and their child abuse of a "museum" for more than a year, so we forgive MC his exuberant use of all caps.

BEHOLD!!!

BEHOLD THE POWER OF THE INTERNETS!!!

BEHOLD THE POWER OF THE DIRTY GODLESS LIBERAL BLOGGERS!!!

We called for it, we delivered it, and victory is ours!

SNIP

Smoke 'em if you got 'em boys. Victory is sweet (and hilarious...)

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

Just Clap Your Hands and Believe!

Page One Kentucky calls our attention to an editorial in the Courier-Journal criticizing the infamous Kentucky Creation Museum for causing untold damage to the critical-thinking ability of school children.

Not to mention the ability of proud Kentucky reality-based bloggers to hold up our heads in Internet public.

I haven't blogged about the Creation Museum (and no, you may NOT have a link to its website) partly out of embarassment for my state and partly because I didn't want to give it any more publicity.

But as Page One points out, the most entertaining - in an end-of-western-civilization kind of way - part of this editorial is the comment section, where you can find people who are apparently allowed access to the Internet (let's hope they neither drive nor vote) complaining about the editorial's "intolerance."

Which occasions the necessity, once again, to address a point also raised by the Joe Klein debacle.

Belief does not trump Fact.

That someone should have to point this out to anyone capable of cognitive thought is a tribute to the Friends of Tinkerbell who have persuaded the mainstream media that If You Really, Really Believe It, It's True.

This year, to the everlasting shame of the nation, nine of 10 Republican candidates for president, said on national television that they don't "believe" in evolution. That's like saying you don't "believe" in gravity. Such an admission is irrefutable proof that you are unfit for anything but serving as JoJo the dog-faced boy in the circus.

The most insidious accomplishment of the wingnut freakazoids has been the elevation of Belief over Fact. It used to be, back BR (Before Reagan), that a person could be a rational thinker and devout Christian who understood the fact of evolution and yet belived the biblical story of creation.

Fact and belief were separate, like vision and hearing. Both are nice, but neither is dependent on the other.

BR, it was annoying but possible to debate evolution vs. creation with someone because that someone understood the difference between facts and belief. He might have disputed the conclusions drawn from the factual evidence of evolution, but he did not claim that his belief alone made facts irrelevant.

Today, merely mentioning facts and evidence that contradict someone's belief makes you an anti-(whatever they believe) bigot and automatically wrong.

Geez, even the Inquisition knew that Galileo was right and therefore had to be silenced lest others discover the same facts.

I believe the sun will rise in the West tomorrow morning. By pointing to it rising in the East, you prove you are a radical, terrorist-helping, America-hating bigot.

(Parts of this post originally appeared as a comment on Glenn Greenwald's Unclaimed Territory on Salon.)

Cross-posted at Watching Those We Chose.