A creation museum of your very own!

The creation museum in Social Circle, Georgia, complete with all of its contents, is for sale. Like me, I’m sure all of you are going “squeeee!!” right now.

You know, Father’s Day is just around the corner, and rather than getting me a $5 tie, maybe the kids should chip in and get me this. It shouldn’t cost much more. And as a special bonus, Georgia benefits when the trucks come in and haul all this trash away. There should be a picnic and a parade.

Maybe I’m being unfair. It might be worth more: that “museum” looks wonderfully kitschy. Everything is in flashy gilt frames, and just the Robot Giant Pandas have got to be worth something.

At least the walruses are safe, and any day now @Nifty will save the Gulf

British Petroleum isn’t so awful after all — it turns out that they have an almost 600 page long emergency response plan to deal with blowouts on their offshore oil wells. All the answers are in there, and I’m sure that they’ll soon be implemented. You can read those plans yourself and feel the warm glow of confidence that all is in good hands.

  1. Lists “Sea Lions, Seals, Sea Otters [and] Walruses” as “Sensitive Biological Resources” in the Gulf, suggesting that portions were cribbed from previous Arctic exploratory planning;

  2. Gives a web site for a Japanese home shopping site as the link to one of its “primary equipment providers for BP in the Gulf of Mexico Region [for]rapid deployment of spill response resources on a 24 hour, 7 days a week basis”; and

  3. Directs its media spokespeople to never make “promises that property, ecology, or anything else will be restored to normal,” implying that BP will only commit candor by omission.

I have reviewed the plan myself. It’s amazing.

  1. The walruses in the Gulf of Mexico are all safe. I repeat, the walruses are safe. This part of their plan was executed perfectly. We have to give them credit here.

  2. The site for primary equipment providers is extremely technical, and it’s also almost entirely in Japanese, so I’m afraid I can’t extract all the details. It does say in English “@nifty” on many of the pages, and nifty sounds like exactly the quality I want in my industrial gear. I think this is a picture of the rapid response team, dressed for deployment to the warm Gulf waters:

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    I poked around a bit and found this cryptic diagram of a mysterious machine of some sort. I’m pretty sure it’s the device that will be lowered deep into the ocean to seal off the gushing wellhead. It is in Japanese, so I can’t tell how it will work, but it definitely looks nifty.

  3. That third part of the plan is also a whopping success. Candor is completely absent. BP’s CEO, Tony Hayward, has in fact done a sterling job of being an unctuous, lying ass, saying that the spill will have only a “very, very modest” impact on the environment, and doing a fabulous job of trying to get his life back.

One other relevant point is that they do list worst case scenarios for various wells, and they’re spot on. The worst-case oil spill for any well is the sum of the amount of oil in various flow lines plus one day’s output from the well, and I’m sure it would be accurate if, as they assume, every catastrophic failure were quickly fixed within one day. Or in some cases, the well is simply instantly shut off. That it’s been flowing for 7 weeks instead of a single day is a fairly trivial difference, and even that estimates are in the range of 20 million barrels lost instead of the predicted 20 thousand barrels, is easily explained if we simply assume that there are creationists in charge of the schedule. We can even estimate when the pipe will be closed by simply using the kind of creationist math with which I am familiar, so we can be confident that the gusher will end within 134 years.

I think we can safely say that BP’s response to this disaster has been as effective as promised in their official response plan, filed almost a year ago. It is so eerily accurate I’m almost ready to credit them with psychic powers. They have the competence of a Sylvia Browne, the infallibility of the Pope, the steely-eyed acumen of Pat Robertson, and the forthright honesty of a Republican senator’s opposition to gay marriage.

I shall sleep well tonight in the knowledge that industry has prepared many such environmental response plans.

If BP can’t fix the oil spill, next stop: Magic!

Oh, how sweet. Something good is going to come out of the Gulf oil spill. While the ocean is poisoned, sea birds tremble and die, fish and marine invertebrates are suffocated, work crews labor to contain the spreading oil slick, rescue workers struggle to clean animals tarred with sludge, and BP (we hope) tries to throttle the ruptured pipe, devout Christians gather to stand around, hold hands, and mumble at the clouds. They must have worked very hard to come up with that kind of pointless time-waster.

This is not a protest. It’s not about belly-aching. This is an opportunity for people to come together and show support for each other. It’s also an opportunity to have a moment of silence in memory of the 11 people who passed away in the accident and the people along the Gulf Coast who have been affected, whose livelihoods are gone because of this.

And don’t forget…a chance to parade your piety on the 10:00 news! That’s actually the primary purpose of prayer vigils, because it’s not as if they do anything.

Everyone is so angry and frustrated and we need to unite instead. We’re all tired. We’re all frustrated. This is a chance to just turn it over to someone else for a minute.

Someone else? Who? The people working on the coast or on boats? I think they’ve got enough work to do.

Oh, you mean God. He’s a useless old git who never gets anything done. Why you’d think it would be at all productive to hand off the work to a phantasm is a mystery. Is it because an immaterial nonexistent ghost would be far more productive than any gang of pious sky-mumblers?

Support the drag queens in a poll!

The Tri-City Herald ran a photo showing a drag queen at an event, the Columbia Basin College’s Queers & Allies drag show. Here it is, entirely safe for work and not at all risque.

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It prompted one reader to write in protest.

Am I the only reader of this newspaper who would like to know what the Herald’s news criteria was for publishing the four-column by seven-inch picture of a drag queen show on the front page May 26? Many would say the photo lacked good taste, but more importantly, failed by most journalistic standards to be “newsworthy” or “all the news which is fit to print.”

Does the editor who made the call have a tabloid mentality or does this person believe there was some social redeeming value to the photo and caption? Was there any “reader take away” from its publication? Admittedly, it may be difficult for your editor to choose a “newsy” story the morning after the cable news networks have already run all the important stories, but come on.

Respectfully, the Tri-City Herald might consider polling its readers to determine if it is as disconnected from its constituency as we find most of our politicians and government officials are these days.

The comic nature of the picture would hardly be appropriate on the cartoon page with Peanuts, B.C. or Garfield since it would insult the talented artists who produce those comics.

It has to be a poe — who could possibly say “talented artists” of B.C. or Garfield? But anyway, the paper ran with the suggestion to poll its readers, and I’m happy to oblige N. Gillette of West Richland by responding.

Should the Herald print photos of drag shows?

Yes
55%
No
45%

Storm the poll! I’ve been to Kennewick, Pasco, and Richland, and I know they desperately need pages and pages of flamboyant drag queens in their paper. Do it for the people.

Sometimes you’ve got to wonder…are we the baddies?

An LA Times story brings up the troubling possibility — nay, near-certainty— that we aren’t the global good guys our right wing brethren keep telling us we are. I know, it’s hard to believe, since we are so obviously the good guys in all that we do, but sometimes, there are trivial little incidents that make a fellow worry. Like when we have doctors doing experiments in torture. That’s the sort of Ming-the-Merciless kind of thing that baddies do.

A prominent human rights group accused the CIA of conducting illegal human experiments and unethical medical research during interrogations of high-profile terrorism suspects under the George W. Bush administration.

Physicians for Human Rights charged Monday that CIA doctors and other medical personnel collected data to study and calibrate the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, severe pain and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques, but did so under the guise of trying to protect the detainees’ health.

Well, at least we don’t have elite military units prancing about with skulls on their uniforms, reveling in death imagery.

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Oh, crap.

Sour old men have new plan to capture the love of Ireland

We all know the Catholic Church has a serious public relations problem right now — they’re hidebound, they’re insensitive to the human needs of their congregations, and, well, sheltering an evil bunch of child-rapers that they shuttle about among unknowing parishes like a buggerymobile or a penis-on-wheels program doesn’t help. You would think that someone would realize that maybe some substantial reform is in order, and they have—but it’s not the kind of reform rational people might have imagined. Instead, the church is planning to crack the whip in Ireland and insist on more dogmatism.

Vatican investigators to Ireland appointed by Pope Benedict XVI are to clamp down on liberal secular opinion in an intensive drive to re-impose traditional respect for clergy, according to informed sources in the Catholic Church.

The nine-member team led by two cardinals will be instructed by the Vatican to restore a traditional sense of reverence among ordinary Catholics for their priests, the Irish Independent has learned.

Priests will be told not to question in public official church teaching on controversial issues such as the papal ban on birth control or the admission of divorced Catholics living with new partners to the sacraments — especially Holy Communion.

Theologians will be expected to teach traditional doctrine by constantly preaching to lay Catholics of attendance at Mass and to return to the practice of regular confession, which has been largely abandoned by adults since the 1960s.

An emphasis will be placed on an evangelisation campaign to overcome the alienation of young people scandalised by the spate of sexual abuse of children and by later cover-ups of paedophile clerics by leaders of the institutional church.

A major thrust of the Vatican investigation will be to counteract materialistic and secularist attitudes, which Pope Benedict believes have led many Irish Catholics to ignore church disciplines and become lax in following devotional practices such as going on pilgrimages and doing penance.

That’s just wonderful — there’s little the church could do to help secularism advance more than to totter on its creaky old legs into the fray, yelling at those damned kids to stop being so progressive. Well, they could bring back the Inquisition and send teams of witchfinders loose in Ireland…and given their record, I expect that’s what we’ll see after the new policy of increased hectoring fails.

I want to see this movie

It’s called Agora, and it’s about Hypatia, who was a kind of non-Christian martyr, murdered by a religious mob. Here’s one account of her death:

And in those days there appeared in Alexandria a female philosopher, a pagan named Hypatia, and she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through Satanic wiles…A multitude of believers in God arose under the guidance of Peter the magistrate…and they proceeded to seek for the pagan woman who had beguiled the people of the city and the prefect through her enchantments. And when they learnt the place where she was, they proceeded to her and found her…they dragged her along till they brought her to the great church, named Caesareum. Now this was in the days of the fast. And they tore off her clothing and dragged her…through the streets of the city till she died. And they carried her to a place named Cinaron, and they burned her body with fire.

She’s definitely a wonderful subject for a movie, they’ve got a big name, Rachel Weisz, playing the leading role, and the film is done and looking for a distributor. No one wants to give it wide release. I wonder why? It could be that it’s badly made (not likely, since it was the highest grossing film in Spain for 2009), or it could be that a movie about an intelligent godless woman who is persecuted and slaughtered by a mob of mindless fanatical Christians with the approval of the church is a poor fit to the American political climate.

The Life You Can Save

Peter Singer has a lovely idea: The Life You Can Save, a plan to reduce poverty worldwide.

I do have one objection. This is basically a plan for wealth redistribution, which I think is a reasonable objective. However, the only people who are going to be helping others are those willing to participate voluntarily — the selfish greedy bastards won’t feel a thing. Shouldn’t there be, like, a policy of progressive taxation that makes the excessively wealthy contribute more to easing poverty? That seems fairer to me.

Nazis, teabaggers…same difference

Last week, Glenn Beck was full of praise for a book he had claimed to have read overnight, which he regarded as a valuable source documenting the perfidy of commies. It was titled The Red Network, by Elizabeth Dilling. This morning, he is having a little trouble remembering the title and is claiming to be getting falsely tarred with accusations of being a “Jew loving Nazi sympathizer” by the Left (it’s always the Left, because as we all know, there are no Jews on the Left). His lapse of memory is amusing because it has been revealed that Dilling was a fanatical anti-Semite who conspired with the Nazis before World War II, and her book is full of obvious racist comments.

…under the opportunities of the American government and the inspiration of Christianity, the American Negroes have acquired professions, property, banks, homes, and produced a rising class of refined, home loving people. This is far more remarkable than that many Negroes are still backward. The Reds play upon the Negroes’ love of their own people and represent them as persecuted in order to inflame them against the very white people who have in reality given the colored race far greater opportunities than their fellow negroes would give them in Africa today.

This kind of passage just sailed right past Glenn Beck as, apparently, unremarkable and unobjectionable…until a few people pointed out to him that he was citing and praising a literal Nazi.

It’s true that Beck’s fans use a different label, but to be fair to the guy, their policies actually are indistinguishable from what the Nazis favored, so his confusion is understandable.