Creationists win a prize

There is a zoo near Bristol called — you’ll see there are already problems right from the name — Noah’s Ark Zoo. It is unambguously proud of its status as a blatantly creationist institution.

After looking at the current explanations for origins and evolution; it is our view that the evidence available points to widespread evolution after an initial Creation by God. This is viewed as controversial by some and welcomed by others; but whether currently popular or not we believe the evidence supports a world-view somewhere between Darwinism and 6000BC Creationism and we encourage interested readers to look into the claims being made.

They are disavowing the strictly young earth creationist approach, so they reassure us that the world really is older than 6,000 years old. Ha ha, how silly — 6,000 years is far too short. Aren’t those dogmatic creationists absurd?

So, you might wonder, how old do they think the earth is? And they cagily hem and haw and refuse to answer, although they do suggest that 4.5 billion years is just way too old, ha ha, goofy evolutionists. They do reference a creationist site that invents a new geology, and which argues, for instance, that the Cretaceous was a period that was actually 4,000 years long.

Real geologists, the ones who actually understand the science, say the Cretaceous was 80 million years long. So they’re only off by about 4 orders of magnitude. I guess that means they think the earth is tens of millions of years old instead of a few billion, which makes them what? Adolescent Earth Creationists, instead of Young Earth Creationists? Maybe we can call them Tweenie Creationists. They’re still wrong, though.

Anyway, this joke of a zoo that miseducates children (but apparently cheerfully and with colorful and interactive exhibits and stories!) has won an award from the Council for Learning Outside the Classroom. It’s a peculiar gift — they’re basically rewarding them for good, effective teaching of lies.

You can read about the award here. Apparently, one of the qualifications is supposed to be about providing “accurate information”; shouldn’t this zoo have been instantly disqualified on that basis alone?

Ben Stein does his best Ben Stein impersonation

Ben Stein has opened his mouth again, this time on the economy. He thinks the 15 million Americans who are unemployed deserve it.

The people who have been laid off and cannot find work are generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities. I say “generally” because there are exceptions. But in general, as I survey the ranks of those who are unemployed, I see people who have overbearing and unpleasant personalities and/or who do not know how to do a day’s work. They are people who create either little utility or negative utility on the job.

Wait…Ben Stein is complaining about other people’s overbearing and unpleasant personalities and bad work habits? The man who built his reputation on a voice like a strangled frog and the dullest personality imaginable thinks those are firing offenses? Very good, then, let him be unemployed.

I’ve known a few people who have been laid off — I grew up near Seattle, where every other year, Boeing would hiccup and mobs of people, including my own father, would find themselves fired and looking desperately to make ends meet. I had no idea that Boeing managed their personnel by firing only nasty unpleasant people.

God hates dogs?

This story is nice and sad at the same time. At an Anglican church in Canada, a parishioner attended with his dog, went up to take communion and his pet followed him, and after giving the man the magic cookie, the priest placed a communion wafer on the dog’s tongue, too. Hey, he was just waiting there with his tongue hanging out, it was the most natural thing to do. Unfortunately, and entirely predictably, some prissy-pants whiner in the congregation didn’t like it.

Days later, the church and diocese received a complaint from one parishioner, who felt the church offended the sacred ritual. The bread and wine are meant to represent the body and blood of Jesus Christ and are only to be given to those who have been baptized.

It’s a cracker. Come on. I’d rather make one dog happy than please all the dogmatists in the world.

And these speculations as rationalizations annoy me.

“In his email, the man’s argument was that Christ wouldn’t have liked it,” said Needham. “But in my opinion, Christ would have thought it was neat. It was just being human. And it made everyone smile.”

Face it, your god is simply a projection of your own personality and beliefs. He isn’t there. If you like dogs, you’ll imagine that your god likes dogs; if you think noisy smelly animals are a nuisance, your god bars the gates of heaven to them.

What fresh torment can we perpetrate on young girls?

How about breast ironing? When I first read about it, I wondered how it would even do anything — but then you discover that they heat stones until they’re hot enough to cause pain, and press these instruments of torture to their chest daily for months. And who carries out this sadistic abuse? Their loving mothers. To make them unattractive to men, who might otherwise get them pregnant.

Don’t watch the video if the sight of scarred breasts bother you.

One in four girls in Cameroon are having this done. It seems to me that sex education and prophylactics would be the less destructive way to prevent pregnancies, and probably more effective, but…did you know that approximately 25% of the population of Cameroon are Catholic?

Comic-con reacts to Fred Phelps

Westboro Baptist Church decided that they were going to picket Comic-Con, and Justin Kirchart sent me pictures. He also sent me a photo of the WBC picket — it’s a sad and pathetic 4 people standing and holding the usual “YOU HATE GOD” and “GOD HATES FAGS” signs, and it wasn’t very interesting, so I didn’t bother to upload it.

Here, though, are the forces of Comic-con madness across the street. They’re much more entertaining. Click to zoom in!

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Justin liked “Jesus was nailed to a cross. Thor has a hammer.” I kind of liked “ODIN IS GOD. Read Mighty Thor #5”. Thor is always good for a laugh in these sorts of things.

Lessons learned from Breitbart and Sherrod

So there I was on strike, and this appalling news story flew by and I had to choke on my tongue. I’m late, but I have to say something.

The story, as you probably all know, is that Shirley Sherrod gave a talk on her work assisting poor farmers hang on to their land, in which she confessed to being less enthusiastic about helping poor white farmers early on. Andrew Breitbart, professional pseudojournalist and teabaggin’ hack, ran just that excerpt of her talk and made it sound as if she and her audience at the NAACP were flaming racist hatemongers who were chuckling over making Whitey pay.

He lied. He lied outrageously by editing out the context (or, as he claims, his source did the editing), and making it sound like racism when it was exactly the opposite, and Tom Vilsack, the Democrat at the Department of Agriculture rushed to appease Breitbart and had Sherrod fired.

Afterwards, the full video of the talk was revealed, and it’s discovered that Sherrod was making the point that her early biases were wrong, and that she learned that it was important to get over the false barriers of racism and realize that this is a problem of the poor of every color. Then the farmers who she’d been initially reluctant to help came forward to say that Sherrod had been a wonderful person who’d saved the family farm for them. It’s quite a story: it’s the complete annihilation of a right-wing lie, and the emergence of a real hero, Shirley Sherrod.

I’ve learned a couple of things.

  • Andrew Breitbart is beneath contempt. He’s not a journalist at all: he’s a partisan hack who will make up stories to fit his biases (he was also guilty of faking the ACORN scandal). I’m hoping the news media will recognize his name as purest poison from now on. I don’t have high hopes, though; people seem to be swallowing Breitbart’s excuses, lame as they are.

  • Our Democratic leadership is spineless. They fired this woman at the command of right-wing attack dogs? For shame. They didn’t even try to investigate and figure out if this was a genuine problem. Please learn: when the wingnuts bark, don’t jump, because they are little yappy dogs who never shut up. Fire Vilsack and put Sherrod in his place — she seems to have a moral compass.

  • Racism isn’t dead, and the Republican party seems to be its bastion. This was an effort by Breitbart to punish the NAACP because it had been accusing the teabaggers of racism; it has soundly backfired, because trying to damage an organization working to end racism is simply another manifestation of racism. Sherrod is fighting back, pointing out what the right-wing media is actually trying to do.

    “They were looking for the result they got yesterday,” she said of Fox. “I am just a pawn. I was just here. They are after a bigger thing, they would love to take us back to where we were many years ago. Back to where black people were looking down, not looking white folks in the face, not being able to compete for a job out there and not be a whole person.”

  • The right-wing political base is truly vile. I looked at a few of their blogs, and despite the thoroughness of Breitbart’s credibility implosion and the way this story has blown up in their faces, they’re still trying to defend it. I’m not going to link to them, but instead, look at this brief and effective deconstruction of one such apologia by John Cole. Are the teaparty promoters racist? Hell, yes. Either that or they’re just brain-damaged idiots, I can’t tell.

  • There’s another minor lesson to be learned here, too. Glenn Greenwald said something of Breitbart, who is still refusing to explain how he got this dishonestly edited tape:

    “Journalists” are supposed to expose their “sources” if they use the journalist to perpetrate a fraud.

    Oh, yes?

  • The important lesson, though, is that this is about class politics and class warfare — not the phony kind the Republicans decry, which is all about the horrible way the obscenely rich are hindered from becoming pornographically rich, but the real one, the one fought in an America where children still go to bed hungry and everyone has to worry about the porous social safety net. This is a country where a middle-class person can be completely wiped out by a serious illness in the family, where the poor are kept paddling in place trying to make ends meet and never get an opportunity to advance themselves. Sherrod said that, too.

    Sherrod delivered an address on race, class, and government that wove together reflections of the murder of her father at the hands of white man, her early-life misgivings about the American South, her work organizing the community in the face of violent racism, and her eventual recognition as a government official working with local farmers that class, not race, was the dominant matter. “It’s not just about black people, it’s about poor people,” Sherrod said. “We have to get to the point where race exists but it doesn’t matter.”

    That should frighten Republicans more than their phony race-baiting story: when Americans wake up to their common cause despite Republican efforts to sow divisions by race, then we might have some progressive politics again (beyond the weak and unprincipled of Democratic Republican-lite politics, that is.)

But most of all, we’ve got to treat the Republican hate machine appropriately: Drudge-acolytes like Breitbart, phonies like Beck and Limbaugh — all are pariahs that our news media must stop treating respectfully.