My enthusiasm for the Fourth of July has inexplicably dimmed this year

I don’t understand it. My patriotic ardor has been cooling for decades, but this year, it’s in the deep freeze. For inspiration, I turn to the American Enterprise Institute (it’s got “American” in the name, so it must be good). Unfortunately, this doesn’t help.

It links to an essay praising Calvin Coolidge and the divinity of our nation’s founding, and it’s about as dishonest as you’d expect from an anti-science far right wing capitalist propaganda organization.

History is replete with the births (and deaths) of nations. But the birth of the United States was unique because it was, and remains, a nation founded not on ties of blood,

Except the blood of the exterminated native peoples of the continent.

soil

Have we all forgotten manifest destiny and westward expansion? Vast tracts of land bought from the French and Mexico? Wars to define borders?

or ethnicity,

As long as your ethnicity is white, and even within ‘whiteness’ we have gradations. Anglo-saxons are privileged over Irish and Italians.

but on ideas, held as self-evident truths: that all men are created equal;

Except the dark-skinned ones, who are less equal and justifiably enslaved. Oh, right: slaves weren’t men, they were property.

they are endowed with certain inalienable rights;

At the time of the revolution, women weren’t even considered entitled to vote, and it was seriously contemplated to restrict those rights to white men of property.

and, therefore, the just powers of government, devised to safeguard those rights, must be derived from the consent of the governed.

Lovely sentiment to express now as the police hold a gun to the heads of all citizens, but especially the brown ones. Does consent flow from the muzzle of a gun?

It gets worse. America is a Christian nation.

What is the source of these ideas, and their singular combination in the Declaration? Many have credited European thinkers, both British and French. Coolidge, citing 17th- and 18th-century sermons and writings of colonial clergy, provides ample evidence that the principles of the Declaration, and especially equality, are of American cultural and religious provenance: “They preached equality because they believed in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. They justified freedom by the text that we are all created in the divine image, all partakers of the divine spirit.” From this teaching flowed the emerging American rejection of monarchy and our bold embrace of democratic self-government.

The fatherhood of god is why, in the antebellum US, Christian ministers could argue for slavery, and how the founding of the country could be built on the bedrock of denying the humanity of those who labored for the Southern aristocracy.

The parties in this conflict are not merely Aboli­tionists and Slaveholders; they are Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battle ground, Christianity and Atheism the combatants, and the progress of humanity the stake.

Put me on the side of the Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans, and Jacobins, and fuck the AEI and everything they stand for.

My patriotism might be partially restored if we could acknowledge our history of wrongs and work towards addressing them, but that is not this America. This country has also taken a big step backwards with its embrace of plutocrats, fascists, racists, and misogynists, or, as we call them for short, Republicans.

No celebrations for me today.

The rot is climbing up into the science community

That story about nuclear fuel rods freaked me out a little bit, but nothing like this more in-depth coverage of the incident by Science magazine. One incident is a terrible and possibly deadly mistake, but what’s going on at Los Alamos is a whole pattern of negligence. The lab where the plutonium work is done has been shut down for almost four years.

Officials privately say that the closure in turn undermined the nation’s ability to fabricate the cores of new nuclear weapons and obstructed key scientific examinations of existing weapons to ensure they still work. The exact cost to taxpayers of idling the facility is unclear, but an internal Los Alamos report estimated in 2013 that shutting down the lab where such work is conducted costs the government as much as $1.36 million a day in lost productivity.

And most remarkably, Los Alamos’s managers still have not figured out a way to fully meet the most elemental nuclear safety standards. When the Energy Department on Feb. 1 released its annual report card reviewing criticality risks at each of its 24 nuclear sites, ranging from research reactors to weapon labs, Los Alamos singularly did “not meet expectations.”

In fact, Los Alamos violated nuclear industry rules for guarding against a criticality accident three times more often last year than the Energy Department’s 23 other nuclear installations combined, that report said. Because of its shortcomings, federal permission has not been granted for renewed work with plutonium liquids, needed to purify plutonium taken from older warheads for reuse, normally a routine practice.

Moreover, a year-long investigation by the Center makes clear that pushing the rods too closely together in 2011 wasn’t the first time that Los Alamos workers had mishandled plutonium and risked deaths from an inadvertent burst of radiation. Between 2005 and 2016, the lab’s persistent and serious shortcomings in “criticality” safety have been criticized in more than 40 reports by government oversight agencies, teams of nuclear safety experts, and the lab’s own staff.

I kind of feel like the loss in productivity in building nuclear weapons is a plus, but more troubling is the general loss of competence and expertise. I don’t want us to build more bombs, but I do want a science and engineering community that knows how to handle the dangerous products of our science.

“There’s a systemic issue here,” said Brady Raap. “There are a lot of things there [at Los Alamos] that are examples of what not to do.”

George Anastas, a past president of the Health Physics Society who analyzed dozens of internal government reports about criticality problems at Los Alamos for the Center, said he wonders if “the work at Los Alamos [can] be done somewhere else? Because it appears the safety culture, the safety leadership, has gone to hell in a handbasket.”

Anastas said the reports, spanning more than a decade, describe “a series of accidents waiting to happen.” The lab, he said, is “dodging so many bullets that it’s scary as hell.”

Well, heck, we can afford to poison the northern half of New Mexico, right?

I just remember working with George Streisinger years ago, a biologist who was extraordinarily concerned with nuclear proliferation and weapons testing, and the dangers of radiation. I can’t even imagine how angry he’d be at this casual negligence and lack of respect for the power and risk of nuclear physics.

I expect that Answers in Genesis is doing just fine, for now

Ugh. This is a terribly dishonest title for an article: Creationist blames dreadful attendance at Ark theme park on tax-starved city not supplying ‘tourist services’. It’s about Ken Ham and his Big Wooden Box theme park, and I knew before even reading it that Ham would not say attendance was dreadful. And he didn’t. The article also claims that the park is failing; we don’t know that, since we can only estimate revenues and expenses. It’s a cheap little outfit, so maybe it’s doing just fine financially — we’ll have to see what their tax statements are like.

Ken Ham is actually complaining not that attendance is low, but that it could be even greater if it weren’t being throttled by the lack of amenities in the region. He’s saying that their attendance is just fine and dandy, and that potentially it could be even greater. Let’s honestly report what he said, OK?

When I visited, I had the subjective impression that attendance was healthy — I think in part because the first part was designed like a cattle chute to confine and restrict the flow of people into the building. But the crowding experience beyond that was, I plainly said, similar to what I’d seen at real museums. So I decided to look at the available data and get a more objective feel for the attendance.

This isn’t easy. I dug up a bunch of annual reports, and sometimes they were surprisingly cagey about attendance figures. In part it’s because some of them are free, so you don’t have metered entrance; most big museums also tend to have traveling exhibits and outreach programs, do you count those for attendance? Or look at something like The Smithsonian museums: multiple museums, no attendance charge, lots of outreach, and they report that they have 12.5 million visitors per year. We cannot compare the Big Wooden Box to the Smithsonian, however.

The American Museum of Natural History brings in about 5 million per year; that’s still an unfair comparison. The regional Science Museum of Minnesota, however, is a comparable in its reach, and their yearly attendance is about 866,000.

Here’s a list of other American science centers. These estimates are just that, estimates, so don’t take them as absolute.

Top 10 Science Centers — USA
1. Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago 1,605,020
2. Pacific Science Center, Seattle 1,602,000
3. Museum of Science, Boston 1,600,000
4. California Science Center Los Angeles, Los Angeles 1,400,000
5. St. Louis Science Center, St. Louis 1,400,000
6. Franklin Institute 892,804
7. Liberty Science Center, Jersey City 866,000
8. Fernbank Science Center, Atlanta 865,000
9. California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco 882,000
10. Exploratorium 600,000

What about the Big Wooden Box theme park? Ken Ham gives some figures in his letter.

For example, last Saturday we welcomed 7,500 guests to the Ark and 2,500 to the museum. Of these 10,000 visitors in one day, almost all of them were from out of state.

He also argues that because of the lack of local hotel rooms, they are limited to to 7,500 to 8,000 guests visiting the Ark in a day. I don’t know how trustworthy his numbers are, though, because he also says this:

Interestingly, a state-commissioned study predicted that if the Ark Encounter were a themed attraction featuring our creationist beliefs (and it does), it would draw 325,000 visitors the first year. The Ark reached that figure in less than three months.

OK, but that suggests that attendance was around 3,600 per day, on average. You also have to expect that the opening months should have a surge of attendance, thanks to the novelty. But if that held up, that would put them on track for about one and a quarter million visitors in their first year, which is respectable. Other estimates put it in the ballpark of a million visitors. Of course, Ken Ham also said this before it opened:

… the full-size Noah’s Ark, when it opens in 2016, is estimated to attract up to 2 million visitors a year…

So there’s the expected exaggeration and inflation by the Answers in Genesis crew, and we can also expect a steady drop off in attendance over the coming years (The Creation “Museum”, for instance, gradually lost attendance to the point where AiG was losing money, and we can expect the Big Wooden Box, given its lack of content, to follow suit), but still — I think my subjective estimate holds up well, and numbers are comparable to what the Science Museum of Minnesota gets.

Here’s why that comparison starts to fall apart for the durability of the Big Wooden Box experience, while still not boding imminent disaster for Answers in Genesis.

  • The Science Museum of Minnesota is big and packed full of interesting hands-on activities and material of genuine scientific merit. It also has regularly changing exhibits, extensive outreach activities, and scientifically literate volunteers who are an important part of the experience. The Big Wooden Box…doesn’t. The people working there are guards and salespersons. One point against AiG.

  • All that stuff in SMM costs money. Keeping the museum lively and up to date is an expensive investment. The BWB is not going to change, it just has to keep doing the same ol’. It’s relatively cheap to run. One point for the profitability of AiG.

  • There’s an invisible component to running a real museum: what visitors see is the public face, but behind the scenes lie extensive collections and research. A real museum is a repository of science and has an active group of research scientists behind it. If you look at the financials for the Bell Museum, for instance, about a third their income goes to research and collections, and another third to public programs. AiG doesn’t have any of that; another point to their profitability, but not their quality.

  • AiG gouges their visitors. Admission to the Science Museum of Minnesota: $25 for nonmembers, and that includes a ticket to the Omni Theater. Admission to the Big Wooden Box: $40, not including parking. And they can get away with it, since their visitors tend to treat the expense as a gift to the glory of their god. Another point of profit to AiG.

  • Ken Ham has no idea what makes for a good experience. Here’s his idea of adding value to the Creation “Museum”: we are adding a parking lot to accommodate 1,200 more vehicles. The surrounding towns are now expected to build more restaurants and hotels because Ken Ham has invested in more parking spaces to an already comically large parking lot. One point against the long-term survival of AiG.

  • The Big Wooden Box does not provide a sound foundation for economic growth, as those surrounding towns are discovering. He also brags that as many as 40 motor coach tour buses arrive from several states on a given day. This is not good for local businesses. That says that a large number of visitors are there specifically for and only for the Big Wooden Box, and that after their visit they’ll get on those tour buses and leave. Another point against long term viability for AiG.

I don’t think AiG can keep this up. They boosted flagging attendance at the Creation “Museum” by sinking a huge amount of money into another gigantic attraction, the Big Wooden Box, but as revenues from that begin to decline, as they will, what will they do next? Add more ziplines? Increase ticket prices? Build an even bigger, more expensive attraction next door (come see the life sized Tower of Babel! Visit the Great Flood water park!)? There are diminishing returns on that kind of pyramid scheme, but don’t write it off yet — people are infinitely gullible when people are asked to donate in the name of Christianity.

But the bottom line is that right now they aren’t showing signs of failing. Those are decent attendance numbers, especially for a rural, out-of-the-way attraction that doesn’t have much content. Compared to real museums or even genuine theme parks with rides and fun things for visitors to do, their expenses are tiny. They’ve got a big wooden box that does nothing but vacuum money out of visitors’ pockets, with no expectation of value provided in return.

They’ll be fleecing the sheep for years to come. I think they’ll disintegrate eventually, but it’ll be a slow decline.

Focus right now on the fact that they sell lies for a profitable living. Attendance is a feature of the gullibility of the American public, which Ken Ham is exploiting; the crappiness of the content is a function of the intellectual bankruptcy of American creationism, which Ken Ham promotes.

Which do I dislike more, Encyclopedia Dramatica or Johnny Monsarrat?

Hey, y’all remember the Secular Policy Institute? The dodgy atheist organization that was formed when Edwina Rogers got fired from the Secular Coalition of America, and immediately signed up some big names like Dawkins & Harris & Shermer & Pinker & Boghossian &tc, who shortly afterwards all fled the organization? No? Maybe this photo will trigger your memory, or your gag reflex:

Yikes, but that was one atheist shit-show I wish I could forget. In addition to the desperate reaching to grab the Usual Suspects, there was another individual I’d never heard of, who was busily working hard to alienate other organizations, and also didn’t like me (but I’m so loveable!). This individual had a prominent role in the SPI, and was also working for the Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.

That person was Johnny Monsarrat.

I know. Who? Never heard of him. But apparently he was going to be a new mover and shaker in the world of atheism He wasn’t. This was several years ago, and he’s more or less vanished from the scene, in part because of odd crackpot crapola in his history, like this:

Reader Jason sent over a blog post that sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole, following the story through a variety of twists and turns. The key player in the story is Jonathan Monsarrat, who among other things founded the video game company Turbine (Asheron’s Call, Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online, etc.). In early 2010, Monsarrat was arrested concerning events at a party in Massachusetts. The charges against him were later dismissed. However, there were various blog discussions among local bloggers and commenters. Not long ago, approximately three years after all of this happened, Monsarrat sued two named defendants and 100 “John Does” in a Massachusetts (not federal) court on a variety of charges, centering around defamation, but also including copyright infringement, commercial disparagement, deceptive trade practices and conspiracy. He’s asking for an astounding $5.5 million.

He’s one of those obnoxious people who flings around lawsuits when people say mean things about him, which, unfortunately, seems to be a common affliction within the atheist community. In this case, he tried to sue people who wrote about his rather tacky behavior and arrest record.

Upon arriving at the scene, police found broken beer bottles near the door of the first floor of the apartment and 25-30 teenagers inside. Many were attempting to conceal bottles of beer and other alcoholic beverages, the police report states. Open bottles of alcohol were found in the kitchen area as well as a small amount of marijuana.

Monsarrat identified himself as the host of the party, but denied that any alcohol was being served, the report states. When asked by an officer to inform his guests that the party was ending, Monsarrat became “argumentative” and refused to follow instructions, police said. Officers asked for identification from several partygoers who responded, “We’re in high school, we don’t have ID.”

So what we have is a fellow who is very full of himself and likes to file frivolous lawsuits who managed to get himself associated with some major players in atheism. He has a reputation as a copyright troll who brings on lawsuits with extravagant demands — basically, he’s a legal extortionist. And now he’s up to his old tricks again.

He’s suing Encyclopedia Dramatica for $750,000.

I detest and despise Encyclopedia Dramatica. It’s a kind ugly amalgam of 4chan Lite, fake news, and generic hate, a wiki for 12 year olds who want an outlet for puerile slurs. They even have a page about me with fake quotes and dishonest characterizations, so I owe them no fondness.

But here’s the thing: I don’t care. There are lots of sites filled with what they consider amusing lies, and no one in their right mind is going to cite Encyclopedia Dramatica as a source for anything — any claim made there is immediately tainted by juvenalia and their disregard for the truth. But I also have no patience for wankers who file SLAPP suits, having been a target for this shit myself.

I can’t quite bring myself to donate to their legal fund — it’s one of those sites that would improve the internet with its disappearance — but I also can’t condone this attempt to extort it out of existence, as a general principle. So I’ll just mention here that yes, you could hold your nose and donate to their legal defense fund, if for no other reason than that Monsarrat is a walking talking chancre.

Ugh. Feel so unclean now.

Celebrate the 4th a day early — burn a Confederate flag today!

At about 2pm on 3 July 1863, almost 13,000 Confederate soldiers made a desperate and foolish attack on the American lines at the battle of Gettysburg — they were repulsed, and half of their men were casualties. That was called the high water mark of the war with the South, and it really was the end.

So remind all your rebel-flag-waving friends that today is the day 154 years ago that their ancestors got their bloody comeuppance in a war they provoked to defend the immoral practice of slavery. The South is not going to rise again.

My kids are going to be so disappointed in me

I’ve failed. Compared to that model father, Jay Sekulow, I’ve completely failed at life.

Poor Christians opened their wallets to a religious nonprofit run by Donald Trump’s lawyer Jay Sekulow. In turn, Sekulow hired one of his own teenage sons—straight out of a Nickelodeon internship—and named him a “director” of the charity, where the son subsequently earned nearly a million dollars.

We raised our kids godless and with the weird idea that grifting was an immoral act. Now they’re going to look at their bank accounts and wonder why I was so cruel to them. Heck, I’m looking at my bank account and thinking I must have messed up.

The Sekulow family has full control of CASE [Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism], which raked in $229 million in donations from 2011 to 2015 alone, The Washington Post reported. CASE solicited donations through an aggressive phone campaign. A script for CASE telemarketers, obtained by The Guardian, instructed callers to pressure the poor for money. “Could you possibly make a small sacrificial gift of even $20 within the next three weeks?” the script instructed telemarketers to ask retirees, the unemployed, and other people who said they were too poor to give. The donations would go toward preserving “our traditional Christian values,” the script said.

Just call me a bad dad. Oh well. At least I’m not going to go to jail for that kind of fraud!

Wait. Neither is Sekulow, I guess.

In a statement to The Guardian, a Sekulow spokesperson said the nonprofit’s payouts were all legal.

Damn. I should have followed the American Way, but I done fucked up.

Why is Chris Christie still governor of New Jersey?

The US seems to lack a way to promptly oust corrupt politicians, and Christie highlights the defects in the system. He’s still at the top of the New Jersey hierarchy despite the bridge closure scandal. And now this: there is a state government shutdown which has closed New Jersey state parks (you can’t go downashore on the 4th of July weekend? This is culture shock for that area), except that Christie has used executive privilege to get his family a beach weekend. It’s got to be great — I’ve been to Jersey beaches, and they tend to be a tightly packed mass of milling humanity, except now the budget incompetence of the governor allows him to clear the masses and have the whole beach to himself.

Because this is a Republican administration, though, they have to lie about it. Christie is using a helicopter to shuttle himself from the shore to work (another expense), and he was asked if he was taking advantage of the beach closures.

At a Sunday news conference on the shutdown, Christie was asked if he got any sun today.

“I didn’t,” he said. “… I didn’t get any sun today.”

Unfortunately for him, a photo had been taken that morning.

Oops.

When later told of the photo, Brian Murray, the governor’s spokesman, said:

“Yes, the governor was on the beach briefly today talking to his wife and family before heading into the office. He did not get any sun. He had a baseball hat on.”

He’s in shorts, t-shirt, and sandals, on a beach chair, on the beach, but he wasn’t getting any sun. Right. Got it.

What lessons have we learned, boys and girls?

  • Republicans will use their own administrative bungles to their own advantage, and no one else’s.

  • Republicans will lie flagrantly about it.

  • Even when caught, there’s nothing anyone can do about it, and the Republican will continue in office.

This should throw a bucket of shockingly cold water on anyone who thinks Donald Trump can be easily kicked out of office by rule of law. I’m beginning to believe that Trump could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and we’d spend a couple of years dithering about what to do.

The Republicans know it, too. Let’s not ignore Christie’s let-them-eat-cake moment.

Asked if this is fair, Christie said Saturday: “Run for governor, and you can have a residence there.”

This is just too meta

The latest tweet from our President of the United States:

That’s Donald Trump complaining about fake news with a clip of him pretending to beat up Vince McMahon of the WWE, the fake sport, with the CNN logo pasted over McMahon’s face.

Trump is a known World Wrestling Entertainment fan and friend of WWE owner Vince McMahon.

Is this politics now?