We get prizes?

Answers in Genesis has some peculiar ideas about how science is done.

This fool says you get a prize if you say the Earth is 30 billion years old, and that you get another prize if you say the Earth is 60 billion years old, but that it’s not fair that he doesn’t get a prize for saying the Earth is a few thousand years old because…creationist math is closer to 30 billion than 60 billion is? What? That’s not how anything works. There aren’t prizes for reciting numbers, this is not Numberwang. You have to provide evidence for your measurement.

Also, the Earth is 4.5 billion years old.

By the way, I am 178 cm tall, or 5 feet 10 inches tall. You should get prizes for announcing that I am 6 feet tall, and more prizes as my height escalates by acclamation to NBA values and beyond. You get no prizes for declaring that I’m 178 microns tall. And don’t you dare bring out a tape measure.

“List of Jews” has an ominous ring

The courts are demanding them, though. I’ve heard of something like this before.

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the University of Pennsylvania to hand over records about Jewish employees on campus to a federal agency as part of an investigation into antisemitic discrimination but said it did not have to reveal any employee’s affiliation with a specific group.

First, you get a list of all the Jews at the university. Then you fire them, imprison them, and kill them. This was the trend in the 1930s and 1940s, when there were sweeping purges of Jewish professors, led by prominent non-Jewish scientists. Here’s a useful word to remember: Rassenhygiene.

The emergence of eugenics as an ‘applied science’ culminated in the horrendous atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Third Reich. Society was to be cleaned of all alien contamination, hence the German phrase ‘Rassenhygiene’ meaning ‘racial hygiene’. Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and people with hereditary diseases were deprived of their human rights, herded into concentration camps, used for scientific experimentation and murdered. And the scientists who provided the scientific backing were respected university professors or researchers of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWS), the predecessor of the Max Planck Society. Many of them remained in renowned positions even after 1945, influential enough to delay an unbiased historical confrontation.

These things sneak up on you. You provide a list for the purposes of “an investigation into antisemitic discrimination,” and next thing you know, Stephen Miller is holding it.

I have another useful word to add to your vocabulary: Lebensborn.

The Lebensborn e.V. (e.V. stands for eingetragener Verein or registered association), meaning “fount of life”, was founded on 12 December 1935,[1] to counteract falling birth rates in Germany, and to promote Nazi eugenics.[2] Located in Munich, the organization was partly an office within the Schutzstaffel (SS) responsible for certain family welfare programs, and partly a society for Nazi leaders.

Sound familiar? This was an organization designed to promote racial purity by determining who was a good Aryan.

The USA doesn’t have an official Lebensborn policy yet, but I note that it is so important to Trump that we end birthright citizenship that he is actually attending Supreme Court hearings today on that subject, an unusual move to use his vast prestige and power to influence a court decision. Let’s hope it backfires on him and that the court decides that the 14th Amendment stands.