Waffles with toxic syrup served

In case you’ve been wondering how Sam Harris and Matt Dillahunty dealt with the absence of their compadre, Lawrence Krauss, at their talk last week, we have a partial recording. They spent 15 minutes explaining that they weren’t going to talk about it, and saying how important the #metoo movement is while doing their damnedest to imply that we have to watch out because bitches lie.

I’ve been sitting on it for a while because when Harris babbles out that bullshit about how people are equating Weinstein and Ansari in “literally the same sentence” my brain became congested with boiling blood and rendered me unable to act. Fortunately, Thomas Smith says exactly what I think of the whole shambles. Go listen to that.

Aron Ra vs. Kent Hovind, tonight

Tonight, at 7pm EST, Aron Ra is going to engage Kent Hovind on this YouTube channel.

I’ll probably tune in, but here’s a hint for future debates: tell me what the question is. This is two personalities clashing in public, and that’s all I know. Without a good sharp question, I know exactly what Hovind is going to do — it’s going to be a smarmy Gish Gallop with Hovind skittering all over the place, and Aron marching along behind, stomping out lies as fast as he can, and both will declare victory at the end.

It would also be good to have a forceful moderator who shuts down either side if they start drifting off topic…but if we don’t have a solid topic ahead of time, they won’t be able to do that.

The Ark Park and Creation “Museum” are raising their admission prices

They were overpriced to begin with, but they’re raising adult ticket prices by a few bucks anyway. That’s not what they emphasize, of course. They’ve got two marketing tactics.

One is that they’ve lowered prices a bit for young people…but at the same time, they’ve gotten rid of group discounts. I suspect it looks good on paper, but the busloads of kids from the nearby vacation bible school will probably be paying the same amount or more. Still, Quiverful Families will praise the Lord for this change.

The other tactic is laughable. They compare their prices to Disney World. Oh, sure, they’re comparable — in one, you enter a big wooden box which contains fake animals in more wooden boxes with Sunday School lessons on the walls, and in the other…well, does Disney World have papier mache models of dinosaurs, and do they sell postcards and plaques explaining that incest was OK in the Bible? No? Then no contest. And look, the lines are shorter at Answers in Genesis!

Disney’s parks and AiG’s attractions are, in a sense, competing for a family’s time for vacation, offering the best possible quality in all they and we do. However, you can spend many hours waiting in long lines for short rides at amusement parks. At our Ark and museum, however, you can easily spend a full day or two at each location, experiencing edu-tainment all day and rarely standing in a long line.

Watch this silly video of kids discovering that they get to go to Disneyland, and imagine replacing the words “Disneyland” with “AiG’s edu-tainment attractions”. I don’t think they’d get quite the same reaction.

They’d probably rather go to summer school.

Least surprising discrimination lawsuit ever

You will not be shocked to learn that Alex Jones is an asshole in the workplace, too.

Rob Jacobson, a former video editor who worked for the site for 13 years, alleges his co-workers and managers called him “The Jewish Individual” and “The Resident Jew,” and that Jones regularly humiliated and belittled him. As the Mail reports, “The abuse got so bad that one member of staff photo shopped Jacobson’s face on to the image of an Orthodox Jew under the words ‘THE JEWISH INDIVIDUAL DEMANDS YOUR HOT TOPICS’ and printed it out for all to see.” Jacobson, who was eventually fired, is planning to sue Jones for discrimination, harassment, and unfair dismissal, in addition to his EEOC complaint.

Meanwhile, Ashley Beckford, a former production assistant for InfoWars‘s parent company, Free Speech Systems, alleges Jones “often spent his time shirtless, and endlessly leering…at female employees and guests,” which created a “disgusting, hostile environment” that openly encouraged his staff to make inappropriate comments towards women. According to the EEOC statement from Beckford, who is African American, Jones made unwanted sexual advances and allegedly groped her while commenting, “Who wouldn’t want to have a black wife?”

Now if only we could also sue capitalism for setting up a system where a man needs a job that requires him to be humiliated for 13 years.

A study in hiding truth behind a lie

Steven Pinker’s latest book — which I have no interest in ever reading, despite the fact that it’s getting reviewed all over the place — contains some interesting exercises in glossing over ugly truths.

You know, in everything I’ve ever read on the Tuskegee syphilis study — and there are lots of books and papers on the subject — no one ever suggested that the doctors infected the patients with syphilis. They didn’t need to. The truth was damned horrifying. The doctors in that study intentionally neglected to treat a treatable disease, allowing it to run its terrible course, just to see what would happen. They also failed to give the patients the information that would allow them to elect to go to a different doctor for treatment, because that would have defeated their purpose of watching spirochetes eat the brains of black people.

There is nothing forgivable in the facts of the story. Scientists watched human beings suffer and die to sate their sick curiosity and to get a few publications. It did not generate new knowledge, because we already had lots of information on the course of the disease. The information did not prevent harm to anyone, because we had an effective treatment already.

But hey, let’s put a happy spin on it! At least they didn’t intentionally infect anyone with the disease. There, it doesn’t sound as awful now, does it? It could have been so much worse! We can take this approach to everything. Sure, the US bombed villages in Viet Nam with napalm and Agent Orange and high explosives, but at least we didn’t nuke them. See how good and progressive we are? Oh, yeah, we may have prisoners held without due process in Gitmo, and we may have tortured them a little bit, but at least we didn’t infect them with syphilis or shoot them out of cannons or throw them into vats of acid. We could have, but because we didn’t, you need to respect our restraint and our growing humanity.

I must have cursed National Geographic by accident

Back in the dim and distant past, around 2011, when the dignified and staid National Geographic bought up my former blogging home, ScienceBlogs, there was a certain self-appointed guardian of the Purity of NatGeo who was infuriated that I might exist under the bold banner and yellow border of his beloved company. I was going to taint the brand! I was a horrible person who should be dismissed forthwith! I was a corruption, a depravity, a dissolute poisoner of the sacred spirit of science!

He was a little bit distraught about it all.

I’ve completely forgotten his name, but I’d be curious to know what he thinks now, now that NatGeo has completely shuttered ScienceBlogs after a couple of years of neglect, and now that NatGeo is peddling…magic…rocks…to people. Yep, they’ve really sold out. I guess they were envying Gwyneth Paltrow’s reputation and money.

It’s true. They’re sending out magic healing crystals to journalists.

The huge box Nat Geo sent me contained a book, some press material, and this glass water bottle with their name printed on the side. The >$70 bottle’s package advertises that it contains “carefully selected and ethically sourced gemstones representing the building blocks of earth,” including “wood,” “water,” “earth,” “metal” and “fire.” It came with an instruction and information manual.

Why does my water bottle have an instruction manual? It reads: “For the most precious moments in life! Gems raise the energy level of water. That’s been known for hundreds of years and scientifically proven. VitaJuwel Gemwater Accessories are not only Jewelry for Water, they’re a great tool to prepare heavenly gemwater like fresh from the spring.” The instructions are: screw in the gemstone vial, fill with water, and then wait 7 minutes.

You know how it works? Vibrations. NatGeo is promoting vibrations.

Some of the claims are really wild. At one point, the pamphlet says: “Everything in nature vibrates. Gems naturally act like a source of subtle vibrations. These vibrations inspirit water, making it more lively and enjoyable.” This is nonsense, and any reference to electricity in crystals (like piezoelectricity, when charge accumulates on some structures in response to physical stress) is neither exclusive to crystals nor relevant to healing or enlivening drinking water. (“Ha! Yeah. Nah,” astrophysicist Katie Mack told me in a DM.)

Now I feel really guilty. He was right. It was all my fault. That I was briefly (and under protest) sponsored by National Geographic was the causal agent that sent the whole venerable institution plummeting into a deep chasm of woo.

I’m sorry, everyone. I didn’t do it on purpose, it must have just been my bad vibes.

Botanical Wednesday: Maybe it’s a trojan horse

My wife gave me my birthday present a month ago. “It’s not my birthday,” I said. She told me to be patient.

My present was a bucket of dirt. “Gee, thanks,” I said.

“You have to take care of it,” she said. “Oh, great,” I said, “A bucket of dirt and a new chore.”

I did as I was told. It was supposed to do something on my birthday, but my birthday is still more than a week away. And now the bucket of dirt looks like this already.

Is it going to get bigger and more garish by my birthday? Should I be worried that it’s going to eat me? Because that would be a surprise.

Why are you praising Dick’s Sporting Goods?

Dick’s announced that they will no longer sell AR-15s, and all I’m seeing is cheers and huzzahs for the company.

My first thought was, “Why was a sporting goods company selling assault rifles in the first place?” There’s something just plain wrong with that.

But now I learn that they’ve pulled this stunt before. In the wake of the Sandy Hook murders, they announced then that they would stop selling these specific murder-tools (cheers, huzzahs), and then a year later they quietly resumed peddling instruments of death (silence, cluelessness). This is a stunt. A ploy. An advertising gimmick. And oh, but they are receiving lots of free advertising right now.

Fuck ’em.

Silent Bob is modest about everything except what goes on in his head

Kevin Smith had a major heart attack, and he talked about it from the hospital.

It’s all so familiar — I went through exactly the same procedures, although in my case it was more preventive than to deal with an immediate crisis. A lot of his responses sound familiar to how I felt at the time, except for a couple of things. The doctors were telling him he was dying, but his major immediate concern was keeping his underwear on, out of modesty. Nope, not me. I did not care. Strip me naked, I don’t mind, just fix me up. He was, obviously, responding with the notorious Kevin Smith motor mouth — he’s telling stories non-stop. Not me. I just go quiet under stress. That’s why he’s the raconteur, and I’m not. In the aftermath, he was quite happy that people who feared for his life were saying all these nice things about him. When I was in the hospital, mostly what I got was gloating hate mail from Christians and atheists; just recently I told my wife that when I die, she ought to just avoid the internet for a few weeks because it will be nothing but hatefulness aimed at my corpse, and as collateral damage, my family.

Otherwise, one thing that did bother me was he mentioned the response to Chris Pratt saying he was going to pray for him. OK, atheist world, there is a huge difference between people with power mumbling “thoughts and prayers” as a substitute for taking action to correct a problem, and a person who has no responsibility for action saying, as a gesture of good will, that they will pray for you. I wouldn’t do it, I wouldn’t believe for a moment that it would actually help, but it’s just a believer trying to be nice.

I know from experience that it actually is a heck of a lot nicer than the believers who cackle about how you’re going to burn in hell, or the unbelievers gleefully telling you they don’t know whether they want you to experience brain damage or die in pain.