Ken Ham’s Big Wooden Box has been sold!

The price? $10! The buyer? Well, it’s … Ken Ham. That’s right, Ken Ham sold his theme park to himself for a sawbuck. You will not be surprised when you learn that this pointless shuffle was done for the purpose of scamming the government out of taxes, so it wasn’t pointless at all. It’s all part of a long con.

On June 29, Williamstown city attorney Jeffrey Shipp sent a letter to the biblical amusement park Ark Encounter, rejecting its request to be exempted from a new safety tax because its is a religious organization.

Shipp said it was clear that Ark Encounter is a for-profit entity, which is how it has been listed with the Kentucky secretary of state’s office since 2011.

But the day before, Ark Encounter LLC sold its main parcel of land — the one with the large-scale Noah’s Ark — for $10 to its nonprofit affiliate, Crosswater Canyon.

Remember way back when Answers in Genesis was begging for all this support from Kentucky, claiming it wouldn’t be an endorsement of religion, because it was going to be an economic boon to secular businesses in the region? It should be treated as an amusement park, not a church. So they got their breaks and the state improvements in access roads, etc., but now that’s not enough — so they’ve flipped it back to the control of their religious non-profit side, because they’re irate about a tax that would pay for fire and emergency services to their park.

The tax would have been about fifty cents on each grossly over-priced $40 ticket. They simply refuse to pay that pittance.

And that makes we wonder how solid AiG’s finances are. They seem awfully desperate to avoid losing that 1.25% of the ticket price to essential services. It’s only the beginning, too.

That’s the latest salvo in an escalating dispute between local officials and Ark Encounter, but some people are worried that Ark Encounter’s maneuver is a precursor to declaring itself exempt from all taxes, including property taxes that help finance Grant County schools.

“I believe this is the first step,” Williamstown city councilman Kim Crupper said. “The impact would be far larger than just Williamstown.”

It’ll happen, and Williamstown and the state of Kentucky will get the screwing they deserve for propping up this shambles. Everyone who has been following Ham knows what to expect.

He got his start working with Carl Wieland of Creation Ministries International, was sent off to manage the American branch of that organization, and then absconded with their mailing list and split off to start his own circus. There was much acrimony and howling and furious lawsuits between the two. And don’t forget the time Ham was kicked out of a homeschooling conference over his nasty and intolerant behavior.

The one thing you can rely on is his greed. If you just look for the choice that will line his pocket the most, you can predict Ken Ham’s behavior perfectly.

Williamstown is so screwed.

Hey, how about if we end that religious tax exemption everywhere and for everyone?

There’s a right way and a wrong way to oppose cruelty to animals

Here are the indisputable facts.

Mink are voracious carnivores. They eat small mammals, birds, fish, and frogs.

Mink are also playful, social animals with complex behaviors. They are wild animals, though, and don’t generally make good pets.

Mink farming is a deplorable practice in which animals are raised and butchered for their skins. The bodies are often ground up to make pet food.

These are all true statements, but they do set up a complicated ethical problem. What do you do with a mink farm in your neighborhood? I can tell you what you should not do, under any circumstances: you do not sneak onto the farm and release them all from their cages while singing “Born Free” and cheering them on as they scamper off to nearby farms, towns, wildlife refuges, and wilderness.

But somebody did that in Eden Valley, Minnesota. They freed 30,000 mink from a farm. You know what’s going to happen now, right?

Desperately hungry carnivores are going to radiate out, killing every small animal they can find. Rabbits and mice and birds are going to get hit hard; you might want to lock up your cats for a while, too. They won’t be particularly efficient at it, I suspect, since they’ve been raised in cages, so there will be some survivors. The mink are going to be competing intensely with each other for increasingly scarce food. They’re going to fight with each other, and most of them are going to starve to death.

It sounds like another PETA-inspired bit of ignorant fanaticism that does far more harm than good.

It’s an irony explosion!

The crew at Answers in Genesis, who believe in defiance of all the scientific evidence the absurd idea that the Earth is only 6000 years old, have a recent youtube episode in which they mock and disparage a certain group of Biblical literalists, who believe in defiance of all the scientific evidence the absurd idea that the Earth is a flat disc. It’s weird to watch, because they bring out all the same arguments everyone does in opposition to creationism, and they are completely unaware of the relevance of their dismissals to their own claim of a young earth. Watch this analysis and be amused.

Paul Davies is not a medical doctor

He’s not a biologist either, and in fact has no training in the life sciences at all. He keeps saying things that are flat out wrong, yet somehow, he’s treated as a credible authority on cancer. Which means he gets a lengthy, credulous puff-piece in Newsweek in which he gets to claim a new theory on cancer: what we know about how it starts could all be wrong.

Over the course of several years spent pondering cancer, Davies has come up with a radical approach for understanding it. He theorizes that cancer is a return to an earlier time in evolution, before complex organisms emerged. When a person develops cancer, he posits, their cells regress from their current sophisticated and complex state to become more like the single-celled life prevalent a billion years ago.

Oh, also…Davies is not an evolutionary biologist, and he gets evolution all wrong, too.

The evidence that cancer is an evolutionary regression goes beyond the ubiquity of the disease. Tumors, says Davies, act like single-celled organisms. Unlike mammalian cells, for example, cancer cells are not programmed to die, rendering them effectively immortal. Also, tumors can survive with very little oxygen. To Davies and his team, which includes Australian astrobiologist Charles Lineweaver and Kimberly Bussey, a bioinformatics specialist at ASU, that fact supports the idea that cancer emerged somewhere between 1 billion and 1 and a half billion years ago, when the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere was extremely low.

I’ve been covering this bullshit for years, do I need to cover all the details again? In short:

  • A standard defense against damaged or infected cells is triggering cell death. It is not surprising that cancers that survive have mechanisms to defeat the most common defense. It is also not true that all mammalian cells are programmed to die; germ line cells are also effectively immortal. Cancer does not need to roll back a billion years to find a way around apoptosis and senescence, but only have to activate genes already present for in all cells for contemporary purposes.

  • Tumors can survive in little oxygen…but this is a capability of healthy cells, too. This is not an atavistic property. Go exercise; your muscles will be starved for oxygen, and those tissues will be under low oxygen tension. Your muscles don’t die under anaerobic exercise. Brain and retina cells also have high metabolic demands, they don’t die every time you think, but just carry on with glycolysis.

Simply put, cancer behavior is not explained by some mysterious regression to a billion-year old program of the old ways. It simply exploits properties that are inherent to healthy modern cells. Inventing some kind of bizarre cellular memory of being a free swimming protist does not work and makes no sense — it’s more of a 19th century idea that has been rejected by the evidence. All of his claims are better explained by recruitment of modern, existing molecular pathways, rather than by some mysterious hidden single-celled ancestor still lurking in your genome.

Many oncologists are skeptical that it ever will. Evolutionary biologist Chung-I Wu, at the University of Chicago, calls the atavistic theory “an extreme position.” Scientists have also criticized Davies’s reference to the discredited “recapitulation theory” that human embryos develop temporary vestigial organs—gills, a tail, a yolk sac—as support for the atavistic model. “I’ve been ridiculed by the biology community,” says Davies.

Yes. Ridicule is what he deserves. Haeckel’s theory was wrong, but it’s the only theoretical foundation for his claims. Haeckel also argued that evolution proceeded by adding new layers of programming on top of deeper layers, and that peeling back recent hereditary factors would expose older patterns of development. It’s not true. Development and evolution don’t actually work that way.

Like quacks everywhere, Davies falls back on the excuse of medical venality — the doctors are all paid off by Big Medicine or Big Pharma to promote methods that don’t work, to keep the cash flowing in by prolonging the suffering of their patients. It’s not just a lie, it’s an offensive lie — Davies has no respect for the hard-earned knowledge in oncology, so he promotes his bogus treatments that, he claims, will do an end run around the failed policies of modern medicine.

Ironically, Davies now gets paid by a branch of Big Pharma.

Davies is unfazed by the objections. “My feeling is, Who cares? The idea was to come in from the outside and lend a fresh perspective,” he says. Davies sees the criticism as largely rooted in territoriality and financial concerns. “Cancer is a multibillion-dollar industry that’s been running for decades. There’s a lot of vested interests out there.” After five years with the NCI program, Davies is now funded by NantWorks, a sprawling private health care company owned by scientist and billionaire investor Patrick Soon-Shiong (who made his fortune reworking the breast cancer drug paclitaxel to be more effective) to continue his work developing the atavistic model.

He hasn’t helped a single cancer patient, but he’s profiting nicely off of them, and further, is getting these ridiculous, clueless media promotions from credulous journalists. It’s a disgrace.

Paul Davies belongs in the ranks of medical frauds, like Dr Oz or Gwyneth Paltrow or Joseph Mercola.

And dear god, I just wish he’d learn a little goddamned humility. Being a physicist does not turn one into an omniscient god, master of all sciences.

I’m going to be famous now!

I’ve been cited in Charisma magazine! Surely respect, honor, and glory will follow in the wake of this awesome acknowledgment.

I am mentioned in the context of explaining how octopus suckers work. Unfortunately, the rest of the article is about getting possessed by squid demons.

After this squid spirit attacked my friend, I went to her home to help her battle it. The attack was severe, but when I laid hands on her and commanded the squid to be bound, the most violent symptoms would cease. Of course, when you stand in the gap, you often take a hit. That squid spirit started stalking me. I ended up with a migraine during the battle—a manifestation of that mind control spirit—and was attacked in my mind for days afterwards.

Fear can open the door to a squid spirit. Of course, unforgiveness is an open door for the enemy. But let’s face it: The enemy doesn’t need an open door to attack. He can strike when we least expect it, which is why we’re to live in a battle-ready state and walk with the Spirit of God who can warn us of impending attacks.

The good news here is a squid’s tentacles do not grow back once severed. If you get discernment that a squid spirit is attacking you, repent for any known open doors, grab some intercessors, and get that sneaky stalker with its manipulating suckers off your mind! Sever the tentacles, in the name of Jesus, and walk free.

Dammit. Cancel the celebration, forget the promotion, I’m not moving to the corner office after all, and I guess I don’t have to hang around waiting for the phone call from my agent after all.

goop fights back!

I guess it was predictable: the quackery on display at Gwyneth Paltrow’s ridiculous goop site has been receiving a lot of well-deserved mockery, and you knew that they weren’t going to simply accept this threat to their credibility and profit by changing their approach and offering legitimate, evidence-based health claims — they’re doubling-down with an extra helping of indignation. So they’ve fished up some people with degrees (please, don’t dignify them by calling them doctors) to defend bullshit. So, for instance, they have a lengthy defense of homeopathy that is straight-up flagrant nonsense

In most countries outside the United States, homeopathics are the first line of defense against ailment, from the common cold to bruising to muscle pain. And since they offer such a gentle but effective path to healing, they’re a great starting point for anyone dipping their toes into alternative medicine—that, and the fact that they’re easy to find, safe to self-treat, and inexpensive. Dr. Ellen Kamhi, a long-time herbalist and holistic nurse (she also leads incredible trips that explore ancient healing arts in indigenous cultures), has been treating illnesses big and small with homeopathics for more than 40 years.

Homeopathic medicines are just water. Sure, they’re gentle, but they’re not effective at all.

But the real fun begins on their new page where they try to specifically address criticisms by deploying a series of statements from quacks. Oh, boy!

As goop has grown, so has the attention we receive. We consistently find ourselves to be of interest to many—and for that, we are grateful—but we also find that there are third parties who critique goop to leverage that interest and bring attention to themselves. Encouraging discussion of new ideas is certainly one of our goals, but indiscriminate attacks that question the motivation and integrity of the doctors who contribute to the site is not. This is the first in a series of posts revisiting these topics and offering our contributing M.D.’s a chance to articulate theirs, in a respectful and substantive manner.

They are very unhappy with Dr Jen Gunter, a real doctor who has made strong fact-based criticisms of the crap sold at goop. In particular, how dare she diss their magic jade eggs, nice porous stones which they recommend that women stuff up their vaginas.

Last January, we published a Q&A with Shiva Rose about her jade egg practice, which has helped her (and legions of other women who wrote to us in response) feel more in touch with her sexuality, and more empowered. A San Francisco-based OB-GYN/blogger posted a mocking response on her site, which has the tagline: “Wielding the Lasso of Truth.” (We also love Wonder Woman, though we’re pretty sure she’s into women taking ownership of female sexual pleasure.)

There was a tremendous amount of press pick-up on the doctor’s post, which was partially based on her own strangely confident assertion that putting a crystal in your vagina for pelvic-floor strengthening exercises would put you in danger of getting Toxic Shock Syndrome—even though there is no study/case/report which links the two—and also stating with 100 percent certainty that conventional tampons laden with glyphosate (classified by the WHO as probably carcinogenic) are no cause for concern. Since her first post, she has been taking advantage of the attention and issuing attacks to build her personal platform—ridiculing the women who might read our site in the process.

Oh, dear. Dr Gunter must hate women’s sexuality. How else to interpret someone who opposes stuffing random objects up one’s hoo-hah? Next thing you know, Dr Gunter will show how much she hates my masculinity by telling me I should stop eating 10 pounds of bacon a day, and that my practice of swinging a chainsaw from my penis doesn’t make me more manly.

Actually, if you read her post on the jade eggs, she isn’t complaining about women’s sexuality — quite the opposite — but is offering sensible advice, “jade is porous which could allow bacteria to get inside and so the egg could act like a fomite. This is not good, in case you were wondering. It could be a risk factor for bacterial vaginosis or even the potentially deadly toxic shock syndrome.”

That’s it.

She also does not endorse using glyphosate-soaked tampons up there. She does point out that the dubious report that tampons are full of glyphosate actually just shows that they have the same amount of glyphosate as the general background level, contrary to the absurd histrionics of goop.

But the best part is the tone trolling of Steven Gundry.

First, Dr. Gunter, I have been in academic medicine for forty years and up until your posting, have never seen a medical discussion start or end with the “F-bomb,” yet yours did. A very wise Professor of Surgery at the University of Michigan once instructed me to never write anything that my mother or child wouldn’t be proud to read. I hope, for the sake of your mother and child, that a re-reading of your article fails his test, and following his sage advice, that you will remove it.

No! The F-bomb? Quick, someone get Gunter’s degree retracted. She said “fuck”!

What’s funny about this is that, naturally, they don’t bother to link to the disgraceful doctor’s post where she inflicts that horrific word on her gentle readers. Here it is.

It’s a response to St Gwyneth saying If you want to fuck with me, bring your A-game. Gwyneth! Wash your mouth out with herbal soap! Your entire site is discredited in the eyes of Steven Gundry because you used a naughty word!

Of course, right there on the same page, there is a direct link to let you buy a jade egg for your crotch for $66. They’re still missing an opportunity to sell chainsaws with a crotch strap.

I think I’ll favor medical advice from real doctors, even ones who might sometimes use a four letter word, over that of pompous cranks trying to grift their way to profit with dangerous pseudoscience, hawked by a college drop-out actress.

Jen Gunter has written a response to goop. It’s a corker. You should read it.

Al Capone’s vault! Mermaids! Aliens! Amelia Earhart!

I think we can now flush away that theory that Amelia Earhart was captured by the Japanese navy, based on one single photograph of previously vague provenance. It’s been tracked down. The photo was published in a Japanese travelogue in 1935. Earhart disappeared at sea in 1937. Unless the cause of the disappearance was that she flew into mysterious temporal wormhole that threw her plane back in time a few years…oh, crap. I just gave the wackos a new pseudoscientific conspiracy theory, didn’t I?

The History Channel ought to be embarrassed about their lack of diligence, though.

Kota Yamano, a military history blogger who unearthed the Japanese photograph, said it took him just 30 minutes to effectively debunk the documentary’s central claim.

Shouldn’t the History Channel’s fact checkers have caught this before the network invested in production and promotion of their ‘documentary’? Do they even have fact checkers?

The descent of the History Channel continues

I’m sure that by now most of you have seen The Photo that the History Channel purports supports a hypothesis that Amelia Earhart was captured by the Japanese navy in 1937. I hope you will all join me in a resounding chorus of “BULLSHIT!”

This is a blow up of the relevant portion of the photo. The person seated with their back turned to us is supposed to be Earhart.

Can you tell? It looks just like her! Right. Looks like bullshit to me.

Not only is that supposed to be a photo of Earhart, but the ‘investigators’ can detect her mood.

They obviously believe that they’ve been rescued, Gary Tarpinian, the show’s executive producer, tells NPR. However, the word came back from Tokyo that … we can’t let her go. I’m not sure why. Did she see something she shouldn’t have seen? Did they think she was spying? Who knows? We can only speculate. But somewhere between when she thought she was rescued and after that photo, she was held captive and she was brought to Saipan.

How can they infer all this? Somehow, I think their analysis consisted of scanning the photo into a computer and shouting “ENHANCE” at it. All bullshit.

Here’s a good debunking of this stupid hypothesis. It’s not bullshit.

Just remember: friends don’t let friends watch the History Channel.

Does Alex Jones know something about his good buddy Trump that we don’t?

Suddenly, everything makes sense.


Folks, I have hundreds of articles I see every week about human-animal chimeras with no rights. You talked about people you know in research labs, I’ve talked to them too. You see humanoids, they’re like 80 percent gorilla, 80 percent pig, and they’re talking.

I’m probably more in tune with what goes on in research labs than Alex Jones (but you never know, I don’t have contact with the alien scientists in Area 51), and I guarantee you that there are no pig-gorilla hybrids, talking or otherwise…and with that, Donald Trump vanishes in a puff of logic.

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.