I mentioned yesterday how the Ark Park attendance is falling short of the exaggerated promises Ken Ham made for it. Dan Phelps provides more details, and also presents Ken Ham’s excuse: it’s because they’re counting all the people, like children under 5, that they let in for free.

Therefore, Mr. Ham is claiming that almost 14% of people visiting the Ark are getting in for free. He is also saying that more people visited in the second year. Although possible, Ham’s apologetics for Ark attendance does not sound convincing. In any case, the Ark is not getting even half of the 2 million projected by Ham in the past. This was especially hurtful to the City of Williamstown, which bent over backwards (and apparently forwards) to the Ark with property tax breaks and selling the Ark nearly 100 acres of land for $2 (not to mention Grant County Development giving the Ark nearly $200,000 cash for locating there). Williamstown and Grant County were sold a bill of goods by AiG when they claimed that the Ark would be the panacea for the City and County’s financial woes.

So even if we accept his explanation (I’m willing), he has still fallen far short of the 2 million predicted visitors, and also, it’s a bit of a bait-and-switch. They begged for tax subsidies and community cash on the basis of bringing in all this tourist revenue with millions of paying visitors who would then contribute to the local economy. You don’t get to pad your numbers with all the people with no money that you’re letting attend for free.

Phelps is also not optimistic that the Ark will sink soon. I agree. Ham has money flowing in, even if it’s less than promised and it’s all going to his organization, rather than the community. He’s doing fine. He’s also planning to expand, because one lesson for grifting is that when you’ve got a lot of plates spinning in the air, it’s best to toss up another one, rather than letting one fall.

A caller to the Atheist Experience gives the recipe (skip ahead to 17:20 to hear his explanation). Tracie transcribed the formula and is asking for volunteers.

The subject must do the following:

1. State, “Jesus Christ, if you’re real, come show me that you’re real.”

2. Abstain (again, for entertainment purposes, not barring you from work or necessary interactions) from internet, TV, movies, music, drinking alcohol, taking drugs, smoking, sex/masturbation/any form of sexual pleasure, for a period of 7 days.

Note: You are not required to fast, and are discouraged from doing so.

Bonus: the guy claims that seeing Jesus corrected his vision. Better than Lasik!

Warning: the guy goes on and on about his phantasmagorical hallucinations at tedious length, and doesn’t seem to understand how evidence works.

Last week, I heard about two boring revelations.

The first is that the Shroud of Turin has finally been proven to be fake. Finally? Again. After all the dating evidence and the historical record show that it was ginned up in the 14th century, long after this story has been put to bed, people still thrash about with this crap. The ‘new’ evidence isn’t even that good — they did a blood spatter analysis. Big whoop.

Next week, news agencies will be shocked to learn that chupacabra is a coyote with mange, because they had a vet look at an old photo.

The second oh-god-my-eyes-have-rolled-back-so-far-they-turned-inside-out story comes from a usually reputable source, the Guardian. They ran a garbage article about cell phones causing cancer, full of distortions of the scientific evidence and conspiracy theories. My god, people, there is no brain cancer epidemic. Practically everyone in the country has a mobile phone now, they’re using them constantly to the point where it’s a standard comedic trope about teenagers and housewives and pedestrians and commuters going through their day with phones clamped to their faces, a gigantic shift in human behavior and reliance on these devices that occurred in only about a decade, and you’d think that if they were causally linked to any kind of cancer there’d be a corresponding surge readily detectable in the epidemiological data. There isn’t. This is a causal agent with people casting about absurdly looking for a problem it might be causing, and not finding one. So they invent an epidemic.

Fortunately, David Robert Grimes comes through with a rebuttal to the Guardian bullshit (he’s very polite. He doesn’t use the word “bullshit” or even anything poetically analogous.) He goes through all the basic, obvious evidence — cell phone radiation is low energy, non-ionizing, and multiple papers have shown a lack of correlation between cell phone use and glioma — and shows how the authors distorted in a dishonest way (he doesn’t even call them liars!) the conclusions of major research studies.

There are signs he’s losing patience with them, though.

The authors conclude by stating a “lack of definitive proof that a technology is harmful does not mean the technology is safe, yet the wireless industry has succeeded in selling this logical fallacy to the world”. Such a statement raises questions regarding their grasp of the term “logical fallacy”. The onus here is on the authors to prove their assertion – it is sheer logical contortion to present a lack of evidence as a superficial supporting argument. That the authors attribute this lack of evidence for their claims to the machinations of a nebulous big telecoms is indicative of a mindset more conspiratorial than sceptical.

This is a problem with what I call sinecure skepticism. There is a self-perpetuating market for glib, contrarian nonsense like cell phones causing cancer, or fluoridation as a communist plot, or ghosts, or the Loch Ness monster, or evolutionary psychology, and the skeptical movement has bred a group of shallow thinkers who lurch at the bait and sell cheap articles that ‘debunk’ the most superficial phenomenology (or in the worst case, write in support of garbage, like EP). In fact, the mission of many skeptics is to focus entirely on the easy crap and to neglect the big issues, because they’re too complex. I’m sure Hertsgaard and Dowie, the authors of the original article, consider themselves to be good skeptics, because skepticism has become nothing but criticism of the obvious using very little knowledge or deep expertise.

Hertsgaard and Dowie are well-regarded journalists, writing in the field of environmental journalism. They are not experts on cell biology, or cancer, or epidemiology, or medicine, or any of the fields that would be relevant to their analysis, so it was an easy leap for them to find fault with a ubiquitous technology, and to uncritically promote another round of this nonsense. David Robert Grimes is a physicist and cancer researcher who actually knows his stuff and can see right through the gross errors.

I like skeptics who actually know something — see also David Gorski or Jen Gunter or Jennifer Raff for examples — and who have actually done the hard work of acquiring deep expertise. Otherwise we get endless cycles of lightweight puffery over trivial inanity, which is exactly what the purveyors of trivial inanity want.

Ask yourself, do we really need more analyses of the Shroud of Turin?

Here we go again, with more weird Christian bias from atheists.

Listening to the lovely bells of Winchester, one of our great mediaeval cathedrals. So much nicer than the aggressive-sounding “Allahu Akhbar.” Or is that just my cultural upbringing? pic.twitter.com/TpCkq9EGpw

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 16, 2018

You know, the first sentence is just fine — please do appreciated the culture and history of a place. Personally, I’m not at all fond of church bells, because I grew up near a church that insisted on playing those obnoxious electronic chimes every 15 minutes, and here in Morris some jerk insisted likewise that the local cemetery play ear-splitting hymns on their electronic carillon all day long (fortunately, no longer). It might be a matter of frequency, too, since the Catholic church 3 blocks away rings their bells every Sunday before mass, and that’s not a problem at all.

Dawkins begins to go off the rails with the second sentence. Why is he comparing church bells to “Allahu Akhbar”? 1) A better comparison would be with the adhan, or call to prayer, of an Islamic mosque. It’s not “aggressive-sounding” at all. It would drive me nuts if I had to hear it every day, but it’s analogous in every way to his church bells. 2) “Allahu Akhbar” just means “God is great”, a phrase you’ll hear all the time in Christian churches. It is awfully arrogant, but it’s exactly the same crap that goes on in the grand medieval building behind Dawkins. Just a different language and a different culture.

Which is why the third sentence is so disingenuously stupid. Exactly, Richard, it’s a matter of your cultural upbringing. What else would it be? This is nothing but a phony call-out to anti-Islamic sentiment.

But wait, his supporters say. He’s Just Asking a Question. Maybe he’s simply acknowledging the varieties of human experience and openly admitting that he has a preference shaped by his history? Read charitably, maybe he’s noting the similarities of these different cultures.

Nice try. Nope. He followed up with this:

The call to prayer can be hauntingly beautiful, especially if the muezzin has a musical voice. My point is that “Allahu Akhbar” is anything but beautiful when it is heard just before a suicide bomb goes off. That is when Islam is tragically hijacked by violence.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 18, 2018

“Allahu Akhbar” is anything but beautiful when it is heard just before a suicide bomb goes off…fine. Relevance? Do you really think the muezzin is urging all listeners to yank the cord on a suicide vest? It’s a call to prayer. Just like the ringing bells of a cathedral. Shall we make the point that the bells of Winchester cathedral are anything but beautiful when it is heard just before a priest yanks down the pants of a little boy? That “Onward Christian Soldiers” isn’t exactly about peace and love? Is it beautiful when Christian America thinks it would a great idea to nuke Mecca?

Talk show host Pat Campbell for WFLA-AM in Orlando, Florida asked the Colorado Republican Congressman Tom TancredoWikipedia’s W.svg how the country should respond if terrorists struck several U.S. cities with nuclear weapons; he responded, “Well, what if you said something like — if this happens in the United States, and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, you know, you could take out their holy sites.” “You’re talking about bombing Mecca,” Campbell said. “Yeah,” Tancredo responded. The congressman later said he was “just throwing out some ideas” and that an “ultimate threat” might have to be met with an “ultimate response.” “What is near and dear to them? They’re willing to sacrifice everything in this world for the next one. What is the pressure point that would deter them from their murderous impulses?” the representative asked, his spokesman stressing he was only speaking hypothetically.

Wow. That sounds just like a Sam Harris hypothetical.

It’s really simply bigotry when you condemn followers of one faith for doing exactly what followers of another faith do, and equate going to a mosque to pray with murder.

Well, that was unpleasant. I caught a red-eye from SeaTac at about 1am last night — cranky already. I had a seat mate who had to keep getting up, so I didn’t get much sleep on the plane — crankier. Then I had my usual 3 hour drive from the airport to home, in this unpleasantly humid Minnesota weather — crankiest.

When I finally got home, I went to the office to pick up my mail backlog. I was sent a new book to review, one of those atheist books about morality and purpose which I would have thought has been done to death, but OK, I’ll take a look and see, maybe it’s new and inspiring. But then, blazoned on the cover, I saw…”Foreword by Michael Shermer”. Jesus fuck. People still go to that rapey guy for recommendations on morality? It’s like seeing a cookbook on cooking with subtlety and finesse, “Foreword by Guy Fieri”. Nope nope nope nope. I tossed that book straight in the trash.

Maximus crankiestiest.

Facebook claims to be cracking down on “fake news”, but in a press conference with journalists to announce their great progress, the Facebook flak was asked one simple, penetrating question. What about Alex Jones’ InfoWars site? Is that going to be blocked?

Guess what…no. They aren’t touching this one extraordinarily prominent source of patent bullshit. Nope. This one is an obvious no-brainer, yet somehow they make excuses to avoid an easy target that would demonstrate a real commitment to cleaning up their service.

During yesterday’s session, Su argued that Infowars operates in a gray area — often toeing the line of provably false but not always crossing it — and, according to CNN, suggested that the company was focusing its takedown efforts on outlets that “can be proven beyond a doubt to be demonstrably false.”

Huh. Which one of these InfoWars claims can’t be demonstrated to be false? How stupid are the people at Facebook?

• Hitler is still alive, under the protection of the US government
• Human-pig chimeras are talking
• NASA is running a child slave colony on Mars
• The Democrats are running a pedophile ring in the basement of a pizza parlor
• Michelle Obama is actually a man
• Sandy Hook was a false flag operation
• Barack Obama is the global head of Al-Qaeda
• Kids are being turned gay by juice boxes
• Lady Gaga used the Superbowl halftime to perform a Satanic ritual

I would like to know which of these Mark Zuckerberg thinks might be true. I want to see his personal testimonial for each and every one of them, or I’m calling shenanigans on the frauds at Facebook.

Wonder why I’ve come to despise debate? Because people who can’t logic their way through a T-maze they’ve run a hundred times before think your refusal to waste time with them is an endorsement.