…take a look at the depressing state of American education. This is the gloomiest article I’ve seen on the American future.

Add to this clear evidence that the U.S. education system, that source of future scientists and innovators, has been falling behind its competitors. After leading the world for decades in 25- to 34-year-olds with university degrees, the country sank to 12th place in 2010. The World Economic Forum ranked the United States at a mediocre 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly half of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are now foreigners, most of whom will be heading home, not staying here as once would have happened. By 2025, in other words, the United States is likely to face a critical shortage of talented scientists.

That hasn’t even gotten to the predictions yet. That’s a description of our current status.

You know, in ten years the Chinese tourists will be flocking to the bargains and sights of an economy in the toilet, and they will be booking tours to the Ark Encounter. And they will point and laugh and laugh and laugh. While proud Kentuckians will be scrabbling to sell them cheap plastic souvenirs in their new, low-paying jobs in the service industries.

I’m not getting a good opinion of people in New Jersey. They’ve got the awful George Berkin, a cretin who rants on NJ Online, and has a reputation as one of the dumbest jerks in the state. And he has commenters. I want to talk about one of them, Terry Hurlbut, who is a marvelous example of creationist pseudoscience and dishonesty. He’s commenting on a Berkin article that is characteristically crazy (it’s a defense of Christianity against atheism that cites CS Lewis’s trilemma), but Hurlbut goes beyond mere inanity to lie about science.

Take a look at this. Creationists only rarely get this arrogant in writing; usually they reserve this kind of total pseudoscientific BS for when they’ve got you one-on-one.

“Did people really live for hundreds of years?” Yes. Pre-Flood, carbon-14 was not present in the vast quantities that pervade our atmosphere today, and cosmogenic C-14 was very rare. During the Flood, the earth’s crust, wracked with magnitude-10-to-12 earthquakes and rich in quartz (which generates electricity when deformed), acted as a gigantic fast-breeding nuclear reactor and produced all of the radionuclides (up to uranium and arguably plutonium) known to man today. That included C-14, produced in tremendous quantities through cluster decay. And when C-14 gets into your system, and then decays, it can wreck whatever molecule (including DNA) of which it became a part. So the reason we *don’t* live hundreds of years today is that we are all suffering from radiation poisoning (or isotopic substitutional poisoning) and have forgotten what it was like not to be subject to such poisoning.

Wow. Breathtaking. So breaking quartz generates electricity (true so far), which with a little prestidigitation is equivalent to turning into a nuclear reactor, which produced all the radioactive elements present on earth in less than a year, and also distributed and mixed them throughout the earth’s crust and mantle. And somehow eight people in a wooden boat survived this remarkable upheaval. (I know, that part was a miracle. The rest was science. Right.)

And the reason we get old is that C-14 decomposes and breaks our DNA. This is a contributing factor, I’m sure, but this fantasy world where all carbon is C-12 never existed: most of the C-14 we’re breathing in is produced in the atmosphere, not some magical giant nuclear reactor beneath our feet, and the only way it wouldn’t happen is if the sun didn’t exist.

Then someone points out that tree ring data contradicts his claims, and Hurlbut ups the ante.

Tree rings are not necessarily annual. And the point is that the Flood, and the associated nuclear reactions in the earth’s crust, released virtually all of the C-14 present in the atmosphere today. Do you know of any experiment in an atmosphere totally free of C-14? I thought not. Isn’t it amazing, how we get used to something as “the new normal” and never consider that it’s the result of a serious health hazard introduced 4400 years ago?

See? His story must be true, because look — the atmosphere contains C14 today! Let’s all ignore the fact that we know how C14 is produced, and that it’s being constantly replenished.

And then he rants some more about the ferocity of his god’s wrath.

And hel-lo-ooooo! The Flood knocked down all the trees that were growing at the time! All the trees that grow today, sprouted after the Flood, not before. You have no concept of how violent an event the Flood was. Magnitude-10-to-12 earthquakes; a water jet powerful enough to throw 1 percent of the earth’s mass, as water, mud, and rock, into outer space; killer hailstorms that froze the mammoths (many of them standing up); and the formation of a protuberance (the Himalaya Range and the Tibetan Plateau) heavy enough to pull the earth off-balance and move the poles. (Which is what the mammoths were doing in the Arctic region in the first place; that used to be a lush tropical jungle.) Not to mention the big rocks that slammed into the Moon, mostly on one side of it, forming the “seas” and causing the Moon to turn one face toward earth and lock in place.

And all that is right there, in the Bible! I repeat: Eight people. Wooden boat. There’s kind of a low limit on how catastrophic the flood event could have been.

I do rather like the argument about the heavy Himalayas making the earth topple over and shift the poles. So why aren’t the Himalayas at the South Pole then, smart guy? Huh? (I know, that argument makes no sense, either.) I’m also struggling to imagine what his pre-flood geography was like…so where was Palestine before this big shift? And what was the orientation of the Earth’s axis of rotation prior to the big wobble?

I’m not seriously asking those questions, because I know how Hurlbut would respond: with more pseudoscience shouted very loudly and with complete and absolutely incompetent confidence. That’s the knack these creationists have; they don’t know anything, but they’re really, really good at making nonsense up, and expressing it with sublime certainty. That must be the training the Bible gives them.

What do you get when you cross Ken Ham and Twitter? You probably shouldn’t look — it’s terrifyingly inane. Besides, it’s mostly just links to Ken Ham on Facebook, where he puts his whiniest complaints about atheists persecuting him, and where he has a few thousand people agreeing with him and Jesus Christ.

I just thought you’d want to know.

Ken Ham commissioned a company named “America’s Research Group” to produce a feasibility study for the construction of his theme park for biblical literalists — I’m sure its conclusion that the park would bring in 1.5 million visitors and $200 million in revenue was a factor in convincing the Governor of Kentucky to embrace the idea.

Only there’s a catch. America’s Research Group is run by Britt Beemer. Who is Britt Beemer? Oh, look: the feasibility study was written by Ken Ham’s personal friend, coauthor, and fellow fundagelical kook.

This wasn’t an independent study at all. It was by a personal ally with multiple ties to Ken Ham.

I don’t know about you, but I smell something rotten.

I’ve been poking fun at Kentucky this week, which is easy to do — investing in a theme park that has Biblical literalism as its centerpiece is embarrassingly ridiculous. But let’s be fair. Ken Ham could have landed in Minnesota, if instead of aiming for a location within a day’s travel of 40% of the nation’s population, he’d wanted a place within a day’s travel of North and South Dakota, and then we’d all be laughing at this rural assembly of yokels. And also, of course, Kentucky has plenty of smart, aware, rational people, as we can see from this editorial in the Louisville Courier-Journal.

Gov. Steve Beshear needs a vacation. Indeed, he should have taken it this week.

Other than extreme fatigue, how else can one explain his embrace of a project to build a creationism theme park in Northern Kentucky (near the Creation Museum) and the apparent willingness of his administration to offer tourism-development tax incentives to developers of the park?

Even if technically legal (in that the law allowing the tax breaks doesn’t discriminate against other religious or anti-religious views), a state role in a private facility that would be built by a group called Answers in Genesis and espouses a fundamentalist view resting on biblical inerrancy indirectly promotes a religious dogma. That should never be the role of government.

Moreover, in a state that already suffers from low educational attainment in science, one of the last things Kentucky officials should encourage, even if only implicitly, is for students and young people to regard creationism as scientifically valid. Creationism is a nonsensical notion that the Earth is less than 6,000 years old. No serious scientist upholds that view, and sophisticated analysis of the Earth’s minerals and meteorite deposits generally lead to an estimate that the planet is about 4.5 billion years old. Furthermore, creationism teaches that the Earth (including humans) was created in six days, thus rejecting the well-established science of evolution.

But if the Beshear administration is determined that Kentucky should cash in on its stereotypes — and wants to fight Indiana to snare the theme park — why stop with creationism? How about a Flat-Earth Museum? Or one devoted to the notion that the sun revolves around the Earth? Why not a museum to celebrate the history and pageantry of methamphetamines and Oxycontin? Surely a spot can be found for an Obesity Museum (with a snack bar).

And while we’re at it, let’s redo the state’s slogan. Let’s try: Kentucky — Unbridled Laughingstock.

I give that one a standing ovation — exactly right.

This ain’t gonna be free: the state guvmint is kickin’ in $37 million in tax incentives to help a gang of Bible-totin’ theocrats build a fancy Disneyland for ignoramuses. This is what it’s gonna look like, they think:

Lookie there: the centerpiece will be a genuwine, life-sized, full scale copy of Noah’s very own ark, all 300 cubits by 50 cubits by 30 cubits of it, and they say it’s gonna be built with materials and methods as close to possible as the ones in the Bible. Where they gettin’ gopherwood? And are they really gonna build it with handsaws and mallets and wooden pegs? That’s gotta be impressive, but it’s gonna be tough to git’r done by 2014.

But wait a consarned minute: it ain’t floatin’. And there’s no talk of stockin’ it with 8,000 pairs of animals, or however many they say there ought to be in there. I’ll give ’em a pass on fillin’ it with dinosaurs (well, maybe not…some say they’re daid, but the folk at AiG say they’re just hidin’), but I want elephants and hippos and giraffes and sheep and pigs and cassowaries and kangaroos and rhinoceroses and monkeys and squirrels and everythin’ tucked in there, to give me the true and odoriferous varmint-rich Ark Experience.

They also claim this big ol’ project is going to make 900 jobs in Kentucky. I don’t believe it. Read your Bible. The original Ark did float, and it did carry a whole menagerie, and it only employed eight people. They’re cuttin’ corners here with their non-floatin’ critter-free ark, so I’m expectin’ they’ll hire six, at most. And that’s generous.

OK, and maybe a couple more to sell tickets, and a few more to hand out kewpie dolls at the booths, and sell cotton candy. But heck, you can just hire a bunch of carnies to do that, and they work cheap.

They’ll be especially cheap since Governor Beshears is workin’ hard to make sure the entire freakin’ state of Kentucky is populated with people qualified to work as carnies, and not much else. Yeehaw!