Brazil has suffered a terrible loss.

Brazil’s oldest and most important historical and scientific museum has been consumed by fire, and much of its archive of 20m items is believed to have been destroyed.

The fire at Rio de Janeiro’s 200-year-old National Museum began after it closed to the public on Sunday and raged into the night. There were no reports of injuries, but the loss to Brazilian science, history and culture was incalculable, two of its vice-directors said.

Imagine if the Smithsonian burned down. It’s not replaceable.

The media are reporting that the cause of this fire was neglect — the museum had “fallen into disrepair”, and that it had only recently managed to land support for a fire prevention project. I might be more favorable to conservatives if they were actually interested in preserving what the nation has, and less interested in looting what we’ve got to benefit the wealthy (I know nothing about the leanings of the Brazilian government; this is a general statement about the neglect I see when conservatives are in power in my country.)

Jeffery Ford is a genius. How do we know? He tells us so.

Jeffery Ford is an author, TED speaker and frequent guest on numerous talk radio shows. He was honored in Michigan’s House of Representatives for winning a global election to become the World Genius Directory’s 2016 Genius of the Year for America (which includes both the North and South American continents).

Whoa. I’ve always wanted to be a genius. I looked up this World Genius Directory to find out how. It’s maintained by a guy named Jason Betts, an Australian who seems to do nothing but churn out “intelligence tests”, some of which are free to lure you in, others that cost a dollar, and some that cost tens of dollars. To get on the World Genius directory, you have to get a high score on one of his tests, and mail him $11 (I think that’s the important criterion).

I’m already dubious about his qualifications. But then he went and wrote this article, “Here’s Why Leftists Truly Hate Conservatives”, and confirmed the value of weird online IQ tests.

There’s only one thing that leftists hate as much as America, and that’s the millions of fact-based, faith-based conservatives who are the human embodiment of everything that makes America and the entire Western world far superior to every other country and culture that has ever existed.

It’s the first paragraph, and I’m already whooping it up! You can’t be both fact-based and faith-based — those are contradictory. I also have to question the assertion that America is a superior nation in all things. If we were, how come we don’t have universal health care, and how did Trump get elected?

Leftists hate conservatives because they are damned by any comparison with them. Conservatives believe in personal accountability and in the power of the individual to make a profound difference in our world. The left doesn’t believe in the power of the individual anywhere near as much as it believes in the absolute power of the collectivist state — where everyone suffers equally and are rewarded for their efforts minimally.

Unlike capitalism, where the individual can go to work for Walmart or Amazon and be treated with respect and a living wage.

Just as the 9/11 hijackers hated America for its freedoms, so too does the American leftist hate us for subjecting them to the high risks that are inherent in a free capitalist society and that is precisely why they have been working night and day for decades now to destroy our country.

They hated us for our freedom? What is this, 2001? No, they hated us because we did not follow their religion, and because we’d exploited and bombed the Middle East and wrecked their homes, to simplify it in another way.

The left has successfully laid waste to our nation’s educational system. Over time, they have covertly transformed our educational system from being one of the best in the world into an indoctrination system that would have made Joseph Goebbels proud.

Spoken as if conservatives had ever supported the public school system, and weren’t wallowing in denial of science.

One of the left’s greatest victories over America has been its infiltration and domination of almost every important aspect of our news media. But all is not lost. As a matter of fact, conservatives are closer to winning the hearts and minds of the vast majority of American people than ever before.

Say what? What liberal news media?

You guys go have fun with this loon. I’m just going to mourn the fact that apparently I can’t become a genius by mailing $11 to some wacko in Australia.

Michael Cohen pleaded guilty on 8 counts, Paul Manafort was found guilty on 8 tax and bank fraud charges.

“Today he stood up and testified under oath that Donald Trump directed him to commit a crime by making payments to two women for the principal purpose of influencing an election,” Davis added. “If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn’t they be a crime for Donald Trump?”

Good question.

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Guess how Fox is handling the convictions?

That War on Christmas is always a great distraction.

One of the more horrible things I can imagine is listening to a debate between Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro, two awful people. It happened. In my vast wisdom, I have simply refused to listen to it. Apparently, they swapped historical arguments back and forth, though, and someone with historical training felt obligated to listen, and ripped them both apart for their ignorance of history.

Contrary to Harris’ silly “bridges” analogy, all of these early scientific thinkers came from a tradition that saw “the Book of Nature” as complimentary to “the Book of Scripture” (i.e. the Bible). This tradition stretched back to the earliest Christian thinkers. This is why Galileo (who was not particularly devout) could quote Tertullian (who was not especially scientifically-minded) as saying “We conclude that God is known first through Nature, and then again, more particularly, by doctrine; by Nature in His works, and by doctrine in His revealed word.” (Adversus Marcionem, I.18). The two elements were intricately and essentially interlinked.

But Harris knows nothing of all this. Just as Harris knows nothing of the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire. Or the place of science in the Islamic world. Or the complexities and nuances of the Galileo Affair. Or medieval universities. Or … anything much about history. And this is why, as with Sagan or Hawking or Tyson or Dawkins, when a scientist speaks about their field of science, they are worth listening to. But when they opine about history they usually have little idea what they are talking about, and that is even if they are not labouring under Harris’ clear ideological biases. His near total ignorance coupled with those crippling biases means what he has to say on these and most other historical subjects is mostly complete garbage.

Well, but, Harris has negligible understanding of science, so there’s not much he has the qualifications to talk about, and Ben Shapiro has even less, so what else can they do but babble ignorantly on topics in which they have no expertise? History is just one among many subjects they can only mangle. But hey, Travis Pangburn will charge $500/head to people who want to listen to them. By libertarian standards of truth, they must be right.

Seriously, though, Tim O’Neill is making an important point. Most of us have expertise in something, but we should be careful about assuming our knowledge of one thing means we have knowledge of all things. Some epistemic humility is always warranted. I’ve inflicted this quote from Augustine on my students many times:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although “they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”

I’ve noticed two kinds of Christians: those who insist that the Bible is absolutely true, and therefore evidence that contradicts it must be reinterpreted to conform, and those who recognize that the Bible is not a full description of the world, and therefore if evidence is found that contradicts it, their understanding of the Bible must be reinterpreted. Personally, I detest both, the first for obvious reasons and the second because they’ve ‘mended’ a flawed document to the point where it’s ridiculously threadbare, but at least one can have a rational discussion with the latter.

I had to dig further into this guy’s writings, and came across his criticisms of the Jesus mythicists, in particular his rebuttal to the “argument from silence”, which claims that Jesus should have been mentioned in many historical sources if he had existed, but he isn’t, so he didn’t. Most telling was his listing of the feeble number of brief mentions of the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in classical records — if the Romans didn’t leave us many documents of this colossal disaster in their backyard, why should we expect them to have mentioned some minor Jewish preacher off in some provincial backwater? He also points out how rare it was for any writings to have survived from 2000 years ago, which lit up a lightbulb floating above my head.

This is exactly the same as the common creationist argument that if evolution were true, we ought to be neck deep in tyrannosaur and stegosaur and diplodocid bones, and because the fossil record is so spotty and incomplete, evolution is false. Never mind that taphonomy shows that finding the bones of a dead animal surviving for even a decade is rare and requires unusual conditions.

OK, I have no problem accepting O’Neill’s argument. But now I’m left with confusion; I’ve never delved deeply into the mythicist literature, and now I don’t understand what the “historical Jesus” means. I don’t believe in the existence of a water-walking, fig-tree-killing, fish-cloning resurrection man who died and came back to life and then whooshed up into the sky. My version of Jesus mythicism is that he was, at best, a radical Jewish preacher who was executed and then inspired decades of fan-fiction that got built up into the New Testament.

O’Neill’s explanation for the absence of Jesus in contemporary documents is in part that he was a minor figure in a small, out-of-the-way region who was understandably ignored by the authorities of the time, and lists alternative explanations for the silence about him.

Fitzgerald finds it significant that Gallio did not mention “this amazing Jesus character” to his brother and concludes this means Jesus did not exist. He does not bother to consider alternatives, such as (i) Jesus existed but was not so “amazing” as Fitzgerald keeps assuming he has to have been if he existed, (ii) Jesus existed but a learned Roman official did not regard people like him as very interesting or important, (iii) Jesus existed and Gallio did mention him to his brother but Seneca did not regard people like him as very interesting or important or even (iv) the whole Gallio-Paul trial scene is a piece of fiction reported or even created by the writer of Acts to emphasise Paul’s credibility. Fitzgerald skips over all these quite plausible alternatives and leaps gymnastically straight to the conclusion Jesus did not exist.

Now I have to recalibrate. What does “Jesus mythicist” mean? Apparently, rejecting the idea of the Son of God wandering about Galilee, and thinking that many of the tales that sprang up around him were confabulations, does not make one a Jesus mythicist. I also don’t know what the “historical Jesus” means. If I die, and a hundred years later the actual events of my life are forgotten and all that survives are legends of my astonishing sexual prowess and my ability to breathe underwater, what does the “historical PZ” refer to? Does it matter if my birth certificate is unearthed (and framed and mounted in a shrine, of course)? Would people point to it and gasp that it proves the stories were all true <swoon>?

Jeez, I’m glad I’m not a historian. What a mess they have to deal with.

Apparently, we do. The US is part of this Saudi-led coalition killing civilians in Yemen, and an American-made 500lb bomb was dropped on a bus with 40 kids on their way to a field trip, killing most of them.

This is just the latest string, unfortunately, of really brutal attacks on civilians in Yemen. It is not the worst of its kind in terms of the numbers of people killed, but certainly because all of the—40 out of the 51 people who were killed were children, it really is just an extreme form of this Saudi-led coalition bombing in Yemen. Here were these kids on a school trip. They were excited. There’s footage—we see them laughing and really being excited. Some of the parents said that they couldn’t really sleep the night before because they were so looking forward to—and here’s the sad part—they’re going to a cemetery just to be able to enjoy some time outside. And as the bus entered a busy market, it was targeted by the Saudi-led coalition and most of these children were killed. Of course, we know that the U.S. is part of the Saudi-led coalition, so we are in fact responsible, just as much as the Saudis and Emiratis are, in the bombing of those children.

You might be wondering how we can justify our participation in these crimes. Have no fear! The excuses are flowing faster than the blood of shattered children. Here’s an AP reporter explaining the logic of the attack.

What is very hard to determine in Yemen is what the children were doing. We worked on covering Yemen since 2015. We know that the Saudi-led coalition has bombed civilian targets all the time—markets, hospitals, schools. This is not a surprise. But we also know that the Houthis are actively recruiting the children and then they send them to the front lines. And the question marks here that are not answered yet—what were the children doing at the time?

There are no schools right now at Yemen. There are no buses carrying children from one school to the house. This is a luxury. The children were visiting a cemetery, and that is where they promote the whole notion of jihad and martyrism. So I mean, on one hand, the Saudi-led coalition is blamed for killing the civilians and this has been ongoing without any—no question about it. But at the same time, we have a look at the other side of the picture and see what the Houthis were doing with the children.

Dude. I’m having flashbacks, man. I grew up during the Vietnam War (I was too young to go, fortunately, but this stuff was in the news all the time), and I remember all the rationalizations for dropping napalm on villages. This is the same old story: we don’t know exactly what these kids were doing, but we can imagine all kinds of nefarious schemes, so let’s pretend after the fact that they were all evil terrorists in training. It is all too familiar.

Let’s ask a Yemeni scholar to reply to that.

To just quickly respond to what your guest just said, it doesn’t really matter what the children were doing. They were children, they were in summer school and for the Saudi-led coalition to bomb a bus full of children is a war crime, regardless of what the children were doing.

Exactly. We’re done. It’s inexcusable.

But he does go on, about all the other children killed in this war.

And to talk about really what the U.S. intervention in Yemen looks like, we know what it looks like. We know the devastation that it has caused. Yemen is falling and all of the services have been failing. 113,000 children died in 2016 and 2017 alone of starvation and preventable diseases such as cholera. What we need from the Senate, what we need from Congress right now is to continue to push toward ending the U.S. involvement in Yemen, given how much the Saudis and the Emiratis rely on U.S. support, on U.S. weapons, on U.S. maintaining and repairing of their aircraft, on U.S. midair refueling and on U.S. targeting assistance.

We know that they cannot continue to wage war on Yemen without extensive U.S. assistance, and Congress needs to act quickly to continue to introduce resolutions in the Senate and in the House to push the U.S. out of Yemen.

The United States has been awfully good at minimizing blood shed on our side, and awfully good at maximizing blood shed and terror in other places. Can we stop, please?

I took a look at the Minnesota primary election results. There weren’t really any surprises, although there was one disappointment.

The disappointment is that Tim Walz will be the DFL candidate running for governor in November. I despise Tim Walz — he’s a conservative Democrat who has been in the pocket of the NRA for years. What’s particularly galling about it is that I keep seeing people saying that they voted for Walz because he was most appealing to outstate (the obnoxious term people in the Twin Cities use for the region outside the Twin Cities) voters, so they were supporting the DFL candidate most likely to win over those Neandertals who don’t reside in the metropolitan region.

I live in “outstate” Minnesota. Grrrr. Don’t assume we’re all gun-totin’ rednecks out here.

The one bit of good news was the election turnout — record numbers all around. Most importantly, there were 600,000 DFL voters and 300,000 Republican voters. You’ve got to wonder how any Republicans ever get elected.

(Rhetorical question: it’s because of criminal levels of gerrymandering, and because in most elections voter apathy is high.)