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.

A call to protest on 15 July

I urge you to join me in reading, adding your name to, and joining in these protests July 15th across the country.

On July 15, 2017:
To all who agonize and rage at what’s being done to the people, protest and demand:
THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO!
In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America!

IMMIGRANTS ARE FULL HUMAN BEINGS, not “illegals” or criminals, to be demonized, terrorized, hunted down, locked up, and thrown out. NO! We will not accept the cruel and brutal future of the Trump/Pence Regime … they must GO!

MUSLIMS AND REFUGEES ARE FULL HUMAN BEINGS, not people to be shunned, banned, and cast out to be swallowed up by oceans and wars. NO! We will not accept the cruel and brutal future of the Trump/Pence Regime . . . they must GO!

WOMEN AND LGBTQ PEOPLE ARE FULL HUMAN BEINGS, not objects to be grabbed, demeaned, victimized, and denied their fundamental right to control their reproduction, and how they choose to live. NO! We will not accept the cruel and brutal future of the Trump/Pence Regime . . . they must GO!

BLACK AND LATINO PEOPLE ARE FULL HUMAN BEINGS, not people to be denied the right even to live, gunned down by the police with impunity, incarcerated in genocidal numbers, and denied basic rights. NO! We will not accept the cruel and brutal future of the Trump/Pence Regime . . . they must GO!

THE PEOPLE OF EVERY COUNTRY ARE FULL HUMAN BEINGS, and not collateral damage to be subjected to massive bombing, invasions, occupations, the danger of nuclear war, and a program of “America First” that would bludgeon them into submission. NO! We will not accept the cruel and brutal future of the Trump/Pence Regime . . . they must GO!

THE CHILDREN, ELDERLY AND POOR of this country, as in every country, should have food for sustenance, health care to live, homes to live in, and not be denied with cruel calculation for the benefit of the few. NO! We will not accept the cruel and brutal future of the Trump/Pence Regime . . . they must GO!

THE EARTH AND THE SPECIES WHO INHABIT IT – including humanity – should sustain life and not be despoiled by ignorance, greed, and the disregard of science. NO! We will not accept the cruel and brutal future of the Trump/Pence Regime . . . they must GO!

IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY: THE TRUMP AND PENCE REGIME MUST GO! Only the people acting together in the streets and public square can force this demand before the world. Should we fail to do so, the future and values we aspire to could be brutally cut short by the actions of the Trump/Pence Regime.

The Trump/Pence government has been step by step criminalizing dissent and bludgeoning the truth with worse to come. Stripping away basic rights and the rule of law is at the core of fascism. Group after group is demonized and targeted along a trajectory leading to real horrors. We must not let this be normalized. History has shown that fascism must be stopped before it becomes too late.

The demand: “The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go,” can unify people and our resistance. There are different programs of struggle against the multiple attacks of the Trump/Pence regime, people have diverse views for how to achieve a better future, and all of this should be aired, shared, and debated. But, if we don’t stop the consolidation of fascism by organizing together to demand that the Trump/Pence regime must go, people’s lives here and around the world, and the earth itself will face greater catastrophe.

Now is the time to act. The scandal and turmoil the regime faces is an opening through which the mass action of the people could burst through and make our demand resound throughout the country, in the halls of power, and around the world.

On July 15th “The Trump/Pence Regime Must Go,” must be spoken, shouted, and acted on with fiercely creative determination. We have righteously marched for women, for science, for the climate, for immigrants, for Black Lives, for LGBTQ Pride. Now the resistance must pull together to drive this regime from power.

July 15th must be a day when every person, every group – religious, community, service, political organization – all who feel the tremendous threat to humanity posed by the Trump/Pence regime – stand together showing the world that people here are determined that this regime must go … not in two years or four, but now.

July 15th must mark a leap to more sustained struggle, inspiring people to see the possibility of ousting this regime through unleashing the tremendous power of the people – aiming for the time when millions can be moved to fill the streets of cities and towns day after day and night after night, declaring this whole regime illegitimate – Demanding, and Not Stopping, Until The Trump/Pence Regime Is Driven from Power.

On July 15, with conviction and courage, overcoming fear and uncertainty, we will act together to resist and say NO!… Not for ourselves alone, but in the name of humanity.

Sign this statement, find a protest in your area, or add your own here: refusefascism.org/2017/06/09/july-15-2017-in-cities-across-the-country-demonstrate/

(from Sunsara Taylor)

As if you needed another reason to boycott Hobby Lobby…

In addition to being hypocritical moralists and outright bigots, the owners are now certifiable international criminals. They’re building a “Museum of the Bible” in Washington DC, and Steve Green wanted to stock it with ancient artifacts, so he threw buckets of money at Middle Eastern thieves to buy up ancient relics, knowing full well that this was illegal and was supporting looting. The guy is a fucking crook who’s feeding the destruction of history, all in the name of his bible.

He has to give them back (almost pointless, given the loss of provenance) and pay a $3 million fine, a pittance for a guy worth $5 billion. A more appropriate sentence would have involved extensive jail time and closure and confiscation of his museum.

Hey, gang! I’m at Convergence! #cvg2017

I’m checked into the Doubletree in Bloomington for Convergence, and have a busy day ahead of me. In a quirk of scheduling, almost all of my panels are today: 5 of them, one after the other, that will completely tie me up all afternoon and early evening. Which leaves me with just one panel on Friday and one on Sunday, so after this I’ll have a light weekend and can enjoy just being here. Anyway, today I’m discussing invasive species, religion in the future, the cosmic perspective (all the things that make us inconsequential in the universe), apocalyptic plagues, and the state of science. Hmm. None of that is very cheerful or optimistic. Looking over my notes for the panels, I’m not bringing much levity, either. I’ll have to hit up some parties tonight.

Why would you trust a guy calling himself “HanAssholeSolo”?

The fine fellow who created the Trump/CNN wrestling video has been tracked down and identified (but not “doxxed”, as the wingnuts are trying to claim). CNN called him and confronted him with his inanity and his contemptible history of racism and sexism, and he scrambled to cover his butt with an apology.

I would like to apologize to the members of the Reddit community for getting this site and this sub embroiled in a controversy that should never have happened, HanAssholeSolo wrote in a Fourth of July post on Reddit.

…

On Tuesday, HanAssholeSolo said he was sorry for his remarks. I am not the person that the media portrays me to be in real life, HanAssholeSolo wrote. I was trolling and posting things to get a reaction from the subs on Reddit.

It became an addiction as to how far I could of with the posts that were made, the Reddit user wrote, calling the incident an extreme wake up call to always consider how others may thing or feel about what is being said before clicking the submit button.

Free speech is a right we all have, but it shouldn’t be used in the manner that it was in the posts that were put on this site, HanAssholeSolo said, before arguing he intended for the meme to be taken purely as satire.

I do not advocate violence against the press and the meme I posted was in no way advocating that in any way, shape or form, the user continued. Our First Amendment protect the press from things like violence, and we as American citizens should respect that even if the opinions of the press are not in line with our own.

I had no idea alone would take it and put sound to it and then have it put up on the President’s Twitter feed, HanAssholeSolo wrote. It was a prank, nothing more.

Apparently, we’re now expected to accept his apology and praise him for seeing the error of his ways. I don’t. I see the usual noise: Free speech! First amendment! It was satire! (said by someone who has no concept of satire). It was just a prank!

Worst of all, the denial implicit in I am not the person that the media portrays me to be in real life. Yes, HanAssholeSolo, you are exactly that person. We saw what you chose to be when you could skulk in cowardly anonymity, and that person is an ugly bigot who tries to curry favor with other ugly bigots. This was you before you learned that your anonymity was easily pierced.

HanAssholeSolo claimed he made the gif, writing on the pro-Trump subreddit r/the_Donald, Holy sh*t!! I wake up and have my morning coffee and who retweets my shitpost but the MAGA EMPORER [sic] himself!!! I am honored!!

Shortly thereafter, news organizations noticed a history of offensive posts, including casual use of highly offensive terms including n*****, goatf*cker and f****t.

500,000 dead Muslims is a good start, HanAssholeSolo wrote in one response. Kill the rest and I’ll be impressed. Good keep up the good work until the last Islamic piece of shit is wiped from the planet.

There are people who have to be anonymous on the internet, who express themselves as decent human beings…and they have to be anonymous to protect themselves from vicious petty bullies like HanAssholeSolo. I’ll be more amenable to accepting that apology when he admits to himself that the middle part of his nom de smear was exactly accurate and describes precisely what he is.

Right now, I have a suspicion that he has a couple of these shitposting account names and will be back seeking the approval of his fellow shitlords. Because that’s who he is.

Canada has fascists?

I am so disappointed. Down here in the poisonous south we’ve been dreaming of Canada as the perfect utopia — the place our souls go to when we’re crushed under the heel of the neo-Nazi jackboot. Now I learn that you’re infected with alt-right assholes, too.

The five showed up to a Halifax park on Canada Day, waving an early variant of the Canadian flag, with the aim of interrupting a ceremony being held at a statue of Edward Cornwallis — the military officer who founded Halifax, but who also ordered the killings of the area’s Indigenous people.

The five say they are part of the “Proud Boys,” a small group started by far-right commentator Gavin McInnes, expressly for males who consider themselves “Western chauvinism” — a blend of sexist and white nationalist themes that have become central to the alt-right.

I hadn’t realized that transphobic, homophobic, misogynistic, racist Gavin McInnes was Canadian. You’ve got a few nasties up there, too, eh?

At least a couple of stereotypes were preserved.

The five left after roughly ten minutes, without incident, after being confronted by the larger crowd at the the statue.

Alt-righties are cowards, and Canadians can intimidate with niceness. And the Proud Boys are just weird, sick people.

My enthusiasm for the Fourth of July has inexplicably dimmed this year

I don’t understand it. My patriotic ardor has been cooling for decades, but this year, it’s in the deep freeze. For inspiration, I turn to the American Enterprise Institute (it’s got “American” in the name, so it must be good). Unfortunately, this doesn’t help.

It links to an essay praising Calvin Coolidge and the divinity of our nation’s founding, and it’s about as dishonest as you’d expect from an anti-science far right wing capitalist propaganda organization.

History is replete with the births (and deaths) of nations. But the birth of the United States was unique because it was, and remains, a nation founded not on ties of blood,

Except the blood of the exterminated native peoples of the continent.

soil

Have we all forgotten manifest destiny and westward expansion? Vast tracts of land bought from the French and Mexico? Wars to define borders?

or ethnicity,

As long as your ethnicity is white, and even within ‘whiteness’ we have gradations. Anglo-saxons are privileged over Irish and Italians.

but on ideas, held as self-evident truths: that all men are created equal;

Except the dark-skinned ones, who are less equal and justifiably enslaved. Oh, right: slaves weren’t men, they were property.

they are endowed with certain inalienable rights;

At the time of the revolution, women weren’t even considered entitled to vote, and it was seriously contemplated to restrict those rights to white men of property.

and, therefore, the just powers of government, devised to safeguard those rights, must be derived from the consent of the governed.

Lovely sentiment to express now as the police hold a gun to the heads of all citizens, but especially the brown ones. Does consent flow from the muzzle of a gun?

It gets worse. America is a Christian nation.

What is the source of these ideas, and their singular combination in the Declaration? Many have credited European thinkers, both British and French. Coolidge, citing 17th- and 18th-century sermons and writings of colonial clergy, provides ample evidence that the principles of the Declaration, and especially equality, are of American cultural and religious provenance: “They preached equality because they believed in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. They justified freedom by the text that we are all created in the divine image, all partakers of the divine spirit.” From this teaching flowed the emerging American rejection of monarchy and our bold embrace of democratic self-government.

The fatherhood of god is why, in the antebellum US, Christian ministers could argue for slavery, and how the founding of the country could be built on the bedrock of denying the humanity of those who labored for the Southern aristocracy.

The parties in this conflict are not merely Aboli­tionists and Slaveholders; they are Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battle ground, Christianity and Atheism the combatants, and the progress of humanity the stake.

Put me on the side of the Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans, and Jacobins, and fuck the AEI and everything they stand for.

My patriotism might be partially restored if we could acknowledge our history of wrongs and work towards addressing them, but that is not this America. This country has also taken a big step backwards with its embrace of plutocrats, fascists, racists, and misogynists, or, as we call them for short, Republicans.

No celebrations for me today.

The rot is climbing up into the science community

That story about nuclear fuel rods freaked me out a little bit, but nothing like this more in-depth coverage of the incident by Science magazine. One incident is a terrible and possibly deadly mistake, but what’s going on at Los Alamos is a whole pattern of negligence. The lab where the plutonium work is done has been shut down for almost four years.

Officials privately say that the closure in turn undermined the nation’s ability to fabricate the cores of new nuclear weapons and obstructed key scientific examinations of existing weapons to ensure they still work. The exact cost to taxpayers of idling the facility is unclear, but an internal Los Alamos report estimated in 2013 that shutting down the lab where such work is conducted costs the government as much as $1.36 million a day in lost productivity.

And most remarkably, Los Alamos’s managers still have not figured out a way to fully meet the most elemental nuclear safety standards. When the Energy Department on Feb. 1 released its annual report card reviewing criticality risks at each of its 24 nuclear sites, ranging from research reactors to weapon labs, Los Alamos singularly did “not meet expectations.”

In fact, Los Alamos violated nuclear industry rules for guarding against a criticality accident three times more often last year than the Energy Department’s 23 other nuclear installations combined, that report said. Because of its shortcomings, federal permission has not been granted for renewed work with plutonium liquids, needed to purify plutonium taken from older warheads for reuse, normally a routine practice.

Moreover, a year-long investigation by the Center makes clear that pushing the rods too closely together in 2011 wasn’t the first time that Los Alamos workers had mishandled plutonium and risked deaths from an inadvertent burst of radiation. Between 2005 and 2016, the lab’s persistent and serious shortcomings in “criticality” safety have been criticized in more than 40 reports by government oversight agencies, teams of nuclear safety experts, and the lab’s own staff.

I kind of feel like the loss in productivity in building nuclear weapons is a plus, but more troubling is the general loss of competence and expertise. I don’t want us to build more bombs, but I do want a science and engineering community that knows how to handle the dangerous products of our science.

“There’s a systemic issue here,” said Brady Raap. “There are a lot of things there [at Los Alamos] that are examples of what not to do.”

George Anastas, a past president of the Health Physics Society who analyzed dozens of internal government reports about criticality problems at Los Alamos for the Center, said he wonders if “the work at Los Alamos [can] be done somewhere else? Because it appears the safety culture, the safety leadership, has gone to hell in a handbasket.”

Anastas said the reports, spanning more than a decade, describe “a series of accidents waiting to happen.” The lab, he said, is “dodging so many bullets that it’s scary as hell.”

Well, heck, we can afford to poison the northern half of New Mexico, right?

I just remember working with George Streisinger years ago, a biologist who was extraordinarily concerned with nuclear proliferation and weapons testing, and the dangers of radiation. I can’t even imagine how angry he’d be at this casual negligence and lack of respect for the power and risk of nuclear physics.

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.