A Cincinnati local paper reacts to Ken Ham’s Folly

A Cincinnati news weekly, the City Beat, has weighed in on the Creation “Museum”. They don’t seem to like it.

Here are some of the good quotes from the article.

Gene Kritsky, biologist:

it’s almost like intellectual molestation.

Not only is it bad science, it is filled with bad religion, and it’s also bad sociology and bad history, too.

Lawrence Krauss, physicist:

This is an institution designed to mis-educate children.

This is nothing but an institutionalized lie and a scientific fraud.

Edwin Kagin, lawyer:

What they are doing is no less an attack on the very way that science and enlightened thought works to produce the modern world. They want to substitute mythology for knowledge. Ignorance is a form of terrorism.

The local paper, The Cincinnati Post:

Frankly, we wish the Genesis museum had been built somewhere else. We wish the 250,000 men, women and especially children expected to visit this year were getting a view of science that comports with what science really knows about the world. Why? Because Greater Cincinnati is trying so hard to market itself, nationally and internationally as a hospitable home for a knowledge economy.

At least, I get the impression it’s not a favorable review. Maybe I need to read between the lines a little more carefully.

Pirate economics?

Normally, I can’t be motivated to read economics—no offense, economists, but I think the economics part of my brain got left behind on one of my many moves around the country, and it was locked in to one particular latitude and longitude anyway—but maybe adding a little swashbuckling and really bad puns in the title would help. Hilzoy has found some interesting examples, anyway. Here’s the abstract to one:

This paper investigates the internal governance institutions of violent criminal enterprise by examining the law, economics, and organization of pirates. To effectively
organize their banditry, pirates required mechanisms to prevent internal predation,
minimize crew conflict, and maximize piratical profit. I argue that pirates devised two
institutions for this purpose. First, I analyze the system of piratical checks and balances that crews used to constrain captain predation. Second, I examine how pirates
used democratic constitutions to minimize conflict and create piratical law and order.
Remarkably, pirates adopted both of these institutions before the United States or
England. Pirate governance created sufficient order and cooperation to make pirates
one of the most sophisticated and successful criminal organizations in history.

Maybe I should read that more carefully. If a group as anarchic as pirates could find a way to stably organize, maybe there are some hints for us atheists.

No, gang, boarding churches and looting them of their wealth probably isn’t a viable strategy to give us a unifying profit motive. We’re going to have to think about something more abstract. Although I do confess that a viking lifestyle does have some appeal…

This might be a good site for someone else…

This site has its heart in the right place, but it’s more for theistic evolutionists than my kind—all the bowing and scraping to a creator god leaves me cold (especially since it seems to substitute hearty encouragement and reconciliation over actually discussing the evidence). But if that doesn’t bother you, take a look at The Epic of Evolution. It’ll probably make somebody happy.

Molly? Anyone want a Molly?

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It’s mid-month, and all you regulars know what that means: it’s time to poll you guys for the winners of the Molly award for June. It’s easy: just leave a comment with the name of the person you most enjoy stumbling across in the comment threads, I count ’em up, the winner gets the grand prize of getting his or her name entered on the Molly roll call. You might want to review that list before casting your vote, so you don’t nominate someone who has already won one.

If you’ve been wondering who the grand prize winner for last month was, it was a tie between Kseniya and BronzeDog. That means you have to read their comments with a special reverence now, and you also have to cast a vote for someone different.