The Ark is leaking!

Once upon a time, Ken Ham was enthusiastically bragging about anticipated attendance figures for his Ark Park.

Over the years, secularists launched vicious attacks against the museum. They will increase, as the full-size Noah’s Ark, when it opens in 2016, is estimated to attract up to 2 million visitors a year…

Unfortunately for his glee, Dan Phelps got the actual attendance figures from a Kentucky Open Records Act query: for 2017-2018, the Big Wooden Box got 862,471 visitors. Not bad, but less than half of what he was expecting.

I wonder if Ham inadvertently revealed one of the reasons for the shortfall.

According to our research, around 60% of those visiting the Ark will be unchurched!

So he was predicting that over half the visitors would be unbelievers — you know, people like me, who visited once to gawk and point and laugh. We were there for the spectacle and the absurdity, not for religious instruction. And people like that are not likely to make repeat visits.

They’re still debating the undebatable at Tuam

A horrific crime was committed by the Catholic Church at Tuam, Ireland. Single mothers and their babies were neglected and died at the hands of a “pro-life” religious cult, ignored, and the deaths hidden away, until the remains of about 800 dead were unearthed. They’d been dumped in a septic tank. That is apparently what Catholics consider death with dignity.

So, you’ve found a mass grave…what do you do next? In the case of Irish authorities, you convene a public meeting and ask the locals if it’s OK if they just ignore all those corpses, maybe put up a nice little plaque or a stone over them, and just move on. It turns out the public wasn’t too happy about the idea of sweeping dead bodies under a discreet rug.

The meeting was supposed to gauge opinion on what to do with the site: (a) leave everything as it is but erect a memorial to tell the world how much we care; or (b) fully excavate the mass grave, exhume and identify the remains, and return the lost loved ones to their grieving families and enable them to rest in peace after a formal and appropriate burial.

Spoiler alert — I was rooting for option (b).

Let’s cut to the chase. What we are dealing with here is a mass grave, one containing the remains of abused persons, people discarded as second-class citizens, coercively separated from their families, born in captivity, and denigrated with the zeal that only religious sanctimony and god-fearing hubris can muster.

It seems simply unconscionable that any humane society would respond to the revelation that nearly 800 babies have been interred in an unmarked grave — a septic tank, no less — and say, ‘Well…let’s just leave them there.’

And yet that is what was being proposed for Tuam.

I agree with option (b), with the addition that a good forensic team be commissioned to identify as many of the dead as possible, along with tracing the paper trail to determine the details of who was responsible and who was lost at Tuam, and the bill, no matter what the cost, should be paid by the Catholic Church. And then they can do (a) and put up a memorial that not only acknowledges the victims but clearly assigns all blame to the Catholic Church for the atrocity.

Science in Mexico needs strong leadership

I got a letter from a science student in Mexico who is concerned about the results of their national election in which they elected a new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has begun appointing the various secretaries and advisors to form a government. His concern is that the appointment of María Elena Álvarez-Buylla Roces to the directorship of Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACyT), the state science council, is problematic.

So I looked into it. My first superficial impression is that she seems to be a good choice: she’s chair of the ecology department at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, she already has a position on CONACyT, and she’s a developmental evolutionary ecologist, a field I find fascinating. She’s qualified and has great credentials. She is so much better than anyone Donald Trump would appoint here that I’m wondering what Mexicans have to complain about.

But then my correspondent points out that she has some troubling ideas about science. In particular, she’s got things wrong about GMOs, which is one of her obsessions.

  • She has mentioned that “Western Science” is the responsible of giving us the flashiest achievements but perhaps the most useless such as putting a man on the Moon.

  • She stated that GMOs are poison and that these can lead to cancer

  • She has mentioned that there is a rise in the US for autism which is caused by the consumption of GMOs

  • She of course links to the Seralini studies.

(The Seralini studies, you may recall, are the notorious bad experiments that claimed to show that the RoundUp Ready genes, not RoundUp itself, caused cancer when injected into rats.)

I might be slightly sympathetic to the argument that the moon landings were a superficial flash in the pan, since we haven’t bothered to sustain that effort, but it smacks of the usual ignorance of a different field of science and engineering than hers — like Sarah Palin’s ridiculous dismissal of fruit fly research. I also am not sure what “Western Science” means. There’s just science, and you can do it no matter what side of the world you live on. And isn’t developmental evolutionary ecology also “Western Science”?

“Genetically modified organism” refers only to a process for generating targeted, planned gene changes. A GMO is no more poisonous than organisms with random genetic changes…which are basically all organisms. You could argue that glyphosate is potentially toxic, but study after study has failed to find evidence of that.

There is no causal connection between GMOs and autism. This is just the worst. Autism is the default villain of so many anti-science arguments.

These claims call her judgment into question. There is good reason to have reservations about her appointment. As a citizen of the US, of course, I have no right to impose on the Mexican science establishment, so all I can do is suggest that my Mexican colleagues take a look at the Facebook page for the resistance, #ResisCienciaCONACyT, their blog at # ResisCiencia18, and follow their Twitter feed. Make up your own mind, organize and fight back!

I also have another suggestion. The US president currently has not bothered to appoint a science advisor, and in the vacuum, the default leadership of American science policy has fallen to a guy with a bachelor’s degree in political science, and in general his appointments to science and engineering positions have been jokes (our Secretary of Energy is Rick Perry, who didn’t even know what the DOE was). Perhaps María Elena Álvarez-Buylla Roces could be sent up here to do the job? Maybe even a notoriously anti-GMO scientist would be an improvement on what we’ve got now.

But still…Mexico and the US can do better.

P.S. You know the three largest cities in the Americas are São Paulo, Mexico City, and Lima, right? New York only makes it to #4. The population of Latin America needs a strong agriculture to sustain itself, so why is Mexico rejecting a key strategy for improving their crops?

The Cloudflare problem

Freethoughtblogs uses Cloudflare protection — we need it because every once in a while, some jerk targets us with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, and the worst jerks are the ones who try to shut down free speech in the name of free speech. Unfortunately, as I’ve recently learned, Cloudflare isn’t necessarily one of the good guys — they also shelter various contemptible hate groups, like incels. Follow the link if you want to see examples of violent threats against women and other groups, since I don’t feel like quoting that crap today.

I do appreciate their insistence on remaining neutral on content, though. Who knows who would be shut down if they didn’t explicitly avoid judging the servers they defend?

Civil liberties organization Electronic Frontier Foundation released a poignant statement in the aftermath of the Charlottesville violence, highlighting the trouble with selective censorship: “All fair-minded people must stand against the hateful violence and aggression that seems to be growing across our country. But we must also recognize that on the internet, any tactic used now to silence neo-Nazis will soon be used against others, including people whose opinions we agree with” such as the Black Lives Matter movement, it said.

So sure, if that’s all this was about, I’d agree that staying out of the fight would be a fair and reasonable way to maintain the integrity of the service. But there is also the idea that you shouldn’t be allowed to shout “fire!” in a crowded theater, and some of these sites are inciting violence and murder. It also seems fair to me that there are some limits — that you ought to be able to express unpopular opinions, but are limited in encouraging dangerous activities.

Other companies place these reasonable restrictions on their users.

Private internet companies can reserve the right to terminate a client’s website if its users post content that violates their terms of service, as many did with The Daily Stormer. GoDaddy, for example, does not allow its clients to use their sites in a manner that “promotes, encourages or engages in terrorism, violence against people, animals, or property,” or for “morally objectionable activities.”

Cloudflare, of course, is also free to set such terms, but has argued that it has no business regulating content because it is a security and delivery network, not a host provider.

OK, “morally objectionable activities” is unacceptably vague — there are people who would say that being gay, or skipping church, are morally objectionable. But saying that a client can’t use your service to promote terrorism or violence is a specific and reasonable constraint. We already have that requirement here at FtB, and we’ve invoked it against bloggers here in the past. If Cloudflare had that kind of provision in their terms of service, we’d sign it without hesitation, and we’d be enforcing it here as well as by our hosting service.

We aren’t even close to what is represented by the clients using Cloudflare, though. Follow the link: it’s people advocating mass murder, torture, and rape. These are mobs whipping each other up into ever more furious hate, and there are multiple examples of readers of those sorts of sites taking action and killing people.

Unfortunately, Cloudflare is so ubiquitous it now has an effective monopoly (they also do a really good job of protecting web sites). Does anyone know of any equally capable alternatives?

What part of “promote the general Welfare” do they fail to understand?

A woman attended a Democratic rally, was appalled, and wrote about how awful it was. I’m thinking we ought to pay her to attend more rallies and publish her reactions, because dang, this is great stuff.

But then Ocasio-Cortez spoke, followed by Bush, and I saw something truly terrifying. I saw just how easy it would be, were I less involved and less certain of our nation’s founding and its history, to fall for the populist lines they were shouting from that stage.

  • I saw how easy it would be, as a parent, to accept the idea that my children deserve healthcare and education.

    • I saw how easy it would be, as someone who has struggled to make ends meet, to accept the idea that a “living wage” was a human right.

    Above all, I saw how easy it would be to accept the notion that it was the government’s job to make sure that those things were provided.

If you’re like me, your first thought was that this has to be satire. No one could be this oblivious. But no, this isn’t someone mocking the right-wing’s inability to grasp elementary civics, this woman is an associate editor at the Daily Caller, and went on Fox & Friends to repeat her gasp of horror.

I was listening to them talk – to Ocasio-Cortez and also to Cori Bush, who she was stumping for in St. Louis – and they say things, they talk about things that everybody wants, especially if you’re a parent, the writer said. They talk about education for your kids. They talk about health care for you kids. The things that you want. If you’re not really paying attention to how they’re going to pay for it or the rest of that, it’s easy to fall into that trap and to say, ‘My kids deserve this,’ and, ‘Maybe the government should be responsible for helping me with that.’

It’s revealing. The mole people have so thoroughly absorbed the ideas that government is bad and the ethos of libertarianism that they’ve lost the ability to recognize that government is a social structure specifically intended to provide for the well-being of its citizens. It’s right there in the preamble to the US Constitution.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Providing for the health and education of our children is what government is for, among other things…but I suspect this person is one of the fearful ones who only sees “for the common defense”, and imagines that justice, peace, and the general welfare are things that detract from the military.

Another uninteresting nerd gets punctured

For a while, YouTube kept throwing these videos from someone called “Diversity & Comics” at me, until I managed to train it to realize that I despise this guy. He’s one of those white nerds — a regular snowflake — who gets irate at characters in comics who are not white men, or white women with large breasts. And now, of course, he’s outraged at the silly She-Ra controversy, where a reboot of a comic character is now drawn with less flamboyant boobs.

He got interviewed by Jim Jefferies at Comic Con. His views were treated with more respect than they deserved, but it’s still an effective skewering.

This looks like a gimmick for a Disney movie

“The Bemidji Merganser and her 76 Ducklings”.

There’s a reason this duck has adopted 76 babies — because all Mergansers look alike, I guess.

The merganser in this picture probably picked up several dozen ducklings that got separated from their mothers. Adult ducks can’t tell which birds are theirs, and lost young birds that have already imprinted on their own mothers will instinctively start following another Common Merganser because she looks like mom.

Roger Waters on the atrocity that Israel has become

This is an excerpt from a longer conversation about Israel and Palestine.

Waters is one of those too rare rock musicians I can respect for openly expressing humanist ideals (another is Peter Gabriel). He claims there is a growing movement to end our unquestioning support for Israel in the US; I don’t know, the right-wing propaganda seems to silence everything.

You can find details about the incident of Palestinian footballers being shot online. Expect the usual noise: “Do you have any sources that are not Palestinian?”