My T Shirt

Some people at CreoZerg said they liked the design on the shirt I was wearing so I decided to post it for the whole world to enjoy.

I Went to CreoZerg

I went to the Creation Museum to meet all the godless heathens today. If you have to go there I highly recommend bringing a few hundred atheists just to help maintain your sense of humor. Also get the group rate, I didn't and the ticket cost $23.27 including sales tax. No wonder they can afford animatronic dinos.

I met P. Z. Myers and Hemant Mehta and lots of very friendly less famous (at least to me) folks. I think everyone showed good restraint in their actions but some of their overheard conversations may have freaked out the Mennonite tourists. Further proof that god doesn't exist can be inferred by the lack of lightning bolts and tornadoes while we were there.

While it was fun to laugh at the pseudo-science and anachronisms, when I thought about how many people tour this place and think all this crap is valid information, it starts to make me a little sick to my stomach. The museum inside and out screams of money. Huge amounts of currency must have been poured into the place and all for the expressed goal of teaching people that their public school education is wrong. It's like going to Disneyland and being earnestly told that Cinderella is historical fact. Investing so much in fairy tales while public schools are having to cut their curricula and activities for lack of funds is obscene. I think such a financial investment in propaganda is even more immoral than the multitude of lies that fill the building.

A Solution to Global Warming

I just stumbled onto this article about people in a Swiss Village who since 1678 have been asking for intersession from the Pope to keep the nearby glacier from growing and destroying their village. It seems however that for the last decade the glacier receded about 12% due to the warmer winters and decreased snowfall, so they have asked the Pope to intercede again.

It is not clear whether the villagers think that the Pope is doing an exceptional job of fulfilling their original request or they think of it as a new problem that requires additional Papal blessings. If the villagers were unsure which it was, that might at least partly explain why it took them a whole decade to act.

Still this is really a slap-the-forehead moment. If someone requests blessings from the Pope for each of the receding glaciers, we'll nip this global warming thing in the bud in no time. I'd be happy to help out if it means I don't have to worry about leaving carbon footprints everywhere I go (Damn those bituminous Hush Puppies!) but we don't currently have a lot of glaciers in Ohio and the latest polls indicate that most Ohioans don't want any. If you know of a glacier that lacks representation, let me know and I'll dash off a note to Rome right away.

Eagles Populations Are Growing in Ohio

Articles in the Ohio papers are reporting that bald eagles are continuing their resurgence with 215 nests reported last year. That is the largest number of nests counted since the time that they were put on the endangered species list. There were times I thought this would never happen.

When I was in jr. high school in the late 1960's my family would travel to the Everglades Nat. Park during Xmas break. On one of those trips I saw a bald eagle perched on a dead tree and felt very lucky because it was one of only fifty in the state of Florida. That was the largest breeding population in the US outside of Alaska. At the same time, it was a sad event as the few remaining eagles were still falling prey to hunters and the effects of DDT. I thought I might be seeing the bald eagle for the last time in the wild.

By the early eighties I was hearing reports of a resurgence in the bald eagle population but I didn't really believe them until one day while I was hang gliding in the mountains of Cleveland National Forest east of San Diego and a bald eagle flew right under me. I'd never even seen a good photo of one in flight and hadn't realized that they had white tails. I tried to follow it for a way, but the eagle had a much better glide ratio than my hang glider.

Later I ran into a National Forest Ranger and asked how the bald eagles were doing. He initially said there were none in the area, but after mentioning my experience, he confided that they were being kept a secret for fear they might get shot. You see, the area east of the big SoCal cities is still cowboy country where ranchers ride horses around their spreads with a Winchester by their side and many believe that raptors (the birds not the dinosaurs) are a threat to the livestock and, therefore need to be shot.

So the bald eagles still weren't out of the woods yet. I mean they were actually in the forest and weren't planning to leave, but there were still plenty of opportunities for them to join the list with the auk and dodo.

Now the news is all good. Bald eagle populations are increasing not just on the coasts, but also around my current digs, smack dab in the middle of Ohio. Finally I can relax and stop worrying about the extinction of our magnificent national bird, at least until its food supply dies off.

The Health Care Spit Ball Fight

I've been trying to understand the proposed National health care plan and I was inspired to dig a little more today after Hemant Mehta brought up the subject on Friendly Atheist. Two of the most important things I learned today are; there is no such thing as "Obama's health plan" in that the current plan as written came from congress, not the President, and those who oppose the health care plan tell blatant lies to frighten people into opposing the plan.

Some good information can be found in an article in Yahoo news and from Politifact.com that indicate that many of the opponents of health care are not interested in objective discussion of pros and cons, they just want to be destructive. Why else would they say so many things that are completely false.

Part of the problem is that too many politicians, pundits and voters view politics as an us-against-them rivalry. The only goal is for the home team to win and the opposing team to lose and if lying, cheating and stealing are necessary to win, that's what you do for the sake of the team. It doesn't matter that legislation may benefit all Americans,if the opposing team wants it, they must be prevented from getting it or the home team loses.

It is as if the US' political system has created a government and constituency with a mean emotional age of twelve. The kids on this side of the street hate the kids on the other side of the street. What ever they like we hate, what ever they want to do we want to prevent and if they try to make friends, run away because they have cooties. Decisions are so much easier if you just do what your party or favorite pundit says and as you lay dying from a preventable disease for lack of health care, you can reassure yourself that it would have been worse if the other team had won.

Religion of Hate

I just saw an AP article about the Idaho town near which the Aryan Nation had its headquarters. It sucks that the little upscale town of Hayden Lake is still stigmatized as the address of the neo-nazi group that was gone by '04 but for me it was more interesting to learn that the Aryan Nation compound included the leaders home and his church. Apparently the group is a religion and the leaders are referred to as pastors. A church with a pastor and crosses sure does sound like they at least thought of themselves as Xians.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised; they tried to emulate Hitler's regime where every Wehrmacht soldier wore a belt buckle embossed with a swastika and the words "Gott Mit Uns" (God is with us). This, however, is another example of how people can be motivated to hatred and bigotry by incorporating the message into the matrix of religious belief. If you change the message from Jews and blacks to gays and atheists, you pretty much have evangelical Xianity.

I Told You "The Family" Is Scary

Pharyngula has a post about Jeff Sharlet's book: The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. I had a post about that a little while ago when I got freaked out by an interview with Jeff Sharlet. When I got no reaction except one from Mike Litch at Notions Capital suggesting I had little to fear, I calmed down. But now P. Z. Meyers has restored my paranoia, and judging from the comments, he's instilled that fear in a lot of his regulars.