It isn’t just the one in the previous post. It also includes this nightmare hellscape:

It’s next week, the damned will need to get their tickets soon. Of course it’s in Texas.

It’s a one-day event, noon until 10pm, and look at all those people! Everyone is crammed into panels so they can shout over each other, a crucial part of being in Hell. They seem to have simply drafted a bunch of otherwise unknown nobodies from social media; I especially like the ones who don’t even go by an identifiable name, like Nuance Bro and Andrew, just Andrew, and oooh, Spectre. Spooky. They seem to have no qualifications other than a follower count and reliably regressive opinions.

You know, once upon a time I was one of those guys in great demand to appear at conferences, but then I became Mr Unpopular practically overnight because I spoke out against a rapist. I suppose I could have been there if only I’d abandoned human decency and all of my principles to be part of that mess, like a Peter Coffin (who is also going to be there.)

At least I can attend Skepticon without any regrets…and yes, it’s happening this year, July 29-31, in person in St Louis. Look for a real announcement from the organizers sometime soon, but keep that weekend open.

Poor pitiful embattled Answers in Genesis. They’re facing a myriad of problems, to the point where they’re even publicly whining about them.

A number of AiG’s leadership and board were meeting recently, working through how to deal with struggles relating to “deplatforming,” the “woke” culture, and mapping out a way forward to protect AiG and resolve some problems (we can make some of these battles public once we’ve worked around them). We have staff working hard on all this, which is also a detraction from accomplishing the many daily tasks that need to be done. I said to the group, “It’s like being in a war, and we’re planning where to send the troops, where to place the tanks, and where we need to move around the enemies’ lines.”

I’d really like to know how “deplatforming” and the “woke” culture are affecting AiG. They’re an isolated, backwards little cult that has built their own enclave in Kentucky; are they having internal battles, or is this just a complaint that everyone else in the world finds them to be stupid? They do list some of their concerns, but none of them seem to have anything to do with “wokeness”. The first of their concerns is that no one wants to work for them, and this grand ark park that was touted as an economic boon for the region is finding it difficult to employ people.

1. Labor shortage. Yes, there is a labor shortage across the nation. Soon we begin what we believe (judging from phone calls, group bookings, etc.) will be a very busy year for our attractions (probably the busiest to date), and we need to employ up to 600 seasonal staff for the spring, summer, and fall months. Usually this includes mostly college and high school students and some retirees and others looking for seasonal work. Last year we were short 300 seasonal staff from what was needed. We had many of our salaried staff from all departments working in culinary, guest services, and other areas to try to deal with this staff shortage.

So their work force is mainly low-paid unskilled labor, many of them working as unpaid interns (they don’t say what percentage of their workers are interns — that would be something interesting to know), and are disappointed that they can’t get enough menial labor. Why, they had to ask people who are important and paid a salary to baby-sit the goats in the petting zoo! What a tragedy.

Ken Ham has a solution, though. Turn the place into a work camp and bring in fervent volunteers from all around the country. They’re going to build dorms.

AiG supporters have donated money to enable us to begin building student housing onsite at the Ark Encounter as we have plenty of land available for this. The first building will house 100 student staff. Now that we have the infrastructure (sewage, water, electric, etc.) in place, it will be less expensive to build the next building to house another 100 staff. One building will be designated for males and one for females (there are only two genders of humans, as we know). We believe housing for 200 student staff will go a long way to solving our labor shortage, but at the same time enable us to provide a Christian facility for these students so we can also help mentor them in the Christian faith. The cost of this additional building to house 100 people is $4.5 million.

There’s a solution! Bring in a captive workforce! It sounds hellish and cultlike, actually. In order to work there, you have to sign a Statement of Faith, along with other requirements, just to be an unpaid intern.

• Must agree with and be able to sign our Statement of Faith.
• Maintains a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
• Regularly attends a local, Bible-believing church.
• Must be able to work some evenings and weekends.

Makes you wonder how they’re going to enforce all that, once they’ve got you locked into institutional housing. Kids, this “job” isn’t going to look good on your CV, and it’s going to be an unpleasant experience. But Ken Ham will benefit from your servitude!

Oh, and Ham has another complaint about the world outside his compound.

3. “Woke” culture. There’s an increasing anti-Christian environment permeating the culture. Increasingly, we’re finding employers will not employ those who come from conservative institutions that take biblical stands on marriage, abortion, and gender (many employers check social media posts to check out what people believe), and we’ve heard of many people being fired from their jobs because of their public stand on God’s Word as a Christian.

“Woke” is not anti-Christian culture. It only means that you are conscious of oppression. Now I know that awareness is the last thing an oppressive institution like far-right conservative Christianity wants, but there are a great many more liberal perspectives on Christianity that are just as valid. I’m not sure what “Biblical stands” he is talking about, though.

Marriage? Polygamy is OK, and marriage in general is transactional…so you can sell your daughters to a suitor?

Abortion? The Bible doesn’t say much about abortion.

Gender? Likewise. It takes certain cultural norms for granted, but doesn’t say anything specific. Oh, except for that verse that says “Love your neighbor, unless they use a pronoun you dislike.” (Sorry, I made that up, but evangelical Christianity makes shit up all the time, so it’s OK.)

Also, I don’t see how this is a problem for AiG. If there are other employers who fire people for holding batshit ideas about the culture, then AiG is just a delightful little refuge from sanity. So what if a cake decorator gets fired for refusing to sell a cake to a gay couple, they can just come to work for a Christian institution and get paid very little and get housed in a little apartment and…well, probably not much cake decorating going on, but they can baby-sit the goats!

AiG is never going to succumb to this heinous “woke” culture, so what do they care?

From Kevin Bird:

“Postmodern NeoMarxist” is just an insult Jordan Peterson uses for anyone he dislikes. It’s another example of projection; you know how wingnuts like to claim that the libs call everyone a Nazi? The truth is that they like to call everyone a postmodernist or neo-Marxist.

Stephen Jay Gould is just an evo-psych boogeyman, and Geoffrey Miller is an ass. This is a great rebuttal, though:

Yep, spot on.

Here’s a one-minute horror story, and a novel (to me) rationalization for quackery.

The patient thinks that it is good that her breast lump has erupted into a bleeding, rotting mass, because that’s a sign that the homeopathic treatments were working, rather than failing. Yikes.

P.S. Important: in the name of all that is holy, do not Google “fungating”. It is not a portmanteau of “fun” and “gating” — the derivation is from “fungal”, and you do not want to see a breast with a fungating mass. It is horrifying to consider that so many people in human history have died of this ghastly disease.

And that is a multi-millennial horror story.

Atheists for Liberty, that horrid far-right reactionary organization, is now campaigning at CPAC. At long last, David Silverman (he’s on their advisory board) has got his wish, finding a front that will support his dream of an atheism that reeks of conservative values. Take a look at the books they are selling!

Those authors are all on their board of advisors, except Hitchens, who is dead. Also on board: Ron Lindsay, to my disappointment. They seem to be recruiting anyone who shows the slightest right-wing tendencies. I wonder why they haven’t invited me to join their board?

Also no surprise: they’ve gone anti-vax. Their argument is that there are religious exemptions, and rather than working to end them, they want to expand them to include atheist exemptions.

It’s unfortunately true. He is now straining to defend creationist caricatures of evolutionary biology. He has a new video exercise in sophistry in which he claims to have scientific support for the claim that “we evolved from a rock”. He excerpts Aron Ra pointing out that evolution does not argue that we are descended from a rock, and tries to refute him by finding a paper in Science that says we did. Only it doesn’t. He’s relying on colloquial use of terms to confuse the issue.

The paper says this:

Thank goodness for granite. If not for the formation and subsequent erosion of large quantities of metal-rich granite on a supercontinent that formed billions of years ago, the evolution of multicellular life—including us—could have been stifled or delayed, according to a new study.

For much of its history, life on Earth existed as only single-celled organisms. Certain proteins critical for multicellular life, and presumed to have been equally critical for its evolution from single-celled ancestors, require heavy-metal elements, especially copper, zinc, and molybdenum, says John Parnell, a geoscientist at the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom. Previous studies suggest that multicellular life evolved sometime between 1.6 billion and 1.2 billion years ago. Researchers thought that before that innovation, these vital metals were locked away from environments where life thrived—either sequestered in the oxygen-poor depths of the ocean or held in ancient ore deposits in Earth’s crust, waiting to be eroded.

This is not saying we evolved from granite, or descended from granite, or even came from granite. It’s saying that some metal elements that living organisms use as catalysts in chemical reactions eroded out of granite, and further, it’s a paper specifically about the origin of multicellular life, not all life.

To explain it in Biblical terms, here’s Genesis 4:22.

As for Zillah, she also gave birth to Tubal-cain, the forger of all implements of bronze and iron; and the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah.

Or Exodus 31:

Now the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “See, I have called by name Bezalel, the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah. I have filled him with the Spirit of God in wisdom, in understanding, in knowledge, and in all kinds of craftsmanship, to make artistic designs for work in gold, in silver, and in bronze, and in the cutting of stones for settings, and in the carving of wood, that he may work in all kinds of craftsmanship.

If I were to now claim that the Bible says we “came from” bronze, iron, wood, gold, and silver, that would be as deliberate a misreading as Powell’s claim that evolution says we “came from” rocks. Life arose from energy-rich molecules in solution in the ocean. That early life used essential metallic elements in promoting chemical reactions does not imply we “came from” rocks, any more than when the Bible proudly declares in Joshua 10:28 that Joshua captured Makkedah that very day, and attacked both it and its king with swords, utterly destroying it along with every person in it, leaving no survivors, it is implying that the Israelites were made of swords.

Clearly, though, followers of the Abrahamic religions can thank goodness for iron. If not for the presence of mineral deposits that allowed them to forge killing weapons, they might have gone the way of Makkedah and Jericho, and the Jewish and Christian religions might have been stifled or delayed.