More Pearls Before Swine pun!
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
The property on which the supposed replica of the mythical ark told in the ghastly Bible story of Noah, that was built by the fundamentalist group Answers in Genesis, has suffered some damage due to rain, an occurrence rich with irony. The owners of the new ark are suing insurance companies for not covering the damage.
The Ark may have been constructed to withstand 40 days and 40 nights of flooding, but Northern Kentucky’s Ark Encounter property did not fare as well as Noah’s original construction when rains hit the area.
Court documents filed in District Court show that the owners of the Ark Encounter in Northern Kentucky have filed a suit against their insurance company after flood and storm damage.
Crosswater Canyon Inc. alongside the Ark Encounter, have filed suit against multiple defendants who comprise the business’ insurance underwriters after their property was damaged by heavy rains.
According to the suit, heavy rains caused a landslide and some structural support damage near the Ark exhibit.
I don’t know why this lawsuit was only brought against the insurance companies. Surely heavy rains are an act of god and thus s/he should be the main defendant?
I have written about how rich people often behave like jerks, such as ignoring the major role that luck played in getting them to where they are now and also drive arrogantly, as if they own the roads. These were largely impressionistic views, based on either my personal experience or reading about the behavior of others. So it was nice to come across this article that summarizes some studies that suggest that my impressions had some correspondence with reality.
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As long time readers know, I am not a fan of the Spelling Bee competition for many reasons. I have also been puzzled by the dominance of people of South Asian ethnicity in this competition. That community seems to be willing to spend enormous amounts of time and money to coach their children to do well in this competition. This year’s competition that ended yesterday resulted in an unprecedented result in which eight students, seven of them with South Asian names, were crowned co-champions because of a sudden rule change. The reason apparently is that the organizers were running out of difficult words.
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Currently Julian Assange sits in a British prison after being unceremoniously ousted from his asylum situation in the Ecuadoran embassy in London. The US has indicted him and seeks to extradite him to the US to face charges. Assange arouses strong feelings. Some people detest him for some of the things he is accused of in his personal capacity while some journalists hate him because he exposed government secrets in ways they do not approve of. But Matt Taibbi argues that whatever we may feel about him, we should be very concerned about the implications for journalism as a whole contained in the indictments.
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I had been aware that more and more people were climbing Mount Everest these days but was absolutely stunned when Marcus Ranum had a post showing a photo of a line of people waiting to get to the summit. At first I thought it must be some kind of hoax because it seemed impossible to me that the top of the world could be just like the long lines outside theaters to see the latest superhero film. But it is apparently true and has been so for some time as this video shows.
This article looks at a controversy that arose over a photomontage of the finalists for this year’s Miss India contest where observers noted that all the contestants looked pretty much the same: light skinned with straight black hair, leading some to jokingly wonder if they were all photos of the same woman.
What is wrong with this picture? pic.twitter.com/61B23aYFr6
— Sameer (@Naa_Cheese) May 28, 2019
The latest episode of Hasan Minhaj’s excellent show Patriot Act examined the deplorable state of international governance in cricket. He points out that the official bodies of the big three cricket nations (India, England, and Australia) act like a cartel and ram through measures that benefit themselves at the expense of other nations and the game itself. They have also resisted efforts to enable more nations to play at the highest level, because they seem to feel that widening the game’s appeal would dilute their power. They even derailed moves to have it included as an Olympic sport.
Here is the show.
Boris Johnson, former mayor of London and foreign minister who has been trying to inveigle his way to the prime ministership for the longest time, is to go on trial for repeating an egregious lie that was at the heart of the 2016 Brexit campaign.
In an unprecedented ruling issued here on Wednesday, a judge has paved the way for Boris Johnson to stand trial for a false claim that was at the very center of the Brexit campaign. The Vote Leave campaign bus was emblazoned with the slogan: “We send the EU £350m a week.” The independent U.K. Statistics Authority said the figure was misleading and the Institute for Fiscal Studies argued it was “absurd,” and yet Vote Leave, and Johnson in particular, continued to use the number throughout the hotly contested Brexit referendum in 2016.
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Politicians are supposed to be servants of the people but it is amazing how quickly they learn to see themselves as rulers, demanding perks and privileges going well beyond what their official duties requires or allows. These extend to cars, drivers, private planes, and who knows what else. They acquire a sense of self-importance in which their time and what they do is more important than that of anyone else, with the only exceptions (at least in the US) being big money donors to their campaigns who are grovelingly deferred to.
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