The Shark Jumping GOP

There was a time, long ago, last century, to be exact, that the Republican Party, the GOP, was a party of ideas.  The ideas were bullshit, but they had ideas.  Cut taxes for the rich, raise taxes on everyone else, and the economy will improve.  Cut taxes and the tax revenue will increase.  Punish people for being poor and the poor will bootstrap themselves right up.  Deregulate industry and industry will  regulate itself.  These policies have given us huge deficits, a wider gap between rich and the rest of us, businesses bankrupting themselves for lack of regulation, and a government which does not have the money to provide the basic services Americans expect.  This is all the direct result of the GOP’s ideas.

Now, the GOP has become the party of no.  No ideas.  Just say no to everything.  Loudly. 

At Least Ussher Had An Excuse

Archbishop James Ussher was a  brilliant man.  He decided to figure out just how old the earthis and used both written history, astronomy, and the Old Testament of the Bible to do it.  And he arrived at the “entrance of the night preceding  the twenty-third day of October in the year of the Julian calendar 710.”  In other words, October 22, 4004 BC.  Despite slipshod calculations and a hefty helping of assumptions, this date is accepted by a remarkable number of Americans.  In the early 17th century, science was so limited, so primitive, so unrefined, that Ussher’s estimate was not bad.  Wrong, but, given the temporally necessary limitations, not bad.  He had an excuse.  He did not have to disbelieve almost everything in order to hang on to that date.

Noah’s Ark Will Be Found. Again. Really.

For as long as I can remember, Noah’s Ark seems be found about every other year.  Sometimes they have found the mountain. Sometimes, they have found the actual ark.  The only consistent part of the story is Ararat —  Mount Ararat, or the Ararat Mountains, or the Mountains in Ararat.  Now it would appear that Liberty University has gotten into the act.

Woo Meets Creationism

As a kid, I was really into dinosaurs.  I planned to be a palaeontologist.  I tried to picture the world inhabited by the Chinle fauna.  Or the late Cretaceous of Eastern Montana.  I tried to imagine the world if dinosaurs were still around.

As an adult, and looking at my car insurance premiums, I’m real glad that, other than avian theropods, there are no dinosaurs.  Hitting a whitetail is bad enough;  hitting an Apatasaurus would be really bad.  Mountain lions and grizzly bears see humans as possible food;  working a forest fire with Utahraptors in the area would be damn close to suicidal.  Though, Calvin’s dreams of T-Rexes flying F4 Phantoms?  Could be interesting.  (Though it would make Julia’s education a lot easier (and a lot more prosaic).)