Simple Answers to Stupid Questions:
Fox News asks, "Has Noah's Ark been found on Turkish mountaintop?"
No. No it hasn't.
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Here in America we have two major political parties. One of them is officially opposed to empathy.
Peter Baker of The New York Times discusses the continuing Republican antipathy to empathy in the context of the impending nomination of a new Supreme Court Justice.
For the record, the Republican Party reiterates its stance against this virtue, which is just … odd.
Seriously, what possible reason is there to oppose a virtue — to oppose a virtue that forms the basis for every other virtue?
I get that there was an initial clutching-at-straws desperation that led some reflexively anti-Obama Republican spokesmen last year to get carried away, pretending that the necessary and foundational virtue of empathy was being put forward as some kind of "legal standard." But after this initial desperate assault on the Golden Rule, you'd have thought the Republican Party would have regained its footing and its senses and began walking back from its ridiculous embrace of sociopathy.
But no. The Republican Party remains officially opposed to the Golden Rule. Proudly so. Creepy and weird.
And also explicitly, by definition, evil. Proudly so.
That's not an accusation on my part. That's their chosen slogan. Creepy and weird. Weird and creepy. What the hell sort of person would join an anti-empathy party?
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Downingtown Rugby Football Club update:
The girls A-side improved to 5-0 this weekend with an 81-0 win.
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Slightly Longer Answer to Stupid Questions:
"Has Noah's Ark been found on Turkish mountaintop?"
Yeung Wing-Cheung, from the Noah's Ark Ministries International research team that made the discovery, said: "It's not 100 percent that it is Noah's Ark, but we think it is 99.9 percent that this is it."
The expedition seems to have found a wooden structure. They hear hoofbeats, so they're "99.9 percent" certain it must be a zebra. Or a unicorn with zebra stripes.
Representatives of Noah's Ark Ministries said the structure contained several compartments, some with wooden beams, that they believe were used to house animals. The group of evangelical archaeologists ruled out an established human settlement on the grounds none have ever been found above 11,000 feet in the vicinity, Yeung said.
I think if you've found a structure with wooden beams used to house animals, then you can no longer rule out an established human settlement, because you just found one.
The young-earth creationists of Noah's Ark Ministries may have unintentionally thrown a wrench in their own theory. YECs arguing for a historical global flood say that the waters of Noah's flood became the oceans of today. And they think they've even worked out the arithmetic:
God acted to alter the earth's topography. New continental landmasses bearing new mountain chains of folded rock strata were uplifted from below the globe-encircling waters that had eroded and leveled the pre-Flood topography, while large deep ocean basin[s] were formed to receive and accommodate the Flood waters that then drained off the emerging continents.
That is why the oceans are so deep, and why there are folded mountain ranges. Indeed, if the entire earth's surface were leveled by smoothing out the topography of not only the land surface but also the rock surface on the ocean floor, the waters of the ocean would cover the earth's surface to a depth of 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometers).
Never mind that they are, literally, advocating a flat-earth theory. Just look at their numbers: 2.7 kilometers. So what's their newly discovered Noah's Ark doing 1,300 meters above the flood line?
If you had these people read Aesop's story of the Ant and the Grasshopper and then asked them what the story means, they would reply that it means they should start raising money for an entomological expedition to Greece, because holy cow — talking insects!
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What sort of government do you get when you decide you're opposed to empathy?
You get the sort of government that feels free to ignore the veil of ignorance — the sort that never has to worry about injustice, only about making sure that the shoe never does end up on the other foot.
You get something, in other words, like Gov. Jan "Papiere bitte" Brewer's Arizona.
Note to Gov. Brewer and the white people of Arizona who support it's new police-state law: If you're really that upset about being surrounded by Mexicans, maybe you shouldn't live in what was, until relatively recently, Mexico.
They were there first. By centuries. Deal with it.
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Dear History Channel,
I'd be a lot more excited about your miniseries, "America: The Story of Us," if it wasn't crammed into a lineup alongside silly garbage like "Ancient Aliens: The Series."
Modest proposal: Try to be the sort of "history" channel that leaves viewers better informed, rather than worse, after watching your programming. Otherwise, you might as well be running a Bixby Snyder marathon of "It's Not My Problem" re-runs. Running tabloid Art-Bell nonsense alongside your serious, factual shows undermines those shows. Plus, it contributes to the kind of "who can say for sure?" silliness that leads to my waking up to Google News alerts that say things like, "Has Noah's Ark been found on Turkish mountaintop?"
Thanks.
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