It's another Secular Sunday: Localism, creationism and the Ark Encounter.

Digressions like this one are perfect grist for quiet Sunday mornings at home, with coffee and kippers, far from the churchgoing population.

I suppose it's true that any reference to localism in the context of our region, in one or the other well-intentioned efforts to locate the components rendering us distinct and different, must be inclusive and recognize the self-defeating prevalence of superstitious nutjobbery.

What makes it even harder is that we cannot blame it entirely on Kentucky, or else Rhonda Rhoads would not be an Indiana office holder. Does it get any more representative than a Creation Museum?

Creationism, its museum, and Idiot America.

While founder and chief cartoonist Ken Ham is little more than a caricature, albeit it influential among the numerous delusionists, Bill Nye says quite sensible things, like this:

"We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future."

Meanwhile, LEO reports that Ham's next great revenue stream is in trouble. As an atheist and secular humanist, I can only hope that my psychic energy has played a part in depleting Ham's investment coffers.

Ken Ham: Ark Encounter close to failure because of “atheists,” “secular” media and possibly the devil himself, by Joe Sonka (LEO Weekly)

... How dare the Enemy — capitalized — trick people into not giving millions of their dollars to a man who makes his living getting rich by telling people that humans used to ride through the desert on saddled dinosaurs?

Photo credit

Creationism, its museum, and Idiot America.

You may have heard the news.

Bill Nye “The Science Guy” will debate founder of Creation Museum in Kentucky, by Irving DeJohn (New York Daily News)

Nye will argue merits of evolution with Ken Ham, museum’s founder. Ham argued once in a YouTube video that Nye ‘really doesn’t understand science.’

Coincidentally, many thanks to my pen pal DE, who has chimed in at precisely the right moment with a link to a snippet from the righteous and inimitable Charles P. Pierce's book, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.

I've discovered a book which purports to define the American mind (there's only one?) or mindset, whatever.

In this excerpt, a visit to the Creation Museum is described.

These were impolite questions. Nobody asked them here by the cool pond tucked into the gentle hillside. Increasingly, amazingly, nobody asked them outside the gates, either. It was impolite to wonder why our parents had sent us all to college, and why generations of immigrants had sweated and bled so that their children could be educated, if not so that one day we would feel confident enough to look at a museum full of dinosaurs rigged to run six furlongs at Aqueduct and make the not unreasonable point that it was batshit crazy, and that anyone who believed this righteous hooey should be kept away from sharp objects and their own money. Instead, people go to court over this kind of thing.

He did select a mighty fine smoke.

It is a law that I’ve cheerfully violated dozens of times during my European travels, but then again, I’m neither the governor of California – nor council president Larry Kochert, who has also been known to ignore laws he doesn’t favor.

Attack lapdog poodles, anyone?

Was Schwarzenegger's cigar a Cuban?, by Michael R. Blood, Associated Press Writer.

The celebrity governor known for his love of premium cigars was headed to the Ottawa airport Wednesday when his motorcade made a detour to a hotel. There, Schwarzenegger picked up a Cuban Partagas cigar in a shop, with the $14.83 bill paid by an aide traveling with him, the Ottawa Citizen newspaper reported.

Under trade restrictions, U.S. citizens are prohibited from buying Cuban cigars anywhere in the world.

If I had a Partagas in my possession, I’d take it to Northern Kentucky, light it up, and blow smoke rings around the new Creation Museum; coupled with the ridiculous Cuban trade embargo, they’re two reasons to suppose that the bill of goods we’re selling to people in places like Iraq is “fundamentally” miscalculated.

Is this a good time to talk about Michael Moore’s latest?

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See also: IUS professors join academics in signing statement questioning Kentucky’s Creation Museum, from the Tribune.