Ham eventually got everything he wanted (taxpayer dollars and retaining the right to discriminate in employing) to build his monument to human ignorance and he's STILL whining.
I STILL want to see his books. I'd be willing to bet that he's having the devil's own time trying to keep the Ark Encounter going (I could have said "afloat," but we all know how unlikely THAT is!), and his debits are still outpacing his credits.
I doubt he'd EVER allow scrutiny of his P&Ls, but those would be very much worth the perusal!
I've seen his books many times. Many of his books consists of inaccurate, outdated, poorly drawn, cartoonish images of dinosaurs he falsely brand as "dragons" and mythical monsters he falsely calls "dinosaurs."
One book ("D" is for Dinosaur), made to use for homeschool, claims that if no one sees what has happened in some event, then that said event never happened. Never mind the evidence that confirms the event to have occurred. And the coloring pages found in the book are over colored in black-ink, turning a lot of people off from coloring the pictures in the book.
Another book (The Dinosaurs of Eden) contains a scenario ripped from the page of James Gurney's fantasy series, "Dinotopia" and falsely claims that no other event has ever happened at the same time another event has occurred. Never mind the numerous events occurring worldwide at the same time that proves the claim Dumb Idiot Ham pulled out of his hind end a lie.
Another book (Dinosaurs for kids) has a poorly inaccurate image of Carnotaurus, an outdated image of Tylosaurus branded as "Leviathan," wrong identifications of teeth, and a "dinosaur" that resembles Hollywood-made Dilophosaurus of Jurassic Park/Jurassic World fame.
And finally, another book (When Dragon's Hearts Were Good), made by a now-deceased Buddy Davis who worked for that Dumb Idiot Ham before his death from the COVID virus in 2020, falsely branded all dinosaurs "dragons" and created a pair of non-existent fire-breathing "dragons" poorly modeled after Baryonyx, a basal Spinosaurid that looked nothing at all like the dragons in the book.
All of his publications should be thrown in a nearby dumpster and/or burn barrel. Preferably the toilet as long as you don't plug it up.
Actually the dinosaur dragon connection is obvious. I have long thought that people discovered the fossil skeletons of dinosaurs just like we have, and they concluded that there were these things called dragons.
That would be the closest shave that Occam‘s razor could provide. No supernatural explanation required
Have a look at the attendance information, please. It's an excel-type spreadsheet, providing attendance figures and fee income.
From an albeit cursory glance, it appears that the entrance fee is 50 pence? That can't be right? How can you run a tourism attraction with an entrance fee of 50 pence? Of course a low entrance fee encourages people to spend more money in the gift shop, but I honestly can't see how the figures stack up
Does that Excel spreadsheet also lay out his operating expenses, which would include utilities, maintenance costs, and most importantly, what Ham is paying himself to run the place? I would expect not.
We really need to see BOTH ends of this operation: what the Ark makes for him, and what it COSTS him.
Let's do a quick (conservative) calculation - average attendance per month approx 50k visitors. Let's assume 15k adults, 15k seniors, 5k youth and 15k children - admission income would be approx 1.8m. Further assume that there's a catering income of a tenner per head plus a fiver in the gift shop, that'd be another 750k.
Estimate of monthly income 2.5m. (Obviously that's revenue, not profit.)
I've got no idea of how much it'd cost to run the place - staffing, utilities, maintenance, repayment of capital costs plus of course the licensing costs payable to Ark Enterprises Ltd (prop K Ham) ....
How much does it cost to visit the Ark in Kentucky? Tickets for the Ark Encounter are $59.95 for adults, $49.95 for seniors, and $29.95 for youth aged 11 to 17. Children under 10 are free.
The entrance fee listed is the per person fee Ham has to pay to the city, ostensibly for emergency services. A one day adult ticket is currently $55 usd. That does not include the parking fees.
I have a better idea. They can drive NORTH to Cincinnati and visit their excellent art museum, then have dinner at any one of a number of terrific restaurants.
I highly recommend Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen. Etouffee to DIE FOR! YUM!
Young earth creationism is as far from science as it gets. Science never admits super-natural arguments and any scientist who attempted to do so would be committing career suicide. I’ve read all of Joseph Campbell’s major works, and he makes it pretty clear that virtually every civilization that ever existed had their creation story, and they don’t agree on much of anything. If Ham wants to be taken seriously by the scientific community, then he needs to put forward some testable evidence because to date, the creationists have never done that. The fact they attack Darwin is actually an admission they don’t have an argument. Even if Darwin got it wrong, that doesn’t prove the Biblical account of creation. They need to prove their own point.
The lack of self-awareness is staggering. To paraphrase: this reporter shouldn't speak about my beliefs, because she's not a theologian. But even though I'm not a reporter, I can freely criticize her journalism.
Ken Ham DESPERATELY needs to get a life. He's made his mark on the Bluegrass State with this ridiculous Ark Encounter, then gets all bent out of shape when it is accurately reported that his exhibits have about as much to do with serious science as a hole in the head. He's gotten this before, from the likes of Bill Nye and Aron Ra, Still he insists, whether because of the Sunk Cost Fallacy or his own bullheadedness, it hardly matters.
Side Note: Charlie Duke is an embarrassment, perhaps even more so than Ham, because he's been IMMERSED in the science, used it to go to the mood, fer petesake, yet he takes up with a flim-flam man like Ham. He deserves all the derision he gets, IMHO.
Does Ken Ham have expertise in science? Does he have training in theology? Not what I've been able to research.
All I can see is a massive ego that equates "reporting the news" with "write what I tell you to write". He has the opposite of expertise in science. He explicitly starts with his conclusion and tries to twist the data to fit, rather than examining the data and following where it leads.
According to his biography, Ham is a former science teacher who became a creationist when a student in his class allegedly told him that evolution refutes the Bible. This lead him to gather up some of his coworkers who think likewise and conspired to start a crusade against science and evolution all because of that one remark. He may display some knowledge of science, but that doesn't excuse his stupidity and ignorance.
Ken Lame...er, Ham believes that the human eye is a perfect design by a perfect creator, yet wears glasses to correct that perfect design. Ham sins by defying his god.
Were said deity real, Ham would quickly learn the lesson that the people of Samaria learned when THEY defied that deity. It wasn't good.
This is what I get to wake up to this morning. Anti-science people complaining that science is not anti-science.
“ …that everything has to be explained just with natural processes, then you’ve basically limited what you can let the objective observation of science tell you,” he said.
“He said” isn’t accurate. He tried to slip one in. There is never been the slightest evidence for the existence of any God, let alone the Christian God. In fact, we have a severe problem, in that Every religion not-X is evidence that every religion X is false. There’s no presupposition that there are no gods, there is simply no evidence that there are any gods. If this asstronot has any evidence that any gods are part of the process, then he should present it and it can be evaluated.
It was a nice try. As I’ve often said, I’d love to see evidence of a God who is present in the world and does things. I’d even settle for good evidence of a leprechaun. I mean, I do see pictures of leprechauns whenever I go to the supermarket. And apparently, tigers love frosted sugar bombs, there’s a vampire that likes chocolate and not blood.
Really, it wasn't a "nice try." It was just one more repetition of the same old malarkey we've heard from Ham more times than we care to count. If Ken has ever said anything original in his attempted defense of his holy book and its story about a fictional flood, I'm unaware of it. That he had a former astronaut along to bulwark (more like bullshit!) his ravings doesn't help matters.
And I'll say it again: Charlie Duke is an embarrassment: to NASA, to science, and to himself.
I sometimes have difficulty deciding whether people like Ham are cynical grifters or sincerely crazy.
I've settled on "both".
Should the reporter give the Hindu creation myth equal time and weight, Ken? The Norse creation myth? Ancient Greek? Canaanite? Mesopotamian?
Should we take the Mesopotamian claims of kings living tens of thousands of years as seriously as Genesis' claims of people living hundreds of years?
Should we give equal weight to the Mesopotamian flood story where the gods flooded the Earth because mankind was noisy and interrupting their sleep? That story historically came first.
Should we really be taking claims seriously that eight people repopulated the world through a lot of sibling fucking?
Is there a rich Hindu fanatic who could be persuaded to build his Hindu equivalent next door and how many regulations that were ignored for Ham would be enforced against the Hindu venture?
That depends, D̶r̶ ̶Z̶a̶i̶u̶s̶ Mr Ham. What is that scientist's field of study? If he is a synthetic chemist, then his opinions on synthetic chemistry are still credible. If she is a geneticist, then she would be rightfully laughed out of the room by other geneticists.
If something is in the news because it's dishonest, it's no less newsworthy because it's based in dishonesty. That may actually make it MORE newsworthy.
The correct term would be "fraudulent news", because all news is real, even when it's a lie.
Remember when they tried rebranding it as "Intelligent Design"? Until they found out that term was already used in archaeology when they look at landscapes for things which are man made. Therefore unnatural "intelligent design", by mankind. So the creationists self owned by calling their so called science man made. Love it when they do that.
Ohhhh, we remember VERY well. We also remember what happened with Kitzmiller v. Dover. "Intelligent Design" got its ass handed to it, and just as well.
PS: I watched this very bleak horror movie the other day (based on a Stephen King book of course) called “The Long Walk”. The story takes place in a dystopian, alternate United States, but it’s feeling a little too familiar these days. I’m mentioning because in the story, a man is executed for reading and teaching his son about Nietzsche 😅
Ham eventually got everything he wanted (taxpayer dollars and retaining the right to discriminate in employing) to build his monument to human ignorance and he's STILL whining.
What. A. Baby. But religion DOES infantilize one.
I STILL want to see his books. I'd be willing to bet that he's having the devil's own time trying to keep the Ark Encounter going (I could have said "afloat," but we all know how unlikely THAT is!), and his debits are still outpacing his credits.
I doubt he'd EVER allow scrutiny of his P&Ls, but those would be very much worth the perusal!
I've seen his books many times. Many of his books consists of inaccurate, outdated, poorly drawn, cartoonish images of dinosaurs he falsely brand as "dragons" and mythical monsters he falsely calls "dinosaurs."
One book ("D" is for Dinosaur), made to use for homeschool, claims that if no one sees what has happened in some event, then that said event never happened. Never mind the evidence that confirms the event to have occurred. And the coloring pages found in the book are over colored in black-ink, turning a lot of people off from coloring the pictures in the book.
Another book (The Dinosaurs of Eden) contains a scenario ripped from the page of James Gurney's fantasy series, "Dinotopia" and falsely claims that no other event has ever happened at the same time another event has occurred. Never mind the numerous events occurring worldwide at the same time that proves the claim Dumb Idiot Ham pulled out of his hind end a lie.
Another book (Dinosaurs for kids) has a poorly inaccurate image of Carnotaurus, an outdated image of Tylosaurus branded as "Leviathan," wrong identifications of teeth, and a "dinosaur" that resembles Hollywood-made Dilophosaurus of Jurassic Park/Jurassic World fame.
And finally, another book (When Dragon's Hearts Were Good), made by a now-deceased Buddy Davis who worked for that Dumb Idiot Ham before his death from the COVID virus in 2020, falsely branded all dinosaurs "dragons" and created a pair of non-existent fire-breathing "dragons" poorly modeled after Baryonyx, a basal Spinosaurid that looked nothing at all like the dragons in the book.
All of his publications should be thrown in a nearby dumpster and/or burn barrel. Preferably the toilet as long as you don't plug it up.
Actually the dinosaur dragon connection is obvious. I have long thought that people discovered the fossil skeletons of dinosaurs just like we have, and they concluded that there were these things called dragons.
That would be the closest shave that Occam‘s razor could provide. No supernatural explanation required
Have a look at the attendance information, please. It's an excel-type spreadsheet, providing attendance figures and fee income.
From an albeit cursory glance, it appears that the entrance fee is 50 pence? That can't be right? How can you run a tourism attraction with an entrance fee of 50 pence? Of course a low entrance fee encourages people to spend more money in the gift shop, but I honestly can't see how the figures stack up
Does that Excel spreadsheet also lay out his operating expenses, which would include utilities, maintenance costs, and most importantly, what Ham is paying himself to run the place? I would expect not.
We really need to see BOTH ends of this operation: what the Ark makes for him, and what it COSTS him.
Let's do a quick (conservative) calculation - average attendance per month approx 50k visitors. Let's assume 15k adults, 15k seniors, 5k youth and 15k children - admission income would be approx 1.8m. Further assume that there's a catering income of a tenner per head plus a fiver in the gift shop, that'd be another 750k.
Estimate of monthly income 2.5m. (Obviously that's revenue, not profit.)
I've got no idea of how much it'd cost to run the place - staffing, utilities, maintenance, repayment of capital costs plus of course the licensing costs payable to Ark Enterprises Ltd (prop K Ham) ....
We had a vice president that was a pence, but he wasn’t worth very much.
Although he was a better man than the current bloke ....
You have to admit that that’s a pretty low bar.
How much does it cost to visit the Ark in Kentucky? Tickets for the Ark Encounter are $59.95 for adults, $49.95 for seniors, and $29.95 for youth aged 11 to 17. Children under 10 are free.
"Children under 10 are free."
Don't let the Epstein Class know!
DARN!
If that didn't get me relegated to "the Dump Zone", I guess I may just as well stop trying.
The entrance fee listed is the per person fee Ham has to pay to the city, ostensibly for emergency services. A one day adult ticket is currently $55 usd. That does not include the parking fees.
I can imagine some poor ignorant fool standing outside Ark Encounter with his family.....
As they try to decide how to spend their money to best honor Gawd: a Trump Bible, or a single admission to Ark Encounter....
I have a better idea. They can drive NORTH to Cincinnati and visit their excellent art museum, then have dinner at any one of a number of terrific restaurants.
I highly recommend Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen. Etouffee to DIE FOR! YUM!
😋😋😋
55 quid? People really pay that kind of money to go and see it? 55 blooming quid??
In May there were 67k people visiting, let's say half were adults, 67 divided by 2 makes 33 times 55 is ..... close to 2m.
To that figure you'll need to add the children's admission plus the income from the tea shop and souvenir sales .....
Are there also astronauts who happen to be flat earthers?
I find it hilarious when YECs and Flat Earthers argue with one another, each thinking the other is out of touch with reality. It’s popcorn time. :D
It's even funnier when you notice that the vast majority of flerfs are also YECs.
And these Flatheads claim that it is atheists who need help.
There was that guy that made his own steam powered rocked which crashed and killed him.
Expirering minds want to know
Rincewind? Maybe he’s more of a Chelonaut.
Young earth creationism is as far from science as it gets. Science never admits super-natural arguments and any scientist who attempted to do so would be committing career suicide. I’ve read all of Joseph Campbell’s major works, and he makes it pretty clear that virtually every civilization that ever existed had their creation story, and they don’t agree on much of anything. If Ham wants to be taken seriously by the scientific community, then he needs to put forward some testable evidence because to date, the creationists have never done that. The fact they attack Darwin is actually an admission they don’t have an argument. Even if Darwin got it wrong, that doesn’t prove the Biblical account of creation. They need to prove their own point.
The lack of self-awareness is staggering. To paraphrase: this reporter shouldn't speak about my beliefs, because she's not a theologian. But even though I'm not a reporter, I can freely criticize her journalism.
Theology=fiction
Any hint of self-awareness would collapse his little empire. He has to stop it when it creeps up on him.
Ken Ham DESPERATELY needs to get a life. He's made his mark on the Bluegrass State with this ridiculous Ark Encounter, then gets all bent out of shape when it is accurately reported that his exhibits have about as much to do with serious science as a hole in the head. He's gotten this before, from the likes of Bill Nye and Aron Ra, Still he insists, whether because of the Sunk Cost Fallacy or his own bullheadedness, it hardly matters.
Side Note: Charlie Duke is an embarrassment, perhaps even more so than Ham, because he's been IMMERSED in the science, used it to go to the mood, fer petesake, yet he takes up with a flim-flam man like Ham. He deserves all the derision he gets, IMHO.
It seems to be a combination of persecution complex, lust for power, and culture war nonsense.
𝐷𝑜𝑒𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑟𝑒𝑝𝑜𝑟𝑡𝑒𝑟 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑒𝑥𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑡𝑖𝑠𝑒 𝑖𝑛 𝑠𝑐𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒? 𝐷𝑜𝑒𝑠 𝑠ℎ𝑒 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑜𝑙𝑜𝑔𝑦? 𝑁𝑜𝑡 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝐼’𝑣𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝑒𝑛 𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑐ℎ.
Does Ken Ham have expertise in science? Does he have training in theology? Not what I've been able to research.
All I can see is a massive ego that equates "reporting the news" with "write what I tell you to write". He has the opposite of expertise in science. He explicitly starts with his conclusion and tries to twist the data to fit, rather than examining the data and following where it leads.
According to his biography, Ham is a former science teacher who became a creationist when a student in his class allegedly told him that evolution refutes the Bible. This lead him to gather up some of his coworkers who think likewise and conspired to start a crusade against science and evolution all because of that one remark. He may display some knowledge of science, but that doesn't excuse his stupidity and ignorance.
Ken Lame...er, Ham believes that the human eye is a perfect design by a perfect creator, yet wears glasses to correct that perfect design. Ham sins by defying his god.
Were said deity real, Ham would quickly learn the lesson that the people of Samaria learned when THEY defied that deity. It wasn't good.
Shall we also mention octopus eyes, which actually have their rods and cones in the RIGHT POSITION and NOT ASS-BACKWARDS!
Seems I just did.
Hee hee!
So instead of rods and cones, there are cones and rods?
Science are hard.
If the eyes were "perfect" they wouldn't pop out of their eye sockets from a hit on the back of the head.
And that's just one reason of many that the human eye is quite poorly designed.
Incidentally, each working human eye has its own blind spot. There's a famous experiment that shows this. It's disconcerting the first time.
https://www.aao.org/museum-eye-openers/experiment-blind-spot
I'd like to get rid of the people who wrongly believe that red and green are different colours.
Dogs don’t see red or green at all. :D
New headline for this article - Liars Hate Being Called Liars.
This is what I get to wake up to this morning. Anti-science people complaining that science is not anti-science.
“ …that everything has to be explained just with natural processes, then you’ve basically limited what you can let the objective observation of science tell you,” he said.
“He said” isn’t accurate. He tried to slip one in. There is never been the slightest evidence for the existence of any God, let alone the Christian God. In fact, we have a severe problem, in that Every religion not-X is evidence that every religion X is false. There’s no presupposition that there are no gods, there is simply no evidence that there are any gods. If this asstronot has any evidence that any gods are part of the process, then he should present it and it can be evaluated.
It was a nice try. As I’ve often said, I’d love to see evidence of a God who is present in the world and does things. I’d even settle for good evidence of a leprechaun. I mean, I do see pictures of leprechauns whenever I go to the supermarket. And apparently, tigers love frosted sugar bombs, there’s a vampire that likes chocolate and not blood.
So there’s that.
Really, it wasn't a "nice try." It was just one more repetition of the same old malarkey we've heard from Ham more times than we care to count. If Ken has ever said anything original in his attempted defense of his holy book and its story about a fictional flood, I'm unaware of it. That he had a former astronaut along to bulwark (more like bullshit!) his ravings doesn't help matters.
And I'll say it again: Charlie Duke is an embarrassment: to NASA, to science, and to himself.
I sometimes have difficulty deciding whether people like Ham are cynical grifters or sincerely crazy.
I've settled on "both".
Should the reporter give the Hindu creation myth equal time and weight, Ken? The Norse creation myth? Ancient Greek? Canaanite? Mesopotamian?
Should we take the Mesopotamian claims of kings living tens of thousands of years as seriously as Genesis' claims of people living hundreds of years?
Should we give equal weight to the Mesopotamian flood story where the gods flooded the Earth because mankind was noisy and interrupting their sleep? That story historically came first.
Should we really be taking claims seriously that eight people repopulated the world through a lot of sibling fucking?
Is there a rich Hindu fanatic who could be persuaded to build his Hindu equivalent next door and how many regulations that were ignored for Ham would be enforced against the Hindu venture?
He will only allow the last, because special pleading.
𝐼𝑠 𝑎 𝑠𝑐𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑠𝑡 𝑛𝑜 𝑙𝑜𝑛𝑔𝑒𝑟 𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑏𝑙𝑒 𝑠𝑖𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑦 𝑏𝑒𝑐𝑎𝑢𝑠𝑒 ℎ𝑒 𝑜𝑟 𝑠ℎ𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑠 𝐺𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑠?
That depends, D̶r̶ ̶Z̶a̶i̶u̶s̶ Mr Ham. What is that scientist's field of study? If he is a synthetic chemist, then his opinions on synthetic chemistry are still credible. If she is a geneticist, then she would be rightfully laughed out of the room by other geneticists.
"Does she have training in theology" (brainwashing)?
No, she apparently is capable of critical thinking.
Actually, the term "fake news" is a misnomer.
If something is in the news because it's dishonest, it's no less newsworthy because it's based in dishonesty. That may actually make it MORE newsworthy.
The correct term would be "fraudulent news", because all news is real, even when it's a lie.
Remember when they tried rebranding it as "Intelligent Design"? Until they found out that term was already used in archaeology when they look at landscapes for things which are man made. Therefore unnatural "intelligent design", by mankind. So the creationists self owned by calling their so called science man made. Love it when they do that.
Ohhhh, we remember VERY well. We also remember what happened with Kitzmiller v. Dover. "Intelligent Design" got its ass handed to it, and just as well.
The Discovery Institute’s “Intelligent Design” turned out to be Creationism in a bad rented tux with mismatched shoes.
And a BADLY edited copy of Of Pandas and People!
It flummoxes me that the Discovery Institute is HQd in my city down on 2nd Ave. and Columbia St.
Condolences. That place deserves to be boarded up and demolished. Sadly, they'd just rebuild elsewhere.
True. Just like how churches are always heavily insured against natural disasters. Which is also a self own on their own total lack of faith.
"In Christianity, neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point"
-Friedrich Nietzsche
PS: I watched this very bleak horror movie the other day (based on a Stephen King book of course) called “The Long Walk”. The story takes place in a dystopian, alternate United States, but it’s feeling a little too familiar these days. I’m mentioning because in the story, a man is executed for reading and teaching his son about Nietzsche 😅
https://img.ifunny.co/images/773ac27c23c52712fd7b9879607f51faa73c92ec038397cca1c10f2791cfe55a_1.jpg
Pretty sure that Noah’s boat didn’t have a gift shop, either.
Exit thru the gift shop. Hard to believe god didn’t invent that.
God did better. He invented give me money for nothing.
https://youtu.be/wTP2RUD_cL0?is=j0Emb7dut3y22W4y
And one's drinks for free? No wonder YHVH chose an old vintner to build the ark.
To get to the gift shop, you have to go through the other gift shop. To get to THAT one, you have to go through the other 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 gift shop.
How do you know?