Coracles, probably Baghdad; what the real Noah's Ark would have looked like. By Nile and Tigris. Journeys in Egypt and Mesopotamia on behalf of the British Museum between the years 1886 and 1913 (1920), showing coracles, or circular boats woven from reeds and sealed with pitch. Wikimedia, public domain.
According to my monthly Kentucky Open Records Act (KORA) request, December Ark ticket sales were the lowest ever (with the exception of 2020 – during the Covid pandemic). In December, 2025, the Ark sold 35,223 tickets, about 4,000 less than December, 2024. Of course, these ticket sales numbers don’t include lifetime pass members or children under 10.
The December ticket sales number means that the Ark sold 652,342 tickets in 2025. These numbers indicate that the Ark will never come close to the 1.4 to 2.2 million attendees per year projected when the Ark was begging/shaking down Grant County, Williamstown, and Kentucky Tourism for perks including 100 acres of land for $2, $200K cash, reduced taxes, a $62 million bond, and $1.825 million/year in sales tax rebates.
Because of massive donations, AIG and its shell companies are not in danger of collapse. They, are not, however, doing as well as in previous years.
According to AIG opponent, Evangelical Christian, and biologist Dr. Joel Duff, there have been layoffs recently at AIG and the Ark. See his analysis here: apparently, there have been numerous layoffs, retirements, and other departures from AIG.
This is just a short note, with no comment, to alert our readers to a splendid article, Killing the Golden Goose: Evangelicals, Trump, and the War on Science, by Rodney Kennedy. Dr. Kennedy is a writer and was formerly pastor at the First Baptist Church of Dayton, an American Baptist Church, and several other churches. His article is hosted by Righting America, which is a forum for scholarly conversation run by William Trollinger and Susan Trollinger.
In brief, Kennedy argues that science is the goose that laid the golden eggs and made America prosperous. Evangelicals, he says, have targeted science for over a century. But now something has changed, and conservative evangelicals allied with Donald Trump have taken direct aim at the entire scientific enterprise.
Kennedy outlines “only a few of [Robert F.] Kennedy’s devastating moves,” “Trump’s disastrous handling of the pandemic,” and how “[s]cience before MAGA [made America] the greatest scientific nation in the world.” As a result, he says, scientists are desperate to find jobs in Europe, Canada, and elsewhere.
To comment on this article, click on its title, which will bring up the article on its own page, with its Disqus comments section after the post.
Taygete decemmaculella, Boulder, Colorado, July17, 2025. Found inside house. I have no idea whether this moth is rare, but Butterflies and Moths of North America (the link above) shows only a handful of sightings and none in Colorado.
Mark Boslough is a Research Associate Professor at the University of New Mexico. For a short biography, see the first link below.
The 2006 new-age book, “Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes,” introduced what is now called the Younger Dryas impact Hypothesis (often abbreviated as “YDIH”). The lead author was Richard Firestone, a nuclear chemist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who had dabbled in alternative archaeology and speculations about cosmic catastrophes caused by supernovas and interstellar comets. Allen West, the second author, was entirely unknown, and there is no record of his existence before 2006. He wrote most of the book in the first person. The third author, Simon Warwick-Smith, appears to have been West’s publicist, whose main contribution was to spice up his prose. The 2nd printing of the book came out on June 5, 2006, and included better graphics and some other changes, including the addition of “PhD” to West’s name.
Last month, as the 20th anniversary of this book approached, I spent some time trying to learn more about West’s background and qualifications. What led him to the prominent leadership role as sample collector and preparer, protocol developer, drafter of data graphs, interpreter of virtually all the evidence on which the YDIH is based, and corresponding author on many of their papers? How did he emerge, seemingly from nowhere, to become the primary founder and director of the Comet Research Group, which describes itself as a group of more than 63 scientists from more than 55 universities in more than 26 countries? How did he form a collaboration with biblical literalists and publish their most widely reported (but now retracted) Sodom comet paper?
I had already learned that West had changed his name from Allen Whitt in 2006 after being convicted in California of a crime associated with fraudulent groundwater survey reports in 1998, but I was never able to lay my hands on his sham reports to see for myself what was wrong with them. Last month, I ran across a USGS report that cited two previous groundwater reports that he had written in 1997, and I was able to check them out from the library of the state engineer in New Mexico.
I’ve also found public records with Allen Whitt’s name associated with earlier lawsuits involving new age businesses, which might shed some light on how he made the transition from purveyor of Sedona woo, to groundwater grifter, to the most prominent and visible member of a group of scientists that claims to have overturned paradigms in multiple established fields, including geology, archaeology, planetary science, impact physics, and paleontology.
I have started a blog series in which I will describe the trail of documents he has published, including the groundwater reports, his new age book, and his peer-reviewed papers. The first installment is here.
Comments can be made at that blog, and also here. To make them here, click on the title of this post, and the area for comments will appear on that page.
Dryocopus pileatus – (male) pileated woodpecker, Ten Mile River Greenway, Rumford, R.I. Mr. Eissenberg writes, "Pileated woodpeckers not only feed on grubs and other insects in rotting wood, they also carve meticulously sculpted nesting holes in the sides of dead trees. These birds make a strong visual case for the dinosaurian origin of birds!"
