And it just got worse after they found Darwin.
In “We Get Poor-Mouthed by the National Center for Science Education” (Evolution News & Views, October 31, 2011 ), David Klinghoffer has fun with Darwin lobby protests about poverty,
This bête noire of creationism [NCSE] occupies a small, rundown, poorly ventilated commercial space in a rough part of Oakland, surrounded by fundamentalist churches. Their tiny staff is paid a pittance compared to most academic or business salaries, and they occupy cramped cubicles cluttered with piles of work.
Earth to Darwinists: Office clutter is not random mutation. It is a sign of a disorganized mind. Get a broom, a recycle box, and a file cabinet, and do more of your work on screen.
Going them one better, he describes his own work environment:
… what did amuse me was [hard-luck kid] Prothero’s attempt to contrast NCSE’s virtuous poverty with the Taj Mahal-like conditions of Discovery Institute’s Seattle office. As he describes it, Discovery occupies a “gleaming headquarters,” “a vast amount of floor space in a brand-new office building downtown, and has a huge staff” — a description in which every term is fictional excerpt for “building” and “downtown.” What is the truth?
Apparently,
Alert: The Following Paragraph Contains Poor-Mouthing
Well, since you ask…Even to call DI’s home an office building is not quite accurate. Our neighbor, across a roof space littered with seagull bones, is an informal gym where the sound of enormous barbells and oversized truck tires being dropped on the floor again and again is the nearly constant accompaniment to our work. A visitor from out of town was sitting with us the other day when a particularly loud crash shook the walls. He thought it was an earthquake, the Cascadia Subduction Zone tearing loose at last. He started heading for the exit till I called him back and reassured him.
Actually, Discovery Institute’s former offices were nothing to write home about either, and when UD News staff visited them in 2007, the neighbourhood seemed to be in the midst of an undeclared class war. Ben Stein noticed it wasn’t all that great too. But we digress.
For the record: UD News’s offices are neat and comfortable, despite a large absence of funding from creationists or anybody else. There is no particular relationship between having a lot of money and making sense and order in one’s environment.
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