Irony of the Day

[wserra]

Modern life has so many remarkable ironies - events that seem designed to destroy irony meters - that it is past time for a thread like this. Even excluding politics.

The first entry: Williamstown, KY, is a community about halfway between Cincinnati and Lexington. Its main - perhaps only - claim to fame is the "Ark Encounter", a 500-foot recreation of Noah's Ark. It's a "theme park" owned and operated by the same folks who own the nearby "Creation Museum" (you know, scenes of kids playing with dinosaurs).

Anyway, a few days ago, the Ark Encounter folks sued their insurers (docket 19-cv-64, KYED) for denying coverage for damage resulting from - wait for it - a flood.

[ArthurWankspittle]

Act of God - obviously not covered.

[The Observer]

Glad this topic was established. A couple of other ironies that didn't get covered or commented on prior to this:

(1) The Southern Poverty Law Center finding itself in the middle of controversy due to its founder Morris Dees fired after being accused of racial and sexual discrimination and the executive officer Richard Cohen resigning as a way to allow the center to transition to new leadership. This was a long-running and well-known problem within the organization, but Dees and Cohen apparently thought that discrimination was something that happened elsewhere and not at home base on their watch.

(2) The Daily Mail and the Sunday Times is reporting that author David Garrow, who wrote a Pulitzer-Prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., is stating that he has had access to FBI summaries that show King was present when a woman was raped in a hotel room and was heard on the tape laughing and "...offering advice..." to the rapist who was another pastor. It would be easy to ignore this and put it down to unsubstantiated proof or the FBI lying about what was on the tapes, but Garrow says he spent several months reviewing the written summaries of the tapes (which will be made available in 2027) at the National Archives. I am guessing that Garrow has little reason to believe that the summaries are inaccurate as to what is captured on the tapes since he is going public with this information. There is no explanation for why the FBI didn't intervene and stop the rape as it occurred, but I guess the agents knew that J. Edgar was too busy looking for communists in the Civil Rights movement and not an arrest over being an accessory to rape. If this turns out to be true, it will certainly be ironic that Hoover and King were in agreement that rape isn't a civil rights issue that either had to be concerned with.