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The Golden Crocoduck

These creationist goobers are worse than low-hanging fruit — they’re rotting on the ground and indistinguishable from the droppings of frugivores — but a good debunking with evidence is still entertaining and informative. Potholer54 has given out his annual Golden Crocoduck award, and I can tell it was a difficult choice. So many amazingly deserving twits, and he has to pick just one!

This year, it goes to Matt Powell, because not only is he a gibbering fool, but he is blatant in his dishonesty.

For next year, though, I would like to nominate Eric Hovind, who has gotten positively hyper on social media lately, and is flooding Xitter with the most stupid assertions, which mostly seem to have been stolen from Harun Yahya’s Atlas of Creation. Copying your homework from one of the most clueless creationists on the internet (or, now, in a Turkish prison) is a truly stupid move, Eric.

The birthday party is ON » « Learn to love your spiders!

Comments

  2. Rich Woods says

    @jacksprocket #1:

    I’ve always assumed so. Perhaps someone should run a poll on Xitter to see if that’s the consensus.

  5. nomdeplume says

    A worthy winner of the “Lying for Jesus Award”. Wonderful to see him called out for the “surfing monkeys” (yet again proving that the only references he uses are headlines in right-wing tabloid trash) where he is caught between saying that “evolutionists” were crazy for saying monkeys reached South America on floating vegetation, and other creationists who are saying that monkeys reached South America from the Ark on floating vegetation. OK Matt, just how did monkeys (and many other groups of African origin) reach South America? Waiting….

  6. says

    #5.
    Dumb Idiot Ham used that made up vegetation fallacy in his putrid faculties to explain how did the animals who allegedly survive the Flood get from Ararat to their respective destinations without crossing land bridges. As usual, no bases or evidence for his claims. All made up.

  9. birgerjohansson says

    Mike the Johnson is not bad enough for the crocoduck award.
    He felt empathy for wossname, Floyd, that got murdered by a cop.
    And he recognised that his adopted black kid will have a bumpier road in life than his white siblings ….thus proving himself woke! MAGAheads promptly condemned him as a RINO when they found out.

  10. nomdeplume says

    @9 Yes, well, maybe, but in an interview this week – “Having raised two 14-year-old boys in America and the state of Louisiana, they had different experiences,” he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “And I’m not so sure it was all about skin color, but it is about culture and society. Michael, our first, came from a really troubled background and had a lot of challenges.”

  11. cheerfulcharlie says

    I am tryingbto image giant tortises migrating from a high mountain at Ararat to a shore, where they could find a handy mat of vegetation to sail all the way to the Galapagos Islands. Maybe the tortises ate the monkeys on those particular rafts.

  13. Rich Woods says

    @nomdeplume #12:

    Wouldn’t it have been easier for the monkeys to just hail a passing turtle? Or maybe not.

    “Sarf o’ the river, mate? Not at this time o’ night.”

  16. Reginald Selkirk says

    Digging Dinosaurs by Jack Horner (1988, ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0894802208
    ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0894802201)
    is an excellent book. I highly recommend it. Being about 35 years old, I’m sure there are specific details in the book that have been superceded by more recent evidence, but it’s still worth a read.

  19. jacksprocket says

    “Being about 35 years old, I’m sure there are specific details in the book”

    Pedantry alert… You may be about 35 years old, but what about the book?
    (sorry- actually I’m a more of grammar anarchist)

  20. dstatton says

    I suppose they justify lying because their cause is just. However, when they lie to damage someone’s reputation, that is bearing false witness, one of the Ten Commandments.

  21. brightmoon says

    Creationists ideas are not just . They’re stupidly dangerous . Their anti evolution stance endangers medical research. Look up the Sabin vaccine for polio- evolved by using natural selection on the virus to evolve a weaker strain that didn’t cause symptoms. That’s just a single example . Creationist geology fails to find oil. Creationists tried that one themselves and failed spectacularly!

  22. Jazzlet says

    Reginald Selkirk @17 & 18
    Ok, that bog is seriously cool. We do have floating bogs in the UK (I’ve jumped up and down on one in unison with my fellow classmates, to make the trees rock), but nothing that size that I am aware of.

  23. raven says

    About water dispersal of species by floating mats of vegetation.
    This is a common idea that has been verified by actually watching species disperse in real time.

    Here is one report from a hurricane in 1995.
    These iguanas floated 200 miles on a massive raft of vegetation.

    nature
    Over-water dispersal of lizards due to hurricanes
    Published: 08 October 1998
    Over-water dispersal of lizards due to hurricanes
    Ellen J. Censky, Karim Hodge & Judy Dudley
    Nature volume 395, page556 (1998)Cite this article

    Abstract
    The possibility and probability of over-water dispersal as a mechanism to explain the distribution of terrestrial animal species in the Caribbean has been hotly debated since the early part of this century1,2. Each theory that has been proposed — including land bridges and over-water dispersal — has involved over-water dispersal to some extent in the distribution of animals. Yet many people remain sceptical of over-water dispersal, believing that the use of rafts is improbable, unobservable and consequently untenable. Here we present evidence to support over-water dispersal as the mechanism by which green iguanas colonized Anguilla.

    Main
    For over-water dispersal to be considered a realistic explanation for the distribution of species in the Caribbean, it must be demonstrated that a viable population could be established. This can be accomplished by the invasion of either a pregnant individual, an asexually reproducing individual or several individuals of both sexes. Animals have been observed on rafting flotsam3, but most of these are small organisms, such as insects4,5. The few accounts of vertebrates found on rafts6,7 have reported only single individuals (but see ref. 8), and do not provide convincing evidence that a population can become established once landfall is reached.

    On 4 October 1995, at least 15 individuals of the green iguana, Iguana iguana, appeared on the eastern beaches of Anguilla in the Caribbean. This species did not previously occur on the island. They arrived on a mat of logs and uprooted trees, some of which were more than 30 feet long and had large root masses. Local fishermen say the mat was extensive and took two days to pile up on shore. They reported seeing iguanas on both the beach and on logs in the bay.

    Dispersal events are often assumed to be caused by large storms, such as hurricanes9. The 1995 hurricane season had above normal activity, with 11 hurricanes and 8 tropical storms10. On 4 and 5 September 1995, hurricane Luis moved through the eastern Caribbean (Fig. 1). The storm was rated category 4 on the Saffir/Simpson Hurricane Scale (SSHS). Hurricane-force winds were reported as far south as Guadeloupe. A week and half later, on 14-17 September, hurricane Marilyn (SSHS category 2) followed a parallel path slightly south of hurricane Luis, and many of the same islands once again experienced hurricane-force winds (Fig. 1). Approximately a month after the first of these hurricanes, iguanas reached the shores of Anguilla.

  25. raven says

    Here is another example of overseas dispersal and one that thousands of people saw.

    A floating dock in Japan was caught in their big tsunami that also damaged their nuclear power plants at Fukushima.
    An entire ecosystem floated from Japan to Oregon.
    They removed two tons of foreign organisms from 100 different species.

    Setting sail on unknown seas: The past, present and future of species rafting
    by Mary Caperton Morton Earth magazine
    Monday, February 11, 2013

    Removal of the dock at Agate Beach was a public process; people were very interested in its progress. Courtesy of the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department

    A section of the dock will be preserved in Newport, Ore., as a memorial to the victims of the earthquake and tsunami. Courtesy of the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department

    On June 5, 2012, several thousand castaways rode a massive boxcar-sized dock to landfall on Oregon’s Agate Beach, just north of Newport. A plaque on the side, written in Japanese, revealed an unprecedented journey: The dock had been unmoored from the Japanese coastal city of Misawa during the catastrophic tsunami on March 11, 2011.

    The dock and its inhabitants — as many as a hundred species, including mollusks, anemones, sponges, oysters, crabs, barnacles, worms, sea stars, mussels and sea urchins — spent more than a year at sea, drifting 8,000 kilometers across the Pacific Ocean. Within hours of the dock’s discovery, marine biologists from Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center were on the scene, identifying species and raising red flags.

    “Very quickly we realized we were dealing with a cast of very bad characters,” says John Chapman, an Oregon State University marine biologist who was among the first on the scene. And it was not a small cast: More than two tons of living organisms would eventually be removed from the 20-meter by 6-meter by 2-meter dock. “This was essentially an intact subtidal community of Asian species, aliens fully capable of reproducing, colonizing and invading the Oregon coast,” Chapman says.

  26. says

    Arguing with creationism seems like such a quaint, 1990s/2000s internet phenomenon these days. I can sort of believe that young evangelicals are still into, but who the fuck has time for this anymore.