Hovind & Powell: rank incompetence!

As I predicted, Kent Hovind & Matt Powell were so stung by Emma Thorne’s video that she’s the subject of their “wack-an-atheist” video tonight.

What’s most hilarious, though, is that they’ve been flailing about for 20 minutes now, and their audio is totally fucked up. It’s unintelligible. Both Powell and Hovind are sitting there, and they haven’t once looked at their audience’s chat, where everyone is yelling at them to fix the audio.

Amazing. He’s done now. He streamed for 42 minutes and never once noticed all his fans screaming at him in the chat that the audio was broken.

Most of you missed it (lucky you), but we do have YouTube’s automated transcript of the whole show. It only includes the words the machine could make out, so it’s a bit…abbreviated. Savor the one time Kent Hovind made sense.

00:23 wednesday
00:42 oh
00:47 okay
01:23 is
01:35 them
01:49 [Music]
01:56 [Music]
02:02 okay
02:04 [Music]
02:11 [Music]
02:34 foreign
03:28 here we go
03:35 [Music]
03:57 okay
04:01 oh
04:26 thank you
04:51 something like that
05:04 hello people my name is evan welcome
05:06 back to my channel welcome
05:13 this is going to be
05:14 my
05:16 last video
05:36 is
06:01 oh
06:28 is
06:41 um
06:58 two weeks
07:42 but we took over shortly after
07:45 yeah
07:59 you have 13
08:01 600 subscribers and uh
08:16 what
08:27 [Music]
08:37 he’s right
08:47 but
08:47 you got a lot of them they’re in the 40
08:49 000s
09:12 [Music]
09:17 okay
09:31 is
09:46 [Music]
10:14 you are the most disengaged
10:58 you continue
11:03 okay
11:37 is
11:44 is
12:07 no
12:22 send me an email send it all over or
12:24 record by drnine.com
12:48 okay
13:28 now
13:42 okay
14:04 foreign
14:24 is
14:46 okay
14:58 foreign
15:50 oh
16:33 also
17:23 is
17:44 okay
17:57 um
18:21 [Music]
18:44 i’m professional
19:13 [Music]
19:18 oh
19:52 okay
20:23 [Music]
20:41 okay
21:28 anytime
22:23 correct
22:32 um
22:48 is
23:27 [Music]
23:34 huh
23:47 just not fine
23:57 foreign
24:14 okay
24:30 is
24:32 again
24:55 how many of you have never heard of my
24:58 voice is
25:27 foreign
26:06 is
26:26 is
26:44 legal systems
27:06 is
27:17 [Music]
27:30 they don’t believe in their marriage
27:56 [Music]
27:59 foreign
28:09 permissions
28:54 we came up here
29:22 i’m
29:32 pick up
29:53 we got married
30:42 okay
30:58 is
31:16 excuse me
31:31 what
31:51 themselves
31:53 at what they come up with
32:40 hey
32:51 foreign
33:04 uh
33:48 is
33:49 [Music]
33:58 foreign
34:06 is
34:22 [Music]
34:24 wonderful
34:42 oh
35:13 [Music]
35:22 recently
35:23 [Music]
35:47 um
35:55 [Music]
36:22 oh
36:38 and
36:51 sorry
36:55 it’s not the first time
37:33 oh
37:48 okay
38:16 i was
38:20 [Music]
38:24 my
38:44 is
39:26 okay
39:43 okay
40:03 [Music]
40:35 and you can find out the truth for
40:37 yourself
41:18 okay
41:32 you
41:43 exactly here
41:57 you want to go
42:05 uh
42:19 now
42:42 [Music]
42:44 okay

Kent Hovind’s nemesis

Kent Hovind has a few people he frequently complains about, two in particular: SciManDan, a guy with a physics background who mainly debunks flat earthers, and Emma Thorne, a YouTube personality (she’s very nice) who made a reputation debunking multi-level marketing schemes, and just generally being a pleasant conversationalist (funny, isn’t it, how he doesn’t focus on evolutionary biologists…or maybe it’s just that Hovind hates British people). They made the mistake of rolling their eyes at the stupidity of Kent Hovind and Matt Powell, though, and now he has featured them on several episodes of his inane “whack-an-atheist Wednesday”. He’s looking a little desperate, actually. I think his world is crashing down on him from several angles, so bullying people on the internet is just his hobby that lets him vent.

Anyway, Thorne just put out a video in which she lets Kent and Matt have it with both barrels, exposing their hypocrisy, lies, and hate-mongering. It’s very entertaining and highly recommended.

Kent Hovind and Matt Powell are going to be whining for weeks about this. Good.

Is Kent Hovind living in sin?

This is a bizarre (but very short) video talking about a letter written by Eric Hovind, about his father, Kent Hovind. It’s a bit inside baseball — Kent Hovind divorced his wife, Jo Hovind, the woman who got dragged into prison as a consequence of her participation in his scam to defraud the government of taxes. He then married a woman named Mary Tocco, who later left him because she suspected he was up to no good again. Hovind told everyone that his divorce and remarriage was fully endorsed by his family and all the good Christians he knew, but apparently not. This letter lists all the people who told him this was a bad idea.

Kent Hovind lied, no surprises there.

The video was posted by his current “wife”, Cindi Lincoln (he seems not to have divorced Tocco before the wedding), who is also the woman he was convicted of abusing, and at this point I am overwhelmed by the soap opera and give up. Lincoln tries to explain.

Eric’s email lists 17 professional counselors, attorneys, Board Members, family members and friends who advised Kent NOT to marry Mary, but Kent refuses to heed. Kent also lied to the public about “everyone telling him to marry Mary, and that only 1 or 2 people told him not to.”

Just like with me, Kent and I had several friends, DAL leaders, family, legal, and counselors give advise for Kent to pay me what he signed for, and to put his wife over Steve, and to NOT torment me with Steve, Ernie, and Brady’s abuse. Kent refused to heed their advise.

Here’s a PSA: don’t ever get romantically involved with Kent Hovind. He’s a psychopath, and it will always end badly.

Matt Powell, I hope you’ve got everything in writing.

Matt Powell gets a promotion

I wonder what Eric Hovind thinks of this?

That’s Kent Hovind on the left, soon to be committed to a jail sentence for spousal abuse. Who will preach to the deluded while he’s away? That’s Matt Powell on the right. Powell is now down in Alabama at Dinosaur Adventure Land, a guest of Mr Hovind, and is appearing in their regular “Wack-An-Atheist videos. He’s also saying that you may call him Professor Powell, despite lacking any degrees or affiliation with an institute of learning, which is kind of par for the course for these frauds.

The video is rather pathetic, with Hovind and Powell reciting the same old creationist nonsense over and over. Dinosaur soft tissue! Bent layers in mountains prove they formed in an instant (quite the opposite, actually)! Coal seams have negligible C-14, therefore they all formed at the same time in a flood! Don’t bother trying to rebut them, because they’ll just deny all the evidence.

I would not, however, say that Hovind is passing the torch. His ego won’t allow that to happen. I also don’t see Powell being very comfortable as an apprentice to Hovind, who has a lot of baggage (the tax-dodging, wife-beating, kiddie-diddler-enabling thing) and I’d love to know what he was promised to get him to move to a decrepit church camp in an Alabama wasteland. He has that deer-in-the-headlights look the whole time. I think Powell is perfectly comfortable with his ignorant line of cant, but doesn’t seem too enthusiastic about being paired with ol’ Kent.

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that this association will end badly for both of them.

You’ll find his picture next to ‘disingenuous’ in the dictionary

How stupid can creationists get? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it’s even more stupid than they assume me to be.

A short while ago I mentioned this Indonesian creationist who was posing as an evolutionary biologist writing a book “for the science community”. He wrote to me Just Asking Questions.

He wasn’t very good at the pretense. His first question was about the Atlas of Creation.

I was not very nice in dismissing him.

Really, if you can’t explain what is wrong with the Atlas of Creation, you’ve got no business writing a book about evolution. It’s that simple.

Alas, he is persistent and has come back with more requests. Dude, you are obvious, go away.

Ray Comfort only asks questions that biologists can’t answer because they are based on his misconceptions. Have you seen a cat evolve into a dog? The first elephant to evolve would have had to wait for millions of years for the first female elephant to appear. How do you explain elephants, then?

Not to mention that if you do give an answer, he’ll cut it out of his video.

I’m not responding directly to Mr Arif — I don’t want to encourage him. But if Muhammad Arif wants to be exposed as a dishonest fool, I’m happy to help.

It’s the arrogance of creationists that gets me

Before my email went down, I was engaged in an exchange with an Indonesian student.

He wrote to me asking if he could ask me a few questions about evolution. All right, it’s an excess of manners to ask if you can ask, but OK, I told him to go ahead. For future reference, anyone, I’m not into formalities or deference — just put your questions up front, boldly. I’ll either answer or not. When someone is that cautious, though, it makes me suspicious.

His next email informs me that he is writing a book to correct misconceptions about evolution in the Indonesian community, and that he is an undergraduate. A bit presumptuous, don’t you think? Most undergraduates are just learning about evolution and lack the knowledge to write a book, but maybe he’s precocious, and maybe he’s exceptionally well educated, and maybe he’s going to narrow the focus of his book to something appropriate. There are undergraduates who are mature enough to do a good job presenting the scientific perspective, but you’re going to have to show me that you’ve got the chops.

His question, though, floored me. He tells me he’s been reading Harun Yahya’s “beautifully illustrated” Atlas of Creation, and that he wants to know if ‘living fossils’ that have been totally unchanged for hundreds of millions of years exist, and gosh, isn’t that a problem for evolution? And then, I knew he’s playing a disingenuous game and trying to trap me.

Yahya’s book is a transparent fraud full of stolen images that strikes one note over and over again: here’s a stolen photo of a fossil. Here’s another photo of a modern animal. See? They’re identical! Therefore evolution is false. Nobody with even a glimmering of an education in biology would fall for it. Stasis is part of evolutionary theory, and besides, a superficial photo of a fossil or animal with murky provenance, selected specifically for their similarity, is not evidence of much of anything. Creationists have no respect for the evidence, though, so anything that reinforces their faulty assumptions is acceptable, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re Islamic or Christian creationists.

So here’s a guy whose source of information about evolution is a creationist propaganda book, who claims that he has sufficient authority to write his own book about evolution, and he’s asking this fucking stupid question. It wouldn’t be stupid from a layman, but he’s making this obnoxious pretense of authority, and most offensive of all, he thinks I’m stupid enough to fall for it.

I see this over and over again. Creationists have this absurd confidence that they have discovered the great flaw in evolution that thousands of scientists who studied it for years have missed, and they love to spring ‘zingers’ on us that they’re sure will stagger us and send us reeling backwards, to quit in defeat like the professor in Big Daddy.

It’s not going to happen. Trotting out some poorly referenced factlet and your profound misconceptions about evolution aren’t going to shock me. I’m also not at all impressed when you’re the kind of weasely coward who can’t even be honest about your intentions.

This is how you advertise your Christian attraction?

With a Donald Trump impersonator?

That’s a disincentive. Also, they’re promoting a crappy movie by those Christian hacks, the Kendrick brothers. It’s not even original — it’s a re-edited release of a ten year old movie that you’re better off listening to the Godawful Movies review than wasting time on this one.