Those funny guys at Uncommon Descent seem to have developed their new standard reply to charges that Jonathan Wells misrepresented Bill Ballard. They’re demanding an apology from me for saying mean things about Wells because—get ready for it—Wells is accurately reporting his agreement with Ballard’s ideas about development and evolution. I knew Ballard, briefly, and his work, and I’ve read both of Wells’ books cover-to-cover, so this is a surprise to me. Wells wrote these two books to support the evo-devo view? He isn’t trying to claim that development does not support evolution?

Come on, you kooks. Are you even aware of the bizarre position you’re putting yourself in? If you want to come in from that cold, crazy world you live in, though, please do: just admit that you were all wrong about evolution, and join the rational world.

The description of the end of the Hovind trial from the Pensacola News Journal can be found below the fold. Foolish little man.

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In my review of the embryology of Jonathan Wells in PIGDID, I made a specific example of the abuse of a quote from Bill Ballard; I pointed out that he selectively edited the quote to completely distort Ballard’s point in the cited paper, and used that to show how dishonest all of Wells’ work was.

Now Tim McGrew of Kalamazoo wants to accuse me of intentionally distorting Wells’ words. I didn’t just selectively edit, he thinks I actively changed Wells’ words to make my point.

Let me rephrase that: Myers has changed Wells’s wording and then has the temerity to accuse Wells of misleading the reader at the very point where Myers himself has made the change in Wells’s words.

Let me put that more bluntly: Myers is lying through his teeth. Literally. He is actually that dishonest. And not a single commentator on Panda’s Thumb for the past two months could be bothered to check Myers’s quotation against Wells’s actual words to see whether Myers was telling the truth.

Sal Cordova, sycophant of the ID movement, has of course leapt upon this claim at Uncommon Descent as well. Let’s see how accurate McGrew and Cordova are.

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After 3 hours of deliberation, the jury found Kent Hovind and his wife GUILTY of tax fraud.

Goodbye, ‘Dr’ Dino.

The Hovind court case will be having final arguments today, but it’s pretty much over.

Defense lawyers for Kent and Jo Hovind rested their case on Wednesday without presenting evidence or calling witnesses. Closing arguments are scheduled to begin at 8:30 a.m. today. The Hovinds’ fate then will be in the hands of the 12-person jury.

I wouldn’t lay odds on the outcome of this trial—evangelical Christians will automatically get a pass by many jurors. He’s such a nice man, after all, and he’s just doing the work of the Lord. I’d bet, though, that he won’t get the full penalty.

If found guilty, Kent Hovind faces a maximum of 288 years in prison, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Heldmyer.

His wife, Jo Hovind, faces up to 225 years. Her charges include aiding and abetting her husband with 44 counts of evading bank-reporting requirements.

On the other hand, the Hovind’s lawyer seemed to think that the best defense is no defense at all.

After Wednesday’s session, Richey said there was no need for a defense.

“I don’t believe the government met its burden,” Richey said. “The government has to prove that (Kent Hovind) knew he had a duty under the law to pay those taxes.”

Hmmm. The testimony shows that Hovind was a man obsessed with his purported privileges as a man of God to escape taxation, he gives talks on his version of tax law, he and his wife were careful to always withdraw sums just under what would require reporting by the bank, and we’re supposed to believe that he was simply a blank-eyed, dumb-as-a-stick dullard who didn’t know what taxes were? Maybe the defense should have been a presentation of his views on evolution. That would have supported their defense that Kent Hovind is an ignorant moron just fine.

Wow—Liberty University is hiring. They’ve got 27 openings for new faculty right now, so if you’re in the market, they might be tempting. The first three on the list are…

Biology: Two positions. Rank open. Ph.D. and compatibility with a young-earth creationist philosophy required. 1) Human anatomy and physiology, 2) undergraduate genetics. Supervision of undergraduate research expected. Contact Dr. Paul Sattler.

Center for Creation Studies: Rank open. Ph.D. and experience in the origins controversy from a young earth creation perspective required. Faculty will teach the required course in creation as well as develop and/or teach in their area of science expertise. Ability to teach courses in astronomy, anatomy and physiology, or other biology courses preferred. Contact Dr. David DeWitt.

Hmmm. Makes the possibility much less attractive, doesn’t it? I suppose if you were desperate enough for a job that you’d be willing to rip out your integrity, throw it in a cesspit, and let a chain of smarmy evangelical cretins squat over it, you might be willing to sign on.

I have to disagree with Red State Rabble and his announcement of the demise of Intelligent Design. We’re seeing signs of a shifting of strategies, the fading of a few personalities, and a little confusion on the part of our enemies, but it is a colossal mistake to be predicting their end at this time. Intelligent Design was nothing but the mask worn by one of the blank faces of ignorant creationism, and all we’ve accomplished with victories like the Dover trial is to take a slap at the façade. We’ve made them briefly recoil, and at best what we can expect is a brief respite while they try to change slogans. Nothing has happened to weaken the foundations of creationism.

I guarantee you that there have been meetings at the Discovery Institute where they try to strategize and rethink how to apply their resources and work their way around the temporary setback of the Dover decision. If nothing else, they’ll evaporate away, and the same people will re-emerge in a ‘new’ and ‘different’ think-tank, shedding bad baggage and expressing a new version of the same old story. Is there one person who changed their mind about Intelligent Design because of a court case? Take a look at the ID blogs, and you don’t find the proponents shrugging their shoulders and saying, “well, I guess we were wrong after all”…they’re going to try re-branding and re-tooling and they’re going to be peddling the same old piss in new bottles.

The supporting base is untouched. Megachurches are growing—and they aren’t preaching skepticism and the appropriate evaluation of the evidence. Talk to your average small-town good old boy, and they won’t have even heard of Dover or Behe or Dawkins or Johnson or Miller…but they sure as hell know they didn’t come from no monkey. There has been no dramatic change in our schools, so that they are now proudly teaching solid, uncensored biology; teachers still know that if they mention the scary “e” word, there will be parents who come down hard on them, and administrators know that if they don’t kowtow to the fundies, they’ll yank their kids out of school and hurt their funding base.

I see little, hopeful touches now and then. But no one takes on the root of the problem.

Read Tristero and wake up to what we face.

The megachurches thus become part church, part shopping mall and part country club. One in Tacoma, Washington, even has its own Starbucks. Brentwood Baptist Church in Houston has a McDonald’s on its 111 acres. The Prestonwood Baptist Church, near Dallas, boasts 15 baseball fields, a Fifties-style diner and a food court. New Birth Baptist Church, also in Texas, offers web links to “antiques”, “dining” and “health and fitness”.

In addition to the megachurches, there are 31 “gigachurches” in the US, which are defined as those that at least 10,000 people attend every Sunday; 73 per cent of all these are in Bush-Cheney territory in the South or West. Some offer bookstores and health clubs on their premises. The Lakewood Church, yet another in Houston, describes itself as a “non-denominational charismatic church” and has a congregation of 25,000 every Sunday. It says it will soon have more than 30,000 people attending the remodelled, $73m former “Compaq Centre” that was previously home to the Houston Rockets, a basketball team.

What the opposition has been doing is building institutions. They’ve been consolidating huge pieces of the social structure and making them their own. Imagine living in a town where, if you want to buy a cup of coffee or get a hamburger, you have to go to a church. We’re becoming Walmartized and Christianified—you are a commodity to destructive, stupefying, self-sustaining cultural monopoly. You want to oppose that by crying to the courts? Go ahead. A little defiance from on high just mobilizes and infuriates them. You aren’t touching them where it hurts, at the community and belief level. You aren’t building your own institutions to oppose them.

Red State Rabble is right, that some of the trappings of the Intelligent Design excrescence are showing signs of going off the rails…but Uncommon Descent and Intelligent Design News and Views and the Discovery Institute (and Pharyngula and The Panda’s Thumb, for that matter) are irrelevant, superficial phenomena. What counts is that millions of people sit quietly watching the stupidity grow, and millions more actively contribute to it.

I haven’t seen any reliable sign that the idiotification of America is receding, or even slowing down. I do see signs that some of us are trying to reassure ourselves that the worst has passed, and I think that’s a dangerous delusion.

In the ongoing Hovind trial, no new revelations except for more details about how rich the creationist con artist and tax evader is. He makes $50,000/year in speaking fees, and with his wife, sells $1.8 million/year in “Christian merchandise” (tell me, you devout and faithful believers who also read Pharyngula: do those two words in conjunction make you cringe a little bit, deep down?).

They still deny that they earn salaries, and claim that they have no income at all.