Old Earth creationists are just as ridiculous as Young Earth creationists

The oldest evidence for microbial life has been found in Greenland, with fossilized 3.7 billion year old stromatolites (layered bacterial colonies) found in the rocks. Here’s what they look like:

stroms

And here’s the abstract of the paper:

Biological activity is a major factor in Earth’s chemical cycles, including facilitating CO2 sequestration and providing climate feedbacks. Thus a key question in Earth’s evolution is when did life arise and impact hydrosphere–atmosphere–lithosphere chemical cycles? Until now, evidence for the oldest life on Earth focused on debated stable isotopic signatures of 3,800–3,700 million year (Myr)-old metamorphosed sedimentary rocks and minerals from the Isua supracrustal belt (ISB), southwest Greenland. Here we report evidence for ancient life from a newly exposed outcrop of 3,700-Myr-old metacarbonate rocks in the ISB that contain 1–4-cm-high stromatolites—macroscopically layered structures produced by microbial communities. The ISB stromatolites grew in a shallow marine environment, as indicated by seawater-like rare-earth element plus yttrium trace element signatures of the metacarbonates, and by interlayered detrital sedimentary rocks with cross-lamination and storm-wave generated breccias. The ISB stromatolites predate by 220 Myr the previous most convincing and generally accepted multidisciplinary evidence for oldest life remains in the 3,480-Myr-old Dresser Formation of the Pilbara Craton, Australia. The presence of the ISB stromatolites demonstrates the establishment of shallow marine carbonate production with biotic CO2 sequestration by 3,700 million years ago (Ma), near the start of Earth’s sedimentary record. A sophistication of life by 3,700 Ma is in accord with genetic molecular clock studies placing life’s origin in the Hadean eon (>4,000 Ma).

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Evolution caught in a movie

It’s a standing joke that creationists demand a complete time-lapse recording of evolution before they’re going to believe it. Joke no more: we’ve got one. It’s a movie of bacteria evolving antibiotic resistance. I don’t even need to explain it, because the video explains everything that’s going on.

Different old joke now: But they’re still just bacteria.

Also, you should be horrified by the power of evolution. It took 11 days for the bacterial population to evolve resistance to a lethal, thousand-fold increase in antibiotic concentration.

Engineering porn

While I’m sure many engineers also found the paint-mixing porn I posted earlier soothing and pleasurable, the diversity of human experience also allows for other stimulants. Like this, the world’s largest engine.

wartsila_engine

The height of a four-story building, the Wärtsilä RT-flex96C is a two-stroke turbocharged low-speed diesel engine designed by the Finnish manufacturer Wärtsilä.

It is designed for large container ships that run on heavy fuel oil. Its largest 14-cylinder version is 13.5 metres (44 ft) high, 26.59 m (87 ft) long, weighs over 2,300 tonnes, and produces 80,080 kilowatts (107,390 hp). The engine is the largest reciprocating engine in the world.

Jesus. There are videos of assembly. Can we call this developmental engineering?

Let’s start one up.

And watch long, slow, lingering videos of the engine in operation. Nothing really happens, but the sound… my future industrial rock band, which I’m calling Wärtsilä (it even has the necessary umlauts!), won’t have a drummer, but we’ll just haul around one of these engines on tour to be the percussion section.

Whew. I need to cool down. Maybe I’ll go watch some paint-mixing videos or something.

North Dakota … a petty, vengeful state

standingrockprotest

After the United States government declared that the North Dakota pipeline should be halted and basically rebuked the process that allowed it to be built, the state of North Dakota has lashed out and issued an arrest warrant for Amy Goodman. Like a good journalist, she’s always annoying the authorities, and now some officious dimbulb in power in that very conservative state has decided, after the fabulous press they got from siccing attack dogs on Indian children, that harassing the journalist who caught their viciousness on video is the right person to punish.

Why can’t Amy Goodman be more like Matt Lauer or Wolf Blitzer, and suck up to the powers-that-be? Maybe it’s because she’s one of the few journalists still doing their goddamn job.

North Dakota also issued arrest warrants for Jill Stein (vandalism: she spray-painted a bulldozer) and Cody Charles Hall (for being an organizer of the protest).

You go right ahead, North Dakota, and make yourself look even worse.

By the way, the last time Amy Goodman got arrested here in Minnesota, it did not go well for the authoritarian thugs.

Trump’s “charities”

You have got to read this investigation into the Trump Foundation. It’s a great big scam. Trump has not built up an endowment, he has no employees, and all he does is beg his cronies to put money into it that he can dole out to generate the appearance that he does charitable giving…or worse, that he can use to buy himself extravagant gifts. If there is going to be any criminal investigation of a political candidate, he ought to be the target.

The Donald J. Trump Foundation is not like other charities. An investigation of the foundation — including examinations of 17 years of tax filings and interviews with more than 200 individuals or groups listed as donors or beneficiaries — found that it collects and spends money in a very unusual manner.

For one thing, nearly all of its money comes from people other than Trump. In tax records, the last gift from Trump was in 2008. Since then, all of the donations have been other people’s money — an arrangement that experts say is almost unheard of for a family foundation.

Trump then takes that money and generally does with it as he pleases. In many cases, he passes it on to other charities, which often are under the impression that it is Trump’s own money.

But, you know, I read the whole thing as an indictment of Trump’s venality and corruption, and I realized that he is so corrupt that he probably reads it as praise for his great business sense. Except for one paragraph. I bet this is the one thing that will burn.

The most money it has ever reported having was $3.2 million at the end of 2009. At last count, that total had shrunk to $1.3 million. By comparison, Oprah Winfrey — who is worth $1.5 billion less than Trump, according to a Forbes magazine estimate — has a foundation with $242 million in the bank. At the end of 2014, the Clinton Foundation had $440 million in assets.

The worst thing you can say to Donald Trump: he’s small, cheap, and poor.

If you don’t believe me, here’s Donald Trump on 11 September 2001.

Only parenthetically in the middle of the 10-minute conversation did Trump turn to a favorite topic-size. 40 Wall Street, he said, referring to his 71-story building blocks away from the now-collapsed twin towers, actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest-and then, when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second-tallest. And now it’s the tallest.

There weren’t any videos of Muslims celebrating the fall of the twin towers, but there was one orange capitalist barely containing his glee at a rival building getting knocked down.

Just call me Chad

I have never been so flattered in my life. Usually the angry MGTOWs and MRAs just call me a beta cuck, but I’ve now discovered what they really, secretly think of me. Dave Futrelle reports on what MGTOWs say about women: they don’t like sex at all, they don’t want it, they don’t get even a little tingle out of it, with one exception. That is, if their partner is a top 5% male like Chad Thundercock.

Women are always saying they love sex but in my experience they are completely f**king frigid and really low sex drive unless you are already having sex with them. They never, ever really ACTIVELY pursue or initiate sex with a stranger because they really just don’t care about it, unless its to get something out of a man, like love, affection, dinners, cards, romance.

They are so completely disinterested in sex and stuck up about it , it makes me f**king sick. This is why they can charge such a heavy price for it, because they really don’t want it and really don’t need it.

A top 5% male like Chad Thundercock may have pussy literally thrown at him though. I am not him, so I wouldn’t know.

Since I happen to intimately know a woman with a perfectly normal, healthy sex drive, I have to assume I must be one of those rare studly types who elicits that kind of response. The alternative is that all those pontificators have either never actually interacted with a woman, or perhaps are so repulsive that women’s libidos wilt away in their presence…but that can’t possibly be true. They’re bold, independent, strong men, right?

Of course, it’s also possible that she’s been putting on an act to get glamorous gifts from me. It is her birthday today, you know, so maybe it’s because she knows she’s getting a spectacular present. I’m getting her a dehumidifier for the basement. It’s a very Chad Thundercock sort of gift.

I’ll tell you another secret that we Chads all know, though. She’s not quite 60 years old today. If I had a time machine and could go back to talk to myself when I was 18, when I was dating Mary when she was a young nubile hottie, and my wrinkly grey-bearded self were to tell me that I was going to grow old with her, and that I’d still be with her when she was over 60, my young self would have felt such awesome joy — the same joy I feel now, that we’d be together even in our old age.

Of course, then old me would bring out my phone — that would be dazzling right there — and show young me a photo that would reveal she’s just going to get better and become a mature nubile hottie, and even my shallower impulses would be gratified.

But then, we fortunate Chads are always getting lucky.

Can you die of an irony overdose?

That’s an important question to ask if you’re about to watch a David Barton video.

Something I’ve noticed about progressives and liberals is how careless they are when throwing false claims around.

Question answered. I’m dead. Will have to continue blogging from beyond the veil, using my spirit form. He killed me with his very first sentence.

This is David Barton, god-emperor of the fabricated historical quotation, claiming that progressives make stuff up. I just…I just…sorry, can’t comment. Got an ectoplasm clog right now.

What is the “false claim” that has him riled up?

For example, I was recently on a national television network where I was introduced as having a doctorate. A progressive instantly ran stories claiming that I don’t have a doctorate. That false claim is amusing on so many levels.

Oh. It’s false? Then what I expect is that he’s about to provide some verifiable evidence that he does in fact have an earned doctorate. That’s easy to do, you know.

But no, he’s going to explain that he doesn’t have to.

First, things like health information, and tax information, and college education information are fully protected by privacy laws, so they don’t know whether I have a doctorate or not, and I’ve always chosen not to talk about it.

Uh, no. Your educational records, stuff like grades and classes attended, are protected by FERPA. But obviously, stuff like whether you graduated from a specific institution are not: if someone puts “Ph.D., Harvard” on their CV, you can contact the registrar at Harvard and ask for a degree verification, and they’ll tell you whether that was earned or not. They have to be able to do that, otherwise people like me might start slappin’ the names of prestigious bible colleges on their CVs to look fancy.

So this is just a bogus dodge.

But what does he do immediately after declaring his degree status a private matter?

Second, just for the record, I do have an earned doctorate. There it is. <waves at a couple of framed pieces of paper in the background>

Third, not only do I have an earned doctorate, I have two honorary doctorates.

No. Your degree is not a piece of paper. It’s a record of academic work. I don’t even know where my version of that certificate I got 31 years ago is located — probably buried in a box somewhere. I certainly don’t have it framed, and putting it in a frame does not add extra weight to its importance.

Here’s how you do it, David Barton: you simply state the name of the institution, and the year you got it. It’s that easy. Then anyone can verify it. For instance, I got a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon in 1985. There’s even a service, National Student Clearinghouse, where you can get verification for $12.50. To do that, though, you need to provide the name of the institution. It would also be nice to state what field you got those degrees in. It should also be an accredited college, because those fly-by-night goofy diploma mills probably don’t submit degree information to national databases.

Good thing I’m already dead, because claiming to give us information while not giving us information is classic Barton.

Isn’t Barton devious? He says he doesn’t need to tell you about his degrees (he’s so modest!), but then he deigns to tell you anyway, except that he doesn’t give you the information he pretends to be giving you.

Some people scrutinized those blurry images, though, and got a little tentative information.

As we and others pointed out, Barton’s assertion seemed a little odd since he never actually stated where or when he “earned” his supposed doctorate and the documents in the background to which he pointed were difficult to read, though one clearly came from Pensacola Christian College, from which Barton received an honorary doctorate. The other two documents appear to have come from Ecclesia College and Life Christian University, an unaccredited Christian university that has also awarded Ph.D.s in theology to televangelists like Joyce Meyers and Benny Hinn.

Somebody needs to tell Barton that Ph.D.s from unaccredited diploma mills don’t count as “earned”.

But, like everything David Barton does, he stands by his words. Which is why Barton has taken down that video. I guess he didn’t make the framed diplomas blurry enough.

And now my spirit is going to have to spend some time finding a new corpse to reanimate. I knew there was a reason we bought a house so close to a cemetery.

Paint porn

Adam Savage just destroyed a half hour of my life by linking to this Paint Mixing tumblr. It’s mesmerizing. It’s just close-up videos of different colors of paint being mixed together, with different movements and different palette tools. I found it pleasantly soothing.

The comments are also pleasant. People apparently have favorite palette knives and color combinations. People are weird. They can also be nice.