Mr. Hovind’s “professor” being vindicated everyday

Uranus as seen by Hubble in 2005, shown in approximate orientation to the plane of its orbit.

If you want to get a feel for how utterly dishonest creationist arguments can be, look no further than Mr. Hovind and the Professor. It’s a spiel told by creationist nutbag Kent Hovind AKA Dr. Dino where he purportedly confounds a nameless scientist by pointing out that some planets and moon rotate backward. Hovind says since “Evolutionists claim the whole universe came from a single spinning dot that blew up,” and therefore any planets or moons, such as Uranus or Triton, going backward would defy the conservation of angular momentum. Thus, evolution is wrong.

Last I heard Hovind was doing time and it’s unlikely he’s open to evidence contradicting his little diatribe anyway. Nonetheless, such evidence exists and more is being gathered all the time:

Uranus is a real oddball in our solar system. Its spin axis is tilted by a whopping 98 degrees, meaning it essentially spins on its side. No other planet has anywhere near such a tilt. Jupiter is tilted by 3 degrees, for example, and Earth by 23 degrees. Scientists have long suspected that some manner of violent impact knocked Uranus off kilter. The accepted wisdom had been that a single object several times more massive than Earth did the damage, slamming into Uranus long ago, researchers said.

The mystery of the cosmic fog

The red speck at the centre of this very deep image from the ESO Very Large Telescope shows the galaxy NTTDF-474, seen when the Universe was only 820 million years old. It is one of the most distant ever to have had its distance measured accurately, and is one of five that have been used to chart the timeline of the reionisation of the Universe about 13 billion years ago. Image: ESO/ L. Pentericci.

There has long been a theory, or perhaps its more of a hypothesis or a conjecture, that the first stars were very different from any class of star we see today. Sci-fi writers and cosmologists wonder if Very Early Massive Objects or VEMO’s might have lit up the early universe and, because of the great density and virtual absence of heavy elements early on, could have had bizarre properties compared to “modern” stars. It’s even possible some may have gone through a phase with nested fusing cores burning multiple substances at the same time, or even semi-distinct cores separated by millions of miles embedded in the same plasma envelope. We may never know just how far off the HR diagram some of these first generation mutants ventured. [Read more…]

Suddenly religion has no place in the GOP

Truly a leg-slapping howler from Mitt Romney:

I would call upon Gov. Perry to repudiate the sentiment and the comments made by that pastor,” Romney told reporters just hours before the pair are scheduled to meet in another presidential debate. “Governor Perry said that introduction hit it out of the park,” Romney added. “I don’t believe that that kind of divisiveness based on religion has a place in this country.”

It’s almost like Mittens lives in some kind of bizarro universe, or maybe he just flat forgot what party he belongs to. But now that the question has beenr aised, you know what I’d like to see asked in the debate tonight? Are followers of Reverend Sun Myung-moon in a cult? Why or why not?

That would be a hoot.

Maybe the American Cancer Society just hates atheists?

Very odd, the American Cancer Society reportedly turned down 250 grand, apparently for no other reason than the donating org was not religious:

Now, in case you’re wondering if this is standard behavior, find someone who works as a development director for a nonprofit. Ask her what her response would be to a $250,000 matching offer from a philanthropic foundation. And ask if her organization would be drooling, celebrating wildly, and bending over backward to make it happen — or if they would be evading, delaying, dodging, deflecting, changing their stories …

Megasvirus may be a normal cell streamlined by evolution

There are plenty of grisly things in the natural world, and the universe of microbes is no different. But for some reason the life cycle of megaviruses disturbs me as much as any blood-sucking, brain-invading metazoan parasites known to science:

The unusual size and gene content of the virus led one scientist to suggest that viruses could explain the origin of DNA-based life. If viruses carried all these genes, then it’s possible to imagine that one could set up shop in a cell and simply never leave … A paper is being released today, however, that argues that this scenario has things exactly backwards. Giant viruses, its authors argue, have all these genes normally associated with cells because, in their distant evolutionary past, they were once cells.

I think I figured Herman Cain out

There are a lot of advantages to being rich. But one of the few disadvantages is the honest day-to-day input from friends, coworkers, and family we all take for granted. That simple feedback is often non-existent for the very wealthy. They could literally propose anything or say anything and there would be a line of people stretching around the block waiting to praise their insightful brilliance. That’s the sense I get with Herman Cain when I read stuff like this:

But Cain said the “offensive” criticism is just a familiar tactic to marginalize him. He suggested his status as a prominent black conservative makes him a target, but said the attacks will not succeed. “I left the Democratic plantation a long time ago. And all that they try to do when someone like me … the only tactic that they have to try and intimidate me and shut me up is to call me names, and this sort of thing. It just simply won’t work,” Cain said.

[Read more…]

Hanks Williams Jr., isn’t sorry in the least

After comparing President Obama to Hitler and subsequently issuing an apology, Hank Williams Jr has revealed his true feelings in the poetry of song — and he’s not sorry at all. The country music legacy has released a new tune with lyrics skewing the ‘liberal media,’ which in this case is the hopelessly liberal Fox and Friends, and attacking the President:

Williams told the AP he wrote the song Friday and recorded it in a Nashville studio later that day. It’s expected to be on iTunes late today or early tomorrow. The lyrics also say the U.S. is “going down the drain” and becoming “The United Socialist States of America.”

My guess is Williams hoped he would get his ESPN gig back if he feigned regret. That probably didn’t happen, freeing the racist imbecile up to express his true feelings. But one thing we can say for sure, whatever Williams may have said about being sorry, it was clearly bunk. He’s fallen hook, line, and sinker for extremist right-wing misinformation and he’s not the least bit sorry about it.

Release the Kraken!

It’s big, it’s ugly, it’s legendary. It’s a tentacled alien monster with three hearts and a voracious appetite for living flesh. Meet the Kraken, or at least some circumstantial evidence for something like it:

There is no direct evidence of such a monster’s existence, let alone its intelligence. The entire tale is based on an untested hypothesis about a puzzling pile of bones that happen to belong to what were otherwise that era’s top marine predators: school-bus-sized ichthyosaurs. … When paleontologist Mark McMenamin of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts visited the fossil site this summer, it reminded him of an octopus midden, the pile of debris this animal piles up to conceal the entrance of its den. And now McMenamin is saying that a giant kraken, twice the size of the modern Colossal Squid, drowned or broke the necks of these ichthyosaur victims before bringing them home for dinner.

That does sound a little thin. But we all want the Kraken to exist, or at least to have existed, you know, back a long time ago when it couldn’t bother us. So it makes a fun story.

Pimp daddy O’Keefe tries to ride again

Video re-editor and smear artist James O’Keefe has been spotted in the Big Apple. Speculation is he’s trying to cook up another hit-job, this time on the Occupy Wall Street movement now terrifying the Job Destroyers who tanked the economy and the classholes apologists who protect them:

Today Occupy Wall Street had an extra-special visitor, although one apparently not sporting his usual camera, nor the traditional 1970s pimp costume. Yes, right-wing scandal-baitor and shameless videotape re-editor James O’Keefe showed up in Liberty Plaza.

O’Keefe is a great exemplar of the long-winded point I was trying to make the other day in this post: conservatives invest long term to farm new liars and scumbags. [Read more…]