Kent Hovind: 10 years!

Shelley the Republican says:

We conservatives have grown accustomed to liberal activist judges perverting justice for their own evil ends. Last year Judge Jones betrayed us all when he passed his verdict in the Dover school-book case. Shortly afterwards, our dear friend Kent was convicted of tax evasion.

U.S. District Judge Casey Rodgers will sentence the Hovinds at 9 a.m for the alleged crime of tax evasion. They claim that he and his lovely wife Jo owe the state almost one million dollars in unpaid taxes. A quick review of the case show that the federal court unfairly denied Hovind’s sensible and truthful defence: Kent owes no tax because everything he “owns” is really property of God. This is a fact that we would all do well to remember!

So please dear friends, join me in prayer this morning. Let us pray to Jesus that Kent and Jo will be allowed to continue their important ministry and continue teaching young scientists about the many flaws in Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Prayer doesn’t work, I guess.

Pensacola evangelist Kent Hovind was sentenced Friday afternoon to 10 years in prison on charges of tax fraud.

After a lengthy sentencing hearing that last 5 1/2 hours, U.S. District Judge Casey Rodgers ordered Hovind also:

— Pay $640,000 in restitution to the Internal Revenue Service.

— Pay the prosecution’s court costs of $7,078.

— Serve three years parole once he is released from prison.

Hovind’s wife, Jo Hovind, also was scheduled to be sentenced. Rodgers postponed her sentencing until March 1 to allow her defense attorney an opportunity to argue possible discrepancies in sentencing guidelines.

Prior to his sentencing, a tearful Kent Hovind, also known as “Dr. Dino” asked for the court’s leniency.

“If it’s just money the IRS wants, there are thousands of people out there who will help pay the money they want so I can go back out there and preach,” Hovind said.

This is very unseemly, but … BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Maybe God just doesn’t answer Republican prayers anymore.

What’s the matter with manimals anyway?

Bioethics is an important subject—it’s too bad it gets sidetracked with nonsense driven by religious dogma and ignorance. One issue is the use of human-animal chimerae in research, which was enough to get our flibbertigibbet idiot of a president incensed, but I don’t see the problem. It’s not as if having weirdly modified experimental mammalian embryos in a dish is a danger to people—some devout Christian woman does not have to worry that she might bump into a lab cart and have a swine-man zygote splash into her vagina and crawl into her womb, but that’s exactly what the hysterics seem to fear. Ophelia has a good rant on the subject.

Why, exactly, does the creation of a certain kind of egg, which will be destroyed within fourteen days, undermine respect for human life? I want to know. What’s the thinking here? That thirteen-day old embryos might end up being dressed up in little outfits and enrolled in school? That they might start marrying people’s children? That they’ll make all the buses and movie theatres and supermarkets too crowded? That they’ll jostle us off the sidewalk and humiliate us? That they’ll want to spend the night in our houses and have their horrible unthinkable disgusting squelchy sex right there with us in the next room listening in fear and horror?

Somebody give me a real reason this is an ethical concern, other than that it conflicts with certain sects weird and absurdly wrong ideas about species purity.

More Friday Cephalopod news

  • Bioephemera not only shows off a chandelier to die for (if I had one installed, my wife would make sure I died for it), but has announced that she needs a cephalopodmania category. It’s infectious.

  • Another blogger with a reputation for Friday Squid blogging is Bruce Schneier. Rumor has it that he will be here at ConFusion, and the organizers are going to try and arrange an ad hoc session with the two of us, on squid.

I knew I forgot something important

I forgot to set up a Friday Cephalopod post before I left, and I don’t have my scanner with me! Don’t panic. Deep breaths. We can cope with this, by being as flexible as a cephalopod.

Here’s what I’ve done. I’ve reposted an article on Gonatus onyx, which has lovely photos of a squid and its babies. If you saw that beautiful movie of a squid releasing larvae as it was suspended in the deep, you’ll recognize it—this is one of those resonantly moving behaviors of certain species of squid: they produced huge numbers of eggs, and then just hover, completely alone and isolated in a deep layer of the ocean, brooding their young.

Also — and this will blow your mind — I will be putting up a MONDAY CEPHALOPOD!!! This is what happens when you think out of the box: you get these earthshaking, radical ideas that might change the whole nature of the blogosphere as we know it. I’m tempted to say there will be Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday Cephalopods, but no, I must step back from the abyss, and just take baby steps. One Monday Cephalopod, then we will return to the traditional Fridays, and hope the wobble induced in the Earth’s rotation will have stabilized by then.

Reply hazy — try again

I sniped at Jim Drummond for his odd demotion of evolutionary biology the other day — his colleague at the University of Toronto,
Larry Moran, tried to get to the bottom of it.

I contacted Drummond by email to see if he really was an IDiot. Prof. Drummond claims he can’t remember exactly what he said because the interview was a long time ago. He says that what he meant was that global warming was just as certain as evolution. When asked if he was a Creationist or a fan of intelligent design, he avoided the question and emphasized the problem of global warming.

The impression I get is that he has some personal doubts about the validity of evolution and that may explain the quoted remark.

That’s not exactly reassuring. If I were accused of making an easily misinterpreted comment, I’d try much harder than that to be unambiguous.

Conservative/liberal character

Broad generalizations about people of certain political views are always good for an entertaining wrangle…so here’s a provocative article on The Ideological Animal:

  • Liberals are messier than conservatives. Their rooms have more clutter, more color. Conservatives’ rooms are better organized, more brightly lit, and more conventional. Liberals have more books and their books are on a greater variety of topics.
  • Compared to liberals, conservatives are less tolerant of ambiguity, a trait researchers say is exemplified when George Bush says things like, “Look, my job isn’t to try to nuance. My job is to tell people what I think,” and “I’m the decider.”
  • Conservatives have a greater fear of death.
  • Liberals are higher on openness, which includes intellectual curiosity, excitement-seeking, novelty, creativity for its own sake, and a craving for stimulation like travel, color, art, music, and literature.
  • Conservatives are higher on conscientiousness, which includes neatness, rule-following, duty, and orderliness.
  • Conservatives have a greater need to reach a decision quickly and stick to it.
  • When people are prompted to think about death–a state of mind psychologists call mortality salience–they actually become more conservative.
  • Studies show that when people are prompted to think about 9/11, their support for President Bush goes up.
  • Conservatives are more likely to have been insecure as kids, whereas liberals are more likely to have been confident as kids.

It begins with some comments about 9/11 Republicans, people who were driven rapidly to the Republican party by fear, but it does admit that there’s more to it than that.

What travel and
education have in common is that they make the differences
between people seem less threatening. “You become less
bothered by the idea that there is uncertainty in the world,”
explains Jost.

That’s why the more educated people are, the more
liberal they become–but only to a point. Once people begin
pursuing certain types of graduate degrees, the curve
flattens. Business students, for instance, become more conservative in their views toward minorities. As they become
more established, doctors and lawyers tend to protect their
economic interests by moving to the right. The findings
demonstrate that conservative conversions are fueled not
only by fear, but by other factors as well. And if the November election was any indicator, the pendulum that swung
so forcefully to the right after 9/11 may be swinging back.

So I just stepped off an airplane and…

¡Hola, amigos! I’m posting this from sunny, tropical…Michigan??!? Wait a minute, I thought January trips were supposed to be to some place with warm beaches and drinks with umbrellas and bikinis, not Detroit. This is more of a lateral shift, a change in longitude, rather than latitude.

There must have been some terrible ConFusion in my travel plans…