Did dinosaurs learn grammar on the ark?

Grammar mistakes people make.

Neoliberalism has been fatal to people and this planet.  That and atrazine. And nuclear radiation and suffocating the oceans.

The NRA Fights For The Right To Leave Unsecured Guns Around Children

The biggest myth about abortion.

Electric rays found in Canada's Pacific.

Reporter tours The Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum in Glendive, Montana and writes up the "facts" established by this creationist "museum".

Blog sprinkles

The trolls among us.

What it means when we hear that Greenland is melting faster than expected..

Hugh Hefner's girlfriends through the ages.

Stats on the folding of the newspapers.. rather crumpling.

Paleontologists visit the Creation Museum:

"It's sort of a monument to scientific illiteracy, isn't it?" said Jerry Lipps, professor of geology, paleontology and evolution at University of California, Berkeley.

This makes way too much sense:

The European Union has reached an agreement with all major mobile phone manufacturers to produce a common phone charger. Apart from reducing the frustration of customers juggling incompatible chargers, proponents say the agreement will encourage recycling and reduce electronic waste.

Of course the scientist was a MAN...

Daily sex makes for healthier sperm

Our very own Iraqi death squads. Bush and Cheney should be proud.

OMG:

"The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States. Because it's going to take a grass-roots, bottom-up pressure. Because these politicians prize their office, prize the praise of the media and the Europeans. It's an absurd situation again. Only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently, and with as much violence as necessary."—Michael Scheuer on Glenn Beck's show

Adam Serwer at Tapped:

This is the same Michael Scheuer who, a few months ago, played patriotism police arguing that anyone who didn't support the United States using torture to interrogate terrorist suspects was anti-American...now he's begging for a terrorist attack on the United States. This is a pretty awesome example of how the right conflates their political interests with the interests of the country as a whole. If there's no terrorist attack, then Americans are safe. But Scheuer can't be right if there's no terrorist attack. And Scheuer being right is actually more important than Americans staying alive.

Torture apologists have tiptoed around the edge of this argument without actually saying so for some time, Leon Panetta walked back his observation about Dick Cheney, that "it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point," but as Scheuer and Beck proved yesterday, this is really how some people feel.

This gets to the essential creepiness about Beck's emotional display introducing his whole 9/12 project--the man wasn't weeping because he wished the country was as "unified" as it was after 9/11, he was weeping because the country is no longer in a such a state of petrified fear that it will acquiesce to whatever extreme measures the right deems necessary. Beck wasn't crying for the country, he was crying for himself, crying because people are no longer frightened enough to agree with everything he has to say. Understand, he only wants to hurt you because he loves you.

A walk on the dark side

Of ignorance, hate, bigotry, and fear. Visit the Genesis Creation Museum (via Ripley at Zen Cabin) with cubswin39 at Daily Kos.



It is stunning to look at the embrace of ignorant faith over science. Where on earth do these people want to lead us but to the dark ages?

Why questions about teeth chew a hole in creationism

And explain why T-Rex wasn't crunching coconuts.

Christopher O'Brien of Northstate Science discusses what Ken Ham’s Creation 'Museum' is doing. The 'museum ' tries to cause doubt in science by pointing out bears have sharp teeth and eat vegetation therefore dinosaurs could have been herbivores: (my bold)

Certainly the responses to these observations are important, but that is not what prompted me to write this post. What really intrigued me was the process I engaged in while obtaining the information. It is the process of discovery that, as much as the answers, serves to radically distinguish science from creationism in all its forms. As I said, my reader raised several issues that, on face value, would be sufficient for most people to stop and wonder if Ham and AIG weren’t at least raising a legitimate issue. For Ham, AIG, and on a different level, the intelligent design advocates, inquiry would completely cease at this point. See, O’Brien is wrong: polar bear teeth are hardly different from other bear teeth and they exclusively eat meat…hence it is possible that tyrannosaurs ate vegetation at one time. Here, the entire goal is accomplished: raise reasonable doubt with the general populace at large.

But science follows a completely different process. Upon reading the phrase “polar bear teeth are hardly different from other bears” the first thing I did was ask myself, “is that true?” and reach for a book on mammalian anatomy; and I did it so sub-consciously and automatically that the significance of the act did not become apparent until a few hours later. Scientists constantly question whether their data (and others') are correct…it’s ingrained as part of the process. The same cannot be said for creationists.

The deliberate misuse of the word 'theory' is another attempt to muddy the waters, trying to get people to have reasonable doubt over a rigourous process such as science. Remember, gravity is a theory, so it's a theory that holds us onto an orbiting ball as it hurtles through space.

I'd rather have science than faith explain to me why I don't fall off.

What big teeth you have, T-Rex....

The better to open coconuts, my dear!

In the middle of the lobby of the 50,000-square-foot Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., a 20-foot waterfall tumbles. Two life-size figures of children with long black hair and in buckskin clothes play in the stream a few feet from two towering Tyrannosaurus Rex models that can move and roar. The museum, which cost $25 million to build and has a sea of black asphalt parking lots for school buses, has a scale model of Noah’s ark that shows how Noah solved the problem of fitting dinosaurs into the three levels of the vessel—he loaded only baby dinosaurs. And on the wooden model, infant dinosaurs cavort with horses, giraffes, hippopotamuses, penguins and bears. There is an elaborate display of the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve, naked but strategically positioned so as not to display breasts or genitals, swim in a river as giant dinosaurs and lizards roam the banks.

Before Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise, museum visitors are told, all of the dinosaurs were peaceable plant-eaters. The evidence is found in Genesis 1:30, where God gives “green herb” to every creature to eat. There were no predators. T-Rex had such big teeth, the museum explains, so it could open coconuts. Only after Adam and Eve sinned and were cast out of paradise did the dinosaurs start to eat flesh. And Adam’s sin is a key component of the belief system, for in the eyes of many creationists, in order for Jesus’ death to be meaningful it had to atone for Adam’s first sin.

[snip]

The movement desperately needs the imprint of science to legitimize itself. It achieves this imprint by discrediting real science and claiming creationist science as true science. All attempts to argue the creationists out of their mythical belief, to persuade them with logic, evidence, scientific inquiry and fact, will fail. They have created a “fundamentalist science.” They know they cannot return to the pre-Darwinian innocence that let them believe the Bible alone was enough. They need, in the midst of their flight from reality, to reassure their followers that science, science not contaminated by secular humanists and nonbelievers, is on their side. In this they are a distinctly modern movement. They seek the imprint of science and scholarship to legitimize myth. This is a characteristic they share with all modern totalitarian movements, which co-opt the disciplines of law, science, medicine and scholarship to give a modern veneer to their primitive and superstitious belief systems, systems that allow the rulers to dictate reality and truth. The “paraprofessional” organizations formed by the Christian right, organizations of teachers, journalists, doctors, lawyers and scientists, mimic the activities of real professional groups. They seek to challenge the legitimacy and the power of the traditional organizations. The duplication of the structures and methods employed by the non-totalitarian world, the use of pseudo-science to dress up fantasy, is slowly undermining our legitimate scientific and educational institutions. It is destroying the foundations of our open society. It is ushering us into a world where lies are true.

Others are saying the coconut theory about T-Rex is false, but all dinosaurs ate green herbs in Eden until Eve fucked it all up.

To counterbalance the Creation Science Museum opening, send P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula ideas for his Creation Museum Carnival.

Tengrain from Mock Paper Scissors and I posted on this 'museum' earlier. They posed light-skin colored children in clothes up to their chins near a velociraptor.

Green herbs indeed.

(update: fixed grammar and added link)