The Pensacola News Journal (“Still the only paper covering the Hovind trial!”) reports that a jury has been picked to decide whether Kent Hovind is an impoverished minister or a huckster who owes the IRS nearly half a million bucks in back taxes.
I’d love to see the trial transcripts, but I haven’t found them anywhere.
The Pensacola News Journal reports
that jury selection for Kent Hovind’s trial begins today. If a jury is selected quickly enough, there might also be time for both sides’ opening remarks. I won’t speculate on whether this is likely, though.
Hovind himself hasn’t written anything about this since
Sep. 27, when he wrote
As for the media, well, they just need a new piece of meat to grind up every day to sell their papers. Truth and the destruction of innocent lives mean nothing to them.
This explains why the only paper to have covered this trial so far is the Pensacola News Journal, which has only published a few local news briefs like the one above.
Sorry, Kent, but you’re no OJ Simpson. The only people who care about your trial are creationism wonks like me.
Gil Dodgen posted the following over at Uncommon Descent:
All computational evolutionary algorithms artificially isolate the effects of random mutation on the underlying machinery: the CPU instruction set, operating system, and algorithmic processes responsible for the replication process.
If the blind-watchmaker thesis is correct for biological evolution, all of these artificial constraints must be eliminated. Every aspect of the simulation, both hardware and software, must be subject to random errors.
Of course, this would result in immediate disaster and the extinction of the CPU, OS, simulation program, and the programmer, who would never get funding for further realistic simulation experiments.
All I can say is “wow”. Either Dodgen is having us all on (which I doubt, since he’s started a new thread to respond to the charge that he doesn’t know WTF he’s talking about), or he honestly doesn’t understand the difference between the simulated environment and the machine doing the simulating.
Presumably he also believes that when NOAA simulates the effect of a hurricane hitting the Florida coast, they have to pour rain onto their computers. And that every time an orc dies in World of Warcraft, a real orc dies in some distant land.
I know that I’m often too rooted in the concrete and have trouble going from a collection of facts to a general principle, but damn!
Wiley has provided a good summary of Yisrayl “Buffalo Bill” Hawkins‘s prediction of a nuclear war on Sep. 12:
As I mentioned earlier, Yisrayl Hawkins (formerly Buffalo Bill Hawkins) of the House of Yahweh predicted that there’d be a nuclear war on Sep. 12, 2006. And as you may have noticed, it didn’t happen.
The good people at Boing Boing came up with a list of possible excuses that Hawkins could use to explain why the nuclear holocaust didn’t happen.
Right now, his web page has the tantalizing headline
The House of Yahweh Prophecy of 9-12-2006 Has Been Fulfilled
Stay tuned for upcoming details
I’m curious to see what excuse he’ll come up with, but if it’s anything like his original prophecy, it’ll be ten dense pages of intricate rationalization, rather than something clear but goofy.
Update: I’m also amused by the bit on his web page that says:
Thursday, September 14, 2006
-2 days remaining before the start of nuclear war
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKZec6aDhww]
It’s got everything: crappy music, worse dancing, puppets, pirates, Christian rap. Words cannot describe it.
Update, Sep. 12, 2006: Favorite comment: “Can’t sleep, the puppets will eat me.
”
Update, Sep. 13, 2006: Another good comment: “Okay America, we gave you religious freedom, and you do THIS with it […] Watching this, some would say the terrorists have already won. But NO ONE WINS with this video.”
TheHouse of Yahweh has announced that nuclear war will start on Sep. 12, 2006.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sjf4ELVeX8]
It’s not clear to me how they came up with this date, so allow me to speculate irresponsibly: the number of the beast is 666. 6 = 5 + 1, and Sep. 12, 2006 is five years and one day after the 9/11 attacks.
Furthermore, 7 is a number often associated with God and goodness: there are 7 days in a week, 7 planets known to the ancients, Joshua destroyed Jericho by marching around it for 7 days, and 7 times on the 7th day, etc.
Now note that Sep. 12 is 7 days before Talk Like A Pirate Day. Coincidence? I think not!
Over at Uncommon Descent,
Lee Bowman complains about people who say ID is a new movement:
Many cite Johnson as the founder of the current ID movement. Popularizer perhaps, but founder he was NOT, nor can he authoritatively be credited with setting its parameters. Luskin notes (as does Dembski in ‘Cosmic Pursuit’, 1998) that Charles Thaxton and Dean Kenyon first wrote on the subject during the ’80s. But is concept even that new?
“Throughout the centuries theologians have argued that nature exhibits features which nature itself cannot explain, but which instead require an intelligence over and above nature. From Church fathers like Minucius Felix and Basil the Great (3rd and 4th centuries) to medieval scholastics like Moses Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas (12th and 13th centuries) to reformed thinkers like Thomas Reid and Charles Hodge (18th and 19th centuries), we find theologians making design arguments, arguing from the data of nature to an intelligence operating over and above nature.” (Wm. Dembski, ‘Cosmic Pursuit’, 1998)
http://www.arn.org/docs/dembski/wd_idmovement.htm
(bold face added.)
If ID has such an ancient heritage, then I think it’s fair to ask why there aren’t any experimental results demonstrating ID. Who are the Isaac Newtons and James Clerk Maxwells of ID? Why isn’t there broader consensus amongst ID proponents of the basics of ID, such as the number of designers, the times and places when they operated, or even a definition of “complexity”?
If, on the other hand, ID is scientific, but too young to have produced any good results, then why should it be taught in public schools?
For those who didn’t know, Coral Ridge Ministries is producing a TV show to appear in a few days, called Darwin’s Deadly Legacy. Judging by the preview, it’s going to be one long argumentum ad Hitlerum, along with a heaping dose of evolution denial, and a bit of Columbine thrown in for good measure.
According to
Kent Hovind’s weblog,
the date for his trial (58 counts of tax evasion, for those who’d forgotten) has been postponed until Oct. 17, so we’ll have to wait an extra five weeks for him to start getting his comeuppance. Oh, well.