Today's Tomorrow Cartoon - Cauldron of Crazy Edition

(click to enlarge)

(Tom Tomorrow, via Daily Kos)

Today's Dispatches From The Stupid Party - Creationist Edition

Recently, the legislature of the Cradle of Stupid Secession, South Carolina, was petitioned by an 8-year-old girl who noticed that her State didn't have an official State fossil.  She wrote to her Democratic State Representative to suggest a Columbian Wooly Mammoth fossil that was excavated locally back in the 18th Century. He thought it was a great idea, so he and a Democratic State Senator introduced bills in their respective chambers to make it happen.

That's when a couple of God-bothering Republican dimbulbs went into action.  We'll let Wonkette capture the Stupid:

State Sen. Kevin Bryant, a fundamentalist Christian who back in 2008 got big satirical larffs with a Facebook post saying “the difference between Obama and Osama is just a little B.S.,” added an amendment to include three verses from the Book of Genesis to explain that God made everything 6000 years ago, because no way did mammoths evolve or anything. Bryant explained that he had no intention of interfering or anything; fossils are nice and all, but “I just felt like it’d be a good thing to acknowledge the creator of the fossils.” 

And when the amendment was ruled out of order on procedural grounds, because it introduced a new topic, things got even stupider. Another member of the “science is lies from the pit of hell” caucus, Sen. Mike Fair, whose district includes Bob Jones University, placed a hold on the state fossil bill. Sen. Fair is such a committed opponent of children being poisoned by knowledge of evolution that the National Center for Science Education dedicated a webpage to documenting his attempts to block the teaching of science.

So we now have scientific proof that there's an 8-year-old girl in the Cradle of Stupid Secession that is more intelligent and better educated than at least two Republican elected officials.  Good to know.

That reminds us:  tune into "Cosmos" with Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sunday nights (check local U.S. listings).

(Image:  Does Bible-bangin' cause brain damage, or vice versa?)

Creationists Demand Equal Time on "Cosmos"

Haha no:

Danny Faulkner of Answers In Genesis and the Creation Museum appeared on The Janet Mefferd Show yesterday to criticize Cosmos for not providing airtime for Creationism adherents. When Mefferd asked if Cosmos will “ever give a Creationist any time,” Faulkner responded by lamenting that “Creationists aren’t even on the radar screen for them, they wouldn’t even consider us plausible at all.” 

Nor would most sane people consider them "plausible."  But we think "Cosmos" host Neil deGrasse Tyson previously addressed Dim Danny's point when he said, "Bullshit!"  “You don’t talk about the spherical Earth with NASA, and then say let’s give equal time to the flat Earthers.  Plus, science is not there for you to cherry pick.”

Equal Time for Science and Ignorance?

If you watched astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's "Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey" last night, you were treated to a sampling of how science should be presented.  The 13-part series, as we noted on Saturday, is an update to the powerful "Cosmos" program presented by the late Carl Sagan (who was a mentor to a young, 17 year-old Tyson).

Being a scientist requires patience, but as the nation's science IQ slips, Tyson has no patience with the anti-science crowd and their foolish enablers in the media who insist on "balance," even if the alternate view is patently nuts:

"...you don't talk about the spherical earth with NASA and then say let's give equal time to the flat-earthers.  Plus, science is not there for you to cherry pick. You know, I said this once and it's gotten a lot of Internet play, I said the good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."

Too bad "equal time" journalism can't free itself of the flat-earthers.

On "Cosmos," Jesus Will Not Be Riding A Dinosaur

Hank Stuever at the once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle previews "Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey," a 13-part series hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson that follows in the footsteps of Carl Sagan's landmark "Cosmos" series from a quarter century ago.  Given the intellectual devolution that has occurred in that quarter century =cough= creationists =cough= wingnuts =cough= Stuever notes:

To borrow that Max von Sydow line from Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters”: If Sagan returned to Earth on his interstellar Ship of the Imagination today, he might never stop throwing up. He’d see evidence of climate change. He read polls that find nearly half of Americans don’t buy evolution. He’d see creationist museums and theme parks. 

This 2014 “Cosmos” has its work cut out for it, to say the least, in a far different context than Sagan’s series did. 

“This ad­ven­ture is made possible by generations of searchers strictly adhering to a simple set of rules,” Tyson tells viewers in a carefully but beautifully phrased invitation to have an open mind. “Test ideas by experiment and observation; build on those ideas that pass the test, reject the ones that fail; follow the evidence wherever it leads and question everything. Accept these terms and the cosmos is yours.” (Reject these terms and you might wind up sitting on an Adam and Eve roller-coaster ride around our 6,000-year-old planet.) (our emphasis)

We can bemoan a failure of public education, the success of ideologically-driven know-nothings, and/or other factors that might account for such a large portion of Americans retreating into anti-science, pre-Darwin 19th Century beliefs.  But this series reminds us that evolution has had it's failures, dead-ends and back-tracks, too.  Put into a socio-political context, that could provide some hope that, despite setbacks, evolution, climate change and other science tested by experiment and observation will come to be accepted by the vast majority.  This series is a step in that direction.

"Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey" premieres Sunday night and repeats Monday night.  In America, check your local listings for the time and channel.