Public school students in Texas, for their part, are more even-keeled. One student at a Dallas High School was quoted as saying, “Whatever. You know what I’m sayin’?”

Um … no. We have no idea what people in Texas are saying.

This image from a surveillance video at an adult video store on Airport Boulevard shows a burglar holding an inflatable sex doll after he broke into the business.

Let me count the ways this wingnut fails:

• First – he’s on video, so he will likely be caught, and we’ll get to put a name to that face.
• Second – While going to a store to buy your porn might be a little embarrassing to some folks in south Alabama, it’s probably not nearly as embarrassing as stealing your porn and having your picture plastered on the front page of the local paper. It would probably have been less embarrassing if Jesus, The Pope, and this guy’s mom all walked in the store and caught him in the act.
• Third – the burglar took no money, just, “an inflatable doll, a bottle of lubricant and a pocket-sized sexual stimulation device called “Devin’s Private Pleasures.”" WTF?
• Fourth – apparently inflatable dolls are not sold pre-inflated. The burglar is alleged to have inflated this one himself. Once again … WTF?
• Fifth – we think that stealing an inflatable doll should count as kidnapping, especially if you’re creepy enough to inflate it while you’re stealing it.

Stay tuned as this story blows up develops.

The other day I was thinking how awesome it would be if everything revolved around me. Seriously, if I were the center of the universe, then all problems – worldly and otherworldly – would take a back seat to my own. When I moved, I would move the universe. When I shake, I would shake the universe. Each time I would fart, a new brown nebula would be born.

Early humans had a similar desire – to not only matter, but to be VERY IMPORTANT. Indeed, some went so far as to codify our self importance into our religious beliefs. For example, it was a matter of Christian faith for over a thousand years that the Earth stood at the center of God’s universe. We had that special place, because we we mattered to god. Earth was His creation and therefore VERY IMPORTANT, and being His children, we were also VERY IMPORTANT.

But then some uppity know-it-alls had to mess up that pretty picture. They used mathematics, and careful measurement and upset a common assumption that had been in place long before the world was declared round. And that, according to an astounding flyer I recently received in the mail, is where western society began to break down.

Yes, I just got a serious-looking pamphlet about the Geocentric Bible, which claims that scientists have been wrong for 400 years, and that the Earth is really still at the center of the universe. By still, I mean “continues to be” although you could take that to mean “motionless” and that would, um, still be correct.

The change from the geocentric theory to the heliocentric theory damaged our viewpoint of the Bible. Genesis 1:1 is literal, and so is Psalm 50:1 “the Lord … Called the earth from the rising of the sun”. Both the earth and the sun are in the same sentence and it is the sun that is moving around a stationary earth

I think there’s some truth in that quote, but not what the purveyors of the Geocentric Bible claim. By adopting the heliocentric view, our view of the bible changed – and whether this is “damage” remains to be seen. Rather than interpreting the bible literally, most people interpret it allegorically, or thematically. Indeed, the bible is literary work that has profound scope and scale, and interesting characters that lived in ancient times. It may be the source of your faith – but it is clearly not 100% factually accurate.

One of the subjects that the bible fails us is in astronomy, since, if biblical claims of geocentrism were accurate, not only would our understanding of the universe be false, any sort of space program based on such faulty understanding would be impossible. That would mean – no weather or communication satellites, no moon landings, no probes to mars or the other planets. Nothing. All of these technological feats are only made possible in a universe in which planetary bodies move in predictable elliptical orbits, and gravity works as we think it does, and the planets and asteroids are where we expect them to be when our space probes get there. Since our universe has a successful space program, then our universe is incompatible with a literal interpretation of every verse in the ancient text of the Bible. Maybe we need to reconsider the veracity of the text rather than our lying eyes.

The earth has not rotated since the day of creation nor will it rotate until midway through the tribulation period.
The firmament carries the sun around the earth faster than the moon because the moon is closer to the earth, the center of the universe. “If I beheld the sun when it shined, or the moon walking in brightness” (Job 31:26). The sun never walks, but runs; “…the sun. Which…rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race” (Psalm 19:4,5).

Another small issue with the geocentric theory is that it posits that the entire “firmament” of the universe revolves around the earth once per day. In this quote, from the Geocentric Bible Foundation, we see that celestial objects closer to the earth move more slowly than those that are farther away (the moon walks while the sun runs). What about objects that are farther away than the sun? Since we know that many stars and galaxies are at least 12 billion light years from the earth, they would have to travel at least 74 billion light years per day (assuming a circular orbit around the earth with a radius 12Bly). To accomplish this, these object would have to be traveling just north of 856000 light years per second. That’s around 20 trillion times the speed of light, which according to the known laws of physics, is about 20 trillion times impossible. Somebody’s wrong by … well … an astonishingly colossal margin.

Could it be that the theory that has distant galaxies whizzing about at 20 trillion times the speed of light be wrong? Is that possible? It certainly conflicts with direct observation and established physical principles – of this universe. Yeah – that could the problem right there. Modern physics allows for the possibility of alternate realities – different universes that are similar to our own, yet differ in some critical way. For example, in another universe, this blog has quite a fan base. It’s also possible, that is some corner of the multiverse, there is a universe in which the sun and stars rotate around a stationary Earth. Yes – quite possibly in some other universe. In ours, however, those galaxies don’t revolve around little, old, but still VERY IMPORTANT, us.

Now, Bristol Palin is back, doing the talk show circuit with her new baby in tow. She’s still and unwed teen mother, and that’s nothing to praise or condemn. Teen pregnancy is certainly an important social issue. Bristol is speaking out as a teen mother about the importance of the GOP solution to teen pregnancy: abstinence.

Never mind the fact that, as public health and education policy, abstinence-only education is a demonstrable failure. Teens that participate in such programs are sexually active at about the same rates as teens who participate in sex education classes that also include information about condom use. The problems appear when you examine pregnancy and STD rates among teens in abstinence only programs. Many teens in these programs don’t abstain, and they don’t use condoms effectively either. This actually puts them at increased risk of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

Just like Bristol Palin, who gave birth on Dec 29, 2008 at the age of 18.

Regardless of the epic failure of abstinence-only education, I have to question the wisdom of selecting someone who rejected abstinence as the GOP Abstinence Ambassador. No – Bristol Palin isn’t the right person to tout the benefits of abstinence since she has no verified abstinence experience.

That would be equivalent to selecting this person as the GOP Fashion and Fitness Ambassador:

“How about their overall creepiness?”
HT To Matt

Nobody should be required to take a neutral stance on stupidity. Indeed – here at SmugBaldy, we’re vehemently anti-stupid, so this is the sort of thing that really irks me. I had previously written a short piece about how creationists were trying to worm their way into the hall of power in Texas, and expand the role of the Judeo-Christian creation story in science classes. Here’s a bit more about how politically charged things are becoming for science education in Texas.

BUSH: A clear lesson I learned in the museum was that outside forces that tend to divide people up inside their country are unbelievably counterproductive. In other words, people came from other countries — I guess you’d call them colonialists — and they pitted one group of people against another

Bush used this bit of logic to apparently defend his administration’s do-lessness with respect to the ongoing Darfur genocide, as well as an excuse for America’s lack of response to the Rawandan Genocide. If that doesn’t peg your irony meter, maybe this will: The WAR President just called American troops in Iraq a colonialist force, while admitting that their presence was “unbelievably counterproductive”.

Sounds like Bush is getting a bit liberal in his loafers, no?

You’re surrounded by Ghost Whisperers, Allison DuBuois, and freaky kids seeing dead people, so it’s only (super)natural to ask yourself, “Hey, could I be psychic?”

Take our little test and find out if you have a hidden psychic ability. Have any of these things ever happened to you?

1. You’ve lost your keys more than once, and every time you find them in the last place you look.
2. You have ever asked yourself, “Who could that be?”, or bother to look at Caller ID when the phone rings.
3. You suspect people are talking about you behind you back, but you don’t know who, nor what they’re saying.
4. You advertise your “Amazing Psychic Reading” business rather than calling your future customers before they call you.
5. You hear ghostly voices that command you to do horrible things to your coworkers with a teaspoon full of sugar and a crowbar, but an aluminum foil hat makes the voices shut the hell up.
6. You had a dream about the sun coming up and then it happened almost exactly as you dreamed it would.
7. You had a shiver run down your spine when you picked up the phone right before it rang. As it turns out, you pick up the phone a lot, and there’s often just a dial tone waiting on the other side.
8. You have ever been surprised by the ending of an episode of Law and Order. (For the more geriatric readers – if Murder She Wrote ever stumped you.)
9. You flipped a coin over and over and once got heads five times in a row.
10. You ever got less than 100% on a multiple choice test.
11. You think that if Sylvia Browne can do it, you can too, all the while forgetting that Sylvia is a fake.
12. You started out writing a “Top 10 List” and wound up with 12 items instead.

If you answer yes to any of the above, sorry, you’re a clod like the rest of us. You have no psychic ability at all. If you’re in this camp, you can proudly use this in your blog to display your normalcy.

If you answered yes to all of them, you’re just like Sylvia Browne: You still have no psychic ability, but are instead quite the freaky freaky weirdo. Here’s your badge:

The episode was aired five years ago.

In a TV series that wrapped up two years ago.

Why the wait, you ask? Obviously, it takes five years to get over the trauma of seeing Charlotte Ross’s butt. This is especially true if you’re an FCC censor, who are a particularly timid sub-species, most famous for their snowflake-delicate sensibilities, intense priggishness, and inexplicable belief in a warped legal doctrine that mature content warnings and V-Chips are not enough cover when someone’s butt is on the tube.

In other words, the FCC really loves ass, and they want ABC to pay over $1.4 million in fines for having shown some butt on their long dead TV show. ABC, for its part argued against the fine, on established biological fact that buttocks are neither sexual nor excretory organs. The FCC rejected the claim, saying instead that:

“Although ABC argues, without citing any authority, that the buttocks are not a sexual organ, we reject this argument, which runs counter to both case law and common sense.”

In this, the FCC unzips its briefs and eposes the flaccid and shriveled meat of their claim – that the human buttocks, or rather each individual buttock working in concert with the other, must constitute a single sexual organ. Their basis is not logic or fact, but rather case law and the Bush Administration brand of common sense. Interestingly, the FCC stipulated that while ABC may have received little or no condemnation from its legion of NYPD viewers, the commission was forced to act on the behalf of the untroubled viewers:

As a matter of clarification, while ABC may not have received many complaints about the program, the Commission received numerous complaints, including thousands of letters from members of various citizen advocacy groups.

What advocacy groups? Busybodies and other nosy neighbors like the 40,661 supporters of the ultraconservative American Family Association who never watched NYPD Blue, but nonetheless found this episode offensive. Or titillating.

See – it’s the people who never read a biology book that get all jealous and worked up over the thought of other people seeing the bits and pieces of the human body that they themselves find both appealing and repulsive. To the AFA, Twyla above waves hello.

And finally, the note that must not be lost in this symphony of the idiotic is the fact that this $1.4 million, if paid, only accounts for less than one tenth of a percent of the $150 billion price tag of the stimulus package. Since nobody knows where the rest of that money is going to come from, you can be assured that somehow, somewhere, there are more loyal Bushie looking into other dark holes for a proverbial golden nugget.

Just don’t bend over.

HT Poynter Online

A week ago, a hacker group calling themselves Anonymous posted their Declaration of War against the “Church” of Scientology, shortly after they were able to bring down one of the church’s websites. Then afterwards, Anonymous posted a second vid clarifying who they are, what their goals are, and that Scientologists should, “Be very wary of the 10th of February”, which most analysts believe refers to a planned DDOS attack against Scientologist websites.

Then, a rival group of hackers calling itself The Regime gained an administrator password to 711chan.org, a site popular with “Anonymous”, and brought their own site down.

The Church of Scientology responded to the Anonymous Declaration of War by sending an armada of space aliens commanded by Xenu himself to attempt to disrupt a Florida Graphic Design firm called the Anonymous Creative Group. Sadly for Xenu, Anonymous isn’t the Anonymous they were after, so the space aliens left with without a shot being fired. This threat, apparently, prompted Anonymous Creative group – not Anonymous Hacker group – to post the following Vid:

Oh – the humanity.