The Smug Baldy Speaks

In my ongoing series about how local non-scientists are attempting to make scientific appeals to include intelligent design in public science classrooms in Alabama, I bring you this tidbit that appeared in yesterday’s Mobile Press Register. In letter titled, “Science not beyond error” a minister from a local Church of Christ argued:
Herein lies […]

Here’s some more for our Republican War on Science file. Or should that be - Idiocy in high places file? Either way, LA Govenor Bobby Jindal demonstrated yesterday that he has no grasp whatsoever of the issues surrounding the establishment of religious dogma under the heading of “Intelligent Design” in our science classes.

Here […]

In a recent opinion piece in our local paper, the author announced support for something he oxymoronically called “non-religious” intelligent design (or ID), and went further to claim that this version of ID was more scientific than its predecessor since it made no claim as to the identity of the mysterious universal designer. The […]

There are fewer controversies in science that get people more worked up than the battle between creationists and scientists over the Theory of Evolution. On the whole, this tug of war typically pits faith against scientific rigor and observable data. Recently, in my home state of Alabama, there have been calls to inject […]

I made this response on Kevin Murrell’s blog after he made the following vacuous claim:

In the movie Expelled, Ben Stein gives a compelling argument for Intelligent Design.

Having not seen the film yet, I can’t really comment on how compelling his argument actually was, but I suspect that it wasn’t a compelling scientific argument. If […]

I saw this comment on a religious blog, and thought I’d give it some more room here. This was made in response to a favorable review of Ben Stein’s movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed:
ID isn’t really scientific and its detractors are correct to say so. However, evolution is completely neutered by LOGIC, which needs […]

In today’s eSkeptic there are not one, but two responses to Ben Stein’s new anti-evolution film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. In the first response, Ben Stein’s Blunder, Michael Shermer recounts his own strange interview for the film, as well as several fabrications, including the one at the film’s opening in which Stein lectures at […]

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, […]

Just when you thought that the battle for America’s soul was won, and the forces of lunacy and idiocy had retreated to the fetid holes from which they sprang, we find that Texas will be the new battleground for creationists bent on the destruction of rational thought in science education. In an editorial today […]

With every presidential candidate shifting into total balls-out (or labia-out, as the case may be) pander-or-perish mode, I think it’s important to cut through the inane hype where possible, and get at their positions on issues that matter to me. One such issue is education. While the uneducated and undereducated aren’t necessarily […]