The Smug Baldy Speaks

Someone posted a stupid comment yesterday in my post about comedian Sylvia Browne’s horrible accuracy for her 2006 predictions, and I wondered why it was that my claims were treated with such disdain, while Sylvia’s wrong predictions (like the one that Arnold Schwarzenegger would lose his re-election bid) were glossed over. Then it occurred […]

My wife gets kudos for this one: The Foundation for Critical Thinking has posted a list of critiques in the news, titled Police States or Critical Societies? Critical Thinking and the Forces Arrayed Against It. The list starts with a brief introduction that asserts:
There are two opposing social tendencies relevant to critical thinking, […]

In the good old days, the blind led the blind, and even so, snake-oil salesmen were relatively easy to spot. Now the snake-oil is well marketed by cool-looking websites like Overwhelming Evidence, where kids are encouraged to, “communicate their views on intelligent design and evolution”.
Indeed, OE puts the power in student’s […]

I love my local newspaper, the Mobile Press-Register. There’s a section of the paper that changes each day, one day it’s the Senior Living section, the next it might be Neighbors section. On Saturdays it becomes the Religion section (because we need to justify the salary of our local Religion editor) and on Sundays, […]

According to CBS News, a recent Gallup Survey shows that 68% of Republicans “Disbelieve Scientific Explanation of Creation”:
A Gallup poll released Monday said that while the country is about evenly split over whether the theory of evolution is true, Republicans disbelieve it by more than 2-to-1.
Republicans saying they don’t believe in evolution outnumbered those […]

In today’s issue of the eSkeptic, Stephen Asma reviews New Creation Museum that recently opened in Kentucky. If you recall, I wrote a bit about this museum a while back, and at the time I thought that the most interesting thing would be how they managed to deal with dinosaurs.
It turns out that explaining […]

Inventor Joseph Newman appeared in today’s Mobile Press-Register, demonstrating his amazing new “Alternative Energy Machine” at the Greater Gulf State Fairgrounds. Among claims that Newman makes are the following:

The device will rid the world of pollution and our dependence on oil
The government has tried to stop his invention because officials are controlled by payoffs from […]

This letter appeared in today’s Mobile Press-Register, and it raises a few questions about the science and politics behind the so-called global warming “debate”. I’ll present it in it’s entirety, and will then address some specific issues.

Global warming claim a ‘hoodwink’
Nancy Pelosi, in addition to being speaker of the House, has apparently become a […]

Please see the updated analysis at the bottom of this post for any corrections and notes.
Below is a list of predictions that famed psychic superhero Sylvia Browne made at the beginning of 2006. Let’s see how well she did.
Weather and Natural Disaster Predictions for 2006:
The weather this year will be worse than last year.
Miss. […]

On another blog, someone asked this about the Alabama school board :
Again, I ask, when did it get to be a good and acceptable thing in this country to be so fucking stupid?
My response:
You know, to me it’s tempting to fall into the trap of calling evolution deniers stupid. But it’ a trap, after […]