The Smug Baldy Speaks

The Guardian reported the interesting story of self-proclaimed psychic, Patricia Putt, and her attempt to take home 1 million dollars from the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF). While many “psychics” have tried to take home the top prize, which would be a scientific stamp of approval to their claims of esp or other super powers, [...]

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to examine critical thinking and I’d like to get your input as well. For starters, I’ll just take on the term “Critical Thinking” itself. In later posts, I’ll cover how critical thinking is related to science and effective argumentation.

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. [...]

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 Pepperdine [...]

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 [...]

So the Heartland Institute’s Conference on Climate Change has come and gone, and they’re touting it as a “Smashing Success”, and saying: The alarmists in the global warming debate have had their say–over and over again, in every newspaper in the country practically every day and in countless news reports and documentary films. They have [...]

Poise. Style. Polish. Class. Selflessness. Sacrifice. Grace. Tactfulness. Decency. Humility. Hillary Clinton? Got you, didn’t I. These aren’t the adjectives that immediately come to mind when I think of Hillary Clinton, and chances are they aren’t the first that pop into your head either. These are, however, some of the words that we’d all be [...]

This video is priceless. Here we have an Atheist and a True Believer having a calm, rational discussion about belief, knowledge, epistemology, and the existence of God. Of course, it’s rational up to the point at which the caller cannot contain his righteous fury.

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 on [...]