The Smug Baldy Speaks

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 […]

For better than 30 years, the Republican party has consistently misused and abused science and scientific knowledge for the purpose of advancing the social agenda of party conservatives, and promoting the economic agenda of its large corporate supporters. That’s not to say that Democrats have not also abused science as well, but the Republicans […]

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, […]

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 […]

Many news sources are reporting that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) latest report makes a strong statement that human activity is “very likely” responsible for global warming. For example, the BBC reported today that:
Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, said: “It is extremely encouraging in that the science has moved on 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 the Skeptic forum, Robbynne asked:
Does anyone happen to know if there is a website anywhere that documents her [Self-Proclaimed Psychic, Sylvia Browne’s] hits and misses? I’d love to see what type of an average she gets (I suspect random guessing produces a higher average IMHO). I tried googling it, but I didn’t […]

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 […]