Aren’t we all more than a little tired of Michael Behe?

He keeps saying the same ol’ debunked crap over and over again, and nowadays when a paper comes out that shows he was completely wrong about something, he spins it into a triumphant vindication for his sycophantic fans, who are all, apparently, abysmally innumerate. The hobby horse he’s been riding for the past few years is the evolution of chloroquine resistance in the malaria parasite: he claims it is mathematically impossible. And that’s the secret of his success: he dazzles creationists with bad math. Really bad math. The kind of math creationists have been fallaciously using for decades.

Ken Miller has a tidy new article exposing Behe’s ridiculous rationalizations.

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Troll logic

Alanah Pierce has been responding to trolls who harass her with threats, abuse, and sexual slurs in what I would have thought was an effective way: she retweets their comments to their mothers. Does your mother know what you’re saying with that mouth?

I thought it was brilliant. But I’ve never understood the mind of a troll, and now some of these boys, with their mothers’ approval, are suing her for defamation. That’s nuts — the only defamation is exposing their own public words to another member of the public. But look how they rationalize it:

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Quiet morning

I’m about to go off to the local clinic for a visit with a specialist, who’s going to figure out all the things wrong with me. It could take days, weeks, or months, who knows…but if I don’t make it back this afternoon, just figure I gave up and have donated my body to science.


That went unexpectedly well. I’m in good shape, the infection that was making me miserable is clearing up, I’m not getting shipped off to the body farm just yet.

“some girls would like to be entomologists too”

Abdo Publishing has a line of children’s science books, including one titled “Bugs”, which a seven year old girl, Parker Dains, read with enthusiasm. And then she discovered that the series was called “the Biggest, Baddest Books for Boys. So she wrote to the publisher, as uppity young ladies are wont to do.

So she wrote to Abdo, telling the publisher that “I really enjoyed the section on Glow in the Dark bugs and the quizzes at the end”, but that “when I saw the back cover title, it said ‘Biggest Baddest Books for Boys’ and it made me very unhappy. It made me very sad because there’s no such thing as a boy book. You should change from ‘Biggest, Baddest Books for Boys’ into ‘Biggest, Baddest Books for Boys and Girls’ because some girls would like to be entomologists too.”

It’s unbelievable what the publisher did next.

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Let’s point and laugh at the libertarian!

They really are the dumbest people in America, and most obnoxious, too. Here’s an example: police in Texas set up a DUI checkpoint, where cars were stopped and drivers quickly checked to make sure they weren’t driving with a blood alcohol over the legal limit. That’s a nuisance, I’m sure, but a minor inconvenience compared to sharing the road with drunk drivers.

Kory Watkins, a Texas libertarian and open carry proponent (so you already know he’s an idiot) objected to the police doing this job, so he was protesting at the check point, and apparently also somehow warning drivers approaching the check point so any drunkards could avoid it (a truly civic-minded fellow), when irony struck.

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