The New Zealand department of conservation maintains a network of huts in the backcountry — these are little shelters with a radio for emergency calls and a mattress so hikers can wait out a spell of bad weather. It’s all very sensible. Until the evangelicals discovered them. Now there’s a missionary campaign to put a bible in every one of them, too, since, as the founder of this plan says, “I realised then this was a captive audience.”

I think I’m going to have to move to New Zealand now. The response by hikers to this effort is classic pragmatism. They think it is a fine idea.

“Given the option of a ropey old Reader’s Digest I would rather use a page from a Bible to start a fire.”

Notice how polite he was to avoid mentioning the other use in which the tissue-thin pages of the bible are superior to the thick glossy sheets of Reader’s Digest.

Oh, man, this gets so much wrong. Sentient life did not evolve 600 million years ago; that was roughly the time that true multicellularity arose. Unless you consider something spongelike to be sentient, it doesn’t work.

Intelligent life did not first evolve 2.5 million years ago. Animal intelligence is something that has to be measured on a continuum. Molluscs are intelligent. It’s just not the same kind or degree of intelligence that tool-using humans have.

Intelligent life hasn’t evolved in Texas yet.

It’s very short. It only has to cover 6000 years to describe all of creation.

Since the wingnuts and creationists are busily pushing a bogus version of intellectual responsibility that they have labeled “academic freedom”, which is really an excuse to peddle any old nonsense to children, some wag is now promoting Academic Free-For-All Day.

Ever since that sad debacle known as the “Enlightenment”, a cult of knowledge-and-learning has insisted that any investigation be based on what has been learned in the past. How limiting! If we can only free our minds from the yoke of wisdom, the possibilities become endless. Also, there is way too much hero worship these days. Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, blah, blah, blah. They are just a bunch of old dead white guys. Why stand on the shoulders of giants when we can peer from between their ankles?

On Academic Free-for-All day, everyone can have it their way. Don’t worry if 99.9% of the experts on some subject agree on one conclusion about the facts — if your ‘gut’ says differently, then go for it! No matter how wacky the idea is, you can usually find a handful of cranks with Ph.D.s to back you up!

They also have a t-shirt contest, always the hallmark of great ideas.

Ann Coulter has been pestering me a lot, lately. Half the right-wing email I get seems to consist of that thick-skulled harpy howling insanely about Al Franken — she seems genuinely staggered by the possibility that us left-wing moonbats actually fought to get him elected.

I’m a bit dismayed to learn that she is Roy Zimmerman’s girlfriend.

One of my students said I had to show you this, because it’s exactly like one of my lectures.