I choose to view this as a positive development

Some of the politicians in the benighted state of Florida want to sell a new license plate.

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The Florida Legislature may create a new license plate that features the words ”I Believe” and the image of a cross in front of a church stained glass window. The measure is moving in both the House and Senate.

Rep. Ed Bullard, a Miami Democrat and a sponsor of the license plate, conceded that ”some people” may find something wrong with it, but he said it was a license plate for those people who may want something other than a plate that has a manatee or picture of the Challenger space shuttle.

Look at it this way: the stupid people in Florida are going to be conveniently self-labeling themselves with the Mark of the Buffoon.

(And seriously, this is OK with me. They’re going to be charging people an extra $25 for the privilege of sticking something so silly on their car; consider it another dumb tax.)

Not just the Mormons, of course

Here’s the story of a young Yemeni lady filing for divorce from her abusive husband.

“My father beat me and told me that I must marry this man, and if I did not, I would be raped and no law and no sheikh in this country would help me. I refused but I couldn’t stop the marriage,” Nojoud Nasser told the Yemen Times. “I asked and begged my mother, father, and aunt to help me to get divorced. They answered, ‘We can do nothing. If you want you can go to court by yourself.’ So this is what I have done,” she said.

She’s eight years old.

Why are little girls always the target?

Here, let me ruin your morning, just in case you hadn’t already heard the story of this raid on the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

A raid was finally triggered April 3, after a family violence shelter received a hushed phone call from a terrified 16-year-old girl saying her 50-year-old husband had beaten and raped her.

State troopers put into action the plan they had on the shelf to enter the compound, and 416 children, most of them girls, were swept into state custody on suspicions that they were being sexually and physically abused.

Doran said it was not until after the raid began that he learned that the sect was, in fact, marrying off underage girls at the compound and had a bed in its soaring limestone temple where the girls were required to immediately consummate their marriages. Also, investigators said a number of teenage girls there are pregnant.

I think “fundamentalist” has become a synonym for “misogynistic pedophile”.

Franklin Institute Awards

Look: it’s possibly the world’s most annoying, boring video. Turn the sound down, it’s a car driving in traffic with a siren howling.

Of course, if you look a little bit more closely, you might notice…nobody is driving! This is an exercise in robotics and computer vision, and it’s one of the achievements that is winning the Franklin Institute Awards this week. Any lucky Philadelphians might want to make it a point to visit the Franklin Institute (which was one of our favorite museums when we lived in Philly) this week — they have a slate of events coming up associated with handing out these prestigious awards. It’s not just robotics, either: miRNAs are recognized, as well as the structure and origin of nucleic acids, and the ocean’s effect on climate change, ultra cold physics, and artificial intelligence.

There’s something for everybody, so it’s a good time to think about stopping by.

Turn out the troops and give them hell

Scott Hatfield is asking for assistance: one of the old school Liars for Jesus, Don Patton, is going to be speaking at his public high school. This is disgraceful. Patton is a sleazy fraud, and to have him abuse public school facilities with his dishonesty is completely inappropriate; confine him to the churches, where nonstop lies are a regular feature.

Scott asks what can be done. Here’s my general prescription for dealing with these slimy hoaxsters:

  • Advertise. These guys feed on an ignorant audience; they get a lot of praise by packing auditoriums with the most stupid people they can find by farming the churches. Counter that by recruiting at colleges. Get people to volunteer to drive attendees to the venue. It doesn’t take much — getting a few people to raise their hands and ask informed, critical questions usually discombobulates them.

  • Research. Find out ahead of time what the subject of the talk will be, and study the actual science. Usually, you don’t have to have an advanced degree to counter the creationists — you will discover that their talks tend to be far more moronic than you would ever believe.

    One difficulty here is that creationists tend to be nonspecialists themselves. While Patton’s idee fixe is that the earth is young, he’s such a blithering boob that he’ll probably wander all over the place, and if you start to pin him down on radiometric dating, for instance, he’ll skitter over to biblical archaeology.

  • Find experts. Getting a skeptical audience is a good step, but finding an expert who can refute the guy on details is invaluable. I note, for instance, that the title of the talk at the high school is “The Record of the Fossils”. Get a paleontologist to show up! This has two useful effects: one, it will mean someone there can refute the creationist in detail; two, the expert will probably be so outraged at the putrid lies the kook is spreading about his discipline that you will have a lifelong ally.

  • BUY THIS BOOK: The Counter-Creationism Handbook(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Isaak. Buy a couple of copies. I guarantee you that the creationist will recite fallacies straight out of that text, and even if you aren’t comfortable with public speaking, you’ll be able to get up to the microphone at the Q&A and simply read the short refutations provided. Wave the book around and tell people where they can get a copy. You might even let your town bookstore know that you’re going to be plugging it so that they get copies in stock.

  • Be polite. Seriously, I get lots of credit at creationist talks simply because I don’t show up and throw tomatoes or gnaw on a baby’s arm while I’m there. Critique the claims of the speaker without compromise and in the strongest possible terms, but do so professionally. For instance, Patton is one of those frauds with a fake Ph.D. from an unaccredited institution — don’t touch that one, unless he starts slandering the qualifications of legitimate scientists first. Focus on his arguments. Criticize him, and the audience will tend to side with him; show that he isn’t as smart as he claims he is, that he doesn’t understand some basic idea that anyone in the audience can grasp, and they’ll begin to doubt him. They might want to believe in creationism, but if you can show him up as a poor representative for creationism and Christianity, they’ll turn on him.

  • Get an evolution-friendly blogger on your side. You know, one who will tell all his readers in the Fresno area to turn out with blood in their eye. Maybe you can also advertise a pre-talk session at a local bar where the sensible evolutionists can meet up, get to know each other, talk about their expertise, and coordinate a little bit.

Rarely, you can go over the creationist’s head and complain to whoever is providing the venue and get them to back out — that might be a possibility here, since it is a little shocking that a public school is hosting the event (it’s after hours, though, and they may be leasing the auditorium, which makes it more difficult to block). I don’t generally favor that, though: let the enemy occupy a position, and then send in the scientific troops to attack it, I say. In some ways it actually makes your position stronger that they are using secular facilities to promote religious nonsense — the church-based audience is on unfamiliar ground.