Teach the (Other) Controversy!
The theory of external delivery holds that certain features of how Christmas presents are delivered each year are best explained by an external source, not an internal source such as your parents.
I Don’t Get Creationist Humor
Over at the “playground” section of the Expelled site, there’s a video of a can-can where the dancers’ heads have been replaced by those of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Eugenie Scott, Sam Harris, and Charles Darwin. This was made with a tool at JibJab that allows you to replace people’s heads in videos they provide.
As humor goes, IMHO it’s on a par with Mad-libs, so I’m somewhat surprised to see it on the website of a serious creationist movie like Expelled. Unless, of course, it’s being marketed to people who think “Oh yeah?! Well you’re French!” is a biting intellectual retort.
I’d HT Chez Dembski, except that that post seems to have been removed (s’okay, it was basically just a link to this “review”). Oh, and just to give you an idea of where this video ranks in Dembski’s opinion, this video was removed, but “The Jude Jones School of Law is still up (albeit sans fart noises).
Phillip Johnson on “Judgment Day”
On Monday, Phillip Johnson appeared on the ID the Future podcast, and talked about being interviewed for
Judgment Day, the Nova episode about Intelligent Design and the Dover trial.
He said that while the producer and crew were pleasant enough, but expressed concern that the interview would be mangled in editing, possibly to make it sound as if he were saying something he didn’t mean.
So I looked him up and asked him. He replied:
I didn’t spot any misquotation, but my interview was edited almost down to nothing (not by the team that interviewed me). I guess that is good. If I had said some silly things that the senior staff at WGBH could have used to discredit ID, those moments would have been shown on the program. If I could have picked the parts of the interview to be broadcast, I could have added a little more balance to a one-sided program.
(posted with permission.)
So no obvious quote-mining or distortion. I’ll be curious to see how this compares to PZ Myers’s interview for Crossroads Win Ben Stein’s Scorn Expelled.
Carnival of the Dembski
Bill “The Isaac Newton of Information Science” Dembski gave a talk at Oklahoma University in Norman, entitled “Why Atheism is no Longer Intellectually Fulfilling: The Challenge of Intelligent Design to Unintelligent Evolution”. But it appears that instead of the usual audience bussed in from local churches, the talk was attended by a lot of OU faculty and students. From all accounts, he gave a pretty standard presentation, but was ripped to shreds in the Q&A session.
Start by reading Golfvixen’s liveblogging of the talk. Then proceed to ERV’s account (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), and/or this summary at Further Thoughts (or better yet, this
roundup of coverage of the event[1]).
And finally, a Christian who didn’t manage to get into the talk, but describes the Q& A and the goings-on outside.
Oh, and I would have liked to link to Dembski’s own account of how the evening went, but I can’t find one.
[1] Yes, he links here. When two carnivals link to each other, does it form a merry-go-round?
(Updated Sep. 21 to add another link to Further Thoughts.)
Crippling Brains for Jesus
Does anyone need more proof that Ron McLeroy, the newly-appointed Texas State Board of Education Chairman, is a superstitious asshat who’s out to cripple the state’s education system? Here’s what he told his church in 2005:
“Whether you’re a progressive creationist, recent creationist, young-Earth, old-Earth, it’s all in the tent of intelligent design,” McLeroy said. “And intelligent design here at Grace Bible Church is actually a smaller tent than you would have in the intelligent design movement as a whole, because we are all Biblical literalists…. So because it’s a bigger tent, just don’t waste our time arguing with each other about…all of the side issues.”
“Modern science today,” McLeroy complained, “is totally based on naturalism,” thus “it is the naturalistic base that is [our] target.”
What’s frightening is that this assclown is in charge of education in Texas. And as bad as that is, the effect of his militant ignorance won’t be confined to one state: Texas is the second-largest market for school textbooks (after California). This means that publishers will tone down the science in their books if they think it’ll make them more likely to sell in Texas.
Maybe we need a new rule: that someone in charge of X must not be ideologically committed to destroying X.
(HT Texas Observer → Texas Freedom Network → Americans United)
I Think I’m Fisked in Japanese, I Really Think So
I ran across this article about my FABNAQ about Intelligent Design. Unfortunately, it’s in Japanese, which I don’t speak, and the Babelfish and Google translations are bad enough that I can’t even tell whether I’m being fisked or praised.
Are there any nipponophones in the audience who can take a look and give me a sense of what’s going on?
Criminally Incompetent Teachers
Over at Kent Hovind’s Whinery, I ran across this comment:
I am a high school science teacher. So far I have been able to teach creation science a couple years without being stopped by administration. I spend as much time if not more teaching creation science as I do going thru the textbook they make me use. Of course, I skip all the chapters with evolution. I use Dr. Hovind’s seminar notebook and his book Are You Being Brainwashed. In a couple weeks I will be going at it again. I pray I can continue to do the same as I have been.
Hopefully, this guy is just lying, and has made the whole thing up. Because if not, that means he’s not just failing to teach the kids science, he’s teaching them antiscience, filling their heads with nonsense that has to be unlearned before they can be properly taught. He’s skipping important parts of the curriculum. He’s bringing in “teaching” materials by a wackjob so far out there that even other young-earth creationists have asked him to stop. And if this has really been going on for years, we have to consider the possibility that the school administration knows about his activities, but is turning a blind eye to them.
How would one go about subpoenaing cseblogs.com’s httpd logs to see where this clown posted from, to see whether any of it is true?
Some ID Research Projects
TR Gregory at Genomicron has a list of ten research projects for ID proponents, all having to do with non-coding DNA. An excellent list, and any ID researcher should jump on it, if only to demonstrate that ID is science.
(HT Freshbrainz)
Kent Hovind Tribute
Definitely NSFW. And about as subtle as a hammer to the ‘nads.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEGEl4uHQAU]
(HT PZ)
(Update: Bonus video. The Upright Citizens Brigade have filmed a live-action version of Jack Chick’s classic tract, Big Daddy.)
Jo Hovind Gets Time
The Pensacola News Journal has the news about Jo Hovind’s sentencing:
Jo Hovind, the wife of creationist theme-park owner Kent Hovind, stood solemnly beside her attorney Friday as U.S. District Judge Casey Rodgers handed down a sentence of one year and one day in federal prison.
Jo Hovind, 51, also was ordered to pay $8,000 in fines and three years supervision when she is released from prison.
Which I guess brings closure to the Hovind saga. Now, when are we going to see similar indictments against Ken Ham, Pat Robertson, etc?