What I suspect is the most popular Intelligent Design site on the net (which is not saying much at all), uncommondescent.com, is getting a bit of a shake-up. Bill Dembski is stepping away from it, DaveScot is no longer a moderator, they’re adding paypal donation buttons…well, OK. I’m feeling ho-hum about it all. Once upon a time, I’d check in weekly to see what flavor of nonsense they were promoting, but increasingly I’ve found that I simply don’t care what the kooks were saying. It’s become a nice self-constructed ghetto for the irrelevant lunatics, with the virtue that I can easily ignore them. The changes will, I think, make them even more boring.

You can enter a drawing for — this is really going to thrill you all — a copy of Expelled! Please do enter, I’d like to see someone rational win it, so they can use it as a coaster or something.

I’ll try to find a better contest next time. Anyone know of any drawings for a handful of dung?

Here’s a fun account of a four-way debate on Intelligent Design in Fort Worth, Texas. Actually, it sounds like it was more of a two-way, with Lawrence Krauss, who is very, very good, speaking on the side of science, against David Berlinski, who is very, very supercilious (that word always comes up when Berlinski’s name is mentioned) speaking on the side of … well, it’s not clear. He doesn’t really have any pro-ID arguments, but mainly seems to be on the side of cashing checks from the Discovery Institute.

You know the debate went well when creationists have temper tantrums afterwards.

She’ll be back: watch this mob of blinkered Republicans gush over Sarah Palin, especially Pat Buchanan, who makes up ‘facts’ as he goes along. The Republicans are accused of being a party that celebrates ignorance, Buchanan is asked if he accepts evolution, and he blithely confirms the accusation by repeating the notorious query of Soapy Sam Wilberforce.

I’ve heard a few times now the idea that the Republican Party has become the Know-Nothing Party. It’s entirely true.

I just got some email that surprised me. It was from Kate Fisher, the marketing director of KKMS radio, a Christian talk radio station I’ve dealt with before. They had a request.

I am with AM980 KKMS, a Christian Teaching & Talk radio station in the Twin Cities. We would like to do a creation debate in mid-January. I am writing today to check on your interest level in participating in something like this and if you are, what your availability and honorarium is.

I didn’t have any problem making a decision on that, and immediately sent my reply.

You know, I had a debate on your station last January — in which I exposed the creationist on the other side as an ignorant fool. The response from your station was then to give the ignorant fool an hour to babble unopposed the next week. I’ll add that you also abruptly changed the topic of the debate an hour before I went on, at the request of my opponent, an unforgivable and sleazy tactic. I do not trust you at all, and I think you would abuse my participation to promote the lies of the creationist position.

So, no, you could not get me to play your game for any amount of money. I have no respect at all for “Christian Teaching & Talk radio”, thanks to your disreputable actions.

I am, however, impressed with the level of shameless gall you have to ask me again.

I was a little bit tempted to put one pinky to a corner of my mouth and say, “My honorarium will be…one MILLION dollars.” I resisted.

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Kate Fisher just replied.

My sincerest apologies as I wasn’t aware that this was what happened. I was simply given your name as a good debater and asked to contact you about doing an event with us.

Thanks for letting me know what happened.

Now I feel a little guilty about lighting into her. But only a little.

Poor little Ken Ham gets no respect. He sets up this fancy museum, he keeps pushing his silly ideas, and what happens? Smart people like Daniel Phelps, president of the Kentucky Paleontological Society, calls him a moron. Deservedly.

I don’t need to say much, though. The scathing excoriation of Ham has already been done:

You said that unicorns are real. You claim that the Beowulf story is evidence of human cohabitation with dinosaurs. You say that sometimes religious genocide is OK. You think that the government is training people to talk to aliens. You believe that evolution is a random process, a process of blind chance, which is just factually wrong. You target children because they can’t defend themselves and trust you (talk about a cowardly act). You believe if a 2-year old understands it, it must be cutting edge science. You believe that observation and measurement cannot trump “common sense.” You believe you do the type of science that you need faith to understand instead of, you know, understanding to understand. You believe…whatever the fuck this is. You employ the nanny-nanny boo-boo defense. Your ilk do not even try to publish outside of their little circle, and you set up a bogus journal to pretend that you were scholars, THEREBY AVOIDING THE DEBATE YOU CLAIM TO CRAVE. You stare at evolution, describe evolution, and then say, “It’s not evolution.”

And yet you wonder why someone with an education and responsibilities and a reputation would not talk to you? Despite this record of shame (I could have gone on and on just looking at my website alone), you have the balls to claim that you won something by [being] so catastrophically ignorant as to be not worth speaking to?

KEN, WE ARE TIRED OF TRYING TO TALK TO YOU. WE HAVE MOVED ON TO RIDICULE. THIS IS WHAT YOU DESERVE, YOU PIG-IGNORANT SLAVE.

I think Ham needs to put up another self-pitying post for each of the insults in there.

It’s true. While I was in Guelph, a sneaky-looking fellow handed me a disc, and told me it was just for me — and that it included the lie-correcting subtitles.

I appreciate it. I still haven’t bothered to watch it, but someday, maybe while I’m dying of some gruesome disease, I’ll want some horrible external pain to distract me, and then I’ll play it. Or maybe I’ll show it as a test of machismo — how long can I bear the stupidity before growling and mauling the machine into silence?

I knew there was a creationist connection to Halloween. Glenn Branch figured it out:

When the distinguished philosopher Philip Kitcher recently addressed the creationist movement in his Living With Darwin, he judiciously assessed creationism in its latest incarnation as historically respectable but currently bankrupt, and proposed to describe it as “dead” science. “In light of its shambling tenacity,” I replied, “‘zombie science’ is perhaps a preferable label.”

Read the rest for the real horror story — the zombies have taken over the Texas educational system.