I have to say, I wouldn’t nor­mally link to the Tel­graph, but this is just too good (and sur­pris­ingly on-​​the-​​ball for the Tory­graph.) I mean, obvi­ously, it doesn’t qual­ify as news per-​​se, but it’s good to see the concept is sink­ing in.

… or er something.

Sud­denly I feel a lot bet­ter about myself again. I mean, I might have under­es­tim­ated the diversity of an import­ant order of mam­mals, but at least I can tell the dif­fer­ence between a cat and an orange. This guy is either stu­pid enough that he can’t or stu­pid enough to think sci­ent­ists can’t. I’m not sure which would be worse.

In any case, PZ says everything that needs to be said.

A couple of years ago, dur­ing the Kitz­miller vs Dover area School Dis­trict case, I was pretty shocked by the beha­viour of some mem­bers of the board that had tried to force ID into the sci­ence classroom. I’m start­ing to won­der if that was a spe­cial case, or if the whole pur­pose of school boards is to intro­duce totally off-​​the-​​wall-​​loopy rules.

Take this case for example. This girl, Megan Coulter, has been given deten­tion, not once, but twice, for… wait for it … hug­ging her friends. Yeah, that’s it. She wasn’t in class or any­thing, just hug­ging her friends good­bye at the end of the school day. Unfor­tu­nately for her, the school has a rule against “pub­lic dis­plays of affec­tion,” because — and this is from the stu­dents hand­book — “It is in poor taste, reflects poor judg­ment, and brings dis­credit to the school and to the per­sons involved.”

That’s right. dis­play­ing affec­tion towards your friends shows poor taste and brings dis­credit to you. What the hell planet are these people from? It reads like some­thing from the fifties.

The UK gov­ern­ment has issued guidelines to sci­ence teach­ers, detail­ing what they should teach about ID and other forms of cre­ation­ism. The answer, thank­fully, is: “pretty much noth­ing.” Well, except pos­sibly to point out that it’s not sci­ence. Now all we need them to do is get rid of the faith schools, and we’ll be able to say we’re giv­ing (all) our kids a good sci­ence education.

Repor­ted in The Guard­ian, and linked from The Panda’s Thumb.

The inter­webs are just full of stor­ies that would be funny if they weren’t depress­ing at the moment. It’s not quite as extreme as claim­ing that con­doms give you AIDS, but this theft of a Kindergarden’s pet rab­bit does fit the bill. Not just because some poor rab­bit has just had it’s qual­ity (or dur­a­tion) of life sig­ni­fic­antly reduced, but because of what it says about the intel­li­gence of some mem­bers our species.

Nor­mally, I’d laugh at that degree of idiocy, but right now, when it’s applied harm­fully against a defence­less rab­bit and a group of preschool­ers, it just doesn’t seem that funny. Not even five year old Zion’s plaint­ive lolcat-​​ism raised a smile.

Linked via Deni­al­ism.