Some good news from Texas! Yeehaw!

The Institute for Creation Research — one of the biggest nonsense-peddlers in the 6000 year history of the world — was handed a nice defeat this week. That link to the National Center for Science Education (the good guys) has all the info you need, but to summarize: the ICR moved from California to Texas. In the previous state, for reasons beyond understanding, they were able to grant Master’s degrees in their graduate school. But Texas didn’t recognize their accreditation, so they filed to get it approved.

Not so surprisingly, scientists and educators rose in protest, and in 2008 the Texas Higher Education Coordination Board — the organization that grants accreditation — denied the ICR. The creationists appealed. In the meantime, they also tried to extend their ability to grant degrees temporarily while the lawsuit continued. What happened this week is that the extension as denied.

And I mean denied. Check out what the court said:

It appears that although the Court has twice required Plaintiff [the ICR] to re-plead and set forth a short and plain statement of the relief requested, Plaintiff is entirely unable to file a complaint which is not overly verbose, disjointed, incoherent, maundering, and full of irrelevant information.

That’s not surprising, as that’s the only kind of information the ICR is capable of producing. Not to mention wrong. See the Related Posts links below for lots more on the ICR’s recent follies.

As far as I can tell, this defeat means that the ICR is still seeking accreditation, but until and unless it does, it cannot grant degrees in Texas.

So what can be said about this? Oh, let me quote one of the pithiest and to-the-point minds of our day:

<Nelson Muntz>Haha!</Nelson Muntz>

Recently the UK paper The Guardian posted an article stating — without a shred of skepticism — that Noah’s Ark may have been round.

Sigh. OK, fine. But it gets better.

The Institute for Creation Research — given just their name, you might guess they haven’t found a scientific fact they couldn’t spin, fold, or mutilate… and you’d be right — claims the article is wrong.

Why?

Because a round ark makes no sense.

And…

BANG!

There goes my irony gland again. Luckily it grows back quickly, because in this line of work I seem to need it a lot.

[Update: Without any comment, I'll just add this link here. The connection should be obvious enough.]