Thoughts in a Haystack

Jeffrey Shallit at Recursivity is having fun with Tom Bethell (already badly mauled by John Derbyshire at The American Spectator) and, thereafter, with Bethell's knight in shining armor, Michael Egnor (about the very definition of "with friends like these ... "), who rode with more chutzpah than competence to Bethell's defense. Shallit needs no help from me but I thought I'd drop a bit more information about Bethell on anyone who may not be old enough to know how long he has been flogging the moribund Equidae that is creationism.

Bethell has been at this for a while. Also, besides being a candidate for for inclusion as one of the oldest living members of Glenn Morton's Longest Running Falsehood in Creationism club (Bethell: "Darwin's theory, I believe, is on the verge of collapse ... ", 1976; "The Party of Darwin is failing, and the party leaders are beginning to get very angry about it", 2007), he is an experienced quote miner.

Apparently, Bethell's motto runs something like: "31 years of being wrong is just not enough."