We who live in the Portland, OR, great city of the United Places of the 'Merica, have little to brag about, but what little we do have, like a cow in the Great Depression, we milk for everything we can, and then we sell the rest to glue factories, dog food companies, and school cafeterias.

We're known for being uppity about trees getting chopped down. Your trees, our trees - it doesn't matter - we just don't like it when you get all chop-chop on the majestic forest-y towers of nature.

We're known for our superhuman smugness. It enables us to get upset at you for renting a tree in twain, though all the while we're clear-cutting something to make room for a new hybrid car factory. Then we drive our hybrid cars at you. Not near you, not around you, not over you - at you. Nothing says I'm-better-than-you than strapping yourself into something that gets slightly less bad gas-mileage than the lightweight econobox being driven by someone who didn't have the tens of thousands of dollars lying around needed to purchase the ultimate license of self-righteousness.

We're also known for having, during Portland's developmental years, moved all the minorities (in this town, that means roughly a dozen people) into the swampland just north of the city proper.

In that last case, by "known for having," what I meant was, "You've never, ever heard about this, and as long as we continue to make smugness the state bird, you never will. Except for here when Rory opened his big mouth. We already hated him, and now we have enough cause to ride our bicycles out to his home in the middle of the night to poke him with pitchforks (made from 100% post-consumer recycled plastic) until he repents. After that, we'll tie him up behind someone's eco-friendly vehicle (probably a Segway) and drag him around town, picketing and protesting him the whole way because of the way his body parts are littering the street and destroying the natural environment. We knew he was evil when we found out he got a job with Microsoft - it's time to pay the piper. And wouldn't you know it - the piper's having a sale..."

These attractions aside, we have one (1) thing for which we deserve to be smug as all get out:

Powell's Books

It's famous. Maybe not as famous as that chipmunk or whatever it was that made the hilarious face on YouTube while this funny music made it look like the hamster or whatever it was hiccupped and scared its panda baby while lighting its own flatulence - nothing is that famous - but still pretty famous, at least based on the meatspace variety of celebrity where you can become reasonably well known without being a gassy rodent.

As far as bookstores go, there's nothing like it. If you say otherwise, and if you can prove it, Portland will have you assassinated, so best shut up, sit down, and keep on reading. Nobody likes a whistle-blower. Unless they're dead. A dead whistle-blower is an Ok whistle-blower. So don't try to be a hero. Not today.

I have set foot in every part of the globe that is the US, Canada, Mexico, the UK, Fiji, or continental Europe. Taking into account the total area in which I've actually traveled, I figure only 99.9% of the world is yet virgin to my boots. I've seen the way they do surveys - the opinions of an entire nation can supposedly be divined from phone conversations with .000001% of a population during dinner time. Doesn't seem like much of a stretch to say that, based on my representative treks, I can authoritatively comment on the entire planet. It's all just McDonald's and Starbucks now anyway.

Considering my status as a man of the world (which I proved in the last paragraph), I feel confident that I can state this fact and delete any comments of yours that contradict me:

Powell's Books is the largest bookstore in the universe. It might be the largest store of any kind. You can see it from outer-space. Powell's Books covers 9/10ths of the Earth's surface and 10/10ths of the moon's. It's that big.

A view from the street of one of Powell's many spacious bathrooms

I've lived in other cities, and they were all stupid. The people were different from the people I'm used to hating. It takes a lot of effort to get to know a city well enough to be able to stereotype its inhabitants. I like it right here, thankyouverymuch.

These other cities had nothing at all like Powell's. There are these stupid bookstores littered across Mother Gaia that have stupid books in them and stupid people who work there and, to get the stupid book you want, you have to order it. If I wanted to order a book, I'd have picked up a menu. Yeah! ZING!

You say you don't have shelf space for the rare out-of-print edition of "Handguns for Dummies" (with blood-resistant plastic coating) I want? Well, sir, then I say you don't have yourself a customer! Yeah! ZING!

That's the beauty of Powell's. Unlike other stores, there's infinite shelf space. Every book ever made ever is in that store. With Powell's, everything I've never wanted is right there.

"Hello, Powell's, employee," I might say, "Could you perchance direct me to a book on communist tomato stockpiling?"

"'New Age'," says the employee, "Walk three miles over that way [pointing] and turn left at our life-size recreation of Mount Rushmore. Oh, and did you want books on Marxist tomato stockpiling, or Maoist tomato stockpiling?"

"Neither," I'd say.

"We have that, too," would say he.

"Bless."

The other day, I visited the science wing of Powell's. I like to educate myself on things that make me sound smart at parties.

"Hey, Cindy," says some scrumptious party-goer to another, "Did you see that hot guy over there? Not only is he really hot, but, aside from being hot, he also knows smart things. He was telling me about something called 'electricity' and I thought it was witchcraft, but he's so hot."

"Really? I saw him earlier and he's SO hot, but I didn't know he was smart, too. Yum-yum."

"I saw him first."

"Back off, bitch."

While looking for one of these smarty science books, I accidentally found something called "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science" that was written by some jackass science fraud named Tom Bethell. I would've missed the book, but I noticed a biggish black thing on the shelf. It took me a minute, but I figured out that it was a mini black-hole, probably created when the stupidity of the book in question reached critical density and collapsed in on itself, capturing nearby light and putting all the legitimate knowledge on the shelf at risk.

If you like stupid, you'll love Tom Bethell

Being a General in the Army of Genius, I was able to reach in, grab the book, and remove it from the shelf before it damaged anything else. It scalded my hands (or my hands scalded it - hard to say), but, nevertheless, I wrapped it in my coat, ran for the cashier line, ran past the cashier line and right out the exit. Two security guards followed me out, yelling at me, telling me to stop. Normally, when stealing something, I'm very cooperative, but this thing was bigger than me - bigger than those security guards. This was about saving others from Tom Bethell's glossy paperback lobotomy. I shouldn't have done it, but I turned around, pulled back my coat, and flashed the book at the guards. They came to a dead halt, fell over, and their eyes glazed as they started mumbling something like, "AIDS is a sham... AIDS is a lie... AIDS is an elaborate hoax perpetrated by black commie lesbian homosexual cross-dressing atheists..."

There was nothing I could do. They must have accidentally seen some of the words on the cover of the book when I used it on them. Unprepared, few people could withstand such an assault on the intellect. I only survived because I have so much brain to spare that a few cells 'sploded by Tom Bethell's concentrated stupidity aren't enough to make a difference. I think. Hang on.

Ok...

Wait...

Fine. I'm fine. Just wanted to check to see if I could still calculate pi out to the trillionth digit in my head in the same amount of time it would take Tom Bethell to verbalize the totality of his scientific knowledge. That's about zero (0) seconds. Everything checks out. Cool.

Back to the book.

Having saved the world from the copy of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science" I got at Powell's, I decided to read it. Given Tom's involvement with The Discovery Institute and The American Spectator, both so insanely conservative and counter to the advancement of the human race that they should even shame most "normal" Christians, it's not easy to ignore his writing. In fact, if you're a Christian, and if you're "progressive" enough to get that modern Christians, when acting with compassion the way Christ did, can do a hell of a lot of good for the world, you should consider it your duty to educate yourself about how certain people are making your religion look very, very bad. I'm not sure that the Christ who fed the poor and cured the sick would be too happy with the way a small, but noisy, group is using his name to strive for just the opposite.

Sure, The Discovery Institute presents itself as an organization seeking to better stuff 'n things with science 'n stuff, but unless you're as talented at self-deception as the guys who run it are, it doesn't take long to see it's just religion with faux-scientific window dressing. In that, it's an insult to science and religion.

No honest scientist could possibly accept The Discovery Institute as having anything at all to do with real science, and Christians ought to be miffed by their promotion of things like Intelligent Design - crap theories wrapping religious ideas in bad science that undermine one of the foundations of Christianity: faith. The Discovery Institute isn't supporting science with its promotion of Intelligent Design, and it isn't serving Christianity by implying that Genesis needs a scientific explanation. If anything, it makes evolution look more credible by validating it with an elaborate attack in the form of ID. Nobody except these namby-pamby intellectually anemic spreaders of the butter of ignorance on the toast of humanity could possibly gain anything here.

The problem is that there are plenty who have something to lose. One of the most famous examples is the Kansas State Board of Education embarrassment. If you missed it, a squad of asstards tried to get Intelligent Design into the schoolbooks (President Bush wouldn't have minded either - as quoted on page 199 of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science": "Both sides ought to be properly taught so people can understand what the debate is about."). I don't know exactly what he meant, as I'm not sure he "understood what the debate is about."

Intelligent Design should be taught, I think, and it has been taught for years - in philosophy classes. The most famous example is from William Paley, the guy who brought us the watchmaker analogy. Overly simplified to fit in the space of this paragraph, the watchmaker analogy is the idea that, should you happen to come across a watch, its various qualities suggest that it was designed and created by someone - someone intelligent - an intelligent designer, and that we can view life in the same way. It's fuel for navel-gazing, but ideas about watches don't, without a lot of forceful grunting, work for explaining what evolution does so well. In other words, Intelligent Design, if it's taught in schools, belongs in philosophy classes, but has no place in science classes. If taught in biology, unless it's taught as an example of faulty scientific thinking, can only take up time that could otherwise be used to, I don't know, teach kids something that isn't totally retarded.

Still... as the title of the post suggests, people like Tom Bethell may actually be geniuses.

In reading his book, it's obvious he's done his research. He quotes and refers to major evolutionist works and authors. He often quotes them out of context, frames them as morons, and tampers with their words in other ways, but he has studied this stuff. He's not stupid. I hate to say it, but he's just not. That's probably the scariest thing about it.

After studying evolution, reviewing the evidence, engaging in debates, writing papers, writing books, and basically living his life around ideas, this guy has still managed to present his case in a way that gives you the impression he actually believes what he's saying. If this is part of some greater agenda that'll somehow make him and his cronies a bunch of money, I'm actually all right with it. They'd be no different from proponents of Complimentary and Alternative Medicine or the guys who peddle all the "As Seen on TV" garbage to poor people who're up in the middle of the night because they don't have jobs to go to the next day and have a little room to spare on their credit cards.

If, however, this guy truly buys his own arguments, then he's a genius. If your standard Christian rejects evolution based on nothing more than a lifelong association with the religion and the Bible, I actually get it. If you haven't made an effort to learn about evolution from practitioners of "good" science, if you have no reason to believe it, and if you think believing it would go against your faith, then discounting evolution isn't such a crazy idea. But if you, like Tom Bethell, have immersed yourself in, researched, and written about evolution, and if you've done so to the extent that you've managed to get people to give you money to do it, you've encountered the evidence, and you've somehow defeated it in your head. The evidence in favor of evolution is so strong that going against it, when you're immersed in it, is like trying to swim upstream with all your limbs cut off, pulling yourself along the bottom using only your tongue.

There are a few widespread gross misunderstandings of science out there. The one I encounter most often is the belief that we only use 10% of our brains. That's worthy of its own post. There's potential for crossover in respect to Bethell's thinkmeat, but, again, in its own post.

One misunderstanding you'll encounter almost as often is a belief that, when scientists say evolution is a "theory", they mean to say that it's a loosely assembled collection of vague notions. We hear it on TV and in movies all the time in phrases like, "Theoretically speaking..." and "...but it's just a theory" that imply a speculative stance rather than one of certainty.

When used in science, the word "theory" is just a smidge away from "fact". Some people are comfortable calling evolution a fact, but the truth is that, abundant as the evidence is, we don't have, for example, a PBS documentary showing macroevolution (the kind of evolution that produces animals like you 'n me) taking place with time-lapse photography. We can't. Humans have been around in their current form for a long time - as much as 200,000 years. We've only had PBS for a small portion of that time. If direct observation of macroevolution is a criterion of proof, we're a little screwed. If that PBS special is the line between theory and fact, I'm all right with that. Plus, microevolution - evolution on the scale of things that are alive and that comfortably exist in populations of bajillions inside your nose - isn't such a mystery. It's not like we're entirely unable to directly observe some form of evolution.

Like any analogy, this one ultimately sucks, but: We don't have to travel to another star to determine its composition. We didn't have to be around a few billion years ago when our sun was formed to be able to determine its approximate age.

We also don't have to observe evolution as it happens to be able to show beyond doubt that it's real. We sentence people to death and invade countries based on evidence that isn't remotely as conclusive as that for evolution.

It's amazing that people deny that the evidence for evolution is insufficient, yet they're fine with the idea that there's an Intelligent Designer. If proof of evolution is incomplete, proof of a designer is non-existent. It's a fantastical guess.

For me, the easiest thing to do is accept evolution as fact-ish. I don't have the time or energy to construct the mental scaffolding necessary to support "scientific creationism".

Tom Bethell clearly has more time on his hands, and that's saying a lot since I'm unemployed.

If he really believes what he's putting out, his creative abilities and his intellectual capacity to make his fantasies real are the mark of genius.

But that doesn't make him not a poo-face.