stcynic
Posts by this author
September 26, 2004
I got to spend yesterday with one of my longtime readers, Dan Ray, a law professor from my home state. We went to the Michigan-Iowa football game, had a nice meal and many hours of interesting conversation. One of the things we talked about was how this blog has sort of organically turned into a…
September 26, 2004
There's nothing more annoying than finding a really good Idiot of the Month nominee, putting it up, and then finding someone a day or two later who makes the first nominee sound like Mortimer Adler by comparison (okay, that's an exaggeration. There is something more annoying than that. Need I…
September 24, 2004
Via Kevin Drum:
Look at this map from the US State Department, posted in November 2001. It shows in red every country in which Al Qaeda had been known to operate. It even includes the United States. Guess what country is not on the list, the most prominent nation in the Middle East in which they…
September 24, 2004
I'll be gone pretty much all day tomorrow, so nothing new until Sunday at least. I'm going down to Ann Arbor to see the Michigan/Iowa football game, and I get to meet one of my readers while I'm at it. Not a bad deal. Now if it would just turn into real fall weather, I'd be all set.
September 24, 2004
This comes from Paul Phillips, who, in addition to being one of the world's best poker players, is also a computer wizard. He's also not a guy prone to overstatement, so I'm just going to copy it here because I think this is very, very important and I want to hammer home the point to everyone who…
September 23, 2004
It's been a while since I handed out an Idiot of the Month award, and I'm sad to say that for the second time since i started this blog, the honor goes to someone from my own state. David Morrell attends Hillsdale College, an excellent little school, and is the founder of The Hillsdale Conservative…
September 23, 2004
Professor Cole also points out the same kind of ambivalent feelings I had upon learning that the Artist Formerly Known as Cat Stevens had been taken off a plane because he's on a terrorist watch list. A lot of people made fun of that, mostly because they still think of Cat Stevens as the guy who…
September 23, 2004
Juan Cole, the historian from the University of Michigan, has an excellent blog that I don't read nearly often enough. This piece is really quite brilliant, as he asks the question, if America were like Iraq, what would it be like? As President Bush goes around the country sounding like Baghdad Bob…
September 22, 2004
Okay, so at least one guy was bothered that I revealed that Annie Duke won last night's Tournament of Champions poker tournament on ESPN, but there was still a LOT of fun to be had by watching it. Most notably, you could watch Phil Hellmuth once again make himself look like a total ass. During the…
September 22, 2004
Ask the average American their theory on why we "lost" in Vietnam and you are likely to get this answer or some variation of it: "We didn't let the military fight the war, the war was fought by politicians. If we'd let the military do their job, we would have won." This notion has become thoroughly…
September 21, 2004
The other day I took a couple of shots at a ridiculous article by Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Al Mohler concerning Meyer 2004. Consider that the opening act. PZ Myers puts Mohler's screed through a shredder, then lights it on fire and buries the ashes. Anyone who still wants to…
September 21, 2004
I don't often cite Joe Carter's writings at Evangelical Outpost favorably, but I have to give credit where credit is due. His post condemning Jimmy Swaggart's vile statement about killing homosexuals is dead on the mark. Swaggart said on a recent broadcast:
I'm trying to find the correct name for…
September 20, 2004
In a follow up to my last post, where I mentioned that Bush deliberately delayed an appointment to the FEC in order to insure that the FEC regulations implementing the BCRA were weakened, I looked it up to make sure I was correct. I was. See if you can reconcile these facts:
A. Bush just went to…
September 20, 2004
I am often heard complaining that reporters, by and large, are lapdogs, not watchdogs. They sit there day after day, press conference after press conference, and dutifully report what they're told without ever bothering to tell you what they know and we all should know - that what we're being told…
September 20, 2004
I sure hope that Robert Novak is wrong about this:
Whether Bush or Kerry is elected, the president or president-elect will have to sit down immediately with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The military will tell the election winner there are insufficient U.S. forces in Iraq to wage effective war. That…
September 20, 2004
Despite the fact that the first thing he did upon returning from his weekend getaway was bust my chops for my take on the Dan Rather fake memo story (LOL), I'd like to congratulate Timothy Sandefur both on his award from the Clarement Institute and on the recent publication of his article about the…
September 19, 2004
Al Mohler, head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (and Bill Dembski's new boss), has weighed in with a profoundly silly and dishonest article about Stephen Meyer's now-infamous peer-reviewed article. It begins with the standard boilerplate "evolution is a theory in crisis" nonsense:
The…
September 18, 2004
If this story is true....wow. That's all I can say. Wow.
My 21-year old daughter disappeared from NYC last Tuesday afternoon when walking with friends through a park where no protest was being held -- and was held prisoner -- without being charged -- by the NYPD for three days. The first day and…
September 18, 2004
A week ago, I wrote rather forcefully (and, I believe, correctly) that it was far too early to tell whether the Killian memos were forgeries and that those on both sides who wanted to assert with certainty one way or the other were substituting wishful thinking for reality. Well now that another…
September 17, 2004
Okay, I'm back in the office and I just had to join in the chorus against one Alec Rawls. I first encountered him when Brian Leiter wrote about his screed against Eric Muller's debunking of Michelle Malkin's book on Japanese internment camps during WW2. Then PZ Myers posted some of his absolutely…
September 17, 2004
Okay, since I'm sitting here waiting for a fax to go through before I can leave, and since I'll be writing nothing of much substance today, I urge you all to go immediately to Positive Liberty and read this post about the reformation, the enlightenment and the fusing of tolerance with Christianity…
September 17, 2004
I'm going to be out of the office for the next several hours, so I've turned off comment moderation. If I get spammed, I'll delete them when I get back. Have a good day everyone.
September 16, 2004
The behavior of Josh Arieh during the World Series of Poker main event, aired recently on ESPN, has sparked a great deal of controversy in the poker world. For those who haven't been watching, Josh Arieh is a terrific poker player, one of the up and coming pros to watch in the future. But here are…
September 16, 2004
Julian Sanchez has a post about the recent outing of Congressman David Dreier, and he approaches it from a more practical perspective. While saying that he doesn't really have a moral problem with it, he offers this analysis:
But I'm increasingly thinking it's a counterproductive strategy. First,…
September 16, 2004
The new classified National Intelligence Estimate on the situation in Iraq, according to sources in the government, is very pessimistic about the outcome of our policies in Iraq:
The estimate outlines three possibilities for Iraq through the end of 2005, with the worst case being developments that…
September 15, 2004
BlogActive, the blog that is busily outing conservative Congressmen who are privately gay while publicly anti-gay, has now sets its sights on David Dreier, the conservative Congressman from California. A few weeks ago, they outed Ed Shrock, a Congressman from Virginia with a nearly perfect score…
September 15, 2004
From Robert Abele:
The Washington quotation frequently used to demonstrate the "religious right" point is this: "It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible." This quotation is frequently found on fundamentalist Christian web sites, without provision of citation. I…
September 15, 2004
Jason Kuznicki declares:
The Libertarian Party is a badge of shame upon an otherwise reasonable branch of political thought.
I wish I could say he was wrong, but with the nomination of Michael Badnarik, there's not much of a retort at this point. Jason links to this article by R.W. Bradford in…
September 15, 2004
Rick Dakan, while praising my blog in general, takes me to task here and here for occasionally revealing the winners of a poker tournament before they've aired on TV. I do apologize for diminishing his ability to enjoy the suspense of those tournaments on television, but I should also say that I'm…
September 15, 2004
As a follow-up to the previous post concerning Joe Carter's response to PZ Myers on the subject of Stephen Meyer's misleading citation of the scientific literature, Wes Elsberry has written a brief response to Carter's criticisms on his message board. He points out the quite obvious concerning…