stcynic
Posts by this author
September 12, 2006
From Slovakia:
A Slovak driver who crashed into a bus shocked rescuers who found him unconscious and half naked with a vacuum pump on his penis.
Police said the 42-year-old man, driving an old Citroen in the Slovak town of Levice, had ignored a "give way" sign.
"It's very likely he had auto-sex…
September 12, 2006
As the nation pauses to reflect on the 5th anniversary of 9/11, I think it's impotant to look at how that event affected so many gay Americans. Can't imagine why that would have any effect on gay people distinct from its effect on straight people? It hadn't occured to me either, until I read this…
September 12, 2006
A new North Carolina law requires students to say the pledge of allegiance, something absolutely forbidden by the Supreme Court in West Virginia Board of Education v Barnette. The school can request that students do so, they can have teachers lead the pledge, but they absolutely cannot force a…
September 12, 2006
One of the frequent commenters at STACLU is a guy named Kerwin Brown. While bored, I followed a link to his blog and boy was that fun. He calls himself a "classical liberal" and calls his blog "Expressions of Liberty" while advocating laws against adultery and "fornication". That last post is just…
September 11, 2006
Amy Calistri and Tim Lavalli appear to have solved the mystery of where the extra $2 million in chips during the World Series of Poker main event came from. The answer is: incompetence. They pinpoint it down to a single break on day 7, when the $5000 chips were colored up into $25,000 chips.…
September 11, 2006
Today is, of course, the 5th anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Centers. While we are remembering how that day made us feel - and it's a day etched in my memory in extraordinary detail - let us also keep in mind that some of the most influential religious right leaders immediately tried…
September 11, 2006
PZ Myers, to no one's surprise, has now taken to going after Ken Miller, the Catholic cell biologist who has been one of evolution's most eloquent and powerful defenders for the better part of the last decade. But he does so based upon a rather obvious misinterpretation of something Miller said in…
September 11, 2006
The Oregon Supreme Court last week reversed a lower court ruling on whether allowing the Boy Scouts to recruit in public schools constitutes unlawful discrimination (see the court's ruling here). It was a fairly technical ruling based upon a narrow reading of Oregon law prohibiting discrimination…
September 11, 2006
Jonathan Rauch, an eminently fair-minded and non-partisan critic, has written a compelling essay on the presidency of George W. Bush and I think he really nails a couple of very important points. In particular, he points out that Bush's lawless approach to spying may well actually undermine the war…
September 11, 2006
Brig. General Mark Scheid has laid out what many others have been saying since before the Iraq war started in 2003, that Rumsfeld's plan for the war was based on absurdly rosy scenarios that bore little relation to reality. He adds one new element to the story: Rumsfeld actually threatened to fire…
September 11, 2006
See Cynthia McKinney lose an election. See Cynthia McKinney whine about how unfair it is and file lawsuits:
Outgoing Fourth District Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney was considering a lawsuit against the state of Georgia Friday.
McKinney questioned whether Georgia's primary system violates the Voting…
September 11, 2006
It's always fun to watch Sandefur go after the Lew Rockwell crowd. In a post at Positive Liberty, he positively eviscerates Thomas Woods, Thomas DiLorenzo and Stephen Kinsella on several subjects. In particular, he makes mincemeat out of Thomas Woods, the neo-confederate pseudo-historian, and his…
September 10, 2006
I am home again after a great evening with friends. I met up with my buddy Dan and we drove to Ann Arbor. We had dinner with Joseph from Corpus Callusum (and his wife? girlfriend? friend? I never thought to ask) and Shelley from Retrospectacle. I had never met either of them before and it was a…
September 9, 2006
Despite bad weather, today is gonna be a great day. I'm headed out of town to hook up with my buddy Dan and head to Ann Arbor. We're going to meet a couple of other ScienceBloggers for dinner, then we're going to see Vinx play at The Ark. This is actually the first place I ever saw him play and…
September 9, 2006
I swear, England is trying their damnedest to make anti-gay rhetoric sound rational and accurate. They're prosecuting a minister for handing out leaflets with Bible verses on them at a gay Mardi Gras event, for nothing other than handing them out:
A police force was caught up in a freedom of speech…
September 9, 2006
I found this at Balko's place and I'm just shaking my head in disbelief. Like he did, I'm going to quote the publisher's description of a new book by Dinesh D'Souza, a guy I previously considered one of the more bright and serious conservative thinkers. After reading this, I think that assessment…
September 9, 2006
There's a new book out about Karl Rove called The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power. One of the stories in the book comes from a former professor from Fordham named Deal Hudson, who was hired by Rove to help court the Catholic vote for Bush. Hudson described an actual…
September 8, 2006
Orac picked up on my post about the guy who claims that looking at the sun can take away your need to eat food by "storing the sun's energy in your brain." He put up a long post about some of the medical absurdities with the claim, and went on to talk about the "breatharians", a group I'd never…
September 8, 2006
I just found this on Youtube. It's a clip of Every Breath You Take from Sting's Unplugged performance on MTV about 13 or 14 years ago. Singing backup on the song is Vinx, the guy I'm going to see with friends tomorrow night in Ann Arbor (this was when he was the opening act on Sting's Soul Cages…
September 8, 2006
Josh Claybourn had this Youtube video over at In the Agora and it's really pretty cool. I like the song too. The video reminds me of the classic Jamiroquai video for Virtual Insanity, only much more stripped down.
September 8, 2006
There are a bunch of bills in Congress right now to update FISA to allow for warrantless wiretaps. The ACLU, naturally opposes this program. That leads Glib Fortuna to posture and preen and call them names, but without a shread of substance in his post. He quotes this comment from a CNS article…
September 8, 2006
I reacted to the announcement by President Bush that the CIA had Al Qaeda prisoners in secret prisons being interrogated the same way a 10 year old reacts to being told something obvious: Duh. Even before the Washington Post revealed that big secret last year, did anyone really not know? Of course…
September 8, 2006
I don't know how many of my readers saw this, but last week someone decided to have a hotornot contest for the ScienceBloggers. But it was based on pictures placed on technorati, and since I don't have a picture there, I was left out of the field of entries; I'm not the least bit disappointed by…
September 8, 2006
Reasons to Believe, an old earth creationist group headed by astronomer Hugh Ross, is trying hard to sell their new book, Creation As Science: A Testable Approach to End the Evolution/Creation Wars. They issued a press release yesterday about the book, which included some false claims, some good…
September 7, 2006
This magazine has stumbled upon an idea I've been advocating for years, that politicians should be like Nascar drivers and should have to wear the logos of all the companies that sponsor their campaigns. It should be all over their clothing and the cars they drive. Here's their mock up of what…
September 7, 2006
Jon Rowe has an excellent post at Positive Liberty about a number of Christian scholars whose work debunks the Christian Nation myth. In addition to the work of Gregg Frazer, which he and I have both promoted greatly, he also cites scholars like George Marsden, Mark Noll and Nathan Hatch. And I…
September 7, 2006
Our government has arrested yet another executive from an online gaming company, this time Peter Dicks, chairman of the board of Sportingbet, a British company. Jacob Sullum, writing at Reason.com, captured this whole situation perfectly a few weeks ago:
If an executive of a U.S. media company…
September 7, 2006
If you liked the Crossfire episode where Lofton accused pop stars of encouraging our kids to have sex with animals, you're gonna love this interview he does with James Stengel when he was the head of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia (Stengel, that is, not Lofton). You're especially…
September 7, 2006
Does anyone remember those reports a while back about some Indian guru who hadn't had to eat any food in 7 years? Well here's a website that tells how he did it - by looking at the sun. This allowed him to "store the sun's energy in his brain" and therefore did away with the need for food. No, wait…
September 7, 2006
One of the government's primary arguments in the various lawsuits against the NSA's warrantless wiretap program is that no one can prove that they have "standing" to sue. The plaintiffs can't show that their specific communications were subject to an NSA wiretap without having the NSA reveal who…