stcynic
Posts by this author
July 19, 2006
And wouldn't you know it, he's making ignorant statements again. I know you're as surprised by that as I am.
Finally, I noticed Ed Brayton is back complaining about anti-gambling laws again. Now he's up in arms about the arrest of a Carruthers (there's an English name), a UK citizen who runs a vast…
July 19, 2006
And finding more absurdity underneath. Oak Leaf, one of the new STACLU contributors, has a post about a Senate committee that heard testimony from JAG corps officers about how to proceed after the Hamdan decision, based upon this article in the New York Times. He begins by invoking the TV show JAG…
July 19, 2006
Radley Balko is quoted in this ABC News story about the arrest of BetOnSports CEO David Carruthers. He points out the futility, the hypocrisy and oppressive nature of the coming crackdown on internet gambling. First, the futility and hypocrisy:
"It's wrong for about 1,000 reasons," said Balko, "but…
July 19, 2006
The Pensacola News Journal has been following the arrest of Kent Hovind closely. A trial date has been set for September 5th and Hovind has pled innocent to the charges (well, kind of). And I can't wait to see how the court treats some of the profoundly silly claims of immunity that Hovind is…
July 19, 2006
In yet another victory for the Equal Access Act, a Federal district judge in Georgia has ruled that a school must allow a Gay Straight Alliance club to meet on school grounds just as it does other groups. The response from the Alliance Defense Fund is stunning in its dishonesty:
But Mike Johnson,…
July 18, 2006
Dembski's home for wayward sycophants is now becoming Dembski and O'Leary's home for wayward sycophants. Denyse O'Leary is taking over DaveScot's role, and I expect she'll do it in more ways than one. Anyone who has read O'Leary's ID writings knows that they are delightfully wacky. DaveScot is…
July 18, 2006
CNN carried the story of the arrest of BetOnSports.com CEO David Carruthers and it adds some detail. This was not a spur of the moment decision, this was planned out.
Carruthers was in custody in Fort Worth, Texas, after a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Missouri returned a 22-count…
July 18, 2006
There are no spoilers in this post
There is a long history of problems at the World Series of Poker that most of the public is unaware of, problems with money being taken for one ostensible purpose and used for another and with dealers and tournament staff being cheated as a result. When Harrah's…
July 18, 2006
Jacob Sollum has an excellent article at Reason about Rep. Goodlatte's misguided and authoritarian bill to ban internet gambling. That bill passed the House recently, but has not come up in the Senate. Sollum points out the many ways in which Goodlatte's arguments for the bill are incoherent and…
July 17, 2006
My house got hit by a huge thunderstorm this afternoon, which knocked out the power. I'm at my brother's house, where he still has power for now. Hopefully things will be back up and running at home soon.
Update: The electric company is estimating that the power at my house will be restored by 10…
July 17, 2006
A whole bunch of religious right groups are pressing Bush to negotiate international treaties to outlaw obscenity, according to Agape Press. They're pushing a report from Bob Peters of Morality in Media. And you're gonna love one of the reasons for it:
Peters also noted in his communication that…
July 17, 2006
Radley Balko's long-awaited report on the militarization of local police departments, and the resulting tragedies, is now available on the Cato website. It's titled Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America. You can download the full text in PDF format, or purchase a copy in book…
July 17, 2006
Wow, this is an explosive story. GQ has a story on Ralph Reed, former Christian Coalition director now running for Lt. Governor in Georgia, that contains new allegations that will shock even the cynical. Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed were, according to email exchanged between the two of them in July…
July 17, 2006
This is absolutely outrageous. A reader sent me this report by email about BetonSports, an online gambling site that is based in the UK. The report is from MarketWatch:
Shares of online-gaming operators based in Britain dropped Monday, after BetOnSports' chief executive was detained while switching…
July 17, 2006
Reason magazine has an interview with Alex Kozinski, perhaps the most libertarian-minded judge on the Federal bench. He is an appeals court judge in the 9th circuit. Kozinski is a fascinating guy. On the subject of growing up in Romania, Kozinski had this to say:
I was a very committed communist…
July 17, 2006
Round 3 with Mark Olson over the meaning of the liberty in the Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately, I don't think there's anything really being added to the argument at this point in his new post on the subject. He begins:
As I had enjoyed, and I think learned much, from Mr Fischer's book…
July 17, 2006
Richard Epstein, the libertarian legal scholar from the University of Chicago, has an op-ed piece in yesterday's Chicago Tribune about the dangers of how Bush is using presidential signing statements. He points out how differently Bush is using them than his predecessors did:
There is nothing new…
July 16, 2006
Or three, perhaps, since I already wrote one lengthy reply in the comments of the first post. How he's back with a second comment, which is little improved from the first one.
Yes, Ed, I understand that your blog enjoys more traffic, but if you'd like to challenge me in the future, at least notify…
July 16, 2006
As Carl Zimmer notes, the IDers are pouring huge amounts of money into Kansas in advance of the August primary elections for the state school board. Kansas has been a battleground since 1999. And as Zimmer also notes, the pro-science folks are getting no support at all from our side. I urge you all…
July 15, 2006
Mark Olson has written a response to my reply to his post on the meaning of the word 'liberty' in the Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately, I don't think he has mitigated any of the logical difficulties with the original post. He begins:
First, I didn't look at the corpus of writings of those…
July 15, 2006
There is a long history of false claims of deathbed conversions becoming popular among what we might loosely call the religious right. From Jefferson to Darwin to Bertrand Russell, it seems that no man whose beliefs conflict with those of the faithful can be allowed to die without the fashioning of…
July 15, 2006
As a follow up on Specter's new bill (see full text here), I suggest this post by Orin Kerr and this post by Jack Balkin. Both point out that not only does the bill not tighten the oversight on the administration's domestic spying efforts, it actually loosens it. Balkin calls it a sham and that's…
July 15, 2006
You all remember Katherine Harris, right? She was the state election official in Florida during the 2000 recount, the one that looked and acted like a Stepford wife with a short in the wiring. Well now she's running for the Senate from Florida and running into major problems. Her third campaign…
July 14, 2006
I just got Queensryche's Operation Mindcrime 2, the long-awaited followup to their brilliant 1988 concept album of the same name. This will be a very short review: this album is so appallingly bad that after it finished I had to put on the original Operation Mindcrime to remind myself of how good…
July 14, 2006
One of the relatively new commenters at STACLU calls himself Glib Fortuna. Like all of the STACLU contributors, he specializes in pointing out the splinter in the eyes of others while ignoring the log in his own, all while blissfully unaware of the contradiction. A textbook example:
It's no…
July 14, 2006
Over at PseudoPolymath, Mark Olson has what I regard as a very oddly reasoned post about the meaning of liberty in the Declaration of Independence. He has been reading a book called Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Fischer, which according to his recounting, details 4…
July 14, 2006
More details on Hovind's arrest are found in today's Pensacola News Journal. I especially love this part:
Of the 58 charges, 44 were filed against Kent Hovind and his wife, Jo, for evading bank reporting requirements as they withdrew $430,500 from AmSouth Bank between July 20, 2001, and Aug. 9,…
July 14, 2006
Over at Volokh, Jonathan Adler posted a link to Derbyshire's response to Gilder and that has brought some real prizes out of the woodwork. Especially amusing is one Joel B, who gives a breathtakingly idiotic response to another commenter. The original commenter, riskable, said:
In our universe full…
July 14, 2006
John Derbyshire, the National Review's token evolution advocate, has written a response to George Gilder's pro-ID article in that same magazine last week. Gilder is the founder of the Discovery Institute. In his response, Derbyshire uses a perfect metaphor for dealing with creationists:
It's a…