stcynic
Posts by this author
March 28, 2006
Not Liberty. For the second time in three years, Michigan State won the collegiate National Debate Tournament championship. After starting the year with a win at the Wake Forest tournament, they had to beat Wake Forest in the finals and they emerged with a 6-1 victory. Congratulations to Will Repko…
March 27, 2006
Here is the matchup for the national championship:
Wake Forest CH v. Michigan State BH
If MSU wins, it will be their second national title in the last 3 years. That's an incredible accomplishment by any measure, made even more amazing by the fact that they didn't even debate NDT until the two…
March 27, 2006
Please Note: There is an update to this post below the fold with the semifinal matchups.
Here are the 8 teams to make the quarterfinals. I don't know what the quarterfinal matchups are, or who they beat in octofinals to get there:
northwestern bc
dartmouth bm
harvard km
wake forest ch
berkeley bw…
March 27, 2006
On Friday, Baylor University officially notified Francis Beckwith that he was not being granted tenure for his position as associate director of the JM Dawson Institute for Church/State Studies. This is causing a good deal of hullaballoo, with claims of bias and, inevitably, accusations that this…
March 27, 2006
Alan Keyes has a column at the Worldnutdaily about the Afghani man targeted for the death penalty for converting to Christianity. It sounds very much like something I might write on the subject of liberty and the need to protect it not only from dictators but from democratic majorities as well. I'…
March 27, 2006
Despite the fact that my two favorite teams, Duke and Michigan State, were knocked out earlier than expected, this has been an incredible NCAA tournament so far. How many classic games and amazing finishes could you possibly ask for? UCLA's comeback over Gonzaga was stunning. Texas' buzzer beater…
March 27, 2006
The Worldnutdaily has yet another badly reasoned defense of ID, this one by a homeschooling mother who appears to be equally ignorant of both science and the rules of logic. But rather than spending the time to fisk this one myself, I thought I'd invite my readers to do it. Pick out your favorite…
March 27, 2006
One of the fastest growing Christian right legal groups is the Liberty Counsel, run by Matt Staver. This is Jerry Falwell's personal favorite and they've been in the spotlight a lot lately, gaining on the American Center for Law and Justice, the Alliance Defense Fund and the Thomas More Law Center…
March 27, 2006
I've been trying like hell to find up to date information on the National Debate Tournament. The most recent information I could find last night was after the first elimination round when it was down to 16 teams. The way it works at NDT is that everyone with a 5-3 record goes to the elimination…
March 25, 2006
I'm going to be on tonight with the HIllbilly Atheist. For those who don't know him, the Hillbilly Atheist is a good ol' boy from Oklahoma who is extremely funny. He has a radio show on the Freethought Media network, which is owned by the Infidel Guy. To listen to the show, click here. On the right…
March 25, 2006
My old friend Henry Neufeld has written a response to all of our discussion of slavery and the Bible, as I actually hoped he would. Henry is a Hebrew scholar, a Christian and the director of the Pacesetter's Bible Institute in Florida. He was among the first people I encountered online about 13 or…
March 25, 2006
Via Red State Rabble, the York Daily Record reports that Judge Jones received enough threatening emails after his ruling in the Dover trial that the US Marshall Service took copies of them all and guarded the Judge and his family:
In the days after U.S. Judge John E. Jones III issued his decision…
March 25, 2006
Mark Olson has written a response - well, kind of - to my post about slavery and the Bible. It's not really a response so much as it is a sneer in my general direction, and a highly inaccurate one at that. He makes no attempt to actually answer my arguments except for a relatively irrelevant one in…
March 24, 2006
Over at In The Agora, in the comments on Eric's post replying to me about slavery and the Bible, a commenter named lawyerchik1 has cut and pasted a bunch of arguments for a global flood from the ICR. Like all flood geology arguments, they require serious ignorance of geology and the evidence in…
March 24, 2006
Eric Seymour has written a response to my post on slavery and the Bible and takes the often-stated position that Biblical slavery wasn't like modern slavery. He writes:
But we also must bear in mind that the slavery which existed in the times and cultures in which the Scriptures were written was…
March 24, 2006
I'd like to comment on a few more excerpts from the translation of the UN report. It's stunning how morally myopic this report is and how thoroughly they manage to point all the blame in the wrong direction. To wit:
The caricatures published are the result of a contest launched by the newspaper in…
March 24, 2006
Well, my Dukies are out of the NCAA tournament. I don't think anyone should be too surprised by that. Coach K has said all year that this is not a great team, it's just a good team. They relied too much on outside shooting and didn't have anyone who could play small forward either offensively or…
March 23, 2006
As a follow up to all the Liberty University nonsense, I thought I'd mention that this weekend is the NDT championships. They're being held at Northwestern. Tonight is the opening ceremonies, where they give away the Copeland Award to the top team during the regular season. This award is voted on…
March 23, 2006
Joseph Farah, grand poobah of the Worldnutdaily, is once again peddling the "evolution leads to Hitler" nonsense. I know this has all been said before, but let's say it all again just to make sure no one misses it. Farah is making a big deal out of an article that shows that German archaeologists,…
March 23, 2006
The Pew Research Center has released the results of a national survey with some very good news for advocates of gay marriage. The good thing is that it's a tracking survey that has been done since 2003, so you can measure how attitudes have changed. The findings are very positive:
Public acceptance…
March 23, 2006
In a thread down lower, totally unrelated to this subject, slavery and the Bible came up and David Heddle made a comment that I want to reply to in full here. I want to move this up because I think this is a really important issue and, for me, it was hugely important. It was one of the key reasons…
March 22, 2006
This, folks, is why liberty is infinitely more important than democracy. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, we installed more or less democratic governments. But in both cases, with wide public support, the constitutions also allow for the imposition of Sharia, or Islamic law, and that insures that no…
March 22, 2006
The UN report that I mentioned the other day concerning Denmark and the uproar over the Muhammed caricatures is now available online, but not in English. Agora (not to be confused with In the Agora) has a partial translation here and a post on the subject here. It provides a good opportunity to…
March 22, 2006
For crying out loud, the exaggeration of this nonsense simply will not stop. CBS News has elevated them to having won the national title in this article. Reporter Steve Hartman says, "They just clinched the national title - ahead of Harvard, even." No, no, a thousand times no. They haven't won any…
March 22, 2006
This is the third straight year I've reviewed the induction ceremony for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Music is extremely important to me and my tastes are diverse enough to encompass nominees as different as Miles Davis and Black Sabbath. This year's nominees included both, as well as Blondie,…
March 21, 2006
Burt Humburg sent me this picture from a conference we attended 3 years ago at Berkeley. I think I have to do it as a popup image because it's too wide for the columns on this blog. It's a bunch of us at dinner at Spangler's in Berkeley. View image.
From the left to the right: Guy from Colorado…
March 21, 2006
There's never any shortage of people ready to claim that the latest disaster or problem is God's punishment on us for this or that. Here's the latest, brought to my attention by Jason Kuznicki.
An outbreak of deadly bird flu in Israel is God's punishment for calls in election ads to legalize gay…
March 21, 2006
You gotta hand it to this cretin - when he loses it, he loses it big. Matt Young puts up a perfectly reasonable post at the Panda's Thumb about a teacher in Colorado who was suspended for showing a 12 minute sock puppet animation of the opera Faust and the absolutely ridiculous response that…
March 21, 2006
Kent Hovind performed (and I use that term intentionally) his seminar in Dover, Pennsylvania over the last few days. The York Daily Record has a report on the event. Included is this quote which demonstrates quite well why oral debates with Hovind are not only a waste of time, they're detrimental…
March 21, 2006
In a post below, I referred to Philip Hamburger's arguments concerning Hugo Black and separation of church and state as a weak argument that really amounts to an attempt to poison the well by focusing so closely on Black's early KKK ties rather than on the actual arguments put forth not only by…