stcynic
Posts by this author
February 21, 2006
Here's an interesting blog with very valuable information about the highly dubious nature of breathalyzer tests and why, frankly, they should be inadmissable in court (and this from a guy who rarely drinks and never drinks and drives). Breathalyzer tests do not measure the presence of alcohol, they…
February 21, 2006
While I was unable to post this weekend, I did see this column by Ben Shapiro (though I saw it at the Worldnutdaily) and planned to comment on it. Shapiro, for those who don't know, is a budding right wing pundit who wants to ban pornography and pretty much anything else he finds offensive. And in…
February 20, 2006
David Irving, the famous holocaust denier from the UK, has been sentenced to 3 years in prison in Austria. It is illegal to deny the holocaust in that nation. I agree entirely with this:
A few Austrians, such as Lothar Hobelt, an associate professor of history at the University of Vienna, believe…
February 20, 2006
One of the cool things that happened while I was dodging below zero temperatures was that Greg Forbes, a friend and fellow board member of Michigan Citizens for Science, has been announced as the recipient of the Civil Libertarian of the Year Award from the ACLU of Western Michigan. Greg is a…
February 20, 2006
As I download the 263 emails that have built up since Thursday evening when I first lost power at my house, let me announce my return. It's been a crazy few days. As some of you likely know, my part of Michigan got nailed with a really bizarre weather pattern on Wednesday and Thursday and it…
February 16, 2006
I generally love Radley Balko's blogging, but this post leaves me with mixed feelings. He links to a Washington Post article about Lloyd Dobler, the John Cusack character in the movie Say Anything, a movie I really liked and recently watched again on TV. But then Balko writes:
Stuever looks at the…
February 16, 2006
Jim Babka, host of the radio show on which I was a frequent guest, is also the co-founder and president of the DownsizeDC Foundation (along with Perry Willis, a frequent commenter here, and Harry Browne, former libertarian candidate for President). DownsizeDC is currently working to pass a law…
February 16, 2006
All of my favorite subjects rolled into one. Over at Uncommon Descent, Doug Moran reacted to the ACLU threatening to sue the Toledo school district for allowing the teaching of ID by declaring them to be the "most vile intellectual terrorists". I'll take ridiculous hyperbole for $1000, Alex. Why…
February 16, 2006
Frank Beckwith, a friendly rival on the question of intelligent design and the law, was a speaker at the Greer-Heard Forum that included many other prominent peopel on both sides of the ID question. The Baptist Press News has a report on his presentation, which a reader emailed me this morning.…
February 15, 2006
Thanks to a lot of hard work by Jason Kuznicki, Positive Liberty is back up and running smoothly. You all should be going there every day, not to see my posts because you can see that here, but to see the posts written by Jason, Jon and Timothy. They really are three of the finest minds and writers…
February 15, 2006
As I've discussed many times, the ID movement has changed its strategy regarding the policies they are advocating to be adopted by school boards and legislatures. They know that any hint of the phrase "intelligent design" is going to be struck down by the courts, especially in light of the Dover…
February 15, 2006
A new study just published concludes that gay marriage is healthy for gay couples in a number of different ways. This has long been an argument I've made, that social conservatives, if "pro-family" really meant something objective and not merely a code phrase for "get the fags", should be all for…
February 15, 2006
The press release says:
The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio today sent a letter to the Toledo Public Schools demanding that they cease allowing staff to teach intelligent design in science classrooms throughout the district.
"Intelligent design has been proven to be nothing more than a thin…
February 14, 2006
The Ohio State School Board today voted 11-4 to remove the "critical analysis of evolution" lesson plan that was advocated so forcefully by the Discovery Institute and other ID advocates in 2002. Cue screams of outrage about "dogmatic Darwinists" (or "Stalinists" or the "Darwinian priesthood" or…
February 14, 2006
My first thought when I heard on Saturday that Cheney had shot someone by accident on a hunting trip was, "Jay Leno just got very excited." These incidents are a dream for comedy writers and last night, they teed off on it. The best lines, predictably, came from Jon Stewart on the Daily Show:
"Vice…
February 14, 2006
Justice Scalia gave a speech in Puerto Rico yesterday in which he bashed the idea of a "living constitution" (and rightly so, I think, this idea is far too vague and insubstantial to be taken seriously) and proclaimed himself an originalist:
In a speech Monday sponsored by the conservative…
February 14, 2006
Somehow I missed this from several days ago. Casey Luskin has a post on the DI blog about the Michigan bill that is rather amusing and highly inaccurate. His rhetorical device of choice these days is the notion of "false fear syndrome", whereby the ID movement keeps making its strategy more and…
February 14, 2006
Ohio's State Board of Education votes today on whether to rescind its earlier approval of a lesson plan that was pushed by the Discovery Institute to teach "criticisms of evolution". The New York Times has a report on the vote, which is expected to be very close. In the wake of the Dover ruling,…
February 14, 2006
Fox News is reporting that Mel Gibson has spent $5 million to set up a foundation to build churches for the very strange quasi-Catholic offshoot sect that he and his father belong to. Mel has tried to publicly distance himself from his father's bizarre views - he's a holocaust denier, among other…
February 13, 2006
Everyone knows by now that Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fellow hunter during a quail hunt in Texas over the weekend. No big deal there, it's a risk you take and no one is going to suggest it was anything but an accident. But the fact this was not real hunting but a "canned hunt",…
February 13, 2006
Following up on my post this morning about Randy Barnett's Taft lecture, Sandefur writes that he is a bit confused as well. That actually makes me feel better about it. It quells my nagging feeling that perhaps I'm just missing something (and perhaps I am, but if it's not obvious to Sandefur either…
February 13, 2006
A conversation I had this weekend reminded me of a wonderful quote from Mencken. I first cited it nearly 2 years ago in a post and I want to reprint it again because it describes my views so perfectly. In this essay, Mencken was actually commenting on what he, the arch-cynic who seemingly believed…
February 13, 2006
I was going to write a post about this Jack Balkin essay commenting on Randy Barnett's Taft lecture concerning the various types of originalism. But then I realized, to my surprise, that I hadn't posted anything about Barnett's lecture in the first place. I had begun to do so, and saved it as a…
February 13, 2006
DarkSyde continues his series of interviews with science bloggers at DailyKos with this interview with Carl Zimmer, hands down the best popular science writer working today. If you want an almost perfect book that explains how scientists go about filling in the details of evolutionary lineages, you…
February 12, 2006
Adam Packer at In the Agora has addressed an entire post to me because I am a Duke fan (the contributors to that site are almost all Indiana fans) and we've had some go-rounds in the past on the subject. Adam writes:
Attention Ed Brayton: Sportsline writer Gregg Doyel dressed down Duke University…
February 11, 2006
Bruce Bawer, writing in the Seattle alternative paper The Stranger, absolutely nails the situation with the Muhammed caricatures:
On the contrary, what's happening here is that a gang of bullies - led by a country, Saudi Arabia, where Bibles are forbidden, Christians tortured, Jews routinely…
February 11, 2006
This article says that, according to Technorati, there are now over 27 million blogs on the internet, with 2.7 million of them being actively updated at least once a week. And according to TTLB, this blog ranks in the top 1000 by the number of incoming links and in the top 500 by the number of hits…
February 11, 2006
Sal Cordova has yet another comment attempting to answer an argument I made (though it's in response to someone else bringing up my argument rather than to the argument itself. In response to another commenter who said, "Yes, because as Ed Brayton points out, almost every facet of science will…
February 11, 2006
There is a quote that I've seen all over the place, and I believe even used myself over the years, from the founder of the ID movement, Phillip Johnson. Here is the quote as it is usually given:
"The objective is to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic, thus shifting the debate…
February 10, 2006
At the risk of raising Lynn's blood pressure a bit, I'll post a link to this post by Tara Smith debunking Tom Bethell's nonsense about AIDS not being caused by HIV (Lynn is a physician who led an AIDS task force at her hospital and an AIDS support group for victims and families, so there are few…