stcynic
Posts by this author
December 9, 2005
I watched a high school basketball game last night on TV that included Lawrence North and their star, 7-footer Greg Oden. He was destined to be the #1 pick in the 2006 draft until the NBA's new agreement outlawed drafting kids straight ouf of high school. He's now going to spend at least one year…
December 8, 2005
In response to my post about Kathleen Sullivan failing the bar exam, Timothy Sandefur emailed me the following. It is posted here with his permission:
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The California bar exam is atrocious. Sheer hell. Three days, six hours a day. First day: Three hours of multiple…
December 8, 2005
Doug Stanhope once did a very funny bit about how people taking a political cause too far can make you go in the other direction just to spite them. He'd say, "It's like the PETA people. I'm sympathetic to their cause, I mean, I would never hurt an animal, that's just messed up. But PETA is so…
December 8, 2005
My longtime readers know that I have very mixed feelings about Richard Dawkins. On the one hand, I certainly recognize that he is quite brilliant both as a scholar and as a writer. His extremely lucid prose has undoubtedly helped millions of laypeople better understand the theory of evolution and…
December 8, 2005
Karl Giberson, editor of Science and Theology News, has an interesting commentary making the same argument I made during the Dover trial when Michael Behe insisted on comparing ID to big bang cosmology. He did it so often, in fact, that one morning when they were set to continue Behe's cross-…
December 8, 2005
Jason Kuznicki has a very entertaining post envisioning a conversation between Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, the three avatars of the Hindu god Brahman, about the "War on Christmas" nonsense that is sweeping the right wing media like a wildfire.
December 8, 2005
This is an incredible story. Kathleen Sullivan, former dean of Stanford Law School and one of the biggest names in legal scholarship, just failed the California bar exam. That's causing no end of snickering around the blogosphere, but apparently the California exam is considered the toughest in the…
December 7, 2005
Radley Balko has a post about one of the most outrageous cases you'll ever hear about. A man is on death row in Mississippi for shooting a cop. Ordinarily, most people would think that's okay. But the facts are unreal. The cops were involved in a drug raid but the residence was a duplex. The cops…
December 7, 2005
The Fordham Foundation has released a report on state science standards for public schools. This report was compiled by a board of experts in various scientific fields, including Paul Gross, Panda's Thumb contributor and co-author with Barbara Forrest of Creationism's Trojan Horse. You can scroll…
December 7, 2005
There is quite an interesting little battle going on among the folks at the National Review. It began when John Derbyshire posted this item on The Corner about the views of Gertrude Himmelfarb on evolution. If you don't know who Gertrude Himmelfarb is, she is surely among the greatest American…
December 6, 2005
William Dembski has a post about Derek Davis, director of the Dawson Institute for Church-State Studies at Baylor, and the comment he made in the NY Times the other day. I highlighted the same comment in a post on Sunday and pointed out the same thing, that Davis had taken a stand in favor of the…
December 6, 2005
Turns out I'm not the only blogger to get cool gifts from readers. Radley Balko (who works at the Cato Institute, coincidentally in line with the last post) is thanking some of his readers for sending him a couple of cool CDs and it includes one of my favorite groups, the Freddy Jones Band. They're…
December 6, 2005
Well, kind of. The Cato Institute has launched an interesting new project called Cato Unbound. It's a combination blog/magazine billing itself as "a virtual trading floor in the intellectual marketplace, specializing in the exchange of big ideas." Each month they will present an essay by a…
December 6, 2005
One of the longstanding problems with many ID advocates is their misuse of the work of scientists. Since they've never had any actual ID research to point to, they have instead frequently put out lists of articles that allegedly support their arguments from the mainstream literature. More often…
December 5, 2005
A couple weeks ago, in response to an article about the Miami police staging random "shows of force" at hotels and banks, surrounding the place with swat teams and forcing everyone to show ID to go in or out for no apparent reason, Radley Balko sarcastically commented that if the terrorists hate us…
December 5, 2005
In the wake of yesterday's NY Times article that included the Templeton Foundation saying that when they demanded that ID advocates produce actual research that could confirm ID and offered to fund that, they didn't come up with any, William Dembski responded with this post on his blog. He makes…
December 4, 2005
This is a guest post from Sheila Kennedy, former director of the Indiana ACLU and now professor of law and public policy at IUPUI. She emailed it to me and said she was having trouble registering with Typekey and wanted to leave it as a comment. But it's so long and detailed that I offered instead…
December 4, 2005
To hear most ID advocates tell it, ID is only rejected by "Darwinian fundamentalists" who hold fast to "atheistic materialism." Laurie Goodstein has an article in Sunday's New York Times that puts the lie to that claim. She shows that many organizations and academics who would be seen as likely…
December 3, 2005
I just came across this excellent post by Dan Herzog at Left2Right about the common conservative rhetoric of being opposed to "legislating from the bench." When he announced the Harriet Miers nomination, President Bush declared that "Harriet Miers will strictly interpret our Constitution and laws.…
December 3, 2005
My old pal DarkSyde has published an interview at Unscrewing the Inscrutable with Carl Buell, better known as Olduvai George. Buell, as I mentioned last week, is a brilliant illustrator who has done the illustrations for numerous books on science and evolution. Most notably, he did all the…
December 3, 2005
I don't care what happened to Natalie Holloway. I don't. Enough already. I give. Get off my TV screen.
December 3, 2005
Jason Kuznicki links to this report from the American Psychological Association that reviews three decades of research on children with gay parents. That review concludes, unsurprisingly to anyone familiar with such research, that children of gay parents are no different than children of straight…
December 3, 2005
Brian Fahling, an attorney for the American Family Association, has written a highly dishonest propaganda piece for Agape Press about evolution and intelligent design. I know it's hardly sound sport to fisk these things, but someone's gotta do it. Like most religious right types, he freely combines…
December 2, 2005
Kevin McCullough, a Rush Limbaugh clone radio talk show host and - naturally - columnist for the Worldnutdaily, has a ridiculous column up about the ACLU's "War on Christmas". He actually accuses the ACLU of filing suits against private businesses to prevent them from celebrating Christmas:
Rather…
December 2, 2005
I still havent' been able to find a copy of the University of California's response brief or their motion to dismiss the ACSI lawsuit, but the ACSI has made the original complaint and their response brief to the motion to dismiss available on their website. I haven't had a chance to go over the…
December 2, 2005
In the last couple days I've encountered two brilliant arguments concerning ID that I'd never thought of before. One was offered by Steve Reuland, a fellow Panda's Thumb contributor, in a comment following my post about Dembski's duplicity on whether the "intelligent designer" has to be…
December 2, 2005
One of the standard arguments we hear from ID proponents is the analogy between SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) and ID. Their argument is that SETI researchers use the same basic premises and inferences that ID does in the search for radio signals from alien civilizations. It's an…
December 2, 2005
After writing up yesterday's post about some folks trying to get Illinois State University to not allow their RAs to have live-in girlfriends, I thought I'd follow it up with another story involving RAs at a public university. The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire decided in July to tell its RAs…
December 1, 2005
From Agape Press, via Bartholemew:
Some parents with students at Illinois State University want the school to reverse its policy permitting professional staff to engage in unmarried cohabitation in student dormitories.
One father, Greg Myers, says he was outraged to learn that the school's Student…
December 1, 2005
I wrote the other day that when Genie Scott was speaking here at MSU, she mentioned that she had once been referred to as "Darth Vader". While talking with Wes Elsberry earlier, he told me the source of the Darth Vader comment - none other than our old friend Casey Luskin. Casey is the founder of…