stcynic
Posts by this author
September 6, 2005
Radley Balko has a devestating post documenting the massive failures of government at all levels to respond to the hurricane. I knew some people were complaining, but I've been too busy to really look at it until now. Even someone as cynical as I am about government can't help but be stunned at…
September 5, 2005
This morning, President Bush nominated John Roberts for the Chief Justice position directly. It's probably a smart move politically, since it appears that Roberts is set to sail through the confirmation process easily, but as I said yesterday I don't like the idea of imposing a CJ from outside the…
September 4, 2005
I'm still up to my eyeballs in boxes to be unpacked. If you left a comment that requires a reply, I'll get to them at some point. I hadn't even looked at my blog in the last two days until I decided to take a break to post the last message about Rehnquist. By Tuesday, I should be pretty much ready…
September 4, 2005
I've been so busy with unpacking that I didn't know until today that Chief Justice Rehnquist had died. It's certainly not a surprise, given his battle against thyroid cancer, but the timing is almost surreal. Not only does it follow on the heels of the disaster in the gulf coast area, but it is 3…
September 2, 2005
I'm still not ready to return to full time posting, since I'm still buried in boxes to unpack and beginning the smoking of ribs for tomorrow, but I wanted to note a few posts about the response of certain nutballs to the hurricane and aftermath that people have sent me. I'm sure by now we've all…
September 1, 2005
Or for the first time, in this case. All the big stuff is moved and my living room is full of boxes, most of them full of books. I went out and bought a couple of bookcases and I think I'm gonna need a couple more. The one thing I don't like about my new house is the size of the kitchen. It doesn't…
August 31, 2005
I just bought a new house and today begins the process of moving in to it. If everything goes well, I'll be back online this evening after the cable installers leave. But I won't have phones until Friday morning when they come to set up all my phone lines (4 total, 2 business lines, a personal line…
August 31, 2005
One of the most fascinating things about the lawsuit against the UC is that they appear to have pulled the legal arguments out of thin air. For instance, the ACSI states in their newsletter:
ACSI seeks to preserve the right of Christian school graduates to attend the college or university of their…
August 31, 2005
In reading the complaint against UC, there are some interesting things to discover. Here's an interesting item it contains. The plaintiffs allege that UC is official state board of education policy by requiring students to believe in evolution:
Furthermore, the State of California has agreed that…
August 30, 2005
Mike Dunford has some follow up information on the UC lawsuit, including a link to the actual complaint filed in court. He offers a few choice excerpts from that complaint along with some analysis. This part is particularly on-point, I think:
"Content discrimination". What a wonderful phrase. It…
August 29, 2005
Okay, now that I have all these comments to reply to, I'm gonna have to beg off until later tonight or tomorrow. Tonight is the draft for my fantasy football league. This league is really more about competitive trash talking than about football, of course. And we've been fighting over rule changes…
August 29, 2005
Okay, since I upgraded to MT 3.2, I haven't gotten a single comment on this blog and this is highly unusual. Is everyone just lurking? I've had almost a thousand hits so far today and not a word from anyone. It makes me wonder if I've got something screwed up and it's not letting comments through.…
August 29, 2005
You might be interested in seeing this brief exchange on Culture Kitchen with William Gibbons. It's in the comments, after the author there pointed to my replies to Gibbons and called them an "ass whomping".
August 29, 2005
Over the last few years, a bizarre situation has been going on here in Michigan. In 2003, a philanthropist named Robert Thompson offered to spend $200 million to build 15 charter schools in the city of Detroit, each serving 500 students, with a guarantee that each one would graduate at least 90% of…
August 29, 2005
I just discovered that Jim Lippard, scourge of Amway and Scientology and all around brilliant guy, has started a blog. This is sure to be one worth reading on a daily basis.
August 29, 2005
Wilfred Elders, a geologist from UC-Riverside, passed along this interesting letter to the editor of his local newspaper, the Press-Enterprise. A school teacher wonders, if ID is to be taught in schools, what exactly are they supposed to teach?
Design: What to teach?
I am curious about what I am…
August 28, 2005
I want to call my readers' attention to this comment left by Shawn Miller, a preacher from New Mexico who spent 109 days in jail for preaching on a street corner. The ACLU of New Mexico intervened at the request of Miller's wife and they managed to get the preacher released from jail, where he has…
August 28, 2005
Daniel Dennett, a man I consider one of the half dozen or so most brilliant thinkers on the planet, has an op-ed piece in today's New York Times about "intelligent design" called Show Me The Science. He makes essentially the same argument I have been making on this blog for nearly 2 years now:
The…
August 28, 2005
This is an interesting case. In Okemos, a town I lived in for 2 years as a child and then coached debate in for 3 years during college, there has been an ongoing battle over the Okemos Christian Center. They wanted to expand their facilities to add a 35,000 square foot school and the township said…
August 28, 2005
I had mentioned in a previous post that I was skipping William Gibbons' claims on human evolution for the time being because I was hoping that Jim Foley would weigh in with his thoughts. He has done so now and I will post it below. Jim chose not to do a line by line response, but instead to focus…
August 27, 2005
A federal lawsuit has been filed by an association of Christian schools against the University of California system accusing them of discrimination because they won't recognize the validity of some courses at Christian secondary schools that use creationist textbooks:
The Association of Christian…
August 27, 2005
Some of you no doubt noticed that for the last few hours, you couldn't leave a comment or do anything here. That's because I was trying to upgrade to Movable Type 3.2 and screwing it up royally in the process. Reed Cartwright, the computer genius who does all of the software work for the Panda's…
August 27, 2005
Chris Buttars, the eternally clueless Utah state Senator, certainly didn't get the answers he wanted from the Utah state school board. Buttars has been threatening to submit a bill to mandate the teaching of "divine design" - a slightly more honest version of intelligent design - if the school…
August 26, 2005
I have a confession to make: I enjoy watching washed up celebrities - especially ones that never exhibited much talent to justify their celebrity - fall on their faces and humiliate themselves. In the vast, insufferable universe that is reality TV, the only show I watch is the Surreal Life, which…
August 26, 2005
Today is an important anniversary. It's the 85th anniversary of the day the 19th amendment was ratified and became part of the Constitution, giving women the right to vote in this country. For sane people, it's the day that the nation made good on one of its founding ideals and extended the right…
August 26, 2005
We have witnessed a speciation event right here on this blog. In the last 24 hours, this blog has gone from being a "marauding marsupial" to being a "large mammal" in the TTLB ecosystem. In this case, however, the event was in fact the result of an intelligent designer. More specifically, it was…
August 26, 2005
I'm not much of a Michael Moore fan, but I thought his movie Bowling for Columbine had some interesting and thought provoking segments in it. Yes, a lot of it was just pointless grandstanding, like taking the ammunition back to K-mart and his interview with Charlton Heston. But I thought the movie…
August 25, 2005
Richard Hoppe has already put this story on the Panda's Thumb, but I had to write it up for here as well. The Discovery Institute loves to talk about the "growing number of scientists" who doubt "Darwinism", and especially about their list of 400 scientists who signed on to a statement they put…
August 25, 2005
It's round 4 with our favorite PhD in creation science apologetics, William Gibbons. You can find his reply at the bottom of this post. I'm moving this all up top so it doesn't get lost in the shuffle. He begins with the issue of plagiarism. I had pointed out that his first response was almost…
August 24, 2005
10 hours ago, Pat Robertson claimed that his call for assassinating Hugo Chavez was taken out of context and misinterpreted:
Wait a minute, I didn't say 'assassination.' I said our special forces should, quote, "take him out," and "take him out" can be a number of things including kidnapping.…