stcynic
Posts by this author
December 9, 2004
DarkSyde has the 6th installment of his Know Your Creationists series up at Unscrewing the Inscrutable, this one introducing Hugh Ross, the old earth cosmologist, and Ken Ham, the young earth Amish impersonator. He cites me in this installment, but just for the record, I did not come up with the…
December 9, 2004
Hat tip to Majikthise and Steve Gilliard for bringing my attention to this article about vets from the Iraqi war becoming homeless after leaving the military. I'll quote just a little bit of the story from one returning Iraqi vet:
A gunner's mate for 16 years, Arellano said he adjusted after…
December 8, 2004
Good ol' Don Rumsfeld and his charming wit:
Hundreds of troops applauded a comrade who complained to Rumsfeld that U.S. forces were being forced to dig up scrap metal to protect their vehicles in Iraq because of a shortage of armored ones.
"Now why do we soldiers have to dig through local…
December 8, 2004
I somehow missed this in the Washington Post article about Henry Waxman's report on misleading and false statements in abstinence-only programs:
Congress first allocated money for abstinence-only programs in 1999, setting aside $80 million in grants, which go to a variety of religious, civic and…
December 8, 2004
The latest update in my 6 month nostalgia tour, which has brought numerous old and dear friends back into my life, is the best update of all. I've mentioned before that I used to coach debate when I was in college. I coached at Okemos High School, just ten minutes or so from MSU. At our first…
December 8, 2004
Science teacher Mark Terry has a fairly thorough and detailed debunking of the Intelligent Design Creationism movement and the claims that they make in the new issue of Phi Delta Kappan. Well worth reading.
December 8, 2004
One of the cherished myths of the social conservatives is the one that says that the US, by "throwing God out of the schools" has been following in the path of godless, immoral cesspools of permissiveness like Sweden or the Netherlands. And in this context, I don't mean the good kind of myth, the…
December 7, 2004
Kelly Hollowell, columnist for the WorldNutDaily and head of Science Ministries (there's two words that don't belong together), has come in for a good bit of bashing here at Dispatches. She's a virtual fountain of stupidity, whether she's writing about the founding fathers or evolution. But not…
December 7, 2004
Let me add my voice to that of Sandefur, Unlearned Hand, Feddie and others in saying that Senator Harry Reid's comments about Clarence Thomas were way out of line. Reid said:
When asked to comment on Thomas as a possible replacement for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Reid told NBC's "Meet the…
December 7, 2004
A group of former members of the armed forces who were discharged from the military for being gay have filed suit asking to be reinstated. The timing of this suit shows the lunacy of the military's policy of throwing gays out of the military. At a time when our armed forces are stretched so thin…
December 7, 2004
It's amusing to watch Farah and his minions at the WorldNutDaily work themselves into a rage at the ACLU. They spit and sputter and contradict themselves and display rank hypocrisy, knowing full well that most of their readers are too clueless to catch them at it. The latest example is this "…
December 6, 2004
Careful, Reed. He'll call you an obsequious follower. See him beating the braindead horse here.
December 6, 2004
My pet troll has decided to take on Dan Ray on the subject of federalism, in response to a comment Dan left here earlier. He seems to think that Dan is a professor of "business and tech ed" from "Podunk U", when he is actually the director of the Paralegal Studies program at Eastern Michigan…
December 6, 2004
I recently joined the religion law listserv, administered by Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy (archive here). I joined it because, obviously, I'm very fascinated by constitutional law, especially by the jurisprudence that has grown up around the religion clauses of the first amendment, and…
December 6, 2004
Joseph Farah has already won an Idiot of the Month Award (now called the Robert O'Brien Trophy) for his hypocritical and absurd arguments about the Boy Scouts and the ACLU. Now Hans Zeiger, intrepid Hillsdale College student and So-Con columnist-in-training (you can find his columns on about a half…
December 6, 2004
Ah, Robert O'Brien is mad as hell and he's not gonna take it anymore. My pet troll, as PZ has dubbed him, has started his own blog, from where he will no doubt launch unintentionally amusing attacks on me. Here's my favorite part of his post addressed to me. After pasting the text of his initial…
December 6, 2004
In the last election, Michigan voters, I am embarrassed to say, approved an amendment to the state constitution banning gay marriage. Here is the text of that amendment in its entirety:
Article 1, Section 25: To secure and preserve the benefits of marriage for our society and for future…
December 5, 2004
My thanks to David Wayne for stopping by last night and leaving a couple of comments. It gave me the chance to see his blog, Jollyblogger, which I'd heard references to but not previously seen. Mr. Wayne is pastor of an evangelical church in Maryland and his blog is really pretty interesting. One…
December 5, 2004
In the aftermath of the decision by the Dover School Board in Pennsylvania to mandate the teaching of Intelligent Design in their science classrooms, there is quite a little fight brewing between the school board and the teachers. The York Daily Record has been following this story very closely and…
December 4, 2004
My new bestest friend Robert O'Brien sent me this charming email:
Mr. Brayton,
After reading your opining here and on PT, the most charitable description of you I can come up with is "a pompous ass, intoxicated with the sound of his braying." You frequently make my pretentious idiot list.…
December 4, 2004
Perhaps I should start handing out an Idiot of the Day award, for crying out loud. Our latest example of rank stupidity: State Rep. John Graham Altman, of Charleston, South Carolina. He's all pissy because a South Carolina public broadcasting station aired a documentary about the life of gay…
December 4, 2004
Jason Kuznicki has a fascinating post about the Rapture Index, a webpage that chronicles all the things they think might foretell of the coming of the rapture. The premillenialists in Christianity believe that Christians will be whisked away before the shit hits the fan in the end times. The…
December 4, 2004
The first is from Andrew Sullivan, an article on how the red state/blue state division is largely one of those who talk the talk and those who walk the walk. The red states talk about morality and "family values", but the blue states tend to actually put those values into practice far more often:…
December 4, 2004
In response to a report put out by Rep. Henry Waxman that detailed a wide range of innacuracies and falsehoods in many of the abstinence-only curricula being used in states around the country, and being heavily funded by the Bush administration, the so-cons are furiously trying to defend such…
December 3, 2004
I have been remiss in linking to DarkSyde's series on ID creationists published at Unscrewing the Inscrutable. In Part 3, he looks at Phillip Johnson. In Part 4, he looks at Jonathan Wells and Stephen Meyer. Well worth reading.
December 3, 2004
I should have learned my lesson about naming an Idiot of the Month too early in the month. In America, just when you think you've found the bottom of the barrell, you discover that it's barrells all the way down. Joseph Swank, move over. You've been out-moroned by Rep. Gerald Allen, a state…
December 3, 2004
Steve Sanders has a post up about the decision by NBC and CBS not to run an advertisement paid for by the United Church of Christ, an ad that bore the message "Jesus didn't turn people away." Watching the excuses offered by the networks on this one is just surreal. They'll show every piece of crap…
December 2, 2004
I'm sure some of you have noticed the difficulty lately with comments or entries being double posted, or with it sometimes showing that you can't leave comments. There are times when the cgi files needed to execute posting comments or entries are not reachable over the last few days. I've talked to…
December 2, 2004
There seems to be this little gaggle of right wing webpages that all feature the same set of idiot columnists - gopusa.com, bushcountry.org, intellectualconservative.com. Add to that richardmullenax.com, named for one of the aforementioned columnists. You see the same people showing up on all of…