stcynic
Posts by this author
December 2, 2004
I've got an anonymous creationist (AC) who keeps piling one absurd statement on to another in the comments on a post below. I'm going to move the discussion up here to keep it from getting lost. This post is addressed directly to him.
The problem at this point is that you think you're not being…
December 1, 2004
I am posting this from a friend's office because we are without power at the moment, so I can't do anything online. We got hit with a nasty snowstorm overnight, very wet and heavy snow, and have been out of power since the middle of the night. Which, in the country, means no water as well as no…
November 30, 2004
Media Matters has a report on the many lies told by Jerry Falwell in his appearance last weekend on Meet the Press. It's just baffling to me that he continues to lie about his incredible statement on the 700 Club after 9/11, where he said, "The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this…
November 29, 2004
Doug Patton, a freelance writer for mensnewsdaily.com and gopusa.com, has written a column on evolution that is so abysmal that it might well qualify him as the Idiot of the Month if I didn't already have one. Perhaps I should wait a day and give him December's award. I especially like this passage…
November 29, 2004
The Supreme Court today refused to hear a case asking them to overturn the Massachusetts State Supreme Court decision on gay marriage. Now one might wonder why on earth someone would try to appeal a state supreme court decision based solely on provisions in that state's constitution to the US…
November 29, 2004
I've said several times lately that the social conservatives, who are playing up the alleged "moral mandate" from the Presidential election, may well overplay their hand and end up getting smacked down by the electorate later for it. Here's a good example of why I think that. The religious right…
November 29, 2004
Maybe I just have a soft spot for cranky elitists (being one myself, of course), but I think this passage, in response to a column by George Will on the problems in academia, is really funny and brilliantly written:
But let us translate: what Mr. Will really means is that universities are places…
November 28, 2004
Having tired of hearing all of the mindless blathering about "judicial activism", the right wing catchphrase that means "judges refusing to allow us to do whatever we want to other people", I hereby propose a new phrase: legislative activism. In response to unpopular court opinions, particularly…
November 28, 2004
It's looking more and more like the story is nonsense. According to the actual complaint filed, the principal did not ban the Declaration of Independence, but told him he could not hand out a list of excerpts and quotations that included one excerpt from the Declaration. Apparently what the teacher…
November 27, 2004
Yesterday I raised the question of why such a high percentage of Americans reject evolution and accept creationism despite the evidence. Here are some other suggestions on why that is from others. Timothy Burke, in an open letter to my Panda's Thumb colleague PZ Myers, suggests several possible…
November 27, 2004
For those of us who have been wondering whether Bush is really on the so-con bandwagon or was just pretending to be in order to court their votes in the last election, here is one bit of evidence for the first conclusion:
President Bush's re-election insures that more federal money will flow to…
November 26, 2004
founding fathers worried more about legislative activism than judicial activism
November 26, 2004
Steve Sanders has an interesting post about a recent poll on many of the items on the social conservative agenda. I won't go through all of the numbers he lists, but I agree firmly with his conclusion as it pertains to the election results and the so-cons misreading of them:
The Republican base…
November 26, 2004
In perusing Heidi Bond's reports on the speech and Q & A session that Scalia held last week at the University of Michigan, one thing jumped out at me. I'll post this just as she wrote it, but keep in mind that these are live blogged notes, not a written out report or a transcript:
Says he'll…
November 25, 2004
You know the religious right is going to go ballistic about this. In Cupertino, California, the principal has apparently barred a teacher from handing out a copy of the Declaration of Independence to his students. Now, I suspect that this teacher is one of those pious crusaders who wants to play up…
November 25, 2004
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Not only is today Thanksgiving, it's also the one year anniversary of this blog, which gives me something extra to be thankful for. In the last year, I've made some new friends because of this page and my life has been enriched in many ways. So to Dan, Timothy, Jon,…
November 24, 2004
I highly recommend Julian Sanchez' essay about the Omnibus Appropriations Bill that was just passed by Congress, a $388 billion spending bill packed full of pork spending and worse. The bill is 3200 pages long and not a single person who voted for it likely knows what is in even half of those pages…
November 24, 2004
Tom Cavanaugh has a wonderful article at Reason Online about the ever-growing cabal of organizations that exist solely to take offense at how their group is portrayed. What sparked this? How about a proposed law in Hungary outlawing blonde jokes. No, that's not a joke.
November 24, 2004
Hat tip to Timothy Sandefur for this link to all the other disclaimers we could put in school textbooks. Brilliant.
And here is Dan Ray's suggestion for a disclaimer to the gravity disclaimer:
If you intend to experiment with your childrens' lives using the theory of gravity as you are willing to…
November 24, 2004
Not content with his rank hypocrisy in condemning Rev. Moon while simultaneously accepting awards from him and making money off his business associations with him, Joseph Farah has now added utter idiocy to the list of reasons to regard him as little more than a carnival barker on the political…
November 23, 2004
The long-awaited decision of the Dover Area School District in Pennsylvania regarding evolution and intelligent design has finally been released to the public (press release found here). It's a policy that virtually guarantees legal action that the school district will lose. Let's take a look at…
November 23, 2004
DarkSyde has the second installment of the Know Your Intelligent Design Creationists series up at Unscrewing the Inscrutable. This one focuses on a couple of young earthers, Carl Baugh and my old pal Kent Hovind. While anyone with an IQ over room temperature, including most of their fellow…
November 23, 2004
Here is a perfect example of why you should never accept at face value how the work of scientists is reported in the non-scientific media. They almost always get it wrong. Look at this report in the Associated Press on the new Pierolapithecus catalaunicus find and compare it to the report in Nature…
November 22, 2004
I had a wonderful day on Saturday visiting with old friends and new ones. First, I had lunch with Dan Ray and his lovely wife, Kim, and got to find out what busy really is. You think your life is hectic? How about having two pre-teen children, working full time Monday-Friday and going to law school…
November 21, 2004
Okay, since I'm a basketball fan, I gotta weigh in on this. I'm sure by now everyone has seen the footage of what happened after the Pistons/Pacers game on Friday night, as Pacers players went up into the stands after fans who were pelting them with beers and bottles and chairs. The NBA has just…
November 21, 2004
From Noam Chomsky's blog:
The outcome was a disappointment, but there have been disappointments before. Take 1984, when essentially the same gang of thugs--a little less tilted to the extreme reactionary statist side--won by a 2-1 margin, with about the same percentage of the electoral vote as…
November 20, 2004
I'm off for the day. Having lunch with Dan Ray and his wife, doing a little shopping, then having dinner with an old friend from debate that I haven't seen in some 13 or 14 years. So it's a day for new friends and old friends and lots of good conversation. Hope everyone has a great day.
November 19, 2004
I've been rather lax lately about reading other blogs and linking to articles that my readers might enjoy. To my delight, lots of other people have continued to write thoughtful stuff even while I wasn't there to read it (perhaps this suggests an answer to that "if a tree falls in the forest"…
November 19, 2004
Here's a quote you aren't likely to have seen from our old pal Robert Bork:
[I]t is naive to suppose that the [Supreme] Court's present difficulties could be cured by appointing Justices determined to give the Constitution its true meaning," to work at "finding the law" instead of reforming…
November 18, 2004
The only way to make a government tolerant, and hence genuinely free, is to keep it weak...Thomas Jefferson, the greatest of all American political philosophers, saw this clearly, and so he was in favor of keeping the government as weak as possible. He believed that in any dispute between a citizen…