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stcynic | October 19, 2006I have a friend who, about 15 years ago, went from being a high school teacher to being the chief lobbyist of a very large company. A couple weeks ago we had a conversation in which he said that if he was still teaching advanced government, now that he's actually worked up close with the legislature at both the state and federal level, he would teach it very differently. I asked him what he meant and he said, "When I taught government, I used to think that legislators are the experts, that they have access to all this information and expertise that the average citizen doesn't have, so we…
stcynic | October 19, 2006Rep. Curt Weldon is one of the more entertaining loonies in Congress. For sheer entertainment value, he ranks up there with James Traficant and B-1 Bob Dornin (and I really miss both of those guys). This is the guy who was deeply involved in the ceremony that crowned the Rev. Moon in a Senate office building a few years ago, but he initially denied it. When asked about it, his spokesman said, "What? Don't know what you're talking about, he wasn't there." When a videotape showed up of him actually giving a speech at the event and embracing Moon, the story changed just a bit.
This is also the…
stcynic | October 18, 2006More reaction to Condoleeza Rice daring to be gracious to a gay man's relatives over at the Freep joint. You're gonna love this one:
This is an issue that is going to affect the very foundation of our society. Soon "gay" marriage will become a reality putting the final nail in the coffin of the american family (if everything is marriage then nothing is marriage); thousands of young people are going to die of AIDS because they believe they have no choice but to be "gay"; it is not trivial.
Yes, someone actually wrote that. And meant it. Bloody hilarious.
stcynic | October 18, 2006Radley Balko has a suggestion for Democrats on how to exploit the passage of the anti-gambling bill and I think it's sound advice:
Over the last week, some 10-15 million Americans who play online poker logged on to their favorite poker sites, only to get a message telling them that, thanks to the U.S. Congress, they're no longer allowed to play. The GOP just politicized a rather large group of people who heretofore were rather apolitical. And they skew rather wealthy.
Of course, we run into the same old problem: Are the Democrats any better? They ought to be. If they were smart, they'd carry…
stcynic | October 18, 2006And yes, I mean that literally. Read this report about a series of attacks in a predominately gay neighborhood in San Francisco, where gay men are being robbed, beaten and then raped by guys screaming at them and calling them faggots.
Mark Welsh said he was attacked as he walked from work to his car
"I was attacked from behind and hit in the back, neck and shoulder, which knocked me to the ground ... As I fell to the ground, they proceeded to kick and punch throughout most of my body."
Throughout the beating and robbery Welsh said his attackers "kept calling me a faggot, many a time."
When…
stcynic | October 17, 2006Pam Spaulding likes to pepper her posts with "actual Freeper quotes", that is, quotes from the folks at Free Republic. If you want to see the absolute bottom of the barrell, dumbest and most deluded right wing hacks and their take on any issue, that is definitely the place to hang out. In her post about Condoleeza Rice and the "profoundly offensive" act of saying a gay man can have a mother-in-law, she pulls a bunch of quotes from this Free Republic post. You really must see them. Here's one of my favorites:
It seems obvious that the Democrat's last minute push for this election cycle is all…
stcynic | October 17, 2006James Walcott has received the galley proofs for Dinesh D'Souza's new book, wherein he blames the "cultural left" for 9/11 because our horrible decadence makes the whackos so very angry. I think Walcott's reaction is about right:
It isn't rare that I take instant animus against a book like this. But I don't tend to react right away. The responsible thing for me to do as an occasional book critic is to wait until the official pub date, find a suitable venue for review, and thrash the book based on its merits.
But this is a special book, deserving special mistreatment. With The Enemy at Home, I…
grrlscientist | October 17, 2006
You Passed 8th Grade US History
Congratulations, you got 7/8 correct!
Could You Pass 8th Grade History?
I got the first question wrong; John Quincy Adams is not the same person as John Adams.
tlambert | October 16, 2006The Tripoli six are five doctors and a nurse who were tortured until they confessed to deliberately infecting their patients with HIV. Revere has the latest on the campaign to free them. Mike Dunford list things you can do to help.
grrlscientist | October 16, 2006A couple days ago, one of my doctors told me that "if you could bottle your sarcasm and sell it, you'd be a rich woman." So of course, I had to take this online quiz to see how it measures up against medical opinion. I'll let you peek below the fold for my results, and I hope that you share your results with me, too.
You're Totally Sarcastic
You sarcastic? Never! You're as sweet as a baby bunny.
Seriously, though, you have a sharp tongue - and you aren't afraid to use it.
And if people are too wimpy to deal with your attitutde, then too bad. So sad.
How Sarcastic Are You?
stcynic | October 16, 2006The SCOTUS denied cert in the case involving the city of Berkeley and the Sea Scouts. The Sea Scouts, affiliated with the Boy Scouts, discriminate against atheists and gays. The city of Berkeley had a program of giving free slips at the city marina to non-profit groups, but not to those groups that engage in discrimination. The Sea Scouts sued all the way to the California Supreme Court and lost. The court essentially ruled that while as a private organization, the Scouts have a right to engage in such discrimination, that doesn't mean that government agencies have to fund their activities or…
stcynic | October 16, 2006While Jason Kuznicki has just started his new job with the Cato Institute, Radley Balko has just announced that he is leaving Cato and joining Reason magazine as a senior editor. An exciting opportunity for him, as he says, to be more of a journalist and less of a policy wonk. So while Cato is gaining one brilliant writer, they're losing another. I guess that evens out. But congratulations to both Jason and Radley for their new challenges. Cato and Reason are lucky to have you, and so are the rest of us.
tqa | October 16, 2006If you watched the news at all yesterday, you probably know that we had a little bit of a shake-up out here yesterday morning. I live on the island of Oahu, which is a fair distance from the epicenter of the quake, so the shaking wasn't too bad. It was strong enough to rattle the windows, knock down a couple of poorly hung pictures, and totally freak out the kids and dog, but no real damage occurred. It was also strong enough to shut down the power grid, so we spent most of the wet, rainy day inside with no power. Things are back to normal now, and I'll have a couple of more earthquake-…
razib | October 16, 2006It's been a few weeks since I posted on the Tripoli Six, but while I've been busy with other things there are still six lives in the balance. Revere has more details, and Janet has a long post on the importance of writing letters. The trial starts October 31st, so let's raise some consciousness as a lead up!
stcynic | October 16, 2006Let me join Jason Kuznicki in applauding the Nobel committee for choosing Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank for this year's Nobel Peace Prize. Yunus is the man who pioneered the concept of microcredit, small loans that conventional banks would not give, targeted to the poorest of the poor to enable them to start their own businesses. It started in the 1970s when Yunus loaned $27 to a group of Bangladeshi women who started a business making bamboo stools. That gave him the idea to start Grameen Bank to do that all over Bangladesh, and it has spawned similar efforts all over the world in poor…
stcynic | October 15, 2006My buddy Jeff emailed me a link to this group with the title, "Oh my god. I can't believe this is real." The Christian Boy Love Forum. I know, it sounds like something from South Park, but they're apparently serious. A sample:
Many boylovers who have attempted to change their orientation say their ability to love others and their self-esteem have been severely damaged. The American Psychiatric Association claims that this attraction begins in adolescence, and efforts to eliminate it are usually ineffective. However, like ex-gays, some boylovers have found change possible. Many Christian…
stcynic | October 14, 2006You've gotta see this amusing post from Gribbit about Pope Benedict and his now-infamous statement about Islam being spread by the sword. He says the Pope shouldn't have to apologize for his remarks, which I agree with. He shouldn't have to apologize for them because they were pretty much accurate. But you're gonna love Gribbit's reason why the Pope shouldn't apologize:
I have a major problem with the presumption that the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, was expected by anyone on this planet to issue an apology to the Muslims of this world. As a soon to be Catechumen in the Roman Catholic…
stcynic | October 14, 2006I came across this post on another blog, and a comment by someone claiming that Dawkins, in his new book The God Delusion says that Thomas Jefferson was an atheist. Here's the comment:
I hate to bring up the name of St. Richard Dawkins too often, as I know he makes the biscuit worshippers come out in a rash. However, in his new book ("The God Delusion" - that's what I love him for, zero words minced) he actually talks about the secularism of the founders and the evidence for Jefferson, at least, being an out-and-out atheist.
These guys were doing their polito-philosophical stuff under the…
tqa | October 14, 2006My post on the Lancet article has attracted a fair amount of comment, both in the comments here and on other blogs. On the whole, those who have addressed my criticisms have disagreed with them. I've read the criticisms and re-read both the new and the 2004 Iraqi death toll studies a couple of more times. Between the two, I've become convinced that some (but not all) of my earlier concerns were unjustified.
In this post, I'm going to try to respond to most of the substantive criticisms (and a few of the other comments). I'll let you know where my views have changed, and I'll try to clarify…
stcynic | October 14, 2006Keith Olbermann's "worst person in the world" segment recently nailed pretty much all of Fox News for their blatantly dishonest attack on Ted Turner. They claimed that Turner was saying he couldn't choose between terrorists and America when that was not the case. Here's the clip: