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stcynic | September 11, 2006Jonathan Rauch, an eminently fair-minded and non-partisan critic, has written a compelling essay on the presidency of George W. Bush and I think he really nails a couple of very important points. In particular, he points out that Bush's lawless approach to spying may well actually undermine the war on terror rather than help it:
An extralegal terrorism war. If the country seriously intends to prevent terrorism, then spying at home, detaining terror suspects, and conducting tough interrogations are practices that the government will need to engage in for many years to come. Instead of making…
stcynic | September 11, 2006Brig. General Mark Scheid has laid out what many others have been saying since before the Iraq war started in 2003, that Rumsfeld's plan for the war was based on absurdly rosy scenarios that bore little relation to reality. He adds one new element to the story: Rumsfeld actually threatened to fire those in the Pentagon who brought up the need for post-war planning. I'll post a long excerpt below the fold:
In 2001, Scheid was a colonel with the Central Command, the unit that oversees U.S. military operations in the Mideast.
On Sept. 10, 2001, he was selected to be the chief of logistics war…
stcynic | September 11, 2006It's always fun to watch Sandefur go after the Lew Rockwell crowd. In a post at Positive Liberty, he positively eviscerates Thomas Woods, Thomas DiLorenzo and Stephen Kinsella on several subjects. In particular, he makes mincemeat out of Thomas Woods, the neo-confederate pseudo-historian, and his claim that the Constitution was essentially a treaty between the states.
Update: And don't forget to read the follow up post, where he smacks Kinsella around a bit more. This is getting brutal. It's time for the ref to stop in and declare this a TKO.
stcynic | September 10, 2006I am home again after a great evening with friends. I met up with my buddy Dan and we drove to Ann Arbor. We had dinner with Joseph from Corpus Callusum (and his wife? girlfriend? friend? I never thought to ask) and Shelley from Retrospectacle. I had never met either of them before and it was a pleasure to meet some of my fellow ScienceBloggers. Unfortunately, we had to leave far too early to make sure we got tickets to the show, but as it turned out that would not have been a problem. We were disappointed to find out that we could have spent another hour talking with the three of them and…
stcynic | September 9, 2006Despite bad weather, today is gonna be a great day. I'm headed out of town to hook up with my buddy Dan and head to Ann Arbor. We're going to meet a couple of other ScienceBloggers for dinner, then we're going to see Vinx play at The Ark. This is actually the first place I ever saw him play and that was a long time ago. I'll be back tomorrow, so I hope everyone has as good a weekend as I'm going to have.
stcynic | September 9, 2006I found this at Balko's place and I'm just shaking my head in disbelief. Like he did, I'm going to quote the publisher's description of a new book by Dinesh D'Souza, a guy I previously considered one of the more bright and serious conservative thinkers. After reading this, I think that assessment has to be reevaluated. A long quote begins below the fold:
In THE ENEMY AT HOME, bestselling author Dinesh D'Souza makes the startling claim that the 9/11 attacks and other terrorist acts around the world can be directly traced to the ideas and attitudes perpetrated by America's cultural left.
D'…
stcynic | September 9, 2006There's a new book out about Karl Rove called The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power. One of the stories in the book comes from a former professor from Fordham named Deal Hudson, who was hired by Rove to help court the Catholic vote for Bush. Hudson described an actual ceremony that he witnessed in the White House in 2001 where Rove had an exorcism performed to rid his west wing office, formerly used by Hillary Clinton, of its "left wing spirit". Now I can see why they'd use some disinfectant around Bill Clinton's desk, but this seems a little over the top to me.
stcynic | September 8, 2006Orac picked up on my post about the guy who claims that looking at the sun can take away your need to eat food by "storing the sun's energy in your brain." He put up a long post about some of the medical absurdities with the claim, and went on to talk about the "breatharians", a group I'd never heard of before. People have actually died following that bit of claptrap. It just reinforces a point I've made time and again: there is no idea or claim so stupid that you can't find a group of people to believe it.
purepedantry | September 8, 2006This is really cool. It is a video of a guy who took a picture of himself every day for 6 years.
stcynic | September 8, 2006I just found this on Youtube. It's a clip of Every Breath You Take from Sting's Unplugged performance on MTV about 13 or 14 years ago. Singing backup on the song is Vinx, the guy I'm going to see with friends tomorrow night in Ann Arbor (this was when he was the opening act on Sting's Soul Cages tour). He doesn't really get involved until the end of the song, but the vocal harmonies he goes into with Sting at the end give you some idea of the power of his voice. So please watch the whole thing. I've asked Vinx' manager to post some of his own stuff to Youtube, which he said he would do, so…
stcynic | September 8, 2006Josh Claybourn had this Youtube video over at In the Agora and it's really pretty cool. I like the song too. The video reminds me of the classic Jamiroquai video for Virtual Insanity, only much more stripped down.
stcynic | September 8, 2006I reacted to the announcement by President Bush that the CIA had Al Qaeda prisoners in secret prisons being interrogated the same way a 10 year old reacts to being told something obvious: Duh. Even before the Washington Post revealed that big secret last year, did anyone really not know? Of course they had secret places where they interrogated such prisoners. Would you want them not to? When they capture someone like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, they have to interrogate them (they are probably the most important sources of intelligence we can have other than an infiltrator) and they have to do so…
thusspakezuska | September 8, 2006It's the start of the fall semester. New committees are being formed, old committees are having new members appointed and all of them are convening for their first meetings of the year. I happened to get hold of the minutes of the first meeting of the Committee on the Status of Women in Science and Engineering (CSWSE) at IncrediblyLowPercentageOfWomenInEngineering Polytechnic University (ILPOWIE Tech). The committee members were appointed by the provost, and they included the Engineering Dean, the Women in Engineering (WIE) Program Director, and a Women's Studies (WMST) Professor. Read…
stcynic | September 8, 2006I don't know how many of my readers saw this, but last week someone decided to have a hotornot contest for the ScienceBloggers. But it was based on pictures placed on technorati, and since I don't have a picture there, I was left out of the field of entries; I'm not the least bit disappointed by that. But this week, Janet has decided that rather than a "who's hotter" contest, we should have a "who's geekier" contest, so she has declared a nerd off. Shelly is all in for it and posts some pretty compelling evidence of nerdiness. Chris has likewise issued a dork manifesto of his own, complete…
tqa | September 7, 2006For my contribution to the Panda's Thumb's ongoing review of Jonathan Wells' new book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (PIGDID), I will be reviewing chapters four and five. Chapter Four covers the record of evolution that is contained in the DNA of all living things, and Chapter Five discusses speciation. A full review of each of these chapters is going to take a while and wind up being rather long. I've divided the reviews up into chunks, and I'm going to post each chunk as I finish it. Comments are more than welcome, and might be helpful when the time…
tqa | September 7, 2006I'm bowing to peer-pressure and joining the throng of SciBlings who have admitted to taking the nerd test. Orac's been trying real hard to claim dominance in this category, and having met the man I am reluctant to argue with him, but it would seem like quite a few of us are giving him a run for his money.
For the record, I scored just as highly as he did on the nerd test, which means that we are equally nerdy, or that we are not actually equally nerdy but one of us knows how to game the test, or that neither of us is all that nerdy but both of us can game the test. (And I should get bonus…
stcynic | September 7, 2006This magazine has stumbled upon an idea I've been advocating for years, that politicians should be like Nascar drivers and should have to wear the logos of all the companies that sponsor their campaigns. It should be all over their clothing and the cars they drive. Here's their mock up of what Hillary Clinton and Rick Santorum would look like:
They also list the contributions they've each gotten by industry, but not by company:
HILLARY CLINTON
Hillary Clinton's top contributions by sector
Finance, Insurance, Real Estate $4,650,601
Lawyers & Lobbyists $3,533,740
Other $3,258,584…
stcynic | September 7, 2006Jon Rowe has an excellent post at Positive Liberty about a number of Christian scholars whose work debunks the Christian Nation myth. In addition to the work of Gregg Frazer, which he and I have both promoted greatly, he also cites scholars like George Marsden, Mark Noll and Nathan Hatch. And I love the response that he cites to his own work in this regard, where some hack from Worldmag calls Rowe a "militant secular pagan" - whatever the hell that is.
stcynic | September 7, 2006Our government has arrested yet another executive from an online gaming company, this time Peter Dicks, chairman of the board of Sportingbet, a British company. Jacob Sullum, writing at Reason.com, captured this whole situation perfectly a few weeks ago:
If an executive of a U.S. media company were arrested in Beijing for violating a Chinese law against "subversive" online speech, or in Tehran for creating "indecent" Web content viewed by Iranians, Americans would ask what right these countries have to impose their illiberal policies on us. Sadly, our government is giving people in other…