Uncategorized
stcynic | August 15, 2006My thanks to Timothy Sandefur for sending me an advance copy of his new book Cornerstone of Liberty: Property Rights in 21st-Century America. It's apparently not available in stores yet. Amazon says they'll have it the end of October. The book is about eminent domain laws around the country and the threat they pose to property rights. It's published by the Cato Institute and contains cover blurbs from some real heavy hitters, including Richard Epstein and Sandra Day O'Connor, whose eloquent dissent in Kelo was inspiring (and that's not something I ever thought I could say about an O'Connor…
pharyngula | August 15, 2006As long as we're dealing with rebuttals to criticism, Joe Carter has reacted to my previous rejection of his incoherent complaints. Don't bother reading Carter, though, who is babbling and whining as usual…instead, just read this rebuttal to the rebuttal of my criticisms. Even if it is from a Christian (or especially since it is from a Christian, depending on the flavor of your biases).
stcynic | August 15, 2006Ever since the arrest of a bunch of suspects in the UK and elsewhere in a plot to bomb several airplanes, the White House and their apologists have been united in their talking points: A) that this proves the need for warrantless surveillance and B) that those who oppose warrantless surveillance oppose all surveillance. Both are flat out lies. Glen Greenwald does a terrific job of showing that in both cases in this post on the subject. In particular, he blasts the Wall Street Journal for peddling those two lies in a recent editorial on the subject. On the question of whether the successful…
stcynic | August 15, 2006Much has been written and said over the last few days after President Bush's comments about the terrorist arrests in England and here the other day. Bush said that it was part of the "war with Islamic fascists" and a lot of people thought that was an inaccurate and insensitive thing to say. I don't often defend Bush, but I will here. He's absolutely right. The ideology of the people we are in a war against certainly can be fairly described as fascist, and it is undeniably Islamic. They seek nothing less than total submission to the most barbaric interpretations of the Quran and the sharia.…
mikethemadbiologist | August 15, 2006I found a site called MRSA Notes that's all about methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus. If you're interested in infectious disease, it's a pretty good roundup of all things MRSA.
neurotopia | August 14, 2006Your results:You are Spider-Man
Spider-Man
95%
Hulk
85%
Superman
80%
Green Lantern
80%
The Flash
75%
Iron Man
60%
Supergirl
58%
Robin
58%
Batman
55%
Catwoman
55%
Wonder Woman
48%
You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.
Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz
stcynic | August 14, 2006Via Radley Balko I find a link to this blog post by Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey, and I realized that this woman has actually left a comment on my blog before. I remember her doing so because she was at the time dating Terrence Chan, a poker player I used to interact with in the poker newsgroup quite a bit. It seems that she broke up with Terrence and announced so on her blog and now is being inundated with men cyber-humping her leg, some of whom she evidently finds undesirable. So she wrote this stunningly self-righteous and arrogant post about how she's a "high quality woman" who has…
purepedantry | August 14, 2006Every time I think the human species has fully exploited all the ways one species can suck donkey balls -- found just every reason for all the other species be like "Yeah, we're not with them." -- we find newer, better ways. Such as, for instance, bark poaching:
Slippery elm trees here are falling victim to thieves who tear off their bark to sell in the burgeoning herbal-remedy market.
The gummy lining of the slippery elm's bark has long been used in North America, and especially in Appalachia, as a soothing agent for coughs, gastrointestinal ailments and skin irritations. But now, slippery…
thescian | August 14, 2006[This short essay was written for Desipundit originally.]
Foreplay
Consider a city you know. Bangalore, for instance. The city looks congested and filthy down on the streets but looks remarkably different and even pretty from the 30th floor of a tall building. The city, of course, is still what it is. What changed is our understanding about it. Understanding why something is the way it is; how it got to be that way; and why the hell does it or should it bother us is empowering. To understand is to take the lift to the higher floors. As we move higher and higher, features that were invisible…
pharyngula | August 14, 2006Maybe you've never heard of the Duggar family, but you may have run across their portrait: it's a fundamentalist family with 15 going on 16 kids. Prof. Bleen has put together a hypothetical picture of the family, if they were living under the creationist theocracy they like so much. It's not a pretty picture, and I think Bleen was optimistic.
tqa | August 14, 2006I was sitting and thinking earlier today - it's a dangerous hobby, and I try not to do it too often, but sometimes I can't resist - and found my thoughts drifting toward the topic of Pascal's Wager. As some of you probably know, Pascal suggested that it is always a better bet to believe in God than to disbelieve, because if you believe in God but are wrong, you won't ever really know it, but if you don't believe and are wrong you stand to lose a hell of a lot more.
I've never been particularly impressed with that argument, mostly because I've never been able to conceive of a deity that…
stcynic | August 13, 2006Folks, this may be a sign of impending armageddon. A Worldnutdaily columnist, Len Kinsolving, has actually written a reasonable, moderate, sensible essay on something. Kinsolving is usually one of their nuttier columnists, even relative to their normal nuttiness, but this column is astonishingly well considered. He's writing about the Dobrich family and the way they were treated in Indian River, Delaware.
When Mona Dobrich went to the Indian River School District board meeting and asked that the school board consider prayers that are generic and less exclusionary, it ignited a local storm.…
thescian | August 12, 2006The we-torture-and-kill-holy-cows show by Penn and Teller is up at Google videos free for your viewing pleasure. [via mf]
stcynic | August 12, 2006This will cause you to become rather angry, if you have any sense:
Powerful evangelical churches are pressing Kenya's national museum to sideline its world-famous collection of hominid bones pointing to man's evolution from ape to human.
Leaders of the country's six-million-strong Pentecostal congregation want Dr Richard Leakey's ground-breaking finds relegated to a back room instead of being given their usual prime billing.
The collection includes the most complete skeleton yet found of Homo erectus, the 1.7 million-year-old Turkana Boy unearthed by Dr Leakey's team in 1984 at Nariokotome,…
stcynic | August 11, 2006A 67 year old Republican congressional candidate in Tennessee named June Griffin has been arrested for stealing a Mexican flag from a grocery store in an attempt to strike a blow for her twisted version of patriotism. This took place, by the way, in Dayton, Tennessee, where the Scopes trial took place.
She said on July 18 she had noticed a small Mexican flag at an Hispanic grocery in the former Rogers Drug Store.
She stated, "I went in and there was nothing English in the store. There was one man who could not speak a word of English."
She said she was outraged about the Mexican flag, saying…
purepedantry | August 10, 2006Hi all,
Blogging is going to be sporadic til Monday. I am in transit to see the Fam until then.
(Don't even get me started on the pooch screw that was security at JFK this morning. Have you ever seen a woman throw a tantrum because she had to throw out her lotion? I have.)
Have a good weekend. Stay safe. Don't kill anyone because of your lotion.
Jake
sb admin | August 9, 2006The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science. If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated. -Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter (1872-1939) English surgeon. [via]
thescian | August 9, 2006The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science. If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated. -Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter (1872-1939) English surgeon. [via]
stcynic | August 9, 2006Larry Darby has now dissolved the Atheist Law Center in Alabama (good riddance), and says he's converted from atheism to something like deism (no, I won't welcome him to the club), but he's still spewing bizarre and incoherent conspiracy theories. Read this meandering screed and you'll see what I mean. It's just a weird mix of anti-communist, anti-conservative, anti-Jewish and anti-lots of other things rhetoric.