stcynic
Posts by this author
June 14, 2006
The New York Times has an interesting article about whether gay marriage will impinge on religious liberty. Mind you, it's not really talking about the religious right bugaboo that ministers will be forced to perform gay marriages; that's nonsense from the get go. But there are lots of ancillary…
June 13, 2006
It took less than 24 hours for the newspapers to begin calling for Pennsylvania's mandatory helmet law to be reinstated following Ben Roethlisberger's accident yesterday. But folks, Roethlisberger is a big boy. His life belongs to him, not to any of us, and he made a choice. A bad choice, certainly…
June 13, 2006
Dembski has posted a quote from an open letter written by Edward Sisson of Touchstone magazine about the Cobb County disclaimer case. In it, Sisson makes a very strange argument that, I think, actually cuts against his and Dembski's position. Here's the quote:
A fundamental problem with the…
June 13, 2006
I've talked before about how easily one could put together a conservative essay generator, similar to the postmodern essay generator, that would crank out volumes of buzzword-laden prose that makes no sense whatsoever. I think perhaps someone has already written one and this piece at the…
June 13, 2006
Jack Balkin gets it exactly right in this post about the Bush administration invoking the state secrets privilege without any attempt to justify it:
I do not mean to suggest that the state secrets privilege should not exist or that it does not have considerable value. Rather, the claim is that the…
June 13, 2006
Now it appears that the NSA wants to mine date from sites like Myspace and Facebook. Frankly, I'm not really bothered by this. The more useless information they gather, the more impossible it is for such data mining to find anything useful. The more storage space and processing power they use up…
June 13, 2006
William Dembski has been bragging for months about the fact that he helped Ann Coulter write the sections of her new book that are about evolution. Now he's promoting her book as "the wedge for the masses" with some thoroughly laughable rhetoric:
Ann is taking Phillip Johnson's message as developed…
June 12, 2006
Since I seem to mention StopTheACLU so often, I thought I should have a shorter way to refer to them. STACLU seems to fit the bill; a slightly longer version - stacluelessness - seems a fair description of their problem. A perfect demonstration is this post full of that trenchant analysis you've…
June 12, 2006
No, not when she claimed that the 9/11widows enjoy the fact that their husbands died. Of course that's vile and anyone with one iota of human decency knows it. I didn't think it was possible for me to despise Coulter any more than I already did, but a friend just emailed me a link to this article…
June 12, 2006
I received an invitation today to attend the Progressive Faith Blog Conference. I will not be able to attend, but thought that one or two of my readers might be interested in doing so. I am not a religious man myself, nor do I really consider myself a progressive, but I think that religious…
June 12, 2006
Last night, a commenter named Goeff Casey left a comment trying to defend Paul Nelson against the charge of lying. Since that post has long since slid off the front page, I'm moving it up top so it doesn't get lost. As we'll see, the attempt fails badly.
You say that you have caught creationists…
June 12, 2006
There are bad ideas, there are really bad ideas, and then there's "who in their right mind allowed this to happen" ideas. The three most frightening words in the English language are no longer "starring Carrot Top". They've been replaced - and believe me, I wish I was kidding - by Bolton Sings…
June 12, 2006
Wow, another classic from Olbermann - a stunning bit of audio that has Bill O'Reilly telling a caller that he was going to get a visit from Fox security because he mentioned Olbermann's name on the air. It's just incredible to hear. Here's the report from Olbermann's show:
June 12, 2006
Pim Van Meurs has a pretty good analysis of the demarcation problem as seen by Larry Laudan and Robert Pennock, and standard ID responses to those positions. They attempt to use Laudan's argument that there is no single set of criteria that are both necessary and sufficent to demarcate science from…
June 12, 2006
Youtube is fast becoming the greatest and most useful webpage in existence. It allows us to post video footage directly to our blogs without having to upload it all. Here's one I came across on Captain Rational's site and just had to post here. It's Keith Olbermann shredding Bill O'Reilly and…
June 11, 2006
I'm sure you've all watched the little tempest in a teapot the last few days between Arlen Specter and Dick Cheney over the NSA's wiretapping and information gathering programs. For a few minutes, it actually looked as though Specter was going to try and support the constitutional notion of checks…
June 11, 2006
Nat Hentof has a well written but frightening article about the Bush administration's constant invocation of the state secrets privilege to shut down any opportunity for the courts to examine the constitutionality of their actions. Sadly, the courts are so far going along with it. Most recently, a…
June 10, 2006
I'm going tonight to hang out with an old and dear friend, Don Reese. He's performing this week in Grand Rapids and we always get together when he's anywhere near here. Being on the road sucks and it's always good to have a buddy around to spend the day with, share a meal with, and just talk to.…
June 9, 2006
Dembski has posted a "UD exclusive" (like the Worldnutdaily, "exclusive" here means "we're the only ones who will publish this crap") by Jerry Bergman, certified creationist loon, attacking Steve Rissing, a biology professor from Ohio State and one of the founders of Ohio Citizens for Science (thus…
June 9, 2006
As all the new folks settle in, I want to draw particular attention to a few of them. This should not be taken as a comment on any blogs I don't mention, but merely as a boost to the ones I've already been a fan of in their previous homes or have some connection with. The others I am eager to get…
June 9, 2006
You've gotta hand it to the DI Media Complaints Division - when their PR team gives them a catchphrase-laden response to something, they repeat it so many times that they begin to sound like Rain Man (just replace Judge Wapner with Judge Jones). Rob Crowther continues to beat this drum in yet…
June 9, 2006
In a 2004 Lancaster, Penn., speech reported in the local newspaper, the Lancaster New Era, Bush said to a group of Amish, "I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job." (link)
Nothing will.
June 9, 2006
This prompted quite a chuckle from me. An Agape Press article about a court ruling that a Christian prison ministry could not receive tax dollars without violating the establishment clause began with this:
Evidently it matters not that a well-known and highly successful prison ministry believes one…
June 9, 2006
ScienceBlogs is set to launch into a new phase in about 15 minutes, with about 25 new blogs joining the list. They're also rolling out a whole new homepage that looks dramatically different from the old one. I can't tell you all the new blogs that are joining us, but a few of them are really…
June 9, 2006
The FDA approved a vaccine for HPV, a virus that causes cervical cancer. Believe it or not, this is actually opposed by the religious right in one of the most twisted and destructive bits of 'thinking" I've ever seen.
In the US, for instance, religious groups are gearing up to oppose vaccination,…
June 9, 2006
Jacob Weisberg has an excellent article at Slate about why the gay marriage amendment isn't going to help the Republicans this time. He points out that they've basically had the amendment behind a "break glass in case of flagging ratings" case, but it has far less traction this time than it did in…
June 9, 2006
Tom DeLay made his farewell speech to the house yesterday and had the astonishing gall to accuse the other party of being for "more government, more taxation, more control over people's lives and wallets." The 3rd or 4th most powerful Republican lawmaker in charge during the most astounding…
June 8, 2006
Via Radley Balko comes this example of paternalistic overreach from Chicago, where they've apparently already banned the sale of fois gras and now are proposing to ban the sale of french fries because - surprise, surprise - they're bad for you:
If the City Council can ban foie gras, a fatty liver…
June 8, 2006
This just gets funnier and funnier. After making the stupendously ridiculous claim that he could leg press 2000 pounds because of his "age defying shakes", Pat Robertson is now defending that claim - kind of:
A spokeswoman recently released a photo she said showed Robertson leg-pressing 2,000…