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stcynic | June 10, 2005Just in case you weren't feeling old enough...today is Josh Claybourn's birthday. His 24th birthday. And on top of that, my 20th high school reunion is coming up in a few weeks. And tomorrow I have friends coming up that I've known since high school and college, so the day is sure to contain reminiscing. After all, even the nostalgia was better in the old days. For crying out loud, I'm turning into my father. Help!
stcynic | June 9, 2005Here's a gem from her latest incoherent screed, this one about Mark Felt, whose daughter she feels the need to take shots at along with every other single mother in the country:
"I'm still a single mom," she explained, "I am not ashamed of this." She ought to be. See, the idea of marriage is to get a man other than your own father to support you while you raise children.
I'll take incredibly stupid statements for $1000, Alex. No wonder my friend Don refers to Coulter as a "hate crime in high heels".
stcynic | June 8, 2005Here are links to two fascinating articles. The first is by Salman Rushdie and it deals with the question of atheism and religion. The second is by the Slacktivist and it compares a recent statement from Ted Haggard, director of the National Association of Evangelicals, with quotes from the bible and prominent Christian theologians.
stcynic | June 4, 2005Okay, not really fishing. I'm off to visit my best friend and see his kids play baseball and softball, respectively, so there'll be nothing new until tomorrow at least.
stcynic | June 3, 2005A blog called Patriots for Bush has linked to an article I wrote in a post about how thoroughly evil the ACLU is. "The American Patriot" writes:
The ACLU is the most unpopular entity in America next to the Klan and the Nazi's, I wonder how long it will be before they defend one of those two groups. Oops, wait a minute, they already have.
But if you follow the link, you see that I was in fact writing about the ACLU defending not the Nazis or the KKK (though they have, and rightfully so), but about them defending Jerry Falwell! Now of course, they could have linked to the many posts I've…
stcynic | June 1, 2005Like most blogs, I link to a lot of newspaper and magazine articles that require free registration. Though free, these will often lead to spam emails, so people don't like to register and often avoid reading the articles as a result. There is a solution. Go to Bug Me Not, put in the URL of the newspaper and it will pop out a username and password for you. It's a beautiful thing.
stcynic | May 31, 2005Jon Rowe has an excellent essay on fundamentalism and the moral paradox to which it leads.
stcynic | May 30, 2005Doug Stanhope has a bit on his new DVD about supporting the troops. He thinks the idea is silly, that you should only support people individually rather than in groups because the group may well include people who don't deserve support. An email that Andrew Sullivan received perhaps supports his point. Sullivan was critical of the military for allowing a tank crew in Iraq to write the words "New Testament" on the side of the tank's turret. Not only did they allow it, they put a picture of it on the DOD website for the whole world to see. Sullivan's criticism was accurate. At a time when the…
stcynic | May 24, 2005Timothy Sandefur has tagged me to answer some questions about books. Here are my answers:
1. Total number of books I've owned. I have no idea. At this point, I have boxes full of books, probably numbering somewhere close to 2000. And I've never sold any books at garage sales or to second hand stores or anything, or for that matter thrown them out, so that must be pretty close to the number of books I've owned.
2. Last book I bought. Hmmm. It's either Freedom Evolves by Daniel Dennett, or Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. I forget the order in which I bought them, but it was within a…
stcynic | May 22, 2005Jon Rowe has a fairly good fisking of a post by Ed Feser on the alleged "unnatural" nature of any sexual act that is not intended for procreation. I think he gives Feser too much credit for coherency, though. Feser's argument is not terribly coherent. Here is Feser's argument in a nutshell: the sexual organs were designed specifically for the purpose of procreation and for no other purpose. Hence, any use of the genitals for any purpose other than procreation is "unnatural", not merely in the sense of being used for something other than its intended purpose, but in the far stronger sense of…
stcynic | May 19, 2005Jon Rowe has another excellent essay on the role of religion among the founding fathers. He draws on an op-ed piece by Mark Lilla in the NY Times on the same subject. Lilla rightly hammers the "schlock history written by religious propagandists like David Barton" while pointing to more serious scholarly efforts at defining the role of religion among the founders. Rowe quotes this from Lilla:
What distinguished thinkers like David Hume and John Adams from their French [Enlightenment] counterparts was not their ultimate aims; it was their understanding of religious psychology. The British and…
stcynic | May 17, 2005This past weekend was the Memphis in May BBQ Competition, one of the largest such competitions in the world. As some of you may know, I am a BBQ fanatic (and I finally just perfected my babyback ribs, by the way) and I love competitions like this, though I've never participated in one. And being a fan of both BBQ and bad puns, I love some of the team names people came up with in this competition:
4 Pork Harmony; Any Pork in a Storm: Barefoot in the Pork; Best Little Boarhouse in Memphis; Big Al and the Butt Rubbers; Bobbi D's Church of Swinetology; Gettin Piggy With It; Pork Me Tender;…
stcynic | May 15, 2005Just a reminder for anyone who is interested in listening, I'll be appearing on the Jim Babka show, Culture Repair, at 5 pm eastern time to debate the 14th amendment with Herb Titus, former dean of the Regent University Law School. To listen online, click here. High quality streaming is available with a subscription, and lower grade streaming is available for free on channels 1 and 2.
stcynic | May 12, 2005Mark Ganek has a very funny column about Gerald Allen and his brilliant plan to ban all the gay books from Alabama. It begins:
Alabama has once again seized the educational initiative, despite being ranked 50th in the country in per pupil spending. A state representative recently introduced a bill that would have taken a decisive and innovative step toward helping the beleaguered students: fewer books. Because if you don't know you don't know it, it's pretty much the same as knowing it.
The bill would have prohibited public schools from buying any books with gay characters, gay themes, or…
stcynic | May 10, 2005I just got a call from Jim Babka inviting me on his show for a second time this Sunday. The subject will be the 14th amendment and whether or not it intended to incorporate the bill of rights as enforcable against the states. My opponent will be none other than Herb Titus, former dean of the Regent University Law School. Mr. Titus is a good friend of Jim Babka's as well as of Perry Willis, who comments here from time to time. He did the legal work on Perry's court case seeking to overturn the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act, on which he and I would agree. It should be a very…
stcynic | May 10, 2005The Worldnutdaily has a link to an AP article which they announce with the breathless headline ACLU Pushes for Legal Cohabitation - like that's a bad thing. The article concerns a 200 year old North Carolina law against living together, a law which recently cost a sheriff's dispatcher her job and is being challenged by the ACLU on her behalf. The article includes this gem of absurdity:
"We think that it's good to have a law against cohabitation because the studies show that couples that cohabitate before they're married, that their marriages are more prone to break up, there's less stability…
stcynic | May 8, 2005This is from an email that Lynn sent to me, that was sent to her by a friend of ours. I'm not going to paste the whole thing, just the last part of it because it really moved me. Lynn's mother died while giving birth to her; I lost my mother 8 years ago (for that incredible story, click here). So this has special meaning for both of us and I hope it does for some of you too, especially on Mother's Day.
Your Mother is always with you. She's the whisper of the leaves as you walk down the street, she's the smell of certain foods you remember, flowers you pick and perfume that she wore, she's…
stcynic | May 5, 2005I've been doing some research on Janice Rogers Brown and in a speech she gave, she quoted this passage from John McGinnis:
There is simply a mismatch between collectivism on any large and enduring scale and our evolved nature. As Edward O. Wilson, the world's foremost expert on ants, remarked about Marxism, "Wonderful theory; wrong species."
That quote from Wilson is almost too perfect to be true. Anyone know if it is? I suppose it shouldn't matter. If he didn't say it, he should have.
By the way, you should read this speech. If anything, it makes me much more likely to support Brown's…
stcynic | May 5, 2005Timothy Sandefur was kind enough to remind me after my post on Robert Bork about an essay by Harry Jaffa called The False Profits of American Conservatism. Jaffa, a student of the late Leo Strauss, is one of the most prominent conservative intellectuals in the country and his essay highlights the major fault line that divides conservatism - the Declaration of Independence. He uses the Lincoln-Douglas debates as a pretext for examining this divide, noting that during those debates, while Lincoln was invoking the principles found in the Declaration as valid and binding in all times and places,…
stcynic | May 2, 2005On ABC's This Week on Sunday, Pat Robertson put on a virtuoso display of irrational claims, hypocritical flip flops and demagoguery worthy of his exalted position as one of the world's foremost leaders of the credulous and stupid. Some of what he said was astonishing even to someone who has followed his career full of manipulative nonsense. For instance, this exchange between the host, George Stephanapolous, and Robertson about Justice Ginsburg:
GS: "You said also that you believe Democrats appoint judges who don't share our Christian values and will dismantle Christian culture. So do you…