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stcynic | November 21, 2005I'm a fan of the Volokh Conspiracy, the group legal blog that features some excellent thinkers, but today's edition has an odd juxtaposition. First, Juan Non-Volokh (who recently announced he would not be blogging anonymously much longer, as I recall) posted an endorsement of Charles Krauthammer's column lambasting ID and supporting evolution. The very next post, by Todd Zywicki, said...well, it's said several things so far today. It initially said:
Scott Adams now has a blog, known apprpriately enough as Dilbert Blog ... I also see that Mr. Adams has also already had the misfortune to cross…
stcynic | November 21, 2005Michelle Goldberg, the terrific writer for Salon.com, has a really interesting article examining the historical roots of the "War on Christmas" idea that is getting so much play in the conservative media these days. As it turns out, this one goes back a lot longer than most of us realize:
In 1959, the recently formed John Birch Society issued an urgent alert: Christmas was under attack. In a JBS pamphlet titled "There Goes Christmas?!" a writer named Hubert Kregeloh warned, "One of the techniques now being applied by the Reds to weaken the pillar of religion in our country is the drive to…
stcynic | November 21, 2005With prominent conservatives like George Will and Charles Krauthammer speaking out strongly in favor of evolutionary theory and against ID lately, you knew there would be a reaction from some of their ideological brethren. George Neumayr, executive editor of The American Spectator, offers this commentary in an attempt to argue that evolution and atheism are one and the same. He begins by trying to poison the well with a false charge of disingenuousness:
Only a small percentage of the American people support the evolutionary claim that life arose through purely material causes. Consequently,…
loom | November 18, 2005Following up on my earlier post, I wanted to relay one more piece of book news. I've been getting some emails over the past couple months inquiring about my book, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea. I wrote it as a companion volume to the 2001 PBS television series, Evolution. Like the series, the book surveys the history and cutting edge of evolutionary biology, from the origin of new species to mass extinctions, from the rise of complex life to the emergence of humans. It also looks at ongoing evolutionary races, whether the competitors are hosts and parasites or members of the opposite sex…
stcynic | November 17, 2005As a follow up on my previous post about Rob Schenck's plan to show up at ACLU headquarters to deliver 20,000 petitions asking them to stop doing things that bother them, I got an email from a source at the ACLU who is having quite a laugh over the whole thing. It seems that the press release for this little stunt was circulated around the office today and they all noted that Schenck had gotten the address wrong. The only one to show up so far appears to be a reporter wandering around in front of the building talking on his cell phone, asking where everyone is. Meanwhile, Schenck may be up…
stcynic | November 17, 2005I have just posted my final post to In The Agora, the group blog I've contributed to for the last several months. It was not an easy choice to make, and I'm sad to have to make it, but I just can't devote the time to it that I would like. I've got this blog, which is obviously my first priority, plus the Panda's Thumb, which I co-founded and obviously can't give up. That left me with two other group blogs that I was contributing to, ITA and Positive Liberty, and most of the time I've been so busy that I've just been cross posting the same material to each of them. That is not the attention…
stcynic | November 17, 2005I've been thinking about this woman in Jordan who was supposed to be part of the suicide bombing of the hotel there last week, but whose vest of explosives failed to detonate. Her husband was apparently one of the others whose bombs did detonate, causing so much destruction. But I'm guessing that the husband was the one who prepared her explosive vest and that its failure to detonate wasn't entirely accidental. He may have left her behind on purpose. After all, if he's about to get 72 virgins in heaven, the last thing he wants is his wife hanging around.
stcynic | November 16, 2005I've seen some stupid people in my life, but this one just may take the cake. A woman in California was shot 4 times by her boyfriend. He and his family then held her hostage, refusing to take her to the hospital. The idiot who shot her happened to mention to a family friend that he was holding his critically wounded girlfriend to a family friend, and that friend called the police. The boyfriend was sentenced to 20 years in prison, but the idiot girlfriend wrote a letter to the judge asking him to go easy on the guy:
"I love Christian today as deeply as I loved him before this awful thing…
stcynic | November 15, 2005The great state of New Jersey - the Garden State - is on the lookout for a new state slogan. This, of course, has become the butt of many jokes as Jersey has long been. The jokes practically write themselves.
New Jersey: What are you lookin at?
New Jersey: Fugetaboutit
It all reminds me of an old Robert Wuhl bit about the New Jersey legislature actually considering a bill that would have made Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run the official state anthem. That would, he noted, be the very first state anthem with the word "suicide" in it. "Baby this town rips the bones from your back" - tourism is…
stcynic | November 15, 2005I'm curious to know if my readers have ever taken a Meyer-Briggs personality profile, and if so what their designation was. Anyone who has taken one and wants to share, please leave a comment. This was prompted by something I read on Paul Phillips' blog, where he mentioned that he is an ENTJ. Knowing Paul even to the extent that I do, as a long distance acquaintance, I am not at all surprised. I've taken a couple of Meyer-Briggs tests and both pegged me as an ENTJ (which means extroverted, intuitive, thinking, judging). For a description of what a typical ENTJ person is like, go here. I'd say…
stcynic | November 12, 2005Jim Anderson of Decorabilia, who coaches debate out in Washington, notes that Timothy Sandefur was cited during a Lincoln-Douglas debate he saw recently. I've never been cited in a debate, that I know of, but I have judged debates and had friends cited. And I remember judging a debate involving a Georgetown Day School team (GDS is a private school in D.C. where a large percentage of the rich and powerful send their kids) in which one team cited the father of one of the debaters on the other team and, according to the GDS debater, misinterpreted him. And once I had someone cite the husband of…
stcynic | November 12, 2005Yesterday I asked the rhetorical question, would Dembski continue to embarrass himself in this situation regarding Shallit's testimony? Well, we have our answer. Not only is he continuing to embarrass himself, he's digging the hole even deeper. He's now compounding his dishonesty with an attempt to erase the past. He has now deleted all three of his previous posts where he made the false claim that Shallit had been pulled from testifying by the ACLU because his deposition was an "embarrassment" and a "liability" to their case, even after one of those posts got almost 100 comments in reply to…
stcynic | November 12, 2005Lo and behold, Dembski has finally managed to find Shallit's deposition transcript, months after it was available if he'd really wanted to find it. If this was a scavenger hunt, he'd have finished last. Now, since I've been perfect in predicting his behavior so far, let me try another one. He will now pick the deposition apart and make fun of it, whether it deserves it or not, in an attempt to claim that he thinks it should be embarrassing to Shallit. He'll strut and pose and huff and puff and pretend to be laughing at Shallit's deposition in the desperate hope that everyone will focus on…
stcynic | November 11, 2005Dembski has responded - kind of - yet again. He's seen my previous post and noted my statement that Shallit's deposition is included as an appendix in the plaintiff's response to the defense motion for summary judgement. He writes:
Ed Brayton at http://www.stcynic.com/blog/archives/2005/11/dembski_finally_respondski… claims that Jeff Shallit's deposition is readily available as Appendix III of the plaintiffs' motion for summary judgment in the Dover Case. See here for that motion. The table of contents lists no appendices. So what happened to them? Stay tuned.
Okay, I admit it. The Priesthood…
stcynic | November 11, 2005It seems that William Dembski can be shamed into more obfuscation, but can't be shamed into actually being honest. First, a little background. On October 29th, Dembski posted an item on his blog in which he claimed the following:
Ask yourself why, after submitting almost 200 pages of materials against me in his expert witness report and after submitting to a deposition with the Thomas More Law Center in July, Jeffrey Shallit did not take the witness stand in Dover for the plaintiffs. Answer: his obsessiveness against me and ID made him a liability to the ACLU.
Clearly, the implication here is…
stcynic | November 8, 2005This has been in the works for a few days, but now it's official. I am joining forces with Burt Humburg to write a detailed history of the Dover trial for Skeptic magazine. Burt, as I noted before, is the Typhoid Mary of the ID movement. He's not afflicted himself, but he appears to be a carrier; everywhere he goes finds itself up to its ears in ID activity - Kansas, Minnesota, now Pennsylvania. We're working on legislation that would prevent him from ever coming to Michigan. But in the meantime, it'll be fun collaborating with him on this article and I thank him for the kind invitation to do…
stcynic | November 8, 2005This blog is reporting on a massive protest of 150,000 Muslims in Morocco on Sunday, gathered to protest against Al Qaeda and their decision to murder two Moroccan relief workers in Iraq. This is very important and we need more of this. I firmly believe that the vast, vast majority of Muslims are good and decent people who are appalled by the actions of Bin Laden and his fellow travelers. But in many communities, they may be cowed by fear into not speaking out. The single most important thing that can happen within the Muslim world, I think, is for moderate, civilized Muslims to begin to come…
stcynic | November 7, 2005It has now been 5 days since I posted absolute, undeniable proof that Dembski's claims concerning why Jeff Shallit didn't testify at the Dover trial were false. That proof was in the form of a motion filed by the defense and Judge Jones' ruling on that motion, which proves incontrovertibly that Dembski's claim that Shallit was pulled from testifying because his deposition was an "embarrassment" to the ACLU is false. In point of fact, it was the defense who went to great lengths to keep Shallit from testifying. I finished that post with the following statement:
So we have now conclusively…
stcynic | November 7, 2005While waiting for stuff to load on my hard drive yesterday I did some surfing and came across a huge list of food blogs. I guess I should have known that there are tons of blogs devoted to food, one of my great passions. So go see this list and visit some of the pages. Time well spent.
stcynic | November 7, 2005One of the mailing lists I used to be on, and miss being on, is the ASA list. The ASA is the American Scientific Affiliation, a group of Christian scientists who are, for the most part, not creationists. Their listserv has long been home to debates over evolution and creationism that are of a higher caliber than those you usually hear. I was on that list for several years, but these days I've just got too many listservs going to keep up as it is. Anyway, Pim Van Meurs is still on the list and he pointed to an interesting report sent to that list by Louise Margaret Freeman, a psychology…