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stcynic | March 7, 2005I returned home from my weekend of fun last night, thoroughly exhausted but happy. Had a great time Saturday night. Though the steaks were underwhelming - the Big Buck Brewery in Auburn Hills seems to think that garlic by itself is all that is needed for a good marinade - the company was great. Best of all, I won $140 playing poker so the whole trip was paid for. God I love that game. Gotta give credit to Dan Ray for hanging in there and playing cards with a bunch of sharks. He's not really a poker player, but he picked it up pretty fast and played pretty well. I was glad to be able to…
stcynic | March 5, 2005I am off until tomorrow. Going to the Detroit area to spend some time with a group of buddies, where we will be engaging in the traditional male bonding rituals of eating steaks the size of hubcaps and playing poker. With no women there to keep us civilized and on our best behavior, I suspect that bodily noises and crude jokes will also be involved.
It just occured to me that we have quite a murderer's row of societal outcasts in this group - three lawyers, a mortgage broker, a lobbyist and a gay republican. All we need is a used car salesman, an abortionist and Jose Conseco and we will…
stcynic | March 2, 2005Timothy Sandefur has written an ode to his favorite pen, the Pilot V-ball Extra Fine Point. I had to laugh because I am exactly the same way. I am very picky about my pens and I absolutely hate most pens. I guard them jealously and threaten physical harm on anyone who steals a pen that I like. Unlike Sandefur, I don't have a single favorite that has lasted quite that long. My current favorite is the Bic Z4 Roller Blac, either in .5mm or .7mm depending on the nature of the document I'm writing. Since I send an extraordinary number of faxes, I tend to use the .7mm for those because the larger…
stcynic | March 1, 2005Here's the arch-moron mynym's latest response to me, wherein he still is too stupid to understand the difference between a public form and a private one. I'm not going to bother with a line by line refutation of it. If you feel like it, go there and pick out all the logical fallacies yourself. Most amusing thing about it: he actually thinks he was stopped from commenting here because he was disproving me. I'll take delusions of grandeur for $1000, Alex.
stcynic | February 28, 2005In a response to my post on his ridiculous equation of private and public forums, mynym has taken his own already-established absurdity and raised it to a whole new level. In response to my statement that "The Constitution's free speech provision applies to governments....", he replies, "But a principle that the law is based on applies to all." But he is obviously wrong. If someone came into your home and called your wife a whore, and you threw him out of your house, would you say that you have violated the principle of free speech? Of course not. If someone stood up in the middle of a…
stcynic | February 28, 2005Okay, it's official. I'm old. It doesn't seem possible that I'm old enough to be having a 20 year class reunion. Yikes.
stcynic | February 27, 2005Howard Van Till, my colleague on the board of Michigan Citizens for Science, has written a review of By Design, by Larry Witham. The book explores the issues and personalities at the interface of science and religion through interviews with some of the key people involved, including Michael Behe, Ken Miller and Paul Davies. It's not limited to evolution and creationism, but also includes the anthropic principle and other relevant issues.
tlambert | February 25, 2005 The Tangled Bank is a showcase of blog posts on biology, medicine or natural history. The latest compilation is here.
stcynic | February 25, 2005Mark Butterworth has responded to my post on his own blog with his thoughts on what he sees as an inevitable civil war. He says:
I'm trying to recall the circumstances which first prompted my musings on a future civil war. I believe that it was in watching the Democrats attack the Republicans in the run up to the last election that had something to do with it.
Well I don't know what led to those thoughts, but the immediate context, as you can see in your original post, was you taking the side of Dennis Prager in a dispute with Jonah Goldberg over whether cultural wars are metaphorical or…
stcynic | February 25, 2005I've read a flood of obituaries of Hunter S. Thompson in the last few days, most of them falling into one of two extreme categories. Depending on who you listen to, Thompson was either an unquestioned genius who changed journalism forever or, alternatively, nothing more than a drunken hack who liked to do drugs and obsess over himself. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in between. Christopher Hitchens, I think, strikes a pretty good balance in this Slate article.
Thompson was a man who, in many ways, got stuck inside his own invented persona. When Hitchens refers to him "discharging fire…
stcynic | February 23, 2005I've just been waiting for this, knowing that Joseph Farah couldn't help but put foot in mouth in this situation. But even for Farah, this is astonishing. In a delightfully silly column called No Substitute for Real Journalism, Farah gives us his take on the whole Gannon/Guckert ordeal. He eagerly calls Talon News and Guckert "pretenders" and contrasts them with the professional standards of the Worldnutdaily. And if you're not laughing yet, stick with me. After admirably noting that, "Maybe the reason the White House didn't mind looking the other way when it came to Gannon-Guckert was the…
stcynic | February 21, 2005Ace Pryhill has an amusing post about the recent Simpson's episode where Marge's sister marries her lesbian lover and Homer gets ordained over the internet so he can perform gay marriages. My favorite part is this wonderful quote from the endlessly ridiculous L. Brent Bozell:
L. Brent Bozell, president of the Parents Television Council, criticized "The Simpsons" for addressing the issue of same-sex marriage, though he said he hadn't seen the episode.
"At a time when the public mood is overwhelmingly against gay marriage, any show that promotes gay marriage is deliberately bucking the public…
stcynic | February 21, 2005In today's Boston Globe, Cathy Young writes about Thomas Woods. In it, she makes many of the same arguments Eric Muller has been making and even references him directly.
stcynic | February 21, 2005I'm still reading this stuff, and it's just unreal. It's like I've overturned a rock and all these southern nationalist whackos are streaming out. How about this story about a book called Southern Slavery, As It Was, written by League of the South board member Steve Wilkins:
Students at one of the area's largest Christian schools are reading a controversial booklet that critics say whitewashes Southern slavery with its view that slaves lived "a life of plenty, of simple pleasures."
Leaders at Cary Christian School say they are not condoning slavery by using "Southern Slavery, As It Was," a…
stcynic | February 20, 2005In perusing Eric Muller's recent entries on the subject, I continue to be amazed by how these people think. Absolutely baffled. Muller reports in this post about a conversation on a radio show that Woods appeared on. That conversation went like this:
Caller: Mr. Woods, I'm in total agreement with you, and I would have to say, Lincoln didn't free anybody; he enslaved everybody.
Thomas Woods, Jr.: Yes, I couldn't agree more. I appreciate that. Thanks.
He couldn't agree more that Lincoln "enslaved everybody"? There seems to be this perverse notion among these people that they had a right to own…
stcynic | February 20, 2005At a time when they should be celebrating a victory in court, as I am as well, the Christian group that had all charges against them dropped in court is now griping about wording in the judge's decision. And naturally, the Worldnutdaily is leading the way:
While applauding Judge Pamela Dembe's dismissal of all criminal charges against four Christians arrested last year for evangelizing at an outdoor homosexual event, the American Family Association expressed outrage over Dembe's "hateful and bigoted comparison of peaceful Christians to these hate-filled groups."
"We are one of the very few…
stcynic | February 19, 2005Eric Muller has a really interesting article on his blog about Thomas Woods' new book Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, and his many other writings. This book is getting an enormous amount of attention in the media, especially on the right, with Woods making appearances on Hannity and Colmes, Scarborough and the like, and it is doing well on the NY Times Bestseller list at the moment. Woods is one of the folks that Sandefur often refers to as "doughface libertarians", though I don't know what this is a reference to (perhaps he'll stop by and tell us). These are generally…
stcynic | February 18, 2005Lawrence Summers has finally provided a full transcript of the remarks he made that caused so much controversy, not to mention physical illness, at Harvard last month. I haven't had time to read them over entirely yet, but at least now people have the full remarks to respond to.
stcynic | February 18, 2005Gary Hurd, an archaeologist and former Curator of Anthropology at the Orange County Museum of Natural History, has posted at the Panda's Thumb a more thorough fisking of Scott Foust's lunacy than the one I did. Nice work, Gary.
stcynic | February 18, 2005Several commenters here have said that in examining the practical effects of abstinence-only sex ed, I am missing the point that the religious right isn't really interested in decreasing teen pregnancy or STDs. Wesley Elsberry sent me this perfect example of that from the ARN message boards. When asked by another person whether he prefers abstinence-only sex ed because it works or because it suits his ideology, Douglas Bender replied:
Both. But even if it only reflected my ideology, and didn't seem to "work" in preventing sexual activity and sexual disease, that would only matter if…