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stcynic | December 7, 2004A group of former members of the armed forces who were discharged from the military for being gay have filed suit asking to be reinstated. The timing of this suit shows the lunacy of the military's policy of throwing gays out of the military. At a time when our armed forces are stretched so thin that they are extending tours of duty and even bringing middle-aged folks out of retirement to send them to Iraq and elsewhere, how stupid is it that we're simultaneously throwing some people out of the military solely because they're gay? The fact is that gay people can serve their country just as…
stcynic | December 6, 2004Careful, Reed. He'll call you an obsequious follower. See him beating the braindead horse here.
stcynic | December 6, 2004My pet troll has decided to take on Dan Ray on the subject of federalism, in response to a comment Dan left here earlier. He seems to think that Dan is a professor of "business and tech ed" from "Podunk U", when he is actually the director of the Paralegal Studies program at Eastern Michigan University. Even more amusing than the fact that he quotes from a Supreme Court decision that was overruled last year is the ending:
Also, professor Dan, as a professor of "Business & Tech Ed," you are in no position to judge Dr. Dembski's qualifications or mine, as we are far above you on the totem…
stcynic | December 4, 2004My new bestest friend Robert O'Brien sent me this charming email:
Mr. Brayton,
After reading your opining here and on PT, the most charitable description of you I can come up with is "a pompous ass, intoxicated with the sound of his braying." You frequently make my pretentious idiot list.
Sincerely,
Robert O'Brien
The "sincerely" was a nice touch, don't you think? And all this because I dared to call a guy who wants to ban all books with gay characters from libraries in his state an idiot. Well, I'm certainly open to a better word to describe the good Rep. Allen. In fact, I'd prefer a better…
stcynic | December 4, 2004Perhaps I should start handing out an Idiot of the Day award, for crying out loud. Our latest example of rank stupidity: State Rep. John Graham Altman, of Charleston, South Carolina. He's all pissy because a South Carolina public broadcasting station aired a documentary about the life of gay residents of the South:
A Lowcountry legislator says he wants to cut South Carolina Educational Television's budget after it aired a documentary on gays in the South.
"I thought it was just social, leftist propaganda that they had no business airing," said state Rep. John Graham Altman, R-Charleston. "…
stcynic | December 2, 2004I'm sure some of you have noticed the difficulty lately with comments or entries being double posted, or with it sometimes showing that you can't leave comments. There are times when the cgi files needed to execute posting comments or entries are not reachable over the last few days. I've talked to my domain hosting company and they say they are doing updates on the server that my domain is hosted on, but they hope to have it finished soon. In the meantime, if you go to post a comment and it just seems to hang there and doesn't connect, don't bother to try it again - it likely did go through…
stcynic | December 1, 2004I am posting this from a friend's office because we are without power at the moment, so I can't do anything online. We got hit with a nasty snowstorm overnight, very wet and heavy snow, and have been out of power since the middle of the night. Which, in the country, means no water as well as no lights and heat. So, I'll be back to post, answer comments, chat and answer e-mail as soon as I have power again. Hopefully soon.
stcynic | November 26, 2004founding fathers worried more about legislative activism than judicial activism
stcynic | November 25, 2004Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Not only is today Thanksgiving, it's also the one year anniversary of this blog, which gives me something extra to be thankful for. In the last year, I've made some new friends because of this page and my life has been enriched in many ways. So to Dan, Timothy, Jon, Jason and many others, thanks for giving me so much to think about, for challenging me to think more clearly and more deeply, and for the praise that encourages me to continue. And thanks, of course, to Lynn, who was the one who pushed me to do it in the first place, and who has brightened my life in…
stcynic | November 24, 2004Tom Cavanaugh has a wonderful article at Reason Online about the ever-growing cabal of organizations that exist solely to take offense at how their group is portrayed. What sparked this? How about a proposed law in Hungary outlawing blonde jokes. No, that's not a joke.
stcynic | November 24, 2004Hat tip to Timothy Sandefur for this link to all the other disclaimers we could put in school textbooks. Brilliant.
And here is Dan Ray's suggestion for a disclaimer to the gravity disclaimer:
If you intend to experiment with your childrens' lives using the theory of gravity as you are willing to do with their education using the theory of evolution, you should first acquaint yourself with the principle of deceleration. This principle posits that a relatively smaller mass accelerating toward a larger mass will, upon contacting that larger mass, rapidly decelerate. The rapidly decelerating…
stcynic | November 23, 2004Here is a perfect example of why you should never accept at face value how the work of scientists is reported in the non-scientific media. They almost always get it wrong. Look at this report in the Associated Press on the new Pierolapithecus catalaunicus find and compare it to the report in Nature, a scientific magazine who has qualified writers on staff. It begins with the very first sentence:
A nearly 13 million-year-old ape discovered in Spain is the last probable common ancestor to all living humans and great apes, a research team says in Friday's issue of Science magazine.
No, that's…
stcynic | November 22, 2004I had a wonderful day on Saturday visiting with old friends and new ones. First, I had lunch with Dan Ray and his lovely wife, Kim, and got to find out what busy really is. You think your life is hectic? How about having two pre-teen children, working full time Monday-Friday and going to law school on the weekends, as she does? If I go to the bank and the post office in the same day, I need a nap. We had a nice lunch with lots of good conversation that ranged from Robert Bork's judicial theories to neo-formalism to telling rude jokes and stories from my comedy days.
After lunch, I did some…
stcynic | November 20, 2004I'm off for the day. Having lunch with Dan Ray and his wife, doing a little shopping, then having dinner with an old friend from debate that I haven't seen in some 13 or 14 years. So it's a day for new friends and old friends and lots of good conversation. Hope everyone has a great day.
stcynic | November 18, 2004The only way to make a government tolerant, and hence genuinely free, is to keep it weak...Thomas Jefferson, the greatest of all American political philosophers, saw this clearly, and so he was in favor of keeping the government as weak as possible. He believed that in any dispute between a citizen and an official, the citizen ought to have the benefit of every doubt. But Jefferson was too intelligent a man to believe that the sweet could not be obtained without also taking in a certain amount of bitter. He knew that a weak government was very likely to be an unstable one - that its very…
stcynic | November 18, 2004Jon Rowe has a fascinating couple of posts up about the naturalistic fallacy (also called the is/ought fallacy), natural law, natural rights, and whether public laws should regulate private morality. I hope to return to this subject and give some of my own thoughts when I have more time, but I urge you all to read his thoughts on the matter for now.
stcynic | November 17, 2004Hat tip to Jim Anderson for a link to this study on children raised by two lesbian parents. The study matched up 44 teenagers who were part of two parents households led by two lesbian women with 44 teenagers raised in two parent households with married heterosexual parents, and it also normalized the factors for ethnicity, economic status, gender, age and other factors. It says:
The researchers found no differences between the two groups in terms of depression, anxiety, self-esteem and school grades. Exactly the same proportion of both groups also reported having had sex (34%).
But while a…
stcynic | November 16, 2004Jon Rowe has a post about his odd sense of humor as a test for his readers. If the test was whether we found the same thing funny that he did, the answer is yes. I laughed out loud reading the melodramatic and overly pedantic memo from Robert Reed concerning the proper way to write the Brady Bunch. He compares it to Shakespearean character development. Howlingly funny. It reminds me of the kind of people who apply literary criticism to the songs of Madonna and actually present papers comparing the archetypal construction of the virgin or some such rot, or who write hysterically overblown and…
stcynic | November 16, 2004Perusing the Congressional Budge Office website, I came across some fascinating numbers from the Federal budget. For instance, where does Federal revenue primarily come from? Let's look at the historical budget numbers. In 2003, personal income taxes provided 44.5% of all revenues; in 2000 it was 49.6%. Corporate income taxes provided 7.4% of all revenues; in 2000 it was 10.2%. But in that time, total Federal revenues have dropped from 2 trillion dollars to 1.78 trillion dollars, while federal spending has gone from 1.79 trillion to 2.16 trillion - almost an exact reversal. The result?
In…
stcynic | November 13, 2004Timothy Sandefur links to a rebuttal of the "fuck the south" rant that I linked to. He is of course correct that many of the founding fathers were from the south, including some of my favorites and his. And it is true that much of that rant was entirely filled with non sequiturs and ad hominems, as I noted when I linked to it. But it still cracked me up. And I was actually hoping that the Neal Pollack response that he linked to would be just as funny in hammering the other side. Alas, it's more of a sober minded critique of the sillier arguments made in the rant. Still, worth reading of…