Ed Brayton is a freelance writer and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of Michigan Citizens for Science and co-founder of The Panda's Thumb. He has written for such publications as The Bard, Skeptic and Reports of the National Center for Science Education, spoken in front of many organizations and conferences, and appeared on nationally syndicated radio shows and on C-SPAN. Ed is also a Fellow with the Center for Independent Media.(static)
Ed Brayton also blogs at Positive Liberty and The Panda's Thumb
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May 11, 2008
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Shaun Mullen has this excellent retrospective and tribute to the late Col. David Hackworth. Hackworth is the most decorated soldier in the history of the American military, but he was also a maverick who dared to tell the truth when the Pentagon preferred lies. We could use a lot more like him.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:23 AM • 0 Comments
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So I went down to Battle Creek on Friday and got a hotel room, expecting to cover a protest against the Church of Scientology on Saturday. Guess what? No one showed up. Well, one person did, and he happens to be a reader of this blog and he recognized me. We waited around for quite a while and no one else showed up, so we left. Quite disappointing.
The weekend wasn't a total bust, though. I got to spend some time with my best friend and his family and that's always a good thing. Got to watch my godson play baseball. And came home with a really nasty sunburn. Thank science for aloe vera lotion.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:16 AM • 10 Comments
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Hurun Yahya, aka Turkish creationist Adnan Oktar, has been found guilty in a court in his home country and sentenced to prison:
Controversial Turkish Islamic author Adnan Oktar was sentenced to three years in prison on Friday for creating an illegal organization for personal gain, state-run Anatolian news agency said...Oktar had been tried with 17 other defendants in an Istanbul court. The verdict and sentence came after a previous trial that began in 2000 after Oktar, along with 50 members of his foundation, was arrested in 1999.
In that court case, Oktar had been charged with using threats for personal benefit and creating an organization with the intent to commit a crime. The charges were dropped but another court picked them up resulting in the latest case.
I have no idea if the charges are legit, of course.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:09 AM • 2 Comments
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Here's a ridiculous story. Code Pink, the group that has gotten so much attention for protesting against the war at the Marine recruiting office in Berkeley, has a special protest planned for this weekend:
The women's anti-war group has told ralliers to come equipped with spells and pointy hats Friday for "witches, crones and sirens" day, the last of the group's weeklong homage to Mother's Day."Women are coming to cast spells and do rituals and to impart wisdom to figure out how we're going to end war," Zanne Sam Joi of Bay Area Code Pink told FOXNews.com.
Yeah, that'll work. Maybe next week you can have a "throw salt over your shoulder" protest, or sacrifice a goat to a Roman goddess.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:02 AM • 12 Comments
May 10, 2008
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Apparently from a real protest against the Beijing olympics, someone holding up a sign that says "Would we have allowed Nazi Germany to host the olympics?" Well, yes, we did. Thank you for playing.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:23 AM • 27 Comments
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Ken Miller reviews Expelled for the Boston Globe. And he nails this precisely:
According to Stein, science leads you to "killing people." Not to cures and vaccines, not to a deeper understanding of nature, not to wonders like computers and cellphones, and certainly not to a better life. Nope. Science is murder."Expelled" is a shoddy piece of propaganda that props up the failures of Intelligent Design by playing the victim card. It deceives its audiences, slanders the scientific community, and contributes mightily to a climate of hostility to science itself. Stein is doing nothing less than helping turn a generation of American youth away from science. If we actually come to believe that science leads to murder, then we deserve to lose world leadership in science.
I haven't seen a single ID advocate take Stein to task for his ridiculous claim that science leads to killing people while religion leads to panacea. Not one.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:16 AM • 17 Comments
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The American Family Association has sent out an email to its supporters urging them to sign a petition demanding that Marriott hotels stop offering in-room adult movies. Here's my favorite part:
Act quickly as time is of importance.
Yes, act quickly! As we speak, untold numbers of middle management trainees and industrial lubricant salesmen are jerking off in the privacy of their Marriott hotel rooms and we must put a stop to this societal scourge. They should be reading their Gideon Bibles, not using their genitalia in unapproved ways. We will not stop until we've eliminated masturbation from society!
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:09 AM • 38 Comments
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Joe Sestak, a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania and retired 3 star admiral, has called for the end of the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy.
"Once you have served in war and faced danger with a gay service member, how can you come home and say gay people should not enjoy equal rights? It is simple. 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' must be repealed."Sestak joins 16 other veterans in Congress who are co-sponsors of legislation to lift the ban on openly gay service.
Hear, hear.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:02 AM • 9 Comments
May 9, 2008
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The YearlyKos conference has been renamed Netroots Nation and will be held this year in Austin, Texas from July 17-20. I am privileged to have been invited back to speak a second time on the science and politics panel. I haven't decided what I will speak on yet, there are several possibilities to choose from. We don't have an exact date and time yet for the panel. It will be moderated by my old friend DarkSyde from DailyKos, who will have more details, including all the other speakers, on the DailyKos front page early Saturday morning. Any Dispatches readers who are planning to attend or just live in the area, please drop me a line and we'll try and arrange a meeting for lunch or dinner at the conference.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 7:10 PM • 10 Comments
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You've probably used the Internet Archive before. It's home to the Wayback Machine, an indispensable research tool for seeing what webpages looked like at specific times in the past, as well as many other great features (including a great archive of bootleg concerts). The FBI served a National Security Letter to them demanding that they turn over information on who accessed their site. With the help of the ACLU and the EFF, they fought that order and the FBI has now withdrawn its letter.
National Security Letters (NSLs) are typically used to compel libraries, internet service providers and telephone companies to turn over information on their customers without a court order or warrant. They are authorized under the Patriot Act, but the DOJ has admitted that the FBI has misused them in literally thousands of cases. The most serious problem with them is the lack of judicial oversight, which leads inevitably to abuse.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:30 AM • 9 Comments
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I had to laugh at this post by Wil Wheaton pointing out that Hillary Clinton is behaving like a psycho ex-girlfriend. I agree with pretty much everything he says. Hillary has, for weeks now, been putting her ego above the interests of her party and she has succeeded only in damaging the inevitable candidate. You don't have to support Obama (and I still haven't decided who I'm going to vote for) to recognize this virtually undeniable reality.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:23 AM • 100 Comments
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This is the report I filed for Michigan Messenger:
A standing room only crowd that overflowed the meeting room, spilled out into the hallway and even down the stairs leading to the second floor of Frankenmuth city hall on Tuesday night witnessed a tense and emotionally-charged city council meeting as a local resident asked the council to remove a Lutheran cross from the city shield and a number of local citizens demanded that the cross stay where it is.
There was nothing unusual about the scene that played out; indeed, for those who have followed church/state battles in other communities it might almost have seemed like actors reading from the same script they've seen rehearsed a thousand times before. Invariably, the resident who believes that his government's use of a religious symbol is an unconstitutional endorsement of religion that sends a message of exclusion to those who don't share that particular faith is in the minority, usually a tiny minority. Lloyd Clarke knew that long before he stepped to the podium to make his request.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:16 AM • 32 Comments
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You may have read about the administrator at the University of Toledo who was suspended for writing an anti-gay column in the local paper. Jon Rowe has an excellent post at Positive Liberty that has exactly the proper response to the situation: defending her right to say what she said, and showing why she's wrong. He systematically debunks her arguments with reason. First, the argument from immutability. She wrote:
As a black woman who happens to be an alumnus of the University of Toledo's Graduate School, an employee and business owner, I take great umbrage at the notion that those choosing the homosexual lifestyle are 'civil rights victims.' Here's why. I cannot wake up tomorrow and not be a black woman. I am genetically and biologically a black woman and very pleased to be so as my Creator intended.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:09 AM • 26 Comments
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This is why these cases involving the Gideons being allowed to distribute Bibles in elementary schools are important.
Some Plano students who are Jewish say they were pressured or taunted to pick up copies of the New Testament from school display tables during recent weeks.Their parents have called for changes in district policies that allow outside groups to distribute materials on campus.
"Probably the one I heard the most was, 'If the Bible touched you, like, will you burn or something?' " said Jeffrey Lavine, 16, a sophomore at Vines High School.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:02 AM • 20 Comments
May 8, 2008
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The Office of Special Counsel was raided this week by the FBI as part of one of the many investigations of wrongdoing by Scott Bloch, the director of the agency that is supposed to protect whistleblowers from reprisals and federal employees from discrimination and political interference. Bloch is a first class butthead and political hack and he is going down like Pamela Anderson at a rock concert.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:28 AM • 8 Comments
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In a long-awaited and very disappointing ruling, the Michigan Supreme Court has ruled that any partnership benefits granted to gay couples, even those as part of negotiated union agreements, are unconstitutional under the anti-gay marriage amendment, Proposal 2, passed in 2004. After the passage of that amendment, the attorney general ruled that a state contract that included such benefits was illegal and that ruling was challenged on behalf of several cities and public universities in the state.
The district court ruled that Proposal 2 did not affect such benefits, but that was overturned by the appeals court and the supreme court upheld the appeals court ruling. The tragic irony of this is that despite the "save the children" rhetoric from the anti-gay crowd, the first people affected by this ruling will be the children of gay couples who may lose health care and other protections as a result.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:23 AM • 56 Comments
