stcynic
Posts by this author
September 14, 2004
The New York Daily News has assigned a writer, Rick Pienciak, to cover the world of poker every week. His latest column has some interesting insights in it about the high stakes poker world, including a revelation, based upon the word spreading in the Vegas poker rooms, that Annie Duke won ESPN's…
September 14, 2004
Jason Kuznicki's Positive Liberty has rapidly become one of the must-read blogs on the web. Jason is in the process of finishing his PhD in history at Johns Hopkins, and is probably the only person any of us is likely to know to have turned down a Fulbright scholarship. His writing is clear and…
September 13, 2004
Okay, this made me laugh. The irony of a google ad for a gay matchmaker service showing up on Clayton Cramer's blog is overwhelming. Cramer is, as Jon Rowe puts it, a tad bit obsessed with gays:
September 13, 2004
Please go read this delightful reflection from Joseph Duemer after a day of repotting his baby bonsai trees. I love this finish:
For all my political consciousness, I remain located in an essentially aesthetic space. But I do not make the mistake of setting the aesthetic above the social,…
September 13, 2004
I am one of those who has said many times that the larger context of the war on terrorism is that of a crucial internal battle within Islam, a battle that puts the US, and western ideals, in the crossfire. Ultimately, the battle to defeat the Bin Ladens of the world must be fought primarily by his…
September 13, 2004
Joe Carter and PZ Myers have been having a little exchange over some claims in the new paper by Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute, a paper that has prompted quite a bit of discussion. I jumped into that discussion briefly in a comment on Joe's page and I'm posting this as a follow up to that…
September 10, 2004
After reading all the blogs and watching the chat room screaming and yelling today, I'm just laughing about the absolute certainty on both sides that the Killian memos are either forgeries or not forgeries. The fact is that everyone is speculating at this time. If they are forged documents, that…
September 10, 2004
Not satisfied with having his spokesperson lie for him, Dick Cheney has decided to jump into the fray and lie on his own behalf:"I did not say if Kerry is elected, we will be hit by a terrorist attack," Cheney told the newspaper, according to a story prepared for Friday's editions. "Whoever is…
September 9, 2004
My position on the whole Vietnam war/draft dodging issue is this: I don't begrudge anyone for trying to avoid service in that horribly misguided war except those who supported the war and refused to go and fight in it. For those who were against the war and avoided service, whether it was through…
September 8, 2004
The DI has, predictably, issued a press release spinning yesterday's announcement from the board of the Biological Society of Washington. Also predictably, it contains several misrepresentations. That's what you have to do when the facts are against you, so it's hardly a surprise. The distortions…
September 8, 2004
First, Cheney comes out and says that if you vote for Kerry, the terrorists will attack us:
"It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that…
September 8, 2004
Given the conversation lately over the question of whether ID is creationism, I thought it would be a good idea to reprint an earlier post from January on the subject of the prevarications of ID:
It is appropriate that in the month of January, I have made so many entries about the Intelligent…
September 7, 2004
In the comments on a post below, Dan Ray suggested that perhaps Stephen Meyer's article on ID in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington had gotten into that journal by "questionable means". He was apparently right. The editor at the time, Richard Sternberg, apparently violated the…
September 7, 2004
I was out of the office and on the road all day today, and part of it was spent in a college town. I live in a small town that is nearly an hour to the nearest bookstore, so I took the opportunity to stop into one and pick up Azar Nafisi's book Reading Lolita in Tehran. I'm about 50 pages into it (…
September 4, 2004
It seems the Worldnutdaily has taken notice of my side project blog, The Panda's Thumb. In an article entitled Anti-evolution paper met with 'hysteria, name-calling', the most consistently wrong news source this side of Pravda has a link to us. A little background is probably necessary. Steven…
September 3, 2004
From his speech three days ago:Twenty years of votes can tell you much more about a man than 20 weeks of campaign rhetoric...For more than 20 years, on every one of the great issues of freedom and security, John Kerry has been more wrong, more weak and more wobbly than any other national figure...…
September 3, 2004
I think it would be fun to make a side by side comparison of the empty rhetoric delivered by Bush and Kerry in their respective campaign speeches.
Now, because we have made the hard journey, we can see the valley below. Now, because we have faced challenges with resolve, we have historic goals…
September 3, 2004
Like Jason Kuznicki, I didn't watch Bush's speech last night, but read it this morning. One of the charms of reading the speech in text is that you get to laugh knowing that such an inane speech was interrupted by applause approximately 14,873,994 times (the other advantage is that when you read…
September 2, 2004
As a follow up to my previous post about Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert's insane comments about George Soros, you need to read Jack Shafer's column on Slate about both Hastert's initial statement and his utterly dishonest defense thereof. Soros wrote Hastert a letter demanding an apology and…
September 1, 2004
I've only just been introduced to her, from a mention of her in a Christopher Hitchens article, but this could really be fascinating. Azar Nafisi is an Iranian expatriate who teaches literature at Johns Hopkins University. She was teaching in Iran at the time of the revolution in 1979, and had high…
September 1, 2004
Jon Rowe says Queen rocks. Timothy Sandefur says Queen sucks. Allow me to cast my vote strongly with Mr. Sandefur - Queen sucks. Not for the same reasons, mind you. I'm with Jon in liking a lot of prog/art rock, and while I also really like most of the bands that Timothy likes (though I never…
September 1, 2004
I've been a fan of Jason Kuznicki's blog for quite some time now, as should be obvious. But I had never read the essay Without Pain or Fear or Guilt, an essay he wrote about his coming out of the closet, until today, when Lynn pointed it out to me and suggested I read it. My reaction upon reading…
August 31, 2004
I think I've made it pretty clear that I loathe political conventions and campaigns in general, with their tired litany of empty language and meaningless cliches. Rarely does anyone even attempt to address a real issue in real terms. Today one of my favorite actors, Ron Silver, gave one of those…
August 31, 2004
Via Atrios: The opening invocation of the Republican National Convention was given by a woman named Sheri Dew, the charming and thoroughly deluded woman behind this bizarre speech where she says that supporting gay marriage is tantamount to supporting Hitler. No, really, she says that. Out loud. In…
August 31, 2004
Just look at this transcript from Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, an interview with Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert:
HASTERT: Well, you know, that doesn't do any good. You know, but look behind us at this convention. I remember when I was a kid watching my first convention in 1992, when…
August 31, 2004
Last night was draft night for a fantasy football league that I've joined for the first time. My brother has been in this league for several years and they decided to expand this year, so I finally got a spot in it. About half the people in the league I knew socially before the draft, and the other…
August 30, 2004
Jason Kuznicki, the Grand Poobah of Positive Liberty, has decided to shorten his blogroll for the sake of aesthetics and intellectual clarity, and went through a difficult culling process (described here) that presumably involved goat entrails and a ouija board. I'm proud to announce that…
August 30, 2004
Lynn just sent me an interesting article on a situation at Black Hawk College involving academic freedom. I recalled seeing a headline on Worldnutdaily about it, but didn't bother reading it until I saw this followup article. Here's the situation, as the Worldnutdaily describes it:
LeBlanc…
August 29, 2004
And the flip flops just keep on coming. It seems that our Man of Principle has discovered that there are a lot of farms in Illinois and decided to backpeddle on some of his rhetoric from an earlier presidential campaign. The AP reports:
On his first campaign trip into Illinois farm country,…
August 28, 2004
Reacting to my post yesterday about Lincoln suspending habeas corpus and trying to arrest Chief Justice Roger Taney, Timothy Sandefur writes:
Still, I can't help but wonder why there's always so much talk about Lincoln's or the Union's violations of civil rights during wartime. (Often examples are…