stcynic

I was on the phone last night with my friend Rick and he told me about this project called Kalamazoo Promise. I grew up in a suburb of Kalamazoo and my parents still live there. Rick works for the city of Kalamazoo today. Someone very wealthy in the area - and their identity is a complete mystery…

This is becoming a far too familiar story. The police all around the nation are committing enormous resources to stop consenting adults from wagering on a game of skill and it's getting entirely out of hand. On a busy night at the New York Players Club in upper Manhattan, vice squad officers…

I don't know if anyone else saw the USC-Fresno State football game on Saturday, but I stayed up far past my bedtime to watch it. I didn't intend to, but I couldn't stop watching Reggie Bush put on a performance for the ages. Bush had 513 total yards against a top 20 team. That's a staggering number…

I'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…

Michelle 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,…

With 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…

Nice to see Eugene Volokh once again taking StopTheACLU to task for their endorsement of the most banal rhetoric, comparing the ACLU to the KKK and to terrorists.

A Northern Ireland politician named Maurice MIlls has weighed in and claimed that Hurricane Katrina was sent by God as punishment for homosexuality. God, as usual, could not be reached for comment.

Ambient Irony has an excellent post on the subject of why methodological naturalism is important to science. The argument, which is dead on the money, is essentially that invocation of supernatural causes eliminates the ability to test a hypothesis because it relies upon the willful decisions of…

The last few months have brought an almost dizzying series of statements from various vatican officials about intelligent design and evolution. One cardinal says ID is valid, another says it's not. The Pope himself makes a statement about intelligence being behind the universe, IDers think that is…

I know we're only 10% of the way through the NBA regular season, but I don't think it's too early to pat myself on the back for what I wrote on October 26th, before the season started: the Detroit Pistons will be better this year than they were the last two years under Larry Brown. For the record,…

Wow, if you thought George Will was a conservative who is annoyed by ID and its attendant anti-evolution nonsense, wait till you see Charles Krauthammer's column today. In his typical fashion, Krauthammer gets right down to brass tacks: Dover distinguished itself this Election Day by throwing out…

Or rather, an unusual chain of events leading up to a solid ruling. A Federal District Judge in New York has granted summary judgement in favor of a church who was denied the right to rent a public school facility in New York to hold church services on Sundays. Nothing unusual about that, of course…

Here's an unusual couple of stories, coincidentally brought to my attention within days of each other but apparently unrelated. The first is that a brewing company in Utah, irritated by Sen. Buttars' attempts to weaken science education in that state by attacking evolution, has renamed one of its…

Right-wing British historian David Irving, who once famously said that Adolf Hitler knew nothing about the systematic slaughter of 6 million Jews, has been arrested in Austria on a warrant accusing him of denying the Holocaust. Irving, 67, was detained Nov. 11 in the southern province of Styria on…

An almost complete skeleton of a primitive mosasaur has been discovered and is reported in a geoscience journal this month. Mosasaurs were reptiles that moved back into the oceans and came to dominate shallow marine ecosystems between 65 million and 95 million or so years ago. The new fossil find…

As 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…

I 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,…

This is the text of an email sent to members of a religious right group called Faith and Action in the Nation's Capital concerning the ACLU and engaging in the usual hyperbolic rhetoric we've come to know and loathe: WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 /Christian Wire Service/ -- The Reverends Rob Schenck (…

I'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…

Conservative columnist George Will has a rather blistering column up about where his fellow conservatives have gone wrong recently. He begins with a blistering statement about the dangers of embracing anti-evolution nonsense: The storm-tossed and rudderless Republican Party should particularly…

My thanks to flatlander for keeping me up to date on happenings in Utah. Our favorite state legislator west of the Mississippi, Chris Buttars, is back and this time he has secret legislation to pursue in his crusade against evolution: A Utah senator says he has opened a confidential bill file…

Paul Phillips has a post about the WSOP final table, which aired Tuesday evening on ESPN, reminding me that I hadn't posted anything about it. The most obvious thing about it, and the thing I found most enjoyable about watching it, was the comraderie among the players and the welcome class with…

I don't know how many people watched Duke play Seton Hall tonight, but if not you missed one of the most dominant games I've ever seen. Seton Hall went up 2-0. 22 missed shots later, it was 26-4 and all but over. The freshmen from Duke were really impressive, which bodes well for the future. They…

I'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…

Interesting follow up on the question of whether the new school board could get the Dover lawsuit mooted or not. It turns out that at least one person on the old school board wanted to attempt it. The old school board had one last meeting on Monday night before the new board takes over next month…

Phillip Johnson, the chief architect of the intelligent design movement, famously said that the primary strategy of that movement is "to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic, thus shifting the debate from creationism vs. evolution to the existence of God vs. the non-existence of…

Someone on Volokh noticed that Underneath Their Robes, the amusing blog I mentioned yesterday, is now gone and the entire site is password protected. I suspect that his boss at the U.S. Attorney's Office didn't like the idea of him dishing about judges they appear in front of. And while I guess…

The 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…

I'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.…