Critical Exponent

Slate suggests some better alternative designs to the upgraded USDA food pyramid.

Salon.com features an interview with Richard Dawkins, “the world’s most famous out-of-the-closet living atheist” who has become a target of the Religious Right. In that interview, he speaks up in defense of rationality. Right on! We need people to think!

Here are some notable quotes:

My American friends tell me that you are slipping towards a theocratic Dark Age. Which is very disagreeable for the very large number of educated, intelligent and right-thinking people in America. Unfortunately, at present, it’s slightly outnumbered by the ignorant, uneducated people who voted Bush in.

Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter. The delusional “next world” is welcome to both of them. This world would be a much better place without either of them.

In those apocalyptic religions, people actually believe that because they read some dopey prophesy in the book of Revelation, the world is going to come to an end some time soon. People who believe that say, “We don’t need to bother about conserving forests or anything else because the end of the world is coming anyway.” A few decades ago one would simply have laughed at that. Today you can’t laugh. These people are in power.

Some Passover humor from Springfield.

The Post reports that a new Florida gun law, championed by the NRA, will expand leeway for self-defense.

The New York Times reports on a study that users are often the source of innovative ideas.

Here’s a study that bucks the current obesity hysteria. Commentary was soon to follow…

Indecisive? Not a problem!

Funny how few people remark on Scalia as an activist judge…

A freshly out-of-the-closet law student asks Justice Scalia some hard questions.