Critical Exponent

The out-going president of the Royal Society warns of fundamentalism hampering our ability to deal with scientific challenges:

In his final speech as president of the Royal Society, Lord May of Oxford will say scientists must speak out against the climate change “denial lobby”.

He will warn core scientific values are “under serious threat from resurgent fundamentalism, West and East”….

“There are serious problems that derive from the realities of the external world: climate change, loss of biological diversity, new and re-emerging diseases, and more.

“Many of these threats are not yet immediate, yet their non-linear character is such that we need to be acting today.

“And we have no evolutionary experience of acting on behalf of a distant future; we even lack basic understanding of important aspects of our own institutions and societies.

“Sadly, for many, the response is to retreat from complexity and difficulty by embracing the darkness of fundamentalist unreason.”

Now that he has reached a bully pulpit from which to wield his long-standing anti-gay campaign, Ratzinger is now endorsing a policy that pretty much says if you’re gay, you’re screwed:

Notice two things. First, deep-rooted “tendencies” are now independent and automatic grounds for dismissal, regardless of whether you “practice” homosexuality or “support” gay culture (whatever that is). Second, even if these tendencies are merely a “situation” in which you “find yourself,” they “gravely obstruct” you from relating properly to men and women. Through no fault of your own, you’re doomed. The Catechism’s paths to perfection—self-mastery, chastity, prayer, and grace—no longer suffice. The church won’t settle for your self-restraint, even with God’s help.

One part of the Instruction permits ordination of priests whose gay tendencies have been “overcome at least three years before ordination.” But this rule applies only to immature candidates passing through a “transitory” phase, not those with “deep-rooted” homosexuality. The policy also says it’s “gravely dishonest,” and therefore disqualifying, to “hide” your homosexuality to get into the priesthood. You’re damned if you show it and damned if you don’t.

So tell me who’s more disordered, well-integrated people for whom sexuality is just one part of the life experience or those who seek out reasons and ways to exclude fellow human beings from full social participation?

The current issue of Mother Jones is devoted to the topic of Church and State in modern America. In an article entitled “Original Intent“, Susan Jacoby debunks the revisionist myths that this country was founded as a Christian nation:

Regardless of the framers’ private beliefs about God, it is more important to look at their public actions in crafting the legal foundation for the new republic. (One might, with less pride, make the same observation about the founders’ attitudes toward slavery; whatever they “truly” believed, what matters is that they signed off on a formula counting a slave as three-fifths of a man.) And here the right-wing script goes awry, for it cannot explain why, if the founders intended to base the government on Christianity or monotheism, they failed to spell out their intentions in the Constitution itself. There was certainly ample precedent for doing so, not only in the Articles of Confederation but in nearly every state constitution…

The founders themselves had varying ideas about how much distance to place between their own beliefs and their public roles. Washington saw nothing wrong with issuing presidential proclamations of thanks- giving to God; Jefferson considered such proclamations unconstitutional. Scalia predictably cites Washington’s thanksgiving proclamations in support of Ten Commandments displays and dismisses Jefferson’s position. In an amusing 1814 letter to his friend Thomas Cooper, Jefferson noted that even Connecticut—which had still not dropped religious restrictions in its state constitution—declared that “the laws of God shall be the laws of their land, except where their own contradict them.”

Whatever happened to the milk spout?

You know what I’m talking about. You get a milk carton, you tear the flaps open on one side, pull the crease out, and voila! an instant pour spout. I remember how mysterious the milk spout seemed when I first saw it, and how neat I thought it was when I finally mastered the knack of creating it effortlessly upon grabbing my school lunch.

Where did the milk spout disappear to? It seems like most cartons these days have a plastic twist top to keep their contents fresh and tight. Good for consumers, I suppose, but perhaps a trifle wasteful, and not a little new-fangled.

Contrary to what many people think, there is no clear evidence linking stress and cancer. Nevertheless, it remains a mystery why the immune system does not attack the cancer cells it recognizes as foreign. One promising therapy being investigated involves making the immune system more aggresive:

In mice, said James Allison, chairman of the immunology program at Sloan-Kettering, some cancers went away after just a single injection of an antibody to CTLA-4. Other cancers required a vaccine, as well, to bolster the newly unleashed immune attack. But then, Dr. Allison found, even the most intractable tumors in mice were destroyed.

Judge Alito touted, as recently as 1985, his membership in a group called the Concerned Alumni of Princeton. Alito graduated from Princeton in 1972, the year CAP was launched

In the early 1970s, “the executive committee of CAP published a statement in December 1973 that affirmed unequivocally, ‘Concerned Alumni of Princeton opposes adoption of a sex-blind admission policy.’” By 1985, when Alito was applying for a job with the Reagan administration, the CAP was fretting:

“People nowadays just don’t seem to know their place,” fretted a 1983 Prospect essay titled “In Defense of Elitism.” “Everywhere one turns blacks and hispanics are demanding jobs simply because they’re black and hispanic, the physically handicapped are trying to gain equal representation in professional sports, and homosexuals are demanding that government vouchsafe them the right to bear children.”

… of sorts. Read all about BlogShares, a fantasy blog share market economy.

It sounds like fun, but, uhm, a big time-suck. I’m staying away.

Critical Exponent is my new presence on the web. Powered by WordPress, it will allow me to consolidate my previous blogs while giving me more control over content and appearance.

My old Blogger entries and comments have all been migrated to this new site; the old blogs will remain static from now on. To read old entries, simply look through the Old Blogs category.

This is still a work in progress. There are planned feature and appearance changes that will find their way to the site over the next several weeks. If you’re interested in how I have customized WordPress, look at the Colophon page and the WordPress technicalities category.

I look forward to interesting discussions and comments. Enjoy!

Here are easy directions for backing up your database. The blog infrastructure can easily be backed up using your system’s standard file commands.

I was following the codex directions to move WordPress, but I could not get it to work: I could see the blog in its new location but I could not log into it. I had to go into the wp_options database and manually change the Blog URI back to its old location.

I finally managed to get the move to succeed by deactivating all the plugins before switching the URI in the Options/General tab and moving all the files.