Critical Exponent

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’s what he says:

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the liberal Union for Reform Judaism, said “religious right” leaders believe “unless you attend my church, accept my God and study my sacred text you cannot be a moral person.”

“What could be more bigoted than to claim that you have a monopoly on God?” he said during the movement’s national assembly in Houston, which runs through Sunday….

He used particularly strong language to condemn conservative attitudes toward homosexuals. He said he understood that traditionalists have concluded gay marriage violates Scripture, but he said that did not justify denying legal protections to same-sex partners and their children.

“We cannot forget that when Hitler came to power in 1933, one of the first things that he did was ban gay organizations,” Yoffie said. “Yes, we can disagree about gay marriage. But there is no excuse for hateful rhetoric that fuels the hellfires of anti-gay bigotry.”…

Yoffie said liberals and conservatives share some concerns, such as the potential damage to children from violent or highly sexual TV shows and other popular media. But he said, overall, conservatives too narrowly define family values, making a “frozen embryo in a fertility clinic” more important than a child, and ignoring poverty and other social ills.

Robin Hood it ain’t. After narrowly voting to decrease funding to important social programs for the neediest Americans, the US House of Representatives is set to consider tax cuts for the wealthy. Hear the NPR story here.

Charles Krauthammer comes out against ID:

Let’s be clear. Intelligent design may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud. It is a self-enclosed, tautological “theory” whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific knowledge — in this case, evolution — they are to be filled by God. It is a “theory” that admits that evolution and natural selection explain such things as the development of drug resistance in bacteria and other such evolutionary changes within species but also says that every once in a while God steps into this world of constant and accumulating change and says, “I think I’ll make me a lemur today.” A “theory” that violates the most basic requirement of anything pretending to be science — that it be empirically disprovable. How does one empirically disprove the proposition that God was behind the lemur, or evolution — or behind the motion of the tides or the “strong force” that holds the atom together?

Read how the CIA developed its torture methods.

Contrary to earlier statements, US forces
are using white phosphorus in Iraq; that makes the administration either incompetent or a liar.

Supposedly we went to Iraq to make the world safer by ferreting out weapons of mass destruction– including chemical weapons– that Hussein would have used on his enemies or on his own people. Now here we are using chemical weapons on our enemies and the Iraqi people. That makes the administration hypocritical.

So, can we go ahead with a war crimes tribunal for George W. Bush?

Here’s proof that the White House was cozying up to big-business while refusing to hear environmentalists:

A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney’s energy task force in 2001 — something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress….

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who posed the question about the task force, said he will ask the Justice Department today to investigate. “The White House went to great lengths to keep these meetings secret, and now oil executives may be lying to Congress about their role in the Cheney task force,” Lautenberg said.

Knox was sweet enough to get me the new Madonna CD last night. So far, Confessions on a Dance Floor strikes me as, well, disappointing. The first track, “Hung Up”, is catchy and danceable. But the other tracks? They’re just not getting me.

It pains me to admit this, since I am a big Madonna fan and have been since I first heard “Like a prayer.” I’ve consistently liked her albums, even if some songs here and there took a while to become familiar and likable.

Maybe this album will grow on me, too.

Mitt Romney, while saying we need to improve our education standards, could not resist taking a gratuitous jab at France:

“We cannot continue to have an excellence gap with the rest of the world and intend to remain the economic superpower and military superpower of the planet. That’s just not going to happen,” Romney said. “We’re in a position where unless we take action, we’ll end up being the France of the 21st century: A lot of talk, but not a lot of strength behind it in terms of economic capability.”

I guess that’s the way to court conservatives in this day and age: insult other countries who don’t follow along, even if they have been and continue to be your allies.

Read Froomkin’s column:

Amid all the tumbling poll numbers of late, Bush’s biggest problem is this: A sizeable majority of Americans — 55 percent according to the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll — believe that he intentionally misled the American public in making his case for war in Iraq.

To “mislead intentionally”: that means “to lie.”