Yesterday one of the quotes of the day on my google home page:

Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.

This sums up nicely my main bitch about the Republican war on taxes. The disadvantages of wealth, even if they include a big tax bill, are NOTHING compared to the disadvantages of poverty. I think tax burdens should be kept as low as possible, but progressive taxation makes perfect sense, and the Right Wing sounds like a bunch of baby whiners when they bitch about it.

This poor woman is raped, booked on an outstanding warrant when she reports it and then denied emergency contraception from the nurse in the jail for religious reasons.

WHAT THE FUCK. The nurse should be fired prior to being shot and the cops should be fired prior to be anally sodomized.

smartorstoopid

It is the truth.

I don’t get what is unfair about this question.

I haven’t read this book yet but I just added to my wishlist. I heard an interview with the author, Sam Harris, posted over at Skepticality and it was very good (although the audio quality sucks).

But what cracked me up was the description for this book at amazon.com:

“Thousands of people have written to tell me that I am wrong not to believe in God. The most hostile of these communications have come from Christians. This is ironic, as Christians generally imagine that no faith imparts the virtues of love and forgiveness more effectively than their own. The truth is that many who claim to be transformed by Christ’s love are deeply, even murderously, intolerant of criticism. While we may want to ascribe this to human nature, it is clear that such hatred draws considerable support from the Bible. How do I know this? The most disturbed of my correspondents always cite chapter and verse.”

This is scarily true. The more religious people are the more they despise the non-religious. Most of them act like they know nothing at all of the teachings of Christ. It’s a joke and those people deserve all the abuse they get. If you read the reviews and discussions at amazon you’ll see what I mean.

Now I do understand that people get offended when atheists act like we get it and you religious retards don’t. I can understand the desire to defend one’s point of view when, as it must seem to them, they are under attack. What I don’t understand is why the principles of love, compassion and tolerance seem to disappear from people even as they try to convince us of the “truth” in their faith.

So here’s my own little Letter to a Christian Nation:

Hey, Christians, you would be a hell of a lot more convincing about how true and wonderful your faith is if you didn’t turn into a bunch of evil, petty, intolerant asses every time we debate this stuff.

Steve Balmer of Micro$oft, over at TechEBlog, exposing himself as a dinosaur in charge of a waning empire, discusses the iPhone.

First of all, as we all know, Microsoft has not come up with a new idea EVER. Microsoft Word is a ripoff of MacWrite, Windows is a ripoff, the Zune is a ripoff. Those guys invent nothing.

Second, he mentions, as have others, the price of the iPhone. They seem to be forgetting that it has a built-in video iPod. So rather than spend $250 on a video iPod and $200 on a phone, you spend it all on the iPhone. The math works out. Plus the rather obvious fact that people will pay more for superior technology. All that and, as we know, v2 of the iPhone will probably be half the price, include GPS and have twice the space.

Just once I’d like to see someone like Balmer say something like “The iPhone is really cool and I congratulate Apple on a great new product.”

It just cracks me up that the nay-sayers can’t admit how cool the iPhone is because they enjoy so much feeling superior to us Apple zealots. They can’t recognize the obvious innovation in the iPhone because they so want to believe that Apple just isn’t that great. No, folks, Apple is insanely great, especially compared to old-school losers like Balmer.