Behold the perfect Right Wing utopia.

This is being reported..... everywhere but I'll send you to MSNBC for reference. The story goes like this. A city offers a fire fighting service to some of the rural families that fall out of its jurisdiction for the bargain basement price of a $75 yearly subscription. This seems like a reasonable proposition. The city is offering a service (that is paid for by its taxpayers) to those outside of the city limits if they are willing to pitch in.  One of those rural families forgot to pay for the service... and then their home caught on fire...... and the fire department showed up and watched the home burn to the ground...... wow.



I understand that city, state and federal services have to be paid for but this seems extremely cruel and unfortunately this seems to be the kind of community that many on the far right want to create. IE We have to privatize everything, the government is always evil, free market.... blah blah.

This reminds me of the endless stories I have heard about insurance companies that attempt to find errors on your applications so they can deny you medical coverage or the vehement push by Republicans to privatize Social Security right before the economy went to shit (that would have worked out real nice wouldn't it?). Privatization is not the answer for critical services like Police, Fire, and I would argue health care. What happened to this family is what will happen in a radically conservative anti tax and government community. Peoples homes burn to the damn ground because they didn't pay a $75 fee.

Is this the kind of country we all want to live in?  Should the police stop and check to make sure you have paid your taxes before they stop someone from killing you? This is disgusting. We should help each other first and check the books later. (and by the way if you are one of those callous pricks that are turning your nose up at this poor guy that lost his home and saying "Fuck him, he should have paid his insurance" I will make sure I remind you when your foolish vision of a world where its "every man for himself" crashes down on your head. Because it will if this crap version of America wins.)

Again I do understand that these services have to be covered but we shouldn't let someones home burn just to encourage others to pay a fee. The firefighters actually stood around and watched this mans home burn to the ground.   We already have this kind of heartless treatment of people in our hospitals. Sure the emergency room will make sure you don't die if you come in the door bleeding to death but if you don't have insurance they will not take care of you beyond that.  We can all either come together and take care of crap like this and take care of each other or we can live in the perfect Right Wing utopia. Bellum omnium contra omnes

SHOCKING REVELATION: Athiest are smarter than the Religious

As reported on CNN some researchers put together a series of quizzes to test the religious and general knowledge of folks and the findings were surprising (to the religious ones). 

"Those who believe the Bible is the literal word of God did slightly worse than average, while those who say it is not the word of God scored slightly better." 

This shouldn't shock us but just in case here is another juicy quote. 

"Smith (the researcher) has a theory about why atheists did so well on the quiz - they have thought more about religion than most people..... The single strongest factor predicting how well a person does on the religious knowledge quiz is education - the more years of schooling a person has, the more they are likely to know about religion, regardless of how religious they consider themselves to be" 

 Soooo what you are saying is that the more one thinks about religion in general..... the less it makes sense. Stay in school punks!

Why do we keep building things like this?

For some reason the human race has an obsession with inventing things that will eventually (insert robot voice over) "KILL-ALL-HUMANS". The military is currently leading the way in kill-bot technology with the Predator drone planes and the deceptively housebroken sounding iRobot line of pre-Cambrianesque prototerminators. USA... USA.... USA!! (fyi I'm for some of these as they kill generic "evil doers" and save the lives of US troops)

But recently we have started to build robots that apparently want to "KILL-ALL-HUMANS AND MAKE THEM FUCKING SUFFER FOR NO REASON". Case in point is this super cute little baby robot. (read the original story here.)

Someone took a great deal of time to develop the mechanics and software required to bring this little guy to life. Once that was completed I imagine the engineers sat back and thought, "You know what this is missing?  The ability to shoot our ass with a damn bow and arrow!" Genius.  First they invent the Stabatron 3000 and now this.

 

Seriously..... why do we keep building these damn things?

Stephen Hawkings is Smart

Physicist, author, genius and all around smooth playa Stephen Hawkins has written a new book, The Grand Design, in which he states that "the universe can and will create itself from nothing", "Spontaneous creation is the reason why there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist", "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper [fuse] and set the universe going,"

This is pretty significant.  Arguably the worlds greatest mind is coming out on the side of cold brutal logic. Mr. Hawkins new stance could open the eyes of millions and I am all for it. We need more people of his ilk to essentially "come out of the closet" and give weight to a line of reasoning that the majority hush because it is either unpleasant or to difficult for them to grasp.

Unfortunately even with the great scientific fame of Stephen Hawkings this message may be derailed. Denis Alexander, one of Hawkings' Cambridge colleagues seems to shoo away the uncomfortable/icky things that Hawkings said by watering them down. "The 'god' that Stephen Hawking is trying to debunk is not the creator God of the Abrahamic faiths who really is the ultimate explanation for why there is something rather than nothing", Hawkings' god is a god-of-the-gaps used to plug present gaps in our scientific knowledge."

I disagree. Hawkings statements seem pretty clear. I understand Mr. Alexanders desire to try to step back from comments like "God isn't real" (I just said that not Hawkings). People will demonize anyone that hints at such a notion but this attempt to make some room for god in Hawkings statements will only damage them. This is not clarification, this is cowardly.

Hopefully Dr. Hawkings will clarify/reinforce his statements. Otherwise the apologists will be around forever.