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Traci and I ended up behind this car one day while out running some errands.  We happened to have the camera with us.  I’ll let this one speak for itself.

Things are starting to get crazy now…and more than just a little bit scary.  Probably the most irresponsible thing McCain has done so far was to choose a Pentecostal religious extremist who speaks in tongues and believes in prophecy and witches as a running mate for this election.  McCain is seventy two years old; which means Palin could control the most powerful country (and military) in the world.  She’s already said that the Iraq war is holy war; now she might just be able to wage holy war on whoever she wants.

I thought I’d expand on this but it looks like Sam Harris has already done it for me.

There’s also another good article about Palin’s shady past as a religious nut.  Below is a YouTube clip of Palin being annoited by a “witch hunter”.  Yeah, people still believe in witches.  Apparently Palin has no problem being associated with that kind of nonsense.

Check out the entire article; it’s scary stuff.

Here’s another good one:

We’re now living in a country where credulity is rewarded and reason is a sin.  Palin is even worse than Huckabee; at least Huckabee wore his crazy on his sleeve and we could vote against him.  Palin appears to be hiding her religious extremism.  For the first time ever I’m now actually worried if my candidate of choice doesn’t win.  This could spell disaster.  The only thing we could hope for if Palin becomes president is a quick impeachment and removal from office before things spiral out of control.

President Palin…just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?  Better get used to saying it if McCain wins and then takes a dirt nap sometime in the next four years.

They do make a cute couple though, don’t they? 

SOMEBODY ought to tell the truth about the Bible. The preachers dare not, because they would be driven from their pulpits. Professors in colleges dare not, because they would lose their salaries. Politicians dare not. They would be defeated. Editors dare not. They would lose subscribers. Merchants dare not, because they might lose customers. Men of fashion dare not, fearing that they would lose caste. Even clerks dare not, because they might be discharged.

And so I thought I would do it myself.

And so begins About the Holy Bible, by Robert Green Ingersoll. I was recently turned on to Ingersoll, a 19th century lawyer and freethinker, on an episode of Freethought Radio.  Dan Barker read one of his works on the absurdity of the Holy Trinity over the air and it inspired me to check him out.  I became fascinated with his writing, both in style and content, and with his clear-headed devotion to liberty and science and his vehement hatred of lying clergy and tyrants.

With all the hubub surrounding the recent explosion of atheist books from authors such as Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins, it’s worth pointing out that Ingersoll died before any of them were born.  Ingersoll lived during a period of heavy religious influence and American slavery (slavery which was, by the way, endorsed by the Bible).  His detractors spouted the same rhetoric as their modern-day counterparts; hijacking morality and holding it hostage with fire and brimstone tongues.  Ingersoll spoke out, just as our current non-believing authors are doing, and made the undeniable case for logic and reason, for liberty and freedom of one’s body and mind.  Ingersoll called himself an agnostic but a freethinker of today would probably call him a humanist and atheist.  Regardless, his words are still relevant over a century later, their message as important as ever.

His works are now in the public domain and can be read freely here.  I encourange everyone to read About the Holy Bible and Myth and Miracle.  I think once you read those, however, you’ll be ready for more.

In a previous post way too long ago I lamented about there being no viable alternative to Outlook.  As a result, Traci and I were stuck using Outlook 2000 to keep and sync our calendars.  I attempted to use Horde for a while but without a viable method of syncing our PDAs it was a no go.

Enter Vista and two brand-new copies of Outlook 2007, setting us back about $160.  We were still on Outlook but now the new Outlook was even more bloated and slow, and its e-mail client still couldn’t seem to figure out how to manage IMAP mail any better than its predecessor.  Now we had more frustration than less.  Then Traci bought an iPhone, replacing her Palm Z22, but still used Outlook (this time via MobileMe).

Outlook persisted, like a virilent fungus growing between the toes while I burned the midnight oil looking for a replacement that would do everything we needed.  Evolution looked good but I couldn’t get it to sync with the PDA on Windows.  I couldn’t just ditch everything and move to Linux either.  OpenOffice had a stagnant project designed to replace Outlook but I gave up on that.  Syncing Horde didn’t seem any more of a reality either, particularly with the new iPhone.  We needed something special, something unique and capable to make this a reality.

Then came the iMac.

We bought Traci’s iMac first and as she …read more »