Goodbye Christopher. I am glad that you lived and I have had the pleasure of meeting you a couple of times — once at the Berkeley Repertoire Theater in the 1997 and once at a book release in 1999. I am certainly going to miss your incisive writing. The world is going to be a poorer place for your departure.

Christopher Hitchens writing in Slate:
The very name Pakistan inscribes the nature of the problem. It is not a real country or nation but an acronym devised in the 1930s by a Muslim propagandist for partition named Chaudhary Rahmat Ali. It stands for Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, and Indus-Sind. The stan suffix merely means “land.” In the Urdu language, the resulting acronym means “land of the pure.” It can be easily seen that this very name expresses expansionist tendencies and also conceals discriminatory ones. Kashmir, for example, is part of India. …

Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) was the third President of the United States (1801–1809), the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and one of the most influential Founding Fathers for his promotion of the ideals of republicanism in the United States. [Wikipedia]
Happy birthday, Mr Jefferson.
Here’s something that Jefferson insisted upon that the Indian government would do well to adopt. In the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, Jefferson wrote:

Religious insanity should be ridiculed as strenuously and as frequently as one can. Here I am talking about the recent demand by the Pastafarians that since their religion forbids the eating of pasta without meatballs, all vegetarian pasta dishes be banned. It offends the Pastafarians that people can even contemplate the eating of pasta without the required half a dozen meatballs.

My distaste for poverty is only exceeded by my utter contempt for those who nurture that awful monster of poverty that chews up living human beings and spits them out like so much garbage. True evil to me is that impulse that disregards human suffering, and more often than not, that evil force emanates from ideology and dogma. Communism is one such evil; the other horror is organized religious dogma mostly represented by the monotheistic religions. The richer the organized religion, the more powerful it is, and has the …

So what do you know — Christopher Hitchens has become a naturalized American citizen. That’s simply great. I can prove syllogistically that Hitchens doesn’t think he is god. Here’s how:
1. Hitchens thinks he is great. (I agree.)
2. God is not great. (According to Hitchens as the title of his latest book is God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.”)
3. Therefore, Hitchens doesn’t think he is god. Q.E.D.
(Proving Hitchens is allah is left as an exercise for the interested reader. )
Here’s Hitchens speaking with Lou Dobbs on CNN.