d_rawk

The Disk Utility that comes with OSX can do some of this for you. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIKb4gCnQH4

Well, you certainly did act imprudently giving strangers access to your machine - but we all make mistakes, and particularly when you are on the spot and put into a panic, it is easy to make bad decisions. First off, do not have further engagement with these people. It does sound like a scam, however, on the other side of it your machine may well in fact be compromised and it is possible that it is being used for DDoS attacks or other nefarious things. Get Malware Bytes (http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/malwarebytes_free) and run that on your machine. Then run http://www.superantispyware.com/download.html Then grab something like the free version of AVG The unfortunate truth, though, is that once a system has been compromised, you can never be fully sure of its status again without doing a full and clean re-install. That's to say - the best thing to do is to back up your data (documents, music, etc..) and re-install Windows (I'm assuming you are on Windows) from the discs that should have been provided to you with your purchase. And then run *all* of the security updates.

She's super talented. Must be a band that actually plays shows, or has intentions to, and not just practice in a basement somewhere. PM me if so.

:laugh:

Or: "how I learned to stop caring, and just gave the middle finger to the world" USA Today headline (echoed by other publications): "Panel to postmenopausal women: Don't take vitamin D, calcium" If you read the actual study that they are discussing, you find out some interesting things. For one, it followed people taking 200 IU of vitamin D - the RDA for vitamin D was for a long time set at 400 IU, but after overwhelming evidence that this was inadequate for North Americans, was raised to 800 IU with a suggested upper tolerance of 4000 IU daily. What the headline should actually say is "Panel to postmenopausal women: you are probably taking a pussy amount of vitamin D, and it isn't doing dick. You need more - or get some sunshine, or something." I find it irritating when people talk about health news and accuse "they" of saying one thing, and then "they" turn around and say another. It presumes a single authority. There are lots of different people, with lots of different agendas, saying a lot of different things. There is no single "they". In this case, as in many, it is telling to read the actual study and its conclusions, and compare that to the sensationalist headline. "They" suck at journalism, full stop. I post this in the politics forum because it seems close enough to a politic rant to warrant it. Thank you for your time.

I'm not sure what you are implicating (well, I can guess, but then I remain uncertain as to why) I took umbrage with the idea that religious debate is irrelevant in a contemporary setting. I conceded my flexibility (quite probably justifiably better labelled 'waffling') of personal affiliation in these matters, emphasized that I think them still important regardless of my current standing, and offered one thread in the ongoing current debate that I find compelling and to which I am swayed as an example of present relevance. I think to be a phony, I would have to have one conviction and pretend another. My point is that my conviction, such as it exists, is in the relevance of oft repeating stories of human conflict between the spiritual and the base, and that I insist that these stories are exceedingly relevant for people of all times and will continue to recur despite our best efforts to escape them (because they don't need escape, they need exploration and celebration [ritual]). If I am the phony, I think that you have me unfairly pegged. If Jesus is the phony, I propose that Jesus is the imperfect telling of the perfect story. Hand me my phony, and I will eat it. Joseph Smith. Not what you were angling after ..

Is it possible that you are suggesting that I am a phony? Of what, I wonder? I was only arguing that I think religious debate - even religious *shudder* conviction - is probably healthier than this thread generally wants to concede. (So help me, I root for the underdog) I have no stake in the ground or territory to defend. Just ideas, that come, get adapted by better ideas, and go. I think so. This is why I say that I think the resurrection is of extreme importance, and why it crops up so readily. Don't let that happen. I gave up beer. Not for any religious reasons.

One thing that I love about you, Beats, is that you never fail to make my brain hurt I'm not one of those, though, am I? I have issues with the idea of a 'personal Jesus'. Rather serious ones, actually. But it gets down into the grit. Simon was one, to be sure. There were many. It was not an uncommon thing for a man to claim messiah-hood. Woot! Jesus did. Osiris, too .. had his lost years in the desert, born of a virgin in a cave/manger, son of God, resurrected after being killed, was the "KRST", was re-enacted in passion plays at easter time, the empty tomb, his coming was announced by three wise men, and proved by a burning star, water into wine, all of that. Not the first, and the story repeats itself everywhere. Where Christ doesn't exist, we invent it. Why? No.

Nobody wants to play with me ... and I'm never one to leave a good thing well enough. In conversation with someone just two days ago - a biker dude who proudly wears the self-designated label of 'true believer' - it was very apparent that his faith, in that contemporary sense of the word, was very much contingent on his understanding of things - in this case 'things' being Christian mythology - being rooted in historical events. I am a Jesus guy, to be sure. But I think that you would be hard pressed, no matter how well educated or devout, to find a historical basis for Jesus as we know him. Even if you could locate a Jesus of Nazareth - say through a time machine - I think you would be terribly disappointed to find that he resembled the Gospels but little. And of which of the contradicting four would he resemble, anyways? But Christ - ah, another matter entirely. Christ re-invents itself perpetually, and what is the story of Jesus as Christ but a re-telling of a familiar story for a new place and a new people? The resurrection is terribly important. Whether the resurrection has ever been a historical event, I'd wager not. I'm not sure that even comes close to the point, though. Was the historical resurrection of Osiris so terribly important to meaning? I openly show my colours - my sympathies have long been with Quakerism, which though founded by Christians, also found that it could not justify an exclusivity to that, and that the principles were universal. There are hindu quakers, muslim quakers, christian quakers, agnostic quakers. There are atheist Quakers ('Nontheist Friends') as well, but that is an interesting debate in itself that needs more room to breathe. But the debate - and I still think it an important one - gets closed down prematurely when we take the 'here is what I grew up with and I don't like it, so all must be similar' and cast that like Jackson Pollock paint over the entire cast of those involved in religious discourse. How would Martin Luther have happened, had he taken that approach? I think a good rule of thumb - and not just for religious matters, but generally - is that no-one is as crazy as your parents. And our children won't be as crazy as us. Dawkins basically choked on himself avoiding how to explain human kindness outside of the 'niceness' of biological nepotism. Rejoice?

"Religions are like wisdom teeth; even though they were crucial to our ancestors, today they are unnecessary and they bring nothing but frustration and pain. Also, they provide us with no wisdom." It has an allure, but falls short of measure. John Dominic Crossan once put it thus - "My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally." The thrust of contemporary anger is against orthodoxy and literalism - why people want to concede that ground and pretend that it is valid, and expend energy inside that narrow battlefield, is troubling. You let the lunatics define the scope and try to argue with lunatics on their terms. Or discount them without reclaiming the territory (the entire wealth of spiritual being) that they took from you. Religions are like "wisdom teeth"? No they are like the philosophy of the spirit, which, like all philosophies has its fancy and flavour of the day and its dissenting voices that gain, or fail to gain, credence over time based on merit. They are like the politics of overwhelming human potential. The narrow debate, if you hand the terms to the present authority, is a dull debate. So take it back and deny that authority and put the lie to it. I concede that people raised by evangelicals may suffer from that misfortune in the way that people given to sexual abuse in their childhood suffer from all manner of darkness around sex. But it is tiresome to hear that sex is universally violent and disruptive, just as it is to hear that religious matters are necessarily unimaginative and fruitless. A dark encounter does not a universal darkness make. Just as I refuse to concede that sexual matters, as they exist broadly, can be defined wholly by the insecurity, perversity, and desire for control that characterizes sexual abuse, I refuse to concede that religious matters, as they exist broadly, can be defined wholly by the insecurity, perversity, and desire for control that characterizes spiritual abuse. Sex jumps out only because - maybe only slightly ahead of religion - it is prone to that conflation of trauma with essence among victims. I believe this to be because these are things that are so fundamental to our make-up that they are the most prone to hijack. It could be any number of things. Food. Religion, as far as I can tell, happens when the spirit of one man encounters the spirit of another, just as politics, as far as I can tell, happens when the freedom of one man encounters the freedom of another. For all of my life, I have not seen a desirable life in which other people were not present - nor can I conceive of a reason to pursue one. Mythology is the repository of man's most ancient science ... to deny that there is wisdom in what persists in poking its head up through every relevant human drama through all of our shared history is blindness, not insight. Where shall we deposit cosmic truth, then?

Quebec membership: from 1,695 to 12,266 (+600%). This without a provincial incarnation in that province. Ontario membership: from 22,225 to 36,760 since Oct. BC membership: from 30,000 to 38,735 since Oct. NS membership: from 1,300 to 3,844 since Oct. No commentary from me.

This. ... and this.

Fair enough - it seems a more meaningful measure. [color:purple]The "Progressive Conservative-Liberal Party of Canada" ? Could work. After all, the Cons were the "Liberal-Conservative Party" before merging with the Progressives, before merging with Reform.

Happy b-day dude

So do the Libs move right, or do they move left? I don't think the NDP is going to compromise with them. I still see a good fit with the Greens, but the Greens want to maintain their identity and maintain their part of the Green Party global movement. That doesn't leave the Libs with much of a home to go to. I don't think that there is much for them to stake out on the left, and I don't think that they have the type of people to occupy the left even if they wanted to. A rightward shift to poach the votes of those who are *c*onservative, but are uncomfortable with the *C*onservatives? Is the Liberal party the Progressive Conservatives reborn? They've always had those values, and everything since that day that McKay stabbed Orchard in the back, there has been a hole in that part of the spectrum that wants to be filled. So we would be left with: (NDP) Centre-left (LPC) Centre-right (GPC) Centre-? (CPC) Centre-right-right It all starts to break down. It isn't a particularly useful metric, I suppose.