Dr_Evil_Mouse

Ain't that the truth. Mind you, they'd probably be calling Ignatieff a Yankee.

Barry Lynn's great. He always does well in face-to-face debates with Falwell et co.

Heard her on DNTO this afternoon - I can see why there's a buzz.

I'll add my voice to the "I'm jealous" chorus. I have very fond memories of Indonesia. Enjoy!

Nice - precocious happy birthday greetings!

"Test me, test me, test me, test me... Why don't you arrest me? Throw me into the jailhouse Until the sun goes down..."

Saturday night again (yay!): another rager at Kelly's Welcome - 9:30-1:30 (or 2, or 2:30, or...). 5544 Manotick Main St.: 20 minutes south of Ottawa on River Rd., right at the Tim Horton's, left at Main, ahead 300 yards or so; look on the right-hand side, and listen for the sound of me butchering Willie Nelson tunes . Hope to see some folks there tonight!

<<<<>>>> I think the advice you've getting here is perfectly sound: more drugs, less exercise . Hope this clears up soon. At least it's nothing guitar-playing related.

Spot on. I feel like sitting down and reading through Charles Taylor's Politics of Recognition again (so too should Harper, for that matter).

"The skeleton of Jeremy Bentham is present at all important meetings of the University of London." Must be some kind of posthumous revenge for having had to sit on God knows how many deadly boring committees.

Are you suggesting we all be identical with people in and with power?

The CPC sure seems to have their agenda in place. Tories shutting down Status of Women offices Why do I suspect they're never going to identify just what those "inefficiencies" might be? Wow, all this they managed to get done, and in advance of Dec. 6, too.

One of the first writers that helped pull me into religious studies was Fritjof Capra , whose Tao of Physics: an Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism I still find a good read. It skirts the potential flakiness of the subject pretty well, imo (and there's plenty of the flakiness around). I wonder if it's on any Intelligent Design blacklists.

I totally agree with you. Among other reasons, too, it's unimaginable that any Canadian politician would be invited out to put in support during an American election; this just comes off as a kind of opportunistic kowtowing.

Yay booze!

I let out a real stinker during the show; I was afraid it might have knocked poor discdaddy out of commission.

I love this forum . d-rawk, thanks for the historical overview. It is, as you make clear, a terrifically complicated matter, in terms of all the multiple cultures, actors, and so on. One thing that's also relevant here is the particularity of the US. They have a kind of formal separation of church and state (though not quite so clearly in the Constitution; the phrase "separation of church and state" doesn't figure there or in the Amendments, but in one of Jefferson's private letters), but compared to Canada, religion is shot through politics. As Dawkins pointed out, hardly any politician would ever get elected as an "outed" atheist. Canada doesn't have anything like the First Amendment, but neither do we have the same kind of religious climate as the US. As for the "problem of evil" (beyond just me existing, I mean) - fact is, imo, there's not much anyone can do that isn't evil for someone or something. Jains, e.g., go to pretty great lengths to avoid inflicting violence on anything around them, by doing things like wearing masks so they don't accidentally inhale bugs, and so on. Shit still happens. Paul Ricoeur makes a useful distinction (in The Encyclopedia of Religion) between natural evil and moral evil, the former being those things like tornadoes and earthquakes, the latter being what we do to one another. That's a good starting point, I'd think. The trick is getting people who are doing things in the "moral evil" category to recognise what effect they're having on others; sometimes, that's really, really tricky. When Adolph Eichmann was brought before the court in Jerusalem to account for his role in the Holocaust, they set out to frame him as a malevolent, brutal monster; what he showed himself to be was a highly effective, pencil-pushing bureaucrat, who was just following what his bosses told him to do. He seemed to the end to have no moral sense of what he'd done. So how categorically could he be described as an evil person?

We'll have to get you good and drunk for our next show, just in case .

Imagine if the only festivals you were allowed to go to were things like Kingdom Bound. Pretty surreal, really.

Better than Rush?

You could get daisy-chains of back-shavers, all grooving in time.

(Note that Megs was too polite to vote either way ).

The guy's being interviewed on CBC 1 right now.

- neither of us were offering solutions, then - whew! That's where real trouble ensues. I have to remember, first off, that humans have so many times precipitated plenty of environmental crises; whether it's lands depleted through want of firewood to make glass or to fire engines, or, say, through scientists like Lysenko in the USSR forcing his modified corn in the 1950s to ruin a massive stretches of central Asia. And then there's the problem of people maybe or maybe not stepping forward to help those who've been hurt in any of these processes. I hear you about the need to accentuate the positive. I guess I was trying no to be seduced by it, given so much of the evidence. In the end, what is everyone prepared to give up? Some people with lots of people working for them are really attached to their stuff and their ways of doing things, and will manipulate lots of people to hang on to that and keep things as they are, no matter what. Are they not completely out of this discussion? I don't know; this is a funny medium that way. The Stephen Franke and Noises from the Toolshed (2005-20-08) just launched into "Call It Democracy". Nice touch they bring .

Wow! Haven't listened to Robin Trower in ages. Fine stuff. Presently - Nero - 2004-09-18 Got still another month and a bit to get myself up to speed . Been enjoying the first album on drives to work in the morning, too (small surprise!).