Once again, a note about a philosophy primer by Mortimer J. Adler. He wrote Six Great Ideas in 1981. He divides the ideas into two groups. Truth, goodness and beauty are ideas we judge by, and liberty, equality and justice are ideas that we act on. His discussion of each idea is broken down into 3 or 4 short chapters. The book is around 250 pages long, divided into 28 short chapters.
Following the links from an essay, featured at AL Daily, published in the San Franciso Journal called "Leaving the Left", I reached the web site of Keith Thompson, a writer in California. His site includes some of his freelance articles and essays including his interview of the writer and fakir Carlos Castaneda, and a magazine piece about a seance.
There is a review of Jared Diamond's book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive" in the London Review of Books. The reviewer, Partha Dasgupta, is an economist. The review is titled "Bottlenecks". It's a long review, with an overview of the book. The book has been praised in reviews and on the web by deep ecologists, Greens, Gaians, and the other usual suspects. Professor Dasgupta isn't singing in that chorus. He is impressed with Diamond's research and the analysis, up to a point.
Here's an article in Christianity Today on living wages and Wal-Mart called "Deliver us from Wal-Mart". This article takes a liberal Christian look at a social and ethical issue.
I got an email from Garth advising me that he had been blocked from commenting on my blog. It turns out that he had used the word socialist, which was blocked by the text string "cialis" in the Blacklist. Cialis is some kind of drug or herbal - I don't know what it is but it has been promoted through blog spam. I have been using a combination of MT-Blacklist, SpamLookup and MT-Keystrokes. I have cut out a lot of stale URL's from MTB, but I still run it to screen for proven text strings found in spam relating to gambling, porn, drugs. SpamLookup and Keystrokes have been pretty effective. I think they basically take care of everything, but there is some question about server load running SpamLookup under a moderate spam attack. MTB intercepts incoming comments first.
A quick peek at the news from New Zealand - spiritualists get a civic grant to fund a counselling service.
On Saturday May 14, about 100 people arrived outside Calvary Temple, an independent pentecostal church in downtown Winnipeg, to protest against a conference being held held in the church - about 400 people were expected - led by representatives of Focus on the Family. The newspaper story wasn't clear on it, but it was a "Love Won Out" seminar. The protest was visible but peaceful, and the conference was private and peaceful. The protesters were against "homophobia" and in favour of same-sex marriage.
The title of George Weigel's The Truth of Catholicism, Ten Controversies Explored, suggests this book will sound like a finger-wagging, lecturing apologetic in defence of Catholic orthodoxy. In fact this 2001 book, like his 2004 book "Letters to a Young Catholic" is an literate and enthusiastic presentation of orthodox Catholic teachings in an American context.
Yesterday, I posted a link to The Onion's satire about fictionology. today, a perfect example of an intelligent person who chooses a value system that lets her choose fiction over fact because it helps her to feels better about herself. Check out this essay by Martha Montello, Novel Perspectives on Bioethics at the Chronicles of Higher Education. She argues that we ought to be learning our ethics from fiction, and base our moral decisions on fairy tales and science fiction.
A little more light reading. The piece is by Christine Rosen writing at the Claremont Institute's online Review of Books "What (Most) Women Want", a book review of "Taking Sex Differences Seriously" by Steven E. Rhoads.
A web piece on a related topic, from The Edge, with streaming media, slides, or text, a nature-nurture debate about women in the sciences in University faculties. The debaters are Steven Pinker and and Elizabeth Spelke.
Since this is from The Onion, I guess it's satire. It's an unfortunately believable story about cults and postmodern ideas about making up the religion you want. It's called "Scientology losing Ground to New Fictionology."
This is the opening part of one of the more flamboyant email spams I have received, another variation on the Nigerian or West African Bank fraud, I think.
The headline of the article read "Crystal Meth Crackdown Urged". The story, from the Canadian Press, was that the Premiers of the four Western Provinces (and three northern Territories), meeting in Lloydminster, had issued a communique announcing a plan to deal with the growing popularity of the highly addictive drug, crystal methamphetimine. There was a picture of the four premiers walking down the street, semi-casually attired. The plan: insist that Crown prosecutors demand higher sentences for trafficking. This announcement is entirely typical of Canadian politics. It pretends that the Premiers are taking action, but it does nothing to help addicted teens and young adults and their families, and nothing to help people to avoid fooling around with toxic and addictive mood-altering drugs.
For the video gamers, an article from Wired Magazine called "Dome Improvement" featured today at Arts & Letters Daily. Video games may be good practice for the problem-solving in modern IQ tests, and IQ tests measure skills in a cultural context.
Here are llinks to two stories about the irony of dogma - specifically about atheist dogmas. Atheists reject religious dogmas and criticize dogmatic reasoning. However celebrity atheists, for instance the scientist and popular writer Richard Dawkins, can present themselves as dogmatic. There are two dimensions of the word dogmatic in popular usage. There is a social and psychological dimension involving the project of presenting one person's ideas and criticizing other people's ideas. This involves temperament, attititude and social skills. Conservative religious believers are rigid and intolerant in public discourse. In that way, the word dogmatic starts to apply to anyone who is firm about a belief. In this sense, it applies to atheists who are aggressively anti-religious. Their confidence in their insights into the world extends to serious criticism of religion and the people who have religious systems of belief. The other dimension of the term dogmatic involves a more formally intellectual examination of what a person believes to be true on the basis of confidence in a set of principles and assumptions.
I spent several hours last week setting up the Sister Jane site, converting Word documents into text and marking up the text with html tags, and organizing the site and the pages. I decided to create a style sheet. The basic idea was to use the headers to break up text sections visually as well as logically. I used borders and background colours in the headers to turn them into visual bars. I applied a couple of levels of indentation to the text. After that, I took the same style sheet and applied it to the Sea of Flowers site with a different colour scheme. The results aren't fancy but the sites seem to be more readable and slightly less generic.
The colour scheme on Sea of Flower site was inspired by the Dutch flags in the documentary on the Canadian Army's fighting in Holland in 1944 and 1945 on Global last Saturday night. I like it and I have applied it to the blog too, as you can see.
The weather in the last week (from Sunday April 24 to Sunday May 1) has been cold, with sudden showers and snow flurries, which killed my interest in cycling. This week promises to be moderately warmer, with sunshine.
The preceding week was a bit warmer and that week I had a Sunday morning ride to St. Adolphe with Mike and Steve into a stiff breeze - and back with a howling gale at our backs. I also have evening rides Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday with Steve or Mike or both, and a Saturday afternoon ride with Mike. Last Sunday, Claire and I drove to Portage and then on to Spruce Woods with my sister Joyce for a 10 k hike in the Carbery desert. It was warmer there than in Winnipeg - Carberry is closer to Brandon than Winnipeg. Then winter came back.
