I've always had collie/lab crosses:highly intelligent (often too intelligent for their own good), or cockers:nut cases always trained as gundogs. Sadly lost the last one to infectious canine hepatitis , but with a baby on the way we decided that house training a puppy and a baby would be a bit much .

I wouldn't say that I was disregarding facts, more attempting to reconcile two substantially differing portrails of one nation, by playing out various, often [too] simplistic, hypothoses:

"When you have elimitated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 1859-1930

On the other hand:

"There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil."
Alfred North Whitehead 1861-1947

Ok we are talking Border Collies not Rough Collies. What you have is a cross between a working sheep dog and a working gundog, so it will round the birds so you can shoot them and then bring them back .

Now this could get really nasty:
Iraqi blast damages Shia shrine
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4738472.stm

Another little tidbit from the ME:

“Religion is making a comeback in Syria, where people feel the state's socialist and pan-Arab ideologies have failed for the last four decades.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4735240.stm

Just remember, "Yes, dear."


Let's face it, it was only a matter of time. Now, let's see how Bush handles this one. The only chance this country has of averting some very serious problems is if the Shiia, Sunni & Kurds can be convinced to direct their years of pent up anger against the "foreign Islamic terrorists" (including the Iranians) that are literally bleeding Iraq and it's people to death. If the US can finally stand side by side with all Iraqis and "help them fight for their own country" against a common enemy, then perhaps we can finally become the legitimate friends and allies of the Iraq people.

All men must eventually fight for their own freedoms, their own families, their own homes and way of life. If Americans actually fight, bleed, die and eventually triumph side by side with the Iraqi people in their struggle for freedom against their real enemies, then we will earn their enduring trust. Until their own struggle is fought and won, it may not matter what "good" we do.

For the first time since this mess started, I can see a glimmer of light at the end of this tunnel. Let's hope all of us don't miss this opportunity.


Here's another take, bb. Do we really think that Hamas was going to moderate it's position peacefully? If that were the case, then they would not have won the election in the first place.

Iran is the one that stands to come out of this as the real loser. It is already on the edge of becoming a pariah nation due to its nuclear ambitions. By allying itself with Hamas it will reduce its credibility as a legitimate member of the world community and thus increase it's isolationism at the exact time that it should be pressing for increased participation within the global community.

My own thought is that perhaps the Isalmic extremists in Iran really "screwed the pooch" on this one.

Who knows, bb, if we get really smart (and lucky) perhaps we could even go 2 for 2 here. Wouldn't that be a serendipitous surprise for all of us; Muslim and non-Muslims alike?

Hello, ns. Now that I finally had some time to read and consider your last post carefully, there is one point in particular that we should discuss.

(NOTE: I have gone into much greater elaboration regards my primary argument than I would have had this dialogue not taken place publicly on the Internet. To assure that every reader could follow and benefit from the response that, I hope follows from ns, I have attempted to make certain that everyone who reads this exchange will clearly understand the drift.)

Ns, you made the statement; "... the same mistake that all scholars in the West make. There are no premises."

By this I assume that you are stating that life is a biological imperative and that logic, much less the "pure physical sciences" such as chemistry, are all abstractions, derivative and therefore inherently inaccurate partial truths.

Actually, while I completely agree with you, I also completely disagree with you. My purpose in what follows is not to tell you what I am already quite certain that you already know (your extensive training in anthropology and philosophy have obviously demanded it). My purpose is simply to lay out my slant on this familiar issue to encourage you to qualify your unconditional statement (for illustrative reasons, I assume) with your own conditional solution (since there are no absolute conditional solutions in either logic or reality, at least not that I am aware of), specifically in relationship to the subject matter at hand.

While we appear to agree on the primacy of "un-interpreted strict biology (materialism)", you do realize of course that according to your statement the concept itself must also be false, a priori, as it is itself an abstraction. Furthermore, it would follow that any verbal/logical representation of life must also be false. It logically follows that we simply can never accurately represent reality.

But this introduces a conflict between logic and experience. If no representation of reality is "accurate," then it must also follow that any one "model of the real" should provide no practical biological benefits over any other specific "model of the real." This of course is vacuous since we know that if we are lost in the wilderness that an accurate map can save our lives, while an inaccurate one will probably kill us. Thus, from an immediately existential point of view "the model of the real" can be asserted to be more real, or at least existentially/biologically more useful, than "the real itself."

The conflict between logic and experience poses a second dilemna. Given that there is an established relationship between cognitive sets and the actual physical act of perception (tendentious apperception), we must then conclude that even our basic perceptions themselves are erroneous - if for no other reason than they must be filtered. [This argument itself does not address other relevant objections such as exclusions to information based upon the physical limitations of the sensory modalities themselves (i.e., the inability of the eyes to see light outside of the visible spectrum)].

Again experience proves otherwise. If the truck is heading straight towards us and we keep our eyes closed because we realize that the information from our senses is not inherently real/accurate, our biological chances for survival have decreased quite dramatically. In this situation, our perception of reality is materialistically/biologically identical to “the real.”

And so forth and so on.

It is obvious, ns, that this is basic philosophy 101 for you. But it is each person's idiosyncratic solutions to this "paradox" that determines the choices that we make. THIS is what I am after from you in relationship to the topic of "the clash between the West and Islamic extremism in the world today." I am afraid, my friend, that I can not simply “let you out of the dialogue” quite so easily. You have too much to offer to the rest of us. But then again, given that you are very likely also an educator, you would already know this*.

* (P.S. – I really don’t want to know. That would spoil the fun.)