[Buddha-l] Re: Greetings from Oviedo

[Chan Fu]

On 9/29/05, Joy Vriens <joy.vriens at nerim.net> wrote:
> Richard P. Hayes wrote:
>
> > Just how it is known that the people being held are in fact vicious al-
> > Qaeda killers is a problem that may remain unsolved, since I have a
> > feeling that one of the amenities the soldier gentleman had in mind was
> > a fair trial. It would not have surprised me at all to hear him say "We
> > cannot give criminals a fair trial, because the only people who deserve
> > a fair trial are innocent law-abiding people, but criminals are guilty."
> > Well, he might not have said that, if it happened he had listened to Bob
> > Dylan singing (sort of) "to live outside the law you must be honest."

To appreciate Dylan's singing, you must first scrape
*both* hand's fingernails across a rather long chalkboard.
Rumor has it the Baez sang a few of his f-word songs at her
latest Texass protest show.

> The world is a bit mad and paranoid at the moment.

"At the moment"...? Well, perhaps if you take "the moment"
to be the last 3 or 4 millennia. Paranoia seens to be encoded
directly in DNA - ref: "fear of snakes, etc.". It' is, and has been
for quite a while, "mad as a box of frogs".

> The world has always
> looked at the US for an exemple, including when it shouldn't and this is
> such a time.

(Examples extricated...)

Read some bits of what's going on here, in the name of
"Homeland Security".

> > Being an unrepentant liberal professor with alleged leftist leanings, I
> > feel it is my prerogative to assign my students a few chapters from
> > Peter Singer's excellent book "The President of Good and Evil." It is
> > full of delicious inconsistencies in the thinking of the man who is
> > currently living in the White House. (Look, if we can refer to the noise
> > that Bob Dylan makes as singing, we can refer to the synaptic exchanges
> > in GW Bush's reptilian cortex as thinking.)

Could you be more specific about what you don't repent,
Richard? :)

I doubt that GWB thinks at all. He has plenty of people to
do that for him.

Also, there is sufficient evidence that mammalian and reptilian
branches of the tree were separated at birth, so we needn't
make that particular denigrating assertion anymore. Perhaps
we could simply refer to him as "monkey-boy" or "ape-man".

> I am afraid that getting rid of GW Bush and his administration won't be
> enough.

Indeed. It'll be a long climb back up from the Swamp
of Original Sin. SOS... ;)

> It can't become worse though.

Sure it can, and it probably will... But humanity has gone
through some tough times before, too. This one, at least,
won't be able to destroy the libraries.

> Joy

Hello, Joy!  Fancy meeting you in a place where I was only
intending to read!  Now, if I can just find Jonathan and
a few cows...

Fondest regards,
cf

and now, back to the buddhist channel...