Does Hoodia Gordonii really slim you?

Hoodia Gordonii is a very interesting old factory that has been used for thousands of years, but only now beginning to catch in the western world Hoodia "for losing weight. The huge media coverage has led to a flourishing industry and products based the Hoodia Gordonii, whether they are Pure Hoodia 'or Hoodia as just one of the components of an existing product weight loss.

But before you rush off to buy a supplement Hoodia should understand a little about what studies have shown so far in connection with Hoodia Gordonii for losing weight. Knowing this information will help you navigate through Hoodia product and buy the best product to avoid fake.

They know the facts about Hoodia:

1) There are a variety of plants Hoodia. Only Hoodia Gordonii class contains an active element that helps suppress your appetite. As demand for Hoodia Gordonii is far outstripping the supply, some dealers Hoodia is unreliable, but use advertising their products, such as Pure Hoodia although it might have been made from a different plant from the Hoodia Hoodia Gordonii.

2) Of course many companies can claim to extract Hoodia slim you down, the only thing that has been shown so far is the P57 molecule. P57 is Active ingredient in Hoodia Gordonii that was isolated. It was licensed to a company called Phytopharm that conducted a study using. Found that morbidly obese people who use; P57 feeding on average less than 1k calories per day. Obviously this is the reason that so many people believe Hoodia for weight loss is the news for the rescuer and obese people looking to slim down.

3) Which is more important to bear in mind is that as long as the Hoodia products exported from the real Hoodia Gordonii should also include some of the active ingredient in it. Study shows that only the core of the plant is the main ingredient.

So does Hoodia work? And the answer is a big yes! But only if you buy a real product and avoid false.

Well, today is a strange day for I was rattling last night.

After teaching I was all fired up. I wrote up the class, I brainstormed for Monday, I did some busy-work for teaching, and it was 10:00. I was not yet sleepy so I decided to mess with the new blog for a few minutes before bed.

Around 3:00am I finally toddled away from the computer, and I got to sleep around 3:40 am.

J is cranky because, when she asked at 2:00am I said I was coming to bed when the truth was that I was rattling.

I am cranky because I spent my rattling working with the new blog and not clearing away busywork - typing in student names for the gradebook, catching up on back issues of the Chronicle of Higher Education or any of the little tasks that always need doing around the house.

So, today I get to do my writing and my busywork.

I am back to chapter 4. I have decided that I do not like to work on chapter 4.

Class went well, at least I liked it.

We did intellectual history: enlightenment thinkers and some of their ideas. On Wednesday we get to do the Freddy and Maria show - enlightened monarchs in Eastern Europe.

I am putting the full writeup on my teaching blog, not here. I just wanted to use this forum to comment that my notion of starting by explaining why I love the Englightenment and why I hate the Enlightenment seemed to work well as both an overview of the movement and a chance to suggest the relationship between a historian, moral judgement, and the events of the past. I argued that a historian wears two hats: we seek to understand the past and recapture the choices and decisions that people in the past made, and yet as human being we also judge the people in the past, just as we judge everyone around us. The trick is to make those judgements not directly by our criteria but rather on the standard of the best practices available at the time.

Thus while I get very frustrated at the way that many enlightenment thinkers made up stories about their past, and I judged them for it using Franklin's satire: "What a wonderful thing it is to be a reasonable creature, for we may find a reason for anything we wish to do" I also placed those stories within the context of reaction to the Counter-Reformation and within the context of a generation of thinkers misled by the implications of their guiding metaphor. The enlightenment was about light, shedding the light of reason into the dark corners of tradition and superstition. Their metaphors, their language, their examples all hinged on the image of bringing light into dark places. But, if you want to change the world and you have a candle, you need to locate yourself within a dark room and not outdoors at noon. In other words, in order for their metaphor to tell an attractive story about their project, then all that came before them had to be wrong, ignorant, or stupid. And so, they found it easy to tell and easier to believe stories that made the past appear to be stupid - the notion that everyone before Columbus thought the earth was flat was an enlightenment tall tale, as is the very concept of the medeival period as the "dark ages."

Oddly enough, the notion that the people who came before were stupid and ignorant, while we bring reason, light and knowledge to improve on their understanding, is a notion that continues to be popular at the present. It may well be the most lasting legacy of the enlightenment.

And from here, I think I can go back to the writeup that the kids will see.

James Lileks wrote a thing about 80s' rock, and Michelle of A Small Victory (I keep wanting to call her Victorious Michelle or Michelle Victoriette, but neither would be appropriate) responded with a comment on Yes. I was reminded of their discussion when I went back to my own record collection and played some vinyl from 1965.

Let me give some more context. The library lent us a recording of Shawn Colvin Live '88, a very good concert in the soprano with a guitar variety. She plays her hits: Steady On, Shotgun Down an Avalanche, and so on. She also covers the Paul Simon tune Kathy's song. Many of Colvin's choices for this concert are songs about love out of control, including Shotgun:

Sometimes you make me lose my will to live
And just become a beacon for your soul
But the past is stronger than my will to forgive
Forgive you or myself, I don't know

I'm riding shotgun down the avalanche
Tumbling and falling down the avalanche

It is a good song, both with the full band and in this minimalist approach. But, it did not grab me the way that Kathy's Song did. Again, it is a song about loving and longing, although while Shotgun is a breakup song this is a song about long distance relationships:

And as a song I was writing is left undone
I don't know why I spend my time
Writing songs I can't believe
With words that tear and strain to rhyme.

And so you see I have come to doubt
All that I once held as true
I stand alone without beliefs
The only truth I know is you.

I spent the entire weekend with that song, and its little guitar riff, stuck in my head. I thought about slapping myself to try to jar the needle out of its groove, but refrained because it might well have skipped to the Oysternband's I Look to You

Crazy people
Stare into the mirror to see what's true
But I
I look for you

a song that I alternately think is about obsessive love for a person and obsessive love for God.

I digress, I just wanted to share some lyrics.

To bring this back to James and Michelle, I dug out Sounds of Silence, the 1965 Simon and Garfunkle album with Kathy's Song on it and played the album through.

It is a good album, but it is also dated. In fact, I think it was dated by 1966 - the whole album is a mixture of laments about the difficulties people have communicating with one another, wistful love songs, and Greenwhich Village boho radical chic. On the other hand, they do use a wonderful Farfisa organ on a couple of tracks, and up-tempo Farfisa organs are always good.

Listening to the album, with its earnest concerns and cleverly commercialized remixes of material from their even more dated first album, was like looking through a window into a particular moment in the past. Some art is timeless, or so the Enlightenment dudes would claim, but this particular album is very closely tied to a time and place, and I think that is what I like about it.

That is all.

That last post was cryptic - I must have written it late at night.

The point of it was that I am wrestling with the look and feel of the new weblog. I have an acceptable front page; I have decided to keep the grey, yellowbeige, red color scheme. I am struggling with the best way to display my archives.

The big question is whether, when you click on a permalink or an extended entry, you should see a page that looks essentially like the main index or a page that looks essentially different - should it include the sidebar?

This question is made more difficult for me because, as a matter of aesthetics, I like permalinks that show the post but not the comments - comments belong in a pop-up window. The way MT works, if you archive individual entries, the comments go at the bottom of the entry; if you archive by day, week, or month, you can put the comments in a pop-up.

I think I need to dig some more, for I know I have seen MT blogs that expand a post in place for the extended entry.

And so to start my day.

EDIT - James at Outside the Beltway has exactly the functionality I was thinking of. He achieves it by using javascript. I learned my HTML before Javascript was invented, and I still mistrust it as a buggy wonder that adds little while breaking browsers and requiring people to upgrade to crap. However, those thoughts might be out of date. Certainly the lowest prevalent denominator among web browsing software now supports javascript.

Still, I have had the design philosophy of "cut the bells and whistles" beaten into me to the point that I have to have a compelling reason before I use a script, a frame, or an image. Compelling reasons exist, so I do use all of these design elements, but I try to make sure that the whole thing loads as smoothly as possible on as many browsers and browser conditions as possible.

Well, class got prepped and I went to spend a couple of minutes with the new blog's layout.

I am wrestling with a design decision. I do want to use the extended entries - some of my blather is better left hidden. Extended entries open onto an archive page - I can archive by post, by day, or by week for these links. In addition I will be maintaining date-based archives linkable from the front and also some category archives.

My first thought was that I like comments in a little pop-up window, not tacked onto the end of the extended entry. So, no archives by post (see Calpundit for an example) unless I go back on that decision.

The default is to use the same archive template for daily and monthly archives. Should these look like the front page - Just One Bite - or should they look different - Sheila O'Malley?

Rather than reading fiction, I mess with these decisions in the hour between ending work and going to bed. The good news is that I am learning more css - I got a float to work for the date archives, but then decided it was ugly. The bad news is that, well, there is a lot of potching and puttering going on.

And so to bed.

Grumble

I prep classes a day or two ahead of time. I don't write out my lectures, and while I make a rough plan of my lectures at the start of the semester I leave things loose because, well, I know I will be revising them a day or two before the class regardless of what I had planned so why duplicate the effort.

In any case, I had a general idea of what to cover this week, and on Friday I sketched out a rough outline and some filler. I expanded that yesterday and started to do some reading. Tonight, after a day of errands and chasing the toddler, I go to finish writing up my lesson plan and I decide that I don't want to do half of my preliminary proposal.

So, I get to revise it almost from scratch - and while I know that plan A will not work, I don't yet have a plan B.

What do I want to say about the enlightenment? How much religion do I want to get into? Why am I focusing so heavily on England and France? Should I do more countries? (Frederick and Catherine and Maria Theresa are due on Wednesday)

I might look into Augustan England and France under the ancien regime. Let me double check the textbook and remind myself what information the kids will be bringing to the classroom.

And all I want to do is go to sleep early. Bother.

Well, I finally went ahead and got my own domain.

I am installing movable type now. Then I will get to design a new blog. Sometime next week I will move this blog over to the new location.

It will take me a while, for I only get to work on this stuff after I stop being productive at my real work.

Our first paper topic is on Thomas Paine Rights of Man. The paper is due on Wednesday, February 18, in class. The question is deceptively simple: "What were the rights of man? Why were they controversial?" This handout is a brief historical background to Thomas Paine and his book.

Thomas Paine was a professional rabble rouser. He inspired the American Revolution, defended the French Revolution, and spent much of his later life trying to create a third revolution in Britain. He was acquainted with Timothy Burke, a Member of Parliament, spokesman for several ministers, advocate of religious toleration, and defender of the American Colonies during the Imperial Crisis of the 1760s and 1770s. The two men exchanged several letters in 1789.

Burke had long been a supporter of constitutional government and human rights; Paine was thus surprised when Burke first gave a speech in Parliament condemning the French Revolution in February, 1790 and then, in November, 1790, issued a long pamphlet, Reflections on the Revolution in France. This pamphlet was written in the form of a critique of a political sermon given in November, 1789 by Richard Price, a Dissenting English clergyman, but it moved on to a complete critique of the National Assembly and its actions. Burke argued that rights and liberties were a contract between those who lived before, those now alive, and those not yet born. He identified that inter-generational transfer of rights with the inter-generational transfer of property, especially landed property, and argued that the National Assembly's expropriation of church property completely destroyed the social contract. He said more than this brief precis; Burke's book is the foundation text of modern conservativism. I flipped a coin as to whether this class would read Burke or Paine and almost assigned both. If any of you are interested in conservative thought or conservative politics I strongly suggest that you read Burke.

Burke was answered by a who's who of the British left, including enlightenment feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. The most famous reply was written by Thomas Paine from Paris. The first volume of Paine's Rights of Man, Feb 1791, was a direct and detailed refutation of Burke's pamphlet. The second volume, published in Feb 1792, was a call for revolution in Britain and in the rest of the world. Paine's books became the foundation texts of the English working-class movement. Selling them was declared a seditious libel and several booksellers were charged with this capital offence for daring to spread radical thought in cheap editions. Following Paine's later book, Age of Reason, the British government shifted from political to religious persecutions and successfully prosecuted a number of English radicals for blasphemy for selling Age of Reason, thus halting sales of Rights of Man.

For your paper, dig through Paine's book, both volumes, and figure out what he means by his title: "Rights of Man." I suggest that you look both for abstract and detailed descriptions of these rights. As you do so, ask why Paine's depiction of rights was so dangerous that people were tried for their lives for selling the book, and so attractive that English radicals continued to take that risk and spread Paine's ideas.

I finished Gentleman Revolutionary, Richard Brookhiser's book on Gouverneur Morris, and I must say that I liked it.

There is a knack to writing popular history: your prose has to be sprightly, your narrative has to move along, and you have to be both reliable and interesting as you do so. I am not a Morris scholar so I can not speculate on how original this work is, but judging from the footnotes he has combined quotes and insights from the many earlier biographies into a coherent tale. Unlike David McCullogh, in other words, Brookhiser is generous in indicating that other people have written about his subject in the past (McCullogh is notorious for only citing primary sources.) But, this is popular history - he tells the tale of the man and his times rather than engaging in debates with other people about the man, his times, and how best to make sense of them.

The charm of the book is the charm of the man. The Gouv. (Joanne Freeman's nickname for him) was always charming and a brilliant writer; much of Brookhiser's work is simply providing a setting for Morris' wit and panache. That charm shows up in his formal prose - the preamble to the U.S. Constitution - and in even his didactic statements like these brilliantly balanced rules for living.

To try to do good, to avoid evil, a little severity for one's self, a little indulgence for others -- this is the means to obtain some good result out of our poor existence. To love one's friends, to be beloved by them -- this is the means to brighten it.

All of Morris' letters sparkle with this sort of prose. He really is the most fun of the founders - even before you consider the incongruity of a man with a fleshless right arm after a burn with boiling water as a teenager, a stump of a left leg after a carriage accident, and an incredible fondness for dancing, travelling, and seducing the wives of other men (perhaps in compensation for his own physical injuries.) Maimed in body, light in spirit, and every inch a gentleman -- you gotta love the Gouv.

On Monday we will be talking about the Enlightenment. I suspect that I will open class by explaining to the kids that the enlightenment was a very good thing - an outpouring of reason, a movement against cruelty, a search for a rational society that respects rights and liberties - and that it was a terrible thing - largely because much Enlightenment thought was rationalization, not reason, justifying the way things were rather than working for human happiness.

In other words, I judge the enlightenment and find it both promising and lacking. I suspect that much of my gut anger at many of the enlightenment dudes comes because they could have done better. There is something more annoying about a promising project that falls short than there is about an idea that is just plain stupid or dangerous.

I was reminded of Matthew 7:1 as I thought about these opening remarks "Judge not lest ye be judged." Checking the text I find the second clause to that statement is perhaps more useful "For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again."

In modern language, the problem with judging is not in making a decision about whether an action or a decision is good or bad, the problem comes if you make that decision on bad criteria. This makes sense - I had forgotten Matthew 7:2 but I have long interpreted Matthew 7:1 in that way. So when we study history we are constantly forming opinions, judgements, about historical actors and historical decisions. The challenge is to judge them on the correct terms. Just as Paul Finkelman argues in Jeffersonian Legacies that we can not measure Thomas Jefferson's decisions about slavery against late 20th-century norms but instead must look at the best practice of Jefferson's day, so too we must come up with reasonable criteria for all our historical judgements and all our policy judgements. Kantians would call it the categorical imperitive; New Testament folks would call it the golden rule; I explain it to the kids as being fair. And, as I also point out to the kids, the criteria you choose for your judgement will have as much to do with your decision as do the facts of the case.

One of the things I most dislike about the enlightenment is the extent to which many enlightenment thinkers felt it necessary to make up stories about their opponents in order to discredit them. The story about Columbus and the flat earth - enlightenment propaganda. The notion that religion and science must always be opposed - enlightenment propaganda. The concept of a "dark age" following the fall of Rome - enlightenment propaganda.

To be fair to the enlightenment dudes, many of these overstatements were created within the contexts of polemic, and polemics are generally aimed not at elucidating truth but at the total destruction of your enemy's position. I read polemics, both for work and as I follow contemporary politics, and I do not care for them. Let me give some contemporary examples and then I will go back to class prep.

Brad Delong has been spending the last week or so attacking the Bush budget, Bush economic policy, and the internal workings of the Bush White House. He eloquently explains exactly why it is that he refers to the Bush team as "those clowns." He does not care for their procedures, their policy, or their institutional honesty. However, as he makes his critiques, he is also fairly clear about the criteria he is using: he wants to see an honest broker, he wants to see policy decisions that look to the future, he wants the Treasury Department to maintain independence and not be the tool of White House speechwriters. I get the sense that he respects many of the people in the Bush administration, or rather that he respects what they have once done. His anger at them comes in part because they are trashing the work he did in the Clinton administration, and in part because they ought to know better.

In contrast, let me introduce a troll, one JadeGold, who has been posting on the Bill Hobb's blog, especially on a discussion about Bush's military service record. At one point in that discussion the topic turned to GWB's military aptitude tests. A poster claimed that GWB scored 25% on pilot aptitude, 50% on navigator aptitude, and 95% on officer aptitude. JadeGold responded with incredulity. How could GWB be good at anything? My response to the same numbers was that they match my preconcieved notion of GWB: he is not book smart; he is very people smart; he has the knack of appealing to and inspiring service people and this has made him an effective Commander in Chief.

The point to this contrast is not just that DeLong is a good guy and JadeGold is a stupid troll. It is a question of style. DeLong uses the norms of collegial controversy; he praises the person of their opponent while denigrating their policies. JadeGold refuses to believe anything good about someone they dislike. It is polemics, the same sort of scorched-earth polemics that led the enlightement dudes to make up stories about the past.

And so to write up a handout on Burke and Paine

Via Bob Mould, I find a very mad cow.

Caution, extensive potty language

Link may not work in I.E., if so then cut and paste.

I just signed up for the Amazon.com associate program. As I write about books I will link to them with the handy-dandy top secret RedTed code. I have not decided if I will grant them an honest-to-goodness link on the permanant sidebar.

If people buy books, I might even get a dollar or two back for my own book addiction. And that would be a good thing.

Gouverneur Morris, in 1800 following Jefferson's victory in an election even tighter than Bush-Gore, suggested to his fellow Federalists what role they should play now that a dangerous visionary had come into power:

Nil desperandum de Republica is a sound principle. Let the chair of office be filled by whomsoever it may, opposition will act as an outward conscience, and prevent the abuse of power.

It is a good line and, as Richard Brookhiser points out, it suggests that "parties will develop a morality of partisanship, keeping each other honest."(1)

Reading that, I paused to consider recent Congressional history. Between Clinton's impeachment, gerrymandering on both sides but more aggressively by Republicans, and the recent decision by the Congressional Republican leadership to exclude Democrats from conference committees between the House and Senate, I wonder to what extent the morality of partisanship is persisting and, more importantly, how it might be returned.

Michael Holt argues that 19th century politics were all about the next election - as long as everyone thought they had a reasonable chance next time, winners did not go overboard nor did losers despair, for they might well change places in two years. If once politics could be seen as a game of Irish stand-down - I hit you in the ear and knock you over, you hit me in the ear and knock me over, we both hit as hard as we could, and afterwards we go get drunk together - now it appears to be closer to a mugging, where the first blow is followed by a boot to the ribs or a boot to the head if you think you can get away with it.

I don't have a good remedy - I feel rather like Bill Bennet only with different vices when I decry the breakdown of morals this way. The answer may lie in districting and gerrymandering - current districting law suggests that it is more important to have exactly the same number of people in each district than it is to have districts that align with natural borders or subsidiary political borders. I wonder how the gerrymanders would change their shape if they were forced to be drawn along county and municipal boundaries, and if the increased competition in many districts would outweight the relative disfranchisement of people in the districts with 101 people as compared to those with 99?

But I do like that Gouverneur Morris quote, and I am enjoying Brookhiser's little biography.

(1)Richard Brookhiser, Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris -- the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution, (New York: Free Press, 2003) p 167. The Latin translates as "Do not despair of the Republic".

After reading this well reasoned set of arguments on Kuro5hin I have resolved that the only reasonable thing to do is move to Movable type. Thanks to the Commissar and LeeAnn for giving me appropriate political guidance in this matter.

Besides, doing hand trackbacks is tedious.

Last night I finished reading Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey. It is a great big book, and she has two more with the same characters - the dreaded trilogy of doorstops. I found myself chewing on it, and wanted to say a few words about the novel.

J and I refer to kinky sex as licorice, as in "not everyone likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice." Phedre, the heroine, is fond of the strong, bitter and salty licorice - she is an anguisette, what we would call a pain bottom. Carey creates an alternate Europe containing a country built on the principle "love as thou wilt" and where a trained courtesan manages to become a crucial catalyst saving the kingdom.

I could not tell what had come first, the character or the world, but the basic setting was intriguing. Imagine that the Christ story had merged not with Horus and not with Platonic dualism but with Bacchus and Isis. Esau, the wandering God, either was the child of Christ and the Magdalene or, in his mythic version, sprung from the earth watered by the blood of Christ and the tears of the Magdalene as she wept for Him. He and his followers reveled, traveled, and finally settled in the South of France where they formed a kingdom. The background alone, and the way she works it up, are almost worth the price of admission.

Within this setting Carey creates a society of oath-bound hedonists. They seek pleasure, they celebrate beauty, but all the characters have sworn one oath or another, all find their choices limited and their desires driven by promises made in the past and constantly renewed in the presence. I am fascinated by oaths, and the chapter I am currently revising hinges in large part on the relationship between oaths and civil society, so this part of Carey was rather to my taste.

Oath-bound hedonism was both the most intriguing and, in retrospect, the most unstable part of her society. She has done a good job imagining and describing the checks and balances of religion, power, culture and custom that keep hedonism from degenerating into egotism, and yet this tension was the point where my suspension of disbelief was most tried. Well, that and the fact that the novel was really set in Boinkistan, that mythical land beloved of erotica authors where disease and unwanted pregnancy never deter or inconvenience the characters as they go about their appointed rounds.

As for the licorice, I do not play in the scene so I can not comment directly; I can only say that Cary's depiction of Phedre's psychology and experiences correspond with some of what I have read about the joy of being a bottom and a pain slut. I would be very curious to see what Eden or Cat have to say about the novel, if they have time for 700 pages of adequate prose. ]

I was struck by Carey's skill at keeping Phedre's assignations, or at least the descriptions of them, closely tied to the plot. The conceit is that she is a sacred prostitute, sworn to the service of Namaah who had paid the way for the Bacchus-God by lying with strangers for money. Beyond that, she is a spy and an intriguer, worming secrets out of people as they relax after beating, cutting or once burning her. Carey mentions the sex, but does not describe it. She does describe the emotional responses to sexual encounters, and the way that these responses shape further actions.

What almost got me to put the book down was not the licorice but the conspiracy. There are a host of characters, many with similar names. All of them are plotting and scheming and playing the game of thrones, all have their desires and alliances, and as Phedre and friends work plots within plots it is very easy for the reader to just plain glaze over. It is in some ways a stereotypically female book, a melodrama of conspiracy, for Carey focuses on interpersonal relationships and on the emotions of her characters - the plot with battles, imprisonments, escapes, magics, and exile is all secondary to the love stories. This is as Tolstoy would have wished it, of course, but the sheer volume of characters and emotions made it hard to keep track. I wondered if this is what goes on in soap operas, or romance novels with 20 characters all revealing secrets to one another?

So, I liked it; it was strange; I am curious to see what Eden and Cat have to say; I will read the next doorstop in the trilogy.

Edit - I would add that the book is not at all like Sam Delaney's Dhalgren, except that I had to stop and think about how it was unlike Dhalgren - the similarities are in the importance of memory, the importance of promises, and the plot role of non-vanilla sexuality.

Edit 2 - Cary, Carey - minor details.

Yesterday's class went well. I called it Starry Messengers after Galileo's book, and we talked about the scientific revolution of the 15th-18th centuries.

The kids had homework, "Why was astronomy so dangerous?" and were thus primed to speak, but that was not the only reason class went well.

I think that the big differences between this and my two previous classes, which did not go well, are that this time I
- was working with a defined and manageable chunk of material
- was largely paralleling the textbook
- used no maps
- was really psyched about the material.

I like ideas and the history of ideas, and this class was all about ideas and about the interplay between science and religion. I even got to teach John Locke's psychology of experience and ideas, one of my favorite little sub-lectures. I even used props to make Locke's point - I borrowed a yellow block from the baby's toybox and then held it up as an exampe of the color yellow and the shape of a block. I then used it to make Locke's point about the absurdity of religious prosecution, threatening to punish the class if they did not assert that the object in my hand was a blue ball. And, of course, they could say it was a blue ball but they still saw a yellow block, for external force and coercion can not change our ideas, only reason, logic, and new evidence can change an idea for Locke.

Perhaps on Monday, when we talk about the enlightenment, I will give them Franklin's approach as a contrast - practice and experience can shape behavior, and morality is a matter of behavior and habit; you can train yourself to be more nearly perfect.

COTV 72 is up at A Perfectly Cromulent Blog.

Go forth and read.

I just finished writing up Monday's class.

It was not a very good class - a mile wide, an inch deep, and hard to follow.

Today we get to do the Scientific Revolution, it should be a much better class.

It is being an odd day - woke up, got baby out and thought about chapter 2. Did some brainstorming and had a short nap. Wrote up class. Only now do I remember that I forgot breakfast and coffee.

I laugh at myself.

DW has moved her webspace to Just One Bite and changed her nom de blog to Eden.

I like the new look and label.