And i don't mean to flame anything...

It goes well with <Kraft Brand Processed Cheese Food Slices> on <Ritz Crackers>, in front of a roaring fire made of <Presto Brand Artificial Pressed Logs- Now Without Cyanide>.

"Loomings" and "gerunds" are words usually used by people who talk loudly in restaurants...

Here we go gathering FOTHERINGAY, FOTHERINGAY, FOTHERINGAY

Here we go gathering FOTHERINGAY

hehe :)>

I shudder to think there is anyone less friendly and more arrogant than we Americans. But then, we have all the gold, so we get to make the rules, right?

During a Sherlock Holmes orgy today, I came across this achingly romantic line from "The Abbey Grange".

"Friend will do, Mary. 'Tis a measure of my love for you. 'Tis so strong it will live on crumbs."

It's really no problem. I hope you did not suffer as a result of a simple misunderstanding. I, too, apologize for hurting your feelings. I hope we can bury the hatchet so to speak, preferable not in my head!

I am actually taking your observations to heart and will try to improve my over-the-board skills. I won't promise you anything because of my age. You know that rocking chair probably looks a little more inviting than doing a thousand more tactical problems or an equal number of endgame studies.

Haven't counted the words - but this may well be the "record bird" from me, ever...

You remember the human rights debate a few days ago on the <Beef Stroganoff> page?

I’m sure you read the whole thread, but just rehashing, the discussion started when during the debate about health care, <Phorqt> asked <Is health care a human right?>. I argued that it should be but it isn’t till it's codified, unless you argue its existence from existing codes.

Shortly afterwards, you entered the fray with:

<"human rights" is a social construct that is meaningless without strong political coercive force.

That is- there are no "natural rights"- meaning rights in nature- in nature, there is no ethical realm.>

When <kb2ct> pointed out that <the United States was founded on the principle that the rights are self evident and universal.> you replied that <"human rights" are not- nor have they ever been- either self evident or universal> and that you had <just wanted to remind people that establishing and agreeing upon a set of "universal human rights"- a la the UN, for example-- takes a back seat, always, to <realpolitik>>

There followed a short exchange with <kb2ct> about power by proxy, further underscoring your main point originally explicated in western literature by <Thucydides>.

My discussion with <karnak64> stimulated me to reread <History of Western Philosophy> in which Bertrand Russell argued – as a historian - that the notion of natural law upon which the concept of self-evident human rights was founded, actually evolved from <geometry>.

Russell’s argument is essentially that <Euclid>’s proof of Pythagoras’ theorem lead to the discovery of irrational numbers. Accordingly, geometry was separated from arithmetic at this juncture, as the latter simply didn’t deal with anything other than what we now define as rational numbers. Geometry was built on self evident axioms to deduce theorems, both of which are held to be true in actual space, “which is something given in experience”.

Influenced by this, natural rights doctrines were a search for self-evident axioms in politics. The Declaration of Independence is therefore modeled on <Euclid>.

Geometry and arithmetic were of course reunited in modern mathematics, but mathematics, seen as a search for eternal and exact truth, provided the base paradigm upon which theology (as distinct from personal religion) was modeled.

Zounds.