iamom | the duality of evil; hard exercise; website construction

In the West you have been struggling for many years with the problem of evil. How is it possible that evil should be there? It seems that it is difficult for the Western mind to understand. But in the light of non-duality, there is no problem: As soon as the idea of good is there, the idea of evil is there. Buddha needs Mara in order to reveal himself, and vice versa.

--Thich Nhat Hanh
From the book “The Heart of Understanding,” published by Parallax Press.

This fact is obvious in the light of nondual understanding. Bush makes very little sense to me when he harps on eradicating evil from the world; by his own standards, he's just as evil if not more so than the people he's against. All this talk about evil is probably just rhetorical anyway, though. If he can install some West-friendly Iraqi generals as the government there, he will undoubtedly gain access to Iraq's oil, for American consumption.

I also find myself wondering what's happening in Afghanistan right now. Does anybody know how that provisional government is doing? Do they even have any country left after all that bombing the US subjected it to? I doubt if the US has spent nearly a fraction as much time, money or energy in rebuilding that poor country as they did destroying it. And still not a clue as to Osama's whereabouts.

Had a fantastic cardio workout this morning -- hit my high point in spades, with sweat literally pouring down my face. Also had a great eating day yesterday -- no cheating, lots of vegetables, and I didn't even need to eat one of my meals, because I wasn't hungry. That's the kind of groove I'm happy to get into with this; it will allow me to adopt this eating plan more easily into my regular lifestyle. Somewhat like that low-carb diet, I also found myself thinking less and less about food yesterday, which is tantamount to long-term success. Eating to live instead living to eat, and all that jazz. Can't wait to post my before and after shots on the site when I'm done at the end of March.

Should go start to work on my business website again. I've been mapping out the general content on paper, and I'd like to start mocking it up soon for critique. Quick question about web page construction, now: does anybody here have experience with modifying large amounts of formatted content on a website on a repeated basis? I have several weekly updates to make for the local jazz association website that take me an hour or more to set up every week. There must be a faster way to do this. Are cascading style sheets something I should be thinking about? (I don't even know what those are, but it sounds like they could help to import unformatted text into a web page and apply a set of formatting standards to it.)