Dedicated To the One I Love - Mamas and Papas

Originally sung by the Shirellas. I just really like this arrangement.

"...music may be an emergent property of the brain, cobbled together from bits of pre-existing machinery and then, as it were, fine-tuned."

I still shake my head that I can find quotes like these in modern times.

Lubchenco, an Oregon State University professor specializing in overfishing and climate change, will be the first woman to head NOAA. A member of the Pew Oceans Commission, Lubchenco has recommended steps to overcome crippling damage to the world's oceans from overfishing and pollution and has expressed optimism for change once President George W. Bush leaves office.

"The Bush administration has not been respectful of the science," she said this year. "But I think that's not true of Republicans in general. I know it's not. I am very much looking forward to a new administration that does respect scientific information and that considers it very seriously in making environmental policies."

The Pragmatist By Christopher Hayes (The Nation)

Pragmatism as a school of thought was born of a similar impulse of reconciliation. Having witnessed, and in some cases experienced firsthand, the horror of violence and irreconcilable ideological conflict during the Civil War, William James, Charles Peirce and Oliver Wendell Holmes were moved to reject the metaphysical certainty in eternal truths that had so motivated the abolitionists, emphasizing instead epistemic humility, contingency and the acquisition of knowledge through practice--trial and error.

This tradition is a worthy inheritance for any president, particularly in times as manifestly uncertain as these. And if there's a silver thread woven into the pragmatist mantle Obama claims, it has its origins in this school of thought. Obama could do worse than to look to John Dewey, another onetime resident of Hyde Park and the founder of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, which Obama's daughters attend. Dewey developed the work of earlier pragmatists in a particularly fruitful and apposite manner. For him, the crux of pragmatism, and indeed democracy, was a rejection of the knowability of foreordained truths in favor of "variability, initiative, innovation, departure from routine, experimentation."

Dewey's pragmatism was reformist, not radical. He sought to ameliorate the excesses of early industrial capitalism, not to topple it. Nonetheless, pragmatism requires an openness to the possibility of radical solutions. It demands a skepticism not just toward the certainties of ideologues and dogmatism but also of elite consensus and the status quo. This is a definition of pragmatism that is in almost every way the opposite of its invocation among those in the establishment. For them, pragmatism means accepting the institutional forces that severely limit innovation and boldness; it means listening to the counsel of the Wise Men; it means not rocking the boat.

But Dewey understood that progress demands that the boat be rocked. And his contemporary Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood it as well. "The country needs," Roosevelt said in May 1932, "and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands, bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach."

That is pragmatism we can believe in. Our times demand no less.

"I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do," Cheney said.

"And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it," Cheney said.

ABC asked him if in hindsight he thought the tactics went too far. "I don't," Cheney said.

Betty Davis - They Say I'm Different

Ulysses, Chaos, and Complexity

In Ulysses James Joyce uncannily anticipates the perspective of the new chaoticians and shares the metaphysical implications of their worldview. Moreover, understanding Ulysses in light of chaos theory can substantially refine our sense of how the novel should be read and legitimately interpreted.

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

The Word - The Unbearable Lightness of Supreme Being

Colbert at Christmas
Colbert Christmas DVD

Green Screen
Bill O'Reilly Interview

Breaking The Will

Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Breaking The Will
How waterboarding got the green light from Bush.

Current rules require biologists in the Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service to sign off on projects even when it is determined that they are not likely to harm species. The rule finalized Wednesday would do away with that requirement, reducing the number of consultations so that the government's experts can focus on cases that pose the greatest harm to wildlife, officials said.

In a world where children are separated from their innocence by villains and other children grow up enemies to innocence, the rest of us are left to play the innocent.

At least one witness reported a curious aspect to the visage of the young man shooting up the Mumbai cafe: The young man was smiling.

Culture is not an escape from conditioning environments. It is an environment of a different kind. ... The 20th century, in which it took us a mere 60 years to elaborate the horse-drawn carriage into a vehicle that carried us to the Moon, and the howitzer into a 50-megaton nuclear weapon, was another threshold. The forces that we created are on a different scale than those of nature...

Lichtenberg figure

More than 2,000 years ago, Socrates warned about a different information revolution — the rise of the written word, which he considered a more superficial way of learning than the oral tradition.

The Free Design - Bubbles