“Creative destruction is replaced with what is just destructive destruction.”

via Q2

"It’s tough to do terrorism in North Korea." - Fareed Zakaria

“As our cultural artifacts are increasingly measured in gigabytes and terabytes, organizing, sorting and displaying information in an efficient way is crucial to advancing knowledge.” — Manuel Lima

The greatest threat to free enterprise, he warned, was not Communism or the New Left but, rather, “respectable elements of society”—intellectuals, journalists, and scientists. To defeat them, he wrote, business leaders needed to wage a long-term, unified campaign to change public opinion.

“There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.”

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Parent Company Trap
www.thedailyshow.com
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“Democracy among humans traces back only 2,500 years or so to Athens, Greece, so it is perhaps not surprising that we are still fumbling around.”

"From the point of view of aesthetic and intellectual elegance, it is a bad experiment. But it is nevertheless a big discovery...It proves that sequencing and synthesizing DNA give us all the tools we need to create new forms of life."

—Theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson on the Venter synthetic biology paper in Science, quoted in Edge.org.

"The price we will pay for this huge amplification of our technological prowess is probably an equal and opposite vulnerability. Welcome to the fast lane, humanity."

—Daniel C. Dennett, Tufts University philosopher on the Venter synthetic biology paper in Science, quoted in Edge.org.

...we’re facing a coalition of the heartless, the clueless and the confused.

In such an all-encompassing and fully explicable cosmos, then, what place for God?

...it will reveal, in pitiless detail, exactly what it is to be human.

"It was a bargain with the devil," says Steiner, the marine scientist who helped lead the response to the Valdez disaster. "And now the devil is gloating."

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Respect My Authoritah
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• Washington Post: U.S. 'secret war' expands globally as Special Operations forces take larger role


• UK Guardian: Obama administration maintains Bush's 'state secrets' policy


• McClatchy: Court: Bagram prisoners don't have Guantanamo habeas rights


• New York Times: Obama Takes a Hard Line Against Leaks to Press


• NPR: Obama Rethinking 'Miranda' Rights


• New York Times: U.S. Approves Targeted Killing of American Cleric

* We look for flaws in the new information,
* seek information that bolsters our original attitude,
* garner for social validation of our original attitude,
* begin derogating the source of the message,
* show signs of anger and discomfort, avoid the new message altogether,
* or simply assert our confidence in the initial belief more adamantly.

Jordan Peterson on Reality and the Sacred (via prospiracy)

In a merging world, nothing is too trivial to gain significance through disruption.

"The global abundance of vertebrates - the group that includes mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibians and fish - fell by about one-third between 1970 and 2006, the UN says."

"There are over 11 million people in this country illegally. They harvest our crops, tend our gardens, work in our restaurants, care for our children, clean our homes. They came as others before them came, to grasp the lowest rung of the American ladder of opportunity, to work the jobs others won’t, and by virtue of their own industry and desire, to rise and build better lives for their families and a better America. That is our history, Mr. President. We are not a tribe. We are not an ethnic conclave. We are a nation of immigrants, and that distinction has been essential to our greatness." John McCain in 2006.

What's his problem now?

Rogue Wave on Jimmy Fallon

Good Morning (The Future) - Rogue Wave

“As humans, we should try to understand how to manage systems in order to avoid passing thresholds,”...

“The question we’re asking is, what’s the best network we can build?” Katifori says.

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Political Shift in D.C.
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The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
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They found that many of the links the slime mould made bore a striking resemblance to Tokyo’s existing rail network.

Spontaneous improvisation was in each case associated with a highly congruous pattern of activations and deactivations in prefrontal cortex, sensorimotor and limbic regions of the brain. In addition, the majority of these regions showed functionally reciprocal patterns of activity. That is, activations during improvisation were matched by deactivations during the control tasks, and vice versa, when each condition was compared to the resting baseline.

There is a really great piece over at BOING BOING by guest blogger Stephen Worth called "Adventures in Music".

Here are a few of fourteen great ones.