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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
eluvium - this motion makes me last
secretcities
clicking through to emanuel smedbøl
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reblogged from: Brad OFarrell Reblogs LOLCats
nyrb—OCCUPIED PARIS: The Sweet and the Cruel
When General de Gaulle told his compatriots in 1944 that there was only one “eternal France,” and that all French patriots had stood up to the Nazi invaders, this myth was gratefully received. The more complicated reality was slow to emerge. But even though the murkier picture of collaboration and compromise, as well as heroic resistance, is now generally accepted in France, a confrontation with the superficial normality of wartime Paris can still come as a shock.
WHY WE REPEAT OURSELVES - NYTimes.com
Researchers think they may understand why people are better at remembering what they have learned than whom they have shared it with.
Dealing with climate change allows no room for the compromises that rule the world of elected politics. “This is analagous to the issue of slavery faced by Abraham Lincoln or the issue of Nazism faced by Winston Churchill,” he said. “On those kind of issues you cannot compromise. You can’t say let’s reduce slavery, let’s find a compromise and reduce it 50% or reduce it 40%.James Hansen, the world’s pre-eminent climate scientist, says any agreement likely to emerge from the Copenhagen negotiations would be so deeply flawed that it would be better to start again from scratch. From the Guardian.
Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it. Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?
36 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD (a novel)
excerpt from Edge magazine.
