Four Decades After Milgram, We’re Still Willing to Inflict Pain: "If this is how most people behave, how do we prevent more Holocausts, Abu Ghraibs and other examples of wanton cruelty? Part of the answer, Professor Burger argues, is teaching people about the experiment so they will know to be on guard against these tendencies, in themselves and others.

An instructor at West Point contacted Professor Burger to say that she was teaching her students about his findings. She had the right idea — and the right audience. The findings of these two experiments should be part of the basic training for soldiers, police officers, jailers and anyone else whose position gives them the power to inflict abuse on others."

To be fair to our humanity, we also now know a large and significant percent of the original participants did NOT comply, and more still were weeded out because they MAY not; choice was always an option and the danger was mostly when we believed the lab-coat knew more than we did about what was 'safe', so it's not a question of inherent cruelty per-se, but primarily one of trust (again!)in our information sources.

The Matthew Herbert Big Band - There's Me And There's You: Matthew Herbert writes "In an age of such infinite and brilliant possibilities of technique, combined with the urgent politics of now, why have music and musicians lost the urge to challenge, investigate, invent and unite? Without the backbones of principle and enquiry, music is sounding more and more like the background to a non-stop Ford commercial"

"we, the undersigned, believe that music can still be a political force of note, and not just the soundtrack to over-consumption" -- if he can generalize that if-or-else to "healing force" (ie Yue) then I'm with him 100%

Ontogeny, Phylogeny, Teleology and Evolution’s Empirical Conundrum: "Darwinism includes no anticipatory mechanism whereby genes needed in the future would be present, though dormant, in ancestors. Only a teleological theory would predict an anticipatory genome. Anticipatory evidence would suggest a pre-coded program underlying the process of multi-generational morphological diversification.

And this is precisely what we observe ..."

Discovery News: "Peppermint has long been touted as a digestive aid, but new research shows just how potent a bacteria-buster it is ...

While peppermint's germ-killing powers have been previously documented, the new study is the first to report the antimicrobial activity of two other mint family members -- Mentha villosa and Faassen's catnip -- along with another non-mint herb, bluebeard.

Essential oils for horseradish, garlic, hyssop, basil, marjoram, oregano, winter savory, and three types of thyme also showed potent bacteria-busting abilities."

when exactly did we stop ritualizing the use of things that were good for us, and become obsessed with pursuing foods and goods that would kill us instead?

Discovery News: "Another reason to celebrate under the mistletoe this holiday season is that researchers have just determined a medicine made out of fermented mistletoe (Iscadore) may prolong the lives of cancer patients.

The plant is Viscum album, the most common holiday mistletoe of Europe, and the species that first inspired the tradition of couples sharing a kiss under its evergreen leaves and waxy berries."

Curiously I was unable to locate any mistletoe anywhere around town; there was some questionably botanically accurate plastic sprigs at the Dollarama, but once upon a time you could actually buy mistletoe, and for years I had a preserved sprig that we'd put up each year, until that one year we forgot to pack it away and said, "that's ok, we'll put it someplace safe for now, and put it with the other xmas stuff later."

Alan Lomax Collection - Songs of Christmas: "Some of these rhymes, bits of plays, songs, dances, etc go back hundreds or thousands of years. I wouldn't really want to listen to this album a lot, but it's fascinating to hear this stuff once or twice (or perhaps once a year). A couple of the tunes though, are totally captivating and unlike anything I've ever heard (and I've heard a lot of things). It can transport you to another time and place, when we really experienced the dark of winter and embraced its impenetrable stygian gloominess at the same time that we called forth to the return of effulgent daybreak."

From Rounderstore: "Songs of Christmas From the Alan Lomax Collection was recorded by Alan Lomax and several of his colleagues in Britain, Ireland, Italy, Spain, the Southern U.S. and the Caribbean between 1950 to 1964. At the time, commercial forces were overwhelming local traditions, and many folk cultures stood on the brink of great upheavals that would forever alter their ways of life."

Green Blog: "We live in a beautiful, but treacherous area of Ontario. The roads can be a real challenge during the winter, what with the low tempuratures and high winds. Living in such close proximity to the Great Lakes makes our area extremely prone to Snow Squalls, causing dangerous whiteout conditions.

Well, the snow has started to fly folks, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t just a little nervous about it."

What and who is the change we need? : Remarkk!: "Many of us are watching with rapt attention what’s going on in the transition to an Obama administration in the United States. I’ve been amazed at how the technologies of participation are being married to the philosophy of transparency in very real and exciting ways. An administration-in-waiting that blogs with open commenting! And offers a Seat at the Table for open policy conversations and submission of documents!

Inspired by these developments and the work of Laurence Lessig and Joe Trippi with Change-Congress.org and Open-Government.us, I registered the domain ChangeGov.ca, with an eye to it being a place for a new conversation for a multi- and non-partisan movement of Canadians interested in changing our institutions of government to reflect our times. I don’t know what this might become, but ..."

heh, nothing like a plan without a plan :) - here we have a raging bandwagon of "GenWe hits the homeland" primed to take on the creaking relic of the Canadian Civil Service, sort of a Starbucks version of the Xinhai Revolution. After watching, and waiting and watching, the tweets, the sites, the really odd bored-room videos, I can't say as I've seen much in the way of any Actionable Sense, so whether this is netgeek ADHD or whether it will make haste to the library, do the due diligence and infiltrate the neurology of our old political system remains to be seen; as one who sat on the periphery of flora.ca (where we just wanted to save taxpayers some millions in license fees, create open access to services and nationalize some national property), I can only wish them luck, but who knows ... I never thought Facebook would work either! (Does it? Work, I mean)