http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/119236?RS_show_page=3
He didn't care when his teenage son came home with blue hair and a mohawk. He speaks his mind with a candor rare for a high-ranking official. He asks for opinions, and seems genuinely interested in the response.
The ISAF command has even discussed ways to make not killing into something you can win an award for: There's talk of creating a new medal for "courageous restraint,"...
His commanders had repeatedly requested permission to tear down the house where ... was killed, noting that it was often used as a combat position by the Taliban. But due to McChrystal's new restrictions to avoid upsetting civilians, the request had been denied.

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Flaubert-s-simple-heart-5320
Un coeur simple. In it, he managed the difficult technical feat of making someone interesting who was good but ordinary and not particularly intelligent, and he also managed the far more difficult emotional and ethical feat of entering the world of someone with whose outlook he did not agree, and portraying it with sympathy, understanding, and admiration, recognizing in it the beauty that it possessed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/opinion/25brooks.html
Most people in government, I find, are there because they sincerely want to do good. But they’re also exhausted and frustrated much of the time... These people often spend 16 hours a day together, and they bond by moaning and about the idiots on the outside.

http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=23542
There was a time when appeasement was an inoffensive, even a rather positive term. The French word “l’apaisement,” from which it probably derives (or the earlier medieval-French apeser), meant the satisfying of an appetite or thirst, the bringing of comfort, the cooling of tensions. Even today, Webster’s dictionary’s first definition of “appease” is “to bring peace, calm; to soothe,” with the later negative meaning being, well, much later in the entry.

A seldom told story is the one of the sprawling pop scene in Ostersund, a rather isolated town in the north of Sweden. No, we kid you not. The city by the lake has spawned lots of great groups, it's just that no one has ever noticed. Originally playing in different punk, rock or indie-groups the six soon-to-be creators of the most beautiful northern pop music imaginable met each other in their mid-teens. It was on strangers balconies and in blistering snowstorms on their way to parties they really learned to know one another.

http://incharacter.org/review/stoicism-is-just-so-yesterday/
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704009804575309610811148630.htmlWhat's interesting is the way both "The Rational Optimist" and "Wrong" converge on the idea of openness as fundamental to progress. For Mr. Ridley, the market for ideas needs to be as open as possible in order to breed ingenuity from collaboration; for Mr. Freedman, this market needs to be doggedly open about its errors as a positive step toward reliability.
http://www.hallahus.se/stilhistoria/takpapp.htm
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8682515?dopt=Abstract if you’re impulsive, bored easily or ever suspected you might have ADHD or BPD, you most likely have the DRD4 7R gene (or one that does roughly the same thing)

http://www.russiantearoomnyc.com/
http://chronicle.com/article/We-Must-Stop-the-Avalanche-of/65890/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platanus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platanus_orientalis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platanus_%C3%97_hispanica
http://www.oldandsold.com/articles11/trees-22.shtml
http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sankthans
Peder Severin Krøyer

http://www.flickr.com/photos/31277456@N04/3693841386/ 
Populus petrowskiana 

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/06/13/the_bright_side_of_wrong?mode=PF What’s called for is a new way of thinking about wrongness, one that recognizes that our fallibility is part and parcel of our brilliance. If we can achieve that, we will be better able to avoid our costliest mistakes, own up to those we make, and reduce the conflict in our lives by dealing more openly and generously with both other people’s errors and our own...
Psychologists and neuroscientists increasingly think that inductive reasoning undergirds virtually all of human cognition — the decisions you make every day, as well as how you learned almost everything you know about the world. To take just the most sweeping examples, you used inductive reasoning to learn language, organize the world into meaningful categories, and grasp the relationship between cause and effect in the physical, biological, and psychological realms.
But this intelligence comes at a cost: Our entire cognitive operating system is fundamentally, unavoidably fallible. The distinctive thing about inductive reasoning is that it generates conclusions that aren’t necessarily true. They are, instead, probabilistically true — which means they are possibly false. Because we reason inductively, we will sometimes get things wrong... And here we arrive at the paradox of error: If we want to prevent it, we must understand that it is an inevitable part of us, an intrinsic side effect of a fundamentally sound system. Put differently, understanding the origins of our mistakes is the only way we can learn to deal with them, as both a practical and emotional matter... Recognizing that error is an inevitable part of our lives frees us from despising ourselves — and forbids us from looking down on others — for getting things wrong. Once we recognize that we do not err out of laziness, stupidity, or evil intent, we can liberate ourselves from the impossible burden of trying to be permanently right. We can take seriously the proposition that we could be in error, without deeming ourselves idiotic or unworthy. We can respond to the mistakes (or putative mistakes) of those around us with empathy and generosity. We can demand that our business and political leaders acknowledge and redress their errors rather than ignoring or denying them. In short, a better relationship with wrongness can lead to better relationships in general — whether between family members, colleagues, neighbors, or nations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migraine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_locust Korstörne
http://www.nice.fr/Culture/Musees-et-expositions/Musee-d-Art-Naif
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/10154775.stm Creativity is akin to insanity, say scientists who have been studying how the mind works. Brain scans reveal striking similarities in the thought pathways of highly creative people and those with schizophrenia. Both groups lack important receptors used to filter and direct thought.
http://folk.uio.no/geirthe/Zapffe.html Zapffe's main argument and world-view was, roughly, this: Like all living species, humans are endowed with a certain number of physiological and social needs; the need for food, rest, security and so on. These needs are quite easily satisfied. However, we humans have an additional need, lacking in all other species, for an overarching meaning of life. This need, according to Zapffe, can never be satisfied unless we deceive ourselves. We can thus either delude ourselves into belief in a false meaning of life, or we can remain honest and realise that life is meaningless... His great survey of tragedy in literature, politics and the arts indicated that all human endeavour was ultimately futile... his view on the human destiny was simply that we ought to stop procreation immediately.
http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Evil-Norwegian-Literature/dp/1564785718 Despite the overuse of the word in movies, political speeches, and news reports, “evil” is generally seen as either flagrant rhetoric or else an outdated concept: a medieval holdover with no bearing on our complex everyday reality. In A Philosophy of Evil, however, acclaimed writer/philosopher Lars Svendsen argues that evil remains a concrete moral problem: that we’re all its victims, and all guilty of committing evil acts. “It’s normal to be evil,” he writes—the problem is, we’ve lost the vocabulary to talk about it. Taking up this problem—how do we speak about evil?—A Philosophy of Evil treats evil as an ordinary aspect of contemporary life, with implications that are moral, practical, and above all, political. Because, as Svendsen says, “Evil should neither be justified nor explained away—evil must be fought.” 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html?pagewanted=all When the target of the action was itself a good guy, babies preferred the puppet who was nice to it. This alone wasn’t very surprising, given that the other studies found an overall preference among babies for those who act nicely. What was more interesting was what happened when they watched the bad guy being rewarded or punished. Here they chose the punisher. Despite their overall preference for good actors over bad, then, babies are drawn to bad actors when those actors are punishing bad behavior.
http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrogardisme

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,695301,00.html But that alone would not suffice to divide the roles so neatly into good and evil. Most climate researchers were somewhere between the two extremes. They often had difficulty drawing clear conclusions from their findings. After all, scientific facts are often ambiguous... Weingart notes that public debate is mostly "only superficially about enlightenment." Rather, it is more about "deciding on and resolving conflicts through general social agreement." That's why it helps to present unambiguous findings... Scientific philosopher Silvio Funtovicz foresaw this dilemma as early as 1990. He described climate research as a "postnormal science." On account of its high complexity, he said it was subject to great uncertainty while, at the same time, harboring huge risks.
http://chronicle.com/article/Soul-Talk/65278/

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Pleasures-of-Imagination/65678 Our main leisure activity is, by a long shot, participating in experiences that we know are not real. When we are free to do whatever we want, we retreat to the imagination—to worlds created by others, as with books, movies, video games, and television..., or to worlds we ourselves create, as when daydreaming and fantasizing.