Two totally unrelated links:

1. Check out Matchbook Romance at purevolume.com. Their song "Monsters" is pretty sweet and I think I like the other ones too. Plus they're free and legal!

2. An interesting piece on our broken world (from CAEI):

... civic trust depends on a personal integrity that goes mostly unremunerated and on collective seedings and waterings (as well as weedings) of that integrity’s rich civic soil. Individuals have to be willing to extend themselves to strangers who embody the republic, not in order to meet contractual obligations or avoid punishment but in self-forgetful affirmations of the whole.