Speedlinking 7/31/06

Happy Monday morning everyone. It's raining again here in the Sonoran Desert, which is a very strange thing. The monsoon has gone all early a.m. instead of middle p.m. Whatever. As long as it rains!

And on with the show:

~ Aaron over at Anxious Living kindly invited me to do a guest post, which is up this morning. Please stop by and have a look.

~ Tusar N Mohapatra at SELF Forum has posted a list (with links) of writers he feels have contributed to the integral movement. See this post as well.

~ Jay has posted a new podcast: The Zero Boss: Reflections of an Imperfect Father.

Join me and a bottle of Columbia Crest Shiraz as we drunk-cast the struggles involved in adapting to fatherhood as a 21-year-old college dropout, earning minimum wage in New York City while nurturing an addiction to Ayn Rand.

~ Colmar thinks ~C4Chaos accused him of attacking the left, but it was yours truly. Sorry ~C4, you get blamed for enough already without taking my heat. And no, it was actually the Keith Thompson article I was referring to, although yes, Paul Berman's article did seem to be attacking the left.

~ My RSS feed to KW's blog seems to be working again, just in time to be "gifted" with the "spontaneous creative genius that tumbles out of Becca as easily and naturally as water down a fall." Uh, yeah, okay. Whatever. Moving on. . . .

~ Katherine Turner of Dating God on Following the Yes. Check it out -- it's about work and going back to school and stuff.

~ Mike of Unknowing Mind continues the discussion of the sacredness of animals -- specifically, animal rights and human power and the limits therein.

~ I found this site dedicated to helping women around the world through Sean at Zaadz. Check it out, then check out his new pod.

~ From Think Progress, Chris Matthews gets one right for a change -- watch it here.

MATTHEWS: Two years ago, King Abdullah of Jordan warned me of what was coming in the mideast. His prediction was dead. He spoke of his fears and what the United States was doing in iraq, toppling one government, electing another, was creating what he called a shi’ia crescent, from Tehran through Baghdad to Beirut that threatened to dominate the Arab world, challenging modern Sunni governments in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and others with an axis of Shia power based in Iran.

When I look at the map today, that Shia crescent the King foretold has come to light. It is hard for us westerners to understand the internal politics of another region when we can’t predict whether the Democrats will take congress from the Republicans three months from now, how could we see the Shi’ia grabbing the high ground from the Sunni in the mideast three years ago? That’s what happened. We converted Iraq from a country which has fought revolutionary Iran for eight years to a bloody stand still to a Shia dominated ally of Iran and created a boulevard of common religion and common regional politics.

Did you hear the new Iraqi leader take sides with Hezbollah in a struggle with Israel? This is the emerging threat, not just to the moderate Sunni countries including Egypt and Jordan who formed and honored treaties to Israel and us. Our brave soldiers have fought, died and been dismembered in Iraq only to connect the disparate pieces of Shi’ia radicalism into a frankenstein monster that has come to life right there on our TV screens and worse yet in the vicarious mideast where young arabs found a hero named Hezbollah.

~ David Brin on "the coming singularity," as posted on KurzweilAI.net.

~ Kevin Kelly thinks civilizations are creatures. Interesting article.

Okay, then, that'll do it for this morning. Have a great day.


Technorati Tags: Kevin Kelly, The Technium, David Brin, Singularity, Chris Matthews, Shia Crescent, Unknowing Mind, Dating God, Colmar, Jay Andrew Allen, SELF Forum, Anxious Living