Speedlinking 9/12/06

I found this at Truthdig last night. Sums it up for a lot of people. The best political cartoons make valid points and often aren't funny. This one fits that definition. The loss of American optimism is not funny.

On that somber note, let's wade into the post-9/11 anniversary world and see what there is to find.

~ Despite the recent find of new evidence for dark matter, "ether theory" is a growing challenge to the dark matter version of the universe. Everything that is old is new again. The National Geographic article contains a cool computer simulation of dark matter.

~ If you download Google Earth (which is very cool, by the way), you can follow Jane Goodall Institute scientist/blogger Emily Wroblewski in her adventures in and around Tanzania's Gombe National Park. (Found at Sierra Club online.)

~ For those of you interested in television on the web, there is now a blog to keep you up to date. Steve Bryant blogs at Reel Pop. On that same line of thought, Al at In Pursuit of Mysteries blogged about TV on your PC last night.

~ Speaking of TV, the fact that Katie Couric's new CBS newscast jumped to the number one spot can only mean that style has replaced substance in TV news. I watched a little bit of her coverage of the 9/11 stuff last night. She carries the journalistic weight of Leeza Gibbons or Mary Hart, which is to say, nada, zilch, none.

~ Tom at Blogmandu has a roundup of the 9/11 posts in the integral-Buddhist blogosphere, so I won't repeat his work.

~ I do want to mention, however, a great Rolling Stone article on Bush's "phony" war on terror. I sometimes review news articles for an online organization that seeks to look at whether or not our news sources are reliable, using a series of objectives standards (number of named sources, lack of "unnnamed" sources, getting the facts right, and so on), and Rolling Stone consitently does well. Use that for whatever it's worth.

~ Moving on, Deepak Chopra takes a break from his political posting to look at the arising of desire within a Vedanta framework. This is more his thing than the political stuff, but the political stuff gets him listed on Huffington Post, which is good for his Intent Blog.

~ Matthew Dallman posts on John O'Sullvan's piece in the National Review. His post takes a tangent into parenting, but he eventually quotes O'Sullivan, who makes some good sense, except when he says this:

And if dissent can be patriotic, it is not invariably so. After all, treason is the highest form of dissent. When “critics of the war” describe the terrorists as the equivalent of Minutemen in the Revolutionary War, or argue that the abuses at Abu Graib make Bush and Rumsfeld the equivalent of Saddam Hussein, they are crossing the boundary that separates even very strong dissent from a diseased partisanship that would prefer America to be defeated by terrorists rather than prevail under the wrong party. That partisanship is hardly distinguishable from hatred of country and gradually mutates into it.

The inability to grasp that some (not all) of the "terrorists" in Iraq are actually patriotic Iraqis who want an invading nation off of their homeland is laughable. The military leadership calls them insurgents for a reason, while the Bushites still want to see them all as al-Qaeda so as to justify the war. Being able to see this clear truth does not make me someone who hates America -- it makes me someone who fears the agenda of the current administration.

Further, hating the willingness Bush and Rumsfeld exhibit to torture al-Qaeda suspects does not make me someone who hates America. It does, however, make me someone who believes so strongly that America is a nation of integrity that the abuses at Abu Graib and at Gitmo sicken me. These are not isolated events -- they are SOP.

Wanting to see Bush out of power does not mean I want to see the "terrorists" win. It does mean, however, that I would feel safer with a smarter man running the country, and with less "cowboy" mentality in the administration of the most powerful country on the planet.

It is continually alarming that the right's pundits will twist valid criticism of the Bush adminstration policies as "America hating." I suspect that most conservative Americans don't share that view (except for fans of Fox News). O'Sullivan makes many good points about liberal flaws in thinking, but he, like so many others on the right, generalize the warped thinking of the few into the misguided beliefs of the many. That, itself, is flawed thinking. Even the attempts at finding a middle ground get lost in partisanship.

~ Shifting gears, Steve Pavlina posts on Your True Identity: Ego or Awareness. Another interesting offering from this fine blog.

~ Ryan Oelke at Anxious Living has a good post on Existential Congruency and Social Anxiety that is worth taking a look at. I plan to comment on his thoughts when I get a minute.

~ Finally, Ken Wilber's blog has reposted his 2003 piece on the Iraq War. In it, he makes some good points and some messy generalizations. He also says SDi is merely a "values line," while also using its terminology to make his points (you can see why he had to create his own color scheme in reading this article).

And that's all I have the energy for this morning.

Tags: Ken Wilber, Iraq War, SDi, social anxiety, Existential Congruency, ego, awareness, John O'Sullvan, conservatives, liberals, treason, Vedanta, desire, "Bush's Phony War", Rolling Stone, 9/11, Katie Couric, TV on the PC, Google Earth, ether theory, dark matter