Sunday, August 13, 2006

Speedlinking 8/13/06

Happy Sunday morning to you all.

My big news this morning is that Elegant Thorn Review now has a home on the web. I went for functionality more than design simply so that the site could handle longer lines and larger photo images. The submissions guidelines are up, so please send me some work. I've only received two submissions so far. I'd like to have a couple of weeks worth of material (posting every few days) before I start adding content. Please forward the link to any poets and photographers you know.

Okay, then, on with what you came here for:

~ Nacho at WoodMoor Village Zendo has posted a great Jane Hirshfield poem.

~ Vince at Numinous Nonsense posts part of an interview with Ray Kurzweil, perhaps the most optimistic man in the world, on how nanotechnonolgy will solve the fossil fuel issue in ten years or so. I know there are a lot of people who groove with his Coming Singularity concept, but I'm not one of them. Ray is fun to listen to, though.

~ CJ Smith of Indistinctunion responds to Vince's post with some Spiral Dynamics contextualization. It seems as though CJ buys into the rapid technological advancement that Kurzweil is selling.

~ Tuff Ghost at vomiting confetti links to an article he likes that claims liberal fears of an American theocracy are just another in a long line of such fears, and that the evidence doesn't support the claims. It's a well-argued article by Ross Douthat, of the Atlantic Monthly, but I'm not quite buying all of it.

~
How to Save the World offers its top stories for the week, including a "great compendium of online articles about philosophy, the mind, phenomenology, consciousness, and all that stuff."

~ meleephd at clear mind has posted a good article on Global Buddhism.

~ Dave at Via Negativa has updated his links -- it's a good collection worth spending some time with.

~ Tom at Thoughts Chase Thoughts responds to Colmar's post from yesterday.

~ Speaking of Colmar, this morning he offers an article from the Wall Street Journal claiming that the British would not have been able to stop last week's terrorist plot if they had the ACLU and the New York Times to deal with. Nice try, but it's a load of crap. Glenn Greenwald has already exposed the falsehoods from that article and another one in the Washington Post. The point is that the US administration felt it needed to break the law to keep an eye on possible terrorists, but the Brits -- with a far more expansive law -- did it legally. I'm not sure I'd want the British law here, but the point is that they didn't feel the need to go to extraordinary means.

~ P2P Foundation offers up a review of eGaia, Growing a peaceful, sustainable Earth through communications, by Gary Alexander, which seems as though it might be an interesting book.

~ Shakespeare's Sister's somewaterytart deconstructs the newest Justin Timberlake (hit?) song. I'm not sure why, but she did, and it was funny in a damn-I-actually-live-in-this-country kind of way. The author's note rocks:
Author's note: For research purposes, I chose to perform this task while listening to free JT downloads on myspace.com and dancing in my computer chair. In the spirit of full journalistic disclosure I feel compelled to report that I enjoyed this very much. Several times I sang along, and on three seperate instances, my boobs jiggled from the effort of sit-dancing. Two of these jiggles will be used as tax write-offs, and the third will be absorbed by my Yearly Low-Brow Enjoyment Allowance.

Okay, that's enough fun for one morning.


No comments: