As usual, Simon World is providing excellent links for news all over Asia. Two reports I’ve found over there: First, something bad is in the soil in Singapore… SINGAPORE (Reuters) – A soil-borne bacterial infection called melioidosis has killed 24 people in Singapore this year, making it more deadly than SARS (news – web sites) or bird flu, the health ministry said on Friday. The illness, also known as Whitmore’s Disease, is listed by the U.S. government as a potential biological weapon but Singapore government officials said there was no sign it had been spread intentionally. Be that as it …

I found this link on Gweilo Diaries to a piece about Dan Rather and the possible fake documents about Bush’s military service. Actually, Rather spoke of his concern that the documents might not be real, which, yes, he takes seriously. It’s a bit late now, yeah… but he is probably really concerned about it, because if they are (and it seems they probably are) then using them was a stupid mistake. Of course, he also acknowledges something very important: that people are using the question of the origin of the documents as a distraction from the real question, which is, …

Usually capitalist-blogs turn me off. All that blather about how to “succeed” and not much thought about what constitutes “success”. Well, Dave Pollard’s How to Save the World is different. I was looking for an interesting article to link to, but there were so many I decided to just link to the whole blog. Go give it a look.

The usually somewhat more acute Kimberley Swygert at Number 2 Pencil disappoints me. Her reading of Christine Anne Inauen’s FrontPage magazine article Hijacking America’s Youth is rather blithe and uncritical. Inauen bemoans the horrors of her Catholic high school education, and concludes that: Intellectual abuse is repulsive at every level, but it is particularly outrageous when ideological teachers prey upon society’s youngest and most impressionable members. These cowards hide behind the guise of one of the most respected professions while taking advantage of their authority to stifle the curiosity of those entrusted into their care. For all that liberal teachers …

Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles is happy that there are Christians out there who are doing what he’s thought they should do for ages: in Take Action: God is Not a Republican. Or a Democrat, they’r admonishing partisan use of religion to garner votes. Good for them. I think the only deity who would approve of the Republicans would be Cthulhu, and I think even Loki would be embarrassed to get caught in some partisan battle in America. The following quote from Pat Robertson, on the main page, is painfully revealing: “I think George Bush is going to win in …

There must be a lot being written about it but beyond a couple of old books I found in Dharamsala on the subject, I’ve not seen much. This article about Tariq Ramadan and his “Third Way” therefore fascinated me, and I shall have to try to dig in and get more. The whole hijab controversy in Europe strikes me as madness, and I expected more, so I am curious now. I got this link from Ritu, by the way.

HG Wells, in one of his several prefaces to the novel The War In The Air, in which he chastised people for not taking note of what he predicted would happen to warfare once war took the the skies. He wrote the following: Again I ask the reader to note the warnings I gave in that year [1921], twenty years ago. IS there anything to add to that preface now? Nothing except my epitaph. That, when the time comes, will manifestly have to be: “I told you so. You damned fools.” And thus could be something Chris someday writes linking …

Rich at Sharp Blue is a sharp fellow. So when he writes something, I check it out. He’s posted on the failure of humanism, and I think his words are deserving of attention: Traditional religion might be losing, but secular humanism is not winning. Instead, conventional religions seem to be largely losing ground to a combination of largely unthinking hedonism and a set of constantly shifting and mutating mystical or spiritual beliefs. Possibly these pseudo-worldviews are gaining ground not just against the old religons but against the scientific, rationalist worldview too. The reason for this, it seems to me, reduces …

Wired’s reporting about Virtual warfare again. How do you create an army who, worse than being pissed off racists, are so disengaged from reality that killing civilians in as easy as shooting characters on a screen? Turn killing civilians into an exercise of killing characters on a screen, of course! This is the new way soldiers will train for battle. In September, a select group of Army infantrymen, Marine corpsmen, Navy sailors, and Air Force pilots at Fort Sill will become the first military personnel to learn the art of combat and the rules of engagement from surround sound action …

It’s a bit late, but this is worth knowing about, I think. On August 25th, people of conscience in the United States will meet genocide survivors from Darfur, Sudan. Using a satellite video link from a refugee camp on the Sudanese border, Americans in a New York studio will speak live to Darfurians facing one of the worst humanitarian emergencies in the world. The webcast went out live and while it’s too late to join in now, it’s worth looking just to see what you never saw on the news.