The Captain's adventures are not limited to Japan. Wherever there's news - and booze - there will be the Captain.

This week he journeys to the tiny Pacific island nation of Tuvalu - said by scientists to be a prime candidate for obliteration due to sea-level rise . Over lunch, he discusses this doomsday scenario with some of the locals and uncovers a few of the subtleties of life on an island that on average is not much wider than an airport runway. Roll up your pant legs and join him before it is too late.

Many members of the city's Jewish community are now certain that God, troubled by the prospect of war in Iraq, has revealed Himself in fish form.

A sweeping new anti-terrorism bill drafted by the Justice Department would dramatically increase government electronic surveillance and data collection abilities, and impose the first-ever federal criminal penalties for using encryption in the U.S.

Development of nanotechnology must be undertaken with care to avoid accidents; once a nanotech-based manufacturing technology is created, it must be administered with even more care. Irresponsible use of nanotech could lead to black markets, unstable arms races ending in immense destruction, and possibly a release of gray goo. Deliberate misuse of the technology by inhumane governments, terrorists, criminals, and irresponsible teenagers could produce even worse problems--gray goo is a feeble weapon compared to what could be designed. It seems likely that research leading to advanced nanotechnology will have to be carefully monitored and controlled.

Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder. These parts of the world I call the Functioning Core, or Core. But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and--most important--the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap.

...

The reason I support going to war in Iraq is not simply that Saddam is a cutthroat Stalinist willing to kill anyone to stay in power, nor because that regime has clearly supported terrorist networks over the years. The real reason I support a war like this is that the resulting long-term military commitment will finally force America to deal with the entire Gap as a strategic threat environment.

"Until we stop thinking of Neandertals as a bush-league version of ourselves, thinking of them as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, we'll never dignify them in an appropriate way as an evolutionary entity in their own right, with their own evolutionary history," [Ian Tattersal] said. "Neandertals did very well for hundreds of thousands of years, and were very adaptable. They probably did the maximum that could be done with intuitive thinking. I just don't think they had the ability to think symbolically."

We have tales full of tragic knights,
who descend upon burning horses
from distant skies
like meteors at night.
We have many sleeping dinosaurs, which we have tied to rocks
in green meadows full of singing birds.
-- from In a magic land by Fadhil al-Azzawi