Here’s what’s caught my eye this morning:
- In response to the apparent false alarm at the Russell Senate Office Building, Armchair Generalist notes that in chemical agent sensors you can choose any two of the following: inexpensive, sensitive, no false positives.
- Here’s an interesting site I found not long ago: Iraq Pipeline Watch has a timeline for terrrorist attacks on the Iraqi oil pipelines.
- With the protests going on in the Middle East over cartoons published in a Danish newspaper, Danish companies have been somewhat in the news. I must be the last to know about this but LEGO’s Mindstorm product has spawned quite a hacker community. Will LEGO be the company that brings robotics into the average home?
- Glen Wishard at Canis Iratus has a very intriguing post in which he considers the possible future paths for Islam in analogy to the Protestant Reformation.
- Noah Millman correctly notes the problems with making a universal law against blasphemy. It’s either not universal, not a law, or doesn’t proscribe blasphemy.
- As I was reading Noah’s post I was reminded of an essay I read almost 50 years ago by the English writer, Hilaire Belloc. In the essay Belloc writes of Islam as a Christian heresy (which isn’t quite true). Ah, yes, here it is. Belloc’s perspectives on the history and development of Islam are interesting, particularly his implication of the relationship between the wealth of the early Caliphate and the rapid spread of Islam. Is there some symmetry with today’s situation? You also may find this snippet interesting:
Cultures spring from religions; ultimately the vital force which maintains any culture is its philosophy, its attitude toward the universe; the decay of a religion involves the decay of the culture corresponding to it—we see that most clearly in the breakdown of Christendom today.
The bad work begun at the Reformation is bearing its final fruit in the dissolution of our ancestral doctrines—the very structure of our society is dissolving. In the place of the old Christian enthusiasms of Europe there came, for a time, the enthusiasm for nationality, the religion of patriotism. But self-worship is not enough, and the forces which are making for the destruction of our culture, notably the Jewish Communist propaganda from Moscow [ed. I don’t endorse Belloc’s anti-Semitism] , have a likelier future before them than our old-fashioned patriotism.
In Islam there has been no such dissolution of ancestral doctrine—or, at any rate, nothing corresponding to the universal break-up of religion in Europe. The whole spiritual strength of Islam is still present in the masses of Syria and Anatolia, of the East Asian mountains, of Arabia, Egypt and North Africa.
The final fruit of this tenacity, the second period of Islamic power, may be delayed: but I doubt whether it can be permanently postponed.
- Iowahawk has roused himself from a long winter’s nap to report “Seething Midwest Explodes Over Lombardi Cartoonsâ€.
That’s the lot.
