blog.spathis.com

Brian Shul, a former Air Force Pilot, reminisces about flying an SR-71 over Libya over at Maggies Farm. Pretty amazing…

The inventiveness of the ancient world never ceases to amaze me. The Antikythera Mechanism was found aboard some ancient roman shipwreck and has recently been meticulously studied. Surprise, the NY Times has a great article about findings so far. Pretty amazing what those ancient Greeks knew & built.

This is incredibly heart-wrenching (http://www.zombietime.com/wtc_9-13-2001/) .

Lets not forget what happened on 9/11/2001 and the souls we lost.

A fascinating little piece by Victor David Hanson, classicist and author of such works as Ripples of the Battle and A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War, over at the National Review. Hanson’s basic thesis is that Iran and Iran’s president (& indeed many in the third world) fundamentally miscalculate the ability of the west (& the US in particular) to rise and meet the challenge posed by those who dare to cross the line. Hanson writes:

Ever since September 11, the subtext of this war could be summed up as something like, “Suburban Jason, with his iPod, godlessness, and earring, loves to live too much to die, while Ali, raised as the 11th son of an impoverished but devout street-sweeper in Damascus, loves death too much to live.” The Iranians, like bin Laden, promulgate this mythical antithesis, which, like all caricatures, has elements of truth in it. But what the Iranians, like the al Qaedists, do not fully fathom, is that Jason, upon concluding that he would lose not only his iPod and earring, but his entire family and suburb as well, is capable of conjuring up things far more frightening than anything in the 8th-century brain of Mr. Ahmadinejad. Unfortunately, the barbarity of the nightmares at Antietam, Verdun, Dresden, and Hiroshima prove that well enough.

I simply love that paragraph. Read it again and digest what it says. Look at history, during the last century far too many barbaric brutal dictators made the same mistake and miscalculated the ability of the west to meet the challenge. For all our problems I don’t believe the west has anything to fear, we are inevitably sliding into a world where many more billions are going to be tormented by trying to decide which iPod to buy. And if you ask me that is far better than any alternative offered by any petty third world dictator.

Powered by Qumana

Update: Fascinating post from John McCarthy on Edward Teller and Heisenberg