Linkfest

For the last couple of months, I've had considerably less time to spend online, but have been trying to maintain my blogging schedule nonetheless. I fear I may have to cut back a little. We'll see how it goes. At any rate, here are several links I put aside to blog about, but then never got around to; hence, some are a couple of months old.

-- For years, a group of Zimbabweans have claimed to be a lost tribe of Israel. Now genetic testing has verified it.

-- When you prick a continent, does it not bleed?

-- The Age of Faith. "Globally, as Jenkins sees it, the existential threat to Islam comes not from the declining number of Europeans indoctrinated in the quasi-Marxist “Imagine” creed, but from the burgeoning millions of the Third World. Whether Muslims are impressed by the secular belief system captured so succinctly in John Lennon’s song is open to debate. But the attractions of Christianity to the populations of the Third World apparently is not. Whatever the appeal of Islam in London might be, it is less so in Africa."

-- J. B. S. Haldane criticized C. S. Lewis's space trilogy (described here), and you can read Haldane's critique online. To read Lewis's clever riposte, you will, unfortunately, have to see his collection entitled On Stories.

-- Christian aid workers deported from Morocco. Apparently for being Christian.

-- In this post on David Thompson's blog is the interesting claim that the standard slur of Jews -- that they are money-grubbers, involved in the banking industry and other forms of making money from other people's money, and related nonsense -- is actually an expression of anti-capitalism. Jews are hated because they are unjustly and incorrectly perceived as the personification (or perhaps ethnification) of capitalism. I call this claim "interesting" because anti-Semitism is usually ascribed to the political right, but this would ascribe it to the political left. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about this to justify having an opinion about it.

-- From the same blog comes this essay on the elitist mindset of the academy.

-- In space news, which I have not been able to keep abreast of, the US military launched an unmanned miniature space shuttle. And Japan is planning to launch a sail-powered craft beyond orbit.