Since I’ve been effectively blog-stipated for a bit, I figured I’d dump all the weird links I’ve been reading lately.

• This Flash movie of the growth of the US is pretty cool to watch. I learned quite a few things!
• James Montgomery Boice wrote an essay called WANTED: Thinking Christians that makes some good points about the dumbing down of society due to TV:
  

  I am convinced the great problem in America today is that people are not thinking. It’s a cultural phenomenon that has spilled over into the church.
  But if churches have absorbed the entertainment mentality, if they have themselves lost the ability to think, they will offer seekers nothing more than what they have already.

• It’s rare that I run across random comments on the space program, but a recent blog entry by Asa called “Manned Mission to Mars: 10 Years Away?” has tons of links and is a great summary of recent accomplishments.
• And with recent events, I read through some thought-provoking essays. Robert Kagan wrote Power and Weakness in June, a long and rambling but somewhat pointed comparison of Europe and American roles having reversed because of the shift in power.
  

  Europe’s rejection of power politics, its devaluing of military force as a tool of international relations, have depended on the presence of American military forces on European soil. Europe’s new Kantian order could flourish only under the umbrella of American power exercised according to the rules of the old Hobbesian order. American power made it possible for Europeans to believe that power was no longer important.

• An editorial in the NY Review of Books called Anti-Europeanism in America looks at American opinions of Europe.
  

  If anti-American Europeans see “the Americans” as bullying cowboys, anti-European Americans see “the Europeans” as limp-wristed pansies. The American is a virile, heterosexual male; the European is female, impotent, or castrated. Militarily, Europeans can’t get it up. (After all, they have fewer than twenty “heavy lift” transport planes, compared with the United States’ more than two hundred.)

• A paper by the American Enterprise Institute entitled Myth IV: America Couldn’t Care Less What the Rest of the World Thinks does a fairly decent job of discussing the fact that Britain still holds sway over American policy and that America does care about their opinion, at least.

UPDATE: The Thinking Christians URL moved.