Weird

How Howard Dean Got His Start?

And now for something completely different: a four-year-old boy who kills chickens by screaming:

A villager was quoted as saying the little boy bent over the henhouse window, screaming for a long time, after being scared by the dog.

“One neighbour told police that he had heard the boy’s crying that afternoon and another villager confirmed the boy screaming by the henhouse window,” the newspaper said.

A court ruled the boy’s screaming was “the only unexpected abnormal sound” and that 443 chickens trampled each other to death in fear.

Space

A Head Scratcher

Here’s a piece by a Greg Autrey in the Baltimore Sun on space policy. It’s kind of a mess:

Why should we care about missiles threatening low Earth orbit? When the Chinese get on with reabsorbing Taiwan – the most likely trigger for a U.S.-China confrontation – U.S. drivers may find that the navigation systems in their SUVs (not to mention their ambulances) aren’t working. Low-flying U.S. military spy satellites are the first target of the new weapon, but the slightly higher GPS (global positioning system) satellites that guide our weapons systems are also attractive to Chinese war planners.

Or, what about when the censorship-savvy Chinese government decides it has had enough of Howard Stern corrupting the youth and takes out Sirius satellite radio?

GPS isn’t “slightly higher.” It’s thousands of miles higher. GEO, where satellite radio satellites reside is thousand of miles higher than that.

But the real problem is that the whole thing is incoherent. What does the “sands of the moon” have to do with ASATs? Just what is it that he’s recommending, policy-wise? More money for NASA? More encouragement of private enterprise? How?

You’d think that with all the knowledge out here on the web, newspapers could find better commentators on space than “a lecturer on business strategy and entrepreneurship.”

Political Commentary

State Of The Union

Well, when the evil Republicans controlled the Hill, it was horrible, but now that the Dems have taken over Congress, everything is wonderful, as commenters noted, though nothing else has changed, and despite the fascist bible-thumper still in the White House.

Here’s the speech I’d like to hear tonight, but I’m sure I won’t. Eli Lake has some further thoughts on what the president should say, and the Dems, who want to eat their cake and have it, too:

Now there are good reasons as to why the Democrats are so incoherent about the war. Their foreign policy masks an uneasy alliance between the party’s anti-war left that resents and seeks to restrain American power, and Bush I “realists” who seek to define and wield the nation’s power as ruthlessly as possible. Call it the McGovern-Scowcroft pact. It’s based on disagreement about big questions on American hegemony and agreement on smaller ones, such as the United Nations, Israel, and the venality of neoconservatives.

Hence Secretary of State Baker today is more influential among congressional Democrats than Secretary of State Albright. The George W. Bush presidency is the only thing that can bring these two tribes together. Anti-war Democrats opposed what they saw as a preemptive war for oil, whereas the realist critics of the war opposed it because they couldn’t understand what Iraqi freedom had to do with our national interest. A war for oil is just the sort of thing realists say nations ought to be fighting.

I wish we had better choices.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!