Rumsfeld has resigned, John Bolton will not be confirmed to the U.N., someone who actually cares about the environment (Barbara Boxer) will be chairing the Senate committee on the environment, rather than someone who has the worst rating from the League of Conservation Voters (James Inhofe). All of a sudden, the real news might be bearable to watch again after years of only being able to stomach the fake news (The Daily Show, still the source I trust the most).
Archive for November, 2006
The News is Bearable Again
Friday, November 10th, 2006Mars at Very High Resolution
Thursday, November 9th, 2006The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is now taking the highest resolution images ever of the surface of Mars (from orbit, not counting, obviously, the rover images). The HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera, built here in Boulder by Ball Aerospace, can resolve features about half a meter across. In the image below, spanning a region about 250 meters across, gullies on a crater wall are indicators of liquid water flowing across the surface relatively recently. There are a still many questions about the amount of water on Mars and the length of time it may have been stable as a liquid on the surface. Some scientists suggest that Mars may have only been wet for brief intermittent periods due to bursts of warming caused by impacts. Others point to evidence for a wet Mars as really indicating a salty, damp Mars rather than one with large bodies of standing or flowing water for long periods of time that would be favorable for life. NASA’s vigorous Mars exploration program, with a future rover (the Mars Science Laboratory) slated for launch in 2009 (but don’t be surprised if that slips a year), is providing a wealth of data that should enable scientists to determine the history of water on the red planet and whether it ever harbored life.
Image credit: NASA/JPL/Univ. of Arizona
Full resolution image here.
Feeling Blue - In a Good Way
Thursday, November 9th, 2006Hoping for the best, prepared for the worst, it is great to actually feel good about the outcome of an election for a change. It looks like the Democrats will pick up 29 seats in the House, giving them roughly the same majority that the Republicans held in the previous congress, and it looks like the Dems are headed for a 51-49 advantage in the Senate. The worst news locally was the defeat, which can only be described as mean-spirited, of Colorado Referendum I that would have granted same-gender couples most of the same legal and financial rights of married couples, while explicitly stating that such “domestic partnerships” should not be considered a “marriage”. This is a case of the majority denying rights to a minority apparently because they simply don’t want the minority to have those rights (property inheritance, joint child custody, visitation) even though it has no bearing on the rights or quality of life of the majority or even the social definition of “marriage”. It mystifies me.
Marie Antoinette
Tuesday, November 7th, 2006There are two movies about queens in theaters now: The Queen and Marie Antoinette. Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth 2 is next on my list, but I’m guessing that Stephen Frears’ movie will show her to be as painfully out of touch with her country as Marie Antoinette was with hers. In Sofia Coppola’s movie, adapted from the book Marie Antoinette: The Journey, by Antonia Fraser, Kirsten Dunst plays the doomed Queen of France, ensconced in the secluded world of Versailles while tales of her excesses fuel the anger of the French people. Coppola uses modern music to set the mood in Versailles and drive home the point that Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI were little more than children, more interested in parties than governance. She even throws in a pair of sneakers in one shot to let us know that she’s being deliberately anachronistic. One can’t help feeling sorry for the goofy monarchs as they while away the time in the peaceful (but gossipy and at times, nasty) gardens of Versailles. By the second half of the movie I found myself wanting to grab each of them and shake them vigorously and yell at them to do something.
Marie Antoinette, for her part, was raised and trained to bear an heir to the throne, but nothing else. Louis is portrayed by Jason Schwartzman as a king hopelessly out of his depth who would rather be left alone to play with his locks and keys, and go hunting on the royal grounds. Neither has been prepared to actually run a country, or even to be a decent figurehead to the people. They are more concerned with keeping up the social graces amongst the nobility at court. When the mobs finally gather outside the palace at Versailles, Marie Antoinette does the only thing she knows how: curtsy to the crowd. The movie is beautiful to look at, but suffers from a too-accurate portrayal of life at Versailles: filled with empty conversations, rituals, and passing the time before the inevitable revolution.
Two More Years
Saturday, November 4th, 2006I couldn’t decide whether to make this about the two years remaining in the Bush presidency or the recent work on the two year extension to the Cassini mission at Saturn. With the elections around the corner, I’ll bite the bullet and face the unpleasant one first. Polls suggest that the Democrats are likely to have the majority in the House of Representatives. The Senate may be too close to call. I’m guessing those close races will end up leaning back towards the incumbents, favoring the Republicans and leaving them in the majority in the Senate. I would much rather see a Democratic majority in the Senate than in the House, but having one may at least help limit the damage for the next two years. The problem I see is that we are already in it (pick your it: national bankruptcy, poverty, Iraq, environmental collapse, lost international standing) so deep, that it’s going to take far more than two years to dig out. Having one house of congress is only going to slow the negative derivative of our national trajectory. Come 2008, what will the voters make of the mess we’re in then?
Bush on the Campaign Trail
Wednesday, November 1st, 2006Direct quote from the occupant of the White House this week: “The Democrats’ approach in Iraq comes down to this: terrorists win and America loses.” Ignoring for a moment how outrageous this is as a political ploy for the President of the United States, let’s take a quick look at the veracity of the statement on its face. The New York Times reported on September 24 on the National Intelligence Estimate completed last April by the United States’ own spy agencies which found that “the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.” It seems like Bush’s policies, not Democrats’, are making terrorists the winners. Thanks to his ill-advised invasion of Iraq, there is a brand new recruiting tool for fundamentalist anti-Americanism.