Morning has broken …
At least the eclipse was nice.
Morning has broken and we are not at war! The Navy successfuly shot down a malfunctioning spy satellite that could have posed a threat to terrestrial (read: living) interests and, astonishingly to the blame-America-first, kill-all-the-humans-but-leave-the-stars-alone crowd, the End of Days is not obviously at hand.
See Jeffrey Lewis’s, Leader of the Doomsday Pack, impassioned plea from yesterday (DON’T FREAKING DO IT!) as an appetizer, then peruse the hand-wringers’ laments: see, for example, “Shooting down satellite raises concerns about military space race” Detroit Free Press. Of course, the Chinese don’t like it, and we wouldn’t want anyone to be mad at us. The Times Online reported this juicy tidbit:
Confirmation that the Pentagon destroyed the spacecraft this morning triggered a fresh diplomatic row with Russia and China.
A Chinese state newspaper, the People’s Daily, criticised Washington for hypocrisy for rejecting a treaty to ban weapons in space proposed by Russia and China and then firing a missile at the spy satellite. Washington claims it had rejected the proposed treaty as unworkable, and said it instead favoured confidence-building efforts.
Let me see if I have this right. America demonstrates hypocrisy after rejecting a proposed ban on space weapons and then using a space weapon, but China is not hypocritical because it proposed and affirmed a ban on space weapons … and then used a space weapon.
Kudos to The Baltimore Sun, “Take that, rogue satellite. China, you watching?”