Friday, January 19, 2007
---U.N. Buys Nukes for NK, Chinese ASAT, The Surge?, Spanish Flu, Korolev 100th, Huygens 2nd, Independent News from Iraq
FOXNews.com- U.S. State Department Reveals North Korea’s Misuse of U.N.
Development Program Funds and Operations
Using my natural "genius for oversimplification", I'm going to summarize this revelation. NK leader Kim Jong Il has diverted tens of millions of dollars of U.N. development aid money to whatever purpose he desired, without the slightest effort at accountability by---and in fact, with the obvious complicity and approval of the UNDP, since 1999.
Now that the U.N. has diverted Iraq's aid money into the personal bank accounts of Kofi Annan and his family, sent "peacekeepers" to molest children in the Sudan, aided Hezbollah in its proclaimed goal of the genocidal extermination of Israel and the Jewish people, and---as we now learn---has diverted still more "aid" money---some of it undoubtedly supplied by helpless U.S. taxpayers--- to support NK's fledgling nuclear weapons program, can there be any question that the United Nations has outlived its usefulness?
China Criticized for Anti-Satellite Missile Test - washingtonpost.com [found on http://www.spacetoday.net/]
The Chinese have destroyed one of their old weather satellites with a ground-based missile, leaving a large cloud of dangerous debris in orbit, and insuring further military escalation in low-Earth orbit.
The response of the U.S. National Security Council:
"The U.S. believes China's development and testing of such weapons is inconsistent with the spirit of cooperation that both countries aspire to in the civil space area"That's telling them...
My Way News [AP] - Casey: 'Surge' Could Go Home by Summer
I think that I'm reasonably well-read---for an inveterate civilian---in military history, technology, and theory, with a history of simulation gaming, but this one has me stumped. Somebody help me out here---what's a “surge”?
My Way News [AP]- 1918 Killer Flu Tested on Monkeys
In 1918, following the unprecedented international scope of WWI, the “Spanish Flu” rampaged around the world, killing an estimated 50 million people, many of the young and apparently
healthy. A sobering experimental result---with samples reverse-genetically extracted from period tissue samples on (only) seven macaque monkeys--- suggests that this feature of the 1918 pandemic influenza resulted from extreme overstimulation of otherwise healthy immune systems. While the study might conceivably lead to better treatment in a future outbreak, it raises the possibility of a pandemic disease that preferentially kills the healthiest among the
population---which isn't very encouraging.
SPACE.com -- Russia Celebrates 100th Anniversary of Space Legend’s Birth
January12, 2007 would have been the 100th birthday of Sergei Korolyov (often phonetically mis-Anglicized to "Korolev"). He was the central figure in the meteoric rise of the Soviet space program, but died in 1966 as the Soviet preparations for a Lunar expedition reached a critical phase. One account is that he died in surgery when his medical team couldn't get an oxygen mask to fit properly because his jaw had been broken by Stalin's interrogators while he was imprisoned in a Siberian gulag. After his death, the Soviet Lunar effort pretty much fell apart, although it isn't clear that the N1---with at least 30 first-stage engines---would have ever worked properly (Spaceflight:The Soviet Race to the Moon ).
The Americans, for their part, have spent the last thirty years snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, failing to ever produce any worthwhile or significant manned spaceflight developments since the lunar missions ended, or to capitalize on the developments of the "space race" in any useful way.
ESA - Space Science - Huygens’s second landing anniversary – the surprises continue
A few of the American unmanned missions, on the other hand, have at least been interesting and/or entertaining. In the two years since ESA's Huygens probe parachuted into the atmosphere of Titan, the data have been assembled into a clearer picture of a really bizarre place. After taking all those smoggy-edged photos and evaluating the wind profiles in the atmosphere, Huygens splatted into a patch of rounded ice “gravel”, apparently an outflow channel of a body of liquid methane-ethane. Other data suggest that Titan is currently active [geo-?]logically, which is surprising in a moon of the outer Solar system.
Michelle Malkin: Back from Baghdad
Malkin has been touring Iraq with the U.S. military, and has posted her analysis.
Michael Yon: Walking the Line 2007: Part 3 of 3.
Another independent perspective on Iraq, from Michael Yon in Anbar Province.
Labels: News Commentary
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