Friday, September 9, 2011

1. BACK TO WORK: SORRY, I'VE BEEN UNDERGOING REPAIRS.

Here's a little of what happened while I was away.

2. FIRST AMENDMENT: TEXAS GOVERNOR CONVENES A CHRISTIAN REVIVAL.

Rick Perry led a prayer meeting of 30,000 evangelical Christians in a Houston football stadium last month, calling on Jesus to guide us out of our national travail. It was billed as non-political. I suppose that's possible; under the First Amendment God is not excluded from politics, but if Perry wants to be President he's got to be able to negotiate at every level. The big question then is, how did God respond? It didn't take long to get an answer. The crowd had scarcely left the stadium when God set Texas on fire. Its still burning. In fact, when God sent Tropical Storm Lee ashore he had it it dump record rains on the other Gulf states, while leaving Texas parched. This is not a good sign.

3. EARTHQUACKS: IT'S TIME TO STOP BEHAVING LIKE ANIMALS.

At the urging of a 5.8-magnitude earthquake centered in Northern Virginia, thousands of books in the University of Maryland Library sought a lower energy configuration, moving from the bookshelves to the floor. Meanwhile, according to the Washington Post, ABC, and NBC, high-strung inmates at the National Zoo like orangutans began to screech and scramble to higher perches "minutes before" seismographs sensed anything. Like maybe they had some special sense that humans don't? Or so the media reported. Were reporters already at the zoo waiting for a quake? Zoos are always in turmoil. Inmates chase each other, fornicate and have food fights, except the laid-back types like pandas that just sit on their ass through it all munching bamboo.

4. DEFEATING OURSELVES: NASA FACES A SHORTAGE OF TELESCOPES.

It was a famous victory. Shaken by the 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik, the US created NASA to wrest the lead in space from the Soviets. And so, 42 years ago, NASA did. The moon landing was political theater at its best. The Soviet Union is long gone; we are now at war with ourselves -- and losing. The real victories were the exploration of the solar system, and the creation of an amazing array of space technologies, ranging from communications satellites and global positioning systems, to the Hubble space telescope, which inspired a generation of the world's youth to study cosmology.

5. THE WEBB TELESCOPE: LET'S NOT LOSE THE NEXT GENERATION.

In July a House panel voted to stop building NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, the far more powerful replacement for the Hubble. Webb fell victim to budget overruns. Yesterday a report commissioned by NASA says that with 59 on board the agency faces a dire shortage of astronauts. What do astronauts do these days? Well, they train on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft to deliver supplies to the International Space Station, which we don't own. And what do we get from the ISS? The garbage and human waste accumulated since the last delivery.

Bob Park can be reached via email at whatsnew@bobpark.org
THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the University, but they should be.