Sherry Chandler

Here’s the most disheartening thing I’ve read in a while: Flexing Muscle, China Destroys Satellite in Test:

China successfully carried out its first test of an antisatellite weapon last week, signaling its resolve to play a major role in military space activities and bringing expressions of concern from Washington and other capitals, the Bush administration said yesterday.

Only two nations — the Soviet Union and the United States — have previously destroyed spacecraft in antisatellite tests, most recently the United States in the mid-1980s.

Arms control experts called the test, in which the weapon destroyed an aging Chinese weather satellite, a troubling development that could foreshadow an antisatellite arms race.

… “This is the first real escalation in the weaponization of space that we’ve seen in 20 years,” said Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks rocket launchings and space activity. “It ends a long period of restraint.”

White House officials said the United States and other nations, which they did not identify, had “expressed our concern regarding this action to the Chinese.” Despite its protest, the Bush administration has long resisted a global treaty banning such tests because it says it needs freedom of action in space.

That last sentence speaks volumes. Star Wars, indeed.

Update: Here’s a little different take on this event at TPM Muckraker.

On a corollary note, the local group of United for Peace and Justice is taking buses to Washington on January 27 for an antiwar march. More information at the link.

Click through to see these impressive driftwood horses by British sculptor Heather Jansch at rense.com.

I found the link at Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Blogosphere where we are told that Heather got the idea of making horses of driftwood thus:

One day while I was out, my son couldn’t find any kindling wood to light the wood-burner and had chopped up a piece of ivy that had grown round a fencing stake. He’d left behind a short section that I immediately saw as a horse’s torso of the right size to fit straight into the coper wire piece I was working on. The next question was where could I find more or similar shapes, and the answer was of course driftwood.

The British, I suppose, are nearly as horse-obsessed as we Kentuckians. But a horse is an elegant beast and so are these sculptures elegant.