Good News – Bad News
The good news is that the GOCE satellite likely disintegrated in atmosphere. They don’t actually know where the debris landed but are assuming that anything that didn’t vaporize fell into the ocean.
It would be nice if we had a reliable vehicle, a sort of low orbit trash truck that could swoop up and pick up dead satellites and bring them back to earth, or refuel them so they could continue to do what they were doing. The way we have been doing it is extremely wasteful.
Juan Cole has a piece on the Iran nuclear talks: France Crashes the Geneva Party, Scuttles Iran Deal.
Of course everyone will know that the announcement of a big Saudi purchase of French military hardware has nothing to do with what France did. The purchase was merely an endorsement of the quality of French equipment.
Israel didn’t know what was in the agreement, but Netanyahu has been screaming that it was a terrible deal. That’s because he expects Iran will do exactly what Israel did – lie to an American President [Kennedy] and then launch an all-out program to build nuclear weapons. He can’t accept that everyone isn’t as dishonest as Israel.
The Saudis don’t want the challenge of Iranian competition in the oil market that would hurt the Saudi ability to manipulate the price of oil, and they resent the fact that this US government isn’t doing what it is told to do by the Saudis.
The talks had been among the US, EU, and Iran. The French will hear from the EU about what they did.
November 10, 2013 Comments Off on Good News – Bad News
