Good News For Planet Hunters

Astronomers caught a brief glimpse of a rocky world of about seven times the Earth's mass orbiting a red star about 21,000 light years from here. Its discovery (made because of an extraordinary coincidence) suggests that smaller, rocky worlds may be more common than giant Jupiter-like planets, giving us better odds of someday spying a planet similar to our own. (LINK)

It's this kind of news that keeps me going after I read things like Jacob Weisberg's column on NSA spying. (LINK). In it, he recognizes that the claims of executive power the Bush administration is making lay the groundwork for dictatorship--albiet a dictatorship that is obliged to face elections occasionally.

Weisberg doesn't suggest this will lead to such things as the jailing of political opponents, and neither do I. Our reasons differ though. Weisberg thinks Congress would stand up to the President if he went that far. I don't. The administration has been going too far for years with scarcely a peep from Congress. The upcoming hearings on the NSA scandal will probably be a joke. No, I think the Bush administration, and its ideological allies, want to preserve the political opposition for the same reason that The Party in Orwell's 1984 preserved Goldsteinism--so that they can have something to drag out and humiliate whenever they need a propaganda boost. Having perfected their engines of slander and insinuation, the Rovists no longer need to do anything so crude as imprison a wayward writer or member of congress. They want instead to make each election a ritual of humiliation, where their candidate (righteous, patriotic, strong, religious, a Reformer with Results) will crush yet another weak, flip-flopping, bible-hating, gay-loving, Osama-backing opponent.

If the Rovists have their way, elections will be to the United States what trials were to the Soviet Union. The outcome will be decided in advance, but everyone loves a show.

It's a good thing scientists are finding other rocky worlds. We just might need to move to one of them.