Sailing past the Saturnine moon Dione, NASA's Cassini spacecraft assumed a course that framed the frozen demiworld clinically, before rings so foreshortened as to be nearly collapsed into an imperceptible plane. But we still gape — awe and understatement are not mutually exclusive.
Agence France-Presse identifies the woman in the photograph above as a Marsh Arab, one from the tribes inhabiting river wetlands between the Tigris and Euphrates — a home scoured by the damming and draining order of Saddam Hussein, reclaimed today through slow restoration with the encouragement and resources of Americans and their allies.
She is an emblem of a country reborn. Observers report that, following a second nationwide democratic procession, Iraqis have directly ratified their first constitution drafted by an elected body. Parliamentary balloting will follow in December, incontestably delivering the Republic of Iraq into the hands of free men. This is a time to celebrate, to congratulate; to give thanks for the providential beneficence responsible for the astonishing courage of men and women who daily resist fear and doubt.
As faith insured this referendum, faith will sustain democratic polity in Iraq and its appeal to the greater Near East. The day has been won, a foundation for a liberal revolution laid. But the enemy — weakened, exposed — remains. Close in, that enemy is the messianic brand of fascism still surrounding Iraq. Beyond, tyranny itself. Free peoples have much work, much duty, entrusted them. Let the Fifteenth of October be a dividend, a vindication and a reminder that liberty can only prevail, for all time, in totality.
Following what he volunteered as one of the worst days of his life, Jerry Holkins, with collaborator Mike Krahulik, produced for today the finest of Penny Arcade comic strips: funny in its scrupulous absurdity and, sharply written, in want of not a single curse.
"Take that!" cried Adversity:
The market came back from three straight days of losses after the Labor Department said September payrolls, while down for the first time in two years, fell by only 35,000 jobs. Fearing an economic slump in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, economists had forecast a drop of 150,000.
"Bit of a sting," said the Giant. Then he thumped Adversity.
It seems unlikely that the president has miscalculated or thoughtlessly erred in his choice of Harriet Miers for the United States Supreme Court. Bush is not irrational, certainly not deliberately impolitic. Nor is he one to neglect his party and his sectional base. Impetus for the White House to nominate — at a second-term popularity nadir — what the left might deride as an incompetent vassal and some aggressive rightists have rejected forthwith as a white elephant would be the anticipation of a third court vacancy, perhaps imminent, that of one of the oldest and furthest left man or woman in robes. This is induction, yes, but somewhat more constructive than plain derision.
The Cassini space probe, still rounding Saturn like an adopted satellite, has set the feats of predecessors Galileo and Voyager firmly in a history of steady and subsequent progression; its telemetry and fidelity introducing the world to pictures once unthinkable. Hardly more than a buxom asteroid, moon Hyperion fell within Cassini's camera sights and the images beamed to Earth depict something of incontestable accuracy and impenetrable, forbidding strangeness — which would rightly leave one unsettled if the mystery of Hyperion did not also mean that there is, yet, in commensurate vastness, wonder in Creation.
Today's American Minute:
He was the only US President to also serve as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He was appointed by President McKinley as the first governor of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War and by President Theodore Roosevelt as Secretary of War. The largest President, weighing over 300 lbs, a bathtub was installed for him in the White House, big enough to hold four men. His name was William Howard Taft, and he was born this day September 15, 1857. President Taft stated: "A God-fearing nation, like ours, owes it to its inborn...sense of moral duty to testify...devout gratitude to the All-Giver for...countless benefits."
No man's rights to life and liberty can be held inviolable without their recognized accordance from an absolute; an absolute best understood when it is, even if in locution, personified as God.
Exploration of Mars by remote control continues as NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity defy adversity and entropy in their trolling about the oxide planet. Each rover having completed nearly two years of service — sixfold the official requirement for mission success — usage and wear has compromised the operation of neither, Opportunity's recent reboot-breather the only geriatric stumble so far. Discoveries are made, wonders are recorded. Spirit witnessed — and then digitally recounted to us — the alien sight of not one moon but two moons, Phobos and Deimos, cutting across a black night sky. Six-wheeled geologist Opportunity has set upon site after site, just now completing the survey of an extrusion nicknamed "Lemon Rind."
Attractive for workhorse, lowest-bid machines, the Martian rovers are remarkably invested with character. Spirit napped during the day to store enough energy for its midnight stargazing; Opportunity, its conscience of a Jet Propulsion Laboratory control team wary of overexertion in the red desert, will be taking its next several days of rock-hunting a little more easily. There are no men in interplanetary space today, and yet it cannot be said that man is not in space.
The national conversation over Hurricane Katrina suffers not only from faithlessness and self-interest but also malapropism, as an exasperated Jonah Goldberg protests typographically borne anti-Semitism: "Please, please stop blaming all of this on the Levys! It's not their fault they failed."
The best-laid word stocks of spell-check oft go astray. Jeans sales reportedly plummeted when some commentators held buckled Levis responsible for the disaster.
Two British-born intellectuals of the phlegmatic school, John Derbyshire and Andrew Stuttaford, have been unhappily documenting scientific illiteracy with some vigor over the past few days and weeks. Today Derbyshire cites a poll revealing Galilean apostasy; yesterday, Stuttaford reported Creationist intransigence. Is that regression? Or failure? Or a very normal division of interest and knowledge? Most of the people who understand neither astronomy nor biology are the people who understand engine blocks, underbodies, plumbing, construction, agriculture and commodities. And an evangelical's good works are hardly impeded because he believes two orders of terrible lizards appeared some two hundred million years later than, say, my acquired estimation.
Study of nature is made possible, for those who are endlessly curious, by a world kept running by those who are not.
