Space.com is reporting that Galaxy 15, an Intelsat satellite that stopped communicating with ground control last month, is threatening to interfere with an SES World Skies satellite. That company specializes in providing communications services to Europe and Third World nations.

Intelsat suspects that an intense solar storm in early April caused the unprecedented event. The satellite is alive, fully on and transmitting, but has left its assigned orbit and is not responding to intelligent signals from earth. They are by no means certain the solar storm caused the problem.

There is another possibility, however. In 2005, SatelliteGuys.us reported that the recently-launched then-PamAmSat’s Galaxy 15 would become a relay for Fox News. Starting in first-quarter 2006, Galaxy 15 has been subjected to a steady diet of Fox.

We only have about 40 years of experience with geostationary communications satellites relaying video content, and the toxic content of Fox News has only been sent to satellites since 1996. While solar storms may be the cause, IntelSat should investigate the effects of caustic content on transponders.

Considering the actions of the satellite (in its relationship with its neighbors) bear similarities to the actions of Sarah Palin, and the Arizona legislature, which we know have also been subjected to a constant diet of Fox News, more research is certainly warranted.

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When Sarah Palin posted a map of “red” congressional districts whose incumbent congresscritters voted for the health care reform act, she used gunsight crosshair icons to designate them. Perhaps she was intentionally feeding into a political climate marked by some recent right wing calls for violence or maybe she was just trying to be cute. Either way, she’s given us one more reason to fear her.

It’s possible she is so completely out of touch with the acrimony of last week’s Health Care protests that she doesn’t understand how this kind of imagery makes her look like a demagogue. Or maybe she’s just a demagogue.

I’m picking the latter, because when even folks like Elizabeth Hasselbeck called her out for it, she chose to counter it with a tortured piece of writing on her Facebook page that tried to claim it was all just one big metaphor, which could just as easily be hoops talk.

While Palin gets props for trying to walk back the rhetoric by claiming its just taken out of context, the whole misdirection attempt has the “dog ate my homework” feel of a 10th grader.

Most 10th graders grow up, and if their thoughts wander back to their immature lies and deceptions, they’re embarrassed. That hasn’t happened yet to Ms. Palin, so we’ll have to collectively be embarrassed for her.

It would be like me trying to argue that my headline is a reference to Ms. Palin doing her hair. Even if I could convince you that was my intent, it would leave you wondering why I chose something so meaningless when I could have found a thousand better ways to make my point.

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As a self-professed new media expert on Twitter, I’m expected to have at least one “next big thing” social media idea, but I’m so edgy that I’ve got two.

Twitter has now reached its late teens (in social media years) and has begun the process of cleaning up its childish things. It recently announced that it would start cancelling and reassigning moribund accounts.

Somebody who took a valuable username, tweeted one tweet and wandered off in a daze shouldn’t be a dog-in-the-manger for someone who would put that enviable 3-character moniker to good use.

That’s where my new social networks come in: two new sites designed to keep flakes from frittering away the valuable naming resources and web real estate of the big guys.

These are gateway networks, one each for Twitter and Facebook. New users who don’t pass a simple online Web 2.0 proficiency test at Twitter and Facebook are sent to my two networks for their trial runs.

I call them Fritter and Flakebook.

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A letter to the editor received from a young reader:

I am 8 years old.
Some of my friends say there is no Twitter Pro.
Papa says, if you see it on THE INTERNETS it's so.
Please tell me the truth; is there a Twitter Pro?

VIRGINIA O'HANLON
115 West Ninety-Fifth Street

VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what Apple and Microsoft tell them.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Twitter Pro. It exists as certainly as user entry form mockups and vaporware and unfunded startups exist, and you know that they abound as dead and moribund webpages on servers this whole world round.

Not believe in Twitter Pro? You might as well not believe in boo.com, or etoys.com or Webvan.

You might get your papa to hire men to watch Source Forge night and day, but even if they didn’t see beta versions coming down the pipe, what would that prove?  Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

No Twitter Pro? Unfathomable. Because VIRGINIA if we tell ourselves that Twitter Pro is nothing but a fairy tale, if we come to believe its just a hoax on the unsuspecting, then we must again ask ourselves that much scarier and vexing question: “How can Twitter monetize itself.”

The Editor

[Snark Rosetta Stone: "Twitter Pro" was an April Fools Joke promulgated by the folks who brought you the Shorty Awards. It was an alleged invitation to participate in the beta program for a rumored paid enhanced service on Twitter that would monetize it. But it really was nothing more than a website that took your twitter avatar and put a "PRO" banner on it, and sent you to your twitter page to replace your avatar with the "enhanced" one. It then let you tweet an invitation to others. A lot of people were fooled, and I was one of them.]

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Scapegoating works well in America. Rove and Bush were such able masters of recasting Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden as the cause of all our ills after 9/11, that they were able to drum up support for an unrelated war just by using them as a mantra.

But now we have new problems, one of our biggest is energy, and perhaps we can recast some Rovian tactics to motivate the Bush base. The left and the arugula-eating intellectuals don’t need any motivating, but the bubbas do, and I’ve got just the scapegoat.

The New Osama

Reddy Kilowatt.

Reddy was born way back in March of 1926 as the symbol of conspicuous energy consumption. There wasn’t a task he wasn’t suited for, nor a burden that couldn’t somehow be adapted for electrification. But then came the 1973 oil crisis, and the concept that “things work better electrically” dissolved in a sea of power bills peppered with fuel surcharges.

But Reddy, actually the mascot of the Alabama Power Company but licensed to local providers across the country, persevered. He’s still a trademark today with his own agent–Reddy Kilowatt Corp, a division of Northern States Power–to protect him. Maybe they can license him as scapegoat and sacrificial lamb.

Because Reddy Kilowatt is really a symbol of everything that’s wrong with the way we approach energy, from his adolescence when he tried to electrify everything, to adulthood as private pitchman for individual power companies that all own pieces of a national grid.

He’s been a spokesman for nuclear power, and has a history of preferring big centralized power generation using carbon fuels to localized power generation from renewable sources. This is a character to be hated and reviled, and if we can recast him as public enemy number 1, we might be able to appeal to the baser instincts of the baser base.

So let’s license Reddy and recast him as a terrorist. Someone whose ideas are dangerous, and who needs to be caught and executed at a federal level. Let’s just make sure we don’t convict him in one of the nine states that allow electrocution as a method of execution. You know he’d choose it if offered, there’s no guarantee it would kill him, and it would just plain send the wrong message.

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