Romney moves right; kerfluffle; some sites to see;and false flags.

View 708 Sunday, January 15, 2012

CES is over, with plenty of new stuff but nothing startling. We’ll get to that another time. On the national scene, Santorum continues to make Presidential speeches but doesn’t seem to be moving in the polls, Mitt Romney is working to run to the right of Newt Gingrich and sounding more conservative on most issues than anyone else (he supports the Ryan budget), and Newt seems to be coming down out of his fit in which he would rather destroy Romney than look like a President. I doubt South Carolina will change those trends.

Having got rich as a capitalist, Romney ran as a liberal Republican back in 1994 when he ran against Ted Kennedy for Senate. Kennedy won easily in a year when the Democrats lost both the Senate and House to Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America. It is an interesting speculation: had Romney run as a Contract With America conservative, would he have done better? He probably would not have won, but it was a Republican year, and it makes an amusing fantasy. Instead he went back to his business career, then turned the Utah Olympics from a predicted disaster into a resounding success.

He governed as a liberal Republican in a liberal Democratic state, which makes him about the most conservative governor Massachusetts has had in a long time; and since that time he has moved steadily to the right. Romney is trying to run to the right. That’s an encouraging sign. And he defends the Ryan budget. That’s another.

A mixed bag of links.

I have a number of Firefox open windows. Too many, actually. Each marks a place that I found interesting enough to save either as inspiration for an essay, or to recommend. Unfortunately I am running out of time. Here are several places you may find interesting; in general the reasons I found them interesting should be obvious. Some are inspirations. Others are horrible examples. And I may come back to some of them as basis for an essay, but meanwhile you are invited to consider:

A Cold War Secret revealed: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9RRJUV02&show_article=1 I have many memories of those days.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/chrome_engineer_explains_near_billion_dollar_investment_mozilla The title should be enough to make this interesting.

http://www.infowars.com/one-man-stands-up-changes-the-world-nightly-news/ on SOPA.

The battlecruiser INSS MacArthur. http://www.starshipmodeler.net/contest4/ss_s15.htm

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/why-pilot-projects-fail/250364/ A thoughtful and worth reading piece. I’m not deleting this one.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/12/our_growing_police_state.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/12/us-molecule-climate-idUSTRE80B1U820120112 Another answer to global warming?

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=35725 On finding Earth sized planets Out There.

http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html Corey Doctorow uses more words than most would, but he makes some good points. The issue is important.

http://freefall.purrsia.com/default.htm I put this here in case there are any of you not following FreeFall. If you don’t know what that is, you should. The important point is don’t try to make sense of the strip from what’s happening now. There’s always a link to the story beginning. Go there. Read it all in order. It will take you a week if you do it at a fairly natural pace of a few dozen of the strips at a time. It’s worth it. The first few episodes will be a bit confusing but that will end quickly enough. The background is a time when we have colonized other planets at other stars, and there are a lot of robots. One thing you probably should know is that Sam is not human, and is the only member of his race in human jurisdiction and thus has something of the status of an ambassador so he gets away with stuff that others could not. Not only is he not human, he is not vertebrate. This gives him an interesting cultural background the discovery of which is a part of the story. Have fun. I certainly have.

http://colinmcinnes.blogspot.com/2011/01/is-sustainability-dangerous-idea.html#more This definitely warrants an essay.

http://www.spacefuture.com/archive/access_to_space_ssx.shtml This is credited to Jim Ransom but I wrote most of the quoted material in it. I hasten to say that Jim was in the conferences that generated the material. It’s a good exposition on SSX and X projects.

http://www.aipnews.com/talk/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=19857 On Hormesis

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/08/how_to_stay_anonymous_part_ii/print.html On cookies and tracking what sites you visit and like that.

I have a huge hunk of mail I’ll try to get up. Meanwhile I am working on another Chaos Manor Reviews column, and our novel proceeds. And thanks to all those who recently subscribed or renewed their subscriptions.

The Marine urination kerfluffle continues with the Secretary of Defense getting into the act. The US will probably lose some good troops out of this, not because of what they did, but because they were dumb enough to film it and let that film be seen. There doesn’t seem to be any way out of this. Were they in my command they’d be put on KP for at least a week, and they’d certainly not get a positive recommendation for promotion, but shooting them for the encouragement of the others seems a bit extreme.

Meanwhile I do hope the Taliban understands that we often give the troops bacon for breakfast, and while this will make the troops a lot more cautious about what they allow their comrades to film them doing, the practice of putting it in a dead enemy’s eye has been traditional since before the Trojan War, and is unlikely to be ended now. There have been many incidents of acts of respect to dead enemies in the centuries, but that was toward brave and honorable enemies.

I understand that argument that the United States must be on higher moral grounds than the enemy. We already are. This doesn’t change that a bit. And I will say again that in the unlikely event they ever put me in a command position, those Marines would be welcome in my outfit. But they would have to peel a few potatoes, and turn in their cell phones. For weeks.

Have you noticed that the US has gone out of its way to apologize to Iran for the execution of the Iranian nuclear scientists?

http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/15/world/meast/iran-nuclear-scientist-killed/index.html

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta Thursday told troops in Texas: "We were not involved in any way — in any way — with regards to the assassination that took place there…. that’s not what the United States does."

Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, said on his Facebook page Wednesday: "I have no idea who targeted the Iranian scientist but I certainly don’t shed a tear."