John Ringo has a new book and it’s an anthology of military science fiction, Citizens:

It includes a story from friend of IMAO Michael Z. Williamson.

Maybe some day I should write some military SF. I could draw an accurate, well researched picture of what the future will be like when war is fought between giant robots and dinosaurs with rocket launchers. There will be a lot more military tactics revolving around not stepping in poo.

One of the two red belts on Jupiter has gone missing:

What the...

This is a big deal.

…Well, it’s seems like a big deal. This is like something big enough for hundreds of earths to fit inside and its just disappeared. What does that mean? What do we do if other stripes on Jupiter start disappearing?

What if this means Jupiter is about to explode?

Well, you’d think we’d just hide behind the sun. One problem: On September 24, Jupiter at its closest to Earth.

I think it’s up to something.

You know, we have to remember that all other planets in our solar system are enemies and need to be treated as such. Who knows what they could do except that it probably won’t be to the benefit of Earth. One of the worst things we ever did was remove Pluto from the planet watch list; now no one is paying attention to it. Why, it could be sneaking up on us right now.

Yeah, so try to sleep at night thinking of all the planets out there and how we have no idea what they’re even up to.

Most politicians seem to be lawyers. I don’t know how that happened, but it’s horrible. Basically, we have lawyers coming up with laws that only other lawyers can understand, keeping themselves employed. None of them ever create anything useful; they just sort of get in the way of and put rules on other people doing useful stuff.

So it would be nice to have politicians come from different occupations, and here’s an editorial saying we should have scientists become politicians.

Horrible idea.

I don’t know if you’ve ever dealt with the output of scientists, but it’s a lot of crap you have to slog through before you find anything of practical application. I mean, the solution to lawyers isn’t people who deal even more in the theoretical. We don’t need people saying, “My new plan is MATHEMATICALLY PROVEN to help the economy.” Then after they implement the plan and everything collapses they’ll be like, “Whoops. I guess we forgot to factor in a couple parameters. Well, NOW it should work.”

Instead, engineers would make good politicians. With engineers, crap has to work at the end of the day. We don’t care if it’s theoretically pretty or what not. Of course, you run into the same problem you always have with why people from useful occupations don’t become politicians: Too busy doing useful stuff. Who can just drop everything and run for office? Mainly lawyers, because they weren’t doing anything useful anyway. I think the only way you’ll get people with useful experience in government is if you start drafting them like with jury duty. I’d certainly rather try random names from the phonebook than who we have now.

Here’s video of my little Princess Buttercup:

I’m now thinking of naming her “Peanut Buttercup Fleming”, but once again SarahK hates goodness and happiness.

In some ways, I feel I’ve already failed her. She’ll be coming into a world without flying cars, without dinosaurs with rocket launchers protecting us, and without the moon being nuked. Then again, I came into this world after the moon landing and that kinda sucked because what interesting things did we have left to do? Well, after Obama, one of the fun things Princess Buttercup will have to do is rebuild civilization.