et ceteras

Random thoughts about random things:

Mitt Romney

Half of Romney's "policy adversaries" claim he is a big-government guy who won't allow market forces to operate. The other half claim he is a laissez faire vulture capitalist. It can't be both, guys.

Meanwhile, his "social conservatism" critics openly doubt whether he is authentically against abortion because he identified himself as "pro-choice" in years gone by...Have they forgotten that none other than Ronald Reagan started out "pro-choice" before his thinking evolved with the passage of time? Because they never expressed doubts about him...Are these people so wedded to their notions of ideological purity that they deny mankind's capacity to grow and advance? If so, I have to wonder if, in some cases, their rigidity really is a symptom of anti-Mormon bias.

Joe Paterno

JoePa was scapegoated in the worst of ways. Ever since the Sandusky scandal blew up, media blowhards and other self-righteous types have stridently accused Paterno of failing some kind of moral test because he reported the Sandusky allegations to his bosses but not to "the authorities." Problem is, he did report it to the authorities.

In fact, Paterno went straight to the head of campus police. And for the record, the campus police department is an actual police department, just like the State College Police Department; it has jurisdiction for what happens on campus while the State College Police Department has jurisdiction for what happens in town. Because the incident he was told about took place on campus, he reported it to the proper law enforcement agency.

What was he supposed to do after that, considering that he did not witness the alleged incident? Was he supposed to assume he had a better grasp of the facts, and the law, than the authorities whose job it is to investigate and indict -- and then start talking to state or federal authorities? I find it nauseating when I hear holier-than-thou journalism majors pretending to know what they would have done in that situation.

Winter

It is being widely reported that this winter is a mild one in the United States. I find it refreshing that people aren't rushing to blame the phantom that goes by the name "global warming" or, alternately, "climate change." There have been more storms erupting from the sun over the past several months than there were over the previous several years, so it makes sense that this winter is not abnormally cold like the last few were.

But then again, even with the uptick in solar activity, this winter actually is colder than usual in some places. Alaska and Canada -- two of the places that yesterday's prophets of doom said would be most affected by global warming -- are going through one of their worst winters in recorded history, with temperatures of minus 79 degrees recorded right before a thermometer broke a few days ago (it is presumed that it then dropped to minus 80 or lower, which would be colder than anything ever recorded in North America). Plus, down here in the lower 48, record snow has fallen in the usually mild city of Seattle. The bottom line is that Nature does what Nature wants to do.

Super Bowl XLVI

In a word, or actually, in two words: Go Giants!