Pro-Con: Did Mitt Romney’s speech on religion answer fears about Mormonism? NO

Mitt Romney is right, of course, when he argues that his Mormon religion shouldn’t be a factor in judging his quest for the White House.

Nevertheless, his attempt last week to put the issue to rest was disheartening. Romney’s speech in Texas clearly was designed to evoke John F. Kennedy’s address to Protestant ministers in Houston in 1960. Like Kennedy, Romney stressed the importance of separation of church and state, to allay fears that he would serve a particular denomination or take direction from his church’s leaders.

But there the similarity ends. Kennedy’s assurance of separation was unqualified and was what his audience at that time wanted to hear. On the other hand, although Romney invoked separation to divert scrutiny from his own Mormon beliefs, he hardly argues that religion is an irrelevant political consideration. Indeed, he emphasized his Christian credentials, deplored “the religion of secularism” and argued that a society must possess religious faith to achieve freedom. That seems to place non-Christians and people of little or no faith lower on his American pecking order.

Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal editorial

Will this be the answer for our future energy needs, Science Fiction shows us how again?

For any true sci-fi fan, you already know about this, but didn’t know it was for real. When you look at the communicators on Star Trek, and today’s cell phones, Sci-Fi had it right. If you remember in Star Wars, Lando operated a gas mining operation, what were they mining? In Battle Star Galactica , they had to mine asteroids for fuel for their engines.

Well folks, the Chinese and Russians don’t think this is science fiction anymore. What if there was an unlimited supply of a new energy source only three days away and 7 tonnes supplied all the electrical energy for the entire US for one year.

And the best part, the new energy source is not radioactive. Well folks you gotta read about this stuff.

Helium-3 (He-3) is a light, non-radioactive isotope of helium with two protons and one neutron, which is rare on Earth; it is sought after for use in nuclear fusion research. More abundant helium-3 is thought to exist on the Moon (embedded in the upper layer of regolith by the solar wind over billions of years) and the solar system's gas giants (left over from the original solar nebula), although still in low quantities (28 ppm of lunar regolith is helium-4 and 0.01 ppm is helium-3).^[1] It is proposed to be used as a second-generation fusion power source.

The helion, the nucleus of a helium-3 atom, consists of two protons but only one neutron, in contrast to two neutrons in ordinary helium. Its existence was first proposed in 1934 by the Australian nuclear physicist Mark Oliphant while based at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory, in an experiment in which fast deuterons were reacted with other deuteron targets (the first demonstration of nuclear fusion). Helium-3, as an isotope, was postulated to be radioactive, until helions from it were accidentally identified as a trace "contaminant" in a sample of natural helium (which is mostly helium-4) from a gas well, by Luis W. Alvarez and Robert Cornog in a cyclotron experiment at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in 1939. ^[2]

Now I already hear you naysayers, “on the Moon” yup, and guess how it’s processed? You scoop it up at 1/6 earth gravity and you squeeze the rock and dust of the moon surface. Guess what you get? Two components He-3 for fuel, but you also get H2-O, WHAT! That’s right folks, you get water. The by product is a compressed building block called, you got it a Brick!

Now all you chemistry nerds out there, if you pass electricity through water what do your get? Right, you strip off the Hydrogen and you get Oxygen. This is how our submarines produce Oxygen to stay under the water indefinitely.

So lets see, we have got unlimited solar energy on the moon for power. Everything is 1/6 the weight, we have building materials, we have water, we have oxygen, we have minerals, we have soil. HUMMMM

The Russians and the Chinese want to begin operations in 2020, and neither of these countries have been much concerned about killing people to get things done. So the US had better knock off this war in the Middle East for OIL, and start spending our grandkids money to get back to the moon.

Oh and if any you thought I forgot about Lando? We could build a Gas mining platform in lunar orbit, using the lunar elevator system, then tow the platform to Jupiter’s moons. There we could extract the gas directly.

All this would likely take 100 years to complete, but what a goal.

Mark