Sundry

-- At The Diplomat, Dr. Namrata Goswami writes about some of the potential uses and problems that would greet President Trump's creation of a sixth branch of the United States military, the United States Space Force. I'm a space nut but I'm not at all sure what to think about the president's move. It might be better if it waited for a day when we could put personnel in space ourselves without hitching a ride on a Russian rocket. Plus, most space opera fans know that a nation or planet with a spaceborne military wing calls it a Navy.

-- Tuesday is a primary election day here in our fair state. One of the advantages of registering as an independent is the ability to ignore the great mass of folks seeking a party nomination. As 2016 demonstrated, the major party nominees may both be worthless and completely unfit for the office they seek. So paying attention to them in order to see which of them deserves your vote less is a chore indeed, but how much worse if you have to pay attention to them as well as the people deemed not good enough to beat them?

-- South Carolina Democratic congressional candidate Joe Cunningham, on learning that his GOP opponent Katie Arrington was injured in an auto accident, immediately suspended all campaign activities "until further notice." No word on how long he will wait to start up again, but the hiatus while Arrington is still being operated on and recovering from the accident is the kind of action we should have a lot more of.

-- Writing at American Consequences, P. J. O'Rourke defends the Electoral College system by which U.S. voters cast ballots for electors, rather than for candidates. The electors then meet and cast ballots for a presidential candidate based on whichever system operates in their home state. Maine and Nebraska allow splits along the line of the percentage each candidate on; the other 48 are winner-take-all.  O'Rourke, who is smarter than I am, ably defends the system as a way of keeping the densely-populated coasts from dominating national races. He omits one key benefit, though. Since there are only 538 electors, that means that only 538 people were required to vote for either of the awful hairballs our system coughed up in the summer of 2016. The rest of us were off the hook -- we didn't vote for candidates. We voted for the candidates' slate of electors from our state. Whew.