Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Gadhafi Dead; Libya to Declare Liberation

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Moammar Gadhafi

I apologize for not covering this in a particularly timely manner (I’ve been dealing with a bad cold), but the big news of the last week has been that Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi was killed by Libyan opposition fighters on Thursday. Libya’s new interim leaders plan to formally declare liberation tomorrow, and NATO officials plan to end all military operations there by the end of the month.

President Barack Obama (D) authorized U.S. involvement in the Libyan conflict as part of a NATO alliance, which began military operations on March 19. Obama, however, failed to receive Congressional authorization for the conflict within the time required by the War Powers Resolution of 1973 . . . so since May 20, U.S. involvement has been on questionable constitutional footing (at best).

Having said that, I have generally supported efforts to depose Gadhafi. Since coming to power in 1969, he kept tight control over internal dissent, executing political enemies and imposing a culture of fear where ten to twenty percent of Libyans were employed as informers against their countrymen. In the 1980’s, Gadhafi had at least twenty-five critics of his regime assassinated overseas, and the Libyan government offered bounties up to 1 million dollars on its enemies’ heads—whether they be foreign statesmen, journalists, or Libyan defectors. Like in Hussein’s Iraq, petty criminals under Gadhafi’s regime were punished with flogging and the amputation of limbs.

The Libyan government attempted to buy nuclear weapons from China in 1972, Pakistan in 1977, and India in 1978. As of 2004, their stockpile of chemical weapons included 23 metric tons of mustard gas and more than 1,300 metric tons of precursors. Gadhafi’s Libya was also a major funding source for terrorist organizations around the world, including radical groups operating in the Philippines, Indonesia, Vanatu, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and more. Libyan agents acting on their own under Gadhafi’s authority were responsible for bombings in Berlin, shootings in London, attempted bombings of government buildings and aircraft in the United States, and the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Needless to say, he was not a great guy . . . for Libya or the rest of the world. I do not rejoice at his death (for the same reasons I didn’t rejoice at Osama bin Laden’s), but I am glad he is no longer running Libya. Like the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, the people of Libya now have a chance to rebuild themselves as a vibrant, free country with robust civil and economic freedoms. Or they could choose a new variant of the regressive path they were on before. For the first time since 1969, Libya’s future is in the Libyan people’s hands. Here’s hoping they choose their path well.

The right of a nation to kill a tyrant, in cases of necessity, can no more be doubted, than to hang a robber, or kill a flea. But killing one tyrant only makes way for worse, unless the people have sense, spirit, and honesty enough to establish and support a constitution guarded at all points against the tyranny of the one, the few, and the many. – President John Adams (Federalist)

On ‘Occupy Wall Street’

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In the last month or so, protesters representing the ‘Occupy Wall Street‘ movement have been descending on city centers to protest against corporations and the political cronyism that often benefits them. Many of their complaints and concerns have some validity. Most of us should be able to agree that large, profitable corporations like General Electric shouldn’t be able to get away with paying no taxes (as they did in 2010). Most of us should be able to agree that the government bailouts under Presidents George W. Bush (R) and Barack Obama (D) were ill-advised, anti-capitalist, and motivated by cronyism. Most of us should be able to agree that if the government is going to be bailing anybody out, it ought to be bailing out the taxpaying public in a fair, equitable way . . . rather than bailing out Wall Street bankers and failed car companies alone.

On these subjects you will get little objection from me against the ‘occupiers,’ though I do object to some of the forms the protests have taken—e.g., attempting to storm the Air and Space Museum in Washington, trashing public parks, obstructing traffic flow, etc. Thankfully the protests here have been much more docile than their European counterparts, especially in Italy, but they still have a distinctly more raucous tenor than, say, the ‘tea party‘ protests of 2008 and 2009 tended to have. Regardless, I do think the protesters are misguided in a few key ways.

Blame for Bailouts

Imagine, for a moment, that you are teetering on bankruptcy. You had a sudden unexpected expense, or you were laid off from your job, and now you don’t know where next month’s rent is going to come from. Maybe you are to blame, maybe you aren’t. That’s not important. What’s important is that you are in trouble. You and the people who depend on you are at risk. So, imagine now that a man from the government knocks on your door and tells you that, “Look, you messed up, but it’s important that you be able to provide for yourself and your family . . . so here’s ten-thousand dollars.”

Read more . . .

Is Romney a Christian? Does it Matter?

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Mitt Romney

Back in April, I addressed the issue of President Barack Obama’s (D) eligibility to be president and his religion. For the whole story you should head over there and read it, but the short version is that Obama is a natural born U.S. citizen (and thus eligible to be President), he isn’t a Muslim (unless you are basing your opinion on traditional Sharia law), he’s apparently not much of a Christian either (as far as I can tell), and we don’t have a religious litmus test for presidents here anyway so it doesn’t matter all that much.

Even so, religion is a perennial issue in our presidential elections. President Thomas Jefferson’s (Democratic-Republican) opponents excoriated him for his unorthodox beliefs. President John F. Kennedy (D) was criticized in some circles for being a Catholic. President George W. Bush was made out to be some kind of hyper-right-wing evangelical Christian (even though he was, in fact, raised in the Episcopal Church and is now a United Methodist—both center-left ‘mainline’ Protestant denominations). Most presidents and presidential candidates who have held even slightly unorthodox religious views have been forced to discuss their faith in the public sphere.

This is understandable, to a point. The religion that one chooses—and we all do, at some point, choose what we are going to believe—gives us some insight into a person’s character, how they make decisions, and what values they subscribe to. These are valid matters to consider when evaluating a candidate for political office. But nobody is (or should be) automatically disqualified because of what they believe or don’t believe in the abstract, or because of what particular religious body (if any) they claim membership in. We should only consider a candidate’s faith, or lack thereof, insofar as it speaks to their character and informs their public policy decisions.

Read more . . .

RIM’s System is Broken

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My Old BlackBerry

I used to have a BlackBerry—the ‘Bold’ 9000. I liked it quite a bit and, for its time, it was a fine phone. I very seriously considered replacing it with another BlackBerry but decided to give Palm another chance with its WebOS operating system. After Palm’s implosion, I ended up choosing Android.

Born out of the two-way pager universe, Ontario-based Research in Motion (RIM) always had a different approach to phones than its industry peers. When they were on top, they were up against three competitors whose phone operating systems all came from PDAs—Palm, Microsoft, and Symbian. The iconic BlackBerry phones from the era before the iPhone were simpler and less powerful than their competitors’ phones, but they were incredibly reliable and easy to use. There was no stylus to juggle with, no touchscreen to smudge, and a keyboard that was a true pleasure to thumb-type on. Once you got the hang of the trackball, it was a clean and efficient way of getting around the interface.

Unique among smartphones, and likely a holdover from their two-way pager background, BlackBerry phones are very reliant on RIM’s data center. Every other smartphone I’ve ever owned or used—ones running Palm OS, Windows Mobile 6, Palm WebOS, Google Android, and Apple iOS—communicated directly with the Internet, either over the phone network or a local wifi network. When I go to log into my corporate email on my Motorola Droid, or when I go to the CNN web site, those connections go directly from my phone, to the network, to the destination.

BlackBerry phones, however, send most of their network traffic through the RIM data centers. On a BlackBerry, your phone’s email app is connected via your phone or wifi network to RIM’s data center, which then connects to your email provider. Your phone is not directly communicating with your email service. When I had my BlackBerry, even basic Internet browsing all went through the RIM data center . . . though my understanding is that newer BlackBerry phones don’t have this problem.

Read more . . .

A Matter of Perspective

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I recently read an article titled ‘10 Misrepresentations About Climate Change‘ on Southern Fried Science. The article’s author, ‘WhySharksMatter,’ made a valiant attempt at being balanced, and I applaud him for that. Five of the ‘misrepresentations’ were on the so-called ‘skeptic’ side of the climate change discussion, and the five others were on the climate change ‘believers’ side. Unfortunately though, the article still has a number of flaws.

‘Misrepresentation’ number 1 is somewhat accurate, although the data is presented in a very slanted way. I’ll come back to this shortly.

‘Misrepresentation’ number 2 cites one particular study about how many climate scientists agree on human impact on Earth’s warming, but doesn’t address any of the actual scientific evidence. More recent studies are finding that much of our climate change dogma is inaccurate or dead-wrong. For example, one study found that CFC’s (largely outlawed in most countries now) and cosmic rays are the primary sources of warming, not the CO2 ecological boogeyman. Another found that even if CO2 were responsible for serious climate change, the problem is only half as bad as we thought . . . because nearly half of all human CO2 emissions are gobbled up by plants. So thanks, SUV drivers; you’re helping to keep the world’s plants well fed! Both studies, and countless more where they come from, point to very serious gaps in our scientific understanding of Earth’s changing climate.

This leads to ‘misrepresentation’ number 3. The author claims that ninety-seven to ninety-eight percent of climate scientists agree that humans are responsible for the warming Earth. Well, this may be true, but that doesn’t bode well for those scientists. In light of an increasing stream of studies (like those I cited above) that are chipping away at the long-standing dogma, and the lack of observable evidence for the dire consequences warming was supposed to bring, it’s looking more and more like they’ve been had. As we spend more and more time studying our impact on the Earth, we keep finding that the Earth is pretty capable of adjusting to nearly anything we’ve been able to throw at it. The seas aren’t rising. The number and severity of natural disasters isn’t increasing.

Read more . . .

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.