Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

The One-Liner Bible

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Introduction

Many years ago, not long after I embarked on reading the entire Bible, I had the idea of compacting the entire Scripture down to one sentence per-book. I put the idea aside at the time, but it continued percolating in the back of my mind, and I thought it was about time I finally sat down and made it happen.

I intend no blasphemy here. Some of the one-liners are necessarily glib, and compressing the over-700,000 word tome of the Old and New Testaments into less than 1,000 words will obviously leave some very important things out. This is most-definitely not intended to be a serious theological work; I am no theologian or Bible scholar anyway. This is, at best, the very barest summary of the Scripture, but I hope you find it interesting and that it leads you to deeper interest in the most important book ever compiled.

The Old Testament is presented in its traditional Christian order, which differs a bit from the modern Jewish ordering. It also includes the seven books of the ‘deuterocanon’ that were recognized as inspired and canonical by the Christian Church very early in her history, but have since been rejected by the Jewish and Protestant communities. The New Testament is also presented in its (largely undisputed) traditional Christian order. In the handful of instances where I quote the Scripture directly, I have used the Douay-Rheims Bible (Bishop Challoner Revision, 1749-52). Enjoy, and God bless you!

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Truth in Advertising

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I wrote just over a year ago about how dishonorable our society has become in many ways. One particular area I pointed out was in business how things are advertised very simply (e.g., ‘unlimited Internet!’) while the reality is often much more complex and contradictory (e.g., ‘2gb per month’—which is not ‘unlimited’).

Another area of frustration with me is how companies now feel that they can change the terms of agreements at-will (and justify it by pointing to a sentence in a 12,000-word service agreement that says they can). One of the cornerstones of honorable behavior is saying what you mean and meaning what you say, not offering your customers an ‘agreement’ that they have never read or agreed to that gives the company the power to change terms on a whim.

And now we see another example. Sears.com made an error and offered Apple iPad tablet computers for $69, when the particular model in question typically retails for something more like $699. Many people placed orders for the drastically under-priced iPads, received order confirmations with the absurdly low price from Sears.com, and were informed that their order was being processed.

After discovering the error, Sears.com cancelled all of the low-price orders. I consider this unacceptable. Anybody who placed an order on the site when the price was set at $69 is now entitled to a $69 iPad. Sears.com entered into an implicit purchase agreement with those customers, and is morally (if not legally) bound to fulfill its obligations under that agreement. The customers are not responsible for Sears.com’s employees’ error; they were offered a product at a particular price, and they accepted the offer. Sears.com cannot renege on the offer they made any more than a customer can renege on the offer they accepted.

The proper moral of the story is not that customers should be wary of prices that are ‘too good to be true,’ but that companies should check and double-check the accuracy of their offers before putting them on their web sites. That is their job, not their customers’, and they are bound to fulfill the obligations they enter into.

Time for Some (Competent) Leadership

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President Barack Obama (D), addressing the need for members of Congress to compromise on raising the federal debt limit, says we need to “pull off the Band-Aid” and “eat our peas” . . . whatever that means. Tortured metaphors notwithstanding, what I’d really like from the president is some competent leadership on our economic policy. Even if we can’t have that, I’d at least like some consistency. Obama’s economic doctrine so far can be best-described as schizophrenic.

Let us review.

When campaigning for the Presidency in 2008, Obama continually painted President George W. Bush (R) and the Republicans as reckless deficit spenders . . . and that epitaph was well-deserved. There is no question that the Republican president and Republican Congress in the first decade of the 2000’s ran up record-breaking deficits and failed to control the growth of government. Fiscal conservatives like myself criticized them for this at the time, and only continued voting for them because we felt they were nominally better than the available alternatives. We were right on that, at least. Obama’s annual deficits—which make Bush’s astronomical deficits look positively tiny—prove that he is not the Clintonesque balanced-budget Democrat he made himself out to be. He campaigned on one thing, and we clearly got another.

In 2006, then Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) made a principled stand against raising the federal debt limit. Congress imposes a statutory debt limit on our government in an effort to keep our federal debt under control, a system that has been in-place since 1939. When Bush wanted the already-astronomical limit increased, Obama described the situation perfectly:

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BREAKING: Carmen Sandiego to Be Released Tuesday

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Off on a Tangent has learned that Carmen Sandiego, ringleader of the infamous Villains’ International League of Evil (VILE) crime syndicate, is scheduled for release from federal prison in Waseca, Minnesota, on Tuesday. Sandiego was convicted of felony tax evasion in 1999 and is serving a fifteen-year sentence. According to sources at the U.S. Marshals Service speaking on condition of anonymity, she is being released early due to good behavior during her incarceration.

Sandiego’s crime spree began in 1985 with a series of high-profile robberies. As a former detective for the renowned ACME Detective Agency in San Francisco, California, her knowledge of law-enforcement and detecting techniques allowed her to elude capture for well over a decade. She spent eight years on the FBI most-wanted list, and was finally apprehended by a Central Intelligence Agency operation at a Finnish villa in November 1998. Her apprehension sparked a major diplomatic row between the United States and Finland.

Sandiego was charged with over twenty crimes, including six counts of robbery, four counts of conspiracy, and three counts of obstruction of justice, but was only convicted on two charges of felony tax evasion in 1999. Many Sandiego associates, including Ihor Ihorovich and Dazzle Annie, remain at large, despite being the subject of numerous ongoing manhunts.

As a condition of her release, it is expected that Sandiego will be required to wear a GPS-enabled tracking anklet for the remainder of her sentence.

Another Letter to Cigna Healthcare

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You may recall a letter I wrote to Cigna Healthcare last May regarding an idiotic ‘preexisting condition questionnaire’ they sent to Melissa. It was idiotic because Melissa had been a Cigna customer for years without interruption. Insurance companies can only hold preexisting conditions against you if you have had a break in medical insurance coverage; because Melissa had been with Cigna forever, they knew there had been no such break. I happily said so, and asked them to look at their own records next time before bothering me.

And let me reiterate one more time what I said at the end of my post where I shared that letter with you, my loyal readers: “[J]ust because I opposed the particular health care reform plan passed by Congress doesn’t mean I think the system doesn’t need fixing. . . .”

Anyway, Cigna is at it again. This time, they are dragging their feet on paying out one of our dental claims because they want to know how much my ‘other insurance carrier’ has already paid. The problem is that we have no ‘other insurance carrier.’ We told them that already the last time they sent us an inquiry about it, and then they promptly turned around and sent us another inquiry asking the same stupid question. So I’ve answered it again, telling them again that we have had only Cigna dental insurance since my employer switched to them at the beginning of the year.

Just to make sure I get the point across, I’ve also included this letter:

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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.