Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Our Real Sputnik Moment

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In President Barack Obama’s (D) State of the Union address last week, he declared, “This is our generation’s Sputnik moment.” It was a lovely, if typical, rhetorical flourish from our president. He was trying to rouse the American people to major investments in research, science, and technology in response to the great strides made by China and other countries in these and other fields.

Sputnik 1 was the first man-made object to orbit the Earth. It was launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, much to the surprise of American observers who almost universally expected the U.S. space program to reach orbit first. The Soviets followed with Sputnik 2 on November 3 of the same year. Our own first satellite was Explorer 1, which launched on January 31, 1958—almost four months later. This national embarrassment in the midst of the Cold War was a wake-up call for Americans. We weren’t doing enough. The Soviet Union was a serious threat to our security, and it was ahead of us in a key area of scientific development.

Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin flew into space and orbited the Earth on Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961, becoming the first human in space. U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard flew into space on Freedom 7 only three weeks later, but we were not able to get a human into orbit until John Glenn flew on Friendship 7 on February 2, 1962. We were still, arguably, far behind the Soviets. The ‘space race’ between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was on, and would become a national obsession for years to come. We seemingly put everything we had into development of space technology, and the effort to beat the Soviets culminated with the Apollo program, where we successfully landed human beings on the moon.

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Second Judge Rules ‘Mandate’ Unconstitutional

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Judge Roger Vinson of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida ruled today that the federal government does not have constitutional authority to require citizens to purchase health insurance. This ruling concurs with a separate ruling last December in Virginia that invalidates the ‘individual mandate,’ a core provision of President Barack Obama’s (D) landmark Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Notably, Vinson’s ruling invalidates the entire health care reform bill on the argument that the unconstitutional individual mandate is ‘not severable’ from the rest of the act.

The health care reform act was signed into law in March of 2010 and immediately challenged by many states on Constitutional grounds. This particular case, ‘Florida et al v. United States Department of Health and Human Services’ (3:10-CV-91-RV/EMT), is the largest challenge with 26 state plaintiffs: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

State of the Union Experimental Live Blog

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I live-blogged the State of the Union address and the Republican response this evening on the Off on a Tangent live coverage page. This was my first attempt at a live blog, so it was definitely an experimental trial-run (and a first technical test of my simple live coverage platform, which I intend to use for other events in the future).

The transcript of the live blog is included below (with some minor formatting added).

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State of the Union Address Tonight at 9pm

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President Barack Obama (D) is scheduled to give the annual State of the Union address tonight at 9:00 p.m. EST before a joint session of Congress. The address will be followed by a Republican Response to be delivered by Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI 1st).

As I do every year, I encourage all of my readers to watch both the State of the Union address and the opposition response. I recommend the unfettered and uninterrupted coverage from C-SPAN, but the addresses will also be available on most broadcast channels and cable news networks.

The Constitution requires that the president report to Congress annually on the state of the union, but does not specify the method or form of this report (Article II, Section 3). The in-person State of the Union address has been a tradition since 1913.

Transcripts of all 1945-2009 addresses before joint sessions of Congress, including each State of the Union, are available from C-SPAN.

“That Among These is Life . . . ”

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One might be forgiven for thinking that the ‘pro-life’ position on abortion is an exclusively religious position. It is true that the most vocal and consistent voices in opposition to pre-birth infanticide are those in the Catholic Church and other Christian churches, but to describe the anti-abortion position as one exclusively religious in nature doesn’t do it justice. If considered honestly and rationally, even cold, scientific logic requires us to be pro-life.

Consider, if you will, that the purpose of science (properly applied) is to increase knowledge and support the well-being of all humanity. Obviously, there have been ‘scientists’ who didn’t subscribe to this, but I think most of us can agree—whether religious or atheist—that science and medicine ought to be serving people, not killing them. If we accept this obvious argument, the question then becomes one of how we define humanity. Is an embryo in a woman’s womb a person, or is it a lump of tissue that is just a part of a woman’s body?

Contrary to the way it is often portrayed, science and religion are rarely (if ever) in true conflict with one another. The Catholic Church has, for example, claimed since antiquity that human life begins at the moment of conception. At the time, there was little direct scientific evidence to support this argument; it was an argument purely from faith. Science did not ever disprove, or even shake, this faith position. On the contrary, at every step the increase in scientific knowledge has bolstered the argument that life begins at conception.

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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.