Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Unfortunate Juxtapositions

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jux2jux1jux3WTOP, a Washington, DC, area all-news radio station, has a pretty good web site. It’s not the flashiest or fanciest news web site, and they occasionally have trouble with journalism fundamentals, but they’re usually pretty fast with local news and provide a good overview of relevant local stories (in addition to national and world news). Plus, the radio station can’t be beat (especially the ‘traffic and weather together on the eights’ filling you in on the these essentials every ten minutes).

One thing that I occasionally run into on the site though is that they have a featured photo section called ‘Picture This’ which appears on the right-hand side of almost any news story. This section usually features a humorous or random photo, but that photo is not related in any way to the story you’re reading. Usually this is harmless, but occasionally it results in unfortunate juxtapositions. Here are two I’ve run across recently that just didn’t seem right.

Update 8/12/2009: Just found a new one today! A story about a pit bull with an un-related (but somewhat inappropriate) photo.

Health Care Insanity

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Look, most of us agree that we need some kind of health care reform. I’m willing to entertain more government regulation of health care than I entertain in most other industries because health care is, indeed, something that everybody should have access to. This is a moral truth that all Christians should agree on, although good Christians can surely disagree on the best way to provide that access.

But the health care plans being foisted upon us by President Barack Obama (D) and the Democratic super-majorities in both houses of Congress are pretty reprehensible. While some parts of these plans are fine (like limitations on insurance companies holding ‘preexisting conditions’ against you), the whole idea of a government plan—even as an optional alternative to private plans—is frightening. With artificially limited prices, this government plan will likely supplant private plans in time and it will almost definitely begin to exhibit the same problems that all other public health care plans have exhibited in countries that have attempted this dangerous experiment. Beyond these ‘big picture’ concerns, however, there is the fact that the plans being considered in Congress are thousands of pages long and nobody—nobody—has actually read them in their entirety.

Doesn’t that scare you? Doesn’t it frighten you that Congress might pass a massive rewrite of our health care system un-read? It should. If they don’t know what’s in the thing, how can anybody know what it will do to our health care system?

Read more . . .

House: Framed and Roofed

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house-roofedMelissa and I ran out to the house on Sunday afternoon just to see the progress. As you can see, the whole house is framed and has a roof and everything. Supposedly it will still be done and ready for delivery in a November-ish time frame.

Now we just need to get everything set up with the loan . . . boy that’s a headache all its own. I’ll get into that later.

I do really wish that we could simplify the process of buying houses, buying cars, buying cell phones, etc. There’s no need to layer complexity upon complexity.

Metro Continues to Fail

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The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) has got some explaining to do. According to yet another damning report on MetroRail that appeared in The Washington Post yesterday, the apparently failure-prone ‘fail safe’ Automatic Train Protection (ATP) system is again at the center of the report.

Metro has a two-layer system designed to prevent trains from slamming into one another. First, Automatic Train Control (ATC) usually runs the trains automatically and makes sure that trains don’t enter a ‘block’ (circuit) occupied by another train. If ATC is off and the trains are running manually, or if ATC fails, the secondary ATP system [supposedly] kicks-in and cuts power to a train entering an occupied block.

The problem is that both systems rely on a single, non-redundant network of track circuits. If a track circuit fails, both ‘layers’ of the protection system evaporate into nothingness. This is how the collision happened in June; both layers of the ‘fail-safe’ system got bad data from one bad track circuit and, because there was no independent backup, people died.

Read more . . .

‘Submission’ is a Dirty Word

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Writing for Catholic Exchange, Pat Gillespie tells a wonderful anecdote about three runaway teenagers that visited his family some years ago and, in a broader sense, how irrationally opposed our western society has become toward the ideas of authority and submission. We all expect others to behave in accordance with societal norms or social standards, and yet we chafe at the idea of following those very norms when we disagree with them for our own selfish reasons.

I’m as guilty as anybody in this respect. As my parents can surely attest, I began to test the authorities in my life early. I tested my family, I tested my schools, and I tested my governments. I still do some of this today in the form of respectful dissent and (in rare instances) civil disobedience. In my younger days, however, my disobedience (while sometimes valid and justified) was too often just my annoying the authorities for no other reason than that they were authorities. This is fairly normal and expected for teenagers, but many adults in western society seem to have never grown out of this phase. Gillespie summed it up in his piece, talking about the three runaways:

I’m sure they took for granted that the world would continue to function according to laws and standards that make community and social life possible, but I don’t think they saw any personal responsibility in making that work by any submission to authority on their part.

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.