Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Site Infrastructure Changes

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As I mentioned on Saturday, I spent part of my weekend making some pretty big adjustments to the back-end of the web site. Since I worked from home today (given the close-to-a-foot of snow), I had a little extra time today to wrap all that up. The infrastructure changes are finished, and everything seems to be working just fine. It should work exactly the same as it did before, but there’s always a chance that I screwed something up so please let me know if you find anything amiss.

The main idea was to simplify the management of Melissa’s and my various web sites by moving many of them to the same back-end system. That way, it’s much quicker and easier for me to apply updates, security fixes, and so on. I also took the opportunity to do a lot of general ‘house cleaning’ around the various MySQL databases and filesystem directories that make up this site and the various other sites we manage.

I hope you all are enjoying the snow!

Snow!? Yay!

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I have a really busy weekend currently in progress, so I’m sorry for the slight reduction in posting. Today was mostly a social day, with a couple different get-togethers with friends with some errands wedged in-between. Tomorrow is church and various other things, including some work on the back-end of my web site (I’m making some architectural changes; they should have no immediate effect on anything from your perspective). I might, if I have time, head over to the NRA range and do some shooting, but I’m guessing I won’t get to that until later in the week.

What I’m most excited about at the moment, however, is the weather. I love winter weather. I’m like a kid hoping he’ll get out of school, except . . . I’m not.

According to the weather men—who are occasionally right—we’re supposed to get snow and sleet this evening (check), followed by snow and sleet tomorrow afternoon turning into snow tomorrow night and into Monday. The current guidance is that we’ll get about 4-6″ of snow and sleet, making it the biggest snowstorm for the DC region this winter so far. It should be fun!

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The DC Representation Insanity Continues

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The Democratically-controlled Congress and President Barack Obama (D) are working to give the people of Washington, D.C. voting representation in Congress. I don’t really disagree with the idea of giving D.C. a representative. In fact, maybe we ought to go a step further and have some form of congressional representation for the people of all U.S. territories—Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, etc. I do believe that U.S. citizens should have a say in their government, even if they don’t happen to live in a state, and it’s a bit of an annoyance to me (as it has been to the people of these territories) that we disenfranchise U.S. citizens.

Having said all that, the U.S. Constitution is clear: the people of the several states, and only the people of the several states, can have voting representation in the United States House of Representatives. States and only states can have Senators. I’m getting really tired of saying it, but we can’t just ignore the Constitution when we don’t like what it says. If we don’t like what it says, we can amend it through one of the two amendment processes that are spelled out in Article 5 of the document itself.

When we wanted to grant the people of Washington, DC, three presidential electors, we passed the Twenty-Third Amendment to make it happen. We didn’t just pass a law and say, “Regardless of what the Constitution says, we’ll do this other thing instead.” That’s why it’s so bizarre to hear politicians rattle on and on under the delusion that they can decide to give D.C. a vote in Congress by simply passing a law. It will never pass the Supreme Court’s constitutional scrutiny. Period.

Almost two years ago, I wrote about three different perfectly-legal ways to get the people of D.C. represented in Congress. How about we do one of those? I vote for option #3, a retrocession of most/all of Washington, D.C. back to Maryland and an appropriate reapportionment and redistricting following the 2010 census. The people who currently live in D.C. would then be represented in the House and Senate by Maryland’s congressional delegation, and would also have a say in the selection of Maryland’s electors in the next presidential election. The end.

As for the other U.S. territories, I would like to see an amendment passed instructing Congress to apportion at least one seat in the House to ‘Other Territories’ (more if the total population of all non-state U.S. territories warrants more by the regular apportionment formulas). In other words, the combined U.S. territories would be treated as a phantom 51st state in the House of Representatives. I would also allot an equal number of electors in the Electoral College to this combined ‘Other Territories’, but they would have no representation in the Senate.

Ash Wednesday and Lent

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Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, the day that most of Christianity marked the beginning of the season of Lent. Lent traditionally lasts forty days (not including Sundays, so actually 46 days) and ends at Easter, when we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Lent is traditionally a season of repentance and represents the forty days that Jesus was tempted in the desert by Satan (Matthew 4:1-11). Christians who celebrate Lent and honestly try to live a Christian life generally mark the season with some form of  sacrifice and/or fasting, contemplation of their sin, and efforts to repent and live a more righteous life.

Churches that have retained elements of traditional liturgical practice—essentially Catholic, Anglican/Episcopal, Lutheran, and churches in the Wesleyan tradition (United Methodist, Wesleyan, Church of the Nazarene, African Methodist Episcopal, etc.)—typically kick-off Lent with an Ash Wednesday church service where the faithful are marked with an ashen cross on their forehead. You probably saw Christians walking around yesterday, especially if you were out in the evening, with a black smudge on their foreheads. This is an outward sign, at least in theory, of an individual’s faith and their personal efforts to rise above the sin in their lives. The ashes are usually made from the burnt palms from the preceding year’s Palm Sunday.

For me, this season is among the most touching in the Christian calendar. Some might look at the negative, criticizing the supposed focus on sinfulness, solemnity, fasting, and so on. I look at the positive. This season is about becoming better people and better followers of Christ, and it culminates in the central celebration of the liturgical year: Easter. We don’t give things up for Lent to look good to those around us (and, if we do, we’re doing it wrong). Churches like the Catholic Church have prescribed specific things—fasting on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday and abstinence from meat on Fridays—while other churches leave it entirely to the individual to ‘give something up’ if they choose, but in all cases the point is to remind you to personally examine who you are and whether you are living as you should and, if you aren’t, fix it. It’s not supposed to just make you feel bad, it’s supposed to motivate you to live better.

Christians everywhere should take this opportunity to self-examine through prayer and sacrifice. Even if you’re in a non-liturgical Christian community that does not formally celebrate Lent, it’s still a good time to individually join with the millions of others in the worldwide Christian community who participate in this important lead-up to Easter. The most important single element of Christianity is that—because of Jesus’s sacrifice—salvation is open to us all. We, however, have to accept it by striving to live the Christian life. Lent, through our own small sacrifices, is an opportunity for us to remind ourselves of this and start moving in the right direction.

God bless.

The ‘Designated Survivor’ Convoy?

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I have been watching President Obama’s (D) address, Governor Bobby Jindal’s (R-LA) response, and the various related proceedings on television since 9pm. About 11:05pm, I heard an impressive commotion outside. It sounded like helicopters, much like those that pass by regularly on police patrol or hospital flights, but they were much louder than usual.

I headed outside to my porch to see what was happening and, squinting into the night sky, made out the outlines of several virtually-unlit helicopters flying low. I believe they were UH-60 Blackhawks, but I may be mistaken. It was dark  and they didn’t have hardly any lights on so my military aircraft identification skills were at a major disadvantage. I am sure there were at least three individual aircraft, and I think there were probably five or six total. As a military aircraft junkie, I thought it was pretty cool.

My suspicion? I think they were returning the designated survivors to Washington. The designated survivors, despite their unfortunate title, are an important part of the continuity planning of the government of the United States. During presidential inaugurations, State of the Union addresses, and other major events, most of our elected leaders are gathered together. Tonight, the President, Vice President, Speaker of the House, President Pro Tempore of the Senate, essentially the entire cabinet, and essentially the entire Congress all stood together in a single building. If, God forbid, the Capitol had been subject to a terrorist attack or natural disaster, there is a small possibility that the government would lack any legitimate successors to the office of president and we would end up with a dangerous power vacuum.

To prevent this unlikely calamity, authorities have long ensured that at least one member of the cabinet eligible to be president is at a remote, undisclosed location during these kinds of major events. Since the 9/11/2001 attacks, several members of Congress have been similarly sequestered. If the Capitol had collapsed tonight killing everybody inside, Attorney General Eric Holder (tonight’s designated survivor) would become president and several yet-unnamed members of Congress would form an interim legislature until the government could be reconstituted.

Interestingly, the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center—a facility known to be an important part of the government’s continuity plans—is located in Blumont, Virginia. If you draw a straight line from Mount Weather to Washington, DC, you might notice it passes right over my home town of Herndon. Coincidence?

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.