Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Obama Cabinet Beginning to Take Shape

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President-elect Barack Obama (D) is beginning to make his selections for his cabinet. The cabinet is a group of senior presidential appointees who head various government departments, and is the premeire ‘advisory board’ providing guidance to the president, and most are in the presidential line of succession.

The cabinet is currently made up of the Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of Defense, Attorney General, Secretary of the Interior, Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of Commerce, Secretary of Labor, Secretary of Health & Human Services, Secretary of Housing & Urban Development, Secretary of Transportation, Secretary of Energy, Secretary of Education, Secretary of Veterans Affairs, and the Secretary of Homeland Security. In addition, several other administrative officers are considered ‘cabinet level’ including the Vice president and the White House Chief of Staff.

Obama has thus-far officially announced his intent to appoint Eric Holder, former Deputy Attorney General under President Clinton (D), as Attorney General and Tom Daschle, former Democratic Senate Majority Leader, as Secretary of Health & Human Services. In addition, media speculation indicates that Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) will be Obama’s appointment as Secretary of State and Timothy Geithner, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as Secretary of the Treasury.

Violence Happens Everywhere

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A few people have asked me why I’m a gun owner. I live in a safe, suburban, middle-class neighborhood; I stay aware of my surroundings and alert; and I don’t engage in any behaviors (drugs, crime, etc.) that might put me at a greater risk of being victimized. I am a practicing Christian, which is clearly a non-violent religion (when practiced correctly). The county I live in has an active police force and a very low crime rate.

Well, there are a few reasons. One, however, stands out: violence happens everywhere.

That safe, suburban, middle-class neighborhood I live in just made the local news because a woman who lived nearby—in a building I can bike to in about five minutes—was found murdered less than a mile from her home. Based on preliminary evidence, it would appear she was assaulted in her apartment parking lot (motive unknown), stabbed to death, and then driven a short distance away to be left dead in her own car.

Self defense is a right and, indeed, a responsibility. Erika Yancey, the woman who was murdered, apparently tried to defend herself as best as she could as an unarmed citizen. There is evidence that she fought back but, sadly, it was not enough. Perhaps, had she been armed with a gun or even a readily accessible knife, she might still be alive today. (As an aside, it is worth noting that—being committed with a knife—this murder could never have been prevented with gun control, even if criminals were to start caring about gun laws.)

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The Nuclear Genie

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You can’t put the Genie back in the bottle. The twentieth century brought about a weapon of such magnitude that we now, for the first time in the history of our existence as a species, have the power to utterly destroy our entire planet. I’m not talking about fossil fuels, though their use ranks with many as a greater danger, but rather nuclear technology.

Of course, like many things, nuclear technology is in-and-of itself neutral. It can be used for good, providing clean energy to the entire world (solving Al Gore’s problem). It can also be used for evil, the creation and use of weapons with enough power to make the mind boggle. The United States is the only country in the world ever to have used nuclear weapons in war, and we have only done it twice during a single conflict (World War II). Thankfully, the nuclear powers of the world have thus far used discretion.

I can accept the existence our nuclear arsenal, since we are extremely unlikely to ever use it except in response to somebody else using nuclear weapons on us. I don’t mind Israel, for example, having nuclear weapons either, since they are clearly only going to use them as deterrent and defensive weapons. I’m a little more wary of Russia, China, India, and Pakistan having them, but I’m not too worried since their leaders have shown enough sense not to commit suicide (the doctrine of ‘Mutually Assured Destruction‘ is, indeed, still alive). India, Pakistan, and Russia are, at least nominally, democracies like Israel, the United States, and the nuclear-capable European powers. China is non-democratic, but its leaders for the last several decades have limited themselves to only committing evil acts against its own citizens.

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Beggars Can’t Be Choosers

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I try to be a generous person. Usually, when I have something that has any value that I am replacing, I’m happy to give the old thing away either for free (usually) or at the same cost I paid to refurbish it (like, if I upped an old computers’ memory for $50 to make it more capable for whoever receives it, I would sell it for zero profit at $50). Melissa and I have been very blessed, and it’s just a small way that we can share our blessings with others instead of selling our old things on eBay to try and make some money.

Since we’re nerds and like to stay pretty cutting-edge with our technology as much as our finances allow, most of what we end up giving away is computer and electronic stuff. Old cell phones (excluding PDA phones) go to a battered women’s shelter that gives them to women in need. Old monitors, computers, and useful peripherals either go to Western Fairfax Christian Ministries or other local charities.

But occasionally we have other things to give away too. I’m in the process of buying a desk from a friend of mine which is much better suited for my work environment than the desks I had before, so I suddenly had two old desks that I didn’t need anymore. One of them was very old and beat-up, but still solid and perfectly useful (and perhaps even worth something, if it had been restored). The other was inexpensive and slightly beat up, but also perfectly usable. We were in a similar situation shortly after our wedding in 2005 when we received money from a relative to buy a couch, so we had a love-seat we’d been using as a couch to give away.

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‘Global Warming’ Through Bad Math and Bad Pipes

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I haven’t spent a lot of time on the whole ‘Global Warming’ thing except when really major things happen (like NASA grossly miscalculating several years of climate data). The 0.7 degree Celsius increase in mean temperature over the last fifty years hardly strikes me as conclusive evidence of anything. It definitely doesn’t make me feel like the world is falling apart or like Al Gore deserves a Nobel Prize for complaining about it. Even if you accept the argument that Earth is getting ‘warm’, which is a pretty goofy claim when we only have about 100 years of reliable temperature records on which to form a baseline, the evidence that it’s because of anything we did is paper-thin and circumstantial.

Anyway, NASA is at it again with their recent announcement that October was the warmest October on record. The problem is that much of the data from Russia was simply a repeat of the August numbers which, as you might expect, are supposed to be warmer than October’s numbers. Upon correcting the data, it turns out that October was stunningly normal.

Meteorologist Anthony Watts’s excellent ‘Watts Up With That‘ blog deserves much of the credit for uncovering this error (the same blogger who discovered NASA’s earlier miscalculations). Watts also asks why the NASA mean temperature graph has changed fairly significantly over the last ten years with little/no explanation, and independently researches weather stations and uncovers possible explanations for temperature ‘anomalies’ (like thermometers sitting close to air conditioner exhaust ports, which would erroneously skew the data warmer).

One bit I found interesting relates to the anamolous Russian numbers—many Russian cities have inefficient above-ground steam systems from the Soviet era, and these uninsulated above-ground pipes could possibly skew temperatures from entire cities. Even if the impact is more limited, it could certainly affect temperature readings at weather stations mere yards away. That’s the perennial problem with trying to get accurate temperature readings from manned outposts and populated areas in the arctic: humans bring heat with them for their own comfort, and a temperature reading at a manned outpost does not necessarily reflect the ‘real’ climate of the region.

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.