Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

They’re Paying Attention Now

Posted

Always-interesting Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal about the current state of the Presidential race and why it’s suddenly starting to look like a close contest between Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) when—earlier—it had looked like an Obama-blowout was in the making.

Noonan’s central thesis is that people are just now starting to look at the race, and so things are just beginning to settle enough that the polling reflects (to a point) how people will actually be voting in November. The ‘paying attention’ aspect of Presidential races seems to get short shrift by the media, but what happens before the moment people start paying attention is essentially inconsequential. Even what’s happening now, though more relevant to November’s outcome than what has happened previous, isn’t that important—most people decide who they will vote for in the final month before the election.

The current state of the election could not have been predicted last fall—a mere nine months ago. While the Democratic campaign had already settled into an Obama vs. Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) race, it could easily have gone either way. The changes on the Republican side were more drastic, with the race appearing at the time to be between Governor Mitt Romney (R-MA), Mayor Rudy Guiliani (R-New York City), and Governor Mike Huckabee (R-AR). McCain, now the presumptive nominee, was being written off by the pundits as an also-ran with no chance of winning.

Read more . . .

Obama Selects Biden for VP

Posted

Presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama (IL) has selected Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) as his Vice Presidential pick. Obama, a first-term Senator who has been criticized for his relative lack of national political experience, has stayed true to political tradition in selecting Biden—a six-term Senator who is the fourth longest serving Democrat in the Senate. Vice Presidential picks are often selected in an effort to counteract the stongest opposition criticisms of the Presidential nominee.

Biden is Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and is generally regarded as one of the Democratic Party’s preeminent foreign policy experts and a ‘moderate liberal’ with regard to his general voting record. In 2002, Biden voted in favor of the ‘Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq’ bill, which passed with a wide bipartisan majority and granted President George W. Bush (R) legal authority to invade Iraq. Biden has since been critical of the administration’s prosecution of the war, and has opposed both continuation of the present approach and immediate withdrawal.

Joining with President Emeritus Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations, Biden has issued a ‘five point plan’ for Iraq that would reorganize the Iraqi government into a decentralized Federalist system of semi-autonomous regions, encourage increased investment from neighboring countries, and create a plan for withdrawal contingent on increasing political stability. It is unclear at this time if Senator Obama will endorse the Biden-Gelb plan for Iraq.

Innocent Until Proven Guilty

Posted

Few things annoy me more than when I get punished for the indiscretions of others. You might think this doesn’t happen often—and that’s true, if you’re talking about innocent people being charged and convicted for crimes—but there are plenty of non-criminal examples where you and I unjustly pay the price for the bad things that others do.

Minor examples occur every day. When I was a senior at Liberty High School in Bedford, Virginia, I and several of my friends liked to eat lunch outside when the weather was nice. The cafeteria had a set of tables and benches outside and eating outside was permitted. One day, a different group of students sitting at the other side of the patio had a food fight. Ultimately, maybe four or five kids threw food at one another and the commotion lasted less than five minutes. How did the administration handle this? Asst. Principal John Eggleston suspended outdoor eating privileges for all students during all lunch periods for at least two weeks. In addition to punishing the four or five students involved, Eggy punished me and a number of others too without cause.

You see this flawed disciplinary method constantly in schools. Some students smoke in the bathroom, so instead of enforcing the no-smoking rules for those kids everybody has to be granted teacher’s permission to pee. Some students go to inappropriate web sites, so instead of paying attention to the students’ Internet use they install flawed, automatic net-nanny software that interferes with all students’ Internet access. More examples abound.

Unfortunately, this goofiness is not limited to our lazily-mismanaged public schools.

Read more . . .

Taking a Sledge Hammer to MSIE

Posted

There are several ways technology moves forward.

  • The first way is for the incumbent (the current leaders in a market) to innovate their products forward on their own. Every company and organization that produces software should strive to do this, even if they happen to be a monopoly in their market, though many monopolistic or near-monopolistic companies have decided not to.
  • The second way is for a new product or many products to arrive on the scene that improves significantly upon the incumbent products. In a fully open market, these better products take over from the previous incumbents quickly. Quark XPress, formerly the industry standard for print layout, had grown stagnant and was quickly supplanted by the much-better Adobe InDesign—which has since become the industry standard. This is often the ideal course when the incumbents have ceased to move forward, but it is extremely difficult in a monopoly environment—witness Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari, which have dented Microsoft’s Internet Explorer market share in web browsing but have not yet supplanted it.
  • Finally, when the market leader/monopolist is stagnated and the competitive products have not completely taken hold, you can bring out the sledge hammer: hack and adjust the incumbent product to behave more like the better alternatives, rather than just letting the incumbent hold back market development.

Read more . . .

Quit Buggin’ Me

Posted

So, I was sitting in front of the television last night watching Cops or Forensic Files or something when the cat, ever busy amusing herself, began jumping up and down by our sliding glass door. After she did this a few times, I figured there must be something there getting her attention. Sure enough, this little green bug was livin’ it up on our back door.

We get interesting bugs hanging out on our back porch fairly regularly, though they’re usually cicadas or bees and other random things. This one struck me as interesting.

I am always amazed at the unique features that animals develop, especially insects. Some look like nuts, some like leaves, some like sticks, and this one—apparently—is modeled after baby corn. Awesome.

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.