Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Virginia Major Party Primaries, 2025

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Seal of Virginia
Seal of Virginia

Virginia’s major party primary elections will be held on Tuesday, June 17, 2025. Off on a Tangent makes recommendations to primary voters in state- and federal-level races in Virginia and local elections in Loudoun County whenever nominees will be chosen through a contested public primary.

Political parties are private organizations that should have no formal standing in our political system. As private organizations, they are free to choose their nominees through whichever process they wish—common methods include conventions, caucuses, private “firehouse primaries,” and direct nomination by party leaders. But in Virginia and many other states, the Democratic and Republican party duopoly has given itself permission to hold public primaries at the taxpayers’ expense.

Public primaries in Virginia are “open.” Any registered voter may vote in any single party primary held on a given day, regardless of whether they are an actual member of that party.

Read more . . .

South Riding Board of Directors, 2025

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South Riding Proprietary

The South Riding Proprietary is a homeowners’ association (HOA) that acts as a de facto local government for the South Riding community in Loudoun County, Virginia. At the proprietary’s annual meeting on May 20, 2025, two of the seven seats on the Board of Directors are up for election.

Members of the board serve three year terms. South Riding property owners may cast their votes by attending the annual meeting in person, by mailing a paper ballot, or with a mailed PIN on Votegrity.net. The two directors at the end of their terms are Michael Hardin and Steve Pasquale. Both are seeking reelection and there are no other candidates. Property owners may vote for up to two candidates, and have the option to write-in other candidates.

Under the Proprietary’s bylaws, at least ten percent of South Riding property owners must cast votes to achieve a quorum. If a quorum is not achieved, the Board of Directors cannot seat new members or perform work, and the meeting will be recessed for up to a month. When the meeting resumes, the quorum requirement drops to five percent. If a quorum is still not achieved, the meeting may be repeatedly recessed and resumed until reaching the five percent threshold.

Read more . . .

Copilot Clippy
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After a recent update to Microsoft Word, a window popped up to tell me about the Copilot “AI” feature. Of course, Copilot is not an artificial intelligence . . . it’s a large-language model text generator. These novelty chat-bots have their place, but they are not intelligent. They are clever fakes.

Regardless, Microsoft added a big Copilot button to my “ribbon” menu, a Copilot chat sidebar, and empty documents have some helpful placeholder text now: “Select the icon or press Alt + i to draft with Copilot.” These “features” are easy enough to disable, thank God. I want my word processor to leave me alone and let me write.

I have a tendency to be an old curmudgeon; I’m told that I was born eighty-five years old. Amid my griping about having another feature to turn off every time I install Word on a new machine, it occurred to me that maybe I am being too judgmental. When Microsoft introduced the “ribbon” menu system, I criticized that too. It doesn’t bother me anymore.

But does that mean the “ribbon” was an improvement, or did I just get used to it?

Read more . . .

Pope Francis Dead at 88

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Updated
Pope Francis (Quirinale.it)
Pope Francis (Quirinale.it)

Pope Francis has died. He was eighty-eight years old.

Francis was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 1936 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His father was an Italian immigrant to Argentina whose family had escaped fascism under Benito Mussolini; his mother was born in Argentina and was also of Italian descent. Bergoglio was the eldest of five children, and initially pursued a career in chemistry. When he was twenty-one years old, he contracted life-threatening pneumonia with cysts and had a portion of one of his lungs removed.

After three years of study at the Immaculate Conception Seminary in Buenos Aires, Bergoglio entered the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) as a novice in 1958. In 1960 he made his vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to formally enter the order as a religious brother. He taught literature and psychology at the College of the Immaculate Conception in Santa Fe, Argentina, and later at the College of the Savior, a private primary and secondary school in Buenos Aires.

Bergoglio entered theological study at San Miguel, a Jesuit seminary in Buenos Aires, in 1967. He was ordained a priest in 1969, then completed his Jesuit spiritual training and took his final vow of obedience to mission in 1973. He was the provincial superior of the Jesuits in Argentina from 1973 to 1979, rector of the Philosophical and Theological Faculty of San Miguel—one of his alma maters—from 1980 to 1986, and confessor and spiritual director to Jesuits in Córdoba, Argentina, from 1986 to 1992.

Read more . . .

April Fools: Optical Equity Initiative

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For April Fools Day 2025, Off on a Tangent was a little blurry. Here’s why:

I’m pleased to announce that Off on a Tangent will be participating in an important new program: the Optical Equity Initiative.

About sixty percent of Americans are forced to wear glasses or contacts. This is a troubling example of deeply ingrained ideas of optonormity. By medicalizing people with nearer or farther focus points as “myopic” and “hypermetropic,” and people with other special eye abilities as “astigmatic” or “presbyopic,” we reinforce these damaging attitudes.

It’s critical that we begin to address these inequities. Effective immediately, Off on a Tangent will be presented with an optical offset. All viewers—cis-focus or not—will have a similar experience. If you wish, you can adjust your virtual glasses using the buttons at the bottom of the screen.

You can see how it looked here.

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.