Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent
Politics
Faith
Liberty
AdamG2016, CC BY-SA 4.0
Posted

The 2020 presidential election was a strange and controversial moment in American history. Then-incumbent President Donald Trump (R) was challenged by former Vice President Joe Biden (D), and the campaign took place amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the absurd overreaction to it, widespread race riots, on-the-fly changes to election rules and norms, and generally enflamed political tensions.

Biden won a 306-232 electoral majority; Trump and many of his supporters claim the election was stolen.

In my 2024 review of Trump’s election-related federal indictments, I included a background analysis of the 2020 election. Because of the pandemic, early and absentee voting was greatly expanded—about 70% of the electorate voted before the nominal election day. As I said in my analysis, “it is obviously easier to cheat when identities are not verified and there is not even a need to be physically present in a public space to fill out a ballot,” but “there is no evidence that there was enough of this fraud to change the outcome of the race.”

Read more . . .

Virginia General Assembly, Special, 2026

Posted

A special election will be held on January 6, 2026, to fill vacancies in the 15th District in the Virginia Senate and the 77th District in the Virginia House of Delegates. I make the following recommendations in those races:

  • Senate, 15th District: Former Virginia Senator Ghazala Hashmi (D-15th) resigned following her election as Lieutenant Governor of Virginia. Former Virginia Delegate Mike Jones (D-77th) and John Thomas (R) stand as candidates to replace her. I recommend voting for John Thomas.
  • House, 77th District: Former Virginia Delegate Mike Jones (D-77th) resigned to seek election to the Virginia Senate. Charlie Schmidt (D) and Richard Stonage (R) stand as candidates to replace him. I recommend voting for Richard Stonage.

Another special election will be held on January 13, 2026, to fill vacancies in the 11th District and 23rd District in the Virginia House of Delegates. I make the following recommendations in those races:

  • House, 11th District: Former Virginia Delegate David Bulova (D-11th) resigned following his nomination to serve as Virginia Secretary of Natural and Historic Resources. Gretchen Bulova (D) and Adam Wise (R) stand as candidates to replace him. I recommend voting for Adam Wise.
  • House, 23rd District: Former Virginia Delegate Candi King (D-23rd) resigned following her nomination to serve as Virginia Secretary of the Commonwealth. Margaret Franklin (D) and Verndell Robinson (R) stand as candidates to replace her. I recommend voting for Verndell Robinson.
Akela999 (Pixabay)
Posted

I live in Loudoun County, Virginia—the data center capital of the world. Many of the online services and websites you use every day come to you from blocky, windowless buildings somewhere within a fifteen-mile radius of my house. The majority of them are here in Loudoun, but they are starting to pop-up in neighboring Fairfax, Prince William, and Fauquier counties too.

For security reasons, the service providers don’t offer concrete details about what systems live in which buildings. But we know the default region for new “cloud” services on Amazon AWS is US East (N. Virginia) (us-east-1), which is probably in Ashburn. Customers on Google Cloud who choose that service’s us-east4 region and Microsoft Azure customers who choose East US (eastus) or East US 2 (eastus2) are utilizing centers near here. Countless smaller “cloud” providers, hosting services, telecom companies, and more, have their own data centers in the area too.

The closest data center to my home is Google ARA1A, about 1.5 miles away in Arcola. It’s a huge facility with tight security and, apparently, its own on-site power plant. On cold days you can see big columns of steam coming up from its cooling towers. It’s not pretty, but it’s not really an eyesore either. It’s just a big building, which isn’t that different from all the other blocky buildings—offices, townhomes, and strip-malls—that spring-up as the suburbs continue to expand outward from our nation’s capital. And I really don’t see how ARA1A is any worse to look at than the abandoned fields, derelict farmhouses, rotting barns, and mounds of dirt that were there before.

Read more . . .

Andrey Grushnikov (Pexels)
Posted

In a 1784 letter to the editor of the Journal de Paris, Benjamin Franklin, then the U.S. Minister to France, satirically suggested that Parisians could improve their productivity and save money on candle wax by synchronizing their lives more closely to the sun during the summer months.

According to Franklin’s calculations, if Paris woke up at sunrise “in the six months between the 20th of March and the 20th of September” the city could save 64 million pounds of candle wax per-year. To make this happen, he proposed, among other things, that “guards . . . be posted to stop all the coaches, etc., that would pass the streets after sunset, except those of physicians, surgeons, and midwives,” and that “as soon as the sun rises, let all the bells in every church be set ringing; and . . . let cannon be fired in every street, to wake the sluggards. . . .”

Somehow, Franklin’s silly joke about saving energy by shifting the working hours of the day eventually developed into the very serious (and very annoying) practice of arbitrarily changing time twice a year: Daylight Saving Time (DST). I don’t know if Franklin would have been amused or horrified to learn that his countrymen would eventually be dumb enough to do what he only joked about.

Anyway, since the purpose of DST is to save daylight, I thought it might be useful to calculate its effectiveness. I wrote a little Python script to iterate through 2025 day-by-day and figure out the sunrise and sunset times at Washington Dulles International Airport under three possible time systems: the current DST system with biannual time changes, permanent standard time with no time changes, and permanent DST with no time changes.

The results are stunning:

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.