Scott Bidstrup
Scott Bidstrup (b. 12 January 1949 in Idaho Falls, Idaho) is an anti-capitalist, a skeptic and a self-taught electronics specialist who has written essays on a range of topics. The youngest of four siblings, he is a self-declared gay activist who suffers from Asperger's syndrome. Bidstrup currently lives in Tobosi, El Guarco, Costa Rica.
Education
As a teenager he built a shortwave receiver and repaired another; later he built radio bradcast transmitters. He also worked evenings and Saturday mornings at his father's electrical shop, graduating in 1967 from Idaho Falls High School. He attended Ricks College in Rexburg, Idaho for a year, but his grades suffered in the second semester because of his extracurricular involvement in a campus broadcasting station.
In May 1968 he moved to Egegik, Alaska to work for Alaska Packers' salmon cannery, refuelling fishing boats and doing bookkeeping, while installing and maintaining boat radios in his spare time. The work was lucrative, and he returned to his Alaskan summer job for three more years while attending Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. During his last two summers in Alaska, he was hired as a full-Time Radio operator, eventually earning a United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Conditional amateur radio licence, which at that time required proficiency of 13 words per minute in Morse Code. In 1971 he received his B.A. in communications from BYU.
Essays
In "The Best Government Money Can Rent" he has denounced the United States Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to spend any amount of money they like on political campaigns as "the final triumph of ideology over reason and pragmatic reality." Other essays attempt to counter the official United States pro-Israeli position in the Israel-Palestine conflict, construct a history of homophobia, explore the problem of climate change, skeptically analyze Christian fundamentalism and allege that much of the ideology of Conservatism is grounded in self-interest rather than egalitarianism.