Posts from — February 2009

I’ve been actively avoiding using the word ‘conservative’ lately, because I find it increasingly meaningless. The conservatism that I like is one of limited government and civil liberties (a necessary part of a limited government). Limited isn’t necessarily the same as small, it’s about power and scope, not size. Limited governments don’t detain citizens without habeas corpus, for example. They don’t wiretap citizens without court order. They work to restrain budgets in order to reduce taxation (as opposed to Cheney’s quote to Paul O’Neill “You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don’t matter”).

The majority of these things are not descriptive of the conservative movement we’ve seen in the last decade, so I’m just going to avoid using the word to avoid confusion wherever possible.

Fiscal conservatism seems to be coming back in style for Republicans now, though. According to the Washington Post:

[Republicans] are also preparing to use the ballooning deficit to renew their push for additional tax cuts.

I’m glad to see the deficit get more focus, as I think it’s a really important issue, but where were these guys during the Bush years? It seems rather ridiculous to start arguing this all of the sudden.

Also, the single-minded focus on tax cuts seems absurd, too. It reminds me of the school nurse in middle school. It seems like whatever the ailment, she would always give you some crackers. We would make jokes like:

“Nurse, I’ve been shot!”
“Here are a few crackers…”
“But I’m losing blood fast!”
“There’s another box of crackers in the back room if you need it”

The analogy isn’t perfect, but it keeps popping into my head.

Also, a ballooning deficit seems like an odd rationale for reducing the government’s income. Personally, I’m more interested in tax reform than reduction. Too much of the tax system taxes things we should encourage (like investment), while aiming to keep gas taxes low.

RNC Chair Michael Steele on civil unions:

“Do you favor civil unions?” Gallagher asked:

STEELE: No, no no. What would we do that for? What are you crazy? No. Why would we backslide on a core, founding value of this country. I mean this isn’t something that you just kind of like, “Oh well, today I feel, you know, loosey-goosey on marriage.” I mean, this is a foundational principle of this country. It is a foundational principle of organized society. It isn’t something that, you know, in America we decided, “Let’s make it between a man and a woman; oh well now, let’s change our mind and make it between anyone and anyone.” No.

(source)

It’s not like this is some fringe opinion or anything, but this doesn’t seem like a good long-term direction for the party.

A while ago, I wrote about a recipe I for homemade Samoas Girl Scout cookies. On Sunday, I finally made them, though I opted for the cookie bar variation, following Karen’s sister’s lead. I was really pleased by how well they came out, and other people who have tried them have liked them.

Here are some pictures:

A few lessons learned:

• The shortcake dough ended up being rather brittle, which was a problem when cutting the bars and when eating. I’m not sure if I overcooked or undercooked it.. maybe adding some more egg would help.
• After dipping the bars in chocolate, separating them from the parchment can be rather messy and problematic. I covered the tray and put it in the fridge for a little while, and they came off really easily.
• I had a few problems with the chocolate drizzle, but eventually got the hang of it. First, I didn’t have a piping bag (the thing that cooks use to put the non-proverbial icing on the cake). I took a ziplock bag with the corner snipped and put chocolate in there, and it worked well at first, but then problems arose. First, some shortcake bits had fell off into the chocolate, so it periodically clogged the tip. I melted some new chocolate and cut a new hole, but this time the hole was a bit too small, so it was really slow. Increasingly tired, I increased the pressure to the point where the whole bag exploded, deluging one of the bars. The third try worked just fine, though

I’ve updated the design of this blog, as previously discussed. I’ve completely removed the sidebars that used to dominate the page, leaving it with a much lighter, more content-focused feel. Here were my goals:

• Less useless stuff on the page. This mostly meant removing the sidebars.
• More space for content. The content area can now hold larger images and wider videos without breaking anything.
• Limit text column width. While I want to be able to fit big images in, I aimed for about 15 words per line in the post body. I can’t remember what the ideal is supposed to be, but this is close. I considered using multiple columns (like persistent.info) to accomplish this, but it didn’t really make much sense here.

Some other notable things:

• I gave increased prominence to my twitter status on the page. I wrote the widget-like stuff myself, using their javascript API (and it still needs some work).
• If you click on Archives at the top of the page, you get a sort of two-layer tag-cloud-style display of the years and months. It’s not hugely useful, but I think it’s a better visualization than just a list. The implementation is a bit of a hack- I take the archives list HTML output, parse it in javascript, then render the clouds on the fly.

Let me know if you have problems- there’s still a lot of stuff I want to fix, but it should be functional now.

Thanks a lot to Jon for all the feedback in the process- this would have been much worse without his input!

I’m going to be working on my blog design this weekend, so things may break intermittently.

A good interview with Nigel Inkster, former Assistant Chief and Director of Operations and Intelligence of MI6:

“We can’t kill or arrest our way out of this problem… we will never solve this issue and live in a terrorism-free world. It has to be managed.”

Inkster said that there was definitely a need for police and sometimes military action in fighting terrorism, but suggested that it was now widely acknowledged in the spook community that the Iraq invasion — and now the Israeli assault on Gaza – were definite factors in radicalisation of British domestic terrorists.

“A move away from the rhetoric of [Global War on Terror] will help,” he said, saying that the “more nuanced message” of the Obama administration was already showing results.

(via Schneier)

Calling this a War on Terror elevates thugs and maniacs to warriors, which is what they’re trying to be. I wish these sorts of quotes didn’t need to always come from former officials, though (see also).

This 11-minute video is the best description of the crisis that I’ve seen yet:

After watching this, I finally feel like I could describe it to someone else for the first time.

Science and politics don’t mix well.

(via)

Via Language Log:

Awesome!

(from mikero.com)