Jeffrey Yasskin’s blog

Julian Sanchez has an article in Reason called The True Spirit of Xmas: How 4/5 of the country became an oppressed minority about the people who see every attempt at tolerance as an attack on Christianity. It’s worth reading, both to see why these people are wrong and to get ammunition for arguments against them.

Given a set of RDF triples, there must be a way to present the data in them. Of course, one can write a program to extract the data, but a DSL is likely to be more efficient. A very good DSL for transforming and presenting XML already exists, XSLT. Its output format is XML, which is what I want. Its input is represented as trees, which are very similar to RDF’s graphs. Thus, I think the RDF presentation language should be built as extensions to XSLT. In particular, I want to design a set of extensions to XPath that will massage an RDF graph into a tree-ish structure that XSLT can understand. I call these extensions RDFPath.

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Howard Dean has clearly been reading George Lakoff. He gave a speech at George Washington University which lays out his vision for the future of the Democratic Party. He’s clearly tired of people trying to push the party right. Instead, he wants the Democratic Party to start framing the debate. It’s worth reading.

Apparently, the U.S. has been eliminating those who count civilian deaths in Iraq. I can understand why American generals would want to hide the number of civilian casualties: large numbers of dead innocents enrages the Iraqi resistance and erodes support for the war at home. They see the suppression as justified because what casualties there are are unavoidable (and they do deserve credit for keeping this number as low as it is), and because the rest of the world just doesn’t understand the realities of war. But they’re wrong.

The world has a right to know what’s going on in Iraq. If we have to lie to justify the war, the war is not justified. Now, the mere existence of civilian casualties does not unjustify the war. World War II had millions of civilian casualties, and nobody considers it unjustified. But they can certainly contribute to the feeling that a war simply isn’t worth it. If the Iraq War has reached this point, the world deserves to know.

However, even if their end is justified, nothing justifies the means they’re using. Nothing justifies targeting civilians. Killing journalists is bad enough. Invading hospitals and bombing clinics is appalling.

By using these tactics, the United States continues to sacrifice its moral authority.

[spotter=Danny Ayers]

Well, I’ve started a blog to replace the old one on LiveJournal. Several of my old posts have migrated over here. This blog runs on WordPress, a free blogging platform. I’m still working out some kinks, so if you see anything that seems wrong or broken, please tell me.

I had two requests, now just one:

• I’m looking for a good title as Jeffrey Yasskin’s blog is a little boring. Suggestions in the comments for this post please.
• rakksi was kind enough to make a feed at jyasskin. Unfortunately, it got the wrong time stamp for all of the posts I’ve moved over there, so they’re all at the top of my friends page right now. You may want to wait a bit before adding the new feed to your friends list.