Jeffrey Yasskin’s blog

This is what this season is all about.

I don’t believe in accidents. We’re here for a reason. The Great Spirit took the gumbo from New Orleans and poured it all over Texas.

Cyril Neville, New Orleans percussionist

For all the beer drinkers among my readers: the company that makes Fat Tire lives sustainably.

[via Shelley]

You can buy yourself a place in one of sixteen authors’ next books. The auctions were suggested by Neil Gaiman and benefit The First Amendment Project.

This war has a popular label and a political label, but it’s not accurate. Terrorism is a means of power projection, it’s a weapon, it’s a tool of war. Think of it as our enemy’s stealth bomber. This is no more a war on terrorism than World War II was a war on submarines. It’s not just semantics … Words have meaning. And these words are leading us down to the wrong concept.

Lieutenant General Wallace Gregson, quoted by Britt Blaser

Wow, this guy’s good.

One of the things I routinely tell people is that if it’s in the news, don’t worry about it. By definition, “news” means that it hardly ever happens. If a risk is in the news, then it’s probably not worth worrying about. When something is no longer reported — automobile deaths, domestic violence — when it’s so common that it’s not news, then you should start worrying.

Bruce Schneier in Should Terrorism be Reported in the News?

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.

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.

From Neil Gaiman’s blog: http://www.theliteracysite.com/. Go give books to poor children.

To all you English teachers out there.

Every person I’ve talked to while writing this essay seems to have felt the same about English classes– that the whole process seemed pointless. But none of us had the balls at the time to hypothesize that it was, in fact, all a mistake. We all thought there was just something we weren’t getting.

The Age of the Essay by Paul Graham

That’s Digital Restrictions/Rights Management for the uncultured among you. Cory Doctorow of the EFF gave this presentation to Microsoft, of all companies. It’s the best argument against DRM that I’ve seen. And it’s public domain, so go ahead and copy it or pieces of it into your own rants.

The CSS Zen Garden is an illustration of how much can be done with just CSS. The HTML on the site is identical for all of the designs; only the CSS changes. Some of the designs are surprisingly pretty, so go visit even if you’re not a web designer.

I even hear that mnemonic looks different in IE and Mozilla/Opera/Safari.