Grouchy Blogger Civil Liberties update

I have been deliberately not blogging about matters political, including our charming Attorney General Singin’ John Ashcroft, for a while. But the latest report in the Washington Post, that Ashcroft urged his staffers to deny FOIA requests, tipped me over the edge.

The story is bad enough. The Justice Department has in the past withheld data that it knew made its positions untenable, including enforcement of gun laws (Reno) and failure to prosecute terrorism cases (Ashcroft); now it’s implicitly promising its staffers that they will be shielded and supported if they decide to deny a FOIA request in part or whole, thus institutionalizing the denial of access to data that could prove it acted in error. The subtext is scarier. It is emblematic of the Bush Administration’s, and Ashcroft’s blatant disregard of the laws and Constitutional framing that they have sworn to uphold that Ashcroft has reversed the direction of the previous administration to consider all government information public unless there is a pressing need to keep the information secret. The author of the article, James Grimaldi, writes, “Justice Department bureaucrats, with Ashcroft’s blessing, are trying to muzzle the watchdogs.” It seems to me that that’s not all they’re trying to do.

John Ashcroft is conspiring, with the complicity of the Bush administration, to draw a dark cloak of secrecy over the workings of government. At the same time, he is lifting all the restraints that have kept our government from trampling the rights that our founding fathers fought for.

Now is the time to act. Write your congressman. If they’re a member of the Republican majority, maybe they’ll stop serving in Bush’s chorus long enough to think about what they’re signing up the country for. If they’re in the Democratic minority, maybe they’ll have an awakening of conscience and start acting like a principled, visionary opposition party.

But act. Before Bush and Ashcroft succeed in making dissent illegal.

Payback will be hell

Good morning! Thirty years is far too short a time with all of you. As Bilbo Baggins once said, I feel I know less than half of you as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as I should.

And thanks to Esta for the technicolor reminder of my mortality. Never fear, dear, I’ve got September 20 circled in my calendar for a few years hence…

Holiday beginning: exhaustion sets in

We started our holiday decorating process last Wednesday with our first trip (but not our last) to Molbak’s for poinsettias (there are 39 different varieties of the plant there right now). Saturday I spent mostly cleaning up our garage, unboxing a few things that were still in boxes, and getting our second TV in the Sun Room set up.

This afternoon Lisa and I went back to Ikea (we were there yesterday as well to get some holiday decorations and a small chair for the Sun Room) to get some shelves. On the way back we stopped at Home Depot and got a six foot “Noble Fir” Christmas tree. We bought it on faith—it was still strapped tight—but we assumed (correctly) that it was in pretty good shape. And with the straps on, I was able to take down the right half of the Passat’s back seat, lay out one of our much abused painter’s cloths, and slide the tree right in.

Getting the tree into the house was a slightly different story. I ran out of upper body strength and patience half way through sawing the bottom 1/2 inch off the tree out in our garage. Fortunately a hammer and chisel helped get the last bit off. After a lot of swearing, vacuuming and sweeping, the tree was in the stand and the needles were out of the garage.

At this point we stopped for dinner, which was a mistake in retrospect. We ran out of steam. I got one string of lights partway on the tree and then stopped. Lisa went to bed and I will follow her once I finish writing.

This is the first Christmas tree we’ve had for at least three years, since the last (or next-to-last) year we were in McLean, Virginia. I think that once we finish setting it up we’ll have succeeded in claiming another piece of this house as our home. Unfortunately that’ll have to wait until Tuesday; I have practice tomorrow night.

I’m quite tired after four days of “rest and relaxation.” I suppose this is what aging does to you. (I’ll be thirty tomorrow.)

Ryan White HIV Program at UVA

The UVA Ryan White HIV Program was established in 1986 and has received a Ryan White Title IIIb grant to “expand and enhance HIV primary care in… the western half of Virginia.”This page at UVA discusses the program and has an enormous list of links on HIV and AIDS resources in Virginia and worldwide.

Figures of concern

The figures in the AIDS epidemic are repeated so often they tend to numb the viewer. Here are a collection of figures, including statistics with and without corroboration, that I present as a kind of collage of the impact of the epidemic (original sources hyperlinked):

  • “Last year, 2.3 million people died of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.”
  • “If AIDS continues unabated for the next 20 years, the worldwide death toll will reach 68 million.”
  • “Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, some 11 million children have been orphaned by AIDS.”
  • Most of the children in the world under 15 years old living with HIV or AIDS are in sub-Saharan Africa: 2.4 million, compared with 300,000 in the rest of the world. That number will continue to grow: in 2001, 700,000 new infections occurred in children under 15, compared with 100,000 in the rest of the world.
  • In the US, the CDC says 816,149 total cases of AIDS have been reported, with 467,910 deaths, including 5,257 children under age 15. New York City leads US metropolitan areas with 126,237 cumulative cases of AIDS, followed by LA, San Francisco, Miami, Washington DC, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, Newark, and Atlanta.
  • The Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) reports that 42 million people are estimated to be living with HIV/AIDS worldwide today. The rate of spread of the disease continues to outpace the death rate of the disease, with five million new infections and 3.1 million deaths in 2002.

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PATH developing a better female condom

Following a reference in the Seattle Times photoessay, I found out about PATH, the Seattle-based Program for Appropriate Technology in Health. Among many other technologies for diagnosis, immunization, and prevention, PATH is working on improving the vaginal condom (PDF). This is critical to preventing the spread of AIDS in countries like Zimbabwe where the high cultural emphasis placed on male virility slows the spread of male condom use.

Seattle Times: special report on AIDS

The Times has an enormous special section on AIDS today. Highlights include a pictorial essay with audio commentary about conditions in Zimbabwe. Interesting captions such as this one:

Women have little control over sexual politics in the sub-Sahara, where men pay a lobola, or bride price, to marry them, and then set the rules. The traditional male condom has proved a weak weapon in the fight against AIDS, so global health workers promote women-controlled devices, such as the female condom touted on this billboard.

Seattle Times: “Personal sorrow, global havoc”

Seattle Times: “AIDS: Personal sorrow, global havoc.” The Times runs an editorial from the newspaper’s perspective that’s crying out for hyperlinks (I really would like a source for the factoid that “by the end of 2002, 42 million men, women, and children will be living with incurable HIV/AIDS,” not to mention demographic breakdowns). But the paper does lay some blame squarely at the feet of our squeamish administration:

Medicine to fight mother-to-child transmission of the disease is available, but is not getting to where the help is needed. Programs to promote safe sex run into squeamishness in the Bush administration about advocating distribution of condoms.

Sexual abstinence is one message, but it flies in the face of reality, especially in destitute countries where selling sex equates to survival, not a moral dilemma. Women suffer half the cases of HIV/AIDS, with devastating effects on families.

Day after Thanksgiving

We had a great Thanksgiving yesterday with Ed and Gina. This was the first time they had a dinner party in their new house, and we were happy to contribute. We did the first course, Risotto a la Milanese, which is a basic white risotto with pancetta and saffron. We then kicked around pitching in here and there on the turkey and other food while drinking wine, which means that the rest of the afternoon while we waited for the food to finish was just a happy warm feeling.

Almost forgot to mention: Ed is a computer monster. With something like six PC towers around, two PS2s, two PS1s, an XBox, a Dreamcast, a Saturn, and shelves full of old Intellivisions, Colecovisions, 2600s, and an Apple IIe for good measure, the place is full of gear. Plus software. Suddenly my 900 CDs don’t seem so bad.

Thanksblogging

Esta is doing her Thanksgiving blogging a day early, and gives thanks for a long list, including the keiretsu, our Pop-pop, and Parliament, among others.

I’m thankful too, for:

  • My loving and patient wife Lisa;
  • Esta: her encouragement, wit, and blog;
  • My Pop-pop, for his enduring humor, strength, and everything else;
  • My parents and in-laws for their love and support;
  • Our house and the fact that it’s still standing;
  • All my friends from Sloan;
  • Greg and Craig, for wit, insight, and steadfast friendship;
  • Tony Pierce, Doc Searls, and Moxie for good reading;
  • Brent Simmons, for good reading, good software, and net.friendship;
  • Dave Winer, for the above, plus good platforms and for surviving his surgery to blog, blog again;
  • Sonic Youth and Arvo Pärt, for transcendence;
  • the Cascadian Chorale and the E-52s, for the opportunity to perform;
  • My readers, for the feedback, the sympathy, and the flow;
  • This weblog, for helping me keep my sanity.

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Type lust

I think I might have to add another category or else transform “Web Design” into just “Design&#8221. As a result of finding typographi.ca, I’m learning about all sorts of type things that I had left behind over the past few years.

I used to fancy myself a typographer, of the digital sort anyway, because unlike my peers in college publications I understood kerning and leading and could identify a few hundred typefaces by sight. (This led to some fun party games with Tyler Magill. One of us would come up with a totally bizarre phrase and the other would have to identify the best way to set it in type. Having an actual computer or type specimen sheet around was cheating…) But somewhere along the way my type lust grew dormant. Not extinct–the fact that I do curly quotes by hand in my HTML should testify to that. Just not active.

Today it’s fully reactivated after looking through the catalog at Fountain. Not only do they have some of the best traditional serifed text faces I’ve seen, including Montrachet, Monteverdi, and Baskerville 1757, but they also have some killer display faces, including the Ketchupa, Mustardo, and Mayo trio. Plus of course free downloads…

my font lust

This is a sample using Fountain’s interactive typesetter. It was set in Montrachet Italic.

Playing with CSS again

It’s always driven me nuts that the month links didn’t line up properly underneath my site calendar. I figured it had something to do with the way I had defined the div around the calendar, but I didn’t have time to look at it until this afternoon.

The problem was that the div was defined to start at 70% of the page width and take the rest of the space on the page, but the content was centered in the div. For some reason, the table had a different center than the line following it, which caused the month links to show up askew.

Easy fix, right? Just recode the width of the calendar div. Except that it turns out not to be simple with CSS. Basically, what I want the calendar to do is this:

  • Hug the right hand side of the page, most of the time
  • If the window is too narrow to put the calendar to the right of the logo and still be visible, either:
    • wrap the calendar to the next line, or
    • scroll the calendar off the page to the right.

I don’t know a way to manage all of those things at once. I currently have changed it so that the calendar hugs the right hand side (for what it’s worth, I changed the width to 190px, the same as the min-width; eliminated the left attribute; and set the right attribute to 0). But if you shrink the browser window too far, the calendar overprints the site logo.

Actually, this isn’t the biggest problem, since the content starts to run into the nav bar before this happens… This is all because there’s no concept of “min-left,” the minimum left distance from the left hand bounding box that an element needs to respect.

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