More Frites Please

Tonight I'm headed to one of my favourite London restaurants, Le Relais de Venise L'Entrecôte. It's a London offshoot of a Paris original that takes great pains to remain true to its Parisian roots.

The beauty is in its simplicity: no bookings, no menu, paper tablecloths and relatively low prices. Everybody eats the same thing: salad with secret mustard vinaigrette topped with walnuts followed by sirloin steak (cooked to order - go for rare, it's that good) and some of the best frites I've ever eaten. You do get a choice of deserts. I like the caramel ice cream.

It's no New York steakhouse, but of course it does not try to be one - nor should it. The atmosphere is thoroughly French and the steaks are excellent. The atmosphere is fun and informal, and the price is right.


I cannot wait for dinner!

New Look

I've decided it's time to refresh the look of the blog. I aimed for simple, clean and readable. Hopefully this layout comes close to this.

I even impressed myself a bit (well, a lot actually) by modifying some html code in the standard Blogger template to get what I wanted.

Anyway, I'll probably tinker with it a little over the next few days as I become accostomed to the new layout.

Comments welcome. Let me know what you think.

UPDATE: If the whole thing goes to hell, you'll know I touched one bit of html code to many.

Right Track

Limbaugh, Republicans and the tea-baggers can bloviate all they want, this graph tells the story in America today.

Attack of the Birds

Today I spent a few minutes watching the Fox & Friends morning show on Fox News (I know, I know). One story they reported was the FAA's release of airplane bird strike data for the past several years. Fox reported the "shocking" number of 89,000 bird strikes on planes in America since 1990.

I'll admit that's a surprising number, but given the context of how many airline and general aviation flights that have taken place in America during the past nineteen years, perhaps I would not characterise it as "shocking."

Anyway, that's forgivable, especially as we know Fox sensationalises everything. But the trio of twits that host this show really lost the plot when the woman anchor (don't know her name, Gretchen something) called the strikes "attacks."

Attacks?! Who is this woman, Tippi Hedren? I suspect we'll now hear calls for a "War on Birds." I'm sure my cats would enthusiastically support it.

Alfred Hitchcock would be proud.

Pro-Torture

New York Magazine lists the pro-torture brigade. No surprise, it's the usual suspects.

From what I can tell, the core of their argument is essentially "Well, it works!"

Everything that happened during the Cheney/Bush years comes down to this: In order to save our values and rights, we must destroy them.

Patriots one and all.

The Will of the People

This was the view on 1 February before many realised the extent to which torture was institutionalised. I wonder how much prevailing opinion has changed today.

Soul Searching

As usual, Krugman says what I think much for concisely and with more simple elegance than I ever could. In Friday's New York Times column, Reclaiming America's Soul, he makes a strong case for why not holding those accountable for making torture America's policy is an enormous cop-out.

Key paragraph:

The fact is that officials in the Bush administration instituted torture as a policy, misled the nation into a war they wanted to fight and, probably, tortured people in the attempt to extract “confessions” that would justify that war. And during the march to war, most of the political and media establishment looked the other way.

It’s hard, then, not to be cynical when some of the people who should have spoken out against what was happening, but didn’t, now declare that we should forget the whole era — for the sake of the country, of course.

The most telling phrase that sums up the essence of today's political reality:

Still, you might argue — and many do — that revisiting the abuses of the Bush years would undermine the political consensus the president needs to pursue his agenda.

But the answer to that is, what political consensus?

Of course, the Republican view of bi-partisan consensus is "do what we want, and if you don't do what we want, you're partisan." Will they ever wake up and realise that America doesn't like their policies. That's why we voted them out!

Report Card

I've been reading Robert Reich's blog and have come to appreciate how clued-in he his. He's published a report card on Obama's economic policies as the administration comes up on its first hundred days. The full post makes good reading, but summarised, his verdict is:

The 10-year budget gets an A. It's an extraordinary vision of what America can and should become, including universal health insurance and environmental protections against climate change.

The stimulus package gets a B. Good as far as it goes but doesn't go nearly far enough.

The last grade is for the bank bailouts. I give them an F. I'm a big fan of this administration, but I've got to be honest. The bailouts are failing.

I agree on all counts, especially his conclusion: good but not good enough.

Exposing Double Standards

Kevin Drum gets it right and Andrew Sullivan sums it up perfectly:

When the Republicans impeached a president for committing perjury in a civil suit, it was about the rule of law. But when it comes to holding a president accountable for war crimes in his public capacity, it is about criminalizing political differences. Do these people even hear themselves?

Although I understand the current US government's desire to "look forward," I find it difficult to accept the reluctance to rigorously investigate criminal acts of the previous government and prosecute if laws were broken. Sure, the wingnuts on the right will cry that these actions are politically motivated and divisive, but the US remains, as far as I can tell, a country of laws.

Hilzoy says it best:

If most people tried to make the case that prosecuting their criminal acts was just "looking backwards", or a sign that the prosecutor was motivated by a desire for retribution, they'd be laughed out of court. Imagine the likely reaction if your average crack dealer were to urge the judge not to dwell on the past. . .

The US legal system rests on the foundation that no one stands above the law, especially those who govern. The current government has an obligation to quash the Bush/Cheney paradigm of "it's legal if the president says it's legal" before the cracks in our Constitution cause it to crumble.

The President must lead the nation on this, but if he does not rise to the challenge, the responsibility falls to the congress to act quickly and decisively.

Has the USA truly become a banana republic?

Tweeting Cats

Cats on the internet are getting out of control. Not only have cutesy cat videos become ubiquitous, more cats are blogging (as you know, so is one of mine), and now they are Twittering.

The UK's Metro reports that an cat owner has rigged up his cat flap to report the comings and goings of his feline friends. The article says:

One clever cat owner has rigged up a cat flap that only allows authorised cats (identified using RFID tags) through, and sends real-time information about the cat-flap usage to the internet.

Naturally, this being 2009, the information is sent directly to Twitter, so the entire world can follow the cats' daily peregrinations via messages like 'Gus is out to sit on the porch' and 'Penny is in to vomit in owners shoes.'

Now, while I do admit that this is fairly ridiculous thing to do, I do think it's a pretty clever use of Twitter, which is a fairly ridiculous thing anyway.

Wait until Aggie hears about this! I'm worried that she'll start tweeting with the rest of the kitty twits and posting them on her blog. Yikes.

The Truth is Out There

. . . or not.

The LA Times carries an article about the infamous Area 51, where conspiracy theorists and UFO aficionados think the government keeps captured aliens and their spacecraft.

Oh, and some think this is where the government staged the "fake" moon landings (I was surprised to find that 7% of Americans think the moon landing was faked).

Now, intelligence agencies and the military have declassified some information about cold-war era activities there and some of the men who worked at Area 51 have gone on the record with their stories.

Turns out that it was mostly super-secret spy plane testing, but an interesting story nonetheless.

Paul Krugman Song

This video has been around for a while now, but I thought I'd share this great song about my very favourite economist. Enjoy.