An American Conservative Speaks

I was, as my British friends might say, gobsmacked, when I heard that the son of conservative icon William F. Buckley, Christopher Buckley, endorsed and plans to vote for Barack Obama in the upcoming presidential election.

Well, it’s true, I’ve always said I have no problems with honest conservatives, being one half the time myself. Honest discussion and even disagreement about issues is one thing; false accusations against character are quite another.

You can read his whole explanation behind his decision on his site, the Daily Beast.  Below I’ve excerpted some of the most salient points:

My colleague, the superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National Review Online a column stating what John Cleese as Basil Fawlty would call “the bleeding obvious”: namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. She’s not exactly alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, just called Governor Palin “a cancer on the Republican Party.”

McCain rose to power on his personality and biography. He was authentic. He spoke truth to power. He told the media they were “jerks” (a sure sign of authenticity, to say nothing of good taste; we are jerks). He was real. He was unconventional. He embraced former anti-war leaders. He brought resolution to the awful missing-POW business. He brought about normalization with Vietnam—his former torturers! Yes, he erred in accepting plane rides and vacations from Charles Keating, but then, having been cleared on technicalities, groveled in apology before the nation.

But that was—sigh—then. John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days.

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian.

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves.

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything Mac related and since I was busy over the weekend rebuilding my system, I thought I’d share what software I’m currently using.

There was nothing really wrong my my old system, but the Mac’s flexibility in terms of booting from external devices makes it easy to try out a fresh installation. While there were no problems with the old system, I do tend to evaluate a lot of different software and over time the system gets cluttered. In particular, my Applications folder has shrunk from 180 entries to 82, though it will end up between 90 and 100 when everything I use is installed.

As is often the case with these updates, my plan to install the system over the weekend and then migrate data and apps over the coming week didn’t pan out. Instead, I did a clean install of OS X, copied my personal folder over and reinstalled all key apps by Sunday evening! Macs really are easier to setup and maintain.

Anyway, here’s the list of Mac software I use almost every day:

• VMware Fusion (for hosting virtual PCs)
• Firefox (web browser)
• Lightroom2 (image management and manipulation)
• Info/xhead (password cache)
• Adium (IM)
• Photoshop cs3
• Dreamweaver cs3
• Dandbrake (dvd/video ripper)
• Solitaire till Dawn
• Vuescan
• Audio Hijack Pro
• Extensis portfolio
• Flip4mac (WMV player)
• Transmit (ftp client)
• Office 2008
• MS Messenger (IM)
• MS Remote Desktop
• Textmate (editor)
• Macgourmet Deluxe (recipe manager)
• OmniOutliner
• Omnifocus (task management)
• Real player
• MissingSync for Palm
• Turbo tax
• Strobosoft (guitar tuner)
• Weatherdock (displays weather in menubar)
• SnapzProX (screen capture s/w)
• iStat menus (system status)
• xAct (audio slicer/dicer)
• SyncTogether (syncs mac address books)
• Instiki (lightweight wiki)
• Eye-one Match (monitor calibration)
• Eclipse (software dev env)
• TWiki (wiki)
• Mysql (database)
• Pathfinder (finder replacement)

And I have to mention the terminal program.  It’s installed by default, which is why it’s not listed above (same with Mail).  I use the terminal program every day, usually with multiple tabs and windows open; it’s via the command line that I rule my networked world!

It’s been 7 years. Obama’s talk tonight at the 9/11 Forum on Community Service reminded me of how united we were in the days following the events of 7 years ago. I would like a return to the feeling of one America, bound by our past, our heritage and most importantly by the laws and rules, based on the US Constitution, that have served us so well, so far.

Remember:

eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty … Andrew Jackson farewell address, March 4th, 1837

It also brought to mind, in a very visceral sense, this song of hope, humility and resolve:

We will get by, We will survive!

Update:

Nightjack, an English Detective, shared this song by Simon and Garfunkel, An American Tune. It seems to match the mood and feel of the day.

Laurina loved sunflowers. I suppose that’s why it was special today, when after visiting Rose Hill we came across a field of sunflowers that were very nicely highlighted against an incoming storm.

::

These are for you, Laurina, on what would have been your 91st birthday. Here’s a nostalgic look at the past, taken 7 years ago at what turned out to be her last birthday. Most of the family was there, including my mom, and we sure had a good time!

This is one of Sheryl’s favorite photos from that day, Laurina talking on a cell phone:

::

Finally, one of my all time favorite photos was taken 7 years ago, sometime after Laurina’s party. The corner where this was taken is less than 1/8 of a mile from where we got stuck in November 2004.

::

No surprise, there are a few more of my sunflower photos on flickr.

A few days into offering All the Pages via the WordPress blogging system things seem to be going pretty well.

The redirects from the old site are working and my modest traffic levels haven’t changed to any degree (though I think it will take 2-3 weeks before that’s a certainty).

Somehow when I imported the entries from MovableType around 100 duplicates were introduced into the system; they’re gone now!

About the only thing that’s lacking compared to the old site is the machine-readable Creative Commons license as well as an indication of the license in the sidebar or footer; I’ll add that soon enough, until then the site is licensed as before, with a Creative Commons non-commercial, attribution, share and share alike license.

I don’t think I mentioned that I’m using a design called Amazing Grace, created and freely distributed by Vladimir Prelovac.

I’ve only made a few minor tweaks to his templates, primarily to make the Atom RSS feed the default feed. I really like how the site looks with this design; thanks Vladimir!

One thing I really like about this new design is the random image that is displayed at the top of the page. Long time visitors to this site will recall that my earlier designs had a simliar feature; sometimes I used to hit reload over and over again just to see what would come up!

Anyway, I’ve got about 30 images prepared for use with the site so far, and will add more over time. The images, besides being scaled down to fit, also have to be processed to add the border. This is done very easily using the ImageMagick program on my linux box.

To process the images I followed the (translated) directions from this site: Le Yet Another Blog, with a couple of changes.

First, I found that the actual image area inside the frame is 285×177, not 283×175 as specified in the article. Not wanting to recreate the images I had already prepared for the site, I simply modified the script used to create the composite images. The result is an additional line of framing, but it looks fine.

I also made a couple of other changes to the script, and have included it below. Caution: you really want to read the full article before trying to process your images.

#! /bin/bash
DESTDIR="out"

# model1.jpg is one of the template images with the inner area
# converted to a white background
SRCPORTRAIT=model1.jpg

# démarrage de l'incrémentation - la dernière image fabriquée
# se nomme br-portrait86.jpg
typeset -i INDEX=0

mkdir -p $DESTDIR

for FICHIER in $(ls src)
do
   composite -compose src-over -geometry 282x177+14+28 -quality 90 src/$FICHIER \
$SRCPORTRAIT $DESTDIR/bg-portrait$INDEX.jpg

# original command for reference. note the geometry args have changed
# composite -compose src-over -geometry 283x175+14+28 -quality 90 $FICHIER \
SRCPORTRAIT $DESTDIR/bg-portrait$INDEX.jpg

   INDEX=$INDEX+1
done

I hope you enjoy the new site look and feel as much as I do. Between the new WordPress software and this great design, I’m pretty happy with the site these days.

Just for grins, here’s a screen shot showing the current 30 images used in the rotating image display in the upper right of this site: