First Looks category archive

It’s 63 Fahrenheits with light rain in Virginia Beach.

The dude who was predicting the rapture to take place by the end of January, that is, by yesterday, has now revised his prediction to Rosh Hashanah, which is scheduled for mid-September.

I’ll have to update my Google Calendar. Wouldn’t want to miss it.

Afterthought:

One would think that always being wrong would send these folks some kind of message clue, but nope.

I’ve done a fair amount of driving in the American west, though never in Death Valley.

Once you get off the main roads, it can get pretty damned remote pretty damn quick, and there’s likely no signal for Google Earth.

“It’s what I’m beginning to call death by GPS,” said Death Valley wilderness coordinator Charlie Callagan. “People are renting vehicles with GPS and they have no idea how it works and they are willing to trust the GPS to lead them into the middle of nowhere.”

The number of people visiting Death Valley in the summer, when temperatures often exceed 120 degrees, has soared from 97,000 in 1985 to 257,500 in 2009. That pattern holds at Joshua Tree as well, which recorded 128,000 visitors in the summer of 1988. Last year: 230,000.

With another potentially deadly summer season approaching, Death Valley managers now are adding heat danger warnings to dozens of new wayside exhibits and working with technology companies to remove closed and hazardous roads from GPS units. They also have posted warnings on the park’s website, telling visitors not to rely on cell phones or GPS units.

I was driving to a job site once with the boss and advised him to strike out along some back roads rather than to go through the stoplight hell of Milford, Delaware.

As we went past the corn fields, eventually emerging right in front of the factory, the boss asked, “How did you find this route?”

“Map,” I said, and pulled out the atlas.

Dawn Turner Trice, writing in the Chicago Tribune, interviews Tom Burrell, retired ad agency owner, on the techniques of whitewashing. Burrell overcame vision problems and racial stereotyping to become the owner of one of the nation’s largest and most effective ad agencies. He knows a bit about propaganda.

A nugget:

Burrell said the campaign to cast blacks as inferior dates back to slave owners attempting to make an inhumane institution fit into a democracy. He considers slave auction posters among the earliest forms of “propaganda” in American history. Much followed, including Stepin Fetchit-type characters, along with salt and pepper shakers, postcards and Halloween masks depicting blacks with big red lips and protruding eyes.

“These messages have been passed down like tchotchkes through the generations,” he said. “Somebody had to say that if we can market this idea that slaves are not human beings — they’re chattel — then the Founding Fathers can say ‘all men are created equal’ and not have this profound contradiction. That’s how the advertising campaign came about.

“We’ve used the Bible, textbooks, symbols, the media, bad science to constantly reinforce those ideas. People buy into it, internalize it.“

Stamford, Connecticut, is a nice little town. It is the little city that could.

But it has its drawbacks.

Like winter.

H/T Alison for the pic.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is dropping plans criticized by historians to build a store near a key Civil War battlefield in northern Virginia.

Lawyers announced the Arkansas-based retailer’s Wednesday in Orange County Circuit Court, where a judge had planned to hear more pretrial motions in a lawsuit challenging the project.

Wal-Mart had planned to build a 143,000-square-foot Supercenter near the site of the Battle of the Wilderness, which is viewed by historians as a critical turning point when the Civil War started to turn in favor of the North. An estimated 185,000 Union and Confederate troops fought over three days in 1864, and 30,000 were killed, injured or went missing. The war ended 11 months later.

Like the world needs another Walmart.

Glomarization points out why the back alleys are coming back.

Automating everything:

Technology that links vehicles into “road trains” that can travel as a semi-autonomous convoy has undergone its first real world tests.

The trials held on Volvo’s test track in Sweden slaved a single car to a lorry to test the platooning system.

Trains of cars under the control of a lead driver should cut fuel use, boost safety and may even cut congestion.

Taking care of business.

The two bodies of work said to have had the greatest effect on modern English are text messages and AOL Instant Messenger Shakespeare’s plays and the King James Version (KJV) of the Holy Bible.

They did not accomplish this in a vacuum; they came at a time when spreading literacy and the use of the printing press facilitated their ability to influence more than a few Oxbridge Dons and isolated lordly literary dilettantes. The article fascinates. A nugget:

Perhaps the most intriguing reason for the impact of the King James Bible is that it ignored what today would be considered essentials for good translation.

“The translators seem to have taken the view that the best translation was a literal one, so instead of adapting Hebrew and Greek to English forms of speaking they simply translated it literally. The result wouldn’t have made all that much sense to readers, but they got used to it, and so these fundamentally foreign ways of expressing yourself became accepted as normal English through the influence of this major public text.”

Examples of Hebrew idiom that have become English via the Bible include: “to set one’s teeth on edge”, “by the skin of one’s teeth”, “the land of the living” and “from strength to strength”.

Boston Voldemorts (HT John Cole) depart NFL playoffs.

Read the transcript.

I know from my days in the security industry, because I knew persons who worked for manufacturers, that Walmart would volunteer to teach manufacturers how to move their factories to China.

Bruce Sterling:

The US is broke. So they can’t buy anything from people; they’re not selling anything that people want, except for guns and iPhones. There’s just not a lot of reasons for foreigners to exercise any hostility against the US, or even care what the beached whale is doing one way or the other.

American soft power is vanishing. Foreigners are much less interested in American television, movies, pop music… America once had a tremendous hammerlock on those expensive channels of distribution, but those old analog megaphones don’t matter half as much in today’s network society.

The USA has become a big banana republic; in other words, it’s come to behave like other countries quite normally behave. The upside is that we don’t get blamed for what happens; the downside is, nothing much happens. Decay and denial. Gothic

But, as a consolation, Goldman’s sacks are full.

Via Feastingonroadkill.

(First published January 8.)

From AZCentral dot com:

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is out of surgery and one of her surgeons said “I’m very optimistic about her recovery.”

“She was shot one time in the head through and through,” Dr. Peter Rhee said at an afternoon news conference at University Medical Center in Tucson.

The bullet entered one side of her head and exited the other after passing through her brain, Rhee said.

Giffords, 40, a third-term Democrat, was shot at an event in Tucson Saturday morning, at a Safeway at Ina and Oracle roads. Authorities identified the gunman as Jared Loughner and said the 22-year-old suspect is in custody. (Initial news accounts and reports from authorities misidentified the name as Laughner.)

Six people, including a girl who was about 9 years old, were killed and 18 were injured in the shooting at a Safeway in northwest Tucson at Ina and Oracle roads. Sources told The Republic that federal Judge John Roll was among the six killed.

President Obama speaks on the shooting:

TPM has the latest on the suspect. He appears to be a rightwing loonie of the type which calls itself “sovereign citizens.” (TPM is likely the best site for keeping up with this story as it breaks.)

No doubt this was completely unrelated to the drumbeat of anti-government and anti-Obama sentiment in Wingnut World.

This SPLC video, prepared for police to use for training during shift roll-calls, describes the particular form of sovereign citizen lunacy. The video is not for the squeamish.

Read more about sovereign citizens here.

Addendum:

The county sheriff speaks:

“When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous,” he said. “And unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”

In the meantime, those who speak the rhetoric of violence are busily washing their hands, saying, “Oh, no. It wasn’t us.”

I need a drink.

Addendum-dee-dum-dum, Two Days Later:

Another indication of the shooter’s having been attracted to the “sovereign citizen” ideology (idiotology?) is his fascination with language, as outlined in the Guardian this Monday:

Some reports have connected this with the arguments of David Wynn Miller – or as he styles himself, Judge David-Wynn: Miller – whose near-impenetrable, capital letter-heavy website expounds the notion that grammar is used to control the populace, and that by inserting colons or hyphens into your name you can escape taxable status by becoming a “prepositional phrase”.

While a small number of defendants have previously sought, without success, to use Wynn Miller’s methods to defend themselves against tax avoidance charges, he has until now remained largely unknown outside of far-right US circles. His name was connected to the Loughner inquiry when an official from the Southern Poverty Law Centre, which monitors extremist groups, told US television that it seemed Loughner had been “getting some of his key ideas from David Wynn Miller”.

Wasserman:

Learn about the wonderful world of free and open source.

What: Monthly TWUUG Meeting.

Who: Everyone in TideWater/Hampton Roads with interest in any/all flavors of Unix/Linux. There are no dues or signup requirements. All are welcome.

Where: Lake Taylor Transitional Care Hospital in Norfolk-Employee Cafeteria. See directions below. (Wireless and wired internet connection available.)

When: 7:30 PM till whenever (usually 9:30ish) on Thursday, January 6.

Directions: Lake Taylor Hospital-1309, Kempsville Road, Norfolk, 23502 (Kempsville Rd. at Lowry Rd.) 461-5001

Pre-Meeting Dinner at 6:00 PM (separate checks) at Uno Chicago Grill, Virginia Beach Blvd. & Military Highway (Janaf Shopping Center). Accessible through the Janaf parking lot or directly from the ramp from Virginia Beach Blvd. to Military Highway north.

This has been Big News in these parts, the home of the largest complex of military bases in the world and the home port of the U. S. S. Enterprise:

The Navy has relieved Capt. Owen Honors as commanding officer of the aircraft carrier Enterprise for showing “exceptionally poor judgment” when he produced a series of raunchy videos and broadcast them for his crew in 2006 and 2007.

Last night, a friend of mine who is retired Navy came over to help me watch football (we picked the most exciting bowl game so far), so I asked him what he thought about the “XO videos” (follow the link above and look on the left side of the page for links to selected edited videos).

He dismissed Captain Honors’s apologists and defenders with a snort: “That’s not leadership.”

It reminds me of those parents who think they should be “pals” with their kids. However pure their motives, they usually end up as ineffective parents and not-very-good pals, however much fun they and their kids might have had along the way.