First Looks category archive

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.

When: Tonight, January 3, 7:00 p. m.

Where:

Meyera E. Oberndorf Central Library (Libris Room)
4100 Virginia Beach Blvd.
Virginia Beach, VA 23452

Afterthought:

There will probably be lots of seating, since Virginia Tech is playing in the Orange Bowl tonight.

More Lucovich.

A week later, most of the snow is gone and what is left is only a couple inches thick, down from a foot.

64 Fahrenheits on New Year’s Day. That is how you say “unseasonable.”

Some pics:

In the middle distance are some crows, but they skedaddled before I could get a good picture. Crows post a watcher at the highest point around; the watcher sounds the alarm if a threat appears. I know from experience that they can tell the difference between me with a rifle and me with a broomstick.

Geese on a pond very pretty walking round (apologies to String Band).

The one on the left was doing somersaults in the water.

More Auth.

The local rag considers why local forecasters blew it on the snow storm. (Weather dot com was much closer, revising its forecast upwards from 1-2 inches to 5-8 inches shortly before the snow started, but it’s not local; it’s cyber.)

I recall reading somewhere that weather forecasting is the only physical science in which success is judged on predicting the future, as opposed to explaining the past.

Afterthought:

Once, there was a grizzled old man who had a reputation for being able to predict the weather with unerring accuracy. Farmers and ranchers from miles around would journey to his cabin for his help in planning when to plant and when to harvest.

One day, after a dry spell, a delegation of farmers from the next county arrived to ask him whether it was going to rain.

“Sorry,” he said. “Can’t tell you.

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Over at the local rag.

Beware of those who claim God is on their side.

Too often, they make their own god, as James Carroll points out in the Boston Globe. A nugget:

The other side of this story is the way in which, again from the very start, we humans have used Jesus as a lens through which to project our prejudices and needs onto the screen of history. So when 1st Century Roman military occupation led to civil war among the colonized Jews, Jesus people purged him of Jewishness to imagine a Gentile Jesus (“His own knew him not’’), in radical contradiction to the first fact of his history — that he was a Jew through and through. When Christians found themselves aligned with the Roman empire, Jesus emerged as the embodiment of political power (King of Kings). When, in times of plague, the challenge was to make sense of inescapable misery, an agonized Jesus came to the fore (the bloody crucifix), as if God could will suffering as a mode of redemption. When Christianity remade itself as Christendom, a necessary reaction to material excess elevated a puritan Jesus (the cross without a corpus). Against cold rationalism, there came a warmly pious Jesus (the Sacred Heart). In line with racist eugenics, an Aryan Jesus emerged (blue eyed, light brown flowing hair). When the time came for the overthrow of the corruptions of the old order, why not a revolutionary Jesus (liberation theology)?

Must go play in the snow.

Afterthought:

The region is shut down. A foot of snow all at once would shut down any place for a day of digging out, even places that are used to it.

One thing I’ve noticed here is that the television news coverage of the weather is nowhere near as panicky as it was in the Greater Philadelphia-Wilmington Co-Prosperity Sphere. I’ll put it this way:

Here, TV News was saying,

A lot of snow. Stay inside. Stay off the roads. And now some pretty pictures of the snow and some weather maps.

And this is a place where four inches is a Big Deal.

In Philly, it would have been and no doubt is

OMG! OMG! OMG! The End of the World as We Know It, the White Horseman of the Apocalypse, We’re All Going To Drown, Look at the Weather Map of Horrors! Look! A Car in a Ditch! A Tree Fell Down! OMG! OMG! OMG!

Worst damned television news on the East Coast.

It looks like the snow is pretty much over, though the forecast calls for the possibility of another inch or two overnight.

The AP reports a foot for Norfolk (for those of you not familiar with the area, Norfolk is about a mile that way); it looks like a foot on the railing of the deck, but I haven’t gotten outside to measure it (walking in the snow scheduled for tomorrow). That would make it half again as much as the maximum predicted and the heaviest snowfall in these parts since 1989.

Snow started last night in the Bayside area of Virginia Beach at about 8:13 p. m. We were driving home from dinner touring the neighborhood looking at lights when we saw the first flakes.

The prediction of one inch had already morphed into a one of 5-8 inches, (It was resoundingly derided by one of our fellow guests at dinner. Now he has a shovel-ready project.)

It looks as if there’s already five inches on the railing and it’s still snowing heavily.

Same view, five hours later:

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