First Looks category archive

Bee Lavender writes at the Guardian:

Five years ago a friend called me in a panic, desperate to borrow an inhaler because she could not afford to go to the emergency room with an asthma attack. That night, I decided to emigrate to a country where everyone has access to basic medical care. Moving to England was worth it. My experiences with the NHS have not been perfect, but they have been superior to the services received in the first 33 years of my life.

In the US I devoted a huge amount of time to chasing appointments, finding specialists, fighting with insurance companies. With the National Health Service I have never had any trouble getting referrals, nor have I ever had criticism of the services rendered. If anything, I have felt spoiled – especially at the start of the recent flu crisis, when men in hazmat suits showed up in the middle of the night to take my temperature. In fact, though I have private top-up insurance here in the UK, I’ve never had cause to invoke it.

Best healthcare in the world.

Except for almost everywhere else west of the Urals.

But easily the richest health insurance CEOs in the world. And they aim to keep it that way.

A. C. Graying at the Guardian. Read it. A nugget:

On one side are those who inquire, examine, experiment, research, propose ideas and subject them to scrutiny, change their minds when shown to be wrong and live with uncertainty while placing reliance on the collective, self-critical, responsible and rigorous use of reason and observation to further the quest for knowledge.

On the other side are those who espouse a belief system or ideology which pre-packages all the answers, who have faith in it, who trust the authorities, priests and prophets, and who either think that the hows and whys of the universe are explained to satisfaction by their faith, or smugly embrace ignorance. Note that although the historical majority of these latter are the epigones of one or another religion, they also include the followers of such ideologies as Marxism and Stalinism – which are also all-embracing monolithic ownerships of the Great Truth to which everyone must sign up on pain of punishment, and on whose behalf their zealots are prepared to kill and die.

Thinking outside of the box inside the squared circle:

Women boxers will have the chance to fight for gold at the 2012 Olympics.

International Olympic Committee chiefs voted on Thursday to lift the barrier to the last all-male summer sport.

Will this be the next Mary Celeste? The BBC reports on the Arctic Sea.

A cargo ship carrying timber worth $1.8m (£1m) from Finland to Algeria is apparently briefly hijacked off the coast of Sweden before continuing its journey through the English Channel – and then disappears.

Nothing has been heard from the Maltese-flagged Arctic Sea since its last recorded sighting on 30 July, and officials appear to have no idea where it could be.

If this event had occurred in the seas off east Africa, the finger would immediately have been pointed at Somalia’s notorious pirates.

But the Arctic Sea disappeared while rounding the west coast of France, in what are considered to be the pirate-free shipping lanes of Europe.

Addendum:

Possibly found.

Read more »

I’m taking the day off.

. . . said the spider to the fly.

August 9, 2009 | Posted by: Frank | Posted in: First Looks | Bookmark this post

Puddytat 1, Tweety 0.

Frankly, I could do without the little presents.

It’s a constant undercurrent in this scene.

No, I’m not accusing the Marx Brothers of racism, and, as they were Jewish, they probably had plenty of other isms to deal with. Though they were children of their time, just as I am a child of my time.

But watch closely. You can see it, a nasty undercurrent, not noticeable when the film was made because it was part of the fabric of society, but all too noticeable now.

It is there, even as Harpo takes the harp to heavenly places, because this film is a child of its time.

And consider as you watch it: This is what the odious Southern Strategy of the Republican Party is all about.

And this is what the whole “birther” thing springs from.

Keeping the darkies in their place. And keeping the white folks scared of the darkies.

Aside: My South Carolina grandmother commonly used the term “darkie.” In her upbringing, it was bad form to remind black folks that they were black.

Report from the field on Twitless Thursday:

Though I didn’t see anyone jumping out of windows or cowering in corners, raging against the dying of the light, I did notice a kind of mass withdrawal that seemed to grip the online community during the hours that Twitter was down.

People were on Facebook saying stuff like “TWITTER IS DOWN! I CAN’T LOOK AT MY COMPUTER! IT BURNS!”

The response was even more pathetic on MySpace: “TWITTER IS DOWN. IS ANYBODY THERE? ANYBODY???”

I read those things (and yes, they were in all caps) and realized the horrible truth. While Twitter is merely a social-networking tool for me, it’s an addiction for others. That’s scary. Because boiling all our social interactions down to 140 characters means we’re no longer talking with each other. We’re talking at each other.

I talked my thoughts at people at Geekazine.

I have cancelled my home delivery subscription to the Inquirer, mainly because I’m gone so much anymore it’s not worth it. And the last time I did a delivery stop, they forgot to start it again (more FAIL).

So this morning I went to the local Wawa to pick up a paper to enjoy over my coffee. If nothing else, I still want the comics and the advice column. Life is not life without comics, despite the best efforts of the Republican Party to render them redundant.

I didn’t look at the paper. I just grabbed it, along with several other things.

And when I got home, I noticed it was kind of fat.

I looked.

It was dated Sunday, August 9, 2009. It had all the Sunday sections and everything. The articles aren’t even up on the website yet.

The Inky is not known for releasing the Sunday paper early.

So where in the time warp did today go?

Read more »

H/T to Kiko’s House.

Naturally, he got shouted down by a mob of wingnuts at a recent townhall meeting.

Follow the link for details.

He was finishing his new-member orientation in the basement of the Cannon House Office Building and hurrying to make a plane. A woman stopped him and said, “Hang on a minute — don’t you want to hear about the benefits?” Then, he recalls, she showed him “a whole cafeteria” of health insurance plans available to him and his family because he was now a federal employee.

“I told her, ‘I’ve got a plane to catch. If you can make that same offer to everybody I’m representing, then I’ll accept it.’ Then I turned to walk out,” the Wisconsin allergist told me in one of two phone interviews this week. “It didn’t seem right. It didn’t feel right to me that I was being offered something that wasn’t being offered to the people I was representing.”

Via the Wayward Episcopalian

The Coyote’s Byte suggests what we can do when Twitter is down.

My favorite:

Going to the bathroom without telling anyone.

Follow the link for the full list.

From paulapoundstone.com. An excerpt:

America’s growing up. We have a black President, and we’ve spent almost as much time on health care as we have on Michael Jackson.

Via CC.

“Stabilizing” is just another way of saying “running out of people to lay off,” and it’s still over half a million (emphasis added):

The number of U.S. workers filing new claims for jobless benefits dropped more sharply-than-expected last week, a government report showed on Thursday, boosting views that the labor market and the economy were stabilizing.

Initial claims for state unemployment insurance benefits fell 38,000 to a seasonally adjusted 550,000 in the week ended August 1 from 588,000 the prior week, the Labor Department said.

(snip)

However, the number of people collecting long-term unemployment benefits rose by 69,000 to 6.31 million in the week ended July 25 . . . .

But check this out for a comparison.

Read it here.

That’s how long I regularly read the Washington Post.

Past tense. Not past perfect.

Via Atrios.