First Looks category archive

I’ll be on the road. You can be there.

Tuesday, Triumph Brewing Company, 2nd and Chestnut, Philadelphia, 6 p.

Frankie Martin writing in the Guardian:

“America is a very frightened country.” It was last October, and I was sitting face to face with Noam Chomsky at MIT, a man the New York Times has called “arguably the most important intellectual alive”. Chomsky was answering a question posed by Akbar Ahmed, American University’s chair of Islamic studies, that he described as “striking”: What is American identity?

As a young American brought up to believe I’m part of a superpower, Chomsky’s identification of fear as essential to what it means to be American caught me off guard. Privileged to be witnessing a conversation between two world-renowned academics in the fields of anthropology and linguistics, I listened.

Follow the link and read the whole thing, especially Mr. Martin’s reflections on the Founders, which, following this opening, will likely surprise you.

Relevant amendments, and some striking parts that do not need amending, are highlighted.

There have been some changes since the last time I posted this, but also some glaring omissions and failures. See if you can find them:

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, unless we don’t like them. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness, unless the United States Attorneys’ offices can be packed with sycophants on the sly. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

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Does anyone else find this a little ookie (emphasis added)?

(Michael) Jackson’s brother Jermaine told Larry King during Thursday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Larry King Live,” that there will be a private ceremony for family and some special guests before the public memorial, according to show transcripts.

He added the family wants to have other memorials around the United States.

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T-Mobile has redesigned its website. It appears that they have fallen into the clutches of those who value appearances over function (not that that ever happens in the field of web design, oh noes) and who are unaware of web standards.

It’s all flashy now, with lots of moving parts.

It just doesn’t work right any more.

It seems to work fine unless you want to look at your account. It lets you log in, then it gives you the finger.

It doesn’t work in Opera, Firefox, Konqueror, or Lynx (with Lynx, it won’t even let you log in).

It does work in Windows Internet Destroyer.

I have been a satisfied T-Mobile customer since they were Voicestream. I have received good service that meets my needs at a fair price, along with excellent customer service and technical support.

I will not cancel my account over this, but I reserve the right to be highly irritated.

Travel Day.

Somehow I missed this:

Residents in New Castle County (Delaware–ed.) are lighting up the lines at the county dispatch center with reports of rumblings that were confirmed to have been caused by a small earthquake.

I did notice the 4.8 that happened when I was San Francisco once. It was like being in a railroad sleeping car going over rough switches.

Twitter on Dr. Dan’s couch:

What are you doing? It’s a simple question that has transformed the internet. With Twitter, we can find out what people are up to and in to at any time. But what’s different about this form of social networking, what makes it appealing, how will people use it in years to come? On the next Voices in the Family, we’ll discuss Twitter. Our guests are Clive Thompson and David Parry. Thompson is a science, technology and culture writer for Wired magazine, The New York Times and New York Magazine. He is also the author of the blog, Collision Detection. Parry is assistant professor of Emerging Media and Communications at University of Texas, Dallas. Check out Parry’s blog, Outside The Text.

Follow the link and search for the June 29, 2009, show or click listen here (MP3).

DougJ at Balloon Juice:

. . . I can’t help but be struck by the contrast between the outpouring of sympathy for people who put money in an investment scheme they didn’t understand and the outpouring of contempt for people who took out loans they didn’t understand. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that Madoff’s victims are wealthy and white, while subprime loanees are (inaccurately) seen as mostly poor and black.

The gift that keeps on giving.

Via Balloon Juice.

John Cole at Balloon Juice.

Power failure. The UPSs held long enough for me to shut the webserver down in an orderly fashion.

Meanwhile, when I went to check on the details of the power failure at the electric company website:

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Off to drink liberally.

Via Bartblog.

A picture is worth a thousand words (click the graphic for a larger image):

Via Delaware Liberal.

Vanity Fair explores Sarah Palin’s career and campaign. I know that some persons are suffering Too Much Palin Syndrome (Palin-drome?); nevertheless, it is a fascinating article.

A nugget:

The narrative that the McCain campaign employed to explain Palin’s selection and to promote her qualifications—that she was a fresh-faced reformer who had taken on Alaska’s big oil companies and the corrupt Republican establishment, governing with bipartisan support—was never more than superficially true. In dozens of conversations during a recent visit to Alaska, it was easy to learn that there has always been a counter-narrative about Palin, and indeed it has become the dominant one. It is the story of a political novice with an intuitive feel for the temper of her times, a woman who saw her opportunities and coolly seized them. In every job, she surrounded herself with an insular coterie of trusted friends, took disagreements personally, discarded people who were no longer useful, and swiftly dealt vengeance on enemies, real or perceived. “Remember,” says Lyda Green, a former Republican state senator who once represented Palin’s home district, and who over the years went from being a supporter of Palin’s to a bitter foe, “her nickname in high school was ‘Barracuda.’ I was never called Barracuda. Were you? There’s a certain instinct there that you go for the jugular.”

Vincent D’Onofrio is looking more like Raymond Burr with every episode of Law and Order CI.

Richard Adams in the Guardian on Bernie Madoff as a distraction:

Sadly for Bernie Madoff, his fraud was straight forward: he stole money from investors and ran a Ponzi scheme. (His particular genius was not to promise fantastic, overnight profits, as is usually the way. Instead he offered solid long-term returns, less likely to attract attention.) But if he’d really been smart he would have got into selling collatoralised debt obligations, credit default swaps, mezzanine level revolving syndicated loans, tulip futures and all the rest. Then, if he’d really got lucky, he’d have got a bailout.