First Looks category archive

Some pictures taken from the South Island of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. The South Island has parking, a fishing pier, and a diner with surprisingly reasonable prices.

A freighter entering the bay from the ocean. The picture is facing north; the vessel is moving from east to west:

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Via Oliver Willis.

From the Guardian:

Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers has paid out more than £1m to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of his journalists’ repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories.

The payments secured secrecy over out-of-court settlements in three cases that threatened to expose evidence of Murdoch journalists using private investigators who illegally hacked into the mobile phone messages of numerous public figures and to gain unlawful access to confidential personal data including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills. Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars were all targets of the private investigators.

No, it will never end, not so long as Pinocchio’s nose can grow.

Twit ain’t necessarily so.
The things you are liable to read on the Twible,
Twit ain’t necessarily so.

Twitter Inc., which lets users post 140-character messages online, said last month that it is testing a feature that would add the word “verified” to some accounts to distinguish real and fake users. While Palin’s account is verified, more than a dozen accounts, including “hockymom64” and “EXGovSarahPalin,” use Palin’s name or title, and some show her photo.

H/T Alison for the link.

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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