First Looks category archive

Especially to those who would deny it.

Via the Great Orange Satan.

Salespersons knocking at your door:

Rachel Gard, who started using Twitter two months ago to keep in touch with friends, says she may stop using the site if companies keep contacting her.

Already Home Depot Inc. has wished her luck painting her room, a medical company recommended its device for her ear infection, and a DJ told her to check out his single.

“I don’t want random people contacting me,” said Gard, 21, who lives in Clearwater, Florida. “Don’t try to sell yourself through my Twitter.”

(snip)

“It is starting to get out of control,” said Christopher Peri, founder of TwittFilter, a Web site that lets users restrict who can follow updates they post to Twitter. “The original value of Twitter is friends talking to friends. When someone says, ‘I’m going to pimp this product,’ it’s no longer a social media.”

The story goes on the discuss Twitter’s efforts to combat twit spam.

Criswell predicts that, if Twitter does not manage to control this, the whole damn thing will just collapse under the weight of marketing, which my old friend once defined as

what companies do when they can’t actually sell anything.

“We’re American seamen. We’re union members. We stuck together. We did our jobs.”

Via Oliver Willis.

Life imitates schmaltz:

In scenes reminiscent of the cult movie, four baby pythons escaped on a passenger plane in Australia, leading to a prolonged search of the aircraft and forcing the cancellation of two flights, the airline confirmed today.

Katie Couric (by the way, I’ve never watched her show and have no intention to do so; I’m a print kind of guy):

“I Twitter and blog very selectively,” she told a crowd of students, politicos and other journalists. “I don’t think anybody gives a rats ass whether I am about to eat a tuna sandwich. I don’t even care. Some of it is so inane and narcissistic and bizarre I don’t quite get it. I don’t know why anyone would want to read it, much less why I would want to write it.”

Via the Huffington Post.

As a trained and sporadically practicing historian, I understand that persons of good will can look at the same sequence of events and interpret it differently.

Persons of good will, however, do not ignore facts and make stuff up.

That’s a wingnut thing.

Steven D reports.

Noz, Brendan, and Ray report on doings in the big city just up the road.

Print journalism can pack a large amount of information into a small amount of time and space. Persons can read much more information in five minutes than can be narrated in five minutes. That’s why half an hour with a good newspaper or news magazine gives us a much greater return on investment and much more depth of information than half a day of news broadcasts.

But the economics of print journalism are failing. Reportage, printing, and delivery cost lots of money–money that these days goes to Craig’s List and, God help me, E! Online.

No solutions here. Wish I had ’em, but I don’t.

Clay Shirky in the Guardian (emphasis added):

The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

(snip)

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

Triumph Brewing Company, 2nd and Chestnut, Philadelphia, Pa., Tuesday, 6 p. Plenty of public transportation and, for drivers, ample street parking on Front.

Find a chapter near you. The only membership requirement is to show up.

Dick Polman:

Which brings us to the week’s main event, the Republican attack on Obama’s newly-released military budget. Faced with the challenge of painting Obama as a defense wimp, they have simply made stuff up.

Their theme (quoting a number of Republican congressmen) is that Obama is working “to pull the rug out from under our armed services,” that he is seeking “drastic defense cuts that will weaken our national security,” that his “military budget cuts” suggest “a sense of naivete,” that “the one place he wants to cut spending is defense,” and that (in the words of Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe) “President Obama is disarming America. Never before has a president so ravaged the military at a time of war…he undercuts those he sends into harm’s way. It is not just unbelievable, it is unconscionable.”

One would never know, from those assertions, that Obama’s budget actually calls for a hike in military funds of $21 billion; that it includes billions in new money for veterans, particularly those suffering from mental health problems and brain injuries; that it adds $11 billion to expand the Army and Marines; and that, most importantly, it reflects a fundamental shift in war-fighting priorities long signaled by Pentagon chief Robert Gates – who started mapping his plans while working for President Bush.

Oliver Willis takes out the kryptonite again.

A creepy allegiance to violence.

The Lotus Sutra Chronicles on spring.

Over the top hysteria, documented by Andrew Sullivan.

Via Gene Weingarten; follow the link and become a Chatological Humor addict just like me.

Phillybits hits the medium time.

Some Guy with a Website.

From John Cole. Follow the link for the guts of the story.

2009 Pentagon budget: $513 billion
2010 proposed Pentagon budget: $534 billion

Surf on a cloudy Sunday at Virginia Beach, Va.

Oliver Willis, like kryptonite to stupid. David Kurtz has more.