Philip

Pictures of Barack Obama

The first 167 days.

A full screen, high quality version of Obama's Muslim world speech at Cairo University

I wanted to watch a full version of Barack Obama's big speech to the Middle East at Cairo University. Most versions are cut and spliced with journalistic comment but this one seems to be straight. Double click to watch full screen:

There is an ad running against same sex marriage in the US:



There has been some fun with the audition tapes of the people who applied to play act fear:



I liked this response:

Obama

Action figure

Could the financial sycophants please...

... shut up for a decade. (Another version of the same thing on Youtube.)

Those Magnificent Men in their Driving Machines

What I love about this is that the fellow on the left seems to have every intention of carrying through with his swing.

It seems auto polo was a proper sport before WWI.

Here is a NYT report of an event at Madison Square Garden in December 1912 which was watched by all sorts of society notables including Vincent Astor:

"There was one near accident during the game, coming in the third period, when the King-Ferriter machine turned turtle. Both occupants escaped serious injury by jumping, but Ferriter was badly shaken up in the fall and was not able to resume playing for two minutes ..."

In the next game, Mr Ferriter also came a cropper:

"During the first period of this game the two machines met head on in the race to the centre for the ball and the King-Ferriter machine was badly disabled. The wheels, axle and part of the frame were badly bend from the force of the collision and the auto had to be pulled of the playing surface ..."

They found another machine and carried on.

I have no idea whether Mr Ferriter is the flying man in the picture but I can`t help but suspect that it is he.

Via kottke.

"The Great Vowel Shift"

Anybody learning English and struggling with our ridiculous spelling/pronunciation can, to some extent, blame "The Great Vowel Shift". Between the 1400s and 1700s, English pronunciation was totally revolutionised. It happened astonishingly quickly and it is not completely clear why:

The upshot has been that the Anglo-Saxons lived (like the Scottish still do) in a 'hoose', and the English live in a 'house'; the Anglo-Saxons (like the Scottish) milked a 'coo', and the English milk a 'cow'; an Anglo-Saxon had a 'gode' day and the English have a 'good' one; an Anglo-Saxon had 'feef' fingers on each hand and the English have 'five'; they wore 'boats' on their 'fate' while the English wear 'boots' on our 'feet'.

Some theories have it that the massive population movements into the South East of England after the Black Death may have led to the shift, with regional accents mixing with and influencing that region's standard pronunciation. There was also great social mobility in and around London following the plague, allowing previously marginalised pronunciations to influence the standard speech of a region that has since huge influence on accepted English. Others argue that the dropping of French by aristocrats in England may have influenced pronunciation. The toffs may either have tried to create their own posh accent more on the French model or, conversely, attempted to speak English in a way they felt was further from French (because France was an enemy).

The shift may be continuing. How do you pronounce "route"? Some Americans can rhyme it with "out". The English are still mired in a distinctly Anglo Saxon "boot". Anyway, all this change is one reason why English spelling is such a nightmare. It was standardised during this shift and therefore has little or no reliable connection to actual pronunciation. For more on that, see "ghoti" and English spelling reform.

On Subsidies

from Calvin and Hobbes.

Sampling Obama

How long will it take for these to be sampled.

Obama's inauguration speech

Here.
And the benediction (great ending!).

One scary thing and one less scary

The Bush Era - "All circus and no bread"
A role playing game asks children to create its monsters.

Most of the expert commentators seem to agree these massive bailouts are a good idea...

They also keep saying that no one could have foreseen the current problems, by which they mean they didn`t.

Just a thought, but the next thing that might happen with the massive borrowing entailed by these bailouts is the total collapse of the dollar. And then the total collapse of global trade. And then we will really be in Great Depression territory.

Two similar maps

Go to this site to find out what relationship is depicted here, if you can`t guess already.

The next Republican candidate

I was interested by this story which, along with many others, is talking about Palin as a possible runner for the next presidential election. Absolutely ridiculous! We need to look closely at who in US politics is actually saying these things: extremist rightwingers and Democrats. The second group are significant. There is nothing the Democrats would like better than to stand against Palin. Barring disasters in this administration, they would definitely win.

Let us just asume that Obama is going to go into this next election as an averagely performing first term President. He has disappointed many but also reassured many. He has not been a great president but not a terrible one either. His message of change somehow feels a little unfinished, as such messages almost always do after one term. The economy has improved a little in the final years of his Presidency. (The health care thing, I am assuming, has not been done because if he has managed to do that he will have rewritten the electoral map). So, like most incumbent Presidents, he is going into the election with a decided advantage. It is not brain science: you can't run the same losing tactic against the same man twice and expect to win, especially when he has a distinct advantage on the second play.

What should the Republicans do? I am going to keep out of questions of what the Republicans can do, because their party may not be capable of following the only strategies that have any hope of putting them into power in 2012, but, assuming they are a functioning political force, they need to look at the nature of the new Obama coalition. It delivered a landslide, remember, so they have to address it, not the crazy notions flitting around in their own heads. If they try to analyse that coalition on an age group basis they are going to end up with their heads in their hands, so I reckon an ethnic breakdown is their only way forward. Boiled down to its bare essentials, Obama's winning formula was this: a 40 per cent or much better split of all the main voting groups plus monolithic (and voting) black loyalism plus a large majority of Latinos. The black group is going to be a little bit less motivated next time but the other groups are going to firm up for Obama, in all likelihood, so, if I was a Republican strategist, the group to aim for are the people from Latino backgrounds. The only thing I am not entirely clear on is the significance of Latinos in terms of the important electoral votes but the way I see it, not that I give two hoots, is that the only hope for the Republicans in 2012 is not Palin at all, but a socially conservative Latino man (?) with a massive dollop of charisma. If they try to do that with a VP pick they will fail. US politics has changed. After Obama, the next Democratic candidate will probably be female. If Obama gets a good health care package for the broad mass of the population through, by the way, the peeling off the Latino vote will not work and Obama will have built a historically enduring electoral coalition (including many of those lost working class whites).

Smushy but...

Tugged forelock to this site.

Some really good photos...

... of, who else, Obama.

The Unfinished Swan

A video of an interesting new game called The Unfinished Swan.




And a bit of propaganda from the Obama campaign. It was done by a local group but is quite compelling:

Good video of Obama talking to a small business owner

Rolling Stone`s profile of the "make believe maverick"

"McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man. But he's still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in," says the Vietnam war hero and former USAF chief war planner in Europe John Dramesi.

Actually, the article is soft on McCain on a few factual points relating to his record.