Lakhdar Boumediene’s Guantanamo Nightmare →
From Sunday’s New York Times. You need to read this. ¶
From Sunday’s New York Times. You need to read this. ¶
Great, short piece on the English accent as it existed in 1776:
I’d always assumed that Americans used to have accents similar to today’s British accents, and that American accents diverged after the Revolutionary War, while British accents remained more or less the same.
Americans in 1776 did have British accents in that American accents and British accents hadn’t yet diverged. That’s not too surprising.
What’s surprising, though, is that those accents were much closer to today’s American accents than to today’s British accents. While both have changed over time, it’s actually British accents that have changed much more drastically since then. ¶
Pitch perfect satirical website about white people and their ‘black friends’. ¶
Is this finally a good minimal Last.fm scrobbler for Mac? So far signs look good. $3.99 on the Mac Store.
(via One Thing Well.) ¶
I did surprisingly poorly. ¶
Sony paid $8.4 billion for control of its cellphone venture, Sony Ericsson, a stake in the record label EMI and other stuff.
Who says English standards are slipping? ¶
Feel like the Obama sheen has worn off and you’re looking for a new messiah? Elizabeth Warren may be that special someone. ¶
The website Nippon.com recently carried an interview with former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone where one of Japan’s most distinguished politicians opined on the problems with the current political predicament Japan finds itself in.
As a previous prime minister, as well as someone who has been around the block a few more times than I have, I’m tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt that his prescriptions (politicians need a better academic grounding, particularly in history, and should spend more time thinking) are what’s required.
Tempted but not convinced. There is a disturbing lack of acknowledgment that the problems the current crop of Japanese politicians are dealing with differ vastly from those which Nakasone addressed in the early 80s. At that time, there was still broad consensus amongst the Japanese population that economic growth should be prioritised.
Contrast that with today. Japan is a prosperous and wealthy country and it’s struggling to adapt to the present day a political system that evolved to deal largely with the problems of rebuilding a shattered society. Western liberal democracies have had a lot longer to do this and even they struggle with it (see: the United States).
Nakasone’s view that politicians today just aren’t as good as the politicans of yesteryear is, in my view, both arrogant and wrong. The politicians of yesteryear didn’t have to deal with the problems that the politicians of today have to deal with. Indeed, you could argue that they sowed the seeds for the many of the dilemmas the country now faces.
It probably goes without saying that none of these arguments are raised with Nakasone by the interviewer. Perhaps he has answers to some of these points but since they’re never asked, I’ll never know.
Nippon.com looks like an interesting site but if this is the standard of interviewing we can expect, well, you’re probably advised to just give it a miss. ¶
Chris Wake has put together an excellent list of the habits of ineffective people. Love it.
(via Shawn Blanc.) ¶
Bill Nguyen is, in many ways, an embodiment of the problem with Silicon Valley. Danielle Sacks wrote an excellent profile which is more than a month old now. In case you missed it, though, it does a splendid job explaining how Nguyen went so wrong with his startup Color and why you shouldn’t have a lot of faith that he can turn that poor performance around. ¶