First Looks category archive

Mike Gruss, writing in my local rag, points out that the clean-up costs from Irene look to be quite high, despite it’s not having been another Hazel.

He then points out a storm is not an entertainment event and should not be so judged. A nugget:

Those who complain that an overhyped Irene underperformed are the same people who can’t distinguish a real natural disaster from a fictional movie.

If it’s on TV, to them, it’s all equal. That’s how Hurricane Irene, despite ruining cherished comic-book collections and newly installed air-conditioning units, became a box-office bust.

Afterthought:

After an informal survey of some of my friends (the persons who showed up an the TWUUG dinner), it appears that the Weather Channel was the primary hyper.

The local media coverage was fairly sane. Some of it was lame, but it wasn’t hysterical.

Addendum, Later that Same Day:

The Feral Genius comments from her post in Connecticut:

Which brings me to Hurricane Irene, which (despite warnings to the contrary) turned out to be an extremely minor storm, here in my little corner of Connecticut. And by “my little corner,” I specifically mean “my small city block, and the one next to mine.” Beyond that, though, the river overflowed its banks, and less than a mile in every direction were homes and businesses without electricity; roads either coated in mud from temporary flooding, or completely washed away, leaving flooded ravines where the roadbed used to be; a building that collapsed directly into the river less than ten minutes’ walk from my front door.

(snip)

In conclusion: despite the catastrophe unfolding in Vermont, the millions still without power on the East Coast, the dozens dead and all the other damage caused by Hurricane Irene, I personally suffered none of the ill effects the media warned me about. Thus, this was a minor fizzled-out nothing of a storm, and the warnings about it mere hype and bullshit. ’Cuz it’s all about me. Only me.

Charles Madigan muses on punishments from God at the Chicago Trib. In the process, he encapsulates much that is wrong with the religious (sic) right.

A nugget (emphasis added).

Hurricanes are not sent to punish us. They are forces of nature created by weather patterns in the Atlantic over near Africa. And earthquakes that crack the Washington Monument are not warnings from heaven about budget deficits or gay people or even those damned Democrats.

Plates shifting, as plates have always been shifting. That’s what earthquakes are all about.

I think it is blasphemous to suggest we can know the mind of God, or even to assume that whatever God is, it is all about us. I am quite certain that God does not punish evil here on Earth because there is so much of it that goes unpunished, so much of it that is rewarded, in fact.

They need to hire back a few of those copy editors.

The curmudgeon columnist in our local rag gets one right:

A major hurricane was buzzsawing toward the East Coast, predicted to come ashore somewhere along the North Carolina coast (early hysterical reports had this as a Cat 4 storm) and where does our hero (Jim Cantore, Weather Channel person–ed.) head?

First he went to Rhode Island. Later, he inched closer to the action in Battery Park.

(snip)

Yep, the biggest storm in years was aiming right at us and we were nothing but a postscript.

Until I read her column, I’d never heard of Jim Cantore. I find the Weather Channel even more boring that Lifetime.

It’s like the old weather broadcasts from the early days of cable, in which a camera kept panning automatically from a thermometer to a barometer to a anemometer, only with more talk noise and less information.

Afterthought:

My brother recommends Stormpulse if you want to track tropical storms with minimal hype and maximal data.

The storm seems to be over in these parts.

Minimal damage except for

• Two fatalities in my state (one poor guy had a heart attack while boarding up his house, and an 11-year old was crushed to death when a falling tree destroyed the family apartment), the
• Almost a half-million Virginians without power, who now have no choice but to talk with their spouses, significant others, and housemates, and the
• Flooding in the low-lying areas (exacerbated by the non-existent global warming because sea-levels are two feet higher than they were 80 years ago).

We were fortunate not to experience a power failure, so we got to watch the coverage on the telly vision (which did little to restore my faith in telly vision news*–there was lots of filling time with babble) and talk amongst ourselves, which we seem to be able to do.

It could have been a lot worse.

I’ve experienced real hurricanes. I know.

_______________________

*I will say that the telly vision news here is saner than the telly vision news in Philly, but that’s sort of like saying that eating grits and red-eye gravy is better than eating straw.

It’s been raining all day. The center of the storm is still about three hours south (about 50 miles) of here. It will arrive just in time for high tide, exacerbating the flooding in susceptible areas.

The rain has picked back up after a pause and the wind has increased significantly, but the storm is no longer maintaining hurricane force winds except perhaps at the side that is well out to sea.

The mail carrier is making his delivery here right now.

Commemorating six years of electronic drivel in almost 11,000 individual droplets.

Midnight.

The rain is starting.

With any luck, it will put out the fire in the Great Dismal.

Have to refill the propane tank and clear the decks.

At the Chicago Tribune, Rachel Marsden is troubled by the focus on the sex lives of the Republican presidential wannabes.

Much of what she says has merit; sexual propriety does not correlate with governmental competence. Here’s a snippet:

“Have you ever had sex with Rick Perry?” asks the ad, placed by the Ron Paul-backing “Committee Against Sexual Hypocrisy” — a “group” consisting of a single guy by the name of Robert Morrow. Morrow encourages the public to call or email him so he can “help you publicize” your experience if you are a “stripper, an escort, or just a ‘young hottie.'”

The American and world economies are circling the drain, and already some are suiting up to play “Indiana Jones on the Trail of the Family Jewels.” Before the expedition moves any further along — and you can be sure that it will — I’d like to provide some handy guidelines for political sex-life vetting.

She continues to offer some remarkably vapid guidelines for reporting on politicians’ sex lives.

They would, for example, forbid reporting on Dwight Eisenhower’s long-term relationship with Kay Summersby, while disqualifying serial philanderer John F. Kennedy from office.

She also ignores the “why” of the attention to the “family values” of Republican pols.

The Republican Party asked for it with their blowhard crusading hypocritical moralism.

Few things fill a foley-o of pages more than titanic hypocrisy taking a wide stance athwart the Appalachian Trail.

Off to drink liberally.

A 5.8 magnitude earthquake centered northwest of Richmond, Va., shook much of Washington, D.C., and was felt as far north as Rhode Island and New York City.

The sliding closet doors rattled a little.

My friend’s workplace, which is an old wooden building constructed in the 1920s, shook enough to get her to hang up the phone and head for the stairs.

I was near the center of a quite noticeable quake once. I told the story here.

Via Frank Chow.

Afterthought:

This explains why my call to Richmond dropped. Now it’s “all circuits are busy.”

Addendum, Later That Same Afternoon:

The Richmond Times-Dispatch rounds up Virginia’s earthquaking history.

Addendum-Dee-Dum-Dum:

Thoreau comments:

P.S. I eagerly await some fundie televangelist explaining that this is God’s punishment for being too tolerant.

Hunting For Pro-Science Republicans
By Madeleine Begun Kane

The scientists can’t be believed,
And scholars sure leave them aggrieved.
Don’t trust any source—
That’s the GOP course:
Calling facts they don’t like ill-conceived.

New location: We are still checking out locations to find a place with a good mix of menu, location, and layout.

Fun and fellowship for liberals. Join us.

When: Wednesday, August 25th, 6 p

Where:
The Jewish Mother
600 Nevan Road (Map)

Yesterday, the smell of fire was as strong as if it were next door.

“We saw smoke out there, so we knew we had a fire,” Craig said.

They didn’t know, however, that it would become the largest fire since the swamp became a national refuge in 1974, swelling to roughly 6,000 acres, or more than 9 square miles, and costing nearly $4 million, so far.

If you don’t want to believe the scientists, believe your fellow inhabitants of the planet:

Animals and plants are shifting their natural home ranges towards the cooler poles three times faster than scientists previously thought.

In the largest study of its kind to date, researchers looked at the effects of temperature on over 2,000 species.

They report in the journal Science that species experiencing the greatest warming have moved furthest.

Weather is not climate, but I know that it is hotter now in this part of the world than it was when I moved away 35 years ago.

Paul McMorrow, writing at the Boston Globe, considers the upcoming civil suits against the banksters and their three-card mortgage monte. A nugget:

Trillions of dollars of bad loans went through Wall Street’s mortgage bond pipeline, and they’ve exploded at astounding rates. Deals where half the mortgages went bad are common. One Goldman lawsuit lists a loan pool where 71 percent of the mortgages failed. Wall Street’s defense so far – that sophisticated investors should have known what they were getting into – is tantamount to saying that investors should have known better than to believe SEC filings.

It’s not a defense that inspires confidence. Wall Street soaked the American populace for everything it had, and then the bankers took their bailouts and bonus checks and slunk off toward the Hamptons. Wall Street titans aren’t in jail, but their reckoning is coming to civil courtrooms, and it’s going to be brutal.

Chancey de Vega states what is obvious except to those who don’t want look. It is not for nothing that Doug J. started referring to the Republicans as the “Confederate Party.”

This is but a bit of a much longer post (emphasis in the original):

While deeply concerned by the federal government’s failure to resolve the long-term structural weaknesses in the economy, Standard & Poor’s was clear about what drove its auditors to lower the credit rating of the United States: the politics in Washington D.C. are dysfunctional and broken; and a mature and reasonable solution to the debt ceiling debate, one that grew out of normal politics and not economic terrorism, would have likely averted this most unfortunate, but wholly predictable, of outcomes.

As the pundit classes try to make sense of the debt ceiling-credit downgrade political drama, they are overlooking a central element in the Tea Party GOP’s almost mouth-frothing resistance President Barack Obama since his landslide election in 2008.

While the black blogosphere (and even Twitter) has been bubbling with this issue for some time, the mainstream media has been dancing around a fact which remains hidden in plain sight. Just as they did with their poor coverage of the Birther issue, and out of fear of a Conservative backlash, the mainstream media is loathe to speak truth to power and point out the obvious: racial hostility is one of the primary forces driving the opposition of the Tea Party GOP to President Obama. This has been evident during the debt ceiling debate and on policy matters across the board. To fail to understand this most basic of realities is to fail to understand American politics in the Age of Obama.

Follow the link to see him identify, then connect, the tea three elements of the strategy,