First Looks category archive

Mr. Feastingonroadkill pretty much sums it up.

From a long post at After the Future:

The cultural left is a tired, morally spent force in American culture. But the cultural right is full of people blinded by their moralistic ideology. Moralism is wannabe morality. It’s the priggish posture taken by the morally immature to appear morally righteous. The moralistic person deep down knows he is a fraud and aggressively strikes out at anyone who would expose him. They know deep down that the world as it really exists does not fit neatly into their simplistic template, so they reject whatever doesn’t fit as ‘evil’. And for these people there is no accommodation with evil; they must confront and destroy it because they sincerely believe it will destroy them if they don’t. Hence the paranoia that is at the heart of the cultural right.

The good part starts about six minutes in (warning: 15 second commericial at beginning) (CNN clip replaced to get rid of the commercial.):

Via Zandar.

Click for the original image.

Via Some Guy with a Website.

Moved because of Easter.

Date: Saturday, April 30th.

Special Guest Speaker: Louisa Strayhorn, the last African American to serve on the Virginia Beach City Council

Location: Bubba’s Deli & BBQ, 3600 Dam Neck Rd, Virginia Beach (Map).

Cost: Adults $10.00, Under 12 $6.00 for all-you-can-eat buffet (it’s a pretty good buffet, too–plenty of variety).

More information here.

Off to drink liberally.

Fun and fellowship for liberals. Join us.

When: Wednesday, April 27, 6 p

Where:
Kelly’s Tavern
1936 Laskin Rd, # 201
Virginia Beach, Va. (Map)

More here.

Irregular shenanigans to resume shortly.

Celebrate yourself some Easter bunny hype:

Did you know that Easter was originally a pagan festival dedicated to Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring, whose consort was a hare, the forerunner of our Easter bunny? Of course you did. Every year the fecund muck of the internet bursts forth afresh with cheery did-you-know explanations like this, setting modern practices in a context of ancient and tragically interrupted pagan belief.

The trouble is that they are wrong. The colourful myths of Eostre and her hare companion, who in some versions is a bird transformed into an egg-laying rabbit, aren’t historically pagan. They are modern fabrications, cludged together in an unresearched assumption of pagan precedence.

The Eostre bunny is like the fairies those little English WWI era girls photographed–made up.

The real Easter Bunny is good enough, thank you.

Read the whole thing, It’s a nice commentary on modern mythology.

Read more »

Spring cleaning.

Every once and a while, teabaggers reveal what truly lies beneath their (you will pardon the expression but in some ways it is most accurate) movement.

My container roses survived the winter quite nicely.

Also, light bloggery.

What Atrios said. (Though the voting profile doesn’t apply to my state. Wish it did, but doesn’t. Southern Strategy and all that.)

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

H/T Susan for the pic.

Off to drink liberally.

Your tax dollars at work:

Via Delaware Online.

Addendum, Later That Same Week:

Thoreau recounts his mother’s experience. A nugget:

So, to recap: They barked at a middle-aged woman who was recovering from shoulder surgery and didn’t raise her hands fast enough while they were taking naked pictures of her.

And via Thoreau, a Raving of a Feral Genius.

Struggling start-up needs your help for fun and fellowship. All you have to do is show up and pay your tab.

Think of Drinking Liberally as a support group for liberals.

When: 6 p.

Where:
Jack Quinn’s Irish Pub
241 Granby Street
Norfolk, Va. (map)

More about Drinking Liberally.

Back when Ed Koch was mayor of New York and I was working for the railroad, Koch decided that it was okay for the homeless to spend their nights at Penn Station.

For the mayor, it got them out of sight of most of the populace by foisting them on the railroad. (We always wondered why he didn’t invite them to JFK Airport–at least that was city property.)

The three railroads that used that station and their customers and employees didn’t think much of the idea; they did not look kindly to camps being set up in the nooks and crannies of the station (Penn Station is a very large place stretching under several city blocks, with three public levels and many more private ones; it has lots of nooks and crannies). It was not uncommon for employees to come to work to find someone sleeping on the floor in front of their office doors.

I recall one of my co-workers referring to the railroad police’s efforts to deal the situation as “playing water polo with the homeless.”

Now Virginia Beach has taken up water polo with the homeless (there is much more information at the link):

Raymond Strand built a small cabin in a wooded area off Loretta Lane and furnished it with a bed, a stove and a closet. He lived there until a month ago, when Beach officials told him and more than 20 other people to vacate the “tent city” they called home.

Strand since then has moved his belongings just a half-mile, to another wooded lot. It’s a much smaller tent city, but the 62-year-old former Army engineer said he had no other options.

All I can say it that the city’s motto seems to be, “Move ’em up, head ’em out.”

Afterthought:

There’s not enough money to help the homeless, but there always seems to be enough money to “partner” with a developer.