First Looks category archive

Beware of those who claim God is on their side.

Too often, they make their own god, as James Carroll points out in the Boston Globe. A nugget:

The other side of this story is the way in which, again from the very start, we humans have used Jesus as a lens through which to project our prejudices and needs onto the screen of history. So when 1st Century Roman military occupation led to civil war among the colonized Jews, Jesus people purged him of Jewishness to imagine a Gentile Jesus (“His own knew him not’’), in radical contradiction to the first fact of his history — that he was a Jew through and through. When Christians found themselves aligned with the Roman empire, Jesus emerged as the embodiment of political power (King of Kings). When, in times of plague, the challenge was to make sense of inescapable misery, an agonized Jesus came to the fore (the bloody crucifix), as if God could will suffering as a mode of redemption. When Christianity remade itself as Christendom, a necessary reaction to material excess elevated a puritan Jesus (the cross without a corpus). Against cold rationalism, there came a warmly pious Jesus (the Sacred Heart). In line with racist eugenics, an Aryan Jesus emerged (blue eyed, light brown flowing hair). When the time came for the overthrow of the corruptions of the old order, why not a revolutionary Jesus (liberation theology)?

Must go play in the snow.

Afterthought:

The region is shut down. A foot of snow all at once would shut down any place for a day of digging out, even places that are used to it.

One thing I’ve noticed here is that the television news coverage of the weather is nowhere near as panicky as it was in the Greater Philadelphia-Wilmington Co-Prosperity Sphere. I’ll put it this way:

Here, TV News was saying,

A lot of snow. Stay inside. Stay off the roads. And now some pretty pictures of the snow and some weather maps.

And this is a place where four inches is a Big Deal.

In Philly, it would have been and no doubt is

OMG! OMG! OMG! The End of the World as We Know It, the White Horseman of the Apocalypse, We’re All Going To Drown, Look at the Weather Map of Horrors! Look! A Car in a Ditch! A Tree Fell Down! OMG! OMG! OMG!

Worst damned television news on the East Coast.

It looks like the snow is pretty much over, though the forecast calls for the possibility of another inch or two overnight.

The AP reports a foot for Norfolk (for those of you not familiar with the area, Norfolk is about a mile that way); it looks like a foot on the railing of the deck, but I haven’t gotten outside to measure it (walking in the snow scheduled for tomorrow). That would make it half again as much as the maximum predicted and the heaviest snowfall in these parts since 1989.

Snow started last night in the Bayside area of Virginia Beach at about 8:13 p. m. We were driving home from dinner touring the neighborhood looking at lights when we saw the first flakes.

The prediction of one inch had already morphed into a one of 5-8 inches, (It was resoundingly derided by one of our fellow guests at dinner. Now he has a shovel-ready project.)

It looks as if there’s already five inches on the railing and it’s still snowing heavily.

Same view, five hours later:

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Science 2.0 has some suggestions from the world of science. My favorite:

Christmas is about a birth but there’s a star that lets everyone know where it happens. So first go take a look at this astronomer’s explanation for the Star Of Bethlehem – planetary conjunction or Christmas miracle? Yes. Bonus: it’s sure to enrage all the left wing atheists you know.

Check out the links in the Old Time Radio section just added to the sidebar below the news feeds, over there.

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Andy Borowitz on Goldman’s sacks.
Follow the link for the full report.

In a rare press conference, the usually reclusive Prince of Darkness defended Goldman’s bonuses today, welcoming reporters at his apartment in New York’s Trump Tower.

“I don’t doubt for a minute that my friends at Goldman deserved those bonuses,” Satan said, adding that “buying their souls was the best investment I ever made.”

When I was a young ‘un, boys learned about cars. Now the only cars they learn about are in GTA. Cars are also much more complicated now; the era of the shade-tree mechanic has ended.

Jennifer Waters has column full of good car maintenance tips at MarketWatch. A nugget:

“Probably the most common cause of the check-engine light is that the gas cap is not on tight enough,” Reed said. The sensor has responded to the extra oxygen going through the gas line and it will go off once the cap has been tightened or the entire tank has been used.

Aside: When my check engine light came on, Donny replaced the gas cap. Problem solved.

Via Shaun Mullen, a gas of an article about the SR-71 Blackbird. A nugget:

One day, high above Arizona , we were monitoring the radio traffic of all the mortal airplanes below us. First, a Cessna pilot asked the air traffic controllers to check his ground speed. ‘Ninety knots,’ ATC replied. A twin Bonanza soon made the same request. ‘One-twenty on the ground,’ was the reply. To our surprise, a navy F-18 came over the radio with a ground speed check. I knew exactly what he was doing. Of course, he had a ground speed indicator in his cockpit, but he wanted to let all the bug-smashers in the valley know what real speed was ‘Dusty 52, we show you at 620 on the ground,’ ATC responded. The situation was too ripe. I heard the click of Walter’s mike button in the rear seat. In his most innocent voice, Walter startled the controller by asking for a ground speed check from 81,000 feet, clearly above controlled airspace. In a cool, professional voice, the controller replied, ‘ Aspen 20, I show you at 1,982 knots on the ground.’ We did not hear another transmis sion on that frequency all the way to the coast.

Via the Brad Blog.

They get to hit and keep on running:

District Court Judge Frederick Gannett accepted the plea bargain in the hit-and-run case against prominent Denver wealth manager Marty Erzinger Thursday, sentencing him to one year of probation and 90 days in jail for running down cyclist Dr. Steven Milo with his Mercedes and then leaving the scene last July.

(snip)

Haddon (the victim’s attorney–ed.) argued that the deal, which included two misdemeanor charges and no felony charges, wasn’t appropriate.

“I submit that in these kinds of instances, prosecutors can, should and do require felony pleas,” Haddon said.

Full Disclosure: I did not make the connection to this earlier post when I posted this Wednesday.

H/T Karen for the link.

Click the image for more Auth.

According to this news report, his tormentors actions “did not constitute a crime.”