First Looks category archive

Another lawyer gets caught with his briefs down, and Above the Law’s Joe Patrice says it sure looks like ChatGPT to him.

Off to drink liberally.

This is the text of a letter to an elected official that I will be putting in the mail tomorrow:

I am receiving voice mails and texts from you and persons claiming to represent you on my cell phone claiming that you are my Representative.

I do not and have never lived or voted in (your state).

Please stop.

I await his response.

Afterthought:

I do think it’s an innocent mistake. I suspect he purchased a mailing/calling list from the wrong persons.

I look forward to his response.

Jamie Raskin posits that today’s Republican Party is being led by the nose by Russia’s wannabe Tsar.

Via C&L, which has commentary.

At The Roanoke Times, Don Kusler discusses the thought police wolf prowling in the sheep’s clothing of “parents’ rights.” A snippet:

Parents should be involved in the education and upbringing of their children. We have that right.

While it may be my right to direct the education and upbringing of my children, it is not my right to impose my views about parenting on my child’s entire classroom, school or community.

That, sadly, is precisely what the culture warriors of the current parent’s “rights” movement are trying to do.

I commend the complete article to your attention.

Yet another oxymoronic “responsible gun owner” exposes a child to politeness.

Police say a woman arrived at the school to pick up one of her children and parked her vehicle in the parking lot of the school. The woman left the car, leaving her 11-year-old and 3-year-old children unattended.

Underneath the front passenger seat was a loaded 9mm Glock handgun which had been stored in an unlocked case, inadvertently left by the female’s fiancé, according to state police.

The three-years-old found the gun and fired it, but, in this case at least, no one was injured.

Afterthought:

One must needs note that “negligently” and “inadvertently,” like “negligently” and “accidentally,” are not synonyms.

At Pyschology Today Blogs, Jeremy Sherman discusses how jerks jerk people about. (For some reason beyond my ken, he chooses to refer to them as “trumpbots.”) Here are his main points; follow the link for an in-depth exploration of each one.

• Wisdom is knowing the healthy moves for the different circumstances.
• The opposite of wisdom is absolute hypocrisy, which can be had by claiming that whatever you do is the best.
• People grant themselves trumped-up (fake) trumpcards, whereby whatever they do is automatically ideal.
• We enable “trumpbots” by thinking that they think or believe or care about anything but winning.

Via All Things Amazing, an image site (some images NSFW).

Suzanne Degges-White has some pointers that may cast light upon some of our polity.

Shorter David Mills: Plastic bag people, you’re such a drag.

Aside:

Thanks to the arrival of the German chains Lidl and Aldi in our neck of the woods, we’ve become quite used to supplying our own reusable bags, and, frankly, it works out quite nicely. Usually, two of the reusable bags suffice where, before, we would leave the store with five or more plastic bags.

At the Portland Press-Herald, Victoria Hugo-Vidal argues that have forgotten what the phrase, “working class,” means. Here’s one example she cites (emphasis added):

I was thinking about class drag, and class in general, because of Rep. Jared Golden. After I wrote a column about his out-of-character Twitter student loan forgiveness rant, Golden published a post to the online platform Substack, saying, “Recently, a political opinion writer described me as living in the cocoon of my present work in politics and my past service in the military and, therefore, out of step with the working class. This fragment of my work history ignores the fact that I spent many years working at the business that belongs to my mother, and before her, to her father.”

(snip)

But more important is Rep. Golden’s second sentence, implying that having worked for his family business puts him more in step with the working class. Here’s the important thing to remember: Working a job does not make you working-class. We’re talking about a multigenerational family business (a golf course, specifically) here. The profit that business generates goes to the family that owns the business. The owners dole out part of those profits to their employees in the form of salaries or wages. Those employees who do the labor are the working class. Not the owners.

Methinks the entire piece is worthy of your attention.

Bad Voltage, S03E61.

It gave me a laugh on my drive to this month’s DL.

Off to drink liberally.

Via PoliticalProf.

When I worked for the railroad, I took the train to New York more times than I can remember. The first view of New York was the towers of the World Trade Center above the New Jersey bluffs before the train entered the tunnel to Penn Station.

Many years later, when I was no longer working for the railroad, I had occasion to take the train to New York. The first view of New York was no World Trade Center above the New Jersey bluffs before the train entered the tunnel to Penn Station.

Image via All Things Amazing, an image site (some images NSFW).

Jim Hightower is not impressed by Big Pharma’s hissy fit.

We human beings sometimes do some terrible things in pursuit of the almighty dollar. But to our credit, one moral line we humans don’t cross is to profiteer by gouging sick people on the price of medicines their lives depend on.

Unless, of course, you count executives of giant pharmaceutical corporations as human beings. Gouging patients is their preferred business model.

I commend his entire piece to your attention.

When news coverage went from being a loss-leader and a service to being a profit center, when news went from information to “infotainment,” well, that’s when this discourse became dis coarse.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Claudia Skowron tries to make sense of the pumpkin spice phenomena. A snippet:

Many will argue that the pumpkin spice flavor itself is delicious. Ironically, most pumpkin spices have next to no pumpkin in them . . . .