First Looks category archive

H/T Susan for the pic.

90 Fahrenheits and sunny today.

In a world without walls, who needs Windows (to borrow a phrase)?

Homes built with Chinese-made drywall should be stripped of all the problem wallboard, electrical wiring and natural gas piping, federal product-safety regulators said Friday.

The stuff gives off fumes which are not only dangerous to persons, but which also corrode metal.

Quality construction at a price that’s right.

It’s Bushie FEMA trailers on steroids.

I’m taking the day off to unpack and stuff.

Oh, my goodness.

As I think I have mentioned here before, I attended Catholic churches for 18 years. Something to do with being married to someone brought up in the Catholic Church.

All the priests I knew were decent fellows who were trying as best they could to do the jobs they had taken on. Not a one of them has ever had his honor questioned.

It is a shame to see them betrayed by their management in such a fashion. I wonder whether the Catholic Church has considered what protecting malefactors does to the religious who are not malefactors.

I would guess not.

For every hinky priest, there is a hinky Protestant preacher.

The individual misconduct was individual sin; protecting the malefactors was organizational sin, for which the organization must answer.

I have seen it before in other large organizations. The first impulse is to circle the wagons. The second, third, and fourth impulses are to circle, circle, circle. And the circle remains unbroken, as the sin perpetuates.

The sex abuse problems in the Catholic church are management problems. Management knew about it, management protected it, management thereby encouraged it.

I wonder what St. Peter will have to say when these clowns appear at his doorstep.

I’m back.

It’s been real.

Bloomberg takes a poll:

. . . 70 percent of those who sympathize with the Tea Party, which organized protests this week against President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul, want a federal government that fosters job creation.

Follow the link to see the full analysis. The incoherence of teabagging is stultifying.

Still slightly under half a mil:

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits fell 14,000 to a seasonally adjusted 442,000, the Labor Department said. The report included annual revisions to the weekly unemployment claims seasonal factors going back to 2005.

Using the old seasonal factors, claims would have dropped only to 453,000. The prior week’s claims figures were revised to show a 5,000 rise instead of a drop. Analysts, who had expected claims to slip to 450,000, said the data was a step in the right direction.

I was listening to this podcast today. A caller called in (as callers tend to do) and remarked that, in discussing health care with his friends and business associates, he has noticed a “significant lack of altruism.”

He summed it us as (I am paraphrasing this), “I’ve got mine. You’re on your own.”

“I’ve got mine. You’re on your own,” pretty much sums up Republicanism, does it not?

Video via TPM.

Lines at Rita’s:

Scammers are pretending to represent Publishers’ Clearing House’s Prize Patrol, taking advantage of the psychological truth that, when confronted with the possibility of already having won, persons’ brains stop working.

These things are pretty difficult to hide. And they took two of them.

Details here.

I can still see the cave in Davy Crockett and the River Pirates.

Jobless figures stay in the same ballpark.

(I am in the final paroxysm of packing up my old house and helping Goodwill make its donation quotient. Yesterday I hit some kind of exhaustion wall and ended up playing Tetris for two hours while ignoring the rest of the world–well, most of the rest of the world, and missed the news.)

The blog is going on five (in August), but two years ago I registered the domain name of pineviewfarm.net.

Take a left at the sweaters, second door down from the pinstripes:

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Taken 18:06 2010-02-27. All I did was sharpen it up a little in the GIMP:

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