First Looks category archive

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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The mopes call you on the phone with a recorded message that your bank’s ATM records have been compromised and give you a number to call.

When you call that number, they talk your information out of you, then raid your account.

More information here and here.

Acidification

Described as “the other carbon problem,” the slow decrease in the pH of ocean waters across the globe is blamed mostly on the burning of fossil fuels and the release of excessive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

(snip)

Increased acidity means that shellfish, from the tiniest to the largest species, have trouble making their shells from calcium carbonate, a victim in the changing chemistry of the oceans, the experts said.
That threat has watermen worried about future impacts on crabs, oysters, clams and other commercial stocks that grow shells or rely on small shellfish for food, said Wayne Creed, an Eastern Shore fisherman, writer and consultant.

The story goes on to point out that some climate change deniers claim that acid is good.

Apparently it is, if you like algae blooms and dead zones.

They must be taking some other kind of acid, the kind that alters reality.

One of the myths treasured by the rightwing is that private industry always does a better job than government “bureaucrats.”*

It just ain’t so, but it does funnel a lot of government money in private hands:

Consider the bomb-sniffing dogs: The Navy contracted out their training. The dogs failed the tests after training (they couldn’t sniff bombs); after thinking about it a while, the Navy decided to buy the dogs and train them itself:

The task probably seemed innocuous enough when a small team of U.S. Navy personnel accepted it last fall. They would trek out to a private security contractor in Chicago to pick up 49 dogs, then transport them to a nearby military base.

But what they found when they arrived was shocking, according to internal Navy e-mails: dirty, weak animals so thin that their ribs and hip bones jutted out.

(snip)

In fact, the Navy said later, at least two of the dogs did not survive. Several others were deemed too sick to ever be of use. Nearly a year after they were supposed to have begun working, the remaining K-9s still are not patrolling Navy installations as intended.

The contractor says the Navy owes it $6,000,000.00.

I hope the guv’mint protected itself by including in the contract a performance bond.

_______________

*As if large private companies somehow do not qualify as “bureaucracies”; case in point: try calling Verizon for a telephone repair and see how long it takes to reach a real live human being.

It took me an hour and six phone calls–Verizon dropped two of them and three others ended up in Menu Hell. Once I got to them, the real live human beings were polite, knowledgeable, and efficient (afterthought: probably because they were hungry for human interaction), but Verizon’s 800-number horror show is one of the reasons I would not contract with Verizon for anything other than basic land line service.

Odds bodkins!

2 B R No B=?