First Looks category archive

There’s weather, and I’m under it. Bloggery may be sporadic for a couple of days.

Off to drink liberally.

Shannon Green offers a “can’t fail” strategy for promoting sane gun laws.

Joe Patrice reports.

I’ve been watching a few episodes of the New Zealand series, The Brokenwood Mysteries, and realized that the church that figures in several episodes is named “St. Judas.”

This blog is 14 years old today.

See the first post.

There’s plastic every where. Here’s an excerpt for the story in The Denver Post:

There are no limits in place, or standards, for this type of pollution, and federal scientists suggested the “microplastics” come from clothing through laundry drier vents, household materials such as tarps, and packaging that degrades, releasing bits that blow in the wind and wash into water — and presumably are evaporated into the atmosphere.

USGS scientists found more plastic particles in water samples drawn from the urban sites — which followed a line from the National Jewish Hospital in east Denver through downtown to Arvada, the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge, the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus and Boulder Canyon.

But Wetherbee and his team also found frequent plastics contamination in water samples drawn at a mountain site near Nederland and at a relatively isolated Loch Vale site at an elevation of 10,364 feet above sea level beneath towering peaks in Rocky Mountain National Park — a watershed that scientists have monitored for more than 20 years for chemical contamination from wind and rain.

(Why do I see a move to Kansas City in these researchers’ future?)

In a related, more serious vein, Mark Chaffee argues that we are not a well-informed citizenry.

Off to drink liberally.

Via Classic Arts Showcase.

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Or, muses The Roanoke Times, there may be more similarities than one would expect.

Shaun Mullen solicits suggestions for coping with Trump’s cultists, as America’s original sin of racism threatens to swamp the polity. He argues that the descent in to deplorability is unprecedented even in the darkest periods of our history.

Here’s a bit from his post.

What I got wrong, much as I had failed to understand when I got blindsided by Agent Orange’s 2016 “victory,” was that Mueller and I, and probably you, too, live in a very different time. A time of profound national polarization when the unwavering support of Trump’s basket of deplorables, variously estimated at upwards of 40 percent of registered voters, is not based on the standards by which we judge a Jefferson, Grant or Kennedy, but an adoration hinged on how Trump keeps beating the system — whether it is cheating on his taxes or stifling Mueller — and how they wish they could be him.

The here-and-now is so different, the rot in America so great and the stench in Washington so overpowering, that the logical alternative to the criminal investigation on which Democrats pretty much bet the post-Blue Wave ranch was a national investigative commission not unlike those empaneled after 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. Gather facts and then bring criminal charges based on those facts.

You cannot argue with those who will not listen. Reasoned debate is not the answer. Unified resistance is, but too many Democrats seem to be lacking spines.

Heck, I think many of today’s Democrats would fear to read aloud even one of Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign speeches.