First Looks category archive

Off to drink liberally.

They get fiendlier every day.

Boy, am I glad that my days of stepping airplanes once or twice a month are behind me.

Ring of Fire’s Josh Gay discusses Texas Republicans’ efforts to gut out the vote in Tarrant County, home of Fort Worth, Texas, by cutting the number of polling places almost by a third.

It occurs to me that one might ask: why are Republicans so afraid of voters might actually vote?

David notes the irony. From the Youtube page:

Milo Yiannopoulos called for mass deportations until immigration authorities arrested him in New Orleans and deported him to Great Britain.

On Tubi, I stumbled over a Looney Tunes series.

I’ve always enjoyed the Warner Brothers cartoons, and I think that Bugs Bunny is maybe one of the greatest cartoon characters of all time. I remember watching the Bugs Bunny Show when I was a young ‘un. I can still hear the theme song in my head.

But the reason I mention this series is this: In the later seasons (there are 13 seasons in the collection), they show older cartoons, many of them black and white, from the late 1930s and early 1940s. In them, you can see the characters that later became the Bugs, Elmer, Daffy, and Sylvester that we know in their earlier incarnations.

In some cases, it’s rather disconcerting.

Thom talks with Gil Duran, author of The New York Times best-selling book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. about how tech billionaires have become tne Robber Barons of this new gilded age.

Susan Estrich argues that the reason the Trump maladministration wants to prosecuthe James Comey has nothing to do with is posting–and quickly taking down–a photo of some shells he happened to see on a beach arranged to spell “8647.” She writes:

It’s because he had the audacity, as the FBI director, to investigate ties between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia. Trump fired him as FBI director in 2017 and has called for him to be jailed ever since. An earlier effort to prosecute him fell apart, so here they go again.

Follow the link for her reasoning.

When I was a young ‘un, back in the olden days, when I was old enough, I rode my bicycle the mile or so to my elementary school. When I got home in the afternoons, I would sometimes take long walks in the woods behind Pine View Farm–those woods you can see in the background of that picture there.

No one tracked me. And, somehow, I always got home okay.

Now it appears that there is a whole industry based on instilling fear in parents so that they will buy products to track their kids’ every move.

For some fool reason, I find this disturbing.

Cruz boos.

As of today, this blog has reached adulthood, having attained its 21st year.

Robert Reich looks at Donald Trump’s hissy-fit against Canada, which has long been one of the United States’s most dependable allies and partners until Trump decided to start a trade war of choice for no good reason except that he can’t stand it when people don’t follow his orders however–er–misguided they may be, and comments that

Trump is a peevish, angry, perverse child.

The question I ask myself is how much worse will his behavior have to get before Republicans and suck-ups around him take some action to stop him?

Sadly, my answer would be “never,” because today’s Republican Party, as the Founders feared might happen some day, has placed faction over governance.

But that’s just me.

Follow the link for the context of that excerpt.

Farron explains how and why Donald Trump has started playing the name game.

WHYY. my old NPR/PBS station in Philly, explores why younger persons are turning to “social” media as a source of news. Methinks it a worthwhile read given the state of dis coarse discourse.

Here’s a tiny bit:

(Media strategist Rachel–ed.) Lobdell said social media, by design, has made it so that individuals no longer need to turn to large platforms to receive news.

“It’s a much less controlled top-down environment,” Lobdell said. “That also has its downsides. There can be a lot of confusion over what is true and what is not true.”

Writing at the Kansas City Star, Terry Albright offers an unlikely theory as to the origins of Donald Trump’s desire to slap his taint on everything.

I say “unlikely,” because I suspect Trump has no clue as the the precedent Allbright posits. See what you think.

I find this worrying.

Microplastics were detected inside a third of insects across six streams within the Schuylkill River watershed, according to a new study by the Stroud Water Research Center.

Researchers at the nonprofit analyzed aquatic insects like mayflies, stoneflies and caddisflies that were collected between 1998 and 2019. . . .

They’re everywhere, even inside our brains.

I doubt that’s healthy.

_______________________

*With apologies to Frank Zappa.

Family matters, in a good way.

A frolicking fence:

A Philadelphia woman whose Honda Odyssey was stolen in July says she later found parts from the vehicle being sold on Facebook Marketplace and exchanged text messages with the person selling them.

Off to drink liberally.