Plead the First

I’m going to be moving Plead the First to a new server this weekend, beginning tonight, so commenting may be disabled, and access to the site may be a bit dicey at times. If you have problems, try again later. Need to contact me and it can’t wait? Try the email address over in the […]

A letter writer in today’s News and Record compares the sale of Mexican flag license plates with genocide: Now I ask, why is the N.C. license plate office allowed to sell a plate with a flag of a foreign country but not a Confederate flag plate? … This is just another example of the increasing […]

From CNN: An unprecedented national survey of pilots by the U.S. government has found that safety problems like near collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than previously recognized. But the government is withholding the information, fearful it would upset air travelers and hurt airline profits. … Among other results, the pilots reported at […]

For me, the highlight of this year’s ConvergeSouth was definitely the film festival organized by Andy Coon. Don’t worry if you missed it – Andy’s taken the time to post video of most of the films. My personal favorites were the Deadly Finger entries, the Banana Bus, and the Katrina film. There are other great […]

The U.S. Postal Service. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. But park a car too close to your mailbox, and all bets are off.

David Wharton shares memories shaped by the Haw river: In high summer the fireflies would settle in the trees after their dipping twilight mating flights and just pulse, their yellow glow contrasting with the thick icy white of the Milky Way. Late at night the whippoorwills would wake us up with their loud, repeating cries. […]

A visual (and aural) representation of coalition deaths in Iraq over time since the beginning of the war. The animation runs at ten frames per second – one frame for each day – and a single black dot indicates the geographic location that a coalition military fatality occurred … Accompanying the visual representation is a […]

Joel Gillespie recently wrote a great post outlining his views on the “pro-family” label and some of the problems with the accuracy and selective application of that label. Joel says that a better label might be “pro-traditional family”. In my reply to his post, I said: One area that I would question is that of […]