This blog is debuting as summer seems poised to break over the land, erasing in its weighty humidity a cold and pointless spring.    And this particular summer, which is being met this week by a trio of scandals looking to linger over the season like a dumb and rumbling and lightning-scarred thundercloud, is a particularly fortunate time to debut.    What’s happening this fitfully stupid week fits in with a lot of what this blog is going to do.

If you are reading this initial post any time within the first week or so of its appearance, there is an exactly zero percent chance that you don’t know at least one of the authors, so I am not going to go long on introduction.   Some of you may know that Greg Johnsen and I used to blog together at Waq al-Waq, and so this is kind of like getting the band back together, with some new members who I think you’ll enjoy getting to know through their writing.

The point of this is to have a blend of different voices and opinions that cuts through the daily riptide of pointless nonsense and ceaseless counter-pointing.   Which is why this week is a good example.   If you want to read this blog to get an up-to-the-second dissection of why what Louis Gohmert said proves him once again to be the single-dumbest member of the US Congress, you might not get that.  You might, because Gohmert delights me, but there won’t be constant update.    There might be days at a time when politics isn’t mentioned, or you might get three straight days of debates over drones.  We think that there is a wide enough range of opinions on the site, and among our readers, as entirely theoretical as they are right now, to sustain a discussion on wiretapping, the latest Pynchon novel, how the Hawks are going to win the Stanley Cup, fracking, Yemen, or deep sea life on impossibly poisonous vents.

So we hope you’ll enjoy it.  It will take a while to find our feet, I’m sure, but stick around.   I would love for you to like us on Facebook or to follow us @irrelevanceshot.