A Guide for New Yorkers Experiencing Their First Hurricane
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3. Floods are not ironically filthy fun pools. They are foul, garbage-filled, shit-containing rivers of poison. But it's cute to watch the rats drown. Ditto hobos.
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6. If you decide to loot, go for small items. You just look stupid trying to carry a TV through the water.
Ok, let's look at this. Mr. Romney, please name any human that, like a corporation, lives indefinitely, can be in many places at the same time, and can kill large numbers of people sometimes knowingly and never get the death sentence or even prison, only a fine. Also, unlike people, corporations can be sold or dissolved. These are obvious legal differences, but cosmology -- the science of our universe as a whole -- gives us a much deeper understanding of Mr. Romney's error.
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Corporations constantly exploit their different legal status from individuals, and they are also orders of magnitude more complex than people and operate according to different rules. It is absolutely ludicrous to imagine that corporations are nothing but people and to use this fraudulent metaphor to protect corporations at the expense of the real citizens the First Amendment was designed to protect.
Most of the fast-food places were boarded up and dim, but a local fine-dining place called Bistro by the Sea (Click it, you'll like it) was open and catering to a few clusters of locals. Dressed Carolina golf-club casual, they sipped wine, nibbled on Atlantic Blue Crab Bisque and watched the trouble spinning toward them on a muted Weather Channel.
Among the nightly specials: a $6.95 drink called “Drink Hurricane Irene Away,” which seemed as though it was concocted to use up every last spirit behind the bar in the case the place was totaled on Saturday: vodka, gin, rum, amaretto, triple sec, grapefruit juice, pineapple juice and grenadine.
I see that Nassau County, Long Island south of Sunrise Highway is being evacuated. That’s my homeland! In Merrick, Sunrise was the big east-west drag, with the Babylon Line of the Long Island Railroad running alongside. Our house was around a mile south of there, although it’s gone now, replaced with a McMansion. Anyway, given the canals running through that area, I can easily see how it might end up underwater.
Also, I’m glad we visited Coney Island and Brighton Beach a few weeks ago, while they still existed.
Wow.
Meanwhile, I’m filing Monday’s column, or at least a draft thereof, today, so that even if New Jersey is plunged into darkness, the show will go on.
In the novel, the State of Israel is founded in 1948, but is destroyed after only three months in an alternative version of the Arab-Israeli War. Without Israel, Palestine is described as a mosaic of contending religious and secular nationalist groups locked in internecine conflict; Jerusalem is described as "a city of blood and slogans painted on the wall, severed heads on telephone poles".[2] The United States president believes in "divine sanction" for neo-Zionism, a movement seeking for Jews to reclaim Israel once again.
In February 2008, Rudin told The Guardian that a film adaptation of The Yiddish Policemen's Union was in pre-production, to be written and directed by the Coen brothers.
TRIPOLI (The Borowitz Report) August 26, 2011 – In an all-out effort to capture Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, rebels fanned out across the country today dressed as former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Donning bright pink pantsuits and black pumps, the fifteen thousand rebels blanketed the Middle Eastern nation, hoping to create a honey trap of sorts for Mr. Gaddafi, whose unrequited crush on Secretary Rice has come to light in recent days.
Rebel field commander Awad Daiki said that with thousands of fierce fighters disguised as Rice, the military mission dubbed Operation Condoleezza was sure to be a success.
"Once we will have Gaddafi in our clutches, there will be cause for celebration," he said. "Plus, we can't wait to get out of these heels."
The cancer-killing properties of marijuana were the subject of discussion in a PBS documentary that aired this week to little media fanfare.
While using marijuana to kill cancer may sound like a wild claim to some, it struck Dr. Prakash Nagarkatti as a great idea. In his studies as professor of pathology and microbiology for the University of South Carolina, he tested synthetic cannabis drugs on cancer cells and developed a formula that was able to completely eradicate cancer cells in a test tube.
A follow-up on mice afflicted with cancer found that up to 30 percent in the test group completely rejected their disease, while others had their tumors significantly reduced. The same drug is now being tested on humans with Leukemia.
But it’s not just Dr. Nagarkatti who sees the medical value of marijuana: it’s the whole pharmaceutical industry. And that’s another point the documentary makes, examining the patents various companies have filed, and what they claim marijuana-based drugs could one day be used to treat.
Looking back on her career as a freedom fighter, Tubman noted, “I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.”
We are ruled by so many “industrial complexes”—military, financial, energy, food, pharmaceutical, prison, and so on — that it is almost impossible to stay on top of every way we are getting screwed.
Is there an end to the stupid? It's a rhetorical question, don't answer. Eric Cantor's remarks about federal aid and Tuesday's earthquake centered in his district transcend stupid and go straight to dense.
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On Fox & Friends Sunday, anchor Clayton Morris admitted that Fox News factcheckers have confirmed that man-made global warming is “certainly” real, but argued that it “doesn’t matter” because climate denial is popular among Fox News-watching conservatives. Morris contrasted Jon Huntsman’s defense of the National Academy of Sciences with Rick Perry’s claims that scientists have “manipulated data” to concoct manmade global warming:
MORRIS: If you dive into the weeds a little bit on this global warming thing, you see that it seems that facts are certainly on Huntsman’s side on all of this and fact checkers have come out, we’re actually having our own brain room look look at this right now that any of Perry’s comments don’t seem to hold a lot of water. It doesn’t matter. What’s resonating right now in South Carolina is helping Governor Perry tremendously and he fired back at Huntsman on global warming and gaining traction, facts or not. [em in orig]
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Miles away, under the same sweltering sun, a grandmother is standing on her front porch, watching her dog pee. She and her husband bought their house fifty years ago. They paid off one loan, then took out a second to get the kids through college and paid that one off, too. Now, she can no longer afford the property tax. Next month, she will have to move in with her daughter and grandson---the one who is allergic to dogs, so she’ll have to give up her pet. On the other side of town, the burger joint has applied for a property tax abatement for its regional distribution center. It has plenty of money to pay its taxes, but why pay taxes if you can get homeowners to do it for you? It’s too bad Grandma can no longer afford the “luxury” of owning a home. She should have planned better for the future. She should never have allowed herself to grow old. And the autoworker should have thought twice before going blind, and the teacher should have chosen some other profession and the veteran was a sucker for volunteering for Bush’s war.
The veteran is feeling a little dizzy today, the result of too much sun and too little water combined with the fistful of pills that the VA gives him in lieu of counseling. He takes a wrong turn and ends up in the upwardly mobile neighborhood where the burger joint has just opened. People on the sidewalk avoid his gaze or grumble angrily. Sometimes they do both. He doesn’t hear them. He is back in Baghdad, watching his best buddy get blown to pieces, only now he’s the one who is dying. Bone and flesh explode. A hero’s death, that’s how it was supposed to be. His country never meant for him to come back home. It has no place for him and his nightmares. It has no place for the blind or the downsized or the elderly. These folks are inconvenient. They make rich bankers look greedy and selfish. They make drug company executives think about their own frailty and mortality. They make oilmen tremble in the night, afraid of what will happen when the crude runs out---
If they were real Americans, they would crawl under a rock somewhere and die, and leave the light of the sun to someone more deserving of it.
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Apparently what we really needed was the strength and inner toughness to let our old folks just die in misery and poverty. The ones who hadn't been smart enough to get rich, of course. The smart ones, the ones who valued Hard Work and Bootstraps and Eating Beets and whatever, would have enough money to live in their mansions with their servants until the end of time, or (and this is my personal fantasy of my late 80s) die in a hammock someplace warm, preferably of rum consumption.
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Note: The Rude Pundit always feels disgusting after he writes something that includes even mild praise for Reagan, who set us on this path of doom. But that's how filthy our discourse has become. You have to give credit to a cannibal serial killer when he doesn't eat all of his victims.
Within hours of an earthquake striking the eastern U.S. Tuesday, a rabbi that has spoken for the anti-gay group National Organization for Marriage (NOM) was already blaming homosexuals.
In a video posted to YouTube, Rabbi Yehuda Levin asserted that “one of the reasons God brings earthquakes to the world is because of the transgressions of homosexuality.”
“An email went out in my community just a few hours ago, ‘How long will it take Rabbi Levin to tie this earthquake in with homosexual marriage?’” he began. “Not very long at all. I’m happy to see that people — even if some of them are scoffers — are starting to see the connection.”
“Yes, there is a direct connection between earthquakes and homosexuality. There was in Haiti and it is here, in New York, in Washington, D.C., where they passed homosexual legislation ordinances, in New York City and state, where they opened, especially on Sunday early, where they passed the homosexual marriage law.”