Category: Current Events

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Okay, Who Had Twin Hurricanes for August?

Something more the Orange Shit Stain in the White House will undoubtedly ignore and instead head to the golf course or tweet something hateful about losers who choose to live in paths of hurricanes.

From US News & World Report:

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Two tropical storms advanced across the Caribbean on Saturday night as potentially historic threats to the U.S. Gulf Coast, one dumping rain on Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands while the other was pushing through the gap between Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and Cuba.

Tropical Storms Laura and Marco were both projected to approach Louisiana at or close to hurricane force just two days apart next week. A hurricane watch was issued for the New Orleans metro area, which was pummeled by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005.

Two hurricanes have never appeared in the Gulf of Mexico at the same time, according to records going back to at least 1900, said Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach. The last time two tropical storms were in the Gulf together was in 1959, he said.

The last time two storms made landfall in the United States within 24 hours of each other was in 1933, Klotzbach said.

The projected tracks from the U.S. National Hurricane Center on Saturday afternoon pointed to both storms being together in the Gulf on Monday, with Marco hitting Louisiana and Laura making landfall in the same general area Wednesday. But large uncertainties remain for that time span, and forecasts have varied greatly so far for the two storms.


"We are in unprecedented times," Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said at a news conference Saturday as he declared a state of emergency. "We are dealing with not only two potential storms in the next few hours, we are also dealing with COVID-19."

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Prophetic

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance." ~ Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

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A Message to Anti-Maskers

The irony of the anti-mask crowd is, it's YOU, you dumb fucks. You're the ones who are stealing freedom from all the rest of us.

This shit is contained in every other first world nation because no other culture has you morons. You've been asked to make a handful of entirely manageable sacrifices for the common good, but you won't do that because you possess this uniquely American malfunction: you have a spoiled rich kid's idea of freedom; Donald Trump's idea of freedom, which is "I do whatever I want, and if anybody else gets hurt, fuck 'em."

"We can contain this outbreak if we all just wear masks when we go out? Oh thank god, that's so easy!" say the rational Americans whose brains still work.

"NO!" shriek you wingnuts. "I've decided 'liberty' means my every passing whim must be gratified because my emotional development stopped at age three!"

And so, no matter how many millions of us do the right thing, make the sacrifices, y'know…CARE ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE, there have consistently been enough of you maniacs offering free rides to the fucking Coronavirus so that the whole country has to stay trapped in this funhouse.

Social media circles are so easy to manipulate. Shit, this crap is probably all coming from nerds at a Russian troll farm, cackling about how much easier it is to kill Americans with memes than with bombs.

YOU are the reasons schools aren't safe for children now, by the way. All that lost educational and social development that you're suddenly so concerned about? It's your fault, and every fucking day you spend shrieking at entry-level service employees about your perceived "rights" is another day you take from them; another day you take from ALL of us. The the rest of us just have to fucking live with it, I guess. As you take and take and take from millions of people you can't be bothered to think—much less care—about. You take their safety, their peace of mind, their future. And in 145,000 160,000 cases and counting, you've taken everything. All this suffering and death doesn't seem to move you in the slightest, and I have to say that's really fucked up.

You folks are broken. You are failed humans. And congratulations, you've ruined everything for everyone else. You got what you wanted. Nobody can tell you to eat your peas. There'll be another quarter million corpses before this is over, and it'll take years to recover from the economic carnage, but you showed us! You "owned the libtards" and nobody can make you do something that you don't want to!

Nobody can make you wear a small piece of fabric over your nose and mouth. For short periods of time. To end a crisis. To save lives. Your parents must be proud.

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Thought for the Day

Not mine, but worth passing on nonetheless:

You remember in Jaws when everyone was pissed that the beaches were closed because the shark kept killing people and they knew it was killing people and they went to the beach anyway? That's what this pandemic is like.