Irene

Irene 25 August 2011

Posted by marisacat in Divertissements, Inconvenient Voice of the Voter, The Battle for New Orleans.
trackback

.
A man walks along a seaside park as Hurricane Irene passes to the east of Nassau on New Providence Island in the Bahamas, Thursday Aug. 25, 2011. Irene is pounding the Bahamas as a Category 3 hurricane. [Lynne Sladky/AP]

Max Mayfield of Katrina fame (well, he tried, but the ptb had a plan, which I call the New Orleans Plan) has weighed in on Irene:

[T]he former chief of the National Hurricane Center called it one of his three worst possible situations.

“One of my greatest nightmares was having a major hurricane go up the whole northeast coast,” Max Mayfield said.

He said the damage would probably climb into the billions of dollars: “This is going to have an impact on the United States economy.” . . . .

Brace! Incoming!! She hits or she fizzles….

Comments»

1. marisacat - 25 August 2011: Madman posted this at the end of the last thread:

‘Help Julaine Appling find a husband’

The Wisconsin Gazette,the statewide LGBT newspaper, has decided to put aside its differences with nemesis Julaine Appling, who spends most of her waking moments opposing gay rights. The editorial in the current edition:

The following is an open letter to Julaine Appling, president of Wisconsin Family Action.

You’ve dedicated your life to promoting heterosexual marriage as the crowning pinnacle of civilization. Yet you have remained single.

Now, as a never-married, middle-aged woman, you are reduced to beginning speeches by claiming you are “straight.” How humiliating. If only you were married – like Marcus Bachmann, for instance – then you might rest above the uncharitable suspicions of filthy minds.

Of course, you’re not suspect merely because you’re single. People are inclined to make assumptions about women whose saunter is more John Wayne than Marilyn Monroe, whose voices are more Johnny Cash than Dolly Parton. We long for the day when humans are not subjected to such meaningless stereotyping. Unfortunately, due partly to the divisive efforts of people such as you, that day has not arrived.

Then there’s your “roommate” Diane, the unmarried woman with whom you have lived for so many years and purchased a home. This undoubtedly innocent relationship only fuels the vicious rumors about your sexual orientation.

We’ve decided to turn the other cheek on your opposition to our rights. We want to help you achieve the marital bliss that is your life’s obsession. OK, there is a self-serving angle to our offer: If you were happily married, maybe you’d leave us alone.

Reply
marisacat - 25 August 2011: I htink Miss Appling is more than a tad confused.

Reply
Madman in the Marketplace - 25 August 2011: as religioauthoritarians so often are …

Reply
marisacat - 25 August 2011: She sounds like one half of a lesbian couple from 50+ years ago….

Reply
Ganjafied Gabacho - 25 August 2011: or like our current DHS chief and ex govenor who regularly choppers into the border area of az to check out her notgirlfirend at morning star ranch

Reply
marisacat - 25 August 2011: Big fucking sis.

what a mess she is.

Reply
2. marisacat - 25 August 2011: AND, Madman posted this link at the end o the last thread too…

😉

The Havoc Hurricanes Wreak On Yankee Cities (A Visual History)

Reply
Madman in the Marketplace - 25 August 2011: that pic from ’38 of the wave hitting the sea wall is pretty awesome.

Reply
Ganjafied Gabacho - 25 August 2011: I was there for Gloria’s fizzle. One day in four years they canceled school in my little private NH shithead factory, locked in the “common room” with no classes, atheltics, assembly or supervision and a lot of seriously fucked up adolescent males preying upon the weak while outside nothing much happened for hundreds of miles of our location except a little wind and rain…

This feels different, call it my ganja-sense (LOL) but I tink dis wan g’wan mek hellfire com down pon backra mon. Jah know I and I crack Washintomb’s Pyramid last weak!

Reply
marisacat - 25 August 2011: A couple of coastal people have said it feels different. “Irene” is taking on that iconic sound already.

Reply
3. Ganjafied Gabacho - 25 August 2011: Good Night, Irene…

gotta love lead-belly…

Reply
4. lucid - 25 August 2011: So the week started off with an earthquake and it’s going to end with a hurricane… just great!

Reply
Ganjafied Gabacho - 25 August 2011: Maybe from our mamma’s perspective (momma earth, that is) it has been a helluva good week…human compassion is beautiful and all, but in the face of nature I think we are revealed to be as inconsistent and irrelevant as a fart at a pig farm…

Reply
Ganjafied Gabacho - 25 August 2011: actually, I’m sorry, I’m pretty thick.
I forgot your location.
good luck bro!

Reply
lucid - 25 August 2011: I’m just hoping it’s tropical storm strength by the time it gets here – not looking that way tonight though.

Reply
marisacat - 25 August 2011: are you in a low lying area lucid?

Reply
lucid - 25 August 2011: I’m in evacuation zone B, but bordering right on C. I’m betting they evacuated at least zone A. They’ll do B if it looks like a Cat 2 upon hitting the city. If they do evacuate zone B, I’m tempted to stay because I am literally a quarter block from zone C and I would worry about the kitties…

Reply
marisacat - 25 August 2011: I just heard an update, it is strengthening and the water temp is 85 degrees…

I will pull up one of the evacuation zone maps for the boroughs… thanks for the detail…

Reply
marisacat - 25 August 2011: Residents in Zone A face the highest risk of flooding from a hurricane’s storm surge. Zone A includes all low-lying coastal areas and other areas that could experience storm surge in ANY hurricane that makes landfall close to New York City.

Residents in Zone B may experience storm surge flooding from a MODERATE (Category 2 or higher) hurricane.

Residents in Zone C may experience storm surge flooding from a MAJOR hurricane (Category 3 & 4) making landfall just south of New York City. A major hurricane is unlikely in New York City, but not impossible.

Read more: Business Insider with map of evacuation zones

Reply
Madman in the Marketplace - 26 August 2011: better hit the bodega and load up on candles!

Reply
marisacat - 26 August 2011: just waking up… and catching up at 5:30 am… and the report I am hearing is Irene is staying off the coast of NC, not going inland to the coast…

So far so good, if that holds…

Reply
lucid - 25 August 2011: I know Gizmo in particular is going to have a shitty day because storms make him cower in the shower.

Reply
5. lucid - 25 August 2011: map

I’m in Greenpoint, virtually all of which is in one of the three evacuation zones.

Reply
6. marisacat - 26 August 2011: ? Talk about dreams being nightmares:

EXCLUSIVE: “Face the Nation” welcomes Gen. Colin Powell to a NEW SET on Sunday, to discuss his leadership in the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation.

What a fucking insult to the author of the speech at Riverside church.

Reply
Madman in the Marketplace - 26 August 2011: so the whitewasher of My Lai is mediating the development of that horrible memorial … in other words, still whiewashing history.

Reply
marisacat - 26 August 2011: yup…. exactly.

Reply
7. marisacat - 26 August 2011: oh FFS. He should shut up.

Obama to speak on Irene

The president, near the end of his vacation, will make a morning statement on the hurricane.

Reply
marisacat - 26 August 2011: What he is REALLY doing…. via Politico’s “44”, full text:

President Obama raised eyebrows [people need to get over it, just shave their eyebrows off – entirely!! -Mcat] this weekend when he visited Comcast CEO Brian Roberts’ Martha’s Vineyard home on Sunday. Comcast, beyond being a telecommunications giant, is also the parent company of NBC and MSNBC.

It turns out that Comcast employees are also the most generous organizational donors to the Obama Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee between the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Comcast employees have donated nearly $200,000 to the fund, according to an Open Secrets analysis. They top out a list that includes Goldman Sachs employees (No. 4), law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher, & Flom (No. 2), and Dreamworks (No. 8).

In addition, Obama has also spent some time with Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett on the phone during his vacation. Buffett’s employees similarly rank among the top 10 organizational donors to Obama, chipping in more than $100,000 so far, and landing in the No. 6 spot on the list.

Reply
ts - 26 August 2011: Maybe if he lectures it enough it will get bored and go away.

Reply
marisacat - 26 August 2011: There’s a positive thought.

😯 … 🙄 … 👿

Reply
marisacat - 26 August 2011: 😆

I think it is because there is no capability for live TV transmission from MV….

[P]resident Barack Obama is cutting his Martha’s Vineyard vacation a day short to get back to Washington, D.C., before Hurricane Irene hits. He will be back at the White House tonight.

His family will stay in the Vineyard until tomorrow morning. [no rush there!! -Mcat]

“I think the president simply reached the conclusion that it would be more prudent for him to be in Washington, D.C., and to be at the White House at the end of the day today,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters, according to Politico. . . . . .

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-is-fleeing-marthas-vineyard-to-escape-irene-2011-8

Reply
8. marisacat - 26 August 2011: oh here is something I did not know about Three Gorges Dam Martin… we have also imported via the company in China charged with this monumental mess about to b dedicated on our Mall to Wars and White Men….

WE FUCKING IMPORTED THE STONE MASON CREW FROM CHINA.

… and they are receiving free housing and food, in Chrystal something or other, in VA but NO PAY. NO PAY…. and apparently when asked why they are working for free, they said, “national pride”.

Yeah right.

Chinese stone, chinese artists and stone cutters, sculptors… and Chinese stone masons to install. On the excuse we don’t know how to assemble such large stone pieces.

Turn the damned lights out.

We are finished.

Reply
Ganjafied Gabacho - 26 August 2011: I wish they would turn the damned lights out, then maybe all these infotainment “reporters” would scurry away like the roaches they are…

Reply
marisacat - 26 August 2011: I don’t think they are ever going away.

Reply
Ganjafied Gabacho - 26 August 2011: I fear they won’t either, long after our impending collapse and perhaps demise they’ll still be ubiquitious, obnoxiously painted with pancake makeup, and blithering nonsensical inacantations to world populated by bacteria, roaches and jellyfish…

Reply
marisacat - 26 August 2011: BI has an article on 3 ft long rats in a Brooklyn housing project. One caught and supposedly plenty more, pictures and all… etc.

I mean who knows, and I was just too squeamish to open the story.

Reply
Ganjafied Gabacho - 26 August 2011: I wonder what Darwin would have to say about that…I’m hoping there’s some 10 foot housecats breeding somewhere in a burrough not about to be flooded….

Reply
marisacat - 26 August 2011: I dunno. Cats can be fierce… but three foot long rats? Ugh. The mind reels.

Reply
Ganjafied Gabacho - 26 August 2011: seriously, blacquoahodch!

Maybe if some big kitties from the Zoo were to escape…of course they might prefer to dine on corn-syrup fattened primate as opposed to shit fed giant rat….
ts - 26 August 2011: But whitey on the moon.

Reply
marisacat - 26 August 2011: So appropriate…

😉

Reply
ts - 26 August 2011: Sad that 40 years after it was written, it still rings true. Though Whitey’s moon budget has had some cutbacks.
ts - 26 August 2011: And speaking of old stuff that still rings 100% true, here’s something from 1992.
9. Madman in the Marketplace - 26 August 2011: Nuclear plants in Hurricane Irene’s path

Sweet dreams!

Reply
marisacat - 26 August 2011: I heard today some of the plants store their fuel rods in OPEN pools.

Reply
10. Madman in the Marketplace - 26 August 2011: Hurricane Irene, as seen from space, Aug. 26, 2011

Reply
Ganjafied Gabacho - 26 August 2011: So pretty from up there….

Reply
11. Madman in the Marketplace - 26 August 2011: At 83, subject of ‘American Girl in Italy’ photo speaks out

You know the photo. You’ve seen it a hundred times. A beautiful, statuesque young woman is walking down a street in Florence, Italy. She’s clutching her shawl, and she seems to be moving swiftly. More than a dozen men are staring at her longingly. One of them is grabbing his crotch.

The iconic 1951 image “American Girl in Italy” turns 60 on Monday. As its anniversary approaches, the stunning woman in the photo — Ninalee Craig, now 83 — is speaking up about it. She wants to explain what the photo represents, and what it doesn’t.

“Some people want to use it as a symbol of harassment of women, but that’s what we’ve been fighting all these years,” Craig said in a telephone interview from her home in Toronto. “It’s not a symbol of harassment. It’s a symbol of a woman having an absolutely wonderful time!”

Back in 1951, Craig was a carefree 23-year-old who had chucked her job in New York and secured third-class accommodations on a ship bound for Europe. She spent more than six months making her way through France, Spain and Italy all by herself — something very few women did in the years following World War II.

She traveled as inexpensively as she could, so she was thrilled when she found a hotel right on the Arno River in Florence where she could stay for $1 a day. There, she met another adventurous solo female traveler: Ruth Orkin, a 29-year-old photographer who came to Italy after completing an assignment in Israel.

Reply
marisacat - 26 August 2011: oh I did not know they used to air brush out the fellow grabbing his vitals.

it is such a wonderful photograph.

Reply
12. Madman in the Marketplace - 26 August 2011: A Mirror of Greatness, Blurred

That figure is the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and his four-acre, $120 million memorial on the edge of the Tidal Basin (which was to have been dedicated on Sunday before officials postponed the event because of the approaching storm) is adjacent to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s, across the water from Thomas Jefferson’s, and along an axis leading from that founding father directly to Abraham Lincoln’s. There are few figures in American history with similar credentials who would have even a remotely comparable claim for national remembrance on the Washington Mall.

Perhaps, though, it was the expectation of such consecrated company that led to the kind of memorial that now exists. There is always an element of kitsch in monumental memorials, a built-in grandiosity that exaggerates the physical and spiritual statures of their human subjects. That is one of the purposes of turning flesh into imposing stone. We can feel it when standing at Lincoln’s toe level in his Grecian memorial on the Mall. It is unavoidable, too, in the Pantheon-like gazebo that houses the towering figure of Jefferson at the edge of the Tidal Basin.

So it should be no surprise that something similar happens to Dr. King. But his statue, by the Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin, goes even further. Those of Jefferson and Lincoln are a mere 19 feet tall; Dr. King looms 30 feet up, staring over the Tidal Basin. And he isn’t decorously posed in a classical structure; he isn’t contained in an ordered space with Greek or Roman allusions. His form emerges halfway out of an enormous mound of granite so heavy that 50-foot piles had to be driven into the ground to provide support.

We don’t even see his feet. He is embedded in the rock like something not yet fully born, suited and stern, rising from its roughly chiseled surface. His face is uncompromising, determined, his eyes fixed in the distance, not far from where Jefferson stands across the water. But kitsch here strains at the limits of resemblance: Is this the Dr. King of the “I Have a Dream” speech? Or the writer of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech?

Originally, ROMA called for water as a major element of the design, glistening sheets flowing over the arc of carved words as fountains murmur, creating a pastoral, meditative atmosphere. The water would also have been a direct allusion to Dr. King’s “Dream” speech and his frequent invocation of the prophet Amos (“let justice run down like waters …”). For budgetary reasons, though, the foundation abandoned almost all these plans, leaving just two small fountains near the entrance, but there was something profound and touching in the original vision.

That initial idea is now also pushed aside by a far less subtle conceit that takes center stage. You enter the memorial from Independence Avenue by walking through a narrow passage between two granite mounds. They arise out of the landscape without any context, and it becomes clear that the corridor between them was created by pushing out a slice of rock — the same rock that now sits at the center of the memorial, on the far side of which is carved the looming torso of Dr. King.

It turns out that these towering mounds at the entrance are supposed to represent something from the “Dream” speech: a “mountain of despair” and, in the rock slice from which Dr. King emerges, the “stone of hope.” The slab is inscribed: “Out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.”

But do these mounds of granite, which are given an almost artificial appearance with their sketchy, cartoonish contours — do they evoke anything at all like a “mountain of despair”? And the unattractive slice supposedly pushed into the center of the memorial: is that really a “stone of hope”? Certainly not, judging from the expression on Dr. King’s face.

The metaphor is not one of Dr. King’s best, anyway, but to center an entire memorial on it, and then to do so in a way that makes no real sense, is baffling. Moreover, the original context of the line from the speech is quite different. Dr. King, after the demonstration in Washington, was going back to the South, his faith intact.

“With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope,” he proclaimed. “With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.”

It is an active phrase; Dr. King and his followers hew the stone from the mountain. Here it is just the opposite; the stone of hope is sliced away and apparently pushed to the center. Dr. King is pushed along with it.

Reply
marisacat - 26 August 2011: The Memorial is lousy, bad, ill considered, dumb propaganda.

In other words, it fails on all fronts.

Reply
Madman in the Marketplace - 26 August 2011: they couldn’t have made it worse if they tried …

… oh, wait …

Reply
13. Madman in the Marketplace - 26 August 2011: Remember all those dispersants we dumped in the Gulf? Now we are learning what is in them:

In response, the E.P.A. published the full chemical composition of Coexit 9500 and Corexit 9527 and nearly a year later, released an aggregate list of 57 chemical components found in the 14 dispersants, although they provided no information about which chemicals were found in which dispersants, citing an obligation to protect what had been deemed as confidential business information by the manufacturers.

A review has now been published by Earthjustice, in collaboration with Toxipedia, an online toxicology Wiki, of all the scientific literature concerning the potential health impacts of these 57 chemicals. The report finds that “Of the 57 ingredients: 5 chemicals are associated with cancer; 33 are associated with skin irritation from rashes to burns; 33 are linked to eye irritation; 11 are or are suspected of being potential respiratory toxins or irritants; 10 are suspected kidney toxins; 8 are suspected or known to be toxic to aquatic organisms; and 5 are suspected to have a moderate acute toxicity to fish.”

While words like “associated with” or “linked to” may sound weak and unconvincing, the syntax highlights just how little is actually known about these chemicals. For 13 of the dispersant ingredients, no relevant data could be found.

“BP had a particular set of dispersants on hand and no one at the time seemed to know if they were safe, whether they were safer than other dispersants products that could be used or even whether they were safer for people and the environment than oil alone,” said Marianne Engelman Lado, a lawyer with Earthjustice. “BP chose Corexit because it was the dispersant on hand, not because it was the safest. However, regulation of dispersants is so inadequate that BP didn’t have enough information to figure out how it compared with other dispersants or oil alone.”

Reply
14. Madman in the Marketplace - 26 August 2011: Republican Barack Obama Says Filthy Tar Sands Pipeline Is Great

Says the Politico just now: “The Obama administration is working overtime to fight the perception that it’s dissing green groups and rubber-stamping a controversial 1,700-mile oil pipeline.” Well that sounds about right for Obama, working at the last minute on the perception of something rather than its reality.

Reply
marisacat - 26 August 2011: More of a R than even Bill C was. Which si saying a lot.

Not that Democrats are anything but empty gamsters…

Reply
15. marisacat - 26 August 2011: new

LINK

8)

Reply