Hurricanes
What people near the president do is they say ‘I love a president who asks questions like that [about nuking a hurricane], who’s willing to ask tough questions.’ … It takes strong people to respond to him in the right way when stuff like this comes up. For me, alarm bells weren’t going off when I heard about it, but I did think somebody is going to use this to feed into ‘the president is crazy’ narrative.[]
Um, no, “unnamed senior administration official,” this isn’t a “tough question.” It’s a really asinine question[] from an asinine president who finds divine inspiration in his own used toilet paper, then denies it when enough folks point and sneer.[] After all, he’s “really, bigly smart,” remember?[]
But like clockwork, the question seems to resurface every few years. In 2004, during a particularly deadly hurricane season, Mary Aiken, an elected member of the Hernando County, Fla., commission, called on NASA to find a way to stop the storms before they could reach Florida, and likened Mother Nature to a terrorist.
“These storms infuriate me,” she said, according to the Tampa Bay Times. “There must be something that can be done. It’s like a war. This state looks like Iraq.”
Informed by the county attorney that government scientists had researched that question before, only to realize that they ran the risk of combining a hurricane’s powerful wallop with deadly nuclear fallout, Aiken wasn’t satisfied. The agency, she declared, simply hadn’t been trying hard enough.[]
It’s like that really huge shit you took that won’t flush. (Hint: Go vegan. And pay the fuck attention in class.)
Antonia Noori Farzan, “Trump denies that he suggested nuking hurricanes. But the government once studied the idea,” Washington Post, August 26, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/08/26/trump-nuclear-weapons-hurricane/
Jonathan Swan and Margaret Talev, “Trump suggested nuking hurricanes to stop them from hitting U.S.,” Axios, August 25, 2019, https://www.axios.com/trump-nuclear-bombs-hurricanes-97231f38-2394-4120-a3fa-8c9cf0e3f51c.html
Gig economy
Dhruv Mehrotra and Aaron Gordon, “Uber And Lyft Take A Lot More From Drivers Than They Say,” Jalopnik, August 26, 2019, https://jalopnik.com/uber-and-lyft-take-a-lot-more-from-drivers-than-they-sa-1837450373
University of California, Hastings College of the Law, “UC Hastings Professor, Academic Leaders Call for Support of AB5,” August 26, 2019, https://www.uchastings.edu/2019/08/26/uc-hastings-professor-academic-leaders-call-for-support-of-ab5/