Wow, I'm impressed at America's rural white trash teens' ability to casually use metric units. See, don't say drugs are all bad, America.
True story: My ex-girlfriend's father had always told his family that his funeral expenses would be covered by the military after he died, because of his army service. Said army service began when he was 17 and went before a judge for stealing cars for the nth time and was told "Either join the army or go to jail." Anyway, once he did die, they found out that the military would not in fact pay for his funeral, because he had been dishonorably discharged from the army for stealing weapons and ammo from the base in Arizona where he had been stationed and selling them to Mexican bandits. It's not a new scam, is my point!
It is absolutely true that downstate NY is the state's economic engine, and the rural and rustbelt areas that would be on their own after any split would immediately be an economic basket case! But it is also an unshakeable conviction among upstate folk that NYC is frittering away upstate tax dollars on terrible things like subways (and really, why is the MTA a state rather than a regional agency?) and of course welfare for all the poor people who live in New York's slums. You cannot convince anyone of the fact that Buffalo and Rochester are much poorer percentage-wise than NYC, and that the poor people in the Bronx are more than compensated for by the rich people in Manhattan who have no upstate analogue.
Basically, I'd like to see NY state split up so that I don't have to listen to my parents whine about it all any more.
I hate to stand up for random shouty people, but I imagine that "secession" guy is advocating that upstate New York (everything north of the northernmost Metro North stop, probably) seceede and form a separate state. I gotta say, as a Buffalo native, this isn't a terrible idea, even if it would replace a reliably blue state with an unbreakably blue state and a swing state. People upstate (and I'm including Western New Yorkers here, who bristle and being put under the "upstate" umbrella) are really alienated from NY state politics, because they have very little power there. Not that they should -- NYC and its environs have most of the people and all of the money -- but it's a bad dynamic.
Yay! I will put a link in the post!
But, uh, isn't the point that we need to check to see if people have weapons that they might use to seize control of the plane, whereas the pilot will already have control of the plane, and thus it really doesn't matter whether he's armed or not?
Someone going by the original name of "p" just posted the following thing on the comments of my innocent apolitical comics blog:
I read your blog for a long time, and it entertained me. I ignored that you wrote for wonkette. (I am a libertarian, I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat.) But now I am so disgusted with wonkette that I will not read anything someone associated with them wrote. I mean really, laughing about a family whose child is taken away by the state? And you’re just laughing because the family has right-wing tendencies? Fuck you.
WHY DO YOU RUIN EVERYTHING JACK???
I would support this crowbar attack if she declared it was because she found the piece "tired and banal, shock for schock value. I mean, really? Putting the word 'orgasm' next to Jesus' head? I'm sure that seemed very transgressive, when you were 12."
Man, the Jonas Brothers are so 2007! If you want kids to pay attention to you these days, you need to enlist Justin Beiber. And Justin Beiber doesn't come cheap.
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Invention