OUT OF THE FRYING PAN, INTO THE NEO-NAZISM
A recent surge of neo-Nazism in several countries—including, improbably, Israel, and Mongolia (where some dark-skinned natives are rabidly anti-Chinese)—has generally been denounced, but Corinna Burt credited it with rescuing her from a life of acting in pornographic videos. According to a hate-group watchdog, the Portland, Oregon, woman is “the most prominent National Socialist Movement organizer in the Pacific Northwest.” In an August interview with Gawker.com, the white-supremacist Burt (a mother of two and a professional embalmer who is also into bodybuilding) said she terminated her porn career (as “Cori Lou,” doing mostly bondage and “torture” films) because, “If we [Caucasians] consider ourselves a master race then we have to act like a master race, not degenerates.”
GETTING CRAPPED ON, IN A GOOD WAY
Though volunteers got the project started in May, Ventnor City, New Jersey, continued through the summer to seek financial donations to finish the new restrooms that provide relief for those visiting the town’s Atlantic shore. Said Commissioner Stephen Weintrob, “How would someone like to have a toilet named after themselves, or a urinal or sink?”
INCREDITABLE
A Treasury Department inspector general reported in June that, out of 2.6 million applicants for federal mortgage relief, 14,000 “home buyers” wrongly received tax credits and that in fact, 1,300 of them were living in prison at the time of filing, including 241 serving life sentences. Sixty-seven of the 14,000 received tax credits for the same house, and 87 more potentially fraudulent tax-credit applications were filed by Internal Revenue Service employees.
GOOD NEWS FOR RAPISTS
(1) California requires that if a sex offender’s GPS tagging device signals that he’s in a prohibited area, parole agents must immediately respond, but that law was easier to pass than to implement. As of June, according to a San Diego Union-Tribune investigation, the state had fallen about 31,000 responses behind. (2) A July Illinois law requires that all hospital “rape kits” on victims be tested for blood and DNA (in that finding a rapist, and certainly convicting him, without such evidence is often hopelessly difficult). Until now, 80 percent of the rape kits taken in the state had sat, untested. (As TV police dramas emphasize, many rape victims are reluctant to submit to the indignity of swabbing and photographing so soon after being violated and comply only because detectives assure them of the rape kit’s importance.)
NOT TAXED ENOUGH ALREADY
It is common knowledge that American corporations avoid taxes by running U.S. profits through offshore “tax havens” like the Cayman Islands and Bermuda, but a May Bloomberg Business Week investigation traced the specific steps that the pharmaceutical company Forest Labs takes to short the U.S. Treasury. Although Forest’s anti-depressant Lexapro is sold only in the U.S., the company’s patent is held by an Irish subsidiary (and since 2005, shared with a Bermuda subsidiary in a tax-code hocus-pocus that insiders call the “Double Irish”), which allows the vast majority of the $2 billion Forest earns a year on Lexapro to be taxed at Ireland’s low rate (and at Bermuda’s rate of zero). Bloomberg estimates that the U.S. Treasury loses at least $60 billion annually by corporations’ “transfer pricing”—enough to pay for the entire Department of Homeland Security for a year.
GOTTA HAND IT TO HIM
In July, Manuel “Lefty” Hernandez, 28, was charged in Springfield, Massachusetts, with snatching a man’s wallet (which he probably did with his left hand, which is his only hand). If he’d had a weapon, police could have charged him with a felony, but it was only a misdemeanor because Hernandez was unarmed.
BEST RESEARCH ASSIGNMENT EVER
University of Central Lancashire (England) researchers, writing in a recent Archives of Sexual Behavior, reported that women achieve orgasm more often during foreplay than intercourse but that they more frequently emit orgasm-signaling “vocalizations” just before, or simultaneously with, male ejaculation.
PLEASE, “VIOLENT LITTLE PEOPLE”
A strange, frightening August headline in The Union (Grass Valley, California): “S.W.A.T. Team Requested for Violent Midgets.” In fact, they were steroid-using, bodybuilder midgets, headed by an apparently particularly dangerous “lead female.”
INCOMPETENT COPS
In March, four NYPD officers, acting on department intelligence, went to the home of Walter and Rose Martin in Brooklyn, looking for a suspect, and broke a window as they worked their way inside. The Martins, retired and in their 80s, were clean, and a police spokesman later admitted that officers had wrongly visited or raided the Martins’ home more than 50 times since 2002 because of a stubborn computer glitch. When the software was originally installed, an operator tested it by mindlessly typing in a random address, but that happened to be the Martins’ house, and thus the visits and raids began.
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