Literally the least you can do.

Still, better than doing nothing. It seems to have helped before.


"Emergency Response teams from the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) are distributing tents, relief supplies, and humanitarian assistance to people displaced by the flooding. In Balochistan, UNHCR has delivered 4,000 tents, 2,700 plastic sheets, 2,200 kitchen sets, and 4,000 plastic mats to the most devastated areas. The organization has partnered with mGive to allow mobile contributions. Anyone in the world can now text the word "SWAT" to 50555 to give $10, which helps provide tents and emergency stipends to displaced families. When prompted, reply with "YES" to confirm your gift."

From and for other ways: http://www.thenation.com/blog/154063/how-help-pakistan


Have been reading Richard Price's "A Multitude of Sins," a short story collection, one of which mentions "pointless acts of pointless generosity"--such as saving a butterfly, even if for only a brief time, from a parking lot--and then makes an argument for doing them anyway.

That reminded me of this pic I took recently with my camera's phone, when, walking around McCarren Park in Williamsburg, M. found a dying butterfly and decided to move it off the sidewalk, out of the way of oncoming foot-traffic.

"I am, for instance, a person who stops to move turtles off of busy interstates, or picks up butterflies in shopping mall parking lots and puts them into the bushes to give them a better chance at survival. I know these are pointless acts of pointless generosity. Yet there isn't a time when I do it that I don't get back in the car thinking more kindly about myself. (Later I often work around to thinking of myself as a fraud, too.) But the alternative is to leave the butterfly where it lies expiring, or to let the big turtle meet annihilation on the way to the pond; and in doing these things let myself in for the indictment of cruelty or the sense of loss that would follow. Possibly, anyone would argue, these issues are too small to think about seriously, since whether you preform these acts or don't perform them, you always forget them in five minutes."

Possibly, but I don't get the feeling he would have written about it if he truly believed that.

Barney Frank use pot legalization analogy...

and then refuses to accept a single metaphor from Stephen Colbert.

(No, he didn't use this one.)

But before that, Colbert was pressing Frank on why the recently-created Consumer Protection Agency was needed, saying it's just another "nanny-state" measure by the Dem's. Frank then asserted that if Colbert was concerned about the nanny state he should consider ending marijuana prohibition. At which point Colbert started using obtuse metaphors about trying to make banks (tigers) change their thieving ways (stripes).

Also, watch the interview with (almost indistinguishable from that other tall, thin scary-looking blond, right-wing-moron chick, except her voice is less raspy--but not completely unraspy, as that's no doubt part of the appeal, being on the radio and their, achem, older male dmographic) Laura Ingraham. He fillets her and her stupid new NY Times best-seller quite nicely; it went well with my mac & cheese entree.

(No, this is MIA. She's like the opposite of Ingraham, but I wanted to post her spitting on a camera guy. Classy.)