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I think we can all agree that the Republican Party and the oligarchs are doing things horribly adverse to our citizens’ rights and our communities' interests, and, once again Thom has done a great job of highlighting how their conspiracies continue to flourish. A couple of days ago, Alis shared some important thoughts about The Republican Brain, specifically, the “…amygdala (fight or flight) and the pre-frontal cortex (judgement) parts of their brains are not communicating, so they react…There are reasonable solutions, but they are not using reason.” I have read that self-described conservatives have bigger amygdalae, and wondered why. Is there a genetic component to it? Is it experiences and environments (like bullying, glyphosate, and HFCS)? Is it all of the above?

After the laziest of Google searches, I found that “Conservatives’ brains are more reactive to fear” (found at https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/fear), which is all a psychopath needs to be able to exploit them. When a psychopath is also morbidly wealthy, then he can pay the Republican Party and the world’s master propagandists to manipulate everyone with a big lizard brain. Is it true that the COVID vaccine included a device that measures and transmits the size of our amygdalae to the RNC?

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I have said for a long time (Gun nuts hate this) is the personal need to carry a gun to protect yourself, is a sure sign of extreme paranoia.

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The Republican Party is not the Party that it use to be. Now it is the Party of lies. Trump told 30000+. That around 20 per day, for 4 years. The Party learned from that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years/

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A book I came upon recently and excellent, The Narrow Corridor, by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson..

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Quick story from my old barracks' days. One of our tall confident platoon members lived in a room with a little guy that had a bit of a speech impediment. It was minor, but people would pick-on him. Mr. Confident told him to man-up. It worked, because the next time he said "Hey, we gotta get this room squared away for inspection.", his room-mate said "Fuck you!".

We already saw Trump booed a little over his vaccination situation. He created a power-hungry monster by bringing together the ugliest parts of America. Those factions are not loyal to each other in any sense of the word. What many of them are doing is literally killing their own body politic. Could we live in more interesting times? That long list Thom put together is breath-taking and heart-breaking.

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Colorado had to shutdown 3 mobile vaccine units giving free Covid Vaccines because the workers were being harassed. https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/coronavirus/colorado-county-covid-vaccine-workers-harassed-over-holiday

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