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Every day I get to read one of your rants and every day I think “I really wish I had learned this when I was in school,” and today’s lesson was no different-filled with new stuff or at least old stuff used in a new way to frame the issues and facilitate my understanding. The legislative efforts of Ossoff and Jones offer some hope but unless there is a way to put it in a reconciliation bill, I think we’ll just get Lucy Van Pelted again. For example, is it possible that they could play their parliamentarian games to tie the bills ( the ones that are supposed to suppress the voter suppressors) to the budget? In other words, in order to exercise the power to challenge state anti-voter activities, they will have to spend our tax dollars and that needs to be added to a budget somewhere. We need this legislation, for without it there’s not a lot that can be done to stop this onslaught of the tenaciously stupid. And we still need to get enough of our fellow citizens to unite and compel our government to meet its purpose.

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Trouble is that you do not hear this on Fox News. They are lead to believe that millions of illegals are voting and something must be done to "STOP THE STEAL". Facts have nothing to do with it in todays Right wing media.

Today Denver is suppose to have the worlds worse air quality due to Forest Wildfires in the West. The Dixie fire in CA is it largest fire in history.

https://www.denverpost.com/2021/08/06/colorado-weather-huge-smoke-plume-bad-air-quality/

https://news.google.com/stories/CAAqOQgKIjNDQklTSURvSmMzUnZjbmt0TXpZd1NoTUtFUWlYcEpHMWs0QU1FZVdOSWFYbElUcnVLQUFQAQ?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen

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Yikes! And the fire season is just getting into the swing of things. The sixth mass extinction is underway.

https://www.geol.umd.edu/~tholtz/G204/lectures/204holocene.html

https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/

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Despite that Republicans will be largely responsible for our once-great nation's slide from democracy to ... good God, who knows what, something Orwellian for sure... in a future history gone horribly wrong, it is nonetheless entertaining to witness the implosion on the right, while FUX News and its cloud of wicked seed battle it out for the sea of eyeballs gradually receding from their grasp, like an ebbing tide, impossible to stop (we hope anyway). The Republican Trump Party is hemorrhaging their marginal voters -- establishment types, educated women, military, law enforcement, entire families who've lost loved ones needlessly to COVID, basically anyone with a fully developed brain. Enjoy the moment however fleeting.

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I've been living on the side of a mountain near Anchorage for a couple of months -- nice and cool with a healthy mix of rain and blue skies like the world should be in the summer, a true paradise. Had to escape the smoke in my hometown in the Lower 48. The new UN IPCC climate report is due out Monday. If Homo sapiens don't evolve, pretty soon there won't be any escaping this self-made crisis.

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Agreed, Old Dave. Well said. Although, the descriptor "tenaciously stupid" gives the unvaccinated walking dead not only too much credit but also way too much of a pass -- unless one defines stupidity as culpability. No matter how "smart" someone might seem outwardly, complicity in crimes against democracy (Hey, and against humanity too, all you self-centered anti-masker/vaxers!) through willful ignorance and subservience to a blowhard authoritarian like Trump IS the ultimate stupidity.

These traitors (almost exclusively Republican from top to bottom) to fundamental democratic principles are willing participants, not mere rubes hornswoggled by a big-city demagogue's Big Lie (okay, maybe some). No, the main reason lies on such a scale work so well with otherwise normal, intelligent individuals is that these lost souls desperately want their fantasy land to be a true thing -- a happy place that's more real than their own sad reality. That's what Trump and Trumpism offer -- something larger and more exciting, however false, than their boring, meaningless, second-hand lives.

To be sure, history is full of knaves. And this latest batch of thieves, liars, and murderers on the world stage is just more of the same crap, only worse given the dire times now. From Putin to Trump and all the tyrants in between, these overblown fools are nothing but a worthless bunch of despicable racists, fascist bastards, and shameless cowards only pretending to be religious and patriotic or whatever gains them popularity with their cheering masses -- the worst enemies to humankind's undying quest for honesty and transparency in governance, real justice, workable democracies, and sane societies worldwide.

It's a truth too hard to handle. How can one admit to the ugliness buried deep inside and forever hidden from self-deluded self-diagnosis -- an absolutely disgusting belief system, more of a raw hateful feeling really, a learned behavior beat into the psyche by repeated brainwash sessions under the guise of parental guidance, negative peer pressure at school and work, and all the other destructive experiences in a sick culture infused with bigotry and racism that permanently scars the mind?

For the great majority of true believers in utter nonsense, the long-term process leading to cognitive dissonance and a severe paucity of critical thinking skills usually begins at a tender young age or perhaps during life's inevitable upheavals and uncertainties that leave one vulnerable to manipulation by the unscrupulous. Is it any wonder then that the so-called "saved" are stubbornly convinced to their dying breath only white Republican Christians should have the right to vote and therefore to run the whole country for their own benefit -- ultimate white privilege? Regardless of all outward influences, however, as functioning adults we are each supposed to be responsible for our own thoughts and actions ...and feelings.

Furthering the rights bestowed upon the righteous (Republicans) and damn the heathens (Democrats) is, after all, what a white male god/father figure demands in the eyes of his beholders, right? Of course it is. Just say it like it is: Petty people put petty gods before them for their own selfish purposes.

John Kenneth Galbraith said it best:

"The modern conservative is not even especially modern. He is engaged, on the contrary, in one of man's oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

That is culpability -- by malignant narcissists who think they are so right when they are so wrong.

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Yeah, Republicans are wearing masks because of the smoke!

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There are reports of it setting off home smoke alarms.

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Visability is currently <1 mile in Colorado. Rated as the worse air in the world. I can see yearly deterioration. Why can Republicans not see it?

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