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November 2020

Voting in America – Fixing This is Just Too Easy

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Prior to moving from the west coast to New England earlier this year I assumed that since the east coast has ‘been in business’ longer than the west, things would be pretty together; organized, with good systems in place.  Well you know what they say about people that assume.

On the morning of November 3 – a cold yet sunny morning glimmering with a layer of unexpected snow – I stood in line waiting with several fellow townspeople for the polls to open, got screened for Covid, and was eventually handed a pen and an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper; some pesty form that a nameless office worker had run off on their HP printer, I guessed; something else to throw away when no one is looking.  And then I realized that it was my ballot!

how to fix voting

I didn’t know if I should laugh, object or look to see if there was a hidden camera ready to record my reaction.  What kind of hobo, hillbilly, half-assed organization came up with these?  In the year 2020, with all the technological advances of the past fifty years, when everything from paying bills to going to class is done via a series of 0s and 1s, these people expect me to cast the most important ballot I’ve cast since the very first in 1976 using 18th century technology? 

Are you kidding me?  What the hell?  Didn’t we put a man on the moon over two generations ago?  And you give me what amounts to some tree bark and a piece of charcoal? 

Unfreakingbelievable. 

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Fossil Fuel Retribution: Climate Hurricanes

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The heat from fossil fuel and wood pellet combustion stored within the oceans (equivalent to dropping five Hiroshima atomic bombs every five seconds nonstop) is supercharging these god-awful climate hurricanes and climate fires.

Climate Hurricanes
Climate Hurricane Iota decimated life in its wake. It was a record 30th named tropical storm within the Atlantic during 2020. 
Image credit: Luis Guillermo Ferrebus/AP

Today, tropical storms are rapidly intensifying into hurricanes and typhoons. In addition, global heating is slowing down these tempests, which means they have become more torrential, violent and deadly.

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Your #GlobalHeating Battle Line

* From climate fires and insect epidemics to megadroughts and climate hurricanes, man-made global heating is terrifying! All hands on deck. This Monday evening, satellite

‘Beeautiful’ Buzzing Sistren

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Gen Zs (<26 year olds) are rescuing and breaking new ground within the queendom of our sistren, the bees.

Honeybees have a remarkably complex language. It includes dancing, headbutting and scaling vibrations. Each intriguing maneuver conveys specific and precise meaning. For example, when honeybees encounter giant Asian hornets their vibrational dialect quickly pulses up the scale. That is, the higher the pitch, the greater the peril.

Honeybees can communicate danger better than any other of the 900,000 or so kinds of insects. That’s why scientists are paying close attention to the bees because they spotlight toxicity within the environment. It’s high time for the lawmakers globally to ban all these deadly nerve poisons that are killing bees and birds, e.g., neonicotinoids, sulfoxaflors, flupyradifurone and chlorpyrifos.

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Your #GlobalHeating Battle Line

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From climate fires and insect epidemics to megadroughts and climate hurricanes, man-made global heating is terrifying! All hands on deck.

This Monday evening, satellite data from Hurricane Eta revealed sustained winds of 190 mph (306 kph) at its core. This climate hurricane in the North Atlantic was the strongest storm so far recorded, and the only Category 5 hurricane ever to form in the Atlantic during November.

Global Heating
Eta was the twelfth hurricane and the record 28th Atlantic storm in 2020. Image Credit: Tropical Tidbits

On Tuesday, Eta delivered an unsurvivable 21-foot (6.4 m) storm surge to northern Nicaragua and southern Honduras. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), nearly 500,000 children (Gen Zs) were in danger of becoming climate refugees.

Global Heating
The Saopin Bridge along highway CA-13 in Atlántida, Honduras, buckled and then collapsed from an extreme deluge of 40 inches (1016mm) of rainfall on Wednesday (Nov. 4, 2020). Image Credit: Twitter/Policia Honduras

Meanwhile, Eta has left the ravaged landfall and is drawing energy from the warm Caribbean Sea while moving slowly northeast towards the Florida Keys.

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Democrats Disingenuous Demeanor

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As quoted recently, on or about October 26, 2020 by political journal  The Hill, by reporter Celine Castronuovo, Rep. Alexandria  Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) took to Twitter late Monday to call for the  expansion of the Supreme Court as Amy Coney Barrett was sworn in as a  justice, with the progressive first-term lawmaker arguing that  Republicans don’t believe Democrats “have the stones to play hardball  like they do.”

More of AOC from The Hill:  “Remember that Republicans have lost 6 of the last 7 popular votes, but have appointed 6 of the last 9 justices,” she wrote. “By expanding the court, we fix this broken system and have the court better represent the values of the American people.”

OK, Um, don’t we have the Electoral College so that populous, left-leaning states such as New York and California do not run roughshod over the more sparsely populated states? If you choose to do  away with the Electoral College, then, by all means be fair, and offer  the states such as Wyoming, Iowa, the Dakotas and the other  conservative states the option of seceding, since it seems that they  do not share the “values of the American people.”

While AOC may be the spokesperson for socialist-leaning “let’s take from the rich and then give all the money away” folks in her congressional district, I’m not convinced that she is a “spokesperson for the American people.”

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Nature’s Harbinger of Heat

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Why has Earth’s climate changed so radically in such a short span of time? The elephant in the living room is combustion heat from fossil fuels and wood pellets chopped up from old-growth forests. That accumulated heat is being stored deep within the oceans. Over the previous 25 years, that heat is the equivalent of dropping 3.6 billion Hiroshima atom-bombs. The oceans drive Earth’s climate, which has become unstable with both higher highs and lower lows.

Even to the untrained eye, the effects of climate instability are highly conspicuous across western North America’s cold tolerant and hardy coniferous forests.

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