There are several good answers to this excellent question.

The first and obvious is that an attack by an exterior group to one’s own naturally pulls the assaulted group together, despite any internal differences that may exist.

A more nuanced, though also important answer is that this is not the same country it was 20 years ago.  We didn’t have a contingent of tens of millions of ignorant people who, by virtue of what they can find on the Internet over a period of a few hours, believe they are overnight experts in a certain subject matter.  These are disciplines in which the true scholars have spent their entire adult lives studying, posing hypotheses, conducting rigorous experiments, drawing conclusions, writing comprehensive papers, getting them peer-reviewed, and publishing their ultimate findings.

We live among countless fools, where that was not the case in 2001.

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Here’s good new at the left.

IMO, his voter suppression laws that flout the 14th and 15th Amendments are even more egregious; looking forward to a decision.  Important precedents say that states can do whatever they want as long as the laws are not blatantly targeted to racial or religious minorities.

Hmmm. Take a peek at the meme below, and that’s just part of the equation.

Drop boxes are removed from and polling places shut down in black neighborhoods.

It could not be any more blatant, short of burning crosses, or signs that read, “N-word Go Home.”

I wrote an earlier post on the meme at left, but here’s something else that needs to be said.  Take every one of the heroes named here, the paramedics, the fire-fighters, and the police, many of whom lost their lives in flames to prevent others from losing theirs.

I hope America never forgets that Donald Trump believes every single one of these people is a “sucker” and a “loser.”  That’s the core character of our 45th president.  Let’s not let that slip away.

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I have bad news for Joe Biden, and for all Americans wishing to put the pandemic behind us: anti-vaxxers don’t function on empirical evidence.

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I thought the meme here was clever.

Between COVID-19 incompetence, voter suppression, and the abortion ban, Texas is a complete disgrace to the union.

It would be interesting to know what is motivating governor Greg Abbott to make his state so totally reviled by everyone but the extreme right wing, especially the white nationalist QAnon idiots.

His actions re: the pandemic, e.g., banning mask mandates, will both prolong the pandemic and frighten off visitors.  Does that sound like a good idea in any conceivable respect?

Someone suggested that crashing the state’s economy will hurt Biden and provide a benefit to the Republicans in the 2022 midterms.  As nutty as that sounds, I really don’t have a better theory.

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The main point of this “never forgot” meme is a tribute to the bravery of those who took extraordinary risk and made huge sacrifices to minimize the damage and suffering on 9/11.  That’s a good thing.

This lies in contrast to the normal use of “never forget,” which is essentially Islamophobia, with a covert threat of retaliation layered on top of it.  No one who was over five or six years old on 2001 could possibly forget this horrific event.

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What a fabulous thought here.

It’s a shame that the bulk of Western Civilization is 180 degrees opposed to this worldview. And as long as that’s the case, our capacity to reach a sustainable way of life will remain elusive.

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Here are some COVID-19 numbers, daily new cases per 100,000 people, as of yesterday, in the U.S. and three others countries I chose at random:

France 16

Germany 13

Argentina 9

U.S. 49

What’s going so wrong here?  We don’t drink enough wine?  Eat enough bratwurst?  Play enough soccer or dance enough tango?

Anything’s possible, but if we look for the most likely cause, it just might be that the U.S. is unique in the world for its staggeringly large numbers of anti-vaxxers, i.e., ignorant people who regard epidemiology as government’s attempt to enslave them.

I had a reason to visit the hospital in Santa Barbara yesterday, and I asked someone how many Covid cases they had in their ICU. The answer, “10 or so, I believe.  Every one unvaccinated.”

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Reuters reports: In a letter posted on Harvard’s website, President Lawrence Bacow said the school’s endowment had no direct investments in fossil fuel exploration or development companies as of June and will not make such investments in the future, “given the need to decarbonize the economy.”

The point of divestiture, of course, is to drive down the price of Big Oil’s stocks, and increase their cost of capital.  This makes fossil fuels more expensive, and less competitive against renewable energy sources.

Great to see Harvard going in this direction.  Their motto, “Veritas” (Truth), is now that much closer to being actualized, insofar as the fossil fuel industry is built entirely on the lie that pumping carbon into the atmosphere is a sustainable course for our civilization.

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From the satirical Borowitz Report in The New Yorker:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Calling President Joe Biden “an authoritarian dictator of the most reprehensible kind,” Fox News has accused him of using the power of the federal government to improve the country.

“Joe Biden came into office claiming that he wanted to be the President of all the people,” Sean Hannity said. “Now, however, his real agenda has become clear: he wants to increase Americans’ life expectancy.” (more…)

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