WyoRock

Fussin` java poor townfolk.

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Some classic Carlin:

The American Dream

We Like War

Homelessness and Golf Courses

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In spring rain
A pretty girl
yawning

– Issa

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The Foolishness of Calling for a "No-Fly Zone"

Life has got a habit of not standing hitched. You got to ride it like you find it. You got to change with it. If a day goes by that don’t change some of your old notions for new ones, that is just about like trying to milk a dead cow.
-- Woody Guthrie

I would like to see every single soldier on every single side, just take off your helmet, unbuckle your kit, lay down your rifle, and set down at the side of some shady lane, and say, nope, I aint a gonna kill nobody. Plenty of rich folks wants to fight. Give them the guns.
-- Woody Guthrie

The Sad, Sad Demise of The Riverton Ranger

Joe Walsh on what the left doesn't get: TrumpWorld "would happily burn this country down"

WHY THE BIG LIE GETS BELIEVED

The Republican Party formally declares that truth is fiction and patriots are traitors

It's really hard to get out of your own head. Go ahead. Give it a try.

The Big Lie is now the central organizing principle of the Republican Party.

Mike Rounds speaks truth knowing that our Republic depends upon it. Republicans like Govs Hutchinson, Baker & Hogan; Sens McConnell, Thune & Johnson; Bush & Cheney; plus 60+ courts and even the right-leaning Wall Street Journal editorial page agree: Joe Biden won the election.
-- Mitt Romney

The downside of Google is that it encourages dimwits to type something into the search bar and call themselves "researchers".

Research is done by experts in the field. Non-experts who say they are "researching" are just google-lurching for anything they can find that might support their preconceptions regardless of the quality of the source material. It's a special form of masturbation where they end up spewing their putrid nonsense into the public square.

Take five chimpanzees. Put them in a big cage. Suspend some bananas from the roof of the cage. Provide the chimpanzees with a stepladder. BUT also add a proximity detector to the bananas, so that when a chimp goes near the banana, water hoses are triggered and the whole cage is thoroughly soaked.

Soon, the chimps learn that the bananas and the stepladder are best ignored.

Now, remove one chimp, and replace it with a fresh one. That chimp knows nothing of the hoses. He sees the banana, notices the stepladder, and because he is a smart primate, he envisions himself stepping on the stepladder to reach the bananas. He then deftly grabs the stepladder... and the four other chimps spring on him and beat him squarely. He soon learns to ignore the stepladder.

Then, remove another chimp and replace it with a fresh one. The scenario occurs again; when he grabs the stepladder, he gets mauled by the four other chimps -- yes, including the previous "fresh" chimp. He has integrated the notion of "thou shallt not touch the stepladder".

Iterate. After some operations, you have five chimps who are ready to punch any chimp who would dare touch the stepladder -- and none of them knows why.

CRITICAL THINKING

THINKING IS POWER

Balance of Payments between States and the Federal Government

Wyoming Immunization Requirements

Adenovirus.

Hepatitis A.

Hepatitis B.

Influenza.

Measles, mumps, and rubella.

Meningococcal.

Poliovirus.

Tetanus-Diphtheria.

Varicella.

Anthrax.

Haemophilus influenzae type B.

Japanese encephalitis.

Pneumococcal.

Rabies.

Smallpox.

Typhoid fever.

Yellow fever.

These are all the vaccines that people must receive in order to be deployed with our armed forces. And until now, there were very few complaints about these requirements.

But today, thanks to a wave of right-wing disinformation on social media and Fox News, tens of thousands of troops are refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine, despite having received many other vaccines in the past.

Visit VoteVets.org

I'm Furious at the Unvaccinated

Liz Cheney's Heroic Stand

An Excellent Examination of "The Giving Tree"

Dumbass nation: Our biggest national security problem is America's "vast and militant ignorance"
-- Millions of Americans embrace vapid lies and conspiracy theories — and the proudly moronic leader who spreads them.
-- The United States is a nation of militantly ignorant people, arrogant in their beliefs, unable to change their minds and unwilling to try.

Stop Telling People To Believe The Science - Dealing With Anti-Vaxxers

In order to attend public or private school in Wyoming, children must submit to a regimen of vaccinations for a whole host of diseases, including diphtheria, measles, mumps, hepatitis B, whooping cough, rubella, and polio.

The idea that Wyoming is against vaccine mandates is simply false, and legislators know it. But such facts are inconvenient for their political stage plays.

- Political Theater at Its Worst

Pretty much since the beginning of the USA, conservative political movements have claimed that they’re the inheritors of some idealized image of the past to give legitimacy to social grievances: whether they’re Trump or Reagan, they want to make America great again—the implication being that they’re reclaiming a greatness that is now lost. My counterargument is that this is indicative of a medical condition known as assbrains.

-- William Kuechenberg, 4 Ways America Fails Hard At Understanding History

The Myth of Regenerative Ranching

Grass-Fed Cattle? - A response to the Allan Savory TED video

Latest Data on Ivermectin, 9/8/2021

The Real Source of America’s Rising Rage (some good history)

This is a must-read:

Elder Care Is Expensive and Exhausting

Afghanistan: 20 Years of Lies

"Fake News", Disinformation, and Propaganda

Flawed ivermectin preprint highlights challenges of COVID drug studies

Ivermectin (Still) Lacks Scientific Support as a COVID-19 Drug

How the right’s ivermectin conspiracy theories led to people buying horse dewormer

"Mainstream media" is a buzzword used by morons to justify ignorance.

The Destruction of Trump Ballots, Explained

Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube turbocharge their profits by using algorithms to amplify and recommend emotionally engaging content. Content that triggers fear and outrage is particularly valuable, especially disinformation, hate speech, and conspiracy theories. The platforms’ profits depend in part on giving disproportionate weight to society’s most radical viewpoints. With billions of users, harm is inevitable. The companies know this and do everything in their power to protect the business model. To paraphrase The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, extremism is the point.
-- Roger McNamee

The bogus GOP claim that Biden is responsible for higher gasoline prices

A good article on the cycle of poverty: People who say they're 'fiscally conservative but socially liberal' just don't understand these 7 things

The Complexity of Simply Searching for Medical Advice

AI Is Neither Artificial Nor Intelligent

There is plenty of research that shows working above 50 hours constantly makes you worse at your job, at least when you are doing thought work. For more physical work, your body breaks down, and likely you will struggle with health as you near retirement.

Cowardice, not craziness, is the reason government by the people may soon perish from the earth.

Technobabble, Libertarian Derp and Bitcoin

The Idea That Deficit Spending Is a Burden on Our Children Is the Dumbest Propaganda

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

-- Annie Dillard

The Return of the Inflationary Cockroaches

Republican Party Freak Show

Rep. Elise Stefanik (who wants to replace Liz Cheney), 4 Pinocchios

Belonging is Stronger than Facts: The Age of Misinformation

As Upton Sinclair famously said, it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

What killed the mines wasn’t a “war on coal”; it was technological progress, first in the extraction of natural gas, then in solar and wind power. Generating electricity from coal would be economically unviable even if we didn’t have to worry about climate change.

30,000 Wyomingites do not have any health insurance

Oh, God! It's got a skeleton!

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/01/opinion/deregulation-health-care-electricity.html

How did we become a country where families can face ruin unless they carefully study something as mundane, as normally routine, as their electricity contract?

many people end up with heavy financial burdens because they chose the wrong health insurance plan — yet even experts have a very hard time figuring out which plan is best. Using an out-of-network health care provider can also lead to huge medical bills.

But the argument that more choice is always good rests on the assumption that people have more or less unlimited capacity to do due diligence on every aspect of their lives — and the real world isn’t like that. People have children to raise, jobs to do, lives to live and limited ability to process information.

Before the subprime mortgage crisis, Edward Gramlich, a Federal Reserve official who warned in vain about the potential for disaster, asked, “Why are the most risky loan products sold to the least sophisticated borrowers?” The question, he suggested, “answers itself — the least sophisticated borrowers are probably duped into taking these products.”

Similarly, there’s clearly a lot of profiteering in medical billing, with the victims disproportionately those least able to understand what’s happening.

The poor also face a heavy “cognitive burden” — the constant need to make difficult choices that the affluent don’t confront, like whether to buy food or pay the rent.

We’re a rich country — and citizens of other rich countries don’t worry about being bankrupted by medical expenses. It wouldn’t take much to protect Americans against being scammed by mortgage lenders or losing their life savings to fluctuations in the wholesale price of electricity.

Climate Crisis - Last Chance - Rolling Stone

The Epoch Times - Holy Shit From Falun Gong - And New Tang Dynasty

How The Epoch Times Created a Giant Influence Machine

Republican Fascist Lies About Montana Medicaid Expansion Regurgitated in Wyoming

QAnon: Into the Storm (review)

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and His Vaccine Bullshit - At It Again - What an Ass

The Ugly History of the Filibuster

Russel's Teapot (re unfalsifiable claims)

2021/02/24 - The coronavirus pandemic has now killed more than 500,000 people in the United States. This is roughly equivalent to the cumulative number of Americans lost in World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars. These deaths from the coronavirus were largely preventable.

PragerU and Climate Misinformation

PragerU Media Bias Fact Check

Doublespeak: Prager University, a Propaganda Machine

PragerU relies on a veneer of respectability to obscure its propagandist mission

Info about Section 230

Freedom means the freedom not to get infected by the jackass who refuses to mask up.

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Consider the 2017 tax cut.

According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, that bill gave 79 percent of its benefits to people making more than $100,000 a year.

It gave more to Americans with million-dollar-plus incomes, just 0.4 percent of taxpayers, than the total tax break for those living on less than $75,000 a year, that is, a majority of the population.

And now Republicans claim to care about equity?

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