Depressing. Imagine being a parent and trying to do everything right, give your

infant an edge by doing some of the creative things recommended by scientists and psychologists, and having your efforts sabotaged by something so basic as contaminants in the food (or the air that they breathe, the lead in the water, etc.).

Not to get too far off on an tangent, but when we look around our country and see a large number of Americans falling for such ridiculous lies, believing absurd things, impervious to fact, unable or unwilling to read books and newspapers, it's hard not to wonder if there are things besides the Autocrat Playbook at work here. Trump: "I love the poorly-educated." He was really saying, "I want stupid people because they are so easy to fool." Why are there so many of them?

Fancy Tower for Billionaires Revealed to Be Horrifying Hellhole

The Cut
Feb 3 2021
By Amanda Arnold

And not just aging dams. There are many issues of concern with China's

Three Gorges Dam, and both China and likely India have even bigger projects on the books that look positively insane:

China’s plans for gigantic Brahmaputra dam strains relations with India further

Powerchina’s announcement it will build a mega dam could spur a dam-building race with India, with disastrous consequences for the ecology of the region

https://www.thethirdpole.net/en/regional-cooperation/chinas-plans-for-gigantic-brahmaputra-dam-strains-relations-with-india-further/

I don't have a source handy, but it's been claimed that Three Gorges Dam is so heavy and vast that it has slightly perturbed the rotation of the earth. It's humungus, relatively new, and already shows preliminary signs of architectural strain in satellite photos.

This is a conversation we should have. This, as best as I can tell, is the

unspoken thesis of Ezra Klein's controversial book Why are we Polarized? I just made a post about this in another thread and even making that post, I felt then and feel now tremendous ambivalence.

But decades of political science studies and more recent developments in Game Theory, and the example of the Republicans, show us what we need to do to play the long game better and use anger to motivate more effective and dependable voting.

I haven't been prepared to go there before, but everything is at stake now, and I'm deeply considering this question.

I'll leave it at that.

It's worth thinking about. Ezra Klein has been arguing that if we were

more motivated by our dislike for the GOP than our affection for our policies, we would transform from being a political party to an identitarian party (like the Republicans are), meaning we would vote like hell in bigger numbers, we would vote in every election like our lives depend on it, because "winning" would be more important to us, almost like fans of a football team need compulsively to win every week. He's talking about our primitive wiring here, and what decades of studies and also Game Theory can teach us about adjusting our party a little bit to be more effective.

Democrats (on-the-street, average Dems) would be as obsessed with politics as even average Republicans are.

The dark side of this is, obviously, that we become a party whose energy is derived from opposing something, instead of our trademark reputation for being the party of hope and regeneration. But I don't think it's wise to dismiss this theory out of hand, because we only need to look at the Republican party to see how well it can work. We would play the long game better.

The Republicans are sure making it easy for us to coalesce around the idea that the GOP is the anti-Democracy party, which makes our job so much easier in terms of deciding what we are for and what we are against.

One of the panelists on MSNBC just literally said what you wrote: Marjorie Taylor Greene is the face of the new Republican Party.

Even if she's gone, we can probably still make this stick with people like Gatez, Jordan, Cruz, Hawley.

But Taylor-Greene is most certainly a lightning rod, almost a caricature of what we have noticed all along about the GOP under Trump.

So I wouldn't dismiss your point at all. Even if she goes, your essential point is important IMO.

Elastica - "Connection" and "Line Up"

Rupert Pupkin, only worse

Horrible. And the female adult appears to be likely to survive. I can't even fathom

losing your children and spouse and dealing with that and trying to move on with life.

Throw this in his face

We also invest in potential--the potential for something creative and small to grow

into something big and profitable, whereas it seems the Republican way is to reward cruder manifestations of success, like net worth (through tax cuts and loopholes), allocating more money to corporations and individuals already at the top of the list hoping they will expand and employ, when they move towards automation and financial strategies that don't result in expansion.

I think it's Thomas Piketty in his book "On Capital" argues that the wealthiest among us don't actually spend much money. That capital often sits and accumulates more capital. Or worse, incestuous schemes like share buybacks...