We, the US, Need Amber Ruffin

The woman is spot on.

Our Insane US Healthcare System

No other nation in the world does health care the way we do in the US.

--We have, far and away, the most expensive health care system in the world. --We are the only nation that ties health care to profit. --We are the only nation where citizens go bankrupt from health care costs. --We are the only nation where our number one cause for bankruptcy for citizens is health care costs, approximately 40% of all bankruptcies in the US are from this, year after year, consistently. Insane. Obscene. Immoral. Fixable.

Happy Thanksgiving, America!

One thing, anyway, we Americans did right, that we do right.

"There is one day that is ours. 

Thanksgiving Day is the one day that is purely American."

--O. Henry 

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Enjoy.

Biden says staff has spoken with Fauci: 'He's been very, very helpful'

Fauci says he would 'absolutely' serve on a Biden coronavirus task force

A reason to give thanks: 

Help with COVID-19 is on the way

Biden to receive first daily presidential briefing on Monday

Oxford-AstraZeneca Vaccine Is Cheaper than Pfizer’s and Moderna’s and Doesn’t Require Supercold Temperature

Have a great day and weekend and by all means, stay safe out there.

Who the Hell Are We America?

 Who the Hell are we, America? Who and what have we become?

We put immigrant children in cages at our Southern border and now we're forcing hysterectomies on immigrant women?? 

US nurse alleges 'hysterectomies on migrant women'

Women in ICE Custody Allegedly Coerced Into Hysterectomies

US watchdog to investigate ICE unwanted hysterectomies

Really?? This is who we want to be??

And now we have a President that has been accused by more than 2 dozen women of sexually assaulting them?

The 25 women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct

So what?  They're ALL lying?  Really?

And that's not bad enough, now another woman just came forward and accused him of same.

'Tired of Being Quiet,' Another Woman, Amy Dorris, Comes Forward to Accuse Donald Trump of Sexual Assault

Donald Trump accused of sexual assault in new interview

And then there's this.

Trump Luxury Properties Have Charged US Government $1.1M Since Inauguration: Report

Can you even imagine the outrageous uproar that would have uttered forth from the Right Wingers and Republicans and conservatives across the nation if the previous President, Obama, did anything remotely similar to this? Does the Emoluments Clause of our Constitution mean nothing now, with this Trump, this President?

Really?

Is this what and who we want to be?

America?? Americans??

More. Believably/unbelievably, still more:

'One of the Most Callous Sentiments Ever Uttered' by US President: Trump Falsely Says Covid Death Toll Not So Bad 'If You Take Blue States Out'

Quote of the Day -- Election Day Version

“My dear friends: Your vote is precious, almost sacred. It is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have to create a more perfect union.”

–- Representative John Lewis, a 2012 speech in Charlotte, North Carolina

A Timely Must-Read

Sunday's New York Times Magazine had a magnificent, even important article I think it's safe to say all adult Americans should read.

America’s Enduring Caste System

Our founding ideals promise liberty and equality for all. 

Our reality is an enduring racial hierarchy that has persisted for centuries.

We heard the man on the ground pleading with the man above him, saw the terror in his face, heard his gasps for air, heard the anguished cries of an unseen chorus, begging the lighter man to stop. But the lighter man, the dominant man, looked straight at the bystanders, into the camera, and thus at all of us around the world who would later bear witness and, instead of heeding the cries of the chorus, pressed his knee deeper into the darker man’s neck as was the perceived right granted him in the hierarchy. The man on the ground went silent, drained of breath. A clear liquid crept down the pavement. We saw a man die before our very eyes.

What we did not see, not immediately anyway, was the invisible scaffolding, a caste system with ancient rules and assumptions that made such a horror possible, that held each actor in that scene in its grip...

American Exceptionalism?

I saw this video earlier today from and by Professor Robert Reich on this pandemic, our response as a nation and our results.


It got me thinking, thinking about America and what and who we are.

• Worst pandemic response in the world.
• More cases of coronavirus and more deaths, both, than any other nation.
• More incarcerated citizens than any other nation, bar none and including far more populated China and India.
• Spend more, far more, on war than any other nation, far and away.
• Spend more, far more, again, than ANY OTHER NATION on health care.
• Only Western, industrialized nation without universal health care.
• Only Western, industrialized nation to tie health care to corporate profit and profits.
• Nation with the most guns in the world.
• Nation with the most homocides and killings, worldwide, again, far and away.

At minimum.

Oh, yeah.

We're "exceptional", all right.

Two References to the US as a Possible "Failed State" in 24 Hours

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, within the last 24 hours, I've seen two--count them, two--different references to the US either being or questioning whether we are just that, a failed state. Here's the first one I saw yesterday from the website AlterNet.

The US is in free fall — 

and at risk of becoming a failed state

And here is the 2nd reference I've seen to this within 24 hours and my you, I'm not searching this out.

Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, 

The Sudden Descent of the United States

And truth be told, the 2nd article at TomDispatch is an expansion on the first article which was  written by Rebecca Gordon. Still, it expands on the idea, question and theme. I thought this part important.

"What Is a Failed State?

People use this expression to indicate a political entity whose government has ceased to perform most or all of its basic functions. Such a condition can result from civil war, untrammeled corruption, natural disaster, or some combination of those and more. The Fund for Peace, which has been working on such issues for more than 70 years, lists four criteria to identify such a country:

--Loss of control of its territory, or of the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force therein
--Erosion of legitimate authority to make collective decisions
--Inability to provide public services
--Inability to interact with other states as a full member of the international community'”

3 out of four, presently? Or all four, already?

The fact is, we, the United States, 

--have more cases of and deaths from this killing international coronavirus pandemic than any other nation

--have a President that has completely, totally ignored a bounty put on American soldiers in the field in Afghanistan by Russia to the Taliban to kill American soldiers

Trump decries Russian bounty reports as ‘fake news’ as his national security adviser says response options were prepared

--have a President that is going forward with his plan to take 9500 American troops out of Gernany shortly

--have no universal health care---the "richest nation in the world", or so we tell ourselves

--have millions of Americans out of work due to the pandemic and so, with no health care whatever

--have amassed a huge national debt--partly due to gross overspending on military which actually weakens us but also due to tax giveaways by the Republicans to the already-wealthy and corporations and then, again, this pandemic and

--have a President who has pulled us out of nearly all, if not all international cooperation agreements like the World Heatlh Organization, etc.

Oh and this broke this morning.

The Trump administration just lent $700 million to a trucking company only worth $70 million

And that's just a short list, a very short list of some of our worst current predicaments.

Meanwhile, a Senator is working to have us buy Russian made weapons, unbelievable.

GOP Senator Seeks Amendment Allowing the U.S. to Buy Russian Defense System

The U.S. could be permitted to purchase the Russian S-400 missile defense system from Turkey under a Senate amendment proposed last week.

Under the amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2021 proposed by Senate Majority Whip John Thune, the U.S. Army would be able to purchase the S-400 missile defense system from Turkey, provided the country certified that money from the purchase would not be used to buy equipment deemed "incompatible" with the NATO alliance.

We're the largest manufacturer and seller of weapons in the world---and we need to buy yet more, these Russian and from Turkey?  Really?

And then finally today, this.

Senate strips provision from intelligence bill requiring campaigns to report foreign election help

(CNN)  The Senate will incorporate the annual intelligence policy legislation into the National Defense Authorization Act -- but only after stripping language from the intelligence bill that would have required presidential campaigns to report offers of foreign election help.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Tuesday that Senate Republicans forced the removal of the election reporting provision as a condition to include the intelligence bill on the must-pass defense policy legislation.

So our government officials CAN, if this passes, not only accept money from foreigners or from foreign nations, which by itself would be bad enough, but they would also NOT HAVE TO REPORT IT.

Isn't that terrific?

Thanks, Republicans!

Failed state?  Failing state?

How much farther down are we going to let or have this President and his political party drag us, America?

The Present Racial, Police Brutality Problem As Today, But 50 Years Ago

I found this yesterday on YouTube. Some of their marketing their own videos, I'm sure. Regardless, it is stunning that it's the same, exact discussion and debate and problem we have today, now---and it's from 50 years ago.  This was posted on the video by one David Hoffman:

This was on national public television (PBS) in the prime time in 1971. It was considered shockingly bold to present this debate and to hear police officers and chiefs of police honestly and bluntly state how they saw the racial injustices in the department and in the society. Some things have clearly changed for the better. But it is, at least for me, strangely familiar and uncomfortable to see what has not changed. Since the murder of Floyd George, once again, police injustice and inequality is front and center in the news across America.

Stunning.

We haven't changed a bit.

Quote of the Day -- On Racism

“There is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat.”

--Robert F. Kennedy, 1968, shortly before his assassination

Quote of the Day -- Prescient, Local Version

Great statement from the protest locally I heard on the evening news. It was said by a speaker at the protest this past Sunday, I believe, by one of the organizers, on the Plaza:

"This isn't black against white.

This is people against racism."

Please Read This Article

I can't emphasize enough reading very conservative, Republican Party supporting George Will's article on this President, his political party and his enablers.

Trump must be removed. 

So must his congressional enablers.

Just a bit from it:

"A political party’s primary function is to bestow its imprimatur on candidates, thereby proclaiming: This is who we are. In 2016, the Republican Party gave its principal nomination to a vulgarian and then toiled to elect him. And to stock Congress with invertebrates whose unswerving abjectness has enabled his institutional vandalism, who have voiced no serious objections to his Niagara of lies, and whom T.S. Eliot anticipated: 

We are the hollow men . . .

Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
or rats’ feet over broken glass . . .

Those who think our unhinged president’s recent mania about a murder two decades ago that never happened represents his moral nadir have missed the lesson of his life: There is no such thing as rock bottom. So, assume that the worst is yet to come. Which implicates national security: Abroad, anti-Americanism sleeps lightly when it sleeps at all, and it is wide-awake as decent people judge our nation’s health by the character of those to whom power is entrusted. Watching, too, are indecent people in Beijing and Moscow.

Quote of the Day -- Timely, Oppressed Version

“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” 

--Elie Wiesel

This Is How Very Racist Our United States of America Are

Check this out.

Video Shows Fatal Shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, Unarmed Black Man In Georgia

A United States citizen. Black.

Out for a jog.

Unarmed.

Shot by 2 strangers, father and son, white, in a pickup truck. With a shotgun.

Jogger killed.

To date, the assailant hasn't even been arrested, let alone jailed or charged.

'merika.

Damn.

And it's all on video.

And he was shot and killed in February.

We're only now talking about it. We're only now considering charges against these two ugly, racist, murderous hillbillies.

Just damn.

The US, This Pandemic and the Coincidental Fall of An Empire

Holy cow, folks.  You ought to read this article. It's by Chauncey DeVega at Salon. He interviews Chris Hedges. Important, if also scary to the point of frightening. It is truly an eye-opener.

Pulitzer winner Chris Hedges: These "are the good times — compared to what's coming next"

Author of "America: The Farewell Tour": We're heading for a steep decline; Biden and the Democrats have no answers

Just a bit from the article:

Empires fall a little bit at a time and then all at once. Over the last two decades, America has proven itself to be well along on that journey. The coronavirus pandemic has simply pushed our nation further along that downward spiral.

Ultimately, the pandemic has further exposed and exacerbated — for those still somehow in denial about the decades-long reality of America as a decaying empire — deep political, social, economic, cultural and other societal problems.

The country's infrastructure is rotting. Trump presides over a plutocratic, corrupt, cruel, authoritarian, pathological kakistocracy. The commons is being reduced to rubble while the ultra-rich extract ever more wealth and other resources from the American people. Excessive military spending has left the United States incapable of attending to the basic needs of its people. A culture of distraction and spectacle has rendered many Americans incapable of being responsible engaged citizens. Our public educational system does not teach critical thinking skills. Radical right-wing Christians, white terrorist organizations and other neofascist paramilitaries and extremists are engaging in a campaign of thuggery, intimidation and violence against multiracial American democracy.

Writing at the Atlantic, George Packer described this woeful state of affairs:

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus — like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly — not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.

Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state.

In the New York Times, Pulitzer-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen diagnosed the health of America's body politic in the age of Trump and the pandemic he has empowered and accelerated:

If anything good emerges out of this period, it might be an awakening to the pre-existing conditions of our body politic. We were not as healthy as we thought we were. The biological virus afflicting individuals is also a social virus. Its symptoms — inequality, callousness, selfishness and a profit motive that undervalues human life and overvalues commodities — were for too long masked by the hearty good cheer of American exceptionalism, the ruddiness of someone a few steps away from a heart attack.

Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer-winning journalist, author, and philosopher, is not surprised by America's decline. In places such as the former Yugoslavia, he has personally witnessed what happens when societies fall apart. In his most recent book, "America: The Farewell Tour," Hedges both details the country's many cultural and political crises and what could potentially happen next. The coronavirus crisis has shown his analysis to be eerily prescient.

In this conversation, Hedges warns that the tumult and pain of Trump's coronavirus crisis is but a preview of far worse things in America's future, as social inequality and political failure combine to create a full collapse of the country's already declining standard of living, as well as its ailing democracy.

Hedges also explains how the Democratic Party and its presumptive presidential nominee, Joe Biden, will likely not be able to respond to the Age of Trump and the economic and social destruction created by gangster capitalism, in combination with the coronavirus pandemic. Why? Because the Democrats are also part of the plutocratic establishment that has failed the American people.

It goes on from there to a podcast (and also written conversation) with Mr. Hedges on our current national situation, not to be missed.

I've said here, several times, many times, how bad this President is, citing facts and showing resources, not opinion. Him and his political party both. 

This clearly shows, to me, the larger, bigger picture, the entire picture or where we--the US--is just now.

And where we may be--are likely?--headed.

Damn.

It's far from pretty.

"Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night."

Not done there, as if that's all not depressing enough, there's also this from The New Yorker just now:

Is America’s “One Nation Indivisible” Being Killed Off by the Coronavirus?

Absolutely Scathing, If Also Sadly Realistic Article Out Now on This President Trump and Our United States

Yes sir and ma'am, this article out just now at The Irish Times is just that, scathing, in its assessment, yes, of this Trumpian President but of us, the United States of America. Because you must have a subscription in order to read it online, I'm posting the entire read here.  Read it and weep, America.

Fintan O’Toole: Donald Trump has destroyed the country he promised to make great again

The world has loved, hated and envied the US, 

Now, for the first time, we pity it

Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.

Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity, and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.

As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”
It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real-time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party, and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.

The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What is supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.
If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.

Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?

It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.

Abject surrender

What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care, and even safety.

Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.

In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students traveling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.

Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”
This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.

It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious provincialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.

Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralyzed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other, they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that the government is innately evil and must not be trusted.

The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.

Fertile ground

But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.

There are very powerful interests that demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society, and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.

Usually, when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.

And the president, his party, and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realization that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.

That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalized. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show anymore. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.

And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is reveling in it. He is in his element.

As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.

Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.”

As I've said especially out on social media so many times---

Thanks, Mr. President.

Thanks, Republicans.

Bad News For Missouri and Our Peak Deaths Date In This Pandemic

A friend sent me the following link and chart with information of when, exactly, the doctors and scientific community is projecting each state will peak in deaths from this novel coronavirus pandemic.

Here's when the coronavirus will peak in your state

The University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has developed a new model that predicts peak coronavirus in each US state

Missouri is, coincidentally, unfortunately, a worst case scenario, of all the states.

This table was last updated April 2:

State	PEAK USE OF RESOURCES	PEAK DAILY DEATHS	TOTAL ESTIMATED DEATHS (BY AUG 4)
USA	April 15	April 16	93,531
Alabama	April 17	April 19	5,516
Alaska	April 15	April 14	148
Arizona	April 27	April 26	1,387
Arkansas	April 26	April 26	619
California	April 26	April 26	5068
Colorado	April 17	April 18	2154
Connecticut	April 15	April 15	1144
Delaware	April 11	April 11	166
Florida	May 3	May 4	6897
Georgia	April 24	April 25	3232
Hawaii	May 3	May 1	372
Idaho	April 26	April 26	397
Illinois	April 20	April 20	3386
Indiana	April 19	April 20	1160
Iowa	May 1	May 1	1488
Kansas	April 28	April 26	640
Kentucky	May 16	May 13	821
Louisiana	April 9	April 10	1834
Maine	April 17	April 15	364
Maryland	April 29	April 28	1766
Massachusetts	April 16	April 17	2381
Michigan	April 9	April 11	3169
Minnesota	April 22	April 21	932
Mississippi	April 21	April 20	918
Missouri	May 21	May 18	1290
Montana	April 26	April 25	266
Nebraska	April 23	April 23	447
Nevada	April 20	April 18	799
New Hampshire	April 17	April 15	331
New Jersey	April 8	April 9	2117
New Mexico	April 24	April 22	525
New York	April 9	April 10	16261
North Carolina	April 26	April 27	1534
North Dakota	April 21	April 20	169
Ohio	April 19	April 19	1898
Oklahoma	April 23	April 23	1419
Oregon	May 5	May 2	558
Pennsylvania	April 18	April 19	2023
Rhode Island	April 20	April 16	259
South Carolina	April 28	April 28	1095
South Dakota	May 4	April 29	204
Tennessee	April 19	April 20	3422
Texas	May 6	May 6	6392
Utah	April 23	April 23	580
Vermont	April 9	April 2	58
Virginia	May 20	May 20	3152
Washington	April 11	April 9	978
West Virginia	May 4	May 1	487
Wisconsin	April 27	April 28	951
Wyoming	May 4	April 28	140

Tough luck there, Missouri, Missourians. Better luck.

STAY. AT. HOME.

Coldest Town in Missouri? Kansas?

Another "clickbait" article out on the interwebs this week. This one is kind of fun.

Coldest Town in Every State

In Alaska it’s Deadhorse.

Do you suppose it froze to death? 

Delaware? Bear. 

A polar bear. Of sorts.

Hawai’i, appropriately enough, it’s Kula. 

Minnesota? Embarrass. 

Embarrassingly cold?

New Hampshire is Colebrook. Also mis-named. Should be Coldbrook. Right? 

In Utah, it’s Coalville. 

Seems like that should be the warmest place in the state. At least indoors.

Kansas? No surprise. At all. At least no surprise to any of us who've paid attention to the region weather forecasts. 

Goodland. 

Talk about poorly named. Wow.

But Missouri? 

Bunker.

Wth is Bunker?

The--Very--Racist History of Banking In Our United States

What so, so many Americans don't know. Or ignore. And/or disavow.



Also ignoring the segregation that got us here and the poorer schools and far less opportunities for jobs and so, better pay.

Sure.

Let's ignore or deny all that.