I am scratching this into a rock on the remote chance that anyone with the ability to read it survives.  I have no idea how many of my species remain alive.  The floods, the fires and the inbred survival instincts of desperate humans and other feral animals have pretty much ravaged the fauna part of the Earthly equation, and, make no mistake about it, this has been a self-inflicted extinction…no meteor…no alien invasion.  Although it began with legitimate naiveté, during the over-zealous period we labeled the Industrial Revolution, it was honed to its destructive razor’s edge by the unflinching power of greed, taking barely more than 100 years to virtually wipe us out.  When we began to remove our blinders to our inherent responsibility for making our planet uninhabitable, at the turn of our ridiculously counted third millennium, there was still time, if only the common threat had held sway over our personal pettiness.  We were, in fact, making strides.  Science, underscored by devastating daily horrors of our folly, was beginning to win out over magical religious, corporate and cultish blather.  Then, one man, Joe Manchin, somehow was given the deciding vote.  I am a journalist, so I try to follow the string of logic, even at its fuzziest.  I can understand the pressures put upon a representative of a coal mining/burning constituency and the multitudes of ill-intentioned lobbyists stumbling over one another to climb up his West Virginian ass.  I can almost empathize with his conundrum, being offered a bigger boat that would no longer be diminished by having “Almost” painted on its stern.  I’m sure there was the ball-tingling rush of being the absolute center of attention.  BUT…when it was shit-or-get-off-the-pot time, Joe carefully weighed his choice of headlines:  1.  JOE MANCHIN SAVES THE WORLD!!!   2.  JOE MANCHIN KILLS US ALL!!!   …and he picked ‘2’.