1/ Mitch McConnell wants to let corporations kill you without consequence. (THREAD)

1/ How do we prevent the next grifter-in-chief and stop Congress from enabling criminals in government?

2/ Trump and McConnell are both pushing pardons. Trump wants pardons for his criminal cronies, enablers, and children. McConnell wants pardons for meat packing plants and corporate criminals.

3/ Although past presidents have had family members working for them - Attorney General Bobby Kennedy is a famous example - none have ever had to pardon their family members for criminal activity in the White House. Until Trump.

4/ Trump’s family of grifters have been extracting money from our government and the American people since day one, starting with the inaugural fund scandal. Just since he lost the election. Trump has raised over $170, million: the grift continues!

5/ Trump has sold out our country and our values. He’s given top-secret information to foreign adversaries, embraced dictators and autocrats around the world, and enthusiastically damaged our relationships with allies. It’s almost as if he’s working for a foreign government.

How can America prevent Republicans from stealing the 2024 election and installing a fascist? /1

Republican threats to have individual states choose electors for Donald Trump even though their citizens voted for Joe Biden are not about this election; they’re about putting a fascist in the White House in 2024. /2

And the reason Republican elected officials across the country are letting this drag out, even though they know Trump has no chance because Biden‘s margin of victory is so large, is to see how far they can push this in anticipation of 2024. This is a test. /3

The next election will not feature a failed, indebted businessman buffoon at the top of the Republican ticket; instead, it will almost certainly be a very competent neofascist, someone like Tom Cotton or Ted Cruz. /4

And their strategy to put him in power won’t be to win the majority of the votes: it will be to take the electoral college, either outright or through Republican-controlled state legislatures simply making it happen. /5

(1/26) On April 18, Bob Woodward recorded Jared Kushner saying that Trump had taken control away from the doctors and was going to open the country back up. Why then? What was happening right around that time?

1/ It’s time to defund the GOP. In yesterday‘s rant, I laid out all the reasons why Democrats should put at the top of their priority list “defunding the Republican Party.“ Here’s a little background, and how to do it. (THREAD)

2/ Back in 1981, the Republican Party decided to defund the Democratic Party. While the Republican party had principally been funded by rich people and big business since the 1920s, the Democrats were largely reliant on the labor unions.

3/ So Ronald Reagan, as part of his “Reagan Revolution,“ figured the best way to destroy the Democratic Party was to destroy America’s unions. His first shot was to destroy Patco, the air traffic controller‘s union, and he did it in less than a week in August, 1981.

4/ He, with Republicans in Congress and conservatives on the Supreme Court than embarked on an eight-year campaign to eliminate unions from the American landscape, thus wiping out the Democratic Party’s ability to win elections.

5/ It worked, and by 1992 American union membership, and their ability to fund elections, had collapsed so severely that Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party had to take money from giant corporations and billionaires to prevail in that election year.

1/ We must stop Republicans from helping Trump “poison the wells“ and “salt the fields“ of America.

2/ Donald Trump‘s treason extends far beyond his efforts to damage Americans belief in our form of government, our elected democratic republic, that Trump’s oligarch buddies in Saudi Arabia, Russia and China also regularly disparage.

3/ Trump’s also actively damaging the ability of the incoming Biden administration to aid Americans during the Trump Depression, and to get the virus in check. In this, he has help from Steve Mnuchin and Mitch McConnell.

4/ While McConnell refuses to even allow a conversation in the Senate about the HEROS Act that already passed the House and would put money in unemployed Americans’ pockets, Mnuchin wants the Fed to return the CARES Act money that they’re leveraging to sustain the stock market.

5/ As Senator Ron Wyden said, “As the economy backslides amid skyrocketing Covid-19 cases, Secretary Mnuchin is engaged in economic sabotage, and trying to tie the Biden administration's hands.”

@ImPranav_M @GunduHuDuGa That's a good qsn, if not a bit nuanced. Avataras are of many varieties and frankly, most of the classification is only for our understanding and not really binding on Paramatma Himself. We can take several approaches to understanding this. If you go by a Vedantic approach,+

@GunduHuDuGa Avatara means that which descends from an exalted state (Taara). Going by Upanishadic observaton of Purnam adham purnam idham, every manifestation of Bhagavan is indeed wholesome. In fact, Avataras usually happen when Iswara is propitiated with certain qualities already+

@GunduHuDuGa described in the Vedas by other Devatas. So, in order to please them, He assumes the form that best envisages the said Vaidika tatvam. For example, Varaha and Nrusimha avatars, though they have sthoola prayojanas, also exemplify the Tejovanna tatvam propounded by Upanishads.+

@GunduHuDuGa All these tatvams ultimately emanate from Him so whatever form He takes is indeed Purna. Now, one may ask then if that's the case, why such a distinction had to be made in the first place. That is because of upasana vidhis and understanding of how Bhagavad tatvam shines+

@GunduHuDuGa with each Leela being performed. Let's take Nrusimha avatar. The purpose of the avatar is neither to save Hiranyakasipu nor rescue Prahlada. For that He need not descend down as H's boons are applicable only for Brahman's creation and not Paramatma Himself.+

@The_Rumpus is open for essay submissions until February 28, so here’s a #RumpusEssays thread in which our amazing editors share what they would like to see in submissions. Give them a follow and send your essay our way via @submittable

Features Editor @happiestwerther is “still (forever) in love with the researched essays that teach me something about a subject while I also learn about a narrator.” #RumpusEssays

Assistant Features Editor @sarahkasbeer would like to see “essays with unexpected engines / innovative structures / emotional and intellectual depth / good ole narrative tension.” #RumpusEssays

Features Editor @kaytaybayy: “I'd love to see essays that are imbued with kinetic energy. I don't care what they're about. Just sweep me into your experiences and thoughts. Compel me to shake my dust off.” #RumpusEssays

Asst Feat Ed @DJ_theoretical: "I’d love to read about that weird, niche topic you’re obsessed with. Your Pog collection, those ribbon candies that seemingly only grandmas buy, your new obscure hobby. Distract me from the horrible big picture with your hyperfixations."

@jeffreyatucker In the end, it is all a natural consequence of a very human foible, namely that we all do everything we can to blame anybody or anything else for our problems, if we can get away with it. It's the reason why rulers start wars to squelch domestic dissent - macro and micro the same

The very notion of the germ theory of disease revolves around this and while it is good for selling medical interventions, treatments and pharmaceuticals, it is no good for either personal health, or public health in any way. We need to start looking at health on a holistic level

More of a systems approach to health would get us to see that the whole instinct to stamp out viruses, like the very counter-factual notion of "zero Covid," and other nonsense, are driven by this need to blame somebody or something else for our problems, so we can have our cake

and eat it too, i.e. we can pass the blame to others and go and kill them, be they bugs or other people (lockdowns???). The results are disastrous for health on both a personal and a public level, and we continue on a path of assured self-destruction. But times are changing, now.

Lifestyle Medicine @aclifemed provides the new paradigm, more of a systems approach to health, in which personal responsibility for our habits comes first, starting with nutrition. Immune systems become depressed by fatigue, stress, inner conflict, malnutrition and so on. Change