Observe: the lie that "government" is a monolithic entity, from which we are somehow separate.

Government is how we organize, manage and maintain our society, but to acknowledge that is to acknowledge society, and one's responsibility to organize, manage, and maintain it.

I'd like to speak the obvious necessary things about the Republican Party, the most central of which is that this is not an organization that is participating in democracy.

Rather, they are cynically utilizing our democracy's vulnerabilities.

The last two Republican Presidents to enter the White House did so without the popular vote.

The last Republican President to enter the White House with the popular vote did so in 1989.

Yet, when they win, they behave as though they have the mandate that comes with a landslide.

For example, they upend the healthcare program.

They give out trillions in corporate welfare.

They start torture programs.

They start surveillance programs.

They lie us into wars.

They gerrymander at every level they can. They deliberately disenfranchise. They make our elections so imbalanced they can get less votes than Democrats but win 60% of the seats.

They are not interested in democracy. They are not participating in a democracy.

When a Democrat actually does win the popular vote—by a lot—they behave as if they are a majority opposition.

They stall. They filibuster. They delay. They engage in deliberate sabotage to gain political advantage.

They are not participating in our democracy.

The Great American Forgetting Project starts today. They're going to simultaneously try to tell us the last four years were an aberration that is over, and that it never happened.

And it's natural to want to forget these awful years.

It's our moral duty not to.

Those who benefit from our country's malicious priorities will do everything they can now to get us to forget how incontrovertibly Trump exposed those priorities.

Many of us thought we were something better than we were, but now we know.

We've seen our nation's face.

And many among us knew the truth all along. Many of us always saw our nation unmasked, because they were the ones who suffered it.

They told us all along, and the rest of us didn't listen.

Now that they've been proven correct, we're going to be asked to not listen again.

We can't deny anymore, that there are people among us, everywhere, for whom no lie is so obvious they won't believe it, as long as they think it serves their ends.

They don't care about truth, and never did.

We should care about truth, and speak it plain.

This is us.

We've seen our national tolerance for open racism, for cruelty, for corruption, for false equivocation.

Not just the tolerance, but the enthusiasm.

Trump didn't create it. It was there. He exploited it.

We'll never become what we want to be if we don't admit what we are.

They're talking about a military coup right now and if it doesn't happen we're going to be told the best way to heal is pretending it never happened.

This is how abuse works.

3,000 people are dying a day and after nearly a year of this Congress is releasing the barest fraction of the economic relief needed to keep people safe and only in exchange for the promise that we can't sue those who endangered the dead.

This is how abuse works.

We have a president who spent 4 yrs lying every time he opened his mouth, obvious lies everyone knew were lies, which his followers believed mostly because the sight of them believing lies caused the rest of us distress, and they loved our distress.

This is how abuse works.

We've endured the sight of police brutalizing our fellow citizens for years, a horror magnified by the knowledge that for Black people this brutality has been a constant way of life, but we're told change must wait, because we aren't asking right.

This is how abuse works.

We have been menaced and lied to and confronted with a daily litany of atrocity that has only made the Republican rank and file happier, and the only message we ever get is that we need to be better at relating to the feelings of people who find comfort in suffering.

It's abuse.

#Justin A day before the @MyMDC_T EOC, the party Treasurer General says he is unable to fund travel costs for delegates to congress because the money was allegedly stolen. We share contents of the letter from #ChiefNdlovu

“My office has been inundated with calls from concerned EOC delegates who by now should have received their Provincial transport allocation.
It has come to my attention that some of our members may not be able to travel to the EOC due to lack of funding.”

Equally I have received allegations that the Treasury is refusing to make payments for EOC, nothing could be further from the truth. I would like to take this opportunity as your Deputy Treasurer to inform you that as treasury we are not able to pay due to the fact that...

that funds were withdrawn from the party account on the 18th December 2020, we are still pursuing and trying to get some Standing Committee members who were involved in the unapproved transfer to return the money to the Party.
I was left a bit shocked to learn that the SG expects

Treasury to release money when he is the one who transferred all the money out of the account without my explicit approval. Perhaps the SG must inform members where the money is. I certainly do not have any knowledge of who he sent the money to or what has happened to those funds

(Thread) Mid-2020 GITMO Update: Arrests, Indictments, & Executions

So before we get started, let us first understand that before Trump was POTUS GITMO (Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp) was a fraction of the size it now is. This can be clearly confirmed by the following visuals, identifying a significant amount of expansion...

for what is expected to be tens of thousands of new ex-elite prisoners. Well, those who are not executed via military tribunal at least. ow, if you are not aware of these indictments I am referring to, that makes perfect sense because they are still sealed and not yet...

Public knowledge. Please allow me to enlighten you. These equate to roughly 222,00 sealed indictments and pertain to the most disturbing and corrupt crimes against humanity. These range from human trafficking, organ trafficking...

child sex trafficking, slavery, treason, terrorism, fraud, misuse of AI, genocide, brainwashing, defamation, 5G endangerment, religious discrimination, misrepresentation, censorship, privacy infringement, and prevention of saving humanity from biotech endangerment.

Here is the full document. I am going to go through it now.

Yep. This is also a point strongly made in @andrewdoyle_com's new book on Free Speech which I am halfway through and am pretty sure I will be recommending as a primer for the alarming number of people who seem confused about what free speech is & why it is good.

Well, good! Conservatives have not been great at this historically so I must give credit where it is due. I really wish this were a left-wing government taking this progressive stance.

(Areo has a piece forthcoming on why supporting FoS is inherently progressive, btw)

Yes, sadly this is true. I currently have half a dozen cases where people are being penalised for trying to express unorthodox views in the academy.

However, I should also say that one case in which I helped a student prepare for an ethical review when she had already been made aware her views were problematic (she wanted to treat people as individuals) was a resounding success & she passed it. So there is still hope.

N714m Scam: Witness Narrates How N159m was Traced to Turaki’s Account

The trial of former Minister of Special Duties and Inter-governmental Affairs, Kabiru Tanimu Turaki continued today Thursday, February 18, 2021 before Justice Inyang Ekwo of the Federal High Court, Abuja...

...with the twelfth prosecution witness, PW12, Bello Hamma Adama narrating to the court how N159,104,000 (One Hundred and Fifty-nine Million, One Hundred and Four Thousand Naira)...

...out of the N329,104,000 (Three Hundred and Twenty-nine Million, One Hundred and Four Thousand Naira) that was meant for the sensitization of Muslim youths was diverted.

Bello, an operative attached to the Chairman's Monitoring Unit of the EFCC, while being led in evidence by M. S. Abubakar, drew the court attention to the statement of the second defendant (exhibit C1-C2 on page 8)...

...in which he admitted transferring the said sum on the instructions of the first defendant.