Mhbx | Buzz Chronicles

Well that didn't take long. We decided to take a trip on Amtrak with the kids for spring break. 9 hours into a pleasant ride, a man was suddenly standing next to me, shouting across me at my 6yo son, "Remember what I told you. They stole you. They're pedophiles." 🧵

I stood between the stranger and my son, whose life has already been so hard, who carries traumas larger than his whole small, fierce frame. I was immovable. "Get away from my family." [2/10]

"Family!? That's not a family! You're rapists. You steal black & Asian kids." My son and my 5yo daughter were both now openly crying, petrified. He yelled right at them, unmoved: "These guys aren't natural. Homosexuals are an abomination. They steal and rape kids." [3/10]

It was suddenly no longer an absurd, abstract attack in an online comments section or a distant legislative session. These horrors were being screamed @ my sweet bewildered son, who's worked so hard to process his grief & control his feelings, who only wants love & safety. [4/10]

I grabbed the kids and moved them to another car while my ferocious husband went into papa bear mode and shouted the man away from us. Eventually the conductor arrived and the man lost his focus on us. [5/10]

Michael Beaton
@mhbx

It is not just wrong
& it is not just the epitome of historical ignorance,
& a comprehensive misunderstanding of the relationship of religious and civil society,
This is the declaration of a much deeper intention of instantiating an "American Fundamentalism".
Think "Gilead".

Georgia Republican candidate Kandiss Taylor goes full theocracy explaining her \u201cJesus, guns, and babies\u201d slogan:

\u201cDon't talk to me about separation of church and state.\u201d

\u201cWe are the church and we run the state.\u201d

\u201c[Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists] don't get to silence us.\u201d pic.twitter.com/9nkkn3JRbM
— PatriotTakes \U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8 (@patriottakes) April 9, 2022

This is the low information ranting of fundamentalists who lay out the emotional, fact & history free, case for what is essentially an American Taliban.
There is no "compromise" or a sense of comity between differences. When you have "the truth" it is a violation to "compromise".

Others, like "The Grand Inquisitor" use the froth and confusion--and subsequent absolutist certainty of their "righteousness" generated by such as this. (and thus justification for killing/harming anyone who disagrees..In the name of God, of course)

It is useful demagoguery.

This battle has been raging for years. Perhaps forever.

One distinctive characteristic of America, has been keeping this level of fundamentalism out of secular power. Individuals, yes, but not the entire system.

One of the consequences of Trumpism is to equate patriotism w religion in a way that births what becomes a passionately ignorant fundamentalism, unmoored from fact or truth,wedded only to its own self as the measure & guide of truth.
It creates a condition of deep tribal devotion

Joe
@DempseyTwo

On May 18, 2019 Ginni Thomas was a guest speaker at an invitation only Council for National Policy event with an audience of GOP donors in McLean Virginia. Her presentation is something to behold. Especially if you’re interested in coups.

Wait until you see this wee 🧵👇🏻

As you know by now, Ginni Thomas is married to Coke can enthusiast and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Ginni has been trying to install a libertarian theocracy in the US foreva eva. On this particular Saturday at the Ritz, she put forth a plan.

First, let’s see who else was in attendance at this closed get together. According to their agenda, they were to receive a House Freedom Caucus update from its chairman. In 2019, the House Freedom Caucus was made up of tea partiers and was led by Mark Meadows.

You’ll remember Mark Meadows from such criminal referrals as not complying with @January6thCmte Congressional subpoena. He was also the White House Chief of Staff during an insurrection and also from the numerous texts he exchanged with Ginni Thomas.

Actually, look at the entire agenda for this meeting. It’s a who’s who of the insurrection. Besides Meadows and Thomas was Cleta Mitchell, trumps lawyer who made sure AZ frauditors got paid, Peter Navarro from the presentations to sweep away

Benjamin Wittes
@benjaminwittes

For the benefit of anyone who is actually confused, rather than shilling for Putin, I do not believe in US military involvement in the conflict in Ukraine and have never advocated anything of the kind—much less for the US engaging in forcible regime change in Russia.

The tweet in question came in the context of a long series of tweets I have been assembling over the past several days of Russian and Belorussian protests opposing the war and demanding change.

Regime change: Russia.
— Benjamin Wittes (@benjaminwittes) February 27, 2022

It came in the context of a series of actions by Western governments—which I support wholeheartedly—to isolate Russia in non-military fashions and support the international order.

My point was that it's hard for me to imagine unwinding these actions entirely while Putin was still in power. Rather, as many other people are saying—including Russians speaking in Russian—the regular order cannot return while Putin remains:

@Leonid_Gozman: "\u0412\u043b\u0430\u0434\u0438\u043c\u0438\u0440 \u041f\u0443\u0442\u0438\u043d \u0443 \u0432\u043b\u0430\u0441\u0442\u0438, \u043c\u0438\u0440\u0430 \u043d\u0435 \u0431\u0443\u0434\u0435\u0442. \u0415\u0433\u043e \u043e\u0442\u0441\u0442\u0430\u0432\u043a\u0430 \u2013 \u043d\u0435\u043e\u0431\u0445\u043e\u0434\u0438\u043c\u043e\u0435 \u0443\u0441\u043b\u043e\u0432\u0438\u0435 \u043f\u0440\u0435\u0434\u043e\u0442\u0432\u0440\u0430\u0449\u0435\u043d\u0438\u044f \u043f\u0435\u0440\u0435\u0445\u043e\u0434\u0430 \u0432\u043e\u0439\u043d\u044b \u0441 \u0423\u043a\u0440\u0430\u0438\u043d\u043e\u0439 \u0432 \u0422\u0440\u0435\u0442\u044c\u044e \u041c\u0438\u0440\u043e\u0432\u0443\u044e."
— Anders \xc5slund (@anders_aslund) February 27, 2022

Does anyone, for example, really think that Germany is going to say, as soon as the Ukraine conflict ends, "Oh, that 2 percent GDP on defense stuff? Never mind!"

$Andrew Wortman \U0001f3f3\ufe0f\u200d\U0001f308$

Andrew Wortman 🏳️‍🌈...
@AmoneyResists

We have video of Trump calling on his supporters to storm the Capitol to “take back our country”

We have @GOP members of Congress on tape doing the same

We have the entire insurrection from inside and outside the Capitol on

We have tweets and emails from Trump calling on his supporters to attack the Capitol

We have tweets, messages, and video from @GOP members of Congress actively enabling the attack

We have multiple insurrectionists who have pled guilty to participating in this siege

We have sworn testimony from Capitol Police officers that they were violently assaulted, maced, hit with blunt objects & overrun by people who claimed they were “sent by Trump.”

We have an entire political party attempting to whitewash this attack as a “normal tourist visit.”

We have @GOP members of Congress still unwilling to condemn the actions of these individuals or call this what it was: a terrorist insurrection aimed at overthrowing the government and installing Trump as dictator despite losing the election by over 7 million votes.

We have nearly every member of the Trump family on tape calling for the insurrection on January

Michael Beaton
@mhbx

@tommy_pane One last shot at registering something that might loosen your grip on this:
I I wish you c/would find something that actually resembles a plan in the Trumpian catalog.

Something more tangible than the bombastic demagoguery & claim to destroy something that many of the Trumpian

2/ faithful actually depend upon. It’s very similar to the tea party holding their angry outrage at the government trying to fix healthcare well demanding they don’t mess with their Social Security or Medicare.
The astonishing ignorance in the Trumpian hoi polloi is concerning.

The Independent Whig
@TheWhig

1/ questions raised by linked thread: What are some other significant traits of liberal thinking? One is the tendency to think WEIRDly. Another is the tendency to employ only 1/2 of the evolved psychological mechanisms of social cognition (and of those mostly just care/harm)

1/n Two interesting findings thus far from my analysis of Pew's March 2020 COVID-19 survey. First, white (and especially 'very') liberals are far more likely than all other ideological-racial subgroups to report being diagnosed with a mental health condition. pic.twitter.com/RynS9lk0jR
— Zach Goldberg (@ZachG932) April 11, 2020

2/ Another is that the left-wing emphasis on altruism/empathy/sympathy can be so single-minded, so exclusionary toward other necessary aspects of healthy society, that it becomes pathological.

3/ Another is left’s relative deficiency in the ability to imagine how other people could think differently, and its tendency to therefore conclude that “others” are sick, broken, malformed:

4/ Another is the left’s greater tendency throughout history to feel not only logically justified, but more, morally obligated, to exclude said sick/malformed/broken “others” from social discourse literally by any means necessary. https://t.co/OBbtApzHyD

5/ These things add up. Patterns emerge. A picture begins to form. More questions arise.

Have we been looking at the partisan divide all wrong all along?

David Rothkopf
@djrothkopf

For those who say that what has happened in the last week will permanently damage America's standing in the world, a short list of reasons why, bad as it was, it won't even make the top 30 things that have really harmed our standing.

1. A coup against our government led by our president
2. Support for the coup from the entire Republican Party
3. A major political party (see above) dedicated to dismantling democracy in the United States
4. A president impeached for encouraging the coup

5. A president impeached for trying to blackmail a US ally
6. A president who bullied & insulted our allies for 4 years
7. A president and party who have actively promoted racism and ethno-nationalism
8. A president & party who sought to shut our borders to people of color

9. Re: the preceding, a president & party who sought to block the entry of Afghan (& Iraqi) allies into the country
10. A president who helped deepen the global COVID crisis through selfishness, ignorance and corruption
11. US having the highest COVID death total in the world

12. A president cozying up to dictators worldwide
13. A president corruptly profiting from the presidency
14. A president who was a serial sex offender
15. A president who is a serial tax cheat

David Roberts
@drvolts

This is the raw truth of the conservative psyche, right here. The core of it all.

Laura Ingraham: "What if we just cut off the unemployment? Hunger is a pretty powerful thing."

Bar Rescue guy: "They only feed a military dog at night, because a hungry dog is an obedient dog. Well, if we are not causing people to be hungry to work..." pic.twitter.com/Pw5C6n6l02
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) August 13, 2021

One core conviction of reactionaries is that everyone is selfish, everyone is out for themselves, their family, their tribe, that *no one* acts in a pro-social or moral or responsible manner except under threat.

That's what God & religion are to them -- permanent threat of punishment, the only thing that could possibly induce large numbers of people to behave. Without that threat, everyone will just revert to brutal, callous selfishness, right?

Important to note that this is pure projection. Empirical research is clear that when it comes to training -- training pets, training kids, training employees -- *positive reinforcement* is overwhelmingly more effective than punishment or threat of punishment.

People behave well & perform well when they are empowered, when they feel valued, when they have a sense of agency & efficacy, NOT when they are cowed & beaten like starved dogs. Reactionaries can't accept this -- they quite literally can't imagine or envision it.

Michael Beaton
@mhbx

@tommy_pane @adamsteinbaugh Thx. Read it. Nothing new here. Though well summarized.
It would be foolish for me to try and discuss much less counter the very many half & full misconceptions. That this is detail making up the hard foundation of your complaint is... well..ibid.

I get you & yours believe it be

@adamsteinbaugh 9/ systems ... contorted out of shape, all to make the answer “Trump won” come out.

It is tantamount to breaking every mathematical premise to make 2+2=5.
You can do it (how many fingers Winston?) but at what cost to everything else?

MartyrMade
@martyrmade

I think I've had discussions w/enough Boomer-tier Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent to extract a general theory about their perspective. It is also the perspective of most of the people at the Capitol on 1/6, and probably even Trump himself. 1/x

Most believe some or all of the theories involving midnight ballots, voting machines, etc, but what you find when you talk to them is that, while they'll defend those positions w/info they got from Hannity or Breitbart or whatever, they're not particularly attached to them. 2/x

Here are the facts - actual, confirmed facts - that shape their perspective: 1) The FBI/etc spied on the 2016 Trump campaign using evidence manufactured by the Clinton campaign. We now know that all involved knew it was fake from Day 1 (see: Brennan's July 2016 memo, etc). 3/x

These are Tea Party people. The types who give their kids a pocket Constitution for their birthday and have Founding Fathers memes in their bios. The intel community spying on a presidential campaign using fake evidence (incl forged documents) is a big deal to them. 4/x

Everyone involved lied about their involvement as long as they could. We only learned the DNC paid for the manufactured evidence because of a court order. Comey denied on TV knowing the DNC paid for it, when we have emails from a year earlier proving that he knew. 5/x

$Nick Knudsen \U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8$

Nick Knudsen 🇺🇸...
@NickKnudsenUS

The victor in the Civil War wasn’t the ‘North’. It was the United States. We beat a violent, traitorous faction.

But that faction lived on through Jim Crow, the ‘Southern Strategy’, now MAGA…

The GOP, Fox & more are infected by the faction. The insurrection is ongoing.

The key tool being used by the faction now is the Big Lie.

They seek to limit access to the ballot box and institutionalize the ability of the faction’s current party - the GOP - to overturn election results.

They seek to defeat the US from the inside, but it’s the same war.

The goal is to rule from the minority. Their coalition is strong & disciplined and includes:

Fox, OAN, Sinclair, Daily Wire, Breitbart, White Evangelical churches, paramilitary groups, Federalist Society, Judicial Watch, Council for National Policy & the Republican Party & more.

The faction is expert at uniting a fervent base by enflaming White resentment.

It’s the same strategy they’ve always had, though the political and social groups that they’ve infected have shifted over time.

White supremacy is always at the core of their ideology.

It’s important to know who the real enemy is so that you can stop fighting battles and realize there’s a full-scale war being waged by a determined, seditious enemy.

The entire faction must be defeated, not just the GOP.

Happy #4thofJuly. May the United States prevail.

Mueller, She Wrote
@MuellerSheWrote

THREAD: TRUMP JUST BECAME MORE OF A NATIONAL SECURITY THREAT THAN HE ALREADY WAS: As most of us know by know, the trump org was indicted on ten counts yesterday, and the CFO Allen Weisselberg was indicted in 15 counts 1/

Despite what the trump org lawyers and donald's crotch goblins are saying - that all Weisselberg did wrong was that he failed to report a mercedes benz to the IRS - these are serious crimes and include conspiracy, fraud, and falsifying business records. 2/

As @kurteichenwald explains here: an org indictment could mean trump lenders will likely call in their loans early, especially if the org falsified business records as count 12 shows it did. So what does this have to do with NATIONAL SECURITY? 3/

As someone who has written for decades about corporate crime, I was reading the Trump O/Weisselberg indictment going, "Yah, ok..hmm..yah..ok..Wait..HOLY SHIT!" The Trump Org is in deep, deep trouble. And not because of the criminal charges. Because of its bank loan covenants.../1
— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) July 1, 2021

Remember when Sue Gordon - who resigned with Bolton after the Ukraine shadow government (Rudy) and the scheme to extort Zelensky in exchange for an investigation announcement into Biden was discovered - wrote an op ed "Cut Off his Intelligence"? 4/

Sue Gordon feared what I posited three months before she wrote the op-ed: that donald was broke and would sell our secrets to pay his debts 5/

He\u2019s going to sell intelligence secrets to pay his debts.
— Mueller, She Wrote (@MuellerSheWrote) October 29, 2020

Scott MacFarlane
@MacFarlaneNews

Wow

Just read through Rep Mo Brooks (R-AL) legal filing today defending himself in lawsuit filed by Rep Eric Swalwell (D-CA) alleging Brooks helped incite the US Capitol insurrection with "start taking down names and kicking ass" speech

It's quite something

(thread)

Rep Brooks specifies he was called by the White House on Jan 5 and invited to give the speech at Ellipse on Jan 6. And only did so because the White House invited him

He also says, at last minute, organizers tried to reduce the time he was allotted for speech

Rep Brooks' court filing includes the vote tally in his District for Trump and Biden

Arguing he was "representing the will" of the Alabama 5th District that day

About those words we've heard in video clips so many times since Jan 6: "Start taking down names and kicking ass"...

Rep Brooks argues the words "as such" at the start of the sentence were important modifiers or softeners of the language

Rep Brooks added this nugget on info in his legal filing:

He believes the evidence is "overwhelming" that Nov 3 elections suffered from voter fraud, that Donald Trump won the electoral college and should be serving his 2nd term as President

Gavin Schmidt
@ClimateOfGavin

The potentially record-shattering extreme heat weather forecasts for the Pacific NW are pretty shocking, but some folks keep getting the climate change connection wrong.

This guy for instance:

He states as a supposed ‘golden rule’ that “the bigger the temperature extreme the SMALLER the contribution of global warming”. This is nonsense - but it’s worth thinking about why.

Any extreme event can have both ultimate and proximate causes. The proximate cause could be a frontal system, a jet stream meander, a hurricane etc. which are not unique. But this all takes place within the climatology, which as we know, is changing.

The Mass claim is based on a naive accounting of the proximate and ultimate causes. He takes the weather-related anomaly (large) and compares it to climatological anomaly (smaller) and concludes that the climate change fraction gets smaller if the weather anomaly grows.

$Dickie Bush \U0001f6a2$

Dickie Bush 🚢
@dickiebush

The world's most valuable skill:

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Instead, here are 9 writing frameworks that cost you nothing and will save you hundreds of hours:

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Atomic Habits from @jamesclear changed my life.

In Atomic Habits, James lays out the Four Laws of Behavior Change.

1. Make it obvious
2. Make it attractive
3. Make it easy
4. Make it satisfying

Here's how to leverage them to build a daily writing habit (\U0001f9f5\u270d\U0001f3fc):
— Dickie Bush \U0001f6a2 (@dickiebush) March 10, 2021

2. With your writing habit down, study these 10 tips from the world's most legendary marketer: David Ogilvy.

One of the most legendary marketers of all time: David Ogilvy

In 1982, David wrote an internal memo to the employees of his advertising agency titled "How to write."

And in just 10 bullets he put together a masterclass in effective writing.

Here's a breakdown of each one: pic.twitter.com/MxRYuQRLyA
— Dickie Bush \U0001f6a2 (@dickiebush) June 2, 2021

3. Then, immerse yourself in the takeaways from the bible on business

Business writing is a superpower.

But schools and employers do a horrible job teaching people to write.

In 1981, two advertising executives wrote a timeless guide for how to write in the business world.

And here are 12 of their tips you should staple to your desktop: pic.twitter.com/w0hh0qBOG4
— Dickie Bush \U0001f6a2 (@dickiebush) June 8, 2021

4. Like to learn on the go?

Dive into the creative process of the world's best writers in these 10 episodes of the @timferriss show.

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\u270d\U0001f3fc\U0001f3a7\U0001f447\U0001f3fc
— Dickie Bush \U0001f6a2 (@dickiebush) March 3, 2021