The rookie GOP congressman describes Capitol Hill chaos, says that some Republicans who knew better voted against election certification out of physical fear, and explains how serving in Iraq and Afghanistan made him want to "end the endless wars."

https://reason.com/2021/01/08/amash-successor-peter-meijer-trumps-deceptions-are-rankly-unfit/

I mean, we saw a number of senators and a handful of members of Congress change their perspectives. And I guess that's good, but it's not ideal. But what to me was the most bewildering was folks giving speeches that were written that morning as if we weren't in a body that had windows broken in just a few hours earlier, law enforcement drawing weapons. As if a woman hadn't been shot and killed 100 feet from where they stood, right? There was still dried blood out there. And they were giving the exact same speeches, the exact same arguments, telling what they thought their people wanted to hear rather than telling them what they needed to hear.

Donald Trump and Us

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/donald-trump-and-us/

Way back in 1990, Trump gave an interview to Playboy magazine. The Soviet Union was in uncertain condition, and democratic protesters were getting bolder. Trump said, “Russia is out of control and the leadership knows it. That’s my problem with Gorbachev. Not a firm enough hand.”

His interviewer asked, “You mean ‘firm hand’ as in China?”

Trump answered, “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it.”

Think on that for a moment: “almost blew it.”

“Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength.”

Okay.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump said of Vladimir Putin, “I think that he is a strong leader, he’s a powerful leader.”

He’s a powerful leader, yes. (I’m not sure how strong it is to jail, maim, and kill your critics. Some would construe all that as a sign of weakness.)

• About three weeks ago, on December 19, Trump tweeted, “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

Uh-huh.

Two days ago, he tweeted, “I hope the Democrats, and even more importantly, the weak and ineffective RINO section of the Republican Party, are looking at the thousands of people pouring into D.C. They won’t stand for a landslide election victory to be stolen.”

Uh-huh. The threat of mob violence, a true hallmark of “conservatism,” right?

Hitler Was Incompetent and Lazy—and His Nazi Government Was an Absolute Clown Show | Opinion

https://www.newsweek.com/hitler-incompetent-lazy-nazi-government-clown-show-opinion-1408136

We tend to assume that when something awful happens there must have been some great controlling intelligence behind it. It's understandable: how could things have gone so wrong, we think, if there wasn't an evil genius pulling the strings? The downside of this is that we tend to assume that if we can't immediately spot an evil genius, then we can all chill out a bit because everything will be fine.

But history suggests that's a mistake, and it's one that we make over and over again. Many of the worst man-made events that ever occurred were not the product of evil geniuses. Instead they were the product of a parade of idiots and lunatics, incoherently flailing their way through events, helped along the way by overconfident people who thought they could control them.

Dustin_Echoes_UNSC on crossing barriers

https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/ksrilh/man_died_at_us_capitol_after_accidentally/gij14sp/

She (and everyone who enabled her) crossed every barrier laid out to impede them. They knew they were breaking the law, but laws only hold weight when they're enforced. So for each barrier they crossed, each person who stepped aside and allowed them to continue, they became more emboldened. Maybe those who enabled the mob didn't see it as much of a threat. Maybe they secretly agreed with them, or maybe they got some personal gain from letting them continue. Regardless of why, she and the mob were as surprised as the rest of us to find themselves wandering the seat of our nation's power, almost entirely unopposed.

Then they came across yet another barricade. Behind that barricade was a secret service agent, weapon drawn in an alamo position, presumably tasked with protecting the leaders within the building - almost the entire line of succession to our republic. He, like all the others before him, was ordering them not to cross the barricade. It's difficult to imagine a more clear and present danger to find yourself in as an American citizen - staring down the barrel of a secret service agent while trespassing in the Capitol. (It has been pointed out that it was a plain-clothsed Capitol Police officer, ostensibly acting in the same role as a secret service agent but for the Legislators. Original left for clarity). Surely she, a 14 year veteran of the Air Force can be expected to know the danger she was in. But the frenzy, the empowerment , and the reinforcement they got by crossing all of the lines behind them led her to believe that even this was a line she could cross. It wasn't until she was shot that anyone else in the mob even stopped to consider the danger they were in.

Had she not been killed, they would have continued to do whatever they could get away with.

If that isn't the personification of Trump and the MAGA cult, I don't know what is.

Edit: I wanted to add some additional context since this blew up, in case my attempt at being brief muddied the point I was hoping to make:

Never before in our history has a President been so emboldened to circumvent the law in such a brazen manor. The events of this week are not simply the delusions of a senile old man. For the past 5 years, and likely much of his life, Trump has gotten away with doing whatever suits his fancy. Our nation, and it's leadership have enabled him throughout his tenure, whether by blind loyalty or for personal gain. He has been let off from an impeachment, with no lasting consequence. Didn't even have to testify. He has been allowed to lie to the American people, again and again from the highest office in the land, but that barrier carried no weight either. He suppressed the vote, tampered with the postal service, used the office for personal and professional gain, and destroyed the citizenry's faith in our electoral system. So far, all barriers crossed with little to no resistance. We cannot expect Trump to simply stop pulling the levers of power of his own volition. Even when he eventually moves on, the blueprint for his scheme is publicly available, and someone else will fill the power vacuum. Likely, someone with more subtlety, and common sense. Someone much more difficult to oppose, or indict.

A bigger threat to our democracy we haven't seen since the civil war. But, pretending this issue just goes away with Trump... to treat his agenda, his methods as an outlier now that they've seen popular support is foolishness. If we as a nation don't establish his treason, sedition, and attempted coup d'etat as the barricade that can never be crossed, if he and his enablers escape this mess without repercussion, we have only ourselves to blame when he or the next demagogue like him crosses that line.

And, watching the rioters being escorted peacefully down the steps of our Capitol, I fear we'll make the same mistake. 

Madness on Capitol Hill

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/capitol-trump-insurrection-explosions/

“This is not America,” a woman said to a small group, her voice shaking. She was crying, hysterical. “They’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.”

A man, possibly her husband, comforted her: “Don’t worry, honey. We showed them today. We showed them what we’re all about.”

Bring the Insurrectionists to Justice

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bring-the-insurrectionists-to-justice-11610065179?st=fy0q4xexsq53i72

True conservatives tend to have a particular understanding of the fragility of things. They understand that every human institution is, in its way, built on sand. It’s all so frail. They see how thin the veil is between civilization and chaos, and understand that we have to go through every day, each in our way, trying to make the veil thicker. And so we value the things in the phrase that others use to disparage us, “law and order.” Yes, always, the rule of law, and order so that the people of a great nation can move freely on the streets and do their work and pursue their lives.

Liz Cheney: Objecting to Electoral College Votes Sets ‘Exceptionally Dangerous Precedent’

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/liz-cheney-objecting-to-electoral-college-votes-sets-exceptionally-dangerous-precedent/

[T]here is substantial reason for concern about the precedent Congressional objections will set here. By objecting to electoral slates, members are unavoidably asserting that Congress has the authority to overturn elections and overrule state and federal courts. Such objections set an exceptionally dangerous precedent, threatening to steal states’ explicit constitutional responsibility for choosing the President and bestowing it instead on Congress. This is directly at odds with the Constitution’s clear text and our core beliefs as Republicans. Democrats have long attempted, unconstitutionally, to federalize every element of our nation—including elections. Republicans should not embrace Democrats’ unconstitutional position on these issues.

The recent proposal for a new “Commission” is even more problematic. It is not reasonable to anticipate that any commission so formed could wrap up its work in 10 days; indeed, the subsequent debate at both the state and federal level would likely require months. Did those proposing a new commission realize that they were in essence proposing to delay the inaugural? Did they mean to set up a new future precedent where the inaugural is delayed and we have an “Acting President?” For how long? Who decides when that process is over? Will that require another Act of Congress? Could the Acting President veto any such future Congressional action? If Congress has authority to create such a commission now, are state elections, recounts and state law legal challenges just “make-work” until Congress gets around to investigating and deciding who should be President? Members who support the new commission proposal may need to answer each of these questions. And in particular, Members should be prepared to answer how such a commission would be justified by the actual text of our founding documents. 

How Volcanos Work

https://www.reddit.com/r/geology/comments/kolies/would_it_be_possible_to_stop_a_volcano_eruption/ghteiet/

VOlcanoes are fed by magma, which is usually generated in the mantle. THat magma is more buoyant than the crust above so rises up through the crust. THe highly pressured magma forces opn fractures to aid that travel. EVentually it reaches a deth where it is neutrally buoyant, so it hangs around in what you were probably taught was a magma chamber. WHat we've come to realise over the last 30 years or so is that it's really not much of a chamber; the magma is stored in a network of cracks and openings, and as it sits there it starts eroding the host rock around it through melting, as well as crystallising and forming crystal mushes within those spaces. So the magma reservoir is really a semi-porous network which is part filled by liquid melt, and part filled by solid material.

(the full comment is really interesting)

All 10 living former defense secretaries: Involving the military in election disputes would cross into dangerous territory

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/10-former-defense-secretaries-military-peaceful-transfer-of-power/2021/01/03/2a23d52e-4c4d-11eb-a9f4-0e668b9772ba_story.html

Ashton Carter, Dick Cheney, William Cohen, Mark Esper, Robert Gates, Chuck Hagel, James Mattis, Leon Panetta, William Perry and Donald Rumsfeld are the 10 living former U.S. secretaries of defense.

As former secretaries of defense, we hold a common view of the solemn obligations of the U.S. armed forces and the Defense Department. Each of us swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. We did not swear it to an individual or a party.

American elections and the peaceful transfers of power that result are hallmarks of our democracy. With one singular and tragic exception that cost the lives of more Americans than all of our other wars combined, the United States has had an unbroken record of such transitions since 1789, including in times of partisan strife, war, epidemics and economic depression. This year should be no exception.

The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done - How personal productivity transformed work—and failed to.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-rise-and-fall-of-getting-things-done

Not long afterward, Mann posted a self-reflective essay on 43 Folders, in which he revealed a growing dissatisfaction with the world of personal productivity. Productivity pr0n, he suggested, was becoming a bewildering, complexifying end in itself—list-making as a “cargo cult,” system-tweaking as an addiction. “On more than a few days, I wondered what, precisely, I was trying to accomplish,” he wrote. Part of the problem was the recursive quality of his work. Refining his productivity system so that he could blog more efficiently about productivity made him feel as if he were being “tossed around by a menacing Rube Goldberg device” of his own design; at times, he said, “I thought I might be losing my mind.” He also wondered whether, on a substantive level, the approach that he’d been following was really capable of addressing his frustrations. It seemed to him that it was possible to implement many G.T.D.-inflected life hacks without feeling “more competent, stable, and alive.” He cleaned house, deleting posts. A new “About” page explained that 43 Folders was no longer a productivity blog but a “website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.”

The Plague Year - The mistakes and the struggles behind America’s coronavirus tragedy

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/04/the-plague-year

Tens of millions of Americans emulated the President’s bravado, and the unchecked virus prolonged unemployment, upended efforts to reopen the economy, and caused many more fatalities. “I’m not buying a fucking mask,” Richard Rose, a thirty-seven-year-old Army veteran from Ohio, posted on Facebook. “I’ve made it this far by not buying into that damn hype.” He tested positive on July 1st and died three days later. There are many similar stories.

It’s dispiriting to think that, had such a simple precaution been broadly implemented from the start, America could have avoided so much suffering, death, impoverishment, and grief. The starkest example occurred in Kansas, when the governor issued an executive order to wear masks in public but allowed counties to opt out. It was as if Kansas were performing a clinical trial on itself. Within two months, infections in mask-wearing counties had fallen by six per cent; elsewhere, infections rose a hundred per cent.

[...]

Surprisingly, the marches did not appear to be significant drivers of transmission. “We tested thousands of people,” Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, at the University of Minnesota, said. “We saw no appreciable impact.” One study found lower rates of infection among marchers than in their surrounding communities. Epidemiologists concluded that mask wearing and being outdoors protected the protesters. Moreover, demonstrators were on the move. Osterholm said that people in stationary crowds are more likely to become infected. In other words, joining a protest march is inherently less dangerous than attending a political rally.

Midnight In Chernobyl: Excerpt

https://www.npr.org/books/titles/737993197/midnight-in-chernobyl-the-untold-story-of-the-worlds-greatest-nuclear-disaster#excerpt

Advancement in many political, economic, and scientific careers was granted only to those who repressed their personal opinions, avoided conflict, and displayed unquestioning obedience to those above them. By the midseventies, this blind conformism had smothered individual decision-making at all levels of the state and Party machine, infecting not just the bureaucracy but technical and economic disciplines, too. Lies and deception were endemic to the system, trafficked in both directions along the chain of management: those lower down passed up reports to their superiors packed with falsified statistics and inflated estimates, of unmet goals triumphantly reached, unfulfilled quotas heroically exceeded. To protect his own position, at every stage, each manager relayed the lies upward or compounded them.

Seated at the top of a teetering pyramid of falsehood, poring over reams of figures that had little basis in reality, were the economic mandarins of the State General Planning Committee—Gosplan—in Moscow. The brain of the “command economy,” Gosplan managed the centralized distribution of resources throughout the USSR, from toothbrushes to tractors, reinforced concrete to platform boots. Yet the economists in Moscow had no reliable index of what was going on in the vast empire they notionally maintained; the false accounting was so endemic that at one point the KGB resorted to turning the cameras of its spy satellites onto Soviet Uzbekistan in an attempt to gather accurate information about the state’s own cotton harvest.

Shortages and apparently inexplicable gluts of goods and materials were part of the grim routine of daily life, and shopping became a game of chance played with a string avoska, or “what-if” bag, carried in the hope of stumbling upon a store recently stocked with anything useful—whether sugar, toilet paper, or canned ratatouille from Czechoslovakia. Eventually the supply problems of the centrally planned economy became so chronic that crops rotted in the fields, and Soviet fishermen watched catches putrefy in their nets, yet the shelves of the Union’s grocery stores remained bare.

 

Confessions of a Xinjiang Camp Teacher

https://thediplomat.com/2020/08/confessions-of-a-xinjiang-camp-teacher/

“It was a huge camp,” she recalled. “There were about 10,000 women with shaved heads, of whom only about 60 were over 60. Most of them were young, pretty, well brought up.”

It was a camp for those who had studied abroad in Korea, Australia, Turkey, Egypt, Europe, or the United States. All highly educated and speaking several languages, they were detained on arrival in Xinjiang after returning to visit their families. Qelbinur suddenly feared for her own daughter, who was studying overseas. “I had decided to kill myself if China forced her to return,” she said.

Sanitary conditions at this camp were vile, Qelbinur recalled. The air reeked from a single toilet bucket in each cell that was emptied once a day. One minute was allowed for face washing in the morning and showers rationed to once a month.“The atmosphere was pestilential,” she said. “Many were getting sick from the lack of hygiene.”

The Church Needs Prophets, But It Wants Lawyers

https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/the-church-needs-prophets-but-wants

Take, for example, the response to the racial reckoning in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing. You might be spending more time listening to lawyers than prophets if you’re more familiar—seven months later—with the flaws of Critical Race Theory than with the details of wealth gaps, achievement gaps, or with the systematic violations of civil rights that are all too common in marginalized communities. 

It’s not easy to find (or listen to) the prophetic voice. I’ve had to learn from painful experience to listen to voices from outside the comfortable confines of my own spiritual cocoon. It’s a source of personal shame, for example, that I couldn’t clearly perceive the realities of contemporary American racism until it was directed at my own daughter, and I was shocked out of my spiritual complacency. 

American Christian culture is rife with congregants looking for lawyers, not prophets and not pastors. The church-shopping phenomenon puts us in churches that make us feel quite comfortable, and the sheer number of available congregations (especially in the South and parts of the Midwest) makes us quite mobile. From all too many members of the congregation comes the cry, “Tell us what we want to hear!”  

What's something Americans are privileged of, but they take it as granted?

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/kkw3cx/whats_something_americans_are_privileged_of_but/

The United States has, by far, the best ocean access of any other nation. There are thousands of miles of coastline on both the Atlantic and the Pacific. This gives the USA unmatched ability to trade in every direction at a much lower cost than pretty much every other country.

Former DHS Official: Trump Pouring 'Fuel On The Fire' Of Domestic Extremism

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/02/908347989/former-dhs-official-white-house-failed-to-take-far-right-extremism-seriously

"They borrowed from ISIS's playbook and they learned how to radicalize people online," she says. In the post-Sept. 11 United States, domestic extremists also adopted an emphasis on smaller attacks that could be carried out quickly with limited planning. What Neumann saw was "the pivot to bring your own weapon to the fight, use whatever you have: a knife, a gun, a vehicle, vehicle ramming," she says. "We've seen a number of vehicle rammings this summer, in fact."

But unlike the urgent interagency response to ISIS, Neumann says there was no clear effort to combat violent extremists on the right.

"If you had a very clear voice at the top, from the president, from other senior leaders in the Republican Party, denouncing this and warning conservatives — warning Republicans — that these groups are trying to recruit you based on things that might sound like a typical conservative belief, but behind it is this insidious, ugly, evil thing, if we had more clear voices talking about it — it would somewhat inoculate people from that recruitment and that radicalization," she says. "But instead, we have the opposite effect. We have the president not only pretty much refusing to condemn, but throwing fuel on the fire, creating opportunities for more recruitment through his rhetoric."

Right-Wing Embrace Of Conspiracy Is 'Mass Radicalization,' Experts Warn

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/15/946381523/right-wing-embrace-of-conspiracy-is-mass-radicalization-experts-warn

"There are no easy answers, even if they're carrying guns and wearing body armor," Dempsey said. "We've got to get past that and be wary of the idea of militarism that doesn't lead to a common conception of service, but leads to the kind of tribalism where we have to protect ourselves and our families by force against those we disagree with."

On the conference call, the analysts agreed that the leftist fringe also is hardening and promoting its own conspiracies. But they said there's simply no equivalency with the right in terms of the volume of disinformation and conspiracy, or in its connections to violent acts.

"There is a monetization of outrage on both sides," Neumann said, "but in particular the conservative infotainment sector makes money off of that outrage." 

Leaked Documents Show How China’s Army of Paid Internet Trolls Helped Censor the Coronavirus

https://www.propublica.org/article/leaked-documents-show-how-chinas-army-of-paid-internet-trolls-helped-censor-the-coronavirus

 “China has a politically weaponized system of censorship; it is refined, organized, coordinated and supported by the state’s resources,” said Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founder of China Digital Times. “It’s not just for deleting something. They also have a powerful apparatus to construct a narrative and aim it at any target with huge scale.”

“This is a huge thing,” he added. “No other country has that.”

Whatever happened to Hotel Detectives?

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6sfj2v/whatever_happened_to_the_house_dick/dldl01g/

Experience was the most important attribute of a hotel detective, since, for the most part, such men had three main functions to perform. The first was to protect the hotel's reputation and prevent it from unwittingly breaking any laws, which, especially in earlier periods, often involved preventing an establishment from acquiring a reputation as the sort of place that allowed unmarried couples to have sex on the premises - very often an offence at the time under laws relating to "unlawful cohabitation". A 1979 article in Texas Monthly notes that in earlier times a house officer would, as part of his routine, challenge male guests with the line "Is there a woman in your room?" Dev Collans, in I Was A House Detective (1954) describes enlisting bellboys to report on "couples who wouldn't open their suitcases while the bellboy was still in the room; married couples didn't hesitate to. A man in sleek clothes with a woman whose shoes were run down at the heels is another giveaway."

Priceless lessons from my sixth-grade English teacher

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/priceless-lessons-from-my-sixth-grade-english-teacher/2020/12/24/ab8842b2-4545-11eb-975c-d17b8815a66d_story.html

3. If a reader doesn’t understand what you are trying to say, that is your fault — not the reader’s.

Sometimes I complain about cranky emails I receive from people who misread something I wrote. Then I remember Mr. Greco’s dictum that the burden of clarity is always on the writer.

Dense, incomprehensible prose is not an indicator of intellect. It signals that a writer doesn’t sufficiently understand the subject matter or was too lazy to write something clearer.