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onetexan
onetexan's Journal
onetexan's Journal
November 18, 2021
https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/watch/tim-gosar-calls-for-brother-rep-paul-gosar-to-be-expelled-from-congress-126475845766
Listening to Gosar's sister & brother speak so eloquently, denouncing his heinous acts, saying he needs to be expelled from Congress and prosecuted, of the need to protect democracy and offering praise of AOC - it amazes me that siblings born of the same parents can be so drastically different.
Then again i'm not terribly surprised given i have a couple of trump-supporting siblings as well.
Gosar's other siblings also denounce him here: https://www.businessinsider.com/paul-gosar-siblings-denounce-him-in-scathing-op-ed-2021-8?international=true&r=US&IR=T
Rep. Gosar's outspoken brother and sister - WOW
https://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/paul-gosar-s-sister-on-his-censure-it-is-about-time-126510661919https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/watch/tim-gosar-calls-for-brother-rep-paul-gosar-to-be-expelled-from-congress-126475845766
Listening to Gosar's sister & brother speak so eloquently, denouncing his heinous acts, saying he needs to be expelled from Congress and prosecuted, of the need to protect democracy and offering praise of AOC - it amazes me that siblings born of the same parents can be so drastically different.
Then again i'm not terribly surprised given i have a couple of trump-supporting siblings as well.
Gosar's other siblings also denounce him here: https://www.businessinsider.com/paul-gosar-siblings-denounce-him-in-scathing-op-ed-2021-8?international=true&r=US&IR=T
November 8, 2021
https://www.forbes.com/video/6279810682001/new-poll-shows-bad-news-for-gov-greg-abbott-in-texas-governors-race/?sh=6cc70ca337f4
Well THIS is now setting up the TX Gov's race to be VERY INTERESTING!!!
Forbes: Texas Gov. Abbott Leads Beto O'Rourke By Just 1 Point In Potential Matchup, Poll Suggests
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2021/11/01/texas-gov-abbott-leads-beto-orourke-by-just-1-point-in-potential-matchup-poll-suggests/?sh=1eb799b95515https://www.forbes.com/video/6279810682001/new-poll-shows-bad-news-for-gov-greg-abbott-in-texas-governors-race/?sh=6cc70ca337f4
Well THIS is now setting up the TX Gov's race to be VERY INTERESTING!!!
October 29, 2021
In a Cosmo exclusive, women on both sides—the former believers and the doctors they’re turning to—show us what it takes to escape.
For Anna*, a 23-year-old pharmacy student in Pennsylvania, it felt like being trapped in a vortex of fear. “I had feelings of hope, but at the same time, I was incredibly scared, distressed, and anxious and even had panic attacks,” she says. She spent as many as eight hours a day poring over feeds on Telegram and Gab, listening to fringe podcasts. “Doing just about anything else,” she admits, “was really hard.”
Another person compared it to a “monster gnawing away at me.” On a message board this summer, they wrote, “My mind keeps circling back to it, no matter what I do. I don’t want this to happen, I’ve seen what it does to people, but I just can’t shake it off, I’m losing my goddamn mind, I can’t focus on anything and my anxiety keeps shooting up, this isn’t who I am.”
“It,” for all three, was QAnon, the infamous and violent pro-Trump conspiracy theory whose followers mushroomed during the pandemic to include suburban moms, yoga teachers, grandmas, and seemingly half of your Facebook feed. The movement was so easy to get into—a provocative post by an acquaintance, a few clicks, a video that rang true, which then surfaced other videos—but would prove to be much harder to get out of.
After the 2020 presidential election, followers disillusioned by Q’s false predictions of an overwhelming Trump victory flocked to Reddit message boards like QAnonCasualties and ReQovery, their posts tinged with vulnerability and desperation. They swapped articles, books, podcasts (commonly the New York Times’ Rabbit Hole series), and tips on how to let go of conspiratorial beliefs. They numbered more than 200,000.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Alot more from this insightful article & affirms what we've known all along - Q is a cult that social media has helped create.
Cosmopolitan: Thousands of People Are Trying to Leave QAnon, but Getting Out Is Almost Impossible
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a37696261/leaving-recovering-from-q-anon/?fbclid=IwAR3mgxihUf8QFJO6SdT6kIDZTEfO1CD3QDJpc-cZncyQX2DNzLmXtOOpjqIIn a Cosmo exclusive, women on both sides—the former believers and the doctors they’re turning to—show us what it takes to escape.
For Anna*, a 23-year-old pharmacy student in Pennsylvania, it felt like being trapped in a vortex of fear. “I had feelings of hope, but at the same time, I was incredibly scared, distressed, and anxious and even had panic attacks,” she says. She spent as many as eight hours a day poring over feeds on Telegram and Gab, listening to fringe podcasts. “Doing just about anything else,” she admits, “was really hard.”
Another person compared it to a “monster gnawing away at me.” On a message board this summer, they wrote, “My mind keeps circling back to it, no matter what I do. I don’t want this to happen, I’ve seen what it does to people, but I just can’t shake it off, I’m losing my goddamn mind, I can’t focus on anything and my anxiety keeps shooting up, this isn’t who I am.”
“It,” for all three, was QAnon, the infamous and violent pro-Trump conspiracy theory whose followers mushroomed during the pandemic to include suburban moms, yoga teachers, grandmas, and seemingly half of your Facebook feed. The movement was so easy to get into—a provocative post by an acquaintance, a few clicks, a video that rang true, which then surfaced other videos—but would prove to be much harder to get out of.
After the 2020 presidential election, followers disillusioned by Q’s false predictions of an overwhelming Trump victory flocked to Reddit message boards like QAnonCasualties and ReQovery, their posts tinged with vulnerability and desperation. They swapped articles, books, podcasts (commonly the New York Times’ Rabbit Hole series), and tips on how to let go of conspiratorial beliefs. They numbered more than 200,000.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Alot more from this insightful article & affirms what we've known all along - Q is a cult that social media has helped create.
September 17, 2021
Covid-19 preparedness - need a game plan
Hi folks,
So my hubby came down with covid earlier this week. The good news is he and our whole family are vaccinated so i'm not worrie. My daughter & i have rapid testing appointments this morning. We have no symptoms and he had mild symptoms. So all is OK except that i really didn't think about needing to have adequate provisions (medication for coldlike symptoms - Nyquil for ex., and enough food to last us while we quarantine. Luckily i did have alot in the freezer but needed fresh veggies, soups and things like that). I ran by this article by Stephanie Ruehle re: needing to be prepared and to have a game plan in the case you do come down with it, because chances are you will.
https://www.nbcnews.com/know-your-value/feature/stephanie-ruhle-my-family-got-covid-19-here-s-what-ncna1250715
September 5, 2021
A Texas state judge issued a temporary restraining order against an anti-abortion group Friday, preventing it from suing abortion providers employed by Planned Parenthood under a harsh new abortion law that went into effect earlier this week.
Travis County District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble ruled that under the Senate Bill 8 law, Planned Parenthood and its staff and patients faced "probable, irreparable, and imminent injury" if they were sued by the nonprofit group Texas Right to Life, its legislative director and 100 unidentified individuals.
However, her three-page order does not prevent others from using the new law against Planned Parenthood or other abortion providers in Texas.
A hearing on a preliminary injunction request was set for Sept. 13.
The pushback is gaining ground it seems. A long way to go still but keep it up Dems! Alot is at stake.
Texas judge grants restraining order against anti-abortion group, temporarily preventing lawsuits
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-judge-grants-restraining-order-against-anti-abortion-group-temporarily-n1278509?fbclid=IwAR14GWnUGtSYhmOA8iuSFCwWtJJwBhyCglTo2dup-B0lGo00J2cPrL_WSc8A Texas state judge issued a temporary restraining order against an anti-abortion group Friday, preventing it from suing abortion providers employed by Planned Parenthood under a harsh new abortion law that went into effect earlier this week.
Travis County District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble ruled that under the Senate Bill 8 law, Planned Parenthood and its staff and patients faced "probable, irreparable, and imminent injury" if they were sued by the nonprofit group Texas Right to Life, its legislative director and 100 unidentified individuals.
However, her three-page order does not prevent others from using the new law against Planned Parenthood or other abortion providers in Texas.
A hearing on a preliminary injunction request was set for Sept. 13.
The pushback is gaining ground it seems. A long way to go still but keep it up Dems! Alot is at stake.
September 2, 2021
Fox & the Big Lie - 2-part series worth watching
produced by the Australian Broadcasting Company. Exposes the truth re: Faux News role of spreading RW propaganda & disinformation. Amazing that it's a foreign country that is gutsy enough to put this together. I haven't seen the American MSM produce one yet.
Part 1: https://www.abc.net.au/4corners/fox-and-the-big-lie:-how-the-network-promoted/13510238?fbclid=IwAR2-DEkSLIWnhN6oVwfhyVX1vmBormhm1xjew6YB_iVcFafxnB5gWXkHPH4
Part 2: https://www.abc.net.au/4corners/fox-and-the-big-lie---part-two/13520230?fbclid=IwAR0IZOxZWKdax2A16GCeXBCdau8I-KR9AT9G2x3MRm5uM0fAhdT0BIZ8g3Q
September 1, 2021
(CNN)Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said Wednesday that "there isn't going to be an impeachment" of President Joe Biden over the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, noting that Democrats control the House and Senate.
"I think the way these behaviors get adjusted in this country is at the ballot box," said McConnell at an event in Pikeville, Kentucky. "The President is not going to be removed from office with a Democratic House and a narrowly Democratic Senate. That's not going to happen."
WTF?!%!?!
McConnell: 'There isn't going to be an impeachment' of Biden
https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/01/politics/mitch-mcconnell-impeachment-biden/index.html(CNN)Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said Wednesday that "there isn't going to be an impeachment" of President Joe Biden over the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, noting that Democrats control the House and Senate.
"I think the way these behaviors get adjusted in this country is at the ballot box," said McConnell at an event in Pikeville, Kentucky. "The President is not going to be removed from office with a Democratic House and a narrowly Democratic Senate. That's not going to happen."
WTF?!%!?!
September 1, 2021
Don't pay attention to the caption which is BS and not what the article was saying. The historical background on the war itself, the bit about the 2 Afghanistans - rural & urban, the warmongering of Bush/Rumsfeld - makes it a great read and gives a much different narrative of what really happened. More importantly, it underscores all the reasons why @POTUS needed to end this failed war the GOP got us into. Oy vey.
I don't agree w/ the author the manner of evacuation could have gone any differently. Withdrawing from losing wars are messy, ugly and highly perilous as we've witnessed. Our 13 troops who gave their young lives so valiantly are true patriots of liberty and we are indebted to them. BUT overall the article has given me a greater understanding of the situation spanning 20 long years. The author interviews Anand Gopal, an embedded journalist & sociologist, who has a firsthand account and tremendous understanding of what happened on the ground.
Excerpts below
_______________________________
"But the reality is that the very speed of the collapse of the Afghan security forces requires a much deeper, and more cosmopolitan, understanding of decades of U.S. policy failures in the country...
Right now, all the coverage is in Kabul, so one would think there is complete chaos in the country. But most of that chaos is just around the airport, and most of Kabul itself is calm. And then life outside Kabul is calm, and for the first time, outside of Kabul there's no war, which, if you talk to men and women in the countryside, especially in those areas that had faced heavy fighting, that's the most significant difference that they've seen, compared to what was there before.
Afghanistan is one of the most rural countries on Earth. The individuals that we tend to hear about are the extreme outliers in Afghan society — which is not to say that they don't deserve a shot and they don't deserve to have a good life in Afghanistan as everyone else does. But if you just focus on these people, you won't actually understand how the Taliban was able to take over. In the countryside, people face very different calculus. They're facing war, and they can be killed either by airstrikes or by roadside bombs or whatever else, and the most important thing they need right now is security, above all else. Afghanistan's been in a civil war for 40 years...
Aleem: The speed of the Taliban's takeover shocked even seasoned analysts and defied U.S. intelligence predictions by a significant margin. What would you say the swiftness of the collapse revealed about what the U.S. was building in Afghanistan for the past 20 years? What are the roots of this failure?
Gopal: The most immediate reason, I think, is that the Afghan military was weaned on the U.S. way of fighting wars, which is almost entirely reliant on air power and on contractors. This goes back to the Rumsfeld Doctrine of the early 2000s, which is to try to decrease the size of the military; decrease the military footprint on the ground; to outsource a lot of the core functions of war-fighting to private contractors; and to shift a lot of the burden of the fighting onto air power.
When the Taliban started to advance, a few things happened at once. One is the U.S. removed its air power, and the Afghan army didn't know how to fight without air power, because unlike the Taliban, they'd been made in the mold of the United States military. Two, all these contractors left, at least the foreign contractors — a lot of the supply chain started to fall in shambles. And then, three, what was left is this military that had no legitimacy on the ground, and nobody was willing to fight and die for the military, because they didn't really believe in it, outside of getting a paycheck or knowing that they're on the winning side. And so, all those things came to a head simultaneously and collapsed like a house of cards.
--------------------------
MSNBC op-ed: War in Afghanistan was far different from how it has been depicted in American media
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/biden-s-afghanistan-withdrawal-could-ve-gone-so-differently-n1278163Don't pay attention to the caption which is BS and not what the article was saying. The historical background on the war itself, the bit about the 2 Afghanistans - rural & urban, the warmongering of Bush/Rumsfeld - makes it a great read and gives a much different narrative of what really happened. More importantly, it underscores all the reasons why @POTUS needed to end this failed war the GOP got us into. Oy vey.
I don't agree w/ the author the manner of evacuation could have gone any differently. Withdrawing from losing wars are messy, ugly and highly perilous as we've witnessed. Our 13 troops who gave their young lives so valiantly are true patriots of liberty and we are indebted to them. BUT overall the article has given me a greater understanding of the situation spanning 20 long years. The author interviews Anand Gopal, an embedded journalist & sociologist, who has a firsthand account and tremendous understanding of what happened on the ground.
Excerpts below
_______________________________
"But the reality is that the very speed of the collapse of the Afghan security forces requires a much deeper, and more cosmopolitan, understanding of decades of U.S. policy failures in the country...
Right now, all the coverage is in Kabul, so one would think there is complete chaos in the country. But most of that chaos is just around the airport, and most of Kabul itself is calm. And then life outside Kabul is calm, and for the first time, outside of Kabul there's no war, which, if you talk to men and women in the countryside, especially in those areas that had faced heavy fighting, that's the most significant difference that they've seen, compared to what was there before.
Afghanistan is one of the most rural countries on Earth. The individuals that we tend to hear about are the extreme outliers in Afghan society — which is not to say that they don't deserve a shot and they don't deserve to have a good life in Afghanistan as everyone else does. But if you just focus on these people, you won't actually understand how the Taliban was able to take over. In the countryside, people face very different calculus. They're facing war, and they can be killed either by airstrikes or by roadside bombs or whatever else, and the most important thing they need right now is security, above all else. Afghanistan's been in a civil war for 40 years...
Aleem: The speed of the Taliban's takeover shocked even seasoned analysts and defied U.S. intelligence predictions by a significant margin. What would you say the swiftness of the collapse revealed about what the U.S. was building in Afghanistan for the past 20 years? What are the roots of this failure?
Gopal: The most immediate reason, I think, is that the Afghan military was weaned on the U.S. way of fighting wars, which is almost entirely reliant on air power and on contractors. This goes back to the Rumsfeld Doctrine of the early 2000s, which is to try to decrease the size of the military; decrease the military footprint on the ground; to outsource a lot of the core functions of war-fighting to private contractors; and to shift a lot of the burden of the fighting onto air power.
When the Taliban started to advance, a few things happened at once. One is the U.S. removed its air power, and the Afghan army didn't know how to fight without air power, because unlike the Taliban, they'd been made in the mold of the United States military. Two, all these contractors left, at least the foreign contractors — a lot of the supply chain started to fall in shambles. And then, three, what was left is this military that had no legitimacy on the ground, and nobody was willing to fight and die for the military, because they didn't really believe in it, outside of getting a paycheck or knowing that they're on the winning side. And so, all those things came to a head simultaneously and collapsed like a house of cards.
--------------------------
August 27, 2021
This collapse, while it seems sudden, has been years in the making. Bergen asked Petraeus if peace negotiations with the Taliban over the past three years set the stage for all of this.
"Yes, at least in part," Petraeus said. I'll break his detailed answer into parts:
"First, the negotiations announced to the Afghan people and the Taliban that the US really did intend to leave (which also made the job of our negotiators even more difficult than it already was, as we were going to give them what they most wanted, regardless of what they committed to us).
"Second, we undermined the elected Afghan government, however flawed it may have been, by not insisting on a seat for it at the negotiations we were conducting about the country they actually governed.
"Third, as part of the eventual agreement, we forced the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban fighters, many of whom quickly returned to the fight as reinforcements for the Taliban. Fourth, the commitment gave President Biden an additional justification/excuse to do what he wanted to do -- leave."
General Petreaus on Afghanistan: This collapse, while it seems sudden, has been years in the making.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/26/politics/what-matters-afghanistan-explainer/indThis collapse, while it seems sudden, has been years in the making. Bergen asked Petraeus if peace negotiations with the Taliban over the past three years set the stage for all of this.
"Yes, at least in part," Petraeus said. I'll break his detailed answer into parts:
"First, the negotiations announced to the Afghan people and the Taliban that the US really did intend to leave (which also made the job of our negotiators even more difficult than it already was, as we were going to give them what they most wanted, regardless of what they committed to us).
"Second, we undermined the elected Afghan government, however flawed it may have been, by not insisting on a seat for it at the negotiations we were conducting about the country they actually governed.
"Third, as part of the eventual agreement, we forced the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban fighters, many of whom quickly returned to the fight as reinforcements for the Taliban. Fourth, the commitment gave President Biden an additional justification/excuse to do what he wanted to do -- leave."
August 24, 2021
This is so great - a chance to really help our Afghan brothers & sisters and their families resettle & rebuild their lives here in the US. If you are in TX please check out here: https://www.rstx.org/
Rachel M: Americans eager to be part of Afghan rescue mission; Officials 'deluged' with help offers
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/americans-eager-to-be-part-of-afghan-rescue-mission-officials-deluged-with-help-offers-119318597898This is so great - a chance to really help our Afghan brothers & sisters and their families resettle & rebuild their lives here in the US. If you are in TX please check out here: https://www.rstx.org/
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Member since: Mon Oct 31, 2016, 08:09 PMNumber of posts: 13,033