Holy HELL, @bootbarn. My wife and I went into your Tualatin, OR store, + as we entered a family of five was leaving – none masked. Then the employee who greeted me (quite cheerfully!) had her mask under her nose...
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@bootbarn Then I counted six other maskless customers + another employee with a mask half-off.
We left immediately.
Because we're not stupid, we respect the law, and we don't want to die.
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@bootbarn Oregon law requires masks. I understand that some people see going maskless as a political statement, but it's the LAW.
And science is science. If my vet said I needed to mask to keep my animals safe from an infectious disease, I'd wear it. Because science is f*cking SCIENCE.
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Context thread:
• The defense bill is DOUBLE the COMBINED costs of COVID stimulus + infrastructure + Build Back Better. (Where are the deficit hawks like @Sen_JoeManchin?)
• And it's unnecessary: U.S. defense $ exceed Russia + China + the next 9 countries COMBINED. ... 1/
@Sen_JoeManchin Some will argue, as @BroadbrainTV does here, that it's ok because "the defense bill is a jobs bill." And that's sort of true: the defense industry accounts for at least 800,000 jobs and 10% of U.S. manufacturing. is.gd/Brn8g0 ...
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@Sen_JoeManchin@BroadbrainTV But as a job creator, defense sucks. About 14MM people work in manufacturing; at 10% of total manufacturing, defense should employ about 1.4MM, but actually employs about half that, because defense toys' materials, research, etc. are expensive compared to labor cost. ...
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The Taliban weren't involved with 9/11. A council of 600 senior AfPak Muslim clerics – essentially the Taliban's governing body – expressed dismay at the 9/11 attacks and offered to expel bin Laden from the country.
The Taliban acknowledged that 9/11 violated Islamic law – but remember, bin Laden initially denied being behind the attacks. At the time, even the U.S. only labeled him a "prime suspect," stopping short of saying we were sure he did it.
That uncertainty was VERY significant.
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Muslim ethics require protecting guests from their enemies – UNLESS the guest has done something to bring trouble on the host. The Taliban COULDN'T surrender bin Laden without evidence he was behind 9/11 (ie, committed a crime while in sanctuary). usip.org/publications/2… 3/
Today's testimony by Capitol Police officers about the Jan. 6 insurrection is making me rethink the Boston Massacre, which in hindsight sounds more like 1/6 than a righteous revolutionary act.
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Eight soldiers guarding a government building were surrounded by 300-400 angry "patriots" hitting them with clubs, rocks, chunks of ice, oyster shells, lumps of coal; many in the crowd taunting the soldiers to fire, others warning them that if they do, the crowd will kill them;
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; the crowd close enough to hit the soldiers with clubs; one witness testifies Crispus Attucks actually grabbed a soldier's bayonet (which, true or not, means they were CLOSE).
A stick thrown from the back makes a soldier fall down + drop his gun; he retrieves it;...
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.@RadioFreeTom's written an interesting thread here, but I keep thinking back to this old discussion where he said that conservatism's main feature isn't standing for things, but standing against them:
@RadioFreeTom That's the classic Buckleyesque statement of conservatism that all '80s college students (including both Tom and I) learned: that a conservative is someone who "stands athwart history, yelling Stop."
I just read the Anglo-Saxon/America First Caucus statement of (so-called) principles, and it's clear that the writers used "Anglo-Saxon" only because "Aryan" already was taken. It's the Racist/Nativist Caucus.
Here are some thoughts about "our" "Anglo Saxon" roots: 1/
Immigrants and invaders. Germanic ones. Nothing "native" about them.
"Saxon" = "Germanic." "Anglo" = "the subset of Germanics who ran England for a while."
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And those foreigners arriving unwanted on British shores didn't respect the culture they found when they arrived: there was "hostility between incomers and natives... violence, destruction, massacre, and the flight of the Romano-British population."
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