coming from every state.

It makes me nervous how much they are talking about this. Is it such a good idea to send so many NG to one place, and announce it over and over again, when the militia and hate group cells are all over the country? Won't they adjust their plans?

I think they will reassess the situation, adapt to the circumstances, and then strike the lower-risk targets available to them.

brought in law professor John Yoo (author of the "Torture Memo" ) for the specific purpose of attempting to craft Executive Orders that would be much more difficult to reverse, based on Yoo's interpretation of a SCOTUS ruling on the DACA issue.

Yoo basically advertised for the job, I think on Fox news. But I don't know which EOs he is responsible for, or what makes them so difficult to reverse.

This stuff fascinates me.

A couple of months ago a DUer posted an absolutely fascinating article about Q Anon written by (I think) a game developer who broke it down. He concluded that Q Anon self-conditions followers to look for and inevitably find connections between totally unrelated things, and he wrote how at a certain point the game is self-perpetuating because human beings find pleasure (dopamine release) in locating patterns in random coincidences and finding "connections" between two things that are unrelated in any way. People who do this also feel smarter than others, who are missing what is actually going on in the world. So the game is pleasurable, addicting and self-reinforcing.

In some ways, it was a frightening article, because the reader is left to conclude that it will be very hard to stop people from tumbling into deeper and deeper layers of self-delusion. But he really explained how this is possible and why certain people are so susceptible.

I wish I had kept better track of that article. It was truly ingenious.

Exactly. Many of Trump's followers are not inherently political. They are not loyal to the Republican party. So for people like Cruz, Hawley, Rubio,Ron Johnson or anybody else to bank on their support is really a throw of the dice.

The wild card might be Don Jr. or another Trump (Ivanka, Eric?).

I'm extremely dubious that Trump loyalty will extend even to his children. It sounds crazy, but I can see it going to a media figure like Alex Jones or Mark Levin before I could imagine it going to a politician.

is the possibility that the most hardcore MAGAts could break with Trump. There were a couple of fascinating stories right after the insurrection saying that on Parler and other far-right platforms, a lot of the people who went to the Capitol were furious at Trump for leading them into this action without giving them instructions of what to do when they got to the Capitol. Many also thought he really was going with them. They were under the impression there was a plan, but nobody told them what to do.

Some of the far, far right fanatics have grown disillusioned with Trump because he started off well but lost his way in their opinions. (Racists like Richard Spencer and his group, some in the Christian Nationalist movement. Early on, Steve Bannon said similar things, but apparently has come back into the fold.).

There was a key moment during the rise of the Nazis where the SA almost broke in half because Hitler was Chancellor but they thought he wasn't doing anything, wasn't moving forward quickly enough with the agenda. The Night of the Long Knives was in part a response to that fear of a rupture within the party.

These militant types are very independent, nihilistic, cocky and self confident and they may feel they have enough power to go out on their own, coalesce around a new leader. I don't think that deep down they believe in the concept of a "leader" or the idea they need a leader. Trump just came along at the right time and lent them legitimacy.

Trump's purpose may have been served. He's spent, he's exhausted, and possibly useless.

If there are any signs of that happening, I believe Republican politicians would break from Trump in a second. They are already fretting about this recent poll showing Republican support for Trump has dropped about a third in the last few days.

this pandemic because people were isolated (in some cases lost their jobs) and cut off from their normal social circles. There are people who like the feeling of belonging to something, being accepted into a group, feeling that they have secret knowledge of how the world works that nobody else has.

Q Anon conditions people to find connections between unrelated things, and it's a game that is self-perpetuating because there's no end to how the human imagination can connect unrelated elements or coincidences. At one point Q Anon believers thought that suicide bomb in Nashville was a missile strike against Dominion voting machines!

terminated the F.B.I.'s counterintelligence investigation into Donald Trump.

He really was a terrible Deputy A.G. whose tenure was so short that it's easy to forget what a terrible job he did.

Some people remember the story about Rod Rosenstein "panicking" after Comey's firing and offering to wear a wire into a meeting with Trump in order to possibly remove Trump from office under the 25th Amendment, and think he might have been a decent person who became overwhelmed by events. But the bulk of the evidence is that he was a rather chaotic personality who in the end decided to mostly help out Trump.

Peter Strzok writes in his book Compromised that he believes it was Rosenstein who leaked his and Lisa Page's private emails (either to Republican politicians or directly to the media).

One of the mysteries of the last four years has been, "What happened to the F.B.I.'s counterintelligence investigation into Trump? Is it still open?" Some passages in Peter Strzok's book seemed to leave oven the possibility it had never been closed. But Comey believes it was closed by Rosenstein.

I'm disappointed about that, but relieved to finally have an answer.

But I love FM on a song by song basis. If you had said "Fleetwood Mac's Greatest Hits" I would have to admit it would be near the very top, because each album has a masterpiece.

Random:

Siamese Dream - Smashing Pumpkins
Everything by Nirvana
Everything by Elvis Costello
Everything by the Jesus and Mary Chain
Hole - Ask for It
Hole - Celebrity Skin
Some albums by Bob Dylan
Belly's first and second albums
The Breeders - Last Splash
Sonic Youth - Dirty
Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
Smashing Pumpkins - Gish
the last 4 albums by pre-breakup Pink Floyd
The late albums by The Beatles
At least three or four albums by Elton John
Cyndi Lauper's first and second albums
The Pretenders first two albums

But yes RUMOURS is a stupendous album. Some Fleetwood Mac purests have come to believe Tusk is their masterpiece. (I don't have an opinion on that).

On January 21st, the failure of this prophecy to come true will be "part of the plan all along" and the game will be reset and reconfigured with new predictions that also won't come true, in an infinite loop of infinite stupidity.