
MercyOtis
2.2K posts

MercyOtis
@MercyOtisW
Transcendentalist no-nonsense woman who loves to laugh and thinks everyone needs more hugs. E pluribus unum.
Texas, USA เข้าร่วม Temmuz 2022
1.4K กำลังติดตาม409 ผู้ติดตาม
ทวีตที่ปักหมุด


@RealDonKeith @WadeMiller It is not America First to give money to foreign governments.
English

🚨Wow! Major Trump-Vance policy shift just dropped:
Foreign aid will now go straight to national governments — no more routing billions through NGOs.
This cuts out the middlemen who’ve turned taxpayer dollars into their own bloated business model.
Effect on NGOs: Many will see their funding evaporate overnight. Expect mass layoffs, shrinking budgets, and some outfits shutting down entirely.
The entire aid-industrial complex just took a body blow — no more endless grift.
America First is finally hitting the middlemen where it hurts.
English
MercyOtis รีทวีตแล้ว
MercyOtis รีทวีตแล้ว

GOOD NEWS: The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office states that the three people who assaulted me yesterday, will be CHARGED.
Here’s the footage of Paige Ostroushko, one of the three, being arrested after attacking me.
She immediately runs from the police and pretends to act shocked as to why she’s being detained.
Thank you to @BreannaMorello for being so on top of this and thank you to the Sheriff's department who ended up having to drive me to safety yesterday due to the violence of the mob.
Am looking forward to seeing these charges all the way through.
English
MercyOtis รีทวีตแล้ว
MercyOtis รีทวีตแล้ว

@martyintexas1 My loyalty is to the Constitution and to the people I represent, not to a President nor to a Party. That’s how our Founders expected our Republic to work.
English
MercyOtis รีทวีตแล้ว

𝐍𝐎, 𝐈𝐓'𝐒 𝐍𝐎𝐓 𝐀𝐈. 𝐈𝐓'𝐒 𝐂𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐄𝐃 𝐏𝐔𝐍𝐂𝐓𝐔𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍.
I see it constantly now. Someone reads a post or an article and spots an em dash — that long horizontal line — and immediately declares it was written by AI. 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭'𝐬 𝐚𝐧 𝐞𝐦 𝐝𝐚𝐬𝐡, 𝐝𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐭𝐆𝐏𝐓. You know who else uses em dashes? People who actually learned how English punctuation works.
I don't normally step on this particular soapbox — and I commit authorial malpractice by never trying to sell you my books — but I've authored over 30 of them. Many have been international bestsellers. Well over 𝟏,𝟎𝟎𝟎,𝟎𝟎𝟎 𝐜𝐨𝐩𝐢𝐞𝐬 in print, translated into 7+ languages, sold around the world. I am, amongst many other things, an actual author. So let me give you a quick education your grammar teachers apparently skipped.
The em dash — this thing right here — is one of the most versatile punctuation marks in the English language. It's called an "em dash" because in traditional typesetting, it was the width of the capital letter M in whatever typeface you were using. It serves three primary functions. First, it sets off a parenthetical statement within a sentence — like this one — when you want more emphasis than commas provide but less formality than parentheses. Second, it signals an abrupt break in thought or a dramatic pivot. Third, it introduces an explanation or amplification of what came before it. Writers have been using it for centuries. Emily Dickinson used em dashes so obsessively her manuscripts look like they were attacked by a horizontal line. Mark Twain used them constantly in dialogue. So did F. Scott Fitzgerald. None of them had access to ChatGPT.
Now for a bit of trivia most people never learn. There's also an 𝐞𝐧 𝐝𝐚𝐬𝐡 — slightly shorter, the width of the letter N. The en dash has a narrower purpose: it connects ranges. Pages 12–44. The years 1941–1945. The New York–London flight. It's the dash between two things that are connected but distinct. Most people have never heard of it, and most fonts render it just barely shorter than an em dash, which is why almost nobody notices the difference.
Both have been part of formal typography since the invention of movable type in the 15th century. Gutenberg's typesetters used varying dash lengths to organize text. By the 18th century, printers had standardized the em and en dash as distinct glyphs with distinct grammatical functions. This isn't some modern AI invention — it's older than the United States.
And if you use Microsoft Word, they're trivially easy to type. An en dash is Ctrl + Minus on the numeric keypad. An em dash is Ctrl + Alt + Minus on the numeric keypad. Word also auto-converts two hyphens (--) into an em dash if you have autocorrect enabled. That's why you see me use them in my books and in my posts — because I know they exist and I know the keyboard shortcut.
The reason AI chatbots use em dashes frequently is because they were trained on well-written text — books, journalism, academic papers — written by people who knew the rules. The AI learned proper punctuation from proper writers. That doesn't make proper punctuation a sign of AI. It makes it a sign of 𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐲.
For the record, the only things I use AI for are conjuring up a quick graphic — like the image on this post — or as a shortcut for preliminary research. Think of it as a Google accelerator. The writing? That's all me. It has been for 30+ books and countless social media posts such as this one.
If you've reached the end of this post, you now know more about dashes than most people who graduated with an English degree. And the next time you see an em dash and your first instinct is to scream "AI" — maybe consider that what you're actually looking at is someone who paid attention in class. Or someone whose grammar teachers didn't fail them quite as badly as yours failed you.
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐦 𝐝𝐚𝐬𝐡 𝐢𝐬 𝟓𝟎𝟎 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐨𝐥𝐝. 𝐒𝐭𝐨𝐩 𝐛𝐥𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐭 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐨𝐭𝐬.

English
MercyOtis รีทวีตแล้ว
MercyOtis รีทวีตแล้ว

Why should anyone be forced to pay property taxes. The state doesn’t buy the house you did. You bought the home, improved it, put a mortgage on it and paid for it. The state collects sales taxes & business taxes to fund services.
Imagine the 70 year old who owns a home today valued at $2M - they bought 30 years ago for $50,000, maintained the house for 30 years and finally paid the house off - Why should they or their heirs pay any tax much less on the increased value?
They will say, “who’s going to support the roads, police, fire department and schools? Sales tax & local businesses can support those things.
For those who support property taxes understand you open the door for the state to collect taxes on ALL property; boats, cars, clothes, art, bicycles, gym equipment, grills, tools, silverware, jet skis, stocks, retirement accounts - everything.
27 states reassess annually, and the rest, do so every 3 years OR lie California, any time you improve the property! It’s brutal and it’s endless!
If you support property taxes on personal property you are either;
a) a communist
b) confused
c) academic
d) free loader
End Property Taxes!
English

I now have MS. Never had a flu shot, never had the flu. Got the jab on the delta round to be able to be around my niece, then got COVID later that year then started getting MS symptoms two weeks later. I noticed changes in my balance, regular pilates practicer at the time, between the jab and getting sick. Still not convinced I would have gotten COVID without the jab. Not looking for conpensation, but these monsters, the creators of the virus and the shots, must be held to account.
English

@JoeyMannarino @elonmusk She can sue if she went to the doctor with the injury and the doctor didn’t report it to VAERS.
English

The vaccine dosage was obviously too high and done too many times.
I had the original Wuhan virus before there was any vaccine and it was much like any other cold/flu. Bad, but not terrible.
But my second vaccine shot almost sent me to the hospital. Felt like I was dying.
PeterSweden@PeterSweden7
This should be headline news EVERYWHERE. A Pfizer insider who was former head of toxicology in Europe has just come out and said something that many "conspiracy theorists" suspected. He estimates that 20 000 to 60 000 people in Germany have died from the c*vid vaccine. This was said at a parliamentary enquiry commission in Germany. So why isn't this massive news being reported everywhere? Is the mainstream media that has recieved millions in funding from Bill Gates deliberately covering this up... 🤔
English
MercyOtis รีทวีตแล้ว

@RFKJr_Official why is this allowed? Why are chemtrails still allowed? Why are we injecting farm animals with mRNA? Why are there still artificial dyes in foods? Why? If your struggle is against big pharma and food corps and evil scientists, why not be up front with the American people and tell us your hands are tied? YOU were the one person we truly hoped would not deceive us.
English
MercyOtis รีทวีตแล้ว
MercyOtis รีทวีตแล้ว

Sad reality.
If you aren't an 80's or 90's kid, you will never know what the real America was like.
Kids played outside.
We weren't glued to our phones because we didn't have one.
We ate what Momma made or we didn't eat.
We didn't have social media.
Summers lasted forever and our biggest fear was Labor Day.
Life was simpler.
Life was good.
Anything was possible.
I weep for our youth.
English
MercyOtis รีทวีตแล้ว
MercyOtis รีทวีตแล้ว
MercyOtis รีทวีตแล้ว
MercyOtis รีทวีตแล้ว

I was thirty-something years old when Iranian students dragged me into a room and told me I wasn't going anywhere. Four hundred and forty-four days later, I walked out. I've spent the decades since trying to make sense of what happened — and what keeps happening — between our two countries.
So don't talk to me about Iran like it's an abstraction. I lived inside that confrontation. I felt it.
Which is why I'm not ready to write off this ceasefire, even though everything about it is maddening.
Negotiations in Pakistan may produce nothing. The talks could collapse before they get started. I've seen American diplomacy with Iran fail more times than I can count, and usually for the same reasons — too much pride, too little patience, and Israel holding a match in the corner of the room.
But here's what I know in my bones: another war won't break Iran. We just tried. It didn't work. Iran doesn't break — it absorbs, it adapts, and it waits. I watched that stubbornness up close for 444 days.
What bothers me most isn't that Iran is winning this moment — it's that we handed it to them. Tehran's framework is running these negotiations. Iran still controls the Strait of Hormuz. Still collecting tolls. Trump looked at their proposal and called it workable. I never thought I'd see the day, but here we are.
Iran wants everything on the table — sanctions, enrichment rights, American troops out, and a deal that covers what's happening in Lebanon and Gaza too. That's a lot to swallow. And Israel, which wasn't invited to this conversation, is already making clear it has no intention of being constrained by it.
That's the part that worries me the most. Because if Israel keeps bombing and Washington can't or won't stop it, none of this holds.
And yet — and I say this as someone who has every reason to distrust Tehran — I don't think we go back to all-out war. Not because anyone has suddenly gotten wise, but because the math doesn't work. A second round ends the same way. Iran still controls the Strait. The global economy still flinches when Tehran flexes.
What we're heading toward isn't peace. It's something smaller and more precarious — two countries silently agreeing not to destroy each other today, with no paperwork and no guarantees.
I know what it's like to survive on something that fragile. For 444 days, that's all I had.
English


@justinamash They will have great war fighting abilities against US Citizens too. That's the REALLY scary part.
English










