POV: Midoriya is confronted about being a villain and goes on defense.

~~~

They’re in Izuku’s hideout. It’s just his; he doesn’t want it to have any connections with the League so he can keep them safe. They were his family, after all.

Izuku’s cornered, his heart surprisingly calm, with Kacchan and Shouto having herded him into the hallway’s corner.

he can’t help but laugh.

What faulty thinking on their part.

He’s always had the upper hand. Always a hidden ace up his sleeve, that which only he knew of. He ruled over them, and probably always will. They were smart: but were they intelligent? Were they genius? Surely not. And Izuku was right.

The collar of his shirt brushed against his neck enough to snap him out of his thoughts. Kacchan was trying to interrogate him on why he became a villain.

Kamala Harris is not eligible to be VP or POTUS under Article II & the 12th Amendment of the Constitution.

The Pandemic has got me thinking. On TV, people of the future are always very comfortable with data. They collect it. They analyze it. They adjust their strategies in real time. Not in days or hours or minutes but often literally in SECONDS.🧵👇

They run simulations of different outcomes. The simulations aren't always right but they seem to put them in the ballpark of what's reasonable. People take the simulations and data seriously. They factor them into their planning.

Even when the future government is evil, it's still smart. Even when the future government is rigid and uncreative in how it responds to stuff, it's responses are still logically related to the assumptions it has made, the data it has collected and the analyses it has performed.

Unfortunately, our civilization is NOT THAT. We collect data but usually haphazardly and in ways that make it hard to draw any conclusions. It often takes a long time for us to make sense of data. Politicians often throw out the numbers completely.

We don't seem to care what the probability of various outcomes are. We don't seem to use probabilities when making decisions. Perhaps, you're thinking about the election predictions and about how they were close but not quite right.

So much cultural criticism boils down to chewing on the strange result of popular genre chum--guilty pleasure stuff--being taken more seriously than it was really designed for or capable of sustaining.

Im thinking about the furors around American Dirt, Bridgerton, and WW84, which, in different ways, are all objects meant to be consumed for pleasure without thinking too much about why and how. And then you think about them and you're like "wow, this sucks."

Scads of thrillers as bad or worse than American Dirt are published constantly, and no one but their readers notices, but THIS one got lots of "serious" attention, so it was held to real literary standards and eviscerated.

Bridgerton is an adaptation of romance novels--not serious alt-history--but when claims for the progressive work it was doing were made, lots of folks were like "wow, this seems pretty silly and kinda careless?"

And the conversation around WW84 is fascinating because of the strange way "comic book movie" is simultaneously "stupid goofy fun, not supposed to make sense" and "this is an allegory for America under Trump" (doubly vexed by the "saving cinema!" role WW84 was slotted into)

An important part of growing as a researcher is developing research taste. But it can be hard to explicitly work on. So I wanted to share some concrete exercises for developing research taste.

(Take my advice with a grain of salt! Note version: https://t.co/2BhyxOKy3q )

Exercise 1: Write down a list of research ideas. Have a mentor you respect rate each idea 1-10. Discuss ideas where you disagree with them after reflection.

It often takes several months of work to truly test an idea. Asking a mentor is a cheap proxy.

Exercise 2: Pay attention when other people try ideas you’ve had. How did the results compare with your expectations?

If you’re investing in brainstorming, you’ll have tens or hundreds of research ideas for each one you try. It can be emotionally uncomfortable when someone publishes an idea you had, but it’s an opportunity to get precious feedback for free.

Exercise 3: Interview researchers around you on their taste. Why do they work on the problems they do? How do they pick problems? What’s their “big picture” of research?

Bonus: If you have a great interview, you might consider writing it up with their permission.

CW Nightmare

In the torn out belly of an old, sprawling hotel, I found myself investigating strange happenings in the fledgling restaurant that sprouted in the blasted ruin.

Swarthy men gutted the collapse, using every nail & timber to build the eatery and it's long tables.
1🧵

I swear to have seen a spider, large as a dinner plate, with an ape-like face and twitching human fingers for legs, ground down to bloody points. But only a flash witnessed in a broken pane of glass. The bike thing was some illusion. A twisting of light and color, nothing more.

It was then , in the darkening hours of the day, that six young travelers entered, seating themselves at the single large feast table. Colorful, happy, bawdy souls in all, they seemed unaffected by the haze of terror that lingered among the workmen.
3🧵

I found no sign of mold or damp, gas or chemical, any phenomenon to explain the various sightings.
The matron, dutiful and mild in manner, brought the travelers beer, soft pretzels, and honey butter - leaving them to chitter and indulge.
4 🧵

The workmen, in the growing dark, left as quickly as a flock of larks, in one writing mass at the foreman's whistle. Unashamed in their obvious terror. Each man nodded to me, the stranger, in quiet gratitude and sorrowful fancy, as I dared to remain after dark.
5 🧵

IMHO, this article — https://t.co/wLiWDOZrvm — is an important corrective to fatalism about the new strain. As in, "welp, there are probably already at least a handful of cases of the new strain already here, so no matter what we do now, it's gonna spread." Not necessarily so.

"10 to 20 percent of infected people may be responsible for...80 to 90 percent of transmission."

"An early run of bad [or good!] luck...can produce dramatically different outcomes."

New Zealand had 277 separate introductions; only 19% of them led to more than 1 additional case.

That's all referring to the original COVID strain, but I haven't read anything suggesting that the same pattern doesn't apply to the new variant. Not sure if we know yet, but it's at least possible a lot of people don't spread it (while the few that do, spread it *A LOT* a lot).

Here's what we know, or think we know:

* The new variant is here, with probably at least a handful of undetected cases.

* The new variant is so wildly contagious that, once it gains a foothold, cases WILL spike.

* Cases stopped rising steeply around Nov. 10 (by onset day).

It seems like 1 of 2 things is true:

1) New variant arrived in October or earlier, and helped cause our November spike. We then reined it in, without even realizing it was here.

2) New-variant community spread is low-level thus far, at least thru ~Xmas. No superspreaders yet.

As we celebrate the end of this difficult year and welcome 2021, I’d like to take an opportunity to review the past year in our 35th Ward. Thread🧵👇🏽

We started this year by passing our 606 demolition moratorium, which has helped preserve our built environment, promote environmentally sustainable building practices, and protect affordable two- and three-flat apartment buildings near the 606 trail.

In January, we also amended Chicago’s sanctuary city ordinance to require our police department to report any requests they receive from ICE. This was a major step forward for accountability, transparency, and immigrant protections.

In February, we continued our work to address displacement and win housing justice for all Chicagoans by advocating for Just Cause for Eviction legislation.

We also continued to advocate to close the loopholes in our sanctuary city ordinance.

As Mark Twain once said, "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." Here's a thread that looks at Premier Kenney's claim that the international border testing pilot program of air travellers has been a "success." #ableg

At his Jan. 1 presser, Kenney noted the the pilot program had a test positivity rate of 1.48% compared to an overall positivity rate from testing done in the province of about 7%. See video link at approximately 3:15:

Indeed, Kenney's numbers for the pilot project are accurate. Of the 18,021 travellers who had participated as of December 17, 1.48% had tested positive after arriving in

But was it appropriate to compare the results among travellers who were presumably screened before boarding and found asymptomatic to those from recent testing results among Albertans who are overwhelming if not entirely symptomatic or have had a known contact with the disease?

Perhaps, it would have been better if Kenney had compared those results to those done among similarly asymptomatic Albertans. As @CBCFletch noted in an October 23 tweet, 659,000 tests among people with no symptoms found a positivity rate of just 0.11%....

Too popular admin - good or bad?
The hype industry is a field in which even two admins, sometimes, can hardly turn around. Most likely they won't. Projects that are launched every day are most often similar to each other.

Only a few projects work stably and efficiently thanks to admins who know what to do. Once having gained popularity, the admin must continue to keep the brand. But whether this is true, let's figure it out.

.@claudiahammond introduces the panel discussion on elitism in occupational psychology with @NancyDoylePsych @TomCalvard @PavtweetKhurana and Ben Williams, former Chair of @ABPsychologists

Ben starts by taking a poll on the topic, do we feel the profession is elitist? 22% say yes, 13% say not at all. #DOPconf

Ben says if success comes to the "best" in a profession, how accessible is it? Or do factors such as network bring you to the elite? Challenging to level the playing field. #DOPconf

Turning to @PavtweetKhurana, who takes issue with "best". Who defines it, standards mapped against what? Does school define access? We can have an elite without elitism, it is exclusion that is problematic. #DOPconf

And now @NancyDoylePsych who talks about lack of disability, racial and other areas of representation in Occupational Psychology. #DOPconf

So here's the problem. Most (but admittedly not all) of the R reps & sens are signing up for this charade *because they know it will fail*. Their calculus is this gives them a media / primary advantage for doing it, but can safely discount the logical conclusion of their argument

That works for them because there's basically no personal cost to doing it. And in the US system as it is, not at all clear to me that externally-imposed consequences would ever be remotely on the table. Not criminal; no personal consequences; no political costs. So an easy win.

The problem is that this strategy is now the new normal. Next time the political cost of engaging in this strategy will be *far* lower.

That's fine (but obnoxious) so long as it stays in the realm of symbolic political bullshittery.

But one day it won't be. Maybe that'll be in 2025, maybe 2029, maybe later. But eventually this strategy will coincide with majorities in Congress where the strategy isn't doomed

And on that day, America will break in a way that won't resolve without extreme violence. America *will not survive* the direct blow of a democratic election for the highest office being explicitly overruled by the other party.

Hey, Happy New Year's Eve, I want to talk about the federal workforce 1/

Let's say in theory that a prominent retired military leader recently suggested that you could "pink slip 50% of the [defense civilian] workforce = 4x gain in productivity."

This is in no way unique, and is totally acceptable political rhetoric by public leaders.

Bashing the federal workforce as lazy, slow, pointless, non-responsive, intransigent, or even subversive is common, even successful, political commentary on a bipartisan basis.

There are many interesting things about this to me, but I'll start with an aside: do you imagine that a congressman could remark, to applause, that we should remove half the soldiers in the Army in order to experience a massive increase in military readiness? Probably not.

But back to your basic bureaucrat. I'm fascinated by understanding the origin of America's derision for the average federal worker. Because to start, it doesn't match with federal worker's view of themselves.

A mini history re: AZ Senate Seat Politics:
McCain was an AZ Senator for 31 yrs over 5 terms.
In 2015 he was primary challenged by Dr. Kelli Ward, an AZ State Senator and tea party fav.
In a surprisingly brutal primary, where McCain poured HUGE 💰 into, he won. (Did he?🤔)

Organizations Protecting Former FPI Members and Public Provocateurs Are Next In Line.

On December 30, 2020, the good people of Indonesia felt relieved, because they received the gift of being free from a bothersome gripping fear.

The activities of the Defenders of Islam Front (FPI) were banned by the government, because they were growing increasingly far from the life of our Pancasila-based society which is tolerant of differences.

The public can now hope to live more peaceful life, in the democratic environment which has been growing since the reformation period began in 1998.

There will be no more disruptions of people who are worshipping or holding weddings, no banning of saluting the national flag, no more raids of cafes, mini-markets, drugstores, eateries, shopping malls and other activities where that group had taken the law into their own hands.

Organized criminal activity hiding behind a religious front has been curtailed by the government in order to uphold the law, as well as for the benefit of social discipline.

You know how unwilling men are to accept that their attraction to women is socialized to desire and prefer women closer to a child’s age/ aesthetic? They will deny it until they die even when you point out how that most of what they find attractive represents “youth” 🙂🙂🙃🙃

First: Skin

No wrinkles or blemished skin, even if their skin looks like a Google satellite map

Ask a man over 30 if he finds wrinkles in a woman’s face sexually desirable, see what he says. He should. He likely cant. He doesn’t know how. He’s never learned to see them that way

Second: Fitness

They seek evidence of “health” bc that is associated with youth. We know that as we age, our bodies/ health deteriorates. Women who “work out” are seen as healthier and more youthful, not old and decrepit. However, this doesn’t apply to fat women who exercise

Third: Body Count/Marital status

The assumption is that the older a woman is the more men have been inside of her and if she’s divorced, a man used to own her pussy. This isn’t something pushed as attractive. Older men seeking younger women is connected to this

body count matters for various reasons but the one we don’t talk enough about is sexual insecurity and the fear of not measuring up to past lovers. The more there are, the greater the risk of failure. Younger women are more attractive bc they minimize this risk of embarrassment