1/ Have you ever heard the expression of, "Wolf in Sheep's clothing", or when someone mentions a, "False Prophet"? All referring to someone being fake.

I like to use those pointing out politicians, also saying they have a "Straw Tail".

@Justfirenews Not quite. I’m arguing that they did the best that they legally could when constrained by bad policy. These are hard ethical calls. Do you continue working for an org that you think is heading in the wrong direction, or do you try to do your best from inside?

I think about this a lot. For instance, my university brought back uni students for in-person learning last fall w no surveillance testing or modified housing. I thought that was a reckless decision. But I didn’t quit my job...

Partially bc the balance of the work my colleagues were doing locally, nationally, & globally was so important and I could support that in a small way. Also income and longterm professional goals that I think will help public health beyond covid.

I think my position is justified. I think the work of many of my applied public health colleagues has been heroic and harm-reducing.

But I recognize that there are always ethical minefields. For instance, finders. My research is mostly supported by the federal government. I think it’s ethical to use that money for my work. But what about Department of Defense? They also...

I took a drive down the 22 yesterday to check out a #monolith that popped up in the Crowsnest Pass area! Went to investigate, left realizing the @UCPCaucus is likely involved, in a bad way, as usual

More in thread 🔽

#monolithmystery
#FiretheUCP #ableg #WaterNotCoal #Alberta

If you haven't driven down the 22, it is gorgeous - rolling foothills, streams cutting through picturesque ranch land, and a rugged mountain landscape background. Near Maycroft provincial park, right near the Crowsnest pass is where this thing stands, approx. 12 feet tall.

It sounds like the Tin Man from Oz when you knock on it and looks to be made of shiny sheet metal. Seems to be mounted firmly into the ground, with no visible supports

Its similar to others I've seen, only in pictures, but has an additional feature: what appears to be an extra component that seems to indicate the monolith is 'pointing' to a larger swath of area, rather than strictly in the direction of the acute triangle shaped object's 'point'

If that is the case, it looks to point towards a chunk of the eastern slopes of Southern Alberta. A chunk that happens to be where the proposed Grassy Mountain Coal mine would be located.

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

@RachaelHorning I see why they started it, but I worry it could cause a lot more harm then good.

There are instances where someone might get a script for a new pt from a new provider and have no background on either of them. That’s typically what it looks like with diversion

But I think the frequency of diversion like that where a doc is knowingly overprescribing for illicit reasons is less common than

I think this is going back towards having pharmacists act as the police of a script without the tools necessary to do that

We know how to ensure that a script is appropriate and right for that patient (regardless of med). But community pharmacists aren’t given adequate access to medical records to truly do the assessments they were trained to do

So the idea that pharmacists need to be a gatekeeper to opioids when they don’t have the proper access to records that would allow them to actually identify clear issues of diversion easily and easily recognize others as appropriate isn’t there

I just hate the “pharmacists are gatekeepers” idea

We are not, or at least not supposed to be. The idea that we are somehow to know that a patient is in pain or not (something subjective that we can’t see) and then if we give an Rx that wasn’t appropriate we can lose our license

The client was always a scary landscape to me. Not necessarily because of the many inconsistencies of the browsers. Not because of the idiosyncratic and plain silly parts of javascript, the chosen language of the client. Not even…

I don't trust the client. This, I always thought, is a good thing. A back-end developer should not trust the client. Every input should be validated and mistrusted, all possible interactions with that less (and less-than)…

I think some of the inherent conflict, not enmity - never that obvious, between front-end and back-end stems from such mistrust. How can we not mistrust them? To us they are a load of hippies using toy languages and eldricht incantations to work around…

But, something has changed. The browser-wars have quieted down somewhat. Javascript performance has begun to approach a qualitatively acceptable domain. HTML has matured and with FlexBox and Grid even CSS is starting to make some sense (if I squint at it).

And now we have Web Assembly. I'm not going to poke into that with my time and effort, I lost enough nights to assembly back at university. After that i took a look at Java and later C#, and decided that life is far too short to spend it managing…

I just wish I knew what an online harm actually was

Funny to see the online harms bill positioned as a blow against big tech when it will give them the power to make sweeping decisions on enforcement while simultaneously making it much harder for smaller competitors

Rule of politics: displays of strength are often signs of weakness. Online harms delegates many aspects of justice to tech companies. It's effectively an admission that the state can't do the work itself

This might be only practical way to proceed, given the scale of the challenge. But as the tech companies are going to be writing their own rules, then enforcing them, it embeds the existing way of doing things to an astonishing degree

The duty of care idea comes from health and safety, but I think the best analogy is financial market regulation pre-2008. It's trying to answer the question: how do we protect people* without interrupting the existing way of working?

*Defined as: keeping stories out of the news

The republican speeches today are familiar to any abuse survivor.

"I hate that you made me hit you. I've never hit anyone before, so that's how awful you've been to me to make me do that. And the way you keep pushing this, it feels like you're trying to make me go there again."

A couple of years ago I promised myself that one day I'll be strong enough to be able to talk about my mental health openly. I've made this my goal. I think this is the day, so here's how I ended up diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 37 - a thread...

In 2017 I reached my rock-bottom. I got back home from Philippines, where I failed to deliver my conference talk due to being a mental train-wreck (for which I'm terribly sorry!). I started having suicidal idealizations and I realized it's time to get help.

It's not that I wanted to end myself, but I would see myself dying in all sorts of ways every-single-day. These are called intrusive thoughts and the ones I had were probably one of the worst ones you can experience.

I started therapy in May 2017 and it was surprisingly easy for me to...just start talking. It was a relief that I could just talk to somebody because I pretty much isolated myself from everybody.

Unfortunately, my therapist didn't want to be specific about my problems and everything was just...too generalized? I don't know how to describe this. I wanted to hear concrete facts eventually, like "you're dealing with X and you should do Y to improve".

I was asked yesterday on a coaching call how I’m always positive :)

This has been an intentional choice & something I’ve worked hard at for years now!

🙏You can’t be grateful & grumpy at the same time!!

🔥I curate my entire life around positivity.

Strategies I use: 🧵
👇👇

❌I never watch sad movies or horror movies.
If I’m watching movie it’s going to inspire or educate me.

❌I never listen to sad music.
All praise music that floods my soul.
I dance & sing often too :)

❌I don’t follow toxic people.
Only Champs that inspire me on my timeline!💪

❌I don’t follow politics or the news at all.
My wife said on Jan 25th something about President Biden & I had no clue he had been inaugurated 🤷
He’s President now?!

Maybe that’s bad,
but I feel I affect the most change in the world from within myself, my home & my community.

❌I don’t allow toxic or negative people on social media or real life.
I block frequently if they are toxic online.

In real life it’s harder, but necessary.
We recently cut out 2 family members that were critical & negative about our mission to foster.
We don’t need that!!✌️

I cut out a long time friend of 16 years that wouldn’t stop talking about politics & Cvoid nonstop.

I asked him to stop & offered to talk other topics but when he persisted & I felt my anxiety rise every time he text,
I decided my peace was more important during this season.

Today the Commons will debate regulations that will essentially tip those who have not yet acquired their EUSS status into the Hostile Environment from 1 July 21. Some thoughts: /1

The regs. are legion. Covering nearly every aspect of the Hostile Environment. These regs have been made using Henry VIII powers. They perfectly illustrate the problem with this power. A single debate on all clauses with no opportunity to amend is not good democracy. /2

The consequences are equally legion. Those who fail to get status will face problems with work, housing, benefits and risk of removal/criminalisation. Yes people with reasonable excuses can apply late to EUSS, but by then the damage may well be done. /3

What of those who apply late? Their status of not being able to work, rent etc. Continues until a decision is made. Increased waiting times and additional hurdles will undoubtedly lead to people delayed in this misery for some time. /4

Doesn’t seem right does it? The Withdrawal Agreement says that those with pending applications have rights until a decision is made (18(3)) so yes it is problematic in ways beyond what is right and just. /5

I know my opinion doesn’t count for much. I’m a faceless name on Twitter (for valid reasons I won’t dilute this message with). However I have been massively affected by what has taken place over the last few days in Scotland and I wanted to air my feelings around this. 1/

We are being told that sex and gender are interchangeable by many and that changing the wording within the amazing Forensic Medical Services Bill makes no difference to the services survivors receive.

We are told this as though we haven’t been privy to the raging debate 2/

around it for the last few years. In years past people often replaced sex with gender to appease sensibilities around sex. This was an accepted practice because it caused no real concerns or issues in regard to the actual protected characteristic of sex. 3/

However, in more recent times gender is no longer used in the same way. Gender is not defined in law but it is being conflated with sex to the extent that people are suggesting that they mean the same thing. They do not and the law agrees that they don’t. 4/

There appears to have been policy capture at the highest levels, within our government, LA’s, NHS and other orgs. These places have made preemptive assumptions on advice from lobby groups that they proudly display champion badges for and pay thousands of pounds to each year. 5/

So, I was asked to write down my thoughts on the coup for a major newspaper earlier this week.

I told them no, and let me tell you why.

In 2016, after the election I wrote an op-ed on white nationalism and the alt-right for a major newspaper and appeared on MSNBC.

I was hyped to have the opportunity to share my expertise with a wider audience.

I wasn't prepared for what came next.

The op-ed was shared pretty widely. It is probably as close as I've come to a viral piece.

I wrote for a prestigious pub, and people were reading about my scholarly research.

Cool, right?

Not quite.

The day the op-ed was published I was at an amusement park with my partner, two kids, nephew and niece, one of my sisters and her partner.

While waiting on the kids to get off a ride, I started getting messages from folks asking if I was okay.

I was confused. Why wouldn't I be okay?

Well, then, folks were like, "Uh, there are some pretty nasty threats being lobbed at you on Twitter."

Just finished listening to Matt Stoller's Goliath, a political and intellectual history of the anti-monopoly movement over the last ~100 years. It gave me a better understanding of the intellectual history of 20th Century anti-monopoly thinking.

In particular, Stoller draws a distinction I hadn't thought very much about previously: between liberals who favor leaving monopolies in place and regulating them strictly vs. those who oppose bigness as such.

As Stoller tells it, New Dealers erected a complicated legal system designed to tilt the playing field in favor of small companies.

For example, there were laws against discounting to prevent big retailers from using their market power to win lower prices from suppliers and undercutting small retailers. A law capped deposit interest rates to prevent big banks from outbidding small banks for deposits.

Stoller situates Teddy Roosevelt, JK Galbraith, and Ralph Nader in the camp of liberals who (mostly) favored regulating monopolies instead of breaking them up. Also Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and most modern Democratic leaders.

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.