BC SOCIETY
Saved by @Alex1Powell

šŸ§µ Ajaxā€™s own MPP decided to take a non-essential trip outside of the country while our town moved from Red to Lockdown.

I donā€™t even know where to start on this. Rules for me and not for thee? Financial privilege in action? Getting away from the ā€œplebsā€ in Ajax? #onpoli 1/x

 My family had plans to travel to Europe this summer, but we knew that it had to be postponed to a safer time. We thought of postponing the trip to now, but decided against it until after vaccinations happened and travel advisories are lifted. #onpoli 2/x
And, by the way @RodPhillips01, as someone eligible to vote in Ajax, let me direct you to this big, bold, red text on Global Affairs Canadaā€™s website. #onpoli 3/x
Yes, sometimes there may be an urgent need to leave the country (dying family member or other family emergency), but in a year where Ajacians, and indeed all Ontarians, have made so much sacrifice, this feels like a quintuple slap to the face. #onpoli 4/x
While individuals still go to high-risk, close-contact workplaces during ā€œlockdownā€ to keep our supply and food chains going, @RodPhillips01 decides to go on vacation. Sounds like another example from a country a few hundred kilometres away. #onpoli 5/x
So, Minister, on Christmas Eve, you and your comms team highlighted the sacrifices we all had to make to limit the spread of COVID-19 this holiday season.

Yet you decided to leave Canada for a non-essential vacation during a global pandemic. #onpoli 6/x
You were parachuted into Ajax as a corporate executive to run against a long-time small business owner in Ajax. You won the chance to represent all Ajacians in June 2018. It seems like youā€™ve also decided to leave Ajacians behind in a crisis. Thatā€™s not leadership. #onpoli 7/x
Not only that, heā€™s left Ontarians behind as well. Itā€™s been a long year for all of us, and the holiday season is a time for rest and reflection ā€” but that also means continuing to follow public health advice and local restrictions.

Not flying around the world. #onpoli 8/x
Furthermore, this isnā€™t just the MPP for Ajax. This is Ontarioā€™s Minister of Finance. For a government so concerned over balanced budgets, govā€™t spending, and efficiencies, having your finance minister go on an international trip during a pandemic is not a good look. #onpoli 9/x
Am I mad? Angry? Furious? Disappointed? Not surprised?

Yes, all of it.

Ajax needs to take note of what their MPP did at the peak of the second wave of a deadly pandemic.

Leaders set priorities. Leaders get things done. @RodPhillips01 is not a leader. #onpoli 10/10 šŸ§µ
The only trip Iā€™m taking right now is to Downtown Yikes City.

11/10 #onpoli https://t.co/ZAQ65eodTk
It keeps going. These dates donā€™t line up. Ajax deserves so, so, so much better.

12/10 #onpoli https://t.co/3HHMC7OUv2
.@RodPhillips01, can you or your team specify when the MPP visited these businesses? Was it before his vacation, during the mandatory quarantine period, or after his mandatory quarantine was completed? 13/10 #onpoli https://t.co/KhJojRbkXR

More from Society

Yaneer Bar-Yam
Yaneer Bar-Yam
@yaneerbaryam
I have been working on pandemic outbreaks for 15 years.

There is a misunderstanding of the difference between the response in much of the West, versus successful countries (including New Zealand and Australia).

Summarizing:

1.Reactive versus proactive and goal oriented.

1/-

2.Mitigation (slowing transmission) versus elimination (stopping transmission)

3.Gradually responding to increasing levels of infection by imposing greater restrictions which enables the infection rate to grow (red zone strategy), ā€¦

2/

versus starting with high restrictions to arrest transmission and relaxing restrictions only when the number of new cases is so low that contact tracing or localized short term action can stop community transmission (green zone strategy, including localized "fire fighting").

3/

4.Trying to keep economic activity and travel as open as possible but perpetuating the economic harm and imposing yoyo restrictions, versus making an initial sacrifice of economic activity and travel in order to benefit from the rapid restoration of normal economic activity.

4/

5.Focusing attention on few individuals resistant to social action because of shortsightedness or selfishness, versus recognizing the vast majority do the right thing if given clear guidance and support, which is what matters for success, as elimination is a robust strategy.

5/
SOCIETY
David Neiwert
David Neiwert
@DavidNeiwert
1) ā€œEliminationismā€ is a term you need not just to become familiar with, especially in todayā€™s American rush toward authoritarianism. This will be a long, illustrated thread explaining what it means, how it works, and why Donald Trump is now our Eliminationist in Chief.


Warning: Some images contain violence and are disturbing.

Also warning: This thread is ridiculously long. 75 tweets is insane. I apologize. But this stuff is important. I hope you find it compelling anyway. If not, I understand.

2) So, what exactly do we mean by ā€œeliminationismā€? Hereā€™s the academic definition:


3) It was largely coined by Holocaust scholar Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in his 1996 book Hitlerā€™s Willing Executioners, about the role ordinary Germans played in the Holocaust, which he described as fueled by ā€œeliminationist antisemitism.ā€


4) The book describes how in reality the largest numbers of Jews and other victims killed by Nazi directive were rounded up and gunned down or immolated en masse and buried in mass graves by ordinary Germans and non-Jewish residents of German-occupied territories.
SOCIETY
Advertisement
Caroline - Real Feminists XX \U0001f1ff\U0001f1e6
Caroline - Real Femini...
@radicalhag
I think the UK trans debate has teased out the sticking points for feminists, and it might be useful to lay them out given that the battle in the US, with a very different legislative environment, is just starting.

The GRA of 2004 gave trans people the ability to change legal sex via a GRC, but only if they had a psychiatric diagnosis of dysphoria and only after having lived in role for 2 years. The spousal veto gave spouses a chance to annul or obtain a favourable divorce.

While this ultimately created the loophole in women's rights that we've been fighting against in the last few years, it catered for a tiny number of dysphoric transsexuals and so did not have an enormous impact.

Discussions with trans friends and allies make it clear that, although surgery wasn't a requirement for a GRC, the diagnostic procedures were expected to trap and exclude males who did not want surgery, thereby preventing fetishists and opportunists from exploiting a GRC.

The Equality Act of 2010 defined the various protected characteristics, including both sex and 'gender reassignment', and provided for sex-based exemptions, under the auspices of which it is legal to exclude trans people from some single-sex spaces and services.
SOCIETY
Marshall Steinbaum \U0001f525
Marshall Steinbaum šŸ”„...
@Econ_Marshall
My wonderful @jainfamilyinst colleagues @laura_bmw & @Edi_Nilaj have released their new report "Student Debt and Young America," which pretty comprehensively demolishes many of the myths about who does and doesn't have student debt.
https://t.co/y02KFosRQ3
Highlights to follow
/1

@laura_bmw @Edi_Nilaj First of all, look at this one chart that tells you why the student debt crisis is happening: rising debt; stagnant income, and the gap has opened widest for minority borrowers.
/2


You look at that chart and you see the total failure of the human capital model to explain labor market outcomes, insofar as it even is a falsifiable social science hypothesis.
/3

Second, while it's true that total loan balances are increasing in income, student debt has increased most over time among the lowest-income groups. This tells you that student debt is becoming a marker of the disadvantaged rather than the advantaged.
/4


Third, balances on outstanding loans are rising over time, not declining. As I said in my last report, the student debt crisis is a crisis of non-repayment. This is why it's foolish to think the student debt is ever going to be paid back, whether it's cancelled now or not.
/5
SOCIETY
Ezra Klein
Ezra Klein
@ezraklein
This is a piece I've been thinking about for a long time. One of the most dominant policy ideas in Washington is that policy should, always and everywhere, move parents into paid labor. But what if that's wrong?

My reporting here convinced me that there's no large effect in either direction on labor force participation from child allowances. Canada has a bigger one than either Romney or Biden are considering, and more labor force participation among women.

But what if that wasn't true?

Forcing parents into low-wage, often exploitative, jobs by threatening them and their children with poverty may be counted as a success by some policymakers, but itā€™s a sign of a society that doesnā€™t value the most essential forms of labor.

The problem is in the very language we use. If I left my job as a New York Times columnist to care for my 2-year-old son, Iā€™d be described as leaving the labor force. But as much as I adore him, there is no doubt Iā€™d be working harder. I wouldn't have stopped working!

I tried to render conservative objections here fairly. I appreciate that @swinshi talked with me, and I'm sorry I couldn't include everything he said. I'll say I believe I used his strongest arguments, not more speculative ones, in the piece.
SOCIETY

You May Also Like

Murray \U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8
Murray šŸ‡ŗšŸ‡ø...
@Rothbard1776
NEW: @SidneyPowell1 radio interview w/ @toddeherman "The new report has a truckload of evidence of foreign interference in the election in it. That's what people seem to want to deny, even though the FBI & CISA ... issued an advisory and alert back on Oct. 30th & updated on

2/ Nov. 3rd, so for them to deny that now is absolutely absurd. Plus, we have an affidavit from an expert cyber-warfare [individual] who even shows the diagram of all the attacks coming in. We know that the VPN ... the Dominion people left those open and unencrypted on the night

3/ of the election, so that anybody could get in. We know that the packets of information went to Serbia [note: over 100 Dominion employees scrubbed there LinkedIn profiles of any affiliation with the company after the election, many of whom were in Serbia], Liechtenstein,

4/ Spain, Venezuela, Hunan, China & Hong Kong. There was traffic all over into our election system that is supposed to be self-contained, not accessible by the internet at all. We have witnesses who document that it was connected to the internet. We have a study out of

5/ [the Dominion voting system in Antrim] MI, they know that it was connected to the internet. They erased their audit files & their adjudication files, where they dumped over 68% of their ballots into a bin that they call "adjudication" [that would've been thousands + thousands
POLITICS , ELECTIONFRAUD
Nicolas Cole
Nicolas Cole
@Nicolascole77
šŸš¢ Atomic Essays Republishing Framework šŸš¢

1. Write Atomic Essay
2. Post image on Twitter
3. (Bonus) Copy/paste text as thread
4. Find relevant Question on Quora. Copy/paste Atomic Essay + image.
5. Copy/paste again on Medium.
6. Again on LinkedIn
7. Win

Guide below āœļøšŸš¢šŸ‘‡

Step 1: Write Atomic Essay

I really enjoy writing right inside the Figma template. It helps give me a good sense of exactly how much "real estate" I have/have left before my time us up and I'm out of space.

Once finished, I export the image and send to my phone on Slack.


Step 2: Post image on Twitter

Before I publish my Atomic Essay on Twitter, I use the Edit/Photo Markup function on the iPhone to highlight standout sentences.

These are usually power-phrases: things the reader skims and thinks, "That's interesting," prompting them to read more.


Step 3: For the Ship 30 for 30 challenge, I only turn Atomic Essays into threads if...

1. The piece is SUPER actionable and lends itself well to the thread format (lots of bullets, quick points, lists, etc.)

or...

2. I'm referencing research and want to link to the pieces.

Step 4: Find relevant Question on Quora. Copy/paste Atomic Essay + image.

Search on Quora around the topic you wrote about. Find a related Question. Copy/paste the whole Atomic Essay as your "answer" (& fix formatting). Then include image so it appears in the thumbnail.
WRITING
Advertisement
Rich Energy
Rich Energy
@rich_energy
Great seeing one of the fastest natural drivers of the last decade Robert Kubica today with @WilliamsRacing at @COTA #USGP #f1 #robertkubica #Poland #richenergy
ALL
Vibhu Vashisth
Vibhu Vashisth
@VIBHU_Tweet
ANCIENT BHARAT WAS CALLED VISHWAGURU, AND IT REALLY DESERVED IT.

India had a well developed education system centuries before the westerners arrived and called us uncivilized. Education was always given a great importance in Indian civilisation since times immemorial.


Ancient India had the Gurukulas and Ashramas as the epicentres of the knowledge and enlightenment. Bigger Gurukulas served as the centres of higher education called universities. Besides these universities, temples also emerged as the major learning centres.

Studying the Holy Scriptures, character building, personality development, responsibilities towards self,family and society,discipline and preservation of the ancient culture and heritage were the key embodiments of education.

This kind of education system made ancient India, a centre of knowledge all over the world. Many foreign students came to India for education and India was called the 'Vishwaguru'.
Takshshila and Nalanda were the two prominent universities of ancient India.


But were these only Universities of ancient India?The answer is 'No'.Let's learn about these gems of our education system that flourished across ancient India & be proud.

NALANDA UNIVERSITY
This was the oldest university of ancient India.Situated in Nalanda distt. of Bihar...
ALL
Billy Bostickson \U0001f3f4\U0001f441&\U0001f441 \U0001f193
Billy Bostickson šŸ“šŸ‘&šŸ‘ ...
@BillyBostickson
@EricTopol @NBA @StephenKissler @yhgrad B.1.1.7 reveals clearly that SARS-CoV-2 is reverting to its original pre-outbreak condition, i.e. adapted to transgenic hACE2 mice (either Baric's BALB/c ones or others used at WIV labs during chimeric bat coronavirus experiments aimed at developing a pan betacoronavirus vaccine)

@NBA @StephenKissler @yhgrad 1. From Day 1, SARS-COV-2 was very well adapted to humans .....and transgenic hACE2 Mice


@NBA @StephenKissler @yhgrad 2. High Probability of serial passaging in Transgenic Mice expressing hACE2 in genesis of SARS-COV-2


@NBA @StephenKissler @yhgrad B.1.1.7 has an unusually large number of genetic changes, ... found to date in mouse-adapted SARS-CoV2 and is also seen in ferret infections.
https://t.co/9Z4oJmkcKj


@NBA @StephenKissler @yhgrad We adapted a clinical isolate of SARS-CoV-2 by serial passaging in the ... Thus, this mouse-adapted strain and associated challenge model should be ... (B) SARS-CoV-2 genomic RNA loads in mouse lung homogenates at P0 to P6.
https://t.co/I90OOCJg7o
ALL