THREAD: We have a historic, even generational opportunity ahead of us just 11 days from now. Let me outline it for you. I'm gonna try and make this non-partisan. I hope you don't judge me irretrievably naïve.

The fact is, much of what's going on in America today is unsustainable. Whether it's government debt, or higher education, climate, or income inequality, it seems pretty clear to just about everyone that if we stay on current trajectory, America is hosed.

I'm not speaking to or about any particular side although if you follow me you probably know where I'm coming from. But 11 days from now we can all collectively choose to keep doing what we're doing -- which means we'll keep getting what we got...

...or we can choose to take a deep breath, close our eyes for a second, and say, "It's time to change." Part of that means turning down the rhetoric. It means taking an inventory of what's broken and thinking hard about how -- together -- we can make things a little less bad.

It means thinking practically about what to do next, and recognizing that the time for maximalist thinking is over; fixing our country will take compromise. All sides will suffer some disappointment, that's how you know the deal was close as possible to fair.

Dear UKRNIJN,

HERE ARE LAST MINUTE TIPS I'VE COMPILED SPECIALLY FOR YOU BEFORE WRITING THAT IELTS ON SATURDAY.

For the listening:
•Ensure your headset is well connected and audible enough before the starting time.

•Concentration is key, try all means not to lose focus.

•One lifesaver is reading the questions ahead of the audio.

•Write all your answers in the question sheet, you've got an additional 10minutes to transfer them into the answer sheet.

•Write them in capital letters, e get why.

READING:
This is the toughest aspect for me but I trashed it.

•Use the formula 15:25:20
I will explain how it works

•Always start with passage 1, it is the simplest,spend ATMOST 15minutes to answer it.

Go to passage 3,spend 25minutes here cos It is the simplest/complex.

•You can now go to passage 2 and spend the remaining 20Mins.

•In my next tweet, I'll be teaching you a strategy that I later used to trash the reading aspect.

WRITING
It was the simplest for me. I had as high as 7.5.

•Start with task 1, it's the easiest and has the lowest mark.

•The most important aspect is your 1st (Introduction) and 2nd paragraphs (Overview)

Nearly every day I take a walk, grab a coffee, and sit for a while in front of Baltimore’s Camden Station. This is where Abraham Lincoln was nearly assassinated on the eve of his 1861 inauguration. Thinking about that little known story a lot lately, so today, I’m sharing it. 1/

Short bit of context: prior to Lincoln’s election, the was a goddamn disaster. Ideologically divided, hateful, and violent. The President, James Buchanan, has long been considered the worst in American history. I wrote this about him a few years

If you spent even 15 minutes learning about the Buchanan presidency, you could have predicted nearly everything that’s happened in the past few years. As you may have heard, history has a way of repeating itself. But now, to Lincoln! 3/

So after Lincoln won the election, half this country was PISSED. He was going to abolish slavery and whatever whatever ‘MURICA! (Change the policy details, and it’s the same hysteria, generated by the wealthy classes to get the poor to do their bidding) 4/

Try to remember how different the world was back then. News came from the paper; not everyone was literate. Opinions were decided for many by those who controlled information. Some said Lincoln was going to destroy their way of life, and needed to die. 5/

It’s time to do a thread about @NeilDotObrien. This arrogant, self-serving, narcissistic, devoid of empathy and pathetic excuse for a human being, continues to spout nonsense on his Twitter page instead of doing his actual job as an MP.

MP’s like @NeilDotObrien do not care that lockdown measures across the developed world, will push an extra 150+ million people into absolute poverty, which will mean them starving to death over the next 10 years. He doesn’t care if people can’t eat, because it doesn’t affect him.

MP’s like @NeilDotObrien don’t care about the millions pushed into unemployment; the millions of small and medium sized businesses going bankrupt; entire family businesses seeing decades of their hard work disappear overnight due to avoidable lockdown measures.

MP’s like @NeilDotObrien earn a salary of £81,932, more than £50k above the national average salary. He is not affected by a loss of income, had his wages reduced to 80% on furlough or worried where his next pay cheque will come from. Why? Because he doesn’t care.

MP’s like @NeilDotObrien don’t care that we have accrued the biggest public debt since WW2, and that these measures are actively destroying a once sound economy which will lead to the greatest economic depression since The Great Frost of 1709.

Dear #YoungProfessional,

Beat Deadlines, don’t meet it:

In the world of social media and the latest gist/violence, there is the tendency to relegate quite important things.

In the world of work, many will meet deadlines, others will miss deadlines but only the exceptional

beat deadlines.
Many times, young professionals equate beating deadlines to not having so much work. That’s not really true!

You can make a habit of beating deadlines, it only requires the discipline needed and self-application.

It is likely that you’re working with a superior who likely also has a superior, thus, there’s a chain of command that probably need to review a piece of work before going to the client. Beating deadlines not only shows you as being efficient, it also shows you’re effective.

Am I saying you should beat deadlines without the required dedication and quality? NO! As I was once told, quality over speed! Does it also mean you cannot have quality and speed? NO! In fact, if you produce quality work and you deliver it past the needed time, the quality

work may become useless!
As I concluded my orientation& training when I first started working, I had a short meeting with a mentor, who is a partner at another top law firm. Over a glass of red wine and me asking how he became a partner quite early,

https://t.co/gfXjaJF2tc New study re the views of nonautistic people towards autistic individuals. The aim - to move away from negative stereotypes.
But the 'sample fictional autistic person' is a white male who likes to only talk about fantasy fiction (LOTR).
Er.../

OK, that describes about 1% of autistic people.
And it exactly matches the stereotype myth that all autistic people are like this.
But...if the aim is to improve how people respond to autistic people...how does this fictional character help?/

My concern is that the more we focus on that 1%, the more we a) forget the other 99% exist and b) the more we set people up to fail, on encountering us. I cannot begin to tell you how confused people are that I'm not a young male who can only talk about Sci-Fi & IT, for example/

...and teaching people how to think positive thoughts about a white male fantasy-fiction-fan doesn't get them anywhere when asked to collaborate with a middle aged gay mum. Let alone one who can manage a decent chat on almost any standard topic on earth/

As it happens, I can chat about LOTR, and IT. But probably no more than anyone else on the street.
If we're serious about improving autistic lives, we need to be serious about diversity.

🧵 After much deliberation concerning the events of last week concerning homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia in our Catholic schools, Toronto—St. Paul’s New Democrats have decided to act.

Members of the @TCDSB and other publicly-funded Catholic institutions and boards have repeatedly attacked members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community. The 2SLGBTQIA+ community is an at-risk community; the COVID-19 pandemic has negatively affected many at-risk 2SLGBTQIA+ youth.

Many Catholic publicly-funded school boards neglect or intentionally omit 2SLGBTQIA+ resources, which may affect the availability of life-saving information and/or resources.

However, we recognize with sadness that there is a culture of homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia in the @TCDSB and in publicly-funded Catholic education based on recent events.

We welcome the 14 January 2021 action wherein the @TCDSB passed a motion to establish 2SLGBTQIA+ resources and to create an advisory committee to deal with issues thereof.

Let’s talk about “the mark of the beast.”

Every time some new vaccine becomes necessary, there’s a small-but-loud group of evangelicals and otherwise who believe taking this vaccine could be “pledging your allegiance to the devil.” But does this have any grounds in The Bible?

The so-called “mark of the beast” appears in The Revelation, so first we’ve gotta dispel some myths about the book as a whole.

I’d argue that if there’s one book that has been twisted most heavily by the “evangelical fanfiction lore” of the 80s and 90s, it’s gotta be Revelation.

American Christianity in the 90s was wack. After years of politicians stoking fears of communism & new world order, conservatives snowballed their vision of what “the apocalypse” would look like, and reverse-engineered their fears back into Revelation with stuff like Left Behind.

The Left Behind books were pretty critical to the end-times fearmongering. Even Liberty University’s Jerry Falwell said at the time, "in terms of its impact on Christianity, Left Behind is probably greater than that of any other book in modern times, outside The Bible.”

Meanwhile, Theologian David Carlson said, “Left Behind promotes a skewed view of the Christian faith that welcomes war and disaster, while dismissing peace efforts in the Middle East and elsewhere—all in the name of Christ.”

🧵👇

Earlier this year I found myself cooking for a woman I'd never met before who lived on a local estate. She was a single mother, her teenage son had picked up Covid from school,and given it to her. She had a zero hours contract, and had run out of money to feed her family /1

They'd been surviving on tinned soup for three days, but that was used up. So she put out a call on social media and I got in touch. I have never heard anyone apologise more, she was utterly humiliated to have to beg for help from strangers. As *you* would be. It was horrible. /2

Now,this woman happened to have become very sick with Covid too.And I often wonder-if she'd been one of the many who only had mild or no symptoms,what decision would she have made?Would she have isolated to the point she had to beg from strangers?Or would she have gone to work?/3

I mean,it'd be easy for me as an epidemiologist to bemoan the fact that not enough people are isolating after testing positive or being in contact with a positive.But I have money in the bank,I work from home,I can afford to have online shopping delivered.I can stay home, easy /4

We know how Covid works by now.We know the epidemic is being driven by close contacts,+we know that those contacts are very often driven by having a lower socio-economic status.People living in crowded households.People with public-facing jobs that can't safely be done at home /5

Normally at this time of year, I get to tout the successes we’ve enjoyed in #Chattanooga in the past 12 months, like initiatives that help our families, ribbon cuttings for park improvements, and economic development deals that bring good jobs.

This year has been different. 1/

As we enter 2021, it is also important to count our blessings. This painful, strange year, for example, has indeed brought renewed clarity to a lot of what is truly important. 2/

I’m thinking about the nurses, doctors, home healthcare staff, and medical providers who have been working harder than ever to care for COVID-19 patients and others. Every day, we witness their sacrifice and service. 3/

I’m thinking also about the police, firefighters, public works employees, teachers, child care workers, and other truly essential personnel who have shown unrelenting dedication to keeping us safe and educating our young people against truly staggering odds. 4/

The pandemic has been brutal on our small businesses and Chattanoogans already living on the edge. I appreciate our Economic & Community Development Dept giving rent and utility assistance and other kinds of support to the business owners and employees who need it the most. 5/

Much misinformation out there about #Texaspoweroutage, @ERCOT_ISO, wind and solar power, and thermal generators (gas and coal). Let's review what we think we know right now. @TPPF @Life_Powered_ 1/10

Two problems in #Texas, one short term and exacerbated by the long term issue, and one long term. 2/10

The short term failure came at about 1 AM Monday when #ERCOT should have seen the loads soaring due to plummeting temperatures and arranged for more generation. 3/10

Texas came very close to having a system-wide outage for the whole state (ERCOT area, about 85% of the state) due to not arranging for more generation. 4/10

This tripped the grid, knocking some reliable thermal plants (gas and coal) offline. This was a failure of the grid operator (ERCOT) not the power plants. 5/10

PUBLIC DEBT HYSTERIA IN ITALY 🇮🇹
Each passing day, I'm more and more astounded at the hysteria surrounding public debt in Italy. This hysteria has country-specific peculiarities. In Italy it's somehow different from the US, the UK or Germany. 1/18

This hysteria is due not only to ideology, but also to provincialism, pusillanimity, rancor towards the State and disregard for legitimate national interest. Let's analyse these issues. 2/18

IDEOLOGY. The Italian free-marketers ("liberisti all'amatriciana") are often a parody of their American and British counterparts. They seem to lack (or pretend to lack) basic understanding of the functioning of government bonds. 3/18

There's no such thing as a free market of government bonds. Or better: a free mkt of gov't bonds can exist only in a monetary union where the central bank doesn't guarantee that single national governments will not fail. We've seen the negative effects of such architecture. 4/18

However, thanks to PEPP, the @ecb implicitly prevents governments' failure. At least for the moment.
This means that the mkt for gov't bonds is controlled by a public authority:it's what usually occurs(and should occur) in every well-functioning modern economy(and democracy) 5/18

I'm disappointed that the following needs to be said, because professors ought to educate themselves on basic facts, instead of accepting myths uncritically and behaving harmfully towards minoritized women in STEM.

People, especially women, who are Black and/or Indigenous have especially challenging pathways into tenure track faculty positions, because academia is still racist and sexist in ways that are intersecting and nonlinearly compounding.

The following myths and facts are paraphrased from the 1996 research article about Ford Foundation Fellows by Smith, Wolf-Wendel, Busenberg et al, "The Pipeline for Achieving Faculty Diversity: Debunking the Myths" at

Academia changes slowly, so these 1996 research results still hold, and in fact other studies indicate that the representation of Black faculty has worsened since 2005.

To summarize the research...

Myth: Potential faculty of color are sought out by numerous institutions, and the competition to hire them is fierce, because there are so few candidates of color.

Fact: Supply and demand statements like this are greatly exaggerated.

1. They spent years & acres of space in state media lampooning Morgan Tsvangirai. But in death, they eulogise him. It is not because they have discovered respect for the man, no. They do it to use him as a source of legitimacy by way of heirship to their preferred “successor”.

2. They abused Tsvangirai while he lived. They still abuse him after his death. They think if they can attach their horse to Tsvangirai he will earn legitimacy in the eyes of the MDC community. The aim is not to praise Mwonzora but to undermine their true & feared rival Chamisa.

3. The irony is that they applaud Mwonzora for the so-called notion of “responsible opposition” while at the same time naming him the true successor to Tsvangirai as if they ever recognised Tsvangirai as “responsible opposition”. In fact, they called him a puppet & beat him up.

4. For someone trying so hard to uplift their chosen horse & to pretend the MDC Alliance is irrelevant, Charamba spends far too much time throwing jabs at Chamisa & the MDC Alliance. MDC people can tell who is the successor to Tsvangirai by the amount of abuse from ZANU PF people

5. The MDC community knows that the Mnangagwa regime wants to build an opposition party that it can control. The MDC Alliance refused to be that kind of party. The regime found a willing horse in the MDC-T & they have been at it all year expelling MPs & grabbing party funds.

[Thread: Fandoms]
I was called by a long lost friend's parents today. A bit of history, she was involved with the fandom(?) of a popular sports team for the past year or so. The involvement grew so intense that she was engaged with the fandom-things for better part of the day ->

She administered multiple social media "fan-accounts" for the team and the players, had a huge "friends-group" within the fandom itself etc.

In the last few weeks, she almost stopped speaking to her parents, and lost all the contact with her friends in the lockdown. ->

3 weeks ago, somehow a (alleged) rumor spread within their fandom circle's social media that she is a "mole for the opposite team" (or something like that) and she faced everything from abuses to rape threats (was reported to authorities. More on that later) ->

From what the description sounded like, the harassment was really worse than what political social media has (in my experience of hot takes in the past year)

Anyway, 2 days after this rumor, their "fandom team lost to opposite fandom team" on some online contest thing. ->

She was blamed by the "friends" in the fandom "for conspiring" and this person went into a literal shock.

Couldn't speak, couldn't eat, lay in bed all day, didn't even get up to visit the restroom and was deaf to everything. FOR 48 HOURS. Had to be taken to a doctor. ->

MY PERSONAL SEXUAL HARRASSMENT CASE :

This SYED woman had her new born baby admitted at JVC NICU. Her brother in law was SHO. They seemed to have high level contacts as I got a call to take care of baby from Consultant before the baby was admitted.

Incidentally, a cousin of lady happened to be my intern just days ago, she came with her own reference.

The rule was, attendents are not allowed into ICU except 1 to change diappers & feed baby, but this family got VIP entry for more than 1 attendent for obvious reasons.

The baby was doing well, some issues had settled, others were resolving.

On fateful night, I wasn't on duty, my colleague was.

Father of baby tried to interfere beyond acceptable level. He asked my colleague why he hasn't sent such test on repeat when it wasn't needed.

Next he tried to read the file & take pics with intent to send them outside, which is illegal.

My colleague objected but attendent was VIP with SHO brother, so it ended up in fight between attendents & my colleague, with attendents breaking some property.

Next day, I went to duty & came to know about the incident.

Now I was in charge of ICU.

As I was putting my morning notes & examining patients, mother came & gave me urine culture vial & told me to do her babie's urine culture.

I'm feeling kind of bored and at loose ends, so I'm going to start serializing, in tweets, my 2006 ~10,000 word "Training Manual for the New American Left"

Here goes:

1. The following might be considered as a treatise on a strategy or for progressives in coming years. It is not at all necessary for those reading the following to agree with every point made in the document as long as there is acceptance of several underlying premises:

2. The new conservative right has achieved at least partial control of many of the significant institutions in American society, especially in politics, media, and to a lesser extent in business and - increasingly - in the area of religion.

3. Meanwhile, political progressives have failed to effectively defend enlightenment values and mainstream institutions from a sustained attack that has been ongoing now for several decades, and...

4. progressives have almost wholly missed the parallel construction, by the new American right - largely now the Christian and religious right - of an entire parallel nation, a shadow nation with its own alternate institutions, culture, assumptions, and even versions of history..