1. Meet Katalin Karico

It is an inspiring story. And a most relevant one for now and going forward. It's my honor to introduce you to Katalin Karico, if you have never heard of her. I hadn't until yesterday.

There is no doubt in my mind she will win a Nobel Prize some day.

2. The pioneering Dr. Katalin Kariko — who fled Communist-run Hungary at 30 for the US in 1985 with $1,200 hidden inside her 2-year-old daughter’s teddy bear — isn’t as powerful or rich as Moderna’s Stéphane Bancel or BioNTech’s Ugur Sahin. Nor has she ever been celebrated.

3. Kariko’s obsessive 40 years of research into synthetic messenger RNA was long thought to be a boring dead-end. She said she was chronically overlooked, scorned, fired, demoted, repeatedly refused government and corporate grants, and threatened with deportation.

4. All along, though, Kariko held fast to her belief in mRNA, which has turned out to be key to building the complicated technology behind the new vaccines developed by Moderna and Germany’s BioNTech (which has teamed with Pfizer.)

5. The co-inventor of modified mRNA, Katalin Karikó is finally getting her moment. She remembers sitting in her father’s butcher shop as a little girl, unafraid of the blood and entrails.

In the spring of 2001, I was going to a meeting at the place where I worked then and still work now. Another of the people at the meeting was an academic dean of our school. She was perhaps the purest expression of academia *at* that school.

1/

That day she was literally wearing a tweed blazer. Before she'd become a dean she'd been an English teacher. Now, the epitome of English Teachers, in my brain, was and remains my father. That day she was a close second.

2/

That day I said hello and asked how she was or somesuch.

She gave me a slightly wry smile. "Oh, you know. Measuring my life in coffee spoons," she said. I chuckled, and we may have traded a couple more lines of 'Prufrock.' I'm not sure.

3/

And I've always been a fan of T.S. Eliot, so it felt natural enough to come to and fro, talking of Michelangelo, and otherwise it seemed a clever turn of phrase just before a meeting about school management systems and database development.

4/

It is a couple of days before 2021, and I am 20 years older, and that memory has taken on a very different shade and tenor. We have all seen too much since then, over and over again.

5/

https://t.co/guIGzPvBBA

1. This THREAD has everything.

Jus cogens.

Hans Kelsen.

The Israel-Egypt conflict.

The right of self-defense and Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.

Buckle. Up. 🧵

2. On August 1, 1951, the UN Security Council met to discuss "Restrictions imposed by Egypt on the passage of ships through the Suez Canal" bound for Israel.

3. Mahmoud Fawzi, Egypt's UN representative, claimed that a state of war still existed between Egypt and Israel, despite their 1949 General Armistice Agreement, and that Egypt retained its belligerent right to visit and search neutral vessels for war materials.

4. Fawzi grounded this right in "the right of self-preservation and self-defence, which ... transcends all other rights," and even hinted that Article 51 of the UN Charter may not limit the right of self-defense.

5. And then ...

... it happened.

Fawzi quoted Hans Kelsen ...

... suggesting that the right of self-defense was ...

jus cogens.

A peremptory norm of general international law that "cannot be affected by any treaty," not even the Charter.

So I have been briefly looking into how OCD is assessed. I came across this image. Crikey, it just makes me think even more that PDA should be viewed as an OCD & related disorder.

I do not have time to explicitly how PDA matches up this, but if one looks at the work of Liz O'Nions

One should see that the model she is describing matches up to the OCD cycle.

So demand = obsessive thought.
anxiety = anxiety.
Demand avoidance behaviour = compulsion.
Temporary relief = temporary relief.

It is acknowledged that demand avoidance behaviours have a loose hierarchy, so the more anxious (distressed) the PDAer is, more extreme behaviour they display to assert the self-agency. This is covered in the work of @Allison66746425

Coming to you live from the back of a police van

I was on my way from getting beer walking back to the car bangvala

Yerr it's hot back here. There's no air at all

We're driving around Kasi now. I hope we see some action. Shootout nyana

We just made a stop at a car wash. Ziyasha

201215 Withfans fansign

(This is a thread of 2 video calls by the same OP)

🐥 I haven’t seen you in two weeks, did you know I found a boyfriend in that time?
🐰 Really?
🐥 Yes, really. And he’s very handsome..

#MarkTuan #마크 #段宜恩 @marktuan
#GOT7 @GOT7Official

🐥 And very gentle, so this is my last time seeing you.
🐰 Oh … how? 🥺
🐥 Let me share my boyfriend with you, ok?
🐰 Ok
🐥 *shows a photo of Mark* How is he? What do you think of him? Is he handsome?

#MarkTuan #마크 #段宜恩 @marktuan
#GOT7 @GOT7Official

🐰 Ohh … 👍🏼
🐥 What do you think of him?
🐰 Very handsome
🐥 Then do you wanna be my boyfriend?
🐰 Don’t you have a boyfriend already?
🐥 and 🐰 both laughing

#MarkTuan #마크 #段宜恩 @marktuan
#GOT7 @GOT7Official #갓세븐

201220 Withfans fansign

🐥 You called me again today~ Is it because you finally decided to be my boyfriend?
🐰 I missed you so I called you *cringes and laughs*
🐥 So you’ve decided to be my boyfriend?
🐰 Okok 2 minute boyfriend!

#MarkTuan #마크 #段宜恩 @marktuan
#GOT7

🐥 Let’s play the ‘Of Course’ game*
🐰 Ok
🐥 This time let’s say a line each after the other
🐰 😲 Don’t make it difficult for me
🐥 I’ll start first, and the person who loses has to grant the other person one wish
🐰 *Nods*

#MarkTuan #마크 #段宜恩 @marktuan
#GOT7 @GOT7Official

Ever hear that old saying "Time is money"? I am about to take you on a journey to show you how [they] have used our understanding of time by connecting it to money to keep US in the matrix.

Thanks to everyone who posted tributes to my father. I thought I might honor him with a not-too-serious thread on some of his major works, from the admittedly warped perspective of one of his offspring. 1/13

Let’s start with Japan’s New Middle Class 1963, hands-down my favorite. I am biased, of course, since my parents conducted the research together, and I know many in the cast of characters.

My parents immersed themselves in the lives of 6 families in a Tokyo suburb. The book is a testament to the payoff from intensive ethnographic research. It offers the reader a vivid portrait of everyday life in 1950s Japan. 3/13

Canton Under Communism 1969, the only one I had to read in college. That ruined it for me. But it was pretty impressive that he could write such a rich book about a country he had never been to. He interviewed refugees from the mainland in Hong Kong.

Japan as Number One 1979, Japan's all-time top-selling non-fiction work by a non-Japanese author – I think. Some claimed it was not truly a work of scholarship, or it did not treat Japan’s strengths and weaknesses evenly. But that was the point.

I don't discuss my projects on Twitter but this is an exception because it is epic.

TLDR: food will follow retail, cloud kitchens will level up local restaurants & Gary V is a genius.

Here goes

👇

In 2019, I got a chance to see a functional @cloudkitchens facility. My immediate reaction was holy s*** this is going to change EVERYTHING.

If you don't know what it is -- here's a feature I

You can now build & launch a delivery-only restaurant within minutes -- like you'd do with a DTC store on Shopify today.

Food was going to follow retail.

The next obvious idea was celebrity food brands!

So I hit up up the two ppl I thought would GET it. @nasdaily & @garyvee

For 3 1/2 years I watched as people build their Twitter accounts, I watched as they interacted with Potus drops visions of sugarplums danced in their heads with the taking down of the deep state and now with a couple minor setbacks they whine the plan isnt working. We have future

1/ Lockdowns are painful. Even Ontario's version will cause suffering for a lot of people. Compliance is high when people see results that are working and can see tangible proof that the tumult in their lives is contributing to the greater good.

2/ Most people's measure will be daily case counts. By delaying our mockdown 5 days Ford has basically endorsed family gatherings for Christmas day.
So that leaves us with our already record case counts about to be added to from a Christmas surge.

3/ People, who are already sacrificing so much, will see an increase of cases by the middle of January rather than a drop. At that point, they will have been "hunkered" down for 3 weeks and instead of a decrease, they'll be seeing similar or higher numbers.

4/ This is why these 5 days, at this time of year are so important. Modelling from yesterday showed a SIX-week lockdown started *immediately* would take current case counts down from 2300ish to around 500.

5/ The current mockdown is 28 days which even without the Christmas surge would not be enough to have a meaningful impact. Here's the issue, by delaying 5 days, even after all the sacrifices people have made, the numbers will still be high when we add the Xmas surge.

Why the Flynn Pardon Matters https://t.co/RQ6Wclo7Z6 @benjaminwittes via @lawfareblog

Trump has long loved the pardon power, though not because of the good a president can do with it. He loves it because of the unchecked power it offers to make statements, make constituencies happy, give out goodies to friends and anger enemies.

As Quinta Jurecic @qjurecic has written, the pardon power works the way Trump wishes the entire presidency works.

For this reason, the Flynn pardon is likely to be the first trickle of what will ultimately be a flood of postelection clemencies—a flood composed mostly of controversial actions designed to energize core Trump supporters and irritate others.

Look for this flood to include a number of different categories of pardon:

The “own the libs” pardons. These serve chiefly to anger Trump’s political opponents by rewarding someone who both flatters him and represents some value or set of values offensive to liberal opinion.

January 6, I will be watching the Republicans in the House who plan to try to overturn the Electoral College and when they fail, will completely support those Congressional districts succeeding from the union as they threaten.

Best of luck.

It’s tough starting a new country under any circumstance. Having Mo Brooks instead of Thomas Jefferson and a handful of proud boys instead of Washington’s Army will add to the challenge.

(This is a rant, not a spelling bee.)

Secede, succeed.

All the big talkers like Ted Cruz will likely down posture in their chairs when they yell “who’s with me?” Marco Rubio will be reciting enigmatic verses.

The tea party will be like “just joking. We kind of have to tax you” because all that’s left is a factory Trump promised to open but never did & the Museum of Creation which hasn’t been a big money maker (but is highly interesting if you’re in Northern Kentucky).

Not sure we need anymore It’s A Wonderful Life discourse but I’ve seen a couple of professional critics in my timeline completely misunderstanding the point of the film so I feel I must intervene for the sake of reason.

Yes, It’s A Wonderful Life ends with Potter getting away with stealing $8000 and with George still trapped in a town he wanted to leave.

But that’s kind of the point, once you realise the film is about depression, and how depression works.

Imagine you wrote down your life, with all the good things in the pro column and the bad things in the con column. When you have depression you only see the ‘con’ column. The 'pro' column is occluded.

That is the situation that George is in when he contemplates suicide. All that Clarence does when he intervenes is to enable George to see the ‘pro’ column again.

So he still has all the problems, regrets and fears that he had before. But now he is also aware that his life has made a difference, his life has been worthwhile and has been a life well-lived. People are better off with him than without him.