the realities of sheffield hallam uni, a thread

tw / sexual assault, suicide

#uniteagainstunite #university #nostaynopay #unistrike

“As a student struggling with severe clinical depression, my suicidal tendencies have been through the roof. After reaching out to Sheffield Hallam, minimal support was offered to me”

“Failure to complete maintenance requests, having to move flags due to leaking pipes, mice infestation, not being there for 6 weeks over Christmas, locked in with no mental health services”

“Quality of my flat is disgusting for what I’m paying -mouse infestation, silverfish infestation, leak so no water in our flat currently and no form of compensation”

- “Had no hot water since Sep,nothing has been done”

⁃"I’ve had multiple issues with my apartment such as broken toilet, mould growing by the door, no heating and no electricity”

⁃"There are rats running round the accommodation and staff are always losing my parcels”

#Prop22 was the most expensive ballot initiative in history: "gig economy" companies firehosed $200m over voters, outspending 48/50 state legislative races on a single question.

That question: can employers misclassify workers as contractors and escape legal obligations?

1/

That's a high-stakes question. US workers spent more than a century fighting for basic rights: the right not the maimed, raped or killed on the job; the right to a living wage; the right to a weekend; the right not to be discriminated against based on race or sex or religion.

2/

Above all: the right to form a union and bargain collectively with employers who otherwise hold all the negotiating leverage - to pool their resources in the same way that gig economy companies did to fund Prop 22.

3/

Workers died for those rights. Bosses fought labor reforms with terror and rape, with blackmail and dirty tricks, with jails and blackballing.

Prop 22 can only be repealed if 7/8th of the California legislature votes to do so. It is, effectively, a permanent fixture.

4/

$200m to pass Prop 22 is a BARGAIN. Every right for workers shifts money from bosses' side of the balance sheets to the workers' side. Prop 22 erased all those rights in a single stroke.

5/

The Pennsylvania State Senate begins its new legislative session of the people's business with.....

An argument about masks and whether or not Senators on the floor should be required to wear them.

#WTAE

They're taking a vote now to require senators on the floor to wear masks for today's session.

They DID NOT call on Jim Brewster for this roll call.

Some

OK.

Democratic Senator Steve Santarsiero from Bucks County has requested a delay in swearing in Senators pending resolution of the judicial challenge to Brewster's win.

Critical of Ziccarelli's "specious" actions, and says she didn't go through proper procedure in courts.

"This happens not in a vacuum, it happens in the context of some very serious threats to our democracy today," Santarsiero said.

Brings up tomorrow's certification challenges expected in DC despite Joe Biden being elected and certified as the winner of Presidential election.

"They are not intending to seat Senator Brewster despite the fact that the people of the 45th district have spoken."

"This is the most serious issue that has come before us" in his time in the senate, Santarsiero said.

"All because one candidate is displeased with having lost."

I'm watching these videos about the Georgia Phone Call and they're talking about if Dominion did any kind of weird hacks, and all I'm thinking is:

I need to get a voting machine.

Yeah, it turns out if you select the party vote option and toggle it Democrat-Republican-Democrat then tap the Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen three times, you'll trigger the Easter egg and you can play DOOM!

Set your location to California, vote no on Prop 22, party vote democrats and select the Green presidential campaign Howie Hawkins, then toggle Prop 22 to yes, then longpress "reset ballot" and you'll get rickrolled.

This is how my brain works. "the voting machines could be hacked! The president might be trying to steal the election! What should I do?

Oh yeah, get a screwdriver and make a voting machine play DOS games."

I wonder if they're still x86 based? The last time we had a big electronic voting scandal, of the they were... But now we're in the arm era.

@ChenHuailun here. I'm adding a supplementary thread before today's scheduled one to expand on the origins and early history of the Church of the East (aka the Nestorian Church) ~ahc #jingjiao 1/

The Church of the East traces its origins to the christological position of the School of Antioch, which held that the human and divine and human essences (ουσία) of Christ were united in a single prosopon (πρόσωπον). ~ahc #jingjiao 2/

This ran against the position of the School of Alexandria, which held that the two essences of Christ were united in a single hypostasis (ὑπόστασις). In general terms, hypostasis is more inherent than prosopon. ~ahc #jingjiao 3/

One implication of the Antiochene rejection of the hypostatic union is that Mary could not accurately be called the Theotokos, or God-bearer. Instead, she is the Christotokos, the Christ-bearer. ~ahc #jingjiao 4/

These Christological debates were further complicated by Syriac terms such as 'kyana' (ܟܝܢܐ), associated with 'ousia' but later translated to 'hypostasis' by Syrian Orthodox; and 'qnoma ' (ܩܢܘܡܐ), sometimes contentiously translated as 'hypostasis' or 'person.' ~ahc #jingjiao 5/

Welcome back to Fresno County Board of Supervisors: 2021 version! Today's meeting will only consist of Oath of Office for re-elected Supervisors Steve Brandau, Sal Quintero and Nathan Magsig as well as designation of Officers. #fresno @uSparkValley Video

Supervisors are moving to 10 AM start time rather than the previous 9 AM. Pre-Covid the parking was tough to find even at 9 AM . I imagine 10 AM will be even harder for the public to engage (if) and when we can meet in person again.

Meeting begins. Sal Quintero is on phone. Rest are present in person. Brandau has Rev. Jim Franklin give invocation. Administering of the Oath of Office to Supervisors Steve Brandau, Sal Quintero, and Nathan
Magsig

Brandau comes down first along with "these old people" (He gets a playful whack from an old lady I assume a relative). Rev. Franklin gives Oath to Brandau.

Quintero is having his administered by Sheriff Mims in an office somewhere. @LincolnSeward Nathan Magisg is having his administered by County Clerk Bernice Seidel.

Thread – A New Year’s Eve Retrospective on 2020 America

1. A good pal of mine emailed me this commentary written by a third party who has allowed for it to be shared with the condition no attribution be given.

2. Recommend taking the time to carefully read this through (twice!) and then ponder the questions asked and the actions evinced in America over the past year. It is a fabulous commentary.

3.

"A year ago today, at the close of a retrospective on the ending decade, I wrote this: "We step into a decade that will likely be more terrible than we grasp. For the nation, for the world, many bills will come due & the survivors will be the quiet and the unseen.”

4. Finishing from a year ago: “My fear — which I expect to be vindicated, even as I hope it is not — is that the decade just ended will be remembered with one word: prewar.”

5. There is no reward in prophecy. Here is the opening passage of Stefan Zweig’s 1941 “The World of Yesterday”:

On nationalism

Is the Nazi holocaust & colonization of Europe an expression of a reactionary political strategy?

Bougois nationalism often consolidates power within one nationality - Germany stripped the Jewish nation of their right to life, without contradicting class intrests

Nazis stoked the racist bougois nationalism in Germany. Nationalism has historically been used to suppress the class contradiction below one of national opression.

Ex: (Parenti) Nazi propaganda described themselves as a classless nation, and the opressed jews as the enemy.

Ex: (Nokhem Shtif - "the pogroms in Ukrain") in Ukraine, during the Civil War of 1918-1919, the white army propagated the Jeudo-Bolshevik conspiracy, and called for the Ukrainian nation to fight the red army and the Jewish people - leading to brutal pogroms & a swollen white army

Ex: (J. Sakai - Settlers) in America, a privelaged, white settler nationality was produced and cultivated as a loyal garrison army, which could dominate the indigenous and African nationalities, at the benefit of the European bourgeois state.

Ex: (Ibrahim Kaypakkaya - "on the national question") in the 1970s, (oppressed) Kurdish and (oppressor) Turkish nationalism entailed the proletariat of each nation fighting for the benefit of their national bourgeoisie, instead of their liberation.

Open Letter: Our democracy is at risk. Progressivism can save us.

We’re in trouble. We have been for a long time. Hopefully, Georgia goes well and tomorrow is just noise. But what if neither happens? We can’t continue to pretend it’s all a joke. So what do we do?

First off, we need to ask how we get here?

America defeated Fascism (totalitarian rule enforced though a violent commitment to a national or racial or identity) embodied in the Nazi Party. We are not a perfect nation. We too are a nation stained by hate, apartheid . . .

slavery, Jim Crowe casteism. But there have been great moments. Defeating the Nazis was one of those moments. FDR was our leader. Like America, he wasn’t perfect. He turned away Jewish refugees. Like his counterparts in Erurope, he was also slow to recognize the Nazis as...

the danger they would become. But when economic and moral calamity threatened certain doom for all, he rose to the moment. He chose well. He led without fear. He made a promise to America. Fight this evil, and we will create a “New Deal.” Healthcare. A social safety...

net. Our soldiers carried government issued commemorative coins into Germany memorializing these sacred promises that they fought for. Sadly, not every one of these promises was fulfilled, but FDR helped rebuild America, literally. Those trails in our state parks? Many of our...

Let me share with you a secret.

In my childhood, I often had what I later came to learn was called “Lucy Dreaming” which sometimes literally made me afraid of sleeping in the dark. It faded away as I grew up and in 2010 (18yo) a friend showed me a 9 hour long video laying out...

...nearly everything about the “illuminati” stuff as we know it.
After that day I got obsessed with researching “the reality” myself. At the same time the lucy dreams came back to me again. Some of them got worse, with me seeing dark-looking entities while locked in my body....

... I started researching specifics and personal experiences about lucy dreams. An old wise man that I had contacted (Bobby), told me to “not be afraid of them, you have power over them”. He also told me “when you enter that mode, you’re in a hallway that other entities have...

...access to, they know your fear and they’ll look certain way to feed from the fear that you give out when you notice them”.
Suddenly it all made sense to me and right after reading his email I could just feel I was really to chill if it (lucy dream) happens again.
Just like...

...that, a few days later, on a Sunday (day nap), it happened. While locked in my body, I was surprised that I was not afraid and for the first time I didn’t feel any entity’s presence. I went as far as trying to get out of my body, but halfway through I struggled so I laid...

Yesterday we announced the launch of The Doomsday Clock, an original 18th Airborne Corps podcast series telling the incredible story of the Corps' Cold War history.

Today we're going to tell you more about some of the guests who will appear on the program.

[1 of 10]

[2 of 10]

Of course, we'll have John Lewis Gaddis, the dean of Cold War historians about the start and end of American confrontation with the Soviets (Episode 16: April 27).

[3 of 10]

We'll also have the great H.W. Brands to talk about the Korean War and the stare down between Truman and MacArthur (Episode 7: February 23).

[4 of 10]

Podcast king Dan Carlin joins us for a deep, dark journey into the philosophy of the Soviet Union (Episode 9: March 9).

[5 of 10]

You know Sir Max Hastings as the great historian, but long before that he was a war reporter. That's him on the right in Vietnam in 1968.

He joins us to talk about American escalation in the Vietnam War (Episode 10: March 16).

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.

(1/25)
Ballot Laundering Operation in re Election 2020

Known Outcome: Mail Fraud within USPS

- My partner and I were invited in late November to review ongoing efforts by private parties of alleged fraud and/or malfeasance in Election 2020.

(2/25)
- Our efforts are as private citizens working completely on a pro bono basis for purposes of election integrity and upholding rule of law.

- After meeting various groups and individuals involved in Election 2020 reviews, we were informed on a host of topics.

(3/25)
- We reviewed extensive data and information. We subsequently decided that we should zero in on the 'currency' to determine the outcome of the election.

- The currency in this election, as in any other, are the ballots themselves. Who produced the ballots?

(4/25)
- Who transported them? Were there excess ballots secreted into the system over and above what Registrars of Voters across the country had initially requested for purposes of voting in their counties? What about envelopes for the delivery/processing of Mail-In ballots?

(5/25)
- What role might the US Postal System have played in transporting ballots? Was everything done 'by the book' so that the sanctity of everybody's vote was upheld and nobody was disenfranchised? Many questions to address. As with all our efforts, time to follow the facts.

Time for my first thread of 2021: Today, How I Measure Myself: a 2020 Report!

With some related thoughts on evaluating management and picking investment managers.

Important note: underlying everything that follows is integrity and trust. Without that, nothing matters.

1) Day to Day: Business Basics

Did I “keep the trains running on time” in 2020? Yes

Do I know how I measure my performance? Yes

How was my performance? Satisfactory

Overall grade: A- (I wasn’t aggressive enough in the markets at the bottom)

Management Thought: Passion not Emotion

Emotional investment decisions tend to be bad investment decisions, but passion keeps somebody in the game - especially when things get difficult

Equally true for investment managers and company management.

Don’t want:

Management Thought 2: Do managers clearly communicate how they are measured and how they evaluate others?

For example, any CEO’s (or investors) job is to allocate capital. Do they measure their effectiveness at allocating capital? How?

Don’t want: “Just need more money”

2) Management Skill: Strategy and Tactics

Few are excellent at both. For example, asset allocation vs trading. Or looking at different asset classes.

Am I humble enough to admit where my circle of competence ends? Do I partner/hire - especially outside that?

2020 grade: A