Today we lost 1820 of our citizens. Many of these deaths could have been prevented. I plead with our Secretary of State @MattHancock and @CMO_England to make changes to our community protective shield as follows: (1)

Face the data with humility. Latest data show only 32% of in-person test results were received within 24 hours...Way too slow. For all routes combined, 18.3% of tests from all test sites were received within 24 hours of a test. (2)

Since Test and Trace launched, 97.8% of all contacts managed by local health protection teams have been successfully reached. Performance of call centres is much worse. The % reached within 24h of the case that reported them reaching the contact tracing system fell to 67.7%. (3)

We should expect many more contacts than have been identified by call centres. And those contacted by call centre or online are simply asked to self-isolate. No follow-up. No link with primary care. No offer of local help. (4)

The MOST important statistic is not measured: compliance with 'self-isolation'. Surveys conducted have shown only 18.5% comply. And many of the poorest groups won't go for a test because they fear being asked to self-isolate. Why? (5)

🧵TERRIBLE NEWS IN KENTUCKY EVERYONE:

SB 9—the “Born Alive” bill enacted by the Republican-controlled legislature—is now law because @AndyBeshearKY failed to veto it.

That’s good news for forced birthers in Kentucky—not so much for pregnant people. #TeamLegal

The bill sat on Beshear’s desk for ten whole ass days. He could've vetoed it.

But he didn’t.

Instead, he just let it go into effect. And the cherry on top of the shit sundae? Today is the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

So that's fun.

So what exactly *is* the Born Alive law?

It is a fear-mongering and myth-making law based on THE LIE that abortion providers are somehow aborting newborns on the regular.

I don't know about you, but aborting a newborn is called murder or infanticide where I’m from.

Kentucky's "Born Alive" law is utter propaganda.

It is also a blatant attempt by Republican legislators to control how and when physicians provide abortion care as @heyitscalla pointed out in this piece for @RewireNewsGroup:

Kentucky’s “Born Alive” law (SB 9) requires a physician performing an abortion "to take all medically appropriate and reasonable steps to preserve the life and health of a born alive infant."

You can read the bill here:

Cliff breakdown.
🇺🇸

honestly there has nothing been more flabbergasting than Democrats having faced down getting blown up / shot / kidnapped and then pretending like they have no power to do anything about it

It turns out it’s not that they didn’t care about their constituents, they’re just abject cowards who can’t even stand up for themselves in an ongoing emergency where the lack of consequences makes a second, third, fourth attack more likely????

“Ah ha, but let’s not ruin Biden’s first one hundred days”

A mob just tried to kill you??? Like, there’s bombs and stuff and a cop died???? Why the fuck do you think we’re on a normal schedule anymore!!!

Silicon Valley companies with soul-crushing moral cowardice built into their DNA have moved faster, *what is wrong with you*

The only thing fascists worship is power, or rather, the semblance of power. The only thing that sets them back is feeling like losers. You can’t play 4D chess with an ideology so one dimensional it isn’t actually an ideology

Amazing what is going on with narratives that justify ever more draconian policies.

1. Lockdowns China did would never be acceptable in a democracy.
2. Covid is really scary and we don’t know how badly it affects people. Maybe the chinese knows something we don’t. Let’s err on the side of caution.

3. It doesn’t seem to impact kids as much, and the figures show shielded protection is viable - but we need to protect against LONG covid. 4. The first wave outbreak seems not to be matched by same scale of excess deaths as second wave. But mutant strain now about!

5. We don’t know if mutant strain will be treatable with vaccines or if it will impact children - better to err on side of caution and shut everything down again. 6. Data suggests hospitals are within winter crisis norms - but these are not the data points you are looking for.

7. The data points you are looking for are anecdotal testimonies from mostly anonymous NHS staff as well as new regimes and protocol constraints which make all the previous data null and void.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights!
Read this Thread please carefully!
ALL governments that are in lockdown violates their own UN rights! Look at this and read carefully.

The full article can be found here

Art 1:
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood

1/3
Art.2
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property,

2/3
birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing

3/3
..or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Earlier today, a group of anti-mask protestors did maskless shopping at the Beverly Connection Target in West L.A. After they entered, they got into a few verbal altercations with customers.

A shopper aimed a bottle of cleaning spray at the anti-maskers. He seemed to spray them with the cleaning liquid.

“It’s not a pandmic, it’s a plan-demic, it’s a scam-demic,” one of the anti-maskers said to a man who engaged with them for a few minutes.

Soon after, two LAPD officers entered the store, approached for crowd and spoke with them for a few minutes. The man who engaged with group earlier asked for them to be removed from the store.

The officers left a few minutes later without making arrests or giving citations that I know of.

THREAD #Cascadia thinks green. We think we're they climate leader that we Can, Should and Must be. But despite promises + initiatives, #GHG emissions from #BritishColumbia, #Washington & #Oregon just keep rising. 1/9
#GtZ #PNW @INVW Viz by @compatibilism @grist

Today @INVW launched a year-long reporting project about #Cascadia's capacity to gear-up on climate action, get off fossil fuels, and slash carbon emissions... A deep dive on how 1 region can DECARBONIZE. 2/9
#GtZ #PNW #BritishColumbia @springshoeanimation

series Getting to Zero: Decarbonizing Cascadia opens with #BritishColumbia, #Washington & #Oregon's Lost Decade - How #Cascadia set some of North America's first and boldest #GHG targets, and failed to deliver.

Yes, #Cascadia's economies expanded 26 percent after the Great Recession. But so did #California. It had policies to guide economic growth - particularly to temper growing emissions from cars and trucks. #BC #WA & #OR did not. 4/9
@INVW #GtZ #PNW

All year we'll be exploring the people, policies and firms working to finally start transforming #Cascadia into the climate fighter its residents expect and need. It's an ambitious reporting project, nearly unique in its cross-border US-Canadian focus. 5/9
#GtZ #PNW

Having a book out when the bookshops are shut and publicity tours aren't an option (except via zoom) is tough. Lockdowns favour big names over smaller or newer authors. But here are some amazing things you can do to help authors ride this out...

1) Review their books on amazon: it's most people's book search engine, and even more when there are no bookshops to browse or booksellers to ask... for example ahem...

2) TELL THEM you enjoyed their book. They may be feeling glum. You will 100% make their day.

3) If their book isn't out yet, preorder it! For eg this from @ldlapinski is coming in April. Most booksellers will be ordering smaller quantities than usual, this gives them a reason to order more! Also you might get a lovely package from @rshipbshop

Oops forgot a bridgerton gif for the last one. Enjoy this one.

So like white people starting to give that black cop credit, as they should. But I’m still not sure they get it, so let me explain a little more succinctly, the play by play that likely happened in that mans mind.

He realized that the entire seat of power of the US govt was I defended, as was he, with no backup, when he looked over his shoulder. That he was the last line of defense, between the barbarians storming the capital. These barbarians, being racist white nazis.

And in that moment, when all of his training kicked in? And he made the heroic split second decision to save the senators lives, and delay as best he could? You know what he realized his absolute BEST weapon was? In that SPLIT SECOND?

It wasn’t his service weapon. His badge, his training. Lol it was the fact he was a BLACK man in front of a racist mob. Nothing else mattered, nothing else would be as effective. And he KNEW that, so fathom what that means for someone defending said racist country

With his life. Lol his gun wouldn’t help save these white elected officials, many of whom had directed this white mob against him...he knew the deep burning racism of said white mob, would be enough, on seeing a black man to forget what they even stormed the capital for.

In a few years the bar moved from saying that children weren’t undergoing irreversible procedures, to arguing in The New Yorker that children should get to sterilize themselves for life without regard to the “arbitrary historical boundaries of

Among those of us with left-of-center political ideals, it’s only radical feminists who will now stand up and say that it’s wrong to sterilize children because they’re different, or unhappy. It’s only conservatives who will platform us to say

Where are the other organizations that claim to represent lesbian and bisexual women, saying that these girls don’t need mastectomies? Where are the gay men’s groups standing up for the wholeness of these boys? Why are they abandoning their responsibilities?

Where are the groups for those on the autism spectrum, standing up to say that it’s completely typical for autistic young people to have social fit difficulties and be unhappy about this, as well as to obsessively perseverate on special interests?

Why are news outlets who’ve made their bones reporting on previous medical scandals ignoring the sterilization of these children? Whether they’re LGB, autistic, or caught up in social contagions because they self-diagnosed from a YouTube overdose in a vulnerable moment?

So... I arrived for carer's vaccine appointment this morning, fully in line with rules as I have a contract arranged via the council themselves. I was told the rules had changed over the weekend and anyone looking after only one person was no longer eligible.

"You're joking me, right?" I say. No, sympathetically she says she has been told this very morning (it's 0805) that the rules had changed at the weekend and I cannot have the vaccine. I'm not usually lost for words. I manage not to swear (v impressive for me).

I say I am lost for words but can I please see a manager, explaining I am the sole carer for an 88-year-old disabled woman with a heart condition and no vaccination. I plead for an exception. She is kind but firm: I am not eligible but she will fetch a manager.

I explain again to the manager, who takes one look at my contract and immediately confirms that I AM eligible. There IS a rule change, but it relates to people claiming carer's allowance, not to those with a formal contract to care for someone.

So I get that some confusion is inevitable in an operation of this scale, but clearly there are people out there who legitimately booked appointments as carers on the basis of carers' allowance and the rules have changed over the weekend. It will be devastating when they arrive.

1. Thanks @glenmpani for your support when my mother passed on. You raised an interesting point on democracy that we should discuss further

2. Forms of democracy have existed in many societies at different times . Even prominent writers, such as Held (1996), suggest that democracy has evolved among societies and different cultures.

3. Both the form and practice of democracy are often contested and as aptly submitted by Street (2011: 305) “There are, of course, as many definitions of democracy as there are democratic theorists.” @glenmpani

4. While democracy is generally taken as the ideal form of rule, it is hotly disputed in other cultures.

5. Held,(1996: 7) believed that the most discernible and attractive form of democracy is one in which citizens in principle can extend their participation in decision-making to a wide array of spheres such as political, social and economic.

VENDING EXPENSES

For everyone who is interested in a vending business, I am going through all of the steps of creating one right now.

And

I want to show you everything so let’s talk about it

-A THREAD-

Your Largest costs are always going to be

- Transportation of the machine (if you have to rent a Uhaul)
- The Machine
- Product

I want to go over all of this with you all

Let’s talk about transporting them first

If you don’t have a way to transport the machine I would always recommend borrowing a truck from someone you know first.

If that’s not the case generally a 1 day uhaul rental will be fine.

P.S. rent a dolly as well

Depending on the machine size the uhaul rental will vary but shouldn’t break the bank. $100-$200 max.

Now is the fun part.

Purchasing the machine

I got this machine on Facebook Marketplace for $1050

Seaga SM22 combo snack/drink machine

A few thoughts on food and land use 2021. This year, and throughout the decade ahead, the world has before it a remarkable obligation and opportunity to bring about a fairer, more inclusive, more sustainable and more resilient food and land use system.

Such a system would ensure that every human being has access to a healthy and nutritious diet; that all the world’s farmers and fishermen live dignified lives; and that the food system itself causes no further loss of biodiversity, no more climate change, and no more pandemics.

To achieve such a food and land use system would require concerted international effort – from governments, companies, farmer’s associations, scientists, and communities – akin in scale and ambition to the quest for a Covid-19 vaccine.

The good news is that a global pivot to more sustainable agriculture, healthier diets, & reduced food loss and waste – coupled with a major effort to protect and restore nature – would generate millions of jobs, as well as sustained economic growth and improved well-being.

To achieve these ambitious aims, action in four areas is urgently needed in 2021 and through the decade:
1.Increase flows of finance to fighting hunger. In the course of the past year alone, the number of acutely food insecure people in the world has risen to 690 million.

Excellent video on the use of race in college admissions. If you do not have time to watch the video, the screenshots set out the basic precepts along with the narrowly tailored cases in which race MAY be considered.
h/t: @ConceptualJames

Klopp joined Liverpool in October 2015 with the club 13th in the PL. Having inherited Brendan Rodgers' squad, he saw them finish the season in 8th. To rebuild, FSG made wholesale changes from the front office to the first team, and they experienced their fair share of poor form.

Despite having a clear idea of which areas of the team needed strengthening (in particular, defense), it obviously didn't happen Immediately. Liverpool finished the 2016/17 season in 4th place, having conceded the 2nd most goals of any team in the top 7.

Ahead of 2017/18, LFC spent big [£168m]. But Klopp's side were still very much a work in progress - conceding 16 in the first nine (including a 4-1 loss at Spurs with Lovren subbed on 30'). They signed van Dijk in January, righted the ship, finished 4th and lost in the UCL final.

Having sold off dead weight (£185m) in 2017/18, LFC once again spent big in 2018/19 [£175m]. Key acquisitions bolstered a core who by then knew Klopp's tactics inside out. They lost just once in PL, narrowly missed out on the title by a single point to City and won the UCL final.

With the desired team assembled, LFC only spent £4.5m in the summer before 2019/20. They hit the ground running and bossed the league, winning it comfortably. Klopp's arrival had marked a transformation at Anfield - patience and belief in his project yielded legitimate results.