1. If baffles me that with so many attorneys on Twitter none spot the issue. Trump's entire team quits ten days before one of the historic trials of all time. That only happens under one circumstance that I know. DC applies version of the ABA Model rules of Professional Conduct.

The focal S:N501 build has been updated with data from 15 Jan, & includes 164 non-UK, non-South African sequences in 501Y.V1 (B.1.1.7 #b117) & 501Y.V2.

The S:E484 build has also been updated. Includes 501Y.V3 & 20B/S.484K (predominantly in Brazil).

1/16

https://t.co/3bdttjKVl4

There are 161 new, non-UK sequences in 501Y.V1 (B.1.1.7) from the Netherlands, Denmark, Australia, Spain, Norway, Germany, the USA, & Switzerland, and from Turkey and Ecuador for the first time.

2/16

Turkey has 19 sequences in 501Y.V1 for the first time. These indicate many independent introductions, though a few clusters may indicate local transmission, and pairs with common exposure.

3/16

Ecuador has 4 sequences in 501Y.V1 for the first time, which represent 2 separate introductions (pic 2). 3 are identical, and may represent exposure to a common source (pic 3). The connection to the Spanish sequence may be a common source, or onward transmission.

4/16

Denmark has 66 new sequences (orange). A few are independent introductions, though many link with older sequences, showing continuing local transmission.

5/16

I’ve done two interviews in the past day with media about the Twitter/Facebook bans and the Parler shut down.

I’m trying to use these opportunities to stress something is getting lost in all the debates about the action: conversation about free expression is the wrong debate. 1/

It’s pretty clear at this point the First Amendment doesn’t apply. The only people making that argument are craven politicians who are trying to gin up anger.

An expression debate focuses on the content. What I keep underlining is social media is a distribution platform too. 2/

What this means is that when someone gets on and posts conspiracy theory content or seditious incitement, it isn’t a question of whether it will be distributed. The publishing platform has the tools for outreach and connection that let that content travel. 3/

Think about me in my basement printing up some nutty manifesto on my laser printer. I still have a problem of reach. How do I get that message out? I could walk the neighborhood or the city, but I’m limited by time and ability.

Working with others takes social connection. 4/

Publishing through a third-party allows for mass printing, but the real power is distribution. They have marketing, sales, shipping arms to make sure those things end up in the hands of others. 5/

1 / A thread about ‘gender markers’. I’d never heard of the term until I visited a friend in hospital after they’d just been castrated and had their penis inverted (‘bottom surgery’ in gender woo woo speak). I went along to be supportive and gave my friend a pink “It’s a girl!”

2 / card. Because I knew that would make my friend feel good. Also brought a cupcake, stuck a candle in it and celebrated the new ‘birth day’. At one point I reached for my bag on the floor and as I got back up unsuspectingly caught a glimpse of the bloodied bandages in between

3 / my friend’s legs, that was only visible from that particular angle. “You’re having your first period!” I squealed nervously, and felt a weird pang in my groin, knowing my friend used to have a rather sizeable and beautiful penis b4 the surgery and now it was all so... flat!

4 / We laughed and my friend also joked about having been worried that the newly created ‘canal’ wouldn’t be deep enough (for penetration, I assume), but that the surgeon had said it was pretty deep (due to big penis) & my friend better be careful not to lose anything down there

5 / There were 2 other friends there - males identifying as women. The talk was all about surgery, and particularly FFS (facial feminisation surgery). I never knew that was a thing. FFS is about reducing or removing the appearance of ‘gender markers’. I felt so naive and asked

Vaccines against the three major killers of the world's poorest: TB, HIV and malaria are unlikely to have vaccines anytime soon unless vastly more money is committed to researching them, according to the Bill Gates-funded Gates Open Research...

Combined, HIV, TB and malaria kill up to 6 million people a year worldwide, yet the foremost leading voice for production of vaccines in the world says getting vaccines for them is not a priority. Why is that?

When one considers that only about 500 people die of TB in the United States a year, it becomes clear that millions dying in Africa, is not important enough to warrant putting more effort into researching vaccines for them

This reveals - albeit expected - a level of hypocrisy from those who claim to want to save the lives of Africans from a pandemic which doesn't even do anything to Africans, at least relative to the Big 3 killers...

Furthermore, other solutions including a hepatitis C vaccine, a combination vaccine against the four leading causes of deadly diarrhoea and a rapid TB cure have been identified by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and by extension the WHO as non-priorities

Have you seen the stories about how Trump administration officials and staffers for Ted Cruz are finding that no one in the private sector will hire them because they are forever tainted by their former bosses' disgraceful behavior?

They're bullshit.

https://t.co/XvYDPpR9yd

1/

The Swamped site from @twittlesis is a crowdsourced list of Trump's ugliest swamp-gators and the employers who put them in positions of power and authority despite their complicity with a fascist would-be

On @TheProspect, @alex_sammon provides highlights of the swamp-to-industry pipeline.

Unsurprisingly, babykiller companies LOVE Trump's gators. Jim Mattis? Board member for General Dynamics. Andrea Thompson? Northrop Grumman. HR McMaster? Zoom.

Rick Perry is back at Energy Transfer Partners, parleying his government service into a plum role in energetically rendering the planet unfit for human habitation.

Ryan Zinke's in fintech.

4/

As punishment for his multitude of sins as the president's personal attorney, Donald McGahn has been sentenced to the Wearing of the White Shoes, threatening people on behalf of the clients of corporate law powerhouse Jones Day.

5/

Imagine if, in the midst of the massive BLM riots this summer, the entire tech infrastructure had deplatformed Facebook because some had used that app to plan events devolving into violence. People would rightly have called that an insane act of ideological fascism.

Yet today, media will celebrate Amazon doing exactly that to Parler. The tech bros are making a horrible and dangerous moment significantly more horrible and dangerous. There are no consistent standards being applied. There is reactionary deplatforming in the name of one side.

Private companies are by law free to do what they like. That’s why I have always said that the solution to the censorship of Twitter is alternatives -- which is what Parler was attempting to be, whatever its flaws.

But when the technological instruments necessary for speech are located in essentially three companies, all of which are moving toward like-minded censorship (Amazon controls about half of all public-cloud infrastructure, Microsoft 16%, and Google 4%), that avenue closes.

I am by nature anti-regulation. But even the consumer-based theory of anti-monopoly championed by free market advocates cuts in favor of anti-monopolistic regulation if these companies are acting in de facto collusion to shut all avenues of dissent.

Ian Wright of Food and Drink Federation says transport will get worse - trucks corssing short straits now about 2,000 - normally 10,000. Also Irish sea volumes very light, system not stressed but will be

Was Covid crisis a dress rehearsal for Brexit? Supply chais for food and medicines kept running. No, says Ian Wright, because there was no paperwork. Says Covid health checks at Dover was more of a dress rehearsal. Says backlog from that was still being cleared on NYE

Andrew Opie says Covid food supply was internal challenge, not external. Learnings from Dover: problem is often empty food lorries going back to Fr, ESP etc - about 1/3rd going back empty - being prioritised to keep food supply going

Stephen Kinnock MP says steel exports subject to quota - above quota tariff of 25% applies. Exports GB to NI count as part of export quota to EU (Port Talbot steel works in his constituency)

Phipson of Make UK says there are easements that could be put in place for steel and other matters but claims EU reluctant to do so for political reasons

@LetsTalkZorro @zjcat7 @Julie76983198 @ggbrokensilence
1. Why did Epstein want Zorro Ranch?
* 23 miles away is Santa Fe.
"This was once a drugstore, Zook’s Pharmacy, that doubled as a base for Russian espionage; in between filling prescriptions and ringing up customers, deep

2. cover Stalinist spies here plotted the death of Leon Trotsky and later coordinated efforts to steal the secrets of the atomic bomb from Los Alamos (distance from Zorro Ranch: 50 miles)"
*There’s the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West, a selective

3. international boarding school in Montezuma founded by Armand Hammer and PRINCE CHARLES, originally a resort hotel built on a hot springs sacred to the Jicarilla Apache, the previous inhabitants of the Sangre De Cristos
*There are also the sites where the Catholic Church hid

4. pedophile priests in local parishes, until a tsunami of lawsuits from victims forced New Mexico’s largest diocese to file for bankruptcy last June. One of those places is in Jemez Springs (Distance from Zorro Ranch: 50 miles.)

5. Here, the Catholic Church still operates one of two treatment centers in the United States for pedophile priests
* A little over 80 miles northwest of Zorro Ranch is Trementina Base, a bunker and vault complex owned by the Church of Spiritual Technology—an elite order within

A few weeks ago, I asked this question: since Muigai doesn't respect the 2010 constitution, why is he invested in #BBInonsense, and in getting Kenyans to accept? He can just run for another term, send cops to kill people, the US will support him and he will remain in office.

The great #KOT explained this to me: #BBINonsense isn't about destroying the constitution. It's about destroying the story. Unfortunately, the only story which we use to challenge Muigai is the constitution.

We don't know our history, we have no theology, our arts are commercialized, our cultures are corrupted, and our education is destroyed. The last pillar standing between us and full scale uthamaki fascism is the Constitution 2010.
#BBINonsense #UhuruinSagana

I honor the lawyers and those working hard to ensure #BBINonsense doesn't happen. But I hallenge us in the arts, in faith, in history to do our work to spport those in law with philosophical, theological, artistic and educational arguments against #BBINonsense.

If Magoha can say, despite the constitution, that kids should be caned, it means that education is completely spineless. #uhuruinsagana #BBInonsense

Do the events in Ondo and Oyo states remind us of anything?

For me, it does. First, the gradual but sure erosion of the sovereignty of our nation-state. Note: I exaggerate the meaning of sovereignty here: that ultimate power of the state that resides in the people.

A thread

Our sovereignty is a fiction as it doesn't lie in the people; it lies in the cabal - a fiendish cohort, gang of criminals who have captured the nation - state.

Secondly, it highlights the Yugoslavia-tion of Nigeria. Or what my friend @ChidiOdinkalu describes as the

gradual restructuring of Nigeria. How can restructure happen without it being noticed? We've to look in the direction of Yugoslavia to understand how 6 ethnic nations - with same language (Serbio-Crotia) - were forced into a union and how centrifugal & centripetal forces worked

to destroy it or knolled the death's knell as someone described it earlier on my timeline.

Inspite of, three issues are emerging from the Ondo and Oyo saga:

1. The reassertion of the civic public - or what I call the civil activia - the active civic.

Here, there is a growing insistence by the people on the sovereignty of the people: the people have become the counterweight to forceful power and are resisting attempt by power to determine state protection. Sunday Igboho represents this

The Chartwells/Compass free school meals package scandal is a teachable moment about capitalism. 1/ Why do so many families need free school meals? Because real wages have stagnated while profits soared...

2/ Why packages and not vouchers? Because the big outsourcers like Compass *lobbied the government* against vouchers, claiming they could use their scale to provide cheaper food...

3/ Here's the business model in a single graphic. Buy food as cheap as possible. Achieve growth by replacing/acquiring smaller, higher-quality providers, hire the cheapest possible labour...("we focus relentlessly on costs")... but it's not done to make huge bottom line profits

4/ If you look at a normal year, Compass and other big outsourcers make relatively meagre profits... they grow, and drive dividends, by acquisition - not by innovation... (except in ways to cut costs)...

5/ Businesses like this were created by the state. They're not the product of the market, or consumer choice, but of regulation. They survive on wafer thin margins because that's how the govt structured the market...

Some people in this country are sincerely confused to hear people talk about “white supremacy” in conjunction with politics in America today. At the same time, a lot of people, both openly and in private, have consternation about changing demographics in America.

Let me explain.

In 1870, right after the Civil War, the US Census showed that there were six states in which African Americans made up more than 45% of the state population - South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Alabama and Georgia. The region we call the “Deep South” plus Florida.

Ten years prior, many of these human beings were considered to be the legal property of other human beings. And then came the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution. Suddenly, these former slaves were citizens. And the men could VOTE.

Suddenly, a lot of whites in these southern states had the fear that they were now either in the minority or at least not in a strong plurality. Their former subjects were now recognized as their equals according to the text of the US Constitution.

And they freaked out.

@6loss I think Stallman's politics is left and libertarian (where libertarian is "extreme liberal"). The intuition most of us had originally is that with enough freedom, the good drives out the bad. As you know, I think we might be discovering that that is "wrong" in some sense ... \1

But it's still a viable and attractive intuition.

And, yes, the GPL etc. is built on that. So freedom is more important than trying to constrain people to do good.
\2

Furthermore ... pragmatically, this appeal to pure freedom clearly engages and recruits more people than if Stallman had tried to use GPL to enforce his own wider political views. You have "right-libertarians" (ESR, or Lessig) on-board with GPL. \3

Finally, I think there is a question whether you could legally codify and enforce restrictions on use. GPL is all about hacking existing copyright law and its definition of "derivative". Because derivation is a well established legal idea, that bit is "easy". \4

Obviously other things like CC or GPL Affero start putting more restrictions (Eg. non-commercial, or "can't use the software on a server without sharing") which push the envelope a bit. I'm sure others have tried to put restrictions eg. "can't use for military" into licenses \5

Everyone should be a lifelong learner.

We stagnate when we're okay with the status quo. But by spotting areas for improvement, we can thrive and live a life worth living.

🧵 My top five reasons to keep learning.

Learning doesn't stop when you leave school.

If you want to thrive in life, you should always be learning. Once you embrace learning as a part of your life, the world will become a playground full of possibilities.

Five reasons everyone should be a lifelong learner:

Reason 1: Learning is fun

Learning allows adults to be playful like kids. Following our curiosity and learning something new, we get little hits of dopamine — the neurotransmitter associated with rewards.

Learning is natural, but it gets shrouded in seriousness the older we get.

Make learning fun to keep it sustainable.

Reason 2: Learning creates possibilities

Most modern jobs rely on specialized knowledge, but that knowledge is changing fast. Companies look for people who can learn new skills quickly.

If you can proof you can learn something, you'll have a job.

Popping back on briefly to share some insights on media consumption, spread of conspiracy theories, & epistemelogical divides.

.@n_d_anderson & I have spent the last few days having important conversations w/ family members who fall in the evangelical right matrix.

We didn't talk presenting issues & aimed our Qs instead for the underlying divides. @DavidAFrench identified this in a recent article as the difference btwn the danger of believing activating lies & enabling lies.

A couple things became apparent very quickly:

1) We had to be the ones to insist on conversation. People are afraid of conversation right now b/c they think it will turn into a fight & they don't want that w/ people they love. Meanwhile, the epistemological divides widen.

2) We had to clarify the underlying disconnects--and they aren't simply at a policy or issue level. Unfortunately, people have been trained to see positions or votes as representative of certain things that don't necessarily represent. But this leads to biggest takeaway...

Thread: 1. Hyperreality comes from the observation that in postmodern society the division between virtual and the real becomes illusive. Hyperpolitics is the blending of hyperreality and politics, or of politically themed infotainment (especially conspiracies) and politics.

I was asked to tell my story. so here we go. Long story short version.

1)My Muslim neighbours. 12 years. The 1st few years were good. Broke bread. Many discussions over coffee on the deck. Kids were young, in school. Then the oldest boy married a girl from Lebanon, had children, who I loved with all my heart. And they loved me.

2)Oldest girl off to University in Edmonton. Social Justice studies. THAT’S when things started to change. Went to work for Omar Khadr’s lawyer. I noticed things. The little ones were not allowed to come and visit me. Hug me. They would whisper in Arabic right in front of me.

3)I was like WTF is going on here? Then 2nd son married a Russian Muslim. Many problems with getting her here to Canada. Offered a lot of moral support through that. When I welcomed her and her child, she turned away and went in the house. 🤔🤷🏻‍

4) I talked with my other neighbour about the changes. She had been a VERY good friend of Zalfa’s. Zalfa did not wear a hijab, wore jeans, sweatshirts. THEN. New Imam. Over night. Hijab, Arabic dress, etc. Wouldn’t go to her house. Kids not allowed over if they had eaten pork.