A very rare combination of two wonderful deities - "Pachu" and "Varadhu".

(Parthasarathy of Thiruvallikeni and Varadarajar of Kanchi, TN).

Sri Partasarathy:
The name 'Parthasarathy', in Sanskrit, means the 'Charioteer of Arjuna', referring to Lord Krishna's role as a charioteer to Arjuna in the epic Mahabaratha.

His face is full of scars depicted to show the injuries caused by the arrows of Bhishma in the war.

Sri Varadarajar:

The Puranic History reveals that the Lord Varadaraja appeared from the flames of Yaga Agni (Holy Fire) in a most beautiful form carrying five weapons and with his consorts Sri Devi and Bhudevi.

The scars in His face are due to the heat caused by the those flames of Yaga Agni.

My name is Itzik Yaakobi, son of Olga and Yaakov Elimelech, brother to Klari (all of blessed memory), survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, number B.11057.

This is my story.

#HowItzikSurvived

📸 Yediot Achronot

I was born in Debrecen, Hungary to an ultra-Orthodox family.

Under my father Yaakov Elimelech's direction, I spent my childhood studying religious and Jewish texts.

My fondest memory is studying the weekly Torah Portion with my father.

📸 @MakorRishon

This is my father of blessed memory who perished in the #Holocaust.

#HowItzikSurvived

While many of my childhood memories have been obliterated by the trauma I experienced during the #Holocaust, I remember Yulia, our non-Jewish housekeeper who I was very found of and who would give me double portions of Gefilte fish.

📸 The synagogue in Debrecen

When I was 13, the Nazis came to power in Hungary & forcibly moved all Jews into ghettos.

The conditions were unbearable. There was little food.

The Nazis purposely fed us pork (forbidden by Jewish law). My mother made me eat it because we were starving. I vomited it up.

For some non-Covid news, and as a bit of recent political history, I’ve been released more than 100 pages of internal press office communications relating to the Home Office’s fried chicken box saga.

You may remember back in heady 2019 that there was an uproar after the government provided takeaway boxes with anti-knife crime messages to chicken shops around the country.

The campaign faced an immediate backlash, with critics questioning why fried chicken shops — stereotypically associated with young black communities — were being targeted by the Home Office for this campaign against knife crime.

The emails I’ve been released show that privately, officials admitted that the outcry risked angering the communities the campaign was trying to reach out to.

A briefing prepared by a Home Office official highlighted that they were “unsure what could be done publicly” to rebuff the criticism, and that the campaign’s focus on chicken boxes had created a perception that the campaign had “publicised racist stereotypes”.

#Bitcoin has never taken any money from anybody. Every person in the world that bought #BTC and did not sell or lose it has made money. I mean hard money too. The only ones that lost either sold it or lost it. What’s the lesson?

The simple answer is #HODL don’t sell and secure it, but not many have done that #. Why? Here is what I learnt from being involved in #Bitcoin for over a decade.

1. You need to overcome the emotions of fear and greed which is hard wired into the human psychology. Not so easy.

2. You need to resist the urge to trade when everybody is telling you #Bitcoin is going to be killed by another competitor or it’s a scam or it’s a Ponzi scheme or it’s just for drug dealers or it’s a dinosaur compared to other crypto or it’s going to get banned or etc. etc. etc.

3. You need to learn how to become your own bank that requires learning a new skill that became easier over time, but was very hard in the early days. Securing your own wealth without a bank gives you freedom, but new problems to solve.

@contrarianEPS @PortfolioYoga I was working with 10 year of Balance Sheet / P&L data, both IGL and Guj Gas don't have it, so missed out.

“Why are all of the artists on the left?”

This myopic observation is a source of misunderstanding and shortsighted resignation for many on the right, both regarding the nature of creativity itself and a path forward for creating a new canon.

Do we actually think the most gifted actors, musicians, and artists are highly literate in political theory? Are they dedicating time to dissecting the precepts of leftist philosophy, intentionally cultivating a revolutionary worldview?

Of course not. If you have the temperament to be a genuinely creative person, you more than likely have laser-focused on your goal, dedicating yourself to the execution of your artistic vision. This is an exhaustive process that requires the full commitment of your being.

This is a good thing - it’s what we want and expect of our artists. They should dance between the practical, the possible, and the seemingly impossible.

I don’t want to live in a world where an anomalous wellspring of creative potential also has to occupy his time guaranteeing he is up to date on the intricacies of some political issue du jour.

Reflecting on the discussion over School Exclusions, it's struck me that many see the concept of Abolition as like "Reform, only better". My experience of running a prison segregation unit has informed my view of how wrong this is. And so... A THREAD 1/

Firstly, updating laptop prevents a blog post, but I may get to that later, if so, I'll link below. To begin: A few years ago, I took over the senior management position in a prison that had departmental responsibility for the prison's Segregation Unit 2/

A Segregation unit is essentially a small living unit within a prison, where people can be taken for the purposes of punishment, or separation from the general population for safety reasons. 3/

When I took over the function, there were normally 12-16 residents, and almost never fewer. There are rules around how/why you can segregate people, which are too much for twitter, but for our purposes, we'll use the two main "themes"- Punishment and Safety 4/

People can be segregated as a punishment after an Adjudication, or held for the good order and discipline of the prison. (See the parallels with the school exclusions debate?) Segregation is not the only punishment available from Adjudication, but is often seen as the top one 5/

Chuck Grassley just now on the Senate floor, without a shred of self-awareness

"The president has every right to discuss ideas & strategies with his closest advisors ... for robust discussion" -- Grassley is talking here about Trump's attempts to scheme with the DOJ to overthrow a free and fair election

It's time we have a discussion about targeting. Let's set aside with the ejection aspect, for a moment, as I believe that needs changed. But undeniably, undoubtedly and unequivocally this was not only not a "textbook" form tackle, it was textbook targeting (formerly spearing).

1

The version of this targeting rule predates targeting itself. The rule began in 1975 as what was called "spearing" as the "deliberate use of the head and helmet" to punish an opponent. No player should use helmet "butt" or "ram" an opponent.

2

Anyone that played pee wee football in the 80s, 90s or beyond should know this as common sense. Every little leaguer football player was taught on day one not to look down when form tackling and not use the top of your helmet. This was a spear. Kids know this.

3

In 1976, the rule was modified more adding the indicator "(N)o player shall intentionally strike a runner with the crown or top of his helmet," to the rule.

This revision brought more clarity to what you could and could not do with the crown of your helmet.

4

Again the rule was modified, slightly, in 1990 to include the facemask. Although leading with the facemask WAS actually a good form tackle, you couldn't do it maliciously. This version of the rule continued on until 2005. Then...

5

For not many men, the proverb says, can love a friend who fortune
prospers without feeling envy;

and about the envious brain, cold poison clings and doubles all the pain life brings him.

His own woundings he must nurse, and feels another's gladness like a curse.

-Aeschylus

US law enforcement has literal centuries of shameful history of infiltrating and spying on politically disfavored activist groups, from trade unionists to suffragists to abolitionists to civil rights advocates to antiwar advocates.

1/

Long before #cointelpro, federal agencies were intercepting communications and embedding as provocateurs in radical political movements, often with the help of mercenary "contractors" like the @pinkerton_agent. The digital age only ramped up this public-private surveillance.

2/

The #NoDAPL protests were infiltrated and surveilled by beltway bandits who billed the US taxpayer handsomely for the

2020's #BLM uprising was subjected to the full array of military and national intelligence surveillance: drones, IMSI catchers, mass interception, infiltrators, wiretaps, "reverse warrants" to recover location data from Big Tech monopolists and

And yet, federal and local agencies were seemingly totally unprepared for a mob of thousands of armed terrorists who stormed the capitol, disrupted the transition of presidential power, and threatened the lives of US legislators as well as the integrity of state documents.

5/

I've been thinking: What if the Texas case was a test for SCOTUS to see how deeply it had been corrupted? As Thomas noted with Alito's concurrence, SCOTUS is the court of original jurisdiction for disputes between States.

1/

Thomas is by far the most originalist Justice on the Court. While I haven't read the opinion closely, if he did not see a problem with standing, there most assuredly was NOT a problem with standing.

2/

That would mean that Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett failed the test, along with Roberts, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer. SEVEN Justices corrupted at SCOTUS.

3/

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002.

His book Thinking Fast & Slow distills his work on human decision making. In doing so, it highlights both the brilliance & limitations of the human mind.

Here’s a summary.

🧵 Thread 🧵

Kahneman begins by introducing the mind’s two modes of thought.

System 1 is automatic, fast, unconscious & effortless.

System 2 is deliberate, slow, conscious & effortfull.

The first accounts for around 95% of all our mental processing. The second, 5%.

To operate efficiently, System 1 uses shortcuts to produce “good enough” solutions whilst expending as little time & energy as possible.

This creates imperfections in human decision making that economists, and their rational-agent perspective, rarely account for.

Here’s 12:

01: Priming

System 1 is an associative machine. When presented with a word such as “lime”, it will easily generate others, such as “green” or “sour”.

This makes us susceptible to priming, in which a common association is invoked to move us in a given direction.

02: Cognitive Ease

System 1 welcomes information which is more easily processed.

Cognitive ease can arise from repetition and simplicity. Even falsehoods will be accepted if they are simple and familiar enough to be effortlessly processed.

Thread. I think being a parent to autistic children requires a very different set of parenting skills. I started out classical parenting in 2001. It made my life (& theirs) very hard and miserable indeed 🙈 I examine what I now realise I really needed below. I had to shapeshift

Foreword. I didn’t find out I was autistic until 2017. Many of my kids were not even diagnosed themselves and it’s hard to respond right when you don’t even know or understand what you are even working with 🙈 anyway I realised . . .

Last week I got a link from Ahrefs (domain authority 90). Huge SEO win!

But it didn’t just happen. I had to make it happen.

Here’s how I did it.

A month ago Ahrefs published an article about the best marketing newsletters.

As soon as I saw it, I knew Zero to Marketing had to be in there!

There was just one problem.

I had to pitch @timsoulo, a guy who writes posts like this one 😅

So what I did was I kept a patient eye on him on Twitter, waiting for an opening.

Act 1 - The foot in the door

Act 2 - The proposal

#Fractals #Mandelbrot. Powerful insights. Using some of the concepts of that framework. The Micro and the Macro (aggregation of Micros); imagine if you will, we as a Species wanted to populate other planets. How would we do it? What structure, design makes most sense?

We might want incorporate our Creation in a manner similar to how we arrived at said new planet. Largest cell in humans is Female Egg. Smallest cell is male sperm. The big bang in "Creation of life" is a fusion of those two. Imagine an asteroid that carried our #DNA (it is sperm)

And hit the proverbial Egg (another planet) to seed life. Our bodies rebuild every part of themselves every 7 years. All of it, no single cell is supposedly left from previous build. Imagine if you will the 3 billion plus lines of code in every one of our living cells containing

Not only all the knowledge of our species but the assembly blocks to create an organic organism that had a brain to interpret the very material in our DNA? Furthermore, imagine if we had embedded antennas to share knowledge across time and space (ants and bees come to mind).

As we go through life we encode, capture these experiences and pass them, as they move from short term memory to long term memory via the rebuilding process of every cell in our body overtime. For years, people have talked about us evolving from animals, what if every plant and

☀️ This morning’s newsy @PunchbowlNews AM

"Trump's role in the riot"

Here’s a challenge: Make the argument that Donald Trump had nothing to do with the riot at the Capitol after the first few days of the impeachment trial.

It’s damn tough.
The Democratic impeachment managers did something Wednesday that desperately needed to be done: They laid out in a thorough, comprehensive and digestible manner what Trump said and did in the months and days leading up to the bloody Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

They covered all aspects of Trump’s shocking behavior -- his provocative tweets, TV interviews and speeches claiming the election was being stolen; his months-long campaign to undermine the American public’s faith in the election results;

his efforts, both public and private, to overturn those results once it was clear he lost, especially his attempts to pressure former Vice President Mike Pence;

his repeated appeals to his supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6, the same day Congress was set to certify Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory;