Captain America II: Death Too Soon (1979) https://t.co/S89X94JBZ7

After the 9/11 attacks, airlines and public buildings adopted a flurry of "security" measures, like taking away pen-knives from fliers or requiring visitors to office buildings to be photographed or present a driver's license.

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Bruce Schneier's seminal 2003 "Beyond Fear" called these measures: #securitytheater.

Schneier pointed out that these measures would be easy to circumvent, and were thus providing only the comforting appearance of security - not security

Security theater is worse than nothing. Security theater gives people the false impression that their risks have been mitigated, when actually things are just as dangerous.

After al, if you know that danger exists, you can take some steps to mitigate or avoid it.

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But if you have the false impression that you've been made safer, you might unwittingly engage in risky behavior.

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Like, if you know your car's brakes are flaky, you might nurse the car along to the mechanic at low speed on side-streets.

But if you don't know about the brakes, you're apt to discover their flaws at 75mph on the freeway.

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Despite the massive triumphs of the world's largest corporations and most rapacious billionaires during the covid crisis, neoliberalism is in ideological retreat: more people are more critical of the idea that "free markets" can solve big problems than at any time in my life.

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The Democratic nomination race was a fight between the neoliberal wing of the party and the Democratic Socialists, with the candidates representing a spectrum between those two sides (and the odd outlier on either side).

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Supposedly, the party grandees brokered peace between the two main factions, but the left is rightfully suspicious about whether Biden - and Republicans-who-sit-as-Dems like Joe Manchin - will deliver anything beyond symbolic gestures.

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One bright spot: Bernie Sanders is finally chairing the Senate Budget Committee, giving him enormous power over muscular covid relief packages, Medicare expansion, and rolling back Trump and Bush tax-cuts on the

This is where Sanders' long experience in the Senate, and his virtuoso work using its procedures to advance his position, will serve him well. As we saw with McConnell, the ability to wield procedure is a powerful asset in getting stuff done.

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The pandemic has afforded all of us a refresher course on the five stages of grief, a theoretical and controversial framework for describing how people cope with tragedy: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

https://t.co/nqPmjCvyab

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A far slower-moving unfolding of these stages can be seen in the reactions of the super-wealthy to the breakdown in neoliberal orthodoxy, the tale that says that inequality results from meritocracy, and makes us all better

Denial came out in the "rationalist" view: the world is better off than ever - richer, less violent, healthier, and any discontent you feel with your plummeting fortunes and the contracting possibilities for your kids is just your tunnel vision. Lack of perspective.

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But the Great Financial Crisis and Occupy triggered the anger of the elites: violent suppression of protests, the "Doom Boom" in new luxury bunkers, Howard Schultz's insistence that "billionaire" is a slur (he says we should call him a "person of wealth").

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The pandemic - and the "K-shaped recovery"- has revealed the existential threat inequality poses for our species, between price-gouging, fraud, profiteering, flouting health directives, and coercing the poor and vulnerable into risking their lives to keep the economy afloat.

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@FionaPearman @ScottMorrisonMP Morrison is our statue of unempathic neoliberalism - erected by evangelical and corporate Australia to celebrate their victory over compassion, equality and secular humanism. 

Hopefully it gets pulled down like the statues of dubious heroes of oppression from an earlier age.

@ScottMorrisonMP The two-party-preferred system in 
Australia politics isn’t working for people, and it sure isn’t working for the planet.

@ScottMorrisonMP My collapse of faith in our democracies isn’t an accident. It’s one of the central victories of the neoliberal project, delivered through two generations of privatisation, outsourcing and deregulation, underfunding of government services (locked in by tax cuts),...

@ScottMorrisonMP restricting freedom of information, targeting whistleblowers and raiding the media who report on them, delegitimising and gagging public interest advocacy, and criminalising protest.

@ScottMorrisonMP Politics in Australia today relies hugely on the fact that most people don’t know most of what’s going on so as to get away with stuff that couldn’t be done under real scrutiny we have seen a clear example of this with the National Coronvirus Cabinet.

#SuvenLife – Niche R&D play..very high risk and very high reward…key is right allocation…

Jazz Pharma was quoting around $0.5 in 2009, today its $150 and Mcap of $8.5 Bn on Nasdaq..almost 300x in 11 years. 80% of its total sales ($2.1 Bn) come from single drug Xyrem.

Axovant Lifescience, bought Alzheimer molecule from GSK, repackaged it and done phase-3 trials. Before starting the trials, the valuation was $2 Bn, just before announcing the data, it rose to $3 Bn. One of the leading broker put the target of $12 Bn if the trials succeeded..

but it failed in phase-3 trials. Current Mcap is $120 Mn…

This is R&D for New Chemical Entity (NCE)…very high risk and very high reward…

Brain-related illnesses, also known as CNS diseases, afflict more than 2 billion people worldwide. Diseases of the brain and mind range

from Alzheimer’s, dementia, epilepsy, migraine, multiple sclerosis, neuro infections, Parkinson’s, psychosis, schizophrenia and stroke to brain injuries and various mental disorders. The global market or CNS therapeutics is projected to reach $137.7 billion by 2025.

#SuvenLife has 1 lead molecule SUVN-G3031 in phase-2 trials which is similar to Xyrem but superior features, 3 molecules completed phase-1 trials and starting phase-2 trials and 11 molecules in pre-clinical trials. All are related to CNS which is growing and uncluttered market

#Suven – Journey of my first 50 bagger…

I bought #Suven first in Apr 2013 around Rs 20…today after almost 7.5 years, its Rs 1000 (Suven pharma 920 adjusted for bonus + Suven Life 80)..CAGR of almost 68% for 7.5 years. I am fortunate to hold it throughout the journey and

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add on multiple occasions on way up. Like to share my experience in this thread for everyone’s benefit..

First time I bought because I like the management focus on R&D. It had chosen the most difficult therapeutic area in pharma which is CNS and it was investing the cash

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flow it used to earn from CRAMS. It also used to write off all the R&D expenses in the P&L instead of capitalizing it in BS. That gave me lot of comfort about management quality.

I kept on adding as funds keep coming. I remember giving a public presentation on Suven in

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Mumbai at one analyst meet in Nov 2017 when it was trading at Rs 160. There was a huge call option embedded at that time in the form of SUVN-502. That would have been the blockbuster molecule if succeeded with market potential of $10 Bn plus..result was due in Dec 2019,

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I loaded around 250-300 knowing the value of CRAMS business itself is more than 300.

SUVN-502 failed in phase-II trials, stock was down 15% from 300 to 250 in a single day, I added heavily. it was largest allocation in my portfolio because I knew the value of CRAMS business

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It's a slow, snowy afternoon. How about a 🧵 on "rationalists" & "rationalism"? I want to talk about what real rationalism might look like & what people devoted to rationalism might actually behave like--and how that differs from what you often see from self-styled rationalists.

Caveat up front: this is not about Slate Star Codex, which I haven't read regularly enough to have an opinion on, or about the recent controversy between SSC & the NYT. I'm more interested in the *idea* of rationalism (vs. the practice).

The core premise of rationalism, as I understand it, is simply that humans' cognitive machinery was not designed by evolution to find truth, but rather to advance the interests & welfare of the collective -- a Venn overlap, but not the same thing. Therefore ...

... reasoning well, both individually & as groups, requires special effort. It requires consciously trying to set aside the parochialism, biases, & other distortions that typically characterize our thinking -- resisting, to some extent, the dynamics of group membership/welfare.

That's all fine. I agree entirely that we should make special effort to reason well & to guard against the typical failures of reasoning to which we humans are prone. I believe it's the best (maybe only) way forward as a species. So far so good.