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THIS IS THE MESSAGE TO BLITZ THE PROVINCE

The mandate from Alberta Health to limit gatherings at Christmas is illegal and has no standing in law. The Alberta Bill of Rights states the following:

" Every law of Alberta shall, unless it is expressly declared by an Act of the

Ok so lets talk blood. Obviously this is an important step forward, however the decisions and recommendations are still seeped in deep institutional homophobia.

A

Context: The ban on gay men giving blood was brought in in 1980 in the face of the AIDS epidemic, where little was known about HIV and testing was patchy at best. This is understandable- however what should have been a temporary measure has remained in status quo for 4 decades 2/

The 'deferral period' of 3 months, brought in in 2011, allowed a straight woman to have unprotected sex with an HIV positive man and give blood the next day while gay men had to remain abstinent for 3 months regardless of the riskiness of their sex. 3/

The obvious problem was that assumptions were being made about the risk of gay men giving blood that showed an ignorance and lack of understanding on the part of policymakers which was rightly criticised and lobbied against 4/

Over the years, LGBT+ lobbying has largely used the image of beautiful white middle class gay men in a long term committed relationship to sell the idea of equality to conservative Britain - 'We're just like you!' we shout as we show people our fascia of respectability. 5/

@MaajidNawaz 2) pre-existing conditions include asthma, mental health issues etc - all kinds of things that don't mean somebody is close to death. And someone in their 60s still has ~20 years of life ahead of them on average.

3) This is based on the erroneous assumption that lockdown causes economic damage - the truth is, covid causes economic damage, and countries that don't deal with covid get damaged the most (Britain has the worst death toll and the worst economic contraction in Europe currently)

4) the first paragraph of this contains some very skewed stats: most scientists agree that IFR is closer to 1% than 0.23%, and 60% vaccination/infection is necessary for herd immunity, not 30-40%

5) The Stanford study is a mess - it takes data from only 10 countries (not enough to draw any meaningful comparisons), and ignores those like Brazil where the result of non-lockdown policies has been catastrophic....

5)... Sweden has horrendous death rates compared to other Nordics (unacknowledged), and the study fails to consider many of the additional extreme measures taken in S Korea (testing to a degree not undertaken anywhere else in the world) that made lockdown unnecessary there.

Ready?
Incoming rant, but serious 😐.

https://t.co/dPsJILZkgP

It really and truly was high-intensity, aimed, microwave radiation that caused “Havana Syndrome” (permanent brain damage) in US and Canadian diplomats while they were stationed in Cuba and China in recent years.

Don’t get caught up in the irrelevant debate about whether these aimed and fired beams of microwave energy were intended to cause physical harm to the brains of our officials (rather than a “side effect” of energy beams fired to activate hidden surveillance gear nearby)...

...
Because it *does not matter* what the official intention was. The facts are:

1. Advanced technology was aimed at official US & CA diplomats.

2. Those diplomats were legally permitted, and expected, to be in those known locations while stationed in Cuba and China.

...

...
3. The devices aimed at our diplomats in Cuba and China were then deliberately and intentionally fired high-energy microwave payloads into the bodies of US and Canadian government officials who were not violating any agreement or law by merely being at these places.

4. In fact, the conventional doctrines of diplomatic immunity extended to official government visitors of this type heavily suggest that even if “Inflicting Brain Damage via Microwave Cannon” was actually a potential criminal penalty...

🧵.@ama_media GPs will soon be able to access new telehealth Medicare items for smoking cessation consults where they can write scripts for nicotine e-cigarettes.

From October, a doctor’s prescription will be required before a person can legally import nicotine e-cigarettes and

liquid nicotine.

The move is designed to curtail use of e-cigarettes, particularly among the young.

But it will also mean more GPs will be able to prescribe them to patients as a smoking cessation product of last resort, and potentially without having to go through the TGA’s

special access scheme.

To support the change new telehealth MBS items will be rolled out from March — although as yet there are few details on which patients will be eligible, what the consults will involve or the rebates.

The AMA says it fears they could be used by a small

group of doctors happy to prescribe e-cigarettes long-term to individual patients.

It has called on the Federal Government to prevent patients claiming the item without an existing face-to-face relationship to their usual GP or their practice.

“We are very concerned about the

idea of a specific item number that would be purely there to facilitate vaping to people with no intention to quit,” @amapresident president @omarkhorshid82 Dr Omar Khorshid said.

“The normal telehealth item numbers are linked to a patient’s usual GP and we wouldn’t want this

Dronepunk: “Flashback”

[CW: Torture, Violence, Firearms, Waterboarding, Vomit, Enhanced Interrogation, Blood, Implied Drug Use, Military Forces, Hypnosis]
[The DronePunk Collective is a creation of @Foresgard and all work here considered non-canon]
1/

Riot_0204 came to. No, not 0204, the person who she was once before she became who she is now. She was bound to a chair, naked. Cable ties at wrist and ankle, cutting into her bare flesh. A bag over her head was pulled off abruptly.
2/

There were two others in the room. DPM uniforms, no insignia or rank marks. One male, armed with a FN rifle. The other, female, was pulling up an improvised crash cart made from a tool trolley.
3/

Through her dimmed perception, she could see the prefab walls and blackout curtains. A headache bright bulb was illuminating over her head. A uniform in tatters on the floor beside her. One eye was bruised shut, saving her half the light.
4/

The female officer slammed a fist into 0204’s stomach. Questions washed over, barely registering.
The mantra trained in came out. Name, Rank, Number… Dead Name. Dead Rank. Dead Number. Dead Person. They don’t live anymore, new life lives in that body.
5/

Few People Know a Contact From Above Occurred HERE in the USA in the Early 1920's. The Couple Contacted were Both Medical Doctors (Sadlers). This Multi-Year Contact in Chicago Resulted in Documents completed in 1935. An Event (WW2) Caused the First Publication Delay Until 1955.

Endowment for the Arts - because of it
6. $300,000,000 for the Endowment for the Humanities/ because no one even knew that was a thing
7. $15,000,000 for Veterans Employment Training / for when the GI Bill isn't enough
8. $435,000,000 for mental health support

9. $30,000,000,000 for the Department of Education stabilization fund/ because that will keep people employed (all those zeros can be confusing, that’s $30 BILLION)
10. $200,000,000 to Safe Schools Emergency Response to Violence Program

11. $300,000,000 to Public Broadcasting / NPR has to be bought by the Democrats
12. $500,000,000 to Museums and Libraries / Who knows how we are going to use it

13. $720,000,000 to Social Security Admin / but get this only 200,000,000 is to help people. The rest is for admin costs
14. $25,000,000 for Cleaning supplies for the Capitol Building / I kid you not it's on page 136
15. $7,500,000 to the Smithsonian for additional salaries

16. $35,000,000 to the JFK Center for Performing Arts
17. $25,000,000 for additional salary for House of Representatives
18. $3,000,000,000 upgrade to the IT department at the VA
19. $315,000,000 for State Department Diplomatic Programs

1/Part 2 on #diabetes #prevention based on the @TheLancet diabetes commission report.

Individual level prevention of type 2 diabetes (T2D) gets a lot of attention. Part 2 reflect this - but don’t worry, there will be more on the other levels in part 3..

Let’s get going..

2/Several large randomized controlled trials (RCT) have shown that lifestyle interventions (diet, exercise, metformin) can prevent/delay onset of T2D as well as prevent later complications like cardiovascular disease and eye disease.

3/This has led to the implementation of diabetes prevention programmes for people at high risk of T2D in some high-income countries (HIC) like Germany, Finland, USA, UK, Poland and Singapore.

4/Evaluation of such real-world interventions is important as they may not provide similar benefits as in the RCTs that included volunteers that were very closely supervised. Evaluation of the US DPP has observed favorable weight loss at 1 year. Similar efforts are underway in UK

5/Although the individual level interventions overall work when there is adherence, it is often only a small proportion of the population that can adhere over time. Hence...

South African doctors are tough. We are used to extreme conditions. Making do with little. Going the extra mile for our patients. We have faced surge after surge of trauma patients hit our depts every weekend, managing the wounded, bleeding, critically injured. A thread 1/

I trained in the early 2000s. When SA didn't have ARVs for patients dying with HIV/Aids. In 2003 as a med student we marched so that South Africans could have access to ARVS. Millions of South Africans died due to the slow rollout of ARVS in the early 2000s 2/

As an intern, as ARVs were just being initiated, countless patients died - too sick to be started on ART, it was too late. As an intern at Bara, I remember certifying 8 patients dead in a night. Some patients were my own age - 24. 3/

ARVs made a huge difference. Life expectancy increased. Child-headed households decreased. More patients living a normal life. The #Covid19SA pandemic has reminded me so much of that pre-ARV era - the helplessness, being overwhelmed with patients and lacking resources 4/

Although we always get nervous when being exposed to HIV, we feel reassured that there ART prophylaxis. With #COVID19 HCWs are at high risk of getting sick, and also severe illness. We have continued to face this fear all year 5/

🚨New paper on "Psychology as a historical science" w/ @JoHenrich & @slingerland20 in Annual Review of Psychology. Catalyzing the field of "historical psychology" by reviewing work on: origins of psychology and institutions today, psychology of the past (data from dead minds) 1/

Our psychology is shaped by our societies, and our societies are shaped by their histories. We can do better than butterfly collecting--just measuring cross-cultural diffs. For psychology to develop a full theory of human behavior, we need historical psychology. 2/

Psychology is shaped by millions of years of genetic evolution, thousands of years of cultural evolution, & a short lifetime of experience; yet, much of the field has focused on that short lifetime of experience. The WEIRD People Problem is not only about geography but history 3/

Past societies can be as culturally distant as distant societies. Cohort effects are a sliver of the cross-temporal variation we would expect in a culturally evolving species. History serves as a kind of psychological fossil record, a source of "data from dead minds". 4/

We (1) review work in historical psychology; (2) introduce methods including causal inference & how to extract data from dead minds; (3) explore the role of theory in mapping history to psychology; and (4) provide some conclusions concerning the future of this field. 5/

good morning! while we wait for @AusPublicHealth to begin their weekly update, here are some things you might've

APH Director Stephanie Hayden starts out talking about the new portal system that pre-registers people for the vaccine, tho the site was down earlier. Not sure if that's still the case.

She stress that vaccine supply is still very limited at the moment.

Says there is not enough vaccine for the entire community yet simply "because we don't have it."

.@MeaEscott says we can't vaccinate ourselves out of the current surge, and we can still take measures to protect ourselves.

Says "we're all frustrated by the number of vaccines available" but protective measures will have to continue until that supply grows.

First Q is about positivity rates in school-age children.

Escott: I'm concerned about positive rates in young people. The situation is different from earlier: Positivity rate is 4x as high as fall and now we have a new variant.

Says it "will be a struggle" to control outbreaks

OK folks, I've decided to take a little time and give you some tips on achieving "Total Self Awareness" and reaching "Bliss", during meditation... The entire exercise requires the quieting of the mind.. If you're new at it, being macho and attempting to meditate..cont

A lot of people are asking about @NightingaleLDN and the current response. Having spent a lot of time there during the last wave, we are proud of all the energy that went into the response. The NHS in London has adapted and changed since the first wave, with hospitals such as 1/

vastly increasing critical care capacity. It was always clear that care would be better delivered within the confines of an established NHS hospital although at the time this capacity was just not there. With the creation of a 170 bed critical care unit 2/

the current efforts are in bringing all that new resource online to help people needing critical care, and this is progressing. One of the challenges @NightingaleLDN was around public information, and this was tricky to overcome. The other challenge in 3/

providing staff was also well documented. NHS staff, especially in the numbers needed to staff a critical care bed are not ‘spare’ when an incident hits and all hospitals, Nightingale or not, are grappling with the staffing challenge. This current wave is huge, and who knows 4/

if the resources of @NightingaleLDN will be needed, even if in a different operating model. It would be silly to say this won’t happen, as the new variant wave is shocking for us all. But the focus on firstly using the additional new capacity within @NHSEnglandLDN is the 5/

JUST IN

"Our healthcare system is at a breaking point."

@MuhyiddinYassin

JUST IN

The government has decided to implement a Movement Control Order (MCO) for 14 days from 12.01am, 13 January 2021.

@MuhyiddinYassin @MKNJPM @KKMPutrajaya

The states under MCO are Penang, Selangor, Melaka, Johor, Sabah and the Federal Territories (KL, Putrajaya, Labuan)

"Social activities that involve large gatherings are not allowed."

@MuhyiddinYassin

"Interstate travel is not allowed nationwide."

@MuhyiddinYassin