I've spent the past year as angry as I've been since the early days of the AIDS epidemic when I had to bury friends in their 20s, 30s because our government didn't care if gay men lived or died from a new virus among us. 1/

Some were put off by my anger, some thought scientists shouldn't be political or if they were tone it down a bit. 2/
I work in public health. I am not a basic scientist or a theoretician. I work in a field that is hemmed in by history and politics on every side. 3/
From the 19th century onwards, we've known that who lives and who dies isn't just a function of biology. The data support this thesis, we call them the social determinants of health. 4/
My friend and colleague Paul Farmer calls out these determinants in more direct terms as pathologies of power, structural violence. 5/
The pathologies of power--have been on full display in 2020. The severity of the epidemic, who got sick, who died, were as much about social and economic forces as they were about a new virus #SARSCoV2. 6/
The health inequities that drove this pandemic were here long before @realDonaldTrump. Democrats & Republicans collectively created the conditions for what we've seen. A disinvestment in public health, a fractured health care system, a weak safety net. 7/ https://t.co/zwyI9hyX9D
If the Democrats win the Senate, the @GOP will still hold the majority of the blame for the carnage. It's all documented by journalists now, the incompetence, cruelty. They can try to spin it otherwise, but let the record show... 8/
But we have a new direction to choose. We can tinker, play the "austerity" politics of the 90s, 00s or think bigger. If we want "out" of #COVID19 and to be ready for the next big pandemic we need a New Deal for Public Health. 9/ https://t.co/7gAFq84QhN
Hope is on the horizon. The new Congress and @joebiden have to go big or go home. 10/
Many conservatives, particularly the @realDonaldTrump dead-enders think my fury is only for the @GOP. They see things in partisan terms. I ask: who has the power? Now @TheDemocrats will have the power. If they fail to deliver, guess what? 11/
I am pro-public health, so are the other activists out there who've been fighting for our lives, whether its been about AIDS, breast cancer, T1 diabetes, TB or HCV. So we will hold @joebiden, @chuckschumer & @SpeakerPelosi's feet to the fire. 12/
We're here to help. All of us would have rushed to help any administration who was serious about the pandemic. But we can't just dust ourselves off and pretend like we can go back to politics as normal. 13/
We need a new politics of care, we need to
"start to build a new movement that heals us and our body politic, and that will allow us—all of us—to survive a pandemic, and then, to thrive." 14/ https://t.co/kU65Lfqrvy
So there is hope this morning, if @senatemajldr is now Senate Minority Leader. He was the single most pernicious obstacle to getting ourselves out of this pandemic better than we came in. There's hope this morning. Who's in for the fight? end/

More from Gregg Gonsalves

And this pathetic move by @JDVance1 isn't what is so odious about him. He's just a phony, all ambition, no real interest in public service. He made a big show out of moving back to #Ohio to start a group to work on the #opioid epidemic. 1/


I work on the opioids, on research on the epidemic, its relationship with HIV/HCV, overdose. I work with data from Ohio, so care deeply about what is going on there. I was excited. Until I started digging. There's no there there. 2/

More here. 3/

You can even read their IRS-990-N filing. Sure looks like @JDVance1 tried real hard on combatting the opioid epidemic in his state. Um. Not. 4/

Now he's moved on to venture capital. Money is more interesting than the suffering of the people of #Ohio I guess. 5/
Important tweet from @jaketapper. One amendment: mainstream media will try to change the subject too. It's not a new criticism, the deferential spirit among the political press corps has been noted since Didion wrote about it in the 1990s.


"Those who talk to Mr. Woodward, in other words, can be confident that he will be civil (“I too was growing tired, and it seemed time to stand up and thank him”), that he will not feel impelled to make connections between..." 1/

"what he is told and what is already known that he will treat even the most patently self-serving account as if untainted by hindsight..." 2/

"In this business of running the story, in fact in the business of news itself, certain conventions are seen as beyond debate. “Opinion” will be so labeled, and confined to the op-ed page or the Sunday-morning shows." 3/

"'News analysis' will be so labeled, and will appear in a subordinate position to the 'news' story it accompanies. In the rest of the paper as on the evening news, the story will be reported “'impartially,' the story will be 'even-handed,' the story will be 'fair.'” 4/

More from Life

THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)

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Trump is gonna let the Mueller investigation end all on it's own. It's obvious. All the hysteria of the past 2 weeks about his supposed impending firing of Mueller was a distraction. He was never going to fire Mueller and he's not going to


Mueller's officially end his investigation all on his own and he's gonna say he found no evidence of Trump campaign/Russian collusion during the 2016 election.

Democrats & DNC Media are going to LITERALLY have nothing coherent to say in response to that.

Mueller's team was 100% partisan.

That's why it's brilliant. NOBODY will be able to claim this team of partisan Democrats didn't go the EXTRA 20 MILES looking for ANY evidence they could find of Trump campaign/Russian collusion during the 2016 election

They looked high.

They looked low.

They looked underneath every rock, behind every tree, into every bush.

And they found...NOTHING.

Those saying Mueller will file obstruction charges against Trump: laughable.

What documents did Trump tell the Mueller team it couldn't have? What witnesses were withheld and never interviewed?

THERE WEREN'T ANY.

Mueller got full 100% cooperation as the record will show.