BC SOCIETY
Saved by @Jacobtldr

1. The problem facing Europe & the US isn't a scientific one. Scientists have been clear for months: public health and economic & social wellbeing are best served by policies that supress the virus. The #JohnSnowMemo cites evidence that makes this

 2. Some media commentators seek to present the issue of how to respond to the virus in simplistic terms: Lockdown vs Herd Immunity. This a mischaracterisation. The countries that have tackled #COVID-19 best have used a range of public health measures.

https://t.co/pf2GZ26ZYm
3. Almost every scientist acknowledges lockdown equals failure. It is a sign governments have failed to implement the measures needed to allow life to be lived more or less as normal, without risking exponential growth in transmission.
4. There is an active misinformation campaign that is being aided and abetted by certain sections of the media and some politicians. The campaign would have us believe that if we open up and shield the vulnerable, all will be well. This approach has been derided as inhumane...
5. ...by the WHO, and ridiculous by Dr Fauci for many reasons. It is based on faulty logic, and the proponents of this approach have submitted no evidence that it can be achieved nor any practical examples of how they would do so.

https://t.co/4Xp0HZYghS
6. In contrast, we can point to many real world examples of countries that have successful managed to control the virus. We can be very specific about how they have done so.
https://t.co/AkbnXKp0yC
7. We can point to real world evidence of what happens when the virus spreads within the community. We’re currently seeing the effects in Europe and the US. Hospitals are filling up, ICUs are running out of capacity and people are dying.

https://t.co/VGo93nsEvA
8. Other countries haven’t used magic to control the virus. They have used a combination of public health measures. They had leaders who took the problem seriously and understood the importance of communicating with their people to bring the whole community with them.
9. I’ve been shocked at the willingness of people in western countries to accept tens of thousands of cases per day, when in much of Asia, TEN cases per day would be regarded with serious concern. These European cases will result in hundreds of deaths per day in a few weeks.
10. In the UK in particular, I’m surprised the opposition hasn’t been more vocal in challenging the government’s pandemic response. There are plenty of scientists and clinical experts who would be willing to help shape alternative policies that actually work.
11. Dr Fauci and many others believe this crisis will not be resolved until the end of 2021. If they’re right, we can’t treat this as a short term emergency. We need measures that are sustainable. I don’t believe cycling through lockdowns is sustainable.

https://t.co/4hSrraf8aA
12. We need policies for the medium to long term, and we should look at other countries that have done well. We need a shift in public attitudes and instead of tolerating misinformation and pseudoscience, we must learn to distinguish between well-evidenced science and nonsense.
13. We must accept that if we want our lives back we need to come together and work hard. The government is no longer listening to scientists, its policies have failed us. Those who said there would be no second wave or that the pandemic had ended in June should be silent.
14. Let the people who’ve understood this pandemic from the outset help shape policy. Many of them wrote or signed the John Snow Memo, or sit on Independent SAGE. If @Keir_Starmer is serious about making life better for the people of Britain, pick up the phone.
15. Start pressing the government with alternatives. Push them to raise their game, because based on our current trajectory, tens of thousands of people are going to die prematurely this winter. Many more will suffer debilitating illness and potential long-term complications.
16. And we will all endure curtailment of our freedom, and suffer economic great harm as a nation. The science is clear. What isn’t clear is whether our politicians have the courage and imagination to manage this pandemic and make life better for us all.

More from Adam Hamdy

Adam Hamdy
Adam Hamdy
@adamhamdy
1. This thread has been given a new lease of life today. People keep saying, "We can't do #ZeroCovid, it doesn't fit with our way of life."

Look around.

What way of life?

The one we used to have?

The UK has been under varying degrees of restriction since March 23rd 2020.


2. Nearly a year of having our social and economic freedoms curtailed in one way or another. Nearly a year of muted economic activity. Nearly a year of mass death and disease.

#ZeroCovid doesn't fit with a way of life that doesn't exist anymore.

3. The question isn't whether it fits with our old freewheeling ways, but whether it would lead to better outcomes than the UK's current (poorly defined) strategy? Experiences in New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam, China, Taiwan and elsewhere very much suggest it would.

4. #ZeroCovid isn't about what's possible. It's about what's necessary. Decide what's necessary and figure out a way to make it possible. We can't force travellers to quarantine in hotels for two weeks? Why not? Taiwan does. And if that's what's necessary, why aren't we doing it?

5. I've heard some odd things said about #ZeroCovid

Simple-minded clod Matt Hancock said Zero Covid is impossible because no country has had zero cases.

Zero Covid sets out an ambition. It signals a country treats any infections as serious
SOCIETY
Adam Hamdy
Adam Hamdy
@adamhamdy
1. I believe the government is about to make another huge mistake. Where is @UKLabour in all this? I have some questions @Keir_Starmer should be asking urgently. Please RT to raise awareness.


2. Where is the modelling or evidence to support a focused protection vaccination strategy? The government has chosen it as its preferred strategy but it must have considered other options. Will the government publish the data and the alternative options considered?

3. A responsible government will have modelling for 20%, 50% and 80% vaccine coverage, and projections for the number of infections, Long Covid and deaths in each scenario. Where are those models? On what basis has the government opted for the 20% scenario?

4. The government should also have modelled each of these scenarios against a backdrop of low, medium and high community transmission. What is the impact of each vaccination scenario against varying levels of community transmission?

5. There should also be some assessment of incidence of reinfection and likely evolution of variants given different levels of community transmission. What does this assessment tell us?
GOVERNMENT
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Adam Hamdy
Adam Hamdy
@adamhamdy
1. THE PLAN

We see countries like China & New Zealand succeed by implementing border controls and wonder why our government didn’t do the same. Unfortunately, it’s been following the 2011 influenza pandemic plan, which says...


2. China & New Zealand have international travel (limited in the case of New Zealand) and freight, and rather than delay their peaks, their border controls have helped keep cases to a minimum. Border controls might not work in a flu pandemic, but they worked for #COVID19.

3. Countries that have done well against #COVID19 have high adherence to mask wearing. The pandemic plan tells us the British people won’t bother wearing masks over time so let’s no bother asking them to, eh.


4. Mass super spreading events have been shown to play a significant role in the transmission of #COVID19.

But the pandemic plan tells us they don’t play a role (perhaps the source of Jenny Harries’ comments about Cheltenham?) and therefore the government will not restrict them


5. I call this the white flag clause. Surrender was built into the assumptions behind our pandemic response. The success of other countries has proved this clause completely wrong.
TRAVEL
Adam Hamdy
Adam Hamdy
@adamhamdy
1. I find it remarkable that some medics and scientists aren’t raising their voices to make children as safe as possible. The comment about children being less infectious than adults is unsupported by evidence.


2. @c_drosten has talked about this extensively and @dgurdasani1 and @DrZoeHyde have repeatedly pointed out flaws in the studies which have purported to show this. Now for the other assertion: children are very rarely ill with COVID19.

3. Children seem to suffer less with acute illness, but we have no idea of the long-term impact of infection. We do know #LongCovid affects some children. @LongCovidKids now speaks for 1,500 children struggling with a wide range of long-term symptoms.

4. 1,500 children whose parents found a small campaign group. How many more are out there? We don’t know. ONS data suggests there might be many, but the issue hasn’t been studied sufficiently well or long enough for a definitive answer.

5. Some people have talked about #COVID19 being this generation’s Polio. According to US CDC, Polio resulted in inapparent infection in more than 99% of people. Severe disease occurred in a tiny fraction of those infected. Source:
SCIENCE
Adam Hamdy
Adam Hamdy
@adamhamdy
1. Last NYE was a quiet one for @AmyMcLellan2 & I, after a busy year writing and helping @DavidHHeadley and @LizzieCurle organise @CapitalCrime1

Someone I follow on Twitter shared this story, and we jokingly said we hoped it wouldn’t be another SARS.

2. A few days later, after watching social media footage coming out of Wuhan, I went for a meeting to plan Capital Crime 2021, and said it was likely we’d have to cancel the festival because of the emerging pandemic. My partners in crime looked at me as though I was unhinged.

3. As the situation worsened, I reconnected with people I knew from my previous life working as a consultant to the medical industry, and it became clear we were witnessing the start of a pandemic.

4. Knowing something about the history of pandemics, I was aware that early intervention, and quick and decisive action were essential. I was asked to write a report for Matt Hancock on the risks of reinfection and long-term ill health caused by coronaviruses.

5. Knowing the public health and economic costs of a pandemic, I joined people like @DrEricDing trying to raise the alarm in February, calling for decisive government action. In the report sent to Hancock, I recommended a 4-week precautionary border closure and lockdown...
HEALTH

More from Society

Sara Benincasa
Sara Benincasa
@SaraJBenincasa
Spent a quaint half hour in a cafe listening to a guy yell at his dad after his dad said that the women Trump molested wanted it: "Dad, that's like saying the Jews who died in the Holocaust were asking for it!" ENJOY YOUR TERRIBLE FAMILIES THIS WEEK!

"Mom, has a man ever touched you without your consent?"
"Of course."
"Did you report it?"
"No."
"Dad, your WIFE has been through this!"

Dad was unmoved and told the guy to stop arguing with him.

At this point we learned the boy child has allergies.

I forgot to remark upon the presence of the very cute grandson, who was very small and gave not one shit about the yelling. I believe a sister or aunt was present and feeling very stressed. I wanted to hand her a Xanax or seven.

It was really hard to not jump in and say, "Sounds like you guys are going to have a fun meal tomorrow!" so they could unite in hatred against me, the outsider, and stop squabbling. Instead I exchanged glances with a nearby fellow lady patron, who also emotionally ate a cookie.

Anyway, I want to thank the random family for yelling about rape and the Holocaust in an Israeli cafe in the US of A today because it reminded me that while this country isn't the greatest, it is inevitably my stupid favorite and I am never, ever bored.
SOCIETY
Breaking The Lines
Breaking The Lines
@BTLvid
We are all products of our own environments. Our environments shape our character, our personality, our habits, our identity.

The environment that Ousmane Dembélé grew up in and the environment that FC Barcelona seeks to engulf its youngsters with could not be more different.

The Great Gatsby starts with a life lesson.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

Ousmane hasn’t had the advantages that La Masia youngsters have had. That’s why he’s Ousmane.

Like every La Masia youngster, Ousmane grew up with a dream: playing for Barça.

Like every youngster, he fought to stand out amid a talented group of players, the majority of which would fail to go pro.

However, his football education was the polar opposite to that of La Masia.

Ousmane did not reside in one of the most expensive academies in Europe: he lived in a low-cost public housing unit in Normandy. He did not play in the well-trimmed pitches of La Masia, he played in the concrete jungles of Évreux. These disadvantages made him the man he is today.

While street soccer encourages individuality & creative freedom, academy-based training like La Masia encourages unselfishness & teamwork.

That’s why Barça produce certain types of 20-year-olds like a factory line. It’s also why Barça spent €145m on a 20-year-old Ousmane.
SOCIETY
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s. e. smith
s. e. smith
@sesmith
Oh are we talking about Sheryl Sandberg again? Well, your reminder that disabled feminists, LGBQT feminists, and feminists of color criticised her ‘lean in’ deal from day one. Don’t let anyone retcon that out of existence.

Like, a pretty narrow slice of feminists actually endorse and support corporate feminism, they’re just white, nondisabled, straight, cis, and noisy so their voices have a bigger reach.

So if your impression is that ‘feminism’ gave her a ‘free pass’ maybe you should question your overall impression of feminism rather than continuing to centre a handful of people as ‘thought leaders’ or whatever.

Critics within feminism have been doing this work for a long time and have been getting shat on it for about as long and I'm tired of seeing them erased. But what do I know — I am, after all, not a feminist.

But I WILL say, from my not-a-feminist perspective, that people who aren’t feminists who are criticising feminism should maybe understand the movement more deeply beyond a handful of high profile celebrity feminists.
TECH , SOCIETY
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick
@ReichlinMelnick
We finally have the U.S. Citizenship Act Bill Text! I'm going to go through some portions of the bill right now and highlight some of the major changes and improvements that it would make to our immigration system.

Thread:


First the Bill makes a series of promises changes to the way we talk about immigrants and immigration law.

Gone would be the term "alien" and in its place is "noncitizen."

Also gone would be the term "alienage," replaced with "noncitizenship."


Now we get to the "earned path to citizenship" for all undocumented immigrants present in the United States on January 1, 2021.

Under this bill, anyone who satisfies the eligibility criteria for a new "lawful prospective immigrant status" can come out of the shadows.


So, what are the eligibility criteria for becoming a "lawful prospective immigrant status"? Those are in a new INA 245G and include:

- Payment of the appropriate fees
- Continuous presence after January 1, 2021
- Not having certain criminal record (but there's a waiver)


After a person has been in "lawful prospective immigrant status" for at least 5 years, they can apply for a green card, so long as they still pass background checks and have paid back any taxes they are required to do so by law.

However! Some groups don't have to wait 5 years.
SOCIETY , IMMIGRATION
Bradly Mason
Bradly Mason
@AlsoACarpenter
Okay, let's do this summary again since there seems to be a collective amnesia relating to Christian Abolitionism in America.

Here again is a summary of the Christian Abolitionists’ arguments against enslavers’ appeals to the Scripture: Thread
SOCIETY

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@ebruenig
one of the things i like about Batman is that it's fundamentally about being orphaned, and being an orphan — how this guy stays tethered to the world in his own weird, abstract, extrajudicial way when he feels that his link to it has been violently severed

Batman does this by permanently recapitulating his own trauma: solving crimes for other people, protecting them. But that's actually just the beginning; he also recapitulates his own experience of orphanness by essentially raising several orphans

Dick is an orphan in the traditional sense: dead parents. Batman sees it happen. Jason, less so: missing dad, known mom who eventually dies. Tim, even less so: parents are around a while, and involved, before both dying. Carrie, even less than that: negligent parents.

Steph: evil father, who openly works against her. And then there's Damian, whose parents are both alive and yet both have identities that totally obliterate their role as his parents. He doesn't relate to them as a mother and father; he can't, and neither can they.

In all these different cases, Batman tries all these different ways of making orphanness for them not what it was for him: Either by trying to teach them the (arguably poor) coping skills early that he learned over a very long time, or by literally legally adopting them, etc.
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Adam McKay
Adam McKay
@GhostPanther
1) My Stan Lee story happened when I was in 5th grade. I was visiting NYC with my Dad and had read the address for Marvel in the comics I read constantly. I begged my Dad to take me and to his credit he did. And guess what? It was just an office.

2) We were down in the lobby and I was kind of crushed. I don’t know what I expected, The Thing and the Yancy Street Gang to be sitting around smoking cigars? Anyway, my Dad was taking a beat to figure where we were going next and a guy came up to us.

3) He was wearing a white shirt and tie and said to Dad “Is he disappointed because. The Marvel offices were just offices?” My Dad said yes and then the guy who had gray around his temples and a mustache said “hold on a second” and opened one of those office mailboxes with a key.

4) He then handed me a thick stack of EVERY SINGLE MARVEL COMIC COMING OUT THE NEXT MONTH. “Here you go. Keep reading Marvel comics” he said and then walked off. I left in a daze and about 15 minutes later it hit me “Gray around the temples, mustache... That was Stan Lee!”

5) Later when I wrote on the Ant Man movie I told Kevin Feige the story, the year, look of the guy etc and Kevin said “That’s exactly the kind of thing Stan would do and he would have been there then. That was him.” Rest In Peace Stan Lee and thank you for the comics.
CULTURE
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Anshul Pandey
Anshul Pandey
@Anshulspiritual
Rig Ved 1.36.7

To do a Namaskaar or bow before someone means that you are humble or without pride and ego. This means that we politely bow before you since you are better than me. Pranipaat(प्राणीपात) also means the same that we respect you without any vanity.

1/9


Surrendering False pride is Namaskaar. Even in devotion or bhakti we say the same thing. We want to convey to Ishwar that we have nothing to offer but we leave all our pride and offer you ourselves without any pride in our body. You destroy all our evil karma.

2/9

We bow before you so that you assimilate us and make us that capable. Destruction of our evils and surrender is Namaskaar. Therefore we pray same thing before and after any big rituals.

3/9

तं घे॑मि॒त्था न॑म॒स्विन॒ उप॑ स्व॒राज॑मासते ।
होत्रा॑भिर॒ग्निं मनु॑षः॒ समिं॑धते तिति॒र्वांसो॒ अति॒ स्रिधः॑॥

Translation :

नमस्विनः - To bow.

स्वराजम् - Self illuminating.

तम् - His.

घ ईम् - Yours.

इत्था - This way.

उप - Upaasana.

आसते - To do.

स्त्रिधः - For enemies.

4/9

अति तितिर्वांसः - To defeat fast.

मनुषः - Yajman.

होत्राभिः - In seven numbers.

अग्निम् - Agnidev.

समिन्धते - Illuminated on all sides.

Explanation : Yajmans bow(do Namaskaar) before self illuminating Agnidev by making the offerings of Havi.

5/9
RELIGION
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@TheWiseOwl_AZ
1. There are more people added on the list of arrests and executions of famous people but no further intel is available at this time.

ARRESTS and EXECUTIONS OF FAMOUS PEOPLE 2020 UPDATED
Explanation of the latest military tribunal arrests and executions of famous people in 2020.

2. The tribunals are arresting these people in plain clothes. We saw the Obama’s arrest, although we didn’t know it was an arrest at the time. The arrest was done nonchalantly so as to not get noticed by the public.
All arrests of these famous people were done this way.

3. If the person is convicted of child sex trafficking, crimes against humanity or treason, they will be executed.
If the person arrested has evidence on someone else to help their prosecution, or is willing to help Trump, & they want to cooperate, they may be allowed to do so.

4. A sentence of execution down to life in prison may be accepted if their evidence is worth anything.
When a plea deal is done, the defendant must present evidence they have to make their sentence lighter. This information is given to the prosecution, defense, and to the judge.

5. If evidence is accepted, they are presented the plea deal. They will have to make a guilty plea to the crime with a video confession & written statement. That is how all plea deals work.

All famous people arrested were either treasonous or involved in satanic worship rituals.
CRIME
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@Belposto_korea
The RV and the Redemption Funds.

ALL Exchanged Currencies as well as all Zim Redemption funds will be placed in the accounts they set up in the Quantum Financial System./1

Absolutely none of these funds will be placed in a Bank at the redemption appointment. Bank computers cannot be programmed to transfer Digital Gold Certificates./2

The QFS can and will transplant funds into a bank account as has been explained earlier,/3

so a person can transfer funds to their own bank account but the desirability will become less and less as the banks go into receivership and their customer’s deposits are confiscated to avoid the Bank’s demise./4

Which bank can compete with the QFS when the QFS is free, secure, private, and stable? One of the major problems in the transition will be the use of Debit Cards for merchant purchases. Will VISA or Mastercard be available?/5
FINANCE