1 January 2021 #MAGAanalysis #HappyNewYear2021

The Forward View + A Table of Contents For Our J.E. Dyer @OptimisticCon's 10 Threads

To be sure, happiness in this New Year's moment has an even more ephemeral feeling than usual, and perhaps by a good deal. Yet it is here.

26 December 2020 #MAGAanalysis #Overturn

Underneath The News, Beneath The Blackout Blanket

I thought to call today's mediation, "The Death Of The News Cycle," but couldn't. It may be ill. One day it may die. But it's power remains vast, and we're going to discuss that first.

16 December 2020 #MAGAanalysis #TheTruth

There Was A War On Earth: Truth vs Lies

Who loves the Book of Revelation? I do. In my youth I opted to study two books of the Bible especially. Daniel and Revelation. After a long break in early adulthood, I found my way back with joy.

2) It's so tempting to follow the path of Revelation 12, where the story of the War in Heaven is told...revealed. Another tempting path pops up. In Genesis, which is now likely my favorite Book of the Bible, we learn of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

3) Consider this little playful numbered analysis:

1) Truth
2) Falsehood (i.e. lies and the lying liars who tell them)
3) Good
4) Evil

Something simple arises. Truth is good. Lies are evil.

How about that?

4) Moving perhaps too quickly, I bounce over to my beloved Master Sun Tzu. Well, him and me, we're a team. He assumes but I explain, it is a moral mandate to lie to your enemies. Allow me...

The Scopelliti Doctrine: It Is A Moral Mandate To Lie To Your Enemies.

5) Ethics is an ancient thing. Making a claim like the one I did above is no small thing, I assure you. I believe I am offering an innovation in the field of ethics. Lying to your friends is bad. Lying to your enemies is good. It's more than just good. It is required.

3 December 2020 #MAGAanalysis #RedoTheElection

When You Catch A Thief

The sleeping giant of America sleeps no more. We have awakened. We're nothing more than the same Common Sense Americans we were in 1776. We're feisty. Independent and self-sufficient. Hard working.

25 January 2021 #MAGAanalysis #MythicalTrump

“If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

Yeah. I watched the original Star Wars movie in the theaters when it came out, and I can't tell you how many times I

25 December 2020 #MAGAanalysis Christmas Edition

The Great Reawakening - A Renewed Dream Of America

@GenFlynn tells me the JOY of the MAGA Movement has returned. Our Xmas gift is A Renewed Dream For America. In case you didn't know, it's his birthday too, he's a Christmas baby!

THREAD: We filed RTIs on behalf of @no2uid asking the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare questions about how your personal data will be protected while you're using CO-WIN, the COVID-19 vaccination registration platform.

We got answers... kind of. Here's the new info.

1/n

Just like with Aarogya Setu, many Indians are worried that about the potential CO-WIN has to leak your data or threaten your privacy in the name of dealing with a pandemic. So, we asked the MOHFW some questions about data protection under the Right to Information Act.
2/n

In the responses we received, MOHFW said that it cannot provide us with a privacy policy on CO-WIN (?!).

Thankfully it was clarified that Aadhaar is not mandatory for registration on Aarogya Setu or CO-WIN, and that physical vaccine certificates will be provided to everyone.
3/n

The data it says it will collect will be your name, gender, date of birth, photo ID, and number.

National, State, and District level admins will have access to use the app, but there is not much further clarity on this point.

But most importantly...
4/n

The responses (or rather lack of them) related to your data privacy and protection are completely vague. We received no clear answers on which Ministries/Depts will have access to your personal data, the permissions provided, etc. This is a failure in terms of transparency.
5/n

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.

I’m contemplating leaving @twitter. The platform has proven to be instrumental in harming people with marginalized identities, which normally I wouldn’t blame a media platform for except that @jack has demonstrated negative interest in doing anything about it.

in the past when I’ve thought about this I’ve thought about it from the perspective of my own safety/comfort. And I’m good on that front; I can handle it. But now I’m thinking about it differently: thinking about the people who tell me they join or stay on twitter because of me.

Every time someone in the press refers to me as a “twitter celebrity” (actual phrase that I don’t fully understand or subscribe to but this is what people say) it means that my presence and voice are adding social cachet to a company that I find to be quite terrible.

People tell me that they learn a lot from what I have to say here, and sometimes that it’s their first or only exposure to certain ideas, histories, perspectives, etc. and I have to weigh that too. But I could post that stuff elsewhere.

We’ll see. I’m just thinking aloud for now but I’m watching closely to see what @twitter and @jack do in the coming days and how they respond to what we now know about Cesar Sayoc (beyond one really stupid tweet). Because we know it’s not just him. Big changes need to happen.

I’ve just finished some research about the use of biosolids (human sewage sludge) as farm manure. The results will keep me awake at night.
¾ of biosolids in the UK are spread on farmland. The rules about what it can contain are not fit for purpose. Please read and share this 🧵

Biosolids typically contain a wide range of synthetic chemicals, including antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals, personal care products, microplastics and persistant organic pollutants, among them “forever chemicals”. Yet testing is restricted to a small number of contaminants.

Spreading them across the land means spreading them through the foodchain and the ecosystem. There’s plenty of evidence of uptake of many of these chemicals by crops, earthworms and other soil animals, and of large-scale antibiotic resistance developing among soil bacteria.

When soil is blown or washed off the land, these chemicals enter the air and water. Some seep into groundwater. We're likely to eat, drink and breathe them. It’s hard to say what the health thresholds are, or what the combined impact of this cocktail of synthetics might be.

Yet the issue has been wilfully neglected by governments. Regulation is negligible. Farmers in the UK are “responsible for knowing the levels of any potentially toxic elements” before spreading sludge. But how? With an on-farm lab that can test for 80,000 possible contaminants?