(1/19) @philvischer & @SkyeJethani, I saw your video that questions whether overturning Roe is the key to reducing abortion.

Glad you're interested in the data. Evidence from the past 40 yrs shows electing pro-life candidates has helped reduce the U.S. abortion rate by over 50%

(2/19) Overturning Roe is not an all or nothing proposition. Since 1973, Republican-appointed judges have not succeeded in overturning Roe v. Wade. However, Republican-appointed Supreme Court judges have upheld a variety of life-saving pro-life laws. These include:

(3/19)
-Public funding limits on abortion
-Parental involvement laws
-Informed consent laws
-Waiting periods
-Partial-birth abortion bans

Meanwhile, judges appointed by Democratic Presidents almost always vote to strike down these common-sense, life affirming, pro-life laws.

(4/19) My 2018 @LozierInstitue shows that there is a very good body of academic research which shows that these incremental pro-life laws reduce abortion rates and save lives.

(5/19) In your video, you never mention the Hyde Amendment, which prevents the federal government from funding elective abortions through the Medicaid program.

There is a body of research which shows that limits on taxpayer funding of abortion reduce abortion rates.

I don’t have the emotional energy right now to get into this with the detail & nuance I would like to, but I see so many lies & misconceptions being spread about myself & other outspoken survivors daily. I am speaking solely for myself here, but I wanted to clear up some things.

I am not anti porn, anti sex work or anti sex worker. Anyone who actually knows me (not just thinks they do because I’m visible online) knows this. But I feel it needs to be said. I do not see sex workers & survivors as two opposing groups, but more often than not one in the same

I have legitimate criticisms of the industry that I was forced into as a child. Many trafficking victims & consenting sex workers & those who are both are also vocal about their issues with the industry as a whole or in parts. That’s our right.

I’ve been openly grateful of EVERYONE, both individuals & groups, who has supported me because almost no one supported my family & I at all for over a decade. I’ve been helped by & also felt used by both pro sex work groups & abolitionists alike. It’s extremely nuanced.

There are so many people who see any survivor, including active sex workers, being critical about the industry or sharing our own experiences & see it as open season to call us swerfs & paint us as bigots to justify their abuse of us.

It's odd that 2020 is almost over and I've not seen one person the whole year go viral for using astrology to predict how shit a year it would be this time last year.

Not one post from november or december last year going "the stars say pandemic, lockdown, unemployment, your parents will die." Etc

It's been a whole year. One person would have gone viral for having a post this time last december saying their astrologer predicted basically *any* part of this year

At the same time: remember the sheer joy of thinking he was dying? Billions of people eagerly urging that to materialize? Wishing all the negative energy you could possibly want on one man?

Kinda disproves that whole thing, huh.

2020: the year woo failed, entirely.

Not even preppers got out of it. They were the first people to start proudly coughing in each other's mouths to own the libs upon their fantasized biological disaster finally occurring.

A great father is a great teacher

Here are five critical thinking skills you must master, so you can one day teach them to your kids

=THREAD=

1. Pattern recognition

Figuring out “what things have in common”

Our brains are pattern recognition machines. We constantly analyze the similarities between people, events, and scenarios to make decisions. Pattern recognition is how we deduce danger. It's also how we prosper.

1a. Pattern recognition

Example exercise:

Say your son loves baseball. Ask: what do all the great hitters have in common? What do they all do the same? What do they do differently? When does a manager usually come out to the pitcher’s mound? Why do you think that is?

2. Reverse engineering

Figuring out “what’s required”

It’s nearly impossible to create anything if you can’t first picture it in your mind. Effective thinkers begin with the result in mind and work backward to determine what steps they need to take. The whole informs the parts.

2a. Reverse engineering

Example exercise:

Say you’re building a birdhouse. Before you begin, ask: what will we need to DO to build this birdhouse? What materials might we need? How will we get them? What instructions might we need? How will we find them? What comes first? Why?

Thread for Wed Dec 16, 2020
Ask yourselves, why we have not seen arrest of the bigger criminals? Hussein, HRC, Soros, George Bush, Rothschilds, etc!
We are in the Second Revolution or WWIII and as such, we need to win. We are not going to commit the same errors as in the past.

People who haven't studied guns tend to assume that the evolution of small arms towards an assault rifle was in someway inevitable.

I'm here to say that this doesn't follow.

In this thread, I'll pickup on the US crossovers I referenced but didn't cash out in my last thread

1/

If you look closely, there is a tendency among some scholars to erroneously link 3 things:

-the qualities of the infantry

-the soldier's capacity to think & use weapons independently

-& the notion of a democratic values

2/

This really struck me when reading Stephen Biddle's really interesting (but obvs I don't agree with it)

The problem with that argument is its underlying technological determinism that implies only democracies can really produce the type of soldier capable of employing weapons like assault rifles.
4/

The argument makes little empirical sense but it also demonstrates a misunderstanding as to how technologies emerge into the military organisation.

5/

Four years ago this month, there was an uproar among analysts (and the public) about whether Cambridge Analytica was a PSYOP. The word is triggering; it tends to get people animated, makes people think of conspiracy theories, implies a grand master plan, shadowy operators, etc.

I have a good memory of that. What's happening now re: QAnon and whether it was a PSYOP and by whom is comparable. And it's a pointless debate. Any operation that 1) does target audience analysis, 2) deploys messaging against audiences, 3) tries to alter behavior, is a PSYOP.

The origin of this particular operation is complicated, networked, and muddied by people who wish to both claim and disclaim it. But it is functionally a PSYOP, has borrowed from that heritage, and can be analyzed in those terms. Miss me with claims to the contrary.

Researchers, journalists, and historians need to get to the bottom of how it evolved (and it did evolve, vs. a unified top-down plan), and we can do that if we work in good faith together. But we have to accept the fact that these kinds of operations are now commonplace.

It also helps to use the lens of emergence; information ops evolve, and incorporate DNA from everything that has come before: LARPs, ARGs, PSYOPs, the general public's participation + gullibility. In that context, one doesn't need top-down orchestration, necessarily.

NEW info about vaccines in #Arizona. Please keep in mind when you hear about new sites opening it doesn't mean they have enough vaccines to meet demand. I'm copying news release almost in its entirety in this thread but first highlighting a key supply point:

"The biggest limiting factor on appointments is the limited supply of vaccine doses. Arizona receives weekly allocations from the federal government, which determines how many vaccine doses the state has and how many appointments can be offered.
Now, the full info from @AZDHS:

"In a major step forward as the state increases the pace of COVID-19 vaccination, prioritized Arizonans will be able to register starting at 9 a.m. Tuesday, Jan. 19, for February appointments at two state-run sites.

Initial appointments are limited based on vaccine supply, with appointments opening up depending on distribution of the vaccine by the federal government.

More than 281,000 doses of the safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine have been administered so far to 243,593 Arizonans, including 32,269 who have received both doses.

We think of this planet, the sun, our solar system, all of this around us as a somewhat stable even static background against which we live.

But our star and solar system have a temporary impermanent existence just like we do. The sun is about half-way through its lifespan...

After about 4.5 billion years of life so far, our sun is living through a relatively stable part of its life in middle-age.

But in about 5 billion years it will run out of hydrogen. It will expand to become so large that it will envelope the Earth.

After enveloping Mercury, Venus, and perhaps even Earth our sun will burn as a Red Giant in its final phases of life.

Over millions of years, a blink of an eye relative to its lifespan, our sun will flash and shrink and grow and shrink again and change our entire solar system.

Cold planets far away from the sun might be warmed, and ice may become atmospheres or oceans on them.

As the sun ejects mass, creating a planetary nebula, the core will heat up and then cool.

Eventually our sun will be a white dwarf.

For trillions of years the white dwarf that used to be our warm, life-giving, sun will radiate away all of its remaining energy. Cooling, dying, crystallizing, until it is dark and lifeless.

A black dwarf, the corpse of our sun, will be all that remains.

In his recent article, @cjsnowdon claims that England's November lockdown was a good example of lockdown effectiveness. Let’s look at that claim using the ONS death-by-date registration data which have now been updated for the relevant period.

Although there is some uncertainty over the average lag between infections and death, we should expect any effect of lockdown to be visible in the deaths series after about three weeks.

If the 5th November lockdown had been effective, we might expect a beneficial effect on the deaths trend from about 26 Nov and an adverse effect from about 23 Dec, reflecting the relaxation on 2 Dec.

So what actually happened?

Nationally, deaths peak on 21 Nov, 16 days after the lockdown, almost certainly too early for that to be the cause.

Deaths increase again from 4 Dec implying infections increased right in the middle of the national lockdown.

That increase may be due to the new variant, but we would still expect to see a steeper increase 3 weeks or so after lockdown was released. In fact, there is little if any clear effect on the trend.

🚨 The June "Death to Asylum" regulation has been finalized. It is set to go into effect on Monday, January 11, just nine days before inauguration.

https://t.co/tQGwoRrjjW

Under this new rule, one of Trump's last parting body blows to the United States' system of humanitarian protection, none but the lucky few will be able to win asylum.

The regulation creates near-total bans on asylum for wide swathes of people and herculean procedural barriers.

Before I get into just how horrific this new anti-asylum regulation is, a picture of Petra I took this morning to soften the blow of what is a terrible thing to read through—even though the Biden administration will be working to end it ASAP and court challenges are certain.

Back to the new regulation, which I wrote about in June when it was first proposed.

Today, the Trump administration says that they have "generally adopt[ed] the [Notice of Proposed Rulemaking] with few substantive changes." Meaning it's just as bad.

The Trump administration's anti-refugee policies show right at the start.

To them, refugee protections are first about "protecting [our] own resources and citizens" and only secondarily about protecting people from persecution.

That's what led us to turn away Jews in the 1930s.

I have interviewed a lot of #designers and #researchers this year. This is my round up of some of the issues I have seen in the industry in 2020:

1. Roughly 80% of the designers I speak to say something like “I haven’t had much opportunity to think about accessibility”...

Many organisations have cultural issues meaning they don’t prioritise accessibility. As a single designer, you can’t fix everything. But you always have the opportunity to make something more accessible than it otherwise would be if you don’t educate yourself or try at all.

2. About 40% of designers I speak to say “I don’t have a specific methodology I use”. In general, this is fine.

Except when it comes to research and problem framing. You don’t need a *single* approach or methodology, but you do need to be able to describe...

how you learn in a structured and reliable way.

You need to be able to describe how you frame a problem so the team can understand and get on board with it.

Design has to be a team sport when you’re working in multidisciplinary teams, and the problem needs to be shared.

NB: I include research here because lots of designers do it. But I rarely hear a researcher say “I don’t have a specific approach or methodology”.

Researchers work in a structured way to learn and communicate findings. There is a lot of good for designers to learn from here.

Not ok: “humans can’t change sex”
Ok:

Not ok: “women menstruate”
Ok:

Not ok: “only women have a cervix”
Ok:

Not ok: “my life was shaped by being female”
Ok:

Not ok: “pregnant women”
Ok:

How do you compare the understanding of a generation that was propelled into protest by the music of Bob Marley,Peter Tosh Okosun and Fela to the one ravaged by the music of Wizkid,Badoo😁 and Naira Marley? A child that say his father is not rich and said his mother doesn’t have

money,na there him dey now. Nobody taught me history, I was 20 when I read Obafemi Awolowo biography,Das Capital by Karl Max at 23 and became a Marxist later to become a social democrat at 26 after reading Awolowo’s trilogy. You don’t even know your history and you are washing

your dirty mouth on your elders. We were on the street as kids in secondary school in 1978 when Segun Okeowo led Nigerian student against the Obasanjo regime,we did the SAP riot against IMF Conditionalities,we fought IBB to a standstill. We are not begging for recognition😁😁you

you are only exhibiting your foolishness and ignorance. The fact that you can’t wine and dine at a protest venue across Nigeria,the price was paid by the blood of a generation. Do you know Beeko-Ransome Kuti, Olisa-Agbakoba, Ayo Obe, Segun Mayegun and many others who got this?

The day I lost interest in this generation was when they started comparing Burna Boy to Fela Anikulapo! Fela didn’t become a legend because of weed,it was his intellectual depth that made him one. Do something for your generation and stop blame game,fight your fight,I fought mine

A man's greatest gift to a woman is her femininity, or perhaps more accurately stated - the safety and freedom to embrace her femininity, to connect with the purity and innocence of her inner child, warm and loving with all the grace, charm and happiness that entails.

The "strong independent woman" will never know this joy, for it is only a man who can give this gift to a woman, she can never realise it for herself by herself.

Women are not at their best when they're alone, they're at their best with a strong but loving and competent man.

Every woman's quest in a relationship with her man is to find her way home, to rediscover and connect with the sweet parts of herself she thought she'd lost

And she can only do this by completely surrendering herself to him.

Of course, such a man must be worthy or she'll suffer

And that's why submission to a man is not weak, but in fact, an act of supreme bravery for the feminine.

To put one's fate in another's hands, and trust that it will not be violated.

That she chose correctly, and he is not only a competent man, but a good man.

SHOW DAUGHTER.

DC Coup Analysis Thread 1/

I am doing my 'first thoughts' review & analysis of the Trump attempt of a Dictatorial Coup of America we just witnessed in DC the past few days. This is the first in a SERIES of THREADS. This looks at 'what happened'. This sets the stage

DC Coup Analysis Thread 2/

Before Wednesday 6.1.2021 Trump had been PLANNING and organizing that event. Trump knew it was date when Congress certifies Biden's victory to become next President. Trump is dumb enough, gullible enough & delusional enough to think it could be undone

DC Coup Analysis Thread 3/

Trump KNEW he had lost the actual popular vote. He had sent Giuliani to try to overturn several State elections which failed. Trump had come to believe, that on 6.1.2021 Congress COULD overturn the popular vote, and make Trump the President.

DC Coup Analysis Thread 4/

Any sane adult who tried to tell Trump the truth, was met with a petulant child who puts his hands over his ears and yells 'lalalalalala, I can't hear you'. Sadly a group of sick bastard liars egged Trump on into his delusions like Giuliani, Ted Cruz..

DC Coup Analysis Thread 5/

...Sadly a group of sick bastard liars egged Trump on into his delusions like Giuliani, Ted Cruz, Hannity & Lindsey Graham - convincing Trump that he CAN BE MADE PRESIDENT inspite of losing the popular vote, through that date 6.1.2021 in Congress