Oregon Prison Report: Voices from the Inside

"...the officers walk around without their masks on then pat us down and search our rooms and touch everything and don’t wear gloves, so I stay in my room 'cause with weak lungs getting Covid can kill me, and I am not here for life."

(Testimony from Critical Resistance PDX's (@criticalresistancepdx) Write Them All Campaign)

Snake River Correctional Institution (SRCI) / October 26th, 2020.

#ODOCKills #KateBrownKills #FreeThemAll

Thank you for sending me letters, I am at Snake River, Ontario, Ore. I have been here for 9 months and have been locked up for 17 months.

The staff here don’t wear their masks all the time and a lot of people have gotten sick with Covid, we have been on lockdown for months.

Since the lockdown I don’t come out much 'cause I have asthma, I use an inhaler, I have Alvesco 80 MCG. Also borderline diabetic, I have gained 120 lbs in 17 months.

The Dove symbolizes the Holy Ghost; Samaritans use the Dove symbol for Aquarian New Age. Gaga means "Senile person, bed-wetter, crazy". Michael Robinson, mentored by Boule Society Freemason Jesse Jackson, is behind Gaga.

Pope Francis released Peace Doves in 2014 which were attacked by a Crow &

1/ It's hard to find words that don't cheapen, belittle, glorify or dismiss what happened during the Holocaust (Shoah). It's also hard to find words that make sense of the numbers involved. 6 million Jewish people, murdered. Entire families, gone.
#HolocaustMemorialDay #Holocaust

2/ Their property, land, art, culture & achievements stolen and erased. Many are still fighting, 75 years later, to regain what was taken from them - physically and mentally. It is almost incomprehensible, yet it happened. But it didn't start or end

3/ Another 11 million people were murdered throughout the Holocaust era. Others targeted included the disabled, the LGBTQ+ community, Black people, Roma, Poles & other Slavic peoples, Jehovah’s Witnesses, prisoners of war & members of political opposition groups.
#genocide

4/ If we held a minute of silence for every known victim of the Nazis we would be silent for over 32 years.

5/ Sadly humanity didn't learn & there have been further genocides by a variety of groups claiming purity, religion or territory as their reasoning. So how do we respond to this? How do we try to be better?
#Darfur #Cambodia #Serbia #Rwanda #Rohingya

I’m his front desk, digital marketer, social media handler, content creator, graphics designer, food warmer, food buyer, plate washer, office cleaner as a matter of fact and I also go to work on Saturdays
Warming and going to buy food for him WAS NOT

Part of my job description, I was doing it because of course nobody wants to stay at home and I’m not the type to sit and ask anybody for anything, I like to hustle
Now straight to the story
Mr Patric got in to the office at 3pm I exactly today and went

Straight into his office(he had visitors)
I usually ask him if he wanted me to order his food or buy but it was already 3pm so I felt he must have eaten from where he was coming from and also if he wanted food he’ll ask me to order, I was on my desk as

Usual up until 4:49pm my colleague comes to call me that mr Patric was calling me, getting there, he said I should go buy food for him, knowing fully well it was almost time to go home, I collected the card calmly and left with the driver to buy food,

I didn’t take my phone Cos I rushed out so I could quickly buy the food and rush back to go home, getting there I realized I had forgotten the pin, the driver was not with his phone, I checked the car and found his car papers, found his number and was walking

@MarkYoungTruth @chuckwoolery 1) What would you say if a BLM/ANTIFA activist (attached) was paying people in 2020 during BLM/ANTIFA "protests", I mean riots. Could that same man have been at the Capitol helping plan the fake MAGA people (attached)?

I've talked with people who argue that they should be allowed to have the sort of conversations that might offend people because if someone is offended, they don't have to be part of it. It's a seductive idea, but it won't

Why? Because there's a ratcheting effect. If you could measure rudeness, a chat might start at 1. People who don't care for that level will leave. So now the chat can start moving toward rudeness level 2 with fewer people to object or moderate.

Where is the limit? Well it will trend toward the comfort level of the most committed members. If part of the "value" of a chat is that it's "honest" (read "rude"), people who don't value that will leave. Problem solved? No! The next level will offend another set of people.

This is what make me so uncomfortable about the ignore feature. It gives people the idea that the way to handle rude behavior is to look away. On an individual level, that's not a bad technique. Why put yourself though frustration if you don't need

But for a group, it's a disaster. It just creates a situation where many people feel powerless, unheard and left out. At some point someone speaks up and discovers it wasn't just them. Now everyone is in for a world of hurt and misunderstanding.

The issue of Black families' trust is not only missing from school reopening plans, but also from many school reopening arguments.

But Black families make up more than 1/3 of our school district and many others, so it matters.

It absolutely matters.

Chicago Public Schools is the third-largest school district in the U.S. In the past 20 years, our classrooms have lost more than 5,000 Black educators, which has had a negative impact on many school communities.

Some of the direct causes of this loss are Rahm's 50 school closings, terminations in Black and Brown schools as a result of turnarounds, and annual layoffs targeting high-need schools with predominantly Black student populations.

CPS then failed to replace the Black teachers forced out of the system, and our district remains deeply segregated. So even as the Black workforce declined as Black schools were closed or turned around, educators were then seldom hired by schools outside of Black neighborhoods.

The decline of Black teachers has also been accelerated by CPS' chief policies of the last decade: student based-budgeting (SBB) and School Quality Ratings Policy (SQRP).

🧵on the Toronto area SGTF (S-Gene Target Failure) study to detect B117 (UK variant). It looked at 11,485 positive tests over Dec 16 to Feb 3 and found 448 had SGTF* (3.9%). These charts show the growth.
https://t.co/5L8tF0MwDv

2. Note: Not every SGTF is B117 but almost all were confirmed with WGS (whole genomic sequencing). Rt for the SGTF was 1.17, non-SGTF were .82 meaning SGTF had an Rt 44% higher. This means that B117 is growing quickly (80% per week in recent weeks) and is projected to overtake

3. the old variants around Feb 20th in the Toronto area. Because the Rt (reproduction number) was only .82 without B117, we know the lockdown was working well in Toronto. It's only because the variant was a small share that infections and cases fell. If it had reached 100%,

4. then every infection would have infected 1.17 more infections and we would have had exponential growth EVEN IN LOCKDOWN where we have seen cases plummet.

5. This data is for the Toronto area. The projections have uncertainty - Feb 20 is approximate but once B117 becomes increasingly dominant over the next 6 weeks, current lockdown efforts would be hard-pressed to stop R from moving above 1, meaning an exponential growth in cases.

Cardano and Elrond communites have always been on friendly terms and there is plenty of space for both to coexist.

I want to address some inaccuracies in @matiwinnetou's recent post.

👇Read the thread👇

1. The governance model on Elrond will be launched during 2021 Q2, and the ethos and spirit is the same as Cardano. To give governance power to the token holders.

2. Three years of development and plenty of external audits such as Trial of bits, hackers invited to break the network during BoN and 1400 validators strees testing for an extended period of time ensures that the network is secure.

3. Many Blockchains are only one company. Elrond Foundation is currently bootstrapping the Network, but will gradually hand over governance to the holders thus enabling decentralization

4. On-Chain upgrades have already been successfully performed both on the mainnet and on the public testnet. Elrond's hardfork detection mechanism has been thoroughly tested in Battle of Nodes under severe adversarial conditions.

@Olivia_Rodrigo's "drivers license" is all in 4/4, but uses some VERY creative phrasing to create a sense of suspense! cc @SwitchedOnPop @Top40Theory @TheDanielNigro

each verse is 7 bars long, with 6 lines and one bar of rest. Your ears expect 8, but you get an odd number. (1/5)

Rodrigo sings the last line, "Crying 'cause you weren't around," then her voice drops out, leaving you in the emptiness of the music...

But then, a piano chord pitchshifts down as the next section starts up a bar early, as if she's interrupted by her own thoughts. (2/5)

similarly, each chorus is 10(!) bars long. The first four lines are two pairs of 3 bars, which is pretty uncommon...

But just as you get used to it, the last two lines have twice as many syllables - and cut off the chorus unresolved in only 2 bars! (3/5)

The bridge is more conventional, with two sets of 8 bars. It's the only part of the song that feels familiar and predictable. Olivia's going nowhere, stuck in her past memories. (4/5)

In the final chorus, she repeats the last line, resolving the song with 3 sets of 4 bars.

It's neater, but it's still not symmetrical. Where any other song would give you a chorus of 16, "drivers license" doesn't give you the satisfaction. Brilliant pop songwriting. (5/5)

What are old-school transsexuals?

They are the ones who made it into the media, or the front of a tabloid, the ones who had the juicy details of surgery that made people wince or cross their legs while reading it.... clickbait, before there was anything to click.

1/

What you hear about old-school transsexuals or 'OST's' is largely the witterings of cishet transphobes who have constructed a MYTH.
2/

If you listen to accounts from transsexuals in the decades gone by when trans care wasnt available for 99.9% of trans people, what is a recurring theme is that they made incredible sacrifices to forge a life for themselves with no other option but assimilation.

3/

What often goes hand in hand with these stories, is prostitution, sex work, risking their own life for basic healthcare and treatment, many never got that far, many were MURDERED, and swept under the metaphorical carpet.

4/

Thats before they even got to surgery, which was equally dangerous and precarious unless you somehow managed to raise enough money to go to one of the very places in the world where the operations were performed with competence and care.
5/

Listening to a @jbouie livechat about the filibuster right now and it's made it clear: the filibuster (and particularly reconciliation as a workaround) hasn't just bottled up progressive legislation, but it's warped the entire constitutional system in subtle-but-fundamental ways.

Reconciliation is the only way to get a law through Congress most of the time, and most of Congress's authorities, to regulate or pass social legislation, are inaccessible in reconciliation.

So the role of Congress has shifted. Instead of the broad national legislature envisioned by Article I - a body to rule over the whole country and direct its government - Congress has become, in most cases, an agency for management of the federal budget.

The existence of reconciliation as an exception to the filibuster is essential to this shift. If reconciliation didn't exist, Congress would be sidelined almost completely, paralyzed, and what would likely happen is that frustrated majorities would just end the practice entirely.

But because of reconciliation, there's actually a pathway to legislating - it's just bound by a strict set of rules that actually dramatically alter the scope of how Congress can act. Thus most of Congress's work gets channeled through those limits, narrowing its practical power.

This is gonna be a long tweet. Be on the look out for the different parts.

PART ONE

@VRSVirginia- Whats the deal sis? Before I begin, let me make myself CRYSTAL F*CKING CLEAR: I’m on TEAM TRUTH as well as TEAM SURVIVOR. As I KNOW you are aware, survivors of physical......

See how unprecedented mining in the forests of Odisha has violated a raft of laws and regulations, severely despoiled the complex eco-system, and resulted in windfall profits for miners at the cost of the public exchequer. [Photo Thread] 1/n

Full story: https://t.co/oH82uzNHzg

North Odisha’s rich deciduous forests and mountain ranges hold 1/3 of India’s haematite iron ore reserves. Here, a mining company constructs a road through the forests around the mining town of Bonai. Mining is done in over 45,000 hectares (ha) of which 34,000 is forested area

This makes it the site of the state’s largest corruption scam. Truck traffic ferrying iron ore dominates the area’s roads. They only halt on Sundays, after villagers agitated for this weekly break so that they could use the roads to attend church and visit markets. 3/n

Trucks jam the road leading up to the mines in the Kurmitar mountain range. The Supreme Court-appointed Justice MB Shah Commission estimated that at current rates of extraction, quality iron ore reserves in this region could run out in 35 years—the government rejected the claim

The Shah Commission’s report was tabled in Parliament on February 10, 2014. Over the past decade, fuelled by a commodity boom led by exports to China, mining increased manifold. These images show the contrast between the mined landscape, and areas that are yet to be mined. 5/n

My longest thread ever. Bear with me.

Sam Harris is wrong. Here’s why:

It’s not about moral superiority one way or the other. It’s that the VALUES are completely misaligned. Why would hardworking evangelicals overwhelmingly support him? Because he doesn’t spit in their face.

Everyone should be a lifelong learner.

We stagnate when we're okay with the status quo. But by spotting areas for improvement, we can thrive and live a life worth living.

🧵 My top five reasons to keep learning.

Learning doesn't stop when you leave school.

If you want to thrive in life, you should always be learning. Once you embrace learning as a part of your life, the world will become a playground full of possibilities.

Five reasons everyone should be a lifelong learner:

Reason 1: Learning is fun

Learning allows adults to be playful like kids. Following our curiosity and learning something new, we get little hits of dopamine — the neurotransmitter associated with rewards.

Learning is natural, but it gets shrouded in seriousness the older we get.

Make learning fun to keep it sustainable.

Reason 2: Learning creates possibilities

Most modern jobs rely on specialized knowledge, but that knowledge is changing fast. Companies look for people who can learn new skills quickly.

If you can proof you can learn something, you'll have a job.

A thread about panic buying and stockpiling outrage. Availability (or lack thereof) of products in supermarkets is a complex and multi-layered issue.

Basically, it's not just people being cunts. 1/

CHANGING BEHAVIOUR. Many people acquire food from non-supermarket sources. Cafes, work canteens, restaurants, delis, service stations etc. 2/

When this decreases significantly, it takes a relatively small proportion of people in an area to buy one extra meal at the supermarket, to affect supply. 3/

BIGGER BASKETS. There are a LOT of people who shop 'little and often', buying only what they need for that day/possibly the next. The govt is now asking people to limit their trips, meaning products which would take a week to leave shelves will now be bought on a single trip. 4/

Again, it only takes a small proportion of people making this change to affect supply.

SPACE ON SHELF. It sounds obvious, but some products take up more space on shelf. Compare a tin of soup with an 18 pack of toilet roll. 5/