Count Giancarlo Cicogna was a member of the Ciga hotels clan. He was with Ghislaine Maxwell for 4 years. He was 'the man who moulded the Ghislaine we now see. He told her where to get her hair cut, and what to wear.'
https://t.co/XorCl9VKW6

There is a very Ghislaine like character named Madam Anais in the movie La Belle De Jour who runs a Brothel. The film was produced by Marina Cicogna.

Private View of 'Once Upon Time' an Exhibition of Photographs by Marina Cicogna Sponsored by Fiat at the Little Black Gallery,

My view Marina Cicogna looks like Dottie in the Disney Channel series WandaVision.

NY Times covered a story of Countess Marina Cicogna, a woman with a very intetesting life. I am sure she knows many secrets and that gives her power over people of influence.

Academic staff at universities can't be open about the complaints against them - and most complaints of transphobia from students seem to be directed at staff. I'm just a final year PhD student, under no contractual requirement to be confidential, so I can share.

The original complaint against me was typical of the sort of thing directed at many female professional academics (and some male too). The strategies employed by my complainants are commonly used.

One of these is to perform vulnerability while behaving aggressively. Performing vulnerability is essential in order to trigger the university's awareness of its duties under the Equality Act, and establish an oppressor/victim dynamic to the case from the outset.

My complainants did this effectively. The complaint was initiated by a fellow PhD student, who joined forces with the SU. A student from the SU wrote the actual complaint. This is how it begins:

In all my dealings with @HuddersfieldUni I accepted that sometimes anonymous complaints were necessary - and that, sometimes, victimisation could be a concern. However, I have never victimised anyone. Nobody has ever argued that I have.

As many of you know, I was apart of the white evangelical tradition. I have talked about things I learned about being Black in white spaces. Now I want to say some things about what I learned about once being a Black evangelical returning back to the Black church.

A thread.

Spending years in white evangelical churches and schools, specifically from 2012-2018, shapes Black people in more ways than we would like to admit. It shapes us to diminish Blackness, devalue our people’s story, and always test what we have against the white logic and litmus.

This is particular reality for us Black men in that space. White Christians exploit our vulnerabilities, give us the room to speak, while simultaneously subverting and devaluing Black women and their struggles and their grievances. Opportunities abound for us and we take them.

We are invited into the meetings, we are given the mic, we are asked to lead groups on race, the Black church, etc. We are asked though often we actually haven’t read or thought deeply about each. We become a weapon. Profiting and policing/punishing those who get out of line.

All the while, white Christians feel good about themselves and other Black people are left to clean up the mess we’ve made, the ways we’ve made fools of Black folk, and the harmful ways we’ve learned to think, and to preach, and to be around us. It is profoundly depressing.

When it's railroading time, you get railroads.

When the railroads turn into the personal satrapies of rail-barons, you get trustbusters.

A couple decades ago, it was online service time. We had the users, the telcoms systems, the computers, the modems, so we got platforms.

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We had that, but we lacked something important: effective antimonopoly enforcement. Lax merger laws allowed companies with access to capital markets to buy out or neutralize all their competitors, so we got monopolies.

Right on schedule, we're getting digital trustbusters.

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Now, some people aren't technically sophisticated, but they do understand a lot about competition law. That's how you get meat-and-taters antitrust proposals like @amyklobuchar's #CALERA, which address the structural problems with antitrust

Klobuchar's bill is hugely important. The reason we have monopolies is that we stopped enforcing anti-monopoly law 40 years ago. Monopoly isn't a tech problem, it's everywhere from sneakers to glass bottles to pro wrestling to candy to

Klobuchar's CALERA doesn't just seek to apply antitrust law to tech - it also explicitly restores the pre-Reagan basis for fighting monopolies: we fight monopolies because they concentrate power and corrupt our politics. All monopolies are guilty unless proven otherwise.

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Yesterday I refused unsafe work. This is how it went.

#onted #onpoli #osstf

1st, to the haters. Since when is it "normal" to go to work scared for your health, your life, and your family's lives? It is our right not be scared at work and our employer (in my case, the gov) needs to put measures in place so we aren't afraid. That is law, not just words.

There were 2 steps to the refusal. Refusing to work to my employer, and refusing to work to the Ministry. If my concerns were addressed in Step 1 - to my employer, there is not need to go to the Ministry. We went to the Ministry.

Involved in my refusal were my administration team, a Health and Safety Inspector from my employer, a Health and Safety Inspector from my union, and later in Step 2, a Ministry of Labour Inspector.

I first stated my specific concerns to my adm. They were so supportive in doing everything in their power to address my concerns. I want to thank them for that. They took my concerns seriously. My concerns were all tied to the increased contagiousness of the new variants:

MY RACIST

If U remember from an earlier post I brought up Sen Elizabeth Warrens remark that "Obama did more for Wall Street than Main Street." I concur. U can ignore poor black people all day, but under no circumstance can U ever ignore poor white

Now Biden must be careful not to repeat the same mistakes of Obama. Biden most go big & go big fast. Fuck inflation. Order the treasury to start printing money. You will not beat Trump by impeaching or prosecuting him. You must beat him on the battlefield of ideas & you do so by-

helping the people he ignored. People with good jobs, food on the table & a roof over their head dont have time to do insurrections. If U help these people, you will choke off the fuel to Trumpism. Some black people will criticize me for taking this approach. My simple retort is-

you can't out-violence white people. We don't make guns. We don't make bombs. We don't make shit. You have to make it such that everyone eats. Otherwise you have to deal with the warning Heather McGhee lays out in her new book: white

Obama did not get this. He made it such that only rich white oligarchs got to feast. Everyone else got crumbs. I need you to get precisely what peace requires. There are a good number of white people in this country which would rather burn this country down than to allow any-

It's been a whole day since we tweeted Part 2 of this chapter, so let us remind you: #AdamSmith just said that the colonies got nothing that helped them succeed from the mother country. (IV.vii.c) #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets

So these two opening sentences are pretty heckin’ sarcastic:
Now we've seen the great advantages the colonies got (they got nothing!) (IV.vii.c.1)
So what have been the great advantages to Europe! (IV.vii.c.2)

Seems like there’s a...tone there. #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets

Europeans buy goods from America, and Americans buy European goods as well. Even countries that don’t trade directly with America have benefited. (IV.vii.c.3–8) #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets

The mother countries restrict colonial trade (esp the exclusive right to buy from or sell to their colonies). That's a dead weight on the increase of the wealth of nations. Everything is more expensive, everyone enjoys less of it. (IV.vii.c.9) #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets

Maybe European countries get added security? In ancient times, empires expected military support and revenue from their colonies, and they got it.
18thC colonies? Not so much. (IV.vii.c.11–13) #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets

Certain “experts” should be quite ashamed for pushing fear mongering tweets and using misleading studies to fit their rhetoric concerning the efficacy of these vaccines. Since they rely on the fact most will not understand the studies since it’s not in layman’s terms allow me. 🧵

Firstly, the conclusions being drawn from this study and this “expert” is that the B.1.1.7 and B.1.351 variants would render these vaccines ineffective. This is highly unlikely. It will take a large amount of genetic diversity to completely render the current vaccines useless.

Not to mention Ding is using an older study to push this rhetoric when Pfizer and Moderna have recently established their vaccines will be effective against these variants. Perhaps someone should pass THOSE studies onto him. For the record, if you’re going to claim these vaccines

are ineffective the last thing you should attempt to utilize to push your rhetoric is a study that concerns monoclonal antibodies. Why? Vaccines are polyclonal. Unlike monoclonal antibody therapies, vaccines (especially those utilizing the whole spike protein) make polyclonal

antibody responses. This means that the antibodies you make after vaccination will be able to bind the coronavirus spike in multiple places not just one. You cannot possibly attempt to relate the effectiveness of a monoclonal antibody treatment against these variants to the

I am a senior staffer at The Lincoln Project. I’m also a woman and a mother to two young boys. I have seen a lot written and said about the organization I work for and I feel like it is important to say some things of my own. [THREAD]

I joined @ProjectLincoln because I believed in its mission. As a woman, the rhetoric out of Trump and his enablers scared and disgusted me. As a mother, I felt that it was my duty to fight for a better, safer country for my children. 2/

The #LincolnProject is not Rick Wilson or Steve Schmidt. It’s not Reed Galen, Mike Madrid, Ron Steslow, Jennifer Horn, George Conway, or John Weaver either. 3/

The Lincoln Project is comprised of a small team of the hardest working, most talented young people I have ever had the pleasure of working with. The team is a group of people mostly in their 20’s to mid-30’s from different backgrounds, states, political affiliations, 4/

and world views, many of whom moved across the country, leaving friends and family behind, to live with strangers for two months in the middle of nowhere, DURING COVID, to fight for the soul of our nation. 5/

As a mom of 4 I have spent a significant amount of my time discussing the virtues of truth telling and the consequences of telling a lie, at this moment one of the kids is writing me an essay on using self-control to ensure her words are true.

On Monday @TuckerCarlson said, “The Green New Deal has come, believe it or not, to the state of Texas. How’s it working out so far?”

First GND is a resolution, second it hasn’t even been past, 3rd, we’re talking about TX. This is objectively false.

He went on to say, “Not a single major American city is prettier or more functional than it was in 1950. The parks that previous generations so lovingly built are filled with vagrants and junkies."

"The monuments they constructed are covered with spray paint. Public transportation is a disgrace. It’s filthy, the streets are dangerous. Are you really surprised that Cory Booker was once the mayor of Newark, New Jersey? You shouldn’t be.”

Wow, that’s a lot to unpack and has little to do with the lack of power in TX. For myself I believe the best is yet to come. I see the dog whistles there, and it’s an excellent example of racist demagoguery and a sure path towards the destruction of our democracy.

@avacta's AVA6000 approved by MHRA. Superb news. First dosing 'around mid-year'; first data to come within 3-4 months after that.

A summary thread on the significance of AVA6000 - and #AVCT's pre CISION platform as a whole - to both the oncology industry and to AVCT itself. 1/10

In very basic terms, #AVCT's pre CISION chemotherapies are essentially reformulated versions of existing, approved chemotherapies that have been used on cancer patients for many years - decades, even.

The pre CISION tech is simply an attempt to improve the safety profile... 2/10

...of the chemo.

Most therapeutics going through clinical trials look for an improvement of at least 20% over the existing industry-standard drug. A 50% increase in efficacy would usually be considered an astonishing result.

In pre-clinical mouse models for #AVCT's AVA6000 3/10

...18 times more pro-doxorubicin was found in the tumour than in the heart. Compare that to the 1:1 ratio of the standard doxorubicin.

What this means is that the pre CISION tech could be used to enable the giving of doses to patients that are multiple times more potent... 4/10

...than standard chemotherapy drugs - either in the form of greater number of cycles of chemo, or in the potency of the individual dose.

For example, in #AVCT's pre-clinical trials, pro-dox (AVA6000) doses were 6x more potent than the standard dox doses.

The results? The...5/10

Having spent 2020 telling covid denalists that they were overly optimistic about the pandemic, I now look forward to spending 2021 telling covid maximalists that they are overly pessimistic about the end of the pandemic.

Telling a denialist in May that we shouldn't open bars back up = telling a maximalist in February that we should open schools back up.

Look, folks, the math is straightforward. ~13% of Americans have been vaccinated as of this

And the 7 day average continues to rise; we're approach 2 million vaccine doses per day. Meaning that we'll double that ~13% much faster than the two months it took us to get there.

So it's entirely reasonable that absent any other intervention, we should expect to hit ~30% vaccinated by the end of March.

We live in a society that misunderstands boundaries and consent. Most people think the former is about just saying no, and the latter is about sex. And while that’s a part of it, they are about agency, autonomy, respect and interpersonal relationships.

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Unsolicited advice without consent is crossing a person’s boundaries. Even if the advice is good advice, even if the person giving the advice is a pastor or a parent, even if the advice is important. Most people aren’t talking about their life so that we may solve it.

2/

It is an honor to be trusted with someone’s life story*, with their thoughts and their challenges, with their struggles and their musings. But it is not an open invitation to try and solve their problems, control their behavior, tell them what to do.

3/

For a group of people that speak often of free will and claim to follow Jesus, Christians are some of the worst at boundaries and consent in general, and advice giving in particular. Think about how many sermons are not sharing spiritual truths, but just giving advice.

4/

Think about how much pastoral counseling is just advice giving. Think about the many books that tell you how to parent, how to be a good wife, how to be a good Christian, how to... and how much of it is general advice as though our lives were interchangeable?

5/

When I was 25, I worked as a legislative assistant in the Missouri General Assembly.

It was a dream job, honestly.

But that dream dissipated the day the #MoLeg decided to name Rush Limbaugh as an “honorable Missourian” and place his bust in the “Hall of Famous Missourians.”

1/

The Hall of Famous Missourians sits in the Missouri State Capitol.

There are busts of Mark Twain, Dred Scott, Josephine Baker, Harry Truman and other legends of history.

The day I learned Rush Limbaugh would join their ranks, I thought it was a joke.

2/

We received phone calls from constituents appalled that Missouri would honor a man who had become infamous that year for calling a college student a “slut.”

And who just that week had continued spreading the racist birtherism lie about our then-President, Barack Obama.

3/

What I learned that day is that it wasn’t *despite* his racism, but because of it that he received this award.

It’s because he created a universe where it was permissible to lynch with language America’s first black President.

4/

Several State Representatives and their staffers intended to protest the vote and the selection.

By the time we made it to the doors of the House Floor, we weren’t allowed in. It was Republicans only. The doors were locked and secured by the Highway Patrol.

5/

Capitalism demolishes society and, with it, itself.

A thread.

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Prior to capitalism, there were plenty of elite-centric, exploitive systems in place. European and Japanese feudalism. Roman mass slavery. The corvee labor of the ancient hydraulic state. Etc.

2/

But as exploitive and repressive as these systems were, they still retained some sense of mutual obligation among classes. Elites depend on the masses to survive and thrive. You can only exploit them up to a certain point, beyond which you threaten your own labor supply.

3/

Consider this quote from Kenneth Jupp on European feudalism. Feudalism entailed *mutual obligations* between rich and poor.

4/

These obligations were not equal, uniform, or always universally respected. But they were at least *there.* In return for labor and agricultural surplus, a feudal lord was obligated to protect his villeins, provide them justice, and respect their usufruct land rights.

5/

@danielashby @AdamWJT @Greens4HS2 @TheGreenParty @GarethDennis @XRebellionUK @Hs2RebelRebel @HS2ltd I'll bite. Let's try to keep it factual. There's a reasonable basis to some aspects of this question, that it might be possible to agree on. Then there are other, more variable, elements which depend on external factors such as transport and energy policy. /1

@AdamWJT @Greens4HS2 @TheGreenParty @GarethDennis @XRebellionUK @Hs2RebelRebel @HS2ltd First up, we know reasonably well how much energy it takes to propel a high-speed train along the HS2 route. We can translate that into effective CO2 generated by making some assumptions about how green the electricity grid is. /2

@AdamWJT @Greens4HS2 @TheGreenParty @GarethDennis @XRebellionUK @Hs2RebelRebel @HS2ltd Secondly, we have a reasonable grasp of how much CO2 is going to be generated by building HS2 - there are standard methods of working this out, based on the amount of steel, concrete, earthmoving, machine-fuelling etc required. /3

@AdamWJT @Greens4HS2 @TheGreenParty @GarethDennis @XRebellionUK @Hs2RebelRebel @HS2ltd Thirdly, we can estimate how much CO2 is generated by cutting down trees, and how much is captured by planting new trees. We can also estimate how much CO2 is needed to keep the railway running and generated by maintaining the track /4

@AdamWJT @Greens4HS2 @TheGreenParty @GarethDennis @XRebellionUK @Hs2RebelRebel @HS2ltd We know how much CO2 is saved by moving goods by freight train on the lines freed up by moving the express trains on to HS2, rather than by truck. /5