[1/3] @thedavidcrosby was born on this day 82 years ago. One of the most fun things I ever did was to sit down w/Croz for a week to talk about his amazing career from #Byrds to #CSNY and beyond. Hear those conversations on @OsirisMedia, with rare music: osirispod.com/podcasts/freak… [2/3] @TheDavidCrosby's last band, featuring his son @jamjora, @ChrisStills and others, will finally play its long-delayed tribute next week at @LoberoTheatre. Shawn Colvin will open. It will be great and healing to hear Croz's music live again. [sold out] lobero.org/events/stand-a…

[1/4] @JerryGarcia, one of the most agile, hard-working, and articulate musicians of his generation, died on this day in 1995. I grew up standing in front of him, seeing Jerry perform with @GratefulDead and the Garcia Band more than 300 times. Photo by me in 1980. [2/4] For #Deadheads like me, @JerryGarcia's death was not just the loss of a man who had brought us much joy and adventure, it was the end of an era in our own lives. I tried to express those thoughts in an essay written shortly after his death: poetspath.com/Scholarship_Pr…

[1/4] Augustus Owsley Stanley III, aka "Bear," was born OTD in 1935. Perhaps best known for making the LSD that fueled the Summer of Love (thus inspiring the Steely Dan song "Kid Charlemagne"), Bear was much more than that. [📸Amalie Rothschild] [2/4] As sound man and mentor to @GratefulDead, Bear began the practice of taping the band every night so they could learn from their own performances. #Deadheads turned that into a global community. Bear's Sonic Journals also captured many other bands with astonishing clarity.

[1/6] Large clinical trial shows that ivermectin *DOES NOT WORK* against #COVID19. So let's review.

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1509275585209589769

[2/6] @FoxNews' Laura Ingraham was one of the first and most aggressive promoters of ivermectin, claiming "hundreds of thousands of people" died unnecessarily because it wasn't approved. She also claimed FDA was suppressing ivermectin in favor of vaccines. washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/…

[1/4] Tips for folks who want to be good allies during #AutismAcceptanceMonth:
1. Most autistic people prefer to be called "autistic" rather than "people with autism."
2. Listen to autistic people.
3. Avoid demeaning/inaccurate terms like "high functioning" and "low functioning." [2/4] 4. Read great books by #autistic authors like "We're Not Broken," "Diary of a Young Naturalist," "Ten Steps to Nanette," "Keep Clear," and "Sincerely, Your Autistic Child."
5. If you book autistic speakers for events, pay them what you'd pay non-autistic speakers.

[1/5] This must have been when Trump so dominated Putin in a meeting that the Russian leader was still shaking in his boots. [2/5] No, wait sorry, THIS must been the time Putin was truly cowed by Trump's alpha-male fearlessness that I keep hearing about in right-wing media.

[1/7] Friends, we need to focus on absorbing these truths, because we're in grave trouble, and it's our trouble as a nation. A foreign dictator whose security forces routinely toss dissidents out windows is trying to start World War 3. Meanwhile... [2/7] The twice-impeached unindicted criminal former President of the United States has declared Putin "savvy" and "a genius," and implied that America should be sending invading forces into Mexico. clayandbuck.com/president-trum…

[1/4] I've seen 3 stories this week on how the Trump crime family and staff jumped the line for #COVID19 vaccines after encouraging the virus to spread & kill half a million Americans. They're the guys who shoved their way into the Titanic lifeboats as women and children drowned. [2/4] Chicago hospital exec brags about vaccinating Eric Trump against #COVID19 early: rawstory.com/eric-trump-265…

[1/4] "Judas and the Black Messiah" (@JATBMFilm) on @hbomax is excellent, probing the FBI assassination of Fred Hampton, a young man who threatened to build radical alliances between poor black and poor white communities in Chicago, organizing against their common oppressors. [2/4] @JATBMFilm feels very timely, but it's enraging to know how little progress has been made against racism. With the GOP endorsing white-supremacist thugs overrunning the US Capitol weeks ago, pundits talking about a "post-racial" society after Obama seem absurd.

[1/4] Now that Trump has called Kamala a "Communist" and "monster," it's worth recalling that Trump's mentor was Roy Cohn, the vile mob-connected lawyer who was Sen. McCarthy's right-hand man in terrorizing the country with fears of imaginary "Reds" in high gov positions. [2/5] Cohn and McCarthy also went after LGBT folks and ruined hundreds of lives - despite the fact that both Cohn and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover were in the closet themselves. (Cohn eventually died of AIDS, denying it to the end.) From Cohn, Trump learned...

[1/4] Important and still under the radar: Trump's cronies are pushing to get their untested and potentially dangerous drug oleandrin approved as a *dietary supplement* to sidestep the usual process of clinical trials and peer review. This would be disastrous. [cont.] [2/4] I wrote in depth about the supplement industry in my bestselling history of autism #NeuroTribes. It's virtually unregulated, and misguided parents of #autistic kids spend thousands of dollars a month for alleged "cures" that do nothing or much worse. Now imagine... [cont.]

[1/18] Thread on why @CripCampFilm, just out on @Netflix, is not just one of the most powerfully uplifting and joyous movies you'll see year, it's the film you need to watch right NOW in #coronavirus hell. It's a doc about a camp for disabled kids run by hippies in the Catskills. [2/18] This camp was FUNKY, not some quaint heart-tugging situation. The kids had a wide range of disabilities, from cerebral palsy to epilepsy to spina bifida and more. Some came from family homes in the Bronx; some from institutions where they were warehoused like animals.

On this day 49 years ago, @thedavidcrosby's "If I Could Only Remember My Name" was released. It's one of my top 10 albums of all time, up there with Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" or anything by the Beatles. [1/4] It features a cast of my favorite musicians at their peak, including Joni Mitchell, Jerry Garcia, Paul Kantner, and Jorma Kaukonen. Together, they explore a wide range of music, from moody instrumentals like "Song with No Words" to a French lullaby. [2/4]

Something just happened that surprised even me: The doorbell rang (which usually annoys me), and it turned out to be a young guy going door-to-door for @ewarren; and when he left, I broke down weeping, as if I'd been holding back a torrent of tears. In fact, I have been. [1/5] We've lost so much already under this criminal, traitorous, and wholly illegitimate presidency. I can no longer talk to 3/4 of my family, who have been brainwashed by @FoxNews. Every day we see our country further degraded and dishonored by the criminal in the White House. [2/5]

Thread: Imagine that nasty little man ordering killings from his vermin-ridden omelet bar. He was a crushing disappointment to his racist father, which must still be a burning coal in his gut. He robbed, cheated and lied for everything he ever got including the Presidency. [1/6] He used a rich-boy snowflake pass to get out of military service, and went on to try to humiliate a senator who endured 5 years of torture in Hanoi that left him disabled. He seethes with jealousy about our first black POTUS, who makes him look like a bumbling ignoramus. [2/6]

A thread on the historical significance of @GretaThunberg being chosen as the first proudly autistic @Time Person of the Year. The fact that autistic folks often speak the truth bluntly, even rudely at times, is often framed as a social deficit. [1/7] In Greta's case, her relentless reiteration of the facts of #climate change, and the importance of science, has made her a focus of incandescent hatred by the same pompous liars and paid-for buffoons who are selling the earth from under the feet of their own grandchildren. [2/7]

Thread on why this tweet is incorrect. For decades, only kids could get an autism diagnosis. They were never consulted on how they wanted to be described. Meanwhile, in the larger community of parents of disabled children, "person first" language prevailed: "person with X." [1/6]

https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1136315391842705414

Then something important happened in the deaf community, when deaf people rejected euphemisms like "hard of hearing" to proudly embrace the term "Deaf"; comparable to LGBT folks proudly embracing the word "queer." [2/6]