That trending National Review piece highlights a major problem for the GOP: old school white Republicans spent 50 years courting the "Cletus" vote, welcoming them to the GOP fold with a handshake over shared white supremacist goals, while sneering at them behind their backs.

CITATIONS FOR COUP TIMELINE

Barr authorizes investigations into election fraud: https://t.co/h7MSjSYblJ

Pilger resigns: https://t.co/lR9iS1Z7g2

Esper’s firing: https://t.co/ADh5PxZ4t4, https://t.co/EgKUX05qYq

Pentagon firings:

"Lofgren asked whether Capitol police had enough officers to handle the capacity, and if they had the National Guard on standby and available to quickly help if needed.

"Sund insisted, yes, they had both bases covered, Lofgren said."

I have

Sund told Tim Ryan the same thing, BUT:

"In fact, three days earlier, Capitol police had told the Pentagon that it was not requesting National Guard support for the event, according to defense officials."

So either Sund was lying about requesting support or DoD is lying.

Both are plausible given everything that happened the day of. But either the Capitol Police Chief or the Department of Defense lied about whether Capitol Police had requested National Guard back-up.

We do know DoD hamstrung Guard units' ability to respond to rioting.

So there was a designated protest zone on the Capitol grounds, but when folks left the rally and marched toward the Capitol, no one was directing them toward the designated protest zone? There was nothing ensuring they went there and not...wherever they wanted?

"A seeming fortress from a distance, the Capitol contains more than 400 separate doors, entryways and ground-level windows."

I hope limiting entry points is one of the first major steps they take to preventing something like this again.

"Multiple European security officials told Insider that President Donald Trump appeared to have tacit support among US federal agencies responsible for securing the Capitol complex in Wednesday's coup

"Today I am briefing my government that we believe with a reasonable level of certainty that Donald Trump attempted a coup that failed when the system did not buckle." - NATO Intelligence official

Yikes on bikes.

"The French police official said they believed that an investigation would find that someone interfered with the deployment of additional federal law-enforcement officials on the perimeter of the Capitol complex...

"...the official has direct knowledge of the proper procedures for security of the facility."

We know that:

1) Sund told Representatives that he had requested additional National Guard back-up. That did not happen.
2) National Guard was deployed for "traffic control" at...

...the Capitol perimeter. Though this was a fairly small number of Guard troops, none were deployed to help inside the perimeter.
3) Additional Guard support was delayed by Sec. of Army Ryan McCarthy, Sec. Def. Christopher Collins, and allegedly by Trump himself for 90 minutes.

Survivorship Bias 101

History is written by the victors. But if we exclusively focus on these successes, we allow survivorship bias to distort our understanding of the world.

But what is "survivorship bias" and how does it work?

Here's Survivorship Bias 101!

👇👇👇

1/ First, a few definitions.

Survivorship bias is the logical error of concentrating on survivors (successes) and ignoring casualties (failures).

When we do so, we miss the true "base rates" of survival (the actual probability of success) and arrive at flawed conclusions.

2/ When we completely ignore failures, we lose our ability to correctly identify the differences between successes and failures.

Put simply, exclusively focusing on successes may actually inhibit our ability to identify (and replicate) the actions that led to such success.

3/ Cicero wrote on the topic over 2,000 years ago.

An atheist named Diagoras is shown portraits of people who prayed and were saved from death at sea as proof of God's existence.

Diagoras replies, "I see those who were saved, but where are those painted who were shipwrecked?"

4/ Cicero cuts right to the point - we cannot conclude that prayer led to being saved from the sea if we ignore those who prayed and then drowned.

Survivorship bias can lead to a deeply-flawed understanding of cause-and-effect relationships.

Let's look at some examples.

From @jack:

Starting now, we are changing the way we do things at Twitter. Even though we have been following policies we created, that we thought were good and necessary, it just hasn’t had the desired effect of promoting good discourse. Effective immediately, we are changing.

The basic principle that now guides us is that instead of trying to manipulate discourse, we are opening it up, and making ourselves more transparent and accountable, and resisting attempts at censorship of us or our users.

Further, we have been fundamentally operating under the false premise that we, our our news and fact-checking partners, are smarter or better at understanding information than you, our users, are. This is a vain fiction, and we will drop this pretense.

We have long known that we are not just another social media site, but the place where citizens, governments, and organizations communicate with each other, for essential purposes. We have a great responsibility to the public to be open. So, we change to improve.

First: we will no longer proactively delete any content, except for: private information harming a person other than who posted it (e.g. doxxing, revenge porn, etc.), and any content we are legally required to remove.

Would anyone like to admit why he cc'd himself in an email Wei Dai would see at ibiblio's host address? I have a few ideas.

was the .ae ccTLD a nod to Tim Berners-Lee/registries that issue top level country code domains? Is that why Tel Aviv is a place I commonly find OTC/Bitcoin related companies and DAC/dev protocols and operations based? Why UAE/Israel have opened commerce bilaterally in 2020?

Bitcoin is worldwide P2P software and growing into a network of the same ilk, what it can send without interference we can't even grasp yet. Even if you don't like another person, or their religious beliefs, bitcoin doesn't care. I lived through 9/11, my friends died in war.

But even I don't want Bitcoin just for the people I am more likely to have similarities too. And in working with the @_Devcoin guys for a few years now, officially since 2020 - I realized people from all spots on this globe and I share much more in common than everyday Americans.

And I haven't turned my back or spurned Americans either. I'm just saying we need to change our mindset. We want things but we won't admit it takes a whole world to pull off what it is we seek. The media is to blame for this but I also think we're at the point for grownups to act

With Myanmar, it seems that some are raising questions about the efficacy of sanctions and concerns about unintended consequences. It’s time for a “Myth and Realities” guide. THREAD. #WhatsHappeningInMyanmar

Myth: Human rights groups are calling for blanket sanctions on Myanmar.
 
Reality: This is false. Most human rights groups are calling for targeted measures directed solely at the military of Myanmar and companies it owns and which give revenue directly to it.

We are talking about the conglomerates and corporations that control the country’s natural resources, including the concessions for extractive sectors (oil and gas, timber, and mining of gemstones, jade, and valuable metals).

We’re calling on governments to focus on revenues and block transactions or seize government or state assets only where there is credible information that the military or its leaders are looting or acquiring state revenues or redirecting it to them.

Myth: Even if tailored narrowly, targeted sanctions will have major negative impacts on the people of Myanmar.
 
Reality: There are all kinds of ways to prevent unintended consequences on the broader Myanmar economy.