Yoga employs more Americans than coal. But compare and contrast 1/2

and 2/2

I think many of us carry in our minds an image of the US economy that looks like this

when the reality is this

and this

Let's all resolve to live in the now

-END-

One more detail.
Pre-pandemic, solar installation employed some 240,000 Americans - 5x the number employed by coal https://t.co/FVkYsOXs0I

Sorry, I can't seem to let this go ... one more point ...

Journalists are fascinated by the unexpected. What happened in 2016 was a surprise, so the people who did it drew disproportionate attention.

But surprises are surprising precisely because they are unusual.

More from David Frum

David Frum
@davidfrum

In an early episode of "Mad Men," the young striver Peggy Olson faces a traumatic experience. The principal character, a man whose life is built upon falsehood and evasion, offers his life advice: "It never happened. It will amaze you how much it never happened." 1/x

With the Tanden nomination, we are watching congressional Republicans put Don Draper's advice into effect.

They supported a profoundly corrupt, cruel, vituperative, and generally immoral and unethical president at the head of an inept and unethical administration. They knew it!

But of course those senators never said so. They were scared and they were shamed. Maybe they stopped some bad things - or at least they tell themselves they did. But the experience had to have been profoundly humiliating for almost all of them. And these are not humble people.

So how do they cope? They follow Don Draper's advice. "It never happened."

The Tanden nomination is the opportunity to rev the pretense loud and fast.

The lady was occasionally indecorous! Even ... sometimes ... untoward. We can't have THAT in the US government!

Hypocritical is not really the word to describe this behavior. It's more a kind of post-traumatic coping mechanism, a denial of the radical abuse that they also suffered, along with US allies worldwide, people of integrity in govt service, and so many bereaved American families

David Frum
@davidfrum

Trump tweets about his health remind me of a story my late father-in-law Peter Worthington told about covering the Six Day War in 1967 ... 1/x

Pete was in Cairo on the day the war started. He was awoken early by air raid sirens. He turned on Radio Cairo to listen for news. Time passed until an announcer delivered a bulletin. "The Zionists attacked at dawn. We shot down six of their planes and suffered no losses." 2/x

Pete shaved and prepared to go visit the air ministry for himself. The announcer returned to the air. "Update: we shot down TWELVE Zionist planes and suffered no losses ourselves."

He understood the Egyptians had suffered a bad defeat. 3/x

He finished dressing, knotted his tie, and the announcer was back.

"Update again. We shot down FIFTY Zionist planes and suffered no losses ourselves."

That's when he realized that the entire Egyptian air force had been wiped out.

4/x

(NB I may have the figures wrong in the anecdote, I'm telling the story from memory, but you get the idea.)

5/x

David Frum
@davidfrum

You're hearing a lot of talk about "irregularities" in the election of 1876 that led to a "disputed" outcome. What is being referred to in this hazy terms?

Across the state of South Carolina, white conservatives had used terror and massacre to deter former slaves from voting in 1876. Here's the story of an attack upon the small town of Hamburg in July

Hundreds of black South Carolinians were killed by white conservative militias. Blacks fought back in many places, but they were out-gunned.

The killings were not spontaneous outbursts. They were part of planned campaign of anti-black voter

Some of the elements of the conservative plan to suppress black votes in South Carolina in 1876 sound queasily familiar in our own time, adjusting for the antique language and technology.

But back of it all was terror and violence, more violence than could be contained by the limited federal forces in the area - who were anyway constrained by the white conservative Democratic House majority elected in 1874.

David Frum
@davidfrum

In February 1981, pro-Franco army officers attacked the Spanish Parliament hoping to halt Spain's evolution toward democracy and liberalism. 1/x

The coup was soon suppressed, in large part because of a miscalculation by the dying Franco regime. In 1975, the regime had restored the old Spanish monarchy, hoping to glamorize authoritarianism. Instead, King Juan Carlos opposed the coup - and most of the army obeyed. 2/x

Here's where the story gets interesting for our current purposes ...

The coup launched to thwart Spain's shift to democracy instead consolidated Spanish democracy. The next year, 1982, social democrats won the biggest landslide in Spanish electoral history. 3/x

The elected social democrats formed a government without a single minister connected to the old regime. State support of the Catholic church ended. Family law was modernized, minority language rights were protected. If Franco had opposed it - the new Spain wanted it. 4/x

The process was not instant. Not until 2019 would the state remove Franco's remains from the lavish tomb he built to himself. But the process was inexorable. The pro-Franco attempted coup guaranteed the total doom of Francoism in Spain. 5/x

David Frum
@davidfrum

On October 16 2020, a secondary school teacher named Samuel Paty was beheaded with a meat cleaver in the street of a small town 20 miles down the Seine from Paris. 1/x

Paty's murderer, a young Chechen refugee, had never met the teacher. The killer was incited to the crime by a multi-day campaign of defamation and disinformation on French social media. 2/x

For 5 years, Paty had taught his classes a unit on free speech and its limits in a democratic society. As part of the discussion, he showed his students some of the famous Charlie Hebdo cartoons - after inviting those who might be offended to leave and then rejoin the class. 3/x

One parent of one student - not the student herself - then set in motion a campaign of denunciation against Paty. And the result was a crime that shocked France and pulled tens of thousands to vigils and protests. 4/x

France has suffered terrible crimes in the name of religion before the Paty killing. We're only 5 years from the horrifying nightclub attacks that killed 130 in November 2015. But past attacks caught France by surprise. This murder announced itself in advance. 5/x

More from Internet

Carlos E. Perez
@IntuitMachine

Chess may be a good analogy for explaining the difference between a descriptive model of reality and a generative model of reality.

A descriptive model of chess will describe the rules (i.e. initial setup, allowed moves, points per piece, objectives). This tells you how a chessboard might evolve and also narrows the combinations of realistic chess positions.

In contrast, a generative model involves the actual gameplay between competing players that follow the rules. It generates new styles and patterns. It establishes new strategies and tactics. It generates new openings, middle gameplay, and end game tactics.

A generative model is an evolutionary model that leads to emergent behavior. As a consequence, a master of chess is able to recall the layout of chess positions in a real game in an instant, yet is unable to remember pieces placed in random positions.

That is because causality is present in the movements of pieces in a chessboard. An intuitive system like the human mind is able to capture that causality as a means to understanding and recall.

Dannielle (Dossy) Blum...
@DrDannielle

SolarWinds follow up. Very good tweet explaining what happened.

Hackers reportedly slipped malware into prior SolarWinds software updates, which gave them access to a "God-mode" for infected networks, including the Treasury and Commerce departments.

The Pentagon is also a SolarWinds customer.https://t.co/Srcoztssol https://t.co/OgMhAjJqPx
— Wes Wilson (@weswilson4) December 14, 2020

Basically what this means is that SolarWinds itself was exploited. Someone posted an infected update as legitimate (digitally signed), leading customers to download a bad update.

“Multiple trojanized updates were digitally signed from March - May 2020 and posted to the SolarWinds updates website” https://t.co/8e3bMFWXYu

FireEye then explains that infected organizations were approached and exploited. This is a separate Step 2.

At this point, information is already going to “malicious domains” without extra intervention, after the malware does nothing for “up to two weeks”

$THE HELLYWOOD REPORTER \U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8\U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8\U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8\U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8\U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8$

THE HELLYWOOD REPORTER...
@mikewolfpack100

Question: HOW Many Accounts Does Twitter Follow???

Answer: Only 9

WHO Are They Following???

$\U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8\u2694\ufe0f\u03b1\u0432\u0455\u03c3\u2113\u03c5\u0442\u0454\xa2\u03c3\u03b7\u03bd\u03b9\xa2\u0442\u03b9\u03c3\u03b7\u2694\ufe0f\U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8$