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

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

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.

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

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

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

Porting vanilla (minimal external API usage, no SIMD, no threading) C++ code to work in the browser with emscripten and WebAssembly is amazingly simple now. The Emscripten docs are excellent, but here are some things that could speed up the process of getting started:

1. Beware of code which does unaligned memory reads/writes (which "may be slow on some CPU architectures")
2. Test with -fsanitize=undefined -fsanitize=address
3. Link with "-s ALLOW_MEMORY_GROWTH=1" and "-s INITIAL_MEMORY=X", X is a multiple of 64k, allows the C++ heap to grow.

(I completely avoid unaligned memory reads/writes because when compiled to asm.js they "can fail silently".)

4. Link with "-s MALLOC=emmalloc" to reduce compiled size.
5. I usually test with -O1 because -O0 can take very long to load/execute.
6. For debugging link with -s DEMANGLE_SUPPORT=1 and -s ASSERTIONS=1

7. C++ printf() outputs to the Developer Console: Chrome Settings->More tools->Developer tools
8. If something crashes, try running in Firefox which may explain the error differently.
9. I use Web Server for Chrome for

Right, I did some reading and here’s what likely happened with Parler. Lots of crossed wires here.

First up: someone noticed that Parler uses sequential integers in the API endpoint to get content.

An API endpoint is just a URL with a value added onto the end that tells the system what you want to get back.

Using sequential integers means that a hacker can set up an automated script to start at 1 and count up, trying API calls over and over again, to get back content from Parler.

Parler apparently had no restrictions on this API endpoint, which frankly blows my mind as a web dev.

If you had a working URL, it just spat out whatever it had whether you were logged in or not.

It seems that EVERYTHING that had been uploaded - video, photos, text posts - was accessible whether it had been deleted or restricted in the app itself. Even uploaded photos of licenses etc etc.

I cannot describe how amateur hour this is, if true.

What are the implications of using hacked data for research?

A short thread inspired by the fact that, before AWs took it down, #Parler was extensively hacked and user data was leaked.

The #Parler dataset seems crazy interesting for doing research, and my first reaction after the breach was to shre it with other #CompSocSci ppl.

However, I started having second thoughts, so what follows is to organize ideas and have it somewhere I can look back to.

2/n

Generally speaking, as far as the ethics of research goes a good advice would be to handle hacked data with caution.

First of all, there's an issue of quality. Data might be altered or incomplete, and the source cannot be considered accountable (assuming src is anonymous).

3/n

Secondly and more importantly, a researcher using the data would probably be violating users’ consent and acting against the data collector's will.

Finally, users’ privacy is at stake, since researchers could see material that users didn’t agree for other people to see.

4/n

Sharing private information without consent might put people at risk of harm.

This is all the more true in cases such as the #ParlerHack, where the leaked information is of particularly sensitive nature, and there’s a high risk of unintended consequences.

5/n

If you're looking at GA EV data and thinking maybe the reason D turnout looks strong relative to 11/3 is because after 2 months of Trump/GOP officials trashing mail-in ballots GOP voters are ditching it for E-Day instead...

Boy do I have some mindblowing statistics for you...

I compared the current mail-in voting tallies for each Congressional District against November mail-in votes for those districts.

The statewide figure currently sits at 62%. Guess which district leads the state?

You guessed it!

GA-14 at 69%. Marjorie Taylor Greene's district.

#2 is GA-8 at 68%.

Jody Hice of "I'm joining Marjorie Taylor Greene in her effort to throw out the Electoral College vote" fame.

GA-9 (Doug Collins) is above the state average at 64%.

IF Republicans were ditching absentee balloting en masse to vote on Election Day, you'd expect to see it by now. But the early *in-person* voting totals are what's actually lagging, not mail-in voting.

Pardon the sloppy spreadsheet, but those last 4 columns are what I'm looking at. The last one in particular.