BC POLITICS
Saved by @Mollyycolllinss

1) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Starting an Impeachment Trial

 2) It is unclear when and how the Senate may begin President Trump’s second impeachment trial. The problem with “starting” an impeachment trial is that once you start, under the Senate impeachment rules, it can potentially supersede all other Senate action.
3) That’s the case - UNLESS - the Senate works out some sort of an agreement on handling an impeachment trial. Otherwise, once you start an impeachment trial, without a side agreement, the Senate meets six days a week at 1 pm et, Sundays excluded, until the trial is finished.
4) The key is when the House sends over the article of impeachment. That triggers a lot of things.

First things first. The Senate must send a parliamentary message to the House that it’s ready to “receive” the article.
5) This is kind of like a football referee waving his hand at a kickoff returner stationed in the end zone to make sure he’s ready to proceed with the kickoff. Once the Senate does that, the House can send the articles.

But…
6) Minutes after approving two articles of impeachment for President Clinton in December, 1998, the House voted on a separate resolution to send the articles to the Senate and appoint the House impeachment “managers.”
7) These House members serve as “prosecutors,” presenting the House’s case to the Senate. After impeaching President Trump in December, 2019, the House never approved the resolution to send its two articles to the Senate until January 15, 2020.
8) The impeachment trial began the next day. The trial is deemed as formally “beginning” once the Senate assembles, the articles are presented verbally to the Senate and the House managers are recognized.
9) The Chief Justice of the United States usually then swears-in the senators as jurors.

The first day of such a trial is often ceremonial. Opening arguments by the House managers and the president’s defense usually don’t start until the next day.
10) Keep in mind that the Senate can vote to dismiss the articles once a trial has started. The Senate could also approve an operating resolution for the trial which supersede the standardized Senate impeachment rules.
11) Such a measure could dictate when the Senate convenes for the trial, its length and how to handle witnesses and evidence.
12) So, the paramount concern in the mind of current Senate Minority Ldr Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is timing out when the House sends over the articles so the Senate may begin the trial – yet balancing that with confirming as many of President-elect Biden’s cabinet members as possible
13) That’s why we believe a trial may not start until next week at the earliest – if not later. Moreover, it’s possible the Senate works out a bifurcated arrangement where it handles nominations and other Senate business (say a COVID bill) during one day part and the trial later
14) But nothing can happen until the House sends the article to the Senate. And Schumer can work with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) as to when he believes it’s convenient to begin the trial.

More from Chad Pergram

Chad Pergram
Chad Pergram
@ChadPergram
1) The Hitchhiker's Guide to a 2nd impeachment of President Trump: The House can impeach someone twice. And the Senate can even launch an impeachment trial after the President vacates his office.
TRUMP
Chad Pergram
Chad Pergram
@ChadPergram
1) Several big, controversial things coming together in the House of Representatives this week.

The House is expected to vote mid-week to fine members who decline to pass through metal detectors en route to the House floor.

2) The House erected the mags after the 1/6 riot. Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) was later refused entry to the House chamber by US Capitol Police after he attempted to bring a gun onto the floor, setting off the mags.

3) Republicans argue that the mags are unconstitutional and interfere with their right to go to the floor, via the “Speech or Debate” clause of the Constitution. It prohibits lawmakers from being arrested or detained when conducting official business.

4) But the Constitution also allows both the House and Senate to craft their own rules.

Also, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is to meet “this week” with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).

5) Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) may try to advance his measure to expel Greene from the House. Expulsion requires a two-thirds vote. Only five House members have ever been expelled. The last was the late Rep. Jim Traficant (D-OH) in 2002.
SOCIETY
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Chad Pergram
Chad Pergram
@ChadPergram
1) Washington is staring at the potential of a government shutdown Monday night. This is grim. Congress has approved four temporary spending bills since the end of the government’s fiscal year in September to prevent a shutdown.

2) The most recent stopgap measure was a seven day plan this week. Mbrs knew that the COVID/coronavirus bill was so large, it would take several days to send to the White House. Yes, that bill funds the government until next fall. But it isn’t law until the President signs it.

3) So, the most recent Band-Aid measure was the equivalent of fiscal grout. The House will approve another emergency measure on Monday. But there's doubt the Senate will do anything before then. And, it’s unclear if President Trump would sign anything. That means a shutdown.

4) A shutdown is always dangerous. It could be more dangerous during a pandemic. And it’s unclear if a shutdown could have devastating impacts on distributing the vaccine.

5) It takes a two-thirds vote of both the House and Senate to override a presidential veto. With 359 House yeas and 92 Senate yeas on the COVID/omnibus bill, both bodies have way more than a supermajority to override a presidential veto.
GOVERNMENT
Chad Pergram
Chad Pergram
@ChadPergram
1) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the New Congress Starting Today and the Election for Speaker.

2) Starting the new Congress is inherently messy in a pandemic. The House of Representatives implemented “remote voting” in the spring.

3) That’s where the House permitted members who were at high risk, quarantining, tested positive or caring for someone who is ill could “phone in” their vote. The Hse will vote on Monday on a new “rules package” to begin the new Congress which will include a remote voting option

4) But in the House, you can’t carry over rules from the 116th Congress to the 117thCongress.

That’s why everyone has to show up at noon today.

This poses an interesting, ethical question:

5) Is it appropriate for members who have tested positive, have been in quarantine or been exposed, be present today?

Here’s what to expect in the House today.
POLITICS
Chad Pergram
Chad Pergram
@ChadPergram
A) This is “Capitol Crunch.” Congress often faces an avalanche of activity in December as lawmakers try to wrap up for the year. And the challenges this year are particularly acute.

B) Talks go on behind the scenes about a potential coronavirus relief package. We truly don’t know the size of the final product. But we keep hearing that the bipartisan “baseline” will be a little more than $900 billion.

C) But there are still major sticking points over liability protections and money for state and local governments.

D) It appears that the only way to advance any sort of coronavirus bill will be to latch it to the big, $1.4 trillion, omnibus spending bill which leaders and appropriators have been working on for weeks. But that’s far from settled, too.

E) Issues still remain regarding migrant detention policy and money for the wall.

Frankly, it’s going to take until at least early next week to get a coronavirus bill which can jell – let alone, the bill to avoid a government shutdown at 11:59:59 pm et on December 11.
POLITICS

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Palmer Report
Palmer Report
@PalmerReport
That new attack piece about Seth Abramson is full of easily debunked false claims. Whenever the mainstream media gets annoyed at an indie pundit like Seth, it just publishes a bunch of bullshit about him, and most people mistakenly believe it. They've done the same thing to me.

The sad part is that when the author of that piece tried to smear a bunch of mainstream media journalists for daring to compare notes with him, they all responded by lying and said they've never compared notes with him. Even though Abramson has proof that they have.

This is the EXACT same strategy that certain mainstream media outlets used against me in 2017-2018. First they lied about me. Then they attacked my mainstream media associates for associating with a "fake news" pundit like me. Then some in the media felt compelled to disown me.

Sadly, it didn't matter that I had overwhelming proof that everything said about me in those attack pieces was false. When you defend yourself, no matter how factually, the average observer merely decides you're being "defensive" and therefore guilty as charged.

Ask yourself why the mainstream media is choosing now to dishonestly attack Abramson. The media's ratings are way down now that Trump is gone. Abramson presumably still has his entire niche audience intact. So the media gets jealous and takes it out on him.
POLITICS
Patrick Byrne
Patrick Byrne
@PatrickByrne
READ AND RETWEET AS THOUGH THE LIFE OF YOUR NATION DEPENDS ON IT. WHICH IT DOES. Citizens, I am going to add to the picture with more information. I am not going to let this pass while keeping information to myself. I am going to walk you through 2 narratives.

A printing shop in Michigan prints ballots for Delaware County, Pennsylvania and as Lancashire County, Pennsylvania (this is normal). But along with the ballots it prints on contract and delivers to those counties, it prints some ballots that get diverted to Bethpage, New York.

There, a boiler room of folks fill in "Biden" (often without even voting downballot). The ballots (which are forensically legitimate, given that they come from the same print shop as the good ballots, ) then get trucked into Pennsylvania and mailed. Hundreds of thousands.

We have all of that documented. Texts, statements, affidavits, everything.

We also know that this same ballot printing company (and other firms in the same family) also print for Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia.
POLITICS , LEGAL
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Brian Cates
Brian Cates
@drawandstrike
Trump is gonna let the Mueller investigation end all on it's own. It's obvious. All the hysteria of the past 2 weeks about his supposed impending firing of Mueller was a distraction. He was never going to fire Mueller and he's not going to


Mueller's officially end his investigation all on his own and he's gonna say he found no evidence of Trump campaign/Russian collusion during the 2016 election.

Democrats & DNC Media are going to LITERALLY have nothing coherent to say in response to that.

Mueller's team was 100% partisan.

That's why it's brilliant. NOBODY will be able to claim this team of partisan Democrats didn't go the EXTRA 20 MILES looking for ANY evidence they could find of Trump campaign/Russian collusion during the 2016 election

They looked high.

They looked low.

They looked underneath every rock, behind every tree, into every bush.

And they found...NOTHING.

Those saying Mueller will file obstruction charges against Trump: laughable.

What documents did Trump tell the Mueller team it couldn't have? What witnesses were withheld and never interviewed?

THERE WEREN'T ANY.

Mueller got full 100% cooperation as the record will show.
POLITICS
Maria \u23f3
Maria ⏳
@ml_1maria
How the CIA gets the media to lie to you

https://t.co/vsTrS43Fft


https://t.co/rUTYg42PYH


https://t.co/1r0MbPv8wG


War on democracy - installing US-puppet dictators in Latin America in order to control their economies
#Guatemala #Arbenz #RedScare

Propaganda, "harmless bombing" and a CIA terror campaign


CIA war on Nicaragua
POLITICS
POJU OYEMADE
POJU OYEMADE
@pastorpoju
1. (On politics) I was once in a conversation with an elderly friend of mine who is American. He is deeply involved in politics in the States and I asked about what he had learnt. He said, "our movement pushed and mobilised and we got (.........) into the white house."

2. "However, we saw that our interests were not executed by him then we realised in a democratic setting sometimes its the people that surround the president or anyone in executive positions that really matter. Those he speaks to first and last.
We therefore changed our strategy"

3. We do support but now with the intent of placing people around the elected officers.
There is a lot of space for influence in positions that are non elective. Every executive leader leans on people to help in developing ideas and in executing them.

4. The young folks should be looking here. Elective positions like Governorship etc can be very expensive. Legitimate costs will run into hundreds of millions but there are positions for assistants, tech advisers, etc that wield alot of influence in shaping policy and direction.

5. If you want to change things you must get your foot into the room and have a seat at the table. The least position there will wield more power than being an critic on the outside. In positions like this skill, loyalty and confidentiality are the requirements and not money.
POLITICS

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Due to the pandemic you may not have visited your local library in a while. So come with me on a virtual library tour, courtesy of stock photography, to see what we do for a living...


Libraries are of course information resource centres, but in many ways they are so much more. To get the best out of them you need to really know your way around the stacks.


The enquiries desk is normally your first stop in a library, and this is where you will meet The Angry Librarian! Why is she angry? Because you keep asking her stupid questions!


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On and on it goes...


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Important paper from Google on large batch optimization. They do impressively careful experiments measuring # iterations needed to achieve target validation error at various batch sizes. The main "surprise" is the lack of surprises. [thread]

https://t.co/7QIx5CFdfJ


The paper is a good example of lots of elements of good experimental design. They validate their metric by showing lots of variants give consistent results. They tune hyperparamters separately for each condition, check that optimum isn't at the endpoints, and measure sensitivity.

They have separate experiments where the hold fixed # iterations and # epochs, which (as they explain) measure very different things. They avoid confounds, such as batch norm's artificial dependence between batch size and regularization strength.

When the experiments are done carefully enough, the results are remarkably consistent between different datasets and architectures. Qualitatively, MNIST behaves just like ImageNet.

Importantly, they don't find any evidence for a "sharp/flat optima" effect whereby better optimization leads to worse final results. They have a good discussion of experimental artifacts/confounds in past papers where such effects were reported.
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So, today, for the first time in 25 (!) years of Apple, I downgraded. From the 2016 MacBook Pro to my 2013, which I had kept in a drawer...


It was pretty simple to do—Apple Time Machine backups let me do it with one click.

That first tweet captures, in two pictures, how badly Apple has “lost the plot” (to quote @wylieprof). On the right is the Apple MagSafe adapter, from 2013. On the left, what I had “upgraded” to.

Thanks, Apple! I really was nostalgic for worrying about yanking my computer off the table.

Oh and I really appreciated not knowing if my computer was charging. What was great was the little whoop sound you used, so that the speaker before me could be informed I was charging my laptop.
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*Heads-up that this thread will feature some extreme examples of homophobia and transphobia.*

Hey folks, have you ever wondered why trans people face constant accusations of fetishism, sexual predation and child abuse/grooming? Well, today let's talk about stochastic terrorism.

So, first we have to talk about what stochastic terrorism actually is. Remember when there was a conspiracy that there was a pedophile ring operating out of a pizza parlour basement, and a crazed gunman showed up? It's that sort of incitement that stochastic terrorism describes.

It's the demonisation or incitement against a group of people or individuals with the intent that other, unaffiliated parties will act upon it; it's the releasing doctored footage and a shooter show up at Planned Parenthood as a direct result of what he's been led to believe.

So with that in mind, let's talk about Russia's extreme anti-LGBT laws that banned the "promotion" of LGBT lifestyles to children. A move that specifically marked LGBT people as a threat to children, and resulted in neo-nazis meting out vigilante "justice" against gay men.


Groups such as this would lure unsuspecting gay men via dating sites, and brutalise and humiliate them on camera. They did so under the guise of combating child abusers, one group calling themselves "Occupy
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Kieran Snyder
Kieran Snyder
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1 There's a chasm between an NLP technology that works well in the research lab and something that works for applications that real people use. This was eye-opening when I started my career, and every time I talk to an NLP engineer at @textio, it continues to strike me even now.

2 Research conditions are theoretical and/or idealized. A huge problem for so-called NLP or AI startups with highly credentialed academic founders is that they bring limited knowledge of what it takes to build real products outside the lab.

3 A product is ultimately a thing that people pay for - not just cool technology or user experience. But I’m not even talking about knowledge gaps in go-to-market work. I'm talking purely technical gaps: how you go from science project to performant + delightful user experience.

4 Most commoditized NLP packages solve well-understood problems in standard ways that sacrifice either precision or performance. In a research lab, this is not usually a hard trade-off; in general, no one is using what you make, so performance is less important than precision.

5 In software, when you’re making something for real people to use, these tradeoffs are a big deal. Especially if you’re asking those people to pay for what you’ve made (can’t get away from that pesky GTM thinking). They expect quality, which includes precision AND performance.
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