Senate votes to confirm Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court – The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/kavanaugh-vote-divided-senate-poised-to-confirm-trumps-nominee/2018/10/06/64bf69fa-c969-11e8-b2b5-79270f9cce17_story.html

Interesting. So Murkowski would’ve been a “no” if Daines had been there? So, she allowed a 2-vote margin rather than closing it to a more narrow margin? Not sure what the significance is.

«Saturday’s vote broke largely along party lines, with one Democrat, Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, supporting Kavanaugh, and one Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, opposing his nomination.

Murkowski asked that she be recorded “present” in a courtesy to Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who missed the vote due to his daughter’s wedding. That ensured the same two-vote margin that would have resulted had Daines been there to vote.»

The War That Never Ends | The Cook Political Report

Source: https://www.cookpolitical.com/analysis/national/national-politics/war-never-ends

«Neither side has cornered the market on hypocrisy. It’s hard to take Republican claims of Democrats operating in bad faith seriously, when Republicans held up the nomination of Merrick Garland for much of 2016. It’s also hard to reconcile Democrats’ universal cries of “I believe her,” with the terrible treatment many showed to Anita Hill, Monica Lewinsky and/or Paula Jones. Meanwhile, voters aren’t making the distinctions on policy or procedure or hypocrisy either. Instead, they rally behind their “team.”»

 

My standard “Robots!” response

I should just save this for copy/paste into replies to various “robots will put us all out of work!” stories.


Weeellll….. mmmaybe. We’ve been automating since out-of-work weavers were throwing their wooden shoes (“sabot” –> saboteur) into automated looms in order to wreck them.

I’m not on board with the picture of a fully autonomous machine replacing 100% of workers in some field overnight, which is what articles like this always seem to imply (at least with their headlines). There will always be challenges that only an adaptable human can handle, and they’ll sometimes be crucial challenges.

That said, yeah, automation has been happening. I think it’s more of a challenge than a catastrophe.

 

bellingcat – 305 Car Registrations May Point to Massive GRU Security Breach – bellingcat

Source: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2018/10/04/305-car-registrations-may-point-massive-gru-security-breach/

Cyber warfare. Whoops.

«The address to which the car was registered, Komsomolsky Prospekt 20, coincides with the address of military unit 26165, described by Dutch and U.S. law enforcement as GRU’s cyber warfare department. The database entry contained Morenets’s passport number.»

 

Police Use Fitbit Data to Charge 90-Year-Old Man in Stepdaughter’s Killing – The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/us/fitbit-murder-arrest.html

«She had been wearing a Fitbit fitness tracker, which investigators said showed that her heart rate had spiked significantly around 3:20 p.m. on Sept. 8, when Mr. Aiello was there.

Then it recorded her heart rate slowing rapidly, and stopping at 3:28 p.m., about five minutes before Mr. Aiello left the house, the report said.»