I’m amazed that no one has mentioned the oldest known media bias: dog bites man is not a story. We’ve been talking about a blue wave for months, and it’s entirely predictable that the GOP will lose ground in the midterms in a complete absence of other information; that’s a century-old expectation.

So any story about GOP momentum is newsworthy, and it’s not in the least surprising if journalists and editors unconsciously bias in favor of printable news. (Same way that a scientist cheers for proof of hypothesis, not so they’re right, but so they can publish.)

The way this is solved in science is with meta-analyses, and arguably the equivalent here is aggregate sites like 538. I don’t know if I trust the exactness of their outcome (if we lose a 6 in 7 election, does that imply bad luck or nefarious doings?), but if the graph of the trend line ticks upwards or down, you can take that to the bank, and little else. Everything Shows a GOP Resurgence Except for the Evidence

Psst… yes, the last 22 months have been a debacle but this is the extinction of humans stuff Bolton pushes Trump administration to withdraw from landmark arms treaty

Dunning and Kruger both just called to say that even they can’t even. Trump: My ‘Natural Instinct for Science’ Tells Me Climate Science Is Wrong

Soooooo much wrong with this story. In general, just ignore everything you see about cybersecurity in the general press until you find a tech journalist on it.

Increasing number of attacks is not news; it’s to be expected. The question is, is it the number of attackers or the size of the attacks? Size doesn’t matter; you can attack any network 1 billion times for around $1,000, but those methods are worthless for data extraction.

“All potential attacks were stopped or mitigated.” Both halves of this sentence are wrong. It’s not all potential attacks, it’s all *detected* attacks and no expert would want to warrant 100%.

Also, mitigated? If you attack Facebook intending to steal all accounts, and they lock you out after 800 million, that’s a mitigation. That word is terrifying. And what it means is: some attacks HAVE BEEN SUCCESSFUL. You don’t mitigate the ones that aren’t.

The Vermont governor saying that all’s well because of yesterday’s backups is merely standard level ignorant. Have they tried restoring them? Have they tested whether the backups are secure?

Here’s the deal: any computer scientist can tell you, and some have been since the 1990s, that the electronic infrastructure supporting voting is a raging trash fire. If our financial systems worked like this, we’d be trading beads and pelts. Announcements like this one are generally intended to point you to where they want you to look (possibly later claiming a Democratic win is illegitimate), so you’re distracted from everything we’ve known for 20 years. DHS finds increasing attempts to hack U.S. election systems ahead of midterms

?Attention everyone who thought discussion of American Brownshirts was hyperbole: it’s fact now.? Shay Horse on Twitter

Ladies and gentlemen, all the memes you’ll need for 2019. These are the finalists of 2018 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards, and they’re hilarious – DIY Photography

Hope they announce the location so I know where I’ll be living in two years. Starbucks is opening a ‘community store’ in West Philly

I’ve seen this article shared three times in the last 30 minutes, so my initial thoughts: the tech details described here are VERY VERY weird. The purported methods of gathering this data are not possible according to my knowledge… but the guy who *invented* the system is quoted and does not say it’s impossible, so I conclude my knowledge is inaccurate.

Likewise, I can’t think of anything you could do with these methods that wouldn’t be easier and better in other ways.

That said, as someone performing forensics on a system, the *human* factors would jump out at me. When they say, “this looks like human rather than automated activity,” that’s likely factual. When anomalous behavior traces only to a Russian bank and a DeVos company, I’d *immediately* assume it was not coincidental.

The only additional hypothesis I can add that’s not in the story: a connection to DeVos is a connection to Blackwater, which to me is a possible answer to “why would someone do it this bizarre way when there are far better methods known to government spy agencies?” Was There a Connection Between a Russian Bank and the Trump Campaign?

Oh, for fuck’s sake. How is it possible to work for the New York Times and write such a blisteringly obvious column as if it’s insightful? “We must all come together” bullshit bullshit bullshit.

That requires both sides to seek reconciliation, and its precisely the Democratic urge to work together as Americans, and to follow the norms and rules, that allowed the Republicans to dominate. Why would they stop? It’s a winning strategy. It’s not the division that might topple them, it’s the overreach and abuse of power.

You want historical analogues to this moment, you’ll find them, but mostly not in American history. It ends with some catastrophic political failure that ends one of the parties; a new one arises and new politics result. Or the catastrophic failure is of the country: probably not dissolution (as our divisions aren’t geographically continuous) but likely our economy, resulting from a failure of our education and science, and likely our power, resulting from our eschewing soft power and abusing military power.

Or our democracy, because a war or terror attack will drive us straight to fascism; look at America October 2001 and tell me I’m wrong. It’s not like we’re starting from a particularly solid base, because subverting democratic institutions is also how Republicans win.

There’s no correcting force or moderating influence left. We ride this until one side, the other, or the country is crushed. Opinion | The American Civil War, Part II