Surely you wouldn't, Malcolm

It's reported in The Australian today:

Malcolm Turnbull is being pressured to relax the nation’s gun laws to secure two key industrial reforms in an escalating round of Senate horsetrading, amid a political firestorm over the government’s bid to curb union power.

The government’s workplace agenda is hanging in the balance as Liberal Democratic Party senator David Leyonhjelm demands an expansion of shotgun imports to win his vote for laws to crack down on illegal union tactics across the construction industry.

Malcolm would absolutely kill his moderate credentials with voters if gave in to this from Leyonhjelm.  Surely he wouldn't do it?

Speaking of Leyonhjelm:  I have the distinct impression that he's in a bit of a funk since not only the election, but before it.  Since Helen Dale resigned, actually.  He did only barely get returned due to the double dissolution;  Pauline Hanson and her group of numbskulls has kept his numbskull off the media radar to a large extent since the election; he copped it for speaking ill of a journalist on the very day she died; and now his best mate in the Senate (the very uninspiring Bob Day - surely one of the dullest politicians to be in the Senate for many a year) is quitting.   Leyonhjelm just looks very glum anytime I see him now.  Retire, David; it'll do you good...

What a loser

Peter Thiel donating $1.25 million to Donald Trump's campaign - Oct. 15, 2016

My opinion of this weirdo just keeps heading down.

What blatant dishonesty

Matt Drudge may have lost his grip on reality - The Washington Post

Problem is, I reckon half of Drudge's readership would not go near the Washington Post for news, and will genuinely go on believing Drudge's dishonesty and propaganda.  

Why hunt bears?

Pedals the bear endeared himself to humans by walking like one. Did hunters kill him? - The Washington Post: The week of agitation over what happened to Pedals coincided with New Jersey’s first bow hunt for black bears in more than 40 years, the Asbury Park Press said. This year, the state’s black bear-hunting season spanned Oct. 10 to 15 for those using bows or muzzleloaders, and will open again from Dec. 5 to 10 for those using firearms. Hunters killed 432 bears in New Jersey last week, according to AP.

Gee. I'm very surprised there is a black bear hunting season at all.   Are they marauding around people to such an extent they need to be culled?   And why pander to the bow hunting fraternity at all?   Surely it makes for a more difficult and painful death if they have to be killed at all.

Kind of glad I don't live in the US...

Update:  I see from this anti-bear hunt Facebook site that many blame Chris Christie for the expanded hunt.   He's not a popular man, and as a sell out to Trump, he deserves it...

Ignoring MOND?

[1609.06642] MOND impact on and of the recently updated mass-discrepancy-acceleration relation

A couple of weeks back, I linked to a report of a new study of galaxy rotation which seemed to be pretty important for what it meant for dark matter.

The link above is to a paper by Mordehai Milgrom, who first proposed MOND, complaining that the paper gave way too little attention to the fact that MOND theories of gravity had predicted this, and it's effectively a strong experimental endorsement of MOND.

It does seem that MOND has a bit of a PR problem in astrophysics.  I see from the Wikipedia article on it at the last link that one of its criticisms is that, at a galactic cluster scale, you still need dark matter to make sense of their movement.  As it says, this makes the theory "less elegant"; on the other hand, it apparently means you can use much less dark matter if you use MOND, which one would think is consistent with the problems of even identifying dark matter. 

Yes, my hunch remains that MOND and Milgrom are unjustly ignored.

I sense a potential for misuse of this study...

Study finds link between marriage attitudes and risky sexual behaviors: This is the first study to investigate links between marriage attitudes and sexual behavior across racial and ethnic minority groups as well as the role skin tone plays in shaping marriage attitudes...

Researchers found that positive attitudes toward marriage had a significant dampening effect on risky behaviors for lighter-skinned African Americans and Asians compared with their
darker skin counterparts, who had more negative attitudes toward marriage. The findings suggest that skin tone plays a role in views toward relationships and marriage, thus impacting decisions about sexual behavior for some people.

I am not at all sure what to make of that!

Excuse me while I talk to monty

Your guest post at Catallaxy has the advantage of not being insane, unlike most of the blog, but I have the following criticisms:

*  did you really have to throw in the "cultural allusion"?:  it reminds me too much of the grand - and nutty - Right wing faux historical prisms that nearly everyone at that blog thinks everything has to be viewed through.  In a way, it reads too much like the grandiose crap that Mk50 used to go on about.  (And, incidentally, he seems to be on some calming medication, or something, now, since he returned under a new identity.  [And why did he bother doing that, when everyone knows who it is?]  He's no longer getting positively excited by the prospect of an American Right wing armed revolution, like he used to.)

* takes too many words to make a point that many - even on the Democrat side - have already made.

* candy was right - the reference to Trump's supporters formerly being the type who would have a country club membership is a tad improbable.  Update:   here's Nate Silver yesterday:

Based on recent polls, I’d estimate that about 35 percent of Trump’s current voters are white men without a college degree, by far Trump’s best demographic group.

  Was this demographic ever into country club membership, monty?

* it's one thing to have sympathy to the economic plight of the low educated under globalisation - and to talk of them having a logical reason for dissatisfaction - but in doing so it risks encouraging them to believe the situation is more catastrophic than it really is, exactly as Trump has been doing.   It also underplays the poisonous anti-evidence based nonsense that the entire leadership of the American Right has participated in for more than a decade as priming Trumpkins to believe any nonsense at all, including that sprouted by their orange buffoon.

I can see how it's not a winning strategy to win hearts and minds to tell people that they are being idiots - yet this is what at least the leadership of the Right needs to be told.   I fear that expressing too much sympathy towards the Trump base makes that job harder to do, and I think that your post reads too much in that direction.

PS:  please pass on the threadsters at Catallaxy that I think they're all being idiots.

JG is correct on this

Trump's Bad Sex Strategy | National Review

A calm explanation from Jonah Goldberg about the stupidity of the Trump, um, counter-grope strategy.

And it was probably written before he heard Trump basically tell a crowd that he wouldn't have forced himself on one of the women 'cos she's not hot enough (as Slate generously puts it.  Others would say - 'cos she's too ugly.)  (Mind you, if challenged on this, I bet he'll deny that's what he meant.  And absolutely no one will believe him.)

He is, genuinely, a rolled gold idiot.

Donald and "disgusting"

Two Women Say Donald Trump Touched Them Inappropriately - The New York Times: In a phone interview on Tuesday night, a highly agitated Mr. Trump denied every one of the women’s claims.

“None of this ever took place,” said Mr. Trump, who began shouting at the Times reporter who was questioning him. He said that The Times was making up the allegations to hurt him and that he would sue the news organization if it reported them.

“You are a disgusting human being,” he told the reporter as she questioned him about the women’s claims.

Asked whether he had ever done any of the kissing or groping that he had described on the recording, Mr. Trump was once again insistent: “I don’t do it. I don’t do it. It was locker room talk.”

There are, one strongly suspects, many more stories to come of unwelcome groping/kissing by Trump, and I wonder whether he'll find a new way to react other than by calling the reporter "a disgusting human being".

This seems to be his favourite insult, and in particular, he seems to use "disgusting" in contexts few other people would.  I take it as a sign of a pretty limited vocabulary, and it's hard to imagine him being good with words in diplomatically important encounters. 

Update:  Trump can't even take his own advice:

More on Penrose

I had missed that Peter Woit had favourably reviewed Roger Penrose's new book a few weeks ago.   Go have a read.

(It's interesting, the discussion about Penrose's issues with inflation.  I always had the feeling that this seemed to be a solution that was widely accepted before the mechanics of how it could happen were even guessed at, which seems to be a somewhat backwards way to work compared to most of physics.  Well, at least for a phenomena that isn't actually being observed but is being inferred. Was my hunch right?)

Watching for new craters

Seems the Moon still gets hit by meteors quite often:

Meteorites have punched at least 222 impact craters into the Moon's surface in the past 7 years. That’s 33% more than researchers expected, and suggests that future lunar astronauts may need to hunker down against incoming space rocks....

Although most of the craters dotting the Moon's surface formed millions of years ago, space rocks and debris continue to create fresh pockmarks. In 2011, a team led by Ingrid Daubar of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, compared some of the first pictures taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which launched in 2009, with decades-old images taken by the Apollo astronauts. The scientists spotted five fresh impact craters in the LRO images. Then, on two separate occasions in 2013, other astronomers using telescopes on Earth spotted bright flashes on the Moon; LRO later flew over those locations and photographed the freshly formed craters^{2, 3}.

LRO has taken about a million high-resolution images of the lunar surface, but only a fraction cover the same portion of terrain under the same lighting conditions at two different times. Speyerer’s team used a computer program to automatically analyse 14,092 of these paired images, looking for changes between the two. The 222 newfound craters are distributed randomly across the lunar surface, and range between 2 and 43 metres in diameter.

Why the Note 7 won't kill Samsung

Before I get onto this topic, has anyone else noticed that suddenly, at JB Hi Fi, the only tablets on sale are Samsung's and Apple's?  (And both of those companies have a small range now.)   Are other manufacturers giving up on tablets?   (I don't know that any other company had screens as good as the big two anyway, but I still liked looking at what other companies offered.)   Are large "phablets" killing the tablet market?

Back to the Note 7 explody phone:  the Note range was not that important to Samsung, anyway:

While the Note stylus is important to many users, it has still been a niche product. The last Note5 (there was no Note6) generated only 5% of all of Samsung's sales, Moorhead said. The Galaxy line of phones, including the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge are from two to three times more popular, according to various accounts.

"The Note line has been very small for Samsung," he said. He and other analysts said it would be hard to see problems from the Note line affecting other lines.

"Samsung has many smartphone models globally and none have experienced the same problem," Burden said.

As to whether Apple or Huawei would benefit from the Note7 disaster, analysts were uniformly convinced there will be little boost to competitors.

Part of the reason is that Samsung already controls the largest share of the smartphone market globally, at 22% in the second quarter, according to IDC. Apple had 12% and Huawei had 9%.

"No way will Samsung lose its ranking over this problem," Moorhead said. "They are just so large."

I knew someone would have posted this theory before I could...

I had independently thought of this last week (honest), but kept forgetting to post about it. Anyway, I guessed it would have occurred to others - for all I know, someone on Reddit probably came up with it months ago.

It's the theory that anxiety about Trump has caused the killer clown panic:

The explanation for October's clown sighting hysteria is staring us in the face | Mary Valle | Opinion | The Guardian: I think this “clown epidemic” is a form of real-time trauma play. Right now, in this nation, on this planet, a bona fide human-like sociopath is very close to grabbing the One Ring of Power. Or the Former One Ring of Power that is Still Pretty Powerful.
'I'm a gentleman': Trump menaces Clinton with imposing presence and brash insults
Read more

China may be the Coke of today and we may just be the Pepsi, which may partially explain the second-rate, rinky-dink two-bit hustler who has fooled millions of people into thinking he somehow cares about them, courting steelworkers as he loads his buildings with Chinese steel, pretending to care about small business owners while notoriously stiffing them for decades.

Somewhere in their heads they must understand that they are not acting in their best interest, and this gigantic killer clown is using their despair and hopelessness against them by masterfully pulling their anger strings, turning them, too into ugly, disjointed residents of his angry uncanny valley.

Yes, it's a Jungian explanation, I suppose; in the same way he thought that UFOs were a sort of psychic projection of societal anxieties.   

About one of the rape allegations

As this article explains, the evidence that Juanita Broadderick offers for her allegation that Hillary Clinton intimidated her after her alleged rape by Bill is extremely thin and improbable.   Apart from the matter of having to infer a double meaning into words, it also assumes that Bill would have told Hillary that he had just raped (or at the very least, slept with) Broadderick, and that Hillary's reaction would be to meet her a couple of weeks later and thank her for not making a complaint.   How likely is that?  

Update:  Homer in comments referred me to a Slate article about this, and it does indeed confirm the wild improbability of Hillary even knowing that Bill had done anything, consensual or nonconsensual, with Broadderick (assuming, for the sake of argument, that a sexual encounter did happen):

As I’ve written before, everything we know about the Clintons’ marriage tells us that Bill took pains to hide his affairs from his wife. In A Woman in Charge, Hillary’s biographer Carl Bernstein describes how Bill initially refused to settle a lawsuit with Paula Jones—setting off the events that led to impeachment—because he feared admitting a sexual encounter to Hillary. “Bill didn’t dare acknowledge to his wife that something had transpired with Jones, so he rolled the dice and risked his presidency on the outcome—just as he would when he denied for months that he had had a sexual relationship with Lewinsky,” Bernstein writes.

If Trump really does insist on going nuclear on the Broaddrick charges at Sunday night’s debate, I hope Hillary sticks closely to what she’s been accused of—greeting a woman who would later call her husband a rapist in what that woman interpreted as a menacing tone of voice. When you examine every accusation of Hillary as an “attacker” of women, it ends up looking equally flimsy. Claims that Hillary Clinton smeared Monica Lewinsky rest on the fact that, after learning of her husband’s dalliance, she called her a “narcissistic loony toon” in a private letter to a close friend. Some on the right think Trump should hit Clinton for representing, as a young lawyer, a poor man charged with raping a 12-year-old named Kathy Shelton. But the judge in the case had appointed her, and as the prosecutor in the case has recounted, she accepted only reluctantly. Bill Clinton’s history with women is hard to defend. Hillary Clinton’s history is not. And her own history is all she should be accountable for Sunday night.

Disaster crowded out by the Donald

North Carolina’s record floods: “You have got to see it to believe all the devastation that has occurred.” - Vox

Yeah, it's getting some media attention, but if I lived in the middle of the North Carolina disaster area, I think I would feel a little peeved about how the Trump stories are sort of crowding out the degree of media attention it would otherwise get.

So there may have been arsenic in the old lace?

I guess lace isn't often coloured, but if it was....

This comes under the category of "things I feel I've read a bit about before, but it didn't stick much in my memory". 

At the Atlantic, there's an interview with the author of a new book which discusses the rather disastrous popularity of arsenic in the Victorian period - with it widely used in popular dyes for wallpapers and cloth of all kinds.  (And also, strangely, foods!)   An extract:

Factory workers were getting sick—and many died—because they were working with green arsenic dye. It was fashionable to wear these artificial green wreaths of plants and flowers in your hair that were dyed with arsenic. In wallpaper factories, workers were becoming really unwell, especially when they were working with flock papers, or papers with small fiber particles that stick to the surface. The workers would dye these tiny, tiny pieces of wool or cotton in green, and while doing so would inhale them and the particles would stick to their lungs. The manufacturing process created a lot of dust from the dye—the dust had arsenic in it—and this created major problems for the factory workers as the dust would stick to their eyes and skin. If there were abrasions on their skin, the arsenic could get directly into their blood stream and poison them that way as well....

Before legislation was passed, bakers used arsenic green as a popular food coloring. Sometimes, a baker was given flour or sugar with arsenic in it unknowingly, but other times it was used as a bulking agent. You wouldn’t believe the kinds of things that were put into Victorian foods as bulking agents. It wasn’t just arsenic, there were lots of weird things. Flour was expensive, so they would resort to adding other things.

There was an orphanage in Boston and all these small children were getting really, really sick and they didn’t know why. It turned out that the nurses were wearing blue uniforms dyed with arsenic and they were cradling the children, who in turn were inhaling the dye particles.

That’s another thing, too: Green was a color that was always seen as the culprit, simply because it was so desirable at the time, but many other colors used arsenic as well. When the National Archives did testing on the William Morris wallpapers, all of the colors used arsenic to some extent. These colors were exceptionally beautiful, and up until this point, it was not something they could achieve without the use of arsenic.

All a bit sad

Ross Cameron goes on Sky to defend Donald Trump comments in video

I had forgotten, too, until I read this other account of his silly TV act, that in his politician days, he used to be prominently Christian.    Then his philandering sex life was disclosed, and that was that.

This performance seems to me to all be part of the unfortunate aspect of right wing cable TV commentary - as with Bolt, they feel they have to throw a bit of theatre and drama into it.  With Bolt, it's  a matter of ratcheting up the "smug" quotient to "11", and lately having the likes of comedy-drama queens (and actually kinda increasingly sad figures) Ann Coulter and Milo on as guests.   All very unfortunate for the former relatively respectable face of conservative political commentary.

Trump duped - what a surprise

Dear Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, I Am Not Sidney Blumenthal

An interesting article here a Newsweek writer.

Seems worth knowing

Common high blood pressure meds affect mood disorders

First it was the contraceptive pill coming under renewed scrutiny for depression - now it's (some) blood pressure medication.

Perhaps people should try regular beetroot juice first?

My guess about the debate

I've still not seen video reports on the Presidential debate, but I note that sources as diverse as monty, Douthat, and the completely-in-the-tank-for-Trump Powerline blog gave the debate narrowly for Trump.   (There are other Trump supporters who, of course, gave it totally to Trump, as you would expect from the alt-right - see Scott Adams - and their dimwitted followers.) 

So, I assume, in one sense it would seem that Trump did better than expected - although, obviously, it was about the lowest bar possible that he had to climb over to look more knowledgeable than in the first debate.

But - and here I'll actually cite Adams with semi-approval (even a weirdo can say something useful once in a while):  after the first debate, he said that Hillary won it on debating technique, but he thought that on the matter of how it made the audience feel, which he said was more important, he gave it to Trump.  (Of course!)

Well, if he's right on the matter of feely perceptions, I can't but get the impression that Trumps strange, intimidating looks and pacing behind Clinton, as well the threat to re-investigate and jail her, were exactly the opposite of what was needed to undo with women the damage caused by the weekend tape.  (Adams, of course, being in love with Trump, cannot see this is a result of using his own criteria.) 

I therefore would guess that the debate will have next to no positive polling effect for Trump.  We'll know in about a week's time.