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.

Space dementia in the news, again

Mars-bound astronauts face chronic dementia risk from galactic cosmic ray exposure | EurekAlert! Science News

I wonder whether active electro-magnetic shielding is still being investigated as a possible response?  (I read something about that many years ago.)   I assume it would involve lots of power, though.    

Let's check in on the delusional deplorables (Australian sub-branch)

It seems that the threadsters at the home for Australian Trumpkins (you know where I mean by now) are cock-a-hoop*  that Trump didn't entirely self-immolate at today's debate.  (Which I haven't watched - just been reading 'net reactions.)

The fact that we're only formerly seen wannabe dictators threatening opponents with special investigations and jail - and that this is not a good look in a democracy - hasn't sunk into their thick heads yet; probably never will.

Anyway, amongst the tidal surge of ridiculousness I was reading, I thought that this spin on Trump and his very curious debate sniff was the funniest by far:

The Donald stood like a General, with his sniffs adding to the serious disdain in his expression at everything Hillary said.

Lulz. 

*  perhaps not an expression that's it wise to use when mentioning Trump.**

** OK, or Bill.

The man is completely untrustworthy

Donald Trump Says Central Park Five Are Guilty, Despite DNA Evidence - NBC News

Paul Krugman tweeted on the weekend that this should be an even worse scandal regarding Trump's character and judgement, but it has been crowded out by the sensationalism of being able to hear his crude sexism from his own mouth. 

Update:  The Atlantic has a short article on the same story, ending with this:

Trump’s stances on social issues, domestic policy, and foreign affairs are often mercurial at best. His disdain towards basic constitutional protections is a rare point of constancy.

The thing is, not admitting he was wrong is more important to him than everything else.

Reviewed in Nature

The Nature website has reviews of four books of interest at the moment:

* the one about Nazi drug addiction, which is getting a bit of publicity - but the review indicates its not that good, really.

*  one co-authored by Michael Mann, about climate change denialism.   Not a topic that really needs dwelling on at the moment, given the crisis in conservative politics in America, perhaps.

*  one taking a big picture approach to how physics has evolved.  Sounds OK.

* the one I am most interested in, by Roger Penrose, in which he criticises some paths modern physics has taken.

Penrose is now 85, so is in great danger of breaching my "he's too old to pay attention to" rule of thumb.  But I don't think he's ever said anything completely silly yet, even though his views on a quantum role in biology and consciousness views are controversial.   Here's part of the review:

Penrose claims that even well-confirmed theories, such as quantum mechanics, are 'oversold' with respect to their presumptive stability. Quantum physics has had an impressive record of predictive success, ranging from quantum chemistry to elementary particle physics. But it faces a deep conceptual problem. Whereas quantum mechanics has a perfect internal consistency when it describes a system that evolves without being measured, the way in which it represents measurements is not coherently embedded in that description. To Penrose, this indicates that the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics have not yet been found and will rely on the elusive full integration of gravity into quantum physics. He argues that the success of quantum mechanics tends to make physicists insensitive to the theory's conceptual problem and generates an unjustified degree of faith in its basic principles as a solid foundation of physics.

Another source of undue trust in a theory, Penrose asserts, is the physics community's tendency to follow fashion — that is, to settle on one strategy of dealing with a problem before severely testing the theory's empirical predictions. Penrose views string theory (a theory of quantum gravity) as the pre-eminent example.

Behold! Stupidity (and worse)

What a fantastic gloat-fest of a weekend, with the Party-breaking quandary for the GOP of how to finally deal with its poisonous orange candidate, all because its leadership couldn't earlier find the gumption to just outright tell a large slab of its base that they were just being nuts.  And that being largely due to a decade of participating in the Fox News, Breitbart, right wing radio echo chamber that encouraged its base to believe conspiracy and nonsense.   (All with the added irony that, for all of those years, Fox News had serious sexual harassment built into its leadership, too.)

At least I can muster a modicum of respect for commentators like Jonah Goldberg, who has let fly with this:

Donald Trump is a fundamentally dishonorable and dishonest person — and has been his whole adult life. The evidence has been in front of those willing to see it all along. And there’s more to find. And there’s more in the Clinton stockpile.

Character is destiny. The man in the video is Donald Trump. Sure, it’s bawdy Trump. It’s “locker room Trump.” And I’m no prude about dirty talk in private. But that isn’t all that’s going on. This isn’t just bad language or objectifying women with your buddies. It’s a married man who is bragging about trying to bed a married woman. It’s an insecure, morally ugly man-child who thinks boasting about how he can get away with groping women “because you’re a star” impresses people. He’s a grotesque — as a businessman and a man, full stop.

If you can see that, but still think Hillary Clinton would be worse. Fine. Just be prepared for an endless stream of more embarrassments in your name. And, for my friends in the media and in politics, if you minimize, dismiss, or celebrate his grotesqueness out of partisan zeal, just keep in mind that some people, including your children, might think you mean it. Or, they might know you don’t mean it. Which means they now know you lie for a living.

And if you can’t see what a hot mess Donald Trump is yet, I doubt you ever will and I wonder what fresh Hell will allow the realization to penetrate your consciousness. Either way, this video is not an aberration. It is not a special circumstance. It’s him. There’s no pivot in him. There’s no “presidential” switch to flip. He’s Donald Trump all the way down. And he will humiliate and debase his defenders so long as they feel the need to defend this indefensible man.

(Mind you, Goldberg was trying on the "it's all Obama's fault that we've ended up with support for Trump" line earlier this year - I would in no way say he's always a reliable commentator.)

But for peak stupidity and offensiveness, where else to go in Australia but to Catallaxy?  First, the "it's not so bad, is it? And it's all his in past" ridiculousness:

Hard to believe the gullibility, no?  But then again, she doesn't believe in climate change because her husband told her so.  She hasn't picked up on the difference between money and reliable smarts, yet.  No wonder she supports Trump.

Mind you, the resident expert on Aquinas and groupie of the unreadable Edward Feser wasn't sure it was that big a deal either.  Yes, a theological brain the size of a planet, and yet no common sense:

What?  Aquinas mustn't have written anything about the importance of character in a leader, obviously...

Then there's the obnoxiousness of old cohenite, who tells us more about the type of man he is than he probably should:

Yeah, "go hard, Trump" is some pretty popular advice thereabouts.  And one commentator, frequently bordering on needing institutionalisation, by the sounds, takes it to the next level:

Just stupid, paranoid, nuts.

Update:   And here's Republican supporting Drudge making his contribution to right wing respect for women:

Letterman has it right

I see that Trump is in the news this morning for a tape showing what a complete and utter sordid boor he is.  How's that playing for you, Evangelicals?  (Of course, who knows how Bill Clinton has talked about sexual conquests before - although I don't think that being being a powerful philandering man necessarily means you have to be a braggart with other men about it.)

Anyway, at the NYT, there's an interview with David Letterman, who (apparently, I didn't recall) had Trump on his show often.   He has a sensible take on Trump:

I’ve known Donald Trump for a long time, and I always thought he was exactly what New York City needed to have: the big blowhard billionaire. “By God, I’m Donald Trump, and I date models, and I put up buildings, and everything is gold.” Nobody took him seriously, and people loved him when he would come on the show. I would make fun of his hair, I would call him a slumlord, I would make fun of his ties. And he could just take a punch like nothing. He was the perfect guest.

So now, he decides he’s running for president. And right out of the box, he goes after immigrants and how they’re drug dealers and they’re rapists. And everybody swallows hard. And they think, oh, well, somebody will take him aside and say, “Don, don’t do that.” But it didn’t happen. And then, I can remember him doing an impression, behind a podium, of a reporter for The New York Times who has a congenital disorder. And then I thought, if this was somebody else — if this was a member of your family or a next-door neighbor, a guy at work — you would immediately distance yourself from that person. And that’s what I thought would happen. Because if you can do that in a national forum, that says to me that you are a damaged human being. If you can do that, and not apologize, you’re a person to be shunned.

I kept telling people he will absolutely not get elected. And then David Brooks said he’ll get the nomination and he will be crushed in the general election. And I thought: Yeah, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. I stand by that. The thing about Trumpy was, I think people just were amused enough about him to keep him afloat in the polls, because nobody wanted the circus to pull up and leave town.

Update:  Hotair acknowledges how bad this is for Trump:

A curious finding

Study Finds Students Of All Races Prefer Teachers Of Color : NPR Ed : NPR

Not sure I would take this report very seriously

Tech billionaires convinced we live in the Matrix are secretly funding scientists to help break us out of it | The Independent

All sounds like a report that should be in the National Enquirer rather than The Independent, but I haven't had time to follow the links.  I do think Elon Musk is a bit nutty, though...