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Original story: Woman says Roy Moore initiated sexual encounter when she was 14, he was 32 (archive)

Roy Moore can still win

Moore has zero incentive to listen to calls from official Washington for him to leave the race. In fact, the louder those calls get, the more likely it is that Moore digs in even further.

Then there is the fact that the widespread condemnation of Moore among GOP senators is not entirely shared by Alabama Republicans.

Take Alabama state auditor Jim Ziegler, for one. In an interview, Ziegler downplayed the accusations against Moore by citing Scripture:

Take the Bible. Zachariah and Elizabeth for instance. Zachariah was extremely old to marry Elizabeth and they became the parents of John the Baptist. Also take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus. There's just nothing immoral or illegal here. Maybe just a little bit unusual.

Then there was Alabama Marion County GOP chair David Hall, who told the Toronto Star's Daniel Dale this: "It was 40 years ago. I really don't see the relevance of it. He was 32. She was supposedly 14. She's not saying that anything happened other than they kissed."

In the Post report, however, the accuser also says Moore sexually assaulted her. She says Moore touched her and forced her to touch him.

Marrying young girls is old hat. We just grope and move on now.

Romney: 'Unfit' Moore 'should step aside'

Why do we care what Romney thinks, again?

Romney mulling Senate bid: report
I Never Liked Mitt Romney, But Now I’m Desperate for His Comeback

Oh, ok.

I went to the new restaurant that wants to become the 'McDonald's of pasta' — and they are onto something big

Ladner says Pasta Flyer's service model embodies the two cornerstones of fast food: speed and low prices. But he refers to the food itself as "slow" and more comparable to what you'd find at a traditional restaurant.

[...] I sampled four pastas: fusilli with basil pesto sauce, fettuccine with creamy Alfredo sauce, whole grain rigatoni with Nonna's meat ragu, and spaghetti and meatballs with marinara sauce. I was shocked to find that all four were of the same quality I would expect from an upscale Italian restaurant that charges around $25 for a bowl of pasta. The noodles were cooked to al dente perfection, the sauces were warm and rich, and the meat was flavorful and tender. The dishes were simple, but done right.

[...] To make this happen, Ladner says the sauces are held just above a temperature set by the NYC Department of Health. After a customer orders, their noodles are cooked in 15 seconds while their sauce is brought to a boil, and then the two are plated.

[...] Ladner says the wheat is milled directly before the pasta is made, resulting in a noodle that's "fresh and alive," and will still be al dente when you eat it a day later as leftovers. "It's the best pasta I know of in the world, and it's $7.50," he says.

Whereas I have zero faith that the West has any capability, much less will, to solve its problems.

I believe my reply is instructive:

Let's take a tour of the problems that the West not only has the capability or will to solve, but actually has done so:

1. Wars -solved.
2. Pollution - solved.
3. Poverty - partially solved. Note the current economic systems of the West have also partially solved poverty in China as well through global trade.
4. Habitat destruction - partially solved with conservation and setting aside green space and wilderness.
5. Population growth - solved.
6. Mass education -solved.
7. Mass, global communication - solved.
8. Global trade system - solved.
9. Authoritarian clowns telling you what to do - partially solved for now.
10. Feeding the world - solved for now.

While I won't discuss all of these, I want to discuss the first three: wars, pollution, and poverty, the last along with population growth because the two problems are intertwined. These are the most stereotyped and the most often wrong when discussing problems and solutions.

So let's start with the problem of wars. Everyone knows that wars continue to happen. We even have a rather bloody one going on in Syria right now. Here, I claim that wars are "solved", yet we still have them. What gives? The first observation here is that wars are between multiple parties, states or significant sub-state actors (guerillas, paramilitary groups, terrorists, freedom fighters, etc). A single entity can't fix all wars. If party A and party B want to fight, party C is limited in what they can do to keep the two parties from fighting, even if they have legal police power over one or both groups. So a solution to war is merely the cessation of war between parties, not the ability of a third party to prevent war.

The key is to look at the developed world countries and conflicts since the end of the Second World War. If one looks at the list of the top 16 (all those with a Human Development Index of above 0.900), one sees that these countries, while often in conflict, particularly the US and UK, are never in conflict with each other. The only real conflict with any sort of involvement between these countries is the paramilitary activity in Northern Ireland which involved the UK directly and had significant private support from Ireland and the US citizens (though zero official support).

Otherwise, conflicts reduce to fishing boats bumping each other on the high seas and fall far short of any serious definition of war.

The lower tier (HDI between 0.800 and 0.899) still show remarkably low levels of conflict between members. Russia (as the controlling state of the USSR) has been in military conflict with other members (putting down revolt in Hungary in 1968, for example). Argentina with the UK in the Falkland War. In excess of a billion people, yet with only a handful of minor wars to point to.

Yes, these developed world countries often wage a fair bit of war, but not on those in the same economic class. This indicates a way to solve in the real sense, war. Elevate all countries to developed world status.

It's also worth noting that the number of deaths from wars has gone down over the past few decades globally as well. Everyone is partially benefiting from fewer and less bloody wars, not just the rich countries.

Moving on, let's consider pollution. It's long been a trite cliche to speak of pollution as if it's just as bad as it's ever been (particularly when complaining that no one will do anything about the environmental cause du jour until it's too late). For example, here's a study of ambient levels of smog components in Los Angeles air from 1960 through to near present (2014 I believe). Ozone (O3) and nitrogen oxides ("NOx") dropped by a factor of four over the time period despite an increase in fuel use of a factor of three! That's an order of magnitude drop in pollution per unit of fuel (and keep in mind that vehicles became moderately more fuel efficient over this time period even with SUVs in the mix). More complex organics, volatile hydrocarbons (VOC) and peroxyacyl nitrates (PAN) dropped much faster with at least two orders of magnitude drop in concentrations of each.

There has been many environmental regulations over the decades, and these have had an effect. There's no more rivers catching on fire in Ohio. There's no more killer smogs in London. Yet it is frequent to see people to speak as if these problems were still among us, undiminished. You know, because we never solve problems.

The final one, poverty is the biggest problem of all, for not only does it cause immense suffering on its own, but it is a driver for many other social problems, most particularly overpopulation and a low regard for human life.

While I've hinted before at myopic interpretations of these problem, it's far more pronounced here both with the introduction of deceptive measures of poverty that both don't measure poverty and measure relative quantities that can never really go away. For example, there's a lot of talk of wealth and income inequality rather than more legitimate measures of absolute poverty (which actually measure a problem!). And sometimes those measures are used deceptively (such as a recent story which The convenient aspects of inequality is that it can never go away, and there's no obvious level which is good or bad. Then you get the conflations with real poverty even though it doesn't even remotely measure that (keep also in mind a tendency to declare that poverty is routinely declared to be people with the lowest percentage of wealth).

Let's take a cursory look at how inequality gets abused:

What I think is wrong with society is that, while I'm just barely on the comfortable side of the wealth divide, the gap is growing at a crazy pace. Prices I learned growing up in the 1970s have mostly inflated 10x, as has my income, meanwhile the bottom end of the income scale (virtually anyone below me on the job-value ladder) has only grown maybe 3-4x, it's pretty sad for the majority of the population.

Reality:

What evidence exists for this? I grant that there is wealth inequality and it has appeared to grow somewhat over the past 40 years. But there is no "crazy pace" to it. For example, we have a Pew Study that shows by their measure, the Middle Class shrinking from 61% in 1971 to 50% in 2015. Roughly, 20% shrinkage in 44 years. That's your "crazy pace". Even worse for your narrative, the upper classes grew more than the lower ones as a fraction of total population. So two thirds of the fraction that were no longer middle class were now upper class.

A particularly dishonest metric claiming an increase in global wealth inequality can be found in this story.

Wealth inequality stands at its highest since the turn of the 20th century - the so-called 'Gilded Age' - as the proportion of capital held by the world's 1,542 dollar billionaires swells yet higher.

The problems with that? 1) not actually measuring wealth inequality. What of the wealth of the 7.4 billion people who aren't billionaires? 2) downplayed that most of the increase in wealth (+17%) can be explained by the pool of billionaires increasing by 10% (145 new billionaires)! 3) Ignores that billionaire wealth is not equal value to those who aren't billionaires and thus, their wealth is exaggerated. Can't eat credit default swaps or even sell them easily for market price. But it made for a great tale of the "second" Gilded Age.

Here's another example from a linked essay rationalizing why the USSR didn't work in typical Marxist fashion:

The United States enacted an income tax in 1913, falling mainly on rentier income, not on the working population. Capital gains (the main source of rising wealth today) were taxed at the same rate as other income. But the vested interests campaigned to reverse this spirit, slashing capital gains taxes and making tax policy much more regressive. The result is that today, most wealth is not gained by capital investment for profits. Instead, asset-price gains have been financed by a debt-leveraged inflation of real estate, stock and bond prices.

Many middle-class families owe most of their net worth to rising prices for their homes. But by far the lion’s share of the real estate and stock market gains have accrued to just One Percent of the population. And while bank credit has enabled buyers to bid up housing prices, the price has been to siphon off more and more of labor’s income to pay mortgage loans or rents. As a result, finance today is what is has been throughout history: the main force polarizing economies between debtors and creditors.

So first paragraph is a work of art that slams the wealthy for having inordinate gains revenue (which simultaneously downplaying the wealth as mere "debt-leveraged inflation"). So why should we care about gains inequality? Who wants more "debt-leveraged inflation"? Yet it is portrayed as a bad thing even though the argument is sheer nonsense.

And then the author whines about how unfair it is that people actually have to borrow money for a house rather than just have one given to them on a silver platter.

Related to that is the common observation that the wealthiest X people have far more wealth than the poorest Y fraction of the population. As indicated here, there's a couple of enormous flaws with that thinking.

To see the problem, here's another version of the same number: the combined wealth of my two nephews is already more than the bottom 30 percent of the world combined. And they don't have jobs, or inheritances. They just have a piggy bank and no debt.

[...]

The chart [2014 regional wealth distribution, Credit Suisse] shows China has basically no one in the bottom 10 percent of the global wealth distribution. At the same time, if you dig into the country-by-country data (page 107 in the Databook), it shows that America has more than 7 percent of the world's poorest inhabitants — second only to India. That is, to put it lightly, nuts.

Anyway, let me trot out some counterexamples for your consideration. First, let's consider those living in extreme poverty. The fraction of people who live in such extreme poverty (here, using the metric of at most $1.90 per day in "international $", adjusted both for standard of living price changes between countries and inflation) has been declining ever since 1820, the start of the graph in the link (that's almost 200 years of such decline). The absolute number of people in such extreme poverty has been declining, despite population growth heavily biased towards the poorest of the world, since 1970! It currently is around 700 million after peaking at 2.2 billion. Over the same time period, the fraction of people living in extreme poverty dropped from just over 60% in 1970 to under 10% in 2015.

Then there's my favorite example of reduction of global income equality. Over a twenty year period (1988-2008), two thirds of humanity (that's everyone in the world) saw at least a 30% increase in their income with the median increasing by over 60%. While the richest got richer, that still means a decline in overall wealth inequality due to the nearing of developed world and developing world incomes.

I'll note that poverty is a huge correlation with population growth (the other big factor being the fraction of women not in the workforce). In 1970, the global population growth rate was 2.1% per year. It has now dropped to 1.1% per year with the developed world showing negative rates before immigration (among everyone who is not first or second generation immigrants).

To summarize, there has long been a narrative about humanity that emphasizes our inability to solve problems. This narrative is grossly in error with the developed world demonstrating a number of solved or partially solved problems in war, environmental problems, and poverty and overpopulation. These solutions have come to the point that extreme poverty, which until 1980 was the usual condition of most of humanity, now afflicts less than a tenth. We are in the midst of the biggest improvement of the human condition ever.

Yet the games continue. This enormous boon is concealed between a web of selective statistics. Critics peer intently at various dubious versions of wealth inequality (often while simultaneously downplaying the value of the wealth they are comparing) because absolute measures of poverty don't give the right answers any more. Would-be environmentalists complain because poisons are poisons (look at the replies which ignore dosage and proper usage) while completely ignoring whether current regulation solves the problems they claim to care about and whether the role of the poison is necessary.

And for some people, it no longer matters how many people die in wars any more. Wars are equally bad no matter how many die. Very convenient for the peacenik who needs a cause that never goes away.

My view is that part of the problem is that we have a case of bad ideology which needs to invent exaggerated or even fake problems in order to act out showing concern. Partly, it's that we're going to worry, even if we don't enough to worry about. Whatever the case, I think it would be nice here to wake up and see what's being done right rather than bumble on into some idiotic and dreadful societal theater because of the Chicken Littles of the world.

There’s now a lot more nerds in elected office. Seventeen candidates with STEM-backgrounds ran their respective races Tuesday, from Virginia governor-elect Ralph Northam—a doctor—to Tiffany Hodgson, a neuroscientist who won a seat on the Wissahickon School Board in eastern Pennsylvania.

Many candidates decided to run only after President Donald Trump ushered in one of the most anti-science administrations in history. And a number of the campaigns sprung out of meetings with 314 Action, a political advocacy group that is helping scientists run for office.

“Voters are ready for candidates who are going to use their STEM training to base policy on evidence rather than intuition,” Shaughnessy Naughton, the founder of 314 Action, said in a press release. “Science will not be silenced.”

17 STEM Politicians Won Elections Tuesday

Theoretical Physicists Are Getting Closer to Explaining How NASA’s ‘Impossible’ EmDrive Works

Theoretical scientists are trying to understand why and how EmDrive propulsion works. The NASA paper suggests a tentative explanation based on a quantum physics theory, "a nonlocal hidden-variable theory, or pilot-wave theory for short."

A new research paper by a Portuguese scientist, titled "A Possible Explanation for the Em Drive Based on a Pilot Wave Theory" is now trending among EmDrive enthusiasts in the NasaSpaceFlight forum. The paywalled paper proposes a similar model to the NASA one (here's an open access preprint you can read.)

Pilot-wave theories have been proposed since the 1920s by quantum physicists, notably Louis de Broglie and David Bohm, to make sense of the weird behavior of quantum matter. Recently, pilot-wave quantum theories have gained more popularity after it was discovered that pilot-wave quantum-like behavior can be reproduced in classical fluids and explained by classical (non-quantum) fluid dynamics.

Not enough meat on these bones for another story, but you might be interested.

Previously: Explanation may be on the way for the "Impossible" EmDrive
Finnish Physicist Says EmDrive Device Does Have an Exhaust
EmDrive Peer-Reviewed Paper Coming in December; Theseus Planning a Cannae Thruster Cubesat
It's Official: NASA's Peer-Reviewed EmDrive Paper Has Finally Been Published
Space Race 2.0: China May Already be Testing an EmDrive in Orbit
Physicist Uses "Quantised Inertia" to Explain Both EmDrive and Galaxy Rotation
EmDrive 3.0: Wait, Where's EmDrive 2.0?

An early draft of former FBI Director James Comey's statement closing out the Hillary Clinton email case accused the former secretary of State of having been "grossly negligent" in handling classified information, newly reported memos to Congress show.

The tough language was changed to the much softer accusation that Clinton had been "extremely careless" in her handling of classified information when Comey announced in July 2016 there would be no charges against her.

The change is significant, since federal law states that gross negligence in handling the nation's intelligence can be punished criminally with prison time or fines.

[...]

The draft, written weeks before the announcement of no charges, was described by multiple sources who saw the document both before and after it was sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee this past weekend.

"There is evidence to support a conclusion that Secretary Clinton, and others, used the email server in a manner that was grossly negligent with respect to the handling of classified information," reads the statement, one of Comey's earliest drafts from May 2, 2016.

The sources who had seen the early draft, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, said the draft statement was subsequently changed in red-line edits on or around June 10 to conclude that the handling of 110 emails containing classified information that were transmitted by Clinton and her aides over her insecure personal email server was "extremely careless."

So... former FBI Director Comey apparently did at one point use the legally significant phrase "grossly negligent" which then somehow morphed to the legally insignificant phrase, "extremely careless" after draft changes by the Senate Judiciary Committee to Comey's statement. I wonder if Clinton apologists care any more.

I am installing McAfee antivirus on my wife's windows 7 laptop.

For years she has been telling g me that you can't do anything with Linux (as in everyone needs MS locked in programs.

Today, she is trying to send an MS Word doc to a publisher, but cannot connect to the website because her OS is sooooo slow and keeps freezing.

My response was "yeah, you can't do ANYTHING with Linux!"

After our usual win/Lin argument, i said I'd install antivirus if she wanted.

THIS. IS. PAINFUL!!! Soooooo slooooooow!

Her argument is that when Linux gets as popular as windows, my system will get slow too....
.....her tablet is Android, lol. She surf's through Linux servers. My daughter and son in law have Android phones (my wife and I don't have cell phones)..... So much she didn't know but now does.

She was so mad and frustrated at me until I pointed out that she was mad at her precious Windows, but taking it out on me, lol.

Getting some brownie points if this antivirus works. Crossing fingers. She'd be so much better off dual booting, but yeah.... Windows is teh best!

Trump’s Legacy: Damaged Brains

The pesticide, which belongs to a class of chemicals developed as a nerve gas made by Nazi Germany, is now found in food, air and drinking water. Human and animal studies show that it damages the brain and reduces I.Q.s while causing tremors among children. It has also been linked [open, DOI: 10.1093/jnci/djh324] [DX] to lung cancer and Parkinson's disease [DOI: 10.1136/oemed-2013-101394] [DX] in adults.

[...] This chemical, chlorpyrifos, is hard to pronounce, so let's just call it Dow Chemical Company's Nerve Gas Pesticide. Even if you haven't heard of it, it may be inside you: One 2012 study found that it was in the umbilical cord blood of 87 percent of newborn babies tested. And now the Trump administration is embracing it, overturning a planned ban that had been in the works for many years.

The Environmental Protection Agency actually banned Dow's Nerve Gas Pesticide for most indoor residential use 17 years ago — so it's no longer found in the Raid you spray at cockroaches (it's very effective, which is why it's so widely used; then again, don't suggest this to Dow, but sarin nerve gas might be even more effective!). The E.P.A. was preparing to ban it for agricultural and outdoor use this spring, but then the Trump administration rejected the ban. That was a triumph for Dow, but the decision stirred outrage among public health experts. They noted that Dow had donated $1 million for President Trump's inauguration.

So Dow's Nerve Gas Pesticide will still be used on golf courses, road medians and crops that end up on our plate. Kids are told to eat fruits and vegetables, but E.P.A. scientists found levels of this pesticide on such foods at up to 140 times the limits deemed safe. "This was a chemical developed to attack the nervous system," notes Virginia Rauh, a Columbia professor who has conducted groundbreaking research on it. "It should not be a surprise that it's not good for people."

[...] Democrats sometimes gloat that Trump hasn't managed to pass significant legislation so far, which is true. But he has been tragically effective at dismantling environmental and health regulations — so that Trump's most enduring legacy may be cancer, infertility and diminished I.Q.s for decades to come.

Chlorpyrifos

Asked in April whether Pruitt had met with Dow Chemical Company executives or lobbyists before his decision, a EPA spokesman replied: "We have had no meetings with Dow on this topic." In June, after several Freedom of Information Act requests, the EPA released a copy of Pruitt's March meeting schedule which showed that a meeting had been scheduled between Pruitt and Dow CEO Andrew Liveris at a hotel in Houston, Texas, on March 9.[91] Both men were featured speakers at an energy conference. An EPA spokesperson reported that the meeting was brief and the pesticide was not discussed.[92]

In August, it was revealed that in fact Pruitt and other EPA officials had met with industry representatives on dozens of occasions in the weeks immediately prior to the March decision, promising them that it was "a new day" and assuring them that their wish to continue using chlorpyrifos had been heard. Ryan Jackson, Pruitt's chief of staff, said in a March 8 email that he had "scared" career staff into going along with the political decision to deny the ban, adding "[T]hey know where this is headed and they are documenting it well."[93]

Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC

Clinton Ally and Former DNC Chairwoman Turns Tables, Accuses DNC of Rigging Primary Against Bernie

Papa John's Blames the NFL for Hurting Pizza Sales 🍕📉🔥

Papa John’s International Inc. founder John Schnatter is going after NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, saying weak handling of the league’s national-anthem controversy has hammered sales of his pizza.

“The NFL has hurt us by not resolving the current debacle to the players’ and owners’ satisfaction,” Schnatter, who serves as the pizza chain’s chairman and chief executive officer, said on a conference call. “NFL leadership has hurt Papa John’s shareholders.”

The remarks follow a controversy over NFL football players protesting during the national anthem, a movement that started last season. The demonstrations have sparked calls for a boycott and raised concerns among league sponsors. But Schnatter’s comments mark the highest-profile example of an NFL partner publicly blaming the outcry for hurting business.