BEST CORRECTION EVER:

NOT THE TV SHOW: New Map of Dark Matter Puts the Big Bang Theory on Trial.

A new cosmic map was unveiled in August, plotting where the mysterious substance called dark matter is clumped across the universe. To immense relief — and frustration — the map is just what scientists had expected. The distribution of dark matter agrees with our current understanding of a universe born with certain properties in a Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.

But for all the map’s confirmatory power, it still tells us little about the true identity of dark matter, which acts as an invisible scaffold for galaxies and cosmic structure. It also does not explain an even bigger factor shaping the cosmos, known as dark energy, an enigmatic force seemingly pushing the universe apart at ever greater speeds. Tantalizingly, however, a small discrepancy between the new findings and previous observations of the early universe might just crack open the door for new physics.

That’s the intro to a fascinating interview with three of the scientists who created the new map.

PAUL KRUGMAN ON ELECTION NIGHT: “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”

CNBC just now: Dow closes at record high in wild session after release of tax reform bill, Powell nomination.

Related: Trump Nominates Jerome ‘Jay’ Powell to Replace Yellen as Fed Chair.

MORE PROBLEMS LIKE THIS, PLEASE: U.S. oil exports boom, putting infrastructure to the test.

WELL, THEY LEFT OUT THE MOST IMPORTANT REASON: YOU’RE NOT EXERCISING. 6 Surprising Reasons You’re Not Building Muscle.

AT AMAZON, save in Grocery and Gourmet Food.

Plus, deals in Industrial and Scientific.

DC MCALLISTER: The Subversive Way Special K’s New Marketing Campaign Hurts Women.

NORMAN FRIEDMAN: The DPRK Dilemmas.

It seems to follow that the North Koreans see their nuclear weapons as cover for a projected attack on South Korea. One may doubt that Kim appreciates just how dangerous his presumed deterrence may be. During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union came to realise that nuclear deterrence had very limited impact beyond precluding the free use of nuclear weapons by either side. Kim hasn’t had long enough to reflect on this experience. We can’t tell whether his bluster indicates overconfidence. Kim’s view may be that the U.S. nuclear counter-deterrent, which threatens the North Korean population, is irrelevant given his limited interest in its welfare.

At the very least, the North Korean capability must leave U.S. allies in the region, particularly Japan and South Korea, uncertain of the umbrella that has been protecting them. Both may very well decide that they need their own nuclear deterrents, and both are well equipped to create them rapidly.

Either possibility is disastrous from a Chinese point of view. The prospect of Japanese nuclear armament is credible: Prime Minister Abe’s recent electoral triumph was partly driven by the perceived North Korean threat. The Chinese are also aware that, as a Korean nationalist, Kim may well press historic Korean claims to Chinese territory in Manchuria. He may require Chinese help to keep his economy afloat, but the Chinese lack any form of defence against Kim’s nuclear missiles.

And that is why it’s past time for China to rein in its dangerous ally, forcefully if need be.

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Surgeons remove 639 nails from patient’s intestines using magnet.

BEGUN, THE AI WARS HAVE: Our Artificial Intelligence ‘Sputnik Moment’ Is Now.

China’s just announced an AI strategy designed to assure it will be dominant in the host of technologies by 2030.

“If you believe this is important, as I believe, then we need to get our act together as a country,” [Alphabet Exec Chairman Eric] Schmidt said this morning. In a Q and A session at the event organized by the Center for a New American Security, Schmidt said he thought the US will maintain its lead over the People’s Republic of China for the next five years, but he expects China to catch up about then and pass us “extremely quickly.”

How important does China think AI can be? Work told me the Chinese estimate they can boost economic growth with AI by 26 percent by 2030. “It’s quite stunning,” Work said. And, of course, the PRC’s government has published a national strategy and released it to the world.

What’s the best response by the United States, I asked Work after Schmidt spoke. The federal government needs to answer this question at its highest levels, as happened after the Soviet Union stunned the world and launched the first satellite, Sputnik, Work said.

I remain dubious of any government effort regarding any kind of intelligence.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: New 100,000-Bolivar Note Worth $2.42 (Now) Coming to Venezuela.

The one thing centrally planned economies never run short of is zeros.

STUDY: Only half of people with hepatitis C aware of the infection.

HMM: Devin Nunes Says Dems Suddenly Very Interested in Viewing DOJ Dossier Docs They Didn’t Want Subpoenaed.

GLENN’S BEEN SOUNDING THIS WARNING FOR 15 YEARS: Escalating threats to infrastructure confirm our need to harden the electric grid.

DHS described the attacks as “a multi-stage intrusion campaign” designed to infiltrate low security and small networks to gain access and then move laterally to the networks of “major, high value asset owners within the energy sector.” DHS said it is confident that the campaign is ongoing, and hackers are actively pursuing the long-term objective of being able to access and manipulate the computer networks of their targets.

Central to any scheme to damage industries and handicap the U.S. economy is the ability to manipulate or control our national power grid – the vast, highly inter-connected network of power plants, wires, poles, transformers and cables that deliver our nation’s lifeblood — electricity — to hundreds of millions of homes, businesses and critical service organizations every minute, every day. We need look no further than the massive impact of recent hurricanes in Florida and Puerto Rico to understand the price of being without power.

The unfortunate reality is that the national electric grid is vulnerable to a variety of potential attacks, natural and man-made, and every U.S. president since 1990 has acknowledged that fact and pledged to promptly address the looming potential risks. But little has been done at the federal level to develop the kind of comprehensive policy, process and financing mechanisms that are necessary to ensure the grid is made as robust and resilient as today’s threat demand.

Indeed.

UNPLUGGED: Pirate TV services are taking a bite out of cable company revenue: Millions of North Americans are using illegal TV services, research finds.

THE LEFT ALWAYS EATS ITS OWN: Democracy is doing just fine at this populist moment. Liberalism, however, is being destroyed by its most fervent supporters.

RISE OF THE MACHINES: Doctors Have Trouble Diagnosing Alzheimer’s. AI Doesn’t.

NICE: After Winning the World Series, Astros’ Carlos Correa Put a Ring on It.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I’m sorry, but this is deeply problematic.

NANCY PELOSI TO CBS’S CORDEN: GOP WORSE THAN ‘DARTH VADER.’

Ahh, good ol’ Nancy — attacking the good guy in the movie, and siding with George Lucas’s stand-ins for the Vietcong.

(As Sonny Bunch writes at the Washington Post in the second link above, “As I always say, it’s not trolling if it’s true.”)

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Leave it to Pelosi to side with people who keep slaves.

UPDATE (From Ed): Second link was incorrect; it’s fixed now above and it’s also here: The destruction of Alderaan was completely justified.

BUT THE NARRATIVE! Global temperature continues to cool.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I don’t want to live in a John Ringo novel. Though I actually just reread this one recently and it held up quite well. To read, not to live in. . . .

JUDITH MILLER: NYC terror attack: Halloween horror would have been much worse without top notch NYPD.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo pointed out another hallmark of a vehicle assault. The perp, he said, was one of those “lone wolves” who “meant to cause pain and harm and probably death and the resulting terror.”

But it takes a pack to raise a lone wolf. Even if Saipov acted alone, he was part of a growing ideological fraternity numbering in the tens of thousands who now inhabit every region of the globe.

Those seeking eternal glory have staged similar attacks in at least a dozen other cities—from Nice to Paris to Barcelona to London to Jerusalem.

Like the attacks in these cities, the Halloween attack in Lower Manhattan was aimed at inflicting maximum carnage. Schools in the area were letting out students shortly after three o’clock when Saipov drove his rented truck off West Houston Street onto the bike path.

There was no shortage of targets. The streets between West Houston and Chambers were crowded with parents picking up their costumed children prepared for an evening of trick-or-treating. Pedestrians and bikers on the Hudson River bike path were stunned and helpless as Saipov careened his weapon through the crowd.

With the collapse of its self-declared “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq, ISIS is on the run. So are its adherents. But as the extremists disperse, the terrorist threat, paradoxically, increases. American and other intelligence agencies have long warned of a likely rise in vehicle and other attacks as the frustrated, furious faithful are forced to reorient their campaign. In May 2017, the U.S. Transportation and Security Agency (TSA) warned truck and bus companies to be on guard for suspicious individuals seeking to rent vehicles.

According to TSA data, Islamist terrorists have carried out more than a dozen vehicular assaults since 2014 that have killed more than 170 people. Such attacks are ever more likely, the TSA memo warned, since “unsophisticated tactics such as vehicle-ramming” are hard to prevent and capable of inflicting “mass casualties if successful.”

Saipov might have killed even more people had the NYPD not been the nation’s premier counterterrorism force. NYPD officers showed up in force minutes after the attack began, shooting Saipov before he could kill even more New Yorkers.

Plus:

Even more essential has been the NYPD’s intelligence division, which has long collected information about suspicious individuals. After being heavily, and in many instances unfairly, criticized for allegedly violating civil liberties, Miller’s former boss, William Bratton, shut down a particularly controversial program that the intelligence unit had run early in its existence—a so-called “demographic unit” that collected information on the location and activities of Muslims suspected of terrorist intentions.

Another critic was New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who lambasted the NYPD for surveilling New Jersey-based Muslims and asked whether the spying was “borne out of arrogance, or out of paranoia, or out of both.” Unconfirmed news reports Tuesday night indicated that Saipov had lived for some time in Paterson, New Jersey.

But the NYPD has not scaled back most of its vital surveillance activities.

Read the whole thing.

PRIORITIES: FBI Checks Out Sexy Strangers on Delta Flight.

According to ClickOnDetroit.com, the frisky flyers, who were not identified, started off as complete strangers heading to different destinations.

The 48-year-old woman was arrested on the plane Sunday after she was seen performing oral sex on the 28-year-old man while they were in their seats.

Both passengers were issued citations, and the investigation into the incident is being handled by the FBI, which could issue misdemeanor or even felony charges as soon as Tuesday.

Every minute the FBI spends investigating a blow job is a minute taken away from tracking down known-wolf terrorists who would blow us up.

DONNA BRAZILE: I WAS SHOCKED, SHOCKED THAT HILLARY CORRUPTED THE DNC!

That’s the point, though, and the message — I knew nothing, nothing! — gets made with a sledgehammer. Brazile’s not worried at this point about admitting her own negligence and failure in her role as a DNC officer; she just wants to separate herself as much as possible from the stink of Hillary Clinton. That would be a neat trick, since Brazile infamously got cashiered from her gig at CNN for passing Hillary debate questions. Brazile is as much a part of Hillary Clinton corruption as Wasserman Schultz was even apart from the DNC. Hacks is a particularly apt title for this tome.

Still, this attempt at rewriting history is certainly instructive. Hillary Clinton still appears to harbor some ambitions for national prominence, and might have designs on another run at the presidency. The story told by Brazile will not just be a roadblock to any remaining ambitions, but also will make it clear that the Clintons have been a far more corrupting influence on the 2016 elections than the Russians ever aspired to be. Right now, it looks like everyone but Hillary is abandoning the SS Clinton. For that reason alone, it’s worth passing the popcorn around and watching the meltdown on the other side of the fence from Brazile’s “reveal.”

At least for while, damn, it must have felt good to be a Clinton.

CONRAD BLACK: Focus of Russia Probe Needs To Be on Clintons.

The fact that, on the same day as the Manafort and Gates indictments, Tony Podesta — who was intimately connected with the Uranium One dealings that were contemporaneous with extraordinarily large pledges to the Clinton Foundation and the celebrated $500,000 speech-making payment to the former president, Bill Clinton — retired as head of the firm that bears his name — may indicate that Special Counsel Mueller is shifting gears with the evidence and broadening his attack, conducted by his largely Clintonian lawyer group. Mr. Gates had so little notice of what was coming that he had not even hired a criminal lawyer; he had a public defender enter his plea.

I presume Mr. Mueller raced out with the Manafort-Gates charges in the hope that, if there were anything Mr. Manafort could say that would be damaging to Trump, an indictment such as this — the usual U.S. prosecutorial technique of throwing all the spaghetti at the wall (“conspiracy against the United States” is one of the more extreme charges) — will bring him to the standard plea bargain: giving extorted and false but incriminating testimony against the big target (Mr. Trump), in exchange for a reduced sentence with an immunity for perjured testimony. Mr. Mueller and his protégé, James Comey, are superstars in the firmament of this profoundly rotten system, but Mr. Manafort’s lawyer gave them clear notice that it won’t work.

At the same time, to shake Mr. Podesta out of his own company, and incite rumors in the Democratic press that the Podestas are being investigated (Tony Podesta’s brother, John Podesta, was Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager), means that Mr. Mueller is already much closer to lifting the rock all the way on the Clintons and President Obama than he is to finding anything vulnerable around President Trump or his campaign.

Months of “Russia, Russia, Russia” may prove to be the Clinton’s worst own-goal yet.