Links - 6th August 2011

"When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." - R. Buckminster Fuller

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It's Time to End the War on Salt - "A meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease"

A Win for Women: Females Hold More Advanced Degrees - "Women are also more likely to have finished high school than men. But the news isn't all good. Females continue to lag behind males in the areas of business, science and engineering"
Comments: "it's a victory as long as women and minorities have the advantages, but if white males do, it is discrimination" "We have over thousands of years shown over and over again and again that a woman can do a much better job then any man can."

Witches fear being driven out of town following 'hostility from Christians' - "What we are suffering is racism from people with a 16th century mentality"
The fact that people use the word 'racist' willy-nilly tells us it's a catchy signifier which doesn't mean all that much

Candy wrapper resistance - "We have created a monster of a migrant worker policy that is almost designed to exploit the vulnerable... This half-baked policy that we have for dealing with worker grievances effectively means that employers feel a certain sense of immunity. You could quite fairly say that our government encourages exploitation and crime"

YouTube - ‪Trolling Saruman‬‏

The Copyright Lobby Absolutely Loves Child Pornography - ""We must filter the Internet to win over online file sharing. But politicians don’t understand that file sharing is bad, and this is a problem for us. Therefore, we must associate file sharing with child pornography. Because that’s something the politicians understand, and something they want to filter off the Internet"... a support group for adult people who were abused as children [is] very outspoken and adamant on the issue of censoring child pornography. Censorship hides the problem and causes more children to be abused, they say. Don’t close your eyes, but see reality and act on it"

Our Culture, What’s Left Of It - "Ideologists find anything that escapes their conceptual framework threatening - because ideologists want a simple principle, or a few simple principles, by which all things may be judged... I suppose that people who feel little control over their own lives or destinies can obtain a slight sense of agency by interfering in the lives of others, in tiny ways... Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better... Tolerance is the greatest moral virtue and broadmindedness the greatest intellectual one. Moreover, no decent person can be other than a feminist. People therefore want to be both multiculturalist and feminist. But multiculturalism and feminism obviously clash; therefore, you avoid the necessity to give up one or the other merely by disregarding the phenomena. How you feel about yourself is more important to you than the state of the world"

Alleged Norway Killer's Manifesto Denies Faith in Chrsit - "Breivik, although claiming to stand up for Europe’s “Christian culture,” in no way links that ideal to true Christian faith. He writes on page 1307 of his online manifesto: “If you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God then you are a religious Christian. Myself and many more like me do not necessarily have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God. We do however believe in Christianity as a cultural, social, identity and moral platform. This makes us Christian.”"
This is far better evidence than the "no true Christian" fallacy

Penangites too lazy to cook assam laksa

Police in Ga. shut down girls' lemonade stand - "They didn't have a business license or the required permits. Midway Police Chief Kelly Morningstar says police also didn't know how the lemonade was made, who made it or what was in it."

Glenn Beck likens Norwegian dead to Hitler youth - "His latest comments about the "disturbing" nature of political youth camps may come as a surprise to Beck's followers in the Tea Party movement. The anti-tax, anti-immigration movement has been holding summer camps in states including Florida and Missouri where children have been taught a curriculum based on God, the US constitution and "the defence of economic liberty""

Unintentionally Sexual Church Signs

Former Google CIO: LimeWire Pirates Were iTunes’ Best Customers - "That same “try-before-you-buy” discovery was echoed in another study we reported on last week which found that users of pirate sites, including the recently-busted Kino.to, buy more DVDs, visit the cinema more often and on average spend more at the box office than their ‘honest’ counterparts"

Preserving memories key to a strong home: PM Lee
Yet they tore down the National Library for a tunnel. MFM: it's OK, they will put a tiny replica/photo of it on a 'heritage trail'

Why the Norway Shooter May End Up Serving a Life Sentence - "All the Norwegians with whom I spoke agreed that their country’s handling of Breivik will be superior to how a mass-murderer would be treated in America. That is, none of them said Breivik should be executed... the fact that Breivik is Norwegian will force judges to place the blame where it truly belongs. "Everybody here is so damn happy that this was a Norwegian," he says. "We cannot blame anyone else for it. The hawks are silenced and have no argument for going out to kill someone on the other side of the face of the world, or attacking some poor Middle Easterner in the subway in Oslo""

Breivik no Christian nut, just nuts - "He says he’s a member of the Knights Templar, an order of soldiers that fought the crusades, but was disbanded 800 years ago. He even talks about Dan Brown’s conspiracy theory novels about the Christian church... He thinks knights go and kill innocent people with car bombs and at summer camps. Half of Breivik’s manifesto is cut-and-paste essays from people ranging from the Unabomber to Winston Churchill to Gandhi to even modern-day bloggers. But Breivik has turned it into justification for murdering people. So a murderer quotes Gandhi. So a fascist quotes Churchill. A Satanist calls himself a Christian soldier. But that was enough to shift the coverage in the mainstream media"

‪Oslo: ALL Assaults involving Rape commited by Non-Western Men‬‏ - YouTube
According to the translation of a news program quoting a police spokeswoman, from 2006-2010 86 sexual assaults involving rape were reported, and "in 83 cases the man was described as having "non-western appearance"" (Google Translate backs the translation up)

Oslo rape statistics shock - "Of the 111 charged with rape in Oslo last year, 72 were of non-western ethnic origin, 25 are classified as Norwegian or western and 14 are listed as unknown... While 65 percent of those charged with rape are classed as coming from a non-western background, this segment makes up only 14.3 percent of Oslo's population. Norwegian women were the victims in 80 percent of the cases, with 20 percent being women of foreign background"
Alternative analysis concludes that there is no epidemic and that Norway (with more immigrants) is safer than Iceland

Heavy Boots - "About 6-7 years ago, I was in a philosophy class at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (good science/engineering school) and the teaching assistant was explaining Descartes. He was trying to show how things don't always happen the way we think they will and explained that, while a pen always falls when you drop it on Earth, it would just float away if you let go of it on the Moon... "You saw the APOLLO astronauts walking around on the Moon, didn't you?" I countered, "why didn't they float away?" "Because they were wearing heavy boots." he responded, as if this made perfect sense (remember, this is a Philosophy TA who's had plenty of logic classes). By then I realized that we were each living in totally different worlds, and did not speak each others language, so I gave up"

Aggie Catholics: Report Says All Women Should Have Free Contraception - "Top 10 Reasons Free Contraception For All is A Terrible Idea... 4 - Contraception makes a woman into an object. When a woman's fertility is seen as a bad thing, then the whole person is not respected. The woman is then turned into an object to be used for mere pleasure. Pope Paul VI predicted this outcome in his encyclical Humanae Vitae"
Reading this was a great start to my day

Shinkansen expert Satoru Sone: Unbelievable China is disassembling and burying train carriages - "Many of the journalists working on the Wenzhou train crash story are finding it hard to believe the railway ministry's denials that it's burying train bodies and parts to hide the truth... The Shinkansen has not had a single major accident like the Wenzhou crash in its 47-year history, despite regular earthquakes and typhoons in Japan"

N.Korean Students Forced into Construction Labor - "There are rumors that the real reason the students are being forced to work on building sites is to avoid an uprising emulating the Jasmine Revolutions in the Middle East, since students are among the most likely to have heard about the uprisings."