Links - 27th June 2017 (2)

Marvel Confirms Popular Fan Theory About Stan Lee's Cameos - "Stan Lee has secretly been playing Uatu the Watcher, an extraterrestrial from the comics whose species appear to observe major events."

Fathers' rights protester scales Buckingham Palace - "Royal security was under fresh scrutiny today after a Fathers 4 Justice campaigner dressed as Batman staged a protest on a balcony at Buckingham Palace. Jason Hatch, 33, from Gloucester, managed to reach the royal residence despite the presence of armed guards, the group claimed. Matt O'Connor, a spokesman for the organisation, said: "We've got a guy dressed as Batman who is on Buckingham Palace on a balcony. He legged it past the armed guards.""

How censored is China's version of WoW? - World of Warcraft Forums - "skeletons being turned into undead player models and undead player models having their exposed bones covered up"
"You cant see Pandaren at all, they are just giant blurry images."
"I know that games in Brazil can't mention alcohol so things get changed from say wine to 'grape juice' or the likes. Our government (Australia) wanted to censor A cup women because it was considered borderline child "adult material" and exploitation of minors."

Well done, feminism. Now man are afraid to help women at work - Telegraph - "Sex & The Office suggests men now view such ordinary, decent behaviours as “too risky” – and, in what will be a bitter irony for equality campaigners – claims that, as a direct consequence, women are now failing to advance at work. This terror of being accused of sexual harassment is now so common it has its own term, “backlash stress”. It sounds like something straight out of a Claims Direct ad – where the only victims are men. The book’s author, Kim Elsesser, a research scholar at the University of California, argues that a “sex partition” has sprung up, which impedes women from building the vital network of contacts both within the workplace and socially... companies themselves are contributing to this mess, as they are now so terrified of legal action they send staff on sexual harassment training courses, and are duty-bound to follow up on any allegation, however minor. Ludicrously, Elsesser cites examples of men who have been dragged in by their HR departments for simply opening a door for a female colleague or complimenting her on a new suit... Elsesser’s book echoes an insightful New York Post article from earlier this year called ‘Powerful Men Now Hide Behind Open Doors’. The writer, Naomi Schaffer Riley, paints a depressingly familiar picture of university lecturers who won’t even close their office doors when alone with a female student... Riley cites a US National Journal survey where a male Congress aide said: “Several female aides have been barred from staffing their male bosses at evening events, driving alone with their congressman or senator, or even sitting down one-on-one in his office for fear that others would get the wrong impression.” In a lawsuit-happy culture, where claims can seemingly be made on a 'he said/she said' basis, men are now trying to ensure their actions are always covered by a third party witness. Increasingly, they want to make sure the walls have ears – just in case something “inappropriate” is said... By carrying on like this we are nurturing and mollycoddling victimhood and it is having profound impacts. Last month in Britain, “fearless feminist” barrister Charlotte Proudman publicly shamed Alexander Carter-Silk, 57, a senior solicitor, for complimenting her “stunning” LinkedIn profile picture – then claimed it was her career that had been “ruined”... This is the bed Third Wave feminism has made. Now we all have to lie in it"

Health food and drinks nutritionists want you to STOP buying in 2017 - "'If you remove gluten from your diet without medical necessity, you will run the risk of missing out on some vitamins and other essential nutrients. 'Many gluten-free products available tend to be quite low in iron, calcium, fibre, thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, and folate. 'Many gluten-free foods would be tasteless without the higher levels of sugar, salt, and other additives to make them more palatable. 'And don't forget that gluten-free junk food is still junk food.'"

What women REALLY want: To marry a rich man and stay at home with the children - "Despite years of equality campaigning and advances for women in the workplace, 64 per cent said they aspire to find a husband who brings home a larger pay packet than they do. None wanted to marry a man who earned less. And 69 per cent said they would prefer to stay at home to look after their children if money were not an issue. Only 19 per cent wanted their other half to be better educated than they are. Instead 62 per cent said they wanted a man to have the same level of intellect... The survey follows controversial research published last week by Dr Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics, which claimed more women are choosing to ‘marry up’ by picking wealthy men for their spouse than in the 1940s. In her report, published by the Centre for Policy Studies think-tank, she said men dominate the top positions because women do not want careers in business... equal roles in the family, where husband and wife shared employment, childcare and housework, was ‘not the ideal sought by most couples’."

Successful women begrudge husbands who earn less, study claims - "one in five women are the main breadwinners in their relationships. Of female high-flyers, one in six actually resented their loved one for not earning more cash and one in ten disliked the financial responsibility... relationships were far less fiery when the man retained his traditional breadwinning role... sociologists as Virginia University, in the U.S study, found that those with traditional marriages, in which couples stick to old fashioned gender roles - with the husband as the main breadwinner - were happier. Entitled What's Love Got TO With It, the report showed women who worked were more dissatisfied with their husbands than those who stayed at home, and the happiest were those whose husbands brought in at least two-thirds of the household income, regardless of how much they helped with domestic chores."

Feminist Academics Blame The Patriarchy For Feeling Like Frauds - "The study draws on well-known feminist Peggy McIntosh’s research which concludes that women generally feel like frauds in their professional life due to patriarchal forces. The authors wrote: “personal feelings of fraudulence are linked to broader, political context.” They criticized universities for adopting “neoliberal” economic accountability that forces scholars to produce applicable research because such traitorous scholars are “likely to be rewarded within a patriarchal system.” Thus Sharp and Weaver suggest that feminist scholars, who don’t accept the “neoliberal” way of doing research, will tend to feel like frauds because they won’t be rewarded as much and will feel inadequate."

Why I'll never date a feminist - "People who are more loyal to their gender and not their significant other don’t make good partners. They will always look at you as inherently more fortunate than them. They’ve bought into the “battle of the sexes” mentality and it often pervades their perceptions of romance. Romance turns into a power struggle rather than a partnership."

Female Islamic Professor Says Allah Allows Muslims To Rape Non-Muslims In Order To Humiliate Them [Video] - "Al-Azhar University is a renowned institute in Cairo, Egypt, that is the oldest degree-granting institute in all of Egypt. The university is touted as “Sunni Islam’s most prestigious university.” Therefore, the statements made by the female professor are concerning due to the rampant rape by the Islamic State to their “war prisoners,” the Yazidi people."

The dating gap: why the odds are stacked against female graduates - "Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary psychology at Oxford University, says women looking for equally-educated male partners, “will be forced to compete, I guess, and those that lose will have to downgrade their expectations and are likely to marry later as a result.” There is historical evidence for this – he points to analyses of parish marriage registers from an area of Germany in the 18th and 19th centuries. “We see this in the historical data – actual ages at marriage are later for those who marry down the social scale than those who marry up or at the same level.”

Switzerland guns: Living with firearms the Swiss way - "Although it is still possible for a former soldier to buy his firearm after he finishes military service, he must provide a justification for keeping the weapon and apply for a permit... It is a condition of the interview that I don't give his surname or hint at his address. "I do as the army advises and I keep the barrel separately from my pistol," he explains seriously. "I keep the barrel in the basement so if anyone breaks into my apartment and finds the gun, it's useless to them." He shakes out the gun holster. "And we don't get bullets any more," he adds. "The Army doesn't give ammunition now - it's all kept in a central arsenal"... when I ask him if he feels safer having a gun at home, explaining that even if he had ammunition, he would not be allowed to use it against an intruder... "there is a strong correlation between guns kept in private homes and incidences occurring at home - like private disputes involving the husband shooting the wife and maybe the children, and then committing suicide"... "over the last 20 years, now that the majority of soldiers don't have ammunition at home, we have seen a decrease in gun violence and a dramatic decrease in gun-related suicides. Today we see maybe 200 gun suicides per year and it used to be 400, 20 years ago"... Prof Killias cannot hide his anger with those in America who use Switzerland to illustrate their argument that more gun ownership would deter or stop violence. "We don't have a gun culture!" he snaps, waving his hand dismissively... "There is no point taking the gun out of your home in Switzerland because it is illegal to carry a gun in the street. To shoot someone who just looks at you in a funny way - this is not Swiss culture!""
If stricter gun control reduces gun deaths in a place without a gun culture, it will even more so reduce them in a place with it

Meet Bodhi - the pet dog who's also a paid MENSWEAR model for top brands including ASOS - “Working with Bodhi is like working with any model, sometimes he’s happy, sometimes he’s not feeling it - at the end of the day he’s the boss.”

Against ‘Sustainability’ - The New York Times - "as the Christian God retreated after Descartes, the attributes traditionally ascribed to Him — goodness, perfection and permanence — were in different ways transposed onto the body of nature... the planet has seen mass extinctions of species and significant alterations to the climate before. The fact that they are traced to the behavior of an individual species only makes them particular, not in some way “unnatural.”... Mass extinctions are no doubt catastrophic, but they are only tragic if nature is viewed as something perfect that we are destroying, rather than as a state of flux in which we are participating... the environmental movement has become, and perhaps always was, infused with a sense of mourning and melancholia (not to mention nostalgia). This melancholia, I would argue, is connected to the death of God, or the ability to conceive God in a certain way, and stems from that Romantic transference of the divine into nature."

I am interested in learning more about how biotech seeds improve sustainability... - "Toward environmental sustainability, the GM insect tolerant crops allow much less broad-spectrum insecticide to be used, which has many advantages. Insect populations are more diverse, and abundant, except for those that directly harm the crop... Economic sustainability means a positive net balance between the cost of production and the value of the product. The best example is perhaps the Hawaiian papaya. Papaya farmers find the GMO papaya much more sustainable than non-GM, virus sensitive varieties"
"Herbicide-tolerant crops have encouraged farmers to practice no-till farming. In conventional farming, the fields are plowed ("tilled") to control weeds. Because of the superior weed control from GM crops, farmers now have to till much less often. This has led to improved soil health and water retention, reduced runoff, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture"

Is the key to romance outsourcing household chores? - The Washington Post - "comprehensive outsourcing is actually the most economical decision for them. Not only does it free them up to devote more time to their professional work, but it also relieves the stress on the family and the marriage... “Families tend to over-buy things and under-buy services given what psychologists have told us about how spending money impacts happiness.”... "I got a lot more joy out of dancing for 15 minutes with Matilda than I would have from a Starbucks cappuccino. And it cost me about a Starbucks drink to pay our assistant [to] spend 15 minutes cleaning up the kitchen.”"

Why science is so hard to believe - The Washington Post - "even students with an advanced science education had a hitch in their mental gait when asked to affirm or deny that humans are descended from sea animals and that the Earth goes around the sun. Both truths are counterintuitive. The students, even those who correctly marked “true,” were slower to answer those questions than questions about whether humans are descended from tree-dwelling creatures (also true but easier to grasp) and whether the moon goes around the Earth (also true but intuitive)... people need to hear from believers they can trust, who share their fundamental values... In the debate over climate change, the central allegation of the skeptics is that the science saying it’s real and a serious threat is politically tinged, driven by environmental activism and not hard data. That’s not true, and it slanders honest scientists. But the claim becomes more likely to be seen as plausible if scientists go beyond their professional expertise and begin advocating specific policies. It’s their very detachment, what you might call the cold-bloodedness of science, that makes science the killer app"

Does Islam Have a Role in Suicide Bombings? - "Khomeini and fellow radical Shiite clerics framed the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) as a modern incarnation of the Battle of Karbala, portraying the Iranian people as Muhammad's grandson and Shiite martyr Hussein ibn Ali and Saddam Hussein as his nemesis Caliph Yazid. They understood that Shiite veneration for the self-sacrifice of Hussein's followers, who died willingly along with their leader, could be leveraged. Khomeini also relied on passages from the Qur'an extolling the virtue of "one who sells himself to seek the pleasure of Allah." Yet most authors of books on suicide terrorism ignore how Khomeini and Amal's Musa Sadr carefully manipulated Islamic tradition, preferring the simple and uncritical assertion that Islam prohibits suicide... The will to equivocate is so strong that it prompted Navid Kermani to advise those looking to understand the 9/11 attacks to ignore the Qur'an and blame Nietzsche... the LTTE [Tamil Tigers] did not engage in suicide terrorism prior to its contact with Hezbollah... Many claim that foreign occupation causes suicide bombing worldwide. But no French or Dutch suicide bombers targeted Nazi occupiers in the early 1940s. The Irish Republican Army's Bobby Sands (above) starved to death during a hunger strike, but the group never adopted suicide bombing as a tactic against British occupiers. No Palestinian suicide bombers targeted Egyptian and Trans-Jordanian occupiers in the Gaza Strip and West Bank from 1948 until 1967... Mira Tzoreff of the Moshe Dayan Center also documents the predatory methods used by Arafat's Tanzim whereby Palestinian girls and young women are seduced, impregnated, threatened with exposure, and then offered a means of escape through their own "martyrdom.""

How Neil Young, Greenpeace work to starve the world’s poor - "to Greenpeace’s loud cheers, MASIPAG, a closely allied organization, violently attacked and destroyed a Golden Rice field trial in the Philippines. The group claimed to be a “farmer-led network,” but local officials reported that its thugs had been bused in from a nearby city. MASIPAG’s list of supporters and partners reads like a directory of European church- and government-sponsored social-justice and development groups... Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace in the 1970s, broke with his creation and now works to expose Greenpeace’s actions in the developing world. He’s joined with Golden Rice inventor Ingo Potrykus in calling for putting Greenpeace on trial for crimes against humanity."

Employer fails to pay, worker goes to jail - "The doctor at CGH prescribed him five months of medical leave. During this period, Ali’s employer merely paid him a small portion of his medical leave wages. To compound matters, Ali was constantly harassed by his employer to sign blank papers, which he steadfastly refused. But the constant pressure on him made it increasingly intolerable to continue staying in the dormitory. When finally, on 13 November 2013, his request for the reimbursement of his medical expenses and leave wages infuriated his employer, Ali moved out of the dormitory. Like many migrant workers, Ali would not want to risk being seized by “repatriation gangsters” hired by employers, and be bundled out of Singapore without completing his course of medical treatment or receiving compensation for permanent disability. The Work Injury Compensation Act (WICA) clearly states that employers are to pay workers their medical leave wages promptly and cover medical expenses for work-related injuries. However, tardiness or failure to pay is a recurring complaint among injured workers who seek help at Transient Workers Count Too; Ali is one of the many cases I have encountered in just the first month of my internship. Having moved out of his dorm for his own security, Ali now had to find a way to pay over $200 a month to rent a bunk bed somewhere. Without a viable financial means to support himself and his family back home, Ali had no choice but to take on alternative employment, even if illegally"