Links - 14th August 2017 (2)

United Passenger "Removal": A Reporting and Management Fail - "Absence of reporting on airline regulations leads to widespread skewing of story in United’s favor. Even though most readers may think United is getting beaten up aplenty in the press, in fact it is getting a virtual free pass as far as its rights to remove a paying passenger with a confirmed seat who has been seated. This seems to reflect the deep internalization in America of deference to authority in the post 9/11 world, as well as reporters who appear to be insufficiently inquisitive. And there also seems to be a widespread perception that because it’s United’s plane, it can do what it sees fit. In fact, airlines are regulated and United is also bound to honor its own agreements. It is telling, in not a good way, that Naked Capitalism reader Uahsenaa found a better discussion of the legal issues on Reddit than Lambert and I have yet to see in the media and the blogosphere (including from sites that profess to be knowledgeable about aviation)... This in turn reveals the lack of any slack whatsoever in United’s system. Clearly the urgency was due to the four crew members somehow being late; Plan A had failed and the last minute boarding effort was Plan B or maybe even Plan C. As one experienced passenger said, “They can’t come up with four crew members in one of their biggest hubs?” It also is a symptom of a badly fragmented business system heavily dependent on contractors"

Meet the Malaysian Neo-Nazis Fighting for a Pure Malay Race - "Malay power is important because we're concerned about keeping a pure Malay community all over the Malay Archipelago [the archipelago between Australia and Southeast Asia, believed by some to be the homeland of the Malay race]. I'm a second-generation fighter for Malay power. The first generation, who founded the Malay-power movement, have been less active recently. Malay power stems from a point in history—the 13th of May, 1969—[when] the Chinese and Malay communities fought each other. However, the punk and skinhead Malay-power movement started in Kuala Lumpur in the early 90s... Ethnic Malays also fall prey to criminals who come from abroad and sell drugs and commit murder, rape, robbery, and so on. The lesson that we can learn from Naziism is that we can take extreme racist action if the position of the Malays is affected by these factors. We won't practice overt racism if the Malay race isn't compromised, but, if threatened, we will take action... We make minorities afraid to commit crime in Malaysia. We always warn them not to cause trouble here. Violence isn't a solution for us because we begin with discretion, tolerance, and politeness when talking to these immigrants. If they insist on continuing or if they are stubborn people, we will do what is necessary. We also do charity work for the community and for Palestine, Syria, Somalia, and other countries that are at war"

Professor raised under communism explains academics' love of socialism – and why they're wrong - "Curta grew up under the iron-fisted regime of Romanian President Nicolae Ceaușescu... I think that there’s an idealism that most people in academia, specifically in the humanities, share... No matter how you can prove that system doesn’t work, with an inclination to go that way perhaps because most people associate socialism with social justice, while the former is an ideology with concrete ideas and concrete historical experiences, while social justice is a very vague abstract notion... As my father used to say, it is so much easier to be a Marxist when you sip your coffee in Rive Gauche, left-bank Paris, than when living in an apartment under Ceaușescu, especially in the 1980s... I went through 20-plus years of school in the old country, under communism, for free, but I had no food on the table."

Cops or soldiers? - "Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams (ie, paramilitary police units) were first formed to deal with violent civil unrest and life-threatening situations: shoot-outs, rescuing hostages, serving high-risk warrants and entering barricaded buildings, for instance. Their mission has crept... Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies, estimates that SWAT teams were deployed about 3,000 times in 1980 but are now used around 50,000 times a year. Some cities use them for routine patrols in high-crime areas. Baltimore and Dallas have used them to break up poker games. In 2010 New Haven, Connecticut sent a SWAT team to a bar suspected of serving under-age drinkers... The number of SWAT deployments soared even as violent crime fell. And although in recent years crime rates have risen in smaller American cities, Mr Kraska writes that the rise in small-town SWAT teams was driven not by need, but by fear of being left behind. Fred Leland, a police lieutenant in the small town of Walpole, Massachusetts, says that police departments in towns like his often invest in military-style kit because they “want to keep up” with larger forces... Because of a legal quirk, SWAT raids can be profitable. Rules on civil asset-forfeiture allow the police to seize anything which they can plausibly claim was the proceeds of a crime. Crucially, the property-owner need not be convicted of that crime. If the police find drugs in his house, they can take his cash and possibly the house, too. He must sue to get them back. Many police departments now depend on forfeiture for a fat chunk of their budgets... [there is] a perverse incentive for police to focus on drug-related crimes, which “come with a potential kickback to the police department”, rather than rape and murder investigations, which do not"
And yet it is more sexy to just chant Black Lives Matter than to look at real issues

Luxembourg Is Not A Microstate! - "it’s still bigger than Singapore, Andorra, Malta, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Monaco, and the Vatican combined!"

US amateur football team Washington Square FC sponsored by Porn site RedTube

The Science Behind Frixion Erasable Pens - "Forms that must be filled out with a ballpoint pen have always vexed writers prone to handwritten typos. But this all changed 10 years ago, when Frixion Ball pens were launched in Europe. These pens leave marks on the page that look just like those from an ordinary ballpoint pen—but flip the instrument around and rub your writing with the eraser, and the heat produced by that friction makes it disappear before your eyes."

‘The Restaurant Of Order Mistakes’ Employs Waiters With Dementia, And You Never Know What You’re Getting - "Food blogger Mizuho Kudo visited The Restaurant of Order Mistakes and had a blast. She originally ordered a hamburger but ended up having gyoza dumplings instead, but everything turned out to be unexpectedly delicious. Kudo also claimed that the waiters were full of smiles and seemed to be having tons of fun."

People Warned Me About Pickpockets In Barcelona. So I Made This… - "The result is this decoy wallet that has a couple of diabolical secrets hidden inside. This idea is just one of many in my ongoing project called Obvious Plant."

People Warned Me About Pickpockets In Barcelona. So I Made This…

Guy Becomes Best Friends With Celebrities By Photoshopping Himself Into Their Pics

Bookstore-Themed Tokyo Hotel Has 1,700 Books And Sleeping Shelves Next To Them - "Book and Bed Tokyo, a bookstore-themed hotel located on the seventh floor of a high-rise in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro neighborhood"

World of Warcraft Pandaren reaches level 90 without leaving starting zone - "Because Doubleagent was determined not to side with either the Alliance or Horde factions, he's never been allowed to leave the Wandering Isle starting zone. This means he's spent the majority of his ascent to level 90 doing the grindiest grinding that has ever been grinded: picking herbs and mining. Apparently all this was worth it in the name of neutrality."

Dear “well-known Halal bakery”, you’ve just lost a talented cake decorator due to your discrimination - "
Comments: "Maybe they really encountered a lot of malays who are lazy and don't turn up for work? My mum runs her own business and it's so tough to get good Malay workers."
"The laziest person I'd ever known is a Chinese who is born to a lawyer and a businessperson. He claims being discriminated as a homosexual and having learning disability stops him from working, when actually all he does every day is to watch porn videos even at 'work' in his aunt's legal firm. And he has no university degree."

Caligula's ancient hideaways - "The imperial palace on Capri is where he spent his late adolescence (before coming to the throne in AD 37); he was the guest of his great-uncle, the morose emperor Tiberius, who had more or less abandoned Rome itself for his island hideaway. It was a place where many writers (including Bob Guccione and Gore Vidal in their Seventies Penthouse movie, Caligula) have speculated that Caligula was schooled in the dark arts of depravity. The Roman biographer, Suetonius, for example, tells stories of Tiberius on Capri having sadistic fun by filling his male guests with wine then putting ligatures around their penises so they could not urinate, and swimming in his pool with boys nicknamed “little fishes” who swam between his legs and nibbled his genitals"

Suetonius on Tiberius' Sex Life - "On retiring to Capri he devised a pleasance for his secret orgies: teams of wantons of both sexes, selected as experts in deviant intercourse and dubbed analists, copulated before him in triple unions to excite his flagging passions... Unweaned babies he would put to his organ as though to the breast, being by both nature and age rather fond of this form of satisfaction."

Roman emperors and women through the ages | Podcast | History Extra - "What Caligula's career demonstrates is that the power of the early emperors was an autocracy that was essentially moderated by fear of assassination"

Anglo-Saxon saints and British slave-owners | Podcast | History Extra - "They are in so many ways very similar people to the abolitionists. And sometimes there's a crossover. There's intermarriages within families, between families I should say of abolitionists and pro-slavers. There is agreement on lots of other issues. So Wilberforce and Hibbert disagree passionately about the morality of slavery but on many other issues they agree. One of the great oddities of British slavery is a great number of the slave owners are philanthropists. They're people who open schools and begin charities, doing exactly the sort of thing that do gooder evangelicals like Wilberforce really support. And so they have so much in common, they have so much in agreement... The belief in freedom, the belief that slavery has run its course, that i is no longer something that Britain can continue with clashes with this idea of property. If the slaves are property then for the government to take the slaves off the slaveowners is abhorrent. The only way they can do that is by compensating the slave owners...
That's only part of what the slave owners receive in compensation. The other compensation is further free labor. The slaves are forced under the abolition act to work for a further six years for no pay for their masters. To continue as it were in bondage paying off their value to their slave owners...
Some of the slave owners the records show were mixed race. They were the mixed race sons usually of plantation owners who had affairs with slaves. And as part of setting them up financially in life they'd given them some slave. There's clergyman, there's even abolitionists who owned slaves who were given compensation"

Food from the past and the history of illegitimacy | Podcast | History Extra - "The first time that illegitimacy was articulated in law was in the sixteenth century when the first poor law acts came out. And that's when illegitimacy started to have an economic effect on society because parishes were expected to pay for the upkeep not just of single mothers while they were confined and after they'd had their babies but of the babies themselves, of the bastards. And so I think that's really when the stigma began because society started to resent paying the wages of sin themselves I think. Before that it really wasn't too unusual that women got pregnant before they were married. In fact in many places in the country you were encouraged to try before you buy if you were thinking of marrying a woman so it wasn't unusual at all...
Nobody's really written about the role of single fathers before. They've been caricatured I guess in the history of illegitimacy as as the bad boys. As the one who got, the ones who got the girls into trouble. But it wasn't always the case. In fact it was rarely the case and I interviewed several men or came across the testimony of several men who were desperately sad that they had not been able to play a part in their illegitimate children's lives. Because it wasn't until 1959 that a natural father could have any say at all over his child. So if a mother for example was forced to get the child adopted or if she wanted to get the child adopted indeed and the father didn't, it didn't matter. The father had absolutely no say... Until nineteen fifty nine if you were pregnant underaged your family could commit you to an asylum. Not because you were mentally imbecilic as the terms were in the day but because you were morally imbecilic"

Ridley Scott's new Crusades film 'panders to Osama bin Laden' - "Sir Ridley Scott, the Oscar-nominated director, was savaged by senior British academics last night over his forthcoming film which they say "distorts" the history of the Crusades to portray Arabs in a favourable light... Academics, however - including Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, Britain's leading authority on the Crusades - attacked the plot of Kingdom of Heaven, describing it as "rubbish", "ridiculous", "complete fiction" and "dangerous to Arab relations"... The Knights Templar, the warrior monks, are portrayed as "the baddies" while Saladin, the Muslim leader, is a "a hero of the piece", Sir Ridley's spokesman said. "At the end of our picture, our heroes defend the Muslims, which was historically correct." Prof Riley-Smith, who is Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge University, said the plot was "complete and utter nonsense". He said that it relied on the romanticised view of the Crusades propagated by Sir Walter Scott in his book The Talisman, published in 1825 and now discredited by academics. "It sounds absolute balls. It's rubbish. It's not historically accurate at all. They refer to The Talisman, which depicts the Muslims as sophisticated and civilised, and the Crusaders are all brutes and barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality."... Dr Philips said that by venerating Saladin, who was largely ignored by Arab history until he was reinvented by romantic historians in the 19th century, Sir Ridley was following both Saddam Hussein and Hafez Assad, the former Syrian dictator. Both leaders commissioned huge portraits and statues of Saladin, who was actually a Kurd, to bolster Arab Muslim pride. Prof Riley-Smith added that Sir Ridley's efforts were misguided and pandered to Islamic fundamentalism. "It's Osama bin Laden's version of history. It will fuel the Islamic fundamentalists." Amin Maalouf, the French historian and author of The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, said: "It does not do any good to distort history, even if you believe you are distorting it in a good way. Cruelty was not on one side but on all." Sir Ridley's spokesman said that the film portrays the Arabs in a positive light. "It's trying to be fair and we hope that the Muslim world sees the rectification of history.""

Episode 44: Operation Coldstore II: The Blame Game - "Operation Coldstore was set for 0200 on 16 December 1962. And it didn’t happen. At the last minute, Lee inserted fifteen opposition politicians not approved by Special Branch into the list. When the Tunku learnt of this, he erupted into fury and in turn refused to sanction the arrest of any Federation politicians. Selkirk, Lansdowne, and Federation security officers tried to convince either Lee to withdraw his names or the Tunku to accept them, but both refused to budge. The Tunku ‘took strong exception to Lee taking advantage of the operation in order to dispose of his political opponents. This he said was typical of Lee who was a thoroughly untrustworthy man. He added, “I cannot work with this fellow. I think we had better carry on with Malaysia without Singapore”.' The Tunku did not want accusations that he was also using the operation to rid himself of his opponents in the Federation. Selkirk felt Lee was ‘utterly unreasonable’ and could ‘put forward no convincing argument’ why the additional names should be included. Lee offered to back down if he could be absolved from any responsibility... When Selkirk pressed him about the fifteen names, Lee blamed Ong Pang Boon, saying they were ‘put forward by his Minister for Home Affairs and not by him.’ Leaving the British to sort out the situation, he fled for the Cameron Highlands and refused all further attempts to contact him until the New Year... An upset Moore tackled him on the inclusion of the names, pointing out that they were not communists and there were no grounds for arresting them. Lee did not dispute this. He admitted it was ‘to strengthen his own chances of political survival’"

Episode 45: The Man, The Myth, The Legend: Who is Lim Chin Siong? - "Chin Siong was feared by the British, by the Tunku, by Lee Kuan Yew. He was feared by the men who loom largest over our own history. Lee was obsessed with defeating Lim. The Tunku openly worried at Lim Chin Siong’s ‘frightening’ organisation abilities and talismanic presence. And he was so feared that they ended up changing the constitutional arrangements of four different territories: of the Federation, Singapore, North Borneo, and Sabah, in order to defeat him. It is not an exaggeration to say that Malaysia was created for the primary purpose of defeating Lim Chin Siong."

Episode 46: Selamat Hari Malaysia - "Tan told the British that ‘the only obstacle [in the way of an agreement] was Lee, and questioned whether it was necessary for him to be “there”’. He complained that ‘Lee was not amenable to reason… complete surrender or brute force were the only two things which Lee understood.’ Even Federation Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Razak, who saw himself as the last Federation leader to really try to get along with Lee, got so frustrated with Lee that on one occasion that he remarked, ‘While it was possible to negotiate with Goh Keng Swee, Lee Kuan Yew was impossible.’"

Episode 50: “Questions & Answers III” - "I realized that you know you seem to be a bit critical about Lee Kuan Yew. Is there gonna be like any legal action taken against you or like any repercussion on your take on Lee Kuan Yew?
Actually there already has been. I mean I used to work for the National University of Singapore and as my contract was coming to an end I was told that because of my work I was no longer welcome. I could no longer be employed at the University. Now of course all this was done informally, face to face meetings, phone calls so there's no paper trail. So you know of course I can't prove that I am black listed. But I have had enough of a reception, enough of feedback from the powers that be to have made very clear their displeasure. With regards to legal action I don't think so. Specifically legal action because everything I do is cited. I have plenty of evidence. I've stacks and stacks of evidence... For all Lee Kuan Yew's great achievements - and he had very great achievements, he was a very smart man, his character was not a surprise to people. Indeed it was celebrated as part of what made him so good, so effective, so brilliant... So to know that he did things like this, that he you know, enabled so much oppression even of those closest to him, that he stabs so many people in the back. People aren't surprised I think. What the, more surprising parts actually were the bits where Lee Kuan Yew acted with great cowardice. You know and that I think people actually had a lot more surprise at because the myth that's built up around him shows him, you know, to be brave and uncompromising but that wasn't the case in the fifties and sixties"