Links - 19th August 2017 (2)

CNN Deleted A Story Linking Trump And Russia, Then Issued A Retraction After Questions Were Raised - "CNN late Friday deleted a story from its website that claimed Senate investigators were looking into a Russian investment fund whose chief executive met with a member of President Trump’s transition team, later issuing a retraction in the story's place. The now-deleted story, by investigative reporter Thomas Frank, was published Thursday and cited a single, unnamed source who claimed that the Senate Intelligence Committee was looking into a "$10-billion Russian investment fund whose chief executive met with a member of President Donald Trump's transition team four days before Trump's inauguration"... Deleting stories without explanation is considered a serious lapse of journalistic ethics"

The future of feminism: The gender revolution has stalled because feminists think empowement is more important than power - "In the age of celebrity feminism and performative male feminists, the idea that feminism is about “equality for all genders” has become increasingly fashionable. And yet, to me, nothing says misogyny like defining feminism as equality for all—as if focusing a movement, or policy, or activism on women alone is taboo... a successful women’s movement in America must ally the 99% and the 1%, black women and white women, straight women and lesbians. Any activism that pits women against each other is not feminism, because sisterhood is our most powerful tool
A feminist admits and proclaims that feminism isn't really about gender equality. Doubtless she will be condemned by other feminists - but only if this is brought up, and otherwise ignored
Does this mean intersectional feminism isn't feminism?

Canada’s Secret to Resisting the West’s Populist Wave - The New York Times - "In 1971, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau faced a crisis amid the rise of French Canadian separatism in Quebec. His party was losing support, and his country seemed at risk of splitting in two. Mr. Trudeau’s solution was a policy of official multiculturalism and widespread immigration. This would resolve the conflict over whether Canadian identity was more Anglophone or Francophone — it would be neither, with a range of diversity wide enough to trivialize the old divisions. It would also provide a base of immigrant voters to shore up Mr. Trudeau’s Liberal Party... Virtually every immigrant to Canada is brought here deliberately. Research suggests that uncontrolled immigration, for example the mass arrival of refugees in Europe, can trigger a populist backlash, regardless of whether those arrivals pose a threat."

Hong Kong’s part-time girlfriends (and a boyfriend) tell their stories - "The phenomenon of part-time girlfriends – or PTGFs – for rent in Hong Kong has blossomed on social media in recent months. They offer services ranging from dining out to watching movies, but also the full gamut of sexual services, with dates costing between HK$100 and HK$4,000, depending on what’s on the agenda. The trend made headlines last week when 10 Hong Kong women, including a secondary school pupil, were arrested on suspicion of advertising sexual services as part-time girlfriends on their Instagram and Facebook accounts... Being a PTGF has helped Celine to better understand the way men think and behave, she says. It’s also given her a clearer idea of the kind of man she is ultimately looking for. She says it will help her to better understand a future boyfriend or husband. She has no problem with the social stigma attached to being a PTGF. “People pay to hang out with me. It’s not much different from seeing a social worker. I have nothing to fear about people finding out I’m a PTGF. After all, I’m not selling my body”... “I differ from other PTBFs in that I have low self-confidence. While other PTBFs highlight their strengths on their self-introduction on Instagram, I emphasise that I’m not a good PTBF. When I think I haven’t performed well, I feel I don’t deserve the customer’s money.”

Hong Kong singles ‘world’s most desperate’, suggests data from dating app - "According to Coffee Meets Bagel, which claims to help singles look for meaningful relationships rather than one-night stands, 66 per cent of Hongkongers who have downloaded the app log on every day. That’s the highest rate of all the app’s markets... Hong Kong women were more forward than their counterparts in the US, which could be linked to the city’s higher female-to-male ratio."

Underage girls, rape … and handbags: inside the murky world of Hong Kong’s compensated dating scene - "Chief Inspector Frances Lee King-hei from the police family conflict and sexual violence policy unit said teenagers often saw compensated dating as a business and had no moral objections to such transactions. “They often think of themselves as entrepreneurs ... and they market themselves,” Lee said. “But they overestimate their ability to control the situation. They think they are in control of the situation and say they have an agreement with their clients about boundaries and rules. But who would really adhere to those rules once you’re already out with that man?”... “We got to know a case [through NGOs] in which a girl was shopping and found something she wanted to buy, but she didn’t have the money. She immediately found a client online and a few hours later got enough money to buy what she wanted”"

Chinese passenger delays flight after chucking coins into plane’s engine for luck - "A superstitious passenger delayed a flight from Shanghai for several hours Tuesday (June 27) after throwing coins at the plane’s engine for good luck"

Swedish Christian Kids Prohibited From Saying Grace or ‘Amen’ At Mealtimes - "A Christian preschool in Sweden has banned children from saying grace at mealtimes, talking about the Bible, or saying “Amen”. The decision to forbid children at the school in Umea to engage in religious practices was reached after a school inspection. The municipality’s supervisors in charge of education noted that the Christian activities violate Sweden’s educational policies"

What’s the best age gap in a relationship? - "A bright young thing considering a silver fox should also take heart from a study by Britain’s Office of National Statistics. It did not find a strong link between age gaps and divorce rates in England and Wales, though there was some evidence that women marrying later than 30 who were more than ten years older than their spouse were more likely to divorce... men with younger spouses survived for longer than those with ones of a similar age. The older their spouse, the worse their survival chances, even after controlling for things like education and wealth... mysteriously, this phenomenon does not appear to apply to women, where the bigger the age gap, the worse their survival chances, regardless of whether they were younger or older... What evidence there is, therefore, vindicates the choices of OKCupid’s users: women should pick men who are as close as possible in age to them, while men should look for younger women"

The Message in Arafat's Headdress - "Arafat's oddly-arranged keffiyeh is meant to resemble the map of "Palestine" -- the Arab state whose creation is his all-consuming goal. It is an emphatic symbol: Without uttering a word, Arafat conveys to everyone who sees him that Palestine is always on his mind. But look again. The shape of Arafat's keffiyeh doesn't correspond with Palestine at all -- not if Palestine means the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the territories Israel took from Jordan and Egypt during the Six-Day War. What it resembles is the map of Israel -- the whole of Israel, from the northern peak of the Galilee, down along the Mediterranean coast, and from there to the southern tip at Eilat. In short, the Palestine that is always on Arafat's mind is not an Arab state that coexists with Israel, but an Arab state that takes the place of Israel. The message conveyed by his keffiyeh is indeed emphatic: It is a message of war without end... Fatah isn't the only PLO faction whose emblem features a map of Palestine that comprises all of Israel. Most of them do, including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Palestine Liberation Front, Al-Saika, and the PLO itself"

Cheetahs Are So Shy That Zoos Give Them Their Own Emotional “Support Dogs”

Men Don’t Want to Be Nurses. Their Wives Agree. - The New York Times - "some men who might have been willing to consider lower-paid jobs in typically feminine fields encountered resistance from their wives, who urged them to keep looking... while work is important to both men’s and women’s identities, there remains a difference. “Work is at the core of what it means to be a man, in a way that work is not at the core of femininity”... many clients remain suspicious of male home health care aides, worried about abuse or sexual predation, and convinced that women will be more caring. “A lot of families prefer females,” he said. “It’s sad because there’s a lot of patients who could stay at home longer if there were more males in the field. They need assistance like getting in and out of the bed, transferring to the shower — it’s a very physically demanding job.” He has also found that many patients, often older women because they live longer, enjoy having male home health aides to talk to... he interviewed recruiters for female-dominated jobs that are also expanding in this economy, such as administration. They were outspoken about their preference for women, he said. “Their rationale was that men are going to be bored in this job,” he said. “The man who is applying for this kind of job would be desperate. And you’re going to leave as soon as you get that other job.” Men can also face resistance from their female peers. Jason Mott, an assistant professor of nursing at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, said some of his male students were teased by their female classmates. “They feel they need to really express their manhood, stressing the athletics they take part in,” he said... “I sometimes wonder if health organizations don’t want men to come into these jobs because they’ll demand higher wages,” Professor Dill said. “They’re happy to have a work force of women they can pay $8 or $9 an hour.”"
If women support "patriarchy", either it isn't really bad for women, or the women are deluded (which ironically is an anti-feminist notion which is presumably okay if deployed to defend feminism)

Seattle’s Minimum Wage Hike May Have Gone Too Far - "In January 2016, Seattle’s minimum wage jumped from $11 an hour to $13 for large employers, the second big increase in less than a year. New research released Monday by a team of economists at the University of Washington suggests the wage hike may have come at a significant cost: The increase led to steep declines in employment for low-wage workers, and a drop in hours for those who kept their jobs. Crucially, the negative impact of lost jobs and hours more than offset the benefits of higher wages — on average, low-wage workers earned $125 per month less because of the higher wage, a small but significant decline... Most — though by no means all — past research has found that modest increases to the minimum wage have little impact on employment, and that if employers do eliminate jobs or cut back hours, those losses are dwarfed by the income gains enjoyed by the majority of workers who keep their jobs. But those studies were mostly based on minimum wages that were much lower than the ones beginning to take effect now. Even some liberal economists have expressed concern, often privately, that employers might respond differently to a minimum wage of $12 or $15, which would affect a far broader swath of workers than the part-time fast-food and retail employees who typically dominate the ranks of minimum-wage earners"

Why the Cross Put Chickens on a New Road - "“Interestingly this time period coincides with a…substantial increase in chicken consumption known from the archaeological record. Historians suggest that a key driver behind these changes was the rising popularity and spread of Christian traditions, which discouraged and also on occasions even banned eating meat from four-legged animals.” But fowl were fair game. “What is really exciting about this new study is that for the first time we can directly link genetic changes in domestic animal with cultural shifts in human food preference"

Keep Rolling Luggage Upright with Physics - ""And the first reaction you will have maybe is to slow down. But actually if you slow down you'll experience very big rocking oscillations." The way back to a smooth ride, he says, is to keep up your speed, or move even faster, once rocking begins. The study is in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A. [G. Facchini et al., The rolling suitcase instability: a coupling between translation and rotation] There are other solutions to suitcase instability—like doing a better packing job. "If you put heavy stuff close to the axis of symmetry, or close to the wheel axis, then it's stable, too." And Courrech du Pont has one more piece of advice to avoid rocking in the first place: "If you go slow enough it will always be stable." Keep that in mind, next time you're running to your gate."

Measures to mitigate risks from ibuprofen, other painkillers adequate: HSA - "In Singapore, low-dosage ibuprofen (200mg) was reclassified from pharmacy-only to general sale list (GSL) in 2016, which means that it can be obtained freely from any retailer without a prescription."
Given how in many places it's OTC...

Your Identity is Not an Argument - "If your physical features, constructivist identity tropes and subjective experience are the only grounds on which you feel confident to give an opinion then you are at once both underselling your value as a rational thinker and overselling your value as a speaker for all who share some arbitrary feature. As Douglas Murray so pithily said upon admitting that this sentence starter was his personal bugbear: “If your point is good it will be valid whoever is saying it.” So, no, I don’t care who you are speaking as but I do care about the full contents of what you’re saying. Insofar as it is on the spectrum of reasonable and supported in some regard by reason itself, it will have value. Insofar as it is self-referential, grounded in narcissism, funnelled through personal biases, hampered by subjectivity, built around your lived experience and intuitive only to those who share your specific piecemeal identity, well then the value is in entertainment only. Facts are facts precisely because they have been proven to be true free from biases, tested under the rigor of empiricism and embraced or questioned along humanist lines... the authority we grant to certain identities does real world damage. For example, I have heard of white feminist groups at two different universities who were so obsessed – and evidently threatened – by intersectionality theory that they felt they could not debate Beyoncé’s feminist credentials as they did not feel comfortable giving a full account of the racial dimension of her activism, not being black themselves. Such a corrosive reduction of humanity to the unthinkably narrow-minded and the impossibly apathetic is worrying."

Mizzou Loses Applicants Thanks To Political Correctness, Forced To Rent Dorms For Football Games - "After the debacle in 2015 when the University of Missouri embraced political correctness, allowing flimsily-supported racism charges to go unchallenged, resulting in the resignation of the university’s president, enrollment plunged. As The Daily Wire has reported, “Many parents and alumni responded by refusing to contribute money to the public university. For example, donations to its athletics department dropped 72% last year.” Now the University of Missouri is attempting to recoup some of its massive losses by renting dorm rooms to football weekend visitors."
Is the University of Missouri a small, unrepresentative elite college?

FROM BAD TO WORSE: After Caving to Black Lives Matter, Mizzou Closes Seven Dorms, Cuts 400 Jobs - "the university is temporarily closing seven dormitories and cutting over 400 positions, including those of some non-tenured faculty members... You might expect that the decline in enrollment occurred primarily among whites... But here’s the big surprise: as the Times notes: “Students of all races have shunned Missouri, but the drop in freshman enrollment last fall was strikingly higher among blacks, at 42%, than among whites, at 21%.” Mun Choi, the new University of Missouri System president, told the Times, “The general consensus was that it was because of the aftermath of what happened in November 2015"
The invisible hand is more powerful than social justice

Muslim contributed terrorism - "Egyptian TV host Youssef Al-Husseini said: "Why do they hate us?! If they didn't, there would be something mentally wrong with them." Claiming that the Muslims have contributed nothing to the West except slaughter, massacres, and terror attacks, Al-Husseini said: "And you still expect them to love us?!""

Mia Khalifa punches a fan for taking her picture - "Khalifa later implied on Twitter that the man had jumped in front of her and shoved his camera in her face"

Charlie Gard's parents lose their final appeal - "Chris Gard, 32, and Connie Yates, 31, wanted to take their 10-month-old son - who suffers from a rare genetic condition and has brain damage - to the US to undergo a therapy trial. Doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London, where Charlie is being cared for, said they wanted him to be able to 'die with dignity'... specialists at Great Ormond Street said therapy in the US is experimental and will not help and added that life support should stop... the ECHR rejected a last-ditch plea and their 'final' decision means the baby's life support machine will be switched off"... barrister Richard Gordon QC, who leads Charlie's parents' legal team, has given indications of the case the couple are mounting in the European court. He has suggested that British government ministers may be in breach of human rights obligations as a result of decisions by judges in London. He has said parents should be free to make decisions about their children's treatment unless any proposal poses a risk of significant harm. Mr Gordon also suggested that Charlie's rights to life and liberty might have been breached and the couple's right to respect for family life infringed.
This is an inevitable consequence of the fetish for ""protecting" children" and the slippery slope of euthanasia

Distrust of vaccinations on the rise across EU - "“I would like to give people two pieces of advice. Firstly, there should be no rush to vaccinate babies, as their immune systems are too fragile to receive vaccines in the first year. Secondly, be vigilant for side effects and declare them to the pharmacovigilance organisation,” Serge Rader said. “This is in the interest of public health, which today is dominated by financial interests,” he added.
If doctors stand to benefit financially from vaccination, then they are biased sources and cannot be trusted, and we should discard their recommendations
Post-modernism and autistic banging on about conflicts of interest have consequences