The 1920s: Roaring or tame? | Podcast | History Extra
"When the men came back in 1918, they got their jobs back, simply for 2 reasons: the unions were too strong. Because many employers wanted to keep women on for 2 reasons: they were seen as more docile and also they were much cheaper...
In 1917, Lloyd George said: we are facing 3 enemies: the Germans, the Austrians and drink. And drink is the worst... he brought in what was probably one of the strangest laws in 1917, that you couldn't go to a bar and buy someone else a drink. You could only buy yourself a drink...
In terms of population, we have, it pretty much rights itself in 1920, people psychologically felt it hadn't righted itself. They felt there were much more women than men... much more young women than men.
And they felt that these women were never going to get married, so they had to make their own fun and they had to go out and work. So they didn't spend, they didn't save up their money for when they became good housewives. They spent on clothes, they spent on makeup, they spent on the cinema and they spent it on dancing. And also they spent it on going to speakeasies, because even though these were not very moral places, they were absolutely filled with women, because they'd be no fun without them.
The new woman. She cuts her hair, she's glamorous, she's exciting. And she openly wears makeup and this doesn't make her a prostitute...
Steamboat Willy... 1929, the beginning of Mickey Mouse. And what's very striking about Mickey Mouse here is he's not a film for children. This is a film for adults. What becomes the hallmark of a children's film, for example extreme violence towards cats and swinging Minnie Mouse round by her bloomers, is jokes for adults but they become vital to this film for children. So the beginning of the Walt Disney of the dream of the cartoon...
If we look at the 1920s and we say women and men didn't want to get married, they wanted to have fun. They didn't want to spend their money on settling down, on buying a house, on buying a baby cradle. So we have this, what seems a soaring divorce rate - or 8 per 1,000, and a refusal to get married, of a late marriage among women.
This completely changes almost overnight after the Depression and people get married very quickly. So it's very interesting, and this is across the board that in times of... boom, we shorten our skirts and we don't get married. And in times of bust, we lengthen our skirts and we start getting married, and we start having babies.
And that's very striking because there's nothing more expensive... than a baby, whatever time you live in. It's the most expensive thing you can have. You simply can't buy as many lipsticks and silver, beautiful films in the 1920s. However many lipsticks and however many flapper dresses you buy, it's not as much as a baby's going to cost. And that's the same, I'd say now, in 2015, how expensive small children are.
And yet the birth rate absolutely soars during times of depression, and so does the marriage and settling down rate. And as a consequence of that, that human behavior that's what gets us out of depression. So the fact is that we all start settling down, we start getting married, we start having children and that generates a huge amount of income in itself because we spend so much money on baby cradles and houses and all the rest of it.
But even when, even although change their behavior with the beginning of the Great Depression, that wasn't enough and it took the Second World War and the aftermath really to get us out of the Depression"
Many liberals mock the economic argument that capitalism will provide pressure to eliminate wage discrimination (e.g. the gender wage gap) because profit-maximising companies would rather hire cheaper labour to do the same tasks. Yet this is empirical proof of this phenomenon
When you can't live without bananas
Friday, January 13, 2017
Links - 13th January 2017
12 Things You Should Never Take for Granted After Working for an Amazing Boss - "Take a moment and be grateful for those amazing bosses who taught you to be a better person, a better boss, and how to be decent to the employees. Don't take those bosses for granted again."
GrabHitch: an express Tinder? - "ONLINE dating is a daunting task. But a good friend of mine thinks he's figured out a uniquely effortless way to score dates. Like many others, he's doing it through a mobile app; it's just not one of those that immediately comes to mind, though. Forget Tinder, OkCupid or Coffee Meets Bagel. My friend (call him Al) swears by Grab - yes, that ride-hailing app - to find love... Grab's carpooling service that is being beta-tested, which allows regular drivers like you and me to give Grab riders a lift, using our cars. In essence, he gives female (and only female) users a ride - and asks out those he finds attractive."
‘Black people and fried chicken’ video: BBC accused of racism - "THE BBC has been accused of racism after it posted a video online asking “Black people and fried chicken — is there any truth in it?”"
How can one investigate reality when even attempting to do so is offensive?
Which country really has the cleverest students? - "The Dutch university system, with low fees, outperforms the United States and England, which charge much higher tuition fees... an efficient school system might not translate into success in higher education. South Korea and Singapore, both high achievers at school level, are below average in the graduate rankings... "When it comes to advanced literacy skills, you might be better off getting a high school degree in Japan, Finland or the Netherlands than getting a tertiary degree in Italy, Spain or Greece," says Mr Schleicher... the OECD findings highlight a longstanding question about priorities for higher education. Should countries invest in making sure there is a good overall standard - or should they focus on cultivating a few world-leading institutions?"
Milwaukee: Police Reveal Officer Is Black, Shooting Justified; Riots Continue - "The violence that erupted in Milwaukee Saturday after a police officer fatally shot a black man continued Sunday night, with rioters throwing glass bottles, rocks, and bricks at officers and firing shots, resulting in one man suffering a serious gunshot injury. The riots Sunday occurred despite the police department revealing earlier that the officer involved was black and releasing more information indicating that his actions were justified. On Sunday, Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn told reporters that the officer (who remains unnamed) was a 24-year-old African-American, who appears to have been justified in his actions. The suspect has been identified as Sylville K. Smith, a 23-year-old African-American man with a lengthy criminal record. According to the officer's body camera, the entire incident took between 20 to 25 seconds. At around 3:30 p.m. Saturday, Smith fled a traffic stop, holding a weapon. The officer pursued him a few dozen feet until Smith came to a fenced yard, where he turned toward the officer and appeared to raise his gun. The officer then fatally shot Smith in the chest and arm... The result of what appears to be a justified shooting is a city devastated by two nights of riots, cars and businesses set ablaze, racist violence, with rioters deliberately targeting white people, and Gov. Scott Walker forced to call in the Wisconsin National Guard"
Maybe many protests against 'police brutality' are just protests against policing
‘You’re Asian, Right? Why Are You Even Here?’ - "some in the group of rioters started chasing after me too. As a former back-of-the-pack runner in middle school gym class, I wasn’t surprised when they caught me. When they threw me to the ground, I reflexively curled up into a ball. Blows landed on my back, head and torso. “Stop! He’s not white! He’s Asian!” I wasn’t sure who said it, or how they knew my race, but within seconds, the punches stopped... Many immigrants also feel grateful for the U.S. justice system, after having left unstable Asian countries that lack civilian juries and rule of law. They believe that some activists, alarmingly, seem to want to blow the whole system up. “I’ve experienced the broken system in my home country and the working system here, so that’s why I really appreciate that everyone can have an opportunity to be judged by a relatively fair judge and jury,” says Xu, who is from China. “I hope the current system can be continuously improved, instead of suddenly broken.”"
Comment: "If you had found yourself caught in a lynch mob of "white" people attacking "black" people, how would you identify the people who said "Stop! He’s not black! He’s Asian! ...Don’t fuck with Chinese dudes "? Would you be so forgiving? You experienced what would have happened if you were "white" and the thing that saved you was not being "white", but "Asian". If you were not "Asian", how would that experience have ended. "
Kyrgyzstan president: 'Women in mini skirts don't become suicide bombers' - "Women can become radicalised to become terrorists if they put on Islamic dress, the President of Kyrgyzstan, Almazbek Atambayev, has claimed in his most recent intervention in a national debate on cultural identity... "If you do not like Kyrgyzstan you can leave our country and go wherever you want. We can pay your travel expenses, even to Syria," the president said - an apparent reference to his government's claim that around 350 Kyrgyz citizens are fighting with jihadi groups in Syria and Iraq... in 2014, while speaking at a session of Kyrgyzstan's Security Council, President Atambayev said that it was not the conservative clothing, or Muslim traditions, that he had a problem with, but more the "Arabisation of society [and the] deprivation of the Kyrgyz nation of its language and traditions"""
Monty Python stars: BBC is 'destructive' for comedy - "the pair said the corporation is now a “destructive” place for alternative comedy and their surreal and irreverent show would never have been made now"
German Catholics lose church rights for unpaid tax - "All Germans who are officially registered as Catholics, Protestants or Jews pay a religious tax of 8-9% on their annual income tax bill. The levy was introduced in the 19th Century in compensation for the nationalisation of religious property... Unless they pay the religious tax, Catholics will no longer be allowed receive sacraments, except before death, or work in the church and its schools or hospitals."
Man fills lubricant dispenser with hydrochloric acid in Sydney gay club
The Alt-Right: Young White Men Sick Of Being Hated - "Hillary Clinton warned the nation of a grave threat to our way of life. It wasn’t ISIS or Russia that she warned us about, although Putin got a mention. Instead it was white men saying very bad things on the internet. The mortal danger to American life that has Hillary jumping in her pantsuit is the alt right. For Hillary, white men being as proud of their race and identity as black men or white women is profoundly disturbing. This is because in the ideological worldview of the left today, best identified I think as Cultural Marxism, white men are the perpetrators of injustice. We are the privileged, the powerful, the bigots and the oppressors. In the mind of the leftist, unrepentant white maleness is the mark of Cain... What they do see are the devastating consequences of leftist identity politics upon society and individuals. They may well have been raised by a single mother. They’ve seen girls favored in the classroom then thrive academically while the boys in the class have languished and become antisocial. They see older generations congratulate their own generosity when mass immigration changes the face of Western cities, when those older leftists won’t ever have to live with the consequences."
If young people should've gotten more votes for Brexit because they will have to live longer with the consequences...
Tiny New Zealand town with 'too many jobs' launches drive to recruit outsiders - "The scheme involves offering house and land packages in the rural community for an attractive NZ$230,000 (£122,000) in the hope that Kiwis struggling with life in big cities will be tempted to relocate."
'Ex-Muslims' organise 'eating' protests outside embassies of Islamic nations to defy Ramzan fast - "Members of the council gathered outside the London embassies of several countries where not fasting during the month of Ramzan is punishable by law. "
Is it really ‘heroic’ to take a selfie at an Islamophobic protest in a secular society? - "For the past few days, Zakia Belkhiri, a young Muslim living in Belgium has become one of the most discussed individuals on social media. This is because during an Islamophobic protest in Belgium, this young girl went to the rally and lodged a counter protest in a special way. As protesters gathered outside the expo, which celebrated Muslim lifestyle, art and culture, they were holding placards with messages such as “No headscarves” and “Stop Islam.” In response, the teenage Hijabi Muslim girl stood firmly in front of the protesters and took selfies as a counter protest. Soon, her selfies went viral all over the social media which were shared by thousands of her supporters around the globe who saw her as a "defiant" teen standing up to anti-Muslim protesters. As much as it might sound amusing and courageous for Muslims around the globe as well as western liberals, there are a couple of things that shouldn't be overlooked in this matter. First of all, no matter how much we oppose the secular western societies, these are much more tolerant than our Islamic Pakistani society or most other Muslim majority states. When an Islamophobic protest took place in Belgium, Zakia Belkhiri was able to register a counter protest without any consequences. How many of us can guarantee a safe exit for any Shia who goes to any similar sectarian Sipah-e-Sahaba rally in Pakistan?... we want all those rights and privileges for ourselves that we are in no way willing to give to others. This is why we enjoy a Muslim girl counter protesting in anti-Islamic rally, but we do not acknowledge that the freedom and space given by a secular society allows her to register this counter protest. If that society allowed an Islamophobic protest, it also allowed a counter protest. Maybe this is why I personally don’t find anything "heroic" in this act... You're a hero if you stand for something knowing that it will endanger your life. For me females defying the system by driving cars in Saudi Arabia, going to prison for dressing up the way they want in Iran, or holding up a picture of Salmaan Taseer at a pro Mumtaz Qadri rally in Pakistan are heroes... There are many heroes in the Muslim world who were well aware of the consequences of all that they stood for yet they stood their ground. Those are the heroes that western Liberals and leftists need to acknowledge. There are many Sabeen Mahmuds, Rashid Rehmans, Parveen Rehmans, Aitezaz Hassans just in Pakistan, Raif Badawi in Saudi Arabia, Fatemeh Estakhari in Iran, the tank man of Tiananmen Square, and many more. Calling Zakia Belkheri a hero puts her in the same league as them. And to me that is an injustice."
To Kill a Mockingbird removed from Virginia schools for racist language - "To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have been suspended from the curriculum in some Virginia schools, after a parent complained about the use of racial slurs. Harper Lee and Mark Twain’s literary classics were removed from classrooms in Accomack County, in Virginia after a formal complaint was made by the mother of a biracial teenager. At the centre of the complaint was the use of the N-word, which appears frequently in both titles. The woman who made the complaint said her son struggled to read the racist language, telling the Accomack County public schools board: “There’s so much racial slurs and defensive wording in there that you can’t get past that.”"
Triggered.
The second brain in our stomachs - ""The modern thinking is that by doing the surgery you're producing changes in various hormones, chemical messengers which affect hunger levels and fullness levels, which in turn cause the weight loss. "Bob's gastric bypass surgery separated off and isolated the part of his stomach which produces most ghrelin, a hormone which appears to play a key role in making you feel hungry." The hope was that this would result in a permanent fall in production of ghrelin. His new shrunken stomach was then attached further down his small intestine, to a section known as the ileum which secretes a different gut hormone, PYY, which is responsible for making you feel full. When we eat, it normally takes 20 minutes for food to get from the stomach to the ileum, causing the release of PYY and the message to the brain, "I'm full". That is why it is better to eat slowly, to give the stomach a chance to tell the brain you have had enough before you overeat."
A Point of View: Loving pets v loving animals - "We go out of our way to ensure that the predators get through the hard days of winter, but do little or nothing for the mice and voles. Moreover we wage relentless war on the rats. There is a widespread habit in our neighbourhood of poisoning rats with warfarin, which then poisons the owls, buzzards and foxes that eat their remains. This habit has contributed to the near-terminal decline of the barn owl in our countryside... Both dogs and cats are predators, but dogs can be trained not to kill. They can be trained to focus their hunting instincts on a particular species, or they can be bred to focus the very same instincts on some other and more humanly useful pursuit, such as herding sheep or retrieving game birds. Not so cats. Everything in their nature tends towards the single goal of killing... One estimate puts at 180 million the number of wild birds and mammals lost to cats each year in Britain. The domestic cat is, without exception, the most devastating of all the alien species that have been brought onto our island. It is also protected, not only by law, but by the inquisitors sent round by the RSPCA, an organisation that claims to love wild animals, while devoting considerable resources to the creatures that destroy them... by loving our pets as individuals we threaten the animals who cannot easily be loved in any such way."
Pakistan: Policemen suspended as cat eats PM's peacock
Is Ed Houben Europe's most virile man? - "Mr Houben is a "charitable sperm donor". He helps lesbian couples, single women and heterosexual couples with fertility problems to have children free of charge... She wanted to know the man who was going to be the father of her child rather than use an anonymous donation... On his computer he keeps an up-to-date list of his progeny to reduce the risk that they might unwittingly interbreed... "They had been trying for 15 years in clinics… paid all their savings… doctors saying 'it will be all right, it will work' and so on - and it did not work. Usually probably it works but for them it didn't. "They came here three times and now they have a baby. They are beyond these feelings of 'ooh there's a stranger sleeping with my wife'." With mothers of his children dotted all around the Netherlands and Europe, how does Mr Houben protect himself against claims for financial assistance? He seems remarkably relaxed about it. He used to draw up contracts, but since a lawyer advised that they would not guarantee protection, he now relies on good faith."
The art of the awkward photo opportunity - "So why is that world leaders find themselves in these situations so often? The answer lies in our changing expectations of what politicians should be like, says Stephen Coleman, professor of Political Communication at the University of Leeds. In the past, their watchword was "authority" whereas now, it's "authenticity". "Somehow they have to appear to be like ordinary people. So what they're trying to do is guess at what being normal looks like." This leads to a sort of "rehearsed spontaneity", he says, which few politicians are able to pull off - with the odd exception, such as Bill Clinton."
Eating cheese in China. - ""Although in some ways you could say the flavours of cheese and fermented beancurd are similar," said Mao, "vegetable stinky foods are very clean and clear in the mouth (qing kou), and they disperse quickly, while milky foods are greasy in the mouth (ni kou), they coat your tongue and palate, and they have a long, lingering aftertaste." Two other chefs said the cheeses had a heavy shan wei (muttony odour), an ancient term used by southern Chinese to describe the slightly unsavoury tastes associated with the northern nomads. Another said that the selection "smells like Russians". "The difference," he added, "is that the stinky things Chinese people eat give them smelly breath, while stinky dairy things affect the sweat that comes out of your skin"... The only cheese that provoked real consternation was the Brie. "It has this animal stench that assaults your nose," said Dai Jianjun. "Definitely the stinkiest," said Mao, "I really can't bear it." Most of the others agreed. Only one chef, Sun Guoliang, actually liked it. "It has such a complex flavour, like stinking beancurd, rotted thousand sheets and fermented beancurd, all mixed together."
Lithuania: Pothole problem mocked in comic photo shoot - "The series of spoof photographs made for the offbeat Bored Panda blog plays on the idea that potholes are big enough to be mistaken for swimming pools, streams or even lakes"
Why can't cats drink milk? Plus 6 other feline myths - "When an adult cat drinks milk, the indigestible lactose in its gut may start to ferment, causing a stomach upset... To train a cat requires a great deal more patience and perseverance than for a dog. This is because most cats only attend to people when they need something specific, while dogs do this all the time. They first have to be taught that there will be a payoff for paying attention, specifically a tasty prawn or morsel of chicken breast. Training sessions need to be kept short to begin with, since cats will walk away as soon as they get bored, and any attempt to drag the cat back to the training area will make it less likely to learn... Stress can arise between cats in the same house, where the owner has unwittingly selected two that do not get along, or between cats in neighbouring houses fighting over a boundary between their respective territories. Cats lack the sophisticated analysis of body-language that enables dogs to resolve such differences and can live in a state of conflict for months, even years, on end. A typical example of this was shown on the BBC Horizon programme The Secret Life Of The Cat, where two of the cats, Kato and Phoebe, living in houses opposite to each other across the street, were still disputing ‘ownership’ of the gardens between."
GrabHitch: an express Tinder? - "ONLINE dating is a daunting task. But a good friend of mine thinks he's figured out a uniquely effortless way to score dates. Like many others, he's doing it through a mobile app; it's just not one of those that immediately comes to mind, though. Forget Tinder, OkCupid or Coffee Meets Bagel. My friend (call him Al) swears by Grab - yes, that ride-hailing app - to find love... Grab's carpooling service that is being beta-tested, which allows regular drivers like you and me to give Grab riders a lift, using our cars. In essence, he gives female (and only female) users a ride - and asks out those he finds attractive."
‘Black people and fried chicken’ video: BBC accused of racism - "THE BBC has been accused of racism after it posted a video online asking “Black people and fried chicken — is there any truth in it?”"
How can one investigate reality when even attempting to do so is offensive?
Which country really has the cleverest students? - "The Dutch university system, with low fees, outperforms the United States and England, which charge much higher tuition fees... an efficient school system might not translate into success in higher education. South Korea and Singapore, both high achievers at school level, are below average in the graduate rankings... "When it comes to advanced literacy skills, you might be better off getting a high school degree in Japan, Finland or the Netherlands than getting a tertiary degree in Italy, Spain or Greece," says Mr Schleicher... the OECD findings highlight a longstanding question about priorities for higher education. Should countries invest in making sure there is a good overall standard - or should they focus on cultivating a few world-leading institutions?"
Milwaukee: Police Reveal Officer Is Black, Shooting Justified; Riots Continue - "The violence that erupted in Milwaukee Saturday after a police officer fatally shot a black man continued Sunday night, with rioters throwing glass bottles, rocks, and bricks at officers and firing shots, resulting in one man suffering a serious gunshot injury. The riots Sunday occurred despite the police department revealing earlier that the officer involved was black and releasing more information indicating that his actions were justified. On Sunday, Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn told reporters that the officer (who remains unnamed) was a 24-year-old African-American, who appears to have been justified in his actions. The suspect has been identified as Sylville K. Smith, a 23-year-old African-American man with a lengthy criminal record. According to the officer's body camera, the entire incident took between 20 to 25 seconds. At around 3:30 p.m. Saturday, Smith fled a traffic stop, holding a weapon. The officer pursued him a few dozen feet until Smith came to a fenced yard, where he turned toward the officer and appeared to raise his gun. The officer then fatally shot Smith in the chest and arm... The result of what appears to be a justified shooting is a city devastated by two nights of riots, cars and businesses set ablaze, racist violence, with rioters deliberately targeting white people, and Gov. Scott Walker forced to call in the Wisconsin National Guard"
Maybe many protests against 'police brutality' are just protests against policing
‘You’re Asian, Right? Why Are You Even Here?’ - "some in the group of rioters started chasing after me too. As a former back-of-the-pack runner in middle school gym class, I wasn’t surprised when they caught me. When they threw me to the ground, I reflexively curled up into a ball. Blows landed on my back, head and torso. “Stop! He’s not white! He’s Asian!” I wasn’t sure who said it, or how they knew my race, but within seconds, the punches stopped... Many immigrants also feel grateful for the U.S. justice system, after having left unstable Asian countries that lack civilian juries and rule of law. They believe that some activists, alarmingly, seem to want to blow the whole system up. “I’ve experienced the broken system in my home country and the working system here, so that’s why I really appreciate that everyone can have an opportunity to be judged by a relatively fair judge and jury,” says Xu, who is from China. “I hope the current system can be continuously improved, instead of suddenly broken.”"
Comment: "If you had found yourself caught in a lynch mob of "white" people attacking "black" people, how would you identify the people who said "Stop! He’s not black! He’s Asian! ...Don’t fuck with Chinese dudes "? Would you be so forgiving? You experienced what would have happened if you were "white" and the thing that saved you was not being "white", but "Asian". If you were not "Asian", how would that experience have ended. "
Kyrgyzstan president: 'Women in mini skirts don't become suicide bombers' - "Women can become radicalised to become terrorists if they put on Islamic dress, the President of Kyrgyzstan, Almazbek Atambayev, has claimed in his most recent intervention in a national debate on cultural identity... "If you do not like Kyrgyzstan you can leave our country and go wherever you want. We can pay your travel expenses, even to Syria," the president said - an apparent reference to his government's claim that around 350 Kyrgyz citizens are fighting with jihadi groups in Syria and Iraq... in 2014, while speaking at a session of Kyrgyzstan's Security Council, President Atambayev said that it was not the conservative clothing, or Muslim traditions, that he had a problem with, but more the "Arabisation of society [and the] deprivation of the Kyrgyz nation of its language and traditions"""
Monty Python stars: BBC is 'destructive' for comedy - "the pair said the corporation is now a “destructive” place for alternative comedy and their surreal and irreverent show would never have been made now"
German Catholics lose church rights for unpaid tax - "All Germans who are officially registered as Catholics, Protestants or Jews pay a religious tax of 8-9% on their annual income tax bill. The levy was introduced in the 19th Century in compensation for the nationalisation of religious property... Unless they pay the religious tax, Catholics will no longer be allowed receive sacraments, except before death, or work in the church and its schools or hospitals."
Man fills lubricant dispenser with hydrochloric acid in Sydney gay club
The Alt-Right: Young White Men Sick Of Being Hated - "Hillary Clinton warned the nation of a grave threat to our way of life. It wasn’t ISIS or Russia that she warned us about, although Putin got a mention. Instead it was white men saying very bad things on the internet. The mortal danger to American life that has Hillary jumping in her pantsuit is the alt right. For Hillary, white men being as proud of their race and identity as black men or white women is profoundly disturbing. This is because in the ideological worldview of the left today, best identified I think as Cultural Marxism, white men are the perpetrators of injustice. We are the privileged, the powerful, the bigots and the oppressors. In the mind of the leftist, unrepentant white maleness is the mark of Cain... What they do see are the devastating consequences of leftist identity politics upon society and individuals. They may well have been raised by a single mother. They’ve seen girls favored in the classroom then thrive academically while the boys in the class have languished and become antisocial. They see older generations congratulate their own generosity when mass immigration changes the face of Western cities, when those older leftists won’t ever have to live with the consequences."
If young people should've gotten more votes for Brexit because they will have to live longer with the consequences...
Tiny New Zealand town with 'too many jobs' launches drive to recruit outsiders - "The scheme involves offering house and land packages in the rural community for an attractive NZ$230,000 (£122,000) in the hope that Kiwis struggling with life in big cities will be tempted to relocate."
'Ex-Muslims' organise 'eating' protests outside embassies of Islamic nations to defy Ramzan fast - "Members of the council gathered outside the London embassies of several countries where not fasting during the month of Ramzan is punishable by law. "
Is it really ‘heroic’ to take a selfie at an Islamophobic protest in a secular society? - "For the past few days, Zakia Belkhiri, a young Muslim living in Belgium has become one of the most discussed individuals on social media. This is because during an Islamophobic protest in Belgium, this young girl went to the rally and lodged a counter protest in a special way. As protesters gathered outside the expo, which celebrated Muslim lifestyle, art and culture, they were holding placards with messages such as “No headscarves” and “Stop Islam.” In response, the teenage Hijabi Muslim girl stood firmly in front of the protesters and took selfies as a counter protest. Soon, her selfies went viral all over the social media which were shared by thousands of her supporters around the globe who saw her as a "defiant" teen standing up to anti-Muslim protesters. As much as it might sound amusing and courageous for Muslims around the globe as well as western liberals, there are a couple of things that shouldn't be overlooked in this matter. First of all, no matter how much we oppose the secular western societies, these are much more tolerant than our Islamic Pakistani society or most other Muslim majority states. When an Islamophobic protest took place in Belgium, Zakia Belkhiri was able to register a counter protest without any consequences. How many of us can guarantee a safe exit for any Shia who goes to any similar sectarian Sipah-e-Sahaba rally in Pakistan?... we want all those rights and privileges for ourselves that we are in no way willing to give to others. This is why we enjoy a Muslim girl counter protesting in anti-Islamic rally, but we do not acknowledge that the freedom and space given by a secular society allows her to register this counter protest. If that society allowed an Islamophobic protest, it also allowed a counter protest. Maybe this is why I personally don’t find anything "heroic" in this act... You're a hero if you stand for something knowing that it will endanger your life. For me females defying the system by driving cars in Saudi Arabia, going to prison for dressing up the way they want in Iran, or holding up a picture of Salmaan Taseer at a pro Mumtaz Qadri rally in Pakistan are heroes... There are many heroes in the Muslim world who were well aware of the consequences of all that they stood for yet they stood their ground. Those are the heroes that western Liberals and leftists need to acknowledge. There are many Sabeen Mahmuds, Rashid Rehmans, Parveen Rehmans, Aitezaz Hassans just in Pakistan, Raif Badawi in Saudi Arabia, Fatemeh Estakhari in Iran, the tank man of Tiananmen Square, and many more. Calling Zakia Belkheri a hero puts her in the same league as them. And to me that is an injustice."
To Kill a Mockingbird removed from Virginia schools for racist language - "To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have been suspended from the curriculum in some Virginia schools, after a parent complained about the use of racial slurs. Harper Lee and Mark Twain’s literary classics were removed from classrooms in Accomack County, in Virginia after a formal complaint was made by the mother of a biracial teenager. At the centre of the complaint was the use of the N-word, which appears frequently in both titles. The woman who made the complaint said her son struggled to read the racist language, telling the Accomack County public schools board: “There’s so much racial slurs and defensive wording in there that you can’t get past that.”"
Triggered.
The second brain in our stomachs - ""The modern thinking is that by doing the surgery you're producing changes in various hormones, chemical messengers which affect hunger levels and fullness levels, which in turn cause the weight loss. "Bob's gastric bypass surgery separated off and isolated the part of his stomach which produces most ghrelin, a hormone which appears to play a key role in making you feel hungry." The hope was that this would result in a permanent fall in production of ghrelin. His new shrunken stomach was then attached further down his small intestine, to a section known as the ileum which secretes a different gut hormone, PYY, which is responsible for making you feel full. When we eat, it normally takes 20 minutes for food to get from the stomach to the ileum, causing the release of PYY and the message to the brain, "I'm full". That is why it is better to eat slowly, to give the stomach a chance to tell the brain you have had enough before you overeat."
A Point of View: Loving pets v loving animals - "We go out of our way to ensure that the predators get through the hard days of winter, but do little or nothing for the mice and voles. Moreover we wage relentless war on the rats. There is a widespread habit in our neighbourhood of poisoning rats with warfarin, which then poisons the owls, buzzards and foxes that eat their remains. This habit has contributed to the near-terminal decline of the barn owl in our countryside... Both dogs and cats are predators, but dogs can be trained not to kill. They can be trained to focus their hunting instincts on a particular species, or they can be bred to focus the very same instincts on some other and more humanly useful pursuit, such as herding sheep or retrieving game birds. Not so cats. Everything in their nature tends towards the single goal of killing... One estimate puts at 180 million the number of wild birds and mammals lost to cats each year in Britain. The domestic cat is, without exception, the most devastating of all the alien species that have been brought onto our island. It is also protected, not only by law, but by the inquisitors sent round by the RSPCA, an organisation that claims to love wild animals, while devoting considerable resources to the creatures that destroy them... by loving our pets as individuals we threaten the animals who cannot easily be loved in any such way."
Pakistan: Policemen suspended as cat eats PM's peacock
Is Ed Houben Europe's most virile man? - "Mr Houben is a "charitable sperm donor". He helps lesbian couples, single women and heterosexual couples with fertility problems to have children free of charge... She wanted to know the man who was going to be the father of her child rather than use an anonymous donation... On his computer he keeps an up-to-date list of his progeny to reduce the risk that they might unwittingly interbreed... "They had been trying for 15 years in clinics… paid all their savings… doctors saying 'it will be all right, it will work' and so on - and it did not work. Usually probably it works but for them it didn't. "They came here three times and now they have a baby. They are beyond these feelings of 'ooh there's a stranger sleeping with my wife'." With mothers of his children dotted all around the Netherlands and Europe, how does Mr Houben protect himself against claims for financial assistance? He seems remarkably relaxed about it. He used to draw up contracts, but since a lawyer advised that they would not guarantee protection, he now relies on good faith."
The art of the awkward photo opportunity - "So why is that world leaders find themselves in these situations so often? The answer lies in our changing expectations of what politicians should be like, says Stephen Coleman, professor of Political Communication at the University of Leeds. In the past, their watchword was "authority" whereas now, it's "authenticity". "Somehow they have to appear to be like ordinary people. So what they're trying to do is guess at what being normal looks like." This leads to a sort of "rehearsed spontaneity", he says, which few politicians are able to pull off - with the odd exception, such as Bill Clinton."
Eating cheese in China. - ""Although in some ways you could say the flavours of cheese and fermented beancurd are similar," said Mao, "vegetable stinky foods are very clean and clear in the mouth (qing kou), and they disperse quickly, while milky foods are greasy in the mouth (ni kou), they coat your tongue and palate, and they have a long, lingering aftertaste." Two other chefs said the cheeses had a heavy shan wei (muttony odour), an ancient term used by southern Chinese to describe the slightly unsavoury tastes associated with the northern nomads. Another said that the selection "smells like Russians". "The difference," he added, "is that the stinky things Chinese people eat give them smelly breath, while stinky dairy things affect the sweat that comes out of your skin"... The only cheese that provoked real consternation was the Brie. "It has this animal stench that assaults your nose," said Dai Jianjun. "Definitely the stinkiest," said Mao, "I really can't bear it." Most of the others agreed. Only one chef, Sun Guoliang, actually liked it. "It has such a complex flavour, like stinking beancurd, rotted thousand sheets and fermented beancurd, all mixed together."
Lithuania: Pothole problem mocked in comic photo shoot - "The series of spoof photographs made for the offbeat Bored Panda blog plays on the idea that potholes are big enough to be mistaken for swimming pools, streams or even lakes"
Why can't cats drink milk? Plus 6 other feline myths - "When an adult cat drinks milk, the indigestible lactose in its gut may start to ferment, causing a stomach upset... To train a cat requires a great deal more patience and perseverance than for a dog. This is because most cats only attend to people when they need something specific, while dogs do this all the time. They first have to be taught that there will be a payoff for paying attention, specifically a tasty prawn or morsel of chicken breast. Training sessions need to be kept short to begin with, since cats will walk away as soon as they get bored, and any attempt to drag the cat back to the training area will make it less likely to learn... Stress can arise between cats in the same house, where the owner has unwittingly selected two that do not get along, or between cats in neighbouring houses fighting over a boundary between their respective territories. Cats lack the sophisticated analysis of body-language that enables dogs to resolve such differences and can live in a state of conflict for months, even years, on end. A typical example of this was shown on the BBC Horizon programme The Secret Life Of The Cat, where two of the cats, Kato and Phoebe, living in houses opposite to each other across the street, were still disputing ‘ownership’ of the gardens between."
Post ID: 1425792834397309984
Nazi camps and St Augustine
Wolfson History Prizes: Nazi camps and St Augustine | Podcast | History Extra
"Repeatedly you will find books by great English historians in the bookshops abroad and like the book on the concentration camp, it is English based authors who in some cases have given the past back to European countries. And we're admired for it. We're admired for biographies. Of course we're admired for novels... The French can't write a novel, they just can't begin to. The Germans write history books as sort of bound in black with gold toothed spines and look like assembly manual for car parts. They're incredibly accurate and good but they're totally unreadable and unusable...
Why do people do things which are, to us unimaginable? And what became fairly clear to me early on was that just as there isn't a typical prisoner, there isn't a typical perpetrator either.
Different people are driven by different motivations at different times of the Nazi dictatorship. You have those who see their service in the camps as a kind of career. A profession. There's one camp commandant who's so proud, even his private notepaper he has a sign at the top saying: concentration camp commandant.
So these are people who rise through the... They make careers, they live, they think of themselves as living... there's a kind of, there's a quote I have in the books somewhere by a wife of a concentration camp commandant who's interviewed decades after the war and she's reminiscing about the wonderful time she had. I mean this is what Hess, the commandant of Auschwitz writes about as well in his memoirs. How wonderful his kids had it in Auschwitz. Just a a wonderful time. So there is that, there's careerism, there's certainly those who enjoy the violence. But these kind of sadists are in a fairly small number.
Others, again, believe in Nazi ideology of course. They do it because they believe they are doing the right thing.
I mean it's wrong to think of some of these men and they are predominantly men as Nihilists. As somebody like Heinrich Himmler the head of this system had, in his own mind, a very clear moral idea. It was just that his moral compass was completely perverse. But these people don't see themselves as nihilists.
And then you've got those who are dragged along in a way by false ideas of comradeship. By the wish to fit in. I mean certainly the work of social psychologists has been important in trying to make us understand more why people get dragged into things or commit deeds which even a few weeks earlier they would've never thought themselves as capable of doing.
And give you one example, there's a doctor who arrives in Auschwitz. SS doctor. And he is asked to perform a selection at the ramp in Auschwitz or take part in this. This is where incoming deportation trains are divided into those Jews who are murdered straightaway and those who are picked out for murderous slave labour. And this man *something* breaks down. He cries, he gets drunk. And he says I can't do this. I think he asks for a transfer to the front.
And within a fairly short period of time, he is doing it. He's doing it because he's getting used to it, he's getting accustomed to it. He has a mentor, a man called Josef Mengele who kind of takes him under his wing and makes him realise that what he's doing there is important somehow for Germany's future. They transfer *name* wife to Auschwitz so he has a bit of a home life there, stabilising in some way, and within a fairly short period of time this man is selecting people, victims, innocent women, children, all people for the gas chambers.
And you come across a lot of these stories where people, in a fairly short period of time get accustomed and used to doing the most heinous crimes...
'Augustine would not have actually sympathised in any way with the elimination of the Jews as somehow murderers of Christ, or whatever... he would concentrate quite often, being guided honesty by scripture... on the words of the Psalms: slay them not, that they be scattered. Better to scatter the Jews all over the place as evidence. And at the Last Judgment matters would be sorted out. But any idea that the early church would've engaged in an extermination policy-'...
'Death camps like Treblinka are set up in the Holocaust with a single function... to kill as many Jews as quickly as possible. And these pure death camps... in occupied Eastern Poland... murder some 1.5 million Jews in 1942 alone. And there you do not have selections like in Auschwitz. Because pretty much everybody on board of these deportation camps is doomed to be exterminated on arrival. So these camps only have this one function.
Concentration camps from the beginning are multi-functional sites. Early on they serve the purpose of breaking the opposition. Later on there is the function of supposedly cleaning Germany of 'asocials and other social outcasts'. It becomes a site of forced labour, of human experimentation. Sites like Dachau go through a huge change in a very very short period of time...
[On the stereotypical idea of a concentration camp] I... fast back to the first day in the camp in spring 33, where the camp looks again completely different. You've got a 100 prisoners, they're treated well. There're no uniforms. They eat with their captors who are policemen not SS men, and none of them think they're going to be there very long.
So though the Third Reich lasts only for a very very brief period of time, there are huge changes and you can see these changes in places like Dachau. That was the only one of those camps which lasts all the way through the Third Reich...
I always say... certainly, in the Ancient World, historians must resemble the God Janus, who had a head looking forwards and a head looking backwards. And it's not possible, nor should we suspend the views that we bring to the topics under consideration, but you can't just write presentist history and attack Julius Caesar for not being vegetarian, as it might be.
It may happen in 30 years time, I'm sure there could be a massive assault on every ancient figure for eating meat. You must keep in balance the views they held at the time and always one test to me is were there significant voices at the time which were strongly against, on moral grounds we may now share, what was being done?...
'The figure of the kapo. These were prisoners who gained a, some kind of administrative or supervisory function in the camp, be it as labour supervisors or barracks supervisors. And they quite often in the literature portrayed in rather stark terms as wholly evil henchmen of the SS, i.e. prisoners who do the bidding of the SS.
But if you probe a little bit more deeply, it becomes morally very very complex. Not every kapo is the same.
There are debates between them about should they, if the SS orders them beat prisoners, should they do that, should they not? And what does it mean if you take a stand to you? Should you maybe beat the prisoners but beat them less hard and pretend that you're beating them harder than you do?
Other kapos say: well, I only beat prisoners or lash out in order to prevent the SS from stepping in and doing even worse. There's an extraordinary case of a former kapo from Dachau who's on trial in Munich.
One of the witnesses says: I'm still glad that this kapo hit me, I'm still thankful to him to this day for the fact that he hit me because that prevented the SS from stepping in and doing even worse.
So is somebody like that a good man? A bad man? Or are these categories which in that starkness don't really help us very much?...
'Hitler very rarely talks about the concentration camps. As far as we know he never visits a concentration camp. And I think the reason for that is that he knows that they are not universally popular within Germany, even amongst ordinary Germans. So he's very conscious of his own nimbus, his popularity, his status, so he kind of tries to stay clear of this. When he mentions the camps he talks about, and he does that a few times in public, he effectively says: well, it's the British who invented the concentration camps'
'It's always... liberal imperialist historians'...
'It's nonsense because just because something is called a concentration camp doesn't make it Auschwitz.
There are, what we think of as concentration camps emerge in the late 19th century, around the turn of the 20th century in a colonial setting. They then take a very different form during the First World War. So there are these kind of detention camps for largely civilians who are locked up beyond the law, using often barracks or barbed wire and those things, but that's often where similarities end as well and my feeling in the end, you might get these questions here in Germany, kind of there've been all sorts of debates over the years over what is the relationship between the Nazi camps and the Gulag and there was a huge historians' quarrel in the 1980s because one German historian suggested that... the Gulag was primary and the Nazis in a way, copied in some ways what had happened earlier elsewhere and ultimately my conclusion was that while there are some similarities and parallels and connections, ultimately all of these camp systems are largely homegrown in a way.
And if you look at the Nazi camp system, the greater influences it seems to me come out of a German military tradition, the German prison system and also the paramilitary culture of the late 1920s and early 1930s of extreme political violence against your opponents. It's bearing in mind... the first camps - Dachau and others - are set up in a completely improvised way as effectively torture chambers very often and bunkers by SS, the same SS and SA men quite often who had run these street battles with Communists in the previous months.
So these are kind of street fighters who now are victorious and you know they brand their victory on the bodies of their opponents... a number of these... Berlin in 1933, there are over 170 of these improvised bunkers and torture chambers...
I'm told that it's important now in much of history teaching in schools where you go to the documentary evidence for Anne Bolyn's underwear. And you make a big thing about underwear and how women were then oppressed because of their underwear and the next thing is you then move over and discuss herrings in Holland. Spotty history. I really don't like that...
I live in an era where archaeology is more unquestioned and texts have become unduly questioned"
"Repeatedly you will find books by great English historians in the bookshops abroad and like the book on the concentration camp, it is English based authors who in some cases have given the past back to European countries. And we're admired for it. We're admired for biographies. Of course we're admired for novels... The French can't write a novel, they just can't begin to. The Germans write history books as sort of bound in black with gold toothed spines and look like assembly manual for car parts. They're incredibly accurate and good but they're totally unreadable and unusable...
Why do people do things which are, to us unimaginable? And what became fairly clear to me early on was that just as there isn't a typical prisoner, there isn't a typical perpetrator either.
Different people are driven by different motivations at different times of the Nazi dictatorship. You have those who see their service in the camps as a kind of career. A profession. There's one camp commandant who's so proud, even his private notepaper he has a sign at the top saying: concentration camp commandant.
So these are people who rise through the... They make careers, they live, they think of themselves as living... there's a kind of, there's a quote I have in the books somewhere by a wife of a concentration camp commandant who's interviewed decades after the war and she's reminiscing about the wonderful time she had. I mean this is what Hess, the commandant of Auschwitz writes about as well in his memoirs. How wonderful his kids had it in Auschwitz. Just a a wonderful time. So there is that, there's careerism, there's certainly those who enjoy the violence. But these kind of sadists are in a fairly small number.
Others, again, believe in Nazi ideology of course. They do it because they believe they are doing the right thing.
I mean it's wrong to think of some of these men and they are predominantly men as Nihilists. As somebody like Heinrich Himmler the head of this system had, in his own mind, a very clear moral idea. It was just that his moral compass was completely perverse. But these people don't see themselves as nihilists.
And then you've got those who are dragged along in a way by false ideas of comradeship. By the wish to fit in. I mean certainly the work of social psychologists has been important in trying to make us understand more why people get dragged into things or commit deeds which even a few weeks earlier they would've never thought themselves as capable of doing.
And give you one example, there's a doctor who arrives in Auschwitz. SS doctor. And he is asked to perform a selection at the ramp in Auschwitz or take part in this. This is where incoming deportation trains are divided into those Jews who are murdered straightaway and those who are picked out for murderous slave labour. And this man *something* breaks down. He cries, he gets drunk. And he says I can't do this. I think he asks for a transfer to the front.
And within a fairly short period of time, he is doing it. He's doing it because he's getting used to it, he's getting accustomed to it. He has a mentor, a man called Josef Mengele who kind of takes him under his wing and makes him realise that what he's doing there is important somehow for Germany's future. They transfer *name* wife to Auschwitz so he has a bit of a home life there, stabilising in some way, and within a fairly short period of time this man is selecting people, victims, innocent women, children, all people for the gas chambers.
And you come across a lot of these stories where people, in a fairly short period of time get accustomed and used to doing the most heinous crimes...
'Augustine would not have actually sympathised in any way with the elimination of the Jews as somehow murderers of Christ, or whatever... he would concentrate quite often, being guided honesty by scripture... on the words of the Psalms: slay them not, that they be scattered. Better to scatter the Jews all over the place as evidence. And at the Last Judgment matters would be sorted out. But any idea that the early church would've engaged in an extermination policy-'...
'Death camps like Treblinka are set up in the Holocaust with a single function... to kill as many Jews as quickly as possible. And these pure death camps... in occupied Eastern Poland... murder some 1.5 million Jews in 1942 alone. And there you do not have selections like in Auschwitz. Because pretty much everybody on board of these deportation camps is doomed to be exterminated on arrival. So these camps only have this one function.
Concentration camps from the beginning are multi-functional sites. Early on they serve the purpose of breaking the opposition. Later on there is the function of supposedly cleaning Germany of 'asocials and other social outcasts'. It becomes a site of forced labour, of human experimentation. Sites like Dachau go through a huge change in a very very short period of time...
[On the stereotypical idea of a concentration camp] I... fast back to the first day in the camp in spring 33, where the camp looks again completely different. You've got a 100 prisoners, they're treated well. There're no uniforms. They eat with their captors who are policemen not SS men, and none of them think they're going to be there very long.
So though the Third Reich lasts only for a very very brief period of time, there are huge changes and you can see these changes in places like Dachau. That was the only one of those camps which lasts all the way through the Third Reich...
I always say... certainly, in the Ancient World, historians must resemble the God Janus, who had a head looking forwards and a head looking backwards. And it's not possible, nor should we suspend the views that we bring to the topics under consideration, but you can't just write presentist history and attack Julius Caesar for not being vegetarian, as it might be.
It may happen in 30 years time, I'm sure there could be a massive assault on every ancient figure for eating meat. You must keep in balance the views they held at the time and always one test to me is were there significant voices at the time which were strongly against, on moral grounds we may now share, what was being done?...
'The figure of the kapo. These were prisoners who gained a, some kind of administrative or supervisory function in the camp, be it as labour supervisors or barracks supervisors. And they quite often in the literature portrayed in rather stark terms as wholly evil henchmen of the SS, i.e. prisoners who do the bidding of the SS.
But if you probe a little bit more deeply, it becomes morally very very complex. Not every kapo is the same.
There are debates between them about should they, if the SS orders them beat prisoners, should they do that, should they not? And what does it mean if you take a stand to you? Should you maybe beat the prisoners but beat them less hard and pretend that you're beating them harder than you do?
Other kapos say: well, I only beat prisoners or lash out in order to prevent the SS from stepping in and doing even worse. There's an extraordinary case of a former kapo from Dachau who's on trial in Munich.
One of the witnesses says: I'm still glad that this kapo hit me, I'm still thankful to him to this day for the fact that he hit me because that prevented the SS from stepping in and doing even worse.
So is somebody like that a good man? A bad man? Or are these categories which in that starkness don't really help us very much?...
'Hitler very rarely talks about the concentration camps. As far as we know he never visits a concentration camp. And I think the reason for that is that he knows that they are not universally popular within Germany, even amongst ordinary Germans. So he's very conscious of his own nimbus, his popularity, his status, so he kind of tries to stay clear of this. When he mentions the camps he talks about, and he does that a few times in public, he effectively says: well, it's the British who invented the concentration camps'
'It's always... liberal imperialist historians'...
'It's nonsense because just because something is called a concentration camp doesn't make it Auschwitz.
There are, what we think of as concentration camps emerge in the late 19th century, around the turn of the 20th century in a colonial setting. They then take a very different form during the First World War. So there are these kind of detention camps for largely civilians who are locked up beyond the law, using often barracks or barbed wire and those things, but that's often where similarities end as well and my feeling in the end, you might get these questions here in Germany, kind of there've been all sorts of debates over the years over what is the relationship between the Nazi camps and the Gulag and there was a huge historians' quarrel in the 1980s because one German historian suggested that... the Gulag was primary and the Nazis in a way, copied in some ways what had happened earlier elsewhere and ultimately my conclusion was that while there are some similarities and parallels and connections, ultimately all of these camp systems are largely homegrown in a way.
And if you look at the Nazi camp system, the greater influences it seems to me come out of a German military tradition, the German prison system and also the paramilitary culture of the late 1920s and early 1930s of extreme political violence against your opponents. It's bearing in mind... the first camps - Dachau and others - are set up in a completely improvised way as effectively torture chambers very often and bunkers by SS, the same SS and SA men quite often who had run these street battles with Communists in the previous months.
So these are kind of street fighters who now are victorious and you know they brand their victory on the bodies of their opponents... a number of these... Berlin in 1933, there are over 170 of these improvised bunkers and torture chambers...
I'm told that it's important now in much of history teaching in schools where you go to the documentary evidence for Anne Bolyn's underwear. And you make a big thing about underwear and how women were then oppressed because of their underwear and the next thing is you then move over and discuss herrings in Holland. Spotty history. I really don't like that...
I live in an era where archaeology is more unquestioned and texts have become unduly questioned"
Post ID: 8547364770789757560
Wednesday, January 11, 2017
Links - 11th January 2017
Updated! Hey, Here's That Obviously Fake 'Dossier' Claiming Trump Is Into Golden Showers! - "Sensational, provocative, insane, scatological (urological?), incredible—the dossier is all that and more. Read about how Trump supposedly insisted on staying in a hotel room used by President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama and hired prostitutes to urinate on the bed. Yes, it's that level of report. And it's all horseshit, if you believe Buzzfeed's own intro to the material, which stresses that we're talking about "explosive — but unverified — allegations." Worse still from a journalistic perspective is this sort of phony-baloney gesture that insulates the publisher evens as it distances any truth claims.
There is serious reason to doubt the allegations. You got that? But let's publish them anyway because, WTF, who doesn't want to read them? The press works better when it verifies information and brings it to the public's attention, and lets us plebes make of it what we will. In this case, all we have is a document that may or may not be "real" or a fake. Remember all the serioso discussions of fake news and how Trump and his deplorables were ruining everything good and clean-smelling in America? Well, the one thing you can say this time around is: Don't blame the billionaire"
2017 Lunar New Year | Jetstar - "With the younger generation increasingly flying the coop over Lunar New Year despite it being the one time of year families gather for reunions, Jetstar is taking a stand – put family first and stay home. For passengers who have booked flights departing Singapore on 27 and 28 January, and are now keen to stay home to enjoy get-togethers with family, we’re happy to move your flights to a later date, for free."
This is a great way to free up seats which can then be resold at higher prices
Moroccan TV show giving women tips on hiding domestic violence bruises provokes outrage - "the woman who did the make-up, Lilia Mouline, says that rather than “normalizing” domestic violence – which she “in no way condones” – she was merely providing realistic advice. “We are here to provide solutions to these women who, for a period of two to three weeks, are putting their social life aside while their wounds heal. These women have already been subjected to moral humiliation and do not need to also have others looking at them,” Mouline told Yabiladi, a news website. “Makeup allows women to continue to live normally while waiting for justice.”
For Safe and Effective Drug Policy, Look to the Dutch - "Lighter enforcement did not lead to more drug use. About 25.7 percent of Dutch citizens reported having used marijuana at least once, which is on par with the European average. In the comparatively strict United Kingdom, the rate is 30.2 percent and in the United States it is a whopping 41.9 percent... in Sweden, 52 percent of marijuana users report that other drugs are available from their usual cannabis source. In the Netherlands, only 14 percent of marijuana users can get other drugs from their cannabis source, according to European drug monitors. This is largely because the vast majority of cannabis users buy from coffee shops. In addition, the country has virtually eliminated injecting drug use as a transmission of HIV and enjoys the lowest rate of problem drug use in Europe. "
General Tso's Chicken creator dies in Taiwan aged 98 - "According to legend, General Tso's Chicken was named in 1952, when Mr Peng was cooking for a visiting US Navy Admiral, Arthur Radford. Low on inspiration, he fried some chunks of chicken and added sauces and seasoning in a bid to create something new. The admiral loved the result. When he asked the name of the dish, Mr Peng christened it on the spot: "General Tso's Chicken"... While General Tso's is best known as American Chinese food, its fame has seen some Hunanese chefs embrace the recipe."
Police probing Quebec maple syrup heist worth up to $30-million - "Quebec police are on the hunt for a sticky-fingered thief after millions of dollars of maple syrup vanished from a Quebec warehouse."
German intelligence officer 'arrested over Islamist plot' raising fears the spy agency has been infiltrated - "The BfV said the man "behaved inconspicuously" prior to his arrest. He had, since April, been engaged in gathering intelligence on Islamist extremists in Germany, Der Spiegel said. Online chats were apparently found between the suspect and other Islamists in which he attempted to recruit them to the intelligence agency to mount an attack on "non-believers", carrying out a bomb attack on the spy HQ "in the name of Allah". He used several different names online and his activities were uncovered about a month ago. The man's family reportedly knew nothing of his conversion to Islam two years ago and subsequent radicalisation... The BfV estimates there are about 40,000 Islamists in Germany, including 9,200 ultra-conservative Islamists known as Salafists, Hans-Georg Maassen, who leads the agency, told Reuters... Isil claimed two attacks in late July - on a train near Wuerzburg and on a music festival in Ansbach - in which asylum-seekers wounded 20 people in total. In addition, security forces had to respond to an attack in a shopping centre in the city of Munich in which nine people were killed by an 18-year-old German-Iranian who had been in psychiatric treatment and was obsessed with mass killings."
Spain terror arrests - Four detained smuggling jihadis into Europe disguised as migrants - "Spain's interior ministry said ISIS was using the group of Algerian and Moroccan men to sneak fanatics into Europe via Turkey posing as migrants fleeing Syria's civil war. Officials also said they may have links to the Paris terror attacks last November."
The truths and tales of Cuban healthcare - "During the period when the Cuban government received generous subsidies from the former Soviet Union, the system more or less worked well. Hospitals were clean and, although they did not have state-of-the-art equipment, people could rely on them. But after the subsidies ended and Cuba's economy went into a tailspin, nothing was the same again. By the time I moved to Cuba in 1997, there were serious shortages of medicine - from simple aspirin to more badly needed drugs. Ironically, many medicines that cannot be found at a pharmacy are easily bought on the black market. Some doctors, nurses and cleaning staff smuggle the medicine out of the hospitals in a bid to make extra cash. Although medical attention remains free, many patients did and still do bring their doctors food, money or other gifts to get to the front of the queue or to guarantee an appointment for an X-ray, blood test or operation. If you do not have a contact or money to pay under the table, the waiting time for all but emergency procedures can be ridiculously long... I saw many hospitals where there was often no running water, the toilets did not flush, and the risk of infections - by the hospital's own admission - was extremely high... for all its shortcomings, Cubans do have better access to healthcare than the majority of those living in many "developing nations", where public health is shockingly inadequate. And as with so many things in Cuba, the state health service offers some amazing paradoxes: you may have problems obtaining medicine, but getting a bust lift, or even a sex change, is no problem, and moreover, it is free of charge."
Why 30 Palestinians celebrated Jewish holiday with settlers - "Why would a population under occupation that bears the brunt of the settlement enterprise visit their occupiers?... Once the story was made public, the Palestinian security service on Oct. 21 arrested four of the Palestinians who had attended the settlers’ event. Bethlehem Governor Muhammad Taha told Israeli Army Radio that the four were accused of behavior that encourages “normalization with Israel,” which according to the governor is a violation of Palestinian law."
How domestication changes species, including the human - "Keeping pets meant inviting animals into the family. It also created new relationships of inequality. The anthropologist Tim Ingold at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, who has spent years studying the reindeer herders of Lapland, argues that it is a mistake to regard domestication as a form of progress, from living in opposition to nature to harnessing it for our benefit. In The Perception of the Environment (2000), he notes that foraging peoples generally regard animals as their equals. Hunting is not a form of violence so much as a willing sacrifice on the part of the animal. Pastoralists, on the other hand, tend to regard animals as servants, to be mastered and controlled. Domestication doesn’t entail making wild animals tame, Ingold says. Instead, it means replacing a relationship founded on trust with one ‘based on domination’. When humans start treating animals as subordinates, it becomes easier to do the same thing to one another."
China has always kept mum on Singapore’s defence ties with Taipei, so why is it complaining now? - "the pinnacle command positions in Singapore’s fledgling air force and navy were occupied by Taiwanese military personnel who served Singapore in the 1970s. Taiwan’s Colonel Liu Ching Chuan was once Commander RSAF (renamed as Chief of Air Force) while former Taiwanese officer Khoo Eng An once held the post of Commander Republic of Singapore Navy (retitled as Chief of Navy)."
Reactionary Democrats trash Bernie Sanders for challenging identity politics - "Liberals have begun scolding Bernie Sanders for challenging identity politics in a speech at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston on Sunday night. When an audience member asked him how she could become the second Latina senator in U.S. history, Sanders said her gender and ethnicity don’t entitle her to votes. “I have to know whether that Latina is going to stand up with the working class of this country and is going to take on big money interests,” Sanders said. “It is not good enough for somebody to say, I’m a woman, vote for me. No, that’s not good enough. What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry”... Despite pushback from triggered reactionaries, Sanders doubled down on his critique of identity politics"
Belief in Santa could affect parent-child relationships, warns study - "lying to children, even about something fun and frivolous, could undermine their trust in their parents and leave them open to “abject disappointment” when they eventually discover that magic is not real."
Justin Trudeau's Statement On Fidel Castro Criticized By Politicians - "The prime minister is facing criticism at home and abroad for his statement expressing "deep sorrow'' about the death of former Cuban president Fidel Castro... some have condemned the prime minister's statement, pointing out human rights violations during Castro's half-century regime... Social media users took the opportunity to mock the prime minister using the hashtag "#TrudeauEulogies,'' which imagines eulogies of dictators and criminals written in the style of Trudeau's statement. For instance, user @MW_Johnson1 wrote, "While a controversial figure, John Wilkes Booth will be remembered as a lover of the theatre.''"
Neural Network Learns to Identify Criminals by Their Faces - "the neural network could correctly identify criminals and noncriminals with an accuracy of 89.5 percent... researchers revealed how they had trained a deep-learning machine to judge in the same way as humans whether somebody was trustworthy by looking at a snapshot of their face"
UK to censor online videos of 'non-conventional' sex acts - "In order to comply with the censorship rules, many mainstream adult websites would have to render whole sections inaccessible to UK audiences. That is despite the acts shown being legal for consenting over-16s to perform and for adults in almost all other liberal countries to film, distribute and watch... Pictures and videos that show spanking, whipping or caning that leaves marks, and sex acts involving urination, female ejaculation or menstruation as well as sex in public are likely to be caught by the ban – in effect turning back the clock on Britain’s censorship regime to the pre-internet era... “Although it is nominally designed to enforce the [Obscene Publications Act] guidelines of the Crown Prosecution Service, in practice it draws far tighter lines, many of them inexplicable. The ban on female ejaculation is a particularly strange example,” he said. The censorship regime has led to bizarre understandings between the producers and regulators, Barnett said. One is the “four-finger rule”, which limits the number of digits that can be inserted into an orifice for sexual stimulation"
Parents: let your kids fail. You’ll be doing them a favor - "we seem to be more worried about raising happy children than competent or autonomous ones... The children who had controlling mothers gave up when faced with a task they could not master. The others did not... The dirty secret of parenting is that kids can do more than we think they can, and it’s up to us to figure that out. (Apparently the French have sorted this out with kids and cooking, and they let their young toddlers wield large knives.) Kids can do dishes and clean a room without a bribe, but to get to clean kitchens and tidier rooms we have to face messier kitchens, not perfectly sorted laundry, and clothes stuffed in drawers while they figure it out... cheer like a grandparent and not a parent. College athletes wanted grandparents at their games because their support was not predicated on achievement."
(4) Riz Rashid - What Is Malay? Is Singapore in China? No but to... - "New York Times editor Michael Luo wrote an open letter to a woman who told him to “go back to China" in October and started the hashtag, #thisis2016. Asians/Asian Americans across the nation responded to Luo and his encounter by using the hashtag and sharing moments of racial insensitivity or ignorance. We decided to respond to the hashtag as well. These are all real statements, quotes and encounters that Bowdoin students have experienced throughout their lives, and while we acknowledge that not all of the things written were intentionally hurtful, they are a product of socially normalized stereotypes and misconceptions. Additionally, the statements are neither isolated, one-time incidents nor are they the worst things we’ve ever heard -- we emphasize that these experiences extend across time and space. We ask that you try to understand the participants' perspectives with an open mind even though their full stories are not posted, and we also encourage productive open dialogue. This is our version of #thisis2016."
"there are some really stupid AMERICANS (not just the white ones) out there. The other day I asked on the Guild Wars 2 reddit if ArenaNet would publish a physical copy in South East Asia for another expansion since it didn't the last time around. And idiotic American redditors went on a tirade about "servers" and "translations" issues or how ArenaNet is not responsible for distribution in CHINA.
This isn't a "white people" problem, this is an American problem.
As an African American woman asked me if I spoke English when I worked in a bar, only to find out she could barely read. And speaking to the solipsism of Americans, how many of these Japanese SJWs who bemoan internment are educated on the atrocities of their ancestors in WW2, are they even aware that Japanese POWs in Australia liked their living conditions so much they were hesitant to return to Japan after the surrender?
#ThisIsCurrentYear"
Not enough focus on soft skills in S’pore workforce: Study - "the SkillsFuture movement tended to focus on hard skills, paying inadequate attention to skills that may be used across jobs... Singapore’s heavy reliance on foreign workers and low productivity growth also pointed to it lacking a “strong indigenous production capacity”, the report said. This, in turn, triggers an “urgent need to re-orientate the education and training policy, and to re-examine the pace of change in industrial policy”."
Ten Years Ago Today, Hillary Voted For A Border Fence - "Ten years later, Clinton has a different mentality towards border fortifications. Now, Clinton denounces Trump’s plan to build a more robust wall along the Mexican border as not merely unwise but perhaps also immoral."
Hillary Clinton Sponsored a Bill to Punish Flag Burning? : snopes.com - "Claim: In 2005, Senator Hillary Clinton co-sponsored a bill to make flag burning a punishable offense.
True"
There is serious reason to doubt the allegations. You got that? But let's publish them anyway because, WTF, who doesn't want to read them? The press works better when it verifies information and brings it to the public's attention, and lets us plebes make of it what we will. In this case, all we have is a document that may or may not be "real" or a fake. Remember all the serioso discussions of fake news and how Trump and his deplorables were ruining everything good and clean-smelling in America? Well, the one thing you can say this time around is: Don't blame the billionaire"
2017 Lunar New Year | Jetstar - "With the younger generation increasingly flying the coop over Lunar New Year despite it being the one time of year families gather for reunions, Jetstar is taking a stand – put family first and stay home. For passengers who have booked flights departing Singapore on 27 and 28 January, and are now keen to stay home to enjoy get-togethers with family, we’re happy to move your flights to a later date, for free."
This is a great way to free up seats which can then be resold at higher prices
Moroccan TV show giving women tips on hiding domestic violence bruises provokes outrage - "the woman who did the make-up, Lilia Mouline, says that rather than “normalizing” domestic violence – which she “in no way condones” – she was merely providing realistic advice. “We are here to provide solutions to these women who, for a period of two to three weeks, are putting their social life aside while their wounds heal. These women have already been subjected to moral humiliation and do not need to also have others looking at them,” Mouline told Yabiladi, a news website. “Makeup allows women to continue to live normally while waiting for justice.”
For Safe and Effective Drug Policy, Look to the Dutch - "Lighter enforcement did not lead to more drug use. About 25.7 percent of Dutch citizens reported having used marijuana at least once, which is on par with the European average. In the comparatively strict United Kingdom, the rate is 30.2 percent and in the United States it is a whopping 41.9 percent... in Sweden, 52 percent of marijuana users report that other drugs are available from their usual cannabis source. In the Netherlands, only 14 percent of marijuana users can get other drugs from their cannabis source, according to European drug monitors. This is largely because the vast majority of cannabis users buy from coffee shops. In addition, the country has virtually eliminated injecting drug use as a transmission of HIV and enjoys the lowest rate of problem drug use in Europe. "
General Tso's Chicken creator dies in Taiwan aged 98 - "According to legend, General Tso's Chicken was named in 1952, when Mr Peng was cooking for a visiting US Navy Admiral, Arthur Radford. Low on inspiration, he fried some chunks of chicken and added sauces and seasoning in a bid to create something new. The admiral loved the result. When he asked the name of the dish, Mr Peng christened it on the spot: "General Tso's Chicken"... While General Tso's is best known as American Chinese food, its fame has seen some Hunanese chefs embrace the recipe."
Police probing Quebec maple syrup heist worth up to $30-million - "Quebec police are on the hunt for a sticky-fingered thief after millions of dollars of maple syrup vanished from a Quebec warehouse."
German intelligence officer 'arrested over Islamist plot' raising fears the spy agency has been infiltrated - "The BfV said the man "behaved inconspicuously" prior to his arrest. He had, since April, been engaged in gathering intelligence on Islamist extremists in Germany, Der Spiegel said. Online chats were apparently found between the suspect and other Islamists in which he attempted to recruit them to the intelligence agency to mount an attack on "non-believers", carrying out a bomb attack on the spy HQ "in the name of Allah". He used several different names online and his activities were uncovered about a month ago. The man's family reportedly knew nothing of his conversion to Islam two years ago and subsequent radicalisation... The BfV estimates there are about 40,000 Islamists in Germany, including 9,200 ultra-conservative Islamists known as Salafists, Hans-Georg Maassen, who leads the agency, told Reuters... Isil claimed two attacks in late July - on a train near Wuerzburg and on a music festival in Ansbach - in which asylum-seekers wounded 20 people in total. In addition, security forces had to respond to an attack in a shopping centre in the city of Munich in which nine people were killed by an 18-year-old German-Iranian who had been in psychiatric treatment and was obsessed with mass killings."
Spain terror arrests - Four detained smuggling jihadis into Europe disguised as migrants - "Spain's interior ministry said ISIS was using the group of Algerian and Moroccan men to sneak fanatics into Europe via Turkey posing as migrants fleeing Syria's civil war. Officials also said they may have links to the Paris terror attacks last November."
The truths and tales of Cuban healthcare - "During the period when the Cuban government received generous subsidies from the former Soviet Union, the system more or less worked well. Hospitals were clean and, although they did not have state-of-the-art equipment, people could rely on them. But after the subsidies ended and Cuba's economy went into a tailspin, nothing was the same again. By the time I moved to Cuba in 1997, there were serious shortages of medicine - from simple aspirin to more badly needed drugs. Ironically, many medicines that cannot be found at a pharmacy are easily bought on the black market. Some doctors, nurses and cleaning staff smuggle the medicine out of the hospitals in a bid to make extra cash. Although medical attention remains free, many patients did and still do bring their doctors food, money or other gifts to get to the front of the queue or to guarantee an appointment for an X-ray, blood test or operation. If you do not have a contact or money to pay under the table, the waiting time for all but emergency procedures can be ridiculously long... I saw many hospitals where there was often no running water, the toilets did not flush, and the risk of infections - by the hospital's own admission - was extremely high... for all its shortcomings, Cubans do have better access to healthcare than the majority of those living in many "developing nations", where public health is shockingly inadequate. And as with so many things in Cuba, the state health service offers some amazing paradoxes: you may have problems obtaining medicine, but getting a bust lift, or even a sex change, is no problem, and moreover, it is free of charge."
Why 30 Palestinians celebrated Jewish holiday with settlers - "Why would a population under occupation that bears the brunt of the settlement enterprise visit their occupiers?... Once the story was made public, the Palestinian security service on Oct. 21 arrested four of the Palestinians who had attended the settlers’ event. Bethlehem Governor Muhammad Taha told Israeli Army Radio that the four were accused of behavior that encourages “normalization with Israel,” which according to the governor is a violation of Palestinian law."
How domestication changes species, including the human - "Keeping pets meant inviting animals into the family. It also created new relationships of inequality. The anthropologist Tim Ingold at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, who has spent years studying the reindeer herders of Lapland, argues that it is a mistake to regard domestication as a form of progress, from living in opposition to nature to harnessing it for our benefit. In The Perception of the Environment (2000), he notes that foraging peoples generally regard animals as their equals. Hunting is not a form of violence so much as a willing sacrifice on the part of the animal. Pastoralists, on the other hand, tend to regard animals as servants, to be mastered and controlled. Domestication doesn’t entail making wild animals tame, Ingold says. Instead, it means replacing a relationship founded on trust with one ‘based on domination’. When humans start treating animals as subordinates, it becomes easier to do the same thing to one another."
China has always kept mum on Singapore’s defence ties with Taipei, so why is it complaining now? - "the pinnacle command positions in Singapore’s fledgling air force and navy were occupied by Taiwanese military personnel who served Singapore in the 1970s. Taiwan’s Colonel Liu Ching Chuan was once Commander RSAF (renamed as Chief of Air Force) while former Taiwanese officer Khoo Eng An once held the post of Commander Republic of Singapore Navy (retitled as Chief of Navy)."
Reactionary Democrats trash Bernie Sanders for challenging identity politics - "Liberals have begun scolding Bernie Sanders for challenging identity politics in a speech at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston on Sunday night. When an audience member asked him how she could become the second Latina senator in U.S. history, Sanders said her gender and ethnicity don’t entitle her to votes. “I have to know whether that Latina is going to stand up with the working class of this country and is going to take on big money interests,” Sanders said. “It is not good enough for somebody to say, I’m a woman, vote for me. No, that’s not good enough. What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry”... Despite pushback from triggered reactionaries, Sanders doubled down on his critique of identity politics"
Belief in Santa could affect parent-child relationships, warns study - "lying to children, even about something fun and frivolous, could undermine their trust in their parents and leave them open to “abject disappointment” when they eventually discover that magic is not real."
Justin Trudeau's Statement On Fidel Castro Criticized By Politicians - "The prime minister is facing criticism at home and abroad for his statement expressing "deep sorrow'' about the death of former Cuban president Fidel Castro... some have condemned the prime minister's statement, pointing out human rights violations during Castro's half-century regime... Social media users took the opportunity to mock the prime minister using the hashtag "#TrudeauEulogies,'' which imagines eulogies of dictators and criminals written in the style of Trudeau's statement. For instance, user @MW_Johnson1 wrote, "While a controversial figure, John Wilkes Booth will be remembered as a lover of the theatre.''"
Neural Network Learns to Identify Criminals by Their Faces - "the neural network could correctly identify criminals and noncriminals with an accuracy of 89.5 percent... researchers revealed how they had trained a deep-learning machine to judge in the same way as humans whether somebody was trustworthy by looking at a snapshot of their face"
UK to censor online videos of 'non-conventional' sex acts - "In order to comply with the censorship rules, many mainstream adult websites would have to render whole sections inaccessible to UK audiences. That is despite the acts shown being legal for consenting over-16s to perform and for adults in almost all other liberal countries to film, distribute and watch... Pictures and videos that show spanking, whipping or caning that leaves marks, and sex acts involving urination, female ejaculation or menstruation as well as sex in public are likely to be caught by the ban – in effect turning back the clock on Britain’s censorship regime to the pre-internet era... “Although it is nominally designed to enforce the [Obscene Publications Act] guidelines of the Crown Prosecution Service, in practice it draws far tighter lines, many of them inexplicable. The ban on female ejaculation is a particularly strange example,” he said. The censorship regime has led to bizarre understandings between the producers and regulators, Barnett said. One is the “four-finger rule”, which limits the number of digits that can be inserted into an orifice for sexual stimulation"
Parents: let your kids fail. You’ll be doing them a favor - "we seem to be more worried about raising happy children than competent or autonomous ones... The children who had controlling mothers gave up when faced with a task they could not master. The others did not... The dirty secret of parenting is that kids can do more than we think they can, and it’s up to us to figure that out. (Apparently the French have sorted this out with kids and cooking, and they let their young toddlers wield large knives.) Kids can do dishes and clean a room without a bribe, but to get to clean kitchens and tidier rooms we have to face messier kitchens, not perfectly sorted laundry, and clothes stuffed in drawers while they figure it out... cheer like a grandparent and not a parent. College athletes wanted grandparents at their games because their support was not predicated on achievement."
(4) Riz Rashid - What Is Malay? Is Singapore in China? No but to... - "New York Times editor Michael Luo wrote an open letter to a woman who told him to “go back to China" in October and started the hashtag, #thisis2016. Asians/Asian Americans across the nation responded to Luo and his encounter by using the hashtag and sharing moments of racial insensitivity or ignorance. We decided to respond to the hashtag as well. These are all real statements, quotes and encounters that Bowdoin students have experienced throughout their lives, and while we acknowledge that not all of the things written were intentionally hurtful, they are a product of socially normalized stereotypes and misconceptions. Additionally, the statements are neither isolated, one-time incidents nor are they the worst things we’ve ever heard -- we emphasize that these experiences extend across time and space. We ask that you try to understand the participants' perspectives with an open mind even though their full stories are not posted, and we also encourage productive open dialogue. This is our version of #thisis2016."
"there are some really stupid AMERICANS (not just the white ones) out there. The other day I asked on the Guild Wars 2 reddit if ArenaNet would publish a physical copy in South East Asia for another expansion since it didn't the last time around. And idiotic American redditors went on a tirade about "servers" and "translations" issues or how ArenaNet is not responsible for distribution in CHINA.
This isn't a "white people" problem, this is an American problem.
As an African American woman asked me if I spoke English when I worked in a bar, only to find out she could barely read. And speaking to the solipsism of Americans, how many of these Japanese SJWs who bemoan internment are educated on the atrocities of their ancestors in WW2, are they even aware that Japanese POWs in Australia liked their living conditions so much they were hesitant to return to Japan after the surrender?
#ThisIsCurrentYear"
Not enough focus on soft skills in S’pore workforce: Study - "the SkillsFuture movement tended to focus on hard skills, paying inadequate attention to skills that may be used across jobs... Singapore’s heavy reliance on foreign workers and low productivity growth also pointed to it lacking a “strong indigenous production capacity”, the report said. This, in turn, triggers an “urgent need to re-orientate the education and training policy, and to re-examine the pace of change in industrial policy”."
Ten Years Ago Today, Hillary Voted For A Border Fence - "Ten years later, Clinton has a different mentality towards border fortifications. Now, Clinton denounces Trump’s plan to build a more robust wall along the Mexican border as not merely unwise but perhaps also immoral."
Hillary Clinton Sponsored a Bill to Punish Flag Burning? : snopes.com - "Claim: In 2005, Senator Hillary Clinton co-sponsored a bill to make flag burning a punishable offense.
True"
Post ID: 5897410171492836759
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
Links - 10th January 2017
Through a Neocolonial Schooling, Darkly | SINGAPORE POETRY - "I remember my Mandarin language teachers repeatedly telling me that I was a “fake” Chinese person since I was really doing badly in Mandarin classes. The fact that the language was not phonetic and was not something I spoke at home as a “mother tongue” really hampered my ability to grasp many of the rudiments. I think what was unspoken as well was the moral and cultural messages that were conveyed by the educational materials used to teach Mandarin. I remember being able to intuit what the responses were to multiple-choice questions simply by choosing the one that best represented traditional values like filial piety and so forth. I also recall being terrified of these teachers: they threw my exercise books at me and poked my arm with red ballpoint pens. It sounds draconian now to think about it! There was also an incident with an English teacher who discovered a stash of pleasure reading (novels, maybe even Virginia Andrews?) in a classmate’s desk and made her kneel in front of the blackboard for what seemed like an eternity to the rest of us until she admitted that she was doing something wrong in reading things that were not on the exam. That marked us for sure. Were these anti-educational measures? I think that depends on what you think an education is for. When you’re running a system where education is being used to mould productive citizens, then these incidents don’t seem out of place. Discipline and punishment in such a system is inevitable, layered with Singapore’s complex relationships with power, race, religion, language, and so on, of course... One of my favourite literature teachers in JC, though, told me to avoid the Ministry of Education and its scholarships at all costs. He told me quite plainly that he did not want the system to kill my love for literature"
I trained a robot to write in Singlish, this is what it wrote.
Big in Japan? Fat chance for nation's young women, obsessed with being skinny - "As women in the United States and across the industrialized world get fatter, most Japanese women are getting skinnier. Still, many view themselves as overweight... The trend is most pronounced among women in their 20s. A quarter-century ago, they were twice as likely to be thin as overweight; now they are four times more likely to be thin. For U.S. women of all ages, obesity rates have about doubled since 1980, rising from 17 percent to 35 percent... "Japanese women are outstandingly tense and critical of each other," said Watanabe, who has spent 34 years treating women with eating disorders. "There is a pervasive habit among women to monitor each other with a serious sharp eye to see what kind of slimness they have." Public health experts say that younger Japanese women, as a group, have probably become too skinny for their own good. Restricted calorie consumption is slowing down their metabolisms, the average birth weight of their babies is declining, and their risk of death in case of serious illness is rising... Researchers have found that Japanese women in urban areas are significantly thinner than those in rural areas. In their first year of college, the weight of young Japanese women falls, unlike that of American women, which increases... daily calorie consumption among young women was often two-thirds of the average adult's actual energy intake. Smoking rates among women in their 20s nearly doubled in the 1990s, jumping from 10 to 20 percent"
Sheryl Sandberg calls on CEOs to make sure employees get enough sleep
The British planned to start World War III by invading Russia with the German army - "You think destruction is your ally? You merely adopted destruction. Russians were born in it, molded by it"
The upper Han | The Economist - "China lays claim not just to booksellers in Hong Kong but, to a degree, an entire diaspora... The Han take their label from the dynasty of that name in the third century BC. Yet the people labelled Han today are a construct of the early 20th century, says Frank Dikötter of the University of Hong Kong. For well over half of the past 650 years, the bulk of territory now called China was occupied by foreign powers (by Mongols from the north, then Manchus from the north-east). Chinese history paints the (foreign) Manchus who ran China’s last dynasty, the Qing, as “Sinicised”, yet recent research suggests that they kept their own language and culture, and that Qing China was part of a larger, multi-ethnic empire... Many Chinese today share the idea that a Chinese person is instantly recognisable—and that an ethnic Han must, in essence, be one of them. A young child in Beijing will openly point at someone with white or black skin and declare them a foreigner (or “person from outside country”, to translate literally). Foreign-born Han living in China are routinely told that their Mandarin should be better (in contrast to non-Han, who are praised even if they only mangle an occasional pleasantry)... China today is extraordinarily homogenous. It sustains that by remaining almost entirely closed to new entrants except by birth. Unless someone is the child of a Chinese national, no matter how long they live there, how much money they make or tax they pay, it is virtually impossible to become a citizen. Someone who marries a Chinese person can theoretically gain citizenship; in practice few do. As a result, the most populous nation on Earth has only 1,448 naturalised Chinese in total, according to the 2010 census. Even Japan, better known for hostility to immigration, naturalises around 10,000 new citizens each year; in America the figure is some 700,000. The conflation of Han and national identity underlies the uneasy relationship between that majority and China’s ethnic-minority citizens. Officialdom theoretically treats minorities as equal and even grants them certain privileges. Yet in practice ethnic groups, particularly those from China’s borderlands, who are visually distinctive, are discriminated against and increasingly marginalised as ethnic Han have moved into their home regions... Although many of China’s citizens are not treated as equals, Han Chinese with foreign passports are welcomed and accorded a special status. Anyone with Chinese ancestry has legal advantages in getting a work visa; foreign-born children of Chinese nationals get a leg-up in applying to universities... Many foreign Han say they are made to feel it is their duty to speak up on China’s behalf... A poll by the Chinese University of Hong Kong found that 9% of respondents identified themselves solely as “Chinese”, down from 32% in 1997, when the territory returned to Chinese rule; the trend is similar in Taiwan... Non-Chinese seem just as beguiled by the purity of Han China as the government in Beijing. Governments and NGOs never suggest that China take refugees from trouble spots elsewhere in the world"
Transgender cyclist is top female finisher at El Tour de Tucson
Stop buying organic food if you really want to save the planet - "Existing GM crops may already be reducing carbon emissions even though they were not designed to do so. Next up: crops that can capture more of the sun’s energy, require less fertiliser and tolerate drought or salt. But the organic movement will have none of it."
BuzzFeed’s hit piece on Chip and Joanna Gaines is dangerous - "A 2016 survey from Pew Research Center shows public support of same-sex marriage is at an all-time high of 55 percent — and it is steadily growing. But the same polls tell us that nearly 4 out of 10 Americans — no small number! — are not on board with it. The minds at BuzzFeed are not naive: They know that the Gaineses and HGTV are going to have to come out with a public statement on same-sex marriage. They also know that if the statement is not 100 percent supportive of same-sex marriage, the network will be pressured to drop them. Think about that for a moment. Is the suggestion here that 40 percent of Americans are unemployable because of their religious convictions on marriage? That the companies that employ them deserve to be boycotted until they yield to the other side of the debate — a side, we should note, that is only slightly larger than the one being shouted down?"
Cops warn those who post Orang Asli arrests online - "Rahman said legal action would be taken against individuals who tried to tarnish the image of the police, while the Orang Asli arrested yesterday were being remanded for two to three days to assist in the investigation"
So much for privileging bumiputeras; can the police ruin their own image?
Who Crushed the Lesbian Bars? A New Minefield of Identity Politics - "Did the lesbian bar disappear because people's identities splintered, leaving behind too few people to patronize women-only spaces? Or did it vanish because mainstream culture has evolved, turning every bar in Portland—from Sloan's Tavern to the Florida Room—into an unofficial lesbian bar? The answer is a little of both. The transgender rights movement that's gained steam in recent years has exploded the categories of gay and straight and male and female. This fall, Portland State University allowed students to choose from nine genders and nine sexual orientations when filling out demographic paperwork. In PSU's recent survey of students and their identities, more students identified as "pansexual" than lesbian... Announcing that a Portland party is intended exclusively for lesbians is stepping into a minefield of identity politics... Stutzman, who has wavy red hair and wears an enameled "I Love Cats" pin on her jean jacket, recalls walking through Vendetta greeting people when someone she'd never met—someone who didn't identify with traditional female conventions like the pronoun "she"—confronted her. "The person was hostile, and wanting to pick a fight," Stutzman recalls. "This person was offended and said they would tell their friends that we were a group of people that were non-inclusive and not respectful of their gender." The person—Stutzman never got a name—left the event, and Stutzman was left feeling confused. As she looked around, she saw many people who fell between male and female. She thought her event was inclusive, even if the vernacular wasn't. "What we wanted to say is, if you're a straight dude, don't come to this event," she says. "Everyone else was fine." Stutzman adjusted her language, no longer calling Fantasy Softball League a lesbian event. Instead, she called it an event for queer women. But even with the change, Stutzman still worried. "Everything I tried, someone was offended," she says. "It got weird and political, and I wanted it to be a fun thing"... After being accused of condoning "trans women exterminationism" in August, the organizers of Temporary Lesbian Bar apologized for imagery used to promote the inclusive monthly event at Mississippi Pizza. The offense? Using the labrys—a double-sided ax often associated with Greek goddesses and a symbol of female strength—as the group's icon. "Hold this group accountable," wrote Viridian Sylvae, a transgender lesbian, on Facebook, noting the image's connection to Greek fascism and violence against trans women... Patrons complained because men were coming in. Other patrons complained when Davis started checking IDs at the door for gender markers. Still others complained when she stopped checking IDs."
Progressivism destroys itself
What will Trump mean for South East Asia? - "according to Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of the Institute of Security and International Studies at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, President Obama's achievements here were often less than they appeared. "The Obama 'pivot' ultimately proved shallow and unreliable, underpinned by rhetorical footwork with little substantive thrust," he says. "It was akin to the inkless 'red lines' drawn in the Middle East, where US leadership was confined to 'leading from behind', eschewing boots on the ground in favour of remote-controlled drone attacks. "Leading from the back often meant not leading at all. "Obama is a popular leader because of his personal appeal, but his policy record is mixed. "His administration too often walked loudly but carried a meek stick.""
Beautiful women more likely to pick gay male best friends, study finds - "prettier women gravitated towards gay men because they felt less likely to be sexually exploited or deceived by them. Physically less attractive women felt threatened by gay male friends for fear they might ‘steal their boyfriends’... The most attractive females in the study were also found to be unpopular with other women"
A Tale Of Two Mascots: How Furries Spurned By Tony The Tiger Are Being Embraced By Chester Cheetah - "Gather round for today's trepid Twitter tale -- a story involving two anthropomorphic mascots for beloved corn-based products and the costume-centric subculture that was spurned by one and embraced by another. That's right, we're talking about the official accounts of Frosted Flakes' Tony the Tiger and Cheetos' Chester the Cheetah showing their true stripes, spots or whatever by responding to a few furries in very disparate ways."
Washington Post Disgracefully Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist From a New, Hidden, and Very Shady Group - "The Washington Post on Thursday night promoted the claims of a new, shadowy organization that smears dozens of U.S. news sites that are critical of U.S. foreign policy as being “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.” The article by reporter Craig Timberg — headlined “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say” — cites a report by an anonymous website calling itself PropOrNot, which claims that millions of Americans have been deceived this year in a massive Russian “misinformation campaign.” The group’s list of Russian disinformation outlets includes WikiLeaks and the Drudge Report, as well as Clinton-critical left-wing websites such as Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig, and Naked Capitalism, as well as libertarian venues such as Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul Institute... the individuals behind this newly created group are publicly branding journalists and news outlets as tools of Russian propaganda — even calling on the FBI to investigate them for espionage — while cowardly hiding their own identities. The group promoted by the Post thus embodies the toxic essence of Joseph McCarthy, but without the courage to attach individual names to the blacklist. Echoing the Wisconsin senator, the group refers to its lengthy collection of sites spouting Russian propaganda as “The List.” The credentials of this supposed group of experts are impossible to verify, as none is provided either by the Post or by the group itself."
UPDATE: Tributes flood in for legendary fantasy author, Chingford-born Joe Dever - "TRIBUTES from friends and fans are flooding in for the legendary fantasy author behind the Lone Wolf gamebooks, after he died aged 60. Joe Dever, who was born in Chingford, was admitted to hospital at the end of October but sadly died this morning (Wednesday). He had been due to attend a convention in Lucca, Italy, which he was forced to cancel after complications from bile duct surgery in August arose"
The World's Biggest Airport - "In all, it covers a total area of 193,000 acres, or 301 square miles—more than any other airport in the world. To put that into a little bit of perspective, the entire country of Singapore is only 277.6 square miles. The only problem? You likely won’t be going there anytime soon. On paper, its significance is hard to dismiss. In person, King Fahd International Airport fails to measure up. For starters: most of the airport's land sits unused and undeveloped. And worse, it's located in the middle of nowhere—literally. A quick virtual glance on Google Maps opens like a scene from Mad Max, nothing but sizzling tarmac, dirt, and a whole lot of desert. A 45-minute drive from Dammam (Saudi Arabia’s sixth largest city), even locals would have to go out of their way just to reach it."
Sperm donor is not responsible for child support, Kansas judge rules - "A Kansas judge has ruled that a Topeka man who donated sperm so two women could have a baby together isn’t legally the child’s father and doesn’t have to provide financial support"
Did Glenn Greenwald And The Guardian Just Get Spectacularly Trolled? - "we find the article ‘Alt-right’ online poison nearly turned me into a racist ‘ in The Guardian written by an ‘anonymous’ contributor. The standfirst reads ‘It started with Sam Harris, moved on to Milo Yiannopoulos and almost led to full-scale Islamophobia. If it can happen to a lifelong liberal, it could happen to anyone’ which really should have had alarm bells ringing at Guardian HQ. The article also contains hilarious little flourishes such as ‘On one occasion I even, I am ashamed to admit, very diplomatically expressed negative sentiments on Islam to my wife’. Blimey. Although the article is so laughable as to appear blatantly fabricated, given what has become standard-fare for The Guardian, all bets were off. Some had no doubts as to its authenticity however... The Elfwick account claims they were inspired by these type of articles from The Guardian’s Abi Wilkinson... So, here we have it. A mainstream ‘liberal’ newspaper will print any old nonsense just so long as it ticks their prejudices check list. Followed by a gaggle of ‘Journalists’ and glorified trolls who will also amplify any old nonsense just so long as it’s unfavourable towards Sam Harris."
It started with Sam Harris… Has the Guardian just published an excellent hoax parody? - "This then is his equally comical moment of truth. He has decided that he was becoming a racist and a terrible hateful person, even though he has not shared with us anything that could be reasonably described as racist or hateful... We may be confused why our author in Britain feels partly responsible for Donald Trump being elected in America, but we can only assume that is something to do with his imaginary journey from listening to Sam Harris to nearly becoming a racist. But this would be a strange reason for feeling responsible for the election of Donald Trump, given that Sam Harris was one of the most outspoken critics of Donald Trump."
UK economy profits from automation of jobs - "The increasing automation of work has raised £140bn in the UK economy"
I trained a robot to write in Singlish, this is what it wrote.
Big in Japan? Fat chance for nation's young women, obsessed with being skinny - "As women in the United States and across the industrialized world get fatter, most Japanese women are getting skinnier. Still, many view themselves as overweight... The trend is most pronounced among women in their 20s. A quarter-century ago, they were twice as likely to be thin as overweight; now they are four times more likely to be thin. For U.S. women of all ages, obesity rates have about doubled since 1980, rising from 17 percent to 35 percent... "Japanese women are outstandingly tense and critical of each other," said Watanabe, who has spent 34 years treating women with eating disorders. "There is a pervasive habit among women to monitor each other with a serious sharp eye to see what kind of slimness they have." Public health experts say that younger Japanese women, as a group, have probably become too skinny for their own good. Restricted calorie consumption is slowing down their metabolisms, the average birth weight of their babies is declining, and their risk of death in case of serious illness is rising... Researchers have found that Japanese women in urban areas are significantly thinner than those in rural areas. In their first year of college, the weight of young Japanese women falls, unlike that of American women, which increases... daily calorie consumption among young women was often two-thirds of the average adult's actual energy intake. Smoking rates among women in their 20s nearly doubled in the 1990s, jumping from 10 to 20 percent"
Sheryl Sandberg calls on CEOs to make sure employees get enough sleep
The British planned to start World War III by invading Russia with the German army - "You think destruction is your ally? You merely adopted destruction. Russians were born in it, molded by it"
The upper Han | The Economist - "China lays claim not just to booksellers in Hong Kong but, to a degree, an entire diaspora... The Han take their label from the dynasty of that name in the third century BC. Yet the people labelled Han today are a construct of the early 20th century, says Frank Dikötter of the University of Hong Kong. For well over half of the past 650 years, the bulk of territory now called China was occupied by foreign powers (by Mongols from the north, then Manchus from the north-east). Chinese history paints the (foreign) Manchus who ran China’s last dynasty, the Qing, as “Sinicised”, yet recent research suggests that they kept their own language and culture, and that Qing China was part of a larger, multi-ethnic empire... Many Chinese today share the idea that a Chinese person is instantly recognisable—and that an ethnic Han must, in essence, be one of them. A young child in Beijing will openly point at someone with white or black skin and declare them a foreigner (or “person from outside country”, to translate literally). Foreign-born Han living in China are routinely told that their Mandarin should be better (in contrast to non-Han, who are praised even if they only mangle an occasional pleasantry)... China today is extraordinarily homogenous. It sustains that by remaining almost entirely closed to new entrants except by birth. Unless someone is the child of a Chinese national, no matter how long they live there, how much money they make or tax they pay, it is virtually impossible to become a citizen. Someone who marries a Chinese person can theoretically gain citizenship; in practice few do. As a result, the most populous nation on Earth has only 1,448 naturalised Chinese in total, according to the 2010 census. Even Japan, better known for hostility to immigration, naturalises around 10,000 new citizens each year; in America the figure is some 700,000. The conflation of Han and national identity underlies the uneasy relationship between that majority and China’s ethnic-minority citizens. Officialdom theoretically treats minorities as equal and even grants them certain privileges. Yet in practice ethnic groups, particularly those from China’s borderlands, who are visually distinctive, are discriminated against and increasingly marginalised as ethnic Han have moved into their home regions... Although many of China’s citizens are not treated as equals, Han Chinese with foreign passports are welcomed and accorded a special status. Anyone with Chinese ancestry has legal advantages in getting a work visa; foreign-born children of Chinese nationals get a leg-up in applying to universities... Many foreign Han say they are made to feel it is their duty to speak up on China’s behalf... A poll by the Chinese University of Hong Kong found that 9% of respondents identified themselves solely as “Chinese”, down from 32% in 1997, when the territory returned to Chinese rule; the trend is similar in Taiwan... Non-Chinese seem just as beguiled by the purity of Han China as the government in Beijing. Governments and NGOs never suggest that China take refugees from trouble spots elsewhere in the world"
Transgender cyclist is top female finisher at El Tour de Tucson
Stop buying organic food if you really want to save the planet - "Existing GM crops may already be reducing carbon emissions even though they were not designed to do so. Next up: crops that can capture more of the sun’s energy, require less fertiliser and tolerate drought or salt. But the organic movement will have none of it."
BuzzFeed’s hit piece on Chip and Joanna Gaines is dangerous - "A 2016 survey from Pew Research Center shows public support of same-sex marriage is at an all-time high of 55 percent — and it is steadily growing. But the same polls tell us that nearly 4 out of 10 Americans — no small number! — are not on board with it. The minds at BuzzFeed are not naive: They know that the Gaineses and HGTV are going to have to come out with a public statement on same-sex marriage. They also know that if the statement is not 100 percent supportive of same-sex marriage, the network will be pressured to drop them. Think about that for a moment. Is the suggestion here that 40 percent of Americans are unemployable because of their religious convictions on marriage? That the companies that employ them deserve to be boycotted until they yield to the other side of the debate — a side, we should note, that is only slightly larger than the one being shouted down?"
Cops warn those who post Orang Asli arrests online - "Rahman said legal action would be taken against individuals who tried to tarnish the image of the police, while the Orang Asli arrested yesterday were being remanded for two to three days to assist in the investigation"
So much for privileging bumiputeras; can the police ruin their own image?
Who Crushed the Lesbian Bars? A New Minefield of Identity Politics - "Did the lesbian bar disappear because people's identities splintered, leaving behind too few people to patronize women-only spaces? Or did it vanish because mainstream culture has evolved, turning every bar in Portland—from Sloan's Tavern to the Florida Room—into an unofficial lesbian bar? The answer is a little of both. The transgender rights movement that's gained steam in recent years has exploded the categories of gay and straight and male and female. This fall, Portland State University allowed students to choose from nine genders and nine sexual orientations when filling out demographic paperwork. In PSU's recent survey of students and their identities, more students identified as "pansexual" than lesbian... Announcing that a Portland party is intended exclusively for lesbians is stepping into a minefield of identity politics... Stutzman, who has wavy red hair and wears an enameled "I Love Cats" pin on her jean jacket, recalls walking through Vendetta greeting people when someone she'd never met—someone who didn't identify with traditional female conventions like the pronoun "she"—confronted her. "The person was hostile, and wanting to pick a fight," Stutzman recalls. "This person was offended and said they would tell their friends that we were a group of people that were non-inclusive and not respectful of their gender." The person—Stutzman never got a name—left the event, and Stutzman was left feeling confused. As she looked around, she saw many people who fell between male and female. She thought her event was inclusive, even if the vernacular wasn't. "What we wanted to say is, if you're a straight dude, don't come to this event," she says. "Everyone else was fine." Stutzman adjusted her language, no longer calling Fantasy Softball League a lesbian event. Instead, she called it an event for queer women. But even with the change, Stutzman still worried. "Everything I tried, someone was offended," she says. "It got weird and political, and I wanted it to be a fun thing"... After being accused of condoning "trans women exterminationism" in August, the organizers of Temporary Lesbian Bar apologized for imagery used to promote the inclusive monthly event at Mississippi Pizza. The offense? Using the labrys—a double-sided ax often associated with Greek goddesses and a symbol of female strength—as the group's icon. "Hold this group accountable," wrote Viridian Sylvae, a transgender lesbian, on Facebook, noting the image's connection to Greek fascism and violence against trans women... Patrons complained because men were coming in. Other patrons complained when Davis started checking IDs at the door for gender markers. Still others complained when she stopped checking IDs."
Progressivism destroys itself
What will Trump mean for South East Asia? - "according to Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of the Institute of Security and International Studies at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, President Obama's achievements here were often less than they appeared. "The Obama 'pivot' ultimately proved shallow and unreliable, underpinned by rhetorical footwork with little substantive thrust," he says. "It was akin to the inkless 'red lines' drawn in the Middle East, where US leadership was confined to 'leading from behind', eschewing boots on the ground in favour of remote-controlled drone attacks. "Leading from the back often meant not leading at all. "Obama is a popular leader because of his personal appeal, but his policy record is mixed. "His administration too often walked loudly but carried a meek stick.""
Beautiful women more likely to pick gay male best friends, study finds - "prettier women gravitated towards gay men because they felt less likely to be sexually exploited or deceived by them. Physically less attractive women felt threatened by gay male friends for fear they might ‘steal their boyfriends’... The most attractive females in the study were also found to be unpopular with other women"
A Tale Of Two Mascots: How Furries Spurned By Tony The Tiger Are Being Embraced By Chester Cheetah - "Gather round for today's trepid Twitter tale -- a story involving two anthropomorphic mascots for beloved corn-based products and the costume-centric subculture that was spurned by one and embraced by another. That's right, we're talking about the official accounts of Frosted Flakes' Tony the Tiger and Cheetos' Chester the Cheetah showing their true stripes, spots or whatever by responding to a few furries in very disparate ways."
Washington Post Disgracefully Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist From a New, Hidden, and Very Shady Group - "The Washington Post on Thursday night promoted the claims of a new, shadowy organization that smears dozens of U.S. news sites that are critical of U.S. foreign policy as being “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.” The article by reporter Craig Timberg — headlined “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say” — cites a report by an anonymous website calling itself PropOrNot, which claims that millions of Americans have been deceived this year in a massive Russian “misinformation campaign.” The group’s list of Russian disinformation outlets includes WikiLeaks and the Drudge Report, as well as Clinton-critical left-wing websites such as Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig, and Naked Capitalism, as well as libertarian venues such as Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul Institute... the individuals behind this newly created group are publicly branding journalists and news outlets as tools of Russian propaganda — even calling on the FBI to investigate them for espionage — while cowardly hiding their own identities. The group promoted by the Post thus embodies the toxic essence of Joseph McCarthy, but without the courage to attach individual names to the blacklist. Echoing the Wisconsin senator, the group refers to its lengthy collection of sites spouting Russian propaganda as “The List.” The credentials of this supposed group of experts are impossible to verify, as none is provided either by the Post or by the group itself."
UPDATE: Tributes flood in for legendary fantasy author, Chingford-born Joe Dever - "TRIBUTES from friends and fans are flooding in for the legendary fantasy author behind the Lone Wolf gamebooks, after he died aged 60. Joe Dever, who was born in Chingford, was admitted to hospital at the end of October but sadly died this morning (Wednesday). He had been due to attend a convention in Lucca, Italy, which he was forced to cancel after complications from bile duct surgery in August arose"
The World's Biggest Airport - "In all, it covers a total area of 193,000 acres, or 301 square miles—more than any other airport in the world. To put that into a little bit of perspective, the entire country of Singapore is only 277.6 square miles. The only problem? You likely won’t be going there anytime soon. On paper, its significance is hard to dismiss. In person, King Fahd International Airport fails to measure up. For starters: most of the airport's land sits unused and undeveloped. And worse, it's located in the middle of nowhere—literally. A quick virtual glance on Google Maps opens like a scene from Mad Max, nothing but sizzling tarmac, dirt, and a whole lot of desert. A 45-minute drive from Dammam (Saudi Arabia’s sixth largest city), even locals would have to go out of their way just to reach it."
Sperm donor is not responsible for child support, Kansas judge rules - "A Kansas judge has ruled that a Topeka man who donated sperm so two women could have a baby together isn’t legally the child’s father and doesn’t have to provide financial support"
Did Glenn Greenwald And The Guardian Just Get Spectacularly Trolled? - "we find the article ‘Alt-right’ online poison nearly turned me into a racist ‘ in The Guardian written by an ‘anonymous’ contributor. The standfirst reads ‘It started with Sam Harris, moved on to Milo Yiannopoulos and almost led to full-scale Islamophobia. If it can happen to a lifelong liberal, it could happen to anyone’ which really should have had alarm bells ringing at Guardian HQ. The article also contains hilarious little flourishes such as ‘On one occasion I even, I am ashamed to admit, very diplomatically expressed negative sentiments on Islam to my wife’. Blimey. Although the article is so laughable as to appear blatantly fabricated, given what has become standard-fare for The Guardian, all bets were off. Some had no doubts as to its authenticity however... The Elfwick account claims they were inspired by these type of articles from The Guardian’s Abi Wilkinson... So, here we have it. A mainstream ‘liberal’ newspaper will print any old nonsense just so long as it ticks their prejudices check list. Followed by a gaggle of ‘Journalists’ and glorified trolls who will also amplify any old nonsense just so long as it’s unfavourable towards Sam Harris."
It started with Sam Harris… Has the Guardian just published an excellent hoax parody? - "This then is his equally comical moment of truth. He has decided that he was becoming a racist and a terrible hateful person, even though he has not shared with us anything that could be reasonably described as racist or hateful... We may be confused why our author in Britain feels partly responsible for Donald Trump being elected in America, but we can only assume that is something to do with his imaginary journey from listening to Sam Harris to nearly becoming a racist. But this would be a strange reason for feeling responsible for the election of Donald Trump, given that Sam Harris was one of the most outspoken critics of Donald Trump."
UK economy profits from automation of jobs - "The increasing automation of work has raised £140bn in the UK economy"
Post ID: 1705630525664284902
Emotional Blackmail for SEO
From: Virgil Anderson
Subject: question
Message: Hi,
I emailed you last week and unfortunately haven't heard back yet. My name is Virgil Anderson. I came across your website and thought you might be interested in my message.
I was recently diagnosed with mesothelioma, which is a cancer caused by exposure to asbestos.
Mesothelioma is a devastating disease that not only affects your system, but is also mentally exhausting. Treatments to fight off mesothelioma often result in weight loss and fatigue. Keeping your body energized with the proper nutrients and vitamins is crucial to recovering from Mesothelioma. Foods groups such as fruits, vegetables, fats, and water should be implemented into a healthy diet to maintain a proper calorie count as well as vitamin intake. Without proper nutrition, white blood cells, meant for fighting off infection, decrease as well.
In my fight against cancer, I have been helped greatly by the Patient Advocates at Mesothelioma.net. They have helped me tremendously through this tough time and don't know where I would be without them.
They actually posted an article highlighting the benefits of a proper diet here: https://(mesothelioma).n e t/nutrition-and-lifestyle-for-mesothelioma-patients/ [Ed: URL deformed so they don't get the benefits of the quasi-link]
Would you be so kind as to share a link to Mesothelioma.net on your website? I think the information could be useful to your website visitors.
I feel it is my duty to give back to the community--to inform people of their options if they are diagnosed with this cancer, and inspire them to not give up!
I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you!
Virgil
Don't want emails from us anymore? Reply to this email with the word "UNSUBSCRIBE" in the subject line.
Mesothelioma.net, 440 Louisiana St # 1212, Houston Texas, 77532, United States
At first I thought he had a fortune to give away
Subject: question
Message: Hi,
I emailed you last week and unfortunately haven't heard back yet. My name is Virgil Anderson. I came across your website and thought you might be interested in my message.
I was recently diagnosed with mesothelioma, which is a cancer caused by exposure to asbestos.
Mesothelioma is a devastating disease that not only affects your system, but is also mentally exhausting. Treatments to fight off mesothelioma often result in weight loss and fatigue. Keeping your body energized with the proper nutrients and vitamins is crucial to recovering from Mesothelioma. Foods groups such as fruits, vegetables, fats, and water should be implemented into a healthy diet to maintain a proper calorie count as well as vitamin intake. Without proper nutrition, white blood cells, meant for fighting off infection, decrease as well.
In my fight against cancer, I have been helped greatly by the Patient Advocates at Mesothelioma.net. They have helped me tremendously through this tough time and don't know where I would be without them.
They actually posted an article highlighting the benefits of a proper diet here: https://(mesothelioma).n e t/nutrition-and-lifestyle-for-mesothelioma-patients/ [Ed: URL deformed so they don't get the benefits of the quasi-link]
Would you be so kind as to share a link to Mesothelioma.net on your website? I think the information could be useful to your website visitors.
I feel it is my duty to give back to the community--to inform people of their options if they are diagnosed with this cancer, and inspire them to not give up!
I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you!
Virgil
Don't want emails from us anymore? Reply to this email with the word "UNSUBSCRIBE" in the subject line.
Mesothelioma.net, 440 Louisiana St # 1212, Houston Texas, 77532, United States
At first I thought he had a fortune to give away
Post ID: 3262538779285115145
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