Links - 12th March 2018 (2)

Is It OK When A Chef Cooks Other People's Food? The Rick Bayless Question - "Pashman: "There are also other Mexicans and Mexican-Americans who are like, 'Screw this guy Rick Bayless.' So how do you feel when you get that kind of reaction to your work?"
Bayless: "Well, usually people who have that opinion of me don't want to have a conversation. Those people that say it are usually very political, and they have a mouthpiece and they just go around saying it. And everybody thinks, 'Oh, lots of people must believe that.' And honestly, I don't think they do. I know that there have been a number of people out there that criticized me only — only — because of my race. Because I'm white, I can't do anything with Mexican food. But we have to stop and say, 'Oh wait, is that plain racism then?'...
"I'm betting dollars to donuts that Bayless has actually traveled far more extensively throughout Mexico, and speaks better f****** Spanish, than most of the bratty, 3rd, 4th, 5th generation Mexican-American hipsters who talk s*** about him.""

The Case for Pink Pork - ""Trichinosis is an antiquated disease, and we've been cooking pork to medium for a long time now," says Chef Naomi Pomeroy, of Portland, Oregon's Beast. Like Pomeroy, other chefs I spoke to argue that medium-rare pork is more succulent, tender, and flavorful than its well-done counterpart... raw and rare beef, lamb, venison, and fish have long been synonymous with upscale dining. In part, that's because cooking meat to a lower internal temperature speaks to a well-sourced, safe-to-eat, and often more expensive product. It can also drastically impact texture and flavor, helping the meat retain a tender, juicy consistency that high heat drives away. This is especially true of lean meats like pork... you are significantly more likely to be killed by a lightning strike than afflicted by even a nonfatal round of trichinosis, at least in the United States... the risks of eating raw or pink pork are not notably worse than those that come with runny egg yolks, beef tartare, or cheap delivery sushi. And the payoff, chefs argue, is worth it... "I don't want to live in a place where the only thing I'm allowed to eat is boneless, skinless chicken breasts that are vacuum-sealed""

Counter Is Friendly: Eating Raw Chicken in Japan

Why is it Safe to eat Raw Beef? - "Raw beef and lamb are safe to eat because the meat is very dense, and bacteria struggle to penetrate the surface. If the surface is cooked, then the middle should be safe to eat raw as long as it hasn’t been sat out at room temperature for a long time. Beef and lamb are also unlikely to contain any parasites due to their complex stomach system and fussy eating habits"

Race and IQ - Thomas Sowell - "Studies had shown that females predominated among high-IQ blacks... Meanwhile, white males and white females have the same average IQs, with slightly more males at both the highest and lowest IQs. This is just one of many unsolved mysteries that is likely to remain unsolved, because doing research on race and IQ has become taboo in many places. My own research was financed in part by a grant from a foundation that told me to remove any mention of IQ research from the activities listed in my project's application. They didn't care if I used their money for that purpose but they did not want it on the record that they had financed research into race and intelligence. Many schools and boards of education also did not want it on the record that they had cooperated by supplying data for any such research. Only when assured of complete anonymity would they let me into their records. A well-known black "social scientist" urged me not to do any such research. His stated reason was that it would "dignify" Professor Arthur Jensen's thesis of a genetic basis for black-white differences in IQ scores. But my own suspicion was that he was afraid that the research would prove Jensen right. As it turned out, the research showed that the average IQ difference between black and white Americans -- 15 points -- was nothing unusual. Similar IQ differences could be found between various culturally isolated white communities and the general society, both in the United States and in Britain. Among various groups in India, mental test differences were slightly greater than those between blacks and whites in the United States"

How "Multiculturalism at all Costs" Has Cost us Lives - "The tolerant majorities of the West have been very accepting of successive waves of immigrants from a wide range of ethnic and religious backgrounds. And almost exclusively within a single generation the newcomers have integrated into the mainstream. While large numbers of Muslims have made this successful adjustment, a large minority have not... If there is a belief that intolerance for Islamic extremism is a threat to multiculturalism itself, one must wonder why there are no loud protests coming from the multitude of other communities... The doctrine of multiculturalism in the West is in need of review. It was once based on a premise of respect and integration. In more recent times it has become obvious that we have allowed cultures to enter our countries which show no respect for the host culture and far from assimilating wish only to ghettoise and create a parallel non-integrated community... We see lack of condemnation of radicals by Islamic scholars and community leaders, which raises many questions, as to why all moderate Muslim leaders are not speaking against the corruption of each other. I must say, that the mentality of a Muslim living within the west, and among those who their traditions have taught to be infidels, makes it difficult to rise against his/her own brother in faith fearing that it could strengthen the cause of the infidel"

Lynn Barber: I took an asylum seeker into my home. It didn’t end well - "he burst out furiously: “I am not a refugee!” What! What are you doing here then? Why are you living in my house? “I am a political leader! My family are very rich! We could buy you up like that. Do you want money? Is that why you write this filth? I get you money. You First World women are all the same, you are heartless. You have no feelings. You Christians are all racists.” And more, and more, increasingly incoherent, rambling, bewildering, but also frightening because he seemed to feel such deep hatred towards me. Eventually he said with great rhetorical flourish: “I can no longer live in this house”... She’d been dropping hints all along that Mohammed was a bad lot — he broke the tumble dryer, he never cleaned the washing machine, one day he was going to the front door just as the post arrived and instead of picking up the letters he walked all over them. She’d told me these things, but I put all her criticisms down to racism... His journey across Europe looked more like a holiday jaunt than a desperate flight to asylum... whenever Mohammed came to me, as he often did, complaining of a sore throat or gummed-up ears or kidney pain, I would tell him — yet again — to go to my GP. He never did. He preferred to Skype his mother in Khartoum (she always recommended parsley tea and he consumed most of my parsley patch) or to take himself to A&E. It annoyed me that he went to A&E more times in the six months he lived with me than I had been in my whole life, and I gave him a lecture about not abusing the NHS... Why did he want to go to a park now? Because, he said, he needed to buy some dope and the people in Calais told him you could always find someone selling it in parks. Oh no, I told him, no dope, or certainly not in the house. Anyway, how could he afford dope when he was supposedly living on £35 a week? But once, when my daughter came to stay, she told me that the top landing reeked of skunk... his rich family in Sudan must have been funding him — and I suspect his frequent trips to Edgware Road were somehow money-related... All my friends, and most of all my beloved Dorota, kept warning me not to trust him, but I just thought: “Oh, they’re all racists, whereas I am this paragon of liberalism.” And I liked the idea that I was being “daring” while they were being so cautious."

The Big Picture: Confronting Manhood after Trump - "we should be as suspicious of males who strongly identify as men as we are of white people who strongly identify as white... We are here in Trump’s America in part because we have been too delicate in our treatment of dangerous ideas. The problem is not toxic masculinity; it’s that masculinity is toxic... If we are going to finish the gender revolution, then, we need to call masculinity out as a hazardous ideology and denounce anyone who chooses to identify with it"
Trump 2020!

An anti-capitalist is the most bourgeois thing you can be - "most of the discussion was about the working class, and the working class was not there. I wager they weren’t following it on Twitter either... Frederick Douglass... went on to defend free speech for racists, by the way, on the grounds that there should be no ‘limit [upon] the right of simple utterance of opinion’. An actual former slave defended free speech for ‘detestable’ people and yet today Ivy League white students will not - remarkable... Even as the Jacobin side recognised the improvements in working life that have been demanded and won over the decades by trade unionists and leftists and reformers, still they talked about life under capitalism as awful. Occasionally they had to speak about the Third World, desperate for some actual examples of the harsh, Victorian-style capitalism they fantasise is still dominant. Yet as Mangu-Ward pointed out, millions of people have been lifted out of poverty as China and India have embraced capitalism... anti-capitalism has become a fatalistic pursuit, a comforting exercise in complaint, a self-aggrandising knowingness about the lameness of life, the pastime, almost exclusively, of the time-rich and well-off, of the kind of people who have gentrified Williamsburg and annoyed their parents by becoming cultural-studies lecturers rather than corporate lawyers... Self-loathing is the bread and butter of the 21st-century capitalist elite. Today, much anti-capitalism looks less like an independent strike against the elite than an externalisation of the elite’s contempt for its system and values"

The Vapidity of Business School - "the marketing class... was based on such basic thinking, using only anecdotes to communicate any form of “lesson” but without actually diving any deeper on the art of thinking... My first year in my business school, I realized that I had abandoned any earthiness and humanity across the street in my humanities building. Men here buzzed around in ties and suits for a simple class! Girls strutted about, click-clacking their way to class in pumps. There was no learning going on. This was a cesspool of business card chucking and for-benefit socializing, called “networking.” Stopping to ask someone what they thought of the professor’s comments in a class invariably got responses like “Pff, it was a waste of time bro” and when I’d press further, asking why they’re here if it’s a waste of time the reply was always “Cause business is where the money’s at.” Occasionally, I’d run into someone who’d give me a curt “I didn’t know what else to do.” There was no passion for business here. It was but a transitional phase in people’s lives that was built as means to acquire a paper that will give them the ability to apply for a job... What worries me is the style of teaching that often just involves mechanical repetition of core equations and pointless anecdotal exchanges about famous business stories. Business schools tend to float along this easy path, going further away from the original purpose of a university: To quench the thirst for knowledge... Business school does not actively encourage people to be interested in anything. The importance of knowing things from other majors is not only ignored, but there is a condescending undertone throughout the student body that the humanities and fine arts are “wastes of time” and the sciences are for nerds and geeks.

A Machine That Only Brews Coffee When Two People Introduce Themselves - "To help break the ice for participants, the Economic Development Board of Singapore (EDB) came up with the ‘Coffee Connector’, a coffee machine that only brews coffee when two people introduce themselves to each other"

Your Coffee Drinking Habit Could be Genetic - "Another recent study also showed how people with a "cold" personality - called alexithymia - tend to drink more coffee than people who better understand and embrace emotions"

'Renoir sucks at painting' movement demands removal of artist's works - "Geller hates Renoir so much, he started an Instagram account also called Renoir Sucks at Painting, which shows closeups of certain Renoir paintings with criticism in the comments, as well as photos of Geller and others gesturing angrily in front of various Renoir works."

An Interview with the Woman Who Drilled a Hole in Her Head to Open Up Her Mind - " Trepanation, a procedure where a small hole is drilled into the skull and left to heal naturally, can reportedly produce a prolonged positive effect on the trepanned individual's mood and overall state of well-being... Trepanation is the oldest surgical operation in the world, dating back to at least 10,000 BC, and has been carried out by independent civilizations in nearly every continent on the planet. From South America to Neolithic Europe, the practice has a rich and diverse history. Shiva, the Hindu god of altered consciousness, was trepanned; it was done by monks in Tibet and up to the modern day in Africa... although it's not illegal to trepan, it's not exactly legal, either. It's a catch-22. You can't get the research authorized because there's not enough evidence to support it, but you can't get the evidence without research. I think it's strange that people can get sex changes but not trepanation—a simple operation. We should research this simple operation that could increase consciousness."

An Open Letter to Millennials Like Talia… – Stefanie Williams - "You think it is somehow more impressive to ask strangers for money by writing some “witty” open letter than it is to put on your big girl pants and take a job you might be embarrassed by in order to make ends meet. And as someone who not only took the “embarrassing job”, but thrived at it, made bank from it and found a career path through it, I am utterly disgusted by your attitude... turning this girl’s inability to work for what she wants into a conversation about poverty (Poverty! She lives in the Bay Area alone and has a corporate job and can afford fancy bourbon! Not exactly the picture of a third world crisis!) and wage issues, it’s utter bullshit"

Four years on, Ridzuan Condominium attempts to ban ‘Africans’ again - "On August 26, 2013, Malay Mail Online first reported Ridzuan Condominium’s decision to ban “African” tenants."

Malaysians Still Can't Enter The US Without A Visa Because Of This One Problem - "Malaysia has been very close in qualifying for the US VWP, fulfilling six out of the seven conditions laid out by the US... The only condition that Malaysia has failed to fulfil so far, is adhering to the minimum approval rate of 97% in filling up the US visa forms. He revealed that the country only fell short of being a participating country in the VWP because of Malaysians' inability to fill in forms correctly"
I'm sure some Malaysians will find a way to blame other people for their countrymen's inaptitude

Israeli team withdraws from table tennis meet - "Israel has pulled its team from the World Team Table Tennis Championships in Kuala Lumpur following a row with the Malaysian government over entry visas. International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) chief executive officer Judit Farago had insisted Israel must be allowed to compete or Malaysia could be banned from hosting future tournaments... Israel’s Table Tennis Association (ITTA) announced their decision on their website claiming the board decided not to send a delegation due to security concerns... Malaysia, a Muslim majority state in Southeast Asia which does not have diplomatic ties with Israel, forbade the delegates to compete under the Israeli flag, to use any symbol identifiable with Israel on their clothes or surfboards, and would not play the Israeli national anthem should an Israeli win a gold medal."
Or: don't hold events in authoritarian countries

Justice League: why the only thing dying in blockbusters is our sense of excitement | Film | The Guardian - "The last straw in unkillability might well have come with the recent Kingsman: The Golden Circle. In the first movie, we all saw Colin Firth’s character get shot in the head at point-blank range. But … he survived. If you can’t kill a character by shooting them in the head, what’s left for us to care about?

Malware and computer viruses: They’ve left porn sites for religious sites. - "“religious and ideological sites” have far surpassed pornographic websites as targets for criminal hackers... The explanation is straightforward: The entrepreneurs who run adult websites are old hands at Web security, and they’ve long since learned to use protection. Those who build and host church websites, by contrast, may have the best intentions, but they tend to be naive and inexperienced. For hackers, that makes them easy prey."