Links - 8th October 2018 (1)

Liberal, Not Lefty on Twitter - Kamala Harris: "Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?"
"1. Selective service (only answer one needs to rebut Harris)
2. Performing circumcision on male babies
3. Regardless of my personal opinion, many pro lifers would argue the government allows the murder of thousands of male unborn babies (their words, not mine) every year"

Clay Routledge on Twitter - "We are living in an era of woke capitalism in which companies pretend to care about social justice to sell products to people who pretend to hate capitalism."

Obama administration spied on Fox News reporter James Rosen: Report - "The Justice Department spied extensively on Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2010, collecting his telephone records, tracking his movements in and out of the State Department and seizing two days of Rosen’s personal emails... The Obama administration has prosecuted twice as many leakers as all previous administrations combined."
Trump is the only one waging a war on the media; it's okay to exclude Fox News from news conferences if you don't like them

Woman, 59, 'had sex with boy, 14, on a balcony in Ibiza' - "His mum bought him two bottles of beer but did not realise Dickinson was giving him more alcohol when she got up. He said: ‘Gail was coming on to me. She was touching my shoulders and legs.' The teenager admitted he ‘regretted’ the alleged encounter the following morning and claimed it only happened because he was ‘pretty drunk’."
If a 59 year old man had had sex with a 14 year old girl after plying her with alcohol...

Transgender person accused of rape is remanded into female prison and sexually assaults inmates within days - "The prison service has apologised after a transgender inmate, charged with raping a woman, sexually assaulted four fellow inmates just days after being remanded into an all female jail. Convicted paedophile Karen White, who was born Stephen Wood, was undergoing gender reassignment, but had not undergone full surgery, when she was accused of repeatedly raping a woman in 2016. The 52-year-old, who had been previously been jailed in 2001 for a sex attack on a child, told the authorities she identified as a woman and was remanded into HMP New Hall near Wakefield, West Yorkshire... Dr Nicola Williams, spokeswoman for Fair Play for Women, which campaigns to preserve women's spaces, added: "This just shows that the risk assessments that prisons do are not good enough, because it's allowed a rapist, with a penis, into a women's prison. And women have been sexually assaulted. It is absolutely outrageous. "We have to change the prison guidance now. There should be no fully intact male-bodied prisoners, ever, in women's prisons." Sarah Ditum, a feminist campaigner said: "This is exactly what feminists have been warning about in the redefinition of sex and gender identity, is the possibility that people such as Karen White, who've got a clear sexual motive for wanting to be put into women's intimate spaces, are going to take advantage of it. It's appalling that something like this has been allowed to happen.""
Transphobia! It is worse to be transphobic than to protect women

Gad Saad on Twitter - "Collective Munchausen following @realDonaldTrump's 2016 victory:
1) The economy will be destroyed
2) A dictatorship will be installed
3) "People of color" and other "marginalized" groups will no longer be safe in the US
4) Global war will erupt due to Trump's instability
5) US democracy will cease to function (linked to prediction 2)
6) Gay rights will be abolished
7) Jews will face greater discrimination because bruh Trump is a Nazi. [Many other hysteric predictions by "intellectual" types were made.]
How many of these fears have materialized? My pointing this obnoxious nonsensical hysteria DOES NOT in any way implying that my wife and I make love with posters of Trump in the bedroom. The point here is to highlight the astonishing collective psychosis that has gripped a broad range of "progressives.""

Facebook Fueled Anti-Refugee Attacks in Germany, New Research Suggests - The New York Times
Like with the study that showed that those who read the news more were more "Islamophobic", this means that the media is the problem

Opinion | Those Who Can Do, Can’t Teach - The New York Times - "Although it’s often said that those who can’t do teach, the reality is that the best doers are often the worst teachers."

Dozens at Facebook Unite to Challenge Its ‘Intolerant’ Liberal Culture - The New York Times - "Titled “We Have a Problem With Political Diversity,” it quickly took off inside the social network. “We are a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views,” Brian Amerige, a senior Facebook engineer, wrote in the post, which was obtained by The New York Times. “We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology.”... The new group has upset other Facebook employees, who said its online posts were offensive to minorities. One engineer, who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, said several people had lodged complaints with their managers about FB’ers for Political Diversity and were told that it had not broken any company rules. Another employee said the group appeared to be constructive and inclusive of different political viewpoints... Mr. Amerige proposed that Facebook employees debate their political ideas in the new group — one of tens of thousands of internal groups that cover a range of topics — adding that this debate would better equip the company to host a variety of viewpoints on its platform. “We are entrusted by a great part of the world to be impartial and transparent carriers of people’s stories, ideas and commentary,” Mr. Amerige wrote. “Congress doesn’t think we can do this. The president doesn’t think we can do this. And like them or not, we deserve that criticism.”"
The comments I read on this (just like the internal Facebook reaction) were largely bashing them, proving their point

Can You Spot the Deceptive Facebook Post? - The New York Times
If "fake" Facebook pages meant to sow division are so similar to "real" ones, what does it say about the "real" ones

Gallup Poll: If 1962 referendum was Yes-No vote, 90% would have voted against merger. - "The PAP itself, perhaps aware of sentiments on the ground, tried to discredit the poll by it's age-old tactic of mud-slinging. The results of the Gallup Poll revealed that 90% of the residents that returned the Prime Minister to the Legislature voted against Merger.

Universities must give more top degrees to black students, under new proposals by regulator - "Universities could be punished unless they give a higher proportion of top degrees to black students, under new proposals drawn up by the regulator."
This will increase the value of black students who have degrees since employers will know that they deserve it

Daytime Naps Linked to Increased Risk of Alzheimer's Disease - "people who are very sleepy during the day were three times more likely than those who were well-rested during the day to have a hallmark for Alzheimer's disease. The new research contributes to an increasing body of evidence that a good night's sleep could be a factor in preventing Alzheimer's disease"

The End of Neutrality - "The importance we place on neutrality in our institutions is actually somewhat new. It grew out of what the intellectual historian Edward Purcell, in the title of an influential 1973 book, called the “crisis of democratic theory,” which gripped American intellectual culture in the 1920s and ’30s. In that era, worldwide depression and a backlash against the idealism of World War I undermined the grounds for believing that democracy was necessarily the best form of government. Because philosophers and social scientists had come to embrace empiricism over rationalism—arguing that our knowledge came from experience, not reason—many intellectuals had lost their confidence in the older philosophical principles that had once seemed absolute. A relativistic outlook seeped into American culture, even affecting how people thought about democracy. But in the crucible of World War II and the fight against totalitarianism, Purcell showed, there emerged a revised defense of democracy. In place of the fashionable cynicism of the 1920s and ’30s came the idea that democracy was superior as a system of government precisely because it wasn’t absolute. It allowed multiple viewpoints to coexist and compete, and it was capable of revision. Although this argument took place at a rarefied level, among scholars and intellectuals, their ideas crept into popular thought... Postmodern critiques of scholarly values were more often mocked than embraced. Objectivity remained a respected ideal. It’s hard to say when the rejection of neutrality went from being a persistent intellectual critique to a dominant belief—or even whether it’s reached that point yet. But the battle in late 2000 over the outcome of the presidential election was a symbolic watershed. That the Supreme Court voted 5-4 along ideological lines to make George W. Bush president deepened the suspicion that not only ostensibly neutral election processes but even the law itself would succumb to the political preferences of those administering it"

Braco (faith healer) - Wikipedia - "Braco... sometimes called "the Gazer", is a self-styled "healer" from Croatia. He does not touch, speak to, diagnose, or treat the people who come to see him — rather, he stands on a platform and gazes"

Domino's Pizza tattoos earn some Russians 'free pizza for life' - "The post says people who get tattoos will be given a certificate offering a maximum of 100 free pizzas, per year, for a century - a possible 10,000 pizzas. But to get that many free meals you would have to live well beyond the average Russian life expectancy."

Bell Burnell: Physics star gives away £2.3m prize - "The sum will go to fund women, under-represented ethnic minority and refugee students to become physics researchers. Prof Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell has been awarded a Breakthrough Prize for the discovery of radio pulsars... Prof Bell Burnell believes that under-represented groups - who will benefit from the donation - will bring new ideas to the field... She now says she wants to use her prize money to counter what she describes as the "unconscious bias" that she believes still occurs in physics research jobs. The former president of the Institute of Physics (IOP) believes that it was because she was from a minority group herself that she had the fresh ideas required to make her discovery as a young student at Cambridge University more than 50 years ago."
If "minorities" bring different perspectives it means they think differently from over-represented groups. But of course anyone who suggests that the difference means they don't/won't do as well as over-represented groups in any way (even if overall they are still better) is a sexist, racist, Nazi

Cosmic Search Vol. 1, No. 1 - Little Green Men, White Dwarfs or Pulsars? - "It has been suggested that I should have had a part in the Nobel Prize awarded to Tony Hewish for the discovery of pulsars. There are several comments that I would like to make on this: First, demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve. Secondly, it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project. We hear of cases where a supervisor blames his student for a failure, but we know that it is largely the fault of the supervisor. It seems only fair to me that he should benefit from the successes, too. Thirdly, I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them. Finally, I am not myself upset about it - after all, I am in good company, am I not!"
Are male feminists who claim she is a victim of sexism mansplaining?

Kuwaiti shop caught sticking googly eyes on fish - "A fishmonger in Kuwait has been closed down for sticking googly eyes on fish to make them appear fresher... another Kuwaiti fishmonger was accused of stuffing his fish with steel nails to increase their weight and market value"

All the good non-fiction that was ever on TV was made by middle-aged men | The Spectator - "All the good non-fiction things that were ever on TV — from Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation to David Attenborough’s Planet Earth (the bits where he’s not proselytising about climate doom, I mean), from Andrew Graham-Dixon’s arty jaunts to Italy to Jonathan Meades’s bizarro forays into architecture, from The World at War to all those more recent war porn documentaries narrated by Sam West, from Werner Herzog’s Little Dieter Needs To Fly to Louis Theroux doing a number on Jimmy Savile — have one thing in common: they were all made by middle-aged men... according to Cassian Harrison, the editor of BBC Four. ‘There’s a mode of programming that involves a presenter, usually white, middle-aged and male, standing on a hill and “telling you like it is”. We all recognise the era of that has passed,’ Cassy-babes recently told Edinburgh Television Festival... mostly white, middle-aged male TV bosses like Cassy-babes (current salary, courtesy of you and me the licence-fee payers: £170,000) have made it so. They’ve taken away the stuff that we like — war, middle-aged male presenters etc. — and replaced it with stuff we don’t like nearly as much — wittering females, worthiness to do with race or disability, etc. All because of some nonsense they were taught about gender, diversity or social justice, which no one cares about in the real world — only at the BBC or on Common Purpose training courses."

Why is a BBC executive calling for the removal of middle-aged white men from television? | The Spectator - "Why would one of the Beeb’s most senior executives, himself a white, middle-aged man, say something likely to antagonise such a large number of the people who pay his £170,000 salary, i.e. licence payers? After all, 87.2 per cent of the UK’s population is white and I imagine the same is true of the 26 million households that forked out £150.50 for a TV licence in the past year. So, when Cassian Harrison says ‘we all’ agree that time’s up for white men, I don’t think he’s speaking on behalf of all the licence payers. Nor is he speaking for viewers more generally. Let’s not forget that the most popular British television programme of last year, with 14 million viewers, was Blue Planet II, which involved a white male (David Attenborough) standing in front of a camera and explaining stuff."