Links - 7th November 2018 (1)

South Africa farm murders: Jacob Zuma calls for white land to be confiscated - "Official statistics on farm attacks are non-existent, due to what human rights groups have described as a “cover-up” by the notoriously corrupt — and potentially complicit — South African government... While South Africa has one of the highest rates of violent crime anywhere in the world, the attacks on white farmers are no ordinary crimes. In a 2014 report, “The Reality of Farm Tortures in South Africa”, AfriForum wrote that “the horror experienced during farm tortures is almost incomprehensible”. “The well-known ‘blood sisters’ from the South African company Crimescene-cleanup have rightly indicated that, in their experience, farm tortures are by far the most horrific acts of violence in South Africa,” the report said. “They are of the opinion that the term ‘farm murders’ is misleading and that the terms ‘farm terror’ and ‘farm tortures’ are more suitable.”... human rights groups say the excessive brutality may be intended to send a message to the general farming community — get out of our country... The number of white farmers in South Africa has halved in a little over two decades to just 30,000... “The average murder ratio per 100,000 or the population in the world is nine, I believe. In South Africa, it is 54. But for the farming community it is 138, which is the highest for any occupation in the world.” Since 2007, at the direction of the government, South African police have stopped releasing statistics about the race of the victims. Monitoring group Genocide Watch says the cover-up has been exacerbated by American and European governments, which have “remained silent about the problem, reinforcing the campaign of denial”. The rise in farm attacks has been blamed on increasingly anti-white hate speech, particularly from the ruling African National Congress."

Do white people have a future in South Africa? - "In South Africa you are twice as likely to be murdered if you are a white farmer than if you are a police officer - and the police here have a particularly dangerous life. The killings of farmers are often particularly brutal... They stole next to nothing. It seemed to be a deliberate, targeted killing. Soon afterwards the son died of his injuries. Belinda van Nord, the daughter and sister of the men who died, told me how dangerous the lives of white people in the countryside have become. The police, she said, had seemed to show little interest in this case... There used to be 60,000 white farmers in South Africa. In 20 years that number has halved."

Real action on land needed to counter extreme EFF rhetoric - "For Julius Malema to use language, as he did on the weekend, that whites should "go to hell" and that the EFF plans to "cut the throat of whiteness", complete with a finger across the throat, is not tolerable in any real democracy."

Excoriating whites not the way to go - "Three years ago at the ANC’s January 8 celebrations in Bloemfontein, President Zuma sang the “Shoot the Boer” song to a stadium full of ANC supporters. The words are as follows:
“We are going to shoot them; they are going to run; we are going to shoot them, with the machine gun; they are going to run. You are a white man – we are going to hit them and you are going to run! Shoot the Boer! We are going to hit them – they are going to run! The cabinet will shoot them with the machine gun! The cabinet will shoot them with the machine gun! Shoot the Boer!”
Can one imagine the leader of any respectable country in the world expressing such deplorable views about a national minority?"

somegreybloke on Twitter - "People are so easily offended these days. That's why I only ever make jokes at the expense of white men, whose thick skins and calmly rational attitudes make them impossible to upset."

STEPHEN HAWKING: How to build a time machine - "All you need is a wormhole, the Large Hadron Collider or a rocket that goes really, really fast "

Pro Revenge Stories — The mad bartender. - "I played Cedric Sartone, simple farmer turned tavern owner who eventually turned it into THE BEST PLACE IN TOWN. It was poppin every night, I was buddies with every adventurer, soldier, mage, druid, and ranger that played the game. After they went out and grinded their skills and did their quests, I was waiting for them with a warm fire and plenty of ale. I’d buy their ingredients and make awesome food and booze (max level cooking!) and was privy to all the gossip. Little did they know I had a side hobby, I was brewing massive amounts of the most gamebreakingly toxic poison possible. For over a year I roleplayed with these people as a simple barman, pretended to be their friend and confidant, and then during a harvest festival where every player on our server was in attendance and I was payed to provide the food and drink… I poisoned every last morsel of food, every drop of drink and after the reagent delivered his speech and all of these fools raised their goblets for the toast and took that deadly sip, I stepped onto the stage and revealed what had happened. They where all going to die, and die they did."

Media Exposure and Romantic Relationship Quality: A Slippery Slope? - "total TV viewing time statistically predicted lower commitment to the relationship, while viewing of programming focusing on romantic relationships predicted lower satisfaction and stronger tendency to engage in conflicts. Consumption of media other than television and the control factors did not predict any indicator of relationship quality"

Tinder Woes, Suspicious Landlords and Snarky Bosses: Young and Russian in D.C. - "Former counterintelligence officials say Russians are particularly fond of the honey trap, the use of attractive young people, usually women, to compromise or gain influence over intelligence targets, usually older men... One former top counterintelligence official described his consternation at the recklessness of State Department officials of both sexes during the Obama years who indulged in sexual favors from in-room masseurs during their stays at the Moscow Ritz, the same hotel made infamous by the Steele dossier’s unsubstantiated allegations about Donald Trump’s behavior in the presidential suite."

A review of the carbohydrate–insulin model of obesity - "The carbohydrate–insulin model of obesity theorizes that diets high in carbohydrate are particularly fattening due to their propensity to elevate insulin secretion. Insulin directs the partitioning of energy toward storage as fat in adipose tissue and away from oxidation by metabolically active tissues and purportedly results in a perceived state of cellular internal starvation. In response, hunger and appetite increases and metabolism is suppressed, thereby promoting the positive energy balance associated with the development of obesity. Several logical consequences of this carbohydrate–insulin model of obesity were recently investigated in a pair of carefully controlled inpatient feeding studies whose results failed to support key model predictions. Therefore, important aspects of carbohydrate–insulin model have been experimentally falsified suggesting that the model is too simplistic. This review describes the current state of the carbohydrate–insulin model and the implications of its recent experimental tests."

New low carb link to life expectancy should be interpreted with caution - "The study, conducted by Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, concluded that diets which are high or lower in carbohydrate were associated with greater mortality, an increased risk of early death... The questionnaires relied upon people remembering what they ate, and it is this information that scientists used to estimate the proportion of calories they received from carbohydrates, fats and protein. There are often accuracy issues with food questionnaires and it is not possible to verify the accuracy of the answers in the study. Furthermore, with diet composition only reported at the start of the trial and six years later, the researchers acknowledge that dietary patterns could have changed over the subsequent 19 years of follow-up"

Latest Low-Carb Study: All Politics, No Science - "How is anyone supposed to recall what was eaten as many as 12 months prior? Most people can’t remember what they ate three days ago. Note that “I don’t know” or “I can’t remember” or “I gave up dairy in August” are not options; you are forced to enter a specific value. Some questions even require that you do math to convert the number of servings of fruit you consumed seasonally into an annual average—absurd. These inaccurate guesses become the “data” that form the foundation of the entire study. Foods are not weighed, measured, or recorded in any way. The entire FFQ used contained only 66 questions, yet the typical modern diet contains thousands of individual ingredients... The lowest-carbohydrate group in the study reported consuming 37% of their approximately 1,558 calories per day as carbohydrate. This 37% translates to a whopping 144 grams of carbohydrate per day. Nowhere else would this be considered a low-carbohydrate diet. Most low-carbohydrate practitioners recommend between 20 and 50 grams of carbohydrate per day. Truly low-carbohydrate diets were not studied... The authors imply that people who eat low-carbohydrate diets can delay meeting their Maker by replacing animal protein with plant protein:... This is rather misleading, as nobody substituted anything for anything else in this study—this was not an experiment. These substitutions took place only in the researchers’ minds... The field of nutritional epidemiology has a dismal track record when it comes to the validity of its guesses—more than 80% of its hypotheses are later proved wrong in clinical trials (human experiments). This is why nutrition headlines are so confusing—one day eggs are bad for us (epidemiology), the next day they are perfectly fine (clinical trials)."

Deming, data and observational studies - "It may not be appreciated how often observational claims fail to replicate. In a small sample in 2005, of 49 claims coming from highly cited studies, 14 either failed to replicate entirely or the magnitude of the claimed effect was greatly reduced (a regression to the mean). Six of these 49 studies were observational studies, and in these six, in effect, randomly chosen observational studies, five failed to replicate. This last is an 83% failure rate... We ourselves carried out an informal but comprehensive accounting of 12 randomised clinical trials that tested observational claims – see Table 1. The 12 clinical trials tested 52 observational claims. They all confirmed no claims in the direction of the observational claims. We repeat that figure: 0 out of 52. To put it another way, 100% of the observational claims failed to replicate. In fact, five claims (9.6%) are statistically significant in the clinical trials in the opposite direction to the observational claim. To us, a false discovery rate of over 80% is potent evidence that the observational study process is not in control. The problem, which has been recognised at least since 1988, is systemic"

Raising Kids With Religion Or Spirituality May Protect Their Mental Health: Study - "It turned out that those who attended religious services at least once a week as children or teens were about 18% more likely to report being happier in their 20s than those who never attended services. They were also almost 30% more likely to do volunteer work and 33% less likely to use drugs in their 20s as well."

China Once Looked Tough on Trade. Now Its Options Are Dwindling. - The New York Times - "China does not import nearly enough from the United States to target $200 billion in American goods — let alone the additional $267 billion in Chinese goods that Mr. Trump has threatened to tax... more drastic moves, like closing factories or encouraging consumer boycotts of American goods, could eliminate Chinese jobs. They could also permanently damage China’s reputation as a place to do business and only accelerate corporate plans to look to other countries."

After a Suicide Attempt, the Risk of Another Try - The New York Times - "A common yet highly inaccurate belief is that people who survive a suicide attempt are unlikely to try again. In fact, just the opposite is true. Within the first three months to a year following a suicide attempt, people are at highest risk of a second attempt — and this time perhaps succeeding. A recent analysis of studies that examined successful suicides among those who made prior attempts found that one person in 25 had a fatal repeat attempt within five years."
Are suicide prevention and euthanasia promotion compatible? If not (if one claims that euthanasia is only for those with terminal conditions and/or those whose {physical} conditions cause them unbearable pain), is this stigmatising mental illness by viewing it as less real than physical illness

Scots and Catalans - History Extra - "There's an editorial in the Times in the 1850swhich says the Scots are a country in manifest want of a grievance. Aand that sense of a grievance, annoying sense of grievance does play its part in the maintenance and the fermenting of Scottish nationalism. But in comparison with the Catalans Scottish grievances are frankly minimal"