Links - 14th September 2019

Google And Facebook Can Track Your Porn History, Even When You're In Incognito

twenty-four examples of filial piety (10): lady tang tirelessly feeds her mother-in-law with breast milk - "In the time of the Tang Dynasty, an official named Cui Nanshan, had an elderly great-grandmother. She had lost all her teeth, thus she could not chew even soft rice. Eating was a big problem. Mr. Cui's grandmother, the Lady Tang, realized the difficulty her mother-in-law had in chewing food, and thus came upon a solution to keep her alive and in good health. The Lady Tang would wake up each morning, perform her daily toilet of washing her face and combing her hair, then she would enter her mother-in-law's chambers and proceed to feed her mother-in-law breast milk from her own body. The elderly matron had no trouble digesting this nutriment, and thus thanks to her daughter-in-law, even though she could not eat normal food, her body stayed strong and healthy."

The Thai Queen who Couldn't be Saved Because an Ancient Law Forbade Touching a Royal - "At the time of her death, Sunandha Kumariratana already had one daughter and was expecting another child. In May 1880, when Sunandha was just 19 years old, she was on a trip to the royal family’s bountiful Bang Pa-In summer residence, outside of Bangkok. She was accompanied by Princess Karnabhorn Bejraratana, not even two years old, and a group of guards and servants... the royal vessel capsized in strong currents and both were plunged into the water. None of the royal entourage proceeded to help them. Supposedly everyone followed the lead of the main guard, who did not assist them or urge anyone else to help the drowning royals–all three lives were lost while their attendants just stood and watched. The guards, and everyone else on the scene, were adhering to an old and rigid Siamese law that did not allow any ordinary person to touch a member of the royal family. Breaking this law was punishable with death. According to Misfit History, besides the law, any desire to help save the life of the queen could have been diminished by a superstitious belief as well. Allegedly, saving a person who was drowning in the river was associated with misfortune. If someone offered help to the person that meant meddling with the spirits who lived in the water."

The Evidence for Caloric Restriction - Intensive Dietary Management (IDM) - "we believe in evidence based medicine. So, where is the evidence that reducing calorie intake as the primary strategy results in long term meaningful weight loss?... We’ve recommended the ‘Eat Less, Move More’ strategy for almost half a century. Where are all these studies? Oh, right. They all conclusively show that CRaP does NOT produce long term weight loss"

Effects of dieting and exercise on resting metabolic rate and implications for weight management - "the majority of the studies point to a reduction in short-term resting metabolic rates that is greater than can be explained by the loss of body mass or fat-free mass over the same time period...  this disproportionate reduction reflects metabolic processes associated with the hypocaloric dieting itself. When calorie balance is resumed, the resting metabolic rate is dependent on the new body mass, especially fat-free mass. This is relevant for motivated patients who adhere to severe hypocaloric diets to achieve rather large weight losses. When they get to goal weight their metabolic rate is severely depressed, and they can experience almost immediate weight gain if they resume their prior higher calorie intakes... Family practice physicians can facilitate healthy and successful weight management among their patient populations by heeding the following tips: (i) determine long-term weight goals based on obtaining a body mass index under 27, if possible 25; (ii) determine short-term weight goals based on a reduction of 1 to 2 body mass index units (approximately 4.5–7.3 kilograms or 10–16 pounds); (iii) encourage patients to maintain this interim goal for 6 months to allow for readjustment of resting metabolic rate for new body mass (as well as for psychosocial adjustments and commitment to necessary behaviour changes); and (iv) determine the next short-term weight goal. Continue to support patient through this cyclical process until body mass index is at least under 27, if not at 25"
In other words, weight loss reduces one's metabolism. Calories out - calories in isn't a complete picture since the variables keep changing and interacting

A Molecular Hurdle Might Make Weight Loss Even More Difficult - "The American conventional wisdom about weight loss is simple: A calorie deficit is all that’s required to drop excess pounds, and moderating future calorie consumption is all that’s required to maintain it. To the idea’s adherents, the infinite complexity of human biology acts as one big nutritional piggy bank. Anyone who gains too much weight or loses weight and gains it back has simply failed to balance the caloric checkbook, which can be corrected by forswearing fatty food or carbs.Endocrinologists have known for decades that the science of weight is far more complicated than calorie deficits and energy expenditures... Schmidt and her team have unlocked a molecular mechanism controlling weight gain and loss in mice: a protein that shuts down the animals’ ability to burn fat in times of bodily stress, including when dieting or overeating. This discovery might hold the key to understanding why it’s so hard for humans to lose weight, and even harder to keep it off... Schmidt’s latest study found an enormous difference in weight gain between two test groups: conventional mice and mice whose RAGE pathway had been deleted. The latter group gained 70 percent less weight than conventional mice, had lower glucose levels, and expended more energy while eating the same high-fat diet and doing the same amount of physical activity. The conventional mice’s bodies hit the metabolism brakes, making it impossible for them to burn as much energy as their RAGE-deleted counterparts."

Janice Fiamengo on Twitter - "In too many cases today, divorce law is a system whereby a man is forced, on penalty of incarceration, to pay his ex-wife to steal his children from him."

Meme - "Majority of Mexicans say immigrants are a burden on their country, favor deporting migrants who travel through Mexico to reach U.S., poll finds"
"Are MSNBC, CNN, AOC & The Dems going to go to Mexico & call Mexicans anti-Hispanic racists?"

More than 60% of Racist Mexicans Want Migrants to 'Go Home' - "American observers of Mexico were confident that President Manuel Lopez Obrador would lose support from his far-left base for stepping up enforcement of immigrant laws. Hoo, boy were they wrong!"

Sargon of Akkad - Posts - "The whole point of having a free press is so that it can mobilize the public against anti-democratic despots. A functioning free press shouldn’t just be calling Trump “racist” — it should be actively working to defeat the modern Republican Party that enables him."
"Carlos Maza believes that the role of journalists is to command the public."
Ironically, Carlos Maza calls himself a "Marxist pig", so he should have no objections to journalists being called "enemy of the people"
Twitter comments: "That's not journalism that's called activism"
""mobilize the public" . I thought journalists were supposed to inform the public, not manipulate them."
"Wow, savior complex is over 9000!!!"
"the point of the press should be to inform the public of the truth so that they can choose to mobilise in whichever fashion seems appropriate, surely"
"The whole point of having a free press is so that it can mobilize the public against anti-republic despots. A functioning free press shouldn’t just be calling Democrats “maxist” — it should be actively working to defeat the modern Democrat Party that enables them."

John Lam - "Whenever you read about Temasek losing money on an investment, one of the retorts you commonly hear is how the CPF minimum sum is going to increase again or that the CPF Board is going bankrupt. Or when GIC invests in a big real estate venture, there would be some comments on how Ho Ching is gambling our money away. As someone from the fund management industry who deals with institutional clients, I get annoyed at the above comments because they are factually wrong. Temasek doesn’t manage CPF money and GIC has nothing to do with Ho Ching. But for the layman, it can be rather confusing since Singapore has not one, not two but three entities who manage Singapore’s assets... contrary to naysayers, GIC isn’t losing money on its investments. Not at a portfolio level anyway. For Financial Year 2018, GIC’s 20 year return is 3.4% above global inflation. It’s not super fantastic but it’s definitely not loss making either. Similarly for Temasek, it has helped generate returns of 15% to shareholders over the past 40 years. (This is on an annualised basis and excludes capital injections). In summary, Temasek started off as a holdings company for Singapore Inc but today, behaves somewhat similar to a fund manager while GIC is the fund manager for the Government of Singapore. Both sovereign wealth funds have had loss making investments that have made the news in the past but the gains they made from more profitable investments far outweighs the less profitable ones."

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "We now find out that the Southern District of New York will not bring any charges over hush money payments. They apparently decided the payments weren’t illegal.Which brings us to Michael Cohen pleading guilty to a campaign finance violation for hush money payments, along with other charges. Much was made about this by Trump’s opponents but nothing in the public record suggested a crime was committed by Cohen — either way, Trump making the payment wasn’t criminal. My guess is the guilty plea was a dirty trick by Cohen and his lawyer Lanny Davis to create problems for Trump. They agreed to accept a package deal of charges, fines, and jail time and made sure that charge was included as one of the ‘guilty’ pleas while others were dismissed. We will probably never know for sure.With this, another legal ‘scandal’ against Trump ends in a whimper. There may be some embarrassing information released from this investigation but no criminal charges."

Swordsfall | Drift of Dreams Kickstarter Open Now! on Twitter - "I don't understand how every Black American doesn't walk around with a crowbar hitting every white person they see until they get tired."
"Cause we're outnumbered"
"I mean, I can see that. I just, it's gotta be so exhausting and infuriating constantly to deal with these hateful idiots. I do, and they wear me out."
"By the time you're ten you just get use to the danger of white people."
"Yet black people commit over 50% of vilent crime while only being around 15% of the population. So statisticaly whites should be far mode afraid of blacks than Visa versa. And OP's crowbar tweet only reinforces this, as well as the blacks being violent stereotype."
It's amazing how racist and hateful these people are. Though perhaps not as amazing as how many racist white people support this mentality

Emily Atkin on Twitter - "I'm the hurricane expert in this conversation"
"Live action shot of what it's like to be a female climate reporter arguing with male meteorologists online
Like, fuck my journalism degree and 5 1/2 years on the climate beat, right?"
If you're a female and wrong, just accuse a man of mansplaining

Abortion and Crime, Revisited (Ep. 384) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "LEVITT: Everybody hated it [the argument that abortion reduced crime]. People who are in favor of right-to-life were upset because our argument seemed to be endorsing the idea that legalized abortion had positive effects. But many people who believed in the right to choose, they were also upset because we were kind of saying, “Well you’re killing these fetuses, so they never get a chance to grow up to be criminals.” The number of death threats that I got from the left was actually greater than the number of death threats I got from the right. Because the other thing that emerged out of the media coverage is that it very quickly became a question of race, even though really our paper wasn’t about race at all."
The tolerant left strikes again - even on a topic that you would imagine would upset the right more

Why NZ cleared a Chinese man for touching a boy's penis - "A 79-year-old Chinese man appeared in court in New Zealand last week after he pinched a toddler's penis in a swimming pool changing room.But despite admitting assault, he was let off a charge as the judge accepted his argument that the behaviour was a traditional sign of affection in China... Chinese man Ren Changfu saw a boy he didn't know getting changed with his father. Ren went over to talk to them, flicked the toddler's penis, laughed and touched it again"

Psychiatrists Reminded To Refrain From Armchair Analysis Of Public Figures - "APA President Maria A. Oquendo wrote: "The unique atmosphere of this year's election cycle may lead some to want to psychoanalyze the candidates, but to do so would not only be unethical, it would be irresponsible."Oquendo was referring to the "Goldwater Rule," a guideline adopted by the APA after a 1964 survey of psychiatrists found that nearly half of those polled felt that GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was psychologically unfit to be president.The rule states that despite the shiny diagnostic T-ball Trump has propped in front of them — his volatility, his grandiosity, his entitlement — professional code holds that if they haven't performed an in-person evaluation, psychiatrists should keep quiet on the mental character of public figures (unless of course they have that person's permission to speak out)... Ghaemi, McAdams and the other mental health experts I interviewed in reporting this piece all staunchly advise against diagnosing public figures from afar — armchair psychiatry, they feel, is a great irresponsibility.But many also feel that even in the absence of a diagnosis, the more general psychological interpretations common to cable news and other media outlets — not under the rubric of the Goldwater Rule, psychologists show up with exceptional frequency as talking heads — can be ethically dubious. "I think offering semi-psychological interpretations is a poor idea for psychologists and psychiatrists," said Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University's Langone Medical Center. "How can anyone give an in-depth character analysis on psychological or mental health grounds without knowing or examining the person at all?"Caplan feels doing so not only stirs up gossip — gossip that demeans those suffering from diagnosed mental illness — but risks pathologizing what could be normal, if off-putting, personality traits... plenty of people with mental illness attain great success: CEOs, performers and even psychiatrists."Whether we like it or not, many have the notion that an individual with a psychiatric condition is less capable than others," she laments. "The fact is that's simply not true."Ghaemi has written extensively on how mental illness can positively contribute to character and success in many ways, whether it's the empathy and realism sometimes imparted by depression (Lincoln, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. come to mind) or the ambition and creativity brought on by mania. A 2006 study out of Duke University reviewed the historical records of 37 presidents and concluded that 18 of them met criteria of psychiatric diagnoses... upwards of 20 percent of the population experiences mental illness in a given year"