Washington owes Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch an apology - "I testified at his Senate hearing, favoring his confirmation despite unrelenting attacks on him as a “rubber stamp” and an ideologue. Gorsuch has proven his detractors wrong and, as this term has proven, he has emerged as one of the most consistent and courageous voices on the Supreme Court. Indeed, a number of senators and pundits in Washington owe Gorsuch an apology for their attacks on someone who is building a new legacy that could be one of the most lasting on the Supreme Court. Gorsuch has been fascinating to watch over the last two years. He has departed repeatedly from the right of the Supreme Court to do what he considers to be the right thing. He remains a conservative justice but, like his predecessor Antonin Scalia, he has shown a sense of his own “true north” judicial compass. In doing so, he has often made both the left and right of the Supreme Court seem shallow and predictable in their rigidity... Kavanaugh also has broken from the right wing of the Supreme Court on occasion... Gorsuch deserves an apology. Many liberal advocates lambasted him despite his stellar reputation as an appellate judge. His actual record was irrelevant to them, and it likely will mean little to them that Gorsuch has now shown more flexibility than certain members in the left wing of the Supreme Court."
Justice Ginsburg on Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh - "'Siegel noted that President Gerald Ford had said he had looked for the best legal mind in the country before selecting Stevens in 1975. He suggested that may not be the criterion for more recent court nominations.But Ginsburg pushed back gently. "I can say that my two newest colleagues are very decent and very smart individuals," she said, referring to Trump's choices of Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh.Later, she invoked the pair when saying "there are a number of cases this term where we didn't divide along so-called party lines.""Keen observers of what the court does will have noticed that I assigned an opinion this term to Justice Kavanaugh and two to Justice Gorsuch." The chance to assign majority opinions is dictated by seniority, so Ginsburg has the power only when Roberts and the court's longest-serving justice, Clarence Thomas, are on the other side'...
Justice Kavanaugh "made history" by being the first justice to hire all female clerks for a single term. As a consequence, Barnes notes, this past term was the first time ever there were more female clerks than male clerks at the Court."
How long before Ruth Bader Ginsburg becomes a Nazi?
Boeing's 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers - "It remains the mystery at the heart of Boeing Co.’s 737 Max crisis: how a company renowned for meticulous design made seemingly basic software mistakes leading to a pair of deadly crashes. Longtime Boeing engineers say the effort was complicated by a push to outsource work to lower-paid contractors... Increasingly, the iconic American planemaker and its subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace -- notably India... one staffer complained about sending drawings back to a team in Russia 18 times before they understood that the smoke detectors needed to be connected to the electrical system, said Cynthia Cole, a former Boeing engineer who headed the engineers’ union from 2006 to 2010.“Engineering started becoming a commodity”... With a strong dollar, a big part of the attraction was price. Engineers in India made around $5 an hour; it’s now $9 or $10, compared with $35 to $40 for those in the U.S. on an H1B visa, he said. But he’d tell clients the cheaper hourly wage equated to more like $80 because of the need for supervision, and he said his firm won back some business to fix mistakes... The 787 entered service three years late and billions of dollars over budget in 2011, in part because of confusion introduced by the outsourcing strategy. Under Dennis Muilenburg, a longtime Boeing engineer who became chief executive in 2015, the company has said that it planned to bring more work back in-house for its newest planes."
Pomperipossa in Monismania - Wikipedia - ""Pomperipossa in Monismania" (also called Pomperipossa in the World Of Money) is a satirical story written by the Swedish children's book author Astrid Lindgren in response to the 102% marginal tax rate that she incurred in 1976... [It] created a major debate about the Swedish tax system.The marginal tax rate above 100%, dubbed the 'Pomperipossa effect', was due to tax legislation that required self-employed individuals to pay both regular income tax and employer's fees.The story, a satirical allegory about a writer of children's books in a distant country, led to a stormy tax debate and is often attributed as a decisive factor in the defeat of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, for the first time in 40 years, in the elections later the same year"
Pomperipossa in Monismania: a true tale of a 102% tax rate in Sweden - ""Creating something of value causes envy. The community cries: no payola! In the banal bickering of bureaucrats you must take part. And help Comrade Castro carry out war in Angola, Or face therapy nursing home style – you old fart,"I find these libertarian type arguments, wherein the government is just there to steal from the people who are creating value, to be disingenuous, and quite puerile.They of course ignore all the external inputs that allow the protagonist to 'create' whatever it is of value that they claim ownership over, such as education, law-and-order, scientific research, and all the other requisites of a functioning society, which are of course funded by taxes."
Pomperipossa in Monismania. - "In the good old days, when the marginal tax rate was at most 83%, there was something called “periodic support”. This meant that, if you – like Pomperipossa in the good old days – had a little bit more money than she needed for bare subsistence, and had some less fortunate relatives or other people you really cared for, you could give them periodic support. These support payments were deductible, and just because of that, it was possible to give them. The welfare cake would still get its reasonable portion, since the one getting the support must pay taxes on it. But one beautiful day the hairs on all the wise men began standing on end again. Perhaps they had heard of a Monismanic son with adequate income giving his poor mom 25 000 in yearly support, so that she could live above poverty. Shame, shame, this is not right, the wise men thought. Support is not the duty of her son, it takes a village. This way we can assure that everyone is equally poor – or not poor if we could just get hold of some more revenue enhancements. We must put a stop to it! And this they did."
Does Apologizing Work? An Empirical Test of the Conventional Wisdom by Richard Hanania - "Politicians and other public figures often apologize after making controversial statements. While it is assumed that they are wise to do so, this proposition has yet to be tested empirically. There are reasons to believe that apologizing makes public figures appear weak and risk averse, which may make them less attractive as people and lead members of the public to want to punish them. This paper presents the results of an experiment where respondents were given two versions of two real-life controversies involving comments made by public figures. Approximately half of the participants read a story that made it appear as if the person had apologized, while the rest were led to believe that the individual stood firm. In the first experiment, involving Rand Paul and his comments on the Civil Rights Act, hearing that he was apologetic did not change whether respondents were less likely to vote for him. When presented with two versions of the controversy surrounding Larry Summers and his comments about women scientists and engineers, however, liberals and females were much more likely to say that he definitely or probably should have faced negative consequences for his statement when presented with his apology. The effects on other groups were smaller or neutral. Overall, the evidence suggests that when a prominent figure apologizes for a controversial statement, the public is either unaffected or becomes more likely to desire that the individual be punished."
More proof that you should never apologise to SJWs - if they're attacking you over something ridiculous, an apology just makes things worse. Probably because it vindicates them so they become even more vicious
Keywords: apologising psychology liberals no effect, apologies are ineffective liberals, apologise to liberals, liberals smell blood, no point apologising, test apology hypothesis
Segments of Random Thoughts - Posts - "Glastonbury Live: "Open to all! DH "I don't see any borders. Do you?""
"Glastonbury reveals 'super-fence'"
The case of Rhino Albino and other B.C. human rights complaints - "In 2012, Ikponwosa Ero, a woman with albinism, launched a human rights complaint against Earl’s Restaurants in Vancouver because it had a beer called Albino Rhino on tap. The product had been on offer for 25 years at that point.The company claimed the rhyming name was intended to be “whimsical and fun” and denote that the beer was “rare and special,” like a white rhino, and was not intended to be discriminatory...
When Guillame Rey, a server at a Vancouver Milestones restaurant, was fired from his job for rudeness in August 2017, he claimed it wasn’t his fault — he’s French.The professional manner Rey’s co-workers called “combative” and his employer described as “rude and disrespectful” was simply “direct and expressive” and totally within the norms in his home country of France, Rey claimed. He said firing him amounted to discrimination on the basis of place of origin — a creative interpretation of section 13 of the province’s Human Rights Code...
Mokua Gichuru, a man whose use of the B.C. court system has been legally limited because of his long-established habit to sue over anything and everything, complained to the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal in 2016 because a Vancouver swing dancing club banned him for being “creepy.” This amounts to “blatant stereotyping” of older, black men interacting with younger women, and is discrimination on the basis of age, sex and race, Gichuru claimed."
Canadians are paying sky-high prices for flights – and merger could make it worse - "For most Canadians, flying from one corner of their country to the other can be a pricey endeavour – so expensive, in fact, that they could fly to Europe or Asia for nearly the same price.Online travel agency Kiwi noted in its 2017 flight price index that Canadians pay more than twice the price Americans do for similar-distance domestic flights... Canadian airlines are tough to threaten, because the federal government works hard to keep foreign competitors at bay... Some foreign airlines have instead boosted service at airports just across the US border. According to the Conference Board of Canada, 5 million Canadians a year cross the border on land to fly out of US airports... the Canadian government owns the majority of the country’s airports, and leases them to local airport authorities. Most regional markets have only one airport, which keeps the number of available gates low"
Lack of Competition Costs Canadians $1-billion/yr - "Greater competition in the tightly-controlled mobile wireless market could result in savings of about $1 billion a year for consumers and the wider economy, says the Competition Bureau... The bureau says the three largest wireless companies, which together have about 90 per cent of Canada’s cellphone market, have the power to maintain prices above competitive levels for a significant period of time. “The bureau estimates that increased retail competition from an additional nationwide mobile wireless carrier could result in gains of approximately $1 billion per year to the Canadian economy in the form of better product choices, price reductions and other benefits to customers”... This backs up the landmark study released by the CBC using data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that compared the cost of cell phone use in Canada to that of 19 other countries. They found that in Canada a mid-range cell phone package costs an average of $572.86 US per year, which is almost $175 more than the average."
From 2014
A (brief) history of Australian food - "The Australian food scene has been evolving in pattern with migration since Chinese gold rush prospectors began sharing food in the 1900s. “Chinese restaurants emerged as a commercial enterprise on the Victorian goldfields,” says Barbara Nichol in her paper Sweet and Sour History: Melbourne’s early Chinese history. By 1890, one third of all cooks in Australia were Chinese, operating “cookshops” to serve Chinese diggers a hot meal from the back rooms of other businesses. The majority of Chinese settlers came from Southern China’s Guangdong Province, so Cantonese food was on the menu. Little wonder then that the cooks were soon serving people from all nationalities, not just the Chinese. Even when the White Australia Policy abruptly drew a halt to Chinese immigration in 1901, special visa favours were made for Chinese chefs... “In the first half of the 20th century the Chinese restaurant was one of the most visible symbols of cultural diversity in Sydney.” The Italians were not far behind... “It is hard to believe that vegetables that we now take for granted, such as eggplants and zucchini, were virtually unknown to the Australian public,” Vicki Swinbank writes in A brief history of the development of Italian Cuisine in Australia. “It must have been a real culture shock for Italians coming to Australian in the early days and being confronted with the typical Australian way of eating at the time. A diet consisting largely of meat, often three times a day, a very limited range of vegetables, all washed down with gallons of tea.”... In their 2014 paper Thailand in Australia, Tamerlaine Beasley, Philip Hirsch and Soimart Rungmanee estimated that more than a quarter of all restaurants in Greater Sydney are Thai"
'World of Warcraft's' virtual gold is seven times more valuable than Venezuela's real money - "The virtual gold in "World of Warcraft," the online role-playing game, is now almost seven times more valuable than real cash from Venezuela, whose economy is in shambles. "
Don’t kill mosquitoes - let them take blood donation, urges French animal-rights activist - "People should not kill mosquitoes but allow them to take "blood donations", a French animal-rights activist has said.Aymeric Caron, a television presenter, said the insects sucked human blood to obtain protein for their eggs, which was “embarrassing for anti-specists who realise they are being attacked by a mother trying to nourish her future children”.Anti-specists are those who oppose discrimination against any species, usually animals."
So much for the slippery slope being a paranoid right wing fantasy
Friday, September 06, 2019
History According to Bob - Trojan War
Heinrich Schliemann Part 2:
Schliemann was also looking for a suitable wife who would accompany him on the dig. He had divorced his Russian wife and decided on a Greek wife, and he decided that because he liked the sound of the Greek language, especially when it was spoken by a woman. Everywhere Schliemann traveled, he had Greek books. He saw actually the world through Greek eyes and even became a fanatical supporter of Greek claims to control of Constantinople, which is now Istanbul. So obviously a Greek wife would be ideal. But how to find one?
Now he wrote to a priest friend of his, a Greek Orthodox priest named Vimposs [sp?] and described to him the kind of qualifications he was looking for in a wife. He wanted her to be poor. Obviously, he's very wealthy, and I think he wanted somebody with roots in the masses... She of course, had to be beautiful, and she needed to be a Homer enthusiast. She should have dark hair, should be well educated, and have a good and loving heart. That was his prerequisites, if you will.
Well, the priest selected a group of women from Athens who met those categories, had pictures taken of them, and then sent the pictures to Schliemann, who then looked through the pictures and decided on a winner. He selected a 17 year old girl named Sophia. Then he went to meet her and her family in Athens. And there, he had to talk and ask her some questions. So for example, he wanted to know if she would like to go on long journeys. He wanted to know, ask her all kinds of history questions. And then of course, the big moment was when she had to recite passages from Homer by heart. In a short time they were married, and then Schliemann was off to Troy. Now initially, he left her in Athens, but ultimately she will indeed arrive on the site to be with him when they find the “Trojan” treasure
Trojan War Pt 1:
Eris determined to make trouble. She threw into the banquet hall, a golden apple marked for the fairest. Of course, all the goddesses wanted it. After long discussions, only the three great goddesses Hera, Pallas Athena and Aphrodite remained. They went to Zeus and asked him to judge between them. Now Zeus of course, is a man who knows a lot about women since he sits, I swear sits on Mount Olympus looking for good little looking chicks to go and have sex with. But he is smart enough to understand that this is not something that he should do. So wisely, he said he would have nothing to do with the matter because he didn't want to make any of them angry. He told them to go to Mount Ida and find Paris, a Royal Prince who was working there as a shepherd and was an excellent judge of beauty. This sort of tactic to get rid of the trouble from Mount Olympus was a good deal… the two goddesses that he passed over, Hera and Athena immediately started making plans for the destruction of Troy
Trojan War Pt 2:
A lot of times, when you read ancient documents, you see numbers in the thousands, 10 thousand or more, frequently, that term simply means a large number of people. I doubt there were 1000 ships in the whole Agean at this time, that is warships and to put X number of men on the ships and then leave them for, quote, 10 years, which probably is just a while or it, would have left the whole of Greece defenseless, so they couldn't take them all. But remember, this is a piece of literature. So it has other ideas and reasoning behind uses. Certainly, there was a large number of people and it was a long siege, but they may have gone back and forth every so often...
The allies of both sides have actually been found in a Hittite document that pretty much patterns everything on Anatolia, on the islands close to where Troy is, they’re on Troy's side and then the Mycenean world is with Agamemnon. So this is an interesting point
Ed: Christian apologetic logic - archaeological evidence for some of what it says means the Iliad is a valid historical document and the Greek Gods are real!
Trojan War Pt 5:
He ended up killing Paris. Paris’s death was not a great loss, being the cause of all the sufferings, nobody was really sorry because of his death. Once his brother Hector had scold him as follows: Paris, you pretty boy, you women struck seducer, why were you ever born? Why were not you killed before your wedding day? Yes, I wish it so. Far better than to be a disgrace to the rest of us as you are and the object of contempt. How the long hair Achaeans must laugh when they see us make a champion of a prince because of his good looks, forgetting that he has no strength of mind, no courage and carried off a beautiful woman from a distant land and a warlike family to be a curse to your father, to the city and to the people as a whole.
After the death of Paris, the Trojans were strong as before, and the walls still stood intact. They never really had been threatened. But for the greater part of the fighting had actually taken place at a distance from Troy's walls...
The Trojan wall was badly damaged by a very large earthquake, which of course, is part of Poseidon’s abilities. And since he is anti Trojan, and a horse is an example of creatures that are dedicated to him that comes into play. There's also the discussion of a horse, if you will, the Assyrians use as a battering ram, perhaps that was something
Schliemann was also looking for a suitable wife who would accompany him on the dig. He had divorced his Russian wife and decided on a Greek wife, and he decided that because he liked the sound of the Greek language, especially when it was spoken by a woman. Everywhere Schliemann traveled, he had Greek books. He saw actually the world through Greek eyes and even became a fanatical supporter of Greek claims to control of Constantinople, which is now Istanbul. So obviously a Greek wife would be ideal. But how to find one?
Now he wrote to a priest friend of his, a Greek Orthodox priest named Vimposs [sp?] and described to him the kind of qualifications he was looking for in a wife. He wanted her to be poor. Obviously, he's very wealthy, and I think he wanted somebody with roots in the masses... She of course, had to be beautiful, and she needed to be a Homer enthusiast. She should have dark hair, should be well educated, and have a good and loving heart. That was his prerequisites, if you will.
Well, the priest selected a group of women from Athens who met those categories, had pictures taken of them, and then sent the pictures to Schliemann, who then looked through the pictures and decided on a winner. He selected a 17 year old girl named Sophia. Then he went to meet her and her family in Athens. And there, he had to talk and ask her some questions. So for example, he wanted to know if she would like to go on long journeys. He wanted to know, ask her all kinds of history questions. And then of course, the big moment was when she had to recite passages from Homer by heart. In a short time they were married, and then Schliemann was off to Troy. Now initially, he left her in Athens, but ultimately she will indeed arrive on the site to be with him when they find the “Trojan” treasure
Trojan War Pt 1:
Eris determined to make trouble. She threw into the banquet hall, a golden apple marked for the fairest. Of course, all the goddesses wanted it. After long discussions, only the three great goddesses Hera, Pallas Athena and Aphrodite remained. They went to Zeus and asked him to judge between them. Now Zeus of course, is a man who knows a lot about women since he sits, I swear sits on Mount Olympus looking for good little looking chicks to go and have sex with. But he is smart enough to understand that this is not something that he should do. So wisely, he said he would have nothing to do with the matter because he didn't want to make any of them angry. He told them to go to Mount Ida and find Paris, a Royal Prince who was working there as a shepherd and was an excellent judge of beauty. This sort of tactic to get rid of the trouble from Mount Olympus was a good deal… the two goddesses that he passed over, Hera and Athena immediately started making plans for the destruction of Troy
Trojan War Pt 2:
A lot of times, when you read ancient documents, you see numbers in the thousands, 10 thousand or more, frequently, that term simply means a large number of people. I doubt there were 1000 ships in the whole Agean at this time, that is warships and to put X number of men on the ships and then leave them for, quote, 10 years, which probably is just a while or it, would have left the whole of Greece defenseless, so they couldn't take them all. But remember, this is a piece of literature. So it has other ideas and reasoning behind uses. Certainly, there was a large number of people and it was a long siege, but they may have gone back and forth every so often...
The allies of both sides have actually been found in a Hittite document that pretty much patterns everything on Anatolia, on the islands close to where Troy is, they’re on Troy's side and then the Mycenean world is with Agamemnon. So this is an interesting point
Ed: Christian apologetic logic - archaeological evidence for some of what it says means the Iliad is a valid historical document and the Greek Gods are real!
Trojan War Pt 5:
He ended up killing Paris. Paris’s death was not a great loss, being the cause of all the sufferings, nobody was really sorry because of his death. Once his brother Hector had scold him as follows: Paris, you pretty boy, you women struck seducer, why were you ever born? Why were not you killed before your wedding day? Yes, I wish it so. Far better than to be a disgrace to the rest of us as you are and the object of contempt. How the long hair Achaeans must laugh when they see us make a champion of a prince because of his good looks, forgetting that he has no strength of mind, no courage and carried off a beautiful woman from a distant land and a warlike family to be a curse to your father, to the city and to the people as a whole.
After the death of Paris, the Trojans were strong as before, and the walls still stood intact. They never really had been threatened. But for the greater part of the fighting had actually taken place at a distance from Troy's walls...
The Trojan wall was badly damaged by a very large earthquake, which of course, is part of Poseidon’s abilities. And since he is anti Trojan, and a horse is an example of creatures that are dedicated to him that comes into play. There's also the discussion of a horse, if you will, the Assyrians use as a battering ram, perhaps that was something
Links - 6th September 2019 (1)
Rationally Speaking | Official Podcast of New York City Skeptics - Current Episodes - RS 229 - John Nerst on "Erisology, the study of disagreement" - "'Twitter is probably the worst of everything… forums have a set context. In a forum there are regular people. That forum might have a theme, and there’s certain etiquette in this forum, or we have a better understanding of what the context is, in a forum.The thing with Twitter is that there's almost no separation into different contexts. You can just see something, at any time something can pop in to your field of vision'...
'Andrew Pickering, and Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sharon Traweek... They typically described things like particle physics as an “ideology”... It's very annoying to read somebody who does that when they don't even recognize that this is a very particular perspective. My professor, he picked out people who wrote from a perspective called “methodological relativism,” which means that when we describe historically why a particular idea became dominant in a scientific field – like, why do people believe in relativity, or why did they believe in the germ theory of disease, or whatever -- we're not supposed to make any sort of reference to the fact that it was correct. It was supposed to be described as purely a social process, who convinced who. [Which] sort of thing is convincing, and for what reason, and all that.'
'could you have gotten it much more easily from someone who thinks the way you do, who just says, "Hey, here's the value of science, and reason, and truth, and objectivity, here are exceptions to the rule." And you could have gotten all that same insight without all the frustrating detours into post-modernism?'
'Oh absolutely.'"
No halal please: meet China’s pig vigilantes - "Xi and her fellow vigilantes have been watching with growing unease what they see as the creeping Islamisation of Chinese society, marked by the setting up of halal cafeterias in universities, the provision of halal-only food on planes and the use of code words to prevent the utterance of “pig” or “pork” on national television or social media... For Xi’s group, these developments represent a blatant effort to appease China’s Muslim population in areas where they believe the state should make no compromises that blur the boundary between religious and secular life. In this Year of the Pig, the battles seemed more urgent than ever for the vigilantes... Linxia, in northwest China’s Gansu province, has launched a campaign that seeks to restrict the use of the halal logo not only on non-food products but also on services such as “halal bathing” and “halal haircuts”... Instead of “pork”, they have begun using a common code word used by Muslim community: darou, which translates to “big meat”... Halal food itself has been a cause of tension in the past. Xi’s account features a post from an internet user who complained in 2017 that customers in the dining car of a high-speed train from Xian to Chengdu, in southwestern China’s Sichuan province, could only get halal food.Another informed her that Sichuan Air was doing the same. “In the future, when people are forced to eat halal food on planes, they should protest,” said one comment on the post. “If more people protest, will airlines dare leaving it alone?”"
China’s beef with Korea: the link between halal food and THAAD - "the popular New York business, The Halal Guys, which opened its first branch in Korea last December, was not halal, said Paik Mina, who studied food science and technology in university and now works on the KMF’s halal committee.“In the USA, it’s halal, but the white sauce has different ingredients when made here.”Paik said there were only 13 halal-certified restaurants in the country, seven of which were within one block of Seoul Central Mosque. There was also one in Busan and Incheon airport’s Nimat. All 13 are listed on KMF’s website.... the rest of Korea’s so-called halal restaurants are self-certified, and not technically halal. “Self-certification is illegal,” Paik said, adding that now the government had a certification system it might soon begin asking restaurants to remove “halal” signs unless they have been certified by KMF.In lieu of enforcing halal certification, the government has created a set of categories to clarify the extent to which restaurants meet halal standards. The highest category, “halal certified”, belongs to restaurants that have been certified by KMF, followed by “self-certified” restaurants, “Muslim-friendly” restaurants, where alcohol is also served, and “pork free” restaurants... “Getting halal food used to be shady, you felt like you were buying illegal drugs – some guy gives you meat in a black plastic bag from his little refrigerator.”... “We campaigned against halal slaughterhouses because halal slaughtering is illegal under the Korean animal protection law”"
The joys of regulation
The effects of fabric for sleepwear and bedding on sleep at ambient temperatures of 17°C and 22°C - "sleepwear played a contributory role to sleep outcomes and participants slept better at 17°C than at 22°C."
Wearing wool to sleep is better than cotton. Bedding has no effect. Heat is bad
Fungal Hallucinogens Send Cicadas on Sex Binges After Their Genitals Fall Off - "scientists have discovered new details on a fungus that compels its cicada hosts to mate long after their genitals have gone and their bodies have turned into what one researcher colourfully describes as 'flying salt shakers of death'.The fungus is called Massospora cicadina, and its effects read like an abstinence campaign for cicadas. But it also appears that it affects the sex-crazed cicadas by sending them on one heck of a drug trip."
Tibetan nun becomes fetish queen after Indian massage 'reawakened her sexuality' - "For ten years Damcho Dyson’s only habit was her plain religious robe – but now she has swapped it for something more stretchy.Damcho lived a simple life of chastity and was once an attendant to the Dalai Lama.But she says a massage while on a trip to India reawakened her sexuality – and turned her into Britain’s naughtiest nun.And now, after quitting her Tibetan Buddhist monastery in France, she spends her weekends cavorting in latex at fetish clubs."
Daily Show Host Trevor Noah to Speak at Islamist Convention - "Noah’s acceptance of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) is especially out-of-place considering his status as a top progressive voice. ISNA’s Islamist orientation puts it at odds with progressive values, such as the organization’s expelling of a pro-LGBT group named Muslims for Progressive Values.The U.S. Justice Department lists ISNA as an “entity” of the Muslim Brotherhood... Muzammil Siddiqi, who was president of ISNA from 1996 to 2000 and is the chairman of the Fiqh Council of North America (an official affiliate of ISNA), endorsed the execution of homosexuals by Sharia-based governments in 2001. Siddiqi, unsurprisingly, has a long history of working for and with extremist organizations... When the foreign-backed groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood like ISNA and CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations) were established in North America and their influence ascended, many Muslims fought against them.In most cases, the Islamists’ network was too powerful and Muslim opponents were marginalized, with some seeing their mosques taken over."
Islam Helped Me Find My Path as a Queer Sex Educator - "As I came to feel less gross about myself, I also realized the sex negativity I felt wasn't from Islam; it was from American society... During my second year of college, 9/11 happened, and it was a turning point for me. I decided to be very out about being Muslim, which coincided with me getting more involved in sex education at my school. I realized that the affirmation I was getting sexually from fully living out my queer identity wasn't that helpful because there were so many underlying feelings and experiences of racism, xenophobia, and just feeling other... Today, my partner is Muslim, and I continue to be very much affirmed by Islam in what I'm doing; in finding myself in places where I learn to forgive myself. God, I know, will forgive me—not even because I did something wrong, but for all the times I did the thing I didn't want to do, or for the reasons I pursued the people I did, or stayed in relationships. I forgive myself for that; that is how Islam helps me. So much of my self-care and self-love comes in forms of tasbih, dhikr, and grounding myself in prayer. That is really part of my sexual affirmation."
She needs to move to a Muslim country so she can be affirmed by Islam and live out her queer identity
London Zoo delights visitors with a cheeky pride banner in the penguins' enclosure - "London Zoo has installed a banner celebrating its same-sex penguin couples.The sign declaring 'some penguins are gay, get over it' was erected in the Penguin Beach enclosure this week to mark Pride... Visitors will be able to learn about gender and mating in the animal kingdom at a Pride-themed talk.Zookeepers will reveal just how common same-sex pairings are – from penguins and pandas to goats and giraffes."
Some penguins are also prostitutes
Why Are Penguins' Sex Lives So Scandalous? - "He began referring to these unattached males as “hooligans,” and described their activities—mating with injured females, with dead penguins, with each other, and occasionally with the snow itself—with breathless fury. “I saw another act of astonishing depravity today,” he wrote on December 6th, 1911, after witnessing a group sex act. “There seems to be no crime too low for these penguins.”"
10 Terrifying Facts You Can't Unlearn About Penguin Sex - "On occasion, a female emperor penguin who experiences a miscarriage will, while “high” on pregnancy hormones, scour the community for abandoned penguins to adopt. If there are no abandoned penguins to adopt, she'll just kidnap one. These kidnappings usually don't last longer than a week and, unfortunately, the kidnapped chick almost always dies as a direct result of the incident.
Penguin gangs, as it turns out, are no better than human gangs. Adélie penguins that travel in tight-knit flocks participate in theft, murder, and gang rape. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. Some adélie penguins even sexually assault young penguin chicks in order to establish reputation, fear, and dominion.
Chicks are often abused by their parents or other adult penguins. These baby penguins can be kidnapped, trampled, and even sexually assaulted.
Yep - humboldt penguins cheat. Female penguins sometimes just walk out on their mates. Males do it, too, but much less frequently than females
If you thought human divorce rates were bad, we've got nothing on penguins. All penguin species sometimes "divorce" - or leave their mate for another penguin - but emperor penguins do it the most frequently. Nearly 81 percent of emperor penguins leave their mates at least once.
While it's commonly assumed that penguins mate for life, there’s one thing nobody’s telling you: they don't always have just one partner. Sometimes, when emperor penguins gather en masse to mate, they don't always have time to wait around if they can't find their former partner. They'll mate with any viable partner that's around. For some, the biological need to reproduce is stronger than the bond of love."
Close to 6 in 10 young graduates remain unemployed: MOM - "In 2018, only 41.6% of degree holders between the ages of 20 and 29 were employed, according to Ministry of Manpower data. This translates into roughly 58% of young university graduates who were unemployed.In comparison, only 2.7% of all degree holders across the age groups were unemployed... the startling statistic for young graduate unemployment may be due to the pursuit of higher education or alternative careers such as entrepreneurship.But experts agree that there is a large proportion of young and educated individuals who are just not able to secure a job – whether permanent or temporary."
'Andrew Pickering, and Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sharon Traweek... They typically described things like particle physics as an “ideology”... It's very annoying to read somebody who does that when they don't even recognize that this is a very particular perspective. My professor, he picked out people who wrote from a perspective called “methodological relativism,” which means that when we describe historically why a particular idea became dominant in a scientific field – like, why do people believe in relativity, or why did they believe in the germ theory of disease, or whatever -- we're not supposed to make any sort of reference to the fact that it was correct. It was supposed to be described as purely a social process, who convinced who. [Which] sort of thing is convincing, and for what reason, and all that.'
'could you have gotten it much more easily from someone who thinks the way you do, who just says, "Hey, here's the value of science, and reason, and truth, and objectivity, here are exceptions to the rule." And you could have gotten all that same insight without all the frustrating detours into post-modernism?'
'Oh absolutely.'"
No halal please: meet China’s pig vigilantes - "Xi and her fellow vigilantes have been watching with growing unease what they see as the creeping Islamisation of Chinese society, marked by the setting up of halal cafeterias in universities, the provision of halal-only food on planes and the use of code words to prevent the utterance of “pig” or “pork” on national television or social media... For Xi’s group, these developments represent a blatant effort to appease China’s Muslim population in areas where they believe the state should make no compromises that blur the boundary between religious and secular life. In this Year of the Pig, the battles seemed more urgent than ever for the vigilantes... Linxia, in northwest China’s Gansu province, has launched a campaign that seeks to restrict the use of the halal logo not only on non-food products but also on services such as “halal bathing” and “halal haircuts”... Instead of “pork”, they have begun using a common code word used by Muslim community: darou, which translates to “big meat”... Halal food itself has been a cause of tension in the past. Xi’s account features a post from an internet user who complained in 2017 that customers in the dining car of a high-speed train from Xian to Chengdu, in southwestern China’s Sichuan province, could only get halal food.Another informed her that Sichuan Air was doing the same. “In the future, when people are forced to eat halal food on planes, they should protest,” said one comment on the post. “If more people protest, will airlines dare leaving it alone?”"
China’s beef with Korea: the link between halal food and THAAD - "the popular New York business, The Halal Guys, which opened its first branch in Korea last December, was not halal, said Paik Mina, who studied food science and technology in university and now works on the KMF’s halal committee.“In the USA, it’s halal, but the white sauce has different ingredients when made here.”Paik said there were only 13 halal-certified restaurants in the country, seven of which were within one block of Seoul Central Mosque. There was also one in Busan and Incheon airport’s Nimat. All 13 are listed on KMF’s website.... the rest of Korea’s so-called halal restaurants are self-certified, and not technically halal. “Self-certification is illegal,” Paik said, adding that now the government had a certification system it might soon begin asking restaurants to remove “halal” signs unless they have been certified by KMF.In lieu of enforcing halal certification, the government has created a set of categories to clarify the extent to which restaurants meet halal standards. The highest category, “halal certified”, belongs to restaurants that have been certified by KMF, followed by “self-certified” restaurants, “Muslim-friendly” restaurants, where alcohol is also served, and “pork free” restaurants... “Getting halal food used to be shady, you felt like you were buying illegal drugs – some guy gives you meat in a black plastic bag from his little refrigerator.”... “We campaigned against halal slaughterhouses because halal slaughtering is illegal under the Korean animal protection law”"
The joys of regulation
The effects of fabric for sleepwear and bedding on sleep at ambient temperatures of 17°C and 22°C - "sleepwear played a contributory role to sleep outcomes and participants slept better at 17°C than at 22°C."
Wearing wool to sleep is better than cotton. Bedding has no effect. Heat is bad
Fungal Hallucinogens Send Cicadas on Sex Binges After Their Genitals Fall Off - "scientists have discovered new details on a fungus that compels its cicada hosts to mate long after their genitals have gone and their bodies have turned into what one researcher colourfully describes as 'flying salt shakers of death'.The fungus is called Massospora cicadina, and its effects read like an abstinence campaign for cicadas. But it also appears that it affects the sex-crazed cicadas by sending them on one heck of a drug trip."
Tibetan nun becomes fetish queen after Indian massage 'reawakened her sexuality' - "For ten years Damcho Dyson’s only habit was her plain religious robe – but now she has swapped it for something more stretchy.Damcho lived a simple life of chastity and was once an attendant to the Dalai Lama.But she says a massage while on a trip to India reawakened her sexuality – and turned her into Britain’s naughtiest nun.And now, after quitting her Tibetan Buddhist monastery in France, she spends her weekends cavorting in latex at fetish clubs."
Daily Show Host Trevor Noah to Speak at Islamist Convention - "Noah’s acceptance of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) is especially out-of-place considering his status as a top progressive voice. ISNA’s Islamist orientation puts it at odds with progressive values, such as the organization’s expelling of a pro-LGBT group named Muslims for Progressive Values.The U.S. Justice Department lists ISNA as an “entity” of the Muslim Brotherhood... Muzammil Siddiqi, who was president of ISNA from 1996 to 2000 and is the chairman of the Fiqh Council of North America (an official affiliate of ISNA), endorsed the execution of homosexuals by Sharia-based governments in 2001. Siddiqi, unsurprisingly, has a long history of working for and with extremist organizations... When the foreign-backed groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood like ISNA and CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations) were established in North America and their influence ascended, many Muslims fought against them.In most cases, the Islamists’ network was too powerful and Muslim opponents were marginalized, with some seeing their mosques taken over."
Islam Helped Me Find My Path as a Queer Sex Educator - "As I came to feel less gross about myself, I also realized the sex negativity I felt wasn't from Islam; it was from American society... During my second year of college, 9/11 happened, and it was a turning point for me. I decided to be very out about being Muslim, which coincided with me getting more involved in sex education at my school. I realized that the affirmation I was getting sexually from fully living out my queer identity wasn't that helpful because there were so many underlying feelings and experiences of racism, xenophobia, and just feeling other... Today, my partner is Muslim, and I continue to be very much affirmed by Islam in what I'm doing; in finding myself in places where I learn to forgive myself. God, I know, will forgive me—not even because I did something wrong, but for all the times I did the thing I didn't want to do, or for the reasons I pursued the people I did, or stayed in relationships. I forgive myself for that; that is how Islam helps me. So much of my self-care and self-love comes in forms of tasbih, dhikr, and grounding myself in prayer. That is really part of my sexual affirmation."
She needs to move to a Muslim country so she can be affirmed by Islam and live out her queer identity
London Zoo delights visitors with a cheeky pride banner in the penguins' enclosure - "London Zoo has installed a banner celebrating its same-sex penguin couples.The sign declaring 'some penguins are gay, get over it' was erected in the Penguin Beach enclosure this week to mark Pride... Visitors will be able to learn about gender and mating in the animal kingdom at a Pride-themed talk.Zookeepers will reveal just how common same-sex pairings are – from penguins and pandas to goats and giraffes."
Some penguins are also prostitutes
Why Are Penguins' Sex Lives So Scandalous? - "He began referring to these unattached males as “hooligans,” and described their activities—mating with injured females, with dead penguins, with each other, and occasionally with the snow itself—with breathless fury. “I saw another act of astonishing depravity today,” he wrote on December 6th, 1911, after witnessing a group sex act. “There seems to be no crime too low for these penguins.”"
10 Terrifying Facts You Can't Unlearn About Penguin Sex - "On occasion, a female emperor penguin who experiences a miscarriage will, while “high” on pregnancy hormones, scour the community for abandoned penguins to adopt. If there are no abandoned penguins to adopt, she'll just kidnap one. These kidnappings usually don't last longer than a week and, unfortunately, the kidnapped chick almost always dies as a direct result of the incident.
Penguin gangs, as it turns out, are no better than human gangs. Adélie penguins that travel in tight-knit flocks participate in theft, murder, and gang rape. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. Some adélie penguins even sexually assault young penguin chicks in order to establish reputation, fear, and dominion.
Chicks are often abused by their parents or other adult penguins. These baby penguins can be kidnapped, trampled, and even sexually assaulted.
Yep - humboldt penguins cheat. Female penguins sometimes just walk out on their mates. Males do it, too, but much less frequently than females
If you thought human divorce rates were bad, we've got nothing on penguins. All penguin species sometimes "divorce" - or leave their mate for another penguin - but emperor penguins do it the most frequently. Nearly 81 percent of emperor penguins leave their mates at least once.
While it's commonly assumed that penguins mate for life, there’s one thing nobody’s telling you: they don't always have just one partner. Sometimes, when emperor penguins gather en masse to mate, they don't always have time to wait around if they can't find their former partner. They'll mate with any viable partner that's around. For some, the biological need to reproduce is stronger than the bond of love."
Close to 6 in 10 young graduates remain unemployed: MOM - "In 2018, only 41.6% of degree holders between the ages of 20 and 29 were employed, according to Ministry of Manpower data. This translates into roughly 58% of young university graduates who were unemployed.In comparison, only 2.7% of all degree holders across the age groups were unemployed... the startling statistic for young graduate unemployment may be due to the pursuit of higher education or alternative careers such as entrepreneurship.But experts agree that there is a large proportion of young and educated individuals who are just not able to secure a job – whether permanent or temporary."
Thursday, September 05, 2019
Links - 5th September 2019 (2)
The demolition of Rodrik’s trilemma - "In his book The Globalization Paradox, published in 2011, the Harvard Professor Dani Rodrik formulated his famous trilemma: it is impossible to attain economic hyperglobalisation, national sovereignty and democracy simultaneously, because only two of these things can be achieved at any one time. The sides of the triangle must be chosen (and it is a choice that comes with consequences: global governance, a golden straightjacket or the Bretton Woods compromise, also known as the liberal order). But at a time of emergence from a lengthy crisis and a change of the world order, the three vertices –and therefore the sides– are all fracturing at once, or at least being subjected to tensions they may or may not be able to withstand, certainly in Europe but also further afield: globalisation, which was already stalling and more so now with the trade war unleashed by Trump; national sovereignty, with the territorial tensions in a range of states and the new nationalisms; and democracy, with reverses to the rule of law in various places, the crisis of systems and the rise of populist movements. A choice can no longer be made between the three sides."
Making tourists pay to use NHS is racist, say doctors | News | The Times - "Doctors have voted overwhelmingly to stop charging foreign patients for NHS care, claiming that doing so is “fundamentally racist”.Up to 500 delegates at the British Medical Association’s annual conference in Belfast backed a motion that said that asking overseas visitors to pay made medical staff “complicit” in racism.“We are doctors not border guards,” Omar Risk said during the debate. “Charging migrants for accessing NHS services is a fundamentally racist endeavour — we are complicit in the oppressive regime.”Doctors who opposed the motion were booed as they spoke against it
Tax money is unlimited!
Doctors' union votes to stop charging overseas patients for their treatment at NHS hospitals - "What is ‘health tourism’?
This is when patients who are not entitled to free NHS care are treated without paying their bills. It covers short-term migrants, holidaymakers and foreigners who deliberately target the NHS. The exact cost is put between £200million and £2billion a year.
What are the rules?
Only patients who are ‘ordinarily resident’ in the UK are entitled to free care, which usually means being here for at least six months. This excludes care in A&E units and GP surgeries which are free for everyone. In all other situations, staff are legally obliged to check eligibility. Anyone who isn’t eligible for free care should be invoiced...
Many hospitals will ask to see passports or utility bills to confirm patients have been living here for at least six months.Patients who admit they are not ordinarily resident or refuse to provide documentation should be taken into a side room and interviewed by an overseas visitor officer.They will be asked further questions to ascertain if they are from the EU and if so, the Government will bill their member state. Otherwise patients will be given an invoice for the course of treatment and if they do not pay up, staff should refuse to provide care.But the cooperation of doctors is required because they are usually the most senior members of the ward or department.The NHS is facing an unprecedented financial crisis due to the ageing population, the toll of lifestyle-related conditions such as obesity and diabetes and the cost of expensive new drugs."
Donkey that retired after giving children rides for 20 years is stabbed in London - "A donkey which gave rides to thousands of children has been stabbed after going into retirement in southeast London.Bimbo, 28, was found with a deep wound in his side by a local resident in Eltham, where he was being kept after retiring in 2012."
How Labour has turned London into a foreign city - "On offer is free NHS treatment, free housing, free schooling and countless welfare benefits. It is a place of opportunity, security and, above all, available women.This was a definite pull for one young Afghan working in a butcher’s in Neasden, North West London.As he put it, in his village, if you slept with more than one person in your life, ‘they shot you in the back’. In Britain, however, sexual opportunities were immense. The agents explain how to take full advantage of the UK.‘London is a country of rights,’ they say. How very true! If you tell the correct story, they are informed, ‘you will never be sent home’.And yet, when migrants manage to reach the UK, they all have to pay back the people-traffickers who got them here.Indeed, it is this debt, sometimes with interest rates of 100 per cent, that lies behind the often appalling working conditions they are forced to accept... There is a whole illegal city in London of several hundred thousand people, and nearly half of them are thought to have arrived after 2001.This is a city hidden from official statistics, but not hidden from employers who take on the workers, no questions asked, through agencies.Legal workers also have problems because the sheer number of new arrivals push down wages.A Polish builder explains that, on his work site, the English builders tell him angrily they used to be paid £15 an hour. Now it is £7 an hour. ‘They hate me,’ he says simply.But then he gripes about the newly-arrived Romanians who, he says, are pushing wages even lower...Judah joined 80 or so Romanians, ‘blank eyes wide with hunger’, touting for work.‘They pace up and down in their work boots for the next 11 hours, muttering tensely, ‘waiting for a white van’.This is a reference to the fact, they tell Judah, that the proverbial White Van Englishman is the best type of employer. Whereas Pakistanis, Turks and Poles are the worst... Judah encountered a Grenadian, now a successful cocaine dealer, who recalled moving to the White City estate in West London with his mother when he was 12.‘We pitched up for a better life, but found ourselves right in the middle of a war zone,’ he recalled.He said the estate ‘was way more corrupt . . . way more dangerous, more full of disillusion than anywhere in Grenada. Within six months of being here, I had lost 75 per cent of my morals.’... The sex industry is another area where our flawed immigration policy has had a malign effect. Now, 96 per cent of prostitutes are migrants. In the main, Albanians have taken over... The mother of one of my son’s friends lived opposite. She was intimidated by the sinister men in leather jackets who sat in the nearby coffee shop all day.She reported to the police that the girls on the top floor looked underage and never went out. In due course, her car was smashed up.She suspected this was done as a warning to keep her nose out of it. The police did nothing and she never raised the matter again. Finally, migration has even changed the nationality of London’s vagrants.There are now around 5,000 — mostly Polish and Romanians — living rough on London’s streets... In this new London, increasingly there is one nationality significant for its absence — white, British-born. Nearly all the migrants comment on this phenomenon... Between 1971 and 2011, the white British share of London’s population slumped from 86 per cent to 45 per cent, overwhelmingly the old Cockney working-class. Cockney, in fact, is predicted to die out in 15 years. I once visited a school in the East End displaying photos of a class from the Thirties and today. In the first photo, the children were all white. In the second, none of them were.In some countries, this might be called racial cleansing. In London, it is simply the result of the failed policy of multiculturalism."
Canada becomes the first G20 country to ban shark fin trade - "Canada has become the first G20 nation to ban the import and export of shark fins, in an effort help preserve a predator under threat.The country is the largest importer of shark fins outside Asia, though shark finning in the domestic fishery has been illegal since 1994... An estimated one-third of fins sold come from species that are at risk... Canada's bill bans the import and export, to and from Canada, of shark fins that are not attached to the shark."... "The shark fin ban is just a gimmick to gain political capital," says Ben Leung, who is active in the Chinese immigrant community in Canada.He criticises the ban, arguing it targets Asian culinary culture, while providing little actual help to protecting sharks."
Thanks to the BBC, we know that two thirds of shark's fin comes from species not at risk - proof that activists are spreading misinformation
Tellingly this doesn't target other shark products
Arby's created a carrot made out of meat and it tastes the same - " the sandwich chain is flipping the vegan "meat" trend on its head, leaning into its "We have the meats" slogan and creating its most bizarre concoction yet: the "megetable," a vegetable made out of meat. And Arby's new megetable, the "Marrot," is exactly what it sounds like: a meat-based carrot that not only tastes like the orange vegetable but has much of its nutritional value... "Arby's is not one of the restaurant companies interested in working with Impossible Foods," Arby's said in a statement this May. "The chances we will bring plant-based menu items to our restaurants, now or in the future, are absolutely impossible.""
The Dalai Lama on Trump, women and going home - "the world's most famous refugee has some surprising views on immigration.In a speech last year he said that refugees to the European Union should ultimately return home, adding that "Europe is for Europeans", a statement he stood by when I challenged him on it."European countries should take these refugees and give them education and training, and the aim is return to their own land with certain skills," he said.The Dalai Lama believes the end game should be to rebuild the countries people have fled. But with some 70 million people displaced across the world according to the latest figures, what if people want to stay?"A limited number is OK, but the whole of Europe [will] eventually become Muslim country, African country - impossible"... I also challenged him on another remark he made in 2015, when he said if he was followed by a female Dalai Lama she would have to be attractive.In another surprise, he reaffirmed his belief that beauty matters as much as brains. "If a female Dalai Lama comes, she should be more attractive," he told me while laughing.His message seemed at odds for a man who preaches a message of tolerance and inner confidence, but the Dalai Lama told me that in Buddhist literature both inner and outer beauty matter. He also said that equality was important and was keen to stress that he supported women's rights and equal pay in the workplace.As the interview drew to a close, I was struck by how unexpectedly frank our discussion had been, which reminded me of something the Dalai Lama had told me earlier in the day.One advantage of not being able to return home to Tibet, he said, was that India is a free country where he can express himself openly. The Dalai Lama's message of unity is universal - but for a man famed for his compassion, he can also be controversial"
Apparently compassion means you should lie
Dalai Lama warns the whole of Europe could become 'Muslim or African' if migrants are not returned - "'They themselves, I think [are] better in their own land. Better [to] keep Europe for Europeans.'It is not the first time the monk has made such comments. In a speech last year in Malmo, Sweden, the Tibetan Buddhist said refugees should return to help rebuilt their own countries.He said: 'Receive them [migrants], help them, educate them, but ultimately they should develop their own country. I think Europe belongs to the Europeans.'Last September when he made a similar comments after being asked about refugees during his public talk in Rotterdam, the Dalai Lama issued a statement in response.He said: 'When refugees from other countries have come to Europe, it's wonderful that Germany and other European countries have given them help. 'However, I think that most of those refugees think of their own lands as home, but just now there is lots of killing, bullying and suffering there.'That's why they escaped. So, in the short term, European countries should provide them with shelter, and should particularly provide children with facilities for education and training, including mechanical training, for the young people.'The aim is that they should eventually be able to return to rebuild their own countries. That has been my view right from the beginning. 'For example, we Tibetans took shelter in India, but most Tibetans want to return to Tibet when the situation there has changed. Each country has its own culture, language, way of life, and it is better for people to live in their own country. That is my view.'... In 2015 he said that if he was succeeded by a female Dalai Lama she would have to be attractive, despite declaring himself to be a feminist.Speaking to the BBC he again said while laughing: 'If a female Dalai Lama comes, she should be more attractive.'On international Women's Day this year in March he called for more women to be given leadership roles instead of men who are 'celebrated for killing their opponents'.He posted: 'Women have been shown to be more sensitive to others' suffering, whereas, warriors celebrated for killing their opponents are almost always men"
Rationally Speaking | Official Podcast of New York City Skeptics - Current Episodes - RS 230 - Kelsey Piper on “Big picture journalism: covering the topics that matter in the long run” - "'another perspective, which is one I hear articulated a lot at Vox in particular, is billionaires are mostly doing some shady stuff. Especially when startups are getting off the ground, a lot of them are breaking laws and cutting corners and ignoring data privacy. And none of them are really in this commendable category where they made their billion dollars. Maybe JK Rowling. But I think there are some people that think she's pretty much the only billionaire who just became a billionaire by making something people wanted.'...
'if cockroaches are trying to imagine how humans will kill them, they might imagine cockroaches with lasers attached to the front or something. They probably won't imagine spray, because they just don't have any of the concepts to come up with spray'"
Making tourists pay to use NHS is racist, say doctors | News | The Times - "Doctors have voted overwhelmingly to stop charging foreign patients for NHS care, claiming that doing so is “fundamentally racist”.Up to 500 delegates at the British Medical Association’s annual conference in Belfast backed a motion that said that asking overseas visitors to pay made medical staff “complicit” in racism.“We are doctors not border guards,” Omar Risk said during the debate. “Charging migrants for accessing NHS services is a fundamentally racist endeavour — we are complicit in the oppressive regime.”Doctors who opposed the motion were booed as they spoke against it
Tax money is unlimited!
Doctors' union votes to stop charging overseas patients for their treatment at NHS hospitals - "What is ‘health tourism’?
This is when patients who are not entitled to free NHS care are treated without paying their bills. It covers short-term migrants, holidaymakers and foreigners who deliberately target the NHS. The exact cost is put between £200million and £2billion a year.
What are the rules?
Only patients who are ‘ordinarily resident’ in the UK are entitled to free care, which usually means being here for at least six months. This excludes care in A&E units and GP surgeries which are free for everyone. In all other situations, staff are legally obliged to check eligibility. Anyone who isn’t eligible for free care should be invoiced...
Many hospitals will ask to see passports or utility bills to confirm patients have been living here for at least six months.Patients who admit they are not ordinarily resident or refuse to provide documentation should be taken into a side room and interviewed by an overseas visitor officer.They will be asked further questions to ascertain if they are from the EU and if so, the Government will bill their member state. Otherwise patients will be given an invoice for the course of treatment and if they do not pay up, staff should refuse to provide care.But the cooperation of doctors is required because they are usually the most senior members of the ward or department.The NHS is facing an unprecedented financial crisis due to the ageing population, the toll of lifestyle-related conditions such as obesity and diabetes and the cost of expensive new drugs."
Donkey that retired after giving children rides for 20 years is stabbed in London - "A donkey which gave rides to thousands of children has been stabbed after going into retirement in southeast London.Bimbo, 28, was found with a deep wound in his side by a local resident in Eltham, where he was being kept after retiring in 2012."
How Labour has turned London into a foreign city - "On offer is free NHS treatment, free housing, free schooling and countless welfare benefits. It is a place of opportunity, security and, above all, available women.This was a definite pull for one young Afghan working in a butcher’s in Neasden, North West London.As he put it, in his village, if you slept with more than one person in your life, ‘they shot you in the back’. In Britain, however, sexual opportunities were immense. The agents explain how to take full advantage of the UK.‘London is a country of rights,’ they say. How very true! If you tell the correct story, they are informed, ‘you will never be sent home’.And yet, when migrants manage to reach the UK, they all have to pay back the people-traffickers who got them here.Indeed, it is this debt, sometimes with interest rates of 100 per cent, that lies behind the often appalling working conditions they are forced to accept... There is a whole illegal city in London of several hundred thousand people, and nearly half of them are thought to have arrived after 2001.This is a city hidden from official statistics, but not hidden from employers who take on the workers, no questions asked, through agencies.Legal workers also have problems because the sheer number of new arrivals push down wages.A Polish builder explains that, on his work site, the English builders tell him angrily they used to be paid £15 an hour. Now it is £7 an hour. ‘They hate me,’ he says simply.But then he gripes about the newly-arrived Romanians who, he says, are pushing wages even lower...Judah joined 80 or so Romanians, ‘blank eyes wide with hunger’, touting for work.‘They pace up and down in their work boots for the next 11 hours, muttering tensely, ‘waiting for a white van’.This is a reference to the fact, they tell Judah, that the proverbial White Van Englishman is the best type of employer. Whereas Pakistanis, Turks and Poles are the worst... Judah encountered a Grenadian, now a successful cocaine dealer, who recalled moving to the White City estate in West London with his mother when he was 12.‘We pitched up for a better life, but found ourselves right in the middle of a war zone,’ he recalled.He said the estate ‘was way more corrupt . . . way more dangerous, more full of disillusion than anywhere in Grenada. Within six months of being here, I had lost 75 per cent of my morals.’... The sex industry is another area where our flawed immigration policy has had a malign effect. Now, 96 per cent of prostitutes are migrants. In the main, Albanians have taken over... The mother of one of my son’s friends lived opposite. She was intimidated by the sinister men in leather jackets who sat in the nearby coffee shop all day.She reported to the police that the girls on the top floor looked underage and never went out. In due course, her car was smashed up.She suspected this was done as a warning to keep her nose out of it. The police did nothing and she never raised the matter again. Finally, migration has even changed the nationality of London’s vagrants.There are now around 5,000 — mostly Polish and Romanians — living rough on London’s streets... In this new London, increasingly there is one nationality significant for its absence — white, British-born. Nearly all the migrants comment on this phenomenon... Between 1971 and 2011, the white British share of London’s population slumped from 86 per cent to 45 per cent, overwhelmingly the old Cockney working-class. Cockney, in fact, is predicted to die out in 15 years. I once visited a school in the East End displaying photos of a class from the Thirties and today. In the first photo, the children were all white. In the second, none of them were.In some countries, this might be called racial cleansing. In London, it is simply the result of the failed policy of multiculturalism."
Canada becomes the first G20 country to ban shark fin trade - "Canada has become the first G20 nation to ban the import and export of shark fins, in an effort help preserve a predator under threat.The country is the largest importer of shark fins outside Asia, though shark finning in the domestic fishery has been illegal since 1994... An estimated one-third of fins sold come from species that are at risk... Canada's bill bans the import and export, to and from Canada, of shark fins that are not attached to the shark."... "The shark fin ban is just a gimmick to gain political capital," says Ben Leung, who is active in the Chinese immigrant community in Canada.He criticises the ban, arguing it targets Asian culinary culture, while providing little actual help to protecting sharks."
Thanks to the BBC, we know that two thirds of shark's fin comes from species not at risk - proof that activists are spreading misinformation
Tellingly this doesn't target other shark products
Arby's created a carrot made out of meat and it tastes the same - " the sandwich chain is flipping the vegan "meat" trend on its head, leaning into its "We have the meats" slogan and creating its most bizarre concoction yet: the "megetable," a vegetable made out of meat. And Arby's new megetable, the "Marrot," is exactly what it sounds like: a meat-based carrot that not only tastes like the orange vegetable but has much of its nutritional value... "Arby's is not one of the restaurant companies interested in working with Impossible Foods," Arby's said in a statement this May. "The chances we will bring plant-based menu items to our restaurants, now or in the future, are absolutely impossible.""
The Dalai Lama on Trump, women and going home - "the world's most famous refugee has some surprising views on immigration.In a speech last year he said that refugees to the European Union should ultimately return home, adding that "Europe is for Europeans", a statement he stood by when I challenged him on it."European countries should take these refugees and give them education and training, and the aim is return to their own land with certain skills," he said.The Dalai Lama believes the end game should be to rebuild the countries people have fled. But with some 70 million people displaced across the world according to the latest figures, what if people want to stay?"A limited number is OK, but the whole of Europe [will] eventually become Muslim country, African country - impossible"... I also challenged him on another remark he made in 2015, when he said if he was followed by a female Dalai Lama she would have to be attractive.In another surprise, he reaffirmed his belief that beauty matters as much as brains. "If a female Dalai Lama comes, she should be more attractive," he told me while laughing.His message seemed at odds for a man who preaches a message of tolerance and inner confidence, but the Dalai Lama told me that in Buddhist literature both inner and outer beauty matter. He also said that equality was important and was keen to stress that he supported women's rights and equal pay in the workplace.As the interview drew to a close, I was struck by how unexpectedly frank our discussion had been, which reminded me of something the Dalai Lama had told me earlier in the day.One advantage of not being able to return home to Tibet, he said, was that India is a free country where he can express himself openly. The Dalai Lama's message of unity is universal - but for a man famed for his compassion, he can also be controversial"
Apparently compassion means you should lie
Dalai Lama warns the whole of Europe could become 'Muslim or African' if migrants are not returned - "'They themselves, I think [are] better in their own land. Better [to] keep Europe for Europeans.'It is not the first time the monk has made such comments. In a speech last year in Malmo, Sweden, the Tibetan Buddhist said refugees should return to help rebuilt their own countries.He said: 'Receive them [migrants], help them, educate them, but ultimately they should develop their own country. I think Europe belongs to the Europeans.'Last September when he made a similar comments after being asked about refugees during his public talk in Rotterdam, the Dalai Lama issued a statement in response.He said: 'When refugees from other countries have come to Europe, it's wonderful that Germany and other European countries have given them help. 'However, I think that most of those refugees think of their own lands as home, but just now there is lots of killing, bullying and suffering there.'That's why they escaped. So, in the short term, European countries should provide them with shelter, and should particularly provide children with facilities for education and training, including mechanical training, for the young people.'The aim is that they should eventually be able to return to rebuild their own countries. That has been my view right from the beginning. 'For example, we Tibetans took shelter in India, but most Tibetans want to return to Tibet when the situation there has changed. Each country has its own culture, language, way of life, and it is better for people to live in their own country. That is my view.'... In 2015 he said that if he was succeeded by a female Dalai Lama she would have to be attractive, despite declaring himself to be a feminist.Speaking to the BBC he again said while laughing: 'If a female Dalai Lama comes, she should be more attractive.'On international Women's Day this year in March he called for more women to be given leadership roles instead of men who are 'celebrated for killing their opponents'.He posted: 'Women have been shown to be more sensitive to others' suffering, whereas, warriors celebrated for killing their opponents are almost always men"
Rationally Speaking | Official Podcast of New York City Skeptics - Current Episodes - RS 230 - Kelsey Piper on “Big picture journalism: covering the topics that matter in the long run” - "'another perspective, which is one I hear articulated a lot at Vox in particular, is billionaires are mostly doing some shady stuff. Especially when startups are getting off the ground, a lot of them are breaking laws and cutting corners and ignoring data privacy. And none of them are really in this commendable category where they made their billion dollars. Maybe JK Rowling. But I think there are some people that think she's pretty much the only billionaire who just became a billionaire by making something people wanted.'...
'if cockroaches are trying to imagine how humans will kill them, they might imagine cockroaches with lasers attached to the front or something. They probably won't imagine spray, because they just don't have any of the concepts to come up with spray'"
Depressing people to sell products, services and ideas
"THE WORLD IS increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn’t very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more? How do you sell an anti-ageing moisturiser? You make someone worry about ageing. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything. How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch a TV show? By making them worry about missing out. How do you get them to buy a new smartphone? By making them feel like they are being left behind.
To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business."
--- Reasons to Stay Alive / Matt Haig
Of course, getting people to buy things isn't the only reason you'd manipulate people to be depressed and worried.
There's also getting people to buy your cause or ideology.
Why The World Is Getting Better And Why Hardly Anyone Knows It
"When a recent survey asked “All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse?” the results were predictably bleak. In Sweden only 10% thought things are getting better, and in the U,S., it was only 6%. Hardly anyone thinks the world is getting better.
And yet the facts show otherwise. In a powerful study entitled “The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it” by Max Roser, an economist at the University of Oxford and the founder of Our World in Data, we learn that on virtually all of the key dimensions of human material well-being—poverty, literacy, health, freedom, and education—the world is an extraordinarily better place than it was just a couple of centuries ago...
Our World In Data suggests that the media are partly to blame. The media does not tell us how the world is changing, it tells us where the world is going wrong. It tends to focus on single events particularly single events that have gone bad. By contrast, positive developments happen slowly with no particular event to promote in a headline. “More people are healthy today than yesterday,” just doesn’t cut it.
The result is that most people are ignorant about how the state of the world has changed. In both the U.K. and the U.S. most people think that “the share of people living in extreme poverty has increased! Two thirds in the US even think the share in extreme poverty has ‘almost doubled’.”
To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business."
--- Reasons to Stay Alive / Matt Haig
Of course, getting people to buy things isn't the only reason you'd manipulate people to be depressed and worried.
There's also getting people to buy your cause or ideology.
Why The World Is Getting Better And Why Hardly Anyone Knows It
"When a recent survey asked “All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse?” the results were predictably bleak. In Sweden only 10% thought things are getting better, and in the U,S., it was only 6%. Hardly anyone thinks the world is getting better.
And yet the facts show otherwise. In a powerful study entitled “The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it” by Max Roser, an economist at the University of Oxford and the founder of Our World in Data, we learn that on virtually all of the key dimensions of human material well-being—poverty, literacy, health, freedom, and education—the world is an extraordinarily better place than it was just a couple of centuries ago...
Our World In Data suggests that the media are partly to blame. The media does not tell us how the world is changing, it tells us where the world is going wrong. It tends to focus on single events particularly single events that have gone bad. By contrast, positive developments happen slowly with no particular event to promote in a headline. “More people are healthy today than yesterday,” just doesn’t cut it.
The result is that most people are ignorant about how the state of the world has changed. In both the U.K. and the U.S. most people think that “the share of people living in extreme poverty has increased! Two thirds in the US even think the share in extreme poverty has ‘almost doubled’.”
Links - 5th September 2019 (1) (Weight Loss/Keto/Fasting)
Dietary carbohydrate restriction improves metabolic syndrome independent of weight loss - "Despite maintaining body mass, low-carbohydrate (LC) intake enhanced fat oxidation and was more effective in reversing MetS, especially high triglycerides, low HDL-C, and the small LDL subclass phenotype. Carbohydrate restriction also improved abnormal fatty acid composition, an emerging MetS feature. Despite containing 2.5 times more saturated fat than the high-carbohydrate diet, an LC diet decreased plasma total saturated fat and palmitoleate and increased arachidonate."
Yet more proof that the Carbohydrate-Insulin hypothesis is bunk
Kevin Bass summarises this as:
"On an isocaloric basis:
1. Replacing carbs with fat lowers blood sugar;
2. Replacing carbs with PUFAs and MUFAs improves lipids;
3. Replacing carbs with fats does not improve blood pressure, fatty liver, visceral fat, or waist circumference."
And claims that this is driven by an increase in unsaturated fat by percent (which swamps the increase in raw saturated fat intake)
Pentagon eyes ketogenic diet in bid to build more lethal warriors - "Top Pentagon officials say research has shown that human bodies in ketosis — the goal of the popular and controversial ketogenic diet — can stay underwater for longer periods, making the fat- and protein-heavy eating plan a potential benefit to military divers. It is one example of a rapidly growing trend as military researchers zero in on how nutrition and certain drugs can enhance how fighting men and women perform in battle... Beyond the pros and cons of the diet, however, lie philosophical questions about how much control the armed forces can and should exert over the physical bodies of the recruits who make up its ranks. The military long has held members to physical fitness standards and weeded out those with substance abuse problems, but some scholars argue that the diet debate crosses a new ethical boundary."
Keto and Paleo diets: what they leave out might just be what you need - and you may gain weight, not lose it - ""For the first month, I bounced out of bed every morning. I slept very well, I woke up feeling like I had slept 12 hours. I felt like that brain fog had lifted," she recalls."The second month, I started to feel very heavy and I actually gained weight. In the third month, something felt wrong."Banks began to experience fatigue and severe anxiety. On a visit to her doctor, blood tests revealed that Banks' diet had caused hormonal imbalances that led her to gain weight. She decided to come off the diet... "There is no one Paleo diet. Paleo was whatever you could grub together and find when you were a Neanderthal," says Christopher Gardner, director of nutritional studies and professor of medicine at Stanford University in California. "Some were heavy in meat, some were heavy in fish, some were practically vegetarian … it depends what part of the world you were living in back then.""
Substantial increase in body weight since 1960s due to interplay between genes and environment - "the findings also show that BMI has increased for both genetically predisposed and non-predisposed people since the 1960s, implying that the environment remains the main contributor to the obesity epidemic."
The Ketogenic Diet: Does it live up to the hype? The pros, the cons, and the facts about this not-so-new diet craze. - "Low-carb advocates in the late 1990s and early 2000s thought maybe they had stumbled on the key to fighting flab: insulin. Insulin is mainly a storage hormone: Its job is basically to help nutrients get into cells.
The low-carb / insulin hypothesis, dramatically oversimplified, went like this:
Insulin makes stuff go into cells.
Stuff that goes into fat cells makes us fat.
If we don’t help stuff go into cells, then we won’t get fat. We might even lose fat.
Carbs (in their digested form of glucose) stimulate insulin release.
Therefore eating fewer carbs = less body fat.
Unfortunately, insulin is not the only player. There’s never only one player in the team sport and complex system that is your body.Nor does insulin act alone. Energy storage is governed largely by our brain, not a single hormone.The other upside to the low-carb approach was that people often ate more protein and more fat. When we eat protein and fat, we release satiety hormones, particularly CCK, which is one of the main hormones that tells us we’re full. More protein and fat means we’re often less hungry. Which means we eat less. Which means we lose fat. It’s the “eating less” part (not the insulin part) that actually matters... You may find it easy to eat less when all you can eat is protein and fat. But after a while, you may grow tired of bringing your own whole salmon to parties, and wonder what the other 95% of the grocery store is up to. You may start to have fantasies about a threesome: you, Oreos, and chocolate sauce. Not only that, you may be getting some serious scurvy and other nutrient deficiencies.For women in particular, lowering carbohydrate intake seems to have negative effects.Women’s bodies go on high alert faster when they sense less energy and fewer nutrients coming in. Many women have found that the low-carb diet that worked great for their husband not only didn’t work for them, but it knocked out their menstrual cycle on the way out the door."
Keto diet doesn't help females lose weight, study says - "female mice on the keto diet were less likely than males to lose weight, and more likely to experienced impaired blood sugar control... After 15 weeks on the keto diet, the male mice experienced losses of body weight and body fat, while the female group actually gained weight. The researchers speculated that estrogen might be interfering with the weight-loss process, so they removed ovaries from some of the mice. This caused females to start experiencing the same weight-loss effects observed in the male group... The male mice experienced another, less desirable change: Their livers showed stronger signs of fibrosis — the thickening and scarring of connective tissue — and fatty storage than the female mice. The males had higher levels of a hormone called FG21, which previous studies have shown is released in response to liver damage."
Intermittent fasting: Surprising update - "They compared a form of intermittent fasting called “early time-restricted feeding,” where all meals were fit into an early eight-hour period of the day (7 am to 3 pm), or spread out over 12 hours (between 7 am and 7 pm). Both groups maintained their weight (did not gain or lose) but after five weeks, the eight-hours group had dramatically lower insulin levels and significantly improved insulin sensitivity, as well as significantly lower blood pressure. The best part? The eight-hours group also had significantly decreased appetite. They weren’t starving.Just changing the timing of meals, by eating earlier in the day and extending the overnight fast, significantly benefited metabolism even in people who didn’t lose a single pound."
Skipping a few meals with intermittent fasting may help people avoid cancer, diabetes, and heart disease - "There’s clear evidence that fasting, when done right, can reduce a person’s chances of developing long-term health issues like diabetes, heart disease, and multiple sclerosis (MS). And it helps some people lose weight, too.Dr. Miriam Merad, director of the Precision Immunology Institute at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, said the typical modern diet of constant eating is making our immune system cells work overtime, and it’s not good for long term health... a type of immune cell called a monocyte, which our bodies typically release to fight off infections and wounds. Monocytes are inflammatory, and the white blood cells can cluster to heal the body when we’re injured. But any time we eat food, monocytes are also standing guard in case we ingest any threatening microorganisms. This is especially true when we eat (and drink) sugar. Monocytes also accumulate in fat tissue, contributing to chronic disease... Researchers have known for a long time that caloric restriction is tied to a host of health benefits. Periodic fasting can help people steer clear of long-term health problems like diabetes, high cholesterol, and obesity. It can also can boost the production of a protein that strengthens connections in the brain and serve as an antidepressant. Some scientists even think fasting can help people live to a ripe old age by keeping cells healthy and youthful longer. Merad now tries to eat dinner a few hours earlier than she used to, and she said other researchers in her lab (as well as her husband) are also experimenting with their own versions of intermittent fasting plans, like skipping breakfast."
Obese People Get More Satisfaction From Food - "people who were obese showed significantly heightened perceptions of initial food satisfaction, whereas the gradual reduction of satisfaction that is typical with increased consumption — in this case, of chocolate — occurred at a slower rate compared with persons of normal weight and persons who were overweight."
Does Intermittent Fasting Boost Your Metabolism? - "Studies have shown that when it comes to weight loss, intermittent fasting can be just as effective as traditional calorie restriction, if not more... Fasting can cause a rise in blood levels of human growth hormone, an important hormone for promoting fat loss... However, women don't always experience the same benefits from fasting as men do, and it's not currently clear if women will see the same rise in human growth hormone... Increases in norepinephrine generally lead to larger amounts of fat being available for your body to burn.Fasting leads to a rise in the amount of norepinephrine in your bloodstream... Many people believe that skipping meals will cause your body to adapt by lowering its metabolic rate to save energy.It's well established that very long periods without food can cause a drop in metabolism. However, studies have shown that fasting for short periods can actually increase your metabolism, not slow it down"
Does Fasting cause (or cure) Hunger? - "The biggest worry about fasting is dealing with hunger. People assume that hunger will get worse and worse until you cannot help yourself and start an IV donut slurry in your garage... Ghrelin, the hunger hormone, increases appetite and weight gain... eating all the time sounds like it will turn off hunger and ghrelin. But that’s far too simplistic. Surprisingly, the answer to turning down ghrelin (and hunger) is the opposite — fasting... hunger is not simply a function of ‘not having eaten in a while’. At 9:00, you have not eaten for about 14 hours, yet you are the least hungry. Eating, remember, does not necessarily make you less hungry... Look at the average ghrelin levels over 24 hours. Over the entire day of fasting, ghrelin stays stable! In other words, eating nothing over 33 hours made you no more or less hungry than when you started! Whether you ate or did not eat, your hunger level stayed the same. Eating more sometimes makes you more hungry, not less. In the same vein, eating less can actually make you less hungry. That’s terrific, because if you are less hungry, you will eat less, and are more likely to lose weight... women would be expected to have more benefit from fasting because their hunger can be expected to decrease better than men. Notice, too, how much higher women’s ghrelin level reaches. I suspect this correlates to the clinical observation that many more women are ‘addicted’ to certain foods eg. chocoholics. Sugar addicts. etc. So many women have remarked how a longer fast seemed to completely turn off those cravings. This is the physiologic reason why. A few other notes about the hormonal changes of fasting. Notice that cortisol does go up during fasting. Yes, fasting is a stress to the body and cortisol acts as general activator as well as trying to move glucose out of storage and into the blood. So, if too much cortisol is your problem, then fasting may not be right for you. Insulin also goes down, which is what we expect. Growth hormone, as we’ve previously noted, goes up during fasting. This helps to maintain lean muscle tissue and to rebuild lost protein when you start to eat again. An interesting study of food cravings found exactly what we have been discussing. When patients were put on low calorie diet (1200) versus very low calorie (500) diets, food cravings didn’t change much on the former, but virtually disappeared on the latter. Yes. By eating almost nothing, food cravings did not get worse, they got much, much better."
Keywords: hunger is largely psychological
Can you eat fast food on the Keto diet? - "While vegans can be orthorexic, it is often prevalent in “counting” diets, in which you incessantly keep track of the percentage of carbohydrates versus fats and protein, for example.The ketogenic diet is one such example. While I’ve written positively about this diet, and many studies confirm its efficacy for weight loss, longevity, and cardiovascular health, there is always the danger of slipping into an orthorexic state of mind. I’ve witnessed people starting out with ketogenic diets treat gluten like the world’s most dangerous toxin. Restriction of carbs should not result in the complete avoidance of them.Yet that’s how the brain is designed: the emotional and physical high we get when changing our diet is correlated with advocacy, often to the point of blind devotion"
This helps explain why diets are like religion
Do calories matter? - Peter Attia - "What you eat actually changes how you expend energy. Similarly, how you expend energy changes what (and how) you eat. To be even more nuanced, what you eat further impacts what you subsequently eat. As you increase (or decrease) in size, this impacts how you expend energy... When you exercise your appetite rises relative to when you don’t exercise. When you eat a high carb meal you are more likely to eat again sooner compared to when you eat a high fat/protein meal due to less satiety... Is it relevant to our bodies that olive oil has about the same energy density (i.e., calories) as biodiesel (also known as fatty-acid methyl-ester)? Or, is it more relevant to us that consuming olive oil has a very different effect on our bodies than consuming biodiesel beyond anything to do with the calories contained within them? Obviously consuming equal caloric amounts of olive oil versus biodiesel will have a very different impact on our body. Why then is it so hard to appreciate or accept that equal caloric values of olive oil and rice could also have very different impacts on our body?"
Too bad he ends off by alluding to the Carbohydrate-Insulin hypothesis, which has no empirical support (in fact, the reverse)
Why Are We Still So Fat? - The New York Times - "There is just one almost uniformly effective treatment, and it is woefully underused: only about 1 percent of the 24 million American adults who are eligible get the procedure.That treatment is bariatric surgery, a drastic operation that turns the stomach into a tiny pouch and, in one version, also reroutes the intestines. Most who have it lose significant amounts of weight — but many of them remain overweight, or even obese. Their health usually improves anyway. Many with diabetes no longer need insulin. Cholesterol and blood pressure levels tend to fall. Sleep apnea disappears. Backs, hips and knees stop aching... when a very fat person diets down to a normal weight, he or she physiologically comes to resemble a starving person, craving food with an avidity that is hard to imagine... Obesity’s genetic connection was conclusively demonstrated in the 1980s in a series of papers showing that body weight is strongly inherited, almost as strongly as height. Children adopted as infants ended up with weights like those of their biological parents. Twins reared apart ended up with nearly identical body weights... For now, researchers wish people — including fat people themselves — would stop blaming the obese for their problem. “This idea that people should eat less and exercise more — if only it were so simple”"
Yet more proof that the Carbohydrate-Insulin hypothesis is bunk
Kevin Bass summarises this as:
"On an isocaloric basis:
1. Replacing carbs with fat lowers blood sugar;
2. Replacing carbs with PUFAs and MUFAs improves lipids;
3. Replacing carbs with fats does not improve blood pressure, fatty liver, visceral fat, or waist circumference."
And claims that this is driven by an increase in unsaturated fat by percent (which swamps the increase in raw saturated fat intake)
Pentagon eyes ketogenic diet in bid to build more lethal warriors - "Top Pentagon officials say research has shown that human bodies in ketosis — the goal of the popular and controversial ketogenic diet — can stay underwater for longer periods, making the fat- and protein-heavy eating plan a potential benefit to military divers. It is one example of a rapidly growing trend as military researchers zero in on how nutrition and certain drugs can enhance how fighting men and women perform in battle... Beyond the pros and cons of the diet, however, lie philosophical questions about how much control the armed forces can and should exert over the physical bodies of the recruits who make up its ranks. The military long has held members to physical fitness standards and weeded out those with substance abuse problems, but some scholars argue that the diet debate crosses a new ethical boundary."
Keto and Paleo diets: what they leave out might just be what you need - and you may gain weight, not lose it - ""For the first month, I bounced out of bed every morning. I slept very well, I woke up feeling like I had slept 12 hours. I felt like that brain fog had lifted," she recalls."The second month, I started to feel very heavy and I actually gained weight. In the third month, something felt wrong."Banks began to experience fatigue and severe anxiety. On a visit to her doctor, blood tests revealed that Banks' diet had caused hormonal imbalances that led her to gain weight. She decided to come off the diet... "There is no one Paleo diet. Paleo was whatever you could grub together and find when you were a Neanderthal," says Christopher Gardner, director of nutritional studies and professor of medicine at Stanford University in California. "Some were heavy in meat, some were heavy in fish, some were practically vegetarian … it depends what part of the world you were living in back then.""
Substantial increase in body weight since 1960s due to interplay between genes and environment - "the findings also show that BMI has increased for both genetically predisposed and non-predisposed people since the 1960s, implying that the environment remains the main contributor to the obesity epidemic."
The Ketogenic Diet: Does it live up to the hype? The pros, the cons, and the facts about this not-so-new diet craze. - "Low-carb advocates in the late 1990s and early 2000s thought maybe they had stumbled on the key to fighting flab: insulin. Insulin is mainly a storage hormone: Its job is basically to help nutrients get into cells.
The low-carb / insulin hypothesis, dramatically oversimplified, went like this:
Insulin makes stuff go into cells.
Stuff that goes into fat cells makes us fat.
If we don’t help stuff go into cells, then we won’t get fat. We might even lose fat.
Carbs (in their digested form of glucose) stimulate insulin release.
Therefore eating fewer carbs = less body fat.
Unfortunately, insulin is not the only player. There’s never only one player in the team sport and complex system that is your body.Nor does insulin act alone. Energy storage is governed largely by our brain, not a single hormone.The other upside to the low-carb approach was that people often ate more protein and more fat. When we eat protein and fat, we release satiety hormones, particularly CCK, which is one of the main hormones that tells us we’re full. More protein and fat means we’re often less hungry. Which means we eat less. Which means we lose fat. It’s the “eating less” part (not the insulin part) that actually matters... You may find it easy to eat less when all you can eat is protein and fat. But after a while, you may grow tired of bringing your own whole salmon to parties, and wonder what the other 95% of the grocery store is up to. You may start to have fantasies about a threesome: you, Oreos, and chocolate sauce. Not only that, you may be getting some serious scurvy and other nutrient deficiencies.For women in particular, lowering carbohydrate intake seems to have negative effects.Women’s bodies go on high alert faster when they sense less energy and fewer nutrients coming in. Many women have found that the low-carb diet that worked great for their husband not only didn’t work for them, but it knocked out their menstrual cycle on the way out the door."
Keto diet doesn't help females lose weight, study says - "female mice on the keto diet were less likely than males to lose weight, and more likely to experienced impaired blood sugar control... After 15 weeks on the keto diet, the male mice experienced losses of body weight and body fat, while the female group actually gained weight. The researchers speculated that estrogen might be interfering with the weight-loss process, so they removed ovaries from some of the mice. This caused females to start experiencing the same weight-loss effects observed in the male group... The male mice experienced another, less desirable change: Their livers showed stronger signs of fibrosis — the thickening and scarring of connective tissue — and fatty storage than the female mice. The males had higher levels of a hormone called FG21, which previous studies have shown is released in response to liver damage."
Intermittent fasting: Surprising update - "They compared a form of intermittent fasting called “early time-restricted feeding,” where all meals were fit into an early eight-hour period of the day (7 am to 3 pm), or spread out over 12 hours (between 7 am and 7 pm). Both groups maintained their weight (did not gain or lose) but after five weeks, the eight-hours group had dramatically lower insulin levels and significantly improved insulin sensitivity, as well as significantly lower blood pressure. The best part? The eight-hours group also had significantly decreased appetite. They weren’t starving.Just changing the timing of meals, by eating earlier in the day and extending the overnight fast, significantly benefited metabolism even in people who didn’t lose a single pound."
Skipping a few meals with intermittent fasting may help people avoid cancer, diabetes, and heart disease - "There’s clear evidence that fasting, when done right, can reduce a person’s chances of developing long-term health issues like diabetes, heart disease, and multiple sclerosis (MS). And it helps some people lose weight, too.Dr. Miriam Merad, director of the Precision Immunology Institute at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, said the typical modern diet of constant eating is making our immune system cells work overtime, and it’s not good for long term health... a type of immune cell called a monocyte, which our bodies typically release to fight off infections and wounds. Monocytes are inflammatory, and the white blood cells can cluster to heal the body when we’re injured. But any time we eat food, monocytes are also standing guard in case we ingest any threatening microorganisms. This is especially true when we eat (and drink) sugar. Monocytes also accumulate in fat tissue, contributing to chronic disease... Researchers have known for a long time that caloric restriction is tied to a host of health benefits. Periodic fasting can help people steer clear of long-term health problems like diabetes, high cholesterol, and obesity. It can also can boost the production of a protein that strengthens connections in the brain and serve as an antidepressant. Some scientists even think fasting can help people live to a ripe old age by keeping cells healthy and youthful longer. Merad now tries to eat dinner a few hours earlier than she used to, and she said other researchers in her lab (as well as her husband) are also experimenting with their own versions of intermittent fasting plans, like skipping breakfast."
Obese People Get More Satisfaction From Food - "people who were obese showed significantly heightened perceptions of initial food satisfaction, whereas the gradual reduction of satisfaction that is typical with increased consumption — in this case, of chocolate — occurred at a slower rate compared with persons of normal weight and persons who were overweight."
Does Intermittent Fasting Boost Your Metabolism? - "Studies have shown that when it comes to weight loss, intermittent fasting can be just as effective as traditional calorie restriction, if not more... Fasting can cause a rise in blood levels of human growth hormone, an important hormone for promoting fat loss... However, women don't always experience the same benefits from fasting as men do, and it's not currently clear if women will see the same rise in human growth hormone... Increases in norepinephrine generally lead to larger amounts of fat being available for your body to burn.Fasting leads to a rise in the amount of norepinephrine in your bloodstream... Many people believe that skipping meals will cause your body to adapt by lowering its metabolic rate to save energy.It's well established that very long periods without food can cause a drop in metabolism. However, studies have shown that fasting for short periods can actually increase your metabolism, not slow it down"
Does Fasting cause (or cure) Hunger? - "The biggest worry about fasting is dealing with hunger. People assume that hunger will get worse and worse until you cannot help yourself and start an IV donut slurry in your garage... Ghrelin, the hunger hormone, increases appetite and weight gain... eating all the time sounds like it will turn off hunger and ghrelin. But that’s far too simplistic. Surprisingly, the answer to turning down ghrelin (and hunger) is the opposite — fasting... hunger is not simply a function of ‘not having eaten in a while’. At 9:00, you have not eaten for about 14 hours, yet you are the least hungry. Eating, remember, does not necessarily make you less hungry... Look at the average ghrelin levels over 24 hours. Over the entire day of fasting, ghrelin stays stable! In other words, eating nothing over 33 hours made you no more or less hungry than when you started! Whether you ate or did not eat, your hunger level stayed the same. Eating more sometimes makes you more hungry, not less. In the same vein, eating less can actually make you less hungry. That’s terrific, because if you are less hungry, you will eat less, and are more likely to lose weight... women would be expected to have more benefit from fasting because their hunger can be expected to decrease better than men. Notice, too, how much higher women’s ghrelin level reaches. I suspect this correlates to the clinical observation that many more women are ‘addicted’ to certain foods eg. chocoholics. Sugar addicts. etc. So many women have remarked how a longer fast seemed to completely turn off those cravings. This is the physiologic reason why. A few other notes about the hormonal changes of fasting. Notice that cortisol does go up during fasting. Yes, fasting is a stress to the body and cortisol acts as general activator as well as trying to move glucose out of storage and into the blood. So, if too much cortisol is your problem, then fasting may not be right for you. Insulin also goes down, which is what we expect. Growth hormone, as we’ve previously noted, goes up during fasting. This helps to maintain lean muscle tissue and to rebuild lost protein when you start to eat again. An interesting study of food cravings found exactly what we have been discussing. When patients were put on low calorie diet (1200) versus very low calorie (500) diets, food cravings didn’t change much on the former, but virtually disappeared on the latter. Yes. By eating almost nothing, food cravings did not get worse, they got much, much better."
Keywords: hunger is largely psychological
Can you eat fast food on the Keto diet? - "While vegans can be orthorexic, it is often prevalent in “counting” diets, in which you incessantly keep track of the percentage of carbohydrates versus fats and protein, for example.The ketogenic diet is one such example. While I’ve written positively about this diet, and many studies confirm its efficacy for weight loss, longevity, and cardiovascular health, there is always the danger of slipping into an orthorexic state of mind. I’ve witnessed people starting out with ketogenic diets treat gluten like the world’s most dangerous toxin. Restriction of carbs should not result in the complete avoidance of them.Yet that’s how the brain is designed: the emotional and physical high we get when changing our diet is correlated with advocacy, often to the point of blind devotion"
This helps explain why diets are like religion
Do calories matter? - Peter Attia - "What you eat actually changes how you expend energy. Similarly, how you expend energy changes what (and how) you eat. To be even more nuanced, what you eat further impacts what you subsequently eat. As you increase (or decrease) in size, this impacts how you expend energy... When you exercise your appetite rises relative to when you don’t exercise. When you eat a high carb meal you are more likely to eat again sooner compared to when you eat a high fat/protein meal due to less satiety... Is it relevant to our bodies that olive oil has about the same energy density (i.e., calories) as biodiesel (also known as fatty-acid methyl-ester)? Or, is it more relevant to us that consuming olive oil has a very different effect on our bodies than consuming biodiesel beyond anything to do with the calories contained within them? Obviously consuming equal caloric amounts of olive oil versus biodiesel will have a very different impact on our body. Why then is it so hard to appreciate or accept that equal caloric values of olive oil and rice could also have very different impacts on our body?"
Too bad he ends off by alluding to the Carbohydrate-Insulin hypothesis, which has no empirical support (in fact, the reverse)
Why Are We Still So Fat? - The New York Times - "There is just one almost uniformly effective treatment, and it is woefully underused: only about 1 percent of the 24 million American adults who are eligible get the procedure.That treatment is bariatric surgery, a drastic operation that turns the stomach into a tiny pouch and, in one version, also reroutes the intestines. Most who have it lose significant amounts of weight — but many of them remain overweight, or even obese. Their health usually improves anyway. Many with diabetes no longer need insulin. Cholesterol and blood pressure levels tend to fall. Sleep apnea disappears. Backs, hips and knees stop aching... when a very fat person diets down to a normal weight, he or she physiologically comes to resemble a starving person, craving food with an avidity that is hard to imagine... Obesity’s genetic connection was conclusively demonstrated in the 1980s in a series of papers showing that body weight is strongly inherited, almost as strongly as height. Children adopted as infants ended up with weights like those of their biological parents. Twins reared apart ended up with nearly identical body weights... For now, researchers wish people — including fat people themselves — would stop blaming the obese for their problem. “This idea that people should eat less and exercise more — if only it were so simple”"
Wednesday, September 04, 2019
Links - 4th September 2019 (2) (US Border Crisis)
US deportations of Europeans could exceed last fiscal year - "From Oct. 2, 2016 through June 24, more than 1,300 Europeans have been removed, compared with 1,450 during all of federal fiscal year 2016 — the last under President Barack Obama. The agency didn’t provide estimates broken down by calendar year.In San Jose, California, an HIV-positive Russian asylum seeker faces possible deportation after overstaying his visa. In Chicago, Polish and Irish community groups say they’re seeing inquiries about immigration and citizenship-related services surge as people seek legal protections.And in Boston, John Cunningham, a well-known Irishman who had overstayed his visa by 14 years, was sent back to Ireland last week, sending shivers through the city’s sizeable Irish expat community."
So much for claims that immigration law is racist because white people don't get targeted - under Trump more (presumably) white people were deported than under Obama
Generous Joe: More “Free” Healthcare For Illegals Needed - "The question was this: “Do you think that undocumented immigrants who are in this country and are law-abiding should be entitled to federal benefits like Medicare, Medicaid for example?”Answered Biden, “Look, I think that anyone who is in a situation where they are in need of health care, regardless of whether they are documented or undocumented, we have an obligation to see that they are cared for. That's why I think we need more clinics in this country.”Biden forgot to put “free” before clinics, but anyway, the candidate then suggested that Americans who disagree likely have a nasty hang-up about the border-jumping illegals who lie with the facility of Pinocchio when they apply for “asylum.”“A significant portion of undocumented folks in this country are there because they overstayed their visas,” he continued. “It’s not a lot of people breaking down gates coming across the border,” he falsely averred.Then came the inevitable. “We” need to watch what we say about all those “undocumented folks.”“The biggest thing we’ve got to do is tone down the rhetoric,” he continued, because that “creates fear and concern” and ends in describing “undocumented folks” in “graphic, unflattering terms.”Biden thinks those “undocumented folks” are citizens"
There's a video but people are still claiming Biden was taken out of context
It's The Only Country Where Undocumented Migrants Have The Same Health Care Rights As Citizens - "In Thailand, migrants — who account for more than 6 percent of the country's 67.1 million population — are able to immediately buy and access the country's universal health care.It's the only country in the world where migrants there illegally have the same health care rights as nationals... A combination of factors led the Thai government to contemplate a system that gave migrants equal health care. By 2005, migrant workers from Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia accounted for 5 percent of all labor forces within Thailand, according to the International Labour Organization. The government recognized the migrants' contribution to the economy, considered access to health care a human right and was concerned that the lack of proper care for this vulnerable population would allow for communicable diseases that had already been controlled in Thailand to spread once again... Initially, migrants would pay 2,800 THB (about $78) for an annual health insurance card. After the program successfully enrolled its starting target of 300,000 migrant subscribers, the yearly premium dropped to 2,100 THB ($58). Today, more than 1.3 million migrants — approximately a third of Thailand's migrant population — are enrolled in the health care system... 'many hospitals refuse to sell migrants health care because taking care of all these sick migrant workers could make the hospitals go bankrupt'... While the 28 countries of the European Union provide universal health coverage for nationals, few offer migrants equal coverage. In Germany or Sweden, for instance, migrants in the country illegally can only access emergency services."
For some reason, some liberals think a lot of European countries provide free healthcare to illegal immigrants, but even Thailand makes them pay
ICE claims more illegals were deported under Obama than Trump - "Immigration and Customs Enforcement has deported more immigrants this fiscal year than any full fiscal year of Trump’s presidency, but has yet to come close to Obama’s early deportation record, according to new internal Department of Homeland Security figures... Under the Obama administration, ICE deported more than 385,000 each year in fiscal years 2009 through 2011, and hit a high of 409,849 in fiscal 2012 — prompting critics to dub Trump’s predecessor “the deporter in chief.” The numbers then dropped to below 250,000 in fiscal years 2015 and 2016.Under Trump, by comparison, ICE deportations dropped to 226,119 in fiscal 2017, then inched up to over 250,000 in fiscal 2018 and hit a Trump administration high of 282,242 this fiscal year, as of June... And while deportations have dropped, the number of illegal immigrants crossing the border, mostly Central American families seeking asylum in the US, has soared to levels not seen in a decade — as the president’s promise to build a wall remains unfulfilled and border workers are overwhelmed by the crisis."
Deportation is only wrong when Republicans do it
Ben Shapiro on Twitter - "If you want to know why conservatives don’t trust the media, compare their treatment of AOC to their treatment of Trump. Both say ridiculous and false things regularly. One is rabidly defended by our journalistic firefighting brigade. The other is called a Hitlerian liar."
Ocasio-Cortez Compares Mandatory Math Classes To Concentration Camps | The Babylon Bee - ""Kids are, like, being forced to learn numbers and do, like, long division," she said. "And even short and medium-sized division. This is basically what happened in the Holocaust. Math teachers are, like, pretty much fascists. We should call them Add-Olf Hitler. You know, because of the additioning they make us do.""This isn't happening in the '40s either---this is happening in 2019," she added as she began trying to cook some instant noodles in the microwave. "We are basically living in Nazi Germany now."Ocasio-Cortez was forced to cut off her live stream after smoke began billowing out of her microwave."
Tim Pool on Twitter - "So let me get this straight. People are flying from Angola to Brazil, then traveling North through Central America and Mexico to get in line for a "concentration camp?"
Being Classically Liberal - Posts - "Remember, the U.S. is a country where immigrants, especially non-whites come for a better life, as well as being the most racist and most evil country against non-whites... enslaving and murdering them."
Record number of African migrants coming to Mexican border - "Undaunted by a dangerous journey over thousands of miles, people fleeing economic hardship and human rights abuses in African countries are coming to the U.S.-Mexico border in unprecedented numbers, surprising Border Patrol agents more accustomed to Spanish-speaking migrants."
Meme - "JUST WONDERING WHY SO MANY PEOPLE FROM AROUND THE WORLD ARE CLIMBING FENCES TO GET INTO OUR CONCENTRATION CAMPS"
Reasons Immigrants were turned away - "Immigrants were turned away if they:
-were sick in any way
-had a criminal record
-if they didn't seem like they would be able to have a job in America...
Ellis Island was also called "heart break Island" This is because some immigrants who were turned away had to take that shameful boat ride back to their homelands. They felt like rejects, and many families were separated this way
For those who keep citing the poem on the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."
Family Separation Is Not the Holocaust - "The Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents brought a flood of comparisons to the Holocaust. Some described the facilities used to hold the children as “concentration camps.” ICE officials have been called Nazis. President Trump and those around him have been described as Hitler and kapos. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden posted a picture of the entrance to Birkenau with the message, “Other governments have separated mothers and children.”... This is an instance of a broader problem. Since the 1990s, as interest in the Holocaust has grown, Holocaust analogies have proliferated. Some have been patently absurd... It is important, though, to distinguish between methods and objectives. Apartheid aimed to economically, socially, and legally humiliate and degrade black people, keeping them in a subservient position. If some were lynched, shot, or killed in some manner that was entirely acceptable, but the objective was not mass murder. The Holocaust, by contrast, was designed to murder an entire group on an entire continent. It did not matter if the Jews designated for death were providing a useful service to Nazi Germany. When it came time to kill them, they were murdered. It is not a question of competitive suffering, but of historical accuracy. Conflating the two periods diminishes the specific, unique horror of each particular crime, and impedes our ability to understand them on their own terms.The same applies to conflating the Holocaust with the family-separation policy enacted by the Trump administration along the southern border of the United States. People are being concentrated in camps, but the contemporary camps bear little resemblance to the camps in Nazi Germany in which people were beaten, tortured, starved, and often killed... Moreover, even taken on its own, narrow terms, the analogy is mistaken. The Nazis aimed not at separation, but extermination. When there were mass shootings, children were not typically separated from parents; they generally kept them together so as not to alarm them"
By Deborah Lipstadt, Professor of Holocaust history at Emory University. Presumably liberals will mock her for being ignorant of history
John Kiehne for State Representative - "Just so you know...
(From Encyclopedia Britannica)
"Concentration camp, internment centre for political prisoners and members of national or minority groups who are confined for reasons of state security, exploitation, or punishment, usually by executive decree or military order. Persons are placed in such camps often on the basis of identification with a particular ethnic or political group rather than as individuals and without benefit either of indictment or fair trial. Concentration camps are to be distinguished from prisons interning persons lawfully convicted of civil crimes and from prisoner-of-war camps in which captured military personnel are held under the laws of war. They are also to be distinguished from refugee camps or detention and relocation centres for the temporary accommodation of large numbers of displaced persons.""
Occupy Hypocrisy - Posts - "Hey, white Americans. What would you do if you crossed over into Canada and we separated you from you children and put them into camps? serious question #ConcentrationCamps"
"I don't cross into other countries illegally."
Surprise surprise, she made her account private
Ocasio-Cortez Refuses Invite To Visit Concentration Camps With Holocaust Survivor - "socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) declined an invitation from a Holocaust remembrance group to visit Nazi concentration camps with a Holocaust survivor, suggesting that it was part of a "far-right" scheme designed for "political gain."... "We at From The Depths, have brought over 100 international parliamentarians to visit the German Nazi Concentration and Extermination camps, parliamentarians from across the political spectrum, including over 20 Representatives of the United States Congress, both Republicans and Democrats alike," Daniels wrote in the invitation to Ocasio-Cortez. "From The Depths is the only foundation dealing with Holocaust memory, memorial and education run entirely by millennials, we feel that this would be great opportunity for you to learn more about this horrendous past, and understand how it impacts lives and education until today." "In the invitation, Daniels wrote: "The opportunity you will have of visiting the German Nazi Concentration Camps along with Mr. Mosberg, a 93 year old survivor of history's most brutal genocidal regime, will enable you to become a witness of a witness, something that our generation will sadly be the last to do, as result of the fact that the survivors are passing away at an ever increasing rate," Daniels concluded. "We await your response and look forward to learning together with you about this painful history.""
Apparently the left never does things (e.g. ludicrous Holocaust dog whistling) for political gain
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez invited by Polish MP to see concentration camps - "Polish MP Tarcynski Dominik has invited US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to visit Poland following her remarks in which she compared migrant detention camps on the United States’ southern border to Nazi-era “concentration camps”... "With this letter," he wrote, "I am formally inviting @AOC to come to Poland, where Adolf Hitler set up the worst chain of concentration camps the world has ever seen, so that she may see that scoring political points with enflamed rhetoric is unacceptable in our contemporary Western societies."... Dominik explained that under German-Nazi occupation, "a number of concentration camps were set up in my country, Poland.""It has caused a deep wound that persists on our proud Polish and European history that we must deal with every single day, and that we reaffirm to one another can never be forgotten, and never allowed to happen again," he continued. “This is why when someone cheapens the history, or uses it for political point-scoring, we become agitated and upset.”“You speak often of bipartisanship, and I feel this is one area in particular where we can begin to live that ideal.”... Following major backlash from several Jewish groups and politicians, as well as a call from House GOP leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy for the congresswoman to apologize for her remarks, Ocasio-Cortez took to Twitter on Wednesday night to defend her actions."
Polish lawmaker schools Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about the Holocaust - "It's odd, of course, that people would willingly jump international borders and surrender to Border Patrol agents with the full knowledge that such a ghastly fate was next for them. National Socialist death camps didn't work that way... Tarcynski could extend a similar letter to Rep. Ilhan Omar, who's circulating a video to claim that the U.S. is heading toward "death camps" as well... Omar, like Ocasio-Cortez, is rather well known for her anti-Semitic statements. Now that both of them are claiming that migrant processing centers are identical to National Socialist death camps, it rather signals that the pair of them are seeking a political twofer: to diminish the significance of the Holocaust, which is a major aim of all anti-Semites, and to elevate the detention centers as indistinguishable."
Ocasio-Cortez Backtracks on Concentration Camp Remark, Blames Liz Cheney - "After a considerable amount of backlash for accusing the United States of running concentration camps on the southern border (and repeatedly doubling down on that claim), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is now backtracking on her original statement, blaming Rep. Liz Cheney for making the comparison of concentration camps to the Holocaust. In addition to the backlash she’s received, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has received (and turned down) multiple invites to visit and tour actual concentration camps so she can get educated on what they really were and why her comparison was irresponsible. Perhaps attempting to pin the blame on Liz Cheney was the best strategy her staff could come up with, but it rings hollow, as it was Ocasio-Cortez who originally told her followers on Instagram, “The U.S. is running concentration camps on our southern border and that is exactly what they are. They are concentration camps. And.. umm… If that doesn’t bother you… I don’t… [unintelligble] I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘never again’ means something”... Actual Holocaust survivors also took issue with AOC’s disgraceful comparison. Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to Holocaust victims, also tweeted the following:
.@AOC Concentration camps assured a slave labor supply to help in the Nazi war effort, even as the brutality of life inside the camps helped assure the ultimate goal of "extermination through labor."Learn about concentration camps ow.ly/LtnX50uHJL2 #Holocaust #History"
Democrats make U-turn on calling border a 'manufactured crisis' - "Democrats have done a U-turn on their claim from earlier this year that President Trump’s concern about illegal immigration at the southern border was a “manufactured crisis.”... Earlier this year, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) accused Trump of exaggerating problems at the border to stoke fear among Americans and distract from the turmoil of his own administration."
Why are families being separated at the border? - "When adults are detained and prosecuted in the criminal justice system for immigration offenses, their children cannot, by law, be housed with them in criminal jails, so the family unit is separated... DHS has also pointed to intelligence suggesting that unrelated children were often smuggled with migrants to avoid detention, meaning the zero-tolerance policy prevents those offenders from abusing the system...
Is this a new immigration enforcement policy?
Not completely... The Obama administration also used family separation when they prosecuted immigration offenses as a deterrent against illegal border crossings after 2014 as more children and families fled violence in Central American countries."
The liberal solution seems to be to not prosecute adults with children for immgiration offences. Which is a great incentive to bring children with you (even if they aren't yours)
Damning New Photos Emerge of Ocasio-Cortez Crying at the Border - "After photos of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez visiting the southern border went viral this week, additional angles surfaced revealing what the New York Democrat was really crying over: an empty parking lot... A black-and-white photo indicated that the fence wasn’t as impenetrable as it initially appeared... detention facilities do stand on the property the protestors had gathered outside of. But he said “they don’t appear to be within eyeshot of AOC’s vantage point, at least not close enough to see children ‘caged’ as she describes. In both directions the nearest building is barely visible. ” He added: “Perhaps that explains the tears. With a limited campaign budget, AOC didn’t have a lot of room for missed photo-op.” Despite her frequent proclamations of concern for migrant children, Ocasio-Cortez on Tuesday defied her party by voting against a bill to provide $4.5 billion in emergency border funding. She was one of just four liberal Democrats to do so, saying, “Throwing more money at the very organizations committing human rights abuses—and the very Administration directing these human rights abuses—is not a solution.”"
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "There are no words that adequately describe the absurdity of our southern border. It is an epic failure of governance that was created by all three branches of government... In 1997, the government entered into a court ordered agreement (Flores) that required children be released promptly from custody into the care of someone... In 2012, President Obama announce DACA - a plan to allow young illegal immigrants to stay in the country. In 2014, Obama announced plans to expand the program. The flow of families illegally migrating to America increased.The increase of incarcerated families brought court challenges. and in 2015, a court ruled that the Obama administration was violating the Flores agreement by keeping children incarcerated with their parents. Children had to be released into the care of someone else within 20 days of being apprehended. The Obama administration responded by (mostly) releasing families instead of holding them until their hearings.Enter Trump. Unhappy with ‘catch and release’ he ordered that the parents be kept in custody - the famous family separation debacle. This attempt to discourage the use of children to gain entry into the country failed as the court’s ordered it to end. With economic hardships happening in Central America, word for around that bringing a child into the U.S. and claiming asylum was the golden ticket to enter"
Rio Grande drowning: Woman watched her husband and daughter die - "The bodies of Oscar Alberto Martínez and his 23-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria, lie face down in murky waters littered with reeds and discarded beer bottles. Their heads are wrapped in a black T-shirt, and her tiny right arm is draped over his shoulders.The shocking image captured Monday was a grim reminder of the dangerous journey migrants take to get to the United States... Martinez arrived along with his wife, young daughter and a brother at a migrant camp in Matamoros on Sunday, hoping for an appointment to receive political asylum from the US... They wanted to have their own home, [their mother] Ramírez said. "That was what motivated them," she said... The victim's wife said they had obtained a humanitarian visa from the Mexican government... The two deaths promoted Salvadoran Minister of Foreign Affairs Alexandra Hill to beg citizens to stay in the country and work with the government as it tries to resolve the economic issues that push so many to leave"
It's amazing how many red flags there are, but people still claim they were refugees and blame Trump for the deaths as if he forced them to skip the queue and swim across the river (ignoring the safe third country principle). Of course many people are ignorant of international refugee law and imagine that crime is a valid reason to seek asylum, but that isn't even the case here. Though some accept that this was economic migration but immediately pivot to say that desperate people need to be let in (presumably the whole of the Third World needs to be allowed to move to the First World)
Butthurt Liberals - Posts - "I'll just illegally enter a foreign country and knowingly put my children in danger"
"Fucking Trump"
Border drowning: Migrant dad and daughter die in Rio Grande - "Noting the Rio Grande currents can be “rapid” and “rough”, Mr Trump said if the US had the right laws, “those people wouldn’t be coming up … they wouldn’t be trying.”“They (Democrats) want to have open borders, and open borders mean crime, and open borders mean people drowning in the rivers. And it’s a very dangerous thing... On Sunday, two months after entering Mexico, they arrived at a migrant centre to make the formal request for political asylum. But La Jordana reports the office was closed for the weekend. Mr Martinez decided to try his luck crossing the river at Matamoros, not far from the Mexican east coast."
Border Patrol Official: Central Americans Entering U.S. With Contagious Health Conditions - "many of those people are sick, he said, a situation that forces Border Patrol agents to divert from their main mission... "Those people realize that as long as they're being apprehended by us, they are still likely to be released on their own recognizance. That's because the country, the U.S. government as a whole, does not have the detention and removal capability to hold them in custody until their immigration hearing."When they know that they are going to be released, even though they're caught, it serves as a huge draw to enter this country illegally.""So they want to get apprehended," Bartiromo said. She was reporting from the El Paso border sector and watched several family unit cross into the U.S."Yeah, they're not trying to get away," Hull said. "They know that we're basically -- a period of time, they are going to be held in custody and then they're going to be released and continue on to all parts of the United States."Bartiromo said one of the illegal aliens she spoke with told her she wasn't fleeing from danger:"You know, yesterday when we were talking with some of the migrants, I asked one woman, I said, why are you here? She said 'asylum, asylum.' She spoke Spanish, and I said 'Oh, well what's happening there? Did they try to hurt you?' She said, well actually, I just want to get opportunity for my daughter. So they are seeing America as just an opportunity for their families. It's not necessarily that they're fleeing."That's exactly right," Hull said. "A lot of people refer to all of these family units as asylum seekers but that's really not the case. Matter of fact, most of those that we encounter when they're caught at this step in the process, they don't indicate fear of return. They indicate they want better opportunity.""
Nrthern Triangle Migrant Flow Study: Final Report - "Asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras represent a significant part of migrants entering the United States... Adult asylum seekers have primarily been driven by economic motivations, and juvenile migrants by economic opportunities and reunification with family , and evidence on the impact of crime and violence on juvenile and adult flows is mixed . Mexico does not offer enough gain in economic opportunities and reduction in exposure to crime and violence to justify the costs of migration , and juvenile migrants require family members and networks already present in the destination country that do not exist in Mexico"
Feds in Southern Arizona turn attention to family fraud at border - "As thousands of migrant families from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador seek asylum in the United States, federal agencies in Southern Arizona are turning their attention to migrants who pose as families to better their chances of being released from custody... Homeland Security Investigations... will start a pilot project at two border cities to take biometrics of children if special agents suspect the children are being “rented” out by smugglers... Maynor Velasquez Molina paid $130 to the family of an 8-year-old boy so he could pretend the boy was his son when they entered the United States... A special agent with HSI interviewed Velasquez, who reportedly said “he had looked for a child in Guatemala to cross the United States/Mexico international border with as he was told that it was easier to get into the United States with a child,” the special agent wrote in the complaint... Migrant families often are released on their own recognizance in Southern Arizona and told to meet with immigration authorities after they arrive at the residence of their sponsor, usually a friend or family member, elsewhere in the United States.Individual adults, on the other hand, are more likely to face criminal prosecution or deportation."
“Recycling” of Children in El Paso | U.S. Customs and Border Protection - "U.S. Border Patrol agents from El Paso Sector working in conjunction with agents from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and officers from CBP’s Office of Field Operations (OFO) identify at least one local case in which children are possibly being recycled and forced to undertake the treacherous journey from Central America to the United States."
Asylum Decisions and Denials Jump in 2018 - "Fiscal year 2018 broke records for the number of decisions (42,224) by immigration judges granting or denying asylum. Denials grew faster than grants, pushing denial rates up as well. The 42,224 decisions represented a 40 percent jump from decisions during FY 2017, and an 89 percent increase over the number of asylum decisions of two years ago... In 65.0 percent of these decisions this past year asylum was denied. This is the sixth year in a row that denial rates have risen"
On average, from FY2001 to FY2018, the majority of asylum claims were denied. But this excludes those who didn't apply for asylum, and those whose claims of credible fear were judged non-credible
Credible Fear | Homeland Security
In FY2016, in 80% of cases credible fear was found. But for Guatemala and Mexico the rate was only in the 60s
Media Savages Trump for Saying Exactly What Obama Said in 2014 [Video] - "Since Congress has refused to aid Trump in his effort to secure the border via a wall, his administration instead implemented a “zero tolerance” policy that strictly enforced existing laws for those illegal immigrants detained after crossing the border illegally.A consequence of that policy — which stems from court precedent set in 1997 — was that children are temporarily detained in separate facilities while their parents are processed and prosecuted for illegal entry, often to be reunited later once the process is completed.Of course, the anti-Trump liberal media has acted as if this policy was ripped straight from Hitler’s playbook of Nazi tactics and is the most horrific policy ever … utterly ignoring the fact that it was essentially a more strict continuation of stated (though not always enforced) policies under the administration of former President Barack Obama... Set aside for a moment the fact that those children and families were encouraged to make the dangerous trek through Mexico to the U.S. in large part because of Obama’s policies and hints of amnesty, and just consider what he actually said in the interview.“Our message absolutely is, don’t send your children unaccompanied, on trains or through a bunch of smugglers,” Obama said. “We don’t even know how many of these kids don’t make it, and may have been waylaid into sex trafficking, or killed because they fell off a train … we have no way of tracking that.”“So that is our direct message to the families in Central America: Do not send your children to the border,” Obama reiterated. “If they do make it, they’ll be sent back. More importantly, they may not make it,” he added."
2014: Obama says crime and poverty do not justify an asylum claim - YouTube
Ryan Fournier on Twitter - "Imagine illegally entering another country and being angry that their detention centers weren’t up to your standards. 🤣"
WATCH: Ocasio-Cortez Confronted On Her Claim Migrants Drinking From Toilet - "Ocasio-Cortez's unsubstantiated claim was met with instant pushback, as border reporter Anna Giaritell reported: "Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., screamed at federal law enforcement agents 'in a threatening manner' during a visit to a U.S. Border Patrol facility in El Paso, Texas, Monday afternoon and refused to tour the facility, according to two people who witnessed it.""13 other House Democrats as well as their aides were in the room," Giaritelli added. "I'm told only Rep. Ocasio-Cortez reacted in this manner.""
WATCH: Protesters at ICE facility in Aurora pull down American flag and raise Mexican flag
Clearly, if you are upset about this you are racist
Rapid DNA testing reveals a THIRD of migrants faked family relationship with kids - "An Immigration and Customs Enforcement pilot of new rapid DNA testing at the border has found that nearly a third of those tested were not biologically related to the children in their custody.ICE conducted the pilot for a few days earlier this month in El Paso and McAllen, Texas, finding about 30 per cent of those tested were not related to the children they claimed were their own... some migrants did refuse the test and admit that they were not related to the children they were with, when they learned their claim would be subjected to DNA proof... some migrants did refuse the test and admit that they were not related to the children they were with, when they learned their claim would be subjected to DNA proof. Current U.S. law and policy means that Central Americans who cross the border illegally with children can claim asylum and avoid any lengthy detention in most cases"
Rep. Ilhan Omar calls for end to Customs and Border Protection - ""We know that they have spoken in the most vile ways about immigrants. We know that they have certain views of what brown and black people deserve," Omar explained. "And so we should be having a conversation about eliminating their existence [and] reforming the agencies that deal with the most vulnerable, who are children and women... Omar previously called for the elimination of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). She also backed Ocasio-Cortez's claim that the U.S. is essentially "running concentration camps" along the southern border."
Paul Joseph Watson on Twitter - "So are we just going to pretend that a left wing terrorist who was radicalised by AOC & Ilhan Omar’s rhetoric trying to kill a bunch of border patrol workers didn’t happen? The media swept that under the rug pretty quick, didn’t they?"
Fareed Zakaria: "It Pains Me To Say This," But Trump Was Right About Asylum System - "Asylum is meant to be granted to a very small number of people in extreme circumstances. Not as a substitute for the process of immigration itself. Yet, the two have gotten mixed up. As the Atlantic's David Frum has pointed out, the idea of a right to asylum is a relatively recent one dating to the early years of the Cold War. Guilt ridden over the rejection of many Jewish refugees during World War II the U.N. created a right of asylum to protect those who are fleeing regimes where they would be killed our imprisoned because of their identity or beliefs. This standard has gotten broader and broader over the years.And now includes threats of gang warfare and domestic violence. These looser criteria coupled with the reality that this is a safe way to enter the U.S. have made the asylum system easy to abuse. Applications from Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans have surged even though the murder rate in their countries has been cut in half... If things continue to spiral downward and America's southern border seems out of control, Trump's tough rhetoric and hard line stance will become increasingly attractive to the public.Keep in mind, that the rise of populism in the Western world is almost everywhere tied to fears of growing out of control immigration"
So much for claims that immigration law is racist because white people don't get targeted - under Trump more (presumably) white people were deported than under Obama
Generous Joe: More “Free” Healthcare For Illegals Needed - "The question was this: “Do you think that undocumented immigrants who are in this country and are law-abiding should be entitled to federal benefits like Medicare, Medicaid for example?”Answered Biden, “Look, I think that anyone who is in a situation where they are in need of health care, regardless of whether they are documented or undocumented, we have an obligation to see that they are cared for. That's why I think we need more clinics in this country.”Biden forgot to put “free” before clinics, but anyway, the candidate then suggested that Americans who disagree likely have a nasty hang-up about the border-jumping illegals who lie with the facility of Pinocchio when they apply for “asylum.”“A significant portion of undocumented folks in this country are there because they overstayed their visas,” he continued. “It’s not a lot of people breaking down gates coming across the border,” he falsely averred.Then came the inevitable. “We” need to watch what we say about all those “undocumented folks.”“The biggest thing we’ve got to do is tone down the rhetoric,” he continued, because that “creates fear and concern” and ends in describing “undocumented folks” in “graphic, unflattering terms.”Biden thinks those “undocumented folks” are citizens"
There's a video but people are still claiming Biden was taken out of context
It's The Only Country Where Undocumented Migrants Have The Same Health Care Rights As Citizens - "In Thailand, migrants — who account for more than 6 percent of the country's 67.1 million population — are able to immediately buy and access the country's universal health care.It's the only country in the world where migrants there illegally have the same health care rights as nationals... A combination of factors led the Thai government to contemplate a system that gave migrants equal health care. By 2005, migrant workers from Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia accounted for 5 percent of all labor forces within Thailand, according to the International Labour Organization. The government recognized the migrants' contribution to the economy, considered access to health care a human right and was concerned that the lack of proper care for this vulnerable population would allow for communicable diseases that had already been controlled in Thailand to spread once again... Initially, migrants would pay 2,800 THB (about $78) for an annual health insurance card. After the program successfully enrolled its starting target of 300,000 migrant subscribers, the yearly premium dropped to 2,100 THB ($58). Today, more than 1.3 million migrants — approximately a third of Thailand's migrant population — are enrolled in the health care system... 'many hospitals refuse to sell migrants health care because taking care of all these sick migrant workers could make the hospitals go bankrupt'... While the 28 countries of the European Union provide universal health coverage for nationals, few offer migrants equal coverage. In Germany or Sweden, for instance, migrants in the country illegally can only access emergency services."
For some reason, some liberals think a lot of European countries provide free healthcare to illegal immigrants, but even Thailand makes them pay
ICE claims more illegals were deported under Obama than Trump - "Immigration and Customs Enforcement has deported more immigrants this fiscal year than any full fiscal year of Trump’s presidency, but has yet to come close to Obama’s early deportation record, according to new internal Department of Homeland Security figures... Under the Obama administration, ICE deported more than 385,000 each year in fiscal years 2009 through 2011, and hit a high of 409,849 in fiscal 2012 — prompting critics to dub Trump’s predecessor “the deporter in chief.” The numbers then dropped to below 250,000 in fiscal years 2015 and 2016.Under Trump, by comparison, ICE deportations dropped to 226,119 in fiscal 2017, then inched up to over 250,000 in fiscal 2018 and hit a Trump administration high of 282,242 this fiscal year, as of June... And while deportations have dropped, the number of illegal immigrants crossing the border, mostly Central American families seeking asylum in the US, has soared to levels not seen in a decade — as the president’s promise to build a wall remains unfulfilled and border workers are overwhelmed by the crisis."
Deportation is only wrong when Republicans do it
Ben Shapiro on Twitter - "If you want to know why conservatives don’t trust the media, compare their treatment of AOC to their treatment of Trump. Both say ridiculous and false things regularly. One is rabidly defended by our journalistic firefighting brigade. The other is called a Hitlerian liar."
Ocasio-Cortez Compares Mandatory Math Classes To Concentration Camps | The Babylon Bee - ""Kids are, like, being forced to learn numbers and do, like, long division," she said. "And even short and medium-sized division. This is basically what happened in the Holocaust. Math teachers are, like, pretty much fascists. We should call them Add-Olf Hitler. You know, because of the additioning they make us do.""This isn't happening in the '40s either---this is happening in 2019," she added as she began trying to cook some instant noodles in the microwave. "We are basically living in Nazi Germany now."Ocasio-Cortez was forced to cut off her live stream after smoke began billowing out of her microwave."
Tim Pool on Twitter - "So let me get this straight. People are flying from Angola to Brazil, then traveling North through Central America and Mexico to get in line for a "concentration camp?"
Being Classically Liberal - Posts - "Remember, the U.S. is a country where immigrants, especially non-whites come for a better life, as well as being the most racist and most evil country against non-whites... enslaving and murdering them."
Record number of African migrants coming to Mexican border - "Undaunted by a dangerous journey over thousands of miles, people fleeing economic hardship and human rights abuses in African countries are coming to the U.S.-Mexico border in unprecedented numbers, surprising Border Patrol agents more accustomed to Spanish-speaking migrants."
Meme - "JUST WONDERING WHY SO MANY PEOPLE FROM AROUND THE WORLD ARE CLIMBING FENCES TO GET INTO OUR CONCENTRATION CAMPS"
Reasons Immigrants were turned away - "Immigrants were turned away if they:
-were sick in any way
-had a criminal record
-if they didn't seem like they would be able to have a job in America...
Ellis Island was also called "heart break Island" This is because some immigrants who were turned away had to take that shameful boat ride back to their homelands. They felt like rejects, and many families were separated this way
For those who keep citing the poem on the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."
Family Separation Is Not the Holocaust - "The Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents brought a flood of comparisons to the Holocaust. Some described the facilities used to hold the children as “concentration camps.” ICE officials have been called Nazis. President Trump and those around him have been described as Hitler and kapos. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden posted a picture of the entrance to Birkenau with the message, “Other governments have separated mothers and children.”... This is an instance of a broader problem. Since the 1990s, as interest in the Holocaust has grown, Holocaust analogies have proliferated. Some have been patently absurd... It is important, though, to distinguish between methods and objectives. Apartheid aimed to economically, socially, and legally humiliate and degrade black people, keeping them in a subservient position. If some were lynched, shot, or killed in some manner that was entirely acceptable, but the objective was not mass murder. The Holocaust, by contrast, was designed to murder an entire group on an entire continent. It did not matter if the Jews designated for death were providing a useful service to Nazi Germany. When it came time to kill them, they were murdered. It is not a question of competitive suffering, but of historical accuracy. Conflating the two periods diminishes the specific, unique horror of each particular crime, and impedes our ability to understand them on their own terms.The same applies to conflating the Holocaust with the family-separation policy enacted by the Trump administration along the southern border of the United States. People are being concentrated in camps, but the contemporary camps bear little resemblance to the camps in Nazi Germany in which people were beaten, tortured, starved, and often killed... Moreover, even taken on its own, narrow terms, the analogy is mistaken. The Nazis aimed not at separation, but extermination. When there were mass shootings, children were not typically separated from parents; they generally kept them together so as not to alarm them"
By Deborah Lipstadt, Professor of Holocaust history at Emory University. Presumably liberals will mock her for being ignorant of history
John Kiehne for State Representative - "Just so you know...
(From Encyclopedia Britannica)
"Concentration camp, internment centre for political prisoners and members of national or minority groups who are confined for reasons of state security, exploitation, or punishment, usually by executive decree or military order. Persons are placed in such camps often on the basis of identification with a particular ethnic or political group rather than as individuals and without benefit either of indictment or fair trial. Concentration camps are to be distinguished from prisons interning persons lawfully convicted of civil crimes and from prisoner-of-war camps in which captured military personnel are held under the laws of war. They are also to be distinguished from refugee camps or detention and relocation centres for the temporary accommodation of large numbers of displaced persons.""
Occupy Hypocrisy - Posts - "Hey, white Americans. What would you do if you crossed over into Canada and we separated you from you children and put them into camps? serious question #ConcentrationCamps"
"I don't cross into other countries illegally."
Surprise surprise, she made her account private
Ocasio-Cortez Refuses Invite To Visit Concentration Camps With Holocaust Survivor - "socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) declined an invitation from a Holocaust remembrance group to visit Nazi concentration camps with a Holocaust survivor, suggesting that it was part of a "far-right" scheme designed for "political gain."... "We at From The Depths, have brought over 100 international parliamentarians to visit the German Nazi Concentration and Extermination camps, parliamentarians from across the political spectrum, including over 20 Representatives of the United States Congress, both Republicans and Democrats alike," Daniels wrote in the invitation to Ocasio-Cortez. "From The Depths is the only foundation dealing with Holocaust memory, memorial and education run entirely by millennials, we feel that this would be great opportunity for you to learn more about this horrendous past, and understand how it impacts lives and education until today." "In the invitation, Daniels wrote: "The opportunity you will have of visiting the German Nazi Concentration Camps along with Mr. Mosberg, a 93 year old survivor of history's most brutal genocidal regime, will enable you to become a witness of a witness, something that our generation will sadly be the last to do, as result of the fact that the survivors are passing away at an ever increasing rate," Daniels concluded. "We await your response and look forward to learning together with you about this painful history.""
Apparently the left never does things (e.g. ludicrous Holocaust dog whistling) for political gain
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez invited by Polish MP to see concentration camps - "Polish MP Tarcynski Dominik has invited US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to visit Poland following her remarks in which she compared migrant detention camps on the United States’ southern border to Nazi-era “concentration camps”... "With this letter," he wrote, "I am formally inviting @AOC to come to Poland, where Adolf Hitler set up the worst chain of concentration camps the world has ever seen, so that she may see that scoring political points with enflamed rhetoric is unacceptable in our contemporary Western societies."... Dominik explained that under German-Nazi occupation, "a number of concentration camps were set up in my country, Poland.""It has caused a deep wound that persists on our proud Polish and European history that we must deal with every single day, and that we reaffirm to one another can never be forgotten, and never allowed to happen again," he continued. “This is why when someone cheapens the history, or uses it for political point-scoring, we become agitated and upset.”“You speak often of bipartisanship, and I feel this is one area in particular where we can begin to live that ideal.”... Following major backlash from several Jewish groups and politicians, as well as a call from House GOP leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy for the congresswoman to apologize for her remarks, Ocasio-Cortez took to Twitter on Wednesday night to defend her actions."
Polish lawmaker schools Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about the Holocaust - "It's odd, of course, that people would willingly jump international borders and surrender to Border Patrol agents with the full knowledge that such a ghastly fate was next for them. National Socialist death camps didn't work that way... Tarcynski could extend a similar letter to Rep. Ilhan Omar, who's circulating a video to claim that the U.S. is heading toward "death camps" as well... Omar, like Ocasio-Cortez, is rather well known for her anti-Semitic statements. Now that both of them are claiming that migrant processing centers are identical to National Socialist death camps, it rather signals that the pair of them are seeking a political twofer: to diminish the significance of the Holocaust, which is a major aim of all anti-Semites, and to elevate the detention centers as indistinguishable."
Ocasio-Cortez Backtracks on Concentration Camp Remark, Blames Liz Cheney - "After a considerable amount of backlash for accusing the United States of running concentration camps on the southern border (and repeatedly doubling down on that claim), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is now backtracking on her original statement, blaming Rep. Liz Cheney for making the comparison of concentration camps to the Holocaust. In addition to the backlash she’s received, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has received (and turned down) multiple invites to visit and tour actual concentration camps so she can get educated on what they really were and why her comparison was irresponsible. Perhaps attempting to pin the blame on Liz Cheney was the best strategy her staff could come up with, but it rings hollow, as it was Ocasio-Cortez who originally told her followers on Instagram, “The U.S. is running concentration camps on our southern border and that is exactly what they are. They are concentration camps. And.. umm… If that doesn’t bother you… I don’t… [unintelligble] I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘never again’ means something”... Actual Holocaust survivors also took issue with AOC’s disgraceful comparison. Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to Holocaust victims, also tweeted the following:
.@AOC Concentration camps assured a slave labor supply to help in the Nazi war effort, even as the brutality of life inside the camps helped assure the ultimate goal of "extermination through labor."Learn about concentration camps ow.ly/LtnX50uHJL2 #Holocaust #History"
Democrats make U-turn on calling border a 'manufactured crisis' - "Democrats have done a U-turn on their claim from earlier this year that President Trump’s concern about illegal immigration at the southern border was a “manufactured crisis.”... Earlier this year, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) accused Trump of exaggerating problems at the border to stoke fear among Americans and distract from the turmoil of his own administration."
Why are families being separated at the border? - "When adults are detained and prosecuted in the criminal justice system for immigration offenses, their children cannot, by law, be housed with them in criminal jails, so the family unit is separated... DHS has also pointed to intelligence suggesting that unrelated children were often smuggled with migrants to avoid detention, meaning the zero-tolerance policy prevents those offenders from abusing the system...
Is this a new immigration enforcement policy?
Not completely... The Obama administration also used family separation when they prosecuted immigration offenses as a deterrent against illegal border crossings after 2014 as more children and families fled violence in Central American countries."
The liberal solution seems to be to not prosecute adults with children for immgiration offences. Which is a great incentive to bring children with you (even if they aren't yours)
Damning New Photos Emerge of Ocasio-Cortez Crying at the Border - "After photos of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez visiting the southern border went viral this week, additional angles surfaced revealing what the New York Democrat was really crying over: an empty parking lot... A black-and-white photo indicated that the fence wasn’t as impenetrable as it initially appeared... detention facilities do stand on the property the protestors had gathered outside of. But he said “they don’t appear to be within eyeshot of AOC’s vantage point, at least not close enough to see children ‘caged’ as she describes. In both directions the nearest building is barely visible. ” He added: “Perhaps that explains the tears. With a limited campaign budget, AOC didn’t have a lot of room for missed photo-op.” Despite her frequent proclamations of concern for migrant children, Ocasio-Cortez on Tuesday defied her party by voting against a bill to provide $4.5 billion in emergency border funding. She was one of just four liberal Democrats to do so, saying, “Throwing more money at the very organizations committing human rights abuses—and the very Administration directing these human rights abuses—is not a solution.”"
Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "There are no words that adequately describe the absurdity of our southern border. It is an epic failure of governance that was created by all three branches of government... In 1997, the government entered into a court ordered agreement (Flores) that required children be released promptly from custody into the care of someone... In 2012, President Obama announce DACA - a plan to allow young illegal immigrants to stay in the country. In 2014, Obama announced plans to expand the program. The flow of families illegally migrating to America increased.The increase of incarcerated families brought court challenges. and in 2015, a court ruled that the Obama administration was violating the Flores agreement by keeping children incarcerated with their parents. Children had to be released into the care of someone else within 20 days of being apprehended. The Obama administration responded by (mostly) releasing families instead of holding them until their hearings.Enter Trump. Unhappy with ‘catch and release’ he ordered that the parents be kept in custody - the famous family separation debacle. This attempt to discourage the use of children to gain entry into the country failed as the court’s ordered it to end. With economic hardships happening in Central America, word for around that bringing a child into the U.S. and claiming asylum was the golden ticket to enter"
Rio Grande drowning: Woman watched her husband and daughter die - "The bodies of Oscar Alberto Martínez and his 23-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria, lie face down in murky waters littered with reeds and discarded beer bottles. Their heads are wrapped in a black T-shirt, and her tiny right arm is draped over his shoulders.The shocking image captured Monday was a grim reminder of the dangerous journey migrants take to get to the United States... Martinez arrived along with his wife, young daughter and a brother at a migrant camp in Matamoros on Sunday, hoping for an appointment to receive political asylum from the US... They wanted to have their own home, [their mother] Ramírez said. "That was what motivated them," she said... The victim's wife said they had obtained a humanitarian visa from the Mexican government... The two deaths promoted Salvadoran Minister of Foreign Affairs Alexandra Hill to beg citizens to stay in the country and work with the government as it tries to resolve the economic issues that push so many to leave"
It's amazing how many red flags there are, but people still claim they were refugees and blame Trump for the deaths as if he forced them to skip the queue and swim across the river (ignoring the safe third country principle). Of course many people are ignorant of international refugee law and imagine that crime is a valid reason to seek asylum, but that isn't even the case here. Though some accept that this was economic migration but immediately pivot to say that desperate people need to be let in (presumably the whole of the Third World needs to be allowed to move to the First World)
Butthurt Liberals - Posts - "I'll just illegally enter a foreign country and knowingly put my children in danger"
"Fucking Trump"
Border drowning: Migrant dad and daughter die in Rio Grande - "Noting the Rio Grande currents can be “rapid” and “rough”, Mr Trump said if the US had the right laws, “those people wouldn’t be coming up … they wouldn’t be trying.”“They (Democrats) want to have open borders, and open borders mean crime, and open borders mean people drowning in the rivers. And it’s a very dangerous thing... On Sunday, two months after entering Mexico, they arrived at a migrant centre to make the formal request for political asylum. But La Jordana reports the office was closed for the weekend. Mr Martinez decided to try his luck crossing the river at Matamoros, not far from the Mexican east coast."
Border Patrol Official: Central Americans Entering U.S. With Contagious Health Conditions - "many of those people are sick, he said, a situation that forces Border Patrol agents to divert from their main mission... "Those people realize that as long as they're being apprehended by us, they are still likely to be released on their own recognizance. That's because the country, the U.S. government as a whole, does not have the detention and removal capability to hold them in custody until their immigration hearing."When they know that they are going to be released, even though they're caught, it serves as a huge draw to enter this country illegally.""So they want to get apprehended," Bartiromo said. She was reporting from the El Paso border sector and watched several family unit cross into the U.S."Yeah, they're not trying to get away," Hull said. "They know that we're basically -- a period of time, they are going to be held in custody and then they're going to be released and continue on to all parts of the United States."Bartiromo said one of the illegal aliens she spoke with told her she wasn't fleeing from danger:"You know, yesterday when we were talking with some of the migrants, I asked one woman, I said, why are you here? She said 'asylum, asylum.' She spoke Spanish, and I said 'Oh, well what's happening there? Did they try to hurt you?' She said, well actually, I just want to get opportunity for my daughter. So they are seeing America as just an opportunity for their families. It's not necessarily that they're fleeing."That's exactly right," Hull said. "A lot of people refer to all of these family units as asylum seekers but that's really not the case. Matter of fact, most of those that we encounter when they're caught at this step in the process, they don't indicate fear of return. They indicate they want better opportunity.""
Nrthern Triangle Migrant Flow Study: Final Report - "Asylum seekers from the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras represent a significant part of migrants entering the United States... Adult asylum seekers have primarily been driven by economic motivations, and juvenile migrants by economic opportunities and reunification with family , and evidence on the impact of crime and violence on juvenile and adult flows is mixed . Mexico does not offer enough gain in economic opportunities and reduction in exposure to crime and violence to justify the costs of migration , and juvenile migrants require family members and networks already present in the destination country that do not exist in Mexico"
Feds in Southern Arizona turn attention to family fraud at border - "As thousands of migrant families from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador seek asylum in the United States, federal agencies in Southern Arizona are turning their attention to migrants who pose as families to better their chances of being released from custody... Homeland Security Investigations... will start a pilot project at two border cities to take biometrics of children if special agents suspect the children are being “rented” out by smugglers... Maynor Velasquez Molina paid $130 to the family of an 8-year-old boy so he could pretend the boy was his son when they entered the United States... A special agent with HSI interviewed Velasquez, who reportedly said “he had looked for a child in Guatemala to cross the United States/Mexico international border with as he was told that it was easier to get into the United States with a child,” the special agent wrote in the complaint... Migrant families often are released on their own recognizance in Southern Arizona and told to meet with immigration authorities after they arrive at the residence of their sponsor, usually a friend or family member, elsewhere in the United States.Individual adults, on the other hand, are more likely to face criminal prosecution or deportation."
“Recycling” of Children in El Paso | U.S. Customs and Border Protection - "U.S. Border Patrol agents from El Paso Sector working in conjunction with agents from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and officers from CBP’s Office of Field Operations (OFO) identify at least one local case in which children are possibly being recycled and forced to undertake the treacherous journey from Central America to the United States."
Asylum Decisions and Denials Jump in 2018 - "Fiscal year 2018 broke records for the number of decisions (42,224) by immigration judges granting or denying asylum. Denials grew faster than grants, pushing denial rates up as well. The 42,224 decisions represented a 40 percent jump from decisions during FY 2017, and an 89 percent increase over the number of asylum decisions of two years ago... In 65.0 percent of these decisions this past year asylum was denied. This is the sixth year in a row that denial rates have risen"
On average, from FY2001 to FY2018, the majority of asylum claims were denied. But this excludes those who didn't apply for asylum, and those whose claims of credible fear were judged non-credible
Credible Fear | Homeland Security
In FY2016, in 80% of cases credible fear was found. But for Guatemala and Mexico the rate was only in the 60s
Media Savages Trump for Saying Exactly What Obama Said in 2014 [Video] - "Since Congress has refused to aid Trump in his effort to secure the border via a wall, his administration instead implemented a “zero tolerance” policy that strictly enforced existing laws for those illegal immigrants detained after crossing the border illegally.A consequence of that policy — which stems from court precedent set in 1997 — was that children are temporarily detained in separate facilities while their parents are processed and prosecuted for illegal entry, often to be reunited later once the process is completed.Of course, the anti-Trump liberal media has acted as if this policy was ripped straight from Hitler’s playbook of Nazi tactics and is the most horrific policy ever … utterly ignoring the fact that it was essentially a more strict continuation of stated (though not always enforced) policies under the administration of former President Barack Obama... Set aside for a moment the fact that those children and families were encouraged to make the dangerous trek through Mexico to the U.S. in large part because of Obama’s policies and hints of amnesty, and just consider what he actually said in the interview.“Our message absolutely is, don’t send your children unaccompanied, on trains or through a bunch of smugglers,” Obama said. “We don’t even know how many of these kids don’t make it, and may have been waylaid into sex trafficking, or killed because they fell off a train … we have no way of tracking that.”“So that is our direct message to the families in Central America: Do not send your children to the border,” Obama reiterated. “If they do make it, they’ll be sent back. More importantly, they may not make it,” he added."
2014: Obama says crime and poverty do not justify an asylum claim - YouTube
Ryan Fournier on Twitter - "Imagine illegally entering another country and being angry that their detention centers weren’t up to your standards. 🤣"
WATCH: Ocasio-Cortez Confronted On Her Claim Migrants Drinking From Toilet - "Ocasio-Cortez's unsubstantiated claim was met with instant pushback, as border reporter Anna Giaritell reported: "Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., screamed at federal law enforcement agents 'in a threatening manner' during a visit to a U.S. Border Patrol facility in El Paso, Texas, Monday afternoon and refused to tour the facility, according to two people who witnessed it.""13 other House Democrats as well as their aides were in the room," Giaritelli added. "I'm told only Rep. Ocasio-Cortez reacted in this manner.""
WATCH: Protesters at ICE facility in Aurora pull down American flag and raise Mexican flag
Clearly, if you are upset about this you are racist
Rapid DNA testing reveals a THIRD of migrants faked family relationship with kids - "An Immigration and Customs Enforcement pilot of new rapid DNA testing at the border has found that nearly a third of those tested were not biologically related to the children in their custody.ICE conducted the pilot for a few days earlier this month in El Paso and McAllen, Texas, finding about 30 per cent of those tested were not related to the children they claimed were their own... some migrants did refuse the test and admit that they were not related to the children they were with, when they learned their claim would be subjected to DNA proof... some migrants did refuse the test and admit that they were not related to the children they were with, when they learned their claim would be subjected to DNA proof. Current U.S. law and policy means that Central Americans who cross the border illegally with children can claim asylum and avoid any lengthy detention in most cases"
Rep. Ilhan Omar calls for end to Customs and Border Protection - ""We know that they have spoken in the most vile ways about immigrants. We know that they have certain views of what brown and black people deserve," Omar explained. "And so we should be having a conversation about eliminating their existence [and] reforming the agencies that deal with the most vulnerable, who are children and women... Omar previously called for the elimination of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). She also backed Ocasio-Cortez's claim that the U.S. is essentially "running concentration camps" along the southern border."
Paul Joseph Watson on Twitter - "So are we just going to pretend that a left wing terrorist who was radicalised by AOC & Ilhan Omar’s rhetoric trying to kill a bunch of border patrol workers didn’t happen? The media swept that under the rug pretty quick, didn’t they?"
Fareed Zakaria: "It Pains Me To Say This," But Trump Was Right About Asylum System - "Asylum is meant to be granted to a very small number of people in extreme circumstances. Not as a substitute for the process of immigration itself. Yet, the two have gotten mixed up. As the Atlantic's David Frum has pointed out, the idea of a right to asylum is a relatively recent one dating to the early years of the Cold War. Guilt ridden over the rejection of many Jewish refugees during World War II the U.N. created a right of asylum to protect those who are fleeing regimes where they would be killed our imprisoned because of their identity or beliefs. This standard has gotten broader and broader over the years.And now includes threats of gang warfare and domestic violence. These looser criteria coupled with the reality that this is a safe way to enter the U.S. have made the asylum system easy to abuse. Applications from Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans have surged even though the murder rate in their countries has been cut in half... If things continue to spiral downward and America's southern border seems out of control, Trump's tough rhetoric and hard line stance will become increasingly attractive to the public.Keep in mind, that the rise of populism in the Western world is almost everywhere tied to fears of growing out of control immigration"