Links - 25th January 2020 (1)

As School District Implements Busing Over Near-Unanimous Opposition, Chinese Immigrants See Communism - "A Howard County, Maryland, school board voted Thursday to implement a busing initiative opposed by the vast majority of the public... The vote was part of a series taken by the board that, together, resulted in the large-scale moving of children to different schools based on their parents’ income, effective in 2020.  Residents of the center-left county are in shock that the board passed a busing plan will move about 5,300 children from their neighborhood schools to balance poverty, despite almost unanimous opposition in the testimony the board heard, and the school system’s own data showing no connection between equal demographics of schools and more equal performance of demographic groups.  Sarah Bedair, a resident who testified before the board, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the board received 6,650 pieces of verbal and written testimony opposing the plan and 150 pieces of testimony in support of it. The social engineering plan micromanaged the flow of children to such an extent that in some cases, students will be moved to a new school that contains only four classmates from their old school, parents said... numerous people who grew up in the Soviet Union and in Communist China said that the busing, and the process through which it was implemented, had the hallmarks of a communist regime... Martin Dimitrov said, “I grew up in Bulgaria during the socialism and what transpired with the redistricting brings horrible flashbacks from totalitarian times. This is slippery slope, folks, be vigilant and stay engaged.”  Anton Dmitriev said, “I grew up in the Soviet Union and the ‘great fight for social justice’ is a slogan straight out of the old soviet propaganda posters. … [Vladimir] Lenin and [Joseph] Stalin used the quote ‘The End justifies the means’ all the time – if the goal is morally important enough in their view, any method of attaining it is acceptable. And there we have it — corruption, wrong data, communities broken apart. … So, as an independent voter myself, I urge this group to become an educational resource to the over 300k residents of Howard County on the dangers of blind ideology.” Jianning Zeng, who is from China, said board chair “Mavis Ellis is a dictator. For those who don’t respect people, they deserve not be respected. They should resign from their [Board of Education] BOE position. Be alert, when an elected body tells citizens that they can not even silently & politely express themselves- that the tyranny of communism.”  Niyada Hin, from Cambodia, said, “The reason I emphasized socialist ideology is, because I have lived in a regime that worshiped it. Communist, to be exact. Socialism is just a milder form of communism but is still a progressive path toward it. Nothing does more damages to a country and human lives than these ideologies when put into practice. … You would not know it until you live it. And I have lived it. … You can ask any Cambodian, they will tell you which regime(s) to avoid.”... Marybeth Steil, a county resident and lawyer, told the DCNF, “I thought I was a Democrat before the August 22 release of the plan, but this totally alienated me. Lots of my neighbors have told me the same. They awoke a bear for sure.”  County Executive Calvin Ball, a Democrat, has a “chauffeur and personal security,” while the school system is spending on more buses instead of educational programs... Steil said the county’s quest for equal results has led to it holding back high achievers. “They are not tracking kids in classrooms. They are ‘integrated’ so that kids who are above grade level have to help teach the kids who are not ahead and still in the same classroom. China is going to eat our lunch, as a nation, if we keep up this crap”... A constellation of affiliated national activist groups, many backed by George Soros and citing what an economist called “junk science,” are pushing “equity” plans nationally. Even as Howard County residents vowed to vote incumbents out of office, neighboring Montgomery County, Maryland, is embarking on similar moves."

How a cultural revolt against "political correctness" helped launch Trump into the presidency - "Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory in part reflected deep cultural opposition to Political Correctness (PC) norms. People dislike being told that they are not allowed to speak their mind, and Donald Trump represented a cultural foil to express that frustration.  New research from Lucian Gideon Conway III, which studies the 2016 election campaign, shows that a sample of moderate Americans were influenced to support Trump by a brief mention of the PC movement, even though the PC movement was framed positively and the discussion had nothing directly to do with either candidate. Taken together, these results suggest that we need to look beyond simple markers of ideology to understand the Trump phenomenon – part of his support stems from a cultural revolt against Political Correctness... often lost in all the chatter about the election is that the American people actually told us that a revolt against restrictive communication (of the kind that characterizes the PC movement) was one of the reasons they were voting for Trump.  Polls from the election cycle showed that people liked his provocative language.  Similarly, feeling voiceless better predicted Trump support than multiple other variables, some of which included age, race, and attitudes towards Muslims, undocumented immigrants, and Hispanics... some people were just generally more prone to be unhappy with communication restrictions going into the study.  And that type of person – the person who was especially annoyed with movements like Political Correctness – was also more likely to support Trump.  Importantly, this was true on both sides of the political spectrum: Even when accounting for people’s conservative or liberal ideologies, the effect of concern with communication restriction remained"

The Yaboiposting - Posts - "Say goodbye, angels. Victoria's Secret announced today that it is officially canceling its annual fashion show because it is no longer "the right fit.""
"Y’all made VS quit their fashion show just cause y’all fat af and sensitive"
"I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Feminism is a war on pretty women"
This also explains why Slutwalks are so explicit - while feminists aggro pretty women who are less tasteless in exposing themselves (e.g. Grid Girls)

How pessimism is poisoning our politics - "Once Trump was elected, the hysteria was dialled up a notch. The new President was about to replace democracy with a fascist dictatorship. The Observer ran a special edition of its New Review supplement comparing our own era to that of the 1930s, based on Trump’s apparent similarities with the Führer. Newspaper columnists encouraged readers to pick up a copy of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (which they did in droves, despite Airstrip One having little in common with 21st century America) together with books by Philip Roth and Sinclair Lewis about fascist takeovers of the government.Three years on from the election of Trump, who has been an embarrassingly incompetent President but who has not, as yet, ushered in the Fourth Reich, it is now climate change that is about to bring the curtain down on civilisation... Indeed, predictions of the imminent demise of not just capitalism, but civilisation itself, have gone mainstream. “Without us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era,” wrote Paul Mason in the Guardian in 2015. As in the Thirties, many in the political centre are fretting about the end of capitalism too... A further delve into some of the articles prophesising the end of capitalism reveals a circularity to much of the reasoning. If capitalism is killing the planet, then, ergo, “Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism,” as a recent headline in another opinion piece for The Guardian read. Each catastrophic event (or the potential for a catastrophic event) is conveniently marshalled as evidence for the correctness of everything one already thought about the world. Apocalyptic anti-immigration tomes are also popular... Solipsism probably plays a role in some of the recent doom-mongering. We all want to live in epochal times because we all want to feel we have a consequential historical role. Or at least the average political activist does. The Nineties cult film Fight Club captured well the mood of anomie when such historical purpose is lacking. The film’s protagonist, Tyler Durden, laments the spiritual emptiness characteristic of consumer capitalism at the supposed ‘End of History’. “We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression.” For many intellectuals, journalists and activists, locating this purpose seems to be synonymous with existential crisis. Thus when the planes crashed into the twin towers on 11 September 2001, the polemicist Christopher Hitchens wrote of a feeling of “exhilaration”. The subsequent ‘War on Terror’ invoked a renewed struggle for civilisation against barbarous Jihadists. Moreover, the defence of ‘our way of life’ functioned as a convenient rallying cry to embark on a particular course of action — in the case remodelling the Middle East — that those who evoked it were already set upon... The “culture of crisis”, as Overy put it when writing about the Twenties and Thirties, was made possible by the “freedom to express fears openly and the competition to identify its causes”. Much of this competition today manifests itself on social media where, to quote from one of my favourite books of the year, online activists “take up more radical positions to get more attention”.  Grand pronouncements about the world burning, capitalist collapse or the death of the West make others sit up and take notice... And, of course, those who make such pronouncements are usually on hand to supply the magical solutions which they claim will reverse the slide towards apocalypse. We should thus take all such doom-mongering with a pinch of salt."

Christian cafe 'warned over homophobic Bible verses' - "The owner of a Christian cafe in Blackpool was warned by police that Bible verses shown on a TV screen breached public order laws.Jamie Murray, who runs the Salt and Light cafe in Layton, said he was told there had been a complaint about "homophobic material"... two police officers visited him last week and told him Bible verses on display in his cafe breached Section Five of the Public Order Act."I was quite incredulous at the way they treated me," he said."There was very little respect and they were quite aggressive."Mr Murray stated: "I did say to the police, 'are you seriously telling me I could be arrested for playing the Bible quietly on a screen?'."I was told, 'it's offensive and homophobic material we are against'."... He said he asked the officers if he could play Bible verses which did not refer to homosexuality.He said the officers replied they would be looking at anything that people could find offensive or insulting.He added: "I was just incredulous because as we all know the list of things that we find offensive is massive and varied and we don't expect the police to get involved.""
On the "myth" of the slippery slope. So much for more rights for some doesn't mean fewer for you

Met Police payout after Southgate preacher's wrongful arrest - "A Christian street preacher who had his Bible confiscated as he was handcuffed by police has been awarded £2,500 for wrongful arrest.Footage of the arrest of Oluwole Ilesanmi pleading with police to not "take my Bible away", has been viewed online almost three million times.He was detained outside Southgate Tube station in February after a 999 call claimed he had been Islamophobic.The Met said it had a right to investigate a potential hate crime. In a video posted online, Mr Ilesanmi, 64, is seen telling police: "Jesus is on the way."An officer, who arrested him for breach of the peace, can be heard replying: "I appreciate that but nobody wants to listen to that. They want you to go away."When Mr Ilesanmi tries to keep hold of his Bible, an officer says: "You should've thought about that before being racist." Mr Ilesanmi admits describing Islam as an "aberration" but said he was expressing his point of view as a Christian rather than denigrating Muslims.On Tuesday, Mr Ilesanmi will hand a petition to the Home Office, signed by 38,000 people, asking for greater protection for street preachers."
Interestingly, the preacher is black

Right to be offended does not exist says High Court judge - "A person's right to be offended does not exist, a senior judge has said, as he hit out at police forces for recording 'hate incidents' despite a lack of evidence.Mr Justice Julian Knowles claimed officers had become too quick to deem an event as a 'hate incident' even when no crime had been committed. He made the comment as the College of Policing, which issues guidance to all police forces across the country on how to record 'hate incidents', is facing a High Court challenge over whether the rules are lawful. The body's Hate Crime Operational Guidance (HCOG), issued in 2014, states a comment reported as hateful by a victim must be recorded, 'irrespective of whether there is any evidence to identify the hate element'.Mr Justice Knowles told the High Court in London: 'That doesn't make sense to me. How can it be a hate incident if there is no evidence of the hate element?' 'We live in a pluralistic society where none of us have a right to be offended by something that they hear.'Freedom-of-expression laws are not there to protect statements such as "kittens are cute"; but they are there to protect unpleasant things.'Its utility lies in exposing people to things that they do not want to hear.'"

Why you shouldn't salt a leech that's sucking your blood - "The sight of a swollen, slimy leech clamped to your skin sucking away at your blood may evoke a wave of panic and disgust. But resist the temptation to pour salt on it, as folk wisdom recommends, because that could cause the leech to vomit into the wound, posing unnecessary health risks... he recommends using a fingernail or a credit card to break the seal between the leech's mouth and your skin quickly, "so it doesn't have time to regurgitate blood." Another option is to wait until the leech is done feeding so it will fall off on its own. That takes about 30 or 45 minutes. Kvist cautions, however, that because leeches' saliva contain powerful blood thinners that can cause you to bleed slowly for longer than usual — up to 36 hours. Because leeches are slow eaters, they are pretty careful about finding a nice spot to feed where they won't be disturbed, Kvist says."It tries to nestle in maybe between toes or any kind of crevice on your body — groins or armpits and stuff like that are what they normally like."... One key feature of bloodsucking animals that can transmit diseases is that they have multiple blood meals over their lives... That includes ticks, which can carry Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and tick paralysis."The good news is it takes 24 to 48 hours [of sucking on your blood] before they have the capacity to transmit a disease," Currie says. If you remove them before that, you're probably fine.That's because they're extremely slow feeders. It takes them weeks or days to complete a blood meal of up to 600 times their body mass... The other requirement for disease transmission is that the microbes that cause the disease must be able to survive local conditions. Mosquitoes can carry West Nile and Eastern equine encephalitis in Canada, but are theoretically capable of carrying a wider range of diseases, such as Dengue fever. It's just that the microbes that cause those diseases can't survive our current climate... In southeast Asia, there are vampire moths that suck blood from a range of animals, including humans. While only the females are bloodsuckers among many biting flies, in moths, it's the males that are out for blood. Currie says it's thought that the males take the salt from the blood and present it to the females as a "nuptial gift" — kind of like the moth version of flowers or chocolate... There are also some species of blood-feeding birds. They include vampiric ground finches in the Galapagos that peck at other birds and drink their blood, and oxpeckers in sub-Saharan Africa that eat blood-filled ticks, lice and mites, but also slurp from wounds in the skin of animals like rhinos and wildebeests... leeches have been important in medicine - they're still used to relieve blood congestion after surgery to reattach fingers and toes, and their powerful blood thinners were key to making the first human kidney dialysis possible in 1921"