Links - 25th January 2020 (2)

Mom's anger after first grade students are given homework assignment to 'identify a fat person' - "Laura Lee Lewis, of London, said her daughter was given a worksheet from London Elementary School with adjectives and two pictures to go with each one.This included examples of picking which drawing best pictured what a hill is, what a cow is, what a dish is and so on.The last question was to identify the word 'fat' by circling one of two drawings of a larger girl and a smaller girl... They could have used an animal. I gave an example of a cupcake. They could have even used that, a bigger cupcake or a little cupcake, and say: "Which one is fat?"' She then said she explained why the assignment was being critical, and humiliating, about weight to her daughter.'I had to explain to her that it was body-shaming'"
Apparently even the word "fat" is body shaming - even when just used as a descriptor. The lady doth protest too much, methinks
If you have to explain why it's body shaming... maybe it's not

Indonesia Wants to Make Itself a Tourist Destination for Penis Enlargement Massages - "In Indonesia, alternative medicine is the answer to nearly every sort of ailment. Broke a bone? Get it massaged. Common cold? Rub a coin against your skin until your blood vessels pop. Trouble in the bedroom? Get a penis enlargement massage!... Minister of Health Terawan Agus Putranto declared penis enlargement massages, known locally as Mak Erot, to be a national asset that has the potential to attract medical tourists from abroad... “We must popularise the idea of traditional medicine for tourism. We have an incredible herbal medicine industry that no one knows about outside Indonesia”... He cited Tongkat Ali (a leaf that is said to boost athletic performance), Purwaceng (a viagra-like substance), and Mak Erot (penis enlargement massage) as exploitable services.  “If we package it correctly, foreigners will be interested”"

How To Grow Kangkung, Curry Leaves & Other Balcony-Friendly Plants Yourself - "Cilantro's a great way to add a fresh flavour to your dishes, but as most grocers sell them in rather large quantities, this can sometimes lead to wastage if you don't use them quick enough while they're still fresh.To avoid wasting, why not plant your own instead? You can use the root part that's usually left over from cooking - just make sure it has about three inches of the stem intact. Place it in a jar of water, give it enough sunlight and change the water everyday."

Apple Will Keep Throttling iPhones. Here's How to Stop It | WIRED - "Last year, controversy stirred as Apple acknowledged that it had, in fact, purposefully inhibited iPhone performance when the battery neared the end of its useful life. The good news: It wasn’t just in your head! The less-good news: Apple will continue the practice with the iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and X. While reports of the throttling first surfaced last December, Apple said it had started the practice in 2016 as a way to elongate the lives of iPhones. As a lithium-ion battery degrades over time, cold weather or high current demands can lead to a device shutting down altogether. Apple pushed a software update intended to keep iPhones from sporadically turning off, by limiting how much strain they could put on the battery in the first place. In doing so, though, Apple also forgot the important step of making it extremely clear to tens of millions of iPhone owners that an invisible boot would slam on the brakes as the battery aged. It further neglected to give those iPhone owners the option to turn that throttling off, in the event that they wanted the phone that they bought to work at the speeds they expected, regardless of the tradeoffs. And it apparently hadn’t considered that the solution to an old battery might just be a new one."

Clapping banned at Oxford University to stop people being triggered - "Students at the University of Oxford have voted to ‘replace clapping’ with a silent wave because it ‘could trigger anxiety’.They are instead being told to use ‘jazz hands’, where they wave their hands in the air... It comes after the University of Manchester passed a similar motion in September last year."

A fifth of students now get extra time in exams amid calls for rise to be investigated - "Dr Tony Breslin, a former chief examiner for GCSEs and a chair of examiners for A-levels, urged Ofqual to probe why requests for extra time have soared in recent years. He said that the “significant” growth in numbers of students being granted extra time should be scrutinised to ensure that no one is “gaming” the system... Ofqual has previously said that it is “right and only fair” that the exam system allows disabled students to have “reasonable adjustments”."
Maybe a fifth of UK students are really disabled, which is why they're so sensitive

Iraqi protesters bring out lions to counter police dogs : pics

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson's Mythopoeic PARTY BOAT - "Jordan Peterson is addicted to the anti-anxiety drug clonazepam and has checked into rehab"
"klonopin withdrawal is one of the worst feelings in the world, so i'm happy to hear jordan peterson is going through it. suffer bitch
hoping peterson's wife leaves him after a speedy recovery"
Public (partial) mirror
Naturally, blue check mark
The irony is this person probably goes on about how it's easy to be a "decent human being"

Unofficial Artist formally known as Diversity and Comics Yaboiposting - Posts - "Hannah Gadsby on Why Men Should Be More Ladylike"
"Being asked to be more feminine, by a woman who’s completely rejected her femininity. That’s right"

Kanye West's Trump Support Strong Despite Liberal "Bullying" - "rapper and vocal Trump supporter Kanye West accused “liberals” of trying to bully him through the expectation that his race would determine his political affiliation.“Just as a musician, African-American, guy out in Hollywood, all these different things, you know, everyone around me tried to pick my candidate for me,” said West, who has been roundly criticized for his support of the president by his show business colleagues. “And then told me every time I said I liked Trump that I couldn’t say it out loud or my career would be over; I’d get kicked out of the black community because blacks — we’re supposed to have a monolithic thought, we can only, like, we can only be Democrats and all.”... “I didn’t have the confidence to take on the world and the possible backlash and it took me a year and a half to have the confidence to stand up and put on the hat no matter what the consequences were,” West explained. “And what it represented to me is not about policies — because I’m not a politician like that. But it represented overcoming fear and doing what you felt, no matter what anyone said, in saying, you can’t bully me. Liberals can’t bully me, news can’t bully me, the hip-hop community, they can’t bully me.” “Because at that point, if I’m afraid to be me, I’m no longer Ye. That’s what makes Ye”"

Fertile Women More Likely to Wear Red - "Those who were wearing red or pink were about three times more likely to be at peak fertility than those who wore other colors... Some studies have found that women report increased sexual desire around peak fertility, greater attraction to masculine features, and a tendency to wear more revealing clothing... fewer women wore red at their peak fertility in the summertime, compared with the wintertime. A possible explanation for this finding is that women may be more likely to use the "wearing red" strategy in situations when they cannot use other attention-getting strategies, such as wearing less clothing (which would be easier in the summertime)"

'Go back to California': Wave of newcomers fuels backlash in Boise - Los Angeles Times - "He blames them for pushing home prices and rents up so high that Boiseans can’t afford to live here on the meager wages most Idaho jobs pay"
Does this count as xenophobia?

The BBC is leading the charge in rewriting our culture to suit the 'woke' brigade - "Everywhere you looked this week, culture was busy trying to correct the mistakes of the past. The new Broadway production of West Side Story has cut Maria's song "I Feel Pretty": the director explains he wants a rendition fit "for the 21st century".  Because, as we know, young women of today have ceased caring about their appearance, no longer enjoy getting dressed up for a big night out and are wholly indifferent to their attractiveness to the opposite sex. If there is still such a thing as the opposite sex, that is. Last time I looked, we were up to seven genders but, hey, it's still only Wednesday! "I feel stunning and entrancing/Feel like running and dancing for joy," a giddy Maria sang on the opening night of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim's musical in 1961. Her frothy, feelgood "I Feel Pretty" made the perfect counterpoint to the agonising poignancy of One Hand, One Heart. How quickly love can become loss and party frock a funeral shroud.  West Side Story was an instant classic because it set eternal truths about human nature to immortal melodies. The attitude of its latest director, Ivo van Hove, seems to be: "Nice try, guys! Now let the #MeToo generation show you how it's done. Let's start by ditching the sexist crap about girls wanting to be pretty." The same wilfully wrongheaded thinking dominates at the BBC. No period drama is safe any more from the drip-drip of politically correct views, regardless of how bizarre they appear in a historical context. We will have to wait till Sunday night to see whether the latest adaptation of HG Wells's War of the Worlds is travesty or triumph. (As is now de rigueur, it has ignored the novel, put a woman and a gay guy centre stage and pushed aside the white straight men who were so annoyingly prevalent in Victorian England.) Its predecessor in that prime slot was a virtue-signalling dud. Blessed with a lavish budget and international cast, World on Fire should have been magnificent, shining a spotlight on Poland's overlooked role in the fight against Nazi Germany. Instead, it rapidly turned into a Woke War Two drama complete with an anarchist Battle of Britain pilot declaring, "I'm not fighting for Churchill or Britain" (God forbid!) and a far-fetched mixed-race, same-sex love story. The villain of the piece was Robina Chase (brilliantly played by Lesley Manville). I mean, OK, the Nazis were bad and everything, but Mrs Chase was a Conservative of decidedly old-fashioned opinions. Oh, the horror! Her racist and sexist views were probably held by 98 per cent of the population in 1939, but the drama still had to punish her for not being feminist or socialist. The BBC blew a few million quid of the licence-payer's money pouring contempt on such stoic, patriotic people with lines like: "Make sure you do what's right, not what’s British."... Remember it was the Manchester Guardian, the BBC house journal, which ran headlines praising Stalin and demanding that Britain didn't go to war with Hitler. Goodies can be baddies, and vice-versa; any great dramatist knows that. Such complexity is no longer welcome, however. Not when the priority is protecting snowflakes... Word from the set of No Time To Die is that this will be the "most politically correct James Bond movie" yet – a contradiction in terms as any reader of Ian Fleming's borderline sado-masochistic novels could tell you, but that clearly hasn’t stopped them trying.  The original plan to have 007 played by a black actress appears to have been shelved after an outcry on social media. But Great Britain's most successful libidinous export since Lord Byron faces humiliation when the patent Bond seduction technique fails miserably. "It's very funny," a source said.  Is it? Do we really want James Bond to be a figure of fun? I don’t... What female in her right mind wants to be James Bond to score a feminist point?"

Cambridge University students cry fowl over 17th century painting that upsets vegetarians - "Some Cambridge University students might consider it a privilege to eat beneath a 17th century oil painting. But not if the students are vegetarian or vegan, and the work features animals bound for the dinner table. The Fowl Market, from the studio of the 16th century Flemish artist Frans Snyders, has been removed from the dining room of Hughes Hall following complaints that it was putting non-meat-eaters off their food."

The real reasons girls are outperforming boys at school - "Boys fall behind girls at almost every level of education, from the moment they arrive at primary school to their GCSE and A-level results.  But such is the unpopularity of the topic, even discussing it has almost become taboo. Boys are three times more likely to get expelled than their female peers and last year, 38 per cent of female school-leavers went to university compared to 28 per cent of males, a gap that has widened significantly over the last decade... “Girls work harder and they listen,” said Prof Valsa Koshy, a professor of education at Brunel University. “Girls are more self-disciplined, determined and self-controlled. They are more likely to do their homework and less likely to take risks. Whereas boys are more entrepreneurial and they take more risks.” Some say that the “feminisation” of education is to blame, with the high proportion of women teachers, particularly in primary schools, leaving boys without role models. But research shows that boys fall behind early on, often before they even start school. “People think it’s something to do with working class boys,” said Prof Gemma Moss, who is the director of University College London’s international literacy centre. “It’s not. You can find the difference with middle class children too. There is something going on with boys which means they are more likely to be struggling with their language skills by the time they are five, and this has an impact on their literacy which means they are less engaged with school.” This can be partly attributed to different parental expectations, where they spend more time signing nursery rhymes and reading with girls while boys are left to enjoy “a bit of rough and tumble”, she said.But another explanation is social. While girls are not afraid to ask for help, boys with poor language and literacy skills will try to hide it and will do “anything they can” to stop people noticing... the phenomenon is not peculiar to the UK. The same trend can be seen across the developed world and is even more pronounced in countries like Iceland, Finland and Sweden which are considered to be the most socially advanced... Part of the reason for the international nature of the trend is biological. Professor Gijsbert Stoet, a psychologist who specialises in neuroscience and educational research at Essex University, explained that boys’ and girls’ brains develop at different speeds, which includes slower language development for boys. “In cognitive psychology we talk about executive function,” he said. “Boys are playful for longer; for a longer time they are unable to plan their own educational schedule. The brain ultimately dictates the speed of development.”He described that the “lack of interest” in boys’ underperformance at school as “frustrating”, given the scale of the problem."
Feminism strikes again in making it taboo to talk about men