Links - 10th February 2020 (2)

Maoism | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "'Now, China's rulers don't like to dwell now on the country's desire to lead the world revolution under Mao because it doesn't fit with contemporary rhetoric about China's peaceful rise to superpower status and about China's non interference in other countries. But it is all the same, an important part of Cold War history and one that has many contemporary afterlives... I think there are a couple of reasons for why Mao and Maoism’s global impact has been to an extent neglected. One reason is to do with the global Cold War or the outcome of the Cold War least in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. So when the Soviet bloc states suddenly collapse between 1989 and 1991, I think there was a widespread assumption that communism in general, communist regimes had been sent to the dustbin of history. And therefore there was perhaps no need to engage seriously with these ideas, even when they underpinned regimes which were still holding on to power as the Chinese Communist Party was after 1989. But I think that China has also contributed to the effacing of awareness of the global history of Maoism for the reason that I alluded to above, namely, that this history of my wanting to lead the world’s revolution just doesn't fit with contemporary foreign policy narratives about peaceful rise, about non interference in other countries. These narratives are very important to the contemporary Chinese self image because many people in China, many politicians in China do see the country as becoming a global superpower. And there's a desire to contrast China's behavior and China's rise to superpower status with the rise centuries earlier of the West, which of course, was extremely aggressive and colonialist and imperialist in the history of its own rise’...
Mao’s legacy in contemporary Chinese politics became particularly conspicuous after 2012. So that year, the Chinese Communist Party under the current President Xi Jinping began for the first time since Mao's death in 1976 to publicly renormalize aspects of Maoist political culture, things like criticism, self criticism sessions, which were a key part of the Maoist political repertoire for propaganda thought control since the 1940s. Xi Jinping brought back catchphrases such as the mass line, which is, you know, another Maoist slogan from the 1940s. Supposedly all about encouraging criticism of officials from the grassroots. And most notably of all, Xi Jinping has brought back the personality cult and at the end of February 2018, Xi Jinping and his central committee abolished the 1982 constitutional restriction that limited the president to only two consecutive terms. So like Mao, Xi Jinping could be ruler for life."

Pakistan protest: Patients die as lawyers ransack Lahore hospital - "Three patients died when hundreds of lawyers attacked a hospital in Lahore during a furious dispute with doctors.Video showed the lawyers ransacking wards at the cardiac hospital, beating up staff and smashing equipment.As panic spread, doctors and paramedics hid, leaving patients unattended, including those in a critical state... The lawyers had been protesting over the alleged mistreatment of some of their colleagues by hospital staff last month.  But the final trigger for the violence appears to have been a video posted on social media by a doctor on Tuesday night in which he poked fun at the lawyers... Video footage shared on social media showed lawyers - in suits and ties - smashing medical equipment and windows, and beating up staff and officials including Punjab information minister Fayazul Hasan Chauhan who had arrived on the scene to try to restore calm... "Pakistanis have been witnesses to violent acts by lawyers for several years now," commented one television anchor on Geo TV on Thursday.  "They have assaulted citizens, attacked policemen, raised their hands on judges and vandalised courts. But yesterday they crossed all limits," she added.  Other commentators said it was a new low for Pakistani society's sinking levels of tolerance which is giving way to mob justice."

Physiological pH for Dummies - "Above 7.45 to 14: Dead
Just above 7.45: Respiratory or metabolic alkalosis
7.45-7.35: Life as you know it
Just below 7.35: Respiratory or metabolic acidosis
Below 7.35 to 0: Dead
... So stop trying to acidify or alkalize your body. Your kidneys and lungs won't let you do it"

Improbable Research - "The Bavarian Pickle-Juice Experiment is using salty waste-water from pickle-making to keep roads from becoming icy. Ig Nobel Prize winner Elisabeth Oberzaucher alerts us to this, with the comment “Waste from the food industry keeps roads ice-free"...
Additional food processing byproducts such as cheese, pickle, potato or beet juice were often incorporated into mixtures depending on the region."

Cheese brine discovery honored with Gladfelter Award - "Norby collected a jug of mozzarella cheese brine from F and A Dairy in Dresser and let it sit outside of his office in -20 degree weather until it finally froze. He discovered that the runoff from making the cheese contained the same amount of saline as commercial brine. The cheese brine, however, only cost about nine cents per gallon. That showed a savings of $1.20 per gallon...
Polk County saved $40,000 in the first winter alone and the dairy saved $10,000 in trucking costs for disposal of its brine. The program continues and has been copied around the state and the nation."

Sharon Corr reunited with baby who 'attended' her concert as an embryo in a laboratory - "Singer Sharon Corr has reunited with her ‘youngest fan’ - a one-year-old girl who attended her first gig as an embryo.The celebrated violinist and The Corrs member, 49, was invited back in May 2018 to the labs of Institut Marques in Barcelona, Spain to play a concert for an unusual audience: hundreds of embryos that were then developing in their incubators... It claims that musical vibrations during IVF fertilisation can help to increase the chances of IVF success by up to 5% and can also support embryo development... The CEO of Institut Marques, Dr Marisa López-Teijón, has won an Ig Nobel Prize for her odd research that showed that a developing human foetus responds more strongly to music that is played electromechanically inside the mother’s vagina than on the belly."

Stripper had sex with boyfriend's disabled Star Wars fan son then beheaded him - "Roena Cheryl Mills, 43, was last Thursday found guilty of the first-degree murder of 29 year-old Bo White at a house in Lerona, West Virginia, in April 2018.Mills – who has the phrase ‘special kinda crazy’ tattooed across her chest – reportedly targeted Bo after having sex with him in return for drugs.She is said to have battered and stabbed him to death before chopping his body up... James White reportedly found his son’s body before sheriff’s deputies did, but believed a prank was being played on him, as he was high at the time."

Can You Trust TripAdvisor Restaurant Reviews? It’s Complicated. - "Despite its mediocre reputation in New York’s food world, Olio e Piú was busy in part because at the time, it was ranked the No. 1 restaurant in New York City — on TripAdvisor. While New Yorkers are more likely to turn to user-generated review sites like Foursquare, Yelp, or Google Maps to navigate the city’s shifting restaurant landscape, TripAdvisor holds considerable clout with international travelers, especially those coming from the European Union, which has 53 percent of all listings... its reported annual revenue of $1.62 billion eclipses both Yelp’s and Foursquare’s by a margin of hundreds of millions... n New York, possibly no one is winning more from TripAdvisor than the Group, a local restaurant conglomerate that serves some 10,000 customers each month. Currently, four of the top 10 slots on TripAdvisor’s New York restaurant rankings are owned by the company: Olio e Piú; Boucherie West Village, a 320-seat French brasserie opened by a former Pastis chef; and its spinoffs, Boucherie Union Square and Petite Boucherie. None of these restaurants are on any critics’ hot lists, but all of them consistently dominate the upper echelons of TripAdvisor’s rankings... a single one-star review has the same weight as five five-star reviews, meaning that targeting people likely to complain is the most effective means of pulling up the overall average. Even after restaurants land on the top 10, they can’t stop putting work into TripAdvisor... an extensive investigation by the Times of London claimed that a third of TripAdvisor reviews are fake. A 2019 analysis of nearly 250,000 reviews of hotels in major tourist destinations by a U.K. consumer group found that one out of seven reviews contained “blatant hallmarks” of being fake... More than 60 percent of the five-star reviews on Olio e Piú’s page come from user profiles that have never reviewed another restaurant. Prior to 2017, that figure was 5 percent. By comparison, at another West Village Italian restaurant, Via Carota, that statistic is currently 1 percent. While some of these one-off review accounts may well be from real customers, many of them follow a suspiciously similar format. Two consecutive reviews, both titled “10/10 Would Recommend,” belong to users named @olioepiulover and @olioepiulover2... In some cases, identical or nearly identical review text, including the names of servers, appeared at multiple restaurants. Many of the accounts used the same stock imagery for profile photos, and more than a few seemed intent on mentioning special promotions, such as Olio e Piú’s weekly discount on bottles of wine... Setting aside questions of accuracy, TripAdvisor’s algorithm fails to capture the diversity that makes New York’s restaurant scene so significant in the first place. In a recent examination of the top 100 restaurants on TripAdvisor, 27 percent were Italian, 10 percent were French, and 31 percent were American, with a heavy emphasis on steakhouses"

Meet the Billionaire Couple Behind Panda Express, Who Built a $3 Billion Fortune Selling 90 Million Pounds of Orange Chicken Each Year

YouTube chef gets creative by selling advertisements placed over her boobs - "On YouTube channel Kuma Cooking, the apparently Japanese host, who is unnamed and unidentified, cooks simple dishes like garlic fried rice (above) while wearing a tight-fitting top. “Kuma” features dishes that are easy for working adults to prepare, especially for those who stay alone or only need to cook a meal for one."

The 10 English words that will make you sound cool in France - "Just as certain English speakers believe that a mélange is more sophisticated than a mixture, so in France sometimes using an English word will make you appear cooler or more sophisticated."

The William F. Buckley, Jr. Program at Yale: ALMOST HALF (49%) OF U.S. COLLEGE STUDENTS “INTIMIDATED” BY PROFESSORS WHEN SHARING DIFFERING BELIEFS: SURVEY - "The 2015 Buckley Free Speech Survey, which was conducted by nationally respected pollster, McLaughlin & Associates, revealed a wealth of information about how college students view rights and topics such as: The First Amendment; speech codes; academic freedom; trigger warnings; “political correctness;” and intellectual diversity, among other things. The national survey of 800 undergraduate students was conducted online and respondents were carefully selected and screened from a nationwide representative platform of individuals who elect to participate in online surveys...
    Forty-nine percent (49%) of survey participants said they have often felt intimidated to share beliefs that differ from their professors, including 14% who said “frequently” and 35% who said “sometimes”;
    Exactly half (50%) said they have often felt intimidated to share beliefs that differ from their classmates, including 16% who said “frequently” and 34% who said “sometimes”;
    The majority of students (53%) say their professors have often used class time to express their own views about matters outside of coursework, including 14% who say “frequently” and 38% who say “sometimes”;
    Greater than six in ten (63%) say political correctness on college campuses is either a “big problem” (19%) or “somewhat of a problem” (44%)...
    By a 52-42% margin, students say their college or university should forbid people from speaking on campus who have a history of engaging in hate speech;
    Seventy-two percent (72%) of students surveyed said they support disciplinary action for “any student or faculty member on campus who uses language that is considered racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise offensive”;
    When students were asked to identify the amendment that deals with free speech, 68% correctly cited the First Amendment. One in three (32%) incorrectly listed another amendment;
    The majority (52%) said that the First Amendment does not make an exemption for hate speech and that all speech is protected under the First Amendment. One in three (35%) say that hate speech is not protected under the First Amendment...
    Liberal students are more likely than conservative students to say the First Amendment is outdated, 30% to 10%, respectively;
    By a nearly two to one margin, students said their school is generally more tolerant of liberal ideas and beliefs than conservative ideas and beliefs, 37% to 20%...
By a 51% to 36% margin, students favor their school having speech codes to regulate speech for students and faculty...
Seven in ten (72%) say their college or university should be doing more to promote policies that increase diversity of opinions in the classroom and on campus;
Almost nine in ten (87%) agree that there is education value in listening to and understanding views and opinions that they may disagree with and are different than their own"
And liberals say there's no problem on college campuses

Nearly half of US college students believe hate speech should not be protected - "48 percent of students do not think the First Amendment should protect hate speech... 58 percent of students think it is important not to be exposed to "intolerant or offensive ideas." Respondents who labeled themselves Democrats were 19 percentage points more likely than those who identified as Republican to believe there are instances when speakers should be disinvited by a university. Disinviting speakers is supported by 78% of "very liberal" students and by 38% of "very conservative" students... Thirteen percent of students responded in the affirmative that racist speech is a form of violence... Four professors from across the political spectrum discussed research that shows that, for the first time, children are more accepting of authoritarianism than their parents, and the upshot of this attitude on campus is a climate of ideological intolerance."
So much for the myth of campus censorship, and how the real problem is conservatives