Monday, January 18, 2021

Links - 18th January 2021 (2)

Chinese soldiers are 'too unfit and masturbate too much', military says - "In one city, 57% of recruits failed the test. The military said 8% of men had an enlarged vein in their scrotum, which they claim is caused by too much sitting down. This was attributed to ‘long time playing computer games, excessive masturbation, less exercise and so on’. A poor diet was also to blame for plenty of candidates’ ill health, with 25% failing blood and urine test due to drinking too much alcohol and fizzy drinks, the military said.The army said 46% of recruits failed a vision test because they spend too long staring at screens, including their phones.Other reasons for failure include candidates eating too much junk food, having sinus problems due to drinking poor quality water, and mental health issues."

Plot Twist: The Key to Better Sleep Is Not a Bedtime—It’s a Wake-Up Time - "Having a set wake-up time doesn’t mean you can regularly go to bed late and still feel well-rested. Your bedtime is still connected to your wake-up time and you should always aim to get enough sleep every night, Breus explains. The difference here is that if you’re keeping good sleep habits, your body will be more forgiving if you have the occasional late night or two... If you’re sleeping at the right time and getting the right amount of sleep, you shouldn’t need a nap. But if you are a nap enthusiast, don’t stress about giving up the habit. If you do need to doze off for a bit, Breus recommends doing so in the afternoon between 1 pm and 3 pm for 25 minutes tops. “In the afternoon, your body temperature drops and releases melatonin. If your nap surpasses 25 minutes, you transition into a deep sleep, which will probably make you feel less refreshed”... If you need to take something to ensure a good night’s sleep, you might want to think about taking supplements. Studies show that taking melatonin can improve sleep quality, and Breus also suggests considering a dietary supplement, like SeroVital Advanced, which contains an amino-renewal complex that works synergistically to improve sleep"

Funny GIF by JustViral.Net - Find & Share on GIPHY
Toddler throws pillow at man. Man throws pillow at toddler

Titania McGrath on Twitter - “Rape did not exist among native nations prior to white contact. I repeat, rape * did not exist * among native nations prior to white contact.”
"Historians must stop referring to Genghis Khan and his soldiers as rapists.Rape is an exclusively white practice. People of colour *cannot* rape.From now on, please say that “Khan was enacting whiteness through mass insemination of unwilling partners”."
Addendum: Animals must have learnt rape from white people

Canada Post sets new record with 8 year delivery time for expedited shipping. : toronto

Dr Chelsea Nichols on Twitter - "I've posted about this before, but I'm never going to stop until the whole world knows about SEX WEASELS in Renaissance art. (A thread) In the 16th century, it was widely believed that weasels conceived through their ears and gave birth through their mouth.This spawned a whole language of hidden sexual symbolism in art, with weasels standing in for everything from fertility talismans to phallic symbols"

Did Tanya McDowell Get 5 Years for Sending Her Son to a Better School While Felicity Huffman Got 14 Days? - "McDowell and Huffman's criminal cases make poor direct comparisons because they involve different criminal charges, different circumstances and different criminal jurisdictions... McDowell in 2012 received five years in state prison in Connecticut in a plea agreement reached with prosecutors over numerous charges, one of which included felony larceny. The larceny charge resulted from sending her son to a school district in which she did not not live, and it drew a public outcry. But she was arrested again, after the school incident, on charges that she offered drugs and prostitutes to undercover police officers... McDowell faced seven counts for the school incident and drug charges, which were resolved together with a plea deal in which she was sentenced to a total of five years behind bars, five years’ probation, and a 12-year suspended sentence. McDowell, unlike Huffman, also had a criminal record: a previous conviction for bank robbery and for having a weapon in a vehicle. McDowell’s record may have influenced her sentencing: “A person’s prior criminal history is taken into consideration in determining any subsequent plea agreement and the corresponding sentence,” Mark Dupuis, spokesman for the Connecticut state division of criminal justice told us in an email."
Better not tell the race baiters

Mohamed Imran Mohamed Taib - "Trivia: What were the original names of Mount Faber* and Fort Canning Hill**?If you do not know, that is part of the violence of colonialism. Violence is not just physical but psychological too. One of the psychological violence that has long-term ramification is the erasure of indigenous history, knowledge and heritage. This is the difference between pre-modern conquests and the age of colonialism... while one can argue that the age of colonialism is long gone (though not fully), the mind continues to be colonised. Sociologist, Syed Hussein Alatas calls this as the “captive mind”"
Comments (elsewhere): "We should declare war on Indonesia, successor state to Majapahit. Who were the ones who burnt down the original Singapore and allowed a runaway prince to found malacca... since everybody is so keen on righting previous wrongs"
"Or maybe if you go back far enough the sultan or orang laut claimed it from someone else who claimed it from someone else etc. "
"So whoever named them Telok Blangah and Bukit larangan didn’t take it from the natives by force, I’m sure."
Of course, having your mind colonised by Western liberal postcolonialism is a good thing

South Korean football team apologises for using sex dolls to fill stands - "The K-League club FC Seoul said the dolls, which had been dotted around stands currently off-limits to supporters due to the coronavirus outbreak, had been ordered inadvertently after a “misunderstanding” with the supplier."
Sex dolls don't just need to be used for sex

90-year-old Japanese gamer grandma breaks world record, praises Grand Theft Auto 5【Video】 - "The world’s oldest video game streamer, Hamako Mori, has played titles like Call of Duty and Dauntless for decades — and shows no signs of stopping.

Florida woman stuffed plastic Easter eggs with porn and placed them in stranger's mailboxes, deputies say - "the eggs contained pornographic images, non-threatening references to nearby churches and county buildings, and other items...  Inside the Civic was 42-year-old Abril Cestoni.Detectives said Cestoni admitted to placing the items in the mailbox, saying she was "educating people.""

Αιεχ Μσση - "In this age of Premium Snapchats and OnlyFans there’s gonna be a lot of bullying 10-20 years from now of kids showing each other the others’ mom’s nudes

I,Hypocrite - Posts - "Dumbass Trump supporter you're an idiot I have a higher IQ then you little racist"
"how many chromosomes do you have"
"more than you"

WendysIsOverParty: Here's why Twitter canceled Wendy's - "A Business Insider article, published May 18 and highlighting $440,000 in donations from Bodenstedt to President Donald Trump's reelection campaign, has sparked outrage among some vocal Twitter users."

Keshaun Dangz on Twitter - "i have had hiccups for multiple hours and i’m about to lose my mind, all remedies welcome"
"@lil_yenta Self flagellation, specifically on your backside. This also works for your white privilege, which is clearly dripping from you."
Uhh

Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh - "On Wednesday Global Times Singapore, one of Singapore’s pro-PAP internet brigade, decided that I am a pro-China agent of foreign interference in Singapore’s domestic politics. As part of a group including Donald Low and Zuraidah Ibrahim. Seems like they got the “CMI” down pat, but forgot the “O”. (Sorry, my Eurasian brothers and sisters: left out again.)This pro-PAP group’s supporters have called me a “traitor” and said that I “should be banned from entering Singapore”.My quick, snarky response, sent to some friends, was: “I’m a 4th generation Singaporean, mofo. Who the fuck are you?”I did not want to post anything, but decided that I must for a simple reason. It reveals the emptiness of this relentless campaign against people who speak out of turn. When pro-PAP forces have difficulty competing intellectually, they resort to ad-hominem attacks. Take out the person rather than the argument.  The easiest way is to just brand us as “foreign agents”. This same tactic has been used over the decades, most recently against Kirsten Han and Pingtjin Thum.What worries me is how easily some Singaporeans buy the pro-PAP line that somebody who speaks out of turn is a foreign agent... Some days I am a Western stooge. Now a Chinese one. Haiyah, make up your damn mind, lah. My brown ass doesn’t like being tossed across the Pacific. I can feel my ancestors in India turning in their graves. There are a couple of things that I find hilarious about this line of argument. First, as anybody who reads my writing knows, I have always personally been in favour of a PAP government; but I believe it will perform better if cut down to size...  In any other country I would be called a PAP supporter. In Singapore, well, for some I am now an agent of foreign interference.Second, these brainiacs have made their assessment based on the fact that I wrote a single op-ed for the South China Morning Post (SCMP).How strange. Over the past decade I have written commentaries for many publications, including The Straits Times, Mothership, Rice Media, The Economist, Foreign Affairs and Nikkei Asian Review.It should be blindingly obvious that I am not a Chinese agent; I am just a bloody whore."

The racism lurking behind Scottish nationalism - "Too often, when minority voices such as mine — children of the colonies, born in Britain — oppose the break-up of what we now consider our country, Scottish nationalists too readily seek to silence our voices by accusing us, instead, of being English “colonists”. Such rhetoric is not only overly antagonistic, it also displays a fundamental ignorance about why most ethnic minorities in Britain have expressed a preference for calling ourselves British over English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish. And while I embrace being both a non-Anglo-Saxon Englishman and a Brit, it is not easy for many of us to forget the nationalist-inspired violent racism levied against us growing up, and still present today.For ‘progressive’ Scottish Nationalists to draw an equivalence between ethnic minorities who oppose their separatism and British colonialism, smacks of the very colonial privilege they seek to denounce. The fact of the matter is that Scottish colonists profited greatly from the creation of the British Empire. Scotland’s debt to Empire is her dirty little secret, seldom acknowledged but ever-present. The “tobacco lords” of Glasgow were enriched by slavery in the Americas and Africa, while a quick visit to the former North British Rubber Company in Edinburgh serves to disabuse most naysayers suffering under such a false sense of righteousness. The pernicious narrative peddled by Scottish nationalists that England colonised Scotland, and then the rest of the world — and so England must even now be resisted in Scotland — sounds suspiciously like an act of whitewashing Scottish culpability, at least to the ears of this descendant of a former colony... We should beware the kid gloves with which metropolitan opinion formers treat the SNP. Their party machine is curiously similar to Momentum, and much of what we would never tolerate from Corbyn now rules in Edinburgh. As such, they are riddled with all the trappings of power, while harbouring a nasty, illiberal and authoritarian streak"

The worst except for all the others - GDP predictions are reliable only in the short term | Graphic detail | The Economist - "For the past 20 years The Economist has kept a database of projections by banks and consultancies for annual GDP growth. It now contains 100,000 forecasts across 15 rich countries. In general, they fared well over brief time periods, but got worse the further analysts peered into the future... The biggest errors occurred ahead of GDP contractions... If forecasters displayed such biases consistently, an aggregator could beat the crowd by granting more weight to those with good records. But top performers rarely repeat their feats"

How accurate are economic forecasts? - "Economists themselves mostly understand their poor forecasting record. Many businesses, however, want at least a best guess about the economic future.Economists, moreover, mostly find that the media won’t report their comments about their forecasts’ weaknesses. In the words of RBA governor Glenn Stevens, people appear to want “the illusion of certainty”...  The RBA’s Stevens said in a November 2015 speech that the bank now tries to emphasise a range of possibilities, of which its “central forecast” is only the most likely. He also disclosed that he and other RBA staff have considered leaving out the central forecasts altogether and just publishing the likely ranges.They concluded the media would just report the number in the middle of the range"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Wednesday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "‘Normally directors choose to take payment in dividends because it incurs much less tax. And if you're a basic rate taxpayer, you only pay seven and a half percent tax on dividends. If you're contributing less in tax, shouldn't you take out less when it comes to things like support schemes, they, shouldn't be perhaps less than 80%?’
‘Well, the logic behind the different taxes that you're, if you're working for yourself, you have, you don't have any of that protections that employees have. Whether that's, you know, all day basic, that kind of thing. This is a very, very standard way of working which has been, you know, not just accepted but actually encouraged by the government. The government has made a lot of its support for entrepreneurs, startups, and some of these companies we have started one person hopefully will grow into bigger ones. So this has never been an issue. It's never been something that yeah, the government said they want to stop. If, when this, this whole thing is over, and the Chancellor did refer to maybe the tax system could change in the future, then that may well be sensible and something which is justifiable doing. The problem is we're in this right now. And these are people whose income has completely disappeared because they work for themselves. So all we're asking is that they get treated the same as, as other people.’"

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