Universal Basic Income Is Neither Universal Nor Basic - Bloomberg - "In 2016, many Brits and Americans who had lost their economic usefulness but retained some political power used the ballot box to revolt before it is too late. They revolt not against an economic elite that exploits them, but against an economic elite that doesn’t need them anymore. It is far more frightening to be useless than to be exploited... with the rise of AI, robots and 3-D printers, cheap labor will become far less important, and demand for raw materials might also drop. Instead of manufacturing a shirt in Dhaka and shipping it all the way to New York, you could buy the shirt’s code online from Amazon and print it in Manhattan. Zara and Prada stores could be replaced by 3-D printing centers, and some people might even have such printers at home.Simultaneously, instead of calling customer services in Bangalore to complain about your printer, you could talk with an AI representative in the Google Cloud. The newly unemployed workers and call center operators in Dhaka and Bangalore don’t have the education necessary to switch to designing fashionable shirts or writing computer code — so how will they survive?... American voters might conceivably agree that taxes paid by Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc. be used to give stipends to unemployed coal miners in Pennsylvania and jobless taxi-drivers in New York. However, does anyone think American voters would also agree that part of these taxes should be sent to Bangladesh to cover the basic needs of the unemployed masses there? Another major difficulty is that there is no accepted definition for “basic” needs. From a purely biological perspective, the only thing a Homo sapiens needs for survival is about 2,500 calories of food per day. Over and above this biological poverty line, every culture in history defined additional basic needs, which change over time. In Medieval Europe, access to church services was seen as even more important than food, because it took care of your eternal soul rather than of your ephemeral body. In today’s Europe, decent education and health care services are considered basic human needs, and some argue that even access to the internet is now essential for every man, woman and child... Whichever way you choose to define basic human needs, once you provide them to everyone free of charge, they will be taken for granted, and then fierce social competitions and political struggles will focus on non-basic luxuries — be they fancy self-driving cars, access to virtual-reality parks, or enhanced bioengineered bodies. Yet if the unemployed masses command no economic assets, it is hard to see how they could ever hope to obtain such luxuries. Consequently, the gap between the rich (Tencent managers and Google shareholders) and the poor (those dependent on universal basic income) might become bigger and more rigid than ever.Hence, even if universal basic income means that poor people in 2050 will enjoy much better medical care and education than today, they might still feel that the system is rigged against them, that the government serves only the super-rich, and that the future will be even worse for them and their children. People usually compare themselves to their more fortunate contemporaries rather than to their ill-fated ancestors... Homo sapiens is just not built for satisfaction. Human happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations. Expectations, however, tend to adapt to conditions, including to the condition of other people. When things improve, expectations balloon, and consequently, even dramatic improvements in conditions might leave us as dissatisfied as before.If universal basic income is aimed to improve the objective conditions of the average person in 2050, it has a fair chance of succeeding. But if it is aimed to make people subjectively more satisfied with their lot in order to prevent social discontent, it is likely to fail."
Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend: Alaska’s universal basic income problem - "For decades, Hammond’s system was an unprecedented success. But in 2015, plunging oil prices created major shortfalls in the state’s budget. In response, then-Gov. Bill Walker deviated from the traditional PFD formula and reduced the value of the check for 2016. Doing so allowed the government to continue funding state services and ensured the sustainability of the fund. Instead of a check for $2,052, as they would have received with the traditional formula, Alaskans that year got a comparatively paltry $1,022.In 2018, Republican state Sen. Mike Dunleavy saw an opportunity. Despite traditional Republican aversions to handouts, Dunleavy ran for governor on the campaign platform of increasing the PFD. He promised every resident up to $6,700, to make up for Walker’s cuts in 2016 and 2017 — though he was foggy on how the state could pay.The result? Dunleavy won by a landslide.The problem is that he now finds himself unable to fulfill his campaign promise without major cuts elsewhere. He’s now seeking to jettison other state commitments to health care, education, infrastructure, and other vital areas"
Why a Universal Basic Income Would Be a Calamity - WSJ - "what has Saudi Arabia’s de facto UBI created? A population deeply resistant to work. Efforts by the Saudi government to diversify the economy have been hamstrung by the difficulty of getting Saudis to trade in their free income willingly for paid labor. Regular citizens lack dignity while the royal family lives a life of luxury. The technocratic elite has embraced relatively liberal values at odds with much of the society’s conservatism. These divisions have made the country a fertile recruiting ground for extremists... Casually accepting the mass unemployment of a large part of the country and viewing those people as burdens would undermine this social contract, as millions of Americans become dependent on the government and the taxpaying elite. It would also create a structural division of society that would destroy any pretense of equality. UBI supporters would counter that their system would free people to pursue self-improvement and to take risks. America’s experience over the past couple of decades suggests that the opposite is more likely. Labor Department data show that at the end of June the U.S. had 6.2 million vacant jobs. Millions of skilled manufacturing and cybersecurity jobs will go unfilled in the coming years.This problem stems from a lack of skilled workers. While better retraining programs are necessary, too many of the unemployed, or underemployed, lack the motivation to learn new skills. Increasingly, young unemployed men are perfectly content to stay at home playing videogames... purpose can’t be manufactured, nor can it be given out alongside a government subsidy. It comes from having deep-seated responsibility—to yourself, your family and society as a whole."
A village in Kenya is quietly disproving the biggest myth about basic income - "Owiti and his fellow villagers have slowly and quietly been disproving the biggest misconception about basic income - that people who receive free money will stop working and waste the cash on vices like gambling, drugs, or alcohol. Anecdotal evidence and nearly all empirical research has shown that unconditional cash transfers help people help themselves. Recipients often use the income to pay for their kids' school fees, buy medicine, repair their homes, and invest in their small businesses to further grow their wealth. While some use the money for so-called “temptation goods,” as economists call them, the majority of recipients defy the stereotype that people in poverty somehow lack moral character or responsibility.As advocates often claim, what the poor seem to suffer from is actually a lack of cash... so far Teti has only observed a few people who seem to misuse the money.Even those, she said, tend to split the money between practical purchases and indulgences... Other research has found that people's spending on alcohol and cigarettes actually went down when they received direct cash transfers. Faced with a brighter future, many people stop using temptation goods as a way to cope with a hopeless situation, researchers have discovered. In the village GiveDirectly is working with, interviews with nearly a dozen recipients showed that most people have actually worked more since the study began."
This coheres with other research on the best way to improve poor people's lives being giving them money
Money for nothing: the truth about universal basic income - "Although such welfare systems have improved standards of living, most require an immense bureaucracy to administer benefits and to ensure that recipients meet strict qualification standards.Welfare critics have long argued that the administrative costs are huge and provide limited positive results; in some cases, they discourage people from finding jobs. In response, leaders across the political spectrum have latched onto the idea of UBI — which has been promoted over the centuries by luminaries such as Thomas More (in his 1516 novel Utopia), philosopher Thomas Paine, the liberal US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and economist Milton Friedman, a favourite of conservatives including US President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Progressive politicians and thinkers have seen the idea as a way to end poverty; conservatives have viewed it as a streamlined welfare system that is easier and cheaper to run... The documents Forget uncovered revealed that teenage children in MINCOME families completed an extra year of schooling compared with teens in similar small Manitoba towns. Hospitalizations decreased by 8.5%, with the largest drops in admissions for accidents and injuries and mental-health diagnoses. Importantly for economists, who worried that the programme might encourage people to quit their jobs, Forget found that employment rates stayed the same throughout the trial... Martinelli thinks that the data will show that it will cost too much to make a programme effective. “An affordable UBI is inadequate, and an adequate UBI is unaffordable,” he says."
No plans to expand Finland basic income trial - "the influential OECD think tank said a universal credit system, like that being introduced in the UK, would work better than a basic income in Finland. Universal credit replaces several benefit payments with a single monthly sum.The study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said income tax would have to increase by nearly 30% to fund a basic income. It also argued that basic income would increase income inequality and raise Finland's poverty rate from 11.4% to 14.1%.In contrast, the OECD said, universal credit would cut the poverty rate to 9.7%, as well as reduce complexity in the benefits system.Another reform option being considered by Finnish politicians is a negative income tax"
Top Economists Endorse Universal Basic Income - "how to pay for all of this? Both Sir Chris Pissarides and Professor Diamond advocate higher taxes on high earnings. They also recommend wealth taxes, though they disagree about how these should work: Professor Diamond is strongly in favor of a well-functioning estate tax, while Sir Chris prefers capital gains taxes on property transactions, including family houses. Perhaps the strongest endorsement of wealth taxes came not come from these economists, however, but from their fellow Nobel memorial prize winner, James Heckman. Speaking on the inequality panel, Professor Heckman noted that the falling cost of capital was driving down wages. To correct this, he advocated shifting the burden of taxation to capital rather than labor."
Basic Income Grants Alleviate Poverty in Namibia - "Before the pilot program, 42 percent of children in the village were malnourished. Now the proportion of malnourished children has dropped significantly, to 10 percent.The village school reported higher attendance rates and that the children were better fed and more attentive. Police statistics showed a 36.5 percent drop in crime since the introduction of the grants. Poverty rates declined from 86 percent to 68 percent (97 percent to 43 percent when controlled for migration). Unemployment dropped as well, from 60 percent to 45 percent, and there was a 29 percent increase in average earned income, excluding the basic income grant. These results indicate that basic income grants can not only alleviate poverty in purely economic terms, but may also jolt the poor out of the poverty cycle, helping them find work, start their own businesses, and attend school."
Basic income paid to the poor can transform lives - "First, it had strong welfare, or “capability”, effects. There were improvements in child nutrition, child and adult health, schooling attendance and performance, sanitation, economic activity and earned incomes, and the socio-economic status of women, the elderly and the disabled.Second, it had strong equity effects. It resulted in bigger improvements for scheduled caste and tribal households, and for all vulnerable groups, notably those with disabilities and frailties. This was partly because the basic income was paid to each individual, strengthening their bargaining position in the household and community.Third, it had growth effects. Contrary to what sceptics predicted (including Sonia Gandhi), the basic incomes resulted in more economic activity and work.Conventional labour statistics would have picked that up inadequately. There was a big increase in secondary economic activities, as well as a shift from casual wage labour to own-account farming and small-scale business. Growth in village economies is often ignored. It should not be.Fourth, it had emancipatory effects. These are unappreciated by orthodox development thinkers. The poor’s liberty has no value. But the basic income resulted in some families buying themselves out of debt bondage, others paying down exorbitant debts incurring horrendous interest rates. For many, it provided liquidity with which to respond to shocks and hazards. In effect, the basic income responded to the fact that in such villages money is a scarce commodity, and as such that has driven up its price, locking most in a perpetual cycle of debt and deprivation... Critics claim a universal scheme is unaffordable. But they would be a substitute for subsidies that in India account for a huge share of national income. They are distortionary, inefficient, regressive and prone to corruption. Switching is feasible and would have substantial positive effects.Another criticism is that a basic income would be inflationary. But it would be a substitute for more expensive policies. The criticism also neglects the elasticity of supply. Thus, it generated a sharp rise in food production, resulting in better nutrition and productivity and in lower unit prices."
Universal basic income policies don’t cause people to leave workforce, study finds - "There is no significant effect, positive or negative, on employment as a whole, although part-time work does increase by 1.8 percentage points, or about 17 percent.
There is a difference in the effect of the unconditional cash transfer in sectors that produce goods or services that can be traded outside of Alaska and those that cannot. Part-time work increases and employment decreases in the tradable sector, but the effects in the non-tradable sector are insignificant.
Any negative effects in the non-tradable sector, meanwhile, are offset by positive macro effects."
Richard Parncutt: Eliminate Poverty with Universal Basic Income and Flat Income Tax (BIFT) - "The rising wealth gap means that progressive income tax is not working. Here are two possible reasons for the failure of progressive income tax to stabilize the wealth gap:
In the UK, VAT (20% on most goods and services) is exacerbating poverty. The same applies to many countries (but not the USA, which has no VAT and sales taxes are lower). In the UK and other countries with high VAT, people with low incomes pay a higher proportion of their income in VAT than people with high incomes. In other words, VAT is regressive, and the regressivity of VAT can completely cancel out the progressivity of income tax (more)! In the end, people are effectively paying about the same rate of tax on every dollar they earn. The obvious solution is to get rid of VAT, but no-one is talking about that, because the rich like it. The more money the government gets from VAT, the less they need from the rich.
The culture of tax deductions favors the rich. Details vary from country to country (more), but the general principle is the same. If I buy a piano to give music lessons, I can deduct the cost of the piano from my income and pay less income tax. That seems fair, but it is not. First, the rich are more likely to be working independently or starting new businesses, generating costs that can be deducted. Second, the rich can afford better accountants who know how to manipulate the tax-deduction system. In this way, tax deductions primarily benefit the rich (more). If I need a piano to give piano lessons and I have no money, I should not get a tax deduction. Instead, I should borrow the money and pay it back from my earnings. That's what banks are for. The same applies to any expenses incurred to produce additional income. A simpler, fairer system with lower tax rates and no tax deductions at all is possible, but no-one is talking about it. The rich want to pay as little tax as possible, while at the same time keeping the public in the dark about what is really happening...
The following figure, copied from the Austrian newspaper Der Standard on 8 January 2019, illustrates the problem. The vertical axis is the percentage of income that each Austrian effectively pays in tax. The horizontal axis is income, starting with the lowest 10% of people and ending with the highest 10%. The graph shows that the rich, the poor, and the middle class are all ultimately paying between 40% and 50% of their income in tax. In other words, Austria is a "flat tax republic". But the problem is not confined to Austria. The situation is similar in most countries, including France. The lower red part of the graph shows the effect of income-tax progressivity: people with lower incomes pay a lower proportion of income as "income tax". The dark blue band at the top shows how that progressivity is cancelled out by the regressivity of VAT and petroleum tax. The result is close to a flat income tax system. No wonder the wealth gap is growing. If everyone is effectively paying almost 50% of their income in tax and receiving all kinds of government benefits in return, the current system is already remarkably close to BIFT. Why not just give everyone the same basic income, tax all income at 50%, and get rid of the other taxes and benefits? Of course other taxes are necessary (environmental taxes to reduce pollution, transaction taxes to calm the markets, wealth taxes to reduce the wealth gap), but VAT on everyday purchases such as regular food is certainly unfair and should be eliminated. VAT for luxury goods is ok, especially if they cause environmental damage... The current relationship between income before welfare and/or tax and income after welfare and/or tax is already remarkably close to the above graph in most countries (some examples are below), but unnecessarily arbitrary and complex. BIFT would simplify that. In fact, it is the the simplest and most effective way to make income tax progressive."
The explanation for funding didn't make sense. Very rambly and repetitive article too
Why Should We Support the Idea of Universal Basic Income? - "A plan of $12,000 per U.S. citizen over 18, and $4,000 per citizen under 18 amounts to a revenue need of $2.98 trillion, which after all the programs that can be eliminated are rolled into it, requires an additional need of $1.5 trillion or so. So where do we come up with an additional $1.5 trillion?
• A land value tax has been estimated to be a source of revenue of about $1.7 trillion.
• A flat tax of around 40% would be sufficient. Due to the way such a tax works in combination with UBI, this would effectively be a reduction in taxes for about 80% of the population.
• A 10% value added tax (VAT) has been estimated to be a source of revenue of about $750 billion. That could be increased to reach $1.5 trillion or added to other sources of additional revenue.
• These other sources of revenue could be a carbon tax ($440 billion), a financial transaction tax ($350 billion), or taxing capital gains like ordinary income and creating new upper tax brackets ($160 billion). Did you know that for fifty years — between 1932 and 1982 — the top income tax rate averaged 82%? Our current highest rate is 39%.
• From 2008 to 2014, we created about $5 trillion out of thin air, and handed it to banks in hopes they would lend it to people. It was called quantitative easing. The result was rich people got even richer. Why not skip the banks, and just hand debt-free money directly and equally to all citizens? Potentially, a quarter of basic income could require no taxes at all."
Apparently people don't respond to incentives and change their behavior when taxed. And this is a fundamental understanding of quantitative easing
The important questions about universal basic income haven’t been answered yet - "We haven’t decided what problem we want to solve, much less what experimental results we’d see if we’d successfully solved it.That’s a problem, Rothstein told me. Studies like the one Finland recently conducted are “meant to tell us whether a UBI is a good idea, but it’s not clear what results would lead to you saying, ‘Yes, it’s a good idea’ or, ‘No, it’s not a good idea.’”Are we looking for a UBI to increase labor market participation? Leave it the same? Decrease it? Do we want a UBI in order to fix welfare disincentives to work, or in order to fix the fact that people have to work to survive? “You can’t solve a problem and its opposite with the same solution”... “A truly universal UBI would be enormously expensive,” the paper argues. This is uncontroversial, even among UBI supporters, but it’s important to spell out — and to look in depth at our options for paying for it. “The kinds of UBIs often discussed would cost nearly double current total spending on the ‘big three’ programs (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid),” the paper finds. “Moreover, each of these programs would likely be necessary even if a UBI were in place, as each addresses needs that would not be well served by a uniform cash transfer.”... “A universal payment of $12,000 per year to each adult U.S. resident over age 18 would cost roughly $3 trillion per year,” they find. “This is about 75 percent of current total federal expenditures, including all on- and off-budget items, in 2017. (If those over 65 were excluded, the cost would fall by about one-fifth.) Thus, implementing this UBI without cuts to other programs would require nearly doubling federal tax revenue.” Many advocates of UBI have a solution to that: UBI should replace other programs, not just supplement them. The NBER paper argues that this solution doesn’t work as well as we’d hope. “Even eliminating all existing transfer programs — about half of federal expenditures — would make only a dent in the cost,” they observe. And that’s not the only problem. Eliminating all existing transfer programs in favor of a UBI would leave some big holes. For example, under the UBI they propose, a single parent of three children would be eligible for $12,000 a year in total assistance. Under the current system, that parent would likely be eligible for a lot more: health care through Medicaid, food stamps, rent and housing assistance, and potentially transfer payments through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. “Replacing existing anti-poverty programs with a UBI would be highly regressive”"
Enough With This Basic Income Bullshit - "By the way, you’ve probably never heard of it, but basic income already exists in France—it is called the Revenu de solidarité active (“RSA”) — formerly Revenu minimum d’insertion (“RMI”). It’s a welfare benefit “aimed at people without any income who are of working age but do not have any other rights to unemployment benefits (such as contributions-based unemployment benefits).” (2.5 million people claim the RSA every year and it costs €10 billion annually, which represents less than 0.4% of the French GDP. Bear in mind that those under 25 are not eligible.)... those in favor of basic income should pay attention to the “RMI/RSA” and draw appropriate lessons: it’s not simple (at all); it has adverse economic effects; and it is widely denounced, notably on the right, as “assistance” (assistanat) that deprives those who claim the benefit from any incentive to look for a job, thus making them live off the middle class taxpayers. If you know politics, you can guess where this is going. Unfortunately, politics is not Silicon Valley’s strong suit. I see four reasons why Silicon Valley sees nothing but basic income as the preferred solution to our mounting social problems. First, Entrepreneurs in general, especially when they’re young, well-educated white men from privileged backgrounds, have no reason to have any familiarity with the complicated and unattractive world of the social state. This is true in every country. Second, there’s a myopia that is specific to the US: the social state there is designed so that only the poor, the old and the unemployed are eligible for social benefits. The fact that the US used to be the sole developed country without universal health insurance makes the US social state all the more of a riddle (even though healthcare sucks up 20% of GDP). Third, there’s a libertarian ideological bias in Silicon Valley that seems to turn people into ignorant morons when it comes to social state-related issues. As engineers, some don’t even get the political stakes. In any case, few express any interest in government-related issues, which remain uncharted territory (even though the US government made Silicon Valley). Fourth, even when they genuinely care about the less well-off, Entrepreneurs tend to focus too much on what they perceive as a giant inefficient bureaucratic machine rather than on the variety of life-saving benefits that this machine provides. In their eyes, because it’s supposedly so inefficient, the social bureaucracy should be swiftly replaced by a simple seamless app—and, hey, let’s call it “basic income”! Because of those biases, all the tech people who try and imagine new forms of benefits for the digital age tend to completely disregard the most critical dimension of all: politics. Yes, there is a political dimension to the social state, and it is not pretty—just consider the ongoing fight around Obamacare... it is widely documented that mitigating risks for individuals through social insurance sustains economic growth, supports small businesses, enhances individual freedom, and makes entrepreneurship thrive...
'If society’s efforts are focused only on its weakest members through selective social policies largely based on “means-tests,” taxpayers come to think in terms of “we” and “they”. “We” — the better-off wage earners and the middle class — have to pay to the state, but get nothing in return. The ground is thus prepared for the disintegration of social solidarity; which in turn encourages tax revolts. The fact is that it is not the weight of the tax burden that causes such revolts, but rather the feeling among taxpayers that they do not get anything for their money. People who derive some benefit from a welfare system are its greatest supporters and therefore pay taxes without feeling exploited.'"
Interestingly a lot of Americans view social insurance as "socialism" which will destroy economic growth, small businesses, individual freedom and entrepreneurship. But then this might have more to do with the nebulous nature of the term "socialism", which gets conflated with social democracy by both its proponents and opponents in endless bait and switching
Unconditional nation-wide Cash transfer programme, Iran - International Basic Income Week - "in December of 2010 the Iranian Cash Transfer Programme was started, paying out the same monthly amount to everyone...
So HOW can a programme that benefits 90% of the population (and the environment) be unpopular?
It’s not unpopular amongst the lower income people. But there is an avalanche of opinions against the cash transfers within the conservative media, academics and the government. One of their arguments is that people don’t work if they get free money... We found no evidence that cash transfers reduced labor supply (With the exception of young people still in education). Some workers even worked more hours after receiving the unconditional income! This has something to do with the source of revenue the cash transfers get funded from: The disbanded subsidies on energy, so – in effect: a fuel tax. People don’t get taxed more on their income – which is usually the main channel for negative labor supply effects. There is little or no evidence in the economics literature that cash transfers have a negative impact on willingness to work. Yes, in theory if you do to need income to live, you may decide not work, but empirically this is not true for the vast majority of the people... The Iranian Cash Transfer Programme could be the UBI model for all oil-rich countries, that can avoid the negative effect of raising the funds through income taxation."
Universal Basic Income and the Threat of Tyranny - "when we examine historical trends in politics and economics, we can spot a basic pattern: political rights are strongly correlated with economic participation. Societies where the state economy depends on small inputs from many different citizens tend to give their citizens significantly more rights, including the right of participation in the government itself. Societies where the state economy comes from natural resources, or other sources that require only a small, fixed number of people to defend or maintain them, tend to develop autocratic regimes with little concern for the welfare of their citizens. This is far from a new observation. Already in classical Greece, Plato reached the same conclusion about the Greek city-states, though in his time the main factor was military more than economic. He observed that city-states with a military based on hoplites (elite infantry who came from the upper classes of society, mostly through the requirement that they finance the expensive armor and equipment for themselves, meaning poor people could not be included) tend to develop an oligarchic government; city-states whose army was based on warships (which in those days required a great number of rowers, a job which did not require much equipment or training, therefore was available for the lower classes) would develop democracy... The World Bank gives us a list of countries ordered by what percentage of their merchandise exports comes from fuels. At 50% or more we find, in this order: Iraq, Angola, Algeria, Brunei, Kuwait, Azerbaijan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Oman, Norway, Colombia, Bolivia and Bahrain. Can we notice a trend? How many of these countries provide a good set of political rights for their citizens?... We do not get our rights because we deserve them, or even because we fight for them – we get our rights because the government needs us... Commentators love to imagine society after universal basic income as full of people studying, working on crafts and hobbies, and generally living happy and fulfilling lives. But we need to prepare for other eventualities as well. There is no shortage of people who use their spare time to practice hatred and violence, and not always out of some competition for resources. What happens if people use their new free time to organize in gangs, militias, or cults that despise the workers and promulgate hateful ideas? Will the workers still be happy to finance them? How many working people would vote against taking universal basic income rights away from Nazis and terrorists? And once that is done, can we be sure they will not get an appetite to take them away from more and more people they dislike?... Will working people accept a vote by non-working people to increase their universal basic income? If so, what stops them from increasing it indefinitely? In such a world where working people are a minority, it seems quite possible that not only they will be able to take away the political rights of the non-workers, they might even have to. If the non-workers not only live without working, but also get to set the rules for the working people, we would truly have to be utopian fantasists to imagine a good relationship between the two groups, certainly in the long run"
This is one factor given for the failure of African governments - since they have resource revenue (and aid money) they have no incentive to be responsive to their populations
What if the state provided everyone with a basic income? - "Basic income is enjoying a comeback, but the idea has been around for some time. US President Richard Nixon ran a successful trial in the late 1960s, for example. For Nixon, it was an efficient way to reform social welfare. A full rollout of the policy was only put on hold after a right-wing backlash. Influential 20th Century economists Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek both thought that some form of guaranteed income was the best way for governments to alleviate poverty. In his book Law, Legislation and Liberty, Hayek presented it as a way to give everyone economic freedom... In 1968, Nixon requested a trial in which 8,500 people were given a basic income of around $1,600 a year for a family of four (equivalent to $10,000/£8,070 today). The free money had little impact on the working hours of participants, with those who did reduce the amount of time they worked engaging in other socially valuable ventures instead. According to Dutch historian Rutget Bregman, an advocate of basic income and author of the book Utopia for Realists, the trial had a major impact on those who took part. “One mother earned a degree in psychology and got a job as a researcher,” he says. “Another woman took acting classes while her husband began composing music.” The woman told the researchers that she and her husband had become self-sufficient artists. Nixon’s experiment also found that young people tended to spend more time in education when they were not working.Canada ran a similar trial in the 1970s, giving 30% of the people in the small town of Dauphin, Manitoba, $15,000 each. A 2011 analysis of the trial by Evelyn Forget, an economist at the University of Manitoba, found that high-school completion rates increased and hospitalisation rates dropped by 8.5%. Employment rates amongst adults did not change at all... a guaranteed income – even a supplementary one – could challenge the idea that people are only valuable members of society if they work... There are also concerns about whether short-term trials can really reveal the sort of social changes that may occur if basic income were actually introduced over the long term. Participants in a trial may use their time to study or retrain because they know they will need to look for work again once the trial ends."
L'origine de Bert
Tuesday, December 17, 2019
Monday, December 16, 2019
Links - 16th December 2019 (3)
'Half of all boxing photos look like gay weddings'
Father absence linked to earlier puberty among certain girls - "the absence of a biologically related father in the home predicted earlier breast and pubic hair development, but only for girls in higher income households. The findings held even after the girls’ weight was taken into account. “The age at which girls are reaching puberty has been trending downward in recent decades, but much of the attention has focused on increased body weight as the primary culprit”... Early puberty has been linked to greater risk for breast and other reproductive cancers later in life, among other health impacts... The mechanisms behind these findings are not entirely clear, the study authors said. Evolutionary biologists have theorized that the absence of a biological father may signal an unstable family environment, leading girls to enter puberty earlier.Another theory that has been posited is that girls without a biological father in the home are exposed more to unrelated adult males – specifically, the pheromones of these males – that lead to earlier onset of puberty. However, in this study, the presence of other adult males, including stepfathers, in the home did not alter the findings. It is also unclear why father absence predicted early puberty only in higher income families, particularly for African American girls. “It’s possible that in lower income families, it is more normative to rely upon a strong network of alternative caregivers,” said Deardorff. “A more controversial hypothesis is that higher income families without fathers are more likely to have a single mother who works long hours and is not as available for caregiving. Recent studies have suggested that weak maternal bonding is a risk factor for early puberty.”Another possibility is that higher income girls in father-absent homes may be exposed to more artificial light... higher income African American girls may be more exposed to certain beauty products, such as hair straighteners, which have estrogenic properties that could influence pubertal timing."
Yet another harm of single parenthood
I Gave My Cat a Fitness Tracker – the Results Were Worrying - "By attaching the tracker to their kitty’s collar and paying a monthly subscription fee of £3.33, users are able to track their pet via an app that shows their activity and location. Activity is categorised as ‘lazy’, ‘active’ or ‘dynamic’, and ‘Pet Points’ are awarded based on how active your furry friend has been, with the option of setting a daily Pet Point goal and seeing how your pet ranks on an overall leaderboard, or against your friends and their pets. You can also set up a ‘virtual safety fence’ around your home and receive notifications should your pet ever travel outside of this area. The tracker even has a 'live' mode, giving you location updates every two to five seconds, which would only really be useful in the unlikely event that Kubrick was kidnapped and we were involved in a high-speed chase to rescue him... Ultimately, the most useful (and horrifying) discovery was that according to the data collected by my iPhone’s health app, over a week of tracking him, Kubrick – a literal cat, who sleeps for a minimum of 40 percent of every day – covered twice more distance on his prowls than me, a human being with much longer legs"
'I kept going': Nine-year-old enters 5km race ... and accidentally wins 10km event - "It took nine-year-old Kade Lovell longer than expected to finish his 5km race in Minnesota, but only because he was busy accidentally winning a separate 10km event."
Primary school in Penang probed for refusing Islamic ‘doa’ recital in school programme - "Police have launched an investigation into a primary school in Penang for refraining its students from reciting Muslim prayers and only allowing Christian prayers during its Outstanding Students 2019 ceremony here last week.Bukit Aman Criminal Investigation Department (CID) prosecution and legal division principal assistant director Senior Assistant Commissioner Mior Faridalathrash Wahid said an Investigation Paper was opened following numerous reports lodged against the school, Sekolah Kebangsaan Methodist, Pulau Pinang... The school is currently being investigated under Section 505(C) of the Penal Code, for intent to incite any class or community of persons to commit any offence against any other class or community of persons. Following the incident, Education director general Datuk Dr Amin Senin said yesterday the ministry was also considering disciplinary action if necessary."
Can a Methodist school refuse to accept Muslim students?
Siti Kasim - "A PRAYER IS A PRAYER! WHAT'S THE FUSS??For heaven's sake! MGS started of as a Mission School. There is no ruling that says they can't recite a Christian prayer before an important ceremony.Muslims being present while a Christian prayer is being recited is NOT preaching nor promoting conversions. Otherwise, no Muslim can ever attend any wedding or funeral service in a Church. To insinuate that this is a form of proselytising is an attempt to establish religious apartheid, and an abuse of clause 11(4) of the constitution.To those parents who have a problem with the school reciting Christian prayers, please send your kids to normal SK or Sekolah Ugama. To the KPM, don't be so bias in taking action, look at orang asli children in SK schools. They're being forced to pray and recite prayers when they're not even Muslims. 4 orang asli girls were slapped by a teacher when they refused to recite an Arabic verse before eating because they are not Muslims. Did you make noise about it? Did the police arrest the teacher that slapped the children? No. Nothing. Zilch."
Penang school gets stern warning after Christian prayer recital - "he education ministry has issued a stern warning to Methodist Girls’ School in Penang following reports that the school had recited a Christian prayer during an awards ceremony.A separate warning was given to a school in Perak which is believed to have conducted an art seminar in Chinese instead of the national language.The director-general of education, Amin Senin, said the ministry is considering further disciplinary action against the Methodist girls’ school for contravening national education regulations.According to a media report yesterday, a Muslim group had lodged a police report, accusing the school of trying to propagate Christianity to Muslims."
Porridge and boiled mutton? New York foodies still love trolling London | Mina Holland - "London’s emergence as a restaurant destination is not especially recent (“flowering” suggests we are at training-bra stage), so why do many, often Americans, continue to peddle such a dim view of British food?... “What is this WEIRD obsession Americans have with London having bad food? Like, seriously, boiled mutton? Was his last visit during the Victorian era?”"
Urinals banned from newly remodeled Portland Building - "The city has redesigned all the bathrooms to be gender neutral-- which means urinals are banned eve' in the men's room... "its gonna take up a lot more space and third- anyone whose ever been to any public event - have you seen the line at the ladies room? Do you see any line at the men's room?"He also argues that urinals use far less water than toilets."
Wokeness is about spite and cutting down people, not lifting them up
‘This is completely wrong’: Evanston elementary school ‘cancels’ Halloween due to equity and some parents are not happy about it - "The heart behind the decision, according to a statement from Michelle Cooney, Lincoln’s school principal, was to honor the school’s value of equity and to be inclusive of all students within the community, particularly those who do not celebrate the holiday... “Halloween is a cultural American holiday, and it’s being canceled because of religious groups,” she said. “We’re a Bosnia and Muslim immigrant and refugee family. Halloween, when we moved (to Chicago) from a different country, was one of the greatest things.”Bajric, who came to Chicago from Bosnia in 1995 with her family, went to a Chicago public school for elementary school, and for her, Halloween was “a way to assimilate,” she said. Her parents worked two jobs, sometimes gone from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., she recalled, and celebrating Halloween at school was often the only taste she got of the holiday.“I didn’t get to celebrate the other holidays,” said Bajric, who remembers Halloween at school being “the best day ever” for her. “Halloween was my way of being like the other kids. Other students from other countries (at Lincoln), they get to feel like the other kids and participate in a cultural holiday.”... “If you want to be inclusive,” Gruber began, “have a conversation and get input from all members of the community. It’s very hard in public school, but it was just decided and that’s why people are so upset — it was just decided. Bring out ideas and discussion about how can we move forward that tries to meet as many needs as possible, not change (our behaviors and traditions) for the views of a few people. That’s not the way society works.”"
Inclusivity is about being bland and taking away things that make people feel they belong
Time to cancel all public holidays, since not everyone celebrates them
Universal Orlando Fires Gru Actor for Flashing White-Power Symbol - "the family were offered a gift card and free tickets to the theme park"
Rebecca Cannon Novicki - "Open letter to Universal Orlando: This is a very common game called “Gotcha” I’m a sports photographer and I couldn’t even tell you how many kids have tried to get away with doing this in a team picture- bonus points if they can actually do it on a teammates leg or arm or some other body part. Given the fact that the younger child is clearly making the same gesture and that Gru is a “villain” It’s painfully obvious to anyone that they were playing this game with the children and your employee went above and beyond by carrying it over into their picture which the children would have thought was hilarious. Except they have gold digging parents who want to teach them they will never be anything more than a victim and to take a harmless kids game and pretend it’s something else. Shame on them but an even bigger shame on you for firing this employee and helping to spread this ignorance, hate and division in this country... Unless you video every interaction at Universal while you are there you will get screwed. In this case, how much is this family taking you for ? And all they had to do was crop the picture and make up a fake story a la Jussie Smollet style but you still fired the employee and gave these piranhas abusing their children and ruining what was probably a fun memory for 15 minutes of fame, exactly what they wanted and I’m still stuck with the computer your employee broke. Obviously my next stop needs to be the media- that seems to be the only thing you respond to. Shameful. So feel free to share this post and media you can contact me about what happens to guests belongings in the on-site hotels while they are in the parks and how Universal “handles” it. That is unless you are too busy with made up hateful and sensational stories like this one. 🤷🏼♀️"
Looks like the black family needs to disown the younger son, who is clearly a white supremacist too
Addendum: This post is no longer available but here is a photo of the white supremacist son flashing it too
Candace Owens on Twitter - "To the people who fly private but lecture us about the environment. To the people who live in gated communities but lecture us about building walls. To the people who travel with armed guards & lecture us about guns: Your bottomless hypocrisy is why America chooses Trump."
Han Hui Hui's Alter Ego 'Han Hui Ying' Dances To K-Pop On Instagram
BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Cash, Credit and Control in China - "A country whose generosity to refugees, hosting close to 4 million of them, has been extraordinary to witness. And yet despite that openness, that willingness to talk to us that so struck me, Turkey is also full of paranoia. The Turkish Republic grew from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire with the defeat of enemies at the heart of its identity. Western powers routed at Gallipoli and Ataturk building up a profoundly nationalist spirit. 123, long live the Turks, goes an old children's rhyme as they learn to count here. It continues: 456, Poland collapsed. 789, the Germans are pigs. 10 11 12, the British are foxes. Barely a week has gone by here when the government or the media over which it exerts near total control hasn't accused an external power of trying to tear up the country. Mr. Erdogan presents himself as the protector in chief, apparently uncovering plots on a daily basis and hitting back. Try googling Erdogan slams and you'll be spoiled for choice. NATO, the US, Israel, Europe, so-called intellectuals - all are on the list, as is, of course, the BBC. Somewhere in this pile of boxes around me is the front page of a Turkish newspaper labeling me a British traitor who should be captured and deported for daring to interview opposition activists. Agent provocateur and modern day Lawrence of Arabia are some of the names I've been called. The mayor of Ankara even suggested we were complicit in a bomb attack near our office since I was on air soon afterwards, the dastardly English still clearly intent on bringing Turkey to its knees… [On the coup] I will always remember the words of an 82 year old neuro psychologist I interviewed soon after, who'd been stripped of her pension and baselessly branded a terrorist supporter. My husband and I fled Turkey after the 1971 coup, she said. There was widespread torture. Leftists like us would have fingernails pulled out in custody. She paused, peering out at the gleaming Bosphorus. But today is worse, she said, because at least then we could trust the judiciary. To see journalists and human rights defenders, some of them friends, locked up or chased out on spurious charges has been tough. The fear and division that now stalk Turkey, the world's largest jailer of journalists, has made it progressively harder to interview people. Government supporters don't trust the Western media. Opponents worry they'll face problems if they speak out. At a party soon after I arrived in 2014, a Turkish woman Melis came up to me. So you're new here, huh?, she said with a typical warm smile. One thing you have to learn about us is we’re militant people. Whichever way we are: religious, secular, militaristic, Ataturk loving, Erdogan loving, even in how we party, we do it all 110%"
Father absence linked to earlier puberty among certain girls - "the absence of a biologically related father in the home predicted earlier breast and pubic hair development, but only for girls in higher income households. The findings held even after the girls’ weight was taken into account. “The age at which girls are reaching puberty has been trending downward in recent decades, but much of the attention has focused on increased body weight as the primary culprit”... Early puberty has been linked to greater risk for breast and other reproductive cancers later in life, among other health impacts... The mechanisms behind these findings are not entirely clear, the study authors said. Evolutionary biologists have theorized that the absence of a biological father may signal an unstable family environment, leading girls to enter puberty earlier.Another theory that has been posited is that girls without a biological father in the home are exposed more to unrelated adult males – specifically, the pheromones of these males – that lead to earlier onset of puberty. However, in this study, the presence of other adult males, including stepfathers, in the home did not alter the findings. It is also unclear why father absence predicted early puberty only in higher income families, particularly for African American girls. “It’s possible that in lower income families, it is more normative to rely upon a strong network of alternative caregivers,” said Deardorff. “A more controversial hypothesis is that higher income families without fathers are more likely to have a single mother who works long hours and is not as available for caregiving. Recent studies have suggested that weak maternal bonding is a risk factor for early puberty.”Another possibility is that higher income girls in father-absent homes may be exposed to more artificial light... higher income African American girls may be more exposed to certain beauty products, such as hair straighteners, which have estrogenic properties that could influence pubertal timing."
Yet another harm of single parenthood
I Gave My Cat a Fitness Tracker – the Results Were Worrying - "By attaching the tracker to their kitty’s collar and paying a monthly subscription fee of £3.33, users are able to track their pet via an app that shows their activity and location. Activity is categorised as ‘lazy’, ‘active’ or ‘dynamic’, and ‘Pet Points’ are awarded based on how active your furry friend has been, with the option of setting a daily Pet Point goal and seeing how your pet ranks on an overall leaderboard, or against your friends and their pets. You can also set up a ‘virtual safety fence’ around your home and receive notifications should your pet ever travel outside of this area. The tracker even has a 'live' mode, giving you location updates every two to five seconds, which would only really be useful in the unlikely event that Kubrick was kidnapped and we were involved in a high-speed chase to rescue him... Ultimately, the most useful (and horrifying) discovery was that according to the data collected by my iPhone’s health app, over a week of tracking him, Kubrick – a literal cat, who sleeps for a minimum of 40 percent of every day – covered twice more distance on his prowls than me, a human being with much longer legs"
'I kept going': Nine-year-old enters 5km race ... and accidentally wins 10km event - "It took nine-year-old Kade Lovell longer than expected to finish his 5km race in Minnesota, but only because he was busy accidentally winning a separate 10km event."
Primary school in Penang probed for refusing Islamic ‘doa’ recital in school programme - "Police have launched an investigation into a primary school in Penang for refraining its students from reciting Muslim prayers and only allowing Christian prayers during its Outstanding Students 2019 ceremony here last week.Bukit Aman Criminal Investigation Department (CID) prosecution and legal division principal assistant director Senior Assistant Commissioner Mior Faridalathrash Wahid said an Investigation Paper was opened following numerous reports lodged against the school, Sekolah Kebangsaan Methodist, Pulau Pinang... The school is currently being investigated under Section 505(C) of the Penal Code, for intent to incite any class or community of persons to commit any offence against any other class or community of persons. Following the incident, Education director general Datuk Dr Amin Senin said yesterday the ministry was also considering disciplinary action if necessary."
Can a Methodist school refuse to accept Muslim students?
Siti Kasim - "A PRAYER IS A PRAYER! WHAT'S THE FUSS??For heaven's sake! MGS started of as a Mission School. There is no ruling that says they can't recite a Christian prayer before an important ceremony.Muslims being present while a Christian prayer is being recited is NOT preaching nor promoting conversions. Otherwise, no Muslim can ever attend any wedding or funeral service in a Church. To insinuate that this is a form of proselytising is an attempt to establish religious apartheid, and an abuse of clause 11(4) of the constitution.To those parents who have a problem with the school reciting Christian prayers, please send your kids to normal SK or Sekolah Ugama. To the KPM, don't be so bias in taking action, look at orang asli children in SK schools. They're being forced to pray and recite prayers when they're not even Muslims. 4 orang asli girls were slapped by a teacher when they refused to recite an Arabic verse before eating because they are not Muslims. Did you make noise about it? Did the police arrest the teacher that slapped the children? No. Nothing. Zilch."
Penang school gets stern warning after Christian prayer recital - "he education ministry has issued a stern warning to Methodist Girls’ School in Penang following reports that the school had recited a Christian prayer during an awards ceremony.A separate warning was given to a school in Perak which is believed to have conducted an art seminar in Chinese instead of the national language.The director-general of education, Amin Senin, said the ministry is considering further disciplinary action against the Methodist girls’ school for contravening national education regulations.According to a media report yesterday, a Muslim group had lodged a police report, accusing the school of trying to propagate Christianity to Muslims."
Porridge and boiled mutton? New York foodies still love trolling London | Mina Holland - "London’s emergence as a restaurant destination is not especially recent (“flowering” suggests we are at training-bra stage), so why do many, often Americans, continue to peddle such a dim view of British food?... “What is this WEIRD obsession Americans have with London having bad food? Like, seriously, boiled mutton? Was his last visit during the Victorian era?”"
Urinals banned from newly remodeled Portland Building - "The city has redesigned all the bathrooms to be gender neutral-- which means urinals are banned eve' in the men's room... "its gonna take up a lot more space and third- anyone whose ever been to any public event - have you seen the line at the ladies room? Do you see any line at the men's room?"He also argues that urinals use far less water than toilets."
Wokeness is about spite and cutting down people, not lifting them up
‘This is completely wrong’: Evanston elementary school ‘cancels’ Halloween due to equity and some parents are not happy about it - "The heart behind the decision, according to a statement from Michelle Cooney, Lincoln’s school principal, was to honor the school’s value of equity and to be inclusive of all students within the community, particularly those who do not celebrate the holiday... “Halloween is a cultural American holiday, and it’s being canceled because of religious groups,” she said. “We’re a Bosnia and Muslim immigrant and refugee family. Halloween, when we moved (to Chicago) from a different country, was one of the greatest things.”Bajric, who came to Chicago from Bosnia in 1995 with her family, went to a Chicago public school for elementary school, and for her, Halloween was “a way to assimilate,” she said. Her parents worked two jobs, sometimes gone from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., she recalled, and celebrating Halloween at school was often the only taste she got of the holiday.“I didn’t get to celebrate the other holidays,” said Bajric, who remembers Halloween at school being “the best day ever” for her. “Halloween was my way of being like the other kids. Other students from other countries (at Lincoln), they get to feel like the other kids and participate in a cultural holiday.”... “If you want to be inclusive,” Gruber began, “have a conversation and get input from all members of the community. It’s very hard in public school, but it was just decided and that’s why people are so upset — it was just decided. Bring out ideas and discussion about how can we move forward that tries to meet as many needs as possible, not change (our behaviors and traditions) for the views of a few people. That’s not the way society works.”"
Inclusivity is about being bland and taking away things that make people feel they belong
Time to cancel all public holidays, since not everyone celebrates them
Universal Orlando Fires Gru Actor for Flashing White-Power Symbol - "the family were offered a gift card and free tickets to the theme park"
Rebecca Cannon Novicki - "Open letter to Universal Orlando: This is a very common game called “Gotcha” I’m a sports photographer and I couldn’t even tell you how many kids have tried to get away with doing this in a team picture- bonus points if they can actually do it on a teammates leg or arm or some other body part. Given the fact that the younger child is clearly making the same gesture and that Gru is a “villain” It’s painfully obvious to anyone that they were playing this game with the children and your employee went above and beyond by carrying it over into their picture which the children would have thought was hilarious. Except they have gold digging parents who want to teach them they will never be anything more than a victim and to take a harmless kids game and pretend it’s something else. Shame on them but an even bigger shame on you for firing this employee and helping to spread this ignorance, hate and division in this country... Unless you video every interaction at Universal while you are there you will get screwed. In this case, how much is this family taking you for ? And all they had to do was crop the picture and make up a fake story a la Jussie Smollet style but you still fired the employee and gave these piranhas abusing their children and ruining what was probably a fun memory for 15 minutes of fame, exactly what they wanted and I’m still stuck with the computer your employee broke. Obviously my next stop needs to be the media- that seems to be the only thing you respond to. Shameful. So feel free to share this post and media you can contact me about what happens to guests belongings in the on-site hotels while they are in the parks and how Universal “handles” it. That is unless you are too busy with made up hateful and sensational stories like this one. 🤷🏼♀️"
Looks like the black family needs to disown the younger son, who is clearly a white supremacist too
Addendum: This post is no longer available but here is a photo of the white supremacist son flashing it too
Candace Owens on Twitter - "To the people who fly private but lecture us about the environment. To the people who live in gated communities but lecture us about building walls. To the people who travel with armed guards & lecture us about guns: Your bottomless hypocrisy is why America chooses Trump."
Han Hui Hui's Alter Ego 'Han Hui Ying' Dances To K-Pop On Instagram
BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Cash, Credit and Control in China - "A country whose generosity to refugees, hosting close to 4 million of them, has been extraordinary to witness. And yet despite that openness, that willingness to talk to us that so struck me, Turkey is also full of paranoia. The Turkish Republic grew from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire with the defeat of enemies at the heart of its identity. Western powers routed at Gallipoli and Ataturk building up a profoundly nationalist spirit. 123, long live the Turks, goes an old children's rhyme as they learn to count here. It continues: 456, Poland collapsed. 789, the Germans are pigs. 10 11 12, the British are foxes. Barely a week has gone by here when the government or the media over which it exerts near total control hasn't accused an external power of trying to tear up the country. Mr. Erdogan presents himself as the protector in chief, apparently uncovering plots on a daily basis and hitting back. Try googling Erdogan slams and you'll be spoiled for choice. NATO, the US, Israel, Europe, so-called intellectuals - all are on the list, as is, of course, the BBC. Somewhere in this pile of boxes around me is the front page of a Turkish newspaper labeling me a British traitor who should be captured and deported for daring to interview opposition activists. Agent provocateur and modern day Lawrence of Arabia are some of the names I've been called. The mayor of Ankara even suggested we were complicit in a bomb attack near our office since I was on air soon afterwards, the dastardly English still clearly intent on bringing Turkey to its knees… [On the coup] I will always remember the words of an 82 year old neuro psychologist I interviewed soon after, who'd been stripped of her pension and baselessly branded a terrorist supporter. My husband and I fled Turkey after the 1971 coup, she said. There was widespread torture. Leftists like us would have fingernails pulled out in custody. She paused, peering out at the gleaming Bosphorus. But today is worse, she said, because at least then we could trust the judiciary. To see journalists and human rights defenders, some of them friends, locked up or chased out on spurious charges has been tough. The fear and division that now stalk Turkey, the world's largest jailer of journalists, has made it progressively harder to interview people. Government supporters don't trust the Western media. Opponents worry they'll face problems if they speak out. At a party soon after I arrived in 2014, a Turkish woman Melis came up to me. So you're new here, huh?, she said with a typical warm smile. One thing you have to learn about us is we’re militant people. Whichever way we are: religious, secular, militaristic, Ataturk loving, Erdogan loving, even in how we party, we do it all 110%"
Post ID: 4987667195215170682
Liberalism Isn’t What It Used to Be
Liberalism Isn’t What It Used to Be - WSJ
"When I worked for the Kennedy campaign, I identified as a Democrat and a liberal. The core beliefs that made me a liberal in 1968 put me at odds with many of the things “progressives” stand for today, 51 years later.
One of those core beliefs is that no one should be discriminated against because of his race. Martin Luther King Jr. ’s dream—that every person be judged by the quality of his character rather than the color of his skin—resonated with the experience of my own Jewish forefathers, who had come to this country seeking an equal opportunity to compete, to learn and to find work. At some point, however, the liberal ideal of equality of opportunity gave way to a progressive program to give certain historically disadvantaged groups overt preferences in education and employment. This is the opposite of judging people based on their character. Liberalism somehow made a U-turn when it morphed into contemporary progressivism.
Another core liberal belief of mine is that proper justice depends on due process—which includes a presumption of innocence. The archvillain of my youth was Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who sought to ruin the career of anyone he accused of being a Communist or fellow traveler. Many compared his efforts to the Salem witch trials, as a result of which 19 people were executed based solely on the “credible” accusations of a few young girls.
The due-process hero of my younger years was Atticus Finch, the fictional lawyer in Harper Lee ’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” He defended Tom Robinson, a black sharecropper falsely accused of rape by a white woman, Mayella Ewell...
I had always thought it was only bigoted Jim Crow juries and redbaiters like Joe McCarthy who rode roughshod over due process. Yet in 2011 the Obama Education Department sent a “dear colleague” letter to colleges and universities, threatening to cut off federal funding unless the schools changed their procedures to make it easier to discipline students accused of sexual assault. As a result, many students were stripped of their rights to counsel, cross-examination of their accusers and discovery of the evidence against them. Those procedures were re-examined by the current secretary of education, a step that was bitterly criticized by progressives because it may make it more difficult to punish the accused—the price of all due-process protections.
My first reaction to the #MeToo movement was satisfaction that victims of sexual harassment could feel safer about speaking out. Then, during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, “women deserve to be heard” transformed into “women deserve to be believed.” A presumption of guilt replaced the presumption of innocence, and progressives seemed unconcerned. I can imagine a #MeToo version of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” with Mayella Ewell as the heroine, Atticus Finch condemned for “toxic masculinity” and the lynch mob cheered as an engine of popular justice.
Another tenet of American justice that inspired me to lean left was the idea that every defendant, however unpopular, is entitled to legal representation. Here my childhood heroes were lawyers like William Kunstler, who defended politically unpopular leftist clients, and the American Civil Liberties Union, which defended clients of every stripe when their constitutional rights were threatened.
This year, however, Ronald Sullivan, a Harvard Law School professor, became the object of student protests after joining disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein ’s defense team. The protests led Harvard to fire Mr. Sullivan and his wife as faculty deans at Winthrop House, a campus residential college. The right of an unpopular defendant to counsel, it seems, is no longer a progressive value.
Another of my core values is free speech. In the McCarthy era, one often heard of professors and screenwriters being forced out of their jobs for expressing far-left views. Today it’s conservative professors that are an endangered species on campus. Progressive students have become expert at forcing the dismissal or resignation of professors who allegedly display insufficient sensitivity about racial or gender issues. All too often, such students are able to keep anyone they disagree with from even speaking on campus. Once again, progressives have become the most visible enemies of a core “liberal” value...
Progressives today are riding roughshod over much of what liberalism once stood for. I hope that old 1960s liberals like me will stand firm, not be shamed into silence, and call out those who challenge our core values, whether from the left or the right."
"It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea." - Robert Anton Wilson
This is an interesting examining of slippage - not the slippery slope but the utter reversal of principles
One liberal response is to take a very restrictive view of liberal values, e.g. they said since the Kavanaugh confirmation was a job interview, not a trial, due process didn't apply, and they strictly interpret censorship in the light of the First Amendment, ignoring the liberal tradition
"When I worked for the Kennedy campaign, I identified as a Democrat and a liberal. The core beliefs that made me a liberal in 1968 put me at odds with many of the things “progressives” stand for today, 51 years later.
One of those core beliefs is that no one should be discriminated against because of his race. Martin Luther King Jr. ’s dream—that every person be judged by the quality of his character rather than the color of his skin—resonated with the experience of my own Jewish forefathers, who had come to this country seeking an equal opportunity to compete, to learn and to find work. At some point, however, the liberal ideal of equality of opportunity gave way to a progressive program to give certain historically disadvantaged groups overt preferences in education and employment. This is the opposite of judging people based on their character. Liberalism somehow made a U-turn when it morphed into contemporary progressivism.
Another core liberal belief of mine is that proper justice depends on due process—which includes a presumption of innocence. The archvillain of my youth was Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who sought to ruin the career of anyone he accused of being a Communist or fellow traveler. Many compared his efforts to the Salem witch trials, as a result of which 19 people were executed based solely on the “credible” accusations of a few young girls.
The due-process hero of my younger years was Atticus Finch, the fictional lawyer in Harper Lee ’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” He defended Tom Robinson, a black sharecropper falsely accused of rape by a white woman, Mayella Ewell...
I had always thought it was only bigoted Jim Crow juries and redbaiters like Joe McCarthy who rode roughshod over due process. Yet in 2011 the Obama Education Department sent a “dear colleague” letter to colleges and universities, threatening to cut off federal funding unless the schools changed their procedures to make it easier to discipline students accused of sexual assault. As a result, many students were stripped of their rights to counsel, cross-examination of their accusers and discovery of the evidence against them. Those procedures were re-examined by the current secretary of education, a step that was bitterly criticized by progressives because it may make it more difficult to punish the accused—the price of all due-process protections.
My first reaction to the #MeToo movement was satisfaction that victims of sexual harassment could feel safer about speaking out. Then, during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, “women deserve to be heard” transformed into “women deserve to be believed.” A presumption of guilt replaced the presumption of innocence, and progressives seemed unconcerned. I can imagine a #MeToo version of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” with Mayella Ewell as the heroine, Atticus Finch condemned for “toxic masculinity” and the lynch mob cheered as an engine of popular justice.
Another tenet of American justice that inspired me to lean left was the idea that every defendant, however unpopular, is entitled to legal representation. Here my childhood heroes were lawyers like William Kunstler, who defended politically unpopular leftist clients, and the American Civil Liberties Union, which defended clients of every stripe when their constitutional rights were threatened.
This year, however, Ronald Sullivan, a Harvard Law School professor, became the object of student protests after joining disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein ’s defense team. The protests led Harvard to fire Mr. Sullivan and his wife as faculty deans at Winthrop House, a campus residential college. The right of an unpopular defendant to counsel, it seems, is no longer a progressive value.
Another of my core values is free speech. In the McCarthy era, one often heard of professors and screenwriters being forced out of their jobs for expressing far-left views. Today it’s conservative professors that are an endangered species on campus. Progressive students have become expert at forcing the dismissal or resignation of professors who allegedly display insufficient sensitivity about racial or gender issues. All too often, such students are able to keep anyone they disagree with from even speaking on campus. Once again, progressives have become the most visible enemies of a core “liberal” value...
Progressives today are riding roughshod over much of what liberalism once stood for. I hope that old 1960s liberals like me will stand firm, not be shamed into silence, and call out those who challenge our core values, whether from the left or the right."
"It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea." - Robert Anton Wilson
This is an interesting examining of slippage - not the slippery slope but the utter reversal of principles
One liberal response is to take a very restrictive view of liberal values, e.g. they said since the Kavanaugh confirmation was a job interview, not a trial, due process didn't apply, and they strictly interpret censorship in the light of the First Amendment, ignoring the liberal tradition
Post ID: 7275257103589011587
Links - 16th December 2019 (2)
Milton Friedman's "Shareholder" Theory Was Wrong - The Atlantic - "An established business will make the most profits by eliminating competition; the tried-and-true method for doing that is to persuade the government to pass a law that discourages new firms from entering its market, or that in some other way reduces its costs. And if the purpose of a business is to “increase its profits,” as Friedman argued, then it is not only “clear-headed,” but also justifiable for a business to use its political influence to dismantle the free market that Friedman cherished... Legally, business executives are employees of the corporation, which—crucially—they, not the shareholders, control. The shareholders have a contractual relationship with the corporation that entitles them to a share of its profits and a vote on certain major corporate decisions. Time and again, CEOs have used their power over the corporation to bat away shareholders when they propose that the corporation should act in a socially responsible way. When an employer says “jump” to an employee, the employee jumps. When shareholders say “jump” to the CEO, the CEO sues them."
Asking America's Police Officers to Explain Abusive Cops - The Atlantic - "police and their critics often see the same events very differently. For example, one anecdote concerns a man in the back of a police car who told his arresting officers that he was having trouble breathing. They ignored him. He died. Many who watched the video saw callous cops who placed no value on a human being's life. But police officers who watched the same tape saw two cops who thought that their seemingly healthy arrestee was faking, as so many people fabricate medical conditions to avoid being taken to jail. These differences in perspective are useful to understand, even if one believes that a given incident is clearly the fault of the police or the person they're arresting."
Just How Wrong Is Conventional Wisdom About Government Fraud? - The Atlantic - "post-Katrina discussions were shaped by the perceived need to ensure multiple safeguards and to move slowly in releasing the intended aid. I thought that was backward. If the money were made more easily available, there would have been more fraud. But if the program had stated upfront that ill-gotten gains would be met with fierce investigation and prosecution on the back end, it could have distributed the cash faster, enabling more people to rebuild their homes, and their lives, much quicker. Instead, it was two to three years before most victims started receiving any money. Two and a half years after the storm, nearly 40 percent still had not received a cent. Meanwhile, there was fraud anyway. The federal government reported about $500 million of it -- or a little less than 10 percent of the total aid payout. Most of this wasn’t undeserving poor people ripping off the system just so they could get a new house in one of the grimmest neighborhoods in the country. More frequently, it was undeserving middle-class people ripping off the system to pocket the money for themselves. It turns out fraud was rampant among officials at government agencies and even charities... the problem with fraud isn’t government programs or beneficiaries. It’s that fraud losses are a cost of doing business in just about everything. According to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), the typical business loses 5 percent of its revenue to fraud each year. Even when detected, 40 to 50 percent of victimized companies don’t recover their losses. The industries most likely to be victims of fraud are the banking and financial sector; government and public administration; and manufacturing... it’s usually managers and executives who commit the worst fraud. It’s not easy to get agreement on actual fraud levels in government programs. Unsurprisingly, liberals say they’re low, while conservatives insist they’re astronomically high. In truth, it varies from program to program. One government report says fraud accounts for less than 2 percent of unemployment insurance payments. It’s seemingly impossible to find statistics on “welfare” (i.e., TANF) fraud, but the best guess is that it’s about the same. A bevy of inspector general reports found “improper payment” levels of 20 to 40 percent in state TANF programs -- but when you look at the reports, the payments appear all to be due to bureaucratic incompetence (categorized by the inspector general as either “eligibility and payment calculation errors” or “documentation errors”), rather than intentional fraud by beneficiaries... The majority of food-stamp fraud appears to be generated by supermarkets “trafficking” in the food stamps. Beneficiaries intentionally ripping off the taxpayers account for perhaps 1 percent of payments... For the most part, fraud isn’t the product of scheming low-income beneficiaries -- Mitt Romney’s 47 percent -- living high on the hog on your dime, but rather someone other than the beneficiary standing to make a buck off it... A landmark 2012 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association not only found that fraud rates are consistent across both government programs and wholly private health care; it also concluded that a “less harmful strategy” than the “common” approach “to contain costs us[ing] cuts, such as reductions in payment levels, benefit structures, and eligibility” would be to “reduce waste” -- mostly on the provider side... Combatting fraud requires efforts and investments that target the real perpetrators, not cheap shots at beneficiaries and reflexive cuts in their programs. There are, after all, equal levels of fraud and theft in other fields, most notably finance -- but we don’t try to reduce it by shutting down the entire industry and blaming the customers."
Canada Ranked As Top Racial Discrimination Countries In The World During The Hiring Process - "While Canada is one of the most multicultural countries around the world, a new study shows that Canada isn't as accepting as we often appear to be. In fact, Canada has just ranked as one of the most racial discriminating countries around the globe when it comes to the hiring process. So, when applying for a job, it appears that a lot more factors occur than just your qualifications... Canada was ranked as the fourth top countries to show a level of discrimination during the hiring process. France, Sweden, and Great Britain all ranked in first, second and third, respectively... Canada was ranked as more discriminatory than the United States when it comes to the hiring process. In fact, the United States was ranked as one of the best countries when it came to being non-discriminatory in the workplace."
Sarah Jeong No Longer A Member Of New York Times Editorial Board - "Jeong’s hiring last August despite her anti-white, anti-men, and anti-cop tweets led many to accuse the paper of a double standard, particularly because at the time it had recently fired Quinn Norton for derogatory tweets about minorities"
The Female Chef Making Japan’s Most Elaborate Cuisine Her Own | The New Yorker - "Hundreds of rules can govern the preparation of a kaiseki meal. Almost all of them serve aesthetic or gastronomic ends, though to a nonexpert they can seem ludicrously fussy. Plates should be arranged with the main element slightly to the rear, so that, to a seated guest looking down, it appears to be centered. Pieces of sashimi should be served in odd numbers. Round food should be served in square vessels, and square food in round vessels. No two bowls of the same shape and material should consecutively appear. Food that is grilled should precede food that is steamed, which in turn should precede food that is fried. Ingredients with narrow, days-long windows of shun—like bamboo shoots in spring, or plum blossoms in winter—should be included not only to bring diners joy but to prompt a melancholy reflection on the relentlessness of time and the inevitability of death. Almost all of kaiseki’s rules can be subverted by the chef; knowing how and when to break them is the most confident expression of kaiseki mastery... Even in Japan, you’re far more likely to see a non-Japanese man behind the sushi counter than a Japanese woman."
Lessons From Putin’s Russia for Living in Trump’s America - "my friend Alex and I got stuck in Moscow traffic a few cars ahead of an EMT van. The siren wailed, the lights whirled, but no one would budge: The ambulance crawled along at the same pace as the rest of us. When I noted this, Alex scoffed. Everyone knows that ambulance drivers make money on the side selling VIP airport rides, he said. Who knows who’s in that van right now? Fuck ’em. What struck me most, at that moment, was how little difference it made whether his allegation was true, an urban legend, or something that had occurred only once or twice. All you needed for it to matter was for it to be plausible. The moment you lived in a society where someone could conceive of an EMT van used as an Über-Uber, you lived in a society where ambulances no longer received the right of way. One tends to imagine life in an autocratic regime as dominated by fear and oppression: armed men in the street, total surveillance, chanted slogans, and whispered secrets. It is probably a version of that picture that has been flitting lately through the nightmares of American liberals fretting about the damage a potential autocrat might do to an open society. But residents of a hybrid regime such as Russia’s — that is, an autocratic one that retains the façade of a democracy — know the Orwellian notion is needlessly romantic. Russian life, I soon found out, was marked less by fear than by cynicism: the all-pervasive idea that no institution is to be trusted, because no institution is bigger than the avarice of the person in charge. This cynicism, coupled with endless conspiracy theories about everything, was at its core defensive (it’s hard to be disappointed if you expect the worst). But it amounted to defeatism. And, interestingly, the higher up the food chain you moved, the more you encountered it... Now people may get arrested for single-man pickets where, five years ago, 100,000-person marches were fine. The new restrictive laws — such as the “gay propaganda” one, or the notorious Article 282 that reinterprets hate speech as anything anyone can take offense at — are shoddily written and full of holes on purpose; their true message is that anyone can be found guilty at any time. This moves justice fully into the realm of ponyatiya and obliterates all need for mass repression: One or two show trials, such as the Pussy Riot ordeal and the fabricated cases against the protesters of May 6, 2012, ensured that everyone else got the message. That message? Again, it wasn’t to operate in totalitarian fear. More like: Sit quietly, enjoy your new bike lanes, or face a carefully randomized punishment. Living in Moscow meant a constant background calculation as to how much this or that transgression against the ponyatiya would cost you, whether it would be worth it or not. Probably not jail. Just your career. Your name on a “stop list.” Maybe. No one has seen these lists. But how much would you be willing to bet that they don’t exist?"
Ridiculous dig at the US aside, this is quite an interesting article
Are U.S. Railroad Gauges Based on Roman Chariots? - " claims about a direct line descent between ancient Roman chariot tracks and the standard U.S. railway gauge jump the tracks when confronted with the fact that despite some commonality of equipment, well into the 19th century the U.S. still did not have one “standard” railroad gauge"
Chicken Biscuit fight - "There’s another famous biscuit that comes from Perak, and it’s the chicken biscuit.It contains zero real chicken, but has all the beauty of chicken flavouring. It also contains nam yu, a type of red coloured fermented bean curd, sesame seeds, sugar, maltose, winter melon, spices and a healthy dose of lard. It’s a far cry from the salty Western option in the form of Nabisco’s Chicken in a Biscuit."
Baby-Faced Teacher in the Philippines is Really 22 Years Old - "Ian Francis Manga is a 22-year-old teacher in the Philippines’ Bulacan province but is often mistaken for being a student himself."
Is Firefox better than Chrome? It comes down to privacy. - The Washington Post - "I peered under the hood of Google Chrome and found it brought along a few thousand friends. Shopping, news and even government sites quietly tagged my browser to let ad and data companies ride shotgun while I clicked around the Web.This was made possible by the Web’s biggest snoop of all: Google. Seen from the inside, its Chrome browser looks a lot like surveillance software.Lately I’ve been investigating the secret life of my data, running experiments to see what technology really gets up to under the cover of privacy policies that nobody reads. It turns out, having the world’s biggest advertising company make the most popular Web browser was about as smart as letting kids run a candy shop... I discovered 11,189 requests for tracker “cookies” that Chrome would have ushered right onto my computer but were automatically blocked by Firefox... Look in the upper right corner of your Chrome browser. See a picture or a name in the circle? If so, you’re logged in to the browser, and Google might be tapping into your Web activity to target ads. Don’t recall signing in? I didn’t, either. Chrome recently started doing that automatically when you use Gmail. Chrome is even sneakier on your phone. If you use Android, Chrome sends Google your location every time you conduct a search. (If you turn off location sharing it still sends your coordinates out, just with less accuracy.)... After the [Gmail] sign-in shift, Johns Hopkins associate professor Matthew Green made waves in the computer science world when he blogged he was done with Chrome. “I lost faith,” he told me. “It only takes a few tiny changes to make it very privacy unfriendly.”"
Meme - "Think you've won this argument? Hah, but you can't sexually please women #owned
Sounds something that an Incel would say but OK
Wow <half-assed provocative pseudoargument here> bye
Imagine being this wrong
Hahaha, no
Honey, no need to be mad you'll stop being an incel one day I'm sure
STOP CRITICIZING WOMEN
Everything you've said is invalid because I say you're a misogynist"
The Righteous and the Woke – Why Evangelicals and Social Justice Warriors Trigger Me in the Same Way - "To a former Evangelical, something feels too familiar—or better said, a bunch of somethings feel too familiar.
Righteous and infidels —There are two kinds of people in the world: Saved and damned or Woke and bigots, and anyone who isn’t with you 100% is morally suspect*. Through the lens of dichotomizing ideologies, each of us is seen—first and foremost—not as a complicated individual, but as a member of a group, with moral weight attached to our status as an insider or outsider. (*exceptions made for potential converts)
Insider jargon... jargon isn’t merely a tool for efficient or precise communication as it is in many professions—it is a sign of belonging and moral virtue.
Born that way... generic average oppression scores get assigned to each tribe and then to each person based on intersecting tribal identities. Thus, a queer female East Indian Harvard grad with a Ph.D. and E.D. position is considered more oppressed than the unemployed third son of a white Appalachian coal miner.
Original sin...
Orthodoxies... The Woke also have tenets of faith that must not be questioned. Most if not all ills flow from racism or sexism. Only males can be sexist; only white people can be racist. Gender is culturally constructed and independent of sex. Immigration is an economic boon for everyone. Elevating the most oppressed person will solve problems all the way up. Did my challenging that list make you think you might be reading an article by a conservative? If so, that’s exactly what I’m trying to illustrate.
Denial as proof... In Woke culture, any pushback is perceived as a sign of white fragility or worse, a sign that one is a racist, sexist, homophobe, Islamophobe, xenophobe, or transphobe. You say that you voted for Barack Obama and your kids are biracial so your problem with BLM isn’t racism? LOL, that’s just what a racist would say. In both cultures, the most charitable interpretation that an insider can offer a skeptic is something along these lines, You seem like a decent, kind person. I’m sure that you just don’t understand. Since Evangelical and Woke dogmas don’t allow for honest, ethical disagreement, the only alternative hypothesis is that the skeptic must be an evildoer or bigot.
Black and white thinking—If you are not for us, you’re against us... pragmatism and compromise are signs of moral taint.
Shaming and shunning...
Selective science denial... Gender dimorphism affects how we think, not just how we look. Personal responsibility has real world benefits, even for people who have the odds stacked against them. Lived experience is simply anecdotal evidence. Skin color is often a poor proxy for privilege. Organic foods won’t feed 11 billion.
Evangelism...
Hypocrisy... Where Evangelicalism traffics in hubris cloaked as humility, Woke culture traffics in discrimination cloaked as inclusion...
Gloating about the fate of the wicked... Some of the Woke curse those they see as fascists to burn in the very same Christian hell, metaphorically if not literally. They dream of restorative justice for criminal offenses but lifelong, ruinous retribution for political sinners: Those hateful Trump voters deserve whatever destitution or illness may come their way. Unemployed young men in rural middle America are turning to Heroin? Too bad. Nobody did anything about the crack epidemic. Oil town’s on fire? Burn baby burn."
Asking America's Police Officers to Explain Abusive Cops - The Atlantic - "police and their critics often see the same events very differently. For example, one anecdote concerns a man in the back of a police car who told his arresting officers that he was having trouble breathing. They ignored him. He died. Many who watched the video saw callous cops who placed no value on a human being's life. But police officers who watched the same tape saw two cops who thought that their seemingly healthy arrestee was faking, as so many people fabricate medical conditions to avoid being taken to jail. These differences in perspective are useful to understand, even if one believes that a given incident is clearly the fault of the police or the person they're arresting."
Just How Wrong Is Conventional Wisdom About Government Fraud? - The Atlantic - "post-Katrina discussions were shaped by the perceived need to ensure multiple safeguards and to move slowly in releasing the intended aid. I thought that was backward. If the money were made more easily available, there would have been more fraud. But if the program had stated upfront that ill-gotten gains would be met with fierce investigation and prosecution on the back end, it could have distributed the cash faster, enabling more people to rebuild their homes, and their lives, much quicker. Instead, it was two to three years before most victims started receiving any money. Two and a half years after the storm, nearly 40 percent still had not received a cent. Meanwhile, there was fraud anyway. The federal government reported about $500 million of it -- or a little less than 10 percent of the total aid payout. Most of this wasn’t undeserving poor people ripping off the system just so they could get a new house in one of the grimmest neighborhoods in the country. More frequently, it was undeserving middle-class people ripping off the system to pocket the money for themselves. It turns out fraud was rampant among officials at government agencies and even charities... the problem with fraud isn’t government programs or beneficiaries. It’s that fraud losses are a cost of doing business in just about everything. According to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), the typical business loses 5 percent of its revenue to fraud each year. Even when detected, 40 to 50 percent of victimized companies don’t recover their losses. The industries most likely to be victims of fraud are the banking and financial sector; government and public administration; and manufacturing... it’s usually managers and executives who commit the worst fraud. It’s not easy to get agreement on actual fraud levels in government programs. Unsurprisingly, liberals say they’re low, while conservatives insist they’re astronomically high. In truth, it varies from program to program. One government report says fraud accounts for less than 2 percent of unemployment insurance payments. It’s seemingly impossible to find statistics on “welfare” (i.e., TANF) fraud, but the best guess is that it’s about the same. A bevy of inspector general reports found “improper payment” levels of 20 to 40 percent in state TANF programs -- but when you look at the reports, the payments appear all to be due to bureaucratic incompetence (categorized by the inspector general as either “eligibility and payment calculation errors” or “documentation errors”), rather than intentional fraud by beneficiaries... The majority of food-stamp fraud appears to be generated by supermarkets “trafficking” in the food stamps. Beneficiaries intentionally ripping off the taxpayers account for perhaps 1 percent of payments... For the most part, fraud isn’t the product of scheming low-income beneficiaries -- Mitt Romney’s 47 percent -- living high on the hog on your dime, but rather someone other than the beneficiary standing to make a buck off it... A landmark 2012 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association not only found that fraud rates are consistent across both government programs and wholly private health care; it also concluded that a “less harmful strategy” than the “common” approach “to contain costs us[ing] cuts, such as reductions in payment levels, benefit structures, and eligibility” would be to “reduce waste” -- mostly on the provider side... Combatting fraud requires efforts and investments that target the real perpetrators, not cheap shots at beneficiaries and reflexive cuts in their programs. There are, after all, equal levels of fraud and theft in other fields, most notably finance -- but we don’t try to reduce it by shutting down the entire industry and blaming the customers."
Canada Ranked As Top Racial Discrimination Countries In The World During The Hiring Process - "While Canada is one of the most multicultural countries around the world, a new study shows that Canada isn't as accepting as we often appear to be. In fact, Canada has just ranked as one of the most racial discriminating countries around the globe when it comes to the hiring process. So, when applying for a job, it appears that a lot more factors occur than just your qualifications... Canada was ranked as the fourth top countries to show a level of discrimination during the hiring process. France, Sweden, and Great Britain all ranked in first, second and third, respectively... Canada was ranked as more discriminatory than the United States when it comes to the hiring process. In fact, the United States was ranked as one of the best countries when it came to being non-discriminatory in the workplace."
Sarah Jeong No Longer A Member Of New York Times Editorial Board - "Jeong’s hiring last August despite her anti-white, anti-men, and anti-cop tweets led many to accuse the paper of a double standard, particularly because at the time it had recently fired Quinn Norton for derogatory tweets about minorities"
The Female Chef Making Japan’s Most Elaborate Cuisine Her Own | The New Yorker - "Hundreds of rules can govern the preparation of a kaiseki meal. Almost all of them serve aesthetic or gastronomic ends, though to a nonexpert they can seem ludicrously fussy. Plates should be arranged with the main element slightly to the rear, so that, to a seated guest looking down, it appears to be centered. Pieces of sashimi should be served in odd numbers. Round food should be served in square vessels, and square food in round vessels. No two bowls of the same shape and material should consecutively appear. Food that is grilled should precede food that is steamed, which in turn should precede food that is fried. Ingredients with narrow, days-long windows of shun—like bamboo shoots in spring, or plum blossoms in winter—should be included not only to bring diners joy but to prompt a melancholy reflection on the relentlessness of time and the inevitability of death. Almost all of kaiseki’s rules can be subverted by the chef; knowing how and when to break them is the most confident expression of kaiseki mastery... Even in Japan, you’re far more likely to see a non-Japanese man behind the sushi counter than a Japanese woman."
Lessons From Putin’s Russia for Living in Trump’s America - "my friend Alex and I got stuck in Moscow traffic a few cars ahead of an EMT van. The siren wailed, the lights whirled, but no one would budge: The ambulance crawled along at the same pace as the rest of us. When I noted this, Alex scoffed. Everyone knows that ambulance drivers make money on the side selling VIP airport rides, he said. Who knows who’s in that van right now? Fuck ’em. What struck me most, at that moment, was how little difference it made whether his allegation was true, an urban legend, or something that had occurred only once or twice. All you needed for it to matter was for it to be plausible. The moment you lived in a society where someone could conceive of an EMT van used as an Über-Uber, you lived in a society where ambulances no longer received the right of way. One tends to imagine life in an autocratic regime as dominated by fear and oppression: armed men in the street, total surveillance, chanted slogans, and whispered secrets. It is probably a version of that picture that has been flitting lately through the nightmares of American liberals fretting about the damage a potential autocrat might do to an open society. But residents of a hybrid regime such as Russia’s — that is, an autocratic one that retains the façade of a democracy — know the Orwellian notion is needlessly romantic. Russian life, I soon found out, was marked less by fear than by cynicism: the all-pervasive idea that no institution is to be trusted, because no institution is bigger than the avarice of the person in charge. This cynicism, coupled with endless conspiracy theories about everything, was at its core defensive (it’s hard to be disappointed if you expect the worst). But it amounted to defeatism. And, interestingly, the higher up the food chain you moved, the more you encountered it... Now people may get arrested for single-man pickets where, five years ago, 100,000-person marches were fine. The new restrictive laws — such as the “gay propaganda” one, or the notorious Article 282 that reinterprets hate speech as anything anyone can take offense at — are shoddily written and full of holes on purpose; their true message is that anyone can be found guilty at any time. This moves justice fully into the realm of ponyatiya and obliterates all need for mass repression: One or two show trials, such as the Pussy Riot ordeal and the fabricated cases against the protesters of May 6, 2012, ensured that everyone else got the message. That message? Again, it wasn’t to operate in totalitarian fear. More like: Sit quietly, enjoy your new bike lanes, or face a carefully randomized punishment. Living in Moscow meant a constant background calculation as to how much this or that transgression against the ponyatiya would cost you, whether it would be worth it or not. Probably not jail. Just your career. Your name on a “stop list.” Maybe. No one has seen these lists. But how much would you be willing to bet that they don’t exist?"
Ridiculous dig at the US aside, this is quite an interesting article
Are U.S. Railroad Gauges Based on Roman Chariots? - " claims about a direct line descent between ancient Roman chariot tracks and the standard U.S. railway gauge jump the tracks when confronted with the fact that despite some commonality of equipment, well into the 19th century the U.S. still did not have one “standard” railroad gauge"
Chicken Biscuit fight - "There’s another famous biscuit that comes from Perak, and it’s the chicken biscuit.It contains zero real chicken, but has all the beauty of chicken flavouring. It also contains nam yu, a type of red coloured fermented bean curd, sesame seeds, sugar, maltose, winter melon, spices and a healthy dose of lard. It’s a far cry from the salty Western option in the form of Nabisco’s Chicken in a Biscuit."
Baby-Faced Teacher in the Philippines is Really 22 Years Old - "Ian Francis Manga is a 22-year-old teacher in the Philippines’ Bulacan province but is often mistaken for being a student himself."
Is Firefox better than Chrome? It comes down to privacy. - The Washington Post - "I peered under the hood of Google Chrome and found it brought along a few thousand friends. Shopping, news and even government sites quietly tagged my browser to let ad and data companies ride shotgun while I clicked around the Web.This was made possible by the Web’s biggest snoop of all: Google. Seen from the inside, its Chrome browser looks a lot like surveillance software.Lately I’ve been investigating the secret life of my data, running experiments to see what technology really gets up to under the cover of privacy policies that nobody reads. It turns out, having the world’s biggest advertising company make the most popular Web browser was about as smart as letting kids run a candy shop... I discovered 11,189 requests for tracker “cookies” that Chrome would have ushered right onto my computer but were automatically blocked by Firefox... Look in the upper right corner of your Chrome browser. See a picture or a name in the circle? If so, you’re logged in to the browser, and Google might be tapping into your Web activity to target ads. Don’t recall signing in? I didn’t, either. Chrome recently started doing that automatically when you use Gmail. Chrome is even sneakier on your phone. If you use Android, Chrome sends Google your location every time you conduct a search. (If you turn off location sharing it still sends your coordinates out, just with less accuracy.)... After the [Gmail] sign-in shift, Johns Hopkins associate professor Matthew Green made waves in the computer science world when he blogged he was done with Chrome. “I lost faith,” he told me. “It only takes a few tiny changes to make it very privacy unfriendly.”"
Meme - "Think you've won this argument? Hah, but you can't sexually please women #owned
Sounds something that an Incel would say but OK
Wow <half-assed provocative pseudoargument here> bye
Imagine being this wrong
Hahaha, no
Honey, no need to be mad you'll stop being an incel one day I'm sure
STOP CRITICIZING WOMEN
Everything you've said is invalid because I say you're a misogynist"
The Righteous and the Woke – Why Evangelicals and Social Justice Warriors Trigger Me in the Same Way - "To a former Evangelical, something feels too familiar—or better said, a bunch of somethings feel too familiar.
Righteous and infidels —There are two kinds of people in the world: Saved and damned or Woke and bigots, and anyone who isn’t with you 100% is morally suspect*. Through the lens of dichotomizing ideologies, each of us is seen—first and foremost—not as a complicated individual, but as a member of a group, with moral weight attached to our status as an insider or outsider. (*exceptions made for potential converts)
Insider jargon... jargon isn’t merely a tool for efficient or precise communication as it is in many professions—it is a sign of belonging and moral virtue.
Born that way... generic average oppression scores get assigned to each tribe and then to each person based on intersecting tribal identities. Thus, a queer female East Indian Harvard grad with a Ph.D. and E.D. position is considered more oppressed than the unemployed third son of a white Appalachian coal miner.
Original sin...
Orthodoxies... The Woke also have tenets of faith that must not be questioned. Most if not all ills flow from racism or sexism. Only males can be sexist; only white people can be racist. Gender is culturally constructed and independent of sex. Immigration is an economic boon for everyone. Elevating the most oppressed person will solve problems all the way up. Did my challenging that list make you think you might be reading an article by a conservative? If so, that’s exactly what I’m trying to illustrate.
Denial as proof... In Woke culture, any pushback is perceived as a sign of white fragility or worse, a sign that one is a racist, sexist, homophobe, Islamophobe, xenophobe, or transphobe. You say that you voted for Barack Obama and your kids are biracial so your problem with BLM isn’t racism? LOL, that’s just what a racist would say. In both cultures, the most charitable interpretation that an insider can offer a skeptic is something along these lines, You seem like a decent, kind person. I’m sure that you just don’t understand. Since Evangelical and Woke dogmas don’t allow for honest, ethical disagreement, the only alternative hypothesis is that the skeptic must be an evildoer or bigot.
Black and white thinking—If you are not for us, you’re against us... pragmatism and compromise are signs of moral taint.
Shaming and shunning...
Selective science denial... Gender dimorphism affects how we think, not just how we look. Personal responsibility has real world benefits, even for people who have the odds stacked against them. Lived experience is simply anecdotal evidence. Skin color is often a poor proxy for privilege. Organic foods won’t feed 11 billion.
Evangelism...
Hypocrisy... Where Evangelicalism traffics in hubris cloaked as humility, Woke culture traffics in discrimination cloaked as inclusion...
Gloating about the fate of the wicked... Some of the Woke curse those they see as fascists to burn in the very same Christian hell, metaphorically if not literally. They dream of restorative justice for criminal offenses but lifelong, ruinous retribution for political sinners: Those hateful Trump voters deserve whatever destitution or illness may come their way. Unemployed young men in rural middle America are turning to Heroin? Too bad. Nobody did anything about the crack epidemic. Oil town’s on fire? Burn baby burn."
Post ID: 6297147252050432603
Fall Of The Berlin Wall
Iain MacGregor On Fall Of The Berlin Wall | History Extra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"‘In West Berlin you'd have had, there were British, American and French soldiers there, still as a legacy of the end of World War Two. What was it like for them now and essentially kind of cut off from the west in just a small part of the city?’
‘Obviously there was travel routes, there was the air corridors going through into West Berlin, there was the train corridors and then there was the autobahn route. The Russians after the Berlin Blockade failed, they weren't going to touch those routes any further. There might be the odd occasion, or it happened frequently where they would be intransigent at the border controls and hold people up, hold the train up, hold cars going through or, or buzz the aeroplane going through.
But generally, I talked to dozens of American, British troops that were stationed there throughout the life of the Berlin Wall. I talked to a few French gendarmes who were on duty at Checkpoint Charlie. To a man and woman all of them said no matter what year they served, all of them said it was the best tour of duty they ever had. And most of them were career soldiers, or career policemen. And they might have been in the army for 25, 30 years, but all of them just kind of gleamed over with nostalgic guys, and just loved the tour of duty that they had...
The difference on the western side was it was an international city. So it's probably the most international city in Western Europe because of the amount of military and civil personnel you had to have to service the the garrisons that were there... it was an exciting place to be. You could literally be, I don’t know, two, 300 yards away from a wall down the side street, you wouldn't even know the wall was there. And many of the veterans that I talked to said that, you know, if you weren't on duty at the wall, and you're living in West Berlin, you wouldn’t think you were 70 miles inside Soviet territory. It just wouldn't occur to you.
Whereas obviously on the eastern sector, yeah, I mean, you could see it all the way up until 1989 when the wall went, and people were finally crisscrossing and going into the eastern half of the city. It was still as if you'd gone back in time, you could be a Russian soldier about to plant your red flag on the Reichstag building. Lots of buildings bombed out, lots of buildings destroyed completely, some rubble in some side streets, bullet holes, marking the walls. It was very much the the main thoroughfares of East Berlin, were deliberately obviously, from a showcase point of view, reconstructed along very Soviet lines, very, you know, ugly buildings. Most of which got knocked down after reunification, but you go down the side streets, and you'd still be back in 1945’...
[On someone getting shot] What shocked the world was, it wasn't the fact that he'd been shot. It was the fact that he was allowed to just lie there bleeding to death in front of everybody. So the watching Americans, the military police witnessed it all. They weren't going to get involved because they couldn't go on to East German territory. It might cause some kind of diplomatic incident so they didn't know what to do. The East Germans were waiting for orders, they shot him and he was lying there. And now they decided, well, what should we do? They were waiting for their orders too. But meanwhile hundreds of West Berliners had seen what had happened and were coming out to find out what was going on, because for the first hour while this kid was lying on the ground, bleeding to death, he was screaming for help, screaming in pain, but no one would come to him. So gradually, obviously, he's he's losing his strength and it was like a horror show. By this time the media had turned up and they captured it all. So the famous photos you have are of his, his body lying on the ground before these Germans managed to get him.
By the time they decided they could go out and they waited for a doctor to turn up, few hours have gone by, he was obviously going to die. They managed to capture him, you see the look that was captured on the photographs of the faces of the East German border guards who shot him, is one of fear and tension, because by this time, there’s hundreds of Berliners screaming and shouting at them. They took them away but he died. He died a few hours later, that brought so much international attention to what was going on. And it really focused again, it focused Checkpoint Charlie, in the world's eyes, that this is somewhere that, you know, is very, very dangerous place, people are dying. Young kids are dying for no reason"
"‘In West Berlin you'd have had, there were British, American and French soldiers there, still as a legacy of the end of World War Two. What was it like for them now and essentially kind of cut off from the west in just a small part of the city?’
‘Obviously there was travel routes, there was the air corridors going through into West Berlin, there was the train corridors and then there was the autobahn route. The Russians after the Berlin Blockade failed, they weren't going to touch those routes any further. There might be the odd occasion, or it happened frequently where they would be intransigent at the border controls and hold people up, hold the train up, hold cars going through or, or buzz the aeroplane going through.
But generally, I talked to dozens of American, British troops that were stationed there throughout the life of the Berlin Wall. I talked to a few French gendarmes who were on duty at Checkpoint Charlie. To a man and woman all of them said no matter what year they served, all of them said it was the best tour of duty they ever had. And most of them were career soldiers, or career policemen. And they might have been in the army for 25, 30 years, but all of them just kind of gleamed over with nostalgic guys, and just loved the tour of duty that they had...
The difference on the western side was it was an international city. So it's probably the most international city in Western Europe because of the amount of military and civil personnel you had to have to service the the garrisons that were there... it was an exciting place to be. You could literally be, I don’t know, two, 300 yards away from a wall down the side street, you wouldn't even know the wall was there. And many of the veterans that I talked to said that, you know, if you weren't on duty at the wall, and you're living in West Berlin, you wouldn’t think you were 70 miles inside Soviet territory. It just wouldn't occur to you.
Whereas obviously on the eastern sector, yeah, I mean, you could see it all the way up until 1989 when the wall went, and people were finally crisscrossing and going into the eastern half of the city. It was still as if you'd gone back in time, you could be a Russian soldier about to plant your red flag on the Reichstag building. Lots of buildings bombed out, lots of buildings destroyed completely, some rubble in some side streets, bullet holes, marking the walls. It was very much the the main thoroughfares of East Berlin, were deliberately obviously, from a showcase point of view, reconstructed along very Soviet lines, very, you know, ugly buildings. Most of which got knocked down after reunification, but you go down the side streets, and you'd still be back in 1945’...
[On someone getting shot] What shocked the world was, it wasn't the fact that he'd been shot. It was the fact that he was allowed to just lie there bleeding to death in front of everybody. So the watching Americans, the military police witnessed it all. They weren't going to get involved because they couldn't go on to East German territory. It might cause some kind of diplomatic incident so they didn't know what to do. The East Germans were waiting for orders, they shot him and he was lying there. And now they decided, well, what should we do? They were waiting for their orders too. But meanwhile hundreds of West Berliners had seen what had happened and were coming out to find out what was going on, because for the first hour while this kid was lying on the ground, bleeding to death, he was screaming for help, screaming in pain, but no one would come to him. So gradually, obviously, he's he's losing his strength and it was like a horror show. By this time the media had turned up and they captured it all. So the famous photos you have are of his, his body lying on the ground before these Germans managed to get him.
By the time they decided they could go out and they waited for a doctor to turn up, few hours have gone by, he was obviously going to die. They managed to capture him, you see the look that was captured on the photographs of the faces of the East German border guards who shot him, is one of fear and tension, because by this time, there’s hundreds of Berliners screaming and shouting at them. They took them away but he died. He died a few hours later, that brought so much international attention to what was going on. And it really focused again, it focused Checkpoint Charlie, in the world's eyes, that this is somewhere that, you know, is very, very dangerous place, people are dying. Young kids are dying for no reason"
Post ID: 6314813532363006493
Links - 16th December 2019 (1) (Kavanaugh)
Lisa Britton on Twitter - "My friend’s 14-year-old daughter told me that girls in her class always use the threat “I’ll say you raped me!” towards the boys. She laughed. This is bad. Very, very bad What can we do about this?"
Jan Crawford on Twitter - "We report tonight the real bombshell: Christine Ford’s close HS friend (who Ford says was at the party when Kavanaugh allegedly assaulted her) said Ford’s story is not believable and told the FBI Ford’s allies pressured her, threatened her with a smear campaign to say otherwise"
Christine Blasey Ford's Lawyer: Okay Fine, Protecting Abortion Was Part of Why She Accused Kavanaugh - "New video has surfaced of leftist activist Debra Katz, the attorney for Christine Blasey-Ford, admitting her client (falsely) accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct in order to protect abortion and Roe v. Wade. "In the aftermath of these hearings I believe that Christine's testimony brought about more good than the harm the misogynist Republicans caused by allowing Kavanuagh on the court," Katz said during an event in Baltimore. "He will always have an asterisk next to his name. When he takes a scalpel to Roe v. Wade we will know who he is, we know his character and we know what motivates him. It's important that we know and that's part of what motivated Christine."... After Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court, the Senate Judiciary Committee released a 400-page long report. In it, investigators found no evidence that any claims, including the ones brought by Blasey-Ford, were true."
TOTO: Did A 'Star Wars' Actress Lose Her Gig After Doing A Comedic Impression Of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford? - "Kevin Hart lost his dream job as Oscar host, we’re told, because he didn’t follow the Academy’s demand to apologize for his insensitive comments about homosexuality.That’s balderdash.Had Hart offered up a full-throated mea culpa the Social Justice crowd would have demanded his professional scalp all the same. Just ask Roseanne Barr and Megyn Kelly, two superstars whose apologies couldn’t save their respective gigs.Did the same fate befall Rachel Butera?... Meanwhile, Oscar winner Matt Damon famously portrayed Kavanaugh as an angry, drunken cad who likely committed the assault in question on “Saturday Night Live.” He didn’t suffer a single career repercussion from the sketch. In fact, it might have undid the damage he did late last year when he tried to say the sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein were more severe that the groping incidents allegedly committed by Sen. Al Franken."
Ethics Complaints Against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh Dismissed - ""It is unacceptable that Supreme Court justices are fully beyond the reach of any system of accountability. This outcome means that the last chance for any serious look into these complaints against Brett Kavanaugh rests with the House Democrats but Jerry Nadler still has not lifted a finger. Nadler is dragging his feet on the Kavanaugh matter even more than he is with Trump, and that is saying something," Brian Fallon, executive director of Demand Justice, one of the groups that signed the letter to Democrats, said in an email to BuzzFeed News."
Of course, if Republicans were investigating a "Democratic" judge, that would be shocking political interference and a threat to judicial independence
NYT updates Kavanaugh 'bombshell' to note accuser doesn't recall alleged assault - "The New York Times suddenly made a major revision to a supposed bombshell piece late Sunday concerning a resurfaced allegation of sexual assault by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh — hours after virtually all 2020 Democratic presidential candidates had cited the original article as a reason to impeach Kavanaugh.The update included the significant detail that several friends of the alleged victim said she did not recall the purported sexual assault in question at all. The Times also stated for the first time that the alleged victim refused to be interviewed, and has made no other comment about the episode. The only firsthand account concerning the supposed attack in the original piece, which was published on Saturday, came from a Clinton-connected lawyer who claimed to have witnessed it. (The lawyer, Max Stier, did not actually provide his account directly; the Times acknowledged that "two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier" had relayed his supposed version of events.)... The update came only after The Federalist's Mollie Hemingway, who reviewed an advance copy of the book, first flagged the article's omission on Twitter — prompting other commentators to press the issue... The revitalized, longshot push to get Kavanaugh removed from the high court came as Democrats' apparent effort to impeach President Trump has largely stalled. Trump, for his part, suggested Sunday that Kavanaugh should sue for defamation.The Times piece by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, adapted from their forthcoming book, asserted that a Kavanaugh classmate, Clinton-linked nonprofit CEO Max Stier, "saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student."The Times did not mention Stier's work as a Clinton defense attorney, or Stier's legal battles with Kavanaugh during the Whitewater investigation, and simply called him a "respected thought leader."... "Omitting these facts from the @nytimes story is one of worst cases of journalistic malpractice that I can recall," wrote the National Review's Washington correspondent, John McCormack, on Twitter.McCormack wrote separately: "If Kavanaugh’s 'friends pushed his penis,' then isn’t it an allegation of wrongdoing against Kavanaugh’s 'friends,' not Kavanaugh himself? Surely even a modern liberal Yalie who’s been to one of those weird non-sexual 'naked parties' would recognize both the female student and Kavanaugh are both alleged victims in this alleged incident, barring an additional allegation that a college-aged Kavanaugh asked his 'friends' to 'push his penis.' The Times went on to note in the article that it had "corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier," but the article apparently meant only that the Times had corroborated that Stier made his claim to the FBI. No first-hand corroboration of the alleged episode was apparently obtained.Nevertheless, Democrats announced a new effort to topple Kavanaugh. Hawaii Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono -- who infamously said last year that Kavanaugh did not deserve a fair hearing because he might be pro-life -- said the Senate Judiciary Committee should begin an impeachment inquiry to determine whether Kavanaugh lied to Congress... During the hearings, Harris strongly implied that she knew Kavanaugh had improperly discussed Special Counsel Robert Mueller's then-ongoing probe with a Trump-connected lawyer.Harris provided no evidence for the bombshell insinuation, which went viral on social media and sent the hearing room into stunned silence, even as she directly accused Kavanaugh of lying under oath.Castro and Warren echoed that sentiment and said Kavanaugh had committed perjury"
Witnesses Defended Kavanaugh. NYT Authors Falsely Claimed Silence - "A new Atlantic-published, adapted excerpt of the book attempts to resurrect Pogrebin and Kelly’s anti-Kavanaugh smears but once again has a major error. “We Spent 10 Months Investigating Kavanaugh. Here’s What We Found” was published in the Atlantic.Their reporting must not have been thorough. In a section explaining why they believe the accusers despite the lack of any evidence, they write that their emotional reaction to the claims was that the claims rang true. But they get major facts wrong... 'The people who allegedly witnessed the event—Kavanaugh’s friends Kevin Genda, David Todd, and David White—have kept mum about it. Kavanaugh has denied it. If such an incident had occurred, Kavanaugh said, it would have been the “talk of campus.”'...
'One of the male classmates who Ramirez said egged on Kavanaugh denied any memory of the party. ‘I don’t think Brett would flash himself to Debbie, or anyone, for that matter,’ he said. Asked why he thought Ramirez was making the allegation, he responded, ‘I have no idea.’ The other male classmate who Ramirez said was involved in the incident commented, ‘I have zero recollection.’In a statement, two of those male classmates who Ramirez alleged were involved in the incident, the wife of a third male student she said was involved, and one other classmate, Dan Murphy, disputed Ramirez’s account of events: ‘We were the people closest to Brett Kavanaugh during his first year at Yale. He was a roommate to some of us, and we spent a great deal of time with him, including in the dorm where this incident allegedly took place. Some of us were also friends with Debbie Ramirez during and after her time at Yale. We can say with confidence that if the incident Debbie alleges ever occurred, we would have seen or heard about it—and we did not. The behavior she describes would be completely out of character for Brett. In addition, some of us knew Debbie long after Yale, and she never described this incident until Brett’s Supreme Court nomination was pending'...
Pogrebin and Kelly’s work has a pattern of omitting exculpatory evidence that supports Kavanaugh’s consistent claim that he never sexually assaulted anyone. The Atlantic piece is excerpted from the book, which has the same error"
Jan Crawford on Twitter - "We report tonight the real bombshell: Christine Ford’s close HS friend (who Ford says was at the party when Kavanaugh allegedly assaulted her) said Ford’s story is not believable and told the FBI Ford’s allies pressured her, threatened her with a smear campaign to say otherwise"
Christine Blasey Ford's Lawyer: Okay Fine, Protecting Abortion Was Part of Why She Accused Kavanaugh - "New video has surfaced of leftist activist Debra Katz, the attorney for Christine Blasey-Ford, admitting her client (falsely) accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct in order to protect abortion and Roe v. Wade. "In the aftermath of these hearings I believe that Christine's testimony brought about more good than the harm the misogynist Republicans caused by allowing Kavanuagh on the court," Katz said during an event in Baltimore. "He will always have an asterisk next to his name. When he takes a scalpel to Roe v. Wade we will know who he is, we know his character and we know what motivates him. It's important that we know and that's part of what motivated Christine."... After Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court, the Senate Judiciary Committee released a 400-page long report. In it, investigators found no evidence that any claims, including the ones brought by Blasey-Ford, were true."
TOTO: Did A 'Star Wars' Actress Lose Her Gig After Doing A Comedic Impression Of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford? - "Kevin Hart lost his dream job as Oscar host, we’re told, because he didn’t follow the Academy’s demand to apologize for his insensitive comments about homosexuality.That’s balderdash.Had Hart offered up a full-throated mea culpa the Social Justice crowd would have demanded his professional scalp all the same. Just ask Roseanne Barr and Megyn Kelly, two superstars whose apologies couldn’t save their respective gigs.Did the same fate befall Rachel Butera?... Meanwhile, Oscar winner Matt Damon famously portrayed Kavanaugh as an angry, drunken cad who likely committed the assault in question on “Saturday Night Live.” He didn’t suffer a single career repercussion from the sketch. In fact, it might have undid the damage he did late last year when he tried to say the sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein were more severe that the groping incidents allegedly committed by Sen. Al Franken."
Ethics Complaints Against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh Dismissed - ""It is unacceptable that Supreme Court justices are fully beyond the reach of any system of accountability. This outcome means that the last chance for any serious look into these complaints against Brett Kavanaugh rests with the House Democrats but Jerry Nadler still has not lifted a finger. Nadler is dragging his feet on the Kavanaugh matter even more than he is with Trump, and that is saying something," Brian Fallon, executive director of Demand Justice, one of the groups that signed the letter to Democrats, said in an email to BuzzFeed News."
Of course, if Republicans were investigating a "Democratic" judge, that would be shocking political interference and a threat to judicial independence
NYT updates Kavanaugh 'bombshell' to note accuser doesn't recall alleged assault - "The New York Times suddenly made a major revision to a supposed bombshell piece late Sunday concerning a resurfaced allegation of sexual assault by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh — hours after virtually all 2020 Democratic presidential candidates had cited the original article as a reason to impeach Kavanaugh.The update included the significant detail that several friends of the alleged victim said she did not recall the purported sexual assault in question at all. The Times also stated for the first time that the alleged victim refused to be interviewed, and has made no other comment about the episode. The only firsthand account concerning the supposed attack in the original piece, which was published on Saturday, came from a Clinton-connected lawyer who claimed to have witnessed it. (The lawyer, Max Stier, did not actually provide his account directly; the Times acknowledged that "two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier" had relayed his supposed version of events.)... The update came only after The Federalist's Mollie Hemingway, who reviewed an advance copy of the book, first flagged the article's omission on Twitter — prompting other commentators to press the issue... The revitalized, longshot push to get Kavanaugh removed from the high court came as Democrats' apparent effort to impeach President Trump has largely stalled. Trump, for his part, suggested Sunday that Kavanaugh should sue for defamation.The Times piece by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, adapted from their forthcoming book, asserted that a Kavanaugh classmate, Clinton-linked nonprofit CEO Max Stier, "saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student."The Times did not mention Stier's work as a Clinton defense attorney, or Stier's legal battles with Kavanaugh during the Whitewater investigation, and simply called him a "respected thought leader."... "Omitting these facts from the @nytimes story is one of worst cases of journalistic malpractice that I can recall," wrote the National Review's Washington correspondent, John McCormack, on Twitter.McCormack wrote separately: "If Kavanaugh’s 'friends pushed his penis,' then isn’t it an allegation of wrongdoing against Kavanaugh’s 'friends,' not Kavanaugh himself? Surely even a modern liberal Yalie who’s been to one of those weird non-sexual 'naked parties' would recognize both the female student and Kavanaugh are both alleged victims in this alleged incident, barring an additional allegation that a college-aged Kavanaugh asked his 'friends' to 'push his penis.' The Times went on to note in the article that it had "corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier," but the article apparently meant only that the Times had corroborated that Stier made his claim to the FBI. No first-hand corroboration of the alleged episode was apparently obtained.Nevertheless, Democrats announced a new effort to topple Kavanaugh. Hawaii Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono -- who infamously said last year that Kavanaugh did not deserve a fair hearing because he might be pro-life -- said the Senate Judiciary Committee should begin an impeachment inquiry to determine whether Kavanaugh lied to Congress... During the hearings, Harris strongly implied that she knew Kavanaugh had improperly discussed Special Counsel Robert Mueller's then-ongoing probe with a Trump-connected lawyer.Harris provided no evidence for the bombshell insinuation, which went viral on social media and sent the hearing room into stunned silence, even as she directly accused Kavanaugh of lying under oath.Castro and Warren echoed that sentiment and said Kavanaugh had committed perjury"
Witnesses Defended Kavanaugh. NYT Authors Falsely Claimed Silence - "A new Atlantic-published, adapted excerpt of the book attempts to resurrect Pogrebin and Kelly’s anti-Kavanaugh smears but once again has a major error. “We Spent 10 Months Investigating Kavanaugh. Here’s What We Found” was published in the Atlantic.Their reporting must not have been thorough. In a section explaining why they believe the accusers despite the lack of any evidence, they write that their emotional reaction to the claims was that the claims rang true. But they get major facts wrong... 'The people who allegedly witnessed the event—Kavanaugh’s friends Kevin Genda, David Todd, and David White—have kept mum about it. Kavanaugh has denied it. If such an incident had occurred, Kavanaugh said, it would have been the “talk of campus.”'...
'One of the male classmates who Ramirez said egged on Kavanaugh denied any memory of the party. ‘I don’t think Brett would flash himself to Debbie, or anyone, for that matter,’ he said. Asked why he thought Ramirez was making the allegation, he responded, ‘I have no idea.’ The other male classmate who Ramirez said was involved in the incident commented, ‘I have zero recollection.’In a statement, two of those male classmates who Ramirez alleged were involved in the incident, the wife of a third male student she said was involved, and one other classmate, Dan Murphy, disputed Ramirez’s account of events: ‘We were the people closest to Brett Kavanaugh during his first year at Yale. He was a roommate to some of us, and we spent a great deal of time with him, including in the dorm where this incident allegedly took place. Some of us were also friends with Debbie Ramirez during and after her time at Yale. We can say with confidence that if the incident Debbie alleges ever occurred, we would have seen or heard about it—and we did not. The behavior she describes would be completely out of character for Brett. In addition, some of us knew Debbie long after Yale, and she never described this incident until Brett’s Supreme Court nomination was pending'...
Pogrebin and Kelly’s work has a pattern of omitting exculpatory evidence that supports Kavanaugh’s consistent claim that he never sexually assaulted anyone. The Atlantic piece is excerpted from the book, which has the same error"
Post ID: 6908789178196698963
Sunday, December 15, 2019
Links - 15th December 2019 (2)
Woman Quits Job To Become '50s Housewife' Because She Thinks 'Husbands Should Be Spoiled' - "30-year-old Katrina Holte now lives as a ‘1950s housewife’, cooking, cleaning and looking after her husband, while making dresses from 1950s patterns in her spare time.Katrina even transformed her home in Hillsborough into a ‘working shrine’ to the era, fitting it out and decorating it in 1950s decor... While she admits the era was far from perfect, 1950s values really appeal to Katrina"
Explain wife-beating question in Islamic Studies exam, Siti Kasim tells Maszlee - "Lawyer and activist Siti Kasim has called on Education Minister Maszlee Malik to explain an Islamic Studies examination question for Form Five students on permissible ways to “hit a disobedient wife.”“Is this what our Malay children (are) learning in school?? What is this Maszlee? Is this acceptable?... The question, which Malaysiakini has sighted, presents a flowchart with the title “Ways to hit a nusyuz (disobedient) wife”."
Doubtless, Malaysia is cited as an example of moderate Islam
Canada's Green Party edits photo of leader holding single-use cup - "Canada's Green Party has admitted to doctoring a photo of its leader to show her holding a reusable plastic cup.However, leader Elizabeth May said the manipulation was done without her knowledge and she was "completely shocked" to see it.The edited photo showed Ms May holding a plastic reusable cup with the Green Party logo and a metal straw.The party leader said that she had nothing to hide as she was using a compostable disposable cup."
Gizmo can reproduce NYC tap water for people who don’t understand how pizza works - "a company called New York WaterMaker has been selling a specialized water filtration system to pizzerias, bagel stores, and bakeries across America, claiming that it can replicate the chemistry of the Big Apple’s H2O. Even though it’s been repeatedly scientifically disproven that New York City’s tap water is what makes their pizza and bagels so good, entrepreneurs, hucksters, and the pizza-loving public alike cannot seem to let go of this old wive’s tale"
Dear Prudence: My job is turning me into a conservative. - "I work for the state government in the department that involves public assistance. I used to be a true-blue liberal. I supported programs that help people. But I’m seeing a lot of clients who abuse the system or purposely make bad choices. I read evaluations from clients who aren’t really disabled or hear from clients that they don’t want to stop abusing substances. I don’t want to sound like a right-wing blowhard, but I’m afraid I’m turning into one. How can I keep my liberal card in the face of what I see every day?"
"How do I fight cognitive dissonance?". Too bad the answer sneakily avoids answering almost all of the question
Research: Wilderness Therapy For Teens Is More Effective, Less Expensive Than Traditional Treatments - "New research from the University of New Hampshire shows wilderness therapy is more effective and cheaper than traditional methods for treating adolescents with substance use and mental health issues.In wilderness therapy, teenagers receive treatment in the context of outdoor experiences like backpacking trips or rock-climbing.The study found that these outdoor behavioral health programs had higher completion rates, better long-term outcomes, and were less expensive than traditional office-based treatment programs."
the norms misser on Twitter - "looking forward to being killed by an autonomous car because a hater repeatedly uploaded my photo to an image processing database with the tag "trash can""
The Japanese Ghost Town Buried Deep in a Canadian Forest - "the camp had been occupied not by transient loggers, but by a community of about 50 to 60 Japanese Canadians, including women and children, over a period of 20 years... They uncovered a square of nitrogen-rich garden soil, fertilized with bone meal, which at one time may have been lush with Japanese vegetables such as daikon and fuki. Even rarer, the team found the remnants of a traditional Japanese-style bathhouse and shrine, suggesting an attempt at recreating traditional village life unparalleled in North America."
OPP no longer identifying gender of victims and accused involved in crimes - "Ontario's provincial police service will no longer release the gender of people who are charged with crimes and those who are victims of crimes. The policy change comes following a review of legislation and the need to be more progressive"
This will surely help crime prevention
Condom deliveryman in China sued over pregnancy - "A woman from Suzhou province in China has blamed a condom deliveryman who arrived eight minutes later than promised and is suing him for 30,000 yuan (S$5,804)... The woman, known as Su, had ordered condoms from an online delivery service last month which promised to deliver them under 20 minutes. However, after taking a shower, she received a message saying that due to the adverse weather, the delivery could be slightly late. Unable to endure a minute longer, Su and her boyfriend had sex. The condoms arrived in 28 minutes but the two had already finished.Earlier this month, Su discovered she was pregnant and is now suing the deliveryman."
Chinese relatives marry, divorce 23 times in home scheme - "Eleven Chinese relatives married and divorced each other 23 times within a month to obtain apartments given out by the state... The cunning family came up with the scheme after officials offered 40 sq m apartments to residents living in an area where homes were demolished, as part of a development project in eastern Zhejiang province. Police said that 13 people became residents of the village and were eligible for the apartments through the marriage scam"
Is Your Smartphone Listening to Your Conversations? - "the CDT alerted the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to a technology called SilverPush. It uses audio beacons to track your activities across devices: Your TV emits a tone during a commercial break, a tone that’s inaudible to you, but your phone is listening for it. Now they can link the TV and phone as belonging to the same person... The internet is rife with anecdotal stories about digital eavesdropping. Many people feel that conversations they’ve had within earshot of their phones have been used to tailor advertising... With services like Siri or Google Assistant, your phone is always listening for a keyword, but that’s processed locally. It doesn’t start recording your audio until it hears “Ok Google” or “Hey Siri.” At that point, it records and uploads an audio file."
Suzannah Lipscomb On 16th-Century Women | History Extra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "[On public trials] ‘Is this something that's particular to the Protestant Reformed Church? Or was it something that existed before the Reformation as well?’
‘It is, especially developed by the Protestants, I mean, because it involves so many lay people in the governance of society, which isn't really something that the Roman Catholics would have adopted. And also, there's a specific reason why we don't have this sort of the sort of records from Roman Catholic areas, although we do have some bishops’ tribunals, we don't have it from, you know, ordinary people policing each other, because people’s sins are dealt with in the privacy of the confessional, as opposed to being aired before this panel of judges who will, you know, lay judges, but judges who then are saying, who will then determine what punishment should be imposed’
‘Right, so we have a sort of semi official, moral police neighborhood watch type organization institutionalized in the consistory, What sort of cases would come before this, this body?’
‘So any form of moral failing. Dancing comes up quite a lot.’...
'Any profanity, blasphemy would call somebody before the consistory'...
‘Invoking the devil, people did that in speech sometimes.’… ‘Dancing, swearing, swearing, all manner of sexual misbehavior. So adultery, obviously, sex before marriage. When we do, one or two cases of homosexual activity, disappear very quickly from the pages, because they're considered so serious, they're sent to be considered in front of the actual legal magistrates. But hetereosexual sexual misdemeanors certainly appear a lot. And also quarrels, when people have fought with each other, that appears a lot as well. People going to Roman Catholic services, particularly even if they've stood at the back and not participated. There's a whole, you know, if they've carried out superstitious rituals, if they've gone to see one of the Bohemians, they're called the sort of soothsayers or local fortune tellers. You know, there's basically a lot of activity that will bring you before the consistory... the consistory itself could only handle spiritual punishments, ie shaming punishments, like being called before the consistory itself, and having to say that you're sorry, and you shouldn't have done it.’...
'[At church] everybody's there, and in front of everybody, you have to say what you've done. If you refuse to do that, or if you commit the sin again, then they might excommunicate you from the church, which doesn't sound like a big deal, but actually means that you're thrust out of both social and economic community, and you can't do business with people. You can't socialize with members of the church. So it is actually quite serious...
A man has to get consent from his parents, or a male guardian if he's under the age of 30'"
History of Japanese Curry and Guide to Curry Based - "At the beginning it was very expensive, a luxury that only rich families could afford: curry powder was imported from Britain. It was only after the great curry powder scandal of 1931, when cheap curry was sold in place of the more expensive British variety, that people realized that they couldn’t really tell the difference between curry types, and this gave a boost to the domestic manufacturers... In the late 1990s, a great variety of regional curry recipes emerged: there is Nashi pear curry from Shimane prefecture, bitter melon curry from Okinawa, scallop curry from Aomori prefecture and so on. Some of those dishes are very peculiar, like whale curry from Wakayama prefecture or Nattō curry from Mito."
Spaghetti Napolitan is Japan's unique take on pasta - "On Aug. 30, 1945, newly appointed Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers Gen. Douglas MacArthur landed at Atsugi Airport in Yokohama and headed straight to an elegant hotel overlooking the harbor that had escaped destruction during the war. The Hotel New Grand served as his headquarters for three days, before turning into a residence for U.S. officers.Anxious to please his new customers, Shigetada Irie, the head chef of the hotel, drew inspiration from the spaghetti with ketchup that was part of U.S. military rations to create a new pasta dish that he called “spaghetti Napolitan.” According to historical accounts, Irie did not use ketchup in his sauce; after all, he had been trained in methods of classical French and Italian cuisine by the first head chef of the hotel, a Swiss. Instead he used canned tomato puree, flavored it with sauteed garlic and bacon, and added canned mushrooms and chopped vegetables. He later supposedly left the pasta for hours after cooking it so that the texture would become more like that of udon noodles, suited to Japanese tastes. (The hotel still serves its version of spaghetti Napolitan, which includes a tomato-based sauce without a trace of ketchup.)"
What's the Difference Between Pastrami and Montreal Smoked Meat? - "In the Jewish deli world, pastrami is king. Except for where it's not.Take a trip to Canada, particularly Montreal, and you'll find a whole different animal: smoked meat.Sure, it looks a lot like pastrami, and it tastes pretty similar, and the general recipe of cured, smoked, and steamed fatty beef is more or less the same. But go ahead, tell that to the Jewish deli cognoscenti. See how that goes over.What exactly are pastrami and smoked meat? Should one of them win the North American deli crown? And what makes them different?I spoke with Eater's Robert Sietsema, who in 2009 wrote an article for Gourmet about the war of the rosy meats. "Good luck!" he said of the assignment, before describing smoked meat as "darker red, greasier, and less smoky." The catch? His visit to Schwartz's, Montreal's most famous smoked meat slinger, where he found the smoked meat "smokier and richer" than New York pastrami.This story, I realized, is going to be harder than I thought."
I don't care about cookies - "The EU regulations require that any website using tracking cookies must get user's permission before installing them. These warnings appear on most websites until the visitor agrees with the website's terms and conditions. Imagine how irritating that becomes when you surf anonymously or if you delete cookies automatically every time you close the browser.This add-on will remove these annoying cookie warnings from almost all websites!"
Where the Left Went Wrong—and How It Can Win Again - The Atlantic - "Twenty years ago, in a series of lectures on the history of American civilization, the philosopher Richard Rorty offered a prediction. His words languished in relative obscurity until the unexpected rise of Donald Trump made them seem prescient... Rorty argued that an ascendant strain of postmodern Leftism with its roots in the academy has tended “to give cultural politics preference over real politics, and to mock the very idea that democratic institutions might once again be made to serve social justice.”This Left is more likely to participate in a public shaming than to lobby for a new law; it is more likely to mobilize to occupy a park or shut down a freeway than to register voters. It “exaggerates the importance of philosophy for politics, and wastes its energy on sophisticated theoretical analyses of the significance of current events.” Its adherents “have permitted cultural politics to supplant real politics, and have collaborated with the Right in making cultural issues central to the public debate.”... like John Dewey, he rejects self-loathing as “a luxury which agents—either individuals or nations—cannot afford,” and finds other aspects of American history and national character to celebrate. Today’s Left would more effectively advance social justice if its adherents possessed a historical memory that extended farther back than the 1960s. they might continue to lament that “America is not a morally pure country,” but might better understand that “no country ever has been or ever will be,” and that no country will ever have “a morally pure, homogeneous Left” to bring about social justice. He urges the Left to be more realist at length:
'In democratic countries you get things done by compromising your principles in order to form alliances with groups about whom you have grave doubts.'...
For Rorty, a Left that neglects victims of economic selfishness will not only fail; its neglect of class will trigger a terrible backlash that ultimately ill-serve the very groups that Leftist identity politics are intended to help... he advised the Left to “put a moratorium on theory … to kick its philosophy habit” and to “try to mobilize what remains of our pride in being Americans.”...
'The contemporary academic Left seems to think that the higher your level of abstraction, the more subversive of the established order you can be. The more sweeping and novel your conceptual apparatus, the more radical your critique'...
This disengagement from practical politics “produces theoretical hallucinations,” he added. “The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called ‘power.’”...
'The Ubiquity of Foucaldian power is reminiscent of the ubiquity of Satan, and thus of the ubiquity of original sin—that diabolical stain on every human soul ... in committing itself to what it calls “theory,” this Left has gotten something which is entirely too much like religion... What stories about blue-eyed devils are to Black Muslims, stories about hegemony and power are to many cultural Leftists'...
“the cultural Left has a preference for talking about ‘the system’ rather than specific social practices and specific changes. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic. Its insouciant use of terms like ‘late capitalism’ suggests that we can just wait for capitalism to collapse, rather than figuring out what, in the absence of markets, will set prices and regulate distribution.” And its abandonment of the melting-pot approach to racial justice, its substitution of multiculturalism, has destroyed the solidarity needed to advance justice in any manner...
Little wonder that [Obama] spent the last year of his presidency expressing frustration at the style of cultural politics gaining traction on elite campuses: He saw how it contradicted the blueprint that he had created for a Left that can win."
Explain wife-beating question in Islamic Studies exam, Siti Kasim tells Maszlee - "Lawyer and activist Siti Kasim has called on Education Minister Maszlee Malik to explain an Islamic Studies examination question for Form Five students on permissible ways to “hit a disobedient wife.”“Is this what our Malay children (are) learning in school?? What is this Maszlee? Is this acceptable?... The question, which Malaysiakini has sighted, presents a flowchart with the title “Ways to hit a nusyuz (disobedient) wife”."
Doubtless, Malaysia is cited as an example of moderate Islam
Canada's Green Party edits photo of leader holding single-use cup - "Canada's Green Party has admitted to doctoring a photo of its leader to show her holding a reusable plastic cup.However, leader Elizabeth May said the manipulation was done without her knowledge and she was "completely shocked" to see it.The edited photo showed Ms May holding a plastic reusable cup with the Green Party logo and a metal straw.The party leader said that she had nothing to hide as she was using a compostable disposable cup."
Gizmo can reproduce NYC tap water for people who don’t understand how pizza works - "a company called New York WaterMaker has been selling a specialized water filtration system to pizzerias, bagel stores, and bakeries across America, claiming that it can replicate the chemistry of the Big Apple’s H2O. Even though it’s been repeatedly scientifically disproven that New York City’s tap water is what makes their pizza and bagels so good, entrepreneurs, hucksters, and the pizza-loving public alike cannot seem to let go of this old wive’s tale"
Dear Prudence: My job is turning me into a conservative. - "I work for the state government in the department that involves public assistance. I used to be a true-blue liberal. I supported programs that help people. But I’m seeing a lot of clients who abuse the system or purposely make bad choices. I read evaluations from clients who aren’t really disabled or hear from clients that they don’t want to stop abusing substances. I don’t want to sound like a right-wing blowhard, but I’m afraid I’m turning into one. How can I keep my liberal card in the face of what I see every day?"
"How do I fight cognitive dissonance?". Too bad the answer sneakily avoids answering almost all of the question
Research: Wilderness Therapy For Teens Is More Effective, Less Expensive Than Traditional Treatments - "New research from the University of New Hampshire shows wilderness therapy is more effective and cheaper than traditional methods for treating adolescents with substance use and mental health issues.In wilderness therapy, teenagers receive treatment in the context of outdoor experiences like backpacking trips or rock-climbing.The study found that these outdoor behavioral health programs had higher completion rates, better long-term outcomes, and were less expensive than traditional office-based treatment programs."
the norms misser on Twitter - "looking forward to being killed by an autonomous car because a hater repeatedly uploaded my photo to an image processing database with the tag "trash can""
The Japanese Ghost Town Buried Deep in a Canadian Forest - "the camp had been occupied not by transient loggers, but by a community of about 50 to 60 Japanese Canadians, including women and children, over a period of 20 years... They uncovered a square of nitrogen-rich garden soil, fertilized with bone meal, which at one time may have been lush with Japanese vegetables such as daikon and fuki. Even rarer, the team found the remnants of a traditional Japanese-style bathhouse and shrine, suggesting an attempt at recreating traditional village life unparalleled in North America."
OPP no longer identifying gender of victims and accused involved in crimes - "Ontario's provincial police service will no longer release the gender of people who are charged with crimes and those who are victims of crimes. The policy change comes following a review of legislation and the need to be more progressive"
This will surely help crime prevention
Condom deliveryman in China sued over pregnancy - "A woman from Suzhou province in China has blamed a condom deliveryman who arrived eight minutes later than promised and is suing him for 30,000 yuan (S$5,804)... The woman, known as Su, had ordered condoms from an online delivery service last month which promised to deliver them under 20 minutes. However, after taking a shower, she received a message saying that due to the adverse weather, the delivery could be slightly late. Unable to endure a minute longer, Su and her boyfriend had sex. The condoms arrived in 28 minutes but the two had already finished.Earlier this month, Su discovered she was pregnant and is now suing the deliveryman."
Chinese relatives marry, divorce 23 times in home scheme - "Eleven Chinese relatives married and divorced each other 23 times within a month to obtain apartments given out by the state... The cunning family came up with the scheme after officials offered 40 sq m apartments to residents living in an area where homes were demolished, as part of a development project in eastern Zhejiang province. Police said that 13 people became residents of the village and were eligible for the apartments through the marriage scam"
Is Your Smartphone Listening to Your Conversations? - "the CDT alerted the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to a technology called SilverPush. It uses audio beacons to track your activities across devices: Your TV emits a tone during a commercial break, a tone that’s inaudible to you, but your phone is listening for it. Now they can link the TV and phone as belonging to the same person... The internet is rife with anecdotal stories about digital eavesdropping. Many people feel that conversations they’ve had within earshot of their phones have been used to tailor advertising... With services like Siri or Google Assistant, your phone is always listening for a keyword, but that’s processed locally. It doesn’t start recording your audio until it hears “Ok Google” or “Hey Siri.” At that point, it records and uploads an audio file."
Suzannah Lipscomb On 16th-Century Women | History Extra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "[On public trials] ‘Is this something that's particular to the Protestant Reformed Church? Or was it something that existed before the Reformation as well?’
‘It is, especially developed by the Protestants, I mean, because it involves so many lay people in the governance of society, which isn't really something that the Roman Catholics would have adopted. And also, there's a specific reason why we don't have this sort of the sort of records from Roman Catholic areas, although we do have some bishops’ tribunals, we don't have it from, you know, ordinary people policing each other, because people’s sins are dealt with in the privacy of the confessional, as opposed to being aired before this panel of judges who will, you know, lay judges, but judges who then are saying, who will then determine what punishment should be imposed’
‘Right, so we have a sort of semi official, moral police neighborhood watch type organization institutionalized in the consistory, What sort of cases would come before this, this body?’
‘So any form of moral failing. Dancing comes up quite a lot.’...
'Any profanity, blasphemy would call somebody before the consistory'...
‘Invoking the devil, people did that in speech sometimes.’… ‘Dancing, swearing, swearing, all manner of sexual misbehavior. So adultery, obviously, sex before marriage. When we do, one or two cases of homosexual activity, disappear very quickly from the pages, because they're considered so serious, they're sent to be considered in front of the actual legal magistrates. But hetereosexual sexual misdemeanors certainly appear a lot. And also quarrels, when people have fought with each other, that appears a lot as well. People going to Roman Catholic services, particularly even if they've stood at the back and not participated. There's a whole, you know, if they've carried out superstitious rituals, if they've gone to see one of the Bohemians, they're called the sort of soothsayers or local fortune tellers. You know, there's basically a lot of activity that will bring you before the consistory... the consistory itself could only handle spiritual punishments, ie shaming punishments, like being called before the consistory itself, and having to say that you're sorry, and you shouldn't have done it.’...
'[At church] everybody's there, and in front of everybody, you have to say what you've done. If you refuse to do that, or if you commit the sin again, then they might excommunicate you from the church, which doesn't sound like a big deal, but actually means that you're thrust out of both social and economic community, and you can't do business with people. You can't socialize with members of the church. So it is actually quite serious...
A man has to get consent from his parents, or a male guardian if he's under the age of 30'"
History of Japanese Curry and Guide to Curry Based - "At the beginning it was very expensive, a luxury that only rich families could afford: curry powder was imported from Britain. It was only after the great curry powder scandal of 1931, when cheap curry was sold in place of the more expensive British variety, that people realized that they couldn’t really tell the difference between curry types, and this gave a boost to the domestic manufacturers... In the late 1990s, a great variety of regional curry recipes emerged: there is Nashi pear curry from Shimane prefecture, bitter melon curry from Okinawa, scallop curry from Aomori prefecture and so on. Some of those dishes are very peculiar, like whale curry from Wakayama prefecture or Nattō curry from Mito."
Spaghetti Napolitan is Japan's unique take on pasta - "On Aug. 30, 1945, newly appointed Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers Gen. Douglas MacArthur landed at Atsugi Airport in Yokohama and headed straight to an elegant hotel overlooking the harbor that had escaped destruction during the war. The Hotel New Grand served as his headquarters for three days, before turning into a residence for U.S. officers.Anxious to please his new customers, Shigetada Irie, the head chef of the hotel, drew inspiration from the spaghetti with ketchup that was part of U.S. military rations to create a new pasta dish that he called “spaghetti Napolitan.” According to historical accounts, Irie did not use ketchup in his sauce; after all, he had been trained in methods of classical French and Italian cuisine by the first head chef of the hotel, a Swiss. Instead he used canned tomato puree, flavored it with sauteed garlic and bacon, and added canned mushrooms and chopped vegetables. He later supposedly left the pasta for hours after cooking it so that the texture would become more like that of udon noodles, suited to Japanese tastes. (The hotel still serves its version of spaghetti Napolitan, which includes a tomato-based sauce without a trace of ketchup.)"
What's the Difference Between Pastrami and Montreal Smoked Meat? - "In the Jewish deli world, pastrami is king. Except for where it's not.Take a trip to Canada, particularly Montreal, and you'll find a whole different animal: smoked meat.Sure, it looks a lot like pastrami, and it tastes pretty similar, and the general recipe of cured, smoked, and steamed fatty beef is more or less the same. But go ahead, tell that to the Jewish deli cognoscenti. See how that goes over.What exactly are pastrami and smoked meat? Should one of them win the North American deli crown? And what makes them different?I spoke with Eater's Robert Sietsema, who in 2009 wrote an article for Gourmet about the war of the rosy meats. "Good luck!" he said of the assignment, before describing smoked meat as "darker red, greasier, and less smoky." The catch? His visit to Schwartz's, Montreal's most famous smoked meat slinger, where he found the smoked meat "smokier and richer" than New York pastrami.This story, I realized, is going to be harder than I thought."
I don't care about cookies - "The EU regulations require that any website using tracking cookies must get user's permission before installing them. These warnings appear on most websites until the visitor agrees with the website's terms and conditions. Imagine how irritating that becomes when you surf anonymously or if you delete cookies automatically every time you close the browser.This add-on will remove these annoying cookie warnings from almost all websites!"
Where the Left Went Wrong—and How It Can Win Again - The Atlantic - "Twenty years ago, in a series of lectures on the history of American civilization, the philosopher Richard Rorty offered a prediction. His words languished in relative obscurity until the unexpected rise of Donald Trump made them seem prescient... Rorty argued that an ascendant strain of postmodern Leftism with its roots in the academy has tended “to give cultural politics preference over real politics, and to mock the very idea that democratic institutions might once again be made to serve social justice.”This Left is more likely to participate in a public shaming than to lobby for a new law; it is more likely to mobilize to occupy a park or shut down a freeway than to register voters. It “exaggerates the importance of philosophy for politics, and wastes its energy on sophisticated theoretical analyses of the significance of current events.” Its adherents “have permitted cultural politics to supplant real politics, and have collaborated with the Right in making cultural issues central to the public debate.”... like John Dewey, he rejects self-loathing as “a luxury which agents—either individuals or nations—cannot afford,” and finds other aspects of American history and national character to celebrate. Today’s Left would more effectively advance social justice if its adherents possessed a historical memory that extended farther back than the 1960s. they might continue to lament that “America is not a morally pure country,” but might better understand that “no country ever has been or ever will be,” and that no country will ever have “a morally pure, homogeneous Left” to bring about social justice. He urges the Left to be more realist at length:
'In democratic countries you get things done by compromising your principles in order to form alliances with groups about whom you have grave doubts.'...
For Rorty, a Left that neglects victims of economic selfishness will not only fail; its neglect of class will trigger a terrible backlash that ultimately ill-serve the very groups that Leftist identity politics are intended to help... he advised the Left to “put a moratorium on theory … to kick its philosophy habit” and to “try to mobilize what remains of our pride in being Americans.”...
'The contemporary academic Left seems to think that the higher your level of abstraction, the more subversive of the established order you can be. The more sweeping and novel your conceptual apparatus, the more radical your critique'...
This disengagement from practical politics “produces theoretical hallucinations,” he added. “The cultural Left is haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called ‘power.’”...
'The Ubiquity of Foucaldian power is reminiscent of the ubiquity of Satan, and thus of the ubiquity of original sin—that diabolical stain on every human soul ... in committing itself to what it calls “theory,” this Left has gotten something which is entirely too much like religion... What stories about blue-eyed devils are to Black Muslims, stories about hegemony and power are to many cultural Leftists'...
“the cultural Left has a preference for talking about ‘the system’ rather than specific social practices and specific changes. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic. Its insouciant use of terms like ‘late capitalism’ suggests that we can just wait for capitalism to collapse, rather than figuring out what, in the absence of markets, will set prices and regulate distribution.” And its abandonment of the melting-pot approach to racial justice, its substitution of multiculturalism, has destroyed the solidarity needed to advance justice in any manner...
Little wonder that [Obama] spent the last year of his presidency expressing frustration at the style of cultural politics gaining traction on elite campuses: He saw how it contradicted the blueprint that he had created for a Left that can win."
Post ID: 1208782292055020796
Observations - 15th December 2019
"When I bake bread, I give thousands of yeast organisms false hope by feeding them sugar, before ruthlessly baking them to death in an oven and eating their corpses."
"It must be seriously alarming for cut guys to realize that their dick still stinks if it isn't washed."
The original whataboutism was chiding someone for looking at the speck in his brother's eye, but not the log in his own
It is curious that those who insist we should listen to scientists that climate change is a serious threat don't listen to them on climate change being more serious a problem than plastics. Or indeed, on GMOs, nuclear and fracking.
First they came for our plastic bags
Now they've come for our straws
Next they'll come for our utensils
What will follow that? Eventually we'll be lugging around our whole houses just to save companies money (disguised as environmentalism)
""I had a super liberal kumbaya brotherhood of all men friend that went to South America and came back super LKY style conservative.
he got wacked on the head from behind and then went back to his hotel room to find out that all his stuff was cleaned out. Then he found out his credit cards were all maxed out as well.
The police shrugged and told him it was unwise to be travelling as a lone asian dude in that area."
"Saying people "let" bedbugs bite is a form of victimblaming."
"calling illegal immigrants undocumented is like calling drug dealers unlicensed pharmacists."
"Gahmen keeps close tabs on all opposition related matters
and even Amos Yee
when Amos' asylum was approved, it was labeleld as "negative news"
on the Gahmen intranet
called "media watch"
they also keep track of Triple H, Roy, etc."
Maybe many Singaporeans talk about "denouncing" Singaporean citizenship when they mean renouncing it because it's a Freudian slip
Why don't the people who get upset at having to pay for other people's healthcare get upset at having to pay for other people's security? Many of the same arguments apply: personal responsibility (you can buy a gun and defend yourself), moral hazard (you can choose not to go to or live in a bad neighbourhood), taxation being theft/extortion etc
Telling people to go home if they hate your freedoms doesn't work if they make up a non-negligible part of your population. Not least since they can also move to subvert those freedoms for everyone else
"It must be seriously alarming for cut guys to realize that their dick still stinks if it isn't washed."
The original whataboutism was chiding someone for looking at the speck in his brother's eye, but not the log in his own
It is curious that those who insist we should listen to scientists that climate change is a serious threat don't listen to them on climate change being more serious a problem than plastics. Or indeed, on GMOs, nuclear and fracking.
First they came for our plastic bags
Now they've come for our straws
Next they'll come for our utensils
What will follow that? Eventually we'll be lugging around our whole houses just to save companies money (disguised as environmentalism)
""I had a super liberal kumbaya brotherhood of all men friend that went to South America and came back super LKY style conservative.
he got wacked on the head from behind and then went back to his hotel room to find out that all his stuff was cleaned out. Then he found out his credit cards were all maxed out as well.
The police shrugged and told him it was unwise to be travelling as a lone asian dude in that area."
"Saying people "let" bedbugs bite is a form of victimblaming."
"calling illegal immigrants undocumented is like calling drug dealers unlicensed pharmacists."
"Gahmen keeps close tabs on all opposition related matters
and even Amos Yee
when Amos' asylum was approved, it was labeleld as "negative news"
on the Gahmen intranet
called "media watch"
they also keep track of Triple H, Roy, etc."
Maybe many Singaporeans talk about "denouncing" Singaporean citizenship when they mean renouncing it because it's a Freudian slip
Why don't the people who get upset at having to pay for other people's healthcare get upset at having to pay for other people's security? Many of the same arguments apply: personal responsibility (you can buy a gun and defend yourself), moral hazard (you can choose not to go to or live in a bad neighbourhood), taxation being theft/extortion etc
Telling people to go home if they hate your freedoms doesn't work if they make up a non-negligible part of your population. Not least since they can also move to subvert those freedoms for everyone else
Post ID: 6670352009904478254
Links - 15th December 2019 (1)
After Being Killed 23 Times Sean Bean Refuses To Die On Screen Again By Rejecting Some Roles - "Here’s the full list of Sean Bean characters who have died:
Ranuccio “Caravaggio” (1986)
German Soldier “War Requiem” (1989)
Tadgh McCabe “The Field” (1990)
Carver Doone “Lorna Doone” (1990)
[Robert Lovelace “Clarissa” (1991)
Gabriel Lewis “Screen One: Tell Me That You Love Me” (1991)
Sean Miller”Patriot Games” (1992)
Lord Richard Fenton “Scarlett” (1994)
Alec Trevelyan “Goldeneye” (1995)
Dave Toombs “Airborne” (1998)
Jason Locke “Essex Boys” (2000)
Patrick Koster “Don’t Say a Word” (2001)
Boromir “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” (2001)
Cleric Errol Partridge”Equilibrium” (2002)
Robert Aske “Henry VIII” (2003)
Dr. Merrick “The Island” (2005)
John Ryder “The Hitcher” (2007)
Bryant “Outlaw” (2007)
Loki “Far North” (2007)
John Dawson “Red Riding: 1974” (2008)
Pyke Kubic / Reese Kubic “Ca$h” (2010)
Ulrich”Black Death” (2010)
Markus Kane “Death Race 2” (2010)
Jones “Age of Heroes” (2011)
Lord Eddard “Ned” Stark “Game of Thrones: Baelor” (2011)
Harry “Silent Hill: Revelation” (2012)
Frank Stinson “Wicked Blood” (Bad Blood) (2014)
Inspector John Marlott “The Frankenstein Chronicles: Lost and Found” (2015)
Regis Lucis Caelum “Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV” (2016; animated)"
Why Budapest plays so many other cities on the big screen | Financial Times - "Budapest is one of those fin-de-siècle cities that seem to contain bits of many others. It can resemble Paris or Berlin; from the hills it looks a little like Florence; yet it can be made to look like Vienna or Moscow — close enough, that is, for an increasingly global audience for Hollywood films... Of course, Budapest isn’t unique in its chameleon capacity. Vancouver is often used as a stand-in for a generic US city, Montreal as an American stand-in for a generic European city. Canada is easier. Yet none of the others have quite the imaginative variety of Budapest. It’s partly because of Hungary’s movie industry expertise, partly because of the cost. But surely there’s more? The more is, I think, its obscurity. It’s the kind of city most people haven’t been to or, if they have, then only briefly or on a drunken stag-do or a business trip. It was built in an era when other cities were already established as exemplars. In the 1890s Budapest was second only to Chicago as the fastest-growing city in the world and its architects looked around to see what had worked elsewhere. They picked a little from Paris, something from Milan, a lot from Vienna, perhaps a few things from London (including a gothic parliament; Budapest made sure its version was a little bigger) and amalgamated them into a city of bits. This was topped by a layer of interwar modernism and a heavier layer of communist central planning with its socialist realism and bleak but durable late modernism. From this cocktail an extremely particular city arose but one in which memories of other cities are persistently present. It is unfamiliarity too which has led to the weirdly widespread use of the Hungarian language in cinema. As a Hungarian-speaking movie-goer, you’re haunted by snatches of cod Hungarian that crop up in the unlikeliest places, usually where film-makers want to evoke the foreign and sinister... When Edward James Olmos’s cop Gaf approaches Deckard at the noodle stand he speaks a few words of bad Hungarian, including a juicy rendering of the phrase “horse-dick”. In the second film, filmed in Budapest, he refers to Deckard as “Nyugdijas” (“retired”). The derelicts in K’s building speak gibberish Hungarian which is, I suppose, intended to evoke the language of low lives. In The Usual Suspects, the devil incarnate, Keyser Soze, is seen by a Hungarian sailor (a Hungarian sailor? Have these people never looked at a map? Or is the absurdity part of the plan?), who describes him in some of the weirdest Hungarian I’ve ever heard.More unlikely still are the Muslim terrorists in Iron Man, speaking Hungarian in their underground, presumably central Asian, base. In The Mummy, an emaciated and super-creepy character in a fez starts spouting Hungarian. Little spoken, strange-sounding, Hungarian, which doesn’t really sound like anything else on earth, has become a blank linguistic canvas upon which suspicions can be projected. Why not? It’ll do."
Man Accused Of Shoplifting Reveals 'Bulge' Was Just His 10-Inch Penis - "Window fitter Steve Whitehurst, 47, was out shopping at Scotts Menswear in Stoke-on-Trent with girlfriend Mandy Shenton, 46, and her 18-month-old grandson... "The manager started arguing with me. She wouldn't let it go. I just kept telling her that it was my penis."Eventually I dropped my trousers in front of everyone and just stood there in my boxer shorts and said, 'See, I've got nothing to hide'."But that didn't satisfy her. She kept saying, 'What's that bulge?'" Steve, who claims he often has to roll up his manhood, said he had to go into a cubicle with a male security guard to prove what was behind the mysterious mound in his jeans... Staff claimed the manager who accused Steve of shoplifting was 'on holiday', with sources saying they never asked Steve to expose himself, accusing him of becoming 'aggressive'"
Kermit and His Droogs Are on the Prowl for a Little Bit of the Old in and Out After a Bout of Ultra Violence
Inmates built computers hidden in ceiling, connected them to prison network - "Inmates at a medium-security Ohio prison secretly assembled two functioning computers, hid them in the ceiling, and connected them to the Marion Correctional Institution's network. The hard drives were loaded with pornography, a Windows proxy server, VPN, VOIP and anti-virus software, the Tor browser, password hacking and e-mail spamming tools, and the open source packet analyzer Wireshark... the geeky inmates obtained the parts from an onsite computer skills and electronics recycling program... A forensic analysis of the hard drives found that they were loaded with "malicious" software and that inmates used the computers to apply for credit cards, research tax-refund fraud, search inmate records, and obtain prison access passes for restricted areas. "Additionally, articles about making home-made drugs, plastics, explosives, and credit cards were discovered""
Muslim of the Year nominee is probed by police after saying 'jihad is the only solution' - "A prominent activist once nominated for a ‘British Muslim of the Year’ award is being investigated by police after she was filmed saying ‘jihad is the only solution’.Sumaira Farrukh, 38, who has rubbed shoulders with Chancellor Sajid Javid and been pictured with Prince Charles, was filmed using the inflammatory word at a rally in Birmingham.Mrs Farrukh, a businesswoman and journalist, spoke at a demonstration attended by hundreds demanding action over India’s plans to strip Kashmir of self-rule... Asked if it was wise to use the word in the current climate, she said: ‘The people who are criticising me are the ones who don’t want a woman to speak out."
Naturally, she was talking about inner jihad and how everyone should just pray
NYC bans calling someone an 'illegal alien' out of hate - "It’s now against the law in New York City to threaten someone with a call to immigration authorities or refer to them as an “illegal alien” when motivated by hate... The directive goes on to list several examples of acts and comments that would run afoul of the restrictions, including harassing people over their accents or grasp of English, or wielding the threat of a call to Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a tool of hate.“A hotel prohibits its housekeepers from speaking Spanish while cleaning because it would ‘offend’ hotel guests or make them uncomfortable,” reads one hypothetical."
It's racist to enforce the law
Transgender woman silences creep who sent her a penis pic - by sending one back - "A transgender woman humiliated a pervert who sent her a picture of his manhood - by replying with a photo of her own larger penis.Faye Kinley, 20, was disgusted to receive the message out of the blue after the creep allegedly found her number on Facebook ."
Lady jealous of son raping foster daughter, strangled her & had sex with sons next to corpse - "A 39-year-old woman and her two sons aged 14 and 16 years old were arrested in Jakarta for the rape and murder of a five-year-old girl.The victim happened to be the woman’s foster daughter and the boys’ foster sister... It was revealed that the victim had been raped by both her foster brothers.The two brothers were taking turns having sex with their foster sister.When their mother caught the older brother taking advantage of the young girl, she was shocked and furious.Not, however, for the obvious reason.She was apparently jealous of the young girl. The three of them have been in an incestuous relationship for the past two months.The relationship was discovered when the police found some sperm stains on the younger brother’s pants.They would partake in sexual activities only when the woman’s husband was away.The three of them have also apparently had a threesome together... the older brother began to strangle the girl after he was caught having sex with her. The mother also assisted in strangling the child until she passed out. To make matters worse, the three of them went on to have sex near the girl’s corpse."
Aditya Mukerjee, the Otterrific ️ on Twitter - "As a parent of young kids I believe rampant access to pornography is a real problem. We need to empower families to be able to moderate what our kids see and when."
"Andrew Yang is the most homophobic Democrat in the entire 2020 race, and that's a *really* high bar. #LGBTQforum"
BLUE TICK - CHECK!
Your Navigation App Is Making Traffic Unmanageable - "City planners around the world have predicted traffic on the basis of residential density, anticipating that a certain amount of real-time changes will be necessary in particular circumstances. To handle those changes, they have installed tools like stoplights and metering lights, embedded loop sensors, variable message signs, radio transmissions, and dial-in messaging systems. For particularly tricky situations—an obstruction, event, or emergency—city managers sometimes dispatch a human being to direct traffic.But now online navigation apps are in charge, and they’re causing more problems than they solve. The apps are typically optimized to keep an individual driver’s travel time as short as possible; they don’t care whether the residential streets can absorb the traffic or whether motorists who show up in unexpected places may compromise safety"
A Silly But Accurate Guide On How To Recognize Famous Painters By Their Art (19 Pics) - "#1 If Everyone – Including The Women – Looks Like Putin, Then It’s Van Eyck
#2 If It’s Something You Saw On Your Acid Trip Last Night, It’s Dali
#3 If Everyone Looks Like Hobos Illuminated Only By A Dim Streetlamp, It’s Rembrandt
#4 If The Paintings Have Lots Of Little People In Them But Also Have A Ton Of Crazy Bulls#%t, It’s Bosch
#5 If Everybody Has Some Sort Of Body Malfunction, Then It’s Picasso
#6 Lord Of The Rings Landscapes With Weird Blue Mist And The Same Wavy-Haired Aristocratic-Nose Madonna, It’s Da Vinci
#7 If You See A Ballerina, It’s Degas
#8 Dappled Light And Unhappy Party-Time People, Then It’s Manet
#9 Dappled Light But No Figures, It’s Monet
#10 Dappled Light And Happy Party-Time People, It’s Renoir
#11 If Everyone Is Beautiful, Naked, And Stacked, It’s Michelangelo
#12 Excel Sheet With Coloured Squares, It’s Mondrian
#13 If The Images Have A Dark Background And Everyone Has Tortured Expressions On Their Faces, It’s Titian
#14 If The Paintings Have Tons Of Little People In Them But Otherwise Seem Normal, It’s Bruegel
#15 If All The Men Look Like Cow-Eyed Curly-Haired Women, It’s Caravaggio
#16 If Everyone In The Paintings Has Enormous Asses, Then It’s Rubens
#17 If Every Painting Is The Face Of A Uni-Browed Woman, It’s Frida
#18 If Everything Is Highly-Contrasted And Sharp, Sort Of Bluish, And Everyone Has Gaunt Bearded Faces, It’s El Greco
#19 If The Painting Could Easily Have A Few Chubby Cupids Or Sheep Added (Or Already Has Them), It’s Boucher"
Ranuccio “Caravaggio” (1986)
German Soldier “War Requiem” (1989)
Tadgh McCabe “The Field” (1990)
Carver Doone “Lorna Doone” (1990)
[Robert Lovelace “Clarissa” (1991)
Gabriel Lewis “Screen One: Tell Me That You Love Me” (1991)
Sean Miller”Patriot Games” (1992)
Lord Richard Fenton “Scarlett” (1994)
Alec Trevelyan “Goldeneye” (1995)
Dave Toombs “Airborne” (1998)
Jason Locke “Essex Boys” (2000)
Patrick Koster “Don’t Say a Word” (2001)
Boromir “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” (2001)
Cleric Errol Partridge”Equilibrium” (2002)
Robert Aske “Henry VIII” (2003)
Dr. Merrick “The Island” (2005)
John Ryder “The Hitcher” (2007)
Bryant “Outlaw” (2007)
Loki “Far North” (2007)
John Dawson “Red Riding: 1974” (2008)
Pyke Kubic / Reese Kubic “Ca$h” (2010)
Ulrich”Black Death” (2010)
Markus Kane “Death Race 2” (2010)
Jones “Age of Heroes” (2011)
Lord Eddard “Ned” Stark “Game of Thrones: Baelor” (2011)
Harry “Silent Hill: Revelation” (2012)
Frank Stinson “Wicked Blood” (Bad Blood) (2014)
Inspector John Marlott “The Frankenstein Chronicles: Lost and Found” (2015)
Regis Lucis Caelum “Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV” (2016; animated)"
Why Budapest plays so many other cities on the big screen | Financial Times - "Budapest is one of those fin-de-siècle cities that seem to contain bits of many others. It can resemble Paris or Berlin; from the hills it looks a little like Florence; yet it can be made to look like Vienna or Moscow — close enough, that is, for an increasingly global audience for Hollywood films... Of course, Budapest isn’t unique in its chameleon capacity. Vancouver is often used as a stand-in for a generic US city, Montreal as an American stand-in for a generic European city. Canada is easier. Yet none of the others have quite the imaginative variety of Budapest. It’s partly because of Hungary’s movie industry expertise, partly because of the cost. But surely there’s more? The more is, I think, its obscurity. It’s the kind of city most people haven’t been to or, if they have, then only briefly or on a drunken stag-do or a business trip. It was built in an era when other cities were already established as exemplars. In the 1890s Budapest was second only to Chicago as the fastest-growing city in the world and its architects looked around to see what had worked elsewhere. They picked a little from Paris, something from Milan, a lot from Vienna, perhaps a few things from London (including a gothic parliament; Budapest made sure its version was a little bigger) and amalgamated them into a city of bits. This was topped by a layer of interwar modernism and a heavier layer of communist central planning with its socialist realism and bleak but durable late modernism. From this cocktail an extremely particular city arose but one in which memories of other cities are persistently present. It is unfamiliarity too which has led to the weirdly widespread use of the Hungarian language in cinema. As a Hungarian-speaking movie-goer, you’re haunted by snatches of cod Hungarian that crop up in the unlikeliest places, usually where film-makers want to evoke the foreign and sinister... When Edward James Olmos’s cop Gaf approaches Deckard at the noodle stand he speaks a few words of bad Hungarian, including a juicy rendering of the phrase “horse-dick”. In the second film, filmed in Budapest, he refers to Deckard as “Nyugdijas” (“retired”). The derelicts in K’s building speak gibberish Hungarian which is, I suppose, intended to evoke the language of low lives. In The Usual Suspects, the devil incarnate, Keyser Soze, is seen by a Hungarian sailor (a Hungarian sailor? Have these people never looked at a map? Or is the absurdity part of the plan?), who describes him in some of the weirdest Hungarian I’ve ever heard.More unlikely still are the Muslim terrorists in Iron Man, speaking Hungarian in their underground, presumably central Asian, base. In The Mummy, an emaciated and super-creepy character in a fez starts spouting Hungarian. Little spoken, strange-sounding, Hungarian, which doesn’t really sound like anything else on earth, has become a blank linguistic canvas upon which suspicions can be projected. Why not? It’ll do."
Man Accused Of Shoplifting Reveals 'Bulge' Was Just His 10-Inch Penis - "Window fitter Steve Whitehurst, 47, was out shopping at Scotts Menswear in Stoke-on-Trent with girlfriend Mandy Shenton, 46, and her 18-month-old grandson... "The manager started arguing with me. She wouldn't let it go. I just kept telling her that it was my penis."Eventually I dropped my trousers in front of everyone and just stood there in my boxer shorts and said, 'See, I've got nothing to hide'."But that didn't satisfy her. She kept saying, 'What's that bulge?'" Steve, who claims he often has to roll up his manhood, said he had to go into a cubicle with a male security guard to prove what was behind the mysterious mound in his jeans... Staff claimed the manager who accused Steve of shoplifting was 'on holiday', with sources saying they never asked Steve to expose himself, accusing him of becoming 'aggressive'"
Kermit and His Droogs Are on the Prowl for a Little Bit of the Old in and Out After a Bout of Ultra Violence
Inmates built computers hidden in ceiling, connected them to prison network - "Inmates at a medium-security Ohio prison secretly assembled two functioning computers, hid them in the ceiling, and connected them to the Marion Correctional Institution's network. The hard drives were loaded with pornography, a Windows proxy server, VPN, VOIP and anti-virus software, the Tor browser, password hacking and e-mail spamming tools, and the open source packet analyzer Wireshark... the geeky inmates obtained the parts from an onsite computer skills and electronics recycling program... A forensic analysis of the hard drives found that they were loaded with "malicious" software and that inmates used the computers to apply for credit cards, research tax-refund fraud, search inmate records, and obtain prison access passes for restricted areas. "Additionally, articles about making home-made drugs, plastics, explosives, and credit cards were discovered""
Muslim of the Year nominee is probed by police after saying 'jihad is the only solution' - "A prominent activist once nominated for a ‘British Muslim of the Year’ award is being investigated by police after she was filmed saying ‘jihad is the only solution’.Sumaira Farrukh, 38, who has rubbed shoulders with Chancellor Sajid Javid and been pictured with Prince Charles, was filmed using the inflammatory word at a rally in Birmingham.Mrs Farrukh, a businesswoman and journalist, spoke at a demonstration attended by hundreds demanding action over India’s plans to strip Kashmir of self-rule... Asked if it was wise to use the word in the current climate, she said: ‘The people who are criticising me are the ones who don’t want a woman to speak out."
Naturally, she was talking about inner jihad and how everyone should just pray
NYC bans calling someone an 'illegal alien' out of hate - "It’s now against the law in New York City to threaten someone with a call to immigration authorities or refer to them as an “illegal alien” when motivated by hate... The directive goes on to list several examples of acts and comments that would run afoul of the restrictions, including harassing people over their accents or grasp of English, or wielding the threat of a call to Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a tool of hate.“A hotel prohibits its housekeepers from speaking Spanish while cleaning because it would ‘offend’ hotel guests or make them uncomfortable,” reads one hypothetical."
It's racist to enforce the law
Transgender woman silences creep who sent her a penis pic - by sending one back - "A transgender woman humiliated a pervert who sent her a picture of his manhood - by replying with a photo of her own larger penis.Faye Kinley, 20, was disgusted to receive the message out of the blue after the creep allegedly found her number on Facebook ."
Lady jealous of son raping foster daughter, strangled her & had sex with sons next to corpse - "A 39-year-old woman and her two sons aged 14 and 16 years old were arrested in Jakarta for the rape and murder of a five-year-old girl.The victim happened to be the woman’s foster daughter and the boys’ foster sister... It was revealed that the victim had been raped by both her foster brothers.The two brothers were taking turns having sex with their foster sister.When their mother caught the older brother taking advantage of the young girl, she was shocked and furious.Not, however, for the obvious reason.She was apparently jealous of the young girl. The three of them have been in an incestuous relationship for the past two months.The relationship was discovered when the police found some sperm stains on the younger brother’s pants.They would partake in sexual activities only when the woman’s husband was away.The three of them have also apparently had a threesome together... the older brother began to strangle the girl after he was caught having sex with her. The mother also assisted in strangling the child until she passed out. To make matters worse, the three of them went on to have sex near the girl’s corpse."
Aditya Mukerjee, the Otterrific ️ on Twitter - "As a parent of young kids I believe rampant access to pornography is a real problem. We need to empower families to be able to moderate what our kids see and when."
"Andrew Yang is the most homophobic Democrat in the entire 2020 race, and that's a *really* high bar. #LGBTQforum"
BLUE TICK - CHECK!
Your Navigation App Is Making Traffic Unmanageable - "City planners around the world have predicted traffic on the basis of residential density, anticipating that a certain amount of real-time changes will be necessary in particular circumstances. To handle those changes, they have installed tools like stoplights and metering lights, embedded loop sensors, variable message signs, radio transmissions, and dial-in messaging systems. For particularly tricky situations—an obstruction, event, or emergency—city managers sometimes dispatch a human being to direct traffic.But now online navigation apps are in charge, and they’re causing more problems than they solve. The apps are typically optimized to keep an individual driver’s travel time as short as possible; they don’t care whether the residential streets can absorb the traffic or whether motorists who show up in unexpected places may compromise safety"
A Silly But Accurate Guide On How To Recognize Famous Painters By Their Art (19 Pics) - "#1 If Everyone – Including The Women – Looks Like Putin, Then It’s Van Eyck
#2 If It’s Something You Saw On Your Acid Trip Last Night, It’s Dali
#3 If Everyone Looks Like Hobos Illuminated Only By A Dim Streetlamp, It’s Rembrandt
#4 If The Paintings Have Lots Of Little People In Them But Also Have A Ton Of Crazy Bulls#%t, It’s Bosch
#5 If Everybody Has Some Sort Of Body Malfunction, Then It’s Picasso
#6 Lord Of The Rings Landscapes With Weird Blue Mist And The Same Wavy-Haired Aristocratic-Nose Madonna, It’s Da Vinci
#7 If You See A Ballerina, It’s Degas
#8 Dappled Light And Unhappy Party-Time People, Then It’s Manet
#9 Dappled Light But No Figures, It’s Monet
#10 Dappled Light And Happy Party-Time People, It’s Renoir
#11 If Everyone Is Beautiful, Naked, And Stacked, It’s Michelangelo
#12 Excel Sheet With Coloured Squares, It’s Mondrian
#13 If The Images Have A Dark Background And Everyone Has Tortured Expressions On Their Faces, It’s Titian
#14 If The Paintings Have Tons Of Little People In Them But Otherwise Seem Normal, It’s Bruegel
#15 If All The Men Look Like Cow-Eyed Curly-Haired Women, It’s Caravaggio
#16 If Everyone In The Paintings Has Enormous Asses, Then It’s Rubens
#17 If Every Painting Is The Face Of A Uni-Browed Woman, It’s Frida
#18 If Everything Is Highly-Contrasted And Sharp, Sort Of Bluish, And Everyone Has Gaunt Bearded Faces, It’s El Greco
#19 If The Painting Could Easily Have A Few Chubby Cupids Or Sheep Added (Or Already Has Them), It’s Boucher"
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