Donald Trump isn’t to blame for this spate of mass shootings | Spectator USA - "The flagship news and current affairs program of the BBC wasn’t in any doubt about who to blame for America’s latest bout of mass shootings. Newsnight’s report began with footage of Donald Trump addressing the faithful at a rally...
O’Rourke described Trump as ‘stoking racism’ and claimed there’d been a rise in hate crimes in every year of his presidency... O’Rourke is referring to the number of reported hate crimes, which isn’t a robust measure because various American agencies have spent millions encouraging people to report hate crimes and making it easier to do so. To see whether the overall level has increased you need to look at whether unreported hate crimes have gone up or down in the same period. That exercise was carried out by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2018 which found that while reported hate crimes increased from 104,400 to 107,900 between 2016 and 2017, unreported hate crimes fell from 92,100 to 86,900, meaning the total number actually fell in the first year of Trump’s presidency. If you look at the past 10 years, the total level of hate crime is declining in the US, as is the amount of racism and anti-immigration sentiment, and Trump’s victory has done nothing to reverse that. Sociologists at the University of Pennsylvania published a study this year showing that Americans have become less inclined to express racist views since 2016, something true of Republican voters as well as Democrats, and a Gallup poll in June 2019 found 76 percent of Americans believe immigration is a good thing, the highest number to date. The same trends are visible in the UK: the population has become less racist and more pro-immigration since the Brexit vote. The liberal narrative about the toxic effect of the rise of far-right populism turns out to be nonsense. It’s incredibly hard to show that inflammatory rhetoric, whether on the right or the left, causes violent crime. All we know for sure is that violent crime across the world is declining, something painstakingly documented by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature."
The California Rule That Doomed PG&E: Inverse Condemnation - Bloomberg - "As PG&E Corp. hurtles toward bankruptcy, a once-obscure legal doctrine with an awkward name certainly bears a portion of the blame.Known as inverse condemnation, it holds California utilities responsible for wildfire damage caused by their equipment -- whether the companies acted negligently or not. The utilities spent most of last year pushing state legislators to change it, to no avail.Deadliest Wildfires In California History As Death Toll RisesDowned power lines lie on the ground during the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, on Nov. 13, 2018.Photographer: David Paul Morris/BloombergThe concept isn’t unique to California, but the way the state applies it is. Inverse condemnation usually applies to government agencies that damage private property while providing a public service. But courts in the Golden State have ruled that the doctrine also can be used against utilities, since they’re authorized by the state to provide a vital public service. That’s why California utilities can be held liable for damages from fires sparked by their equipment, even if they followed all of the state’s stringent safety rules. They can try to pass on those costs to ratepayers, but there’s no guarantee such efforts will get approved by the state’s California Public Utilities Commission."
Of course, it's sexier to only blame capitalism for the power cuts
How The Future Of California’s Power Grid Hangs On The Constitutionality Of ‘Inverse Condemnation’ - "The application of inverse condemnation to California utilities goes back to court decisions in the 1960s and ’70s. And for decades investor-owned utilities, like PG&E, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, were okay with the law, because the courts held that they could “socialize the burden” by hiking electricity rates enough to cover any unexpected costs, thus spreading the pain around evenly. When PG&E, for instance, had faith that regulators would let it socialize fire damage across its 16 million customers, it didn’t feel such a need to shut off power across a broad territory to lower the already remote likelihood of a fire breaking out. But a few years ago, the status quo changed... Among California’s investor-owned utilities, PG&E is most exposed, with half of its 70,000-square-mile territory in high-fire-risk zones, it has had three times more fires per mile of power lines than SCE or SDG&E... if the company can’t convince the court its rights have been violated? California lawmakers could come to the rescue and write a new interpretation of inverse condemnation, heeding the recommendation of this year’s Final Report of the Commission on Catastrophic Wildfire Cost and Recovery which found that:
“The current interpretation of inverse condemnation, holding utilities strictly liable for any wildfire caused by utility equipment regardless of standard of care or negligence, imperils the viability of the state’s utilities, customers’ access to affordable energy and clean water, and the state’s climate and clean energy goals; it also does not equitably socialize the costs of utility-caused wildfires.”"
California Republicans Propose Suspending Renewable Energy Mandate to Fund PG&E Infrastructure Upgrades - "Gallagher said last year 45 million metric tons of carbon was emitted by the wildfires. The year before it was 39 million metric tons. “That’s more than nine times California’s combined reductions achieved in 2016 and 2017,” Gallagher said. “We are literally losing when it comes to element policy. Why don’t we readjust this, because the power outages are the result.”Gallagher said that every dollar spent on the additional cost of renewable energy is one dollar that is not available to be spent on vegetation management, line insulation, “undergrounding” lines, and other grid-hardening measures. “Dollars spent on forestry management have been found to do more to reduce carbon than other measures. Science shows that redirecting funding to forestry management gets us a better bang for our buck in carbon reduction,” said Gallagher.Gallagher said PG&E acknowledges that its infrastructure is so old, it can’t hold up to regular winds, much less high winds. They say it will take 10 years to complete all of the equipment and infrastructure upgrades. “That is totally unacceptable for the people and businesses of this state, to face 10 more years of power outages,” Gallagher said. “So, money needs to go into fast-tracking these upgrades.”Gallagher said PG&E is currently spending $2.4 billion annually on a legislative mandate to buy renewable power. At the same time, the company spent only $1.5 billion to update its century old infrastructure in 2017. “That’s a lot of money to put into infrastructure if we suspend the renewables mandates,” Gallagher said... Rather than discussing and debating the merits of such a temporary plan, Senate President pro Tempore Toni G. Atkins (D-San Diego) immediately issued a statement Tuesday refuting Nielsen’s and Gallagher’s plan"
The high cost of renewable energy
Power to almost 1 million Californians could be shut off over fire hazard - "A major electric provider in northern California began shutting off power to hundreds of thousands of customers to prevent power lines from sparking wildfires."
US infrastructure!
Larry Naritelli - California's mandated power outages make Teslas... - "California's mandated power outages make Teslas unusable. You can't make this up. It's reality."
And California's the future!
Why New York City Is On the Verge of Disaster - "Electrical blackouts are scary things. On July 13th of this year, New York City had a blackout that lasted for five hours. The subway stopped along several lines, people were trapped in elevators, Carnegie Hall and Broadway theaters shut down, and Jennifer Lopez was cut off in at her concert at Madison Square Garden.New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio blamed Con Edison, the New York utility that manages most electric power in the city. And why shouldn’t they? Just before the blackout, Con Ed president Tim Cawley embarrassingly said, “By any measure, we are the most reliable electric delivery system in the United States."The next weekend, it happened again, this time in Brooklyn... The storm was the immediate cause of the blackout, of course, but the storm took advantage of an electrical infrastructure weakened by years of poor investment choices. We know this because a few months after the storm, the Utility Workers of America, the union negotiating with Con Edison, released a report on the company’s operational practices, alleging that “Con Edison appears to operate its electric distribution system based on a policy of“run it until it fails.’” The details of Con Ed’s operations are ugly. The union noted a lack of redundancy in voltage equipment, smart meters paid for by the stimulus that were never turned on, and a lack of basic supplies. “Our members have worked on cable so old,” said the report, “that it has paper insulation, and on utility poles that were installed in the 1930s and remain in service today.”... The second big problem is the Hudson tunnel, the nation’s busiest railroad route, connecting New York City to New Jersey. The tunnel was built in 1910 and is on the verge of collapse. In 2009, as part of the stimulus, there was the money to rebuild what everyone knows is the most important piece of crumbling infrastructure in America. But then- New Jersey Governor Chris Christie killed it to attack Obama and promote himself as a Presidential candidate, Obama didn’t do anything about it, and Trump has refused to move forward on a new attempt. Concrete is falling apart in the remaining tube.In other words, a good chunk of New York’s transportation infrastructure could collapse, at any point... In 2011, an antitrust attorney did a report on how we overpay for government contracting. In service of ‘shrinking government,’ policymakers chose to set up a system where instead of hiring an engineer as a government employee for, say, $120,000 a year, they paid a consulting firm like Booz Allen $500,000 a year for a similar engineer. The resulting system is both more expensive and more bureaucratic... Most top tier management consulting is useless. It boils down to telling executives they should raise prices or avoid taxes in a fancy way, helping one faction in a corporation win an internal battle against another, or aiding a cowardly leader do something he or she knows she should do but is afraid of doing without outside validation. It’s highly overpaid make-work, which is why the movie Office Space resonated. This corruption wasn’t that bad until the 1990s, when Bill Clinton and Al Gore introduced their ‘reinventing government initiative,’ which transferred large amounts of government work to overpaid private contractors. They bragged the size of government didn’t grow, even as they were building a slothful, incompetent, and highly corrupt shadow government in place of the relatively functional public system they took over. This trend of offshoring wasn’t just Federal, but state-level as well. Twenty five years later we’re dealing with a government that can’t govern."
Anglo-Saxon studies group says it will change its name amid bigger complaints about where the field is going - "Anglo-Saxon studies “has always had problems, not unlike any other field,” independent scholar Mary Rambaran-Olm said this week. Yet “we seem to be one of the least equipped and slow to move ourselves into the 21st century with regard to tackling racism, sexism, inclusiveness, representation” and other issues, she added... ISAS -- whose members study the language, literature, history and culture of fifth- to 11th-century England -- chose its name upon its formation in the early 1980s. Yet it’s “long been recognized that the term 'Anglo-Saxonist' is problematic,” the advisory board said in its statement about the name change. “It has sometimes been used outside the field to describe those holding repugnant and racist views, and has contributed to a lack of diversity among those working on early medieval England and its intellectual and literary culture.”... Scholars' concerns go beyond ISAS. Last year, for example, saw a proposed boycott of the Western Michigan University Medieval Institute's International Congress on Medieval Studies, and a related push for more inclusive, self-critical sessions for the 2019 gathering.“Now is an urgent, contested time in medieval studies and in the world at large,” read an open letter of concern published by the BABEL Working Group, which supports the congress. “Responding to the field's evolution would mean acknowledging its heightened interest in the perspectives of scholars of color and creating space for these underrepresented voices.” The statement was signed by many individual scholars and along with the Medievalists of Color group.There was backlash to the letter: Richard Utz, chair of the School of Literature, Media and Communication at Georgia Institute of Technology, wrote in Inside Higher Ed that he supports diversity but rejected “the dotted line the letter of concern insinuates between the faculty of the Medieval Institute, on the one hand, and the racist neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, Va., on the other.” Scholars in a number of fields, including medieval studies, have said they're worried about the misappropriation of terms and symbols by white supremacist groups in recent years. And some of the “public interest (and some scholarship) is imbricated with some of the problematic traditions in the history of the reception of medievalia in postmedieval times (for example: nationalism, racism, toxic masculinity)”... Erik Wade, a visiting lecturer at Bonn, among others, has argued that the term 'Anglo-Saxon' has long been used to create and enforce racial hierarchies."
Liberalism infects another discipline
Somehow I've never seen complaints that academics in 'ethnic studies' are pre-dominantly 'ethnic'
The Poland Model—Promoting ‘Family Values’ With Cash Handouts - The Atlantic - "the program has proved intoxicating for large swaths of the population, one that helped garner PiS a decisive parliamentary victory in elections yesterday, winning over not just conservative Catholics, but an array of more unlikely fans, including leftists who felt that PiS, by favoring a model typically eschewed by right-wing parties, offered a compelling critique of a rigged system that left workers vulnerable to the predations of international and local elites.“They were listening to people like me; they were reading Thomas Piketty,” says Rafał Woś, a columnist for the socialist Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, referring to the French economist whose agenda-setting book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, argues that wealth could continue to concentrate in the hands of the rich. The book was endorsed by the PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczyński in 2015.The program’s design—free money, no strings attached—is similar to a universal basic income, and marks a sharp departure from the paternalistic attitude of previous governments, which viewed poor families as “incapable of being in charge of their own money”... The universality of the program has even won it grudging plaudits from some feminists"
The Secret to Cutting Government Waste: Savings by a Thousand Cuts - The Atlantic - "Such reviews routinely identify annually recurring savings totaling roughly 5 percent of total operating spending... By unscrewing the tiny light bulb behind the big plastic display that covers almost the entire front of most soda machines -- which serves no purpose but to make the can of Coke look more delicious -- Texas saved about $200,000 a year in energy costs... So there are many places to look to reduce costs without threatening public services. One cardinal rule: Look for how to do better rather than simply how to cut. Cuts are easy to find -- but they don't necessarily save money. Every state in the country could cut its budget by one-quarter or more overnight by eliminating Medicaid -- but taxpayer subsidies to hospitals for uncompensated care would skyrocket. Reducing governmental costs doesn't necessarily involve doing less; usually, it involves doing better. The biggest impediment to "doing better" is that those in government -- as well as advocates and critics -- tend to think in terms of programs and functions that can, or might have to be, cut. To most, that's what government consists of. But this view of government -- and of how to trim government budgets -- is reminiscent of an old New Yorker cartoon, in which a father tells his family, gathered around the kitchen table, "Because of the recession, we're going to have to let one of you go." No family, of course, would really approach a tight budget that way, but that's pretty much how most discussions of government cuts proceed -- cutting budget "line items" wholesale... It's an old adage: What gets measured gets done. And most budgets don't identify, track, and measure wasteful practices. That's why the waste occurs.What should be cut is what's not in the budget. Another rule of thumb is that most of these savings will not be found in particular agencies or administrative units. While some large standard departments like health, human services, corrections, and transportation are reliable producers of inefficiencies, the real savings come in government-wide functions that affect all departments and, as a result, tend to be budgeted by none. Personnel and procurement functions are always good places to look for improvements to save money (remember Rule No.1: improve performance, savings will follow); utility costs like energy and phones also tend to be neither well-monitored nor cheap. These are not what most people think of when they think of government waste and inefficiencies -- but they are where most of the money disappears, just like in most organizations and probably your own household budget... the first place to go is to public employees themselves -- the very people the public likes to imagine as lazy, stupid sinkholes for tax dollars. In fact, most public employees are conscientious and can tell you exactly how to make government work better and more efficiently. Unfortunately, in the current climate of disdain, they're rarely asked... Some might say that shows just how inefficient "government" is, but that misses the real point: Every human organization -- including governments and businesses -- has inefficiencies"
L'origine de Bert
Thursday, December 19, 2019
Wednesday, December 18, 2019
Links - 18th December 2019 (3)
Beto O'Rourke's Comments at the LGBTQ Forum - The Atlantic - "The issue of gay rights and recognition and acceptance of the LGBTQ community has moved at warp speed—in political terms anyway—this past decade.“I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage,” said the candidate Barack Obama in 2008.At Thursday night’s nationally televised forum on LGBTQ rights, candidate Beto O’Rourke showed how far, and how quickly, the Democratic Party has moved. The former Texas congressman caused quite a stir when he said he would support revoking the tax-exempt status of religious institutions—colleges, churches, and charities—if they opposed same-sex marriage. Though his swift “yes” in response to the CNN moderator Don Lemon’s question received an enthusiastic response from the Los Angeles audience, much of America—including those blue-hued states—might see troubling ramifications of this that go well beyond O’Rourke’s applause line... it aligns with the Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet’s policy recommendation to take a “hard line” with religious conservatives because, after all, “trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War,” and “taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.” Even so, O’Rourke’s comments mark the first time a Democratic presidential candidate has overtly endorsed stripping the tax-exempt status of religious organizations who hold conservative views about marriage and sexuality. This feels very much like the candidate Obama’s “cling to guns and religion” comment at a 2008 San Francisco fundraiser that became first an attack line used by Hillary Clinton and then a well-worn conservative talking point that the would-be president was aloof and out of touch with small-town America. But more troubling than the rhetoric is where it leads... journalists should ask O’Rourke and every other Democratic candidate how this policy position would affect conservative black churches, mosques and other Islamic organizations, and orthodox Jewish communities, among others... policy analysts should assess the damage O’Rourke’s proposal would cause to the charitable sector. O’Rourke’s stance—if played out to its end—would decimate the charitable sector... During a 2015 summit at Georgetown University that focused on caring for the poor, then-President Obama and the Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam showed a similar lack of understanding. Putnam asserted that “most organized religion has … been entirely focused on issues of homosexuality and contraception and not at all focused on issues of poverty.” Obama added that “fighting poverty” for Christians is often seen as just “nice to have.” As the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat observed at the time: “It would be too kind to call these comments wrong; they were ridiculous.” In fact, religious individuals and organizations spend billions of their own dollars in the charitable sector and donate hundreds of millions of hours of service in global and domestic regions where the social fabric is the most distressed. They have spent generations building institutions, infrastructure, and networks that enable large-scale responses to natural disasters and other calamities. When hurricanes and tornadoes devastate entire communities, churches and religious organizations mobilize thousands of volunteers and many tons of relief supplies"
So much for the "myth" of the slippery slope
Keywords: religion and charity
Men become richer after divorce - "Divorce makes men - and particularly fathers - significantly richer. When a father separates from the mother of his children, according to new research, his available income increases by around one third. Women, in contrast, suffer severe financial penalties. Regardless of whether she has children, the average woman's income falls by more than a fifth and remains low for many years... "The general belief that men get fleeced by their divorces while women get richer and live off the proceeds has long been due for exposure as a pernicious myth," said Ruth Smallacombe, a family consultant at Flip. "In reality, women often suffer economic hardship when they divorce."... Jenkins combined data from 14 different British Household Panel Surveys over 1991 to 2004 with the findings from five European surveys. Recalculating the results using the formula by which the government measures poverty, he established new per capita incomes. Jenkins found that the positive effect on men's finances is so significant that divorce can even lift them out of poverty, while women are far more likely to be plunged into destitution. Separated women have a poverty rate of 27% - almost three times that of their former husbands...
Almost half of all marriages in England and Wales will end in divorce."
Nice try. Divorce only makes women "poorer" in the sense that they no longer have access to their husbands' earnings. Using this same methodology, a new child would also make both parents "worse off" because their per capita income would fall - even if their raw incomes didn't change at all
To look at it another way: marriage makes women better off because they marry richer men, and makes men worse off because they marry poorer women. Somehow marriage making men poorer isn't an issue
Cat needs glucose drip after mating with at least five females in single night - "'I thought they'd be professional, but the staff member didn't feed Xiaopi during the day and let him out to roam freely at night.'That's right, all the cats were free to walk around the shop and then the employee went home."
The Average Worker Spends 51 Percent of Each Workday on These 3 Unnecessary Tasks - "1. Unnecessary Commuting (13 percent)
As of 2018 (the last year measured), the average one-way commute to work is 27 minutes, nearly six minutes more than in 1980, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And that's just the average, which means that some of us are spending a lot more than that. (I've known people with three-hour commutes--one way.)...
2. Unnecessary Meetings (16 percent)
According to a study at MIT that I described in a previous post, the average worker spends approximately 22 years of their 45-year career in meetings. An estimated third of that time is spent in meetings where there's no value added...
3. Unnecessary Emails (23 percent)
According to research cited in Forbes, the average office worker spends 2.5 hours a day reading and responding to an average of 200 emails, of which approximately 144 (mostly CCs and BCCs) aren't relevant to their job...
1. Implement company-wide work-from-home.
While some jobs (like equipment maintenance) must be performed on-site, most office jobs can be accomplished remotely. Indeed, several studies have shown that remote office workers are much productive than on-site workers, without even counting the time they waste commuting... top management must admit to themselves that their brand-new open plan office was a dumb idea. However, smart bosses don't throw good money after bad, so it's time to bite the proverbial bullet on this one.
2. Create an efficient-meeting culture...
3. Throttle your email system.
Here's are some approaches I've seen over the years:
Turn off email during peak working hours.
Limit the number of emails an employee can send each day.
Discourage CC, BCC, and Reply All emails.
Discourage Sisyphus-like behaviors like trying to achieve "zero Inbox."
Here's an idea: Customize the company-wide email client so that it's impossible to close any internal email until you've rated its usefulness to you and your job.Track those ratings and it will quickly become clear who's wasting everyone else's time with unnecessary email. Then adjust their compensation accordingly (all the way to $0 when appropriate)."
Petition for Cell Service on the Subway - "Did you know that Toronto is the only major Canadian city without a connected underground for all? More than two-thirds of TTC riders surveyed are unaware that connectivity is available on the subway in Toronto, and 71% don’t realize that their mobile carrier isn’t allowing them to use it...
iwantaccess.ca is brought to you by BAI Communications. The Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) awarded BAI Communications the contract, in a fair and open tender process, to design, build and operate its free public Wi-Fi (TCONNECT) and cellular network. Coverage in the stations has been live since 2015 for Freedom Mobile customers, however, the Big 3 Telcos have yet to join the network. Now, BAI is committed to educating cellular customers of the Big 3 Telcos about why they can’t access this network, and what they can do about it."
Japan ninja student gets top marks for writing essay in invisible ink - "A Japanese student of ninja history who handed in a blank paper was given top marks - after her professor realised the essay was written in invisible ink.Eimi Haga followed the ninja technique of "aburidashi", spending hours soaking and crushing soybeans to make the ink.The words appeared when her professor heated the paper over his gas stove."
Woman Takes Anti-Selfies Stance By ‘Dying’ At Famous Landmarks And They’re Strangely Hilarious (30 Pics)
79 Times Kids Realized Their Parents Were Cooler Than Them
Argument analysis: Justices divided on federal protections for LGBT employees (UPDATED) - "Karlan spent much of her time at the lectern dealing with two main sets of concerns. The first was the argument that Congress could not possibly have intended to bar employment discrimination based on sexual orientation when it passed Title VII back in 1964. After all, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed, at that time the American Psychiatric Association labeled homosexuality a mental illness... Arguing on behalf of the employers, attorney Jeffrey Harris had to grapple with questions from Gorsuch and some of the court’s more liberal justices about the text of Title VII. Justice Elena Kagan led the way, telling Harris that the test to determine whether there is discrimination under Title VII is whether the same thing would have happened if the employee were a different sex. That test, she suggested to Harris, comes out against the employers: Although Bostock and Zarda were fired for being gay – that is, for being men who were attracted to other men – they would not have been fired if they were women who were attracted to men... David Cole of the American Civil Liberties Union argued on behalf of Aimee Stephens, a Michigan funeral director. Stephens had dressed and appeared as a man until 2013, when she announced that she intended to live and work as a woman and would eventually have sex-reassignment surgery. Thomas Rost, the owner of the funeral home where Stephens worked, fired Stephens because she “was no longer going to represent himself as a man. He wanted to dress as a woman,” which Rost believed would violate “God’s commands.”Cole described the case in simple terms. Stephens is being treated differently because of the sex she was assigned at birth. If she had been assigned a female sex at birth, he argued, she would not have been fired for wanting to come to work dressed as a woman. But instead she was assigned a male sex, Cole continued, and so she was fired because she failed to conform to the sex stereotypes of her employer. It can’t be the case, Cole asserted, that Ann Hopkins – the plaintiff in the Supreme Court’s original case on sex stereotyping – couldn’t be fired or denied a promotion for being insufficiently feminine, but Stephens could be fired for being insufficiently masculine."
Maybe soon, women's shelters can be forced to accept "cis" men
Surprising New Data Shows Comic Readers Are Leaving Superheroes Behind - "For the first time that anyone can remember, superheroes are being outsold in their native medium – American comic books and graphic novels – by other kinds of content, notably kid-oriented fare and Japanese (or Japanese-inspired) manga."
Strange, we were told that audiences demanded diversity. Apparently the Japanese didn't get the memo
Thor 4: Let’s topple every pale, male and stale superhero character we can get our hands on - "It’s the ostensibly more reasonable complaints of “I don’t mind female/POC/LGBT+ characters, but why can’t they make their own?” that nettles me – because make no mistake, we are! Villain, Interrupted, my play about supervillains in prison therapy, runs at the Camden Fringe in August – highlighting my point perfectly. Original characters, even the ones created by behemoths like Marvel or DC, have nothing like the traction of old favourites, meaning we’re starting the race seconds before the big boys cross the finish line. Stealing a few of their spots at the front is not only positive, but absolutely necessary. Quite apart from anything else, it genuinely makes the art better and bigger.Audiences tire of the same old stories, told by the same old people, with the same old characters just dressed up in different superpowers... Giving audiences superheroes (and spies and princesses) different to themselves normalises diversity in a way targeted campaigns can only dream of. This is the power of representation – I can’t tell you how good it felt to watch women, PLURAL, fight alongside the men in Endgame, and how disappointing it was to have Marvel swerve an (onscreen-or-it-doesn’t-count) bisexual superhero in the form of Valkyrie – something they have pledged to correct in Phase 4... We’re stepping out of the shadows – and if we can step on our male predecessors along the way, all the better."
When they loudly proclaim their Agenda
[Unsolicited Opinions on Israel???] | Know Your Meme - "[Unsolicited Opinions on Israel???] is an exploitable quote originally featured in the fourth issue of Marvel's comic series Angela Queen of Hel. Since its publication in late January 2016, the satirical censorship joke has come under criticism from many readers who read it as an out-of-place commentary on heavyhanded sociopolitical issues like feminism, manosphere and anti-zionism, leading to a series of photoshopped parodies and satirical jokes poking fun at the commentarial nature of the original comic...
Upon confronting her, Bor goes on what can only be assumed to be a politically incorrect tirade against Angela, as indicated by the author's self-censored black-bar redaction notes in (shown below).
[A lot of misogynist filth]
[Red Pill M.R.A. Meninist Casual Racism]
[Unsolicited Opinions on Israel???]"
It's amazing how far comics have fallen. Apparently hitting people on the head with your hatred and not even bothering to be subtle or make your "social commentary" make sense in-world are what passes for "art" nowadays
So much for the "myth" of the slippery slope
Keywords: religion and charity
Men become richer after divorce - "Divorce makes men - and particularly fathers - significantly richer. When a father separates from the mother of his children, according to new research, his available income increases by around one third. Women, in contrast, suffer severe financial penalties. Regardless of whether she has children, the average woman's income falls by more than a fifth and remains low for many years... "The general belief that men get fleeced by their divorces while women get richer and live off the proceeds has long been due for exposure as a pernicious myth," said Ruth Smallacombe, a family consultant at Flip. "In reality, women often suffer economic hardship when they divorce."... Jenkins combined data from 14 different British Household Panel Surveys over 1991 to 2004 with the findings from five European surveys. Recalculating the results using the formula by which the government measures poverty, he established new per capita incomes. Jenkins found that the positive effect on men's finances is so significant that divorce can even lift them out of poverty, while women are far more likely to be plunged into destitution. Separated women have a poverty rate of 27% - almost three times that of their former husbands...
Almost half of all marriages in England and Wales will end in divorce."
Nice try. Divorce only makes women "poorer" in the sense that they no longer have access to their husbands' earnings. Using this same methodology, a new child would also make both parents "worse off" because their per capita income would fall - even if their raw incomes didn't change at all
To look at it another way: marriage makes women better off because they marry richer men, and makes men worse off because they marry poorer women. Somehow marriage making men poorer isn't an issue
Cat needs glucose drip after mating with at least five females in single night - "'I thought they'd be professional, but the staff member didn't feed Xiaopi during the day and let him out to roam freely at night.'That's right, all the cats were free to walk around the shop and then the employee went home."
The Average Worker Spends 51 Percent of Each Workday on These 3 Unnecessary Tasks - "1. Unnecessary Commuting (13 percent)
As of 2018 (the last year measured), the average one-way commute to work is 27 minutes, nearly six minutes more than in 1980, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And that's just the average, which means that some of us are spending a lot more than that. (I've known people with three-hour commutes--one way.)...
2. Unnecessary Meetings (16 percent)
According to a study at MIT that I described in a previous post, the average worker spends approximately 22 years of their 45-year career in meetings. An estimated third of that time is spent in meetings where there's no value added...
3. Unnecessary Emails (23 percent)
According to research cited in Forbes, the average office worker spends 2.5 hours a day reading and responding to an average of 200 emails, of which approximately 144 (mostly CCs and BCCs) aren't relevant to their job...
1. Implement company-wide work-from-home.
While some jobs (like equipment maintenance) must be performed on-site, most office jobs can be accomplished remotely. Indeed, several studies have shown that remote office workers are much productive than on-site workers, without even counting the time they waste commuting... top management must admit to themselves that their brand-new open plan office was a dumb idea. However, smart bosses don't throw good money after bad, so it's time to bite the proverbial bullet on this one.
2. Create an efficient-meeting culture...
3. Throttle your email system.
Here's are some approaches I've seen over the years:
Turn off email during peak working hours.
Limit the number of emails an employee can send each day.
Discourage CC, BCC, and Reply All emails.
Discourage Sisyphus-like behaviors like trying to achieve "zero Inbox."
Here's an idea: Customize the company-wide email client so that it's impossible to close any internal email until you've rated its usefulness to you and your job.Track those ratings and it will quickly become clear who's wasting everyone else's time with unnecessary email. Then adjust their compensation accordingly (all the way to $0 when appropriate)."
Petition for Cell Service on the Subway - "Did you know that Toronto is the only major Canadian city without a connected underground for all? More than two-thirds of TTC riders surveyed are unaware that connectivity is available on the subway in Toronto, and 71% don’t realize that their mobile carrier isn’t allowing them to use it...
iwantaccess.ca is brought to you by BAI Communications. The Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) awarded BAI Communications the contract, in a fair and open tender process, to design, build and operate its free public Wi-Fi (TCONNECT) and cellular network. Coverage in the stations has been live since 2015 for Freedom Mobile customers, however, the Big 3 Telcos have yet to join the network. Now, BAI is committed to educating cellular customers of the Big 3 Telcos about why they can’t access this network, and what they can do about it."
Japan ninja student gets top marks for writing essay in invisible ink - "A Japanese student of ninja history who handed in a blank paper was given top marks - after her professor realised the essay was written in invisible ink.Eimi Haga followed the ninja technique of "aburidashi", spending hours soaking and crushing soybeans to make the ink.The words appeared when her professor heated the paper over his gas stove."
Woman Takes Anti-Selfies Stance By ‘Dying’ At Famous Landmarks And They’re Strangely Hilarious (30 Pics)
79 Times Kids Realized Their Parents Were Cooler Than Them
Argument analysis: Justices divided on federal protections for LGBT employees (UPDATED) - "Karlan spent much of her time at the lectern dealing with two main sets of concerns. The first was the argument that Congress could not possibly have intended to bar employment discrimination based on sexual orientation when it passed Title VII back in 1964. After all, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed, at that time the American Psychiatric Association labeled homosexuality a mental illness... Arguing on behalf of the employers, attorney Jeffrey Harris had to grapple with questions from Gorsuch and some of the court’s more liberal justices about the text of Title VII. Justice Elena Kagan led the way, telling Harris that the test to determine whether there is discrimination under Title VII is whether the same thing would have happened if the employee were a different sex. That test, she suggested to Harris, comes out against the employers: Although Bostock and Zarda were fired for being gay – that is, for being men who were attracted to other men – they would not have been fired if they were women who were attracted to men... David Cole of the American Civil Liberties Union argued on behalf of Aimee Stephens, a Michigan funeral director. Stephens had dressed and appeared as a man until 2013, when she announced that she intended to live and work as a woman and would eventually have sex-reassignment surgery. Thomas Rost, the owner of the funeral home where Stephens worked, fired Stephens because she “was no longer going to represent himself as a man. He wanted to dress as a woman,” which Rost believed would violate “God’s commands.”Cole described the case in simple terms. Stephens is being treated differently because of the sex she was assigned at birth. If she had been assigned a female sex at birth, he argued, she would not have been fired for wanting to come to work dressed as a woman. But instead she was assigned a male sex, Cole continued, and so she was fired because she failed to conform to the sex stereotypes of her employer. It can’t be the case, Cole asserted, that Ann Hopkins – the plaintiff in the Supreme Court’s original case on sex stereotyping – couldn’t be fired or denied a promotion for being insufficiently feminine, but Stephens could be fired for being insufficiently masculine."
Maybe soon, women's shelters can be forced to accept "cis" men
Surprising New Data Shows Comic Readers Are Leaving Superheroes Behind - "For the first time that anyone can remember, superheroes are being outsold in their native medium – American comic books and graphic novels – by other kinds of content, notably kid-oriented fare and Japanese (or Japanese-inspired) manga."
Strange, we were told that audiences demanded diversity. Apparently the Japanese didn't get the memo
Thor 4: Let’s topple every pale, male and stale superhero character we can get our hands on - "It’s the ostensibly more reasonable complaints of “I don’t mind female/POC/LGBT+ characters, but why can’t they make their own?” that nettles me – because make no mistake, we are! Villain, Interrupted, my play about supervillains in prison therapy, runs at the Camden Fringe in August – highlighting my point perfectly. Original characters, even the ones created by behemoths like Marvel or DC, have nothing like the traction of old favourites, meaning we’re starting the race seconds before the big boys cross the finish line. Stealing a few of their spots at the front is not only positive, but absolutely necessary. Quite apart from anything else, it genuinely makes the art better and bigger.Audiences tire of the same old stories, told by the same old people, with the same old characters just dressed up in different superpowers... Giving audiences superheroes (and spies and princesses) different to themselves normalises diversity in a way targeted campaigns can only dream of. This is the power of representation – I can’t tell you how good it felt to watch women, PLURAL, fight alongside the men in Endgame, and how disappointing it was to have Marvel swerve an (onscreen-or-it-doesn’t-count) bisexual superhero in the form of Valkyrie – something they have pledged to correct in Phase 4... We’re stepping out of the shadows – and if we can step on our male predecessors along the way, all the better."
When they loudly proclaim their Agenda
[Unsolicited Opinions on Israel???] | Know Your Meme - "[Unsolicited Opinions on Israel???] is an exploitable quote originally featured in the fourth issue of Marvel's comic series Angela Queen of Hel. Since its publication in late January 2016, the satirical censorship joke has come under criticism from many readers who read it as an out-of-place commentary on heavyhanded sociopolitical issues like feminism, manosphere and anti-zionism, leading to a series of photoshopped parodies and satirical jokes poking fun at the commentarial nature of the original comic...
Upon confronting her, Bor goes on what can only be assumed to be a politically incorrect tirade against Angela, as indicated by the author's self-censored black-bar redaction notes in (shown below).
[A lot of misogynist filth]
[Red Pill M.R.A. Meninist Casual Racism]
[Unsolicited Opinions on Israel???]"
It's amazing how far comics have fallen. Apparently hitting people on the head with your hatred and not even bothering to be subtle or make your "social commentary" make sense in-world are what passes for "art" nowadays
Post ID: 7538038237018527891
America’s Math Curriculum Doesn’t Add Up
America’s Math Curriculum Doesn’t Add Up (Ep. 391) - Freakonomics Freakonomics
"In 1820, for instance, Harvard began requiring knowledge of algebra to gain admittance. As a result, secondary schools started teaching algebra. Fifty years later, Harvard added geometry to its requirements, and the secondary schools followed suit.
After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in October 1957, math education became a matter of national security. The math curriculum was overhauled with two very different goals in mind. The first goal was to increase the number of engineers, mathematicians, and scientists. This led to the introduction of higher-level, more abstract math in the high school curriculum. The second goal was to develop a workforce that could do the complex calculations required to support the military and space efforts. Remember, this predates the age of modern computers.
BOALER: It’s funny, really. When I was in school and many years ago, the joke of maths teachers used to be, “You’ve got to be able to do all these calculations because you’re never going to be walking around with a calculator in your hand.” Well, turns out that everybody’s walking around with a calculator in their hand... Teaching is always very hard to change because people learn it from their own school days, and then they want to become the maths teacher they had. Well, maths teachers do anyway. And when people have tried to change, they’ve really received aggressive pushback, which has caused some of them to sort of withdraw and go back into teaching the way that they were...
Boaler knows firsthand what this pushback is like. During the early 2000s, she found herself caught up in what’s known as the “Math Wars,” a debate over the math curriculum between reformists and traditionalists. And if you think “wars” is an exaggeration:
BOALER: People went to extreme lengths to try and stop reforms. I think somebody went on a hunger strike, even, in L.A. Yeah, it was really a battleground...
SADOFF: We always think of teaching to the test as a bad thing, but we want people to teach to the test. We put those concepts on the test because that’s what we want students to learn...
COLEMAN: We survey first-year math teachers and first-year college professors not only in math but outside of math, and we analyze which math is most used in their courses. That’s a knowable question. At the same time, we ask high-school teachers what math is the most important for use in college and compare those two data sets...
The college teachers say, “Very few things matter and matter a lot.” The high school teachers say, “Everything matters.” Think of the stress of that. They must do everything, or they are betraying their kids, which forced them to race through the curriculum lest their kids are not ready.
What the college teachers say but is not heard is, if your students can do these core set of things, we can do the rest. But if those are shaky and they’re merely faintly aware of them and aware of a lot of other mathematics, we’re stuck...
The first is the most humble, but it’s powerful, is arithmetic. The command of the four operations: subtraction, multiplication, division, and addition — but crucially, fractions. The next area of math that’s hugely predictive of your future success is what I would call data analysis and problem-solving, including rates, ratio, proportion, designing quantities that interact with one another in that way, and watching their growth over time in development. The third area of math that’s extremely widely used is what I would call the heart of algebra, which is linear equations. That portion of algebra is then very widely used in other disciplines to open up many other problems."
"In 1820, for instance, Harvard began requiring knowledge of algebra to gain admittance. As a result, secondary schools started teaching algebra. Fifty years later, Harvard added geometry to its requirements, and the secondary schools followed suit.
After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in October 1957, math education became a matter of national security. The math curriculum was overhauled with two very different goals in mind. The first goal was to increase the number of engineers, mathematicians, and scientists. This led to the introduction of higher-level, more abstract math in the high school curriculum. The second goal was to develop a workforce that could do the complex calculations required to support the military and space efforts. Remember, this predates the age of modern computers.
BOALER: It’s funny, really. When I was in school and many years ago, the joke of maths teachers used to be, “You’ve got to be able to do all these calculations because you’re never going to be walking around with a calculator in your hand.” Well, turns out that everybody’s walking around with a calculator in their hand... Teaching is always very hard to change because people learn it from their own school days, and then they want to become the maths teacher they had. Well, maths teachers do anyway. And when people have tried to change, they’ve really received aggressive pushback, which has caused some of them to sort of withdraw and go back into teaching the way that they were...
Boaler knows firsthand what this pushback is like. During the early 2000s, she found herself caught up in what’s known as the “Math Wars,” a debate over the math curriculum between reformists and traditionalists. And if you think “wars” is an exaggeration:
BOALER: People went to extreme lengths to try and stop reforms. I think somebody went on a hunger strike, even, in L.A. Yeah, it was really a battleground...
SADOFF: We always think of teaching to the test as a bad thing, but we want people to teach to the test. We put those concepts on the test because that’s what we want students to learn...
COLEMAN: We survey first-year math teachers and first-year college professors not only in math but outside of math, and we analyze which math is most used in their courses. That’s a knowable question. At the same time, we ask high-school teachers what math is the most important for use in college and compare those two data sets...
The college teachers say, “Very few things matter and matter a lot.” The high school teachers say, “Everything matters.” Think of the stress of that. They must do everything, or they are betraying their kids, which forced them to race through the curriculum lest their kids are not ready.
What the college teachers say but is not heard is, if your students can do these core set of things, we can do the rest. But if those are shaky and they’re merely faintly aware of them and aware of a lot of other mathematics, we’re stuck...
The first is the most humble, but it’s powerful, is arithmetic. The command of the four operations: subtraction, multiplication, division, and addition — but crucially, fractions. The next area of math that’s hugely predictive of your future success is what I would call data analysis and problem-solving, including rates, ratio, proportion, designing quantities that interact with one another in that way, and watching their growth over time in development. The third area of math that’s extremely widely used is what I would call the heart of algebra, which is linear equations. That portion of algebra is then very widely used in other disciplines to open up many other problems."
Post ID: 4102264317509721412
Links - 18th December 2019 (2)
California Is Set to Require Public Universities Offer On-Campus Abortions - "Advocates say the program ensures California students can actually get abortions without having to make an onerous journey off-campus. “It’s about access. Just because you have a constitutional right, if you don’t have access to that constitutional right, then it’s really no right at all,” said California state Sen. Connie Levya, a Democrat and main sponsor of the bill. “I’m tired of women being shamed.” A 2017 report on students’ access to abortion found that the average distances student must travel from a California public university to an abortion clinic is about five miles and takes just under 40 minutes, one way, via public transportation. Medication abortions in California require two visits. The California state legislature managed to pass Levya’s bill, then known as “SB 320,” last year. But in a move that shocked advocates and opponents alike, the state’s Democratic, abortion rights-supporting then-governor vetoed it. In a message at the time, Gov. Jerry Brown said that average distance is “not an unreasonable distance.”“Because the services required by this bill are widely available off-campus, this bill is not necessary,” he added.“What went through my head was, ‘Here’s another old white guy telling students what to do with their bodies’”... implementing the legislation could, over time, far exceed its projected cost.“The cost has to be burdened — shouldered — by somebody and that somebody will be the students and/or taxpayers”"
Presumably California is going to require public universities to have gun shops on campus too
Apparently needing to take a bus to get an abortion is telling people what to do with their bodies
Bulk download images · Issue #1382 · telegramdesktop/tdesktop · GitHub - "I know this is a dumb workaround, but:
Set "Default download path" to the folder you want your photos to be downloaded.
Open the most recent photo in a batch.
Hover mouse over "Download" icon.
Now repedeately press "Left" (or "Right", I don't remember) on keyboard and click left mouse button.
This is the fastest (IMO) method (~2 photos per second) to bulk download images.
Or setup an IFTTT integration..."
Schizophrenia and violent crime: a population-based study - "Patients with schizophrenia were at increased risk for violent crimes compared with controls [odds ratio (OR) 4.3, 95% confidence interval (CI) 3.8–4.9], especially women (OR 9.9, 95% CI 6.2–15.7). Risk for violent crimes was higher among patients with co-morbid substance misuse than in patients without such co-morbidity (OR 5.1, 95% CI 4.2–6.3)."
Make Men Men Again - Posts - "GM becomes first major auto company in history to have a female CEO and a female CFO"
*Several months later*
"GM to Lay Off More Than 10,000 Workers, Close Five North American Plants"
The Satiety Index - "Susanna Holt, PhD, has developed the Satiety Index, a system to measure different foods' ability to satisfy hunger. A fixed amount (240 calories) of different foods was fed to participants who then ranked their feelings of hunger every fifteen minutes and were allowed to eat freely for the next two hours. Of all the foods tested, potatoes were the most satisfying."
Turkey is now a haven for terrorists and an enabler of terrorism - "Turkish law enforcement is known to turn a blind eye to jihadists, while the country’s courts treat them leniently, often releasing them pending trial or granting them parole — in stark contrast to harsh treatment meted out to secular and pro-democracy dissidents.After their ouster from Egypt in 2013, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood established new institutions in Turkey. In addition to Islamist propaganda, the movement’s television stations have broadcast death threats against Egyptian officials and foreign nationals in Egypt. Ironically, the Turkish government defends the Muslim Brotherhood’s “freedom of expression” even as Erdogan has silenced Turkey’s domestic opposition. Turkey stalks and prosecutes dissident groups with zeal, branding them terrorists, while allowing actual terrorists from Hamas to operate freely on Turkish soil"
The "mildly Islamist" government strikes again
Dating project for NUS & Yale-NUS students uses Nobel Prize-winning algorithm to find 1 ideal match - "the Aphrodite Project asks you 60 questions and uses an economic nobel prize-wininning algorithm (plus some other math stuff) to present you with the most ideal partner among all participating students."
Najib calls Malaysians his ‘cronies,' says all should be jailed with him since they gained from BN’s policies
IBM fired up to 100,000 employees to attract millennials - "former VP of Human Resources Alan Wild said IBM had "laid off 50,000 to 100,000 employees in just the last several years" in order to make itself seem like "[a] cool, trendy organization," like Google or Amazon, and not like "an old fuddy duddy organization."...
[IBM] Converted job cuts into retirements and took steps to boost resignations and firings. The moves reduced the number of employees counted as layoffs, where high numbers can trigger public disclosure requirements.
Encouraged employees targeted for layoff to apply for other IBM positions, while quietly advising managers not to hire them and requiring many of the workers to train their replacements.
Told some older employees being laid off that their skills were out of date, but then brought them back as contract workers, often for the same work at lower pay and fewer benefits...
"I doubt IBM lays off its older workers solely to appeal to millen[n]ials. . . It's more likely that older workers are laid off because they are more expensive due to higher pay, have more paid time off, use more healthcare, and are more politically calibrated to their organizations than younger workers.""
Elsevier: "It's illegal to Sci-Hub." Also Elsevier: "We link to Sci-Hub all the time." - "the researchers who write the papers that Elsevier publishes are scientists, not private-equity-backed looter/profiteers, so they are more interested in science and scholarship than ensuring that Elsevier continues to rake in billions. And since Elsevier doesn't pay for any of the work it publishes, it's hard for them to exert pressure to end this practice.Now, in theory, the referees, peer reviewers, editorial boards and advisors for each journal could lay down the law on this stuff and ban links -- but they're also all volunteers who are not paid a dime by Elsevier.The reality is that scholarly publishing corporations contribute virtually nothing to scholarship (that's a peer-reviewed, empirical finding -- not a statement of opinion)."
Veterinary tech training video starring man as pissed-off, unruly, and frightened cat
What I learned about leadership when I interviewed the biggest drug dealer in history - "A) TRY TO GET THE PEOPLE WORKING FOR YOU TO BE MORE SUCCESSFUL THAN YOU
B) HONESTY
C) BE VERY LOW KEY
D) ONLY DO THE ESSENTIAL
E) DON'T MAKE IT ABOUT THE MONEY
F) REDUCE CONFRONTATIONS
G) FREEMIUM
H) ASSUME THE WORST"
Google Thinks I’m Dead - The New York Times - "Google had mashed my picture from The New York Times’s website with the Wikipedia entry for a better-known writer with the same name, who died in 2013... My picture, however, appeared inaccurately only in Google search results, so it seems reasonable to assume that a company with thousands of employees, whose parent company, Alphabet, has a market capitalization of about $740 billion, would be able to help. But like many technology companies, Google doesn’t really put a lot of emphasis on human technical support, something anyone who has had a problem with Gmail already knows. There’s no customer service hotline, and it’s unclear which of the various “feedback” options is appropriate... more than one friend has mentioned to me the 1985 movie “Brazil,” which I Google during my 20 minutes on hold. Apparently, “Brazil” is about a much worse bureaucratic nightmare set in a “consumer-driven dystopian world in which there is an overreliance on poorly maintained” machines ... The website says I should keep submitting feedback, over and over again from different IP addresses. If possible, I should also enlist the help of other people. I surmise that this will help push my query to the top of Google’s to-do pile. Or it won’t do anything. One thing’s for sure — there’s no way to know!"
N.Y. venue cancels screening of Jordan Peterson movie that left staff ‘uncomfortable’ - "This is the second time a public venue has cancelled a screening of the movie. In September, the Carleton Cinema in Toronto cancelled what was supposed to be a weeklong run of the documentary due to complaints brought forward by theatre employees."
Of course, if someone with a sincere objection to abortion felt uncomfortable about a movie featuring abortion, liberals would say that person should be fired instead
Toronto ranked the 13th best city in the world for work-life balance - "The average Toronto office employee gets to work around 9:13 a.m., spends just over 40 hours on the job per week, takes 15 paid vacation days per year and spends roughly 80 minutes of every day commuting... A total of 40 cities were chosen for the ranking, all of them "in-demand metropolises" with an abundance of reliable data available to researchers... Toronto, Vancouver and Ottawa are all represented on the list in terms of Canadian cities, all of them with remarkably similar scores across many of the 20 factors used by Kisi to determine "work-life balance." With a total score of 72.55 out of 100, Vancouver edged out both Ottawa and Toronto, which boasted scores of 72.11 and 63.55 respectively. Much of this has to do with Toronto's longer commute times, high "city stress" score and lower rates of access to outdoor spaces... Helsinki, Finland, Munich, Germany and Oslo, Norway round out the top three, while Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Tokyo, Japan, and Buenes Aires, Argentina are ranked the worst three cities for work-life balance. Not a single U.S. city cracked the top 15. The closest was San Diego, where unemployment is low, but so too are the average number of vacation days taken at 9.7."
Singapore is the second most overworked city
Thread by @DigitalLawyer - "Oooof. Was just subjected to the most credible phishing attempt I've experienced to date. Here were the steps:
1) "Hi, this is your bank. There was an attempt to use your card in Miami, Florida. Was this you?"
Me: no.
2) "Ok. We've blocked the transaction. To verify that I am speaking to Pieter, what is your member number?"
Me: (that number, by itself, is useless).
3) "We've sent a verification pin to your phone."
~ Gets verification pin text from bank's regular number ~
Me:
4) "Ok. I am going to read some other transactions, tell me if these are yours. ~ Reads transactions ~"
Me: Yes. These are all legitimate transactions I made
5) "Thank you! We now want to block the pin on your account, so you get a fraud alert when it is used again. What is your pin?"...
--> Once I gave my member number, the attacker used the password reset flow to trigger a text message from the bank.
--> They used this to gain access to the account.
--> Then read some of my transactions to give the call more credibility
--> Needed the pin to send money, failed at that step.
--> Everything before the "what is your pin" seemed totally legitimate. English was perfect. The bank verification code, sent by the expected number, tricked me.
--> The asking for my pin over the phone... not so much."
Love lives of Hong Kong teens laid bare in survey - "One in four Hong Kong teenagers had their first relationship before the age of 13, and some were as young as nine... After a break-up, 50.6 per cent said they hid their emotions, while 15.5 per cent admitted self-harming as a result. One in 10 said they bad-mouthed their ex online."Parents told us that they really wanted to know if their children were in a relationship. But the children said they definitely would not tell their parents, because the parents would have forbidden that"... "Some parents have made it clear their children can only get into a relationship when they are at university."Lam said she knew of a case where a mother had followed her daughter after school to check if she had a boyfriend. Though the daughter left the school with a male classmate, he was not her boyfriend... when teenagers go through a break-up, 15.1 per cent jump into another relationship as soon as possible, while only 36 per cent seek help from someone else... 14.3 per cent said they argued with their other half once or twice a week, while 34.6 per cent did so between one and three times a month, underlying the need for them to learn how to get along with the opposite sex... "There was a Form Three girl who lived in North district, and her boyfriend lived on Hong Kong Island. The boy was so clingy and required her to send him WhatsApp messages the moment she left school," Lam said.Ivy Tam Wing-sze, a third-year student at Shue Yan University, said she wanted her boyfriend to know what was on her mind even if she did not spell everything out. "I have been with him for about a year," she said. "In the beginning we argued about three times a month. Later on, it became around once every two months."I am not good at expressing my feelings. I hope I only have to say a few words and my boyfriend understands I am upset.""
Blackface Controversy Splits Cosplay Scene Over League Of Legends Outfit - "For the upcoming EuroCosplay Championships, taking place in London later this month, French cosplayer Livanart decided to create an elaborate costume based on Pyke from League of Legends. Livanart is a white French woman, while Pyke is “a black guy from Bilgewater.”Livanart had obviously worked on the outfit for a long time (she even won the French Cosplay Cup earlier this year with it), and had impressed judges enough that she was selected as one of 25 finalists for the competition. Yet last week, with the championships only two weeks away, Livanart was told by organizers that, following complaints, her cosplay would not not be allowed to participate... While Livanart is dressed as a black character with black skin, she hasn’t applied make-up or paint; her transformation into Pyke is achieved through the wearing of a prosthetic suit. Critics see this as a loophole and believe that the same intent as blackface—to alter your skin color to match that of a black person, a practice with a terrible past—is still present in the cosplay. Those rushing to Livanart’s defense, meanwhile, say that because her suit is a faithful recreation of the character’s likeness, it’s an act of tribute, not caricature. They also argue that because it’s a suit it’s not blackface, and that as the popular cosplay refrain goes, everyone should be free to cosplay as whoever they want, regardless of the color of their skin... In support of Livanart’s position, another finalist, JustJay from the Czech Republic, has withdrawn from the competition."
Obviously someone from a country where people aren't as obsessed about blackface as Americans pretending to be someone in an imaginary universe is meant to mock black people in the real world
Someone Spent Over $220,000 In Microtransactions On A Transformers Game - "Yodo1 developers created a machine learning neural network that analysed player behaviour and session times to predict what players would become high spenders.The bot could spot "potential whales" with about 87 percent accuracy, but "we think we can get it up to about 95 percent," Fong said. The model was trained with around two and a half years of player monetisation data, and Fong explained that it was even technically possible to build in logic that would target different players with different monetisation packages. But such a model would ultimately backfire. When asked to clarify the capabilities of the tech that, Fong explained it would be a net loss for the studio, since the backlash from players would be disastrous. "We don't want to create a situation whereby different people pay different prices for the same thing""
Presumably California is going to require public universities to have gun shops on campus too
Apparently needing to take a bus to get an abortion is telling people what to do with their bodies
Bulk download images · Issue #1382 · telegramdesktop/tdesktop · GitHub - "I know this is a dumb workaround, but:
Set "Default download path" to the folder you want your photos to be downloaded.
Open the most recent photo in a batch.
Hover mouse over "Download" icon.
Now repedeately press "Left" (or "Right", I don't remember) on keyboard and click left mouse button.
This is the fastest (IMO) method (~2 photos per second) to bulk download images.
Or setup an IFTTT integration..."
Schizophrenia and violent crime: a population-based study - "Patients with schizophrenia were at increased risk for violent crimes compared with controls [odds ratio (OR) 4.3, 95% confidence interval (CI) 3.8–4.9], especially women (OR 9.9, 95% CI 6.2–15.7). Risk for violent crimes was higher among patients with co-morbid substance misuse than in patients without such co-morbidity (OR 5.1, 95% CI 4.2–6.3)."
Make Men Men Again - Posts - "GM becomes first major auto company in history to have a female CEO and a female CFO"
*Several months later*
"GM to Lay Off More Than 10,000 Workers, Close Five North American Plants"
The Satiety Index - "Susanna Holt, PhD, has developed the Satiety Index, a system to measure different foods' ability to satisfy hunger. A fixed amount (240 calories) of different foods was fed to participants who then ranked their feelings of hunger every fifteen minutes and were allowed to eat freely for the next two hours. Of all the foods tested, potatoes were the most satisfying."
Turkey is now a haven for terrorists and an enabler of terrorism - "Turkish law enforcement is known to turn a blind eye to jihadists, while the country’s courts treat them leniently, often releasing them pending trial or granting them parole — in stark contrast to harsh treatment meted out to secular and pro-democracy dissidents.After their ouster from Egypt in 2013, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood established new institutions in Turkey. In addition to Islamist propaganda, the movement’s television stations have broadcast death threats against Egyptian officials and foreign nationals in Egypt. Ironically, the Turkish government defends the Muslim Brotherhood’s “freedom of expression” even as Erdogan has silenced Turkey’s domestic opposition. Turkey stalks and prosecutes dissident groups with zeal, branding them terrorists, while allowing actual terrorists from Hamas to operate freely on Turkish soil"
The "mildly Islamist" government strikes again
Dating project for NUS & Yale-NUS students uses Nobel Prize-winning algorithm to find 1 ideal match - "the Aphrodite Project asks you 60 questions and uses an economic nobel prize-wininning algorithm (plus some other math stuff) to present you with the most ideal partner among all participating students."
Najib calls Malaysians his ‘cronies,' says all should be jailed with him since they gained from BN’s policies
IBM fired up to 100,000 employees to attract millennials - "former VP of Human Resources Alan Wild said IBM had "laid off 50,000 to 100,000 employees in just the last several years" in order to make itself seem like "[a] cool, trendy organization," like Google or Amazon, and not like "an old fuddy duddy organization."...
[IBM] Converted job cuts into retirements and took steps to boost resignations and firings. The moves reduced the number of employees counted as layoffs, where high numbers can trigger public disclosure requirements.
Encouraged employees targeted for layoff to apply for other IBM positions, while quietly advising managers not to hire them and requiring many of the workers to train their replacements.
Told some older employees being laid off that their skills were out of date, but then brought them back as contract workers, often for the same work at lower pay and fewer benefits...
"I doubt IBM lays off its older workers solely to appeal to millen[n]ials. . . It's more likely that older workers are laid off because they are more expensive due to higher pay, have more paid time off, use more healthcare, and are more politically calibrated to their organizations than younger workers.""
Elsevier: "It's illegal to Sci-Hub." Also Elsevier: "We link to Sci-Hub all the time." - "the researchers who write the papers that Elsevier publishes are scientists, not private-equity-backed looter/profiteers, so they are more interested in science and scholarship than ensuring that Elsevier continues to rake in billions. And since Elsevier doesn't pay for any of the work it publishes, it's hard for them to exert pressure to end this practice.Now, in theory, the referees, peer reviewers, editorial boards and advisors for each journal could lay down the law on this stuff and ban links -- but they're also all volunteers who are not paid a dime by Elsevier.The reality is that scholarly publishing corporations contribute virtually nothing to scholarship (that's a peer-reviewed, empirical finding -- not a statement of opinion)."
Veterinary tech training video starring man as pissed-off, unruly, and frightened cat
What I learned about leadership when I interviewed the biggest drug dealer in history - "A) TRY TO GET THE PEOPLE WORKING FOR YOU TO BE MORE SUCCESSFUL THAN YOU
B) HONESTY
C) BE VERY LOW KEY
D) ONLY DO THE ESSENTIAL
E) DON'T MAKE IT ABOUT THE MONEY
F) REDUCE CONFRONTATIONS
G) FREEMIUM
H) ASSUME THE WORST"
Google Thinks I’m Dead - The New York Times - "Google had mashed my picture from The New York Times’s website with the Wikipedia entry for a better-known writer with the same name, who died in 2013... My picture, however, appeared inaccurately only in Google search results, so it seems reasonable to assume that a company with thousands of employees, whose parent company, Alphabet, has a market capitalization of about $740 billion, would be able to help. But like many technology companies, Google doesn’t really put a lot of emphasis on human technical support, something anyone who has had a problem with Gmail already knows. There’s no customer service hotline, and it’s unclear which of the various “feedback” options is appropriate... more than one friend has mentioned to me the 1985 movie “Brazil,” which I Google during my 20 minutes on hold. Apparently, “Brazil” is about a much worse bureaucratic nightmare set in a “consumer-driven dystopian world in which there is an overreliance on poorly maintained” machines ... The website says I should keep submitting feedback, over and over again from different IP addresses. If possible, I should also enlist the help of other people. I surmise that this will help push my query to the top of Google’s to-do pile. Or it won’t do anything. One thing’s for sure — there’s no way to know!"
N.Y. venue cancels screening of Jordan Peterson movie that left staff ‘uncomfortable’ - "This is the second time a public venue has cancelled a screening of the movie. In September, the Carleton Cinema in Toronto cancelled what was supposed to be a weeklong run of the documentary due to complaints brought forward by theatre employees."
Of course, if someone with a sincere objection to abortion felt uncomfortable about a movie featuring abortion, liberals would say that person should be fired instead
Toronto ranked the 13th best city in the world for work-life balance - "The average Toronto office employee gets to work around 9:13 a.m., spends just over 40 hours on the job per week, takes 15 paid vacation days per year and spends roughly 80 minutes of every day commuting... A total of 40 cities were chosen for the ranking, all of them "in-demand metropolises" with an abundance of reliable data available to researchers... Toronto, Vancouver and Ottawa are all represented on the list in terms of Canadian cities, all of them with remarkably similar scores across many of the 20 factors used by Kisi to determine "work-life balance." With a total score of 72.55 out of 100, Vancouver edged out both Ottawa and Toronto, which boasted scores of 72.11 and 63.55 respectively. Much of this has to do with Toronto's longer commute times, high "city stress" score and lower rates of access to outdoor spaces... Helsinki, Finland, Munich, Germany and Oslo, Norway round out the top three, while Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Tokyo, Japan, and Buenes Aires, Argentina are ranked the worst three cities for work-life balance. Not a single U.S. city cracked the top 15. The closest was San Diego, where unemployment is low, but so too are the average number of vacation days taken at 9.7."
Singapore is the second most overworked city
Thread by @DigitalLawyer - "Oooof. Was just subjected to the most credible phishing attempt I've experienced to date. Here were the steps:
1) "Hi, this is your bank. There was an attempt to use your card in Miami, Florida. Was this you?"
Me: no.
2) "Ok. We've blocked the transaction. To verify that I am speaking to Pieter, what is your member number?"
Me:
3) "We've sent a verification pin to your phone."
~ Gets verification pin text from bank's regular number ~
Me:
4) "Ok. I am going to read some other transactions, tell me if these are yours. ~ Reads transactions ~"
Me: Yes. These are all legitimate transactions I made
5) "Thank you! We now want to block the pin on your account, so you get a fraud alert when it is used again. What is your pin?"...
--> Once I gave my member number, the attacker used the password reset flow to trigger a text message from the bank.
--> They used this to gain access to the account.
--> Then read some of my transactions to give the call more credibility
--> Needed the pin to send money, failed at that step.
--> Everything before the "what is your pin" seemed totally legitimate. English was perfect. The bank verification code, sent by the expected number, tricked me.
--> The asking for my pin over the phone... not so much."
Love lives of Hong Kong teens laid bare in survey - "One in four Hong Kong teenagers had their first relationship before the age of 13, and some were as young as nine... After a break-up, 50.6 per cent said they hid their emotions, while 15.5 per cent admitted self-harming as a result. One in 10 said they bad-mouthed their ex online."Parents told us that they really wanted to know if their children were in a relationship. But the children said they definitely would not tell their parents, because the parents would have forbidden that"... "Some parents have made it clear their children can only get into a relationship when they are at university."Lam said she knew of a case where a mother had followed her daughter after school to check if she had a boyfriend. Though the daughter left the school with a male classmate, he was not her boyfriend... when teenagers go through a break-up, 15.1 per cent jump into another relationship as soon as possible, while only 36 per cent seek help from someone else... 14.3 per cent said they argued with their other half once or twice a week, while 34.6 per cent did so between one and three times a month, underlying the need for them to learn how to get along with the opposite sex... "There was a Form Three girl who lived in North district, and her boyfriend lived on Hong Kong Island. The boy was so clingy and required her to send him WhatsApp messages the moment she left school," Lam said.Ivy Tam Wing-sze, a third-year student at Shue Yan University, said she wanted her boyfriend to know what was on her mind even if she did not spell everything out. "I have been with him for about a year," she said. "In the beginning we argued about three times a month. Later on, it became around once every two months."I am not good at expressing my feelings. I hope I only have to say a few words and my boyfriend understands I am upset.""
Blackface Controversy Splits Cosplay Scene Over League Of Legends Outfit - "For the upcoming EuroCosplay Championships, taking place in London later this month, French cosplayer Livanart decided to create an elaborate costume based on Pyke from League of Legends. Livanart is a white French woman, while Pyke is “a black guy from Bilgewater.”Livanart had obviously worked on the outfit for a long time (she even won the French Cosplay Cup earlier this year with it), and had impressed judges enough that she was selected as one of 25 finalists for the competition. Yet last week, with the championships only two weeks away, Livanart was told by organizers that, following complaints, her cosplay would not not be allowed to participate... While Livanart is dressed as a black character with black skin, she hasn’t applied make-up or paint; her transformation into Pyke is achieved through the wearing of a prosthetic suit. Critics see this as a loophole and believe that the same intent as blackface—to alter your skin color to match that of a black person, a practice with a terrible past—is still present in the cosplay. Those rushing to Livanart’s defense, meanwhile, say that because her suit is a faithful recreation of the character’s likeness, it’s an act of tribute, not caricature. They also argue that because it’s a suit it’s not blackface, and that as the popular cosplay refrain goes, everyone should be free to cosplay as whoever they want, regardless of the color of their skin... In support of Livanart’s position, another finalist, JustJay from the Czech Republic, has withdrawn from the competition."
Obviously someone from a country where people aren't as obsessed about blackface as Americans pretending to be someone in an imaginary universe is meant to mock black people in the real world
Someone Spent Over $220,000 In Microtransactions On A Transformers Game - "Yodo1 developers created a machine learning neural network that analysed player behaviour and session times to predict what players would become high spenders.The bot could spot "potential whales" with about 87 percent accuracy, but "we think we can get it up to about 95 percent," Fong said. The model was trained with around two and a half years of player monetisation data, and Fong explained that it was even technically possible to build in logic that would target different players with different monetisation packages. But such a model would ultimately backfire. When asked to clarify the capabilities of the tech that, Fong explained it would be a net loss for the studio, since the backlash from players would be disastrous. "We don't want to create a situation whereby different people pay different prices for the same thing""
Post ID: 2168235246153335457
My first Latin spam comment
It's not every day you get blog comment spam. In Latin.
I'm impressed Disqus flagged it:
Name: theresa goodluck (Guest):
Message: die enim bona amici ego iustus volo ut participes mea testimonia quam ego got programmed detruncati card, ego eram quondam in platea quia ego Eversa a me officium propter quod ego eram posse reddere mea bills quod esset quam ego invenerunt me ipso viventium in via, vidi societatem inscriptio haec erat brainhackers@aol.com in pasco penitus cum ego participatur, sicut dicitur quod homo est testimonium eius in vias novas ad pecuniam, quae erat velox ad quomodo ego contingi turba auxilium postulans hoc card.
Google Translate translation: good day my friend and I just want to share my testimony that I got programmed hacked card, I was once in the street because I was sacked from my job because I was not able to pay my bills and to which I found myself living on the road, I saw society this was to address brainhackers@aol.com When I shared browsing the internet, as it is called as a witness for new ways to make money, which was quick to be dependent on how the company will help the card.
I'm impressed Disqus flagged it:
Name: theresa goodluck (Guest):
Message: die enim bona amici ego iustus volo ut participes mea testimonia quam ego got programmed detruncati card, ego eram quondam in platea quia ego Eversa a me officium propter quod ego eram posse reddere mea bills quod esset quam ego invenerunt me ipso viventium in via, vidi societatem inscriptio haec erat brainhackers@aol.com in pasco penitus cum ego participatur, sicut dicitur quod homo est testimonium eius in vias novas ad pecuniam, quae erat velox ad quomodo ego contingi turba auxilium postulans hoc card.
Google Translate translation: good day my friend and I just want to share my testimony that I got programmed hacked card, I was once in the street because I was sacked from my job because I was not able to pay my bills and to which I found myself living on the road, I saw society this was to address brainhackers@aol.com When I shared browsing the internet, as it is called as a witness for new ways to make money, which was quick to be dependent on how the company will help the card.
Post ID: 2248683849389542698
Links - 18th December 2019 (1)
Behavioural evidence for a transparency–efficiency tradeoff in human–machine cooperation - "Recent advances in artificial intelligence and deep learning have made it possible for bots to pass as humans, as is the case with the recent Google Duplex—an automated voice assistant capable of generating realistic speech that can fool humans into thinking they are talking to another human. Such technologies have drawn sharp criticism due to their ethical implications, and have fueled a push towards transparency in human–machine interactions. Despite the legitimacy of these concerns, it remains unclear whether bots would compromise their efficiency by disclosing their true nature. Here, we conduct a behavioural experiment with participants playing a repeated prisoner’s dilemma game with a human or a bot, after being given either true or false information about the nature of their associate. We find that bots do better than humans at inducing cooperation, but that disclosing their true nature negates this superior efficiency. Human participants do not recover from their prior bias against bots despite experiencing cooperative attitudes exhibited by bots over time. These results highlight the need to set standards for the efficiency cost we are willing to pay in order for machines to be transparent about their non-human nature."
Can a computer fool you into thinking it is human? - "Brian Christian, author of The Most Human Human, a book about the Turing test, points out that most modern chatbots do not even try to pass it.There are exceptions: Ivana-esque chatbots were used by Ashley Madison, a website designed to facilitate extramarital affairs, to hide the fact that very few human women used the site. It seems we are less likely to notice a chatbot is not human when it plugs directly into our libido.Another tactic is to wind us up. The MGonz chatbot tricks people by starting an exchange of insults. Politics - perhaps most notoriously the 2016 US election campaign - is well-seasoned with social media chatbots pretending to be outraged citizens, tweeting lies and insulting memes... The economist Adam Smith explained in the late 1700s that productivity is built on a process of dividing up labour into small specialised tasks. Modern chatbots work on the same principle.This logic leads economists today to argue that automation reshapes jobs rather than destroying them. Jobs are sliced into tasks. Computers take over the routine tasks and humans supply the creativity and adaptability."
Hot or bot? How to tell if your Tinder match is a real live human - "It can take a while for a bot to trip up and reveal its non-human self, since online dating conversations between actual humans tend to be superficial at the beginning regardless.No one knows this better than Robert Epstein, a Harvard-educated psychologist and expert on artificial intelligence who was duped by a chatbot years ago, in the days before Tinder. Epstein was "dating" a woman he met through an online dating service for months, under the auspices that she was a Russian immigrant (which explained her sometimes poor English) Eventually, however, he started to get suspicious from their complete lack of phone calls and the fact that no progress was being made on actually meeting in person. Perhaps she wasn't real, he thought, but how can you ask a robot who might be a human if she's really a robot and not sound like a jerk?So he tried this instead. "I tricked the Russian chatbot by typing random alphabet letters—one of the simplest tricks," Epstein told me. "She/it replied as if I had sent real speech."Specifically, he sent a sentence that read "asdf;kj as;kj I;jkj;j ;kasdkljk ;klkj ‘klasdfk; asjdfkj. With love, /Robert." The bot, not understanding the first part, simply ignored it and responded with more details about her family.Other chatbots will use similar tactics when random letters are introduced. For instance, if you say, "I love jkhfkdjh," the bot might respond, "What do you love about jfhfkdjh?" simply repeating the phrase back to you. A human would likely respond, "WTF?"... Epstein tried his hand at online dating again after his incident with "the Russian" and ran into another "female" bot. He chatted with her for a bit before the programmer himself cut off the conversation. "The programmer quickly realized who I was and confessed his deception (which he also made me promise not to reveal)," he told me. "He was very proud of his creation.""
Don’t Mention the Corpses: The Erasure of Violence in Colonial Writings on Southeast Asia
Ironically, trying to position colonial violence as unique is another form of historical erasure
Russian man sues Apple for 'turning him gay' - "The GayCoin cryptocurrency arrived with a note saying, "Don't judge until you try," according to the complaint."I thought, in truth, how can I judge something without trying? I decided to try same-sex relationships," the complainant wrote."Now I have a boyfriend and I do not know how to explain this to my parents ... my life has been changed for the worse and will never become normal again," he added."
Saudi Arabia: Unmarried foreign couples can now rent hotel rooms - "The government move comes amid efforts by Saudi Arabia to grow its tourism industry... The new visa regulations state that female tourists are not required to fully cover up but are still expected to dress modestly.Alcohol remains banned."
The Internet’s horrifying new method for installing Google apps on Huawei phones - "Just make a Chinese website your device's remote administrator. It'll be fine!... Huawei has already been asked if it is behind Lzplay, and honestly, at this point, that would probably be the best-case scenario, given how powerful Lzplay is. Huawei shot down this idea, though, and gave the following statement to Android Central: "Huawei's latest Mate 30 series is not pre-installed with GMS, and Huawei has had no involvement with www.lzplay.net."Further research is not really possible right now, since, as Wu writes, the Lzplay app is "obfuscated/encrypted by QiHoo Jiagu (奇虎加固), and is non trivial to reverse engineer." So somebody went out of their way to hide exactly what Lzplay is doing, so we have no idea how it works or who made it... If a Huawei-aligned entity created Lzplay for the purposes of alleviating Google app anxiety for potential Mate 30 customers, it really seems to have backfired now. The future state of apps like Google Pay is in flux, and Lzplay highlights just how shady and compromising life outside the Google ecosystem can be. Huawei could fix all of this by giving users full control over their devices and allowing them to unlock the bootloader, so normal Google app flashing techniques would work, but so far, it doesn't seem to want to do that."
Meet The Dominatrix Who Requires The Men Who Hire Her To Read Black Feminist Theory - "Over time, Mistress Velvet said she began “doing a lot of theorizing” about the power dynamics of a black woman holding that kind of supremacy over a white cisgender man. She began introducing black feminist theory into her sessions with clients, who’ve told her their relationship in that space has impacted their behavior outside of it.One client said he noticed he only held the door open for black women. Another, whom Mistress Velvet educated about the systemic oppression of black women, founded a nonprofit to support black mothers on Chicago’s South Side."
The clients are masochists after all
Why I ditched my therapist to hire a dominatrix instead - "In addition to more typical services like fetish play, bondage and corporal punishment, some professional dominatrixes offer life coaching services that focus on confidence-building and improving self-esteem, though many also offer help with anything from fitness goals, dating and professional development."
Math is racist: Seattle schools’ math curriculum looks at things like ‘Power and Oppression’ and ‘Resistance’ - "RealClearInvestigations’ Mark Hemingway brought our attention to this document headed, “SEATTLE PUBLIC SCHOOLS: K-12 Math Ethnic Studies Framework,” and it’s more frightening than Common Core ever dreamed of being. Apparently “Math Ethnic Studies” for kindergartners through high schoolers looks at things like “What does it mean to do math?” and, more importantly, “How is math manipulated to allow inequality and oppression to persist?”"
No wonder Americans are so bad at maths when indoctrination into grievance politics is prioritised
National bans on smacking children linked to less teenage violence - "The analysis found that thirteen-year-olds from places with full smacking bans were less likely to get into frequent fights as those from nations where it is allowed everywhere – in boys, who fought the most, the rates for frequent fighting were 8.5 per cent and 12 per cent respectively.This suggests “bans not only keep children safe from adults, but also from their peers”, says Alana Ryan, of the UK’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which has long campaigned for a ban on smacking in the home.But Catey Bunce of the Royal Statistical Society says this makes the mistake of assuming that a correlation between two things means one causes the second. It could be that the second causes the first – for instance teenagers who get into lots of fights might grow up to be tougher disciplinarians as parents, and so reject smacking legislation. Or perhaps both factors – smacking and teenage fights – are affected by a third, such as broader societal attitudes... Another caveat to the latest findings is that there was just a small difference in frequent fighting between countries with full bans, like Sweden, and partial bans, like England and the US. In boys the rates were 8.5 per cent versus 10 per cent, a gap too small to be statistically significant in this analysis."
This cross-sectional methodology is remarkably bad
Man who does not understand consent has right to pursue sex, court rules - "The court of protection has ruled that a man who cannot understand the issue of consent must be allowed to pursue sexual relationships.Mrs Justice Roberts ruled that the man, who has autism with impaired cognition and lives in a supported residential placement, has a “fundamental right to sex”.The court considers issues relating to people who might lack the mental capacity to make decisions.A clinical psychologist submitted a report saying that the 36-year-old man, referred to as JB, represents a “moderate risk” of sexual offending to women, particularly to those who are vulnerable, and that JB cannot understand that a woman’s consent is relevant in sexual situations, nor that attempting sex without consent is likely to be a criminal offence. However, the judge said that insisting that JB understands the issue of consent before being allowed to pursue sexual relationships would be discrimination because it would “impose on him a burden which a capacitous individual may not share”.She said not having that knowledge might result in criminal prosecution but JB was “entitled to make the same mistakes which all human beings can, and do, make in the course of a lifetime”. JB has never been charged with any criminal offence but because of his behaviour towards women he has been subject to a care plan by his local authority since 2014 which has imposed significant limitations on his freedoms... “The capacity test in civil law is set as low as possible so that, for example, a 70-year-old woman with dementia who sometimes can’t remember who her husband is, can’t be banned from having sex with him.“But there is an interesting tension in these cases which has never been tested in the supreme court illustrated in this case, where JB is judged to have capacity but is nevertheless 100% at risk of being arrested for a crime if he tries to have sex with someone without their consent.”"
Facebook exempts political ads from ban on making false claims - "Facebook has quietly rescinded a policy banning false claims in advertising, creating a specific exemption that leaves political adverts unconstrained regarding how they could mislead or deceive, as a potential general election looms in the UK.The social network had previously banned adverts containing “deceptive, false or misleading content”, a much stronger restriction than its general rules around Facebook posts. But, as reported by the journalist Judd Legum, in the last week the rules have narrowed considerably, only banning adverts that “include claims debunked by third-party fact-checkers, or, in certain circumstances, claims debunked by organisations with particular expertise”."
Or maybe having big tech be the arbiter of truth is inherently problematic
S’pore influencer accused of racism after posting photo of Sikh men’s turbans & calling them ‘obstructions’
Apparently if you're Sikh, you're suddenly transparent and are incapable of blocking visible light
Sikh peer quits Today programme's Thought for the Day slot after 35 years - "Lord Singh of Wimbledon has quit BBC Radio Four's Thought for the Day after more than three decades, blasting the over-sensitivity of the corporation's bosses.The peer, who has been a Sikh voice on the Today programme for 35 years, said the BBC tried to block him from discussing a guru from his religion who fought against the forced conversion of some Hindus to Islam in 17th century India.A celebrated interfaith activist, Indarjit Singh hit out at the BBC for its 'prejudice and intolerance' after he was told the broadcast, which did not criticise Islam, may have offended Muslims... He also hit out at the BBC's 'misplaced sense of political correctness' that forces contributers to only say non-controversial statements that no listener could complain about. Lord Singh told the newspaper: 'It was like saying to a Christian that he or she should not talk about Easter for fear of giving offence to the Jews.'... He was not informed of anyone listening being offended by his broadcast... 'The need for sensitivity in talking about religious, political or social issues have now been taken to absurd proportions with telephone insistence on trivial textual changes right up to going into the studio, making it difficult to say anything worthwhile.'The aim of Thought for the Day has changed from giving an ethical input to social and political issues to the recital of religious platitudes and the avoidance of controversy with success measured by the absence of complaints.'He said he believed Sikhism founder Guru Nanak and even Jesus Christ would not be 'allowed near Thought for the Day' if they were alive today."
Can a computer fool you into thinking it is human? - "Brian Christian, author of The Most Human Human, a book about the Turing test, points out that most modern chatbots do not even try to pass it.There are exceptions: Ivana-esque chatbots were used by Ashley Madison, a website designed to facilitate extramarital affairs, to hide the fact that very few human women used the site. It seems we are less likely to notice a chatbot is not human when it plugs directly into our libido.Another tactic is to wind us up. The MGonz chatbot tricks people by starting an exchange of insults. Politics - perhaps most notoriously the 2016 US election campaign - is well-seasoned with social media chatbots pretending to be outraged citizens, tweeting lies and insulting memes... The economist Adam Smith explained in the late 1700s that productivity is built on a process of dividing up labour into small specialised tasks. Modern chatbots work on the same principle.This logic leads economists today to argue that automation reshapes jobs rather than destroying them. Jobs are sliced into tasks. Computers take over the routine tasks and humans supply the creativity and adaptability."
Hot or bot? How to tell if your Tinder match is a real live human - "It can take a while for a bot to trip up and reveal its non-human self, since online dating conversations between actual humans tend to be superficial at the beginning regardless.No one knows this better than Robert Epstein, a Harvard-educated psychologist and expert on artificial intelligence who was duped by a chatbot years ago, in the days before Tinder. Epstein was "dating" a woman he met through an online dating service for months, under the auspices that she was a Russian immigrant (which explained her sometimes poor English) Eventually, however, he started to get suspicious from their complete lack of phone calls and the fact that no progress was being made on actually meeting in person. Perhaps she wasn't real, he thought, but how can you ask a robot who might be a human if she's really a robot and not sound like a jerk?So he tried this instead. "I tricked the Russian chatbot by typing random alphabet letters—one of the simplest tricks," Epstein told me. "She/it replied as if I had sent real speech."Specifically, he sent a sentence that read "asdf;kj as;kj I;jkj;j ;kasdkljk ;klkj ‘klasdfk; asjdfkj. With love, /Robert." The bot, not understanding the first part, simply ignored it and responded with more details about her family.Other chatbots will use similar tactics when random letters are introduced. For instance, if you say, "I love jkhfkdjh," the bot might respond, "What do you love about jfhfkdjh?" simply repeating the phrase back to you. A human would likely respond, "WTF?"... Epstein tried his hand at online dating again after his incident with "the Russian" and ran into another "female" bot. He chatted with her for a bit before the programmer himself cut off the conversation. "The programmer quickly realized who I was and confessed his deception (which he also made me promise not to reveal)," he told me. "He was very proud of his creation.""
Don’t Mention the Corpses: The Erasure of Violence in Colonial Writings on Southeast Asia
Ironically, trying to position colonial violence as unique is another form of historical erasure
Russian man sues Apple for 'turning him gay' - "The GayCoin cryptocurrency arrived with a note saying, "Don't judge until you try," according to the complaint."I thought, in truth, how can I judge something without trying? I decided to try same-sex relationships," the complainant wrote."Now I have a boyfriend and I do not know how to explain this to my parents ... my life has been changed for the worse and will never become normal again," he added."
Saudi Arabia: Unmarried foreign couples can now rent hotel rooms - "The government move comes amid efforts by Saudi Arabia to grow its tourism industry... The new visa regulations state that female tourists are not required to fully cover up but are still expected to dress modestly.Alcohol remains banned."
The Internet’s horrifying new method for installing Google apps on Huawei phones - "Just make a Chinese website your device's remote administrator. It'll be fine!... Huawei has already been asked if it is behind Lzplay, and honestly, at this point, that would probably be the best-case scenario, given how powerful Lzplay is. Huawei shot down this idea, though, and gave the following statement to Android Central: "Huawei's latest Mate 30 series is not pre-installed with GMS, and Huawei has had no involvement with www.lzplay.net."Further research is not really possible right now, since, as Wu writes, the Lzplay app is "obfuscated/encrypted by QiHoo Jiagu (奇虎加固), and is non trivial to reverse engineer." So somebody went out of their way to hide exactly what Lzplay is doing, so we have no idea how it works or who made it... If a Huawei-aligned entity created Lzplay for the purposes of alleviating Google app anxiety for potential Mate 30 customers, it really seems to have backfired now. The future state of apps like Google Pay is in flux, and Lzplay highlights just how shady and compromising life outside the Google ecosystem can be. Huawei could fix all of this by giving users full control over their devices and allowing them to unlock the bootloader, so normal Google app flashing techniques would work, but so far, it doesn't seem to want to do that."
Meet The Dominatrix Who Requires The Men Who Hire Her To Read Black Feminist Theory - "Over time, Mistress Velvet said she began “doing a lot of theorizing” about the power dynamics of a black woman holding that kind of supremacy over a white cisgender man. She began introducing black feminist theory into her sessions with clients, who’ve told her their relationship in that space has impacted their behavior outside of it.One client said he noticed he only held the door open for black women. Another, whom Mistress Velvet educated about the systemic oppression of black women, founded a nonprofit to support black mothers on Chicago’s South Side."
The clients are masochists after all
Why I ditched my therapist to hire a dominatrix instead - "In addition to more typical services like fetish play, bondage and corporal punishment, some professional dominatrixes offer life coaching services that focus on confidence-building and improving self-esteem, though many also offer help with anything from fitness goals, dating and professional development."
Math is racist: Seattle schools’ math curriculum looks at things like ‘Power and Oppression’ and ‘Resistance’ - "RealClearInvestigations’ Mark Hemingway brought our attention to this document headed, “SEATTLE PUBLIC SCHOOLS: K-12 Math Ethnic Studies Framework,” and it’s more frightening than Common Core ever dreamed of being. Apparently “Math Ethnic Studies” for kindergartners through high schoolers looks at things like “What does it mean to do math?” and, more importantly, “How is math manipulated to allow inequality and oppression to persist?”"
No wonder Americans are so bad at maths when indoctrination into grievance politics is prioritised
National bans on smacking children linked to less teenage violence - "The analysis found that thirteen-year-olds from places with full smacking bans were less likely to get into frequent fights as those from nations where it is allowed everywhere – in boys, who fought the most, the rates for frequent fighting were 8.5 per cent and 12 per cent respectively.This suggests “bans not only keep children safe from adults, but also from their peers”, says Alana Ryan, of the UK’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which has long campaigned for a ban on smacking in the home.But Catey Bunce of the Royal Statistical Society says this makes the mistake of assuming that a correlation between two things means one causes the second. It could be that the second causes the first – for instance teenagers who get into lots of fights might grow up to be tougher disciplinarians as parents, and so reject smacking legislation. Or perhaps both factors – smacking and teenage fights – are affected by a third, such as broader societal attitudes... Another caveat to the latest findings is that there was just a small difference in frequent fighting between countries with full bans, like Sweden, and partial bans, like England and the US. In boys the rates were 8.5 per cent versus 10 per cent, a gap too small to be statistically significant in this analysis."
This cross-sectional methodology is remarkably bad
Man who does not understand consent has right to pursue sex, court rules - "The court of protection has ruled that a man who cannot understand the issue of consent must be allowed to pursue sexual relationships.Mrs Justice Roberts ruled that the man, who has autism with impaired cognition and lives in a supported residential placement, has a “fundamental right to sex”.The court considers issues relating to people who might lack the mental capacity to make decisions.A clinical psychologist submitted a report saying that the 36-year-old man, referred to as JB, represents a “moderate risk” of sexual offending to women, particularly to those who are vulnerable, and that JB cannot understand that a woman’s consent is relevant in sexual situations, nor that attempting sex without consent is likely to be a criminal offence. However, the judge said that insisting that JB understands the issue of consent before being allowed to pursue sexual relationships would be discrimination because it would “impose on him a burden which a capacitous individual may not share”.She said not having that knowledge might result in criminal prosecution but JB was “entitled to make the same mistakes which all human beings can, and do, make in the course of a lifetime”. JB has never been charged with any criminal offence but because of his behaviour towards women he has been subject to a care plan by his local authority since 2014 which has imposed significant limitations on his freedoms... “The capacity test in civil law is set as low as possible so that, for example, a 70-year-old woman with dementia who sometimes can’t remember who her husband is, can’t be banned from having sex with him.“But there is an interesting tension in these cases which has never been tested in the supreme court illustrated in this case, where JB is judged to have capacity but is nevertheless 100% at risk of being arrested for a crime if he tries to have sex with someone without their consent.”"
Facebook exempts political ads from ban on making false claims - "Facebook has quietly rescinded a policy banning false claims in advertising, creating a specific exemption that leaves political adverts unconstrained regarding how they could mislead or deceive, as a potential general election looms in the UK.The social network had previously banned adverts containing “deceptive, false or misleading content”, a much stronger restriction than its general rules around Facebook posts. But, as reported by the journalist Judd Legum, in the last week the rules have narrowed considerably, only banning adverts that “include claims debunked by third-party fact-checkers, or, in certain circumstances, claims debunked by organisations with particular expertise”."
Or maybe having big tech be the arbiter of truth is inherently problematic
S’pore influencer accused of racism after posting photo of Sikh men’s turbans & calling them ‘obstructions’
Apparently if you're Sikh, you're suddenly transparent and are incapable of blocking visible light
Sikh peer quits Today programme's Thought for the Day slot after 35 years - "Lord Singh of Wimbledon has quit BBC Radio Four's Thought for the Day after more than three decades, blasting the over-sensitivity of the corporation's bosses.The peer, who has been a Sikh voice on the Today programme for 35 years, said the BBC tried to block him from discussing a guru from his religion who fought against the forced conversion of some Hindus to Islam in 17th century India.A celebrated interfaith activist, Indarjit Singh hit out at the BBC for its 'prejudice and intolerance' after he was told the broadcast, which did not criticise Islam, may have offended Muslims... He also hit out at the BBC's 'misplaced sense of political correctness' that forces contributers to only say non-controversial statements that no listener could complain about. Lord Singh told the newspaper: 'It was like saying to a Christian that he or she should not talk about Easter for fear of giving offence to the Jews.'... He was not informed of anyone listening being offended by his broadcast... 'The need for sensitivity in talking about religious, political or social issues have now been taken to absurd proportions with telephone insistence on trivial textual changes right up to going into the studio, making it difficult to say anything worthwhile.'The aim of Thought for the Day has changed from giving an ethical input to social and political issues to the recital of religious platitudes and the avoidance of controversy with success measured by the absence of complaints.'He said he believed Sikhism founder Guru Nanak and even Jesus Christ would not be 'allowed near Thought for the Day' if they were alive today."
Post ID: 6472747268644369120
Tuesday, December 17, 2019
Links - 17th December 2019 (3) (Bolivia/Evo Morales)
Bolivia’s election panel declares Evo Morales winner after contested tally; opponents demand second round - The Washington Post - "Bolivia’s government electoral tribunal on Thursday declared President Evo Morales outright winner in the election for a fourth term in office after a controversial vote count that sparked protests across the South American nation... Tensions continued to escalate in the Andean nation of 11 million, which this week became the latest in Latin America to erupt in violent anti-government demonstrations. Protesters burned and looted election offices Monday night after the socialist president emerged from an unexplained gap in the publication of election results in better shape than he entered it... [Morales] had warned the night before of a coup attempt led by “the right,” in coordination with foreign powers: “We have confronted it without violence, but I have to say, we are in a state of emergency to defend democracy.” Mesa, who has united opposition parties from the right and the left against Morales, called the accusation “incredible” and accused Morales of “maneuvering a massive fraud.” “If there is someone that systematically violates and breaks the constitutional rule of law, it’s Evo Morales,” said Mesa, who was president from 2003 to 2005. “He controls and gives orders to all the powers of the state.”... The Coordinator for the Defense of Democracy, a committee formed Wednesday by Mesa, other opposition leaders and civil society groups, called for “peaceful protests” until the government agrees to go to a second round of voting. The chief elections observer for the Organization of American States said Wednesday that Bolivian authorities had no valid explanation for the gap in publishing vote counts. The OAS, which met in Washington on Wednesday to discuss the election, has called the gap “surprising” and “worrying.” Gerardo de Icaza, the OAS director of electoral observation and cooperation, said the election should go to a second round, no matter the results of the first. “Given the context and the evidenced problems in this electoral process, it would still be a better option to go to a second round,” he said. On Thursday, the European Union agreed... The fact that he was running for a fourth term was controversial: After losing a referendum in 2016 that would have allowed him to sidestep term limits, he secured a court ruling that enabled him to run again anyway."
Of course online a lot of people were fulminating about a CIA coup and sharing the usual paranoid delusions and frothing denunciations
Bolivia: Researchers at risk for denouncing fraud | Amnesty International - "On 24 October Edgar Villegas, systems engineer and analyst, denounced irregularities in Bolivia’s general elections of 20 October on public TV. His study done with other academics pointed to large discrepancies between the preliminary count and the final electoral results that gave victory to incumbent president Evo Morales. Following the TV interview Villegas, his family, and Mónica Ximena Galarza, the journalist who interviewed him, were intimidated. These incidents happened in a wider context of repression by the authorities in response to social protests following the election results."
The fall of Morales is a body blow to the Corbynista Left's utopian delusions - "There was a time when the fall of a Bolivian president in the middle of a British general election wouldn’t have made waves here. Jeremy Corbyn, however, is not one to let his own electioneering get in the way of a denouncing an imperialist coup anywhere. And he is right to sense the end of an era in the fall of Evo Morales.What happened on Sunday was not just another small political earthquake in the Andes. When enraged crowds chased the Bolivian president from office as a vote-cheat they punctured long-held Left-wing fantasies that Evo Morales was shaping an eco-socialist Shangri-la... Morales’ sudden fall is as bad a trauma for them as Chile in 1973. Jeremy Corbyn’s generation of Left-wingers never recovered from General Pinochet’s brutal toppling of the elected socialist Allende then. A CIA-steered military coup became their template for explaining why their hero of the moment failed to fulfil his revolutionary promises. Hoping to see their kind of popular uprising overthrow today’s elected conservative president in Chile, they ignored how, up the Andes in Bolivia, their own hero had squandered his political capital. Evo Morales lost a referendum on whether he could stand a fourth time, then stood anyway. Then he fiddled a first round lead into an outright win which fooled no one there but Corbynistas everywhere. Morales began life as an agitator for the small coca farmers’ lobby, disguised as an Indian rights organisation. However, over fifteen years in power – but unnoticed by the Corbynistas – Morales and his cronies had constructed the type of Latin American extraction-based economy which they normally denounce as neo-imperialist. After centuries of exporting silver, today’s Bolivia is a natural gas supplier to its neighbours and exporter of lithium to battery-makers around the globe. After early years when poverty fell sharply as the President re-orientated priorities to the poor, ordinary Bolivians had recently begun to grumble that the regime was putting itself first. Morales’ failure to detect his slipping popularity pointed to serious delusions of grandeur. Fuelled by praise for his regime from Western fellow travellers and even the IMF, he began to act like an elected Ceausescu. Thirty years after the fall of Romania’s communist dictator with his architectural megalomania and museum of gifts to himself, Morales was building a 25-storey presidential palace and a museum of his own life in his home town. Yet the political realities of in Latin America always came second in Corbynista minds to identifying the next Left-wing utopia somewhere up the Amazon."
Jeremy Corbyn condemns 'appalling coup' as Bolivia's Socialist President Evo Morales quits - "Mr Morales said yesterday he would resign after the military called on him to step down and allies deserted him following weeks of protests over accusations of election rigging."
Is there a left-wing authoritarian that Corbyn *doesn't* support?
BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, A 'wow' moment in Latin America - "[On Morales] He did good things at the beginning, admits Americo, but then it was all corrupt. Bolivians watched as he became increasingly undemocratic. First in 2016, he lost a referendum on whether to scrap presidential term limits. He appealed to the Supreme Court, stuffed full of his people, which ruled that it would be against his human rights if he were not able to run. It was at this point he lost a lot of goodwill. And then an election last month, pushed Bolivians over the edge. I was there. It was the most uncertain election since he had come to power, still loved by millions. But his popularity was waning. One opposition politician I spoke to foresaw all of this. If Evo wins in the first round, that means fraud, she told me. No data points to him being able to win this straight out. Sure enough, on the evening votes were counted, something strange happened. By the time more than 80% of votes had been tallied, it looked like Evo was going to have to go through to a second round. Then the counting stopped. It was odd. Then a tweet from the Organization of American States who'd been observing the vote, demanding that the government explain this mysterious pause. A colleague asked the electoral board for comment. Their reply: don't believe in fake news, please. But when the full count came in the next day, sure enough, Evo had won outright. Few people believed the result. And that was the start of weeks of unrest. The fear among some Bolivians was that Evo was taking Bolivia in the same direction as Nicolas Maduro, the socialist leader of Venezuela, a country rich in oil, but now an economic basket case. For a man who professed to be a very normal person, many were also outraged when Mr. Morales decided to build a new presidential palace in the heart of old La Paz"
Maybe the CIA forced Morales to rig the election
Terry Glavin: The delusional Euro-American ‘left’ locks in its revisionist tale of Bolivia - "Nearly three weeks had passed since the official vote tally had inexplicably frozen in Morales’ constitutionally dubious fourth run for the presidency in an election that would end up conclusively shown to have been rigged. There had been mounting chaos in the streets of La Paz, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, El Alto, Cochabamba, Sucre, Potosí — the whole country, in other words. Bolivia was writhing in rumour-fuelled leaderless pandemonium and riot... he’d been done in, Morales explained, by “racist, coup-plotting, right-wing sellouts.” Amplified by the Venezuelan propaganda channel Telesur, the storyline is now locked in. Slight variations are permitted. It was a CIA operation. Or it was a cunning plot by the Organization of American States to overthrow an anti-imperialist indigenous folk hero. Or it was a neoliberal conspiracy to enforce capitalism’s hegemony by capturing Bolivia’s vast lithium resources to turn them over to the wicked multinational corporations. Canadians are to be particularly ashamed, because by publicly noticing Bolivia’s corrupted elections, Chrystia Freeland, our foreign affairs minister, is once again serving as the hemispheric lickspittle and criminal accomplice of U.S. President Donald Trump. Since last Sunday, this delusional revisionism has been articulated and recapitulated in one iteration or another by British Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, by the upstart U.S. Democrats Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, by the New Democrats Niki Ashton and Jenny Kwan, by the Toronto Star’s Thomas Walkom, and by all the undead Chomskyite webzine pamphleteers who continue to suck the oxygen out of all the spaces in the Anglosphere where a properly radical internationalism might otherwise thrive... The “coup” storyline is also of a piece with the fashionable caricature of the crises in Venezuela and Nicaragua, where formerly “progressive” regimes have degenerated into brutal strongman states — which is exactly the direction in which Morales’ increasingly corrupt government was headed... The Bolivian uprising — and that’s what it can be called, or at least it is more accurate to call it that than to call it a “coup” — is in the same category as the current upheavals involving millions of ordinary people taking to the streets in Beirut, Moscow, Hong Kong, Santiago and Baghdad. These are insurrections against unaccountable, unresponsive and — almost always — despotic governments. The Euro-American “left” has had almost nothing to say about this phenomenon, which involves challenges to the entrenched establishment at least as radical as anything that the gringos have managed to mount in Paris, or San Francisco, or London, or Washington, since perhaps 1968... It’s a tragedy, and a great shame, that in his final years in power Morales began to corrupt the system he and his Movimiento Al Socialismo had built, almost from scratch. But that’s what he did. And when threatened by an almost certain electoral loss, Morales took the despot’s way out."
Of course online a lot of people were fulminating about a CIA coup and sharing the usual paranoid delusions and frothing denunciations
Bolivia: Researchers at risk for denouncing fraud | Amnesty International - "On 24 October Edgar Villegas, systems engineer and analyst, denounced irregularities in Bolivia’s general elections of 20 October on public TV. His study done with other academics pointed to large discrepancies between the preliminary count and the final electoral results that gave victory to incumbent president Evo Morales. Following the TV interview Villegas, his family, and Mónica Ximena Galarza, the journalist who interviewed him, were intimidated. These incidents happened in a wider context of repression by the authorities in response to social protests following the election results."
The fall of Morales is a body blow to the Corbynista Left's utopian delusions - "There was a time when the fall of a Bolivian president in the middle of a British general election wouldn’t have made waves here. Jeremy Corbyn, however, is not one to let his own electioneering get in the way of a denouncing an imperialist coup anywhere. And he is right to sense the end of an era in the fall of Evo Morales.What happened on Sunday was not just another small political earthquake in the Andes. When enraged crowds chased the Bolivian president from office as a vote-cheat they punctured long-held Left-wing fantasies that Evo Morales was shaping an eco-socialist Shangri-la... Morales’ sudden fall is as bad a trauma for them as Chile in 1973. Jeremy Corbyn’s generation of Left-wingers never recovered from General Pinochet’s brutal toppling of the elected socialist Allende then. A CIA-steered military coup became their template for explaining why their hero of the moment failed to fulfil his revolutionary promises. Hoping to see their kind of popular uprising overthrow today’s elected conservative president in Chile, they ignored how, up the Andes in Bolivia, their own hero had squandered his political capital. Evo Morales lost a referendum on whether he could stand a fourth time, then stood anyway. Then he fiddled a first round lead into an outright win which fooled no one there but Corbynistas everywhere. Morales began life as an agitator for the small coca farmers’ lobby, disguised as an Indian rights organisation. However, over fifteen years in power – but unnoticed by the Corbynistas – Morales and his cronies had constructed the type of Latin American extraction-based economy which they normally denounce as neo-imperialist. After centuries of exporting silver, today’s Bolivia is a natural gas supplier to its neighbours and exporter of lithium to battery-makers around the globe. After early years when poverty fell sharply as the President re-orientated priorities to the poor, ordinary Bolivians had recently begun to grumble that the regime was putting itself first. Morales’ failure to detect his slipping popularity pointed to serious delusions of grandeur. Fuelled by praise for his regime from Western fellow travellers and even the IMF, he began to act like an elected Ceausescu. Thirty years after the fall of Romania’s communist dictator with his architectural megalomania and museum of gifts to himself, Morales was building a 25-storey presidential palace and a museum of his own life in his home town. Yet the political realities of in Latin America always came second in Corbynista minds to identifying the next Left-wing utopia somewhere up the Amazon."
Jeremy Corbyn condemns 'appalling coup' as Bolivia's Socialist President Evo Morales quits - "Mr Morales said yesterday he would resign after the military called on him to step down and allies deserted him following weeks of protests over accusations of election rigging."
Is there a left-wing authoritarian that Corbyn *doesn't* support?
BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, A 'wow' moment in Latin America - "[On Morales] He did good things at the beginning, admits Americo, but then it was all corrupt. Bolivians watched as he became increasingly undemocratic. First in 2016, he lost a referendum on whether to scrap presidential term limits. He appealed to the Supreme Court, stuffed full of his people, which ruled that it would be against his human rights if he were not able to run. It was at this point he lost a lot of goodwill. And then an election last month, pushed Bolivians over the edge. I was there. It was the most uncertain election since he had come to power, still loved by millions. But his popularity was waning. One opposition politician I spoke to foresaw all of this. If Evo wins in the first round, that means fraud, she told me. No data points to him being able to win this straight out. Sure enough, on the evening votes were counted, something strange happened. By the time more than 80% of votes had been tallied, it looked like Evo was going to have to go through to a second round. Then the counting stopped. It was odd. Then a tweet from the Organization of American States who'd been observing the vote, demanding that the government explain this mysterious pause. A colleague asked the electoral board for comment. Their reply: don't believe in fake news, please. But when the full count came in the next day, sure enough, Evo had won outright. Few people believed the result. And that was the start of weeks of unrest. The fear among some Bolivians was that Evo was taking Bolivia in the same direction as Nicolas Maduro, the socialist leader of Venezuela, a country rich in oil, but now an economic basket case. For a man who professed to be a very normal person, many were also outraged when Mr. Morales decided to build a new presidential palace in the heart of old La Paz"
Maybe the CIA forced Morales to rig the election
Terry Glavin: The delusional Euro-American ‘left’ locks in its revisionist tale of Bolivia - "Nearly three weeks had passed since the official vote tally had inexplicably frozen in Morales’ constitutionally dubious fourth run for the presidency in an election that would end up conclusively shown to have been rigged. There had been mounting chaos in the streets of La Paz, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, El Alto, Cochabamba, Sucre, Potosí — the whole country, in other words. Bolivia was writhing in rumour-fuelled leaderless pandemonium and riot... he’d been done in, Morales explained, by “racist, coup-plotting, right-wing sellouts.” Amplified by the Venezuelan propaganda channel Telesur, the storyline is now locked in. Slight variations are permitted. It was a CIA operation. Or it was a cunning plot by the Organization of American States to overthrow an anti-imperialist indigenous folk hero. Or it was a neoliberal conspiracy to enforce capitalism’s hegemony by capturing Bolivia’s vast lithium resources to turn them over to the wicked multinational corporations. Canadians are to be particularly ashamed, because by publicly noticing Bolivia’s corrupted elections, Chrystia Freeland, our foreign affairs minister, is once again serving as the hemispheric lickspittle and criminal accomplice of U.S. President Donald Trump. Since last Sunday, this delusional revisionism has been articulated and recapitulated in one iteration or another by British Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, by the upstart U.S. Democrats Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, by the New Democrats Niki Ashton and Jenny Kwan, by the Toronto Star’s Thomas Walkom, and by all the undead Chomskyite webzine pamphleteers who continue to suck the oxygen out of all the spaces in the Anglosphere where a properly radical internationalism might otherwise thrive... The “coup” storyline is also of a piece with the fashionable caricature of the crises in Venezuela and Nicaragua, where formerly “progressive” regimes have degenerated into brutal strongman states — which is exactly the direction in which Morales’ increasingly corrupt government was headed... The Bolivian uprising — and that’s what it can be called, or at least it is more accurate to call it that than to call it a “coup” — is in the same category as the current upheavals involving millions of ordinary people taking to the streets in Beirut, Moscow, Hong Kong, Santiago and Baghdad. These are insurrections against unaccountable, unresponsive and — almost always — despotic governments. The Euro-American “left” has had almost nothing to say about this phenomenon, which involves challenges to the entrenched establishment at least as radical as anything that the gringos have managed to mount in Paris, or San Francisco, or London, or Washington, since perhaps 1968... It’s a tragedy, and a great shame, that in his final years in power Morales began to corrupt the system he and his Movimiento Al Socialismo had built, almost from scratch. But that’s what he did. And when threatened by an almost certain electoral loss, Morales took the despot’s way out."
Post ID: 8062550308491222634
A History Of The United States
A History Of The United States | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"The Revolution shaped the future of the country significantly less than the Constitution did. I mean, revolution is literally that, a revolving, a turning of the wheel. And Americans understood their revolution as a revolution that needed to stop. And in particular, they looked to France, whose revolution did not stop, and the wheel kept turning. The Revolution got bloodier and bloodier, and more and more anarchic. In the United States after the revolution, there was an, which was itself quite radical, there was an extraordinary amount of momentum to stop the wheel from turning anymore, and to kind of right the political order, and that momentum was all that was what led to the drafting and then the ratification of the Constitution in 1787.
The Constitution is not radical in the way that the Revolution was radical, the Constitution looks for stability. It's radical in the sense that it is an entire rejection of aristocracy. It is far more democratic than any frame of government anywhere else in the world at that time, but it is conservative in the sense of establishing three branches of government of course, along the order of the mixed constitution in England, that looks for stability in addition, attributing political power across groups… [The authors of the Constitution] all believed that it was essential to study history to even consider yourself as eligible for public service of any kind. And the, you know, the chief architect of the Constitution, James Madison of Virginia, spent a great deal of time reading history, and particularly making an inventory, essentially of all of the fates of every other Republican government in all of human history. Each of the drafters of the Constitution, each of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention made some version of that study...
‘How much should we need to understand the role of the media and of communications more generally, when we think about the history of the US?
‘I think it's very useful to have a few more data points then say the last five minutes which is I think what most of us walk around with in our head, or maybe you know, the time horizon that most of us carry around in our head about the influence of technologies of communication on political arrangements, maybe begins with, you know, the first iPhone or with the founding of Facebook, you know, these are developments in the last 15 years. I sought in this account to offer a time horizon that begins in 1492, with Christopher Columbus and his quill and his journal of printed you know, a paper on which he writes down what he what he sees and what he wants to report to the king and queen of Spain, that technologies of communication are and have always been crucial tools for the exertion of power. They have been tools both of tyrants and of democrats, people seizing power from tyrants so that when we think about you know in the US, oh, Black Lives Matter is a movement of the social, of social media, wouldn't have been possible without social media.
There are analogues throughout history that have that kind of emancipatory utopianism to them. Frederick Douglass in the 19th century, an escaped enslaved person who became a famous orator and one of the most important statesmen of the United States in the 19th century, believed that photography would end slavery, that same way, the sort of Black Lives Matter advocates think that social media and posting images of police brutality has this, you know, technologically carries this political capacity to upend existing political arrangements. Douglas thought that about photography, that if people could only see black men and women as they truly are, the way that a photograph captures you, as opposed to a racial caricature, which is really all that Americans had seen, White Americans had seen, that this would this would be kind of irrefutable evidence of the equality of all people’...
I tend to find solace in history because I genuinely think that you, I didn't want to die in childbirth, die of malaria, walk around with smallpox, pox on my face, see my children die in infancy, not be able to vote, like there's very little when you look at the past, there's like appeals to me. So I don't, I don't find solace in, I don't, I'm not nostalgic about the past. And I find that history that pedals nostalgia to be quite insidious. At the same time, I do find solace in the past because I see that people face struggles, not all together unlike struggles that many people are facing today, and nevertheless found a way through them."
"The Revolution shaped the future of the country significantly less than the Constitution did. I mean, revolution is literally that, a revolving, a turning of the wheel. And Americans understood their revolution as a revolution that needed to stop. And in particular, they looked to France, whose revolution did not stop, and the wheel kept turning. The Revolution got bloodier and bloodier, and more and more anarchic. In the United States after the revolution, there was an, which was itself quite radical, there was an extraordinary amount of momentum to stop the wheel from turning anymore, and to kind of right the political order, and that momentum was all that was what led to the drafting and then the ratification of the Constitution in 1787.
The Constitution is not radical in the way that the Revolution was radical, the Constitution looks for stability. It's radical in the sense that it is an entire rejection of aristocracy. It is far more democratic than any frame of government anywhere else in the world at that time, but it is conservative in the sense of establishing three branches of government of course, along the order of the mixed constitution in England, that looks for stability in addition, attributing political power across groups… [The authors of the Constitution] all believed that it was essential to study history to even consider yourself as eligible for public service of any kind. And the, you know, the chief architect of the Constitution, James Madison of Virginia, spent a great deal of time reading history, and particularly making an inventory, essentially of all of the fates of every other Republican government in all of human history. Each of the drafters of the Constitution, each of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention made some version of that study...
‘How much should we need to understand the role of the media and of communications more generally, when we think about the history of the US?
‘I think it's very useful to have a few more data points then say the last five minutes which is I think what most of us walk around with in our head, or maybe you know, the time horizon that most of us carry around in our head about the influence of technologies of communication on political arrangements, maybe begins with, you know, the first iPhone or with the founding of Facebook, you know, these are developments in the last 15 years. I sought in this account to offer a time horizon that begins in 1492, with Christopher Columbus and his quill and his journal of printed you know, a paper on which he writes down what he what he sees and what he wants to report to the king and queen of Spain, that technologies of communication are and have always been crucial tools for the exertion of power. They have been tools both of tyrants and of democrats, people seizing power from tyrants so that when we think about you know in the US, oh, Black Lives Matter is a movement of the social, of social media, wouldn't have been possible without social media.
There are analogues throughout history that have that kind of emancipatory utopianism to them. Frederick Douglass in the 19th century, an escaped enslaved person who became a famous orator and one of the most important statesmen of the United States in the 19th century, believed that photography would end slavery, that same way, the sort of Black Lives Matter advocates think that social media and posting images of police brutality has this, you know, technologically carries this political capacity to upend existing political arrangements. Douglas thought that about photography, that if people could only see black men and women as they truly are, the way that a photograph captures you, as opposed to a racial caricature, which is really all that Americans had seen, White Americans had seen, that this would this would be kind of irrefutable evidence of the equality of all people’...
I tend to find solace in history because I genuinely think that you, I didn't want to die in childbirth, die of malaria, walk around with smallpox, pox on my face, see my children die in infancy, not be able to vote, like there's very little when you look at the past, there's like appeals to me. So I don't, I don't find solace in, I don't, I'm not nostalgic about the past. And I find that history that pedals nostalgia to be quite insidious. At the same time, I do find solace in the past because I see that people face struggles, not all together unlike struggles that many people are facing today, and nevertheless found a way through them."
Post ID: 5355486764712590151
Links - 17th December 2019 (2) ("Male Privilege")
Baby batterer who left tot brain damaged then moaned about missing haircut appointment dodges jail - "A woman who left a baby brain damaged then moaned about missing a haircut appointment has been spared jail.Shannon Soutter walked free after a judge said it “neither appropriate or necessary” to lock her up.The 23-year-old attacked the wee girl over a two month period while apparently looking after her at a house in Arbroath, Angus .The child had brain injuries in April 2018 as well as fractures to her skull, ribs and ankle.She may also have permanent blindness with medics describing her prognosis as “poor”."
UK: Judge Releases Mother Who Went Clubbing With Infant Who Died While She Was Partying - "Marina Tilby, 26, from Aberaeron, Ceredigion, Wales, had been seen out nightclubbing with her baby boy before returning to a caravan with two men she had met on that night... Tilby was jailed for two years and four months by Swansea Crown Court... Judges later released Tilby at a London court of appeals after reducing the sentence to 16 months suspended."
Orwell & Goode on Twitter - "Men have no friends and women bear the burden" - Harpers Bazaar
"Men have no friends; women most affected"
After all, women are the primary victims of war even though men are the ones who die
Woman who said she was too pretty for jail gets no time - "Lauren Cutshaw went viral last year when she said she was too pretty to go to jail after she was arrested for DUI. The judge in her case seems to agree as Cutshaw, 34, is being given a sweet deal, including no time behind bars. She even gets to keep her driver's license. Cutshaw, a real estate agent from South Carolina, was pulled over after blowing through a stop sign at more than twice the speed limit on Aug. 5, 2018"
Brooke Skylar Richardson is found NOT GUILTY of murder or manslaughter - "The cheerleader who buried her baby in her backyard after giving birth in secret was found not guilty of murder, manslaughter and child endangerment on Thursday.Skylar Richardson, 20, had been facing life in prison if convicted of all the charges.They included aggravated murder, manslaughter, gross abuse of a corpse and child endangerment. She has also been charged with tampering with evidence but the judge removed that count during the trial... She was convicted of gross abuse of a corpse and now faces a maximum of one year behind bars... Skylar said she gave birth to a stillborn on the toilet in the upstairs bathroom of her family home in Carlisle, Ohio. She buried the baby afterwards in her backyard and was caught two months later when she tearfully confessed to a gynecologist what she had done.Prosecutors believe the baby was born alive and that Skylar killed her because she did not want her to intervene with her 'perfect life'.They also claimed that she set fire to it, initially basing the allegation on the finding from a pathologist who said the bones - once they had been excavated - looked burned.The pathologist later recanted her claim but before she did, detectives interviewed Skylar for a second time.During that interview she confessed to 'trying to cremate her a little' after being told by them repeatedly that they 'knew she did something with fire'... They also referred back to a text message Skylar sent her mother in the hours after she delivered the baby where she said she was happy to have her 'belly back'.The message read: 'I'm literally speachless (sic) with how happy am... I am literally so excited now just for dinner to wear something cute yayyyy my belly is back and now I'm takin(sic) this opportunity to make it amazing.'... they called on a psychologist who had treated Skylar when she was younger to testify.He said that she had been sexually abused... Prosecutors objected to the testimony, claiming it was irrelevant.Other witnesses called to the stand were high school teachers at her school who said she often sat with autistic children at lunch so that they did not have to eat alone, and her classmates who say she was so meek at school that they had to defend her from bullies... Her younger brother, Jackson, also testified.He described her as his 'best friend' and recalled how she would sneak food, like donuts, while her parents were not home. Skylar cried as he spoke.The defense's final witness was a marketing expert who had made a virtual design of the family's home.It is unclear why they called him beyond trying to humanize Skylar and show the bathroom where she gave birth and her bedroom."
Sydney Watson on Twitter - "Male privilege nutshelled - When a woman cannot pay child support, they get public housing. When a man cannot do the same, they get prison time."
FAQ: Do Women Have to Pay Child Support? - Mitchell & Crunk - "shocking is that non-custodial mothers are less likely to pay child support than non-custodial fathers. One-quarter of custodial mothers have not received child support payments from the father, while 32 percent of custodial fathers have not received payments from the mother, according to data provided by the U.S Census Bureau. Not only is nonpayment of child support common among both genders, non-payment tends to be more common among mothers mandated to pay it to their ex-spouses."
WATCH: Rape accuser 'attacks Neymar in Paris hotel' - "Footage reportedly showing Brazilian football star Neymar being attacked by the woman who has accused him of rape in a Paris hotel room has been shared online.The video is said to have been filmed in May, the day after the alleged sexual assault, and reportedly shows Neymar lying on a bed with accuser Najila Trindade Mendes de Souza before she begins to lash out at him. "But I'm going to hit you, you know why? Because you attacked me yesterday and left me here alone," she is heard shouting as the man said to be Neymar is seen attempting to defend himself."
Now they can prosecute him for filming her without consent
Moment teacher is seen kicking student's chair - as judge OVERTURNS her conviction for assault - "Kimberley Peschi, 42, of Galloway, was originally found guilty of simple assault after she was accused of pulling a 12-year-old student’s chair backwards at Belhaven Middle School in Linwood in 2017.The sixth-grader, whom she was supervising during lunch in the cafeteria, had been leaning back in the chair when Peschi kicked the legs out from the chair, causing him to fall and hit his head on the floor... Peschi can be seen walking across the room towards the student, wearing a lilac cardigan. She lifts her right leg and kicks out at his chair.The child can be seen toppling over before getting back up. The teacher walks away... Superior Court Judge John Rauh overturned the guilty verdict on May 3 this year and took the order requiring her to forfeit her teaching license off the table.Rauh said that, after looking at the video, Peschi’s claim that she was trying to stabilize the chair was 'plausible'"
Northwest Arkansas woman gets probation for framing husband with child porn, rape - "A Northwest Arkansas woman will serve six years of probation after admitting to framing her husband by putting child pornography on his phone and falsely telling police he sexually assaulted a girl."
Serial drink driver who crashed car after downing bottle of wine is spared jailed because she's a WOMAN - "Victoria Parry was told by a female judge if she was a man "it would be straight down the stairs" to prison but was instead handed a suspended sentence and a driving ban...
MEN are more likely to be jailed than women, Ministry of Justice figures have revealed.Ten per cent of male defendants were immediately sent to prison in 2017 - but just two per cent of women were.Men are also more likely to be hit with suspended sentences, with 6 per cent of defendants being handed one at court.But just three per cent of women get one.A massive 89 per cent of women were handed fines or community sentences - compared to a mere 78 per cent of men"
Meanwhile feminists are saying we shouldn't send women to prison - equality!
Male childcare worker: 'I face discrimination every day' - "I was working in a prep centre, in the kindy with 2-4 year olds. The kids were all having a nap, all was peaceful, and it seemed like an average day. A pair of parents walked past and clocked me, just sitting there.The next thing I knew, they’d reported me to the police for touching their child inappropriately.It hit me like a bus.They started an active campaign against me, even though I’d done nothing wrong.They put posters of my face with my name and where I worked, saying I was a child molester.It was plastered everywhere around traffic lights and in the streets. They spread lies about me throughout the community.I had to go for an interview with child protection services. I was terrified. I knew I’d done absolutely nothing wrong, but if I were found guilty of something it would affect my entire life... I had to be moved to another childcare centre. They said the claims had been proven to be false. They’d interviewed the parents and it turned out they’d put words in the little girl’s mouth.I asked why, and was told, “Because the parents don’t believe men should be working in childcare.”... I had a huge moment of clarity; this is the way society is now.Men are judged and the prejudice is fierce.The truth was, if I stayed in this line of work, every time I would move to a new centre I’d have to prove myself to be trustworthy. I’d have to start all over again.Ultimately, it would be just a matter of time before something awful like that happened again. And, it would only get more difficult as I got older. I saw a woman on the news recently who doesn’t let men babysit her kids. That’s the kind of discrimination I’m talking about.Children need men around in their life too. We’re not all monsters; some of us just love kids and want to be a positive influence.It’s a really negative side effect of feminist ideology - and it’s getting worse. We need to stop and think about what we’re teaching our children because they do pick up on it... Male teachers tell me, ‘Be very careful, anything you say can be used against you. You need to protect yourself.’... That’s it for me, I’ve decided to pursue a career in a different field.”"
Boy 15, made to sign sex offenders register after he and girl 15, swapped nudes - "The unnamed youngster got chatting to two girls – aged 15 and 17, while visiting the Future Farmers of America conference in 2012.Both girls believed they were in a relationship with the boy. The youngster, from Colorado, sent both a photo of his erect penis and asked them to send a naked selfie in return.After initially resisting, both girls sent the nude photo of themselves... A 2018 survey found that one in four teenagers polled had received a sext, with one in seven respondents admitting sending one themselves."
Yet even the older girl didn't have to register as a sex offender
Men need not apply: university set to open jobs just to women - "A Dutch engineering university is taking radical action to increase its share of female academics by opening job vacancies to women only.Starting on 1 July, the Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE) in the Netherlands will not allow men to apply for permanent academic jobs for the first 6 months of the recruitment process under a new fellowship program... Dutch and EU laws allow policies to recruit underrepresented groups"
So since men are underrepresented in universities, can universities open places just to them?
Ex-dinner lady who had sex with 14-year-old boy spared prison spell because it would have put her four children into foster care - "A FORMER dinner lady who had sex with a 14-year-old boy has been spared a prison term because it would have meant her four children would be put into foster care. Terri Spragg, 35, had sex with the young lad on several occasions – including on the kitchen floor – warned him not tell anyone because it was illegal."
Mother who killed her toddler twins will NOT face murder trial - "A mother who killed her 23-month-old twin son and daughter will no longer face a murder trial, a court heard today.Samantha Ford, 38, admitted manslaughter by diminished responsibility following the deaths of toddlers Jake and Chloe and the prosecution accepted her plea today... Ford, of Westwood, later admitted she had drowned the children after the breakdown of her marriage"
VIDEO: Woman Avoids Being Charged With Sexual Assault On Officer Despite Video - "“Oh yeah?” she yelled out seductively, as she rubbed her rear end against the officer’s thigh and pelvis. “You like that? You like that?”"
Drunk woman who had sex with 14-year-old at party is cleared of abuse - "Kimberly Abell, 33, seduced the 14-year-old in front of his friend after getting drunk at a teenager’s birthday party. A court heard she drank half a bottle of vodka, half a bottle of Disaronno liqueur and shots before asking the schoolboy: “Aren’t you going to f*** me?”... “She had previously had a conversation with the boy’s mother about their respective children, and would know roughly how old he was.”"
Judges told: 'be more lenient to women criminals' - ""It is now well recognised that a misplaced conception of equality has resulted in some very unequal treatment for women and girls.""
Apparently equality means being lenient to female criminals
UK: Judge Releases Mother Who Went Clubbing With Infant Who Died While She Was Partying - "Marina Tilby, 26, from Aberaeron, Ceredigion, Wales, had been seen out nightclubbing with her baby boy before returning to a caravan with two men she had met on that night... Tilby was jailed for two years and four months by Swansea Crown Court... Judges later released Tilby at a London court of appeals after reducing the sentence to 16 months suspended."
Orwell & Goode on Twitter - "Men have no friends and women bear the burden" - Harpers Bazaar
"Men have no friends; women most affected"
After all, women are the primary victims of war even though men are the ones who die
Woman who said she was too pretty for jail gets no time - "Lauren Cutshaw went viral last year when she said she was too pretty to go to jail after she was arrested for DUI. The judge in her case seems to agree as Cutshaw, 34, is being given a sweet deal, including no time behind bars. She even gets to keep her driver's license. Cutshaw, a real estate agent from South Carolina, was pulled over after blowing through a stop sign at more than twice the speed limit on Aug. 5, 2018"
Brooke Skylar Richardson is found NOT GUILTY of murder or manslaughter - "The cheerleader who buried her baby in her backyard after giving birth in secret was found not guilty of murder, manslaughter and child endangerment on Thursday.Skylar Richardson, 20, had been facing life in prison if convicted of all the charges.They included aggravated murder, manslaughter, gross abuse of a corpse and child endangerment. She has also been charged with tampering with evidence but the judge removed that count during the trial... She was convicted of gross abuse of a corpse and now faces a maximum of one year behind bars... Skylar said she gave birth to a stillborn on the toilet in the upstairs bathroom of her family home in Carlisle, Ohio. She buried the baby afterwards in her backyard and was caught two months later when she tearfully confessed to a gynecologist what she had done.Prosecutors believe the baby was born alive and that Skylar killed her because she did not want her to intervene with her 'perfect life'.They also claimed that she set fire to it, initially basing the allegation on the finding from a pathologist who said the bones - once they had been excavated - looked burned.The pathologist later recanted her claim but before she did, detectives interviewed Skylar for a second time.During that interview she confessed to 'trying to cremate her a little' after being told by them repeatedly that they 'knew she did something with fire'... They also referred back to a text message Skylar sent her mother in the hours after she delivered the baby where she said she was happy to have her 'belly back'.The message read: 'I'm literally speachless (sic) with how happy am... I am literally so excited now just for dinner to wear something cute yayyyy my belly is back and now I'm takin(sic) this opportunity to make it amazing.'... they called on a psychologist who had treated Skylar when she was younger to testify.He said that she had been sexually abused... Prosecutors objected to the testimony, claiming it was irrelevant.Other witnesses called to the stand were high school teachers at her school who said she often sat with autistic children at lunch so that they did not have to eat alone, and her classmates who say she was so meek at school that they had to defend her from bullies... Her younger brother, Jackson, also testified.He described her as his 'best friend' and recalled how she would sneak food, like donuts, while her parents were not home. Skylar cried as he spoke.The defense's final witness was a marketing expert who had made a virtual design of the family's home.It is unclear why they called him beyond trying to humanize Skylar and show the bathroom where she gave birth and her bedroom."
Sydney Watson on Twitter - "Male privilege nutshelled - When a woman cannot pay child support, they get public housing. When a man cannot do the same, they get prison time."
FAQ: Do Women Have to Pay Child Support? - Mitchell & Crunk - "shocking is that non-custodial mothers are less likely to pay child support than non-custodial fathers. One-quarter of custodial mothers have not received child support payments from the father, while 32 percent of custodial fathers have not received payments from the mother, according to data provided by the U.S Census Bureau. Not only is nonpayment of child support common among both genders, non-payment tends to be more common among mothers mandated to pay it to their ex-spouses."
WATCH: Rape accuser 'attacks Neymar in Paris hotel' - "Footage reportedly showing Brazilian football star Neymar being attacked by the woman who has accused him of rape in a Paris hotel room has been shared online.The video is said to have been filmed in May, the day after the alleged sexual assault, and reportedly shows Neymar lying on a bed with accuser Najila Trindade Mendes de Souza before she begins to lash out at him. "But I'm going to hit you, you know why? Because you attacked me yesterday and left me here alone," she is heard shouting as the man said to be Neymar is seen attempting to defend himself."
Now they can prosecute him for filming her without consent
Moment teacher is seen kicking student's chair - as judge OVERTURNS her conviction for assault - "Kimberley Peschi, 42, of Galloway, was originally found guilty of simple assault after she was accused of pulling a 12-year-old student’s chair backwards at Belhaven Middle School in Linwood in 2017.The sixth-grader, whom she was supervising during lunch in the cafeteria, had been leaning back in the chair when Peschi kicked the legs out from the chair, causing him to fall and hit his head on the floor... Peschi can be seen walking across the room towards the student, wearing a lilac cardigan. She lifts her right leg and kicks out at his chair.The child can be seen toppling over before getting back up. The teacher walks away... Superior Court Judge John Rauh overturned the guilty verdict on May 3 this year and took the order requiring her to forfeit her teaching license off the table.Rauh said that, after looking at the video, Peschi’s claim that she was trying to stabilize the chair was 'plausible'"
Northwest Arkansas woman gets probation for framing husband with child porn, rape - "A Northwest Arkansas woman will serve six years of probation after admitting to framing her husband by putting child pornography on his phone and falsely telling police he sexually assaulted a girl."
Serial drink driver who crashed car after downing bottle of wine is spared jailed because she's a WOMAN - "Victoria Parry was told by a female judge if she was a man "it would be straight down the stairs" to prison but was instead handed a suspended sentence and a driving ban...
MEN are more likely to be jailed than women, Ministry of Justice figures have revealed.Ten per cent of male defendants were immediately sent to prison in 2017 - but just two per cent of women were.Men are also more likely to be hit with suspended sentences, with 6 per cent of defendants being handed one at court.But just three per cent of women get one.A massive 89 per cent of women were handed fines or community sentences - compared to a mere 78 per cent of men"
Meanwhile feminists are saying we shouldn't send women to prison - equality!
Male childcare worker: 'I face discrimination every day' - "I was working in a prep centre, in the kindy with 2-4 year olds. The kids were all having a nap, all was peaceful, and it seemed like an average day. A pair of parents walked past and clocked me, just sitting there.The next thing I knew, they’d reported me to the police for touching their child inappropriately.It hit me like a bus.They started an active campaign against me, even though I’d done nothing wrong.They put posters of my face with my name and where I worked, saying I was a child molester.It was plastered everywhere around traffic lights and in the streets. They spread lies about me throughout the community.I had to go for an interview with child protection services. I was terrified. I knew I’d done absolutely nothing wrong, but if I were found guilty of something it would affect my entire life... I had to be moved to another childcare centre. They said the claims had been proven to be false. They’d interviewed the parents and it turned out they’d put words in the little girl’s mouth.I asked why, and was told, “Because the parents don’t believe men should be working in childcare.”... I had a huge moment of clarity; this is the way society is now.Men are judged and the prejudice is fierce.The truth was, if I stayed in this line of work, every time I would move to a new centre I’d have to prove myself to be trustworthy. I’d have to start all over again.Ultimately, it would be just a matter of time before something awful like that happened again. And, it would only get more difficult as I got older. I saw a woman on the news recently who doesn’t let men babysit her kids. That’s the kind of discrimination I’m talking about.Children need men around in their life too. We’re not all monsters; some of us just love kids and want to be a positive influence.It’s a really negative side effect of feminist ideology - and it’s getting worse. We need to stop and think about what we’re teaching our children because they do pick up on it... Male teachers tell me, ‘Be very careful, anything you say can be used against you. You need to protect yourself.’... That’s it for me, I’ve decided to pursue a career in a different field.”"
Boy 15, made to sign sex offenders register after he and girl 15, swapped nudes - "The unnamed youngster got chatting to two girls – aged 15 and 17, while visiting the Future Farmers of America conference in 2012.Both girls believed they were in a relationship with the boy. The youngster, from Colorado, sent both a photo of his erect penis and asked them to send a naked selfie in return.After initially resisting, both girls sent the nude photo of themselves... A 2018 survey found that one in four teenagers polled had received a sext, with one in seven respondents admitting sending one themselves."
Yet even the older girl didn't have to register as a sex offender
Men need not apply: university set to open jobs just to women - "A Dutch engineering university is taking radical action to increase its share of female academics by opening job vacancies to women only.Starting on 1 July, the Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE) in the Netherlands will not allow men to apply for permanent academic jobs for the first 6 months of the recruitment process under a new fellowship program... Dutch and EU laws allow policies to recruit underrepresented groups"
So since men are underrepresented in universities, can universities open places just to them?
Ex-dinner lady who had sex with 14-year-old boy spared prison spell because it would have put her four children into foster care - "A FORMER dinner lady who had sex with a 14-year-old boy has been spared a prison term because it would have meant her four children would be put into foster care. Terri Spragg, 35, had sex with the young lad on several occasions – including on the kitchen floor – warned him not tell anyone because it was illegal."
Mother who killed her toddler twins will NOT face murder trial - "A mother who killed her 23-month-old twin son and daughter will no longer face a murder trial, a court heard today.Samantha Ford, 38, admitted manslaughter by diminished responsibility following the deaths of toddlers Jake and Chloe and the prosecution accepted her plea today... Ford, of Westwood, later admitted she had drowned the children after the breakdown of her marriage"
VIDEO: Woman Avoids Being Charged With Sexual Assault On Officer Despite Video - "“Oh yeah?” she yelled out seductively, as she rubbed her rear end against the officer’s thigh and pelvis. “You like that? You like that?”"
Drunk woman who had sex with 14-year-old at party is cleared of abuse - "Kimberly Abell, 33, seduced the 14-year-old in front of his friend after getting drunk at a teenager’s birthday party. A court heard she drank half a bottle of vodka, half a bottle of Disaronno liqueur and shots before asking the schoolboy: “Aren’t you going to f*** me?”... “She had previously had a conversation with the boy’s mother about their respective children, and would know roughly how old he was.”"
Judges told: 'be more lenient to women criminals' - ""It is now well recognised that a misplaced conception of equality has resulted in some very unequal treatment for women and girls.""
Apparently equality means being lenient to female criminals
Post ID: 864793611317312787
Joan Robinson on Marxist Economics, National Accounting and Exploitation
"How does the law of value, which was devised to penetrate the disguises of capitalism, turn out in a socialist economy?
First of all, labour-value as a unit of measurement of National Income is quite useless. We cannot estimate the total value of the goods produced in a year by simply totting up the hours of labour that have gone into them.
To begin with there is the problem of distinguishing between productive and unproductive labour...
Adam Smith is groping for the concept of labour which contributes to the process of accumulation. Marx took over the distinction between productive and unproductive labour. He includes transport as productive, but excludes commerce. In practice, in calculating National Income in the socialist countries, the line seems to be drawn between physical commodities and services. Thus a hat is part of National Income, but a hair-do is not. There may be very good empirical reasons for this procedure. A growth of productivity can be measured much more easily when there is a physical output (though differences in quality are hard to catch), while services can only be valued at what they cost. But from a philosophical point of view the distinction between value-producing labour and the rest is not very easy to understand...
Value is the product not of the hours of work actually expended on a job, but of socially necessary labour time. Marx was careful to avoid the absurd argument that the products of a slow worker contain more value than the product of an efficient one. Technical progress and accumulation of capital equipment reduce the value of given commodities, and when obsolete methods are still being used side by side with superior techniques or when some groups of workers are using more mechanical equipment than others, and at the same time some are more efficient than others within each group, how can we work out the exact figure for the socially necessary labour time for each branch of production?...
In practice the socialist economists have to tot up their National Incomes in money terms, and they have just the same problems about index numbers, the same puzzles about historic versus replacement cost, the same temptation to make figures mean more than they can, as their capitalist colleagues. The theory of value does not help them in the least...
At the same time the socialist economy is proud to show a faster rate of accumulation than any capitalist economy has ever done. To have labelled investable resources ‘exploitation’ and ‘unpaid labour’ is somewhat embarrassing. To argue that the capitalists extract surplus for their own benefit while the social planners are concerned with the good of society is to argue on the subjective, moral plane; objectively considered, the capitalists in Marx’s scheme were an organ or society whose function was to secure accumulation, just like the socialist planners. As Keynes puts it: ‘Like bees they saved and accumulated, not less to the advantage of the whole community because they themselves held narrower ends in prospect.’ As we see nowadays in South-East Asia or the Caribbean, the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all. Here the law of value develops a kind of squint that leaves one deeply confused...
Among all the various meanings of value, there has been one all this time under the surface, the old concept of a Just Price — the principle that made Adam Smith’s hunters swap their game on the basis of the time that each species usually took to catch. It is the meaning that is wanted here. Prices ought to be such (subject to political expediency) that a day’s work in the country and in the town brings in about the same income. But even when this is granted as an ideal there still remains the problem of calculating what is to be considered an equivalent income for individuals leading quite different kinds of life in different environments. Value will not help. It has no operational content. It is just a word."
--- Economic Philosophy / Joan Robinson
First of all, labour-value as a unit of measurement of National Income is quite useless. We cannot estimate the total value of the goods produced in a year by simply totting up the hours of labour that have gone into them.
To begin with there is the problem of distinguishing between productive and unproductive labour...
Adam Smith is groping for the concept of labour which contributes to the process of accumulation. Marx took over the distinction between productive and unproductive labour. He includes transport as productive, but excludes commerce. In practice, in calculating National Income in the socialist countries, the line seems to be drawn between physical commodities and services. Thus a hat is part of National Income, but a hair-do is not. There may be very good empirical reasons for this procedure. A growth of productivity can be measured much more easily when there is a physical output (though differences in quality are hard to catch), while services can only be valued at what they cost. But from a philosophical point of view the distinction between value-producing labour and the rest is not very easy to understand...
Value is the product not of the hours of work actually expended on a job, but of socially necessary labour time. Marx was careful to avoid the absurd argument that the products of a slow worker contain more value than the product of an efficient one. Technical progress and accumulation of capital equipment reduce the value of given commodities, and when obsolete methods are still being used side by side with superior techniques or when some groups of workers are using more mechanical equipment than others, and at the same time some are more efficient than others within each group, how can we work out the exact figure for the socially necessary labour time for each branch of production?...
In practice the socialist economists have to tot up their National Incomes in money terms, and they have just the same problems about index numbers, the same puzzles about historic versus replacement cost, the same temptation to make figures mean more than they can, as their capitalist colleagues. The theory of value does not help them in the least...
At the same time the socialist economy is proud to show a faster rate of accumulation than any capitalist economy has ever done. To have labelled investable resources ‘exploitation’ and ‘unpaid labour’ is somewhat embarrassing. To argue that the capitalists extract surplus for their own benefit while the social planners are concerned with the good of society is to argue on the subjective, moral plane; objectively considered, the capitalists in Marx’s scheme were an organ or society whose function was to secure accumulation, just like the socialist planners. As Keynes puts it: ‘Like bees they saved and accumulated, not less to the advantage of the whole community because they themselves held narrower ends in prospect.’ As we see nowadays in South-East Asia or the Caribbean, the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all. Here the law of value develops a kind of squint that leaves one deeply confused...
Among all the various meanings of value, there has been one all this time under the surface, the old concept of a Just Price — the principle that made Adam Smith’s hunters swap their game on the basis of the time that each species usually took to catch. It is the meaning that is wanted here. Prices ought to be such (subject to political expediency) that a day’s work in the country and in the town brings in about the same income. But even when this is granted as an ideal there still remains the problem of calculating what is to be considered an equivalent income for individuals leading quite different kinds of life in different environments. Value will not help. It has no operational content. It is just a word."
--- Economic Philosophy / Joan Robinson
Post ID: 3405765319267276040
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