BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Why are people putting chemicals in our food?
"‘We know that there’s about 12,000 materials responsible for the flavour and aroma of food... if we analyze a raspberry, for example, we’ll find that there are 250 components responsible for the flavor of that raspberry. You can't make a raspberry flavor commercially with 250 components and try and match it. So what you have to do is, is look at how you combine those materials to make a raspberry flavor say from 12 components, and then use those materials to make that, that flavor that'll work technically in the end application. So the raspberry flavor we’ll make for ice cream will be different to what we might make for a yogurt, which might be different than what we might make that might go into a cake or a biscuit... at different fat levels, for example, and the fact that if you're going to eat ice cream that's very cold, your flavor perception is different. So you might need to emphasize different aspects of that flavor.’...
‘Phytochemicals are small… secondary metabolytes. So plants produce those chemicals to defend themselves from pests and diseases. So they're a defense mechanism to most plants. So they serve really almost the same purpose to humans who eat it, they are good antioxidants’...
‘They're also involved in some pretty wacky projects like recreating the smell of space’…
‘Many years ago, I got approached by the curator of an art gallery in the north of England and he wanted to do a project called impossible smells. So to begin with, he had ideas like what would it smell like inside a coffin? After someone was buried and things like that. So after we left behind some other crazy ideas like that we concentrated on things like what would it smell like inside the Mir space station when it was allowed to crash back to earth and burn up. And because of that, I got approached them by other people and one of them was a project to help train astronauts for NASA. And when the astronauts are walking outside the the space capsule and what have you, when they get back inside they and they repressurize they experience a particular sensation of smell... we had interviews with three or four astronauts that had walked outside. They were very consistent actually in their descriptions, and they were typically along the lines of hot metal and fried steak... You almost get the idea that this is your barbecue, right? So so that's the kind of thing that we created’...
'A bag of salad. The ingredients that as you might expect, mix leaves, spinach, lamb’s lettuce, red chard and beetroot leaves. Sounds pretty unprocessed, but my research suggests there might be other ingredients in this salad that aren't on the label. For instance, to ensure it's safe, salad can be washed in a chlorine solution. There may also be processing aids that stop the leaves from turning yellow or wilting. The bag might be pumped with gases, which keep the food from rotting. But as I look at this label, I would be none the wiser to any of these possible processes.'...
‘In the US do people really care about whether something's natural or synthetic?’
‘Absolutely. There is a great amount of interest and I would say an unprecedented interest in food. I usually say never before has food and what's in food been blamed for what ails humanity today, and never before has it been more important to understand what's in food and what should be in food. Not only to understand the problem, but also as a solution and to make a tangible difference. So, today, Americans tend to be more accepting than the rest of the world. Maybe because it is their culture to adopt things quickly. They've, you know, the entire country is made up of people that came from somewhere else and adopted and adapted to different things.
The reason why I believe synthetic products are not as demonized in the United States, as they are in the rest of the world may come from the lack of education and knowledge and a state of ignorance. And let me explain that. There's a fear of packaged foods in the rest of the world. And there's a fear that what is being consumed might harm you. But these are the same foods that supported us, our troops during wars and the disadvantaged when disasters strike. When you go to a relief camp, we are giving them packaged foods. But people now have this fear of sugar and salt and chemical substances, which actually can make food better for you, accessible. They fear preservatives, synthetics that can make food safer, and they fear flavors and colours that add so much more to the enjoyment of food. But there's another concept and that is dose makes the poison. So there's a concept of moderation’...
‘Synthetic vanilla, I think a lot of it's used with the petrochemical precursor and so you say you know blame is placed on these, the idea that there's something dangerous in our food, but those don't sound like things we should be eating’
‘Right, but petroleum for that matter, what could be more natural than petroleum?’...
‘The two main versions of vanillin that are made at the moment, one comes from the wood pulp industry. So that is not considered a natural source. And one of the most common areas in this product is allowed in the USA as well is converting eugenol, so chemistry. If you look at the chemistry, the eugenol molecule that comes from clove oil is very close to being the same molecule as vanillin. So it's quite a simple piece of chemistry. In Europe, we don't allow that to be called natural.’...
‘As someone who teaches food safety regulations and works very closely with the regulatory clearance of ingredients, I can tell you this much. In the United States, the FDA will not allow an ingredient unless it has been tested and shown to be safe. There's another aspect of it and that is the testing part of it. Although today people want things that are natural in their food products, it must be pointed out that using a synthetic molecule that has been highly tested is safer than this molecule that is come from something natural has not been tested and that may come with some other molecules, which may not be as safe for continued use’"
L'origine de Bert
Sunday, April 26, 2020
Links - 26th April 2020 (2)
Cosplay as "Local Malaysian Girl" at Tesco - YouTube
Edinburgh law student Robbie Travers who ridiculed Isis is accused of hate crime | News | The Times - "Edinburgh University is investigating a law student over claims that he mocked Islamic State on social media and put “minority students at risk and in a state of panic and fear”... One of his Facebook postings came after the US air force dropped a “massive ordnance air bomb” on an Isis stronghold in Afghanistan in April.Mr Travers wrote: “Excellent news that the US administration and Trump ordered an accurate strike on an IS network of tunnels in Afghanistan.“I’m glad we could bring these barbarians a step closer to collecting their 72 virgins.”Esme Allman, a second-year history student and the former black and ethnic minority convenor of the university’s students’ association, filed a complaint to the university. Another complaint, made on her behalf, said: “Not only do I believe this behaviour to be in breach of the student code of conduct, but his decision to target the BME Liberation Group at the University of Edinburgh, and how he has chosen to do so, puts minority students at risk and in a state of panic and fear while attending the University of Edinburgh.”... One of the complaints against Mr Travers says: “While I have not met him personally, given my matriculation at the University of Edinburgh, my membership of the Black and Minority Ethnic Liberation Group at the university, and how I identify personally, I take issue with this clear and persistent denigration and disparagement of protected characteristics and blatant Islamophobia.”Mr Travers said that Ms Allman’s complaint was hypocritical and posted a comment that she is alleged to have made in which black men were described as “trash”. In her own Facebook post, which has been seen by The Times, Ms Allman wrote: “To conclude, black men are trash. All men are trash.” The complaint on Allman's behalf said that “Travers published a decontextualised quote by Allman from a privileged conversation generated by minority students in a safe space he is neither subscribed to nor a member of, without her consent”.Mr Travers said that he would not “be intimidated into being silenced, and will continue to make criticism of hateful ideas, supremacist ideas and beyond regardless of any characteristic of the individual promoting the ideology”."
I thought ISIS had nothing to do with Islam
Does this mean that all minorities are Muslim?
Guy Travels 2,400 km to Surprise GF, Finds Her in Another Man’s Arms - "He was so excited to see his girlfriend and even prepared a beautiful surprise as he bought a teddy bear mascot to wear for the lovely moment."
Is Dentistry a Science? - The Atlantic - "Common dental procedures are not always as safe, effective, or durable as we are meant to believe. As a profession, dentistry has not yet applied the same level of self-scrutiny as medicine, or embraced as sweeping an emphasis on scientific evidence. “We are isolated from the larger health-care system. So when evidence-based policies are being made, dentistry is often left out of the equation”... Consider the maxim that everyone should visit the dentist twice a year for cleanings. We hear it so often, and from such a young age, that we’ve internalized it as truth. But this supposed commandment of oral health has no scientific grounding... Today, an increasing number of dentists acknowledge that adults with good oral hygiene need to see a dentist only once every 12 to 16 months. Many standard dental treatments—to say nothing of all the recent innovations and cosmetic extravagances—are likewise not well substantiated by research. Many have never been tested in meticulous clinical trials. And the data that are available are not always reassuring... Fluoridation of drinking water seems to help reduce tooth decay in children, but there is insufficient evidence that it does the same for adults. Some data suggest that regular flossing, in addition to brushing, mitigates gum disease, but there is only “weak, very unreliable” evidence that it combats plaque. As for common but invasive dental procedures, an increasing number of dentists question the tradition of prophylactic wisdom-teeth removal; often, the safer choice is to monitor unproblematic teeth for any worrying developments. Little medical evidence justifies the substitution of tooth-colored resins for typical metal amalgams to fill cavities. And what limited data we have don’t clearly indicate whether it’s better to repair a root-canaled tooth with a crown or a filling. When Cochrane researchers tried to determine whether faulty metal fillings should be repaired or replaced, they could not find a single study that met their standards. “The body of evidence for dentistry is disappointing,” says Derek Richards, the director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Dentistry at the University of Dundee, in Scotland. “Dentists tend to want to treat or intervene. They are more akin to surgeons than they are to physicians."... When physicians complete their residency, they typically work for a hospital, university, or large health-care organization with substantial oversight, strict ethical codes, and standardized treatment regimens. By contrast, about 80 percent of the nation’s 200,000 active dentists have individual practices, and although they are bound by a code of ethics, they typically don’t have the same level of oversight."
S’pore company lets you rent a date for S$60-S$200, no physical contact & only at public spaces - "Here’s Maybe.The concept appears to be modelled on sites like “Oh My Oppa”, where people rent a Korean guy to serve as a tour guide."
Lucas Lynch - "Would've loved to see what the Karen consensus on the Superbowl Halftime Show would've been if Lizzo or Missy Elliot had been the halftime featured artists, and the event featured them dancing in scantily clad outfits.Would the Seven Karen Army be screaming about objectification? Doubt it.Free sexual expression of women seems to be great, as long as they are unattractive in a traditional sense, for some weird reason.That this maps on to tendencies in female intrasexual competition I'm sure is just a total coincidence."
Lucas Lynch - "Superbowl LIII: *topless man* White Women: *Gushing*
Superbowl LIV: *2 women showing off* White Women: *Annoyed and making phone call*"
"The most true meme ever created does not exi...."
A freed terrorist strikes again: two stabbed in Streatham attack - "A terrorist wearing a fake suicide vest stabbed two people on a busy London high street on Sunday just days after his release from prison and while under surveillance by counterterrorism officers who shot him dead.Sudesh Amman, 20, had been automatically released from jail halfway through a three years and four month prison sentence for possessing a bomb making manual.Government sources on Sunday night admitted that there had been concerns about his behaviour but they were powerless to keep him behind bars... Up to 180 convicted Islamist terrorists have been released early from jail in the past two decades, analysis shows, and the Telegraph warned that Amman was due for release in the wake of the London Bridge attack... Amman was shot dead by plain clothes officers who had been following him within eight seconds of stabbing his first victim in the back in Streatham... Sunday's attack will raise questions about how a terrorist apparently under 24-hour surveillance was able to attack innocent people in broad daylight on a busy high street... The knife obsessed college student had been jailed for 3 years and four months in December 2018 after sharing an al-Qaeda magazine in a family WhatsApp group and had reached the automatic halfway release point in his sentence, including time served on remand."
I wonder what the manpower cost of following all these released terrorists is - quite apart from the harm of reoffending
Dainy Radical Love Bernstein on Twitter - "Still a powerful cartoon!" *Cartoon showing a GOP man smothering Justice*"
"Please be careful with sharing this image, it is very triggering for many of us to suddenly see a graphic image of a woman being held down like that.(Suffering a mild panic attack now.)"
Not a parody. How do these people live everyday life?
CNN Condemns D-Day Soldiers For Lack Of Diversity | The Babylon Bee - "Everyone was really happy that the Allied forces stopped Hitler. Everyone, that is, except CNN, who published a retrospective on the war this week, zeroing in on the real issue of Operation Overlord: no gay female trans POCs in any of the units."
How Serbian Immigrants Made an Ohio Town the ‘Fried Chicken Capital of the World' - "You can only try pahovana piletina in two places. One is Vojvodina, Serbia, where the unique style of fried chicken was born. The other is Ohio, where “Barberton-style fried chicken,” as it’s known there, became one small town’s claim to fame. What started as a comforting meal for an immigrant family came to define a community, turning a humble Ohio town into the “Fried Chicken Capital of the World.”... you fry the chicken low and slow in pork lard for 20 minutes... This “porcine baptism,” writes John T. Edge, author of Fried Chicken: An American Story, leaves the chicken “sheathed in a crisp but slightly chewy mantle.” Papich says the frying method leaves the poultry with soft, porky notes"
Socialist Venezuela Proposes To Privatize Its Collapsing Oil Industry - "Venezuela sits atop the world's largest proved reserves of petroleum, even bigger than Saudi Arabia's. In 2007, Venezuela's Bolivarian socialist government under President Hugo Chavez seized without compensation the assets of several private American oil production and service companies then operating in that country. In those heady days, global oil prices were ascending and would eventually peak in July 2008 above $132 per barrel. This oil price boom boosted Venezuela's GDP per capita to nearly $15,000 annually, thus bolstering Chavez's political popularity. But peak oil fears abated as they always do when demand draws forth more supply, causing prices to fall.In the succeeding years, socialist efficiency has had its totally predictable effects on the Bolivarian Republic's oil industry... This offer may be less than tempting to Big Oil since the Bolivarian Republic still owes billions to the oil companies whose property it seized 10 years ago."
Damn US sanctions!
Florida police make traffic stop and find bag full of drugs labeled 'Bag Full Of Drugs'
Is Paying a Premium for European Foods Worth It? - "Take Parmigiano-Reggiano, the Italian PDO and world-renowned hard cheese made with raw cow's milk. True Parmesan's sharp, nutty taste comes from the breed of cows, says Paxson, what they eat, the seasonality of the production cycle and the microbial environment where the cheeses are aged. “And then there's the skill embedded in these culinary traditions and this cuisine,” she says. “Does Parmigiano-Reggiano taste different from a similar cheese produced in Wisconsin? Of course it does.”Spanish olive oil is another prime example. According to Davis, Spain is much hotter and drier than Italy and Greece, leading to less bacteria growth on the olives, as well as less insects—including fruit flies. “This means the use of less pesticides for both a cleaner olive, and a cleaner oil,” he says. As with wine, dry and warm climates can stress the vines—something that in small quantities is good for the fruit and leads to a much more concentrated and stronger extra-virgin olive oil flavor profile... While Matt Accarrino, head chef at San Francisco's Michelin-starred SPQR, concedes that no great substitutes really exist for Parmigiano-Reggiano or balsamic vinegar of Modena (not currently on the EU tariff list), he maintains that a lot of how you experience food has to do with your environment, such as eating maple syrup taffies at a sugar shack in Quebec or sipping Scottish whisky at a distillery on the Isle of Islay... tariffs like these also offer both restaurateurs and consumers an opportunity to stop and reflect. “A lot of food is how it makes you feel,” he says, “and many of us have an emotional connection to French wine or Italian cheese,” from a Paris vacation we once took or an unforgettable meal. “These 'legacy foods' may serve as benchmarks and reference points [for our culinary experiences], but to rely on them solely?” Accarrino already incorporates ingredients like locally foraged sea urchin, and bacon and quail eggs from Bay Area producers into SPQR's dishes, because “I'm very conscious that we're an Italian-inspired restaurant in San Francisco. Italians from Puglia in the south don't cook with cheeses from northern Italy. They use what's in their own backyard. I think that these kinds of tariffs bring into light that sort of culinary cycle where you can say, 'what do we have right here?'”"
We need double blind taste tests
Edinburgh law student Robbie Travers who ridiculed Isis is accused of hate crime | News | The Times - "Edinburgh University is investigating a law student over claims that he mocked Islamic State on social media and put “minority students at risk and in a state of panic and fear”... One of his Facebook postings came after the US air force dropped a “massive ordnance air bomb” on an Isis stronghold in Afghanistan in April.Mr Travers wrote: “Excellent news that the US administration and Trump ordered an accurate strike on an IS network of tunnels in Afghanistan.“I’m glad we could bring these barbarians a step closer to collecting their 72 virgins.”Esme Allman, a second-year history student and the former black and ethnic minority convenor of the university’s students’ association, filed a complaint to the university. Another complaint, made on her behalf, said: “Not only do I believe this behaviour to be in breach of the student code of conduct, but his decision to target the BME Liberation Group at the University of Edinburgh, and how he has chosen to do so, puts minority students at risk and in a state of panic and fear while attending the University of Edinburgh.”... One of the complaints against Mr Travers says: “While I have not met him personally, given my matriculation at the University of Edinburgh, my membership of the Black and Minority Ethnic Liberation Group at the university, and how I identify personally, I take issue with this clear and persistent denigration and disparagement of protected characteristics and blatant Islamophobia.”Mr Travers said that Ms Allman’s complaint was hypocritical and posted a comment that she is alleged to have made in which black men were described as “trash”. In her own Facebook post, which has been seen by The Times, Ms Allman wrote: “To conclude, black men are trash. All men are trash.” The complaint on Allman's behalf said that “Travers published a decontextualised quote by Allman from a privileged conversation generated by minority students in a safe space he is neither subscribed to nor a member of, without her consent”.Mr Travers said that he would not “be intimidated into being silenced, and will continue to make criticism of hateful ideas, supremacist ideas and beyond regardless of any characteristic of the individual promoting the ideology”."
I thought ISIS had nothing to do with Islam
Does this mean that all minorities are Muslim?
Guy Travels 2,400 km to Surprise GF, Finds Her in Another Man’s Arms - "He was so excited to see his girlfriend and even prepared a beautiful surprise as he bought a teddy bear mascot to wear for the lovely moment."
Is Dentistry a Science? - The Atlantic - "Common dental procedures are not always as safe, effective, or durable as we are meant to believe. As a profession, dentistry has not yet applied the same level of self-scrutiny as medicine, or embraced as sweeping an emphasis on scientific evidence. “We are isolated from the larger health-care system. So when evidence-based policies are being made, dentistry is often left out of the equation”... Consider the maxim that everyone should visit the dentist twice a year for cleanings. We hear it so often, and from such a young age, that we’ve internalized it as truth. But this supposed commandment of oral health has no scientific grounding... Today, an increasing number of dentists acknowledge that adults with good oral hygiene need to see a dentist only once every 12 to 16 months. Many standard dental treatments—to say nothing of all the recent innovations and cosmetic extravagances—are likewise not well substantiated by research. Many have never been tested in meticulous clinical trials. And the data that are available are not always reassuring... Fluoridation of drinking water seems to help reduce tooth decay in children, but there is insufficient evidence that it does the same for adults. Some data suggest that regular flossing, in addition to brushing, mitigates gum disease, but there is only “weak, very unreliable” evidence that it combats plaque. As for common but invasive dental procedures, an increasing number of dentists question the tradition of prophylactic wisdom-teeth removal; often, the safer choice is to monitor unproblematic teeth for any worrying developments. Little medical evidence justifies the substitution of tooth-colored resins for typical metal amalgams to fill cavities. And what limited data we have don’t clearly indicate whether it’s better to repair a root-canaled tooth with a crown or a filling. When Cochrane researchers tried to determine whether faulty metal fillings should be repaired or replaced, they could not find a single study that met their standards. “The body of evidence for dentistry is disappointing,” says Derek Richards, the director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Dentistry at the University of Dundee, in Scotland. “Dentists tend to want to treat or intervene. They are more akin to surgeons than they are to physicians."... When physicians complete their residency, they typically work for a hospital, university, or large health-care organization with substantial oversight, strict ethical codes, and standardized treatment regimens. By contrast, about 80 percent of the nation’s 200,000 active dentists have individual practices, and although they are bound by a code of ethics, they typically don’t have the same level of oversight."
S’pore company lets you rent a date for S$60-S$200, no physical contact & only at public spaces - "Here’s Maybe.The concept appears to be modelled on sites like “Oh My Oppa”, where people rent a Korean guy to serve as a tour guide."
Lucas Lynch - "Would've loved to see what the Karen consensus on the Superbowl Halftime Show would've been if Lizzo or Missy Elliot had been the halftime featured artists, and the event featured them dancing in scantily clad outfits.Would the Seven Karen Army be screaming about objectification? Doubt it.Free sexual expression of women seems to be great, as long as they are unattractive in a traditional sense, for some weird reason.That this maps on to tendencies in female intrasexual competition I'm sure is just a total coincidence."
Lucas Lynch - "Superbowl LIII: *topless man* White Women: *Gushing*
Superbowl LIV: *2 women showing off* White Women: *Annoyed and making phone call*"
"The most true meme ever created does not exi...."
A freed terrorist strikes again: two stabbed in Streatham attack - "A terrorist wearing a fake suicide vest stabbed two people on a busy London high street on Sunday just days after his release from prison and while under surveillance by counterterrorism officers who shot him dead.Sudesh Amman, 20, had been automatically released from jail halfway through a three years and four month prison sentence for possessing a bomb making manual.Government sources on Sunday night admitted that there had been concerns about his behaviour but they were powerless to keep him behind bars... Up to 180 convicted Islamist terrorists have been released early from jail in the past two decades, analysis shows, and the Telegraph warned that Amman was due for release in the wake of the London Bridge attack... Amman was shot dead by plain clothes officers who had been following him within eight seconds of stabbing his first victim in the back in Streatham... Sunday's attack will raise questions about how a terrorist apparently under 24-hour surveillance was able to attack innocent people in broad daylight on a busy high street... The knife obsessed college student had been jailed for 3 years and four months in December 2018 after sharing an al-Qaeda magazine in a family WhatsApp group and had reached the automatic halfway release point in his sentence, including time served on remand."
I wonder what the manpower cost of following all these released terrorists is - quite apart from the harm of reoffending
Dainy Radical Love Bernstein on Twitter - "Still a powerful cartoon!" *Cartoon showing a GOP man smothering Justice*"
"Please be careful with sharing this image, it is very triggering for many of us to suddenly see a graphic image of a woman being held down like that.(Suffering a mild panic attack now.)"
Not a parody. How do these people live everyday life?
CNN Condemns D-Day Soldiers For Lack Of Diversity | The Babylon Bee - "Everyone was really happy that the Allied forces stopped Hitler. Everyone, that is, except CNN, who published a retrospective on the war this week, zeroing in on the real issue of Operation Overlord: no gay female trans POCs in any of the units."
How Serbian Immigrants Made an Ohio Town the ‘Fried Chicken Capital of the World' - "You can only try pahovana piletina in two places. One is Vojvodina, Serbia, where the unique style of fried chicken was born. The other is Ohio, where “Barberton-style fried chicken,” as it’s known there, became one small town’s claim to fame. What started as a comforting meal for an immigrant family came to define a community, turning a humble Ohio town into the “Fried Chicken Capital of the World.”... you fry the chicken low and slow in pork lard for 20 minutes... This “porcine baptism,” writes John T. Edge, author of Fried Chicken: An American Story, leaves the chicken “sheathed in a crisp but slightly chewy mantle.” Papich says the frying method leaves the poultry with soft, porky notes"
Socialist Venezuela Proposes To Privatize Its Collapsing Oil Industry - "Venezuela sits atop the world's largest proved reserves of petroleum, even bigger than Saudi Arabia's. In 2007, Venezuela's Bolivarian socialist government under President Hugo Chavez seized without compensation the assets of several private American oil production and service companies then operating in that country. In those heady days, global oil prices were ascending and would eventually peak in July 2008 above $132 per barrel. This oil price boom boosted Venezuela's GDP per capita to nearly $15,000 annually, thus bolstering Chavez's political popularity. But peak oil fears abated as they always do when demand draws forth more supply, causing prices to fall.In the succeeding years, socialist efficiency has had its totally predictable effects on the Bolivarian Republic's oil industry... This offer may be less than tempting to Big Oil since the Bolivarian Republic still owes billions to the oil companies whose property it seized 10 years ago."
Damn US sanctions!
Florida police make traffic stop and find bag full of drugs labeled 'Bag Full Of Drugs'
Is Paying a Premium for European Foods Worth It? - "Take Parmigiano-Reggiano, the Italian PDO and world-renowned hard cheese made with raw cow's milk. True Parmesan's sharp, nutty taste comes from the breed of cows, says Paxson, what they eat, the seasonality of the production cycle and the microbial environment where the cheeses are aged. “And then there's the skill embedded in these culinary traditions and this cuisine,” she says. “Does Parmigiano-Reggiano taste different from a similar cheese produced in Wisconsin? Of course it does.”Spanish olive oil is another prime example. According to Davis, Spain is much hotter and drier than Italy and Greece, leading to less bacteria growth on the olives, as well as less insects—including fruit flies. “This means the use of less pesticides for both a cleaner olive, and a cleaner oil,” he says. As with wine, dry and warm climates can stress the vines—something that in small quantities is good for the fruit and leads to a much more concentrated and stronger extra-virgin olive oil flavor profile... While Matt Accarrino, head chef at San Francisco's Michelin-starred SPQR, concedes that no great substitutes really exist for Parmigiano-Reggiano or balsamic vinegar of Modena (not currently on the EU tariff list), he maintains that a lot of how you experience food has to do with your environment, such as eating maple syrup taffies at a sugar shack in Quebec or sipping Scottish whisky at a distillery on the Isle of Islay... tariffs like these also offer both restaurateurs and consumers an opportunity to stop and reflect. “A lot of food is how it makes you feel,” he says, “and many of us have an emotional connection to French wine or Italian cheese,” from a Paris vacation we once took or an unforgettable meal. “These 'legacy foods' may serve as benchmarks and reference points [for our culinary experiences], but to rely on them solely?” Accarrino already incorporates ingredients like locally foraged sea urchin, and bacon and quail eggs from Bay Area producers into SPQR's dishes, because “I'm very conscious that we're an Italian-inspired restaurant in San Francisco. Italians from Puglia in the south don't cook with cheeses from northern Italy. They use what's in their own backyard. I think that these kinds of tariffs bring into light that sort of culinary cycle where you can say, 'what do we have right here?'”"
We need double blind taste tests
Post ID: 3378335604584191055
Saul David On The WW2 Battle Of Okinawa
Saul David On The WW2 Battle Of Okinawa | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"We should never lose sight of the fact that Truman and most of his seniors advisors were heavily influenced by the unutterable horror of the fighting on Okinawa, and actually interesting, not just the deaths of servicemen, but also the deaths of civilians. And although you may think that all of Truman's calculations come into play when he's trying to save American lives, actually, I don't think that's true. And he's gone on the record and did go on the record at the time saying, this wasn't just about American lives. This is about saving Japanese lives.
So when you get people criticizing and accusing the Americans of an atrocity by using those two nuclear weapons, you need to understand the context in which that decision is taken. And you need to understand the potential consequences for the loss of life, particularly among Japanese civilians in Japan, if the fighting had continued and the weapons hadn't been used. So yes, 200,000 lives lost isn't appalling tragedy, which is the estimate of lives lost to the use of those two nuclear weapons. But we also need to take account of the fact that many, many more lives would have been lost if they hadn't been used…
Basically, what's remarkable is that the the casualties [on Okinawa] didn't affect them [the Japanese] in the slightest. They didn't affect them in the slightest. They didn't particularly affect them. And this is even more chilling thought, Rob, after the first nuclear weapon was dropped on Hiroshima. So you know, it's interesting people say, well, you even if you justify the use of one bomb, why then use the second one? Because nothing had changed after those.
The Americans when they made the decision with the allies with Churchill and with Chiang Kai Shek, the Chinese nationalist leader to use the new nuclear weapons, they then put out a warning to Japan. It was a coded warning, to be fair because the Japanese had no idea that this weapon would be as destructive as it was, but they were making it pretty clear that you know, they were going to unleash terrible destruction. You could say okay, they were still a little bit unsure of the power of this weapon, but they certainly weren't unsure of it after it was dropped on Hiroshima.
And yet the hardliners were still absolutely arguing we should go on, we should fight on. And even after the second weapon was dropped, which of course leads to the decision for unconditional surrender, there was a split among the High Command and the Emperor. And it's the Emperor, interestingly enough, who is finally persuaded by some of his, you might describe them as more moderate, but I would describe them as slightly less extreme than the than the other characters in the war cabinet, who said, you know what, we've got to surrender. That they're just going to blow Japan to pieces. There is nothing we can gain by fighting on. And yet, despite all of that, now, two atomic weapons have been dropped. It's pretty clear where this is going.
There is an attempted coup, which luckily is defeated and the moderates retain control. But there were still hardliners, even after the second atomic bomb that was dropped, arguing we should continue the fight. So you get a sense of some of the mindset of people in Japan of that time, let's just keep fighting to the end, a bit like, of course, the Germans had done in in Europe...
The long term legacy of the battle is unfortunate, and that legacy is that there are still US servicemen on the island today. And this is actually quite controversial because, you know, there's a feeling that you wouldn't, we want to see the back of these people? You know, we are not some kind of colony of America, not 75 years on. And yet the same time this same witness - he’s no longer alive, he died a few years ago - but this same person made the point that actually the Americans had played their part in saving a lot of lives. When the Japanese on the one hand, were encouraging people to commit suicide, the Americans were doing everything they could to save civilian lives by providing food and shelter and a safe place for them to go and he acknowledged the debt that they still owe to America today."
Of course it's more fashionable to bash the Americans as evil savages
"We should never lose sight of the fact that Truman and most of his seniors advisors were heavily influenced by the unutterable horror of the fighting on Okinawa, and actually interesting, not just the deaths of servicemen, but also the deaths of civilians. And although you may think that all of Truman's calculations come into play when he's trying to save American lives, actually, I don't think that's true. And he's gone on the record and did go on the record at the time saying, this wasn't just about American lives. This is about saving Japanese lives.
So when you get people criticizing and accusing the Americans of an atrocity by using those two nuclear weapons, you need to understand the context in which that decision is taken. And you need to understand the potential consequences for the loss of life, particularly among Japanese civilians in Japan, if the fighting had continued and the weapons hadn't been used. So yes, 200,000 lives lost isn't appalling tragedy, which is the estimate of lives lost to the use of those two nuclear weapons. But we also need to take account of the fact that many, many more lives would have been lost if they hadn't been used…
Basically, what's remarkable is that the the casualties [on Okinawa] didn't affect them [the Japanese] in the slightest. They didn't affect them in the slightest. They didn't particularly affect them. And this is even more chilling thought, Rob, after the first nuclear weapon was dropped on Hiroshima. So you know, it's interesting people say, well, you even if you justify the use of one bomb, why then use the second one? Because nothing had changed after those.
The Americans when they made the decision with the allies with Churchill and with Chiang Kai Shek, the Chinese nationalist leader to use the new nuclear weapons, they then put out a warning to Japan. It was a coded warning, to be fair because the Japanese had no idea that this weapon would be as destructive as it was, but they were making it pretty clear that you know, they were going to unleash terrible destruction. You could say okay, they were still a little bit unsure of the power of this weapon, but they certainly weren't unsure of it after it was dropped on Hiroshima.
And yet the hardliners were still absolutely arguing we should go on, we should fight on. And even after the second weapon was dropped, which of course leads to the decision for unconditional surrender, there was a split among the High Command and the Emperor. And it's the Emperor, interestingly enough, who is finally persuaded by some of his, you might describe them as more moderate, but I would describe them as slightly less extreme than the than the other characters in the war cabinet, who said, you know what, we've got to surrender. That they're just going to blow Japan to pieces. There is nothing we can gain by fighting on. And yet, despite all of that, now, two atomic weapons have been dropped. It's pretty clear where this is going.
There is an attempted coup, which luckily is defeated and the moderates retain control. But there were still hardliners, even after the second atomic bomb that was dropped, arguing we should continue the fight. So you get a sense of some of the mindset of people in Japan of that time, let's just keep fighting to the end, a bit like, of course, the Germans had done in in Europe...
The long term legacy of the battle is unfortunate, and that legacy is that there are still US servicemen on the island today. And this is actually quite controversial because, you know, there's a feeling that you wouldn't, we want to see the back of these people? You know, we are not some kind of colony of America, not 75 years on. And yet the same time this same witness - he’s no longer alive, he died a few years ago - but this same person made the point that actually the Americans had played their part in saving a lot of lives. When the Japanese on the one hand, were encouraging people to commit suicide, the Americans were doing everything they could to save civilian lives by providing food and shelter and a safe place for them to go and he acknowledged the debt that they still owe to America today."
Of course it's more fashionable to bash the Americans as evil savages
Post ID: 3902181233799976015
Links - 26th April 2020 (1) (Transport)
How to end traffic - "It can be easier to imagine European cities car-free because for so much of their histories—whether they are 300 or 3,000 years old—they were... While American cities can seem new when compared to European counterparts, every major U.S. city—with the exception of Las Vegas—was founded before the introduction of the automobile... urban planning in America is rooted in pre-car, mostly European models... In many American communities, like Austin or Atlanta, cars are so much the default that there’s little or no sidewalk at all... bikes, pedestrians, and cars intermingle without barriers. In the Netherlands and Belgium, this is frequently accomplished by having cars share the same space—at the same grade—with the pedestrians and bikers that often greatly outnumber autos. Visiting Haarlem, the city just outside Amsterdam that’s famous as the home of painter Frans Hals and for lending its name to the neighborhood in New York City, we found this type of street sharing is the norm. In the city’s core there are no sidewalks at all: pedestrians, bikes, and cars simply share the street. Forced to drive at safe speeds, cars and trucks become the exception for getting around, used for deliveries and hauling cargo, not shuttling single individuals—unlike in the United States, where “74 percent of [commuting car] trips are individuals driving alone.”... Of course, limiting private vehicular traffic only works in tandem with robust transit options. While smaller city centers may be completely walkable, any ZTL in a larger American city would require transportation that’s reliable, frequent, and safe. New Yorkers frustrated by subway delays and repair schedules might scoff in disbelief, but Manhattan, in particular, is home to America’s best transit system... In New York’s Financial District—the subject of a comprehensive “Make Way for Lower Manhattan Plan” that provides a framework to begin ridding the area of cars—is served by free shuttles, three city bus lines, and nearly every subway. The problem comes in smaller urban areas where transit has lagged behind"
New York becomes first city in US to approve congestion pricing - "The plan was approved by the state legislature early on Monday morning as part of the state budget, after a crisis in the city’s subways brought to a head a decade-long fight over charging motorists in Manhattan.Under the plan backed by Governor Andrew Cuomo, drivers will have to pay tolls to enter Manhattan south of 60th Street... “We have a signal system that dates to the 1930s. We have subway cars that date to the 60s. We have a subway system where a scant minority of stations are accessible to riders in wheelchairs and to people with strollers. The money will go a long way toward starting the work and delivering projects that we need done.”... Other US cities may look to New York’s plan for a congestion solution, but Mitchell Moss, the head of the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University, said the city’s situation is unique.“There is nothing as dense as Manhattan”"
Should Canada charge drivers to use roads during rush hour? - "Stockholm initially introduced it as a pilot program because the majority of people opposed it. Seven months later, that same majority voted in a referendum to make it permanent.“There’s something about really experiencing those benefits that’s different than just being told about those benefits”"
Maybe Singaporeans don't like ERP because they're already paying so much for cars
Kansas City is making its bus system fare-free. Will other cities do the same? - ""Big-city systems are already crowded at least during the peak period and simply wouldn’t have the capacity to handle all the riders that free fares would attract"... the top priority for most transit riders is how frequent and reliable a system is, not its price... a majority of Kansas City’s bus lines run every 30 to 60 minutes, which can make bus connections difficult."
Transit and the “D” Word - "To pay off, transit investments need to meet a minimum density threshold."
Population density in Toronto significantly less compared to other major cities: Fraser Institute - "cities in Canada are significantly less dense than other major cities around the world.The study lists population densities of 30 cities in high income and developed countries, and Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto come 13th, 16th and 19th on the list, respectively... because Canadian cities are less dense, places like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver can likely accommodate more housing supply. The population density in New York City is more than double Toronto’s, with 10,935 people per square kilometre."
The fast and the furious: Research shows that owners of high-status cars are on a collision course with traffic | University of Helsinki - "the drivers of expensive cars are more likely to break traffic regulations. This phenomenon has been explained with the common assumption that wealth has a corrupting effect on people, resulting, for example, in high-status consumption and unethical behaviour in various situations.Lönnqvist approached the question from a different angle by asking whether specific types of people are drawn to high-status cars regardless of their financial assets and also have a tendency to break traffic laws... self-centred men who are argumentative, stubborn, disagreeable and unempathetic are much more likely to own a high-status car such as an Audi, BMW or Mercedes.“These personality traits explain the desire to own high-status products, and the same traits also explain why such people break traffic regulations more frequently than others”... "those whose personality was deemed more disagreeable were more drawn to high-status cars. These are people who often see themselves as superior and are keen to display this to others"... One of the more unexpected results was that another personality type is also drawn to high-status cars: the conscientious. People with this type of personality are, as a rule, respectable, ambitious, reliable and well-organised. They take care of themselves and their health and often perform well at work.“The link is presumably explained by the importance they attach to high quality"
New York becomes first city in US to approve congestion pricing - "The plan was approved by the state legislature early on Monday morning as part of the state budget, after a crisis in the city’s subways brought to a head a decade-long fight over charging motorists in Manhattan.Under the plan backed by Governor Andrew Cuomo, drivers will have to pay tolls to enter Manhattan south of 60th Street... “We have a signal system that dates to the 1930s. We have subway cars that date to the 60s. We have a subway system where a scant minority of stations are accessible to riders in wheelchairs and to people with strollers. The money will go a long way toward starting the work and delivering projects that we need done.”... Other US cities may look to New York’s plan for a congestion solution, but Mitchell Moss, the head of the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University, said the city’s situation is unique.“There is nothing as dense as Manhattan”"
Should Canada charge drivers to use roads during rush hour? - "Stockholm initially introduced it as a pilot program because the majority of people opposed it. Seven months later, that same majority voted in a referendum to make it permanent.“There’s something about really experiencing those benefits that’s different than just being told about those benefits”"
Maybe Singaporeans don't like ERP because they're already paying so much for cars
Kansas City is making its bus system fare-free. Will other cities do the same? - ""Big-city systems are already crowded at least during the peak period and simply wouldn’t have the capacity to handle all the riders that free fares would attract"... the top priority for most transit riders is how frequent and reliable a system is, not its price... a majority of Kansas City’s bus lines run every 30 to 60 minutes, which can make bus connections difficult."
Transit and the “D” Word - "To pay off, transit investments need to meet a minimum density threshold."
Population density in Toronto significantly less compared to other major cities: Fraser Institute - "cities in Canada are significantly less dense than other major cities around the world.The study lists population densities of 30 cities in high income and developed countries, and Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto come 13th, 16th and 19th on the list, respectively... because Canadian cities are less dense, places like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver can likely accommodate more housing supply. The population density in New York City is more than double Toronto’s, with 10,935 people per square kilometre."
The fast and the furious: Research shows that owners of high-status cars are on a collision course with traffic | University of Helsinki - "the drivers of expensive cars are more likely to break traffic regulations. This phenomenon has been explained with the common assumption that wealth has a corrupting effect on people, resulting, for example, in high-status consumption and unethical behaviour in various situations.Lönnqvist approached the question from a different angle by asking whether specific types of people are drawn to high-status cars regardless of their financial assets and also have a tendency to break traffic laws... self-centred men who are argumentative, stubborn, disagreeable and unempathetic are much more likely to own a high-status car such as an Audi, BMW or Mercedes.“These personality traits explain the desire to own high-status products, and the same traits also explain why such people break traffic regulations more frequently than others”... "those whose personality was deemed more disagreeable were more drawn to high-status cars. These are people who often see themselves as superior and are keen to display this to others"... One of the more unexpected results was that another personality type is also drawn to high-status cars: the conscientious. People with this type of personality are, as a rule, respectable, ambitious, reliable and well-organised. They take care of themselves and their health and often perform well at work.“The link is presumably explained by the importance they attach to high quality"
Post ID: 692320966533034791
Historian Elma Brenner On Medieval Medicine
Historian Elma Brenner On Medieval Medicine | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"‘We can say that a lot of the remedies did work. Certainly not all of them. And certainly, it's really interesting to think about remedies that have incredibly convoluted or exotic ingredients. So Theriac is a good example of that, which was a very, kind of a cure all medicine of the later Middle Ages that anyone who could wanted to get hold of, particularly against plague. And it's not clear that that would have worked, but it would have, we can also think about the kind of placebo effect as well, which obviously is impossible to measure.
But it's something we can also think about today as with some of the remedies that we take on a day to day basis like paracetamol. You know that you take it, you're reassured that you've done something and you start to feel better… [Theriac] was a whole mixture of ingredients, some of which came from the east. So from outside Europe, and it included things like snakes venom and to counteract poison, so sort of like for like, counteraction…
[On harmful medicines] Some remedies, for example, involve lead, which we know is not a good thing. For the treatment of the pox, which is roughly equivalent to modern day syphilis in the early decades of the 16th century, mercury was an ingredient which we again know is not a good thing. Overall, however, the overriding impression you get if you're leafing through the pages of a late medieval recipe mompendium with lots of medical recipes, is that these are plant based remedies, with a number of plants that we might use today in cooking, that we also know are actually ingredients for modern day pharmaceuticals, that we don't think would have harmed the body.
So the overriding impression is that these wouldn't have harmed people. You do get interesting occasional lawsuits actually from the later Middle Ages against apothecaries, or physicians, sort of claiming that the remedy was harmful. So there is some evidence for that kind of thing, but not much.’
‘And generally speaking, do you think did medieval people believe in… the treatments that they took or or were advised to take? Did they believe that they had efficacy?’
‘That's a really interesting question. So, on the one hand, yes, because we see these remedies being copied numerous times. And in the early decades of printing from the end of the 15th century, we get printed compendia that were clearly selling very well. And there were lots of different versions of them and they were kind of popular, kind of self help books.
On the other hand, within those collections, you get multiple different remedies for the same ailment. So you might have something like excessive bleeding… you might have seven different remedies to try to counteract that, which suggests an awareness that it might not work. Which is an important difference, I think, from modern day medicine, when we tend to have complete faith in pharmaceuticals. And we go and buy something over the counter, and we're confident that that will work. We're not shopping around for a different version of aspirin, for instance.
A different attitude in the Middle Ages where you might try several different things, you're quite open minded, you're ready to see failure’...
[On bloodletting] ‘If you were someone who had the means to kind of follow a regimen to stay healthy, you would regularly have yourself bled in order to just keep the humours balanced. And we know that this certainly happened in monasteries as part of the monastic life…
‘What do they do with the blood that they let?’...
‘Usually it was disposed of. So some medical ingredients of the magical kind actually might include a quantity of human blood. Possibly an interesting variant of this is the blood taken from the little finger of a child sometimes comes up, something that you would put into your magical remedy. Apart from that, I think it is disposed of. However, other human fluids, particularly urine, did have a range of functions. So urine did have a range of industrial functions, including in the production of parchments, which is quite interesting’"
"‘We can say that a lot of the remedies did work. Certainly not all of them. And certainly, it's really interesting to think about remedies that have incredibly convoluted or exotic ingredients. So Theriac is a good example of that, which was a very, kind of a cure all medicine of the later Middle Ages that anyone who could wanted to get hold of, particularly against plague. And it's not clear that that would have worked, but it would have, we can also think about the kind of placebo effect as well, which obviously is impossible to measure.
But it's something we can also think about today as with some of the remedies that we take on a day to day basis like paracetamol. You know that you take it, you're reassured that you've done something and you start to feel better… [Theriac] was a whole mixture of ingredients, some of which came from the east. So from outside Europe, and it included things like snakes venom and to counteract poison, so sort of like for like, counteraction…
[On harmful medicines] Some remedies, for example, involve lead, which we know is not a good thing. For the treatment of the pox, which is roughly equivalent to modern day syphilis in the early decades of the 16th century, mercury was an ingredient which we again know is not a good thing. Overall, however, the overriding impression you get if you're leafing through the pages of a late medieval recipe mompendium with lots of medical recipes, is that these are plant based remedies, with a number of plants that we might use today in cooking, that we also know are actually ingredients for modern day pharmaceuticals, that we don't think would have harmed the body.
So the overriding impression is that these wouldn't have harmed people. You do get interesting occasional lawsuits actually from the later Middle Ages against apothecaries, or physicians, sort of claiming that the remedy was harmful. So there is some evidence for that kind of thing, but not much.’
‘And generally speaking, do you think did medieval people believe in… the treatments that they took or or were advised to take? Did they believe that they had efficacy?’
‘That's a really interesting question. So, on the one hand, yes, because we see these remedies being copied numerous times. And in the early decades of printing from the end of the 15th century, we get printed compendia that were clearly selling very well. And there were lots of different versions of them and they were kind of popular, kind of self help books.
On the other hand, within those collections, you get multiple different remedies for the same ailment. So you might have something like excessive bleeding… you might have seven different remedies to try to counteract that, which suggests an awareness that it might not work. Which is an important difference, I think, from modern day medicine, when we tend to have complete faith in pharmaceuticals. And we go and buy something over the counter, and we're confident that that will work. We're not shopping around for a different version of aspirin, for instance.
A different attitude in the Middle Ages where you might try several different things, you're quite open minded, you're ready to see failure’...
[On bloodletting] ‘If you were someone who had the means to kind of follow a regimen to stay healthy, you would regularly have yourself bled in order to just keep the humours balanced. And we know that this certainly happened in monasteries as part of the monastic life…
‘What do they do with the blood that they let?’...
‘Usually it was disposed of. So some medical ingredients of the magical kind actually might include a quantity of human blood. Possibly an interesting variant of this is the blood taken from the little finger of a child sometimes comes up, something that you would put into your magical remedy. Apart from that, I think it is disposed of. However, other human fluids, particularly urine, did have a range of functions. So urine did have a range of industrial functions, including in the production of parchments, which is quite interesting’"
Post ID: 3801456334717217727
Saturday, April 25, 2020
Eloise Moss On A Modern History Of Burglary
Eloise Moss On A Modern History Of Burglary | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"[On the late 19th/early 20th century] What's really distinctive about the history of crime in this period, but specifically the history of burglary is that the law itself has a very, very specific set of criteria for what actually counts as a burglary.
So, today, if someone breaks into your home at any time of day or even any kind of property in any sense, it can be classified as a burglary. Now before 1968, which was when the Theft Act made that the case, before that point, burglary by law was defined as breaking into an exclusively domestic environment, so, an inhabited residential space between what are legally defined as the nighttime hours of 9pm and 6am.
And for that reason, burglary has a kind of really sinister aspect to it because essentially, when the burglar is nearby, you are going to be in bed, asleep, vulnerable. Potentially undressed, even, around the presence of that intruder, so it carries a life sentence, because it's entwined with ideas of vulnerability. It's entwined with ideas of rape, and it's even imagined as a kind of a rape of your home, that penetrating into the sanctity of your own personal space in a period where privacy is really a marker of particularly being a middle and upper class person. Privacy is is sacrosanct. So the idea of what's usually characterized as some working class person breaking into that space is horror, you know, and then purloining your valuables...
"‘There's a romance about burglary in this period that is associated with so many people experiencing economic deprivation. And the idea that certain burglars have kind of taken more initiative than others to clamber up and over into people's properties and therefore avoid the police altogether because they're not operating at street level, they're clambering over and above the the level of the streets. Is actually viewed as sort of slightly inspirational.
There's a historian called Gillian Spraggs, who suggests that we have a cult of the robber In England dating from the medieval period with characters like Robin Hood through the 18th century with real life highwaymen like Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard, who have been idolized in songs and ballads and in stories for as long as we can remember’...
‘You mentioned that there is almost an erotic connotation to it as well. You did touch on it when you were talking about the invasion of the boudoir’...
‘The idea of a very handsome young man dressed in black and he's very athletic, clambering up into your bedroom by night is not viewed as necessarily a bad thing by everyone and there's a lot of quite trashy semi erotica written around that possibility in stories of the period’...
‘There were women burglars, there are women burglars, but in the period that of this book 1860-1968, as far as the government was concerned, and as far as the judicial system was concerned, no there weren’t... women was viewed as so integral to domesticity, to home life, to maintaining the stability of homes and relationships in this era, the idea that a woman would kind of ignore all that ideology to break into a house to threaten a family, to threaten their prosperity and their sense of safety and stability and to threaten the relationships at the core of that family by their presence, by making the home less safe, was really something that contemporaries fought against...
They were given either much lighter sentences, and often the ones having been captured for burglary that charge would then be changed into being an accomplice of a man. So a lot of women burglars actually become quite canny about this and say, oh, no, it wasn't me, it was my boyfriend or my husband who had lured me into doing this, or who gave me these things and then it turned out they were stolen, who knew? You know, poor me. And they say this in court.
And they are believed because people want to believe that a woman will not have been able to commit this crime, both on moral grounds and actually in terms of skills as well, because as much as the burger is seen as the aristocrat of crime, they're associated with being particularly clever and particularly skilled. And again, this is a period in which largely women are thought to be far less intelligent than men"
Patriarchy!
"[On the late 19th/early 20th century] What's really distinctive about the history of crime in this period, but specifically the history of burglary is that the law itself has a very, very specific set of criteria for what actually counts as a burglary.
So, today, if someone breaks into your home at any time of day or even any kind of property in any sense, it can be classified as a burglary. Now before 1968, which was when the Theft Act made that the case, before that point, burglary by law was defined as breaking into an exclusively domestic environment, so, an inhabited residential space between what are legally defined as the nighttime hours of 9pm and 6am.
And for that reason, burglary has a kind of really sinister aspect to it because essentially, when the burglar is nearby, you are going to be in bed, asleep, vulnerable. Potentially undressed, even, around the presence of that intruder, so it carries a life sentence, because it's entwined with ideas of vulnerability. It's entwined with ideas of rape, and it's even imagined as a kind of a rape of your home, that penetrating into the sanctity of your own personal space in a period where privacy is really a marker of particularly being a middle and upper class person. Privacy is is sacrosanct. So the idea of what's usually characterized as some working class person breaking into that space is horror, you know, and then purloining your valuables...
"‘There's a romance about burglary in this period that is associated with so many people experiencing economic deprivation. And the idea that certain burglars have kind of taken more initiative than others to clamber up and over into people's properties and therefore avoid the police altogether because they're not operating at street level, they're clambering over and above the the level of the streets. Is actually viewed as sort of slightly inspirational.
There's a historian called Gillian Spraggs, who suggests that we have a cult of the robber In England dating from the medieval period with characters like Robin Hood through the 18th century with real life highwaymen like Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard, who have been idolized in songs and ballads and in stories for as long as we can remember’...
‘You mentioned that there is almost an erotic connotation to it as well. You did touch on it when you were talking about the invasion of the boudoir’...
‘The idea of a very handsome young man dressed in black and he's very athletic, clambering up into your bedroom by night is not viewed as necessarily a bad thing by everyone and there's a lot of quite trashy semi erotica written around that possibility in stories of the period’...
‘There were women burglars, there are women burglars, but in the period that of this book 1860-1968, as far as the government was concerned, and as far as the judicial system was concerned, no there weren’t... women was viewed as so integral to domesticity, to home life, to maintaining the stability of homes and relationships in this era, the idea that a woman would kind of ignore all that ideology to break into a house to threaten a family, to threaten their prosperity and their sense of safety and stability and to threaten the relationships at the core of that family by their presence, by making the home less safe, was really something that contemporaries fought against...
They were given either much lighter sentences, and often the ones having been captured for burglary that charge would then be changed into being an accomplice of a man. So a lot of women burglars actually become quite canny about this and say, oh, no, it wasn't me, it was my boyfriend or my husband who had lured me into doing this, or who gave me these things and then it turned out they were stolen, who knew? You know, poor me. And they say this in court.
And they are believed because people want to believe that a woman will not have been able to commit this crime, both on moral grounds and actually in terms of skills as well, because as much as the burger is seen as the aristocrat of crime, they're associated with being particularly clever and particularly skilled. And again, this is a period in which largely women are thought to be far less intelligent than men"
Patriarchy!
Post ID: 5806711498610000109
Links - 25th April 2020 (2)
Pinpointing The Exact Moment 'Cats' Reviewers Lost Their Minds - "The incomprehensible horror has claimed the sanity of many of journalism's finest...
"Are the coats that some of the cats, like Macavity (Idris Elba) and Old Deuteronomy (Dench), wear actually made from the skin of other cats? And if so, does this mean that Jennyanydots, who at one point unzips herself out of a full-body fur suit, is a kind of Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs type? Why would you ever put 'Beautiful Ghosts', the underwhelming new addition that Swift and Webber wrote for this adaptation, right up against 'Memory'? Is the implication that Grizabella, played by Jennifer Hudson, became an outcast because she did sex work intentional, and if so, what does sex work for cats entail and why are the other cats so goddamn judgemental about it?""
Dame Judi Dench Says Her 'Cats' Character Is Trans - "Tom Hooper's disastrous Cats is undoubtedly the worst movie of the year, but it's also one of the most interesting. The film has had Jason Derulo's dick edited out with CGI and new and improved graphics shipped out to theatres days after its release. It's even drawn comparisons to medieval paintings. Now, adding to the Cats news cycle, Dame Judi Dench has suggested her feline character is trans."
Too bad that didn't save the movie
Johan Torres's answer to Is the movie Cats (2019) really that bad? - Quora - "there is the baffling decision to have some cats naked and some cats in clothes. This can be easily ignored in the theater where everyone is wearing lavish costumes and there effectively is no line between what would be clothed or nude. But even if you can work your mind around the weird Ken doll-esque smoothness of the nude cats, you get shocked back into thinking about it when a cat decides to take off their clothes. And then, to make the levels of incomprehensibility even more stratospheric, at one point Rebel Wilson unzips her fur to reveal she is wearing a full dance outfit underneath it… and then underneath the outfit a new (old?) coat of fur. It felt like my mind was experiencing a computer error when it happened... the cast for the movie is absolutely bizarre. Rebel Wilson, James Corden, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Jason Derulo, Taylor Swift, Idris Elba. It’s like they just picked names from a hat. And they all seem so incredibly excited to be doing a Cats adaptation. No one is phoning in their performance. No one is winking to the camera. Ian McKellen though is absolutely the stand out as he is determined to give the most considered and realistic performance… for Cats.Though you can tell who the theater actors were, the ones who could be hired cheap, because those cats stick around for the entire musical, while the celebrities are shuffled off as fast as possible... But the most impressive thing about Cats is its sheer genuineness. On every level, everyone involved thought they were making great art. The true classics of camp have to be naive. Works of art that are ill-considered, drowning in shocking excesses and wild pretensions. But that can never be achieved intentionally. To be transcendentally camp, it needs to have been sincerely aiming for that pinnacle of true art.Every single creative decision involved in the movie Cats is the wrong one, including the decision to adapt Cats in the first place. It is literally drowning in artistic vision. Its ambition is utterly without bounds. The execution… well the execution fails in every frame. It is bad in the most glorious way possible. It is possibly beyond what mere humans would consider taste. Cats is a fever dream. Cats is staring into the blasphemous visage of Azathoth. Cats is absolutely terrible on every level. And yet I have rarely had as much fun in a movie theater as I did watching it. I want to see it a second time. I know when it is released for home viewing I will probably watch it every year, like I do with Gymkata, The Room, Teen Witch, Troll 2, and Birdemic.Your ability to get enjoyment out of it depends heavily on whether you enjoy camp, and in particular, musical camp. Cats is an absolute treasure, and we should cherish it."
Alastair Stewart used SAME 'angry ape' quote in previous Twitter row - "Alastair Stewart used the 'angry ape' quote from Measure for Measure during a Twitter row with a white environmentalist 18 months ago, it emerged today. The tweet emerged after the veteran presenter was forced out of ITN last night after black Twitter user Martin Shapland complained he used the phrase towards him. But in June 2018, Mr Stewart had used exactly the same Shakespeare quote in an exchange - this time over horsefeed and ragwort - with a white Twitter user... Supporters of Mr Stewart said he appeared to have a habit of using the phrase to make a point about those he felt were claiming to be experts in a certain field... 'he will be the first man ever fired for accurately quoting Shakespeare'"
Since we're told that colourblind people are racist, this is fitting
How long before Shakespeare himself is cancelled?
Stickers bearing white supremacist messages found in Ipswich
So "Reject White Guilt" and "It's Okay To Be White" are "white supremacist" messages. It's telling how institutionalised anti-white racism is
Why liberal white women pay a lot of money to learn over dinner how they're racist - "A frank discussion is led by co-founders Regina Jackson, who is black, and Saira Rao, who identifies as Indian American. They started Race to Dinner to challenge liberal white women to accept their racism, however subconscious. “If you did this in a conference room, they’d leave,” Rao says. “But wealthy white women have been taught never to leave the dinner table.”... “White men are never going to change anything. If they were, they would have done it by now”... It seems unlikely anyone would voluntarily go to a dinner party in which they’d be asked, one by one, “What was a racist thing you did recently?” by two women of color, before appetizers are served. But Jackson and Rao have hardly been able to take a break since they started these dinners in the spring of 2019. So far, 15 dinners have been held in big cities across the US... Morgan Richards admits she recently did nothing when someone patronizingly commended her for adopting her two black children, as though she had saved them. “What I went through to be a mother, I didn’t care if they were black,” she says, opening a window for Rao to challenge her: “So, you admit it is stooping low to adopt a black child?” And Richards accepts that the undertone of her statement is racist... A lot of people hate Saira Rao.“The American flag makes me sick,” read a recent tweet of hers. Another: “White folks – before telling me that your Indian husband or wife or friend or colleague doesn’t agree with anything I say about racism or thinks I’m crazy, please Google ‘token,’ ‘internalized oppression’ and ‘gaslighting’.”... Another previous attendee, who did not want to be named, says she found Rao to be dogmatic, and presented a distorted depiction of history, leaving out facts that do not fit her narrative. At one point, she referred to Rao as “the Trump of the alt-left”."
How does one find so many suckers?
As absolution goes, it'd be cheaper and faster to go to church. And at least the priest wouldn't tell you you'll never be forgiven
Why Iowa is so important this time - The Washington Post - Jennifer Rubin, May 13 2019
What good are the Iowa caucuses anyway? - The Washington Post - Jennifer Rubin, February 3 2020
Of course, Trump "attacking" the press is the real danger to the media
The Case Against Stretching - "According to a 2016 study of 605 personal trainers in the U.S.—virtually all of whom had certifications from the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) or the National Strength and Conditioning Association—80 percent of them still prescribed traditional static stretching to their clients... The main spur for the Sports Medicine article, by exercise scientist James Nuzzo, is the fact that flexibility is still pegged as one of the five “major components” of physical fitness, alongside body composition, cardiovascular endurance, muscle endurance, and muscle strength, by the ACSM. The 2018 edition of the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, from the Department of Health and Human Services, also lists flexibility among its big five (this time alongside cardiorespiratory fitness, musculoskeletal fitness, balance, and speed).If you actually flip through these documents, you’ll experience a bizarre cognitive dissonance. The Guidelines state repeatedly that “flexibility activities are an appropriate part of a physical activity program, even though their health benefits are unknown and it is unclear whether they reduce risk of injury.”... greater flexibility as measured by the sit-and-reach test isn’t associated with longer life—unlike the ACSM’s other four “major components” of physical fitness. It also doesn’t predict more successful aging (like avoiding falls), except in ways that are better predicted by muscle strength. Contrary to a half-century of locker-room wisdom, being flexible doesn’t seem to protect you from injury either. This topic is the focus of hundreds of studies, and there are admittedly a few that do find benefits. At the other end of the spectrum, there are a few that find that being too flexible is also associated with injury. But overall, it just doesn’t seem to make much difference. It’s also not associated with non-sports-related problems like low-back pain. And finally, being flexible doesn’t improve your sports performance—unless you’re doing something where range of motion has a direct impact. If you’re a gymnast or a ballerina or a hockey goaltender, you’d better be flexible. Even as a cyclist, you need enough flexibility to be able to get into an aerodynamic riding position and still pedal comfortably. If you’re a runner, on the other hand, you’re highly unlikely to sustain an injury that has any connection to your inability to touch your toes. In fact, there’s some evidence that greater flexibility makes you a less efficient runner, presumably because having tight “springs” in your legs allows you to store and return more energy with each stride... there’s solid evidence that holding a stretch for a minute or more temporarily decreases strength and speed for up to an hour, likely due to changes in the neuromuscular signaling from brain to muscle. That’s a pretty harsh irony: all the stretching that I did religiously before every race in the 1990s and early 2000s might have actually dulled my edge... Nuzzo suggests that strength training is an ideal alternative. Sure, it makes you strong and has all sorts of other long-term health benefits—but if you use your full range of motion while doing it, it can also make you more flexible, with various studies showing increases in sit-and-reach scores of between 10 and 25 percent. Aerobic exercise and other forms of functional and combined training can also boost flexibility, according to a few studies. Basically, it appears that being healthy and active is enough to maintain a reasonable level of flexibility."
Don’t throw out old, sprouting garlic — it has heart-healthy antioxidants - "“Sprouted” garlic — old garlic bulbs with bright green shoots emerging from the cloves — is considered to be past its prime and usually ends up in the garbage can. But scientists are reporting in ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry that this type of garlic has even more heart-healthy antioxidant activity than its fresher counterparts... When seedlings grow into green plants, they make many new compounds, including those that protect the young plant against pathogens... Other studies have shown that sprouted beans and grains have increased antioxidant activity"
Garlic Scapes - "Scapes are delectable, with a gentle flavor that’s much less pungent than mature garlic. They can be used to lend a garlic perfume (e.g., put a half a scape in a pot of cooking rice for a subtle garlic note), as an herb, or cooked and eaten like a vegetable. Scapes are perfect pureed with butter to prepare herb butter for vegetables, fish, etc., or made into pesto with basil or another herb. Used as a vegetable, they work well paired with other green veggies (e.g., asparagus, peas) in frittatas or stir-fries."
Black market breakfast cereals are alive and well in Canada - "Black markets and shadow economies, that were typically used to buy and sell illegal goods, have a banned product that you wouldn’t expect to be on their proverbial shelves, breakfast cereal. Certain American cereals are not permitted to be imported according to regulators at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA). Nonetheless, some boxes of prohibited cereals have been appearing in Canadian corner stores and local farmers markets.Breakfast cereals including Cookie Crips and Franken Berry are not sold officially by General Mills to grocery chains in Canada. According to General Mills Canada the reason that some cereals sold in America are not sold north of the boarder is due to certain government regulations... Canadian regulations put cereal in its own special category that requires cereal sold in Canada to have a specific nutrient profile. One might assume that sugar content might be the reason for the ban, but it turns out that the amount of sugar in American cereals is comparable to that contained in Canadian cereals. The real reason, however, that certain cereals are not sold in Canada has to do with vitamin and other nutritional requirements established by the government of Canada... Labeling laws and French language requirements also play a role in preventing some of these cereals from being sold in Canada. General Mills also reports that different products are made to suit the needs of different consumers and that the cereals sold in Canada are made for the Canadian palate... Cereal isn’t the only food item sold on Canadian black markets. Pirate Joe’s, a store popular in Vancouver, is an unauthorized and unaffiliated reseller of goods found at the popular US grocery store Trader Joe’s. Pirate Joe’s will soon be reopening after winning a legal case brought by Trader Joe’s.In another example, in 2012 three Canadians including a police officer were arrested for smuggling restricted cheese across the border. Vancouver at that time even had its very own “cheese baron” who according to the National Post single handedly imported 18,725 kilograms of illegal cheese. Buying or selling contraband cereal isn’t a crime punishable by jail time like some other restricted black market items... If Canadians are willing to buy a cereal for nearly twice its U.S. price or smuggle tens of thousands of pounds of cheese across the border annually perhaps the government should consider liberalizing some of the current laws surrounding food regulation with the goal of increasing consumer choice?"
"Are the coats that some of the cats, like Macavity (Idris Elba) and Old Deuteronomy (Dench), wear actually made from the skin of other cats? And if so, does this mean that Jennyanydots, who at one point unzips herself out of a full-body fur suit, is a kind of Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs type? Why would you ever put 'Beautiful Ghosts', the underwhelming new addition that Swift and Webber wrote for this adaptation, right up against 'Memory'? Is the implication that Grizabella, played by Jennifer Hudson, became an outcast because she did sex work intentional, and if so, what does sex work for cats entail and why are the other cats so goddamn judgemental about it?""
Dame Judi Dench Says Her 'Cats' Character Is Trans - "Tom Hooper's disastrous Cats is undoubtedly the worst movie of the year, but it's also one of the most interesting. The film has had Jason Derulo's dick edited out with CGI and new and improved graphics shipped out to theatres days after its release. It's even drawn comparisons to medieval paintings. Now, adding to the Cats news cycle, Dame Judi Dench has suggested her feline character is trans."
Too bad that didn't save the movie
Johan Torres's answer to Is the movie Cats (2019) really that bad? - Quora - "there is the baffling decision to have some cats naked and some cats in clothes. This can be easily ignored in the theater where everyone is wearing lavish costumes and there effectively is no line between what would be clothed or nude. But even if you can work your mind around the weird Ken doll-esque smoothness of the nude cats, you get shocked back into thinking about it when a cat decides to take off their clothes. And then, to make the levels of incomprehensibility even more stratospheric, at one point Rebel Wilson unzips her fur to reveal she is wearing a full dance outfit underneath it… and then underneath the outfit a new (old?) coat of fur. It felt like my mind was experiencing a computer error when it happened... the cast for the movie is absolutely bizarre. Rebel Wilson, James Corden, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Jason Derulo, Taylor Swift, Idris Elba. It’s like they just picked names from a hat. And they all seem so incredibly excited to be doing a Cats adaptation. No one is phoning in their performance. No one is winking to the camera. Ian McKellen though is absolutely the stand out as he is determined to give the most considered and realistic performance… for Cats.Though you can tell who the theater actors were, the ones who could be hired cheap, because those cats stick around for the entire musical, while the celebrities are shuffled off as fast as possible... But the most impressive thing about Cats is its sheer genuineness. On every level, everyone involved thought they were making great art. The true classics of camp have to be naive. Works of art that are ill-considered, drowning in shocking excesses and wild pretensions. But that can never be achieved intentionally. To be transcendentally camp, it needs to have been sincerely aiming for that pinnacle of true art.Every single creative decision involved in the movie Cats is the wrong one, including the decision to adapt Cats in the first place. It is literally drowning in artistic vision. Its ambition is utterly without bounds. The execution… well the execution fails in every frame. It is bad in the most glorious way possible. It is possibly beyond what mere humans would consider taste. Cats is a fever dream. Cats is staring into the blasphemous visage of Azathoth. Cats is absolutely terrible on every level. And yet I have rarely had as much fun in a movie theater as I did watching it. I want to see it a second time. I know when it is released for home viewing I will probably watch it every year, like I do with Gymkata, The Room, Teen Witch, Troll 2, and Birdemic.Your ability to get enjoyment out of it depends heavily on whether you enjoy camp, and in particular, musical camp. Cats is an absolute treasure, and we should cherish it."
Alastair Stewart used SAME 'angry ape' quote in previous Twitter row - "Alastair Stewart used the 'angry ape' quote from Measure for Measure during a Twitter row with a white environmentalist 18 months ago, it emerged today. The tweet emerged after the veteran presenter was forced out of ITN last night after black Twitter user Martin Shapland complained he used the phrase towards him. But in June 2018, Mr Stewart had used exactly the same Shakespeare quote in an exchange - this time over horsefeed and ragwort - with a white Twitter user... Supporters of Mr Stewart said he appeared to have a habit of using the phrase to make a point about those he felt were claiming to be experts in a certain field... 'he will be the first man ever fired for accurately quoting Shakespeare'"
Since we're told that colourblind people are racist, this is fitting
How long before Shakespeare himself is cancelled?
Stickers bearing white supremacist messages found in Ipswich
So "Reject White Guilt" and "It's Okay To Be White" are "white supremacist" messages. It's telling how institutionalised anti-white racism is
Why liberal white women pay a lot of money to learn over dinner how they're racist - "A frank discussion is led by co-founders Regina Jackson, who is black, and Saira Rao, who identifies as Indian American. They started Race to Dinner to challenge liberal white women to accept their racism, however subconscious. “If you did this in a conference room, they’d leave,” Rao says. “But wealthy white women have been taught never to leave the dinner table.”... “White men are never going to change anything. If they were, they would have done it by now”... It seems unlikely anyone would voluntarily go to a dinner party in which they’d be asked, one by one, “What was a racist thing you did recently?” by two women of color, before appetizers are served. But Jackson and Rao have hardly been able to take a break since they started these dinners in the spring of 2019. So far, 15 dinners have been held in big cities across the US... Morgan Richards admits she recently did nothing when someone patronizingly commended her for adopting her two black children, as though she had saved them. “What I went through to be a mother, I didn’t care if they were black,” she says, opening a window for Rao to challenge her: “So, you admit it is stooping low to adopt a black child?” And Richards accepts that the undertone of her statement is racist... A lot of people hate Saira Rao.“The American flag makes me sick,” read a recent tweet of hers. Another: “White folks – before telling me that your Indian husband or wife or friend or colleague doesn’t agree with anything I say about racism or thinks I’m crazy, please Google ‘token,’ ‘internalized oppression’ and ‘gaslighting’.”... Another previous attendee, who did not want to be named, says she found Rao to be dogmatic, and presented a distorted depiction of history, leaving out facts that do not fit her narrative. At one point, she referred to Rao as “the Trump of the alt-left”."
How does one find so many suckers?
As absolution goes, it'd be cheaper and faster to go to church. And at least the priest wouldn't tell you you'll never be forgiven
Why Iowa is so important this time - The Washington Post - Jennifer Rubin, May 13 2019
What good are the Iowa caucuses anyway? - The Washington Post - Jennifer Rubin, February 3 2020
Of course, Trump "attacking" the press is the real danger to the media
The Case Against Stretching - "According to a 2016 study of 605 personal trainers in the U.S.—virtually all of whom had certifications from the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) or the National Strength and Conditioning Association—80 percent of them still prescribed traditional static stretching to their clients... The main spur for the Sports Medicine article, by exercise scientist James Nuzzo, is the fact that flexibility is still pegged as one of the five “major components” of physical fitness, alongside body composition, cardiovascular endurance, muscle endurance, and muscle strength, by the ACSM. The 2018 edition of the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, from the Department of Health and Human Services, also lists flexibility among its big five (this time alongside cardiorespiratory fitness, musculoskeletal fitness, balance, and speed).If you actually flip through these documents, you’ll experience a bizarre cognitive dissonance. The Guidelines state repeatedly that “flexibility activities are an appropriate part of a physical activity program, even though their health benefits are unknown and it is unclear whether they reduce risk of injury.”... greater flexibility as measured by the sit-and-reach test isn’t associated with longer life—unlike the ACSM’s other four “major components” of physical fitness. It also doesn’t predict more successful aging (like avoiding falls), except in ways that are better predicted by muscle strength. Contrary to a half-century of locker-room wisdom, being flexible doesn’t seem to protect you from injury either. This topic is the focus of hundreds of studies, and there are admittedly a few that do find benefits. At the other end of the spectrum, there are a few that find that being too flexible is also associated with injury. But overall, it just doesn’t seem to make much difference. It’s also not associated with non-sports-related problems like low-back pain. And finally, being flexible doesn’t improve your sports performance—unless you’re doing something where range of motion has a direct impact. If you’re a gymnast or a ballerina or a hockey goaltender, you’d better be flexible. Even as a cyclist, you need enough flexibility to be able to get into an aerodynamic riding position and still pedal comfortably. If you’re a runner, on the other hand, you’re highly unlikely to sustain an injury that has any connection to your inability to touch your toes. In fact, there’s some evidence that greater flexibility makes you a less efficient runner, presumably because having tight “springs” in your legs allows you to store and return more energy with each stride... there’s solid evidence that holding a stretch for a minute or more temporarily decreases strength and speed for up to an hour, likely due to changes in the neuromuscular signaling from brain to muscle. That’s a pretty harsh irony: all the stretching that I did religiously before every race in the 1990s and early 2000s might have actually dulled my edge... Nuzzo suggests that strength training is an ideal alternative. Sure, it makes you strong and has all sorts of other long-term health benefits—but if you use your full range of motion while doing it, it can also make you more flexible, with various studies showing increases in sit-and-reach scores of between 10 and 25 percent. Aerobic exercise and other forms of functional and combined training can also boost flexibility, according to a few studies. Basically, it appears that being healthy and active is enough to maintain a reasonable level of flexibility."
Don’t throw out old, sprouting garlic — it has heart-healthy antioxidants - "“Sprouted” garlic — old garlic bulbs with bright green shoots emerging from the cloves — is considered to be past its prime and usually ends up in the garbage can. But scientists are reporting in ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry that this type of garlic has even more heart-healthy antioxidant activity than its fresher counterparts... When seedlings grow into green plants, they make many new compounds, including those that protect the young plant against pathogens... Other studies have shown that sprouted beans and grains have increased antioxidant activity"
Garlic Scapes - "Scapes are delectable, with a gentle flavor that’s much less pungent than mature garlic. They can be used to lend a garlic perfume (e.g., put a half a scape in a pot of cooking rice for a subtle garlic note), as an herb, or cooked and eaten like a vegetable. Scapes are perfect pureed with butter to prepare herb butter for vegetables, fish, etc., or made into pesto with basil or another herb. Used as a vegetable, they work well paired with other green veggies (e.g., asparagus, peas) in frittatas or stir-fries."
Black market breakfast cereals are alive and well in Canada - "Black markets and shadow economies, that were typically used to buy and sell illegal goods, have a banned product that you wouldn’t expect to be on their proverbial shelves, breakfast cereal. Certain American cereals are not permitted to be imported according to regulators at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA). Nonetheless, some boxes of prohibited cereals have been appearing in Canadian corner stores and local farmers markets.Breakfast cereals including Cookie Crips and Franken Berry are not sold officially by General Mills to grocery chains in Canada. According to General Mills Canada the reason that some cereals sold in America are not sold north of the boarder is due to certain government regulations... Canadian regulations put cereal in its own special category that requires cereal sold in Canada to have a specific nutrient profile. One might assume that sugar content might be the reason for the ban, but it turns out that the amount of sugar in American cereals is comparable to that contained in Canadian cereals. The real reason, however, that certain cereals are not sold in Canada has to do with vitamin and other nutritional requirements established by the government of Canada... Labeling laws and French language requirements also play a role in preventing some of these cereals from being sold in Canada. General Mills also reports that different products are made to suit the needs of different consumers and that the cereals sold in Canada are made for the Canadian palate... Cereal isn’t the only food item sold on Canadian black markets. Pirate Joe’s, a store popular in Vancouver, is an unauthorized and unaffiliated reseller of goods found at the popular US grocery store Trader Joe’s. Pirate Joe’s will soon be reopening after winning a legal case brought by Trader Joe’s.In another example, in 2012 three Canadians including a police officer were arrested for smuggling restricted cheese across the border. Vancouver at that time even had its very own “cheese baron” who according to the National Post single handedly imported 18,725 kilograms of illegal cheese. Buying or selling contraband cereal isn’t a crime punishable by jail time like some other restricted black market items... If Canadians are willing to buy a cereal for nearly twice its U.S. price or smuggle tens of thousands of pounds of cheese across the border annually perhaps the government should consider liberalizing some of the current laws surrounding food regulation with the goal of increasing consumer choice?"
Post ID: 2915414191834470040
Mary Beard On The Nude In Western Art
Mary Beard On The Nude In Western Art | World Histories Podcast - HistoryExtra
"Committed gallery goers tend to be terribly sniffy when they hear someone say: you know, oh this is just soft porn for the elite, isn’t it? And, you know, I can be sniffy about that too. But I think it's a question that that you really have to answer or you have to ask. I'm not sure if there is an answer is there? But I think you do have to look at this and think, so what is the difference between this and soft porn?
And that comes over very clearly in one of the paintings that we feature in the first episode, which is Courbet’s origin of the world, which is a very detailed hyper realistic painting of a woman's genitals, and she doesn't have a head and she doesn't have any limbs. And you think, why is it? How do we explain why this is in a gallery and it is a masterpiece, whereas similar photographs of that, we’ll much more likely find in a, you know, a not wholly salubrious shop.
And, and I think that, there isn't, you know, when it comes to the human body, there isn't a strict divide: porn or art is partly in the eye of the beholder. But I think it was very interesting looking at this painting which has been extremely controversial. And it now hangs very much in a very kind of proud place in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. And it was interesting thinking about all the ways that we have of convincing ourselves that a painting like that is art. So it's in a very elaborate gilded frame, which says, masterpiece, right? It's called, the origin of the world, which gives it a kind of, sort of high level mysticism.
And even the Musee d'Orsay’s own website, talks about the use, and the sophistication of the use of color, stops it being pornography. And, you know, all those things are, in a way true, but all I think that shows is just how difficult the boundary is between art and porn and I, I've been very surprised at the vehemence of the reaction, even, even to the kind of rather crude semi accurate quotes of what I said. How. Really. Violent people get when they're confronted with the difficulty of that distinct. And in a way, justifies the program, I think... ‘I think she needs to be punched every day.’…
‘You open with a fourth century BC statue’...
‘It’s what we believe to be the first full sized sculpture of a female nude in the West, certainly in Greece but probably the West. And it's a very puzzling piece. It was made in the early fourth century BC. We’ve got no idea why after centuries of representing women closed the sculptor practically chose to do this sculpture of the goddess Aphrodite in the nude. What we do know is it was instantly quite difficult for people. The first clients he offered it to said no thank you, we’re not taking that. It then ended up being taken by the city of Kaleidos [sp?] in what is now Turkey.
And they kind of turned lucky in a way because it became a huge slightly notorious tourist attraction. You know, they put it on the ancient equivalent of fridge magnets, you know, it went on coins and on lamps and, and everything. But there is, there's a whole lot of, kind of background stories told about it, which shows you very clearly how difficult it was for people. There's one famous incident. It's described a couple of centuries later.
About a young man, story of a young man who falls in love with a statue and manages to get locked up with her in the temple. And then he tries to, well, sleep with her is probably a bit too coy and rape her is probably a bit too extreme. Have his way with her is what kind of books usually say. And he then, he does that. He leaves, apparently, the mark of his seed on on her thigh. And then he goes off and he throws himself off a cliff...
We have very strange boundaries about what we think counts as a nude. And that's still very much sits, not entirely, but it very much sits within a essentially classical form. And there's all sorts of other naked bodies that maybe we have to put back into the category of the nude. And we start very near the beginning of the program with the body of Jesus.
Because actually, if you think about Western urban culture, the place you see naked bodies, sometimes is more often anywhere else, maybe apart from an art gallery, and even there sometimes is in churches, you know that the crucified Jesus is usually not absolutely naked, effectively naked. And yet we don't talk about the nude Jesus…
We look at some amazing Michelangelo drawings at the British Museum with Neil MacGregor who used to be the director there. And he’s very clear that, you know, one of the bodies that has been most crucial and formative in the way the West has thought about nakedness and nudity is Jesus's body and of course it has, because if you have a religion whose central paradox is God made man, you have to say, so what sense, how far is Jesus man? And how far is Jesus a sexual being? And there are some extraordinary drawings in which you can see. Well, yeah, let's not put too fine a point on it. There's not much doubt that Jesus has got an erection...
‘If you look at, you know, standard definitions of pornography, I mean, I don't think there was ever any good definition of pornography. But if you look at what people say, make something pornographic. It's that you have no personality. All you've got is the genitals. You don't have a head, you don't have a face. You're not engaging with this person. You're just seeing it as sexual organs.
And in every way, on that kind of definition, Courbet’s origin of the world looks like a piece of porn... And yet it is treated now. And to some extent for me has become is… when I look at it, I enjoy actually enjoy looking at it. But it's become a piece of art, it is a piece of art. And yet it's a piece of art that you can see. Everybody is terribly, very careful to remind you that it's art. Let me talk about all the the wonderful use of mustard and brushstrokes. You know, the website, the museum tells you that it's not pornography, because of the nice colours. And you think that this is, I mean, you know, I can see where they're coming from, but it's desperate. They put it in this gilded frame which you know, and it's a kind of frame that you don't put pornography in, you know. This is the kind of frame that masterpieces go in…
There's a wonderful street artist who came down... sits in front of it in the Musee d'Orsay. And then she lifts her skirt up, reveals her genitals… There is a woman, a real woman, whose genitals you can’t actually see as clearly as the one in the painting, is being removed from the gallery when behind her is this really detailed-... I assumed what she was doing was trying to point out the irony of it'"
Sounds like people think Mary Beard is 'trolling' - since they feel uncomfortable when she points out Hard Truths
"Committed gallery goers tend to be terribly sniffy when they hear someone say: you know, oh this is just soft porn for the elite, isn’t it? And, you know, I can be sniffy about that too. But I think it's a question that that you really have to answer or you have to ask. I'm not sure if there is an answer is there? But I think you do have to look at this and think, so what is the difference between this and soft porn?
And that comes over very clearly in one of the paintings that we feature in the first episode, which is Courbet’s origin of the world, which is a very detailed hyper realistic painting of a woman's genitals, and she doesn't have a head and she doesn't have any limbs. And you think, why is it? How do we explain why this is in a gallery and it is a masterpiece, whereas similar photographs of that, we’ll much more likely find in a, you know, a not wholly salubrious shop.
And, and I think that, there isn't, you know, when it comes to the human body, there isn't a strict divide: porn or art is partly in the eye of the beholder. But I think it was very interesting looking at this painting which has been extremely controversial. And it now hangs very much in a very kind of proud place in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. And it was interesting thinking about all the ways that we have of convincing ourselves that a painting like that is art. So it's in a very elaborate gilded frame, which says, masterpiece, right? It's called, the origin of the world, which gives it a kind of, sort of high level mysticism.
And even the Musee d'Orsay’s own website, talks about the use, and the sophistication of the use of color, stops it being pornography. And, you know, all those things are, in a way true, but all I think that shows is just how difficult the boundary is between art and porn and I, I've been very surprised at the vehemence of the reaction, even, even to the kind of rather crude semi accurate quotes of what I said. How. Really. Violent people get when they're confronted with the difficulty of that distinct. And in a way, justifies the program, I think... ‘I think she needs to be punched every day.’…
‘You open with a fourth century BC statue’...
‘It’s what we believe to be the first full sized sculpture of a female nude in the West, certainly in Greece but probably the West. And it's a very puzzling piece. It was made in the early fourth century BC. We’ve got no idea why after centuries of representing women closed the sculptor practically chose to do this sculpture of the goddess Aphrodite in the nude. What we do know is it was instantly quite difficult for people. The first clients he offered it to said no thank you, we’re not taking that. It then ended up being taken by the city of Kaleidos [sp?] in what is now Turkey.
And they kind of turned lucky in a way because it became a huge slightly notorious tourist attraction. You know, they put it on the ancient equivalent of fridge magnets, you know, it went on coins and on lamps and, and everything. But there is, there's a whole lot of, kind of background stories told about it, which shows you very clearly how difficult it was for people. There's one famous incident. It's described a couple of centuries later.
About a young man, story of a young man who falls in love with a statue and manages to get locked up with her in the temple. And then he tries to, well, sleep with her is probably a bit too coy and rape her is probably a bit too extreme. Have his way with her is what kind of books usually say. And he then, he does that. He leaves, apparently, the mark of his seed on on her thigh. And then he goes off and he throws himself off a cliff...
We have very strange boundaries about what we think counts as a nude. And that's still very much sits, not entirely, but it very much sits within a essentially classical form. And there's all sorts of other naked bodies that maybe we have to put back into the category of the nude. And we start very near the beginning of the program with the body of Jesus.
Because actually, if you think about Western urban culture, the place you see naked bodies, sometimes is more often anywhere else, maybe apart from an art gallery, and even there sometimes is in churches, you know that the crucified Jesus is usually not absolutely naked, effectively naked. And yet we don't talk about the nude Jesus…
We look at some amazing Michelangelo drawings at the British Museum with Neil MacGregor who used to be the director there. And he’s very clear that, you know, one of the bodies that has been most crucial and formative in the way the West has thought about nakedness and nudity is Jesus's body and of course it has, because if you have a religion whose central paradox is God made man, you have to say, so what sense, how far is Jesus man? And how far is Jesus a sexual being? And there are some extraordinary drawings in which you can see. Well, yeah, let's not put too fine a point on it. There's not much doubt that Jesus has got an erection...
‘If you look at, you know, standard definitions of pornography, I mean, I don't think there was ever any good definition of pornography. But if you look at what people say, make something pornographic. It's that you have no personality. All you've got is the genitals. You don't have a head, you don't have a face. You're not engaging with this person. You're just seeing it as sexual organs.
And in every way, on that kind of definition, Courbet’s origin of the world looks like a piece of porn... And yet it is treated now. And to some extent for me has become is… when I look at it, I enjoy actually enjoy looking at it. But it's become a piece of art, it is a piece of art. And yet it's a piece of art that you can see. Everybody is terribly, very careful to remind you that it's art. Let me talk about all the the wonderful use of mustard and brushstrokes. You know, the website, the museum tells you that it's not pornography, because of the nice colours. And you think that this is, I mean, you know, I can see where they're coming from, but it's desperate. They put it in this gilded frame which you know, and it's a kind of frame that you don't put pornography in, you know. This is the kind of frame that masterpieces go in…
There's a wonderful street artist who came down... sits in front of it in the Musee d'Orsay. And then she lifts her skirt up, reveals her genitals… There is a woman, a real woman, whose genitals you can’t actually see as clearly as the one in the painting, is being removed from the gallery when behind her is this really detailed-... I assumed what she was doing was trying to point out the irony of it'"
Sounds like people think Mary Beard is 'trolling' - since they feel uncomfortable when she points out Hard Truths
Post ID: 4303539313041382015
Links - 25th April 2020 (1)
Religious leader sells meth to students, claims it’s halal - "A religious leader in Indonesia was arrested for selling methamphetamine to students, claiming it was halal or permissible under Islamic law.Ahmad Marzuki, from Madura, Northeast Java, sold the substance to his pupils at an Islamic boarding school, as per Vice Indonesia/Vice yesterday, Jan 29. He told them that the illegal drug would increase their drive to study and recite the Quran... Marzuki explained that he knew methamphetamine is illegal under Indonesia’s laws, but that he found “no evidence against it in the Quran.”"
Dank Detective Memes - Posts - "It's not that I don't know how to use the metric system, it's that I choose not to utilize measurement designed to be used by people who have trouble counting without taking off their socks.
Imperial is a flex on the third world."
Weird flex, but ok. I guess that's why Americans are so great at maths. Oh wait.
Meme - "How Big Are Deer? Adult Deer Are as Tall as a Bicycle They Weigh as Much as 800 Hamburgers"
The fabled superior American Imperial system
Meme - "To remember how many feet there are in a mile, u just gotta use 5 tomatoes. five to-mate-oes sounds like five, two, eight, 0 and there's 5280 feet in a mile"
"To remember how many meters there are in a kilometre you just remember "1000” because the system of measurement in the rest of the world wasn‘t invented by a drunk mathematician rolling dice."
Meme - "Today we asked my three year old cousin how much he weighs and he said, "uhhh, like fifty squirrels”"
Strange how the Imperial system is superior because it uses units people can relate to
Meme - "4 PERSONS MAX 1000 KG OR
1 HORSE 5050 BANANAS 6666 HENS EGGS 2941 PIGEONS 88 HADDOCK 10526 NICKELS"
What's this in normal people measurements? - "The number of cricket chirps in 14 seconds plus 40 equals the temperature in Fahrenheit."
"Americans be measuring temperature in crickets but avoid Celcius at all cost"
Mohubedu on Twitter - "A sinkhole roughly the size of six to seven washing machines has closed the northbound lanes of State Line Road near 100th Street in Kansas City, Missouri."
"Americans will measure with anything but the metric system"
Quote by Josh Bazell - "In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities"
Heraclitean Fire on Twitter - "Populism is what the establishment elites call democracy when they don't like the outcome."
Susan Brown's answer to Why do a lot of Fly Emirates crew quit within 3 years of joining the airline? - Quora - "Fatigue. The rosters the Emirates crew have are a lot...
Rules. When you sign your Emirates cabin crew contract you also sign up to follow 10000 rules. There are various strict rules the crew have to follow both on duty and off duty. Example: the female crew are not allowed to have any male friends sleep over at their house. The same for the male crew. Example: if the crew wish to have family over to their accommodation, they have to sign forms and have it approved. This is in regards to having family over to stay for a long period of time. There is also a curfew in place for all crew. The strict rules can feel suffocating for some. Example: the crew are not allowed to have alcohol in their houses without a liquor license. If the company finds out the crew have alcohol in their accommodation without having a liquor license then the crew is fired. Having all these rules makes the crew feel very controlled by the company. The crew feel like kids having a ‘’big brother’’ watching them at all times, etc...
Working environment... There are a lot of back stabbing happening among the crew. A lot of crew reporting each other. A lot of crew getting fired for silly reasons, etc. The crew feel they don’t have any support from the managers. Example: if a crew member ends up having a argument with a passenger, then the passenger have the right to get that crew member fired. The crew really have no voice... When the crew have no voice, no support from managers and have difficult passengers then sometimes it feels like they are ‘’modern day’’ slaves on board.
Roommates. The crew share the accommodation with one or two other crew. The crew are not allowed to change accommodation until after they have completed their probation period. The probation period is 6 months"
Captain America has more dialogue spoken in Spider-Man: Homecoming than all of Infinity War. : marvelstudios
People who understand Chinese/Japanese, what's the dumbest thing you've seen tattooed on someone? : AskReddit - "Korean tattoos, which You rarely ever see. They were written vertically on his each of his calves. One said left leg, the other said right leg."
"Dude was so proud of his grandson that he had a tattoo that said “I love my grandson”Except I’m guessing everyone just googled “I love my grand son” because it came out reading “I love fat boys.”"
"I have the characters for Shrimp Dumpling (Har Gow) tattooed on me. I knowingly did this, because I'm half Chinese and fucking love shrimp dumplings.I had a chinese girl ask me if I knew what it meant and I laughed and said of course, I love dumplings.My chinese mother was not impressed but then laughed and said it was very me."
"Once when I was in university, working at a shop, a very fat lady came in with the kanji for "large" tattooed on her shoulder blade. I politely complimented her tattoo and asked what it meant. She said it meant "sassy"."
"The four elements tattoo with "Dirt, hot, blow, wet" was pretty funny."
"Japanese speaker here. Guy had one that read "トン勝" Someone told him that トン (Ton) means pig and 勝 (katsu) means to win. He thought that putting them together means to win against pigs (police?) とんかつ Tonkatsu means pork cutlet. I didn't have the heart to tell him."
"Seen a few over the years but one that I remember most was when I first started learning Mandarin.The guy had a tattoo on the back of his leg that proudly said 牛肉 which means beef."
"Sort of a reverse semi-related answer to this question, my cousin was in Japan trying to land a business deal with some auto manufacturers, taking them out to dinner and such, and during dinner a girl walked by wearing a shirt that said "I want to berry my head in your chest" (misspelling the fault of the shirt, not of me). He laughed like a donkey breathing Joker gas, and had to fumble trying to explain to these old Japanese dudes what was so funny.Eventually, when his Japanese wasn't up to snuff enough to explain either the act or the misspelling, he settled for miming the action with a pair of invisible breasts. The Japanese dudes instantly understood that, and thought it was hilarious. It apparently made the rest of the business negotiations run much more smoothly."
"I met a girl when I was backpacking in China who knowingly had the characters for "prostitute" tattooed on her hip - she thought it was funny, and the only people who saw it would be ones she chose to show it to.The Chinese guy who was drinking with us in the hostel was horrified, and suggested that she get another tattoo underneath which said "only joking"."
"Guy had "変態外人" on his arm, said it meant "Lover of Asian Beauty" when in fact it means "Foreign Pervert""
Cartier Rose's answer to Why does Canada refuse to recognize foreign education degrees or credentials? - Quora - "One time, I was asked to teach Management in this college which is located in a country outside Canada. At the end of the semester, we had an open book exam.On the day of the exam, we sat students apart from each other. But shortly after the exam, the students starting exchanging papers and talking to each other. I tried to stop them, and it got to a point where one student, stood up. Towering over me, he pointed his fingers at me and said: “ This is my friend. I have to help him and I have right to let him copy my answers. What do you want? The other local invigilators immediately came to my assistance. They pulled me aside and told me that I was new and didn’t understand their practice. They allowed students to copy from elementary school on, so this was not an issue.I’ve many more of such cases, having lived in many countries."
"It is our Canadian policies of being ‘fair’ and ‘non-discriminatory’ that reduce everyone to the lowest denominator. The Canadian government cannot say that one graduating from Harvard is accepted while another from Bogabogaland is not.Therefore, if we have to give an exception to someone graduating from Harvard medical school, we have to give an exception to someone graduating from Bogabogaland. Now, do you want someone with a medical degree from Bogabogaland to operate on you? I can assure you, you wouldn’t want that."
Chlorine - "Chlorine is the most widely used disinfectant in the home. It is also disinfectant used by the water industry to maintain hygienic conditions within the public water supply network of pipes... Water is safe when it leaves the treatment works and the trace of chlorine is there only to preserve the high quality of the water as it passes through the miles of pipes used to convey water to homes and workplaces. Chlorine has a long history of about 100 years of safe use for hygiene purposes worldwide."
I wonder whether the British people triggered by chlorinated chicken know their water is chlorinated, and their salads and vegetables are washed in chlorinated water
Chlorinated chicken: How safe is it? - "Chlorine-rinsed bagged salads are common in the UK and other countries in the EU"
Barq's - Wikipedia - "Barq's /ˈbɑːrks/ is an American soft drink. Its brand of root beer is notable for having caffeine"
The only root beer which can match A&W
Dank Detective Memes - Posts - "It's not that I don't know how to use the metric system, it's that I choose not to utilize measurement designed to be used by people who have trouble counting without taking off their socks.
Imperial is a flex on the third world."
Weird flex, but ok. I guess that's why Americans are so great at maths. Oh wait.
Meme - "How Big Are Deer? Adult Deer Are as Tall as a Bicycle They Weigh as Much as 800 Hamburgers"
The fabled superior American Imperial system
Meme - "To remember how many feet there are in a mile, u just gotta use 5 tomatoes. five to-mate-oes sounds like five, two, eight, 0 and there's 5280 feet in a mile"
"To remember how many meters there are in a kilometre you just remember "1000” because the system of measurement in the rest of the world wasn‘t invented by a drunk mathematician rolling dice."
Meme - "Today we asked my three year old cousin how much he weighs and he said, "uhhh, like fifty squirrels”"
Strange how the Imperial system is superior because it uses units people can relate to
Meme - "4 PERSONS MAX 1000 KG OR
1 HORSE 5050 BANANAS 6666 HENS EGGS 2941 PIGEONS 88 HADDOCK 10526 NICKELS"
What's this in normal people measurements? - "The number of cricket chirps in 14 seconds plus 40 equals the temperature in Fahrenheit."
"Americans be measuring temperature in crickets but avoid Celcius at all cost"
Mohubedu on Twitter - "A sinkhole roughly the size of six to seven washing machines has closed the northbound lanes of State Line Road near 100th Street in Kansas City, Missouri."
"Americans will measure with anything but the metric system"
Quote by Josh Bazell - "In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities"
Heraclitean Fire on Twitter - "Populism is what the establishment elites call democracy when they don't like the outcome."
Susan Brown's answer to Why do a lot of Fly Emirates crew quit within 3 years of joining the airline? - Quora - "Fatigue. The rosters the Emirates crew have are a lot...
Rules. When you sign your Emirates cabin crew contract you also sign up to follow 10000 rules. There are various strict rules the crew have to follow both on duty and off duty. Example: the female crew are not allowed to have any male friends sleep over at their house. The same for the male crew. Example: if the crew wish to have family over to their accommodation, they have to sign forms and have it approved. This is in regards to having family over to stay for a long period of time. There is also a curfew in place for all crew. The strict rules can feel suffocating for some. Example: the crew are not allowed to have alcohol in their houses without a liquor license. If the company finds out the crew have alcohol in their accommodation without having a liquor license then the crew is fired. Having all these rules makes the crew feel very controlled by the company. The crew feel like kids having a ‘’big brother’’ watching them at all times, etc...
Working environment... There are a lot of back stabbing happening among the crew. A lot of crew reporting each other. A lot of crew getting fired for silly reasons, etc. The crew feel they don’t have any support from the managers. Example: if a crew member ends up having a argument with a passenger, then the passenger have the right to get that crew member fired. The crew really have no voice... When the crew have no voice, no support from managers and have difficult passengers then sometimes it feels like they are ‘’modern day’’ slaves on board.
Roommates. The crew share the accommodation with one or two other crew. The crew are not allowed to change accommodation until after they have completed their probation period. The probation period is 6 months"
Captain America has more dialogue spoken in Spider-Man: Homecoming than all of Infinity War. : marvelstudios
People who understand Chinese/Japanese, what's the dumbest thing you've seen tattooed on someone? : AskReddit - "Korean tattoos, which You rarely ever see. They were written vertically on his each of his calves. One said left leg, the other said right leg."
"Dude was so proud of his grandson that he had a tattoo that said “I love my grandson”Except I’m guessing everyone just googled “I love my grand son” because it came out reading “I love fat boys.”"
"I have the characters for Shrimp Dumpling (Har Gow) tattooed on me. I knowingly did this, because I'm half Chinese and fucking love shrimp dumplings.I had a chinese girl ask me if I knew what it meant and I laughed and said of course, I love dumplings.My chinese mother was not impressed but then laughed and said it was very me."
"Once when I was in university, working at a shop, a very fat lady came in with the kanji for "large" tattooed on her shoulder blade. I politely complimented her tattoo and asked what it meant. She said it meant "sassy"."
"The four elements tattoo with "Dirt, hot, blow, wet" was pretty funny."
"Japanese speaker here. Guy had one that read "トン勝" Someone told him that トン (Ton) means pig and 勝 (katsu) means to win. He thought that putting them together means to win against pigs (police?) とんかつ Tonkatsu means pork cutlet. I didn't have the heart to tell him."
"Seen a few over the years but one that I remember most was when I first started learning Mandarin.The guy had a tattoo on the back of his leg that proudly said 牛肉 which means beef."
"Sort of a reverse semi-related answer to this question, my cousin was in Japan trying to land a business deal with some auto manufacturers, taking them out to dinner and such, and during dinner a girl walked by wearing a shirt that said "I want to berry my head in your chest" (misspelling the fault of the shirt, not of me). He laughed like a donkey breathing Joker gas, and had to fumble trying to explain to these old Japanese dudes what was so funny.Eventually, when his Japanese wasn't up to snuff enough to explain either the act or the misspelling, he settled for miming the action with a pair of invisible breasts. The Japanese dudes instantly understood that, and thought it was hilarious. It apparently made the rest of the business negotiations run much more smoothly."
"I met a girl when I was backpacking in China who knowingly had the characters for "prostitute" tattooed on her hip - she thought it was funny, and the only people who saw it would be ones she chose to show it to.The Chinese guy who was drinking with us in the hostel was horrified, and suggested that she get another tattoo underneath which said "only joking"."
"Guy had "変態外人" on his arm, said it meant "Lover of Asian Beauty" when in fact it means "Foreign Pervert""
Cartier Rose's answer to Why does Canada refuse to recognize foreign education degrees or credentials? - Quora - "One time, I was asked to teach Management in this college which is located in a country outside Canada. At the end of the semester, we had an open book exam.On the day of the exam, we sat students apart from each other. But shortly after the exam, the students starting exchanging papers and talking to each other. I tried to stop them, and it got to a point where one student, stood up. Towering over me, he pointed his fingers at me and said: “ This is my friend. I have to help him and I have right to let him copy my answers. What do you want? The other local invigilators immediately came to my assistance. They pulled me aside and told me that I was new and didn’t understand their practice. They allowed students to copy from elementary school on, so this was not an issue.I’ve many more of such cases, having lived in many countries."
"It is our Canadian policies of being ‘fair’ and ‘non-discriminatory’ that reduce everyone to the lowest denominator. The Canadian government cannot say that one graduating from Harvard is accepted while another from Bogabogaland is not.Therefore, if we have to give an exception to someone graduating from Harvard medical school, we have to give an exception to someone graduating from Bogabogaland. Now, do you want someone with a medical degree from Bogabogaland to operate on you? I can assure you, you wouldn’t want that."
Chlorine - "Chlorine is the most widely used disinfectant in the home. It is also disinfectant used by the water industry to maintain hygienic conditions within the public water supply network of pipes... Water is safe when it leaves the treatment works and the trace of chlorine is there only to preserve the high quality of the water as it passes through the miles of pipes used to convey water to homes and workplaces. Chlorine has a long history of about 100 years of safe use for hygiene purposes worldwide."
I wonder whether the British people triggered by chlorinated chicken know their water is chlorinated, and their salads and vegetables are washed in chlorinated water
Chlorinated chicken: How safe is it? - "Chlorine-rinsed bagged salads are common in the UK and other countries in the EU"
Barq's - Wikipedia - "Barq's /ˈbɑːrks/ is an American soft drink. Its brand of root beer is notable for having caffeine"
The only root beer which can match A&W
Post ID: 1394671379787046732
The English Defence League; 'Real' immigrants
BBC Radio 4 - Thinking Allowed, The English Defence League; 'Real' immigrants
"‘The English Defence League, the EDL, characterized in that commentary as a far right group. Well, it's a label which readily conjures up such other terms as racist and fascist. It's a label which almost seems to preempt the need for any further inquiry into the precise nature of such a movement. But it was exactly that kind of foreclosure that led my next guest to undertake a major ethnographic study of the EDL study, which in the words of one reviewer breaks apart stereotypes of rightist activists as simply dupes, thugs, and racists. Well, that study which is now published as Loud and proud: passion and politics in the English Defence League, is the work of Hilary Pilkington, who's professor of sociology at the University of Manchester’...
‘The electoral results, looking here 1980-2012 show that support for far right parties such as the British National Party didn't really rise above 1% until 2012, then rose to 1.8%. And that level of support has remained below countries such as France and the Netherlands’...
‘One way you can look at this is to think about why, what are the reasons there might be for those parties not having made it through into national parliament, for example. And one of those reasons is quite simply we have a political system which makes it very difficult for them to do that. So if you look at BNP, but also UKIP, they've had electoral successes, and rather paradoxically, in the European Parliament. So I think if you look perhaps at other measures, like for example, the ongoing European surveys on values and attitudes, so if you look at base levels of xenophobia, for example, you find that the UK has around 20%, which is typical of other Western European societies where there have been major breakthroughs by populist radical right parties into national Parliaments’...
‘The English Defence League initially rose in defense of British troops coming home from Afghanistan’...
‘Interestingly, the mission statement of the English Defence League didn't change for the entire period that I was in the field. And it's only recently that there's been, I would say a significant shift in the way that it expresses its aim. So the new mission statement issued in January 2016, for example, for the first time has any statement on immigration. Prior to that there was no official statement on immigration’
‘Now, I've got here, these are the words of one of the speakers at a sort of a national demonstration, which expands upon who is being targeted by the EDL. This goes back to, this is Luton, 2014’
‘I’m not talking about the guy you carpool with. I’m not talking about the guy you see at the school gates, picking up the children. I’m talking about the extremists, the loons the clerics and the imans who want to preach a seventh century ideology in a 21st century world.’
‘That's interesting because your respondents, reading what they had to say, they're keen to stress. That they were only opposed, this is that time, they were only exposed to extremism, not to individual Muslim people. In addition, many of them also claimed not to be racist. I mean, I know it's an ethnography, you're not going to be judge and jury on this. But how consistent and convincing did you find those sort of claims? Not racist, you know, not anti muslim?’
‘I think there are a number of different differentiations that they make, actually. So one of them is, some people would make a differentiation between militant - what they called militant or extremist Muslims - and Muslims. Most of the respondents I talked to extensively, though, made an even more important distinction between Islam and Muslims. So for example, they would make a point of saying, we are not protesting against Muslims, we have nothing against Muslims. We think there is a, an inherent problem in Islam or in certain readings of Islam. So they would make that, that that distinction. That's not to say that, especially in the heat of demonstrations, on the coach, in the banter, in the run up to demonstrations, there wouldn't be a slippage between those positions’…
‘My response to that is to imagine if somebody told you that they were very hostile to Judaism, but not to Jews. Now, history and convention would immediately probably set the alarm bells ringing because while it might be possible in some respect to hold the things separately, in practice, they quickly come together. For example, how would an EDL member identify a practitioner of Islam? They’d look for a Muslim. And to do that they'd use social signs, dress, appearance, name or skin color, perhaps all of those in a way, which means we're talking here about how groups are made into a race rather than religion, per se. And I think Hillary brings it out really well in the description of Kane and Tina at least in that section on seeing Islam, which brings us back I think, to many of the mechanics of how Islam is racialized. And insofar as it becomes this kind of explanatory variable for all that’s alien in these young people's political imagination’...
‘Their grievances are quite widespread, but they're usually expressed in terms of a sense that people like us, have become second class citizens. So it would be expressed on one level in relation to what they perceived as competition over resources, especially social housing. And the second main articulation of it would be around a sense that there was a two tier justice system as I called it. So things which were understood as racist when they were perpetrated against others in inverted commas, were not perceived as being racist when perpetrated against us.’...
‘Since you've completed your research, they've got a new mission statement, which is, it references the first time the need to control immigration, unlike their previous statement, what do you make of this development?’
‘It's an interesting development. I think it's not surprising given you know, in 2015, it was a rather bizarre situation where every mainstream party had a policy on immigration and was talking about how they would control immigration and what benefits they would reduce for certain types of immigrants and so on. And the EDL had no statement on immigration’...
‘They did expressively disassociate themselves from the British National Party didn’t they?’
‘Oh, yes, there's a grassroots level, almost all respondents are adamant that they would have nothing to do with with the BMP. That only two respondents out of my whole group were, had been former members of the BMP. And both had very strong reasons for why they'd left.’
Good to show to people who claim the BBC is entirely and irrevocably biased and 'leftist'
Presumably according to Nasar Meer (who conflates criticism of extremist Islam with criticism of Islam, and then with anti-Muslim sentiment), we can't criticise fundamentalist Christianity
Curiously other episodes don't have second interviewees who critique the first. But I'll take what I can get...
"‘The English Defence League, the EDL, characterized in that commentary as a far right group. Well, it's a label which readily conjures up such other terms as racist and fascist. It's a label which almost seems to preempt the need for any further inquiry into the precise nature of such a movement. But it was exactly that kind of foreclosure that led my next guest to undertake a major ethnographic study of the EDL study, which in the words of one reviewer breaks apart stereotypes of rightist activists as simply dupes, thugs, and racists. Well, that study which is now published as Loud and proud: passion and politics in the English Defence League, is the work of Hilary Pilkington, who's professor of sociology at the University of Manchester’...
‘The electoral results, looking here 1980-2012 show that support for far right parties such as the British National Party didn't really rise above 1% until 2012, then rose to 1.8%. And that level of support has remained below countries such as France and the Netherlands’...
‘One way you can look at this is to think about why, what are the reasons there might be for those parties not having made it through into national parliament, for example. And one of those reasons is quite simply we have a political system which makes it very difficult for them to do that. So if you look at BNP, but also UKIP, they've had electoral successes, and rather paradoxically, in the European Parliament. So I think if you look perhaps at other measures, like for example, the ongoing European surveys on values and attitudes, so if you look at base levels of xenophobia, for example, you find that the UK has around 20%, which is typical of other Western European societies where there have been major breakthroughs by populist radical right parties into national Parliaments’...
‘The English Defence League initially rose in defense of British troops coming home from Afghanistan’...
‘Interestingly, the mission statement of the English Defence League didn't change for the entire period that I was in the field. And it's only recently that there's been, I would say a significant shift in the way that it expresses its aim. So the new mission statement issued in January 2016, for example, for the first time has any statement on immigration. Prior to that there was no official statement on immigration’
‘Now, I've got here, these are the words of one of the speakers at a sort of a national demonstration, which expands upon who is being targeted by the EDL. This goes back to, this is Luton, 2014’
‘I’m not talking about the guy you carpool with. I’m not talking about the guy you see at the school gates, picking up the children. I’m talking about the extremists, the loons the clerics and the imans who want to preach a seventh century ideology in a 21st century world.’
‘That's interesting because your respondents, reading what they had to say, they're keen to stress. That they were only opposed, this is that time, they were only exposed to extremism, not to individual Muslim people. In addition, many of them also claimed not to be racist. I mean, I know it's an ethnography, you're not going to be judge and jury on this. But how consistent and convincing did you find those sort of claims? Not racist, you know, not anti muslim?’
‘I think there are a number of different differentiations that they make, actually. So one of them is, some people would make a differentiation between militant - what they called militant or extremist Muslims - and Muslims. Most of the respondents I talked to extensively, though, made an even more important distinction between Islam and Muslims. So for example, they would make a point of saying, we are not protesting against Muslims, we have nothing against Muslims. We think there is a, an inherent problem in Islam or in certain readings of Islam. So they would make that, that that distinction. That's not to say that, especially in the heat of demonstrations, on the coach, in the banter, in the run up to demonstrations, there wouldn't be a slippage between those positions’…
‘My response to that is to imagine if somebody told you that they were very hostile to Judaism, but not to Jews. Now, history and convention would immediately probably set the alarm bells ringing because while it might be possible in some respect to hold the things separately, in practice, they quickly come together. For example, how would an EDL member identify a practitioner of Islam? They’d look for a Muslim. And to do that they'd use social signs, dress, appearance, name or skin color, perhaps all of those in a way, which means we're talking here about how groups are made into a race rather than religion, per se. And I think Hillary brings it out really well in the description of Kane and Tina at least in that section on seeing Islam, which brings us back I think, to many of the mechanics of how Islam is racialized. And insofar as it becomes this kind of explanatory variable for all that’s alien in these young people's political imagination’...
‘Their grievances are quite widespread, but they're usually expressed in terms of a sense that people like us, have become second class citizens. So it would be expressed on one level in relation to what they perceived as competition over resources, especially social housing. And the second main articulation of it would be around a sense that there was a two tier justice system as I called it. So things which were understood as racist when they were perpetrated against others in inverted commas, were not perceived as being racist when perpetrated against us.’...
‘Since you've completed your research, they've got a new mission statement, which is, it references the first time the need to control immigration, unlike their previous statement, what do you make of this development?’
‘It's an interesting development. I think it's not surprising given you know, in 2015, it was a rather bizarre situation where every mainstream party had a policy on immigration and was talking about how they would control immigration and what benefits they would reduce for certain types of immigrants and so on. And the EDL had no statement on immigration’...
‘They did expressively disassociate themselves from the British National Party didn’t they?’
‘Oh, yes, there's a grassroots level, almost all respondents are adamant that they would have nothing to do with with the BMP. That only two respondents out of my whole group were, had been former members of the BMP. And both had very strong reasons for why they'd left.’
Good to show to people who claim the BBC is entirely and irrevocably biased and 'leftist'
Presumably according to Nasar Meer (who conflates criticism of extremist Islam with criticism of Islam, and then with anti-Muslim sentiment), we can't criticise fundamentalist Christianity
Curiously other episodes don't have second interviewees who critique the first. But I'll take what I can get...
Post ID: 267290026798762211
Friday, April 24, 2020
Links - 24th April 2020 (2)
The Iroquois Theater Disaster Killed Hundreds and Changed Fire Safety Forever - "The opulent theater had been advertised as “absolutely fireproof.” How could hundreds of souls – mostly women and children - perish so rapidly? Who was responsible?Days later, the Chicago Tribune ran a list of regulations that had been flouted by the Iroquois, including the lack of an adequate fire alarm, automatic sprinklers, marked exits, or suitable fire extinguishing devices. Even the two large flues on the rooftop where the smoke and flame could have vented out were boarded shut... The fire forced Chicago to take a hard look at how they regulated large public spaces in the booming city. “How much of that was because they had flouted the building codes and how much of it was that the building codes didn’t go far enough?” says John Russick of the Chicago Historical Society. “…[there was] a fair amount of ‘our buildings don’t protect us and we need to do more to them.’ It wouldn’t have been enough even if the building codes had been followed—a lot of people would have died in the Iroquois Theater fire.”"
I wonder how libertarians will blame regulation for the deaths
Someone says this is why exit doors open outwards, but I can't find unanimity on this (or even which direction they should swing in)
Singapore jails Indonesian helper for mixing menstrual blood, saliva into employer’s food - "A foreign domestic helper had stolen more than S$17,000 (US$12,624) in cash from her Singaporeanemployer’s mother. She was also afraid that the family would scold her for her work performance.So the Indonesian mixed some of her urine, saliva and menstrual blood into their rice and water, and the family of six ended up consuming it.This practice of using vaginal fluids to make love and magical potions can be found in some parts of Southeast Asia, where some believe that they have special powers."
PINK HEDONIST on Twitter - "When women are told that they can never be wrong and are never responsible for anything bad that happens to them - they become tyrants. However, while acting like tyrants, they think they are the VICTIMS that have been falsely wronged. Nothing can be more dangerous than this."
Why Is Vietnamese Food in America Frozen in the 1970s? - "Forty years after the Vietnam War, many Vietnamese restaurants in America are still a tribute to a time and a place that no longer exists: 1970s Saigon. I thought I knew Vietnamese food until I met the dish banh trang nuong. As a Vietnamese-American, I’ve always clung to the nostalgic idea of Vietnamese food as a way to connect with folks back home. But when I first saw banh trang nuong in a YouTube video documenting street food, and then in real life at Brooklyn restaurant Di An Di, I faced a moment of crisis. The dish, dubbed “Vietnamese Pizza” on the menu, consists of a circle of rice paper crisped up on a grill and topped with cooked egg, shrimp powder, pickled chiles, ground pork, and hot sauce. The idea of there being a Vietnamese dish that I didn’t know about was distressing, to say the least... You can see it in the way pho is almost universally expressed in the United States: It’s the South Vietnamese style, which includes tableside garnishes like basil, sliced chiles, and hoisin sauce. In the North, they prefer their pho without such last-minute additions. Though pho only came to the South in 1954, when Northerners migrated that way en masse in response to the country’s partition, Southern chefs used the soup as a base to showcase the flagrant potency of their region’s herbs and chiles. Like any other cuisine, food in Vietnam has evolved and expanded in the last four decades—banh trang nuong was only one example of the myriad innovations and trends that have arisen from street vendors and chefs since the 1970s. Nevertheless, the enduring image I have of Vietnamese food is only what my parents and grandparents could piece together in their own kitchens. My grandparents and their children cook what is nostalgic for them; in turn, their memories of the past are what I myself crave. The mom-and-pop restaurants I frequent as an adult have rarely challenged this narrative: We all remember and fill in the gaps together... Through food, they could, like many Vietnamese restaurant owners, remember Saigon, even if maps didn’t show it.
So much for "authenticity"
Keywords: stuck in the 70s, stuck in the 1970s
Meet the Woman Bringing Social Justice to Astrology - "Nicholas used November 2017's mercury retrograde to urge her followers to contact the FCC prior to its vote on net neutrality. She wrote about the new moon in Scorpio representing the need to heal during the initial wave of sexual assault accusations in Hollywood. She’s posted about DACA and the border wall and has even been promoting an online tool called FreeFrom, which was started by her wife Sonya Passi to help victims of domestic violence understand how to pursue financial compensation"
Since both are bullshit and Democrats are more likely to believe in astrology, this is fitting
Avast's Free Antivirus Harvests All Your Clicks, Sells Them to Third-Parties - "As we’ve learned time and time again, “free” things on the internet are almost never truly free. If you’re not paying with money, you’re probably paying with your data. That’s the case with the free antivirus products from Avast, which harvest browsing history for sale to major corporations. Despite claims that its data is fully anonymized, an investigation by our sister site PCMag and Motherboard shows how easy it is to unmask individual users"
Comparing meta-analyses and preregistered multiple-laboratory replication projects - "Many researchers rely on meta-analysis to summarize research evidence. However, there is a concern that publication bias and selective reporting may lead to biased meta-analytic effect sizes. We compare the results of meta-analyses to large-scale preregistered replications in psychology carried out at multiple laboratories. The multiple-laboratory replications provide precisely estimated effect sizes that do not suffer from publication bias or selective reporting. We searched the literature and identified 15 meta-analyses on the same topics as multiple-laboratory replications. We find that meta-analytic effect sizes are significantly different from replication effect sizes for 12 out of the 15 meta-replication pairs. These differences are systematic and, on average, meta-analytic effect sizes are almost three times as large as replication effect sizes. We also implement three methods of correcting meta-analysis for bias, but these methods do not substantively improve the meta-analytic results."
Garbage in, garbage out
Darius Media Network - Posts - "sleeping around in your 20's has consequences later on in life, don't let society fool you.i wanna know how women got triggered by this tweet when this wasn't gender specific. I am confusion."
Cathy Young on Twitter - "American Dirt, a novel that takes a sympathetic view of the migrant crisis, has earned the author death threats and forced her to cancel the book tour. But it's not Trump world that hates it—it's woke liberals."
"This, I think, is why attempts to find a "cancel culture on the right" are a fundamental misreading. Right-wing mobs sometimes target political enemies, for sure. But there's no RW equivalent to this kind of ideological policing toward people sympathetic to RW causes."
France is losing the battle to save the baguette, warns leading bread historian - "France is losing the battle to save good bread as a Gallic baking renaissance among a small elite of boulangers has failed to topple the tasteless white baguette, the historian considered the world’s foremost authority on the subject has warned.Steven L Kaplan, who France has decorated for services rendered to the quintessentially French staple, said that the country was facing a “perfect storm” of factors - from globalisation to complacency - that have blunted the ability of bakers and consumers to care about or even recognise a top quality loaf. The American historian had long warned that standards were slipping, dating the decline in quality to the 1920s with the transition from slow bread making with a sourdough base to a quick process using yeast. Mechanisation in the 1960s hastened the plunge towards increasingly tasteless bread.The result has been plummeting daily consumption in France, which has fallen from 600g per person in the late 1880s - two and a half baguettes - to just 80g today - less than a third of a baguette.There was hope in 1993, when the French government issued a decree to create a special label called “the bread of French tradition”, made exclusively with flour, salt, water and leavening and no additives or freezing. In parallel, millers offered bakers better flour and renowned Parisian baker Lionel Poilâne blended large-scale production with artisanal practices like lengthy fermentation with sourdough and wood oven baking... Instead of a widespread rise in top quality bread, the government decree only sparked a “niche renaissance” among an elite of “incredibly imaginative, audacious” bakers, some of whose loaves are “so good they are up there with a Cheval Blanc or Chateau Latour wine”.“That’s great for people in the bourgeois bohemian districts of Paris but it just hasn’t touched the vast majority; among France’s 29,000 so-called “conventional boulangers”, only 10 per cent at best are interested in such things,” he said.The rest continue to offer mediocre bread to the French, whose “lack of taste is underlined by one staggering statistic: about three quarters continue to eat the 1960s white baguette - a bleached, deformed, unnatural, tasteless loaf,” he scoffed.It is not a price issue, he told the Telegraph, as often “we’re talking about a difference of sometimes 20 centimes”.“Most French are no longer able to discern and then evaluate what constitutes good or bad bread. They take refuge in the citadel of subjectivity by saying: ‘I know it’s good, I’m French. Because I like it, it must be good.’”... Globalisation is one of the culprits, he said, saying that it had “powerfully sapped terroir, the French attachment to local and national taste” and spread the desire for soft fluffy fare you don’t have to chew.But more dramatically, he said it was a sign that the French had lost their reign as the “hegemonic source of the arts de table they had enjoyed since the 17th century”.Meanwhile, France’s national confederation of bakers and patissiers was making things worse by waging war on industrial baguettes and bakery chains without defining and improving the quality of their own bread.The latest “scary” sign of the decline was France’s absence from the podium at this month’s bakery world cup in Paris, whose winners were China, Japan and Denmark."
The surprise place where hijab can spell trouble - ""It is easier to be wearing hijab in London than Cairo." This is how 47-year-old Dalia Anan describes her experience as a woman wearing the Islamic headscarf - also known as hijab - in London compared to her hometown in Egypt... "I feel judged in Egypt more than I do here"... "After a certain time in the evening, you are not allowed into some restaurants or what are regarded as 'cool' places, especially in the north coast"... Several women also reported not being allowed to swim with the full-body "burkini" swimsuit or scuba diving suits in some resorts. "The problem is that hijab has become subconsciously categorised as 'low class', and, hence, it is banned in places that cater exclusively for the high class"... In Egypt, Dina explains, "high class now refers to those who have a lot of money, speak English rather than Arabic and are 'open minded', which means they drink alcohol and wear revealing clothes"... All those I spoke to said an increasing number of Cairo's upper class are taking off the hijab, and they said those who are still wearing it frequently get questioned about why they still have it on... The stigma of wearing hijab among Egypt's upper class was also one of the main drivers for the #MyChoice social media campaign that was launched in May. One of the campaign's co-founders, 30-year-old Heba Mansour, says she had "a cultural shock" when she moved to Egypt three years ago after living abroad with her family."You are mocked and downgraded because of the hijab," says Heba, who works as a senior progressive adviser at the American University in Cairo and just completed her Masters degree in educational leadership."
I never knew there was so much disgusting Islamophobia in Cairo
All those posts about "Afghanistan" and "Iran" in the 70s (i.e. Kabul and Tehran) take on a different light
Intimate relationships between races more common than thought - "Intimate partnerships between the races—estimated at more than 5 percent of all marriages in the United States—are much more prevalent when cohabitation is also considered... While 25 percent of married Asian women have white husbands, for example, nearly 45 percent of cohabiting Asian women have white partners. And while 17 percent of married Latino women have white husbands, about 22 percent of cohabiting Latino women live with white men... “Cohabitations are not a trivial share of young people’s unions,” Harris and Ono report. “Among the four racial groups we examined, about one in six unions is a cohabitation. Just over 16 percent of unions for Asians, Latinos, and whites are cohabitations, and more than 25 percent of unions for Blacks. So focusing exclusively on interracial marriages, as most previous research has done, seriously underestimates the extent of intimate contact between the races.”In general, whites and Blacks were much more likely than Asians and Hispanics both to marry and to cohabit with their own racial group, the researchers found. But within each racial group, there were slightly different patterns, depending on gender as well as type of union.While almost 96 percent of married white women have white husbands, the researchers found, fewer than 93 percent of cohabiting white women live with white men. White women are 3.5 times as likely to live with Black men as to be married to them, and they’re also more likely to live with than marry Asians and Hispanics... About 69 percent of married Asian women are married to Asian men, while 25 percent of married Asian women have white husbands. “But as common as marriages are between Asian women and white men, cohabitations are even more prevalent,” says Ono. “In fact, Asian women are more likely to be living with white men than with Asian men. Nearly 45 percent of cohabiting Asian women have white partners, while less than 43 percent have Asian partners.”... In general, the researchers found that Black, white, Asian, and Latino men and women consistently choose to cohabit with people who are different from the people they marry. For all of these groups, cohabiting unions are more likely to be interracial than are marriages"
The first data I've seen on interracial relationships beyond marriage; interracial gender dynamics are even more exaggerated here than with marriage
I wonder how libertarians will blame regulation for the deaths
Someone says this is why exit doors open outwards, but I can't find unanimity on this (or even which direction they should swing in)
Singapore jails Indonesian helper for mixing menstrual blood, saliva into employer’s food - "A foreign domestic helper had stolen more than S$17,000 (US$12,624) in cash from her Singaporeanemployer’s mother. She was also afraid that the family would scold her for her work performance.So the Indonesian mixed some of her urine, saliva and menstrual blood into their rice and water, and the family of six ended up consuming it.This practice of using vaginal fluids to make love and magical potions can be found in some parts of Southeast Asia, where some believe that they have special powers."
PINK HEDONIST on Twitter - "When women are told that they can never be wrong and are never responsible for anything bad that happens to them - they become tyrants. However, while acting like tyrants, they think they are the VICTIMS that have been falsely wronged. Nothing can be more dangerous than this."
Why Is Vietnamese Food in America Frozen in the 1970s? - "Forty years after the Vietnam War, many Vietnamese restaurants in America are still a tribute to a time and a place that no longer exists: 1970s Saigon. I thought I knew Vietnamese food until I met the dish banh trang nuong. As a Vietnamese-American, I’ve always clung to the nostalgic idea of Vietnamese food as a way to connect with folks back home. But when I first saw banh trang nuong in a YouTube video documenting street food, and then in real life at Brooklyn restaurant Di An Di, I faced a moment of crisis. The dish, dubbed “Vietnamese Pizza” on the menu, consists of a circle of rice paper crisped up on a grill and topped with cooked egg, shrimp powder, pickled chiles, ground pork, and hot sauce. The idea of there being a Vietnamese dish that I didn’t know about was distressing, to say the least... You can see it in the way pho is almost universally expressed in the United States: It’s the South Vietnamese style, which includes tableside garnishes like basil, sliced chiles, and hoisin sauce. In the North, they prefer their pho without such last-minute additions. Though pho only came to the South in 1954, when Northerners migrated that way en masse in response to the country’s partition, Southern chefs used the soup as a base to showcase the flagrant potency of their region’s herbs and chiles. Like any other cuisine, food in Vietnam has evolved and expanded in the last four decades—banh trang nuong was only one example of the myriad innovations and trends that have arisen from street vendors and chefs since the 1970s. Nevertheless, the enduring image I have of Vietnamese food is only what my parents and grandparents could piece together in their own kitchens. My grandparents and their children cook what is nostalgic for them; in turn, their memories of the past are what I myself crave. The mom-and-pop restaurants I frequent as an adult have rarely challenged this narrative: We all remember and fill in the gaps together... Through food, they could, like many Vietnamese restaurant owners, remember Saigon, even if maps didn’t show it.
So much for "authenticity"
Keywords: stuck in the 70s, stuck in the 1970s
Meet the Woman Bringing Social Justice to Astrology - "Nicholas used November 2017's mercury retrograde to urge her followers to contact the FCC prior to its vote on net neutrality. She wrote about the new moon in Scorpio representing the need to heal during the initial wave of sexual assault accusations in Hollywood. She’s posted about DACA and the border wall and has even been promoting an online tool called FreeFrom, which was started by her wife Sonya Passi to help victims of domestic violence understand how to pursue financial compensation"
Since both are bullshit and Democrats are more likely to believe in astrology, this is fitting
Avast's Free Antivirus Harvests All Your Clicks, Sells Them to Third-Parties - "As we’ve learned time and time again, “free” things on the internet are almost never truly free. If you’re not paying with money, you’re probably paying with your data. That’s the case with the free antivirus products from Avast, which harvest browsing history for sale to major corporations. Despite claims that its data is fully anonymized, an investigation by our sister site PCMag and Motherboard shows how easy it is to unmask individual users"
Comparing meta-analyses and preregistered multiple-laboratory replication projects - "Many researchers rely on meta-analysis to summarize research evidence. However, there is a concern that publication bias and selective reporting may lead to biased meta-analytic effect sizes. We compare the results of meta-analyses to large-scale preregistered replications in psychology carried out at multiple laboratories. The multiple-laboratory replications provide precisely estimated effect sizes that do not suffer from publication bias or selective reporting. We searched the literature and identified 15 meta-analyses on the same topics as multiple-laboratory replications. We find that meta-analytic effect sizes are significantly different from replication effect sizes for 12 out of the 15 meta-replication pairs. These differences are systematic and, on average, meta-analytic effect sizes are almost three times as large as replication effect sizes. We also implement three methods of correcting meta-analysis for bias, but these methods do not substantively improve the meta-analytic results."
Garbage in, garbage out
Darius Media Network - Posts - "sleeping around in your 20's has consequences later on in life, don't let society fool you.i wanna know how women got triggered by this tweet when this wasn't gender specific. I am confusion."
Cathy Young on Twitter - "American Dirt, a novel that takes a sympathetic view of the migrant crisis, has earned the author death threats and forced her to cancel the book tour. But it's not Trump world that hates it—it's woke liberals."
"This, I think, is why attempts to find a "cancel culture on the right" are a fundamental misreading. Right-wing mobs sometimes target political enemies, for sure. But there's no RW equivalent to this kind of ideological policing toward people sympathetic to RW causes."
France is losing the battle to save the baguette, warns leading bread historian - "France is losing the battle to save good bread as a Gallic baking renaissance among a small elite of boulangers has failed to topple the tasteless white baguette, the historian considered the world’s foremost authority on the subject has warned.Steven L Kaplan, who France has decorated for services rendered to the quintessentially French staple, said that the country was facing a “perfect storm” of factors - from globalisation to complacency - that have blunted the ability of bakers and consumers to care about or even recognise a top quality loaf. The American historian had long warned that standards were slipping, dating the decline in quality to the 1920s with the transition from slow bread making with a sourdough base to a quick process using yeast. Mechanisation in the 1960s hastened the plunge towards increasingly tasteless bread.The result has been plummeting daily consumption in France, which has fallen from 600g per person in the late 1880s - two and a half baguettes - to just 80g today - less than a third of a baguette.There was hope in 1993, when the French government issued a decree to create a special label called “the bread of French tradition”, made exclusively with flour, salt, water and leavening and no additives or freezing. In parallel, millers offered bakers better flour and renowned Parisian baker Lionel Poilâne blended large-scale production with artisanal practices like lengthy fermentation with sourdough and wood oven baking... Instead of a widespread rise in top quality bread, the government decree only sparked a “niche renaissance” among an elite of “incredibly imaginative, audacious” bakers, some of whose loaves are “so good they are up there with a Cheval Blanc or Chateau Latour wine”.“That’s great for people in the bourgeois bohemian districts of Paris but it just hasn’t touched the vast majority; among France’s 29,000 so-called “conventional boulangers”, only 10 per cent at best are interested in such things,” he said.The rest continue to offer mediocre bread to the French, whose “lack of taste is underlined by one staggering statistic: about three quarters continue to eat the 1960s white baguette - a bleached, deformed, unnatural, tasteless loaf,” he scoffed.It is not a price issue, he told the Telegraph, as often “we’re talking about a difference of sometimes 20 centimes”.“Most French are no longer able to discern and then evaluate what constitutes good or bad bread. They take refuge in the citadel of subjectivity by saying: ‘I know it’s good, I’m French. Because I like it, it must be good.’”... Globalisation is one of the culprits, he said, saying that it had “powerfully sapped terroir, the French attachment to local and national taste” and spread the desire for soft fluffy fare you don’t have to chew.But more dramatically, he said it was a sign that the French had lost their reign as the “hegemonic source of the arts de table they had enjoyed since the 17th century”.Meanwhile, France’s national confederation of bakers and patissiers was making things worse by waging war on industrial baguettes and bakery chains without defining and improving the quality of their own bread.The latest “scary” sign of the decline was France’s absence from the podium at this month’s bakery world cup in Paris, whose winners were China, Japan and Denmark."
The surprise place where hijab can spell trouble - ""It is easier to be wearing hijab in London than Cairo." This is how 47-year-old Dalia Anan describes her experience as a woman wearing the Islamic headscarf - also known as hijab - in London compared to her hometown in Egypt... "I feel judged in Egypt more than I do here"... "After a certain time in the evening, you are not allowed into some restaurants or what are regarded as 'cool' places, especially in the north coast"... Several women also reported not being allowed to swim with the full-body "burkini" swimsuit or scuba diving suits in some resorts. "The problem is that hijab has become subconsciously categorised as 'low class', and, hence, it is banned in places that cater exclusively for the high class"... In Egypt, Dina explains, "high class now refers to those who have a lot of money, speak English rather than Arabic and are 'open minded', which means they drink alcohol and wear revealing clothes"... All those I spoke to said an increasing number of Cairo's upper class are taking off the hijab, and they said those who are still wearing it frequently get questioned about why they still have it on... The stigma of wearing hijab among Egypt's upper class was also one of the main drivers for the #MyChoice social media campaign that was launched in May. One of the campaign's co-founders, 30-year-old Heba Mansour, says she had "a cultural shock" when she moved to Egypt three years ago after living abroad with her family."You are mocked and downgraded because of the hijab," says Heba, who works as a senior progressive adviser at the American University in Cairo and just completed her Masters degree in educational leadership."
I never knew there was so much disgusting Islamophobia in Cairo
All those posts about "Afghanistan" and "Iran" in the 70s (i.e. Kabul and Tehran) take on a different light
Intimate relationships between races more common than thought - "Intimate partnerships between the races—estimated at more than 5 percent of all marriages in the United States—are much more prevalent when cohabitation is also considered... While 25 percent of married Asian women have white husbands, for example, nearly 45 percent of cohabiting Asian women have white partners. And while 17 percent of married Latino women have white husbands, about 22 percent of cohabiting Latino women live with white men... “Cohabitations are not a trivial share of young people’s unions,” Harris and Ono report. “Among the four racial groups we examined, about one in six unions is a cohabitation. Just over 16 percent of unions for Asians, Latinos, and whites are cohabitations, and more than 25 percent of unions for Blacks. So focusing exclusively on interracial marriages, as most previous research has done, seriously underestimates the extent of intimate contact between the races.”In general, whites and Blacks were much more likely than Asians and Hispanics both to marry and to cohabit with their own racial group, the researchers found. But within each racial group, there were slightly different patterns, depending on gender as well as type of union.While almost 96 percent of married white women have white husbands, the researchers found, fewer than 93 percent of cohabiting white women live with white men. White women are 3.5 times as likely to live with Black men as to be married to them, and they’re also more likely to live with than marry Asians and Hispanics... About 69 percent of married Asian women are married to Asian men, while 25 percent of married Asian women have white husbands. “But as common as marriages are between Asian women and white men, cohabitations are even more prevalent,” says Ono. “In fact, Asian women are more likely to be living with white men than with Asian men. Nearly 45 percent of cohabiting Asian women have white partners, while less than 43 percent have Asian partners.”... In general, the researchers found that Black, white, Asian, and Latino men and women consistently choose to cohabit with people who are different from the people they marry. For all of these groups, cohabiting unions are more likely to be interracial than are marriages"
The first data I've seen on interracial relationships beyond marriage; interracial gender dynamics are even more exaggerated here than with marriage
Post ID: 3964207355527599904
China: stirring up trouble abroad to cover unrest at home
On China deploying an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea:
"As I've said before, PLA starts shit overseas to cover for trouble back home. THey have never deployed a carrier so far south before. Why are they doing this now? Have they made some military breakthrough? Do they have some special submarine capability?
No its because they are facing impending economic collapse back home. Many months of lockdown means lack of food esp for big cities. Vegetables and produce spoil becuas ethey lack freezers. And after economic collapse comes civil unrest.
I said before that China's draconian measures serve dual purposes - to control the infection, but also to brutally suppress any uprisings. Villages as far away as Inner Mongolia are shut down. This is happening on both far east and west provinces in China.
CCP has quietly spread out PLA forces throughout the country to prevent widespread uprisings, and no one seems to have noticed
Even 1 month of lockdown causes massive economic damage especially regarding food supply. Crops and produce spoil. Freezer usage is uncommon in China where electricity supply is patchy at best. Roads are in horrible condition esp in mountainous areas. We already know that supplies are being hoarded in central areas where top CCP officials are located, and excess food left to spoil.
These problems can be mitigated by bringing in food from other provinces, but a "second wave" of infections has caused Wuhan to be placed under lockdown again. Its a matter of time before this happens to other cities.
Its common knowledge that the PRC economy was slowing down prior to the outbreak. This has brought the economy to a screeching crash. This is bad for several reasons. China banks are extremely strict about loans and typically will only lend money to someone with a AAA or AA rating. Most people do not qualify, hence they use something called the "shadow banking system". This shadow system is so large that not even the CCP knows how big it is.
Widespread land reform has caused real estate to become highly profitable in China. This has caused rapid increase in property prices esp in cities, worst in Beijing and Shanghai. We now have a "subprime" lending system with rapidly escalating property prices, now coupled with an economic crash. Does anyone remember where they've seen this before? That's right- USA 2007/8.
So you see, the PLA and PLN moves are largely distractions. The wumao army is working in overdrive to suppress negative news and generate propaganda to distract the population. Right now it seems to be working as the eyes of the world are focused on the pandemic. There is no military nor naval breakthrough that can explain PLA's latest aggression in the South China Sea.
China teeters on the brink"
"As I've said before, PLA starts shit overseas to cover for trouble back home. THey have never deployed a carrier so far south before. Why are they doing this now? Have they made some military breakthrough? Do they have some special submarine capability?
No its because they are facing impending economic collapse back home. Many months of lockdown means lack of food esp for big cities. Vegetables and produce spoil becuas ethey lack freezers. And after economic collapse comes civil unrest.
I said before that China's draconian measures serve dual purposes - to control the infection, but also to brutally suppress any uprisings. Villages as far away as Inner Mongolia are shut down. This is happening on both far east and west provinces in China.
CCP has quietly spread out PLA forces throughout the country to prevent widespread uprisings, and no one seems to have noticed
Even 1 month of lockdown causes massive economic damage especially regarding food supply. Crops and produce spoil. Freezer usage is uncommon in China where electricity supply is patchy at best. Roads are in horrible condition esp in mountainous areas. We already know that supplies are being hoarded in central areas where top CCP officials are located, and excess food left to spoil.
These problems can be mitigated by bringing in food from other provinces, but a "second wave" of infections has caused Wuhan to be placed under lockdown again. Its a matter of time before this happens to other cities.
Its common knowledge that the PRC economy was slowing down prior to the outbreak. This has brought the economy to a screeching crash. This is bad for several reasons. China banks are extremely strict about loans and typically will only lend money to someone with a AAA or AA rating. Most people do not qualify, hence they use something called the "shadow banking system". This shadow system is so large that not even the CCP knows how big it is.
Widespread land reform has caused real estate to become highly profitable in China. This has caused rapid increase in property prices esp in cities, worst in Beijing and Shanghai. We now have a "subprime" lending system with rapidly escalating property prices, now coupled with an economic crash. Does anyone remember where they've seen this before? That's right- USA 2007/8.
So you see, the PLA and PLN moves are largely distractions. The wumao army is working in overdrive to suppress negative news and generate propaganda to distract the population. Right now it seems to be working as the eyes of the world are focused on the pandemic. There is no military nor naval breakthrough that can explain PLA's latest aggression in the South China Sea.
China teeters on the brink"
Post ID: 3807647013966013767
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