Links - 11th January 2017

Updated! Hey, Here's That Obviously Fake 'Dossier' Claiming Trump Is Into Golden Showers! - "Sensational, provocative, insane, scatological (urological?), incredible—the dossier is all that and more. Read about how Trump supposedly insisted on staying in a hotel room used by President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama and hired prostitutes to urinate on the bed. Yes, it's that level of report. And it's all horseshit, if you believe Buzzfeed's own intro to the material, which stresses that we're talking about "explosive — but unverified — allegations." Worse still from a journalistic perspective is this sort of phony-baloney gesture that insulates the publisher evens as it distances any truth claims.
There is serious reason to doubt the allegations. You got that? But let's publish them anyway because, WTF, who doesn't want to read them? The press works better when it verifies information and brings it to the public's attention, and lets us plebes make of it what we will. In this case, all we have is a document that may or may not be "real" or a fake. Remember all the serioso discussions of fake news and how Trump and his deplorables were ruining everything good and clean-smelling in America? Well, the one thing you can say this time around is: Don't blame the billionaire"

2017 Lunar New Year | Jetstar - "With the younger generation increasingly flying the coop over Lunar New Year despite it being the one time of year families gather for reunions, Jetstar is taking a stand – put family first and stay home. For passengers who have booked flights departing Singapore on 27 and 28 January, and are now keen to stay home to enjoy get-togethers with family, we’re happy to move your flights to a later date, for free."
This is a great way to free up seats which can then be resold at higher prices

Moroccan TV show giving women tips on hiding domestic violence bruises provokes outrage - "the woman who did the make-up, Lilia Mouline, says that rather than “normalizing” domestic violence – which she “in no way condones” – she was merely providing realistic advice. “We are here to provide solutions to these women who, for a period of two to three weeks, are putting their social life aside while their wounds heal. These women have already been subjected to moral humiliation and do not need to also have others looking at them,” Mouline told Yabiladi, a news website. “Makeup allows women to continue to live normally while waiting for justice.”

For Safe and Effective Drug Policy, Look to the Dutch - "Lighter enforcement did not lead to more drug use. About 25.7 percent of Dutch citizens reported having used marijuana at least once, which is on par with the European average. In the comparatively strict United Kingdom, the rate is 30.2 percent and in the United States it is a whopping 41.9 percent... in Sweden, 52 percent of marijuana users report that other drugs are available from their usual cannabis source. In the Netherlands, only 14 percent of marijuana users can get other drugs from their cannabis source, according to European drug monitors. This is largely because the vast majority of cannabis users buy from coffee shops. In addition, the country has virtually eliminated injecting drug use as a transmission of HIV and enjoys the lowest rate of problem drug use in Europe. "

General Tso's Chicken creator dies in Taiwan aged 98 - "According to legend, General Tso's Chicken was named in 1952, when Mr Peng was cooking for a visiting US Navy Admiral, Arthur Radford. Low on inspiration, he fried some chunks of chicken and added sauces and seasoning in a bid to create something new. The admiral loved the result. When he asked the name of the dish, Mr Peng christened it on the spot: "General Tso's Chicken"... While General Tso's is best known as American Chinese food, its fame has seen some Hunanese chefs embrace the recipe."

Police probing Quebec maple syrup heist worth up to $30-million - "Quebec police are on the hunt for a sticky-fingered thief after millions of dollars of maple syrup vanished from a Quebec warehouse."

German intelligence officer 'arrested over Islamist plot' raising fears the spy agency has been infiltrated - "The BfV said the man "behaved inconspicuously" prior to his arrest. He had, since April, been engaged in gathering intelligence on Islamist extremists in Germany, Der Spiegel said. Online chats were apparently found between the suspect and other Islamists in which he attempted to recruit them to the intelligence agency to mount an attack on "non-believers", carrying out a bomb attack on the spy HQ "in the name of Allah". He used several different names online and his activities were uncovered about a month ago. The man's family reportedly knew nothing of his conversion to Islam two years ago and subsequent radicalisation... The BfV estimates there are about 40,000 Islamists in Germany, including 9,200 ultra-conservative Islamists known as Salafists, Hans-Georg Maassen, who leads the agency, told Reuters... Isil claimed two attacks in late July - on a train near Wuerzburg and on a music festival in Ansbach - in which asylum-seekers wounded 20 people in total. In addition, security forces had to respond to an attack in a shopping centre in the city of Munich in which nine people were killed by an 18-year-old German-Iranian who had been in psychiatric treatment and was obsessed with mass killings."

Spain terror arrests - Four detained smuggling jihadis into Europe disguised as migrants - "Spain's interior ministry said ISIS was using the group of Algerian and Moroccan men to sneak fanatics into Europe via Turkey posing as migrants fleeing Syria's civil war. Officials also said they may have links to the Paris terror attacks last November."

The truths and tales of Cuban healthcare - "During the period when the Cuban government received generous subsidies from the former Soviet Union, the system more or less worked well. Hospitals were clean and, although they did not have state-of-the-art equipment, people could rely on them. But after the subsidies ended and Cuba's economy went into a tailspin, nothing was the same again. By the time I moved to Cuba in 1997, there were serious shortages of medicine - from simple aspirin to more badly needed drugs. Ironically, many medicines that cannot be found at a pharmacy are easily bought on the black market. Some doctors, nurses and cleaning staff smuggle the medicine out of the hospitals in a bid to make extra cash. Although medical attention remains free, many patients did and still do bring their doctors food, money or other gifts to get to the front of the queue or to guarantee an appointment for an X-ray, blood test or operation. If you do not have a contact or money to pay under the table, the waiting time for all but emergency procedures can be ridiculously long... I saw many hospitals where there was often no running water, the toilets did not flush, and the risk of infections - by the hospital's own admission - was extremely high... for all its shortcomings, Cubans do have better access to healthcare than the majority of those living in many "developing nations", where public health is shockingly inadequate. And as with so many things in Cuba, the state health service offers some amazing paradoxes: you may have problems obtaining medicine, but getting a bust lift, or even a sex change, is no problem, and moreover, it is free of charge."

Why 30 Palestinians celebrated Jewish holiday with settlers - "Why would a population under occupation that bears the brunt of the settlement enterprise visit their occupiers?... Once the story was made public, the Palestinian security service on Oct. 21 arrested four of the Palestinians who had attended the settlers’ event. Bethlehem Governor Muhammad Taha told Israeli Army Radio that the four were accused of behavior that encourages “normalization with Israel,” which according to the governor is a violation of Palestinian law."

How domestication changes species, including the human - "Keeping pets meant inviting animals into the family. It also created new relationships of inequality. The anthropologist Tim Ingold at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, who has spent years studying the reindeer herders of Lapland, argues that it is a mistake to regard domestication as a form of progress, from living in opposition to nature to harnessing it for our benefit. In The Perception of the Environment (2000), he notes that foraging peoples generally regard animals as their equals. Hunting is not a form of violence so much as a willing sacrifice on the part of the animal. Pastoralists, on the other hand, tend to regard animals as servants, to be mastered and controlled. Domestication doesn’t entail making wild animals tame, Ingold says. Instead, it means replacing a relationship founded on trust with one ‘based on domination’. When humans start treating animals as subordinates, it becomes easier to do the same thing to one another."

China has always kept mum on Singapore’s defence ties with Taipei, so why is it complaining now? - "the pinnacle command positions in Singapore’s fledgling air force and navy were occupied by Taiwanese military personnel who served Singapore in the 1970s. Taiwan’s Colonel Liu Ching Chuan was once Commander RSAF (renamed as Chief of Air Force) while former Taiwanese officer Khoo Eng An once held the post of Commander Republic of Singapore Navy (retitled as Chief of Navy)."

Reactionary Democrats trash Bernie Sanders for challenging identity politics - "Liberals have begun scolding Bernie Sanders for challenging identity politics in a speech at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston on Sunday night. When an audience member asked him how she could become the second Latina senator in U.S. history, Sanders said her gender and ethnicity don’t entitle her to votes. “I have to know whether that Latina is going to stand up with the working class of this country and is going to take on big money interests,” Sanders said. “It is not good enough for somebody to say, I’m a woman, vote for me. No, that’s not good enough. What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry”... Despite pushback from triggered reactionaries, Sanders doubled down on his critique of identity politics"

Belief in Santa could affect parent-child relationships, warns study - "lying to children, even about something fun and frivolous, could undermine their trust in their parents and leave them open to “abject disappointment” when they eventually discover that magic is not real."

Justin Trudeau's Statement On Fidel Castro Criticized By Politicians - "The prime minister is facing criticism at home and abroad for his statement expressing "deep sorrow'' about the death of former Cuban president Fidel Castro... some have condemned the prime minister's statement, pointing out human rights violations during Castro's half-century regime... Social media users took the opportunity to mock the prime minister using the hashtag "#TrudeauEulogies,'' which imagines eulogies of dictators and criminals written in the style of Trudeau's statement. For instance, user @MW_Johnson1 wrote, "While a controversial figure, John Wilkes Booth will be remembered as a lover of the theatre.''"

Neural Network Learns to Identify Criminals by Their Faces - "the neural network could correctly identify criminals and noncriminals with an accuracy of 89.5 percent... researchers revealed how they had trained a deep-learning machine to judge in the same way as humans whether somebody was trustworthy by looking at a snapshot of their face"

UK to censor online videos of 'non-conventional' sex acts - "In order to comply with the censorship rules, many mainstream adult websites would have to render whole sections inaccessible to UK audiences. That is despite the acts shown being legal for consenting over-16s to perform and for adults in almost all other liberal countries to film, distribute and watch... Pictures and videos that show spanking, whipping or caning that leaves marks, and sex acts involving urination, female ejaculation or menstruation as well as sex in public are likely to be caught by the ban – in effect turning back the clock on Britain’s censorship regime to the pre-internet era... “Although it is nominally designed to enforce the [Obscene Publications Act] guidelines of the Crown Prosecution Service, in practice it draws far tighter lines, many of them inexplicable. The ban on female ejaculation is a particularly strange example,” he said. The censorship regime has led to bizarre understandings between the producers and regulators, Barnett said. One is the “four-finger rule”, which limits the number of digits that can be inserted into an orifice for sexual stimulation"

Parents: let your kids fail. You’ll be doing them a favor - "we seem to be more worried about raising happy children than competent or autonomous ones... The children who had controlling mothers gave up when faced with a task they could not master. The others did not... The dirty secret of parenting is that kids can do more than we think they can, and it’s up to us to figure that out. (Apparently the French have sorted this out with kids and cooking, and they let their young toddlers wield large knives.) Kids can do dishes and clean a room without a bribe, but to get to clean kitchens and tidier rooms we have to face messier kitchens, not perfectly sorted laundry, and clothes stuffed in drawers while they figure it out... cheer like a grandparent and not a parent. College athletes wanted grandparents at their games because their support was not predicated on achievement."

(4) Riz Rashid - What Is Malay? Is Singapore in China? No but to... - "New York Times editor Michael Luo wrote an open letter to a woman who told him to “go back to China" in October and started the hashtag, #thisis2016. Asians/Asian Americans across the nation responded to Luo and his encounter by using the hashtag and sharing moments of racial insensitivity or ignorance. We decided to respond to the hashtag as well. These are all real statements, quotes and encounters that Bowdoin students have experienced throughout their lives, and while we acknowledge that not all of the things written were intentionally hurtful, they are a product of socially normalized stereotypes and misconceptions. Additionally, the statements are neither isolated, one-time incidents nor are they the worst things we’ve ever heard -- we emphasize that these experiences extend across time and space. We ask that you try to understand the participants' perspectives with an open mind even though their full stories are not posted, and we also encourage productive open dialogue. This is our version of #thisis2016."
"there are some really stupid AMERICANS (not just the white ones) out there. The other day I asked on the Guild Wars 2 reddit if ArenaNet would publish a physical copy in South East Asia for another expansion since it didn't the last time around. And idiotic American redditors went on a tirade about "servers" and "translations" issues or how ArenaNet is not responsible for distribution in CHINA.
This isn't a "white people" problem, this is an American problem.
As an African American woman asked me if I spoke English when I worked in a bar, only to find out she could barely read. And speaking to the solipsism of Americans, how many of these Japanese SJWs who bemoan internment are educated on the atrocities of their ancestors in WW2, are they even aware that Japanese POWs in Australia liked their living conditions so much they were hesitant to return to Japan after the surrender?
#ThisIsCurrentYear"

Not enough focus on soft skills in S’pore workforce: Study - "the SkillsFuture movement tended to focus on hard skills, paying inadequate attention to skills that may be used across jobs... Singapore’s heavy reliance on foreign workers and low productivity growth also pointed to it lacking a “strong indigenous production capacity”, the report said. This, in turn, triggers an “urgent need to re-orientate the education and training policy, and to re-examine the pace of change in industrial policy”."

Ten Years Ago Today, Hillary Voted For A Border Fence - "Ten years later, Clinton has a different mentality towards border fortifications. Now, Clinton denounces Trump’s plan to build a more robust wall along the Mexican border as not merely unwise but perhaps also immoral."

Hillary Clinton Sponsored a Bill to Punish Flag Burning? : snopes.com - "Claim: In 2005, Senator Hillary Clinton co-sponsored a bill to make flag burning a punishable offense.
True"