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Friday, February 17, 2017

Links - 17th February 2017

A So-Called Singaporean Love Story (Told In Corporate Jargon) - "Before they knew it, an extension was applied to the date ‪until 11pm. “It’s getting late,” said Siew May, “We should execute our exit plan so we can leverage on the MRT to get home.” “Okay,” said Boon Keong, “Agreed as per your suggestion.” It started to rain. Raindrops were bouncing off the pavement like a bad PowerPoint animation. Fortunately, Boon Keong had an umbrella. “Can I share that with you?” Siew May asked. “I left mine at the office. Hope your understanding is very much appreciated.” “Sure,” said Boon Keong, “Pleased to be able to meet your requirements.”"

Effect of Medicaid Coverage on ED Use — Further Evidence from Oregon’s Experiment — NEJM - "Medicaid coverage increased health care use across a range of settings, improved financial security, and reduced rates of depression among enrollees, but it produced no detectable changes in several measures of physical health, employment rates, or earnings. A key finding was that Medicaid increased emergency department (ED) visits by 40% in the first 15 months after people won the lottery. This finding was greeted with considerable attention and surprise, given the widespread belief that expanding Medicaid coverage to more uninsured people would encourage the use of primary care and thereby reduce ED use"

Sohail Ahmed - I propose that we round up leftists who defend... - "I propose that we round up leftists who defend Islamists, alongside the Islamists themselves, and put them all on an island...
We set it all up so that the Islamists are in charge, and the leftists are being ruled over. Then we wait and see what happens...
After a few years, we let the leftists (that are still alive) back into society, and we ask them if their views have changed at all."

What's the deal with Wendy Carlos? - "She's lying. It's a well documented fact that she's a transexual. C'mon, fake photos, her field is male dominated so she had to pose as a man???.... WTF?
She's a little sensitive about her past eh?"
"Wendy Carlos has always been absurdly over-sensitive about the whole transexual thing. Her website used to have an angry rant about people questioning her "private life" and such like that. It looks like it has now been replaced with "complete denial". If I'm not mistaken, it seems to me that I first heard about Walter becoming Wendy when she was on the cover of Contemporary Keyboard Magazine in 1979(?)"
"Letter to Wendy:
Listen Wendy, no one here really cares that you are a transexual. I've worked with a few transexuals and nobody really thought that much about it. Just stop denying it and people will stop talking about it. O.K.?"
"all this time i thought it was a husband/wife duo. cool."

How Not to Build a Digital Archive: Lessons from the Dark Side of the Force - "A file format policy that relied on the Evil Empire and Rebel Alliance using the same software"

Russia and Syria could be encouraging migrant sex attacks to oust Angela Merkel, pro-EU firm says - "Russian and Syrian secret services may be encouraging refugees in Germany to carry out orchestrated sex attacks, in a bid to oust Angela Merkel from office, it is claimed. The extraordinary assertion was made by an expert from the European Council on Foreign Relations, who said the foreign powers could collude to destabilise Germany ahead of next year's election. Gustav Gressel, a Russian expert at the think-tank, said small numbers of refugees with links to the Kremlin and Syrian security services could be mobilised to sway public opinion against the Chancellor."
Uhh

Priest CANCELS Nativity because it could offend Muslims - "Fr Sante Braggiè, from the city of Cremona in northern Italy, said there would be no nativity scene at the local cemetery this year as it could offend people from other faiths whose relatives are buried there."

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Tuesday's business with Dominic O'Connell - [On Trump's conflicts of interest] "Pippa Malmgren, a former US Presidential advisor, says Presidents have overcome these problems before.
'Throughout American history we've had presidents who've had business interests, who've come from a particular sector and kept the businesses in the family blind trust. So we've dealt with it in the past. And I think we'll deal with it this time too... He doesn't really own a property business. What he owns is a business where people buy the right to have his name on the building. The issue is how do you get the people who have bought the right to have his name on the building for the next 20 years to pay it all right now? They can't'
'What about the problems with dealing with foreign governments? Every foreign government in dealing with the Trump business organisation will now know that they are talking to someone who has some connection to the most powerful political figure in the world'
'Well, this was exactly the allegation that has been levelled at the Clinton foundation'"

BBC World Service - The World This Week, Trump tells China: kowtowing is over - "The apparently haphazard way it's unfolding suggesting another fundamental truth. Namely that Leave didn't expect to win and Remain didn't expect to lose"

The death of Queen Elizabeth will be the most disruptive event in Britain in the last 70 years - "After the current Queen was crowned, her regnal number — II — caused controversy in Scotland, which she also rules, as there was never a Scottish Elizabeth I. When postboxes bearing her cypher were erected in Scotland, some were attacked and vandalised."

Should young people become involved in politics? - "If you're gonna be young, you're better off spending your time on something more useless. People who are young and into politics tend to be immature, tend to be driven towards the fringes, they think life is very straightforward and easy and they've got all the answers. You quickly discover that you haven't. You discover that politicians are mostly all liars. And you wake up some day and think: what have I done with the last few years of my life?... I think there's something slighty unhealthy about someone who puts aside a time in their life which should be spent for other sorts of things for the kind of dry, boring mainstream politics that I certainly got engaged with. Again, I spent my youth delivering leaflets. I really... should've been sleeping around... When I was young, I was a nervous anxious teenager who was bullied at school and politics offered me a family, and it offered me older people who said: oh, you know about what we're interested in. Well done. You're brilliant. And I think on the one hand maybe that was good for me. It kept me off the streets. On the hand other hand I think maybe it stopped me from maturing. It actually delayed my maturity. And you see that in some people who have gone straight from school into politics, that they've got a slightly delayed maturity and I think that's why some middle-aged politicians go off the rails, because they really haven't had a youth... One very sad thing is the number of people at university who think because I'm gonna be head of this particular committee for paperclips in my local Conservative association, I'm going to be Prime Minister someday, and it doesn't work like that... David Cameron who was the guy at Oxford who wasn't involved in politics"
On podcast this was titled: "Is youth politics a waste of time?"

BBC World Service - The Documentary, Island of Love - "[On Middle Easterners needing to go to Cyrpus for non-religious marriage, e.g. to someone of a different religion] In Lebanon, like elsewhere in the Middle East, religion can't be ignored. Many people are religious, and religion and the state aren't separated. Religious authorities inflence political life and your personal life. They control marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance with their own courts and systems of family law. And while ordinary Lebanese may have grown more accepting of mixed-faith relationships and civil marriages, both Christian and Muslim leaders oppose them.
3 years ago, Lebanon's top Sunni Muslim cleric passed a fatwa, a ruling describing civil marriage as a bacteria spread by predators. He said anyone who supported the idea was an apostate, a non-believer who couldn't be buried in a Muslim cemetery. In Beirut's Sunni Muslim court, a judge, Sheikh Abdul Aziz Shafi'i uses softer language but defends the ruling.
'Everything in a Muslim's life has a religious aspect. We live our lives to praise Allah's power and to please him. The mufti's fatwa was because as Muslims, we don't believe that Islam is separated from our lives. In politics, in our families, in our trades, the law of Islam, enginera [sp?] must be applied. If we refuse this, we are not Muslims. You have the right to refuse but you are not a Muslim...
If you get religiously married [in Israel] you have to go to the rabbi and the bride have to go and have special training for being a wife"
Are Lebanon's top Sunni Muslim cleric and the Beiruti judge ignorant and/or Islamophobic for saying Islam is incompatible with secularism?

BBC World Service - BBC Trending, Trolls, 'the Devil', and Death - "[On Duterte] But despite the huge of deaths, the President's popularity doesn't seem to have been affected. People are even writing pop songs about him... [On an extra-judicial killing] The most difficult part of the scene is how normal it seems. The stores don't stop cooking food, teenagers take photos with their mobile phones and it isn't long before the police tape is lifted...
Davao today has rules covering everything from smoking to jaywalking. Karaoke's even banned after 10pm...
At a certain point there was also the killing of taxi drivers being held up by people just to get their day's earning. What mayor did was to request some policemen to be in civilian clothes disguised as taxi drivers. And in fact he himself sometimes goes around as a taxi driver at night. When that news cropped up, that whole thing of taxi drivers gone down very low...
He's shirtless, wearing shorts, flip-flops, face down in a pool of blood. A family member is nearby and we're told that the man's son witnessed him being dragged out of his house by 4 masked men. His brother agrees to speak.
'We're happy to see him like that because here in the neighbourhood even his own family like me, are at odds with him. He has been a user for a very long time. Every time he's high on drugs, he becomes violent, taunting people. He's even destroyed my mother's house'...
I'm quite speechless. I'm not really sure what to say. I've never seen a family reaction like this before"

a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07hhvxx">BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Sovereignty - "Popular sovereignty, where the people are sovereign. And the advantage of the people over monarchs is that they're not underaged ever, they don't get senile. so they have more claim in some ways to be absolute, supreme, perpetual and even indivisible, which were some of the key marks of sovereignty that Bodin identified"

The Incoherence of the Philosophers - Wikipedia - "Al-Ghazali's insistence on a radical divine immanence in the natural world has been posited as one of the reasons that the spirit of scientific inquiry later withered in Islamic lands. If "Allah's hand is not chained", then there was no point in discovering the alleged laws of nature"

List of CONFIRMED HATE HOAXES is growing BIG LEAGUE. EXPOSE THE FAKE NEWS "rise of hate crimes in Trump's America" nonsense. Corrupt MSM won't do their job, so we have to do it for them! : The_Donald
For some reason there don't seem to be false flags in the other direction

Are There Really More Hate Crimes At Schools Following Donald Trump's Election? - "it’s much easier to find examples of violence against students who have openly backed Trump; there are more than a few stories of kids being pummeled for disagreeing with the losing side (detailed below). We did see anti-Trump protests by college and high school students around the country turn violent in cities such as Portland, Ore., as agitators joined the groups. Who didn't hear angry students clearly shouting "F*#% Trump" in news footage from post-election rallies?... What many of the tales of intimidation by the alleged pro-Trump forces have in common is a paucity of details... After reading through myriad stories since Election Day, what’s clear is that the widely reported episodes of violence and intimidation are usually vague, involve roaming gangs of indistinguishable white males, and produce no witnesses. Often the police aren’t even called, but when they are, the stories tend to fall apart... some of the biggest stories out of college campuses recently have involved debunked tales"

Blog: Astonishing number of fake hate crimes since Trump election - "The hoaxes must be seen in the contex of the post-election hysteria about Trump deliberately generated by the left to, 1) energize their supporters to oppose the president-elect's agenda; and 2) delegitimize Trump's victory. Add to that the natural inclination of some people to do anything to get attention, and you have a potent mix of fear and hate that leads to the current spate of fake "hate crimes" that the media eagerly reports as they try to justify their open opposition to Trump's candidacy. Perhaps this hysteria reached its pinnacle on a JetBlue flight, when a gay Brooklyn lawyer began screaming at Ivanka Trump, saying her father was "ruining the country.""

Muslim hate crime hoaxer’s sister blames the NYPD

The Difference Between Vegetarians In India And The West - "“Indian vegetarians were more likely than their meat-eating counterparts to endorse not only values related to purity, but also those supporting traditional authority and in-group loyalty. Conservative values, in other words. This was not true among meat-avoiding Westerners. Indeed, American vegetarians actually placed less value in traditional authority than meat-eating Americans. Ruby and his colleagues suspect these differences reflect the cultures involved, and the place of vegetarianism within those cultures. Most vegetarians in the West were not raised as such, but made a decision at some point to convert from the meat-eating diet followed by the majority of people in their culture.” In contrast, “vegetarianism has been firmly established in India for centuries, and is associated with tradition, power and status,” the researchers write. “Most Indian vegetarians are raised as such by their families.”"

Branko Milanovic on Twitter - "Naivete of great thinkers is breathtaking.A few years ago telling us how Web freedom will blow away dictators. Today, "it helps demagogues"

Thousands attend Mexican girl's party after viral invitation - "She was celebrating her 15th birthday - a traditional coming-of-age party in Mexico known as "quinceanera". About 1.2 million people had earlier vowed to attend the party. However, the father later said the idea had been to invite neighbours and friends only - while stressing he would not turn anyone away."

Melissa McCarthy Shares The Ultimate Girl Power Photo From The Set Of 'Ghostbusters' - "McCarthy, along with her co-stars Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones, stand in front of a group of over 50 cast and crew members, while holding a giant sign printed with the words “girl power.”... “3 cheers to @theellenshow from all the remarkable women of #ghostbusters. When we stand together we are unstoppable! #girlpower.”"
Too bad feminism doesn't bring in box office revenue

Luis Garcia's answer to Why did the new Ghostbusters movie perform poorly? - Quora - "The villain is a blatant anti-feminism villain, pathetic and loser, that gets defeated by being hit in the genitals. You can’t make this shit up."
Feminists can't make good movies - which is why they need to lobby others to push their agenda

Hey r/singapore! What are your thoughts on interracial dating? : singapore - "t was very nice dating here cause it's really different depending on the ethnicity of your date. Malay girls tended to be either conservative either extremely open (different from easy, and this is not bad in my book). Quite caring and giving. Chinese girls tended to be more shy, but once they open up they're very nice. Many of them are pressured by their family and pressure themselves for top careers etc. I've dated some of these and it was.. boring... Dating Singaporeans has been different from dating French (or Europeans for that matter) girls. It's definitely more engaging (girls take it very seriously here! you have to answer that whatsapp in 2 minutes lol), more romantic (quite ironic from someone who comes from the so called Romantic country right?). One downside is that they don't seem to understand the concept of personal freedom in a relationship. They seem to think you belong totally to them, and even going out with dude friends needs to be explained etc. Definitely not as in Europe. The other downside is girls were mostly less interesting, less talkative, and were far less able to talk about interesting topics. Some were quite childish for their age (20-22)"
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