Links - 7th March 2017

Swap driving licence for cheap noodles, Japan urges older motorists - "Under a scheme launched last week in Aichi prefecture in central Japan, elderly drivers will be given discounts on ramen noodles at 176 outlets of the Sugakiya restaurant chain, but only after they surrender their driver’s licence. The move comes after the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, called for more action to address the steep rise in road accidents, some of them fatal, caused by drivers in the over-74 age group."

Truth is Clinton stole Sanders’ nomination & was bad candidate – ex-CIA officer Kiriakou (EXCLUSIVE) - "The reluctance to release proof of alleged Russian hacking aimed at swaying the US election in Donald Trump’s favor indicates it “doesn’t exist,” former CIA analyst John Kiriakou told RT, arguing that the Democratic Party’s defeat should be pinned on Clinton"

Jeremy Corbyn is showing how left populism fails - "Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the UK’s Labour Party, is the most authentically left-wing politician currently leading a major party in the industrialized world. He is also presiding over that party’s historic political collapse... Prime Minister Theresa May had higher approval ratings than Corbyn among Labour voters... “It's a totally idiotic, unworkable idea,” Danny Blanchflower, a Dartmouth professor who used to serve on Corbyn’s economic advisory council, tweeted. “Interesting that we haven't heard from any UK Labour MPs or a single economist who think that @jeremycorbyn idea of a pay cap is a good plan.”

The problem with English - "The English language used to be an asset of the US and UK. Now it has become a weakness... Being an English-speaking society is like living in a glass house: it makes you transparent. Conversely, foreign countries are opaque to mostly monolingual Britons and Americans. Foreigners know us much better than we know them... Just as English let down the anglophone powers in Iraq, so did their other traditional weapon of influence: warfare. They have given up on invasions. The US now spends $597bn a year on its military and still can’t stop Russian adventuring."

Board game and luxuries discovered in Crusader castle in the Galilee - "among the things that evidently never change is the European appetite for pork. The archaeologists discovered bones from domestic European-type pigs inside the castle, as well as remains from turtles, deer, sheep and cattle."

This PrEP campaign is urging people to ‘F*ck Without Fear’
This is a great way to combat stereotpes about gay men and prevent moral hazard

Did the Greeks Help Sculpt China's Terra Cotta Warriors? - "prior to the appearance of the terra cotta warriors, Chinese sculptors did not have a tradition of producing life-size statues. The leap from having no experience to creating armies of the artworks indicates they may have had some outside influence or help."

Math Department Releases Classification of Safe Spaces - "The classification, which details over 200 different safe spaces, differentiates them by their properties along different “axes,” a term which the math department recently picked up from activist literature. Such properties include whether a space preserves an identity, respects the limits of its members, or is sufficiently intersectional. A safe space must also have carefully chosen boundaries, limits, and norms. One familiar safe space is the Möbius strip, as it is impossible to impose a preferred orientation upon it."

The right look: Conservative politicians look better and voters reward it - "We show that politicians on the right look more beautiful in Europe, the United States and Australia. Our explanation is that beautiful people earn more, which makes them less inclined to support redistribution"
This is additional evidence for feminists being ugly

Was a Norwegian Cartoon Banned from Twitter and Facebook? : snopes.com - "Rumors that a political cartoon featuring Donald Trump was banned from the social media sites were likely started in an attempt to spread the image to a wider audience."

‘Is this what the west is really like?’ How it felt to leave China for Britain | Xiaolu Guo - "I used the first-person plural too much in my everyday speech. In the west, if I said “We like to eat rice”, it would confuse people. They couldn’t understand who this “we” was referring to. Instead, I should have said “We Chinese like to eat rice”. After a few weeks, I swapped to the first-person singular, as in “I like to eat rice”. But it made me uncomfortable. After all, how could someone who had grown up in a collective society get used to using the first-person singular all the time? The habitual use of “I” requires thinking of yourself as a separate entity in a society of separate entities. But in China no one is a separate entity: either you were born to a non-political peasant household or to a Communist party household. But here, in this foreign country, I had to build a world as a first-person singular – urgently."

Hillary Cabinet plans leaked: Sheryl Sandberg at Treasury, Starbucks CEO at Labor. - "the job of running the Environmental Protection Agency was "likely" going to go to "an African American." Which “African American,” apparently, didn't really matter. And that is how United States politics work."

The U.S.-Canada Border Runs Through This Tiny Library - "While Canadians are guaranteed safe passage to the library, it’s a bit of a harrowing journey. To enter they have to walk past a series of security cameras on Church Street and then past the U.S. border guard stationed out front. As long as they collect their books and walk back the way they came, everything is fine. But if they walk out and continue into the U.S. they’ll be picked up for illegal entry. “We pretend that no one left Canada,” Rumery explains."

Nutella maker fights back on palm oil after cancer risk study - "The hazelnut and chocolate spread, one of Italy's best-known food brands and a popular breakfast treat for children, relies on palm oil for its smooth texture and shelf life. Other substitutes, such as sunflower oil, would change its character, according to Ferrero... Any move away from palm oil would also have economic implications as it is the cheapest vegetable oil, costing around US$800 a ton, compared with US$845 for sunflower oil and US$920 for rapeseed oil, another possible substitute... High temperatures are used to remove palm oil's natural red color and neutralize its smell, but Ferrero says it uses an industrial process that combines a temperature of just below 200C and extremely low pressure to minimize contaminants. The process takes longer and costs 20 percent more than high-temperature refining, Ferrero told Reuters. But it said this had allowed it to bring GE levels so low that scientific instruments find it hard to trace the chemical."

Woman has lived at Changi Airport for 8 years: Report - "She is among more than 10 "regulars" at the airport, the Chinese evening daily reported. The woman in her 50s, who preferred to remain anonymous, told the paper that she rented out her three-room flat in Tampines eight years ago and moved to the airport... She eats at the airport food court and finds living there quite convenient as there is a supermarket, showers, air-conditioning and free Wi-Fi, Wanbao said. She has rental income of more than $1,000, and is not in financial difficulty, but hopes to have a roof over her head... Another regular, a man in his 60s, told Wanbao he has a rental flat in Beach Road but fell out with his roommate. To avoid his roommate, he started sleeping at the airport recently, but goes home in the day. He also prefers to sleep in air-con on hot nights"

Singapore’s forgotten age of innovation - "Kallang Airport... was an art deco dream and one of the most advanced airports of its time, built in anticipation that Singapore would become an important global aviation hub... in the 1930s it could boast of a public trolley bus system that was the world’s largest, and which officials came from around Asia to see... In 1879, Singapore became the first city in the East to have a telephone system. It made international headlines in 1937 with the first phone call between Singapore and London - involving a father and his homesick young daughter. And then there was the Causeway, the largest engineering project in Malaya of its time, which took 2,000 men and five years to complete."
Some fishing village

Oymyakon, the coldest village on earth: Temperatures drop to -71.2C, locals can't wear glasses because they freeze to their faces and the school only shuts if it falls below -52C - "Locals are said to leave their cars running all day for fear of not being able to restart them. Even if there was coverage for mobile phone reception the phones themselves would not work in such cold conditions."

Decline of the dentist's drill? Drug helps rotten teeth regenerate, trial shows - "The therapy works by enhancing the natural ability of teeth to repair themselves through the activation of stem cells in the soft pulp at the centre. Normally, this mechanism is limited to repairing small cracks and holes in dentine, the solid bulk of the tooth beneath the surface enamel. Now scientists have shown that the natural process can be enhanced using an Alzheimer’s drug, allowing the tooth’s own cells to rebuild cavities extending from the surface to the root."

Too many chiefs | The Economist - "Not that long ago companies had just two or three “chief” whatnots. Now they have dozens, collectively called the “c-suite”. A few have more than one chief executive officer; CB Richard Ellis, a property-services firm, has four. A growing number have chiefs for almost everything from knowledge to diversity. Southwest Airlines has a chief Twitter officer. Coca-Cola and Marriott have chief blogging officers. Kodak has one of those too, along with a chief listening officer. Even so, chiefs are relatively rare compared with presidents and their various declensions (vice-, assistant-, etc). Almost everybody in banking from the receptionist upwards is a president of some sort. The number of members of LinkedIn, a professional network, with the title vice-president grew 426% faster than the membership of the site as a whole in 2005-09. The inflation rate for presidents was 312% and for chiefs a mere 275%"

Do French women embrace cheaters? - "Some women accept a cheater “because the qualities they appreciate in him surpass fidelity,” clinical psychologist Maryse Vaillant told the paper. “These are strong women, not victims…. [They are] capable of distinguishing what’s essential from what is secondary. They know their husbands need conquests to feel confident in themselves, and they accept it,” she said. This way of thinking derives from a “maternal attitude” under which certain women “take pleasure in their husbands behaving like little boys who chase skirts and then return, rather than like men who feel responsible for the security and well-being of their families,” added Bernard Voizot, a member of the Societe psychanalytique de paris (Paris Psychoanalytic Society). “A Woman who doesn’t forbid her husband from having sex with others can also get an illusion of omnipotence. In authorizing it, she places herself in a position superior to him.” This latter reason appears to play a role in Sinclair’s case. In 2006 when L’Express magazine asked if she suffered from her husband’s reputation as a seducer, she responded that she was “proud” of it. “It’s important for a politician to seduce,” she said. “As long as I seduce him and he seduces me, that’s enough for me." Competition can also play a role. Some women “need the rivalry of another woman to love a man. They want to feel triumphant over a rival, just as young girls fantasize about eliminating their mothers to have their fathers to themselves,” child psychologist Samuel Lepastier told Le Monde. He added that this sentiment also motivates women who have affairs with their friends’ husbands, or with other married men. “Often the day the man divorces, they lose all interest in him,” he said, having achieved their conquest... Others accept the dalliances because they feel that men’s sexual needs are stronger than their own, and they would prefer not to have sex too often"

Cobra's severed head bites, kills chef - "Chef Peng Fan, of Guangdong Province in China, cut off the head of a spitting cobra as he prepared to dice its body for a soup, the Daily Mail reports. But 20 minutes later, as Peng was tossing the head in the trash, the head was still functioning. That's when the venomous creature bit the chef, who died before anti-venom could be provided. "We ... could hear screams coming from the kitchen," says one restaurant guest."

Malaysian women join Middle East jihadists as ‘comfort women’, reveals intelligence report - "Malaysian women are believed to have joined the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis) forces to offer Jihad Al-Nikah or sexual jihad"

Thefts of Tide detergent on the rise - "Tide has become a hot commodity among thieves at supermarkets and drugstores in at least some parts of the country. For a variety of reasons, the detergent in the familiar flame-orange bottle is well-suited for resale on the black market: Everybody needs laundry detergent, and Tide is the nation's most popular brand. It's expensive, selling for up to $20 for a large bottle at stores. And it doesn't spoil... Other popular items for thieves include baby formula, razor blades and over-the-counter medication."

The untold story of how a culture of shame perpetuates abuse. I know, I was a victim - "When I first told my mother about the abuse I’d suffered, she was absolutely devastated. The root of her anger was clear: I was heaping unbound shame on to my family by trying to bring the perpetrator to justice. In trying to stop him from exploiting more children, I was ensuring my parents and my siblings would be ostracised. She begged me not to go to the police station... Although Sohail and I had removed a proven paedophile from the community and helped empower another woman to end her torture, we were not celebrated. On the contrary, we were shunned."

Women Have The Midas Touch, Not Men - "both men and women respond positively to warmth and friendliness from women, but not necessarily from men."

Somebody Kept Driving Over This Trump Supporter’s Sign. The Trump Supporter Got Revenge. It’s Awesome. - "Tallah attached over 30 nails facing upward to the base of one of her three signs so when an unsuspecting "peaceful" Leftist made a bee-line for them, at least one side of their car would need new tires"

Meet China’s Most Famous Single Dad | Foreign Policy - "Li argues that Confucius’s era was more tolerant than people realize and that some mistakenly confuse Confucius’s ideas with those of neo-Confucian conservatives who took his precepts to extremes. He writes that Confucius was compassionate and lacked the "hypocritical moralism of the philosophers in the Song and Ming dynasties." He notes that in ancient China, new brides could chose to leave their marriage within the first three months if they didn’t get along with their spouse. Scholars in Confucius’s time were more hedonistic, he writes, and unabashed about their fondness for food, drink, and sex: "Passion between a man and a woman was considered natural." Li also argues — not terribly convincingly — that Confucius showed something of a feminist side in the Book of Rites when he noted that men should lie with their concubines, even the older ones, once every five days until the woman reaches her 50th year. This showed that Confucius believed the sexual needs of mature women "ought to be met," Li explains"

MH370 and the Secrets of the Deep, Dark Southern Indian Ocean | Foreign Policy - "Not that there are other options besides Perth: There simply isn’t anything closer by — let alone inhabited lands. The closest spit of land is the French archipelago of Kerguelen, uninhabited but for a rotating staff of what must be the world’s most bored meteorologists. In the 19th century, the French government even decided against establishing a penal colony on the Delaware-sized island because it would be too cruel on the inmates"

As Shariah Experiment Becomes a Model, Indonesia’s Secular Face Slips - NYTimes.com - "Indonesia as a whole has drifted in a conservative direction, and Aceh, once an outlier, has become a model for other regions of the country seeking to impose their own Shariah-based ordinances, alarming those who worry about the nation’s drift from secularism. “Whenever Aceh issues a law, saying it’s the highest order of Shariah, it provokes others to do the same thing”... A recent study found that more than 442 Shariah-based ordinances have been passed throughout the nation since 1999, when Jakarta gave provinces and districts substantial powers to make their own laws. These include regulations concerning female attire, the mixing of the sexes and alcohol. But for local officials, the spread of Shariah from Aceh is a point of pride, and delegations from areas with a history of embracing conservative Islam regularly visit to see how it has been carried out here."