Links - 25th April 2017

Carrie Fisher's complicated relationship with her iconic Princess Leia gold bikini

War survivors weigh in on referencing Syonan-to - "Like Mr Huang, fellow war survivor Chin Kah Chong, 86, was similarly philosophical about the name. “To me, the name is harmless now,” said Mr Chin, who was a war correspondent for Pana News Agency, covering the Vietnam War in 1965. Meanwhile, the debate continues to rage on. Creative producer Gracie Teo, 37, felt “the choice of name could have been more sensitive to (take into consideration) the generation who went through the Sook Ching incident”... But Mr Timothy Wee, 32, pointed out that in Germany, many concentration camps still retain their original names — despite the painful memories they evoke. “It would have been easy to sweep unpleasant details under the rug of history, but I applaud the National Archives of Singapore’s brave decision,” said the freelance travel writer, who felt that the choice of name was “a good way to start a national conversation on the Syonan experience”."
Ironically, there is a Sook Ching memorial in Chinatown
Sadly, when the War generation dies off offence mongers will be free to claim offence on their behalf without (m)any counters

The most insane deaths seen by an NYC medical examiner - "she removed all of Booker’s major organs and placed them between his legs — the best way to ensure they wouldn’t slip and fall to the floor. Then she removed Booker’s testes, took a sample from each, and put them back in the scrotum. “I had been taught to replace them unless there was a tumor or signs of injury,” Melinek writes. “Families can be very particular about the testicles”... “Did he suffer?” is the question, Melinek writes, that she’s most often asked and most often dreads. She almost always lies. “What’s the worst way to die?” is the next-most-asked question, to which Melinek usually replies, “You don’t want to know”... she has a final warning for New Yorkers who live alone with cats: The urban legend is true. “Your faithful golden retriever might sit next to your dead body for days, starving, but the tabby won’t,” she writes. “Your pet cat will eat you right away, with no qualms at all. I’ve seen the result.”"

"Very Right Wing" People Are Happiest With Their Sex Lives - "in most countries sexual satisfaction increased the further right you went along the political spectrum... The study also showed than in Britain at least, people with right wing and very right wing politics were markedly happier overall than their left wing counterparts – but this trend did not replicate across Europe"
Addendum: Also reported as: "Survey: Right Wing People More Likely to Be Sexually Satisfied... Those who consider themselves as “very right wing” are more likely to have a satisfactory sex life, according to a new European survey by YouGov that interviewed over 19,000 people"

Salman Rushdie's New Novel is About Political Correctness and the Culture Wars - "“When people say, ‘I believe in free speech but …,’ then they don’t believe in free speech,” he said. “The whole point about free speech is that it upsets people.” “It’s very easy to defend the right of people whom you agree with — or that you are indifferent to,” Rushdie said. “The defense [of free speech] begins when someone says something that you don’t like.” “There are no safe spaces against offensive ideas,” said Rushdie. Rushdie has come to lose his confidence in the progressive left—including those who once defended his controversial book"

The three questions that every patient should ask their doctor - "The JAMA study suggests that doctors frequently don’t know and certainly, don’t know best. This is vexing but not all doom and gloom because doctors now have at their disposal an unprecedented number of sound guidelines, robust protocols and genuinely plain-language information for patients, not to mention easy web-based access to experts. When it comes to doctors seeking advice the world really is a global village. In a world of rapidly evolving information, patients should be prepared for a doctor to say, “I don’t know” provided this is followed by, “but I’ll find out.”
Here are three questions that every patient should ask of every new proposed drug or intervention:
What are my options?
What are the specific benefits and harms to me?
What happens if I do nothing?"

Print Friendly & PDF - "Make any web page print friendly"
"Save paper & ink"

Muslim women shouldn’t use emoticons, says the National Muslim Youth Association in Malaysia - "An anti-Valentine’s campaign called “Mind the Valentine’s Day Trap” has also been held by Jakim since 2011, where volunteers approach youths to warn them of the celebration’s alleged danger. In addition, previous sermons had claimed the day originally worshipped ancient Roman deities, or celebrated the fall of Muslim rule in Cordoba, Andalusia, now in modern-day Spain."

China's attempt to punish Taiwan by throttling tourism has seriously backfired - "Taiwan set a new record for international tourism last year. And it did so by courting visitors from the rest of Asia, thus reducing its reliance on Chinese tourists... even when China was sending over large numbers of tour groups, they were only benefiting a small number of Taiwanese businesses that were aimed primarily at this market. On top of that, many of these local businesses were only getting a fraction of the total money spent, with most of the spoils going to Chinese tour organizers."

I’m a gay New Yorker — and I’m coming out as a conservative - "All I had done was write a balanced story on an outspoken Trump supporter for a liberal, gay magazine, and now I was being attacked. I felt alienated and frightened... I realized that, for the first time in my adult life, I was outside of the liberal bubble and looking in. What I saw was ugly, lock step, incurious and mean-spirited... It can seem like liberals are actually against free speech if it fails to conform with the way they think. And I don’t want to be a part of that club anymore. It used to be that if you were a gay, educated atheist living in New York, you had no choice but to be liberal. But as I met more Trump supporters with whom I was able to have engaging, civil discussions about issues that impact us all, I realized that I like these people — even if I have some issues with Trump himself... I hope that New Yorkers can be as open-minded and accepting of my new status as a conservative man as they’ve been about my sexual orientation."

Is 'Generation Z' the most conservative since WW2? - "The research, which surveyed more than 2,000 people, forms parallels with recent evidence that young people are less likely to drink and take drugs than their immediate elders. Sir Mark Walport, the government's chief scientific adviser, told The Times that technology had had a huge effect on society and teenager's values. Computer games and internet use meant they had 'less time and opportunity to participate in traditional risky behaviours'"

The Great Hypocritical Muslim Cover-Up - "Did these non-Muslim women—indulging their Orientalist fetish by covering their heads—not stop to consider for one moment that their counterparts in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and under Taliban or ISIS rule also require our solidarity in taking their hijabs off?"

German nursery rhyme about fox who steals a goose banished from town after complaint from vegan

What if the internet stopped working for a day? - "losing internet access for a few days just made people fall behind on their work. “People carried out all the same activities they would have done had the internet been up, but they just did it two or three days later,” Borg says. “The economy is set up to deal with what essentially amounts to a holiday weekend”... In some cases, shutting down the internet for a short time might even increase productivity

The Next Big Blue-Collar Job Is Coding

How Reliable Are Surveys? - "only 9 percent of people asked to take part in surveys actually do"
This is a much better objection to surveys than sample size

Syrian refugees don’t want to camp in Saudi Arabia. They want a future

Millennials are struggling at work because their parents 'gave them medals for coming last' - "Studies may show that the millennial generation reports having high self-esteem, but that largely includes narcissism and extrinsic rewards: “Reporting that you’re self-confident and being self-confident are not the same thing,” Sinek points out."

San Francisco janitor who earned S$380k in a year caught hiding in closet during work hours - "Mr Liang Zhao Zhang, who cleans the Powell Street station in downtown San Francisco, reportedly earned a total of US$271,243 (S$385,000) in 2015... According to Transparent California, there were at least 49 other janitors who earned over US$100,000 in 2015."

Mark Pearson tried for sex crime after brushing past actress in Waterloo station - "It cannot be said with certainty that the artist and the actress made even fleeting physical contact. CCTV images showed only that they walked past each other.Yet the woman, who is in her 60s, claimed Mr Pearson sexually assaulted her – penetratively – for ‘two or three seconds’... Mr Pearson wonders whether he is ‘a victim of the way the CPS is rigorously trying to redress the balance’. One of his supporters, author Erin Pizzey, the family care activist who founded the world’s first shelter for victims of domestic violence, certainly believes so."

Farmer spends 16 years studying law by himself to sue firm

Asylum seekers who burnt down Dusseldorf refugee camp shouted 'damn Germans', court hears - "Adel Z., a 27-year-old Algerian Muslim, is accused of setting the hall on fire because he was outraged that food and drinks were given to non-fasting roommates during Ramadan."

Why Westerners and Easterners Really Do Think Differently - "complex images were shown to test subjects from East Asia and North America. The scientists tracked the eye movements of the participants in order to gauge where their attention was focused. It was found that the Chinese participants spent more time looking at the background of the image, while the Americans tended to focus on the main object in the picture. Holistic and individualistic thinking manifested in one clear example... Even today, more than 100 years after the colonization effort, the effects of living in a society that was so recently a frontier show up in individual and holistic thinking tests. With residents of Hokkaido demonstrating tendencies towards individualism to a larger extent than the rest of the Japanese population."

Galaxy Harassment - "Galaxies are generally not found in isolation. Most of them are surrounded by a swarm of satellite galaxies and are often embedded in larger aggregates such as galaxy groups or clusters. In these environments, interactions between galaxies are not uncommon and in general, can be divided into two basic types: mergers and ‘fly-bys’. Interactions involving high-speed fly-bys are often referred to as galaxy ‘harassment’."

Muslim Apostates in North America Face Leftist Scorn, Muslim Death Threats - "One common method of dismissing her aims, Haider said in the speech, is to assume that she is “pro-war” or that she broadly supports the far-right agenda in some way, though neither is the case. “Sometimes I am called an Uncle Tom or a House Arab. Another term thrown around at ex-Muslims and other brown critics of Islam is ‘native informants.’”

castleships: Okay I’m only gonna say this once... - kind Bird King - "The last Eyak fluent speaker died in 2008, her name was Chief Marie Smith Jones and she was also the last full-blooded Eyak on Earth. The very last. Please appropriate Eyak culture. It’s the only way it’s going to survive. There’s less than 500 of us remaining, and we’re scattered more and more every year. Families I grew up with in Alaska converted to Catholicism. The military took my family across the globe and left us an entire continent away. The language I learned at the dinner table in 1998 now almost exclusively exists on those cassette tapes my white father recorded that night and in reconstructive attempts from a French academic that studied our language from halfway across the globe. It sucks shit guys, it really does. When I first saw the Thunderbird skin I cried, I cried for an hour. Because Overwatch is huge. It will live on for years if not decades. And there’s Pharah with her hair in braids I haven’t seen my mother wear in over a decade. Wearing the colors that remind me of a home I no longer have. Embodying a mythic figure that I trusted to protect me during Y2K and sought out constellations in the sky for."

Berrywoman | alluringdolls: check-your-privilege-feminists: ... - " Tumblr social justice: spreading the world apart instead of bringing us together, one group at a time.
I hate Tumblr :)
That’s why I hate the “cultural apropriation” crap, it’s only an excuse to make people ashamed of their interests and create a segregation between people. Fuck this."

How Jim Carrey deals with paparazzi

Everyone mistook a priest for a KKK member - "social media became a furious storm of confusion regarding a man in white robes roaming along 10th St. and purportedly armed with a whip."

Is terrorism in Europe at a historical high? - "The number of fatalities from terrorist attacks between 1970 and 1990 amount to considerably more than those killed between 1990 and 2015. In 1988, more than 425 people were killed in terror-related attacks in Western Europe. One of the most fatal, the bombing of Pan Am flight 103, led to the deaths of 270 people when the plane came down in the Scottish town of Lockerbie."
Of course, ignoring the higher, very localised ETA/IRA component in the 1970s/1980s deaths obscures much compared to today's more widespread threat

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Food Chain: The Musical - "[On Ghana Jollof] 3 Nigerian women walk up to these 3 Nigerian men to serve them their Jollof rice which they enjoy, but then I appear with my Ghana Jollof and to make sure that you know that it's Ghana Jollof I have the national flag of Ghana, little one, standing out of the very orange-red rich Jollof with chicken and salad on the side and then you see all the Nigerian men leave their wives"