Links - 21st August 2018 (1)

The Rise Of Sweden's Far-Left Militants - YouTube
From 2014 - before Antifa started causing trouble in the US. It's just a matter of time before antifa attacks the house and car of someone who denies being part of a "far right" group too. Unsurprisingly in the interview they support communism
Comment: "The "Revolutionary Front" would be easy to sympathize with if it wasn't for the fact they are so incompetent that they've attacked Slovakian immigrants mistaking them for Swedish nationalists, they have also hacked down an elderly widows door then smashed all her belongings because the previous occupant had voted for a nationalist party. If they had just kept it between them and nationalists in streetfights then I'd have no problem with them, but the fact they constantly ambush people for voting parties they dislike, attacking random apolitical people for having shaved heads or for vandalising others property has made me hate them entirely. They need to be shut down by the government. They are a terrorist organization and are far more violent and dangerous to the average person in Sweden than nationalists. They can't even call themselves antifascists when they attack members of the fucking liberal party for disagreeing with them, and they always jump them from behind while outnumbering the opposition 5-1."

New Research Shows Bitcoin's Meteoric Rise Was a Scam - "Academic researchers at the University of Texas have concluded at least half of Bitcoin's rise to a peak price of nearly $20,000 last year was due to manipulation by traders on Bitfinex, the primary Bitcoin exchange, using another cryptocurrency called Tether to boost prices when they dipped on other exchanges."

High cost of housing drives up homeless rates, UCLA study indicates - "higher median rent and home prices are strongly correlated with more people living on the streets or in shelters. The research backs other studies that have found a similar relationship."

Trump was right. The rest of the G7 were wrong | George Monbiot - "In arguing for a sunset clause to the Nafta trade agreement, this odious man is exposing the corruption of liberal democracy"
When the Guardian agrees with Donald Trump

Women shun cycling because of safety, not helmet hair | Helen Pidd - "Some 76% of women who already cycled or wanted to start said segregated lanes would help them to cycle more... The main reason most women don’t cycle in the UK is because they think it is dangerous. You can tell them until the cows come home that the roads are statistically safe, and that you are more likely to be killed walking than on a bicycle. But when they sit on the top deck of a bus and look down to see a cyclist squashed up against the kerb they feel no compulsion whatsoever to join them. Women do seem to be more vulnerable, perhaps because they are often more reluctant to “own” the lane and so end up in the gutter: 10 out of 13 cyclists killed in London in 2009 were women, and eight of them were killed by left-turning HGVs, according to the campaign group Cycling UK. Xavier Brice, at Sustrans, believes city planners are to blame. “Fifty-one per cent of the UK population is female, yet most of our cities are failing to design roads and streets for women to cycle”"
Apparently women being more risk averse than men or worse cyclists than men aren't possibilities

Travel Experts Reveal 10 Ways To Save On Travel - "the cheapest days to travel are Tuesday, followed by Wednesday, and then Saturday... There are sites to set up accommodations for travelers to house-sit, or to actually swap homes for a period of time. This is a great way to get to know a new city without spending a ton of money."

The Decline and Fall of Asia's Airline Empires - "That's left the two cities' airlines exposed. Long-haul international aviation is a cutthroat business, and its best practitioners historically have had either state support or an easily dominated domestic market at their backs. Cathay and Singapore have never had the latter, and it's a hotly contested debate whether they benefit from the former -- especially when compared with their aggressive new state-owned competitors... Crushed between the tectonic plates of the Chinese and Gulf carriers, the cities' airlines are also geographically disadvantaged. Two-thirds of humanity lives within an eight-hour flight of Emirates' base in Dubai, making it particularly well-placed to link global travelers"

Einstein's travel diaries reveal 'shocking' xenophobia - "Ze’ev Rosenkranz, senior editor and assistant director of the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology, said: “I think a lot of comments strike us as pretty unpleasant – what he says about the Chinese in particular. “They’re kind of in contrast to the public image of the great humanitarian icon. I think it’s quite a shock to read those and contrast them with his more public statements. They’re more off guard, he didn’t intend them for publication.”"
Time to tear down all the statues

Chinese internet users are surprisingly sympathetic to Einstein’s racist remarks - "Many in China are saying the physicist’s remarks match their own impressions of what China must have been like in the early 20th century... "Just look at the economic status, education, and hygiene conditions, which most of the common people wouldn’t care that much about because they didn’t have the conditions… He described them as obtuse and blunt but he also said people were industrious.” Some noted Einstein’s descriptions are a lot like those of the famous Chinese writer Lu Xun, whose short stories depicted people’s suffering as they experienced the radical social changes of that time"

Indonesia: Son dies after mother's coffin falls on him in freak accident

New Study Busts the Myth That Knights Couldn't Move Well in Armor - "Medieval scholars have long known that armor worn by knights of that era allowed for far more mobility than most people realize. There’s even a 1924 educational film created by the Metropolitan Museum of New York to address the popular misconception. But until quite recently, little quantitative data was available to support that stance.

Medieval Knight vs Modern Soldier on Assault Course [video] - "they set up this experiment to find out, pitting men in modern combat kit, full fireman’s gear and a full set of armour"

A Medieval Man Used a Knife as a Prosthetic Limb - "he attached a knife to the stump with a cap, buckle, and leather straps, using his teeth. Not only did he survive the amputation and DIY prosthetic attachment, but he lived on for a very long time."

Le combat en armure au XVe siècle - YouTube

Anatomy And Physiology 101: Science Explains Why Butt Hair Exists On The Human Body - "no one actually knows why we have butt hair, but (no pun intended) it may simply exist because there's "no significant evolutionary pressure against it.""

And the award for best writing in a porno movie goes to... - YouTube - "This is from a movie called Trailer Trash Nurses 4"

The Sims Horror Movie - YouTube

The Gobbledy Gooker: Wrestling's Most Bizarre Gimmick

Dora the Explorer Movie Trailer (with Ariel Winter) - YouTube

Ariel Winter Breast Reduction Surgery Exclusive Interview - "Glamour: How did you settle on a D-cup?
Ariel: [My doctor and I] did. I knew for sure that I wasn't going to go bigger than a D because the whole point was to get rid of it! I was a 32F and that was too big for me! My doctor said we shouldn't go bigger than a D, and I agreed. He said he didn't think we should go smaller than a C, and I agreed. And the reason I said that was because I have always been a curvier girl. Always. And I enjoy being a curvier girl. I don't want to be disproportionate again. I have a big butt, I like having a big butt. I didn't want to have a big butt and no boobs!...
Glamour: Have you noticed a change in how people treat you since the surgery?
Ariel: People start looking me in the eye. Guys I'm friends with can start looking me in the eye. Other people I know can finally not turn around and whisper behind my back about, "Are those real? Are those fake?" I've heard that for so many years. Even at 14, people would ask me, "Do you have fake boobs?"

Kobe Bryant's 20-year career also shows how far video games have come - "Bryant, 37, is one of three NBA players still active who debuted in video games as sprites and not as a motion-captured, 3D-modeled and animated figures"

Captain Novolin - Wikipedia - "Captain Novolin is an educational platform video game, starring the eponymous superhero who has type 1 diabetes. It was developed by Sculptured Software and published by Raya Systems for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The game became available to the public in 1992 and was sponsored by Novo Nordisk, makers of the Novolin brand of insulin... Captain Novolin can die if his blood glucose level goes too high or low. Players can earn bonus points by correctly answering questions that relate to diabetes"

Fear is the path to the dark side - "Obsidian on KOTOR2 and what KOTOR3 might have been"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Critical Mass Catering - "Do some cuisines just lend themselves to mass catering? And do some cultures take it more in their stride?...
Indian food is, in my opinion, perfect and made for mass catering and being mass produced. Let's says a set menu consisting of lamb, chicken, rice, naan bread, a nice salad. Everything is put into curries and put in the middle of the table. It's hot. It still looks like curry. And that's the beauty of Indian food...
The more we cater for, the less kind of we can charge a head... almost like printing just because we've got to make that food anyway in the kitchen. For us, it's just a matter of ordering more ingredients, still producing that food and cooking it with the same staff"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Rosalind Franklin - "When Rosalin Franklin was at Cambridge women couldn't graduate. They didn't technically belong to the university. They were there as a presence but they weren't ordinary students... I get the impression that she would have liked to be remembered not as a woman, but as a scientist who did very, very important work in DNA, in coal, in the tobacco mosaic virus. She was not particularly keen on campaigning for women. That wasn't how she thought of herself. And I think she'd rather be remembered as a great scientist for her scientificry... than for being a pioneering woman or a downtrodden woman or anything else in her identity."

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Sun Tzu and The Art of War - "[According to Sun Wu] Warfare is a last resort so he's not an advocate of warfare... Confucians would also agree with that. The Daoists would definitely agree with it because they think warfare is violence. It's artifice, it takes people away from their natural course. Confucians think that warfare should be unnecessary because if you're a moral leader your own population will follow you but external states will also bring tribute to you. Mohists were willing to wage warfare but they were also pacifists so they were only willing to help those who were losing. Sun Wu was different from them in the sense that he thought warfare had a role to play in bringing about order. He thought differently about the role but also the nature of war... it's important to win a victory as fast as possible... morality is far less a concern for him than for any of the others we know of at the time... Just in 2015, there were 240 books published in China and in Japan, and partly in the West about the Sun Tzu. And these include a certain number of scholarly, academic publications, but also books about Sun Tzu and the Mao. And Sun Tzu and management"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Tocqueville: Democracy in America - "I've never been to a place like this before. This is quite astonishing place. What holds it together, what holds it together is the fact that Americans want to make money. And the other thing is their self interest. And he's never seen, I've never seen anything like this book because as Robert says previous republics have been held together by virtue. This is not being held together by virtue, it's being held together by the desire to make money. And the pursuit of self interest... While Americans disagree on something, conversation, discussion will flourish. Once they've made up their mind the majority will silence all opinions. That's beginning that fear about the power of public opinion... in a country which is held together by the desire to make money, by self interest, the primary concern will be a desire for comfort, material well being and majority will impose that, that desire at the expense of liberty. They will place well being before liberty. And if it's one thing Tocqueville stands for, it's you should always place Liberty above other considerations...
Despotism traditionally would be described as rule by fear and the rule by one person... What's new here. It's not, it's not fear, it's public opinion that is doing the work and it's not one person, it's the mass of the people. And I think Tocqueville is just about the first person to identify this as a very, very serious threat to liberty... we've got the people, which in the face is a good thing. Of course, the people should rule. But what Tocqueville was trying to say is be very careful because within the rule of the people, there's a new danger about which we have to be very, very concerned and that is the power of public opinion, and once public opinion comes into play, you're silenced... you might wish to marry an African Americans and so on, it might be perfectly legal, but you can't because the weight of public opinion will deter you from doing so. So he is identifying something very, very new. Upon which later writers like John Stuart Mill will build"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Almoravid Empire - "One of the features of the Almoravids. The men wear veils, but the women often don't... women have a lot of political and cultural autonomy, which is important to them."

Daisuke Shima Heralds in 10 Years of an Erect Japan - "Daisuke Shima, celebrated actor and the star of the upcoming series “Mom is a Transvestite”, welcomed in the tenth anniversary of Viagra’s Japanese debut by launching its “Hardness is a Man’s Honorable Decoration (硬さは男の勲章)” campaign... while most agree with the western stereotype that Asian men tend to be on the small side, the Japanese hold the fierce belief that they are much harder than Americans."

The Alt-Centrist - Posts - "Enforcing border control and immigration policy is hate speech.
The user who posted this has been zucc'd and cannot even appeal due to account restrictions.
#HateSpeech"
Posting on Facebook that you should use the navy to prevent illegal immigrants from coming to your country by picking them up, sinking their empty boats and returning them to their home country from where they can "apply for residency/asylum like everyone else" is considered hate speech and is a zucc-able offence

South Korea: Shin Tae-yong made players swap shirts to try to confuse opposition - "South Korea's coach says he made his players wear different numbered shirts in recent friendlies to confuse opponents who he says cannot tell them apart... "They might know a few of our players but it is very difficult for Westerners to distinguish between Asians and that's why we did that.""

Risotto, robotics and virtual reality: how Canada created the world's best libraries - "Given that books and articles can now often be accessed by other means, the Toronto Public Library network has tried to move beyond the original (but still significant) mandate of maintaining physical collections. It sees its relevance in providing programmes and services, as well as in facilitating free, or cheap, use of technologies that might otherwise only be available in exclusive spaces, such as art schools or science laboratories."

Labour suspends activist challenging gender self-identification policy - "Labour has suspended an activist who attempted to stand as women’s officer while claiming he identified as a woman “on Wednesdays”, as the party’s ruling body reaffirmed transgender women were eligible to stand on all-women shortlists... The party recently suspended a number of campaigners who vociferously opposed the policy of allowing trans women to be on all-women shortlists, including several who had crowdfunded a legal challenge to the policy."
If you can identify as a pastafarian...

Meet the man standing to be a Labour party women’s officer | Coffee House - "David Lewis... is a member of the Labour Party. After several years of supporting the party, he became a full member last year having been “inspired” by Jeremy Corbyn... Generally, equalities law doesn’t allow organisations such as Labour to reserve jobs or services for any particular group, but the Equality Act 2010 includes some exemptions for single-sex services... Some women have resigned from Labour over this issue... Many (but not all) of the people who raise questions about self-identified gender rules are women, women who are struggling to make their voices heard in what passes for the public debate about gender, because those who speak out are at risk of abuse and accusations of transphobic bigotry. Or even being assaulted."
Apparently discrimination against genderfluid people is alright