Links - 4th September 2018 (1)

Tipping the Scales | by Noah Feldman | The New York Review of Books - "If Donald Trump’s nominee to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, who announced his retirement on June 27, is confirmed by the Senate, the Supreme Court will have a stable majority of conservative justices for the first time since before the New Deal... Ultimately, Democrats cannot rely on judges for social progress. A functioning liberal democracy requires a liberal populace that is prepared to vote for the policies it wants."
It's remarkable that this article is mainly about how to control the court and weaponise it to ensure desired outcomes, even while acknowledging that Reagan and George HW Bush didn't do the same. Though the conclusion at least is heartening

8 Apps Designed Specifically for Modern Douchebags - "Do not waste your time. You will always know if your girlfriend bleeding today. Are you popular with the girls? Are you familiar with the situation when you invite a girl for a date and at the end of the evening you hear: 'Sorry, but I have "special days"?' Then this application is for you. It will help you to be aware of 'special days' of your girlfriends and you will never make a mistake by inviting 'wrong' girl to the date. Just add all your girlfriends and do not forget to mark sometimes when they had 'critical days.' The application will automatically calculate the period and will let you know when your girlfriends will have the next critical days as well as will recommend you, whom you should visit."

Comfort feeding - "Because breasts don’t develop until puberty, biologists have suggested that they help the female attract a mate and keep him interested in her welfare and that of her children. Those with larger breasts were more successful, the theory goes, and produced more offspring. But that explanation didn’t ring true for Bentley. For one thing, she points out that the fascination with breasts is hardly universal. “Among many cultures where the breast is uncovered it isn’t such a source of erotic imagery,” she says... Most primate infants aren’t at risk of suffocation, she realised, because they have a protruding jaw and lips. So she suggests that the breast co-evolved with human facial features. As the face became flatter, the breast became larger to compensate"

Study: Describing Breastfeeding as ‘Natural’ Is Unethical Because It Reinforces Gender Roles - "It’s “ethically inappropriate” for government and medical organizations to describe breastfeeding as “natural” because the term enforces rigid notions about gender roles, claims a new study in Pediatrics."

Echolocating Bats Cry Out Loud to Detect Their Prey - "Source levels of open space and edge space foragers (Emballonuridae, Mormoopidae, Molossidae, and Vespertilionidae) ranged between 122–134 dB SPL. The two Noctilionidae species hunting over water emitted the loudest signals recorded so far for any bat with average source levels of ca. 137 dB SPL and maximum levels above 140 dB SPL"
Lucky we can't hear them

Kevin Rothrock on Twitter: "White-Carded: Russia's Diversity Absent From Homogenous Soccer Squad. Rooting for Team Russia is basically Nazism. https://t.co/2T01M4g92S"
The world is full of Nazis to liberals

Google Is Building a City of the Future in Toronto. Would Anyone Want to Live There? - "Sidewalk has come to appreciate “how deeply different” the Canadian view of privacy is compared with that in the United States. Canadians tend to see privacy as a fundamental human right; Americans have historically been more willing to see it as something that should be protected, with abuses punished after the fact, but which can be traded away in exchange for some benefits, like free Gmail. Google makes its billions in large part by collecting data on its users and slicing and dicing it for the benefit of advertisers. Sidewalk has already stipulated that data collected in Quayside won’t be used for advertising purposes. Says Cavoukian, “It’s not going to be a smart city of surveillance. It’s going to be a smart city of privacy, and that will be a first.""

How a victorious Bashar al-Assad is changing Syria - The future of Syria - "Homs, like all of the cities recaptured by the government, now belongs mostly to Syria’s victorious minorities: Christians, Shias and Alawites (an esoteric offshoot of Shia Islam from which Mr Assad hails). These groups banded together against the rebels, who are nearly all Sunni, and chased them out of the cities. Sunni civilians, once a large majority, followed. More than half of the country’s population of 22m has been displaced—6.5m inside Syria and over 6m abroad. Most are Sunnis... In the capital’s new cafés revellers barely notice the jets overhead, bombing rebel-held suburbs. “I love those sounds,” says a Christian woman who works for the UN. Like other regime loyalists, she wants to see the “terrorists” punished... Mr Assad, though, seems focused less on recovery than rewarding loyalists with property left behind by Sunnis. He has distributed thousands of empty homes to Shia militiamen. “Terrorists should forfeit their assets,” says a Christian businesswoman, who was given a plush café that belonged to the family of a Sunni defector. A new decree, called Law 10, legitimises the government’s seizure of such assets. Title-holders will forfeit their property if they fail to re-register it, a tough task for the millions who have fled the country. The measure has yet to be implemented, but refugees compare it to Israel’s absentees’ property laws, which allow the government to take the property of Palestinian refugees... Christian women in Aleppo show their cleavage. “We would never ask about someone’s religion,” says an official in Damascus. “Sorry to say, we now do.”"

Gender identity needs to be based on objective evidence rather than feelings - "Future historians may see this as a clash between postmodernism and facts: the facts of life, namely sex and reproduction, on the one hand, and the idea that sex, or at least gender, is defined by thoughts and feelings rather than bodies... gender identity is not easy to define, let alone prove. Even legislators have been forced into circular reasoning. For example, the state of Massachusetts defines it as “a person’s gender-related identity, appearance or behaviour, whether or not that gender-related identity or behaviour is different from that traditionally associated with the person’s physiology or assigned sex at birth”. This, to me, is not only circular but sexist, as it assesses behaviour against stereotypes... The system works because it is based on objective evidence, crucially a clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria and those medical reports. A medical practitioner testifies that changing legal sex is necessary to promote mental wellbeing. That is priceless in a world where truth is increasingly held to be relative and different people hold different truths... If we abandon the testimony of experts, we may find ourselves at the mercy of whoever shouts loudest. That is no way to live. It would be better to abandon the push to self-identify legal sex and look for progressive changes that make the process of gender reassignment simpler without damaging its credibility. More generally, we need to be intellectually honest. I am not female and I know that I cannot become female, but I can and do live in a way analogous to the way that women live. I make no claims I cannot justify and my life is better for it"

How to clean a ceiling fan in 60 seconds - "To clean your ceiling fan and remain dust-free, try creating a DIY cleaning tool using items you already own. All it takes is a pair of barbecue tongs, some rags and four rubber bands."

How stress echoes down the generations - "upon screening the men’s sperm, the researchers found that concentrations of two types of micro-RNAs, miR-34 and miR-449, were as much as 100 times lower in samples from abused men."

In Denmark, Harsh New Laws for Immigrant ‘Ghettos’ - The New York Times - "Starting at the age of 1, “ghetto children” must be separated from their families for at least 25 hours a week, not including nap time, for mandatory instruction in “Danish values,” including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, and Danish language. Noncompliance could result in a stoppage of welfare payments... "the Social Democrats say, ‘We give people money, and we want something for this money.’ This is a system of rights and obligations.” Danes have a high level of trust in the state, including as a central shaper of children’s ideology and beliefs, he said. “The Anglo-Saxon conception is that man is free in nature, and then comes the state” constraining that freedom, he said. “Our conception of freedom is the opposite, that man is only free in society.” “You could say, of course, parents have the right to bring up their own kids,” he added. “We would say they do not have the right to destroy the future freedom of their children.”"
Apparently the Nazis witheld benefits from certain parents unless their kids attended 25 hours of daycare a week. Nazism doesn't sound so bad after all
Interestingly many of the top comments are supportive
Comment: "One statistics has shown that immigrants and children from immigrants from Lebanon have a crime rate of index 257 (total Danish crime rate would be 100, I suppose), while, e.g., US immigrants to Denmark and their children have a crime rate of just 32. Thus Americans in Denmark are much more law-abiding than ethnic Danes (thank you, US, for sending us such people!) and Lebanese in Denmark much more criminal on average. (Numbers from publication "Indvandrere i Danmark 2015", Danmarks Statistik, page 9). The 257 number is after adjustment for socioeconomic status. If you only adjust for age, the Lebanese reach 310, and for crime involving violence 331. Another statistics, that of children of non-Western immigrants outside the work force, reaches a staggering index 421 (page 99). I believe we see the same pattern in many other European countries. The issue that children of immigrants have a higher crime rate than their parents is also a call for concern... All numbers I referred to are available in the googlable "Indvandrere i Danmark 2015". Google Translate can do a reasonable job translating the Danish to English"

Delivering Amazon Packages to the Top of the World - The New York Times - "early each morning, the convenience of the digital age arrives, by way of a plane carrying 15 to 20 bags of packages from Amazon. At an elevation of 11,562 feet, Leh is the highest spot in the world where the company offers speedy delivery."

FATAH: Islamic Relief and other Islamist groups to receive $23M - "While Islamists will receive millions to conduct their Sharia agenda in Canada, Muslim critics of jihad, polygamy, FGM and Sharia have been left on their own to fight global Islamofascism... “most Friday sermons at mosque congregations end with a call to Allah to grant Muslims victory over non-Muslims, referred to as ‘Qawm al Kafiroon’.”... In recommending Islamic Relief as one of the recipients of the $23 million fund, Khalid covered up the fact that even Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority country has banned Islamic Relief from providing either relief or aid to some 500,000 Rohingya refugees who have taken refuge in the country."

CEOs Are Ridiculed for Huge Salaries: Why Aren't Athletes and Entertainers? - "Actors, athletes and executives are among the most populous inhabitants of the rarified atmosphere of multimillion dollar incomes. Why is it, then, that corporate executives are coming under fire for excessive pay when athletes like Michael Jordan and entertainers like Oprah Winfrey seem to stir no such feelings of resentment? Indeed, Winfrey is widely beloved by millions of people, many of whom are women with lower-than-average incomes, and Jordan is respected and admired by millions more, many of whom are men with lower-than-average incomes... Part of the answer, suggest some experts, is the nature of their different jobs. Athletes and entertainers produce something that is clearly evident to their fans... “Life is better because of entertainers, and there’s a genuine admiration for the special skills that entertainers have. People look at them and say, ‘Gee, I wish I were like that person, I wish I had their talent.’ But when people look at managers, they tend to say, ‘I could do that.’” Fader adds that entertainers and athletes also exude a bigger-than-life aura that leads fans to forgive – even applaud – what among regular people, including executives, would seem pretentious or even outrageous

WATCH: ICE Busts Suspected Sex-Trafficking Ring, Liberals Protest

After ‘reflecting very carefully’ on groping allegation, Trudeau says he doesn’t feel he acted inappropriately - "Criticism of Trudeau’s response to the allegations has grown louder since the Post published the first in-depth reporting on the allegation — confirming the woman’s authorship of the editorial and that she made separate contemporaneous complaints about the alleged incident to both her editor and publisher — and in light of his avowal that he has been “deeply engaged” on issues of sexual assault since his early 20s, the zero-tolerance policy for sexual misbehaviour he has imposed on his own political caucus and his previous statements that women should be believed when they raise allegations of impropriety. Adding their voices to that criticism in the wake of Trudeau’s comments Thursday was Valerie Bourne, publisher of the Advance at the time of the alleged incident, and Brian Bell, editor of the newspaper, the two supervisors to whom the woman reported the incident that summer. Bourne told the Post she thought the prime minister’s explanation was unsatisfactory, “tap-dancing” around the substance of the allegation and Bell called it “damage control.”"

On groping allegation, Trudeau ducks the rules he set - "We must believe this woman. Trudeau has told us that must be the default position when such allegations come to light. Former Liberal MPs Massimo Pacetti and Scott Andrews learned that lesson. So did former Liberal cabinet ministers Hunter Tootoo and Kent Hehr. New Democrats Christine Moore and Erin Weir learned as well. This is not to place all these stories on the same plane, but the common thread is all paid a price (Moore is under investigation) because of an overdue intolerance for inappropriate behaviour... because it’s 2018."

Facebook Algorithm Flags, Removes Declaration of Independence Text as Hate Speech - "Since June 24, the Liberty County Vindicator of Liberty County, Texas, has been sharing daily excerpts from the declaration in the run up to July Fourth. The idea was to encourage historical literacy among the Vindicator's readers... The post in question contained paragraphs 27 through 31 of the Declaration of Independence, the grievance section of the document wherein the put-upon colonists detail all the irreconcilable differences they have with King George III. Stinnett says that he cannot be sure which exact grievance ran afoul of Facebook's policy, but he assumes that it's paragraph 31, which excoriates the King for inciting "domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages." The removal of the post was an automated action"