Links - 4th September 2018 (2)

Magistrate Nigel Stringer defended himself in Morningthorpe Norwich burglary private justice - "A magistrate defending his family against an armed gang who stormed his home ended up being arrested himself – and accused of a racially aggravated assault. Police detained Nigel Stringer for three hours and he remains under investigation while the gang – believed to have been armed with a gun, knives, metal bars and a crossbow – were allowed to leave... police were uninterested in the injuries he suffered and told him the gang had simply entered his garden as civil trespassers and 'done nothing wrong'. Mr Stringer said he later discovered a discarded metal bar and three knives.Within weeks he was informed that police had closed the file about the trespass... 'This should be a warning to all homeowners that not only are the police unable to protect us, they will actually arrest innocent homeowners who protect themselves, even against an armed and dangerous gang.'"
What happens when you're obsessed with hate crimes

Computers Predict Pop Chart Success - "songs had become less happy over the 30-year span; as well as more danceable, more relaxed—and more likely to have women behind the mic. But the big hits bucked a number of those trends. "The behavior of successful songs looked almost like a separate species of songs. They have quantifiably different features, their own little trends." The hit singles were happier than the norm…almost a throwback to earlier times. And even more likely to be sung by women. The details are in the journal Royal Society Open Science. [Myra Interiano et al., Musical trends and predictability of success in contemporary songs on and off the top charts]"

How to disable Taskbar thumbnail preview on Windows 10 - "On Windows 10, every time you hover over an app icon in the taskbar you get a small pop-over preview of the app's window. If you happen to have multiple windows or tabs of that app open, that preview expands to show every one of them. They can be useful — clicking one takes you straight to that app. But sometimes it just gets in the way. Thankfully, you can disable this feature. It's not as easy as it used to be, but there's a workaround for killing app preview thumbnails on Windows 10."

China must stop fooling itself it is a world leader in science and technology, magazine editor says - "China is fooling only itself if it thinks it will soon overtake the United States as a world leader in science and technology, according to the boss of a state-owned publication dedicated to the subject. With the world’s two largest economies embroiled in an escalating trade dispute, the comments made by Liu Yadong, editor-in-chief of Science and Technology Daily, which comes under the supervision of the Ministry of Science and Technology, were unexpected."

Singapore's S$134m bottled water addiction - "While some of these bottled water products are derived from mineral-rich springs, a significant number - including market leaders like F&N’s Ice Mountain and Coca-Cola’s Dasani - are sourced from public water supplies. These two brands made up more than half of the bottled water sales volume in Singapore last year... A situation where people are willing to pay as much as a thousand times more for bottled water when clean, drinkable tap water is readily available at a nominal charge has left some environmental advocates and experts scratching their heads"

Meet The Woman Who Poisoned Makeup To Help Over 600 Women Murder Their Husbands - "She’s the most successful serial killer whose name you’ve never heard. Giulia Tofana killed hundreds of men in 17th-century Italy when she turned her makeup business into a poison factory, selling a deadly concoction called Aqua Tofana, thought to have been laced with arsenic, lead, and belladonna"

2 men arrested for allegedly fighting over last available toilet urinal in Aljunied MRT station

How China tried to shut down Australian media coverage of its debt-trap diplomacy in the Pacific - "Chen Yonglin, a former diplomat at the Chinese Consulate in Sydney who defected in 2005, told Business Insider that this happens frequently with local Chinese language media in Australia and that, ultimately, the incident in Australia would have originated in Beijing... Vanuatu took an $85 million loan from the Export-Import Bank of China for the Luganville wharf, which is topped with a 2% interest rate, that needs to be repaid within 20 years. But a similar wharf project in Port Vila, which was funded with a Japanese loan only required a 0.55% interest rate and gave the country twice as long to repay it... When Sri Lanka defaulted on its loan for a Chinese-built port, it gave state-owned China Merchants Group a 99-year lease which experts believe was a strategic acquisition in the region."

From Singapore to the US, overseas Chinese are increasingly fearful of criticising Beijing. Is this what China wants? - "As the panel concluded, a woman in the audience, without raising her hand to request permission from the moderator to speak, started to shout at me: “What’s your nationality? Are you Chinese? What university did you study at?” The seemingly irrelevant questions baffled the audience. She then identified herself as a professor at one of the “top universities” in China, and went on to lecture me on the journalistic principles she said she preached to her students: “be objective”, which, by her own words, meant focusing on the positive things, not like me (as well as the other panellists who are not from mainland China), who were “negative and too dark”... These kind of Orwellian-style scenes may be common in China nowadays... But what is more intimidating now is that, even overseas, no matter how far away, you feel you are still being watched... the student was vilified because she dared to criticise some in her own country for not tolerating criticism – and that her critics, through their harsh reactions, inadvertently attested to what she was saying."

Beijing more insecure about foreign ideas and criticism than before, says China watcher

Once Eaten By Birds, Stick Insects Get The Ride Of Their Lives - "seeds and stick insect eggs share many similarities in size, color, shape and texture. Like seeds, stick insect eggs are also remarkably durable—they are coated with a layer of calcium oxalate, which can withstand acidic environments such as digestive tracts."

Crow greets tourists with ‘Y’alright love?' in a Yorkshire accent - "A crow has been filmed greeting tourists with ‘Y’alright love?’ in a Yorkshire accent."

Opinion | South Korea’s Enduring Racism - The New York Times - "a bar in the popular Itaewon district of Seoul refused an Indian customer. “No Indians,” the bouncer was heard to say. “It is a rule. No Kazakhstan, no Pakistan, no Mongolia, no Saudi Arabia and no Egypt.” None of this is surprising given South Korea’s education system. For decades, children, myself included, were taught to believe that this is a single-blooded nation — dubbed danil minjok in Korean. This myth of racial purity was promoted to foster national unity. Only after 2007, when the United Nations urged South Korea to stop promoting this racist notion, did the school curriculum change. With interracial marriage increasing, especially between South Korean men and women from other parts of Asia, the government has promoted the idea of damunhwa — literally “multiculturalism.” But it’s defined as foreigners marrying South Korean citizens, so the damunhwa paradigm promotes little tolerance for other types of foreigners seeking to stay here long term."
So much for the USA being the most racist country on earth

How Conservatives Weaponized the First Amendment - The New York Times - ""What’s now being called the libertarian position on speech was in the 1960s the liberal position on speech"... liberals who once championed expansive First Amendment rights are now uneasy about them... Many on the left have traded an absolutist commitment to free speech for one sensitive to the harms it can inflict. Take pornography and street protests. Liberals were once largely united in fighting to protect sexually explicit materials from government censorship. Now many on the left see pornography as an assault on women’s rights. In 1977, many liberals supported the right of the American Nazi Party to march among Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Ill. Far fewer supported the free-speech rights of the white nationalists who marched last year in Charlottesville, Va... Some liberals now say that free speech disproportionately protects the powerful and the status quo... "Instead of providing a shield for the powerless, the First Amendment became a sword used by people at the apex of the American hierarchy of power."... The title of the article asked, “Can Free Speech Be Progressive?” “The answer,” the article said, “is no.”"
Again, we see the liberal mentality that having "power" makes you wrong. Justice is just something to be weaponised by/on behalf of the "powerless" as a way to hurt the "powerful" - rather than being something fair or a commitment to procedural equality
The powerful and the status quo actually don't need free speech protection because they are powerful and the status quo. This suggests that liberals raging against free speech are unhappy that liberal power is not enough to quash dissent - i.e. liberalism IS power and the status quo

Scarlett Johansson's 'trash' response to transgender role slammed - "The actress is set to star in Rupert Sanders' upcoming movie Rub & Tug, about the underground sex industry in 1970s Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Johansson will portray Jean Marie Gill, who owned a massage parlour and was an integral part of the scene at the time. The problem with Johansson's casting is that Gill was a transgender man who was assigned female at birth, and spent most of his life identifying as a man. Rather than cast a transgender man to take on the role of Gill, therefore allowing the story to be told from a place of first-hand experience, Johansson, a cisgender female, will be taking the lead - and Twitter is not happy."
Solution: don't make any movies starring trans people

Lord Mayor Magid Magid brands Donald Trump a 'wasteman' and BANS him from Sheffield - "Magid entered the room dressed in his mayoral chains, and a black t-shirt which read 'Donald Trump is a wasteman', whilst wearing a sombrero 'in solidarity with Mexican's, other Latins and all people suffering at the hands of the Trump regime... The 28-year-old made headlines last month becoming the city’s youngest ever Lord Mayor, first Green Lord Mayor, where his inaugural photograph went viral across the world. Magid further made headlines after receiving abuse online and in press for refusing to toast to the Queen and for being a black, Muslim immigrant. He is also known for wearing a different hat and a different t-shirt with a message on for every full council he chairs"
Great way to combat 'stereotypes'

The Left Goes All In On Open Borders - "“No borders. No nations. Fuck deportations!”... Rather than a squabble over the semantics of immigration law, the guiding principles of the protest apparently see open borders as morally desirable and that no person should be refused entry to the U.S... The inevitable signs lecturing the American public that “No person is illegal” were out in full-force, suggesting everyone has the right to come to this country... In years past, Democrats and liberals would argue that they believed in strong security measures when it came to immigration. They supported the construction of a border wall in 2006, and agreed to hiring more border security to put an end to illegal immigration in 2013 as a part of the Gang of Eight deal. Now those measures are equated with fascism in the liberal discourse of 2017"
Apparently ICE is the American Gestapo

Texas teenager attacked on video for wearing Make America Great Again hat - "A 16-year-old boy has been verbally abused and assaulted at a restaurant for wearing one of Donald Trump’s trademark “Make America Great Again” hats... a restaurant manager in Canada was sacked after refusing to serve a man wearing a MAGA hat."

Mike Stuchbery on Twitter - "Folks mad that I said kid who lost his MAGA cap and a drink thrown on him got off easy. I just think he learned a valuable lesson in personal responsibility. You want to offend, be prepared to face the consequences."
Naturally, this comes from a verified account. I guess women who wear skimpy clothing should also be prepared to face the consequences

New theory suggests female orgasms are an evolutionary leftover - "Orgasm itself may have no evolutionary function, but it is derived from a key part of the reproductive cycle, Pavlićev and her colleague propose today in the Journal of Experimental Zoology Part B: Molecular and Developmental Evolution. Pavlićev didn't start out studying orgasms. To better understand the evolution of reproduction, she was compiling data on the ovarian cycle in different mammal species. During this cycle, cells destined to become eggs mature, escape from the ovary, and travel down the reproductive tract. She discovered that in some species, environmental factors control egg maturation and subsequent ovulation; in others, such as rabbits, sexual intercourse with a male or even just his presence causes the release of the egg. In either case, a series of changes involving the hormones oxytocin and prolactin are triggered that cause the egg to mature and migrate. In humans and other primates, the ovulatory cycle has become spontaneous, generally on a set schedule that requires neither an environmental trigger nor a male. Pavlićev then realized that women still undergo the same hormonal changes as species with induced ovulation, but during orgasm."

Women Experience 2 Types of Orgasms; Now Sonographs Reveal How Clitoral And Vaginal Climaxes Cause Different Sensations - "during external clitoral stimulation the orgasm did not involve the internal root of the clitoris. However, during vaginal stimulation, due to the movements and displacements, both the root and the external clitoris were involved. The researchers found this difference affected blood flow and therefore led to a difference in sensation."

The G-Spot And 'Vaginal Orgasm' Are Myths, According To New Clinical Review - "“The way that we talk about it in society, many women feel that [orgasm] is what they’re supposed to do and that that would be the supreme success of the encounter,” Saltz said. “But most women do report that it’s the closeness; it’s the shared intimacy; and, of course, the physical arousal is pleasurable by itself.”"