Links - 9th October 2018

High School English Students Forced to Learn Gender-Bending Pronouns and Anti-White Propaganda - "A student posted an assignment to social media, handed out by teacher Emily Thomson of Kennedy High's English department, that detailed "power and privilege" in America which, according to the assignment, names "U.S. born," "white people," "Christians," "middle, owning class," "heterosexuals," "men," and "veterans" as the oppressors of non-white humankind. How this is not a violation of the school's policy against discrimination based on race, creed, and sexuality is baffling... The white "agent" at the top of the image is guilty of discriminating against blacks, oppressing gays, marginalizing Asians, exploiting women and disenfranchising SJWs with pink hair."

Goldsmiths student group mounts extraordinary defence of GULAG camps - "A student union group has been roundly condemned after mounting an extraordinary defence of Stalin's notorious gulags... hard-left activists at Goldsmiths university tweeted a defence of the gulags - claiming they helped rehabilitate workers and were nicer than Western prisons. They claimed that inmates were actually treated well and allowed to join theatre groups and write for prison newspapers. Historians voiced their astonishment at the ludicrous defence, while relatives of those killed in gulags accused the student group of trying to rewrite history... A study of Soviet data found that 1,053,829 people died in the worker camps from 1934 until 1953... The Goldsmiths account later deleted the tweets after being met with the fierce backlash. A spokesman for Goldsmiths, University of London said: 'Goldsmiths has a diverse and inclusive community with many people caring deeply about trans rights... The student group is based at Goldsmiths university - whose student unions have garnered a reputation of pursuing wacky and controversial left-wing policies"

Ed Jordan on Twitter - "As a leftist who makes gulag jokes semi-frequently, it is ridiculous to seriously claim that gulags were not instruments of censorship and repression of of dissent used by a brutal authoritarian dictatorship. Seriously defending them is as fucked up as Holocaust denial.
Also I'm not sure why an LGBTQ+ society is attempting to defend a regime under which homosexuality was illegal, but there you go I guess."
On Goldsmiths and the Gulag

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The morality of parental rights - "'They've raised all the resources necessary to provide the treatment. So I quite agree that in some circumstances, opportunity cost as the economists call it or injustice in terms of preventing other people from having useful treatments would indeed stop the state or the National Health Service from providing very low probability benefit treatments at great expense.'
'So the problem with that moral system is that rich parents can keep their children alive, but poor parents can't'"
Apparently it's better to force the kids of rich parents die than to let them pay for their own treatment

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Veganism and Animal Rights - "I actually think that chlorinated chicken or factory farmed chicken being available to more and more people as a wonderful step forward for humanity. And we should stop worrying about that. I suppose as a humanist, I think animals are useless unless humans can make use of them. And if anything, what I'm worried about is in enthusiasm for animal rights because we've lost faith in an intellectual commitment of the exceptionalism of humans, I am a humanist and animals are beneath us...
‘The idea that you can't have rights without responsibilities is a very strange one, because you just gotta think of the classes of human beings: you have young children, babies, people with moderate, severe brain damage and so on, who also have no responsibilities. But if you wanted to infer from that that they have no rights I think that would be a very strange inference.’...
‘Animals as a species though are not capable of taking responsibility for their own actions.’...
‘What I find disturbing is that you can't distinguish between, say for example, somebody with a mental incapacity, a human being, my mother with dementia, because she has limited capacity and you can't see a moral distinction between her and a chimp that throws a brick, that's what I'm saying, I think she's more than an animal’"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, The perfect cuppa - "In the hierarchy of liquids to be drunk wine has this, is at the top of the list. You know that because there's an actual different menu at a restaurant for wines, as if to say, "Oh this is the most sophisticated liquid in your life”, which is not true. A cup of tea, actually, is just as sophisticated as a bottle of wine… you really have got to get the temperature right, because if you don't have the right water at the right temperature, you will not get the thousands, and I mean it's thousands of flavour molecules in a cup of tea. If you're having one now, you are drinking the most sophisticated liquid on the planet… if you’re drinking black tea, [the water must be] on the boil, because designed to get those flavours out at 100 degrees, but if you're drinking green tea, then you want off the boil, you want 72 degrees."

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Perils of journalism - "[On Syria] Documents, and photographs smuggled out. People risked their lives to bring out things like meeting minutes from the Office of the President, that clearly showed a primary aspect of their war strategy was to eliminate the journalists...
We had a contact in Lebanese intelligence, who said quite clearly that they picked up Syrian radio signals, said any journalist found in the region of Hams had to be executed and had the bodies thrown onto the battlefield… someone said to me, ‘You're in more trouble if you’re caught with a camera than a rifle in Homs’"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Tony Blair on Jeremy Corbyn - "Some labour MPs wonder whether it's time to sit as independents, others ponder in private about creating a new party"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Friday's business with Rob Young - "The US does have some justification to say that the terms of trade aren’t fair. When China was submitted to the WTO it was a very different economy to what it is today. The G7 as they were then wanted China in the family of trading nations, they wanted them in, they gave them preferential treatment. China doesn't need preferential treatment today, to give you an example, if a western company wants to do business in China today it has to partner up with a local company, it has to hand over its IP, it can't bid for Chinese companies, whereas for a Chinese company coming out to the US or western Europe, the terms of the trades are very different. And that's why Donald Trump was elected."

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, The Invisible Ingredient - "‘For the bulk of our customers, half an hour is the time they commit to their evening meal. Fifteen is preparing the item and 15 minutes is eating it’...
‘Before, it didn't matter how long it took to make a little vine leave or a little stuffing everything. In the Middle East, well in Egypt, at any rate, you honored your guests by taking a lot of time. But now I don't feel that at all. And I want to take short cuts. I want to go out, I want to see friends and I know that my children are all working and they all don't want to do things that take four hours’...
People do dedicate less time to cooking when they used to. British households spend around half as much time preparing an evening meal than they did in the 1980s and the average person has a repertoire of just four recipes. In the US it's a similar picture according to its Department of Agriculture. Households spend, on average, just thirty-seven minutes per day on food preparation and clear up. A household’s main cook saves over a week of solid preparation time every year by using pre-prepared food.… In Britain in the late 1970s, frozen food once a status symbol, had begun to be seen as unhealthy and a bit down market"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Rethinking the Celebrity Chef - "A study in the UK by the market research firm YouGov showed people say their eating habits are influenced more by cookery programs and the personalities on them than by government Healthy Eating campaigns. Just forty years ago, though most great chefs were hidden away in the kitchen. Some may have been famous but only for their food...
If you look at two of the most famous chefs of the past 200 years, Carême, a French chef of the early nineteenth century, and Escoffier of the early 20th century, they were famous enough that people brought their cook books, sauces were named after them, they were regarded as defining French cuisine. But again, nobody asked their opinions about general things and they were regarded as master craftsmen. And not as artists. So really, the change comes in the 70s and the 80s... Many celebrity chefs now, they're more celebrities than chefs...
The Nouvelle movement, brought about a much more personalized cuisine where chefs started to compose their own dishes. This was the beginning of what's now known as a signature dishes and they became known for the same reason writers or musicians or filmmakers become."

UPDATE 3-South Africa in recession for first time since 2009; rand slumps
I'm sure this has nothing to do with what they're doing to white farmers

'Violating Freedom': CA Lawmakers Vote Again to Stop Churches from Helping Gays - "Hundreds of pastors across the state have traveled to Sacramento this year to oppose the bill, fearing that it will shut down church conferences on sexuality, ban Christian books on sex and any paid counseling for those seeking to change their orientation."
If you don't support gay marriage, don't get a gay marriage. If you don't agree with what some Christians say on homosexuality, silence them

Man Wrongfully Sentenced to 50 Years in Prison Goes Free After Dog He Supposedly Killed Is Found Alive and Well - "A dog may have spared a Salem, Oregon, man from a 50-year prison sentence for sexual abuse of a minor. The fact that the dog is still alive contradicts key testimony used to convict the defendant, who had already been released from prison and is no longer facing a possible retrial. In this very strange and slightly confusing tale, plumber Joshua Horner was convicted in 2017 of abusing a minor who testified that Horner had threatened to shoot her animals if she ever squealed on him to the cops. To prove he was in earnest, she said, he shot her dog... even the jury that convicted Horner was not unanimous. How is that legal? It turns out Oregon is one of two states where jury decisions need not be unanimous—even when the outcome will result in a person spending 50 years in a cage."

Indian woman divorce husband because dem no get toilet - BBC News Pidgin - "One woman for India don get permission from court to divorce her husband because im no gree build toilet for dem house. The woman wey dey for her 20's don dey married to her husband for five years, but na for inside bush she dey poopoo."

This Delhi man was called a ‘pervert’ in viral post 3 years ago — and he’s still stuck there - "Three years after he was labelled a ‘pervert’ because of an alleged incident of molestation on a Delhi road, Saravjeet Singh, 28, is struggling to keep a job, has to appear at a police station every time he needs to leave the city and is yet to get a passport... Arguments in the case against him are yet to begin as the complainant, former St Stephen’s student Jasleen Kaur, has not attended even a single hearing in the matter. There have been 13 hearings so far."

12-year-old boy who transitioned to female changes his mind two years later - "At just 12-years-old, Patrick Mitchell, begged with his mother to begin taking oestrogen hormones after doctors diagnosed him with gender dysphoria... After heeding advice from professionals who suggested that it was right choice, his mother was fully supportive and Mitchell began to transition... Now, in a bid to revert back to his original body, he has stopped taking his medication and is about to have an operation to remove excess breast tissue in what will be the final stage of his transition."

Annual air pollution caused by the Hungry Ghost Festival - "the change in the chemical composition of the rainwater and PM2.5 (PM ≤ 2.5 μm) atmospheric samples could be correlated directly with burning events during this festival, with many elements increasing between 18% and 60% during August and September compared to the yearly mean concentrations"

Mona Lisa: Physician Diagnosis Solves Mystery of Enigmatic Smile - "each of the physical abnormalities he spotted on the “Mona Lisa” has a known medical correlate. The bump next to her eye, for example, is likely a xanthalesma, a yellowish cholesterol deposit under the skin, usually near the eye. Similarly, the bulge on her hand is probably a type of fatty benign tumor known as a lipoma or a xanthoma, if it’s rich in cholesterol. The bulge on her neck, meanwhile, could be the beginnings of a goiter, an abnormal enlargement of the thyroid gland. “It’s not an aquiline neck,” says Mehra. “You don’t actually see the trachea.” “So, I’m basically looking at a receding hairline, loss of eyebrows, a swelling in the neck, coarse, thin hair,” he says. Then there’s the xanthalesma and the lipoma or xanthoma. “And I’m looking at a slightly edematous, swollen woman with no hair throughout. That, to me is a classic picture of clinical hypothyroidism, or an underactive thyroid gland.”"

Doctors said the coma patients would never wake. AI said they would - and they did - "At least seven patients in Beijing who doctors said had “no hope” of regaining consciousness were re-evaluated by an artificial intelligence system that predicted they would awaken within a year... but the machine also made some mistakes"

Novelist, 68, arrested for 'fatally shooting husband' blogged about 'How to Murder Your Husband' - "Nancy Crampton Brophy, 68, was arrested last week for the June 2 murder of Daniel Brophy."

How to Determine the Minimum Size Needed for a Statistical Sample - "Suppose you are getting ready to do your own survey to estimate a population mean; wouldn’t it be nice to see ahead of time what sample size you need to get the margin of error you want? Thinking ahead will save you money and time and it will give you results you can live with in terms of the margin of error — you won’t have any surprises later."