Links - 1st May 2019 (2)

'Smash Racism DC' Antifa Leader Arrested For 'Ethnic Intimidation' Against Hispanic Marines - "A leader of the Antifa group "Smash Racism DC," which gained national notoriety after converging on the home of Tucker Carlson and terrorizing his wife, has been arrested and charged with "ethnic intimidation" in connection to a brutal attack on two Hispanic Marines in Philadelphia... While Antifa presents itself as "anti-fascist" and "anti-racist," as an Antifa group in Philly demonstrated in November, they openly embrace fascistic violence and racist behavior, not only against anyone they perceive to be white, but minorities who don't back their radical agenda... The Antifa members initially called the Marines "Nazis" and "white supremacists," but after Godinez yelled out, "I'm Mexican!" the assaulters allegedly began to hurl racial slurs at them, including "spic" and "wetback."... Unsurprisingly, it was a conservative news group rather than the mainstream media that did the legwork necessary to bring Alcoff to justice"

Revealed: Antifa Leader Relied On Anonymity To Push Radical, Violent Communist Agenda - "The significant efforts Alcoff takes to separate his true identity from his radical personas appear to be intentional, and his comments become more extreme when he has more anonymity. Through his Twitter account, which he’s managed to keep anonymous, Alcoff has said that Antifa organizations need to operate “both an above board group and a below one.”Operating groups within the bounds of the law is necessary to “get press” and “to have a base of support,” while underground groups are necessary so activists can’t be “linked by prosecutors or press,” he wrote. Alcoff said to avoid too much overlap between lawful and unlawful groups “to keep the press from blowing the open secret.”... Alcoff spoke on the Joint Economic Committee Democrats’ “Opportunity Agenda” podcast in August, where he stressed the importance of a stable and depoliticized regulatory environment so that “companies and industry figures out how to profit from more responsible lending.”But in his social media postings, Alcoff often calls for the murder of the rich and the dismantlement of capitalism... As mainstream news outlets have faced criticism during the Trump era for excusing or ignoring violence carried out by Antifa groups, Alcoff said it “feels good” to see “militant tactics” “mainstreamed.”... Alcoff’s radicalism appears to have been bred at a young age.“I was raised in a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist family that understands intersectionality,” he said at Left Forum 2015. “On the other hand, much of my adult life has been in anti-authoritarian movements ranging from counter-globalization to some of the anti-militarist wings of the anti-war movement to Occupy Wall Street to Cop Watch.”Alcoff’s mother reminisced in a December 2016 Facebook post that when Alcoff and his brother, Sam Alcoff, were teenagers, they “began to ask for presents of cans of spray paint” and “duct tape, bulk cutters [sic], gas masks.”"

VIDEO - Antifa Member Shot To Death After Drawing Down on Eugene, OR Cops in School - "Charlie Landeros, aged old enough to know better, loved his far-left activism. He belonged to an armed Antifa group we’ve covered, training “oppressed peoples” in armed self-defense. And now he’s no longer with us after drawing down on two Eugene, Oregon police officers who attempted to arrest him at a Eugene middle school there... No one knows why, in addition to the gun on his hip, that Landeros brought a backpack full of ammunition and loaded magazines to the school that day. Maybe Eugene police stopped a school massacre by an unhinged loser."

Antifa Went To Protest Fascists. They Targeted The Wrong Group — And Threatened To Kill Me. - "This isn’t the first time that Antifa in the Pacific Northwest has targeted the wrong people. At a demonstration in Portland, Oregon in August, a leftist man carrying an American flag was bashed on the head with a metal bat by a group of masked individuals dressed in black who thought he was a conservative. He was left on the ground in a pool of his own blood... The irony of a mob of mostly white "anti-racists" harassing a gay Asian-American journalist was lost on them. "Racist, sexist, anti-gay; far-right bigot go away!" they repeated like a mantra.I refused to leave or engage. They mocked my silence, calling me a fearful coward. A police officer finally approached me after an hour of abuse. I assumed he was going to help. I was wrong."At some point you are inciting conflict and we’re going to take some action to remove you from the area," he said. "Do you understand that?" I told him I wasn’t leaving the public sidewalk... When the rally attendees dispersed, Antifa protesters across the street used bullhorns to call them terrorists. "My grandfather killed Nazis like you and my son will do the same," a masked woman shouted. A woman holding an American flag yelled back to them: "Jesus loves you."The protest last weekend demonstrates once again that when overzealous "anti-fascist" ideologues can’t find actual fascists, they will make them up. And the people they purport to protect—minorities and people of color—aren’t safe from their indiscriminate abuse and threats."

Group Of U.S. Marines Maced, Assaulted, Called 'Nazis' By Antifa. Local Member Has Been Charged. - "Antifa members in Portland exhibited violent behavior against demonstrators at a #HimToo protest. Six people ended up getting arrested, including a 19-year-old Antifa member named Heather McClintock who was captured on video harassing, assaulting, and spitting on demonstrators. She was charged with harassment."

Nicotine - Gwern.net - "One of the reasons tobacco became so popular in the 1600s, along with tea & coffee (for their caffeine), was that nicotine is a powerful stimulant. Obvious enough; it affects tons of systems. Less obvious is that nicotine has many beneficial effects (and these benefits may be related to anomalous smoking results); the infamous deadliness of smoking would seem to be almost solely from the smoke, not the nicotine. Even less obvious is that nicotine itself may not be especially addictive, and its addictiveness is genetically modulated. All of the harm seems to stem from tobacco, and tobacco smoking in particular; this is not necessarily obvious because almost everyone casually conflates tobacco with nicotine (especially public education programs), treating them as a single synonymous evil I dub “nicbacco”... the research literature is full of results connecting nicotine with improved mental performance"

Humans couldn't pronounce 'f' and 'v' sounds before farming developed - "They found that the upper and lower incisors of ancient human adults were aligned, making it hard to produce labiodentals, which are formed by touching the lower lip to the upper teeth. Later, our jaws changed to an overbite structure, making it easier to produce such sounds.The team showed that this change in bite correlated with the development of agriculture in the Neolithic period. Food became easier to chew at this point, which led to changes in human jaws and teeth: for instance, because it takes less pressure to chew softer, farmed foods, the jawbone doesn’t have to do as much work and so doesn’t grow to be so large."

What If Ayn Rand Was Right About Entrepreneurs and Inequality? - "recent research on the matter raises the prospect that Piketty may be almost entirely wrong, in that income inequality is primarily driven by labor income that is realized as profit by owner-managers of mid-market firms. This is a mechanism consistent with Rand’s basic premise—that extreme incomes are predominantly earned as a function of the exceptional abilities and efforts of skilled entrepreneurs, not by a class of passive capital owners. Piketty does recognize that entrepreneurs may generate extreme incomes via their own efforts, however he also warns that such entrepreneurs tend to accumulate the capital that precedes the creation of a rentier class and entrenched wealth inequality. The NBER view suggests this warning may be unnecessary, as the primary source of income inequality is demonstrably earned business income—income ultimately attributable to the labour efforts of skilled owner-managers that does not remain tied to any particular stock of capital nor persist through multiple generations."

Meme - "'Of Course, the Princess Is the Kidnaped One Because Is the 'Helpless and Weak' Woman Sexist Concept'
'No, She Is the Kidnaped One Because She Is an Important Political Leader. in Charge Of a Prosperous Kingdom and Whose Kidnapping Will Destabilize the Region...'
'Ahh and Keeping Calm and Not Doing Anyching Reckiess in a Hostage Situation Is Not Weakness, Is Common Sense"

BFI Vows Not to Fund Movies With Facial-Scarred Villains - "The British Film Institute (BFI) has announced it will no longer fund movies featuring villain characters with facial scars. The organization’s decision supports the growing #IAmNotYourVillain campaign started by Changing Faces, the United Kingdom’s leading charity group for people with a visible difference such as a mark or scar. The group has made it their mission to de-stigmatize facial scars in film and television since scarring is often used on villains (see The Joker, Darth Vader, and more), and now the BFI is vowing to support that effort."

A post by Apple is Shit on December 2, 2018 - "Apple's attitude before it became successful: "we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas"
Apple's attitude after it became successful: "I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this"
"Stealing is wrong""

F-word removed from Linux code comments in favour of 'hug' - "Following the change, several contributors responded to the alterations calling them insane, one wondered if Sakkinen was just trying to make a joke, and another called it censorship and said he’d refuse to apply any sort of patches like this to the code he's in charge of. Another contributor said they didn’t mind the change but that some of the sentences were now difficult to understand, this was echoed by a Dutch contributor who said the replacements were confusing for non-native English speakers."

We Asked Men and Women to Wear Sensors at Work. They Act the Same but Are Treated Very Differently - "We went in with a few hypotheses about why fewer women ended up in senior positions than men: Perhaps women had fewer mentors, less face time with managers, or weren’t as proactive as men in talking to senior leadership.But as we analyzed our data, we found almost no perceptible differences in the behavior of men and women. Women had the same number of contacts as men, they spent as much time with senior leadership, and they allocated their time similarly to men in the same role. We couldn’t see the types of projects they were working on, but we found that men and women had indistinguishable work patterns in the amount of time they spent online, in concentrated work, and in face-to-face conversation. And in performance evaluations men and women received statistically identical scores. This held true for women at each level of seniority. Yet women weren’t advancing and men were."
Good research but their interpretation is conveniently speculative. Ironically they call for hard data in their conclusion. Even though hard data already exists explaining why women lag behind and suggests that in some scenarios it's actually men who are underpaid

My take on the guilty verdict of Cardinal Pell.... - Ronán O'Raghallaigh - "My take on the guilty verdict of Cardinal Pell... I find the allegations absurd, to say the least. Personally knowing the context of a ‘Sunday Solemn Sung Cathedral Mass’ very well, there are too many points that simply don’t add up...
1. Choir boys don’t just leave the recessional without being noticed. They walk in front of the older singers and are clearly in view of the whole congregation.
2. I have never seen a celebrant of any given liturgy leave before the end; that includes ‘leaving’ the recessional before exiting the door of the Church. No less a Bishop at a solemn Mass - this is fictitious. Has anyone ever seen a celebrant leave the recessional at a random point before the Church door?
3. Anyone who has ever been involved in a Cathedral liturgy knows that the bishop is never alone inside the sacristy (and, needless to say, inside the Cathedral). It just doesn’t happen. If anything, people are always wanting ‘a moment alone’ but can’t get one.
4. The allegation: Archbishop Pell walks out of the recessional into the sacristy (as everyone else in the sanctuary recesses out of the Church), no one sees him leave (or the two choir boys before him) he then finds the two choir boys drinking altar wine, he reproaches them and proceeds to lift up his alb and chasuble, move his cincture out of the way, undo his belt, drop his pants and ‘commit three vile sexual acts including oral penetration.’ All of this happens in the space of approx. six minutes and no one witnesses anything.
5. Cardinal Pell stood as the figure head of the Catholic Church in Australia. In recent years he held the third most powerful position in the Church. It is, humanly speaking, almost impossible to have an unprejudiced jury against a man who is (to the average punter) ‘the face of the Church’. Have juries ever erred in the past? Yes. Might they have got it wrong in this instance? Yes. Do I think people are looking for a scapegoat and +Pell might just have been the man? Yes"