Links - 26th August 2019 (3)

In Montreal, a Berlin Wall of the Mind? - The New York Times - "Fast-forward three decades, and separatism is largely in retreat. One in four Anglophones in Quebec marry French Quebecers... provincial legislators unanimously passed a resolution calling for shopkeepers to stop saying “Bonjour-hi” when they greet customers and to say simply “Bonjour” instead.Meanwhile, Valérie Plante, the outward-looking mayor of Montreal, was recently criticized for releasing highlights of the city’s budget in English... Chloe Molson, a university student with a Francophone mother and an Anglophone father, said that when she sometimes used English to greet customers at the Westmount supermarket where she works part-time, they sometimes rebuked her.“One woman said to me, ‘Don’t you understand French?!’” she said.But her Anglo friends sometimes become panicked when addressed in French."

As young home cooks seek convenience, the fate of Singapore’s wet markets hangs in the balance - "Many other wet market vendors that TODAY spoke to also said business has been getting tougher for them over the years, as shoppers are increasingly turning to supermarkets and grocery delivery services.A National Environment Agency (NEA) survey conducted last year found that 39 per cent of Singaporeans had not been to a wet market in the previous 12 months.The number has been steadily rising. In 2016 and 2014, the corresponding figures were 33 per cent and 23 per cent respectively... Besides slowing demand, vendors also face an uphill battle in convincing their children to take over the family business... Undergraduate Sean Lew, 22, is fairly typical of young grocery shoppers who spoke to TODAY — he said he prefers supermarkets as they are air-conditioned and more hygienic.“I would only go to the wet market for beef, because beef there is way cheaper than in the supermarkets,” he said.Fellow undergraduate How Ying Hui, 22, added that the short opening hours of wet markets make them too inconvenient.“I would prefer to get fresh meats and vegetables at the wet market, but because most of the stalls are closed by noon, there would not be many stores open if I go after school.” Ms Cheong Bao Wen, 23, an operations executive at a private equity firm, said that she has only been to a wet market once and is unlikely to ever return.“The wet market is very warm and smells sometimes. Plus anything that I can get there, I can also get it from the supermarkets. And supermarkets are also more accessible than the wet markets.”"

Judge gives doctors go-ahead to abort mentally-ill woman's baby despite mother's religious objections - "A judge has given doctors the go-ahead to perform an abortion on a pregnant mentally-ill woman.Mrs Justice Lieven has concluded that a pregnancy termination is in the woman's best interests after analysing evidence at a hearing in the Court of Protection, where issues relating to people who lack the mental capacity to make decisions are considered, in London.Bosses at an NHS trust responsible for the woman's care had asked Mrs Justice Lieven to let doctors perform an abortion. Specialists said a pregnancy termination was the best option.The woman's mother, a former midwife, was against abortion because of her Catholic faith and said she could care for the child... the woman, who is in her twenties and is 22 weeks pregnant, had the mental age of a child aged between six and nine"
This is like giving a 9 year old Jehovah's Witness a blood transfusion against his will

Spies fear a consulting firm helped hobble U.S. intelligence - "America’s vast spying apparatus was built around a Cold War world of dead drops and double agents. Today, that world has fractured and migrated online, with hackers and rogue terrorist cells, leaving intelligence operatives scrambling to keep up.So intelligence agencies did what countless other government offices have done: They brought in a consultant. For the past four years, the powerhouse firm McKinsey and Co., has helped restructure the country’s spying bureaucracy, aiming to improve response time and smooth communication. Instead, according to nearly a dozen current and former officials who either witnessed the restructuring firsthand or are familiar with the project, the multimillion dollar overhaul has left many within the country’s intelligence agencies demoralized and less effective.These insiders said the efforts have hindered decision-making at key agencies — including the CIA, National Security Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. They said McKinsey helped complicate a well-established linear chain of command, slowing down projects and turnaround time, and applied cookie-cutter solutions to agencies with unique cultures. In the process, numerous employees have become dismayed, saying the efforts have at best been a waste of money and, at worst, made their jobs more difficult. It’s unclear how much McKinsey was paid in that stretch, but according to news reports and people familiar with the effort, the total exceeded $10 million... In each case, bureaucratic changes that slow response time or hamper intelligence collection capabilities could cause the loss of company secrets, private government data, the democratic process and even American lives. Already, some projects at the NSA have been cut or delayed as a result of disgruntled employees leaving the agency."
Strange, libertarians tell us that the private sector is always better than the public sector

Ice Cream Man Charges Influencers Double Because They Keep Asking For Free Ice Cream - "CVT Soft Serve in Los Angeles took to social media to share its new policy: ask for a free cone and you must pay double... the well-established brand doesn’t need free promo from influencers, as it already has some pretty famous customers, like actor Bill Murray"

China slips app into phones of visitors, sifting their data - "China has turned its western region of Xinjiang into a police state with few modern parallels, employing a combination of high-tech surveillance and enormous manpower to monitor and subdue the area’s predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities.Now, the digital dragnet is expanding beyond Xinjiang’s residents, ensnaring tourists, traders and other visitors — and digging deep into their smartphones... China’s border authorities routinely install the app on smartphones belonging to travellers who enter Xinjiang by land from Central Asia, according to several people interviewed by the journalists who crossed the border recently and requested anonymity to avoid government retaliation.Chinese officials also installed the app on the phone of one of the journalists during a recent border crossing. Visitors were required to turn over their devices to be allowed into Xinjiang.The app gathers personal data from phones, including text messages and contacts. It also checks whether devices are carrying pictures, videos, documents and audio files that match any of more than 73,000 items included on a list stored within the app’s code.Those items include Islamic State publications, recordings of jihadi anthems and images of executions. But they also include material without any connection to Islamic terrorism, an indication of China’s heavy-handed approach to stopping extremist violence.There are scanned pages from an Arabic dictionary, recorded recitations of Quran verses, a photo of the Dalai Lama and even a song by a Japanese band of the earsplitting heavy-metal style known as grindcore"

Kim Jong Un's elite bodyguards run beside his car because of a Clint Eastwood movie - "“As a boy, he’d seen the movie ‘In the Line of Fire,’ in which Eastwood plays a US Secret Service agent who had been guarding John F. Kennedy when he was assassinated in 1963. Eastwood’s character and other agents run alongside the president’s car,” Fifield’s book says. Becoming a bodyguard for the North Korean leader is extremely difficult. Lee Yeong Guk, a bodyguard for Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, has said it’s “harder than passing through the eye of a needle.”Recruits are chosen from the military and must pass through several tests to judge their health, eyesight, looks, personality, and family background, according to Fifield.“Those charged with guarding the Brilliant Comrade must have excellent political credentials and come only from the most loyal classes,” Fifield’s book says. They must be around the same height as Kim, and they are among the only people allowed to carry firearms near the leader... North Korea takes extraordinary measures to protect Kim, including taste-testing food before it’s served to him and toting around his personal toilet so no foreign government can analyze his DNA for health information"

Opinion | Why Fiction Trumps Truth - The New York Times - "When it comes to uniting people around a common story, fiction actually enjoys three inherent advantages over the truth. First, whereas the truth is universal, fictions tend to be local. Consequently if we want to distinguish our tribe from foreigners, a fictional story will serve as a far better identity marker than a true story... The second huge advantage of fiction over truth has to do with the handicap principle, which says that reliable signals must be costly to the signaler... If political loyalty is signaled by believing a true story, anyone can fake it. But believing ridiculous and outlandish stories exacts greater cost, and is therefore a better signal of loyalty... Third, and most important, the truth is often painful and disturbing. Hence if you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you. An American presidential candidate who tells the American public the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about American history has a 100 percent guarantee of losing the elections. The same goes for candidates in all other countries... Even if we need to pay some price for deactivating our rational faculties, the advantages of increased social cohesion are often so big that fictional stories routinely triumph over the truth in human history. Scholars have known this for thousands of years, which is why scholars often had to decide whether they served the truth or social harmony. Should they aim to unite people by making sure everyone believes in the same fiction, or should they let people know the truth even at the price of disunity? Socrates chose the truth and was executed. The most powerful scholarly establishments in history — whether of Christian priests, Confucian mandarins or Communist ideologues — placed unity above truth. That’s why they were so powerful."

Poll: Americans Are Highly Critical of the State of Public Discourse - "Eighty-five percent of Americans believe political debate has become less respectful. Seventy-six percent think it has become less fact-based. And 60 percent believe political debate doesn’t focus on issues as much as it did in the past... Could the negative political debate – devoid of facts and substantive issues – be the result of the free society in which we live?That’s part of the argument advanced by Richard Weaver in a few essays on propaganda. Writing several decades ago, Weaver explains that propaganda – that fact-less fluff so many Americans resent – is to be expected in a free and pluralistic society, because “a pluralistic society is one which must countenance propaganda from many sources.”...
'we have largely ceased to teach rhetoric. If democracy means anything, it means that every person is an active advocate of policies. He must listen to many arguments, and he must make arguments in refutation. He cannot do either of these well—he cannot make his honestly held views acceptable to others, and he cannot disarm an opponent in an argument—unless he has some understanding of the probative value of statements.'"

Foodie Calls: Dating For a Free Meal (Rather Than a Relationship) - "23% of women in this first group revealed they’d engaged in a foodie call. Most did so occasionally or rarely. Although women who had engaged in a foodie call believed it was more acceptable, most women believed foodie calls were extremely to moderately unacceptable... those that engaged in foodie calls scored higher in the “dark triad” personality traits.“Several dark traits have been linked to deceptive and exploitative behavior in romantic relationships, such as one-night stands, faking an orgasm, or sending unsolicited sexual pictures”"

When a libertarian cites Sweden you know there’s something fishy going on - "When a libertarian cherry picks an ownership model from Sweden – which has a world-famous cradle-to-grave welfare system and hence is a country to send shudders down libertarian spines – you know there’s something fishy going on.It’s true, private road associations manage two thirds of the road network in Sweden. But what Wellings doesn’t reveal in the executive summary is that the Swedish Government subsidises these road associations. Furthermore, the privately owned and operated roads are mostly dirt tracks, in the middle of nowhere, with incredibly low volumes of traffic. Municipal roads in Sweden, just like municipal roads in most places in the world, are owned by the municipalities concerned. Private ownership of all city streets would lead to dystopian horrors, in Sweden and everywhere else.The private roads in Sweden see very low numbers of vehicles, less than 50 vehicles per day from outside the area and 70 local journeys per day."

Sikh drivers are transforming U.S. trucking. Take a ride along the Punjabi American highway - Los Angeles Times - "Over the last decade, Indian Americans have launched trucking schools, truck companies, truck washes, trucker temples and no-frills Indian restaurants modeled after truck stops back home, where Sikhs from the state of Punjab dominate the industry.“You used to see a guy with a turban and you would get excited,” says Pal, who is in his 15th year of trucking. “Today, you go to some stops and can convince yourself you are in India.”Three interstates — the I-5, I-80 and I-10 — are dotted with Indian-American-owned businesses catering to truckers. They start to appear as you drive east from Los Angeles, Reno and Phoenix, and often have the words “Bombay,” “Indian” or “Punjabi” on their storefront signs... At a Subway in Amarillo a few hours later, he grabs his go-to lunch when he’s taking a break from Indian food: a chicken sandwich on white bread with pepper jack, lettuce, tomato and onion. At home, the family is vegetarian. Pal relishes chances on the road to indulge in meat. He used to depend solely on his wife’s cooking. Today, he has other options. It’s a luxury to switch from homemade meals to Punjabi restaurants to fast food."