Links - 10th October 2019 (1)

The myth of flying peanuts: not so deadly after all - "Although nut allergy is real and scary for parents and sufferers – it can’t for practical purposes be transmitted through the air enough to cause these severe reactions. Researching the story for my new book, The Diet Myth, I spoke to several of the world’s leading food allergy consultants including Adam Fox, a consultant in paediatric allergy at St Thomas’ Hospital. He and colleagues who have worked for many years testing thousands of children with severe allergic reactions had “never heard of nut vapours causing these severe reactions”. Peanut particles are heavy and although can form dust on surfaces, studies have been unable to detect peanut particles in the air or the key allergens in the air in sufficient amounts to cause a reaction. They all agreed that the plane incident as it was reported could not have occurred however strong the plane air conditioning or the belief of the parents... Australian researchers used mice sensitive to allergies and asthma and found they could prevent the risk of young pups being allergic depending on what the mother ate in pregnancy. The higher the fibre content and the more food diversity, the lower the rate of subsequent allergies. What was really novel was that gut microbes were crucial to the process. Pregnant mice with the high-fibre diet had a group of microbes that produced an anti-inflammatory chemical called acetate... Many with allergic families are told to cut out foods or avoid eating peanuts (there is a common belief that eating peanuts will lead to a peanut allergy in babies later), while others are routinely told to avoid eating French cheese or salamis, raw or undercooked meats because of the risk of very rare infections that other countries don’t worry about.In this way they anxiously end up on very restrictive diets, lacking diversity and fibre. These diets could be having the opposite effects to those intended as they starve our gut microbes of nutrients and reduce the immune dampening chemicals they naturally produce.An increasing trend is that many of us think we have food allergies when we don’t. One study found that while 38% of people think they have a food allergy, the real figure is closer to around 1%. This exaggerated fear of allergies means that parents are preventing some children from eating foods such as wheat, nuts, eggs or milk. Paradoxically, peanut allergy looks like it could be cured by reintroducing tiny amounts of peanuts slowly early in life. Early studies also suggest microbes can help prevent the allergy as introducing probiotics has also helped. Data so far shows non-allergic mothers who eat peanuts are less likely to subsequently have peanut allergic children. And a change of heart may finally be underway after interim guidelines issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics, and based on a peanut trial led by Gideon Lack at King’s College London, suggested that babies at high-risk of developing peanut allergy are protected from peanut allergy at the age of five if they eat peanut frequently, starting within their first 11 months."

Is It OK to Bring Peanuts on a Plane? - "Billie Frank, who owns the trip-planning company Santa Fe Traveler, was on a US Airways flight when, during takeoff, the crew announced that, due to a passenger’s allergy, no one could eat any kind of nut. “They were going to serve peanuts but reverted to pretzels,” Frank recalls. “I’m allergic to wheat and had brought almonds to snack on. I was unable to eat on the flight. I thought it unfair that a whole plane was held hostage to one person’s allergy. I’m sensitive to perfume and allergic to cats and some dogs, yet I have to ride in the cabin with them.”"

What Socialism Meant for My Great-Grandfather - WSJ - "After the Communist Party took over in 1949, it pushed for “land reform” to win the support of the country’s 300 million landless peasants. The Party claimed landowners were class enemies and exploiters of the poor, and that unequal land ownership was the main cause of social injustice. Though many villagers shared similar economic conditions, a government worker came to my great-grandfather’s village and divided everyone into five classes: landlords, rich peasants, middle peasants, poor peasants and laborers. Then a work team organized “speak bitterness” struggle sessions so the poor could vent their frustration against the “rich.” At first, villagers hesitated to speak ill of one another, especially their kin, in public. But the work team was good at stirring up envy and greed and inflaming hatred toward any villager who owned property. My great-grandfather often had to stand in front of the village with his head bent, listening to his neighbors and relatives accuse him of wrongdoings that were grossly exaggerated or plain false... My great-grandfather’s life was spared, but neighbors didn’t hesitate to take his land, cattle and even farming tools away from him. He became a landless farmer overnight.The poor farmers didn’t come out ahead for long. In 1953 the Chinese government started a movement to collectivize agriculture. The land that had been handed to poor farmers was gradually returned to the state. By 1958 there was no private land ownership. Private farming was prohibited. Farmers were required to sell their produce to the government at fixed prices; no private sales were allowed. Farmers couldn’t choose which crops to grow. They had to follow the orders of local Communist leaders, many of whom didn’t know much about farming. Crops perished and millions of people starved... A few years later, I immigrated to the U.S. My great-grandfather’s plight and China’s history have cemented my belief that socialism is evil and I was lucky to escape it. Yet nowadays, I sometimes feel as if I’m back where I came from. I want to scream every time I hear the American left’s eerily familiar slogans: “Make the rich pay their fair share,” “Level the playing field,” “You didn’t build that.” This is the same sort of rhetoric the Chinese Communist Party used against landowners like my great-grandfather. The policies advanced by that rhetoric ruined China’s economy along with millions of lives. The American left offers nothing new. Socialism always begins with a great promise and ends in disaster. It has failed every time and everywhere it was tried. Let’s not throw away American prosperity so that a few leftists can give it another go."

A Feminist Capitalist Professor Under Fire - WSJ - "mutinous students demanded her firing over public comments she’d made that were not wholly sympathetic to the #MeToo movement, as well as for an interview with the Weekly Standard that they called “transphobic.” That denunciation, with its indignant dogmatism, is particularly slapstick, since Ms. Paglia describes herself as “transgender.”... Ms. Paglia tells me she belongs to the “pro-sex, free-speech wing of feminism,” which she says had its heyday in the 1990s... she published an op-ed article lauding the pop singer Madonna as “the true feminist,” who “exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode.” The op-ed incensed the “prudish” feminist establishment. Ms. Paglia has since soured on Madonna, who she says was “once refreshingly sane in her teasing affection for men” but has now undergone a “collapse into rote male-bashing.” Ms. Paglia laments that the “antisex and repressively doctrinaire side of feminism is back again—big!” She calls it “victim feminism” and complains that “everything we’d won in the 1990s has been totally swept away. Now we have this endless privileging of victimhood, with a pathological vulnerability seen as the default human mode.” Everyone is made to cater to it—“in the workplace, in universities, in the demand for safe spaces.” As a teacher of undergraduates, Ms. Paglia despairs at how “bad it is for young people, filled with fears, to be raised in this kind of a climate where personal responsibility isn’t spoken of.” Since her own youth, she says, college students have devolved from rebels into skittish supplicants, petitioning people in authority to protect them from real life. Young adults are encouraged to look for “substitute parent figures on campus, which is what my generation rebelled against in college. We threw that whole ‘in loco parentis’ thing out.”... “Everything is so easy now,” Ms. Paglia continues. “The stores are so plentifully supplied. You just go in and buy fruits and vegetables from all over the world.” Undergrads, who’ve studied neither economics nor history, “have a sense that this is the way life has always been. Because they’ve never been exposed to history, they have no idea that these are recent attainments that come from a very specific economic system.” Capitalism, she continues, has “produced this cornucopia around us. But the young seem to believe in having the government run everything, and that the private companies that are doing things for profit around them, and supplying them with goods, will somehow exist forever.”... "When I got to college,” Ms. Paglia says, “you could go out for a beer, you could talk with a drink in a public place, in an adult environment.” That’s how 18-year-olds away from home for the first time learned the “art of conversation, of looking at each other, reading facial expressions and body language.” After the ban on drinking, “instead of a nice group of people conversing and flirting, you got the keg parties at fraternities on campus, this horrible environment where women milled about with men in this huge amount of noise, with people chugging beers down.”... “So almost immediately, by the late 1980s, you get this date-rape extravaganza, and the hysteria, and the victimage.”... She recalls a “horrifying” example from her classroom a few years ago. She was teaching “Go Down, Moses, ” the famous Negro spiritual. “The whole thing is about antiquity,” she says, “but obviously it has contemporary political references.” She passed out the lyrics and played the music, “and it suddenly hit me with horror—none of them recognized the name ‘Moses.’ And I thought: Oh my God, when Moses is erased from the West, what is left of Western civilization?” Judging by last semester’s protests against Ms. Paglia, today’s college students seem better versed in the polemics of gender identity than in Judeo-Christian history"

Nicole Arbour on Twitter - "Fat people shouldn’t be allowed to ride horses. Ha! Now you have to pick a side! So are you pro animal abuse, or do you just hate fat people you biggot?!? #Checkmate"

Detroit music festival removes race-based ticket prices - "A local music festival in Detroit has moved away from ticket prices based on race after drawing international attention when a rapper pulled out of the show over the price discrepancy.The organizers behind Afrofuture Fest announced on their Eventbrite listing last week that tickets for people of colour would cost $20 US. Tickets for "non-people of colour," however, were priced at $40 US... The statement went on to say the initial ticket pricing structure was meant to reflect an "historic inequity."... The original ticketing idea prompted a Detroit-based rapper — who is of mixed race — to pull out of the event."My grandmother and her husband, they both had a big influence on me," said Tiny Jag, whose real name is Jillian Graham. "Even my first mixtape is named after my grandmother who would have been charged double to come support me."Eventbrite said festival organizers were violating a rule and would unpublish the event if changes weren't made to the pricing structure."We do not permit events that require attendees to pay different prices based on their protected characteristics such as race or ethnicity"... Tiny Jag said she has received a combination of support and hostility for her decision... A U.K-based rapper, who goes under the stage name Zuby, commended Tiny Jag for withdrawing and criticized the festival in a series of tweets, telling organizers: "You've become the very racists you claim to stand against.""I think it's offensive regardless of what angle you look at it," Zuby, whose full name is Zuby Udezue, told CBC News in a phone interview Sunday."As someone who is black, the idea that I'm going to be charged less money for something because the assumption is, 'oh, this person is not white so therefore, they are poor and can't afford this,' that is racism itself."He added not everyone in Detroit who is below the poverty level is black."
Anti-racism is just racism against white people

Man Denied Boarding For Wearing Shorts, Wears Skirt Instead - "Bishop was merely transiting through the Kingdom on his way to Turkey and would not actually enter it. Nevertheless, gate agents informed him he had to find pants or would be denied boarded. This despite the fact that nothing was mentioned to him at check-in or while he was visiting the lounge (he calls it the Saudia lounge in his story, but he likely means the Garuda Indonesia or JAS Lounge).Without any pants in his checked or carry-on bag and the flight just moments from closing, Bishop darted down the concourse and purchased a sarong, a “garment consisting of a long piece of cloth worn wrapped around the body and tucked at the waist or under the armpits, traditionally worn in Southeast Asia.” In other words, a skirt.He added that FAs confided him onboard that this is a regular problem on Saudia and the airline does not make any exceptions. I’ll never forget my trip to Iran in 2011. Upon arrival on Kish Island, I was chastised for dressing so offensively and almost denied entry into the country. I was wearing shorts. If you are a male traveling through Islamic countries, always keep in mind that it is considered offensive to expose your knees"
Some people online claim only women are barred from flights because of attire

Trump protest behind suicide attempt by college professor, police say - "A college professor is facing felony charges after shooting himself on a Nevada campus last month in what police say he claimed was a protest of President Donald Trump, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.Sociology professor Mark J. Bird, 69, was found with a self-inflicted gunshot wound outside a bathroom at the College of Southern Nevada, where he has taught since 1993. He was charged with discharging a gun within a prohibited structure, carrying a concealed weapon without a permit and possessing a dangerous weapon on school property"

Drink water from a public toilet? Singapore's taps put to the test - "To shower, they use their filtered water, and the family doesn’t ever drink directly from the tap. In her household, tap water is used only for general cleaning and washing dishes... Singaporeans are aware that tap water is “clean and safe to drink”, said Erny Kartolo, one of the founders of the Drink Wise, Drink Tap campaign. “But the surroundings of the tap … affect their perception of the tap water”. In an old building, for example, people assume that the water pipes “are also old and rusty” and therefore “contaminate the water”, which is untrue, she cited. To find out how credible such fears are, Talking Point collected water samples from 15 taps: Five in eateries and shopping centres, five in public toilets such as at hawker centres and five in HDB flats across the island.The samples were sent to a laboratory to investigate for bacteria and harmful metal contaminants such as lead and arsenic. And the results showed that there was no presence of bacteria in any of the samples.As for trace metals, they ranged from 0.02 to 0.3 parts per billion (ppb), compared to the World Health Organisation’s guideline of 10 ppb.“It’s well below the guideline … so it’s very safe,” noted Marchwood Laboratory Services’ head of quality assurance, Flordelina Umalia, who has spent the past 12 years testing water samples from various sources in Singapore. The test results across the 15 samples were also “all quite consistent”, showing that the water from all the taps were “very clean”, even those from dirty surroundings.Some people have observed that when they use a piece of cloth to filter their tap water, it turns brown after some time, but Umalia explained that these particulates are naturally occurring minerals in the water... Accredited dietician Jaclyn Reutens, from Aptima Nutrition and Sports Consultants, said that while many believe the minerals in mineral water will improve their nutrition, “what people don’t realise is that the levels of minerals are actually very low”.For example, there are seven milligrammes of calcium in a bottle of mineral water, compared to 200 mg in a slice of cheese.And to obtain the amount of potassium in a banana, one may need to drink up to 100 litres of mineral water.The amount of calcium, magnesium and potassium in a bottle of mineral water is “so negligible” that it “doesn’t make a difference”, she said... As for alkaline water, advocates think it can neutralise an acidic body, which they believe is prone to diabetes, gout and cancer.The stomach is meant to be acidic, however, to kill the pathogens found in food and help digestive enzymes to break down protein.“So if you’re trying to make your stomach more alkaline, you’re defeating the purpose of your stomach”... If it is a matter of taste, can the public tell the difference between tap and bottled water?When Talking Point presented people with tap water and two brands of bottled water in a taste test, some people mistook tap water for mineral water... Instead of paying for bottled water then, a “good solution” would be to install more dispensers like water coolers “all around Singapore”, where they can also refill their water bottles, suggested Kartolo.“We found that people had very different perceptions about public taps compared to water dispensers or water coolers. So public taps are a complete no-no … But a water cooler is totally fine because it looks nice.”"