Links - 3rd October 2019 (1)

Disney (DIS) Shares Fall After Missing Profit Estimates - "Walt Disney Co. shares took their worst tumble in nearly four years after the opening of the most highly anticipated theme-park attraction in the company’s history fell flat, hammering results in its latest quarter... As the Star Wars opening approached, Disney tried to manage an anticipated surge in crowds at its California resort. For example, the company allowed only those with reservations to enter the attraction for the first three weeks. But social media was aflutter with images of lightly walked streets and short waits for attractions. Sales of Star Wars merchandise slumped"
Get woke...

Disney's Star Wars Land Isn't Drawing Crowds

Star Wars: 5 Things The Prequel Trilogy Did Better Than The Sequel Trilogy (& 5 Things The Sequels Are Doing Better) - "9. Prequels did better: Original stories
The sequel trilogy is less of a story and more of a Star Wars greatest hits album. All of the best moments from the original trilogy have just been rehashed and strung together in a loose narrative. An evil empire wants to dominate the galaxy. A band of rebels fights to stop them. A Skywalker has turned to the Dark Side and is controlled by a badly scarred puppet-master. A scavenger from a desert planet is realizing their dreams of intergalactic adventure and discovering their latent Force abilities. A rogue pilot is learning to respect authority. It’s the same story, just told far worse. The prequels, on the other hand, had engaging and unique narratives we hadn’t seen before in the Star Wars saga: a Jedi’s forbidden love, the creation of a Clone Army, a politician who is secretly a Sith Lord slowly taking over the galaxy.
7. Prequels did better: Characters arcs
Where are the journeys of Rey, Finn, Poe Dameron, and Kylo Ren heading in The Rise of Skywalker? It’s entirely unclear. Rey keeps teasing a Dark Side connection, Kylo Ren can’t decide what side of the fight he wants to be on despite leading one of them, Poe is as cool as a cat now as he was when the trilogy began, and Finn has been stuck at the same stage of his character development since half an hour into The Force Awakens.
5. Prequels did better: Tying in to the overall saga
The prequel trilogy is essential to the overall Star Wars saga. It justifies its existence by telling a story that adds to the original trilogy. The sequels don’t do this – in fact, they detract from the original trilogy.By having the Empire come back more powerful than ever and turning the Rebels into bumbling buffoons with no real plan, as well as breaking up Han and Leia and making Luke all bitter and angry and grizzled, the sequel trilogy has undone everything that made the original trilogy a thoroughly developed story. The sequel trilogy is hardly integral to the Skywalker saga – it’s actually better without it.
3. Prequels did better: Overarching storylines
There is really no overarching storyline in the sequel trilogy. It’s vaguely about the Resistance fighting the First Order, but there’s no forward momentum or discernible endgame.
1. Prequels did better: Understanding Star Wars
From Disney’s forced snowflake-friendly messages to Kathleen Kennedy’s focus on creating products and not movies to J.J. Abrams’ irritating mystery-box habit, the sequels just don’t get Star Wars. The new movies don’t even class as space operas – they’re even in the wrong genre!"

Spot-on George Lucas cosplay at Comic-Con - "Rotating through a Rolodex of Lucas-inspired catchphrases, Thompson walked around the convention yelling to no one in particular, "Those are my movies, dammit.""

Slave lucas : StarWars
With Evil Mickey Mouse holding the chain

RIGHTS-EAST ASIA: Compensated Dating Picks up among Youngsters - "‘’Typically, these children don’t have a dire need for financial support,” added McCoy, but ‘’they have a desire to purchase consumer goods”... ‘’Most are ‘typical’ teenage students, usually girls, from middle-class families and with few outwardly perceivable social or financial problems”... A 16-year-old Thai girl identified as ‘May’ is a case in point, it adds. Before being caught in a ‘’lucrative escort business”, she had been selected to ‘’lead an anti-drug advertising campaign and was a well-known student at a leading educational institution”.She mirrors what child rights activists had learnt about Japan, where the girls come from ‘decent’ families and are ‘’not particularly rebellious nor trouble makers”. According to ECPAT, the attraction to this form of ‘dating’ with adult men who are strangers is a way of ‘’earning gifts and extra spending money to supplement living expenses, buy consumer goods, cover nights out with friends or pay for hobbies and trips”.The age of children trapped in this net of abuse varies. In Japan, ‘enjo kosai’ is so common a phenomenon that ‘’13 percent of respondents in a recent survey of junior high school students in their final year admitted to practising it”, the report reveals.The common age of junior high school students is between 13 to 15 years.In South Korea, a police study cited by the report highlights ‘’two to three students in every middle and high school class” believed to be involved in prostitution. ‘’Statistics for 2000 show 222 girls aged 18 or younger were caught by police engaging in ‘wonjo kyojae’, with girls aged under 16 accounting for 62.6 percent of cases.”‘Wonjo kyojae’ is the Korean word for ‘compensated dating’, which is often made through on-line chats on the Internet."

Female Students Vulnerable to Sex Trade on Internet - "One in every three female secondary school students in Busan were found to have received sex trade proposals while chatting online.... Among the female students who received the offers, only 35 percent said they ignored them. Nearly 20 percent said they were actually engaged in the sex trade, while the rest said they were ``intrigued'' by the offers... Among those who sold sex, 37 percent said they did so on impulse, 25 percent did so for money, and the rest out of curiosity and other reasons"

Thread by @Chokinghijabi: "Chinese warlord era is a very underappreciated period in history. For example: a converted Christian warlord named Feng Yuixang was known fo […]" - "a converted Christian warlord named Feng Yuixang was known for baptizing his soldiers with a firehose before Battle as a way to "Shield" them against death...
Zhang Zuolin, an illiterate warlord who controlled wealthy Manchuria thought that printing money would make him rich, but it blew up in his face when it caused hyperinflation and ruined the economy. In response he blamed the leading merchants in his domain and had them all shot.
Zhang zongchang the "dogmeat general" was a man with a large appetite. He was known to keep 30 to 50 concubines of different nationalities, including Koreans, Japanese, white Russians, French and Americans who were all given numbers since he could not remember their names... Zhang was also known as the "Three Don’t Knows" since he could never keep count of how much money, soldiers or concubines he had...
Wu Peifu, the "Philosopher General" billed himself as the protector of Confucian values, usually appearing in photographs with the scholar's brush (a symbol of Confucian culture) Wu liked to appear in photos taken in his office with a portrait of his hero, George Washington...
He also loved to boast about the size of his penis, which became part of his legend. He was widely believed to be the most well-endowed man in China, nicknamed "General Eighty-Six" as his penis when erect was said to measure up to a pile of 86 Mexican silver dollars...
Once during a drought Zhang Zongchang visited a temple to pray for rain. When he entered he slapped a statue and yelled "FUCK YOUR SISTER! HOW DARE YOU MAKE US SUFFER BY NOT GIVING US RAIN! He then ordered his artillery to fire at the sky until it rained.It rained the next day. Another thing he did was after seeing a basketball game for the first time, he asked “Why the hell are they fighting over a single ball? We’re the hosts. Are we seriously this poor?” He ordered all the players be given a basketball...
His infatuation with Vajrayana Buddhism and his eccentric personality mixed with brutal and often violent treatment of enemies and his own men earned him the moniker "The Mad Baron" He preferred to call himself “The incarnated God of War and Khan of grateful Mongolia"."

Want to Improve Your Memory? A Decade-Long Stanford Study Suggests You Should Stop Doing This 1 Thing - ""heavy" multitaskers significantly underperformed "light" multitaskers on tasks that required working memory and sustained attention. Multitasking, in other words, went hand-in-hand with a diminished ability to process memories and sustain a single point of focus."

5 Best Sleeping Positions for Lower Back Pain - "The Global Burden of Disease study named lower back pain the leading cause of disability across the globe.What’s even more interesting is that most back pain isn’t caused by serious medical conditions, like cancer or arthritis. Instead, it’s often brought on by stress or strain from bad posture, awkward sleeping positions, and other lifestyle habits...
For some people, sleeping on their back may be the best position to relieve back pain:
Lay flat on your back.
Place a pillow underneath your knees and keep your spine neutral. The pillow is important — it works to keep that curve in your lower back.
You may also place a small, rolled up towel under the small of your back for added support"

FATAH: Shariah law makes a comeback in Ontario - "Two Muslim men — an activist turned Shariah mortgage seller and an Islamic cleric who sold his Islamic seal of approval on such mortgages — were acquitted on Friday of a dozen criminal charges by an Ontario Superior Court judge who validated aspects of Sharia law in reaching her decision. Justice Jane Ferguson described the trial as a “huge learning curve in Islamic finance.”Shariah in Canada?But what happened to the declaration by Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, on September 11, 2005, that “there will be no Shariah law in Ontario”?"

Toronto Muslim: Executing gays may sound “unfair” , but it's Sharia law | David Menzies - YouTube

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey: Plant-based meat not good for your health - "“The [brands] who are capturing the imagination of people — and I’m not going to name these brands because I’m afraid I will be associated with the critique of it,” says Mackey, “but some of these that are extremely popular now that are taking the world by storm, if you look at the ingredients, they are super, highly processed foods.”... And Mackey isn’t alone. Some dietitians aren’t completely sold on the plant-based burger craze either.“They are not necessarily healthier than beef burgers,” Alissa Rumsey, a registered dietitian, told CNBC in July. “They’re totally fine to eat, but there’s no need to replace your beef burger if you don’t enjoy these,” Rumsey added, pointing out that both plant-based burgers and traditional beef burgers have the same amount of sodium and saturated fat."

Let's All Just Chill About Processed Foods | WIRED - "You are you and I am me because of processed foods, because our ancestors learned how to cook meat and make bread and, perhaps more importantly, beer. Accordingly, our brains grew and our guts transformed. But those two words smashed together, processed foods, take on new terror in this era of organic, locally sourced, artisanal, cage-free, free-range, I-want-to-know-the-given-name-of-the-chicken-I’m-eating food... it’s time to get real about processed foods. For one, processed doesn’t have to mean unhealthy, and indeed it’s only because of certain processed foods that people around the world get the nutrition they need. Two, processed foods keep better, cutting down on food waste. And three, if we expect to feed a growing population on a planet with finite arable land, we have to engineer new sources of food, protein in particular. The core of the confusion around processed foods is definitional. According to the Institute of Food Technologists, processing is—and get ready for this—“one or more of a range of operations, including washing, grinding, mixing, cooling, storing, heating, freezing, filtering, fermenting, extracting, extruding, centrifuging, frying, drying, concentrating, pressurizing, irradiating, microwaving, and packaging.”So … virtually everything you put in your mouth is processed"

Whitewashing the truth of why men kill themselves - "Imagine the outcry if a man was appointed head of a leading domestic violence prevention organisation? So how come the federal government has just proudly announced a woman, Christine Morgan, as National Suicide Prevention Officer? This is just the latest move by a government determined to deny the fact that suicide is overwhelmingly a male problem, with six out of eight of our daily suicides taking the lives of men.Amazingly the recently released National Suicide Prevention Implementation Plan is proudly “gender neutral”, failing to acknowledge that men not only dominate suicide statistics but offering no special programmes to address the unique causes of male suicide, which differ dramatically from those of women who end their own lives. The alleged link to mental health problems is the most glaring mistake. “Around 80 per cent of people who die by suicide have a mental health issue,” declared ScoMo yesterday when announcing Morgan’s appointment. No, Prime Minister. That’s simply not true of men, the major group at risk. Australian research shows over half of all male suicides, 78 per cent of male farmer suicides and 83 per cent of suicides in older men were not predominantly associated with a mental health diagnosis... There’s solid evidence that the major cause of suicide in this country is not mental health problems but rather the toll taken by family break-up, where fathers often face mighty battles trying to stay part of their children’s lives, up against a biased family law system which fails to enforce contact orders, and often facing false violence allegations which are now routinely used to gain advantage in family court battles... Remember that lavish ABC series, Man Up, made by radio star Gus Worland? Hours of television focusing on the high male suicide rate, endlessly discussing why men won’t talk about their feelings – and barely a word about why men are killing themselves. Last year Worland’s new charity, Gotcha4Life, raised nearly half a million dollars to “save the lives of men suffering mental illness”, money to be spent mainly on programmes in schools teaching boys to express their feelings. Whenever there’s a known link to female suicide, like post-partum depression, the money pours in to properly address the problem. Yet men struggling to deal with the devastating consequences of dealing with family break-up are given no support. Key organisations providing support for men in these circumstance – like Dads in Distress – face constant battles for funding."