Links - 22nd November 2019 (1)

An0maly on Twitter - "Notice a pattern? The fear-mongering never ends. When they get caught in a lie, they move to the next big lie. Ozone layer. Nuclear catastrophe. Ice Age. Global Warming. Kavanaugh. Russia Collusion. They don’t want solutions. They want you in a permanent state of fear."
"Happiness isn’t very good for the economy"

Disney CEO Admits George Lucas Didn't Like ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens' - "Just prior to the global release, Kathy screened The Force Awakens for George. He didn’t hide his disappointment. "There’s nothing new," he said. In each of the films in the original trilogy, it was important to him to present new worlds, new stories, new characters, and new technologies. In this one, he said, "There weren’t enough visual or technical leaps forward."

Introverts Who Pretend To Be Extroverts Report Being Happier

‘For 30 years I’ve been obsessed by why children get leukaemia. Now we have an answer’ - "numbers of cases have actually been increasing in the UK and Europe at a steady rate of around 1% a year. “It is a feature of developed societies but not of developing ones,” Greaves adds. “The disease tracks with affluence.”... “For an immune system to work properly, it needs to be confronted by an infection in the first year of life,” says Greaves. Without that confrontation with an infection, the system is left unprimed and will not work properly.”And this issue is becoming an increasingly worrying problem. Parents, for laudable reasons, are raising children in homes where antiseptic wipes, antibacterial soaps and disinfected floorwashes are the norm. Dirt is banished for the good of the household.In addition, there is less breast feeding of infants and a tendency for them to have fewer social contacts with other children. Both trends reduce babies’ contact with germs. This has benefits – but also comes with side effects. Because young children are not being exposed to bugs and infections as they once were, their immune systems are not being properly primed.“When such a baby is eventually exposed to common infections, his or her unprimed immune system reacts in a grossly abnormal way,” says Greaves. “It over-reacts and triggers chronic inflammation.”... Greaves is now experimenting on mice to find out which bugs are best at stimulating rodent immune systems. The aim would then be to follow up with trials on humans in two or three years. “The aim is to find six or maybe 10 species of microbes that are best able to restore a child’s microbiome to a healthy level. This cocktail of microbes would be given, not as a pill, but perhaps as yoghurt-like drink to very young children.“And it would not just help prevent them getting childhood leukaemia. Cases of conditions such as type 1 diabetes and allergies are also rising in the west and have also been linked to our failure to expose babies to bacteria to prime children’s immune systems. So such a drink would help cut numbers of cases of these conditions as well."
The hygiene hypothesis strikes again!

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Inca - "‘What did the Spaniards make, Spanish make any attempt to understand these people, instead of quite soon as we got blowing them into oblivion?’
‘Yes, they did. I mean, they had their own translator, Martine, who was very important in terms of the process of communicating between the Quecha speaking and other languages, but particularly Quecha speaking Inca and the Spanish. And they did make very strong attempts, I think to understand what was going on and indeed the success of the Spanish is partly that they did understand quite a lot of how the Inca were working. Partly they were drawing on sort of information they already had about how the Aztec worked, which is why they chose to take the Emperor and capture him was because they'd already seen an empire that was like that where taking a single ruler can have such devastating effect. So they did bring certain understandings of the landscape. And they then you know, one of the things that they do quite early on is to begin to try and record Inca history and understanding in order to be able to maintain their control.’...
It's pretty catastrophic when the Spanish conquer the Incas, and a lot of elements of their culture are severely tested, but quite a lot of them do survive. So if we think about religion, yes, people are forced to convert. But there's pretty clear evidence from well into the 17th and 18th centuries, that indigenous traditions such as, for example, disinterring mummies, or dead people who've been buried, or for example, worshipping the gods through sacrifices of llamas or guinea pigs, which was the other main domesticated animal, that continues, and you end up with quite a sort of Socratic form of religion that incorporates both Christianity and pre existing beliefs. This is illustrated really well by a picture that is in Cusco Cathedral, which shows Jesus having the Last Supper, and it's done by an artist named Marcos di Pata. If you look at it initially, it looks quite normal. Jesus and his disciples are sat around a table. But if you look closer, Jesus is about to tuck into a roasted guinea pig, which is not really what you'd expect, and he's also drinking chicha beer and and other items. So this kind of mixture does continue. One other quite nice element of the painting is that the disciple who is Judas Iscariot is supposed to have been painted with the facial features of Francisco Pizarro, the Conquistador...
Men end up with an increased element of maize in their diet. And one of the arguments for this is this is because they are drinking more beer because they are being reciprocated for their work through festivals of beer while they are working. So that we see some aspects of what the Inca are doing and using beer to manipulate the masses if you like"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Martina Navratilova on Caster Semenya - "‘You will know that although, as you put it, she was born that way, born a woman, she does have abnormally high testosterone levels. And some say, well, look, that's just not fair. It's not competing on a level playing field.’
‘Well, we try to make the field as level as possible, as you know, hers physical condition is a very unusual case. Very, very rare situation. The fact that she has been competing as a woman and has been doing this all her life, has been brought up as a woman, physical attributes. I mean, it's just, it's a very tricky situation. I mean, where do you go from here?’
‘It's not just about her is it? The International Athletics Federation have claimed that there are over 100 records have been set in recent years by women like Caster Senebta, and that they could see a future which all the prizes are going to people, ah not all but most who have DSD?’
‘Well, unless there's an epidemic in the, in the condition, I don't think that's going to happen. Again, this is a very few people, women, men have this condition. That have been competing or are at an elite level. It's not going to be a deluge or sort of exceptional situation. And maybe the thing to do, which I've been saying all along is just take it as a case by case basis, because there is no way to make one rule that fits everybody.’
‘And yet, there’ll be plenty of people listening to you, who may be a little surprised by this. They know that you were quite outspoken about trans women taking part in women's sport. And they saw this test case, they saw this issue of testosterone levels as perhaps a way to avoid the problem that you had described. Why don’t you see it that way?’
‘Well, again, because this is an exceptional situation where you have, you know, even if you have hundreds of athletes like this, you're talking about hundreds of people who are potentially transgender, could be every man. I'm not saying obviously that this would happen or could happen. But potentially, you have any male can say, okay, I am, I am really a woman and transition and live as a woman, potentially every man can do that. Whereas this, this hyper androgenism is you're born with it. And it's an exception rather than a rule.’...
‘There are people who have criticized you, say, look, this is a myth, the idea that someone born a man would choose to change their gender to win prizes or trophies, medals or indeed, money. It's far too traumatic a thing, far too emotional thing for anybody to make that sort of decision.’
‘Again, the way some of these rules in some of these sports are you don't have to do anything other than proclaim yourself a female... I did not apologize. I said I did not mean to offend anybody. And if I'm wrong, please tell me where but I was never really told where I was wrong. I was just attacked… the potential for cheating is certainly there. Has it happened yet? I don't know. Would it happen? Probably. Because you know, people cheated for far less than hundreds and hundreds of millions potentially of dollars or whatever money you may be making. Athletes have been asked would you cheat on with steroids, etc. so that you could win a gold medal even if it takes away 10 years of your life? And so many of them said yes. So the potential is there'"
The trans lobby is going to be on her again since she's just said some trans athletes are just pretending to be trans

Catholic School Cures Harry Potter Fans By Forcing Them To Read JK Rowling's Twitter Feed | The Babylon Bee - ""We found that nearly 100% of kids were no longer interested in the books after they read Rowling's constant retconning of characters and rants about American politics," said school pastor Fr. Dan Reehil. "Once they found that Rowling said that Trump was worse than Voldemort and tried to shoehorn issues of diversity, gender and sexuality, and social justice into the novels long after they were written, kids' interest in the series just disappeared, as though their enthusiasm had been hit with a Reducto charm."

Man Who Died In Broad Daylight Shooting 'Accidentally Killed Himself' - "As he was hitting the windows the gun went off and he shot himself - that's what we've been told"

Meet the `SPY 11' Kids With $250 Billion Riding on Their Lives - Bloomberg - "The fate of the world’s largest exchange-traded fund rests on the health of a group of twenty-somethings.Thanks to a quirk in the legal structure used to set up the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust, known as SPY, more than $250 billion rests on the longevity of 11 ordinary kids born between May 1990 and January 1993. Those children are now carving out careers in public relations, restaurants and sales, spread around the country from Boston and Philadelphia to Alabama and Utah. But none of the eight spoken to by Bloomberg News was aware of their role in investing history... like many trusts, the fund was initially structured to expire in 25 years -- in January 2018. It was subsequently amended to peg the fund to the lives of individuals, which extended its own life. SPY as we know it will cease to be on Jan. 22, 2118, or 20 years “after the death of the last survivor of the eleven persons” -- whichever occurs first""

Taobao didn’t remove pirated work based off Taiwanese artist, but did so after someone purposely said she is ‘pro-independence’
Summarised as: "A wild story: A painter from #Taiwan found out his works were printed on stationaries sold on Taobao. So what did he do? Instead of fighting with the Chinese manufacturer, he reported himself as pro Taiwan independence, and the products were immediately taken off Taobao"

Historian Harry Potter On British Prisons | History Extra Podcast - History Extra - "There was no prison system in Britain, really until the late 18th, early 19th century, because there was no need for one. There was a vast plethora of different established loops [sp?] that were used for custodial purposes, somewhat purpose built prisons, many were just kind of lockups, which could actually be a room in a pub, or a dungeon in a castle, or even a cell in a monastery, which, of course, is where we get the term cell from. There came a time when more and more offenses, were actually attracting penalties of a punishment being prison, as opposed to the norm where punishment, prison was a place where you kept people until they were tried, and then executed, transported, flogged, put in the pillory, fined or whatever it was. But with the decline of capital punishment, and the problems with transportation, prisons were now being seen as places where people would be sent in lieu of other punishment. And that's when, of course, they began to think about the purpose of prison rather than purely its functional role...
‘The topic of expenses has already come up a couple of times, what have some of the biggest obstacles establishing new prisons have faced over the centuries?’
‘Well to begin with there wasn't a great deal of problem, because they were all private enterprises. And they were run for profit. And you actually paid for the keepership of such an establishment. And you made your money by charging the prisoners. So they were charged an entry fee and they were charged an exit fee. You had what was called the tap which sold liquor, amongst other things, which caused a bit of consternation among some reformers’
‘Sounds more like a hotel than a prison.’
‘Well, it was a fairly bog standard hotel. But as with all those things, that was really, there was the first class or second class and very much third class, depending on your, depending on how much money you had to spend, you could actually live quite well. I mean, in Newgate, if you had the money, you will get your own ,cell you can have your friends coming in to visit you, you will be able to have food brought in. But you will primarily be expected to pay for everything from the bed to everything you bought in the shop, for instance. And they would charge your visitors money to come in as well. So you could make a lot of money out of prison. So initially, there wasn't any problem.’"

Gordon Brown on Businessman Andrew Carnegie | History Extra Podcast - History Extra - "‘It was a gospel that was quite authoritarian, it was he knew best’...
‘And he put conditions on that giving didn't he?’
‘Carnegie believed that if he gave, but those people who received it did nothing, then that would be a transaction that wouldn't work. And so he insisted that if he gave money, something was done in return. So for example, when he gave the libraries and he gave 3000 libraries around the world, he insisted that those people who had the libraries given by him provided the books themselves. And that usually caused quite a lot of controversy because money had to be raised locally, to back up the endowment of the library by Carnegie. And in some cases, they had a local referenda to decide... to have the library. And it was conditional in another sense that he expected the recipient to do something in quite a big way. I remember when he was asked by New York Philharmonic Orchestra to give a sum of money to save the orchestra from going out of business. And Carnegie that morning was prepared to give them money, but only half of it and told them to go away and find another donor and then he would pay up. Later in the day, the Philharmonic people came back and said, look, we found the money. And Carnegie started to write the check to back up the other donor. When he asked casually who the other donor was, it was your wife, he was told. And Carnegie of course, had been outmaneuvered by his wife. Because the Carnegie family were paying for the whole of the orchestra. Carnegie’s gospel of wealth was that he should give it all away. So to die rich was to die disgraced. And so he set out in a very planned way to give away his money. Now, the first sixty years of his life, he’d made money, the next 20 he was giving it away. Some people say that he could not undo the damage he’d done in the first 60 years by whatever he did in the next 20 because he was a ruthless employer. He was authoritarian, he was quite egotistical’...
Carnegie makes us think about what the purpose of philanthropy actually is, I think he makes us think about it in two ways. One is we've got to look at the impact. And so we now have tools for measuring the impact... the second thing he does is makes us think about the the purpose of philanthropy, and whether philanthropy is really a small number of rich people doing as they like, and just sponsoring the causes that they find attractive, and perhaps even changing from one moment to the next in a very discretionary way. Because charity is given can be as equally taken away, or whether people should as Carnegie did think very carefully about the purpose"
He doesn't go into the contempt that Carnegie had for poor people since they were a lost cause - it was the next generation he was interested in