Links - 12th May 2020 (1)

With restaurants closed, a bacon backup is building in Minnesota and hog prices are plunging - "About two-thirds of pork belly, from which bacon is derived, is purchased by the food-service industry, and the shutdown of restaurants, colleges and schools has hit hard... Food service companies buy bacon by the 15- or 20-pound box. Shifting the supply chain to wrap that bacon in a 12-ounce package for the grocery store takes time.  “You can’t just do it overnight, and in the meantime, that product goes into freezers. That’s another thing that’s weighing on the market, is all that meat in storage”... Another profound concern is whether packing plants — which already complained of a labor shortage — can accept all the pigs that farmers are raising for slaughter. In some states, workers tested positive for COVID-19 and plants closed as a result."

Save your bacon: A real meat shortage looms with virus shutdowns - "Americans could start to see shortages of pork, chicken and beef on grocery shelves as soon as May as major packing plants swept by the coronavirus remain shuttered and the nation’s massive stockpiles of frozen meat begin to dwindle."

Donald Low - "Seeing pictures that my friends in Singapore send me of empty supermarket shelves and long queues of people waiting to buy face masks at Mustafa make me wonder what’s the point of having this strong, authoritarian and paternalistic government when we can’t even keep calm in the face of an epidemic that will kill far fewer people than pneumonia does every year. The people who claim we are calmer and better than the Hongkongers in responding rationally to this crisis can go shove it up their ass. And the PAP IBs who claim to be bolstering trust in the government are clearly quite useless except in their Panglossian sucking up. They are no different from the petty functionaries in Wuhan telling their bosses that all is well while covering up an impending crisis. And what use is POFMA when people are entirely capable of scaring themselves even without fake news? For once, I would like to see the PAP government be honest and acknowledge that they have a trust deficit and a serious crisis comms problem.Actually, economists have a piece of advice to stop this nonsense. If supermarkets can raise prices immediately in response to the surges in demand, the panic buying will stop... not allowing prices to increase at all in times like this (out of a moral distaste for price gouging) we’re giving up the most valuable rationing (of demand) and signalling (of scarcity) device — prices which adjust to changes in demand"

Tommy Koh laments that Singapore is a First World country with Third World citizens - "Veteran diplomat Tommy Koh laments that Singapore is a First World country with Third World people. Many Singaporeans lack the civic-mindedness that citizens of an advanced country should have... a friend had attended a dinner at which none of the guests, including Singaporeans, could understand why people in the United Kingdom had voted for Brexit."Nobody could understand why anybody had voted for Donald Trump. Nobody could understand why the protesters in Hong Kong had anything to protest about at all," he said. The troubling conclusion that his friend came to was that the dinner guests - even though they came from different parts of the world - had far more in common with each other than others living a block away from them."He worried that his children only ran into poor people when they were delivering their Internet shopping," he said, adding that societies must find a solution to be more inclusive."

Rebecca Long-Bailey vows to back all strikes ‘no questions asked’ as Labour leader - "Rebecca Long-Bailey has pledged to back workers and trade unions in every strike and dispute “no questions asked” if she succeeds in becoming Labour leader."
I'm sure this gives everyone confidence that she'll handle the economy well

Affirmative Therapy Matters, but Queer People Want Therapists to Challenge Them - "M wasn’t clicking with their new therapist, and they just couldn’t figure out why.They were both people of color, something that M had specifically sought out in the hopes that their shared identities might strengthen their connection and improve the quality of their sessions. But after a few sessions, M, a 27-year-old fishmonger who lives in Minneapolis, didn’t feel like they were getting anywhere with the specialist they’d chosen"
Who wants to be accused of transphoia/homophobia?

Harvey Weinstein Naked Photos Shown to Jury After Intersex Revelation - "Weinstein did not respond to reporters’ questions about what he thought of jurors viewing naked photos of him. Donna Rotunno, a lawyer for Weinstein, said in an email that the photos had been introduced for “no other reason than to shame Mr. Weinstein.” Jessica Mann, a woman Weinstein is accused of raping, testified last week about the appearance of Weinstein’s naked body. She said that when she first saw Weinstein, he had no testicles and appeared “deformed” or “intersex.”"

Rutgers prof: Iowa caucuses are a 'sickening display' of 'whiteness' - "A professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey posted a tweet complaining about the “whiteness” of the Democratic Iowa caucuses.Rutgers American studies and Art History professor Nicole Fleetwood had some concerns about the race of the Democratic candidates in theHawkeye State.“Watching the Iowa Caucus is a sickening display of the over-representation of whiteness”... Fleetwood has previously stated that "every level of govt“ is guilty of "upholding ideology of white hate mongering and violence against non-white people.""

The tale of an iceberg at Iowa State | App Content - "As the world still continues to search for more efficient ways to supply clean drinking water at an affordable and sustainable rate to all areas around the globe, Iowa State University Museums along with the Iowa State history department remember a remarkable time in both university and world history when the ‘Water Prince’ brought an iceberg to Ames, Iowa.Collaborating with the Iowa State history department, Iowa State University Museums took students back to a time in Iowa State history when a Saudi prince and a one-ton iceberg made their way to Iowa State's campus.Michael Christopher Low, an assistant professor, lectured students and community members on the long history behind global water security and how it led former Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Faisal to help fund a mission to bring an enormous iceberg to the middle of Iowa."

Alcohol flows out of taps in 18 Kerala homes, families shocked - "A land where wine flows like water may sound like an epicurean’s paradise. However, in Kerala, this 'utopia' turned into a shocking reality for 18 families living in a residential building in Chalakkudy, when a foul-smelling mixture of water and liquor started pouring out of their taps... The mystery was swiftly solved and culprits were identified as a bunch of excise officials from Irinjalakuda, who callously disposed off 6000 litres of beer and other spirits into a pit next to the apartment"

No, Professors Are Not Brainwashing Their Students - "Yes, it is true that liberals dominate the academy. And yes, I agree that this is a problem. But the worst fears of conservatives — that liberal faculty are brainwashing their students — are simply not true. And we can prove it. Superficially, the Indoctrination Thesis makes sense. College graduates tend to be more liberal than their non-graduate peers and are more likely to support the Democratic Party... the kinds of people who attend university are already more likely to be liberal... Attending a university or college has little-to-no influence on a student’s partisan or political identity. Moreover, what influence it does have is likely mediated through actors other than faculty.Don’t believe me? In one of the most rigorous studies of its kind, researchers use data from the General Social Survey to directly compare the political attitudes of sibling pairs. This allowed them to see how college graduation affects political attitudes while also controlling for family background, upbringing, etc. They found that once these other factors are accounted for, the liberalizing effect of college disappears. Other studies tell a similar tale. In a 2008 article, scholars use data surveying the same students twice, first as freshmen and then again as seniors. Drawing on responses from more than 6500 undergrads from 38 private institutions (including many elite liberal arts colleges), they find that, while students do grow more liberal, they do so at a rate and to a degree indistinguishable from their non-college peers. They also report that faculty composition (a university’s ratio of liberal-to-conservative professors) has no relationship on whether or how students’ political beliefs change. Sociologist Kyle Dodson goes further, showing that students who report the most contact with faculty — and therefore would presumably be most susceptible to indoctrination — actually grow more moderate in their political beliefs. The liberals become more conservative, the conservatives becoming more liberal, and everyone else chugs along unchanged. It wasn’t always this way. Data from the 1940s to 1970s show that there used to be a strong relationship between college attendance and political liberalism. But the link has been weakening for decades, probably because of hardening political attitudes among freshmen. High schoolers also have a much wider range of colleges and universities to choose from, making it easier to find an institution that matches their pre-existing beliefs.But none of this means higher education has no political effect. College graduates are more likely to be politically active than their non-graduate peers, especially if they major in the social sciences. They also tend to be more politically knowledgeable, as shown in a recent study of identical twins. And while college seems to have little impact on whether a student is liberal or conservative, a number of studies find that it does make them more supportive of civil liberties and gender egalitarianism, though not less religious. However, even these changes are more likely due to the influence of peers (i.e., other students) than faculty. Indeed, one of the best predictors of whether a student’s political views will change in university is their degree of social embeddedness"
I encountered a lot of resistance to this article. One possibility is that they're trying but failing. Another is that we hear about those who do, but maybe most don't

The History and Evolution of Pho: A Hundred Years' Journey - "before the French conquered Vietnam, the Vietnamese people did not slaughter cows for food. Instead, they used these animals to till their rice fields and as beasts of burden.The general theory held by most Vietnamese culinary experts is that the word "pho" is a corruption of the French "feu" or "fire." Pho could be a Vietnamese adaptation of the French soup "pot au feu" or French beef stew, which the French brought to Vietnam when they came to rule the country. But let me take this theory further into something more concrete to possibly reflect facts. It is this: Vietnamese love to take foreign words and use them as our own, but with a Vietnamese accent. Thus "feu" became "Phở."... [The north's] Pho bac has an intense and delicate flavor that is entirely different from pho nam, which is pho of the south. The focus of pho bac is on the taste of its clear and simple broth. The star anise and other spices commonly used in pho serve as subtle undertones of flavor rather than complex layers. The main ingredients in pho bac are the rice noodles and the thinly sliced rare beef cooked quickly in the hot broth. You would not find a bowl of pho bac topped with the popular herbs and garnishing found in pho nam or in pho outside of Vietnam.Even today, northern Vietnamese and pho purists consider pho bac the true pho. It is not uncommon to find a person from northern Vietnam or a pho purist to turn away from lavish preparations of pho nam or from pho that is not made from beef stock. A few purists may even find such preparations shocking and disgusting... Unlike in North Vietnam, food is rich and abundant in South Vietnam. Herbs and other ingredients are used liberally. The Vietnamese of the south put their taste for the lavish on the frugal pho bac to create the classic pho nam. They put more spices in their pho than their northern counterparts. They experimented with other beef parts, and even used other ingredients such as chicken and tripe. They added bean sprouts and herb garnishing as topping on the soup. They were also very liberal about the use of fish sauce and hoisin sauce to flavor their pho."

The True Story of How a Singaporean Succeeded in Hollywood - "The actors here, unlike the actors in Singapore, are highly respected and supported by their country. They also have access to solid training, better productions of the highest quality, and most importantly, powerful unions that will fight for their well being and provide them with good welfare.The difference between an actor who has received training and one who has not is day and night. When I worked with Hugh Jackman and his acting professor from Western Australian Academy of the Performing Arts on a Mastercard commercial, he said that it is so important for actors to go to school. Training helps you to uncover your abilities as an actor, and gives you so much to work with to push your limits.On the other hand, actors in Singapore often have a tough time receiving support from the community. Very often, when I am asked this question, people expect me to say the negative things about Singaporean or ‘Mediacorp’ actors. During my years working as an actress in Singapore, I managed to get to know some great actors that you now see very often on screen. Even though I’ve successfully transitioned into to a bigger and more mature acting industry, I do not see them as less. They can only work with what they are given.A Singaporean actor who dedicates themselves to their craft, works hard to deliver a good performance, is always at the top of their game, shows appreciation for their experiences, and has integrity, shares the same qualities as any other good actor.If Singaporean directors cannot appreciate a good actor, or if they cannot tell the difference between good and bad acting, do you expect them to guide an actor on set towards ‘good acting’? Teamwork is everything. Hollywood actors often thank their directors for a reason... Do you want to be like Jennifer Lawrence, Elizabeth Moss, or Gloria Reuben (who is my neighbour and who I inspire to be like)? One is internationally known, surrounded by paparazzis, the highest paid actress, winning Oscars—i.e. a movie star. The other is winning Emmys, a world class television actress, but a little bit more low key. The last is very well known and respected in the industry. Her name rings a bell, and seeing a picture of her makes you go, ‘Oh! I know her! She’s great!’, even though she has remained extremely low key; just happy to be working and collecting fat paychecks. Marci Phillips, the head of casting for ABC (Grey’s Anatomy; The Good Doctor), once told us at a masterclass, “Those who are not happy before they become famous, will become more unhappy after, but those who are already happy with themselves will become happier when they become famous.”... J.K. Simmons once said, “If you do not love it enough, get back on the bus and go home.” The struggle is real, and rejection happens more than bookings. Even A-listers receive their fair amount. However, with perseverance and a strong will, it can be a worthwhile journey. As Prince Ea says, “Every dies but not everyone lives”.At the end of the day, we all know that the only person standing in our way is ourselves."
Coming from Rice, I was surprised by the lack of grievance and bitterness