Links - 7th February 2017

Swiss cheese hole mystery solved: It's all down to dirt - "Contrary to what cartoons have suggested over the years, the holes are not made by mice eating their way through the cheese. And nor are they produced by carbon dioxide released by bacteria, as popular scientific belief held. Instead, a Swiss laboratory says they are created by flecks of hay... the findings explained why fewer holes had been appearing in Swiss cheeses over the last 15 years, since more modern milking methods made it less likely for hay to fall into containers."

Having a ‘work spouse’ makes you happier - "In 2015, they conducted an online survey of 276 people. Based on their findings they defined a work spouse relationship as a “special, platonic friendship with a work colleague characterised by a close emotional bond, high levels of disclosure and support, and mutual trust, honesty, loyalty, and respect”... The emergence of work spouses can be seen as a symptom and extension of the increasingly blurred lines between work and family life"

Singaporeans among the world’s gloomiest millennials, Japan tops survey - "The Japanese are even more downbeat than young Greeks, who have suffered Great Depression-like conditions and political upheaval in recent years. The survey also found that 14 per cent of Singapore millennials believed they would have to work until the day they die, compared to 12 per cent globally. Singapore is joint-fourth on this list, behind Japan (37 per cent), China (18 per cent) and Greece (15 per cent). Meanwhile, Singapore millennials work more hours in a week than even the Japanese, according to the survey findings. On average, Singapore millennials worked 48 hours a week, coming in second alongside Mexico, China and Switzerland. India millennials topped this list by working an average of 50 hours a week, while the Japanese worked 46 hours."

The “Hamilton” cast’s condescending attitude toward Mike Pence is why Donald Trump won in the first place - "Imagine a president of the United States who rounded up and deported more immigrants than any other in history; put an entire generation of black men in jail with their draconian anti-drug policies; ran a horrid racist campaign against America’s first black president; attacked victims of sexual assault; or had policies that were responsible for the deaths of countless innocent civilians? Would the cast of “Hamilton” give a special wag-of-the-finger message to such leaders during their performance? Of course they wouldn’t—they absolutely love and adore Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton... It’s yet another example of the pomposity of entertainers and celebrities who fancy themselves as guardians of acceptable thought and speech, and so many Americans are just plain tired of it... British actor and comedian Tom Walker—a progressive vehemently opposed to Trump—made a similar point about the left’s attitude toward those outside their political and cultural bubble in an angry but poignant video rant after the election. “Not everyone that voted for Trump is a sexist or a racist,’ Walker yells. He continued:
The left is responsible for this result because the left have now decided that any other opinion, any other way of looking at the world is unacceptable. We don’t debate anymore because the left won the cultural wars. So if you’re on the right, you’re a freak. You’re evil. You’re racist. You’re stupid. You are a basket of deplorables. How do you think people are going to vote if you talk to them like that?"

Video puts Muslim bakeries, florists in gay-rights spotlight - "Along with cheers from the right, the video has drawn a backlash from the left, where columnist Wes Williams of IfYouOnlyNews.com charged Mr. Crowder with being “homophobic, AND racist,” calling the expose “an attempt to smear Muslims”... “Many of the Muslim bakeries were kind enough and willing to serve us, but many of them were not,” Mr. Crowder said. Mr. Williams argued that there has been no media coverage of Muslim bakeries because there have been no complaints filed against them, a point reinforced by Sommer Foster, political advocacy director of Equality Michigan, who said Friday she was unaware of any complaints... “Waiting for the militant progressive supporters of gay wedding cake to start threatening and protesting these Muslim ran bakeries,” she said in a Facebook post. “I think we will be waiting a long time.”"

Outlook 2010 crashing replying to HTML email - Spiceworks - "When a particular user in my organisation replies to some HTML emails Outlook completely freezes and needs to be ended via Task Manager and restarted. I think i've narrowed down the problem to HTML emails with embedded images (which is a lot given people have them in their signatures etc). If I delete the images before sending then it sends straight away. I've been able to replicate the problem for the same user on a different machine, so it's not a machine/profile issue as far as I can see."
"Are the images pulling from an external source? Outlook may be waiting on a network response."

Taking the Pill doesn't damage your sex drive - the length of your relationship is more important

Police force describes missing woman as 'chubby' - "A police force has come under sharp criticism for describing a missing woman as "chubby"... many also pointed out that, presumably, the force was using a description given to them by Elizabeth's family, with one saying: "The family supply the description. Grow up and stop being offended by everything. Hope they find her soon." And another added: "Send her my love and hugs. And tell her all people were worried about is that she was called chubby not that she was missing."
They shouldn't have mentioned her size, then maybe she wouldn't have been found

Trump could be the new JFK says Bill Gates: Microsoft boss says new president will unite country through innovation as the pair meet - "'It was a good time,' the Microsoft head honcho declared. 'We had a good conversation about innovation, how it can help in health, education, the impact of foreign aid and energy, and a wide-ranging conversation about the power of innovation,' he said, using the buzzword once more."

Wonder Woman Is No Longer UN Honorary Ambassador For Gender Equality - "Wonder Woman has been demoted from her role as ‘Honorary Ambassador for the Empowerment of Women and Girls’. On Monday it was announced that Wonder Woman’s campaign will come to an end on Friday, just two months after it began. The appointment of the DC Comics heroine was controversial to say the least, prompting protests and an online petition from UN staff."
Maybe the Burka Avenger would've been better

Donald Trump's anti-Muslim policies are tame compared to Pakistan's treatment of the Ahmadis - "this is an apartheid of the worst kind which has been underway for several decades now. It is incredibly ironic that a country like Pakistan, whose conceptual foundations were built on safeguarding the rights of Muslim minorities in India, now treats its own minorities with such disdain and callousness. To me, the lack of introspection and critical thought among the general populace is emphasised the most when Pakistani Muslims, who hold discriminatory beliefs against Ahmadis, cry foul of the policies against Muslims put forward by Donald Trump... It would behove such Muslims to come to the realisation that the fundamental human rights they expect to receive in the West should also extend to the treatment of minorities in Muslim-majority states. Paying heed to the Golden rule of 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you' should take us a long way."

Pupils at German primary school chant Muslim prayers as migrants outnumber natives - "The father of the pupil at the girl's primary school in German ski resort Garmisch-Partenkirchen discovered that his daughter had been forced to learn the Islamic prayer when he discovered a handout she had been given. He claimed she had been "forced" by teachers to memorise the Islamic chants... The incident comes just weeks after parents complained to German newspaper Hessian Niedersächsische Allgemeine (HNA) that their children's nursery was refusing to acknowledge "Christmas rituals" to accommodate the "diverse cultures" of other pupils. The Sara Nussbaum House daycare centre in Kassel refused to put up a Christmas tree, tell Christmas stories or celebrate Christmas in general because it said only a minority of pupils were Christian"

Muslim student filed bias crime report to avoid curfew punishment - "A Muslim student who said she was harassed on the subway by drunken, hate-spewing white men shouting “Donald Trump!” lied to police because she broke her curfew... Her strict, Muslim parents allegedly forced Seweid to shave her head over the incident and were upset that she was dating a Christian... In a bizarre twist, Seweid’s older brother, Abdoul, was also charged with falsely reporting an incident back in 2012. Cops said Abdoul, then 17, claimed a pal was “assaulted by three unknown males,” according to a Newsday story at the time."

Humans no longer have a penis bone because we don’t need to have as much sex

Why Do iPhones Cost So Much More In India And Singapore Than China And Japan? - "The fact that Japan and China have the two cheapest average iPhone prices in Asia (they're respectively number two and three cheapest overall in the world, behind Angola), while developing countries like India, Indonesia and Bangladesh cost more, is really surprising. Linio concludes that these differences are due to the different tariffs and taxes from different countries. But there are other reasons too. Logistics of the supply chain is a big factor. In India, because Apple doesn't have its own store, iPhones have to be sold through third party retailers, and according to a report by the Wall Street Journal, smartphones have to pass through up to five middlemen in India before it reaches consumers -- and each one takes a chunk... Apple makes less per iPhones sold in India than in other countries"

There is more than one truth to tell in the heartbreaking story of Aleppo - "it’s time to tell the other truth: that many of the “rebels” whom we in the West have been supporting – and which our preposterous Prime Minister Theresa May indirectly blessed when she grovelled to the Gulf head-choppers last week – are among the cruellest and most ruthless of fighters in the Middle East. And while we have been tut-tutting at the frightfulness of Isis during the siege of Mosul (an event all too similar to Aleppo, although you wouldn’t think so from reading our narrative of the story), we have been willfully ignoring the behaviour of the rebels of Aleppo."

A Profoundly Woolly Feral Sheep Is Rescued in Canberra, Australia - "Leave a sheep unshorn for long enough and it’ll begin to resemble a shambling, woolly iceberg. But as cute as that sounds, it’s a bad idea: Massively hairy sheep face many dangers, from heat stress to blindness to toppling over and never being able to get up again."
Don't tell PETA

Reviving Malay Connections in Southeast Asia - "Filipino politicians who dreamt of creating a Pan-Malay nation also considered adopting the name Malaysia, which had referred to the overall Malay archipelago before becoming the name of the newly independent Malaysian nation in 1963*. The former Filipino Vice-President of the Pan-Malayan Union presented a bill in the Senate in 1962 to change the name of the Philippines to Malaysia (Alonto 2003 p.190). While the bill was debated in the Congress, the name was adopted by Tunku Abdul Rahman, who led the Malaysian nationalist movement
* - For example, the advocate of the Greater Malaya, Ibrahim Yaacob, used this word to refer to the Malay Archipelago in 1951"

Was Hitler democratically elected? - "People who say that Hitler wasn’t really elected are usually germanophiles who search for excuses for crimes of the german people in the “Third Reich” (the argument is that a small undemocratic minority oppressed the good people of germany). But since Pharyngula is an american blog the case here might be a lot less sinister. The idea that Hitler wasn’t elected democratically is probably an allusion to the fact that he never got more than 50% of the votes (the best result was some 44%). Americans, with their “the winner takes it all”-system tend to forget that you can win a german election without winning a majority. The problem with this is that, without a majority, you have to form either a coalition with other parties, or form a minority goverment, or both, and in fact that was the problem that had plagued the Republic from the beginning. To put the results into perspective, the 43,9% for the NSDAP in the 1933 election was the best result any party had ever had in the Republic of Weimar from 1919 to 1933... Incidentally, counted in percentages the NSDAP had a better democratic legitimation than any party in the Federal Republic of Germany for at last 20 years – the best result in this time was 44,3% for the conservative „Union“ in the 1987 election and as the name suggests even this is a (permanent) coalition of two parties (CDU/CSU)"

Trump Supporters Beat Gay Man in California? : snopes.com - "None of the reports we found about Chris Ball's altercation with purported Trump supporters mentioned a location, cited a police report, or any provided information substantiating his attackers' motives. The account could have been completely accurate, but the event it described also could have been a garden-variety bar fight that took place after what turned out to be an exceptionally tense night in the United States."

MILO Takes On Lesbian Hate Crime Hoaxes At Texas Tech - "Milo listed a number of LGBT hoaxes and their perpetrator, including the likes of Carol Ann and Laura Stutte, Mari Poindexter, Charlie Rogers and more.
“It’s a world where feminist whingers can make hundreds of thousands of dollars by complaining about mean words from anonymous strangers on the internet, and everyone believes them and opens their wallets.”"

Girl wins right to have body frozen so she can return from the dead - "A 14-year-old girl who has died of cancer has been cryogenically frozen in the hope that she can be "woken up" and cured in the future after winning a landmark court case in her final days. The girl's divorced parents had disagreed over whether her wish to be frozen should be followed"

City University students vote for campus ban on Sun, Mail and Express - "Students at City University of London, home to one of the country’s most respected journalism schools, have voted to ban the Sun, Daily Mail and Express from its campus... The motion, while largely symbolic, is embarrassing for the university, which runs one of the UK’s top journalism programmes. Less than 200 of the university’s 19,500 student population attended the meeting where the motion was passed to ban the newspapers “in their current form”... The students’ union said there was “no place” for the papers on campus or university properties although it was unclear how the ban would be enforced. A number of journalism students are looking to pull out of the union in protest against the decision, which they believe harms the university’s reputation. Many graduates go on to work at the Sun, Mail and Express titles in some capacity... another motion titled “why is my curriculum white?” was passed attacking the university as the “primary motor in reproducing this ideology of whiteness”. The union has resolved to take an active role in “decolonising” the curriculum and “start asking where are our black lecturers”... online publication Spiked released its latest free speech rankings for universities, finding that 90% of institutions were carrying out some form of censorship, up from 80% a year earlier... almost two-thirds of UK students back the National Union of Students’ no platforming policy"

Male researchers stress out rodents - "Male, but not female, experimenters induce intense stress in rodents that can dampen pain responses... the animals seemed to show a decrease in pain response of about 40% when a man rather than a woman remained in the room, based on pain levels analysed using the mouse grimace scale... It wasn’t just men who caused the stress spike in the rodents, but any nearby male animal, including guinea pigs, rats, cats and dogs. Male cage-mates of the animal being tested were the only exception, and produced no changes in stress hormone levels."

How drag saved my relationship with my Muslim mother and made me fall in love again with my Arab heritage - "performing uplifting tropes of Middle Eastern femininity has been a key feature of my practice. Whilst I set out to reject my heritage through the queer art of drag, I’ve ended up falling back in love with it. And though my mother does not accept a large part of who I am, through performing what I love about her on stage, my wounds are healing. We’re in fact closer than we’ve ever been."
???

Peranakans and Cultural Appropriation

Has the ‘soul’ gone out of modern Peranakans?

"A member of an online Peranakan group commented that the way I wore the kebaya - casually thrown on over a tank top and a pair of skinny jeans - was “gauche” and looked “uncouth”.

She was right - my grandmother would probably turn in her grave if she knew that I was taking her beloved kebayas to the nightclubs.

Gripes like these are increasingly common in the Peranakan community, some of whom in recent years have taken to policing their culture against a wave of modern spinoffs – including cheaper knock-offs of embroidered kebayas, and watered-down versions of its food...

“Being Peranakan is not just a question of superficial accessories, it’s a culture,” said Ms Sharon Ong, the person who made the online comment.

“When you wear somebody's ethnic dress, you are expressing a culture… so to interpret anything in a meaningful way, we have to understand the original version first,” she added.

Another online user said: “Wearing a Kebaya or batik shirt alone is not complete if you do not have a connection with its culture and history. It is like an outfit with no soul, no bau (Malay for smell)”

And it’s not just these tangible aspects of the culture that have come under scrutiny by the community - some debates even extend to the “purity” of a person’s ancestry, as though you have to meet certain standards in order to qualify as being Peranakan...

Most of the Peranakan dishes on the table were prepared by Mr Leong’s Hakka aunt-in-law.

Mrs Patricia Lim, Mr Leong’s aunt, said: “My mum never taught her children to cook, but would quietly go to my brother's house to teach my sister-in-law her recipes so that she would be the one cooking for all of us. Quite naughty, right?”...

The kebaya style we know today is merely one aspect of a fashion that has been evolving for hundreds of years.

Culture expert Mr Peter Lee said: “We need to break the myth that the kebaya (of today) is traditional.” In fact, he pointed out that for a period of time, it was the batik sarong that was the most important part of the attire. “Now it's sort of the reverse - there is a lot of emphasis on the kebaya, and today it's all about a riot of colours and often very badly matched - it's very garish,” said Mr Lee...

“When I hear Peranakans saying ‘oh, that's not very Peranakan’, it’s such a contradiction, and this has created a whole fear of the Peranakan tradition. Sometimes, defining culture is a bit dangerous if you start including and excluding things.”

Mr Lee, who has authored books and curated exhibitions on the evolution of Peranakan culture, says his work is about showing that in the past, people did not actually have fixed ideas of the culture. “In those days, people didn’t say ‘today, I am going to try to be Peranakan’. It was just a way of life found in colonial port towns - it was a very shared culture,” he added.

So when it comes to other aspects of the culture, like the food, Mr Fred Lam - an antiques collector and owner of Baba Fred Antique House - is all for innovation. “What's wrong with having buah keluak sauce over spaghetti?" he said,

"And what's wrong with buah keluak ice cream, when there are other types of buah ice cream - like Macadamia nut ice cream? People have the right to express their own cooking style”...

Cultural producers should be allowed to “be as creative as possible, as they are the ones who will help us best preserve culture as a living culture”.

Mr Lee noted: “I think it is unlikely that you will find people who would want to behave like a 19th century Peranakan."


It is amusing that some Peranakans are complaining about cultural appropriation (even if the term isn't actually used).

If nothing else, a hybrid culture such as Peranakan culture is already a 'bastardised' one (ditto for the purity of bloodlines).

Maybe it's better to let Peranakan culture die out instead?


From the previous article in the series:

The slow death of Peranakan cuisine?

"You can never please a Peranakan because recipes vary from family to family, which poses a conundrum over what’s “most authentic”.

Take these dishes for example - Babi Chin and Babi Pongteh are almost-similar dishes of belly pork stewed in a fermented soya bean paste; it’s just that one calls for spices like coriander powder and cinnamon sticks, while the other doesn’t.

But do a quick search on the internet and you’ll find heated arguments among food bloggers about which dish has the additional spices. And the debate extends to two notable Singaporean cookbooks too - according to Mrs Lee’s Cookbook, Babi Chin does not have coriander powder, but her sister Mrs Leong’s recipe calls for it.

Peranakan restaurants in Singapore especially don’t get off easy - when mum’s cooking is always the basis of comparison, any deviation from what is familiar is usually met with strong backlash...

Upon tasting the gravy, Mrs Gan and Mrs Wong start bickering about how much coconut milk to add.

“You can never get a precise recipe from any Peranakan lady and I think that’s one of the difficulties (in maintaining consistency),” says Mrs Wong.

“They will always say ‘one handful of this, another handful of that’. It’s always agak-agak (estimate)!”"

Links - 6th February 2017

Blog: Sarah Silverman calls for military coup against 'fascist' Trump

Facebook’s new anti-clickbait algorithm buries bogus headlines - "Facebook manually classified tens of thousands of headlines with a clickbaitiness score to train the new algorithm. Now it can detect headlines like “When She Looked Under Her Couch And Saw THIS… I Was SHOCKED!”; “He Put Garlic In His Shoes And What Happens Next Is Hard To Believe”; or “The Dog Barked At The Deliveryman And His Reaction Was Priceless.”"

BBC Radio 4 - Crossing Continents, Syria's Secret Library - "Anjad is one of many of Daraya's residents I've been speaking to over these last 5 months over scratchy Skype lines. It's the only way I can talk to them. The siege by pro-Syrian government forces means there's no way I can get in there or they can get out. But people there have been very inventive. Some have used their mobile phones to record the sounds of life around them...
This is a place where despite years of snipers, barrel bombs and hunger, life just carries on. For instance the local council still goes around repairing damaged buildings and even collecting garbage. Again, the determination to maintain some sort of normality is humbling. After all, Daraya is fighting for its very survival. But Annas (?) explains to me that the library is at the heart of that very fight...
'There is an old Arabic saying that goes something like a fighter who lacks knowledge has no principles. He'll become no better than a highway thief. War should be built on principles. So I see no point in sending young men to fight when they don't truly understand what they are fighting for. We've been under siege now for nearly 4 years. We have to be educated. Fighting itself isn't the answer, or you're a threat to your nation... We don't ban any books. We're open to everything, because we believe censoring books just increases ignorance. If we want to raise an intellectual generation then we need to let people think for themselves. To be honest with you, we even have explicit books here. We don't write them, though we place them on the top shelf. If anyone wants to borrow one of these books, they have to speak to one of the library staff'...
'We hold regular talks here. Someone will come to the library and give a lecture, and then after that we'll hold a discussion about the issues raised. We had one talk on how Japan managed to recover after the devastation of World War II because we're in a similar predicament. It was a really inspirational talk. We've also had several talks about the Civil War in Iraq because we want to learn how to prevent such awful things happening to us when this conflict is over...
The other day I described heaven to them... I then asked them to imagine their own vision of heaven. First, I nominated Ahdid [sp?]. 'Close your eyes tightly' I told him 'and describe your visions of heaven'. Adil's response shocked me. The picture in his head was of a plane swooping down from the sky dropping bombs on his family. I couldn't relieve his stress. I can't help any of the children take refuge in thoughts of a beautiful heaven. They just can't imagine a place like that'
How come you can have internet access and Skype during a siege?


BBC Radio 4 - Looping Swans - "How Khruschev started going to the ballet and whe international relations begin opening up, how he had to show the visiting foreign dignitaries something, something beautiful. And what are you going to show them? Opera? With long hours of singing in Russian that no one can understand. With ballet you can show them a beautiful woman. That's the simple reality of it. The Bolshoi didn't have a huge repertoire. So it was simple: give them Maya Plisetskaya in Swan Lake. The music is catchy, it's melodic... poor Khrushchev had to sit through 185 performances of Swan Lake half asleep. But he would sleep like a horse, with his eyes open"

BBC World Service - The Documentary, Africa’s Ivory Dilemma - "[On poaching] 'Do you feel any regret for the fact that you're killing these animals that are endangered?'
'I don't regret it. I feel heroic because they terrorise us. They invade our farms. And we don't get any compensation'...
'It's third or fourth in terms of international crime... behind drugs, arms and human trafficking'"

BBC World Service - The Documentary, We Shall Fly, Dreaming the Wrong Dream? - "[On a Zambian space camp] One special afronaut, the only woman afronaut, the only woman astronaut actually at the time, Matha Mwamba a 16 year old girl, was raising a herd of cats which were to be released one by one when she got to Mars to make sure that the atmosphere was amenable to lifeforms...
He'd had to disband the space program because his top afronaut, Matha Mwamba had become pregnant and as he would say to one of the reporters: I've had troubles with my spacemen and spacewomen. They won't concentrate on spaceflight. There's too much lovemaking when they should be studying the moon'

BBC World Service - The Documentary, The Debates Dissected - "'Someone who has said that pregnancy is an inconvenience to employers'
'I never said that'
'Who said that women don't deserve equal pay unless they do as good a job as men'
'Didn't say that'...
'I think you know, part of the disheartening, all we've been doing here is trashing Trump. But now I'd like to say some negative things about Hillary Clinton just to balance the scales. Hillar Clinton is the second most unpopular person to run for President aside from Donald Trump. She is a prevaricator, we have seen this clear evidence of extreme dishonesty, carelessness in her handling of classified information. She openly lied about things in the debate. Policies that she supported. This ridiculous thing she said about how her support for open borders and open hemispheric agreement was about energy, which is absurd, and what I've heard time and again from people throughout this general election season is this: this is it? These are the 2 out of 330 million people in this country, this is what it comes down to?
So much for equal pay for equal work

The Zambian Space Programme of 1962 - Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog - "I’m getting [the astronauts] acclimatised to space-travel by placing them in my space-capsule every day. It’s a 40-gallon oil drum in which they sit, and I then roll them down a hill. This gives them the feeling of rushing through space. I also make them swing from the end of a long rope. When they reach the highest point, I cut the rope – this produces a feeling of free fall.’
Nkoloso was, in short, one of those wonderful eccentrics who usually only appear after three or four generations of middle class parliamentary democracy, preferably with what Beachcombing likes to think of, with apologies to Weber, as the Protestant Mad Ethic somewhere in the background. And yet here in Africa, in that wonderful glow of colonial freedom, before everything went to hell in the 1970s and the 1980s, was the kind of genius that would not have gone amiss riding through the English shires in the 1700s in a turquoise stage coach, raving about Atlantis and Romish spies. Nkoloso revealed, for example, that he had been watching Mars from his ‘secret headquarters’ and had discovered that the planet was peopled by a strange race of primitive savages. He guaranteed, however, that he would not force their conversion, which was gracious of him. Perhaps memories of cack-handed Anglican missionaries in his part of Africa?"

BBC World Service - The Documentary, The Life of President Fidel Castro - "'The government here like North Korea, or the China or Romania and East Germany of the past, it tried to silence all the dissident voices. I believe Fidel Castro didn't realise in the early 1960s that he was opting for a model of Concentration Camp Communism.'
'While this repression was doing on inside Cuba, Fidel Castro was still actively championing revolution in the rest of the developing world. This willingness to export the ideals of the Cuban Revolution won Castro further support from radicals such as Jesse Jackson in the United States'...
In 1980, the situation reached a crisis point. In response, Castro opened the port of Mariel and more than 100,000 Cubans left for the US. Once again, he tried to turnthe crisis to his own advantage, releasing hundreds of criminals from prison and sending them among the thousands of ordinary people who wanted to get out...
[After the fall of the USSR] In an effort to show the openness of the regime, in 1998, Cuba even welcomed the staunchly anti-Communist Pope John Paul II to the island.
'You are and must be the protagonists of your own history' urged the Pope. And Fidel responded as he had hundreds of times in the past 4 decades by blaming all his country's misfortunes on the United States. Cuba he said had been the victim of genocide by the most powerful nation on earth simply because it wanted to decide its own destiny"

BBC World Service - The Documentary, The Taboo of Feminism - "There's this one phrase that I repeat aloud because I heard a lot was '*someting* tu eres mas bonita'. When you're quiet with your mouth shut you look a lot prettier... [it was told] to all of us. Think about what the phrase means too... that's more important right? How you look. And of course, you know what? Latinas, we love looking good...
At first glance there's nothing wrong with confidence, right? It's great to be confident. But if we look at it a little closer, we could also say that now women aren't only told to work on their bodies and to look beautiful but also to work on their mental state. So we have to be confident. It means that women now even have to spend more time and energy and money and effort on being in the right state of mind"

BBC Radio 4 - Crossing Continents, Torah and Tech in Israel - "Someone who has totally unfiltered internet access at home or in the office is considered to be on an inferior level. The regular Haredi schools won't accept his children. People in his synogogue and community will view him with a crooked eye. Another potential problem is that people won't let their children visit his home to play with his kids or even in the yard outside. And now for something much more dramatic. In Haredi society, you get married through matchmakers and no regular Haredi person will make a match with someone whose home has unfiltered internet access. You can sum it up with a very simple sentence: if you don't follow Haredi club's rules for electronic devices, you have to leave the club...
The tradition is that the temple fell in *something* because of *something*, which is hating each other for no reason. And the way that the temple will be built again... and that's like a symbol for everything being good is *something*, which is loving each other for no reason"

BBC World Service - The Documentary, America Revisited, America Revisited: The South - "[On picketing abortion clinics and yelling] 'Most of us communicate verbally right?... one of the daddies... came to bring, to have his baby killed. And I told him and Dad lost his temper right? We have that a lot here'
'Have you ever been hit?'
'I've been hit. I've had cars driven at me. I've heard all kinds of interesting things before schnelly [?]. Now he's in no better shape than an unborn child'...
'I was incarcerated with 5 of my biological brothers'
'So it was a family thing'
'Yeah, it was sorta like a family reunion in prison... honestly, most of the African Americans that I talked to had a very low opinion of President Obama. They didn't think President Obama was doing much of anything'"
Maybe the black prisoners had internalised the dominant paradigm of racism

BBC World Service - The Documentary, Jobs for the Girls - "Shanti runs a small garage with her husband. The couple came to the city from their village originally to find work and they used to run a tea shop, she tells me. But eventually found that they could make much more money repairing tyres and fixing truck and motorbike parts...
So why is Shanti the only woman working here as a mechanic?
'Why? Because other women want to earn money in easy ways. This is hard work. They like to dress up. These women working at tea stalls and so on. But look at me - I've got no makeup on. I'm here to work, not to look good'
'She's very proud of the fact that she's very simple. She dresses very simply. She's wearing a bright sari. Very Indian style of dressing but she's really emphasising on the fact that this is a tough job and she feels that women don't get into this job because they don't like the rough and tumble that this work requires'...
By day, Geetha Lahori [sp?] is like any other traditional housewife. A mother who takes care of the house, her husband and her children. But by night, it's a different story.
'As soon as I step out of the house, I feel stronger. In the house I wear sari or Indian clothes, but when I'm out and about, people keep a distance from me and I really like that. Whether I'm here at work or travelling in a bus or walking on the road, once I'm out of the house, I feel like a bouncer'...
India actually has a really good percentage of female pilots. The world average is 3% whereas in India the average is 11%
Another explanation for the gender pay gap

BBC World Service - The Documentary, Jobs for the Girls - Part Two - "Train them as masons so that they can claim equal wages with equal work. That way nobody can stop them then. But it was a Herculean task because no woman was willing to learn skilled labour like mason, because everybody will laugh at them. No woman was, had ever done this job before... Woman mason? They thought that it was culturally against God even. God does not design women for doing such kind of work...
You don't employ men anymore because your experience has been once they get trained, they migrate to the Gulf in search of better jobs. Whereas your experience with women is different because they tend to stay put
More reasons for the gender pay gap

BBC World Service - Assignment , Cleansing Turkey - "But Gulen condemned the coup and denies any role in it. And even if he was involved, it's hard to believe that a 100,000 people, or even a fraction of that number, can have known in any way about a conspiracy which by its very nature, had to be as tight as possible. The government says that all those dismissed supported the movement in one way or another. But in fact, at least some, such as *name* the history lecturer, actively opposed it...
'You've got a complete set of the works of Lenin... and Stalin's works as well. A little bust of Karl Marx... you're a leftist'
'Yes, I mean I have been sharp critic of political Islam and all kinds of religious sects all my life... it's visible to the naked eye, how can I be Gulenist?'...
'There is no evidence they can show against me except for the book'
The book that led to his dismissal and questioning by police. A book by Fethullah Gulen...
'I am an academic, I can read any books and this is ridiculous. You are making Turkey appear ridiculous in the eyes of whole world... and even that book I was against Gulen. I had underlined those lines where he says Islam punishes apostasy by death. He approves of it, yeah, unbelievably for some, because he is known as a moderate Islam'...
A woman who's facing the sack just because she scored a very high mark of 90% in the civil service entrance exam in 2010. That's the year that Gulenists are said to have stolen the exam questions beforehand so the candidates from their movement would be better prepared. Now anyone who did well in that exam that year is under suspicion"

The Pizza Project: A Taxonomy of the World's Great Pizza Styles, Great Fun No Matter How You Slice It - "I will begin my Pizza Project with the proposition that it is the makeup and thickness of the crust that defines a species of pizza, and that the infinite combinations of toppings create subspecies. In other words Neapolitan pizza is a species, while Margherita is a sub-species. Neapolitan pizza is defined by a very specific dough recipe (dictated by law in Italy) and there are many sub-species depending on the toppings. Margherita is the most famous sub-species, with just tomato sauce, cheese, basil, garlic, salt, and olive oil. But Roman pizza, which is a unique species identifiable by a different dough recipe, can also have a sub-species called Margherita made with the same toppings. Still with me?"

The Popular Myth That Right-Wing Extremism Kills More Than Islamic Terrorism in U.S. Since 9/11 - "The New America study does not count violent jihadist attacks from self-radicalized or “lone wolf” terrorists who swear allegiance to Islam in the same manner as terrorist attacks committed by a card-carrying member of Islamist terror organizations. If a terrorist yells “Allahu Akbar!” before going on a murder spree, you see, that's not enough. However, when right-wing terrorist attacks are coded by New America, those are attributed in a loose manner to mere statements made by the perpetrators that fit the left-wing's shibboleth that racist or anti-government views define someone as a “right-winger.” Thus, the conclusions are not only questionable, they are borderline deceptive. The professor concludes:
Right wing terrorism is more deadly for Americans only if you add a number of very limiting parameters (e.g. excluding the victims of 9/11, ignoring “lone wolf” attacks without solid connections to groups like al-Qaeda and their affiliates, etc…). But if you lift those limitations, and apply equal standards, then the raw and unfiltered numbers of deaths of Americans due to Islamic extremism in the United States over the last fifteen years dwarf the numbers attributable to right wing extremism by a ratio of over 62 to 1. Even if you leave out 9/11 victims and just focus on the ideological statements and goals of the attackers, then the deaths of Americans due to Islamic extremism still outnumber the deaths attributable to right wingers (which reveals an even greater disparity when compared with population groups). If we move beyond America’s borders, then the disparity becomes far greater, with somewhere around 90% of the world’s terrorism related deaths attributable to Islamic extremism, and only a fraction of 1% attributable to right wing extremism."
Addendum: This draws on work by Andrew Holt

100 Women 2016: I am a 'surrendered wife’ - "Despite considering herself a feminist, she follows - and now teaches others - the approach of a controversial book called The Surrendered Wife..
The six principles of being a 'Surrendered Wife'
Relinquishes inappropriate control of her husband
Respects her husband's thinking
Receives his gifts graciously and expresses gratitude for him
Expresses what she wants without trying to control him
Relies on him to handle household finances
Focuses on her own self-care and fulfilment"

Yes-Dearing Your Way to a Happy Marriage? - The New York Times - "''You liberated women are going to make men weak and then you won't want them,'' she warned. ''You'll be sorry!'' Naturally, I ignored her. Now I'm wondering if she was simply ahead of her time... ''Instead of throwing out traditional roles, try them on again,'' Ms. Doyle exhorts in Chapter 13, called ''Abandon the Myth of Equality.''The gist is that if men feel they are in charge, their wives, freed from constant decision-making, will be happier, too... The surrendered wife provides sex on demand (a rather innocuous edict compared with a zestier suggestion in Marabel Morgan's 1973 work, ''The Total Woman,'' which urged wives to greet their husbands naked and wrapped in cellophane). Being available, Ms. Doyle temporizes, ''doesn't mean you don't have to ask for what you want first.''"

U. Toronto lecturer: 'Misconception' that there's a thing called 'biological sex' - "“‘Cisnormativity’ is basically the very popular idea and assumption that most people probably have […] that there is such a thing as male and female and that they connect to being a boy or a girl, or a man or a woman.” “Cisnormativity,” Matte continues, is also the notion that everyone assumes “there is male and female,” but “very little is actually looked at to … understand what’s actually the case.” He claims scientists have refuted the sexual “binary” notion for over 50 years."

Links - 31st January 2017

Be Careful What You Wish For (especially if it is Hitler) | Scott Adams' Blog - "I’m talking about ordinary people doing ordinary things to turn Trump into an actual Hitler. For example, if protesters start getting violent, you could expect forceful reactions eventually. And that makes Trump look more like Hitler. I can think of dozens of ways the protesters could cause the thing they are trying to prevent. In other words, they can wish it into reality even though it is the very thing they are protesting... If you are looking for the tells that this dangerous situation is developing, notice how excited/happy the Trump critics seem to be – while angry at the same time – that Trump’s immigration ban fits their belief system"

The Persuasion Filter and Immigration | Scott Adams' Blog - "what about Trump’s critics on the far right who want more extreme immigration? Trump needs to negotiate with them too. And he is. He did that by showing them that his temporary offer was so extreme that people took to the streets. The system (America) is actively trying to eject Trump like some sort of cancer cell. And the worse it gets, with protests and whatnot, the more leverage Trump has to tell his far right supporters that he has gone as far as the country will let him go. He needed that. The protests are working in his favor. He couldn’t negotiate with the extreme right without them... On Twitter I am seeing lots of well-meaning liberals tweet charts showing that no one from the banned countries has ever been a terrorist in the United States. But Trump isn’t trying to solve the PAST. He’s trying to reduce risks in the future. And the future has risks that are unlike the past. If you want your president to solve only problems that have already happened in the past, we can ignore any potential climate change issues too... President Obama’s approach was to give a free pass to Islam in general and to any Muslims that were just minding their own business. But the unintended consequence is that Muslims have less incentive to police their own ranks. Trump changed that. Now if you want to stay out of the fight against terrorism it will cost you. So Trump has created a situation – or will soon – in which the peaceful Muslims will either have to do a lot more to help law enforcement find the terrorists in their midst or else live with an increasingly tainted brand"

Outrage Dilution | Scott Adams' Blog - "When you encounter a situation that is working great except for one identifiable problem, you can focus on the problem and try to fix it. But if you have a dozen complaints at the same time, none of them looks special. The whole situation just looks confusing, and you don’t know where to start. So you wait and see what happens. Humans need contrast in order to make solid decisions that turn into action. Trump removed all of your contrast by providing multiple outrages of similar energy."

Is Trump’s Refugee/Immigration Executive Order a ‘Muslim Ban’? Unprecedented? Legal? Useful? Here Are Your Answers. - "Obviously, this policy isn’t a Muslim ban. If it were, there would also be a ban on Muslims from the forty-odd other Muslim majority countries, plus a ban on Muslims living in Europe and Canada... It’s Somewhat Unprecedented, But Not Entirely. There are two oft-cited precedents here: President Obama’s six-month ban on Iraqi refugees in 2011, and President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 ban on Iranian visa-holders... Obama implemented the policy quietly, while Trump did so openly. And it’s worth noting that Obama’s policy did result in the death of at least one refugee waiting to be processed"

Most claims about Trump’s visa Executive Order are false or misleading - "the “ban” is only for four months 90 days while procedures are reviewed, with the exception of Syria for which there is no time limit. There is a logic to the 7 countries. Six are failed states known to have large ISIS activity, and one, Iran, is a sworn enemy of the U.S. and worldwide sponsor of terrorism. And, the 7 countries on the list were not even so-designated by Trump. Rather, they were selected last year by the Obama administration as posing special risks for visa entry, as even CNN concedes in passing... the Obama administration selected those countries — whose names are not mentioned in Trump’s EO... Trump worked off of the Obama administration’s list of particularly risky countries for visa entry. To lay the blame on Trump’s business interests is a lie, or as Frantzman puts it, fake news... The “ban” is not without exceptions. There are categories of visa holders who still may enter even from those 7 countries... There are anecdotal reports of people being detained while trying to enter the U.S., or pulled off planes, or not allowed to board. It’s hard to know whether these reports — if true — are the result of policy or confusion. As with any large bureaucratic endeavor, there seems to be administrative confusion... It is possible to criticize the EO and Trump visa/refugee policy without hyperbole and fakery. That opponents feel the need to make false and misleading accusations is a signal that they fear losing the policy argument on its merits."

3G - Association between gluten intake and satiety Master thesis project opportunity – University of Copenhagen - "Gluten is present in high amounts in western-type diets. However, very little is known of how dietary intake of gluten affects satiety and therefore influences the human body weight regulation."

Only Connect star Alan Connor explains the popularity of quiz - "During the Second World War, BBC Radio tried out something new: asking people questions and seeing how many they could answer. The programmes were, of course, part of the war effort – and there was not even the suggestion of prizes. The Air Raid Wardens’ Training Bee tested ARP volunteers on the finer points of sirens and blackouts. Another concept, Sons In France Against Parents In England, offered poignant family reunions, live on air, but was aborted because of the drunkenness of those sons in France – one audibly vomited during the quiz and the others seemed constantly on the verge of giving away their location to the enemy."

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Can you build a nation without war? - "People fight. Almost every state you can think of has at some point or other a civil war in their history... Most recently South Sudan, but this country, France, Germany, wherever you name. The sensible peaceful Finns escaped from Russia following the October Revolution in 1917. The same year they had a civil war because the state is up for grabs at that point...
This whole business of state-building, I think we've been deluding ourselves that because states have finally been settled and established relatively undisputed in the West, that we know how to set up new ones or help people set up new ones... I'm coming to the conclusion [that they haven't learned from the West because] that every second generation has to do war because they don't take the lessons of the previous war seriously for themselves. The tendency is to think: we've been there, done that, we're better than that, and if you get the ex-paramilitaries in the Northern Irish campaign, they will say that they can persuade the immediate next generation that violence doesn't work as a politicial tool but not the generation after that. They have to find out for themselves...
War has been as intrinsic to our history as peace. It's not that peace is normal and war is abnormal - it's the combination of the two which is our story"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Does Just a Girl promote trans issues? - "The BBC should not be promoting this unbelievable piece of propaganda targetted at children encouraging them to change their gender. And the three issues were really that it did normalise, trivialise and glamourise what is a very serious life-changing decision. It also played, secondly, to regressive gender stereotyping and thirdly it ignored completely any of the harmful or dangerous impact that either taking puberty blockers would have or indeed completely changing your gender through surgery... The character also talked about her being a famous musician when she would grow up, how she would have future fans. There was this very strong hint at how this would be popular, sort of suggesting that it would give her more attention. And secondly it really did trivialise it...
Puberty is a very difficult time for children and I really tought it played on that and played on people's fears. Puberty blockers can stunt growth and cause infertility. They're serious, it's a serious issue and it shouldn't be trivialised and sold to six year olds"

BBC Radio 4 - Today, How will humans evolve? - "The chance of the average European or American being killed by a terrorist are a 1,000 time less than dying from eating too much. I mean from that perspective, McDonald's and Coca Cola are a much greater threat to the life of the average Brit or the average American than Al-Qaeda...
We are probably one of the last generations of Homo Sapiens. In a century or two we will either destroy ourselves or more likely, upgrade ourselves into something different... the main products of the 21st century will be bodies and brains and minds, not vehicles, not weapons, not tools"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Wednesday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "[On LoopUp] In some of your marketing reps, you say one of the biggest drivers of business for you is frustration. People just get so irritated with conference [calls]"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Panorama programme on child abuse investigations draws criticism - "On my Twitter feed, I had filth of a kind that's indescribable, from people who knew nothing about the case at all, all of whom believed what was said and all of whom accused me of being involved in some way, because I'd spoken out as a friend of Leon's, and when I went to Leon Brittan's memorial service, there was a photograph and they again came back with these filthy statements. All of it of course means that no one can stand up for a friend without recognising that you're going to be hit with stuff you've never even considered or thought about before it happens"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Paul Gambaccini: 'False accusers need to be prosecuted or offered medical attention' - "Not only did I not know these two people, but the police were accusing me of having sex in the decade before I started havivng same-sex relations. So so much for where were you on the night of April 23rd, they were not only in the wrong day, the wrong year, they were in the wrong decade...
It is a tactic of the police to call out and ask if people would like to make accusations, and this was brought to my attention by Liz Kershaw of 6 Music. Two weeks before I was arrested, she told me that Yewtree had called her and asked if she would like to accuse Dave Lee Travis and she said 'No, don't you need evidence?' and they said 'No, we need people who agree', that's the premise
under this mutation of the British justice system has occured from the centuries old, internationally respected, objective evidence based system into the subjective rumour and accusation based system. There can be no evidence, only people who agree"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, What makes a great national anthem? - "The French Marseillaise by common consent, says Alex Marshall, the world’s most powerful national anthem. It’s this ludicrously over-the-top, bellicose, rambunctious tune and once you’ve heard it once you literally can’t get it out of your system. But it’s also flawed. Listen to the words. I think a lot of French people today are more than embarrassed by it. Look at what happened after the Charlie Hebdo tragedy recently, people were singing it, and most of them were doing so with a look of great discomfort knowing this is a song that’s unifying at that moment, but whose chorus is, let impure blood water our fields, it’s hardly the message you want to send out to the Islamic world at that time. Many national anthems are like that, and the surprising thing is how few countries feel they are inappropriate now and should be changed and more reflective of our values today. But some countries have changed their anthems. Nepal’s national anthem used to sound like this, but then the monarchy was overthrown and now they sing this. The Nepalese anthem is probably the world’s bizarrest by quite some way because it sounds like the sort of song you would hear in a south Asian takeaway. It’s this joyous folk tune about how all the different ethnicities in Nepal should unite together as one garland. And it’s a very gentle song, yet it was born of the Maoist Revolution?... There’s a paradox about many anthems, today they are prized by patriots and conservatives, but often they were written by radicals and revolutionaries to boost morale among underdogs. Even Islamic State, Alex Marshall maintains, has a national anthem. There is one song called My Ummah, Dawn Has Appeared, which is all about establishing, you know, the Islamic State has arisen by the blood of the Martyrs, Islamic State has arisen by the jihad of the pious...
lots of countries in the 19th century borrowed God Save The Queen, only Lichtenstein has kept it"

BBC World Service - The Documentary, What My Parents Taught Me - "He showed me the difference between the real world and most people's reality, which is they think that things happen to them for a reason and good things and bad things happen to the because God made it happen. That very well may be but my dad taught me that good or bad, nothing happens to you. They just happen... If you look at it like there is a reason that your mom died and there's a plan for it, that gets very confusing"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, 'Power doesn't always corrupt. Power can cleanse' - "Robert Moses. He has great dreams for great public works. Parks, highways, housing - everything. When he's young, he's an idealist. And he can't get anything built. So he learns he has to get power. He thinks he's gonna be elected mayor or governor, but his personality is that of a dictator. No one likes him. He can't get elected. So he has to find a way of creating power without getting elected. So he writes these laws that no one understands. But they give him power. And he has more power than any mayor or any governor - anyone who was elected. In fact
he has more power than any mayor or governor combined... Vietnam was Lyndon Johnson's war... they talk about Iraq. 130,000 men. Or Afghanistan. He had 600,000 men. He sent an army to Asia... We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we dropped on Europe in World War II"

BBC Radio 4 - Today, 04/09/2015, Syrian mother: "Where do we go?" - "Turkey. We tried to do something in Turkey but the language is too difficult to learn. We don't have any job and houses, rent is too high. And the people, they hate Syrians"
So much for Muslim solidarity

BBC World Service - The Documentary, Naija Sexual Desires - "'Most guys just all about themselves. People are not, they don't take sex as an intimate thing anymore. It's more like a drive-by'
'It used to be so hard to get some-'
'To get a girl to sleep with you'
'Yes, basically'
'Now they are the ones who they want?'
'So girls initiate sex'
'Yeah'
'You all *something* to say sex don't you?'
'I always use condom, yeah, cos you can't ever be too sure'
'So how can any young woman negotiate what makes her happy if she's with a young man that describes sexual intercourse as a drive by?'"

BBC Radio 4 - Moving Pictures, Scenes in and around Kyoto - "A nordan [sp?] or a kind of advertising curtain that depicts a centipede and the idea is that you have a 100 different legs or 100 different feet coming into your shop, so it's very auspicious although they're kind of nasty creatures"

On the US subsidising the rest of the world

I think few people have noticed another funny... - Michael Petraeus

"I think few people have noticed another funny thing - how easily the attention seeking left is being manipulated into doing things others want. In this case - of course, it's Donald Trump.

Trump takes funding away from organizations promoting abortions abroad. Reactions on the left:
Day 1. Outrage! What a despicable human being, pushing us back to the Middle Ages!
Day 2. Netherlands starts an international abortion fund to replace funds taken by the US.

Ah, so it turns out American taxpayer doesn't have to fund them after all! It took just a little nudge and look! Money was found!

Temporary ban on travelers from selected unstable Middle Eastern countries. Reactions on the left:
Day 1. Outrage! They are like Jews fleeing Nazi persecution! Trump is a hateful bastard going against American ideals! What will these people do now?!
Day 2. Justin Trudeau: Canada will take refugees banned by the US.

So this time it turns out USA is not the only country you can go to. So it's not like it has any 'obligation' to take in everyone just because some folks think that's the "right" thing to do.

Trump said 'no' twice - and lefties rebelled for a second and then did things themselves. We have to praise the new American president for so skillful management of the underutilized human and financial resources on the political left!

All it took to get them to actually do something was to be, for once, assertive. And just look! If there's a will, there's a way.

The funny thing is - the more they do it, the more they reinforce original narrative Trump presented. That America is used by others for their own benefit, that American taxpayers are paying for things they never really wanted to pay for. Take away the funds and all of a sudden it turns out that money is somehow found elsewhere! Magic!

PS. Notice how he also floated the same idea around NATO. If some countries don't fulfill their commitments why should US come to their aid? A bit of outrage - and now everybody is scrambling for money. There's even renewed talk of a possible EU army and closer European defense cooperation.

Well whaddaya know..."

Also:

"Look how much US taxpayers are spending on the world - military and economic aid via the UN or directly across ME and Africa. Billions in aid to Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt etc. Not to mention massive expenses on securing global trade routes, for which US is not compensated by anybody.

And yet, it is widely hated, ridiculed and disrespected. Even by Europeans, who consider Americans simpletons - even though US practically bankrolls NATO's existence."


Comment seen elsewhere: "Seems the whole world runs into a problem when America stops acting as the charity fund for all humanity."

Links - 23rd January 2017

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Big Beer - "SAB Miller are good corporate citizens. And they respect beer culture. They understand that beer is different in different parts of the world. If you look at Africa for instance where the company started, they do a huge amount there to keep the beer industry going. They actually sell raw materials to the growing emerging craft brewers in South Africa"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, The Olympics of Chinese Food - "'He Xiaolong is the youngest winner. He's just 28.'
'Chinese food has 3 factors. The first one is cutting skill. I can cut the tofu like a hair. The second one is flavour. The third one is fire. When you cook Chinese we often have to use thermometer. And I have 2 hopes. First one, I want to eat the rice. I miss rice very much. And second is sleep. It's so tired. But, most exciting, I win'"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Should We All Be Vegans? - "'As with most things in life, it's really not quite that simple. Take the environment. According to research by Professor Paul Fischbeck at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, vegetables like lettuce, aubergine, celery and cucumber can have a bigger environmental footprint than meat like pork or chicken.'
'Not all vegetables are created equal. Some of them require far greater greenhouse gas emissions than others. For example if you compare head lettuce to pork products like bacon, they can be 3.5, almost 4 times greater when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. But if you look at water, cherries or mushrooms or mangoes could be 5 or 6 times more water required per 1,000 calories than say bacon. If you go with the fact that you need about 2,000 calories a day to maintain your weight, how are you getting those 2,000 calories?'
'What is the environmental footprint of lettuce?'
'It turns out that if you look at the pounds of greenhouse gas emissions associated with 1,000 calories of lettuce, it's about 16 pounds. If you have a truck full of lettuce, it requires the same amount or almost the same amount of energy as moving a truckload of beef or pork. But you get far fewer calories in that truckload... you have a diet which will be a mixture of various things, and the question is how do you compare things? Our analysis looked at the recommended diet by the US Government of what we should be eating and we compared it to what we actually eat. And it turns out that the healthier diet that's recommended by the government has a larger greenhouse gas footprint and requires more water than what we currently do eat'"

Otto Radio - The Food Chain: Vegan Babies: Should You Restrict Your Child's Diet? - "'You cannot nourish a robust baby merely on foods from plants, says Nina Planck. She's the author of the Real Food series in the States and she's also written the Farmer's Market Cookbook. She's gone so far as to call the vegan diet dangerous when it comes to children'...
'A 100% plant-based, total vegan diet is really unprecedented in all of human history. There are no traditional human societies which are multi-generational on a diet strictly of plants without any synthetic supplements. It's simply not a natural human diet. And I think you can read from the advocates of strict vegan diets that most of them do recommend supplements. And I think that's a step forward because it's a recognition that you need an artificial diet to supplement the plants... I think the entire history of replacing real food and whole food with food made by humans in factories and in labs is a history of failure in that we're always discovering something too late after people are in ill health or die. Some may remember, they fed a whole bunch of smokers beta-carotene supplements... the results were unhelpful. More people died of lung cancer, more smokers died of lung cancer on the supplements. So why might that be when we know that people who eat lots of yellow and green and red foods full of natural beta-carotenes have on balance less cancer? Well, it might be that when we isolate these things we fail to account for lots of things in them that we are ignorant of'"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Dining with the Dead - "In medieval times, it wasn't unknown for people to devote more than half the value of their entire estate to pay for the food and drink at their own funeral. The hope was that a really good post-burial party would be more likely to encourage your friends, family and neighbours to pray for you when you were gone... [Ghana's] carved out a reputation for hosting some of the continent's most extravagant funerals"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, In Search of Lost Foods - "[On the consequences of the Green Revolution] '3/4 of the total calories consumed in the world are coming from only 12 crops and 5 animal species and you can compare that to the fact that humans have used more than 7,000 species of plants and that there are another 70,000 plants which are known to have edible parts"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Wednesday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "'Many of our trading partners have human rights issues. We don't get progress by shouting from the sidelines, we get progress by engaging and many British investors are making a contribution. They're employing for example Saudi women. We are seeing very real progress in Saudi on a number of issues including women's employment'
'So you would say actually it helps to do business with these countries'
'It helps open up to the outside world, absolutely"

BBC Radio 4 - Today, Iceland: country or grocery shop? - "The Icelandic government up till 4 years ago owned a significant stake in our company. Just as recently as June of this year we worked very closely with the Icelandic FA promoting both our brand and the Icelandic football team. There is a very strong link over the past decade of us working together very closely with the Icelandic government"

BBC Radio 4 - Today, Who is Pieter Brueghel the Younger? - "There're 10 Brueghels who were painters altogether, 10 of them. And the issue is slightly complicated because the father of the Brueghels was the greatest of them all, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, spelled his name with an H in the middle for the first half of his career and then for reasons no one knows... he decided to take the H out of his name. So there's a confusion there. But it was he who was the really great painter. His son Pieter Brueghel the younger was a wonderful painter but his great fame is for doing copies of his father's paintings. But then Pieter Brueghel had another son Jan Brueghel who was much more original and famous for his flower paintings"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Will Trump carry out his campaign promises? - "When I look at your country it's a great example. You know the climate change policies and green initiatives basically put your steel industry out of the market. Two things: one is China dumping steel on the world market. But the other thing is the cost of your electricity today is as I understand it is 90% higher than it used to be. And so you can't afford to have foundries and steel plants"

Listen to Aleppo: Nearly one million living under seige - Omny personal radio - "Some of the surgeons now, everybody talks to me and wants to know whether or not we could get to talk to a surgeon or doctor in Aleppo. But actually the surgeons and the doctors in Aleppo don't want to speak anymore because they feel totally and utterly abandoned and they feel ttat they've almost become a spectator sport so that they tell the situation, how bad it is, but nothing is done to try and help them"

BBC Radio 4 - Today, Lord Hill: 'Choice is stupid or intelligent Brexit' - "We do have, because of the nature of British politics, a much more transactional, rational, economic based
approach to life. And people here, I think, forget that for the Europeans their project is an emotional project, it’s a political project, that actually it’s quite a romantic project. So if we think in the UK that ultimately economic rationalism will win out in terms of the negotiation, that is to misread how the Europeans will approach this negotiation"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Clinton's loss 'not a gender defeat' - "The way she talked about gender was tone deaf. Even in her last speech, I mean, people in America right now have such terrible problems. I can't stress this enough. Our climate is deteriorating, there is no middle class, increasing there are bubbles of rich people and everybody else has terrible lives, people working two jobs and she always phrased it: we can break that last, hardest glass ceiling. Well that's nice if you've got everything else in your life lined up but even if you're a woman and you care about women's issues and you care about women's leadership, you wanna hear her talking about your family and your budget and your pension and your vanishing IRA, or minimum wage job, or unemployment surival...
We're in a time when the only thing, and you're seeing it with the Trump election, the elites will not pay attention to populism, so it's been redirected into racism and xenophobia and what everyone in the world needs to get is that ordinary people are seeing through the agenda of globalisation to take sovereignty away from ordinary people"
Is Naomi Wolf a misogynist?

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Did the rise of 'populism' cost Cameron his job? - "I think the word is meaningless... It doesn't mean anything to me. It's become a euphemism for exploiting the baser instincts of the general public, which is a profoundly patronising way of looking at the general public. But to say that he was defeated by this and he's got to combat it sounds like an old-fashioned aristocrat complaining about the tenants in rebellion. It just is ridiculous. What is happening now, and this is fascinating, is almost all these words are degenerating in our hands. We can't use left and right, we can't use liberal conservative, we can't use globalist and nationalist in their traditional terms anymore because they've become alternative words of abuse and approbation. Depending on what other message you're trying to get across. And I think what's so interesting about politics now is everything is shattered...
Traditionally, you could say well on the right there are conservatives who like the system as it is, on the left there are people who want to change it. Now I find on the whole people on the left want to keep things as they are. They want the traditional mechanisms of the state, the subsidy and so on, to remain in place, because there are groups they are defending. People sort of on the right are now people who are challenging that and feel left behind - this new phrase the left behinders. But all that is really happening is that somewhere the tectonic plates are shifting and we haven't yet found a language to describe it... The word liberalism desperately needs redefining. We know it's a sort of feel-good approach to the world, a general appreciation of other people. We can't express that as a political program anymore because it's become a way of defending interest groups... what's new here is clearly that the loyalties that used to drive politics no longer exist. People who are what we might call members of the working class do not vote Labour anymore, they suddenly vote UKIP. What's going on here?"

Listen to Friday's business with Katie Prescott - Omny personal radio - "In the 1930s, when the world was in similarly dark times, one of the things that averted fascism for example in the United States and in Britain was the strengthening of the labour movement. Giving people, not just a voice on their digital computers but starting to create organisations so that the people who are losing out feel that they have some influence over the rules and they have some influence over what's gonna regulate the lives of their children"

BBC Radio 4 - Today, Victoria series creator reveals queen 'crush' - "She really got on badly with her mother who she felt was trying to use her for power. And I think Albert, you know, it all came together for her and she realised that he was the one for her but she wasn't going to give up any power. And it's interesting. They spend 6 weeks before they get married negotiating this very interesting contract about what he's allowed to have and whether he can have a title and how much money he can have. It's a quite serious pre-nup so there's a lot of quite modern elements to this marriage"

BBC Radio 4 - Today, Does Great British Bake Off help contestants turn pro? - "[Deidre Critchley who started a jam making business then ended it] You can have a hobby and you can be passionate about it, but the reality of running your own business can often take you away from doing those, doing the jam making... my children don't like to eat it as much as they used to"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, 'People feel we're not a united nation anymore' - "'I felt a wave of optimism. It really did feel as if England had won the World Cup. It was that sort of feeling of euphoria. Like oh my gosh, we've done it'
'That for me was the first time in my life in this country that I'd witnessed and been a part of true democracy'
'I felt we were getting control back over over our country. It seemed that we'd lost our way over the last 20, 30 years'
'One voted counted for one towards a total outcome, which never happens'"

New Calais asylum plan would be 'migrant magnet' - BBC News - "I don't think the asylum system was set up on the assumption that there would be hundreds and hundreds of people trying get to Europe and that's what we've faced in the last few years. We've seen in Italy and Greece that it's under massive pressure and that is leading to questions about the whole Schengen border free system in other parts of the EU. We can't be exempt from that. We've actually been
protected by not being in Schengen. And having our island border. But the whole asylum is under huge pressure. Whether it can last in this state, I don't know"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, 'Intrusive medical tests not accurate' - "I spoke to somebody at an asylum centre in the UK recently who said that he's had people with grey hair who all claim to be 17. Not that anyone believes it. They'll do it with a smile on their face, but they it because it takes that little bit longer to sort the case out and the longer people can stay, the less chance there is that they're gonna get removed so we mustn't be naive about this. I mean it's no good that Lily Allen turning up with tears in her eyes and all the rest of it. We need to be quite hard nosed here. People are desperate, I understand that and they will say what they need to say to get in. When I was at the camp at Calais there were caravans up with notices on saying: 'come here, we'll coach you in what to say'...
'If we don't raise this question and we allow ourselves to be carried along on a tide of emotion, Lily Allen style with tears in our eyes, we're not actually going to be able to help the people who need our help. What we're just going to end up doing is very quickly exhausting the well of hospitality that exists in Britain. I mean people in Britain I think want to help children but we don't want to be taken for a free ride either by people who seem to have got to the front of the queue even though they clearly look in some cases a lot older than 18. And there is a test that will determine people's age, it's used across the world. It seems to be perfectly accepted. It was first suggested by a Labour Minister about 10 years ago. And all I'm saying is that that is one of the tools that we could use. I don't accept that it's intrusive to take an X-ray of someone. Someody who's willing to throw themselves onto an electrified rail line or jump into a moving lorry isn't going to be terribly worried about having an X-ray"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, 'Voting won't be about Trump's personality' - "'A clown and a sexist and heavens know what else. That proves he's not fit to be president, many would say?'
'No, I would say the moderators have proved they're not fit to be moderators. Consider this to judge our moderators. We've now had, what is it, 4 1/2 hours of presidential debates across 3 debates. The first question about immigration was asked tonight. Immigration, that is the issue that has shaken this entire election year... No one is voting for Donald Trump because of his personality or his character. As I say: In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome! It's all about his issues. No, it's not like Americans looked around the country and thought: I know, let's run this gauche, loud reality TV star. He was the only one who would talk about these issues and why? It's because the business round table, you know these various business lobbyist groups, they want the cheap labour. It is 100% the issues which is why, I might also add, at the risk of sounding crazy, I don't fully trust the polls right now because we are going to have millions of people voting in this election who haven't voted for 20 years. And you know how do we account these people?... If taking strong positions and resisting brutal, non-stop attacks from every media outlet for more than a year now on positions that will put America first, I think that's a sign of character, and on that issue of character, Trump is head and shoulders above anybody running for President this year"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Thursday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "This could be enormously invigorating for the UK. We are now being forced to focus on 85% of the world economy rather than the 15% which is the European Union. Now when we joined the European Union it was about a third of the world economy. It was very sensible to try and get access to the European Union and the single market, but the world has changed...
'Most people really resist the idea of paying for financial advice, don't they? Because for decades we've had financial advice paid for 'free' because the people selling the stuff paid the advisors'...
'The cost was hidden in commission and somehow it seemed as if it was free. And yet if you think of any other professional financial service, you'd expect to pay an accountant, why wouldn't you pay a financial advisor? What I think has to happen is advice, the cost of providing it needs to be brought down'"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, GCSEs: Why do girls do better than boys? - "This gap opened up when GCSEs replaced O levels. O levels were examined at the end. GCSEs throughout the course with lots of coursework, and girls tend to apply themselves and work harder through the whole course. Boys on the whole... tend to prefer end of course examinations. Now, if I'm right, we'll be able to see this because with the new GCSEs... we're reverting to end of course examinations... I think we fuss too much as a society if different groups achieve different outcomes... [The gap] is not in all subjects of course. Boys are ahead in mathematics and they tend to go on to do the sciences, or mathematics at A level and on to university. And that's thought to be a bigger problem from the point of view of girls. That may just be the way people are"

BBC Radio 4 - Today, Why do we still love the pub quiz? - "The stakes are extremely low in pub quizzes. So if you Google stuff in order to win it, you're sacrificing a lot of self-respect for the sake of 4 pounds. I don't think it's worth it for the vast majority of people...11% of people who do pub quizzes have used their phone. But 27% of people have deliberately and loudly discussed a wrong answer in the hope that another team might be eavesdropping...
What is considered a lucky number in Italy because when written as Roman numerals it forms an anagram of the Latin for 'I have lived'?
The answer is 17

The Acceptability of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece

"For Greenberg the homosexuality of Classical Athens - subject of a definitive study by Kenneth Dover - was transgenerational (in that the lover was older, the beloved little more than a boy without the first growth of a beard); it was based on a differential of power (the lover was older, richer, more experienced. and took the active role; the beloved was younger, without resources, gaining an education, and took the passive role): it was transitional (both parties filled the roles of beloved and lover at different stages); and it was not exclusive (it was indeed "just a stage they were going through", and the lover would frequently have a wife and children at home and in due course the beloved would become an adult citizen and take a wife). This homosexuality — more accurately pederasty — played an institutionalized role in Greek society in the 5th and 4th centuries BC...

However, though 4th-century BC Athens readily accepted this “homosexual” ethos of eromenos and erastes (with evidence provided by the Attic comedies of Aristophanes, by Plato, and by Aeschines’ speech of 346 BC in prosecution of Timarchus), the freedoms were constrained. The eromenos who, voluntarily or due to parental pressure, gave his favours for material gain in overt prostitution lost his place among the citizens and could be arraigned for hubris if he subsequently attempted to act as a citizen by speaking in the assembly or holding reserved ofiice. Similarly. the man or boy who took the passive (receptive) role in anal intercourse (who allowed himself to be penetrated) separated himself from the citizens and was ordered with women, foreigners, and prostitutes. The role of the beautiful yet aloof object of a worthy male citizen's desire was allowed the beardless youth: a coeval relationship between men — more especially if anal intercourse was imputed to it — was not."

--- Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece (ed. Nigel Wilson)


In other words, Ancient Greece was certainly not a gay paradise

Life in what Oxfam calls the Era of "Neoliberalism"

Au delà de tous les sophismes contre... - Corentin de Salle:

"Au delà de tous les sophismes contre l'abominable mondialisation capitaliste et la non moins exécrable financiarisation de l'économie, voici quelques chiffres sur l'état du monde. De quoi faire réfléchir tous ceux qui, quel que soit leur bord, appellent au protectionnisme et à la fermeture des frontières."

Translation: Going beyond all the sophistry about horrible capitalist globalisation and the no less awful financialization of the economy, here are some numbers about the state of the world. Food for thought for all who, regardless of their political leaning, call for protectionism and the closing of borders.


"Life in what Oxfam calls the Era of "Neoliberalism"
Hunger, Poverty, Illiteracy, Child mortality
Sources: Johan Norberg: Progress (Oneworld) - FAO, World Bank, UNESCO, World Bank, EPA"


Addendum:

Poor Thinking from Oxfam

"Oxfam began as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief. It still does valuable disaster relief work today, but it often functions like a political campaigning group...

This year they highlighted Vietnam as a case of deprivation, and it is true that Vietnam is still a very poor country. But it started from a very low base: they only brought in broadly capitalist institutions in 1986. Since then, their income per capita has gone from $100 per annum to $2,000, and continues to grow at stratospheric rates, mirroring the widely-lauded situations in China and, to a lesser extent, India.

China and India are still poor by Western standards, but a report focused on how capitalism was failing them would rightly have been deemed ludicrous – everyone knows how well they’ve done since abandoning full state control of their economies...

Let us suppose that we went even further than Oxfam would like and redistributed the whole of the wealth of the richest people equally throughout the world and throughout the lifetimes of the world population.

Depending on how you do the calculation, you would end up giving everybody a pay rise of between 65p and £1 per year – or about 0.03 per cent for your average Kenyan.

And, at the same time, you would have destroyed the system by which entrepreneurial- led innovation promotes economic growth and which has enriched previously destitute countries in a way that Oxfam could never have imagined back in 1980...

We should stop focusing on the rich as if they are the problem and, instead, focus on the policies which reduce the number of people who are poor"

Links - 20th January 2017

Skipping Saturday’s protests could be the most ethical choice Trump opponents can make - "thanks to the way that we tend to think about our own moral behavior, these public displays of political identity could actually hurt protestors’ long-term goals. The potential harm comes from a phenomenon known as moral self-licensing. When we do something we perceive as good, like attending a protest march, we give ourselves permission to do something bad, like skipping political activities with arguably more consequence. In other words, moral self-licensing can thwart our efforts to make the right ethical choices. “There are times when you should step out and be a hero and this [inaugural protests] isn’t one of them,” Brennan says. “Save your energy and your time and use it when it really matters.” This isn’t a position universally shared among political philosophers."

Vladimir Putin says Donald Trump didn't use prostitutes because he's met so many beautiful women - "Putin said that Trump wasn’t a politician when he visited Moscow in the past and Russian officials weren’t aware that he held any political ambitions. It’s “complete nonsense” to believe that Russian security services “chase after every American billionaire,” he said... Trump is “a grown man, and secondly he’s someone who has been involved with beauty contests for many years and has met the most beautiful women in the world,” Putin said. “I find it hard to believe that he rushed to some hotel to meet girls of loose morals, although ours are undoubtedly the best in the world.”"

The White House Gets Into the Nudge Business - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "the national school lunch program, which offers low-income students free and reduced-price meals at school. And I remember hearing that unfortunately many, many kids who are eligible for free meals at school were actually going hungry every single day because of a burdensome application process. And this was really remarkable to me, right? You don’t think about barriers like application processes as actually deterring kids from being enrolled in programs. But I was excited to hear that the U.S. Department of Agriculture took steps to eliminate the need for an application altogether for those students whose eligibility could be determined through existing administrative data"
Meanwhile in Singapore the process is often designed to humiliate you

Is the Internet Being Ruined? - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "BENKLER: When browsers first came out in the 1990s, the idea was: here is a universal standard for describing what it is you want to say or show and if you use that universal language, then anyone using any device can implement this reader. And essentially what the browsers did was they decentralized power from the operating system. If you were writing for Windows, you needed to write for Windows in this way. If you were writing for Apple, you needed to write for Apple in that way. Once you could write something on the web, you could write to this general purpose reader, the browser, and anything could run. What happened with the app is that you got special-purpose containers, if you will, for every kind of content. So you shifted from a general-purpose platform that’s based on open standards and anyone can write what they want, to a platform that says, “Write a very special program that fits only your data.” It’s a complete transformation...
Apple has been known to reject apps that it finds objectionable:
BENKLER: For example, someone developed a game that essentially criticized the manufacturing conditions and the worker conditions at the Chinese company Foxconn that was putting together the iPhone. That got banned on the App Store and removed from the App Store.
TUFEKCI: There was another app that was blocked that sent out a notification every time a drone had been used to kill people. So, it was a political statement to say, “Look, this is how much we’re using drones to do this.” And the App Store wouldn’t approve this"...
WERTH: And while these may sound like fairly minor examples, Benkler says, consider the deal that Apple made to restrict the use of Skype when it first became available on the iPhone in 2009. At the time, AT&T was the iPhone’s exclusive carrier. And AT&T essentially told its customers, “by the way, we have this rule about Skype”...
TUFEKCI: There’s all these really smart engineers. They’re the brightest computer scientists, and all they’re thinking about is: “How do I keep someone on Facebook for 10 more minutes? What’s the exact combination of things that will keep them staying on the site for as long as possible so we can show them as much advertisement as possible?” And given the amazing, revolutionary, fascinating disruptive potential of the Internet, it really feels like a waste to have this much intelligence and smarts being used to figure out how to keep you clicking on ten more animal videos. Basically Facebook is an environment in which you’re structurally, architecturally encouraged, to be positive and liking things. And that means that most people’s feeds are dominated by happy news"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Meet the Author: Jodi Picoult - "It's really hard to talk about racism without offending people. And honestly, that is what keeps most white people silent on the topic of racism. They're terrified and paralysed by saying the wrong thing. It is far more important for us to talk about this"

BBC World Service - The World This Week, Russia: The Arrest No-one Can Quite Believe - "The interesting thing is that in all the discussion about it, what many people are focusing on is that that's such a small amount of money. People are saying things like $2 million, that's what a city mayor would ask, no a minister, so this is ridiculous. So that shows the peculiar Russian take on things but it also shows the level of doubt. People just don't believe this story as it's presented to them:"

Rationally Speaking: About Sam Harris’ claim that science can answer moral questions - "Harris begins with a rather startling claim: “The separation between science and human values is an illusion,” adding “facts and values seem to belong to different spheres [but] This is quite clearly untrue. Values are a certain kind of facts. They are facts about the well beings of conscious creatures.” This is a frontal assault on what in philosophy is known as the naturalistic fallacy, the idea — introduced by David Hume — that one cannot directly derive values (what ought to be) from facts (what is)... if we let empirical facts decide what is right and what is wrong, then new scientific findings may very well “demonstrate” that things like slavery, corporal punishment, repression of gays, limited freedom of women, and so on, are “better” and therefore more moral than liberal-progressive types such as Harris and myself would be ready to concede. The difference is that I wouldn’t have a problem rejecting such findings — just as I don’t have a problem condemning social Darwinism and eugenics — but Harris would find himself in a bind. Indeed, he seems to be making a categorical mistake: what he calls values are instead empirical facts about how to achieve human wellbeing. But why value individual human wellbeing, or the wellbeing of self-aware organisms, to begin with? Facts are irrelevant to that question."
Another critique of The Moral Landscape

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Burnt - "For acrylamide... the academic researchers who have studied dietary acrylamide that humans are exposed to haven't found strong associations...
The idea that acrylamide is something in food that we could actually reduce and have some control over, that might cause cancer is kind of appealing. And in a way the idea that oh industry could just reduce the acrylamide levels in cold cereal or potato chips and that would make us all healthier is nicer than thinking: oh, we really all need to be eating more fruits and vegetables. We need to be eating less processed food. We probably need just to be eating less overall and exercising more. And all of those things would reduce cancer risk. But those are pretty sweeping things that require people to make changes in their everyday lives. Whereas the idea that there is just one chemical that we could focus attention on and industry could focus attention on is kind of appealing as a way to reduce cancer risk"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Full English Brexit - "95% of the vets working in abattoirs in the UK are actually from the EU. It's very hard to get British vets to do this thing... when British people decide they want to be vets, remember it takes a long time to be a vet. It takes absolutely years. It's not much easier than being a doctor... and most people that do that have an image of them curing the family dog and seeing the looking of happiness on the girl's face. They're not really imagining that they're going to spend their life working in an abattoir watching cows get slaughtered and watching former convicts washing down the carcasses. That's not really what they're aiming for in their career"

What do these kind of feminists actually think... - Madelaine Hanson - "If you’re white, don’t call yourself an intersectional feminist because-
you do not experience the type of oppression that the term was coined to discuss
it has been used by white feminists as a shield to avoid being held accountable for bigoted actions or words
some white feminists fixate on it as a way to separate themselves from other white feminists in order to seem less problematic without putting in actual intersectional work (again, avoiding accountability)
intersectionality is often used without proper credit being given to the creators of the concept (Black women)
claiming it as a white woman erases Black women and pushes away the issue of anti-blackness"
"What do these kind of feminists actually think they achieve in our movement, other than massively pissing people off and creating unnecessary anger, frustration and division?... What they mean is: I'm angry at white women, I don't want them in my feminism. Which is, in itself, gender based racism."
"If you use caps for one ethnicity and lower-case for another in the same sentence, you're probably a racist cunt."

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Italian vote 'big rejection' of the establishment - "'I'm skeptical of the term populism, which increasingly people are using for anything that's just popular. Oh and anything they don't like and want to put scare quotes around. Anti-establishment, I think, certainly. And that is the great mistake that Matteo Renzi made, which was to make a referendum that was on a very specific set of constitutional reform issues on to effectively a referendum on him, the establishment, the established order, even the EU. And every time the public are getting a chance to kick against that established order, they are taking it. And I think, instead of denigrating this trend, one should try harder to understand it. There's a lot of pooh-poohing of it but the public may not be on to nothing. And this is something that mainstream politicians really have to think about... instead of saying that... they're being, their brains are being stolen by crazy politicians and lying media and so on, we should consider that the public have a real concern. In Italy, for instance, with such high youth unemployment, the public have a real concern. When the Eurozone crisis has gone on, crisis after crisis, they have a real concern. When as many people as were in the Calais Jungle... arrive every single day on the Southern Islands in Italy, you know the public have a concern that's justified about immigration. And again and again we see this tendency from the political mainstream, instead of saying ok they are actually on to something, and we're going to do something in response, is either to sort of tweak around the ideas of their rhetoric or to describe the people as being wrong. As populist. As people who've absorbed fake news and so on. This is a big mistake in the long term'...
'It's used much too broadly. And people should really define it very carefully. I think populism is about parties that simply say it's impossible for there to be pluralism and for reconciliation of competing interests in society. They posit a claim that there is a corrupt elite and there's we the people and these two things cannot be reconciled and that they are fundamentally at odds with one another. And in an open society that's a real problem because it means that you can't go for the kinds of compromises and negotiations between interests that are the essence of democracy. So the question is whether political systems can now absorb the new energy coming from new upstart radical parties, some of whom will become part of the establishment in due course, just as the Greens have done in many countries'"

Man in the Netherlands euthanised due to his alcohol addiction - "More than 5,500 people ended their life using Holland’s euthanasia laws last year. One of those who died was a sex abuse victim who suffered severe anorexia, chronic depression and hallucinations. Fiona Bruce, a Conservative MP, told the Daily Mail news of Mr Landedijk's death was "deeply concerning and yet another reason why assisted suicide and euthanasia must never be introduced into the UK". “What someone suffering from alcoholism needs is support and treatment to get better from their addiction – which can be provided – not to be euthanised," she added. “It is once again a troubling sign of how legalised euthanasia undermines in other countries the treatment and help the most vulnerable should receive.”"
What was that about the slippery slope being a fallacy?

Singapore: From Third World to First? - "already by the 1970s, Singaporean GDP per capita actually exceeded that of the UK. But the main point to take away from that graph is that Singapore entered the community of independent states as a prosperous country, at least by the standards of the time. That Singapore has progressed tremendously since independence is true, but not a story of turning the “Third World” into the first. If anything, it is a story of how to escape the middle income trap."

'Power Rangers' Alum Amy Jo Johnson Talks Movie Reboot, Relocating to Canada in Trump Era - "Amy Jo Johnson, who played the Pink Ranger in the original Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers TV series, did move north — only before the U.S. election — to launch herself as a Canadian film director. "I'm happy, I'm really happy here. I actually feel like I've become a nicer person, becoming Canadian," Johnson tells the Hollywood Reporter while attending the Whistler Film Festival. "I have friends here who say, 'We're not the backyard that you can just escape to. I tell them, good thing I did that 10 years ago,'" Johnson says of Toronto in the Trump era. The Power Rangers alum, who moved to Canada a decade ago, insists she crossed the border to leave Hollywood behind. "In my 20s, it was super fun (in Los Angeles). I was wild, and partied a lot. And when I got into my 30s, I started to panic. My mother had died, I was single, I couldn't find the right guy, my biological clock starts ticking""

Are animal ingredients included in white sugar? | Frequently Asked Questions | About PETA | PETA - "Bone char—often referred to as natural carbon—is widely used by the sugar industry as a decolorizing filter, which allows the sugar cane to achieve its desirable white color. Other types of filters involve granular carbon or an ion-exchange system rather than bone char."
Oh no even sugar isn't vegan!

Eviltwin's Blog: Bollywood Veggies & Let's get Naked - "right at the furthest end of the farm just passed the Mr Pee Wee and the Jack-A-Loo eco toilet you get to The Sanctuary. During all my explorations I have come across many strange things I thought I would never see in Singapore but this must be the weirdest. Here it is for all those folks who enjoy an even more intense nature experience. The sign reads "Nudity is welcome in the Sanctuary - Be respectful - No cameras Please""
There is a nudist sanctuary in Singapore at Bollywood Veggies!

Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies - "Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity. On the other hand, we detected only modest genetic differentiation between different current geographic locales within each race/ethnicity group. Thus, ancient geographic ancestry, which is highly correlated with self-identified race/ethnicity—as opposed to current residence—is the major determinant of genetic structure in the U.S. population"
Funny, I thought race was a myth
Addendum: Racial groupings match genetic profiles, study finds
Related: Genetic ancestry highly correlated with ethnic and linguistic groups in Asia
Keywords: Race is a myth,
Ed: This was previously posted in April 2015

Bad Medicine, Part 1: The Story of 98.6 - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "where there is death there is hope, as a cohort of doctors who rubbished it moved into retirement and then death, the opposition disappeared."

Trust Me - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "Putnam found that social capital was relatively low in the U.S. in the early 1900s and rose fairly steadily through the 1960s. But that’s when the decline began.
PUTNAM: I looked hard to find explanations and television, I argued, is really bad for social connectivity for many reasons.
“More television watching,” Putnam wrote, “means less of virtually every form of civic participation and social involvement.”
HALPERN: As Bob sometimes put it, I think, rather elegantly, when we were looking forward in terms of technology or the Internet and of course, even pre-Facebook and so on, would it be, in his words, a “fancy television”? In other words, it will isolate us more and more. Or would it be a “fancy telephone” and would connect us more and more? Because technology has both those capabilities. So when I played video games when I was a kid, you basically did them mostly by yourself or with a friend. When I look at my teenage kids playing videos, they’re actually talking to each other all the time...
We look like we have certain systematic biases about how we estimate whether we think other people can be trusted. And in essence, we overestimate quite systematically the prevalence of bad behavior. We overestimate the number of people who are cheating on their taxes or take a sickie off work or do other kinds of bad things. This doesn’t seem to be just the media, although that may reinforce it. It seems to be a bit how we’re wired as human beings...
If we were talking in America in the 1920s or 1930s, the difference between Irish people and Italian people would have been enormous. I have some friends who got married in the 1960s, he was from an Italian background, she was from an Irish background, and when they got married everybody called it a “mixed” marriage. Parents on both sides all said mixed marriages never work"