READ: WAPO Opinion Piece Proves the NRA Doesn’t Only Exist for “Old, Straight, White Men” - "When offered a job at the NRA, McLaughlin expresses his hesitation.“While I was considering the position, friends urged me to say no because the NRA was homophobic and only existed for old, straight, white men. But I convinced myself that I would be able to leave my sexuality at home and bring my Second Amendment passion to work. I took the job.”After starting his new job, McLaughlin realized how inclusive the NRA is.“Two weeks after I started, at the NRA’s annual meeting in Dallas, Chris W. Cox, executive director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, gave a speech that impressed me. He said, “We fight for you whether you’re black, white, rich, poor, gay or straight, because your life matters equally. You have every right to be proud of it and every right to defend it, and the National Rifle Association is proud to represent you.” McLaughlin writes.“I decided to be open about my sexuality at work. I was met with nonchalance. No one cared. I was embraced as a fellow Second Amendment supporter, just like everyone else. I work with people from all over the United States, from different faiths and of different races. Also, I’m not the only gay person. We are united in our belief that no one can take away our right to defend ourselves.”However, after McLaughlin released his op-ed, he was met with a lot of hostility from the “tolerant left” and took to twitter to express his disappointment.
"Interesting responses to my WaPo piece about being a gay 2A supporter:
The “tolerant” left called me racist, a traitor, ugly, fat, a nazi, a terrorist, homophobic and a disgrace.
Conservatives called me American, a patriot, a gentleman, a trail blazer, and a friend. #EnoughSaid""
The Use Incineration Bottom Ash As Land Reclamation Material - "Incinerationis a common waste treatment process that involves the combustion of municipal solid wastes to produce incineration ashes. More than 80% of these ashes comprise of a heavy fraction known as incineration bottom ash (IBA). IBA has been used in a few countries in road construction, embankments and other civil engineering applications. Another potential use for IBA is in land reclamation. Binding IBA with marine clay with additives produced solid matrices with high physical strength and low environmental impacts. Results showed that heavy metal concentrations within the matrix meet the Dutch criteria for industrial land use."
So much for the moral panic about running out of landfill space in Singapore
Trump Uses Chaos to Get Stuff Done - "the exhausting storms that mark political life in Washington obscure the ruthlessly effective work happening across the federal government."
Canada Declares Climate Emergency, Then Approves Massive Oil Pipeline Expansion - "Only one day after declaring a climate emergency, Canada has approved the expansion of a massive pipeline that will increase oil production in Alberta and release more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere."
Kuroš Taheri-Golværzi - "That face you make when Democrats constantly repeat 'no one is above the law' while refusing to enforce immigration law"
L. on Twitter - "I told my homegirl “I attract fuck boys” She was like “you’re a woman, a pretty woman, you attract everyone. Then, you chose fuck boys” I damn near jumped out the car"
Mike Cernovich on Twitter - "No one talks about the Cambodian Genocide, which is among the worst holocausts as Cambodia never recovered. The reason why the media rarely brings it up? Pol Pot was a left wing communist"
Average internet speed up one year after net neutrality repeal - "Nearly a year after the repeal of net neutrality took effect, the average internet speed in the United States for fixed broadband rose 28% and the country is now ranked No. 7 globally.When the Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal net neutrality in December 2017, average internet download speed was approximately 77 Mbps and the U.S. was ranked No. 12 globally in average speed... Since the repeal took effect on June 11, 2018, average internet download speeds have increased 28% from 93 Mbps to 120 Mbps. "When I became FCC Chairman in January 2017, investment in our nation’s broadband networks had declined for two straight years," FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said in a statement released last week. "So we turned the page on the failed policies of the past and charted a new course. We focused on reducing unnecessary regulatory burdens and cutting red tape that discourages broadband deployment. And we concentrated on updating our rules to match the modern communications marketplace ... The latest evidence reaffirms that our policies are working""
How do Spanish speakers feel about the term 'Latinx,' a gender neutral alternative to 'Latino'? - Quora - "Breaking the binary, as they put it, of the Spanish language is the ultimate measure of disrespect you could possibly do to the language. By attempting to ruin the grammar of their very language, which in many cases is the only thing binding every Latino together, you are showing that you do not care about Spanish. The only thing you care about is imposing an ideology and your dogma on a group of people who never asked for it. Or in other words, cultural imperialism, the very thing these people claim to be fighting against... If you genuinely respect the language and the people who speak this language on a day to day basis, and want to prevent this sort of strong-armed spread of words to cultures and languages who wish to not bear the brunt of a new wave of cultural imperialism, please keep using Latino and Latina. It is the correct way, it is the respectful way, it is the right way."
"Latinx is yet another term recently concocted by Western leftists that nobody in the real world wants or asked for. It’s another way for self-righteous westerners to feel good about themselves by supposedly fighting injustice and trying to include “everybody” by practising newspeak instead of actually doing something to change what they perceive as injustice.Just like cultural appropriation, hardly anyone outside the mainstream Western world (NA+WE+NE) cares... since many American Latinos were never taught in formal Spanish, they do not have the same kind of respect towards the Spanish language that a native Latino would... Latinx is a politically-driven word with no use other than to include an imaginary ultra-minority of third wave feminists. Unfortunately since this vocal minority dominates college campuses, the administrations of universities that are typically made up of pushover non-Hispanic whites (who don't understand the context) tend to follow along and use “latinx” as a way to refer to all Latinos out of respect to this vocal minority."
Why Men Don’t Like Funny Women - "After the students finished writing their quips, a new set of participants rated the captions. They found the men’s punch-lines to be ever-so-slightly more clever—about .11 points more on a five-point scale... In a 2011 study in the journal Intelligence, male participants also penned more amusing captions than women did... Men wrote some of the best jokes, but they also used more profanity and sexual humor, and those jokes weren’t rated very funny... In a later experiment, Mickes gave both male and female participants a list of random words, such as “beef jerky” and “water slide,” and asked them to write paragraphs using the words. Without prompting, the men wrote funny paragraphs. The women’s paragraphs were more creative and better-written, but they weren’t funny. However, a surprising thing happened when Mickes explicitly told the participants to try to be funny in their paragraphs: Both genders used humor, and in equal measure. As in hockey, it appears, so in lols: You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take. The 2011 Intelligence study similarly found that men wrote more captions overall, both funny and lame. In other words, men make more attempts at humor, so they are successful more of the time.“Men are willing to take more risks [in humor], and they also fail more miserably,” Gil Greengross, an evolutionary psychologist with Aberystwyth University in Wales and author of the 2011 study. But for the man, “it's worth it. If you fail and you're not funny, you lost maybe a few minutes. But if the person laughs, the benefit can be huge.”... Funny people are more likely to be smart. (In one of the many New Yorker studies, the students who scored higher on intelligence tests also generated the funniest captions.)... we rely on humor as a proxy for intelligence. On average, women tend to use their laughter to lure in potential mates, while men use their jokes to attract as many women as they can... both genders would say they wanted someone “with a good sense of humor.” It was only when researchers pressed their subjects on what they meant, specifically, by “sense of humor,” that the sex difference became clear. Women want men who will tell jokes; men want women who will laugh at theirs... The neuroscientist Robert Provine once listened in on dozens of spontaneous conversations in public spaces and identified 1,200 distinct “laugh episodes.” He found that women laughed significantly more than men did, especially when a man was nearby... A 2001 study that analyzed casual conversations among young people found that while men told more jokes and more successful jokes in mixed company, women told many more jokes when they were in all-female groups. “Evidently,” the researchers concluded, “women only joke when men are not around.”"
The research seems to suggest that men are funnier than women
FactCheck: do black Americans commit more crime? - "It’s true that around 13 per cent of Americans are black, according to the latest estimates from the US Census Bureau.And yes, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, black offenders committed 52 per cent of homicides recorded in the data between 1980 and 2008. Only 45 per cent of the offenders were white... academics have noted that the proportion of black suspects arrested by the police tends to match closely the proportion of offenders identified as black by victims in the National Crime Victimization Survey.This doesn’t support the idea that the police are unfairly discriminating against the black population when they make arrests."
Racial differences in homicide rates are poorly explained by economics - "a one standard deviation increase in percent black corresponds to a bit more than a one standard deviation increase in the county homicide rate. Controlling for the poverty rate, single-motherhood rate, and racial segregation rate, as we see in model (4), reduces the association with black to about 0.6 SD...
Although the data are somewhat noisy and single-motherhood is quite strongly associated with the black population (r=0.76 at the county level), it seems to me that:
there is a non-linear relationship between single-motherhood and homicide (which may be throwing off the linear model estimates somewhat)
counties with very high rates of single-motherhood have very high homicide rates even with negligible black populations
blacker counties with low-rates of single-motherhood seem to have homicide rates much closer to the national average (the same cannot be said for other covariates)...
Controlling for single-motherhood rates with an unweighted loess regression I find little evidence to suggest that percent black adds much in the way of predictive validity... By now I think it should be pretty clear that the economic conditions of each group are not particularly strong predictors of their victimization rates and that they certainly don’t come close to closing the white-black gap. Even poor “white” counties have homicide rates quite a bit lower than affluent “black” counties with low poverty rates... While blacks are more likely to live in “high-poverty neighborhoods” (>= 40% poor at census-tract level), only about 10% of blacks live in these neighborhoods nationwide... It’s also worth noting that the hispanic poverty concentration is pretty similar to blacks and yet their homicide rates are much lower (even controlling for poverty rates)... black immigrants in the US experience vastly lower rates of incarceration (much closer to the white average). It’s also not likely to be explained well by selection (e.g., cognitive ability, education levels, etc) because we find these differences even controlling for education levels... it’s hard to even grapple with these things productively as a society when we deny basic objective facts and suppress vocal dissent."
Keywords: Single parent, do not predict, single parenthood predicts criminality better than race
The Real Root Causes of Violent Crime: The Breakdown of Marriage, Family, and Community - "State-by-state analysis by Heritage scholars indicates that a 10 percent increase in the percentage of children living in single-parent homes leads typically to a 17 percent increase in juvenile crime.
The rate of violent teenage crime corresponds with the number of families abandoned by fathers.
The type of aggression and hostility demonstrated by a future criminal often is foreshadowed in unusual aggressiveness as early as age five or six...
Neighborhoods with a high degree of religious practice are not high-crime neighborhoods.
Even in high-crime inner-city neighborhoods, well over 90 percent of children from safe, stable homes do not become delinquents. By contrast only 10 percent of children from unsafe, unstable homes in these neighborhoods avoid crime.
Criminals capable of sustaining marriage gradually move away from a life of crime after they get married.
The mother's strong affectionate attachment to her child is the child's best buffer against a life of crime.
The father's authority and involvement in raising his children are also a great buffer against a life of crime...
Since 1965, welfare spending has increased 800 percent in real terms, while the number of major felonies per capita today is roughly three times the rate before 1960. As Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) says, "If social spending stopped crime we would be the safest country in the world... between 1950 and 1974 black income in Philadelphia almost doubled, and homicides more than doubled. Even the Reverend Jesse Jackson, whose prescriptions for social reform mirror conventional liberal ideology, admits that black-on-black homicide is not an issue of poverty. The crime rate in other communities also shows no link between low incomes and crime. The Chinese in San Francisco in the mid- 1960s, for instance, had the lowest family income of any ethnic group (less than $4,000 per year) but next to no crime: only 5 Chinese in all of California were then in prison. There is a widespread belief that race is a major explanatory cause of crime. This belief is anchored in the large disparity in crime rates between whites and blacks. However, a closer look at the data shows that the real variable is not race but family structure... According to the professional literature, the absence of the father is the single most important cause of poverty. The same is true for crime... "A close and intense relationship between a boy and his father prevents hostility and inappropriate aggressiveness."... The dominant role of fathers in preventing delinquency is well-established. Over forty years ago, this phenomenon was highlighted in the classic studies of the causes of delinquency by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck of Harvard University. They described in academic terms what many children hear their mothers so often say: "Wait till your father gets home!"... The benefits a child receives from his relationship with his father are notably different from those derived from his relationship with his mother... "The woman has a contract with the government: She will continue to receive her 'paycheck' as long as she fulfills two conditions: 1) She must not work; and 2) She must not marry an employed male.""
Addendum: Also see: The Impact of Income and Family Structure on Delinquency
CDC: Children do best with two biological parents - "Two biological parents provide the safest environment for a child, according to a study released last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics. The study is the first to look specifically at biological and non-biological parents, rather than married, cohabitating, or same-sex parents.The study found that children are more likely to experience potentially traumatic events, like household violence or a parent’s incarceration, when they live with only one or neither of their biological parents."
L'origine de Bert
Wednesday, August 21, 2019
Sunday, August 18, 2019
Links - 18th August 2019 (2)
Rockets from Batam, statistics and MHA - "One incident that the Singapore government seems to be obsessed with is the alleged rocket plot aimed at Marina Bay Sands in August 2016. I have read repeated reports on this alleged incident in the mainstream media even though the district court in Jakarta had ruled in 2017 that such a plot did not exist... Despite the verdict of the Jakarta court, why does the government continue to mislead the public that there was a rocket plot against Singapore in 2016?... Paragraph 14 is not only baseless, it disrespects the verdict of the Jakarta court. It is telling Indonesia that we will disregard the verdict and will continue to use the alleged incident to instill fear of a terrorist attack in the minds of Singaporeans... Singapore prides itself as having an independent judiciary. Anyone who remotely criticises the judiciary is hauled before the courts under the dreadful Administration of Justice (Protection) Act. Shouldn’t we respect the judiciary of Indonesia by accepting its verdict even if this alleged incident of a rocket plot can no longer be used to instill fear in Singaporeans?"
Anti Social Justice Warriors - Posts - "Fancy Co-Living Spaces Are the Trendy New Way White People Ruin Everything"
"Damn white people and their ***shuffles deck*** ROOMMATES!!!! I seriously wish Vice would just come right out and admit what they really think: the very existence of white people is racist."
Hands-free bubble tea: Viral Japanese trend involves using your chest as a drink holder - "Ever got tired of using your hands to hold your bubble tea?Well, a new trend in Japan provides just the solution, that is if you happen to be blessed in that department... One in particular shared that the great thing about having a big bust was that she could use her laptop and drink iced latte at the same time."
Genetic analysis shows lasting effects of caste system on health of modern Indians - "The earliest Indian residents are believed to have migrated from Africa about 75,000 years ago. Other groups of people also arrived on the subcontinent, from Central Asia and East Asia, and intermarried a great deal.Then, around the year 500 something dramatic happened. The caste system began to show its effects... the caste system began to be enforced much later during the Gupta empire, which ruled northern India between 320 and 550. The empire, also known as Vedic Brahminism, was noted for flourishing economics, art and literature, as well as for its enforcement of ancient moral laws and conduct that all Hindus must follow. These laws included allowing marriage only within each tier of each person’s caste... intermarrying was quite common among all parts of Indian society until 500 AD, when genetic signs of intermixing rather suddenly stopped... Not every group cooperated with the Gupta Empire rules, however. Another study published earlier this year, found that intermarrying was (and is) quite common in some northeastern Indian societies, especially around the Himalayas... endogamous practices have had some effects on health and disease. These aren’t entirely due to castes — many populations in the country were isolated long before the caste system was enacted. But a number of population and region specific diseases exist, including Madras motor neuron disease, Handigodu disease, and pseudocholinesterase deficiency among Vysyas. In addition, a number of Indian ethnic groups have selected for MSTN and DOK5 genes, which affect lipid metabolism and could have an effect on the incidence of type 2 diabetes."
So much for the Indian revisionists who claim caste wasn't a thing till the British
The Puzzle Of Indian IQ: A Country Of Gypsies And Jews - "The question of Indian IQ is a big puzzle. Far trickier than China’s IQ which I think I’ve basically figured out (101-102 today; 106-108 genetic ceiling). The PISA-adjusted IQ of India – as extrapolated from the states of Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh, which are relatively rich and are reputed to have good school systems by Indian standards – is a miserly 75.4... the differences between Indians, and East Asians and Europeans, are huge. India is in fact at the upper level of sub-Saharan African IQ which typically ranges from 65 to 80. There are lots of factors holding India back: Malnutrition (which is on average perhaps worse than in sub-Saharan Africa), vegetarian diets, poor education system, a moderately high rate of consanguineous marriage. But all that said the sheer size of the gap makes me skeptical that all of it is down to environmental factors alone... whereas “China focuses on giving the masses a solid basic education that prepares them for manufacturing jobs” India on the other hand “focuses more on giving outstanding university educations to the meritocratic elite.”"
Myanmar doctor's licence revoked due to bikini Facebook posts - "A Myanmar model and doctor said she would appeal against a medical council decision to revoke her licence for posting photos of herself on Facebook in revealing outfits and bikinis.The Myanmar Medical Council suspended the medical licence of Nang Mwe San in a letter to her dated Jun 3, saying she dressed inappropriately.On her Facebook page, the 28-year-old often posts photos of herself wearing tight dresses, lingerie, swimwear and even traditional Burmese clothing in sexy poses.Mwe San has been a general physician for four years, but stopped practicing two years ago to pursue a modelling career"
Given that Christopher Lee Kwan Chen got suspended for posting stuff online irrelevant to being a doctor too, it would be cultural imperialism and ethnocentrism to criticise the Burmese for having their own standards of proper conduct
Tunnbrödsrulle: The Ultimate Swedish Style Summer Hot Dog - "Anthony Bourdain once said that one particular Swedish street food was, “…the most disgusting thing ever…and I love it.”Tunnbrödsrulle is served at many fast food establishments and snack bars in Sweden, just like any other hot dog you could pick up at your local gas station here in the States. But for those who’ve tried tunnbrödsrulle, they know it’s unlike any other hot dog.Tunnbrödsrulle is comprised of mashed potatoes, sausage or hot dogs, lettuce, shrimp salad, mayonnaise dressing, onions, ketchup and mustard and is served wrapped up in a tortilla or flatbread"
Lucas Lynch - Don't worry. He has a PhD. - Reza Aslan: "Your dad raped your mom."
"Don't worry. He has a PhD."
Differences in exam performance between pupils attending selective and non-selective schools mirror the genetic differences between them - "On average, students attending selective schools outperform their non-selective counterparts in national exams. These differences are often attributed to value added by the school, as well as factors schools use to select pupils, including ability, achievement and, in cases where schools charge tuition fees or are located in affluent areas, socioeconomic status. However, the possible role of DNA differences between students of different schools types has not yet been considered. We used a UK-representative sample of 4814 genotyped students to investigate exam performance at age 16 and genetic differences between students in three school types: state-funded, non-selective schools (‘non-selective’), state-funded, selective schools (‘grammar’) and private schools, which are selective (‘private’). We created a genome-wide polygenic score (GPS) derived from a genome-wide association study of years of education (EduYears). We found substantial mean genetic differences between students of different school types: students in non-selective schools had lower EduYears GPS compared to those in grammar (d = 0.41) and private schools (d = 0.37). Three times as many students in the top EduYears GPS decile went to a selective school compared to the bottom decile. These results were mirrored in the exam differences between school types. However, once we controlled for factors involved in pupil selection, there were no significant genetic differences between school types, and the variance in exam scores at age 16 explained by school type dropped from 7% to <1%. These results show that genetic and exam differences between school types are primarily due to the heritable characteristics involved in pupil admission."
So much for the 'myth' of meritocracy
Antisemitic Violence in Europe, 2005-2015: Exposure and Perpetrators in France, UK, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Russia - "Available data on perpetrators suggest that individuals of Muslim background stand out among perpetrators of antisemitic violence in Western Europe,but not in Russia, where right-wing extremist offenders dominate. Attitude surveys corroborate this picture in so far as antisemitic attitudes are far more widespread among Muslims than among the general population in Western Europe."
Dutch Prof Warns No Western Society Has Managed to Fully Integrate Muslims - "Based on his 20-year-long studies on integration and assimilation, Ruud Koopmans, a professor of sociology at Humboldt University in Berlin, has arrived at the conclusion that Muslims are more difficult to integrate than other immigrant groups.Professor Ruud Koopmans suggested than no Western country has managed to successfully integrate Muslims. In an interview with the Danish newspaper Berlingske, he stressed that despite individual pattern breakers, the overall picture and the general trend are discouraging... Muslims consider themselves separate from other non-Muslim groups, and refrain from broader interaction with those outside their religion. For instance, almost 60 percent of the Muslims surveyed rejected the idea of maintaining friendships with homosexuals, and 45 percent said the same thing about Jews. According to Koopmans, the fundamentalist interpretation of the Quran, which is prevalent among Muslims, prevents them from being integrated into Western countries. According to Koopmans' studies, up to 50 percent of Muslims in Europe hold fundamentalist beliefs. By contrast, the proportion of fundamentalists among Christians is much lower, at less than 4 percent. In his new book, "The Decrepit House of Islam", Koopmans paints a rather gloomy picture of the Muslim world; one marked by growing fundamentalism and sectarian conflicts. He concluded that when it comes to democracy, human rights, and political and economic development, the 47 Muslim-majority countries are worse off... attributing this to conservative views on the role of women, low investment into children's education and fundamentalist propaganda... [They] basically claims that the Quran and the Sunna must be taken literally, and that the way the Prophet lived in the 7th century must be the yardstick for how Muslims should live in the 21st century," Koopmans concluded. "Such a brand of Islam is, firstly, a threat to world peace. Secondly, it prevents integration.""
Fundamentalism and out-group hostility: Muslim immigrants and Christian natives in Western Europe - "Almost 60 per cent agree that Muslims should return to the roots of Islam, 75 per cent think there is only one interpretation of the Koran possible to which every Muslim should stick and 65 per cent saythat religious rules are more important to them than the laws of the country in which they live. Consistent fundamentalist beliefs,with agreement to all three statements, are found among 44 per cent of the interviewed Muslim... Against the idea that fundamentalism is a reaction to exclusion by the host society, we find the lowest levels of fundamentalism in Germany, where Muslims enjoy fewer religious rights than in any of the other five countries... Because the demographic and socio-economic profiles of Muslim immigrants and native Christians differ strongly, and since it is known from the literature that marginalized, lower-class individuals are more strongly attracted to fundamentalist movements, it would of course be possible that these differences are due to class rather than religion. However, the results of regression analyses controlling for education, labour market status, age, gender, and marital status reveal that while some of these variables explain variation in fundamentalism within both religious groups, they do not at all explain or even diminish the difference between Muslims and Christians. A cause for concern is that while among Christians religious fundamentalism is much less widespread among younger people, fundamentalist attitudes areas widespread among young as among older Muslims... While about one in five natives can be considered as Islamophobic, the level of phobia against the West among Muslims – for which oddly enough there is no word; one might callit “Occidentophobia” – is much higher still, with 54 per cent believing that the West is out to destroy Islam. These findings concord with the fact that, as a 2006 study of the Pew research institute showed, about half of the Muslims living in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom believe in the conspiracy theory that the attacks of 9/11 were not carried out by Muslims, but were orchestrated by the West and/or Jews... These findings clearly contradict the often-heard claim that Islamic religious fundamentalismis a marginal phenomenon in Western Europe or that it does not differ from the extent offundamentalism among the Christian majority. Both claims are blatantly false"
Anti Social Justice Warriors - Posts - "Fancy Co-Living Spaces Are the Trendy New Way White People Ruin Everything"
"Damn white people and their ***shuffles deck*** ROOMMATES!!!! I seriously wish Vice would just come right out and admit what they really think: the very existence of white people is racist."
Hands-free bubble tea: Viral Japanese trend involves using your chest as a drink holder - "Ever got tired of using your hands to hold your bubble tea?Well, a new trend in Japan provides just the solution, that is if you happen to be blessed in that department... One in particular shared that the great thing about having a big bust was that she could use her laptop and drink iced latte at the same time."
Genetic analysis shows lasting effects of caste system on health of modern Indians - "The earliest Indian residents are believed to have migrated from Africa about 75,000 years ago. Other groups of people also arrived on the subcontinent, from Central Asia and East Asia, and intermarried a great deal.Then, around the year 500 something dramatic happened. The caste system began to show its effects... the caste system began to be enforced much later during the Gupta empire, which ruled northern India between 320 and 550. The empire, also known as Vedic Brahminism, was noted for flourishing economics, art and literature, as well as for its enforcement of ancient moral laws and conduct that all Hindus must follow. These laws included allowing marriage only within each tier of each person’s caste... intermarrying was quite common among all parts of Indian society until 500 AD, when genetic signs of intermixing rather suddenly stopped... Not every group cooperated with the Gupta Empire rules, however. Another study published earlier this year, found that intermarrying was (and is) quite common in some northeastern Indian societies, especially around the Himalayas... endogamous practices have had some effects on health and disease. These aren’t entirely due to castes — many populations in the country were isolated long before the caste system was enacted. But a number of population and region specific diseases exist, including Madras motor neuron disease, Handigodu disease, and pseudocholinesterase deficiency among Vysyas. In addition, a number of Indian ethnic groups have selected for MSTN and DOK5 genes, which affect lipid metabolism and could have an effect on the incidence of type 2 diabetes."
So much for the Indian revisionists who claim caste wasn't a thing till the British
The Puzzle Of Indian IQ: A Country Of Gypsies And Jews - "The question of Indian IQ is a big puzzle. Far trickier than China’s IQ which I think I’ve basically figured out (101-102 today; 106-108 genetic ceiling). The PISA-adjusted IQ of India – as extrapolated from the states of Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh, which are relatively rich and are reputed to have good school systems by Indian standards – is a miserly 75.4... the differences between Indians, and East Asians and Europeans, are huge. India is in fact at the upper level of sub-Saharan African IQ which typically ranges from 65 to 80. There are lots of factors holding India back: Malnutrition (which is on average perhaps worse than in sub-Saharan Africa), vegetarian diets, poor education system, a moderately high rate of consanguineous marriage. But all that said the sheer size of the gap makes me skeptical that all of it is down to environmental factors alone... whereas “China focuses on giving the masses a solid basic education that prepares them for manufacturing jobs” India on the other hand “focuses more on giving outstanding university educations to the meritocratic elite.”"
Myanmar doctor's licence revoked due to bikini Facebook posts - "A Myanmar model and doctor said she would appeal against a medical council decision to revoke her licence for posting photos of herself on Facebook in revealing outfits and bikinis.The Myanmar Medical Council suspended the medical licence of Nang Mwe San in a letter to her dated Jun 3, saying she dressed inappropriately.On her Facebook page, the 28-year-old often posts photos of herself wearing tight dresses, lingerie, swimwear and even traditional Burmese clothing in sexy poses.Mwe San has been a general physician for four years, but stopped practicing two years ago to pursue a modelling career"
Given that Christopher Lee Kwan Chen got suspended for posting stuff online irrelevant to being a doctor too, it would be cultural imperialism and ethnocentrism to criticise the Burmese for having their own standards of proper conduct
Tunnbrödsrulle: The Ultimate Swedish Style Summer Hot Dog - "Anthony Bourdain once said that one particular Swedish street food was, “…the most disgusting thing ever…and I love it.”Tunnbrödsrulle is served at many fast food establishments and snack bars in Sweden, just like any other hot dog you could pick up at your local gas station here in the States. But for those who’ve tried tunnbrödsrulle, they know it’s unlike any other hot dog.Tunnbrödsrulle is comprised of mashed potatoes, sausage or hot dogs, lettuce, shrimp salad, mayonnaise dressing, onions, ketchup and mustard and is served wrapped up in a tortilla or flatbread"
Lucas Lynch - Don't worry. He has a PhD. - Reza Aslan: "Your dad raped your mom."
"Don't worry. He has a PhD."
Differences in exam performance between pupils attending selective and non-selective schools mirror the genetic differences between them - "On average, students attending selective schools outperform their non-selective counterparts in national exams. These differences are often attributed to value added by the school, as well as factors schools use to select pupils, including ability, achievement and, in cases where schools charge tuition fees or are located in affluent areas, socioeconomic status. However, the possible role of DNA differences between students of different schools types has not yet been considered. We used a UK-representative sample of 4814 genotyped students to investigate exam performance at age 16 and genetic differences between students in three school types: state-funded, non-selective schools (‘non-selective’), state-funded, selective schools (‘grammar’) and private schools, which are selective (‘private’). We created a genome-wide polygenic score (GPS) derived from a genome-wide association study of years of education (EduYears). We found substantial mean genetic differences between students of different school types: students in non-selective schools had lower EduYears GPS compared to those in grammar (d = 0.41) and private schools (d = 0.37). Three times as many students in the top EduYears GPS decile went to a selective school compared to the bottom decile. These results were mirrored in the exam differences between school types. However, once we controlled for factors involved in pupil selection, there were no significant genetic differences between school types, and the variance in exam scores at age 16 explained by school type dropped from 7% to <1%. These results show that genetic and exam differences between school types are primarily due to the heritable characteristics involved in pupil admission."
So much for the 'myth' of meritocracy
Antisemitic Violence in Europe, 2005-2015: Exposure and Perpetrators in France, UK, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Russia - "Available data on perpetrators suggest that individuals of Muslim background stand out among perpetrators of antisemitic violence in Western Europe,but not in Russia, where right-wing extremist offenders dominate. Attitude surveys corroborate this picture in so far as antisemitic attitudes are far more widespread among Muslims than among the general population in Western Europe."
Dutch Prof Warns No Western Society Has Managed to Fully Integrate Muslims - "Based on his 20-year-long studies on integration and assimilation, Ruud Koopmans, a professor of sociology at Humboldt University in Berlin, has arrived at the conclusion that Muslims are more difficult to integrate than other immigrant groups.Professor Ruud Koopmans suggested than no Western country has managed to successfully integrate Muslims. In an interview with the Danish newspaper Berlingske, he stressed that despite individual pattern breakers, the overall picture and the general trend are discouraging... Muslims consider themselves separate from other non-Muslim groups, and refrain from broader interaction with those outside their religion. For instance, almost 60 percent of the Muslims surveyed rejected the idea of maintaining friendships with homosexuals, and 45 percent said the same thing about Jews. According to Koopmans, the fundamentalist interpretation of the Quran, which is prevalent among Muslims, prevents them from being integrated into Western countries. According to Koopmans' studies, up to 50 percent of Muslims in Europe hold fundamentalist beliefs. By contrast, the proportion of fundamentalists among Christians is much lower, at less than 4 percent. In his new book, "The Decrepit House of Islam", Koopmans paints a rather gloomy picture of the Muslim world; one marked by growing fundamentalism and sectarian conflicts. He concluded that when it comes to democracy, human rights, and political and economic development, the 47 Muslim-majority countries are worse off... attributing this to conservative views on the role of women, low investment into children's education and fundamentalist propaganda... [They] basically claims that the Quran and the Sunna must be taken literally, and that the way the Prophet lived in the 7th century must be the yardstick for how Muslims should live in the 21st century," Koopmans concluded. "Such a brand of Islam is, firstly, a threat to world peace. Secondly, it prevents integration.""
Fundamentalism and out-group hostility: Muslim immigrants and Christian natives in Western Europe - "Almost 60 per cent agree that Muslims should return to the roots of Islam, 75 per cent think there is only one interpretation of the Koran possible to which every Muslim should stick and 65 per cent saythat religious rules are more important to them than the laws of the country in which they live. Consistent fundamentalist beliefs,with agreement to all three statements, are found among 44 per cent of the interviewed Muslim... Against the idea that fundamentalism is a reaction to exclusion by the host society, we find the lowest levels of fundamentalism in Germany, where Muslims enjoy fewer religious rights than in any of the other five countries... Because the demographic and socio-economic profiles of Muslim immigrants and native Christians differ strongly, and since it is known from the literature that marginalized, lower-class individuals are more strongly attracted to fundamentalist movements, it would of course be possible that these differences are due to class rather than religion. However, the results of regression analyses controlling for education, labour market status, age, gender, and marital status reveal that while some of these variables explain variation in fundamentalism within both religious groups, they do not at all explain or even diminish the difference between Muslims and Christians. A cause for concern is that while among Christians religious fundamentalism is much less widespread among younger people, fundamentalist attitudes areas widespread among young as among older Muslims... While about one in five natives can be considered as Islamophobic, the level of phobia against the West among Muslims – for which oddly enough there is no word; one might callit “Occidentophobia” – is much higher still, with 54 per cent believing that the West is out to destroy Islam. These findings concord with the fact that, as a 2006 study of the Pew research institute showed, about half of the Muslims living in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom believe in the conspiracy theory that the attacks of 9/11 were not carried out by Muslims, but were orchestrated by the West and/or Jews... These findings clearly contradict the often-heard claim that Islamic religious fundamentalismis a marginal phenomenon in Western Europe or that it does not differ from the extent offundamentalism among the Christian majority. Both claims are blatantly false"
Post ID: 3462857489532244063
The History of Singapore: Living in a Time of Deception
Episode 23: Living in a Time of Deception
"Poh Soo Kai (PSK) on his memoir's title: The left wing was deceived. Kuan Yew presented himself... pro-forma as an anti-colonialist. When in fact he was fighting the left and working with the British...
PJ Thum (PJ) on the British Archives : When you were going through the material, was there anything which really shocked you or surprised you or just jumped out at you...
PSK: I was very shocked. First I went there to find out what were the real reasons for my arrest. Was it security? I know it wasn't security but I wanted to know what they write, and the archives showed it wasn't security but political. We were arrested on political grounds. In fact Moore the acting high commissioner, PBC Moore wrote that "if it was security we should arrest them straight away"... it's because we were political opponents and he, the British admitted that we were the strongest political force in Singapore at that time. And so we had to be smashed. We had to be crippled...
The greatest shock came when first I found that Lee Kuan Yew was like, you take Clause 30. Where detainees were not allowed to take part in the 1959 Rendel Constitution election... we all thought at that time that it was the British who insisted on that clause. But when I read the archives, I was shocked because it was Kuan Yew who initiated the clause and who persuaded the British to introduce it. And told the British that you introduce it, you bear the blame. But I am going to oppose. I can't believe the deception, the depth of deception. And in the Tanjong Pagar by-election he went to the extent to tell the electorate look if you vote for me I will have that clause which was introduced by him, suggested by him removed...
'When Lim Yew Hock wanted to spill the beans when he felt that Lee Kuan Yew was attacking him unfairly'
'On the Chew Swee Kee case. He said in the assembly: you play dirty, I play dirty'
'And of course, this is all in the government hansard of course. When Lee Kuan Yew realises what is going to come out of Lim Yew Hock's mouth, he jumps up and says "That's a dirty lie".'
'And technically he's correct. Because Lim Yew Hock said he and Lim Yew Hock both saw the colonial secretary together. But it wasn’t so. The colonial secretary was careful to see each of them separately. So it was a lie. Technically a lie'...
[On being detained and getting newspapers] ‘Why black out the economic news?’
‘I don’t know. I mean why don't they allow me to read Barisan newspaper? It's published legally. I asked for it they say no, we can’t let you have it. Unless you apply personally to the director. So I did apply. And he says, no no, he says Dr. Poh, I permit you to read this paper, that issue because you are not a communist. And the letter was sent by his department through the prison to me… I had the letter with me but during my second arrest, it disappeared.’
‘So you had in writing at one point that you weren't a communist. So then did you respond well if I'm not communist why am I here? Why am I locked up?’
‘They said you’re pro-communist’...
‘In British hongs, British firms, if they employ a British officer and he comes down to Singapore, he falls in love with a local girl, he can't get married. He can’t. If he gets married they send him back, sacked.’
‘And what happens to the local girl?’
‘He can only keep her as a mistress. And they all do that’"
"Poh Soo Kai (PSK) on his memoir's title: The left wing was deceived. Kuan Yew presented himself... pro-forma as an anti-colonialist. When in fact he was fighting the left and working with the British...
PJ Thum (PJ) on the British Archives : When you were going through the material, was there anything which really shocked you or surprised you or just jumped out at you...
PSK: I was very shocked. First I went there to find out what were the real reasons for my arrest. Was it security? I know it wasn't security but I wanted to know what they write, and the archives showed it wasn't security but political. We were arrested on political grounds. In fact Moore the acting high commissioner, PBC Moore wrote that "if it was security we should arrest them straight away"... it's because we were political opponents and he, the British admitted that we were the strongest political force in Singapore at that time. And so we had to be smashed. We had to be crippled...
The greatest shock came when first I found that Lee Kuan Yew was like, you take Clause 30. Where detainees were not allowed to take part in the 1959 Rendel Constitution election... we all thought at that time that it was the British who insisted on that clause. But when I read the archives, I was shocked because it was Kuan Yew who initiated the clause and who persuaded the British to introduce it. And told the British that you introduce it, you bear the blame. But I am going to oppose. I can't believe the deception, the depth of deception. And in the Tanjong Pagar by-election he went to the extent to tell the electorate look if you vote for me I will have that clause which was introduced by him, suggested by him removed...
'When Lim Yew Hock wanted to spill the beans when he felt that Lee Kuan Yew was attacking him unfairly'
'On the Chew Swee Kee case. He said in the assembly: you play dirty, I play dirty'
'And of course, this is all in the government hansard of course. When Lee Kuan Yew realises what is going to come out of Lim Yew Hock's mouth, he jumps up and says "That's a dirty lie".'
'And technically he's correct. Because Lim Yew Hock said he and Lim Yew Hock both saw the colonial secretary together. But it wasn’t so. The colonial secretary was careful to see each of them separately. So it was a lie. Technically a lie'...
[On being detained and getting newspapers] ‘Why black out the economic news?’
‘I don’t know. I mean why don't they allow me to read Barisan newspaper? It's published legally. I asked for it they say no, we can’t let you have it. Unless you apply personally to the director. So I did apply. And he says, no no, he says Dr. Poh, I permit you to read this paper, that issue because you are not a communist. And the letter was sent by his department through the prison to me… I had the letter with me but during my second arrest, it disappeared.’
‘So you had in writing at one point that you weren't a communist. So then did you respond well if I'm not communist why am I here? Why am I locked up?’
‘They said you’re pro-communist’...
‘In British hongs, British firms, if they employ a British officer and he comes down to Singapore, he falls in love with a local girl, he can't get married. He can’t. If he gets married they send him back, sacked.’
‘And what happens to the local girl?’
‘He can only keep her as a mistress. And they all do that’"
Post ID: 5758490537219895801
Links - 18th August 2019 (1) (Oberlin)
Gibson’s Bakery awarded more than $11 million in years-long legal battle with Oberlin College - "Gibson’s Bakery won more than $11 million from Oberlin College Friday in a lawsuit stemming from protests outside the College Street business in November 2016.The bakery sued the liberal arts college and Vice President and Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo after a robbery at the bakery.Three black Oberlin students were arrested after one tried to use a fake ID and shoplifted... After the students were arrested, student protests erupted, claiming that the robbery charge and physical conflict were racially motivated. Protestors urged patrons to shop elsewhere... The students pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in August 2017, reading statements into the record that Gibson was within his rights to detain the robber and that the conflict was not racially motivated... Raimondo handed out flyers calling Gibson’s racist and spoke into a bullhorn at the protests. The suit also said other professors participated. A member of the Gibson’s Bakery legal team said the jury found:
Oberlin College and Raimondo liable for defamation
Oberlin College liable for infliction of intentional emotional distress
Raimondo liable for intentional interference of business relationships"
Punitive Damage Award Makes Oberlin Verdict More Meaningful - "Given the prevalence of malice and falsehood in modern outrage mobs, the culture was ripe for a case like the Oberlin trial, and the plaintiff’s attorneys have drawn the blueprints for copycat litigation... employees and administrators helped publish and distribute the false flyer, including by disseminating it to the media. The college also suspended its business relationship with the bakery.Anyone who’s spent any time dealing with campus controversies knows that activist administrators often help, support, and even direct the activities of radical students. Some administrators seem to view campus activism as part of the educational process itself, a rite of passage that helps prepare them for a lifetime of political engagement. In my litigation days, I’ve seen multiple instances where administrators help activists formulate messages, plan protests, and provide university resources to favored activists. When activists are engaged in constitutionally protected speech, there is absolutely no legal problem with this kind of university engagement. When, however, student activists are spreading outright lies and violating the law, university engagement becomes extraordinarily risky.Second, the size of the jury award will create a legal market for litigation. There’s a relatively simple reason why campus free-speech codes proliferated well before there was a concerted legal counterattack — money. It takes money to sue universities, and First Amendment cases simply don’t yield eye-popping jury awards. It took the creation of large networks of nonprofit, pro-bono lawyers to turn the free-speech tide on campus. Common-law torts are different. Plaintiffs can receive real compensation, and universities have deep pockets. In a radio interview yesterday, I compared the verdict to the kind of sound that causes prairie dogs to stand alert — suddenly, lawyers are paying attention... Critics are already decrying the “chilling effect” of the Oberlin verdict. To the extent that the verdict causes activist administrators to pause and consider the underlying veracity and merit of the public campaigns they’re asked to join, then this is one chilling effect that may well do some good"
Oberlin College ordered to post $36 million bond to delay Gibson's Bakery collection of Judgment - "“there is serious concern about [Oberlin College’s] ability to pay this sizeable judgment three years from now”. Gibson’s Bakery devoted much of its opposition to arguing for a bond on the basis that Oberlin College was in poor financial shape
Get woke, go broke
WATCH: Oberlin College accused of trying to wait out bakery owner’s cancer death
WORSE THAN YOU THINK: There’s More To The Oberlin Story Than Previously Reported - "Protesters didn’t just remain outside making their false accusations. Some students actually entered the bakery and harassed customers. Lorna Gibson, wife of David Gibson (son of owner Allyn Gibson), testified that students entered the bakery “and began taking pictures of people and making nasty comments to our customers shopping.” Lorna said she asked the students to leave and they refused, “and then they started pushing their cameras in my face and yelling things at me.”She said students blocked customers from moving about the aisles. Lorna also testified the store employees had their tires slashed."
Oberlin and the price of wokeness - "When a faculty member in the theatre department wrote to a local paper, criticising the Oberlin campaign, Raimondo said in an email to her fellow administrators: ‘Fuck him. I’d say unleash the students if I wasn’t convinced this needs to be put behind us.’ She clearly saw the students as her own army she could deploy when she wanted. But, on other occasions, it appeared that the administration was deferring to the students, raising the question of whether there were any adults in charge... The administration seemed to live in fear of the students. In a telling moment in the trial, Ferdinand Protzman, chief of staff for administration, testified that the administration cut ties with the bakery because they feared students would create a ‘tantrum’ on campus, especially in the cafeteria during dinner. Specifically, they imagined angry students might throw Gibson’s food on the floor of the cafeteria and stomp on it. ‘Doesn’t that sound more like a nursery school than a college?’, Gibson’s lawyer asked. ‘Nursery school students do throw food on the floor, yes’, replied Protzman... The Oberlin case reveals more than the usual story of a few campus crazies getting out of control. For a start, it shows how the social-justice agenda has been institutionalised now, taking the place of the traditional intellectual mission. Administrators play a facilitating if not leading role in setting this agenda, including helping with protests to prove they mean it. Across the US, colleges have developed bloated bureaucracies over the past two decades, with spending on administrators increasing at twice the rate of spending on teachers (and adjuncts replacing full-time professors). These officials dominate student life, setting the rules for everything from freshmen orientation to ‘microaggression’ guidelines and kangaroo courts to handle sexual-assault accusations. More importantly, the Oberlin case has shone a light on how the culture in colleges has become deeply corrupted. Courtroom details showed how Oberlin’s pursuit of wokeness had left it devoid of a moral compass. An example is how the administration could not bring itself to condemn shoplifting... Shoplifting among students is already outrageously bad: Oberlin town police reported that 83 per cent of shoplifting arrests were Oberlin students. A 2017 article in Oberlin’s magazine discussed the school’s ‘Culture of Theft’, almost as if it was a fun rite of passage. One bookstore owner said she loses $10,000 a year in stolen goods to students. The article’s author himself admitted he shoplifted from the storeowners he interviewed. This is really sick: here are some of the wealthiest students in the country getting their kicks off from stealing from the poor townies. Clearly, the moral rot runs deep in this institution."
Oberlin College and Raimondo liable for defamation
Oberlin College liable for infliction of intentional emotional distress
Raimondo liable for intentional interference of business relationships"
Punitive Damage Award Makes Oberlin Verdict More Meaningful - "Given the prevalence of malice and falsehood in modern outrage mobs, the culture was ripe for a case like the Oberlin trial, and the plaintiff’s attorneys have drawn the blueprints for copycat litigation... employees and administrators helped publish and distribute the false flyer, including by disseminating it to the media. The college also suspended its business relationship with the bakery.Anyone who’s spent any time dealing with campus controversies knows that activist administrators often help, support, and even direct the activities of radical students. Some administrators seem to view campus activism as part of the educational process itself, a rite of passage that helps prepare them for a lifetime of political engagement. In my litigation days, I’ve seen multiple instances where administrators help activists formulate messages, plan protests, and provide university resources to favored activists. When activists are engaged in constitutionally protected speech, there is absolutely no legal problem with this kind of university engagement. When, however, student activists are spreading outright lies and violating the law, university engagement becomes extraordinarily risky.Second, the size of the jury award will create a legal market for litigation. There’s a relatively simple reason why campus free-speech codes proliferated well before there was a concerted legal counterattack — money. It takes money to sue universities, and First Amendment cases simply don’t yield eye-popping jury awards. It took the creation of large networks of nonprofit, pro-bono lawyers to turn the free-speech tide on campus. Common-law torts are different. Plaintiffs can receive real compensation, and universities have deep pockets. In a radio interview yesterday, I compared the verdict to the kind of sound that causes prairie dogs to stand alert — suddenly, lawyers are paying attention... Critics are already decrying the “chilling effect” of the Oberlin verdict. To the extent that the verdict causes activist administrators to pause and consider the underlying veracity and merit of the public campaigns they’re asked to join, then this is one chilling effect that may well do some good"
Oberlin College ordered to post $36 million bond to delay Gibson's Bakery collection of Judgment - "“there is serious concern about [Oberlin College’s] ability to pay this sizeable judgment three years from now”. Gibson’s Bakery devoted much of its opposition to arguing for a bond on the basis that Oberlin College was in poor financial shape
Get woke, go broke
WATCH: Oberlin College accused of trying to wait out bakery owner’s cancer death
WORSE THAN YOU THINK: There’s More To The Oberlin Story Than Previously Reported - "Protesters didn’t just remain outside making their false accusations. Some students actually entered the bakery and harassed customers. Lorna Gibson, wife of David Gibson (son of owner Allyn Gibson), testified that students entered the bakery “and began taking pictures of people and making nasty comments to our customers shopping.” Lorna said she asked the students to leave and they refused, “and then they started pushing their cameras in my face and yelling things at me.”She said students blocked customers from moving about the aisles. Lorna also testified the store employees had their tires slashed."
Oberlin and the price of wokeness - "When a faculty member in the theatre department wrote to a local paper, criticising the Oberlin campaign, Raimondo said in an email to her fellow administrators: ‘Fuck him. I’d say unleash the students if I wasn’t convinced this needs to be put behind us.’ She clearly saw the students as her own army she could deploy when she wanted. But, on other occasions, it appeared that the administration was deferring to the students, raising the question of whether there were any adults in charge... The administration seemed to live in fear of the students. In a telling moment in the trial, Ferdinand Protzman, chief of staff for administration, testified that the administration cut ties with the bakery because they feared students would create a ‘tantrum’ on campus, especially in the cafeteria during dinner. Specifically, they imagined angry students might throw Gibson’s food on the floor of the cafeteria and stomp on it. ‘Doesn’t that sound more like a nursery school than a college?’, Gibson’s lawyer asked. ‘Nursery school students do throw food on the floor, yes’, replied Protzman... The Oberlin case reveals more than the usual story of a few campus crazies getting out of control. For a start, it shows how the social-justice agenda has been institutionalised now, taking the place of the traditional intellectual mission. Administrators play a facilitating if not leading role in setting this agenda, including helping with protests to prove they mean it. Across the US, colleges have developed bloated bureaucracies over the past two decades, with spending on administrators increasing at twice the rate of spending on teachers (and adjuncts replacing full-time professors). These officials dominate student life, setting the rules for everything from freshmen orientation to ‘microaggression’ guidelines and kangaroo courts to handle sexual-assault accusations. More importantly, the Oberlin case has shone a light on how the culture in colleges has become deeply corrupted. Courtroom details showed how Oberlin’s pursuit of wokeness had left it devoid of a moral compass. An example is how the administration could not bring itself to condemn shoplifting... Shoplifting among students is already outrageously bad: Oberlin town police reported that 83 per cent of shoplifting arrests were Oberlin students. A 2017 article in Oberlin’s magazine discussed the school’s ‘Culture of Theft’, almost as if it was a fun rite of passage. One bookstore owner said she loses $10,000 a year in stolen goods to students. The article’s author himself admitted he shoplifted from the storeowners he interviewed. This is really sick: here are some of the wealthiest students in the country getting their kicks off from stealing from the poor townies. Clearly, the moral rot runs deep in this institution."
Post ID: 8606560649752541932
Friday, August 16, 2019
Links - 16th August 2019 (2)
Smartphones aren’t making millennials grow horns. Here’s how to spot a bad study - "This story became popular in part due to the nature of the modern media landscape, specifically how news organizations re-report stories, and how quickly stories steeped in moral panic are shared on social media. And recent research tells us that it is difficult, if not impossible, to correct a viral story once it has invaded the zeitgeist.
Jihadism has been an abject failure, but what does Western success look like? - "We now appear to be stuck in a holding pattern: jihadists cannot defeat us, but they will not give up; we can mitigate the jihadist threat, but we cannot eradicate it. It is a story of jihadist failure offset by mixed Western success.The truth is that we have probably reached the maximum point of threat-mitigation. Any improvements from here are likely to be at the margins, or adjustments to meet jihadist innovation... The appropriate analogy here is crime. No government pretends to be able to eradicate crime and no citizen expects it to. Success in the fight against crime is judged by the extent to which its harms are minimised, the operations of criminals constrained, and dangerous offenders removed from the community"
Manfred Man - My reply to this Canadian who wants to teach... - "My reply to this Canadian who wants to teach Singaporean how to be grateful.
Dear Mr Eric Brooks,
The reason why Singapore is what it is today, is because Singaporeans are always complaining and always pushing the govt to keep improving.... Afterall, they are the highest paid govt in the world, hence... when you have to pay such salaries to these people, it is natural that we demand them to live up to their worth..... you probably didn't feel the pain of many Singaporeans because you were privileged to be on the receiving end of the rope enjoying and reaping the benefits contributed by those on the other end of the rope that are exploited with suppressed wages while businesses (and you) profiting and benefiting from it....
Yes, high wages push up cost of things in Canada.... but they also enable people to earn a decent wage.... When you pay $40 a month for clearing of rubbish in Singapore, you enjoy the benefits of it.... but at whose expense? Let me tell you, it is at the expense of those lowly paid hardworking blokes that work like slaves.... If you are happy with that, it just shows what kind of man you are.... you are grateful for the benefits that you enjoy that was provided by the same people that you are now calling them "ungrateful".... the same people that you didn't think deserved a decent wage.... the same people that you think that it is ok to exploit so that YOU can get your rubbish cleared for $40 a month....
And that's probably why you came to Singapore... to seek a "better" life.... I went to Canada for the very same reason too.... to seek a better life... The only difference is, you came to seek a better life by exploiting on those that are less privileged.... while I sought a better life in Canada by bringing my business there that adds value and contribute to their economy so that those less privileged can earn a decent wage.... I don't complain about the high cost because I know it goes towards someone's decent wage.... I don't complain paying high taxes because I know (and feel assured) that should there be a day where I become incapable of earning an income, there will be social safety nets that I can fall back upon....
So in your same words, Canada do care for its people..... BE GRATEFUL, Eric....."
'Loco,' 'Hombres': Why Trump Uses Mock Spanish - "Trump’s use of hombres and loco illustrates what the late linguistic anthropologist Jane Hill termed “Mock Spanish,” an anglophone appropriation of Spanish words that, she argued, can serve as “a site for the indexical reproduction of racism in American English.”"
Code switching is racist!
12 NUS students would have been expelled under stiffer penalties for sexual offences - "For serious offences, offenders will get a minimum one-year suspension, which the university's Board of Discipline or Disciplinary Appeals Board cannot override or remove. In severe or aggravated cases, or multiple incidents without any mitigating factors, the offender will be immediately expelled... Examples of cases that the heads of the academic or non-academic units could handle are:
- Attempting an unwelcome kiss on a date
- Planting an unwanted kiss on the cheeks of a person
- Stroking a person's face without the person's consent
- Giving an unwanted massage on the arms of a person
- Briefly holding the waist or shoulder of a person without the person's consent
- Persistence e.g. continuing to communicate, send flowers, or to wait for another person even though the person has made clear that he/she is not interested in such advances.
- Staring inappropriately at the breasts of a person
- Making a joke about a person's private parts, sexual organs or sex life
- Using expletives such as "slut" or "whore" on a person
- Stealing undergarments
- Gesticulating body (fully clothed) in a sexually offensive way to another person.
The review committee also spelt out the types of sexual misconduct which it considers "severe" or "aggravated", and should lead to mandatory expulsion, even if it is a single incident or there are compelling mitigating factors such as being truthful during investigations. This includes touching a victim's private parts or sexual organs, perpetrating a significant number of sexual misconduct incidents or if there is an extensive duration of the misconduct. Other acts in this category are abusing authority, deliberately incapacitating a person in order to commit the sexual misconduct, possessing child pornography, affecting a significant number of people, and causing substantial harm, damage or trauma to the victim...
For serious cases which are single incidents, a suspension of at least one year will be meted out. The committee recommended that a two-year suspension or expulsion should be given if these offences happen more than once.
Offences in this category include:...
- Unwanted sexual advances or requests for sexual favours, sexually explicit remarks, offensive body language or gestures and other forms of sexual harassment"
In some ways, this is more extreme than the travesties that have happened/are happening in US college campuses thanks to Obama. Looks like gender segregation is going to come into effect in NUS
Removing discretion in response to public pressure is a good recipe for outrageous verdicts
Presumably "abusing authority" means the chairman of an ECA cannot enter a relationship with his vice-chair.
It seems if I make pelvic thrusts often or many people see me, I can be expelled. If I make them once and one person sees me, I can be suspended for a year
Corey A. DeAngelis on Twitter - Bernie Sanders: "The video game industry made $43 billion in revenue last year. The workers responsible for that profit deserve to collectively bargain as part of a union. I'm glad to see unions like @IATSE and the broader @GameWorkers movement organizing such workers."
"When you don't understand the difference between revenue & profit"
I’ll Have to Call My Lawyer - The New York Times - "“Good Samaritan” laws give legal protection to bystanders who courageously come to the aid of people in emergencies. Last month, the California Supreme Court gave its state law a disturbingly narrow interpretation that could discourage future good Samaritans from providing help out of fear of being sued.The ruling came after the victim of a car crash sued her would-be rescuer for negligence. On Halloween night in 2004 the car in which Alexandra Van Horn was riding crashed into a light pole. When her co-worker, Lisa Torti, who was in another car, saw the accident, she rushed over to help. Worried that the wrecked car would catch fire or blow up, Ms. Torti lifted Ms. Van Horn out of the front passenger seat. Ms. Van Horn, who ended up being paralyzed, sued, contending that Ms. Torti’s negligence in moving her caused her paralysis.In her defense, Ms. Torti invoked California’s good Samaritan law. All 50 states have laws of this kind, but the protection they offer varies. By a 4-to-3 vote, the California Supreme Court ruled that the state’s law did not give Ms. Torti immunity from liability because it applies only to people who offer medical help."
No good deed goes unpunished
Looks like this got amended later to include nonmedical help
Fake News: BBC Describes Refugee Terror Bomber from Iraq as 'Surrey Teenager' – Again - "The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has been caught describing Iraqi refugee and convicted terrorist Ahmed Hassan as a “Surrey teenager” for a second time"
Poll: Trump Better for Black Americans Than Obama - "According to the national telephone survey, 55 percent think “life for young black Americans has gotten better since Trump’s election” or stayed about the same (33 percent and 22 percent respectively) while 36 percent think it’s gotten worse. In July 2016, only 13 percent said that “life for young black Americans had gotten better since the election of the nation’s first black president.”... Even though black Americans have better opportunities under Trump, voters still think the government should be doing more, and believe that the sour relationship between Trump and members of the Congressional Black Caucus doesn’t help—though it’s hard to say what the left-wing Congressional Black Caucus has actually done for black America. Years of race-baiting and playing the race card against Republicans to reinforce loyalty to the Democratic Party hasn’t had a positive impact"
Vernon Chan - Sounds fair since historically the Democrats were... - "Burgess Owens on Reparations: 'How About the Democratic Party Pay for All the Misery It Brought to My Race?'"
"Sounds fair since historically the Democrats were the slavery party, and modern SJW theory says historical sins are a permanent stain that cannot be forgiven or atoned"
Anti Social Justice Warriors - Posts - "Ordering a happy meal and the cashier asked 'for a boy or girl?' And then I explained for 30 minutes how damaging it is to enforce the gender binary. I am disgusted
"Now I see why Mcdonalds employees want 15 an hour"
Paris: metro tickets & gum tree tributes | The Lady Travels - "Some argue that the metro tickets left on Jean Paul Sartre’s grave symbolise communist struggles for freedom. Jean Paul Sartre was never afraid to show his communist sympathies throughout his life and writing, and was famously compared to fellow french philosopher Voltaire when pardoned by President Charles de Gaulle after being arrested for civil disobedience in 1968. “You don’t arrest Voltaire,” said de Gaulle in explanation for the pardon. France has always regarded Voltaire as a great French libertarian renaming Boulevard du Prince-Eugène after him in 1870 because it was the location of endless struggles for freedom and liberty. To this day, protests and demonstrations significantly take place along Boulevard Voltaire, and violence has often flared up along it. In 1962, nine people were killed by police outside the Charonne metro station located along the boulevard during communist protests against the Algerian war raging at the time. It is therefore believed the metro tickets represent the deaths of those individuals, their struggle and the location of their death, connecting Jean Paul Sartre with Voltaire: the location for freedom fighting and Voltaire: the freedom fighter.
Jihadism has been an abject failure, but what does Western success look like? - "We now appear to be stuck in a holding pattern: jihadists cannot defeat us, but they will not give up; we can mitigate the jihadist threat, but we cannot eradicate it. It is a story of jihadist failure offset by mixed Western success.The truth is that we have probably reached the maximum point of threat-mitigation. Any improvements from here are likely to be at the margins, or adjustments to meet jihadist innovation... The appropriate analogy here is crime. No government pretends to be able to eradicate crime and no citizen expects it to. Success in the fight against crime is judged by the extent to which its harms are minimised, the operations of criminals constrained, and dangerous offenders removed from the community"
Manfred Man - My reply to this Canadian who wants to teach... - "My reply to this Canadian who wants to teach Singaporean how to be grateful.
Dear Mr Eric Brooks,
The reason why Singapore is what it is today, is because Singaporeans are always complaining and always pushing the govt to keep improving.... Afterall, they are the highest paid govt in the world, hence... when you have to pay such salaries to these people, it is natural that we demand them to live up to their worth..... you probably didn't feel the pain of many Singaporeans because you were privileged to be on the receiving end of the rope enjoying and reaping the benefits contributed by those on the other end of the rope that are exploited with suppressed wages while businesses (and you) profiting and benefiting from it....
Yes, high wages push up cost of things in Canada.... but they also enable people to earn a decent wage.... When you pay $40 a month for clearing of rubbish in Singapore, you enjoy the benefits of it.... but at whose expense? Let me tell you, it is at the expense of those lowly paid hardworking blokes that work like slaves.... If you are happy with that, it just shows what kind of man you are.... you are grateful for the benefits that you enjoy that was provided by the same people that you are now calling them "ungrateful".... the same people that you didn't think deserved a decent wage.... the same people that you think that it is ok to exploit so that YOU can get your rubbish cleared for $40 a month....
And that's probably why you came to Singapore... to seek a "better" life.... I went to Canada for the very same reason too.... to seek a better life... The only difference is, you came to seek a better life by exploiting on those that are less privileged.... while I sought a better life in Canada by bringing my business there that adds value and contribute to their economy so that those less privileged can earn a decent wage.... I don't complain about the high cost because I know it goes towards someone's decent wage.... I don't complain paying high taxes because I know (and feel assured) that should there be a day where I become incapable of earning an income, there will be social safety nets that I can fall back upon....
So in your same words, Canada do care for its people..... BE GRATEFUL, Eric....."
'Loco,' 'Hombres': Why Trump Uses Mock Spanish - "Trump’s use of hombres and loco illustrates what the late linguistic anthropologist Jane Hill termed “Mock Spanish,” an anglophone appropriation of Spanish words that, she argued, can serve as “a site for the indexical reproduction of racism in American English.”"
Code switching is racist!
12 NUS students would have been expelled under stiffer penalties for sexual offences - "For serious offences, offenders will get a minimum one-year suspension, which the university's Board of Discipline or Disciplinary Appeals Board cannot override or remove. In severe or aggravated cases, or multiple incidents without any mitigating factors, the offender will be immediately expelled... Examples of cases that the heads of the academic or non-academic units could handle are:
- Attempting an unwelcome kiss on a date
- Planting an unwanted kiss on the cheeks of a person
- Stroking a person's face without the person's consent
- Giving an unwanted massage on the arms of a person
- Briefly holding the waist or shoulder of a person without the person's consent
- Persistence e.g. continuing to communicate, send flowers, or to wait for another person even though the person has made clear that he/she is not interested in such advances.
- Staring inappropriately at the breasts of a person
- Making a joke about a person's private parts, sexual organs or sex life
- Using expletives such as "slut" or "whore" on a person
- Stealing undergarments
- Gesticulating body (fully clothed) in a sexually offensive way to another person.
The review committee also spelt out the types of sexual misconduct which it considers "severe" or "aggravated", and should lead to mandatory expulsion, even if it is a single incident or there are compelling mitigating factors such as being truthful during investigations. This includes touching a victim's private parts or sexual organs, perpetrating a significant number of sexual misconduct incidents or if there is an extensive duration of the misconduct. Other acts in this category are abusing authority, deliberately incapacitating a person in order to commit the sexual misconduct, possessing child pornography, affecting a significant number of people, and causing substantial harm, damage or trauma to the victim...
For serious cases which are single incidents, a suspension of at least one year will be meted out. The committee recommended that a two-year suspension or expulsion should be given if these offences happen more than once.
Offences in this category include:...
- Unwanted sexual advances or requests for sexual favours, sexually explicit remarks, offensive body language or gestures and other forms of sexual harassment"
In some ways, this is more extreme than the travesties that have happened/are happening in US college campuses thanks to Obama. Looks like gender segregation is going to come into effect in NUS
Removing discretion in response to public pressure is a good recipe for outrageous verdicts
Presumably "abusing authority" means the chairman of an ECA cannot enter a relationship with his vice-chair.
It seems if I make pelvic thrusts often or many people see me, I can be expelled. If I make them once and one person sees me, I can be suspended for a year
Corey A. DeAngelis on Twitter - Bernie Sanders: "The video game industry made $43 billion in revenue last year. The workers responsible for that profit deserve to collectively bargain as part of a union. I'm glad to see unions like @IATSE and the broader @GameWorkers movement organizing such workers."
"When you don't understand the difference between revenue & profit"
I’ll Have to Call My Lawyer - The New York Times - "“Good Samaritan” laws give legal protection to bystanders who courageously come to the aid of people in emergencies. Last month, the California Supreme Court gave its state law a disturbingly narrow interpretation that could discourage future good Samaritans from providing help out of fear of being sued.The ruling came after the victim of a car crash sued her would-be rescuer for negligence. On Halloween night in 2004 the car in which Alexandra Van Horn was riding crashed into a light pole. When her co-worker, Lisa Torti, who was in another car, saw the accident, she rushed over to help. Worried that the wrecked car would catch fire or blow up, Ms. Torti lifted Ms. Van Horn out of the front passenger seat. Ms. Van Horn, who ended up being paralyzed, sued, contending that Ms. Torti’s negligence in moving her caused her paralysis.In her defense, Ms. Torti invoked California’s good Samaritan law. All 50 states have laws of this kind, but the protection they offer varies. By a 4-to-3 vote, the California Supreme Court ruled that the state’s law did not give Ms. Torti immunity from liability because it applies only to people who offer medical help."
No good deed goes unpunished
Looks like this got amended later to include nonmedical help
Fake News: BBC Describes Refugee Terror Bomber from Iraq as 'Surrey Teenager' – Again - "The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has been caught describing Iraqi refugee and convicted terrorist Ahmed Hassan as a “Surrey teenager” for a second time"
Poll: Trump Better for Black Americans Than Obama - "According to the national telephone survey, 55 percent think “life for young black Americans has gotten better since Trump’s election” or stayed about the same (33 percent and 22 percent respectively) while 36 percent think it’s gotten worse. In July 2016, only 13 percent said that “life for young black Americans had gotten better since the election of the nation’s first black president.”... Even though black Americans have better opportunities under Trump, voters still think the government should be doing more, and believe that the sour relationship between Trump and members of the Congressional Black Caucus doesn’t help—though it’s hard to say what the left-wing Congressional Black Caucus has actually done for black America. Years of race-baiting and playing the race card against Republicans to reinforce loyalty to the Democratic Party hasn’t had a positive impact"
Vernon Chan - Sounds fair since historically the Democrats were... - "Burgess Owens on Reparations: 'How About the Democratic Party Pay for All the Misery It Brought to My Race?'"
"Sounds fair since historically the Democrats were the slavery party, and modern SJW theory says historical sins are a permanent stain that cannot be forgiven or atoned"
Anti Social Justice Warriors - Posts - "Ordering a happy meal and the cashier asked 'for a boy or girl?' And then I explained for 30 minutes how damaging it is to enforce the gender binary. I am disgusted
"Now I see why Mcdonalds employees want 15 an hour"
Paris: metro tickets & gum tree tributes | The Lady Travels - "Some argue that the metro tickets left on Jean Paul Sartre’s grave symbolise communist struggles for freedom. Jean Paul Sartre was never afraid to show his communist sympathies throughout his life and writing, and was famously compared to fellow french philosopher Voltaire when pardoned by President Charles de Gaulle after being arrested for civil disobedience in 1968. “You don’t arrest Voltaire,” said de Gaulle in explanation for the pardon. France has always regarded Voltaire as a great French libertarian renaming Boulevard du Prince-Eugène after him in 1870 because it was the location of endless struggles for freedom and liberty. To this day, protests and demonstrations significantly take place along Boulevard Voltaire, and violence has often flared up along it. In 1962, nine people were killed by police outside the Charonne metro station located along the boulevard during communist protests against the Algerian war raging at the time. It is therefore believed the metro tickets represent the deaths of those individuals, their struggle and the location of their death, connecting Jean Paul Sartre with Voltaire: the location for freedom fighting and Voltaire: the freedom fighter.
Or it could just be that the metro tickets are left by fans who misunderstood it to be some sort of tradition practiced at all French luminaries’ graves having past Serge Gainsbourg’s head stone beforehand to reach Jean Paul Sartre’s."
Post ID: 3954916116553930133
How much sugar is there in my salt?
I was looking at the ingredients list of some salt I bought and was amused to see that there was some sugar inside.
Now, there are people who are so strict about eliminating sugar from their diet that even if a product contains 0.0001% sugar, it is unacceptable.
Of course, even natural foods like lemons and cucumbers contain some naturally occurring sugars at higher concentrations than 0.0001% (2.5% and 1.7% respectively) so you can't cut out sugar out from your diet completely (without it becoming very boring - even butter has trace amounts of sugar, for example).
But anyway, out of curiosity I decided to try to estimate how much salt there was in my sugar.
My first step was the nutritional information - 0g carbs per 1.5g. We know that under FDA regulations, if a food has under 0.5g of carbohydrates, the nutritional information may advertise it as having 0g of carbohydrates. So we know that my salt at most has 0.4999g of sugar per 1.5g.
Next, I went to the ingredients list. Ingredients must be listed in order of proportion - i.e. there's more of the first ingredient in the list than the second, more of the second than the third and so on. We can see that sugar is the third item on the list, so we know there is under a third of sugar in my salt at most.
However, we can see that the second ingredient is calcium silicate (an anti caking agent). My salt cannot be a third calcium silicate, or it wouldn't taste like salt.
I went to look up how much calcium silicate salt typically has. Under FDA regulations, salt can contain up to 2% calcium silicate. So we know there is at most 2% sugar in my salt.
If this is still too much sugar for you, you can always buy a different brand of salt (my concerns about this salt are about ease of pouring, but that's another story for another time).
Now, there are people who are so strict about eliminating sugar from their diet that even if a product contains 0.0001% sugar, it is unacceptable.
Of course, even natural foods like lemons and cucumbers contain some naturally occurring sugars at higher concentrations than 0.0001% (2.5% and 1.7% respectively) so you can't cut out sugar out from your diet completely (without it becoming very boring - even butter has trace amounts of sugar, for example).
But anyway, out of curiosity I decided to try to estimate how much salt there was in my sugar.
My first step was the nutritional information - 0g carbs per 1.5g. We know that under FDA regulations, if a food has under 0.5g of carbohydrates, the nutritional information may advertise it as having 0g of carbohydrates. So we know that my salt at most has 0.4999g of sugar per 1.5g.
Next, I went to the ingredients list. Ingredients must be listed in order of proportion - i.e. there's more of the first ingredient in the list than the second, more of the second than the third and so on. We can see that sugar is the third item on the list, so we know there is under a third of sugar in my salt at most.
However, we can see that the second ingredient is calcium silicate (an anti caking agent). My salt cannot be a third calcium silicate, or it wouldn't taste like salt.
I went to look up how much calcium silicate salt typically has. Under FDA regulations, salt can contain up to 2% calcium silicate. So we know there is at most 2% sugar in my salt.
If this is still too much sugar for you, you can always buy a different brand of salt (my concerns about this salt are about ease of pouring, but that's another story for another time).
Post ID: 2325322836217831915
Links - 16th August 2019 (1)
California Interest Groups Decide Hydroelectric Power Doesn't Count as Renewable Energy - "these interest groups have decided that the way to meet the renewable energy goal is to have more solar and wind power even if hydroelectric power is cheaper. They are set on their solution. Notice that that means that they don’t really want renewable energy. They want solar and wind"
Environmentalism: where means become ends
The Brain Needs Animal Fat - "although DHA does exist in algae, algae are not plants, and we don't know if we can access the DHA within edible algae without special extraction methods. Prior to the availability of algae-derived supplements (which only became available recently), the only pre-formed DHA naturally bioavailable to everyone would have come from animal foods"
Busy Boyfriend Makes Chatbot To Reply His GF; She Ends Up Sending It 300 Texts A Day - "Luckily for Mr Li Kaixiang, he works as a software engineer. He hatched a brilliant plan to keep his girlfriend company while he’s busy at work.According to Abacus News on Tuesday (11 Jun), Mr Li secretly created a chatbot to send ‘his’ girlfriend messages throughout the day."
Anne Lister, the Real 'Gentleman Jack' | History Extra Podcast - History Extra - "[On her diaries] Anne Lister had almost seduced every woman of her acquaintance, and written in lust and pleasure about that. No guilt, no lesbian self hatred, no desperation, but having fun. And so the friend Arthur Burrell advised John Lister to burn these diaries immediately. But John Lister did not. I have the feeling that these diaries are bigger than we are, and we may not burn them. What he did, in fact, was hiding them...
There have been homosexual acts all through history. But the awareness of being different is the modern part of it. So historians tend to say this happened in the late 19th century, this awareness of homosexuals of being different, and so on. So letting your sexuality give you an identity...
She gave life to everything in the in the act of writing. Living without writing was incomplete to her. See, she's quoting her orgasms and the orgasms of her partner. She is giving credits. Was it good? Was it not so good? She gives us exactly time and place. We learn about a quickie she and Mariana needed during the day only seven minutes to close the door. to take off their clothes, have sex, put on their clothes again and open the door again. That was seven minutes... Men did not write so openly about their day to day sexual practices like Anne Lister. For sure we do have the pornographic discourse since antiquity. But pornography belongs to literature and follows the rules of narration. So confessions on a non literate level, like this of and Lister’s are extremely rare. And now it's not from a man, it's from a woman. And then from a lesbian one, that's unique."
Bad translation : SWGalaxyOfHeroes - "The german translation for Shaak Ti's first special ability is not well thought out. The "Sturmabteilung" (literally: storm detachment) was Nazi Germany's paramilitary organization."
Get Woke, Go Broke: Evergreen State College Is Down To 300 New Enrollments - "the price of going "full woke" is evident: the school is welcoming the smallest incoming freshman class on record. Only 300 students have selected Evergreen State College for their education. "This fall, we expect less than 300 freshmen to attend Evergreen, a fifty percent drop from two years ago," one Evergreen professor admitted on the site, Heterodox Academy. "It is the only four year institution in the state of Washington that has seen a decrease in applications, and is currently publicly funded for 4200 students, far greater than this year’s anticipated total attending class of 2800.""
𝐧𝐚𝐦𝐢 波 on Twitter - "don’t let this tainted ‘self love’ trend have you 50 & alone because you walked away from everything that ‘didn’t serve you’ instead of learning conflict resolution."
Effects of sexualized video games on online sexual harassment.
Oddly, the study's official abstract doesn't mention that it was women who were doing more harassing in *both* the pre- and post-treatment conditions - of both men and women, or that men were sexually harassed more than women. Doubtless, it will then be used to bash men for being creeps. Indeed I have seen popular coverage of the study gloss over the results, just lamenting about how video games make women get sexually harassed (with the unspoken implications that it's men doing the harassing and that men don't get harassed)
The authors posit that the moral panic about men sexually harassing women could have led to these results - women don't see what they do as sexual harassment, and men aren't seen as objects of sexual harassment. Which shows the obvious harms of bashing men
We tried to publish a replication of a Science paper in Science. The journal refused. - "Science is supposed to be self-correcting. Ugly facts kill beautiful theories, to paraphrase the 19th-century biologist Thomas Huxley. But, as we learned recently, policies at the top scientific journals don’t make this easy.Our story starts in 2008, when a group of researchers published an article (here it is without a paywall) that found political conservatives have stronger physiological reactions to threatening images than liberals do. The article was published in Science, which is one of the most prestigious general science journals around. It’s the kind of journal that can make a career in academia... We drafted a paper that reported the failed replication studies along with a more nuanced discussion about the ways in which physiology might matter for politics and sent it to Science. We did not expect Science to immediately publish the paper, but because our findings cast doubt on an influential study published in its pages, we thought the editorial team would at least send it out for peer review.It did not. About a week later, we received a summary rejection with the explanation that the Science advisory board of academics and editorial team felt that since the publication of this article the field has moved on and that, while they concluded that we had offered a conclusive replication of the original study, it would be better suited for a less visible subfield journal. We wrote back asking them to consider at least sending our work out for review. (They could still reject it if the reviewers found fatal flaws in our replications.) We argued that the original article continues to be highly influential and is often featured in popular science pieces in the lay media (for instance, here, here, here, and here), where the research is translated into a claim that physiology allows one to predict liberals and conservatives with a high degree of accuracy. We believe that Science has a responsibility to set the record straight in the same way that a newspaper does when it publishes something that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. We were rebuffed without a reason and with a vague suggestion that the journal’s policy on handling replications might change at some point in the future. We believe that it is bad policy for journals like Science to publish big, bold ideas and then leave it to subfield journals to publish replications showing that those ideas aren’t so accurate after all... Open and transparent science can only happen when journals are willing to publish results that contradict previous findings"
Cameroon players 'crying and accusing FIFA of racism' after goal awarded by VAR in World Cup clash - "Cameroon manager Alan Djeumfa insisted every decision against his side had been wrong and defended his players, who claimed they were the victim of racism.'It was a miscarriage of justice. Why should I talk about anything other than that,' said Djeumfa.The 46-year-old refused to elaborate on what the injustices were, given that each of the VAR decisions had seemed accurate.He hinted that the sense of victimhood had been kindled by the VAR decision which saw fellow African nation Nigeria defeated by France last week."
If you incentivise something, you get more of it
Neighborhoods to Avoid When Visiting Minneapolis - "With a violent crime rate of 1,063 reported incidents for every 100,000 residents, nearly three times the corresponding national rate, Minneapolis is one of the most dangerous cities in the country"
Back in Omar's district, police deal with gangs, relations with tight-lipped Somali community - "In the dead of the cold, late night on Tuesday, a young Somali man was shot in the hip. Someone took him to the local trauma center, left him there, and drove off.The man told police at his bedside that he didn’t know who shot him, who took him to the hospital, or why he was targeted. “I’m intoxicated,” he told cops, while doctors tended his wound, before insisting he didn't know anything else about what happened.For the attending police officers, it was a frustrating, albeit familiar, response from a member of the Somali community, whose support in November sent one of their own, Rep. Ilhan Omar, to Congress. While Omar has spoken out frequently and forcefully on a range of issues - some that seem little connected to her district - most members of the Somali community she represents remain far more insular... According to data compiled last year by the Washington Post, more than half of all homicides statewide in Minnesota go unsolved. And that's in part because Somali-Americans in Minneapolis aren't talking enough to police, according to officers. The Somali community grew here rapidly here during the 1990s, when large numbers of Somalis fled a devastating civil war.. Omar, meanwhile, has consistently used her platform to take aim at law enforcement... For some officers, that kind of pushback from the top does more to divide than unite"
East African community reeling from weekend shootings demands solutions - "After the latest spasm of gang violence, Minneapolis’ Somali residents and business owners on Monday stepped up their calls for help from City Hall and police headquarters to help curb the senseless shootings that they say too often go overlooked... Abdi Ali sat drinking tea with friends in a coffee shop, tucked among the colorful stalls of spices and textiles and housewares. The others nodded in agreement as he questioned how seemingly so many acts of violence involving victims of east African descent go unsolved.“We’ve been here 20 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Ali, who owns a textile stall. “A lot of people are not coming to this area anymore.”"
Minneapolis' 'Little Mogadishu' Sees 56 Percent Increase in Violent Crimes Caused by Somali Gangs - "Violent crimes increased by more than 50 percent in 2018 in Minneapolis’ Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, nicknamed “little Mogadishu,” which authorities attribute to Somali gang activity in the area... In 2008, the Minneapolis Police Department created a Somali liaison position to focus solely on addressing the issue. The department currently has 5 Somali-speaking officers to assist in outreach to the immigrant community. According an MPR report from the time, officers began to notice that Somali gangs were dividing themselves along the same clan lines of their war-torn country."
Anarchist group at UT Austin threatens to dox incoming freshmen if they join conservative campus clubs - "the network released extensive personal information of pro-Brett Kavanaugh demonstrators at UT Austin, including their names, photos and contact information. It went so far as to post some of the phone numbers of the employers of students and encouraged its adherents to call them to get them fired.Composed mostly of students at UT Austin, the group also actively encourages the harassment of conservative students, having praised the destruction of signs and tactics of physical intimidation during the pro-Kavanaugh demonstrations."
She Accused Them Of Rape. Every Witness Present Said No Sexual Contact Occurred. They Were Both Expelled. - "In a first-of-its-kind ruling, a judge in Tennessee has ruled that even a private college must provide basic due process rights to students accused of sexual assault... One witness, J.H., told campus investigators that he was with J.S. the entire time and would have seen if something happened, but he didn’t.C.S. didn't even identify J.S. (who has brought this particular lawsuit against the university) during interviews with campus investigators. She was not the one who reported the incident to the school. Rhodes opened the investigation on its own."
Environmentalism: where means become ends
The Brain Needs Animal Fat - "although DHA does exist in algae, algae are not plants, and we don't know if we can access the DHA within edible algae without special extraction methods. Prior to the availability of algae-derived supplements (which only became available recently), the only pre-formed DHA naturally bioavailable to everyone would have come from animal foods"
Busy Boyfriend Makes Chatbot To Reply His GF; She Ends Up Sending It 300 Texts A Day - "Luckily for Mr Li Kaixiang, he works as a software engineer. He hatched a brilliant plan to keep his girlfriend company while he’s busy at work.According to Abacus News on Tuesday (11 Jun), Mr Li secretly created a chatbot to send ‘his’ girlfriend messages throughout the day."
Anne Lister, the Real 'Gentleman Jack' | History Extra Podcast - History Extra - "[On her diaries] Anne Lister had almost seduced every woman of her acquaintance, and written in lust and pleasure about that. No guilt, no lesbian self hatred, no desperation, but having fun. And so the friend Arthur Burrell advised John Lister to burn these diaries immediately. But John Lister did not. I have the feeling that these diaries are bigger than we are, and we may not burn them. What he did, in fact, was hiding them...
There have been homosexual acts all through history. But the awareness of being different is the modern part of it. So historians tend to say this happened in the late 19th century, this awareness of homosexuals of being different, and so on. So letting your sexuality give you an identity...
She gave life to everything in the in the act of writing. Living without writing was incomplete to her. See, she's quoting her orgasms and the orgasms of her partner. She is giving credits. Was it good? Was it not so good? She gives us exactly time and place. We learn about a quickie she and Mariana needed during the day only seven minutes to close the door. to take off their clothes, have sex, put on their clothes again and open the door again. That was seven minutes... Men did not write so openly about their day to day sexual practices like Anne Lister. For sure we do have the pornographic discourse since antiquity. But pornography belongs to literature and follows the rules of narration. So confessions on a non literate level, like this of and Lister’s are extremely rare. And now it's not from a man, it's from a woman. And then from a lesbian one, that's unique."
Bad translation : SWGalaxyOfHeroes - "The german translation for Shaak Ti's first special ability is not well thought out. The "Sturmabteilung" (literally: storm detachment) was Nazi Germany's paramilitary organization."
Get Woke, Go Broke: Evergreen State College Is Down To 300 New Enrollments - "the price of going "full woke" is evident: the school is welcoming the smallest incoming freshman class on record. Only 300 students have selected Evergreen State College for their education. "This fall, we expect less than 300 freshmen to attend Evergreen, a fifty percent drop from two years ago," one Evergreen professor admitted on the site, Heterodox Academy. "It is the only four year institution in the state of Washington that has seen a decrease in applications, and is currently publicly funded for 4200 students, far greater than this year’s anticipated total attending class of 2800.""
𝐧𝐚𝐦𝐢 波 on Twitter - "don’t let this tainted ‘self love’ trend have you 50 & alone because you walked away from everything that ‘didn’t serve you’ instead of learning conflict resolution."
Effects of sexualized video games on online sexual harassment.
Oddly, the study's official abstract doesn't mention that it was women who were doing more harassing in *both* the pre- and post-treatment conditions - of both men and women, or that men were sexually harassed more than women. Doubtless, it will then be used to bash men for being creeps. Indeed I have seen popular coverage of the study gloss over the results, just lamenting about how video games make women get sexually harassed (with the unspoken implications that it's men doing the harassing and that men don't get harassed)
The authors posit that the moral panic about men sexually harassing women could have led to these results - women don't see what they do as sexual harassment, and men aren't seen as objects of sexual harassment. Which shows the obvious harms of bashing men
We tried to publish a replication of a Science paper in Science. The journal refused. - "Science is supposed to be self-correcting. Ugly facts kill beautiful theories, to paraphrase the 19th-century biologist Thomas Huxley. But, as we learned recently, policies at the top scientific journals don’t make this easy.Our story starts in 2008, when a group of researchers published an article (here it is without a paywall) that found political conservatives have stronger physiological reactions to threatening images than liberals do. The article was published in Science, which is one of the most prestigious general science journals around. It’s the kind of journal that can make a career in academia... We drafted a paper that reported the failed replication studies along with a more nuanced discussion about the ways in which physiology might matter for politics and sent it to Science. We did not expect Science to immediately publish the paper, but because our findings cast doubt on an influential study published in its pages, we thought the editorial team would at least send it out for peer review.It did not. About a week later, we received a summary rejection with the explanation that the Science advisory board of academics and editorial team felt that since the publication of this article the field has moved on and that, while they concluded that we had offered a conclusive replication of the original study, it would be better suited for a less visible subfield journal. We wrote back asking them to consider at least sending our work out for review. (They could still reject it if the reviewers found fatal flaws in our replications.) We argued that the original article continues to be highly influential and is often featured in popular science pieces in the lay media (for instance, here, here, here, and here), where the research is translated into a claim that physiology allows one to predict liberals and conservatives with a high degree of accuracy. We believe that Science has a responsibility to set the record straight in the same way that a newspaper does when it publishes something that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. We were rebuffed without a reason and with a vague suggestion that the journal’s policy on handling replications might change at some point in the future. We believe that it is bad policy for journals like Science to publish big, bold ideas and then leave it to subfield journals to publish replications showing that those ideas aren’t so accurate after all... Open and transparent science can only happen when journals are willing to publish results that contradict previous findings"
Cameroon players 'crying and accusing FIFA of racism' after goal awarded by VAR in World Cup clash - "Cameroon manager Alan Djeumfa insisted every decision against his side had been wrong and defended his players, who claimed they were the victim of racism.'It was a miscarriage of justice. Why should I talk about anything other than that,' said Djeumfa.The 46-year-old refused to elaborate on what the injustices were, given that each of the VAR decisions had seemed accurate.He hinted that the sense of victimhood had been kindled by the VAR decision which saw fellow African nation Nigeria defeated by France last week."
If you incentivise something, you get more of it
Neighborhoods to Avoid When Visiting Minneapolis - "With a violent crime rate of 1,063 reported incidents for every 100,000 residents, nearly three times the corresponding national rate, Minneapolis is one of the most dangerous cities in the country"
Back in Omar's district, police deal with gangs, relations with tight-lipped Somali community - "In the dead of the cold, late night on Tuesday, a young Somali man was shot in the hip. Someone took him to the local trauma center, left him there, and drove off.The man told police at his bedside that he didn’t know who shot him, who took him to the hospital, or why he was targeted. “I’m intoxicated,” he told cops, while doctors tended his wound, before insisting he didn't know anything else about what happened.For the attending police officers, it was a frustrating, albeit familiar, response from a member of the Somali community, whose support in November sent one of their own, Rep. Ilhan Omar, to Congress. While Omar has spoken out frequently and forcefully on a range of issues - some that seem little connected to her district - most members of the Somali community she represents remain far more insular... According to data compiled last year by the Washington Post, more than half of all homicides statewide in Minnesota go unsolved. And that's in part because Somali-Americans in Minneapolis aren't talking enough to police, according to officers. The Somali community grew here rapidly here during the 1990s, when large numbers of Somalis fled a devastating civil war.. Omar, meanwhile, has consistently used her platform to take aim at law enforcement... For some officers, that kind of pushback from the top does more to divide than unite"
East African community reeling from weekend shootings demands solutions - "After the latest spasm of gang violence, Minneapolis’ Somali residents and business owners on Monday stepped up their calls for help from City Hall and police headquarters to help curb the senseless shootings that they say too often go overlooked... Abdi Ali sat drinking tea with friends in a coffee shop, tucked among the colorful stalls of spices and textiles and housewares. The others nodded in agreement as he questioned how seemingly so many acts of violence involving victims of east African descent go unsolved.“We’ve been here 20 years, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Ali, who owns a textile stall. “A lot of people are not coming to this area anymore.”"
Minneapolis' 'Little Mogadishu' Sees 56 Percent Increase in Violent Crimes Caused by Somali Gangs - "Violent crimes increased by more than 50 percent in 2018 in Minneapolis’ Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, nicknamed “little Mogadishu,” which authorities attribute to Somali gang activity in the area... In 2008, the Minneapolis Police Department created a Somali liaison position to focus solely on addressing the issue. The department currently has 5 Somali-speaking officers to assist in outreach to the immigrant community. According an MPR report from the time, officers began to notice that Somali gangs were dividing themselves along the same clan lines of their war-torn country."
Anarchist group at UT Austin threatens to dox incoming freshmen if they join conservative campus clubs - "the network released extensive personal information of pro-Brett Kavanaugh demonstrators at UT Austin, including their names, photos and contact information. It went so far as to post some of the phone numbers of the employers of students and encouraged its adherents to call them to get them fired.Composed mostly of students at UT Austin, the group also actively encourages the harassment of conservative students, having praised the destruction of signs and tactics of physical intimidation during the pro-Kavanaugh demonstrations."
She Accused Them Of Rape. Every Witness Present Said No Sexual Contact Occurred. They Were Both Expelled. - "In a first-of-its-kind ruling, a judge in Tennessee has ruled that even a private college must provide basic due process rights to students accused of sexual assault... One witness, J.H., told campus investigators that he was with J.S. the entire time and would have seen if something happened, but he didn’t.C.S. didn't even identify J.S. (who has brought this particular lawsuit against the university) during interviews with campus investigators. She was not the one who reported the incident to the school. Rhodes opened the investigation on its own."
Post ID: 6178579082192829486
Tuesday, August 13, 2019
Links - 13th August 2019 (2)
The Real Problem With Fake News - "Today, according to a new Pew Research Center study, Americans rate it as a larger problem than racism, climate change, or terrorism... One of the biggest risks often imputed to the current media environment, in which audiences can pick and choose news outlets that agree with them, is that people will become more and more siloed, cutting themselves off from information that they don’t like or that contradicts their prior assumptions.The Pew study suggests that fake-news panic, rather than driving people to abandon ideological outlets and the fringe, may actually be accelerating the process of polarization: It’s driving consumers to drop some outlets, to simply consume less information overall, and even to cut out social relationships."
If everyone who disagrees with you is a Russian bot and anything from a website you dislike can be dismissed because the website is 'biased'...
Why Fears of Fake News Are Overhyped - "many of the initial conclusions that observers reached about the scope of fake news consumption, and its effects on our politics, were exaggerated or incorrect. Relatively few people consumed this form of content directly during the 2016 campaign, and even fewer did so before the 2018 election. Fake news consumption is concentrated among a narrow subset of Americans with the most conservative news diets. And, most notably, no credible evidence exists that exposure to fake news changed the outcome of the 2016 election. The fake news panic echoes fears that prior forms of communication would brainwash the public. Just as exaggerated accounts of hysteria over Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast took advantage of doubts about radio, claims about the reach and influence of fake news express people’s broader concerns about social media and the internet... Consistent with behavioral evidence showing that online echo chambers are relatively rare, fake news consumption was concentrated among the 10 percent of Americans with the most conservative news diets, who were responsible for approximately six in 10 visits to fake news websites during this period. Even in that group, however, fake news made up less than 8 percent of their total news diet. Finally, people ages 60 and over consumed more fake news than other cohorts, which may reflect a lack of digital literacy or simply having more time to read news."
Testosterone and Civilization - Posts - "describe the American left in one image"
"tall blonde communist. won't date a man who makes less than 6 figures"
Brooklyn threesome killer sobs behind bars over girlfriend’s deceit: ‘I threw my life away for a f---ing lie’ - "He raced to his lover's defense, killing a man he thought raped his girlfriend in a three-way tryst — and now he sits in jail fearing she set him up.A disheveled Christopher Membreno was stunned on Saturday to learn that police believe the ménage à trois in Brooklyn involving his girlfriend and two men was consensual."I threw my life away for a f---ing lie? My life is over because of a f---ing lie?"... "She has not been charged at this point with anything," said a high-ranking police source, who noted that charges may never come. "Lying to your boyfriend is not the same as, say, lying to the police.""
#BelieveWomen
Amazingly in response some people still say rapists deserve to die
Woman reveals the shocking 'toxic femininity' she's experienced at work - "Imagine turning up to work every day knowing the person sitting opposite you is doing everything in their power to push you out of your job.That was the shocking reality for Naomi Joy, a 30-year-old former PR director from London, who witnessed and experienced 'toxic femininity' throughout her career.She reveals one female colleague in her thirties once declared everyone in the office 'hated her', while another tricked her into making a mistake so that she would be favourite for a promotion... she conducted a survey of 1,000 employed British women and found more than half claimed to have been sabotaged at work by another member of the so-called sisterhood, while more than a third (37 per cent) said they'd actually felt scared or threatened by a female colleague. .. while men are buoyed by competition, women report negative emotions - but only when competing with other females... Evelyn Cotter, a career coach who founded SEVEN Career Coaching, told me that female clients routinely claim they have been undermined by other women."
Women need to do better!
Of course one of the interviewees found a way to blame this on men
Gender differences in response to competition with same-gender coworkers: A relational perspective. - "We take a relational perspective to explain how women and men may differently experience competition with their same-gender coworkers. According to gender socialization research, the female peer culture values harmony and the appearance of equality, whereas hierarchical ranking is integral to the male peer culture. As competition dispenses with equality and creates a ranking hierarchy, we propose that competition is at odds with the norms of female (but not male) peer relationships. On this basis, we predicted and found in 1 correlational study and 3 experiments that women regard competition with their same-gender coworkers as less desirable than men do, and that their relationships with each other suffer in the presence of competition. We discuss the implications of these findings for women’s career progression"
The Economists Who Studied All-You-Can-Eat Buffets - "New research shows that paying that much for a buffet might actually make the food taste better... Those who paid $8 rated the pizza 11 percent tastier than those who paid $4. Moreover, the latter group suffered from greater diminishing returns—each additional slice of pizza tasted worse than that of the $8 group... “We specifically refer to our ‘all-you-care-to-eat’ items in this way because we do not want to encourage our guests to intentionally overeat,” says Kerry Kramp, chief executive of Sizzler. “Sometimes guests misperceive these types of promotions and they take it as a challenge to potentially overconsume. That is not what we hope for and the majority of our guests greatly appreciate the flexibility to have a little more of their favorite menu items. We never create ‘consumption challenges’ and that is why we basically refer to these as ‘all you care to eat’ versus ‘all you can eat.’ People can eat a lot of food if they are not feeling like there is a value to the actual item.”... As far as dealing with those customers trying to “beat the buffet,” the maxim is this: It’s all about the average... The other key metric in buffet economics is managing waste"
Why spoilers are ruining storytelling - To the victor belong the spoilers - "Shocking plots are what get people talking, tweeting and tuning in. In television, they help to guarantee huge ratings on the day of broadcast. The hubbub encourages fans to book their cinema tickets in advance. The Russo brothers begging viewers not to ruin the Avengers films probably helped them to secure the biggest opening weekend in film history. See it now, that seemed to say, or have someone else spoil it for you. This attitude stifles proper discussion of stories by critics as much as viewers, and it inflicts damage on storytelling as a craft. By promoting one technique, the twist, and one effect, surprise, stories get bent out of shape. They try too hard to counter expectation and resist predictability. “The Lord of the Rings” is totally predictable from beginning to end, but the series does not suffer for it. William Shakespeare gave away the end of his tragedies by billing them as such and no one seemed to mind (“Romeo and Juliet” even told the audience the story in a prologue). “Columbo”, a classic crime serial, reveals who commited the murder at the beginning of each episode and succeeded in making the investigation thrilling to watch. Stories that promote surprise over character end up as mere soap opera, a series of sensational shocks. That corrodes credibility"
Rep. Omar filed joint tax returns before she married husband - "U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar misused campaign funds in violation of state rules. They also revealed that she had filed joint tax returns with her husband years before they were legally married and at a time when she was married to another man.The revelation put the freshman representative under more scrutiny from critics who have taken issue with her marital past... Omar has so far kept her tax returns private. While she has called for President Donald Trump to release his tax returns, her campaign did not acknowledge the AP’s request to release hers. Her campaign also did not answer a question about whether there might be issues with other tax returns prior to Omar’s marriage to Hirsi in 2018."
AP: Ilhan Omar Ignores Request for Tax Returns, but Demanded Trump's - "Omar has joined Democrats in demanding that President Donald Trump release his tax returns, even claiming — oddly — that he had to do so because it was “required by law”"
Ilhan Omar Refuses to Comment on Terrorist Recruitment in Her District - "Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) declined to address a report that found the highest level of terrorist group recruitment has taken place in her congressional district.According to a Fox News report from February, “More men and boys from a Somali American community in Minneapolis have joined – or attempted to join – a foreign terrorist organization over the last 12 years than any other jurisdiction in the country.” The city of Minneapolis is located in Omar’s district."
Logic, Empathy, Honesty - Posts - "Homophobia used to mean "people who don't want gay people to have equal rights"
Now it's used to silence people saying "Let's try to keep sexuality out of schools"
Racism used to mean "people who discriminate against people over the color of their skin"
Now it's used to silence people saying "Maybe there are differences between different racial groups that affect outcomes"
Sexism used to mean "people who believe women should be controlled and subjugated",
Now it's being used to silence people who say "perhaps women don't have the same life goals as men, and choose not to earn more"
We once used powerful terms to call attention to people trying to restrict people's freedom. "
Licensed Memes - Posts - "There is now a K in LGBTQQICAPF2K+"
"How secure is your password? Fantastic, using that password makes you as secure as Fort Knox. Time to crack your password: 25 years"
Paul Embery on Twitter - "I voted Leave. Not once have I demanded Remain voters be:
-hauled through the courts
-banned from the media
-denied the vote unless they meet an intellectual requirement
I have seen all these things suggested by some on the other side of the argument.
But I'm the fascist."
Tempted to cheat on a written exam? Artificial intelligence is 90% certain to nab you - "Combining big data with artificial intelligence has allowed University of Copenhagen researchers to determine whether you wrote your assignment or whether a ghostwriter penned it for you -- with nearly 90 percent accuracy... "Our program identifies discrepancies in writing styles by comparing recently submitted writing against a student's previously submitted work. Among other variables, the program looks at: word length, sentence structure and how words are used. For instance, whether 'for example' is written as 'ex.' or 'e.g.'""
If everyone who disagrees with you is a Russian bot and anything from a website you dislike can be dismissed because the website is 'biased'...
Why Fears of Fake News Are Overhyped - "many of the initial conclusions that observers reached about the scope of fake news consumption, and its effects on our politics, were exaggerated or incorrect. Relatively few people consumed this form of content directly during the 2016 campaign, and even fewer did so before the 2018 election. Fake news consumption is concentrated among a narrow subset of Americans with the most conservative news diets. And, most notably, no credible evidence exists that exposure to fake news changed the outcome of the 2016 election. The fake news panic echoes fears that prior forms of communication would brainwash the public. Just as exaggerated accounts of hysteria over Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast took advantage of doubts about radio, claims about the reach and influence of fake news express people’s broader concerns about social media and the internet... Consistent with behavioral evidence showing that online echo chambers are relatively rare, fake news consumption was concentrated among the 10 percent of Americans with the most conservative news diets, who were responsible for approximately six in 10 visits to fake news websites during this period. Even in that group, however, fake news made up less than 8 percent of their total news diet. Finally, people ages 60 and over consumed more fake news than other cohorts, which may reflect a lack of digital literacy or simply having more time to read news."
Testosterone and Civilization - Posts - "describe the American left in one image"
"tall blonde communist. won't date a man who makes less than 6 figures"
Brooklyn threesome killer sobs behind bars over girlfriend’s deceit: ‘I threw my life away for a f---ing lie’ - "He raced to his lover's defense, killing a man he thought raped his girlfriend in a three-way tryst — and now he sits in jail fearing she set him up.A disheveled Christopher Membreno was stunned on Saturday to learn that police believe the ménage à trois in Brooklyn involving his girlfriend and two men was consensual."I threw my life away for a f---ing lie? My life is over because of a f---ing lie?"... "She has not been charged at this point with anything," said a high-ranking police source, who noted that charges may never come. "Lying to your boyfriend is not the same as, say, lying to the police.""
#BelieveWomen
Amazingly in response some people still say rapists deserve to die
Woman reveals the shocking 'toxic femininity' she's experienced at work - "Imagine turning up to work every day knowing the person sitting opposite you is doing everything in their power to push you out of your job.That was the shocking reality for Naomi Joy, a 30-year-old former PR director from London, who witnessed and experienced 'toxic femininity' throughout her career.She reveals one female colleague in her thirties once declared everyone in the office 'hated her', while another tricked her into making a mistake so that she would be favourite for a promotion... she conducted a survey of 1,000 employed British women and found more than half claimed to have been sabotaged at work by another member of the so-called sisterhood, while more than a third (37 per cent) said they'd actually felt scared or threatened by a female colleague. .. while men are buoyed by competition, women report negative emotions - but only when competing with other females... Evelyn Cotter, a career coach who founded SEVEN Career Coaching, told me that female clients routinely claim they have been undermined by other women."
Women need to do better!
Of course one of the interviewees found a way to blame this on men
Gender differences in response to competition with same-gender coworkers: A relational perspective. - "We take a relational perspective to explain how women and men may differently experience competition with their same-gender coworkers. According to gender socialization research, the female peer culture values harmony and the appearance of equality, whereas hierarchical ranking is integral to the male peer culture. As competition dispenses with equality and creates a ranking hierarchy, we propose that competition is at odds with the norms of female (but not male) peer relationships. On this basis, we predicted and found in 1 correlational study and 3 experiments that women regard competition with their same-gender coworkers as less desirable than men do, and that their relationships with each other suffer in the presence of competition. We discuss the implications of these findings for women’s career progression"
The Economists Who Studied All-You-Can-Eat Buffets - "New research shows that paying that much for a buffet might actually make the food taste better... Those who paid $8 rated the pizza 11 percent tastier than those who paid $4. Moreover, the latter group suffered from greater diminishing returns—each additional slice of pizza tasted worse than that of the $8 group... “We specifically refer to our ‘all-you-care-to-eat’ items in this way because we do not want to encourage our guests to intentionally overeat,” says Kerry Kramp, chief executive of Sizzler. “Sometimes guests misperceive these types of promotions and they take it as a challenge to potentially overconsume. That is not what we hope for and the majority of our guests greatly appreciate the flexibility to have a little more of their favorite menu items. We never create ‘consumption challenges’ and that is why we basically refer to these as ‘all you care to eat’ versus ‘all you can eat.’ People can eat a lot of food if they are not feeling like there is a value to the actual item.”... As far as dealing with those customers trying to “beat the buffet,” the maxim is this: It’s all about the average... The other key metric in buffet economics is managing waste"
Why spoilers are ruining storytelling - To the victor belong the spoilers - "Shocking plots are what get people talking, tweeting and tuning in. In television, they help to guarantee huge ratings on the day of broadcast. The hubbub encourages fans to book their cinema tickets in advance. The Russo brothers begging viewers not to ruin the Avengers films probably helped them to secure the biggest opening weekend in film history. See it now, that seemed to say, or have someone else spoil it for you. This attitude stifles proper discussion of stories by critics as much as viewers, and it inflicts damage on storytelling as a craft. By promoting one technique, the twist, and one effect, surprise, stories get bent out of shape. They try too hard to counter expectation and resist predictability. “The Lord of the Rings” is totally predictable from beginning to end, but the series does not suffer for it. William Shakespeare gave away the end of his tragedies by billing them as such and no one seemed to mind (“Romeo and Juliet” even told the audience the story in a prologue). “Columbo”, a classic crime serial, reveals who commited the murder at the beginning of each episode and succeeded in making the investigation thrilling to watch. Stories that promote surprise over character end up as mere soap opera, a series of sensational shocks. That corrodes credibility"
Rep. Omar filed joint tax returns before she married husband - "U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar misused campaign funds in violation of state rules. They also revealed that she had filed joint tax returns with her husband years before they were legally married and at a time when she was married to another man.The revelation put the freshman representative under more scrutiny from critics who have taken issue with her marital past... Omar has so far kept her tax returns private. While she has called for President Donald Trump to release his tax returns, her campaign did not acknowledge the AP’s request to release hers. Her campaign also did not answer a question about whether there might be issues with other tax returns prior to Omar’s marriage to Hirsi in 2018."
AP: Ilhan Omar Ignores Request for Tax Returns, but Demanded Trump's - "Omar has joined Democrats in demanding that President Donald Trump release his tax returns, even claiming — oddly — that he had to do so because it was “required by law”"
Ilhan Omar Refuses to Comment on Terrorist Recruitment in Her District - "Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) declined to address a report that found the highest level of terrorist group recruitment has taken place in her congressional district.According to a Fox News report from February, “More men and boys from a Somali American community in Minneapolis have joined – or attempted to join – a foreign terrorist organization over the last 12 years than any other jurisdiction in the country.” The city of Minneapolis is located in Omar’s district."
Logic, Empathy, Honesty - Posts - "Homophobia used to mean "people who don't want gay people to have equal rights"
Now it's used to silence people saying "Let's try to keep sexuality out of schools"
Racism used to mean "people who discriminate against people over the color of their skin"
Now it's used to silence people saying "Maybe there are differences between different racial groups that affect outcomes"
Sexism used to mean "people who believe women should be controlled and subjugated",
Now it's being used to silence people who say "perhaps women don't have the same life goals as men, and choose not to earn more"
We once used powerful terms to call attention to people trying to restrict people's freedom. "
Licensed Memes - Posts - "There is now a K in LGBTQQICAPF2K+"
"How secure is your password? Fantastic, using that password makes you as secure as Fort Knox. Time to crack your password: 25 years"
Paul Embery on Twitter - "I voted Leave. Not once have I demanded Remain voters be:
-hauled through the courts
-banned from the media
-denied the vote unless they meet an intellectual requirement
I have seen all these things suggested by some on the other side of the argument.
But I'm the fascist."
Tempted to cheat on a written exam? Artificial intelligence is 90% certain to nab you - "Combining big data with artificial intelligence has allowed University of Copenhagen researchers to determine whether you wrote your assignment or whether a ghostwriter penned it for you -- with nearly 90 percent accuracy... "Our program identifies discrepancies in writing styles by comparing recently submitted writing against a student's previously submitted work. Among other variables, the program looks at: word length, sentence structure and how words are used. For instance, whether 'for example' is written as 'ex.' or 'e.g.'""
Post ID: 1259915327735226708
Why Asians get racially profiled
In subtle asian traits:
"Fun customs/biosecurity stories, go! Because it's never the nice white families who get 'randomly' selected for open bag screening 🤔
I'll go first: note that NZ has super strict biosecurity rules that don't allow you to bring in fresh fruit, vege, and most animal products including eggs.
So my Gran is coming to visit during mooncake season and of course she is bringing in mooncakes with egg yolks 🥚 - that's the best part! The biosecurity officer asks if her mooncakes have yolks, and she says NO. When they ask to cut into one to check, she provides one, they cut into it, no egg yolk and she's free to go - little knowing that she gave them the one she bought specially without yolk EXACTLY for that purpose! All the others have yolks. The friends she was travelling with ALL had yolk mooncakes that were confiscated, so everyone had to share hers.
As a side note, this is the same Gran who, in a later trip, pulls very illegal beef jerky out of a pocket of her handbag. She managed to sneak it in by totally forgetting it was there until she wanted a snack 😂😂😂
What have been your experiences at the border?"
My comment:
When I flew into new Zealand I got racially profiled by the Filipino customs official who asked if I had any food to declare
When I said no he asked specifically if I had barbecued pork from Singapore
Now I know why that happened!
Don't worry, I'm not triggered but the next time some Asian complains about stereotypes and starts a long rant about racism, I'll relate your grandma's story to them
"Fun customs/biosecurity stories, go! Because it's never the nice white families who get 'randomly' selected for open bag screening 🤔
I'll go first: note that NZ has super strict biosecurity rules that don't allow you to bring in fresh fruit, vege, and most animal products including eggs.
So my Gran is coming to visit during mooncake season and of course she is bringing in mooncakes with egg yolks 🥚 - that's the best part! The biosecurity officer asks if her mooncakes have yolks, and she says NO. When they ask to cut into one to check, she provides one, they cut into it, no egg yolk and she's free to go - little knowing that she gave them the one she bought specially without yolk EXACTLY for that purpose! All the others have yolks. The friends she was travelling with ALL had yolk mooncakes that were confiscated, so everyone had to share hers.
As a side note, this is the same Gran who, in a later trip, pulls very illegal beef jerky out of a pocket of her handbag. She managed to sneak it in by totally forgetting it was there until she wanted a snack 😂😂😂
What have been your experiences at the border?"
My comment:
When I flew into new Zealand I got racially profiled by the Filipino customs official who asked if I had any food to declare
When I said no he asked specifically if I had barbecued pork from Singapore
Now I know why that happened!
Don't worry, I'm not triggered but the next time some Asian complains about stereotypes and starts a long rant about racism, I'll relate your grandma's story to them
Post ID: 7269592201374802832
Links - 13th August 2019 (1)
When you lose weight, your fat cells don't just let go of fat - "Like that grandparent, your fat cells are always trying to store stuff. Fats? Of course. Vitamins? Heck yeah. Hormones? You bet. Random pollutants and toxins? Sure. Adipose tissue will soak all that up like an oily little sponge and keep it safe until you need it again. That’s the whole point of body fat—to store energy for you. When you lose weight, your fat cells start shrinking, releasing lipids and other fats into your bloodstream. These get broken down, and eventually the smaller molecules exit via your urine or breath. But adipose cells release all the other molecules they've hoarded, too. That includes key hormones like estrogen, along with fat-soluble vitamins and any organic pollutants that found their way into your bloodstream as you gained weight."
Cuban infant mortality and longevity: health care or repression? - "The common assessment is that Cuba’s achievements in lowering infant mortality and increasing longevity are among the praiseworthy outcomes of the regime—a viewpoint reinforced by studies published in US medical journals (Campion and Morrissey 1993; Cooper and Kennelly, 2006) We argue that some of the praise is unjustified. Although Cuban health statistics appear strong, they overstate the achievements because of data manipulation. Moreover, their strength is not derived from the successful delivery of health care but rather from the particular repressive nature of the regime which comes at the expense of other populations... Physicians are given health outcome targets to meet or face penalties. This provides incentives to manipulate data. Take Cuba’s much praised infant mortality rate for example. In most countries, the ratio of the numbers of neonatal deaths and late fetal deaths stay within a certain range of each other as they have many common causes and determinants. One study found that that while the ratio of late fetal deaths to early neonatal deaths in countries with available data stood between 1.04 and 3.03 (Gonzalez, 2015)—a ratio which is representative of Latin American countries as well (Gonzalez and Gilleskie, 2017).2 Cuba, with a ratio of 6, was a clear outlier. This skewed ratio is evidence that physicians likely reclassified early neonatal deaths as late fetal deaths, thus deflating the infant mortality statistics and propping up life expectancy. Cuban doctors were re-categorizing neonatal deaths as late fetal deaths in order for doctors to meet government targets for infant mortality... physicians who worried that a mother’s behavior might lead to missing the centrally established targets will prescribe the forceful internment in a state clinic (casa de maternidad) so that they may regulate her behavior. Physicians often perform abortions without clear consent of the mother, raising serious issues of medical ethics, when ultrasound reveals fetal abnormalities because ‘otherwise it might raise the infant mortality rate’... Cuba has one of the highest abortion rates in the world... government restrictions of automobile ownership improves Cuban life expectancy by reducing accidents but also by forcing the population to increase their reliance on more physically demanding forms of transportation (e.g. cycling and walking)"
Election fraud allowed to take place in Muslim communities because of 'political correctness', report warns - "Election fraud has been allowed to take place in Muslim communities because of “political correctness”, a major report finds as it calls for unprecedented reforms to the British voting system.In a report commissioned by the Government, Sir Eric Pickles, the former Conservative Cabinet minister, today warns that the authorities are in a “state of denial” and are “turning a blind eye” to election fraud.He said that there is evidence of voter fraud “especially in communities of Pakistani and Bangladeshi background” but that the cases have been ignored because of “over-sensitivities about ethnicity and religion”.Sir Eric warns that “challenging issues” over community cohesion should never be an “excuse” for failing to “uphold the rule of law and protect British liberties”. Sir Eric’s report makes a series of recommendations to Theresa May, the Prime Minister, and calls for people to require identification when they are voting and for police cordons around polling stations to prevent intimidation.He also calls for officials at polling stations to be banned from speaking any language other than English and says that it should be made a criminal offense to attempt to influence someone to vote for a candidate because of their religion."
Meme - "Of Course This Is a Pipe. Nobody Really Thinks That Artistic Portrayals of Certain Objects Are Literally the Objects Themselves. Referring to Symbols as What They Are Understood to Represent Is Merely a Universally Employed Lingustic Convenience. Saying This Is a Portrayal of a Pipe Would Be Too Tiring. So Yes This Is a Pipe Because the Word Pipe Is Understood by Everyone to Refer to Portrayals of Pipes as Well as Actual Pipes. This Is How Language Works Stop Being Pedantic You Post-Modernist Bore"
Nico on Twitter - "Please don't police the bodies of pregnant people. To protect children against alcohol harm, take on the industry. Call for a ban on alcohol advertising. Campaign for a health tax on alcohol manufacture and distribution. Demand public parks and libraries next to bars.
Pregnant people are whole human beings, not baby incubators. Patriarchy demands that they be pure gestational vessels despite toxic environments and structural oppression, while absolving fathers of responsibility. If you want healthy babies, work for healthy societies.
If it bothers you to see a pregnant person drinking alcohol, does it bother you equally when your bros who are fathers are out drinking with you instead of being with their kids?"
"Drinking alcohol while pregnant is now a way to.... *squints* ...own the patriarchy. Yep. There’s your hot take for today, y’all."
Study of marathon runners reveals a ‘hard limit’ on human endurance - "Athletes who can run the equivalent of 117 marathons in just months might seem unstoppable. The biggest obstacle, it turns out, is their own bodies. A new study quantifies for the first time an unsurpassable “ceiling” for endurance activities such as long-distance running and biking—and it also finds that pregnancy’s metabolic toll resembles that of an ultramarathon"
SCANDAL: Bizarre royal sex toy exposed in TV documentary - "Known for his raunchy lifestyle, Bertie – also known as Dirty Bertie and Edward the Caresser – was the proud owner of this device, which allegedly allowed him to service up to two women at once, despite the restrictions of an increasingly rotund frame as he reached his older age... ‘What really perturbed me about the chair is that there was room on it for two ladies, one on the top and one underneath—but exactly how he got to the one underneath we never managed to actually work out between the whole crew."
Throwback Thursday: When the King of England had a love chair to 'pleasure two partners at once' - "Bertie seems to have had a particular taste for married women and often selected his mistresses from the wives of his intimate circle of friends, who considered it their duty to King and c*** to turn a blind eye...
Napoleon Bonaparte’s sister, Pauline (1780-1825), took on so many well-endowed lovers that her doctors diagnosed her with an exhausted vagina."
41 Scandalous Facts About Edward VII, The Playboy King - "One of Edward’s favorite indulgences was to frequent the Parisian Brothel La Chabanais. He had his own room fitted with a copper bathtub decorated with half-swan-half-women, among other things. He quite enjoyed filling it with champagne and bathing in it with prostitutes. As one does."
Newspaper Article - We will maintain racial balance among S’poreans: PM Lee, TODAY, 9 February 2013, Page 4 - "The racial balance in Singapore will not change in spite of the immigration plans as set out in the White Paper on Population, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said yesterday."
Since the Chinese have the least children, this is a tacit admission that ethnic Chinese are targeted in immigration
The Encyclopedia of Mistresses/an Under-The-Covers Look at the Other Women of History's Most Influential Men: Dawn B. Sova - "This text is a record of the famous women throughout history who have been branded mistresses, many of whom used their sexual talents in the bedroom to wield heady power in the boardroom, the throne room, the battlefield and even the pulpit."
Prof. Jordan Peterson responds to CBC cultural appropriation fallout - "Journalists are already self-censoring in the toxic fallout from the CBC’s cultural appropriation controversy, University of Toronto Prof. Dr. Jordan Peterson says.Peterson, whose fight against mandatory use of genderless pronouns drew international attention, said the impact of political correctness on free speech and broader society is profound.“This is why I’ve been warning about the emergence of such ideas at the university,” Peterson told The Toronto Sun.“Anybody who thinks these ideas are going to stay in the university, believe me, they’re engaging in wishful thinking.”A number of prominent journalists have been criticized for their recent participation in a debate about cultural appropriation, whether writers using the creations of other cultures are exploring or exploiting them...
What are the implications for journalists?
“The first lesson is they’re going to be hung out to dry by their superiors … And the second is that the radical mob learned that with a relatively moderate level of effort, they can humiliate and take down even journalists that have impeccable reputations and large followings. So if the journalistic community wanted to teach their enemies the lesson they most want to be taught, they taught them that this week.”
In some cases, the journalist apologized. Why wasn’t that enough?
“You never apologize to a mob. You’re not dealing with individuals who you can reestablish a relationship with. You’re dealing with a soulless idea that has people in its possession. And it’s a shifting entity, it doesn’t even involve the same people necessarily across time although there’s often a core, and all the idea is going to do with your apology is note that you believe that the game is fair, the game that they foisted on you is fair and that you’re guilty of breaking the rules.”"
Alexandra Petri on Twitter - "what if as a nation we just did one BIG Kickstarter once a year to help everyone pay medical bills instead of 327 million individual ones"
Vietnamese Model Sparks Outrage, May Be Fined for ‘Offensive’ Dress at Cannes Film Festival - "A Vietnamese model who showed up at the 72nd Cannes Film Festival in a look that left little to the imagination has received widespread condemnation in her home country.Ngoc Trinh, 29, attended the French film festival on May 19 for the premiere of “A Hidden Life,” a movie following an Austrian farmer who refused to fight for the Nazis in World War II... The revealing dress has caused “public outrage” across Vietnam, according to the country’s Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism... Thien reportedly ordered officials to investigate the model for possible violations in Vietnam’s strict public decency laws... Many reportedly slammed Trinh’s taste as a disgrace to the country. Across message boards, users described her dress as “sexually explicit,” “weird” and “gross”"
Legal immigrant prof’s criticisms of illegal immigration result in calls for his ouster - "A legal Chinese immigrant professor from Georgia Gwinnett College is facing harsh criticism calls for his termination following “controversial” remarks he made about illegal immigration. According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Fang Zhou of the college’s history department used phrases such as “ghetto thugs” and “libtards” on social media, and said he has a sign in his office which reads “Deportation of illegal immigrants.”Zhou said he “speaks truth to power” in his class and teaches about “the financial drain of illegal immigration on the economy and the high crime rates of illegal immigrants.” Upon completion of his course, Zhou said his students are “overwhelmingly against” illegal immigration... Zhou’s RateMyProfessors.com page is overwhelmingly positive, and the three negative reviews don’t mention illegal immigration nor classroom indoctrination"
Georgia professor’s immigration comments cause stir on social media - "“If you are going to to reward illegal immigrants, there will be more illegal immigrants,” he said.Zhou said he has plenty of students who disagree with his viewpoints, some have sent him hate mail. Critics, he said, must come with information to defend their position.“To make a convincing argument, please present evidence,” Zhou said"
Cuban infant mortality and longevity: health care or repression? - "The common assessment is that Cuba’s achievements in lowering infant mortality and increasing longevity are among the praiseworthy outcomes of the regime—a viewpoint reinforced by studies published in US medical journals (Campion and Morrissey 1993; Cooper and Kennelly, 2006) We argue that some of the praise is unjustified. Although Cuban health statistics appear strong, they overstate the achievements because of data manipulation. Moreover, their strength is not derived from the successful delivery of health care but rather from the particular repressive nature of the regime which comes at the expense of other populations... Physicians are given health outcome targets to meet or face penalties. This provides incentives to manipulate data. Take Cuba’s much praised infant mortality rate for example. In most countries, the ratio of the numbers of neonatal deaths and late fetal deaths stay within a certain range of each other as they have many common causes and determinants. One study found that that while the ratio of late fetal deaths to early neonatal deaths in countries with available data stood between 1.04 and 3.03 (Gonzalez, 2015)—a ratio which is representative of Latin American countries as well (Gonzalez and Gilleskie, 2017).2 Cuba, with a ratio of 6, was a clear outlier. This skewed ratio is evidence that physicians likely reclassified early neonatal deaths as late fetal deaths, thus deflating the infant mortality statistics and propping up life expectancy. Cuban doctors were re-categorizing neonatal deaths as late fetal deaths in order for doctors to meet government targets for infant mortality... physicians who worried that a mother’s behavior might lead to missing the centrally established targets will prescribe the forceful internment in a state clinic (casa de maternidad) so that they may regulate her behavior. Physicians often perform abortions without clear consent of the mother, raising serious issues of medical ethics, when ultrasound reveals fetal abnormalities because ‘otherwise it might raise the infant mortality rate’... Cuba has one of the highest abortion rates in the world... government restrictions of automobile ownership improves Cuban life expectancy by reducing accidents but also by forcing the population to increase their reliance on more physically demanding forms of transportation (e.g. cycling and walking)"
Election fraud allowed to take place in Muslim communities because of 'political correctness', report warns - "Election fraud has been allowed to take place in Muslim communities because of “political correctness”, a major report finds as it calls for unprecedented reforms to the British voting system.In a report commissioned by the Government, Sir Eric Pickles, the former Conservative Cabinet minister, today warns that the authorities are in a “state of denial” and are “turning a blind eye” to election fraud.He said that there is evidence of voter fraud “especially in communities of Pakistani and Bangladeshi background” but that the cases have been ignored because of “over-sensitivities about ethnicity and religion”.Sir Eric warns that “challenging issues” over community cohesion should never be an “excuse” for failing to “uphold the rule of law and protect British liberties”. Sir Eric’s report makes a series of recommendations to Theresa May, the Prime Minister, and calls for people to require identification when they are voting and for police cordons around polling stations to prevent intimidation.He also calls for officials at polling stations to be banned from speaking any language other than English and says that it should be made a criminal offense to attempt to influence someone to vote for a candidate because of their religion."
Meme - "Of Course This Is a Pipe. Nobody Really Thinks That Artistic Portrayals of Certain Objects Are Literally the Objects Themselves. Referring to Symbols as What They Are Understood to Represent Is Merely a Universally Employed Lingustic Convenience. Saying This Is a Portrayal of a Pipe Would Be Too Tiring. So Yes This Is a Pipe Because the Word Pipe Is Understood by Everyone to Refer to Portrayals of Pipes as Well as Actual Pipes. This Is How Language Works Stop Being Pedantic You Post-Modernist Bore"
Nico on Twitter - "Please don't police the bodies of pregnant people. To protect children against alcohol harm, take on the industry. Call for a ban on alcohol advertising. Campaign for a health tax on alcohol manufacture and distribution. Demand public parks and libraries next to bars.
Pregnant people are whole human beings, not baby incubators. Patriarchy demands that they be pure gestational vessels despite toxic environments and structural oppression, while absolving fathers of responsibility. If you want healthy babies, work for healthy societies.
If it bothers you to see a pregnant person drinking alcohol, does it bother you equally when your bros who are fathers are out drinking with you instead of being with their kids?"
"Drinking alcohol while pregnant is now a way to.... *squints* ...own the patriarchy. Yep. There’s your hot take for today, y’all."
Study of marathon runners reveals a ‘hard limit’ on human endurance - "Athletes who can run the equivalent of 117 marathons in just months might seem unstoppable. The biggest obstacle, it turns out, is their own bodies. A new study quantifies for the first time an unsurpassable “ceiling” for endurance activities such as long-distance running and biking—and it also finds that pregnancy’s metabolic toll resembles that of an ultramarathon"
SCANDAL: Bizarre royal sex toy exposed in TV documentary - "Known for his raunchy lifestyle, Bertie – also known as Dirty Bertie and Edward the Caresser – was the proud owner of this device, which allegedly allowed him to service up to two women at once, despite the restrictions of an increasingly rotund frame as he reached his older age... ‘What really perturbed me about the chair is that there was room on it for two ladies, one on the top and one underneath—but exactly how he got to the one underneath we never managed to actually work out between the whole crew."
Throwback Thursday: When the King of England had a love chair to 'pleasure two partners at once' - "Bertie seems to have had a particular taste for married women and often selected his mistresses from the wives of his intimate circle of friends, who considered it their duty to King and c*** to turn a blind eye...
Napoleon Bonaparte’s sister, Pauline (1780-1825), took on so many well-endowed lovers that her doctors diagnosed her with an exhausted vagina."
41 Scandalous Facts About Edward VII, The Playboy King - "One of Edward’s favorite indulgences was to frequent the Parisian Brothel La Chabanais. He had his own room fitted with a copper bathtub decorated with half-swan-half-women, among other things. He quite enjoyed filling it with champagne and bathing in it with prostitutes. As one does."
Newspaper Article - We will maintain racial balance among S’poreans: PM Lee, TODAY, 9 February 2013, Page 4 - "The racial balance in Singapore will not change in spite of the immigration plans as set out in the White Paper on Population, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said yesterday."
Since the Chinese have the least children, this is a tacit admission that ethnic Chinese are targeted in immigration
The Encyclopedia of Mistresses/an Under-The-Covers Look at the Other Women of History's Most Influential Men: Dawn B. Sova - "This text is a record of the famous women throughout history who have been branded mistresses, many of whom used their sexual talents in the bedroom to wield heady power in the boardroom, the throne room, the battlefield and even the pulpit."
Prof. Jordan Peterson responds to CBC cultural appropriation fallout - "Journalists are already self-censoring in the toxic fallout from the CBC’s cultural appropriation controversy, University of Toronto Prof. Dr. Jordan Peterson says.Peterson, whose fight against mandatory use of genderless pronouns drew international attention, said the impact of political correctness on free speech and broader society is profound.“This is why I’ve been warning about the emergence of such ideas at the university,” Peterson told The Toronto Sun.“Anybody who thinks these ideas are going to stay in the university, believe me, they’re engaging in wishful thinking.”A number of prominent journalists have been criticized for their recent participation in a debate about cultural appropriation, whether writers using the creations of other cultures are exploring or exploiting them...
What are the implications for journalists?
“The first lesson is they’re going to be hung out to dry by their superiors … And the second is that the radical mob learned that with a relatively moderate level of effort, they can humiliate and take down even journalists that have impeccable reputations and large followings. So if the journalistic community wanted to teach their enemies the lesson they most want to be taught, they taught them that this week.”
In some cases, the journalist apologized. Why wasn’t that enough?
“You never apologize to a mob. You’re not dealing with individuals who you can reestablish a relationship with. You’re dealing with a soulless idea that has people in its possession. And it’s a shifting entity, it doesn’t even involve the same people necessarily across time although there’s often a core, and all the idea is going to do with your apology is note that you believe that the game is fair, the game that they foisted on you is fair and that you’re guilty of breaking the rules.”"
Alexandra Petri on Twitter - "what if as a nation we just did one BIG Kickstarter once a year to help everyone pay medical bills instead of 327 million individual ones"
Vietnamese Model Sparks Outrage, May Be Fined for ‘Offensive’ Dress at Cannes Film Festival - "A Vietnamese model who showed up at the 72nd Cannes Film Festival in a look that left little to the imagination has received widespread condemnation in her home country.Ngoc Trinh, 29, attended the French film festival on May 19 for the premiere of “A Hidden Life,” a movie following an Austrian farmer who refused to fight for the Nazis in World War II... The revealing dress has caused “public outrage” across Vietnam, according to the country’s Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism... Thien reportedly ordered officials to investigate the model for possible violations in Vietnam’s strict public decency laws... Many reportedly slammed Trinh’s taste as a disgrace to the country. Across message boards, users described her dress as “sexually explicit,” “weird” and “gross”"
Legal immigrant prof’s criticisms of illegal immigration result in calls for his ouster - "A legal Chinese immigrant professor from Georgia Gwinnett College is facing harsh criticism calls for his termination following “controversial” remarks he made about illegal immigration. According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Fang Zhou of the college’s history department used phrases such as “ghetto thugs” and “libtards” on social media, and said he has a sign in his office which reads “Deportation of illegal immigrants.”Zhou said he “speaks truth to power” in his class and teaches about “the financial drain of illegal immigration on the economy and the high crime rates of illegal immigrants.” Upon completion of his course, Zhou said his students are “overwhelmingly against” illegal immigration... Zhou’s RateMyProfessors.com page is overwhelmingly positive, and the three negative reviews don’t mention illegal immigration nor classroom indoctrination"
Georgia professor’s immigration comments cause stir on social media - "“If you are going to to reward illegal immigrants, there will be more illegal immigrants,” he said.Zhou said he has plenty of students who disagree with his viewpoints, some have sent him hate mail. Critics, he said, must come with information to defend their position.“To make a convincing argument, please present evidence,” Zhou said"
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