Kids getting pwned

From Cheezburger:

This Double-Whammy Gif of Two Kids Getting Wrecked Is What Dreams Are Made Of - FAIL Blog - Funny Fails:

"Sometimes a gif comes along and changes the way you see the world. It’s the kind of gif that makes you realize that good things still happen, and that no matter how dark the night becomes, the dawn will shine all the brighter.

This is that gif.

This is a gif of two kids getting totally wrecked by one, giant red-rubber ball, and it’s glorious.

Feel free to use this next time you see someone get destroyed online — maybe if you witness a two-tiered roasting supreme."



Keywords: children ball, kids ball, hit by ball

We also have:


Baby dumped in snow

And:


Kid has slinky-like thing thrown onto him
(converted from Animated GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY)

Links - 4th December 2018 (1)

1 in 4 Statisticians Say They Were Asked to Commit Scientific Fraud - "The absolute worst offense (i.e., being asked to fake statistical significance) occurred to 3% of the survey respondents. Another 7% reported being asked to change data, and a whopping 24% -- nearly 1 in 4 -- said they were asked to remove or alter data. Unequivocally, that is a request to commit scientific fraud. Of the less serious offenses, 55% of biostatisticians said that they received requests to underreport non-significant results... the ongoing reproducibility crisis may have, at least in part, a more sinister explanation."

If left to ‘market forces’, developers will build smaller apartments at ever higher prices - "land cannot be moved around. We have a shortage of land supply but cannot import any. On the other hand, demand for property is always there and will shoot up irrationally — as will the selling price — when people expect property prices to rise continuously in the foreseeable future."

Millennials choosing Instagram-worthy homes over saving for retirement: Manulife survey - "Millennials are also spending more than any other generation on their desired life stage goals. On average, they are splurging or expecting to splurge an average of $177,000 on the renovation of their first house, and over $209,000 on the purchase of their first car – over 45% higher than the other generations."

Feminist Mom Tells 'Entitled' Boy to Leave Public Park So Daughters Can Have 'Girls-Only' Time - "A mom's attempt to promote feminist values by telling a stranger and her son to leave a public space drew the ire of a mommy-blogger... write a takedown last week. "I’ve seen families start to separate along gender lines, and not because of the men," Hill argued. "It’s the moms who separate themselves and their daughters to a point that it becomes exclusive. In doing so, they present a warped view of gender equality to that of the most stereotypical male chauvinist.""
And we're told feminism is for men too

China should thank Trump and stop using trade war as excuse for confused economic signals - "Without his actions, the Chinese government would not have scaled down its over-the-top propaganda drive about how amazing China has become, nor would it have been forced to reflect on its own limits and pitfalls. Nor, more pertinently for Chinese consumers, would China have been so forthright in lowering or even removing tariffs on imports including consumer goods and drugs, which it has done three times in the past year or so."

So far, the big trade war loser is China, not the US - "Beijing has just reported its weakest quarterly official growth figure in a decade, and its currency has recently fallen to its lowest level since 2017. The 6.5% year-on-year growth reported for the third quarter is the official figure, and Chinese officials themselves have long conceded that many of their economic measuring sticks are doctored (which means that the unofficial, but real, number is probably much worse). By contrast, the US economy has remained relatively robust and shows little sign of a slowdown yet... America’s Asian Cold War allies were shocked at the manner in which the US ruthlessly exploited the crisis for the benefit of Wall Street (failing to appreciate that the end of the Cold War had in essence eviscerated the basis of the bargain whereby American trade policy accommodated a huge increase of Southeast Asian exports to the US, to underwrite the latter’s ongoing prosperity and ensure that its bloc remained firmly within the US sphere of interest as it fought to contain the spread of global communism)... a large economy with a trade deficit has greater bargaining power than smaller economies with trade surpluses (in spite of its growth, China is still smaller in market exchange-rate terms). By cutting the overall trade deficit, the big deficit country stimulates domestic growth and employment via import substitution. Meanwhile, the surplus nation loses a big chunk of its foreign market, leaving it with an overbuilt export sector. Moreover, it is politically easier to build new factories in the former deficit country than to have mass layoffs and idle factories in the former surplus country. That is what Trump means when he says that “trade wars are good and easy to win.” The dirty secret of globalization-driven cheap-labor offshoring is that it has boosted profits by much more than it has lowered consumer prices. The claim is that consumers will be hurt, but in the first instance, it is likely that the huge profit margins of the offshoring firms get whittled down first. They’ll still make profits, but not the same kinds of windfalls from cheap labor. That’s also one of the implicit quid pro quos embedded in the US corporate tax reform."

5 Endangered Singaporean Hawker Dishes Millennials Have Never Heard Of & Where To Find Them - "1. Oyster cake (UFO) - Maxwell Fuzhou Oyster Cake
2. Chao tah bee hoon - Yong Kee Seafood Restaurant
3. Tau kwa pau - Say Seng Tau Kwa Pau
4. Roti kirai (roti jala) - Hajjah Sadiah Muslim Food
5. Chicken rice balls - Hainan Chicken Rice"

The liberal autocrat - "‘As federal chancellor I bear the responsibility for the successful and the unsuccessful.’ So said Angela Merkel on Monday when she announced that she would give up the leadership of her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and step down as German chancellor in 2021. Some foreign newspapers presented this as a ‘shock decision’. But within Germany, Merkel’s announcement was largely greeted with relief. Merkel made her announcement after the CDU had yet again suffered heavy losses in a regional election... the seemingly endless Merkel era has been characterised by a lack of democratic choice and the inability of the mainstream parties to open up debates and consider alternative ways of dealing with political problems"

The death of a Japanese countryside festival - "The heirs, who live up in Tokyo or Osaka, will soon look down upon the pitiful relic as if it were at the bottom of a well: unreachable, unfeasible and easily forgettable. Meanwhile, these historic homes sit patiently, like a forgotten dog in a cage that waits every day for its master to return."

Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says
Maybe the promotion of recycling, straw hysteria etc are driven by corporate interests to distract attention from their (much bigger) contributions to environmental degradation so they can carry on business relatively unmolested.

Zero plastic bags or zero waste? In defence of Singapore’s rejection of a plastic bag ban - "1. In Singapore’s context, banning/charging for plastic bags would not have a significant, positive environmental impact..
Given our highly effective waste collection and management system, Singapore’s contribution to marine- and land-based plastic pollution is minimal. Also, plastic bags account for a small percentage (see point three) relative to all waste generated in Singapore...
2. There are more concerning waste streams to regulate in Singapore...
Plastic waste only accounted for 11 per cent of the total waste generated in Singapore in 2017. It is unclear what proportion of this 11 per cent is due to plastic bags and whether the a ban would have a lasting effect in reducing plastic waste...
3. Resources are limited"

Opinion | Recovering the (Lost) Art of Civility - The New York Times - "Since the Republicans won back the House of Representatives in 1994, it’s been a much fiercer competition between the two parties than at most times since the Civil War. When you see yourself as the minority party for the long term, you have incentives to cooperate with the majority party to move some parts of your agenda. But when you think that you might win back control soon, there’s a strong incentive to just hold out and fight. On the other hand, when you gain control, you know it might not last, so you want to maximize your wins and use whatever tactics you can to overcome opposition. We’ve seen both parties doing this since the 1990s. And when you play win-lose politics fiercely for more than 20 years, voters adopt that mind-set too — or they become so frustrated that they tune out."

Birthright Citizenship Is Not Actually in the Constitution - NYTimes.com - "Senator Jacob Howard, who introduced the language of the clause on the floor of the Senate, contended that it should be interpreted in the same way as the requirement of the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which afforded citizenship to “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power.” The Supreme Court has never held otherwise. Some advocates for illegal immigrants point to the 1898 case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, but that case merely held that a child born on U.S. soil to parents who were lawful, permanent (legally, "domiciled") residents was a citizen."

Vegetarians are more miserable and enjoy parties less than meat-eaters, scientists claim - "Those who cut meat from their diet experience more negative feelings, have lower self-esteem and see less meaning in life, a study found. The authors conclude that vegetarians may be less ‘psychologically well-adjusted’, suggesting teasing by omnivores may be to blame."
Or maybe they are sad because they can't eat meat

Vegetarians are 'less healthy and have a lower quality of life than meat-eaters', scientists say - "Vegetarians are less healthy than meat-eaters, a controversial study has concluded, despite drinking less, smoking less and being more physically active than their carnivorous counterparts.A study conducted by the Medical University of Graz in Austria found that the vegetarian diet, as characterised by a low consumption of saturated fat and cholesterol, due to a higher intake of fruits, vegetables and whole-grain products, appeared to carry elevated risks of cancer, allergies and mental health problems such as depression and anxiety."

That's rich! We gave £1billion aid to India as they built £330million statue - "Britain donated more than £1billion to India in the years when it was lavishing a fortune on building the world’s tallest statue... India is the world’s fastest-growing economy, has sent a mission to Mars, boasts more billionaires than the UK and itself hands out millions to needy nations. It currently gives more foreign aid than it receives despite its problems with disease and healthcare.

First It Was All About Diversity, Then Inclusion. Here's Why Neither Of Those Are Enough - Everyday Feminism - "Well, it’s 2018, and frankly, we want money, resources, and power"
From the horse's mouth

George R. R. Martin, Fantasy’s Reigning King - The New York Times - "SOMETIME THIS SUMMER, sales of the first five books in Martin’s eventual heptalogy, “A Song of Ice and Fire,” surpassed 85 million copies sold worldwide. Now available in 47 languages, the series is also the basis for HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” by many measures the most popular television show on earth, airing in 170 countries."

George R. R. Martin Answers Times Staffers’ Burning Questions - The New York Times - "We spend 10 times as much energy and thought and debate in the media discussing whether or not N.F.L. players should stand for the national anthem than this threat that’s going to destroy our world... We are such a deeply divided culture these days, such a deeply divided country. It’s not just S.F. and fantasy. You’re seeing it in gaming with Gamergate. You’re seeing it in comic books with what they’re calling Comicgate. You’re seeing it in young adult fiction with ridiculous internet purge campaigns. It’s coming from the extreme right. And it’s coming from the extreme left as well. And it is very dispiriting. But yes, it has invaded science fiction and fantasy in a big way. Fortunately, the traditional science fiction fans were able to push back against the various Puppy campaigns and win that fight, I think. But it took a toll — the Hugos are wounded. And more, the collegial atmosphere that united science fiction for most of my lifetime is changed. I mean, I remember days when you would have an extremely progressive left-wing author like Norman Spinrad or Harlan Ellison doing a panel with a conservative author like Jerry Pournelle. And they would go hammer and tongs at each other on a panel, arguing the ideas. And then they would adjourn to the bar and drink together and sing old songs for a few hours. That doesn’t seem to exist anymore, the idea of science fiction or fantasy as something that could unite people from all over the political spectrum. It’s a different age. I’m sometimes reminded of Yeats’s “Second Coming”: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / … / The best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passion and intensity.”"

Links - 3rd December 2018 (Liberal Anti-Semitism)

Facebook Removes Rabbi’s Post Detailing Harassment From Farrakhan Supporters - "New York Rabbi Avram Mlotek, who claimed in a Facebook post that he was harassed by supporters of Louis Farrakhan on his commute home Thursday evening, is now saying that Facebook has removed his post. Mlotek wrote in a subsequent Facebook post on Friday that Facebook told him they had taken down the post because it “violates community standards.”"
Intersectionality?

Rabbi Claims He's Getting Death Threats for Saying President Trump Is Welcome in Pittsburgh - "Rabbi Jeffrey Myers said he's receiving death threats after telling CNN President Trump is welcome at the Tree of Life synagogue."

NYC Synagogue Vandalism Suspect Is Former City Hall Anti-Hate Crime Intern - "The suspect in the vandalism of a New York synagogue was a Democratic activist and former City Hall intern who worked on anti-hate crime issues... He is a “queer” black man informally adopted by a Jewish couple, and The New York Times’ charity, the Neediest Cases, helped pay for him to go to college where his focus was African American studies... A political event with two Democratic candidates at the Union Temple of Brooklyn was canceled Friday after attendees found graffiti saying “Die Jew Rats” and “Hitler,” which one of the candidates said highlighted the need to vote out “hate.”"

Is It Safe to Be Jewish in New York? - The New York Times - "Contrary to what are surely the prevailing assumptions, anti-Semitic incidents have constituted half of all hate crimes in New York this year, according to the Police Department. To put that figure in context, there have been four times as many crimes motivated by bias against Jews — 142 in all — as there have against blacks. Hate crimes against Jews have outnumbered hate crimes targeted at transgender people by a factor of 20... If anti-Semitism bypasses consideration as a serious problem in New York, it is to some extent because it refuses to conform to an easy narrative with a single ideological enemy. During the past 22 months, not one person caught or identified as the aggressor in an anti-Semitic hate crime has been associated with a far right-wing group... bias stemming from longstanding ethnic tensions in the city presents complexities that many liberals have chosen simply to ignore. “When we were growing up in Harlem our demoralizing series of landlords were Jewish, and we hated them.” So begins an essay by James Baldwin that appeared in The New York Times in 1967 titled “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White.” When a Hasidic man or woman is attacked by anyone in New York City, mainstream progressive advocacy groups do not typically send out emails calling for concern and fellowship and candlelight vigils in Union Square, as they often do when individuals are harmed in New York because of their race or ethnicity or how they identify in terms of gender or sexual orientation."

The New York Times Just Made A STUNNING Admission About Why Leftists Often Refuse To Call Out Anti-Semitism - "Orthodox Jews, who are often the targets of anti-Semitic attacks, aren’t seen as victims; their victimizers, who aren’t conservatives and who can’t be linked with conservatives, aren’t seen as victimizers. There’s a reason Al Sharpton, who helped initiate a riot against Orthodox Jews in Crown Heights in 1991, has a show on MSNBC where he opines about President Trump’s linkages to white supremacist anti-Semitism. Certain types of anti-Semitism are worthy of note. Others aren’t. And those on the Left often decide which is which with simple reference to a preferred narrative in which Jews are part of the white privileged class, unless they are victimized by white supremacists."

As Brooklyn Hate Crime Suspect is Arrested, Time for the Left to Rethink Its Attitude to Anti-Semitism - "Polite, 26, is not a white supremacist. He is African-American, was raised in part by Jewish foster parents, and was sent to Brandeis University with the help of a charity run by The New York Times. He was a Democratic party activist, a protégée of former City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, and a one-time City Hall intern who, according to the Times, worked on “initiatives to combat hate crime, sexual assault and domestic violence.” But Polite’s journey through so many of contemporary liberalism’s most vaunted paths—academia, politics, activism—and the kindness shown him by Jews were apparently not enough to prevent him from contracting the mind-numbing virus of anti-Semitism... in today’s America, no one side has a monopoly on hate and chaos. When the Democratic Party’s leaders, including a former president and a former attorney general, stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Louis Farrakhan on the stage at Aretha Franklin’s funeral, is it any wonder that some are prone to listen when Farrakhan refers to Jews as termites? And listen they do: Earlier this week, a rabbi, Avram Mlotek, was harassed on the subway in Manhattan by a Farrakhan supporter who blamed the Jews for all the violence directed against them everywhere in the world... Polite wasn’t a disgruntled loner with loose social network and no systems of support. Throughout his troubled life, he received one opportunity after another to rise above his hard beginnings. He enjoyed all aspects of the liberal American dream, from a warm foster family to an all-expenses-paid scholarship to a fine university to a position working alongside a prominent progressive politician. He ought to have been, as the Times wrote when it reported about his success just a year ago, one to “defy the statistics.” Instead, he tried to burn down the Jews... the left has just as much of a Jew-hatred problem on its hand, if not a much bigger one: If the second most powerful progressive politician in the city with the largest Jewish population in America couldn’t detect, let alone curb, the arsonist on her staff, the problem is much graver than many might care to admit"
If you endorse anti-white racism, it's just a hop, skip and jump away to anti-Semitism - Jewish Privilege was the original White Privilege, after all

How the Liberal Jewish Establishment Failed to See Left-Wing Anti-Semitism Coming - "By the sixties, anti-Semitism in America was profoundly changing. But the ADL didn’t change. Anti-Semitic violence was now largely a feature of urban life. The new Jewish middle class, many of them Holocaust survivors and accented immigrants who had worked tirelessly in sweatshops to put their kids through college, was driven out of its comfortable urban enclaves by racial violence. Jewish neighborhoods and businesses built by the immigrant generation vanished in riots, firebombs, muggings, and stabbings. The second act of the civil rights movement was an anti-civil rights movement that, had it been directed at blacks, would have been met with protests and outrage. Instead, the left defended the perpetrators and condemned the victims. Black leadership jettisoned Martin Luther King’s calls for equality and co-existence, replacing them with nationalism and racial supremacism. And the left cheered. That’s how Al Sharpton went from leading anti-Semitic pogroms to addressing the DNC. It’s why Obama and the Congressional Black Caucus met with Farrakhan. It’s why Bernie Sanders backed Jesse “Hymietown” Jackson despite his anti-Semitism. It’s why anti-Semitic black literature is celebrated... When two black men were kicked out of Starbucks, there was outrage. When a Jewish organization was kicked out of Starbucks at the behest of the fan of a black supremacist who admires Hitler, there were shrugs... Defenders and condemners of this phenomenon will blame the unique issue of race in America. But that doesn’t hold up. The left did the same exact thing with pogroms in Russia. Whether it was Russian peasants or urban thugs, the left defended the violence as the outcry of an oppressed class or race against the privileged Jewish bourgeoisie, even though the targets were inevitably the Jewish poor."

WARMINGTON: Trudeau silent about attack on Jewish teens - "the prime minister, who has been quick to comment on racial attacks in the past, has since Sunday been tweeting about other things, including his current meetings with leaders in Singapore and having some fun commenting on some new Canadian children, originally from Eritrea, delightfully getting their first taste of snow to which Trudeau joked in a tweet: “Now convince them that shovelling is fun and you’re all set.”"

Why Are Middle East Girls Better in School Than Boys?

Why Are Middle East Girls Better in School Than Boys?

"Jordan has never had a female minister of education, women make up less than a fifth of its workforce, and women hold just 4 percent of board seats at public companies there. But, in school, Jordanian girls are crushing their male peers. The nation’s girls outperform its boys in just about every subject and at every age level. At the University of Jordan, the country’s largest university, women outnumber men by a ratio of two to one—and earn higher grades in math, engineering, computer-information systems, and a range of other subjects.

In fact, across the Arab world, women now earn more science degrees on a percentage basis than women in the United States. In Saudi Arabia alone, women earn half of all science degrees. And yet, most of those women are unlikely to put their degrees to paid use for very long.

This is baffling on the most obvious levels. In the West, researchers have long believed that future prospects incentivize students to invest in school. The conventional wisdom is that girls do better in school as women acquire more legal and political rights in society. But many Middle Eastern women do not go on to have long professional careers after graduating; they spend much of their lives working at home as wives and mothers. Fewer than one in every five workers is female in Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman...

Across the developed world, girls report doing one more hour of homework than boys per week, according to survey data, and boys are four times more likely than girls to report playing video games daily or almost daily. In many Muslim cultures, parents also tend to give girls less freedom. There is an ever-present anxiety that girls will shame the family by having a liaison with a boy. Teenage boys, meanwhile, congregate in the streets and in smoky cafés without supervision.

There are also practical differences in incentives: In Jordan, a boy with mediocre test scores can still get a job after high school, maybe with the police or maybe cleaning hotel rooms. It probably will not be a great job, but it will give him some money and allow him to marry someday, which remains a mark of status in the culture. What’s more, under the law, boys can often count on inheriting twice as much as girls.

Women and girls, on the other hand, have far fewer choices...

Boys’ schools are more violent places, concluded the study, which was funded by USAID. Over half of the boys interviewed said they’d experienced some kind of bullying in school over the previous year. Only 11 percent of girls said the same thing. Two-thirds of male teachers said they’d witnessed physical violence among students in the past year—compared with less than a quarter of female teachers. Boys also reported worse relationships with their male teachers...

The separation of students, teachers, and administrators into single-sex public schools may serve cultural and religious purposes, but it seems to create an unintentional ghetto for boys—where less-devoted teachers instruct less-engaged students amid more violence...

“We used to say, empowering women, and now we talk about empowering men,” Hamood Khalfan Al Harthi, the undersecretary for education and curriculum in Oman, says...

In Western countries, some studies suggest that boys—and girls—do better in single-sex environments, not worse. But everything depends on the execution... After South Carolina opened hundreds of single-sex public schools starting in 2008, for example, some teachers found that boys who had never gotten in trouble before were suddenly regulars at the principal’s office. “If you’re in a group of all boys, being disrespectful to the teacher may raise your status in the eyes of some boys,” Sax says. “Boys know that’s not true for girls.”...

Boys may be particularly harmed by bad schools and especially responsive to strong schools. Using Florida birth and school records, the researchers compared the effects of strong schools on siblings in the same families. The worse the school, they found, the bigger the gender gap in favor of girls. “School quality,” the study concluded, “is more consequential for boys than girls.”...

The fact that boys are struggling around the world means that too many schools are designed with a bias for girls. Too many teachers prefer compliance over competition, quiet diligence over risk-taking, and on average that leads to schools that are more comfortable for girls than for boys in every time zone"

Links - 3rd December 2018 (1)

John Seungjin Oh(오승진)'s answer to Is life hard in South Korea? - Quora - "This test is so stressful to take that the police force deploy their personnel and police boats in the Han River on the day of the test because so many students attempt suicide... Korea has the highest suicide rate of any OECD country, and it’s constantly increasing... Korea has the second longest work hours in OECD while having significantly lower pay than other countries. There is even a popular term called Passion Paying, which refers to the low amount of pay that people get, usually excusing it by saying “you’re passionate about this job, right? So I don’t need to pay as much money”...
All males, and only males are required to serve in the military for 2 years. And even worse, they need to serve in one of the most important stages of your life: When you’re supposed to go look for a job right after you graduated, or is currently in university. This is why women actually have much higher employment than men in the 20’s, and has a crushing advantage over all men. This doesn’t look so gender-equal does it?...
A very large portion (as in, more than half) of feminists in Korea are very….. radical and have caused many problems on the excuse of “gender inequality”. But the truth in Korea is that legally, there are more advantages of being a girl (no military service), and even socially, Korea is taking a very progressive view on gender equality…that was, until radical feminists caused an extreme hate on feminism in Korea recently. I am a feminist by definition because I believe in gender equality. But most “feminists” in Korea are closer to female chauvinists. Womad (not to be confused with WOMAD music festival) is a very infamous “feminist” community/website in Korea, and...
2. It supports Park Geun Hye just for being a woman
3. Stated “All daughters should kill their fathers. They’re all sexist bast*rds. We support the kill-the-father project.” One member of the community actually worsened her father’s heart disease in an attempt.
6. Staged sexual assault in order to insult all men...
Korea is an extremely racist society, discriminating especially against Southeast Asian people and African-Americans, as well as many Indians."

Apparently You Can Make Gigantic Cocktails in a Washing Machine - "There's an old video, originally filmed in July 2015, making the rounds again. It's just under a minute long, showing a group of Brazilian partygoers in Agronômica, a municipality of the state of Santa Catarina, making a big, mean batch of caipirinha with a repurposed washing machine."

Democrat-supporting women strip off for 'Grab Them By The Ballot'
"Because according to Democrat shills, when fat ugly, unfit women are shown naked it’s “liberating”, and “progressive”. But when a gym fit and attractive woman does the very same thing, it’s “sexist”, and “oppressive”.
This brand of feminism is Trumps most cherished ally. They also need to keep up how much they hate white males to help the Dems lose."

I got into an argument with my friend because I reject evolution because it's heteronormative. Are scientists going to make evolution more inclusive or will they replace it with something else? - Quora

Researchers find tweeting in cities lower than expected - "less people tweet per capita from larger cities than in smaller ones, indicating an unexpected trend that has implications in understanding urban pace of life... Much like newspapers, a few entities are responsible for spreading information through a large city. The researchers dubbed these people "town tweeters.""

Mosquitoes Learn the Smell of Danger - "mosquitoes that were trained to associate human smells with their potentially deadly defensive maneuvers lost their appetite for the previously attractive scent"

Muslim woman exudes love for 'magical' Israel - ""Everyone of all ages in Israel gave me exceptional, world class treatment. I got sloppy little kisses from infants, handmade presents from small children, endless praise from teenagers, saw the childish side of young adults, got treated to wonderful local eats by people my parents age, and listened to words of wisdom and got major hugs from people that were much older. Why am I saying this? To let you know that the people of Israel of all generations love, and love to be loved. And believe me... I didn't only see a small handful of people in one town. "Don't listen to what the media, or what low res overly shared graphics say against Israel or the IDF (may God bless them.) Take everything you hear as inspiration to try to figure out what the real story is for yourself by getting straight to the source… Don't blindly go by the ridiculous headlines and stories by the media."...
"It's almost crazy how many Muslim women I saw driving, shopping independently, studying, working, and enjoying life in Israel. Freedoms they couldn't even dream of elsewhere in the Mideast. And yes, many of them were all burka'ed out to the nines. Also, it's way safer to walk outside late at night in most parts of Israel, than in NY. Because the people are civil and good. If you reply with anything contradictory, I'll simply ignore cause that won't be worth my time. "Anyway, I went to businesses run by Jews, and got great customer service. I went to businesses run by Muslims. Also got great service. Customers were mixed everywhere, and everyone got along just fine. Interestingly enough, in both cases, the shop owners/staff weren't able to figure out whether I was a Muslim or Jew. I took that as a compliment. "I didn't think it would be possible for me to love Israel and her people more than before. But yep. This trip did it. Does that make me a Zionist? Probably. You will be surprised how many other Zionist Muslims I came across there. So bring it on haters, bring it on. I will stand at the front line for the chosen people. And after the smoke clears, we will cuddle and play board games together while enjoying bourekas and lemonade with mint."... "I was not discriminated against at all by any means. If anything, I was given bigger discounts, and larger portions of meals because everyone was delighted to see that I was a Jew-loving Muslim. They went out of their way to make sure I was comfortable and enjoying my stay. Even strangers.""

Better Data Could Mean Better Dating - "both men and women tended to pursue mates just 25 percent more desirable than themselves. "So they're being optimistic, but they're also taking into account their own relative position within this overall desirability hierarchy.""

Navy SEAL Veteran On 25 Percent of Students Who Say They Were Traumatized After the 2016 Election - "Eli Crane, a Navy SEAL veteran and CEO of Bottle Breacher, was surprised to see the recent study showing that 25 percent of college students said they were traumatized after President Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election... According to Crane, “the millennial generation has been so coddled and protected from reality they are now trying to misappropriate a diagnosis primarily reserved for combat vets, first responders, sexual assault victims and individuals who have suffered from real trauma because their candidate lost an election.”... “That adversity that they fought so hard to keep you from experiencing so you didn’t get your little feelings hurt or overwhelmed. You actually need more of it, not less of it. It’s the only way to develop that cloak of protection from real life called thick skin.”"

Woman Chokes Club Bouncer She Mistakenly Thought Groped Her - "Police have released a New York nightclub’s surveillance video showing a 5-foot-1, 125-pound woman choking a bouncer into unconsciousness after she mistakenly thought he had slapped her on the bottom. The Oct. 20 video released Thursday by Plattsburgh police shows 22-year-old Kierah Lagrave, of Plattsburgh, approaching the bouncer from behind near the Five1Eight nightclub’s dance floor and putting her arms around his neck."

University of Denver Hosts 'White Privilege Symposium' Focusing on How White People can Hold Themselves 'Accountable' for Being White

Group tells AG to charge woman who falsely accused man of molest - "A group that includes the Malaysia Hindu Sangam has charged that the Attorney-General’s Chambers was pressured into dropping a case against a woman who falsely accused a man of molesting a girl. They said the false allegation had damaged 38-year-old Mathurai Veeran Krishnan’s reputation and made it difficult for him to get a job in the last 18 months... Following the accusation against Veeran, several NGOs such as the Women’s Aid Organisation, Voice of the Children and the Association of Women Lawyers urged authorities not to charge Maya."
Unsurprisingly, the women's organisations (which are probably feminist) are the ones defending non-accountability for false accusations. Maybe this is why official statistics on false accusations are so low - because of pressure not to charge the accusers

Nigeria May Be A Developing Nation, But It Is Rich In Culture vs. Get Me Out Of This Godforsaken Hellhole - "It's sad how the media always dwell on the negative aspects of African society. Granted, Nigeria faces some economic challenges (the result of centuries of colonialist exploitation), but I'm sure Nigerians don't concern themselves with thoughts of shallow materialism when they are surrounded every day by such stirring, dynamic expressions of the human spirit."
"No one is safe. The police chase people in the streets and beat them like dogs. This new general, Abubakar, he is no better than the rest before. President Babangida, he stole $12 billion from the Nigerian people. When people ask where the money goes, they are shot. They shoot people every Sunday on Victoria Beach. The bodies always wash up on the sand after they throw them in the ocean"

Unemployed white South Africans blocked from registering on government jobs website - "The organisation stated that the exclusion is part of a “long list of policies obsessed with race”, and that exclusion based on race was becoming the norm."

More Voters Say the Press Has Divided the Country Than Trump - "In the new Morning Consult/Politico poll, 64 percent of registered voters said the press has done more to divide the country than unite it since Trump took office, compared with 56 percent who said the same was true of the president... The view that the national news media has been a mostly divisive presence was shared among partisans: A plurality of Democrats (46 percent) said the national media has done more to divide than unite... A Morning Consult/Politico poll in July found that 28 percent of voters said they had “a lot” of confidence in the presidency — more than twice the 13 percent who said the same of television news and double the 14 percent who said the same of newspapers"

Canadian stoners go back to street dealers as government struggles to meet high demand

Links - 2nd December 2018 (2)

Google Walkout Organizers Explain Their Demands - "A commitment to end pay and opportunity inequity, for example making sure there are women of color at all levels of the organization, and accountability for not meeting this commitment... A clear, uniform, globally inclusive process for reporting sexual misconduct safely and anonymously... Promote the Chief Diversity Officer to answer directly to the CEO and make recommendations directly to the Board of Directors. In addition, appoint an Employee Representative to the Board. Both the CDO and the Employee Representative should help allocate permanent resources for demands 1-4 and other equity efforts, ensure accountability to these demands, and propose changes when equity goals are not met. A company is nothing without its workers. From the moment we start at Google we’re told that we aren’t just employees; we’re owners. Every person who walked out today is an owner, and the owners say: Time’s up."
Comments: "I hope this walk out serves as a wake up call to boards of directors all across American but especially in the progressive hot beds of NYC and the Cali Coast, that when you embrace a culture of active progressivism in the workplace, it embraces you too, and you will be constrained, you will be shamed, you will be on display. Rejecting the scientific liberalism of James Damore in retrospect feels like an unforced corporate error that will be very hard to walk back."
"Every story has two sides. Here we've heard, at most, half of one side. Anyhow, as an employment lawyer, I can tell you the easiest way to get rid of harassers (especially high level ones) is through a severance package. They have rights too and, in cases where there is no direct evidence (which is 90% of cases), it's the most cost effective way to end a bad situation for your employees and move on. Plaintiff's lawyers will tell you the same thing. Sad that these protesters didn't think to talk to any experts in the field before staging their protests/photo ops. I guess to them the message matters more than the reality."

Lucas Lynch - "This concern over safe spaces is so overblown. Good thing it's limited to just a bunch of nutty college students who won't possibly be in a position to control everything we see and hear. This one is really astonishing... This is how a religion takes over our society. Google, of course, is one of the most liberal, open and tolerant workplaces on the planet. And the ideologues will simply demand more power and more money as efforts to make distributions 100% equal fail and fail again, as the reality is that many of the supposed inequalities in representation aren't due to systemic oppression. Put such an ideology completely in charge of the world's information and be very afraid of what could come next."
Comments: "Do these companies realize they are merely hastening the demise of American corporate hegemony around the world?? You think Chinese companies are devoting ANY resources to dealing with this nonsense? Nope."
"Insane that people thought this was ever a small domain of blue-haired activists on college campuses. This shit goes to the top of corporate America. As Andrew Sullivan said "we are all on campus now""
"How many anonymous sexual misconduct complaints against the Chief Diversity Officer would it take before they were fired I wonder? #listenandbelieve"

Andrew Sullivan: We All Live on Campus Now - "the most common rebuttal to my intermittent coverage of campus culture has been: Why does it matter? These are students, after all. They’ll grow up once they leave their cloistered, neo-Marxist safe spaces. The real world isn’t like that. You’re exaggerating anyway... The Enlightenment principles that formed the bedrock of the American experiment — untrammeled free speech, due process, individual (rather than group) rights — are now routinely understood as mere masks for “white male” power, code words for the oppression of women and nonwhites. Any differences in outcome for various groups must always be a function of “hate,” rather than a function of nature or choice or freedom or individual agency. And anyone who questions these assertions is obviously a white supremacist himself. Polarization has made this worse — because on the left, moderation now seems like a surrender to white nationalism... Liberals welcome dissent because it’s our surest way to avoid error. Cultural Marxists fear dissent because they believe it can do harm to others’ feelings and help sustain existing identity-based power structures... it is about the spirit of the First Amendment. One of the reasons I defended Katie Roiphe against a campaign to preemptively suppress an essay of hers (even to the point of attempting to sabotage an entire issue of Harper’s) is because of this spirit... This is a real-world echo of the campus habit of disrupting speakers, no-platforming conservatives, and shouting people down. But now this reflexive hostility to speech is actually endorsed by writers and editors. Journalism itself has become a means of intimidating journalists... An entirely intended byproduct of this kind of bullying — and Roiphe is just the latest victim — is silence... No one feels capable of saying anything in public. In the #MeToo debate, the gulf between what Twitter screams and what pops up in your private email in-box is staggering... When the perpetrator of an anonymous list accusing dozens of men of a whole range of sexual misdeeds is actually celebrated by much of mainstream media (see this fawning NYT profile), you realize that we are living in another age of the Scarlet Letter. Moira Donegan has yet to express misgivings about possibly smearing the innocent — because the cause is far more important than individual fairness... Almost every corporation now has affirmative action for every victim-group in hiring and promotion. Workplace codes today read like campus speech codes of a few years ago"
When even Andrew Sullivan is using "cultural marxism" unironically!

I translated Chinese writer Louis Cha ‘Jin Yong’. Here’s why he never caught on in the West - "all of Mr Cha’s books have been re-published in a number of Asian languages, including Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, the mother tongues of countries that share many of the cultural underpinnings of China... the OUP edition [translation of Louis Cha] sells steadily in small numbers. The main reason, I think, is the style of the storytelling. Which is ironic, because in Chinese terms, Cha’s writing was a huge leap in the direction of Western literary methodology compared with his forebears. Apart from the subject matter – often dramatic events from Chinese history that mean nothing elsewhere – the amount of description and the things described and not described, I think, make it difficult for Western readers to relate to Cha’s work... Cha was writing in those days to fill space in the newspaper and the more words he wrote, the more space he filled – just like Dickens. I once asked him about all the flowery names he gave to the kung fu fighting moves and weapons and whether they precisely described things he knew of. He said, no, he was largely just making it up to sound colourful. That was a relief for me... The Chinese diaspora turned out to be the natural market for English versions of Cha’s books, at least in the short term. Hundreds of people have contacted me over the years since The Book and the Sword was published to ask when I would do another one, and, interestingly, almost all of them are people of Chinese ancestry living in places like Canada and Australia. They understand the cultural context because of their family background, but they cannot read the Chinese books. So an English version is, for them, a godsend."

The shared sorrow of Louis Cha ‘Jin Yong’ and Deng Xiaoping - "He said lightheartedly that this was the third time he had made a comeback, just like “the characters in your books have to go through hell before they rise to the top. That is life.” Deng Rong, the younger daughter of Deng Xiaoping, said her father used to read Cha’s martial arts novels – obtained from Hong Kong because they were banned in China – at noon and then half an hour before going to bed. Even on business trips, Deng would take a martial arts novel with him."

I can only have sex when I’m drunk? : TooAfraidToAsk - "I’m 23F and I just realized that I only have sex when I’m drunk. The prospect of engaging in sexual activities SOBER came up the other day, and I started to panic and felt really uncomfortable at the thought of it. I suddenly realized that, for the last 3 years, I will only engage in any sexual act with my boyfriend provided I am drunk. What the heck do I do with this information? Is this normal?
Edit: My boyfriend is not raping me, jesus fucking christ."

ANDREW SULLIVAN: THINKING. OUT. LOUD. - "Of all the debates Sullivan has been embroiled in, his collision with the gay left is the hardest to reconstruct, because the gay-rights debate has been transformed in the two decades since, not least by his own writing. Yet Sullivan wrote the first major article in America calling for gay people to be given the right to marry—and he was savaged by other gays. His talks were picketed by a group called the Lesbian Avengers, who waved signs with Sullivan’s head in the crosshairs of a gun. In gay bars he was denounced as a “collaborator” and physically attacked. He was anathemised by mainstream gay-rights organisations, who refused to engage with him. Why? The Village Voice writer Richard Goldstein spoke for this tendency when he claimed that Sullivan was “promoting the bargain of assimilation. But this deal comes with a price. It requires gays to maintain the illusion that we’re just like straights… [But] we were interested in messing with the codes of sexuality.” By advocating marriage, Sullivan was opting into the very system gay people should destroy. He was just “Rush Limbaugh with monster pecs,” a self-hater who “would solve the faggot problem by urging gay men not to act like fags”. Today, marriage is the Number One demand of the gay-rights movement... Many of the people who denounced him as “evil” for proposing marriage were now—without any apology—getting married themselves
When gay marriage was considered heteronormative and thus homophobic

15 photos of the USS Indianapolis, whose World War II sinking started the deadliest shark attack in history - "About 300 of the 1,195 sailors would go down with the heavy cruiser, and approximately 900 survivors would have to wait about four days in the water to get rescued. Subjected to dehydration, heat, delirium from drinking salt water, and shark attacks, only 316 would make it out of the water alive... The loud noise, thrashing and blood drew in many sharks, which are thought to have killed a few dozen to 150 sailors, making it the worst shark attack in history."

Public toilets in South Korea to be monitored to crack down on spycam porn - "Public bathrooms at all transport hubs in South Korea, including airports, bus terminals and metro and train stations, will be regularly monitored as a measure to better deal with secret cameras installed in public toilets, as well as spycam pornography that has been prevalent in the country's cyberspace... Spycam pornography, locally known as "molka", generally refers to secretly produced, sexually exploitive videos or pictures of women in public spaces, such as restrooms and subways, among others. Such content has also been created and shared online by victims' former boyfriends, typically in retaliation, with the intent to damage the women's future job and marriage prospects... Once entering a bathroom stall, checking for peepholes that may contain secret lenses - and stuffing tissues inside if there are indeed holes - has become common practice among South Korean women, they say. The new measures were introduced as government data showed that 24 per cent of all spycam-related crimes have so far taken place at transport sites - including public restrooms in crowded metro stations, highway rest areas and airports... The new government measure requires all South Koreans who operate transport sites to establish a special team to monitor the property, including public restrooms, and to inspect for secretly installed cameras at least once a day... A public bathroom that has been monitored and regulated well and consistently for a significant amount of time will be designated a "clean zone"... While there is no doubt that the mass women's rights rallies have been the major driving force behind the changes, recent research showed that only about 50 per cent of South Korean women and 20 per cent of South Korean men endorse the cause. A study by the Korea Press Foundation, which surveyed some 1,000 Korean men and women aged 20 to 59, found that 72.5 per cent of those who did not support the rallies think the protests may, in fact, make more South Koreans think negatively of feminism. At the same time, 17.1 per cent said South Korean women do not experience gender-based violence and discrimination to an extent that they need to hold a mass rally. The women's rights rallies have been a subject of debate as some participants have made controversial remarks against men during previous editions. They were later accused by critics of openly committing hate speech."

Eduardo Marqués Collado's answer to Why does Spain have such a low crime rate compared to other European countries like France, the UK, Italy, or Portugal? - Quora - "Spanish law makes a big, huge distinction between crimes that involve violence (or the threat of violence) vs. those that don’t, up to the point of considering them different crimes altogether... Consequently, criminals in Spain have huge incentives to act as non-violently as possible. That’s why there is so many petty thefts and scams, yet so very little armed robbery, for example."

On The Vietnam War with Sir Max

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: Addendum: EP6 On The Vietnam War with Sir Max

"The key thing that has changed meanwhile, is that, I very much bought into the idea that not only was this a disastrous war, which indeed it was, but because the United States was tied up with a bad cause, that therefore the other side's must be a good cause. And I've now come to believe, having studied a huge amount of material from North Vietnam and from the communist side and so on that really north and south Vietnam, I've come to believe, were two rival tyrannies.

And the idea that Ho Chi Minh was a good guy, anymore than Mao Zedong was, or Che Guevara, these were absolutely ruthless revolutionaries. And they did terrible stuff. And whereas everybody has seen the pictures of the South Vietnamese police chief executing the Vietcong prisoner in 1968 and the naked kid running away after a South Vietnamese napalm strike.

The Communists made very sure that there were no photographs of many of the dreadful things that their side did, the terrorism that, I mean, for instance, there's an entirely reliably sourced story of one of many village chiefs who was being buried alive in the Mekong Delta in the early 1960s by the local communists in front of all his fellow villagers, to demonstrate that the price of, of rejecting the revolution was much worse than mere death. And he pleaded for a merciful bullet and the communists cadres just said that they saved their bullets, for the, for the imperialists, and in the Tet offensive of 1968, when thousands of perfectly innocent people whose worst crime was to support the South Vietnamese government were executed in cold blood by the communists, again, no pictures, and we didn't see all this stuff...

We saw in 1975, that when the communists gained power, the ruthlessness and the incompetence with which they behaved, starvation descended on the Vietnamese people in the 1980s, and any idea that the other side were the good guys now seems to be out of order. And I have come strongly to believe what is true of most events in history, that neither side had a monopoly of virtue or vice...

‘Walt Boomer said, said to me, he said, nothing, he said, in my lifetime, has changed America more than Vietnam. He said, it created a mistrust and a suspicion of government and of the people in charge that we've never been able to undo.’...

‘The credibility gap… Americans would believe their president most of the time, regardless of which party he even was and that’s never been the same…

‘Kennedy was both courageous and bold at the time of the of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which could have gone horribly wrong. But sometimes when presidents, I mean, Lyndon Johnson terribly wanted to be seen, to be courageous and to be doing the right thing as the leader of the United States by sending in troops to Vietnam. But of course, he got it wrong.

But what I'd like to feel is that through my own narratives, one is all the time trying to realize that governments are trying to do very difficult things. I don't just mean the United States government in the context of Vietnam but most governments most of the time.

And the same way for military commanders. I mean, I've seen enough wars myself as a reporter. One’s seen enough terrible things on the battlefield that it is very difficult to fight wars. It is not as my father and his friends used to say, oh it's all a great wrong. It's very tough out there on the battlefield and, and I find that at the age of 72 I have a huge sympathy for the people that make the decisions that I didn't have when I was a stupid young kid’...

I think that many of the reporters who served in Vietnam did an outstanding job of reporting entirely accurately what they themselves saw and knew but where they failed was because there's so much going on on the other side that they had no access to. That all the incredibly bad stuff that the other side was doing never got any sort of show. And I quite understand, in a very small way I was party to it myself… you were witness to the corruption and the incompetence of the South Vietnamese government but we just didn't pay enough attention to stuff we couldn't see...

On the one hand, a lot of senior Americans did not tell the truth to the world about what was happening. But on the other hand, America did preserve a commitment that was very honorable to let us see for ourselves. So that in a way that's never been repeated in any war since, that if any of us sort of didn't believe what we were being told about some battle going off in the middle of nowhere, we could get access. And me as a British journalist, as much as anybody on fixed wing aircraft and helicopters to go out there and look for ourselves. And the Communists would never let anybody but Jane Fonda go up and see what the hell was going on in their neck of the woods...

The late 60s... all sorts of stuff got tangled up together. It was the worldwide youth movement against the established order and the revolt against the old sexual morality and the enthusiasm of pot and all this stuff got rolled up with Vietnam and you've got to remember kids in those days were putting posters on their college walls of Mao Zedong, who anybody who knows anything knows was one of the great mass murderers of the 20th century up there with Hitler so there was incredible naivety among the kids... one of the things that drove the protest movement was the fact that a lot of them were terrified of being drafted. That they were afraid they were going to have to waste two years of their lives in uniform and maybe lose their lives all together...

‘The supreme irony of the war, if you go to Vietnam today, if you said to an American in about 66, how would you like Saigon to look in 2018? Well, actually, it’ll be pretty much the way it looks now. And although it's still a very unpleasant totalitarian state in Vietnam they do now have license to make money. They all want to be Americans. They're incredibly nice to Americans, because they realize that the American system is worth, countless more valuable and countless more valued than that their own wretched government. But they're all completely hooked on American culture and on making money... while the United States failed in Vietnam, with B-52s and spooky gunships and defoliation, that the United States triumphed with Johnny Depp and YouTube. But what we've learned is that economic forces can be at least as important if not more so than soldiers in deciding how history plays out’

‘My stepfather always said just drop blue jeans, rock and roll and Playboy magazine on them and they'll become Americans’"

Links - 2nd December 2018 (1)

Funding for Gaelic ‘discriminates against Muslims’ - "A former SNP Holyrood candidate has claimed “anti-Muslim racism” is seeping into Scottish education because language policies treat ethnic minorities as inferior to white Scots. Nighet Riaz, an academic at the University of the West of Scotland, said Gaelic was promoted and given millions of pounds in ring-fenced public funding while the traditional languages of non-white groups were sidelined in schools... She said the SNP narrative of Scotland being a “more tolerant, welcoming nation” clashed with the experiences of ethnic minority communities and described lack of provision for Urdu as “a form of anti-Muslim racism being played out by the state”. She added: “The reality is that no new funding is being diverted to minority languages other than Gaelic which is ring-fenced by the Gaelic School Capital Fund and protected by legislation, as it is seen as the ‘Scottish’ language. We cannot ignore that Gaelic is spoken by white Scots, whilst Urdu is spoken predominantly by brown Muslims. This suggests that ethnic minorities, Muslims in particular, are not considered equally Scottish as white ‘native’ Scots.”"
Promoting your traditional culture is racist if you're white

Brighton University accused of encouraging prostitution, as sex workers charity gets stall at Freshers fair - "The University of Brighton has been accused of encouraging prostitution after a sex workers' support group ran a stall offering help for students at its freshers' fairs. An investigation is being launched into the decision to allow the Sex Workers' Outreach Project Sussex (Swop) attend the university's events in the city and at its campus in Eastbourne... In a series of tweets it promoted its attendance, it said: "1 in 6 students does sex work or thinks about turning to sex work. We can help." It also tweeted: "If you're topping up your fees with sex work, or struggling to balance work and studies, or want to talk and don't know where to go... we're here for you. We respect your autonomy, privacy and confidentiality."... Another feminist activist, Sarah Ditum, told the Sunday Times: "This is essentially a grooming operation, pitching prostitution as a manageable, desirable lifestyle, equivalent to joining the rowing club.
If teaching children about homosexual relationships and homosexual people isn't promoting homosexuality, why is offering sex workers or potential sex workers support encouraging prostitution? Especially since a lot less than 1 in 6 people are homosexual

Owners of failed SMEs hit by huge debts - "Successful start-ups in Singapore are often glamorised, used as examples of the heights one can attain through innovation and grit. But there are many more that fail, saddling their owners with crushing debt and despair"

Southampton student union president vows to tear down WWI mural - "A US-educated student rep for England's University of Southampton, who sparked outrage by saying a mural in memory of First World War soldiers should be 'painted over' because it displays only 'white men', earns at least $25,000 (£20,000) as Students' Union President. Emily Dawes, 21, whose family lives in a $1.2 million (£930,000) home in upscale Vienna, Virginia, provoked outrage when she referred to a mural depicting Allied First World War soldiers as a 'mural of white men' and called for it to be taken down... she boasted about her 'extra as heck' manifesto and petitioned for unisex toilets, sexual consent training and 'social media accessible to multiple cultures'. Dawes, who describes herself as 'openly bisexual' was previously president of the university's Feminist Society and says her favorite thing about Southampton is the 'pretty dope' vegan food... Dawes has previously written a blog about her battle with anxiety and depression, it said: 'So as some of you will know, I live my life alongside some fun diagnoses: generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) and clinical depression... 'Mark my words - we're taking down the mural of white men in the uni Senate room, even if I have to paint over it myself.' Both she and the students' union have since apologised for her comments after she was accused of abusing the free speech the soldiers fought and died to protect...
students painted over Rudyard Kipling's popular 'If' poem after it was put up to inspire those attending Manchester University. Activists said writer Kipling was racist and replaced his work with 'Still I Rise' by American poet Maya Angelou. Earlier this month, Cambridge University Students Union were criticised after considering crossing out the phrases 'British war veterans' and 'Poppies' from Remembrance Day plans... professor Nigel Biggar came under fire after he said society should take a more balanced view of the Empire rather than simply remembering it with shame... student campaigners at Oxford called his article 'racist' and claimed it 'whitewashed' the British Empire"
Apparently men sacrificing their lives isn't enough for feminists
Someone couldn't have come up with a better caricature of a SJW (feminist, anti-white racist, vegan, mental health issues etc) if he'd tried
Apparently balance is whitewashing and only an uncritically negative view of colonialism is acceptable ("blackwashing" is good?)

Somali man whose deportation was stopped by do-good plane passengers is revealed to be a gang-rapist - "A Somalian whose deportation from Britain was dramatically halted after airline passengers staged a mutiny demanding his release can be exposed today as a convicted gang rapist who was being kicked out of the country because of his sickening crime. Officials escorting Yaqub Ahmed on a flight from Heathrow to Turkey were forced to abandon his deportation when around a dozen holidaymakers who felt sorry for him angrily intervened shortly before take-off... Ahmed, 18 at the time of the rape and living in Clerkenwell, North London, is thought to have been granted refugee status after arriving in Britain from war-torn Somalia as a boy."
Is this rape culture?

Millennium Falcon Alternate Layouts That'll Blow Your Mind - "The Design of the Millennium Falcon Is Fully Customizable"

Hong Kong’s Cantonese speakers have long had to code switch, but is that a disadvantage? - "Hong Kong’s education chief Kevin Yeung Yun-hung recently got flak for asserting the obvious: “the future development of Chinese language learning across the globe will rely mainly on Mandarin”, before wondering aloud whether Hongkongers, most of whom learn Chinese in Cantonese, would be disadvantaged... Given China’s sheer size, and ethnic and linguistic diversity, a standardised common tongue has always been necessary. In the centuries before the founding of the Chinese empire in 221BC, the myriad feudal states conducted official business and inter-state diplomacy using Yayan or “standard speech”, a language spoken in the Zhou dynasty royal capital, in present-day Henan. Yayan continued to be spoken in the imperial era, with a standardised written form,but by the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1271-1368), the Chinese language spoken in the then capital (present-day Beijing) was made the common tongue of the empire. The subsequent Ming dynasty used the language of the original capital Nanjing, but the Manchu Qing dynasty that followed once again decreed the use of the “speech used by mandarins in Beijing” as the common language."

A lottery win could change the way you vote - "they became more right wing after their windfall... Winning more than £500 ($645) shifted people’s views approximately 0.13 points on the scale to the right. That’s equivalent to about a 2% shift towards the Conservative end of the spectrum. It might not sound like a huge shift, but it was significant compared with other factors that influence an individual’s politics, such as education. Completing secondary education to age 18 nudged people along the political spectrum by nearly 4% to the right, compared with people who have no formal education, according to the survey data. And the greater the lottery win, the greater the shift to the right. There’s a well-established link between having more money and being more right wing, but this is tricky to disentangle from the values people grow up with and the social circles they move in"

The cost of keeping Singapore squeaky clean - "“If you have littering like you see in other countries, it can breed rodents, flies, cockroaches. They are all carriers of bacteria and germs,” said Edward D’Silva, chairman of the Public Hygiene Council. Mosquitoes are an even bigger worry. You won’t get malaria here, but in a bad year, there’ll be tens of thousands of cases of dengue... Singapore isn’t clean because locals fear fines. It’s clean because there’s an army of workers scrubbing it... There are 56,000 cleaners registered with the National Environment Agency. There are likely thousands of independent contractors who aren’t registered. Mostly they’re low-paid foreign workers or elderly workers. Taipei, by contrast, has maybe 5,000 cleaners... In Japan, Australia or the UK, there isn’t the same availability of very low-cost labour to take on the cleaning jobs. In Singapore, cleaners are mostly drawn from a pool of roughly a million foreign workers as well as local aged workers. But as Singapore’s population grows and labour becomes more expensive, it simply won’t be affordable to employ so many cleaners... Singapore spends at least SGD$120m (US$87m) a year on cleaning public spaces."

Civil partnerships: 'Why I want one with my sister' - "Catherine and Ginda want to be able to enter into a civil partnership so they can enjoy the same inheritance rights as other couples who have formalised their relationship. Catherine says it is a "glaring injustice" because civil partnerships are open to any two people. They don't need to be involved in a romantic relationship - they just cannot be blood relatives. "Excluding siblings is pure discrimination. I could have a civil partnership with my next door neighbour, but I can't have a civil partnership with the person I have shared my home and life with."... "The central issue is this: why should all those whom the government presume are in a sexual relationship, whether heterosexual or gay, enjoy legal recognition, and only those who live together in committed, secure, platonic relationships be denied it?""
So much for the slippery slope being a logical fallacy

Polyamorous relationships may be the future of love - "Polyamory does not feature in any census tick box but anecdotal evidence suggests that it is on the rise. Some are even calling for it to be recognised by law following the legalisation of gay marriage in the UK and the US... She spoke to numerous poly activists in research looking into whether polyamorous marriage might ever legally be possible A 2012 survey of 4,000 polyamorous people revealed that about 76% of the respondents would be interested in legal marriage if it were available, while 92% agreed that “consensual, multiparty marriages among adults” should enjoy the same legal status as marriage between two people. This appetite for legal poly marriage may have arisen as a result of the support given to same-sex marriage, which is now a legal right in the UK and in the US, Aviram says. “It galvanized the poly activists.”... For polyamory to be protected by law it will first have to be considered an orientation in the way that homosexually is. If, legally speaking, it is seen as an orientation, then the reasoning goes that poly individuals would be protected by similar anti-discriminatory laws. Legal researcher Ann Tweedy, of Hamline University School of Law recently laid out an argument for why it should be considered an orientation... Monogamy is also extremely rare in the animal kingdom, as BBC Earth explored in detail. Even among apparently monogamous animals there are many “extra-pair copulations”, or cheating. Our closest relatives, chimpanzees, bonobos and even orangutans all live in highly promiscuous societies, which suggests our common ancestor with chimps did so too. In this view, “the idea that monogamy is ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ in human beings is hard to sustain”, says Barker. “As with so many things, there is a lot of diversity in this area.”"

Blasphemy laws are being repackaged around the world as prohibitions on 'hate speech.' Don't buy it - "blasphemy laws are being repackaged as prohibitions on “hate speech.” Over the years there has been a campaign, led by some Muslim nations, to have the international community condemn “defamation of religion." This rhetorical sleight of hand allows defenders of blasphemy laws to portray them as protections for persecuted believers rather than the enforcement of a theological orthodoxy. On the day before Irish voters chose to remove blasphemy from the constitution, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that an Austrian woman’s rights weren’t violated when she was convicted of “publicly disparaging religious doctrines.” While conducting a seminar on Islam, the woman had suggested that an alleged marriage between Muhammad and a 6-year-old girl amounted to pedophilia... Criminalizing criticism of religion is also difficult to reconcile with guarantees of freedom of expression and freedom of religion contained in such widely embraced documents as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Union‘s Charter of Fundamental Rights. It also has been demonstrated that blasphemy laws are more likely to be enforced against religious minorities than adherents of a majority faith."

Should it be illegal to call Mohammed a paedophile? - "Should you be allowed to say that the founder of one of the world’s largest religions was a paedophile? According to the European Court of Human Rights the answer is ‘no’. In a decision issued this week the Court in Strasbourg ruled that this statement is defamatory towards the prophet of Islam, ‘goes beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate’ and ‘could stir up prejudice and put at risk religious peace.’... I have a huge four-volume collection of the hadith (sayings) of Mohammed picked up on my travels in North Africa some years ago. They are the Bukhari hadith – that is the collection of hadith that scholars of Islam recognise to be the most authentic and reputable collection of Mohammed’s sayings... All religious traditions have oddities. Some Christians and Jews recently expressed aggravation when Joe Rogan and I laughed at a portion of a text from their religious tradition regarding blasphemy, bears and baldies. But what can you do? Pretend that the legend of Elisha and the two bears isn’t in the Bible? Isn’t odd or funny? Burn all copies of the text? Unwittingly, perhaps, the ECHR has brought us to something of an impasse in this ruling. For the hadith are – next to the Qur’an – the most important foundational texts of Islam... Are we allowed to say what we read in books? Or are we to lie in order to remain on the right side of the new blasphemy laws of our day?"

Links - 1st December 2018 (Crime in London and the UK)

London Crime Wave: City Hiring Hundreds of £150 a Day ‘Anti-Racist Police Monitors’ to ‘Promote Diversity’ - "“The skills you possess are highly prized,” the Metropolitan Police tells potential candidates for the role, which requires no qualifications nor job history besides “life experience”, “an appreciation of diversity issues”, and that applicants have lived in London for three years. A role introduced in 2003 to identify and weed out potential racists amongst police recruits, community assessors are expected to “challenge inappropriate behaviour or behaviour from colleagues and bring this to the attention of the Assessment Team”, as well as to “complete, sign and date any recorded evidence of inappropriate language or behaviour”... Taxpayers Alliance chief John O’Connell said: “We are constantly told that the Met Police needs more money to keep policing crime, but more money isn’t going to make a difference if spending priorities are completely warped... the popularity of the capital’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, had plummeted from +22 in May to just +4 in September as public concern continued to grow over the city’s violent crime epidemic. However, the Labour mayor, who has used his office to take a strong, pro-globalist stance on “culture war” issues like feminism and to denounce U.S. President Donald J. Trump, insists the problem is solely down to police spending cuts by the Conservative government."
This will help tackle knife crime!

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, London's knife crime problem - "'The National Audit Office says it's not clear what effect police numbers reductions have had on crime... they have said there is no hard evidence and moreover other statistics show that stop and searches in the capital have fallen to 135,000 over the last year'...
'We set the Home Office to work with people across the board. Police officers, but also people working in education and healthcare, social services, and so on, to find out what was going on. We produced the serious violence strategy in April. And as a result of that very intensive piece of work, we, I'm afraid, found that the claim about police numbers does, isn't supported by the evidence of previous spikes in serious violence. So for example, in the late 2000s, there was a similar spike in violence. And there were many, many more police officers on the streets in that day and age. So I think actually what you know, when I speak to the victims of crime and to their families, they're not talking about police numbers, they want to stop our young people getting involved in violence in the first place. And that's why we're placing so much emphasis on the long term work of early intervention and prevention.'...
'Is there perhaps a correlation between what the police officers are being asked to do these days and the level of crime and you'll realise that I'm obviously talking about Sara Thornton, who is the chair of the National Police Chiefs' Council, a very serious senior police officer herself, and she is concerned that our focus is on the wrong thing at the moment. We need to redirect our focus towards violence and burglaries rather than the sorts of focus that it has, at the moment - gender based hate crime and that sort of thing, they cannot be the right priority she says, for a service that is overstretched'...
'On the wider issue of hate crime... if a young black man is killed, because of the color of his skin, that is a hate crime. And that absolutely must be investigated'...
'That is a crime anyway, if a young black man or a young white man is killed, that is murder and that is a crime. We don't need it to be a hate crime'
Maybe they'll just blame hate crimes for causing the crime wave next

Met police launch drive to balance the gender ranks - "The Metropolitan police commissioner, Cressida Dick, has said she wants half of London’s officers to be women, as part of a commitment to end male domination in the ranks. With just over one in four officers, 27%, being female, the Met has launched its first recruitment drive targeting women."

London acid attack map reveals the areas of the capital too dangerous for delivery drivers because of the epidemic

More than 1,400 addresses where ambulances won't go without police protection revealed as attacks on paramedics soar - "AMBULANCE crews will not attend incidents at more than 1,400 homes in England without a police escort, shocking new figures have revealed... Around eight paramedics are subjected to a serious attack every day as they try to carry out their work saving the public."

London Cop Tells LBC: "There Are No-Go Areas" - ""Rob", currently serving in the Met Police, insisted police weren't scared, but admitted bosses had told officers to avoid wearing uniforms in certain places in the capital. He told Nick Ferrari: "There has been a time when it's been advised not to wear half-blues or uniform to and from work. "It's like damage limitation. You try to do the most you can to prevent anything bad from happening... Regarding no-go areas in London, Rob added: "With gang crime in London, there are areas which you wouldn't go into as a pair of cops in a car because of the fear of having things thrown at you when you're driving through certain estates - bottles etc."

A London murder mystery: Why are killings up? - "It was then Home Secretary, and now Prime Minister, Theresa May who rolled back stop-and-search powers for police, arguing they were being used to target ethnic minorities. The number of random searches is now a quarter of what it was in 2011, when the police conducted 1.2 million of them... the likelihood that a child under 14 will eventually commit a murder can be predicted by four factors: living in a poor neighbourhood, having low socio-economic status, having a young mother or having an unemployed one. Boys with all four were five times more likely to commit murder than others. The data make one thing impossible to ignore: It's complicated. That means solutions will not be found in simplistic formulas such as more policing or body-searching... social media is spreading violent tendencies"

London's crime is out of control – and it's strategy, not police cuts, that are to blame - "The New York Police Department (NYPD) has roughly the same amount of resources to use as Scotland Yard – 30,000 officers and budgets of £3bn a year – but has managed to get rates down significantly, with murder at a record low... Huge amounts of resources have also been invested in sorting out high-profile, political cases, such as the celebrity phone-hacking scandal, leaving the most basic police job – keeping the public safe – under neglect. The London crime wave has been exacerbated all the more by the lack of leadership from our mayor, Sadiq Khan, who simply isn’t tough enough to put the fear into London’s criminals. After all, what moped thief is going to listen to a man who spends his time pondering whether bikini adverts are dangerous? Khan’s problem is prioritisation. He pays an inordinate amount of attention to fashionable issues; making videos about feminism and discussing whether London needs more gender neutral loos, for instance. All this makes for great headlines, but leaves Britain’s young men – the ones most often roped into crime and it’s consequences – desperately uncared for. His Night Tzar, Amy Lamé, is equally biased in favour of females. One of her most-publicised initiatives has been developing a night safety charter (whatever that is) to end women’s harassment. But it’s an activity of negligence, in a way, considering men are the ones being stabbed on our streets."

Why London’s soaring murder rate is everyone’s problem | The Spectator - "The news that for two months in a row London’s murder rate has been higher than New York’s has jolted the country out of this complacency... Since the revelations about the late Jimmy Savile emerged in 2012, a great number of police resources have been consumed with investigating historic sex offences. While serious sexual offences committed in the past should not be dismissed, a moral panic has led to disproportionate attention being paid to allegations which have either proved to be fantastical — such as those against the late Sir Edward Heath — or which were simply not serious enough to have been pursued decades after the events supposedly took place. The skewed priorities of some police chiefs have been compounded by the politicised approach of the Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, who announced her departure from the job this week. Under her leadership, the Crown Prosecution Service has concerned itself rather more with ‘fashionable’ offences, such as date rape and hate crime. The result has been a string of collapsed rape trials — while shoplifters and burglars have escaped prosecution. The skewed priorities of some police chiefs have been compounded by the politicised approach of the Director of Public Prosecutions, Alison Saunders, who announced her departure from the job this week. Under her leadership, the Crown Prosecution Service has concerned itself rather more with ‘fashionable’ offences, such as date rape and hate crime. The result has been a string of collapsed rape trials — while shoplifters and burglars have escaped prosecution."

Investigating hate crime risks distracting police from their core role, warns head of Britain’s chief constables - "Investigating hate crime risks distracting police from their core role of handling emergencies, solving violent crime and burglaries and neighbourhood policing, the head of Britain’s chief constables warned today. Sara Thornton, head of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), told the summit on Wednesday that historical probes into potential crimes committed by dead people and widening hate crime to include misogyny had also had an impact... chief constables had in July discussed recording misogyny as a hate crime after pressure from campaign groups. This would have meant recording such allegations even when no crime had been committed... she said she wanted police to “solve more burglaries and bear down on violence before we make more records of incidents that are not crimes"... “Recent randomised trials in Western Australia have shown that if a crime hotspot is unpatrolled for five days then crime is five times higher than in comparable crime hotspots that have 13 minutes patrolling a day.” Yet police were increasingly being drawn into areas that were not directly related to crime"
And some people are puzzled that knife crime is increasing, only blame funding cuts and/or deny that obsessing about trivialities/non-issues can cause real harm

UK Liberals Trash Female Cop For Suggesting Police Should Focus on Real Crimes Instead of 'Misogyny' - "Criticism of Thornton's statement largely stemmed from the view that toxic masculinity is the underlying diagnosis behind many acts of violence"

Tackle street harassment or burglary? The police shouldn’t have to choose | Suzanne Moore
What she seems to be complaining about is that wolf whistling should be seen as more of a problem than burglary, because it scares women and can lead to domestic abuse

Diane Abbott Enraged After Tory MP Backs Stop and Searching Minorities: 'They're More Likely to Kill' - "Tory backbencher Philip Davies enraged Labour Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott during a parliamentary debate on stop-and-search, pointing out that searching minorities more often than white people makes sense as they are disproportionately likely to kill... “While white people made up 87 per cent of the population, they were responsible for 67 per cent of murders. Black people made up 3 per cent of the population but 14.5 per cent of murders. Asian people were 6 per cent of the population but were responsible for 12 per cent of murders, and mixed race people were 2 per cent of the population but responsible for 5.5 per cent of murders.“It is also a fact that black people are more likely to use a knife or a sharp instrument to kill,” he continued.“That is the background and those are the facts. I am not sure anybody disputes them, because they are the official facts. If no crimes were taking place, we would not need stop-and-search, but in the real world there is crime, and it is a serious problem... Davies... disputed the contention that minorities are only overrepresented in the crime statistics because they are more likely to be searched in the first place. “I asked a parliamentary question about this in 2016. I was told that the following were the percentages of searches that resulted in an arrest. For white people who were stopped and searched, 13 per cent were arrested as a result. For black people it was 20 per cent, for Asian people 14 per cent and for mixed race people 17 per cent. “The evidence shows that the community that is much more likely to be stopped and searched and yet found to have done nothing wrong is white people. Those are the facts. They might be inconvenient facts for people who have a particular agenda, but they are nevertheless the facts.”... “In fact, one police officer told me that, in their training, they were told to avoid stopping and searching somebody from an ethnic minority because it could easily get them into trouble. What a message to send out to our police officers, who try their best to combat crime.”"

Man, 67, murdered by violent thug after police told him to investigate robbery himself - "A "vulnerable" pensioner told by police to carry out his own inquiries into a crime was murdered by a robber he tracked down. Nicholas Churton, 67, was killed in a brutal machete and hammer attack by Jordan Davidson, 26, at his address in Wrexham, North Wales"

Links - 30th November 2018 (2)

The Pythagorean Cup - The Cup That Spills Your Drink When You Get Too Greedy

Republicans and Democrats Don’t Just Disagree About Politics. They Have Different Sexual Fantasies. - "Republicans were more likely than Democrats to fantasize about a range of activities that involve sex outside of marriage... self-identified Democrats were more likely than Republicans to fantasize about almost the entire spectrum of BDSM activities, from bondage to spanking to dominance-submission play. The largest Democrat-Republican divide on the BDSM spectrum was in masochism, which involves deriving pleasure from the experience of pain... What connects Republicans and Democrats, I believe, is that their fantasies are at least partly driven by what they can’t have. As I argue in Tell Me What You Want, the supersized sexual appeal that nonmonogamous and voyeuristic acts hold for Republicans likely stems from the fact that sex outside of marriage and multipartner sex are huge no-nos in a political party that continues to make “traditional marriage” one of the cornerstones of its official platform and regularly funnels federal funds toward abstinence-only sex education... Within the Democratic Party, much of what drives the political agenda is the view that inequality is the source of a wide range of social problems. This is regularly seen in the party platform, which recently made multiple mentions of the need to “level the playing field.” It’s not a stretch, then, to suggest that playing with power differentials—especially in BDSM settings, where women and men might not appear to be on equal footing and where the lines of sexual consent might not always be explicit—is taboo in many Democratic circles... the single most commonly fantasized-about politician among both parties was the same: Sarah Palin"
This is evidence that feminists really do want to be dominated

Upholding the Jihadist's Veto - "The vast majority of European democracies have abolished their blasphemy bans without an increase in religious conflict, unrest or violence. And those who do seek to enforce the “Jihadist’s Veto” by killing and threatening journalists and authors in Amsterdam, Paris and Copenhagen, should not be rewarded for their efforts. Enforcing blasphemy bans is neither a sign of progress and tolerance nor likely to appease religious extremists. That lesson should be clear from a number of Muslim majority countries where blasphemy laws contribute to more, not less, extremism and violence. In 1992, Egyptian secularist intellectual Faraq Fouda was condemned as a blasphemer by a council at the Islamic Al-Azhar Islamic for mocking Islamist ideology and pointing to dark chapters in the history of Islam. Shortly thereafter, he was murdered by Islamists. Subsequently, Al-Azhar university not only blamed Fouda for his own murder but also banned Fouda’s complete works... blasphemy laws are being abused to target religious minorities, dissenters, and to legitimize vigilant mob violence. Human rights discourse should play no part in providing legitimacy—however indirectly—to such practices... the Court’s insistence that verbal attacks on religious doctrines and figures should have a certain “factual basis” creates an impediment to rigorous and passionate debate of religion. Much contained in texts considered sacred by their followers will be rejected as falsehoods by those of other faiths or non-believers"

What's so blasphemous about free speech? - "the American First Amendment lawyer Ken White argues that hate speech isn’t capable of legal definition — because baked into any such legislation is the claim that certain words cause direct harm in the same way a violent act does. The problem with this is that what is hateful to one person may be amusing or even meaningless to another. As a result, “hate speech is whatever someone in power thinks it is”, White suggests. It’s important here to note the distinction here between hate speech and incitement, which is a crime. Incitement requires a causal link between speech and the commission of a crime. Hate speech does not. It is such US-style legal reasoning that led Irish politician Councillor Keith Redmond to call hate speech (all of it) “secular blasphemy law” during Ireland’s referendum campaign, and to argue that hate speech laws generally and religious vilification laws in particular amount to “blasphemy by the back door” — and constitute a direct assault on freedom of speech... Section 127 only applies online, people can make the most outrageously racist, sexist, or bigoted jokes at, say, a comedy club or down the pub. If, however, their speech is recorded and finishes up on the internet, they’re in trouble. Thousands of people have been convicted under this statute — we’ve only heard about Meechan and Linehan because they’re famous. It is Section 127 that allows police up and down the country to pitch up on people’s doorsteps — while loosely throwing the phrase “hate speech” around — for something they’ve posted on Facebook or Instagram."

In the Shadow of the Sword by Tom Holland – review - "The problem with the life of Muhammad is that there is almost no textual support for it until almost two centuries after his death. Holland is not going so far as to say that he never existed. Just that the account we have comes from the 800s, by which time Haroun al-Rashid was caliph over an empire that stretched from China to the Atlantic, and the 1,001 Nights was being compiled. The veracity of details and perhaps also some of the more important moments of the prophet's life were – are – impossible to prove. The same goes for the Qur'an. There is no written mention of it in the period immediately following Muhammad – nor any commentary on it until the eighth century... Holland points out that "there is not a shred of backing" in the Qur'an for locating Mecca in the Hijaz"

Christian News Site 'LifeSite' Blacklisted by Web Host

Trump approval rating with blacks now at 36%, Rasmussen poll says - "Trump proudly and frequently cites the current low unemployment figures among African-Americans as a reason voters from that demographic should support him. On Friday, Trump cited those numbers in a tweet in which he also said he was "honored" to have the support of musician Kanye West. In May, Trump boasted to a crowd at a National Rifle Association convention that West's endorsement had doubled his percentage of African-American supporters after a Reuters poll showed it went from 11 to 22 percent in one week"

Even Good Husbands Are Sexist. Here's What I Did About Mine. - "To be frank, they tend to sit out anything bigger than cutting up an onion. And when they do cut up onions, they often do it wrong — chopping for a salad instead of slicing for a stir fry. Most of the time, it’s easier for us just to do it ourselves, rather than accept their "help."... There’s no comparison to the feeling of failure a woman has when her “work day” is done and she comes home and the house is a complete mess. I’ve never seen a man lose his mind over a dirty countertop, but I have seen and heard many women pour their hearts out on the issue (and I have definitely been one of those women). And that’s OK! I don’t think a woman should ever apologize for wanting things to be tidy or to look a certain way. But, emotional labor also has a way of slowly scraping us from the inside out. As generous as some of us are by nature, it can feel like we are chasing our tails for no one when our time- and brain-consuming efforts are taken for granted... "I am still running around the morning our house cleaner comes to ‘clean before she cleans,’ which my husband thinks is crazy.”... She would do what many of us are normalized to do — resent the fact that he wasn’t helping and then feel even more resentful when he didn’t complete the task up to her standards... Geoff and I came up with a “hack.” On even-numbered nights during the workweek, he would provide dinner for us. He could cook, he could order takeout, we could go out to eat — the decision was totally up to him. The only rule was that he couldn’t ask me for any insight, preferences, or cravings beforehand, and I couldn’t make any suggestions or provide any opinions before or during the meal. I would just arrive home and dinner would be there for me, and I would have to eat it whether I liked it or not. On odd-numbered nights of the week, I would do the same for him... I bit my tongue a lot. If I had Thai food for lunch and he ordered Thai food for dinner, I would eat Thai food twice in one day without telling him. It was hit or miss, but I couldn’t complain. Like, I literally could not complain. And that silence was a game changer — as was my attitude. Even when the food was kind of meh, I made sure Geoff knew how much I appreciated his efforts, and this paid off in spades (and pasta). Regardless of gender, compliments and encouragement are the oldest "hack" in the book. And I had all this extra space in my brain!... I’ve stopped micromanaging and making assumptions about who can or can’t do what chores well. Perfect is the enemy of the good, and honestly it’s just great not having to decide what’s for dinner."
She almost realised the answer to her question - "emotional labour" is to a large extent women caring about things that men don't care about and don't see the need to care about, or getting upset that men don't do things the way they would (actually this isn't even limited to a gender divide - women also disagree with other women on how to do the same task)
Keywords: a cleaner before, embarrassed, women have higher standards for cleanliness

Melissa Chen - Can we please appreciate my sister's commitment to... - "Can we please appreciate my sister's commitment to Halloween? They had a Halloween costume contest at work and she stayed in character as Rafiki all day, singing "asante sana squash banana" and going up to co-workers and smearing whipped cream on their foreheads, saying "Siiiiiiiimba.""

Canada resort staff were fired for being white - tribunal - "Resort owner Kin Wa Chan said he wanted to hire Chinese employees because he believed they were cheaper. The tribunal found the seven staff were forced out in August 2016, and replaced with Chinese workers."

Canada woman loses snoring row complaint with neighbours - "A Canadian woman who complained of harassment after her landlords urged her to seek help for her snoring has lost her case. The woman had taken her landlords to Quebec's rental board seeking a rent reduction over the dispute. The board's tribunal said her excessive snoring could not be considered a normal level of noise expected in an apartment complex. It also said she was wrong to refuse to see a doctor about her snoring."

Seventy Years of the New York Times Describing Saudi Royals as Reformers - "In honor of Thomas Friedman's latest love letter to the ruling dynasty in Saudi Arabia, here is seventy years worth of the New York Times describing the royal family as reformers"

Ben & Jerry's partners with group tied to Anti-Semite Farrakhan - "Vermont-based ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s released a new flavor to show its support for groups fighting President Donald Trump’s agenda, including the Women’s March, a group whose leaders enjoy ties to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan."
"Resist"

Are Koreas About to Finally Make Peace? U.S. Helps Disarm World’s Most Heavily Fortified Border - "North and South Korean personnel have completed disarming an important section of the massive demilitarized zone that lies between them, an unprecedented step amid a warming of relations between the longtime foes."
Trump haters can't continue to insist that there's no progress - so they'll just claim he has nothing to do with this

Trump’s reversal of failed Obama policies has created a booming economy - "The unemployment rate in September stood at 3.7 percent, the lowest rate since 1969. Not coincidentally, for the week ending Oct. 15, initial claims for unemployment benefits were the lowest since 1973, when the U.S. population was 110 million people smaller. This is because the Trump economy’s job creation numbers are regularly beating expectations – averaging over 208,000 jobs per month so far this year. Will hiring continue to increase, causing the number of workers forced onto the unemployment rolls to continue its decline? Yes, it will. There are currently more job openings than people unemployed. Last March was the first time that had happened since the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) began compiling the data. It has happened every month since. In August, there were 7.1 million job openings – the highest number ever recorded – with only 6.2 million people unemployed. In other words, there were 900,000 more job openings than people who had looked for a job in the past 30 days. Again, a remarkable record. Who is benefitting? Is it, as Democrats claim, only the rich who benefit from tax cuts and economic growth? No. People are benefitting across demographics regardless of race, sex or level of education. Unemployment rates are at or near record lows for African- Americans, Hispanics, Asians, women and people without high school diplomas. The BLS announced Wednesday that the wages and salaries of American workers in the third quarter of this year were 3.1 percent higher than during the same period one year ago – the biggest increase in 10 years... We are averaging 3.3 percent GDP growth year to date with GDP growth coming in at 4.2 percent in the second quarter and 3.5 percent in the third... Following the 2016 election, Obama economists initially tried blaming structural problems for his failure to generate better economic growth. They also were quick to demean the Trump administration’s 3 percent GDP growth forecasts. A February 2017 Business Insider article discussing 3 percent GDP growth quoted former Obama administration economist Lee Branstetter as stating that “it's essentially mathematically impossible to get the growth they're talking about.” In March, economist and Obama administration alum Jason Furman blamed changed economic circumstances and forecast 10 years of GDP growth “around 2 percent a year.” In May, fellow Obama economist Larry Summers, compared believing in the Trump administration’s forecast of 3 percent GDP growth to believing “in tooth fairies.”"