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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30592132017-02-24T08:40:52.031+08:00BalderdashAgagoogahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://feedburner.google.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3059213.post-35785614753095215622017-02-23T18:53:00.000+08:002017-02-23T18:53:11.879+08:00Links - 23rd February 2017 (2)Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber — Susan J. Fowler - "Over the next few months, I began to meet more women engineers in the company. As I got to know them, and heard their stories, I was surprised that some of them had stories similar to my own. Some of the women even had stories about reporting the exact same manager I had reported, and had reported inappropriate interactions with him long before I had even joined the company. It became obvious that both HR and management had been lying about this being "his first offense", and it certainly wasn't his last. Within a few months, he was reported once again for inappropriate behavior, and those who reported him were told it was still his "first offense". The situation was escalated as far up the chain as it could be escalated, and still nothing was done.

The Tao of bao: a randomised controlled trial examining the effect of steamed bun consumption on night-call inpatient course and mortality. - "Medical superstitions remain prevalent in today's stressful and technology driven healthcare environment. These irrational beliefs commonly involve night calls, which are periods of volatile workload. In Singapore and Hong Kong, it is commonly held that consumption of steamed buns ("bao") by on-call physicians is associated with increased patient admissions and mortality, due to a homonymous interpretation of the word "bao" in dialect... The consumption of steamed buns ("bao") has no effect on inpatient admissions, mortality, or sleep duration on call."

Take a bao if you are not superstitious. - "RESULTS: Sixty-eight doctors, nurses and medical students responded to our survey. Only 11 admitted to being superstitious, yet 31 believed in the ill-fortune associated with eating bao or meat dumplings, 6 in the nefarious powers of black (5) or red (1) outfits on call, and 14 believed that bathing (6 insisting on the powers of the seven-flower bath) prior to the onset of a call portended good fortune, in terms of busy-ness of a call. Twenty-four believed in "black clouds", i.e. people who attracted bad luck whilst on call, and 32 refused to mouth the words "having a good call" until the day after the event. We discovered 2 hitherto undescribed and undiscovered superstitions, namely the benefits of eating bread and the need to avoid beef, for the good and ill fortune associated with their ingestion.
DISCUSSION: Superstitious practices are alive and well in modern-day Singapore, the practice not necessarily being restricted to the poorly-educated or foolish."

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Young to inherit more but in less equal amounts - "'Could it be more popular to tax wealthier old people to pay for their own care which they don't currently pay for often, rather than inheritance tax which is somehow seen by people as immoral'...
'The problem with inheritance tax is the perverse incenstives... it encourages people to spend more rather than to save and invest and to put money in places that can actually value the rest of society as well as their own family'"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Friday's business with Joe Lynam - "It's often said you come away from CES with problems you never knew you had. Like how well you're brushing your hair"

The Aberfan disaster and women who made history | Podcast | History Extra - "Barbara Castle was my favourite MP ever... always very funny, always absolutely full of opinions and she was one who said to me one day: oh you know, Jenni, I think you young feminists go a bit far. I don't care, y'know, if they call me the chair or the chairman or the chairwoman or the chairperson, as long as I'm in the chair...
Margaret Thatcher was the most frightening interviewee I've ever encountered because I think it was her great delight to catch journalists out with being slightly loose with the facts. It would delight her to be able to tear you limb from limb so I've never been so well-researched as when I went to interview her"

Meryl Streep said nothing when... - "Meryl Streep said nothing when Obama's Justice Department was targeting reporters and intercepting their communications; she said nothing when Obama's Justice Department was arming Mexican drug lords, resulting in murder; she said nothing when Obama's IRS was threatening and intimidating private citizens because of their viewpoints; she said nothing when Obama's NSA was gathering a massive amount of telephonic activity by American citizens; she said nothing when Obama threw Israel over the cliff at the UN; she said nothing when Obama's policies (or lack thereof) contributed to the growth of ISIS and its genocide, rape, slavery, and torture; etc"
Words speak louder than actions

Every month, 20 SIA girls get pregnant - "if we didnt notice, the service sector & hospitality sector have been hiring pinoys & ahtiongs in droves. soon, we can expect to hear foreign accent lingo coming from SIA girls.
singapore airlines new advert tagline "帅哥,你要去吗?"
SQXXX pinoy SIA girl: "excuse me sirrrr, tank you for plying wip singaporrr airrlines, what woot chew like to driing por represh-meant, coppee, tea, or mee?""

Refusing to reverse, 2 women drivers face-off for 2 hours - "Two women drivers who found themselves on opposite sides of a narrow back lane and refused to reverse so the other could pass, found themselves in a two-hour face-off last week. According to a report by The Star Online, the incident took place at approximately 11am on Thursday in a back lane off Jalan Dato Abdul Rahman in Seremban town. A video of the incident, shot by one of the women shows the other driver flashing vulgar signs at her, then exposing her bra and later resorting to staying put in her car as she listened to music on her earphones. The video also shows a male passenger, who was with the other driver, getting out of the car and walking towards the woman listening to her earphones. He is heard saying, "Reverse lah. Reverse lah!" to which he received a middle finger flashed at him in anger by the woman."

McDonald's Miri outlets remove halal-certified cake sign - "All McDonald's outlets in Miri have removed notices allowing only halal-certified cakes to be brought into its premises, following the state government's criticism of the rule. Commenting on the swift action by the fast food chain's outlets, Michael Tiang, who is political secretary to Sarawak Chief Minister Adenan Satem, said: "Such prompt action by McDonald's constitutes a wise move as well as a positive response to the strong objections among Sarawak people towards its recent unpopular policy"... "they received a further instruction from their headquarters to take down such notices so as to complement the tolerant spirit in Sarawak," he said in a statement released yesterday. He urged McDonald's to dispense with their latest policy as such a move was "not welcomed in the racial and religious harmonious society in Sarawak". Tiang had previously said consumers were entitled to reject unreasonable requirements, and if necessary, would boycott the establishments. "It is always the Sarawak chief minister's stand that racial or religious extremism has no place in Sarawak as the state practises a culture of tolerance, moderation and mutual understanding towards all races and religions," Tiang said."
Looks like East Malaysia is Less Strict about Islam than Singapore

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, John Dalton - "Like most Protestants, non-conformists of all sorts were very committed to studying the works of God for themselves. Not, say, in contrast to the Catholics who allegedly believe everything that the priests tell them. The Protestant tradition is that you investigate God's works for yourself. And the point about this in relation to science: that God's works mean both the written work, the Bible, but also the works of creation. So there's a long standing interest in Protestantism in studying the natural world and seeing that as the work of God, and trying to understand the power and wisdom and benevolence of God through looking at the natural world.
So that's one thing that influenced this general Protestant interest in the natural world. But there's another thing I think specific to the late 18th century, particularly to non-conformists is that: think about what you could do as a leisure activity if you're in the late 18th century. Now, there's no television, there's no radio, there's no cinema. So what're you gonna do? You might read novels... you could do that. But that's fiction and lots of non-conformist traditions would frown on wasting your time on such idle frivolity.
And the theatre is not necessarily much better. And as for gambling, drinking, horse-racing, that's not really appropriate either for people from the stricter non-conformist traditions like Quakerism. So what can you do?
Well, one thing you can do study the natural world. It's a form of what was called rational recreation. So it's recreation, but it's respectable and rational recreation...
Public spectacle... what else do you do as a kind of leisure activity... you don't have football matches to go to. You go to hangings, you go to races and celebrity funerals... it's a big civic event"

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Garibaldi and the Risorgimento - "Latin America... Democracy is taken for granted while everybody everywhere else in the world except the United States and Switzerland, democracy was a bad word. Was up to the 1870s was just unacceptable, like Communism and Bolshevism for a later generation"

BBC World Service - The World This Week, Should the West have intervened? - "We tried intervening and occupying in Iraq, and that didn't work. We tried intervening and not occupying in Libya, and that did not work. We tried not intervening and not occupying in Syria, and that did not work either. And that crude analysis is almost always followed by a shrug of the shoulders"

British MPs bear some blame for Aleppo tragedy, says George Osborne - ""Let's be clear now: if you do not shape the world, you will be shaped by it. We are beginning to see the price of not intervening," Osborne said... The inescapable reality, Johnson said, was that "we as a House of Commons, we as a country, we vacated that space into which Russia stepped, beginning its own bombing campaign on behalf of Assad"... "I think we are deceiving ourselves in this parliament if we believe that we have no responsibility for what has happened in Syria. The tragedy in Aleppo did not come out of a vacuum; it was created by a vacuum, a vacuum of western leadership, of American leadership, British leadership"... The Labour MP John Woodcock, a long-term advocate of intervention, said: "We've said 'Never again' so many times, and we mean it when we say it, but then, a few months, a few years later, it comes to nothing."

Scribie Transcription Service | Free Podcast Transcription - "At Scribie.com, our big vision is that eventually all audio/video content created by man will be available as text and the knowledge capital therein will be unlocked for the greater good of humankind. To further this vision we are offering our transcription service free of charge to podcasters. The files will be transcribed whenever we are able to schedule it in and we will send you the transcripts once it's complete. We will also post the audio and transcript on our blog."

Contact Us - McDonald's® - "We do not condone the use of offensive / inappropriate language and we reserve the right not to respond to correspondences that contain vulgarities or derogatory content.
[Checkbox] I agree to McDonald's Restaurants Pte Ltd Terms of engagement."

Singapore: Troop carriers held in Hong Kong should be freed - "Professor Simon Chesterman, dean of law at the National University of Singapore, said sovereign immunity should apply in this case. "Given China's strong position on sovereign immunity, which it has invoked in other jurisdictions for its own protection, it would be surprising if this matter is not resolved - eventually," he said."

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, What does Sir Ivan Rogers' resignation mean for Brexit? - "He said... Don't be afraid to speak truth unto power. Well, the word truth is quite an interesting word. I would say actually the word should've been: the opinion unto power. Because I've had many times in the department where I've had civil servants sit in front of me telling me adamantly that some things can or cannot be done, and you look at that and you argue back and debate about it, think about it and then you come back and say there are different ways to do things and I don't agree with that and I'm going to do this. Ministers have to make those decisions. That's what they're there for"

Alibaba CEO Jack Ma meets with Trump, pledges to create 1 million US jobs - "The meeting comes just a few weeks after Trump met with another Asian technology powerhouse, Masayoshi Son the CEO of SoftBank. At that meeting, Trump took credit for a previously announced investment by a fund run by Son and said that the fund would help to create 50,000 jobs."

Jamshid Piruz who beheaded Dutch woman is allowed into Britain unchallenged - "A convicted murderer from Holland was able to walk through Britain's porous borders without any checks and went on to attack two police officers with a claw-hammer... Court documents in Holland said he was 'inspired by Taliban movies in which beheadings were seen'... 'This offence was committed at a time of stress for my client. He was in a foreign country. He seems to have been vulnerable. He seems to have been hallucinating. 'He was very confused by the vehicles driving on a different side of the road than he was used to'... it is not enough for an EU citizen to have a serious criminal conviction – if it is some time in the past, the UK may fall foul of Brussels directives if they refuse to allow that person into the country."

Agagoogahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://gssq.blogspot.com/2017/02/links-23rd-february-2017-2.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3059213.post-49560114200030803032017-02-23T15:52:00.000+08:002017-02-23T15:52:01.773+08:00Bad MedicineBBC Radio 4 - Crossing Continents, Addicted in Suburbia

"After any injury, many Americans expect to be pain-free. The US consumes around 80% of all opiate painkillers produced in the world. But for too many people their dependence on prescription medication has led them to heroin. Addiction is everywhere, even here in the upmarket suburbs of Lorain county west of Cleveland...

In Ohio, we hear many stories of opiates unnecessarily prescribed even after minor dental work. And across the US, the tentacles of the heroin epidemic reach back to the over-prescription of pills that started in the 1990s. Pain became a fifth vital sign."

Bad Medicine, Part 2: (Drug) Trials and Tribulations - Freakonomics Freakonomics

"The majority of new cancer drugs are marginal, that they offer sort of very small gains at tremendous prices, and to give you an example of that, among 71 drugs approved for the solid cancers, the median improvement in overall survival or how long people lived was just 2.1 months. And those drugs routinely cost over $100,000 per year of treatment or course of treatment."

Bad Medicine, Part 3: Death by Diagnosis - Freakonomics Freakonomics

"ANUPAM JENA: Prescription opioid use has gone up about 300-400 percent since the year 2000. America is a world leader in the consumption of painkillers. Here's what a 2007 report found:

WAILOO: We were consuming about 83 percent of the world's oxycodone in the United States. And it is not because we had 83 percent of the world's pain. It's because we are a consumer society that believes in the power of the magic pill...

In the late 1980s and early 90s, there was a push to mandate the recognition and treatment of pain. This culminated in the promotion of pain as the fifth vital sign, along with temperature, blood pressure, pulse, and respiratory rate. Which made pain the only vital sign that is determined not by objective measurement, but by the patient's own assessment...

One result of this prescription onslaught? It is believed to have contributed to a recent uptick in mortality rates. Anupam Jena is a physician and a healthcare economist at Harvard.

JENA: Mortality rates in the U.S. have risen for the first time in 10 years. Which is striking, considering that mortality rates have been falling for at least 100 years...

WAILOO: Yeah, so pain management was really emerging as a recognizable and legitimate area of medical practice and care in the 1960s, early 1970s, with the development of multidisciplinary pain centers... There was a general recognition that you needed more than just drugs to deal with people in chronic pain. You needed social workers, you needed surgeons, you needed psychologists, you needed a wide range of others as well as people with pharmacological expertise. But those multidisciplinary pain centers were really expensive.

WAILOO: And so, you know one of the economic trends, since the 1980s, with the rise of cost containment, is to sort of see drugs as the cheapest and the fastest solution to our problem.

This coincided with a big shift in how drugs are marketed to the public...

"Physicians who do not comply with patient requests," the authors wrote, "may be the recipients of poor ratings on patient satisfaction scores, possibly resulting in emotional, financial, and professional penalties." So imagine this. You are a doctor and your patient asks, maybe by name, for a prescription pain-killer. You may think the patient doesn't really need it; you may, in fact, be worried they'll abuse it, maybe even sell it. But if that consumer has the ability to punish you professionally … well, you might just write the scrip...

The third-leading cause of death in the U.S., after heart disease and cancer, was … medical error. I'm going to say that again: the third-leading cause of death in the U.S., accounting for 10 percent of deaths annually, is medical error...

If you happen to be treated by a doctor who is 10 years or 15 years out of residency, your mortality within thirty days of being hospitalized is higher... We don't see this effect among high-volume doctors — doctors who are seeing a lot of patients. So what that suggests that if you are an older doctor who is seeing a lot of patients, you are protected from this adverse effect

The Cost of Satisfaction

"Higher patient satisfaction was associated with less emergency department use but with greater inpatient use, higher overall health care and prescription drug expenditures, and increased mortality."

Agagoogahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://gssq.blogspot.com/2017/02/bad-medicine.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3059213.post-32194841898448017402017-02-23T13:37:00.000+08:002017-02-23T13:37:06.948+08:00Links - 23rd February 2017 (1)Investing in the 'little things' for the benefit of Singaporeans - "quite often, policy misunderstandings were intertwined with cynicism — even lack of trust — about the Government and its intentions. Our ambassadors would excitedly tell a pioneer citizen about his annual Medisave top-ups and show him how this would help to offset his MediShield Life premiums, only for him to reply: "Zheng hu (the Government) give me money, zheng hu take it back." In one heartbreaking case, ambassadors told a wheelchair-bound senior about the Disability Assistance Scheme, which would give him $100 every month. They filled in his application form, made an appointment with a doctor for him, and left him a postage-paid envelope to submit the form in. Six months later, they visited him again, only to find that he had not submitted his form. Why? Because his friends had told him there was no way that the Government would "give out money for free". That piece of misplaced coffee-shop chatter cost the senior $600 in cash benefits."

Scientist Dr David Goodall, 102, wins the right to keep job at Perth university - "A 102-year-old scientist has won his battle to continue his research on university campus after initially being kicked off amid concerns he was a safety risk."

Interesting Facts about Chinese Relationships, Marriages - "Generally, Chinese single men put most of their energy into work while women tend to arrange an enjoyable single life for themselves. To some extent, this has been an outcome of the popular idea that successful men and beautiful women are the most favored spouses... While gender equality has been widely supported in the country, Chinese women still prefer husbands who can earn two times their level or even more, so the men can be the major breadwinners in the family. In contrast, men prefer wives with comparative incomes."

Project Fear Brexit predictions were 'flawed and partisan', new study says

Feminists Defend Man Who Harassed Ivanka Trump on JetBlue Flight - "Progressives have a habit of shrieking about "harassment" any time one of their own is met with criticism. They define any sort of disagreement as abuse, but have no problem lobbing their own attacks at anyone whose views are not in alignment with their own. And when a man does it, it's called "mansplaining.""

How Pope Francis Became the Leader of the Global Left - WSJ

14 questioned over Christmas tree adorned with word "Allah" in Indonesia - "the chairman of Jambi's Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) Adri Hasan slammed the hotel for the incident, which he claimed was blasphemous. "We want this case to be thoroughly investigated to prevent restlessness among Muslims," he said."
Maybe they will censor bibles next

Drexel Professor: 'Abolish The White Race' - "Cicariello-Maher, a white man who specializes in race and racism among other topics, has been the subject of criticism from media outlets and social media users after he tweeted on Saturday, "All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide." He subsequently deleted the tweet and brushed it off as a joke, saying that "White isn't a race"... Ciccariello-Maher said that the massacre of whites during the Haitian Revolution was a "good thing." During the Haitian massacre in 1804 as many as 4,000 whites were killed."

Stallion Imagery Too Sexist For Kentucky School - "Frederick Douglass High School, named in honor of the famed civil rights leader who was also a male, had intended to use a graphic of a stallion as the school's mascot because of the community's rich horse-breeding heritage. But Cahill's online petition, that only elicited a relative handful of respondents, has killed the idea. Some of the 214 people who responded to the petition to stop the stallion found the imagery "inappropriate and sexist.""

Preserving a unique slice of Singapore's rural life - "the agricultural sector, though small, plays a strategic role in the nation's food security, supplying some 10 per cent of its food."

How 'Rogue One' Brought Back Familiar Faces - NYTimes.com - ""When Peter Cushing makes an 'aah' sound, he doesn't move his upper lip. He only opens his jaw about halfway, and makes this square shape with his lower lip, that exposes his lower teeth." Before nuances like this were accounted for, Mr. Knoll said their creation "looked like maybe a relative of Peter Cushing and not him exactly.""

How The Fuck High Was This New Yorker Guy When He Wrote This Star Wars Take? - "Listen. I am not going to try to unpack and critique the bonkers Rogue One review published by the New Yorker's Richard Brody today. I do not even know where to begin. I am just going to blockquote some portions down below this paragraph, and I invite you to join me in making halting, inarticulate, baffled vocalizations at them."

Why 'Rogue One' Is Superior to 'The Force Awakens' - "Rogue One contains more Star Wars head nods, hat tips and hidden treasures than an eight-year-old's toy collection and a San Diego Comic-Con exhibit hall combined. So why is it, then, that the film somehow feels fresher than The Force Awakens' nostalgia?... While The Force Awakens contented itself with putting a contemporary gloss on tried-and-true formulae, Rogue One took a shot at something new. The former used nostalgia as a currency and fan service as a cudgel; this semi-peripheral addition to the canon uses both of these elements for riffing and a big-picture–narrative spackle, but also as grist for making a statement"

Rogue One's CGI Princess Leia: The sands of time are so cruel you can't even do motion capture for your younger self - "People have aged so much that you can't even get them to do the motion capture. As you get older you're not the same, your whole body language is different"

'Rogue One' director based battle scenes on real war photos

Admit it: 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' stinks -- and here's why - "Sitting in the theater at "Avatar," I felt like I was being pounded into submission by a giant hedge fund. Watching "The Force Awakens," I felt as though I was being shown a trailer for the next four movies in the series. Except that trailers aren't normally two hours long and you don't have to pay $12.50 to see them. "The Force Awakens" will reinforce even more strongly a blockbuster, sequel-oriented style of moviemaking and marketing that has sapped Hollywood of its creative energies. Why be creative when that will merely interfere with merchandising, and when recycling is more dependably profitable?... One can envision Hollywood eventually turning out only two products: "Star Wars" movies and James Bond movies, each periodically "rebooted" for a new generation of customers by casting the latest new young stars in new costumes facing the same old perils and uttering the same old quips, with every other vestige of creative originality relegated to the void and forgotten."

Android Is Different, In A Good Way - "even though the Samsung Galaxy SIII got frozen at Android 4.3, it still retained the ability to see nearly all of its basic functionality updated up to current 2016 standards. Did it lose something? Yes, it lost some technical improvements within Android 4.4.2, 5.0 and 6.0 which improved smoothness and battery saving (though new versions then eat that away). However, most of the more important new version features which remain within the core Android OS deal mostly with support for new hardware. Since the hardware doesn't change on an old device, most of those improvements are meaningless... This trend towards making Android more modular and migrating more functionality away from the core OS remains in force. This trend makes the actual updating of the core OS less and less important... Many iOS users will be familiar with the experience. When updating iOS in their older devices, the new version bogs down their old device to near-unusable status... The thesis this article seeks to advance is that the OS update landscape is not as clear-cut as most people would have it. While a lot more Android devices will be stuck in earlier OS versions than Apple devices, when it comes to the actual core functionality Android is structured in such a way that even older OS versions have access to the latest core apps and most of the latest OS functionality. As a result, most of Android's core app functionality will actually be updated more often than in iOS"

Intrasexual Competition Shapes Men's Anti-Utilitarian Moral Decisions - "Killing someone in order to save several lives seems more morally acceptable to men than to women. We suggest that this greater approbation of utilitarian killings may reflect gender differences in the tolerance to inflicting physical harm, which are partly the product of sexual selection. Based on this account, we predicted that men may be less utilitarian than women in other conditions. In four studies, we show that men are more likely than women to make the anti-utilitarian (hypothetical) choice of causing three same sex deaths to save one opposite sex life; and that this choice is more likely when there are fewer potential sexual partners, more likely for heterosexual men and less likely if the female character to be saved no longer has reproductive value."

The strange history and ugly core of Donald Trump Jr.'s Skittles tweet, explained - "The online "poisoned candy" metaphor started with feminists pushing back against the complaint that "not all men" are misogynists. Anti-feminists shot back, substituting Muslims for men in the analogy to demonstrate how offensive it would otherwise be. Then — truly missing the point — conservatives adopted it over the past year as a genuine argument that any migration from Syria is too big a risk... Ben Grelle, who turned the tweet into an image that went viral, argued that he only wanted to justify why marginalized people should fear the powerful majority, not the other way around: "What harm befalls an oppressive group if people are cautious of them?""
Vox seems to think that "the point" is that men are evil

Italy told to brace itself for 'September assault' after arrival of 150,000 migrants - worldnews - "This is idiotic. The Mediterranean migrants are "rescued" about 12 km off the Libyan coast. The governments and NGOs patrolling just outside Libyan waters aren't rescuing anyone. All they're doing is providing a free taxi service for illegal immigrants. They might as well just charter free, ongoing flights between Italy and every African capital. Come one, come all.
FFS. Is it any wonder that the numbers keep growing?"

Google and Mozilla Remove Extension That Was Caught Selling User Data - "Ironically, the extension's purpose is to provide information on the reputation of websites that users are trying to access, if they're safe for kids, contain spam, are trustworthy, or don't respect user privacy."

Must-see artworks at National Gallery Singapore - "Commissioned by the Japanese army, Meeting of Generals Yamashita and Percival ( 1942 ) by Miyamoto Saburo immortalizes probably one of the darkest moments in the British history. In 1942, the Japanese government sent Miyamoto Saburo to Singapore to create a painting based on the surrender incident. But he did not witness the actual surrender; he came after it was done," said Low. Therefore, he made sketches of the room where the event took place. He also had the chance to make detailed sketches of Yamashita and Percival. However, some elements of the painting are fictitious. "We know that the British were carrying a white flag and a British flag, but they were not allowed to bring those flags into the room where the ceremony took place," said Low. However, the flags were later inserted into the painting at the request of Japanese military authorities. In addition to the actual event, the painting became proof that Japanese art is equally as impressive as Western works. "One idea that we want to bring forward in the exhibition is [that] painting is a subjective expression for artistic activity. So we have to understand how the arts were produced, [by] whom they were produced, and why they were produced," Low explained.

'Clinton quite effective at discrediting herself, doesn't need Putin's help' - ex CIA analyst - "The report lacks any factual evidence, because the intelligence services apparently don't have any, Larry Johnson believes"

Trump Uses Twitter as Strategic Weapon - "they do garner enormous media coverage and allow Trump to drive his message home... Alex Conant, former adviser to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio's Republican presidential campaign in 2016, told Politico, "The challenge is by being spontaneous, it's hard to build an echo chamber of surrogates and supporters to consistently drive home the message. The opportunity is that Trump is able to connect with the American people in an authentic and real way that other recent presidents haven't been able to. When he tweets, people understand it's actually coming from him." Kevin Madden, a GOP strategist and former adviser to GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012, told Politico, "Trump understands one important dynamic: In a world where there is a wealth of information, there is always a poverty of attention, and he has this ability to generate four or five story lines a day. In the face of that, how can his opponents break through on even one of them? He is always in control.""

What's It All About, Shakespeare? - "The very thing I love about Shakespeare's girls is the very thing that means they're not really representative of the rest of their gender...
Shakespeare's women all, to my mind, have this in common. They are stronger than their sex. Or, at the very least, stronger than their sex is 'expected' to be. And, in many ways, that's to be applauded. Unlike some of Shakespeare's contemporaries, he didn't write insipid, weak female roles. Yet, unfortunately, this means he's not telling 'real' women's stories, either. These are girls who are breaking men's rules in order to play in a man's world. But what about all of those women who couldn't do that? Well, the fact is, their stories wouldn't have been anywhere near as entertaining!"
Similarly, the fetishisation of strong female characters makes them unrepresentative

Queering the Gaze: Calgary Hockey Breasts, Dynamics of Desire, and Colonial Hauntings - "This paper compares two hockey-related breast-flashing events that occurred in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The first was performed by Calgary Flames fans, the 'Flamesgirls', in the 2004 NHL Stanley Cup final, and the second flashing event occurred when members and fans of the Booby Orr hockey team participated in lifting their shirts and jerseys at a lesbian hockey tournament at the 2007 Outgames/Western Cup held in Calgary. We deploy an analysis of visual psychic economies to highlight psychoanalytic framings of masculinized and feminized subject positions in both heteronormative and lesbigay-coded sporting spaces. We suggest there is a queer twist to the Booby Orr flashing context, which we read as disruptive and potentially resistive. The paper ends by turning to Avery Gordon's (1997) Ghostly Matters, to consider how even in its queer transgression, the Booby Orr flashing scene is simultaneously haunted and saturated by the absent presence of colonial technologies of visuality and sexual violence. It is argued that in this case, openings for transgressive gender dynamics might be imaginable – even as those logics themselves are disciplined and perhaps made possible through racialized colonial framings of appropriate desire."

Blair babes 'have failed' women in politics - Telegraph - "BLAIR'S babes, the record number of Labour women MPs elected in 1997, have put back the cause of women in politics by concentrating on their own working conditions since entering Parliament, says Gillian Shephard, the former Tory minister... She had "high hopes" that they would transform Parliament and make a big difference to government. But the new women were "whipped into line" and became mostly compliant, hopeful of preferment... by concentrating on their working conditions, they may have deterred other aspiring women from becoming politicians. In the book, she singles out Tess Kingham (Lab, Gloucester), who said she would not be standing at the next election because of late night sittings, and Julia Drown (Lab, Swindon S), who led an unsuccessful campaign for mothers to breast-feed anywhere in the House. Mrs Shephard quotes approvingly a reported comment from Betty Boothroyd, the Speaker, that she would have more sympathy when she saw check-out girls at Tesco breast-feeding their babies while doing their job. Criticism could be levelled at some of the "sillier aspects" of conditions at the Commons but all-night sittings and the "rough and tumble" of the place were not a secret. There could hardly be a workplace whose conditions were better known in advance. "If such conditions are unacceptable, and they may be to parents of young children, then it is better to wait to get elected until it is an easier proposition. Other professional women - lawyers, accountants and teachers - do not demand the right to breast-feed while in court, with clients or in front of a class. I imagine there would be uproar if they did. Why, then, do women MPs choose to give their own profession a bad name by demanding privileges not available to other women?""

Female MPs are useless not victims of sexism: Ann Widdecombe lashes out at the Blair Babes with a 'sense of grievance' - "Female MPs who complain about how macho politics are not the victims of sexism but simply 'useless', Ann Widdecombe has claimed. The outspoken former Tory minister dismissed the idea that Westminster was biased against women, and insisted both sexes were 'roughed up' during debates. In remarks likely divide opinion in Parliament, Miss Widdecombe said women must not go into politics with a 'sense of grievance'. Miss Widdecombe, who was prisons minister in John Major's last government, insisted those women who do choose a career in politics had to prove their commitment, and realise having a family might not be conducive to the rough and tumble of life in Westminster... 'About sixth months afterwards, one of them came up to me in the corridor and she said to me: "Ann, isn't it horrible how the men are so rude to us?" 'And I said "yes, and isn't it horrible how they are so rude to each other?" And she hadn't thought of that."

Agagoogahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://gssq.blogspot.com/2017/02/links-23rd-february-2017-1.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3059213.post-5992739867268530722017-02-23T10:35:00.000+08:002017-02-23T10:35:07.045+08:00The Overblown Harms of Underaged Sex"University of Georgia social work professor Allie Kilpatrick.. In 1992... published the results of a study based on a thirty-three page questionnaire about childhood sexual experiences, administered to 501 women from a variety of class, racial, and educational backgrounds. Instead of employing the morally and emotionally
freighted phrase sexual abuse, she asked specific questions: How old were you, how often, with whom did you have sex? Did you initiate or did the other person? What acts did you engage in ("kiss and hug," "you show genitals," "oral sex by you," etc.)? Was it pleasurable, voluntary, coerced? How did you feel later?

Kilpatrick found that 55 percent of her respondents had had some kind of sex as children (between birth and age fourteen) and 83 percent as adolescents (age fifteen to seventeen), the vast majority of it with boys and men who were not related to them. Of these, 17 percent felt the sex was abusive, and 28 percent said it was harmful. But "the majority of young people who experience some kind of sexual behavior find it pleasurable. They initiated it and didn't feel much guilt or any harmful consequences," she told me. What about age? "My research showed that difference in age made no difference" in the women's memories of feelings during their childhood sexual experiences or in their lasting effects.

Teens often seek out sex with older people, and they do so for understandable reasons: an older person makes them feel sexy and grown up, protected and special; often the sex is better than it would be with a peer who has as little skill as they do. For some teens, a romance with an older person can feel more like salvation than victimization. Wrote Ryan, a teenager who had run away from home to live in a Minnesota commune with his adult lover, "John was the first person in my life who would let me be who I wanted to be. . . . Without John I would have been dead because I would have killed myself." Indeed, it is not uncommon for the child "victim" to consider his or her "abuser" a best friend, a fact that has led to some dicey diagnostic and criminal locutions. William Prendergast, a former prison psychologist and current frequent-flyer "expert" on child abuse, for instance, talks about "consensual rape" and young people's "pseudo-positive" sexual experiences with adults.

Of course, there are gender differences in the experiences of early sex. The law did not invent these. Boys are used to thinking of themselves as desirers and initiators of sex and resilient players who can dust themselves off from a hard knock at love. So among boys, "self-reported negative effects" of sex in childhood are "uncommon," according to psychologists Bruce Rind and Philip Tromovitch's metanalysis of national samples of people who have had such experiences. Girls and women, on the other hand, are far more often the victims of incest and rape than boys are, and gender compounds whatever age-related power imbalances an intergenerational liaison may contain. Phillips found that girls spoke of entering such partnerships willingly and often rationally and of satisfaction with the adult status they borrowed there. Yet they also often "let their guard down with older guys," agreeing not to use a condom, to drop out of school, or cut off ties with friends and families who could have helped them after the relationship was over. Her older informants offered another vantage point from which to view such relationships, often speaking disparagingly of their past older lovers and regretfully of their choices. Phillips pointed out that such bad behavior and twenty-twenty hindsight aren't exclusive to older-younger relationships. A younger lover might have been just as unfaithful and just as likely to leave a young woman with a baby and no help.

The subjects of Sharon Thompson's Going All the Way represented such love affairs in far more positive ways. Just over 10 percent of the four hundred teenage girls she interviewed through the 1980s "told about actively choosing sexual experiences with men or women five or more years older than they." These girls "had no doubt that they could differentiate between abuse, coercion, and consent." They represented themselves as the aggressors, persisters, and abandoners in these relationships, adept at flipping between adult sophistication and childlike flightiness to suit their moods or romantic goals.

Which story is true—freely chosen love or sweet-talked dupery? Both, said Thompson wisely when I asked her. Phillips seemed to agree. "Rather than presuming that adult-teen relationships are really a form of victimization or that they really represent unproblematic, consensual partnerships—rather than maintaining either that willingness means consent or that an age difference means an inherent inability to consent—we need to step back and probe the nuances of adult-teen relationships from the perspectives of young women who participate in them," Phillips wrote. If we are going to educate young women to avoid potentially exploitative relationships, "those strategies must speak to [their] lived realities and the cultural and personal values that they, their families, and their communities hold regarding this issue." Phillips admitted to ambivalence about age-of-consent laws."

--- Harmful to Minors - The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex / Judith Levine

Agagoogahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://gssq.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-overblown-harms-of-underaged-sex.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3059213.post-58446255363291940552017-02-22T13:14:00.000+08:002017-02-22T13:14:06.409+08:00Links - 22nd February 2017List of Shark Products
Sharks are the coconuts of the sea - every part of them is useful

Gravity Payments' $70K minimum salary: CEO Dan Price shares result over a year later - "sales skyrocketed after the announcement, and Gravity Payments continues to take on new clients at a rate it never had before. It reports nearly doubling profits in a year, from $3.5 million in 2014 to $6.5 million in 2015. So Price is re-evaluating the metrics, and still trying to decide what his income should look like. "

Does True Love Exist? A Social Escort Responds. - "if my clients didn't love their partners despite whatever that is lacking in their relationships, they would've left. But they didn't. Maybe their partners don't pay attention to them in the bedroom, or they have certain fantasies that they know their partner would never be comfortable with doing. Paying me (and other escorts) is also an admission to the fact that they never wanted to leave their relationship at all. Love, sex and relationships are complex things, and while they do overlap, understanding that they can be separated has allowed me to continue believing in love."

Virologist urges HIV 'bug chasers' not to infect themselves - "A leading scientist has expressed alarm at a trend in the West in which gay men use social networks to seek HIV-carrying sex partners in order to get infected. The "bug chasers" are often motivated by a desire to secure life-long medical care and social welfare benefits. French virologist Francoise Barré-Sinoussi, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for her life-long work in fighting Aids, said in an interview with the Post that she was unhappy to see such abuse of valuable medical resources and warned that the people doing it might not be well informed of all the risks."

Jay Liu's answer to Has political correctness made it impossible to communicate honestly or effectively? - Quora - "People are always quick to point out that political correctness is not a form of censorship because it's not part of the law. The obvious problem is how "censorship" is confined to "state censorship".
Yes, violating the subtle rules of political correctness will usually not land you in jail, but getting your entire career, public image and social standing destroyed is arguably just as bad as a stint in an actual prison. The reality is that political correctness is a far more effective and sophisticated form of censorship and thought policing than anything Goebbels could have come up with. The closest parallel I can think of to modern day America in terms of political correctness is the Cultural Revolution in China... Don't these Red Guards remind you of some other young, energetic people in the US who have tendency to organize and persecute those who hold beliefs other than their own? Oh yeah, the Social Justice Warriors!"

Why salad is so overrated - "Salad vegetables are pitifully low in nutrition. The biggest thing wrong with salads is lettuce, and the biggest thing wrong with lettuce is that it's a leafy-green waste of resources... Charles Benbrook... and colleague Donald Davis developed a nutrient quality index — a way to rate foods based on how much of 27 nutrients they contain. Four of the five lowest-ranking vegetables (by serving size) are salad ingredients: cucumbers, radishes, iceberg lettuce and celery. (The fifth is eggplant.) Those foods' nutritional profile can be partly explained by one simple fact: They're almost all water... The corollary to the nutrition problem is the expense problem. The makings of a green salad — say, a head of lettuce, a cucumber and a bunch of radishes — cost about $3 at my supermarket. For that, I could buy more than two pounds of broccoli, sweet potatoes or just about any frozen vegetable going, any of which would make for a much more nutritious side dish to my roast chicken... Salad fools dieters into making bad choices... Salad has unfortunate repercussions in our food supply. Lettuce has a couple of No. 1 unenviable rankings in the food world. For starters, it's the top source of food waste, vegetable division, becoming more than 1 billion pounds of uneaten salad every year. But it's also the chief culprit for foodborne illnesses. According to the Centers for Disease Control, green leafies accounted for 22 percent of all food-borne illnesses from 1998-2008"

Polish nationals less likely than Dutch to claim welfare - "Polish nationals are less likely to claim welfare benefits than the native Dutch, according to new figures from the national statistics office CBS which were released on Thursday. However, other groups of immigrants and refugees are much more likely to be on benefits, the figures show.
For example, the CBS says seven out of 10 Somali nationals and six out of 10 Syrians live on welfare (bijstand), compared with just 3% of the Dutch. Afghans, Eritreans and Iranians are also much more likely to be living on welfare. 'A high percentage do not speak the language sufficiently and a relatively large percentage are low-skilled or without any relevant education,' the CBS said."

Trump Supporters Are Prejudiced—and So Are You - ""People with both relatively higher and lower levels of cognitive ability show approximately equal levels of intergroup bias," write psychologists Mark Brandt of Tilburg University and Jarret Crawford of the College of New Jersey, "but toward different sets of groups"... "people with lower levels of cognitive ability express more prejudice towards ethnic minorities and gays and lesbians." However, the researchers also found that "people with higher levels of cognitive ability express more prejudice toward Christian fundamentalists, big business, Christians, the Tea Party, and the military." Overall, "lower levels of cognitive ability are associated with prejudice towards groups perceived as liberal/unconventional, and as having less choice over their group membership," the researchers write. (You have no say in your ethnicity.) "At the same time, the data also suggest that higher levels of cognitive ability are associated with prejudice towards groups perceived as conservative/conventional, and as having more choice over their group membership." (No one forces you to become a business executive.) Brandt and Crawford argue that some cognitive processes utilized by less-intelligent people do lead to prejudice, including an inability or unwillingness to see things from another's perspective; elevated sensitivity to threat; and the need for certainty. But they note that brighter people can come up with "more self-convincing justifications for prejudice." In other words, we can use our superior minds to convince ourselves that our emotion-based assumptions actually have merit."

BBC World Service - The Documentary, The Year Everything Changed - "Vaclav Klaus is one of Europe's longest serving political leaders. A former Prime Minister and President of the Czech Republic.
'What we really wanted in the moment of the fall of Communism... was freedom, democracy, market economy and... to be again a normal European sovereign and independent state. After 3 centuries of belonging to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. after half a century belonging to the Soviet Empire, we really wanted to be free. Nothing more... Our slogans on the streets in Prague in November 89 were 'Back to Europe'. And I was the first one who very soon started to explain the people here: back to Europe doesn't mean exactly avante [?] into the European Union... we wanted to become a normal European state.'
'That's what you are isn't it?'
'We are not. We are a member of a very specific conglomerate, grouping of countries called the European Union. To speak about independence is a joke. We wanted to be integrated in the EU but not unified. I think that the role of the national government is now rather limited. Most of the decisions come from Brussels, not from Prague here, so this is not independence'"

BBC Radio 4 - Today, 03/07/2014, What books should politicians read? - "The idea of Harold McMillan going into the garden on No 10 Downing Street and reading Jane Austen novels when it all got too much, I've always found very appealing. And I think voters might that quite appealing. I always thought it was PR but actually when you read Harold McMillan's letters, he mentions terrible times when he's Prime Minister over the Middle East and he says my only solace was reading Emma. Thank goodness for that...
Some of those classics we've mentioned, of course they're books we should all read but the thing a lot of them have in common: Emma, Middlemarch, Great Expectations is that they're wonderful studies in what is surely a politician's abiding vice, which is self-deception"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Monday's business with Rob Young - "He believes his life of crime has left him with, I suppose recruitment professionals might call them 'transferable skills'... One of my parole hearings... she said you treat crime like it's a corporate venture. You do a cost-benefit analysis to everything you do. I had to agree. A lot of guys that do that crime at that level - if you put them in running Apple or Microsoft, they would do just as good as a CEO"

DTR Podcast from Tinder & Gimlet Creative - "Mixed Signals" - Product Hunt - "Glasses make a right swipe 12% less likely"

Pornhub's 2016 Year in Review – Pornhub Insights - "Countries like Canada, the United States, Mexico, Australia, Norway and Colombia are all hitting up our 'lesbian' category the most. While South America, Russia, and a good portion of Western Europe and Northern Africa are more common frequenters of Pornhub's 'anal' category. The sage color you see represents the higher proportion of views in the 'Ebony' category, which is more concentrated in Africa. And the orange that covers most of Asia, shows where the 'hentai' category gets the most love. There is still quite a bit of yellow spread throughout the map, which indicates a preference for the 'teen (18+)' category."

Isolated Low Temps May Reassure Climate Skeptics - "cold-influenced-denial may be playing out across the U.S., in particular in Appalachia and the South. Because it turns out those areas have had lots of record low temperatures in the last 12 years. And they're also by and large the same parts of the country that have high numbers of global warming skeptics. So researchers have a theory that personal experience with cold snaps could be trumping scientific facts"
The reality of lived experience!

Shoppers who wear pyjamas in Tesco are given a dressing down - "So-called "all-day pyjama syndrome" is widely seen as a growing social and sartorial problem in the UK. Earlier this year a headteacher at a school in Darlington appealed for parents to stop wearing their pyjamas at the school gates after she noticed an increase in the number of parents failing to get dressed for the school run. Some were even wearing pyjamas to school assemblies and meetings, she said."

Can't remember Marina Bay before Marina Bay Sands? This photographer captured it all through the years

Study: Ice Cream For Breakfast Boosts Brain Performance

11 really good reasons why your country should have a monarchy - "monarchical states seem to promote cohesion. A study by Sascha Becker and others shows higher trust and less corruption inside the borders of the old Habsburg empire than among the people who live just outside the empire's historical borders... Former Bank of England rate-setter Tim Besley wrote a working paper earlier in the year suggesting that "in a country with weak executive constraints, going from a non-hereditary leader to an hereditary leader, increases the annual average economic growth of the country by 1.03 percentage points per year." That's a lot!"

The Evolutionary Dominance of Ethnocentric Cooperation - "ethnocentrism eventually overcomes its closest competitor, humanitarianism, by exploiting humanitarian cooperation across group boundaries as world population saturates"
"Racism" is evolved

Automated book-culling software drives librarians to create fake patrons to "check out" endangered titles - "Two employees at the East Lake County Library created a fictional patron called Chuck Finley -- entering fake driver's license and address details into the library system -- and then used the account to check out 2,361 books over nine months in 2016, in order to trick the system into believing that the books they loved were being circulated to the library's patrons, thus rescuing the books from automated purges of low-popularity titles."

Healthcare workers prioritize helping people over information security (disaster ensues) - "In Workarounds to Computer Access in Healthcare Organizations: You Want My Password or a Dead Patient?, security researchers from Penn, Dartmouth and USC conducted an excellent piece of ethnographic research on health workers, shadowing them as they moved through their work environments, blithely ignoring, circumventing and sabotaging the information security measures imposed by their IT departments, because in so doing, they were saving lives... IT's imposition of password rotation schedules meant that no one knew what their passwords were from moment to moment, forcing them to write them down and share them (in some cases, IT might have had this policy set by vendors or regulators/insurers). Aggressive timeouts on terminals meant that clinicians spent an undue amount of time logging in, making it impossible to get their work done."

Elderly Catholic woman has mistakenly been praying every day to Elrond from 'Lord of the Rings'

High marks for standardized tests - "If an exam effectively gauges a student's mastery of U.S. history or English grammar, then teaching the test is simply a matter of helping students develop that knowledge. Teachers who feel that a test ignores something essential should commit to fixing the test, not condemning the entire practice of testing."

Japanese company replaces office workers with artificial intelligence

Muslim Groups Are Reportedly Circulating This Illustration of Santa Getting Punched in the Face - "The Anatolia Youth Association's Istanbul University branch released an illustration of a bearded Muslim punching St. Nick in the face... a similar illustration of Santa being punched was also seen in the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia"
No wonder Santa shot up the Istanbul nightclub

The Reina atrocity shows how deeply Islamic fanaticism has taken hold in Turkey - "The victims of terrorism are called "martyrs" while the names of urban landmarks are changing, slowly, into Martyrdom Hill or Martyrdom Street. Ministers greet police officers, wishing them to sacrifice themselves for the nation. "God willing, you shall be martyrs too," says the minister of urbanisation, Mehmet Özhaseki. The government is trying to cover its incompetence in both foreign and domestic policy with the language of jingoism and patriotism. Those who question the official line are labelled "betrayers" and "pawns of western powers". Young people are told that we are a country surrounded by water on three sides and enemies on all four. As paranoia, distrust and fear intensify, the culture of coexistence dissolves... even after the horrific act of cruelty in Reina. Islamist commentators appeared on TV to say: "We are against New Year. We are against drinking alcohol and celebrations. Whoever wants to blow up whatever place may do so." What is puzzling is how, in a country where anyone who writes anything critical about the government can be instantly sued, and possibly even arrested and put on trial, such religious or nationalist hatemongers rarely have action taken against them... Once we thought Turkey would be a shining role model for the Muslim world; now we are worried that our country may in fact be following some of its worst examples"

Santa Gets Circumcised in Turkey - "Just a day after Christmas, the Islamist whippersnappers took to the streets of Istanbul with an inflatable Santa Claus to protest against Christmas and New Year's celebrations in Turkey. One of the protesters took a blade to the doll's genital region and stabbed it multiple times. Prior to the knifing, demonstrators placed empty beer cans and a syringe in front of Santa, supposedly as a warning about the dangers of celebrating Christmas."

Agagoogahttp://email@example.com://gssq.blogspot.com/2017/02/links-22nd-february-2017.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3059213.post-36802193768163691292017-02-22T10:58:00.000+08:002017-02-22T10:58:16.923+08:00Anglo vs Hispanic Family Culture"Going to the airport in San Juan and in Hartford exemplifies one significant, tangible difference between Puerto Rican and Anglo Protestant culture. For us, picking up a relative at the airport is a chore; we may do our wife or son "a favor" by going along for the ride, but if we can stay home and let someone else do it, we will. After all, no one wants to miss the latest episode of Survivor or Lost. But for many Puerto Ricans a trip to the airport is an anticipated, loving family experience. Six or eight family members crowd into a car bound for the airport and wait eagerly at the gate for an arriving spouse, son, or daughter. In San Juan, the crush of relatives is an everyday phenomenon. Some wait on the glass walkway, spot the relative, throw excited kisses, and then rush to the gate to embrace the relative who is already kissing the other family members. Anglos accentuate the individual and disparage the waste of time. Puerto Ricans key on the family, and for the family they have all the time in the world"

--- America Beyond Black and White. How Immigrants and Fusions Are Helping Us Overcome the Racial Divide / Ronald Fernandez

Agagoogahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://gssq.blogspot.com/2017/02/anglo-vs-hispanic-family-culture.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3059213.post-35453186942768444922017-02-21T23:59:00.000+08:002017-02-21T23:59:05.475+08:00Links - 21st February 2017South Korea Appoints 'Twitter Officer' to Monitor Donald Trump's Tweets - "The JoongAng Daily reported: "The Korean government is still in the process of building ties with Trump and does not have a lot of insight into his foreign policies—like most of the world. "His 140-character posts are currently the most effective insight into policies of the incoming administration.""

FIFA fines British teams $100K for poppy displays - "FIFA forbids players and fans of its 211 member nations from displaying political or religious symbols during international games. This includes the poppy emblems used to remember those in the armed forces who died in the line of duty."

How Intersectionality Makes You Stupid - "whoever shouts the loudest and claims victimization on account of more facets of their identity can expect to get what they demand, regardless of the quality or even logic of what they have to say. Proponents of intersectionality have elevated its categorical paradigms of all-encompassing, omnipresent "oppression," and its attendant, identity-based hierarchies of virtue, to that of a Weltanschauung, a new morality to replace the basic, classical liberal principles of freedom, individual rights, and equality before the law on which Western civilization is based. Because of intersectionality's insistence that identity politics trumps all, reflexive condemnation replaces reasoned discussion, and those claiming to represent a higher good smother the rights of individuals. Likewise, intersectionality compels one to adopt agendas that have nothing to do with his or her own. Worse, in the name of "solidarity" with other supposedly "oppressed" groups, it leads to alliances with those actively hostile to one's cause. This is how a gay rights organization led by well-meaning progressives can be duped into disinviting private citizens of the one country in the Middle East respecting the humanity of gays, all at the behest of people who use cultural relativism to excuse Muslim societies that throw homosexuals from the tops of buildings."

'Chess worse than gambling & eating pork' – Turkish imam

Syrian refugee 'who asked ISIS for money for cars he could drive into crowds' arrested - "Prosecutors said the man 'admitted contact with the ISIS but denied terrorist motives' - suggesting he claimed to have attempted to defraud the extremist group."

ACLU: Obama Worse Than Bush On Civil Liberty Issues

'Screw for Denmark' sex campaigns produce baby boom in months - "According to research by Denmark's Politiken newspaper, the summer months of June-August this year will produce 1,200 more Danes than last summer. In total, some 16,200 babies are due to be born."

PAX South 2015: Why We Need Games Like Social Justice Warriors - "as a game journalist (represented by the Mage class here), you could greatly deplete your opponent's reputation (one of their two health bars) by choosing the "public naming and shaming" attack, but at a great cost to your own reputation too, as well it should be. Meanwhile, sticking to options that involve empathizing with, listening to, and educating your foes grants you bonuses. The dirty stuff might work in the short term, but in the long term, you really only hurt yourself and the discussion."

Tourists didn't recognise the Queen when she left her tiara at home on Balmoral walk - "Richard Griffin described how Her Majesty had gone for a walk near the grounds of Balmoral dressed in tweeds and a headscarf. So low key was her look, that a group of American tourists completely failed to realise who she was. Mr Griffin, who was speaking at a recent talk about his time working with the royals, said the Queen was keen not to blow her cover... She played along when the American tourists asked: 'Do you live round here,' simply replying that she had a house nearby. And when asked if she had met the Queen, she simply gestured to her companion and said: 'No, but he has,' according to the policeman."

Michael Fitzjohn's answer to Were soldiers returning from Vietnam really spat on in airports? - Quora - "My university was a liberal, activist place where the Vietnam war was widely condemned... The professor looked at me as if he was having a heart attack. He screamed "you're a baby killer." He threw me out of class and everyone cheered him as I left the room. I tried to say I was a medic. He didn't care. I learned to keep my mouth shut, live with fellow veterans, and drink. I got my degree."

Gender Differences in Partner Influences and Barriers to Condom Use Among Heterosexual Adolescents Attending a Public Sexually Transmitted Infection Clinic in Singapore - "condom use at last intercourse for both genders was negatively associated with Malay race and peer connectedness and was positively associated with confidence in the ability to use a condom correctly. Being employed was positively associated with condom use for female respondents only. For male respondents only, condom use showed a positive association with living in better housing, older age at first intercourse, and engaging in sexual intercourse with commercial sex partners. Almost all (90%) commercial sex partners suggested condom use and provided condoms compared with 8.1% of non–sex worker partners. Condom use showed a negative association with inconvenience in its use among male respondents but not female respondents."

35,000 Brits sign up for dating site helping Muslim men find multiple wives - "According to the site's creator, 33-year-old Azad Chaiwala, secondwife.com promotes "fidelity, morality and old-fashioned values." "Users police each other and every picture is vetted for decency. We do not allow cleavage," the East Midlands-based businessman explained."

Iceland wants UK to join Nordic alliance of non-EU countries - ""When Britain leaves the EU, we will see a triangle that covers a large part of the globe: Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Norway - and now the United Kingdom," Iceland's President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson said in an interview to Iceland Monitor. The countries do not belong to the European Economic Area (EEA) or any part of the EU... The European Free Trade Association (EFTA), made up of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland, will also become much more relevant after UK's escape from the European bloc, according to the president."

Shelby Donovan Completely Misunderstood Her Mother's Christmas Gift - "Her gathered family quickly realized what Donovan thought, and they themselves began laughing, punctuated by her mother bursting out with, "Do you actually think I would get you a dildo for Christmas?" Turns out, the teen was holding the present upside down, and it was actually a cupholder to use with her morning coffee"

"Drink at least eight glasses of water a day." Really? Is there scientific evidence for "8 × 8"? - "No scientific studies were found in support of 8 × 8. Rather, surveys of food and fluid intake on thousands of adults of both genders, analyses of which have been published in peer-reviewed journals, strongly suggest that such large amounts are not needed because the surveyed persons were presumably healthy and certainly not overtly ill. This conclusion is supported by published studies showing that caffeinated drinks (and, to a lesser extent, mild alcoholic beverages like beer in moderation) may indeed be counted toward the daily total, as well as by the large body of published experiments that attest to the precision and effectiveness of the osmoregulatory system for maintaining water balance. It is to be emphasized that the conclusion is limited to healthy adults in atemperate climate leading a largely sedentaryexistence, precisely the population and conditions that the "at least" in 8 × 8 refers to. Equally to be emphasized, lest the message of this review be misconstrued, is the fact (based on published evidence) that large intakes of fluid, equal to and greater than 8 × 8, are advisable for the treatment or prevention of some diseases and certainly are called for under special circumstances, such as vigorous work and exercise, especially in hot climates"

Premarital Sexual Intercourse Among Adolescents in an Asian Country: Multilevel Ecological Factors - "Independently significant factors for premarital sex among boys were pornography viewing (adjusted odds ratio [OR]: 5.82 [95% confidence interval [CI]: 2.34–14.43]), lack of confidence to resist peer pressure (OR: 3.84 [95% CI: 2.27–6.50]), perception that more than one half of their friends had engaged in sex (OR: 3.37 [95% CI: 1.92–5.92]), permissiveness regarding premarital sex (OR: 3.41 [95% CI: 2.10–5.55]), involvement in gang activities (OR: 3.45 [95% CI: 1.66–7.15]), drinking (OR: 1.77 [95% CI: 1.07–2.94]), smoking (OR: 1.91 [95% CI: 1.14–3.20]), and living in low-cost housing (OR: 3.25 [95% CI: 1.64–6.43]). For girls, additional factors were previous sexual abuse (OR: 7.81 [95% CI: 2.50–24.41]) and dropping out of school (OR: 2.72 [95% CI: 1.32–5.61]), and stronger associations were found for lack of confidence to resist peer pressure (OR: 5.56 [95% CI: 2.94–10.53]) and permissiveness regarding premarital sex (OR: 6.25 [95% CI: 3.30–11.83]). Exposure to persons with HIV/AIDS or sexually transmitted infections in the media was negatively associated with sex for boys (OR: 0.27 [95% CI: 0.16–0.45]) and girls (OR: 0.24 [95% CI: 0.13–0.47])."

Someone Drew the Disney Princesses With Normal Bodies and They Look Beautiful - "
Comment: "what does snow white having blue hair and Jasmine having tattoos have to do with anything? That doesn't make them "normal". Smh social media..."
"Ummm ... they're cartoons. I've never seen a "normal" mouse that looked like Mickey Mouse, but I never felt the urge to complain."
"Before you know it, they are going to start criticizing Sci-fi and calling those unrealistic too."
"so all white girls are chubby with a large waist?"
"instead of shaming bigger girls we can start shaming skinner girls. Brilliant!"
"Artist seems to only make the white characters overweight - interesting"
Why not redraw the Disney princesses so they look as good as normal people, i.e. make them uglier? Why celebrate body positivity, i.e. being fat, but not being ugly?
If you redraw them as they would be in an African country, i.e. as black, is that blackface?
Friend: "They should draw Disney princesses with type 2 diabetes
Body positivity is fucking dangerous for Asian people
We are more vulnerable to obesity related diseases than Ang Mohs, who tolerate being hamplanets much better"

Weird crash with multiple windows showing up - "This same thing happened to my computer just the other day. I had been away and came back to discover well over 50 mysterious windows open with strange titles, including:
- igfxtrayWindow
- MCI command handling window
- PersistWndName
- ReceiverMessageWindow
and many more, some of which were extremely cryptic. Some did not have titles at all. Several of them were tiny, not much bigger than a short title bar. A few looked like they had something to do with Citrix. Most of them looked like they were spawned from the applications I had running at the time, especially Windows/Internet Explorer, which claimed at least 40 of the windows. I looked at the task manager and saw that sidebar.exe and several instances of iexplore.exe were hogging the CPU. Also, the Start menu was blank."

"Fuck Trump": Four In Custody After Man Tortured In Facebook Live Video - ""Fuck Donald Trump, fuck white people," the man says... Johnson said police were investigating if the incident was a hate crime, but so far he said there was no indication it was motivated by politics or race... A second video shows the victim being threatened with a knife until he says, "Fuck Donald Trump," gets on his knees, and kisses the floor."
If white people kidnapped and tortured a black person, made him say "Fuck Obama" and the police said "there was no indication it was motivated by politics or race...

CNN Panelist Blames Trump For Racist Torture of Mentally Disabled Man

Pro-Trump narratives converge in one awful attack streamed on Facebook - The Washington Post - "If the attackers had been white and the victim had been black, the incident would have, of course, conjured America's ugly history of white mobs committing violence against black people. There is no parallel history of the reverse happening on anything remotely approaching the same scale."
Comment: "So Callum Borchers wrote this? No more credibility for him. Is he living in the real world?

Lucas Lynch - A disabled child is tortured in Chicago and the... - "A disabled child is tortured in Chicago and the Whataboutery being tossed around by members of the social justice left is predictable and depressing as ever. What about George Zimmerman not being in jail and Eric Garner being murdered? Well, at the time, you pointed out how ridiculous it was to divert the focus from the victims of the crimes just as they happened. "All Lives Matter" and "Not all men" rightfully became objects of ridicule and satire as people tried to deflect from the horrific reality of what had just taken place... Even worse, are you *more* concerned that the assailants saying "Fuck white people" makes your ideology look bad more than the state of the victim? Because you basically are saying your ideology is more important than a human being - pretty similar to people choosing to defend the Confederate flag in the wake of the Dylan Roof shooting rather than focusing on the victims and the pernicious ideas that inspired Roof to take their lives. Lost in it all is the victim himself. I wish him a speedy recovery, even though he's a privileged white male and thus the root of all evil."

Wide Racial Divide in Sentencing - WSJ - "Prison sentences of black men were nearly 20% longer than those of white men for similar crimes in recent years, an analysis by the U.S. Sentencing Commission found... the findings drew criticism from advocacy groups and researchers, who said the commission's focus on the very end of the criminal-justice process ignored possible bias at earlier stages, such as when a person is arrested and charged, or enters into a plea deal with prosecutors"

Black Lives Matter activist giving Yale lecture compares protests to Boston Tea Party - "A prominent Black Lives Matter activist has offered a defense of violent looters who plundered U.S. cities like Ferguson and Baltimore in a lecture series delivered at Yale. DeRay McKesson, 30, was invited to the prestigious school to lecture on the movement... McKesson, a former math teacher is a prominent activist associated with Black Lives Matter. He often speaks to the media from large-scale protests in strife-ridden areas across the country. He has amassed 234,000 Twitter followers and Hillary Clinton has personally invited him to political meetings."

Merkel wanted refugees to be lorry drivers - "German Chancellor Angela Merkel in September tried to push through a plan that would allow refugees to be trained and hired as lorry drivers – just months before a lorry was used by a suspected asylum-seeker to mow down civilians during Monday's Berlin terror attack. Merkel encouraged companies to hire refugees – even if they hadn't yet been granted asylum – as drivers and also wanted to make it cheaper for migrants to trade in their foreign driver's license for a German one... the Organization of German Profession Lorry Drivers (BDBK) fought back. "We give a definite no to use refugees as lorry drivers," BDBK chairman Wolfgang Westermann said at the time. "Professional lorry drivers need a thorough and qualified education. You cannot let everyone drive off in a 40-ton lorry."

Agagoogahttp://email@example.com://gssq.blogspot.com/2017/02/links-21st-february-2017.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3059213.post-47744660873838949792017-02-21T22:42:00.000+08:002017-02-21T22:42:00.614+08:00English Kings and French Homage"The peculiar status of the English kings in the French political order dated back to the treaty of Paris of 1259. Before that treaty the dukes of Aquitaine had acknowledged no superior on earth. They had performed no homage to the kings of France since the confiscation of their continental dominions had been proclaimed by Philip Augustus at the beginning of the thirteenth century, an act which they regarded as unlawful and which they refused to recognize. It was an unsatisfactory stalemate which the parties proceeded to replace in 1259 with an even more unsatisfactory compromise. The treaty doubled the size of the duchy, suddenly extending its boundaries from the coastal plain to the steep valleys of the interior and into regions which had not known English rule for half a century. But the surrender of these great territories was hedged about by qualifications and exceptions. The English dynasty recovered certain ill-defined rights in the 'three bishoprics' of Limoges, Perigueux and Cahors. Subject to equally ill-defined conditions, they were also promised the return of the diocese of Agen and parts of Saintonge and Querey. There was no comprehensive territorial settlement of south-western France. All that was finally settled in Paris in 1259 was that the Duke held his lands there as the vassal of the King of France and owed him liege homage, the feudal bond to which all other loyalties yielded. On 4 December 1259 Henry III performed the act of homage in a fine ceremony in the garden of the royal palace in Paris, but what were the territories for which he was doing homage and what were his rights within them were questions which were left for his successors to argue out with increasing vehemence in the courts of successive French kings and finally on the battlefield. It was 'a defiance of good sense' as an Archbishop of Canterbury acidly observed twenty years later, and more than any other act it earned Henry his place in that region of Dante's Purgatory reserved for children and negligent kings, 'il re de la semplice vita'."

--- Hundred Years War Vol 1: Trial by Battle / Jonathan Sumption

Agagoogahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://gssq.blogspot.com/2017/02/english-kings-and-french-homage.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3059213.post-49338852605943307482017-02-19T22:15:00.000+08:002017-02-19T22:15:06.044+08:00The Museum Of Lost ObjectsBBC World Service - The Documentary, The Museum Of Lost Objects: Palmyra

"[On Russia flying in an orchestra to play in Palmyra] I really felt it was ridiculous. It was ridiculous in terms of the continuous tragedy of Syria. I mean, let's assume that you are in the BBC going to give the Syrian news 30 seconds today. They stole those 30 seconds from the hundreds of people that were killed that day...

[On Boris Johnson's replica of part of Palmyra] Nasser feels this zeal for restoration misses the point.

'I do not think that reconstructing the temple would be the best way of honouring its memory. And if the idea is to actually create a Palmyra, let's do a Disney Palmyra somewhere else. There's no value to reconstructing fake monuments in an authentic site. Perhaps what I'm saying is a bit of an extreme opinion and perhaps there is a way of reconstructing something but also the difference is that Palmyra was always in ruins. We have to allow it to age and to die. We have to allow it to turn into ruins. Even if it's actually by a wanton act of criminality as what Daesh did in Palmyra.'

Let ruins be ruins. In that case, should we do nothing in the face of the cultural destruction?...

'My dream would be to reconstruct them using only the pieces that remain'...

'The very very earliest figures, representations of leaders we have in Mesopotamia from around 3500 BC. One of the key things they do is also fight lions. They're not shown fighting, killing other people because that's almost demeaning. They have to have a lion who is the only real sort of, not quite equal but near rival because they're incredibly powerful and sort of unpredictable'

From the imagery of Babylonian and Assyrian kings to Islamic miniatures of the medieval and early modern period, we find scenes of the hunt. Of brave princes struggling with lions. The lion was both regal and untameable. The quintessence of strength and Man's ultimate opponent. So much of the male Kingly obsession with the lion had to do with imagining its destruction.

In modern Syria, there is no escaping the lion. The last name of Syria's ruling dynasty, Al-Assad means the Lion. It features prominently on the regime's propaganda. One slogan goes 'Syria and Al-Assad for eternity after eternity'. But the family name only became Al-Assad a few generations ago...

Saddam posing like an Assyrian king. He is on an Assyrian chariot, led by two horses and the horses are trampling on a lion that must have been killed by Saddam with an arrow on it... there he is, Saddam pointing his bow and arrow at... American missiles and a helicopter"

BBC World Service - The Documentary, The Museum Of Lost Objects, Bombed and Bulldozed in Syria

"[Al-Mari's] deep skepticism about organised religion led him to critique both Islam and Christianity, to imagine Mohammed shouting from a minaret and Jesus banging a bell. Al-Mari suggested that religion was just sound and fury, signifying very little.

'He was someone who doubted all the received wisdom and the received religions around him. And you have to remember if you lived in 970, 980 which is when he was a young man, in the area where he lived, you were not surrounded only by Sunni Muslims. But you had all the Christian churches in huge numbers, I would say in huge proportion and also you had all the splinter group from Islam, namely the Alawis that rule Syria today were staring to appear then. But also you had the Ismailis. And then you had the Sunnis and you had the Shia.

So he lived already in a multiple faith environment and reflected on if you want the stupidity of all of these followers of the different faith in terms of fighting over what he thought of as undeserving of the fighting, his importance if you want in his poetry is that he knew his Islam. This is not someone who is coming from outside.

And he basically started questioning the validity of the claim that this is divine. Now of course if you say that today you lose your life. And as a matter of fact you don't need to be in ISIS land to lose your life for that"

BBC World Service - The Documentary, The Museum Of Lost Objects, Looted in Iraq

"I feel as an Iraqi, there is not a lot in our modern history to be very proud of. So for many Iraqis we draw a lot on our ancient history, on the history of Mesopotamia, home to the first civilisations of the world. I feel very proud...

[On sculpture] The big curly beard is also a sign of virility and the beards kind of got smaller and less complicated as you got less important...

[On a Nimrud Genie head locked away in Scotland Yard] Its looting may have prevented its destruction...

Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu are aggressors, ecological thieves. They come to Humbaba's forest to take its timber back to their treeless homeland in Mesopotamia. In this newly discovered tablet of the epic, we find remarkably a sense that the heroes of the tale were in the wrong... it points to the ambiguity of the Gilgamesh epic.

In so many other ancient epics like the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf for example, we find a black and white world: a clear binary of good and evil. In Gilgamesh there is plenty of grey...

'You can think of archaeology as kind of like crime scene investigation in the ancient past, so what you want is not just the knife but the knife on the floor next to the blood splatter with the footprints and the, you know, if someone just turns up at the police station and hands them a knife. And it's like look I found this knife. Aren't you guys always collecting knives? They'd be like, no, not really but okay, thanks'...

Lamia describes how Arab friends had a hard time accepting that Baghdadis were responsible for the looting of their own treasures.

'Literally I had a telephone from Algeria... right across the Arab world... everyone had its own theory of who looted the museum... I started doing statistics.

So it depends whom you don't like. Was it the Americans? Was it the Israelis? Was it the Kuwaitis?... they never ever accused the actual people in Baghdad that looted it'"

Agagoogahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://gssq.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-museum-of-lost-objects.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3059213.post-53031809724674746842017-02-19T20:11:00.000+08:002017-02-19T20:11:01.678+08:00Links - 19th February 2017 (2)Londoners launch anti-Tube Chat campaign - "London commuters have attempted to prove they are insular and unfriendly by wearing badges discouraging fellow passengers from talking to them."

Why Do Women Risk Pain and Injury Wearing High Heels? - "as heel height increases, men pay more attention to women—much more attention... Men lust after women, and some women experience male-style desire. But many women feel less motivated by lust than the need to feel desired, to attract and hold male attention. High heels attract male gazes. Women often complain about the downsides of high heels, but continue to wear them. Apparently, the yearning to appear desirable beats the desire to feel comfortable."

Want a helping hand? Try wearing high heels. - "Are men more likely to respond to women in heels because they find them more attractive, and are they more likely to answer survey questions from or help an attractive woman? Or are the men who help a woman in heels pick up her glove correctly perceiving that a woman in heels is in fact, physically, less stable than a woman in flats, and might therefore be more likely to need their help? Or, more interestingly still — and more troublingly — does a woman's perceived instability and vulnerability make her more physically attractive to some men?"

Men's music ability and attractiveness to women in a real-life courtship context - "This experiment tested the assumption that music plays a role in sexual selection. Three hundred young women were solicited in the street for their phone number by a young male confederate who held either a guitar case or a sports bag in his hands or had no bag at all. Results showed that holding a guitar case was associated with greater compliance to the request, thus suggesting that musical practice is associated with sexual selection."

Gardener accidentally triggers 'red alert' for northern lights while cutting the grass

Hamas condemns video of Muslim and Jewish people dancing as 'disgraceful spectacle' - "Officials from Hamas have criticised a video appearing to show Muslim and Jewish people dancing together at a Hanukka ceremony, describing it as a "disgraceful spectacle". The Islamist group said the video from the event, hosted by the king of Bahrain and attended by members of the local Jewish community, was "humiliating" after it was posted on YouTube."

Disney to reportedly receive £41 million insurance payout after death of Carrie Fisher

Who Said It: A Suffragette or a Member of the KKK?

Witchcraft banned from Rwandan soccer matches after bizarre incident

Self-driving cars will exacerbate organ shortages. - "There's also evidence that both monetary and nonmonetary compensation offer strong incentives for donation. In 2008, for example, Israel instituted a benefit package for living donors that included full wage reimbursement for 40 days and up to five years of paid expenses for a variety of services, including health and life insurance. The country also amended its organ transplant law again in 2010 to allow a patient to gain priority allocation on a transplant list if a member of his or her family demonstrated willingness to donate an organ. The number of living organ donors increased by 67 percent between 2011 and 2013 compared with the previous three-year period."

Man convicted of bacon attack on mosque dies in jail - "Kevin Crehan, who was from Knowle in Bristol, was jailed in July. He was convicted along with three others of committing a racially aggravated public order offence. In January 2016 they shouted racial abuse at a member of the Jamia Mosque on Green Street in Totterdown in Bristol while rashers of bacon were placed on the door handles and a St George's flag was tied to the fence."

White House fails to make case that Russian hackers tampered with election - " The US government's much-anticipated analysis of Russian-sponsored hacking operations provides almost none of the promised evidence linking them to breaches that the Obama administration claims were orchestrated in an attempt to interfere with the 2016 presidential election."

Shanghai working woman opens Instagram account to document lucrative affair with her boss

Malaysian man says he is living in fear after wife buys million-ringgit insurance in his name - "The man, who has been a construction safety officer since retiring in 2011, said two men posing as civil engineering students attempted to strangle him inside a car on Sept 10."

Steve Martin deletes tweet calling Carrie Fisher 'beautiful' after backlash
Comment: "so she was not beautiful? or she was not a creature? which is it? is it wrong to say a person is a creature of habit? that's what feminists are for sure - they are creatures of habit when it comes to criticizing anything a man states..."

Monkeys Make Stone "Tools" That Bear a Striking Resemblance to Early Human Artifacts

This Chinese Billionaire Is Moving Production to the U.S. to Cut Costs - "Wage and transportation costs are getting higher in China, Cao says. "Compared with four years ago, labor wages [in China] today have tripled," he told China Business Network. Meanwhile, "transportation in the U.S. costs the equivalent of less than one yuan ($) per kilometer, while road tolls [in China] are higher," he added, pointing out that some mid- and small-sized Chinese enterprises have already started moving to Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam and Cambodia for cheaper wages and materials."

Indonesia's Growing Islamist Populism - "There is one group in particular, the Islamic Defenders Front (Front Pembela Islam/FPI), which has always been around since 1998, but it was seen as a splinter group; it was seen as a group that was only active at the very Islamist margins. They have now proven that they can mobilize numbers of people that was unprecedented in Indonesian history. Again, the demonstration on the 2nd of December probably had around 750,000 people on the streets of Jakarta. That is larger than any demonstration we have seen, including in the 1950s and 1960s. So that has catapulted the leader of this particular group, Habib Muhammad Rizieq Syihab, into the center of Indonesian politics."

This smart urinal will clean your dick entirely hands-free

Three British Airways passengers treated like 'rock stars' when they found they were the only people on board their flight

People think they've seen 'Shazaam,' but it never existed - "If you fondly remember the early-1990s film "Shazaam," starring the comedian Sinbad as an incompetent genie who tries to help out two young children — then you are wrong. Not because the movie isn't good, but because it never existed in the first place."

Somali-American teen becomes the first Miss USA hopeful to wear a hijab and a burkini - "she stuck to her conservative Muslim dress code, covering her head with a hijab and wearing a burkini during the swimsuit competition. A burkini is a swimsuit worn by many Muslim women, which covers most of the body"
If you don't stick to the rules, shouldn't you get thrown out?

It's time to accept reality – Hong Kong is a city in decline and it's our fault | South China Morning Post - "Virtually everything that is wrong with us is rooted in our fight for so-called true democracy. We lie to ourselves that our promised high degree of autonomy equals self-determination with elections free of any Beijing input. We delude ourselves that this so-called true democracy will shield us from the mainland."
???

Singapore named second most vegan-friendly city in Asia by Peta - "Taipei, Taiwan, pipped Singapore to the top spot on the list by the international animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals or Peta."

audioBoom / Today: Should women fight on frontline? - "We are physically different... as an example, in my squadron, we deployed with a lot of very heavy communications vehicles. We had, there were quite a lot of physical tasks to be done every time we deployed on exercise. We had a maximum of 4 girls in my squadron, 4 women in the squadron and it was perfectly natural and normal that the guys would do all the heavy jobs and those jobs which were physically demanding, whilst women would do the slightly less physical. I mean it was just the normal course of events. It was absolutely fine in the situation that I was in. But when we're talking about an infantry section of 8 guys and you've got 1 person who is not actually as physically strong or as physically capable as the other 7, over possibly an extended period of time, which is what has not been tested, that could create an effect on our combat effectiveness... Captain Katie Petronio who was a combat engineer, an American combat engineer, who herself was definitely up for anything that a man could do when she joined. She spent an extended period of time in Afghanistan, had to carry a very heavy load and was physically affected very seriously and she has said herself: Stop. Stop. Women should not be placed in these situations
Which is more valuable? A feminist perspective or the perspective of someone (who is incidentally a woman) who has on the ground military experience?

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, The fall of the Soviet Union: The Rosenberg reports - "'By nature, I am a typical monarchist'
'You'd like a Tzar back'
'I want the Tzar. I understand that the country is so big, and it has so many problems that I don't see anybody else but a strong mighty powerful person who's gonna run this country'
'Does Vladimir Putin fulfil that need for a Tzar?'
'To my understanding, yes'
'Western governments would say the President is being aggressive. The West doesn't trust Vladimir Putin'
'So why should they like him? He's not a girl. He's not a pretty woman. Why should they like him? Not everybody likes people who have their own point of view'...
'The West has very often believed that Russia was insulted, that Russia was humiliated and that the West has done wrong and the West should look at its own mistakes, where did we get Russia wrong. I would say no. The West did not get Russia wrong. Russia got itself wrong. Russia constructed its own grief. Russia constructed its own litany of concerns, cos this was a new ideology that was very much befitting the authoritarian drift in Russian domestic politics. We needed an external enemy. And we needed a new sense of confrontation with the West in order to consolidate Putin's domestic power'"

Stupid Reasons to Go to War in the Middle Ages - "Another strange medieval conflict was the so-called 'War of the Bucket', fought in 1325 between the Italian city-states of Bologna and Modena. They had been foes for many years before this, and during a period of heightened tension, a group of Modenese soldiers sneaked into Bologna, and stole a bucket from the main city well. The Bolognese demanded the return of the bucket, which was refused, and then mustered an army of 32,000 men to attack Modena. However, the Modenese met them at the Battle of Zappolino. Two thousand men were left dead on the battlefield, and the Bolognese being routed. You can still see the famous bucket on display in Modena."

The War on Stupid People - "[In the 1950s] hiring decisions were "based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics."... The 2010s, in contrast, are a terrible time to not be brainy. Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart. People who'd swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being "stupid" has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement... Harvard Business School professor Chris Argyris argued that smart people can make the worst employees, in part because they're not used to dealing with failure or criticism. Multiple studies have concluded that interpersonal skills, self-awareness, and other "emotional" qualities can be better predictors of strong job performance than conventional intelligence, and the College Board itself points out that it has never claimed SAT scores are helpful hiring filters... Intelligence and academic achievement have steadily been moving up on rankings of traits desired in a mate; researchers at the University of Iowa report that intelligence now rates above domestic skills, financial success, looks, sociability, and health... the less brainy are, according to studies and some business experts, less likely to be oblivious of their own biases and flaws, to mistakenly assume that recent trends will continue into the future, to be anxiety-ridden, and to be arrogant."

The Three Stages of Stupidity - "I suggest there is a three stage mental process undertaken by thinkers of the New Left...
The three stages are:
1: Holding the urge to protect and support the underdog above all other motivating forces to the point of myopia. Support for the underdog is felt by most humans, thankfully, and should be. But it is so strong in some that it is followed unequivocally and other motivations are ignored.
2: With that as a motivating principle each problem is approached, subconsciously and consciously, by dividing all actors in a situation into the 'oppressor' and the 'oppressed'. This is done along demographic lines, be them race or gender or sexuality or whatever. If you are part of that group you're treated as the group. The view struggles with seeing individuals at all.
3: The thinker then falls for Bertrand Russell's fallacy of 'The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed'. The weaker group in the binary situation is of superior virtue. No. Matter. What...
let's say there is an article in the Guardian about the oppression of women in the Muslim world. The Muslim woman becomes part of the oppressed minority of Muslims against the oppressor, which is the West, and her individual struggle as a woman is then subsumed. Despite solicitous studies in the field of intersectionality, you really are only part of one group at a time with this process. Because the people speaking of feminist ideals become part of the West they have to be bad. For although feminists are on the oppressed side in a UK based topic, these ones are up against Muslim men, who are lumped in simply as Muslims, and therefore the feminists must conform to their larger identity, Westerners. Hence why we see committed feminist writers, plagued by this process, willingly abandon their sisters in a Muslim country under talk of cultural relativism and of different standards applying."

Agagoogahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://gssq.blogspot.com/2017/02/links-19th-february-2017-2.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3059213.post-84930346186130899472017-02-19T15:09:00.000+08:002017-02-19T15:09:09.570+08:00The Secret History of YogaBBC Radio 4 - The Secret History of Yoga

"The celebrated champion of the Hindu Renaissance, Swami Vivekananda, who was invited to talk at the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, is usually credited with introducing Yoga to the West. But it turns out, he wasn't keen on physical postures either...

I visited the Lonavala Yoga Institute to meet [India's] leading expert on traditional Indian yoga poses.

'Nowadays when I travel all over the world, I find different funny names of the yogas. I don't know why they want to use yoga like you know, dog yoga, wine yoga, nude yoga, beach yoga. Sorry to say but there is no any mention of all such yogas in the ancient manuscripts'

Dr Manmath Gharote has dedicated his life to tracking down ancient yoga manuscripts to understand what they tell us about the practice of yoga in the past...

'Integration of personality is the prime aim of yoga. There are 5 aspects of personality. Physical, mental, emotional, social and spiritual. 5 different aspects of personality should work harmoniously with each other. Flexibility of the spine, flexibility of the joints, flexibility of the muscles, is the pre-requisite, important aspect of that. But it is not the ultimate aspect. So yoga says although you practise asana through the body, it is for the mind. As when you're capable to stable the mind, then you can achieve complete eradication of the suffering, and then you go for the attending eternal peace...

Surya Namaskar, salute to the sun, a dynamic sequence of 12 backward and forward bends...
'Most of the people, they think Surya Namaskar as yoga. But you will never find any reference about Surya Namaskar as yoga. Because what *something* says asanas has 2 characteristics: *something* stability, *something* comfort. In Surya Namaskar, there is no *something* stability. It is a dynamic, and when dynamic exercises are there, it is not yoga'...

That most iconic of yoga poses: the downward dog...

'Does that feature in any of your older texts?'

'Not until this 18th century text mentions a posture called Gaja so actually that's the elephant pose, but that corresponds to the downward dog of today'

All these years I thought I was imitating a dog and actually it was an elephant...

In the early 20th century... spurred on by the eugenics movement, there was a burgeoning worldwide interest in what became known as physical culture.

'Gymnastics, bodybuilding, running, jumping. Anything that will make the body fit, fast, strong, healthy'...

'Indians could build their bodies, become strong in the service of national emancipation'...

'To prove their fitness for self rule meant Indians demonstrating that their physical prowess was the equal of their colonial masters'...

Using X-rays and other then novel tools of medical science, this sort of experimentation helped to distance yoga from its unsavory association with those grizzled street corner yogis.

'What we're seeing a process of modernisation. And in that process aspects which aren't prior to this time part of the yoga system start to be incorporated'"

Agagoogahttp://email@example.com://gssq.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-secret-history-of-yoga.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3059213.post-28851498636047641122017-02-19T12:07:00.000+08:002017-02-19T12:07:08.465+08:00Links - 19th February 2017 (1)Couples Must Show Marriage Certification To Sit Next To Each Other In TransMalaya Express Bus - "The company relayed it segregates female and male passengers, both Muslim and non-Muslim, with the exception of married couples and family members. This is seen as an advantage to female passengers, to provide them with comfort, upon looming concerns of sexual harassment. "We have heard and read reports of how female travellers get molested by strangers, so we took this effort to give them a greater sense of security and comfort."... As of February last year, tickets were issued out to passengers according to appropriate seats − women on the right, while men on the left. Checks were also conducted for Muslim couples, where they would first need to show their marriage certification to the counter staff to sit together on the bus."

Bus driver who goes the extra mile awarded trip to UK - "On Dec 10, at the bus company's inaugural awards night, Mr Kumaran — who joined the UK-based operator in May after 16 years with SMRT — received his biggest prize yet for excellent service: A pair of return tickets to London and five nights' accommodation worth S$4,500. About 60 commuters have written in to praise him since the company launched its services. This is at least double the number of compliments that most of the firm's top-performing bus drivers get, Tower Transit's group communications director Glenn Lim said.""

Multilingual S'porean woman prevented WWIII in France airport by acting as peace corp translator - "The potentially planet-ending incident occurred after an American of African descent had overheard a group of mainland Chinese tourists saying "那个", while waiting in line to clear immigration at the French international airport. The Chinese words, "那个", which can be pronounced as "na ge" or "nei ge", depending on accent and when spoken out loud in the mainland Chinese volume, bears an uncanny resemblance to "n*gger". The American was witnessed to have gone ballistic and the Chinese tourists retaliated because they did not know what led to his aggression, resulting in a shouting match."
Ahh... Americans imposing their cultural context on others and then getting offended

9 of the Queen's Strangest Powers and Privileges - "SHE CAN DRIVE WITHOUT A LICENSE."

Rescue Mission Launched As Thousands Stranded On Higher Moral Ground - "A WORLDWIDE rescue mission has been launched today after thousands of internet commentators were left stranded on higher moral ground in dangerously ignorant conditions, following an incident in a Cincinnati zoo where a gorilla was shot in a bid to protect a young boy. Internet rescue service personnel have been inundated with emergency calls from people trapped in comment sections, many of whom are incredibly passionate about news stories they can jump to conclusions on without reading the facts."

An army of 1000 Japanese soldiers was decimated by saltwater crocodiles during the Battle of Ramree Island of World War II.

Chinese Velveting 101: An Introduction to Water-Velveting - "Velveting meat—the practice of marinating slices of meat in egg white, wine, and cornstarch—is a Chinese cooking technique that we've covered here on Serious Eats before. Typically, after the meat is marinated, it is quickly blanched in a bath of hot oil and then drained, at which point it's ready to be stir-fried. The end result is meat that's tender, silky, and smooth in texture"

Mother of Kiryat Arba terrorist: My son is a hero - "The mother of the Palestinian terrorist who killed an Israeli teenage girl as she slept in her bed early this morning tells a Hebron news channel that her son was "a hero" who made her "proud." "My son died as a martyr defending Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque," the Palestinian Media Watch organization quotes the mother of Muhammad Tarayrah as saying. "Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds, he [my son] has joined the martyrs before him, and he is not better than them. Allah willing, all of them will follow this path, all the youth of Palestine. Allah be praised.""

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Who murdered Clara Kirton? - "Hair without a root can be used to determine ethnicity that might help narrow down a field of suspects or confirm the identity of someone already in the frame. But in most cases, strands of hair without roots will not deliver a full DNA profile. It's thought that will be possible in 3-4 years"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, How do you become a comedy writer? - "I worry about modern comedy though. It seems to be getting cruder and cruder. Charm and subtlety are lost. The double entendre has been replaced by the single entendre"

It's time to move on from AWARE - "Poor Malay women were told they need to stop having children, while educated Chinese women were being given benefits to have more. When AWARE was formed, reproductive rights to abortion and contraception were fought for as a "choice," as it is for Chinese women, but Malay women were not even given this choice due to sterilization programmes, and this is an issue that has been largely ignored by AWARE. The truth is, AWARE was not started to combat the pain and horror of this country's eugenicist policies. Nope. It was formed to protect precious Chinese wombs."
Will Sangeetha's allies abandon her now?; the left eats itself

The Epic of Gilgamesh Theme of Sex - "Shamhat uses sex as a way to civilize Enkidu. In Mesopotamian culture, sex with a gal like Shamhat connected her lover to the divine life-force, so to speak. This apparently explains how Enkidu becomes more man than beast (which, when you think about it, is a funny inversion of how we usually think about sex—that it makes us like animals)"

Central Java Governor bans ancient sex ritual on Mt. Kemukus - "Those who seek wealth are encouraged to have sexual intercourse on the mountain with someone other than their legal partner in order to achieve prosperity... Before his death, Prince Samodra left a message stating that for any person willing to engage in intercourse with a person other than his or her legal partner seven times on Pon Friday, the day when Samodra died alongside Ontrowulan, the person'€™s wishes would be fulfilled."

Why Stormtroopers Always Miss - Imgur

Star Wars: The Clone Wars Chronological Episode Order | StarWars.com

Why the Pentagon opening all combat roles to women could subject them to a military draft

Tetris taught me that when you try to fit in you'll disappear. : Showerthoughts - "But if you don't fit you lose..."
"Isn't Tetris actually a metaphor for communism?"

Raccoons and the Myth of Washing Food |

Australia data shows gun controls a huge success 20 years after mass shooting - "The chances of being murdered by a gun in Australia plunged to 0.15 per 100,000 people in 2014 from 0.54 per 100,000 people in 1996, a decline of 72 percent, a Reuters analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showed... The country has had no mass shootings since."

Class Size: What Research Says and What it Means for State Policy - "Class-size reduction has been shown to work for some students in some grades in some states and countries, but its impact has been found to be mixed or not discernable in other settings and circumstances that seem similar. It is very expensive. The costs and benefits of class-size mandates need to be carefully weighed against all of the alternatives when difficult decisions must be made... Harris finds short-term rates of return for computer-aided instruction, cross-age tutoring, early childhood programs, and increases in instructional time that are all greater than those for CSR... The popularity of class-size reduction may make it politically difficult for policymakers to increase class size in order to sustain other investments in education, even in a time of budget austerity"

UK's leading student union adopts controversial new stance on gay men - "The National Union of Students (NUS) LGBT+ Campaign has concluded during its recent annual conference that gay men do not require a reserved place on society committees because they 'do not face oppression as gay men within the LGBT+ community.' It is now appealing to LGBT+ societies all over the country to drop their gay men's representatives. The conclusion stemmed from the shared view of the delegates at the conference, which took place in Sheffield from 15-17 March, that 'white cis gay men' are often responsible for misogyny, racism and anti-transgender and anti-bisexual sentiments"

In Photos: Feasting on Dog Meat at China's Infamous Summer Solstice Festival

Stand-Up Comics Have to Censor Their Jokes on College Campuses - "they wanted comedy that was 100 percent risk-free, comedy that could not trigger or upset or mildly trouble a single student. They wanted comedy so thoroughly scrubbed of barb and aggression that if the most hypersensitive weirdo on campus mistakenly wandered into a performance, the words he would hear would fall on him like a soft rain, producing a gentle chuckle and encouraging him to toddle back to his dorm, tuck himself in, and commence a dreamless sleep—not text Mom and Dad that some monster had upset him with a joke... I saw ample evidence of the repressive atmosphere that Rock and Seinfeld described, as well as another, not unrelated factor: the infantilization of the American undergraduate, and this character's evolving status in the world of higher learning—less a student than a consumer, someone whose whims and affectations (political, sexual, pseudo-intellectual) must be constantly supported and championed. To understand this change, it helps to think of college not as an institution of scholarly pursuit but as the all-inclusive resort that it has in recent years become—and then to think of the undergraduate who drops out or transfers as an early checkout... "You can't use logic on these people," Geoff Keith told me over dinner at the Hilton, "or then they think you're a dick."... The college revolutions of the 1960s—the ones that gave rise to the social-justice warriors of today's campuses—were fueled by free speech. But once you've won a culture war, free speech is a nuisance, and "eliminating" language becomes a necessity."

Maths study shows conspiracies 'prone to unravelling' - "the chance that a conspiracy is revealed becomes quite large as time passes and the number of conspirators grows. The Moon landing hoax, for instance, began in 1965 and would have involved about 411,000 Nasa employees. With these parameters, Dr Grimes's equation suggests that the hoax would have been revealed after 3.7 years"

Russian atheist faces year in jail for denying existence of God during webchat

Large breasts and narrow waists indicate high reproductive potential in women. - "women with higher breast-to-underbreast ratio (large breasts) and women with relatively low WHR (narrow waists) have higher fecundity as assessed by precise measurements of daily levels of 17-beta-oestradiol (E2) and progesterone. Furthermore, women who are characterized by both narrow waists and large breasts have 26% higher mean E2 and 37% higher mean mid-cycle E2 levels than women from three groups with other combinations of body-shape variables, i.e. low WHR with small breasts and high WHR with either large or small breasts. Such gains in hormone levels among the preferred mates may lead to a substantial rise in the probability of conception, thus providing a significant fitness benefit."

New Theory on Why Men Love Breasts - "In a 1951 study of 191 cultures, anthropologist Clellan Ford and ethologist Frank Beach reported that breasts were considered sexually important to men in 13 of those cultures. Of those, nine cultures preferred large breasts. Two — the Azande and Ganda of Africa — found long, pendulous breasts most attractive. Another two — the Maasai of Africa and Manus of the South Pacific — liked breasts that were upright and "hemispherical," but not necessarily large. Thirteen cultures also reported breast simulation during sex, but only three of those overlapped with the societies where men reported finding breasts important for sexual attraction. In a chapter in the book "Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives" (Aldine de Gruyter, 1995), cultural anthropologist Katherine Dettwyler describes telling friends in Mali about sexual foreplay involving breasts and getting responses ranging from "bemused to horrified."... A 2011 study compared men's preferences for breast size, symmetry, and areola size and color in Papua New Guina, Samoa and New Zealand and found that men from Papua New Guinea preferred larger breasts than men from the other two islands. Because the men surveyed from Papua New Guinea hailed from more of a subsistence culture than the men in Samoa or New Zealand, the results support the idea that in places of scarcity, padded bustlines could signal a well-fed woman with reserves for pregnancy and childrearing, the researchers wrote. Areola size and color preferences were highly idiosyncratic between cultures... Recent studies have found that nipple stimulation enhances sexual arousal in the great majority of women, and it activates the same brain areas as vaginal and clitoral stimulation. When a sexual partner touches, massages or nibbles a woman's breasts, Young said, this triggers the release of oxytocin in the woman's brain, just like what happens when a baby nurses. But in this context, the oxytocin focuses the woman's attention on her sexual partner, strengthening her desire to bond with this person. In other words, men can make themselves more desirable by stimulating a woman's breasts during foreplay and sex. Evolution has, in a sense, made men want to do this."

Gene Expression: Intercourse and Intelligence - "Depending on the specific age and gender, an adolescent with an IQ of 100 was 1.5 to 5 times more likely to have had intercourse than a teen with a score of 120 or 130. Each additional point of IQ increased the odds of virginity by 2.7% for males and 1.7% for females. But higher IQ had a similar relationship across the entire range of romantic/sexual interactions, decreasing the odds that teens had ever kissed or even held hands with a member of the opposite sex at each age... The student surveys at MIT and Wellesley also compared virginity by academic major. The chart for Wellesley displayed below shows that 0% of studio art majors were virgins, but 72% of biology majors were virgins, and 83% of biochem and math majors were virgins! Similarly, at MIT 20% of 'humanities' majors were virgins, but 73% of biology majors. (Apparently those most likely to read Darwin are also the least Darwinian!)... Looking at this chart it would strongly appear that higher complexity majors contain more virgins than majors with lower cognitive demand... Sexual behavior (or at least the investment needed to procure a partner or sustain one) may compete with time/resources required for other goals, and intelligent people may have more demanding goals. James Watson even hinted at this in a recent Esquire magazine piece:
If I had been married earlier in life, I wouldn't have seen the double helix. I would have been taking care of the kids on Saturday. On the other hand, I was lonely a lot of the time...
intelligence correlates with less sex within marriage for the same age range. While still consistent with pregnancy fears and competing interests, lower sex drive seems like a better fit. In fact another revealing finding from the Counterpoint survey was that while 95% of US men and 70% of women masturbate, this number is only 68% of men and 20% of women at MIT!... the smartest men in the GSS (approx. IQ >120) were also more likely to visit a prostitute. (Hardly indicative of cautiousness) This may suggest intelligent men are less able to find willing sex partners. Are smart men less attractive to women? Perhaps in some ways. For instance HS found that smart men were less likely to be athletic, and this paper shows, unathletic men and women have fewer sex partners. Athletic men, with more willing sexual partners are also less likely to visit a prostitute. Athletic activity gives men more masculine bodies, which are more attractive to women. A more masculine physique correlates with (PDF) an increased number of sex partners."

'White Allies': #BlackLivesMatter Walrus Admits She Only Wants Their Money (UPDATE) - "Want to know what the BLM thugs think about their white allies? This one says she only wants to use white allies to drain their bank accounts, says that every single possession or cultural aspect whites own was stolen — she claims that literally everything white people have should be given away to blacks. And to top it all off, she wants to physically beat white allies who show up at protests, and thinks that they should only be utilized in militant operations as dumb, silent, "police buffers"."

Agagoogahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://gssq.blogspot.com/2017/02/links-19th-february-2017-1.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3059213.post-81876435113977283272017-02-19T10:07:00.000+08:002017-02-19T10:07:01.710+08:00On the Mess that is Qoo10A: Thinking of ordering some things
-> Open qoo10/lazada
-> Panic ensues

what-the-fuck UI.

B: Qoo10 is what you get if you browse Amazon while being on LSD

C: Qoo10 UI is absolute rubbish. That's why I don't use them at all.

D: Qoo10 is the epicentre of misleading marketing. It's a miracle people still go there.

A: Upfront honesty is rare around here. O Amazon why hath thou forsaken us.

D: At least Lazada doesn't advertise a certain price in the search page and then add a bunch of ridiculous surcharges because of item colour or warranty.

A: I think its the sellers' fault for all these misleading prices. For example 3000k 810lm led lamps really shouldn't cost 30 singapore pesos, each. More like 3 and at most 10.

D: It's also Qoo10's system at fault for allowing such behaviour. Seems to work for them though…

E: Most sinkies are idiots. That's why scam sites like qoo10 are still in business.

F: Be patient.. the lord Amazon will soon draw nigh.. Take heart O shopper for thy faith will be rewarded.

G: You'd be surprised how many of the older gen doesn't give 2 shits about the UI, hence it being left like that since time began (also that a cluttered layout used to be more appealing towards an Asian culture)

H: It's still more appealing in most Asian culture, mostly I think due to language system. Singapore is a bit different because we use mostly English.

I: I knew folks who used to work there. No good rationale, just money making corp agendas

Agagoogahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://gssq.blogspot.com/2017/02/on-mess-that-is-qoo10.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3059213.post-62092031067039977692017-02-18T16:05:00.001+08:002017-02-18T16:05:28.874+08:00Women and the SalonBBC World Service - The Documentary, The Salon

"A woman trusts 2 people with her head. The first person is a psychologist. And the second is the hairstylist...

[In Japan] 'As women who work at the department store, we are particularly told not to dye our hair red or blonde. Also, we have to tie our hair back so it doesn't fall down when we bow. Every day at the morning meeting, there is a check to make sure we look respectable.'

There's only one acceptable colour of hair for women in Mamie's [sp?] workplace, and that's black. So she heads to the salon to have her grey roots dyed black again...

My husband had got me a dog without so much as a word. She's family. If it wasn't for Mini, I probably would have split up with my husband. We have lots of conversation through the dog. She mediates. When I'm with Mini, people always talk to me so I've made new friends...

'For some women, an important aspect of womanhood is being a mother'...
'Another aspect of a woman's identity could be her sexuality'
'One could be her religion'
'Now imagine a woman who's struggling to come to terms with all 3'
'What does she do?'
'She gets a haircut'
'What I'm saying to myself with my hair is body ownership. I choose. It's the only part of you and your body that you can shape and really personalise. It's my body, it's my hair. It belongs to me. I can say yes and I can say no'...

'The voluptuous Westernised version of sexiness is beyond their reach as Japanese. So instead of sexy, they go for cute'
'Typical Japanese figures are not really sexy, are they? Maybe about 1% of us can be sexy. Girls are short, so are boys'
'Perhaps because we are cute to start with. Westerners can look good. They are cool'
'They just wear H&M and just look so cool'
'The Japanese are cute, so perhaps we are emphasising the Japanese cuteness.'
'I'd actually like to look more grownup, but with my face and I'm short, so it doesn't really work. So I try to most out of what I have and be cute'
'We Japanese want to look young'...

[On Brazilian hairstyles in South Africa, costing almost $400] 'I need to consider Tracey's brothers as well. Their needs and some of their wants'

This is Tracey's mother, Hope. When it comes to Tracey's looks, Tracey pays for everything. Nails clothes, shoes, hair...
'The cost of Brazilian is the cost of what some people pay for rent... just so she can look good... Tracey and myself take the huge chunk of my income: 20% would go to Tracey and myself. For our hair and our clothes and beauty in general... Young girls go for good things. And good things require money, so as a parent if you can't afford to give your child what they want, they'll look for men that have the money to support them, and that I can't have that in my house. I need my child to concentrate on school.

Time for rich men will come in the near future. Maybe 10, 15 years from now... My child needs to look good, my child is an extension of me. So you look at my child looking good, you expect the mother to look just as good or better'...

It was difficult as a woman to find someone to cut her hair as short as she liked it.

'I used to go to barbers' shops before and they always did a bad job. The looks you get when you walk in because you're a woman turning up at a barber shop, historically a place where men go to get their hair done, you'd kind of feel unwelcome'

'And why didn't you go to hair salons?'

'Oh, god. They're even worse. Firstly they charge you astronomical prices for like a 2 minute job and also when you say short you never come out with the shortness that you asked for. It's like their definition of what short hair should look like'

The reason women get charged more is because they're more fussy (despite the lady who got short hair complaining it was discrimination for women to be charged more than men)

Agagoogahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://gssq.blogspot.com/2017/02/women-and-salon.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3059213.post-79422538533334748942017-02-18T14:28:00.000+08:002017-02-18T14:28:07.785+08:00Links - 18th February 2017BBC World Service - The Documentary, Secret Lives - "Timing matters too. One study found that as romantic partners get to know each other, they become more judgmental about the disclosures they make...
I've reached the point that when... my sister or someone tells me: hey, I want to tell you something but you have to keep it a secret, I just say: don't tell me. Don't tell me because that is a burden. Especially if I cannot tell my husband, don't tell me"

Big Secrets Can Burden You Physically | What is Psychology? - "individuals seem to feel physically burdened when asked to think about or cover up meaningful secrets. These meaningful secrets being harbored by the participants included important issues such as infidelity and sexual orientation. "People who recalled, were preoccupied with, or suppressed an important secret estimated hills to be steeper, perceived distances to be farther, indicated that physical tasks would require more effort, and were less likely to help others with physical tasks" (Slepian, et al., 2012).

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Beauty from Within? - "The Victorian lady was expected to her have beauty as a gift from God. A pure mind and pure living would create a beautiful face. Shop-bought cosmetics were the preserve of actresses, prostitutes and the French. So if you go through Victorian beauty manuals, strawberry juice was said to be very very good for removing wrinkles and freckles, the despair of blondes, could be addressed with green beans boiled and pulverised...
More than half of all the food, drinks and supplements to make beauty claims to be launched in 2015 were in the Asia-Pacific. 25% in Europe and just 4% in the US...
The clinical studies we have done, we normally run them over 3 months. And we start to see statistically significant effect after 1 month of intake, and that is daily intake. Basically when we age, our collagen network starts to fragment, it's not as cohesive and that's when you get wrinkles and sagging. And what we can see is we can actually reverse that trend and make that collagen network more intact. We can show that the overall collagen density increases so these are like objective measurements...
But not everyone agrees the science behind these products is rigorous enough...
As dermatologists we certainly know that poor nutrition can have very detrimental effects on your skin. What we don't know too well is if in a person that already has a good nutritional status, if we add supplementatiom of these compounds, are we getting beneficial effects. So now you're talking about the collagen peptides and certain studies have shown that when these are taken as supplements, they can accumulate in the blood and possibly modify the skin. There's been no large controlled studies proving their efficacy. When you ingest something it has to be a process by your digestive tract and then absorbed into your bloodstream and then make it to whatever target tissue it's designed to act at. It's possible to measure for example the concentration of these collagen peptides within the blood, but from there it's very hard to know whether or not they're getting into the skin. And that's true for most supplements. Knowing how much is actually getting there is not a simple question"

'CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION' KEEPS PEOPLE LOCKED IN POVERTY - "poor families around the world – those living on less than $2 a day – spend much of their income on goods that do not appear to alleviate poverty. For example, the average spending on festivals is as high as 15% of income in some regions of India. Similarly, South Africans spend on average a year's income on an adult's funeral, often financed by borrowing... Moav and Neeman propose that people care about their economic status and try to signal their income through conspicuous consumption. The analysis shows that if human capital is somewhat observable and correlated with income, then an unfortunate outcome driven by 'signalling' can emerge, in which poor individuals spend a large fraction of their income on conspicuous consumption. In particular, individuals with high human capital have a recognisable earning ability – professional titles, degree certificates, prestigious jobs, etc. – and relatively little need to signal success. In contrast, those without certified accomplishments have a relatively stronger motivation to impress via conspicuous consumption. As a result, the fraction of income allocated to conspicuous consumption can decline as the level of human capital rises – and the income allocated to savings and education can increase. Thus, the analysis predicts that among poor families with low levels of education, there will be low saving rates and low investment in the future – particularly in children's education."

Over half of women wake up in a mood with their partner - because he annoyed them in a DREAM in the night

The world's most secure smartphones - and why they're all Androids - "This may seem odd, as Android has long been dogged by a poor reputation for security. However, building on Android is much easier than building a smartphone OS from scratch. Also, because the core of Android is open source, it's much more likely that bugs will be spotted and fixed... there can also be a cost-saving element: without secure phones, some customers in investment banking could only discuss certain sensitive deals in person, so the phones can save money, speed up projects and pay for themselves in a week."

Christina H. Sommers on Twitter - "When young women say no to feminism, feminists don't accept that no means no."

Anti-gun dildo protest at UT-Austin is 'sexual harassment' according to federal definition - "The federal government should be descending on the University of Texas-Austin any day now to investigate the school's response to hordes of students who practiced blatant "sexual harassment." That's because students who oppose the state's new campus-carry law were publicly brandishing dildos to protest the law last week – and that's certainly "unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature" to at least some students."

curioustraveller1985 comments on Discouraged, more under 30 stop looking for jobs - "when I was working in a industry trade association, I often had to deal with hundred of SME bosses. Nearly all were asking for relaxation of foreign manpower curbs. When I asked them why they are so dependent on manpower curbs, "NS liability" was one of the informal answers very often given to me, although not a single one of the bosses would ever put it down on paper."
"A common complaint was "we've become the training ground for the middle east". This wasn't a case of MOM not willing to renew the S-Passes or Work permits; this was a case of their staff not wanting to work in Singapore because they received better-paying offers elsewhere in the world. When we suggested that they paid better salaries to retain their most talented staff, they refused to accept it. Instead, they suggested things like the duration of work permits and S-Passes should be doubled or tripled; one even suggested that the leaving staff should somehow be "forced" to stay in Singapore. I was like thinking "WTF" when i heard that at industry engagement session."

Bust of talent agencies for pimping porn starlets reveals hard times in industry - "Latin Quarter and Haute Couture used their web sites to attract customers by posting the names of actresses, their photographs and titles of their films were posted on the sites. Popular actresses fetched upwards of 80,000 yen per 120-minute session, with the bathhouse taking a cut of 15,000 yen... Fuzoku writer Taizo Ebina says that more women are entering the AV trade to snag a rich husband. "Girls are half-heartedly entering the trade on a lark with friends, some of whom are looking to score big by marrying into money," says Ebina. "With the title 'AV actress,' women have a chance to encounter rabid fans with money from the Middle East and China." (Though such an assertion may sound absurd, actress Yuria Satomi appears to be highly skilled at befriending wealthy men.)"

Transgender kids: Have we gone too far? - ""When we ask, 'When did you first learn about this label of gender dysphoria', they'll say, 'Me and Mom watched Oprah,' " adds Dr. Hayley Wood, a member of his team... Gender confusion is often temporary. About three-quarters of little kids who have issues with their gender – boys who want to be princesses, girls who throw their dresses in the garbage – will be comfortable with it by adolescence, according to Dr. Zucker. (Many of them will grow up to be gay or bi.) Gender confusion can also be a handy label for whatever ails a child (or her family). That's why Dr. Zucker takes a watch-and-wait approach. He even advises parents of princessy six-year-olds to say, "You're not a girl. You're a boy."And in the hotly politicized world of gender politics, that makes him, in many people's eyes, a dangerous reactionary... At what point do you start taking life-altering decisions for a child that will have enormous physical, social and emotional consequences? Alice Dreger is a bioethicist and professor at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. She calls herself an (im)patient advocate who prefers evidence to ideology. She is a strong supporter of transgender rights. But she thinks the pendulum has swung too far... For some people, including some adolescents, transgender treatment is lifesaving. But these treatments are neither simple nor benign. They may, among other things, retard maturation, suppress your growth or render you sterile. And in the end, medical science cannot create a body that makes you forget you were born the other sex. "Some kids need it, but for the kids who don't, it's dangerous," she says. "All else being equal, it's better to avoid long-term hormone therapy and major surgery that removes a lot of tissue." Disturbingly, data on long-term outcomes for transgender kids are scarce. No one is tracking the evidence on puberty-blocking intervention either. "We are doing major interventions and we have shockingly little idea what the outcomes are," Ms. Dreger says. You get the sense that what we have is not so much a rational approach to a psychosocial issue as a radical ideological experiment. Here's more unwelcome news from Ms. Dreger. A child's gender issue may merely be a symptom of other family problems. "The dirty little secret is that many of these families have big dysfunctional issues. When you get the clinicians over a beer, they'll tell you the truth. A lot of the parents aren't well in terms of their mental health. They think that once the child transitions, all their problems will magically go away, but that's not really where the stress is located." Clinicians won't say these things publicly, she says, because they don't want to sound as if they're blaming gender problems on screwed-up families."

The Transgender Battle Line: Childhood - WSJ - "sexologists, who presumably would be able to determine the healthiest approach, are extremely reluctant to get involved. They have seen what happens when they deviate from orthodoxy. In 2003 a sex researcher and psychology professor at Northwestern University named J. Michael Bailey published "The Man Who Would Be Queen," a book that countered the idea that male-to-female transgenderism is innately tied to gender identity. For some, he said, the attraction is related to a sexual fantasy of being a woman. Dr. Bailey was quickly accused of transphobia and sustained several years of vicious public attacks. The episode left a lasting impression on sexology: Science that doesn't align with prevailing attitudes can be dangerous. Witness the recent experience of Kenneth Zucker, a psychologist in Toronto (who has conducted research with Dr. Bailey)... We don't allow children to vote or get tattoos, yet in the name of progressive thinking we are allowing them to choose serious biomedical interventions with permanent and irreversible results."
The right wing is hardly the only side which manipulates science for political purposes

How the Fight Over Transgender Kids Got a Leading Sex Researcher Fired - "Zucker had built up quite a CV during his time leading the clinic: In addition to being one of the most frequently cited names in the research literature on gender dysphoria and gender-identity development, and the editor of the prestigious journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, he took a leading role helping devise diagnostic and treatment guidelines for gender dysphoric and transgender individuals. He headed the group which developed the DSM-5's criteria for its "gender dysphoria" entry, for example, and also helped write the most recent "standards of care" guidelines for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health — one of the bibles for clinicians who treat transgender and gender-dysphoric patients... the real scandal here is how CAMH responded to a sustained campaign of political pressure: by allowing a vital scientific question — vital not only to gender-dysphoric and transgender young people, but to anyone who is a parent or will one day become one — to be decided by activists on the basis of flimsy, anonymous allegations. They think the activists' claims about the clinic are unfounded, and argue that the controversy has more to do with adult agendas than with genuine concern for gender-dysphoric children and youth. As Dr. Jack Drescher, a psychiatrist with a research focus on gender-identity issues, explained in an email, this fight resembles many other culture-war battles: "[C]hildren serve as proxies for the competing value systems of adults.""

Stop calling them boys and girls! Advisers paid £200k to help train teachers claim using sex specific classrooms is unfair to transgenders

Transgender cop's uniform keeps her out of event she organized - "Officer Christine Garcia, who transitioned last year, helped plan the event and was part of the Police Department security detail that watched over a commemorative march down University Avenue. After the march, when Garcia tried to enter the event as a member of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community, she was asked to leave because her uniform could upset others in attendance."

Paglia: 'Transgender Mania' is a Symptom of West's Cultural Collapse - "Paglia went on to talk about her book Sexual Personae and how the emergence of transgenderism signifies the end of Western culture. "Now I am concerned about this… In fact, my study of history in Sexual Personae, I'm always talking about the late phases of culture.
"I was always drawn to late or decadent phases of culture. Oscar Wilde is one of the great exponents of that in the late 19th century. He's one of my strongest influences from my earliest years.
"And I found in my study that history is cyclic, and everywhere in the world you find this pattern in ancient times: that as a culture begins to decline, you have an efflorescence of transgender phenomena.That is a symptom of cultural collapse.""

Transgender Identities Are Not Always Permanent - "Alexis Arquette (formerly Robert Arquette), a transgender performer and activist, returned to living as a man before his death on September 11, 2016, at the age of 47. Arquette appeared in the movies Pulp Fiction and The Wedding Singer and was a force for transgender rights... 'In 2013, amid increasing health complications, Alexis … began presenting herself as a man again, telling [her close friend] Ibrahim that "'gender is bullshit.' That 'putting on a dress doesn't biologically change anything. Nor does a sex-change.' She said that 'sex-reassignment is physically impossible. All you can do is adopt these superficial characteristics but the biology will never change.'" That realization, Ibrahim suspects, was the likely source of her deep wells of emotional torment.'
The process of abandoning the transgender life and reverting back to one's innate gender/sex is called detransitioning. As someone who has detransitioned myself, I only wish more would speak up about the reality of what life is like after transitioning to the other gender and why some people eventually decide to embrace their birth sex."
If someone undergoes a sex change twice, do you need to perform the Orwellian rewriting of his historical name (e.g. pretending that Switched on Bach was released by Wendy Carlos) the second time too?

Hair salon at Plaza Singapura shuts, leaving customers with thousands of dollars in unused treatments - "She said many clients of the previous salon have come to her with outstanding amounts on their packages ranging from $100 to $20,000."
Who buys a $20,000 package?!

Sex changes are not effective, say researchers - "The review of more than 100 international medical studies of post-operative transsexuals by the University of Birmingham's aggressive research intelligence facility (Arif) found no robust scientific evidence that gender reassignment surgery is clinically effective... most of the medical research on gender reassignment was poorly designed, which skewed the results to suggest that sex change operations are beneficial. Its review warns that the results of many gender reassignment studies are unsound because researchers lost track of more than half of the participants... the high drop out rate could reflect high levels of dissatisfaction or even suicide among post-operative transsexuals. He called for the causes of their deaths to be tracked to provide more evidence... Research from the US and Holland suggests that up to a fifth of patients regret changing sex. A 1998 review by the Research and Development Directorate of the NHS Executive found attempted suicide rates of up to 18% noted in some medical studies of gender reassignment... "You either have an operation or suffer a miserable life. A fifth of those who don't get treatment commit suicide""
If either way you're miserable and may kill yourself...

Agagoogahttp://email@example.com://gssq.blogspot.com/2017/02/links-18th-february-2017.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3059213.post-53501958843288224232017-02-18T10:26:00.000+08:002017-02-18T10:26:02.117+08:00On Evaluating Poetry, and Dead White Men's Pre-Eminence in itAbstract: Two independent but highly correlated measures of permanent fame and a measure of contemporary fame were investigated for a sample of 50 eminent poets. The greater the permanent fame of the poets, the more they avoided references to concepts and emotions and the more they focused upon concrete images. Permanent fame was related to estimated intelligence but unrelated to wealth or social class. Contemporary fame was found to be unrelated to permanent fame and could not be predicted by the variables investigated. It is apparently based upon different criteria in different epochs. For neither permanent nor contemporary fame was there any evidence that rich white men have any advantage in becoming famous.

Article: There has recently been controversy about the canon of great works ofWestern literature. It has been argued that one must be a rich, preferably dead, white man in order to gain admittance. This argument is rather fatuous. Some poor white men such as Robert Burns somehow got admitted. Some women such as Jane Austen also managed to get in. Even Phyllis Wheatley, a black woman, has been in the canon of American poetry for several hundred years. It certainly does help to be a dead white man to be included in the canon, but examples such as those cited above show that this is not a necessary condition. It is most certainly not a sufficient condition to be a dead white man. The vast majority of dead white men who tried their hand at literature have been justly consigned to oblivion. If they ever were in the canon, their names have been expunged.

Another criticism of the canon has been that one's works must uphold the status quo in order to be admitted. If I understand Marxism, Feminism, and the New Historicism, the main business of society is to oppress poor people, women, and people of colour. It has also been held that we want to oppress 'the other'. Because it is nevermade very clear who 'the other' is, I would guess that these are rather difficult people to find, let alone oppress. Herrnstein Smith (1988) argues that canon formation is a political process. One must say what the ruling class wants to hear or he or she will have no chance of being admitted to the canon.We are left to wonder how a poet such as Ezra Pound made his way into the canon. He certainly didn't say anything that the American ruling class wanted to hear. Van Peer (1996, see also Chapter 1 in this volume) compared versions of the Romeo and Juliet story by Shakespeare and Arthur Brooke. Shakespeare's version went against the mores of the ruling class, whereas Brooke's version conformed with them. Why is Shakespeare in the canon and Brooke forgotten? One imagines that the reason has to do with literary quality.

In the past, the ruling class may have taken some interest in literature. At least in Western Europe and North America, this has not been the case for quite a while. They are too busy making money to have the slightest interest in literature. To take the most extreme case, no one at all reads contemporary poetry with the exception of other poets and teachers of literature (Auden 1948). Canon formation may be political, but it is academic politics. Like much in academia, arguments as to who should or should not be in the canon are pointless, as the canon is literally cast in concrete. Martindale (1995) did a study of how many books the Harvard University libraries have about the 602 poets listed in the various Oxford Book of English Verse. Shakespeare came in first with 9,118 books about him. Milton was a distant second with 1,280 books devoted to him. At the other end of the scale, no books at all were devoted to 134 of the poets. The top 25 poets accounted for 64.8% of the books. These are certainly canonical authors, and nothing is going to change that. Even the relative ordering is unlikely to change. ForMilton to surpass Shakespeare, 78 books about Milton would have to be written in each of the next 100 years. This seems quite unlikely.

One could certainly argue that if no one reads the books about Shakespeare and Milton, then the numbers I have cited count for nothing. However, we shall see below that contemporary fame is a fleeting thing unrelated to permanent fame. The canon refers to permanent fame. How does one obtain permanent fame? One supposes by the literary quality of his or her works. The beauty of one's poetry is not in the colour or one's skin or one's social class but in the quality of what he or she has produced. Beauty is most certainly not in the eye of the beholder. I have done dozens of studies in which people were asked to rate works of art or literature. The most relevant is Martindale and Dailey (1995). We replicated I.A. Richards's (1929) experiment and used statistical methods to measure agreement amongst subjects. Richards was simply wrong. People agree perfectly well as to the meanings of poems. The only way to explain this is to postulate that there is something in the poems that people perceive in the same way. It is well to recall Hume's (1757) comment: "Whoever would assert an equality of genius and elegance between Ogilby and Milton...would be thought to defend no less an extravagance, than if he had maintained a mole-hill to be as high as Tenerife, or a pond as extensive as the ocean."

One would suppose that literary quality is determined by the way an author puts together words. However, a moment's thought reveals that which words are combined is also important. A sonnet sequence on the joys of trading pork bellies on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange would not be well received. Computers are not very good at determining a well turned phrase, but they have no trouble in tallying words or classes of words. A few computer studies concerning the difference between good and bad literature have been carried out...

Contrary to the views of the layperson, poetry has not dealtwith the expression of emotion for several centuries (Martindale 1997). Contemporary British and American poetry by eminent poets contains about the same amount of emotional content as is found on the front page of the New York Times (Martindale 1990)"

--- Some correlates of literary eminence / Colin Martindale in The Quality of Literature: Linguistic Studies in Literary Evaluation / ed Willie van Peer

Agagoogahttp://email@example.com://gssq.blogspot.com/2017/02/on-evaluating-poetry-and-dead-white.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3059213.post-14227128812376751052017-02-17T22:34:00.002+08:002017-02-17T22:35:22.467+08:00Lakshmi / GilgameshBBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Lakshmi

"'It reflects the idea of what a wife does for her husband. If you look at the ancient text the laws of Manu which is about the ideal roles for people in society and Hinduism. It says a wife should obey her husband, it's very old school in that sense, but it also says that if the wife is not happy, the blessing of the household that she brings will not come.'

'If she's not happy she leaves'

'Well, it doesn't go quite so far as to say...'

'She leaves if she's not being treated well enough'...

'I'm not sure if the laws of Manu says that a wife should leave her husband. It is true that Lakshmi will leave Vishnu or any king who does not deserve her. And that's important. she's said to be fickle and the idea is that if you do not deserve her blessing she will move on to a different figure who deserves it more'...

She has an agricultural side. She's even said to reside in cow dung...

'She is much less of a goddess who manifests herself in anger at your misbehavior'...

'She's sometimes been likened to the Virgin Mary in the Catholic tradition. In that she's not about telling you ethically what to do - Krishna does that. Jesus does that and so on, she's much more about giving you grace even when you don't expect it. Even in situations where you need to be lifted up from a difficult situation. In that sense she forms the grace bestowal figure that is quite similar from the character of Mary'...

I once took a Hindu group to a Christian church. And they'd heard about Jesus as the God of love and goodness and blessing. They went into this Catholic church and saw a suffering, tortured man. And then they went to the Passion of Christ and came back to me the next day and said: I'm very confused. What did Jesus represent? Is it pain, is it suffering, is it love? I said It's love, but it has many different sides and I think that's helpful. Often Hinduism is pointing towards similar, related concepts of the divine. But it's not a single thing. It's some very complex idea...

She's the power without which her consort fades away...

That idea is quite widespread even if you look at the Old Testament, the character of wisdom is a powerful figure who helps God to create the universe. If you look at Egyptian myth, Isis helps the Great God to create the universe. The notion of power as being fundamentally female is actually quite a widespread idea in many different religions.

A Hindu woman once said to me, she was about to get married the next day: we need goddesses like Laskshmi, as well as Durga the warrior goddess, who I like, I also need a goddess who represents what I can be for my husband, my children and my household. Powerful in a soft but important way. What makes it feminist is that she's autonomous. She's powerful and she can leave if she's not treated well. That's what's essential"

***

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Epic of Gilgamesh

"People have sought to interpret these two dreams in terms of linguistic puns. So the word for axe sounds vaguely like the word for a male cultic prostitute and so on and so forth and so in some sense, these two dreams prefigure the sexual relationship between the two. But it all becomes very unwieldy, doesn't it? You have these dreams about totally random objects just for the sake of introducing some sort of wordplay and the words barely exist in the first place.

Gilgamesh being... very vulnerable. He's just won this great victory over Humbaba's... and he's washing after the battle, and we often find that there will be an event when heroes are kind of relaxed, they're not expecting something to happen, and because of the display of his body, Ishtar sees him and as you say there's this strong desire. And being a goddess of love and war - one might also say sex and violence - she's extremely direct, she's very aggressive and so she proposes to him, promising him wealth and power.

But as we mentioned earlier, she does have this very, let's say disencouraging dating history, this terrible fate that's met by all her previous lovers. So Gilgamesh refuses. He doesn't want to be the latest in the list of casualties... She's not used to not getting what she wants. To actually thwart Ishtar is a very dangerous strategy, so she calls down from her father the sky god Bull of Heaven to kill Gilgamesh and to destroy Uruk...

Discovering this flood story which nobody would've predicated and came from sources much older than any known sources of the Bible was extremely high impact. This went beyond the limited world of scholarship. This became a matter of national discussion involving Prime Ministers, heads of state. It was internationally discussed. And of course for some people it was seen as a threat. The question was was it something that would somehow undermine the Bible or indeed was it something that supported the Bible. Could it be seen as supporting the belief in the Bible as a literal text?...

It also explores... would it be good to live forever? But if you look at the circumstances in which the Flood Hero is placed after he's made immortal by the Gods, having survived the Flood. He lives in, against a landscape that is not described. It's a blank sheet. And he lives there forever, with his wife. They have no company.

The poet doesn't say but he asks this question between the lines: isn't this an extremely lonely place to be, immortality? And I think if we think about the problem of immortality, when people say: oh, I'd like to live forever. In fact, and it's been explored in other literatures, living forever is probably hell on earth...

When mankind offends against the Gods, actually mankind is offending against nature. You find that in the cedar forest, as we've discussed, but also in the flood story you have the same idea coming. That somehow the expansion of human numbers is such that the Gods are disturbed. It's a kind of way of saying that too many people, overpopulation overburdens the earth and the earth will do something about it.

There's the kind of early notion of Gaia theory here, that the earth will respond as a self-regulating mechanism and get rid of the plague. In Gilgamesh of course it's the Gods who respond to the overpopulation of mankind in the flood story and try to wipe mankind out. So embedded there is the idea of, a view of ecology or the environment in which human beings do not, as in the Bible have dominion over the earth, but they're actually part of a world which is very carefully balanced and there're opportunities for them to endanger this balance by cutting down the cedar forest, by growing too fast in numbers which I think is a sophisticated notion and anticipates modern ideas about humans on the planet too"

Agagoogahttp://email@example.com://gssq.blogspot.com/2017/02/lakshmi-gilgamesh.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3059213.post-37743752511488913212017-02-17T19:14:00.000+08:002017-02-17T19:14:11.475+08:00Links - 17th February 2017A So-Called Singaporean Love Story (Told In Corporate Jargon) - "Before they knew it, an extension was applied to the date until 11pm. "It's getting late," said Siew May, "We should execute our exit plan so we can leverage on the MRT to get home." "Okay," said Boon Keong, "Agreed as per your suggestion." It started to rain. Raindrops were bouncing off the pavement like a bad PowerPoint animation. Fortunately, Boon Keong had an umbrella. "Can I share that with you?" Siew May asked. "I left mine at the office. Hope your understanding is very much appreciated." "Sure," said Boon Keong, "Pleased to be able to meet your requirements.""

Effect of Medicaid Coverage on ED Use — Further Evidence from Oregon's Experiment — NEJM - "Medicaid coverage increased health care use across a range of settings, improved financial security, and reduced rates of depression among enrollees, but it produced no detectable changes in several measures of physical health, employment rates, or earnings. A key finding was that Medicaid increased emergency department (ED) visits by 40% in the first 15 months after people won the lottery. This finding was greeted with considerable attention and surprise, given the widespread belief that expanding Medicaid coverage to more uninsured people would encourage the use of primary care and thereby reduce ED use"

Sohail Ahmed - I propose that we round up leftists who defend... - "I propose that we round up leftists who defend Islamists, alongside the Islamists themselves, and put them all on an island...
We set it all up so that the Islamists are in charge, and the leftists are being ruled over. Then we wait and see what happens...
After a few years, we let the leftists (that are still alive) back into society, and we ask them if their views have changed at all."

What's the deal with Wendy Carlos? - "She's lying. It's a well documented fact that she's a transexual. C'mon, fake photos, her field is male dominated so she had to pose as a man???.... WTF?
She's a little sensitive about her past eh?"
"Wendy Carlos has always been absurdly over-sensitive about the whole transexual thing. Her website used to have an angry rant about people questioning her "private life" and such like that. It looks like it has now been replaced with "complete denial". If I'm not mistaken, it seems to me that I first heard about Walter becoming Wendy when she was on the cover of Contemporary Keyboard Magazine in 1979(?)"
"Letter to Wendy:
Listen Wendy, no one here really cares that you are a transexual. I've worked with a few transexuals and nobody really thought that much about it. Just stop denying it and people will stop talking about it. O.K.?"
"all this time i thought it was a husband/wife duo. cool."

How Not to Build a Digital Archive: Lessons from the Dark Side of the Force - "A file format policy that relied on the Evil Empire and Rebel Alliance using the same software"

Russia and Syria could be encouraging migrant sex attacks to oust Angela Merkel, pro-EU firm says - "Russian and Syrian secret services may be encouraging refugees in Germany to carry out orchestrated sex attacks, in a bid to oust Angela Merkel from office, it is claimed. The extraordinary assertion was made by an expert from the European Council on Foreign Relations, who said the foreign powers could collude to destabilise Germany ahead of next year's election. Gustav Gressel, a Russian expert at the think-tank, said small numbers of refugees with links to the Kremlin and Syrian security services could be mobilised to sway public opinion against the Chancellor."
Uhh

Priest CANCELS Nativity because it could offend Muslims - "Fr Sante Braggiè, from the city of Cremona in northern Italy, said there would be no nativity scene at the local cemetery this year as it could offend people from other faiths whose relatives are buried there."

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Tuesday's business with Dominic O'Connell - [On Trump's conflicts of interest] "Pippa Malmgren, a former US Presidential advisor, says Presidents have overcome these problems before.
'Throughout American history we've had presidents who've had business interests, who've come from a particular sector and kept the businesses in the family blind trust. So we've dealt with it in the past. And I think we'll deal with it this time too... He doesn't really own a property business. What he owns is a business where people buy the right to have his name on the building. The issue is how do you get the people who have bought the right to have his name on the building for the next 20 years to pay it all right now? They can't'
'What about the problems with dealing with foreign governments? Every foreign government in dealing with the Trump business organisation will now know that they are talking to someone who has some connection to the most powerful political figure in the world'
'Well, this was exactly the allegation that has been levelled at the Clinton foundation'"

BBC World Service - The World This Week, Trump tells China: kowtowing is over - "The apparently haphazard way it's unfolding suggesting another fundamental truth. Namely that Leave didn't expect to win and Remain didn't expect to lose"

The death of Queen Elizabeth will be the most disruptive event in Britain in the last 70 years - "After the current Queen was crowned, her regnal number — II — caused controversy in Scotland, which she also rules, as there was never a Scottish Elizabeth I. When postboxes bearing her cypher were erected in Scotland, some were attacked and vandalised."

Should young people become involved in politics? - "If you're gonna be young, you're better off spending your time on something more useless. People who are young and into politics tend to be immature, tend to be driven towards the fringes, they think life is very straightforward and easy and they've got all the answers. You quickly discover that you haven't. You discover that politicians are mostly all liars. And you wake up some day and think: what have I done with the last few years of my life?... I think there's something slighty unhealthy about someone who puts aside a time in their life which should be spent for other sorts of things for the kind of dry, boring mainstream politics that I certainly got engaged with. Again, I spent my youth delivering leaflets. I really... should've been sleeping around... When I was young, I was a nervous anxious teenager who was bullied at school and politics offered me a family, and it offered me older people who said: oh, you know about what we're interested in. Well done. You're brilliant. And I think on the one hand maybe that was good for me. It kept me off the streets. On the hand other hand I think maybe it stopped me from maturing. It actually delayed my maturity. And you see that in some people who have gone straight from school into politics, that they've got a slightly delayed maturity and I think that's why some middle-aged politicians go off the rails, because they really haven't had a youth... One very sad thing is the number of people at university who think because I'm gonna be head of this particular committee for paperclips in my local Conservative association, I'm going to be Prime Minister someday, and it doesn't work like that... David Cameron who was the guy at Oxford who wasn't involved in politics"
On podcast this was titled: "Is youth politics a waste of time?"

BBC World Service - The Documentary, Island of Love - "[On Middle Easterners needing to go to Cyrpus for non-religious marriage, e.g. to someone of a different religion] In Lebanon, like elsewhere in the Middle East, religion can't be ignored. Many people are religious, and religion and the state aren't separated. Religious authorities inflence political life and your personal life. They control marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance with their own courts and systems of family law. And while ordinary Lebanese may have grown more accepting of mixed-faith relationships and civil marriages, both Christian and Muslim leaders oppose them.
3 years ago, Lebanon's top Sunni Muslim cleric passed a fatwa, a ruling describing civil marriage as a bacteria spread by predators. He said anyone who supported the idea was an apostate, a non-believer who couldn't be buried in a Muslim cemetery. In Beirut's Sunni Muslim court, a judge, Sheikh Abdul Aziz Shafi'i uses softer language but defends the ruling.
'Everything in a Muslim's life has a religious aspect. We live our lives to praise Allah's power and to please him. The mufti's fatwa was because as Muslims, we don't believe that Islam is separated from our lives. In politics, in our families, in our trades, the law of Islam, enginera [sp?] must be applied. If we refuse this, we are not Muslims. You have the right to refuse but you are not a Muslim...
If you get religiously married [in Israel] you have to go to the rabbi and the bride have to go and have special training for being a wife"
Are Lebanon's top Sunni Muslim cleric and the Beiruti judge ignorant and/or Islamophobic for saying Islam is incompatible with secularism?

BBC World Service - BBC Trending, Trolls, 'the Devil', and Death - "[On Duterte] But despite the huge of deaths, the President's popularity doesn't seem to have been affected. People are even writing pop songs about him... [On an extra-judicial killing] The most difficult part of the scene is how normal it seems. The stores don't stop cooking food, teenagers take photos with their mobile phones and it isn't long before the police tape is lifted...
Davao today has rules covering everything from smoking to jaywalking. Karaoke's even banned after 10pm...
At a certain point there was also the killing of taxi drivers being held up by people just to get their day's earning. What mayor did was to request some policemen to be in civilian clothes disguised as taxi drivers. And in fact he himself sometimes goes around as a taxi driver at night. When that news cropped up, that whole thing of taxi drivers gone down very low...
He's shirtless, wearing shorts, flip-flops, face down in a pool of blood. A family member is nearby and we're told that the man's son witnessed him being dragged out of his house by 4 masked men. His brother agrees to speak.
'We're happy to see him like that because here in the neighbourhood even his own family like me, are at odds with him. He has been a user for a very long time. Every time he's high on drugs, he becomes violent, taunting people. He's even destroyed my mother's house'...
I'm quite speechless. I'm not really sure what to say. I've never seen a family reaction like this before"

a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07hhvxx">BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Sovereignty - "Popular sovereignty, where the people are sovereign. And the advantage of the people over monarchs is that they're not underaged ever, they don't get senile. so they have more claim in some ways to be absolute, supreme, perpetual and even indivisible, which were some of the key marks of sovereignty that Bodin identified"

The Incoherence of the Philosophers - Wikipedia - "Al-Ghazali's insistence on a radical divine immanence in the natural world has been posited as one of the reasons that the spirit of scientific inquiry later withered in Islamic lands. If "Allah's hand is not chained", then there was no point in discovering the alleged laws of nature"

List of CONFIRMED HATE HOAXES is growing BIG LEAGUE. EXPOSE THE FAKE NEWS "rise of hate crimes in Trump's America" nonsense. Corrupt MSM won't do their job, so we have to do it for them! : The_Donald
For some reason there don't seem to be false flags in the other direction

Are There Really More Hate Crimes At Schools Following Donald Trump's Election? - "it's much easier to find examples of violence against students who have openly backed Trump; there are more than a few stories of kids being pummeled for disagreeing with the losing side (detailed below). We did see anti-Trump protests by college and high school students around the country turn violent in cities such as Portland, Ore., as agitators joined the groups. Who didn't hear angry students clearly shouting "F*#% Trump" in news footage from post-election rallies?... What many of the tales of intimidation by the alleged pro-Trump forces have in common is a paucity of details... After reading through myriad stories since Election Day, what's clear is that the widely reported episodes of violence and intimidation are usually vague, involve roaming gangs of indistinguishable white males, and produce no witnesses. Often the police aren't even called, but when they are, the stories tend to fall apart... some of the biggest stories out of college campuses recently have involved debunked tales"

Blog: Astonishing number of fake hate crimes since Trump election - "The hoaxes must be seen in the contex of the post-election hysteria about Trump deliberately generated by the left to, 1) energize their supporters to oppose the president-elect's agenda; and 2) delegitimize Trump's victory. Add to that the natural inclination of some people to do anything to get attention, and you have a potent mix of fear and hate that leads to the current spate of fake "hate crimes" that the media eagerly reports as they try to justify their open opposition to Trump's candidacy. Perhaps this hysteria reached its pinnacle on a JetBlue flight, when a gay Brooklyn lawyer began screaming at Ivanka Trump, saying her father was "ruining the country.""

Muslim hate crime hoaxer's sister blames the NYPD

The Difference Between Vegetarians In India And The West - ""Indian vegetarians were more likely than their meat-eating counterparts to endorse not only values related to purity, but also those supporting traditional authority and in-group loyalty. Conservative values, in other words. This was not true among meat-avoiding Westerners. Indeed, American vegetarians actually placed less value in traditional authority than meat-eating Americans. Ruby and his colleagues suspect these differences reflect the cultures involved, and the place of vegetarianism within those cultures. Most vegetarians in the West were not raised as such, but made a decision at some point to convert from the meat-eating diet followed by the majority of people in their culture." In contrast, "vegetarianism has been firmly established in India for centuries, and is associated with tradition, power and status," the researchers write. "Most Indian vegetarians are raised as such by their families.""

Branko Milanovic on Twitter - "Naivete of great thinkers is breathtaking.A few years ago telling us how Web freedom will blow away dictators. Today, "it helps demagogues"

Thousands attend Mexican girl's party after viral invitation - "She was celebrating her 15th birthday - a traditional coming-of-age party in Mexico known as "quinceanera". About 1.2 million people had earlier vowed to attend the party. However, the father later said the idea had been to invite neighbours and friends only - while stressing he would not turn anyone away."

Melissa McCarthy Shares The Ultimate Girl Power Photo From The Set Of 'Ghostbusters' - "McCarthy, along with her co-stars Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones, stand in front of a group of over 50 cast and crew members, while holding a giant sign printed with the words "girl power."... "3 cheers to @theellenshow from all the remarkable women of #ghostbusters. When we stand together we are unstoppable! #girlpower.""
Too bad feminism doesn't bring in box office revenue

Luis Garcia's answer to Why did the new Ghostbusters movie perform poorly? - Quora - "The villain is a blatant anti-feminism villain, pathetic and loser, that gets defeated by being hit in the genitals. You can't make this shit up."
Feminists can't make good movies - which is why they need to lobby others to push their agenda

Hey r/singapore! What are your thoughts on interracial dating? : singapore - "t was very nice dating here cause it's really different depending on the ethnicity of your date. Malay girls tended to be either conservative either extremely open (different from easy, and this is not bad in my book). Quite caring and giving. Chinese girls tended to be more shy, but once they open up they're very nice. Many of them are pressured by their family and pressure themselves for top careers etc. I've dated some of these and it was.. boring... Dating Singaporeans has been different from dating French (or Europeans for that matter) girls. It's definitely more engaging (girls take it very seriously here! you have to answer that whatsapp in 2 minutes lol), more romantic (quite ironic from someone who comes from the so called Romantic country right?). One downside is that they don't seem to understand the concept of personal freedom in a relationship. They seem to think you belong totally to them, and even going out with dude friends needs to be explained etc. Definitely not as in Europe. The other downside is girls were mostly less interesting, less talkative, and were far less able to talk about interesting topics. Some were quite childish for their age (20-22)"

Agagoogahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://gssq.blogspot.com/2017/02/links-17th-february-2017.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3059213.post-73613546133876117062017-02-17T15:13:00.001+08:002017-02-17T15:13:36.921+08:00The Politics of Recognition"A number of strands in contemporary politics turn on the need, sometimes the demand, for recognition. The need, it can be argued, is one of the driving forces behind nationalist movements in politics. And the demand comes to the fore in a number of ways in today's politics, on behalf of minority or "subaltern" groups, in some forms of feminism, and in what is today called the politics of "multiculturalism."

The demand for recognition in these latter cases is given urgency by the supposed links between recognition and identity, where this latter term designates something like a person's understanding of who they are, of their fundamental defining characteristics as a human being. The thesis is that our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.

Thus some feminists have argued that women in patriarchal societies have been induced to adopt a depreciatory image of themselves. They have internalized a picture of their own inferiority, so that even when some of the objective obstacles to their advancement fall away, they may be incapable of taking advantage of the new opportunities. And beyond this, they are condemned to suffer the pain of low self-esteem. An analogous point has been made in relation to blacks...

It was not always so, and our ancestors of more than a couple of centuries ago would have stared at us uncomprehendingly if we had used these terns in their current sense. How did we get started on this?...

We can distinguish two changes that together have made the modern preoccupation with identity and recognition inevitable. The first is the collapse of social hierarchies, which used to be the basis for honor. I am using honor in the ancien regime sense in which it is intrinsically linked to inequalities. For some to have honor in this sense, it is essential that not everyone have it...

As against this notion of honor, we have the modern notion of dignity, now used in a universalist and egalitarian sense, where we talk of the inherent "dignity of human beings," or of citizen dignity. The underlying premise here is; that everyone shares in it... "Mrs." and "Miss" have been collapsed into "Ms." Democracy has ushered in a politics of equal recognition, which has taken various forms over the years, and has now returned in the form of demands for the equal status of cultures and of genders...

We have to see the analogy to earlier moral views, where being in touch with some source -- for example, God, or the Idea of the Good -- was considered essential to full being. But now the source we have to connect with is deep within us...

This new ideal of authenticity was, like the idea of dignity, also in part an offshoot of the decline of hierarchical society. In those earlier societies, what we would now call identity was largely fixed by one's social position...

In the earlier age recognition never arose as a problem. General recognition was built into the socially derived identity by virtue of the very fact that it was based on social categories that everyone took for granted. Yet inwardly derived, personal, original identity doesn't enjoy this recognition a priori. It has to win it through exchange, and the attempt can fail. What has come about with the modern age is not the need for recognition but the conditions in which the attempt to be recognized can fail. That is why the need is now acknowledged for the first time...

Where the politics of universal dignity fought for forms of nondiscrimination that were quite "blind" to the ways in which citizens differ, the politics of difference often redefines nondiscrimination as requiring that we make these distinctions the basis of differential treatment. So members of aboriginal bands will get certain rights and powers not enjoyed by other Canadians, if the demands for native self-government are finally agreed on, and certain minorities will get the right to exclude others in order to preserve their cultural integrity, and so on...

Reverse discrimination is defended as a temporary measure that will eventually level the playing field and allow the old "blind" rules to come back into force in a way that doesn't disadvantage anyone. This argument seems cogent enough -- wherever its factual basis is sound. But it won't justify some of the measures now urged on the grounds of difference, the goal of which is not to bring us back to an eventual "difference-blind" social space but, on the contrary, to maintain and cherish distinctness, not just now but forever. After all, if we're concerned with identity, then what is more legitimate than one's aspiration that it never be lost?...

The claim is that all human cultures that have animated whole societies over some considerable stretch of time have something important to say to all human beings...

Of course, the demand for inclusion is logically separable from a claim of equal worth. The demand could be: Include these because they're ours, even though they may well be inferior. But this is not how the people making the demand talk.

But there is something very wrong with the demand in this form. It makes sense to demand as a matter of right that we approach the study of certain cultures with a presumption of their value, as described above. But it can't make sense to demand as a matter of right that we come up with a final concluding judgment that their value is great, or equal to others'. That is, if the judgment of value is to register something independent of our own wills and desires, it cannot be dictated by a principle of ethics. On examination, either we will find something of great value in culture C, or we will not. But it makes no more sense to demand that we do so than it does to demand that we find the earth round or flat, the temperature of the air hot or cold...

In fact, subjectivist, half-baked neo-Nietzschean theories are quite often invoked in this debate. Deriving frequently from Foucault or Derrida, they claim that all judgments of worth are based on standards that are ultimately imposed by and further entrench structures of power. It should be clear why these theories proliferate here. A favorable judgment on demand is nonsense, unless some such theories are valid. Moreover, the giving of such a judgment on demand is an act of breathtaking condescension. No one can really mean it as a genuine act of respect. It is more in the nature of a pretend act of respect given on the insistence of its supposed beneficiary. Objectively, such an act involves contempt for the latter's intelligence. To be an object of such an act of respect demeans. The proponents of neo-Nietzschean theories hope to escape this whole nexus of hypocrisy by turning the entire issue into one of power and counterpower. Then: the question is no more one of respect, but of taking sides, of solidarity. But this is hardly a satisfactory solution, because in taking sides they miss the driving force of this kind of politics, which is precisely the search for recognition and respect...

Here is another severe problem with much of the politics of multiculturalism. The peremptory demand for favorable judgments of worth is paradoxically-, perhaps one should say tragically -- homogenizing. For it implies that we already have the standards to make such judgments"

--- The Politics of Recognition / Charles Taylor

Agagoogahttp://email@example.com://gssq.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-politics-of-recognition.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3059213.post-65954284530519388922017-02-16T21:51:00.000+08:002017-02-16T21:51:23.758+08:00Links - 16th February 2017BBC Radio 4 - Today, 25/02/2015, Gaza conflict: Mothers share children's trauma six months on - "'One of her children asked why God brought the Israelis or the Jews to the world and the sibling answered so 'that they can kill us and we can be martyrs'... I wanna know what she is telling her children. I am teaching my children that the other side are people just like us, that the other side have a right to live just like us and we have to find a way to interact and build bridges and not bombs'"

BBC Radio 4 - Today, 14/01/2015, Do modern feminist campaigns only benefit an elite few? - "Essentially, modern feminism, especially as you get it in the media, has become a combination of outrage and elite self-interest. Basically what we have is a focus on campaigns which are supposedly going to benefit women generally and which freak out politicians. But which actually, as we can tell from the evidence, the data, do nothing for the vast majority of women. And 2 obvious ones would be this campaign to get a minimum of 30% of women on the boards of big companies and also the obsession with all-female shortlists. Both of which have become big media campaigns and which are of no interest to the vast majority of women, no relevance to them, and they aren't even interested...
There's no evidence that having a minimum number of women on boards does anything for anybody. And I really want to emphasise this because we've had a number of countries now which've done this and what has happened is it hasn't done any good to the companies concerned. So this idea that you get diversity by replacing an Oxbridge-educated white male with an Oxbridge-educated white female. The evidence that this makes any difference to the companies' effectiveness is zero. And they also don't do anything for what is going on. They don't have any impact on the degree to which women in the companies which they are supposedly running have more or fewer opportunities for promotion or to the pay structure. And can I also say I don't recognise this vast swell of grassroots outrage about rape and assault. I recognise a Twitter tsunami about it but the thing that actually interests the vast majority of women is living standards, what's happening to their families, the much more the health service and those things are not affected by whether or not you're voting for a woman or a man. Women vote for an MP, they don't vote for a woman... What bothers me is that feminism which was originally about increasing opportunities to half the population has become so focused on issues which are of interest to about 10% of women"
Of course Alison Wolf got bashed

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Plate of the Union - "[On Clinton in 1992] 'I could've just been just a woman home. baking cookies and having teas.' And unbeknownst to her at that time it really set off a firestorm because a lot of people were like: well, that's what I do. I'm home cooking. What's wrong with that? I make cookies and I spend time with my kids... people really took offence to it. And the PR director at our magazine at the time was like: we gotta do something with this. So let's throw down the gauntlet and see if she can really make cookies. and so we started this Presidential cookie contest. And I really didn't think anything of it at the time but it really picked up a lot of energy. And I remember coming in to work every day having to make these damn cookies to send out to all these press people to try. And it just got bigger and bigger. She actually got really into it and she started baking cookies and giving them out and was doing her cookies against Barbara Bush's cookies. They were both chocolate chip cookies but Hillary's had oatmeal in it. So they won. And 4 years later we did it again and we've been doing it every Presidential election and all but one of the elections, the person who won the cookie election won the Presidential contest...
A taco bowl, it's an edible bowl. Tastes like you dropped a taco on the floor and scooped it up. It has the flavours of commercial foods. Yellow cheese that isn't cheese, industrial sour cream, ground meat that isn't meat. It's a very popular food but it's definitely not something that the Mexican-American community is eating. It really would be more of a part of American fast food culture. But I guess that's the only thing that qualifies as Mexican at the Trump Tower"

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, The Hidden Cost of a Home-Cooked Meal - "[On Kenya] A woman, before you get married you have to know how to cook. In the rural setup, a woman who gets married and does not know how to cook actually is a big problem for that particular family. So what happens, from what I've seen in my younger ages is the woman would be taken back to her mother for a few months to be taught how to properly cook the meals that she is supposed to be cooking for her family, especially her husband. Then she would go back when they feel she is ready. She would be lucky, most women are usually lucky that their men accept them back. So it's unacceptable...
'After World War II, the food industry which had been completely geared up towards the war effort was up and running and producing packaged, frozen and dehydrated foods to be eaten in foxholes basically. And they had to completely shift towards a regular market of families eating at home. The great future for food in America and they hoped in the world was that fresh food would go into decline. People would not be eating fresh oranges. They would be drinking dehydrated juice or frozen concentrated juice and in fact to an extent that's exactly what happened. But what they hadn't counted on was that a lot of home cooks were completely content with what was already going on at home in the 1950s in America. It was simpler to turn out a dinner for your family than it had ever been probably in the whole history of human cooking. You had hot and cold running water pretty much everywhere. You had gas and electricity, people had refrigerators with the little freezing compartments. It was not a big deal to put food on the table. Meals themselves had gotten much simpler after the war. And women knew how to cook"

For Russia, Syrian Ties Complicated by Marriage - The New York Times - "They are all women from the former Soviet Union who married Syrian men. Pan out to the greater expanse of Syria and the number of Russian wives grows to 20,000, the human legacy of a cold war alliance that, starting in the 1960s, mingled its young elites in Soviet dormitories and classrooms. This unusual diaspora offers some insight into the many-stranded relationship between the two countries, one that makes the Kremlin reluctant to cast off Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad... Syrian-Russian unions were especially common — and not just for geopolitical reasons, husbands and wives said in interviews. Many Syrian men felt genuinely transformed by their time in Russia; they also sought to avoid paying a bride-price as is customary in the Middle East. Mahmoud al-Hamza, who met his wife, Nadezhda, in a Moscow park in 1971, said that in order to marry a Syrian, "you need an apartment, you need to pay money, you need to buy gold, and for a Russian woman you just need a wedding ring." Soviet women had their own reasons to pursue Syrians — nondrinkers who, thanks to the Baath Party's ties to the Communists, traveled freely in and out of the Soviet Union. A new wave of marriages followed the Soviet collapse, as young women sought a way out of economic chaos. "Let all the world hear this: Russian men, maybe not all of them, but more than half of them are gigolos"... "If there is a quarrel, what will a Russian woman do? She will cry," she said. "Maximum, she will go to her friend and say, 'He is such and such.' And what will an Arab woman do? She will gather a posse of all her relatives. She may run at night to her husband's mother and sister and start yelling"... even young men who have never set foot in Russia have started "to call us very seriously and say, 'Help me marry a Russian.'""

Turning Japanese by The Vapors Songfacts - "One of the more misinterpreted songs of all time, word was that "Turning Japanese" refers to the Asian facial features people get at the moment of climax during masturbation. In a VH1 True Spin special, they asked The Vapors about this song, and they explained that it is a love song about someone who lost their girlfriend and was going slowly crazy"

Singapore's S$134m bottled water addiction - "In a country where tap water quality far exceeds minimum World Health Organization (WHO) and US Environmental Protection Agency standards, it may come as a surprise to some that bottled water is a booming, multimillion-dollar business... F&N confirmed that Ice Mountain sold in Singapore "is sourced and packed in Malaysia from tap water", while Coca-Cola said that Dasani produced for the Singapore market comes from "the local water supply at (its) facility in Malaysia"... some consumers have become more concerned about health issues surrounding tap water consumption, such as "the hygiene of the water ducts and pipes". When these concerns were relayed to PUB, it told Channel NewsAsia that Singapore has "a comprehensive and rigorous maintenance, servicing and monitoring programme which covers the entire water system, from reservoirs to waterworks, through the distribution network, to the end consumer's tap". This ensures that the tap water is "clean and wholesome", it said. PUB also added that the pipes used in Singapore's potable water supply "are primarily cement-lined ductile iron and steel water mains" that comply with international standards"

A compilation of Mediacorp's "Have you taken your medicine?"
Mostly from Channel 8, but Channel U seems to have some. And some look Korean. Maybe it's an East Asian thing?

www.hardwarezone.com.sg - View Single Post - Visa to Australia - "VISA Service Fee
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The domain name www.kangarooskang.com redirects here

The Bengali Famine - "Mr. Polya begins by dismissing all historians who disagree with him as Anglo-American and Zionist propagandists, including official biographer Sir Martin Gilbert—who, since it's always a good idea to question the accused, we asked for comment. "Churchill was not responsible for the Bengal Famine," Sir Martin replied. "I have been searching for evidence for years: none has turned up. The 1944 Document volume of the official biography [Hillsdale College Press] will resolve this issue finally"... "The idea that Churchill was in any way 'responsible' or 'caused' the Bengal famine is of course absurd. The real cause was the fall of Burma to the Japanese, which cut off India's main supply of rice imports when domestic sources fell short, which they did in Eastern Bengal after a devastating cyclone in mid-October 1942""

A review of the evidence for the effectiveness, safety, and cost of acupuncture, massage therapy, and spinal manipulation for back pain. - "Initial studies have found massage to be effective for persistent back pain. Spinal manipulation has small clinical benefits that are equivalent to those of other commonly used therapies. The effectiveness of acupuncture remains unclear. All of these treatments seem to be relatively safe. Preliminary evidence suggests that massage, but not acupuncture or spinal manipulation, may reduce the costs of care after an initial course of therapy."

No, Super Mario Run isn't too expensive, you're just too cheap - "While most of the reviews are very positive, the average score is only 2.5. What's bringing the score down is the many, many 1-star reviews. Overwhelmingly these reviews are about one thing: price. In an app store where price has been thoroughly driven down by freemium and $0.99 games, it seems a traditional approach to pricing up-front for quality content leaves a sour taste in user's mouths... This content is new interesting, and can engage the senses in ways that just having more gold can not. This is part of the art of games, and it's being lost with the IAP-driven design of most mobile games today. These games don't win awards for creative excellence. They aren't viewed as adding to the art of crafting games. No, they are more akin to something else that rewards players for playing with an alternative currency devised by the system… slot machines... Players avoid paying $10 one time, and instead pay $0.99 50 times, or in some sad cases, much much more. Like this guy, who spent $1 million dollars on Game of War In-App-Purchases. Seriously, you can't make this up. On average, mobile gamers spend $87 per player on their "free" games. Tim Cook himself was forced to reckon with this abusive type of monetization after being probed by the FTC, and Apple ended up refunding $32.5M for in-app purchases made by kids."

hardly pocket change: mobile gamers spend an average of $87 on in-app purchases - "Our analysis validated the existence of mobile gaming "whales". Data shows that only 10 percent of the mobile in-game purchasing population accounts for 90 percent of mobile gaming sales. Further listening to the statical sonar reveals that the top one percent, the "white whales", of mobile gamers account for an astonishing 58 percent of the mobile gaming revenue from in-app purchases. This trend doesn't occur among traditional games, where roughly 28 percent of the audience accounts for 90 percent of game sales... The real cost is we are raising a generation of gambling addicts. We are throwing out all the value in the art and craft of storytelling in games. We are abandoning everything that makes the experience of playing games valuable, and replacing it with cheap thrills. "Free" never means free, you'll always pay one way or another."

Why Margaret Cho was justifiably angry over Tilda Swinton's demand for emotional labour - "Of course Cho was polite in her emails; if people of colour weren't polite every time we're confronted with problematic behaviour by powerful white people, we'd be rioting every hour of every day. Instead, we do our best to present our case, hope we're actually listened to, and then later vent to our friends about the latest round of extracurricular emotional labour we've had to do in our workplace, in our school, on the bus ride home, or wherever it occurred. There is absolutely nothing surprising about Cho's emails or her account on the podcast; both will be familiar to anyone from marginalised backgrounds or who faces systemic discrimination"
Yet more proof that white people (or other "powerful" people) shouldn't try to appease SJWs because you can never win. They will look for some angle to attack you anyway, so you might as well do your own thing (since you'll get savaged regardless).

Minority rule, majority hate - "Can two seemingly unrelated issues like globalization and violent ethnonationalism actually have a priori linkages? Yale University professor Amy Chua's new book takes the globalization debate into uncharted territory via myriad comparative examples to show the explosive collision between free market democracy and ethnic hatred... The latifundia feudal land ownership system, dominated by Spanish-blooded families, is booming further with each new round of pro-globalization reforms. Other outsider minorities making hay under the neo-liberal economic order in Latin America include Lebanese, Jewish and Palestinian businessmen, who corner enormous profits in Brazil, Panama, Argentina, Belize and Honduras. All over the region, traditionally soft in ethnic identity assertion, "distinctively ethnic resentment against market-dominant light-skinned elites is on the rise"... Besides whites, the other non-indigenous market dominant minorities in Africa are Indian and Lebanese merchants"
You can't blame colonialism for Indian and Lebanese success in Africa

"Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays": Republicans and Democrats are Polar Opposites - "Nearly one-quarter (24%) of Democrats say they blocked, unfriended, or stopped following someone on social media after the election because of their political posts on social media. Fewer than one in ten Republicans (9%) and independents (9%) report eliminating people from their social media circle. Political liberals are also far more likely than conservatives to say they removed someone from their social media circle due to what they shared online (28% vs. 8%, respectively). Eleven percent of moderates say they blocked, unfollowed, or unfriended someone due to what they posted online. There is also a substantial gender gap. Women are twice as likely as men to report removing people from their online social circle because of the political views they expressed online (18% vs. 9%, respectively). Notably, the gender gap also differs significantly across political affiliation. Three in ten (30%) Democratic women say they removed an individual from their online social network because of a political opinion they expressed, while only 14% of Democratic men reported doing this. Republican men and women are about equally as likely to say they blocked, unfollowed, or unfriended someone on social media because of political posts (10% vs. 8%, respectively)."
This replicates the Pew finding that liberals are more intolerant (i.e. more likely to block, unfriend or hide people because of politics)
"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy." ― George Orwell, 1984

Kevin 👐 Glass on Twitter: "@JulieBorowski: I am so torn on immigration. I want free migration of people, but can't deny that Germany's open door policy led to terrorist attacks.
@KevinWGlass: sometimes we gotta bite the bullet and say increased welfare for refugees is worth the increased risk of domestic terrorism"
Besides the modern version of Original Sin liberals believe in turning the other cheek. So ironically despite a reflexive anti-Christianity stance they are quite like Jesus

Michigan recount reveals error, but not the one Jill Stein wanted - "Green Party nominee Jill Stein's presidential vote recount in Michigan may have turned up massive voter irregularities — in the Democratic stronghold of Detroit. Now it's Republican leaders who are demanding an investigation to determine why a third of the city's voting machines registered more ballots than actual voters, the Detroit News reported."

Agagoogahttp://email@example.com://gssq.blogspot.com/2017/02/links-16th-february-2017.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3059213.post-68826803920390848802017-02-16T18:51:00.002+08:002017-02-16T18:51:12.523+08:00The Myth of Child Porn (Online)"In spite of proud FBI claims, many lawyers and journalists, including me, suspect that the child pornographer is the same penny-ante presence online as he was in Times Square. Bruce Selcraig, a government investigator of child pornography during the 1980s who went online in 1996 as a journalist to review the situation, concluded the same. In the cyberspeech debate, he said, the dissemination of child porn amounted to "a tuna-sized red herring."

Aficionados and vice cops concede that practically all the sexually explicit images of children circulating cybernetically are the same stack of yellowing pages found at the back of those X-rated shops, only digitized. These pictures tend to be twenty to fifty years old, made overseas, badly re-reproduced, and for the most part pretty chaste. That may be why federal agents almost never show journalists the contraband. But when I got a peek at a stash downloaded by Don Huycke, the national program manager for child pornography at the U.S. Customs Service, in 1995, I was underwhelmed. Losing count after fifty photos, I'd put aside three that could be called pornographic: a couple of shots of adolescents masturbating and one half-dressed twelve-year-old spreading her legs in a position more like a gymnast's split than split beaver. The rest tended to be like the fifteen-year-old with a 1950s bob and an Ipana grin, sitting up straight, naked but demure, or the two towheaded six-year olds in underpants, astride their bikes.

So when these old pictures show up on the Net, who's putting them there? Attorney Lawrence Stanley, who published in the Benjamin A. Cardozo Law Review what is widely considered the most thorough research of child pornography in the 1980s, concluded that the pornographers were almost exclusively cops. In 1990 at a southern California police seminar, the LAPD's R. P. "Toby" Tyler proudly announced as much. The government had shellacked the competition, he said; now law enforcement agencies were the sole reproducers and distributors of child pornography. Virtually all advertising, distribution, and sales to people considered potential lawbreakers were done by the federal government, in sting operations against people who have demonstrated (through, for instance, membership in NAMBLA) what agents regard as a predisposition to commit a crime. These solicitations were usually numerous and did not cease until the recipient took the bait. "In other words, there was no crime until the government seduced people into committing one," Stanley wrote...

In 1995, the FBI launched its child-pornography task force Innocent Images, which trains special agents under a congressional grant of ten million dollars to rout out pedophiles on the Net. From 1996 to 2000, the unit initiated 2,609 cases. But barely 20 percent of those generated indictments, with just 17 percent resulting in convictions. The FBI's Peter Gullotta told James Kincaid that Innocent Images had achieved 439 convictions since 1995. How were these criminals found? "It's like fishing in a pond full of hungry fish," Gullotta told Kincaid. "Every time you put a line with live bait in there, you're going to get one." This might sound like inducement (especially to journalists like myself, who have talked to the fish)—the same tactics that Stanley described in the 1980s, only updated from snail mail to e-mail...

According to the FBI's Gullotta when he spoke to Kincaid, the typical catch has no previous criminal record. Almost no such case goes to trial; the defendants plead guilty. The government calls this more evidence of guilt. But, again, closer examination of such cases (in fact, of most child abuse charges) reveals that pleas are often taken under advice of counsel to eliminate the chance of a long prison sentence and also to limit the personal destruction that publicity wreaks even if the accused is exonerated.

Unfortunately, plea bargains, because they lack the details of depositions, interrogations at trial, and the defense's version of events, make it almost impossible to tell what the person is accused of doing, much less whether he did it. Federal statistics aren't much help. According to Kincaid, neither the FBI nor the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children now keeps track of how many children are actually lured to danger after online assignations, the feared eventuality that motivates these operations. Journalists are frustrated by more than insufficient data, though. In 1995, while I covered the story of the first man convicted for possession of "lascivious" videotapes of minors who were neither naked nor doing anything sexual, I arrived at the Justice Department in Washington D.C., only to learn that my scheduled viewing of the evidence had been canceled because, well, the tapes were illegal. Exposing the models to my eyes, an agent told me, would criminally harm them (I later learned that portions of the tapes had aired on Court TV). I drove six hours to western Pennsylvania, where the court clerk set me up with a VCR, and I yawned through hours of badly filmed images no racier than a Bahamas tourism commercial. Similar restrictions were placed on reportage of the Landslide investigation. According to the Times, "the authorities did not release the addresses of the actual [foreign] sites" allegedly offering child-pornographic images, and the only models described were two British siblings, a girl and a boy, ages eight and six. But agents did not reveal whether these children were photographed engaging in sexual activity, and journalists were obviously unable to inspect the images themselves...

Statistics that I got from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 1996 indicated that the feared eventuality that motivates all this activity had rarely come to pass. Only twenty three minors were enticed to malls and hotel rooms by their adult suitors between 1994 and 1996, none of these "children" was under thirteen, and most were at least a couple of years older than that. A 2001 survey conducted by the University of New Hampshire found that almost a fifth of ten- to seventeen-year-olds who went online received sexual solicitations from "strangers," an unspecified number of whom may have been adults. However, it would be hard to impute widespread harm to these experiences. Three-quarters of the youth said they were not distressed by the posts. And, wrote the researchers, "no youth in the sample was actually sexually assaulted as a result of contacts made over the Internet." As for pedophiles caught in the act, as far as I can gather only one such case has occurred: the infamous Orchid Club, whose members took turns having sex with a child in front of videocams that broadcast their doings to their compatriots in real time."

--- Harmful to Minors - The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex / Judith Levine

Agagoogahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://gssq.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-myth-of-child-porn-online.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3059213.post-49143821137268073802017-02-08T09:17:00.000+08:002017-02-08T09:17:02.207+08:00Links - 8th February 2017Hassan Raza - People involved in attacking, burning and destroying... - "People involved in attacking, burning and destroying Ahmedi mosque did not belong to ISIS, Taliban, Al Qaeda or Boko Haram. They were ordinary people. So your theory of "Hey the combined forces of all terrorist organizations make up only 0.003% of the global Muslim population, so ordinary Muslims are peaceful" fails because guess what? One call from mosque was enough to transform the so called ordinary "peaceful" Muslims into a mob today. These people were normal people who live among us, they are not affiliated with any terrorist outfits but the fact that one sermon was enough to turn them into a mob shows us the severity of the people we are dealing with. These people might not qualify to be labelled ''terrorists'' but by no means can they be called "peace loving" either so PLEASE spare me with your 0.003% bullshit."

The story behind the world's oldest museum, built by a Babylonian princess 2,500 years ago - "In 1925, archaeologist Leonard Woolley discovered a curious collection of artifacts while excavating a Babylonian palace. They were from many different times and places, and yet they were neatly organized and even labeled. Woolley had discovered the world's first museum."

For the love of God, stop donating canned goods to the food bank - "Canned goods have a particularly low rate of charitable return. They're heavy, they're awkward and they can be extremely difficult to fit into a family's meal plan. Worst of all, the average consumer is buying those canned goods at four to five times the rock-bottom bulk price that can be obtained by the food bank itself... And then there's the logistical nightmare when these boxes show up at the food bank's loading dock... It doesn't feel as good to donate money. As much as we like to pretend that charitable giving is a selfless act, a lot of it is driven by the human need to feel special and magnanimous."

Why men might have a point about 'man flu' – viruses want to kill men more than women, scientists find - "They appear to be particularly nasty if they are the sort of virus that is transmitted from mother to child, such as rubella, chickenpox, zika and hepatitis. Put simply, women are more valuable to the virus than men are because they can pass it on to more people... "Survival of the fittest is relevant to all organisms, not just animals and humans. It's entirely probable that this sex-specific virulent behaviour is happening to many other pathogens causing diseases. It's an excellent example of what evolutionary analysis can do for medicine.""

Theresa May's leather trousers prompt political row - "Former chancellor Ken Clarke has not been impressed, telling the Sunday Politics it was "tedious" that stories about what women politicians were wearing featured in the newspapers. "I feel sorry for women in politics," he said. "I'm glad to say men in politics don't have great news stories about what they are wearing."
But people talk about Trump's hair...

Belgian porn photos prompt suspension of government worker - "The woman has worked for the ministry for six years, and insists the pictures are private and nothing to do with her job, Belgian reports say. But her boss is said to have disagreed, because photos posted on Twitter clearly featured the ministry itself. "

Two young girl 'suicide bombers' blow themselves up near Nigerian market - "One bomber appeared no older than seven and the second about eight years old... a female suicide bomber carrying a baby on her back was shot by soldiers at a checkpoint on 28 November, detonating her explosives and killing the woman and the baby"

BBC World Service - The Documentary, Treating the Sex Offender - "You feel a lot safer. If you were in a so-called normal prison, you have to hide your crime from certain people because certain people don't like it. I mean I don't like it meself, but I have to live with what I've done. But when you come here, you have nothing to hide from anybody. Everybody knows that everybody is a sex offender so people just get on with their time...
You can't cure people of a sexual attraction to children... It's there and it will be there forever. If someone has a sexual preference for violence, that may be there forever. What we give them are the tools to cope with those risky thoughts, those risky feelings, so they know the harm done, so they know ways that they can keep themselves and other people safe...
Around 1-2% of the general population could be classified as pedophiles. But defining a child sex offender with that term remains complex.
'The sort of definition of people who are pedophiles is that they are sexually interested in children. And I think that's sometimes quite different to people who have opportunistic interest in children. That's not necessarily about sexual gratification. It could be but it depends. It could be for other reasons. And that might not necessarily be their sexual preference. It might be who happens to be who's available for their sexual gratification'...
'A lot of the work we do is aimed at building the self-esteem of people that have committed a sexual offence, because a lot of sexual offending is as a direct result of low self-esteem, especially against children because they don't judge. They have no experience of sex. They have no experience of adult things, so people can feel more comfortable with children'..
'I am a victim of sexual abuse myself. And I think that caused a lot of trouble. I think my sexual development, it stopped when I was abused. And that's probably the... major factor'"

BBC World Service - Assignment , The Battle for Barcelona - "There are 14 of these bike, scooter, segway rental places in the neighbourhood. And of course they're for the tourists. She says you turn the corner and you walk smack into one all the time... It was about in 2011 when our old people couldn't go onto the balconies anymore and hang out the washing because they would be looking into a tourist apartment and seeing a couple with the curtains open having sex... The problem we're hearing about again and again from the people who live in the city is the springing up of accommodation for tourists in residential areas. In other words, working Barcelonans having to live cheek by jowl with visitors who are on holiday. Exactly what the websites advertising this sort of accommodation promote as a way of having an authentic experience...
[Airbnb spokesman:] Of the 9 million people that were reported to be coming to Barcelona last year, our community probably hosted around 900,000 of them. About 80% of the hosts who are listing on our site have 1 listing. They are generally renting the home that they live in. A typical host in Barcelona earns about 5,000 euros a year. We think that home-sharing is a solution to many of the problems that the City Hall has recognised, which is about concentration of tourists in very very tight areas of the city. By embracing home-sharing, we can be spreading tourists more widely, more of that money can be going into the pockets of regular Barcelona residents. And we think that a holistic approach to tourism is the right way for the city and for the government to be tackling what is undoubtedly a challenge for the city...
'A majority [of AirBNB users] are now either individuals or even private companies that own several properties. So in Barcelona we know that 54% of individuals advertising on AirBNB for the city advertise more than 1 room or property. That's more than half. And that this is a very different type of activites than sharing a room in a flat where you live. It's very different in terms of scale. It's very different in terms of its impact on the housing market'...
'Some serious studies have been done by colleagues here in Barcelona and there's ample evidence that about 60% of the listings are concentrated in Ciutat Vella the Old Town and the Eixample, which are already the neighbourhoods suffering from the greatest mass and flows of tourism and which are also the neighbourhoods where most of the hotels are concentrated. And there is much less AirBNB offer in peripheral neighbourhoods of Barcelona.'
'AirBNB disagrees with this but won't share its data so it can be independently verified'

BBC World Service - The Documentary, Cruising, Cruising - New Destinations - "Chinese travel in a different way... they travel, first of all, rather in small groups than than as couples or individuals. So that means they want to have a living situation - the cabins in a way that they can stay together or they have some private space. Most Chinese people think it's boring to travel by yourself or only with your spouse. So the men want to talk to other men. Ladies want to talk to other ladies'
'For Chinese, especially for senior people, they feel comfortable and safe to travel by cruise. They don't need to worry about get lost. They don't worry, there's no panic of catching the flights, the trains and they don't worry about the language problem... the younger generation. They've earn through hard work and they get good salary, like to return the love to the parents'...
The Chinese do not like to be on the sun. Meanwhile all the Western people all the cruise vessel in general have a lot of swimming pool, sun deck, some chairs, enormous space in the open air. So Chinese vessels should have more covered space...
Colour contrast, more contrast. Which is often the sort of the more muted tones that we would say is modern can often appear cheap for the Chinese market"

BBC World Service - The Documentary, Leaving the Fold - "One of the most memorable things that happened to me that whole time I was at that Christian school was one teachers always used to pull us out of lessons to give us long lectures about something that she was angry about that particular day, and on this day, she was angry because one of the kids had been heard in the playground singing a secular song and she said if you were out in the park and you saw some dog dirt on the floor, would you pick it up and rub it in your friend's face? And she mimed picking up the dog dirt and rubbing it on the child's face, kind of crouched down in front of this kid and mimed rubbing it on the face. I remember she used this phrase dog dirt over and over again and this sort of curled lip as she said her disgust at dog dirt. You rub it on her face. Said, singing... it's bad enough that you would listen to this evil music in your own time, but by singing it within the earshot other Christian children in this school is the same as rubbing dog dirt in their faces...
'At my first wedding... it was the first time I had thought about leaving religion... we were both Hindus but of different community with different beliefs. The bone of contention at our wedding was that my family wanted to have alcohol and meat served on the wedding day which is when the religious ceremonies are performed and her side of the family didn't believe in that. And that was not acceptable to my side of the family who in fact came for the wedding and did not eat or drink anything at the wedding, and I think that was an appalling act of intolerance. I felt that how can somebody not have tolerance and actually you know turn an event of love and a lot of religious significance into an event of hatred and intolerance... if they would have just embraced each other with love and affection, they would have forgotten about what was served. But I think they felt that their belief was more important than the celebration of love of two people. So it just made me believe that if there's a belief that supercedes love, then that's not a belief that I want to be a part of'"

BBC World Service - Assignment , Basques Face the Future - "People are standing in the street, drinking, talking. And there's gonna be a competition later on to decapitate a goose down in the port. Luckily the goose is already dead...
That's kalimotxo [Ed: aka calimocho]. It's a mixture of red wine and Coke... it's very popular here"

BBC World Service - The Documentary, The Forgotten Prisoners of Apartheid - "[On refusing to play ball with the Truth & Reconciliation Commission] What I committed could not be classified as crime, because one cannot combat/compare poison with antidote. Because the violence of the oppressed is radically different from the violence of the oppressors... I did apply for amnesty, and in the application I stated that I was responsible for all ABLA [sp?] operations that took place while I was its commander. They answered did cheer see? [???] Said crime cannot be collectivised. Had to be individualised. So tell us what crime you have committed. Then I said I was not going to be part and parcel of a process that criminalised the African noble struggle...
The TRC say the person who pulled the trigger is the one who should confess. Which means leaders: none of them of both the PAC and ANC appeared before the TRC. Some of them were commanders in chief who, when it is bad, they are exonerated and the footsoldiers are punished...
People get offended when you compare them with the apartheid regime. But the apartheid regime was better. Because both the apartheid regime and the ANC regime say they have no political prisoners. But the apartheid regime, to its credit, said much as we don't have political prisoners, we have security prisoners. And security prisoners were treated better than common prisoners...
'Any mistake, I would be inside and forever... Even now. Like, I cannot get angry like anybody else. I cannot point anybody with the finger and say 'hey, don't do that to me' otherwise if that person can go to, report me in the police station I'm back'"

BBC Radio 4 - They Call Us Viet Kieu - "My mom was always keen to pass her culinary skills on to us. Endless details of exact temperatures for boiling rice and instuctions on how to lift a chicken out of a pot. It was the setting for where our conversations about her life in Vietnam began. She would tell me about her Vietnamese childhood chasing fireflies in the moonlight, selling vegetables in the market and playing in the ricefields. But whenever my questions turned to the Vietnam War, which would eventually make her leave it all behind, she'd become elusive and shake her head. And every once in a while she'd give us an odd warning that we shouldn't speak ill of the Vietnamese government or else. Or else what? She wouldn't say. Instead, she would make us food, but her fear was inherited by me all the same. And a mountain of questions was starting to pile up. Does the Vietnam my mother feared still exist?...
Viet Kieus have a sort of stigma attached to them from Vietnam because about 10 years ago, the waves of Viet Kieus that came back, we're like yeah, you know, we're rich, let's go back and help the people. Let's give them clean water and there was a certain type of entitlement which I like to call a Viet guilt. The mentality of like I know so much, I'm coming back here to help the people... I'm gonna fix things...
I thought to this day that simply voicing your disdain for the Communist party, which still rules Vietnam, would be enough to make you disappear, have your family violently threatened and have your head chopped off. Turns out I was quite wrong.
'The worst thing that could happen is that [we] would get a call, probably at midnight, and the next morning we'd have to go see either the Cultural Police or the Ministry of Culture and we'll be given a session of mmm mmm, you've done it wrong here here and here. Now you can either pay a fine or we'll shut you down'

BBC Radio 4 - Moving Pictures, The Harvesters by Pieter Bruegel the Elder - "The wonderful thing about Breugel and really to me the wonderful thing about Northern Renaissance art in general is the more you look at it the more you find. There's no area that isn't thought about. Even the background is treated like foreground...
A cruel animal game. You can see these children, and even a guard and these farmers and they are throwing sticks to a live goose. And the goose is hanging there and the one who would kill the goose could have it and eat it. But you can imagine that this gives a lot of screaming from the goose and they liked it that way. They liked to see the suffering of the goose and the noises would only make their excitement larger and the more silent the goose gets the more excited they become again because it means the end is near...
The year 1565 saw the coldest winter anyone could remember. Bruegel's response was to produce the first oil paintings of snow in art history"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Why do we misunderstand Africa? - "A really good example is the migrant crisis right now. The Africans who are turning up, crossing the Mediterranean and so on, are given this term economic migrants, and the idea is that they're coming from a place of destitution and trying to sort of better themselves. Consider what they're paying to get here. It's $5-10,000 a head. The amazing thing about that is not the inequality or the fact that it costs me $500 to go to Africa but the fact that so many people can afford it. They're not coming because they're poor. They're coming because increasingly they're not...
'There are some of Africa's 54 countries are doing incredibly well, I mean better, growing faster than any other country in the world'
'Since about 2003, Africa has doubled global economic growth and pick any year, at least 5 out of 10 of the fastest growing countries in the world are Africac. They beat India, they beat China. There's actually no greater recognition of how well Africa doing than there are now a million Chinese who have emigrated to Africa. A million people from the hottest economy of the last 30 years have moved to Africa. What does that tell you? It is the land of opportunity'...
[On the West missing out on Africa to China] 'The biggest investor in Africa is France, then comes the US, then the UK, then South Africa, then Malaysia. After that is China. So there are all sorts of misexceptions, but the biggest one is the idea that anybody gets to boss Africa around these days. Africa has got lots of stuff that everybody wants, but these days that draws suitors, not conquerors'
Is it racist to think economic migrants are rich for being able to try to migrate to Europe or racist to think that they're poor?

When Your Hedge Fund Manager Buys a Ferrari, Find a New Manager - "the car your hedge fund manager drives says something about his capacity for risk taking -- and his ability to generate market-beating returns. Minivan owners in particular run funds that tend to take on far less risk and exhibit lower volatility than sports-car driving managers, according to a new study by academics Yan Lu, Sugata Ray and Melvyn Teo. The researchers say car ownership can be a good gauge of a trait they call "sensation seeking," which has been linked to substance abuse and crime -- not the most comforting behavior when it comes to money management. They found that the increased proclivity for risk taking comes "without being compensated for higher returns.""

Agagoogahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://gssq.blogspot.com/2017/02/links-8th-february-2017.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3059213.post-36868883232856256082017-02-07T13:45:00.000+08:002017-02-07T13:45:09.779+08:00On getting an Android Phone this year"if anyone wants to change Android phone this year, if you can wait, hold out for phones sporting the SnapDragon 835 processor to be out on the market

it is manufactured by a collaboration between Qualcomm and Samsung foundries, and it will offer a 30% reduction in power consumption due to its 10nm FinFet technology. Current top line phones introduced last year sporting Snapdragon 820/821 uses 14nm FinFet, which is already a 30% drop in power consumption over the 2015 processors which doesn't use the FinFet technology

Battery life is going to increase exponentially comparatively
and also a lot less heating"

Agagoogahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://gssq.blogspot.com/2017/02/on-getting-android-phone-this-year.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3059213.post-72292061576087180322017-02-07T09:52:00.000+08:002017-02-07T09:52:13.396+08:00Links - 7th February 2017Swiss cheese hole mystery solved: It's all down to dirt - "Contrary to what cartoons have suggested over the years, the holes are not made by mice eating their way through the cheese. And nor are they produced by carbon dioxide released by bacteria, as popular scientific belief held. Instead, a Swiss laboratory says they are created by flecks of hay... the findings explained why fewer holes had been appearing in Swiss cheeses over the last 15 years, since more modern milking methods made it less likely for hay to fall into containers."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Agagoogahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com://gssq.blogspot.com/2017/02/links-7th-february-2017.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3059213.post-38225682966354349952017-02-06T20:51:00.000+08:002017-02-06T20:51:00.166+08:00Peranakans and Cultural AppropriationHas the 'soul' gone out of modern Peranakans?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the previous article in the series:

The slow death of Peranakan cuisine?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Agagoogahttp://email@example.com://gssq.blogspot.com/2017/02/peranakans-and-cultural-appropriation.html