Links - 26th May 2017 (1)

Salman Abedi named as the Manchester suicide bomber - what we know about him - "The suicide bomber who killed 22 people and injured dozens more at the Manchester Arena has been named as 22-year-old Salman Abedi, according to US officials. Born in Manchester in 1994, the second youngest of four children his parents were Libyan refugees who came to the UK to escape the Gaddafi regime."
Saying that almost none of today's attacks are by current refugees is not comforting

Are Tories the workers' party? Labour polling figures suggest they are - "Jeremy Corbyn appears in this election campaign to have achieved something even Ed Miliband was unable to do: lose the majority support not only of Britain’s skilled workers, dubbed social class C2 by the pollsters, but also the DEs – the semi-skilled, unskilled and unemployed.

The Comey memo offers no proof for impeachment of Trump - "this memo is neither the Pentagon Papers nor the Watergate tapes. Indeed, it raises as many questions for Comey as it does Trump in terms of the alleged underlying conduct... Impeachment is not meant to be an alternative for criminal cases that cannot be submitted to a grand jury. It is also not meant to be politics by other means. Finally, it is not a vehicle to redo an election for those with morning-after regrets. Ironically, for those who charge that Trump has compromised the legal system, the same objection can be made over demands for criminal charges or impeachment based on his still undisclosed memo."
"Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He testified during the Clinton impeachment and serves as the lead defense counsel in the last impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate for Judge Thomas Porteous."

London Summit 2017 | SeekingArrangement - "Becoming a Sugar Baby just got easier! SeekingArrangement.com’s Sugar Baby Summit is a meeting of Sugar Babies that features progressive courses on how to succeed in Sugar. This Summit is aimed at providing a skill set unlike any other. The event features experienced Sugar Baby coaches, as well as a roster of financial, career, and relationship experts. Each course provides valuable knowledge about Sugaring, but is also designed to improve your life overal"

Forget paleo, go mid-Victorian: it’s the healthiest diet you’ve never heard of - "Health expectancy provides valuable comparative insight. Mid-Victorians enjoyed relatively good health in old age. The elderly then, including workhouse inmates, were physically capable of working until the last few days or day of their lives. Agricultural labourers regularly worked into their 70s. Hospital capacity was limited because of home nursing and a lesser need for non-acute medical facilities. In contrast, men today can anticipate spending the last 7.7 years of their lives in a state of increasing medical dependency: for women that figure is in excess of 10 years. From this perspective, the medical gains of the last century are severely tarnished. The implications of a better understanding of mid-Victorian health are profound. It becomes clear that, with the exception of family planning, the vast edifice of post-1948 healthcare has not so much enabled us to live longer but has merely supplied methods of controlling the symptoms of non-communicable degenerative diseases, which have become prevalent due to our failure to maintain mid-Victorian nutritional standards. Dysnutrition is arguably the largest cause of ill-health today. Our study in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (here, here, and here) shows that the majority of the Victorian urban poor consumed diets which were limited, but contained extremely high nutrient density. Bread could be expensive but onions, watercress, cabbage, and fruit like apples and cherries were all cheap and did not need to be carefully budgeted for. Beetroot was eaten all year round; Jerusalem artichokes were often home-grown. Fish such as herrings and meat in some form (scraps, chops and even joints) were common too. All in all, a reversion to mid-Victorian nutritional values would significantly improve health expectancy today... In the 1870s Victorian health was challenged by cheap sugar and the first generation of mass-processed high-salt and high-sugar foods. This dragged urban health and life expectancy to a nadir around 1900 — a date that consequently provides a highly misleading baseline. (The trend was even reflected in people’s height. The minimum height for infantry was lowered from 5ft 6in to 5ft 3in, then later to 5ft, in just two decades.)"

It’s dangerous and wrong to tell all children they’re ‘gender fluid’ - "What started as a baffling skirmish on the wilder shores of victim culture has now turned into something more menacing. The Commons Women and Equalities Select Committee has produced a report saying transgender people are being failed. The issue is not just whether they really do change their sex. The crime being committed by society is to insist on any objective evidence for this at all. According to the committee, people should be able to change their gender at will merely by filling in a form. Instead of requiring evidence of sex-change treatment, Britain should adopt the ‘self-declaration’ model now used in Ireland, Malta, Argentina and Denmark. To paraphrase Descartes, ‘I think I am a man/woman/of no sex, therefore I am.’... for trans people gender is certainly not irrelevant but is of all–consuming importance. Yet Miller and her committee would deprive them of the ability to announce their new sexual identity on passports or other official documents. Is this not, by Miller’s own logic, cruelty to trans people? But of course logic doesn’t come into this. Gender politics is all about subjective feelings. It has nothing to do with fairness or equality. It embodies instead an extreme egalitarianism which holds that any evidence of difference is a form of prejudice... a UK survey found about half of young and a third of adult transgender people said they had attempted suicide. The committee does not suggest this is most likely because of the unbearable mental conflict over their sexual identity. Instead, it blames ‘transphobia’ for driving them to this despair... Trans and gender issues, says the committee, should be taught in schools as part of personal, social and health education. We can all predict what will happen. Gender fluidity will be actively promoted as just another lifestyle choice. Under the commendable guise of stopping the minute number of transgender children being bullied, the rest of the class will be bullied into accepting the prescribed orthodoxy — that gender is mutable, and any differentiation in value between behaviour or attitudes is bigoted and prohibited... According to Professor McHugh, prepubescent children who begin imitating the opposite sex are being treated by misguided doctors with puberty-delaying hormones to render later sex-change surgery less onerous — even though such drugs stunt children’s growth and risk causing sterility. These are the very drugs that the Miller committee wants the specialist Tavistock gender clinic to prescribe to children with less delay."

The sneering response to Trump’s victory reveals exactly why he won - "The suggestion that American women, more than 40 per cent of whom are thought to have voted for Trump, suffer from internalised misogyny: that is, they don’t know their own minds, the poor dears... those who do politics these days — the political establishment, the media, the academy, the celeb set — are so contemptuous of ordinary people, so hateful of the herd, so convinced that the mass of society cannot be trusted to make political decisions, and now those ordinary people have given their response to such top-down sneering and prejudice. Oh, the irony of observers denouncing Middle America as a seething hotbed of hatred even as they hatefully libel it a dumb and ugly mob... The respectable set’s allergy to Trump is fundamentally an allergy to the idea of democracy itself."

Taipei’s Fiery New Mayor Knows Whose Culture Is Best | Foreign Policy - "For the [world’s] four Chinese-speaking regions — Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Mainland China — the longer the colonization, the more advanced a place is. It’s rather embarrassing. Singapore is better than Hong Kong; Hong Kong is better than Taiwan; Taiwan is better than the mainland. I’m speaking in terms of culture. I’ve been to Vietnam and mainland China. Even though the Vietnamese are seemingly poor, they always stop in front of red traffic lights and walk in front of green ones. Even though mainland China’s GDP is higher than that of Vietnam, if you ask me about culture, the Vietnamese culture is superior... I once said that when more than 99 percent of Chinese people close the doors while doing their business in bathrooms, we can start talking about reunification. This hurt the feelings of many Chinese people, but a cultural gap [between mainland China and Taiwan] does exist"

India Doesn’t Understand Its Rape Problem | Foreign Policy - "Protesters, politicians, and celebrities have advocated vocally for harsher punishments for rapists, from public execution by firing squad to surgical castration. But violent retribution, judicial and extrajudicial alike, has done little to end rape. Statistics from India’s National Crime Records Bureau show that incidents of reported rape in the country increased 35.2 percent between 2012 and 2013. Rather than solving the rape problem, the bloodlust pulsing through India has instead squelched the country’s ability to address the problem’s roots... Kavita Krishnan, secretary of the advocacy group All India Progressive Women’s Association, argues that the obsession with punishment “deflect[s] attention from the accountability shared by the state” — its failure to address social norms that lead to sex crimes against women. These norms often emerge from legal and educational institutions that place little to no premium on gender equality. India’s preoccupation with capital punishment gives “individuals a way to distance themselves from potentially sexist beliefs they may themselves hold”... the Justice Verma Committee report included numerous legal reform recommendations, such as stiffer sentencing and an expanded list of criminal offenses against women. It also advised against capital punishment or chemical castration as punishments for rape, citing a lack of empirical evidence that either deters violence... India’s lower house of Parliament passed a bill that ignored many of the Justice Verma Committee’s most substantive recommendations... In April 2014, a Mumbai court handed down death sentences for three men convicted in the 2013 gang rape of a journalist. Ujjwal Nikam, the public prosecutor in the case, said he sought the death penalty because he “wanted to send a message to like-minded persons that if they commit such crimes the death penalty is inevitable.” “For the government, legislation was the easiest change they could enact,” says Nikhil Mehra, an advocate who served as a researcher with the committee. “Generating serious societal change, on the other hand, is much more difficult.”"

The Social Laboratory | Foreign Policy - "many current and former U.S. officials have come to see Singapore as a model for how they'd build an intelligence apparatus if privacy laws and a long tradition of civil liberties weren't standing in the way... they are looking to analyze Facebook posts, Twitter messages, and other social media in an attempt to "gauge the nation's mood" about everything from government social programs to the potential for civil unrest... In a country run by engineers and technocrats, it's an article of faith among the governing elite, and seemingly among most of the public, that Singapore's 3.8 million citizens and permanent residents... are perpetually on a knife's edge between harmony and chaos... This economic rise might be unprecedented in the modern era, yet the more Singapore has grown, the more Singaporeans fear loss... Singaporeans' boundless ambition is matched only by their extreme aversion to risk... by U.S. standards, Singapore's privacy laws are virtually nonexistent, and it's possible that the government collected private communications, financial data, public transportation records, and medical information without any court approval or private consent... The officials running RAHS today are tight-lipped about exactly what data they monitor, though they acknowledge that a significant portion of "articles" in their databases come from publicly available information, including news reports, blog posts, Facebook updates, and Twitter messages... One Singaporean told me it's easy to find porn -- just look for the web addresses without any obviously sexual words in them... Hard Choices: Challenging the Singapore Consensus, by Donald Low and Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh, argues that the ruling People's Action Party, which has held uninterrupted power since 1959, may have invented the notion that Singapore is one step away from ruin in a bid to subdue the masses and cement the government's hold on power... "In Singapore, the threshold for surveillance is deemed relatively higher," according to one RAHS study, with the majority of citizens having accepted the "surveillance situation" as necessary for deterring terrorism and "self-radicalization.""

University of Wisconsin Study Finds Eudaimonic Happiness Lessens the 'Bite' of Risk Factors for Disease - WSJ - "Some researchers say happiness as people usually think of it—the experience of pleasure or positive feelings—is far less important to physical health than the type of well-being that comes from engaging in meaningful activity. Researchers refer to this latter state as "eudaimonic well-being." Happiness research, a field known as "positive psychology," is exploding. Some of the newest evidence suggests that people who focus on living with a sense of purpose as they age are more likely to remain cognitively intact, have better mental health and even live longer than people who focus on achieving feelings of happiness. In fact, in some cases, too much focus on feeling happy can actually lead to feeling less happy, researchers say. .. symptoms of depression, paranoia and psychopathology have increased among generations of American college students from 1938 to 2007, according to a statistical review published in 2010 in Clinical Psychology Review. Researchers at San Diego State University who conducted the analysis pointed to increasing cultural emphasis in the U.S. on materialism and status, which emphasize hedonic happiness, and decreasing attention to community and meaning in life, as possible explanations"

How to Trick the Guilty and Gullible into Revealing Themselves - WSJ - "By the early 1980s, Van Halen had become one of the biggest rock bands in history. Their touring contract carried a 53-page rider that laid out technical and security specs as well as food and beverage requirements. The "Munchies" section demanded potato chips, nuts, pretzels and "M&M's (WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES)." When the M&M clause found its way into the press, it seemed like a typical case of rock-star excess, of the band "being abusive of others simply because we could," Mr. Roth said. But, he explained, "the reality is quite different." Van Halen's live show boasted a colossal stage, booming audio and spectacular lighting. All this required a great deal of structural support, electrical power and the like. Thus the 53-page rider, which gave point-by-point instructions to ensure that no one got killed by a collapsing stage or a short-circuiting light tower. But how could Van Halen be sure that the local promoter in each city had read the whole thing and done everything properly? Cue the brown M&M's... During the Middle Ages, if a court couldn't determine whether a defendant was guilty, it often turned the case over to a priest who would administer an "ordeal" using boiling water or a smoking-hot iron bar. The idea was that God, who knew the truth, would miraculously deliver from harm any suspect who had been wrongly accused. As a means of establishing guilt, the medieval ordeal sounds barbaric and nonsensical. But according to Peter Leeson, an economist at George Mason University, it was surprisingly effective—because it let the garden weed itself... After a new employee has completed a few weeks of training, Zappos offers them a chance to quit. Even better, the quitter will be paid for their training time and get a bonus representing their first month's salary—roughly $2,000—just for quitting! All they have to do is go through an exit interview and surrender their eligibility to be rehired at Zappos. What kind of company would offer a new employee $2,000 not to work?... Mr. Hsieh figured that any worker who would take the easy $2,000 was the kind of worker who would end up losing the firm a lot more in the long run. By one industry estimate, it costs an average of roughly $4,000 to replace a single employee, and one recent survey of 2,500 companies found that a single bad hire can cost more than $25,000 in lost productivity, lower morale and the like"

Seasonal Allergy Symptoms, Such as Watery Eyes, Sneezing and Fatigue, Can Significantly Impair Driving Ability - WSJ - "Common seasonal allergy symptoms, such as watery eyes, sneezing and fatigue, can significantly impair driving ability, says a study in the July issue of Allergy. Allergy symptoms' effect on driving was comparable to having a blood-alcohol concentration nearing impaired levels, according to the researchers. Allergy medications weren't wholly effective at reducing the symptoms' effects...
Bedrooms of boys with above-average BMIs had significantly more TVs, electronic games and magazines. Bedrooms of boys with average or below-average BMIs had more souvenirs from other places, computers, religious items and artwork or pictures. Girls with above-average BMIs had more board games, dolls, and stereos. Girls with lower BMIs were more likely to have objects associated with physical activity, such as calendars, schedules and spinning disco balls...
Pressure from waist belts, especially worn over a large waistline, can cause pockets of silent acid reflux to develop in the lower esophagus without noticeable symptoms...
People with peripheral artery disease, or narrowed leg arteries, were able to walk significantly farther using Nordic walking poles than when they didn't use poles, according to a study in the June issue of the British Journal of Surgery. Poles work the body 23% harder than normal walking, but the participants didn't seem aware of the extra exertion, the researchers said"

For More Teens, Arrests by Police Replace School Discipline - WSJ - "A generation ago, schoolchildren caught fighting in the corridors, sassing a teacher or skipping class might have ended up in detention. Today, there’s a good chance they will end up in police custody... a student got a misdemeanor ticket for wearing too much perfume... a teen was charged with theft after sharing the chicken nuggets from a classmate’s meal—the classmate was on lunch assistance and sharing it meant the teen had violated the law... Nearly one out of every three American adults are on file in the FBI’s master criminal database... In recent decades, a new philosophy in law enforcement had been applied to schools. It was “deal with the small stuff so they won’t go to the big stuff, and also it sent a strong message of deterrence”"