Yay, a new antibiotic on the horizon! Guardian
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Ha, this is good. On the oft-repeated canard that Islam "needs a reformation" on the grounds that this would obviously produce a separation of church and state.
"But no one seems to be calling for an Islamic Henry VIII to reinvent Muslim society — and that isn’t just because the king had a penchant for beheadings. There is no getting around the fact that Henry technically transformed England into a theocracy. The king declared himself England’s supreme political and religious leader, the very role that Islamists imagine a caliph would enjoy. (To this day, Queen Elizabeth vies with the Dalai Lama for the title of World’s Most Endearing Nominal Theocrat.)" Foreign Policy
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Would you rather live on $100k a year now, or in 1964 (holding the *nominal* amount fixed)? How about $20k a year? This interesting little thought experiment illustrates how technological progress has exacerbated rather than alleviated the effects of growing nominal income inequality. Marginal Revolution
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Catching up stuff from a few days ago... The UK government denied the UN special rapporteur on violence against women access to the Yarl's Wood immigration detention facility, presumably because she would in fact have found significant evidence of violence against women. Can we talk for a second about how abhorrent this is? Guardian
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Ha, this is good. On the oft-repeated canard that Islam "needs a reformation" on the grounds that this would obviously produce a separation of church and state.
"But no one seems to be calling for an Islamic Henry VIII to reinvent Muslim society — and that isn’t just because the king had a penchant for beheadings. There is no getting around the fact that Henry technically transformed England into a theocracy. The king declared himself England’s supreme political and religious leader, the very role that Islamists imagine a caliph would enjoy. (To this day, Queen Elizabeth vies with the Dalai Lama for the title of World’s Most Endearing Nominal Theocrat.)" Foreign Policy
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Would you rather live on $100k a year now, or in 1964 (holding the *nominal* amount fixed)? How about $20k a year? This interesting little thought experiment illustrates how technological progress has exacerbated rather than alleviated the effects of growing nominal income inequality. Marginal Revolution
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Catching up stuff from a few days ago... The UK government denied the UN special rapporteur on violence against women access to the Yarl's Wood immigration detention facility, presumably because she would in fact have found significant evidence of violence against women. Can we talk for a second about how abhorrent this is? Guardian
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“We always say that, for us, conservation is all about killing things.” New Yorker
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This confirms all my prejudices and I'm not even sorry. Slate
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Your cat probably doesn't like you, and probably doesn't even like being petted.
"Finally, there's some evidence, turned up by Mills, that many cats don't actually like being petted by humans at all. In a 2013 study, he and other researchers measured levels of stress hormones in cats, with the intention of figuring out whether having multiple cats in the same household is a bad idea. That didn't turn out to be true, but they did find that the cats who allowed themselves to be petted had higher stress levels afterward than the cats who disliked it so much that they simply ran away." Vox
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This is unbelievable. Boko Haram have just massacred more than 2000 people in a single attack on a town in northern Nigeria :( :( Washington Post
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Huh. In 2007, while President Ahmadinejad was very publicly denying the Holocaust, Iranian state TV was broadcasting a hit show *about* the Holocaust, including sympathetic portrayals of French Jews in danger of deportation. The story is loosely based on the life of Abdol Hossein Sardari, an Iranian consular official who saved the live of hundreds of French Jews by issuing them fraudulent Iranian passports. WSJ
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More Iran trivia... Apparently it's normally considered very rude to accept a give the first time it's offered - you should refuse three times, allowing the giver to insist. Here is my favourite quote from the article:
"It is possible to ask someone not to t'aarof ("t'aarof nakonid"), but that raises new difficulties, since the request itself might be a devious type of t'aarof." Wiki
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