1. Chinese business entertainment. Every bit as bad as you suspect. E.g., "one of my sources was unsympathetic after an American friend, working with a sole colleague, was on the brink of hospitalization following a banquet with Hunanese officials. “What an idiot,” she said, “Bringing only one other person to drink with the government!”" and "“Sometimes everyone strips off and you lie around naked together in comfortable rooms. The lower ranking members of the group then serve the other ones food and drink. On other occasions, we got high together, took off our shirts, and danced around in a circle holding hands,” one Western observer commentated, preferring anonymity." There is worse stuff at the link.
2. The Spanish Inquisition? Lovely people. "Well, for a start, the jails of the Inquisition were universally known to be hygienic and well maintained. They were neither built nor run as places of punishment. The standard of care that inmates received was high enough that prisoners held by the Crown would often petition to be moved to Inquisition jails. There are recorded cases of criminals committing public heresy with the express purpose of being held and tried by the Inquisition, rather than the secular courts."
3. Do you remember Obama's Kill List? It's still going strong. Here is an account of a court case by a US citizen who thinks that the United States government has tried to kill him five times. He'd like it to stop.
4. Labour is no longer the party of the working class. You knew that, but here are some background statistics you might not have known: the "2017 Labour Party rule book, a 91-page document, contains 26 mentions of “gender”, 41 of “BAME” (black, Asian and minority ethnic), 43 of “ethnic”, 11 of “race”, two of “black” and “Asian” respectively, but only two of “class”"; "The proportion of working-age men without qualifications who were not active in the labour force increased from 4% in the mid-1990s to 30% today. Poor white British children do worse in school than any other ethnic group. In 2016, 75% of the suicides reported in the United Kingdom were men. The suicide risk for low-skilled men, particularly those working in the construction industry, is three times higher than the male average.". This is from the Economist, which adds some unusually forthright comment: "The public-sector middle class is huge despite decades of wolf-crying about the destruction of the middle class. ... The universities have dangerously over-expanded (while also perfecting the art of teaching their students that the West is based on exploitation, patriarchy and other injustices). ... Whatever the problems with British productivity in general the country is doing a brilliant job of mass-producing an alienated “intelligentsia” that will provide a Corbyn-style Labour Party with the votes that it needs to win the next election."
5. Are you a bit unsure about Bayesian probability? This is the clearest explanation I have seen. Take this on statistical significance: "If a researcher shows me data that would only occur one time in twenty if geography didn’t matter to hospital waiting times, then I’ll become a firm believer in the “postcode lottery”, because the idea was reasonably plausible to start with. But if a researcher shows me data that would only occur one time in a 1,000 if the position of Jupiter were irrelevant to British election results, I’ll respond that this leaves the idea of a Jovian influence on the British voter only slightly less crazy than it always was."
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