"A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation." - Bertrand Russell

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The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness - "By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women's declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging -- one with higher subjective well-being for men... the changes brought about through the women's movement may have decreased women's happiness. The increased opportunity to succeed in many dimensions may have led to an increased likelihood of believing that one's life is not measuring up. Similarly, women may now compare their lives to a broader group, including men, and find their lives more likely to come up short in this assessment. Or women may simply find the complexity and increased pressure in their modern lives to have come at the cost of happiness."

Body art. Literally - "An American artist has spent the past 20 years making sculptures out of human skin, and is to exhibit his work in public in the UK for the first time later this year... Using skins from white men who donated their bodies to medical science, he has created freak versions of mundane items including flags, boots and maps of America – in effect using skin like leather. His work, he says, is a commentary on human cruelty and America's ethics and morality... Gallery owner Robert Devcic said Krasnow uses only white skin because much of the suffering in the Americas has been caused by white people. "He uses skin to make the point that suffering is universal," he said. "It is tanned using the same process that you'd use for an animal skin.""
Not only are white men evil, their skins can be used for 'science'

Manic Pixie Dream Girls Are The Scourge Of Modern Cinema - "The always-relevant Onion A.V. Club has coined a term for the type of movie girl-woman whom we've long despised: the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. The A.V. Club defines the MPDG as "that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." Our own Sadie had a fantastic rant about this particular kind of flighty creature, whom she termed "Amazing Girls," or, ideal muses whose beauty, sweetness and gentle, studied eccentricity renders them entirely docile... As the A.V. Club deftly notes, "Like the Magical Negro, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype is largely defined by secondary status and lack of an inner life. She's on hand to lift a gloomy male protagonist out of the doldrums, not to pursue her own happiness.""

Moving Beyond Bias - "We justify the rhetorical contortions that excuse black people from challenging examinations; in the end, it is based on a tacit sense that such things are antithetical to black authenticity, that it is somehow untoward to require this kind of concentrated scholarly exertion on black people. It is the grown-up version of what Barack Obama termed in his speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention "the slander that says that if a black youth walks around with a book in his hand he's acting white." "I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not," W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1903. A century later, the International Association of Professional Black Firefighters tells us, "Cognitive examinations have an adverse effect upon blacks and other minorities."... Imagine Du Bois listening to a rep from the black firefighters' association now sneering that the promotion test merely measures "the ability to read and retain"--i.e. engage in higher-level thinking processes! O tempora, o mores."

Ethnic profiling doesn't stop terror - "In a study released on Tuesday, the Open Society Institute -- a think tank and democracy-promotion organization funded by billionaire George Soros -- argues that racial profiling of Muslims is essentially a public relations tool designed to make people feel safer in the immediate aftermath of a terror attack... The report, titled "Ethnic Profiling in the European Union," argues that profiling is both ineffective and counterproductive, pointing out that "stops and searches conducted under counterterrorism powers in Europe have produced few charges on terrorism offenses and no terrorism convictions to date." At the same time, targeting specific communities alienates them, "contributing to a growing sense of marginalization in minority and immigrant communities.""
The study is slightly misspecified: stopping people randomly, period, does not stop terrorism. Intelligence does.

On Jacob Zuma, Iraq, Croatia, home ownership, Somali pirates, education, Greece, Machiavelli, economics - "An enduring lesson of financial crises, you point out, is that “political constraints interfere with economically efficient solutions” (“The curse of politics”, April 18th). But who is to blame that “academic economists often proposed solutions that glossed over real-world political and legal obstacles”? This is, once again, the proclivity of a profession that has long left the real world for mathematical niceties in ever more intricate models. I would thus propose an alternative title to your article: “the curse of economics.”"

nasubi - "Nippon Television's (NTV) producers have obviously never heard of the Geneva Convention. If they had, they wouldn't have treated poor Nasubi the way they did. They wouldn't have stripped him naked and shut him in an apartment, alone with no food, furniture, household goods, or entertainment. They wouldn't have kept him there for over a year until he had won $10 000 in prizes by sending in postcards to contests. They wouldn't have cut him off from the world and they would have told him that he was on nation-wide TV."

PornOrchestra: radical reinterpretation of pornographic film scores - "The PornOrchestra is an attempt to radically reinterpret the soundtrack to pornographic film. This complicated genre has taken its share of scorn: from adult film producers who refuse to pay it any mind to legions of consumers who instinctively snap the sound off after pressing Play."

100+ Funny Photos Taken At Unusual Angle [Humor]

Batteries Feel Included: 309. Easy Solutions #1 - "So, you're in love with one of your friends, but she has a boyfriend and probably wouldn't have sex with you anyway. What you will need: 1 x knife, 1 x ring, access to a sunbed, the ability to grow a beard... Now comes the hard part - The monologue. In your own words you must give a speech in which you mention all of these key points:
a) You are married to each other in the future
b) Her current boyfriend is dead
c) The world is coming to an end. It's up to you to pick a reason, but I would recommend a war against machines. This whole situation will be backed up by the Terminator franchise
d) In the future your relationship is not going well
e) You've come back in time because you can't help but feel that she would have been happier with her current boyfriend if he hadn't been killed
f) Her current boyfriend is going to be hit by a bus on a day six months from her present. She should stop him going to work that day
g) If she does exactly what you say this current version of yourself will be erased and you will never get married. If she questions this flaw in your time travel logic, because you cannot change the past, simply reference Back to the Future...
There will be three possible outcomes:
3) You will be filled with guilt because of this moral grey area where you aren't entirely sure if what you've done counts as some kind of low level rape. You will take your own life by hanging, overdose or wrist cutting."

Free boob jobs offered to nurses at Prague clinic

find last.fm very-far-away-neighbours - "interesting option to waste some time is listening to last.fm-libraries of users having more or less an opposite taste than yourself. sadly, while last.fm's so called neighbour finding options are quite great, it lacks a decent search for users who do not share your taste at all. this gap is now closed, just enter your last.fm username below and you should be able to find several more or less randomly selected users which all have one thing in common: they listen to almost completely different music than you do :)"

Hottie Ann' - "My name is Ann, I'm a 22 yo' woman in Singapore. Currently I am looking for work as a secretary at an office building. :)... I am a kind woman who is looking for a man that would give me some good experience…My name is Ann, I am GENUINE european girl, half german-half czech. I am open minded girl and consider myself attractive.. I like this Internet thing. I have posted some pics, I hope you will like them"
Like PopCap, this is another site that does IP targetting. I am amused.

I Will Have To Visit Singapore Someday… - "I have always heard stories about this sort of thing in Southeast Asia, but never have I seen the proof!"
Raffles Hotel sold Sluts for 6.25 each in 2003 (not including 10% service charge, 1% cess or 4% GST

Made-to-order playmaids - "What the middle-age lady wanted was to be introduced to a Singaporean man who was a widower or a divorcee of any age, who could do with a live-in companion. For S$300 a month, she would move in with him as a part-time mistress and home minder... It’s mutually beneficial, since the man could have a companion-cum-domestic help at half the cost of a full-time maid (plus levy). No contract, no marriage, no legal complications! It is temporary and no notice of termination is needed. “Just say goodbye and pack your bags’” she said... “These are lonely men whose wife has died or who are divorced, and their married children long gone, so the companionship is as important as the sex,” said one agent. It is useful to eliminate the risk of lonely, vulnerable men being cheated by a foreign spouse... The tidal wave of arrivals in recent years – especially the women – has brought about tremendous social changes to this small island that are both good and bad. It has added to a vibrancy never experienced before, but it has also created social friction among the locals, including family break-ups. Their number is unknown. According to Tian Fu Club, a clan association formed by the mainlanders here, 300,000-400,000 Chinese have become citizens or permanent residents here."
Interestingly, the men are the ones who are vulnerable in this narrative.