"No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

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How I Became A Keynesian - "Second Thoughts in the Middle of a Crisis"

The Butterfly Tales... - The One About The iPhone - "The iPhone sucks – or at least mine does. The phone keeps restarting so often that I’m sometimes convinced it is on an eco-friendly sleep mode. It hangs more frequently than inmates on death row and the damn ‘Home’ button is faulty. If you are an iPhone user, you deserve an award for patience, a plague for putting up with this crap or you deserve a hug at least However, a peculiar scene started unraveling before me. There were actually more people sending in their iPhones for repair than there were actually people buying it"

Barack Obama's Smile Never Changes
Must be Botox

Spanking lowers a child's IQ, researcher says - "Straus suggests that the chronic stress created by regular spanking creates post-traumatic stress symptoms in children. PTSD is linked to lower IQ. Economic status also underlies both spanking practices and IQ"
Again, Science Reporting Headline FAIL

What REALLY makes a woman want to sleep with a man? - "Women whose partners had similar genes reported wanting to have sex less often. They had less motivation to please their partner sexually compared to the women going out with men with dissimilar genes. Women with MHC-similar partners also reported more frequent sexual fantasies about other men, particularly at the most fertile phase of their ovulation cycle. And their sexual fantasies about other men did not just remain in their heads. They also reported higher rates of sexual infidelity... Men with a high shoulder-to-hip ratio begin having sexual intercourse at an early age - 16 or younger... But be warned: they have more affairs while in a relationship... In our studies, we found that some women had sex with men simply because they'd been impressed by their dancing"
Addendum: Another article on this book: Why women have sex - ""We never ever expected [the reasons women sleep with men] to be so diverse," she says. "From the altruistic to the borderline evil." Evil? "Wanting to give someone a sexually transmitted infection," she explains... 73% of Russian women are in love, and 63% of Japanese women are in love... Only 61% of Russian men are in love and only 41% of Japanese men are in love. Which means that 12% of Russian women and 22% of Japanese women are totally wasting their time."

Some of the very unromantic reasons why women sleep with men - "We [have] been fed a Utopian myth that men and women have sex purely because they're crazed with lust for each other - or, in a long-term partnership, because they still adore each other. Any woman past the age of 16 knows what idealistic nonsense this is... 1,000 women were interviewed about their real reasons for saying 'Yes' when they could have said 'No'. Boredom, winning favours and to get rid of a headache were high up the list... In this light, feminism's eagerness to persuade women to have sex only when we experience knee-trembling desire seems naive... The book claims 84 pc of women have sex simply to keep their partners quiet or to get help with the chores. You may feel shocked at the hint of prostitution - the bartering of our bodies for a bit of DIY - but within a committed relationship is it truly so different from any other trade- off which ultimately nets both participants what they want?... '[He] started to sing to me in French... When he got to the third verse, I thought: 'I can't stand any more of this.' So I locked my fingers in his, to stop him strumming, and dragged him upstairs - just to shut him up."

Kiss the Girl... Continued - "Surely it won't hurt
If you go for the shirt
Now that you kissed the girl
(Sing with me now)
Shalalalalala forget the face
It's on to second base
Go on and feel the boobs
Shalalalalala unhook her bra
It's just like Mardi Gras
In New Orleans with the dudes"

HDB's version of subsidy, affordability and fair prices - "The HDB sells flats base on market price instead of cost as this is the fairest way of pricing new flats. A market base pricing approach ensures that all groups of buyers enjoy similar discounts to the market and would be fair to those who are buying other HDB flats today"
This is curiously reminiscent of SAF notions of "fairness" - basically making everyone suffer (not to mention exactly the same as the old NKF's "subsidy"). But there's at least one group of people this is fair for: the flat builders.

Blood Lamp: Lamp Powered By Blood For A Cause - "As excessive blood loss is dangerous to one’s life, similarly overexploitation of natural resources, to produce extra energy, effects the environment and our quality of life."
GAH

Playing second fiddle to foreigners despite having a birthright - "AN ELECTRONICS firm that advertised last week for a “preferably non-Singaporean” engineer has added fuel to a worsening controversy in this migrant city... A similar storm broke some years ago when another company told a fresh Singaporean graduate during a job interview that his chances were slim if he had to report for annual reservist duty. “We prefer a foreigner who has no such obligations,” the executive had added. Besides, they are much less costly to hire... The foreigners, hungrier and without family responsibility here, generally work longer hours for less pay – something that married Singaporeans with a home mortgage to pay cannot possibly match. A small industry has risen to recruit them in large numbers – as indicated by a recruitment agency, with this advertisement: “Do you find it difficult and expensive to hire local staff? Why not consider hiring foreign talents?”"
Singapore: the only country in the world which treats foreigners better than its people

YouTube - Jizz In My Pants - In light of recent events this is quite sad.
[Addendum: A response - "Puke In My Mouth" -MsTaken.com]

Unhygienic German men voted the worst in bed while lazy English come second in the battle between the sheets - "The survey, carried out by global research website OnePoll.com, asked women from 20 countries to rate nations on their talent in the bedroom and give reasons for their answers."
Why is there no ranking of female lovers? Do they just need to lie back and think of [their respective countries]? It is better to be the Object than the Subject - you have less work to do.

Household Hints With Sex Toys - "Use a Rabbit Vibe to mix up a single serving smoothie right in your glass. The rotating motion of the shaft blends the ingredients. Also works great mixing hot chocolate or pureeing cream soups... To keep an opened bottle of wine from going bad, stick a buttplug in the neck. A slender beginner’s model works best."

Tainted love: Are we wrong to treat incest as a taboo? - "The bizarre case of Patrick Stuebing and Susan Karolewski has captivated the world since the couple crashed into the headlines in 2001 with the birth of their first incestuous son (two of their four children are disabled). Not just because their self-proclaimed love seems to break one of the modern world's last taboos. But also because last week the couple's lawyer, Dr Endrich Wilhelm, lodged a plea with the country's highest judicial body, the Constitutional Court, in a bid to attempt to overturn Germany's ban on incest. According to Dr Wilhelm, there is simply "no moral or legal basis" for incest to be a criminal offence today... [this] is a clear example of Genetic Sexual Attraction"
Happily, it is legal in progressive France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Portugal, Turkey, Brazil and Japan