So degrading to wash cars topless while others watched - "WHAT really happened at the topless car wash? Were the models really topless? Were they misled into taking part, or did they go in with their eyes open? All four models and their freelance agent have challenged the organiser's version of the event.... All four girls said they took off their bikini tops but kept their nude-coloured nipple tape on throughout... Mr Chen insisted all the models took off their nipple tapes. To prove it, he showed The New Paper on Sunday one uncensored low-resolution picture showing Cara's exposed breasts. But she said: 'I swear, I never never took it off. It must have been edited to look like I wasn't wearing anything.'"
Right. How come no one asks the participants (i.e. drivers)?

Britons Weary of Surveillance in Minor Cases - "A report in 2007 by the lobbying group Privacy International placed Britain in the bottom five countries for its record on privacy and surveillance, on a par with Singapore... It is legal for localities to follow residents secretly. Local governments regularly use these surveillance powers — which they “self-authorize,” without oversight from judges or law enforcement officers — to... investigate reports of noise pollution and people who do not clean up their dogs’ waste. Local governments use them to catch people who fail to recycle, people who put their trash out too early, people who sell fireworks without licenses, people whose dogs bark too loudly and people who illegally operate taxicabs... the localities and agencies can film people with hidden cameras, trawl through communication traffic data like phone calls and Web site visits"

Animal welfare in Nazi Germany - Wikipedia - "There was widespread support for animal welfare in Nazi Germany and the Nazis took several measures to ensure protection of animals. Many Nazi leaders, including Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring, were supporters of animal protection. Several Nazis were environmentalists, and species protection and animal welfare were significant issues in the Nazi regime. Heinrich Himmler made efforts to ban the hunting of animals. Göring was an animal lover and conservationist. The current animal welfare laws in Germany are more or less modification of the laws introduced by the Nazis."
PETA would approve.

Women and shoes: A love affair in pairs - "Actress Penelope Cruz confesses: "I have never been able to study a new role until, alongside the director, we choose the shoes which the woman we are about to bring to the screen will be wearing. Everything starts down there." More than anything else, women's shoes speak the language of sex. You don't have to be a moralist or an anthropologist in order to understand the message transmitted by a girl in a pair of rubber-soled loafers versus one wearing noisy stilettos... A high-heeled shoe is the object of apparel that - more than any other - marks the difference between men and women... "Sometimes, when we're about to shoot a closeup, the director will say to me that I can take off my shoes as my feet won't be in the frame," said actress Sarah Jessica Parker. "But I've never done it. The expression of a woman in flats is totally different from one in heels.""

False Sex Abuse Accusations Lead to Revision of Theories - "The research showed that between 23 percent and 33 percent of child sexual abuse cases involved false allegations, between 2 percent and 8 percent of cases involved deliberate lies by children, and the majority of reported cases were unfounded"

The Truth of Interracial Rape in the United States - "Like Ahab's search for the Great White Whale, liberals' search for the Great White Defendant is relentless and never-ending. When, in 1988, Tawana Brawley's and Al Sharpton's then year-old spectacular charge that several white men including prosecutor Steven Pagones (whose name Brawley had picked out of a newspaper article) had abducted and raped the 15 year old was shown to be completely false, the Nation said it didn't matter, since the charges expressed the essential nature of white men's treatment of black women in this country. When the Duke University lacrosse players were accused of raping a black stripper last year, liberals everywhere treated the accusation as fact, because... the rape charge seemed to the minds of liberals to reflect the true nature of oppressive racial and sexual relations in America... In the United States in 2005, 37,460 white females were sexually assaulted or raped by a black man, while between zero and ten black females were sexually assaulted or raped by a white man"
The figures sounded like inflammatory lynch mob material, but when I checked the figures for 2006 they were similar to the quoted ones for 2005. Of course one can pick on the "Perceived race of offender", but that won't explain the large discrepancy. You can't blame underreporting either since this was from the National Criminal Victimization Survey (i.e. people saying if they'd been a victim of crime).
Another interesting finding: not only are White people incompetent interracial robbers, they are violent AND incompetent interracial robbers

What Do You Have Against Women? - "One obstacle to gender equality are those women who demand equal treatment in public, while demanding unequal treatment in private... It is an objective fact that most serial killers are men. To hide this fact is to mislead the public about a matter of public concern... women have no hesitation in saying the most rapists are men. The reason? It's an objective fact — most rapists really are men. But if I say that most false accusers are women, someone will certainly complain that I am saying most women are false accusers... As a general rule, men don't make ridiculous accusations of bias. Editors know this, so they publish virtually anything if it's only offensive to men, not women. Before you ask "where's your evidence?", a request to which you have every right, here it is: "All men are rapists, and that's all they are." — Marilyn French, in "The Women's Room" (1977) The book was published without hesitation and still sees brisk sales... I've had many conversations like this over the years. They follow this general pattern:
* "You can't say that about women!"
* "Can I say it about men?"
* "Uhh ... sure, why not? Men are animals.""

not martha - Meat Hand

Giant breasts shock China - ""The park used to be a great place for families, but now what attracts my son the most is the huge breasts. "I have tried to educate him with some scientific knowledge, but all he thinks when he sees the statue are smutty thoughts"... "The little girls were scared and cried loudly, asking me if they would grow those huge things""

Man sues over lack of 'Lynx effect' - ""The company cheated me because in its advertisements, it says women will be attracted to you if you use Axe. I used it for seven years but no girl came to me."... "There is no data to substantiate the supposition that unattractive and unintelligent men don't attract women. "In fact some of the best looking women have been known to marry and date absolutely ghoulish guys""

Living in a cage in Hong Kong - "Chung lives in a 625 square foot (58.06 square meter) flat here with 18 strangers... The 19 occupants share two toilets"
There is actually something to the government's statement: "People choose to live in bedspace apartments and cubicles because these apartments, apart from commanding a low rental level, are mostly conveniently located in the urban area"

A Pretty Face or a Hot Body? - "If you were interested in pursuing a partner for a short-term relationship which would you be most interested in…their face or their body? And for a long-term relationship?... They asked 375 college students to pick whether to date someone based on either seeing just their face or their body. Nearly all participants chose to see the face. Except for one of the sexes in one situation... "We found that everyone was more interested in the opposite sex person’s face than their body—except for men in the short-term mating condition."... Freud famously asked, what do women want. I guess it was clear to him what men wanted."
This explains "cover the face, bang the base" (or bomb the base). The explanation is not a very strong one (maybe they'll firm it up when they write a paper), but the results at least have been replicated elsewhere

The SuperFreakonomics Global-Warming Fact Quiz - Freakonomics Blog - "Our question, at noted above, is what is the cheapest, fastest way to quickly cool the Earth... But that is not the question that Al Gore and the climate scientists are trying to answer. The sorts of questions they tend to ask are “What is the ‘right’ amount of carbon to emit?” or “Is it moral for this generation to put carbon into the air when future generations will pay the price?” or “What are the responsibilities of humankind to the planet?”"

Goodbye GeoCities: 7 Retro Things We'll Miss Forever - "1) Under Construction GIFs
2) HTML... HTML makes it harder to add a hyperlink than to make text scroll horizontally across the page. That’s where priorities were in the Netscape days.
3) Guestbooks
4) FAQs
5) Webmasters
6) Take me to the top
7) Visitor counters...
We’ll miss the impossible to remember URLs. We’re going to miss hand-coding our pages in Notepad. We’ll even miss the ridiculously invasive ads"

Giz Explains: Why Every Country Has a Different F#$ng Plug - Worldwide electric plugs

Daddies be damned! Who are the British women who think fathers are irrelevant? - "Having reached the age of 38 without meeting Mr Right, Karen Shefras decided to become a mother by using donated sperm... According to one gynaecologist the Mail spoke to this week, as many as 50 per cent of patients being given sperm at his clinic are single women or are in same-sex relationships... In the end, perhaps the truth is that, for complete fulfilment, women need both a partner and children. The most worrying question of all is why the most natural thing in the world has become so seemingly difficult to achieve, and why a generation of women have fallen foul of their dreams."

The Kids Are All Right - "Many people claim that all the graphic imagery and information floating around the internet will warp young minds and stunt the maturity of our children. Maybe. Maybe not. Older generations always bemoan the morals of those who come after them. People thought my generation would turn out to be a cohort of criminals, deviants and slackers. That happened to some of us sure, but most people my age are well into careers, raising families and just as confused about life as their parents before them. And when it comes to sex no single generation can claim the moral high ground... The kids of today will inherit their own particular set of problems, especially regarding sex. But they’ll develop their own coping skills and muddle though"