Links - 11th June 2010

"The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously." - Nicholas Butler

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Useless, jobless men – the social blight of our age - "One in seven working-age households is dependent on benefits for more than half its income. More than half of all lone parents depend on the State for at least half their income. William Beveridge would be horrified to discover that the safety net he designed has become a trap, creating generations of worklessness and dwindling self-esteem. It is also creating a glut of unemployed, unwanted, unmarriageable men... The taxpayer has become the father: one in four mothers is single and more than half live on welfare... Robert Rowthorn, Professor of Economics at Cambridge, has shown that female and male worklessness have been going in opposite directions for 30 years, well before this latest “mancession”. His research suggests that half the rise in lone parenthood in the past 30 years may be due to male unemployment. He believes that governments must start to focus on these men, and question the feminisation of education and the workplace"

Tetris and its Connection to Confucianism - "Not only does the game consider the duality of order and chaos but trains and improves your decision-making skills... Tetris accesses a basic human desire that was the genesis of rituals in ancient China. One difference between the Tetris ritual and Xunzi’s philosophy lies in his conception of human nature as inherently bad... “The gentleman is harmonious but not conformist. The little man is conformist but not harmonious”. Finding the harmony between your speed and the skill level of the game is how to find the Way of Tetris, which is hidden just below the surface of normal play... Tetris, in its highest and purest form, is about learning how to fail"

Irreligious - redefining Christianity and religion.: Aftermath of a party - "God is with CHC. God will protect CHC. The wicked will get their just desserts. What they all seem to be saying is this: The church can do no wrong. Pastor Kong knows what he is doing. We trust him."

Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain - "We, non-believers, atheists, and ex-Muslims, are establishing or joining the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain to insist that no one be pigeonholed as Muslims with culturally relative rights nor deemed to be represented by regressive Islamic organisations and 'Muslim community leaders'. Those of us who have come forward with our names and photographs represent countless others who are unable or unwilling to do so because of the threats faced by those considered 'apostates' - punishable by death in countries under Islamic law."

YouTube - Mini Cannon Firing and Destroying Targets. Among the World's Smallest Guns - "Homemade miniature cannon shoots and destroys objects. It fires steel balls with great power and accuracy"

"Dream Ball" Project - "To the children in The Third World; Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, Congo and etc, who cann't enjoy football freely because of poverty, war and natural disaster, having a football means a lot and can be a dream and hope to escape from their poor life. However, the children are so poor that they can not buy a football. So, they play football with the ball made of plastic bag or a coconut palm leaves Therefore, giving them thier own footballs which can give them hope, is our aim of this project."
Using Aid Containers which turn into footballs - ingenious!

What a daft way to stop your spaniel eating the milkman - "As we know, one man once got on one plane in a pair of exploding hiking boots and as a result everyone else in the entire world is now forced to strip naked at airports and hand over their toiletries to a man in a high-visibility jacket. In other words, the behaviour of one man has skewed the concept of everyday life for everyone else. And we are seeing this all the time... We see the same sort of overreaction to paedophilia. Just because one man in your town likes to watch schoolgirls playing netball, you must apply for a licence if you wish to take a friend’s kids to school in the morning. And I now run the risk of having my camera impounded by the police if I take pictures of my children playing on the beach... We seem to have lost sight of the fact that throughout history 90% of people have behaved quite normally 90% of the time... What good did all the airport legislation achieve? None... Did it prevent a chap from getting on board with exploding underpants? No, it did not."

Hamas refuses flotilla aid delivered by Israel
I'm sure people will blame Israel somehow; "Hamas's forces have bulldozed the homes of Gazans who had moved onto former settlement land without authorisation"

Are Cameras the New Guns? - "When the police act as though cameras were the equivalent of guns pointed at them, there is a sense in which they are correct. Cameras have become the most effective weapon that ordinary people have to protect against and to expose police abuse. And the police want it to stop."

On Language - Revert - "As Alison Waters, a lexicographer at Oxford University Press, told The Indian Express, revert in the sense of "reply" is one of eight contributions from Indian English included in the latest batch of OALD additions. It has spread beyond India, however, cropping up in the English of Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and elsewhere. In these countries, the usage has occasionally been deemed improper by language authorities. Singapore's Speak Good English Movement, for example, labels it "a mistake" that should be avoided in official correspondence."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/carrotsglazedwithcum_80467? - "The worst shortened URL ever"

Unemployed women given £1,000 makeovers to help them find a solvent husband - "They estimate that if 70 women find a solvent husband, the council can save £330,000 on welfare payments. They also believe that finding love will help get the unemployed off state benefits by improving their confidence and ambitions. So far, just one candidate has signed up for the voluntary scheme, which is aimed at women but open to men as well... In 2008, jobless Dutch in Maastricht were given a 10-week course of 'regression therapy' at a cost of £720 in the hope that coming to terms with their past lives would help them find a job."

Publishing Company Under Fire for Putting Warning Label on Constitution - "Wilder Publications warns readers of its reprints of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, Common Sense, the Articles of Confederation, and the Federalist Papers, among others, that “This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values as it would if it were written today.” The disclaimer goes on to tell parents that they "might wish to discuss with their children how views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and interpersonal relations have changed since this book was written before allowing them to read this classic work." Walter Olson, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, says the company may be trying to ensure that oversensitive people don't pull its works off bookstore or library shelves... "Any idea that’s 100 years old will probably offend someone or other"... The warning seems to be offending more people than the documents themselves"

Gallery: Digitizing the past and present at the Library of Congress

Do Nice Guys Finish Last? (RP) - "I will employ popular culture, psychological research, feminist debates over experience, and random internet rants, in order to explore some of the discourse on this question to demonstrate why it is important, analyze attempts to answer it, and suggest a program of research to ask it in a more fruitful manner."
When I read "I originally wrote this paper for a Woman’s Studies class in college", I thought it was going to be crap, but it was surprisingly good, and an extensive survey of the literature on this issue
Addendum: This is from the website "Feminist Critics", at http://www.feministcritics.org/

BP OIL SPILL: Lord Tebbit and Boris Johnson attack Obama's 'anti-British' rhetoric - ""The whole might of American wealth and technology is displayed as utterly unable to deal with the disastrous spill - so what more natural than a crude, bigoted, xenophobic display of partisan political Presidential petulance against a multinational company?"... Lord Tebbit pointed out that U.S. engineering giant Halliburton was also involved in the events leading up to the Gulf disaster. And he added: 'It is time that our American were reminded that they sang a different tune when the American company Union Carbide killed many thousands of Indians at Bhopal. Not to mention when the American company Occidental killed 167 people on a North Sea oil rig in 1988"

Mind Over Mass Media - "NEW forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fiber. So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we’re told, is reducing discourse to bullet points... But such panics often fail basic reality checks... the denunciations of video games in the 1990s coincided with the great American crime decline... For a reality check today, take the state of science... scientists are never far from their e-mail, rarely touch paper and cannot lecture without PowerPoint... Critics of new media sometimes use science itself to press their case, citing research that shows how “experience can change the brain.” But cognitive neuroscientists roll their eyes at such talk... Media critics write as if the brain takes on the qualities of whatever it consumes, the informational equivalent of “you are what you eat.” As with primitive peoples who believe that eating fierce animals will make them fierce... Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart"
Keywords: "the internet is making us stupid", "the telegraph"