Who is the shark and who is the prey?

10 hours to Civilised Weather!

Will be in Macau from Friday till Sunday.

"The graveyards are full of indispensable men." - Charles de Gaulle

***

Hilarious:



"You started complaining that my tits are AA cups and too small! And you dumped me because of that?

Today, 3 months after we broke up, I want to show you something. Now, take a good look, I have a C cup! Don’t you regret dumping me now? And I bet you want to do me again, right? But sorry, you don’t stand a chance anymore. I won’t see you again and I will NEVER let you touch my C’s.

Ng Ga Ching, you could say I’m a bitch or that I have princess syndrome, but whatever it is, you can never say that I am small again. Look at them, they are C’s! You don’t even have a C on your school certificate."

(via chinaSMACK)

"Of course the game is rigged. Don't let that stop you--if you don't play, you can't win." - Robert Heinlein

***

International Skip School Day planned

"Some Facebook users have organised an "International Skip School Day", scheduled for today. And more than 1.2 million students have pledged to be part of it...

One secondary school principal, who did not want to be named, said... "Singapore students are generally very responsible and orderly. They know what to do and what not to do."


This is why Singapore will never be great, for greatness is not achieved by doing what you are supposed to do.

But then schools in Singapore are not primarily about learning, but rather social engineering, in part by enforcing strict conformity (down to the choice of school tailor, and whether your shirt or blouse has one square pleat or none).

"An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory." - Friedrich Engels

***

From the Facebook group, Overheard at the National University of Singapore:


"Roses are Red. Violets are Blue. Who is more powerful than LEE KUAN YEW?"

"I never vote for anyone; I always vote against." - W. C. Fields

***

Dilbert Short:Sensitivity Exercise



Dogbert: In this sensitivity exercise, close your eyes and imagine how it feels to be a woman.

Wally: People acknowledge my existence. They, smile for no reason and hold the door open. I'm, I'm popular.

Other co-worker: I can't find my keys.

Wally: I'm never going back! I can't! I won't!

Other co-worker: My blouse falls to the floor.

Dogbert: Break, break!


Also good:

Estro (on the male-female wage gap)

"The price of freedom of religion, or of speech, or of the press, is that we must put up with a good deal of rubbish." - Robert Jackson

***

Homeopathy on the NHS is unethical, doctors tell MPs - "The NHS spent £12m on homeopathic remedies between 2005 and 2008, money many critics said the health service could not afford... Unlike conventional drugs, homeopathic treatments can be sold without being proven to work in clinical trials. Instead, they can be marketed for mild conditions if homeopaths broadly agree the treatment relieves symptoms of a condition. Many scientists believe this exemption should be removed because it is misleading and undermines the credibility of pharmacists and the government's regulatory body, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency"

Business Information - "During the 1990s virtually an entire generation of top executives left their businesses, retired, or passed away. Many of these executives had achieved legendary status--[David] Packard at Hewlett-Packard, [Akio] Morita at Sony, [Sir John Harvey-] Jones at ICI, [Sam] Walton at Wal-Mart, and [Jan] Carlzon at SAS... This 'old guard' was the last of a breed of executives who developed their management skills almost entirely in the workplace... In 1993 businesses around the world spent $17 billion for consultants' recommendations, and AT&T alone lavished $347.1 million on outside expertise... we suspect that if those [managers] of years gone by found themselves at the helm of any of today's extraordinarily complex and competitive business enterprises, they would steer a straight and successful course"

What's The Harm? - "This site is designed to make a point about the danger of not thinking critically. Namely that you can easily be injured or killed by neglecting this important skill. We have collected the stories of over 670,000 people who have been injured or killed as a result of someone not thinking critically... Many proponents of these things will claim they are harmless. We aim to show that they are decidedly not."
Examples there: acupuncture, voodoo, Jehovah's Witnesses, Dowsing, Holocaust denial. Though for the last, all 5 cases of harm come about because of persecution, so it sucks as an example

Swiss prostitutes trained to use defibrillators in brothels to prevent clients dying - "Brothel owners in the Lugano area say electric shock treatment to restart customer's hearts is needed because so many elderly customers are using their services"

Tiger Woods Announces Return To Sex | The Onion - "Saying that fucking is his "calling and [his] one true passion," Woods spoke of how he has always adored the sight of a neatly trimmed mound, the smell of fresh stank early in the morning when the labia glisten with dewy juices, and the feel of a perfect impact with a woman's vagina... "I just have to take my time, visualize the line, and read the grain and the slope of the vulva correctly," Woods said. "It's really all mental at that point""
Racism!

ShadyURL - Don't just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening. - "Example: http://spongebob.nick.com/backstage/characters/spongebob/ becomes http://5z8.info/malicious-cookie_d5d2_hateminorities"

Tickle Cock Bridge returned to original name after row - "In an attempt to spare blushes, a council official suggested it was called Tittle Cott bridge and a plaque bearing the sanitised name was erected... “I was horrified at another example of the nanny state telling us something we don’t want to do.”"
Comment: "Apparently the first plaque was erected. I notice that to save embarassment when reverting to the traditional name, the replacement plaque will be installed."

Bacon burger backlash rocks France - "The Quick chain has taken pork off its menu in eateries in Roubaix, northern France, as well as in Marseille and in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil to try to tap into the growing market of Muslim customers... Roubaix town leaders on Thursday filed a complaint for discrimination, their lawyer Frank Berton told AFP. He said Quick was effectively making the supplying of its products conditional on religious affiliation. "I'm not bothered by the fact that there is a halal menu," said Roubaix's Mayor Rene Vandierendonck. "But this is going too far because it is the only menu on offer and it has become discrimination." French far-right politician Marine Le Pen suggested the Halal menus were providing a financial boost to Muslim organisations that certify meat as having been slaughtered in accordance with Islamic practices."

The 24 Best Chat Roulette Screenshots [NSFW] - "Chat Roulette is quickly becoming the go to site if you want to chat with the most socially depraved people you will ever interact with. It's mostly dudes masturbating, but every now and then you'll get a good laugh out of it."

How Christian Were the Founders? - "There was a religious element to the American Revolution, which was so pronounced that you could just as well view the event in religious as in political terms. Many of the founders, especially the Southerners, were rebelling simultaneously against state-church oppression and English rule... 'You couldn’t tell the story of the Pilgrims or the Puritans or the Dutch in New York without religion'... the founders were overwhelmingly Christian; that the deistic tendencies of a few — like Jefferson — were an anomaly; and that most Americans in the era were not just Christians but that “98 percent or more of Americans of European descent identified with Protestantism”"

OMG It’s The Ultimate Photobomber!
NSFW

Evgeni Plushenko - Sex Bomb

Evgeni Plushenko is damn sexy


Addendum: Better quality version of the same routine (performed sometime else):

"The truth is more important than the facts." - Frank Lloyd Wright

***

"Any society concerned with fairness must try to decide what general structures or modes of treatment, applied to persons who differ greatly one from another, will qualify morally as a form of equal treatment, or at least not egregiously unequal treatment. In some cases, such as the vote, identical treatment will do. In other cases, such as taxation or maternity leave, it clearly will not...

In the face of such a problem, there almost inevitably develops an opposition between liberal and radical approaches. Liberals attempt to discover a way of taking the differences into account in the design of fair institutions without hoping to transcend the differences themselves, because they are considered part of that human complexity and diversity that cannot be abolished without tyranny. Radicals are more optimistic about eliminating the source of the problem, root and branch, persuaded that differences that many find natural or inevitable are really the social product of temporary conditions, to be transformed by a revolution in conventions, mores, or human self-understanding. The conflict within feminism between liberals and radicals is an example of this classic problem...

[Nussbaum] says that Dworkin should have been “more circumspect” in her rhetoric to avoid giving the impression that she thinks all heterosexual intercourse is rape:

Examining her rhetoric with care, one may discern a far more plausible and interesting thesis: that the sexualization of dominance and submission, and the perpetuation of these structures through unequal laws (such as the failure to criminalize marital rape or to prosecute domestic violence effectively), have so pervasively infected the development of desire in our society that “you cannot separate the so-called abuses of women from the so-called normal uses of women.” This sentence certainly does not say that all acts of intercourse are abuses. It does say that the dominant paradigms of the normal are themselves culpable, so we can’t simply write off the acts of rapists and batterers by saying that they are “abnormal.” Gendered violence is too deep in our entire culture. (p. 245)

It is not perfectly clear what Nussbaum is saying, but she seems to be endorsing the claim that rape and battery are just fuller and franker expressions of the feelings present at the core of most heterosexual relations in our society.

MacKinnon and Dworkin have gotten a lot of mileage out of this charge... Anyone who does not flee from self-awareness knows that the inner life is a jungle, most of it never expressed. Apparently some women and some men are aroused by fantasies of rape and degradation, and there is pornography addressed to such fantasies, but it is simple-minded to regard this as a matter for societal concern.

The socially important features of sexual consciousness are more mainstream and closer to the surface... to overcome the maltreatment of women and the refusal to take them seriously it shouldn’t be necessary to attack all asymmetries in the sexual relation as infections of “dominance.”

Nussbaum has a lengthy discussion of the charge of “objectification,” in ‘which she comes down finally in favor of D. H. Lawrence’s way of seeing women as sex objects and against Playboy’s: “One cannot even imagine Mellors boasting in the locker room of the ‘hot number’ he had the previous night, or regarding the tits and ass or the sexual behavior of Connie as items of display in the male world.” This is rather high-minded, and uncharitable to the readers of Playboy, whose drooling over the centerfold need not be incompatible with treating women with respect and, even more important, with regarding the sexual desire and sexual behavior of women without contempt. Women’s bodies are great erotic vessels, and there is nothing wrong with erotic art that displays them as such and arouses the physical imagination...

Certainly the appeal to many women of Dworkin’s and MacKinnon’s violent images reveals something—if only that there is a great deal of sexual unhappiness out there. But as Nussbaum observes, one kind of sexual objectification, the surrender of autonomy and control during sex, can be personally and sexually fulfilling for women. Sexual dismantlement drives us all, men and women alike, deeper into our bodies and thereby reunifles the multiple layers from most to least civilized.

The mere fact that sexual desire and sexual relations are socially shaped does not mean that they have to be infected with injustice. Other natural appetites, for food and drink, are subject to elaborate, socially created forms of expression and fulfillment without carrying much of a message, except when they become vehicles for conspicuous consumption. Of course, sex is a relation bctween people and more likely to be entangled with their other relations. Yet sexual feelings are powerful enough to determine a good deal in their own right, whatever the social setting. It is not a mere convention that men and women are anatomically and sexually different and that in sexual intercourse these differences are imaginatively and physically expressed and acted out. Social structures can reach deep into the core of the self, but they usually do not replace it—certainly not in the case of anything as fundamental and powerful as sexuality...

The datum that convinces me that social construction is relatively powerless over sexual desire is the unquenchable survival of homosexuality in the face of the most severe repression and public obloquy. Nussbaum is sensibly skeptical about the social explanation of basic sexual orientation, invoking “the feeling of determination and constraint that is such a common feature of self-reports concerning homosexuality in our society.” We must distinguish, she rightly says, between the social explanation of norms and the social explanation of desires. One of her essays offers a heartfelt defense of gay and lesbian rights. It seems to me that the much-maligned desires of horny heterosexual males deserve comparable understanding."

--- Nussbaum on Sexual Injustice / Thomas Nagel

My dear Friend,

As you read this, I don't want you to feel sorry for me, because, I believe everyone will die someday.My name is Usman Ibrahim I am a merchant of Saudi Arabia nationality but presently residing in london. Ihave been diagnosed with Esophageal cancer .It has defiled all forms of medical treatment, and right now I have only about a few months to live,according to medical experts. I have not particularly lived my life so well, as I never really cared for anyone(not even myself)but my business.

I want God to be merciful to me and accept my soul so, I have decided to give alms to charity organizations, as I want this to be one of the last good deeds I do on earth. So far, I have distributed money to some charity organizations in the Oman, Algeria and Malaysia


IIRC, this is the first time I am getting a "I am dying. Please help me distribute my money to charity" from an avowed Muslim; the reference to "God" is usually to the Christian one.