Links - 3rd March 2011

"Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday." - Don Marquis

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Singapore’s most tech-enabled taxi - "Comfort DelGro (the taxi company) has not stopped him from outfitting his taxi, but they have warned him that should they receive negative feedback from passengers, he will have to remove everything from his taxi"
Apparently one piece of negative feedback, no matter how inane, will outweigh all the positive reviews from his clients. So one idiot can ruin things for everyone. Hell, a jealous rival could just pretend to be an irate passenger

Twitter is a playground for spiteful Lefty bullies - "I... was called a "c***", a "t***" and a "spoof figure" with "archaic views" who was "an embarrassment to young people". A charity worker near where I live expressed her desire to, in her words, cut me up... Moir wrote a piece that asked tough but pertinent questions about a gay culture that may have contributed to Stephen Gately's death. She was pounced on by the offence brigade and branded "homophobic"... why are bullying and death threats now considered a socially acceptable way to express disagreement with someone in a public forum? And how come it always seems to be the Left doing the shouting?... Twitter rather disproves the case that forcing people to "own" their remarks might move them to be more reasonable... with a media increasingly taking its cues from Twitter and Facebook, platforms colonised by spoilt urban liberals, won't the so-called "silent majority" of Middle England become even more disenfranchised, and, consequently, suffer still further from under-representation and ridicule?"
Why were the Bolsheviks and the Nazis so similar?

Great Gatsby 'Nintendo' game released online - "The San Francisco developer, Charlie Hoey, actually created, coded and published the game with the help of his friend Pete Smith as a tribute to their nostalgic love of old NES games"

Cool car plate much? on Twitpic

Onward & Upward With the Arts: Listen To This - "For at least a century, [classical] music has been captive to a cult of mediocre élitism that tries to manufacture self-esteem by clutching at empty formulas of intellectual superiority... A complete version of the Death of Classical Music Archive would go back to the fourteenth century, when the sensuous melodies of ars nova were thought to signal the end of civilization... [Composers] have gone through a rough stretch in the past hundred years, facing external obstacles (Hitler and Stalin were amateur music critics) as well as problems of their own invention (“Why doesn’t anyone like our beautiful twelve-tone music?”)... There may be kids out there who lost their virginity during Brahms’s D-Minor Piano Concerto, but they don’t want to tell the story and you don’t want to hear it... At an early performance of “Parsifal,” listeners hissed an unmusical vulgarian who yelled out “Bravo!” after the Flower Maidens scene. The troublemaker had reason to feel embarrassed; he had written the opera. The Wagnerians were taking Wagner more seriously than he took himself—an alarming development... Jazz was satisfying a hunger for popular art that in previous eras only classical composers had been able to satisfy... All music becomes classical music in the end"

Diabetic's discrimination lawsuit against sushi restaurant is hard to swallow
Diabetic sues sushi restaurant for not letting him skip the rice in a sushi buffet

The new face of porn - "Now there is porn for everyone. Literally. There are websites that have audio recordings describing pornographic websites for blind people (pornfortheblind.org...), porn full of saucy deaf people getting it on and using sign language to express their desires (deafbunny.com) and sites that cater to everything from our fear and fascination with Middle Eastern and Muslim women (arabstreethookers.com) to snot fetishes (seriously: see snotgirls.com if you dare)... the biggest irony may be that sexually empowered feminist women have gone from being critics of pornography to being major consumers of it. Pornography, like sex itself, is fraught with complexity and contradiction, but the failure of anti-porn feminism was ultimately positive. Out of its ashes came a new culture of porn that is serious and steadfast in its dedication to pleasure and politics"

Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he's from the future - "Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had travelled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world... "Countries do not exist where I am from. The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and Kit-Kats for everyone. It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I'm here to stop it ever happening""

Uniformed Letter Carrier with Child in Mailbag - "After parcel post service was introduced in 1913, at least two children were sent by the service"

Pedophilia a ‘sexual orientation’ experts tell Parliament - "“Pedophiles are not simply people who commit a small offence from time to time but rather are grappling with what is equivalent to a sexual orientation just like another individual may be grappling with heterosexuality or even homosexuality,” emphasized Van Gijseghem. “True pedophiles have an exclusive preference for children, which is the same as having a sexual orientation. You cannot change this person’s sexual orientation.” He added, however: “He may however remain abstinent.”"

John Dominic Crossan's 'blasphemous' portrait of Jesus - "Crossan's overarching message is that you don't have to accept the Jesus of dogma. There's another Jesus hidden in Scripture and history who has been ignored... The first Christians told Jesus' resurrection story as a parable, not as a fact... If you believe in a God that uses violence to "save" humanity, you'll start believing that violence is permissible in certain circumstances, such as suicide bombing or invading other countries to spread democracy, Crossan says. The human addiction to violence, though, is so ingrained that even the authors of the New Testament had trouble accepting Jesus' nonviolence, Crossan says. So they did a little editing. Crossan's proof: Jesus preaches nonviolence at the beginning of the New Testament. By the book of Revelation, he's leading armies through heaven to kill evildoers. "Christianity both admits and subverts the historical Jesus," Crossan says"

19th-century China: Clashing with the foreign devils | The Economist - "Sun Yat-sen... held the ethnic Manchus who controlled the dynasty in more contempt than the Westerners who had forcibly set up colonial enclaves, the Russians who had carved off part of Manchuria, or the Japanese who had taken Taiwan after a war in 1895. To keep the story simple, the [Communist] party prefers to view the Manchus as Chinese... Described now as a humiliation, the establishment of foreign settlements was not always seen this way by the Chinese. Mr Bickers says the arrangement was “simply a variant of the long-established practice of allowing sojourning communities to organise their own affairs”. The term “unequal treaties”, now routinely used in China to describe the agreements reached between foreign powers and the Qing government after several military defeats, was unknown until 1923. Chinese nationalism, portrayed by the party in terms suggesting it had always been a force, was slow and fitful in its 19th-century awakening... rising nations, eager to extend their global reach and easily riled by the slights of other powers, have a habit of behaving badly"

Cat-lover stole from Salvation Army to save strays - "Fined $2,000... Neo Chuan Seng, 54, a newspaper vendor had committed the offence in January last year. He pleaded guilty and told investigators that he had hoped to sell the clothes and use the proceeds to take care of stray and injured cats"
You know you're a crazy cat lover when cats are more important to you than humans

Sometimes Invasive Species Are Good - "Biologists are often biased against invasives, and decline to notice or report instances of beneficial invasions."

10 Reasons Why I Love Being A Woman (Take The Pledge!) - "1. I get to carry my babies around with me for 9 months and then bring them into the world.
2. I get to fall into the arms of the man I love, feeling accepted, protected and completely loved.
3. I get to wear high heels and flat shoes (and sandals and Fit-Flops).
4. I get to cut and grow out and colour my hair on a whim.
5. I get to ferry my kids from school to class to sailing to gym and drink bubble tea with them and talk.
6. The Singapore Woman’s Charter.
7. I get full licence to cry when I lose a body part. Aron Rolston had to be macho about it for 127 Hours.
8. I get to put on a bikini when I’m feeling skinny and a maillot when I’m feeling soggy.
9. When I’m down, all it takes is a new lip gloss—not a BMW—to cheer me up.
10. I never get my wee-wee caught in my jeans zipper.
11. I can still go for Zumba class no matter how old I get."
The flip side of "10 Reasons Why I Love Being A Woman" is "10 Reasons Why I Hate Being A Man"

Man loses $200K – and the girl – in online scam - "A Naperville man is out $200,000 after wiring money to an online girlfriend he didn’t realize was a fake"

Yoga vs Vodka (picture)

Blasphemy Law and the Marginalisation of Pakistan’s Moderate Muslims - "The outpouring of grief, condemnation and soul searching by liberal and moderate writers has conveyed an impression that there is widespread revulsion over the assassination. Nothing can be farther from the truth. According to Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai, the ‘moderates’ have a strong presence only in the editorial pages of the English language press, the readership of which is not more than a few hundred thousand in a nation of close to 180 million people... street and state power has been steadily shifting away from this marginalised section, as is evident from million man marches in support of Qadri, the showering of rose petals on Qadri by Pakistani lawyers, and the difficulty of finding a cleric willing to read Taseer’s funeral prayers. Even worse, leading lights of the lawyers movement, who never tired of telling the world that they were fighting in defence of rule of law and a more liberal state, flatly refused to publicly condemn Qadri... the struggle in Pakistan is no longer between moderate and radical Islam, but between two competing versions of radical Islam... The best that the ‘moderates’ can come up with is that the fundamentalists do not represent the ‘silent majority"... “the phrase ‘silent majority’ in Pakistan can only be used in the context of its original meaning — it originates from Homer’s Odyssey, and refers to the dead who are in the majority as compared to the living”... What the ‘moderates’ cannot or don’t want to understand is that the extremists don’t need to win a majority in Parliament to push for what they want"
Keywords: Pakistan, extremism, moderates lost, English language newspapers, radicalism

Vatican confirms report of sexual abuse and rape of nuns by priests in 23 countries - "Most of the abuse has occurred in Africa, where priests vowed to celibacy, who previously sought out prostitutes, have preyed on nuns to avoid contracting the Aids virus... some [reports] have been in circulation for at least seven years... In extreme instances, the priests had made nuns pregnant and then encouraged them to have abortions... In one case in which an African sister was forced to have an abortion, she died during the operation and her aggressor led the funeral mass... a vicar in one African diocese had talked "quite openly" about sex, saying that "celibacy in the African context means a priest does not get married, but does not mean he does not have children"... One of the most tragic elements that emerges is the fate of the victims. While the offending priests are usually moved or sent away for studies, the women are normally chased out of their religious orders, they are then either to scared to return to their families or are rejected by them. they often finished up as outcasts, or, in a cruel twist of irony, as prostitutes, making a meagre living from an act they had vowed never to do"