Links - 26th July 2011

"Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. Teach a man to create an artificial shortage of fish and he will eat steak." - Jay Leno

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Dominique Strauss-Kahn case 'on verge of collapse' amid doubts over maid - "Prosecutors have serious concerns about the credibility of the 32-year-old maid who accused Mr Strauss-Kahn of attempting to rape her... He is under house arrest and armed guard, and must wear an electronic tag. But the newspaper said that the flaws in the prosecution were so great that he could soon also have all eight criminal charges against him - including attempted rape and criminal sexual acts - dismissed"
I expected the feminists to go silent, declining to pursue the implications of the more recent DSK developments. What's sauce for the gander is also sauce for the goose... (or should be, without feminarchy anyway). Predictably, they went down another track but that just provides more sauce to throw back

Bernard-Henri Lévy: Lessons of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair - "The “shame on you’s” that greeted Dominique Strauss-Kahn as he arrived for the hearing on June 6th, shouted by battalions of hotel chambermaids who knew nothing of the actual case and whose protest had been orchestrated and scripted, were obscene... Dominique Strauss-Kahn was no longer Dominique Strauss-Kahn... He was the symbol of arrogant France. He was the emblem of the world of the privileged, odiously sure of their own impunity. He was the mirror of this world of white global bankers that constitutes Wall Street—one that the other America, the Main Street of every city in the country, sees as the quintessential enemy... The sad thing is, that’s not what justice is. Justice doesn’t oppose symbols, but human beings... “That Dreyfus is guilty, I deduce not from the facts themselves, but from his race.” The Strauss-Kahn affair is obviously unrelated to the Dreyfus affair... giving voice to the lowly is one thing. Considering this voice as Gospel is quite another... after George W. Bush’s invention of the concept of “pre-emptive war,” America, under Cyrus Vance, Jr., has perhaps begun to invent the idea, scarcely less horrifying, of “pre-emptive penalty”"

How to Train a Husband - "Amy Sutherland, a journalist who spent a year at an animal-trainer school and decided to apply the trainers' techniques to her husband's annoying habits... [Critics] contend that books such as Sutherland's reinforce war-of-the-sexes stereotypes about women using their feminine wiles to manipulate simple-minded men. The idea of women training simple men is a well-worn trope of pop culture. In the 1963 film "If a Man Answers," Sandra Dee's mother hands her a canine-training manual with the advice "If you want a perfect marriage, treat your husband like a dog." More recently, the BBC reality show "Bring Your Husband to Heel" featured a professional dog trainer teaching wives how to get their husbands to sit and stay"
The differential reaction to the "Obedient Wives Club" and things like this (Addendum: i.e. the Obedient Husbands Club) is very telling

Gym workout caused tremor at Seoul building: Experts

Zimbabwe man claims rape by gang of women - ""The intentions by the three women are not clear but we suspect it could be for ritual purposes," he added. While sexual attacks by women throughout the country have been carried out by various numbers of women, Bvudzijena says that victims have all been caught unaware when they were drugged... There is currently no law on the books in Zimbabwe for rape by a woman"

TOKUSATSUS - O maior blog de downloads de Tokusatsu do Brasil!
Lots of Tokusatsu video files - both subbed/dubbed in Portuguese and Raws. I found hard-to-find J.A.K.Q. Dengekitai raws here

33 Reasons Librarians are Still Extremely Important - "Eliminating libraries would cut short an important process of cultural evolution: The library that we are most familiar with today – a public or academic institution that lends out books for free – is a product of the democratization of knowledge. In the old days, books weren't always so affordable, and private libraries, or book clubs, were a privilege of the rich. This started changing during the 1800's, with more public libraries popping up and the invention of the Dewey Decimal Classification system to standardize the catalogues and indexes"
Summary: "We're romantic just as we used to idolise memory and condemn writing as making humanity stupider"
"We haven't digitised everything"
"We can't digitise everything"
"We don't understand the web"

The humble physicist - "My colleague from the English department asked if the behavior she had just witnessed was typical of what happens when scientists get together. When we assured her it was, she commented, “Wow. It seems like you all are really trying to get at the truth. In my field, we just stand up and try to show how smart we are.”"

Living With Breasts That Can Be Seen From Orbit - "I've found that nothing helps my breast-related self-image quite so much as sleeping with women. If you're not queer, sorry about that, but for the girl-on-girl crowd: When was the last time you thought “Wow, I wish her breasts were smaller/bigger/perkier/farther apart/a different shape”? Probably never. Probably you usually think something along the lines of “Hell yes, naked girl!” Seeing other women's bodies in a context where you're enjoying, not critiquing, can help you reframe your relationship with your own body in the same way."

Broken Taboos Take Center Stage in Singapore - NYTimes.com - "“Both our media and education system have been very poor at providing Singaporeans with a language with which to discuss politics. And just when the people were beginning to speak, they would often be dismissed as ‘complaining,’ airing ‘grievances’ or ‘venting.’ I’m quite sure that if these ‘complaints’ were given more recognition as genuine and honest examples of political expression, then many would have been able to develop the confidence to improve and refine how politics is discussed and debated in this country.” ... “The piece is very masculine, and in Singapore that very masculine point of view is not very often heard of.” ... “I think heterosexuals are a bit under-represented right now in local plays”"

Big Content's latest antipiracy weapon: extradition - "If people can be extradited for copyright infringement by countries in which they haven't set foot, "every website like this could give rise to prosecution in several jurisdictions. It will become impossible for the person to defend without spending millions of dollars.""

World’s Richest Man: ‘Charity Doesn’t Solve Anything’ - "“The only way to fight poverty is with employment,” he said. “Trillions of dollars have been given to charity in the last 50 years, and they don’t solve anything.”"

Somali militants block foreign aid from famine-hit south
They're probably denouncing the famine as a Western Anti-Islamic Conspiracy

Discovery of a More Equal Number of Viking Women - "The society they lived in was pretty egalitarian. Originally, the researchers who have been studying Viking society mis-identified the remains of the settlers as male because they were often buried with swords and shields. Finally sorting them by their bones, instead, it was recently discovered that approximately half of the remains were female."

Pictures: Fake Chinese Apple store fools staff - "A fake Apple store so convincing even the staff think they work for Steve Jobs"

HARRY POTTER AND THE FILM PHD - "In essence, episodes two to eight are all remakes of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” (2001)"

Ramen Walker: Making Ajitama (味玉)

‪The Albert Heijn Song‬‏ - YouTube

Why Taipei’s MRT trumps Singapore’s - "Taipei proves it is possible to offer a high-quality, high-frequency and affordable MRT service without losing money. It also suggests that certain services, such as public transport, tend to function optimally as natural monopolies and ought not to be owned by companies that seek to maximise profits"

Are Singaporeans selfish self-centred people? I put it to the test - "We had convened 2 hours after we seperated and the stories flowed out, to my astonishment my story was by far the most mundane…"
Best comment: "What if it's 4 males doing this experiment? Would it have the same results?... you can't just set up social experiments in a haphazard manner and then proclaiming the end result as positive and definite"

Google is changing your brain, study says, and don't you forget it - "When we know where to find information, we're less likely to remember it -- an amnesia dubbed The Google Effect... It doesn't prove that we're incapable of thinking long and hard about anything, she said. "And it could be that once we stop worrying about memorizing dates and facts and names, we're better able to concentrate." In fact, a wired life may actually open up more creative things to do with our brain, the team said. Psychologists have long known that it is easier to grasp an abstract concept when the brain is not fixated on memorizing facts"
"this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves"

The Logic and Morality of Feminism - "If the masculine terms used to describe God in the Bible are proof of its hostility toward women, then the masculine terms in which it characterizes Satan must be proof of its hostility toward men.  Yet we can go further: if the Bible is a piece of “misogyny,” then why is Wisdom, which Christians later identified with God, feminine?  The name of “Judas” has for 2000 years been synonymous with unspeakable treachery throughout Christendom; so horrible is it that in spite of having once been fairly common, it has been millennia since any parent in the Western world thought to curse his child with it.  Indeed, Judas, the apostle who betrayed Christ, is the Villain Extraordinaire in the Western imagination, and has been for thousands of years.  Why, we may ask, would the authors of a book (or collection of books) allegedly shot through with “misogyny” identify, not women, but men and male figures as the worst of monsters? Why would it not infrequently portray women as being the most loyal servants of God?"