Links - 15th September 2011

"I am not in this world to live up to other people's expectations, nor do I feel that the world must live up to mine." - Fritz Perls

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Coca-Cola Chicken Wings - "Many people don’t even realize it’s a Chinese dish, much less a common one. I have never seen it printed on a restaurant menu or in an English-language Chinese cookbook. It does, however, appear from time to time in Chinese-language cookbooks and on cooking shows, sometimes involving as few as three ingredients."

Avoid financial advisers | Tan Kin Lian's Blog - "My advice to consumers - avoid all financial advisers and insurance agents. Do not buy any investment or life insurance product from a person who approaches you. You will never know if you can become the next victim of this type of financial product."

Ursus Wehrli Creates Meticulous Art From The Everyday @PSFK - "Wehrli finds everyday situations of disorder and compulsively organizes them into neat rows according to color, size, shape, and type. Case and point, the pine branch arranged by needle size and an entire parking lot grouped together by color reveal hints of OCD behavior"

The Limping Middle Class - "Some say we couldn't have reversed the consequences of globalization and technological change. Yet the experiences of other nations, like Germany, suggest otherwise... The real reason for America's Great Regression was political... Yet the rich are now being bitten by their own success. Those at the top would be better off with a smaller share of a rapidly growing economy than a large share of one that's almost dead in the water"

High school student sold herself online to spite dad - YouTube - "A junior at a prestigious Taipei high school was arrested after she sold herself online. The girl engaged in relations with six men for US$1.75 a pop. She said she did it to get revenge on her father, who had confiscated her cell phone and forbidden her from surfing the Internet"

Is “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight,Red sky in morning, sailor’s warning” true? Everyday Mysteries

What teachers really want to tell parents - "This summer, I met a principal who was recently named as the administrator of the year in her state. She was loved and adored by all, but she told me she was leaving the profession. I screamed, "You can't leave us," and she quite bluntly replied, "Look, if I get an offer to lead a school system of orphans, I will be all over it, but I just can't deal with parents anymore; they are killing us""

How the World Failed Haiti - "This, then, is the legacy that decades of foreign investment have bestowed on Haiti: a brutal and intractable poverty, borne of a disastrous mix of well-intentioned aid and profit-driven development. Every decade or so, it seems, the world comes up with a bold new plan for saving Haiti — and each ultimately proves as ineffective and fleeting as the last."
Why is the outside world always to blame?

Her art asks: Can you believe your eyes? - "Many artists paint models, but Alexa Meade takes it to a whole new level. She applies paint directly onto living models, then photographs them in a way that tricks you into wondering: Is it art? Or is it real?"

9/11 Truth: Why Osama Bin Laden's death won't kill the conspiracy theories. - "As long as there is public distrust of government—and with the financial crisis, the collapse of the economy, and the recent debt ceiling debate, public opinion of Washington is at a record low—there will be conspiracy theories"

9/11 Truth: How conspiracy theorists react to apostates like Charlie Veitch. - "One man's poison pill is another's smoking gun... the people most adept at weakening the "9/11 Truth" movement were the truthers themselves. Because conspiracy theorists can't just have disagreements. If you disagree with a conspiracy theorist, then you probably belong to the conspiracy."

10 Things MASS EFFECT Fans MUST Know From Tie-ins

Successful woman to support house husband, kids - "The well-qualified man stayed at home caring for the kids while his wife worked as an IT manager, earning $12,000 a month. When they got divorced, the court made the woman support her ex-husband and kids. The ex-husband, was also given 40 per cent of the matrimonial assets (valued at about $700,000) as recognition for his sacrifices, though he had contributed only about 20 per cent."
A happy case from 2009
Keywords: alimony, maintenance, richer

Porn Studio Building Massive Underground Bunker to ‘Ride Out the 2012 Apocalypse'

Sex Ratios and Crime: Evidence from China’s One-Child Policy - "High sex ratios imply fewer married men, and marriage has been conjectured to be a socializing force. Our paper exploits the quasi-natural experiment generated by the Chinese one-child policy, a policy which is widely held to be behind the surplus of sons. While a national policy, its implementation was local. We show that the provincial level implementation was unrelated to contemporaneous economic characteristics of the province... Using annual province-level data for the period 1988-2004, we show that a 0.01 increase in the sex ratio raised violent and property crime rates by some 3%, suggesting that the rise in excess males may account for up to one-seventh of the overall rise in crime"

Porn Star Teacher Allowed to Go Back to the Classroom - ""British teacher Benedict Garrett was given a reprimand for working as a stripper and porn star while also serving as the head of personal, social, and health education at a high school in East London. Yup, that's right, the sex ed teacher was a porn star... Johnny Anglais... would be allowed to go back to the classroom if he gave up his moonlighting at bachelorette parties and in dirty movies"

SINGAPORE'S COUNTER-RADICALIZATION PROGRAM CLAIMS - "The RRG is a joke, Israeli Embassy DCM Idit Abu lamented to Poloff. The religious counselors are all either members of MUIS, or are connected to the organization, and at least among ethnic Malays in Singapore, MUIS is tainted, and everyone sees religious counselors as government lackeys... the Government of Singapore does not even have a good understanding of ethnic Malays in the country, let alone how and why some ethnic Malay Singaporeans have turned to religious extremism... "They are like children with guns. It's all a big game to them, and they have only avoided any serious terrorist incidents occurring here through sheer luck"... Many Malays feel marginalized in Singapore... Malays distrust MUIS and avoid expressing any discontentment with the government while attending services at local mosques. It is only privately that the Malay youth express their growing disillusionment, he said. Some disaffected Malays turn to crime... The GOS is not concerned about the up-tick in ethnic Malay criminal activities, because the authorities view the increase as an indication of growing secularity among Malays"

Weathering the Storm - "Failure destroys some people. Others rise from the ashes, only to come back stronger. A guide to surviving tough times."

Why we can never escape our siblings - "Only children tend to exceed other kids in terms of academic accomplishments, sophistication, vocabulary, and often, social skills as well"

Gmail man (Office 365 Advertisement) - YouTube - "Microsoft takes a swing at Google with this funny advertisement"

Facebook accused of covert smear campaign against Google

Chain of Fools : Upgrading through every version of windows (HQ) - YouTube - "The program manager icons created in Windows 3.0, which are still present and functional in Windows 7. This is nearly 20 years worth of application compatibility, and Microsoft should be applauded for their efforts in this regard"

Another Home spoils image of Singapore - "Spoofing is always preferable to what our past NDP songs have been doing all this while: Recycling. I present to you now the most over-used word that is not ‘We’ in the history of NDP songs"

Paleofuture - "Paleo-Future reader Tom T. sent me an amazing collection of postcards from the dawn of the twentieth century that depict what life would be like in the year 2000"

America’s Reactionary Feminists - "Geminism is philosophically as much in harmony with conservative, and especially libertarian, values – and in some ways even more so. The core of feminism is individual choice and freedom, and it is these strains that are being sounded now more by the Tea Party movement than by the left... It is blindness to this perfectly legitimate approach to feminism that keeps tripping up commentators who wish to dismiss women like Margaret Thatcher, or Muslim women, or now right-wing US women leaders, as somehow not being the “real thing”"

Strauss-Kahn and 5 other vexing sexual assault cases - "The “he said, she said” nature of such cases is one complicating factor (as is getting victims to report sexual assaults in the first place). But so are prosecutorial zeal, power politics, personal troubles of accusers, and even false accusation"

Media censorship: us versus them? - "When I was at ST in the 1990s, the working arrangement was clear. Reporters and columnists like me were to focus on being good journalists, write for our readers, and not try to second-guess what would make the government happy. Instead, our editors would shoulder the burden of making those difficult political judgment calls... my editors were actually sparing me from the thankless task of appeasing an impossible-to-please government... Given that the PAP government is not going to revise its philosophy on managing the media, the only other politically viable alternative formula would be for the entire newsroom to internalise the PAP’s thinking. That would be the only way to get rid of the frustration in the newsroom, but it would also kill what’s left of journalism"

The True Cost of the Royal Family - "The cost to maintain the royal family today is 40 million pounds per year. But the revenue paid to the UK from the royal lands is 200 million. 200 million in revenue subtract 40 million in salary costs equals 160 million pounds in profit. That’s right: The United Kingdom earns 160 million pounds in profit, every year from the Royal Family."

Quick note on divorce - "The point of this video – as indeed I did not realize at first – is to make opposition to homosexual “marriage” seem ridiculous through comparison to divorce. After all, no one in their right mind could possibly want to ban divorce, right?... And of course the response to this – and the reason I failed to perceive the satire at first – is to agree. To the folks who crafted that video, I say: yes, you’re right. If we are concerned about “protecting the family”, we should – and do – want to ban divorce as well. I may not have written it here, on this blog, but I have agreed for a long time that compared to divorce, homosexuality is a sideshow. No-fault divorce has wrought untold devastation upon the family and should be repealed at once"