Links - 19th February 2012

Louis Vuitton Condoms - "Louis Vuitton is holding up to their reputation by making it fashionable and expensive to have sex using one of their condoms, retailing at $68 dollars!"

Judas goat - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - "A Judas goat is a trained goat used at a slaughterhouse and in general animal herding. The Judas goat is trained to associate with sheep or cattle, leading them to a specific destination. In stockyards, a Judas goat will lead sheep to slaughter, while its own life is spared"

Why PAP Needs High Minister Salaries - "PAP needs this system of high ministerial pay, because they have turned the political system on its back. Instead of grooming a set of career politicians, PAP just keeps parachuting high-flyers from nowhere into office. Singaporeans have to ask themselves: is this the right kind of political system? Is this what we really want? Ministers who have no feeling, no empathy with the people, who are basically just headhunted to do a job. Or do we want a system where ministers work their way from MP’s, where they earn their stripes. If you understand this, you will see why PAP cannot pay ministers less than $1m"

I Spit on Your Grave - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - "Movie critic Roger Ebert gave the film no stars, referring to it as "a vile bag of garbage...without a shred of artistic distinction," adding that "Attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of my life." He mentioned in his review a female member of the audience (one of many people who randomly talked aloud) who had "feminist solidarity for the movie's heroine"... Michael Kaminski's 2007 article for the website "Obsessed with Film", titled "Is 'I Spit on Your Grave' Really a Misunderstood Feminist Film?" argues that, when understood within the context in which director Zarchi was inspired to make it, the movie may be equally appropriate to analyze as "feminist wish-fulfillment" and a vehicle of personal expression reacting to violence against women... in Australia. In 2004 the full uncut version was awarded an R 18+, lifting the seven-year ban. The Office of Film and Literature Classification justified this decision by reasoning that castration is not sexual violence (Australian censorship law forbids the release of films that depict scenes of sexual violence as acceptable or justified)"
Men are evil

Medical Daily: Dying from a Broken Heart is Possible: Study

Ponytail Shape Is Determined by Complex Physics - NYTimes.com

Huge-breasted model, 31, walks away from horror crash after 38KKK chest acts as airbag

Hamza Kashgari, a Saudi Writer, Detained in Malaysia Over Twitter Posts - NYTimes.com - "Malaysian police detained the writer, Hamza Kashgari, a 23-year-old columnist for the Jeddah-based Al Bilad newspaper, when he arrived at Kuala Lumpur International Airport on Thursday... the foreign affairs official said Malaysia does not grant asylum out of respect for the laws of other countries"
Not very smart of him. Would Malaysia grant asylum to a Muslim fleeing religious persecution?

Bound & Gagged - "The grand posture of writers in liberal democracies is that they are the moral equivalents of dissidents in repressive regimes... To maintain the illusion that they are part of some kind of radical underground, intellectuals must practise a deceit. They can never admit to their audience that fear of violent reprisals, ostracism or crippling financial penalties keeps them away from subjects that ought to concern them - and their fellow citizens... The cost of a libel action in England and Wales is 140 times the European average. Contrary to common law and natural justice, the burden of proof is on the defendant... By allowing libel tourists to fly to London and use our repressive laws, the English legal profession had also stopped the British investors from learning of the danger in investing in [Ireland's] banks"

Women are better at parking than men, study suggests - "The findings contradict not only popular belief but also previous research. Figures from the Driving Standards Agency last year disclosed that tens of thousands more women fail their driving test on parking errors than men. Researchers at the Ruhr University Bochum, in Germany also found that women take up to 20 seconds longer than men to park a car."
Female drivers != females != females who can drive

BioEdge: Is it morally wrong to take a life? Not really, say bioethicists - "[I]f killing were wrong just because it is causing death or the loss of life, then the same principle would apply with the same strength to pulling weeds out of a garden. If it is not immoral to weed a garden, then life as such cannot really be sacred, and killing as such cannot be morally wrong"

List of common Chinese surnames in Singapore - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tan has the highest share of 9.5%

Skepticblog » Science TV “network decay” - "Four channels that used to be largely documentaries on science and history are now dominated by guns, explosions, dangerous occupations and other “reality” TV. Their shows have buzz words in the titles like “biggest”, “wildest”, “monsters” or “killers”, and plain old junk fill up most of their air time... since these are commercial channels that must sell ads based on numbers of viewers, the same factors that affect every other commercial enterprise came into play"

How Video Games Helped Treat a Burned War Veteran

Nagging in Marriage Is More Common Than Adultery But Can Also Lead to Divorce - WSJ.com - "Research that Dr. Markman published in 2010 in the Journal of Family Psychology indicates that couples who became unhappy five years into their marriage had a roughly 20% increase in negative communication patterns consistent with nagging, and a 12% decrease in positive communication. "Nagging is an enemy of love, if allowed to persist""

More Doctors 'Fire' Vaccine Refusers - "Pediatricians fed up with parents who refuse to vaccinate their children out of concern it can cause autism or other problems increasingly are "firing" such families from their practices, raising questions about a doctor's responsibility to these patients... a major factor was the concern that unimmunized children could pose a danger in the waiting room to infants or sick children who haven't yet been fully vaccinated"
"In Australia you also lose tax benefits if you don't immunize your kids. Society imposing a cost on being irrational before your kids (or someone else's) pays the price."

Why Thousands of Iranian Women Are Training to Be Ninjas - "Watching the video above, if you look past the tiger-striped costumes and over-the-top production, you can glimpse the self-empowerment of these women in a society that seeks to rob them of power, and perhaps begin to understand why ninjutsu, and athletics in general, have become so popular with Iranian women... women in Iran are stronger collectively and more assertive individually than the Islamic Republic would have us believe. After all, its laws and restrictions would not be necessary if Iranian women were as powerless as the religious leaders hoped. It is precisely because Iranian women do wield power in their society and homes that the country's reactionary leaders feel compelled to imbalance the playing field, to pass laws taking that dignity and influence away"
Interestingly, this argument means that "patriarchal oppression" is actually a sign of female power

Supply, Demand, and Valentine’s Day « - "After female participants read an article describing a dearth of men in the local population, the amount of money they expected a man to spend on dinner, Valentine’s Day, and engagement rings decreased (and likewise, they expected men to woo them more lavishly when there were reportedly more men than women)."

Sex brings partners closer emotionally survey - "Sixty-six per cent of men and 72 per cent of women felt loved by their partners during sex. These are some of the findings from the latest Global Sexual Wellbeing survey conducted by Durex to understand consumers sexual attitudes and behaviours. On sexual satisfaction, respondents in Singapore seem hard to please. Singapore scored a national average of 58 per cent, making them the second least satisfied country globally. Fifty-four per cent of men felt satisfied with their partners when it comes to sexual pleasure while 62 per cent of women claimed their partners are good at providing sexual pleasure."
SG women are worse in bed than SG men

Leaving Singapore, and discovering certain truths about this famous city state - "The Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts... mission and ‘values’: “To create a favourable view of Singapore among Singapore residents and the international audience” is a very polite way of saying “You’ll rarely hear anything bad about Singapore because we won’t let you say anything bad about Singapore!”... It makes sense now, why many of us in India perceive Singapore in such positive light. All I ever knew about Singapore prior to my first visit in 2010 was how strict the laws were, the sights I saw from all the Indian films that were filmed in Singapore and travel shows. If there’s one thing Singapore is really good at, it’s marketing itself... despite Singapore’s claim of racial integration as one of its strongest aspects, I still didn’t see many inter-racial couples... Singapore has more culture than all of UAE likes to claim it has... there are many who view Singapore as ‘perfect’ nation... Compared to most Asian nations, it honestly is... [My second time in Singapore] there was a sense of boredom already. There was little else for me to explore"

Airline Flamingo Air offers passengers chance to join the 'Mile High Club' with in-flight sex - "That was 21 years ago. Today, and thousands of customers later, these so called "flights of fancy" are nearly half of his business. But what happens behind the pilot's curtain, that's none of his business."
Other tidbits: "A study last year revealed that a whopping 95 percent of plane passengers want to become part of the mile-high club (20 percent claim to have already joined.)"
"At least five men have refused to go after their wives booked the trip -- and those marriages ultimately ended in divorce. And one couple even conceived a child aboard the plane."

Sean Penn blasts UK for refusing to hand over Falkland Islands to Argentina - "‘A good number of his movies have been turkeys, so I suppose we shouldn’t expect much better coming out of his mouth’... ‘In the 21st century people have a democratic right to their own future. It is Argentina that is trying to impose its wishes on the people of the Falklands. As an American he should remember that freedom is precious, and it is something his countrymen have defended around the globe. He must understand that the UK is equally entitled to defend the freedom of the people of the Falklands, even if they are 8,000 miles away’... 'Do we expect the French to land on the Isle of Wight and do nothing about it?'"
Ironically Penn has blasted the US for its "simplistic and inflammatory view of good and evil"