Links - 29th May 2014

HDL ‘Good Cholesterol’ Found Not to Cut Heart Risk - NYTimes.com - "Now, a new study that makes use of powerful databases of genetic information has found that raising HDL levels may not make any difference to heart disease risk. People who inherit genes that give them naturally higher HDL levels throughout life have no less heart disease than those who inherit genes that give them slightly lower levels. If HDL were protective, those with genes causing higher levels should have had less heart disease"

Why Alcohol Is Good for You - "Heavy drinkers also live longer than abstainers. (Only 61 percent of heavy drinkers died during the study.) In other words, consuming disturbingly large amounts of alcohol seems to be better than drinking none at all... drinking isn’t just about de-stressing. In fact, the cultural traditions surrounding alcohol tend to emphasize a second, and perhaps even more important, function: socializing... moderate drinkers have more friends and higher quality “friend support” than abstainers. They’re also more likely to be married."

Knee Surgery No Better Than Placebo - "Perez was assigned to the placebo group of the trial: He was given anesthesia and doctors made incisions in his knee so that it looked as though he had an arthroscope inserted. This sham surgery group was compared to other patients who underwent an actual arthroscopic procedure"
Meanwhile, most faith healing is for pain...

The Problem With Eyewitness Testimony - "Bias creeps into memory without our knowledge, without our awareness. While confidence and accuracy are generally correlated, when misleading information is given, witness confidence is often higher for the incorrect information than for the correct information. This leads many to question the competence of the average person to determine credibility issues. Juries are the fact-finders, and credibility issues are to be determined by juries. The issue then arises whether juries are equipped to make these determinations. Expert testimony may not be helpful. Indeed, since the very act of forming a memory creates distortion, how can anyone uncover the "truth" behind a person’s statements? Perhaps it is the terrible truth that in many cases we are simply not capable of determining what happened, yet are duty-bound to so determine. Maybe this is why we cling to the sanctity of the jury and the secrecy of jury findings"

When radiologists take a selfie - Imgur

George R.R. Martin on 'Game of Thrones' and Sexual Violence - NYTimes.com - NYTimes.com - "Q. Why have you included incidents of rape or sexual violence in your “Song of Ice and Fire” novels? What larger themes are you trying to bring out with these scenes?
A. An artist has an obligation to tell the truth. My novels are epic fantasy, but they are inspired by and grounded in history. Rape and sexual violence have been a part of every war ever fought, from the ancient Sumerians to our present day. To omit them from a narrative centered on war and power would have been fundamentally false and dishonest, and would have undermined one of the themes of the books: that the true horrors of human history derive not from orcs and Dark Lords, but from ourselves. We are the monsters. (And the heroes too). Each of us has within himself the capacity for great good, and great evil... I have to take issue with the notion that Westeros is a “dark and depraved place.” It’s not the Disneyland Middle Ages, no, and that was quite deliberate … but it is no darker nor more depraved than our own world. History is written in blood. The atrocities in “A Song of Ice and Fire,” sexual and otherwise, pale in comparison to what can be found in any good history book. As for the criticism that some of the scenes of sexual violence are titillating, to me that says more about these critics than about my books. Maybe they found certain scenes titillating. Most of my readers, I suspect, read them as intended."
I suppose critics want to bowdlerize Shakespeare too. Why is it okay to slaughter thousands, but not to rape one woman?

For ‘Game of Thrones,’ Rising Unease Over Rape’s Recurring Role - NYTimes.com - "At a certain point, you get the feeling that you can’t walk through a chapter without expecting something horrible — almost always to a female character — just to prove that this is indeed a very scary and dark piece of literature"
You have to be a feminist to think that A Song of Ice and Fire visits horrible things "almost always" on females

The Ever Increasing Size of Godzilla: Implications for Sexual Selection and Urine Production - "So why is Godzilla obtaining ever larger sizes with time? Skyscrapers. Skyscraper height has increased dramatically over the last century. For Godzilla to continue to plow through buildings in major metropolises, a more formidable size is needed. Of course this size change can only be evolutionarily adaptive if it changes the fitness of Godzilla, i.e. in the simplest case the number of offspring passed to the next generation. If Godzilla is able to topple buildings this might allow for greater acquisition of resources in this case food in the form of people. This would increase the lifespan of Godzilla allow for more reproduction or allow for greater amount of energy to be passed to the offspring increasing their rate of survival Or perhaps toppling buildings is a sexual display that sexual partners cue on. Sexual selection! Of course the real problem of a 55,000 ton Godzilla is the urine production. Using the handy Kaiju post, we can quickly calculate that, 151,436,928 gallons per day. That is about 1.8 of the largest production oil tankers."

New report highlights the BBC's Islamism and immigration bias - "Ed West, the author of the study, writes that like any organisation, the BBC has a "tendency towards groupthink" and one that perhaps reflects "minority - even elitist - viewpoint[s]". Examples of the bias include the use of "unanimously pro-migration interviews" for a special feature on migration in 2002 - a feature which has been slammed as "propaganda". Even the television soap opera, Eastenders, has been criticised for masking the real truth about immigration in Britain, with the report suggesting that the predominantly white cast in East London is not reflective of reality. It states, "a realistic East London soap opera would have to show a white family moving out every year, to be replaced by Bangladeshis or Somalis, and much of the programme would need to be subtitled." Broadcaster Jeff Randall, formerly of the BBC, suggested that the organisation's attitudes to multiculturalism were not impartial, stating, "When I was there, this was not up for grabs. Multiculturalism was 'a good thing'. The BBC supported it. Don’t take my word for it because, when I complained to the BBC about our coverage of asylum-seekers, this is what I got back from a very senior BBC news executive: 'Jeff, the BBC internally is not neutral about multiculturalism. It believes in it, and it promotes diversity. Let’s face up to that'." On the subject of Islamism, the report asserts that the BBC "tends to downplay activities on the part of Islamists". An unnamed producer revealed that, "The BBC has a set of anxieties about Islam... they think it's quaint." The BBC's schools website, aimed at educating children, apparently gives an uncritical view of Islam, one in which men and woman are equal and 'the Prophet Muhammed stressed the importance of women'. But coverage of Christianity tends to be more harsh, with the same website stating, "Many people think the Christian Church is sexist. It does not treat men and women equally." The corporation has also been charged with being, "soft on honour killing and FGM (female genital mutiliation)" according to an unnamed producer working within the organisation"

Sony Crams 3,700 Blu-Rays' Worth of Storage in a Single Cassette Tape - "Stupid hipster 80s fetishism notwithstanding, cassette tapes don't get much love. That's a shame, because magnetic tape is still a surprisingly robust way to back up data. Especially now: Sony just unveiled tape that holds a whopping 148 GB per square inch, meaning a cassette could hold 185 TB of data"

Military Personnel Reveal The Most Unusual Punishments They've Ever Seen | Business Insider

How Singapore’s media restrictions hurt even the PAP - "Singapore’s recent past suggests that governance has suffered as a result of the media regulatory regime. Problems were not tackled in time, not because they emerged suddenly and out of the blue, but because censorship allowed the government to remain in denial for too long. I recall that back in the 1990s, when I was a journalist in the national media, there were already signs of unease about the government’s immigration policies. I had colleagues who felt it was in the public interest to investigate the generous Singapore Inc scholarships for foreign nationals, for example. Certainly, there were also many journalists knew they should report and comment on the great public unhappiness about the new policy on market-pegged ministerial salaries. And newsrooms were fully aware of the mounting anxiety about healthcare and other costs, as a result of the PAP’s neoliberal turn towards market fundamentalism... By dampening doubts and dissent, by allowing government to operate in an echo chamber, the media gave yesterday’s policy makers an easier ride. But, today’s policy makers are paying the price."

Singapore Inc. Needs a Rethink, Economists Say - Southeast Asia Real Time - WSJ - "the current social contract – optimal for places with young populations, rapid growth, full employment, and rising real wages – “would not be sufficient to ensure equitable and inclusive growth in the face of the changes unleashed by globalization, rapid technological change, and our own policies,” the economists said in the paper released Monday on the IPS website. The authors include academics and former senior civil servants who carry significant heft in policy-making circles, including Manu Bhaskaran, a partner at consultancy Centennial Group and adjunct research fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy; Donald Low, a former senior bureaucrat at Singapore’s finance ministry; Tan Kim Song, an economics professor at the Singapore Management University; and Yeoh Lam Keong, former chief economist at the Government of Singapore Investment Corp... These electoral setbacks “reflected a discontent with the current model of economic and social development: the over-riding emphasis on growth over distribution; the inadequacy of our social safety nets and the uncertainty this creates; wage stagnation for significant elements of the workforce even as a small segment at the top enjoys large increases; and the increase in inequality,” the economists wrote in the paper... The solution, they said, involves creating sturdier social safety nets and rolling back a market-fundamentalist approach that has transferred risks from the state to citizens in areas like public housing, social security, and healthcare. While retaining the essence of Singapore’s admired social institutions, policy makers should also borrow successful ideas from Scandinavian and East Asian contemporaries, and reject existing dogma – like the insistence on the virtues of small government and low taxes, and a reflexive rejection of expanded welfare – the economists said."

The Stereotype of #YesAllWomen

#YesAllWomen in the wake of Elliot Rodger: Why it’s so hard for men to recognize misogyny.

"When women took to Twitter to share their own everyday experiences with men who had reduced them to sexual conquests and threatened them with violence for failing to comply—filing their anecdotes under the hashtag #YesAllWomen—some men joined in to express surprise at these revelations, which amassed more quickly than observers could digest. How can some men manage to appear polite, kind, even “wonderful” in public while perpetuating sexism under the radar of other men’s notice? And how could this dynamic be so obvious to so many women, yet completely foreign to the men in their lives? Some #YesAllWomen contributors suggested that men simply aren’t paying attention to misogyny. Others claimed that they deliberately ignore it. There could also be a performative aspect to this public outpouring of male shock—a man who expresses his own lack of awareness of sexism implicitly absolves himself of his own contributions to it.

But there are other, more insidious hurdles that prevent male bystanders from helping to fight violence against women. Among men, misogyny hides in plain sight, and not just because most men are oblivious to the problem or callous toward its impact. Men who objectify and threaten women often strategically obscure their actions from other men, taking care to harass women when other men aren’t around...

A drunk man stepped right between us... we politely endured him as he dominated our conversation, insisted on hugging me, and talked too long about his obsession with my friend’s hair. I escaped inside, and my friend followed a few minutes later. The guy had asked for her phone number, and she had declined, informing him that she was married and, by the way, her husband was at the party. “Why did I say that? I wouldn’t have been interested in him even if I weren’t married,” she told me. “Being married was, like, the sixth most pressing reason you weren’t into him,” I said. We agreed that she had said this because aggressive men are more likely to defer to another man’s domain than to accept a woman’s autonomous rejection of him...

Another young woman was alone at the bar when an older man scooted next to her. He was aggressive, wasted, and sitting too close, but she smiled curtly at his ramblings and laughed softly at his jokes as she patiently downed her drink. “Why is she humoring him?” my friend asked me. “You would never do that.” I was too embarrassed to say: “Because he looks scary” and “I do it all the time.”

Women who have experienced this can recognize that placating these men is a rational choice, a form of self-defense to protect against setting off an aggressor. But to male bystanders, it often looks like a warm welcome, and that helps to shift blame in the public eye from the harasser and onto his target, who’s failed to respond with the type of masculine bravado that men more easily recognize. Two weeks before the murders, Louis C.K.—who has always recognized pervasive male violence against women in his stand-up—spelled out how this works in an episode of Louie, where he recalls watching a man and a woman walking together on a date. “He goes to kiss her, and she does an amazing thing that women somehow learn how to do—she hugged him very warmly. Men think this is affection, but what this is is a boxing maneuver.” Women “are better at rejecting us than we are,” C.K. said. “They have the skills to reject men in the way that we can then not kill them.”"


While the coping strategies are interesting, a Gramscian analysis would say that women are complicit in their consent, and are thus part of the problem.

Also, it's rich that this is presented as an "all women" problem, considering these are people who are normally against "stereotypes". Some stereotypes (e.g. "male privilege") are evidently more acceptable than others.


"A survey of 10,648 women federal workers by the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) in 1980. In the survey, which defined harassment very broadly ('unwanted sexual attention'), about 40 percent of women reported having been harassed within the preceding two years; an update in 1988 reported a rate of 42 percent. Men in the original MSPB study reported harassment rates of about 15 percent"

- Sexual Harassment as an Ethical Issue in Academic Life / Leslie Francis


That is possibly workplace-only sexual harassment, but from other sources:

Statistics – Academic and Community Studies- Stop Street Harassment

"Using a national sample of 12,300 Canadian women ages 18 and older from 1994, sociology professors Ross Macmillan, Annette Nierobisz, and Sandy Welsh studied the impact of street harassment on women’s perceived sense of safety in 2000. During their research, they found that over 80 percent of the women surveyed had experienced male stranger harassment in public...

Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates conducted a nationally representative telephone survey of 612 adult women between June 17 and June 19, 2000. From this survey, they found that almost all women had experienced street harassment: 87 percent of American women between the ages of 18-64 had been harassed by a male stranger; and over one half of them experienced “extreme” harassment including being touched, grabbed, rubbed, brushed or followed by a strange man on the street or other public place...

During the summer of 2003, members of the Rogers Park Young Women’s Action Team in Chicago surveyed 168 neighborhood girls and young women (most of whom were African American or Latina) ages 10 to 19 about street harassment and interviewed 34 more in focus groups. They published their findings in a report titled “Hey Cutie, Can I Get Your Digits?” Of their respondents, 86 percent had been catcalled on the street, 36 percent said men harassed them daily...

83 percent of women in Tel Aviv reported experiencing street harassment in a study conducted by the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality’s committee for advancing the status of women...

In a poll conducted by the Ending Violence Against Women (EVAW) Coalition in London, 43 percent of young women ages 18-34 had experienced street harassment just during the past year alone. The total sample size was 1047 adults and the poll was conducted in early March 2012...

France: “Researchers from The National Institute of Statistics and Economics Studies found in a 2013 study that 25% of women aged 18-29 reported being scared when they walked on the streets. They also discovered that 1 in 5 women have suffered from verbal harassment on the street in the past year, and 1 in 10 said they had been kissed or caressed against their consent.”"


What many of the sources do not report (at least according to the summary here) is frequency. It is misleading to say that 99% of women have been sexually harassed if for half of them the incidents took place more than a year ago.

I would say the France and London results are the most telling - only 25-43% of young women experienced street harassment in the past year. Consider that this is the age group most likely to be victims of street harassment (and that the past year is not an especially short period of time) and the frequency of harassment, while significant, is nowhere near as prevalent as what #YesAllWomen would suggest.

Links - 26th May 2014

These Dreamy Photos Answer The Question: 'What Would I Have Looked Like In Another Decade?' - "Ohio State University student Annalisa Hartlaub was able to paint a picture by depicting each decade's quintessential mainstream and counterculture looks. Using herself as a model and tinting each picture to realistically reflect the technology of the decade, Hartlaub's "Counter // Culture" photo project catalogs nearly 100 years of fashion history from 1920 through today. "

Should We Raise the Minimum Wage? 11 Questions and Answers - Jordan Weissmann - The Atlantic - "By the 1980s, economists largely agreed that increasing the minimum wage hurt employment among teens and other unskilled workers. But that consensus collapsed during the next decade, with the rise of what’s known now as the “new minimum wage research.” The chief demolition crew consisted of David Card and Alan Krueger, whose most famous study compared employment at fast food restaurants in New Jersey, where the minimum wage had recently been raised, with employment at fast food restaurants in Pennsylvania, where wages stayed stable. When Card and Krueger analyzed the results of this “natural experiment,” they found no evidence that raising worker pay had killed jobs. That sparked a fight that’s continued on, in various permutations, to today. Conservatives tend to champion work by David Neumark, an economist at the University of California-Irvine, and William Wascher, of the Federal Reserve Board. Early critics of Card and Krueger, their research compares employment trends across entire states, using elaborate statistical controls to isolate the impact of minimum wages. They have consistently found that requiring businesses to pay their workers more reduces employment among teens. Liberals, meanwhile, favor work by a group of economists fronted by Arindrajit Dube of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dube is best co-authored study that used contemporary data to essentially repeat Card and Krueger’s natural experiment in thousands of counties across the the country. It found no significant evidence that higher minimum wages hurt employment among restaurant workers. Both sides have criticized each others’ ideas fiercely, and attempted variations on the other sides’ preferred research methods, mostly, it seems, to show how their their academic nemeses botched their own approach. Meanwhile, Jonathan Meer and Jeremy West of Texas A&M University have recently added a new wrinkle to the controversy with a paper that says minimum wages can noticeably bring reduce total employment by slowing down hiring. Now they're in a fight with Dube. And so it goes."

A summit of food safety experts leaves 100 ill with food poisoning.

The end of Sarah Palin - "If the politically engaged seem bored with Obama, they have all but forgotten Sarah Barracuda, the manqué of anti-Obama populism... My personal favorite line was this: "The American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of 'personal discovery.'" You could almost hear that punch landing."

Oberlin College tables its trigger warning policy: Do the warnings threaten academic freedom? - "Blecher said the problem with the policy and trigger warnings generally is that “what could trigger off somebody in the abstract is almost anything.” That means that professors in all kinds of disciplines could have to rethink what they teach and how—and how to warn students about it ahead of time. Referring to language in the tabled policy, he said, “it had this long list of ‘isms,’ so you’d end up having to fill your whole syllabus with their advice or suggestions, depending on what you’re teaching.” As to the policy’s alternative reading suggestion, Blecher added, “What are you going to do, have two syllabi?”"
Comment: "I'm someone who's supposed to be helped by trigger warnings and I think the idea is stupid. I was sexually assaulted by a coach as a kid. It left me with definite issues with male authority figures. In grade 7 I had a gay teacher. Trust me, that year was just one long trigger warning. But even in grade 7 I knew the issue was mine to deal with. I'm not going to ask the teacher to stop being male. I'm sorry but you have to deal with the issues yourself. You can maybe ask your friends to be very empathetic about certain issues but even then it's easier for me just to drop out of some conversations than expect everyone else to watch what they say. I can't and don't want to control the world or expect it to coddle me. I do want to focus on how I react to the world."

How the Tea Party movement can save itself and become a powerful force for good. - "What does everyone get wrong about the Tea Party? When Democratic Rep. Charlie Rangel described it as a collection of “mean, racist people,” he was doing little more than bluntly restating views that are widely held on the left. When Tea Party conservatives counter such charges of racism by noting the popularity of African-Americans like Ben Carson, Allen West, Herman Cain, and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, they are routinely dismissed. One scholar, University of Washington political scientist Christopher Parker, went so far as to attribute the rise of conservative black candidates and activists to Tea Party prominence to the triumph of tokenism. Yet when you delve into Parker’s data on the racial attitudes of white voters toward blacks, as Robert VerBruggen and Cathy Young did a few years back, you’ll find that the views of whites who support the Tea Party and those who don’t are not that far apart. It turns out that whites who have negative attitudes about minorities tend to also have negative attitudes about other whites. You’d be on much firmer ground calling the Tea Party cranky than you would be calling it racist... Tea Party conservatives will often distinguish between government transfers that flow to deserving productive citizens (like themselves) and those that benefit people they see as undeserving freeloaders (unlike themselves)... But this distinction was absolutely central to FDR’s New Deal and Bill Clinton’s commitment to help those who “work hard and play by the rules.” Few serious people deny that means-tested programs can make it hard for poor families to climb the economic ladder, and there is nothing hypocritical about believing both that these programs should be made more work-friendly and that the safety net for older Americans should be protected. Finally, the Tea Party has been assailed as inauthentic, a faux grassroots, “astroturf” movement financed by shadowy elites who have essentially duped an army of cranky retirees into doing their bidding... The fact that wealthy campaign donors are far more likely to support establishment Republicans over Tea Party conservatives in GOP primaries tells a different story."

Alice Robb – How Capital Letters Became Internet Code for Yelling - "In 2006, Belgian software developer Pieter Hintjens launched the “CAPSoff” campaign, aiming to get the offending key kicked off the keyboard altogether."

Rolling to good health? Senior citizens hooked on strange activity - "Every weekday morning, they take turns rolling down a slope at Bedok Reservoir. They are led by 71-year-old retiree Lew Keh Lam, known to the group as 'Master', who started the activity seven years ago. Mr Lew claims rolling downhill can cure all forms of ailments, including cancer, Parkinson's Disease and stroke. "Our body is short of negative ions. In the morning, before the sun shines, there're a lot of negative ions in the grass. If your body requires the negative ions, it will allow you to roll, and when you don't need it, it won't let you roll," said Mr Lew in Mandarin."

Donald Sterling’s racist history: The L.A. Clippers owner hurt more minorities as a property owner. - "Sterling caused actual harm to dozens of families, and the response was near silence. And it’s in that contrast that we can clearly see our public hypocrisy on racism. When it comes to open bigotry, everyone is an anti-racist. The same Republicans who question the Civil Rights Act and oppose race-conscious policy are on the front lines when it’s time to denounce the outlandish racism of the day. “I wholeheartedly disagree with him,” said Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul in response to Cliven Bundy’s digression on “the Negro.” Sean Hannity, the Fox News personality who championed Bundy’s cause of free grazing rights, blasted Bundy for his “ignorant, racist, repugnant, despicable” comments. Indeed, the mere hint of racial insensitivity is enough to bring the hammer down, as we rush to refute and repudiate the transgressor... At the same time, we all but ignore the other dimension of racism—the policies and procedures that sustain our system of racial inequality... In a world where racism looks like cartoonish bigotry, it’s hard to build broad outrage for unfair voter identification laws or huge disparities in health care access... Lyndon Johnson’s prejudice—he said the word nigger, a lot—is less important than his civil rights record... A world where Donald Sterling hates black people but rents to them at fair prices is better than one where he loves them, but still discriminates."
One of the perils of oversensitivity to offensive words: you ignore actions that cause real harm to the groups you supposedly want to protect (though not all the examples of supposedly harmful actions are necessarily unjustifiable)

"A trained ape could get a status of forces agreement": Was Donald Rumsfeld's attack on Obama's foreign policy race-baiting? - "while making the case for war with Iraq, he used the “trained ape” reference again... It’s clear that Rumsfeld likes the reference, which is why he used it again when criticizing the Obama administration over its policies in Afghanistan... The response from the Internet was predictable... it’s clear from the context of Rumsfeld’s remarks that this wasn’t a reference to President Obama, specifically. To wit, the sentence that immediately preceded “A trained ape could get a status of forces agreement” was “This administration, the White House and the State Department have failed to get a status of forces agreement.” It’s a broad target that encompasses a range of people, not just Obama. In fact, when you consider the full interview, it’s easy to see the rhetorical logic... From his self-interested description of administration diplomacy to his unacknowledged role in facilitating the status quo, there’s a lot to criticize in Rumsfeld’s short interview. What’s unfair is to attack him for race-baiting. You don’t have to like the Iraq war architect (I don’t!) to see that he was using a favorite phrase, not whistling to the racists"
It's easier to denounce someone as racist (yet again) and dismiss him than to show how he is wrong

Lyndon Johnson was a civil rights hero. But also a racist. - "Perhaps the simple explanation, which Johnson likely understood better than most, was that there is no magic formula through which people can emancipate themselves from prejudice, no finish line that when crossed, awards a person’s soul with a shining medal of purity in matters of race. All we can offer is a commitment to justice in word and deed, that must be honored but from which we will all occasionally fall short. Maybe when Johnson said “it is not just Negroes but all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry,” he really meant all of us, including himself. Nor should Johnson’s racism overshadow what he did to push America toward the unfulfilled promise of its founding. When Republicans say they’re the Party of Lincoln, they don’t mean they’re the party of deporting black people to West Africa, or the party of opposing black suffrage, or the party of allowing states the authority to bar freedmen from migrating there, all options Lincoln considered. They mean they’re the party that crushed the slave empire of the Confederacy and helped free black Americans from bondage. But we shouldn’t forget Johnson’s racism, either. After Johnson’s death, Parker would reflect on the Johnson who championed the landmark civil rights bills that formally ended American apartheid, and write, “I loved that Lyndon Johnson.” Then he remembered the president who called him a nigger, and he wrote, “I hated that Lyndon Johnson.”"

Trolling FAPs for Fun and Amusement

(On Roy Ngerng)

A: "Our tongue is just like a two edged knife. Choose to bless and not to hurt."

Heavenly Father, teach us to be gentle as we speak. Convict our hearts and guard our lips. To be mindful of the words that we speak today.

Problem is Roy has chose to hurt so it is only fair he gets back his just desserts. Had he chosen to bless others

Me: I guess Lee Kuan Yew deserves what's coming to him then.

A: You carry on twisting words and insulting others, you just wait and see how the almighty will "take care" of you. KARMA is a bitch, don't say we didn't warn you.

Me: You might wish to know that you have just committed an offence under Section 508 of the Penal Code, Act caused by inducing a person to believe that he will be rendered an object of divine displeasure

"Whoever voluntarily causes or attempts to cause any person to do anything which that person is not legally bound to do, or to omit to do anything which he is legally entitled to do, by inducing or attempting to induce that person to believe that he, or any person in whom he is interested, will become or will be rendered by some act of the offender an object of divine displeasure if he does not do the thing which it is the object of the offender to cause him to do, or if he does the thing which it is the object of the offender to cause him to omit, shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to one year, or with fine, or with both."

A: Again, stop twisting words and playing the fool here.

Me: Verily, I am unworthy and worth less than dust. I abase myself.

B: Dafuq did I just read lol...

Ten Gurumantras for a cool life

Ten Gurumantras for a cool life:

1. Money is not everything. There's also Mastercard & Visa.

2. One should love animals. They are tasty too.

3. Save water. Drink on the rocks.

4. Fruits/Salads are healthy. So leave it for  sick.

5. Books are holy. So don't touch them.

6. Don't shout in the office. It disturbs those who are sleeping.

7. Love thy neighbor. But don't get caught.

8. Hard work never killed anyone, but why take the chance.

9. Why do something today when it can be done tomorrow. By someone else.

10. Every one should marry because happiness is not the only thing in life