When a rape case should not go to court, by Helen Mirren - "Dame Helen Mirren was engulfed in controversy over the prosecution of date-rapists last night. In an interview, the actress said women who are raped after willingly going to bed with a man cannot expect their attackers to be charged... She said that if a woman voluntarily ended up in a man's bedroom, took her clothes off and engaged in sexual activity, she still had the right to say 'no' at the last second. If the man ignored her, Dame Helen said, that was rape. But she continued: 'I don't think she can have that man into court under those circumstances. I guess it is one of the many subtle parts of the men-women relationship that has to be negotiated and worked out between them.'... She recalled: 'I was [date-raped], yes. A couple of times. Not with excessive violence, but rather being locked in a room and made to have sex against my will. It's such a tricky area, isn't it? Especially if there is no violence. 'I mean, look at Mike Tyson [the boxer jailed for raping beauty pageant contestant Desiree Washington in an Indianapolis hotel room]. I don't think he was a rapist.'"
Luckily she isn't a man, or she'd be lynched.

Roman Empire 'raised HIV threat' - "The spread of the Roman Empire through Europe could help explain why those living in its former colonies are more vulnerable to HIV."

Rich Man’s Burden - "Perhaps for the first time since we’ve kept track of such things, higher-income folks work more hours than lower-wage earners do... At one time we worked hard so that someday we (or our children) wouldn’t have to. Today, the more we earn, the more we work, since the opportunity cost of not working is all the greater (and since the higher we go, the more relatively deprived we feel)... even with the same work hours and household duties, women with higher incomes report feeling more stressed than women with lower incomes... not only does more money not solve our problems at home, it may even make things worse... the better off you are in absolute terms, the more relatively deprived you may feel. In fact, a poll of New Yorkers found that those who earned more than $200,000 a year were the most likely of any income group to agree that “seeing other people with money” makes them feel poor... Rising inequality causes us to work more to keep up in an economy increasingly dominated by status goods. That further widens income differences."

Internet Explorer - "Internet Explorer does not support MathML (used here for equations) and has severely broken support for other Web Standards like CSS2 and XHTML. Most Web designers have bent over backwards to shelter you from the failings of this wretched browser. I have not. Aside from the equations, many things on these pages will render poorly or not at all in IE. If they do, I'm sorry, but I ain't gonna “fix it.” MathML support can be obtained with the aid of a new plugin. For the rest, you need to get yourself a Standards-Compliant browser, like Mozilla."

Thinking People Eat Too Much: Intellectual Work Found To Induce Excessive Calorie Intake - "Despite the low energy cost of mental work, the students spontaneously consumed 203 more calories after summarizing a text and 253 more calories after the computer tests. This represents a 23.6% and 29.4 % increase, respectively, compared with the rest period. Blood samples taken before, during, and after each session revealed that intellectual work causes much bigger fluctuations in glucose and insulin levels than rest periods."

Ravi Zacharias on the Reason Driven Podcast, and an analysis of all his nonsense. Among them: Dishonestly misrepresenting Peter Singer as claiming a child with Down's Syndrome is worse than a pig, claiming that if Sartre is right we should kill ourselves, making theism the default position to fall back to, bait and switching (changing the problem of Hell to that of Evil), the Euthyphro problem, "God is Holy" being unintelligible due to the lack of a falsifier; anyhow even if we accepted his fallacies, it'd commit us to deism at the most (such is the weakness of defending Christianity purely on philosophical grounds).

Where Everybody Knows Your Name - "If you don’t read Korean you’ll be surprised that the above photo is advertising a bar called “Hitler,” or “Hitler House,” as in the photo below. Hitler bars are growing rare in Korea, but they still exist... 'The owner of the just-opened Hitler’s Cross restaurant in Mumbai claims he’s not “trying to promote Hitler here.” Instead, Punit Sabhlok tells the Mumbai Mirror, the Nazi dictator “wanted to conquor the world by using force and I would like to do that by the food and service I provide.”'... I’m sure the person who owns this bar would say something similar. And, likewise I’m sure they’d be rightly pissed if someone opened a bar called Hirohito House."
My comment: Some would consider Che Guevara T-shirts to be offensive too.

Civilization IV: Colonization... Wow that looks offensive - "Goddamit, am I the only one who think it's morally disturbing to make a game that celebrates COLONIZATION?... It's entirely possible, even likely, that you can finish the game without killing any Native Americans. And I'm sure there are no options to give the Native Americans smallpox or send them on a death march. But that's irrelevant. A game about colonization that's entirely about controlling the settlers can either force the player to do horrific things or let him avoid doing it and whitewash some of the worst events of human history. Either option is offensive... Even more disturbing, though, is that colonization was and is a racist process. The colonizing people ALWAYS thought they were superior by dint of their ethnicity or nationality"
*FACEPALM*
Someone: "In Civilization I can take control of a european civilization and crush a non-european civilization. This must mean Civilization is a racist game, right? Of course, I could also crush the europeans as the noble but tough leader of a non-european civilization, which for some reason wouldn't be racist.
In Europa Universalis, I can trade in: *pause* SLAVES! Racist beyond belief!
In Heroes of Might and Magic I can use gather an army and kill countless numbers of creatures of other races. That would also be a racist game...
In Championship Manager I can choose to buy a player who in the real world is caucasian and leave a less pale player unemployed. I wouldn't know their colour unless they were very famous, and I don't think there's much chance of it influencing my decision, but in theory I could act in a racist way. This makes this game racist as well.
In Arcade Pool I can use a white ball to hit a black one and force it into a hole. Another racist game...
In summary every game I've ever played could be considered racist, with a bit of imagination... Making a game that deals with history without using a narrow-minded anti-european approach isn't racist. In my opinion, thoughtlessly crying racism at every opportunity *is*"
Someone else: "a game reporter/reviewer who's never heard of Colonization?"

Floridians like it raw - "The other day it was a maid cafe in Culver City, now we get word that naked sushi has made its way to Clearwater, Florida... 'Officials with the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation, which licenses restaurants, say Keir hasn’t violated health requirements. Even Mayor Frank Hibbard, who convinced Hooters’ owners in 2006 to reword a sexually suggestive billboard, says he’s letting this one go. He says little about the event other than, “I wouldn’t eat sushi off anyone’s body.”... “Every time Picasso had a girl pose nude in one of his paintings, was that demeaning? No, I don’t think it was,” he says. Inside the Dirty Martini, the patrons, half of them women, agree.'"

Japan's new professional seducers - "She is one of Japan’s new breed of professional seducers, hired by embittered spouses to entrap their straying partners. And she’ll stop at nothing to get the desired results... Kyoko finished school three years ago. She had seen TV programmes about girls who worked as temptresses and thought that might be a job for her... “It’s fun. I like seeing the underside of life,” she says, “and the money’s very good. I meet different targets every day. I’m not so keen on the old ones and I sometimes get to like the young ones. I sleep with all of them.” As for Mr A, “He’s not so bad. He’s bald, that’s all.”... “It’s much easier to seduce a man than a woman,”... Men are not suspicious when a lovely young girl starts chatting to them. Even a bald 40-year-old salesman in a crumpled suit with a cheap briefcase assumes he’s irresistible to women... “Around 27 women start to enjoy sex. I specialise in women in their late twenties who enjoy sex.”"
This is not so different from what you might read in WaiWai. No surprise. Damn Japs.