Links - 8th February 2013

A Shocking Death, a Financial Lesson and Help for Others - NYTimes.com - "The site offers some basic financial advice, gives away free templates for a master checklist and provides starter forms to draft a will, living will and power of attorney. There’s also a guide to starting a list of all of the accounts in your life that someone might need to access and shut down in your absence... She also urges people to leave traces of themselves. This is particularly crucial for parents who fetishize every piece of preschool artwork and capture every meaningful moment but rarely come out from behind the camera themselves."

Muslim-Western Tensions Persist | Pew Global Attitudes Project - "Muslims express more unfavorable opinions about Christians than Americans or Europeans express about Muslims... Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere who say relations with the West are bad overwhelmingly blame the West. However, while Americans and Europeans tend to blame Muslims for bad relations, significant numbers believe Westerners are responsible... In four of the six largely Christian nations included in the study, most say they have a positive opinion of Muslims... Narrow majorities of Jordanian (57%) and Indonesian (52%) Muslims also give Christians a favorable rating, while in Egypt – which has recently experienced violence between elements of its Muslim and Christian communities – views are divided (48% favorable; 47% unfavorable). Meanwhile, very few Muslims in Pakistan (16%) or Turkey (6%) have a positive opinion of Christians. Ratings for Jews are uniformly low in the predominantly Muslim nations surveyed – in all seven of these nations, less than 10% have a positive opinion of Jews. Indeed, outside of Indonesia, less than 5% offer a positive opinion... Muslims associate a number of negative traits with Westerners. Across the Muslim publics surveyed, the median percentages saying people in Western countries such as the U.S. and Europe are selfish, violent, greedy, immoral, arrogant and fanatical exceed 50%... Non-Muslims in Western Europe, the U.S. and Russia offer somewhat more positive assessments of Muslims than Muslims do of Westerners... few think Muslims are respectful of women... Muslims tend to identify with their religion, rather than their nationality... Lebanon and the Palestinian territories are exceptions to this pattern... Throughout Europe, most Christians think of themselves primarily in terms of their national identity. Fully 90% of French Christians take this view. The clear exception is the U.S... There is no Muslim public in which even 30% accept that Arabs conducted the [9/11] attacks. Indeed, Muslims in Jordan, Egypt, and Turkey are less likely to accept this today than in 2006."
Islamophobia!

Chinese millionaire street sweeper refuses to give up work

Explaining Underweight BMI and Body Dissatisfaction among Young Korean Women - "Khang et al. noted a statistically significant rise in underweight rates among women aged 20–39, from 8.2% in 1998 to 13.2% in 2007... the direction of this trend toward underweight uniquely among the demographic of women aged 20–39 is an important finding that demands greater study... South Korea’s overall low BMI may be partially explained by the active societal emphasis on a “traditional” Korean diet... Korean society has one of the highest per capita vegetable intakes throughout Asia. Accordingly, a 2002 study by Lee et al. writes that “the most noticeable feature of the South Korean nutrition transition is that the dietary shift has not been linked with a level of fat intake commensurate with its income level”... According to a 2006 International Health and Behaviors Study of 18,512 university students across 22 countries, the dieting rate of Korean women was the highest rate of males or females in any country — 77% of Korean women reported dieting, as compared to overall rates of 51% of women and 25% of men... 64.1% of women overestimated their own weight... [there was] an association between lower BMI and weight overestimation... surveying 201 Korean and 205 American undergraduate women, revealed that Korean women were comparatively more critical of their own appearances... According to TIME Asia in 2002, at least 10% of Korean adults have received surgical enhancement... According to feminist theory, this recent upsurge in female societal empowerment may be associated with an oppressive backlash in media portrayals of gender ideals... "[Korean] women with poor education are 5 times more likely than more educated women to be overweight,” while no comparably significant disparity exists for Korean men""
According to non-feminist theory (aka do not blame "patriarchy" for everything), an upsurge in female societal empowerment may be associated with giving women what they think women want and/or what women think they women want; Why does education make one more susceptible to "patriarchal" influences?

Brazilian Bikini Waxes Make Crab Lice Endangered Species - "More than 80 percent of college students in the U.S. remove all or some of their pubic hair -- part of a trend that’s increasing in western countries. In Australia, Sydney’s main sexual health clinic hasn’t seen a woman with pubic lice since 2008 and male cases have fallen 80 percent from about 100 a decade ago... A majority of college men and women in the U.S. and Australia remove all or part of their pubic hair, researchers at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, reported in a 2011 paper, citing surveys and research by other scholars. In the U.K., 99 percent of women older than 16 years remove some hair, most commonly from the under arms, legs and pubic area, a 2005 study found. Brazilian waxing took off internationally in the early 2000s, possibly spurred by the attention it was given on television shows such as Sex and the City... Women and men who have sex with men took up the [Brazilian wax] initially. Now, heterosexual men are doing so also... A 20-year-old Australian woman with poorly controlled diabetes was hospitalized with a life-threatening bacterial infection of her genitalia following a routine Brazilian wax"
This is shocking. Will we never respect Nature and its creations?!

Karen Armstrong wants us all to love Islam - "'Like Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Christians, Sikhs and secularists, some Muslims have undoubtedly been violent and intolerant'... Note the comparison of present-day Muslims with those of other faiths, who are not currently as violent as Islam. And “secularists”? Are we really beheading people lately? Buddhists? There should be a name for the fallacy in which faiths with drastically different levels of violence and intolerance are held equal so long as any of their adherents are violent at all. And does she really believe that if we are more tolerant of Islamic threats, and stop publishing criticisms of their fatwas, their violence, and their ridiculous calls for death to those who publish cartoons or name teddy bears after the prophet, that Muslims will be so impressed by our “liberal values” that the violence will stop?

PA affirms death penalty for land sales to Israelis - "The Palestinian Authority on Sunday reaffirmed the death penalty for any Palestinian found guilty of selling land to Israelis. The decision came in response to a ruling by a Palestinian court according to which such acts were only a “minor offense”... In 1997, the PA announced that it would seek the death penalty for any Palestinian convicted of selling land to Jews or Israelis, in accordance with the Jordanian “Law for Preventing the Sale of Real Estate to the Enemy”... Although the PA has thus far refrained from executing those convicted of selling land to Jews, there have been many extrajudicial killings of Palestinian suspects over the past decades"

MtF 3 year Timeline - YouTube - "This video is of me going through a 3 year transition (Roughly one thousand pictures). I have had FFS [Ed: Facial feminization surgery] during the process"

Japan's porn stars make their way in the real world - "Sola Aoi, now a veteran of nine years in the business, claims her longevity is down to ambition. "I think from the start I knew this was an industry with very few veterans in it, but on the other hand I didn’t expect that I’d necessarily be in it for the near nine years I have, so I’m kind of myself surprised. Many of the other girls I started with didn’t have the same goals as me, that is, to use this career as a launching pad to move into other areas of show business." "Prior to joining the industry, I aspired to be a pre-school teacher and was already attending school to become one. I’d wanted to do that since I was a child. However, when I thought about my future in that career I could envision exactly how my life would turn out and to be honest, it seemed a little boring."

No Pants Subway Ride proves passengers need better underwear
Would this be legal in Singapore?

Pimp for underaged prostitute appeals jail term & fine - "Tang had no qualms manipulating and deceiving potential clients and went to great lengths to ensure that the clients of the underage girl won't know what her real age was... He pocketed 50 per cent of their earnings. Between September 2010 and November 2011, he secured nearly 700 bookings for 17 escorts. During that period, he earned more than S$185,700 from them. From the 17-year-old girl alone, Tang received about S$21,700 of her earnings. He obtained the underage girl's mobile phone number from her previous modelling agency and asked if she wanted to "earn good money". He reportedly told her not to disclose to clients that she was 17 years old. The court had also heard that Tang moved from being the Southeast Asia head of the marketing team in Internet giant Yahoo! to becoming an online pimp."

How to plan & book a journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway - "Moscow to Beijing via Mongolia: This is arguably the most interesting Trans-Siberian route to take. The weekly Trans-Mongolian train (train 4 eastbound, train 3 westbound) leaves Moscow for Beijing every Tuesday night. The 7,621 km (4,735 mile) journey takes 6 nights. This train crosses Siberia, cuts across Mongolia and the Gobi desert, then enters China. Westbound, it leaves Beijing every Wednesday morning."

Cuddle club offers bum pillow service - "For the equivalent of about £7 a minute, patrons can rest their heads on the bottoms of its female staff. Or for a little less - £7 for three minutes - they can rest their heads in a female employee's lap... For an extra fee the customer can stare into his cuddler's eyes for one minute."

Why 'Feminism' is poisoning Atheism - YouTube - "Equality is great, but thats not really what this is about. Its about a small bunch of PC whiners who suggest such outrageous things as 'there is an active debate online at the moment as to if women in the secular community should be either eye candy and f*ck toys for the privileged white men, or equal colleagues' (PZ Myers)... They also seem to want this policy to protect them from criticism. That is you shouldnt have the right to say things that might offend people at a conference, because thats almost as bad as physical assault... It's not even a straw man. It's simply bullshit. It's an outrageous fiction told to conjure up this bogeyman that there's this great faction of the secular community that argues that women are fuck toys and eye candy for privileged white men"
I love how they accuse women in the atheism community who say they don't notice sexism of internalising the dominant paradigm. And now you have a dress code for at least one atheist conference (they can go fight with SlutWalk)
Great slogan: "Patriarchy: when you no longer believe in God but still want to have something invisible, all-powerful and unverifiable to believe in"
He has a good counter for those who say freedom of speech doesn't mean you don't have to censor YouTube comments (and those on similar social media) - since social media is an inherently public medium, censoring comments is like putting up a soapbox in a park and making a speech, but knocking down the soapboxes of those who try to reply (or words to that effect)