Links - 23rd November 2013

Man jailed for sex with underage prostitute and two other offences - "A man who had sex with a 17-year-old prostitute and ran away without paying was on Monday sentenced to seven months' jail. Khoo Wenbo, 28, had booked the girl for sexual services in December 2010. While the prostitute was in the shower, Khoo did a check and discovered she was under 18 years old at that time. So he decided to have her perform oral sex on him, thinking that would not be against the law. While the minor was in the shower after sex, Khoo fled the hotel room without paying."

Picking the Best Charity for Typhoon Haiyan Relief - "What we don't encourage is sending volunteers. There's been too many untrained, unorganized volunteers coming to disaster areas and that just adds a huge burden to the local relief workers and don't send goods and products, unless they've made some arrangement or determine that these are goods that are actually needed"... Give to proven, time-tested health activities instead of disaster relief. This contrarian recommendation comes from a very reputable source: the Disease Control Priorities Project (DCPP), which is jointly organized by several groups including the World Bank, World Health Organization and Gates Foundation. This advice takes courage, resisting the popular pressure to donate to disaster relief, and is based on a sound foundation of cost-benefit analysis: "The highly emotional and sensationalized climate of disaster response has long prevented the adoption of a cost effectiveness approach in decision making . . . perceptions and visibility tend to prevail over facts and analysis, resulting in a lack of evidence-based studies on costs and benefits. . . . Emergency health interventions are more costly and less effective than time-tested health activities. Improvisation and rush inevitably come with a high price." Two thumbs up for a remarkably frank assessment to help donors do as much good as possible in the long term... "Allow your funds to be used where most needed -- even if that means they're not used during this disaster. Disasters attract a great deal of media attention and money, yet in many cases the biggest challenge is logistics. The result can be that money isn't the limiting factor in the immediate relief effort. We found evidence of this both for the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the 2011 Japan tsunami""

CDC - Chemical Irritants (Chloramines) & Indoor Pool Air Quality - "Pool operators may receive complaints from swimmers and pool staff about stinging eyes, nasal irritation, or difficulty breathing after being in the water or breathing the air at swimming pools, particularly indoor pools. New research indicates that these symptoms may be an indication of poor water and indoor air quality at the pool caused by a build-up of irritants, known as chloramines, in the water and air. Irritants in the air at swimming pools are usually the combined chlorine by-products of disinfection. These by-products are the result of chlorine binding with sweat, urine, and other waste from swimmers... Getting swimmers to shower before getting in the pool and promoting regular bathroom use to reduce the amount of urine in the pool will decrease the formation of irritants"
Noxious water/air at swimming pool = lots of people peeing

Atheist marriages may last longer than Christian ones - "Conservative Christians think of themselves as the last line of defense for a time-honored and holy tradition, marriage. In the conservative Christian view, marriage is a sacred union ordained by God. It binds one man and woman together so that the “two become one flesh” until they are parted by death. This view of marriage is unbiblical, to be sure. See Captive Virgins, Polygamy, Sex Slaves: What Marriage Would Look Like If We Actually Followed The Bible. But hey, who actually reads the Bible? Surely, what God meant to say is that marriage should take the form that is most familiar and traditional to us: One male plus one female who is given to the male by her father–that part is biblical–for life. In this worldview, Christian marriage is under assault by an anti-trinity of powerful and dark forces: feminism, homosexuality and godlessness. Faith, on the other hand, saves both souls and marriages. When I was young, a slogan made its way around my church: The family that prays together stays together. Tom Ellis, former chairman of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Council on the Family boldly claimed that “born-again Christian couples who marry…in the church after having received premarital counseling…and attend church regularly and pray daily together… experience only 1 divorce out of nearly 39,000 marriages.” But then came data. According to research by the Barna Research Group over a decade ago, American divorce rates were highest among Baptists and nondenominational “Bible-believing” Christians and lower among more theologically liberal Christians like Methodists, with atheists at the bottom of the divorce pack... Churches do honor and support marriage. They also may inadvertently promote divorce, especially—ironically—those churches which most bill themselves as shining lights in a dark world. To prevent that greatest-of-all-evils, abortion, such communities teach even high school students to embrace surprise pregnancies as gifts from God. They encourage members to marry young so they won’t be tempted to fornicate. But women who give birth or marry young tend to end up less educated and less financially secure, both of which are correlated with higher divorce rates... Secular couples tend to see both marriage and divorce as personal choices. Overall, a lower percent get married, which means that those who do may be particularly committed or well-suited to partnership... A growing number say that marriage is obsolete. In one of those peculiar twists of fate, conservative Christian obsessions with abortion and sexual purity may be accelerating this trend. Naomi Cahn and June Carbone, authors of Red State, Blue State, propose that Bible-belt opposition to abortion has increased the non-marital birthrate and acceptance of single parent families:"

I am devastated and troubled by the allegations that my book, Above The Game: A - Pastebin.com - "I am devastated and troubled by the allegations that my book, Above The Game: A Guide to Getting Awesome with Women, promotes rape. That couldn't be further from the truth. A handful of quotes were taken out of context and posted on Tumblr which steamrolled in a game of telephone where hardly anyone bothered to read the original version... If "Don't wait for signs, make the first move" promotes sexual assault, then "Kiss the Girl" from The Little Mermaid was a song about rape... In fact there is an entire section on consent that the bloggers conveniently left out to paint me in a poor light"
Yay feminism!

A Cold War Fought by Women - NYTimes.com - "this “mean girl” form of indirect aggression is used more by adolescents and young women than by older women, who have less incentive to handicap rivals once they marry. Other studies have shown that the more attractive an adolescent girl or woman is, the more likely she is to become a target for indirect aggression from her female peers. “Women are indeed very capable of aggressing against others, especially women they perceive as rivals,” said Dr. Vaillancourt, now a psychologist at the University of Ottawa. “The research also shows that suppression of female sexuality is by women, not necessarily by men.” Stigmatizing female promiscuity — a.k.a. slut-shaming — has often been blamed on men, who have a Darwinian incentive to discourage their spouses from straying. But they also have a Darwinian incentive to encourage other women to be promiscuous. Dr. Vaillancourt said the experiment and other research suggest the stigma is enforced mainly by women. “Sex is coveted by men,” she said. “Accordingly, women limit access as a way of maintaining advantage in the negotiation of this resource. Women who make sex too readily available compromise the power-holding position of the group, which is why many women are particularly intolerant of women who are, or seem to be, promiscuous”... Studies have shown that women’s ideal body shape is to be thinner than average — and thinner than what men consider the ideal shape to be. This pressure is frequently blamed on the ultrathin female role models featured in magazines and on television, but Christopher J. Ferguson and other researchers say that it’s mainly the result of competition with their peers, not media images. “To a large degree the media reflects trends that are going on in society, not creates them,” said Dr. Ferguson, a psychologist at Stetson University. He found that women’s dissatisfaction with their bodies did not correlate with what they watched on television at home. Nor were they influenced by TV programs... “Sexual competition among females seems to increase due to circumstances that tend to be particularly common in affluent societies,” Dr. Ferguson said. In traditional villages, people married at an early age to someone nearby, but young men and women in modern societies are free to postpone marriage as they search long and far for better options. The result is more competition because there are so many more rivals"
Feminism, meet reality. Poor Barbie, actresses and supermodels!
This is exactly what my theory about why women hate sluts, pornography and prostitutes says.

Cops Taser A Little Girl - "Three police officers in Pierre, S.D., responded to a report last week of a suicidal 8-year-old who had stabbed herself in the leg and was threatening to plunge a 4 ½ inch knife into her chest. An officer fired a Taser gun at the girl to subdue her, the Argus Leader reports. The Pierre police chief is reviewing the incident but said the Taser was the least forceful way for the officer, whose name was not released, to subdue the child for her own protection. “He quite possibly saved the juvenile’s life that night”"

Scott Adams Blog: What's the Difference Between a Sexist and a Regular Asshole? 11/21/2013 - "Help me understand the difference between a sexist and a run-of-the-mill asshole that happens to be male... If a man overlooks a female job candidate because of gender alone, isn't that more a case of stupidity than sexism? Clearly women are excelling at ever profession on earth, so what kind of hiring manager would fail to notice a worldwide trend so immensely obvious? Answer: a dumb one... If I am your boss's boss, and you tell me your direct boss is being a sexist, my skepticism alarm goes off because the label so often gets misused. But if you tell me your boss is being an asshole, complete with examples, or you say he's incompetent at his job because he ignores qualified job candidates, I start considering his replacement. Your choice of labels can make a big difference."

Batkid: boy who beat cancer becomes superhero for the day - video - "Thousands of volunteers help transform San Francisco into Gotham City on Friday to fulfil a young leukaemia survivor's wish to fight crime like his hero, Batman. Five-year-old Miles Scott arrived in his very own Batmobile and helped to fight the likes of Penguin and The Riddler. Scott's wish, which was granted by charity Make-A-Wish, received international coverage and even caught the attention of the White House"

Child found chained to porch with dead chicken

Should we be outraged that Australia spied on Indonesia? No - "Do I feel more informed, knowing this was being done in my name? I’m not even surprised. Am I outraged that it was done? No. Here are some examples of how the media have treated allegations of Indonesian spying"
It doesn't seem as if the Indonesians protested against their own government for spying on Australia

6 Buildings That Look Like Vaginas - "There are so many phallic buildings that, in 2003, Cabinet Magazine launched a Most Phallic Building Contest. After writer Jonathan Ames claimed that Brooklyn’s Williamsburg Bank Building was the world’s most phallic, defensive readers attacked him, claiming that their city’s dick-like building was the most dick-like in the land. The score was settled by voting, and Michigan’s Ypsilanti Water Tower, AKA the Brick Dick, emerged as the proud winner.)