Links - 27th April 2014

LeighAlert: Free Alerts And Reminders - "Countdown Reminder sends you an email message with number of days remaining till your particular life event. For example:
165 days remaining till My Vacation
You can set your own frequency (daily, weekly or monthly)."

Forbidden love - "There is a surprisingly wide range of literature concerning incest for us to draw on when we try to understand the mindset of the participants. Consensual incest has been portrayed sympathetically in popular fiction for centuries, from John Ford's masterful 17th-century play 'Tis Pity She's a Whore to Ian McEwan's novel The Cement Garden and Steven Poliakoff's film Close My Eyes. The writer Kathryn Harrison caused a sensation in 1997 when she published The Kiss, a memoir of an affair with her father, and even in the popular medium of TV, from Jerry Springer (who has featured incestuous sisters on his show) to Brookside (which featured a love affair between siblings Nat and Georgia), incest has been depicted in a not unsympathetic, if somewhat salacious, manner... To prohibit two people from having sex because their offspring may be "defective" or "inferior" is to adopt the standpoint of a eugenicist. Indeed, Dr Sean Gabb has clearly shown that the impetus behind the 1908 Punishment of Incest Act was just that: the proponents of the act were exactly the same figures who advocated the "sterilisation" of the "feeble-minded". If we prohibit incest on the grounds that it risks producing "defective" children, we must also prohibit reproduction by haemophiliacs and the carriers of a host of other "defects""

Robin Thicke backs Blurred Lines lyrics after criticism - "He says Blurred Lines refers to blurring the lines between men and women and also between a good girl and a bad girl. When asked about the video which features naked women, he said he wasn't sure about it but admitted his wife made him put it out."

Magnet - The People's Funny Pictures Blog - Quora

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Fan Trailer Is…Gritty? | Giant Freakin Robot

Charities losing out thanks to Facebook and Twitter 'slacktivism' - "social media addicts are happy to puff themselves up by supporting causes with a ‘like’ – but then contribute nothing financially. It may be because slacktivists are more concerned with letting others see how charitable and fashionable they are without having to put their hands in their pockets. Report author Kirk Kristofferson said: ‘Our research shows that if people are able to declare support for a charity publicly in social media it can actually make them less likely to donate to the cause later on.’ Social media campaigns do raise awareness but that could be at a cost to how much is raised from rattling tins in the high street"
"Awareness" - the solution to all problems

Japan’s first masturbation bar for women opens in Shibuya - "Love Joule, located in the Shibuya entertainment district, opened in July and provides Japan, according to its Web site, with its first “love and sex bar dedicated to women.”"

An Attempt To Stop The Disney Machine - Deadline.com - "I’m told that the Walt Disney Co is currently attempting to trademark the character name “Princess Aurora” for all media: stage, sound, film, TV, video, Internet, photographs, news. In short, everything except literature. The name comes from the 1697 Charles Perrault fairy tale and Aurora is the Princess’s daughter (and thus a princess herself). The first use of “Princess Aurora” was in the 1890 Tchaikovsky ballet “The Sleeping Beauty,” which Disney turned into the 1959 animated film. It has been used continuously since then in the ballet as the title character’s name. The problem is that, if the Disney Company is successful, it will effectively control the legal right to all future performances of the ballet. The move also could sink any movie about the ballet or that uses a scene of the ballet in another movie. “This would be like a film studio trademarking the character name “Ebenezer Scrooge” for all media (no one has) and then no one could perform “A Christmas Carol” on a stage, TV, in a film, radio, etc without first securing the right to use the name from the trademark owner”"

Evaluating Drug Decriminalization in Portugal 12 Years Later - "The Portuguese experiment has been in action since Law 30/2000 went into effect nearly 12 years ago, and Goulão's staff is currently calculating how much money the country's judicial system has saved, in its courts and prisons, now that it no longer has to process individuals the police catch with a few grams of drugs. "The police still search people for drugs," Goulão points out. Hashish, cocaine, ecstasy -- Portuguese police still seize and destroy all these substances... When Portugal's parliament was debating the proposed Law 30/2000, representatives of right-wing parties declared that planes would start arriving in the country daily, full of people looking for an easy opportunity to pump themselves full of drugs. Our entire country will become a drug-ridden slum, these parties said. The left-wing parties in parliament held a majority, though. Goulão sits in his office and pages through charts, tables and graphs that are just some of the great quantity of data his team has collected over the years. The data show, among other things, that the number of adults in Portugal who have at some point taken illegal drugs is rising. At the same time, though, the number of teenagers who have at some point taken illegal drugs is falling. The number of drug addicts who have undergone rehab has also increased dramatically, while the number of drug addicts who have become infected with HIV has fallen significantly. What, though, do these numbers mean? With what exactly can they be compared? There isn't a great deal of data from before the experiment began. And, for example, the number of adults who have tried illegal drugs at some point in their lives is increasing in most other countries throughout Europe as well. "We haven't found some miracle cure," Goulão says. Still, taking stock after nearly 12 years, his conclusion is, "Decriminalization hasn't made the problem worse.""

A blonde chick with a cute pussy. | Mortal Online Forums

Bad year for US Congress - "To call this one a "Do Nothing Congress" is really generous, she said. “Because, rather than simply do nothing, they have done real damage to the country. They’re hurt our economy, they’ve hurt the international economy, they’ve left children out in the cold, not going to school, They’ve made sure that people aren’t eating and they’ve made the Defense Department not ready. These are just a few of the things that have happened"

Isaac Asimov's 2014 predictions.

20 online dating cliches - and what they really mean - "I'm easy-going
Variations on this are "I'm laid back" and "I'm down to earth." In his list of 10 things he hates about Plenty of Fish profiles, Greg Hendricks writes that these are so common that he ignores profiles that include them. "What are any of these even supposed to mean? These stock traits are in so many profiles, I practically skip right over them." Plus, who would ever describe themselves otherwise, says Foxton. "No-one thinks, 'I'm really uptight.'""

All Norwegians become millionaires as oil fund balloons - "in Norway, oil wealth may have made the state reluctant to make reforms or cut subsidies unthinkable elsewhere. Farm subsidies allow farmers, for instance, to keep dairy cows in heated barns in the Arctic. It may also have made some Norwegians reluctant to work. "One in five people of working age receives some kind of social insurance instead of working," Doerum said, despite an official unemployment rate of 3.3 percent."

The London 'Anti-Cafe' Where Everything Is Free But You Pay 5 Cents A Minute Just To Be There
In normal cafes food and drinks are overpriced to cover the cost of lurkers anyway

Hospital Shame - "I was at the Changi hospital, where the tent stands as a sore thumb, over the past week visiting a relative, and the A and B1 class beds were only about half filled. To fill A class beds, our restructured hospitals actually send missions to Myanmar, the Middle East and Africa to advertise our services. At the out-patient level, appointments for B and C patients can take months, whereas those for A class patients only take a week. There is clearly a very inefficient use of our current resources. In the shorter term, taking into account our severely-stretched resources, restructured hospitals should no longer be in the medical tourism business and should concentrate on providing care for citizens. There should be only one standard of care. Private healthcare should be provided by private hospitals. This would leave our public hospitals with increased capacity to deal more efficiently with over-crowding."

Dear Straits Times, a simple apology would have sufficed - "even as the Straits Times enjoins critics to "ask themselves why they would dismiss this version of events, and believe the first" and treats Pyongyang with such scepticism, the Straits Times should probably start by applying that same kind of scepticism to itself."

This Man's Homemade Sex Doll Is Absolutely Horrifying

British film set in a storage facility earned £44 at US box office - "Storage 24, a British horror film based in a self-storage facility, took the smallest amount of money at the American box office last year: a paltry $72, or £44 after being shown in just one cinema for a day."

Balik Cina - Discover the best Malaysia has to offer - "Balik Cina has the finest collection of beautiful and inspirational quotes by Malaysian politicians. 220 right now. Start by searching for a name, topic or phrase."

Group wants to shun Silicon Valley and revive 40-hour working week - "Frederick W. Taylor, the 20th century originator of “scientific management,” prescribed reduced work times and achieved remarkable increases in output per worker... “Research shows that knowledge workers actually have fewer good hours in a day than manual labourers do – on average, about six hours, as opposed to eight.”"

Woman stalker who tried to kiss victim gets probation and told to stay away - "A former relief teacher was yesterday placed on 12 months' supervised probation for using criminal force on a teaching intern"
If she were a guy, she'd almost certainly have gotten jail

The Inequality Problem - NYTimes.com - "If you have a primitive zero-sum mentality then you assume growing affluence for the rich must somehow be causing the immobility of the poor, but, in reality, the two sets of problems are different, and it does no good to lump them together and call them “inequality”... the income inequality frame contributes to our tendency to simplify complex cultural, social, behavioral and economic problems into strictly economic problems... Low income is the outcome of these interrelated problems, but it is not the problem. To say it is the problem is to confuse cause and effect. To say it is the problem is to give yourself a pass from exploring the complex and morally fraught social and cultural roots of the problem. It is to give yourself permission to ignore the parts that are uncomfortable to talk about but that are really the inescapable core of the thing."

Study says using plus-size fashion models could make women fat - "the research posits that the use of overweight models on fashion runways and in ads may encourage women to get fat by influencing them to think that being overweight is normal and healthy."
What's sauce for the goose...