Day: January 29, 2014

Correction appended, Jan. 30, 03:30 EST. It was the mayor of Osaka who saidthat comfort women served a “necessary” role, not the mayor of Hiroshima. The article has been amended to reflect this.

Did the American government employ sex slaves during the Second World War? The newly appointed chairman of Japan’s public broadcasting system apparently thinks so.

In the latest in a string of revisionist statements by conservative leaders in Japan, Katsuto Momii said the “comfort women” system, in which women were coerced into serving in brothels for Japanese soldiers during World War II, “could be found in any nation that was at war.”

“The comfort women system is considered wrong under today’s moral values. But the military comfort women system existed as a reality at that time,” said Momii. “Can we say there were none in Germany or France? It was everywhere in Europe.”

On Tuesday…

Thought Trojan’s core demographic was fumbly teens and drunken college kids? Think again. The commercial above reveals their true target audience: horny dads. Just another ad addition to the horny parent canon.

(h/t Digg)

The Napoleon complex has been explained.

Short people are mistrustful of others and prone to paranoia, according to a study published Wednesday by the journal Psychiatry Research. Oxford researchers sent 60 women on two simulated rides in London subways populated by both men and women, lowering their virtual vantage point by 25 centimeters in one of the rides. Participants, though often unaware that they’d just been shrunken slightly, reported markedly increased feelings of paranoia while seeing through the eyes of a shorter avatar.

“The results were very clear,” the study says. Making people shorter “led to more negative evaluations of the self compared with others and greater levels of paranoia.” Researchers say the study “provides strong demonstration of the importance of social status to the occurrence of paranoid fears.”

Though only women were included in the Oxford study about how paranoid short people are, researchers predict the results…