AdamSmith

Wonders never cease.

Until we have a dedicated Masturbation forum here. And putting aside that the whole of boytoy.com already qualifies. http://www.jackinworld.com/

Banana Boat -- YES!

Not bad.

Fascinating what you can find on Etsy. Antique Embalming Pump / Unusual and Rare Art Deco Era by the Embalmers Supply Co Westport Conn / Working and Fully Functional $288.00 USD Only 1 available Overview Vintage item from the 1930s Feedback: 258 reviews Only ships to United States from Owensboro, Kentucky. This Is unusual and rare old machine! We have been collecting, buying and selling these antique embalming machines for a very very long time now and never seen another cased example like this. Manufactured by the Embalmers Supply Co. Westport Conn. From the look of this machine around the 1930's or 40's and It works perfectly. Don't miss out on this opportunity to own this truly rare and bizarre antique machine. The case Is very well constructed using steel and extremely heavy. It measures 6 3/4 inches tall X 7 1/2 inches wide X 9 inches deep. When opened It exposes the aspiration and injection nozzles, a regulator to turn the pressure up or down as needed and the original electrical cord which Is still in excellent condition too. The top of the case has the company name embossed into the steel on the underside and a brass warning label which states " Warning Glass Bottles May Break If Pressure Over Ten Pounds Is Used " (ESCO, Embalmers Supply Co.). This unusual old embalming machine will be very carefully packaged to ensure safe transport and arrival and ship to you with insurance and tracking information all inclusive with your shipping costs. Please feel free to contact us with any questions or concerns you might have or for your international shipping quote. https://www.etsy.com/listing/195784917/antique-embalming-pump-unusual-and-rare?ref=exp_listing

Without comment.

Maybe this overstates the point for emphasis, but still. The American Century is over: How our country went down in a blaze of shame We face a triple crisis in foreign policy, economics and democracy. Here's how it all went to hell Michael Lind salon.com Donald Rumsfeld, Jamie Dimon, David Koch (Credit: AP/Rob Carr/Reuters/Keith Bedford/AP/Phelan M. Ebenhack/Photo montage by Salon) In 1914, the American Century began. This year the American Century ended. America’s foreign policy is in a state of collapse, America’s economy doesn’t work well, and American democracy is broken. The days when other countries looked to the U.S. as a successful model of foreign policy prudence, democratic capitalism and liberal democracy may be over. The American Century, 1914-2014. RIP. A hundred years ago, World War I marked the emergence of the U.S. as the dominant world power. Already by the late nineteenth century, the U.S. had the world’s biggest economy. But it took the First World War to catalyze the emergence of the U.S. as the most important player in geopolitics. The U.S. tipped the balance against Imperial Germany, first by loans to its enemies after 1914 and then by entering the war directly in 1917. Twice more in the twentieth century the U.S. intervened to prevent a hostile power from dominating Europe and the world, in World War II and the Cold War. Following the end of the Cold War, America’s bipartisan elite undertook the project of creating permanent American global hegemony. The basis of America’s hegemonic project was a bargain with the two major powers of Europe, Germany and Russia, and the two major powers of Asia, Japan and China. The U.S. proposed to make Russia and China perpetual military protectorates, as it had already done during the Cold War with Germany and Japan. In return, the U.S. would keep its markets open to their exports and look after their international security interests. This vision of a solitary American globocop policing the world on behalf of other great powers that voluntarily abandon militarism for trade has been shared by the Clinton, Bush 43 and Obama administrations. But by 2014 the post-Cold War grand strategy of the United States had collapsed. China and Russia have rudely declined America’s offer to make them subservient military satellites, like Japan and Germany. China has been building up its military, engaging in cyber-attacks on the U.S., and intimidating its neighbors, to promote the end of American military primacy in East Asia. Meanwhile, Russia has responded to the expansion of the U.S.-led NATO alliance to its borders by going to war with Georgia in 2008 to deter Georgian membership in NATO and then, in 2014, seizing Crimea from Ukraine, after Washington promoted a rebellion against the pro-Russian Ukrainian president. There are even signs of a Sino-Russian alliance against the U.S. The prospect excites some neoconservatives and neoliberal hawks, who had been quiet following the American military disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in a second Cold War against a Sino-Russian axis, the European Union, with its economy comparable to America’s, will not provide reliable support. Russia is a nuisance, not a threat to Europe. China doesn’t threaten Europe and Europeans want Chinese trade and investment too much. In Asia, only a fool would bet on the ability of a ramshackle alliance of the U.S., Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam and Australia to “contain” China. The U.S. still has by far the world’s most powerful and sophisticated military — but what good is it? Russia knows the U.S. won’t go to war over Ukraine. China knows the U.S. won’t go to war over this or that reef or island in the South China Sea. As Chairman Mao would have said, America is a paper tiger. The U.S. military was able to destroy the autocratic governments of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya — but all the foreign policy agencies of the U.S. have been unable to help create functioning states to replace them. Since 2003, Uncle Sam has learned that it is easier to kick over anthills than to build them. In addition to having a huge military that for the most part can neither intimidate strong adversaries nor pacify weak ones, America has an economy that for decades has failed to deliver sustained growth that is widely shared. Apart from a revival of oil and gas production in the U.S., the economy’s main area of comparative strength has been technological innovation. The rise of self-driving vehicles and the “internet of things” are promising developments. But these mostly involve the extension of existing information technology to new sectors. The American tech economy has been living on intellectual capital accumulated before the 1980s, when the Defense Department funded the early breakthroughs in information technology. Compared to earlier breakthroughs like transistors and satellites, most of today’s innovations are trivial and contribute little or nothing either to living standards or national industrial power: “Hey, give me a billion dollars for my app that tells you when to pick up your laundry!” The picture is even bleaker when we turn our gaze from Silicon Valley to the rest of the American economy. The manufacturing sector has been decimated by subsidized imports from China, Japan and other mercantilist countries, and by the decisions of many American multinationals to shut down American factories in order to exploit cheap labor and take government subsidies in other lands. America’s infrastructure is decrepit, but Congress cannot even agree about how to fund the aging interstate highway system, much less invest in twenty-first century transportation and communications systems. Most of the jobs being created in the U.S. are in the low-wage, non-union, no-benefit service sector where millions are trapped in the status of the “working poor.” Among the biggest beneficiaries of the current American economic system are not entrepreneurs or innovators, but parasites who owe their wealth to rigged markets or government subsidies. The “parasite load” in the U.S. economy includes many in the financial industry who expect that the federal government will socialize their losses but let them keep their profits — profits taxed at low rates, or hidden from taxation altogether. Other parasitic special interests include the predatory monopolies of America’s health care sector — the pharma industry, which charges Americans far more for the same drugs than it is allowed to charge in Canada, Europe or Asia; physicians, who tend to be paid much more in the U.S. than in other countries with comparable health outcomes; and price-gouging hospitals. Much of America’s higher education industry, too, is riddled with parasites, including bankers who profit from lifelong debt serfdom by Americans who take out student loans and empire-building university administrators who fund personal entourages with public and private money. Suppose a delegation from a developing country were to visit various First World nations in search of models. What on earth could the U.S. teach them? How to enrich bankers who add little or no value to the economy? How to ensure that citizens pay far more for medical goods and services that cost much less everywhere else? How to make citizens go into debt to get an education? How to import multitudes of poor foreign workers to compete with native workers, even though the country is suffering from massive and persistent underemployment? How to allow many employers to pay wages so low that workers are forced to use public welfare services to survive? All right, let it be stipulated that the world’s greatest military hasn’t been very successful either at intimidating other great powers like China and Russia or frightening warlords in Mad Max wastelands into obedience. And let’s concede that any country that chose the post-1980s U.S. economic system as its model would be certifiably suicidal. Aren’t we still the world’s greatest liberal democracy? The U.S. remains a paragon of liberalism and democracy compared to many foreign dictatorships and anarchies, of course. But the proper comparison is with other advanced industrial democracies. By that test, current American democracy offers little for Americans to take pride in. Personal freedom? These days, Europeans insist on far more protections for individual privacy against government surveillance or corporate exploitation of our data than we Americans have been. While most civilized countries long ago abolished the death penalty, the U.S. has recently been among the world’s leaders in executions, surpassed only by Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran and China. For the most part, we allegedly freedom-loving Americans can’t be bothered to protest government data mining, corporate data mining and the occasional mistaken execution of innocent Americans by bungling state governments. Elections? The U.S. still uses the unfair British colonial era plurality voting system, long jettisoned by most modern democracies in favor of alternatives like proportional representation. Partisan state legislatures cynically gerrymander districts to favor the party in power in the state capital. Having been captured by the neo-Confederate White Right, the Republican Party in one state after another is trying to change voting laws to minimize voting by disproportionately black and Latino low-income voters. And politicians of both parties have to grovel and scrape before a small number of billionaires, in order to win in the “money primary” that weeds out politicians who can’t find some hedge fund manager or casino owner to bankroll them. I do not mean to imply that other societies are doing much better than the U.S. at the moment. The European Union is suffering from a self-inflicted austerity policy disaster, China under its kleptocratic Communist Party is facing slowing growth and popular discontent, and so on. The end of the American Century won’t be followed by the Chinese Century or the European Century. The emergence of a multipolar world means it won’t be anybody’s century. With two lost wars in a decade, a stalled economy choked by parasitic lobbies and a political system dominated by billionaires, you would think there would be a sense of crisis in America. But neither party is willing to acknowledge the severity of our problems, much less contemplate the radical structural changes that are necessary to address them. Those on the right who denounce “crony capitalism” perversely tend to focus on government aid to a productive industry like the Export-Import Bank, while averting their gaze from the most egregious examples of economic parasitism — finance-industry predators and the predatory medical-industrial complex. For their part, neoconservatives are in complete denial about the limits to American power illustrated by the debacles in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and, earlier, Vietnam. (To be sure, we did defeat Grenada and Panama). The mainstream Clinton-Obama Democrats, whose politics is a legacy of the booming 1990s, are also unable to acknowledge how bad things really are. Admitting that American foreign and domestic policies for decades have almost completely failed to achieve their stated goals would tend to cast doubt on the record of the two Democrats, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who have occupied the White House for four of the six presidential terms since the 1992 election. Instead, many mainstream Democrats would have us believe that all that is needed to fix essentially sound foreign and domestic policies is a Democratic congressional supermajority and a few tweaks — a bit more multilateralism and foreign burden-sharing in foreign policy, slightly bigger subsidies for low-income households at home. The U.S. is facing a triple crisis — a crisis of foreign policy, a crisis of economics and a crisis of democracy. The American republic has renewed and rebuilt itself during even greater crises in the past, and can do so again. But the first step is to drop the happy talk and chest-thumping and flag-waving and be honest with ourselves about the severity of the problems confronting us. Michael Lind is the author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States and co-founder of the New America Foundation. http://www.salon.com/2014/07/12/the_american_century_is_over_how_our_country_went_down_in_a_blaze_of_shame/

Another. (Attended this one live. Tiny computer speakers needless to say don't do much justice.)

Recital of organ music from the Spanish Golden Age on Duke Chapel's two magnificent instruments. Great stuff if you grok it.

Is 'Big Brother' ignoring a budding gay showmance? By Rae Votta on July 04, 2014The Daily Dot Reality show romances, otherwise known as showmances, are staples in the genre as a way to stir up drama, solidify alliances, and titillate viewers. But why is one of the juiciest and most fan-supported showmances on this season’s Big Brother happening off TV? Big Brother contestants Frankie Grande and Zach Rance have been getting more than cozy on the reality show’s 16th season, airing now on CBS. The two men are part of a strong alliance of mostly male contenders, but have also made a Final Two pact with each other. They’ve been spotted snuggling in beds, draped around each other, checking out each other’s backsides, and talking about masturbation and lubrication. There’s just one catch—all of this flirtation hasn’t made it to air. Big Brother runs 24/7 livestreams of house activities, and fans watch and analyze every move as they try to determine who will be evicted next. They also pick favorites (or pairs of favorites in this case). Fans have already dedicated blogs to the duo and are shipping the pair, even if the mainstream viewers have no clue there’s a potential showmance brewing between the two men. ♡ emily @emilyyyxo Follow I've been stalking bb fan pages on here and tumblr and watching zankie vines over and over I need sleep and I NEED HELP 2:03 AM - 4 Jul 2014 The lack of incorporation into the televised show is, of course, rubbing fans the wrong way. Big Brother doesn’t shy away from focusing on romances, and there’s more than enough footage of the duo getting cozy around the house and forming a pact to make a plot point. There’s even footage of another pair of contestants talking about the situation, and Zach, who hasn’t declared a sexuality on the show, apparently told one housemate that he wanted to sleep with Frankie (in coarser terms). https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Lgm8MNErmyw That’s pretty juicy material ripe for inclusion on the main show. So what gives? Is Big Brother shying away from a gay showmance on air, or are they just saving it in hopes that things heat up later in the season between the two for a big reveal? Or do they just think the pair is bromantic instead of romantic and thus less interesting to the mainstream viewers? Regardless of motivation, fans are already frustrated that none of their canoodling is making the air. “The fact that they still haven’t given Zankie any airtime is infuriating tbh. Like they could totally use it as a big plot device this season, especially given Frankie Grande’s huge following on and off the show. And it’s not like they’d be short of any footage,” complained Tumblr user dehltreice. “It’s not even just the showmance. zack and frankie made a final two deal. that’s HUGE. if it was anyone else, i guarantee you they’d show it. so why not frankie and zack?,” said Tumblr user sansa-swifts. “Because it’s gay. the answer is because it’s gay.” The fervor for the pair might be more than just their handsy nature in front of the cameras. Frankie is a YouTube celebrity in his own right, and also the older half-brother of pop sensation Arianna Grande. She’s been tweeting her own fans directly about her brother’s involvement on the show and managing his social media while he’s locked away in the house. This has lead to adorable interactions with Zankie fans wanting to know Arianna’s opinion on the matter. odalissa ♡ @odalissaxx @FrankieJGrande do you ship #zankie? Frankie James Grande ✔ @FrankieJGrande Follow a little bit yes hahah. it's cute. gotta pass the lil sis test tho - “@odalissaxx: @FrankieJGrande do you ship #zankie?” 11:50 PM - 3 Jul 2014 Even Arianna is aware, Big Brother. Time to let this showmance shine on TV. Screengrab via BigBrother/YouTube http://www.dailydot.com/geek/big-brother-gay-romance-ignored/

SO IT GOES -- John Fleming's Blog · July 14, 2013 · 10:36 am Exclusive! – Mr Methane reports from World Fart Championships in Finland (A version of this piece was also published on the Indian news site WSN) Mr Methane (left) & Championships’ presenter Phartman This morning, dramatic news from Finland via my professional farting chum Mr Methane. Yesterday, at the first ever World Fart Championships in Utajärvi, Finland. the single and team events were won by two Russian friends, Vlad & Alex who had flown to Helsinki from Moscow and then made a five hour train journey to Utajärvi. They had heard of the farting festival earlier this year on Mr Methane’s website and Vlad said to Alex: “There is a farting contest this summer in Finland. Shall we go ?” Alex replied: “Yes we should.” Vlad said: “There is more. Mr Methane is performing there.” Alex is said to have replied: “Wow! I have already packed.” Not unreasonably, they decided that the double whammy lure of a farting competition AND possibly meeting Mr Methane, their hero, was too good to miss. “So,” Mr Methane told me this morning from Finland, “they came and won both prizes for Russia yesterday, establishing a new festival volume record in the bargain.” Documented air battles raged in Japan between 1603-1868 Admittedly, this was not difficult, as it was the first World Fart Championships, although the tradition of farting competitions goes back at least to 17th century Japan where, between 1603-1868 there were “He-gassens” – fart battles. In the 199os, a collection of scrolls showing some of these bitterly-fought air battles was sold at Christie’s in London for $1,200. At yesterday’s World Fart Championships in Finland, Mr Methane was not competing. He had been invited by the organisers as a farting icon and the inspiration to a generation of Finnish flatulists. Before the event, presented by local entertainer Phartman, both Mr Methane and I had been a bit vague about how the organisers were going to make farting into a competition and how they were going to decide winners. All was revealed yesterday. Winning Russians Vlad (left) & Alex in the team event “Contestants had to drop their trousers,” Mr Methane reported, “but they kept underpants on. There was a large egg timer and they had 30 seconds in which to fart. There was a decibel meter and a microphone in a pipe below the seat on which they sat. For team events, there was a double seat. “Contestants had two attempts – not one after other – they went to the back of the queue. It was all about the volume.” “How loud were the Russian winners?” I asked. Mr Methane performed The Blue Danube to hushed crowds in Finland yesterday with backing from the Utajärvi brass band “Sorry,” Mr Methane told me, “I can’t remember the exact decibel meter reading, but it was just under 90.” “And the audience?” I asked. “They were polite, enthusiastic and appreciative of my show which was the matinée intro to the Fart Championships themselves. I also closed the Championships with a long fart at the end.” Russians’ secret weapon “Did the Russians have any particular technique?” I asked. “They told me they thought a particular Russian drink had helped them win the contest,” said Mr Methane. “It is non alcoholic but fizzy.” It is called квас оцаковскии – kvass otsakovskii. Kvass is a fermented drink made from rye bread and is marketed in Russia as a patriotic alternative to cola. Coca-Cola launched its own brand of kvass in Russia in 2008 and Pepsi has signed an agreement with a Russian kvass manufacturer to act as a distribution agent. So the kvass wars cannot be far off. You read it first here. Mr Methane tells me: “It tastes like fizzy Marmite. Vlad and Alex presented me with a bottle as a gift and then sang a couple of verses of my song Cut The Cheese (available to view on YouTube)” “Did they get a prize?” I asked him. The Russian winners with part of their prize “Yes,” said Mr Methane. “52 cans of nuclear pea soup, the fuel that Phartman uses. Their two straight event wins mean that they went back to Russia with 104 tins which could be a problem at the airport baggage drop. But the organisers put their prize in a wheelbarrow and gave them a lift to the station for the 11.00pm overnight train back to the south. “The weather had looked a bit dodgy before the Championships – overcast and showers – but it brightened up once the farting started and the sun eventually shone. “I stayed overnight in a disused mental asylum in middle of a forest with Phartman who turns out to be a psychiatric nurse. It is very Soviet Union. The mosquitoes in the woods around the mental hospital have bitten me nearly to death. I am now off to catch a plane. There are strong winds here at the moment.” Mr Methane will be talking about his life farting around the world in his own full-length show at the Edinburgh Fringe in August and, unless discovered by Hollywood, will be performing at the increasingly prestigious Malcolm Hardee Awards Show on 23rd August. http://thejohnfleming.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/exclusive-mr-methane-reports-from-world-fart-championships-in-finland/

One is hard pressed to recall when the Archbishop of Canterbury last made "big news" of any kind. Thomas à Becket is about the only one who springs to mind.

True of a number of things, no?

Lord Carey: I support assisted dying The intervention of the former Archbishop of Canterbury is a dramatic departure from the official line of the Church of England By John Bingham, Religious Affairs Editor 8:57PM BST 11 Jul 2014 The Telegraph Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, is supporting moves to legalise assisted dying, it has emerged. His intervention is a dramatic breach with the official line of the Church of England. It comes days before the House of Lords considers a Bill tabled by Lord Falconer allowing doctors to prescribe terminally ill patients a lethal dose of drugs. Lord Carey is expected to argue that upholding the sanctity of human life without regard to suffering caused in the process could go against the spirit of Christian teaching. He will point to the fact that Christians already rely on the ethical principle of double effect to justify giving terminally ill patients doses of painkillers which will ultimately kill them. The former primate, who publicly championed traditionalist arguments on issues such as gay marriage, has previously spoken against relaxing the law on dying. In the Lords in 2006, during a previous attempt to change the law, he warned that if assisting someone to end their life was allowed, it would soon be treated as casually as abortion. While many opponents of the proposal argue that Christianity forbids any assisted suicide, Lord Carey has been persuaded that the commandment Thou shalt not kill should not mean prolonging suffering. The Church of England distanced itself from his position but Lord Falconer, the Labour former lord chancellor, said it demonstrated that the Churchs official opposition to the Bill was not necessarily representative of its wider membership. It is understood that Lord Carey was moved by the case of Tony Nicklinson, the locked-in syndrome sufferer who fought a legal battle to be allowed to die, before starving himself. The Bill would not have directly applied to Mr Nicklinson as he was not terminally ill but it is understood that his case prompted Lord Carey to reconsider the wider issue. Last month, following a case brought by Mr Nicklinsons widow, Jane, the Supreme Court urged Parliament to review the blanket ban on assisted dying or face possible intervention by the courts on human rights grounds. Under Lord Falconers plan, modelled on the system in the US state of Oregon, doctors would be able to provide a fatal dose of drugs to patients judged to have less than six months to live. Patients would administer thesubstance themselves but could receive help if unable to do so. The process would require two doctors signatures. Lord Falconer said: The number of people who support this Bill is quite substantial even from practising and active members of the Church of England and also other churches such as the Roman Catholics as well as for example the Jewish community. The Anglican church at the very top, by which I have in mind the bishops in the House of Lords, has been quite opposed, but it has not been the feeling that they represent their congregations. Opponents of the Bill said they were flabbergasted at Lord Careys change of position. Dr Peter Saunders, of the Christian Medical Fellowship, said: There is no biblical precedent or justification for compassionate killing. There is a world of difference ethically, legally, philosophically and theologically between helping someone to kill themselves with a lethal drug on the one hand and proportionate pain relief or withdrawal of meddlesome treatment on the other. Bishop Michael Nazir Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester, and a friend of Lord Carey, said: We must not assume that we know when people are going to die. Lord Carey himself knows of individuals, that I also know of, who were given six months to live and lived for years afterwards. A spokesman for the Church of England said: The Church of England is opposed to assisted suicide. He said that the General Synod passed a motion in February 2012 which expresses its support for the current law on assisted suicide as a mean of contributing to a just and compassionate society in which vulnerable people are protected. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/10963195/Lord-Carey-I-support-assisted-dying.html

THANK YOU, HITO!!! See, ye doubters and naysayers? See? See? And you know who you are.

Yes, I should have been more literal. In my post above, "see" = "bugger" or "get buggered by." Spectators optional.