AdamSmith

Awfully optimistic, aren't we? In the spirit of the season...

"Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell..." Satan, Paradise Lost

Which one?

Who wears the pants in this family?

I see two very creative fetishists in the making. As it were.

Extraordinary, outstanding in-depth investigative reporting from The Boston Globe. Reminder of how good this sometimes tired old paper can be at its best. http://www.bostonglobe.com/Page/Boston/2011-2020/WebGraphics/Metro/BostonGlobe.com/2013/12/15tsarnaev/tsarnaev.html

Surprise, surprise. Bible belt states lead the US in gay pornography searches between 2004 and 2011 Oscar Loves Life A secularist, Muslim-born scientist's perspective on religion, hypocrisy, conflict, sexuality and society The states of the Bible belt, America's conservative corridor, lead the country in searching Google for homosexual online media content between 2004 and 2011. I applied Google Insights for Search to the term gay porn and filtered the results to the "Online Media" category. The specific link to the search I performed can be located through this link. The results are normalized by Google such that the scaled numbers can be compared with each other. The top 10 states that lead the United States searching for gay porn are Mississippi, Florida, West Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio and New York. The results also include a map showing the relative scaling for search volume across the US. Search volume index for gay pornography searches Since a few of the states in the top 10 are Bible belt states, I wanted to graph the search volume index of gay porn as a function of religiosity for people from those states. I included data from a recent Gallup Poll that surveyed Americans about how important religion was to their lives. I plotted the results of this poll as a function of the number of searches for the word 'Bible' in each of the 51 states, just to confirm the that Google searches do indeed reflect the opinions and interests of the people within their states. To no surprise, as the graph below shows, there is terrific correlation between the Gallup Poll on religion and the relative number of Google searches for the word "Bible". Utah comes out as an anomaly because of the large Mormon population who are not as interested in searching for the word "Bible". For Utah "LDL" was more searched religious term. Next, I plotted the Gallup Poll as a function of Google search volume index for "gay porn" and plotted the results below. The trend is not perfect, and it is not meant to be. But it does have some interesting features. The results clearly show that the most religious state, Mississippi, also leads the country in gay porn searches. Several other religious states are also surprisingly at the top of the list. Those were the results and in my opinion, this data shows that hypocrisy is quite prevalent in the Bible belt. People may be conservative or they may be pretending to be conservative, but there is certainly a lot more homosexuality around than they are led to believe. It is also possible that homosexuals in these states are oppressed and are reluctant to come out of the closet and fuel their frustrations through openly dating. They may be a lot more isolated and alone than gays in California, for example, which is a much more liberal state. As a result, they turn to the Internet to sexually satisfy themselves. The table below shows the raw data. Data for the Google searches for gay porn has been extracted from the Google Insights for Research website which can be accessed through this link. Similarly, the data for the "bible" Google searches can be accessed through this link. The data for the importance of religion for the states comes from a recent Gallup Poll. State / Google searches for gay porn / Google searches for "bible" / Religion is important (%) Mississippi 100 93 85 Alabama 78 100 82 South Carolina 79 85 80 Tennessee 77 93 79 Arkansas 88 91 78 Louisiana 90 63 78 Georgia 82 77 76 North Carolina 81 76 76 Oklahoma 79 79 75 Texas 93 77 74 Kentucky 90 72 74 West Virginia 89 67 71 Kansas 75 60 70 Utah 61 24 69 Indiana 75 66 68 Missouri 80 64 68 Virginia 64 62 68 South Dakota 63 60 68 North Dakota 59 48 68 Nebraska 68 51 67 New Mexico 91 47 66 Florida 100 60 65 Ohio 85 57 65 Maryland 59 50 65 Pennsylvania 80 48 65 Michigan 78 58 64 Iowa 63 50 64 Illinois 76 49 64 Minnesota 58 48 64 Arizona 80 45 61 Idaho 58 44 61 Wisconsin 65 43 61 Delaware 65 40 61 District of Columbia 56 40 61 New Jersey 77 34 60 Wyoming 66 49 58 California 75 48 57 Colorado 78 44 57 Hawaii 76 40 57 Montana 68 50 56 New York 83 38 56 Connecticut 66 28 55 Nevada 88 33 54 Oregon 57 46 53 Rhode Island 85 25 53 Washington 67 46 52 Alaska 57 49 51 Maine 78 29 48 Massachusetts 71 25 48 New Hampshire 66 28 46 Vermont 74 24 42 http://oscarloveslife.blogspot.com/2011/12/bible-belt-states-lead-us-in-gay.html

I couldn't help imagining the respective thought balloons as Barack and Raúl shook hands. BO: If Florida would just vanish into a giant sinkhole I could fix this tomorrow. RC: If Fidel would just check out I could fix this tomorrow.

Eek. But falling seems entirely possible. Last time I attended something in Carnegie main hall, my seat was front row, first balcony. It took me a while to stop thinking how easy it would be to trip, fall over the rather low wall, and bounce off the 2 box levels on the way down to a hard stop on somebody in the orchestra seating.

From the same delightful blog... 10 Horrifying Methods Of Capital Punishment From Around The World Jul. 18, 2013 By Charlie Morrigan In Texas, they prefer the electric chair, but around the world and throughout history, there have been many awful, horrendous methods of killing criminals, enemies, or undesirables. Some methods are now banned, but to this day, people continue to sentence other people to death. And Wikipedia has lots of gory specifics. Read on! 1. Slow slicing (China) a form of torture and execution used in China from roughly AD 900 until it was banned in 1905. In this form of execution, the condemned person was killed by using a knife to methodically remove portions of the body over an extended period of time. This was civilized torture and execution, though. Recipients of the slow slicing were sometimes given opium as an act of mercy, or to prevent them from fainting. Turns out getting your body lopped off bit by bit with a knife can overwhelm a person. 2. Suffocation in ash (Ancient Persia) an execution method where a tower/room was filled with ash, into which the condemned person was plunged. Wheels were constantly turned while he was alive, making the ash whirl about, and the person died by gradual suffocation as he inhaled the ash. This is a pretty creative way to murder a person. 3. Decapitation (Japan) In Japan, decapitation was a common punishment, sometimes for minor offences. Samurai were often allowed to decapitate soldiers who had fled from battle, as it was considered cowardly. Decapitation was historically performed as the second step in seppuku (ritual suicide by disembowelment). After the victim had sliced his own abdomen open, another warrior would strike his head off from behind with a katana to hasten death and to reduce the suffering. The blow was expected to be precise enough to leave intact a small strip of skin at the front of the neck—to spare invited and honored guests the indelicacy of witnessing a severed head rolling about, or towards them; such an event would have been considered inelegant and in bad taste. …Oh, and then there’s this unsettling anecdote: One of the most brutal decapitations was that of Sugitani Zenjubō (ja:杉谷善住坊), who attempted to assassinate Oda Nobunaga, a prominent daimyo in 1570. After being caught, Zenjubō was buried alive in the ground with only his head out, and the head was slowly sawn off with a bamboo saw by passers-by for several days. 4. Blowing from a gun (Great Britain) a method of execution in which the victim is typically tied to the mouth of a cannon and the cannon is fired. The British weren’t the only ones to do this — the Mughal emperors, the Ottoman Turks, and folks in Algiers and Sumatra also got in on the action. In Afghanistan, or as I like to call it, “almost Iraq,” this practice continued until 1930. 5. Stoning Stoning people to death continues to occur in many countries around the world, whether officially sanctioned or not. The following are two excerpts from the Iran penal code for stoning adulterers: Article 102 – An adulterous man shall be buried in a ditch up to near his waist and an adulterous woman up to near her chest and then stoned to death. Article 104 – The size of the stone used in stoning shall not be too large to kill the convict by one or two throws and at the same time shall not be too small to be called a stone. Some nice clear rules to guide your barbarism! 6. Dismemberment There have been many methods of removing limbs from prisoners as a form of capital punishment, but what follows is a Persian method from the 19th century called shekkeh, described by Robert Binning: the criminal is hung up by the heels, head downwards, from a ladder or between two posts, and the executioner hacks away with a sword, until the body is bisected lengthways, terminating at the head. The two several halves are then suspended on a camel, and paraded through the streets, for the edification of all beholders. When the shekkeh is to be inflicted in a merciful manner, the culprit’s head is struck off, previous to bisecting the trunk 7. Crushing This form of execution, no longer sanctioned by any governing body, has occurred via various methods throughout history. It was used as a method of forcing a plea bargain in court by placing increasingly heavier stones on a person’s chest — in French, peine forte et dure (“hard and forceful punishment”). It was also commonly carried out via elephants in South and South-east Asia for over 4,000 years. The only recorded American instance of the stone method occurred during the Salem witch trials: Giles Corey [...] was pressed to death on September 19, 1692, during the Salem witch trials, after he refused to enter a plea in the judicial proceeding. According to legend, his last words as he was being crushed were “More weight”, and he was thought to be dead as the weight was applied. 8. Sawing There are various methods, check it out: Different methods of death by sawing have been recorded. In cases related to the Roman Emperor Caligula, the sawing is said to be through the middle. In the cases of Morocco, it is stated that that the sawing was lengthwise, both from the groin and upwards, and from the skull and downwards. In only one case, in the story about Simon the Zealot, the person is explicitly described as being hung upside-down and sawn apart vertically through the middle, starting at the groin, with no mention of fastening or support boards around the person, in the manner depicted in illustrations. In other cases where details about the method, beyond the mere sawing act, are explicitly supplied, the condemned person was apparently fastened to either one or two boards prior to sawing. 9. Scaphism, or “the boats” (Ancient Persia) The intended victim was stripped naked and then firmly fastened within the interior space of two narrow rowing boats (or hollowed-out tree trunks) joined together one on top of the other with the head, hands and feet protruding. The condemned was forced to ingest milk and honey to the point of developing a severe bowel movement and diarrhoea, and more honey would be rubbed on his exposed appendages to attract insects. He would then be left to float on a stagnant pond or be exposed to the sun. The defenceless individual’s faeces accumulated within the container, attracting more insects which would eat and breed within his exposed flesh, which — pursuant to interruption of the blood supply by burrowing insects — became increasingly gangrenous. The feeding would be repeated each day in some cases to prolong the torture, so that fatal dehydration or starvation did not occur. Death, when it eventually occurred, was probably due to a combination of dehydration, starvation and septic shock. Delirium would typically set in after a few days. I have to say, this doesn’t sound fun. 10. Gas chamber There have been many recorded instances, but the most well-known of course was in Nazi Germany. Gas chambers were used in the Third Reich as part of the “public euthanasia program” aimed at eliminating physically and mentally retarded people and political undesirables in the 1930s and 1940s. In June 1942 many hundreds of prisoners of Neuengamme concentration camp, amongst which 45 Dutch communists, were gassed in Bernburg. At that time, the preferred gas was carbon monoxide, often provided by the exhaust gas of gasoline-powered cars, trucks or army tanks. During the Holocaust, gas chambers were designed to accept large groups as part of the Nazi policy of genocide against the Jews. Nazis also targeted the Romani people, homosexuals, physically and mentally disabled, intellectuals and the clergy. Gas chambers in vans, concentration camps, and extermination camps were used to kill several million people between 1941 and 1945. Some stationary gas chambers could kill 2,000 people at once. http://thoughtcatalog.com/charlie-morrigan/2013/07/10-horrifying-methods-of-capital-punishment-from-around-the-world/

30 Weirdest Deaths You’ll Find On Wikipedia Jul. 23, 2013 By Charlie Morrigan Many of us are afraid to die but perhaps hope that we will at least die of natural causes, at an advanced age, having recently seen those whom we love. Drift off into sleep and never wake up. The following list, culled from Wikipedia, describes unusual, strange, horrible deaths. Although, a death is a death is a death. 1. Arius (336)… said to have died of sudden diarrhea followed by copious hemorrhaging and anal expulsion of the intestines while he walked across the imperial forum in Constantinople. He may have been poisoned. 2. Crown Prince Philip of France (1131)… died while riding through Paris, when his horse tripped over a black pig running out of a dung heap 3. Al-Musta’sim, the last Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad (1258)… executed by his Mongol captors by being rolled up in a rug and then trampled by horses. 4. Martin of Aragon (1410)… died from a combination of indigestion and uncontrollable laughing. 5. George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence (1478)… executed by drowning in a barrel of Malmsey wine at his own request. 6. Hans Steininger, the burgomaster of Brunau, Austria (1567)… died when he broke his neck by tripping over his own beard. The beard, which was 4.5 feet (1.4 meters) long at the time, was usually kept rolled up in a leather pouch. 7. Gouverneur Morris, an American statesman (1816)… died after sticking a piece of whale bone through his urinary tract to relieve a blockage. 8. Sherwood Anderson (1941)… died of peritonitis after swallowing a toothpick at a party. 9. The Collyer Brothers, extreme cases of compulsive hoarders (1947)… found dead in their home in New York. The younger brother, Langley, was crushed to death when he accidentally triggered one of his own booby traps that had consisted of a large pile of objects, books, and newspapers. His blind and paralyzed brother Homer, who had depended on Langley for care, died of starvation some days later. 10. Basil Brown (1974)… a 48-year-old health food advocate from Croydon, drank himself to death with carrot juice. 11. Boris Sagal, a film director (1981)… died while shooting the TV miniseries World War III when he walked into the tail rotor blade of a helicopter and was nearly decapitated. 12. Kenji Urada, a Japanese factory worker (1981)… killed by a malfunctioning robot he was working on at a Kawasaki plant in Japan. The robot’s arm pushed him into a grinding machine, killing him. 13. Tennessee Williams, American author (1983)… died when he choked on an eyedrop bottle-cap in his room at the Hotel Elysee in New York. He would routinely place the cap in his mouth, lean back, and place his eyedrops in each eye. 14. Garry Hoy (1993)… a 38-year-old lawyer in Toronto, fell to his death on July 9, 1993, after he threw himself against a window on the 24th floor of the Toronto-Dominion Centre in an attempt to prove to a group of visitors that the glass was “unbreakable,” a demonstration he had done many times before. The glass did not break, but popped out of the window frame. 15. Bernd-Jürgen Brandes, from Germany (2001)… voluntarily stabbed repeatedly and then partly eaten by Armin Meiwes (who was later called the Cannibal of Rotenburg). Brandes had answered an internet advertisement by Meiwes looking for someone for this purpose. Brandes explicitly stated in his will that he wished to be killed and eaten. 16. Richard Sumner (2002)… a British artist suffering from schizophrenia, went into a remote section of Clocaenog Forest in Denbighshire, Wales, handcuffed himself to a tree and threw the keys out of his reach. His skeleton was discovered three years later. There were signs that he may have later changed his mind. 17. Francis “Franky” Brohm, 23, of Marietta, Georgia (2004)… was leaning out of a car window and decapitated by a telephone pole support wire. The car’s intoxicated driver, John Hutcherson, 21, drove nearly 12 miles (19 km) to his home with the headless body in the passenger seat, parked the car in his driveway, then went to bed. A neighbour saw the bloody corpse still in the car and notified police. Brohm’s head was later discovered at the accident scene. 18. Kenneth Pinyan from Seattle, Washington (2005)… died of acute peritonitis after receiving anal intercourse from a stallion. The case led to the criminalization of bestiality in Washington state. 19. Lee Seung Seop, a 28-year-old from South Korea (2005)… collapsed of fatigue and died after playing the videogame StarCraft online for almost 50 consecutive hours. 20. Jennifer Strange, a 28-year-old woman from Sacramento, California (2007)… died of water intoxication while trying to win a Nintendo Wii console in a KDND 107.9 “The End” radio station’s “Hold Your Wee for a Wii” contest, which involved drinking large quantities of water without urinating. 21. Humberto Hernandez, a 24-year-old Oakland, California resident (2007)… killed after being struck in the face by an airborne fire hydrant while walking. 22. Kevin Whitrick, a 42-year-old British man (2007)… committed suicide by hanging himself live in front of a webcam during an Internet chat session. 23. Surinder Singh Bajwa, the Deputy Mayor of Delhi, India (2007)… died after falling from his building’s terrace while trying to fight off attacking Rhesus macaque monkeys. 24. David Phyall, 50 (2008)… the last resident in a block of flats due to be demolished in Bishopstoke, near Southampton, Hampshire, England, decapitated himself with a chainsaw to highlight the injustice of being forced to move out. 25. Uroko Onoja, a Nigerian polygamist businessman (2012)… died after being forced by five of his six wives to have sex with each of them. Onoja was caught having sex with his youngest wife by the remaining five, who were jealous of him paying her more attention. The remaining wives demanded that he also have sex with each of them, threatening him with knives and sticks. He had intercourse with four of them in succession, but stopped breathing before having sex with the fifth. 26. João Maria de Souza, 45 (2013)… died when a cow, believed to have escaped from a nearby farm, went onto his roof during his sleep, causing the room to cave in and the 3000-pound cow landing on him in Brazil. He died soon afterwards due to internal bleeding. 27. Li Po (Li Bai), Chinese poet and courtier (762)… supposedly tried to kiss the reflection of the Moon beside the boat in which he was travelling, fell overboard and drowned. 28. Edward II of England (1327)… after being deposed and imprisoned by his wife Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer, was rumoured to have been murdered by having a horn pushed into his anus through which a red-hot iron was inserted, burning out his internal organs without marking his body 29. Frank Hayes, a jockey at Belmont Park, New York (1923)… died of a heart attack during his first race. His mount finished first with his body still attached to the saddle, and he was only discovered to be dead when the horse’s owner went to congratulate him 30. Gareth Jones, actor (1958)… collapsed and died between scenes of a live television play, Underground, at the studios of Associated British Corporation in Manchester. Director Ted Kotcheff continued the play to its conclusion, improvising around Jones’ absence. http://thoughtcatalog.com/charlie-morrigan/2013/07/30-weirdest-deaths-youll-find-on-wikipedia/