Peaches: they look like butts (but taste way better). And what better way to reinforce that imagery than putting fancy little panties on them? Originally created by a fruit vendor in Nanjing, China, a box of nine pantied peaches sell for around $80. That's almost $10 apiece. Am I paying for the peaches or the panties? Also, what am I supposed to do with a bunch of miniature panties after I've eaten the peaces? "Do you have any small pets?" Stop. Just walk to the police station and turn yourself in.
Keep going for a couple more shots of the sexy fruit.
Thanks to dr venkman, who has been selling apples wearing tighty whities for years now with very little growth in business. Damn, I would have thought that was a million dollar idea.
John Brennan at the announcement of his nomination to lead the CIA in January, 2013. Photo via Flickr user Chuck Hagel
Along with the Iraq War, freedom fries, and Dick Cheney shooting a friend in the face, the George W. Bush administration was known for hyper-aggressive interrogation and detention policies carried out in the name of preventing terrorism. With the US Senate Intelligence Committee's report on post-9/11 excesses by the spy agency set to go public in a matter of weeks, CIA officials are now coming out of the woodwork to sell the masses on their honor and integrity.
But their PR offensive hit a stumbling block on Thursday, when an agency spokesman formally admitted for the first time that the CIA illegally accessed Senate investigators' computers.
An in-house inspector general found that "some CIA employees acted in a manner inconsistent with the common understanding reached between SSCI (Senate Select Committee on Intelligence) and the CIA in 2009,” according to agency spokesman Dean Boyd. That's a passive-aggressive way of conceding that operatives were trying to keep their skeletons in the closet by monitoring what Congress was up to. CIA Director John Brennan apparently apologized to the two senior members of the Senate committee, one from each party, who had expressed displeasure that their staffers were spied on by an outfit that is not supposed to perform surveillance on the mainland United States.
"The agency was pretty good at avoiding domestic surveillance when I started there," said Marc Sageman, a former CIA operative who joined the agency in 1984 and later worked with the New York Police Department (NYPD) on counter-terrorism strategy. "That was really not us—that was the FBI."
Why would agents go rogue now? Probably because Bush-era policies like torture (including waterboarding) and extraordinary rendition (extralegally transferring alleged terrorists between countries, often stashing them at secret so-called black sites) look, to normal people at least, like shady behavior. And though we still don't have the report, which remains classified for the time being, it is rumored to find that all those extracurricular activities failed to prevent a single terrorist plot. Remarkably like the NYPD's Muslim surveillance program—which targets everyone who looks or sounds vaguely Islamic in the city and even New Jersey—the CIA violated civil liberties without actually making Americans any safer.
"After being briefed on the CIA Inspector General report today, I have no choice but to call for the resignation of CIA Director John Brennan," Colorado Senator Mark Udall said in a statement. "The CIA unconstitutionally spied on Congress by hacking into Senate Intelligence Committee computers. This grave misconduct not only is illegal, but it violates the US Constitution’s requirement of separation of powers."
So Brennan's future at the agency is looking murky—even as one of his predecessors, George Tenet, works furiously behind the scenes to shape how the public interprets the pending Senate report, as the New York Timesreported earlier this week. Tenet isn't just trying to defend his integrity; there's also cash in the form of private-sector consulting fees to be had if he can resuscitate his reputation. There is technically a (slight) possibility of some kind of criminal prosecution as well, given that the report apparently accuses the CIA of misleading Congress and even the Bush White House about the effectiveness of torture. Then again, given that the Obama Justice Department has consistently shied away from going after anyone who did anything illegal before 2009, let's not get our hopes up.
"When I left, we pretended to be ethical," Sageman, who parted ways with the CIA in 1991 to practice medicine, told me. "I think that pretense just got dropped."
When US Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chair of the Intelligence committee, first went public with news of the CIA's snooping of her investigators' computers in March, Brennan issued a spirited denial that is not aging well.
"As far as the allegations of, you know, CIA hacking into, you know, Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth," he said in an interview with NBC's Andrea Mitchell that same day. "I mean, we wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s just beyond the—you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do."
Feinstein has yet to join Udall in calling on Brennan to resign, but suffice it to say he's on thin ice at this point. If and when the report emerges, the CIA may need to clean house in a major way.
I can't say I've ever been particularly interested in swingers' clubs, mostly because in my mind they are the haunts of the old, desperate, and flaccid, the playgrounds of gold-toothed Russian mobsters and characters out of Michel Houellebecq novels.
But then came an offer from my girlfriend. She had been to a swingers' club a few years before we met and found it quite fun. I said nothing at the time, mulling over it instead. A few days later, on a weekend, we were in a club drinking with some of my friends till the early hours. Around three in the morning, I leaned over and whispered in her ear, "I think now's the right time. Let's go swinging."
We left our group without much explanation and hopped in the car. Twelve miles later, we were up in the mountains on the outskirts of Barcelona, looking for parking outside a mansion. As we walked through the gates, a well-attired man in his 40s came out of the door in the company of two women. My doubts about my own outfit were confirmed as soon as we walked in. Compared with everyone else in the club, I was dressed like a fucking dog. The glamorous woman that greeted us explained politely that my shorts were totally against the dress code, but since it was my first time, just this once, they were willing to let it go.
Entrance cost about $70 and included four drinks. Men could enter only if accompanied by a woman, while women were allowed in either way. We were given a tour of all the different rooms—these included a disco (full of naked people), a pool (also full of naked people but which we did not try because my girlfriend hated the idea of all the sperm swimming around in the water), several king-size bedrooms, a cinema (which only showed porn, of course), and a terrace (which I guessed would be the equivalent of a night club's chill-out zone. The rules were made clear: Our belongings had to be left at the entrance, where we were given a towel and a pair of slippers. The couple should not at any point separate.
After going through these first steps, we drank some whiskey and walked around, taking in everything that was happening around us in an attempt to acclimate to the people and environment. Finally, we decided to go into one of the rooms. We moved into semi-darkness, while some 20 people engaged in various sexual activities in the space around us. We found a corner and started getting it on. It did not take long for others to join us, and within a few minutes our couple had turned into a handful.
The rules had been clear form the start: You must always ask for the couple's permission to participate, whether that is expressed or implied, keeping in mind that "no" very definitely means no. But of course, once you get into it, "no" isn't going to be in very many people's vocabulary. With an unmistakable gesture, a guy asked for my permission to get closer to my girlfriend. Before I could remind him of the obligation to use a condom, he showed me he already had one in his hand. He put it on and as he penetrated her, I pushed her head southward, asking her to give me a blowjob.
Shortly after that I lost her for a while. I ended up in another corner with two women while my girlfriend was his. I found her much later in another room—she was giving some other guy a blowjob, so I started licking her pussy while different sets of hands touched her everywhere. After a powerful orgasm, she got up, drank more whiskey, and started talking to a guy who told her that he was trying to hold back ejaculating for as long as possible but that having sex with her made that very difficult. I listened as I received oral sex from another complete stranger.
We took a break on the terrace. We smoked and talked with a guy from Seville, who spoke passionately against Catalan nationalism. That was a little boring, so we left—this time for the cinema, where we had sex with another couple. We never exchanged a word with them, but we understood one another quite easily. You see, part of the fun is looking, but also showing off.
After we were done with them, we went on a final tour of the house and decided to leave. We returned home satisfied—a new day was just beginning. Still excited, we smoked a last spliff and fucked while discussing the experience.
Maybe in a different context I would not have felt any attraction to the people I met that night, but I don't think I would have found anyone repugnant either. There were young people there but also older people—smaller and other larger, athletic bodies as well as bodies that clearly had not been taken good care of. But in the context of a swingers' club, that was unimportant.
The really interesting thing about the experience was the purely sexual connection established between complete strangers. It is also a great way for a couple to get over jealousy. You have to turn the tables and use others' sexual desire to your advantage. And if you cannot get over jealousy, you should just join in.
Picture related: looks like she forgot something.
A 38-year old Scottish woman recently had a five-inch vibrator (possibly just a dildo, but five inches seems sad for a dildo) removed from her vagina after forgetting it was in there after a drunken night of kinking ten years prior. For reference, that is 9 years, 364 days and 23 hours entirely too long to have a vibrator in your vagina.
The woman came to the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary after she had been experiencing symptoms including fatigue, incontinence and severe weight loss, and after performing an X-Ray, doctors found a five inch sex toy lodged up in her lady parts, protruding into her bladder. It was then that the woman recalled a sexual encounter from ten entire years ago in which she and a partner had been using it and couldn't remember removing it.
Listen, I'll be the first to admit I don't know anything about vaginas (in my mind they're like kangaroo pouches), but I can't help but feel like you should know if there's a five-inch sex toy still inside of you. But who knows, maybe vaginas are more like butts than I imagined (I jammed my wallet up there for safekeeping one night and forgot about it for a week).
Thanks to lilco, who agrees if you're going to leave anything in your vagina for a decade, it better give you superpowers.
To most, the idea of traveling by rail is as quaintly nostalgic as the image of a Great Depression–era hobo carrying a bindle, contemplating the theft of a pie from a windowsill. To most, the idea of paying just as much, often times more, to spend ten times as long in transit as it would take to hop on an airplane seems insane. I, however, am not most. I am a moron, which is why I recently spent 22 tedious hours traveling between Chicago and New York via Amtrak. Let me paint you, dear reader, a portrait of my mistake.
Things did not begin well. As I waited in line to board, a man began screaming obscenities, irate because an elderly woman had fallen down and had to be scooped off the platform, thus delaying our departure. “He’s been doing that all day, yelling at people,” the man behind me, wearing a travel pillow, sighed. After getting on his knees and putting his hands behind his head in a very lackadaisical, “been there, done that” manner, the screaming man was escorted away by Amtrak police.
An autistic kid with filthy nails and cloudy glasses approached and immediately began quoting an egregiously long passage from The Great Gatsby. I asked why he chose to take a train to his destination instead of a plane. He explained that he could carry more things on a train. He said this while wearing three overstuffed bags and holding two tattered others, one of which he informed me had milk in it. “How much milk?” I asked. “Two cartons.” “Why not just travel with fewer items?” I asked. The look of abject confusion he gave me in response wordlessly answered my query.
The train, I quickly realized, is for misfits. There was a reason why the people surrounding me didn’t want the TSA to touch them. This mode of transportation’s main appeal is the fact that one does not need to be searched in order to obtain entry onto it; hell, one doesn’t even need to show a ticket until one boards. Budget-conscious terrorists could, if they so desired, not purchase a ticket and save a few bucks before getting all those virgins they were promised. Autistic kids could, and apparently do, transport dairy across state lines.
I could have purchased a sleeper suite, and therefore extricated myself from the absurdity that surrounded me, but that would have cost hundreds of additional dollars. The sleeper cars are separated from the plebes in coach class; you can’t even enter them without paying the fee. I envied whoever was blessed enough to afford one.
The romanticism of the rails is dead. There is no beauty, no ceremony, in it. White, brown, and beige plastic covered every surface. Water sloshed in the sink of the filthy bathroom. The cutlery was plastic; the plates—holding flavorless, overpriced turkey sandwiches—were made of paper. Artless photos of hot dogs and Pepsi products hung askew in the snack car.
I’m sure there was at least one romantic on the train, a Beat Generation enthusiast in love with riding the rails, but I did not encounter them. I encountered an aggressive little person who cut in line at the snack car and ordered one of the aforementioned artless hot dogs. An aggressive mother/daughter duo who cut in line as we boarded and spent the trip rubbing their hands with sanitizer, softly snoring and scrolling through their Android phones. A man who, every time I passed him on the way to the restroom, lasciviously informed me that I “[looked] really nice.”
The woman sitting in front of me, who I viewed with a combination of contempt and awe, was on her telephone for the entire 22-hour train ride. At 4 AM, she loudly barked, “Fuck you. FUCK YOU!” to whatever unfortunate soul was on the other end of the line. She lambasted the employees for not telling her she could go outside at a stop to smoke a cigarette, even though she was sitting, talking on her phone, the entire time we were stopped. Had she any brains, her excessive cell phone usage would have given her brain cancer.
At one point, she turned to the long-suffering college girl sitting next to her. “You got a Facebook?” she asked. The girl said she didn’t, an obvious lie. “You don’t have one?!?” Telephone incredulously responded. “Why not? You can use it on your phone!” She then asked for the girl’s full name, presumably to investigate the matter further. My pity for the girl was absolute.
After a couple hours of fitful sleep, I woke up in Cleveland at 7 AM. We pulled in alongside the highway I used to take to my job at the wallpaper factory, next to the football stadium I once sat in front of while willing myself into wanting to kiss a guy I knew I didn’t really want to kiss. Next to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame I went to with my ex, before we knew of the horrors that would arise from our courtship, where we marveled over the size of the cover of More Songs About Buildings and Food.
I smoked a cigarette, still drunk from the Jim Beam I smuggled onto the train the night before, which was appropriate, because I was back in Cleveland, and stared into the early morning clouds punctuated with light. We motored away, past graffiti-covered abandoned factories and graffiti-covered un-abandoned factories and my former life; assuming you could call what I was doing at the time living. Telephone chattered away all the while.
As I smoked on the Syracuse platform, he approached. A middle-aged English teacher who normally lives in China, he comes to Los Angeles sometimes. Could he give me his card, and next time he’s in town, I could show him around? His friend there can’t, because he’s working all the time. “I’m not a very good tour guide,” I told him, as I stared at a billboard for a fly-by-night law firm. “Well, at least you’re honest,” he said with a painful smile. He looked tired. I looked tired. I don’t always look tired, though. I got the impression he did.
“So… have you traveled overseas before?” he asked, ignoring my lack of enthusiasm for engaging him in conversation. “I lived in Australia once,” I told him, “but that’s it.” “Australia! Is it as chill there as I would imagine? Beautiful scenery?” “Well, I lived in Sydney, so it was pretty metropolitan. I didn’t really leave the city much, so I can’t say.” He gave me another pained smile. “Why were you living in Sydney? School? Work? Did you get a job out there?” “I was in a relationship with someone who was Australian,” I replied, staring now at the Dunkin’ Donuts below us. To this, he wordlessly nodded and walked away. We did not speak for the rest of the train ride. He got off at Schenectady with his 12-year-old son.
Mennonite people, with their bonnets and non-rolling luggage, were the only ones on the train who had to be there. They demurely avoided eye contact whenever anyone walked by them. They carried their things with them whenever they left their seats. They did not trust the rest of us, and rightfully so.
I leaned back, listened to George Gershwin, and felt the vibration of the rails, wondering how my experience would have differed in years past. As soon as I opened my eyes, I saw the mother and daughter endlessly scroll through their newsfeeds. As soon as I took my headphones off, I heard Telephone’s chatter. “Can I follow you on Instagram?” one passenger asked another. Gershwin is dead, as is his world. And I was taking an antiquated mode of transportation through an antiquated version of America—forests unsullied by strip malls, abandoned factories, dilapidated shacks, muddy water. Even as I did, I was surrounded by the garish light of modernity.
A recently discovered database failure is certain to have lethal consequences: Many of the 747,000 weapons that the Defense Department provided to the Afghan National Security Forces were not properly labeled and tracked—which means that insurgents or arms dealers could easily get hold of them.
Lucy was starting to hold back tears. We sat in her living room, my iPhone working overtime as my tape recorder, and she was so pissed off it looked like she might cry. She was telling me about our former Dungeon Master, who had exploited our Dungeons & Dragons game to live out his sad-sack fantasy after she'd already flatly rejected his advances just weeks before. "I really didn't want my character to go down that route and have fake sex with this character," Lucy explained to me on that sunny afternoon. But the adventure "didn't get anywhere else unless I let it get more and more sexualized. Once we went down that path that was the only thing that got me rewards in the game, if I kept doing those things. Or at least allowing it to happen to my character and not being like, 'Fuck that shit' and walking away."
"Lucy" is an alias, by the way.
Sporting a mousy face and thick-rimmed glasses, Lucy is the kind of woman simultaneously ignored, marginalized, and fetishized by the prototypical geek. She's attractive but doesn't seem unattainable, possessing that "approachable" look that seems almost tailor-made to appeal to dorky guys with gutter-dwelling self-esteems. Lucy's been a dork for most of her life: She was first introduced to D&D by friends in high school, and in college she was an officer in a video game club where she coordinated events.
"Lucy"
I first met Lucy when we both responded to a Reddit advertisement looking for players for a new D&D campaign in Williamsburg at the beginning of this year. Besides my wife, Lucy was the only woman in the party, and I was glad to see her there. I'd braced myself for the worst stereotypes of other players—a bunch of neckbeards with glandular problems. I was happy that I wouldn't be playing in a group like that.
At its best, Dungeons & Dragons is a game without limits, a game in which even the rules themselves can be subsumed by the logic and necessity of shared storytelling. D&D lets players take on different identities, different roles—even wildly different moral systems. It is an elaborate system of wish fulfillment, in which scrawny, socially awkward teenagers can become bruising hulks who wield massive great axes and slay dragons singe-handedly. The game's boundaries are limited only by the players—what they want to accomplish and what they are willing to attempt. And like any game that encourages the wish fulfillment of (primarily) teenage boys, sometimes these impulses will take a dark and ugly turn.
The leader of our group—let's call him Jason (because, well, that's his name)—had a thing for Lucy from the start, as he confessed to my wife and me soon after we first met him. Months later he finally gathered the courage to ask her out, but she firmly rejected him. And that should have been the end of it.
My wife and I missed a session for the first time, and Jason made his move. He introduced a new character that he would get to control. The character, "Mercurios," was rugged and handsome, with "red wavy hair that seems to move like a flame covers a slightly tan face of man," as Jason would later write. All the "ladies" in the "town" fawned over Mercurios relentlessly, a weird piece of auto-erotic exhibitionism when one considers the fact that both the ladies and the man depicted were being controlled by Jason himself. In any case—the party needed this character's help, and Jason made it very clear that the only way to get it would be if Lucy's character made like she wanted to do the nasty. Lucy didn't like this idea. But when she tried other techniques to advance the story, they invariably failed. Eventually Jason—er, the character—suggested that they go somewhere more comfortable, somewhere more private.
"It was just kind of guided in that direction."
Nothing else explicitly happened between these two quasi-fictional people, but that was Lucy's last session with our group all the same. For myself, it would be months before the real story of what had happened became fully clear.
And now that it is, I need to find a new D&D group.
Is this a problem, though, or just one ugly circumstance? When the question of harassment in role-playing games comes up in online communities, stories abound. But no form of harassment or exploitation is more controversial than fictional rape, particularly as it is always at the hands of either another party member or a character controlled by the Dungeon Master. In a game in which the character is of your own invention, in which you play-act what the character sees, how he or she acts, and what he or she desires, it can be a truly traumatic experience. "I have had characters raped," one poster noted on an internet forum that discussed the topic at some length all the way back in 1999. "I can say from experience that even though I know I am not my character, it is very traumatic. The GM in question did not give me an out."
One woman I spoke with online (who asked not to be quoted) recently had her character put into a "gimp suit" by her Dungeon Master—against her strong protestations, and in front of her younger sister. She left the game in disgust. Fortunately, the rest of the party was similarly offended and never invited that player back. (#NotAllRoleplayers, after all.)
According to a dissertation on gender in role-playing games from 2006, more than 55 percent of female gamers had been "made to feel uncomfortable, judged or harassed because of their gender," compared with 5.4 percent of male players. Similarly, 40 percent of women witnessed such an incident, as did 32 percent of men. Not all of these instances signify something as egregious as fictional rape, but the numbers are disappointing all the same.
Dungeons & Dragons bubbles up in our cultural consciousness every decade or two before receding back to the depths of niche weirdness, and it seems to be having one of its signature moments once again. A recent New York Times article highlighted the game's incredible influence on a generation of writers and artists, while other mainstream outlets have noted the admirable efforts made in this new edition toward inclusiveness of all races, genders, and sexual identities.
This year, Dungeons & Dragons celebrates its 40th birthday with the release of a fifth edition, which will take the game fully into the 21st century. Early in the new edition's rulebook, the authors suggest that players need not "be confined to binary notions of sexuality and gender." Dungeons & Dragons is a game arguably most famous as a shorthand for the deepest depths of geek culture. That it added this stipulation to its newest rules is refreshing—and more than a little surprising. An uncomfortable legacy remains deeply ingrained in the DNA of Dungeons & Dragons, a legacy that stretches all the way back to the origins of the game itself.
Originally created by Gary Gygax, an insurance underwriter, high school dropout, and avid gun collector, D&D is the child of a self-described "biological determinist." Gygax believed that while "it isn't that gaming is designed to exclude women," there's "no question that male and female brains are different" and that "females do not derive the same inner satisfaction from playing games" as men do. This, explained Gygax, was why "everybody who's tried to design a game to interest a large female audience has failed." These opinions, while fairly in line with the overwhelmingly male niche culture of war games that laid the groundwork for D&D in the early 1970s, have helped enshrine a legacy that the game has had difficulty leaving behind.
In the first edition of the Dungeon Master's Guide from 1979, Gygax provided Dungeon Masters with a "Random Harlot Encounter Table."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, surveys at the time pegged the number of female players somewhere between 0.4 and 2.3 percent. Still, it's impossible to say how much the attitudes displayed by the game's creator were a function of this gender gap rather than its cause. Regardless, it would be decades before the game's publisher—or its players—made serious efforts to recruit outside this cloistered circle.
In 1983, not ten years after the game's creation, the first truly comprehensive study of tabletop role-playing games was conducted. Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games As Social Worlds by Gary Alan Fine was a study on the habits, attitudes, and demographic breakdowns of the practitioners of this new, weird hobby called "role-playing." And Fine's results were far from flattering. The book painted the picture of an insular boy's club consisting of social cast-offs and introverts, entrenching a perception that largely remains intact to this day. According to Fine, only between 5 and 10 percent of players at the time were women. But beyond noting this massive gender gap, Fine asked what accounted for this disparity.
"Girls don't have enough imagination," one woman quoted in the study explained. The games were just "too complicated." Some men surveyed for the study helpfully suggested that "females' greater commitment to social reality" was to blame for their lack of representation. The report also highlights a deep anxiety and violence toward women in the men he surveyed and observed. "It is striking," Fine notes at one point, "that players consider inhibitions that prevent characters from engaging in fantasy rape to be a problem, but such is male informal interaction." He also writes, "While it is not inevitable that the games will express male sexual fears and fantasies, they are structured so that these expressions are legitimate."
A number of the players he surveyed agreed. When Fine asked one individual whether women were accepted in his group, his answer was more than a little revealing: "Yeah, they're accepted. They're accepted and they're sort of treated special. I mean people make a little joke about them, or talk to them in kind of a kidding way... You know, they're making sexual remarks to the girls and teasing her about sex and so on. It's considered standard, no big deal."
Fine cautions, "The absence of females is not an accident of fate, nor is it something that will likely change rapidly." He also writes, "Females will not constitute a large percentage of the gaming world in the near future." When D&D's publisher, Wizards of the Coast, conducted a market research survey in 2000, they found that 20 percent of all players were women—a paltry number, but an appreciable rise from the early 80s.
As countless players and industry professionals I spoke with—both male and female—were eager to note, Anna Kreider, who runs the blog "Go Make Me a Sandwich," is a vocal critic of much of the artwork and outreach that the industry attempts (or fails to attempt). Yet she noted over email that, "As much as I write about the ugly side of game culture, I am lucky to be part of a community of game designers who are some of the best, most amazing human beings I know. Games are an amazing medium and can be a powerful tool of self-examination and social change... Overall I'm very hopeful for the future of the hobby."
You've seen where airplanes go to die , but what happens to the airports we abandon? They slowly fall to pieces, like the ones in this gallery, looking like sad monuments to a future that never happened.
Yeah, that scene was pretty insane. And to think that they actually do that as punishment (more frequently to women than men from my understanding) in some countries.
Stylized violence is everywhere on television lately, but true to its form as the most dismal show on television, The Leftovers started last night with a hate crime so brutal, we had trouble watching it. And naturally, the aftermath is thoroughly bleak.
Lately, browsing through Romanian magazines and newspapers I keep coming across articles about the awesomeness of beer—articles on how it is food not booze, how it can cure kidney stones and how, during the summer months, it could even replace water. It's not like I needed any convincing but looking into this trend, I quickly found out that all that information is being fed to the Romanian press by something called the Center for Beer Studies, Health and Nutrition.
Founded in 2012 by Dr. Corina Zugravu, Dr. Alin Popescu and Dr. Mihaela Begeaâ, the CBSHN is essentially a committee that offers scholarships to MA, MBA and PhD candidates whose research is based on beer. In the two years they have been active, they have given out four scholarships as well as supervised those students' research.
From this research, beer seems to be a wonder beverage, which can prevent sicknesses like osteoporosis, diabetes, ulcers, Parkinson, senility and heart attacks. Also they recommend drinking one or two glasses of beer per day, depending on your gender. But I read in a psychology magazine that you have to take at least a three-day break between glasses to avoid becoming an alcoholic. To get things straight, I spoke to Cornelia Zugravu, the president of the Beer Center.
VICE: What was the first research your center published? Cornelia Zugravu: We launched the first one last year with funds from the beer industry. It identified certain possible positive effects of moderate beer consumption on the memory and the attention span. We used the latest generation of neural imaging to find out how beer helps us remember things better and stimulates the attention centers on our brain by better incorporating data in our long term memory.
Moderate beer drinking also amplifies the impact of positive memories on the brain. The research was done on 29 men between 18 and 64 years, and moderate consumption of beer, which ranged from four to 14 glasses.
If beer stimulates our attention span, why can't we drink and drive?
You could always go with non-alcoholic beer.
I read that beer is addictive. Is that true?
All studies and statements, be they our own or international, are based on a moderate consumption of beer. In this context, there are no health risks—not even those of addiction.
At what point does beer become bad for you?
It depends on individual characteristics, such as weight, height and sex. The tolerance level differs from one body to another. To keep the study in the area of positive effects we found the right level of consumption, which scientifically does not put the body at risk. That is 0.66 liters per day for men and 0.33 liters per day for women, if the beer has an alcohol concentration of five percent.
Is fortified beer dangerous?
The recipe for beer has remained unchanged for years and it only contains cereals, hops, water and yeast. The alcoholic concentration is obtained only through fermentation.
Your site says that a glass a day can significantly increase good cholesterol. What is good cholesterol and how can beer improve it?
According to a study done by Hebrew University in Israel, people who consume moderate amounts of beer, have a lower incidence of heart attack and other heart ailments. That is because moderate beer drinking helps stimulate good cholesterol production (cholesterol HDL), which reduces the risk of arterial sickness. Good cholesterol acts as a vacuum cleaner for excess cholesterol, while the bad kind sticks to the walls of the blood vessels.
Is non-filtered beer better than normal beer for our health?
Both national and international studies focus on normal beer. But surely unfiltered beer has the same benefits.
Despite all these discoveries, your don't advise people to start drinking. Why is that?
We don't promote beer drinking. We can't tell a person to get drunk, but we can give relevant information about this product to consumers and the scientific community, to help them make the right choices.
Uh, remember how when Sam Raimi announced at Comic-Con that he and his brother Ted were working on an Evil Dead TV series and that Bruce Campbell was somehow involved? And I figured he could be doing anything from starring to producing? Turns out it's the former. Groovy.
Note: Worthwhile larger version HERE.
This is the ad created for laxative brand Dulcolax by creative agency McCann Health. It ran in Singapore newspapers and bus shelters and features a bunch of sad turds gathered around the inside of an @$$hole, staring at it like a campfire. You think they're telling ghost stories? Turd ghost stories are about farts, by the way. How many days has that one turd counted on the wall? Because it looks like over 400. And if you're a turd that hasn't felt the refreshing freedom of a toilet bowl pool in over 400 days, I've got bad news for you -- your owner is dead and you're never leaving that @$$hole. How's that for a scary story? Also, this is ad is so good I already live my life with almost constant diarrhea and still went out and bought a case of Dulcolax.
Thanks to JF and piglsey, who encourages you to set those turds free.
We've seen an AT-AT cat playhouse before, and now there's an AT-ST. I don't really have any more info, I just found the pics on The Bloggess's site in between posts about her weird taxidermy fetish. So it looks like it's up to us to make up our own backstory. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess it was built by a guy who loves his cats AND Star Wars. Remember: the simplest explanation is usually the right one. Or maybe the whole thing fell to earth like a f***ing asteroid, I don't know. "I bet he got it in a McDonald's Happy Meal." Now you're thinking.
Thanks to me, for being in touch with my inner cat enough to admit MEOW MEOW MEOW MEOW MEOW.
If you had to pick the smartest show on TV, you’d probably go with something that like House of Cards (though technically on Netflix) or Modern Family, or any number of things on HBO—shows that are smart in that they showcase dynamic writing and complex characters, and offer a fresh perspective. But the smartest show on TV has none of these traits; it’s smart because it’s fooled you into thinking it’s something that it’s not. It’s smarter than you—The Bachelor.
While often dismissed as trashy television, The Bachelor simply can’t be ignored, if for no other reason than that it’s on a fairly unprecedented run. Since debuting in 2002, the franchise has enjoyed a remarkable thirty-one seasons in primetime—eighteen of The Bachelor, ten seasons of the spinoff, The Bachelorette, and three of its second spinoff, Bachelor Pad. And there’s no signs of slowing down—last year’s The Bachelor finale drew over 11 million viewers and this season’s The Bachelorette (whose finale is today) consistently ranks #1 or #2 in the Nielsen nightly ratings.
What’s more, the show’s formula has remained virtually unchanged in its 12 years: Twenty-five or so single women vie for the heart of one eligible bachelor, who ultimately chooses and proposes to one of them after eight weeks of gradually narrowing the field. The bulk of the show is a whirlwind journey of four-star resorts, exotic locales, extravagant dates across the globe, with all the tears, fights, and secrets—better known as “drama”—you might expect when a couple dozen women simultaneously date the same man and live under the same roof. However, the heart of the show, quite literally, is the narrative of two people falling in love and eventually finding their way to each other.
Photo Courtesy ABC/Javier Pesquera
Put simply, The Bachelor is many things at once. It has the love triangle (and rectangle, pentagon, hexagon, etc.) intrigue of a soap opera, the voyeuristic appeal of a reality show, and the competitive draw of a game show. But what it really is underneath all of that is something completely different: a carefully devised, high budget social experiment—one that would make Stanley Milgram jealous.
Here’s the founding question: Can you make a large group of women fall in love with a man they’ve never met in two months time? (You can reverse genders in the case of The Bachelorette.) The answer, as has been proven over the course 27 seasons of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, is yes. Each season at least four of the contestants tell the bachelor they are “falling in love” or actually utter the words, “I love you”—the bachelor cannot reciprocate until the proposal—and a great deal more display strong feelings for the bachelor and express real sorrow at being eliminated; it’s a near inevitability that they too would’ve expressed such emotions had they been chosen to stick around. In fact, it is so rare that a contestant does not take a liking to the bachelor that it made “Bachelor history” (a term they like to use) when two women decided to leave on their own on the last season of The Bachelor, including this year’s bachelorette, Andi Dorfman. Needless to say, the formula works. The more interesting question is, how?
The first trick of the Bachelor Experiment, as we’ll call it, is to put the bachelor on a podium. The main way this is done is by limiting the contestants’ exposure to him. When they meet for the first time, the women are brought out of a limo one by one and are afforded a greeting of about thirty seconds. Throughout the first night, and for much of the remainder of the show, the interactions continue to be brief. While the women may “steal him away” from the group for a few minutes of private conversation (besides the cameras, of course), it isn’t long before another contestant does the same. After a while, it begins to look a lot like a meet-and-greet at a mall or a bookstore, where people line up for hours just to shake the hand of a celebrity. Only in this case, it’s not the celebrity that creates the long line, but the long line that creates the celebrity. After being in this environment for enough time, the bachelor looks a lot like a star, always in town for one day only. So when a contestant is given the chance to spend the day with the bachelor on a “one-on-one date” (a normal date) as opposed to a “group date” (something that, to my knowledge, does not yet exist in the real world), it’s a little like Leonardo DiCaprio just asked them to prom. More importantly, after being in a constant state of pent up emotion—not just because the conversations are mostly short, but because they sometimes go days without seeing the bachelor—the release is so great that it accelerates their feelings towards him. But, just as quickly, the date ends and they go back to being part of the group. Only now, after having advanced the relationship—or, in Bachelor parlance, “getting that one-on-one time”—they are left wanting even more, forever in the uncritical honeymoon phase.
Inevitably, this type of dynamic breeds a sort of inferiority complex. Something that’s amazing about the show (which you can easily become conditioned to as a viewer) is how quickly the contestants become grateful for things that they would normally expect when it comes to a relationship. When the lucky woman is informed that she will be taken on a one-on-one date—via a “date card” delivered by the show’s host (once again, the bachelor doesn’t appear more than he has to)—she feels fortunate to have the bachelor’s undivided attention for a few hours, and the other women feel as though they’ve been rejected. As a result, the bachelor’s position as the prize of the show is further reinforced and unquestioned, and the power differential grows. Of course, just about everyone who signs up to go on a reality/game show has to expect that there will be a few differences between the show and everyday life. But unlike other shows of its kind that also create a distorted reality, like Big Brother or Jersey Shore, the stakes in The Bachelor are serious—the only prize for winning is marriage, and the only goal is love—and the contestants are making decisions that will, hopefully, drastically affect their real lives.
Photo Courtesy ABC/Matthew Putney
How the show reminds the contestants that they are “there to find love” and correspondingly “there for the right reasons” (two quotes you’ll hear almost every episode) is perhaps the most important part of the Bachelor Experiment. From the moment the contestants step out of the limo, they are surrounded by extraordinary luxury, most likely completely unknown to them. The swanky hotels and the paradisiac destinations are just the beginning—it’s the access that’s nearly unparalleled. Any given date might include scaling a 40-story building, taking a helicopter to a private island for the day, having dinner in a castle, or performing onstage with a popular band—all things that happened this and pretty much every season, and aren’t even really “for sale” normally. But so intertwined are the extravagance and the idea of falling in love that they become one and the same. To partake in the decadence of the experience (and it’s impossible not to) is to at the same time believe that it’s also the narrative of your own love story.
The show doesn’t just rely on a fairy tale narrative to make their contestants feel like they’re falling in love, though. In fact, The Bachelor relies on a healthy dose of overt contradictions to warp reality. To name a few: The bachelor is there to find his one true love, but he makes out with half a dozen women in a given night; He’s ready to get down on one knee at the end, but the woman he proposes to is probably not the last person he’s had slept with (the final three are allowed to spend one night with the bachelor in “the fantasy suite”); He wants to build a life with someone, but spends all his time getting to know the women in completely fantastical situations. Even the show’s beloved host, Chris Harrison, is at once a chaperone, always maintaining order in the house, and a pimp, constantly delivering the contestants to the bachelor and telling them they have to leave when eliminated. These contradictions are entirely out in the open, yet never acknowledged. The result is an atmosphere that’s completely mind-bending, where the realities of the situation simultaneously exist at both poles of the Madonna-whore complex. In the void of a logical reality, it’s much harder for the contestants to do anything but follow the structure of the show.
Photo Courtesy ABC/Bill Matlock
Indeed, this control is vital to the Bachelor Experiment. The producers manage nearly every detail of the show, from where they stay to how they travel to what they do on their dates. If we’ve learned anything from the Stanford Prison Experiment, it’s that after enough time in a given power structure, people will alter their behavior to comply with the rules put in place by those in charge. Obviously the contestants aren’t in a prison (far from it), but that’s the point—the manipulation is hard to notice when you’re being treated like royalty everywhere you go. What’s more, many of the trappings of the first class treatment they enjoy actually serve to disorient them further—the constant travelling from one place to the next, the perpetual flow of booze (and it is perpetual), and the disconnection from their real lives that is often viewed as a perk. Like in any good experiment, the subjects don’t know what’s being tested for.
As the show’s creator, Mike Fleiss, has admitted, the Bachelor franchise is not good at creating couples. And it’s true, only a few have gotten married and stayed together. But that’s not part of the experiment, or what makes it compelling TV—all they have to do is feel like they’re in love, or be in love for a while. What we watch when we watch The Bachelor is not someone finding their soulmate; yet, that has to be the prevailing belief in order for the Bachelor Experiment to work.
Even so, come 8:00pm tonight, I’ll be anxiously watching to see who Andi chooses to be her husband. Social experiment or not, I’m genuinely interested to see how it ends. And that’s the second genius of the Bachelor Experiment—it’s also an experiment on us, the viewers, who watch season after season, knowing all the while that the process is flawed, the environment is artificial, and the feelings usually wear off. As soon as the show comes on, it’s the smartest one in the room.
Giancarlo T. Roma is a Brooklyn-based writer and musician. Follow him on Twitter.
A young man sees changing numbers floating above the heads of people around him and suddenly recognizes a woman who can do the same. But a tragic twist forces him to realize how the numbers—and what they tell you about people—can be a curse.
We know you're busy. You probably didn't have time to read every article we published on VICE.com this year. So we've compiled a list of some of our favorites and will be re-featuring them through the end of 2014. This one originally published on July 23rd.
A couple of days ago, I received a very angry email from someone in reference to an article I wrote about a restaurant. In the article, I mentioned that I wasn't a huge fan of eating in pretentious restaurants. I also mentioned that I am a vegan. This did not sit well with the young man who emailed me. "You're going to make fun of people for being pretentious when you're a fucking vegan?" he wrote. "Fuck off."
I went back and looked at the comments on the post in question. He was not alone in his sentiment.
One commenter, a man named Dante Thompson, told me that I was a "dick" for ordering vegan food. He also called me a "fucking hipster."
Another guy named Riley Ulrich wrote, "You are a fucking piece if [sic] shit and you should be fired. Everybody hates you."
The implication that I am a pretentious eater is odd to me. Above is an image of what I had for lunch today. A slightly miserable-looking faux-meatball sub. For breakfast, I had Doritos. For dinner, I intend to go to Taco Bell. Animal products aside, I eat like a particularly fussy child (or, at the very least, an adult skateboarder).
When I hit my 20s, I started trying to eat a salad or some other such healthy bullshit for at least one meal a day, because that feels like something a grown-up should do. But my heart isn't in it. In an ideal world, I would eat pretty much nothing but meat and cheese served in or on some kind of gray carbohydrate.
But we don't live in an ideal world. We live in a world where the best-tasting kind of foods are literally made from death and suffering.
This is why I don't eat meat or animal products. Because meat and animal products are a giant fucking bummer. I don't need to tell you where your meat and dairy come from, because you've already seen it. And you know it looks like a fucking miserable nightmare of seared-off beaks, bolts through brains, and twitching corpses on dirty floors.
And we can all agree it's miserable, right? Regardless of whether or not you consume the end products of the meat and dairy industries, surely we can all admit that mass, industrialized death is not all that nice? There's a bunch of other stuff I could go into here about greenhouse gases caused by the meat industry, or contaminated water run-off, or meat causing colon cancer. But that would be dishonest, because I didn't consider any of that stuff when deciding to become a vegan.
I'm not saying that, because I try to avoid hurting animals, I'm somehow more ethical than you. Nobody is ethical. Humans are cancer. Everything would be better off if we were all dead. I'm typing this on a fossil-fuel-powered laptop that contains conflict minerals and was, I assume, manufactured in conditions that look vastly different from the conditions that I am working in right now.
I'm also wearing a shirt that cost $6. I'm not totally sure how it was manufactured, shipped to the US, and sold to me, but I'd imagine someone is getting shit on pretty heavily somewhere along the chain if the whole thing cost $6. And how awful is that? I'm wearing a shirt that probably made multiple humans miserable as it was being created, and almost certainly harmed the planet in a fairly major way, and I don't even know where it came from or how it was made. There is no way of living in the modern world without doing morally reprehensible things on a daily basis.
What I'm trying to say is that I am a piece of shit. And so are you. And I don't care what you eat. You can eat whatever, whenever, and however the fuck you want. As previously discussed, beyond the whole murder thing, I barely even give a shit what I eat. I definitely don't have time to worry about what you put in your mouth.
I think that very few people are totally OK with the fact that an animal died in order for them to eat. I can't imagine there are many people reading this that would be able to eat a McRib if they had to go through the process of raising the cow, slaughtering it, disemboweling it, clearing its remains up off the floor with a pressurized hose, then forming that gore into a rib-shaped treat themselves. A few of you probably could, I'm sure. And that's fine.
When people take a moral stance against something that we don't feel super great about ourselves, it makes us feel like they're judging us. This is why we hate hippies, or freegans, or Gwyneth Paltrow, or people who drive electric cars. Because they make us feel like we're being judged. And when people feel judged, they act like dicks. Like when Heather Graham stomped that guy's face off in Boogie Nights.
There's also the stereotype of the preachy vegan. The one who exists in the oft-repeated "how do you find a vegan at a dinner party?" joke. I'm not sure if this is just a side effect of me trying my hardest to avoid hanging out with assholes, but I have never, at any point, encountered a preachy vegan. I've encountered a lot of preachy meat eaters, though. The kind of people who quote Ron Swanson and think bacon, as a concept, is funny.
The kind of people who have endless questions about my nutrition, especially protein. So, so many questions about protein. I'm not sure why my nutrition is such a big concern for people I don't know. With the exception of vegans, Live Aid, or those people who eat couches on My Strange Addiction, I don't remember ever seeing someone show concern for another person's nourishment.
There are many, many things that I do that are bad for my health, but nobody ever gives me shit for them. The fact that I live within one mile of a freeway, drink beer at least once a week, and consume diet drinks on a semi-regular basis slips by unnoticed. But suddenly every single fucking person I meet is an expert on nutrition and wants to know where I'm getting my protein and my vitamin D and my iron. I have no idea if/where I'm getting that stuff from. And I'm sure you don't know where you're getting it from, either. Just because you got a chicken burger with your BK meal instead of a veggie burger doesn't suddenly mean your body is in perfect nutritional harmony.
The most confusing part of the animosity toward vegans is the glee that people get from seeing them fail. In the article I mentioned earlier, I posted a picture of some food I'd eaten. Though I didn't realize at the time, the food I'd eaten contained eggs. Accidentally eating animal products is something that happens from time to time. NBD. However, there were multiple people who smugly and gleefully pointed out to me that I had accidentally eaten an animal product.
If I saw someone trying to do something nice for an animal and they fucked up, I don't think my immediate reaction would be to get all smug and laugh at them about it. I didn't read that "I Died Today" blog post about the dog dying and think "LOL! They tried to cure that dog's tumor but they failed!" But then maybe you would, IDK.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to Taco Bell. Beans instead of meat and no cheese, please.
Tucked away in the Last of Us movie panel, like a demon under the floorboard of a cabin in the woods, director Sam Raimi revealed he and his brother Ted are attempting to turn his iconic horror movie franchise Evil Dead into a TV series... with Bruce Campbell involved.
Pelican Bay, California's most notorious supermax prison. Photo via the California Department of Corrections.
The United States has an enormous prison problem. A more-than-2.4-million-prisoner-sized problem, to be precise, locked up in the archipelago of federal penitentiaries, state corrections facilities, and local jailhouses that form the nation's thriving prison-industrial complex. Since 1980, the number of incarcerated citizens in the US has more than quadrupled, an unprecedented rise that can attributed to four decades of tough-on-crime oneupmanship, and a draconian war on drugs.
Today, more than one out of every 100 Americans is behind bars, and the US has the largest prison population in the world, both in terms of the actual number of inmates and as a percentage of the total population. The numbers are staggering: The US incarceration rate is nearly 3.5 times higher than that of Mexico, a country that has spent the last decade in the throes of an actual drug war, and between five and ten times higher than those seen in Western Europe. There are more people locked up in the US than in China. In fact, the US is home to nearly a quarter of the world's prisoners, despite accounting for just 5 percent of the overall global population.
But the data gets even more disturbing when broken down at the state level. A recent analysis by the Prison Policy Initiative shows that while states like Louisiana have undoubtedly led America's march toward mass incarceration, no state or region has been immune to the prison boom. And each state is a global aberration, with incarceration rates that compare to those found in isolated dictatorships and countries recovering from civil war.
As the chart shows, 36 states have higher incarceration rates than Cuba, the country with the world's second highest prison rate. New York comes in just above Rwanda, which is still trying thousands of people in connection to the 1994 genocide. Even Vermont, birthplace of Phish, Ben & Jerry's, and the country's only socialist senator, imprisons a higher percentage of its population than countries like Israel, Mexico, or Saudi Arabia.
Looked at in terms of actual inmate numbers, this means that the number of people behind bars in most US states is on par with the prison populations of entire nations. And not Luxembourg or Burundi. Big, messy countries, like Venezuela and Egypt.
“The question here is are we using prison too much, and when you compare one US state to another US state, you start to think ‘Eh, maybe it’s all just the same,’” said PPI Executive Director Peter Wagner, who co-authored the analysis. “But the bigger picture here is that every single state is out of step with the rest of the world.”
“Other than the United States, most of the countries with high incarceration rates have had a very recent social trauma," Wagner added. “New York has the same incarceration rate as Rwanda and there has not been a massive genocide in New York State. The irony is that New York actually used to have a much higher rate of incarceration. It's actually one of the grand exceptions in the country, of a state that has been reducing its prison population."
The numbers, Wagner explained, underscore the central role that states have played in America’s unprecedented prison buildup. While much of the recent prison debate has centered on federal sentencing laws and drug policy reform, the real mass incarceration action has taken place at the state level. According to PPI data, more than half of US inmates—57 percent—are in state prisons, and another 30 percent are incarcerated in local jails, generally for violating state laws. Though prison rates have varied widely across the US, all 50 states have implemented some set of policies—like mandatory minimums, “truth in sentencing” policies, or “three strikes” rules—aimed at putting more people in prison for longer periods of time.
Unsurprisingly, the economic and social impacts of this trend have been massive. According to a 464-page report published by the National Research Council earlier this year, state spending on corrections increased 400 percent between 1980 and 2009. The result, the NRC points out, is that prisons are now some of the primary providers of health care, counseling, and job training to the country's most disadvantaged groups. Meanwhile, the social and cultural costs of mass incarceration are disproportionately borne by poor communities, minorities, and people with mental illnesses.
And the actual benefits of mass incarceration are minimal, at best. Sure, crime rates have gone down since 1980, but studies have found the connection between increased prison rates and lower crime is tenuous and small. In fact a report released by The Sentencing Project this week found that in states that have substantially reduced their prison population in recent years, like California, New York, and New Jersey, the crime rate has actually fallen faster than the national average.
“It's really a situation of diminishing returns for public safety,” said executive director Marc Mauer. “And the amount of crime control that we produce becomes less over time as well.”
Recently, though, there are signs that America is doing a rethink on its experiment with mass imprisonment. Earlier this month, the US Sentencing Commission voted to retroactively extend lighter sentencing guidelines to about 46,000 prisoners currently serving time for federal drug crimes, a move that was endorsed by the Department of Justice. Efforts to implement criminal justice and federal sentencing reforms that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago have been gaining traction from both parties in Congress, forming a rare left-right coalition that is decidedly soft on crime.
At the state level, tight budgets have forced governors and lawmakers to ease drug laws and relax harsh incarceration policies, and to look for more cost-effective criminal justice solutions, including investing in better drug treatment and parole programs. Even in Louisiana, the world’s prison capital, Republican Governor Bobby Jindal has passed modest measures, setting up an early release program for some nonviolent drug offenders, although he recently vetoed stronger sentencing reforms.
“We’re always going to have prisons and we're always going to have crime, but many states are starting to rethink their drug policies, their sentencing laws,” said Mauer. “The impact is not dramatic yet, but I think there's no question that the climate is beginning to shift. The question is how far can we go now that we’ve started to move in the other direction.”
That screen cap at the top is a game on 486x that was totally on my grandpas computer in the early 90s. Played that a lot in between using aol in the 9600 baud modem.
Whether it’s the Gaza Strip or the tragic mess of MH17, July has been a big month for missiles. Stockpiled by every army on the planet, as well as countless junta and rebel groups, self-guided missiles are ubiquities of modern life. Sure, your great-grandparents would probably struggle to believe that a meathead rebel army could someday blow a plane out of the sky but unfortunately, that's the world we live in. So how is this possible? And how did we get to this point?
Let’s start with some clarification. Missiles are divided into two streams: ballistic and cruise. Ballistics is the science of how a projected object forms an arch as it falls and then lands in a predetermined area. Ballistic missiles are therefore powered by rockets on the way up, and fall towards the target on the way down. They’re also generally the ones to carry nuclear warheads. Cruise missiles on the other hand, are guided by on-board jet engines for the whole journey, so are suitable for carrying light-weight explosives with pin-point accuracy.
Both formats originated in Nazi Germany. Fritz Gosslau and Paul Schmidt were the two aerospace engineers behind the V-1 rocket, which evolved into the modern cruise missile. They worked for the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe, creating the first jet engines. After that, in 1942, they made another conceptual leap—replacing the jet pilot with a payload of explosives, thus creating a flying bomb. V-1 rockets announced their attack with a loud buzzing sound, and while they could only carry small payloads, they were incredibly accurate for the period.
V-2 rockets were designed simultaneously by Wernher von Braun, but the approach was fundamentally different. Von Braun was convinced that liquid fuel combustion would create enough thrust to carry enormous payloads over long distances, so he focused on what would become the modern ballistic missile. Introduced in September 1944, V-2 rockets had little effect on Germany’s ailing war efforts, but they were unstoppably fast (5,760 km/h or 3579 mph) and could be launched 320 kilometres (200 miles) from their targets.
Both missiles migrated from Germany to pretty much everywhere with the fall of Berlin in 1945. Both the US and the USSR tried to lure former Nazi scientists to work for their arms programs, and most of the von Braun team took the American bait and left for Huntsville, Alabama. Not many went with the Soviets except for a guy called Helmut Gröttrup, who was allegedly sick of being an assistant on von Braun’s team. From this divergence, the Nazi designed V-2 rocket evolved into the Redstone missile in the US, and the R-2 in the USSR.
From here, missiles spread exponentially. It’s a messy family tree, but basically your nation’s arms technology is basically a descendant of whatever side of the Cold War you landed. For example, today’s Chinese missiles evolved from the 1950s Dong Feng range, which was a copy of the Soviet R-2. Likewise India’s missiles were originally reverse engineered from the 1960s Soviet SA-75 SAM, while most countries throughout the Middle East use on descendants of Soviet technology. Exceptions are in Egypt and Israel, which both buy and develop arms from the US.
According to Amnesty International “the United States is by far the world’s largest arms trader, accounting for around 30 percent of conventional arms transfers in terms of value.” American arms companies supply weapons to around 170 countries, including most NATO partners, and a few human rights-free zones such as Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe. Proxy conflicts such as Vietnam and Afghanistan mean that one side use Russian arms, while the other uses American.
Since the Cold War there have been several advancements in missile technology, the main one being how they’re guided. As a missile closes in on the target, a diverse range of systems are used, depending on what it is. To target buildings and structures, Tomahawk missiles use a system called DSMAC (Digital Scene Matching Area Correlation) which takes photos of the target and compares it with pre-programmed images from a satellite. Other missiles designed for moving targets use thermal imaging, while the Soviet BUK missile system, which is currently copping the blame for downing MH17, uses a tracking technique called semi-active radar homing. This searches for radar signals emitted from something like a plane, and then measures how the radar pulse bounces off the ground, to chase down the source.
Missiles have also become a lot more destructive. The warhead in most modern missiles doesn’t explode when they hit the target, they explode on top so nothing obstructs the blast wave. How the blast is directed however, and how the casing shatters, all depends on the target. Currently, the bulk of Israeli warheads are designed to pierce tanks and bunkers in the Gaza strip. HEAT (High-explosive anti-tank warheads) explode with a hypersonic ray of molten metal (often copper) hurled at the target, which slams through most steel or concrete. Thermobaric warheads are also designed to deal with bunkers, by filling confined spaces with molecularized fuel and setting fire to it. Many of them operate in a two stage detonation—the first charge destroys any armor, while the second kills the contents.
The BUK missile that likely brought down MH17, is able to be loaded with a number of interchangeable anti-aircraft warheads. The most common forms are continuous-rod warheads in which the explosive warhead is encased in a cylinder of steel rods, welded end to end. When the warhead explodes, the bars expand into a zig-zag shaped ring, slicing through the plane’s fuselage. The other option, which according to Bloomberg is looking more likely, is a fragmentation warhead which shreds planes with a cloud of metal shards.
Detonation of a continuous rod warhead at China Lake, California. Image via
Each of the aforementioned developments are pretty clever in an icy, sad way. In fact people say rocket science usually to describe something clever, although space rockets came from missiles, and you probably wouldn’t praise missile science. And despite all these leaps and bounds, the essential core to conflict remains: humans disagree and want to kill each other. From some far-ahead alien race it’s possibly not so impressive to build a missile. It’s probably kind of a dumb thing to do. Not making rockets for the purpose of carrying death and destruction is the real rocket science.
Shut up about your high tech super soakers, because Bunch O Balloons is about to take water fights to the next level. Just look at it! You can fill like a zillion balloons all at once, and then DRIVE YOUR ENEMIES BEFORE YOU.
Dr. George King invoking spiritual energy for storage in an Operation Prayer Power battery, on the shores of Lake Powell, USA, in the early 1970s.
So far, the concept of aliens in popular culture has largely been limited to little green, probing perverts from sci-fi movies and the rantings of conspiracy theorists. Which is why the conversation about extra-terrestrial life is for most people submerged in farce. However, there is a group of men and women in a renovated church in Parson’s Green, who take the matter very, very seriously: They are The Aetherius Society and to them, aliens are gods.
The society was founded in 1955, by a London cabbie called Dr. George King after he claimed to come into contact with aliens. According to him, speaking directly through their larynges, these “highly evolved intelligences from other planets” would communicate wisdom and guidance for mankind.
Today The Aetherius Society boasts thousands of members worldwide as well as headquarters in London, Los Angeles and Auckland. I went down to their European headquarters in West London to meet with the leading member Richard Lawrence; a man who, amongst other things, claims to have channeled the voice of Dante Alighieri and Sir Winston Churchill.
The Aetherius Society HQ in Parsons Green.
VICE: For those who don’t know, could you summate what The Aetherius Society is?
Richard Lawrence: It is a society based on Dr. George King and his contacts with an extra-terrestrial intelligence known as “Aetherius.” It is spiritual, religious, scientific and educational. It’s spread around the world. It’s not massive, but we have thousands of people who are members or support our activities, with tens of thousands of people enquiring over time.
How do other religions fit into your beliefs and can separate beliefs co-exist?
We have people who’ve come from Islamic, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist and atheistic backgrounds. We’re not the one and only way, we just introduce a cosmic dimension to spirituality. So we believe that some of the great spiritual leaders such as Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi and Sophocles were all in fact aliens sent to help us. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea; it could be regarded as heretical by some religions.
Do you ever get anger from religious figures?
Well yes, I think Dr. King received anger from Christians when he first claimed that Jesus came from Venus. Born-again Christians have denounced me on the radio. On the other hand, I’ve been invited to speak at a Synagogue, at an Anglican event and I’ve spoken in two Buddhist temples at the invitation of the monks.
Richard Lawrence at his desk at The Aetherius Society
How did you first meet Dr. King and how did your faith change through this meeting?
That was at Hull University. When I went there a group of The Aetherius Society was enshrined in the union. The members of the union had had a vote and decided to accept the authority of inter-planetary parliament. It was through them, that I became aware of him. I got to know him personally by coming here to Parson’s Green and volunteering. In the last 20 years of his life, we became close friends.
To be honest with you, I had never heard of your society before spotting your lecture in Time Out. However, reading up I’ve noticed Dr. George King has been documented in prominent publications for decades now, even having been featured live on the BBC. How did he first get into the public eye?
As you can imagine, he was ridiculed quite mercilessly by the media and the public in the 1950s. But he was a very strong person and this didn’t put him off. There were many UFO contactee claims around the world at that time—as there are today—but his hallmark was his spirituality. This was a big part of his life—from childhood to the years leading up to The Command, which was the first alien contact he had.
Before this, he had become celibate and spent eight hours doing yoga every day. Have you ever met a man who does eight hours of yoga every day? I certainly haven’t.
A portrait of Dr. George King.
One of the things you announced in the new edition of your book Contacts With The Gods From Space was that Dr George King was himself an alien.
Yes, he was one of those beings that have come from another world and lived among us, and was born through the womb of an earth woman. In fact his mother and grandmother also believed that. At his birth it is believed his grandmother even said, “Mary, this child is not of this Earth!”
Wait, so his mum was called Mary?
His mother was actually called Mary—but he never compared himself to Jesus at all and certainly wouldn’t allow that. But, if you look at what he did and what we believe then it fits.
Have you ever seen or had an experience with an alien?
Well I’ve seen UFOs. I had a big sighting in Hull actually.
Can you tell me about it?
It was a cigar-shaped object—probably a mothership—that was moving very slowly in the sky, illuminating it. It was on the news that there was a UFO sighting so we drove out to this field to see it. The government used to wheel people out to explain these. I mean, a professor at our university said it was a barium cloud. Barium clouds don’t behave in that way. In fact, the explanations for UFOs are a study in themselves. Hilarious, some of them.
Members and sympathisers taking part in Operation Prayer Power on Holdstone Down.
So you think there are wide scale government cover-ups?
Beyond any doubt. That’s actually proven. There’s been CIA cover-ups. In fact, I’ve brought CIA papers to this country that were released under the Freedom of Information Act. When Tony Blair’s government brought this Act in, I was told that the top three asked questions by the British public were about UFOs. They used to have a UFO department in the Ministry of Defense, but because they were getting all these questions they closed it. This was on the grounds that it had no “defense value,” saying that they had “no opinion of the existence of extra-terrestrial life.” “No opinion,” can you believe it? All rather convenient.
Are people who don’t believe in aliens ultimately ignorant?
Um… well I don’t want to avoid your question here, but I think we all suffer from ignorance. I don’t want to condemn people but I think they’re wrong. I can understand it if they’ve never investigated it. It depends whether they say, “they don’t exist”, or whether they say, “I don’t know”. If they say, “there’s definitely no such thing as an alien anywhere”, then that’s pretty stupid. Especially since it’s been announced that there’s 40 billion planets in our galaxy that can sustain life as we know it.
A member of The Aetherius Society invoking spiritual energy for storage in an Operation Prayer Power battery on Holdstone Down, North Devon
Moving onto your activities, can you tell me about your Holy Mountain expeditions and how they fit into your beliefs?
Dr. George King actually climbed 18 of these mountains—not the 19th though, that’s Kilimanjaro—and discovered that they are charged with energy by beings from other planets. We invite people to come to Devon with us and see if they can sense that. We go to the mountains to send energy out for peace.
And you have something called a Prayer Battery?
Yes, we work with that every Thursday. People who practice prayer will come up and put their hand in front of the battery, channeling energy, which you can feel through the arm and hand. In that way, we store energy in the battery and when we have a crisis that energy can be released.
This can be in conjunction with the extra-terrestrials who will send it wherever it is needed. The first big one we did was in the 1970s when we released 532 prayer hours to a war that was brewing in Cyprus and eight hours later the war stopped. [ed.note: Dr. King claims to have interfered with the Turkish Invasion of Cyprus]
Are we now under threat of our own destruction?
In a nutshell, what we think is that, after Maldek (which was destroyed by us and is now an asteroid belt), we came here and built up a civilization called Amuria, which we all destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. Then we built up Atlantis and, again, that was destroyed.
We are now in a position where we could do the same but we don’t think we will be allowed to destroy the planet; Mother Earth is more important to us than the people. She is the highest being that we can physically touch and is herself a goddess. If we want to stop this war and destruction, it can only be done through sending love energy. A treaty won’t do it, money can’t do it and politics certainly don’t do it.
You have a perception of aliens being an inherently benevolent force. Do you therefore stand against the widespread image of evil, probing forces?
Well firstly, we do not say that they are all benign. What we say is that benign forces from those who are hostile protect us.
Richard Lawrence on The Great Change.
So there are evil aliens?
There are beings out there, not in our solar system that we have been protected from. If we hadn’t been protected we wouldn’t stand a chance.
Why are they hostile?
Well that’s a good question for VICE, isn’t it... why do people go to war?
Finally, if aliens do exist, why haven’t they made themselves known to everyone?
They are far more aware than we are of the psychology of the terrestrial mind. Panic and hostility would be the result. I would say that for anybody who wanted to know, the evidence is there. If they don’t choose to look into it, or to deny it because it's inconvenient to their belief system, then the beings haven’t yet chosen to force them to change. There’s a plan though, a long-term plan. They will prove themselves at the time that is in the best interest of the human race. There will be a Coming.
Wow. I would say unbelievable, but it's completely believe able.
Drawing of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court at an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) event in Germany last year. Photo via Flickr user mlcastle, original drawing by Lindsay Young
When the National Security Agency would like to take a look at all of the metadata of phone calls made by people using Verizon, a program revealed last summer by Edward Snowden, they must obtain approval from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (better known as the FISA Court), which typically grants such requests. VICE has obtained disclosures that reveal for the first time since this program was made public that FISA Court judges have not only owned Verizon stock in the last year, but that at least one of the judges to sign off on the NSA orders for bulk metadata collection is a proud shareholder of the company complying with these requests.
On May 28 last year, Judge James Zagel, a FISA Court member since 2008, purchased stock in Verizon. In June of this year, Zagel signed off on a government request to the FISA Court to renew the ongoing metadata collection program.
He's not the only one. We filed a request to the courts for the personal finance statements for all of the FISA Court judges. About a month ago, federal judges began turning in their disclosures, which cover the calendar year of 2013. The disclosures show that FISA Court Judge Susan Wright purchased Verizon stock valued at $15,000 or less on October 22. FISA Court Judge Dennis Saylor has owned Verizon stock, and last year collected a dividend of less than $1,000. The precise amount and value of each investment is unclear—like many government ethics disclosures, including those for federal lawmakers, investments amounts are revealed within certain ranges of value.
The FISA Court continually rotates with respect to how it deals with requests from the government. In essence, each judge takes turns overseeing surveillance asks from the Feds. Judge Roger Vinson, the judge who signed off on the order disclosed by Snowden last year, requested an extension for filing his personal finance statement. While it's not clear how the rotation schedule works, it's certainly plausible Judge Saylor or Judge Wright will soon be asked to renew the next request by the NSA for metadata from telecom companies.
Do the investments constitute a conflict of interest? Federal judges are bound by an ethics law that requires them to recuse themselves from cases in which they hold a financial stake in the outcome, or in cases in which their "impartiality might reasonably be questioned."
In the past, revelations about stock ownership have invalidated certain court decisions. For example, after an eye-opening investigation from the Center for Public Integrity, which revealed that a federal judge who participated in a mortgage foreclosure-related decision owned stock in Wells Fargo, a case was re-opened. The FISA Court is different. For one thing, FISA proceedings are ex parte, meaning Verizon isn't even a party for the NSA requests. However, telecom companies certainly have a stake in how they comply with government orders, and some ethicists say judges would be well served if they simply steer clear of these types of investments.
"I think prudence would suggest that a FISA judge would not acquire investments in these telecommunication stocks," says Professor William G. Ross, an expert on judicial ethics at Samford University's Cumberland School of Law in Alabama. "I'm not saying there is a conflict of interest, which my impression says there's probably not," Ross says, adding, "this is between what's improper and what's prudent."
District court clerks told VICE that judges typically do not offer responses on the record for these types of inquiries. Judge Saylor's office could not offer a comment, and a request for comment was also sent to the other judges.
Last year, Gawker reported that many FISA Court judges have owned various telecommunication stocks over the years. But the ethics forms we obtained show that since the Snowden revelation, FISA Court judges have been specifically purchasing and holding stock in the company that is the only named telecom giant known for its compliance with the NSA's bulk data orders.
Lee Fang, a San Francisco–based journalist, is an investigative fellow at the Nation Institute and co-founder of Republic Report.
Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite found in cat poop that can make both people and cats ill. It can infect any warm-blooded animal, including reportedly 60 million Americans. People infected with T. gondii typically have flu-like symptoms. Dr. David J Bzik in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Dartmouth recently said, “We know biologically this parasite has figured out how to stimulate the exact immune responses you want to fight cancer.” Cells in the body that are activated by T. gondii include natural killer cells and cytotoxic T cells, both known to fight cancer.
In research studies Dr. Bzik’s team have provided evidence that a modified version of the parasite that is unable to replicate, termed “cps“, effectively kills melanoma and ovarian cancer cells in mice with aggressive forms of these cancers leading to high survival rates. The special trick is the ability for the parasite to reprogram the immune system to wipe out tumor cells.
Image of a cps parasite inside a tumor cell from Dartmouth News.
The researchers also discovered that even if cancer has depressed the immune system of the host, cps can activate the immune response to wipe out the cancer cells. The hope is to eventually test this treatment in humans by infecting the patient’s own cells with the mutated version of the parasite, which is predicted to ramp up the cancer-fighting ability of the immune system and may offer long-term protection from that specific cancer.
In addition to making you more outgoing and less afraid of cats, this research gives us one more reason to appreciate that nasty little poop parasite.
There’s plenty of science and religion stuff out there, but I think talking about anything else right now would be to ignore the elephant in the room.
There’s a basic moral principle that I subscribe to that goes like this: When your neighbor is relentlessly firing rockets at you in an attempt to kill as many civilians as possible, or barring that to make life unlivable for civilian populations, then you have carte blanche to do whatever is necessary to make it stop.
I have no patience for bloggers who sit in perfect safety on the other side of the world, and, with steepled fingers and their feet on an ottoman, argue that any country can or should be expected to put up with that. Show me someone lecturing Israel about proportionality or just war theory, and I’ll show you someone you can ignore.
And I definitely have no patience for people who write things like this:
I’ve had people try to tell me that it is justifiable — that Hamas is firing rockets into Israeli neighborhoods. I freely grant that trying to kill random citizens with rockets is also unconscionable, whether it’s done by Palestinians, Israelis, or Americans. But how can anyone condemn one and not the other?
That, sadly, is P. Z. Myers. That sure is a tough question he asks. X hits Y because he hates him and wants to hurt him. Y, after getting hit for a while, eventually decides to hit back. P. Z. cannot figure out why we might condemn one but not the other.
Moreover, of the three groups he mentions; Palestinians, Israelis and Americans; only one actually has leadership that routinely tries to kill random citizens. It’s nice for him to provide the formula for successfully bombing your neighbors, though. Apparently, so long as you are willing to hide your weapons in civilian areas, your neighbor is helpless to do anything more than ask you nicely to stop.
Hamas, whose leadership is currently waiting it out in Qatar, is getting precisely what it wants from all this. Its rockets are not really about scoring any kind of military victory. It’s about deliberately provoking Israel to reply, after which the inevitable dead civilians will grant them a public relations victory. Yes, they are that cynical and nihilistic. Let us not forget that the Hamas charter does not just call for the destruction of Israel, but for the murder of Jews generally. I keep reading that public opinion was turning against Hamas, but what Israel is doing will drive up their support. If that is true, I can only say it is hard to sympathize with people who want terrorists to represent them.
Hamas has been running Gaza for quite a few years now, and in that time they have done nothing to suggest they are serious about setting up the institutions of a functioning state. Instead they have done everything they can to militarize Gaza, and to turn as many of their people as possible into martyrs.
Gaza was a prison before this latest incursion, but it did not have to be this way. Jeffrey Goldberg
explains things well:
The politics of the moment are fascinating and dreadful, but what really interests me currently is a counterfactual: What if, nine years ago, when Israel withdrew its soldiers and settlers from Gaza, the Palestinians had made a different choice. What if they chose to build the nucleus of a state, rather than a series of subterranean rocket factories?
This thought is prompted by something a pair of Iraqi Kurdish leaders once told me. Iraqi Kurdistan is today on the cusp of independence. Like the Palestinians, the Kurds deserve a state. Unlike most of the Palestinian leadership, the Kurds have played a long and clever game to bring them to freedom.
This is what Barham Salih, the former prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government, told me years ago: ““Compare us to other liberation movements around the world. We are very mature. We don’t engage in terror. We don’t condone extremist nationalist notions that can only burden our people. Please compare what we have achieved in the Kurdistan national-authority areas to the Palestinian national authority . . . We have spent the last 10 years building a secular, democratic society, a civil society.”
What, he asked, have the Palestinians built?
So too, Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, once told me this: “We had the opportunity to use terrorism against Baghdad. We chose not to.”
In 2005, the Palestinians of Gaza, free from their Israeli occupiers, could have taken a lesson from the Kurds — and from David Ben-Gurion, the principal Israeli state-builder — and created the necessary infrastructure for eventual freedom. Gaza is centrally located between two large economies, those of Israel and Egypt. Europe is just across the Mediterranean. Gaza could have easily attracted untold billions in economic aid.
The Israelis did not impose a blockade on Gaza right away. That came later, when it became clear that Palestinian groups were considering using their newly liberated territory as a launching pad for attacks. In the days after withdrawal, the Israelis encouraged Gaza’s development. A group of American Jewish donors paid $14 million for 3,000 greenhouses left behind by expelled Jewish settlers and donated them to the Palestinian Authority. The greenhouses were soon looted and destroyed, serving, until today, as a perfect metaphor for Gaza’s wasted opportunity.
If Gaza had, despite all the difficulties, despite all the handicaps imposed on it by Israel and Egypt, taken practical steps toward creating the nucleus of a state, I believe Israel would have soon moved to evacuate large sections of the West Bank as well. But what Hamas wants most is not a state in a part of Palestine. What it wants is the elimination of Israel. It will not achieve the latter, and it is actively thwarting the former.
I would love to end the post there. The trouble, though, is that Israel has largely been taken over by their own crazed right-wingers. Sometimes we do not realize how good we have it in the States, where the Tea Party is all we have to worry about. Much of the Knesset, the ultra-Orthodox, and many of the settlers make Netanyahu look like the calm, reasonable one. But they are the ones who are running the country right now.
While I get very absolutist when one country is randomly firing rockets at its neighbor, the fact remains that Israel has spent much of the last several years deliberately sabotaging moderate forces within Palestine. Mahmoud Abbas was someone they could really have worked with, and he desperately needed to be seen as legitimate by his constituents. There was much that Israel could have done to strengthen him, but the right-wing forces within Israel did not want to see that happen. They are perfectly happy to have Hamas be the public face of Palestine, precisely because they do not want to end the occupation. They do not care about a functioning Palestinian state any more than Hamas does. All too many of these folks are in thrall to a lunatic religious view in which God has bequeathed the entire West Bank to hem.
Israel accomplished something incredible in its first fifty years. Even as they faced relentless war and violence from their neighbors, they built a country to be proud of, with contributions to the arts, science and technology out of all proportion to their tiny size. But the endless violence has caught up with them, and now their citizens have become radicalized. Just as many Palestinians have abandoned all hope of a two-state solution, so too have many Israelis given up all hope of peace. They are so resigned to endless violence and the scorn of the world, that they no longer worry much about creating the next generation of terrorists or of finding moderate voices to support.
Sorry to be so grim, but I don’t see much reason for optimism.
I’ll give the final word to Leon Wieseltier. He is not someone I usually quote favorably, but I agree with pretty much everything he says here:
A thousand Hamas missiles cannot erase the stain of the murder of Muhammad Abu Khdeir, nor can the murder of Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar, and Naftali Fraenkel extenuate it. Introspection in a time of war is perhaps a lot to ask; people under attack are not inclined to guilt. But the burning of the Palestinian boy must not be eclipsed by the struggle against the aggressions of Hamas. There is no Iron Dome to intercept the conscience. The day of the atrocity against Muhammad Abu Khdeir—a revenge killing in a society that mocks revenge killings in other societies—was a dark day in the history of the state and the religion in whose name it was, however falsely, perpetrated. The maniacs who perpetrated the crime did not, in their ideas and words, come from nowhere, from no politics, from no culture. The top-to-bottom revulsion in Israel at what was done in the forest near Jerusalem, a sincere revulsion, does not end the matter. Regret, if it is to be genuine, cannot be efficient. It certainly must not become another ground for the sensation of moral superiority. The makeshift monument in the forest that was erected to the memory of the Palestinian boy was defaced, and erected again, and defaced again. Even as it endures sirens and shelters, Israeli society must cultivate its revulsion, its sickened feeling, not least because the ruin of relations between peoples is even more dangerous than the ruin of relations between presidents and prime ministers.
And later:
But this is not all that needs to be said. (Yes, the other shoe is about to drop. I have two feet.) Israel has not only demons, but also enemies. One of its enemies, according to Human Rights Watch, is committing war crimes by launching missiles indiscriminately against civilian targets. The Israeli campaign in Gaza is not an act of revenge for the slaying of three Jewish boys; it is an act of retaliation against the Gazan barrage of rockets at Israeli towns and cities. What is the difference between revenge and retaliation? It is a fair question. The difference lies in the legitimacy of self-defense. Revenge protects nothing, except the maddened psyches of those who commit it. It is not an act of self-defense, it is an act of self-expression. It is certainly not a “response” in any rational sense. The Israelis who slaughtered the Palestinian boy were not provoked; they were pre-provoked. Yet in the matter of the rocket attacks from Gaza, Israel was provoked. The security of its citizens was at risk; and security is assessed empirically, not ideologically; and security is no less fundamental, morally speaking, than peace. Israel is acting strategically, not emotionally, in Gaza. It is “degrading” an incontrovertible threat. This does not exempt it from the means-ends question, but the campaign to destroy an arsenal that is being hurled against one’s population is warranted by reason and dignity. It is not a political solution, but a missile in mid-air is not a political problem.
More than a century after their discovery, we still don't really know what blood types are for. Do they really matter? Reporter Carl Zimmer investigates.
Peaches: they look like butts (but taste way better). And what better way to reinforce that imagery than putting fancy little panties on them? Originally created by a fruit vendor in Nanjing, China, a box of nine pantied peaches sell for around $80. That's almost $10 apiece. Am I paying for the peaches or the panties? Also, what am I supposed to do with a bunch of miniature panties after I've eaten the peaces? "Do you have any small pets?" Stop. Just walk to the police station and turn yourself in.
Keep going for a couple more shots of the sexy fruit.
Thanks to dr venkman, who has been selling apples wearing tighty whities for years now with very little growth in business. Damn, I would have thought that was a million dollar idea.
Picture related: looks like she forgot something.
A 38-year old Scottish woman recently had a five-inch vibrator (possibly just a dildo, but five inches seems sad for a dildo)
Note: Worthwhile larger version 
We've seen 
