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(all links safe for work) Some once hypothesized that as pornography became more accessible and more mainstream, men in turn would become uncontrollable, ravenous sexual beasts. I always thought this myself: a man will see something in porn that a real woman won't give him—Internet porn now caters in a click to every fetish you can imagine—and he will find a way to get it.
 
My ex-girlfriend, observant and intelligent beyond her years, always used to tell me the opposite: it wouldn't turn men into beasts, having their way with every woman they saw. No, it would turn them away from women completely, libidos and their ability to connect with real females weakened by the hardcore acts and impossible bodies that only porn stars could give them. The porn would crave some intrinsic desire, but leave both people in the couple lonelier and less fulfulled.
 
Now I think she was absolutely right.
posted by symphonik at 10:45 PM PST - 209 comments

Billyuns and billyuns of years ago, or at least a fair while back, there used to be a kingdom on the moon. The kingdom had a princess named Serenity, and she was guarded by representatives of nearby planets. Things being as they were, said representatives were all, teenagers in sailor suits. Look, no one said it was going to be sensible.
posted by Johnny Assay at 9:02 PM PST - 10 comments

If the election was to mark the point from which Iraqis would settle their differences through politics and not through violence, it failed; for those responsible for the insurgency— not only those planting suicide bombs but those running the organizations responsible for them and the leaders of the community that has shown itself sympathetic enough to the insurgents' cause to shelter them—did not take part. The political burden of the elections was to bring those who felt frightened or alienated by the new dispensation into the political process, so they could express their opposition through politics and not through violence; the task, that is, was to attract Sunnis to the polls and thereby to isolate the extremists. And in this, partly because of an electoral system that the Sunnis felt, with some reason, was unfairly stacked against them, the election failed.

Iraq: The Real Election. See also Iraq: Without Consensus, Democracy Is Not the Answer. (pdf)
posted by y2karl at 2:45 PM PST - 35 comments

Oxford University has just announced that they and Brigham Young University have developed a technology to read the previously illegible papyri of Oxyrhynchus collection. More info here and here.
posted by Kattullus at 2:10 PM PST - 26 comments

The Academic JFK Assassination site is an unbelievably thorough compendium of information on the Kennedy assassination. It's an excursion into conspiracy theories without any crackpottery. Some of the articles are immensely readable. See, for example, Richard Popkin's 1966 New York Review of Books article The Second Oswald.
posted by painquale at 2:01 PM PST - 21 comments

Lightning begin their Stanley Cup Defense During the lockout and cancelled season, a Tampa Tribune sports writer has been using a popular hockey simulation game to play out the 2004-2005 season, and has been covering each game as if it were real. Yesterday the SimBolts took a 2-0 lead in their first round match, on the strength of Ruslan Fedotenko's hat trick. Final standings and league leaders. ¶ The Virtual Ottawa Senators have a 2-0 lead over the SimLeafs. I'll be checking back to see faux Ottawa choke.
posted by KS at 1:54 PM PST - 14 comments

The Rise of Disaster Capitalism --...Although hotels and industry have already started reconstructing on the coast, in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia and India, governments have passed laws preventing families from rebuilding their oceanfront homes. Hundreds of thousands of people are being forcibly relocated inland, to military style barracks in Aceh and prefab concrete boxes in Thailand. The coast is not being rebuilt as it was--dotted with fishing villages and beaches strewn with handmade nets. Instead, governments, corporations and foreign donors are teaming up to rebuild it as they would like it to be: the beaches as playgrounds for tourists, the oceans as watery mines for corporate fishing fleets, both serviced by privatized airports and highways built on borrowed money....
Naomi Klein on "reconstruction" money after natural disasters--and who benefits. (Makes Wolfowitz seem like a less unlikely choice to head the World Bank after reading, too.)
posted by amberglow at 1:43 PM PST - 36 comments

The Language of Saxophones At 55, L.A. musician and poet Kamau Daáood is finally beginning to acknowledge the possibility of his own place in local letters with his debut book of poetry, The Language of Saxophones, a 30-plus-year retrospective published by City Lights. Though he’s recorded a solo CD and read nationally and internationally, Daáood had never seen fit to collect his material in a book. Until now. “I never liked the idea of poetry sitting on a shelf somewhere, lost in all those book spines”.
posted by matteo at 1:01 PM PST - 2 comments

The US house majority leader, a long-time supporter of an armed citizenry, jokes about weapons as the great equalizer in his battles with critics. “When a man is in trouble or in a good fight, he wants all of his friends around him, particularly armed,' said Delay to the NRA convention.
posted by found missing at 11:02 AM PST - 46 comments

Alliance against Urban 4x4s (SUVs) Facts, figures and references covering the environment, safety issues, bull bars, and possible new taxes.
posted by Lanark at 10:45 AM PST - 16 comments

Are you thinking what we're thinking? Make your own Tory party election poster. I did. Also happening in real life.
posted by armoured-ant at 10:01 AM PST - 34 comments

The mitochondrion, the Krebs cycle and other cell biology animations. Flash.
posted by Wolfdog at 8:55 AM PST - 13 comments

Paul Krugman: The best places to get sick A dozen years ago, everyone was talking about an American health care crisis. But then the issue faded from view: A few years of good data led many people to conclude that HMOs and other innovations had ended the historic trend of rising medical costs. But the pause in the growth of health care costs in the 1990s proved temporary. Medical costs are once again rising rapidly and the U.S. health care system is once again in crisis. So now is a good time to ask why other advanced countries manage to spend so much less than we Americans do, while getting better results.
posted by Postroad at 8:52 AM PST - 67 comments