Monday, January 31, 2011
Mother 'set fire to house killing two of her children to create drama after partner cheated' | Mail Online
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German phone executive murdered ten-year-old boy and blamed stress of the office | Mail Online
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Sunday, January 30, 2011
Death by snail
Slug blamed for horrific crash which killed teenage girl | Mail Online
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Saturday, January 29, 2011
Man sentenced for sex act on horse
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-12309654
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Phoenix police: Man used car in suicide attempt, other driver killed
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Friday, January 28, 2011
Killed by a 'stray spark': Ember from open fireplace may have caused house blaze that killed four children | Mail Online
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Jouster Paul Allen killed with lance splinter during Time Team re-enactment | Mail Online
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Mummy fried - woman sets fire to house while trying to reanimate long-dead sister — RT
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Thursday, January 27, 2011
Ōkunoshima located in Okuno-shima, Japan | Atlas Obscura | Curious and Wondrous Travel Destinations
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French priest jailed for stealing £2m from the church - Telegraph
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Girl, 9, and father shot dead by 'anti-immigrant vigilantes' as she begged for life | Mail Online
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Local News | $10M settlement for man shoved into wall by King Co. deputy; jurors react to video | Seattle Times Newspaper
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Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Shameless father faked terminal cancer in bid to con his FAMILY | Mail Online
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South Carolina woman, Miriam Fowler Smith, kills nephew's 'devil dog' after pup eats her Bible: cops
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NOLA.com : Pearl River murder preceded by affair and loan, but motive remains unclear
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Man hunted after sex attack on lamb - Crime, UK - The Independent
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Japan suspect in Lindsey Hawker murder writes book
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12283883
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Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Young Guatemalan immigrant crushed to death after fall into mixer at Brooklyn tortilla factory
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BBC News - Alien Hand Syndrome sees woman attacked by her own hand
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Classroom assistant killed after banning daughter's boyfriend from house | Mail Online
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Local News | Two people killed and two deputies wounded in shootout at Walmart in Port Orchard | Seattle Times Newspaper
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Monday, January 24, 2011
Violence
Violence is the expression of physical force against one or more people, compelling action against one's will on pain of being hurt. Worldwide, violence is used as a tool of manipulation and also is an area of concern for law and culture which take attempts to suppress and stop it. The word violence covers a broad spectrum. It can vary from between a physical altercation between two beings to war and genocide where millions may die as a result. The Global Peace Index, updated in June 2010, ranks 149 countries according to the "absence of violence".
More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence
Gunman shoots himself after overnight stand-off with police - Telegraph
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Indian police hunt killer rooster after it slashes owners throat | Mail Online
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Fatal hit-run: Hawthorne mob assaults driver who hit woman aiding crash victim - latimes.com
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Sunday, January 23, 2011
Quote Unquote: St Filippo Neri
Spernere mundum, spernere te ipsum, spernere te sperni.--St Filippo Neri
Scorn the world, scorn yourself, scorn being scorned.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Boxer Leigh Clift charged with murder as man stabbed dies 9 years after attack | Mail Online
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Four workers dead following industrial accident at offshore engineering company | Mail Online
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Friday, January 21, 2011
Woman suffers stroke after amorous partner gives her a love bite | Mail Online
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Peristal Singum Labyrinth located in Berlin, Germany | Atlas Obscura | Curious and Wondrous Travel Destinations
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Thursday, January 20, 2011
Schoolgirl, 11, died after falling two floors head-first in bannister-surfing game teachers tried to prevent | Mail Online
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Boy, 14, stabbed to death and three other teenagers knifed | Mail Online
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Bristol: Derision Over Flatulence Listed As Motive For Fatal Attack - Courant.com
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CBS Philly - News, Sports, Weather, Traffic and the Best of Philadelphia
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Detention Hearing Waived For Teen Charged With Killing Family Members | WSPA
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Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Russian woman who wear miniskirts 'should not be surprised if they get raped' - Telegraph
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Jets fan killed sleigh-riding while celebrating Gang Green's playoff win died wearing Sanchez jersey
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Man axes wife for 'lucky' foetus - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
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Police: Mt. Mansfield student dead in self-inflicted shooting at school | The Burlington Free Press | Burlington, Vermont
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Domestic abuse: My ex-boyfriend turned me into a human fireball | Mail Online
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Muslim woman told 'wear the hijab or I'll kill you' by cousin | Mail Online
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Man jailed for leaving sister to die in squalor - News - News Guardian
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Woman admits hiding baby's decomposing body - National - NZ Herald Mobile
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'iPod Assassin' Stephen Freeman Jailed for Murder Alessio Di Risio
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Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Schizophrenic stabbed brother, 9, to death after health workers said he was no threat | Mail Online
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The christening without much Christianity: Anglican church offers 'baptism lite' to attract non-worshippers | Mail Online
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Pregnant schoolgirl, 15, and unborn baby die after 'she suffered heart attack' | Mail Online
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Monday, January 17, 2011
Parks Department worker, 62 stabs himself to death while woman, 81, kills self by jumping out window
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Boy, eight, killed by Porsche the driver borrowed from a friend | Mail Online
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Sunday, January 16, 2011
Quote Unquote: H. P. Lovecraft
For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.
From the story The Outsider by H. P. Lovecraft
Italian 'Big Brother' removes contestants for blasphemy - Telegraph
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Elephant backs female trainer into a wall and crushes her to death at Knoxville Zoo | Mail Online
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Bride Micheala Harte was murdered on her honeymoon for 'just a few rupees' | Mail Online
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Mum accused of using Facebook while baby died - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
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San Bernardino parents, son killed by downed power lines | abc30.com
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Saturday, January 15, 2011
Vienna Undertakers' Museum (Bestattungsmuseum) located in Vienna, Austria | Atlas Obscura | Curious and Wondrous Travel Destinations
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Mother and son, 3, electrocuted when electric heater falls in bath | Mail Online
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HAIR transplant patient had ‘W*****’ written on his head for 19 YEARS without knowing it | The Sun |News
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Holmes County boy, 10, kills mother, sheriff says | chillicothegazette.com | Chillicothe Gazette
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Cops: Man Tries to Sever Neighbor’s Toes, Scalp | FERGUS FALLS, Minn.
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Friday, January 14, 2011
Paedophilia 'culturally accepted in south Afghanistan' - Telegraph
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Horse-trainer 'murdered ex-boyfriend then sat drinking wine while watching his body burn' | Mail Online
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Man allegedly trained dog to bite woman during arguments — Orland Park news, photos and events — TribLocal.com
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Thursday, January 13, 2011
Arizona shooting: 'Tucson angels' vow to guard funerals of victims - Telegraph
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Muslim leader 'raped young boy as he attended mosque for religious lessons' | Mail Online
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Wednesday, January 12, 2011
DEATH INSTINCT
The pioneering Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud was a person with few illusions about human nature and civilization. In fact, he had been relentlessly exposing what he saw as the hidden strivings and conflicts beneath the mask of civilization. Even Freud, though, had not expected such a catastrophic violation of the values of civilization. Entering the sixth decade of his life, Freud had observed too much self-destructive behavior both from his psychoanalytic patients and society at large. He had grown dissatisfied with some of his own theories and felt the need to address more decisively the human propensity for self-destruction. His version of the question of the times became: Why do humans so often act against their own best interests—even the desire to survive?
It was in 1920 that Freud offered his death instinct theory. This was an uncertain time both in Freud's own life and in European culture. World War I, "The War to End All Wars" (unfortunately, misnamed), had finally concluded. Both the victorious and the defeated had experienced grievous loss. Parents had been bereaved, wives widowed, and children orphaned. Many of the survivors of combat would never be the same again, physically or mentally. In Austria and Germany the devastation of war and the terms of the surrender had produced not only economic hardship but also a debilitating sense of hopelessness and frustration.
Thoughtful people found even more to worry about. World War I seemed to be much more than a tragic ordeal for all involved. In the minds of many observers, this protracted period of violence and upheaval had shattered the foundations of Western culture. Western civilization with its centuries-old traditions appeared to have been dealt a deathblow. Classical concepts of honor, beauty, glory, truth, and justice had been mutilated in the killing trenches and the casual brutalities of war. The visual, musical, and performing arts were contributing to the unease with disturbing new forms of expression. Science was increasingly seen as a threat to humanity through such routes as dehumanizing workplaces and ever-more lethal weaponry. The life sciences, through the theories of Charles Darwin, the nineteenth-century English naturalist, had already sounded one of the most troubling notes: Homo sapiens can be regarded as part of the animal kingdom. Humans were primates with superior language and tool skills. Where was the essence of humankind's moral being and the immortal soul? The physical and spiritual devastation of World War I seemed to have confirmed the gradually building anxieties about the future of humankind.
Freud introduced his new theory in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Most philosophers and psychologists had assumed that people are motivated by the desire to experience pleasure and avoid pain. This was not, however, always the case. Some of Freud's patients, for example, were masochistic—seekers of physical or emotional pain. The more he thought about it, the more connections Freud perceived between masochism, suicide, war, and the inability to love. Was there something in the very nature of humans that prompted them to override the self-preservation instinct and bring about harm both to themselves and others?
Life and Death: Eros and Thanatos
Freud came to the conclusion that humans have not one but two primary instincts. He called the life-favoring instinct Eros, one of the Greek words for "love," and the death instinct Thanatos, the Greek word for "death." It was characteristic of Freud to invoke Greek literature and mythology, but it was also characteristic of him to ground his ideas in the biomedical and physical sciences. He suggested that all living creatures have an instinct, drive, or impulse to return to the inorganic state from which they emerged. This todtriebe (drive toward death) is active not only in every creature, great or small, but also in every cell of every organism. He pointed out that the metabolic processes active in all cells have both constructive (anabolic) and destructive (catabolic) functions. Life goes on because these processes work together—they are opposing but not adversarial.
Similarly, Eros and Thanatos function in a complementary manner in the personal and interpersonal lives of humans. People seek out new experiences, reach out to others, and expend energy in pursuit of their goals. Eros smiles over ventures such as these. There are times, though, when humans need to act aggressively on the world, protect their interests, or withdraw from overstimulation and exertion and seek quietude. Thanatos presides over both these aggressive and risky ventures and the longing for "down time." Humans function and feel at their best when these two drives are in harmony. Sexual love, for example, may include both tenderness and thrill-seeking.
Effects on Children
Unfortunately, though, these drives are often out of balance. Children may be punished or shamed for their exploratory and aggressive, even destructive, actions (e.g., pulling a caterpillar apart to see what is inside). A particular problem in Freud's generation was strong parental disapproval of exploratory sexual expression in children. As a consequence, the child might grow into an adult who is aggressive and destructive where affection and sharing would be more rewarding—or into a person with such thwarted and convoluted sex/death impulses that making love and making war are dangerously linked.
Suicide and Homicide
Suicide and homicide often have roots in a confused and unbalanced relationship between the life and the death instincts. The destructive impulses may be turned against one's own self (suicide) or projected against an external target (homicide). Wars erupt when society at large (or its leaders) have displaced their own neurotic conflicts to the public scene.
From: http://www.deathreference.com/Da-Em/Death-Instinct.html
It was in 1920 that Freud offered his death instinct theory. This was an uncertain time both in Freud's own life and in European culture. World War I, "The War to End All Wars" (unfortunately, misnamed), had finally concluded. Both the victorious and the defeated had experienced grievous loss. Parents had been bereaved, wives widowed, and children orphaned. Many of the survivors of combat would never be the same again, physically or mentally. In Austria and Germany the devastation of war and the terms of the surrender had produced not only economic hardship but also a debilitating sense of hopelessness and frustration.
Thoughtful people found even more to worry about. World War I seemed to be much more than a tragic ordeal for all involved. In the minds of many observers, this protracted period of violence and upheaval had shattered the foundations of Western culture. Western civilization with its centuries-old traditions appeared to have been dealt a deathblow. Classical concepts of honor, beauty, glory, truth, and justice had been mutilated in the killing trenches and the casual brutalities of war. The visual, musical, and performing arts were contributing to the unease with disturbing new forms of expression. Science was increasingly seen as a threat to humanity through such routes as dehumanizing workplaces and ever-more lethal weaponry. The life sciences, through the theories of Charles Darwin, the nineteenth-century English naturalist, had already sounded one of the most troubling notes: Homo sapiens can be regarded as part of the animal kingdom. Humans were primates with superior language and tool skills. Where was the essence of humankind's moral being and the immortal soul? The physical and spiritual devastation of World War I seemed to have confirmed the gradually building anxieties about the future of humankind.
Freud introduced his new theory in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Most philosophers and psychologists had assumed that people are motivated by the desire to experience pleasure and avoid pain. This was not, however, always the case. Some of Freud's patients, for example, were masochistic—seekers of physical or emotional pain. The more he thought about it, the more connections Freud perceived between masochism, suicide, war, and the inability to love. Was there something in the very nature of humans that prompted them to override the self-preservation instinct and bring about harm both to themselves and others?
Life and Death: Eros and Thanatos
Freud came to the conclusion that humans have not one but two primary instincts. He called the life-favoring instinct Eros, one of the Greek words for "love," and the death instinct Thanatos, the Greek word for "death." It was characteristic of Freud to invoke Greek literature and mythology, but it was also characteristic of him to ground his ideas in the biomedical and physical sciences. He suggested that all living creatures have an instinct, drive, or impulse to return to the inorganic state from which they emerged. This todtriebe (drive toward death) is active not only in every creature, great or small, but also in every cell of every organism. He pointed out that the metabolic processes active in all cells have both constructive (anabolic) and destructive (catabolic) functions. Life goes on because these processes work together—they are opposing but not adversarial.
Similarly, Eros and Thanatos function in a complementary manner in the personal and interpersonal lives of humans. People seek out new experiences, reach out to others, and expend energy in pursuit of their goals. Eros smiles over ventures such as these. There are times, though, when humans need to act aggressively on the world, protect their interests, or withdraw from overstimulation and exertion and seek quietude. Thanatos presides over both these aggressive and risky ventures and the longing for "down time." Humans function and feel at their best when these two drives are in harmony. Sexual love, for example, may include both tenderness and thrill-seeking.
Effects on Children
Unfortunately, though, these drives are often out of balance. Children may be punished or shamed for their exploratory and aggressive, even destructive, actions (e.g., pulling a caterpillar apart to see what is inside). A particular problem in Freud's generation was strong parental disapproval of exploratory sexual expression in children. As a consequence, the child might grow into an adult who is aggressive and destructive where affection and sharing would be more rewarding—or into a person with such thwarted and convoluted sex/death impulses that making love and making war are dangerously linked.
Suicide and Homicide
Suicide and homicide often have roots in a confused and unbalanced relationship between the life and the death instincts. The destructive impulses may be turned against one's own self (suicide) or projected against an external target (homicide). Wars erupt when society at large (or its leaders) have displaced their own neurotic conflicts to the public scene.
From: http://www.deathreference.com/Da-Em/Death-Instinct.html
Connection of SEX AND DEATH
Few question that life's greatest drives are to reproduce and to avoid death. The Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and the French social theorist Michel Foucault argued that the two are fused, that the death instinct pervades sexual activity—a connection easily seen by a Frenchman whose language frames orgasms as petit mort, or "mini-deaths." With the AIDS epidemic their view has become particularly poignant. A 1992 study from Amsterdam, for instance, found that about one in six U.S. soldiers surveyed said that sex without condoms was worth the risk of getting the AIDS virus. A year later a story released by Planned Parenthood counselor offices in San Antonio, Texas, explained how teenage girls were demonstrating their toughness by having unprotected sex with an HIV-infected gang member. It seems that, for some, sexual desire is intensified in the presence of taboos and boundaries, even deadly ones.
The Scientific Perspective: Death As the Cost of Reproduction
Early lessons about the connection between reproduction and death often come from exceptional stories from the animal kingdom. Pacific salmon, for instance, return after three or four years in the ocean to battle hundreds of miles upstream— against gill nets, predators, and dams—to the tributaries where their lives began, to spawn and to die. Their remains fertilize the streams, providing food for the tiny microorganisms on which their offspring will feed. In addition, one cannot forget the story of how the female praying mantis bites off the head of her partner while mating. Or how in several marsupial mice species, the immune systems of the mice collapse after their first mating, leading to death shortly thereafter.
It has been observed that death is the price multicellular creatures must pay in order to reproduce. The biologist William Clark observed, "Obligatory death—as a result of senescence (natural aging)—may not have come into existence for more than a billion years after life first appeared. This form of programmed cell death seems to have arisen at about the same time cells began experimenting with sex in connection with reproduction" (Clark 1996, p. xi). Perhaps one legacy of this original immortality is the telomerase, the so-called immortality enzyme, found within the cells of testes and ovaries. Absent from normal cells that age and die, telomerase is what allows cancerous cells to reproduce without limits.
In the case of the life span of mammals, the period in which they have the greatest resistance to harmful environmental factors is when they have the greatest reproductive capacity. Evolution has little interest in the survival of those who have produced viable offspring and are in the post-reproductive period of life, hence the extreme rarity of senescent (old) animals in the natural order.
Humanity is not immune from this law of death as the cost of sex. This toll for reproduction has particularly been borne by women. Unlike at the start of the twenty-first century, when women held a seven-year life-expectancy advantage over males in developed nations, historically, because of their high maternal death rates, women were the shorter-lived sex. Maternal death rates remain high in poor nations of the world, where women are up to 200 times more likely than women in the richest countries to die as a result of complications of pregnancy, abortion, or childbirth—the causes of one-quarter of all deaths of those of childbearing age. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2001 that black women were four times more likely than non-Hispanic white women to die of pregnancy related problems.
Even the sex act itself can prove lethal. Cardiovascular specialists have long warned how extramarital sex was dangerous for heart patients, as it increased their blood pressure and pulse rate more than when having sex with a familiar partner. Such activity killed a former American vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, who died of a heart attack during an extramarital tryst in 1979. In 1998, having sex shortly after having given birth proved fatal for two British women, who died of air embolisms.
Attempts to enhance one's sexual experiences can be deadly as well. In 1998 the Food and Drug Administration reported the deaths of several men taking the highly popular Viagra impotence pill. Each year, attempts at sexual self-gratification accidentally kill between 500 and 1,000 individuals, predominantly men, because of autoerotic asphyxia. To heighten their sexual orgasm during masturbation, these individuals cut off the supply of oxygen and blood to their head, often by tying a belt or rope around their neck. Consciousness may be lost, and the individual dies by strangulation.
Relationships between Sex and Longevity
The need for species to change over time underlies evolution's mechanisms for triggering death with sex. In addition, there are genetic clocks determining the time frame for species to produce and raise the next generation to the point where it can successfully pass on its genetic code. Thus the later in life a species reproduces, the longer its life expectancy. Fruit flies with special "longevity genes" have been created, allowing them to live twice as long as their normal counterparts. By breeding them at increasingly advanced ages, Carla Sgrò and Linda Partridge also found that fruit flies that produced eggs at a young age died earlier than those that reproduced when they were older. When the younger-reproducing flies were sterilized with X rays, they began living as long as their older counterparts.
How this phenomenon might apply to humans raises interesting questions. Will the trend toward postponing parenting ultimately lead to the delaying of senescence and death? And, given the trend of affluent older males beginning second families with their young "trophy wives," will an even greater longevity advantage develop in the upper classes?
Nevertheless, postponement of parenting indefinitely can also lead to premature death. In 1986 Evelyn Talbott found that women over the age of fifty who had been married but had never had children might face an increased risk of dying suddenly of heart disease. Several studies in the early 1990s found that men who had vasectomies increased their risk of testicular cancer and prostate cancer, the latter by 56 to 66 percent at all ages.
Another 1994 study of 1,800 Seattle women by Janet R. Daling and her colleagues for the National Cancer Institute found that abortion increased women's risk of breast cancer by 50 percent. In the same year, a study directed by Mats Lambe found that having a child increased a woman's risk of breast cancer in her younger years but protected her against cancer in later life. For example, a thirty-five-year-old woman who gave birth at age twenty-five had an 8 percent higher risk of breast cancer than did a childless woman the same age; at age fifty-nine, however, the former's risk was 29 percent lower than the latter's.
On the other hand, eliminating one's ability to reproduce has also been found to reduce the likelihood of death. A 1999 study by physician Edward M. Messing and his associates showed that castration increased the survival chances of men with spreading prostate cancer. And Canadian researchers in 2001 reported that women with a high probability of developing ovarian cancer could reduce their cancer risk by up to 72 percent with tubal ligations.
Special Case of AIDS
During the late twentieth century it was the AIDS epidemic that most universally symbolized the lethal aspects of sexuality, particularly acts outside of monogamous relationships. While the popular conception in the United States initially saw the sex-death connection largely confined to specific high-risk groups, particularly homosexual populations, throughout most of the world the epidemic spread through heterosexual unions.
At the start of the twenty-first century, the highest rates of HIV infection were in sub-Saharan African countries, occurring within the most sexually active segment of the population, those fifteen to forty-nine years of age. Here the cultural sex order made for an epidemiological nightmare, where individuals were more likely than their European counterparts to have numerous sex partners. Once again women were disproportionately the victims, more likely being the one infected than infecting—owing to greater male promiscuity and female subservience—and being the sex to most quickly develop full-blown AIDS infection and dying of its effects. Projections, made in 2000, were that men would outnumber women by eleven to nine. Without AIDS, life expectancy in 2010 was projected to be 70 years in Zimbabwe, 68 in South Africa, and 60 in Zambia. With AIDS, life expectancy was expected to fall below 35 years in Zimbabwe, to 48 in South Africa, and to 30 in Zambia.
The HIV deaths resulting from sexual relations extend from individuals to entire social orders. The epidemic has killed family structures—producing a huge generation of orphans—and severely diminished chances for economic development. In 1999 at Eskom, South Africa's electric utility, 11 percent of the workers were infected with HIV, as were an estimated 40 percent of the Ugandan military and one-third of that country's teachers. In South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Kenya, some of Africa's most industrialized countries, gross domestic product was predicted to be 20 percent lower by 2005 than it otherwise would have been without the epidemic.
When the Sex Drive becomes Deadly
Evolution has endowed human males with a high sex drive coupled with considerable aggressiveness—especially regarding matters of breeding rights. In Pakistan, husbands are often acquitted for the "honor killing" of their spouses, whose "crime" may range from a simple flirtation to an affair.
Violent sexual assaults on the weak and unempowered occur throughout the world. In Juárez, Mexico, during the late 1990s, at least seventy women had been raped and murdered by sexual predators, their bodies dumped in the Chihuahua Desert. In the United States, the rape, maiming, and murder of children are frequent news items, leading to most states passing sexual predator legislation and demands that the public be informed of where these individuals reside when released.
Violence between sexual intimates is unfortunately common. Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women in the United States, resulting in more injuries than muggings, rape by strangers, and car accidents combined. In about one-third of killings of women, the killer is either her spouse or boyfriend. And of females murdered by strangers, prostitutes comprise a disproportionate number of victims.
Rough sex has produced its share of fatalities as well. One highly publicized death occurred in the mid-1980s in New York City's Central Park, where an eighteen-year-old woman was found strangled. Robert Chambers, a nineteen-year-old from an affluent family, confessed to having accidentally killed her while engaging in "kinky sex." This turned out not to be the case, but the defense has been used several times since for deaths resulting from sadomasochistic sexual activities.
Psychiatrists have long seen the underlying sexual motivations behind serial killers, typically featuring elements of sadism and necrophilia. Tim Cahill's psychobiography of John Wayne Gacy— who between 1972 and 1978 raped, tortured, and then murdered thirty-three young men in the Chicago area—detailed Gacy's feelings of inferiority and unworthiness in his father's eyes, guilt about his homosexual tendencies, and feelings of inadequacy in male-female relationships.
Connections between Sexual and Death Moralities in the American Mind
Moral codes often contain messages of restraint regarding matters of sex and harm of others—the antithesis of social chaos with its orgies of sex and violence. It is worth noting the internal consistencies of these issues in individuals' minds, for how they coalesce affects outlooks toward a host of political and religious matters.
Consider, for instance, attitudes toward the moralities of abortion, euthanasia, and the right of the terminally ill to commit suicide, and how they correlate with the perceived moralities of premarital sex and homosexual relations. According to the National Opinion Research Center's "General Social Surveys," (Davis and Smith 1998), between 1977 and 1998 the proportion of American adults supporting all three death matters increased from 26 to 38 percent, while the percent disapproving of all three declined from 33 to 26 percent. During the mid-1990s, 70 percent of those who endorsed all three death issues believed it was "not wrong at all if a man and woman have sex relations before marriage," compared to only 15 percent of those who opposed these three death issues. Similarly, 64 percent of those who endorsed all three death issues believed that "sexual relations between two adults of the same sex" was "not wrong at all," compared to 12 percent of those opposed to all three death issues.
Death-Sex Connections in the Arts
In a 1992 book, Camille Paglia claimed that it was in the West that sex, violence, and aggression are major motivations for artistic creativity and human relationships. There is little doubt that these are qualities of audience appeal. Hollywood has long known of the attractions to the erotic and the violent, which is why 60 percent of R-rated movies and nearly half of X-rated movies contain violence. The long-term success of the James Bond movie series derives from its fusion of sex and death.
According to Geoffrey Gorer, such seductions derive from cultural pruderies to matters of sex and death. William May observed that as sex becomes pornographic when divorced from its natural human emotions of love and affection, so death becomes pornographic when divorced from its natural emotion, which is grief. Perhaps the pornographic connotation is why designer Christian Dior chose in the 1990s to label one of its perfumes "Poison."
From: http://www.deathreference.com/Py-Se/Sex-and-Death-Connection-of.html
Victoria Eltonya Bynes charged with aggravated battery after allegedly setting boyfriend's genitals on fire | Gainesville.com
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Mother murdered children, started horror house fire, police say | theage.com.au
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Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Male model Renato Seabra charged with murder after confession in castration slay of Carlos Castro
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CBS Los Angeles- News, Sports, Weather, Traffic and the Best of LA
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Monday, January 10, 2011
Frederik Ruysch Dioramas
Anatomical Diorama with Fetus Skeletons and Other Body Parts
1701-16
Engraving
Excerpt from 'The Problem With Atheism' by Sam Harris
Given the absence of evidence for God, and the stupidity and suffering that still thrives under the mantle of religion, declaring oneself an “atheist” would seem the only appropriate response. And it is the stance that many of us have proudly and publicly adopted. Tonight, I’d like to try to make the case, that our use of this label is a mistake—and a mistake of some consequence.
My concern with the use of the term “atheism” is both philosophical and strategic. I’m speaking from a somewhat unusual and perhaps paradoxical position because, while I am now one of the public voices of atheism, I never thought of myself as an atheist before being inducted to speak as one. I didn’t even use the term in The End of Faith, which remains my most substantial criticism of religion. And, as I argued briefly in Letter to a Christian Nation, I think that “atheist” is a term that we do not need, in the same way that we don’t need a word for someone who rejects astrology. We simply do not call people “non-astrologers.” All we need are words like “reason” and “evidence” and “common sense” and “bullshit” to put astrologers in their place, and so it could be with religion.
(...)
Attaching a label to something carries real liabilities, especially if the thing you are naming isn’t really a thing at all. And atheism, I would argue, is not a thing. It is not a philosophy, just as “non-racism” is not one. Atheism is not a worldview—and yet most people imagine it to be one and attack it as such. We who do not believe in God are collaborating in this misunderstanding by consenting to be named and by even naming ourselves.
Another problem is that in accepting a label, particularly the label of “atheist,” it seems to me that we are consenting to be viewed as a cranky sub-culture. We are consenting to be viewed as a marginal interest group that meets in hotel ballrooms. I’m not saying that meetings like this aren’t important. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think it was important. But I am saying that as a matter of philosophy we are guilty of confusion, and as a matter of strategy, we have walked into a trap. It is a trap that has been, in many cases, deliberately set for us. And we have jumped into it with both feet.
(...)
So, let me make my somewhat seditious proposal explicit: We should not call ourselves “atheists.” We should not call ourselves “secularists.” We should not call ourselves “humanists,” or “secular humanists,” or “naturalists,” or “skeptics,” or “anti-theists,” or “rationalists,” or “freethinkers,” or “brights.” We should not call ourselves anything. We should go under the radar—for the rest of our lives. And while there, we should be decent, responsible people who destroy bad ideas wherever we find them.
From: http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/sam_harris/2007/10/the_problem_with_atheism.html
My concern with the use of the term “atheism” is both philosophical and strategic. I’m speaking from a somewhat unusual and perhaps paradoxical position because, while I am now one of the public voices of atheism, I never thought of myself as an atheist before being inducted to speak as one. I didn’t even use the term in The End of Faith, which remains my most substantial criticism of religion. And, as I argued briefly in Letter to a Christian Nation, I think that “atheist” is a term that we do not need, in the same way that we don’t need a word for someone who rejects astrology. We simply do not call people “non-astrologers.” All we need are words like “reason” and “evidence” and “common sense” and “bullshit” to put astrologers in their place, and so it could be with religion.
(...)
Attaching a label to something carries real liabilities, especially if the thing you are naming isn’t really a thing at all. And atheism, I would argue, is not a thing. It is not a philosophy, just as “non-racism” is not one. Atheism is not a worldview—and yet most people imagine it to be one and attack it as such. We who do not believe in God are collaborating in this misunderstanding by consenting to be named and by even naming ourselves.
Another problem is that in accepting a label, particularly the label of “atheist,” it seems to me that we are consenting to be viewed as a cranky sub-culture. We are consenting to be viewed as a marginal interest group that meets in hotel ballrooms. I’m not saying that meetings like this aren’t important. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think it was important. But I am saying that as a matter of philosophy we are guilty of confusion, and as a matter of strategy, we have walked into a trap. It is a trap that has been, in many cases, deliberately set for us. And we have jumped into it with both feet.
(...)
So, let me make my somewhat seditious proposal explicit: We should not call ourselves “atheists.” We should not call ourselves “secularists.” We should not call ourselves “humanists,” or “secular humanists,” or “naturalists,” or “skeptics,” or “anti-theists,” or “rationalists,” or “freethinkers,” or “brights.” We should not call ourselves anything. We should go under the radar—for the rest of our lives. And while there, we should be decent, responsible people who destroy bad ideas wherever we find them.
From: http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/sam_harris/2007/10/the_problem_with_atheism.html
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Sunday, January 9, 2011
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Friday, January 7, 2011
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Thursday, January 6, 2011
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Monday, January 3, 2011
Stereo (Cronenberg 1969)
Stereo is a 1969 Canadian film written, shot, edited and directed by David Cronenberg. It stars Ronald Mlodzik, who also appears in Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future, Shivers and Rabid. It was Cronenberg's first major effort after his two short films, Transfer and From the Drain. It is a brief feature film, with a running time of an hour. This film is set in 1996.
Info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereo_%28film%29
Info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereo_%28film%29
Sunday, January 2, 2011
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Saturday, January 1, 2011
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