Created by adult product purveyors Topco, the Sarah Palin blowup doll is known as the ???This is NOT Sarah Palin Inflatable Love Doll.??? Featuring a busty, conservatively dressed Palin lookalike, the box cover promises: ???Cross party lines with your own inflatable running mate!??? The political love doll???s suggested uses include: ???Blow her up and show her how you???re going to vote,??? ???Let her pound your gavel over and over,??? and ???It???s time some male interns caused a scandal in the Capitol.??? In addition, the company suggests, the Palin doll could stand in for the candidate at her next debate with Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden. ???This blow-up sex doll could really satisfy the swing voters.??? Who knew the coming presidential election could be decided by a sex doll?

Full Story: The Frisky

(via PervScan)

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Original Post: Technoccult

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“The British government has released a health warning over a so-called ???willy spread??? found to have the same chemical blamed for China???s bad milk.

The Ann Summers sex shop???s ???I Love You??? sets seemingly have melamine, the stuff that made thousands of Chinese babies sick and led to at least four deaths. The British Food Standards Agency says it???s in the kits??? chocolate-flavored ???body pen,??? ???willy spread,??? and ???nipple spread??? ??? all of which are made in China.

???This is a first. We???ve never had to put out an alert before on ???willy spread??? ??? chocolate-flavored or otherwise,??? an FSA spokesperson said in the official announcement.”

(via The Inquisitr. Thanks DJ!)

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Just a quick note to mention that Technoccult TV will resume in late November, on a monthly schedule. Future episodes feature Reich artist Elijah Brubaker, the deadly fighting arts of Mu Ryu, and the long awaited interview with Rex Church.

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“It has long been suspected that humans have an ancient history of drug use, but there has been a lack of proof to support the theory. Now, however, researchers have found equipment used to prepare hallucinogenic drugs for sniffing, and dated them back to prehistoric South American tribes. Quetta Kaye, of University College London, and Scott Fitzpatrick, an archeologist from North Carolina State University, made the breakthrough on the Caribbean island of Carriacou.

They found ceramic bowls, as well as tubes for inhaling drug fumes or powders, which appear to have originated in South America between 100BC and 400BC and were then carried 400 miles to the islands. While the use of such paraphernalia for inhaling drugs is well-known, the age of the bowls has thrown new light on how long humans have been taking drugs. Scientists believe that the drug being used was cohoba, a hallucinogen made from the beans of a mimosa species. Drugs such as cannabis were not found in the Caribbean then. Opiates can be obtained from species such as poppies, while fungi, which was widespread, may also have been used.”

(via Telegraph)

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“Controlling the level of a fatty acid in the brain could help treat Alzheimer’s disease, an American study has suggested. Tests on mice showed that reducing excess levels of the acid lessened animals’ memory problems and behavioural changes. Writing in Nature Neuroscience, the team said fatty acid levels could be controlled through diet or drugs. A UK Alzheimer’s expert called the work “robust and exciting”. There are currently 700,000 people living with dementia in the UK, but that number is forecast to double within a generation.

Scientists from Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease and the University of California looked at fatty acids in the brains of normal mice and compared them with those in mice genetically engineered to have an Alzheimer’s-like condition. They identified raised levels of a fatty acid called arachidonic acid in the brains of the Alzheimer’s mice. Its release is controlled by the PLA2 enzyme. The scientists again used genetic engineering to lower PLA2 levels in the animals, and found that even a partial reduction halted memory deterioration and other impairments.”

(via BBC News)

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Psychologists in the Prison Service will try to “cure” extremist Muslim inmates of their political beliefs with controversial therapies similar to those used to “de-programme” members of religious cults.

The experimental treatments are being developed by a special Extremism Unit set up by the Ministry of Justice in January last year, The Mail on Sunday has discovered.

Sources say the therapy forms part of a wide-ranging strategy to combat Islamic extremism in Britain’s jails.

This London

(via Cryptogon)

Who determines who is a “fanatic” and who determines when they have been “cured”?

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From Ectoplasmosis:

The 1987 documentary on the life of Robert Crumb, underground comics pioneer, 60s icon, and the quintessential Dirty Old Man. Written by the man himself, it lacks the distance from its subject that made Terry Zwigoff???s Crumb more of a revelatory study in neuroses and emotional trauma and instead puts you squarely in the middle of Crumb???s gonzo world of misogyny and self-loathing and in that sense it is a much better illustration of Crumb the Artist as opposed to Crumb the Man.

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Because I’ve been busy with Esozone stuff, I haven’t posted about something with potentially far reaching consequences: Max Hardcore has been sentenced to prison for distributing “obscene” material.

Because the films which Little produced included scenes involving sadomasochism, the Bush DOJ alleged, and the federal court found, that the films were not merely pornographic, but also “obscene,” and thus illegal (Little’s lawyers argued, unsuccessfully, they were intended primarily for distribution in Europe, where such films are legal). Ironically, Little’s defense to the obscenity charges was quite similar to the defense which the Bush DOJ itself, years earlier, had embraced in order to claim that Bush officials were not engaged in “torture” when subjecting helpless detainees to gruesome treatment: namely, because the acts in question didn’t involve the infliction of severe pain, they weren’t illegal.

There was no suggestion that any serious violence was ever inflicted or that the adult actors in the film were anything other than completely consensual. But the court found that the depiction of severe pain was not required for conviction; instead, mere humiliation and degrading treatment was sufficient to render the films criminal and to warrant a long prison sentence. As the judge put it: “This is clearly degrading, clearly humiliating and intended to be so.” So, having already bankrupted Little with the DOJ’s prosecution, it’s now off to federal prison — for the next 4 years of his life.

But for our highest government officials, including the ones responsible for this prosecution, we have a different story altogether. In 2002, the Bush DOJ radically re-defined “torture” and illegal treatment of detainees to exclude anything that falls short of “the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” The DOJ’s John Yoo even decreed that the President could legally order “’scalding water, corrosive acid or caustic substance’ thrown on a prisoner” and possibly even “slitting an ear, nose or lip, or disabling a tongue or limb.”

Full Story: Salon

(hat tip: majikthise)

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Contrary to the general assumption that people involved in bondage and discipline and sadomasochism (BDSM) are sexually deficient, a new sex survey has now shows that such people are not damaged or dangerous, and might even be happier than those who practise “normal” sex.

The study of 20,000 Australians by public health researchers at the University of New South Wales has revealed that two per cent of adult Australians regularly partake in sadomasochism and dominance and submission-type sexual role-play. […]

Prof Richters said that the findings went against professional views of BDSM.

“People with these sexual interests have long been seen by medicine and the law as, at best, damaged and in need of therapy and, at worst, dangerous and in need of legal regulation,” she said.

She also revealed that there was an assumption that those involved in BDSM were sexually deficient in some way, “and need particularly strong stimuli such as being beaten or tied up to become aroused”.

She expressed hope that her findings would help change those stereotypes.

Full Story: sify

(via SexRev)

See also: Is ‘Internet Normal’ the New ‘Sex Normal’?

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The devadasis stand in the direct line of one of the oldest institutions in India. The word comes from Sanskrit: deva means “god” and dasi means “a female servant.” At the heart of the institution lies the idea of a woman entering for life the service of a deity. The nature of that service and the name given to it have wide regional variations and have changed through time; only recently have most devadasis come to be working in the sex trade.

Some experts trace the institution to the ninth century; others maintain that it is far older, and claim that what is arguably one of the most ancient extant pieces of Indian art, a small bronze of a naked dancing girl from Mohenjo-daro, dating to around 2500 B.C., could depict a devadasi. By the time of Asoka, in the third century B.C., a piece of graffiti in a cave in the Vindhya hills, in central India, recalls the love of Devadinna, an artist, who had fallen for “Sutanuka, a devadasi.” There are large numbers of images of temple dancing girls and a few textual references to devadasis from the early centuries A.D. onward, including some in the area immediately around Saundatti. The largest collection of inscriptions, however, comes from the Chola temples, around Tanjore, in Tamil Nadu, where the great Chola kings of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries boast of giving hundreds of devadasis, or tevaratiyars, to the temples they founded. These royal temples were conceived as palaces of the gods, and just as the king was attended by ten thousand dancing girls so the gods also had their share of devoted attendants. The vast entourages added to the status of rulers, whether heavenly or terrestrial, and were believed to surround them with an auspicious female presence.

Full Story: New Yorker

(Thanks Dr. Gabbo!)

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