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7 Lbs of Cocaine Found Stuffed in Frozen Goat Meat at JFK Airport

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7 Lbs of Cocaine Found Stuffed in Frozen Goat Meat at JFK Airport

Last month, customs agents at JFK International Airport discovered more than seven pounds of cocaine stuffed inside three large chunks of frozen goat meat, which were packed in a passenger's luggage.

On March 20, Yudishtir Maharaj flew from Port of Spain, Trinidad into JFK, where custom agents selected him for a random search.

From Trinidad Express:

Special agent Michael Martinez indicated Maharaj "presented a checked-in, large black suitcase and a laptop bag for inspection.

When the officers examined the suitcase, they found three packages in the suitcase, which Maharaj claimed "in sum and substance contained frozen cooked goat meat. The three packages were X-rayed revealing a square-like object inside of each one."

The CBP officers later took Maharaj into a private room and, according to Martinez in the court doc­ket, "drilled into the packages and discovered a powdery-white substance, which later tested positive for the presence of cocaine."

"An arriving passenger at John F. Kennedy International Airport had a different kind of 'beef' when encountered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officers," U.S. Customs announced in a press release Monday morning. "When probed, the frozen packages of meat produced a white powder that tested positive for cocaine."

The 7.35 pounds of cocaine is worth between $1.2 and $1.8 million, according to Trinidad Express, though Gawker.com sources estimate its worth at between $80,000 and $165,000.

Maharaj, who claims he didn't know the cocaine was in his goat meat, was arrested and faces felony drug charges.

7 Lbs of Cocaine Found Stuffed in Frozen Goat Meat at JFK Airport

7 Lbs of Cocaine Found Stuffed in Frozen Goat Meat at JFK Airport

[via Gothamist]


Supreme Court Doesn't Want to Be Involved With Your Gay Wedding Photos

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Supreme Court Doesn't Want to Be Involved With Your Gay Wedding Photos

Today the Supreme Court turned down the opportunity to rule on a case about same-sex wedding photography that fulfills every nightmare religious conservatives in America have about our new era of gay rights. The state of New Mexico had ruled that if you are in the wedding-photography business, you must be willing to take photographs of weddings involving same-sex couples—even if your own religion opposes such weddings.

By declining to hear the petition, the Court allowed that ruling to stand. Op-ed writers are free to fulminate about how innocent souls are forced to set their religion aside in the name of treating gay people as if they're full human beings.

In 2006, New Mexico wedding photographer Elaine Huguenin refused a job. Vanessa Willock had emailed to ask if Huguenin's business, Elane Photography (no explanation on the dropped "I" there), would photograph her commitment ceremony to her lesbian partner. Huguenin refused on the grounds that she was a devout Christian who only photographed "traditional marriages."

Willock, a former equal employment opportunity officer at the University of New Mexico, complained to the New Mexico Human Rights Commission. The New Mexico Human Rights Commission found for Willock under New Mexico's "public accommodation" law.

Public accommodation laws stem from the civil rights era. They hold that a merchant—a restaurant, say, or a florist—can't decline to serve someone based on their race, religion, or other specified characteristics., regardless of the merchant's personal beliefs or preferences. New Mexico includes sexual orientation on the list of what's protected.

These laws exist because segregation operated, in part, by allowing such individual acts of discrimination to add up to a system imposed on the general public. But they do get tricky where customer service blends into personal expression.

Wedding photography is a terrifyingly demanding business. People are fixated on the notion that the wedding must absolutely no matter what OK must be THE Best Day of Their Lives. And you, the wedding photographer, may inadvertently reveal the truth that lies beneath their aspiration by hitting that button at just the moment when a hair is out of place or a flicker of doubt crosses someone's brow. Susan Sontag did once liken photography to murder, after all.

Is the resulting work a mere commercial service to be rendered, or is it an act of individual creativity? As the First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh has pointed out over the life of this case, in certain avenues of business—such as photography—public accommodation laws allow the government to compel someone to "speak" in favor of gay marriage. By taking pictures that show the joyous and uplifting features of a wedding, for instance.

Huguenin appealed to the New Mexico Supreme Court, claiming that her First Amendment rights had been violated. The court disagreed, and affirmed the decision of the Human Rights Commission:

Elane Photography has misunderstood this issue. It believes that because it is a photography business, it cannot be subject to public accommodation laws. The reality is that because it is a public accommodation, its provision of services can be regulated, even though those services include artistic and creative work. If Elane Photography took photographs on its own time and sold them at a gallery, or if it was hired by certain clients but did not offer its services to the general public, the law would not apply to Elane Photography's choice of whom to photograph or not. The difference in the present case is that the photographs that are allegedly compelled by the [New Mexico Human Rights Act] are photographs that Elane Photography produces for hire in the ordinary course of its business as a public accommodation. This determination has no relation to the artistic merit of photographs produced by Elane Photography. If Annie Leibovitz or Peter Lindbergh worked as public accommodations in New Mexico, they would be subject to the provisions of the NMHRA.

No one wants to deny that there is art and skill and judgment involved in wedding photography. But most people are not looking for essential acts of self-expression from their photographers. The happy couple hopes to see their happiness itself reflected in the photograph. They are hiring the photographer in the hope that he or she will find it at the right time on the right day. The photographer's artistic sensibility is an add-in.

The New Mexico Supreme Court suggested to Elane Photography that it simply put a disclaimer on its website instead, saying that the photographers didn't agree with gay marriage, but that of course it would comply with all anti-discrimination laws.

The Supreme Court of the United States didn't give its reasoning today, in declining the appeal of that ruling. But here's one guess: It declined in case that disclaimer solution totally solves the matter. What kind of couple, looking to have someone record their Special Day, would insist on hiring a company that fundamentally believes their wedding is an act against God?

[Photo via AP, from a 2004 gay wedding in Massachusetts.]

Rwandans light candles of remembrance and listen to religious speeches and music at a ceremony in Ki

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Rwandans light candles of remembrance and listen to religious speeches and music at a ceremony in Kigali, Rwanda, on Monday. Thousands of Rwandans packed the country's main sports stadium to mark the 20th anniversary of the beginning of a devastating 100-day genocide. Image via Ben Curtis/AP.

This Is The Car The Game Of Thrones World Could Build

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This Is The Car The Game Of Thrones World Could Build

The new season of Game of Thrones started last night, and, surprise, there's no cars. Not that I was expecting any, of course, because I know that a little bit of magic makes people (even fake ones) stupid, and incapable of building anything like a car. But if they could, what sort of car would the GoT world produce?

This is a tricky question. The technology of the GoT world is pretty stunted, but they do have some fairly limited magic going on, so that can help compensate a bit. Even so, the type of cars they'd be capable of producing isn't going to be anything that's going to give much competition even to a '78 Pinto, but I do think a crude motor-driven vehicle is possible, and there's even a way to do it that is thematically compatible with the fictional world.

This Is The Car The Game Of Thrones World Could Build

The basic level of technology in Westeros and the other lands of the world of A Song of Ice and Fire seems to be roughly at a medieval level in our world. They have decent metallurgy, able to make steel, and able to work it into reasonably complex mechanisms like locks and winches, they have glasswork, simple wheeled animal-drawn vehicles, woodwork, textiles, stonemasonry, and not a hell of a lot more. The only sources of power seen other than animal power are windmills, and I assume water-power exists as well.

I think technically, they could be able to make a crude atmospheric steam engine, and while they could probably get a Cugnot-style vehicle to work, a steam-powered vehicle just doesn't really fit conceptually with the GoT world. At best, it'd just be a transplant from our world, and I'd rather come up with something that feels more, well, native.

And I think there is something. There's an engine type that could utilize two substances unique to that fictitious world, and the way the engine itself works is a sort of direct analogy to the fundamental conflict of the series, one that's alluded to in the series title, A Song of Ice and Fire. That engine is a Stirling engine.

This Is The Car The Game Of Thrones World Could Build

A Stirling engine is a closed-cycle engine that works based on temperature-based expansion and contraction of a trapped gas (like regular air) and essentially turns heat energy into mechanical energy. It's been experimented with for driving cars (including some NASA-tweaked AMCs), but poor power-to-weight ratios and worse money-to-people-giving-a-shit ratios kept the engines from getting any real commercial success. But the Game of Thrones world has two things our world lacks that could make these engines make sense: wildfire and the ice technology of the White Walkers.

These two magical elements are unique to their world and are at two ends of the spectrum: wildfire is an extremely hot-burning substance, sometimes described as "fire made flesh" or something like that. It ignites easily, and burns very hot for a very long period of time. It would make an ideal fuel for keeping the hot cylinder in our Stirling engine nice and toasty.

This Is The Car The Game Of Thrones World Could Build

On the other side, there's the White Walkers (also called the "Others") ability to make things like swords, knives, and probably letter openers and wine tools out of remarkably strong ice. But not just any ice — as G.R.R. Martin himself says,

Ice. But not like regular old ice. The Others can do things with ice that we can't imagine and make substances of it.

So, special ice "substances." The Night Watch is always desperate for money and resources — they could take advantage of their far-North location to send out some poor bastards to harvest some of these ice substances from White Walker-infested areas to bring back for use in Westeros' burgeoning automotive industry. Sure, it'd be dangerous, but mining coal's never been a walk in the park, either, and once decent money came into the picture, I'm sure they'd find a way.

This Is The Car The Game Of Thrones World Could Build

So, with these two diametrically-opposed materials, wildfire and white walker ice, you could make a Stirling engine with extremely divergent temperature extremes for each cylinder, and those temperatures would maintain their difference pretty much regardless of environmental conditions — no more dealing with the vagaries of air-cooling or burning kerosene or whatever. These two materials could really maximize the potential of a Stirling engine.

You'd have to build in some precautions, of course — only a very small amount of each material would be needed, since they're both so potent and potentially dangerous. The White Walker ice-material would probably need to be jacketed in regular ice as an insulator, and then made into a jacket of sorts around the cold cylinder.

For the wildfire, a very well-insulated and protected vessel would be needed, with a series of outlets for jets of flame to heat the hot cylinder evenly. A simple sliding valve system could be used as a throttle of sorts, to vary the intensity of the heat — though I admit, I'm not totally sure if that would affect engine speed. Living in reality, I haven't had a chance to play with wildfire, so I'm not really sure how it reacts to things. To be safe, we'll include a very simple idler gear type of setup to allow for a neutral setting or speed control.

So, there's our engine, one that uses materials unique to the world of GoT and is almost eerily conceptually suited for that world. Could it actually, fictionally, really, not-really be built? I think so.

This Is The Car The Game Of Thrones World Could Build

The basic cylinders, pistons, crankshaft, and linkages for the engine I think are well within the capabilities of the better smiths of that world, and the evidence of some brewing industry suggests that they should be capable of making cylindrical vessels that can hold some pressure. The seals between the pistons and the cylinders I think would be an issue, but let's say they're able to figure that out, too. We're already accepting magic here, so why not?

For the rest of the vehicle, I think things will be need to be kept pretty damn simple, especially if they're going to build these in any quantity. The chassis and body will not be that different that most of their basic farm carts, though adding some simple leaf-spring suspension wouldn't be a bad idea. Steering could be anything as simple as a single pivot point with a fixed axle to something slightly more advanced, like a basic Ackermann steering geometry setup.

I think the Stirling engine would be mounted in the middle, maybe behind the seats and under the rear passenger/load area, and power transmitted to the wheels via belt (they seem really good at making leather belts) to a simple, manual CVT-type transmission. I knew I'd find a place to use that goofy idea. Brakes could be simple lever or spoon-type brakes; they can figure that out on their own.

This Is The Car The Game Of Thrones World Could Build

Essentially, there would just be a simple lever to shove the drive belt back and forth along a cone connected to the rear axle — put it at the big end for low gearing to get started, then gradually move it to the apex to get close to a 1:1 drive ratio. There'd have to be some simple spring-loaded tensioner in there, too, but that shouldn't be too big a deal.

Also, at each end of the cone would be a free-wheeling roller, matching the cone size at each end, to act as a sort of neutral/idler gear. This would allow coasting and parking, a way to de-couple the engine from the drivetrain without shutting it down. Because, honestly, I'm not sure you could shut it down, at least until the wildfire ran out, because I don't think you can easily stop a wildfire fire.

The body on this basic chassis could be specified by the client — either simple, basic farm wagons, more elaborate passenger carriages for the high-borns, or even having a shipwright make a sleek little runabout for the King or some wealthy playboy.

So there you go — now you can stop wondering. I do think it would have been possible, just barely, for self-propelled vehicles to be built and used in the Game of Thrones world. I expect by the 5th season we'll be seeing trans-Westeros rally races and some exciting action over at the Braavosi Speedway.

Those Who Serve Tech Billionaires Lunch are Facing Eviction

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Those Who Serve Tech Billionaires Lunch are Facing Eviction

At Google, the people who spoon out gourmet lunches to the Mountain View struggle to feed themselves. At Tesla Motors, chariot-builders of the geek elite, working at the corporate cafeteria means you might not be able to afford your own home.

Bloomberg reports from Palo Alto, where rents are spiking—even in historically affordable locales—and wages for menial jobs are stuck in the past. The combination is exactly what you'd assume: the people who do things for the people at the tech companies are being priced out of their own roofs by the tech companies:

Virginia Valencia earns $12 an hour in the cafeteria at Tesla Motors Inc. headquarters in Palo Alto, California, where she serves breakfast to the staff and billionaire co-founder Elon Musk. He prefers juice to coffee, she said.

[...]

Valencia has been fighting eviction since she fell behind on her $1,064 rent payment in November. And she's not the only one. Each month, as many as 300 Woodland Park residents receive notices from Equity Residential giving them three days to pay or vacate their homes, according to an employee's sworn testimony in a lawsuit.

When Valencia laments that "It seems like they just don't want us here," she's not wrong: there's an entire wave of startups bent on destroying the service economy and remaking it in a more convenient, direct, mercenary mode. The more widely used an on-demand food-serving app becomes, for example, the more professional peril anyone with a food-serving job faces. Silicon Valley would turn services (and servers) into impulses without benefits or protections—what used to be labor can be more neatly packaged as an ad hoc "task" or "gig."

And so, Palo Alto turns its back on people who might've had to struggle to make ends meet working at a cafeteria for people who design $70,000 electric cars, but now have their very livelihood threatened. It'd be one thing if tech companies meant job creation that could promise the Virginia Valencias of Palo Alto a way of life. But at least there will be a part-time sock delivery gig waiting for her in San Francisco.

At least Valenica's boss is worried about the right things:

Study: Twitter Is Destroying Your Marriage, You Self-Absorbed Jerk

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Study: Twitter Is Destroying Your Marriage, You Self-Absorbed Jerk

Who says journalism degrees are useless? If not for Russell Clayton and his doctoral research at the University of Missouri's j-school, we might have only guessed at the fact that your inability to stop tweeting leads your spouse to, uh, "favorite" someone else's handle.

Clayton surveyed 581 Twitter users of varying ages on their social-media habits, as well as the general health of their co-habitations. The results, published in his paper "The Third Wheel: The Impact of Twitter Use on Relationship Infidelity and Divorce," were unequivocal:

[He] found that active Twitter users are far more likely to experience Twitter–related conflict with their romantic partners. Clayton's results showed that Twitter-related conflict then leads to negative relationship outcomes, including emotional and physical cheating, breakup and divorce.

Questions to survey respondents included: "How often do you have an argument with your significant other as a result of excessive Twitter use?" and "How often do you have an argument with your significant other as a result of viewing friends' Twitter profiles?" Those were cross-referenced with the results of other questions like: "Have you emotionally cheated on your significant other with someone you have connected or reconnected with on Twitter?" "Have you physically cheated on your significant other with someone you have connected or reconnected with on Twitter?" and "Has Twitter led to a breakup/divorce?"

The aggregate answer to all this among Twitter users was: Yup.

Arguments over Twitter obsessions, or favoriting porn stars' tweets, or broadcasting domestic issues to your 342 followers, or whatever else, led to couples' arguments and broken romances "regardless of length of romantic relationship," Clayton said. "Couples who reported being in relatively new relationships experienced the same amount of conflict as those in longer relationships."

This builds on Clayton's earlier Facebook relationships research, in which he found that yes, Facebooking leads to Facebook-related conflicts that destroy relationships with spouses and partners IRL—but in the case of Facebook, the damage was worse among relationships less than three years old, while Twitter arguments were horrible for romantic pairings pretty much all the time.

Does this marriage-wrecking social media addiction describe you? Take heart: Your spouse probably has no idea about that Tinder account yet. But Clayton did make a few recommendations based on the research, including the suggestion that coupled-up twimphomaniacs scale back to "moderate, healthy levels of Twitter use" for the good of their flesh-and-blood lovers.

He also recommended that "couples share joint social networking site accounts to reduce relationship conflict, and there are some social networking site apps, such as the 2Life app, that facilitates interpersonal communication between partners," because facilitating interpersonal communication between partners is really hard when that partner is, you know, right there in front of you.

[Shutterstock/evgenymate]

"Knitted boyfriend substitutes are 'hot' stuff."

Why Everyone Was Screaming About Wrestling Last Night

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Why Everyone Was Screaming About Wrestling Last Night

Last night wasn't just the premiere of Game of Thrones/another Sunday where you stop to consider that you will have to go to work until you're 70 years old. It was also one of the most insane nights in the history of WrestleMania, a.k.a wrestling's Super Bowl.

If you were looking at Twitter between 9 and 10 p.m. ET last night (which you were), you noticed that all of a sudden a lot of dudes on your timeline were shouting at the same time about something, almost as if someone had died. What actually happened was that The Undertaker—a WWE/WWF legend—lost a match to Brock Lesnar. So, why exactly was that a big deal?

For one, The Undertaker hadn't been defeated at WrestleMania ever. He had won 21 straight matches at the event, a fact that was promoted by WWE like it was an actual feat of human achievement (after each Undertaker victory at WrestleMania, his record would flash on the Jumbotron). But The Undertaker is almost 50 years old now, and so he wrestles infrequently, with the specter of a career-changing loss hanging over every match.

Still, the expectation was that, regardless of how close he came to losing, The Undertaker would end up prevailing, not unlike an action hero, over Lesnar, an ex-UFC champion finding his footing at WWE as a classic heel. That belief did not waver, even as the match was drawn out by Lesnar kicking out of a pin move.

But soon after that, once the men had finished crawling around the ring, Lesnar hoisted the 7-foot-tall Undertaker onto his shoulders in preparation of delivering his signature move the "F-5" (for the third time that night), in which he basically throws his opponent onto his face. After tossing The Undertaker, who flopped onto his back, Lesnar slithered on top of him for the pin. Yet, even still, every single person in the Superdome in New Orleans expected The Undertaker to triumphantly kick out and rightfully win his 22nd WrestleMania match against one of WWE's most hated wrestlers.

"Every single person" is not an exaggeration, and it explains the sheer hilarity of those images you probably saw last night of wrestling fans reacting to the end of the match like The Undertaker's leg had shattered completely in half.

Why Everyone Was Screaming About Wrestling Last Night

Why Everyone Was Screaming About Wrestling Last Night

This was an arena full of adults finally losing their innocence. The internet immediately became a place of mourning. #ThankYouTaker trended on Twitter for all of last night and the better part of this morning. Reddit's WWE subreddit was flooded with people attempting to "make sense" of The Undertaker finally losing. Current and ex-wrestlers were equally as stunned. This woman literally posed on top of a grave.

Almost immediately, several conspiracy theories were offered up as explanations, the most popular being that The Undertaker was the victim of a "screwjob," a reference to a 1997 match in which champion Bret Hart was told he would defeat challenger Shawn Michaels, only for WWF brass to plot behind his back for him to lose. But it appears that The Undertaker took a willing loss in the most dramatic way possible.

It was an honorable decision by The Undertaker—who could have bitterly refused to be defeated at wrestling's most high profile event—and a canny move by WWE, who overtook Game of Thrones as Sunday night's most talked about event. Still, if you're considering "getting into" wrestling, remember that something this exciting could only be as such because it can't ever happen again.


House Shows, Ranked

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House Shows, Ranked

1. House of Cards

2. Pee-Wee's Playhouse

3. Dream House

4. Playhouse 90

5. Run's House

6. Sorry, I meant Run's House

7. The Hilarious House of Frightenstein

8. CBS Playhouse

9. Little House on the Prairie

10. This Old House

11. MTV's House of Style

12. Tyler Perry's House of Payne

13. Warehouse 13

14. House Minority Leader Weekly Briefing

15. Bear in the Big Blue House

16. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse

17. Desperate Housewives

18. House of Lies

19. Dollhouse

20. Full House

[COUPLED ENTRY] 21 a. House Hunters, 21 b. House Crashers, 21 c. House Hunters Vacation

22. My House is Worth What?

23. 704 Hauser

24. House

[Image by Jim Cooke, source photo via Shutterstock]

Advice for Heterosexual Women Encountering Lesbians, Circa '88

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This comes via New York magazine's pop music critic Jody Rosen, who adds that the "priceless period piece unearthed yesterday by a friend packing for a move." Seems like pretty sound advice, especially No. 1. Really, do not run from the room. It is rude. (No. 2 is also right insofar as all backing away in social situations should be done slowly and with discretion.)

Cartoon Foresaw Asshole Redface Guy A Decade Ago

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Cartoon Foresaw Asshole Redface Guy A Decade Ago

As if that dumbass-Indians-fan ordeal couldn't get any more surreal, it turns out one cartoonist depicted almost the exact situation in 2002.

On his blog, Lalo Alcaraz says that he wasn't even aware of the eerie similarity between his satirical cartoon and the real deal until someone tweeted a side-by-side comparison of the two.

At first I thought it was just a hilarious comparison. Then I began examining the two images more closely and got a little weirded out. I went to the archives to pull up the big, high-res version of the toon (below, double-click to enlarge) and compared it to the photo. I immediately noticed the face paint, the writing on the shirt, the similar headdresses, and the nearly identical right hand position of the mascot-lovin' dude. When I noticed the nearly identical pose of the Native protester in the photo and in my cartoon, I started tripping out.

He even nailed the weak rationalization—though, to be fair, the real Native American's side-eye was much fiercer than the cartoon version. So is this art imitating life, life imitating art, or just morons being incredibly predictable, even in the extremes?

[Jim Romenesko|Pocho.com]

h/t Joe

Christian GOP Congressman Caught Cheating on Sexy Surveillance Tape

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Christian GOP Congressman Caught Cheating on Sexy Surveillance Tape

Rep. Vance McAllister, a freshman Republican congressman from Louisiana who made his Baptist faith a central focus of his campaign for Congress, has been making out in the dark with a staffer who was not his wife, according to surveillance video released today.

The surveillance film, embedded below, actually dates from two days before last Christmas, according to the Ouachita Citizen, McAllister's hometown paper, which received the video from an anonymous source and published it today.

The paper also managed to identify the paramour in McAllister's "extramarital encounter":

The incident occurred at roughly 1:39 p.m. on Dec. 23, 2013, inside McAllister's congressional office at 1900 Stubbs Ave., Suite B, in Monroe.

The woman who McAllister, 40, was caught kissing for almost half a minute is Melissa Anne Hixon Peacock, 33, of 400 Zachary Way, Sterlington. She is McAllister's district scheduler. 


Neither the congressman nor his scheduler commented to the paper, but they noted that Peacock—"a self-described cosmetologist"—donated $5,200 to McAllister's campaign last year. Both parties are married; McAllister and his wife of a decade and a half have five children. Here is a photo of him with his wife, Kelly, on the campaign trail last fall:

Christian GOP Congressman Caught Cheating on Sexy Surveillance Tape

McAllister won a special election last November to get to Congress, and the word on the street was that he'd been living it up in DC ever since. The Citizen added that McAllister's behavior seemed especially rich, given his moral positioning:

Throughout last fall's congressional campaign, McAllister, a Republican from Swartz, touted his Christian faith and in one television commercial, he asked voters to pray for him. At least two other campaign television commercials featured McAllister walking hand in hand with his wife, Kelly, while their five children walked along. One television commercial captured the McAllister family in the kitchen of their home preparing breakfast before attending church.

McAllister and his wife have been married for 16 years.

McAllister told The Ouachita Citizen during last fall's campaign that he would not shy from stressing his Christian faith. McAllister and his family are members at North Monroe Baptist Church. That faith prepared him for public service, he said during an interview.

"You don't achieve goals by compromising your integrity but by building relationships on respect," McAllister said.

"We have to love our neighbor, which is the most bipartisan you can be," McAllister told The Ouachita Citizen at the time.

Love those neighbors, America. Love them so hard.

Belle Knox Is Going to Host a Porn Reality Show

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Belle Knox Is Going to Host a Porn Reality Show

The X Factor of porn is, uh, coming, and Duke University porn starlet Belle Knox has signed on to host.

The reality webseries is called The Sex Factor (obviously), and features a panel of established porn performers presiding over 16 aspiring adult stars—8 men and 8 women—as they compete for a $1 million top prize and "porn stardom." Judges include Tori Black, Lexi Belle, Keiran Lee (the man with the million-dollar penis), and Remy LaCroix.

As in the original X Factor, the audience will vote to decide who gets eliminated after each round of challenges—which will presumably not involve singing or wearing clothes. Voters will even decide the contestants' porn names.

The show kicks off in May, and a winner will be declared at the AVN Awards in June.

[H/T New York Post, Photo Credit: Belle Knox/Twitter]

Deadspin Lacrosse Dad Sues Coaches For Not Playing His Son | Gizmodo From Sexting to Sacraments: How

Continue Fracking, Pay No Attention to All the Earthquakes

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Continue Fracking, Pay No Attention to All the Earthquakes

I do not have the scientific expertise to offer a worthwhile opinion on the practice of "fracking." All I know is: whatever you do, do not worry about all the earthquakes it is causing!

Look, you can find experts on one side who say fracking is dangerous, and experts on the other side who say it's not dangerous. All I know is that our nation needs energy resources, and fracking can provide those, and also, in news that may or may not be related, the state of Oklahoma has already had as many earthquakes in three months of this year as it did in all of last year, and—not saying this as a value judgment—it may be, could be, might be, is linked to all of that frackin'. Bloomberg reports:

State regulators last year curtailed operations at one Love County injection well and shut down a second after a series of earthquakes in the area, according to Matt Skinner, a spokesman with the Oklahoma Corporation Commission. State officials are analyzing a swarm of earthquakes in the past 10 days near Langston, he said.

"This is the area we're most concerned about," Skinner said in an interview "We do have injection wells in the area."

Could blasting water into cracks in the earth with incredibly high pressure be related to an explosion of earthquakes? Who's to say? In the meantime, strap yourself in—for energy savings!

[Photo: AP]


Kate Middleton's Royal Tour Journals: Day 1

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Kate Middleton's Royal Tour Journals: Day 1

This month, powerful baby Prince George performs his first official royal duty—an inspection of British penal colonies and their outlying areas—as he and his parents, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, spend three weeks traveling across Australia and New Zealand. During this time, Gawker.com will publish a selection of entries from his minder Kate Middleton's travel journals.


7 April, 2014

Set foot on New Zealand soil for the first time in my life this morning, and decided to just wear all my buttons at once because nothing makes me more anxious when traveling abroad then deciding which buttons to roll out on what days and not knowing how they will be received. We received what one might call a bit of a fright at the Wellington Airport ("HOLY fucking mother of God!" said William) when we came face-to-face with a 42-foot sculpture of a jaundiced, bleary-eyed Gollum stretching out over the food court. I am no fan of food courts, chiefly for the foods they contain, but this may be the worst I have seen (for the reason described).

From the airport, we traveled by armoured car to the residence of the Governor-General. William held the baby so that I might have a chance to look out the window at the lush countryside, and wonder about what other immense movie props my child and I will be forced to discover in its green, rolling hills. About twenty minutes into the trip, he asked if I was sure it was appropriate for a male child to wear head-to-toe white ahead of Good Friday. I closed my eyes and told him I was not available.

At the residence, we received a "traditional Maori welcome," and I did not feel awkward, as was one of my 2014 resolutions.

My God. My God.

Catherine

Kate Middleton's Royal Tour Journals: Day 1

Getting Drunk On Planes Must Now Be Done Without Limes

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Getting Drunk On Planes Must Now Be Done Without Limes

The challenge, should you have the gumption to accept it, is to take all your forthcoming mid-air cocktails without the tangy garnish of a fresh lime. Several airlines are soon to nix them from their inflight service.

With the recent devastating uptick in lime prices—giving the drink-enhancing pithy nuggets the menacing nickname of "green gold"—airlines are doing what they think is right by cutting back on their already meager drink offerings. Some are even substituting with lemons.

United Airlines spokesman Rahsaan Johnson took a blasé attitude to the delicate art of mixology as he told AP:

"We still serve limes, though they're more difficult to source. So, on some flights we're substituting with lemons."

Casually being served a margarita with a lemon while a screaming toddler kicks the back of your chair into your skull is only one more way to ensure mile-high mutiny.

The airlines that are cutting back include United Airlines and Alaska Airlines. Luckily, if you're flying JetBlue, you can rely on "crystallized citrus additives True Lemon and True Lime" to propel you into belligerent airborne inebriation instead.

But fear not. The cutbacks of citrus joy slices is apparently "temporary."

[Image via AP]

Makers of Lethal Painkiller Open Lawsuit After Massachusetts Ban

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Makers of Lethal Painkiller Open Lawsuit After Massachusetts Ban

Last week, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick announced a state of public health emergency as heroin and opiate overdoses rise. The announcement called for a ban on the new drug Zohdyro, an opiate painkiller ten times stronger than Vicodin. In response, Zogenix, the drug's maker, has filed a federal lawsuit.

Zohydro had just started rolling out in California markets this March, and Patrick's decision has forestalled any chances of that happening in the Northeastern state, calling it a "potentially lethal narcotic painkiller."

Patrick has ensured that Narcan, an overdose preventive medication, will be more readily available to first responders, but has also promised that Zohydro will stay off the market until more safeguards are put into place.

"We must have more rigor over the overprescription of pain medication," Patrick said. Opiate overdoses in Massachusetts rose 90 percent from 2000 to 2012.

Predictably, Zogenix is not happy with this decision, claiming it is "impermissible" and that "it impedes the FDA's Congressional mandate to approve a range of safe treatments to promote the public health." The FDA's approval of the drug last year was met with controversy, and many states are following in Massachusetts' footsteps in banning access.

Zohydro's intended purpose is for "the management of pain severe enough to require daily, around-the-clock, long-term opioid treatment and for which alternative treatment options are inadequate," but many believe it will result in only further opiate overdoses.

Zogenix asked for a meeting with Patrick regarding the matter, and he is now reviewing the lawsuit.

[Image via AP]

[A high school student in Bladensburg, MD today cannot even believe his fucking eyes that President

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[A high school student in Bladensburg, MD today cannot even believe his fucking eyes that President Obama is within grasping distance. Photo via AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais]

Watch New Heartstopping Video From the Mustang-Wanted Daredevil Crew

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Earlier this year, a Ukrainian collective of daredevils called Mustang-Wanted published a terrifying video of them climbing—and hanging from—various tall buildings and objects. This week, the group posted a new video that's more nerve-racking than the first.

In case you, for whatever insane reason, were thinking of imitating the stunts, here's a message from "Mustang," the group's leader, via the Mustang-Wanted website:

First, I must tell you, that the following videos and photos feature stunts performed by professionals. I really insist that no one attempt to recreate or re-enact any stunt or activity performed on this site. Even if you`re totally sure that you can do that, you are putting yourself in danger. So, please, don't try to recreate my stunts. I mean it!

Also, you better leave the site if you are under 88 years old, because here you can find materials that will lead to the aesthetic dissatisfaction or even injure your psyche.

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