The Deadliest Poisons in History (And Why People Stopped Using Them)
Once people figured out they could kill each other with special substances instead of sharp sticks, the proverbial poison cookie was born. However, there are only so many times you can use the same trick. As people caught on to how poisons worked, and moved them to the forefront of investigations, certain poisons fell out of fashion. We’ll take a look at the glory days of them all.
Sometimes when we look around our lives we can’t help but think – this situation would be greatly improved with the use of a little poison. After all, can every last one of the Borgias be wrong? Modern day people are not the first to come around to this way of thinking.
Greeks and Romans: Hemlock and Aconite
It’s best to start with the classics. When people didn’t know where else to turn, they turned to hemlock. It’s most famous for being the poison that Socrates drank in the spirit of good citizenship. It would not have been a particularly pleasant death. Accounts of his death say it was peaceful, with feeling going out of his legs first, and the eventual numbness killing him. Actually, hemlock acts as a paralytic that keeps the mind awake. It takes out the muscles and then shuts down the respiratory system, so death comes from waking asphyxiation.
Aconite comes from the plant monkshood. It, reportedly, also has a famous casualty. The emperor Claudius was said to have been poisoned by his wife by aconite in a plate of mushrooms. The wife part of that scenario seems to be an anomaly since aconite was known as “The Mother-In-Law’s Poison.” It first caused vomiting and diarrhea, and then caused arrhythmic heart function until the person died.
Hemlock and aconite were a great favorite of the Greeks and the Romans. They didn’t just poison each other with the direct version of hemlock, but tried to do each other in with the meat of larks, which were said to eat so much hemlock that their flesh was poisonous. Why did they favor these plants so much? Well, it was also given by doctors to ease swelling and calm seizures or muscle spasms. Aconite was a treatment for head colds by doctors – right up until the 20th century. As meticulous as poisoners seem, they often use whatever comes to hand when they need to kill someone. Since they could get hold of both of these poisons and have a seemingly innocent reason for using them, they were ideal. They fell out of favor often because they weren’t nearby. Over time, the effects of the poison became known. Occasional throw-back poisoners tried to use them, but as one unlucky Victorian poisoner who had gotten his entire education from a classics textbook found out, medical science moves forward. His “undetectable aconite,” was well-known as a poison. Being a poisoner is very much about staying ahead of the curve.
Read it all HERE.
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Dept. of Labor: Occupational Outlook Handbook “The Occupational Outlook Handbook is the government’s premier source of career guidance featuring hundreds of occupations – such as carpenters, teachers, and veterinarians. Revised every 2 years, the latest version contains employment projections for the 2010-20 decade.”
The 1960 presidential election holds the title of the closet presidential race. John F. Kennedy won just a tenth of a percent more popular votes than Richard Nixon, but he did carry a clear majority in the Electoral College with 303 votes, as opposed to Nixon’s 219 votes. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
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24 Hours at Club Marquee in Las Vegas
If you’ve been to Vegas, you’ve heard about it or stood in line to get in. Marquee, the superest of the superclubs, sprawls over an astonishing 60,000 square feet. It allows you to party very, very hard. For just thousands of dollars! Would you like bottle service at one of our dance-floor tables? That’ll be another $10,000. How about a 30-liter bottle of champagne to share with a dozen women you’ve never met? $250,000. How about we get Kim Kardashian to come? $100,000. Devin Friedman explores the world, adds it all up, and explains the mysteries and the pitfalls of the hottest club on the planet
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Swallowed Diamond Was Fake
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This film came about because Sarah Macdonald wanted to find out more, to investigate the alternative cancer treatments and the clinics behind them.>At first it seemed easy enough. The facilities promote their services through glossy brochures and online video testimonials, such as one from a woman called Lorraine Weaver, who describes how she reacted to suggestions for conventional medical treatment for lung cancer:“They said they were going to do chemo and radiation and I said I don’t think so. I walked out and called my niece and she said you go to Oasis of Hope… and I came down and I was cured and I thank God every day, don’t ever give up hope.”She found that this kind of statement was by no means unusual. The clinics often claim survival rates that far outweigh anything a conventional oncologist could offer – a complete cure when all else has failed.When you have just been told that there is nothing else conventional medicine can do for you, it is easy to understand the attraction. So you abandon rational thought, phone the travel agent and find yourself in Los Angeles about to take a bus tour around the Tijuana clinics.
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Ex-Rocker Finds a Different Path to Fame, Chanting All the Way
Krishna Das, once known as Jeff Kagel, in Times Square on Tuesday.
In June 1967, a small group of high school and college students on Long Island formed a rock band that would eventually become Blue Öyster Cult.
For a brief time, Jeff Kagel, then a student at State University of New York at Stony Brook, was the band’s lead singer. Then he quit.
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The downtrodden young man who quit the band nearly a half-century ago is still performing — but not as Jeff Kagel, and not at rock concerts.
In following a different path, Mr. Kagel still managed to become a star, singing with Sting and rubbing shoulders with Madonna. And on Thursday night, Mr. Kagel will be at Lincoln Center for a screening of a documentary about his life in which he has emerged as a celebrity in the world of yoga.
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OM NAMAH SHIVAYA BY KRISHNA DAS – YouTube
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A survey of men who look for sex online finds they’re more interested in emotion than getting kink
They’re rich, married, middle-aged — and they pay for sex. But they aren’t looking for taboo sex they can’t get at home: These men want an emotional connection.
That’s according to a new survey of men who look for sex online, rather than on the storied street corner, and trade reviews on a website called the Erotic Review (as a Gawker headline once put it, “It’s like Yelp, but for hookers”). These men are connoisseurs of the sex trade, although they refer to themselves as “hobbyists.” The nearly 600 men surveyed were mostly white, middle-aged, highly educated and pulling in six figures. They aren’t necessarily representative of users of the Erotic Review, let alone the much broader sex-buying community.
But the findings, even given these limitations, are fascinating — take that most of these “hobbyists” are primarily concerned that a provider has “a happy and cheerful personality.” That’s why I decided to talk to Christine Milrod, a psychotherapist and one of the lead authors on the study, about the so-called Girlfriend Experience, in which sex workers provide the illusion of a more romantic, cash-free transaction — and why these “hobbyists” are drawn to it.
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