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I have noticed something new that’s cropped up over the last year or so. When I write about the superhero stuff here people tend to yawn. Oh, sure, there are those who do appreciate it but, in the main, those articles just doesn’t have the traction they used to. And I can see why. A few years ago this was one of the few places you could get fan info on upcoming films. Now there are hundreds of sites. More importantly they limit their articles to some click bait and a couple hundred words. Usually with one generic image. It’s enough for the ADHD world we live in. Additionally, we have added quite a few new readers from around the world and, to be polite, American pop culture doesn’t interest them as much as some might like. I exclude China from that blanket statement. This blog isn’t allowed there and they are starved for American movies, even the ones that are censored beyond recognition. That said, the inverse is true when I do the Big Wake Up Call with Ryan Gatenby every Friday on Fox Sports Radio in Aurora Illinois. The demographics are different and they love the superhero stuff. They like the fact that we know people who are actually working on various films and who can share tid bits of behind the scenes stuff with us. Not enough for an article here but plenty to fill a few minutes of air time. So I parse out my content accordingly.

Additionally, I have stopped writing about Florida (state motto: Hey Ya’ll Watch This!). Mostly because it’s low hanging fruit and, quite honestly, it depresses me. There are only so many times you can write naked, meth and Wal-Mart in the same sentence before you figure, fuck it, let the monkeys have it all back.

So to keep my sanity I moved on.

Which has turned out to be a fun move. I can do more, in depth, stuff here about our future and other subjects and people seem to enjoy them. In keeping with that, let’s kick back and chat about all the world’s knowledge.

Even the cat pics.

Mike Murphy, over at Quartz, says that scientists have figured out a way to fit all the world’s electronic data in an object that would fit in a tea spoon.

Even though it’s looking increasingly likely that humanity will find a way to wipe itself off the face of the Earth, there’s a chance that our creative output may live on. Servers, hard drives, flash drives, and disks will degrade (as will our libraries of paper books, of course), but a group of researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have found a way to encode data onto DNA—the very same stuff that all living beings’ genetic information is stored on—that could survive for millennia.

One gram of DNA can potentially hold up to 455 exabytes of data, according to the New Scientist. For reference: There are one billion gigabytes in an exabyte, and 1,000 exabytes in a zettabyte. The cloud computing company EMC estimated that there were 1.8 zettabytes of data in the world in 2011, which means we would need only about 4 grams (about a teaspoon) of DNA to hold everything from Plato through the complete works of Shakespeare to Beyonce’s latest album (not to mention every brunch photo ever posted on Instagram).

There are four types of molecules that make up DNA, which form pairs. To encode information on DNA, scientists program the pairs into 1s and os—the same binary language that encodes digital data. This is not a new concept—scientists at Harvard University encoded a book onto DNA in 2012—but up to now, it had been difficult to retrieve the information stored on the DNA.

Past tests have seen gaps in retrieved information, as DNA reacts with its environment and degrades at room temperature. Robert Grass, the leader of the project at the Federal Institute, has found a new way to preserve the information: treat it like a fossil. His team encased their DNA sample in a shell made from silica—similar in structure to fossilized bones and one of the main components of glass—and stored the sample at about 140°F for a few weeks to test its durability.

When researchers recovered the sample, they were still able to read the encoded data, and Grass told the Institute’s blog that had the DNA been stored at subzero temperatures, it could potentially be read in over a million years. CDs and DVDs only have shelf lives of about 25 years, according to the US National Archives, so this would be quite an improvement on our current data storage techniques.

The event he’s talking about in his opening sentence is called the Holocene Extinction. Science is now projecting that animals are going extinct at an alarming rate and that, sooner rather than later (say in your kid’s lifetime), the food chain could become so diluted as to cause all the upper life forms (that includes us) to die. Unlike the last mass extinction which was caused, at least in part, by a meteorite, this one is strictly man made. Just because some people don’t understand the science doesn’t mean you can ignore it.

But, okay, so we can store all the world’s digital data (yes, cat pics and this blog included) but we still need a new planet or, at least, a new place to live. How do we get there? Darren Orf, over at Gizmodo, put a lot of thought into that question and came up with some answers. I’m going to bullet point them here but strongly suggest you go read his entire article. It’s well written and very educational.

1. A mobile space station… like the Death Star
Nope. It would wipe out the resources of a solar system, require way too much power to move and be far to unwieldy to steer.

2. An orbital space station… like Deep Space 9
This example is not self sustaining. That’s why each episode has visitors. Stick that baby in orbit with no lifeline and everyone dies anyway.

3. A traditional Mars base camp… like in Mission to Mars
Since we have not figured out a way to grow food in alien conditions and since bringing along greenhouses, soil and water isn’t practical, everyone would die.

You might notice a theme developing here.

4. An upper atmosphere space station… like Cloud City
Well, if you built it in low earth orbit and figured out how not to have everyone freeze to death, you’d still need supplies. On any other world you’d need air too. Otherwise, say it with me now, everybody dies.

5. Giant spaceship habitats… like in Wall-E
Let’s quote Sydney Do, a research fellow and doctoral candidate at MIT who systematically dismantled the doomed Mars One mission, since that’s what Darren did.

In the case of the Wall-E spaceship, the habitat is in deep space, so its access to any resource external to the habitat is essentially zero (for example, the habitat would have to be nuclear powered since it would be too far from our Sun or other light sources for solar power to work effectively); and it has a population of several thousands of people, all of which consume food, water and air that needs to be supplied from somewhere, and produce waste that needs to be managed.

Even if some form of biological support system were implemented, the energy-poor environment of deep space that the spacecraft is in would mean that there would be insufficient energy to support these biological processes. In short – this is one of the more far-fetched scenarios.

In other words, everybody dies.

6. A halo world… like in Elysium
Larry Niven’s Ringworld is the closest you can come to making this work but, and this is a big but, you’d need to strip one hundred percent of Earth’s natural resources to create it. That includes animals, trees, water, sea life and so on. Given that that would take decades, at best, and humans can’t really live for decades without food, everyone would die.

7. An underground base… like in The Matrix
This one gets a strong maybe. Your biggest issue would be that you’d be cut off from all communications outside of your underground world. That may, or may not, be a bad thing.

8. A carved-out asteroid…like in 2312
I’ll let Darren answer this one en toto.

So yeah this is a book but it’s a great book so I’m including it. In this novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, humans carve out an asteroid and build a type of terrarium, which uses centripetal force to create artificial gravity.

NASA expert Al Globus says one big challenge would be making sure an asteroid is airtight considering most asteroids are just giant piles of rubble. He says asteroids are also very hard to spin up and changes in center of gravity would require constant course correction.

But of all space habitats this one could actually be possible. You just got to find that special flying chunk of rock to call home, says Do.

NASA is attempting to do something very related to this concept with its Asteroid Redirect Mission.

The challenge in this is selecting the right asteroid – one with the right structure and orbit, for it to be valuable. There have been concepts where asteroids are put in periodic orbits between Earth and Mars and modified to act as crew transports between the two planets. The extra mass around the asteroid provides shielding against the harsh space radiation environment.

The main challenges associated with this concept would be moving a habitat-sized asteroid into the desired orbit (this would require propulsive capabilities beyond what we currently have), and mining and processing the materials on the asteroid, as we have no experience in doing this.

The constraints of moving such a dense object would mean that this habitat would be more suited towards a smaller crew of about 4-6 people, rather than something at the colony scale.

Asteroids, man. Who knew.

Yes, I know, it should read “Who knew?”

Also, I should note that it would take a lot of asteroids to save even a portion of the human race. So there’s a lot of work to be done and, if nothing’s done to fix this mess, it had better be done soon.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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It started out innocently enough. A mention on the Big Wake Up Call of the story of Kristina Baylen, a 30 year old Florida woman who impersonated a nurse. For a year. And gave out shots. And medical advice. And was barely a high school graduate. Yeah, that Kristina Baylen. The number of scary things in those previous sentences are too numerous to mention. Suffice it to say she’d still be there if there wasn’t a paperwork snafu. Because, apparently, playing doctor as a child is all you really need experience wise to be a qualified medical professional in some places. Anyway, after the show attentive listeners began emailing me with other examples of this. I did not know this was a real problem. But it is.

Some perspective. Last October I suffered a seizure and went to the hospital. Every single person there had an ID and a passcard to get through security. Later, when I went for follow up care the doctor I visited had his diploma on the wall. That is a requirement in Illinois. They’re not bragging, they’re letting you know you are actually being attended to by someone who made it all the way through medical school.

This, as it turns out, is not a national requirement.

The lovely Samantha Key, of Mt. Vernon Kentucky, was arrested for impersonating a nurse. In a hospital. She claims the staff had it in for her. She may be right. Those licensed professionals can be a tad territorial. Fortunately for all she was found out pretty quick and the hospital dealt with her decisively by firing her after they called the cops. Even so, it took them three weeks to figure it out.

In Dallas Texas the wonderfully fun Jada Necole Antoine was arrested, finally, after three freaking years. Granted she’d stolen an ID from a legitimate nurse to pull off the scam but how the hell didn’t anyone notice that they had two nurses with the exact same name? And, grab this, she had not one job or two. … oh, fuck it. I’ll let the court tell you.

“Antoine had direct responsibility for patient care in the field,” court records said.

About $2.3 million in hospice claims were submitted to Medicare for services Antoine performed while impersonating a nurse, court records show.

The other companies authorities said she worked for are: Community Hospice of Texas, Elysian Hospice, Hospice Pharmacy Solutions, New Century Hospice, Keystone Custom Care Hospice and Silverado Senior Living Hospice.

Yikes.

In Billings Montana Angela Corson Smith ramped up the crazy by claiming to be a physician assistant student, a nurse practitioner student, a neonatal intensive care unit nurse, director of nursing and, I love this one, insurance fraud specialist. She actually conned people out of over $57,000 to fund that last one. Fortunately for everyone, besides the fact that she’s off the street and behind bars, is the fact that Montana does, kind of, check out their medical professionals. It only took them three years to stop her.

No, I’m not done.

in Pennsboro Pennsylvania Toccara Marie Crenshaw stole an ID, passed herself as a nurse and would have done some damage but, thankfully, someone recognized the name and knew she wasn’t her. One call to the cops later and off to the hooskow she went.

Yes, she got caught due to pure chance. That should make you feel better.

in West Palm Beach Florida, of course we get back to Florida, a fake Dr. Robinson (this one’s a 17 year old kid so we’re not naming him) passed himself off as an OB/GYN by wearing a white coat and saying that’s what he was. Pretty slick hunh? He was caught when another doctor asked him one of those doctor questions that the kid couldn’t answer. Good news? He never actually dealt with a patient.

I’ll take my good news where I find it.

In Orlando, still in Florida, Ugarriza Fuentes was working as a surgical assistant when a fellow medical professional called the cops claiming that the nice assistant was performing liposuctions. Long story short, far from being a surgical assistant, he was only licensed to run a massage therapy center. For the record it seems he was actually good at what he did.

In Miamai, yep, still Florida, Teobaldo Humberto Fuentes & his wife Jina, not only pretended to be medical professionals, they opened a clinic. And, because … Florida … he treated kids (shots, etc.) with no way of verifying that the kids received proper care and, again, Florida, he provided gynecological exams to visiting moms.

Oh, wait, they didn’t run “A” clinic, they ran a fucking series of them. Believe it or not it wasn’t until a reporter noticed that the clinics also owned condos, a transportation company, did real estate management, and sold car wheels that this whole scam fell apart.

So did they have any medical experience whatsoever? Well, yes, the husband once worked as an X-Ray tech.

Lessons learned? Make sure you see a license that allows a professional to treat you or your family. Also, it might not hurt to look up their business license. If they also own car shops you might want to take your health elsewhere.

Sex Slaves "WTFRU" (NSFW) from Dale May on Vimeo.

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I get it. Sometimes you’ve got some “me time” and you want to make it worth your while. So, a little soft music, a nice dinner for one, maybe a rose (For me? You shouldn’t have!), a couple of adult libations, some jiffy lube and off you go for an evening of one handed romance. You let your imagination run wild. Your brain, the most erotic organ you have in any case, starts firing. Finally, after however long it takes you, your synapses collapse into a heap of protoplasmic ecstasy. Later, after you’ve toweled yourself off, you bask in the glow of self love. That’s all well and good. In fact it’s pretty damn healthy actually. Science has proven that masturbation has many health benefits too. Masturbation helps you sleep, relieves cramps, helps prevent prostate cancer, alleviates urinary tract infections, can help relieve Restless Leg Syndrome symptoms, helps boost your immunity and it just, plain old, makes sex better. If that last one seems counterintuitive just think about it. You’ve made sure all your parts work. You’ve proved to yourself that you have an imagination. Those two things that make you happy also happen to be the exact same things that will make your partner happy. So have at it and enjoy.

Just not in public.

I was talking to a friend of mine and I mentioned that there seemed to be a growing trend of American’s rocking the one eyed wonder weasel, or feeding the bearded clam as the case may be, in places that aren’t usually on anyone’s go to list when it comes to personal pleasuring. He told me to quit exaggerating. Look, if I’ve told him once I’ve told him a billion time, I don’t exaggerate.

But, after being called out like that I feel it’s my duty to prove me right.

Let’s start in Florida because ….. well, Florida.

Meet Amie Carter. This lovely young lady was walking around the outskirts of Orlando, Florida (the greatest place on Earth!). So far so normal. Then she started walking in the middle of the street. Not smart but .. oh, wait. Yes, buck naked in the middle of the road she started commando diddling in front of police. When they tried to arrest her she resisted, did over a grand’s worth of damage to a Nissan (I’d kill to hear that call to an insurance agency) and kicked her legs in the air at the cops. While her path to stardom as a Rockette may be closed the nice police were kind enough to offer a new path to jail. Drugs may have been involved.

Meet Frederick Tennyson Davis. No, you really, really want to. Freddy boy showed up at a library in Toronto not once, but twice, with a cucumber in one hand and his love muscle in another. How he managed to elude police the first time has got to be the saddest tale one cop can tell another. Still, the terror of the tomes has been incarcerated so it’s safe to read again.

Or not.

Meet Tyree Carter. The 20 year old Racine, Wisconsin resident has been banned for being a bibliophile of epic, and disturbing, proportions. He would go into an aisle, pick out a book he loved and then share his love of literature by flogging his frog in front of anyone who happened by. He’s been banned from any library in the world for life.

So what do you do if the cops bust for you a little self loving?

Not this.

Meet Mike Eiskant. Mike was a cop in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was videotaped sitting in his car, demanding that someone on his cell phone show him her tits while he was rubbing one off. And that was the least of his problems. Check this out.

… he entered a plea of no contest before Bernalillo County District Court Judge Reed Sheppard to two counts of attempt to commit a felony (false imprisonment), one count of stalking, two counts of harassment and other charges including larceny and possession of marijuana, according to the Santa Fe New Mexican.

Seven of the charges occurred in 2011 and the counts of false imprisonment, stalking and harassment relate to traffic stops involving female drivers, according to the criminal complaint.

In return for pleading no contest, Eiskant agreed he “will never again become a law enforcement officer anywhere in the United States,” according to a statement from Attorney General Gary King’s office.

On the other hand, meet this guy. Again, we’re back in Florida. A woman had called the cops because she saw someone masturbating in the CVS parking lot (oh, you know you want to do it too). When the cops tracked him down inside the store he claimed it was because he had a rash and not because he liked himself. And, again this is Florida, to prove it he whipped out his balls and showed them to the cop. And they were horrid. No charges were filed.

In Omaha, Nebraska, Darryl Moore, not to be confused with Dennis Moore, tried a similar tactic. He told the cops he’d witnessed a murder. When they asked for details he dropped trough and started flogging his frog. Fortunately for the citizens of Omaha the police didn’t have to take him very far. The good news for Darryl, and the bad news for the janitor, is that he completed the process before they could stop him.

Speaking of people janitor’s hate, meet Anthony Bruce Berry. The Lantana Florida native, I’m seeing a theme developing here, was having trouble using a door knob, yes, you read that right, so he fucked it. He has also faced charges of indecent exposure two times before, and has had 32 other arrests for charges such as robbery, sexual assault and cocaine possession since 1979.

Really? A door knob?

Let’s try and wrap this up, as it were.

Scott Smith, from Penn Township, Pennsylvania, claimed his pants were too big and that’s why his penis kept popping out. No, the cops didn’t believe him either.

William Blakely, the vice-mayor (man is that post aptly named) of Mt. Carmel Tennessee, was arrested for masturbating out of the window of his car while he drove. I don’t even want to know how or why he developed that skill.

Not enough?

Meet Nick Gonzales (in a firehouse?), Gregory Matthew Bruni (pooped & masturbated in Tony Lands’ Florida Home), Steven Young (at a parade no less), Elijah Slocumb (incorrectly named according to witnesses), Jared Weston (the master of hair don’ts), and the man, the myth, the legend, Edwin Tobregta.

Here’s a little sumptin sumptin about Eddie.

Edwin Tobergta, 35, was arrested in Hamilton, Ohio on Wednesday for allegedly having sex with an inflatable pool raft by the side of the road, Fox 19 reports. This is the fourth time Tobergta has been arrested for this kind of offense.

In 2011, Tobergta was caught with his pants down in an alley with his neighbor’s pink, inflatable raft.

He went to jail, but was arrested again in 2013 for having sex with the EXACT SAME RAFT, which had inexplicably not been thrown out. The 2013 offense occurred at Tobergta’s own home, but he was charged with — and pleaded guilty to — public indecency because it happened within the view of children during the day.

It is unclear if Tobergta’s most recent alleged offense took place with the same pool raft.

In 2002, Tobergta was arrested for publicly pleasuring himself with an inflatable pumpkin. That object wasn’t a pool toy, though, because come on, a man needs a little variety.

In his newest mugshot, Tobergta is wearing a T-shirt that reads, “I’m out of my mind. Please leave a message.”

POOL PARTY!

Or not.

I limited my research to the last two years and to those that were actually charged. Well, except for rash-man. That was just too fun not to share.

Had I not done so you would have thought that War and Peace was a pocket book.

So what have we learned today boys and girls? You only share with CONSENTING partners. Got it?

Good.

Now have fun out there.

tsurufoto presents… Give Me A Reason To Love You starring Sheila Savage (NSFW) from tsurufoto. on Vimeo.

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I once attended a Republican party sponsored “Family Values” event. This was back before the party had gone completely insane. Anyway, after 8 hours of speeches and catch phrases the event concluded and several gentlemen there asked if I wished to accompany them for a drink or two. Since my brain, at that point, felt as though someone had dragged Brillo over and through it, I said yes. So we toddled out of the hotel and went to one of Tampa’s top tourist attractions, a strip club. No, I’m not kidding. Don’t get me wrong, I like strippers. Hell, I’m a big fan of naked women in general. But I was the only one who saw a disconnect. To them this was just as God intended. You chat about the sanctity of marriage for a bit and then stuff dollars in the g-string of a stranger. What made the whole thing even more fun was the fact that I happened to know one of the dancers. She was, and still is, the daughter of a buddy of mine. I instantly became the coolest human on Earth when she walked over and said “Hi Uncle Bill, what brings you here?”

So there I sat, watching my buddy’s daughter give a lap dance to my new drinking partner. My therapist loves me just because of shit like this. On the plus side I couldn’t pay for a drink if I tried and, eventually (as in immediately), I quit trying.

Valerie Tarico, over at Salon.com says what I witnessed isn’t new or strange. In fact, the largest procurers of porn live in. so called, Red States.

Red-state conservatives may insist that the rest of us should keep aspirin between our knees and be forced to bear Divine Justice Babies if we don’t. They may refuse to provide cake or flowers for gay weddings, or even to attend. They may pretend that teens won’t do it if we just don’t tell them how. They may adopt the Church Lady posture if anyone mentions sex that doesn’t involve one man, one woman, the missionary position and a pulsing desire for more offspring.

But online search traffic from behind closed doors in Jesusland suggests that the bad, nasty, sexual impulses righteous believers are trying so hard to shut down may be their own. And if Google search patterns mean anything, they’re not succeeding too well: studies consistently demonstrate that people in conservative religious states search for adult materials online far more often than people in blue states.

Ever since Freud first started publishing his theories, psychologists have had a fascination with what he called “defense mechanisms“:

• Denial means simply refusing to acknowledge that some event or pattern is real.
• Repression involves pushing uncomfortable thoughts and feelings to the far recesses of the subconscious mind.
• Reaction formation is saying or doing the opposite of what you really want but won’t allow yourself to express.
• Projection means assuming that others share the impulses, feelings, and vices that you find unacceptable in yourself.

Freud had a lot of ideas that haven’t withstood the test of time or the scientific method, but defense mechanisms have stuck, in part because they are so useful for explaining some of humanities’ more bizarre behaviors. Like, perhaps, the conservative obsession with controlling everyone else’s sexual behavior.

For almost two centuries, what happened in the Bible Belt, sexually at least, stayed in the Bible Belt. Oh sure, there was the odd scandal involving a small-town preacher and the pretty young wife of a deacon or youth minister, or a big-name televangelist who, for example, asked male followers to get vasectomies and then examined their swollen willies. And there were the shocking-shocking-I-tell-you revelations of evangelical leaders feeling up young female interns or paying male call boys or even behaving like Catholic priests. But most people, for some reason, have had a hard time considering the possibility that conservative religion might actually augment sexual obsessions rather than icing them, that there might be a pattern of correlation between authoritarian religion, sexual repression, and sneaky sex.

The pattern of repression prompting deviant behavior isn’t new. Ancient Roman society was very authoritarian, to the point of forcing women to look pleasing for their husbands upon penalty of death. So when you read that the Apostle Peter advised women not to wear makeup and to dress modestly he wasn’t being a fuddy duddy. He was advocating a revolutionary idea, that women could control what happened to their bodies.

That still hasn’t caught on in some places.

Oh, and in case you missed that day in Bible study, the Romans killed Peter for that. But it was too late, the damage had been done.

Anyway, I’ve shared all of this to get us to the point of this article. Carrie Weisman, also at Salon.com, says that knowing what we know we shouldn’t be surprised by this, but we are.

The Middle East, home of ISIS & Al Qaeda, is the fastest growing porn market in the world.

The world is a big place, and cultural gaps are vast. But there are a few things that connect people across borders. Some people argue food is the best glue while others say it’s education. But there’s a new contestant: online porn.

Porn is being made and watched in the Middle East, and millions more are watching it around the planet. In fact, some of the world’s top porn consumers come out of the Middle East. According to data released by Google, six of the top eight porn-searching countries are Muslim states. Pakistan tops the list at number one, followed by Egypt at number two. Iran, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Turkey come in at numbers four, five, seven and eight, respectively. Pakistan leads the way in porn searches for animals like pigs, donkeys, dogs, cats and snakes.

According to research put out by PornMD, the terms “creamy squirt,” “blowjob” and even “Kendra Wilkinson” (Hugh Hefner’s former girlfriend) appear on the top 10 most-searched terms coming out of countries like Iraq, Syria and Iran. The word “Arab” is the number-one searched porn term in Egypt, Iran and Syria. Some get a little creepier. “Pain” lands at Iraq’s fourth most-searched term, while “father daughter” and “brother sister” come in at numbers four and five for Syria. Both the words “mother” and “mom” appear on Egypt’s top 10 list.

The specifics are representative of a broader change taking place in a society all but defined by extreme “moral” standards. The fact that porn trends within the region can even be tracked is impressive, given that the sale of erotic material is banned in nearly every Arab country except Lebanon and Turkey.

In 2009, Iraq’s government moved ahead with new censorship laws, prohibiting material deemed harmful to the public. Taher Naser al-Hmood, the country’s cultural minister, claimed, “Our Constitution respects freedom of thought and freedom of expression, but that should come with respect for society as a whole, and for moral behavior. It is not easy to balance security and democracy. It is like being a tightrope walker.”

Ahmed Mohammed Raouf, chief engineer for the State Company for Internet Services, told the New York Times, “I don’t want to stop a person from seeing a certain thing, but I also want to protect society.”

More recently, the Saudi Arabian government announced that it had hacked and disabled about 9,000 Twitter accounts associated with the publication of pornography and arrested many of the handles’ owners. The move was organized by the Commission for the Promotion and Prevention of Vice, also known as Haia, the Saudi religious police.

The good news for porn fans in the region is that a lot of these restrictions seem fairly easy to overcome. It’s not uncommon to find vendors lining the streets armed with pornographic videos. Nor is it rare to find young men hanging around popular shopping centers, selling cards to disable Internet blocks.

Meet the Stars

Mia Khalifa, a 21-year-old born in Lebanon, has just been voted the “Number 1 Porn Star” on Pornhub, a free website that is the 73rd most popular site on the Internet, according to analytics company Alexa. Khalifa moved to the United States at the age of 10 with her family. Corey Price, vice president of PornHub, told Buzzfeed that the site has seen more than 750,000 searches for Khalifa since Saturday.

Khalifa plays up her Middle Eastern heritage in her movies, sometimes wearing a hijab and sporting heavy eyeliner to emphasize her “exotic” look. The raw sexuality of Khalifa’s work literally strips away common western stereotypes of Muslim women. In his piece, “In Praise of Vulgarity” Charles Paul Freund argues, “Broad-based culture, popular and vulgar, is far from being a mere distraction or a source of self-absorption. As Islamists have learned, it can function as a bulwark against coercion. More than that, it can even be a means of democratic resort.”

But then there are those in the opposing court. NOW Lebanon’s Juliana Yazbeck wrote, “For someone who has struggled so much to assert their presence as a human being with a working, thinking brain, I cannot deny that I felt a pang of despair when Mia erupted across social media and entertainment news. It never even crossed my mind to think, ‘She doesn’t have the right.’ What did cross my mind was: Really? Of the very few Lebanese women who are making global headlines, it had to be a porn star?”

Yazbeck’s response was fairly mild compared to other more extreme protesters. Many conservative Muslims have targeted Khalifa via Twitter, writing things like, “@miakhalifa You do realize that you’ll be the first person in Hellfire right?” Another user posted a manipulated image of an Isis militant holding Khalifa’s decapitated head.

And she’s not alone. After Sila Sahin, a Turkish-German actress, posed nude for the German edition of Playboy, she received a slew of criticism. Threads on Islamic websites read, “She must pay” and “She needs to be careful.” One user wrote, “I would kill her. I really mean that. That doesn’t fit with my culture.”

Is this a sex problem? Or is it a porn problem? Or is it just another hiccup in the long, thorny path to gender equality? Women are given center-stage in a lot of pornography, after all. Maybe some in the Middle East aren’t interested in seeing that happen. Or maybe they feel that sex should be restricted to a more private and procreative space. Many Muslim states declare that cemented social morals should not be violated. The data out there, however, suggest their public may feel otherwise.

Mia has been using her new-found celebrity status to, as you might have guessed, help recruit football players for Florida State University.

You just can’t make stuff like that up.

Nevertheless, the overall point is that repression represses nothing. It’s like squeezing a tube of toothpaste very hard and then trying to get everything back in when you’re done.

XVIDEOS (NSFW, or school, or ….) has surrendered and set up a dedicated page for Middle Eastern amateur porn videos. Actually, they have dozens of pages of it. And they aren’t the only ones.

A quick Google search for “middle eastern porn” will keep you reading for hours, if not days.

One thing you’ll note right away, if you watch any of the videos, is that they come with male narration. Usually the camera guy trying to figure out if the model speaks English. Everything else is porn like you’re used to, but that little oddity drives home the point. They’re not used to this and are still trying to figure out what works best.

Judging by the couple of videos I viewed while researching this today, they’ll get there sooner rather than later.

So if seeing a hot young lady in a hijab do the nasty with some random guy makes your day, you can thank the nice terrorists for that.

One thing’s for certain. That toothpaste ain’t going anywhere.

"Salam & Love" from Julien Rotterman aka "el rott" on Vimeo.

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