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Gun sales in America are soaring in the wake of President Barack Obama's re-election with weapons retailers reporting AK-47s flying off shelves "like hotcakes."
Owners of guns have been stocking up because they are concerned about a potential tightening of regulations on assault weapons in the president's second term.
In October the number of background checks on people applying to buy guns, an indicator of future sales, increased by 18.4 per cent.
There was a similar jump when
President Obama was first elected in 2008. A total of 12.7 million background checks were carried out that year, up from 11.2 million the year before, and the number has been rising since then.
Shares in weapons manufacturers like Smith & Wesson and Sturm, Ruger also surged after Mr Obama's re-election.
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Alexander Hamilton
, Warren Harding, F.D.R., Ike, L.B.J., Representatives Mark Souder, Chris Lee and Anthony Weiner , Senators Gary Hart, John Ensign and David Vitter. Maybe a first lady, Grace Coolidge. And now, David H. Petraeus .
There would seem to be nothing new about the weakness of otherwise powerful Washington figures in the face of temptation. But that is not precisely true: the difference these days is that it is virtually impossible to get away with it.
Mr. Petraeus, the military commander and director of the Central Intelligence Agency, resigned on Friday after admitting an affair with a woman later identified by Obama administration officials as his biographer.
Mr. Petraeus was tripped up by an F.B.I. investigation that stumbled across his extramarital relationship. But in a digital era when the details of even average citizens are cached for public view, the odds of exposure have become exponentially greater.
That prominent figures throw caution to the winds may be no accident, some say. A 2001 study in the Journal of Family Psychology concluded that the incidence of extramarital affairs rises with income and education.
Once, sex scandals did not become scandals until their participants died. The affairs of Nelson Rockefeller, the former New York governor, became public only after he died while having sex with a girlfriend. The Washington press corps is famous, or infamous, for declining to report on the serial extramarital couplings of President
John F. Kennedy .
Kennedy had plenty of White House company: Mr. Hagood, the author, said his research indicates that about one third of American presidents have had extramarital affairs.
Harding made illicit love in an Oval Office coat closet. As a senator from Texas, Lyndon Johnson commandeered a room in the Capitol for his meetings with women, said the presidential historian Robert Dallek. As president, he said, Mr. Johnson installed a buzzer to alert him when his wife, Lady Bird, threatened to interrupt one of his conquests.
Mrs. Coolidge was widely rumored to have running liaisons with Secret Service agents.
President
Bill Clinton , of course, goes without saying.
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Could sex with robots help extend human life spans? Some futurists seem to think so.
A Nov. 7 article on the futurist website
Transhumanity argues that robot lovers could help extend life spans by giving users mind-blowing "longevity orgasms" far superior in quality to those from human "meat-bag" partners.
The link between orgasms and health is not unexplored. Some have argued that
orgasms have significant health benefits and "The Longevity Project," a book about an eight-decade study of long-life factors, observed that women with higher frequency of orgasm during sex lived longer.
But assuming robots can do it better than humans, is there necessarily a correlation between the quality of orgasm and longevity?
If the latter is the case, then a sex robot's superior skills in the sack might be less of a game changer than the fact that a sexbot will never be too tired or unwilling to get it on.
A scenario envisioned by
Victoria University researchers plots the rise of robot prostitutes by 2050.
