In other news, water is wet.

Hmmm....catering to vice hurts society:  Gambling Casinos hurt local economy.

Who knew?

Things that make you go "WTF?"

File this under "sin makes you stupid."

Former Olympian/motivational speaker/business-woman/prostitute...and, yet, her husband wasn't "supportive" of that part about being a prostitute.

Favor Hamilton described the escort business as “exciting,” an illicit midlife diversion from her routine existence, one in which she operates a successful Madison, Wisconsin real estate brokerage with her husband, delivers motivational speeches, and does promotional work for various businesses and groups, including Disney’s running series and Wisconsin’s Potato & Vegetable Growers Association.

She said that only her husband Mark, 44, was aware of her escort work, but that, “He tried, he tried to get me to stop. He wasn’t supportive of this at all.” The couple lives in a $600,000 Madison home and appears to be in no financial distress based on a review of court and municipal records.
 

Supportive?  I'm not one to judge, but what about divorce her skanky ass?

Apparently, the decision to become a $600 an hour whore was about post-partum depression and some kind of psychological issues. She says that she isn't going to play the victim card, but then immediately does by portraying herself as a victim of post-partum depression.

And there's more:

Favor Hamilton answered that as a world-class athlete she was conditioned to believe she was invincible, and that doubts and concerns were counterproductive thoughts. During a subsequent conversation she brought up Tiger Woods’s tumultuous fall, saying that, “I mean, he’s the biggest athlete ever. He obviously thought he could never get caught.”

Favor Hamilton also blamed herself for being “too trusting.” She expected other participants in the insular escort business--where men seeking sex are called “hobbyists” and women selling it are “providers”--to honor a code of silence. Though she seemed entirely sincere, it was nonetheless a credulous notion that client and escort were morally bound by some implicit pledge of omerta.

Why would her secret be safe with guys about whom she knew nothing (except that many were paying for sex while their spouse was back home)
 

Right.  Because if there is one thing that reason and common sense tells us, it is that gentlemen who are willing to  lie and cheat to their wives make the most trustworthy of confidants.

The unsettling thought is how calm and rational this story is pitched. It's offered as a bad choice and a life lesson, rather than as a complete moral and intellectual failure.  Obviously, Favor Hamilton has to recover, but certainly some period of self-exile and shame and penitence is in order, if only as part of the learning process.

Commenter on my review of a book that attacks "wine headed wops" and "communist pollacks," and ridicules a woman who had just seen the back of her husband's head blown away...

...digs a deeper hole for himself.

File under "Anti-Catholics are nuts."

My Amazon review of "Why I am not a Catholic."

S. Wilder writes:

No, I'm not taking the position that the Catholic church was started by "negroes" If you took the time to study the history with an open mind without prejudice, you would see that the Latin church DID originate in Africa (Alexandria, Egypt). The Two Babylons documents this. There's no bigotry, there are facts presented that can be researched. You can have your opinion and say. A book for "bigots" well then you haven't read the Bible very much have you? It's full of "bigoted" statements from Jesus Christ and the apostle Paul. But if you're ecumenical minded, then the Bible would indeed be "bigoted" as well as "racist" You sir are the "bigot" for PREJUDGING (prejudice) people as being that way just because there are words and statements in the book that apparently offend you and because you don't like the author without knowing the person or people you're judging. Kick up dust all you want about the contents of the book, but the FACTS remain.

I respond:

The purpose of a review is to let a potential reader know what to expect from the book before they invest their time or money in it. My review did exactly that. You don’t dispute that my quotes were accurate. Rather, what you contend is that I cherry-picked the quotes in order to …what? Give the reader the impression that the book is written by a bigot? I don’t need to do that; Dr. Ruckman has managed to accomplish that feat by himself, as witnessed by the fact that Amazon won’t allow me to use the ethnic slurs he used in his book.

You come to this review in order to castigate my review, but you have made no effort to show where I am wrong about my description of Dr. Ruckman’s unchristian bigotry against Italians, Poles, Catholics and women who have just seen the back of their husband’s head blown off. Not only do you defend a this book, but you see nothing wrong in attempting to attack to Catholic Church on the grounds that it was started by “Black Africans.” That’s the text you chose to quote – “Black Africans” – and you apparently saw nothing at all wrong with using that term.

An impartial reader would ask, why is it important to S. Wilder and Dr. Ruckman that the Catholic Church was purportedly founded by “Black Africans”?

One would be more inclined to ask that question after one realized that it is wrong as a matter of fact. Not all Africans are “Black Africans.” Africans from North African are of various lineages, including Semitic, Phoenician, Roman, Greek etc., which do not qualify as “Black Africans.” Augustine and Tertullian, for example, were of Roman lineage, albeit Augustine may have had a Berber mother.

And yet S. Wilder and Dr. Ruckman think that this false information – a trope common to bigots and racists - is important?

And what does it matter? Is Augustine less of an authority because he was allegedly a “Black African.” Why the injection of irrelevant racial information if the person who brings up the irrelevant information is not a racist?

I note that in this iteration you do not even attempt to defend Dr. Ruckman’s comments about “wine-headed w*ps” and “communist p*ll*cks” or his shameless ridicule about Jackie Kennedy. May I take it, therefore, that on some level you concede that Dr. Ruckman’s book does traffic in bigotry?

As for your factual claims, they are complete nonsense from start to finish. The Church of Rome originated in, by golly, Rome. We know this from the letter of St. Paul to the Romans, the letter of St. Clement of Rome to the Corinthians and the letter of St. Ignatius to the Romans. There certainly were other churches in the Latin-speaking West, and in the Greek-speaking East, such as Antioch and Alexandria, that acknowledged the primacy of Rome, but that is not surprising, and it is contained in every reliable book of history not written by an obsessive-compulsive, fabricating, pseudo-scholar, which includes Hislop’s The Two Babylons, which is a favorite of people with an unchristian, obsessive compulsive need to reinforce their narrow, bigotry.

The simple truth is that I fairly advised readers of what to expect from Dr. Ruckman’s book, so that they didn’t, like me, expect to read a serious work of criticism, but instead found themselves dumped into a world of “wine-headed w*ps”, “p*ll*cks”, unchristian comments about suffering human beings, and factual misinformation that is cut to suit the bigotry of people who think that kind of thing is hunky-dory.

If you like those kinds of thing, then, of course, go ahead and buy the book.

On the other hand, if you are a fan of human decency, "occupy" the comment section and offer your two cents worth.

Everyone is seeking some kind of god...

...even sinners when they sin.

Is there anything, after all, that does not bear a likeness to God after its own kind and fashion, seeing that God made all things very good for no other reason than that he himself is supremely good? Insofar then as anything that is is good, to that extent it bears some likeness, even though a very remote one, to the highest good, and if this is a natural likeness it is of course a right and well-ordered likeness; if it is faulty, then of course it is a sordid and perverted one. Even in their very sins, you see, souls are pursuing nothing but a kind of likeness to God with a proud and topsy-turvy and, if I may so put it, a slavish freedom. Thus our first parents could not have been persuaded to sin unless they had been told, You will be like gods (Gn 3:5).

Saint Augustine of Hippo; John E. Rotelle; Edmund Hill (2011-01-23). The Trinity (The Works of Saint Augustine) (p. 312). New City Press. Kindle Edition.

From the "Sin makes you stupid" file.

Who are these people? 

And why do they think they have a magic charm against the reasonably foreseeable result from this kind of reckless behavior?

Weiner acknowledges that he sent lewd pictures of himself to strangers.

He didn’t have any explanation for his online habits.


“I don't know what I was thinking,” Weiner said, explaining that he thought his sexting and racy communications were “frivolous.” He also said that he has never met any of the women he communicated with in person. He declined to say if he engaged in phone sex with them, as the latest allegations claim.

“It was something that I did that was just wrong, and I regret it,” Weiner said, adding that he panicked when the first tweets went public, and lied to hide his other X-rated activities.

“I was embarrassed, I was humiliated,” he said. “I was trying to protect myself and my wife.”

He insisted he did not use government equipment, using his own phone and his home computer, to communicate with the women.

People who know Weiner were stunned, having argued as recently as last week that he was too smart to have done what he was accused of.

Two points:

First, the issue isn't whether a politician misused government equipment.  The issue is why out of the thousands of people available for the job anyone with such a clear lack of common sense is indispensible.

Second, the "too smart" defense is so obviously a "non-starter" in this day and age when it comes to politicians and other public figures.
Concerning the first point, Weiner refuses to resign, which shows the sense of entitlement that our political class has developed.
 
Also, I was willing to believe Weiner's denial in light of the support given to his denial by the recipient, but she seems to have just plain lied:
 

The scandal first emerged after Weiner sent the now infamous 'bulge' picture to Seattle student Gennette Cordova.


When the story broke on May 27, Weiner at first said his Twitter account had been hacked and denied the picture was of his crotch.

But today, a chastised Weiner claimed the 'bulge' picture was of his crotch and that he had sent it as a joke to Miss Cordova.

And, then, there is this:

'They were all adults, at least to the best of my knowledge'

Well, that's reassuring....because it would be absolutely creepy if he actually knew the people he was sending the pictures to.  Of course, there are a lot of men in jail who used the same defense.

And, speaking of creepy, there's this story by one of the six women Weiner "sexted":

I have nothing against Rep. Weiner. I think he was intrigued by me because I am different than the people he normally meets. I don’t know why he opened up to me in certain ways, but that’s the best explanation I have.


He was trying to get me to talk about myself sexually, and I said, straight up, I’m not an open book. I was real blunt. He would ask me weird things, like “Did you miss me?” I didn’t understand that–how could I miss someone I hadn’t met and didn’t know? What is there to miss about me if you don’t even know me?

He said that he was an open book, maybe way too open. And after that he said to me that I was “too fucking real,” not like other people who were all over him. He realized that I wasn’t taking the bait, and I think that intrigued him enough to send messages to me and open up to me and try to be real, too.

At first I was skeptical that I was really talking to Rep. Weiner, so I asked him to take a picture of himself, which he did. Then I asked him to pick up the phone and call me. I had to hang up because of something that was happening on my end, but then I called back and heard a voice saying, “Congressman Anthony Weiner’s office,” so I hung up. He asked me if I was satisfied, and I guess I was–I didn’t pursue that any more.

Talking to him was sometimes a turn-off because he was so open and just so full of himself, as if he were looking, searching for something. I don’t know if he loved telling me his personal business. I didn’t want him to say more, didn’t want to hear stories about sex with famous people. But I guess he needed to express himself.

Why would this apparently smart person have put himself in such a compromising position?

Sin makes you stupid.

Motion in Limine #1: The fact that she was having an affair is entirely irrelevant to her claim that Defendant ruined her marriage. 

Women sues cell phone company for accidental disclosure of her adultery to husband.

A Toronto woman is suing cellphone provider Rogers Wireless for a breach of privacy that led to the end of her marriage.


Gabriella Nagy is asking for $600,000 in damages for invasion of privacy, breach of confidence, breach of contract and negligence.

Nagy's problems began in 2007 when her husband signed a contract with Rogers to provide home phone and internet service at the couple's home.

The woman, whose last name is different from her husband's, had a Rogers cellphone under her own name that was not supposed to be included in the services her husband had ordered.

But unbeknownst to Nagy, Rogers included her personal cellphone statement with the family's invoice, which was mailed to her husband.

Nagy was having an extramarital affair at the time and the bill revealed frequent long calls to her lover.

According to a statement of claim filed in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, "The husband used the previously private and confidential information that the defendant (Rogers) unilaterally disclosed to the husband to inquire about the people that the plaintiff (Nagy) was telephoning and the nature of such calls."

The husband left Nagy and their two children, aged 6 and 7, a month after making the discovery.

After the breakup, Nagy was emotionally distraught and eventually lost her job and her ability to work.

She also broke off the affair shortly after her husband left.

According to the statement of claim, Nagy continues to suffer emotional and psychological distress, has been prescribed antidepressants and is under the care of a psychologist and psychiatrist.

The statements made in the court document have not been proven.

Rogers says it cannot be held responsible for the condition of the marriage, the affair or the subsequent breakup.

Defense motion for summary judgment, Issue #1 - The Plaintiff has no damages because she is estopped from denying that her marriage had no value to her when she chose to commit adultery.
 
There are going to be some good times in that lawsuit.
 
Via Mark Shea.

Californians, you have been hosed again.

Remember when a majority of California voters decided to fund one form of research - the one that chopped up baby humans - to the tune of $6 billion?  Remember when I said that going long on a technology that venture capitalists would not underwrite was stupid, stupid, stupid?  Remember how I said that it would suck the oxygen, i.e., funding , out of the room for other technologies?

Well, I was right.

Calif. Quietly Shifts Fruitless Embryo Research Funds to Adult Stem Cells:Investors knock waste on useless research

California's Institute for Regenerative Medicine came into being five years ago, fueled by a conviction that the Bush administration's restriction on embryo-destructive research in the National Institutes of Health was stifling the progress of science.


But after years of fruitless work, the Institute has now quietly diverted funds from embryonic stem cell research (ESCr) to adult stem cell research - which has already produced dozens of treatments and all-out cures for maladies ranging from spinal cord injury, to Alzheimer's, to type I diabetes.

The California government - which is again teetering on the brink of bankruptcy - in 2004 passed the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative, or Proposition 71. The initiative pumped $3 billion into research seeking some medical use for stem cells harvested from human embryos, which are killed in the process.

But an editorial in the Los Angeles-based Investor's Business Daily magazine January 12 pointed out the abysmal failure of the state's massive investment in research that has procured no effective treatments to date.

"Five years after a budget-busting $3 billion was allocated to embryonic stem cell research, there have been no cures, no therapies and little progress," notes the IBD editors.

"ESCR has failed to deliver and backers of Prop 71 are admitting failure."

The editors also called out the Institute for dissembling on the real source of progress among stem cell research. "Over the years ... when funding was needed, the phrase 'embryonic stem cells' was used. When actual progress was discussed, the word 'embryonic' was dropped because ESCR never got out of the lab," they write.

"This is a classic bait-and-switch, an attempt to snatch success from the jaws of failure and take credit for discoveries and advances achieved by research Prop. 71 supporters once cavalierly dismissed."

Although scientists and pro-life advocates have denounced the dead-end science of embryo research for years, the political and ethical furor surrounding embryonic research appears to have obscured the undeniable superiority of adult stem cells' track record. Not only have adult cells already produced dozens of treatments, but embryonic stem cells have been found prone to multiply out of control, causing tumors, and are less easily cultivated into specific types of tissue than their adult counterparts.

Meanwhile, due to advances in induced pluripotent stem cells, adult cells are now capable of transforming into various types of cells – an ability once thought to be held only by embryonic cells.

Dr. Bernadine Healy, the director of the National Institutes of Health under the Bush administration, wrote in a March 2009 U.S. News & World Report column that "embryonic stem cells, once thought to hold the cure for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and diabetes, are obsolete." The same month, however, President Obama reversed the Bush administration ban on taxpayer funding of embryo research, saying that "our government has forced what I believe is a false choice between sound science and moral values."

The IBD editors concluded that "it is ESCR researchers who have politicized science and stood in the way of real progress

I'll bet that wasted $6 Billion could come in useful right about now.

File under "Sin makes you stupid."

http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/jan/10012908.html

Ignorance and Bigotry

When I was a youth, it was commonplace to link bigotry with ignorance. We were taught that racial bigotry came from ignorance of other people. That linkage probably did more to isolate and undermine the culture of explicit racial bigotry than any law or court opinion.

This NCR interview with P.Z. Myers shows the same linkage between Myers' bigotry and his own palpable ignorance.

Some excerpts:

That Myers has the equivalent of a junior high school education in religion is glaring. He understands little about the history and function of the Catholic Church and even less about the place of the Eucharist in the lives of Catholics. When I told him that many have laid their lives on the line to protect the Blessed Sacrament, he recoiled in disbelief, saying, “Really? People really do that!?”

Although Myers goes on and on about the "death threats" he received - by which he refers to an e-mail where the sender expresses his anger in the hyperbolic form of "if you were here, I'd kick your ass" - the overwhelming majority of e-mails he received were as he described later in the interview, statements by people trying to explain why his actions caused individual harm to them as individuals. Myers response on his blog was to sneer at these e-mails and absolutely refuse to credit the underlying sentiments as having any truth whatsoever.

As his interview makes clear, Myers is totally ignorant and, worse, his pride allows him to project his ignorant opinions as the norm for other people.

That would be the picture next to the definition of "bigotry."

There is also this:

I decided to call his bluff. “Has Christianity contributed anything to humanity?” I asked him.

“Well,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone, “there is this general property of religion — it’s great at building community. Religion has been a good thing for many individuals; it has brought them together and given them comfort. But over all, religion … holds back humanity.”

What, I asked, about the Church’s role in founding the first Western hospitals, universities, banks and even many breakthroughs in science? He interrupted me, irate and incredulous:

“No, people made those contributions to Western Civilization.”

That the Church was involved in the very foundations of our Western culture is, according to Myers, irrelevant.

“That’s like saying,” he continued, “that because for so many years people got smallpox, smallpox is to be credited for all the virtue men have done.”

As I talked with Myers I was struck by an irony: For a scientist whose job it is to observe cause and effect, he has a poor understanding of the cause, Catholicism, and its effects on world culture. He does not see Christianity as an elevating force in the world, but rather as a strange superstition — akin to banging a pot to scare away the moon.

I like the point about Myers' refusal to see cause and effect.

But, of course, Myers does see cause and effect when he wants to. Hence, when something bad happens it is not "people" who do the bad thing, but Christianity.

Double standards are a classic symptom of bigotry.

Thre is also this:

I asked Myers, “You have, throughout your blog, described Catholics as stupid, stupider, scary, dark age fanatics” and words that we can’t print. This language doesn’t strike you as bigoted?”

“Why should it?” he replied. “I am making honest characterizations of individual people.”

“But in desecrating the Eucharist,” I continued, “you have insulted and hurt thousands of Catholics. What do you have to say for that?”

Myers’ answer was true to form: “The whole silly part of this whole episode is that I’ve got so many people writing me and saying that I have seriously hurt them. But what have I done? I have thrown away a cracker.”

Amazing.

NY Governor publicly confesses "error" in a "personal matter."

Here is the video.

The "personal matter" is paying $50,000 per weekend to a prostitution "ring."

Politics is pretty lucrative.

Update:

Here is the NRO post with the $50,000 "buy-out" language:

The johns paid as much as $50,000 for a weekend with a prostitute and had the option of purchasing a "buy out" of their favorite girls, which allowed them to book trysts directly with the hookers, Manhattan federal prosecutors said.

The Emperors Club, an upscale escort service, ranked its hookers on a seven-diamond scale on its Web site and then charged its wealthy clientele accordingly for "dates," court papers said.

But I don't see that language in the linked article.

The article does report that:

Spitzer is believed to have been a long-standing client of the Emperors Club VIP, an upscale escort service that supplied well-heeled johns expensive "fashion models, pageant winners and exquisite students" for up to $5,500 an hour. The women were ranked on a three to seven diamond scale for based on brains, beauty and education.

Nonetheless, that does seem like an awful lot of money for a "man of the people" to be throwing away on a "per hour" basis.

Hey, maybe there are "Two Americas."

Like a man in the desert lamenting the absence of Evian water.

Every now and again you see a post that jars the perspective back into the proper focus, like this Catherine Harmon post on "Hey Britney, it was never about your singing!" on the misinterpretation of the reaction against "America's favorite skank":

That being said, I must admit to finding the media backlash against Britney the last few days fascinating. It says so much about what our culture values. Our complaint isn’t that the 25-year-old former pop princess cavorted around onstage in a black bikini and knee-high boots, it’s that she did it with less-than-rock-solid abs. We aren’t in an uproar because the mother of two young boys pranced through a sexually explicit dance routine to a vulgar song entitled “Gimme More” on national television; the really atrocious thing is that she couldn’t make it through the dance moves with the precision and skill of her jail-bait teenage years and that she frequently slipped up in her lip-syncing. Brit isn’t being derided all over the Web for looking and acting like a prostitute or stripper; she’s the object of sarcasm and pity because she looks like a woman who has had two babies in the last two years and who maybe isn’t doing 1,000 crunches a day anymore.

OK, that just about does it for one of my rare forays into popular culture.