Empirical results to tatoo on my nutsack

Now a new paper, published by the journal Contraception, culls evidence from several studies to argue that withdrawal is actually nearly as effective as condoms in preventing pregnancy. The paper reports that couples who practice withdrawal perfectly over the course of a year -- meaning the male partner always pulls out before ejaculation -- have only a 4 percent pregnancy rate. More "typical" couples using withdrawal (those who sometimes mess up) have a pregnancy rate of 18 percent. |Dana Goldstein|

What, you were watching basketball?

It is not known whether Angel Sandoval will be granted entry into the Hall of Fame

“Things have changed,” Angel Posadas Sandoval, 74, finally confessed, not going into specifics but nonetheless making himself abundantly clear.

He was talking, however obliquely, about the free Viagra the government is giving away to poor men age 60 and above.

With midterm elections looming in July, Mayor Marcelo Ebrard has been rather creative in his attempts to make life more livable for the people of this sprawling metropolis, which finds itself clogged with traffic, overwhelmed by smog, prowled by criminals and reeling from the global financial crisis. |NY Times|

The only letterboxed cheeto porn you'll ever see.

I'd recommend watching this all the way through, but I skipped around.


(Double hat tip)

Now this is what I call a sex scandal

The News of the World reported in a front page story that FIA president Mosley, 67, had taken part in a "sadomasochistic orgy" with five prostitutes that reportedly involved Nazi role-playing.

According to a story posted by the London-based Times Online on Monday, Mosley and others "re-enacted a concentration camp scene in which he played the role of both guard and inmate." |source|

FIA="International Automobile Federation", except frenchified.

Three questions

Obviously, Spitzer should resign and will resign. And even if he sticks around, nobody's political career could possibly survive this picture, so he won't win another term.

All and still, I want to know more about this investigation. According to the NY Times, here's how it all started:

There, in the Hauppauge offices of the Internal Revenue Service, investigators conducting a routine examination of suspicious financial transactions reported to them by banks found several unusual movements of cash involving the governor of New York, several officials said.

The investigators working out of the three-story office building, which faces Veterans Highway, typically review such reports, the officials said. But this was not typical: transactions by a governor who appeared to be trying to conceal the source, destination or purpose of the movement of thousands of dollars in cash, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Ok, first question. How typical is this sort of surveillance? If this is something that all Americans are subject to then I'm not too happy with that. If, alternately, this sort of surveillance is focused only on a limited pool of targets, then I'd like to know how those targets are selected. In either case, the pattern seems to involve surveillance prior to suspicion and then escalation of investigation prior to the identification of any illegal act.

Back to the NY Times for a description of the next stage of the investigation:

But before long, the investigators learned that the money was being moved to pay for sex and that the transactions were being manipulated to conceal Mr. Spitzer’s connection to payments for meetings with prostitutes, the official said.

Then, with the assistance of a confidential informant, a young woman who had worked previously as a prostitute for the Emperor’s Club V.I.P., the escort service that Mr. Spitzer was believed to be using, the investigators were able to get a judge to approve wiretaps on the cellphones of some of those suspected of involvement in the escort service.

Second question. Why did the investigation continue once it was discovered that the suspicious transactions were concealing cash transfers to an escort service? What I'm getting at is that escort services routinely advertise publicly and post prices. See, for example, the website of the very escort service used by Spitzer. Maybe law enforcement agencies should routinely investigate such services, but the fact is that they don't. Instead, the arrangement seems to be that society will look the other way so long as the escort services don't explicitly say that the service being offered is sex. Moreover, the target of this investigation is clearly Spitzer, but even assuming that the allegations are true the most serious charges he is likely to face are misdemeanors. Recruiting confidential informants and installing wiretaps goes well beyond the norm for investigation of such crimes.

Leaving all that aside, here's one last question. Would you expect a corrupt politician to pay for his own call girls?

Speaking of environmentalists...

This is well covered in other blogs, but sits astride our recent topics like a necrophiliac pornographer.

In a 1998 book decrying American culture, Huckabee was no seeker of common ground. He drew stark lines, equating environmentalists with pornographers and homosexuality with pedophilia and necrophilia. He also declared that people who do not believe in God tend to be immoral and to engage in "destructive behavior." He drew a rather harsh picture of an American society starkly split between people of faith and those of a secular bent, with the latter being a direct and immediate threat to the nation.

(Un)like father, (un)like son

I can't recall which class I read it for, but I believe Money by Martin Amis was the only book in it that I actually finished. Recommended. This is my first post in a good long while, and I'm just testing, bloggy blog testing...and tipping you off to a good article in the New York Times Magazine about Kingsley and Martin, the Amis authors. I wonder what it's like to be so close to one's father that one can recount information like the following with authority:

That Kingsley was an enthusiastic drinker and philanderer (someone who “lived for adultery,” his son says) was well known to most of his British readers, who watched with amusement or dismay as he turned himself over the years from a handsome young socialist into a monstrous caricature of an old buffer: fat, reactionary, alcoholic, rude and intolerant. He grew so devoted to the queen (who knighted him in 1990) that he had erotic dreams about her. They usually began, Martin says, with Sir Kingsley attempting to paw the royal chest and Her Majesty protesting: “No, no, Kingsley. We mustn’t.”

They play nintendo

According to a survey conducted by Gametart, a game rental service in the UK, chicks who game get more lovin' than those who don't. Out of a sample of 200 ladies (or should that be "laid-ees"?), the ones who gamed got, erm, fragged 1.1 more times a week than those who didn't. |WIRED|

(Even though I got the link via Feministing I'm pretty sure that I'm a bad person for posting it)