Patheos Hosting Ads For Contraceptives

When I was over at Mark Shea's Patheos page updating that last link, I noticed that there was a link in the "Around the Web" section entitled Female Condoms: Will women wear them? near the bottom. It was right next to an ad for Mark Shea's book This is My Body about the Eucharist. I noticed that you can also get to it from the Elizabeth Scalia's blog posts, as in this example where she talks about going to meet the "inventors" of Patheos. I don't want to provide the link to the offending ad, but you can go to their pages and verify this and click on it their. Basically it goes to a site called "LifeScript" with a big infomercial disguised as a news article on so-called "female condoms". The page is also covered with ads for Essure, another contraceptive described as "permanent and non-surgical". Here's some text from the infomercial:

Prophylactics aren’t expected to be particularly pretty, but no one wants to have sex looking like they’re wearing their grandmother’s rain slicker. That may be why the female condom, available since the late 1990s, has never caught on in the U.S. The fact that it is visible may be a turn-off for some. But women may want to reconsider: after all, the rain-gear look trumps facing unwanted pregnancies or STDs...

The female condom — marketed as the FC — may not be alluring, but it puts protection directly into the hands of women. Produced by the Female Health Company, the FC is one of four barrier birth control methods, the other three being the cervical cap, the diaphragm and the sponge. Of these, only the FC can prevent both sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and pregnancy when properly used.

The page also contains links with text such as The Morning After Pill, Top 5 Birth Control Methods, etc. You get the idea. Here's what it looks like on Mark Shea's blog.

Here's what it looks like on the Anchoress's blog.

What do I make of all this? Well, one thing I did right away was to remove the Google AdSense ads from my blog. I realized that anything can be advertised there, and if I write the word "contraception" in a post, chances are pretty good that Adsense will throw in an ad for the morning after pill, rubbers, etc. I cut the one on the side and the one at the bottom. I'm working on the one at the top, but I forget how to access that one. I think I need to go into the template code, fun stuff — dusting off the HTML book....

I know that Mark and Ms. Scalia do not want to promote using contraceptives. And they never had to worry about accidentally doing so on their old blogs where they were their own masters. But this is what happens when you abandon you own little garden and start "working for the man" to make more money. You end up sacrificing control for a steady paycheck from the factory farm managers.

If Patheos ever extends an offer to me to blog there, I'll have to decline the offer based on this. Not that they'll ever ask me now.

There — got that pesky top ad out of there. Ad-free now. Maybe I'll advertise coffee made by monks now. Or something.

Does anyone here speak Austrian?

Bear with the stuttering stuff at the beginning. It's sort of funny, but wait until you get to some of the real goof-ups.



Here's the source; this page has even more detail and footage of more of Boy Wonder's blunders.

Some of these are priceless. The Irish one turns out to not have been a gaffe really, but a joke (ha, ha). My favorite is around 3:50 where he reprimands the teleprompter crew.

More laughs from OWS

Here's a treat for your Easter Basket. Excerpt from beginning:

As the nascent Occupy movement attempts to revive interest in its radical left-wing agenda, it is burdened with a host of organizational and financial problems left over from some of the bitter infighting that took place during the winter.

Last night, the two main organizational bodies of Occupy Wall Street were dissolved, and a new group running OWS’s finances is admitting to a lack of transparency, financial discrepancies and poor financial decisions by the previous custodians of hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations.

There are a lot of laugh lines in here like "Who’s accountable if this is a ‘leaderless’ movement?" But the main takeaway for me is that no one among the general populace really cares that much for their ideas, let alone their methods. Sure, they may get propped up by Soros or Obama if they are needed for the election, and for that reason I don't think OWS is dead as a political force. Who knows, maybe the ranks will be combed for drones to staff the next incarnation of ACORN.

However, the Occupy movement is not vibrantly alive as a grassroots organization like one of the Tea Party groups. I believe that one reason is that the Tea Party groups aren't tied to bizarre manifestos touting obscure ideals like horizontalism, General Assemblies or Facilitation Working Groups. My theory is that most of the people who really believe these kinds of structures can work on a large scale are dyed-in-the-wool academics who have seen it work in some pointless non-profit agency or a group home they worked in while working on their degrees. In other words, only on a small scale in a controlled environment. These theoretical models haven't been tested for real until now, and they are failing.



This is a bit rambling, but I'll offer a line to sum this development up as follows: "Seeking to be peaceful anarchists, they became contentious bureaucrats." Maybe someone can improve on this summation. Or just enjoy a laugh at their expense.