In the Vatican’s latest effort to clarify the Pope’s recent remarks about condoms, Vatican has said that that condoms are also okay for women. According to Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi:

“I personally asked the pope if there was a serious, important problem in the choice of the masculine over the feminine,” Lombardi said. “He told me no. The problem is this … It’s the first step of taking responsibility, of taking into consideration the risk of the life of another with whom you have a relationship. This is if you’re a woman, a man, or a transsexual. We’re at the same point,” Lombardi said.

My guess? There’s going to be a lot more clarifying on this stance in the days to come, but if this pope finally does bring Catholic sexuality into the 21st century, it will be a thing to behold.

Just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse, Flying With Fish (via BoingBoing) reports that the TSA is going to start threatening to eject people from airports for refusing patdowns.

The new clarified policy for those who refuse pat downs by a TSA Transportation Security Officer (TSO), any pat down, is that the person who is refusing the pat down will be advised that they will be denied entry into the airport, and be escorted from the security screening area by TSA TSOs or police officers. If the person refuses the pat down again, they will be approached by a Supervisor TSO (STSO), who will again explain that a refusal of the pat down will result in the immediate removal from the security area by police officers. Following an escort out of the security area to the pre-security area the person will be informed that that they are being denied entry and that they may not attempt to reenter security.

TSA procedures are awesome for creating an illusion of safety, but I think Americans are starting to realize that the price of this illusion is becoming far too high.

In an interview with NPR last week, TSA Head John Pistole defended the new invasive pat downs, but was unable to answer Melissa Block’s question about what we’re doing to get ahead of NEW threats. It seems that everytime some terrorist does something crazy (shoe bombs, underwear bombs, etc.), we update our procedures to catch those people. But what will those crazy terrorists think of next? John Gruber points out one problem with this approach to airport security:

Here’s the question for Pistole, and anyone else who argues that these new TSA procedures are an appropriate response to that [underwear bomb] incident: What happens if the next guy hides his bomb up his ass?

Does this make sense to anyone? From the Washington Post:

Journalist Peter Seewald, who interviewed Benedict over the course of six days this summer, raised the Africa condom comments and asked Benedict if it wasn’t “madness” for the Vatican to forbid a high-risk population to use condoms.

“There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility,” Benedict said. But he stressed that it wasn’t the way to deal with the evil of HIV, and elsewhere in the book reaffirmed church teaching on contraception and abortion, saying: “How many children are killed who might one day have been geniuses, who could have given humanity something new, who could have given us a new Mozart or some new technical discovery?”

According to Politico, MSNBC has suspended morning host Joe Scarborough:

MSNBC said Friday that it is suspending “Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough for two days after he acknowledged giving eight previously unknown $500 contributions to friends and family members running for state and local offices during his tenure at the network, a violation of parent NBC’s ban on political contributions by employees without specific permission from the network president.

“I recognize that I have a responsibility to honor the guidelines and conditions of my employment, and I regret that I failed to do so in this matter,” Scarborough said in a statement. “I apologize to MSNBC and to anyone who has been negatively affected by my actions,” he said, adding that after he was made aware of some of the contributions, he called MSNBC President Phil Griffin “and agreed with Phil’s immediate demand of a two-day suspension without pay.”

First of all, shouldn’t MSNBC see that this apparently-haphazard application of their suspension policy is doing more harm to its image than good? [Side question: Does anyone think a two-day suspension is anything but the most shallow of attempts at appearing impartial?] But at least they’ve learned something from the Olbermann suspension: do it more carefully and you can avoid creating a media firestorm and pissing off your on-air personalities. I was a bit taken aback last week reading Howard Kurtz’s deconstruction of the Olbermann fiasco, as it’s apparently even more crazy over there than it already appears.

We’ll see how the media reacts to Suspending Your Host Redux, but I suspect there won’t be as big of a hullabaloo this time around.

From NPR comes the fascinating story of why humanity chose gold as one of its most valuable metals:

You want the thing you pick to be rare…At the same time, you don’t want to pick an element that’s too rare.  So  osmium — which apparently comes to earth via meteorites — gets the axe. That leaves us with just five elements: rhodium, palladium, silver, platinum and gold. And all of them, as it happens, are considered precious metals.

And to think, platinum, it could’ve been you if your melting point was just a wee bit lower…

Screenwriter John August, writing about Amazon.com’s new movie studio:

Several readers have written to ask my take on all this. I won’t conjecture about anything beyond what’s on the press release and website, but I’m left with some pretty big questions. I have a hunch other screen-bloggers will be tackling some of the glaring ones, like copyright, authorship and the 18-month free option. So I’ll just ask one: Do you really want random people rewriting your script?

…In software development, the open source movement has succeeded in bringing teams of strangers together. But writing code is a lot different than writing a screenplay. A bad line of code is obvious; it doesn’t do what it needs to do. A bad line of dialogue is a judgement call. A thumbs-up, thumbs-down voting system isn’t likely to fix this.