This gun is pointed right at your heart.
That is my least vulnerable spot!#

Chip Gibbons writes about some letters from women after their abortions.#

I encourage you to read both letters in full to understand the complete context.

While they regret their abortions, those who value sanity should not. When I read their letters all I can think is how lucky we are that these women did not have their babies. They are far too immature, delusional and self-pitying to be good mothers.

They want love and approval from their boyfriends and husbands, and when that fails them, they seek love, forgiveness and approval from God. The motto of such women seems to be: When you can't get a real man to love you, make one up! Make him a bigger man who will take care of your every need, one who will love you unconditionally, one who's always there when you need him, one who can forgive all your failings.

They don't seem to ask themselves how they got pregnant in the first place and how unwanted pregnancies can be prevented in the future. There are alternatives like abstinence, birth control, sexual activity without intercourse and homosexuality.

Alex Singleton writes about globalization:#

One of the wishes of the anti-globalization lobby is that we should be more content with what we have. Part of this is based on the discredited view that economic growth leads to a net harm to the environment. Instead, economic growth enables societies to spend more on the environment. The richer Britain gets, the better the environment gets. That is why London's air today is the cleanest since records began in 1585.

Russell Roberts comments on a Bloomberg News story on the anti World Bank and IMF protest in DC on Saturday.#

He notes that the added the company Bechtel to their list and explains what this is irrational:

The complaint is that Bechtel aids privatization which means higher prices for water. But privatization of water can allow the poor and others to have access to clean water that was unavailable when water was given away.

The only systematic study (by Galiani, Gertler and Schargrodsky) I have seen of this issue looked at Argentina where privatization of water led to a drop in child mortality of 5-7 percent, with the with reductions of 24% in the poorest areas.

Alex Singleton quotes from what sounds like a great book, The Dictionary of Dangerous Words.#

Social

An adjective which automatically reverses the meaning of any noun to which it is attached. Thus a 'social market economy' is not a market economy, a 'social worker' is not a worker, 'social democracy' is not democracy, 'social theory' is not theory, 'social democracts' are not democrats and 'social justice' is not justice - indeed its pursuit involves and leads to injustice.

AKMA writes about frozen grocery carts that are for your "convenience."#

Now at no point in the pondering, planning, implementation, or publicizing processes did anybody think that Jewel was doing this "for my convenience." No one had complained to them, "It's so inconvenient that, when I parked on the street instead of the lot, my grocery cart can roll right up to the car!" No one even vaguely imagined that we would find this arrangement more convenient. The closest one could say would be that this device helps Osco keep their prices down, but anyone who's pushed an oversensitive cart too close to (but not "over") the faded yellow warning line, only to find herself with an immobile mountain of groceries, will have known that "convenience" was not what Jewel was after.

Jewel lies to its customers with impunity, and everyone knows they're lying, and I'm not aware of any groundswell of outrage at this transparent deception.

Julie Leung writes about writing out check lists for mates and sums it up as using "Excel" or "Word" for love.#

You should go read her whole post. While I was reading the only thing I was thinking is about making a template of vector that describes different attributes of a person, then making a vector of your ideal choice, and then using some matrix math and maybe rank-reducing to get rid of errors and popping out which person was most like the person you'd like to be with.

One could use this system when trying to decide whether to stay with a current girlfriend or get a new one, obviously a problem is that many of the attributes can only be learned by experience. Thus, unless you are willing to date multiple women at the same time (presumably without their knowledge of this activity) then such a tool would not be very useful for making comparisons between women.

This leads me to think that the only tools available would actually not be very useful because they only allow one to compare person A with past women (for which data is already collected) and an ideal (which is expected to be unattainable.)

The only logical conclusion is the most rational thing is to date many women and constantly eliminate them and find new ones until some threshold of desired "fitness" has been reached, at which point you'd want to slowly back out of finding new mates to focus on one--but still constantly re-evaluate the potential.

I imagine that this what our mind is already doing anyways, so any attempt to recreate it would be sub-par and we should trust our instincts.

This might be satire.

Stick at Kuro5hin.org writes about the Kleptocracy of Rusty.#

Rusty seems to have disappeared again leaving the website to stagnate. This time he has disabled new users from registration meaning that the userbase will slowly shrink while he procrastinates and refuses to delegate tasks to others.

Broken promises

Rusty has made a number of promises over the years that he has not kept. While normally I would say he is under no obligation to keep these promises we did donate over $30,000 to assist him in doing them.

Today Julie Leung is inspiring me to satire.#

What if my ambition is to have a family? What if my ambition is to be a wife? What if I want to pour all I have into what I have at home? Is that wrong? Is that not being ambitious? I think I can have plenty of ambition thriving "inside" the family. Okay, I haven't read the article from which this sentence is quoted, but the quote itself stimulated a response.

Julie, you are not making this choice of your own free will. You have been brainwashed by the male white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that forces a context on all our lives. You do not realize that no woman really wants to raise a family. From day one, they have been forced to do so by evil males who spent their freedom having promiscuous relations and raping women (as well as poor migrant workers.)

I truly pity you.

This post has been brought to by a student of Postmodern Womanness.

About a week ago, I finished reading the first book I have read by Nathaniel Hawthorne, that book was The House of the Seven Gables.#

I was very satisfied with the book. Hawthorne's style is full of detail and continually conquering new peaks of vividness, without going overboard and becoming a bore. The setting of the book is also agreeable--I am fond of books about the height of the British Empire and the aristocrats that lived during those times, and this book is setting during a similar period in America, although the family in question is at the bottom of its power.

I get misty eyed about the time when people spoke with courtesy, thought intently about their words and the manner of speaking, and did not always need to be in a busy uproar to be happy. But perhaps this world never existed and is just the content of books. Regardless, it is a pleasant fantasy.

To get an idea of the story and the framework that it takes place in, take this passage when the young cousin, Phoebe, of Hepzibah and her brother Judge Pyncheon, first sees the friction between those two and their other sibling Clifford.#

Phoebe went, accordingly, but perplexed herself, meanwhile, with queries as to the purport of the scene which she had just witnessed, and also whether judges, clergymen, and other characters of that eminent stamp and respectability could really, in any single instance, be otherwise than just and upright men. A doubt of this nature has a most disturbing influence, and, if shown to be a fact, comes with fearful and startling effect on minds of the trim, orderly, and limit-loving class, in which we find our little country girl. Dispositions more boldly speculative may derive a stern enjoyment from the discovery, since there must be evil in the world, that a high man is as likely to grasp his share of it as a low one. A wider scope of view, and a deeper insight, may see rank, dignity, and station all proved illusory, so far as regards their claim to human reverence, and yet not feel as if the universe were thereby tumbled headlong into chaos. But Phoebe, in order to keep the universe in its old place, was fain to smother, in some degree, her own intuitions as to Judge Pyncheon's character. [pg. 98-99]

Another one of the interesting little lessons that are in the book is delivered by a roaming jack-of-all-trades, Holgrave, who rents a room with the family of the House of the Seven Gables and develops a relationship with Phoebe.#

"For example, then," continued Holgrave. "A dead man, if he happen to have made a will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much longer dead than he. A dead man sits on all our judgment seats; and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in dead men's books! We laugh at dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's pathos! We are sick of dead men's diseases, physical and moral, and die of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients! We worship the living Diety according to dead men's forms and creeds. Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man's icy hand obstructs us! Turn our eyes to what point we may, a dead man's white, immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart! And we must be dead ourselves before we can begin to have our proper influence on our own world which will then be no longer our world, but the world of another generation, with which we shall have no shadow of a right to interfere. I ought to have said, too, that we live in dead men's houses; as, for instance, in this of the Seven Gables!" [pg. 139-140]

This idea brings many others--all great books are by dead men, our laws and states were established by dead men, and the great snowballing destruction of our world was a mistake kicked off by unnamed long dead men as well. And I am sentimental of the world of many dead men.

No one seems to ever be satisfied with today, they want the past and look forward to a future that will recreate it.

I sound like Dave Pollard.