Stop Obama's Abortion Bailout

Read this at Jen Hartenburg's blog.

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From the Susan B. Anthony List:

Did you know the abortion industry wants a $1.5 BILLION taxpayer bailout?

President Obama's 2010 Budget recommendations signal the Abortion Bailout is in full swing!

Here is the 2010 edition of the Abortion Bailout Package:

• Taxpayer funding for abortions in the District of Columbia
• $317 million in taxpayer funding for “Title X” Health Clinics (aka your local Planned Parenthood affiliate)
• $50 million for the UNFPA, an international aid organization connected to coercive abortion as part of China’s coercive one-child policy
  
  In December 2008, Abortion groups submitted a 50 page proposal to the Obama-Biden Administration. To date President Obama has fulfilled 11 of the 15 policies requested for the first 100 days. With more of the Abortion Bailout to come, we can surely expect to see some of the other demands to come in the months ahead:
• Include Abortion coverage in any taxpayer-subsidized national health care program
• Expand taxpayer-funded abortions on military bases
• Expand taxpayer-funded abortions through the Peace Corps program
• Expand taxpayer-funded abortions for federal prisoners

• 
  

To easily send a letter to your Senators, use the form on the Susan B. Anthony list.

Happy Father's Day from Charles Dodgson, Sr.

In honor of Father's Day, I here reproduce a letter written to an 8-year old Lewis Carroll (aka Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) from his father Charles Dodgson III.

My dearest Charles,
I am very sorry that I had not time to answer your nice little note before. You cannot think how pleased I was to receive something in your handwriting, and you may depend upon it I will not forget your commission. As soon as I get to Leeds I shall scream out in the middle of the street, Ironmongers, Ironmongers. Six hundred men will rush out of their shops in a moment -- fly, fly in all directions -- ring the bells, call the constables, set the Town on fire. I WILL have a file and a screw driver, and a ring, and if they are not brought directly, in forty seconds, I will leave nothing but one small cat alive in the whole Town of Leeds, and I shall only leave that, because I am afraid I shall not have time to kill it. Then what a bawling and a tearing of hair there will be! Pigs and babies, camels and butterflies, rolling in the gutter together -- old women rushing up the chimneys and cows after them -- ducks hiding themselves in coffee-cups, and fat geese trying to squeeze themselves into pencil cases. At last the Mayor of Leeds will be found in a soup plate covered up with custard, and stuck full of almonds to make him look like a sponge cake that he may escape the dreadful destruction of the town. Oh! where is his wife? She is safe in her own pincushion with a bit of sticking plaster on the top to hide the hump in her back, and all her dear little children, seventy-eight poor little helpless infants crammed into her mouth, and hiding themselves behind her double teeth. Then comes a man hid in a teapot crying and roaring, "Oh, I have dropped my donkey. I put it up my nostril, and it has fallen out of the spout of the teapot into an old woman's thimble and she will squeeze it to death when she puts her thimble on."

At last they bring the things which I ordered, and then I spare the Town, and send off in fifty waggons, and under the protection of ten thousand soldiers, a file and a screw driver and a ring as a present to Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, from

his affectionate Papa

May all our fathers profit by such a concatenation of generosity, ferocity, and an understanding of spatial relations.

This morning.

You want to know what it's like to be Jonathan Charles Wright?

It's like this:

You wake up and look for a pair of jeans to put on, but they are all dirty. You consider doing a load of laundry, but then just settle for some dirty jeans. In the middle of working from your apartment, while listening to your favorite band, on a gloomy North Idahoan summer day, a pair of brand spanking new jeans are literally delivered to your front door. You proceed with what you were doing, stopping only to blog about what it's like to be yourself by relating the aforementioned events.

Two wary enemies

I hope that the hornet in my dining room and I will be able to cohabitate like gentle-creatures, bearing towards one another due bodily respect. The arrangement is roughly this: the hornet does not sting my body, and I do not squash it into oblivion. Furthermore, penalty for the hornet's failing to uphold his end of the bargain extends to all of hornet-kind. Should the hornet fail to uphold its end of the arrangement, I shall swear vengeance on all of its hornet-kin and shall wreak insecticidal havoc throughout the hornet ranks.

Saturday morning bits.

I am sitting in my dining room with Louis. I am sitting next to the window, which is being propped open with a green hardbound volume of "Poetry of the Victorian Period". Knew those Victorian poets would come in handy for something.

My fingernails smell. They smell bad, I think. The smell reminds me of a moment when I was bussing a banquet at The Old Spaghetti Factory: as I was walking through the back-zone, I passed a server who smelled potently, and I began trying to place the smell.

Louis is now singing passionately, and badly, along with the music playing from my computer.

I love coffee.

I am now singing passionately, and badly, along with the music playing from my computer.

This coffee isn't really that good.

I am "liking" pictures on facebook. Louis is "organizing feeds".

Here's the conversation we just had:
J: [looking up from his computer] What are you doing right now?
L: [looking up from his computer] Organizing feeds.
[J begins typing with intent.]
[L chuckles uproariously.]

You, reader, might not like the description "chuckles uproariously". Can one chuckle uproariously? It seems like behavior of an uproarious kind requires a certain threshold of volume and/or intensity to be breached; and it seems further that chuckling stays well within the bounds of this threshold. Fine observations. But consider the laughing noise Louis in actuality made. It was not an uproarious laugh, per se, but it was not a mere chuckle. This chuckle had gusto. I want to say that the chuckle had attained maximal chuckle-capacity. Anything more would have transcended chuckle into full-bodied laughter. Hence, an uproarious chuckle. Think: as uproarious as a chuckle could be without sacrificing chuckle-dom.

We are each talking to ourselves simultaneously.
"Engagement announcement on Facebook, eh?"
"Why aren't these pages showing up together?"
"They cannot have been together long"
etc.

Now we're eating triple-decker PBJ's and drinking beer. He has a pyramid hefeweizen; I a Mighty Arrow pale ale. You can tell we are delving into my collection of beers rather than his, because mine don't taste like wood and aren't the texture of sludge.

I just watched this video:


Louis says, "peanut butter sticks to your ribs." and he insists on banging on my walls.

A Whale and Another Whale

If you haven't seen this video yet, behold:

"Churchyard"
by
A Whale and Another Whale
Churchyard

Quotation of the Day.

"There's nothing wrong with having a torrid love affair with a 16 year old girl" - My boss.

Quine's Autobiography

I have been reading Quine's Autobiography. Several passages have so far resonated with me, but the following especially hit the spot.

My study of German in Vienna yielded lavish dividends in Prague, for my dealings with Carnap were in German. It was my first experience of sustained intellectual engagement with anyone of an older generation, let alone a great man. It was my most notable experience of being intellectually fired by a living teacher rather than by a book. One goes on listening respectfully to one's elders, learning things, hearing things with varying degrees of approval, and expecting, as a matter of course, to have to fall back on one's own resources and those of the library for the main motive power. One recognizes that the professor has his own work to do, and that the problems and approaches that appeal to him need not coincide in any very fruitful way with those that are exercising oneself. I could see myself in the professor's place, and I sought nothing different. I suppose most of us go through life with no brighter view than this of the groves of Academe. So might I have done, but for the graciousness of Carnap.

A problematic virtue.

Some of Saki's stories aspire to that strange literary criterion to which I pledged myself in my youth. Any sentence taken in isolation from the whole is enjoyable as an atomic, stand-alone unit. I am in the process of transcribing my favorite passages from all of Saki's works (as if to somehow siphon some of their worth by physically writing them myself, in addition to simply further ingraining them into my consciousness) and some of his stories I have trouble not transcribing in full, line by line. A problematic virtue.

Note>

I just thought of Max, and realized I love him dearly and cherish him as a friend. I'll write the Irvine log blog in a bit.

Seattle log.

I am back in Coeur d'Alene after a wonderful weekend in Seattle.

Seattle has much to recommend itself to a visitor. Multifaceted in the characters of its neighborhoods, teeming with a kind of San-Franciscan beauty and culture. Everything is misty and rainy, which gives one the sense of freshness and cleanliness, as if the city were in a state of perpetual self-ablution; I have used this description before, but it reminds me of Thales, who thought the world was composed solely of water. This is a view more easily held in Seattle.

Daniel's neighborhood of North Queen Anne comprises narrow one-way streets wreathed in branches and vines, curving up and down steep hills, each boxed in by attractively unusual houses. Daniel & Josiah's apartment is a fine, well furnished bachelor pad. Certainly far more put together than mine. It boasts an impressive view of hills and peninsulae, traced (i.e., obstructed) by a just recently blossomed jacaranda tree.

I arrived Friday night after my 5-hour drive across the stretch of Washington state, including a blood-curdling stint through the hazy dark of Snoqualmie pass. Daniel and I had tomato soup, grilled cheese, and amber beer.

Saturday was a shopping spree. I bought a table and 4 chairs at Ikea (pictures forthcoming) and gobs of clothes from Urban Outfitters and H&M. Joking with Daniel all the way! True fun. Josiah arrived home from his trip to Japan around lunchtime, roughly just before Daniel and I had skipped back to the homestead, so there was happy story-swapping. Though, truth be told, Josiah was vacillating between a state of long-flight sedation and guitar-playing passion. Later, he and I would play a brief yet thoroughly satisfying piano-guitar duet of Bon Iver's "For Emma". I think it was "For Emma"; Bon Iver songs are hard to tell apart. We played loudly and sang heartily. Saturday evening the three of us went to dinner with Jessica, Erin, and Chelsea. I cannot tell you how nice it is to encounter pleasant girls who can sustain conversation about things beyond their present line of sight. And what's more with creativity and wit! Other Saturday highlights include: spitting contests, an intense Ingmar Bergman film that is better to remember than it was to watch, a city park with old Oil Refinery machinery scattered about.

Sunday I slept in, then took the bus downtown to find Daniel at the hotel the desk of which he mans. Getting horribly lost in a pretty city, I have found, is not something to complain about. I enjoyed walking around downtown and into Belltown, half-heartedly attempting to get my bearings. Ace Hotel, where Daniel works, is "hip" in an intermittently good way. Some of the rooms have atria where you can eat breakfast! Very cool.
After then stalking around town looking for a cool, "local" coffee shop, failing miserably due to equal portions of high standards and bad directions, I settled for a franchise of a coffee shop chain local to Seattle. I flopped down and flipped through Quine's Epistemology Naturalized. Daniel and I went to the Seattle library, throughout which the clocking noise of my dress shoes unabashedly reverberated. We went to The Old Spaghetti Factory where we glutted ourselves and proclaimed our good taste to one another. We went home to rest, exhausted.

Then, the coup de grace: that night we went to see the Ratatat show. I get why one might want to go to a concert now; it's not just about listening to good music that you like (which you can do at your computer, as I do now), it's about feeling that music intrusively vibrate in your chest, it's about dancing without reserve along with a throng of other dancing human beings, it's about smiling while you dance at those surprisingly friendly hipster boys and those super-cute hipster girls with whom you now share the bond of sincerely enjoying something together, it's about bumping and grinding (!). Such concerts in such warehouse-like venues are closed systems in which one may give free reign to a blend of Orphic and Bacchanalian impulses without impugning one's virtue. I maxed out my fun level. Great time.

By way of denouement, we went to a greasy late night burger place afterwards.

The next day I would pound a large red bull and drive home, daydreaming the whole way.

Read.

I've heard about a famous argument between Corie and Max, and thought this might be informative:

AN ARTICLE DISCUSSING WHETHER AND WHY WOMEN AREN'T AS FUNNY AS MEN, WRITTEN BY A WOMAN.

Enjoy.

Joke.

If you've seen this twitter update, then you already get this joke.

Updates on Twitter Updates.

1. As soon as I started using Twitter, I saw that there was a user called THE_REAL_SHAQ. I went to read their twitter, and it was hilarious. Such a good parody of the Shaq. e.g., "I hate leprekons lol", "David stern said i dnt mind sounding trite, what does that word mean, any scholars out there", "Bout to get ready for the dunk contest, whos gonna win", etc. But then it got a bit repetitive--the joke got old. Suspiciously old. So, after doing some research, I realized it IS THE REAL SHAQ. I'm not sure if this makes it dramatically more funny or less funny, but I can't read them anymore regardless.

2. How can somebody as intelligent and funny as Stephen Fry have such a quotidian, banal twitter? I don't get it. I love Stephen Fry, but his twitter is just boring. As a celebrity, his life is like a perpetual vacation, and his twitter is like the boring comments people make about their vacations, only with the added bonus of his describing whatever technological difficulties he faces in so-updating. Baffling.

3. Daniel Walker is my hero.

2 addenda, to be included in the previous blog post.

Fifthly, a CONFESSION:

My parenthesis-usage in the previous blog post is inconsistent.

Sixthly, an INSTRUCTION THAT MIGHT STRIKE THE READER AS UNNECESSARY IF THE READER HAS READ THE TITLE OF THIS BLOG POST:

These two "things" are to be considered part of the previous blog post.

A blog post comprising 4 things, one of which is the blog post itself.

First, a WARNING:
Reader, I wrote the following blog post without creative foresight. After having finished it, I looked upon my works and saw they were mediocre, and I separated them from this WARNING. One might suggest that I simply not post the following blog, but the problem with that suggestion is that I spent a whole 5 minutes writing it, and I used html coding to italicize words and stuff, and would feel like my effort, thought spent on a blog not worthwhile, would be wasted. To quote a barista to whom I spoke yesterday, "I would rather do something bad that nothing at all". Now, while this maxim may not apply well to the ethical governance of one's own life, it may be a decent maxim for art. Think of Chesterton's permutation of an old adage: "If something is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." Hence, I showcase the following not-very-entertaining blog. Read or don't. But don't say I didn't warn you.

Secondly, a SECOND WARNING:
It would be helpful for one to understand Hume's theory of personal identity if one desires to get a decent amount of the humor that follows. This is so because the back half of the post is just about Hume's theory of personal identity. For some reason in the following blog post I capitalize "Personal Identity".

Thirdly, the BLOG POST:

February, you were too short. I thought I had more time. I thought we had more time. I didn't think that 14 blog posts for February was all I had in me. I had more to give.

But no. You've left me. We won't really ever meet again. Our relationship has been sloppily abandoned, profitable possibilities left unactualized. Think of the times we could have had! The New York Times we could have had! The times we could have had had! "Had had" had had the better effect on the teacher!

Yes, yes, I know: you will be back next year. But it won't be the February 2009 whom I've grown to love, to adore, to nuzzle. It will be some new February. Nice, no doubt. Friendly. Attractive. Intelligent. I may even learn to nuzzle this new February. But it won't be the same.

Similarly, I realize that if I were to adopt a Humean understanding of Personal Identity (half-okay/half-asinine jokes to make here: "A Humean Understanding of Personal Identity is a Contradiction In Terms", "To Understand Personal Identity (or much of anything) from a Humean Position, Simply Omit", etc.) then all relationships are this way. I will never really be friends with Max again, once I see him, etc. I will be friends with some new person named Max who has a remarkably (though, of course, not "remarkable" [heh heh heh]) Max-like body, but who in fact is radically different. In this way, my social circle has a high turn-over rate. (Does anybody know the term in ecology meant to refer to an ecosystem's combined "death" rate and "birth" rate? So, example: the rainforest has a high rate of this kind, since things are born and die so frequently and quickly, while the desert has a very low rate of this kind, since very few things are born, but those that are last for a long long time. I keep grasping for this word in metaphors, etc., but don't actually know the word, and so I end up having to describe the concept itself in the rather long-winded way much like that which you have just experienced. This makes room for a nice argument as to why having a sophisticated vocabulary is helpful [in that it assists you in having sophisticated thoughts, and having them quickly] but it's a downright pain.) I have tons of friends named Max, but never any for very long.

But then, lets be thorough and comprehensive here kiddies, really I won't be friends with this person at all, but some me-like person named Jonathan Charles Wright will be friends with the Max-like person named Max. In this way, my social circle is very limited. And my social circle is very limited. And so is mine.

In this way, also, this blog post is an incredible, massive collaborative effort.

Also, on this view, in marriage, you can have adulterous thoughts about your "spouse", if we define "spouse" in the everyday sense, but retain Humean identity in a strict philosophical sense. This might be an inconsistency, to insist of continuous "spouses" but discontinuous (?) identities (?); but if it is, it's a kind of inconsistency that Humeans must commit if they are at all inclined to keep up with their mothers.

Fourthly, a POST SCRIPT COMPRISING TWO QUESTIONS:

Is the sentence "I wrote the following blog post without creative foresight" part of this blog post? Is this?

Trip-Lets.

Douglas Hofstadter is better than Jonathan Charles Wright, I admit it.

Hofstadter came up with the idea of three-dimensional typefaces back in the 1970s, calling them "trip-lets" (as in "triple letters"). He designed the cover for his Pulitzer Prize-Winning book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, which is a picture of such trip-lets, cut (by Hofstadter) out of wood and then shined light at them from three different directions. Observe:

Apparently there is some kind of thematic value to the trip-lets (beyond simply being clever and cool), since in the book he kind of makes the claim that what Gödel, Escher, and Bach do are all essentially alike in important ways.

Anyway, the trip-lets are cool, and I have stumbled on some websites that exploit their inherent coolness to greater effect. The most interesting one is a art project of many trip-lets (computer images and physical works of art), which employ three different fonts for each letter of the trip-let. I particularly like this example of a "triple Z":

Neat!

Anyway, for some fun, check out Action Types.

Looking it over excites me. I spin into an eddy of thoughts about what possibilities in this creative vein have yet to be actualized. I go scatter-brained with considering variations on this theme. (For instance, imagine whole stories written using these fonts, organized into a narrative "cube". Is it even possible!?)

For a simple puzzle version of the same concept, check this out.

Ms. All or Nothing.

On some holiday last week, Louis and I were engaging one another in conversation and coffee shop fare, all but forcing pastries and caffeinated beverage down one another's gullets.

Incidentally, I have just made myself some coffee, and finally believe that the quality of any given french press of coffee is quite beyond any powers I might exert in making it. It reminds me of my former roommate Ben, may God bless him and keep him, who discovered, with no less import than Godel's discovery that there were numbers named after him, that the best anyone can do to make the internet work is to perform ceremonial motions of plug-in, pull-out, turn-off, turn-on, jazz hands, etc., in a rain dance fashion. As with internet connectivity and the rising of the Nile, so with coffee-by-french-press. This coffee is bland: the coffee equivalent to flat soda. Yet nothing in my morning coffee-making-voodoo-dance was any different from successful times before! Just when one is getting settled into a deterministic and mechanistic understanding of the universe, the gods tinker with one's coffee. I hereby give up and profess that all causation is fundamentally spooky and must be sacerdotally inveigled. (Remember blowing into Nintendo game cartridges, with all the hope and mysticism with which one blows on a dandelion? It would not surprise me if the psychological state of one so-blowing were isomorphic to that of a monk caught up in Shintoistic prayer.)

Back to them gullets. Striking upon a lull in our coffee-shop colloquy, I gazed around the place. A young (late high-school/early college) woman was looking at me. (Quelle plot twist--I agree. What do you want to bet that from amongst my readership Max is the one to have moved closest to the edge of his seat at this? Brianna, of course, takes prize for "Most Worried Gasp".) Protocol demands that I respond with an inscrutable and ineluctable smirk, during the execution of which, this young woman struck me as attractive. She seemed almost a younger, yet slightly worn, Kiera Knightly.

Incidentally, here's a picture of Kiera Knightly at what I consider her absolute best. It makes me laugh every time.


In so many words I informed Louis of my estimation of the girl in question, referring to the object of assessment as "2 o'clock". Louis burst into incredulous laughter. He was not of my opinion. Rather, on an aesthetic scale of -10 to +10, he placed her somewhere just below 0, which is to say he would sooner look at a wall or a chair than her.

Needless to say--well--if it's really needless I'll just skip it. Let's move on.

I needed more data. What could explain this drastic divergence in opinion between Louis and me? I proceeded to stand up and (more or less) to pace around and inspect her as one might broodingly and oglingly circumambulate La Victoire de Samothrace on a slow day at The Louvre. Alas, my estimation of her beauty was inversely proportional to the number of degrees of rotation from which I beheld her.

Plopping down next to Louis, confuted, I deigned a valedictory gander at "2 o'clock née Knightly". Gasp! Her beauty was restored! From that angle and from only that angle, this girl was nearly irresistible. Otherwise, she was gaining fast on the Gorgon. Clearly, she must be aware of this feature of her features, and accordingly has become accustomed to triangulate the exact position in any given coffee shop from which she will best allure her most promising future mate (in this case, me). Imagine a dance scene during which she would have to keep this angle from her partner at all times. Man, I should write romantic comedies.

I could go on, but have to go. on.