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March 24, 2006

When 'pro-lifers' turn to abortion; Free mp3s: Pink Floyd '72, Led Zep; RSS backlash

"The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion": When the Anti-Choice Choose. From a Canadian pro-choice site,

Abortion is a highly personal decision that many women are sure they'll never have to think about until they're suddenly faced with an unexpected pregnancy. But this can happen to anyone, including women who are strongly anti-choice. So what does an anti-choice woman do when she experiences an unwanted pregnancy herself? Often, she will grin and bear it, so to speak, but frequently, she opts for the solution she would deny to other women -- abortion.

In the spring of 2000, I collected the following anecdotes directly from abortion doctors and other clinic staff in North America, Australia, and Europe. The stories are presented in the providers' own words, with minor editing for grammar, clarity, and brevity. Names have been omitted to protect privacy. ...

Go read 'em. Footnotes have links to some sources. Psychology is tricky stuff.

Entirely understandable: Some women who have been actively leading anti-choice activities and picketing of clinics find themselves needing an "exception," and the next day resume their picketing of the clinic whose services they have chosen. It's their secret.

Not so understandable: Some women who oppose abortion rationalize that they have had "an accident" but "refuse to sit in the waiting room with women they call 'sluts' and 'trash' " -- other women who have also had "accidents."

Before you assume you know my position on this, here it is: With advanced birth control methods, abortion could become rare. If you oppose birth control, you're asking for a world of hurt.
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Free mp3s:Pink Floyd, Best Of Tour '72: RESTORED VERSION, at Singapore's BigO, of course; it's ROIO of the Week [Recordings of Indeterminate Origin] :

It was recorded during a four-night stand at the Rainbow Theatre in London from Feb 17 to 20. Roger Waters had finally decided that the next album would not be called Eclipse: A Piece For Assorted Lunatics. Instead the programme for the Rainbow Concerts was printed as Dark Side Of The Moon. These concerts were the first public performances of the legendary album. And the quality was said to be fantastic.

Also still open for downloads:

-- Led Zeppelin, For The Benefit Of Anyone Who Was Making A Bootleg

-- Mahavishnu John McLaughlin & Devadip Carlos Santana,
A Live Supreme

and more. Check the right side of that Pink Floyd download page, the most current entry; if the links say "Open" in red, it's still available.

An RSS reader showing feeds from defenselink.mil

RSS backlash: Maybe RSS feeds --- your favorite blogs/news-site links delivered to your PC like email -- are new to you, but some longtime bloggers miss your visits to their pages:

Jeneane Sessum (Allied), LAZY AGGREGATOR PEOPLE GO HOME,

You know what happens to blogs when all you do is feed off their feeds, but you never click through and you never link and you never comment? THOSE BLOGS FALL DOWN GO BOOM. And the people you are forgetting to talk to are some of the hardest working bloggers in blog business. Working their asses off so you can save yourself the trouble of clicking a damn mouse. You'd rather read them in an ugly scrolling window. That's like coming over for dinner and eating in the front yard.

What's the matter with us? We have to get out and WALK the blog neighborhood. Everyone reading this post, please make sure that you have a blogroll. Sure, I can't tell you what to do, but Blogrolls are the antidote to RSS and aggregators. Bring back our conversation nodes, our watering holes, our double wides. Bring back our summer-time Christmas lights and nativity scenes.

Please. I am not writing posts for you to read; I AM TALKING TO YOU.

A response from Euan Semple (The Obvious), Technology giveth and technology taketh away,

...But I have stayed uneasy. It felt like I wasn't really visiting people any more. I had turned relationships into content. I was also increasingly frustrated that I didn't really know who was reading my own blog as it is hard to get a sense of how many people access your content through RSS and because of the lack of referalls you can't get to know them.

Ralph Brandi: (There is No Cat), RSS levels community,

Feed aggregators reduce every site to a dull grey lowest common denominator. Allied is Burningbird is Emergency Weblog is the New York Times; they all look the same in a feed reader. Most feeds don't include the associated comments from a post; if they did, the same item would come up as new over and over and over as comments were added, which would break the model on which feed readers are built.

From Shelley Powers (Burningbird), A Pale Moon’s Shadow,

I’m also thinking of putting a line at the bottom of each post in the Atom feed, saying:

“Created especially for my friends. Does this mean you’re my friend? Good. I need a place to sleep, then. I’m no bother. Really. Well, aside from the insomnia. Oh, and I have 8 cats. Well, my boyfriend’s kind of scary, but the meds seem to help.”

Communities, friendships, a sense of companionship and sharing can’t be made or broken through the use of tools. If anything, when we become friends through our online associations, we have done something extraordinary–we have reached beyond the limits of technology and created something human, and real.

But it’s a fragile reality–like the shadow of a pale moon.

As I tried to say in comments at Jeneane's -- they went down and she ended up blogging it instead -- I fired up an early RSS reader years ago, but kept forgetting about it. I like to see the sites, see them change. (Of course, I don't generally read opinion-only blogs that are just text after text after...)

I have no idea how many of you read this weblog. In addition to feeds, many read it on other Belo news sites --23 of them, last I looked. I've gotten emails from people I've mentioned saying, "Thanks for the mention in the Dallas Morning News." and I find Google links from sites to a blog post citing me as,

SHEILA Lennon: The Front-Runner's Fall Press-Enterprise (subscription) - Riverside,CA,USA

-- Firefox News: Sheila Lennon: 'The 46 best free PC utilities'; Unitarian Jihad ... KVUE (subscription) - Austin,TX,USA

or even,

-- " 09-23 Sheila Lennon: Hacking the Presidential Election(The Press-Enterprise, RI)"

I sneezed a sneeze into the air, it fell to earth I know not where...

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 9:53 AM | Permalink