I am currently learning the Tarot---which is not that easy----studying fly fishing--------------- (my gear came in)......learning how to operate a new smart phone......reading "After Shock" by Robert B. Reich.....sorting through a group of very small solar panels to see what use i can put these to...repairing my Rovio robot with the replacement parts that actually, finally, showed up..... staring at the winter garden which is so different....and setting up my personal kit for the upcoming winter.

I have pretty much finished up every summer/fall project i had started...there are a few small things left to do which I will finish up over the next two weeks, mopping up so to say.

Driving down the street to my coffee shop one day this week I saw, what was obviously, two 15 year old girls standing and talking on the sidewalk....Nothing strange here, and your first thought is probably----- "you old perv!" What i was observing however was that each of them had a baby carrier. New Mexico is now, after beating out Mississippi, the state in the union with the highest number of unwed teenage mothers. I could not help feeling that somehow these two girls were playing dolls? That like playing dolls there was no need for nasty old boys to be around?

I see young girls with these pre-marriage babies all the time now, most often out somewhere with their mother/grandmother. Unlike religious fanatics, i could care what someone does---I engage on this from a societal viewpoint and not from a moralistic position. This region is too deeply Republican, too "born again" to teach birth control so i can only assume that this is a Palin situation, the no sex before marriage delusion followed immediately by a teen mother & baby. In this area of New Mexico however, the sheer mass of numbers of unwed mothers means that if there is marriage in the future, the male must accept the "barbie baby" from the start of the relationship.

Does this cost? Oh yes! I am quite sure that all parties involved are on any government programs available to them, including the preachers daughter, the Republican party chairman, and the oil executive. Therefore there is no expulsion from any of the local social groups for unwed motherhood---it is merely disregarded as an issue. Every one's daughter gets pregnant as a teenager, receives their government sanctioned funding, rich or poor, and moves along.

I have to laugh when i hear Republican speeches that it is the illegal immigrants that are taking advantage of social services by having babies, that unwed teen mothers is a racial/poverty problem---here in southeastern New Mexico, white, 16, year old mothers drive about in SUV's bought for them by their oil company granddad, with the kiddie in the car seat' to collect their government checks....but............. Because all their daughters are fucking---rich/poor/legal/illegal/found the lord/lost the lord.....it is OK.......nothing to see here.

Any informed borrower is simply less vulnerable to fraud and abuse.
Alan Greenspan