(Actually, due to the day's loss of population with those three terrible earthquakes, we probably go over 6 billion tomorrow.)

They do say the population rise is slowing. It would have to, of course, eventually, or crash catastrophically. As people's lives get better, they stop having more and more children in the hopes that one or two will live long enough to keep the family going. China is preening over its one-child policy. Since it's coercive, and there are forced abortions to enforce it, I can't approve. Besides, I wonder about what things will be like in 15 years. They all want sons, so they abort and expose girl children. What happens when all these boys are adolescents? Are they going to go pillaging for women in neighboring countries?

Locally, there's another moral dilemma. A group called CRACK (Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity) has come to town. Sacramento is the methamphetamine capital of the west. In the last 12 years, I've seen a lot of damage done to the children of these addicts. The very first case I noticed, I was afraid the junkie was going to prostitute her pre-school daughter for the next fixes. Neglect abounds. CRACK's idea is to give addicts $200 if they are sterilized or go on to long range birth control. Civil libertarians are horrified... what if they clean up in 5 years and can't have any more children? Barbara Harris, the founder of CRACK, says they already have children, make it up to them. Those kids are probably in the foster care system and could use a clean and sober parent. This column has some statistics about the people who have already taken the money. (71 women with 510 pregnancies. Of those, 185 were abortions, 29 stillbirths, 22 died shortly after birth. 207 of the surviving children are in foster care.) I'm definitely of two minds about this, but I think I approve of the group. People who would give up the ability to be a parent for $200 probably shouldn't be parents, and there are so many damaged children in the system already. Here is Salon's article on the group. (Oh, of the victims I have known, almost all of them were white, so much for the racism charge.)

Sigh. It's also a year since Matthew Shepherd was killed. And Laramie is back in the news.

I neglected to mention that I exploded in the bookstore yesterday and got 6 books. I've just been too good too long. Then today my order from England of two comedic fantasy short story collections came. (Mumble, I had to order my own copy of 'Bagger's story, since he only gave me a manuscript copy.) Also we got our RailFair tape today. It's quite fun.

I'd hoped to go to San Francisco today to see the Treasures of Assisi exhibit, but Rich really isn't well. It ends November 14 and I may go by myself if I have to.

I'm climbing the walls about CASA at the moment. I gave my case stupidvisor the court report two weeks ago so it could be edited and printed on letterhead and copied in time, and now it's only a week till the court date, and nobody is calling me to sign it... I'll get the blame for being unprofessional and it's NOT MY FAULT. I suspect them of being busy writing grants to serve more children, which is all very good, but we gotta serve the ones we already have.

(She did call, after I wrote that, about 8. I missed the call, and Rich didn't hear it, but I can sign the thing tomorrow. NOW they're all in a hurry. I refuse to let my supervisor make me feel guilty because the phone was busy when she called. Both of us have been staying off-line most of the time, but I started trying last Wednesday to get a reply, and how was I to know she'd EVER call back?)

Loss of the Mars Orbiter because of a metric-English error is completely unacceptable. It's time we bit the bullet and went metric. We were in England in 1971 when the coinage went metric. There had been years of preparation and dual coinage, but still, the man at the fish-and-chips shop couldn't figure out that a bob of chips was still a bob(5p) of chips. First we learned shillings and pence, and then we had to teach decimal to the natives. It'll be hard to change to metric: I'm really familiar with pounds, miles, quarts and inches, but it's doable. And it would certainly be easier for kids, instead of trying to learn 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon and 16 T to a pint, and in water a pint's a pound the world around, and there are 16 ounces to a pound and 2000 pounds to a ton, and what is a gill, anyway?