I think the most illuminating thing to do, is to step back a couple of paces from all the scandal mongering that has gone on throughout human history, and look for why the people doing the "mongering" are putting their energy into it.

The primary or source reason that I have seen why people jump on opportunities to declare some person to be horrible, for pretty much ANY immediate reason, is due to their actual hope of gaining traction with an often entirely unrelated personally profitable goal of their own.

It is the sensed duplicity of it all, that upsets many people the most, even though they don't put their finger directly on either the duplicity, or on the goals that the duplicity is hiding, when they make their complaints.

People who complain about "too much political correctness" are especially susceptible, oddly enough, to being tricked into supporting the HIDDEN agendas of the people who are pointing directly AT the "political correctness" problems.

The same phenomenon happens to those who get derisively referred to as "SJW's" (Social Justice Warriors).

Once a person becomes excited about the knowledge that injustice is loose in the world, they all too often are prone to accepting ANYTHING they hear from the "victim" side, and actually ABSOLVE the "victim" of pretty much any real crimes they might have committed that are independent of whatever is being done to them unjustly.

It all essentially goes back to what many of us experienced in early childhood, where we tried to escape punishment for our OWN wrongdoing, by pointing out some error by our siblings or friends.

It is sadly not at all a new phenomenon, but we do seem to be going through an especially egregious version of it lately, wherein we are not only being called to EXCUSE the bad behavior of one person or group, due to flaws in their critics, we are being asked to EMBRACE AND SUPPORT the wrongdoing of the people who's opponents have been shown to have errors on their own side of things.

It is the embrace of real errors and abuse, that I myself find most upsetting.

Technically, Love does not exist. It's not a thing unto itself.

It's a description of a collection of ideas, feelings, commitments, behaviors and so on, that varies from one person to the next, and from one time in a person's life to the next.

Excuse me, what does the word "deices" mean here?

When I look it up, all Ifind are descriptions of how to get ice off of airplane wings.

Anyway, if you are asking what the United States policy approach to an epidemic in another country is, that can be tricky.

I take a different (longer) view than many people, because of my background as an historian. I know that there are a few primary reasons why any foreign nation decides to get involved with the INTERNAL concerns of another nation, and that most commonly, the people debating the issue at the time, are only aware of one or two of the actual half dozen possible reasons.

A repeating mistake that the United State in particular has made throughout it's existence, has been to put itself through bouts of ISOLATIONISM. That's where a majority view takes hold, that we should just back away from the rest of the world, and let other countries deal with their own problems by themselves. Isolationism is usually based on intense resentment, especially of the cost to Americans of being involved on foreign soil. Monetarily, especially.

The thing is, time after time, isolationism leads directly to allowing VERY bad things to happen TO the United States. It was isolationism that led to leaving Afghanistan to the Russians and to the Afghans, that led to the attacks of 9-11. It was isolationism that led to the devastation of World War 1 and World War 2. Isolationism is leading right now, directly to the likely invasion and subjugation of the Ukraine by Russia, as well as similar fates for other Eastern European nations.

Right now in the middle east, Russia is maneuvering for controlling influence over as many nations there as it can arrange, with the ultimate goal of interfering with the US' ability to deal with those countries economically in the future.

That kind of long range concern, needs to be included in our calculations for what to do about a given situation in Yemen.

That doesn't mean that we have to send our troops in to every nation around the world, by any means. But we DO need to think past immediate short term financial and medical concerns, before choosing what actions to take.

The emotional aspects of this are among the most confusing, I think.

There are lots of common myths, or maybe they could be called common misunderstandings about males and females.

The idea that females are less emotionally stable is one of them. The idea that males are less emotionally "available" is another.

Aside from the wide variation in behaviors that I've witnessed, I think that even the exact situations where people make such declarations about a specific person, are often wrong.

So far as I know, I haven't been female for AT LEAST sixty six years, maybe longer. So I wont even try to speak for women. But as a guy who has been accused of being "emotionally unavailable" a number of times, I can say for sure, that in every one of those cases, I was if anything, the OPPOSITE of unemotional. What was usually going on, was that I wasn't expressing the emotion that the woman was hoping for, in the manner she wanted to see me perform.

In reality, remaining stoic, at least for me, is the result of extreme tumultuous emotion; not the LACK of it.

I would say you are wrong in one specific and narrow aspect: where you use the word "should."

The tricky thing about declaring that something "should" or "should not" be true, is that humans commonly use that (as I think you have here) as a way to BORROW AUTHORITY from elsewhere, in order to "win" whatever argument they are having.

The thing I always do when "should" comes up, including in my own mind, is to find out exactly who this implied external authority is.

I of course have no idea what your external authority is. That's up to you to figure out.

Aside from that, you might have a problem that I and many others have had to deal with since forever...which is that just because something doesn't mean anything to me, doesn't mean that it doesn't mean anything to someone else.

For example, I've known lots of people who at least claimed that they didn't care at all if their mate had sex with other people or not. The people who said that, usually said so as a part of arguing that therefore their mate should be okay with THEM having casual sex with whomever they pleased.

The trouble is, that what "should" or "should not" be true, regardless of what each person believes, always fails against what actually IS TRUE.

What we have to deal with in relationships, to make them work well, isn't what "should" or "shouldn't" be true; we have to deal with what IS TRUE. Regardless of whether or not it makes sense to us.

If you two do try to get back together, I certainly hope that your friend has come to a change of mind and emotion about your friends from your romantic past. I just would caution you against trying to push her to change, based on how you feel. She will only change USEFULLY, if she changes based on how SHE FEELS.

I would have a lot more things on my walls if it weren't so surprisingly expensive to put things up. Just things that are key mementos from my own past.

On my project desk right now, I have a couple of decks of cards, and a meal menu that I bought online, from the S.S. United States. A great ship that briefly sailed between America and Europe in the fifties and sixties, before air travel erased that mode of transportation.

I really couldn't say in a logical way, why it would make me feel better to preserve things like this in framed boxes on my walls, I just know that it would. Heck, it could be as simple as that I would feel subconsciously as though I had joined and taken my own place in the world, alongside all the other people who have things on their walls (other than programmed stuff).

Side note: the only thing that strikes me as bizaar, when it comes to stuff on walls, is when there is MEANINGLESS STUFF there. Like in businesses, where some designer decided that the waiting room should look like your uncles living room.

Especially weird, is all of what I call "Business Art" that gets churned out across the US, just to have stuff to put on waiting room walls. Business Art is specifically designed to be juuuust arty enough that we all subconsciously accept that since it's in a frame, it must be "art," but not have enough concept or thought or any other intrusive expression in it, so that we actually want to react to it AS ART.

If I could afford it, I'd love to have all sorts of sneaky stuff on my walls. Paintings that look like the usual old ships at anchor, but if you look closely, you'll see that the crew is just starting to mutiny, or to do something else interesting. I'd like to have a line of hieroglyphs running as a decorative band along the top of my living room walls, that only the people who could read them, would realize were quotes from the Rocky and Bullwinkle SHow. Stuff like that.

I'm not arguing for or against socialism or capitalism. I just read the article, and noted that it was the same sort of thing I've seen from certain kinds of people throughout my life. Lots of very nice chat about how it would be nice if rich employers would behave responsibly and with attention to their employees, vague unsupported pronouncements about how magically wonderful competition is, careful avoidance of even a hint that the "be nice" ideas be anything but voluntary, and then a bunch of unsupported assertions to the effect that certain other people (anyone who supports any other approach) are actively trying to destroy everyone's lives.

As I think msharmony suggests, if we take the idealized notions of how capitalism can work, when all participants are saintly and wise, then we could have economic heaven on earth. But then, with those same saintly and wise people in charge of a more socialized approach, everything could be great.

The thing is, the same thing could be said of a classic benevolent dictatorship.

What I find upsetting about this, and most similar diatribes about the natural wonders of capitalism, is that it quietly ignores the natural negative consequences of a world where only those CAPABLE of working in lucrative fields, will have a chance at a pleasant life. The physically and mentally handicapped are ignored, as are children and the no longer able to work elderly. No way to insure that anyone who DOES work, and work hard, will be rewarded FAIRLY for that work, and not cheated by the people in a position to dictate the lowest return on labor that they can force people to accept. Just a lot of cheerful notions of how in an idealized (i.e. non-existent) world, free market capitalism allows nice stuff to happen.

Difficult to say, really.

All I originally wanted in life, was a true life mate, come what may.

Never found one, though. Just a few people who wanted me to act as a sort of service provider.

Never met any woman who wanted to live with me. Only women who wanted me to live with them. Big difference.

It depends on how you define "rejected."

I suspect that a lot of us on both side feel rejected far more often than we are actually directly rejected.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing. It's a real thing, though.

Every profile that lists things we know we can't provide, is a rejection of us, after all.

Actually, it's a lot of drivel. Boiler plate rich-guy-who-loves-himself stuff.

He doesn't know what ACTUALLY happened anywhere else, he just repeats common anti-socialist propaganda.

Using Venezuela as a PRIMARY example of socialism in reality, is no more valid than using a horrifyingly corrupt capitalist country, as your [primary representation of what all capitalism is.

And notice that through all of his warm and loving words about seeing to the best interests of all people, he proposes absolutely NOTHING AT ALL be done to actually make that happen.

Sorry, it's a TERRIBLE article to use to promote capitalism.

I want to point out for consideration, how this is all another example of a larger common human behavior or "habit."

That is, it's affected by a combination of a couple of things people like to do, or do sloppily.

First, we like to categorize and sort things, for logical and practical reasons. And we like to talk to each other about everything, as a part of exchanging what we learn for what others have learned, as a natural part of working to protect ourselves and improve our own lives. This is what led to us coming up with the WORDS Love and Hate.

The second "habit," is that people can be and often are careless or sloppy about our sorting activities, once we have the "bins" set up. Mainly because we want to sort as quickly as we can, in order to make as much personal and collective progress as we can.

What all THAT is leading up to, is that I see frequently, that lots of things get tossed into our bin labeled "hate," that really are something else. And once we mis-sort something, the sloppiness of our sorting, can lead directly to taking the wrong ACTIONS for what we do about what we put in the various "bins."

Some things that people call "hate," are actually angers. Frustrations. Sometimes people even put something that is actually a weird variation of LOVE, into the "hate bin."

For example, what I've OFTEN witnessed directly, is how much delight certain people feel, when they publicly attack someone or something else. Attacking with a sense of self-righteous purpose, appears to be more fun than anything else in life, to some people. To me, that kind of nearly pure joy, shouldn't be carelessly tossed into the "hate bin," without a LOT of careful scrutiny.

In fact, I've often witnessed people actively searching for additional people or things to direct claimed "hate" at, in order to get that rush of self-righteousness and self-adoration. There is no way that that kind of pure pleasure-seeking should go into the same category as the kind of feeling people get, that is so painful and self-immolating, that we know it as "hate."

For myself, I eventually increased my "emotional sorting bins," as I saw more complexity in all this, until it's rare for me to put much of anything into either of the original "love" or "hate" bins.

That doesn't mean I love the world, or feel less pain and anger than anyone else, particularly when I am suffering abuse or intellectual assault. It just means that I am loathe to say "that's hate," or "that's love," when something happens.

My ex's who caused me the greatest and ongoing pain that I continue to carry, I can't say I "hate." I have worked hard to understand all that happened to me, and why people who claimed to care for me caused such pain. The more I've understood, the less I've felt pure anger at the people, and the more I've felt more of a sad regret that I didn't understand sooner than I did.

So I guess what I'm trying to get at, is to suggest we all be careful what we toss into our "hate bin," mainly because whenever we complete a "sorting action" like that, we tend to stop investigating what's really going on, and end up building our ongoing futures, on how clever we feel about all our "sorting," rather than on what actually transpired in our lives.

I've never found anything that I personally can do to PURPOSELY make a woman like me, and "go weak" over me. The only times it's happened have been accidents, so I don't try.

What I've observed, is that a woman is just like a guy, in terms of the process of this kind of thing. That is, her collective expectations, tastes, physiological desires and even the timing of everything all plays a part in what makes her open up to another person.

That is why the same thing that can make a person go "weak at the knees" in one case, might make them get that annoyed expression or even be infuriated when another person does it all.

Simple example of what worked once on me: a very long time ago, I was already interested and attracted to a certain woman, and chatting with her amiably about various things, just being my usual self. After one particularly confusing exchange where I said all sorts of dumb things that would have made many other women certain I was a complete idiot, she warmly responded with "you silly man" and a smile. I emotionally fell right off the top of the stern masculine battlements I'd been trying to build to impress her, and landed in a puddle of adoration on the ground.

I doubt that same thing would work twice on me, but then the factors of timing and desire were awfully complicated.

Not really at all sure what "mid century" means in furniture.

Myself, I've gone through a whole range of likes and dislikes.

For a time, I wanted the most sleek, modern stuff I could find, and even designed a couch I was going to build (couldn't afford the tools).
I was enthralled by Victorian stuff for a bit. I especially wanted one of those classic semi-couch like chaise lounge chairs. Not sure why.

I never liked the LOOK of the mainstream stuff, such as the La-z-boy chairs, and especially not the over-stuffed look.

All in all, had I the funds, I'd have a house with enough rooms to have a different era of furniture in each, so that I could move from one room to the next, depending on my mood.

With all I learned long ago about how sales does and doesn't really work, by the time I knew about impulse buying, I was just amused.

I don't care that some vendors will make a higher profit than others on a given product. Heck, sometimes I knowingly pay double for something small (like sodas) simply because I realize I'm saving much more valuable time and gasoline, not driving to another location for it.

The thing I realized about all of it, the whole sales hook-or-by-crook stuff, is that the real key to not feeling sucked in, is basic self-awareness and responsibility. Decide what you want to buy, what you want to pay for it, and then go get it. If you find later you might have saved a few dollars elsewhere, chalk it up to education costs, or even better, to the use you had from your copy of the thing between when you got it, and when the lower priced one was available. That's got real value after all.

Bottom line, from my experience, there's a lot more self-delusion going on amongst the SALES people, than there is amongst their customers.

Reading what you've written here, your problem is entirely within yourself.

That problem is, that you don't know WHY you want to break up. You believe you DO need to break up, but you haven't figured out anything else.

Until you know in detail, why, you wont be able to move from your spot (excepting taking one of the unilateral actions others have suggested, of course).

Essentially, you are like a person who wants to go out to eat, but who hasn't worked out what they are hungry for or which place they want to eat, so they continue to stare into their refrigerator, that hasn't got anything they actively want in it.

I just hope for your sake that you're not going through what many youngsters(anyone under fifty) do, and thinking that if you just get out on your own entirely, that something will magically come to you, about what you want your life to be about. Lots of those folks dump their mates, only to find out that they STILL don't know what they want, and then go rushing back to their ex again, after it's too late. You could look up "seven year itch" for some thoughts about that common phenomenon.

But again, most of all, I recommend you figure out what you want to actively put your life energy into DOING. That usually results in a person being able to work out solid and logical reasons for who they need to be with, where they want to live, and so on.

The way I learned to keep it straight, is to think about telling someone what time it is.

If you are looking at a clock, and waiting until it has a 12 on it followed by two zeroes (assuming it's digital)...

...by the time it takes for you to turn to the person who you want to tell, it's something you know. That is, if it's just noon, by the time you turn and get out the words "it's twelve...something," it's afternoon, and you know that, so you have to say "twelve P.M."

Three weeks funding is nothing. Not to the people who will be paid for those weeks of course, but in terms of resolving any of the issues that have led to this mess, it's nothing.

Might as well have said "twenty minutes."

I am the first son of a man who double majored at college in Math and English, and in addition to having correct grammar ground into me, I managed to acquire a tremendous love of accurate expression on my own.

One of my dad's favorite frustrating language wrenchings, was when he would respond to the children asking "Can I do xxxx?" by saying "I have no idea! Can you?"

But more than anything else, my life long frustration with people saying one thing, but meaning something else entirely, has caused me to be VERY careful and sensitive about how I and others write or speak.

I've had many experiences of doing exactly what someone asked me to do, only to enrage them, because I didn't do what they INTENDED ME TO UNDERSTAND.

My own repeat failings: misusing "its" versus "it's." Using apostrophes in general is always a struggle. I've yet to have found a clear and simple way to tell when and when not to add one. Especially the words that I'm supposed to imply the possessive by adding an apostrophe AFTER the end of the word.

I don't know if anyone else experiences this, but when I'm reading something someone wrote, and I come across one of the many common errors (such as using too in place of to, or vice versa), I actually feel as though I've physically stumbled over an out of place piece of furniture. It can completely disrupt my reading, bring me to a screeching halt, and make me reread the statement several times, just to try to make sure of what the person was trying to say. I don't so much get irritated or judgmental, as I am confused and doubtful about their intent.

Your attempt to claim similarities to gestapo are of course entirely wrong.

Actual "Gestapo tactics" would be to arrest and incarcerate first, and then search for cause afterwards (if at all).

Nice skeleton. All the ones I've known, would've left the mess.