Because some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

-- Dark Knight (2008)

Take your third deep breath in ten days. Because we stand at a precipice in U.S. markets. Congress is playing political brinkmanship with the biggest financial decision of our generation. We just had the largest bank failure in U.S. history. Credit spreads have widened to the point of gibbering meaninglessness. And some people are still nattering about what might be the perfect variant of the Paulson bailout plan.

Listen. There is no perfect. As Voltaire wrote, "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien". The perfect is the enemy of the good. No plan is perfect; no plan will be static. But standing on the precipice and inching every closer to the abyss is stupid and suicidal.

Admittedly, some people don't care. They are so wrapped in their vendettas,their ideological purity and their Calvinist moralizing that they would rather see everything come down around their ears than do anything about it. Fuck them. While some men want to watch the world burn, we don't need to stand idly by while they set the fire.

I shouldn't be posting things as I'm too tired and frustrated, but in case you can't tell, I've had it.

In a recent survey of 19 states that have held a presidential primary this year, 63% of Catholics identified themselves as Democrats, compared with 37% for Republicans, a sharp increase from 2005 when 42% of Catholics identified themselves as Democrats. One of every four voters in the U.S. is Catholic.

And Obama's share of the Catholic vote keeps inching upward.

Granted, it is a pretty solid system that helps its users do some basic things that the average social networker enjoys doing these days with regularity. But, at the end of the day, its predecessor in the networking industry makes those connections, too. And, well, Twitter's got a whole heckuva lotta users already, sowhy bother going elsewhere to gorge on the wide world of public (and private) Web chatter?

Well, who knows. Maybe it's just one of those mysteriously simple decisions everyone of us makes some time or other if only because we can, and because we want to. In any case, Pownce is nonetheless a presence in the social sector, and since it's inching ever more closely towards its official public debut (slated for January 22), we thought it'd be fitting to share with you some pre-launch information gleaned from one of the startup's founders, Leah Culver, in an interview published by Tech Confidential earlier in the week.

Culver, if you weren't aware already, is a Bay Area resident who nabbed her first fifteen minutes of fame during her employ at the custom fabrication house Instructables through an advertising exercise in which she arranged to have a number of companies based (mostly) in Silicon Valley pay to inscribe their respective logos on a new Apple MacBook Pro. Through the arrangement, Culver effectively obtained a free laptop computer - which, according to widespread consensus, she needed dearly and a significant amount of publicity, to boot.

Now she's got her sights almost exclusively on the development of Pownce, which, all things considered, is a fairly young thing. A project described as a micro-blogging utility, Pownce had its first public outing (through an invite-only process, a stage in which it remains to this day) back in the early summer of 2007. It was then described as a potential Twitter-killer.

Several months later, it would no longer be touted (by the tech punditocracy, anyhow) as such. Following months of incremental updates and alterations, the brand has diminished in its appeal. The Culver-Rose experiment, once a fairly frequent topic of discussion in the blogosphere, no longer commands a particularly noteworthy spotlight. It lagged. It lagged some more.

But according to Culver, the team behind the project are not tossing in the towel whatsoever. They see that, through the delivery of a new, more complete API, expected to be presented around the time the official public release of Pownce and its Adobe AIR-compatible device, the concept can proceed to expand and evolve into a robust communication platform and they very clearly believe it will.

Culver states that, more bonus features forpro accounts in the next year, a sign that the company's tiered business model in which it offers both free and paid-for subscription options will continue to remain in play. The Pownce co-founder claims that the operation sells quite a few pro accounts.

We must say, in spite of Pownce's showing a rather erratic and lackluster growth history, one thing above all that we'll give its creators some credit for is their ability to run more or less on their own steam. In closing out her interview with Tech Confidential, Culver claimed that, to date, Pownce is self-funded.

Though the company is of course open to the idea of working some good ol' venture capital into the equation if need be.

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