blogs

Over at Check Your Premises, Francois Tremblay has finally completed his two-part essay on love. For convenience, here’s part one; and here’s part two.

When I wrote in the introductory column to the most recent Sunni’s Salon that “we aren’t holding high hopes for a bumper crop of anything but lessons learned”, I wasn’t indulging in false modesty. And it is now official—as reports start to come in, even friends with self-professed brown thumbs are reaping their rewards. So, how does Sunni’s garden grow? Let’s go out to the patch to review the sorry state of affairs.

Well, not quite. Our daughters have both taken off, Ayn for Paris and Ada for the beach. Annie and I sort of feel we should take advantage of this and do something out of the ordinary. But what? Anything we want to we can do when the girls are here. If we are going out and they are home (which in the case of Ayn is becoming rarer and rarer) we tell them and ask if they want to come along. Unless it involves an expensive restaurant, the answer is usually "no". They have their own lives and are far too busy to tag along with a couple of old folks.

So we will probably just follow our normal routine, maybe go check out a new restaurant, but that is about it. It turns out that we are quite content with our lives and do not have a great need to escape.

With the girls gone the house feels empty. It is funny because since Ayn has been working she is almost never home, and Ada seems to be on a 30 hour day, so we sometimes go a couple of days without seeing each other. Even so, we know they are around.

Ada will be back in five days and Ayn in two weeks, it will be good to have them back and I look forward to hearing all about their trips.

After my last words on the R.P. diversion, I took a long break from LRC. The only exceptions had been Butler Shaffer, and one of the columnists who focused on health issues; but, as the latter recently leveled “intellectual” property violation charges against some excerpts posted in my area at The Boondocks, I’ve stopped reading him. Then—silly me—I heeded the urgings of several people and started browsing the blog, primarily because Butler Shaffer posts there. However, after reading several posts like these, I’m done with the entire site. It’s one thing to encounter nationalistic, grossly oversimplified perspectives in political and media propaganda, but to find it permeating an allegedly pro-freedom web site is too much for me.

I’ve had a lot on my mind lately ... some things you can guess about, others you’ll likely hear about here eventually, and some issues that will never be mentioned publicly. Suffice it to say that stuff was starting to weigh fairly heavily on me. But today I found a surefire cure for that weight.

Take one Darlin’ Daughter, add an awesome older brother (that’d be Snolf the First), a fun loving wolf, and lots of water. Slosh around well, and leave in the sun to get warm [viz., D.D. wanted to go to a water park]. Then add good pood, lots of presents, and chocolate cake with ice cream.

The result? One birthday very happily celebrated, and a tired but happy family.

The picture has little to do with our day ... for those of you who know my Darlin’ Daughter, you may recall her fondness for snails—and that’s a version of her animal totem the snail is hitching a ride from. She squealed in delight when I showed her the picture this morning, so I thought some of you might like it too.

[Addendum: I posted this late Monday night my time, but the site’s time zone is apparently different ... hence the difference between the header date, and the time stamp on the post itself.]

I am finding the ongoing changes in and challenges to my thinking interesting, and sometimes even amusing. To be clear (and repetitive, I know), I have been a science-oriented person as far back as I can remember—wondering about how things work and how to test ideas and wanting proof for everything. I still consider myself a scientist, even though I have not worked in that realm for years ... yet the way some individuals apply scientific theories is problematic for me.

The chart behind the curtain will probably accomplish that. I snagged it from some econ blog I happened across. It’s kinda big and might mess up the formatting here for those of you with smaller screens, but I dare not shrink it further, as it’s barely legible as is.

What with the change in comment and registration policies, I figured it was time to knuckle down and finish my ramble attempting to summarize the guidelines for participating here. So here you go: Getting the Lay of the Land. Comments are disabled there, but are welcome on this post. A link to it will go in the sidebar for easy reference, of course.

Sunni posted A Request for Mama Liberty. I cannot respond to the request, but will respond to the insinuation (made by a visitor) "that in accepting any religion, one becomes subservient to its god(s), and thereby sets up a contradiction with being truly free."

I'm not sure just where to start... but this has been increasingly bothering me for quite a while and, if nothing else, trying to put it into words here - and any comments from you folks - may help better than thrashing around in my own mind.

I am a lifelong Christian. I've studied much of religion, both Christian and other, and have given much thought to it all. I've gone through a number of churches, having been a Catholic for nearly 25 years until recently, and so made a good faith effort to be part of that community in a number of ways.

Recent conversations with various people online regarding freedom in relationships, agorism, and other topics led me to do a fair amount of thinking on the topic of exactly what freedom is to me. Fortunately, before I got too deeply into the subject I recalled that I’d written about this subject more formally already, in a book manuscript that went unpublished. In what follows I’ll pull from that manuscript (finally, a use for some of it!) and add to it, to try to give a clearer picture of how I define freedom, and why I make the claim I do, that all freedom is personal.

Not being a smoker, and not having one in the household, I just now learned that the politicrats are looking to further demonize this particular leaf. And yeah, we all know the answer to the question I posed, but for grins, let’s play along for a short while.

A while back, I mused on a possible outcome of the economic situation in the USSA, in Lemonade for Voluntaryists?. And today, I discover that the lemonade is starting to flow.

... is two-fold, it appears.

Yes, that’s where I am again ... I have lots of ideas brimming in my mind, but something doesn’t seem right about addressing any of them here right now. Not entirely sure why, but I trust my intuition, so there it is.

Anyway, over at Check Your Premises, Francois Tremblay has posted on one of the issues I’m pondering. So, while my tongue is tied, some might find his posts on The True Self, Seat of Love worth considering.