On to New Pastures

After a fruitful nine-year journey here at blogspot.com, the time has come for me to move this project to greener pastures. I've copied all of my posts to the new site at fearlessdream.us, and will be publishing all future material there.

Blogger helped me get my start, and for that I'm grateful. But I'm interested in greater ownership of my content, hope of simpler, more streamlined page structure and markup (I confess, I geek out a bit on stuff like that), and the other benefits that moving to WordPress can offer.

I haven't gone to the length of updating links or setting up forwarding for individual posts. But the RSS/Atom feed should auto-forward to the new feed URL (http://fearlessdream.us/feed).

This project is far from over, so please stop by the new site for the latest, including new episodes of The No Fear Pioneer. You can also still find me on Twitter as @kulak76.

Thanks for reading, and here's to the future! Ad astra!

The No Fear Pioneer, Episode 4: Independence Day

Happy Independence Day! Episode 4 of “The No Fear Pioneer” is up!

The No Fear Pioneer, Episode 3: The Next Frontier

Episode 3 of “The No Fear Pioneer” is up!

The No Fear Pioneer, Episode 2: Risk vs. Gambling

Is it officially a “podcast”, now that I have more than one episode?

Episode 2 of “The No Fear Pioneer” is up!

The distinction between risk and gambling, and the implications for those who stake their lives or fortunes on an inherently uncertain endeavor, are our topics. As with the pilot episode, I had a lot of fun thinking the ideas through and producing this one, and I hope you’ll enjoy the results!

Launch Day for "The No Fear Pioneer"!

I’m tremendously excited to be launching a brand new podcast today: “The No Fear Pioneer”. (Note the shiny new “Podcast” tab, above!)

The idea is to look at risk, opportunity, and freedom in the context of frontiers past, present, and future. What drives some people to seek the frontier life — to become pioneers? How has our frontier past shaped our present, and where can today’s pioneers find the challenging life of wide open spaces that they seek?

There are plenty of great podcasts out there, so I plan to keep this one short and sweet, with episodes limited to the 5-15 minute range.

You can listen on the podcast home page, which will have links to subscribe in iTunes and Stitcher as soon as my listings go live. I have exciting ideas in mind for future episodes, which will appear on the feed and the podcast page as I make time to produce them.

Hope you enjoy the first episode — I put my all into it, and had loads of fun producing it!

Saving Ricochet

Ricochet, a deservedly popular and uniquely valuable site for civil, center-right discussion and superb podcasts, and one of my favorite online destinations, needs our help. And they’re asking very little.

For people dedicated to the idea that something worth having is worth paying a little of our hard-earned money for, keeping Ricochet going should be easy. We can do this in our sleep, folks. All they need is for a mere 2% of their 400,000-500,000 unique monthly visitors to join, at the bargain price of $3.67 per month or $29.95 for a year (=$2.50/month). I’ve been a member since March 2011, and am already renewed through March 2014. If you’ve enjoyed the site and want it to stick around beyond their projected “fiscal cliff” of January 21st (also known in some circles as “Inauguration Day 2013”), please become a paid member, or give a gift membership. They’ve given the world some uniquely great content, and now they need more new members to step up. Pronto.

There are plenty of sites you can visit to read editorials and blog posts, and then drown in a sea of spite-filled ad hominem invective punctuated only occasionally by a sparse flotsam of sincere and insightful remarks in the comments that follow, if that’s your thing. We call this phenomenon “The Internet(s)”. By charging a nominal membership fee for the ability to post and comment, and thus giving participants some “skin in the game” — a small but significant stake in keeping the place civil — Ricochet has built a site and community without peer, where one’s time reading and having meaningful discussions can actually be well spent. What’s more, Ricochet provides the unique opportunity to engage in discussions with prominent great minds, and people of uniquely interesting perspectives and great wit — people such as Peter Robinson, Victor Davis Hanson, James Lileks, Rob Long, Claire Berlinski, Pat Sajak … the list goes on and on.

Friends, we’re going to need a gathering place like Ricochet more than ever in the coming years. If we give a damn, we can easily keep it going. Or, we can just let it go under on Inauguration Day, content to dream of the other, far better uses to which we can put the 8 cents a day we’ll each have saved. Our choice.

There’s a founders’ discussion of their fiscal sitution in the latest podcast episode.

Not Dead, Just Resting

Actually, I’ve been doing anything but resting, but this way I get to make a gratuitous parrot sketch reference. Sorry. Couldn’t resist.

As my IM status message has indicated persistently for months now, I’ve been “deeply immersed” in my startup venture, which has kept me away from blogging and will likely continue to do so through most of the summer. I miss writing, and there are topics constantly on my mind that I’m chomping at the bit to get to, but I have to prioritize getting a first revenue-generating product finished, polished, and shipped, as my ability to continue doing what I’m doing hinges on demonstrating to my board of directors (read: wife) that I can actually make a respectable income pursuing my pet pipe dream. (I’m also racing against the clock of another “project” we have in the pipe: Our second child is due to arrive in June (!), and I want to be ready to give that venture my full devotion!)

The great news work-wise: I’ve been having the time of my life, am incredibly excited about what I’m working on, and can’t wait for the world to see it. The opportunity to develop an app of my own design, that I myself would love to have and be able to use, has been a reward in itself. Each morning when I climb the stairs to The Office (read: the spare room where I have my workspace set up), coffee in hand, I get to enjoy the feeling and knowledge that I’m doing exactly what I want to be doing. For that, there is no substitute, and I am doing everything I can to make the most of it and ensure that I get to continue making great and useful things.

Part of the cost of the project is that it’s going to continue to be mostly quiet around here until I ship. I am really looking forward to beginning to write and post again as soon as I can, but until that becomes something I can start spending time on, I’ll mostly be limited to checking in and micro-posting on Twitter. So look for me there for now, but stay tuned: I’ll be back!

Just Being Myself

A minor announcement: After six years of blogging as “an unrepentant kulak”, I’ve switched to publishing under my real name.

It’s bothered me for a while now that others have taken far greater risks to secure the freedom and the thriving free society that I enjoy, and also has felt odd to me to “hide” behind a pseudonym to advocate for what are, or ought to be, fairly non-controversial, mainstream, foundational American principles. Now that I’ve gone solo in my work, and no longer have an employer to protect, I also feel a bit freer to drop the pseudonym, and I think with age I’ve also become more comfortable with being liked or disliked (or loved or reviled!) for who I am, and I’ve seen the need to do what we can for what matters most to us, in the time we have.

Not much more to say about it beyond that. As I wrote when I started this blog, I’ve endeavored to keep the discussion reasonable and refrain from writing anything that I didn’t feel comfortable standing by. Looking back on six years of work, I think I’ve lived up to that promise, and I intend to continue striving for the same goal.

I’ve written a bit about my former nom de plume, which people have occasionally asked about, at the bottom of my new Welcome page. In the accompanying site reorg., I also moved my blogroll and other sidebar links to their own page, which I expect will make them a lot easier to keep up to date. I hope visitors will take a look there now and again; there are some truly great blogs, sites, and podcasts listed. I’ve updated my Twitter and Ricochet profiles too.

That’s it for now.

Nothing more to see here.

To my online friends of many years: Nice to meet you. Again!

(Footnote: Because of the way I set up my blog template, all previous posts have been retroactively tagged with my new byline. Just FYI.)

Three Weeks of Being a Twit

Hard to believe it’s been nearly three weeks already since I started using Twitter (my first Twitter post is here)! I think I was pretty well hooked by Day 2, and now I don’t care to imagine life without Twitter.

Being able to read and post tweets on the go from my iPhone is what has really made it work, as life offers plenty of opportunities for a quick, 120-character-or-less note that aren’t conducive time-wise to writing substantial blog posts (which the entry method on the iPhone isn’t really well suited for anyway). I definitely engage with the “Twittersphere” much more via iPhone than via a web browser on the desktop/laptop. So far I’ve been using “Twitterific”, and it’s been great, though I’ve noticed there are a few other highly-rated iPhone Twitter clients that are probably worth a look. Twitterific’s ability to post pictures, current location coordinates (approximate in my case, since I have a first-gen iPhone), and URLs from Safari are very nifty, and have been lots of fun to use so far.

In terms of the Twitter community/experience, it’s been very interesting to see the variety of ways in which others use Twitter, and to start to figure out how I want to use it. The founding idea of posting occasional quick notes about “what you’re doing now” is appealing, and to some limited extent I’ve been sticking to that so far. Others have taken their use beyond that starting point, using Twitter more to chat with other users (or “Twits”, if you prefer), or as a short-form blog of sorts. Some individuals’ feeds consist mainly of links to news articles, and there are also news organizations such as the WSJ, CNN, and BBC that offer their headlines and story links in Twitter form. I followed Instapundit via Twitter for a short while, but found that my previous habit of reading RSS/Atom feeds via NetNewsWire works much better for keeping up with Glenn’s stream and other blogs/news feeds. There have been other Twitter-isms to discover such as “#tcot”, the search hashtag for Top Conservatives on Twitter. I haven’t yet figured out whether or how deeply I want to participate in that, but the #tcot list has already helped me find a number of interesting users to follow. So far, I’ve mainly been inclined to follow people with similar interests who post more everyday “what I’m up to” tweets, or a combination of that and pointers to interesting news and such. I get a good dose of news and editorials already via the blogs and sites I follow, and find what I really enjoy in Twitter is the opportunity to see what others like me do or find interesting in their day-to-day lives. There are plenty of other potential uses inherent in the Twitter format though, and maybe I will find myself making more use of them as time goes by.

Meanwhile: You can continue to find me here at fearlessdream.blogspot.com, as well as on Twitter at twitter.com/kulak76 See you all out there!

Tied Up Like a Christmas Present

Between pre-holiday work deadlines and the characteristic frenzy of activities (some authentically delightful, others perhaps less so) that makes the holidays so great, it’s likely to continue to be quiet here for at least another week. I very much look forward to posting more when I can; there’s a lot that I still want to get around to writing about. Meanwhile, you can find me on Twitter, where I hope to continue to manage at least a few potentially interesting thoughts a day.

Happy Holidays, all, and thanks for stopping by!

On Twitter as "kulak76"

A bit late to the party, perhaps, but I’ve created a Twitter account. My feed, for any who may be interested in taking a peek or following it, is at http://twitter.com/kulak76

I’m thinking I’ll give Twitter a serious try for at least a good month or so — posting at least one “tweet” a day (if not a few more) about what I’m up to or what’s on my mind as I go about the business of life. I’ll continue blogging here as usual when I find the time and inclination to point out interesting articles, or to write more substantive stuff, but I’m intrigued by the idea of supplementing blogging with a more immediate way to toss out casual thoughts, and maybe even (with any luck?) connect more effectively with others who have similar interests.

My blog-reading habit, together with the occasional posting I do here, has provided a priceless gateway to deeper thinking about issues that weigh on my mind, as well as a certain much-appreciated sense of loose-knit community and just plain “not-alone-ness”, in discovering that there are others who share similar feelings and concerns. I’d hate to have to life life without a place to write about such things, or without my periodic visits to the neighborhoods of the blogosphere that I frequent. But even during times when I’m keeping up relatively well with all of that, I feel a remaining distance at the end of the day between me and others of my kind. Can tweeting help close that gap a bit? It will be interesting to see. I imagine much will depend on finding some intersection between the Twitter-sphere and people I’ve started to get to know in glorious Blog-ville (since blithering alone into a vacuum can only hold its interest for so long — even for me), and/or discovering other interesting feeds to follow.

One intriguing aspect of the Twitter format is that gathering together a group of people who follow one another’s Twitter feeds is a bit like creating a long-lived, slow-motion/casual-turnaround chatroom of sorts. The participants don’t all have to be online at the same time, which could otherwise present a problem for those in different time zones (the reason I’ve been such a stranger at The Chase Lounge, though I don’t mean to be). You can show up now and again, catch up on what others are up to, post, and either stay logged in for a bit of back-and-forth if others are online at the same time, or come back later without missing the conversation.

Anyhow … all the above is probably way too much thinking for something meant to be fun and casual. Consider this an invitation to follow my Twitter feed if the fancy strikes you.

Don’t have a Twitter account? Create one; they’re free! (No, I don’t work for Twitter, and I have no part whatsoever in the Vast Twitter Conspiracy, no matter what anyone tells you to the contrary. I have merely drunk the Kool Aid flavor of the month and found it satisfactory.)

Incidentally, I’ve been using the Iconfactory’s excellent “Twitterific” app on my iPhone to read and post, and am liking it greatly so far.

The free version does just about everything that the ad-free, theme-enhanced $9.99 version does, but I expect I’ll soon move up to being a paying customer if I continue to find Twitterific useful. One of its nifty features is a Javascript bookmarklet that sends the URL of any page you’re looking at in Safari to Twitterific for inclusion in a tweet. (Twitter then replaces it with a space-saving TinyURL.) Posting pictures is fully supported too (from your existing photo library, or taken on-the-fly). I’ve taken much advantage of both of these features already.

OK … ‘Nuff said. Everybody in the pool! (What’s that? I’m the last one to find the pool? Heh.)

Renovations Afoot!

As very nearly promised last August, I’ve decided to make a break with the standard Blogger stylesheet that I’ve been relying on for the past 3+ years and give this site a new design of its own. What you should see now, if all went reasonably well, is a tentative first iteration of the re-design.

In taking this makeover leap I’ve risked revealing the very humble, limited nature of my graphic design “skills”. It seemed worth venturing, though, as I’ve really wanted to try to give this space a unique look and feel appropriate to the spirit of its purpose: a place to illuminate and celebrate the ideas and culture — nay, Civilization — that move me and are dear to my heart. I expect to continue making adjustments as I attempt to converge on that desired feel, but hopefully this first version is most of the way there (and reasonably legible!).

In accounting for the image that I’ve chosen for the top of the page, I should clarify that I am not a pilot — just an appreciator of aircraft in all their wonderful variety, who nurses hopes of learning to fly those beautiful machines someday. (If and when I do, I will certainly write about the experience here.) As for the fair ladies of relative antiquity who grace the sidebar with their presence (I’ve added one more since the previous design), they are meant to embody the virtues of this free society that I love so dearly, and serve as a reminder that it must be both stridently defended and gently and wisely nurtured. I hope my choices of imagery succeed in conveying that this is a celebration.

Anyhow, enough meta-blogging for now… In short: Pardon our dust, thank you for your patience, and please resist the urge to adjust your V-HOLD. A few links and image references might not quite be working yet, but I’m working to find and fix the loose ends and get everything running smoothly again as soon as possible, in preparation for more on-topic blogging to come. Hope you’ll drop by again soon.

Regards,
The Management

Plans

I’ve got plans for this space, my friends. It’s likely to be a bit longer before hard evidence of that begins to appear on these pages, but I’ve been making gradual but real progress behind the scenes lately on gathering my years of accumulated ideas and notes together into a semi-organized basis from which to work, and I can feel my thoughts and motivation converging … “gel-ing” … synergizing even!

Prompted in part by a recent trip to New York, I’ve made a good start on finally writing an account of my own peripheral but deeply felt experience of September 11th, 2001, and plan to have a finished piece ready to post in time for the fast approaching seventh anniversary of that terrible, clear-skied day. I’ve also managed to extract from NetNewsWire the accumulated flagged web article and blog post links that constitute a virtual paper trail of much of the most noteworthy and relevant reading I’ve done in the years since — material from which I know I’ll want to draw, and to which I’ll want to refer readers, as I delve into various topics. Lastly, though of lesser priority, a site redesign may soon be in the works, so please don’t be alarmed if you come back one day to find that the proprietor has rearranged the familiar furniture. (I promise to keep the Comfy Chair.) Douglas Bowman’s Rounders 4 has served me well and faithfully these past three-plus years since my first post, but I think it may be time to strike out into new and uncharted territory, and try my hand at a creating a custom design of my own that can more closely suit the feel and spirit of the space I’ve wanted to create here.

Blog promises are a risky thing, I know full well, and are surely worth far less than the virtual paper they’re printed on. But on the flip side of that, the prospect of being humiliated by one’s own empty promises has a certain tendency to focus the mind. i.e. Risk acknowledged and deemed worth taking.

Hope to have more for you soon! Management out.

Pardon Our Dust

To accommodate an improvement in the way I write and submit my posts, I’ve had to republish all my old entries. I seem to have succeeded in doing so without causing those entries to appear as new in the blog’s Atom feed. But in cases where I didn’t get the necessary accompanying markup adjustments quite right, you may see some formatting oddities in archived posts — blockquotes with missing line breaks, paragraphs concatenated together, etc. — that I will hopefully notice and fix soon. (Blogger’s “Convert line breaks” setting is retroactive in its effect, so changing it for the benefit of my new posts requires me to adjust all the old ones to look right with the new setting.)

The expected payoff for all the trouble is a faster, easier process that I hope will lead me to do more writing and post here more often. (A-ha! I said it! I committed!)

So, per this post’s title and the usual signage convention, please “Pardon Our Dust” during renovations. We are improving our facilities to better serve you, our valued customers…

Thank You for your patience during this transition,
The Management

Back in the game?

Things finally having let up a bit in my work life, it looks like I may actually be able to set aside some time to start blogging here again. — I certainly hope so! After starting this project a little over a year ago, I've still got plenty of ideas queued up and ready to write about, and have been looking forward to getting back to it. I don't have a particular schedule in mind yet, but will try to start writing and posting again as I can find moments in which to do so. I've been enjoying lots of good reading and listening material lately, so may start with a bit of "linkblogging". Stay tuned!

I'm still around!

...and still unrepentant! :-)

I lost touch with the blogosphere during a holiday vacation week away from frequent Internet access, and have yet to catch up on reading my favorite blogs, much less posting here. (The accumulation of interesting stuff to read really does become a daunting virtual "pile" in short order!) But I do hope to pick this up and get the momentum going again before too long... Until I make the time to start writing substantive posts, I may slip into "linkblogging" and short-post mode for a little while...

Among other happy discoveries, I've been greatly enjoying the recently launched "Glenn and Helen Show" podcast, put together by Instapundit Glenn Reynolds and his wife Dr. Helen. I've been a big fan of Glenn's widely read (to say the least) blog, and he brings the same refreshingly level-headed and inquisitive approach to the podcasts that comes through in his prolific posting. The interesting topics and interviewees have been plentiful. Don't miss the lastest episode: another conferene-call interview with the ever-engaging, thought-provoking informative and irreverent Austin Bay and Jim Dunnigan. Available (free) via the iTunes Music Store, Yahoo, and wherever fine podcasts are aggregated...! Listen and enjoy!

This is harder than it looks

To any few readers I have who might be stopping by periodically to check for updates here: I thank you sincerely for your too-kind interest, and I apologize. I've been itching to write more, and have a few almost-finished drafts that have been circling in a holding pattern for far too long, but I haven't yet managed to figure out how to fit this project in as a regular part of my life and land them. It is quite simply beyond my miniscule intellect's comprehension to understand how blogopheric giants like Glenn Reynolds manage to succeed in their full-time day jobs, have time for family, and simultaneously write (or even “link-blog” with brief, insightful comments) so prolifically. My work life isn't even at its most intensely demanding right now, so I would think I should be able to fit an allowance for writing into my still-existent free time now if ever. No doubt part of the problem is that I'm just plain slow at this when I do manage to sit down and get to it — a situation that I can only hope will improve as I gain more experience as a writer. In the meantime, to any who may be reading this, thank you for your patience! I hope to soon get the hang of what I'm attempting to do here and manage to produce some worthwhile prose on the burning issues that have motivated me to start this project. I'm going to try to put some time into finishing up one or two new posts today. Hope to see you again soon on the other side!

An Acknowledgement, as I get underway

OK. Today, I begin.

But first, a tip of the hat is in order. (I'm not actually given to wearing hats very often, but let's just set that minor detail aside for the moment and go with the metaphor, shall we?)

One of the blogs I've been frequently reading and enjoying since first encountering it last Spring is written by a trained therapist living in New England. Blogging anonymously under the pseudonym "neo-neocon", her goal has in part been to explore the process of her own political change in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, in an ongoing series titled "A Mind is a Difficult Thing to Change". Reading her insights and perspective, and occasionally participating in the discussions in the comments sections following her posts, has been a very helpful kind of therapy for me, as someone going through a very similar experience earlier in life and on the other side of the continent.

Neo's thoughtful work has helped motivate me to begin recounting my own story and exploring my own process of change and of coming to better understand myself. I've been grateful for the thought and effort she puts into her writing, which consistently comes across as being motivated by a sincere desire to better understand things, and I hope to follow her admirably level-headed example in that regard. (Hers is certainly a blog to which I'd refer any Democrat with a sincere interest in understanding what the heck happened to his or her wayward former compatriots.)

As a practical means of keeping momentum on the writing end (with the added benefit of hopefully not boring my readers too terribly) I expect to try to stick to the essentials and get through this bit of storytelling fairly quickly. There is plenty of stuff in the recent past and present that I want to blog about, and I hope to start making more time for that soon. So if I can manage it, I'm going to do my level best to suppress any perfectionistic tendencies that might become an undue hindrance, and try to treat this more like writing a series of e-mail messages -- which, for whatever reason, don't seem to take as long to compose. Better to post something rather than to wait indefinitely for the right turn of phrase to come to mind, or to be sure that every last detail is in place.

The above said, I do feel the need to start this blog by establishing some basic context: Who am I, and what's motivated me to begin this project? In my most recent post, I wrote:

Discovering that I am more different from those around me than I had realized, in my way of seeing and thinking, has prompted me to try to understand the essential reasons for and origins of those differences. Is there just a different set of axioms wired into my way of perceiving, analyzing, and responding to the world? How did I acquire them? What makes me “me”?

As I get underway, these are the some of the questions I'll be setting out to explore.

I've been told that I have changed over the past several years. Have I in fact changed in my views? Have the Democratic party and "liberalism" with which I once decidedly identified changed? Have I grown to become more aware of and to more clearly understand the foundational differences between my own beliefs and the philosophy of contemporary liberalism in the U.S.? To some extent, each of these things has happened. And while the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and their aftermath have certainly been a catalyst for my own change and reexamination of my thinking, the story goes back farther than that and there's much more to it.

My first piece in the series is coming together. If I don't quite manage to finish it today, I hope to get it posted sometime in the coming week for sure. Stay tuned and thanks for visiting!

Getting Started (The Tyranny of Beginnings)

Having amply, if unintentionally, demonstrated what I meant by “weeks at a time,” I suppose I can consider it OK to get this project rolling now. I'm working on it, folks. The trouble is, I've been accumulating so many ideas I want to write about that figuring out just where and how to begin is turning out to be a big challenge. Combined with the need to make time to sit and write at reasonably regular intervals, the experience is giving me a whole new degree of respect for those who manage to make this look so easy.

I've been thinking a lot about what I want to say and the points I want to cover, jotting down thoughts here and there and composing fragments of future posts as they come to me in seemingly random order. I think throughout my life this has just been the way that the process of writing has worked for me. Occasionally, I've had the experience of writing something straight through from begining to end without looking back, and being reasonably satisfied with the end result. More often, though, I'll start at some random point in the middle (wherever my mind seems inclined to focus first) and build the thing up, adding fragments as they come to mind, and finally arranging them in sequence and linking them together until I have a coherent end result with a natural flow of thought to it.

At this stage the pieces are starting to come together, but not necessarily in sequential order, so it's going to take a bit more time before I can start to roll the first finished pieces off the assembly line. I assure you though, my mind is still on this, and I'm working on it when I can.

It's been an interesting exercise thinking back to earlier parts of my life and revisiting the path by which I became the person I am today, while attempting to distill from that the set of experiences that seem to have been most important in shaping the way I see and think. Discovering that I am more different from those around me than I had realized, in my way of seeing and thinking, has prompted me to try to understand the essential reasons for and origins of those differences. Is there just a different set of axioms wired into my way of perceiving, analyzing, and responding to the world? How did I acquire them? What makes me “me”?

As I get underway, these are the some of the questions I'll be setting out to explore. Stay tuned. I hope to have more in the coming weeks.

On Approach

A few things that I didn't manage to work into my first post:

I expect that my frequency-of-posting style in this blog will be to take whatever time I need to carefully consider and try to clearly articulate each set of ideas that I set out to cover, and therefore to post less frequently than many other bloggers do. (Which is not to imply that other bloggers don't think things through; I just suspect it will take me longer to approach such quality of work as I've had the pleasure of enjoying from others!) So if I end up being quiet for weeks at a time, don't despair or assume that I've given up. I'll make it clear when I consider this project finished, if that ever happens.

I'm writing under a pseudonym here to keep work and personal life separate, both for my own benefit and to protect my employer. It just seems like the smart thing to do these days, given how easy it is to Google up information and connect it to its source, and given how politically homogeneous the circles in which I currently work and socialize appear to be.

Irrespective of the free license to rant unaccountably that blogging anonymously provides, my intent is to try to keep the discussion here reasonable and say nothing that I wouldn't be willing to stand by. If I'm not sure about something, I'll say I'm not sure. I may at times feel the need to vent a bit when something really bothers me, but I'll make my best effort to take a good deep breath before doing so. Likewise, when I recommend or refer to other blogs, I'll try to stick to sites where reasoned discussion is the norm. I don't get much out of reading angry one-sided screeds, and it's not my style either.

Lastly, I hope it will become clear as I go on that, while I'm writing based on my own experience living in the United States, and feel a desire to express my love for the particular country and culture that have made my own life of freedom possible, I do not regard the love of freedom or the ability to adopt and live by its principles as being the exclusive purview of any particular nation or group of people. It is a universal concept to me, there for any who choose to strive for it. A high regard for the importance of freedom has certainly been a foundational and defining characteristic of American culture and governance, but of course we are a nation built by and of people from all over the globe, my own ancestors included among them. So to you, from wherever you may hail, if you feel this love of, this hunger for liberty too, then welcome, friend. I hope you will find comfort, inspiration, or something of value to you in these pages.

Hang in there folks. There's more coming, I promise.