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For those of you who drink, whiskey, there is a brand -aside- from Jack Daniels which is any good. Something Union. I'd be more informative only I've had a considerable portion of it already. It's the company that makes UV Vodka, anyways.

The cherry whiskey is delicious. I approve.

Now to hunt down a honey flavoured whiskey. I like mead, or at least I like mead that doesn't taste like bee farts like most mead tastes like, so I'm hoping honey whiskey will be even better.

(And I've had cognac which tastes -precisely- like Gentleman Jack, but it was more expensive, so on that count, you should stick to the GJ.)

Intoxicated rambling over.

It's a rainy day
Can't go out and play
Don't let it bother your mind,
It'll go away.

Shine on, shine on
The sun shines on
Don't you worry `bout a thing
The sun shines on.

Darkness tonight,
Comes and eats the light -
Don't let it worry your head,
It'll be alright.

Shine on, shine on,
The sun shines on
Don't you worry `bout a thing
The sun shines on.

Winter comes in gray,
And it has arrived to stay -
Don't let it consume your warmth,
Spring won't long delay.

Shine on, shine on
The sun shines on
Don't you worry `bout a thing
The sun shines on.

Shine on, shine on
The sun shines on
Long after you've gone away
The sun shines on.

Shine on, shine on
The sun shines on
On your shallow hidden grave
The sun shines on.

Flecks of chaos pushing through the wake -
The edge of conscious, guarded thought;
It exists not for its own sake,
But for the lack of what is sought.

A rhythm without melody or beat,
An object without the definition of light;
It is what the eyes can't meet,
Blinded by the noise of mental flight.

Deliberately they set the blade,
With flush of wind it soon must fall -
No chance for the farewell bade,
Counting every chance it fails to stall.

It is death, this mindless muck -
Life too deliberate to deliberate -
Death delayed but by a touch of luck,
But delayed only - it will not abate.

They may sate it with a flow of blood,
From those whose blood will flow -
But they are they in whom life may bud,
And in their breasts will action grow.

Life lived in motion may flee at last -
The mind at absent rest may only fail;
The jungle may for now lay in the past,
But not far behind does it now trail.

Death shall catch they who intent screens -
Life not a product where chaos seeths.
Conscious motion, mind and means -
Are the air which existence breathes.

...happy Thanksgiving, to those of you in the States.

Not that such wishes are meaningful. Wishing somebody well doesn't make them well - that requires a personal commitment to self-improvement and personal happiness which is too much effort for a majority of people interested only in avoiding misery. If I'm going to wish I might as well wish for a pony. One which never poops and doesn't require constant attention and grooming.

I am selfish. Too selfish to drop a dollar in a beggar's cap, too selfish to care about the homeless on the street, too selfish to have any desire to help drug addicts come clean, too selfish to help a disadvantaged person live a normal life.

These are characteristics of a selfish person.

My selfishness runs deeper than that, however.

I am too selfish to want to rule the world, no matter the benefits it brings me - for I want my life to be mine and mine alone.

I am too selfish to lie - for I would not settle for being somebody other than me, for living a life besides the one I am living.

I am too selfish to steal - for I want to know that what is mine is mine by my own effort, built to my standards, by my virtue.

I am too selfish to hate - for my life and my time are too important for such nonsense.

I am too selfish to envy - again, because my life and my time are too valuable.

I am too selfish to be racist - because the money of a black man is as good as the money of a white man, because his effort is worth nothing less, because I want the best - regardless of what colour it takes.


I am too selfish to be anything less than the person I am - and too selfish, yes, to deal with people who do not live to my standards to any degree except the necessary. I am selfish - but because I am selfish, I will never break my moral code, because it is mine, and of exceedingly high quality. I will not stain my soul, so to speak, to save yours.

The men who drop the nuclear bombs will not be selfish people, for it is the realm of selflessness, of blind belief in something greater than yourself, which would grant them the moral authority to do so. Evil in its purest form is not the realm of the selfish, who value themselves - it is the exclusive domain of the selfless, who don't.

Greed in the hands of the selfish produces good - because they are not willing to contort their minds and their bodies to achieve their ends. I work for a living, I serve others, in the name of my greed - and we all profit. That is the virtue of selfishness. Given name, it is Capitalism.

Collectivism, in all its attendant forms, does not eliminate greed - it eliminates selfishness. It eliminates self. It eliminates responsibility, integrity, personality, and all of the attendant forms of selfishness - it doesn't eliminate needs, or desires, or any of the attendant forms of greed. Selflessness is the unnamed vice, known by its fruits, but unnamed by its deed.

...a brief summation of my opinions:

McCain will not be a continuation of Bush's most characteristic habit - that of failing entirely to veto anything whatseover. As his strongest point, he has a reputation for doing exactly what Bush has been failing to do for the past eight years, and opposing legislation which is loaded down with irrelevant crap.

Obama is actually the closer of the two to what we've had over the past eight years - he's proposing cutting one war, yes, but replacing it with another, and escalate the other war we're in. He's also unlikely to veto any increase in government spending or government power, given that he's a centralist. (Not centrist, centralist - someone who believes in concentrating government power, as opposed to a decentralist, who believes in spreading it out.)

Beyond that, the difference will be in what they propose; McCain is rather harsh to be a diplomat, but Obama has demonstrated incompetence at ad-hoc discussions/debate, so neither would do particularly well at unstructured diplomacy, and with structured, it comes down to who they hire. Obama will tend to propose leftist legislation, and, because it's a majority Democrat legislation right now, he'll have little difficulty pushing any legislation he desires through. McCain will tend to favour right legislation (Far right by European standards, but more centrist by US standards), which he'll have trouble getting passed unless it is widely regarded as good legislation.

Neither one will really have much of a substantive short-term impact on the world - they'll just take the credit or the blame for everything that happens, and the far-left and far-right will ignore everything that disagrees with their opinions.

McCain will probably have a better long-term impact, just because the vast majority of federal programs are complete failures and wastes of money (all of them in the long term, really...), and his oppositional status to the legislative body at present will let fewer of them through.

Voting libertarian, anyways, and expecting Obama to win. (And it doesn't matter what the popular vote is - that's not our governmental system, and the people don't elect the president, as hopefully everybody is now fully aware. Hopefully I won't have to put up with another four years of bitching about a "stolen" election, however.)

...sure has changed in the years it's been since I was over there, especially the Las Colinas area.

The little suburb of Dallas has grown up quite a bit.

Dallas isn't doing too badly, either - I would have expected it to stagnate a bit, as quickly as it has grown over the last thirty years, but there are seven new skyscrapers under construction in the downtown portion.

Much of the business flowing in is business which has left other parts of the country - heck, Dallas is pretty much the basin into which most of the expertise of the once-iron belt flowed into when that area collapsed.

I've been reading a few politicians and even fewer economists suggesting the Northeast will begin to recover soon, because it did the same thing back in the 80's and rebounded - but I strongly doubt it. Expenses there are just too high to justify moving a business into the area, and they've locked themselves into that situation with minimum wages and other guarantees of localized inflation. The old business justifications - being close to other businesses - are collapsing, both because the businesses just aren't centralized there anymore, and because the internet and telecommunications generally have eroded most of the penalties of distance.

If gas continues to go up at this point, I expect it to sever that bridge permanently - telecommuting, already rising in popularity, will become an employment benefit more popular than healthcare. And once THAT bridge is crossed, New York, and indeed much of the B2B-serving Northeast, will be dead to everyone outside the fashion and service industries.

And damn it's nice. When I hold doors open for strangers they thank me rather than passing through without so much as a sideways glance. And hell, strangers hold open doors for me, as a matter of course, rather than an exceptional situation.

Oh, and there's an ECONOMY. Things have changed since I left, like installing these damned Canadian yellow turn lights. (Okay, they're not really Canadian, probably, but that's the only other place I've seen them.) New buildings have been constructed - there's an economy! I believe the new Sam's Club which was being constructed in Newington, CT is almost done, now, after a year, and a Walgreen's opened, and the Lowe's is almost ready to start being worked on after a year in what I assume was court, and then there was a CVS that had opened. That's the area in Connecticut I was living. And that was the sum total of economic development in that part of Connecticut over the course of a year. Whereas I've seen four new commercial buildings here in Tyler in the past week built since Easter, just driving to destinations, and that without looking - including a Taco Bueno, a tropical food store, and two others. There was also a new iron foundry or something in Dallas I noticed while driving around there. Awesomeness.

What chemical property do green beans possess, that when mixed with an otherwise perfectly satisfactory combination of carrots, balsamic vinegar, and salmon, turn it into a massive pile of extremely messy foam in a steamer?

[Edit]: It still turned out delicious.

I'm American, in that specific sense that people from Canada and Mexico scowl at. I'd be American even if I were born in Japan, however - because America is the only nation in the world which defines itself by an attitude rather than a border, by a philosophy rather than a race. If you want to help females, or if you want to help gay people, or if you want to help black people, or Mexican people, if you want to return to Cuba because that is your home - you aren't my kind of people. My kind of people define themselves by their philosophy, by their mind. They define others on the same terms, and judge them on those terms.

If you're majoring in "Women's Studies," or "Mexican Studies," or "African American Studies," it's unlikely I'll be able to rouse anything more than contempt for you.

If you define yourself by one of these characteristics - if you couldn't write an essay explaining who you are, without mentioning that you're female, that you're black, that you're Cuban - then it's unlikely I'll be able to rouse anything more than contempt for you.

I do not regard religion in this manner. Yes, there are many who treat religion as a hat to be worn, where discarding it changes nothing - but religion can also be philosophy. So, while I believe we should look past gender, race, and nationality - I don't believe we should look past religion. Religion is a matter of the mind, and is something one chooses, something which at least in part defines a person.