Home
Patrick B. Yancey
2005-05-09 16:00
"home (hohm) n. 1. The place where one lives, esp. with one's family.
2. One's native land...
3. A house."
~ Oxford American Dictionary, Heald Colleges Ed., 1980
I am homeless in manifold ways. Though I have had residences to call my own, were any my true home? I try here to answer that question, in the order the dictionary so conveniently suggests above.
Honor
Patrick B. Yancey
2005-02-13 17:00
"Nobody can acquire honor by doing what is wrong."
--Thomas Jefferson
Economics
Patrick B. Yancey
2003-12-09 17:00
'Good Lord! What a lot of trouble to prove in political economy
that two and two make four; and if you succeed in doing so, people cry, "It is so clear that it is boring." Then they vote as if you had never proved anything at all.'
~ Bastiat, 'That Which is Seen and That Which is Not Seen'
Revolution II
Patrick B. Yancey
2003-11-02 17:00
'War is an applied science, with well-defined principle tested in history; analogous solutions may be found from ballista to H-bomb. But every revolution is a freak, a mutant, a monstrosity, its conditions never to be repeated and its operations carried out by amateurs and individualists.'
~ Robert Heinlein, 'If This Goes On''
I have felt compelled to expand upon the thoughts I expressed in '...
Revolution
Patrick B. Yancey
2003-10-28 17:00
'If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend,
I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.'
--E. M. Forster
Suffrage
Patrick B. Yancey
2003-10-20 16:00
I do not know when I first became convinced that the franchise was a 'right' I had little use for. All that I can say for certain is that, even when I believed in the mechanism of State, I never exercised it. To date I have been asked three times at Department of Restricting My Right to Move Freely (also known by its more pedestrian but less accurate name of the Department of Motor Vehicles)...
Bearing Arms
Patrick B. Yancey
2003-10-19 16:00
'' [F]or once, the Sharp's rifles and revolvers
were employed in a righteous cause. The tools were in the hands of one who could use them.' --Thoreau,
'A Plea for Captain John Brown'
Relationships
Patrick B. Yancey
2003-10-12 16:00
I have never had a successful relationship. The reasons have, in the past, seemed to me to be varied and complex, but recently, particularly since the dissolution of my last liaison, I have come to a much simpler view of the navigation of this particular minefield: Don't enter it.
"But," the reader says, "one must be in a relationship!" Why? To combat loneliness? To feel wanted...
Death
Patrick B. Yancey
2003-10-02 16:00
"Eheu fugaces labuntur anni."
("Alas, the fleeting years slip by.")
-Horace, Odes
Life as Me
Patrick B. Yancey
2003-09-28 16:00
"I should not talk so much about myself
if there were anybody else I knew as well."
-Thoreau, Walden
Anarchy
Patrick B. Yancey
2003-09-25 16:00
"[G] overnment never furthered
any enterprise, save by the alacrity with which it got out of its way."
-Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience"
Coversation
Patrick B. Yancey
2003-09-24 16:00
I despair, I fear, of ever communicating a thought to anyone who does not already agree with me. Is the point of discourse the sharing of reasoned, rational viewpoints, seasoned by experience and tempered with reflection, or is it the discussion of triviality, the weather, what Movie Star #35 is doing in his latest contrived vehicle, or what his tacked-on love interest is wearing in it? Why is...
Freedom
Patrick B. Yancey
2003-09-23 16:00
"What force has a multitude?
They can only force me who obey
a higher law than I."
-Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience"
I live in solitary confinement. What most, however, would consider the literal, prosaic interpretation of this concept is, happily, not my implication. I do not feel imprisoned, or deprived of any comfort or liberty I choose to enjoy, within the limits of expense and...
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