I'm an immigrant. I'll never be an American in the way that someone born, raised, educated here is an American. That's OK. There are pubs in Britain I know where you can have lived in the same locality for twenty years and you'll never be a 'local'. It seems to me that immigrants to a country have a perspective that the native-born will never, can never, possess. It may not be a more accurate perspective. It may not be a more detailed or comprehensive perspective. But it must, of necessit...

Happy birthday, America. And thank you.

I make no claims for this article beforehand. I don't claim that it's coherent or consistent, or that it's particularly well thought out. Given the chaotic nature of my thoughts on love, there's no reason why it should have any of the above-mentioned qualities. C'est la vie c'est la guerre. What is love? How do you love others? Can you, and should you if you can, love yourself? We say we love many things. We love our cars, our wives/husbands/children. We love our pets and our jobs. we s...

After fourteen days of unemployment I'm working again. Whereas I recently worked for D now I work for T. T is a large civil engineering company here in Richmond - the office I work in downtown is less than twelve minutes away on a route that has little traffic. I liked the office as soon as I got into it on Wednesday, when I attended the interview. It occupies three floors in a very large historic building downtown - but without being a part of the business area. The area the building occ...

Sometime in the late 1980s, after marrying for the first time, I returned to my local vocational college to once again mount an attempt to turn my life around. There had already been radical changes in my life. I had become a Christian. As a consequence of my first conversion I had met the woman who would subsequently become my first wife, married her, and we had set up home together. And as a consequence of marrying into that particular family I had become determined to gain a Degree. Jenny'...

What is happiness? Does anyone deserve to be happy? Can happiness be bought? What's the difference between happiness and misery? Does anyone deserve to be miserable? No one fully understands the life of another. No one can, merely on the basis of external appearance, judge whether another is truly happy or not. What is happiness? Is it found in external circumstance? For example, are the fabulously wealthy happy? Does the ability to buy whatever you want, whenever you want it, bring y...

Locamama posted an article here ( Link ) asking if God cares. Before my response to her she received a couple of others offering sympathy and encouragement. I answered her as bluntly as I could: no, God doesn't care. That's perhaps a little too blunt, left as it is. So here, as a primer for the puzzled and confused, is a more detailed explanation of my point of view. I've written on the topics of faith and theology many times, engaged in many discussions of those topics here on JU. My...

I posted this on the Gurdian's talkboards this morning, in response to an article about prejudice and fat. Read the article and comments here ( Link ). I'm posting it because Sabrina thought it was funny and wanted me to share... cannibalcritic Comment No. 472616 March 13 14:47 USA We all need something to hate. And there isn't much left, after the work of the PC-mongering wankers that generally (not universally, please note) make up the readership of the Guardian and its ilk. ...

( Link ) This is a link to the image that currently graces my desktop at home (image insertion seems not to be working right now). And this is a link to the website of the creator of that image: ( Link ) You should look at his stuff, it provokes thought and that in itself, in this dumbed-down age of complacent fear and self-satisfied hysteria, is a dangerous act, almost a revolutionary act. The greatest threat to any State is not an armed populace. It's an armed populace that think...

I had occasion to go to the dentist recently, and while there I found myself confronted by what can only be described as child porn, laid out along with Red Book, and Woman's Weekly, and all the other innocuous crap you find in doctors and dentists offices. This pornographic publication is called Just Seventeen, or something like that, and its supposed audience is that of teenage girls between the ages of seventeen and nineteen. Apparently every teenage girl in America between those ages i...

Link Below is the text of a comment I posted in response to the linked blog entry on CiF, addressed to the blogger (follow the link to see what CiF is). Wucker - What part of the word 'illegal' do you not understand? Il or legal? I'm a legal permanent resident of the USA. It's cost four years of dealing with bureaucrats and the better part of $10,000. It's a complicated, expensive, slow-moving process that will have taken seven years by the time I become a citize...

Everyone in JU (at least, those who have been here awhile) knows little whip. Everyone. And everyone who knows her in JU has an opinion about her, whether 'good' or 'bad'. She has her favorite victims, her good JU buddies, and the rest to amuse her, the vast sea of anonymous, mediocre, second-rate bloggers whom everyone ignores. And all who have, in any way, encountered her have an opinion about her. Allow me to tell you the truth. The very worst you can imagine of her, the cruellest and ...

I watch those TV shows about wine, occasionally. I watch them because I take a perverse pleasure in how much I hate the wine-babble of the people involved in them. I felt the same way about cigar aficionados - until tonight. Wine-speak I still despise, but no longer praises sung to the divine Cigar. My wife, bless her black little heart and her chromed-steel eyes, likes to give - and not just on Christmas Day. All this month she's been presenting me with presents because for her Christmas ...

Communism, as everyone knows, is dead. Except in Cuba and certain parts of Latin America. And if it isn't dead in those parts of the world it certainly ought to be - because, as everyone also knows, Communism is a delusion on a par with the contention that the earth is actually flat. Communism as practiced in the old Soviet Union was not the Communism theorized by Marx. 'Communism' in the Soviet Union was simply centralized control over the economy, bound up with the cult of the personalit...

I hate work. I hate it with a passion. Like the title says, the only thing I hate more is unemployment. It's a European thing generally, but it's also and particularly an English thing. One of the most alien (to me) attitudes I've encountered since arriving here is the American attitude to work. Any good working-class Englishman (which is what I am at the marrow - working-class and proud of it) will tell you that employers per se are the enemy of the worker. In part this attitude has ...