Introduction

So, the is the obligatory first post.  Of course it's obligatory - in order for there to be a blog, there must be posts, and one of them is bound to be the first.

Talking  doesn't come naturally to me.  I'm not an outgoing person.  It's not so much that I'm anti-social, as mostly a-social.  I just prefer to spend my time by myself or with my family, reading, watching movies, or playing games.

My communication skills also suffer because I don't generally think in words.  I think in ideas and concepts.  This makes learning and thinking about many different things easy.  It makes communicating knowledge and ideas rather difficult.  I have the concepts and ideas.  I lack the vocabulary and communications skills.  Thus, this blog is my attempt to improve my communications.  Oh, and please excuse the occasional typos.  My fingers can't keep up with my thoughts, and are getting more dyslexic and less precise as I get older.  And I grew up reading Agatha Christie mysteries, so I tend to use some British spellings.

I freely admit that I can't speak worth a lick.  Oh, I can talk just fine.  But I'm really not very good at it.  I have a particular form of aphasia where I have trouble with nouns in general, and proper names in particular.  It takes me weeks of constant contact to learn somebody's name, and if I don't interact with them for more than a month or so, I generally forget their name.  I get stuck in the middle of a sentence because I can't access the next word.  This has been going on for years, and is getting worse as I age.  She Who Must Be Obeyed (AKA my wife of over 25 years) understands when I am forced to talk around or describe the noun I'm trying to use.  She seldom laughs any more, although she does still smirk.  OK, I admit, it is funny sometimes.  ("Humor is pain for others." - Heinlein) 

The weird thing is that I seldom block on the same word twice.  It's like the word exists in memory, but the link to it is broken.  Once reestablished, the link works just fine again, and becomes stronger than it was before. The words I lose aren't even necessarily uncommon.  The ones my wife uses as examples of this phenomenon are "bank" and "cat."  Not exactly rocket science.

I politically identify a conservative American, but what I really am is an anti-communist.  Which, really, is what America is (was, should be) all about.  Communism (socialism, leftism, progressivism, etc, ad nauseum) is simply evil.  I see this as self evident.  I really can't understand how people seem blind to this.  Of course, I don't think they are.  I think the people who are in favor of the total control of people see themselves as members of the royal/ruling/master class, not as one of the peasants/proletariat/working class.  Communism is many things.  It's a religion - they have their holy documents, saints, mantras, and dogma.  It's a political theory - it's all about how to control people and things.  The one thing it's not is an economic theory.  Economics is the study of the interactions between supply and demand.  Communism doesn't concern itself with demand at all - it is solely concerned with supply.  Plus it works against human nature.  Not the control part - the will to power is part of human nature.   No, what communism gets wrong is the basic idea that people are ants or bees.  Interchangeable widgets with no free will, no ideas, no desires.  Their attempts to make men into widgets necessarily includes a lot of loss - around 100 million dead last century.  I don't think this is a good thing.  That makes me a reactionary conservative now.  The older term was counter-revolutionary.  Or just plain sane.  Differently sane, perhaps, but sane nonetheless.