If someone asked you what your favorite emotion was, how do you think you’d answer? For many people, I suspect they would answer “Happiness”, “Joy'', or some variant of exclusively positive emotion. Someone may think more meticulously and answer with “Contentment”, which while a positive emotion has a lot of nuance attached to it. However my answer to that question is what I feel others would consider more orthodox: Bittersweet. Pleasure accompanied by suffering, not exactly most people’s first pick but from my perspective pain is necessary in order to enjoy the pleasure that life gives you. Perhaps I'm over-romanticizing but there’s something to desire from looking back fondly at times where you were hurting and seeing yourself in a better place in the present. Perhaps you finally have moved on from “The one who got away” and can look back on those times with fondness. Perhaps you are sharing stories of a friend or family member at their funeral and though they may never w
So now it’s Abaco. From the earliest days of Ayn Rand’s influence over the Libertarian Movement, frustrated activists have given up on their efforts to reform or revolt against the American State to seek the promised Gulch. In the early 1960’s, a group composed primarily of engineers and technologists worked on a plan to construct an island nation on a shallow land base of the North Sea. Preform agreed on a tiny, nominal government, a free port status which would thrive on free trade between Britain, Norway, and Denmark. Individuals who had been into education and political action (the LIBERAL INNOVATOR, leafletting the Cow Palace GOP convention) gave up and published PREFORM-INFORM backing the escapees. Then the British seized the pirate radio stations operating outside their territorial waters. Oil was discovered in the North Sea, and Britain, Denmark, and Norway promptly carved up the sea bed. The Preform crowd either Browned out or went into escapist trips such as bec