The difference between “free speech” and speech without consequence.

Well, it is a new year in pretty much all of the world now, with even the Westernmost Americans bringing everything other than their political science into the year 2013.

Ah, Sydney, I have missed you so. But no matter how you try to push me away again, I am not leaving.

So, as I wrote that I would do in the last entry that I completed before I went quiet, I moved back to the place in Australia where I grew up. (This is a totally separate discussion, but do not ever call me Australian. I am autistic. If you do not understand the distinction, please go and read something else.) Western Sydney, or Central Western Sydney as the transit authority and its contractors are calling it nowadays, has always been a puzzle of contradictions. There are problems with it, some of them enormous, but the thing that has made me anxious to return to it since long before I began to experience serious respiration problems remains the same. As bad as it sometimes seems, it is often by a long road the best part of the “commonwealth” of Australia.

So, apparently Barack Obama is President again…

(Note: Following is an article I wrote during my time offline, maybe hours after the 2012 election results were announced. Barack Obama is a lot like other Democrat Presidents in that he continually alternates between giving me hope and utterly disappointing me. Regardless of which way you choose to look at it, however, the events of the last few months say that change on multiple levels is needed in political systems throughout the world.)

I have been off the real Internet (that is, without a permanent connection in the place where I rest my head) for a little while. But what I saw through web pages on a ‘phone both warmed my heart and reminded me of just how sick the world I am living in really is. There have been a few different news pieces that made me blink and say “what in the unholy fukk?”, but almost all of them filter back to American President Barack Obama winning a second term.