I need to start with an explanation. This site has become a big part of my life and my thoughts. I spend a lot of time thinking about and writing about ideas that I have.

But in early February, I came down with a significant bronchitis. As a result, for the last few months, I have been trying to get back on track.

I guess I owe myself a few hours a week bringing the work I’ve done into the website. There are pages of ideas that I have written about, and there will be lots of “My Thoughts.” I know—somehow I think people care what I think. There will also be changes that occur.

I’ve warned the reader that this is an ongoing project of ideas and other things.

So over the next few weeks, I will be adding to the website—and especially this page—the things that I worked on while I was struggling with figuring out how to breathe again.

This is not an excuse, but only an explanation for what might look like a backlog of content, as well as the jump in dates.

I spend a lot of time thinking about various ideas and things that people say. It leads me to try to figure out how the world works within the structure I understand—and how it works in general.

Especially how to understand it without accepting the factionalistic views of things.

So I focus on structure.

My experimental area is the rhetoric used in the world. I sometimes find it is used so loosely that I don’t always understand what it means.

My tools are the ALC NABB grammar I have been working on and developing.

Which leads me to What Must Not Be Done—and the following “My Thoughts.”

I am going to admit something a little embarrassing: I like to hear attorneys argue. In attorney language, their arguments tend to be fascinating. I can find a lot of these on social media.

I enjoy the way they have to frame their thoughts, especially when there are questions. Most of the time, these arguments remain rational—others, not so much—but the language is interesting.

As a result of listening to one such argument, I have been thinking.

I’ve been trying to sort out a few ideas that tend to get mixed together. And I am not so sure the way they are used makes a lot of sense to me. Because of the NABB, I try to stay focused on the structure, process, and rhetoric of things.

Not to argue for one position or another, but just to understand how they differ.

Which led to a Supreme Court case about rights. It’s a common argument there, believe it or not—and I suppose it should be.

It seems like the word “right” does a lot of work for us. That is, for people. And sometimes more than it should.

At a basic level, a right is something that should be protected. A right simply asks that others—especially government—not interfere. It sets a boundary. I call that a constraint.

A constraint is a hard line. A black letter. Something that may not be interfered with.

Gravity is a constraint. Ask any astronaut, any motorcycle rider, or a roofer. Don’t mess with gravity.

Freedom of speech is a good example. At its core, it doesn’t guarantee that anyone will listen, agree, or provide a platform. It simply means that speaking one’s mind is allowed—that it isn’t something that should be unnecessarily blocked, even if it’s annoying.

The Bill of Rights is full of these things. There are ten of them, and they all restrict the federal government—and by extension, state and local governments.

That makes rights different from other things we often talk about in the same way. I mean other things that I have heard called rights. I’ve found those uses… a little peculiar.

If something depends on resources, organization, or the actions of others, it seems to function differently. That doesn’t make it less important. It just means it belongs to a different category.

What I’m noticing is that when everything gets described as a “right,” those differences start to blur. And it becomes more difficult to understand what a right actually is.

And when that happens, it becomes harder to see where limits come from—or how systems actually work.

Rights, at least in this sense, don’t create things. They don’t provide outcomes. They draw lines.

They define what must not be done by authority or coercion.

Maybe that’s their role—to protect a space where agency can exist, without trying to define everything that happens within it.

Isn’t that cool? Thank you, James Madison and the other writers and thinkers who came up with this idea.

If that’s true, then it might help to be a little more careful about what we place inside that category.

Not because other things don’t matter.

But because they may need to be understood in a different way.