We remained at our encampment of this day until the morning of the 7th, when we descended ten miles lower down and encamped on a spot of ground where several thousand Indians had wintered during the past season.

I have been writing my blog for several years. Whenever I have written about pertinent subjects, no one has supported them. For instance, the stray dog menace. I cycle in the morning every day, and I am still scared of stray dog attacks.

A person who suffers from severe locomotor anxiety finds himself in an almost permanent state of mental tension. He wakes in the morning with the anxious expectation of having to go out somewhere in the course of the day.

Imagine you wake up one morning with a knock at the door, and when you answer, there's Denzel Washington announcing that he's going to be filming on your street for several weeks.

I grew up in an era of pretty severe poverty. My parents weathered the Great Depression, and money was always a very big concern. I was weaned on a shortage mentality and placed in foster homes largely because there simply wasn't enough money to take care of the most basic of needs.

My mom didn't believe in putting chemicals in hair. But when I got to college, we didn't have A/C in our dorms freshman year. So after several days of waking up looking like a Chia Pet, I was like 'OK, I'm gonna get a perm.' And then my hair revolted and fell out. I was over that quick, fast and in a hurry.

I've been fascinated with severe weather since I was four, when I saw a tornado at night in my mom and grandmother's southeast Minnesota hometown while everyone else was asleep - an experience I encoded in 'The Stormchasers.'

I believe this with all my heart: The greatest coach of all time in my eyes is my mom. She's instilled in me a toughness and a perseverance and just a never-quit mentality, and I thank her every day for providing me, for what she sacrificed her life for.

My mother told me on several different occasions that she was livin' her dream vicariously through me. She once said that I was getting' to do all the things that she would have wanted to have done.

The making of the far-famed New York Central Park was opposed by even good men, with misguided pluck, perseverance, and ingenuity, but straight right won its way, and now that park is appreciated. So we confidently believe it will be with our great national parks and forest reservations.

Since the dawn of time, traditional marriage - the union between one man and one woman - has been the building block of civilization, and at no point in our nation's history has that foundation been under more severe attack than now.

We didn't know that Mother had gone through a passionate love affair or that Father suffered from severe depression. Mother was preparing to break out of her marriage, Father threatening to take his own life.

Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained.

Football is like life - it requires perseverance, self-denial, hard work, sacrifice, dedication and respect for authority.

Access to our civil courts has been severely restricted by the combination of: the removal of legal aid from some cases based on their type, not their merit; a high financial threshold for the receipt of legal aid in other cases; and a failure to deliver a safety net for vulnerable individuals by the exceptional funding arrangements.

Authorities that erect major obstacles to migration - or place severe restrictions on migrants' work opportunities - inflict needless economic self-harm, as they impose barriers to having their labor needs met in an orderly, legal fashion. Worse still, they unintentionally encourage illegal migration.

This is sort of typical Hillary Clinton: to do things that are not legal, to say that they are, and then try to cover them up. Hillary Clinton severely chastised other whistleblowers for using Internet channels that were not secure, and yet she herself was doing that with private, high-level State Department information.

There's no legal protection for cyborgs. In 2010, I started the Cyborg Foundation to defend our rights. Cyborgs have been kicked out from several places because they are seen as a possible security threat. I've been kicked out from places such as Harrods, Casino Montecarlo, and many supermarkets.

The military tribunals currently underway at Guantanamo Bay create a clear legal process, as affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, for adjudicating the cases of these terrorists, when possible. Those efforts would be severely undercut by moving the detainees to the United States.

I sat down with a yellow legal pad and began writing 'A Time to Kill.' Had no idea what I was doing. It became, over a period of several years, a secret little hobby nobody knew about except my wife, because she was reading chapter by chapter.

I say the law should be blind to race, gender and sexual orientation, just as it claims to be blind to wealth and power. There should be no specially protected groups of any kind, except for children, the severely disabled and the elderly, whose physical frailty demands society's care.

Neurologically, I'm a quadriplegic, so virtually everything about my work has been driven by my learning disabilities, which are quite severe, and my lack of facial recognition, which I'm sure is what drove me to paint portraits in the first place.

Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.

I've been the co-chair of the Non-Partisan Women's Caucus and vice-chair for several years, taking a leadership role in this women's organization.