Merry Christmas…

… from all of us at Rod’s Alter Ego.

For those of you not on the snail-mail recipient list of our annual and ever-so-tacky “Year In Review” newsletter – lucky for you!

For a limited time it is available here (0.5 MB pdf).

Best Wishes in the New Year to all of you.

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

So they say. Especially these two.

Shown here exhibiting no gumption to go for their morning run because morning hasn’t arrived yet. Maybe at 10:30 or so it will. I heard the newswoman remark that even today, winter solstice, expect the sun to set nine seconds earlier than yesterday. Ohh kay. So I’ll need to gather up my towel, the sun block, and the fold-able chaise lounge and leave the beach today at 3:41:09 instead of 3:41:18. Gotchya.

In reality, today I am housebound. Waiting for UPS to arrive to deliver the wine. Eighteen bottles I think. They demand an adult signature else it’s back on the big brown step van where it will get cold and bounce around for hours until finally it’s delivered back to the warehouse, scanned and scheduled for another try the following day. Failing that, they will leave a Post-It style admonishment on the front door: COME GET IT YOURSELF. And then add, somewhat passive-aggressively, Merry Christmas. Because it always happens this way. You wait and wait and wait, and then think, Okay, I can sneak out for an hour and run the dogs. Sure enough, you get back home and see a little yellow sticky on the front door: Sorry we missed you. Inevitably!

As if there were not enough triggers this time of year to point our mood toward the doldrums, the Packers had to go and lose their first game. So long 19 wins in a row. So long perfect season. I pity the Bears coming to Lambeau field to play Christmas night. My guess is the Cheeseheads are going to bring out some special kind of Whoopass for that game. Look out. And then we (yes, “we”, much to the chagrin of my sister who insists that since I no longer live in Wisconsin I have no business inviting myself into the collective “We”) will have locked up home field advantage throughout the playoffs. Meaning the road to the super bowl necessarily will go through the Frozen Tundra.

When The Collapse Comes

Worried that a police state in this country is imminent? Here are some rather sanguine tips for what you and your family and community should and should not do. Among them: Don’t be a foreigner; stay anonymous; don’t think it’s better “over there”; assess the basics; know some skills, and get prepared. I found the specific advice on “Why Texas” (the author lives in Austin) both surprising and informative (bold is the author’s emphasis, not mine):

If some enemy force was foolish enough to try to enter Texas, they would be obliterated by a mass of Texas farmers, ranchers, National Guardsmen, law enforcement officers and ex-military men who are all locked and loaded to the hilt. That’s where I feel safest, in the midst of the best-armed and most well-skilled riflemen in the country, most of which are upstanding, community-minded citizens who defend life and liberty. Texas is a fortress of determined men and women who will not, under any circumstances, willfully surrender their freedoms or their Bill of Rights.

Interestingly, Austin is also a progressive town with lots of raw foods, vegans, yoga studios and amazing artists. It’s a progressive, almost liberal town, surrounded by conservative country folks who ultimately serve as a safety buffer that protects the city of Austin itself. When SHTF time comes, you can bet all the unarmed Austin residents will be begging the rural cowboys to protect them from looters and armed gangs.

That’s why people who don’t own guns dial 911 — because they want men who DO own guns to arrive as quickly as possible and solve their problem.

Who’s the Whacko

Sometimes people mistake me for a Republican, never a Democrat. In fact I am neither. I derive my political attitude, largely Libertarian, from my moral attitude, which is more or less Objectivist (see Ayn Rand). By comparison to most I was a late comer to Objectivism. I didn’t arrive at my moral attitude from reading Rand. I was well into my thirties lounging on a beach in Hawaii when I first read the Virtue of Selfishness, and discovered there was a philosophical language around the attitude I already knew I possessed. I remember thinking: “That sounds a lot like me.”

All these years later you still see Rand exalted in the darnedest places. The comments there indicate not everyone agrees.

You hear all kinds of epithets lobbed at Democrats and Republicans. A special set is reserved for Libertarians, including, but not limited to, crackpot, whacko, or Utopian. Serious but more generous critics prefer terms like “unrealistic”. These people provide counter-arguments of variable quality why a nation cannot – and never could have – self-organize around the principle of rational self-interest, and apologize instead for the variable amount of coercion that is necessary, they say, to hold the polity together, to keep the dark side of self-interest from ruining freedom and liberty for all.

Problem is, once you grant a little coercion is necessary for X (where x=your favorite reason), then the camel’s nose is under the tent, and before long he’s all the way in. In less than one hundred years in our case. Before long you have politicians at the podium during a nationally televised debate unabashedly approving of making a supposed bad guy feel as though he is being drowned, if that’s what it takes to get important information. Or not. Either way, yes yes, by any means necessary, the AmericanPeople® must be kept safe.

Instead of expressions of outrage at the apologists for torture, we hear even more pressing concerns:

More important, Bachmann’s shoes clash with her clothes. Forgive us if this sounds harsh, but a female candidate cannot convey Commander-In-Chief readiness in backless sandals paired with an evening suit, just as a male candidate wouldn’t score points wearing a suit and tie with mandals. [Source]

In the meantime, the lone Libertarian on stage, the unelectable one, well-coiffed if that really matters, is rarely called on.

I’m quite sure it’s because he is unrealistic.

It’s About Opportunity


Source

If true, then the Occupiers should allocate their protest proportionally, and camp out at hospitals and clinics, colleges and universities, too. This is where ~20% of the 1% hoarding their ill-gotten booty work. People looking to provide encouragement and credibility to this movement have compared it to the seeds of the sixties civil rights movement, in the sense that the civil rights acts were the culmination of grass roots protests like this. The problem with that comparison is that one of the chief objections the Occupiers have is inequality of outcome, e.g. skewed distribution of wealth and income, not inequality of opportunity, which, arguably, is what the civil rights movement was about.

I know don’t know where the movement is headed or what eventually will come of it. I expect a few weeks of cold winter nights should weaken the resolve of many of them. On the other hand…

In an effort to do our part to spur the economy, we and friends bought tickets to the Rocky Horror Picture Show presentation at a local gay bar.

Certain of us got caught up in the interactive spirit of the evening and dressed a tad…well, let’s just say, “festive”.

iWonder

Dear Mr. Jobs, if you’re in-looking from the Other Side you see the outpouring of adulation for you. I have nothing to add or take from all that. While you were with us, on this side, I heard you were at times difficult to work with, and for. I never knew that about you. I didn’t pay much attention really. I’m a Windows user. Sorry. Nothing against you or your products; it was the people who fawned on Apple that often rubbed me the wrong way. I should know better than to associate the merit of products with the mindset of the people who use them. I do have a pod, though. Here’s myPod:

A replacement actually. A little worse for wear but it still works fine. Left my first one on board an Alaska Airlines flight from Minneapolis to Seattle. Filed a claim but I’m not hopeful for its return. Or my noise canceling headphones. Man, plugging those babies into myPOD and turning on “Shuffle” made the time fly by. Ha ha. Thank you for that. Nearly a thousand songs inside my shirt pocket, with room left for a pen and chewing gum. That really is cool. So is all your other iStuff. Your biographer said you regretted not having surgery when you were first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. A slow growing type he said, you were one of the lucky ones according to your doc. I don’t know, hard for me to think that getting any cancer makes you lucky, but it’s all relative I suppose. I don’t know what’s on the Other Side, or even if there is an Other Side. Save me a seat if you would.

One Is Enough

Rufus @ 11 years.

His “Radiance” is reluctant to post on this celebratory day, so ya’ll will have to endure my brief bemoanment of America’s game.

I wholeheartedly agree with Frank Deford, one is enough. Especially in baseball, where plays are separated by a yawning span of pitcher-catcher agreement, standing, leaning, bending, peeking (at the runner), crotch scratching (catcher), and then further pondering until, finally – throw the damn ball already! – the pitch. Then sometimes the batter won’t swing. Or worse, the pitch isn’t even thrown! – consider the balk. Copy paste, all over again. Is it any wonder drunkenness is rampant among the fans? When the moments of actual athleticism on the field, over the course of hours of otherwise mind-numbing nothingness, may be replayed in sixty seconds or less of real-time? And they make this spectacle of somnambulism the best of seven? Puh-leez.

I will never again mock synchronized swimming.