Out of Sight, Out Of Mind

It’s been nearly a month since I posted anything and there have been questions of both concern and my sanity in the mean time. That said, the day will come soon when I’ll be back to angering my ideological opponents by writing churlish diatribes about the next effort to strike liberty from our lives.

Besides the extra dose of dyspepsia that the capital markets have wrought on my fragile mental health there have been other doings as well. I have a dear friend, Dr. Brad Weeks, for whom I’ve been working rebuilding his web site. Being the lazy guy that I am I just put up Wordpress for him and massaged the template so it fits the criteria that he requires to post content. The “build” was the easy part but getting the good doctor to learn how to use the software has taken a couple hours a day for nearly three weeks now. It’s not that he doesn’t have the capacity but, like a great many people dedicated to a science, he really doesn’t want to learn the stuff inasmuch as he’s more interested in learning medicine. The technical issues are legion and he insists on cutting and pasting from his extensive library of MS Word docs – which contain so much superfluous code in them that they nearly always conflict with the style sheet protocols of Wordpress. But if you’re interested in alternative medicine his is a great site to learn things like the fact that a tablespoon of honey provides better efficacy than over-the-counter cough remedies that the FDA is now telling us we should keep out of our kids. Besides that, he’s a fellow libertarian.

Now, beset with the season of overindulgence, I have to make the candy that we give as gifts each year to friends. I actually love doing it but it’s time consuming and working with chocolate is a delicate and complicated process (perhaps more complicated for my little mind than for others. But my candy making skills have become legendary (at least in my mind) and friends border on rudeness suggesting they hope to receive some of the calorie laden booty created by these same hands that type words unfit for human consumption.

What I haven’t been doing is paying particularly close attention to politics. I think that’s good from time to time just so one can see the forest through the trees. The liberal wing of the Budge clan, my younger brother’s family, have determined that Ron Paul is their guy. It’s a phenomenon that makes me chuckle – not at them per se but at the whole lefty movement that is charging hard for Paul. Paul’s stance on the war seems to overshadow the fact that his libertarian policies would be deeply deleterious to programs and benefits that most on the left endorse. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with about 80% of what the guy has to offer and that, I think, is about the same percentage as anyone else I see in the race. The question is (being a member of the neo-libertarian movement) whether or not his goal to close all of the 171 military bases we have on foreign soil would endanger our liberties more than what a more measured goal might be. At the end of the day, however, he might get my vote simply out of protest by sending a my little minute message to the GOP that they have to start paying attention to the libertarian wing of conservative fusionism. It’s kind of like honking one’s horn at a parked train, I know, but there is just enough spiritualism in the act to provide a sense of false satisfaction. We get what we like one way or another – false or not.

Well, I’ll be back sooner or later. In the event that I don’t come back soon let me post an email I got from a friend yesterday:

To All My Democrat Friends:

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for
an environmentally conscious, socially responsible,
low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter
solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the
religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice,
with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions
of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular
traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally
fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the
generally accepted calendar year 2008, but not without due respect for
the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to
society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is
necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the
Western Hemisphere. Also, this wish is made without regard to the race,
creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference
of the wishee.

To My Republican Friends:

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Ditto.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 at 8:35 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.