1. This month marks the six-year anniversary of A Mild Voice of Reason.
2. I’ve installed the Disqus system for comment management on this blog. The tool will allow my visitors to leave comments using logins from Disqus, Yahoo, Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. No personally identifiable information about any user is ever recorded or tracked by this site.
3. February has been absolutely insane with contract work. Not only do I have a better-than-average chance of winning a four-figure contract with a local private client, but I’ve got $1,500 in open A/R with a national client for performing some fascinating special-project assignments. It’s nice having so much paid work that I don’t have time to do unpaid work. Not bad for a part-timer.
4. Travel: It’s not just an adventure, it’s … OK, it’s an adventure. I’m planning on a June trip to Las Vegas to celebrate All Things Tony, then it looks like a GO to visit Italy in July for a tourist event with the St. Anthony choir. THEN, I’m apparently supposed to be in San Diego in August to attend this year’s Joint Statistical Meetings — I may or may not be chairing an SRMS session.
5. Nerd alert! Last week I installed CM9 alpha 0.6 on my Touchpad. In plainer English: My HP Touchpad, acquired last year under firesale pricing, now dual-boots into the native webOS and CyanogenMod’s CM9 work-in-process release of Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich.” I’ve been running ICS almost exclusively for a week and love it compared to Android 2.x. There are a few bugs, but none that substantially affect me — CM9 0.6 doesn’t yet feature a working microphone or camera, but I use neither. Otherwise, it’s been remarkably stable and eminently usable. And the Feedly RSS reader is almost orgasmic in its elegance. That said, of all the mobile platforms, I’m still wildly in love with Windows Phone 7. I’ve used my WP7 phone since last September and have no complaints about the OS (only about companies that haven’t yet seen the wisdom of releasing a WP7 app). Unlike Blackberry and Android, which I loved for about three weeks until the platforms gave me reasons to kvetch, I don’t have any substantive qualms about WP7 and I’m excited as hell for the consumer beta of Windows 8 coming out in 10 days.
6. Interesting news on the cigar front. First, on Wednesday Alaric and I went to Tony’s office in Lansing for a quick podcast followed by a trip to The Corona in Okemos to enjoy cigars in the lounge. Tony brought a bottle of The Macallan 18-year single-malt Scotch whisky. I purchased a Joya de Nicaragua maduro corona — the most full-flavored cigar I’ve ever enjoyed. Second, I have discovered two new things about the Grand Rapids tobacconists. Not only is Tuttle’s under new ownership as of the beginning of the month (the new owner introduced himself — nice fellow), but it seems that Buffalo Tobacco will soon open its own smoking lounge. On both counts, can I have a “hallelujah!?”
7. Last Saturday I hosted a dinner party. Jon and Emilie came over from Novi and Tony and Jen came from Lansing. I prepared Pacific salmon fillets crusted with red pepper and pine nuts and steamed some reasonably fresh asparagus. The “salad” course was slow-cooked pasta jambalaya using some fabulous andouille sausage I picked up from Russo’s (and browned in olive oil); dessert was a chocolate-and-hazelnut cheesecake, also from Russo’s. I even offered a carefully planned appetizer platter — four different types of cheese, each selected to pair with the bottle of Sangiovese I picked up. We enjoyed conversation and appetizers and wine in the living room — with a nice fire, to boot — as soft Bach played. After dinner, we played a party game and knocked off a respectable number of additional bottles of wine. The evening’s festivities capped off the next morning with a group brunch at The Spinnaker.
8. Sadness: I did buy an $80 bottle of port — casked in 1984, bottled in 1988, and aging ever since. Yet apparently the cork didn’t like this; much of it disintegrated into the bottle. I did strain some of the precious liquid into my decanter, but still.
9. Elsewhere on the social front, I’m planning to have lunch and do some writing tomorrow with Duane. Last weekend, I had lunch with Charlie at The Winchester. Two weeks before that, I had a fabulous dinner with Stacie at The Green Well — highly recommended. It’s good to sit down with people for tasty food and tantalizing conversation. And let’s not forget the two writing events I attended this month. “The tentacles of love are like a bow metaphor” or something like that.
10. I finally managed to finish my desk. Or rather, I decided I’m finished. It’s now a lovely U-shaped wooden contraption bolted to a large bookcase. I’m not entirely thrilled with one part, but I blame myself for not adequately thinking through the way I cut and assembled one segment of the frame. Still, everything’s off the floor and the wires are hidden and everything’s stained and the surfaces are stable, so I consider it a moral victory.
11. I have the world’s most awesome landlord. Not only are he and his wife just a riot, but he’s very responsive — even to odd things. Last week, I noticed that I had a curious intermittent leak in the ceiling from my cigar room (the three-season porch). The fluid came directly from the kitchen sink area of the upstairs neighbor, and it was dark-colored and a bit greasy. I figured her J-trap came loose or something. But nope. It now appears that the fluid is raccoon urine, and the landlord is sparing no strategy — mothballs, live-bait traps, sealing the rafters – to fixing the problem. Yay me.

All for now. Ciao.

Slippery slopes aren’t inherently bad — at least, not in the non-technical sense of the phrase that most people understand. “Slippery slope” remains a loaded way of acknowledging that some arguments, primarily moral ones, almost never lead to a black-or-white conclusion; what’s “slippery” is the grey area between the moral poles. Gillikinism #1: “The rhetorical volume of one’s opinion is inversely proportional to the wisdom contained therein.” The more strident the claim to a moral absolute, or lack thereof, the less likely that the claimant understands his own argument.

But there’s a problem here.

Moral philosophy admits to several equally respectable approaches that nevertheless lead to different conclusions. A Kantian, for example, tends to favor duty over most other motivations and follows the universal maxims, like the Golden Rule, for dealing with others. Consequentialists care less about duty and more about creating the best long-term outcome for the greatest number, even if sometimes you have to crack a few eggs to get the omelet. Divine-command theorists — usually the ones who preach about God’s Will — use the Bible (or Koran) as a definitive rulebook, although it’s interesting to note in passing that relatively few ethicists accept non-religious imperatives (e.g., environmentalism or socialism or whatever) as valid sources of the “divine command” even though they should. Care ethicists strive to preserve the relationships of those involved in a dispute even if the final resolution gets creative. In all, there are roughly a dozen major ethical paradigms, each of which has a high degree of internal coherence and each of which can lead to a very different answer based on the same set of inputs.

Given this diversity of ethical opinion, some people conclude that there’s no such thing as objective moral truth. As such, a genteel pluralism ought to reign; non-judgmentalism and a well-meaning but pervasive relativism become the putative hallmarks of enlightened thought.

It’s hard to escape the relativism trap, mostly because except for the other person employing genuinely atrocious logic, the only way you can successfully fight against the ethical judgment of another is to impose your own moral framework upon his moral framework. Forcing one man’s ethical standards on another smacks of imperialism, racism, sexism, heterosexualism or whatever -ism gets your goat. To the extent that we have “shared moral values,” we’re merely acknowledging the happy accident that most ethical paradigms share certain principles. But when those principles diverge, we retreat to our own private judgments and a good relativist will refrain from arguing with the judgments of others.

Except, of course, when they won’t; it’s a hallmark of contemporary relativism that what happens in the bedroom is privileged but other things, like disbelieving in anthropogenic global warming, warrants public castigation. Ideology often trumps ethics, and the language of the ethical becomes merely a convenient weapon in what is essentially an ideological battle. Indeed, because many people don’t follow an ethical paradigm with perfect fidelity, it’s not uncommon for people to deploy duty-based principles in one context, communitarian principles in another and even to rely on religious precepts for still other contexts. When people unconsciously pick-and-choose their ethical framework depending on the circumstances of the moment, outside influences like ideology have the chance to more strongly influence the final judgment.

Relativism fails us, though, in one major respect: If we concede that what’s ethically appropriate remains in the eye of the beholder, then we cannot draw a meaningful public line over what’s permissible and what isn’t.

Contemporary debate about marriage bears this failure out. For millennia, marriage was the legal and sexual union of one man and one woman. In the late 20th century, gay-rights activists began fighting for the law to recognize marriage as including same-sex pairs. Their argument was a moral one: “Marriage equality” is a right, and people who oppose the right are homophobic bigots. And no one wants to be a bigot, right? Yet when people pushed back, public discourse slowly grow to accept the pro-gay-marriage position while castigating those who opposed it as trying to impose their religious values on gays who didn’t accept them. Which was true. And it was also true that the activists were imposting their own values on those who didn’t accept them. Two-way street.

A good relativist would say, “Well, I’m not gay and I wouldn’t marry a (wo)man, but if others really love their partners, then who am I to judge?” (Unspoken cognate: “Well, I’m gay, but I recognize that marriage has had a stable definition over thousands of years so I’ll find a way to express my love using institutions that don’t conflict with majoritarian preferences until such time that the majority sees it the same way and the transition is uncontroversial.”)

When a person retreats to relativism as a default position within a moral dispute, what we really have is moral nihilism — the denial that there’s a shared moral understanding at all, or that some judgments are intrinsically more valuable than others. Nihilism doesn’t need to be explicit to be effective; to adopt the position that we each have our private morality and there cannot be an reconciliation or accommodation without someone being the “victim” is to deny that ethics as a concept remains viable.

When the choice is between relativism or absolutism, relativism usually wins. And by extension, then, nihilism wins as well.

In complicated ethical disputes, the real virtue lies not in asserting or withdrawing an ethical perspective, but in engaging with another to reconcile the discrepancies between their value systems. In short, the only way to avoid nihilism is to embrace the slippery slope — to accept the shades of grey, and to never retreat into a world where one’s core convictions lose their force to guide action in the world.

Just be sure to put on your crampons.

On a federal level, the nomination battles continue, although the Keystone Kops routine of these incessant televised debates benefits no one as strongly as Barack Obama. Where else can he get hundreds of hours of sound bites of various Republicans drawing blood from whoever will be the eventual nominee?

Depending on the day of the week, phase of the moon and polling outfit under contract, Mitt Romney is either the obvious front-runner or a distant second behind Newt Gingrich. Ron Paul, the Republican version of Crazy Uncle Lester, won’t go away no matter how plain the writing on the wall. Rick Santorum heckles from the wings, having performed well in Iowa but without any sort of dollars or infrastructure to perform well anywhere else in the country. Newt Gingrich seems to be in full-frontal Looney Tunes mode; one day he attacks, the next day he retracts, the day after he’s boldly reorganizing the floor plan of the House chamber to accommodate the new Congressmen from America’s pending lunar state.

Meanwhile, the pundits wage a battle for the soul of the conservative movement. Some — most prominently Erick Erickson of RedState — define conservatism as being whatever Mitt Romney’s not, irrespective of what Romney’s for. The Majarushie, Rush Limbaugh, seems almost as scattershot about the candidates as a Rick Perry debate answer. Mark Steyn is so consumed by the debt bomb that he may not have noticed that New Hampshire had a primary. George Will, Charles Krauthammer and Peggy Noonan speak as voices of reason, but in a season when National Review and The Weekly Standard are reviled as centrist organs of some nefarious “Republican Establishment,” it’s not clear that what passes for reason nowadays even deserves a voice — let alone three. Ask any two prominent public conservatives for an opinion and you’ll wind up with seven conflicting answers.

The real lesson here is that there’s a dangerously wide gulf between boots-on-the-ground activists (often, prominent bloggers) and elected officials. The former often insist on purity at all costs. The latter, frequently demonized as “establishment types,” worry more about electability and skill at governance even if you have to suck up a bad logroll at times. Conservatives used to grudgingly obey the WFB dictum that you support the most conservative candidate electable. Today, the rabid wing of the conservative movement values symbolic purity over substantive success. Look no further than the way groups like RedState and Heritage Action have targeted U.S. Rep. Fred Upton for extinction. Upton is a genuinely decent and honorable man (I met him several times while an officer in the College Republicans at Western Michigan University) who has assembled a solid career of center-right policy wins. But because he didn’t pinky swear to someone’s pledge or have a hissy fit about light bulbs, he’s persona non grata. Never mind that if Upton were to be successfully primaried, the seat would likely fall into the Democratic column. Kalamazoo and its environs aren’t exactly staunch Republican territory (MI-06 went +8 for Obama). But hey, apparently it’s better to purge the kulaks even if it kicks the GOP back into minority status.

Speaking of Michigan — Pete Hoekstra still appears to be the leading nominee to challenge Sen. Debbie Stabbenow, although the powers-that-be that usually meddle in state Republican politics have resurrected an old ally to oppose the Holland-area native. Why? Probably because Hoekstra, when he first won his seat in Congress, launched a surprise and successful primary challenge against an obviously corrupt but very well-connected Congressman, and that man’s allies still bear a grudge. Hoekstra would make an outstanding addition to the U.S. Senate — his even-handedness as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee remains particularly laudable.

“Tis the silly season of national politics. Everyone’s jockeying for influence, and the knives of partisanship slice with ruthless abandon. This year, the conservative movement seems fractured in ways I don’t recall in my lifetime. The basic problem remains the question of ideological purity, and the degree to which we’ll accept a strong and electable candidate (for any race, in any jurisdiction) in the face of a less-qualified but more ideologically driven competitor.

The stakes are high. Let’s hope that in the end, the GOP can rally around its troops and win the battle instead of fracking each other and leaving no one left to man the barricades against the Obama blitz.

I’ve noticed a similar trend with words like issue. Writers sometimes use this term as an all-purpose, no-fingers-pointed surrogate for more precise terms like problem or disagreement. It seems that computers don’t break anymore, they “have issues” — just like people coping with emotional difficulties are “dealing with issues.”

The meanings of many words fluctuate over time. Some words trend more specific; others become more general. Yet I cannot help but wonder sometimes if the general tendency in contemporary language is for everyone to speak like some sort of ESL student, using a conversational style not unlike the Roman copia verborum that flourished after the Silver Age of Latin literature. In the Roman Republic, sentences remained compact and speakers elected for a single precise term, even if the word were relatively rare. In the later Empire, especially as more and more non-native speakers started picking up Latin, the linguistic tendency was to use shorter, simpler words — requiring, therefore, more subordinate clauses and adjective phrases to convey meanings that could have been rendered with one well-picked but relatively rare word.

Is English undergoing a similar transformation? As the language settles as a lingua franca for international trade and as technologies like Internet-enabled messaging emphasize speed over style, it probably ought not shock anyone to see a sentence like “You can pre-heat your oven to 400 degrees in order to get it ready for baking your cookies” when “Heat your oven to 400 degrees before baking your cookies” is more concise. Yet how many would really see anything wrong with the first sentence? In fact, it’s not really wrong at all in any but the most pedantic analysis. Just inelegant. We’ve grown tolerant of simplistic prose, unnecessary over-use of the passive voice and sentences written with twice as many words as they require. Is this a good thing? A bad thing? Beats me.

But it’s an interesting question to think about sometimes.

If a real doomsday arrives, though, the results will be less kind. Picture it: Famine. War. Rape. Disease. Wanton murder. Illiteracy. Prostitution.

What might a future look like? What must stout-hearted people do to survive, if the prophecies of those pesky Mayans prove accurate?

Assume a total global catastrophe, like a horrific virus or nuclear event or solar flare that kills 95 percent of the population and eradicates effective government. In the first few days, the struggle is simply to survive the event itself — steering clear of infected people, seeking protection from radioactive fallout, etc. Long-distance communication may well cease; electricity and water probably would stop flowing and gasoline becomes worth its weight in gold. Families would try to connect and people would seek supplies necessary for their short-term survival, even if acquiring them meant looting and pillaging or even killing.

As reality sets in over the next few weeks, though, a few things would likely happen:

• The elderly and infirm would die.
• Small children would be at elevated risk, especially if their parents died.
• More and more aggressive, Type A folks would seek to dominate the supply chain around them, forming the nexus of small chieftains that would rule over areas not already divided along tribal lines.
• Society would fragment along ethnic/tribal/familial lines in areas where those traditions still carry weight. People would have to increasingly make tough choices to survive, in the “If you want bread, give me your 15-year-old daughter for the night” vein.

In the unfolding months and years, a pseudo-medieval system of the strong controlling the weak would prevail. Most durable resources like transport, weapons and tools become prized objects, typically looted from “before the fall.” Odds are likely that a patchwork of communities would arise across the world. In places where a strong local community exists — think Africa and the Middle East — existing authority structures may well endure. In places like Europe, North America, Russia and China, civilization would fragment along much more strongly Hobbesian lines; picture survivalists with guns offering protection in return for labor, obedience and access to nubile young girls.

But what happens a century later? What happens when the tools break and there’s nothing left to loot? What happens when the bullets and gasoline run out? What happens when the antibiotics and canned food are gone? When the doctors are all dead?

In the Middle Ages, Europe adapted to climate and disease with “more of the same” — a feudal, agrarian society may not have a lot of excess resources, but it could subsist in all but the most horrific of conditions. If modern-day North America collapsed, would enough people remain with the skills necessary to re-create even a feudal level of society? Would we regress from high-tech to agriculture to hunter-gatherer mode? And even if we did farm for a while, who among us could mine or smelt iron or even copper so that we could replace our tools as they wear out and break? Who has sufficient woodworking knowledge to build large structures or sailing vessels? What would happen to literacy? If top-down oppression became the dominant mode of small-unit political organization, how would cooperative villages with a healthy division of labor spring up?

Tough questions. The best a person could do in the early days after the apocalypse is simply survive. After that, all bets are off.

So what prompts this blog post? Merely this: Social fragmentation and happy-go-lucky utopianism remain the hallmark of today’s left-wing ideologies. When push comes to shove, and Occupy fetishists have the chance to live the “we are family” mode of Rousseau-inspired communitarianism, will a post-capitalist, post-apocalyptic world be happier and more free? Or will it look like Europe in the Dark Ages?

Think about what it would be like to survive the apocalypse. Think about what your ideology says about human nature. Then try to reconcile the cognitive dissonance.

So, my farewell to 2011 is largely without disdain, although the year did go out with something of a whimper: I went with Tony and Jen to the Laurel Manor NYE party in Livonia and didn’t acquit myself as professionally as I would have preferred. It was a somewhat fancy affair, with 500 or so attendees, many of whom were older folk in tuxedos and ball gowns but there were plenty of the younger crowd, too. Let it suffice that despite the good conversation and the salmon/filet dinner, I was insufficiently attentive to the nature and pace of the product flowing liberally from the premium open bar and ended up paying the price. I think part of it was that the bartenders were wildly inconsistent in how stiffly they poured the drinks — some were thin, some would shock a bear’s liver. Hard to pace yourself when you’re not acutely aware of what’s coming your way.

The last week of the year witnessed unheralded productivity. I’m not sure if it was the time off, or adding fish oil to my daily vitamin cocktail, or what, but my vacation saw me knock off more long-term goals from my to-do list than I’ve accomplished in the last two years combined. Among other things, I wrote a journal article, tweaked my various social-networking profiles, set my 2012 goals list, wrote a letter of inquiry to finish my master’s degree, pulled my annual credit reports, knocked off a bunch of around-the-house tasks, scheduled a long-delayed dental appointment, set up appropriate Mesh syncing for my files across my phone/netbook/PC, updated my freelancer profile with SPJ, reviewed my 403(b) investment allocations, blogged a fair amount and sketched out the drafts of four different books. Whew. And that was on top of holiday parties and a few other goals I accomplished too personal to mention in a public blog post.

So. I’m off to a good start. As part of my 2012 planning, which began in October (as usual), I’ve pulled forward my long-standing personal vision: “I aspire to be an elderly man who, upon his 70th birthday, can look himself in the mirror free of the sting of regret.” This vision will be realized in party through four major life goals and six core strategies:

Major Life Goals

• Begin the Great Loop by the time I turn 40.
• Complete a circumnavigation. Eat lunch in Antarctica.
• Finish at least one major thru-hike (PCT, CDT, AT).
• Write at least one fiction and one non-fiction book.

Core Strategies

• Reduce consumption.
• Cultivate serenity.
• Nurture relationships.
• Exhibit insatiable curiosity.
• Do fewer things, but do them well.
• Favor action over study.

In the master plan, I’ve got a series of almost 50 tasks between now and September 30 (and a handful extending until 2016). These tasks represent time-bound chunks of the various activities I need to do to make progress on my bucket-list goals. So, it’s good to have a plan of attack. Other major things I want to nail this year, at a lower grain than the bucket list, include (finally) running the Riverbank Run and G.R. Marathon, getting the prerequisites out of the way to begin divemaster training, return to the dojo in late winter, go skydiving this summer, and take a long weekend to backpack/hike in a national forest.

In other news … 2012 is looking interesting. I’ve planned out attendance a series of business-networking mixers to grow my company, and the prospect of playing in the new water park in Las Vegas in June provides great incentive to get back to my target weight (no one likes a shirtless muffin top). Tony and I are spending the weekend together in a few weeks to dedicate solely to joint business planning. I’ve already booked a client meeting for next week, and I’ve got a good handle on my tasks, calendar and bills for January. Yay.

I am looking forward to 2012, and I hope that my dear readers have a safe, happy, healthy and profitable year as well!

So far, so good. A nice little satire about the business world, yes?  How many enterprises start with some sort of asinine idea (say, build a mobile app that does something 37 other mobile apps already do, but differentiate by using “creatif misspellingz” in the app name), and then … profit! Somehow. Err … Umm. Yeah.

But funny thing about those underpants gnomes: Like all good satire, there’s a hidden truth behind the laugh track. In this case, I think the secret is that people are either really good at generating ideas, or at profiting off the ideas of others, but there aren’t that many people who are good at moving something from concept to execution.

Lately I’ve been on a “life as project management” kick (have to put that CPHQ certification to use at some point!). Having taken the week between the holidays as vacation, I’ve enjoyed the spare time to get caught up on a bunch of mundane things like laundry and cleaning – but I’ve also invested considerable effort into figuring out, relative to my goals list, how to get from idea to outcome with maximum efficiency.  Long-time blog readers know that I undertook the “idea” phase seriously in late 2007. Prior to that, I drifted in the wind. After that, I had a game plan, a series of goals and attitudes and bucket-list wishes that I intended to guide subsequent decision-making. And I even identified my personal version of the “profit” phase: Being content at what I saw, when I looked at myself and my life’s history on the morning of my 70th birthday.

But darned if I didn’t have a big red question mark in the middle.

Oh, sure. I had an idea that certain goals required certain things to occur in a defined sequence. One of my goals, for example, is to earn my divemaster certification. I am currently open-water certified. To get to divemaster, I’d need to get certified for advanced open water and rescue diving. Then log  a minimum of 40 dives to meet eligibility requirements for the divemaster program. But did I ever put those things on a calendar or in my budget?  The total cost of getting eligible to earn that divemaster c-card will probably run between $2,500 and $3,000, factoring in the cost of the two major large courses, the cost of air for dives, and all the equipment I’d need. (And don’t get me started on the professional training costs … I think it’s running more than $1,000 these days.)

Again: For a long time, there was just a big red question mark between “I want to be a divemaster” and “Yay, I’m a divemaster.”

And the story repeats for so many other parts of my bucket list. And the thing is, the items on my lifelong goal list aren’t even that unreasonable. The things I want to do in the short term are eminently doable. I’ve just spent so much time defining the concept and clarifying “what done looks like” that I never really said, “Hey, idiot. Are you actually going to make progress on any of these things, or just tweak your goal list year after year?”

So the last few days, I’ve been plotting the execution. I’ve looked at all of the things I want to accomplish in 2012, what the material costs are, what the reasonable timing may be, and then slotting everything on a monthly calendar. Much of it has been guided by a consistent project-management methodology: Identifying scopes and exclusions, setting key dates, budgeting, linking dependencies, noting potential constraints.

The great thing about this exercise is that it provides a sense of purpose, a feeling that one’s actions are leading to a significant conclusion even if any given tasks seem boring in the moment. It also helps to level-set expectations. If I want to get everything in the “Jason 2012″ project accomplished as planned, I’m looking at a total cash requirement of between $25,000 and $27,500 and a wrap-up date of September 30. I’ve separated everything into blocks, so that routine living expenses (food, utilities, rent, etc.) are wholly covered by my hospital income, so the costs of my goals require a totally separate source of funding. Like, you know, my business.

Having thus identified the financial resources, I can then back into what I’d need in terms of client development, projects, etc. Suddenly, that $25k doesn’t look so daunting. It’s just roughly $3k per month between now and September. Just $100 per day. I can do that.

And scheduling. Instead of saying, “I’d like to do X in 2012, or Y by 2020″ I’ve moved into breaking down complex goals into logical milestones and then scheduling those milestones for a specific month. So, with the divemaster goal — pick up essential diver gear (BCD, regulator, octo, gauge) in February; pick up wetsuit and remaining accessories in March; sign up for advanced training in April; schedule rescue diving training in June; log 40 total dives by Labor Day. At which point, I can enroll in the divemaster program and work through it in September.

And so on, and so on, for a dozen different goals. Heck, I’ve got one item on my task list with a due date in late 2016.

This planning carries within the seeds of implication, though. It means that every day, I need to be focused on the future. It means I need a defined set of tasks that I perform each day, and a mechanism for tracking detailed tasks on an ongoing basis. It means that coming home and thinking, “Hmm. I guess I’ll just veg out on the couch or play Star Wars: The Old Republic for hours” must become a thing of the past. Thanks to a subscription to Office365, I can use the power of Exchange and SharePoint and OneNote to keep all my devices in sync using the right tools for the job.

This story has a moral beyond public peacocking, though. To wit:

The first stage of self-actualization is thinking seriously about who you are and who you aspire to be, removing the pernicious influence of others and understanding the you that most of us keep hidden even from ourselves; done right, it takes months or years — not just an afternoon spent with a pot of coffee and a notebook. The second stage consists in identifying clear life goals — with a solid expectation of what it takes to say you’ve achieved them. Come back to them every few months for a year or so until you know in your heart as well as your head that you really want to make it happen. The third stage is moving from planning to execution, to put away excuses and endless tinkering and simply begin. The fourth stage is, having been successful, you mentor others in the art of success.

In short … we need to beat the underpants gnomes at their own game. A little project management for your life can help.

Perhaps the unseasonably mild weather contributes; without snow and bitter cold, it feels like late spring. Not like Christmas.

Perhaps the lack of a defined routine matters. In the past, the holiday season inaugurated with a giant feast at my grandparents’ house on Thanksgiving, then progressed through the solemnity of Advent, and culminated with a two-fer of a huge family get-together on Christmas Eve night at my grandparents, then Christmas morning at home.  With my grandfather enjoying his eternal reward and the other holidays skipping around a bit (or fixed but with fewer people), there’s not a lot of joy in it anymore.

Perhaps its a sense of impatience: with myself, with the world. It’s like I can hear the clock ticking but can’t do anything about it.

Perhaps it’s an overall frustration with a whole bunch of things right now. Mostly work-related. Plus the brakes on my truck are shot, which means driving is risky.

I don’t know.

I did have some fun. Dinner and cigars in Lansing with Tony and Jen was nice. The office potluck before Thanksgiving afforded the opportunity to try a new jambalaya recipe on the unsuspecting masses. My mom’s Thanksgiving meal was lovely, as was Christmas eve, and the weekend before Christmas offered a great opportunity to spend time with the family at my grandmother’s condo. I went to the 10 a.m. Mass of Christmas Day at the Cathedral of St. Andrew; the service was beautiful and I even got a bit emotional during the singing.

And the new year should be fun — a huge dinner and open bar at a hotel in Livonia to ring in the new year with Tony and Jen. Looking forward to that.

And this week, I’m off from the hospital. Yay. And I’m actually being astonishingly productive. (Said, as laundry is cycling and dishes are drying and my email is caught-up and my task list is refreshed … while I blog.)

But still. In terms of holiday seasons, this one doesn’t rank high on the memorableness chart.

The problem is that the Democrats, by and large, simply aren’t serious yet about the discontinuity between their policies and the health of the country; they either refuse to acknowledge, or fail to understand, the cliff up to which their entitlement programs have pushed the federal treasury. It was smart politics a century or even a generation ago to promise more Social Security, more Medicare, more union benefits. More, more, more. Yet it’s increasingly obvious that America has reached a point — brilliantly observed and meticulously calculated by the likes of National Review‘s Kevin Williamson and Mark Steyn — where the old rules simply don’t work anymore.

To be fair to the Democrats, it’s not exactly easy to pivot when your party’s playbook has transformed from a path of short-term electoral success to a program of long-term national suicide; witness the GOP struggle to define a coherent foreign policy in the aftermath of the Soviet dissolution. The wrenching change that accompanies a material shift in the country’s fortunes rarely ends well for ideologues who anchor their political edifice to yesterday’s reality — think, for example, of the unceremonious death of the Whig Party before the Civil War and the implosion of the Republicans during the early New Deal years. We can hold out hope that the Party of Jefferson will find a bold leader who will reorient the left toward a saner worldview. It’s possible … but then, so is failure.

Yet although there are hints that some Democrats have wisened to the new economic reality (think James Carville or Doug Schoen), the rank-and-file of the party seems caught in the cross hairs of a struggle between centrist-leaning New Democrats and hard-left Progressive Democrats. The failure of the so-called Supercommittee to find meaningful deficit reduction seems to boil down to one point: Republicans wanted to cut spending without increasing taxes. Democrats wanted to make wealthy people pay higher taxes so as to reduce the spending cuts to programs that they favor.

This leads to a curious impasse, with the Dems forging a curious end-run around it through the politics of group discreditation.

American history is replete with examples of scapegoating. When hard-working Protestants were priced out of the labor market in the nineteenth century, Irish Catholic immigrants bore the blame — and the wrath of government, through immigration restrictions and laws that made it harder for Catholics to integrate into mainstream society. When Detroit suffered the first massive wave of layoffs in the 1980s, people blamed Japan and Japanese. During the national paranoia after the Soviet bomb and Sputnik, the rump of U.S. communism was persecuted without mercy. In the 2000s, it became fashionable to blame Mexican illegals and NAFTA for “taking good jobs” from white Americans (despite that white Americans steadfastly refused to take those jobs). After Pearl Harbor, FDR ordered Japanese Americans rounded up and put in prison camps; after the Civil War, wounded Southern pride exacted its pound of flesh from freed blacks, setting up generations of segregation and lynchings.

And so on, and so on. Easier to blame than to reform.

America overcame institutional scapegoating largely though a deeper commitment to ensuring civil rights for all citizens. Anti-Catholic bias is mostly gone. Racism has largely been eradicated from government. Everyone’s Irish on St. Patrick’s Day. Although some problems remain — why does anyone care if a Mormon is elected president? And why is Mexican immigration still such a hot potato? — the default position in polite society remains one of neutrality and toleration of our differences.

Curious, then, that the response of the Most Elevated Disciples of Toleration, the Democratic left, seems to play the scapegoating game again with reckless abandon. Economy in the tank? Blame “millionaires and billionaires” who’ve gamed the system by speculating off of unsustainable bubbles that left the working family’s 401(k) plans empty. Can’t find a job? Blame “large corporations” for sending jobs overseas. Cutting back on bloated local spending? It’s because “the rich” aren’t paying their “fair share.”

Is there any problem in today’s America that doesn’t spring from the wealthy? One would think the rhetoric of socking it to the Rich Parasite would have fallen away after Auschwitz and Treblinka and Birkenau, but apparently it’s still okay as long as you substitute “millionaires and billionaires” for “Jews.”

Blame substitutes for reform, because reform would make the Democrats face the unpleasant reality that a not-insubstantial share of today’s economic crisis results from generations of DNC-sanctioned policy preferences. Easier ignore the facts and point fingers than to accept responsibility for giving birth to Leviathan.

Housing bubble? Look at the irrational federal expansion of the Community Reinvestment Act that mandated banks to make housing loans based on sociopolitical rather than economic factors. Death of heavy industry? Most of this comes from generous union contracts, making domestic labor significantly more costly than foreign labor. Infrastructure decay? It costs much more in time and regulatory compliance just to get an clean environmental impact statement — making such projects unattractive and inherently risky. Medicare at risk? The doc fix doesn’t help, leaving fewer and fewer providers willing to pick up federally insured patients.

America has a lot of problems. Insufficient taxation of the wealthy isn’t among them. Consider:

• For tax year 2009, the top 1 percent of wage earners paid 36.7 percent of all federal income taxes. The top 10 percent of wage earners — those with a federal adjusted gross income of just $112k or higher — paid 70.5 percent of all federal income taxes. By comparison, the bottom 50 percent of wage earners paid 2.3 percent of all federal income taxes.
• Taxing income at 50 percent for earners in the $1 million to $10 million category would raise enough revenue to reduce the deficit a mere 8 percent (and the debt, just 1 percent). Taxing at 100 percent for all people earning $10 million or more would generate a 12 percent deficit reduction and a 2 percent debt reduction. Guess what? That’s a drop in the bucket.

So. Even if we granted every progressive’s wet dream and taxed the wealthy at 100 percent levels, we won’t have enough revenue to solve America’s financial problems. Not even close.

Demonizing the wealthy isn’t about economics, it’s about politics. It’s about redirecting blame from bad policy to allegedly bad people. It’s easier to lambaste successful Americans for “not paying their fair share” — and why isn’t 70 percent of revenue among the top 10 percent of earners fair enough? — than it is to admit that a socioeconomic model based on wealth redistribution eventually proves unsustainable.

Conservatives need to fight back against this demonization of the successful by turning economic success into a civil right. Just as it’s not fair to scapegoat Jews or Catholics or blacks or gays or Mexicans for our problems, it’s also not fair to scapegoat the wealthy. The counter-argument must self-consciously adopt the language of civil rights activism if it’ll stick against Democrats who relish class warfare as much as children relish candy.

The rich didn’t make America’s economic problems; bad policy did. If we want to play the blame game, lets start with generations of politicians, Democrat and Republican alike, who treated America’s wallet like a no-limit credit card with a bill date of February 30. And instead of merely pointing fingers, let’s put in place policies that promote economic growth and reduce the influence of burdensome regulations pushing down on small businesses across the fruited plain.

America faces a difficult economic future. Present spending is unsustainable and no amount of tax increases will fix it. The only solution comes from significant spending restraint and entitlement reform. If we continue to let the Democrats blame the wealthy, we will turn these important reforms into an unnecessarily ideological hot potato that means we’ll see ruthless ideological warfare in the back seat as Uncle Sam drives off the cliff.

The unhappy ending is avoidable. The question is — will we stop the unnecessary and distracting class warfare and actually address the problem, or will we let envious scapegoating continue to block meaningful reform?

Perhaps a bit of good old-fashioned civil rights talk can help the body politic get the scapegoat off the altar long enough for our leaders to institute real and meaningful reform.

• Sawyer and Stephanopoulos did a good job at moderating. They tended to be warmer than other moderators, and less critical of the candidates. They seemed to view their job as being facilitators rather than dictators, being much less aggressive about timekeeping than, say, Scott Pelley was, and more celebratory of the human side of campaigning. Although Sawyer’s delivery tended to ramble a bit, the questions themselves were fair game and delivered in fair manner. The pair made for the best debate moderators I’ve seen yet this cycle.
• Maybe it was the more relaxed timekeeping, or that there were fewer candidates on stage (Cain backed out and Huntsman and Johnson weren’t present), but it seemed like the candidates had more time for crossfire and to express themselves in a reasonable amount of time. No one was really cut off the entire night. Everyone on stage had plenty of time to talk — no “Siberia” in the corners, as it were.
• Santorum performed well. His answers were generally good, and delivered strongly, although he felt too nervously earnest. Like the popular high school jock running for class president, and you know in 10 years he’ll be selling used cars and be overweight with three kids and a minivan. Unfair, I know. I just wish he seemed warmer and less uptight. He could try smiling and even crack a joke every now and then.
• Perry had a good night — he rarely stumbled and had some fairly decent answers, although it’s not clear he helped himself by appearing unable to count to three. He has a maddening habit of giving a cursory answer to the question presented to him and then using the rest of his time to answer someone else’s questions — the net effect is to suggest that he can’t answer on the fly and instead needs to think about what the last guy said and then try to one-up it.
• Romney was Romney — generally polished, with good answers and an easy grace. He took more of a beating than Gingrich (unfairly, I think, from Bachmann) but handled it OK. The ABC News commentators argued that Romneys’ “$10,000 bet” to Perry about the contents of Romney’s book hurt him in Iowa, because Iowans don’t bet $10k even on sure things. Not sure I believe that — it was a gimmick, but it pushed Perry on defense. I wasn’t a huge fan of Romney’s answer about Gingrich’s “Palestinians are an invented people” claim: The former governor seemed to suggest that the President of the United States needs the approval of the Prime Minister of Israel before opening his mouth about Middle East affairs, an absurd claim if ever there was one. Yes, Gingrich’s comment was ill-timed. But it wasn’t wrong, and to suggest publicly that making statements of that sort requires pre-clearance by the Israeli government transmits a sense of American weakness I think it’s best to avoid. Romney seems to defer to the side of caution. This may be admirable in a POTUS but as a candidate being blunt about being cautious sends the wrong signals.
• Gingrich was Gingrich. The Speaker did well, giving generally good answers. Sometimes he seemed a bit too impressed by his own cleverness, but again — Gingrich was Gingrich. He handled the marital-fidelity question with grace. Newt is a polished extemporaneous speaker. The ABC News commentators suggested that by this point, it’s Gingrich instead of Romney who’s the apparent nominee. I wouldn’t be upset by a Gingrich candidacy, but it’ll take a lot of discipline to get through the primaries then the general election, and Newt’s lack of discipline is … well, legendary.
• Paul remains the GOP’s irascible old curmudgeon of an uncle. He provides color, and a welcome diversity to the ideological spectrum on the stage, but his policy proscriptions are so off-kilter that it’s good for America he’s polling so poorly.
• Bachmann enjoyed a very strong night. She spoke frequently, and forcefully, on many issues. Although her performance was solid and likely helped her in Iowa, her bulldog-like attacks on Gingrich and Romney seemed contrived and desperate (and were successfully rebuffed by both men simultaneously heaping scorn on her for the comparison) and when she gets on a roll, her eyes glaze over and she doesn’t blink or shift her gaze. Minor point, but it kinda creeps me out. And she needs to stop worshipping Herman Cain.

In all, the debate left me heartened about the overall quality of the Republican field. Any of the people on stage — even Paul, and even the candidates who weren’t there — would make a far better president than the incumbent.

The current horse race puts it as a two-way competition between Romney and Gingrich. I’m OK with either candidate. I think Romney would perform better with independents in the general election, but Gingrich may inspire more conservatives to turn out. And although Obama is currently weak, the Democrat’s chances could improve, and the eventual GOP nominee may well suffer from self-inflicted danger.

The long series of debates had a real impact on the nomination process. Painful as it sometimes was, the system did its job of helping Republican voters better understand who their nominees really are. For that, and for the quality of Republican candidates in this cycle, every conservative ought to be relieved.