Occupation of Independence

 One of the things that is good about old age is that you are forced to confront the brutal truth that the universe doesn't revolve around your own ego, which in fact, will soon be gone.  Freed of that delusion, you can pay more attention to other people in the world.  Sometimes these people have remarkable and admirable qualities that deserve more notice and praise. For instance, my camping neighbor.  Normally I am resentful towards camping neighbors.  I dreaded the coming conversation with this oldster.  You know how it goes: endless, long-winded anecdotes, told with irrelevant details.  Sometimes a single anecdote can turn into a 10 minute soliloquy that bores the listener to death.  Then they forget many of the details and hold things up even more. But this guy had none of those faults.  He had many anecdotes that fit into the topic of conversation  -- and it did feel like a conversation because his story only lasted three sentences...

 It seems like every "fall back" season, when Daylight Time goes back to Standard Time , I am traveling near the junctions of Utah , Arizona , and Nevada .  What a mess that makes! I start off with Mountain Daylight Time , then Mountain Standard , then Arizona Time , and finally Pacific Standard .  The only thing I miss is Pacific Daylight . I hate resetting the clock in the van.  Various electronic devices in my trailer do not adjust themselves -- perhaps they would if I spent an hour wading through the Settings menu.  The phone is the only gadget that is adjusted automatically, but I have always wondered if it uses the Time at the celltower or the time at the phone's location. And my poor little dog.  When do I feed her?  She only cares about the Tummy Time Zone. Still, this area makes for a nice visit.  Yes St. George Utah now has the traffic of Las Vegas .  What a skill it is to allow yourself to visit a place that used to b e good, and...

 Has it finally come to this?  The Traitor-in-Chief in the White House calls MTG a "traitor", despite his ambassador to Israel, Huckabee , having had a meeting with a convicted spy and traitor, Jonathan Pollard . Is there no limit to how craven the US government can be towards Israel? Anyway,  Kim Iversen deserves to be praised for her recent video on this topic. Maybe it is time to plant FBI agents in the congregations of Protestant Evangelical churches , make Christian Zionists register as foreign agents, and keep them on electronic bracelets in the mean time. The Wall of Shame for American politicians

  Israel's war of extermination in Gaza has radicalized me.  It has made me openly contemptuous of anything connected with the old Canaanite storm god, Jahweh. (Or El , if you prefer.)  This bumped my You Tube algorithm towards the " Cold Reason " channel.  Typically they beat up on Christianity, probably because it is an easy and obvious target.  I would rather see them go after other religions, for a change.  And they finally did:  They savaged Buddhism recently. Buddhism usually gets a lot of good press, but does it really deserve it?  Perhaps it gets off too easily, just because it is a non-Abrahamic religion  and because the European and American audience wants to rebel against the religion of its parents. Buddhism likes to promise tranquillity, coming from the extinction of desire  and pulling away from the world.  But we will all be peaceful enough when we are dead, so why brag up Quiescence while we are still alive? In ...