Occupation of Independence

 Recall that I am a recovering armchair general, attempting to become an armchair media critic.  It has always been surprising how much talking there is on You Tube, and yet there are hardly any maps.  I have seen talking-heads give confusing and lengthy speeches about war-front geography -- please, shut up and show me a meaningful map! The maps that are shown do not even have labels on them.  If graphs are shown, their labels and legends are illegible. Perhaps the medium is the message.  Graphs and maps do not show well on the restricted real estate of a smartphone, but talking does.  Earlier I wrote about how bad many talking-heads are, at talking.  But there are people who are good at talking.  Other people would be wise to imitate them.  So this is a shout-out to one of those good talkers: 'Mr. Global,' on You Tube.  Seriously I love the way that guy talks! 

In preparation for a colonoscopy, they put you on a special diet to empty out your intestines.   It involves a lot of Gatorade, clear broth, and laxatives. I thought I would be hungry without solid food, but the broth was surprisingly satisfying.  I had never bought broth before, at the grocery store.  Why wasn't I buying broth all the time?  On top of everything else, broth doesn't need refrigeration when unopened.  A camper should like that. Putting leftovers into broth for more nutrition and taste is so easy.  That is how our frugal (and less obese) ancestors ate.  They used leftovers from the main meal in mid-day.  Remember that they didn't have good refrigeration in those days.  There is always something that needs to be used up, soon. My new evening meal. Just think: all my life I had been cleaning out skillets and pans during the mid-day meal by washing the residue down the sink, instead of saving it for evening soup.  A...

 Perhaps we got as much as 0.05" of rain the other day.  If that weren't miraculous enough, it stayed cloudy most of the day. The next day there was some dampness to the ground.  This is fantastic for a hiker or mountain biker.  The ground had turned from something uncomfortable and dead into something completely different, something with real hope.  But don't think I am telling tall tales: there weren't any mud puddles to slosh through. If life and hope aren't worth noticing and writing about, what is?  But how would you actually write about it?  Lavishing adjectives on it probably wouldn't work.  The long-suffering reader knows my stump speech by heart, by now.  But each new manifestation of it seems fresh to me because something that was dead and predictable is washed over by the surprising and the alive, like a wave of white sea foam onto a beach.  Before the smartphone, RVers still had daguerreotypes to capture the moment....

It is rare to get a punch in the gut when reading a history book.  But how would you react to this quote about the war between ancient Athens and Sparta, from Lewis Dartnell's "Origins, How the Earth's History Shaped Human History"?  It was written  7 years before Trump-anyahu's War Against Iran : "Ultimately it was Athens' dependence on grain imported along the sea lanes from the Black Sea that proved her fatal weakness. Falling upon the Athenian navy right in the narrow strait of the Hellespont, the Spartans utterly destroyed it.  The Peloponnesian War is a good illustration of the central importance of the geography of the seas and the vulnerability of vital maritime routes at narrow straits. Commanding such naval chokepoints, and thus a rival’s access to overseas resources, is often as important as controlling territory on land, and can determine the outcome of wars and the fate of civilisations." It is rare to see such a tangible and pithy examp...