Occupation of Independence

Every year I stop in at a canyon system in southeastern Nevada.  It is the official beginning of the  crowded desert camping season.   As  a newbie camper I made an effort to talk to my 'fellow'' campers.  That ambition has died over the years.  So it was a pleasant surprise to talk to three camping neighbors on the first day.    Perhaps some momentary good luck at conviviality is the perfect way to start the holiday season.   Why have I disliked the Holidays so much?  Perhaps it is the music that we are tortured with in virtually every store, and these days at the gasoline pump.   Can I do better than listen to soft-rap versions of 'Frostie' or 'Rudolph' blaring over crappy speakers at the grocery store?  Yes!  It works great to listen to sprightly baroque music, played by small ensembles. Such music evokes images of folk traditions, feasting in the village, folk dances, flirting between the young people, and e...

Many people are already feeling betrayed by Trump II.  He has appointed quite a few warmongers to his team.  Is he just staking out a really strong position against Putin?  Maybe he just wants pull off a deal with Putin that makes Donald Trump look like the great master of the "Art of the Deal." But will he get the last laugh?  Or will he just get sucked into the trap of turning the old president's lost war into the new president's lost war?  Remember how Americans thought they were getting out of the Vietnam debacle in 1968 when they elected Nixon on a peace platform.  Then he fell into the "peace with honor" mistake.  The agony dragged on to 1975.   Until Trump proves me wrong, I will continue to believe that the best way out of the Ukraine mess is to come in as the new president and announce that: 1.  Expanding NATO was a mistake made by a Democrat president in the 1990s. 2.  Helping the coup d'état in Kiev in 2014 was a mistake made ...

Northwestern Arizona.  It is never wise to get greedy with Mother Nature, and I wasn't.  I accept that "weather" in the Southwest does not consist of temperature or rain, but only of hellish wind on some days, and not-so-hellish on other days. And yet, we had a generous rain of a couple hundredths of an inch.  Everything smelled wonderful the next day.  There was enough moisture to actually form pretty cumulus clouds.  And what fun they can be, as they dapple the lunar mountains with dark patches and shadows.  

Recently I was watching some old Charlie Chaplin movies that were edited and re-issued by him in a later era.   He added music and replaced the captions with his own voice-overs.  I thought it was an interesting -- and effective -- combination of old and new techniques.   Perhaps this suggests how a modern media consumer can be more than a passive consumer.  As an example, consider how numb and passive we have become to news of slaughter in Gaza.  It bothers me that I object to the sadistic murder of children in a purely intellectual or philosophical way, but don't really feel anything. It's not that I consider feelings more important than thought.  There are people who do consider feelings a more essential and authentic part of their soul.  Recall the classic movie, "Lawrence of Arabia:" the newspaper reporter asked the Arab king, 'Isn't mercy a passion with Lawrence?"  The king replied that yes it was with Lawrence, but with the king ...

One of the many things that the "Wizard of Oz" movie did right was to use the new invention of technicolor in a creative way: they essentially made a character out of technicolor by starting the movie in black and white, and then shifting to technicolor in the land of Oz. When an RV traveler is blown out of Utah by another "blue norther", and heads downriver along the Colorado River, they are doing the Wizard of Oz thing in reverse.  They are going from technicolor to brown and grey.  Does this mean disappointment? Not edited by software or AI Not necessarily. This is certainly good news and is worth explaining.  Years ago I started losing interest in landscape photography because it was too edited to believe.   I will not go ga-ga over a photo just because Photoshop Pro has reddened it too death.  It is understandable that newbies would go crazy over red rocks, but most of them will probably notice the effect wearing off pretty quickly. It is natural and h...

There are people who genuinely appreciate paintings, poetry, and other arts.  I wish I did.  It seems like I only respond to music, occasionally writing, and even "architecture" once in a while. Be that as it may, this is time for our annual pilgrimage to a stony picnic table in southwestern Utah. This stone picnic table is almost a religious shrine to me. Who is responsible for it?  Surely not some BLM bureaucrats!   For one thing, the picnic table is not ADA (wheelchair) compliant.  Besides that, it is too imaginative for bureaucrats.  Perhaps the BLM offered a competition to the local schools, and one of them came up with this. There is a patio stone quarry a mile away.  In the backdrop, the photos show Gooseberry Mesa.  This picnic table should be offered in the dictionaries for the word, autochthonous.  It seems to grow right out of the rocky ground nearby, as if people didn't have to do anything to build it.  I literally flutt...

When a person follows the news, they must be careful.  They must accept good news, such as  Trump blocking certain well-known neocon warmongers from his cabinet.   But considering what a failed president Trump was in his first term, we should not be naive.  While everyone has been fooled into thinking that Trump is going to be anti-war this time around, the neocons could flap their leathery wings (I am plagiarizing Kunstler) and fly in under the radar with a lesser-known neocon who is even a viler piece of human filth than the better known ones.  That way, both sides would feel like Trump is their man.  And Mrs. Adelson would feel like she is getting a good return on her investment. It is how politics is played.  War really is the "health of the state."

Oldsters remember the troubles of 1968 and much of the world's disgust with the Vietnam War.  They remember their surprise when President Johnson announced he was not running for another term.  Nixon took advantage of the unpopularity of the war to stage a big political comeback.  In a couple years you could hear a song on the radio: "Tin soldiers and Nixon comin', 4 dead in Ohio." The Vietnam War had become the new president's war.  "Peace with honor" was the trap that Nixon fell into. The Duran laid out the Neocons agenda for the next couple months: how to turn the Ukraine debacle into Trump's debacle.  In his first term as president, he would have fallen for that trap.  Will he be smarter this time around? Ahh dear.  I must try to be hopeful without letting my expectations become naive. When the Biden administration started off by withdrawing American troops from the Afghan quagmire, he took a lot of criticism for how it was done.  But most A...

  Whether you feel like the winner or the loser of the recent election, there is lots to think about and learn by asking the right questions.  As I get older I get lazier and am reluctant to step into tedious expository prose.  I prefer to look for vignettes or metaphors, each better than 'a thousand words.' Cold, high winds were interrupting my usual 'backcountry babushka' duties at camp.  So I deigned to carry some dirty clothes to a laundromat I used to use.  Prices were 50% higher than expected.  I am glad I started hand-washing clothes a couple years ago, lest I have to put up with these high prices all the time. Then I dug my heels in, picked up my basket of clothes, and simply walked out.  They didn't have many customers.  I had never done this before at a laundromat.  H igh prices can be fought to some extent by substitution.  Perhaps a lack of skills or imagination hold us down sometimes.  Perhaps we are slaves to habit. B...

Let's hope that this is the worst election the USA will ever have.  How could it come up with two shittier candidates?     Western media is saturated with election coverage.  But there are some people who don't care too much.  Regardless of who is elected, apartment buildings in Lebanon will keep getting bombed by American/Israeli planes.  The mass-slaughter in Gaza will continue. After all, America is just choosing their new Zionist-in-Chief.  I suspect Trump would be a little more reckless than Harris with Iran, but at least there is an explanation -- Rapture Christians in the American Bible Belt are a core constituency of his.  What would Harris's excuse be? I think Trump would wind down the Ukraine debacle faster than Harris.  Either candidate will continue deficit spending until the "bond vigilantes" come back strong or inflation becomes double-digit and the main political issue.   How many votes will be cast by people who...

On an early morning walk to the canyon edge I heard a large animal moving around, and pretty close to us, too.  And it was getting closer. Soon I could see him.  A bighorn sheep ram -- let's call him El Borrego -- was actually walking towards us.  Hopefully my little dog would not see him and start barking.  I tried to freeze and get my camera ready at the same time. El Borrego saw me.  He kept making direct eye contact with me, the same way that coyotes sometimes will.  At first I wondered if El Borrego was crazy, rabid, or something.  Closer inspection of his collar might provide the explanation:  Gosh, is it possible that the Utah state wildlife people are over-managing the wildlife a little? But at the time I was so excited that I didn't see the GPS collar, and instead thought only of freezing, to see how close El Borrego would come.  He came up to the rim of the canyon, maybe 75 feet away from me, and coyly looked at me while hiding behi...