Occupation of Independence

Nobody knows for sure how Trump 2.0 will be sabotaged.  Political tricks are like military ones and terrorist ones: you can't use an old tactic a second time because the world has become wise to it.   So this time around it won't be "Russian collusion."  The obvious choice will be to turn Biden's lost and unpopular war into Trump's lost war.  A fair number of Trump's supporters are flag-waving jingoes who want their president to be tough.  Making America Great Again means roaming the world and telling other people who their government should be.  This will make it easy for Trump to stake out a tough position relative to Putin.  Trump's ego needs to show the world what a great deal maker he is. Russia will ignore this game and keep doing what it is doing: winning.  That will cause Trump to bluster a little harder.  In a matter of weeks, Biden's debacle will have become Trump 2.0's debacle. A movie metaphor came to mind.  The reader might ...

One can not praise stoic mental discipline too much during the winter camping season.  You have escaped heat and insects.  Congratulations!  But you must lose on something else, such as neighbors and motorhead yahoos.    Still, a person does have a bit of control over the situation.  In general, physical or geographical relocation does not help too much.  Rather than looking for a spot where you can get away from noisy neighbors, it might work better to be pro-active and give a welcome to good neighbors.  Encourage them to cluster around you.   Even more, maybe solar campers need to work as an organized group. That said, I had a bit of luck at a place where you really shouldn't expect to have much luck.  I was geographically separate from the morons but didn't expect it to last for long.  Still, it lasted long enough for a pleasant surprise as I stepped out of the trailer one morning: What was this beast doing a hundred yards f...

It takes a lot of mental discipline to camp in the desert Southwest in the winter.  It is difficult to escape neighbors with generators.  Some of them specialize in door-slamming or loud music. It helps to keep a sense of humor about one's own aversion to neighbors.  When I manage to get away from the hordes of moron-assholes, and feel pleased with my situation, it is only a matter of time before some vehicle is prowling around, looking for a spot close to me.     Did they see my white box from two miles away and then drive down the bumpy road just for the joy of ruining my camping?  What a look of pure malevolence must be on my face! What part of "Get off my lawn!" do they not understand?  That is when I laugh at myself.   Most of the time the invaders are not as bad as I fear.  It helps to have a plan B if they do turn out to be professional assholes.   From a big picture point of view, a dispersed camper has nothing to complain...

Occasionally a walker in the desert finds something a bit gruesome, in this case a dead burro I guess.   Naturally it will get used as a visual metaphor from time to time on this blog.  Even today I am tempted to put captions underneath it, such as: The last month of the Blinken/Sullivan administration. The state of American diplomacy. Trump's anti-war image. The future of NATO. The German economy. And then my favorite:  'It's only a dry heat.'  But it is winter, so that won't work. It is unpleasant to focus this post purely on the gruesome, so let's get some relief with some nice eye candy from Utah this autumn: