Occupation of Independence

 Should I buy a weedwhacker or lawnmower?  The southwestern desert is filling in with so much green grass-like vegetation!  There is supposed to be a secondary rainy season in the desert southwest, but you don't get it every year. But we are getting it this year.  The wild burros must be fattening up and feeling their animal spirits, if you know what I mean.  The gestation period for a burro is about 12 months, so next winter there should be quite a baby-boom of little burritos. My skin just feels so good with the moister air.  There is a challenge with all this greenery: letting it impress the hell out of you, despite it not being spectacular tourist scenery. It is almost humorous to me to imagine the dissatisfaction that Canadian (and Puget Sound) snowbirds must be feeling right now.  They don't understand what I am ranting about.  They came here to sit in a folding chair, and to wear their shorts and sandals, with the sun hitting their face! (...

 Now that You Tube is flooded with fake (AI) videos, people have to make a decision.  Are they going to waste their lives watching crap produced by a computer algorithm, or will they go back to books, the written word.  Of course the world of books isn't perfect either. I don't know if we can reasonably expect any improvements in the world of books .  But there are possible improvements in how we read.  Do you feel guilty unless you read the lumber from cover to cover?  Do you really benefit from 400 pages of verbiage about a topic, no matter how potentially interesting and important the topic is?  For the most part, reading is an unnatural and tedious way to kill time. But it has advantages. Perhaps reading should imitate what I have recently advertised about walking: that we need to 'unclench the fists' while walking; we need to forget about 'how far? and how fast?'; that we need to frolic like a dog, investigating an arroyo. Thinking along these ...

Aren't you surprised by the alarmism that pervades the media coverage of winter storms ?  I envy the people in the High Sierra ( Donner Pass and Truckee ) for their glorious snowstorms.  Granted, difficulty with driving can create emergencies in some situations.   But there are a lot of false crises, resulting from driving too fast, driving without chains, and poor planning with household supplies.  These result from thinking that mother nature is not supposed to have an effect on human life, and that one day is supposed to be just like all the others. I have watched ten videos from the High Sierra and fluttered my eyelashes through all of them.  Yes, that could be simple hypocrisy.  Arizona in the winter provides great sleeping weather , no insects, hardly any mud, and sunny skies. But there is something ignoble about comfort.  The soul yearns for a rigorous test and challenge, something grander and nobler, such as they are getting in the Hi...

 The news from Britain is hard to believe: the Starmer regime is practicing censorship that seems completely un-British.  Think of how this turns its back on centuries of proud English traditions.  Maybe this is a good thing because it give the modern English a chance to show some of the heroism that their ancestors showed.  Or maybe the greatness shown by a country happens only once, and is never to be seen again. I have read quite a bit of history, but does it really help to judge modern England's chances to recover? A great decision also faces Americans.  Are they content to go the way of declining, bankrupt, overly militarized empires?  Will they reclaim at least some of the Constitution that is currently being flushed down the toilet by Trump?  My guess is that America is unredeemable.  Let's hope Britain at least produces some good news.