Occupation of Independence

It's easy to predict what kind of food a child will choose: the more sugar the better. Adults move on to other foods that are more interesting in a non-teeth-sticking sort of way, which means that they have to apply quite a bit of imagination and discipline to develop a good diet. Naturally the adult looks down on the child's food preferences, but not in a mean sort of way. How many times has restaurant food really knocked your socks off? I can't remember a dessert doing so, at least during my adulthood. But recently I was having breakfast with a friend (a professional caterer from Patagonia AZ), when we both commented on the hash browns as being the best we had ever had in our lives. Their mighty secret: they made the hash browns out of potatoes  -- fresh. They barely needed any tabasco sauce to make them interesting. Most restaurants presumably thaw out ready-made hash browns from the Sysco truck. I also had some natural scenery knock my socks off recently, and t...

During presidential election years it is typical for the two main political parties to rent an empty store in a strip mall and use it for their local campaign headquarters. I happened to be going by the Democrat headquarters this morning, in the college town of Gunnison CO, when I saw this.  This isn't aiming any specific accusation at the Democrats. I doubt that they were doing anything illegal, and if I knew where the Republican headquarters was, I might have seen a similar sign.  The "college loan bubble" has been been getting a lot of attention lately, at least on the internet. Is it a "complex" issue? Or does this photograph undercut the need for, not only a thousand words, but also a thousand pages of a book about government funding and the ability to corrupt everything it touches?