Occupation of Independence

...or at least part of it. The reader, being the suspicious cynic that he is, thinks the title has been chosen as a set-up for satire and facetiousness. Not this time. It is just too easy to mock the federales right now. Where's the challenge? Besides, readers know that I am basically a "small-government" classical liberal. If they disagree, then I am annoying them. If they do agree, then I am boring them with an all-too-familiar sermon. In politics people can lose their credibility when they become too ideologically predictable and uniform. They lose their individuality. Instead of working out opinions on their own, based on their own experiences in life, they end up merely repeating ideological package-deals, bumper sticker slogans, shibboleths, and mantras. Consider, briefly, an analogy from the investment world: do you really trust perma-bulls or perma-bears? If an investment advisor can't change gears based on changes in the world, is he anything other tha

Well, it's about time. I finally shared a good conversation with a traveler under proper conditions: sun, no wind, cool temperatures, and elevation. There is something about elevation that makes man rise above the messy minutiae of daily life and look at the big picture. The Little Valiant One vanquishes yet another peak in the Rockies Perspicuity. In general it comes from traveling through time rather than through geography. But this was an exception because location made quite a difference. Glenn M. of toSimplify.net and I stopped on a ridge and discussed the various syndromes that armchair travelers and the blogs that pander to them are prone to.  Mesa Verde in front of our conversation. We concurred that much of what is on travel blogs is not helpful to getting armchair travelers out of their armchairs. Endless discussions of details about a blogger's rig are intended to be helpful, but are they, really? Or do they reinforce the mistaken notion that va

I was going to be kind and gentle in writing about the pickup truck insanity of modern America. This post was going to start off by discussing several recent trends in the motor vehicle industry that I think are quite positive:  anti-lock brakes (ABS) as standard equipment across the entire fleet. brake-based traction control systems as standard equipment, since 2010. This eliminates the need for mechanically complex four-wheel drive trucks for the vast majority of suburban cowboys. the replacement of heavy, truck-based, gas-sucking SUVs by lighter, unibody-framed "crossovers". the venerable Ford Econoline full-sized van is being replaced by a unibody-framed "Transit" van. small diesels are being added to the light pickup truck line. And then the bad luck hit. I happened to be driving around a dreadfully congested city (Durango, CO). It was impossible not to notice something weird when driving downtown, with the narrow streets and diagonal parking: full-size

Durango, CO. The reader might have noticed that I have been on a horse kick lately. A cynic would say that this is just a temporary romantic escapist fantasy by somebody who doesn't know what he is talking about. At any rate, it is time to recall the old saying about, 'be careful what you wish for.' When my kelpie and I came home the other day we found the area taken over by huge horse trailers and their occupants. Some kind of event/competition was taking place nearby. That was good news.  What wasn't such great news was that I couldn't really go inside my trailer. The first thing I thought about was what a horseman told me some time ago: "There is such a thing as horse sense, but it's not necessarily the horse that's got it." That would be a pretty tight fit for me and the dog between the action end of the horse and the door. Since I know nothing of the do's and don'ts around horses, it seemed like a good idea to find the hors