Occupation of Independence

The mighty world-improvers are set to convene again in Davos, Switzerland.  I wasn't invited. But that won't stop me from showing the world how we can achieve Utopia.   Think of a peasant grandmother, a babushka, walking down to the Volga River in the 1800s.  She carries a basket of clothes for washing.  At the river she chops a hole in the ice, and goes to work with her bare hands in the cold water.  And she is using no electricity, no Russian gas, no coal or petroleum.  How virtuous! The saints of Davos smileth upon her. A couple days ago my washboard arrived.  I haven't had one since my trip to mainland Mexico.  I remember the corrugated, galvanized steel washboard working quite well.  My new washboard appears promising, that is, effective.  It is just the right size for a 5 gallon bucket.  It is lightweight and won't rust.  But it is plastic, therefore, made from petrochemicals! It worked better than I hoped.  Look at this, just from a couple small articles of cloth

The "Wagner" group of the Russian military has apparently taken over the Donetsk city of Soledar today. (Donetsk is one of the four regions recently annexed to Russia.)  Considering how slow the battle near there has proceeded over the last couple months, this all seems rapid and triumphant.    There is an irony to watching the video from the movie, Apocalypse Now, featuring Richard Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries."  The video is a powerful combination of visual images, dramatic situation, and music.  Of course the war in the movie was Vietnam, but it is related to the Ukraine War in the sense that the Ukraine War might be seen as the American Empire's biggest debacle since Vietnam. Heretofore the war in the Donbass region has been slow and slogging, as if it were imitating the Western Front of World War One, albeit with satellites and drones.  And now something happened that seems blazingly fast by comparison. A certain amount of triumphalism is called for

There is something a little bit funny about the Yuma desert outside my door.  It has a desert pavement, but it is soft and thin.  (My little dog loves running on it, though.)  Nah, it is something else. Where are the arroyos?  There are only gentle swales a couple feet deep.  And yet bushes and dwarf trees line up along these swales.  Although there is nothing visually entertaining about this, it is fun to consider that this part of the Colorado River system has run out of 'gravity.'  There is only a few feet of altitude between my campsite and the Colorado River.  After that, it loses only a couple feet per mile before it oozes into the Gulf of California.  A person can camp over so much of the West and spend all of their time in the high-altitude drainages of the Colorado or the Columbia/Snake.  You could say that Yuma is the sister city of Astoria OR or even New Orleans.  Over most of the West, there is plenty of 'gravity.'  But not in Yuma.

I was driving south the other day.  Not a good direction.  With all that sun blasting through the windshield, it was necessary to turn on the air conditioning -- in January for gawd's sake.  My Yuma nausea kicked on in seconds. But wait.  Since it is January, the warm hours only total up to about four.  That means 20 hours of mild coolness, instead of the more usual chilliness that one experiences in Arizona at night.  Being at an altitude of 250 feet has some advantages! In fact mild coolness at night is a rare pleasure for me.  It is worth thinking about it.