That mariachi skull was super badass. Mexican & South American cultures are so fascinating. Most of us in the US hardly even know a tidbit about it. I moved down to the border into the mountainous sonoran desert in Arizona and have definitely heard that there's been an up-spike of deportation & border patrol goons since the election....

*promote one of my desert island tunes and the life of one of my [not so secret] celebrity crushes. R.I.P Leon Russell [heavy sigh]

Punchline for an old joke about opening a can of beans on a desert isle:

Economist: First, assume a can opener....

Vimeo description:
Atmospheric refraction plays with the light of any object near the horizon. Here stars, startrails and the sun, filmed in timelapse photography from two major observatories in Chile, display immense distortion above inversion layers in the outskirts of the Atacama desert, Chile. The moon scene is filmed near Boston at the Atlantic Ocean shoreline. The mirage is an optical phenomenon in which light rays are refracted and bent in the atmosphere and produce distorted or multiple images of the object.

Here's an example of a project we'd have 2-weeks to finish:

A Space for 2 people to live out their life-cycle together.
Site: Desert (Southwest US)
Requirements:
- mass-based passive heating/cooling w/ profound southern views
- brise-soleil with morning privacy
- compost privy as hearth of house


about 3 years of projects like this, fast-fast-fast, with our Senior Thesis being a year-long self-initiated/directed exercise. Fluidity and broad gestures were rewarded...but not as we were discover in the "real world".

I used to do desert racing (before I broke my back and wallet), and this makes Baja look like a flat track race. It was awesome in person...I think we were the only non Icelandic people there. Good times, good times.

Meh, quit living and farming in A FUCKING DESERT...

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Thanks man,I replied.... I decided that I am going to move to the Sonoran desert, get away from Cali and focus on health, space and money Ayahuasca/DMT definitely influenced that decision. SF/Bay Area/Santa Cruz/Silicon Valley... it's too unwieldy for me to deal with anymore. Shit, is out of control in terms of risk & cost of living.... 15 years, brah, I'm finally off into the wilderness... will be riding my bike across a seemingly infinite wasteland of beauty every day

Gary Breecher, better know as The War Nerd, "Saddam Died Beautiful: A Special Eulogy":

"Blaming Saddam for being what he was is like blaming a rattlesnake for killing. That's how it lives, and it's what that Crocodile Hunter guy would've called "a bee-YOO-tiful ambush predator." Saddam was right for Iraq the way a Sidewinder is right for the Mojave. The NeoCons scared us by shaking his fangs in our faces, as if Saddam planned to bite every single commuter in LA, when all he wanted to do was stay alive and in power -- because those were the same thing for him -- in the Iraqi desert, where everything stings, sticks or bites. We may as well have gone on a crusade to wipe out all the snakes and spiders in the desert for being what they are. Only difference is, we wouldn't have lost 3000 soldiers that way."

---

Saddam was a rat-fuck bastard of the lowest order, but the world ISN'T a better place now that he's gone. In fact, for the amount of chaos his removal has sown, he might as well have been named Franz Ferdinand

For starters, I have to oppose the implied thought that Saddam's reign of terror was preventing this sectarian violence. His rule through the Suni minority to wage genocides against the Kurdish and Shia majority and decades of brutal repression of same all served to make the sectarian hatred and violence worse. Tally up the hundreds of thousands he killed through genocide, the million plus he killed in the Iran-Iraq war and everyone that died by direct execution or deliberate starvation level poverty and compare it doesn't stand out as starkly and objectively a desirable alternative to today.

Now if you ask what would I do differently it depends on what level of power I've got to act with. Ideally, we can go back to first Iraq war and have Bush senior march on Baghdad. This would've aborted one of Saddam's genocides. Equally importantly, this would have kept the Shia Iraqi population's view of America as a liberating force. The standing in the desert and watching Saddam slaughter them thing still carried their mistrust of American forces after Saddam's actual removal later. That singularly stupid move of leaving Saddam in power, at the urging of most of the planet, drove the Shia population of Iraq back to Iran as their sole sympathetic ally.

Next step, after the removal of Saddam, whether we can do it back then, or only a few years ago as it really happened is to truly setup an occupation government. You don't bring stability to a region by immediately trying to transition to a democracy before the shooting has even stopped. The occupation government would be run by somebody with actual knowledge and experience with Iraq, rather than as Bush senior did by sending in a guy with zero experience and a two week lead to brief himself. The task you should place on this leader, is to setup a federated Iraq, with distinct and autonomous Shia, Sunni and Kurdish states. The occupation government would dictate things after taking input from Iraqi's rather than holding them to the tyranny of the majority as Bush and co allowed. The occupation would setup an initial constitution defining what laws and agreements spanned all three Iraqi provinces/states and what extent of autonomy they had to define their own systems of government. The American military's job would be to enforce this very basic constitutional framework. Each Iraqi state/province would be aided in setting up their own governments with a transition plan again dictated not voted upon. The transition plan would define the point in time when each state transitioned from occupation rule to a self determined future and rule of law.

The above plan on the whole would work, but Bush and co couldn't have managed post Saddam Iraq more poorly if they had actively tried to.

If zero time travel is allowed and we are to 'fix' things today, you need a lot MORE power. You need an army the size of America or Russia's and the political will to spend several years doing things the public will hate you for. The end game is still the same as above, a federated Iraq kicked off under a dictatorial occupation. To get there from today though you need to create stability. You need to take an army and march it across the entire country. As each city is cleared of militants you take a census of everybody and keep it because you need it to track down future militants. In entirely hostile locations like were ISIS has full rule, you bomb them into the stone ages before marching the army in. The surviving population is given full medical treatment. Now, as for sorting militants from civilians though, you do NOT use American style innocent until proven guilty justice. Instead, any fighting age males are considered guilty until proven innocent. This level of rule of law needs to remain in place until stability can be restored. You of course guarantee lots of innocent arrests, but your trying to prevent massive numbers of innocent deaths so it's required. As you stabilize the nation you can relax back to innocent until proven guilty and work on re-integrating the convicted.

You'll note that although the methods I'd declare necessary above are by any count 'brutal', they do not extend into Saddam's usage of genocide, torture and rape as the weapons of choice.

Soooo, guy gets shipwrecked on a deserted island, becomes delirious and has sex with a sea turtle? Count me in.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Arizona moon keep shining . From the desert sky above ...

This movie got me into off road racing as a kid. Love it. Nothing like a land rush start in the desert!
*quality *vintage *motorsports