War

I Bought the Cheapest Ford Raptor in the USA, Formerly Owned by the BORDER PATROL!!!
I'm reading Lost In Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff. It's a true story about a WW2 rescue mission in New Guinea. It's late in the war and the Japanese have been mostly pushed out of the area. The allies have a base on the north coast at Hollandia. It's paradise except for being hot, humid and riddled with mosquitoes, plus there is not much happening until a pilot discovers a valley in middle of the island with people living there. It's not on any of their charts, so it may as well be unknown. They start taking groups of people on sight-seeing flights, and wouldn't you know it, one of these airplanes crashes. Now we have to mount a rescue mission to see if there are any survivors and to get them out. This is a bit of a problem because they can't even see any way to get there. They end up parachuting in.

Anyway, Mitchell devotes chapter 11 to talking about the natives. There are maybe 100,000 people living in this valley. The raise pigs and they grow sweet potatoes and seem to be getting by quite well. However, their main occupation seems to be waging war on their neighbors. It's like an fundamental obligation. It's like the Hatfields and the McCoys, except going on for centuries.

Which kind of explains the Ford versus Chevy rivalry. Whose your enemy? The guys who drive a different brand of truck than me. How do you know he's your enemy? 'Cause he drives a different brand of truck. Geez, it's perfectly obvious. Can't you understand nuthin'?

Peace is an artificial construct, combat is the natural order of things. Peace you have to work at. We've done a pretty good job here in the USA. If you believe what you hear about the rest of the world then this place is paradise. It doesn't take much to upset the apple cart. We've got protests and riots going on all over the place these days. Some say they're protesting the incident in Minneapolis. That may have been the match, but the shutdown of the economy caused by the COVID-19 panic provided the tanker truck full of gasoline.

P.S. I was shocked by the prices in this video. $7,000 for broken truck with 150,000 miles on the odometer, and $50,000 for it when it was new eight years ago. Yee gods. I never thought of pickup trucks as costing much more than a car, but now they seem to cost twice as much, new or used. Has something changed that makes trucks more expensive, or is my memory just faulty?