Return Trip, Accidental Terrorism, and Bundys Up to Their Usual Nonsense

Ammon Bundy, who is currently involved in an unauthorized occupation of a federal wildlife reserve building in Oregon

My brother and I made it back to our condo safely. Each of us had our own car, but we traveled in a two-car caravan to placate my mother. We encountered a bit of weather Had Matthew been traveling solo he would almost certainly have arrived home significantly earlier, but I refuse to drive as fast as he does when left to his own devices We encountered just a bit of weather near then end of the trip, but it wasn't severe enough to be scary.

I'm in the middle of a book, so I had to finish it before getting to bed. I'm reading The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary by William Shunn. In his first-person account, Shunn tells the story of his experience as an LDS missionary, the acme of which would surely have been his admittedly ill-advised decision to telephone a pretend bomb threat to an airline in order to delay a flight, thereby preventing a fellow missionary from defecting from the mission force before LDS officials could arrive in attempt to dissuade the young man from leaving prior to his originally-scheduled release. Knotty blogged about the book recently, and I remembered having read it quite some time ago. I have no clue as to where my original copy might now be, so I reordered a copy -- this time an electronic version.

I greatly enjoyed Shunn's story, but I found his retelling of the early history of the LDS church to be rather tiresome.  Shunn is an engaging writer, and I understood how seamlessly the early history of Joseph Smith story wove into Shunn's own narrative, but I've heard almost all of the LDS lore so many times that I found myself scanning ahead through the LDS history to wherever Shunn's own tale resumed. Regardless, it's an entertaining read, and I highly recommend it.

At least two of the sons of Cliven Bundy -- an LDS rancher and second amendment enthusiast who took part in a much-publicized dispute with the federal government in 2015 over the right (or lack thereof) to allow his cattle to graze free of charge on federal land -- have, along with some members of a local militia,  occupied a federal wildlife refuge. While I recognize the rectitude of being more respectful than I typically am of the rights of others to hold beliefs that aren't  in line with my own, I hope that this most recent act of civil disobedience on the part of members of the extended Bundy family is causing some of those who aligned with them in their previous controversy to re-think the advisability of supporting such anarchy.