Today I was in the shop and I saw that they had national road atlases for sale – good, old fashioned, Rand McNally 11 inch by 15 inch national road atlases. And I found myself seriously contemplating it.
I hemmed and hawed over it a bit. But I thought to myself: what if I need to hit the road and the cell service is out? or if the GPS system is militarized again? Or if I need to travel while staying off of the network?
So I bought it.
I hope it will be long out of date before it ever becomes relevant.
But the thought would not have crossed my mind a few years ago.
Anyway, maybe get a road atlas, just in case.
Those Rand McNally atlas books got my family across the country twice.
GPS still is a military system that doesn’t actively obstruct civilian use right now. “Selective Availability” has been switched off since 2000 or so and probably can’t be switched back on just like that; satellites launched from 2099 on are stated not to support selective availability.
As there are several other systems now, reducing GPS’s precision has become somewhat pointless in the context of denying (potential) adversaries the use of your own assets anyway.
However, GPS is a prime target for adversaries in several scenarios. A lot of vital civilian applications use GPS as a highly precise time signal.
GLONASS and BeiDou are predominantly military systems as well. As is NavIC, but in its current implementation it only works in India and ~1.500 km around it.
Galileo is intended to be an EU civilian GNSS that allows all users access to it. The EU’s stance is that Galileo is a neutral technology, available to all countries and everyone. Initially, Galileo was to be designed in a way that would have made it impossible for the US to block the Galileo signals without also interfering with its own GPS signals. But for some reason or other (which honestly has nothing at all to do with American officials hinting at the US’s capability of shooting down any satellites if deemed necessary), Galileo is now using frequencies that allow the blocking or jamming of either GNSS without affecting the other.
Anyway, paper maps work without electricity.
Make sure the map is accurate enough, though. Way back when in the GDR, any maps the public could freely buy were deliberately warped and inaccurate near the borders to make it harder to plan crossing them illegally. Other Eastern Bloc countries had similar schemes in place.
Robert Reich’s peptalk for today:
Trump increasingly resembles a monster — a creature that’s extremely powerful and dangerous and is inflicting extraordinary harm on human beings.
Elon Musk is also behaving like a monster. JD Vance is a baby monster in waiting.
The monstrous Trump-Vance-Musk regime (I can’t in good conscience call it an “administration”) has appointed a Star Wars cantina of other monstrous people.
Monsters abroad are eager to work with them. Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, and the neofascist parties in Europe — which Vance and Musk are actively urging Europeans to support — would like nothing better than for the world to succumb to their monstrosities.
Authoritarians are attracted to one another because they legitimize each other. The more thugs in high places, the easier it is for another thug to make it to the top. Oligarchs also help boost each other’s power and wealth.
The rise of these monsters raises a profound challenge for the rest of us: How do we maintain common decency when monsters are in charge?
It was a question our parents’ or grandparents’ generation had to face when confronting the monsters of their era — Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Franco, as well as homegrown monsters such as the Ku Klux Klan, Father Coughlin, Senator Joe McCarthy, and other bigots who fed off their fetid fumes.
I remember my father saying that while it was only natural to fear such monsters, we must not submit to them. We can’t let fear cause us to hide or retreat. If we submit to their bullying, we only encourage more bullying.
He said it was natural to worry about the monsters, but we shouldn’t obsess about them. We couldn’t let the monsters take over our waking hours, our conversations, our dreams. If we obsessed about them, we gave them power over us that they didn’t deserve.
And he told me that while it was natural to want to defend ourselves from the monsters, defensiveness was not enough. Defending ourselves would not stop them. We had to go on the offensive. Rather than retreat, we had to fight them. Rather than resist them, we had to overpower them.
Yet neither my father nor his generation faced the task of maintaining decency and integrity in America at a time when many people in positions of leadership in this country have joined the monsters or given in to them.
Part of the way to do this, I believe, is to celebrate integrity wherever we find it — such as in the public servants I listed last week in my post on “profiles in courage.”
On Thursday, Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon resigned rather than obey an overtly political order from a top Justice Department official to drop a corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
Sassoon is not a liberal Democrat. She had been a law clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia and was appointed to her position only recently by Trump. But Sassoon has integrity. She explained that the order to dismiss the case was “inconsistent with my ability and duty to prosecute federal crimes without fear or favor and to advance good-faith arguments before the courts.” She continued:
“I have always considered it my obligation to pursue justice impartially, without favor to the wealthy or those who occupy important public office, or harsher treatment for the less powerful.”
Integrity can be infectious. Sassoon’s resignation was quickly followed by the resignation of five other Justice Department prosecutors.
On Friday, Hagan Scotten, the lead prosecutor on the federal corruption case against Adams, also resigned. Scotten condemned Trump’s political justification for dropping the charges against Adams, saying in his resignation letter that any federal prosecutor “would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials.” He added:
“If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you [Emil Bove III, the acting deputy attorney general] will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”
These resignations represent the most high-profile public resistance so far to Trump’s tightening control over the Justice Department. They demonstrate that Trump and Musk’s monstrous behavior has not been normalized.
It is important to remember that while the monsters claim most headlines, they are still the exceptions.
Despite the outcome of the 2024 election, most Americans are decent people who want to live in a decent society, and who reject bigotry and hate. That’s been my experience over decades of public service.
We can maintain our ideals by demonstrating them whenever and wherever we can — showing courage in the face of fear, protecting the vulnerable in the face of brutality, practicing kindness in the face of cruelty, and preserving what is left of our democracy in the face of tyranny.
We can maintain decency in the time of monsters. We must. It is the first step in resisting the monsters, and the prerequisite for overpowering them.
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Thank you. Reich himself is an example of that kind of infectious integrity. (As well as an example of how to age well-- his energy and clearheadedness, while in his eighties, are amazing.)
Yeah, he’s kinda amazing.
I have a friend who was a grad student of his at UC-Berkeley. She tells me that he is a legit humble, friendly, thoughtful human. She works for the State of California in part because he inspired her to do so.
Hoping I have as many intact marbles as he does, when I get to be 80.
If I should be so lucky.
He also raised a really funny son. Sam Reich of CollegeHumor, Game Changer, etc. is his son, which I did not know until recently.
Oooooh excellent! Fun new rabbithole!
Thanks for the heads-up.
Yay!
For anyone with perhaps more targeted travel plans/escape routes, I can’t recommend the delorme atlas and gazetteers enough:
They’re great for general exploration of an area, and very detailed and generally pretty up to date. We have a few of the New England states, and they include logging roads and other things you don’t typically see on more auto-centric maps. Including every little puddle and pond, it seems.
I love these things so much, I bought two so I could wallpaper the entryway with the state of Maine.
Another resource – your use of “targeted” made me think of them, @ClutchLinkey – is AAA. They still produce “trip-tiks” for free for members (I assume CAA does as well, but you guys aren’t in dire need). Tell them a destination and they’ll put together a customized driving trip for you. Start now and do it for multiple destinations so that you have options when/if the time comes.
learn about the Black Panther Party free breakfast program
learn about the Zapatista uprising
learn about Jane
learn about the Kensington Welfare Rights Union
learn about STAR
learn about Act Up
learn about the Battle of Blair Mountain
learn about the Spanish Civil War
we are not the first
I tried another soup from my strategic soup reserve. Amy’s Organic Black Bean Soup.
Smaller can than Progresso. Tasted pretty good. All ingredients were understandable.
My only criticism is that it was a purée. So it was actually like Brown Windsor Soup, with some corn kernels floating in it.
I’m going to put this here, because I’ve had a hard time being hopeful lately, and this video actually helped.
Thanks for this, because I’ve never tried Amy’s Organic options before. My soup reserve plan on the road will need some adjustment. Since Progresso wasn’t available at the nearest market with delivery, I bought several cans of Campbell’s Chunky soup instead. So far, I’ve tried two flavors (Clam Chowder and Baked Potato with Bacon). The first was nearly inedible - very metallic. Adding hot sauce to mask the flavor worked well enough to finish the can. The second one was slightly better (after mixing with tuna), but now I regret buying two of each. One can is two servings, which means I have two bad bowls of clam chowder in my future. 
Great message! I’m glad that it also gave you some hope.
Keep us posted.
From that interview, this from Jon Favreau:
"It is fine if you give up because you want to give up, right? Giving up assures that the bad things will happen. It doesn’t even give us a chance to stop it. And that’s fine, if you want, but also, it’s going to be really hard to outrun those bad things, even if you’re not paying attention to politics.
You might not care about politics, but politics cares about you. And it’s going to affect you. And I think we’ve all seen that."
ETA: typos
ETA2: and punctuation missing
Stop Project 2025 PDF: