James Spader..................

I want that one more time......................

 

Uh-oh.............................

 The hallmark of a resilient, productive and sustainable culture is that disagreements aren’t risky.

-Seth Godin, from here

If only this would work..................

 

  more fun here

Staying sane..........................

 One way to stay sane yet also stay informed is in your head add the words, "In accordance to the prophesies" in front of any headline you read. So for example, "In accordance to the prophesies, Joe Biden will be forgiving $10,000 in student debt." Life's more fun this way.

-Chris Lynch

Hey, I sit still a lot.....................

 Sitting still feels reckless in a fast-moving world, even in situations where it offers the best odds of long-term compounding. It’s like being told that you should play dead if a grizzly charges you – running for your life just feels more practical. The bias towards action is one of the strongest forces in business investing for three reasons: It can be the only signal to yourself and others that you’re not oblivious to risks. It can be the only signal to others that you’re worth your salary. And it can provide the illusion of control in a world where so much is out of your hands.

-Morgan Housel, from here

Good advice..............................

 

Labor and wait.  Back story here.

More good advice...................

 “Fix the lifestyle you want. Then work backwards from there.”

-Cal Newport, from here

End of the trip.......................

Denali National Park and Preserve is home to Denali, at 20,310 +/- feet above sea level, the highest mountain in North America.  We traveled there via a five-hour bus ride north from Anchorage.  Alaska is a mighty big state.  

When I was a youngster, we learned to call the peak Mt. McKinley.  The natives never called it that, and in 2015 it was officially renamed.   The Denali National Park contains about six million acres and is accessed by one wee roadway.  I got the idea that visitors were welcomed to look, mostly from a distance, with the intent being to leave the acreage wild and mostly unvisited.  They have succeeded in that.  All in all, it is a pretty amazing place.  If you get the chance, go.

The Alaskan Range

The Alaskan Range takes in a lot of territory

Pretty fair hiking country

From 60 miles away, mostly shrouded in clouds, we
think the big thing in the middle is Denali

Ditto

Interestingly enough, we were told on multiple 
occasion: "Run from a moose."  They are not out to
get you, they may charge you simply because they
want to be left alone.  On the other hand, we were
told on multiple occasions: "Don't run from a bear.
If you run they think you are dinner.  Stand in a 
group, raise your arms to look bigger, make noise.  
Don't run."   Never had to make either decision.

Traveling by train back from Denali to Anchorage to
get on an airplane back to Ohio.  Here we are sitting
in the upper deck with great views, we dined in the
lower deck.  Very civilized way to travel.  

A weighty subject......................

 Next time you’re “hungry”, ask yourself: “Would I eat broccoli?” If not, you’re probably not really hungry. This will make you a leaner person. No, I didn’t say happier. I said, “leaner.”

-Eric Barker, from this post

Checking in.........................

.........................with the Future Lawyer:

 . . . the inner person needs to be fed, and to grow, for a life to be well lived. Practice whatever art interests you, without regard to success or fame. Make your soul grow.

Thank goodness for cartoons...................

graph via Power Line

Checking in..........................

 ......................with Ray Visotski:

If you want more truth......................

 When someone cares enough to tell us their truth, perhaps the best response is, “thank you.”

-Seth Godin, from here

In the background................

Mason Proffit's 1973 album, Come & Gone..........Melinda

 

A history lesson from the early 1930s..........

 People suffering from sudden, unexpected hardship are likely to adopt views they previously thought unthinkable.

-Morgan Housel, from here

patience and clarity.............................

Learn to measure people by the narrowness or breadth of their vision; avoid entangling yourself with those who cannot see the consequences of their actions, who are in a continual reactive mode.  They will infect you with this energy.  Your eyes must be on the larger trends that govern events, on that which is not immediately visible.  Never lose sight of your long-term goals.  With an elevated perspective, you will have the patience and clarity to reach almost any objective.

-Robert Greene, The Laws of Human Nature 

Checking in....................................

 ......................................with Alexis De Tocqueville.

      I think, then, the the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. . . .

     Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate.  That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild.  It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.  For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that  happiness; it provided for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principle concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances; what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

       After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community.  it covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.  The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting.  Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

      Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions:  they want to be led, and they wish to remain free.  As they cannot destroy either the one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once.  They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people.  They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty, this gives them a respite: they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians.  Every  man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of people, but the people at large who hold the end of his chain.

     By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again.  A great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large.  This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience.

      It is indeed difficult to conceive how men who have entirely given up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they are to be governed; and no one will ever believe that a liberal, wise, and energetic government can spring from the suffrages of a subservient people.

-Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Home sales go oops...............................

 

explanation and enlargeable graph here

The boomer generation....................

 .................was nurtured by the Holland-Dozier-Holland songwriting team (along with Brian Wilson and Lennon-McCartney of course).  Any Major Dude With Half A Heart offers his CD version of  covers of some Motown hit songs.  

In search of........................

.......................... Hubbard Glacier:

When one looks at the map of the Hubbard Glacier, it sounds silly that we were in search of it.  Yet, that is what is seemed like.  It was a dreary, overcast morning.  The cloud cover was very low as the ship  entered Yakutat Bay.  Just seeing the mountains lining the bay was a challenge at times.  Looking at the water, it was clear from all the ice floating that a glacier was near.  Amazingly, just as it had done all through the cruise, when we got the the right spot, the rain and clouds abated and the sun came out—and there was Hubbard Glacier in all its glory.

They tell us that, unlike many other glaciers, Hubbard Glacier continues to grow, doing interesting things with the waterways around it as it does.  Click on the link above for more information.

Glacial litter

Ditto

There is a glacier out there somewhere

Ah, we found it

Glaciers are noisy.  As the ice cracks and calves, it sounds
like the roar of thunder

You don't want to get too close.  If it calves, the resulting ice
berg - "the size of a ten story building" - will bob up and out.

Glacier watching experts

Cruisin'...............................

 Stretching some 1,000+ miles north from Vancouver, the Inland Passage is a favorite of cruise lines.  It is easy to see why.  You are almost never out of sight of picturesque land.  The stops along the way are interesting (if you can overlook the plethora of diamond and jewelry stores) historically and geologically, fun, and filled with good eating/drinking. The water the ship travels on seems to be considerably calmer than the open ocean, and, beyond the occasional fishing vessel and other cruise ship, not very crowded.  Your faithful blogger tends to have motion issues, but completed the seven-day cruise without any queasiness. 

It is a really big state

The Inland Passage

spoils of war..........................

       There was no hope for the villagers. Column after column of marauding invaders swarmed the area, herding their victims into a tight circle, relentlessly closing off all avenues of escape. Then the attack began. I couldn't believe the extraordinary strength of the invading hordes as they bore aloft, seemingly effortlessly, the spoils of war, their helpless enemies. As I watched them from my outpost hour after hour in utter fascination, I couldn't decide whether these soldiers reminded me more of highly disciplined Roman soldiers or pillaging Vikings. 

    "Don't get bitten, Boydie," Kate warned me. "They've got really powerful jaws, and you might not be able to pull them off." Like me, she was stationed with her bum in the air, eyes and ears down in the dirt, watching the Matabele ants execute their raid on the termite nest.

- Boyd Varty, Cathedral of the Wild

 

the misery of war...................

      It is common to label this appreciation for power and its role in state affairs "realism" or "neorealism."  But Thucydides—and this is why he is truly a great historian—is too discerning a critic to reduce strife down to simply to perceptions about power and its manifestations.  War itself is not a mere science but a more fickle sort of thing, often subject to fate or chance, being an entirely human enterprise.  The Peloponnesian War, then, is not a primer for international relations studies, and the historian des not believe that "might makes right."  Tragedy, not melodrama, is its message. . . .

     For a writer who is supposedly interested in power rather than tragedy, Thucydides misses no occasion to note how heartbreaking the losses of particular armies were.  What seems to capture the historian's attention is not, as is so often claimed, the role of force in interstate relations but the misery of war that is unleashed upon the thousands—the subject of this book—who must fight it.

-Victor Davis Hanson, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

furious indifference...........................

 Courage is almost a contradiction in terms.  It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.  "He that will lose his life, the same shall save it," is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes.  It is a piece of everyday advice . . . A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying.  He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape.  He must not merely wait for death, for then we will be a suicide, and will not escape.  He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it, he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.

-Gilbert Keith Chesterton

preparation for freedom.........................

     Let us begin by asking the question of principle, namely, what should a lover of liberty wish to see done in the schools?  I think the ideal but somewhat Utopian answer would be that the pupils should be qualified as far as possible to form a reasonable judgment on controversial questions in regard to which they are likely to have to act.  This would require, on one hand, a training in judicial habits of thought; and, on the other hand, access to impartial supplies of knowledge.  In that way the pupil would be prepared for genuine freedom of choice on becoming adult.  We cannot give freedom to the child. but we can give him a preparation for freedom; and this is what education ought to do. 

     This, however, is not the theory of education which has prevailed in most parts of the world.

-Bertrand Russell, from his essay on John Stuart Mill