Third port of call..........................

 ...............................Juneau, Alaska:

The capital city of Alaska is an interesting place.  Geographically, it is larger than the State of Rhode Island.  Population-wise, it is smaller (32,000+) than Newark, Ohio.  Not accessible by road, you can only get to Juneau by boat, plane, or being born there.  A major stop for the cruise ships, a significant part of the town is dedicated to tourists.  Our tour guide pointed to  the capital building, "the one with flags on top", but it took a while to find it.  A mere 12 miles from downtown Juneau is the Mendenhall glacier and Nugget Falls.  Well worth the morning trip.  During the afternoon we went whale-watching.  We saw humpbacks surface and use their blowholes.  Watching them use their tail flukes to dive was pretty cool.

Arriving in Juneau

As advertised

It borders on Canada, but is long way to anywhere else

I suspect they didn't pay a lot for the archicture

Panorama from the cruise ship

The Mendenhall glacier

Ditto

Nugget Falls at Mendenhall

One amazing traveling companion

A calving from Mendenhall glacier

Hunting whales

Thar she blows!

Leaving Juneau after a full day

Is the Big Bang Theory in trouble................?

 It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.

-Richard Feynman

Pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope don't seem to be supporting it.  Story here.

via

About this time every day..............

 

And written by the victors..................

 Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship. Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.

-Will Durant

via

Second port of call......................

 ..........................Icy Strait Point:

This would appear to be entrepreneurship at its finest.  Cruise ships, with their many multitudes, stop here regularly.  It is not really a city, or village, it is a tourist attraction.  Wikipedia says it better than I can:

Icy Strait Point is a privately owned tourist destination just outside the small village of Hoonah, Alaska. It is located on Chichagof Island and is named after the nearby Icy Strait. Owned by Huna Totem Corporation, it is the only privately owned cruise destination in Alaska, as most stops are owned by the cities in which they are located. Huna Totem Corporation is owned by approximately 1,350 Alaskan Natives with aboriginal ties to Hoonah and the Glacier Bay area. Many of them are of the Tlingit people.

We rode the gondola up the mountain.  Some of us zip-lined back down.  We took a hike with a native guide and learned about the medicinal value of local plants.  We toured a mock salmon cannery.  And we made our first error in judgment.  We opted to go whale watching in Juneau inside of Icy Strait.  The people who whale-watched at Icy Straits were treated to many breaching whales and orcas.  Those of us who whale-watched in Juneau saw whales, not breaching, and no orcas.  Oh well.

Riding up the mountain.  Our home away from home is 
safely berthed, awaiting our return.

Passing on the goodness of nature learned from his elders

He emphatically said he was carrying the shotgun "for our 
protection".  There are probably more resident brown bears
on the island than there are full-time resident people.

My Sweetie made a new friend

Major league zip lining.................

 

If you are not checking in...............

 ......with Some It's Just As Well, why aren't you?

Both are sneaking up on us...................

 

via

In praise of mischief.......................

 "Mischievous people make the world a lot more interesting, and a much better place to live."

"Another example is a little more boisterous and even more obviously mischievous. There is a story about the Chinese monk Budai, a quasi-historical figure in Buddhism otherwise known as ‘the laughing Buddha’. Budai was well known for his pranks and mischief, and did not disappoint even in death. Knowing that he would be cremated, when he knew he was dying he stuffed his pockets with gunpowder and fireworks, so that his followers would be amazed and shocked – and would burst into fits of laughter – as his corpse exploded on the pyre at his own funeral. It is hard, I think, to imagine a greater triumph over death than this. It is also a wonderful example of the cheerfulness of mischievous people extending beyond life into death."

-whole story here

via

This is sort of interesting...................

 

via

First port of call.......................

 .............................Ketchikan, Alaska.   The southernmost Alaskan city, with a population a bit over 8,000 folks, it styles itself "The Salmon Capital of the World".  The first salmon cannery opened here in 1885.  We watched lots of salmon battling some mighty currents to get up stream.  After a half hour. we decided this group wasn't making it home.

Ketchikan currently has the largest standing collection of totem poles in the world (for some reason no pictures were taken).

The vague shadow halfway up is salmon trying desperately

If you look carefully, you will see the shallows teeming with
salmon, either resting or waiting their turn to climb the rapids.

Cruising................................

 My Sweetie and I just returned from a two-week jaunt: north to Alaska and back.  The cruise ship left from Vancouver and ventured up the Inside Passage, stopping at Ketchikan, Icy Straits, Juneau, Skagway, and Seward. In between the stops at Skagway and Seward, we cruised the Hubbard Glacier in Yakutat Bay. Disembarking at Seward, we bused north for five hours to Denali National Park.  After a night's stay there, we took a train back to Anchorage.  Flying home on the red-eye a day later, we arrived home safely and happy, and a bit tired.

Masks were required on the flight from Chicago to Vancouver.
Serious fines were threatened for non-compliance.  Not normally
compliant individuals, we both wore masks through John Glenn 
International and O'Hare, as well as on the planes.  You see, once
we landed in Vancouver, we needed to score "negative" on a
Covid test.   Scoring a "positive" would have disqualified us from
 getting on the boat.  Gratefully, we were all "negative."

Fifty years ago........................

Harry Nilsson............................................Spaceman

Four sensible rules for investing (and life)....

1, Stocks usually go up.

2. Sometimes stocks go down.

3. The world never actually comes to an end and if it ever does it won’t matter what your portfolio looks like.

4. You have to invest in something.

My strategy is to continue saving and investing and following my plan no matter what the market is doing.

None of us controls what happens in the market.

But we all have control over how much we save, how we allocate our assets, how often we check the market value of our portfolios and how we make intelligent investment decisions.

You focus on what you can control and let the chips fall where they may.

-Ben Carlson, from this post

On the separation of intent from reality.....

 The administrative state may operate in a bubble where blatantly bad ideas receive little or no substantial pushback. State officials seem disconnected from reality when they issue arbitrary orders that are unlikely to make a difference when applied in the real world.

-Michael Van Beek, as culled from here

via

Our elites aren't very.............................

 Honesty is a rare quality in the exercise of the will to power. For at least a generation, our elites haven’t valued anyone’s freedom but their own: but it was fascinating to hear them say it. . . .

After all, if you are obsessed with control, you will never get enough of it. But there’s no necessary contradiction between the two perspectives: you can be addicted to control and aware of its loss. In a vague and inchoate way, the progressive elites sense that they have power but lack authority. They live in dread of a reversal in the tide of history . . .

-Martin Gurri, as cut-and-pasted from here

Some thoughts...........................

 ..............................on the good stuff.

Honey, I have a feeling we're not in Newark, Ohio anymore................

 

From the airplane.  Suspect it is Mount St. Helens

Walking around Vancouver......................

Totally impressed by its skyline

Vancouver House: Bjarke Ingels' work of art

Granville Island Public Market

A touch of whimsy

Gastown's Steam powered clock

 

Likely true

It's a hard working city.  A major container port.

North Vancouver

Gardening art.  Weeding must be a bitch.

A little slice of heaven - a vinyl record store

My Sweetie in her favorite coffee shop

endless wonderment...............

 For the real amazement, if you wish to be amazed, is this process. You start out as a single cell derived from the coupling of a sperm and an egg; this divides in two, then four, then eight, and so on, and at a certain stage there emerges a single cell which has as all its progeny the human brain. The mere existence of such a cell should be one of the great astonishments of the earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell.

-Lewis Thomas, Medusa and The Snail

Opening paragraphs.....................

     On any other day, Julian would have tossed it straight into the rubbish bin.  Or better yet, he would have fed it into Sarah's professional grade shredder.  During the long, bleak winter of the pandemic, when they had sold but a single painting, she had used the contraption to mercilessly cull the gallery's swollen archives.  Julian, who was traumatized by the project, feared that when Sarah had no more needless sales records and shipping documents to destroy, it would be his turn in the machine.  He would leave this world as a tiny parallelogram of yellowed paper, carted off to the recyclers with the rest of the week's debris.  In his next life he would return as an environmentally friendly coffee cup.  He supposed, not without some justification, there were worse fates.

-Daniel Silva, Portrait of an Unknown Woman

Why dieting is difficult.....................

 When dopamine signaling reaches a certain level you increase learning dramatically to the point where something becomes habitual. We have a name for this: addiction. Addiction has a terrifying sound to it, but it’s just the point where something learned is so powerful it can overwhelm constructive behavior. . . .

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.”

-More neuroscience on the subject here

About "the long tail"..........................

 A takeaway from that is that no matter what you’re doing, you should be comfortable with a lot of stuff not working. It’s normal. This is true for companies, which need to learn how to fail well. It’s true for investors, who need to understand both the normal tail mechanics of diversification and the importance of time horizon, since long-term returns accrue in bunches. And it’s important to realize that jobs and even entire careers might take a few attempts before you find a winning groove That’s how these things work.

-Morgan Housel, as extracted from here

magical thinking........................

 “The farrago of magical thinking, technocratic hubris, ideological delusion, self-dealing and sheer shortsightedness that produced the crisis in Sri Lanka implicates both the country’s political leadership and advocates of so-called sustainable agriculture.”

-as culled from this Matt Ridely post on "eco-extremism"

clumsy........................

 It also seems that, where a mass movement can either persuade or coerce, it usually chooses the latter.  Persuasion is clumsy and its result uncertain.

-Eric Hoffer

compromise........................

 Compromise is another word that carries shades of weakness, vacillation, betrayal of ideals, surrender of moral principles.  In the old culture, when virginity was a virtue, one referred to a woman's being "compromised."  The work is generally regarded as ethically unsavory and ugly. . . .

     A free and open society is an on-going conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises—which then become the start for the continuation of conflict, compromise, and on ad infinitum.  Control of power is based on compromise in our Congress and among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.  A society devoid of compromise is totalitarian.  If I had to define a free and open society in one word, the word would be "compromise."

-Saul D. Alinsky

     

Truth or fiction...........................

 ......................with the Babylon Bee one never knows.

There is a name for all this hot weather.........

 

more fun here

Martin Gurri............................

 ................talks presidential politics.  Well worth your time.  A few snippets:

Biden is entirely a creature of the party establishment, a politician devoid of hard edges, known to drift safely within the mainstream of elite opinion. He was chosen as a last-gasp backstop to block the anti-establishment Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primaries and to defeat the detestable Trump. These tasks he accomplished. Quite naturally, he’s looking for gratitude—particularly now, when his fortunes are at a low ebb. Though it’s easy to forget this, Biden is president. He has revealed his intention to run for a second term. He believes he has earned the right to the establishment’s support.

He may not get it. Institutional loyalty has been bred out of contemporary elites. Most Democratic grandees are cut from the same cloth as the president: All that matters is staying at the top. From their perspective, Biden was the right tool to accomplish this purpose in 2020 but may be totally wrong for 2024. After all, he’s polling behind Trump. The holocausts a vengeful Trump might wreak on Democrats, if returned to power, can justify any number of betrayals. . . .

Even if the president steps down, there’s still the vexing question of choosing his successor. Historically, Democratic presidents have been succeeded as party chief by their vice presidents: That was the case with Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Al Gore and, of course, Biden himself. The difficulty is that the current incumbent, Kamala Harris, has actually failed at the job of vice president and is even more unpopular than Biden. Harris seems unable to utter a word in public without delighting the meme-makers of the internet. However, in a caste obsessed with identity, can tradition be overturned to deny a female “person of color” her shot at the top spot? That would not be a good look.

Behind Harris, ambition runs high but presidential timber gets scarce. Members of the cabinet, like Pete Buttigieg, are lightweights already tarred with failure. Elizabeth Warren crashed and burned early in her last try at the nomination. Gavin Newsome, governor of California, is the white, male equivalent of fellow Californian Kamala Harris. Bernie Sanders is about to turn 800. We can gauge the desperation of the liberal flock by current whispers that maybe, just maybe, this is finally Hillary Clinton’s turn. Clinton is the worst politician of recent times—but she’s competitive with this bunch.

The best hope for Democrats in this bleak landscape is the second coming of Trump. Despite improved polling numbers that, at 42 percent approval, make him the “most favorable” political figure in the country, the former president strongly unites and galvanizes the opposition while having the opposite effect on his own party. Like Biden, Trump would enter the contest burdened by an immense weight of baggage. Like Biden, he would be an old man seeking redemption rather than a fresh face on the offensive. And if Biden can be said to bar the way to more attractive Democratic candidates, Trump does much the same to Republicans: He’s too volatile to embrace but too important to ignore.

For all this, Democrats remain terrified of Trump and are spending vast amounts of energy plotting his destruction. Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s January 6 production in the House, for instance, is an attempt to persuade the public that the most important issue confronting it lies in the past: namely, Trump’s supposed machinations to engineer an “insurrection” against our democratic system. This is futile stuff: Trump’s popularity has actually increased during the hearings. Opponents have never learned that attention is the helium that lifts this strange political mutant above the competition.

Yet Trump also is stuck in an ungainly posture that looks backward to the 2020 election. He’s no longer interested in making America great but in proving himself to be the greatest winner of all time. The Democrats would make 2024 about January 6, 2021; Trump insists that it should be about November 3, 2020. Meanwhile, the public is wholly concerned with bread-and-butter issues and has shown no interest in making the next presidential contest an exercise in the interpretation of history.

Fifty years ago.............................

Loggins and Messina...............Your Mama Don't Dance

 

Unlearning..............................

 The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

-Alvin Toffler

Toffler wrote Future Shock in 1970.  I remember reading it, but that's about it.  One of these days I'll check it out from the library to see how well it has aged.