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Sockeye are hammering into the Kenai River, like NOW.

>12K by sonar yesterday. I’ll be on the river tomorrow, dip netting.

Some nice photographs taken at the Tour de France.

As a Libertarian I am sometimes criticized, or envied — most often the former — for having a political philosophy that allows me to criticize the Left and the Right. I concede it does confer a certain flexibility at cocktail parties, where party goers often segregate into cliques along political ideology. I’m welcomed in all of them, especially when the dialog turns to carping about the policies of the Other Side. Carping comes easy to libertarians, mostly because government policies continue to provide us such a fertile substrate for our complaints.

Anyhoo, this morning I’d like to add my voice to the complaint concerning the oft-heard shibboleth from the Right, namely, “Obama is a socialist.”

As the director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest reminds us, you think Obama is a socialist? You ain’t seen real socialism dude, like, for instance, twentieth century Czechoslovakia.

It’s like people who point to real bad poverty in the Ozarks, and you want to ask these people if they’ve ever been to, say, the slums of Guatemala City. Or the hills outside Port-au-Prince. I admit no familiarity with the former, though a friend of mine has multiple times gone to lend his assistance rebuilding the latter, and confirms the deprivation there.

Back to the POTUS being a socialist, consider this from another (nominally libertarian) voice, Fred Reed:

Next, why do the cognitively challenged say that Obama is a socialist? The man is an arch-conservative. (I’m not sure what arches have to do with it, but never mind.) He bailed out Wall Street, the beating heart of predatory capitalism, and then carefully didn’t prosecute those who masterminded the sub-prime scan. Socialists hate Wall Street. Obama breast-feeds it. And he sends the military to bomb every country he has heard of, which is very conservative. He is ideally qualified to be president of Guatemala.

Seen while walking this morning with Lucy at Kincaid Park. A Devil’s Club bloom emerges.

And the reason its species name is O. Horridus

Many of our mountain bike trails here are lined with O. Horridus, an incentive to avoid falling if ever there was one.

Wait a minute, wasn’t it during the Clinton era that people — mainly Clinton supporters — claimed that the many accusations of marital infidelity Clinton was defending himself against, even if true (many turned out to be true), would be irrelevant to his capacity to be a good president? They said that was a “private matter” between him, Hillary and his family. So why is the Left now demanding that Mitt Romney fully disclose his private finances? How he chooses to manage his “private” portfolio should have little predictive value in how well he’ll perform as POTUS, right? Not that I’m a big Romney fan, just saying.

Actually, I might argue that cheating on your wife multiple times should raise more concern about your character (lack of it actually), and how it might carry over to your professional judgement, than multiple savings accounts in a Swiss bank.

Seen while cycling the Bird-to-Gird trail the other day: Sun (!), Eagles, Bears, Tourists, Taco’ed Wheel, and…

… a Happy Wife

Eagle sightings were abundant. The picture I took was of one that appeared to be an adult Golden perched high atop a tree. A minute earlier it was standing on the mud flats of Turnagain Arm, the tide going out, I’m guessing hunting for small fish, possibly hooligans. The picture didn’t turn out very good, looked more like a gay hock vulture. The bears? A black sow with (at least) two cubs. Here’s the picture — I maxed out the zoom on my Android.

As Happy Wife correctly pointed out to me, false positive sightings of black bears occur all the time. Someone will scan a broad mountain slope and say, “Look, see that black spot, I think that’s a bear.” But when you see a real black bear, you understand what it means to be black. There is no mistaking it. So if you’re not sure it’s a bear, it likely isn’t. Grizzlies? They’re (usually) brown, that’s different. And up here they’re a helluva lot bigger than a black bear. Adults anyway.

We saw other less notable wildlife too. In total it was enough that we both paused and remarked, “Look where we live.” And when we returned home and took a gander at a heat index map of America, redder than a bad sunburn, we felt like gloating a bit.

Oh, and that taco’ed wheel. Two chicks were riding abreast going into a tunnel as I was coming out (opposite direction). I avoided a collision and said something to the effect of Hey, single file please. Seconds later I heard “Ugh…oomph…crap…!” Crash. Thought one of them had plowed into Happy Wife who was behind me a few clicks at the time. But it was one of the chicks who crashed, and pretty badly judging from the condition of her bike, which was clearly unrideable. I asked if she was hurt, she said I don’t think so.

Why I do I press on here? Hearing Lileks question himself made me do the same. He has commenters, evidence of readership, a following. At the very least he’d be letting people down if he stopped blogging. People like me. I’ve been following Lileks on and off for years because…well, lots of reasons, not the least of which is he is maybe the only blogger who has ever caused my morning coffee to come suddenly shooting out of my nose. And the entertainment is free. His blog is always just a click away. No logging in. No pesky passwords. No repeated links to the PayPal donate button (if he even has one). But the biggest reason is the content. I admit to a fondness for a crafty story wrapped around the most quotidian things, the otherwise banal day-to-day things found in the backwash of our lives. But Lileks pays attention. For Lileks, it’s not just a box of cereal on the grocery store shelf; inside his prose the box and its colorful advert becomes a kind of cultural signpost. He doesn’t merely let his dog out in the back yard. There’s something important in the yard; something otherwise disregarded as mundane or pointless becomes worthy of our focus, occasionally via the dog’s point of view. Cataracts and all. It usually takes pages of good fiction to trigger my empathy; Lileks can pull it off in a single post.

Not everything he writes do I find entertaining or even interesting, but that’s not the height of my bar. Consistently good is good enough. The perfect can go pound salt.

Which brings me back to why I blog. For family and friends mostly. Living in Alaska we don’t get down to America too often and the blog is a way to stay in touch. And meager though it may be, I do have some readers. Not judging from the number of comments, but according to my site meter I do have visitors, some days a dozen or more, other days less, a few days many more. Could be web spiders or bots I suppose, can’t rule that out. Anyway, blogging is great way to think out loud, a way to link to things I find entertaining, scholarly, or neither. And it keeps me writing. So there’s something in it for me too.

Keep on trucking Mr. Lileks.

Grant writing time. Which you’ll understand accounts for the present paucity of posts here. This is a time for dense, persuasive prose, and considerable chest thumping, in order to get our research aims… well, paid for. Aka, begging for money.

Elsewhere, heard on the boob tube:

The POTUS said (I’m paraphrasing), “It’s no different than forcing people to buy car insurance.”

I have a couple problems with that line of reasoning.

1) While lots of people drive, it’s not a law that you do. So in that sense, no, Mr. POTUS, it’s not the same thing, because just being a citizen of the US will subject you to being forced (coerced if you like) to buy health insurance. Practically, there’s no opting out of being a US citizen, like you can opt out of driving. Apples and oranges, sir.

2) Even if you do choose to drive, while auto insurance is mandatory in most states, plenty of people nevertheless drive without it. You need a key (or secret code) to start car, not an insurance policy. In fact, this is why insurance companies offer uninsured motorist coverage; in case you collide with an uninsured motorist the cost to repair your car and/or yourself is covered.

3) Even conceding the auto insurance analogy, arguing that forcing people to do Z is unobjectionable because we already force them to do A, B, C, whatever, is (or should be) some kind of political fallacy.

4) Any government coercion reduces personal liberty.

You know you’re cycling in Anchorage when …

Seconds before I snapped this he (she?) was peeing on those pansies. Ha!