A tone mapping of an older photo taken flying between Juneau & Gustavus.

It appears spring is threatening to show up, which saying so, in April in Alaska is always tempting fate.  However, the weather has been good enough to get a good start on bicycling.

Yesterday, the Alaska Randonneurs held their second ride of the season.  I did a 100K and though a little windy in places, it wasn't too chilly.  Below is the route.

Happy Easter

A happy Easter to those few who venture to this remote corner of the internet.

Below is a little something for your consideration first published in 2006.
It's, I hope, well worth a little of your time.

Did you ever break a promise?
Did you ever break a vow?
Have you traded love for money,
And are you happy now?
Did you kiss him in the garden,
And then abandon him to fate?
Is your final sin forgiven,
Or is it far too late?


One little non-Easter tidbit;

The beatings will continue until morale improves...
So relentless is this brainwashing that it percolates throughout the curriculum, so that even exam papers in French, English or religious studies can ask students to explain why the world is dangerously warming up, or why we must build more wind turbines. In 2012, I described an A-level general studies paper set by our leading exam board, AQA, asking for comment on 11 pages of propagandist “source materials”, riddled with basic errors. A mother wrote to tell me how her intelligent son, after getting straight As on all his science papers, used his extensive knowledge of climate science to point out all their absurd distortions.

He was given the lowest possible mark, a fail. When his mother paid to have his paper independently assessed, the new examiner conceded that it was “articulate, well-structured” and well-informed. But because it did not parrot the party line, it was still given a fail. I fear this corruption of everything that education and science should stand for has become a much more serious scandal than Mr Gove yet realizes.

Read the whole thing here.

Reflections

In light of the latest junk science from the UN's IPCC touting global warming , err "climate change", I thought it fitting to link to this article about James Lovelock.
Lovelock is was a leading light in the environmentalist movement.

From the article.

Green guru and geophysicist James Lovelock, considered one of the pioneering scientists of the 20th century, has officially turned his back on man-made global warming claims and the green movement’s focus on renewable energy. Lovelock conceived the Gaia theory back in the 1970s, describing the Earth’s biosphere as “an active, adaptive control system able to maintain the earth in homeostasis.”...

The newly skeptical Lovelock responded: ”Well, that’s my privilege. You see, I’m an independent scientist. I’m not funded by some government department or commercial body or anything like that. If I make a mistake, then I can go public with it. And you have to, because it is only by making mistakes that you can move ahead.”

Lovelock dismissed the entire basis for global warming concerns in his BBC television interview. “Take this climate matter everybody is thinking about. They all talk, they pass laws, they do things, as if they knew what was happening. I don’t think anybody really knows what’s happening. They just guess. And a whole group of them meet together and encourage each other’s guesses,” Lovelock explained.

Please, do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

Just to gauge how big of a change that is, here are some earlier quotes.

Writing in the British newspaper The Independent in January 2006, Lovelock argued that, as a result of global warming, "billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable" by the end of the 21st century.^[27] He has been quoted in The Guardian that 80% of humans will perish by 2100 AD, and this climate change will last 100,000 years. According to James Lovelock, by 2040, the world population of more than six billion will have been culled by floods, drought and famine. Indeed "[t]he people of Southern Europe, as well as South-East Asia, will be fighting their way into countries such as Canada, Australia and Britain".^[28]

"By 2040, parts of the Sahara desert will have moved into middle Europe. We are talking about Paris – as far north as Berlin. In Britain we will escape because of our oceanic position."^[28]

"If you take the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predictions, then by 2040 every summer in Europe will be as hot as it was in 2003 – between 110F and 120F. It is not the death of people that is the main problem, it is the fact that the plants can't grow – there will be almost no food grown in Europe."^[28]

"We are about to take an evolutionary step and my hope is that the species will emerge stronger. It would be hubris to think humans as they now are God's chosen race."

Irrational Exuberance, or just Passing Gas

(UPDATED, Scroll Down)

Lately, there has been a lot of hyperbolic optimism with respect to the Shale, tight oil, fracking boom that the US has been experiencing.  It is a good thing, don't misunderstand me.  However, some seem to think that it's the end of our energy worries and it's back to the good times!

More sober assessments, while optimistic, are a bit more guarded.
From an article at Zero Hedge,


"Our analysis suggests that commentators and policymakers need to better distinguish between the ways in which the US shale gas boom constitutes a ‘revolution’ and the ways in which it does not. The US unconventional energy boom has reversed the decline of domestic production, significantly lowered oil and gas imports, reduced gas costs for consumers, and created a political space for tougher regulations on coal-fired power plants. But it is not a panacea. Even if current estimates of production turn out to be accurate, the benefits to the US economy in the long run are relatively small, and the benefits to manufacturing competitiveness in most sectors are even smaller. In the longer term, US energy security and climate goals will still require a strong role for public policy frameworks. Improving energy efficiency and promoting low-carbon technologies will be just as important as before. For the EU, given its more limited known reserves of unconventional oil and gas, these conclusions are likely to be all the more relevant."

Read the whole thing here.

All the more important considering how our so-called leaders have utterly squandered the last eight years.

Least that cast a gray cloud over your sunshine, there's this...

"The promises that you save for the future have collapsed into dust as interest rates have been driven lower making savings utterly worthless. There is no such thing as saving and living off your fixed income. The elderly are being driven back into the work force and the whole ideas that a generation believed in are vanishing before their eyes.
So it is no longer communists and dictators that are the targets. All governments are now the targets and when the economy turns down after 2015.75, the threat of civilization will be pulled apart by the self-interest of politicians clinging to power to the detriment of the people."


 

Worth a few minutes of your time. My mom e-mailed this to me the other day.

Shadows & Light

3/15/2014.  I took this Saturday morning after we received around 18 inches of snow the previous night.

"More than three-quarters of Americans say the five-year bull market in U.S. stocks has had little or no effect on their financial well-being."
 

    Man & his best friend.

The Lee Shore

Here's a great wingsuit clip...

Anchorage Saturday Morning 3/01/2014

A three exposure HDR composit taken with my Canon 7D, a Tamron 18-270 lens, ISO:100, bracketed at -2,0,2.  No polarizer.

The fog lies low over the water of Knik Arm.  Spring is coming!

1930 Packard

The Hudson

Two interesting articles below....

America Didn't Decline. It Went Global  (found on Politico, but interesting none the less)

By Sean Starrs | 2/24/2014

We’ve been obsessing over the decline or persistence of American power for more
than three decades now. The latest example is a Gallup poll out Monday
showing rising dissatisfaction with the United States’ standing in the world —
but it all started with a wave of declinism in the 1980s, set off by the rise of Japan. Then the
doom and gloom suddenly vanished amid the triumphalism of the 1990s, which
transformed the United States into the world’s only superpower. After the Sept. 11 attacks
and the invasion of Iraq, many thought “empire” was a better moniker, with the United
States apparently able to reshape world order virtually at will. And then just a few years
later — poof! — declinism returned with a vengeance, with American power supposedly
crashing like the latest Hollywood reality queen. China supplanted Japan as a hegemon on
the rise, and the biggest global financial crisis since 1929 — emanating from the United
States itself — was allegedly the final nail in the coffin of the American century.

But really? Is it really possible for American power in the world to flip-flop so wildly over
the decades? Surely, the economic underpinnings of national power run deeper than that?
And throughout these waves of conventional wisdom over the decades, there have always
been contrarians, including in the present. So how is it possible for commentators to look
at the same data and come to completely opposite conclusions?

Lynn Canal

Over the Top

Via Insatpundit;

New Day Dawning...

My apologies for posting several pictures of the same scene (though I rather like them or I wouldn't post them), but with my knee finally feeling better, I will be getting out & about more.

Here is a little tidbit I received via e-mail from a weight lifting site I subscribe to;
Read it and ask yourself, could you imagine Obama doing that?
Hell, could you imagine Obama even spending time with wounded soldiers?

The last time he went to Afghanistan, he met with Marines only after they had been disarmed.
American Marines, disarmed before being allowed in the same building with the American president.
The mind reels...

With today being President's day, here's
a presidential feat of strength that you
probably haven't heard before:
*******************************************
On the day of April 8th, 1865, President
Lincoln was at a Union Army field hospital
in Virginia. spending hours shaking hands
and greeting thousands of wounded soldiers.
At the end of that long day, he spotted an
ax and walked over to it.
He was able to grip the ax by the very end
of the handle and hold the 7-pound tool
parallel to the ground, motionless.  He was
56 years old at the time.
"Strong men who looked on, men accustomed
to manual labor, could not hold the same
ax in that position for a moment," wrote
Francis Fisher Browne, a Union soldier who
authored a biography called "The Every-Day
Life of Abraham Lincoln."
Lincoln performed this feat on several
occasions and it was never mentioned
that anyone could duplicate it.

View From the Porch 1-25-2014

Via Instapundit...

Greatness, Past & Present

The trans Alaska Pipeline.
Construction on the Trans Alaska pipeline began on March 27, 1975 and was completed on May 31, 1977. It's approximately 800 miles long and crosses some of the roughest, coldest, most remote country in North America. It has survived earthquakes, attempts at sabotage, and has produced without a spill. The environmental destruction many said would result never happened.

Today, with the environmental laws, workplace requirements, and numerous other impediments, this pipeline would take at least twice as long to build, if it could be built at all.  Similarly, a nation, the only nation, to have placed men on the moon and brought them safely home numerous times can no longer put men in space on its own. Both conditions are self-inflicted. We still have the capability, but the will is eroding. How familiar today's prevalent attitudes would seem to the Romans of the early 4th century.