I love Alaska! We are for sure coming back. The road into Exit Glacier from Seward has little pull-offs are regular intervals specifically designed to allow a larger vehicle pull in and spend the night. No charge. The larger pull-offs, the gravel pits, the parking lots are full of campers and tents, all at no charge. The place is made for free-wheeling, away from KOA’s. Next time here, we will rent a conversion van and camping equipment, all of which is much cheaper than a rental car and motel.

This was a learning trip for us, what to do, what not to do. We loved Kenai in all its magnificence, and riding with a hungover bush pilot was a trip in its own, in addition to being a real trip. We saw the great brown bear, flew up and around a volcano, saw a pod of whales down below. There are very few airstrips up here, so when it is time to land, they look for an open stretch of gravelly beach. Quite a surprise to those of us expecting a runway.

We are on the Glenn Highway, away from the big attractions. There are some massive glaciers here, and the whole area is sculpted by glaciation in addition to ancient volcanism. But the hiking is sparse, and we were warned about bear activity, advised to stay close to people. We drove into Lake Louise, not THE Lake Louise, and there was eighteen miles of paved road leading to a small resort and some houses. The road is four years old and wavy, badly in need of repairs. The resort owner wants the state to fix it for her.

How did these fortunate few people get a million dollar highway to their (probably summer) homes?

Can’t say for sure but I’ve a hunch. Ted Stevens, the man they named the airport after, the guy who wanted to build that bridge to nowhere that Sarah belatedly opposed.

Not much time, and my reflections on what I’ve seen are like those of a mosquito on a moose. There is so much more here. Tonight we board a plane at 10:30 PM and fly to Denver. It will be 102 in Boulder tomorrow.

We have Internet today. We are at a B&B north of Seward, on the east side of the Kenai Peninsula. We met a nice group of folks from Ohio at breakfast, and are headed out to hike up to “Lost Lake.” Since there are so few names to give lakes, they chose that one. Timber, Jewel, and Hidden were taken.

Sarah Palin is very popular up here, it seems. And our Ohio breakfast companions spent quite a bit of time in Wasilla trying to find her house. She’s kind of a phenomenon, a showgirl kind of appearance, full of folksy wisdom. It will be interesting to see if money actually backs her up in a run for president. In my view it is unlikely, as she cannot be controlled on stage, and at times her ignorance is painfully obvious even to supporters. Money tends to like the Reagan/Obama type – handsome, well-spoken, and easily managed.

Off and running. Hi David.

The view out our window is simply stunning – a long string of mountains across Cook Inlet. Take the view of the Tetons across Jackson Lake, multiply if by five, add the massive Grewingk Glacier, and that is what we see.

I did not bring the cord that allows me to upload pictures from the camera, so someone else took these photos. Our motel room is a square box facing the inlet, simple and functional. The only thing interfering with the few is another set of boxes like ours fifty yards away.

The drive up the other sided of the peninsula last “night” was uneventful. The area is one suburb, Alaska-style, with houses on five and ten and thirty acres lots instead of quarter-acres. We went sixteen miles, and in all those miles did not see one convenience store. The area is a rain forest with houses every few hundred yards. It covers an area perhaps the size of Spokane, but with only a small fraction the number of people.

The houses are all functional, no McMansions. The essential businesses are located in the little town that started this place. People drive many miles for a quart of milk. The roads are good, and the winters mild by Alaska standards, we are told. It’s an idyllic life, on the surface, but there’s a veneer of faux wealth over the poverty of the area. You can see it in the old cars and in the businesses that have not done a face-lift in decades. Occasionally there is a 20×20 box-style two-story house, and a few people living on buses. The only industries are fishing and tourism, both tough ways to make a living. There isn’t much prosperity here.

We were to fly over the inlet to see some brown bear yesterday, but everything was socked in. They said they would call if it opened up, but cell phones only work in town proper, and we weren’t about to sit around waiting for it to ring. So we headed out to see some country on foot. And, sure enough, around 4PM they called telling us to come on down and hop a flight. But we didn’t get the message until 5PM. So we are set to go Wednesday morning, our last chance at seeing the famous brown bear before we head north to Seward Wednesday afternoon.

We did go on a short flight out and back yesterday – the pilot, Scooter, from Boulder, CO, was just checking to see if he could land across the inlet. It was only my second time on a small plane, and exciting. In the next life … gonna get me a plane. A friend in Bozeman owns, or owned, a small plane. He could not afford to keep it post-retirement. It is expensive, and if you do not turn those machines into cash flow, they will consume your IRA in a hurry.

Oh yeah – the “Spit” – a five mile landing strip jutting out into the inlet. It’s in the photo above. There’s a large marina, and maybe a hundred little businesses, mostly fishing-related. There’s the usual gift shops, and all of those bear things – watch chains and statuettes that are made in China and sold in every part of the country that has a bear. Nothing is fancy here, but everything is expensive. We paid $22 for a cheese pizza out there. It’s a tiny building. We paid downstairs and then went up a flight of stairs outside the building to a small sun room overlooking the Inlet. Very nice.

Two days ago we went down to the ‘beach’ below our motel room. It’s rough and unwalkable, made of rough rocks and littered with natural debris. There’s a makeshift hut up a few hundred yards, and nearer us were two young boys who had ridden their motorcycle and ATV down there and built a fire. They were friendly, but talked about how “punks” and “hippies” come down there at night and build bonfires and drink beer. I told them that every beach in the world is a magnet for young people to build fires and have parties. But they only know this beach, and are already developing a redneck attitude. But the boys were tan and muscular specimens for twelve-year olds. They are Alaskans, through and through.

So today we aging punk-hippies are going to walk the beach – maybe get ten slow meandering miles in. We can’t drink beer, as we might stumble and fall and break something. We didn’t come here to fish or hunt – just to see the place and walk some trails. But the forest here is very thick, and trails are a rarity. Not that we care – we would walk the highway just to feel the breeze and smell the flowers and trees and salt air. This is Alaska!

Flying up here, looking out over the Canadian Rockies, was reassuring. As far as I could see was nothing but snowy peaks jutting through the clouds. No one lives there! May it always be so.

When exposed, McInnis said that he had depended on a paid researcher, and that this researcher was the real plagiarizer, and not him. Today the assistant said (Denver Post) that the McInnis people had crafted a letter having him take responsibility for the whole mess, but that he had refused to sign it. So now we have McInnis not only plagiarizing, but also pissing downhill. What a guy!

Something far more interesting and revealing happened here. McInnis’s “Musings on Water” is not an important document, and was read only by a few people and then filed away. Because we live in the Google age, someone was able to nail him for the passage lifts. Stuff like that goes on everywhere. Scott’s lesson to the rest of the political class is they need to be more careful in the art of disguised bribery.

Three hundred thousand dollars! It is not peanuts, and it was not for research. It was a disguised bribe.

Scott McInnis is nothing, was nothing, and will be a well-paid something in the future, just not holding public office. In the meantime, there are quite a few Colorado politicians of “both” parties hitting the Ambien at night as they try to keep their minds off the payments they received for fake work done for people who have an unseen interests in public policy.

This whole affair reminds me that while we need campaign finance reform, corruption will not ever be easily undone.
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By the way, this train of thought was triggered by a few words from a much smarter guy than me, David Sirota, who wondered about the bribery aspect this on AM760 this morning. It is a very confusing set of circumstances until put in that framework. Did not mean to pull a McInnis on Sirota.

Why only two parties? There’s a reason, and that reason is systemic, and stems from the workings of financial power. Like Crips and Bloods, there’s only two choices, and each mirrors the other.

One of my favorite books was written in 1965 by Jacques Ellul, and called “Propaganda”. I have never met another person who has read it, or will read it. Perhaps it is the name – “Propaganda” calls up images of Korean indoctrination camps, Soviet commissars and Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

Ellul wrote on a very high level, detached from the power centers, and so described public opinion management not just in the totalitarian centers, but also in the democracies of that time.

This did not sit well with American elites, who would not even acknowledge propaganda’s existence on this side of the pond. It was only something that happened beyond the Iron Curtain. The idea too that it could serve egalitarian purposes must have chafed.

One of Ellul’s observations was that we suffer from illusions, one of which is “progress.” We buy electric razors because they are “better” than the old blades. They are not, but they are newer, and thus represent progress. In fact, he said, progress doesn’t really exist even as technology improves.

Ergo:

Of course, the political parties already have the role of adjusting public opinion to that of the government. Numerous studies have shown that political parties often do not agree with that opinion, that the voters – and even party members – frequently do not know their parties’ doctrines,

and that people belong to parties for reasons other than ideological ones. But the parties channel free-floating opinion into existing formulas, polarizing it on opposites that do not necessarily correspond to the original tenets of such opinion. Because parties are so rigid, because they deal with only part of any question, and because they are purely politically motivated, they distort public opinion and prevent it from forming naturally.

Two parties then existed, and people cling to them because they know no other way. They don’t even represent our opinions.

A party or a bloc of parties as powerful as a would-be runaway party starts big propaganda before it is pushed to the wall. This is the case in the United States, and might be in France if the regrouping of the Right should become stabilized. In that situation one would necessarily have, for financial reasons, a democracy reduced to two parties, it being inconceivable that a larger number of parties would have sufficient means to make such propaganda. This would lead to a bipartite structure, not for reasons of doctrine or tradition, but for technical propaganda reasons. This implies the exclusion of new parties in the future. Not only are secondary parties progressively eliminated, but it becomes impossible to organize new political groups with any chance at all of making them heard. … On the other hand, such a small group would need, from the beginning, a great deal of money, many members, and great power. Under such conditions, a new party could only be born as Athena emerging fully grown from Zeus’ forehead.

Ross Perot is not crazy. That people think he was is the power of propaganda. Since his time, our two parties have fixed the system so that no future Perot will ever upset them as the one of the 1990’s did.

Ralph Nader’s futile attempts in 2000 through 2008 prove Ellul’s point. It will never happen. There isn’t enough money to overcome the big two. So, no surprise, Nader’s latest book is called “Only the Super Rich Can Save Us.” He too has realized the Athena paradox.

What to do? That’s a question often asked. Over at 4&20 over the weekend, they wrestled with immigration … what to do? The author of the post is a Democrat, and had harsh words for Republicans, who are not ‘offering solutions’ to that problem.

We now have 11.5 million illegals here. Most are here due to Bill Clinton’s NAFTA, also supported by the ‘other’ party. They are not going anywhere. We need to melt them in with us, bring them under our laws, and adapt. But bringing them under our laws would not be enough, as our laws are designed to thwart popular organizations. The illegals have to be blended into the current propaganda structure, and so must be shut out until they adapt. So the two parties are merely fighting for the votes of the Hispanic population while not doing anything concrete about the ‘problem.’

There is no solution to be had, or alternately, the ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ of immigration is, like so much else, an illusory goal. There is no electric razor that will fix that problem.

And so that’s the way it is in the bipartite state. We must seek solutions that cannot be had until we break from the two parties, and the two parties are too powerful to break.