Tlingit Cultural Event (totem carry) at Wrangell Alaska

Tlingits toted a new memory stick to Totem Park today.

https://youtube.com/shorts/8OS8fTPQa9I?feature=share

https://youtube.com/shorts/8OS8fTPQa9I?feature=share

Remembering the Reagans, etc

 I used to spend a fair piece of time boating in S.E. Alaska. I saw several interesting vessels- one a stern steered boat with a large oar for a rudder, the sailing ship Lady Washington etc. I also saw former President Reagan's yacht near Wrangell as it passed on the way to town. I will recount that experience after mentioning briefly a pair of experiences myself- one on a skiff, to leave a chronological note.

For a few years when it was 32 my feet would turn black from cyanotic blood and I restored circulation by taking a hot shower-then the skin would turn back to pink or flesh color from a line above my ankle moving down eventually to my toes. It wasn't frostbite- it was something like trenchfoot that did it. I spent a day walking through deep water snow and creeks in combat boots. Comparable to keeping my feet in a bucket of ice and slushy water for a day. A couple days later they were swollen up like balloons and I had to get extra wide tennis shoes sizes to big for temporary use. I reinjured them in 2018 while bringing a skiff down from Juneau in October and nearly drowned crossing Taku Inlet. My boots had a leak and they stayed cold and wet for days. Then I returned to the shed and it was like my feet were on fire and hell for a week. I got snowed in and couldn't leave to go to a clinic in town. I made it eventually and got a drug that makes the brain not feel pain. My feet were nearly all recovered before that last injury.

https://suno.com/s/xWfqJoHuby5E4Rrg

Sometime around the Republican National convention of 1992 Ronald and Nancy Reagan yachted up the inside passage and put in at Wrangell.

https://suno.com/s/z2nno76Ttde4VdQ0

Ronald Reagan like seemed a tool of God, a man of peace and Christian- wise as a serpent yet gentle as a dove in a political ecosphere of vipers, and yet he seemed to be fading and looked under the weather. Nancy was on his arm and seemed healthy enough and to be reinforcing him as they walked along the sidewalk with a small entourage. Nancy was also an actress.

Ron looked at me as I was taking my last $100 from the bank when he walked past outside the bank window. He was wearing a wool sweater he had bought at Hickok's- a clothing store that opened shortly before his visit and closed not long after the Reagans left Wrangell. I had served as a reservist mostly for 6 years of his administration and that changed the way I looked at things perhaps. Reagan was taking heat for the Iran contra connection with Oliver North at the time and was perhaps getting away from the media spotlight in Alaska on a yachting sojourn. I thought I would help him out so I wrote an letter to an editor asking if Reagan had secretly been a communist -really counter-intuitive to what the public thought he had been. The premise was that he had been a Democrat and admired Franklin D Roosevelt when a young guy, and added several trillion dollars to the national debt as President (the debt excusable as a one-time thing in order to end the Cold War- no subsequent President should have followed that deficit spending example).

Shortly after that it was announced that he had Alzheimers and went into seclusion for the remainder of his days. I worked for a temporary agency at a construction site years later with a guy for a day that looked like Reagan's twin brother; he was a bricklayer. Nice guy. Interesting times. Maybe the Reagans used their acting skills to get some of their political work done.

Reagan was somewhat transparent- there is a lot of biographical stuff written about him. I think Nancy not so much- well I haven't read that. At that level the public persona needs to coincide with the private. Interesting thing I read that was somewhat biographical was a history by an insider of how Reagan de-escalated nuclear missile stocks with the Soviets. He was the only one who thought about that much in his administration- his goal was to eliminate all nuclear weapons. Everyone else in the government; and this continued into the start of the Bush administration, was aboard the traditional hawkish point of view. 

Reagan was a kind of voice crying in the wilderness in his own way and Gorbachev met him halfway. I suppose there is a secret history of Mikhail and his philosopher wife Reza that hasn't been written and never will be. I suspect that the Gorbachev's were the tip of an iceberg of high level insiders that wanted to end communism in Russia yet had to be rather careful covert and indirect to get that done because traditional, conservative communists would not tolerate that movement toward liberalization directly. 

https://suno.com/s/yL347Rks88vUjIqB Night Rises in Darkness

Presidents may have a lot of secret communications, methods and means perhaps unknown to history. Heck, I thought I saw Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in a ferry terminal parking lot in Juneau in 1994 I believe it was. She had on a fishnet sweater kind of thing over a t-shirt and asked if I had change for a dollar so she could use a pay phone to call a taxi- She said 'I've got to get Randy home'. Bill was dressed casually like a regular grunge Alaskan, yet wearing a very large gold star like a sheriff badge some place down south that no one in Juneau wears anything vaguely resembling it, and appeared to be drunkish. Secrets people keep lol Everyone has seen celebrities though at some time. I did see Sean Connery at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in New Orleans at 2 in the morning getting out of a limousine in the parking garage where I was cleaning the gutter as a temporary over night worker.

A Reply to Effort for New Logging in the Tongass

 I observed tree growth facts from the decades of living in the forest reasonably well. Muskeg areas, peripherals spaces and well-drained slopes for comparative purposes. I saw the different orders of appearance of repopulating with trees , in a manner of speaking pine, then red cedar, sometimes yellow, spruce and the two kinds of hemlock with the late arrival of fir that occurs in the different kinds of drainage areas. I know that wolves don't like to share space with humans because people walking about in crunchy snow interferes with deer hunting. Rowing between Prince Rupert and Juneau one can compare the areas with real old growth from so much regrowth over the past century and human effects of development from roads and boats. The ecosystem is a contiguous fact with one thing- like barge and other boat traffic leaving influences in their wake. Pea plants grow along the shore in various places as do tall feral grains. Deciduous trees crowding in along the beach aren’t found in the interior.

People degrade the environment rather than improve it. They accelerate entropy. That's why wildlife declines, fishing collapses, etc. Puget Sound and the Willamette Valley are laboratory examples for the destruction of Alaskan environmental health. Washington and Oregon achieved that long ago. Without conservation and new ways of using theoretically sustainable resources the system tends to collapse. Maybe A.I. will find an optimal way to use sustainable resources someday that won't harm human prospects on Earth.

There are several stumps from logging in the Mill Creek days that remain- what 120 year old stumps of very large size. One can see what has grown around them in the time passed, is not too large. A hundred-twenty year old tree is what- two and a half or three feet in diameter? It is the concatenated affect of human work degrading-never improving the ecosystem is the problem. nature does not recover or evolve nearly so quickly. There is plastic on beaches from Wrangell to Farragut Bay where there is some Older growth forest rather nice to walk through. Wild forests are a major sink absorbing much CO2 and filtering out other impacts of human exploitation of the ecosystem. As the wild Earth vestiges perish and the ecosphere is treated as a farm there are a lot of subtle harmful losses of ecosystem services adversely affecting human prospects on Earth. People are not bright enough to manage the ecosphere themselves yet- God's provisioning of a healthy supportive ecosphere should be respected rather than erased.

Tourism is also a natural resource. Logging adversely impacts it as people don't spend thousands to see logging cuts. Long ago I thought of the northward exodus of people from California to Oregon, Washington, Montana and Alaska. Resumption of large scale logging will probably stimulate more destruction of the S.E. ecosystem and that will bring development of more roads and housing. Hundreds of thousands of aliens may move north too for cheap labor when Trump is gone and Democrats resume their policies. I believe forest conservation is the best way to keep S.E. Alaska somewhat wild. Not a lot of wild remains in the U.S.A.; people favor slaughtering it. Then the fishing gets even worse- https://www.udio.com/songs/m2Ew6wpxksuzVEJ9dXTTju

-There were more comments and then the inevitable personal attacks started. I wrote the following in reply to one.

 I simply expressed my dissent on logging. Ecospheric destruction seems like a low-IQ kind of venture in the present situation on Earth. On public issues and matters of public governance everyone has a right to provide their opinion. That is a part of democracy that the nation fails without. The strength of western civilization is in the diversity of opinion. People listen to themselves and if they choose, learn the opinions of others; sapere aude. 

Anyone with some education ought to not be silent and let the bottom of the barrel dominate things without anyone saying bad ideas are bad. You may regard political free expression as hypocritical. So might the Klan, fascists of various sorts and organized crime. Democrats in social media often make personal attacks on people they don't identify as one of their own kind rather than address issues. I have other writing to do yet will defend myself so long as people attack even on onerous subjects. A certain segment of Wrangell is intolerant of political pluralism in regard to opinions. They keep running on forever if someone posts something they don't like. Everyone who lives in the borough should expect some measure of fiduciary equality of interest and resource investment by the city.

https://iccinet.org/arctic-sea-ice-sets-record-low-maximum-extent/#:~:text=NSIDC%20has%20announced%20that%20on,occurred%20over%20the%20past%20decade.

AI Changes on a Small Town

Since 1990 I lived much of the time in a small Alaska town where the logging mill that was the major employer closed down a year or two later. The population hasn’t increased since the logging mostly stopped. World population is right and a half billion. Wrangell has around 2000 people. It is located in America’s last great coastal forest. Ever year young workers leave, yet dome wildlife recovers while fishing declines. AI will probably affect human conservation practices.

AI will make it more difficult for writers too. AI will soon write custom novels for anyone with an app the way it’s going, as if it were making a custom pizza. Musk said there may be 10 billion robots within 20 or 30 years. There is supposed to be a super AI upgrade next. Trump has that 500 billion dollar Stargate AI project going. Who knows where that will lead?

I would guess that traditional ponzinomics where population grows and increases resource consumption so the population can stay working age will be replaced by smart robot workers while the human population ages and decreases in number to some ecologically sustainable level.

Lots of changes ahead if WW 3 doesn’t happen. Wrangell may be lucky enough to just observe the changes for some time. It’s funny how science fiction is becoming fact.

I didn’t use FB’s AI grammar rewrite version in this comment. That version said Wrangell can observe and adapt to the changes. Fait accompli I guess.