Next stop on the Seattle Trip was the Asian Art Museum, $18 for admission or $0 if you have organized your life as an economist would predict: “This program provides free admission for up to five people. In-person verification of SNAP, EBT, or WIC card is required.”
One of my favorite exhibits: a local Scientist wearing a protective anti-COVID mask over a full beard. Six years after coronapanic, he/she/ze/they couldn’t find a job with less exposure to the potentially-infected public?
(We saw quite a few indoor and outdoor maskers, but it was rare to find one with as lush a beard underneath the mask.)
Next stop: the Seattle Japanese Garden.
The surrounding arboretum has a gift shop explaining how to garden while Black:
We saw Islamic immigrants in hijabs and burqas, various Asians, and a lot of white people in the Arboretum, but none of the Black girls featured in the book that was for sale.
Next stop: the Ice Box Arcade, which answers the question “How do you keep the local progressives from vandalizing a $15,000 Harry Potter pinball machine, tainted by J.K. Rowling’s stubborn Science-denying insistence that there is a difference between men and women?”
Answer: tell them that the quarters placed into the machine will go to support a Rainbow Flagism nonprofit organization. The collection, which is wonderfully well-maintained, includes a rare James Bond retro machine from Stern:
The standard James Bond modern Stern series is Sean Connery-only. This retro machine is enhanced with Roger Moore and “Daniel Craig says he goes to gay bars to avoid fights at straight venues” (Guardian; if you live with a woman see if you can make “I need to go to the bathhouse every three nights because our water pressure at home isn’t good enough” work?).
Contrary to what you might have read, Seattle progressives most definitely did not set up a 16′-high statute of Lenin on a street corner (you can enjoy some Halal food at Sinbad Express while visiting).
Back to our hotel neighborhood, the pub requires that you pass the sacred Rainbow Flag (but not trans-enhanced?) before entering (this was taken in May, not June/Pride):
CVS keeps my beloved Dawn and Bounty securely locked up:
An awesome playground next to the Norwegian cruise ship pier:
I’ll cover our return to Seattle from the Alaska cruise in a follow-up post.
Our precious children apparently cannot be exposed to reality and, therefore, our trip to Seattle skipped the parts of Seattle that have made the news recently. We stayed at an elite Courtyard by Marriott next to Lake Union in hopes of avoiding some of Seattle’s, um, more colorful characters.
Stickers on lamp posts by the hotel:
We went for breakfast to a Halal bagel shop, Toasted. According to the web site, the owners of the shop selling a baked item created by Polish Jews are “Murat from Istanbul and Jaafar from Iraq” (this isn’t cultural appropriation?). The merch sales at the shop help pay to increase the number of immigrants in the U.S., an odd thing for Seattleites to support in my opinion given that we were never able to complete one trip anywhere near the city without getting stuck in horrific traffic. Even a trip from Sea-Tac to downtown aat 11:30 pm on a weeknight was delayed because the Uber driver couldn’t reach us through the horrific traffic at the airport. The average resident of Seattle loses 87 hours per year to traffic jams (source), equivalent to two weeks of full-time work and, therefore, if the country weren’t as jammed, he/she/ze/they could presumably take an additional two weeks of vacation and still be just as productive.
Speaking of immigrants, one stated reason for filling the U.S. with low-skill migrants is to provide cheap labor for enterprises such as the above bagel shop and, also, for Uber and Lyft drivers who won’t mind spending hours in traffic jams. We already know that AI is coming for those driving jobs. How long will it be before an Optimus-style robot can do at least half of the work in the bagel shop?
Next stop: Museum of History and Industry. It’s $25 to enter, but free to anyone who presents an EBT card (which never expires because, apparently, hardly anyone ever gets off EBT/SNAP). The museum can also be free for the Latinx:
The Open Doors program works with organizations that serve communities who have historically been excluded from museum spaces. These communities include, but are not limited to, Black, Native American, Latinx, Pacific Islander, Asian, refugee, immigrant, LGBTQ+, people with disabilities, and people with low and/or no-income.
Through this program, organizations or community groups can reserve a free group visit, or receive admission passes to be distributed to their participants for use on their own schedule.
We’re informed that almost any woman who holds a job in 2026 is a “trailblazer” and “breaker of the glass ceiling”. It turns out that Seattle had a female mayor for about four years starting in 1924:
The museum reminds us that World War II wasn’t a time of maximum racial sensitive here in the U.S.: “Salvage Scrap to Blast the Jap”.
There’s a reasonably comprehensive history of Boeing and its founder, William Boeing. Left out: Mr. Boeing’s history as the developer of real estate with a race-based restriction. For electrical engineers, the reminder that Fluke has been based in the Seattle area for most of its life would warm the EEs’ hearts if they had hearts:
AI enthusiasts will appreciate Seattle-style AI (Microsoft Bob):
The book section puts Gay Seattle and a pro-Hamas work right next to each other:
(This would become a recurring theme throughout Washington State, i.e., simultaneous advocacy for 2SLGBTQQIA+ and Hamas-ruled “Palestine”.)
A University of Washington book on the subject of how immigrant plants “compete for space with native plants”, marketed to residents of a migrant-rich city with an “affordable housing crisis”:
A couple of books on how to walk in the woods while not being a white male:
A book on how to be gay and Asian at the same time:
Some items relating to righteousness in general:
Although the museum’s collection of historical photos shows men designing, building, and flying airplanes, the gift shop reminds us that building airplanes was a primarily female activity during World War II:
(ChatGPT says that the majority of workers were men and that the vast majority of highly skilled jobs in aircraft production, e.g., machinists, were held by men (probably over 90 percent).)
Note that the above photo including a trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag was taken on May 21, i.e., pre-Pride. Speaking of Pride, the local bank wants customers to pay their respects to Rainbow Flagism before engaging in any business:
Let’s hope that they have fat bank accounts because gasoline throughout Washington State was about 1.5X the cost of what we pay in Florida ($6.20/gallon was the most common price at name-brand stations):
Happy IPO Day to SpaceX, which its investors presumably hope will be the future of space travel. Via this post, we can also look at the past of space travel.
Most air and space museums, including the Smithsonian, are primarily about showing artifacts and make little attempt to educate visitors. Seattle’s Museum of Flight is a notable exception and, thus, could easily occupy a nerdy family for a day. Here are some snapshots from an early June 2026 visit.
The SR-71, the world’s fastest airplane and one that reached the edge of space (85,000′), with the world’s slowest, Gossamer Albatross II, ironically placed just above it (in real life, the Albatross II flew mostly at 5-15′ in order to take advantage of ground effect).
How did the SR-71’s engines, designed for slower aircraft, function? A sign explains:
Maintenance might not be simple…
Notice that there is an aircraft on top of the SR-71. This is thoroughly explained (also sadly, since Roy Torick was killed in testing for the D-21B drone):
How about the camera? The museum displays the 30-inch Itek lens:
The Museum avoids American chauvinism, pointing out that modern rocketry was developed independently in three countries and that, before Goddard, there was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Russia.
(There is a big section on the Apollo program and the role of Boeing, and companies later acquired by Boeing, building equipment for it, but the photos aren’t too exciting.)
The World War II exhibit gives reasonable space to allied and enemy aircraft, e.g., a Yakovlev and a Nakajima:
Equal space is accorded to female pilots who ferried aircraft over friendly skies and male pilots who flew in combat. Nancy Nordhoff Dunnam served in the U.S. between February 1944 and December 1944, most of which was spent in training. She lived until 2017. Richard Bong spent about two years in combat in the Pacific, shooting down 28 heavily armed Japanese planes, and died in 1945 while helping to bring the U.S. military into the jet age.
Were there any male pilots in WWII who did the same jobs as these heroic females, i.e., ferrying airplanes? ChatGPT:
In the U.S., aircraft ferrying was run mainly through the Army Air Forces Ferrying Command, later part of the Air Transport Command (ATC). Its Ferrying Division delivered newly built aircraft from factories to training bases and ports of embarkation. That system used AAF military pilots, civilian pilots, airline pilots, and women pilots including WAFS/WASP. The Air Force history page for the Twenty-Second Air Force says the Domestic Wing/Ferrying Division moved newly produced aircraft using “AAF pilots, civilian pilots, and women pilots” from the WAFS/WASP. The male civilian pilots came from several pools: airline pilots, commercial/private pilots, bush pilots, air-taxi pilots, crop dusters, business pilots, and pleasure pilots. … 27 male pilots per female pilot.
So… the gender that did 27/28ths of the work gets no credit in the museum. Congress and President Obama awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2009 to the civilian female pilots. Did the civilian male pilots who performed similar jobs get a similar honor? ChatGPT says “no”.
The Museum’s outdoor-but-covered exhibits include most of Boeing’s greatest hits, including the 747, an Air Force One 707, a 787, a B-17, and a B-29.
The 727 on display is accompanied by a D.B. Cooper sign:
There is a sobering Vietnam memorial, displaying a beautiful B-52 and also reminding us of the cost of war, nothing that we lost 10,000 aircraft in the war.
A notable omission from the plaques of names of men who were held as POWs: Robert L. Stirm. AP:
Stirm, a decorated pilot, was serving with the 333rd Tactical Fighter Squadron based in Thailand in 1967. During a bombing mission over North Vietnam that Oct. 27, his F-105 Thunderchief was hit and he was shot three times while parachuting. He was captured immediately upon landing.
He was held captive for 1,966 days in five different POW camps in Hanoi and North Vietnam, including the notorious “Hanoi Hilton,” known for torturing and starving its captives, primarily American pilots shot down during bombing raids. Its most famous prisoner was the late U.S. Sen. John McCain, who also was shot down in 1967.
As Wikipedia notes, however, the principal welcome that he received was being sued for divorce, under the nation’s then-new no-fault divorce laws, by the wife who’d been having sex with various new friends while the pilot was held prisoner. She obtained the house and car that he’d purchased, a child support revenue stream, and 43 percent of his military pension for her service on the home front (maybe her name should be on the wall as the person who made the greater sacrifice during the Vietnam War? A judge decided that fairness required that she receive the majority of the money that Robert L. Stirm was paid during his USAF career (only 43 percent of the pension, but she got 100 percent of his pay while he was a POW)).
Circling back to the interior, the museum shows a seemingly crazy rescue apparatus for pulling downed pilots out of the jungle (now “rainforest”) by helicopter:
What about compliance with the Washington State religion? Employees at the front desk are fully masked:
The museum costs $29 to enter or $3 if you’ve been wise enough to get an EBT card for SNAP or have any other evidence of being on “any form of government or public assistance”:
Anyone on what used to be called “welfare” can also get a family membership for $29 that includes an unlimited number of children and grandchildren for one year (normally $140).
As one turns away from the masked ticket agents (6+ years after coronapanic they haven’t been able to find a job that won’t expose them to tens of thousands of potentially infected humans every year?), the gift shop reminds visitors to “Celebrate Pride”:
The front desk near the outdoor section displays the sacred Rainbow Flag along with a U.S. Navy flag.
Although Seattle is an oasis of tolerance amidst a country full of haters, the Museum has had to set up a segregated “All Gender Restroom” separated from the main restrooms.
The gift shop also reminds us that aircraft are primarily designed, built, and flown by people who identify as “women”:
Let’s close by reminding ourselves just how much of the aviation industry was once controlled by Bill Boeing. The United Aircraft and Transport Corporation owned Boeing, Pratt, and United Airlines, among other companies, until it was broken up the U.S. government in 1934. It would be interesting to imagine an alternative history in which the vertically integrated company had stayed together. For one thing, founder Bill Boeing might have stayed in aviation instead of devoting his time to horses and racially restricted real estate development (Mr. Boeing agreed with future Harvard research that diversity makes a community worse, not better).
Finally, the 140 mph (supposedly!) Taylor Aerocar and the SR-71:
The Native Americans enjoyed life in their village within what is today Glacier Bay prior to the eponymous glacier expanding all the way into the ocean:
Due to President Calvin Coolidge’s designation of the bay as a “national monument” in 1925 (Wikipedia), the natives were forever cut off from residing in their Connecticut-sized homeland.
Given that it is a violation of federal law for an Indian to return what the acknowledger says is “home”, is it fair to call this Peak Land Acknowledgement?
Note that if we ever did give Glacier Bay back to the Native Alaskans they would immediately become insanely rich. The National Park Service disdains filthy lucre and therefore imposes a two-ship-per-day limit while charging an absurdly low $8/passenger fee (i.e., about what a cruise passenger might pay for a drink at the onboard Starbucks). Each ship parks itself in front of the headline glacier for only about one hour and, therefore, given the number of hours of daylight in the summer, it would be trivial to increase the number of ships to accommodate nearly all of the 1.7 million passengers who visit Juneau each year. The Indians could hike the price to $60 per passenger, the standard fee for a seat at specialty dining, and thus harvest about $100 million per year for doing almost nothing.
(Currently most of the profit from the land is extracted by Princess, Holland, and Norwegian because these are the major cruise lines that have long-term contracts with the National Park Service. I.e., the U.S. Treasury gets almost nothing and the government cronies get nearly all of the profit that is obtainable from the park. (The itineraries that include Glacier Bay can support higher prices even though the cost to the cruise line is no higher.))
A present-day Glacier Bay village of 2,000+ passengers on Holland America, owned since 1989 by Florida-based Carnival, which was founded by Ted Arison, a Palestinian born in Tel Aviv, Palestine.
Celebrity tarnishes the Starlink brand by advertising “Starlink” and delivering 1990s Internet speeds (see Celebrity Starlink Wi-Fi Internet (3 Mbps at $1,000 per month)). What was it like on Norwegian during a recent Alaska trip (on the Norwegian Joy)? Similar pricing, but 100 Mbits down and 10 up:
Mid-afternoon on a sea day:
Perhaps they’re throttling uploads to 10 Mbps because it was never fast to upload photos to Dropbox. However, downloads perhaps run at a speed related to the number of users online and active.
Latency means that web pages feel slower even than on our ghetto-class Xfinity cable at home, but the bandwidth is there for streaming addicts.
What if you need to connect an IoT device, old Kindle, or something else for which the Norwegian web-based portal won’t work? A Windows 11 PC is capable of broadcasting a mobile WiFi hotspot to multiple additional devices even with just one WiFi adapter. (This also works for using a laptop and phone at the same time or sharing among family members.)
Separately, Norwegian might be the ultimate nightmare for a progressive. It was co-founded by an Israeli (Ted Arison, “third-generation sabra” born in Tel Aviv in the “Palestine” days, who later founded Carnival, which also own Cunard, Costa, and a bunch of others, with financing from Israeli-Bostonian Meshulam Riklis). If Jewish-Israeli foundation weren’t bad enough, the modern company was built by private equity (Apollo, founded and run by three American Jews)!
How’s the ship? I’ll cover that in a separate post. Derek Zoolander would probably say that it is suitable for ants and needs to be at least three times bigger.
Lifestyles of the Rich and Not-so-famous… a 50-year-old friend who is a good skier reported to our chat group from Aspen. What does it cost to spend a week with the elite? For two parents and two adult children in a rented 2BR timeshare, the basic cost (airfare plus lodging) for mid-March was about $15,000 thanks to his wife, a business genius. If a mere mortal were to arrange this it would be $30,000. “St Regis nearby is $2400 a night, which is not the peak rate.” Note that this trip was booked before the ski season started, so the prices don’t reflect that fact that Colorado had no snow this year.
To save time, the family’s tickets were straight into the Aspen airport.
Tailwinds too strong for a landing in Aspen, so they are diverting to Grand Junction – that is a 2-3 hour drive
20kt gusting 30
These small mountainous airports are bad news
And that is why I prefer SLC to all of them
But [wife] was hell bent on “trying out Aspen”
I have to say the turbulence right now is like on the Katana [Diamond DA20, a paper airplane, basically, in its response to wind]
Given the 3:30am wake up call, this trip is going to be a hoot now
They will need multiple buses to send this plane full of skiers with their gear
My friend used to vacation in Aspen all the time and I remember that he got stuck here because of the weather at least twice. Planes depart SLC pretty much in any weather. One time he was in Aspen with his kids for four days waiting for a flight. Couldn’t get a car rental because everything was rented, car services were all booked.
Just arrived in our hotel. 4 hours after landing
A guy told [wife] that we were lucky we got to grand junction; People were arriving in Ubers without their bags from Denver
(I personally would have booked a flight into Denver (“mile-high”), spent a night or two adjusting to higher altitude, and then proceeded 3.5 hours by car up to Aspen, 8,000′ above sea level.)
What’s the experience?
Aspen is about stopping to ski early because your salesman at David Yurman called you because your diamonds were ready for pick up
they definitely do have snow on slopes, just not as much as usual. Better than a good day on the East Coast
Ikon passes were $5k for 4 people [lift tickets]
[wife] is raving about the Franke coffee machine [in the condo]
Skiing is ok. Not as bad as we thought it would be. Icy at the bottom. Not crowded.
It is kind of a small mountain. Snowmass and Buttermilk are nearby but require a shuttle
I think I know who likes it: it is guys whose wives don’t ski
So they are bored in all other locations. Here they can go shopping or sit in restaurants. If you have a wife who doesn’t ski and bitches at you, then she will drive you nuts in Utah.
Women are visibly prettier.
too few slopes. They arent bad but Snowbird is a lot better
[daughter] just ran for 40 minutes at her usual pace here and said that it was noticeably harder because of the altitude
How about the elites?
Very few non whites. [quoting wife] “I just saw my first Asian just now. She was with a white dude, so the type that wants to be white”. Racism and stereotyping are rampant here
You have people dressed in furs on the top of the mountain – they actually dress up and go up there with their shopping bags
[wife] grabbed our skis from the valet and some woman in the elevator looked at her and said “why are you moving your own stuff…?” Implying that bell staff is supposed to bring it all to our room. We are clearly not used to the luxury lifestyle. These time shares are all run like hotels.
You should see some of the houses being built on the hills here. Like the Hamptons
Speaking of well-to-do people… Aspen sucks overall. all these dressed up people get old pretty quickly. restaurants are very nice but that’s the only advantage. after i ski all day, i really want to just be in bed or order in. we ordered in twice already.
Getting back home:
Aspen airport doesn’t disappoint on departure. We have been sitting on the ground for an hour because of “quite a few arrivals”
Embraer is being thrown around by rising air like a Diamond Katana
Honestly, I think Aspen is beyond overrated
Final answer?
[wife] might disagree but I think Aspen sucks. Definitely not for you guys. Since you don’t dress up in furs and blow $1k for dinner “to see and be seen”. I was moderately connected to these people and still am to some extent as you saw from my friend’s photos for example, but I don’t go to their parties, which are boring as f*ck. Regarding skiing Aspen is overall inferior to Utah and Vail. Not because all runs suck – there are a few good ones, but overall it is way too small. It is for a green/blue run crowd and has some harder ones so that experienced people can feel that the vacation didn’t totally suck. It is mostly about the town. This is literally it. I think one can cover this entire map in one day of skiing.
Frederic “Rick” Bourke, the co-founder of the Dooney & Bourke accessories brand, is putting his Robert A.M. Stern-designed home in Aspen, Colo., on the market for $70 million.
Completed around 1993, the roughly 11,000-square-foot, seven-bedroom house is built horizontally along a rock face on Red Mountain, with tawny-beige stucco walls set atop a native sandstone base.
Bourke acquired the roughly 3.5-acre Aspen property in the late 1980s. The lot sits high on Red Mountain, about 800 feet above downtown. He asked Stern to design a family home there.
[from the big house to The Big House] Bourke’s neighbor in Aspen was businessman Viktor Kozeny. In 2009, Bourke was convicted of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for engaging in a scheme with Kozeny to bribe Azerbaijan government officials. Bourke spent almost a year in prison starting in 2013.
Here’s the VFR chart for the airport, a 8440′ and surrounded by mountains high enough that the FAA says not to fly below 14,600′ (you could still hit a mountain, though, with an altimeter reading of 14,600′ in the winter because the Earth’s atmosphere contracts in the cold and the true altitude is lower than what is indicated):
Airlines have a custom RNAV (RNP) N Runway 15 that supposedly takes them down to about 540′ above the runway before they need to be able to look out the window and see. The lowest approach available to general aviation, including the elites in their private jets, requires the pilots to see the runway when 2100′ above it (up to 91 knots approach speed; Cessna or Cirrus) or 2400′ above (91-120 knots; a lot of rabble-class bizjets) or 3200′ above (121-140 knots; the Big Iron for the Big Shots). This is actually more restrictive than ordinary visual (VFR) flying, which can be done with a ceiling of 1000′.
(In the plate below, notice that the approach features a second localizer that isn’t associated with any runway. This provides guidance for the missed approach. Imagine the consequences, especially in the pre-GPS days, of the obvious mistake of failing to switch the frequency or of forgetting how to use the back course of a localizer, something that the typical instrument-rated pilot might do in training and then never again.)
There’s also a GPS approach that has similar minimums for jets:
As Women’s History Month comes to a close, let’s look at a February visit to the Pinball Hall of Fame, on the Strip in Las Vegas.
This is essentially a big warehouse filled with old arcade games, indifferently maintained and many powered off. That said, it is a large enough collection that there are probably some playable games within that you’ve never seen and never played.
Tip: Get there right when it opens if you want to be able to hear the machines’ callouts and music clearly. Don’t be put off by the surly ladies who run the place! (I’m not sure why they’re there because one of them said that she didn’t like pinball and never played any of the machines.)
In order to avoid what Google Maps said would be a very un-rapid rapid transit ride, I Ubered into San Francisco on a Sunday morning to meet a friend for dim sum in Chinatown.
If you get something at one of the take-away places, there is a nice patio above the Rose Park Station at Stocktown and Washington St. where you can eat it. After Chinatown, we walked to the City Lights bookstore:
“Essential” marijuana is available down by the water, right next to the In-N-Out Burger that was closed by authorities for its refusal to demand vaccine papers (remember that California marijuana stores were open for the entire 18-month period during which schools were closed):
Transportation variants:
Then back to Berkeley for coffee the next morning:
Moe’s Books (Berkeley) moved all of the Gaza books to the back of the store (see A trip to Berkeley, California (November 2024))
Some of the books that were prominently displayed:
Nearby Mrs. Dalloway’s Books features works on how to spend most of the day reminding kids that they’re going to die when the Earth goes Full Venus:
I talked to a professor of adolescent medicine shortly after seeing these books and he said that it made sense for all teenagers to be in therapy because of their reasonable fears regarding climate change.
Housing is a human right, which means either a $3 million house from this real estate agency or sleeping in the real estate agency’s alcove:
Dove soap is too precious to be left on the shelf at CVS:
… we landed in Concord, California, rode on “Transforce” tires, were admonished to “Coexist” with people of different religions, and arrived at a Thai restaurant with an all-gender restroom:
The next day it was time to visit Berkeley, California. A house in my hostess’s neighborhood celebrates RBG, who refused to hire Black law clerks, and Black Lives Matter:
Although everyone I talked to in Berkeley agrees that taxation in California should be higher, there is no “Repeal Proposition 13” sign on the fence of this house worth $2.4 million and taxed at $1.3 million (referenced to its 2006 purchase price). Nor are any of the Californians who said they wanted higher taxes and that they hate generational wealth (unearned!) working to implement a 16 percent state death tax in California to match estate tax rates in Maskachusetts, New York, and other progressive states.
Two yards over, “Free Palestine” (this was a day before Donald Trump attacked the peaceful Iranians so the signs in support of the Islamic Republic hadn’t gone up yet):
Outdoor masking is common and so is wearing an “I’m gay” t-shirt, but it was relatively rare to find an intersection:
Californians love to brag about being rich and also say that housing is a human right, yet are happy to walk by neighbors who live in tents:
Californians also love to brag about their commitment to environmentalism, yet driving old cars that spew pollution is common. (Note that the owner of the 40-year-old Mazda 323, ChatGPT-estimated value of $1,000, was concerned about theft.)
Gasoline is $5/gallon:
Those who’ve converted to electric install tripping hazards on the public sidewalks:
