Great Smoky Mountains, Gatlinburg, and Pigeon Forge

by philg

For a former New Englander, the big shock of being in the Great Smoky Mountains in July was the bug situation. Following standard practice from the Appalachians in MA, NH, VT, and ME, we had brought enough DEET and picaridin to cover a herd of elephants and yet found ourselves in the woods without being bothered by any flying insects, even in wetter lower-lying areas.

We spent our first day driving to Kuwahi, known to the white invaders as “Clingmans Dome,” the highest point on the Appalachian Trail and, at 6,643′, the third highest mountain in the land that we stole east of the Mississippi. We left the cabin before 7 am because we had been warned that parking lots within the park tend to fill up.

Our reward for the drive was getting progressively deeper into a cloud until, at last, nothing was visible.

On the way, official government scientists reminded us that, while diversity is our strength and non-native humans are hugely beneficial for any ecosystem, non-native insects are a disaster:

Cars feature a lot more religious and political expression than in Florida. We can be grateful to Jesus for the dinosaur blood that saved us from walking up 4,000′ from the Gatlinburg airport (KGKT):

On the back of a small SUV, a reminder not to follow the examples of Al Franken and Harvey Weinstein when visiting the Knoxville Zoo:

How about the bears? We spent a day driving to Cades Cove to see the bears. The approach to Cades Cove from Gatlinburg follows a winding river and features more curves than all of the roads in South Florida combined. The kids loved it and asked if we could go back the same way.

Upon reaching Cades Cove the National Park Service warned us, via a big electronic sign, that it would take 2-3 hours to drive the 11-mile loop. This was, if anything, an underestimate. Traffic moves slower than in midtown Manhattan. We were grateful to take a break in the middle and walk to Abrams Falls:

How about those bears? We did see a few during the Cades Cove day, usually at least 100′ away and often obscured by trees. After a long day of attempted bear-viewing in the National Park we found that the street right in front of our cabin was blocked by four bear cubs and a bear parent of unknown gender ID. After 20 minutes, one cub hadn’t moved at all and we began researching wildlife rescue options, thinking that perhaps the cub had been hit by a car. Eventually, though, all of the bears got up and moved up the hill and we were able to get to our cabin (that’s actually our rental, in the photo).

Apparently, even the bears can’t handle the epic crowds within the National Park and prefer to hang out in Gatlinburg and even inside our rental:

After a day off at Dollywood (maybe I’ll do that as a separate post), we returned to the park for a walk to Grotto Falls. We didn’t get out quite as early and found that we needed to park roughly 1/2 mile downhill from the trailhead. The parking areas within the Park would need to be 3-4X bigger to handle even the weekday demand for the more popular trails. Most of the photographs taken in the Park are lies. Most visitors, even those willing to go on a 2-3-hour hike, will have an essentially urban experience inside the National Park. The trail to Grotto Falls is more crowded than a typical American city sidewalk, but it is possible, even in the middle of the day, to make it look like you’re in the woods by yourself:

Where to stay? We liked our cabin, which had a great view from the desk and enabled us to see bears up close and personal. But it was 10 minutes of driving down some scary mountain roads to get to a supermarket, restaurant, or the main roads into the Park. Remarkably, there were delivery services that would, at a reasonable price, bring groceries (the Publix app works!) or meals up to the cabin, and it was also possible to get an Uber either to or from the cabin. If you want to go back to your lodging in between activities it probably makes more sense to stay closer to one of the towns.

Pigeon Forge, home to Dollywood, is a serious challenge to those who believe that markets will result in reasonable outcomes. It is a strip of hideous commercial development, fronted by massive parking lots, jammed with 6 lanes of traffic, and inaccessible to pedestrians. Every urban planning major should be sent here so that if he/she/ze/they is ever experience self-doubt or doubt in his/her/zir/their chosen profession, he/she/ze/they can think back to the Pigeon Forge experience.

The only thing that can be said in favor of Pigeon Forge is that people are friendly and seem happy to be working. Well, and that it is possible to purchase socks celebrating Rainbow Flagism:

And maybe the Titanic Museum, which gets great reviews, but was rejected by our 8-year-old: “Titanic hit an iceberg and sunk. What’s the problem with you?” The kids were irresistibly drawn to the medieval castle containing MagiQuest (not to be confused with MAGAQuest, in which the task is helping non-partisan FBI agents find documents) and it was actually a lot of fun (buy the unlimited time option because there is no way you’ll get out of the Magi section in less than 2.5 hours) and a smart air-conditioned choice on a hot afternoon or evening.

Gatlinburg is just as traffic-clogged, but at least it is walkable and it is closer to the Park:

Maybe the best compromise between a mountain experience, access to the Park, and access to services and attractions: the DoubleTree Park Vista hotel. It is right next to a road leading into the Park and high enough above the town that you get some mountain views and mountain air. We drove by it on our way to Grotto Falls. The reviews suggest that the place needs renovation, but once it does get a make-over it should be nice.

Travel tip: bring some mini bottles of maple syrup. The local mania seems to be for making pancakes (not obviously better than those McDonald’s serves as part of the Big Breakfast), but corn syrup with a touch of artificial flavor is the only topping that is reliably available. Our kids got a surprise after we asked a waitress “Do you have real maple syrup?” and she responded “Yes,” then returned with what used to be called Aunt Jemima. We explained that this was “real” to her.

Overall: Great Smoky Mountains National Park is, in fact, great. But unless you’re a serious backcountry hiker, it is also mostly ruined by the crowds. Everything was designed for the U.S. circa 1960 (population 180 million and most people had to work on most days), not for the U.S. circa 2022 (population 333 million and the entire laptop class can pretend to work from Gatlinburg just as easily as pretending to work from home). If you don’t love crowds you probably won’t find the Park relaxing.

At the same time that we were in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a friend was in a $7,000/night dude ranch in Montana. The elites were paying $7,000/night for, essentially, the same experience that our family had in the National Parks circa 1980. An elite family could go for a walk without bumping into a lot of other people. They could park wherever they wanted to. They could get into a restaurant and eat without waiting 45 minutes or an hour. They could ride horses without making reservations in advance. But we could do and actually did all of those things as an upper-middle-class family (my dad worked for the Federal Trade Commission) in the early 1980s in Yellowstone, Bryce Canyon, Zion, Grand Canyon, etc.

Related:

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Trump vs. Biden in the New York Times

by philg

According to my browser, the word “Trump” occurs 6 times on the front page of today’s New York Times. “Biden” occurs 3 times.

Biden is featured for expanding government (and, therefore, borrowing and the deficit) as well as for being a quarter century older than the mandatory retirement age for an FAA air traffic controller (gone before age 56, even at the sleepiest airports where there might be one operation every 10 minutes).

Some of the headlines mentioning Trump:

Excerpts from the Trump stories:

Liberal excitement is understandable. Mr. Trump faces potential legal jeopardy from the Jan. 6 investigation in Congress and the Mar-a-Lago search. They anticipate fulfilling a dream going back to the earliest days of the Trump administration: to see him frog-marched to jail before the country and the world.

But the nightmare wouldn’t stop there. What if Mr. Trump declares another run for the presidency just as he’s indicted and treats the trial as a circus illustrating the power of the Washington swamp and the need to put Republicans back in charge to drain it?

There is an obvious risk: If Mr. Trump runs again, he might win.

It’s impossible to understand the G.O.P. reaction to the raid, though, without accounting for the context of the Russia investigation of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign that consumed the first two years of his presidency. … investigations of prominent figures of one party carried out by officials of the other party aren’t going to be met by a relaxed attitude and sympathetic understanding.

The last time there was a significant investigation of a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, Democrats waged all-out war on the prosecutor. The independent counsel, Ken Starr, had a Republican background, but he wasn’t working for a G.O.P. administration. He was appointed by a three-judge panel after Mr. Clinton’s own attorney general, Janet Reno, triggered the investigation.

The Russia investigation was a national fiasco that brought discredit on the F.B.I. and everyone who participated in it. The probe prominently featured a transparently ridiculous dossier generated by the Clinton campaign, eventually spinning into a special-counsel investigation that became, to some significant extent, about itself and whether Mr. Trump was guilty of obstruction. People who should have known better got caught up in the feeding frenzy and speculated that the walls were closing in on Mr. Trump or that he might have been a Russian asset going back decades.

That experience guarantees that no Republican is going to take assurances about the Mar-a-Lago search, or any other Trump investigation, at face value.

Is it fair to say that Trump (our distant neighbor here in Palm Beach County, though there is a world of difference between the Palm Beach and Jupiter lifestyles!) has more mindshare, nearly two years after his last election, than any other former president with the same distance from being in office?

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Do the 87,000 new IRS agents boost the attractiveness of welfare relative to work?

by philg

One of the features of the latest spending bill from Democrats in Congress and Joe Biden is the hiring of 87,000 IRS agents (or 30,000 new agents, depending on whom you believe). I’m wondering if this tips the scales a bit in favor of not working. If you’re in public housing, on Medicaid, shopping via SNAP/EBT, talking on an Obamaphone, and playing Xbox via the new taxpayer-funded broadband benefit, you won’t have to deal with the IRS in any way, regardless of how many agents are hired.

Back in 2013, before all of the coronapanic-related enhancements, the welfare system yielded more spending power than working at the median wage (i.e., being a chump) in at least some states. Table 4 from CATO:

Obviously, the typical American will still be unlikely to get audited in any given year, but the greater risk of an audit, with all of the expense that is entailed even when no errors are found, could be reasonably expected to have at least a small effect on labor force participation, no? Especially for the declining percentage of Americans who are willing to incur the risk of starting their own business (See Inc. and “The decline of American entrepreneurship — in five charts” (Washington Post, 2015)). Speaking of labor force participation rate, let’s check the chart:

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A gathering of 20 kindergartners was a Scientifically unacceptable public health risk…

by philg

…. but Science doesn’t have a problem with an upcoming gathering of more than 275,000 mostly shirtless adults at Southern Decadence (September 1-5, 2022). Neither the CDC nor Louisiana’s public health officials, who eagerly shut down the New Orleans Public Schools, have made any attempt to shut down this event due to the potential for spreading SARS-CoV-2, monkeypox, and any other viruses that can spread from one shirtless human to another.

Science closed the Atlanta kindergartens as recently as January 2022 (NYT), but Science will soon welcome 100,000+ adults for all-day/all-night parties during Atlanta Black Pride.

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A light airplane route out of Florida to the Great Smoky Mountains

by philg

For Floridians hoping to cool off, the nearest mountains are the Appalachians in TN/NC, i.e., the Great Smoky Mountains. It’s an 11-hour drive from Palm Beach County to Cherokee, NC, the southern gateway to Great Smoky Mountains National Park and a 12-hour drive to Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge, TN, the northern gateway and home to Dollywood. In a small airplane, however, the trip can be done in approximately 3.5 hours to KGKT (550 nm). A 3.5-hour flight in a vibrating noisy bathroom-free piston-powered airplane is too much for most pilots and nearly all passengers. Where to stop, then?

The simplest route from flat Florida to mostly-flat eastern Tennessee bends around the west of the Appalachian Mountains via Chattanooga. Why go over these mountains, which generate all kinds of clouds and bumps, when you can instead relax on windward side, entirely free of turbulence and with a much wider range of altitudes to choose from? (as shown below, the FAA considers any altitude lower than 6,600′ to be risky with respect to terrain)

On our way to Oshkosh, however, we enjoyed a rare day on which thunderstorms were not forecast, except on both coasts of Florida (see Garmin Pilot app screen shot from halfway through our first leg). The winds aloft were forecast to be light and therefore there was no risk of powerful downdrafts on the lee side of the mountains. So we planned a scenic crossing of the Appalachians with a first stop in Lake City, Florida (KLCQ). The kids learned to appreciate our pool table by playing on a table with trashed felt using cues with no tips.

Our next stop was KDNL, the “downtown” airport for Augusta, Georgia. There is a flight school on the field and the learning continues even in the men’s room, however Ketanji’s panel of biologists might define the term “men”:

We hopped in the courtesy car and headed downtown to the Morris Museum of Art, “the oldest museum in the country that is specifically devoted to the art and artists of the American South.” It is situated on an attractive river walk and right next to a good restaurant, Augustino’s, within the Marriott hotel.

One of the paintings above is John Steuart Curry’s Hoover and the Flood, celebrating the heroics of America’s only engineer-turned-President, the most skilled technocrat ever to attempt technocratic management of the U.S. economy, in the context of the Climate Change-induced Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.

The final leg required a climb to 10,500′ and weaving to stay out of the clouds and bumps. The forecast was accurate regarding the lack of thunderstorms, but there was still some pop-up convection that made an indirect route seem wiser.

A Cirrus about 15 miles north of us apparently went into one of the above small rain showers and reported “severe turbulence” to Air Traffic Control (“large and abrupt changes in altitude and/or attitude and, usually, large variations in indicated airspeed. The airplane may momentarily be out of control. Occupants of the airplane will be forced violently against their seat belts.”). A combination of NEXRAD and ATC kept us out of anything upsetting. Upon landing, we found that our Enterprise Cadillac(!) sedan had been pulled up next to our airplane by the alert line staff at KGKT.

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An Opera Superstar and a Progressive go into a Bar…

by philg

Checking a couple of recent news stories…

“Placido Domingo’s name comes up in Argentina sex sect probe” (state-sponsored PBS)

Opera star Placido Domingo’s name has appeared in an investigation of a sect-like organization in Argentina that also had U.S. offices and whose leaders have been charged with crimes, including sexual exploitation.

Domingo, the Spanish opera singer who has faced accusations of sexual harassment from numerous women over the past three years, has not been accused of any wrongdoing in the Argentina case.

“Placido didn’t commit a crime, nor is he part of the organization, but rather he was a consumer of prostitution,” said a law enforcement official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because the investigation continues. Prostitution is not illegal in Argentina.

The article says that “children or teenagers … were sexually exploited”. Placido Domingo is, thus, a child molester? The specific person who visited the opera star in his hotel room is named: Susana Mendelievich. How old is this teenager? In 1990, she was old enough to play the piano (source). Operawire reports that she is today 75 years old.

The great opera star, in other words, is accused of paying for sex with a 75-year-old.

“Social Media Was a C.E.O.’s Bullhorn, and How He Lured Women” (New York Times):

Kacie Margis [27 years old], a model and artist, first learned about Dan Price in 2020 the way many people do: through social media posts that celebrated his progressive politics.

Five years earlier, Mr. Price had propelled himself to an unlikely position for the head of a 110-person payment processing company when he told his employees that he was raising their minimum pay to $70,000. His announcement was covered by The New York Times and NBC News. Esquire did a photo shoot. He made appearances on “The Daily Show” and at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

On Monday, the police in Palm Springs, Calif., said they had referred Ms. Margis’s case to local prosecutors, recommending a charge of rape of a drugged victim.

What harmful drugs did the Progressive icon employ in his nefarious scheme? For those who had the patience to read another 7 screens of text:

Ms. Margis returned to Room 423, where she took a cannabis edible to counter insomnia, something she’s regularly done since being at the 2017 mass shooting at a Las Vegas music festival. Mr. Price returned and tried to initiate sex.

I’m wondering if this is at odds with Science. Marijuana is such an important booster of overall health that marijuana stores were “essential” and, at least in California, Illinois, and Maskachusetts, remained open on every day that public schools were closed. This is a Scientific fact and it is reflected in Science-guided policies designed and imposed by politicians and officials who Follow the Science. But, simultaneously, a different branch of the same Science-following government considers healing cannabis to be drug that leaves a person mentally and physically incapacitated, unable to resist a sexual assault.

Moving on to one of the other victims… Serena Jowers, also mentioned in the article as having provided sex to the Progressive CEO without an explicit fee being charged:

Unless we want to say that, just as being elderly makes a person better suited to being President of the United States being elderly makes a person better at having sex, it seems that sending out a handful of Progressive tweets yields a superior return in the sexual marketplace than a lifetime spent honing one’s craft as an opera singer.

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Pride Month in Denver

by philg

Working through my backlog of summer photos, I stopped off in Denver during Pride Month. In traveling from California to Colorado, both states in which people say that they Follow Science, hardly anyone was wearing a mask:

I stayed in Arvada, which is 90 percent white and 0.9 percent African American according to Wikipedia. Nonetheless, a sign downtown informed me that this was a “Community of Color”

Someone with a commitment to social justice and an air rifle may have developed this sign starting from “Community Banks of Colorado”. Hanging a rainbow flag was popular in a variety of locations around Denver (also the rugged Toyota just for fun!):

Considering that half of the nation says it wants to stop the spread of COVID-19, the airport seemed to be at or beyond its design capacity:

As United Airlines was rapidly consuming Jet A, the company reminded me that we should all travel by sailboat as Greta Thunberg does:

Following a mask-free flight between the Science strongholds of Denver and Atlanta, I learned that some people are concerned enough about aerosol COVID-19 to wear a surgical mask, but not concerned enough to avoid the crowded airport or the Chick fil-A line:

Having the Garmin Pilot app running while on a commercial airliner yields some unsettling messages:

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San Diego trip report

by philg

Digging through the summer photo backlog, a report on a June trip to San Diego where I slaved away as an expert witness on a software case in federal court (the jury stuck around to be interviewed by the attorneys after the trial and said that they understood and enjoyed my testimony!).

The local public library sends travelers off from FLL with free music and movies:

If you don’t download these on the airport WiFi, JetBlue will prepare you for California’s state religion on the flight out with movies classified as “Pride Picks”:

I saw more homeless people, pit bulls, homeless people with pit bulls, pit bull poop, and trash in the street in my first two days in San Diego than during nearly a year in the West Palm-FLL-Miami area. Here are a couple of sidewalk-dwellers just steps from where the laptop class enjoys $50/person meals:

San Diego presents a huge challenge to those who believe that a market economy is efficient. There are gleaming new skyscrapers next to lots used for surface parking or other low-value activities. If the land isn’t valuable, why would people build up 15 or 20 stories? If the land is valuable, why is so much of it still not developed in any significant way?

Whatever the real estate values might be, one great thing about California is the Chinese food. While waiting for a table at the San Diego outpost of Din Tai Fung, we learned that Lucid has dog mode:

The shopping mall reminded us to observe Rainbow Flagism:

Back downtown, the official city art shows Mexican-Americans taking the bus while rich white people yacht in the background:

My favorite images from the trip depict a debate between saving Mother Earth via light rail or via battery-electric vehicles that turned violent:

I suspect that the Tesla 3 in the image was rented to the driver for $390 per week by Uber, as was a Tesla 3 in which I rode (“horrifyingly bumpy and uncomfortable compared to the Hyundai Sonata I was in yesterday,” I wrote to a friend at the time). The drive says that he must do 30 trips per week in order to keep the car and that this corresponds to 1.5 days of Ubering. I posted about this on Facebook, which helpfully added some editorial content of its own: “Explore Climate Science Info”. In the same vein, Google ran a big animation for Juneteenth:

Californians did manage to steal some great land from the Native Americans and Mexicans. Here’s some topiary:

Old Town featured a CDC reference work on how to prevent an aerosol respiratory virus with a cloth mask:

Compared to southeast Florida, it was much more common to see fully covered women:

Aside from observant Muslims, it was rare to see someone following the Science by wearing a mask, despite a raging COVID-19 epidemic at the time. A jammed street fair, with no masks:

It was outdoors, though, right? In my courthouse experience, only one juror and one chubby clerk wore masks. The guards in the lobby were unmasked. The judge was unmasked. More or less everyone in the building was unmasked. These folks will say that they’re preventing COVID-19 from spreading by behaving in a more scientific manner than residents of Florida, but I couldn’t figure out what they were doing differently.

Circling back to the observant Muslims depicted above… they were just a few steps from an official city-flown rainbow flag:

If they were to need to transact some business at the bank they would have to walk under the sacred symbol of Rainbow Flagism:

I recommend the Japanese Friendship Garden in Balboa Park:

But of course my favorite tourist attractive was the USS Midway, an aircraft carrier launched just as World War II was over. The ship is now a museum and Navy veterans, including aircrew, give fascinating lectures on how everything works.

San Diego is a great place to spend 7-10 days as a tourist, hitting all of the museums and parks while enjoying great weather and great food. If one were to live there, however, the contradictions would eventually begin to rankle. Why are there so many unhoused people if rich Californians say that they want to provide housing to the unhoused? Why isn’t there enough civic spirit and agreement that people will get organized to pick up trash and dog poop in their city? (Florida has almost no litter by comparison and dog pick-up bag dispensers are common anywhere that people want dog owners to clean up.) If California wants to welcome millions of migrants from conservative societies, which Californians say that they do, how does it make sense to have Rainbow Flagism as the state religion?

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COVID-19 stimulus spending would have funded 16.6 million middle class children from age 0 to 18

by philg

Today’s inflation news… “It Now Costs $300,000 to Raise a Child” (Wall Street Journal):

The cost of raising a child through high school has risen to more than $300,000 because of inflation that is running close to a four-decade high, according to a Brookings Institution estimate.

It determined that a married, middle-income couple with two children would spend $310,605—or an average of $18,271 a year—to raise their younger child born in 2015 through age 17. The calculation uses an earlier government estimate as a baseline, with adjustments for inflation trends.

Let’s combine that with “Where $5 Trillion in Pandemic Stimulus Money Went” (Pravda, May 11):

Stimulus bills approved by Congress beginning in 2020 unleashed the largest flood of federal money into the United States economy in recorded history. Roughly $5 trillion went to households, mom-and-pop shops, restaurants, airlines, hospitals, local governments, schools and other institutions around the country grappling with the blow inflicted by Covid-19.

Even at today’s inflated costs, therefore, if we hadn’t decided to spend all of our current and future savings on coronapanic we could have fully funded 16.6 million children in middle class families, a group that doesn’t tend to have children. This chart from 2019 shows that low-income Americans, who get taxpayer-funded housing sized for whatever families they choose to create, and high-income Americans, who are rich enough to buy family-sized houses, are the ones that have kids:

That’s considering only direct federal spending. Can we guess that at least another $5 trillion was spent and/or sacrificed via state governors’ lockdown orders? Now we’re up to being able to fund 33+ million middle class kids. There are only about 70 million children at all income levels in the U.S. right now. Roughly half of school kids are poor enough to get free or reduced-price lunch (NCES) and, therefore, presumably are entitled to other programs that used to be called “welfare”. So the coronapanic spending, at both state and federal levels, would have been enough to fund 100 percent of American children, for their entire childhood, whose childhoods are not already being funded by taxpayers.

Related:

  • “Scandal-hit Hunter Biden ‘agreed to pay baby mama $2.5 million” (The Sun, October 2020) shows that the stripper-turned-family-court-plaintiff, even if she failed to invest the $2.5 million in an inflation-protecting manner, will still get a $2.2 million profit off Joe Biden’s granddaughter (when will this kid be invited to the White House? Grandpa is not getting any younger or more energetic!)
  • “Prosecutors Struggle to Catch Up to a Tidal Wave of Pandemic Fraud” (NYT): “… one of the largest frauds in American history, with billions of dollars stolen by thousands of people … In one instance, 29 states paid unemployment benefits to the same person. … Another individual got 10 loans for 10 nonexistent bathroom-renovation businesses, using the email address of a burrito shop.”
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I need to get COVID-19 within the next three weeks (the government tests arrived today)

by philg

On May 1, 2022 I ordered my “free” (i.e., taxpayer-funded) COVID-19 tests. They arrived in today’s mail. They expire 22 days from now, on September 9, 2022.

For these to be useful, in other words, I need to copy the Pfizer CEO and add COVID-19 to my vaccinated-and-boosted body… within the next three weeks.

Related:

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