The first stop in our cruise was in Ketchikan, Alaska, a small town of 8,000 people at the southernmost tip of the Inside Passage coastal route for ships and boats. Historically, it was a fishing community but today it is largely devoted to tourism and government services.

We weren’t interested in the very tourist-y downtown area and immediately made our way to the “fish ladder”, the rapids used by salmon to jump their way upstream to spawn, pictured below.

We must have seen a dozen salmon leaping the rapids in the few minutes we spent watching the fish ladder. We then made our way from the fish ladder to the beginning of our guided nature walk in the Tongass National Forest, the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world. The walk was one of the highlights of our trip.

Our very well-informed trail guide introduced us to the flora and fauna of the rainforest in the course of a roughly two mile walk. Sitka Spruce. Western Hemlock. Various berries. Devil’s Club, a spiny bush. Much to our delight we encountered four black bears along the trail maintaining a safe distance. We were told that we may have seen more bears on our nature walk than those who took the bear walk.

It rains quite a bit in Ketchikan—to the extent that they measure rainfall in feet per year not inches. 12 or more feet of rain per year is typical. Apparently, we brought good weather with us. The temperature varied from the 50s to the 70s in the course of the morning and it was one of Ketchikan’s few rainfree days.

Our visit to Ketchikan was quite brief, just the morning. After our nature walk we caught a bus at the Totem Heritage Center (Ketchikan has the largest collection of standing totem poles) and returned to the ship which departed around noon for Juneau.

Can anyone envision an end condition for the war in Iran other than the end of President Trump’s term? I can’t. I think that the war in Iran is likely to continue as long as anyone in Iran has drones or missiles and as long as there are targets within striking range which may be a very long time, indeed. Is there one person with the practical authority to say, “The war is over; cease firing,” and have every organization and commander capable of launching a missile or drone actually stop? I don’t believe there is.

Iran in 2026 is not Japan in August 1945.

A little more than a week ago my wife and I flew to Vancouver and overnighted there. We spent the day wandering around town, took the SkyTrain to the harbor, took the ferry to Granville Island, wandered around the island, returned to the hotel, and went to bed so we would be up in plenty of time to board our ship.

It had been 60 years since I had been in Vancouver. I was astonished by several things. First, it has grown substantially. When I was last there it was a slightly grungy factory town. Now it’s heavily built up and mostly new.

Second, it was very clean and neat. Even the SkyTrain was neat and tidy, more so by far then the El in Chicago.

Third, it was demographically very different from the Vancouver I remember or, indeed, from any city I had ever been in. By my casual observation, a remarkable number of the people are of East Asian extraction.

We boarded our ship early the next morning. It was the Coral Princess, pictured above. Our stateroom had a balcony. You can see the balconies along the side of the ship in the picture.

Next stop, Ketchikan.

My wife and I were on a cruise to Alaska for a week and then stayed with friends in Wasilla for several days. I thought it prudent not to disclose where we were but it did cut into my posting pretty severely. But now we’re back and I have a lot to say about our trip, about Alaska, and about what’s been going on.

I’ll try to get back to posting at my usual pace soon but right now I’m tired. As G. K. Chesterton put it, no man is so in need of a vacation as one who has just returned from one.

There has been considerable fulmination in the media outlets about the increase in measles cases in the United States, What follows is a table documenting the reported cases of measles this year for OECD countries in 2026

Recent Reported Measles Incidence — Selected OECD Countries

Most recent 2026 figures available from national or international public-health authorities. Reporting dates differ by country, so the figures should be regarded as an indication of relative scale rather than a precise ranking.

Country	Reported cases	Reporting period	Approx. population	Cases per million
Mexico	12,479	Jan. 1–Aug. 8, 2026	~130 million	~96.0
Canada	1,114	Jan. 1–Aug. 8, 2026	~41 million	~27.2
England*	970	Jan. 1–Aug. 17, 2026	~58 million	~16.7
United States	2,465	Jan. 1–Aug. 6, 2026	~342 million	~7.2
Japan	498	Jan. 1–May 20, 2026	~124 million	~4.0

*The most recent UK government figures available on a directly comparable calendar-year basis cover England rather than the entire United Kingdom.

Sources: Pan American Health Organization/WHO for Mexico, Canada and the United States; UK Health Security Agency for England; Japan Institute for Health Security for Japan. Figures are provisional and reporting dates differ. Population figures are rounded, so per-capita rates are approximate.

Quite a number of explanations have been suggested for the increase in cases including delays in vaccination produced by the COVID-19 pandemic, “vaccination hesitancy”, and others.

Considering the large numbers in developed countries other than the U. S., I see little reason to blame the increase on conditions specific to the U. S. Officials should strive to reduce the numbers but I don’t believe there is any need for brow-beating.

We’re still in the dog days of summer, a slack period for opinion pieces, so I’ll use the opportunity to take stock of what I see as the four big stories whose significance extends well beyond local concerns. As I see it they are:

• The war with Iran
• The Russo-Ukrainian War
• “Trade war” with Canada
• Data centers

The war with Iran

I articulated my opposition to the war with Iran on the first day of the war, largely on just war grounds. That hasn’t changed. I think it is incumbent on President Trump to explain how we will achieve victory in this war. Not what his objectives are—how we will achieve victory. At this point that seems to be some combination of economic pressure and military force. Why will this be successful now when it has not in the past?

The Russo-Ukrainian War

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has rejected the notion of a wartime election, despite calls for it from his opposition. NBC News reports:

Echoing his ?previous comments on ?the matter, Zelenskiy said a wartime election might be possible if Kyiv’s partners could guarantee security, but that no one ?has proposed such a plan.

“Elections right now are a ?tsunami for ?the state, which will split Ukraine,” he said.

“That’s why my strategy is to steer the country toward an ending of the war and to preserve an ?independent ?and sovereign state.”

Fedorov, a longtime Zelenskyy ally who ?has been seen as a top political challenger, did not explicitly say whether he would stand ?in any future election.

Since the outset of hostilities I have argued that we should provide military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine. That, however, should not be construed as unqualified support for the Ukrainian government and everything it does. Russia was wrong in attacking Ukraine. We should continue to support Ukraine. We should use whatever leverage our support provides to nudge Ukraine in the direction of being more democratic, more liberal, less corrupt, and less ethno-nationalist.

“Trade war” with Canada

Cristina Roca reports at the Wall Street Journal:

After weeks of marathon talks between U.S. and Canadian trade officials, an agreement was almost in sight. Then, late on Friday, the talks collapsed at the 11th hour. Tariffs of 50% on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods went into effect, and Ottawa said it will respond with dollar-for-dollar levies on Sept. 8.

My general view is that we should engage in trade reciprocity with other countries. In the past I have been critical of the U. S.-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement (USMCA) on the grounds that it wasn’t strictly reciprocal and that Canada and Mexico were each exploiting different aspects of the agreement to their own advantage and our disadvantage. That remains my view.

In the particular cases of Mexico and Canada I believe the long-term ideal objective is moving in the direction of a single, trans-continental economy. These aggressive moves and Canada’s reaction are not steps in the right direction.

Data centers

In general my view is that Congress has largely ceded what is inherently a national policy problem to the executive branch, states, local zoning authorities, utilities, and individual companies. The construction of data centers presents a classic collective-action problem. And historically that’s exactly the sort of problem for which Congress exists. Individual communities have every reason to consider the local costs of data centers but little reason to consider the national costs of not building them.

Unfortunately, Republicans have largely outsourced national data-center policy to President Trump while Democrats haven’t decided what national data-center policy should be. There’s something between “build anything anywhere” and “stop building data centers” that is the better policy strategy and Congress should establish a national framework for what that is.

I’ve been mulling over the interaction among commercial users of the Internet, social media, AI, data centers, and end users for some time now.

The graphic above summarizes those thoughts. Comments appreciated.

What struck me about Thomas Beck’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, complaining about “Medicare for All”, was how much he relies on the notion of “true prices”. Here’s his opening:

The notion of a “Medicare for All” system is enjoying a revival. Democratic primary victories by candidates who champion single-payer healthcare, most notably U.S. Senate candidates Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota, have pushed the proposal back into the healthcare debate.

What these candidates fail to understand—or refuse to acknowledge—is that applying Medicare payment rates to all services provided to all patients would destroy the American healthcare system.

and this is a passage that illustrates my point:

Congress’s Medicare Payment Advisory Commission estimates that hospitals lost about 12 cents on every Medicare dollar they received in 2024 and projects Medicare margins will remain roughly 10% below the break-even point in 2026. Those losses are sustainable only because Medicare is one part of a mixed-payer system.

The other main part is commercial insurance. A 2024 Rand study found that private insurers paid hospitals, on average, more than 2.5 times Medicare rates. Those much higher payments help support emergency departments, trauma centers, neonatal intensive-care units, behavioral-health programs, teaching hospitals and rural facilities, as well as investment in technology, cybersecurity and emergency preparedness.

In effect, America’s hospitals are financed by a combination of public underpayment and private overpayment. The arrangement may not be elegant or even rational, but it keeps hospitals operating. Medicare for All would destroy that balance.

In short his thesis is that private insurance pays the true price of healthcare and subsidizes Medicare.

But that’s not how hospital pricing actually works. Commercial rates aren’t derived from underlying costs at all they’re the output of market power and negotiating leverage between hospitals and insurers. A hospital with few competitors nearby can charge substantially more than a hospital lacking comparable market power; a hospital in a competitive market can’t, regardless of what Medicare pays it.

It’s true that revenue from profitable service lines and well-paying commercial patients funds unprofitable-but-necessary services like trauma centers, NICUs, and behavioral health. That’s a real financial structure. But it’s a static accounting fact about how a given system currently allocates money not a causal claim that Medicare’s low rates force private rates up. Under a single-payer system, that internal cross-subsidy would have to be rebuilt through the payment schedule itself, e.g. higher rates for money-losing service lines, which is a real policy design problem not proof the system is mathematically impossible.

But he’s right that “Medicare for All” has a math problem—it’s just not the math he’s pointing to. An explanation that hews more closely to the facts is that Medicare functions as a reference price and that our prices for healthcare are higher than those of other developed countries because all of the factors, e.g. care providers and insurance companies, lack incentives that would reduce prices and Congress has refused to control the price of healthcare. No foreseeable reform even one that completely eliminates private insurance is likely to bring U.S. healthcare spending anywhere near that of other developed countries without directly constraining the prices paid for healthcare.

I wish I knew what Nate Silver’s opinion on Patrick Ruffini’s recent findings on opinion polls was. The short version is that opinion polls overestimated Democratic electoral performance: over the last four cycles, he says 73% of the polls he examined overstated the Democrat, with the effect particularly pronounced in summer polling. Nate has apparently expressed an opinion but, unfortunately, it’s hidden behind a paywall.

Based on my admittedly anecdotal experience canvassing Chicago wards, I think there’s a relatively benign possible explanation at least compared with some of the explanations being offered. I’ve gone door to door in multiple Chicago precincts accompanied by the Republican ward committeeman and my experience has been that Republican households are less likely than Democratic households to answer the door and engage with a canvasser. If a similar difference exists in willingness to respond to pollsters, that alone would introduce a partisan response bias.

The recent Median Strategies debacle raises a related but rather different question: are polls as reliable as they used to be? If you’re not familiar with Median Strategies the organization admittedly published false opinion polls as a “social experiment”. How one might distinguish between a social experiment and political shenanigans is unclear to me. I only pay attention to polls from a small number of outlets: my old client NORC, Gallup, Pew Research, a few others. There’s an enormous amount of disinformation these days.

Be very careful out there.