Julian Simon, the economist who was legendarily skeptical about environmental doom, once posed a question at an environmental forum: “How many people here believe that the earth is increasingly polluted and that our natural resources are being exhausted?” Almost every hand shot up. He then said, “Is there any evidence that could dissuade you?” There was no response, so he asked again, “Is there any evidence I could give you—anything at all—that would lead you to reconsider these assumptions?” Again, no response. Simon concluded, “Well, excuse me. I’m not dressed for church.”
So I was reading this article about Democrat controlled California eagerly applying for the hated Trump administration’s $1 trillion infrastructure spending plan. I know, Democrats can’t help themselves when it comes to spending other peoples money, but this takes some world record chutzpah…
Anyway, I was thinking back to a conversation I had with someone that supported the California High Speed Rail project. I’ve been more than a little skeptical about this boondoggle, but my friend was convinced it would be a good thing because, according to her, flying to LA took so long and was so expensive. She claimed tickets run $400 and after getting thru security and baggage and car rental the trip takes about 4-5 hours.
So when I got home I googled a few items and now see the flaw in her logic.
According to Wikipedia, the fastest production high speed rail is 200 MPH. California requires 220 MPH, and even if they get that, a straight shot uninterrupted trip will take a minimum of 2 hours for the 400 mile distance. Security, baggage and car rental are a wash because it takes the same regardless.
Anyway, my next Google query looked at cost and duration of flight times from SF to LA. Google Flights appeared with an average of 1.5 hours flight time and $100 cost for a one-way ticket.
So the fastest PRODUCTION train in the world is slower than what California needs. And somehow the golden state is going to develop and run this new record breaking speed while competing with the airlines at less than $100 per ticket.
Yeah, so the next this comes up with my friend I’ll try to be nice to her and gently break the news. California high speed rail is a dream for public employee unions and developers, but a boondoggle for the paying public.
But it’s okay – Trump is supposedly stupid enough to be easily fooled by his obviously more intelligent political opponents. They got this…
Excellent article from Walter Russell Mead pointing out several assumptions that have proven to be questionable at best, outright disasters at worst.
According to the Mr. Mead here’s a list of failures:
That we had a policy to end the North Korean nuclear drive (ditto for Iran)
That Europe was becoming a great posthistorical power based on the mighty engine of the euro
That the two-state solution was just a settlement freeze away
That international institutions and civil society were replacing national governments at the center of world politics
That immigration was a no-brainer
That the progress toward free trade was inexorable
That democracy was irresistibly on the march
Money quote: “A different kind of statesmanship, harder-edged and less sentimental, is going to be needed… Brutal clarity rather than liberal pink cloud thinking is the rising force in international affairs.”
Councilman Ash Kalra, who terms out of the D2 seat next month, will also get a head start in his new role representing the 27th Assembly District. Kalra, who will succeed Assemblywoman Nora Campos, resigns from the council this week and will get sworn into the state Legislature next week.
This, my friends, is what is known as a political machine. Voters pass term limit laws designed to end career politicians. But the machine paves the way for one to jump to the next level of political office, thus maintaining the party control.
Democrats have been running California since the 70s. It should also be noted that since then we’ve seen housing prices skyrocket, wildlife are more protected than people, infrastructure such as roads and dams are neglected, and we have a special blend of gasoline that becomes even more scarce when inevitable shortages arise.
Thank you Democrats for giving California that unique reputation among the land. We’re so special we have a standing reservation on the little yellow buses.
Found this on Drudge Report… I’ve lived in San Jose and worked in Palo Alto for 35 years, and traffic in the Bay Area is the worst I’ve ever seen. When the dot com bubble was at its peak, even then it was not as bad as now.
But it’s not just traffic. Quality of life in California is reaching a precipitous point – housing prices are outrageous, we have no water thanks to environmental policies that discourage dams, we pay extra for special gasoline that becomes even more scarce during shortages, and now traffic is a nightmare.
Thank you, state planners. You’ve opened the borders, adding millions more to the population, while bowing to special interests that choose to enhance the lifestyle of animals as opposed to citizens.
It would be nice to add more lanes to those freeways, but the argument has always been that that only encourages more drivers. But that logic fails when you consider the number of immigrant drivers coming across an open border. Were they expecting newcomers to pledge a loyalty to pedestrianism?
Sorry to be such a Republican downer, but Democrat policies that have flourished in this state for the past 50 years are now coming home to roost. And it’s only going to get worse…
So I was reading about the FBI investigation of Hillary’s email server, and documents have been turned over to congress for review… and then I caught this lower into the article: “(congressman) Chaffetz has not read the new documents, which include classified records that must be read in a security facility.”
Yeah, so Hillary trading unsecured email back and forth as SoS is okay, but in order to review that we need to go to a secure facility.
Here’s why this won’t sway voters who support Trump. This is a video over 10 years old that has obviously been revealed to embarrass and shame him. It won’t work because there have been so many attempts to selectively stir up fake outrage depending on who the target is – and guess what… only Republicans have a target on their backs. So people instantly recognize this for what it is – a sleazy attempt to sway voters with little substance behind it. Yeah, Trump said something he shouldn’t have – big deal. That’s what he does, and if you didn’t know that about him by now you haven’t been paying attention.
The other reason it won’t work is Hillary has Bill Clinton. His chasing of women is legendary, going far beyond the meaning of consenting adults. Why he hasn’t been given the Cosby treatment is beyond me, except it’s obvious that “special people” get “special treatment”. Same with the FBI investigation. If anyone other than a Clinton had done these things there would be howls of outrage followed by trials and imprisonment.
Thank goodness Donald Trump has the balls to stare this one down too.
Maybe if you had the foresight to get bi-lateral support, instead of ramming it thru using arcane procedures, then maybe you might have a shot at fixing the problems.
When did the baking trade become such a political hot cake? Seriously, if you need a cake that badly then bake your own damn cake… and I support the cops!
Bill, Republic of Texas said…I’m with SunSong. These Trump quotes show him go be unfit to be President. Get in your neighbors faces.Punch back twice as hard.Punish your enemies.Bring a gun to a knife fight. I don’t want to lessen the anger.
Mr. Trump came from that. . . . You see the dynamic in many spheres. In Hollywood, as we still call it, where they make our rough culture, they are careful to protect their own children from its ill effects. In places with failing schools, they choose not to help them through the school liberation movement—charter schools, choice, etc.—because they fear to go up against the most reactionary professional group in America, the teachers unions. They let the public schools flounder. But their children go to the best private schools.This is a terrible feature of our age—that we are governed by protected people who don’t seem to care that much about their unprotected fellow citizens.
It was back in the 80’s/90’s when I noticed the trend to celebrate breaking rules. Instead of cheating it came to be considered “clever”. The sign says No Fishing, but if you find a way into the forbidden water you’ll get what you want faster and better. Because if you don’t then others will.
This breaking of rules has grown to include how you treat others. Disrupt a stage. Shout down a speaker. Reach out and take what you want and ignore the impact to others.
Dueling would confer consequences onto all the ugly, dishonest, uncouth, untrue, and defamatory things people say about you or your family. Yes, some politicians might be struck down if we allowed this ancient combat to reemerge in contemporary society. But I’m sure that’s a sacrifice most of us would be willing to make.
I was going to call this the best post of 2015 but it’s actually from a 2014 discussion posted on a site called Campaign for Social Justice… readable text is here.
Highlight: “We tolerate you because we believe in free speech and civil discourse, not bullying and violence. But that means we have to watch you advocate against that very freedom.”
It’s actually encouraging that the sciences are maintaining their grip on truth, and will likely continue to do so – as long as we keep global warming out of the mix (I’m looking at you NASA.)
Higher education is increasingly a house divided. In the sciences and even the humanities, actual scholars maintain the high standards of their noble calling. But in the humanities, especially, and elsewhere, faux scholars representing specious disciplines exploit academia as a jobs program for otherwise unemployable propagandists hostile to freedom of expression.
The Interior minister said French authorities have conducted 2,235 searches, made 263 arrests and seized 334 weapons, including 34 military-grade weapons, since last month’s attacks on several bars and restaurants, a concert hall and the national stadium in Paris.
California Gov. Jerry Brown went on the attack Saturday slamming neighboring states’ gun laws. Brown told the Sacramento Bee that Nevada and Arizona are a “gigantic back door through which any terrorist can walk.”
Hey Jerry – the guns were legally purchased by bad guys in your own damn state. Quit trying to shift the focus away from Islamic terrorists and on to law abiding gun owners.
Peggy Noonan observes a new low in public discourse – the mocking of prayer in response to a tragedy:
The background is that Republican presidential contestants responded online to the shootings with the only helpful thing you can say—or do, frankly, from faraway—when a story like this occurs. “Praying for the victims, their families & the San Bernardino first responders,” said Jeb Bush. Mike Huckabee said he was “praying.” John Kasich: “My thoughts & prayers go out to those impacted.”
This managed to enrage the progressive left. You can take your prayers and stuff ’em. The answer and the only answer to this tragedy is gun control, and if you’re not for it you’re not allowed to be part of the conversation. “Please shut up and slink away,” tweeted a reporter. Another: “Your thoughts and prayers don’t mean a damn thing.” A reporter at the Huffington Post damned public officials’ “useless thoughts and prayers.” Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos: “How many dead people did those thoughts and prayers bring back to the life?”
She goes on to suggest some common sense about winning people to your side, as opposed to beating them down:
Here’s an odd thing. If you really are for some new gun-control measure, if you are serious about it, you just might wait a while, until the blood has cooled, for instance, and then try to win people over to see it your way. You might offer information, argument, points of persuasion. Successful politics involves pulling people together. You don’t use a tragedy to shame and silence those who don’t see it your way; that only hardens sides. Which has left me wondering if gun-control proponents are even serious about it. Maybe they’re just using their wedge issue at a moment of high stress to hammer people on the other side of the ideological and philosophical divide.
Earlier she references our “responsibility as an adult” as an unspoken guideline for facing tragedy – unfortunately liberals continue to yearn for those golden days of their youth when holding a protest was the cool thing to do.
Nowadays everyone just wants to tell them to grow up.
Matter of fact this could apply to politicians as well. Hell, why waste a good idea – just throw the whole liberal “gotta have control over everything crowd” on it too!
GEORGE WILL: America’s Higher Education Brought Low. “People who are imprecisely called educators have taught, by their negative examples, what intelligence is not.”
Let’s put it bluntly: Kerry tells us that certain acts of mass terror are not as bad as others if the terrorists have a “legitimacy” or a “rationale” understandable to your average progressive elite moron, one that said moron “could attach to.” You find encapsulated here the self-loathing that progressives feel for Western society, a loathing so deep that they are willing to “attach” themselves to those who would kill us in cold blood as long as the killers had an understandable reason, of course. This is the same sort of “cool detached intellectualist logic” at work, say, when Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland, Stalin conducted his murderous purges, Castro and Che ran their firing squads 24/7, as Chavez/Maduro dismantle democracy in Venezuela, or as thugs take over universities in the name of “tolerance” and “black lives” etcetera, etcetera . . .
For the progressive the victims at Charlie Hebdo, of course, had committed the crime of treating Islam to almost the same level of mockery to which they subject Christianity, Judaism, Israel, and conservative politicians. They violated the Molotov-Von Ribbentrop Pact that exists between Islam and progressivism. It was too bad they had to die, but it was understandable.
Ouch. Plus: “Unfortunately for Western civilization, the Obama misadministration is not a fictional mockumentary. This is real. The disaster is real. The blood being spilled by Muslim crazies is real.”
It started going downhill as soon as government workers were allowed to form unions. Up to that point a government job didn’t pay as well a private sector, but you had security and didn’t face the layoffs of private industry. But with unions came increased pay as well as security. Fast forward to today when public unions make more than private sector, and don’t have layoffs, AND contribute to a political party that returns the favor by boosting benefits.
When it comes to government, if you aren’t involved in the provision of actual public goods, you are involved in extortion. It may be legal. It may have the blessing of the mayor, the city council, and your union representative, but it’s still extortion. And you should be ashamed of yourself.
This is undoubtedly one of the funniest things on the interwebs… with the added benefit of having a strong element of truth. I know it’s been out there for a long time but it gets me every time I watch it.
Posted by totalterry 
