Negative Railroad A Collection of Breaks in the Line

Progressive Rail, a Lakeville-based shortline railroad, made the news this week:

The neighborhood off Kenwood Trail has become a parking lot for trains, bringing with it more problems than residents would like.

Pam Steinhagen has enough anger to fill a train tanker. She says since last November, the cars have been parked here and have created an eyesore on rails. Not only that, Steinhagen says she's worried about kids who've turned the cars into a playground.

So Steinhagen has organized a neighborhood petition and contacted the city and the company that owns the cars' progressive rail.

In summer, the ghosts of Detroit come alive:

Among the abandoned houses of Detroit, the lucky ones aren't burned completely or bulldozed, but allowed to be consumed by the foliage once meant to beautify them.

NRR’s previous excursion to the ghosts of Detroit

What people call “credit card companies” are really just banks. The largest issuer of credit cards is Bank of America. JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup—2nd and 3rd largest issuers—are banks.

Using the label “credit card companies” creates a false distinction. There is not some shadowy, specially-evil class of corporations preying on poor little consumers. They’re the same companies that cash paychecks and pay interest on old-fashioned savings accounts.

Not all card issuers operate retail banks—you can’t deposit a pile of loose change at the local American Express office. Discover and Amex are just banks without storefronts.

Truth is revealed by both what is said and what is not said. Neo-neocon offers a non-conspiratorial reason for following Barry’s birth certificate controversy:

This furtiveness on Obama’s part ties into his secrecy about other aspects of his life. I’m referring most particularly to his school records, from Occidental and Columbia and Harvard Law. These, we know he could release. This failure of his leads inexorably to the perception that the man is hiding something, although we don’t know exactly what or exactly why.

This fact, from a 2003 New York Times story, struck me:

To date, 208 of the 343 firefighters killed on Sept. 11 have been positively identified.

135 FDNY had no earthly remains even after two years of digging and sifting. That’s total sacrifice.

The story covered a debate about how to honor rescuers in a 9-11 memorial. Should they be considered equal with the other victims? Should their rescuer status be acknowledged? If so, would that be fair to the civilians who stayed in the flaming towers to help others escape?

From the comments in a Vox Popoli thread about health care:

If you can't get insurance because of a pre-existing condition, you don't really want insurance. You want someone else to pay your bills. Insurance is about sharing risk of the unknown. A pre-existing condition is known with certainty.

People with asthma or diabetes, for example, need medicine to maintain a quality of life similar to those without such afflictions. Inhalers and insulin are more ongoing necessities—like food—than one-time catastophes like a kidney transplant.

Although the term is in common use, my experience as a local crime-fighter has taught me there is no such thing as a criminal justice system. The term “system” implies a coherent integration of activities which does not exist. Lawmakers, police, prosecutors, courts, prisons, and probation departments have overlapping interests, but are independent bodies. This is most commonly witnessed as a revolving jailhouse door, where an offender is arrested, charged, released, and then arrested for the same offense, often within days. If this were a system, it would be a failed system.

Frank Stephenson sees a similar problem with health care:

We’re heading into local election season in Minneapolis. The deadline to file as a candidate for City Council representing the 55418 has just passed. Kevin Reich, the presumptive winner (by virtue of his DFL endorsement) is facing more challengers than I had expected. Here’s the field, with links to the two campaign websites I could find:

TJIC’s opinion on Cronkite is indistinguishable from my own:

I never got the veneration that some people feel for news anchors.

They’re stuffed shirts, selected for and paid for their ability to project an air of portentiousness and seriousness while they read crappy fourth-rate, low-depth, low-bandwidth news aloud to an audience of admiring monkeys.

Why, exactly, should I care that another one of these hair-gelled used-car-salesmen has passed on?

A US soldier challenging the legitimacy of orders issued under President Obama has had his deployment to Afghanistan rescinded two days before his case was to be heard in Federal Court:

[Major Stefan] Cook said without a legitimate president as commander-in-chief, members of the U.S. military in overseas actions could be determined to be "war criminals and subject to prosecution." He said the vast array of information about Obama that is not available to the public confirms to him "something is amiss."

The Failed Obama Administration is proposing to limit consumer finance contracts. A new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) would amplify existing government assaults on the people’s right to make contracts:

Traditionally, consumer protection in the United States has focused on disclosure. It has always been assumed that with adequate disclosure all consumers -- of whatever level of sophistication -- could make rational decisions about the products and services they are offered. No more. If the administration's plan is adopted, many consumers will be told that they cannot have particular products or services because they are not sophisticated, educated or perhaps intelligent enough to understand what they have been offered.

Don Boudreaux extends the reasoning:

The current President must not listen to himself. Or he’s a paragon of “do as I say, not as I do” hypocrisy. In a speech to the descendants of those his ancestors enslaved, Barry chided African leaders:

“No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20% off the top. No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery.

I will likely never drive one, and almost certainly never own one, but I love that such things exist:

The Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport

Cobb’s post about achievement, from which I just quoted, offers many points of resonance.

It is a popular idea, which may or may not be owned by the Left, that war is essentially stupidity writ large. That the act of war represents a failure of intellect - an inability to think through problems.

The ability to wage war is the greatest fortune a people possess, for it is the manner in which they preserve their very lives, when their lives themselves are threatened.

Quoted from: Cobb

An apt description of today’s urban culture is “post-modern”. All meaning is derived from context, without anchor to history and tradition. Tradition is merely fuel for irony, where the past is never faced honestly.

We knit and bake and work on motorcycles just like people did last century, but now the tone is different. The past has been deconstructed and rebuilt in terms of exploitation and degradation. The only acceptable way to embrace tradition is by mocking it. An implicit conflict between the experienced value and the learned negative regard remains unresolved.

The Pickens Plan, to build huge taxpayer-subsidized wind farms in the name of oil independence, has collided with economic reality:

The economy has changed drastically since the tycoon last year called for the United States to cut back on its oil imports in the face of record-high prices and said he planned to invest $10 billion in wind power.

Stepping out of today’s thoughtstream, I looked up the definition of “hope”. Wielded by so many candidates and agitators, I wondered if its meaning had changed. Here’s m-w.com:

intransitive verb
1: to cherish a desire with anticipation
2 archaic : trust

transitive verb
1: to desire with expectation of obtainment
2: to expect with confidence : trust

synonyms see expect

Observing Independence Day, Cobb calls out the practitioners of identity politics:

I find it difficult to presume to lead some fraction of the people or to defend some fraction of humanity as a worthy political aim. I am greatly convinced that the human animal does not vary so much that he can be served well by a wide variety of principles. There are a simple few and the paths towards attaining and defending them are few. But having found those paths, we must find our human center of gravity, each individual conforming at their core, and place that center on those paths.

Rules that apply only to some qualified group are counter to our common humanity. There are too many ways to rearrange ourselves into sets of suffering, and this devolves into a struggle to find the most powerful victimhood rather than a persistent effort to do the basic things all humans have moral duty to pursue. Either we embrace that all men are created equal, or we are doomed to live within the limits of tribalism.

When Congress next week gets back its business of looting and pillaging, Al Franken will join the world’s most exclusive club. Norm Coleman’s recount appeal was denied by the Minnesota Supreme court: