Negative Railroad A Collection of Breaks in the Line

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed down from generation to generation, says that when you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.

In the Public Service, however, a whole range of far more advanced strategies is often employed, such as:

Auto sales are down significantly in the short term, so much that the least-viable manufacturers are taking a lifeline from the US Congress. Congress has made no secret that they intend to wiggle their end of the rope to force greater production of fuel-efficient vehicles. But that class of vehicle has suffered the biggest drop in demand:

Inconsistencies which appear at the verbal level turn out to be illusory when you progress to the actual science.

Quoted from: Blake Stacey

Via: Maggie’s Farm

Even before his coronation in a few weeks, Barack Obama is bringing the country together. Turns out, the majority in nearly every state wants more information about the facts of his birth and citizenship.

C’mon, Barry, show us the document!

TJIC has a suggestion to address the lefty bias our educational system:

I think that anarchists should be given equal time - every time the schools bring a politician in, anarchists should be brought in too.

“Hey, kids, do you want to go to Disney World?”

“Yeah!!!”

“Well, your moms and dads worked very hard, and now they have a lot of money, and they can all take you to Disney World, and maybe buy you a pony.”

“Yeah!!!”

Is today the end of the “Holiday Season”? Is “Happy New Year!” the last cheer to offer before we hunker down to our resolutions and resume our ordinary life patterns? The NRR has its own schedule of holidays, a mash-up of several religious, cultural and political observances from around the world. But we had found no clear ending for the current season, a date when our decorations and mannerisms should change from poinsettia to snowflake.

When I hear buzzwords like sprawl and McMansion and hyperconsumption and unsustainability and so forth, they are universally used as pretexts to allow the author to hate his fellow citizens without seeming snobby. No one needs what I don't want is the slogan of the age.

Tonight is New Year’s Eve. The headlines are suggesting celebrations will be scaled back due to the current economic conditions. That’s the conventional wisdom.

I will likely be staying in, too. Not because I’m broke. New Year’s is traditionally a big cultural festival, and there are plenty of ways to celebrate on the cheap. The chatter I overhear confirms a concern about overspending, but that’s not why folks are choosing to stay home tonight.

Town planners are in the vanguard of the continued attack on our prosperous lifestyle. We are told our detached houses on large lots that extend ever-farther from the urban core are unsustainable. The auto dependency of such arrangements is killing both the planet and our underlying human social network.

I maintain humans do not have an energy problem. The energy used by all of humanity is only about 1/10000 of the solar energy hitting the planet. There is no shortage of power. What we have is a technology problem: How do we capture more and/or increase efficiency?

Although I nearly missed it, most of you are probably aware that last Wednesday Thursday was Christmas (see, I really did almost miss it). My relationship with Jesus Day is unique, an adjective chosen in order to sidestep a bout of reflective self-analysis. The day has been one of tradition and rememberance. Both in common culture and in my own.

The Electoral College has met and cast the actual votes making Barry the President-elect. This has not deterred the Obama Birth Deniers:

A second conference has been posted on the docket for the U.S. Supreme Court over the issue of Barack Obama's eligibility to occupy the White House, this one scheduled a week after Congress is to review the Electoral College vote tabulation.

First, from today’s headlines:

Somalia's president has resigned after months of political infighting within the UN-backed transitional government.
…
The government has failed to restore security to Somalia, which has been without an effective central government since 1991.

What things cost under earlier conditions is history; what the supply and demand are today is economics.

Quoted from: Thomas Sowell in Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy

Arianna Huffington adopts my rhetoric (yes, I know she’s never heard me, but I’ve been calling for socialists and central planners to be relegated to midnight radio for years):

Because my internets are abuzz with chatter about this year’s Che Guevara hagiography, here’s a bit from a Ché biographer:

One of the prerequisite talents for elected office is maintaining a straight face when telling jokes like this:

Many people talked about a housing "bubble" before it "popped", but none (to my knowledge) warned about the credit and economic contraction that would follow. Nevertheless, no one is shy about being wise enough to offer radical policy prescriptions now that the downturn is here.

The evidence is mounting that we have not made sufficient sacrifice to Ra, or whichever sun god is in charge:

I have detected  a new crisis that I have named "the daylight change crisis". I first noticed it sometime around the end of June this year. I started paying attention and created computer models and sure enough I was right! We are losing daylight at an astonishing rate. Each day we are losing approximately 2 minutes of day light and my computer models predict total darkness by next July.

Juxtapose this against yesterday’s demo of the house on Polk Street:

Al-Shabab, an armed group fighting transitional government and Ethiopian forces in Somalia, is desecrating religious shrines in the south of the country, Al Jazeera has learned.