Negative Railroad A Collection of Breaks in the Line

I was a part of this:

In Minnesota, Ron Paul supporters swept the three district conventions that occurred today, winning nine of nine delegates to the national convention. Minnesota is set to hold more such conventions next week.

The RP local delegates seem to understand that their cause is bigger than one election. They have learned the rules and built a movement, taking over most of the offices in the precinct- and district-level Republican Party.

The Minneapolis and Metro-area GOP is no longer your father’s Republican Party. It is the Founding Fathers’ Republican Party.

Next month we find out if the Ron Paul R3voltion can complete an overthrow of the Minnesota GOP.

The sheeple are clamoring for the arrest of Zimmerman. People don’t understand that an arrest is merely a detention, and Zimmerman was indeed detained at the scene. If charges are brought, he will be served a notice to appear. The cops know where Zimmerman is, and he seems to present a low flight risk. A “perp walk” serves Big Media and the public’s thirst for vengeance. It is not a requirement of justice.

Martin’s family is upset that some factions are out to destroy the boy’s reputation. Martin already made his reputation. He was the person blowing up twitter under the handle NO_LIMIT_NIGGA. He was the person found with a collection of suspicious—if not incriminating—evidence in his backpack. The boy’s reputation is not what his momma thought of him, it is what his friends thought of him. And how he saw himself.

The widely distributed photos of Trayvon are from years ago. He looked like an angel and an athlete. More recent pics show him in full embrace of the thug life. Something about the culture and subculture in which he lived transformed an angel into thug in a few years. It is difficult not to suggest there is a deep pathology in that subculture.

Making Martin the face of systemic racism is not just stretching the available facts, it demeans both his individual personhood and the essential ideal of justice:

From a plaque on a wall inside NRR’s Main Terminal Station:

The sleeping kitten seen on our sign boards is named Chessie. She used to work for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway. When the C&O evolved into the CSX Corporation, Chessie was let go. We found her wandering the intertracks and decided to give the old gal a new home.

I am delighted to discover there is a photo from the day we met, all those years ago.

H/T: Theo Spark

What happened in Minnesota’s Senate District 60 has been repeated in St. Louis, MO:

The slate backing Paul cast 158 votes in the non-binding caucus Saturday. The purpose was to choose representatives to a round of Congressional district meetings in April and June that will repeat the process to send 52 delegates from Missouri to the August convention in Tampa, Fla.

The slate that primarily backed Santorum had 74 votes, while the Romney slate mustered 50 votes.

The delegates to the next-higher level are not bound, but it is widely understood that Paul supporters are fiercely loyal. It is unlikely they’ll be voting to support Santorum or Romney.

Definitions reside in people, not in words.

Quoted from: Dalton Kehoe; Effective Communication Skills, Lecture 3

Minnesota is a caucus state. That means it selects its delegates to a national political convention through a cascade of smaller elections. Last month I went to the lowest, grassroots caucus of the Republican party. I was elected a delegate and had a right to vote in the next tier of the election cascade.

That election was held yesterday. Since this is a redistricting year and political unit boundaries are redrawn, the first order of business was to establish rules and adopt a constitution for what is now the Minnesota Senate District 60 Republican Party (SD 60).

I enjoy rules and rulemaking, so this was not tedious. Parliamentary procedure was a bigger factor in this convention than in most neighborhood meetings, but less strict than the government meetings I watch on public-access TV.

The local food co-op had blueberries on discount. Organic, of course. But they were grown in Chile.

“Eat local” isn’t a strong commandment, just a nagging slogan. When hipsters want organic blueberries, the market will find a way to satisfy them, climate be damned!

I bought some. Have not tried them yet; hope they were worth the trip.

It is 72° with sunshine in Minneapolis. An unseasonably perfect day. Everyone who can be outside is outside.

Except the Occupy Wall Street protesters. If they can’t suffer, I guess they don’t feel like they make a difference. Or they’re somewhere else wearing hair shirts over globalistical warmening.

One thoughtful, skeptical self-described neocon has put domestic reconstruction ahead of nation building:

So I think today that I'm going to follow Taleb and cast a vote for Ron Paul, the nutcase crackpot. Why? Because only a nutcase crackpot like Paul (being very specific) has the nerve to base his entire campaign on a few salient facts and properly directed wishful thoughts.

…
In other words, I've recognized the value of killing obstacles blocking my view of the world, and for me, 99% of them are financial. Therefore what I need to do is make every effort to kill financial obstacles. That means voting for Ron Paul because only Ron Paul will create the conditions under which the proper disaster will occur in the short term. Obama and Romney on the other hand will sustain a stasis field which will behave like Wile E. Coyote walking on air over a deeper and deeper ravine.

Collapse is inevitable. We might be able to use politics to shape it, or to delay it. But it will happen. The sooner losses are recognized in a Great Repricing, the smaller our aggregate suffering.

If Cobb can find a reason to vote for the wookie, the wookie might have a chance.

The TEA people are loosely organized. Just exactly what they want and which candidates merit their support is an ongoing debate.

Karl Denninger denigrates them because of polling which suggests the TEA people are in favor of maintaining a significant welfare state. Vox Popoli looks at different polls and mocks the TEA people for being in favor of pre-emptive war and nation building. From what I see, there is some overlap between all these factions. I maintain that they stand for exactly what their acronym represents: Taxed Enough Already.

It’s not a sophisticated movement, more an ad-hoc coalition of one shared sentiment. It is a strong and widely-held sentiment which has political weight. The TEA people have not formed a TEA Party with structure that can contend amidst existing major or minor political parties.

Around Christmas time I received a small, thoughtful gift. It was the box set of the first season of the TV series “Mad Men”.

Obama Derangement Syndrome has two forms. Here’s CNN infobabe Soledad O’Brien displaying the positive strain:

[UPDATE: The embedded version of the video is set to autoplay. NRR seeks to avoid such unwelcome intrusions on our passengers. Please click here to view the segment.]

O’Brien pre-emptively attacks the message and the messenger. Barack must not be questioned!

Wikipedia says Critical Race Theory:

Moral people cannot depend on legality alone to guide them.

Quoted from: Walter E. Williams

Another bridge in Minneapolis has failed. You probably didn’t hear about it, because: a) nobody died; and, b) it served only a small handful of people.

It’s a bike and pedestrian bridge crossing a major arterial and a light rail line. It was as much a public art project and a pander to the green factions as it is a segment of infrastructure.

Global politics and global economics are interwoven. The way the warhawks talk about Iran, one would think it is just another primitive society. It isn’t.

The United States military won the war in Iraq. It looks like they have won the war in Afghanistan, too:

Finally, ABC’s Jake Tapper asked Carney when was “the last time US troops in Afghanistan killed anybody associated with Al Qaeda.” Carney didn’t have an answer, and referred Tapper to the Defense Department and NATO’s International Security Assistance Force.

I queried those agencies Tuesday and got an answer today. According to a Defense Department spokesman, the most recent operation that killed an Al Qaeda fighter was in April 2011—ten months ago.

I have been suffering from Obama Derangement Syndrome for about four years. My case I think was much milder than most. But the current President did inflame the evil in my nature.

Not anymore.

My opinion of the man, his politics and his disposition hasn’t changed. He’s a fascist and a demagogue and all the rest, for sure. If he is reelected he will deliver as much Progressive change as Congress will allow. And probably more, as he has proven that the law is merely an inconvenience that can be overcome by will and executive fiat.

I think those of us that were angry and fearful in 2008 were right to be so. We lost. In retrospect, I don’t think things would be much different under a President McCain. There would be some monstrous Federal healthcare bill, but one passed with a proper vote and GOP consent. The impossible strategy in Afghanistan would still leave the territory under disputed control, with no victory in sight.

From I Want a New Left:

See here. The suggestion is to put Qur’an’s all over the place because obviously destroying them can’t be allowed. Then when terrorists come along, they will see them and refrain from perpetrating a terrorist act because it would destroy a Qur'an.

Sadly, logical consistency is not a jihadi trait.

MaxedOutMama looks at the GDP data for the two most recent quarters:

We didn't fall into a recession - we fell into a depression. …

• Real spending on food dropped 2.6 billion.
• Clothing and footwear dropped 4.4 billion.
• Gas & fuel dropped 3.5 billion.

This economy is not improving. This is structural on real incomes.

Although I prefer measures of physical quantities (tons, yards, barrels), dollar-based statistics are not subject to much shenanigans over a recent short term.

Tam looked at the landscape a week ago and saw the same thing:

The reading material for Week 2 of Constitution 101 includes the Virginia Declaration of Rights:

a document drafted in 1776 to proclaim the inherent rights of men, including the right to rebel against "inadequate" government. It influenced a number of later documents, including the United States Declaration of Independence (1776), the United States Bill of Rights (1789)

I have read this document before, but the course is delivering on its promise of giving familiar material its proper philosohical underpinnings.

Like the Bill of Rights, the less specific but more essential points are listed at the end. Here are the last two rights declared by Virginia:

XV That no free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.