Twelve billion in and we've made some very trivial speed upgrades -- 10 fewer minutes for the Seattle-Portland route -- to low-speed trains, and, with a single exception that started ten years ago (and also will never happen), zero high speed trains.

Not even high-speed train rails. Not even high-speed rail plans.

Do watch the report. It's not that there aren't any high-speed trains now. Given government inefficiency, you wouldn't expect them for 15-20 years anyway.

It's that none of the money appropriated for such trains has gone to such trains. It's just gone to Amtrak's wish-list for minor improvements for slow-speed trains... and lots of money for state and federal workers, of course.

Disgraceful. It's nothing but lies.

Posted by: Ace at 03:18 PM | Comments (615)
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Have you read this story?

It's egregious. Go read that; I can't summarize a summary, and there's no sense just quoting half their article.

Clarification: Note that while this woman did in fact do the power-game passive-aggressive asshole-aggressive I'm Gonna Put You on My Twitter Timeline, she didn't actually ask for the guys to be fired. Or at least I haven't seen that claimed. That seems to be PlayHaven's call. That's on them.

Now, this Adria Reid or whatever her name is is a real harpy who enjoys the power-trip she gets in accusing people of the New Witchcraft, which is supposedly hateful speech. It's an Empowering Game for her, accusing people and such.

She's like the girl in Oleanna -- did you see that? Go see that. I'll wait.

Saw it? Tough to watch, right? But it makes a good point: We are empowering the worst of us with this power to accuse people of Witchcraft, I mean, Speechcraft.

Petty broken tyrants like this get off on it, and we just keep giving them that power.

But I don't want to talk about her, actually. Because people like her have always existed. There have always been scolds and hysterical accusers and yes, until recently, no shortage of people willing to bid for a little Spotlight Time for themselves by accusing others of sorcery. (In fact, in Africa and in India's hinterlands, the practice continues.)

We used to just roll our eyes, or, if we were feeling a little empowered ourselves, we used to tell them to have a lie-down on the fainting couch until they had sufficiently re-gathered their shit enough to join reasonable adult company again.

What's changed?

Us.

What the Unholy Hell was this company, PlayHaven, doing firing an employee who broke no laws, stood before no tribunal, and did not even act on the company's behalf, but his own behalf, on the say-so of a serial hysteric and Witch-Finder?

You see the problem? The problem in PlayHaven.

And the problem is corporate America generally.

Mark my words. I've said this before, and I'll say it again: The primary direct threat to your right to speak freely as a private citizen and an adult in a free democracy comes not from the government, but from your employer, who will fire you if some hysteric tweets about something you said in your personal capacity.

Why? Because they don't want the supposed "firestorm" such a tweet will cause.

They're cowards. And they will fire you for exercising your free speech rights as an American citizen if someone accuses you of breaking the Speech Laws on FaceBook.

Now, we can't change that either. The world is full of weak men. PlayHaven especially so.

But we can change incentives. As Milton Friedman said, we cannot expect to put good and noble people into positions of authority over us. He was speaking of the government, but his point applies equally to employers. He said we have to accept that the people with authority will continue to be be bad -- and we will only have real freedom and real progress when we change the incentives such that bad, weak people do the right thing.

Because the bad, weak people will be penalized for doing the wrong thing and rewarded for doing the right thing. They'll still be cowards motivated by fear-- but we can only have progress when we put the correct incentive structure of fear into them.

In the instant case, this means punishing, by any consumer boycott we can manage, PlayHaven, whoever the hell they are, until they re-hire this guy and give him a $5000 bonus as a shame-based cash-money apology for their own cowardice and weakness.

But this is not restricted to PlayHaven. This is going on all over.

What is needed is a statement, an organization, a mission, a continuing effort to let corporations know that what free adult citizens say on their own time, for their own personal account (that is, not on the company's behalf), is not the corporation's problem, and they will not have a lot of lunatic baying for red meat from the "online community" over such personal, not corporate speech.

And, conversely, if they seek to limit American citizens' freedoms, they will have a problem.

I know no one will join me in this. I know I'll just be told it's every company's right to fire people. (But then, people have a right to boycott over unjust actions, too.) And I'll hear that people have to be responsible for their words. (And this includes getting fired for saying "dongle?")

And I know people on both the right and left will think about the times they really would rather like to get someone from the opposite party fired.

But this is going to be affecting all of us, all of us who still dare to speak our minds publicly, and it is actually in all of our best interests to put a stop to this ludicrous Salem Speechcraft Panics.

We should still retain the power to boycott corporations who act against our interests -- in their corporate capacity.

And corporations with an interest in a generally upright image will retain the right to fire people who seriously injure that image with notorious actions of serious moral turpitude.

But people getting fired left and right for simply exercising their basic right to free speech?

Yes, I know company's have the right to do this. But if we keep incentivizing them to do it -- that is, if we keep all the risk on the "Keep Him on the Payroll" side of the ledger, with no downside risk for these ridiculous Salem Witch firings -- we'll have more and more of it until basic company policy will be:

IT IS REQUIRED THAT YOU DO NOT ENGAGE IN ONLINE ARGUMENT OR DISCUSSION OF ANY SENSITIVE ISSUE, AND FURTHER DO NOT ENGAGE IN SUCH DISCUSSIONS IN ANY PUBLIC OR SEMI-PUBLIC VENUE, BUT INSTEAD CONSIDER IT A PART OF YOUR BASIC JOB DUTIES TO REPRESENT YOUR EMPLOYER AS HIS SPOKESMAN IN ANY PUBLIC SETTING WHATSOEVER. FAILURE TO REPRESENT YOUR EMPLOYER AS HE WISHES TO BE REPRESENTED IN EVERY SINGLE MOMENT OF YOUR WAKING LIFE MAY RESULT IN TERMINATION WITHOUT NOTICE.

PlayHaven fired this guy on the hysterical shriek of a Witch-Finder because that is currently the easiest, safest thing to do.

Should it be the easiest, safest thing to do? Or should doing that sort of thing also carry some risks, so that it's not just an Automatic Termination when someone is Accused of Witchcraft?

I believe the latter. And I think we've gone way too far towards the former.

We should not have a regime in which the terror falls on those who speak. We should strongly prefer a regime in which terror should fall -- if terror needs to fall at all, which apparently it always does -- on those who would stop others from speaking.

Posted by: Ace at 01:23 PM | Comments (544)
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Not to saddle up my hobbyhorse again, but wasn't it formerly the law that only aristocrats and noblemen could carry personal weapons?

Yes, that was the law. The right to be armed differentiated the noblemen from the commoners.

Jim Carrey wants to keep his guns. His life is valuable.

Posted by: Ace at 12:53 PM | Comments (162)
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It still might get screwed up in the execution (it's a gift the GOP seems to have) but I like this idea:

Via an email release-

Senator Ron Johnson (WI), Ranking Member on the Subcommittee on Financial and Contracting and Oversight today announced the release of the first installment of his Victims of Government project. The series will perform oversight of the cost and impact of unnecessary, ineffective, and excessive federal regulations. Johnson also invited anyone who has been dealing with excess regulation to submit their stories on his Senate website.

“The root cause of our economic and fiscal problems is the size, the scope, and the cost of government - all the rules, all the regulations, and all the government intrusion into our lives," Johnson said. “The Victims of Government series is designed to demonstrate that - in a very personal and powerful way. Over-regulation consumes massive amounts of the people’s money, too often lacks common sense, has no heart, costs jobs and economic growth."

This is something I was on about over the weekend on Twitter. The GOP has a tendency to "tell" and not "show". We've some how gotten to the point where we've decided that showmanship is a bad thing and we can simply rely on "White Paper" presentations. Well we live in a listicle world now.

One thing that drove me nuts during the campaign was that Republicans would say "Dodd-Frank is killing the economy" and audiences would cheer. How many people can name 3 provisions of Dodd-Frank that are bad? Did the GOP ever once trot out a person who was harmed by it? No, they didn't. But the Democrats would run out a motley assortment of people who were "saved" because Obama was giving them money for their mortgage or "standing up to Wall Street".

We can say "government is bad" but we're up against sob stories that the Democrats trot out. If we want to convince people that big government is bad, we need to show it. We need to have "real" people make the case, in concrete terms and in formats (video, infographics, and yes...listicles) that can be shared and easily digested. You may not like that this is what it has come to but that's irrelevant. This is what it's come to.

That's where this project can still go wrong. It's great to collect these stories but how are they going to convey the results?

Still it's a step in the right direction.

Here's the link if you have a story to share.

Below the fold: A kick off story of a family screwed over by the government. more...

Posted by: DrewM at 11:01 AM | Comments (351)
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Well, it's a mix of things and I wouldn't want to guess based on arguments anyway.

Kennedy tipped his hand quite a bit by saying the gay marriage ban "hurts children." Well, if it hurts children, presumably he'd be against that.

Posted by: Ace at 09:42 AM | Comments (539)
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1, I didn't know this show was still even on.

2, "Ripped from the headlines"? Which headlines? Last August's? Hey I've got a Ripped From the Headlines plot I'd like to pitch-- it's about this big boat, see, that hits an iceberg, see? Very big to-do a short time ago in all the local rags. Lots of fellers n' dames were talking about it at the Automat, see?

3, Will the last NBC viewer please turn out the lights. more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:01 AM | Comments (299)
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Michael Gerson:

The nation’s religious composition — as revealed in a recent presentation by Luis Lugo of the Pew Research Center — is changing. In 2012, America ceased to be a majority Protestant country — the result, mainly, of a decline in the numbers of mainline Protestants (though there have been smaller losses among white evangelicals as well). Catholicism is holding its own with a stable 22 percent of the public, but its ethnic composition has shifted dramatically — about half of all Catholics younger than 40 are Latino.

One group, however, has swelled: those with no religious affiliation, also known as “nones” (as in “none of the above”). In the 1950s, this was about 2 percent of the population. In the 1970s, it was about 7 percent. Today, it is close to 20 percent. These gains can be found in all regions of the country, including the South. The trend is particularly pronounced among whites, among the young and among men.

I've been thinking for some time that men are the first abandoners of tradition and women tend to be the last preservers. I know that I tend to casually forget about social obligations and most women I know don't (or at least remember a lot more).

Anyway, there's some texture to that 20% of of the "nones:"

Not all the nones, it is worth pointing out, are secular. Only about 30 percent of this group — 6 percent of the public — are atheists or agnostics. The rest of the nones describe themselves as indifferent to religion or as “nothing in particular.” Sixty-four percent of the nones, however, say they believe in God or a universal spirit with “absolute certainty.” Even 9 percent of atheists and agnostics — defying both dogma and the dictionary— report themselves absolutely convinced of God’s existence.

What? Okay whatever Einsteins.

There's more to the article, including the conversion of the religious to the non-religious and of course the conversion of the non-religious to the religions -- 40% of those raised without religious affiliation actually do join a religion later in life (though I would imagine a lot of this is due to marriage-- it's a relatively simply thing for non-affiliated to just join the spouse's religion).

Gerson offers a couple of possibilities why impiety should be a growing phenomenon, including the always-popular Because, the Religious Right.

Whatever the reason, the result will probably not be good. An old Charles Murray piece explored the growing differences between the Two Americas, one affluent and stable, the other poor and frequently in various states of instability such as family break-ups and drug abuse. His exemplars for the two Americas Belmont (the more prosperous and stable town) and Fishdown (the more downscale one).

Among various other differences is the difference between Belmont's and Fishtown's relative level of religiosity:

Religiosity: Whatever your personal religious views, you need to realize that about half of American philanthropy, volunteering and associational memberships is directly church-related, and that religious Americans also account for much more nonreligious social capital than their secular neighbors. In that context, it is worrisome for the culture that the U.S. as a whole has become markedly more secular since 1960, and especially worrisome that Fishtown has become much more secular than Belmont. It runs against the prevailing narrative of secular elites versus a working class still clinging to religion, but the evidence from the General Social Survey, the most widely used database on American attitudes and values, does not leave much room for argument.

For example, suppose we define "de facto secular" as someone who either professes no religion at all or who attends a worship service no more than once a year. For the early GSS surveys conducted from 1972 to 1976, 29% of Belmont and 38% of Fishtown fell into that category. Over the next three decades, secularization did indeed grow in Belmont, from 29% in the 1970s to 40% in the GSS surveys taken from 2006 to 2010. But it grew even more in Fishtown, from 38% to 59%.

I spoke with an atheist one time who identified himself as strongly in favor of Christianity in society. His reasons weren't metaphysical, but practical: Christianity (or I suppose any number of other well-behaving, good-results-promoting religions) tends to produce good social results in society. Whether Christianity is the truth was a separate question (which he answered in the negative); but he couldn't help observing that the combination of capitalism, democracy, stable British-derived law and Christian moral philosophy (which tended to support the other three) seemed to work well, and countries without any of these seemed to be on the whole pretty crappy.

One question I would ask about that, though: While I accept that these things do go together, do we know it's A that tends to promote B, rather than B promoting A? During the campaign Romney spoke a couple of times about wanting to promote good moral values, because those would in turn promote industriousness and a good work ethic and ultimately prosperity. I wondered, though, whether it wasn't the other way 'round: did industriousness, a good work ethic, and ultimately success produce in turn good moral values? (As in many things, it might be a mutually-reinforcing virtuous cycle, of course.)

Adam Carolla surprised me with a simple observation one time. He thought that a kid sentenced to life in prison for murdering someone in stone cold blood should have his sentence reduced so he could be out of jail by age 30 (or so). That surprised me; Carolla is a law and order guy. I didn't/don't agree with him on that, necessarily. But that's unimportant. The observation is what mattered. He suggested the kid probably just killed someone for a trivial amount of money -- say, $300 -- because he valued his own life about that cheaply. His life was cheap -- about $300's worth of life, all told -- and therefore every human life he saw walking down the street he also saw as being worth about $300. If you can get $300 out of it, kill that person. That's what people are worth.

I know this is obvious. "In the mean streets where life is cheap..." is such a cliche. Still, I hadn't considered it a while. It was just a cliche to me, and so it was meaningless.

While, again, I don't agree with him that this should be a mitigating factor in criminal punishment, it strikes me as most likely true. (Not every true thing should be a factor in criminal punishment.) But it does seem that people who value their own lives as worthy will tend, on average, to view other people's lives as worthy too. And people who are cynical about the value of their own life will be even more cynical about the value of the lives of others.

And cynical about things in general.

People living rather bad lives tend to be cynical about things. They feel that the "Rules don't work" so they abandon the rules. (I'm not so sure I'd agree with them that the "Rules don't work;" I suspect they haven't been taught the actual rules or aren't applying them properly or consistently.)

But my point is, maybe Fishtown isn't getting poorer because it's getting less religious. Maybe it's partly also that as it gets poorer, it gets more cynical about things, more despairing of its place in the world, and then, because of that, it gets cynical about religion.

I don't know, actually. Just some thoughts that occurred to me.

Any way you slice it, though, I don't think I agree with the atheists that we're entering a New Age of Beauty and Reason because we're abandoning religion. I fear it's might be more the direct opposite.

Posted by: Ace at 07:46 AM | Comments (585)
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Ugh. Okay, fine then.

He says he doesn't want to do the political correctness necessary for politics, and doesn't want to jump into bed with special interests. What he would like is to play some kind of political mediator on TV:

He would like to do a show that focuses on “educating the American populace about things that are essential to our freedom,” he said in his soft, steady voice. Or he would like to try a show that would bring together people who hold opposing views on critical issues that are dividing the nation. Carson would then help them seek a middle ground or resolution.

“If the proper venue was presented, I would probably accept such a thing,” he said.

Great more commentators. We have too many counselors and not enough leaders.

The guy is retiring, and he had a tough job, and I suppose he would like an easy one. I don't begrudge him that. But... TV? It's so trivial. Another damn talking head show.

Posted by: Ace at 06:53 AM | Comments (192)
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Now What the Hell is This?

Posted by: Ace at 06:00 AM | Comments (63)
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Morning, Morons! Ace's bacon supply is getting low. If you haven't already, please hit the PayPal button on the left and send him a little fatback money. Or buy your Subtle Butt disposable gas neutralizers through the Amazon link on the right.

As LauraW mentioned a while back, Ace never asks us to put on one of these Ace-o-Thon subscription drives. He's a little modest about that. The cob-loggers got together and realized it had been a while since the last one. So everyone, if you can, chip-in and help keep this pirate ship sailing.

Posted by: rdbrewer at 06:15 AM | Comments (60)
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