A modest counterproposal to Gov. Strickland’s rail project

…stagecoach service between Cleveland and Youngstown, running on Highway 422.

The advantages are many:

1. Stagecoaches are green, much greener than locomotives. Horses run on renewable and Ohio-grown hay and oats. Coaches are primarily built of renewable wood. The project would not require  rails or other environmentally-expensive infrastructure, though expansion of one shoulder each way along 422 would be advantageous (such as found on 528 in Geauga Co).  Horses could also  help keep the right-of-way mowed. There is a tailpipe emissions problem however. (Speaking of that, why don’t the Amish have to bring their conveyances to get sniff-tested? A horse with buggy on that rotating drum at the E-check station, with a big fan in front and the tailpipe wand up its tailpipe….I’d pay good money to watch that.)

2. Local talent, local jobs. There are plenty of qualified teamsters along the route (who, since these are government jobs, will probably have to become Teamsters). Granted, unemployment is low in Geauga Co., because the Amish employ themselves and each other. But if need be, we could import laid-off Amish from the RV industry in Indiana, who could also participate in Ohio’s revitalized buggy and harness industry. Granted, a stagecoach is more complex than a simple Amish buggy, but it’s the same technology, and with the aid of cost-overrun contracts, I’m sure any Amish buggy shop could produce suitable rolling stock, complete with kerosene lanterns, state-of-the-art Victrola sound system, and as a premium add-on 3G wireless Internet.

3. Economic development. Given that the trip will take about a day and a half, there will be need for hospitality services. The Welshfield Inn, JDs Post House, and the Halfway Inn will all see increased traffic (and if I ever run for public office, I expect quid pro this quo). The coach will overnight on the outskirts of Warren, by the intersection with the 5/82 loop. There are a few motels there already, as well as the start of a stagecoach-fit “entertainment district”,  IYKWIMAITYD, stocked with Asia’s finest.

4. Animal rescue.  Since it’s no longer legal to slaughter horses for food in the Land of the Free, there’s a problem with people abandoning horses. PETA can lobby the state government to put these horses to work instead of shooting them, Granted, some would never make it up the 700 Hill into Welshfield, but what do you want, efficiency or mercy?

5. People are just as eager to go to Youngstown as they are to Cleveland.

Now, just as in the governor’s proposal, there will be objections . One will be cost.  In 1863, the cost of a stagecoach trip between Nebraska City and Denver (535 mi) was $75, or about $.14/mi, which would make the trip $9.10. But those are 1863 dollars, equivalent to .455 oz of gold, now worth about $492. If you think the gold market is in a bubble right now, other means of calculating dollar equivalence give  values between $131 and $17,236. But the state subsidy required to make the trip cost-competitive would actually be quite small. Assuming no subsidy in the 1863 figure, and using its gold equivalent value, a competitive ticket price of $10 and a ridership of 200 per year, I guesstimate that the annual cost to the state would be about $100K, much less than the rail project. But since the project will require several dozen state employees, the actual defecit will be higher.

The other objection will be time. Why should people spend a day and a half making a trip that they could make in an hour and a half? If you have to see somebody NOW, why aren’t you doing it on Skype? Stagecoaches, like railroads, are romantic. But there are lots of railroads; this would be the only common-carrier stagecoach used for actual transportation, and would make Ohio a leader in what will doubtless be the primary transportation mode of the 22nd Century. It’ll be a great tourist draw…isn’t tourism supposed to solve all our economic problems? Anyway. time is a relative thing. If we really want the stagecoach to be competitive, we can declare 422 to be one big 20 mph school zone, and exponentially  increase the number of highwaymen controlling it. We can jack up tolls on the turnpike too, just in case anybody gets shunpikey ideas about 422. You know in your heart that there’ll be more Staties on I71, and a special gas tax to pay for the train, so why not for the stagecoach?

Let’s face it, spending $400m to build and $17m a year to operate a train to take 6 hrs to make a 4 hr trip is distinctly lacking in imagination. Not even making the tracks out of Rearden Metal would help that concept.  It’s been a long time since Ralph Perk’s hair, “4 dead in Ohio” and the burning river put Ohio on the map. Isn’t it time we did it all over again, with feeling?

RIP Howard Zinn

One more Commie down. The dextrosphere is doing the happy dance, but I’d like to put a word in for Zinn’s People’s History. Yes, it’s biased as hell…just like almost every other history text out there. It may be “badly written, intellectually dishonest and insultingly shallow Marxist propaganda”. It also contains important information you won’t find elsewhere. I would never teach it as a sole book, but I’d certainly use it as a supplement. You see, I have this strange belief that history is about seeing what happened and then drawing conclusions from it. If we don’t teach from an early age how to draw patterns from history, if we give students a tidy narrative with no loose ends, then they won’t have the tools to analyze events as they are occurring and act as citizens accordingly. Of course, that’s the reason they don’t teach history that way in most high schools.

…but another young hero arises

Behold 19 year old Jimmy Winkelman, who has a company named The South Butt which makes fleece jackets, and which is being legally persecuted by some other company called The North Face, which seems to think that their trademark is being infringed. Here is the reply to said persecution. Note Affrimative Defence III, which nicely sums up just how STUPID this action has been as a business move.

I thought you needed a smile after the preceding bummer.

O’Keefe busted

Oh man…
I see all kinds of problems here. Pranking ACORN is one thing; trying to wiretap a Senator is another. Morally, we all have a perfect right to keep tabs on our employees during business hours, so I don’t think this was necessarily wrong. But most people find it distasteful at the least when the boss sniffs their Internet stream, so Landrieu will get a little sympathy for that. Ethics and public opinion aside, laws about wiretapping are a lot stronger.

Oddly, this morning Mike Vanderboegh linked an article from Parameters, the US Army War College Quarterly, Autumn 2009, Vol. XXXIX, No. 3, on “Playing for the Breaks: Insurgent Mistakes”.   Several elements of this operation were mistakes as described in the paper. First, there was an element of overreaching. The ACORN operation was wildly successful, but it was on a civilian target. Instead of going for another NGO, or even some small office-holder, O’Keefe went straight to the top (the only way he could have gone farther would have been to bug the White House or the Pentagon). He compounded his error by assuming that people who work for a Senator would be as susceptible to human engineering as the fetal alcohol victims and other dimbulbs who work for ACORN. (in that, he was very nearly right, as the trouble came when he tangled with the GSA.) And by the sounds of it, the phone company part of things was inadequately researched. He pulled out his cellphone, which was a dead giveaway that something was up.  Most importantly, most people will feel no sympathy at his failure. If he’d crashed and burned at ACORN, nobody would know unless ACORN reported it, and few people had any sympathy for them at all, even before Pimpgate. Unfortunately, and to our country’s detriment, senators don’t have the same level of intrinsic ridiculousness that community organizers do.

O’Keefe, being a known face and a high-value target, should not even have been involved in the execution of this. He should have been the planner. Now, he’s been captured in enemy territory, and they’re going to throw the book at him. Much as I admire the kid’s balls, he wasn’t thinking, and he’s going to be in world of hurt. Not quite Sophie Scholl hurt, but close enough. They’ll let the last of the Manson family out before he sees freedom again.

UPDATE: Lots of comment at Ace suggesting that this isn’t what it appeared to be. Maybe not; I hope not ;we’ll see.  My points about overreaching still stand.

Is Ellie Light astroturf?

Well, she denies it…then she denies she denied.
Kudos to the Pee Dealer for actually doing some real journalism for once, instead of just printing the AP wire.

I liked this comment over at Ace:

14 Yeah, its 2010. You don’t need a memo from Axelrod. People know the tune, so they dance. No need to have everyone actually listening at the same place to the same song.

It’s like the whole gov’t/media “No links to AQ” whenever there is an attack or attempt. OBL doesn’t send out a frag order to Abdul and Isamil. They know the game plan and they do their best to carry it out. Of course, their best tends to suck. You know, I always thought that if those planes had taken off from Texas instead of the whiny weak North, 9/11 would have turned out a little differently.

BTW, I am not in any way trying to compare the Axelrod/Plouffe network to AQ. One are enemies of freedom, determined to bring down this country, and the other are a bunch of cave dwelling maniacs.

UPDATE: No, apparently “she” is Winston (as in Smith) Steward, a girlyman afraid of signing his own name because the Radical Right might come after him, like these guys did.

Screaming sexism in Congress

A female Democratic lawmaker in footage released Sunday said Congress could pass healthcare if female lawmakers “sent the men home.”

Rep. Carol Shea-Porter (D-N.H.) said that both Republican and Democratic women members of Congress understand how to care for relatives and thus want the healthcare system to change.

“We go to the ladies room and the Republican women and the Democratic women and we just roll our eyes,” she said. “And the Republican women said when we were fighting over the healthcare bill, if we sent the men home…” at which point she was interrupted by loud applause.

“You know why? I’m not trying to diss the men but I’m telling you it’s the truth that every single woman there has been responsible for taking care of a [relatives] and so we think we can find a common ground there,” she said.

If a Republican said this about women, would he have a job?

UPDATE: Vox Day takes this places I wouldn’t dare. As the witches say, “Be careful of what you ask for; you might get it.”

Chemical Ali dies of a cerebral O2 deficit

….caused by a rope.

Good riddance.

5 days for coconut candy

Two Bronx men were locked up and left to rot in a filthy jail cell for nearly a week after a pair of cops mistook their candy for a bag of crack.

The “drugs” were finally tested five days later and determined to be popular Coco (coconut) Candy. The charges were dropped.

The trouble began the night of Jan. 15, as José Pena, a 48-year-old plumber, and his longtime pal and colleague Cesar Rodriguez, 33, were headed to a party, and decided to stop at a bodega on 181st Street and the Grand Concourse.

When they came out, cops were waiting and asked to search their Ford minivan. “I said ‘Go search.’I even opened the door,” Rodriguez told The Post.

First mistake. The cops did not have probable cause to check the van. And the cops are not your friends.

An officer rummaged around, came out holding a “Hello Kitty” sandwich bag, and shouted “Bingo!” the men said.

“It’s only candy!” Rodriguez said, as the cops handcuffed him and Pena, and several other police cars rushed to the scene.Rodriguez said he buys a 50-cent bag of Coco Candy, a hard coconut-based treat, almost every day. Because it easily crumbles, he puts it in a sandwich bag.
“Can you test it? Can you taste it?” Rodriguez asked the cops.
“Shut up!” they replied.
“I didn’t know having candy was a crime,” he said.
The men’s lawyer, Neal Wallerstein, said the cops could have realized their mistake quickly.
“That’s the reason why they have a field-test kit,” he said, referring to the NYPD’s portable drug identification equipment.But Wallerstein said cops just needed their noses.

“It smells like sugar,” he said.

And here in the comments is why America is going down, hard:

why should the cops be suspended???? if it looks like crack and is in a plastic bag they should be arrested regardless, if they didnt arrest them and it was crack and they sold it to one of your kids you liberals would be going nuts on the cops, and as for tasting it?? wtf if some1 asked me to taste crack and risk my life with all the chemicals its cut down with i’d tell them to screw themselves its my life or thiers, this is a no brainer, both men arrested and have the alleged drugs sent to the lab for testing

Breitbart pisses his credibility away

The site that began with the Giles/OKeefe stings is now reduced to publishing empty anti-Ron Paul screeds by Eric Dondero.

Dondero, a self-proclaimed “libertarian Republican”  has for years haunted the libertarian blogosphere with screeds mocking libertarians, arguing that the GOP darling-du-jour (Bush, Giuliani or whomever) is “really libertarian.” Even the mention of his name has become a punch line. In the latest rant, he equates Coakley’s position on the Middle East wars with Ron Paul’s (a stretch; Coakley never met a principle she could hold), and ends “But its [sic] notable that voters of one of the most dove-ish of states, [comma sic] chose to side forthrightly with the candidate of the Bush foreign policy agenda, over Obama/Paul.”

I understand that tomorrow, Big Government will run a debate between Charles Johnson and Andrew Sullivan on the topic “Trig: Sarah’s or Bristol’s?”, with both eventually agreeing that, whoever the mother was, Trig’s father was actually one of the survivors of the Roswell crash.

“The name is not the thing” (Robert Anton Wilson, paraphrasing Korzybski)

I was speaking today to a high school teacher in an urban district far away from Black Water Farm, and she was discussing the problem Certain Ethnic parents have in naming their children. Apparently, it never occurs to these people that a name is something you carry around for life, that it has great bearing upon your future success, and that it requires more thought than naming a pet. This trend was referenced in John Ross’ Unintended Consequences, only there it was a cruel game played by white OB/GYN interns to encourage poor women to give their children names like Anus Brown, or the BATF agent G.G. Jackson (nee Gonorrhea Gaily). Apparently, mothers come up with these names all by themselves.

The more benign form seems to be oriented towards increasing self-esteem… name like Holy Kidd, or Precious. “My classes are filled with royalty : Princes, Princessess, Kings, Queens,” she said. Then there are the wacky, Zappaesque names, like the sisters “LehMONjelo” and “OrANjelo” (named after popular boxed desserts). Or the possibly ignorant, like “NoNAHmee” (or, as spelled on the birth certificate, “no name”)

But the worst case came when she was subbing in a class, calling roll. “I don’t know how to pronounce this name.” “It’s ShiTHAYD.” Yes, somebody had actually named their son Shithead. Yeah, there’s one for the boardroom. What’s the matter with you people!?

UPDATE: The Hillboyz talk about this in Cleveland:

“What’s her name?”.

“K-9Nia”.

“How do you say that?”

“Kuh-neen-eee-ya”, the woman behind the counter overemphasized, with the DUH! unspoken.

Of course, that’s how you pronounce a name that has both a hyphen and the number nine in it.

No wonder the kids at that school can’t read. Their own names make no sense, and have nines in them. How are they supposed to read “cat” and “dog” when they are looking for the numbers mixed with letters and hyphens?