SOCIALISTS KEEP LOOKING TO “UNEXPECTEDLY” NATIONALIZE: Nationalize Greyhound.
—Jacobin, today.
If only there was a nationalized transportation system that has existed for decades that we could use as a benchmark to see how nationalizing Greyhound would likely proceed:
After posting historic spending deficits in 2021 and 2022, Amtrak is planning to spend more in fiscal year 2024 as federal funding expands to “unprecedented” levels.
Amtrak posted operating losses of $1.08 billion in 2021 and $886.8 million in 2022, far greater than pre-COVID losses, but is still going ahead with expansion. By comparison, Amtrak lost $29.4 million in 2019, the year before the pandemic hit.
The increase in spending was pandemic-related, according to Amtrak.
Amtrak asked Congress for a $350 million bump in funding for fiscal year 2024 to $3.65 billion.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) was signed into law by President Joe Biden on November 15, 2021. The law authorizes $1.2 trillion for transportation and infrastructure spending with $550 billion of that figure going toward “new” investments and programs. Amtrak will receive $85.2 billion via IIJA from FY 2022 through FY 2026.
—Amtrak presses on with more funding and expansion despite historic losses, the Washington Examiner, May 19th.
And it’s curious that Jacobin doesn’t want competition for Greyhound’s services, when they exist as competition among the left for Salon’s longstanding goals of nationalizing every industry in the US:
—Salon.com, March 6, 2013.
—Salon.com, January 18, 2014.
—Easy Riders, Raging Stasists, Ed Driscoll.com, February 22, 2014.
—Salon.com, July 8, 2014.
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W.H.O. Declares War on Farming
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One evening, I was sitting in the kitchen of the house in which our coven had its temple. We were about to go in and conduct an important ritual. As we got up to leave, I felt violently ill. I was dizzy, I was sick, I was lightheaded. Everyone noticed and fussed over me as I sat down, my face pale. I had an overpowering feeling that I should not go into the temple. I felt I was being physically prevented from doing it. Someone had staged an intervention.
After that, there was no escape. Like C. S. Lewis, I could not ignore “the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.” How much later was it that I was finally pinned down? I don’t remember. I was at a concert at my son’s music school. We were in a hotel function room, full of children ready to play their instruments and proud parents ready to film them doing it. I was just walking to my chair when I was overcome entirely. Suddenly, I could see how everyone in the room was connected to everyone else, and I could see what was going on inside them and inside myself. I was overcome with a huge and inexplicable love, a great wave of empathy, for everyone and everything. It kept coming and coming until I had to stagger out of the room and sit down in the corridor outside. Everything was unchanged, and everything was new, and I knew what had happened and who had done it, and I knew that it was too late. I had just become a Christian.
None of this is rationally explicable, and there is no point in arguing with me about it. There is no point in arguing with myself about it: I gave up after a while. This is not to say that my faith is irrational. In fact, the more I learned, the more Christianity’s story about the world and human nature chimed better with my experience than did the increasingly shaky claims of secular materialism. In the end, though, I didn’t become a Christian because I could argue myself into it. I became a Christian because I knew, suddenly, that it was true. The Angelus that was chiming in the abyss is silent now, for the abyss is gone. Someone else inhabits me.
I am not a joiner, but I accepted, eventually, that I would need a church. I went looking, and I found one, as usual, in the last place I expected. This January, on the Feast of Theophany, I was baptized in the freezing waters of the River Shannon, on a day of frost and sun, into the Romanian Orthodox Church. In Orthodoxy I had found the answers I had sought, in the one place I never thought to look. I found a Christianity that had retained its ancient heart—a faith with living saints and a central ritual of deep and inexplicable power. I found a faith that, unlike the one I had seen as a boy, was not a dusty moral template but a mystical path, an ancient and rooted thing, pointing to a world in which the divine is not absent but everywhere present, moving in the mountains and the waters. The story I had heard a thousand times turned out to be a story I had never heard at all.
Out in the world, the rebellion against God has become a rebellion against everything: roots, culture, community, families, biology itself. Machine progress—the triumph of the Nietzschean will—dissolves the glue that once held us. Fires are set around the supporting pillars of the culture by those charged with guarding it, urged on by an ascendant faction determined to erase the past, abuse their ancestors, and dynamite their cultural inheritance, the better to build their earthly paradise on terra nullius. Massing against them are the new Defenders of the West, some calling for a return to the atomized liberalism that got us here in the first place, others defending a remnant Christendom that seems to have precious little to do with Christ and forgets Christopher Lasch’s warning that “God, not culture, is the only appropriate object of unconditional reverence and wonder.” Two profane visions going head-to-head, when what we are surely crying out for is the only thing that can heal us: a return to the sacred center around which any real culture is built.
Up on the mountain like Moriarty, in the Maumturk ranges in the autumn rain, I had my own vision, terrible and joyful and impossible. I saw that if we were to follow the teachings we were given at such great cost—the radical humility, the blessings upon the meek, the love of neighbor and enemy, the woe unto those who are rich, the last who will be first—above all, if we were to stumble toward the Creator with love and awe, then creation itself would not now be groaning under our weight. I saw that the teachings of Christ were the most radical in history, and that no empire could be built by those who truly lived them. I saw that we had arrived here because we do not live them; because, as Auden had it:
We would rather be ruined than changed.
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
It turns out that both the stuffy vicars and the trendy vicars were onto something: the Cross holds the key to everything. The sacrifice is all the teaching. I am a new and green pupil. I can talk for hours, but ideas will become idols in the blink of an eye. I have to pick up my cross and start walking.
How can I feel I have arrived home in something that is in many ways so foreign to me? And yet beneath the surface it is not foreign at all, but a reversion to the sacred order of things. I sit in a monastery chapel before dawn. There is snow on the ground outside. The priest murmurs the liturgy by the light of the lampadas, the dark silhouettes of two nuns chant the antiphon. There is incense in the air. The icons glow in the half-light. This could be a thousand years in the past or the future, for in here, there is no time. Home is beyond time, I think now. I can’t explain any of it, and it is best that I do not try.
I grew up believing what all modern people are taught: that freedom meant lack of constraint. Orthodoxy taught me that this freedom was no freedom at all, but enslavement to the passions: a neat description of the first thirty years of my life. True freedom, it turns out, is to give up your will and follow God’s. To deny yourself. To let it come. I am terrible at this, but at least now I understand the path.
In the Kingdom of Man, the seas are ribboned with plastic, the forests are burning, the cities bulge with billionaires and tented camps, and still we kneel before the idol of the great god Economy as it grows and grows like a cancer cell. And what if this ancient faith is not an obstacle after all, but a way through? As we see the consequences of eating the forbidden fruit, of choosing power over humility, separation over communion, the stakes become clearer each day. Surrender or rebellion; sacrifice or conquest; death of the self or triumph of the will; the Cross or the machine. We have always been offered the same choice. The gate is strait and the way is narrow and maybe we will always fail to walk it. But is there any other road that leads home?
Meaning of Partridge in a Pear Tree
This is a Christmas Carol that has always fascinated me. What does a Partridge in a pear tree have to do with Christmas? From 1558 until 1829, Roman Catholics in Ireland and England were not permitted to practice their faith openly. Someone during that era wrote a carol as a catechism song for young Catholics. It has two levels of meaning; the surface meaning plus a hidden meaning known only to members of their church. Each element in the carol has a code for religious reality, which the children could remember .
A Partridge in a Pear Tree The partridge in a pear tree is Jesus, the Son of God. In the song, Christ is symbolically presented as a mother that feigns injury to decoy predators from her helpless nestlings, recalling the expression of Christ’s sadness over the date of Jerusalem: Luke 13:34-35 “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings …” In Summary:
BOWLING ALONE READS LIKE A NOSTALGIC LOOK AT THE GOOD OL’ DAYS:
What [Robert] Putnam couldn’t possibly have seen at the dawn of the technological revolution is how much worse the “bowling alone” phenomenon would get with the addition of the smartphone and the internet. I was waiting tables during the portable computer revolution. In the course of just a few years people went from dining together to dining together, alone. Entire families eating together, all looking at their phones.
My Gen Z nephews look at the TV like a telephone landline. Why would they be chained to one room, at the mercy of other people’s preferences, when they can roam freely from place to place, consuming whatever content their heart desires?
There is a line in Bowling Alone that made me laugh out loud. Putnam wrote, “Some see hope in the rise of news on the Internet or the all-news cable channels. It is still too early to predict the long-run effects of these new channels,” Putnam wrote. He adds, “That said, the early returns are not encouraging.”
Adorable. Cable news is dead. Cable broadcasts get fewer viewers than many YouTube streamers. Trump will probably be our next president, again. Now we are fat and lazy and also outraged and misinformed and distracted. Our attention spans are shredded by the multiple devices and social media constantly capturing our attention.
And as a result: The closing of the teenage mind is almost complete.
In the 1950s, the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg developed a model for moral reasoning that follows a trajectory similar to Piaget’s model for cognitive development: Children progress from more concrete to more abstract thinking, from more rigidity to more flexibility. Levine says that what alarms her about the rigid, concrete take on right or wrong she sees in my generation is that without the “capacity to hear opposing points of view, you don’t develop empathy. And you’ll need empathy to end up with a good partner, to be a good parent and to be a good citizen.”
Julie Lythcott-Haims, a former Stanford dean, agrees: “We’re in desperate need of humans who can grapple openly with ideas, and disagree, as reasonable people will, without villainizing each other.”
I see teenagers unintentionally becoming more unforgiving and judgmental rather than open-minded and compassionate. When we can’t or don’t talk freely, we lose the chance to find real common ground, acknowledge complexity or grasp that even our own opinions can be malleable. If we listen only to those who already agree with us, we won’t make wider connections. We won’t grow.
Some people told me not to write this piece — that I could get canceled online, cut off by peers and perhaps even rejected by colleges. That’s a risk I’m willing to take.
I definitely don’t have all the answers, but I believe that daring to get past what’s acceptable and engage in open dialogue — as we did walking away from English class that day — is the key way to finding them and becoming the empathetic critical thinkers we need to be as we grow into adulthood.
Let’s start talking.
But that would require reasoning and — heaven forfend — even thoughtful debate! It’s so much easier (for kids of all ages) just to let those knees jerk and tear down the posters when confronted with a liberal ideology that causes them plenty of cognitive dissonance.
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Did I Get John Fetterman Wrong
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How to Really Fix America's Higher Learning Institutions
Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill morality has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich.
Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner on the many illusions shattered by Hamas’s pogrom and the orgy of antisemitism it inspired.
“Reporters want to fan the flames of conflict leading to war because they’re so damn stupid. That is my belief of your profession.” As Sir Bedivere (Terry Jones) might say, who is this who is so wise in the ways of the media and world peace? Why, it’s Jerry Brown, billed by the allegedly damn stupid reporter as a former governor of California. That is true, but there’s so much more to the man.
This article is based on a speech delivered at Shift’s Defense Ventures Summit in Washington, D.C. on November 15, 2023. Scroll down for a video of the address.
Two years ago, I made a bold prediction, which is actually a bad thing for a venture capitalist to do because we’re so often wrong. During the Reagan National Defense Forum, I tweeted “Time is Running Out with Silicon Valley.” We needed to figure out how to get the Department of Defense to transform its laborious, unproductive procurement process. If they didn’t, start-up companies with breakthrough ideas were going to abandon military defense and move to more fruitful areas of technology. We had to move faster. We had to act with urgency. Because American defense—and the defense of our allies—depended on us.
And then just a few months later, that prediction became a moot point: Russia invaded Ukraine and reminded us why defense technology is not merely something to debate in theory. We were living in a new geopolitical reality. Time wasn’t running out. The sand was at the bottom of the hourglass. History had begun again, and we understood we were entering a new, violent age that would look different from the recent past.
In that narrow window before the world changed, I also wrote a thesis for a new category of technology company. At the time, this felt somewhat controversial, maybe even a little shocking, to my friends in San Francisco. In the essay I stated that my firm Andreessen Horowitz, one of the largest venture capital firms in the world, was unabashedly and proudly declaring its unanimous support for America. That we were betting on America. And that this wasn’t a marketing gimmick or some ESG-adjacent nonsense, but a strategy. We’re in the business of value creation. Of taking bets on things that get very big, very fast. We concluded that America and our allies are best off when we’re building technology companies that support the national interest.
We believe a strong America means a strong world. A safer world. A more civilized world, which is a term we should use more. And that technology is the backbone of maintaining this order and civilization and always will be.
We called this movement American Dynamism. In the investing business, it’s all about calibrating risk and sometimes taking bets that others don’t see. But this bet was and is so obvious. It might have just taken a little bit of moral courage to say the word America out loud.
But others have said it. The great investors will tell you: one of the few certainties of the last 150 years has been the growth and dynamism of the United States. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, at their recent annual meeting in Omaha, repeatedly reminded their investors “never bet against America.” Buffett reminded the crowd that a young country like ours started out with half of one percent of the world’s population, and just 247 years later, here we are commanding 25 percent of the world’s GDP.
“A miracle,” he called it. That’s an oddly religious phrase for an investor, but an accurate one. Jamie Dimon prefers a poker analogy: that America has the best hand ever dealt to any country on this planet, ever. Whether it’s our geography, our universities, our peaceful neighbors, our natural resources, the rule of law, our work ethic, innovation in the core of our bones, the widest and deepest financial markets, and the best military on the planet. We will have this last item, he said, “for as long as we have the best economy.”
America is destined to win.
So why are we starting to fear that this miracle is now on shaky ground? Why do we sense we’re encountering the greatest global unrest since the Cold War? That we’ve entered the most precarious moment in our lives?
Because deep down, we know how you win a war against America.
You win a war against America when we stop innovating. When we become scared of technology, and the drive that resides deep in our bones. When we cease to be the world’s exporter of innovation and cede that role to China, or to global consortiums of dunces.
You win a war against America when you greet builders with suspicion. When your instinct is to destroy the weirdos doing new things on the frontier.
You win a war against America when old companies become too big to fail and ensure that the little ones around them are squashed instead. When we trust age more than we trust vitality, when everything is old—from our infrastructure to our industrial base to our political leaders—because we’ve conquered and discouraged the new.
You win a war against America when our identities become more important than our duties to each other. When we turn inward and focus on our neuroses rather than on the needs of our families and our communities. Around fifty years ago, sociologist Philip Rieff called modern man “psychological man” in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, noting that psychological man “is likely going nowhere, but aims to achieve a certain speed and certainty in his going.” In 50 years, our new neuroticism is now a meme that mocks men who would rather build things and do things than go to therapy, an ethos we used to celebrate in this country.
You win a war against America when we believe the doomer memes and stop thinking life has meaning at all. When our faith in everything is broken: a recent Wall Street Journal poll found that faith, family, and the flag—the very things that used to define our national character—have eroded in the last 25 years. Less than thirty percent of people say patriotism is important to them, down from 70 percent two decades ago. Religion, having children, and community fared the same. You win the war against America when it’s nihilism all the way down.
You win a war against America when our great cities are ruled by crime rings. When businesses are shuttered because security is meaningless theater. When our police are derided. When good people are driven out by bad policy.
You win a war against America when fentanyl pours across our borders, manufactured by an adversary that still remembers the Opium Wars, and delivered by cartels that have no respect for human life. One hundred thousand of our countrymen and women are dead every year in a silent epidemic that’s being met with a collective shrug.
You win a war against America with toys like TikTok that give our adversaries direct access to the anxious minds of teenagers. You win a war against America when you invest billions of dollars in the CCP’s tech ecosystem and pretend that’s just the way business works.
You win a war against America when you have us both-sidesing terrorism. When “nuance” and “it’s complicated” gets in the way of condemning barbaric enemies who slaughter children in their bedrooms as they plead for mercy. You win a war against America when we no longer believe in good and evil, civilization and destruction, just fine people on both sides.
You win a war against America when many in our media and universities seem more aligned with the propaganda of Hamas than the interests of this country. When we forget about hostages because the news cycle thundered to some other Current Thing. You win a war against America when the debate is no longer about security versus privacy but our modern and more dangerous debate of security versus grievance.
You win a war against America when you can no longer speak freely in the land of free speech. When we consume more than we create. When we attack capitalism, the engine of our growth, as though we don’t deserve and shouldn’t celebrate the fruits of our building.
You win this war against America silently, methodically, and without firing a single shot.
But the good news is we know how to fight back. And we’re here because we heard the call to build against these dark forces we face. We know technology is the escape hatch from a nihilistic world. That democracy demands a sword and sometimes we have to use it to defend ourselves, our allies, and civilization.
Some have been critical that we named this movement American Dynamism, but I’ll tell you, never have two words in the investing community meant so much and stood for real, civilizational truth. We often focus on America—the obvious beneficiary of our building. “American” was meant not only as a symbol of what we build for but the unseriousness we reject, a global elite that would be so foolish as to have Iran chair a UN Human Rights forum. America is order—the order we want, the order our allies want. And we shouldn’t be afraid to say that.
But even more important than our choosing the word America is the word Dynamism, the teleological end of technological supremacy. We aren’t American defense, or defense tech, or hard tech, or deep tech, or military tech. Those are means to the end we aspire to—but what is that end?
Dynamism is growth, movement, momentum, and opportunity. In his techno-optimist manifesto, Marc Andreessen wrote, “We believe everything good is downstream of growth. We believe not growing is stagnation, which leads to zero-sum thinking, internal fighting, degradation, collapse, and ultimately death.” Dynamism is life. And we embrace dynamism and the values upon which the country was founded because they are true and worth defending. Dynamism makes America the country people want to be from, to immigrate to, and to build a life, career, or company in.
Alexis de Tocqueville described America as many things, but he was struck by the insatiable spirit of American dynamism and opportunity:
The American lauds as a noble and praiseworthy ambition what our forefathers stigmatized as servile cupidity. In America, fortunes are lost and regained without difficulty, the country is boundless and its resources inexhaustible. . . . Boldness of enterprise is the foremost cause of its rapid progress, its strength, and its greatness. Commercial business is there like a vast lottery by which a small number of men will continually lose, but the State is always a gainer.
The State is always a gainer. America always wins.
So how do we ensure we continue building dynamism? How do we win a slow and methodical silent war?
Well, it takes will and it takes courage.
Every day I talk to smart young people who want to work in tech or become founders. And I ask them a simple and obvious question—one that should be instinctual to answer. Not about their revenue goals or their product or how they’re going to scale a team from 5 to 50. But a more essential question: What do you believe? Why will people follow you? I might as well ask: What is your creed? What will you shout from the rooftops even if you’re maligned for it?
We don’t win a war against bad ideologies unless we know who we are, what we stand for, and where we’re headed. And if we lose this silent war—the ultimate war for American ideals—it’s not because we don’t have the know-how to build missiles and hypersonics and attributable systems and drone swarms. It will be because we doubt our inheritance. Because we doubt the beauty and nobility of what we’re building. Because we doubt that American Dynamism is true and the key to a safer, more prosperous civilization.
Katherine Boyle is a venture capitalist and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. She is the co-founder of the American Dynamism practice, which invests in companies building to support the national interest. Follow her on X @KtmBoyle.
