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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The truth about George Floyd's Death
A trove of emails, Slack messages, and other documents reveal Fauci’s behind-the-scenes involvement. ‘Tony doesn't want his fingerprints on origin stories.’
SAN FRANCISCO MORPHED INTO DETROIT SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: Spiraling in San Francisco’s Doom Loop. What it’s like to live in a city that no longer believes its problems can be fixed:
A note to my fellow San Franciscians: I’m sorry. I know. There’s always some story in the east-coast press about how our city is dying. San Franciscians hate—HATE—these pieces. You’re a stooge and a traitor for writing one. When I set out reporting, I wanted to write a debunking-the-doom piece myself. Yet to live in San Francisco right now, to watch its streets, is to realize that no one will catch you if you fall. In the first three months of 2023, 200 San Franciscans OD’ed, up 41 percent from last year.“It’s like a wasteland,” the guard said when I asked how San Francisco looked to him. “It’s like the only way to describe it. It’s like a video game — like made-up shit. Have you ever played Fallout?”
I shook my head.
“There’s this thing in the game called feral ghouls, and they’re like rotted. They’re like zombies.” There’s only so much pain a person can take before you disintegrate, grow paranoid, or turn numb. “I go home and play with my wife, and we’re like, ‘Ah, hahahaha, this is SF.’”
As NRO’s Jay Nordlinger wrote in 2010 wrote in 2010 when the original Detroit was making headlines and photo spreads thanks to its Hiroshima-like bombed out landscape, “If people are voting a certain way — maybe it’s because they want to. Maybe they know full well what they’re doing. Sometimes you have to take no — such as ‘no to Republicanism’ — for an answer.”
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Leftist Cabal Who Got Biden Elected : Must be held Accountable for Failure
When Ideology Trumps Empathy - Dems are All Hypocrites
When Ideology Trumps Empathy - City Journal Essay
It turns out that black lives really don’t matter. In the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, conservatives had relentlessly raised the alarm about the post–George Floyd crime surge: homicides had risen 29 percent in 2020 (the largest increase on record), and they have continued rising since then. Democrats and their media allies responded either that crime was a racist fiction or that, because post-Floyd crime levels nationally were still lower than they were in the early 1990s, there was nothing to see here, folks, move on!
These opposing positions were tantamount to saying that black lives matter or that they don’t. Black Americans have borne the brunt of the increased violence since the George Floyd race riots. Their share of homicide victims went from 53 percent in 2019 (blacks are 13 percent of the national population) to 56 percent in 2020. At least an additional 2,164 black lives were lost in 2020 over the 2019 count, compared with an increase of 950 white and Hispanic homicide victims combined in 2020. Such disparities only worsened in 2021 and 2022. In 2020, blacks between the ages of ten and 24 died of gun homicide at 20 times the rate of whites in the same age range. In 2021, blacks between the ages of ten and 24 died of gun homicide at nearly 25 times the rate of whites of the same age.
It’s the only racial disparity that progressives don’t care about.
ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC: Likinsonberal PAC Urges Donors To ‘Take Out’ Republican Congressman Who Survived Being Shot Last Year.
CNN analyst Chris Cillizza deletes tweet showing Trump in crosshairs.
Related: How a Bernie Bro Nearly Committed the Biggest Political Killing In American History.
Plus, earlier:
Ilived for very many years in rural Vermont. I’d bought a long-abandoned, post-and-beam farmhouse on a third-class dirt road. The realtor was a German immigrant who’d come to Vermont with his wife and infant children just after the war. He suggested that I call a local builder, Bob, to inspect the house, which was superficially in dreadful shape, but the farm and basement were sound. Bob said he’d be glad to put it right, and he and his brother-in-law restored it to its 1805 perfection.
Bob’s family had lived through the war in Germany, and through the famine afterward, and through relocation in America, ignorant of the language. Bob taught himself carpentry and all the building trades, and became a much-respected member of the small town, where all of his contemporary men had fought against the Axis in World War II. His brother-in-law, Eric, had been in the Hitler Youth, and Bob was a glider commando in the Luftwaffe—the equivalent, today, of Delta Force, or the Navy Seals.
My family became friends with Bob, and his wife, Ilse, became a surrogate grandmother—or better, great-aunt—to my kids. His family was my first encounter with the German national character—hard working, honest, and uncomplaining.
Of course I was seldom unaware that the regime he had fought for was dedicated to the destruction of my people and my race (if Jews are a race … in any case, to my like). I asked Eric about the Hitler Youth, and he said that he’d missed one meeting, and was told by his group leader that, should he miss another, he’d be shot. And, Bob, and every other man of fighting age and ability, was conscripted, and what were they to do?
Just as Eric explained, and perhaps apologized for, his membership in the Hitler Youth, Bob would tell me that his father had risked his life saving a Jew of his acquaintance.
To both cases: perhaps, and perhaps not. I never met a German who had lived through that wartime period who did not share with me the history of his family helping the Jews. Putting aside the question of the stories’ truth, I was struck by their seeming necessity for the teller. The current self-protective rationale of the Nazi era invokes an occupation by the forces of evil, which they were mostly too powerless to fight. Most of the people who lived through it are gone, and their descendants are entitled to imagine a history with which they can live—neither absolutely false nor true, but one in which someone tried to act.
Over the last two years in America, I’ve witnessed our own forces of evil with incredulity, despair, and rage. Corruption, blasphemy, and absurdity have been accepted by one-half of the electorate as the cost of doing business; as has the fear this acceptance generates. Does anyone actually believe that men change into women and women into men who can give birth, that the Earth is burning, the seas are rising, and we’ll all perish unless we cover our faces with strips of cotton?
No one does. These proclamations are an act of faith, in a new, as yet unnamed religion, and the vehemence with which one proclaims allegiance to these untruths is an exercise no different from any other ecstatic religious oath. They become the Apostles’ Creed of the left, their proclamation committing the adherent physically to their strictures, exactly as the oath taken on induction to the armed services. The inductee is told to “take one step forward,” and once they do he or she can no longer claim, “I misunderstood the instruction.”
Those currently in power insist on masking, but don’t wear masks. They claim the seas are rising and build mansions on the shore. They abhor the expenditure of fossil fuels and fly exclusively in private jets. And all the while half of the country will not name the disease. Why?
Because the cost of challenging this oppressive orthodoxy has, for them, become too high. Upon a possible awakening, they—or more likely their children—might say that the country was occupied. And they would be right.
Gandhi said to the British, you’ve been a guest in our house for too long, it is time for you to leave. He borrowed the line from Oliver Cromwell, and it’s a good one. The left has occupied the high places for too long, promoting dogma even as the occasions for their complaint have decreased (what position is closed to people of color, or women? Inclusion in all levels of the workforce; preference in higher education, a seat in the cockpit, in the Oval Office, in a movie’s cast, or admission to an elite school+? And yet the vehemence of their protests has increased, progressing into blacklisting and even rioting by those claiming to represent “the oppressed.”
Old-time physicians used to speak of the disease “declaring itself.” History teaches that one omnipresent aspect of a coup is acts of reprisal staged by agents provocateurs of the revolutionaries, and blamed on supporters of the legitimate government. It would be a historical anomaly if we were not to see such between now and the midterm elections.
For the disease has declared itself, and we are not now in a culture war, but a nascent coup, with its usual cast of characters. The Bolshevists could have been defeated by a company of soldiers in the suburbs of Moscow, Hitler stopped at Czechoslovakia, and the current horrors confronted at the Minneapolis police station or a meeting of the San Francisco school board. But those tragedies, and our current tragedies, were not just allowed but encouraged to run their course.
Yet I believe there is hope for reason and self-direction. Hispanics in Texas are opposing the policies which have infested their state with the gang violence they fled in Mexico; Ron DeSantis and conservative Floridians have displayed irrefutable common sense, responsibility, and probity, opposing “critical race theory” and the sexual indoctrination of adolescents. Black conservatives, similarly, appeal to the reason of their historically reasonable community, to address the horrors the left has made of the cities. In San Francisco, a place where many of us left our hearts but the natives have historically surrendered their brains, the people voted to remove the wicked fools on their school board. And Bari Weiss founded a university in Austin, Texas, for the pursuit of free thought.
As Tennessee said, “Suddenly there’s God so quickly.”
This is a bit more than facetiousness on my part. I’ve found great comfort in the Torah, counseling Moses again and again, when he was reluctant to fight the power of the Egyptians, and unsure he could do it alone, that he would not be alone, as God would be with him.
What we are seeing through these brave dissenters is the wisdom of the Rumpelstiltskin story. The young woman marries a king who locks her in a cell until she is able to spin flax into gold. She despairs at the impossible task, until an elf shows up and says he’ll show her how. He does so. She asks how she can thank him, and he says all he wants is her firstborn child. And she must give him her child until, or unless, she figures out his name. She is terrified and clueless, but she knows she must try. Eventually, after committing to the task, she guesses his name. What prompted her, frightened though she was, to break the sick cycle? She would not visit her plight upon her child.
Now, the disease having proclaimed itself and its dangers having become clear, it is time for us all to overcome the occupation by standing up to those tyrannies under which we are not prepared to live.
Now that the suspected New York train shooter has been arrested by the police, charges of terrorism and hate crimes can’t be far behind. Or can they?
As PJ Media has reported, suspected terrorist Frank James was a supporter of the black separatist group Nation of Islam. His recorded rantings on his YouTube channel and Twitter account were full of his racist poison. YouTube has already disappeared his channel with Frank James’s hundreds of videos.
But there’s one comment in particular that may sound eerily familiar to those who were sentient beings on 9/11/01 and remember its aftermath.
One of the most shocking comments uttered in response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon and the attempted attack on the White House or Congress was said by Senator Barack Obama’s spiritual advisor and pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
Barack Obama’s Chicago minister, who officiated the Obama’s wedding ceremony, declared before cheering parishioners that the Islamist Al Qaeda attack was America’s “chickens coming home to roost.” It was so divisive that Obama, then running for president, had to disavow Wright and gave a speech on race to distract from the poison coming from the pulpit of the church he’d belonged to for 20 years.
Related: FBI Blows It Again: Knew About Subway Terrorist’s Racist Videos and Had Him on Watch List
James, who, as we reported, calls himself a “prophet of doom,” described 9/11 as “the most beautiful day, probably in the history of this f***ing world.”
James was also quite upset that new Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is married to a white man. “I had no idea, with that African name, that she would be married to a white man. … Our black sister Supreme Court Justice, power to the people, is married to a f**king white man. (Crying) I don’t believe this sh*t. Oh, God! Wait a minute. This motherf**ker right there, there he is. There he is! White man! Black sister, Ketanji, married to a white man.”
He posted positive things about Black Lives Matter shooter Micah Xavier Johnson, who murdered five Dallas Police officers.
Will the Leftist media memory-hole the name of the racist terror suspect and stay mum on hate crime and terror charges against the man, as they have done with other Leftist killers?
Victoria Taft is an award-winning journalist, writer and terrestrial radio talk host, heard in Seattle and on the rest of the Left Coast. Listen to her twice weekly “Adult in the Room Podcast.” Find her at VictoriaTaft.com Parler, MeWe, Minds, Locals, Twitter & Facebook. Her book mocking antifa will be out this year. For media inquiries write: Victoria@VictoriaTaft.com
