Quotulatiousness

July 18, 2019

Andrew Coyne interviews NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the National Post, Andrew Coyne discusses NATO, Donald Trump, and Russia with the current Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg:

General Hastings “Pug” Ismay, later the first Secretary General of NATO during his military service as Winston Churchill’s chief military assistant in 1941.
Official British government photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

Throughout their term in government — and especially since Donald Trump’s victory in America’s 2016 election — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have taken every opportunity to pay tribute to the “rules-based international order,” the consensus among countries that everyone’s interests are best served by following a set of rules and guiding principles that have evolved through the decades, expressed through things such as trade agreements and international alliances like the United Nations. If this consensus has a face it may be that of Jens Stoltenberg. The urbane former prime minister of Norway has been Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) since 2014, and through tough times for the international consensus he’s been one of the loudest voices defending it. This week he was in Canada to meet with Trudeau, to tour the Canadian Forces’ Garrison Petawawa and to discuss Canada’s NATO deployments in Latvia and Iraq. He sat down for an interview with the National Post‘s Andrew Coyne.

Q. Lord Ismay, NATO’s first secretary-general, famously defined the alliance’s mission as “keeping the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” When you hear some of the things Donald Trump says about NATO, about Article 5 (the collective defence provision) — are the Americans still in?

A. Yes. And they are more in now than they have been for a long time — meaning that they are actually increasing their NATO presence in Europe. After the end of the Cold War, Canada and the United States, for natural reasons, reduced their military presence in Europe. Because tensions went down, there was less need… Now tensions are increasing again, and both Canada and the United States are now increasing their military presence in Europe: Canada with a Canadian-led battle group in Latvia, and the United States with a battle group in Poland and also with a new armoured brigade. So what we see is that the United States is actually investing more in NATO, more military presence in Europe, more U.S. investments in infrastructure, in pre-positioned equipment, more exercises. So the message from the United States is that they are committed to NATO and we see that not only in words but also in deeds.

Q. But when you see Trump questioning the value of multilateral institutions, asserting “America First,” his chumminess with Putin, does it risk sending a signal that, if push came to shove — if Russia got up to no good in the Baltics or what have you — that America’s resolution to resist that would be less than certain?

A. For me the strongest possible signal to send is the presence of U.S. forces in Europe. The fact that we now, for the first time in the history of NATO, have U.S. troops in the eastern part of the alliance, in Poland and the Baltic countries. There is no way to send a clearer signal than that. And the Canadian troops because they are part of the picture. To have American troops in the Baltic countries sends a very clear signal that if a Baltic country is attacked it will trigger a response from the whole alliance… It’s not possible to imagine a stronger and clearer signal than that.

QotD: “They might speak English, but they don’t speak Western”

Filed under: Books, Education, History, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[Responding to a photo of a protest sign labelled “Dumbledore wouldn’t let this happen“] I swear, it’s all you ever see from them.

But something happened to me last night, I had a kind of realization. It suddenly hit me WHY that is.

It’s because Harry Potter is literally all they collectively know.

Schools don’t teach history anymore.
They no longer teach the canon of Western literature.
They certainly don’t teach the Bible.

So Millennials literally have no points of common reference. It’s not that they all just want to look like complete morons by infantilizing their political metaphor to the level of a children’s book, it’s that they have no other choice.

They’re literally bereft of the allegorical language of the West. I’m sure there’s some Harry Potter monster analogy I could use to explain it to them, how it’s like monsters have come along and literally stolen their ability to speak, their common language, and their birthright.

They can no longer express or understand the set of references we have from our past, our most prized stories, and our culture’s religious quotations. They can’t do Shakespeare, Milton, or even Mark Twain because they’ve never learned any of these while they were being taught Indonesian multicultural dancing and given participation awards. They don’t know what happened at Hastings in 1066, at Runnymede in 1215, or even at Sarajevo in 28th June 1914, because they were being given feminist diversity training instead of learning the history of their civilization. They certainly don’t know what “the least of these” refers to or where it comes from, as a recent event with a White House staffer proved.

They’ve lost the entire allegorical language of the West. They might speak English, but they don’t speak Western. To them, it’s like a foreign, dead, alien language. A set of stories they do not know.

RPGPundit, “Harry Potter and the way Millennial Leftists Don’t Even Speak Western Anymore”, The RPGPundit, 2017-02-02.

July 17, 2019

TAB Short: US Military Railway Guns In Action

Filed under: History, Military, Railways, Technology, USA, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Armourer’s Bench
Published on May 19, 2019

During World War One massive railway guns were used to reach deep behind enemy lines and attack enemy infrastructure with both sides using the massive artillery pieces. In this episode Matt takes a look at some archival footage of America’s massive railway guns ranging from 10 to 16 inches.

Check out our accompanying article for more information and sources at:
https://armourersbench.com/2019/05/19/us-military-railway-guns-in-action/

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The Answer:
According to the original footage notes the mystery item is a 60-feet tall captured German field periscope ‘claimed to have been used by the German Crown Prince during the war’.

Footage:
https://catalog.archives.gov/id/24749

QotD: “The United States government [became] the greatest and most potent maker of criminals in any recent century”

Filed under: Health, History, Law, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

For most of the history of the United States, drugs were legal. People could buy opiates and cocaine-based products from their local pharmacy. An opiate-laced brew called Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, for example, was particularly popular with housewives. One person who viewed this legal system with skepticism was a Los Angeles doctor named Henry Smith Williams. When a small number of his patients became addicted, he was disgusted, and he came to see them as despicable “weaklings.” So when opiates and cocaine were banned in 1914, he welcomed this first birth-pang of the drug war with glee.

But then he noticed what happened to his addicted patients. They didn’t stop using. Instead, “here were tens of thousands of people, in every walk of life, frantically craving drugs that they could in no legal way secure,” he wrote in one of his books. “They craved the drugs, as a man dying of thirst craves water. They must have the drugs at any hazard, at any cost.”

At the same time, Smith Williams realized that the drug war was “in effect ordering a company of drug smugglers into existence.” Because pharmacists could no longer sell these drugs, the Mafia and other criminal organizations stepped in, selling a vastly inferior product at extortionate prices. In the pharmacies, morphine had cost two or three cents a grain, but the criminal gangs charged a dollar.

The death rate among addicts rose, and those who survived began to behave very differently. An official government study had found that, before the drug war kicked in, three-quarters of self-described addicts had steady and respectable jobs: some 22% were wealthy, while only 6% were poor. They were more sedate as a result of their addiction, but they were rarely out of control or criminal. Yet faced with the need to meet these extortionate new prices, many of the men started to commit property crimes, and many of the women started to steal or prostitute themselves.

So Smith Williams watched as the drug war created two waves of crime: first a wave of violent criminal drug-dealers, and then a wave of criminality among addicts. “The United States government,” Henry wrote in shock, had become “the greatest and most potent maker of criminals in any recent century.”

Johann Hari, “A 1930s California story shows why the war on drugs is a failure”, Los Angeles Times, 2017-06-16.

July 14, 2019

The Epstein scandal is another example of the importance of accurate names

Filed under: Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

ESR has some concerns about the Epstein case, specifically on the correct terminology to use:

The sage Confucius was once asked what he would do if he was a governor. He said he would “rectify the names” to make words correspond to reality. He understood what General Semantics teaches; if your linguistic map is sufficiently confused, you will misunderstand the territory. And be readily outmaneuvered by those who are less confused.

Mug shot of Jeffrey Epstein made available by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department, taken following his indictment for soliciting a prostitute in 2006.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

And that brings us to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. In particular, the widespread tagging of Epstein as a pedophile.

No, Richard Epstein is not a pedophile. This is important. If conservatives keep misidentifying him as one, I fear some unfortunate consequences.

Pedophiles desire pre-pubertal children. This is not Epstein’s kink; he quite obviously likes his girls to be as young as possible but fully nubile. The correct term for this is “ephebophile”, and being clear about the distinction matters. I’ll explain why.

The Left has a long history of triggering conservatives into self-discrediting moral panics (“Rock and roll is the devil’s music”). It also has a strong internal contingent that would like to normalize pedophilia. I mean the real thing, not Epstein’s creepy ephebophilia.

Homosexual pedophiles have been biding their time in order to get adult-on-adult homosexuality fully normalized as battlespace prep, but you see a few trial balloons go up occasionally in places like Salon. The last round of this was interrupted by the need to take down Milo Yiannopolous, but the internal logic of left-wing sexual liberationism always demands new ways to freak out the normals, and the pedophiles are more than willing to be next up in satisfying that perpetual demand.

Liberals have proven themselves utterly useless at resisting the liberationist ratchet, so I’m not even bothering to address them. Conservatives, if you want to prevent the next turn, don’t give the pedophilia-normalizers maneuvering room. Rectify the names; make the distinctions that matter.

Epstein’s behavior is repulsive because we judge young postpubertal humans to be too psychologically immature to give adult consent, but it’s nowhere near the evil that is the sexual abuse of prepubertal children.

QotD: The legacy of the original hippies

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In my younger days, when I myself wore my hair long and may have dabbled in the occasional Red Dragon, Purple Om and Roobarb ‘n’ Custard, I think I might have been quite surprised to learn that the hippies I idealised at the time — well, I liked Easy Rider, and used to play Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” more often than was good for me — in fact shared the same ideological roots as the Hitler Youth.

Not now I’m older and wiser, I don’t. Beneath the kaftan of every other hippie beats the heart of a fascist — the intolerance, the zeal, the control-freakery — and it all stems from that moment, pinpointed in the documentary, when a left-wing activist and Berkeley drop-out named Jerry Rubin had a sudden insight: that there were more hippies than there were radicals.

The unfortunate result of this was that Rubin and his ilk realised that they could prey like vampires on these fluffy-headed flower children and turn their innocent yearning for peace, love and drug-addled sex into something much more dangerous, whose effects we are ruing to this day.

All that long hair, those beads, the patchouli, the starry eyes, the psychedelic sounds of the Grateful Dead; they were really just a kandy-kolored, tangerine-flake Trojan Horse for the values — or rather the anti-values — that have gone on to make our culture so weak, decadent and vulnerable to destruction by more iron-willed invaders.

This was, of course, exactly what influential campus thinkers of the time such as German-born cultural Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse wanted. For them, free love, female emancipation, black empowerment, the groovy rejection of authority and pursuit of the self — all sugar-coated with a great soundtrack and lashings of lovely psychotropics — were really just a means to an end: the death of the family, the dismantling of the system, and, ultimately the destruction of western civilisation.

James Delingpole, “Hippies gave us wonderful things, but they left an evil legacy too”, The Spectator, 2017-06-10.

July 13, 2019

Piling on the charges to encourage plea bargaining – modern policing at work

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A recent local crime story included the following laundry list of charges for one of the accused:

Shaquille Lovell, 21, of Ritson Road South in Oshawa is charged with careless carry of a prohibited firearm, contravention of storage regulations, unauthorized possession of a firearm, possession of a firearm knowing its possession is unauthorized, possession of a loaded prohibited firearm, and possession of a controlled substance for the purpose of trafficking (cocaine).

He was found to be carrying a prohibited weapon (a handgun) and a controlled substance (cocaine). Those two offences should be more than enough to prosecute with strong chance of conviction. All the rest of the bafflegab charges appear to be piled on to encourage plea bargaining, because they’re literally peripheral to the main criminal activity the accused has been charged with.

Lawyers, especially legal aid lawyers, will encourage the accused to “bargain down” the charges — one of the reasons for so many separate charges being applied — to avoid the cost and delay of a full trial … and the risk of facing the full potential sentence. Even relatively well-to-do middle class people will be more likely to want to avoid a long, drawn-out legal battle because it might well cost them everything they own. Poor people don’t even have that much of an option.

Canadian law enforcement is continuing to follow down the path of the United States, where a 90% conviction rate is considered low. According to Statistics Canada, “In 2013/2014, 63% of all cases completed in adult criminal court resulted in a finding of guilt”, but also “The extent to which plea negotiations are utilized in Canada currently remains unknown.”

July 12, 2019

“Devil Dogs” – U.S. Marines – Sabaton History 023 [Official]

Filed under: Germany, History, Media, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Sabaton History
Published on 11 Jul 2019

The United States entered the battlefields of Europe in 1918. Among the first Americans to participate in the fight were the U.S. Marines, who quickly adopted the name “Devil Dogs”. One of their most notable engagements is the Battle of Belleau Wood in June 1918, where the Marines fought the battle-hardened Germans for 26 days.

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Sources:
IWM: Q 61342, Q 70181, NTB 319-2, IWM 687, 1061-08e, IWM 508-67, IWM 501-9, IWM 435, IWM 778, Q 98994, IWM 484

An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.

© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.

From the comments:

Sabaton History
2 days ago
This episode is about the US Marines and their actions during the Battle of Belleau Wood in 1918. While most of the footage in this episode is depicting the Marines and the Germans in 1918, and some of it is even depicting the actual fighting in Belleau wood, there is not a whole lot footage or imagery from the action. So for whoever is enough of a history buff to spot that some of our illustrative material is in fact depicting other engagements, well spotted! We try to use authentic material whenever we can, but in the end we have to make an episode visually attractive and dramatic, and we can’t do that with just looking at Indy’s head for 15 minutes (although I’m sure that many of you wouldn’t mind). That was the announcement. Peace, rock on and cheers!

Mark Steyn urges caution when considering the Epstein case

Filed under: Government, Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It may make sense to avoid a rush to judgement, as the way the federal justice system works these days does not encourage a belief in its impartiality or, for that matter, its dedication to the concept of “justice”:

I am wary of saying anything too definitive re the Jeffrey Epstein case, because so much of the reporting is way too trusting of the federal prosecutors’ official narrative. Don’t get me wrong: I take it as read that he’s an industrial-scale pedophile, if only because it seems to be the only thing anybody knows about him – including how he made his billion dollars. He apparently requires three “massages” a day by underage girls. So, upon being informed that Mr Epstein was flying his “Lolita Express” around Africa with Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey and a softcore porn actress called Chauntae Davies on board, I’m disinclined to accept the official explanation that this was an Aids-relief “humanitarian” mission.

Mug shot of Jeffrey Epstein made available by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department, taken following his indictment for soliciting a prostitute in 2006.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

That said, as longtime readers know, I regard federal justice as appallingly corrupt, and so the sudden revival of Epstein’s prosecution is somewhat more than intriguing. First, and as often with prominent American cases, the details make no sense:

    In a memo filed to the court, prosecutors outlined the scope of Epstein’s vast wealth to argue that he has the means to flee the country and escape prosecution, noting that he not only has homes in Manhattan, Palm Beach, New Mexico and Paris — with his Upper East Side townhouse, of which prosecutors are seeking the forfeiture, alone worth $77 million — but also owns a private island in the US Virgin Islands.

    He also has three US passports, owns at least 15 vehicles and has access to two private jets, according to the memo.

I can understand how a rich man comes to have fifteen cars, but how pray, does one individual citizen acquire three US passports? And from a government supposedly on “orange alert” these last eighteen years.

Second, Epstein was the beneficiary of a ludicrously lenient federal plea deal a decade ago for exactly the same charges. So this would appear to be “double jeopardy”. Not so fast, say the feds:

    It is well-settled in the Second Circuit [appellate court] that a plea agreement in one US Attorney’s office does not bind another unless otherwise stated.

Is that so? Thanks to that litigious loser Cary Katz, I’m more familiar with Second Circuit jurisprudence than I might otherwise wish. But I had no idea of the above. So apparently, when you enter into a plea deal with “the United States” that says things like “the United States, in consultation with and subject to the good faith and approval of Epstein’s counsel, shall select an attorney representative for…” and “if Epstein successfully fulfills all of the terms and conditions of this agreement, the United States also agrees that it will not institute any criminal charges against…”, the words “the United States” only apply to the United States that resides at 27 Ocean View Parkway, Miami Beach and not the United States that resides at 32b Rotting Wharf Lane, The Bronx. So forget double jeopardy; you could have demicentuple jeopardy. Who knew?

One more thing: it seems fairly obvious that Epstein is also a procurer for those whose appetites likewise run to schoolgirls. This is where the manifests of his airplane are at least somewhat inferential. Yet the new indictment is concerned only with “the New York Residence” and “the Palm Beach Residence” — and not the Lolita Express jetting well-heeled buddies to Paedo Island. Is this some cozy arrangement to ensure that Bill Clinton et al are excluded from the case?

July 11, 2019

From Aerobatics to Terror Bombing | Between 2 Wars | 1927 Part 2 of 2

Filed under: History, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published on 10 Jul 2019

With thousands of planes left over from World War One, hobby pilots and entrepreneurs set out to create the modern airline industry. Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, and many more set record after record, while airplane manufacturers start the creation of passenger, freight planes, and a new generation of aerial weapons.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Joram Appel and Spartacus Olsson
Directed and Produced by: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer : Joram Appel
Post Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Joram Appel
Edited by: Daniel Weiss

Archive by Reuters/Screenocean https://www.screenocean.com

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH

The genesis of the administrative state during the Great Depression

Filed under: Cancon, History, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Leonid Sirota provides some interesting background on the rise of the administrative state during the 1930s:

Top left: The Tennessee Valley Authority, part of the New Deal, being signed into law in 1933.
Top right: FDR (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt) was responsible for the New Deal.
Bottom: A public mural from one of the artists employed by the New Deal’s WPA program.
Wikimedia Commons.

To a degree that is, I think, unusual among other areas of the law, administrative law in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Canada is riven by a conflict about its underlying institution. To be sure there, there are some constitutional lawyers who speak of getting rid of judicial review of legislation and so transferring the constitution to the realm of politics, rather than law, but that’s very much a minority view. Labour unions have their critics, but not so much among labour lawyers. But the administrative state is under attack from within the field of administrative law. It has, of course, its resolute defenders too, some of them going so far as to argue that the administrative state has somehow become a constitutional requirement.

In an interesting article on “The Depravity of the 1930s and the Modern Administrative State” [PDF] recently published in the Notre Dame Law Review, Steven G. Calabresi and Gary Lawson challenge the defenders of the administrative state by pointing out its intellectual origins in what they persuasively argue was

    a time, worldwide and in the United States, of truly awful ideas about government, about humanity, and about the fundamental unit of moral worth—ideas which, even in relatively benign forms, have institutional consequences that … should be fiercely resisted.

That time was the 1930s.

Professors Calabresi and Lawson point out that the creation of the administrative state was spearheaded by thinkers ― first the original “progressives” and then New Dealers ― who “fundamentally did not believe that all men are created equal and should democratically govern themselves through representative institutions”. At an extreme, this rejection of the belief in equality led them to embrace eugenics, whose popularity in the United States peaked in the 1930s. But the faith in expertise and “the modern descendants of Platonic philosopher kings, distinguished by their academic pedigrees rather than the metals in their souls” is a less radical manifestation of the same tendency.

The experts, real or supposed ― some of whom “might well be bona fide experts [while] [o]thers might be partisan hacks, incompetent, entirely lacking in judgment beyond their narrow sphere of learning, or some combination thereof” ― would not “serve as wise counselors to autonomous individuals and elected representatives [but] as guardians for servile wards”. According to the “advanced” thinkers of the 1930s, “[o]rdinary people simply could not handle the complexities of modern life, so they needed to be managed by their betters. All for the greater good, of course.” Individual agency was, in any case, discounted: “the basic unit of value was a collective: the nation, the race, or the tribe. Individuals were simply cells in an organic whole rather than ends in themselves.”

H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.

July 10, 2019

Summer Stupidity: CHICAGO (City Review!)

Filed under: Food, Humour, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published on 9 Jul 2019

O Chicago, a city near and dear to my heart. And not just because I have a healthy respect for pizza that’s functionally pie.

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Fake news, whacky conspiracy theories, and the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein

Filed under: Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Week, Matthew Walther uses the Epstein case to illustrate why many so-called “low information voters” tend to believe all sorts of odd things like Pizzagate:

The arrest of the apparent billionaire investor Jeffrey Epstein at a New Jersey airport on Saturday on federal charges for crimes he was accused of during the Bush administration should not be surprising to anyone who has followed the news carefully. He may have escaped in 2008 with a ludicrous one-year stint in a county jail that he was allowed to leave six days a week, but his name has never quite been out of the headlines. Between 2008 and 2015 Epstein reportedly settled more than a dozen lawsuits from Jane Does alleging sexual assault; the youngest of his alleged victims was 14 years old.

Mug shot of Jeffrey Epstein made available by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department, taken following his indictment for soliciting a prostitute in 2006.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

The only question is why did it take this long? Why was the ludicrous deal that gave Epstein and his fellow conspirators immunity in exchange for a slap-on-the-wrist jail sentence ever allowed to go through in the first place?

[…]

We should keep all of this in mind the next time we feel inclined to sneer at so-called “low-information voters,” especially the kookier sort. You know the people I mean. Wackos. Gun nuts. 8channers. Conspiracy theorists in Middle America who watch InfoWars (one of the few journalistic outlets to discuss the issue of pedophilia regularly) and post about QAnon and “spirit cooking” and the lizard people. The news that a globalized cabal of billionaires and politicians and journalists and Hollywood bigwigs might be flying around the world raping teenaged girls will not surprise them in the least because it is what they have long suspected. For the rest of us it is like finding out that the Jersey Devil is real or turning on cable news and finding Anderson Cooper and his panel engaged in a matter-of-fact discussion of Elvis’s residence among the Zixls on the 19th moon of Dazotera.

Among other things, the Epstein case forces us to ask ourselves some uncomfortable questions about the real meaning of “fake” news. There is, or should be, more to being informed than fact-checking formalism. If you have spent the last few years earnestly consuming mainstream left-of-center media in this country you will be under the impression that the United States has fallen under the control of a spray-tanned Mussolini clone who is never more than five minutes away from making birth control illegal. If you watch Fox News and read conservative publications, you no doubt bemoan the fact that Ronald Reagan’s heir is being hamstrung by a bunch of avocado toast-eating feminist witches. Meanwhile, Alex Jones’s audience will tell you that America, like the rest of the world, is ruled by a depraved internationalist elite whose ultimate allegiance is not to countries or political parties or ideologies but to one another. These people believe in nothing. They will safeguard their wealth and privilege at any cost. They will never break rank. And they will commit unspeakable crimes with impunity, while anyone who dares to speculate openly is sued or hounded out of public life as a kook.

July 9, 2019

“Why can’t America have great trains?”

Filed under: Economics, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At the very end of his recent book Romance of the Rails, Randal O’Toole regretfully (he really, genuinely is a train fan) answers the question three ways … none of which bolster the hopes that the United States will go back to great passenger railway service:

First, when we had great trains, they were used mainly by the elite, and that remains true of great trains in other countries today. Before 1910, it is likely that a majority of Americans had never traveled more than 50 miles from home, and most had never been on a train, while many others had taken only one or two train trips in their life. As James Hill observed, “the so-called ‘travelling public’ forms in reality but a small, and the more fortunate class of the community.” If he was prejudiced against passenger trains, as some claim, it may have been for altruistic reasons, as the people who relied on freight trains “direct and indirect, include all. Hence justice requires that railway systems … should be cautious not to favor passenger traffic at the necessary expense of freight payers.” It is neither sensible nor fair fo the government to subsidize transportation catering mainly to the wealthy.

Second, new transportation technologies have replaced trains and streetcars. Planes are faster and less expensive for long distances; cars and buses are more convenient and less expensive for short distances; and there is no midrange distance at which passenger rail has an advantage over both cars and planes.

Third, and just as important, other new technologies, including the moving assembly line, telecommunications and the electrical grid, have reshaped our cities so the urban patterns that once made rail convenient to large numbers (though never a majority) of people have been replaced by patterns in which rail makes no sense for passenger travel.

Although we might want great trains in our fantasy of what the world should be like, the reality is we don’t need trains. Most Americans don’t ride the trains we have, nor would they ride them even if they met some arbitrary devinition of “great.” We love passenger trains, and we will remember them in museums and tourist lines. But if the government stays involved in transportation at all, it should be to prepare for the next revolution in transportation, not to try to reverse the previous one.

Plan Red: Britain and America’s Planned Wars on Each Other

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Historigraph
Published on 27 Jan 2019

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Sources:

Christopher M. Bell, “Thinking the Unthinkable: British and American Naval Strategies for an Anglo-American War, 1918-1931”, The International History Review, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Nov. 1997).

Kevin Lippert, War Plan Red: The United States’ Plan to Invade Canada and Canada’s Secret Plan to Invade The United States (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2015)

Stephen Roskill, Churchill and the Admirals

Ben Wilson, Empire of the Deep: The Rise and Fall of the British Navy

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