MALINVESTMENT, visualized. “Below right is a photo taken of unused lumber hauling rail cars now par…

Find your own allegory, I'm not going to connect the dots for you.

The question is: Is Atlas Shrugged visionary, or historical?

MALINVESTMENT, visualized. “Below right is a photo taken of unused lumber hauling rail cars now par…: "

MALINVESTMENT, visualized. “Below right is a photo taken of unused lumber hauling rail cars now parked on a closed railroad spur in Eastern Oregon, part of 20 miles of empty rail cars dedicated to hauling lumber to market. Most of these lumber hauling rail cars have been in mothballs since 2008 ….”

UPDATE: Reader Bruce Webster writes:

When I read your post and then went to the linked post, I immediately thought of these passages:

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Empty trains clattered through the four states that were tied, as neighbors, to the throat of Colorado. They carried a few carloads of sheep, some corn, some melons and an occasional farmer with an overdressed family, who had friends in Washington. Jim [Taggart] had obtained a subsidy from Washington for every train that was run, not as a profit-making carrier, but as a service of “public equity.” (p. 351)

=========

Six weeks ago, Train Number 193 had been sent with a load of steel, not to Faulkton, Nebraska, where the Spencer Machine Tool Company, the best machine tool concern still in existence, had been idle for two weeks, waiting for the shipment — but to Sand Creek, Illinois, where Confederated Machines had been wallowing in debt for over a year, producing unreliable goods at unpredictable times. The steel had been allocated by a directive which explained that the Spencer Machine Tool Company was a rich concern, able to wait, while Confederate Machines was bankrupt and could not be allowed to collapse, being the sole source of livelihood of the community of Sand Creek, Illlinois. The Spencer Machine Tool Company had closed a month ago. Confederated Machines had closed two weeks later.

The people of Sand Creek, Illinois, had been placed on national relief, but no food could be found for them in the empty granaries of the nation at the frantic call of the moment — so the seed grain of the farmers of Nebraska had been seized by order of the Unification Board — and Train Number 194 had carried the unplanted harvest and the future of the people of Nebraska to be consume by the people of Illinois. “In this enlightened age,” Eugene Lawson had said in a radio broadcast, “we have come, at last, to realize that each of of us is his brother’s keeper.” (p. 911)

============

I suspect you can guess what book those came from. ..bruce..

Indeed. An Army Of Eugene Lawsons!

"

Royal Oak to allow guns at Ford Arts, Beats & Eats festival | freep.com | Detroit Free Press

The Freep does the impossible: It reports on a gun issue at a Royal Oak City Council meeting and manages to find a single quote supporting the council's decision to uphold Michigan law and not ban open carry.

And that quote makes the man look like a paranoid nutter.

Douglas Holloway of Westland said he would leave his gun at home if his safety and that of his family could be guaranteed at the event.

"I don't think anyone can do that," he told Royal Oak city commissioners. "You can't stop criminals.

Notice that it's a partial quote, with unquoted attribution.

Read the rest, an note the two GM employees and the university professor that sees the conspiracy that the "gun lobby" has cooked up.

Royal Oak to allow guns at Ford Arts, Beats & Eats festival | freep.com | Detroit Free Press

Srsly?

I'd really like to know where they found those 8%. I'm guessing in the White House Rose garden.

in reference to:

"Eight percent (8%) rate the economy as good or excellent while 55% say it’s in poor shape."
- http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Most-read-ever-Examiner-editorial-Time-to-admit-Obamanomics-has-failed-100335924.html (view on Google Sidewiki)

Matt Ridley: Down with Doom: How the World Keeps Defying the Predictions of Pessimists

The evidence is all around us that things are getting better. Is it possible that the reason is because we always think it's getting worse?

Denial is one of humanity's greatest powers.

Matt Ridley: Down with Doom: How the World Keeps Defying the Predictions of Pessimists

I began to pay attention and a few years ago I started to research a book on the subject. I was astounded by what I discovered. Global per capita income, corrected for inflation, had trebled in my lifetime, life expectancy had increased by one third, child mortality had fallen by two-thirds, the population growth rate had halved. More people had got out of poverty than in all of human history before. When I was born, 36% of Americans had air conditioning. Today 79% of Americans below the poverty line had air conditioning. The emissions of pollutants from a car were down by 98%. The time you had to work on the average wage to buy an hour of artificial light to read by was down from 8 seconds to half a second.

Not only are human beings wealthier, they are also healthier, wiser, happier, more tolerant, less violent, more equal. Check it out - the data is clear. Yet if anything the pessimists had only grown more certain, shrill and apocalyptic. We were facing the `end of nature', the `coming anarchy', a `stolen future', our `final century' and a climate catastrophe. Why, I began to wonder did the failure of previous predictions have so little impact on this litany?

The sun has gone out

That's overly dramatic, but the thing that no one is saying is that it's entirely possible that after burning furiously for the last century the sun may have exhausted the fuel closest to the core, and as a result the rate of fusion has slowed.

So is it doomsday?

Not quite. There's still a lot of fuel there, but the sun is a really large object and it may take some time for more fuel to fall inwards to the center of gravity.

I'm no physicist but I've heard this theory before as sort of a "fringe" thing mumbled in science fiction backwaters. The upshot is that it could get pretty cold, so buy some long johns.

What's wrong with the sun? - space - 14 June 2010 - New Scientist

Sunspots are windows into the sun's magnetic soul. They form where giant loops of magnetism, generated deep inside the sun, well up and burst through the surface, leading to a localised drop in temperature which we see as a dark patch. Any changes in sunspot numbers reflect changes inside the sun. "During this transition, the sun is giving us a real glimpse into its interior," says Hathaway.

When sunspot numbers drop at the end of each 11-year cycle, solar storms die down and all becomes much calmer. This "solar minimum" doesn't last long. Within a year, the spots and storms begin to build towards a new crescendo, the next solar maximum.

What's special about this latest dip is that the sun is having trouble starting the next solar cycle. The sun began to calm down in late 2007, so no one expected many sunspots in 2008. But computer models predicted that when the spots did return, they would do so in force. Hathaway was reported as thinking the next solar cycle would be a "doozy": more sunspots, more solar storms and more energy blasted into space. Others predicted that it would be the most active solar cycle on record. The trouble was, no one told the sun.

Long Hot Summer Begins: Congressman Attacks Student

Two things about this bother me. One, that it's blatant assault. Two, if the student had defended himself he would have gone to jail.

Long Hot Summer Begins: Congressman Attacks Student: "

Maybe it is my Catholic upbringing, but I’ve always been cursed with a bit too much empathy. It is often difficult to witness people bearing the full weight of the consequences of their decisions, even when it is richly deserved. (And, in the case of House Democrats few have ever been more deserving of reaping everything they’ve sown.) We’re human, after all, and witnessing people on the cusp of realizing that they’ve lost everything can be difficult.

Last week, Democrat Congressman Bod Etheridge (D-NC2) attended a fundraiser headlined by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He was asked by some students on the street whether he supported the “Obama Agenda.” He didn’t take it well.

Expect more of this. A hard, progressive left captured the Democrat majority in Congress and forced them to enact a fantasy grab-bag of legislation that is increasingly unpopular with the American public. We’re on the cusp of a deeper recession, millions of unemployed Americans have no prospect for work, taxes are about to spike higher and we’ve maxed out the national credit card. The Democrats were given a chance to run government and they’ve only succeeded in running it into the ground.

So, yeah, Democrats who are up for reelection this November are a bit testy.

Fortunately, Rep. Etheridge isn’t one of those gerry-mandered political welfare queens. According to the Cook Report, his district is an R+2 district. He has a credible opponent. Check her out here.

Let’s recap what we saw on this video. A sitting Congressman–a presumed living extension of James Madison and other founding fathers–was asked on a public street whether he supported the President’s agenda. His response was to hit away a video camera and assault a student. The age of Pericles this ain’t.

It is going to be a long, hot summer. But, you’ve been given a target. Act accordingly.

"

San Diego to Arizona:

San Diego to Arizona: “Look, just because we called you racist bigots…”

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