Energy, Security

American Business Desperate for Trains as Air Travel Falls Apart

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The WSJ reports air travel reliability has deteriorated so much that business communities are scratching their head about why they can’t get on a modern high-speed train instead.

This summer’s air-travel disruptions are leading some business travelers to change plans and hit the road.

But is “hitting” deteriorating infrastructure of roads to just sit in long traffic jams any kind of real upgrade from air travel?

It says a lot that people believe stepping into the infamous security theater of a Chertoff checkpoint feels worse than driving — something incredibly stressful, dangerous and expensive. Even pilots try to warn potential customers that being in hell for up to six hours is better than American air travel.

“Drive when you can,” Tom Kubik, a retired pilot with 42 years of experience, told budgeting website Humble Dollar. “We draw a six-hour drive circle around our house. If we’re within six hours, we’re in the car. The airport experience and the hassles associated with flying these days make driving a much less stressful trip. That’s true even with gas prices where they are today.”

Rental car companies like Avis are of course ready to get behind dumping on air travel with tone-deaf logic such as this.

Opt for driving if: You dislike the crowds, lines…

Do we know what is absolutely full of awful crowds and lines?

Driving.

Based on the overall findings, the U.S. ranked as the most traffic-congested developed nation in the world, with American drivers spending an average of 41 hours a year battling traffic…

Worse, driving in America means you become far LESS safe because of crowds and lines. At least crowds and lines in airports are designed to make you safer.

The American driving model is basically a racist death trap that gets exponentially worse when things go wrong.

Aside from their weaknesses as evacuation conduits, highways are dangerous in their own right. Road accidents are a persistently high cause of fatalities in the United States. And, as the traffic jam in Virginia shows, highways are not only bottlenecks but traps. With the right circumstances—an accident, a stopped tractor trailer, the wrong kind of weather—motor vehicles can move neither forward nor back, leaving people stuck unless they abandon the limited shelter their cars offer. Worse, most emergency response is also based on motor vehicles. Stretches of highway may become largely inaccessible to ambulances or buses for evacuation, making assistance that much more difficult.

Yes, I said racist. America’s interstate highway system was a race-based design by VP Nixon (under President Eisenhower) for segregationist planners to destroy and block non-white prosperity — today experts in transit design literally call it a network of “death corridors“.

This only gets worse with racist companies like the unsafe-by-design Tesla, which pretend they are doing something innovative while obviously repeating the worst engineering mistakes in history and killing far more people.

All that sets up any intelligent business traveler to look hard at America and ask where’s the train?!

  • Economist: How trains could replace planes in Europe
  • NYT: “rail is the way to go”
  • EuroNews: “The majority of the European population would be in favour of banning short-distance flights at an EU level and taking the train instead”
  • Bloomberg: Europe Asks Travelers to Ditch Planes for Night Trains
  • BBC: How to travel by train – and ditch the plane
Security

FTC complaint: Harley Davidson “illegally restricting customers’ rights”

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Hot off the FTC desk is a complaint that the company was violating American freedom.

“Consumers deserve choices when it comes to repairing their products, and independent dealers deserve a chance to compete,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. [Harley Davidson was] imposing illegal warranty terms that voided customers’ warranties if they used anyone other than the companies and their authorized dealers to get parts or repairs for their products.

Perhaps The Drive said it best:

The truth is, Harley-Davidson is a luxury brand cleverly disguised as a blue-collar, workin’ man’s brand. It’s a name synonymous with regular, working-class folk, but have you seen the prices of these things? Harley-Davidson is in the same price range as BMW and Ducati, two brands with a public perception of being expensive toys for the upper-class.

Agreed. Harley is like riding a BMW or Ducati. None of them are meant for working people who actually work on things. They are brands that represent heritage-obsessed lawless elitists — German, Italian and American icons of fascism if you will.

I mean we all know BMW and Ducati riders don’t wrench, right? The dichotomy between freedom and “luxurious ignorance” was literally the thesis of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance published in 1974.

The freedom-loving Robert Pirsig rode and repaired Honda, not some white-collar shiny untouchable Harley.

Security

Kiss of Death: Florida Governor Blocks Healthcare for Children

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Florida’s Governor is running with scissors in opposition to science.

The Florida Department of Health said Wednesday that it has not pre-ordered COVID vaccines for children under 5 because it does not recommend the shot for all children. Why it matters: Every other state has pre-ordered vaccine supply for the age group…

Florida has also recommended that healthy children ages 5-17 not get vaccinated against COVID in direct contradiction to guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which recommends the Pfizer vaccine for the age group.

This Governor is clearly evil. There’s no better way to describe such abject dismissal of life and his abortion of children.

“I would say we are affirmatively against the COVID vaccine for young kids,” DeSantis said. “These are the people who have zero risk of getting anything,” he said…

Affirmatively against. He means blocking a young kids right to life.

Zero risk? Such twisted propaganda, basically an obvious lie as children die.

Data collected by the CDC up to June 2022 and no secret (viewed 1.74M times) shows hundreds of dead children across America.

0-4 years — 442 dead
5-18 years — 815 dead

That’s very much NOT ZERO risk.

Someone should put 1,000 baby coffins on DeSantis’ lawn and ask him if he can say ZERO risk while looking at all the innocent and preventable lives lost.

Source: “Project places 1,000 wreaths on the graves of 1,000…”

Imagine DeSantis standing over the graves of 1,000 American soldiers and trying to promote a theory that they faced zero risks, their lives didn’t matter because they were young.

More to the point, even though DeSantis has been repeatedly documented as racist, when it comes to these children his disrespect isn’t even based on race. Here are the largest numbers in the 0-4 year old group:

Hispanic — 123 dead
Non-Hispanic Black — 117 dead
Non-Hispanic White — 160 dead

Scientists since March of 2022 have been explaining very clearly that these numbers of dead children will continue go up and could accelerate without vaccination — the safest and most effective prevention.

As many as 20% of all child deaths from Covid in the US have occurred during the Omicron surge of the pandemic. […] “We saw a massive surge of hospitalized young children during Omicron that we didn’t see in the earlier months of the pandemic,” said Jason Kane, a pediatric intensivist and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Chicago Comer children’s hospital. […] The under-five age group saw record-high hospitalizations over the past few months. Omicron hospitalization rates for kids under the age of five soared five times higher at Omicron’s peak than during the Delta wave, according to recent CDC research and data tables.

Governor DeSantis knows children in Florida are dying faster than ever before as he sits on one of the most alarming statistics.

Florida’s COVID-19 response took a hit this week as the number of COVID-related child deaths in Florida more than doubled in just over a month, according to data from the Florida Department of Health.

The actual stories from parents are heart-wrenching.

…family is trying to process how their 10-year-old daughter went from being perfectly healthy to dying in five days from Covid-19. […] “They did her chest X-ray and when they came back, they said that there was no signs of Covid pneumonia, her lungs were perfect, beautiful. They didn’t seem concerned,” Nicole said. So they went home and Teresa continued to quarantine.

Within 24 hours, she stopped breathing and was rushed to a local hospital and ultimately transferred to Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters (CHKD) Norfolk where she died.

It’s so hard to read this kind of news. Like reading about children dying in car crashes who weren’t wearing a seat-belt or in a car-seat… if only Teresa could have gotten the vaccine.

CDC study shows that child passenger deaths have decreased 43 percent from 2002 – 2011

We know the solution. We know the deaths are easily preventable.

Any Governor who says children have zero risk of dying in car accidents should be impeached, and I feel the same when they very fraudulently say children have zero risk of dying from a virus.

No more premature deaths should be the goal of good government, and it’s easy to see how removing DeSantis from office could save a lot of lives.

“I don’t think he cares about his family. He let Casey DeSantis all over the place without a mask during chemotherapy. I don’t think he cares about his daughters. He’s heartless,” said [Florida Senator] Polsky.

What is it about these elitists from Harvard law?

…by defying the best science we have in the face of a lethal pandemic, DeSantis is also one of the most dangerous people in our country today. […] Both Harvard and Yale should rebuke him.

See also:

History, Security

“Humility Makes a Great Intelligence Officer”

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Marc Polymeropoulous has published a new leadership book. He describes it as a revelation about his failures in the first two thirds of his career, which he then credits for making him into a good leader in the last third of his career.

These things stuck out for me in his CSPC interview (118 views):

He refers to intelligence like going to bat in baseball, where a .300 hitting average is great even though we know it’s a 70% rate of being wrong. I actually like this as I tend to define intelligence, especially artificial intelligence, as the ability to hit a target.

An example he gives of this is chilling, however, since Marc’s best agent in Afghanistan was tortured and killed because of a very simple and predictable operations mistake.

Maybe then the 70% failure rate in baseball is not really applicable more widely in other fields, especially high risk ones. Instead such standards of quality in sports are ok to be low because by design outcomes shouldn’t really matter — it’s just a game.

As Calvin and Hobbes put it a long time ago, next to their snowman made from only two balls, “the fastest route to success is lowering expectations”.

Something tells me the .300 might need to go way up to a number more like .900 when lives are on the line every day, because nobody should want to go to bat repetitively knowing it has 70% chance of death! But who in history has ever batted .900? That’s where gaining an upper hand using modern information warfare comes in, right?

Even more confusing is “employ the dagger”, a notion Marc offers the audience as evidence that “competition is good”. He says when officers did something desired he would award them a physical token of appreciation, a souvenir knife he’d buy at the market for $10.

In corporate circles this is a well-known tactic. Give people a snow globe after x years of showing up to work and they’ll work more, right?

In baseball I guess this is the idea that a coach could give out a $10 trophy bat for hitting a ball, instead of expecting the team to find enough satisfaction in achieving a 70% failure rate.

It’s thus interesting to see him conflate a well-tread concept of internal appreciation and reward systems to affect morale with a raw “good” of competition. What if the competition is toxic because teams are in fact killing each other instead of targets?

Something obviously sounds not right about generic praise of competition. Perhaps Marc is using some kind of over-compensation act (surrounded by hyper-competitive personalities in the killing fields) to cover up his softer anti-competitive leadership messages of inclusion and unity.

He’s obviously a master at fitting in. I wonder if him floating these ideas about 1) pointy sharp tool and 2) competition is meant to disguise his true message that is rather blunt and collaborative.

There is neither any uniqueness or shortage for such inexpensive daggers (hey, even I have at least TWO from my time in… Nepal) nor any real scarcity to his approvals. Competition for an award and attention isn’t a fair description of any system that could operate just fine without using any competition (with each other) at all.

He goes on to say his leadership success grew by including more people into communications, a larger tent for collaboration. This suggests he valued the opposite of pressing everyone into competition (e.g. bringing finance officers and kitchen chefs into his planning).

From there he digs further and hits the empathy button hard, which takes the listener further from his opening salvo on competition culture.

In other words, he’s basically saying competition works if people are kind instead of selfish, aligned instead of oppositional.

His big tent mindset (he calls out nostalgically for everyone in competition to hold a sense of unity) combined with his points on empathy and repetitive reference to humility being a core ingredient for great intelligence… it all seems his love of competition comes with some pretty huge caveats.

Humility is presented as competitive advantage in intelligence — hitting a target without pride or arrogance, just like some African tribes have advocated for thousands of years.

When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man – and thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this … so we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way, we cool his heart and make him gentle.

While Marc’s leadership advice sounds good in principle, there’s a moment in the interview where he boasts about delivering news of a successful assassination. Oops.

Such hubris about targeted hits not only is a swing and a miss according to his own doctrine, it’s unfortunately a widespread problem he could be making worse. Just look at some of the latest American Army PSYOP and Department of State messaging (while Frank Church rolls in his grave).

In all seriousness, how would baseball exist if hyper-competitive batters could assassinate a pitcher, sort of like how Walter “Steel Arm” Dickey was killed in 1923 with a dagger?

By the time he was 17, he was a pitcher who threw so hard and fast that he gained the nickname that followed him the rest of his life. […] “He was as good as I ever saw throw a baseball,” Roy recalled to James, “I remember one time that Steel Arm brought in his whole team to the dugout. No one was left except him and the catcher. He then struck out three straight men, daring them all the time to hit. They could not do it.

Such questions about lawfulness in competition bring to mind the lessons behind a song called “Move on Up” as well as a film called The Rubble Kings.

Humility in the context of American history in fact might serve as an excellent gateway into discussing rule of law being far more important to real success in intelligence than arbitrary displays of power.

As an afterthought, has anyone at the NSA ever said humility is a good thing?