Freight trains in the US are close to 3 miles long. Similar freight trains in Europe are more like half a mile long. Long-haul trains in the US, carrying standard shipping containers, are typically double stacked using specially-designed well cars. The bridges and tunnels in Europe simply do not have the vertical clearance, and the weight-bearing capacity to manage that.
Also, rail in Europe is typically owned by government, and it is optimized around passenger traffic. Freight gets the leftovers.
All this means that rail, carrying freight, in the US is much more efficient, economically and environmentally, than rail in Europe. That is the amount of fuel used per mile of cargo is much better in the US than it is in Europe.
The fuel cost per ton mile drops as the train gets longer because the locomotives are already burning diesel to move their own weight.
Locomotives use the most fuel when starting a train from rest. (A body in motion wants to remain in motion.) So when you can double stack containers, on trains that are nearly 3 miles long, and run them non-stop for a 1000 miles, as opposed to having to wait for passenger trains to get out of the way in every other town, the efficiency improves a lot.
The homeowner told the sheriff’s office that the man had previously lived in the house but had been evicted. On the night of the shooting, he said, the man had shown up at the house and demanded to be let in before forcing his way inside.
He was shot multiple times, and did not survive.
While Washington State has a long history of recognizing self-defense, it is early days in the investigation, and the DA's office will ultimately make any determinations about charges in this case. Pierce County, Washington, is home to Tacoma, which is the county seat. I have no idea how that DA views self-defense.
Trinidad, Texas, is about a 70 mile drive southeast of Dallas. It had a population of 860 as measured by the 2020 census.
There is plenty of cooruption in big cities, like Chicago, and the police departments in places like that can get caught up in it as well. But small town America is not immune, and the Good-ole Boy Network can often make them think that the rules are whatever they want them to be.
Their troubles started when Jennifer Combs was using F*c*book to collect reports/complaints about the water in Trinidad. Police arrested her and charged her with a felony. That was back in May.
When we first introduced you to Jennifer Combs, the facts already sounded hard to believe. The Texas mom said police arrested her after she used Facebook to collect complaints about discolored water in Trinidad.
Combs spent 23 hours in jail on a felony false alarm or report charge. A Henderson County grand jury later declined to indict her. She has since filed a federal lawsuit alleging political retaliation.
While she was in jail, a man protested outside of the jail. He was arrested. A judge dismissed those charges, and the city fired the judge. The grand jury and the judges dismissal, were in July (I think).
It was about at this time that the city apparently fired the city attorney.
Both the firing of the judge and the attorney are legally suspect, as well as morally insane. The speculation is that the attorney told the city commission that they couldn't fire the judge, so they fired him as well.
Three Trinidad city officials resigned [in mid July] and the Texas Rangers have launched an investigation after an area resident filed a complaint with the law enforcement agency amid concerns about discolored water coming from the rural Texas town’s pipes.
Today's letter reveals that the Trinidad Police Department is under investigation by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement; the scope of the investigation remains unclear.
Speculation, mine and others, is that the arrest of Combs, and the arrest of the protestor basically come down to cops saying, "You have disrespected my authority."
In the meantime, a judge has questioned information given to him by Trinidad officers in relation to an arrest warrant, the chief of police has resigned, a few other city officials have resigned, and the Henderson County, District Attorney has cut the PD off at the knees.
On Monday, the Henderson County District Attorney's Office and County Attorney's office informed Trinidad that it will no longer take cases from the Trinidad Police Department.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has been investigating the city's water supply. On Monday, TCEQ released their findings.
TCEQ's report found discolored water in Trinidad that "exceeded the standard."
Tests of the water found disinfectant contamination that exceeded federal maximums by more than 300%.
There are more details at all of those articles. Now this all mostly blew up a month ago, around 21 July, the letter from the DA is about a week or 10 days old. As mentioned, Combs was arrested in May. I only tripped across all of this because of insomnia, and a YouTube video.
This video is from Brandon Grable, ad Texas Civil Rights Attorney who runs the YouTube channel Clearly Established. Prosecutor Cuts off Trinidad Police Department. The video is a bit over 13 minutes. It covers all of this, and more.
Portland, Oregon, mother Allison Roberts told Fox News Digital Tuesday she hopes her fight with her children's elementary school over a trans-inclusive flag will inspire others to speak out for their beliefs.
Ms. Roberts describes herself as a liberal Democrat. (Is there any other kind allowed in Portland?
She didn't have a problem with the Pride Flag. It was the Trans Flag that was apparently was a bridge too far.
According to the Liberty Justice Center, which filed a lawsuit on behalf of Roberts last week, she initially expressed concern last year over Meriwether Lewis Elementary School's decision to repaint its traditional rainbow pride flag with an "Intersex-Inclusive Progress" variant and an "identity flower" assignment given to her 11-year-old child that asked students to identify and discuss their gender identity with classmates and teachers.
So the school trespassed her, even though she was speaking out away from the school, and a government agency really can't punish you over your speech.
Roberts was later issued a one-year trespass order after a heated exchange with another parent, barring her from attending school events, including her child's graduation ceremony. When she reached out to the school for clarification, Roberts was reportedly told it was a result of engaging in "harassment, intimidation, and threatening behavior" as part of a pattern of "animus and harassment targeting vulnerable members of [the] community."
Here is the quote that the Left hates.
There's no hate speech exception to the First Amendment.
There are more details if you click thru, including details on the completely, predictable lawsuit. (Hat tip to William Teach at Pirate's Cove.)
China Carney’s Canada: What’s wrong in Canada? Save Blackie’s relatives in Cuba. Carney’s Choo Choo train.
The Democrat Party’s America: Whines like a loser. VDH – Hating Israel. In Havana.
Hat Hair's John Sexton, Will Iran Escalate As an October Surprise? It wouldn't be much of a surprise, but the media would fall for it, and might even conspire with Iran.
“Socialists Now Say That Shoplifting Is A-OK.”
Funny how all those films of riot never show people stealing soap and toothpaste, just flat screen TVs and Nikes. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
2. Yesterday in NY a women who converted to Islam, or “reverted” as the Muslims claim in their bizarre temporally inverted universe, was arrested for planing a Jihad attack against government targets.
9 Million Images Exposed by People Finder ClarityCheck
A reverse image search and people-finder service that promises users that their reverse image search is “private and secure” has been found to have left over 9 million image files exposed
Victory Girls: Prince Harry And Meghan Markle: Once Upon A U-Turn, also, CNN: The Network Who Thinks Its Viewers are Drooling Morons
Watts Up With That: The 1970s Oil Crisis: Never Forget
The government already spends almost $1 trillion on K-12 education and yet somehow across the country we have places where few, if any, kids can read or do math at grade level.
Oh, please. Here’s a newsflash: everything ragebaits Democrats.
“It was all just a joke. Trust us.” And I’ve got some beachfront property in Arizona to sell you if you buy that bullshit.
Why Smart People Keep Falling for Stupid Ideas Behind the Narrative 📣
Pacific Palisades, Twenty Months Later Chris Bray
United States debt hits $40 trillion for first time in history JTN
Lindsay Clancy said a voice told her to kill her children; prosecutors focus on when. You will see this woman around the right twitter-sphere, because she killed her children, and lots of other women are supporting her
We get a recap of the In-N-Out Burger shooting and the roll played by Mr. Salinas.
Many other incidents of armed self-defense by ordinary Americans flew under the radar in the weeks leading up to Salinas’ intervention. Here are just a handful of the other defensive gun use stories from around the country that occurred in July:
Click thru for those details. Here is one typical example; there are many more.
July 13, Tulsa, Okla. — Police say that a homeowner shot and wounded a man who came onto his property and threatened to kill him if he resisted the man’s attempt to steal his truck. The man then followed the homeowner into the residence when he tried to leave. The homeowner initially tried to defend himself with a baseball bat, but it proved unsuccessful and he was ultimately forced to fire his gun.
Two Penn State University fraternities are at the center of a cocaine trafficking ring bust, leading to charges against 14 people, authorities announced on Monday.
Is the DA up for reelection this year or something? Or was this just a slow news day? I guess it is news if they operation was large, but really this strikes me as a dog-bites-man sort of story.
Thirteen of the people charged were Penn State students at or around the time of the alleged drug trafficking ring, from around 2023 to 2024, prosecutors said. The 14th defendant, Thomas Robinson's father, is accused of trying to conceal evidence and obstruct the investigation.
The only thing that surprises me is that the authorities went after them.
How did a love of Heavy Metal lead to some great acoustic guitar? Rodrigo y Gabriela are a pair of guitar players from Mexico City who met due to a common love of Heavy Metal. But the music they play, or what little I have heard, is definitely not Metal.
This is "Stairway to Heaven" by Rodrigo y Gabriela from their 2006 album, Rodrigo y Gabriela. It was, of course, originally written by Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, and recorded by Led Zeppelin on their 1971 untiled album, usually known as Led Zeppelin IV.
Lindsay Clancy is a mother on trial for the January 2023 deaths of her three children in Massachusetts. There is an entire cadre of feminists who refuse to recognize the amount of evidence that she did the deed.
Women are actually rallying outside the courtroom in support of this murderer. And, of course, blaming her husband for it.
The facts of the case are irrelevant to this; Lindsay’s supporters aren’t about facts, they’re about emotion. The core premise of their argument is very simple: No woman is ever responsible for anything.
Click thru for ... whatever this is. And there is plenty of irony, and absurdity.
Star Trek premiered on 8 September 1966. 60 years ago this fall. I didn't watch it until it was on syndication, in the 1970s. (We had 1 TV in 1966, and my dad would not watch a SciFi show back then.)
When Nerdrotic says that the fans saved this franchise from the studio, he is right. The studio killed it, in part by starving the show for a budget that could sustain SciFi, and then cancelling it. It lived in syndication, through the 1973 animated series, and eventually through Star Trek fan conventions. The studio would eventually approve a movie. It was a disaster, because they didn't understand Trek. They wanted spectacle, and Trek was always about ideas. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, was more true to form.
Since the J.J. Abrams era started with the Reboot (reboot - because Hollywood has no creativity) things have gone to shit. Abrams admitted in at least one interview that he didn't like Star Trek, which probably explains why he tried to turn it into something else.
It’s something I and others have said for decades: Democrats are Useful Idiots. Especially when they decided they would quietly take the side of Islamic extremists because Bush 43 was president, due to BDS and because they were indoctrinated into this kind of idiocy.
I make my living teaching self-defense. Self-defense laws – when can you use force? – are pretty homogeneous nationwide. Gun laws are something else entirely –what can you have and where can you have it? – and no two states are exactly alike in that respect.
A federal judge has ruled that a state judge who used AI to handle the entire decision in a case so she could spend the day playing Cookie Run Kingdom or something equally important cannot be sued. (Tom's Hardware)
The state judge's actions may not be reasonable, or even legal, and the decision can be appealed, but the judge cannot [be] sued.
Have you followed the strange, demonic and awful story of Lindsay Clancy? Lindsay was a nurse with three young children, Callan, Dawson and Cora Clancy, all between 8 months to 5 years old.
Jabari Joshua Thomas, 19 and Demetrius Tromain Travis, 20, tried to rob a food-delivery person.
Thomas got into the backseat of the victim's car and at one point, allegedly put a gun to the driver's head, the warrant said.
The suspect were also trying to access the driver's CashApp when the driver pulled out his own gun and opened fire, the warrant said.
Travis was airlifted to a trauma center, but did not survive. Thomas was located in Miramar and arrested. The delivery driver was not charged, because Florida has not morphed into Massachusetts.
Miami Gardens, is in Dade County, Florida. It is just a bit north of Miami.
And another way that Florida is not like a Blue state, you are held responsible for the completely foreseeable consequences of your actions. Jabari Joshua Thomas is charged with 2nd degree murder in the death of Mr. Travis. Most of us non-lawyers call that Felony Murder, and it drives the Left bonkers. He was committing a felony, and as a result of that action, someone died; he will be held accountable.
Those who can’t do, teach. And those who can’t teach, govern. That has to stop. We have to stop it
Chicago didn’t wake up one morning and discover itself governed by incompetents.
This disaster was grown, nurtured, and weaponized inside the very institution that now consumes the largest share of your property taxes while delivering ever-worsening results: the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and the demons who have possessed it, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), led by the Notorious SDG, Stacy Davis Gates.
Chicago Public Schools consumes an enormous amount of money. What do the students get? That is a good question.
Chicago now spends nearly $40,000 per pupil on a system with declining enrollment, a ballooning bureaucracy, and outcomes that would embarrass a developing country. Functional illiteracy is up. Discipline is down. Parents are fleeing, taking their children with them, continuing the systemic death spiral.
The IPI has been big ole meanies by pointing out the CTU has not been a positive contributor to Chicago education
Meep is an actuary, so her interest in Chicago Public Schools is usually directed at the state of the pensions. (They are not in a good state.) But occasionally she can't help but covering other issues.
So, I’ve been enjoying the hissy fit that the CTU (Chicago Teachers Union) has been having over the past couple of days by saying it’s filing a lawsuit against the Illinois Policy Institute.
She has a bit of information about the lawsuit. Click thru.
Maybe you should review the companies you are hiring. And maybe you should review what they are actually doing for you.
Yeah, maybe tossing all of the physical media and using the cloud to store your memories wasn't the best move?
Especially if you've got 70 years of archival footage that could disappear at the drop of a hat, as this St. Louis PBS station has learned.
They stored those 50 terabytes of data with a company that went out of business. Now they don't have the data.
There is a silver lining.
As it turns out, however, OSS used another data company, Iron Mountain, to host the archive.
Iron Mountain is still in business, but since its client was OSS, it is refusing to hand over the files.
The PBS station is now suing.
Wouldn't it have been cheaper to just hire Iron Mountain in the first place? Maybe this other company, Open Source Storage (OSS), offered some extra services. Still it would be nice to review the financial health of companies you are trusting with important data.
The hat tip goes to Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog and “This Was PBS.”
You should backup your data. You should have multiple backups of your data. You should have multiple rotating or rolling backups of your data. You should have multiple rotating or rolling backups of your data saved to different types of backup media. Ideally, you should have multiple rolling or rotating backups of your data saved to different types of backup media including off-site backups.
Evidently, a PBS station didn’t follow any of these rules.
Because the show runner, Damon Lindelof, thought Green was stupid or something.
Green Lanterns isn't my favorite comic of all time, but if you are going to hire someone to adapt a superhero comic for TV, maybe you should hire someone who doesn't hate superhero comics.
Instead of making a show about intergalactic space cops going on cosmic adventures and battling all manners of weird and wonderful alien threats, they instead decided to make a Temu version of True Detective, complete with bleak, cynical, and mostly unlikable characters who constantly have to swear to prove just how edgy they are. Patched together with all the tedious tropes of modern Hollywood writing and the usual laundry list of safe, predictable political targets like Republicans, smalltown America, and immigration policy. And holy fuck balls is it tedious.
The video is seven and a half minutes long, which is much shorter than watching the actual episode.
I love the videos from folks like The Critical Drinker, because they save me from wasting time on shows and movies I might have been tempted to watch.
According to the Montgomery County Coroner's Office, James Cameron, 34, died on August 5 following a shooting on Fairpoint Avenue.
As of a press conference given by the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office on August 5, Chief of Staff Jeremy Roy said information about the alleged shooter will not be released other than that she is a 33-year-old female with a concealed carry permit.
This was a burglary at 2:15 AM on 5 August. He broke in. She shot him. He did not survive.
Montgomery County, Ohio, is home to Dayton. Dayton is the county seat.
The Montgomery County Sheriff's Department is treating this as justifiable self-defense, though any charges will be up to the DA.
Connecticut doesn't let FFLs run NICS checks. They dealers have to use the Connecticut system, which would be fine if that system actually worked.
Saturday was supposed to be a big sales day for Lock N’ Load Firearms, which is located in Southington, Connecticut. The gun shop has two major sales each year, and Saturday was its “Customer Appreciation Day.” The store spent a lot on advertising the event and on party goods. Several vendors came out for the sale.
The fun ended around 11:40 a.m., when the state’s computer system went down, and it stayed down throughout most of the day.
An employee of another gun store said the outages are becoming a regular thing.
And outages are not the only problem.
Common names, he said, like “John Smith” have become a serious issue for the state’s computer systems, which lack the clarity of a NICS Unique Personal Identification Number or UPIN, which gun owners can apply for.
Which is insane.
The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms has begun to ask if the whole thing is a deliberate attempt to stand in the way of the Second Amendment.
OK, it isn't ending. It is "transitioning," to something besides "an Office for Research university-wide research institute and center."
Northwestern University is reportedly planning to end its African studies program by the end of the month.
According to The Purple Wire, two sources at the university said administrators informed staff that the program would end at the end of August. One staff member said that staff was not given a reason for the closing.
Wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Left to ensue in 3, 2, 1, ...
“They told us that the center is closing, so all staff are being laid off because there will be no center to employ you,” a staffer said.
There is some question about if, or how, some other part of the university will absorb the program.
Northwestern University is located in Evanston, Illinois, directly north of the City of Chicago. It is bordered by Chicago to the south, Lake Michigan to the east, Skokie to the west, and Wilmette to the north.
Meta faces a $1.4 trillion fine in a case brought by multiple US stats over (checks notes) creating a product that people wanted to use. (Engadget)
May be time to pull some strings and drop space rocks on statehouses.
Iran Food Prices Soar 400% as U.S. Sanctions Bite Economy
Iranian citizens report food prices surging 400 percent under U.S. sanctions as annual inflation exceeds 80 percent and the rial collapses to 1.88 million against the dollar.
The Democrat Party’s America: Victor Davis Hanson – Destroying norms. Electoral integrity.
Brookfield Carney’s Canada: A car accident. Come to Canada and get free stuff.
Don Surber: The perfect Democrat candidate
First Street Journal: Killadelphia, But it’s not my fault, You in a heap o’ trouble, boy ** Updated! **, Killadelphia (2), and So, what would Andy Beshear do?
RedState's Teri Christoph sees Biden’s Former Press Secretary Calls Karoline Leavitt a Liar—Then Gets Hit With a Brutal Fact Check. Insty, QUESTION ASKED: Who could replace White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt? "AND ANSWERED:" Not a bad choice
Disaster Averted
There have been lots of bizarre primary results around the country–mostly on the Democrat side, to be fair–but it looks like here in Minnesota, reason has prevailed.
ITEM 3: The Last Refuge reported, “After Advocating for Illegal Alien Leniency and Amnesty, Mike Lindell Gets Crushed in Minnesota Primary.”
That put a pillow over his political aspirations.
I wish there were a comments section. I can only imagine…
When everything is racism, nothing is rac… wait… OK, it’s racism.
Can I hate everybody in this story?
Here are further thoughts from Bob Graboyes on AI.
C. Jarrett Dieterle reports this unhappy news: “New Jersey revives the fight to reclassify gig workers as employees.”
