Plutocracy’s Evil Bend Is Why California High Speed Train Not Built

California politics has been captured by plutocrats, and the high speed train disaster is a consequence. Plutocrats are devious: they support the cause of their enemies, with friendly, concerned faces, and new language, while giving them cancer. They kill with a pat in the back, smiling.

Initially it was simple and obvious: as direct as possible between San Francisco and LA: downtown SF to SF airport, then 92 bridge (an enormous existing bridge), then straight to Altamont Pass next to the enormous freeway, then all the way down the straight I5 freeway through cheap wasteland. This is the way the original high speed network, in France, was built: straight in the wilderness. 

And it was the original, voter approved plan, decades ago. 

However California NIMBYs transformed the plan into a (slow) commuter rail… arguably, they said to serve cities, but truly their motivation was to torpedo the project, by making it impossibly expensive, complicated, and taking away its main reason for being: to be faster than plane, city center to city center. 

That the motivation of Democratic donors and pseudo-environmentalists was evil is demonstrated by their resistance to train electrification, where they delayed matters by decades… Plutocracy is strong in California and plutocracy loves private jets, not successful high speed trains for common folks: that would introduce the nice life to the masses, who deserve to suffer. 

Let them fly private, say the plutocrats, and they chuckle. The private jet industry in the US employs one million workers, makes 1% of the CO2 emissions of the US, and is entirely taxpayer subsidized. Whereas no electric train is in sight in San Francisco (they were a century ago)… Private jets can be readily observed, flying all over…

Patrice Ayme

Altamont Pass (it really looks like this; sequoia forests are 30 kilometers to the west, in the direction of the windmills). Plutocrats didn’t want the train to go that way, because it would have passed through the East Bay, population 2.5 million… Instead of being used as a commuter train to bring servants to the hyper wealthy Silicon Valley

P/S: For further edification one can consult a long article in the NYT:

How California’s Bullet Train Went Off the Rails
America’s first experiment with high-speed rail has become a multi-billion-dollar nightmare. Political compromises created a project so expensive that almost no one knows how it can be built as originally envisioned. (By Ralph Vartabedian; Oct. 9, 2022.)

LOS ANGELES — Building the nation’s first bullet train, which would connect Los Angeles and San Francisco, was always going to be a formidable technical challenge, pushing through the steep mountains and treacherous seismic faults of Southern California with a series of long tunnels and towering viaducts.

But the design for the nation’s most ambitious infrastructure project was never based on the easiest or most direct route. Instead, the train’s path out of Los Angeles was diverted across a second mountain range to the rapidly growing suburbs of the Mojave Desert — a route whose most salient advantage appeared to be that it ran through the district of a powerful Los Angeles county supervisor. [Who made a deal with a plutocrat who gave him a lease… adds the NYT… “If I get my lease, you get my vote was the deal,” Mr. Bauer, the most influential member of the train board said.]

The dogleg through the desert was only one of several times over the years when the project fell victim to political forces that have added billions of dollars in costs and called into question whether the project can ever be finished.

Now, as the nation embarks on a historic, $1 trillion infrastructure building spree, the tortured effort to build the country’s first high-speed rail system is a case study in how ambitious public works projects can become perilously encumbered by political compromise, unrealistic cost estimates, flawed engineering and a determination to persist on projects that have become, like the crippled financial institutions of 2008, too big to fail.…

The state was warned repeatedly that its plans were too complex. SNCF, the French national railroad, was among bullet train operators from Europe and Japan that came to California in the early 2000s with hopes of getting a contract to help develop the system.

The company’s recommendations for a direct route out of Los Angeles and a focus on moving people between Los Angeles and San Francisco were cast aside, said Dan McNamara, a career project manager for SNCF.‌

The French company‌ ‌pulled out in 2011.

“There were so many things that went wrong,” Mr. McNamara said. “SNCF was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build a high speed rail system.”

Morocco’s bullet train started service in 2018.

…But as with so many decisions on the project, other considerations won the day. There was heavy lobbying by Silicon Valley business interests and the city of San Jose, which saw the line as an economic boon and a link to lower cost housing in the Central Valley for tech employees. They argued for routing the train over the much higher Pacheco Pass — which would require 15 miles of expensive tunnels. [Instead of just half a mile with Altamont.]

What If God Is Nuts?

A Moroccan Jihadist climbs on a High Speed European train in Brussels. It is easy to get weapons in Belgium, less so in France. He is armed with a full automatic machine gun, a Kalashnikov, AK 47, nine magazines for the AK47, a handgun, a knife. He has been told, and believes, that, as the faithful, he should obey god’s writ. And even more than that, he will fight racism.

How come?
If Islamophobia, the fear of Islam, is racist, does not that mean that Islamophilia, the love of Islam, is anti-racist? Thus by believing Islam to death, are not Jihadists fighting racism? Jihadists believe that, to the bottom of their all consuming hearts. When god is nuts, nuts are gods.

And What If God Is A Crazy Homicidal Maniac?

Notice that France is the most atheist country (thus number one targets for Jihadists). From my point of view, France’s healthy skepticism about the morality of god, is directly traceable, not just to Clovis and his Franks, but to the election, in Paris, more than a century before that, of Julian as “Augustus“ (supreme Roman emperor, in 360 CE). The Catholic bishops hated the all too moderate and philosophical Julian, who was derided as “the Apostate”. The Franks organized a flurry of anti-Christian coups, during the Fourth Century.

The High Speed train enters France. The Jihadist goes to the toilet to equip himself (for a slightly different version, see the New York Times). He comes out, a Frenchman in his fifties confronts him, grabs the Kalashnikov AK47, and runs away with it. The Jihadist shoots the Frenchman, the bullet enters next to the spine on the left side, in the lumbar area, through the entire left lung, and comes out through the clavicle. Alerted, two young American soldiers, and a friend, an Afro-American, plus a British businessman, and a French conductor, jump the killer. The lead American hero, Spencer, loses his thumb to the killer’s cutter (it got re-attached in a French hospital, right away). Everybody survives, because the would-be assassin’s gun jams. As related in the Times:

“Mr. Norman [UK Consultant] and Mr. Sadler [Afro-American student] had joined in the efforts to subdue the gunman, who “put up quite a bit of a fight,” Mr. Norman recalled at the news conference in Arras on Saturday. “My thought was, ‘I’m probably going to die anyway, so let’s go.’ Once you start moving, you’re not afraid anymore.”

Mr. Stone [large Martial Arts expert, Air Force First Class] wounded and bleeding, kept the suspect in a chokehold. “Spencer Stone is a very strong guy,” Mr. Norman said. The suspect passed out. Mr. Norman busied himself binding him up with a tie.

Mr. Skarlatos [22 year old Oregon National Guard soldier, back from Afghanistan, friend with Sadler and Stone] , the AK-47 in hand, began to patrol through the carriages, looking for other gunmen. He made a series of startling discoveries: The suspect’s guns had malfunctioned, and he had not had the competence to fix them.

“He had pulled the trigger on the AK. The primer was just faulty, so the gun didn’t go off, luckily,” Mr. Skarlatos said. “And he didn’t know how to fix it, which is also very lucky.” In addition, the gunman had not been able to load his own handgun: “There was no magazine in it, so he either dropped it accidentally or didn’t load it properly, so he was only able to get what appeared to be one shot off,” Mr. Skarlatos said.”

In the fifties, George Orwell wrote excellent books where he introduced, and condemned, the notion of “thought crime”. Actually he had invented nothing, the USSR had condemned people to death for “Thought Crimes” before.

Roman law itself distinguished the notion of “Mens Rea” (mental act). To be culprit of voluntary homicide, it’s not enough to kill somebody, one has to have thought about it (mental action). Orwell may have thought too fast, and too superficially: fast and shallow thought crime.

We live in a world where human thoughts are increasingly capable of enormous amplification. So what people think about matters.

Legislators recognized this after the Nazi fiasco. Nazism was an ideology of hatred. Once allowed to rule, it programmed tens of millions of Germans into exterminating others. Ideally, such hate ideologies ought to be outlawed. But the lines are hard to draw between fantasy and thought meant to program people into killing robots.

So legislators, starting in France and the USA, decided that hatred of an ideological character, if one could legally prove that it was present, would be an aggravating factor in the commission of a crime.

Another approach was tried earlier. With Christianism. In the Middle Ages, Christianism played an horrendous role. It started with the Fall of Rome to which it contributed heavily (said Gibbon, and I  agree, in part). Then Clovis and his Franks mitigated the Jesus superstition, and things went well, until the rise of nationalism, tribalism, plutocracy and Crusades in the late Eleventh Century (also the time of the break between Rome and Constantinople: all those phenomena are related). After that, Christianism became a force for the worst… Until the last execution for heresy in Spain in the Nineteenth Century, if not the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, where the Church and its Opus Dei, were on the side of fascism (Franco, Hitler, Mussolini).

In the New Testament, Jesus orders to kill unbelievers: Luke 19-27. Thus Islamism is just a parrot, if not a parody, a parroty, of Christianism.

Luke 19:27: “But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.”

Please compare with the Qur’an “Verse of the Sword” (Sura 9, v5):

“9:5 When the sacred months are over slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them. If they repent and take to prayer and render the alms levy, allow them to go their way. God is forgiving and merciful.”

Islamophiles, like pedophiles, are hard pressed to explain that one away. Muslim terrorists revolve around this verse, doing what it orders. The Qur’an, a very short book (83,000 words, I counted) contains many other verses, to the same effect.

Christianism, obeying Christ, killed millions, if not tens of millions. Still, in the end, it was made to submit: any priest teaching Luke 19:27, the core of Christianism in the Middle Ages, would now be fired. So how was Christianism forced to submit? Asking Louis XI, Henry VIII, or the French Revolution, brings the same answer: Christianism was FORCED to submit.

Forcing Christianism is not new: the Franks forced Christianism to submit to their state, most notably in the Sixth and Eight Centuries. In the former case, the Vatican had to submit to the nomination of Frankish bishops, and when the Pope threatened to have them burned for teaching secularly, the Frankish authorities pointed out that Pope “Gregory The Great” had no army. In the Eight Century, the Church underwent nationalization, to pay for the war against Islamism. Then the Popes, on their knees, begged the Franks to come subdue the Lombards (Charlemagne did so, once the Church agreed to recognize him as Roman Emperor). (And I am not even mentioning Philippe Le Bel’s accidental execution of the Pope in the Fourteenth Century, followed by the incarceration of the Papacy in Avignon, among many similar exploits of anti-clerical type…)

There is one religion, always: that of the state (in the generalized sense of religion I use). Superstitions can be tolerated, as long as they are compatible with the state. So make Islam compatible. And that means some Islamist texts ought to be viewed as the Thought Crimes they are, and being ignored as well as Luke 19;27 (and other statements of Jesus to the same effect) are ignored.

If we, who believe in an ever wiser civilization, could submit the fury of Catholicism (“universalism”), we can certainly submit the meekness of submission (what “Islam” means)… Civilization is rising: time for the savages to realize that the gods must be crazy.

Patrice Ayme’