Guest Post: Boyd Cathey => The Abbeville Institute => The Rot Has Reached the Statehouse

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/let-the-rioters-do-their-worst-i-wont-stand-in-their-way/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=aa71a850-6840-4acb-88f5-6258c09ff0cb

 I write this post in retrospect:

I am a Southern Partisan.  I am PROUD to be a son of the South.  Despite the scourge and stain of slavery that it brings, I think the South is culturally superior to places outside of the South that I’ve visited outside what is traditionally known as the South.  

Culturally, the South moves at a slower pace.  It’s a more religious place, in the sense of the Christian principle and the Golden Rule, where adherents believe that the way they desire to be treated is dependent upon the way they treat others.  Those of us who are old enough and have had this teaching, are wise enough to understand the principles that make it work, are thankful for learning it and don’t care to live where it’s not practiced.  Generally, I’ve found that the manner native Southerners treat others is much more polite that in other areas of the country.  It's more Traditional in the sense that “wisdom of the elders or ages” isn’t thrown out and dismissed as old school thinking.  Because of this, History is revered and respected, warts and all.

While what Governor Roy Cooper has done this injustice to Native or adopted Tarheels, who are Southern Partisans, we must address the root of this problem:  Back a few years ago, when (hopefully, as we don’t want to admit that anyone in America can harbor the hatred and evil required to plan and commit mass murder against others) a “mentally ill” Dylan Roof had, with malice in heart, planned and then killed black worshippers in a Charleston, SC church Bible Study.  VERY SHORTLY THEREAFTER, the NAACP leadership came calling on then SC Governor, Nikki Haley, requesting her to remove the Confederate Flag from the state capital grounds, as a symbol of hate.  

Looking to expand her constituency, Nikki Haley, though it was good political reasoning to ban this historic symbol, to gain political capital from would be black voters at the expense of the “few” whites who would be offended at her actions.  I am one of those whites, who is cognizant of US history.  (And though I’ve lived in the metro Charlotte area of NC since October 1967, my heart is that of a South Carolinian, with my Paternal relatives being from The White Oak Community and Winnsboro areas of Fairfield County.  Lord willing, I hope to retire in the Winnsboro area in about 10 years).

There is little doubt that Ms. Haley was working hard to increase her position politically.  And she maximized her position with the Trump administration, as the Ambassador to the United Nations, she first tried to do so with her removal of the “Southern Cross” at the expense of history.  The same history, with the Confederacy losing their battle to defend their homeland, was the very thing that Ultimately freed the slaves.  It was short sighted for the NAACP to have done this.

However, in making this decision, Governor Haley “pissed on” the American Heritage and History itself.  A lack of wisdom was demonstrated, as she engaged in a Faustian bargain for what she thought would give her personal political gain.  It is apparent, that as an immigrant, who did not see the value of history, she should not have had the sole power to make that decision.

More importantly, she gave the NAACP, and Black Lives Matters the ”green light” to demand that all other weak politicians forgo their history and historic emblems, because they might be offensive (to people of small character, who ALWAYS look to be offended).

ALL OF THE STATUES FROM THE WAR FOR SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE THAT HAVE BEEN TORN DOWN, REMOVED OR DESTROYED CAN ULTIMATELY BE TRACED TO GOVERNOR HALEY AND HER CAPITULATION TO THE NAACP’S DEMANDS TO ELIMINATE HISTORY THEY FOUND OFFENSIVE.

NOW BLACK LIVES MATTER IS DEMANDING/HAS DEMANDED THAT (1) ANY AMERICAN FOUNDING FATHER THAT OWNED SLAVES MUST BE ERASED FROM THE ANNALS OF HISTORY, SHE’S RESPONSIBLE FOR THOSE, and (2) AS WELL AS THE CHURCH ART THAT DEPICT JESUS, THE APOSTLES, AND OLD TESTAMENT PATRIARCHS THAT ARE SEEN AS “WHITE.”

Nikki Haley may be a great administrator, but she’s just another hack politician, trying to climb the political ladder, just like Roy Cooper.  And I’ll never vote for either of them.  

Full Disclosure:  Although I’m a Southern Partisan, my paternal Grandfather and his brothers came to America, through the Port of Charleston, SC, about a decade after the war was over. But my most famous “Civil War” ancestor was my Paternal Grandmother’s Great, Great Uncle, Ambrose E. Burnside, a Union General and later U.S. Senator.  My Maternal Grand Parents, who immigrated through the “MacIntosh Coast of Georgia, had kin folks who served in the Confederate Army.

And, with that, I’ll end my rant

So Why Would Canadian Pacific Reacquire It’s Old Line East of Saint-Jean, Quebec, now the Central Maine & Quebec Railway (of the Lac Magantic Derailment and Fire infamy)?

So why would Canadian Pacific reacquire it’s old line, now the Central Maine & Quebec (what was the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic of the Lac Magantic, Quebec tank train derailment and resultant fire and deaths infamy)?

Well, my opinion is that CP has seen the writing on the wall:  Transcontinental Intermodal rail service won’t ever be the once lucrative cash cow it once was, before the opening of the New Pana-Max shipping lane of the Panama Canal.  With this tectonic shift in the way intermodal containers go to marketing and distribution centers, to deliver products at retail stores, I believe that the Management at CP decided it was in their best interest to have an East Coast port or two, from which they could ship short run intermodal trains to their Marketing Hubs and Distribution Centers in the Eastern half of Canada and the northern US.  

Am I delusional?  I don’t think so - Let me continue my thoughts.  Before The new Pana-Max Lane of the Panama Canal opened, I wrote a blogpost explaining, from a Supply Chain perspective, why Transcontinental Intermodal would die a quick death.  

• I started by showing that most markets for goods are in the eastern US, as that was where the major Population Centers and, therefore the Marketing Centers and Distribution Centers we’re located (70 % east of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers)  and many of the largest Western Population Centers were on the Coast and did not require Intermodal Containers to ship by rail.  
• I detailed the “Interchange Points” where railroads would transfer traffic and their problems.  
• I ran a SWOT Analysis, showing the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats on each transcontinental rail route from the Pacific ports to the interchange locations.
• I showed that it will cost less for containers to be delivered by ship to East Coast Ports and delivered to Distribution Centers in the East to Midwest of North America, simply because 1 container ship could haul the equivalent of 22+ container trains of 300 Containers.

I later wrote another blogpost, about a new joint BNSF-CSX Intermodal train from LA to North Baltimore, Ohio and discussed how CSX would probably convince the suppliers that by shipping directly to the East Coast and then by CSX that their shipping costs could be lowered.

As Savannah made an agreement with St.Louis Freightways  to ship from Savannah to St. Louis and then a second agreement to ship to Chicagoland quicker and at a lower cost than from the west coast, I pondered if Savannah, the 4th busiest port in the US by TEU Lift Volume, would “run the table” on Intermodal traffic and “If All (rail)Roads would lead to Savannah.

With this article in Trains Magazine’s News Wire, http://trn.trains.com/news/news-wire/2019/12/04-canadian-pacific-has-eyes-on-its-old-route-to-quebec-city, my guess is that the editors are thinking the same thing as I am:  It's no longer going to be profitable to ship containers by rail from the Pacific Coast to East Coast Markets, when container ships can carry containers directly to East Coast Ports at a lower cost.  

Guest Post=> F.H. Buckley=> Spectator USA=> American Breakup: Secession Is Much Closer Than We Think

This article speaks for itself. *********************************************************************************

CONSERVATISM LIBERALISM POLITICS US POLITICS

American breakup: secession is much 

closer than we think

The states with the most active secession movements are progressive and want to escape from a federal government they think too conservative

F.H. Buckley

The United States is ripe for secession. Across the world, established states have divided in two or are staring down secession movements. Great Britain became a wee bit less great with Irish independence, and now the Scots seem to be rethinking the Act of Union (1707). Czechoslovakia is no more and the former Soviet Union is just that: former. Go down the list and there are secession groups in nearly every country. And are we to think that, almost alone in the world, we’re immune from this?

Countries threaten to split apart when their people seem hopelessly divided. I’ve seen it already. Before moving to the United States, I lived in a country just as divided, without the kind of fellow feeling required to hold people together. Canada was an admirably liberal country, yet it came within a hair’s breadth of secession. America is headed the same direction today, and without the reserve and innate conservatism that has permitted Canadians to shrug off differences.

We’re less united today than we’ve been at any time since the Civil War, divided by politics, religion and culture. In all the ways that matter, save for the naked force of the law, we are already divided into two nations just as much as in 1861.The contempt for opponents, the Twitter mobs, online shaming and no-platforming, the growing tolerance of violence — it all suggests we’d be happier in separate countries.

That’s enough to make secession seem attractive. But there’s a second reason why secession beckons. We’re overlarge, one of the biggest and most populous countries in the world. Smaller countries, as I’ll show, are happier and less corrupt. They’re less inclined to throw their weight around militarily, and they’re freer. If there are advantages to bigness, the costs exceed the benefits. Bigness is badness.

It might therefore seem odd that we’ve stayed together so long. If divorces are made in Heaven, as Oscar Wilde remarked, how did we luck out? The answer, of course, is the Civil War. The example of Secession 1.0 in 1861, with its 750,000 wartime deaths, has made Secession 2.0 seem too painful to consider. In my book, American Succession, I explode the comforting belief that it couldn’t happen again. The barriers to a breakup are far lower than most people would think, and if the voters in a state were determined to leave the Union they could probably do so.

To begin with, we’re far more likely to let it happen today than we were in 1861. John Kerry had a point when he said that Putin, by invading Crimea, was behaving as if it were the 19th century. While the secretary of state was mocked for what seemed like naivety, public attitudes have in fact changed since 1861. We are now less willing to take up arms in order to maintain the Union and readier to accept a breakup instead. Next time, we’re likely to find a President James Buchanan in office and not an Abraham Lincoln.

Second, a cordial divorce might be worked out through the amending machinery of a convention held under Article V of the Constitution, if all sections of America were good and tired of each other. Secession cannot be unconstitutional when there’s a constitutional way of making it happen, through a constitutional convention.

Finally, the Supreme Court might revisit its denial of a right of secession. The originalists on the Court would recognize that the Framers had thought that states had the right to secede, while the more politically minded members of the Court might hesitate before ruling secession illegal and permitting the president to make war against a state. Instead, the Court could be expected to look northward, to the more nuanced view of secession rights taken by the Canadian Supreme Court, which rejected both an absolute right and an absolute bar to secession.

So it’s not difficult to imagine an American breakup. The reasons why a state might want to secede today are more compelling than at any time in recent history. Slavery isn’t on the ballot, and there would be no undoing of the civil rights revolution anywhere. Indeed, the states with the most active secession movements are progressive and want to escape from a federal government they think too conservative. Were secession to happen today, it would be politically correct.

So it might happen. I see us on a train, bound for a breakup. The switches that might stop us have failed, and if we want to remain united we must learn how to slow the engine. That will take things that have been in short supply lately: a greater tolerance for ideological differences, thicker skin to imagined slights, a deeper repository of confidence in and sympathy for our fellow Americans. These are things we used to have, and can learn to have again if we recognize that the alternative is secession.

Federalism used to allow for greater differences among the states, and that permitted us to sort out our differences by settling among people with like beliefs. And while federalism was discredited when it sought to excuse racist Jim Crow laws in the South, we’ve left that world long behind. That is why I propose, as a solution to our divisions and an antidote to secession, a devolution of power to the states — not mere federalism, but the alternative that the British presented to the Continental Congress in 1778 after it had decided upon secession through the Declaration of Independence. It was what Gladstone and Charles Stuart Parnell sought as an alternative to Ireland’s outright secession. The solution was ‘home rule’. Adopted in America, this would return more power to a seceding state than it possesses now, or ever possessed under American federalism.

F. H. Buckley is a law professor at George Mason University. American Succession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakupwill be published in January (Encounter Books).

Guest Post=> Michael Curtis=> American Thinker => Why Is Fake News Accepted by So Many?

January 24, 2019

Why is Fake News Accepted by so Many?

By Michael Curtis

If there is a model of integrity in reporting the news and analyzing troubles ahead it is C.P. Scott, longtime editor (1872-1929) and later owner of the Manchester Guardian.  His counsel in his May 1921 centenary essay was priceless: “Comment is free, but facts are sacred… It is well to be frank, it is even better to be fair.” While pursuing a progressive liberal agenda, his emphasis was always accurate news reporting. 
It is sad that the mainstream U.S. media and many of those involved in intellectual endeavors do not abide by Scott’s maxim. A recent event comprising a publication by BuzzFeed and responses to it indicates a continuing problem.  BuzzFeed, citing two anonymous federal law enforcement officials reported on January 17, 2019 that Robert Mueller had evidence that President Trump told Michael Cohen to lie about discussions of a potential proposed Trump Tower to be built in Moscow.  

On the next day, January 18, 2019, a spokesperson for Mueller repudiated the story: “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate.” 

Several aspects are interesting.  One is the refusal of BuzzFeed (and CNN and MSNBC) to accept Mueller’s denial. BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith stood by its reporting despite the fact that no texts or other documents corroborated the story.  His refusal reflects the reality that in general the mainstream media are more to the left in presenting news or opinions than is the median opinion of U.S. voters.  
Criticism of the left media does not mean that one is adopting the argument frequently voiced by Trump about the assault on him by “Fake News,” or accepting his view of critics as “Enemies of the People”. The C.P. Scott formula should be espoused by news media of the left as well as the right because of concern about bias, the frequent use of misleading information, the fact that headlines of stories don’t always reflect their content or import, and the willingness of journalists to publish and of readers to consume or not challenge Fake News.  Furthermore,  the eagerness to condemn Trump results in the presumption of guilt rather than innocence; in this case the focus is to blame Trump for obstruction of justice, and implicitly call for impeachment of the President.  
There are wider implications: the question of bias in reporting and the lack of diversity in teaching as well as reporting the news. A number of objective studies and surveys have illustrated the bias on the left.  One, published in Politico in October 2016, showed that about 91% of news coverage of candidate Trump was hostile.  
Another factor is realization that technology has changed the nature of journalism. Patience is not one of the outstanding characteristics of the media. The initial, inaccurate, BuzzFeed story immediately caught fire and went “viral”.  Its accuracy was not immediately challenged by much of the media. This is surprising because BuzzFeed, a site founded in 2006 which became a global media company, is regarded by many as an unreliable source. Indeed, its editorial stated “we firmly believe that for a number of issues there are not two sides.” A Pew Research Center report concludes that Buzzfeed is one of the most distrusted news sources in the U.S.  On January 10, 2017 it published the Christopher Steele dossier alleging that the Russian government had been cultivating, supporting, and assisting Trump for years. 
Allegations of this kind are mixed with past activity by Trump, who bought the Miss Universe pageant in 1996, later sold it, but brought it to Moscow in 2013, and was involved in negotiations to build in Moscow a Trump Tower. Trump associates carried on conversations with Russian officials on the issue. Nevertheless, this does not lead to proof of Trump’s guilt in the issue of “collusion” between Trump and Moscow.
The rapid, unthinking acceptance of the BuzzFeed story evokes the memory of the impact of the 23-year-old Orson Welles’ narrative and production of the War of The Worlds, on October 30, 1938, the evening before Halloween.  The program, a modernized version of the story by H. G. Wells, was a fictional report on the Martian invasion of the U.S at Grovers Mills, N.J., a few miles from Princeton.  The fake news broadcast of the invasion, interrupted by piano solos of Debussy and Chopin and other orchestral music, was mistaken by many as a genuine news broadcast and caused panic among listeners.  Welles never clearly explained whether his intention was to create panic in the audience, but he did acknowledge that his Fake News was mistaken for a genuine news broadcast.  His success helped lead to a contract in Hollywood where in 1941 he cowrote and directed Citizen Kane.
The troubling question is why Fake News is accepted by so many.  It can be the sheer repetition of inaccurate information by the media, leading most people to be reluctant to challenge what they have heard or read.  But an underlying problem, not often discussed, remains, the lack of diversity among reporters, and to take the matter further, the lack of diversity in the teaching of public affairs in universities.
Lack of diversity, and consequent bias, in the media is clearly shown by a study of news coverage of the first 100 days of the Trump administration released by the Shorenstein Center at Harvard. Coverage was overwhelmingly negative: CNN, 93%, CBS and NBC 91%, the New York Times 87%, the Washington Post 83%, the Wall Street Journal 70%, and even Fox News 52%.
Account should also be taken of the lack of diversity of political opinion in universities, since they have a responsibility to educate those who will become reporters.  Education should emphasize the necessity to be free of bias in scholarship, and the dangers of curtailment of free speech on university campuses, ideological conformity, and outright discrimination. But studies show that political correctness pervades the campus, and that political leaning of faculty is overwhelmingly leftist and friendly to the Democratic party. An article by Mitchell Langbert titled “Homogenous: The Political Affiliations of Elite Liberal Arts College Faculty” in the June 2018 Academic Questions published by the National Association of Scholars analyzed a sample of 8,688 tenure track professors from liberal arts colleges and showed that the ratio of liberal to conservative faculty is 12.7-1 if military colleges are excluded, and 10.4-1 if they are included. 
Figures for some colleges such as Wellesley, Swarthmore, Williams, indicate the ratio of the faculty is 120-1 liberal.  There are sharp differences in fields; engineering has 1.6-1 liberal and chemistry 5.2-1, and physics 6.2-.1; science is 6.3-1; social science 12.3-1 and humanities 31.9-1. Not a single Republican was found in gender studies, Africana, or peace studies, or in the faculty at Bryn Mawr. At the extreme were liberal bastions such as anthropology, 56-0, and communications, 18-0.
Universities should be reminded that a monologue is just a form of continuous fiction. It is time to focus on the bias, oversimplification, the inaccurate tonality, of issues presented in the media and the items chosen or neglected on an inherently ideological basis in the media and on the campus.

Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/01/why_is_fake_news_accepted_by_so_many.html#ixzz5eCZeRcw0
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Guest Post: Leslie Alexander=> Abbeville Institute Blog=> Stranger In A Strange land

Above all things, the top 2 we’re defined by probably are our Belief System (in my case, Religious Denomination - literally the belief and values system I follow and the omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent Deity that I worship) and our Manners. Manners have often defined by whether and if we’re “polite” to one another. (As in “Mind your Manners.”)  But, really, it is just the way, the "manner,” in which we interact with each other.  Some people are sharp, others stand-offish. Some are ambivalent, ignoring you.  I was taught to be open, to be friendly, to share, to be kind, to be forgiving, not to judge motives, to be honest, not to boast and to be respectful.  Most others who are of my age and grew up in the South were taught to be this way.  Some say it’s because we were raised in the Bible Belt.  True, but once you become of age, it’s your choice to choose who or in what you believe and the manner that you’re going to interact with others.  So to quote  Tony Beckett, a pastor, who once was a regular on "Back to the Bible," a Christian Radio show about 15+ years ago, as he spoke of Christianity and used the famous Gatorade advertising tag line “Is it in you, Does it show?”

I’m of Scots-Irish roots on both sides.  The Scots-Irish are known to be a resilient people group, renowned for their tenacity.  They settled on the border lands and never looked back.  Whenever there was a piece was sub-standard, the Scots-Irish seemed to get it.  Whether it was because all of the good land was gone or because they could not afford to buy good land, they took less productive land a and made the  best of it until it was as good as the premium land.  Unfortunately, the old joke about the Scots being great at taming the wilderness, but not worth a damn in living in it after it had been civilized holds true with me.  So I can be a little rough around the edges, when it comes to manner.  But as a Christian, a follower and disciple of Christ, I'm called to be better than that and that's the manner I mostly choose when interacting with others.

I married “out of my clan,” to a transplant from the Mid-West, of French-German ancestry, who has a beautiful smile and is nice.  I chose her to jointly go through this journey of life, to share hopes and dreams, heartaches and misery, poverty and wealth and a home and children.  But, she is different as are her parents.  Although they are Christian followers too, they seem reserved, stand-offish and even sharp in their Manner.  The lessons of life learned in West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and the western side of both Maryland and Pennsylvania and the clannish behavior of that area has rubbed off on them.  It’s taken me years to get my wife out of her shell and to assimilate and to learn to "be southern."  She's still not comfortable, not as open as I am, but you'd never know it by the way she interacts with others.  Now, she’s probably as southern as I am.  Her parents never will be.  But that’s OK: I married their daughter, not them.  I’m just thankful they had her and raised her to follow Christ.

As I approach retirement and my guide posts in life, older parents and trusted friends, pass away and move on,With older wisdom, passing from one generation to the next, the lessons of life are being passed to me.  It’s not like I really know or have discovered anything revolutionary:  As a former Supervisor and Mentor once said to me, “Jake, we just hitchhike off of the knowledge of others.”  He of course was right. 

I’ve decided to move back to the small town where my Daddy was raised and probably live in his old house.  It’s not like I know anybody there:  They’re all deceased, or dying, as they were his age (Aren’t we all dying?  Life ends:  It's terminal.   But some are perceived to be much closer to the end of life here, having met, greeted and succumbed to old age).  So why would I want to go back to the town of my Dad, his Parents, Cousins and Grand Parents?

Well, first, it’s what I always considered home.  Second, it’s far enough away from this damned city, where the chances of my being assimilated are just about none. And at 1/300th the size of this Bright Lights, Big City Metropolis in which I live, if the number of cars and idiot drivers, who believe they can defy the laws of physics, in traffic, every day is 1/300th of what I deal with now, so driving should also be more relaxing as well. 

I looking forward to leaving, having been here 52 years and watching it metastasize like a cancer on the region, growing very quickly and out of control.  At first Mid-Westerners moved here for jobs in the 1980s.  Now, as the economy is ramping back up some, we're getting Yankees from New York toward New England, moving into what was the city I've lived in and around for 52 years.

The story below isn't quite the mirror reflection of my life, but it's more than a little familiar. 

So without further delay, I present Stranger in a Strange Land, https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/stranger-in-a-strange-land/.
****************************************************************

Stranger in a Strange Land
By Leslie Alexander on Oct 14, 2019


I recently relocated–with any luck, temporarily–to a sprawling metroplex of a city of almost seven million, within an even more massive state.

I’d believed I understood globalism and loss of identity. I thought I had made an uneasy peace with the reality of modernism and destruction of memory.  I had no idea.  Not only is there no regional culture here—one of common language, mores and manners–there is not even an American one. 
Stores, restaurants, and other establishments ring loudly with the sound of Spanish. New to the city, I ask questions, and rarely chance upon a fluent English speaker.  Even in the upper-income neighborhood in which I’m staying, it is rare to see an American flag.  Get lost and venture to outlying neighborhoods and whole blocks of stores have signage only in Spanish. Even the do-it-yourself car wash speaks to you in Spanish, though I keep telling it to stop.  

There is a distinct feeling that almost everyone has come from somewhere else, and not a similar place.  An untattooed, unpierced body is infrequent.  Pink is the most common hair color. Amorphous masses of bodies abound–male, female, or something in between. Cordial relations between the sexes–between ladies and gentlemen–is non-existent.  Instead, there’s a strange ambiguity that feels desolate. The atypical Normals look at each other with recognition.  And a kind of wistfulness.    
Courtesy is rare.  A Louisiana girl, I am accustomed to pleasant greetings and warmth, a shared desire to connect.  Here, greetings are often met with silence or suspicion.  Even a drive-through smoothie shop is an empty experience; I recently attempted small talk at the window, trying mightily to connect.  I left feeling unseen, and sad.  

I expressed this disquietude one evening to a friend of common origins.  We were at a large eatery with loud music playing. A mass of activity was before us but nothing resembling authenticity.  A place with no name. I told my friend I was searching for a shared American culture. That place, I reminded him, where people come together though common conviction, values, and rituals. Where memory unites. That thing that regional culture used to offer. 

 “You’ll meet all kinds of people,” he assured me. “I don’t want to meet all kinds,” I replied. “I just want to meet my kind.”     

He didn’t understand me. But when I looked closely at his visage, I detected a melancholy, one born of resignation.  He, too, through necessity, settled here. One becomes accustomed to that which one cannot change.

All over America, in small towns and large—but Southern towns are bigger targets—leftist transplants are scheming with dreams of transformation. They know how we should live, what our mode of transportation should be, what we should eat, how much property we should own, where we should park, how many children we should have (not many), how they should be educated, and whom we should befriend. The list is endless. There is, of course, a policy for each important item, if we could just wake up and recognize their genius. 

What they’re not interested in is creating real, organic, economic growth. They’re not proponents of individual prosperity that would make it possible for people to stay home, find good jobs, rear families. That would come dangerously close to front porches, rocking chairs, human connection, and Gramps and Grandma just down the block.  It would mean tradition.  Instead, big government do-gooders love crony capitalism, which benefits a handful, but to their way of thinking, the right handful. These modern-day carpetbaggers should be resisted like the vermin they are. 

Me, I’m still taking my stand.  I want to—and will again–live in a place where people remember who I am, who know where I began. Where folks remember-or know someone who remembers – that my father smoked cigars while he watched football, his children cheering, that my grandfather was a crusty old businessman who’d give you the shirt off his back, that the smell of summer magnolia is most pungent right after a rain. Where someone still remembers my French-Canadian grandmother, Maman, the unexpected mention of her bringing me to tears.  A place where the poignant hymn of growing up may be sung and past, but somehow still lingers.  When a man was still a man, and not afraid to be one.  When children were called home at dusk and heard,” Put your toys away, wash your hands, respect your mother, and “Yes, sir, every time.”

When I was about 20, a boy we had grown up with in the neighborhood took his life.  My grown brother wept, lying on the floor at my father’s feet, my father’s hand upon his head, until he was expiated, cleansed. It was a display of the purest, most exquisite grief. 
My mother is an enigma.  A stunning, Catholic, South Louisiana belle, she met my father in little theatre in North Louisiana.  He was a gregarious Baptist, and Marine-Corp tough.  He thought perhaps they wouldn’t marry when my mother’s brother, Uncle Rob, under the influence, provoked him almost to blows one night. My father was restrained, but said angrily, “I could have killed him.”  

“I would certainly have understood that,” she replied. The wedding came off, with so many Catholic clergy on the altar my father said no man had ever been so married in the history of the world.  
Uncle Rob, a former World War II pilot, and my father, completed their lives the best of friends.      

When we grew up, my seven brothers regaled us with tales of their boyhood, their lifelong buddies adding to their stories of mayhem and madness.  One of my seven brothers, a virtuoso athlete, had a habit of straddling onto a sturdy magnolia branch outside his second-story bedroom window, a branch that led to the trunk, and then to a near-perfect drop into the darkness after curfew. My parents never tired of recounting the expletives they heard one night when my brother realized the branch was gone.  It has never grown back. 

My four sisters and I are very different. Our lives are beset with imperfections and the human failures that deeply afflict every life.  But we are connected by one undeniable truth, maybe the only one that matters.  We saw true sacrifice and devotion.  We saw grit. Even as girls, we learned how to appreciate the best of manhood.       

I will live again, and die, where the old dreams, greatest joys, and saddest tears are remembered. In that place where memory lives. 

No, this is not home, can never be. I will live again where my beloved dead are buried, put flowers on their grave, and by the mere act of remembering, bring them to life again. Where people recognize each other, even if we are not all the same. Most of all, I want to live where yesterday is revered, and where heroism is still honored.  

If we lose common language and culture, we betray those whose lives made ours possible. We turn our backs on them. There can be no deeper shame. 

Chesterton wrote, “Tradition is the democracy of the dead.” If, so, we have denied our forebearers their justice.  We have wronged them. We have capitulated too easily to the spirit of the age. 

I am in this city for my livelihood. I often wonder if it’s a Faustian bargain for which my soul will ever forgive me.

Leslie Alexander Southern Culture Southern Tradition

About Leslie Alexander
Leslie Alexander is the descendent of a Confederate veteran and a Revolutionary War soldier. She brought a small bit of Louisiana earth with her to Dallas. More from Leslie Alexander

Guest Post: Brandon J. Weichert=> American Greatness=> Avoiding Britain's Dead End Foreign Policy Fate

This is an excellent assessment and comparison of our recent past (watching Great Britain go from the Super Power of the world to a second rate power) and the present state of the US overarching military and (National) state strategy.

Avoiding Britain's Dead End Foreign Policy Fate

Brandon J. Weichert

- December 1st, 2019

In 1902—just a few short years after Queen Victoria’s momentous Diamond Jubilee celebration and at the height of British imperial power—London was fretting about its strategic position. British strategists, according to the late Oxford historian Michael Howard, were concerned that year about “Imperial weakness: of commitments all over the world to be defended, of well-armed and rapacious adversaries who threatened them, and of very slender resources to protect them with.”

As Howard assessed, the isolated British Empire had a “[n]avy whose supremacy still depended on the divisions among her adversaries and an Army incapable of taking the field against any single one of them.” The three “interlocking problems” facing British statesmen in 1902 were “Home Defence, Mediterranean and Middle East, Far East.”The United States today finds itself in a strategic position similar to what the British Empire faced over a century ago. It is at once the ubiquitous global superpower, yet it is also incapable of conclusively defeating two-bit stateless terror groups and tinpot dictatorships.

Despite spending $750 billion a year on defense, the Pentagon warns that America’s vaunted deterrence is no longer believable either to Chinese or Russian leaders. Washington’s military leaders expect moremoney to be handed to them, even as they’ve been unable to win the Global War on Terror after 20 years and a combined $6.4 trillion.

As with the British Empire in 1902, the American imperium today appears unable (or unwilling) seriously to reassess its global commitments. Thus, U.S. foreign policy remains on autopilot (even as the plane descends closer to the ground). The levers of foreign policy are still controlled by the “Intellectual-Yet-Idiot”-types who fully believed Francis Fukuyama’s absurd notion that history had ended with the Cold War. This ridiculous belief has negated any attempt to arrest the decline of U.S. foreign policy.

A Jack of All Trades, Master of None

At present, the United States tries to do too much with resources that are insufficient to live up to its current strategic commitments (and, given the breadth of those commitments, it’s hard to imagine what amount of resources would be enough). This is an unserious position for a country with pretensions of global superpower status to take.

The U.S. spends more money on its defense than the next 10 countries combined—including China and Russia—and its defense planners insist that the U.S. military is unable to effectively “take the field” and deter great power rivals.

After 20 years of increased defense spending (with little to show for it), it is time to restrain the overall spending and focus on funding programs with direct applications to today’s strategic environment.

No, Washington should not replicate the mindless cuts of the Obama era’s sequestration. Instead, policymakers should focus on defending the United States and its military forces from real and current threats rather than spending vast sums of money on projects that amount to big paydays for defense contractors and political donors.

For example, the country faces real threats in the strategic domains of space and cyberspace. American forces also need to be able to better withstand attacks on the electromagnetic spectrum. Strengthening those three areas of strategic defense likely would enhance America’s deterrence against strategic rivals, especially Russia and China. These would be far better investments than another supercarrier or a sixth-generation warplane.

More important, Washington needs to reassess its global commitments. The real reason President Trump is facing impeachment is that he dared to voice support for the new Ukrainian president’s desire to broker a lasting peace deal with Russia. After all, it has become an article of Washington’s secular progressive religion that Ukrainian sovereignty and the sage advice of the foreign-policy establishment must be preserved above all else.

This foolish stance on the part of U.S. policymakers is akin to the erroneous British belief of the last century that Belgium’s neutrality was essential for Britain’s national security. The German Empire’s invasion of Belgium during World War I ensured that London automatically would enter the war on the side of France.

Of course, the Germans had no desire to fight the British at that time. They just wanted to invade France from nearby Belgium. While a German victory over France would have upset the vaunted balance of power in Europe, the costs for having entered the Great War were so onerous for Britain that it never fully recovered. In fact, British actions in 1914 ultimately ensured the very thing their leaders worked to avoid: total imperial collapse by the end of the century.

The United States should not be taking lessons from the failed imperial enterprise of their older British cousins.

National Interest Alone 

Instead, American leaders should think back to their own heritage and avoid entangling alliances. That does not mean the United States should become “isolationist” or that it should not support the principle of national sovereignty for all countries. What it means is that the United States should enter into foreign relations on the basis of national interest (and not oversell its intentions to potential allies in order to secure their allegiance).

Only after the national interest has been secured through an alliance can matters of shared values link our country to another. But rarely should “shared values” become a requirement for entering into an alliance or a guarantee of our full-throated support.

The United States reserves the right unilaterally to alter, or even to break, those alliances based solely on national interest. Far too often, American leaders place the notion of shared values ahead of the national interest. Just because another nation claims to share our values doesn’t mean we are committed to expend endless amounts of blood and treasure for that nation’s national security.

Most of the Washington establishment, unfortunately, believes in this utopian notion of linking countries to the United States based on ambiguous notions of “shared values” (does the United States really have “shared values” with a deeply corrupt Ukraine?) These utopian fallacies then lead to some of the gravest strategic overreaches imaginable on the part of American leaders: we weaken ourselves through overcommitment and invite the very challenges we seek to deter.

Today, the United States faces a resurgent Russian empire as well as a rejuvenated Chinese empire. Washington cannot possibly take on such large powers simultaneously, yet this fact escapes many in the Washington foreign policy establishment.

Fact is, most geopolitical theories from the last century revolve around the notion that we should preventthe coalescence of a military and political alliance on the Eurasian mainland. Apparently, Washington’s policymakers have forgotten these timeless lessons (perhaps the utopians never learned them at Yale, as they were far too busy enjoying Sex Week).

Washington must choose which power it seeks to balance against: Russia or China. The choice will determine the future of America’s development on the world stage. And, despite what most “experts” will tell you: there is a right and wrong choice here. Russia, for all of its problems, is the lesser threat. Yet Washington insists Russia is an immediate danger. The longer that Washington refuses to make a comprehensive deal with Moscow over outstanding strategic disagreements—all while ignoring China’s grievous provocations—the more we endanger ourselves and our sovereignty.

Pushing Russia away drives Moscow closer to Beijing. We tell ourselves not to worry and that historymakes a Sino-Russian entente unlikely. History, of course, determines nothing. After all, no one believed either the Germans or British would wage war upon each other in 1914—yet that is precisely what they did.

Like the British Empire of 1902, the United States today appears willing to leave the fate of their strategic position in the world to the “divisions among her adversaries.” History does not repeat, as the old cliché goes, but it does rhyme. And, already, there are significant signs of a new Eurasian coalescence, as Russia, China, and Iran feel compelled to act together against the “threat” of American military power.

The United States needs to make hard choices regarding its long-term strategy now. America cannot defend the world everywhere at once—and it shouldn’t be expected to do so. Instead, Washington must plug immediate weaknesses in its own strategic defense, while reorganizing its global commitments. Should the United States fail to fundamentally reorder its foreign policy for a long-term strategic competition with multiple actors, all while using limited resources, then we will surely suffer the same fate as the British Empire of the previous century.

****************************************************************Fortunately for the United States, I believe we currently have the right man in office to focus on the problems at hand, have an adult discussion, determine our course of action, eliminate what is out of scope and proceed to resolve and reorganize the problem at hand, America's mission in the world.  President Trump is much like a CEO, who's turning around a business:  For a while EVERYTHING WILL BE DISRUPTED until it operates smoothly and generates the outcome that he wants.  He’s got a lot to do in the next 5 years.  And while draining the swamp at the NSA, CIA, DIA, FBI and DOJ is the problem at hand (no, not the Resistance or Impeachment), they are small potatoes as compared to the Pentagon and the State Department.

Trump has been magnificent focusing on our National Energy Policy and hundreds of thousands of administrative rules that kept us dependent on Middle-Eastern petroleum.  Now we can tell those who hoped to control us with the bridle of petroleum, that we’re going our own way, determining our own future and not following some government or leader who would have us do it at our loss of vision, strategy, allies and future. Concurrently, Trump has rebuilt our military to the levels where it should be maintained.  

Now comes the hard part:  In his remaining time, he must decimate the "New World Order" insurgents at the Pentagon and the Department of State to the point where the Employees that remain understand that they are employed at the will and discretion of the President and are not in charge of the country.  There is no "New World Order."  Our Statist and Military leaders have long led us down this road, wasting our monetary and military resources, our national future and the lives of many of the young men who would lead it.

The new (and correct) direction must be America takes care of its allies, from this point onward.  If it is not directly in our interest, we must walk away from it.  Europe, Africa, South America, the Middle East, the Sub-Continent (Pakistan, India, and Bangledesh) and the Far East must take care of itself and is no longer our problem to police or defend.

While China is correctly identified as the primary country to watch in this article, focusing on them as a strategic enemy should be easy.  President Eisenhower was as correct about the Military-Industrial complex that have long infiltrated the Pentagon and the Department of State, as President Washington did about avoiding the entangling conflicts of other nations.   

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Guest Post: Jim Blaze=> Railway Age=> Is Intermodal Rail Stalling?

OK boys and girls.  Here's an article guaranteed to send chills down the spines of Railroad Management in North America.  Why?  Because, as a commodity, Coal made so much profit for Railroads that it easily paid for Infrastructure and Maintenance on the railroads.  But when coal traffic dried up like a deciduous leaf in the fall, the Big 7 Railroads in North America decided to make Intermodal Traffic their next Cash Cow.

Now, I consider this a bold, but risky move, as railroading in North America got lazy hauling bulk commodities that were shipped in quantities too large for trucks, but where there weren't competitive water routes via rivers lakes and oceans.  However railroads have long ceded the truly fast freight to truckers who compete against each other to provide timely service and to airplanes for overnight shipping, when the time constraint for an item was truly critical.  And when Power Companies found out that they could economically choose natural (methane) gas AND Combustion Gas Turbines with Waste Heat Boilers and Steam Turbines to replace Coal (Wood or even Oil) Fired Steam Turbine plants they jumped at the chance, leaving and even stranding assets.  I'm not sure the railroads have the desire, let alone the will to really compete with truckers with  intermodal and piggy-back service.

Intermodal is also risky because of the dynamics of railroading, where long trains create nearly intolerable conditions.  In the articulated, permanently coupled, double-stacked container "well" cars, the axle loading is 125 tons.  That's higher than the axle loading on loaded coal hoppers and loaded coal hopper trains aren't routinely run at 60-70 MPH.  This alone is a recipe to rapidly wear out and destroy the track that trains are run on.  Add to this the possibility of string line derailments, where when trains are operated around sharp curves at low speeds, the pulling force is able to derail cars because the force is applied in a straight line, when the cars are following tracks that curve away from that force vector.

This strategy was tried before by the Northeastern Anthracite railroads, when home heating in New York, New Jersey, Northeastern Pennsylvania and New England  changed fuels from Anthracite hard coal to Fuel oil after World War II.  Smaller railroads in Eastern Pennsylvania banded together with smaller railroads or railroads from Chicago that didn't directly reach the New York/North Jersey Ports to ship Piggy Back trailers of goods into Chicago's expansive distribution center.  It wasn't a bad plan, but it didn't give the railroads enough capital  to adequately maintain their infrastructure.  The entire railroad system in the Northeast, with its short distance hauls slowly succumbed to truck competitions

So now rail traffic in general, as well as intermodal traffic is contracting, with lower volumes as compared to last year for 41 weeks as on the week of October 14, 2019.  Lower volumes of traffic, means lower volumes at regional warehouses, which means sales in retail stores are slowing.  Back up the Supply Chain, less goods are being made or imported, which eventually means fewer shifts are being worked to make these goods, which means less workers have disposable income to purchase goods, which affects sales volume.  This is how a recession gets started.

Now whether or not an economic slow down is caused by Inflation (Price increases that eat away at disposable income and eventually savings), fewer containers means less trains and even smaller profits for the railroads.
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• September 05, 2019
 
• Class I, Freight, Intermodal

Is Intermodal Rail Stalling?

Written by Jim Blaze, Contributing Editor

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Shutterstock

Intermodal rail—a transportation mode choice that was to take trucks off the road—is slowing down. Where is it heading? Over several decades, the premise was that railroad intermodal trailer on flat cars (TOFC) and containers mostly on double-stacked well cars (COFC) would grow in volume and therefore reduce highway truck congestion. 

This is not a financial analysis to help determine whether to buy or sell railroad stock.  This is about the evolving role of rail intermodal service in a market that is dominated by trucks, whose share of volume dwarfs rail.

Data courtesy of IANA and TTX, from materials presented in August 2019.

Yes, rail intermodal has grown, and at a pace mostly above the growth rate of the nation’s gross domestic product. But the commercial message sent by the railroads has largely focused upon the financial earnings and the success of railroad company yield management using their so-called Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR) business model.

As one example, CSX  proudly states that “CSX has more pricing power [now] … particularly in intermodal truck-rail business …” according to Wall Street Journal business editor Paul Page (October 2018). However, on a volume and market share basis, changes in CSX’s origin-destination intermodal services have resulted in weakness in CSX’s second-quarter intermodal volume.  The company reported a 10% drop year-over-year in intermodal volume. CSX also reported an 11% drop in intermodal revenue for the quarter.

Beyond this one eastern railroad, mid-August 2019 U.S. rail total carload and intermodal volumes were down 3.5% year-to-date to 16.6 million units. Of that, U.S. carloads fell 3.2% to 8.1 million, while U.S. intermodal units dropped 3.7% to 8.5 million.

Not everyone is negative about rail intermodal.  In the eastern states, Norfolk Southern executives remain optimistic. They stated in mid-July that Norfolk Southern’s rail intermodal could see demand grow in certain service lanes during the second half of this year. “We’ve got the most powerful intermodal franchise in the East, which is married to the consumption part of the U.S. economy, and the economy continues to move in the direction of the consumer. The consumer-related economic indicators are still relatively strong. We’ve got a diverse merchandise franchise, which offers many opportunities for growth in the second half of the year,” NS Chief Marketing Officer Alan Shaw said during his company’s second quarter earnings call on July 24.

The NS logic is that some of the railroad’s intermodal customers (channel partners) support that second-half intermodal market outlook.

Financially, as Wall Street Journal reporter Lauren Silva Laughlin wrote on August 23, PSR execution so far has been good for shareholders of North America’s freight railroads, including CN, Canadian Pacific, CSX, Kansas City Southern, NS and Union Pacific.

Yet, here is the market share and growth “rub”: Financials aside, unit volume is not growing at the rate once expected in intermodal trailers/containers. The U.S. rail freight sector remains at about 10% or less of total surface freight by mode by shipper payments billed vs. trucking and other freight modes.

Data courtesy of IANA and TTX, from materials presented in August 2019.

The rail industry position is that rail pricing and rail freight dependability have improved greatly since the passage of the 1980 Staggers Act (which partially deregulated the U.S. railroad industry). There is no question of that improvement based upon the statistical evidence. But as the old saying goes, “What have you done lately?”

The Association of American Railroads is correct that “intermodal rail has benefited rail customers with competitive rates and unmatched efficiency of scale.” True, average rail rates have fallen 46% since 1981, allowing most rail shippers to move nearly twice as much freight for the same price paid more than 30 years ago. However, recently, railroad rates have been increasing. Some rates are increasing much faster than nominal inflation.

Meanwhile, the hope of diverting millions of trucks annually from the congested eastern interstates and primary U.S. highways isn’t quite playing out as once expected. Why? In large part because the average distance that most of the trucks moving between markets in the eastern states are in the 250- to 500-mile range—and are not ripe for rail conversion.

No American railroad has achieved a sustainable high-margin profit intermodal service over such short distances. Moreover, the PSR model with its long trains doesn’t match that geographic opportunity. Further, the railroads still lack a rapid load-on/load-off railcar platform to capture the dominant roadway traffic we call semi-trailers. Flats, tankers and similar big rig semis just don’t fit onto the very-low-cost-per-operated-mile double-stacked well railcars.

Statistically, the movement of trailers on rail flat cars is a disappearing market segment. A recent conference sponsored by the Intermodal Association of North America (IANA) and TTX Company gave the industry an interesting profile of where intermodal is this year. The patterns they revealed were these:

Trailer on Flat Car Continues to Decline as a Rail Intermodal Service:

• Four of the past 11 years back to 2009 saw declines in TOFC volume.
• Two of those years saw volume drops of more than 20%.
• Only two years provided a relatively high 10% to 11% increase in year-over-year growth.
• The period 2011 to 2015 witnessed a low 1.6% to 2.9% increase, spaced between 5.3%t and 9.7% declines.
• What used to be ~3 million TOFC units more than a decade ago is now trending to ~ 1.2 million annually.

No one disputes this trailer pattern. Yet most of the traffic units out on the highways remain the semis. Rail management doesn’t have a mechanical engineering solution to grab this market. Does anyone dispute this? In contrast, stackable containers are the dominant domestic intermodal service.

The cost per mile to move a 53-footer on a stack container car is about 40% to just 60% per mile moved of a similar trailer or container chassis moved on the road. That’s the internal railroading business cost—not the price charged.

The railroads have been clearly documenting in their periodic investor reports that they are using pricing leverage to increase their intermodal margin. They are getting greater earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) by not growing volume under the PSR model. Instead, they are increasing their prices against trucking prices in strategic lanes.

What Happened to the Railroads’ Plan to Grow by Taking Domestic Share? 

• Domestic rail container units used to grow at a respectable 9.6% to as much as 14.7% year-over-year pace between 2009 and 2013.
• After 2013, this growth rate dropped to about a 4.5% average.
• 2017 was up by only 2.7% over 2016.
• So far in 2019, the rate is down about 6%.

Because of the huge trucking base share, rail intermodal must gain at a near-double-digit pace to take highway share.

International Intermodal Container Movement Patterns Are a Bit Different:

International intermodal units have been growing year-over-year at a more stable range of about 4.5% to nearly 7% year-over-year until the trade dispute started. Now it’s dropped to a mere 1.4% pace to-date in 2019.

The future is at best unclear. This railroader’s interpretation is that, based upon the current evidence, far less intermodal highway to railway shifting will occur than was formerly expected unless something in the railroad intermodal business model changes. Or truck capacity drops.

Driver shortages for trucking will likely continue. This will include shortages of drivers in the short-haul lanes and the drayage markets. Railroads don’t have a solution to combat either the short-haul or the drayage shortages.

The following are credited with interesting facts and observations. However, they might disagree with some of my data interpretation:

• Melissa Peralta, Senior Economist, TTX Company.
• Peter Wolf and John Woodcock as recent IANA speakers.
• Technical observations shared by experts like Larry Gross and FTR’s Eric Starks.

Independent railway economist, Railway Age Contributing Editor and Freightwaves author Jim Blaze has been in the railroad industry for well over 40 years. Trained in logistics, he served seven years with the Illinois DOT as a Chicago long-range freight planner and almost two years with the USRA technical staff in Washington, D.C. Jim then spent 21 years with Conrail in cross-functional strategic roles from branch line economics to mergers, IT, logistics, and corporate change. He followed this with 20 years of international consulting at rail engineering firm Zeta-Tech Associated. Jim is a Magna cum Laude Graduate of St Anselm’s College with a master’s degree from the University of Chicago. Married with six children, he lives outside of Philadelphia. “This column reflects my continued passion for the future of railroading as a competitive industry,” says Jim. “Only by occasionally challenging our institutions can we probe for better quality and performance. My opinions are my own, independent of Railway Age and Freightwaves. As always, contrary business opinions are welcome.”

Categories: Class I, Freight, IntermodalTags: Freightwaves, IANA, Intermodal Association of North America, Opinion, TTX