The history of high-speed rail service
Obama is enamored of high-speed rail and is spreading the wealth around to get it built.
Texas refused the money as there is simply no reason for this kind of service -- when the demographics change, airplanes can set up new routes. Rail is forever. There is serious union money behind the lobbying for this boondoggle.
Know who else loved high-speed rail? From
Ann Althouse:
The love of high-speed trains.
I've been a big critic of the romantic enthusiasm for high-speed trains in present-day American political discourse, so I was fascinated to run across this rather similar romanticization of high-speed rail in some Nazi propaganda (from 1932):The Nordic landscape cries out to be traversed by rails over which express trains can speed. It is a characteristic of all Nordic vehicles to increase their speed. Ever-increasing velocity is a built-in characteristic of the rails themselves, the rails by which, in the Nordic experience of the world, the whole world is penetrated. Rails that are already in existence and those that must constantly be constructed for ever newer, ever faster vehicles on which men who experience the world Nordically may strive toward ever new goals. The Nordic soul experiences its world as a structure made up of countless thoroughfares � those already at hand and those still to be created � on land, on water, in the air, and in the stratosphere. It races like a fever through all segments of the Nordic community, a fever of speed which, infectiously, reaches out far beyond the world of the north and attacks souls who are not Nordic and for whom, at bottom, such action is contrary to their style and senseless.
If you are really enthusiastic about high-speed trains, please consider the possibility that you are deranged.
Two tickets to Godwin please...
Posted by DaveH at August 21, 2011 9:05 AM