Free Republic

That’s not what’s interesting. If fox had had any fact checkers they would have asked him how his book related to his research in global jihad. They tried to pigeonhole a more or less secular/pantheistic liberal as a Muslim and he burned them.

If they had asked him more detailed questions about his beliefs, regarding one state Palestine, jihad or khatami they would have had far more to work with.

You can read it for yourself here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/156747924/Reza-Aslan-Dissertation . Let the freeper something storm begin.

Bombing raids over California? The fire balloons don’t count. Methinks he doth protest too much.

Amen +1

You can add what's left of him as a friend on facebook.

The author is confusing the issues of public ownership and subsidies. Although most roads are publicly owned, they are not subsidized. We pay gas taxes to fund road improvements and construction. I am willing to pay higher gas taxes if necessary to maintain and improve our road system provided that competitive bidding without union mandates and racial preferences not occur.

The important distinction between public ownership and subsidies involves the level of usage and the underlying cost of the infrastructure. Light rail even with good ridership levels must be heavily subsidized by non users because it does not have sufficient capacity. For example, the Denver area has several lines of light rail. Even though these lines have good ridership, there are large subsidies for both construction and operation. These lines are largely funded by sales taxes and general taxes. User fares would have to be quadrupled to fund operations. These lines are nice to ride but they lack capacity to make much of a difference. The lines reduce congestion somewhat. An alternative solution such as bus rapid transit would have cost much less to build and operate. The bus rapid transit lanes could have been shared by tool paying autos.

American roads are heavily subsidized. We had this discussion a few days earlier, user fees only pay around ~60% according to this article (the 2003 stats had 78 billion being user fees and 33 million coming out of general funding sources so more like 70%).

What a joke of an article. The main purpose of highways is to facilitate transportation more effectively. How are you going to move goods and services on light rail and buses to a specific destination?

For long distance freight, heavy rail is much *much* cheaper. The main advantage of highways is that they're much harder to bomb.

It’s not just the small rural towns that make the west no good for public transportation. The big cities out here take up huge chunks of land for surprisingly little population. If you travel west you can actually see how when we crossed the Mississippi the wide open space really changed the American mentality. In the east you see a lot of multistory buildings, even single family houses tend towards two or three stories because there’s still this European “small space” mentality. Once you get to the west (up until the Pacific where we finally ran out of room) multi-story houses become a rarity, because there’s tons of room. Out here you have the “ranch” house, which is really an eastern style two story house except you take the second story (ie the “private” part of the house) and put it next to the first story “public” part) in an L. Office complexes that back east would be 5 stories with parking under the building out west are 2 stories with an open air parking lot, same square footage of office space, much higher land footprint.

This all adds up to cities that are impossible to cover well with public transit, to cover the territory you need so many routes and trains/ buses that even if half the population was using the system they’d run mostly empty most of the time. The whole western US is an urban planners nightmare, you can drop them in non-rural Phoenix and watch them pee their pants, it’s hell on earth for them. Kind of awesome really.

Exactly, that's why their goal is to make the western way of life untenable. You can see some of this view for the future in Austin where they're making these huge multistory developments with stores on the bottom and apartments above.

That might be how they’re thinking, but once you get west of the Mississippi the place is just too wide open for it. They’ll need to make cars REALLY expensive, and then we’ll still probably drive them. Public transportation, for local or long distance, just can’t work out here, the population density is too low. They’ll never learn though.

Liberals view small rural towns as "dead space" that eats up resources better allocated to cities. Most urban planners salivate over high density mixed use development. If you read magazines written by and for the liberal intelligentsia they're quite open about this.

2003 numbers have fun

For most Americans the daily 10+ mile walk (each way) to the train station would be healthy.

This train stuff is just silly. Everyone (i.e., Willie Green) points to Europe as a model. But they all forget that Europe grew up around the train system. America grew up around the highway system. If train travel were viable in America there would be private companies building tracks everywhere.

They're a bit more ambitious than that. If you read the liberal urban planning blogs they're intent on starving out the exurbs and remodeling the suburbs to get rid of cul-de-sacs(to force through traffic into neighborhoods). They want you to take the bus in town and if you need to go a long distance, the train. Anything but a car.

No it doesn’t. People don’t ride trains, people don’ t WANT to ride trains, funding trains is a stupid pathetic waste of money. Don’t waste money on transportation we know for a fact will not be used.

I think the liberal idea is to make cars expensive enough that the great unwashed stop driving and leave respectable citizens on the highways.

Europe really is the model of the modern liberal.

High speed rail and local commuter trains are the wet dream of Fascists and Euro-weenies! They dream of a world where the government controls your arrival and departure, your route and your destiny. These are the people who hate Big Oil but love Big Brother!

The Nazis loved to force folks onto trains too!

The autobahn(which inspired American highways) was another of Hitlers pet projects.

So, are you claiming the government doesn’t collect near enough in fuel taxes to pay for roads?

Are you seriously making that argument?

Yup. 33 billion of general tax revenue + 79 billion or so fuel tax. So per capita $330 per american or so(Yes I know that taxes really don't work this way).

If such routes actually are profitable then they do not need subsidy. Those routes alone would be served by private companies. Subsidy makes some political sense in the foreshortened vision of politicians but makes no economic sense.

The only reason trucking is anywhere near competitive with rail travel is the 32+ billion the gubbmint spends maintaining the highway system each year.

Highways versus trains are an interesting comparison. You can't monopolize the highway(the gubbmint owns it) so small business can move goods more easily. It also aids in the mobility of people; it's hard to move your family across the country in a train.

There are many arguments for car travel, but they are social and military, not economic.

Chinese, Americans, Europeans and Indians, the aggregate brainpower of the world is greater than it ever was.

There's a certain amount of hubris in that statement. If you watch the amazing ability of the Chinese to "#$"#$ in their own bed you'll have a pretty negative view of their "brainpower".

He is even gloomier than AL Gore. Were all gonna die,we are domed etc.

We *are* going to die. That part is assured. The real question is when. Dinosaurs lasted millions of years, humans have been around 50,000-250,000 years or so. Rediscovering the fact that species go extinct is nothing "new".

Well, OK then, nothing to worry about here, time to move along.

If the gubbmit turns off google and the core routers you'll have much bigger problems and the internet will keep chugging along just fine.

The real problem is when they start squealing about porn and demand everything is filtered.

Stupid. The whole point of the Internet is to survive a nuclear attack. Even if they shut down the core routers in the US all you need is a single point of connection to somewhere in the rest of the world and a mesh network. They’ll have to triangulate and shut down every ham radio operator in the states.

I remember when $800,000 was real money. Guess I’m getting old.

I hear you there. :)