Trains Not Tolls 1

The Trouble with Tolls

Maryland, following Virginia's lead, auguring similar failures and inequities, is moving to put in toll lanes as it seeks to expand 270 to accommodate exurban commuters from Frederick County and further. At the same time, it is depreciating it's already depreciated commuter train service. Lexus lanes sound attractive until you study their full implications.

Lexus lanes are premised on notions that private monarchal government is somehow better than public government, “privateering” of public infrastructure. This false argument was setup in the 1880s and has been in operation since then. It is very lucrative for the Privateers, not so much for actual capitalists and workers. The results of privatization often look good in the immediate aftermath. But they rarely are sustained. This is because the capital and labor necessary to sustain private systems is often secondary in importance to profiteering.

Worse, the financial benefits of privatization are illusory for other reasons.

1. The investment money is usually acquired by people, or their artificial person fictions, avoiding taxes on unearned income and often represents an opportunity cost of previous privatization.
2. Investment money is often also from surpluses intended for other purposes, (derivative) and that will lead to short term spending rather than sane development. [Bubbles and Booms]
3. Rental income is built into the investment. They will not invest unless they can guarantee rent from their investment. This means the profits are artificial and much higher than if the investment represented public investment.
4. Ownership equals rule, and rule means that which a person owns, they can loot, junk or destroy. And so whether or not the new system is maintained solely relates to whether the new owners can extract maximum profits if they maintain it.
5. Acquiring public services, where the customer has minimal or zero ability to find alternatives or refuse the products involved, usually leads to profiteering. Such as people using patent monopolies to jack up the price of insulin.
6. Profiteering is built in. If a person owns the market, the tracks, the shop buildings, other infrastructure, they can live on rent from them.
7. They will invest in markets and infrastructure that is lucrative, and neglect markets, i.e. neighborhoods that are short on credit.
8. And since their income is derivative of our already privatized banking system, that means they will likely collapse when the economy turns.
9. Privateering used to kill with broadsides, now it kills stochastically.
Bridges collapse because they were cheaply built.
Things manage to be costly and cheaply built at the same time.
Bills don't get paid while the privateers walk off with the loot.
Both inequality and inequity rise.

Those are the theoretical reason why Lexus lanes and similar privatization schemes fail. What is happening in Virginia illustrates how that plays out. Nothing like paying 60$ to use lexus lanes during rush hour times. They will claim they aren't price gouging. But does anyone believe them?

Reference:

https://ggwash.org/view/61095/495-and-95-toll-prices-were-very-high-on-tuesday-thats-likely-a-sign-theyre-working

Post Truth and Authoritarianism

The irony of the times is that what is happening to us in America, is not new. Like the spooky refrain in the Battleship Galactica reboot,

“It has happened before”

The only real difference is that some of us understand what is happening to us.

Hypatia and the Barbarians within

In the movie Agora, Hypatia, then, like now:

“is a 2009 Spanish English-language historical drama film directed by Alejandro Amenábar and written by Amenábar and Mateo Gil. The biopic stars Rachel Weisz as Hypatia, a mathematician, philosopher and astronomer in late 4th-century Roman Egypt, who investigates the flaws of the geocentric Ptolemaic system and the heliocentric model that challenges it.”

The movie Agora is fictional. We don't know for sure how advanced science was in 415 AD, but we do know that much was lost to history during that time. Thus the movie is probably is more accurate than its critics like to admit.

”Surrounded by religious turmoil and social unrest, Hypatia struggles to save the knowledge of classical antiquity from destruction. Max Minghella co-stars as Davus, Hypatia's father's slave, and Oscar Isaac as Hypatia's student, and later prefect of Alexandria, Orestes.”

Powerful Secrets

The secrets of the PaRDeS, religious interpretation, lay behind most of the religious traditions of the Common Era, and those secrets include deep psychological insights into the value and uses of myth, narrative, emotion and belief.

Deep Secrets

A thin elite understood the world, almost as well as educated people understand the world now. Deep understandings buried in myth and fable enabled a thin elite to live lives of value and learning. Mystery religions taught people to understand deep psychological truths within themselves through meditation, study, and parsing out the allegorical meaning within religious text. The myths themselves were of value as entertainment and the fantasies gave comfort to the sick, dying, enslaved and suffering.

The Gnostic bible texts used the power of interpretation to preach equality, make people see nuances of reality and open them up to enlightenment. Such texts are only secret because those reading them don't read past the fictional vehicle to their inner truth.

Manipulating Masses

These Bishops also understood the tools that we know today as propaganda and marketing, and how to use religion to manipulate people. Homilies meant to comfort and sick and dying, could turn people into fanatics, or make them angry at rivals or enemies. Any tool can be used for good or evil purposes and the early church used its power to manipulate people. The early church was, for the well educated bishops and priests who converted to Christianity, in part, to ride its opportunities for wealth and power, such a tool.

Solving a Problem

The Romans had a problem. Religion had been chaotic, paganism was losing its power to motivate people, and the Romans needed to control their empire. Christianity appealed to people who were oppressed, enslaved, and to whom the old Gods were no longer speaking. Ironically this was a mostly urban phenomena, so the Bishops accommodated rural beliefs even as they sought to craft a religion that enhanced their power. In the process they created a bigger problem.

Believing your own Myth

Unfortunately the tools of myth and interpretation were used to turn people into fanatics, demonize rivals and stir up mobs to attack enemies of Christiandom. Those early Christians taught people to be fanatic, and the fanatics burned the books that had made Roman Culture tolerable to the educated. Whether they were sincere, true believers, or simply manipulative sociopaths, but the result was not peace.

The Barbarians inside the Gates

Instead people fought over religious issues. They converted and then fought with "heretics." They attacked fellow citizens as Pagans, Jews, or members of heretical religions. The internal wars were what made Rome weak. Dropping standards of hygeine. Baths shut down as "pagan" followed by plagues caused by parasite vectors and spread due to poor hygeine. The Vandals may have looted and burned Rome, but they were fighting fights motivated as much by their Arianism's conflict with Catholicism as by tribal identity. Religion enhanced tribalism. Tribalism used religion.

A New Civilization?

The replacement of Graeco-Roman culture with Christian culture was led by people who understood secrets and misused them. As a result, the secrets were burned or buried with the books and educated people, like Hypatia, who understood them. The movie depicts the Barbarians at the Gate, as being ordinary Roman Citizens in the Gate. That is all too accurate about now, every bit as much as then. The author Joshua J. Mark in the Ancient History Encyclopedia writes:

“The anti-intellectual stance of the early church is attested to by early Christian writers themselves and so, if the Christians in the film are depicted as ignorant it is because they were so by choice. St. Justin Martyr (c. 100-165 CE) was openly hostile to classical learning and claimed that all the important values and thoughts expressed by writers like Plato were stolen from the Christian Bible’s Old Testament.” [ancient-eu]

Rejecting Civilization

The early Christian apologist Tertullian (c. 160-230 CE) also rejected classical learning and famously stated:

“What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? What between heretics and Christians? Our instruction comes from "the porch of Solomon," who had himself taught that "the Lord should be sought in simplicity of heart." Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition! We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after enjoying the gospel! With our faith, we desire no further belief.” Tertullian

The Barbarians were inside the gate.

Hypatia

https://www.ancient.eu/Hypatia_of_Alexandria/

https://www.ancient.eu/article/656/historical-accuracy-in-the-film-agora/

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1186830/

A Recidivist President

The Mueller report did not exonerate Trump. But he, his co-conspirators and co-dependents in the GOP, with a little help from the corrupt Attorney General William Pelham Barr, created a propaganda campaign to make it look like it did. They succeeded enough so that Trump decided he'd beat the rap and been "exonerated." Instead Trump shakes down the newly elected Ukrainian President Zelensky, in a shakedown over delivering promised military assistance. He does this, knowing that Ukraine is fighting trench war within it's country on the border with its Donbas provence, where the Russians have Tanks and military forces and regularly shoot at any Ukrainian who raises his head out of the trenches or happens to be in the path of an artillery shell. The USA promised to let them buy Javelin Anti-tank Rockets. Trump deliberately held up those missiles, after the State Department had certified that they'd complied with anti-corruption requirements to try to force investigations into 3 subjects:

1. An investigation into Burisma intended to go after Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden, who had been put on Burisma's board in order to curry favor with the Obama administration. That could be true, but not illegal and had no influence on Joe Biden.
2. They also claimed that Biden got a Prosecutor General of Ukraine fired in order to stop a Burisma investigation. This is false. The prosecutors fired were not doing investigations into corruption, but were themselves corrupt and shaking down targets. His ultimate replacement did investigate Burisma. Biden was proud of instigating reforms, not doing nepotism. Trump doesn't care about nepotism. You can ask his children.



3. The Cloudstrike allegations, is worse. It is part of a Russian Disinformation campaign that made up a false story that the DNC Server somehow ended up in Ukraine. The Emails were "in the cloud", but the DNC server is now in their basement along with the Watergate file Nixon's burglars broke into. Cloudstrike is a US security firm. One of it's top people was born in Moscow, not Ukraine. The whole story was a megilla designed to shift blame from the Russian Hackers to a Russian Target, Ukraine.

It turns out there is a whole lot of corruption going on. I was trying to draft mock up articles of impeachment based on what I knew when we found out about what Trump is doing in Ukraine. It just keeps getting more surreal. The latest news is that Giuliani is in Ukraine making a movie “documentary” about all this, a sort of Citizens United 2.0 Biden edition. That Barr is going around the work trying to put the USA Intel community on trial, put the 5 eyes intel sharing agreement into the shredder, and dig up dirt on those who informed the Mueller investigation so they can be discredited, prosecuted or driven out of office.

Ukrainian Impeachment Report:

https://intelligence.house.gov/report/

PDF: https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/20191203_-_full_report___hpsci_impeachment_inquiry_-_20191203.pdf

Mueller Report:

https://www.npr.org/2019/04/18/708850903/read-the-full-mueller-report-with-redactions