Your rage is fully warranted. After printing trillions ostensibly for infrastructure, this happens (because they wasted it on their boutique causes), and now they think they can get away blaming it on Trump. Won't even declare emergency. Parasitic government.
I think we should ask all residents to get on buses...to the Mexico US border...and declare asylum seekers...and I am not kidding or joking on any level. I am 100% serious.
There’s the irony... I know ex pats living in Mexico... they are pretty strict about who they take. Also, you have to sign a document saying you will not seek any employment for two years ( I think it’s two ) .
Sounds like a pretty good idea. Although, I'm not sure they'd want to be put up in fancy hotels with people getting stabbed, raped, and druggies everywhere. 😒
I would take my chances...maybe they will send them to NYC or Martha's Vineyard..heck maybe Florida will take them. I want to open my doors to a family.. problem is, where.I live isn't sustainable for most likely the income bracket of East Palestine. So if they come here, it wouldn't be affordable long-term.
You nitwits are so easy to wind up! Islamofascists are going to kill you—we need some 18 year olds from East Palestine to volunteer to lose a leg in Iraq to quench our bloodlust…the toxic smoke won’t be able to kill too many brain cells because there just aren’t that many to kill. ;)
Look at me mommy! I put on your makeup and now I’m pretty like you! Are you mad mommy?? Don’t hit me mommy!! Stop hitting me mommy!! I’ll wash it off mommy! Stop hitting me mommy!!
It took over a week for the secretary of transportation to make any relevant comment let alone take any action. The "left" was once the proponent of environmental protection. Now it seems to ignore disasters like this one and the destruction of the Nordstream pipeline which released untold amounts of methane as a byproduct of foreign policy (which you noted in your podcast with Matt Taibbi). When Fox News takes the lead, unexpectedly, on this episode one is more and more convinced that "right" and "left" are terms which have completely lost definitional reliability, which appears to be the corporatist intention. One's terror is the result of deliberate confusion and obfuscation.
Let's get my politics up front . I'm a Trump Republican. However; I'm also a retired civil engineer who has a lot of experience with USG agencies and the railroads.
The Federal Railroad Administration is one of the worst of the agencies. It's "oversight" is a joke, irrespective of the party in power. I rwas that; in the Trump Administration, the FRA failed to enforce a requirement for improved braking technology. The absence of such technology may have contributed to the disaster
Trump's Transportation Secretary, Mitchell McConnell's wife, is not responsible for that decision. She probably never knew it was made. A permanent civil servant putting in his/her time toward his/her pension made the decision. I had the misfortune of dealing with dozens of such civil servants in my career as a private sector engineer. So neither Trump and Chao, nor Biden and Buttigieg are personally responsible. The bloated, personally unaccountable bureaucracy is responsible
So are the railroads. I lived near a large Pennstlvania Rail Road yard as a boy; and have worked on or near rail properties throughout my professional career. Spills of solid and
liquid hazardous materials have been routine as long as there gave been railroads, polluting surface water and groundwater. They usually are not as spectacular as East Palestine was
In order to increase their profitability to make themselves attractive to corporate and institutional investors (some of NS's largest investors are Bkackrock; Goldman Sachs; and JPMorgan Chase), railroads nationwide have reduced staffing in their Maintenance of Way Departments. The results are reduced track inspections; reduced track maintenance; reduced reconstruction of substandard trackage, and deraikments such as that in East Palestine and at other locations in the US over the past 10 days.
I am increasingly stunned by how many aspects of infrastructure maintenance seem to be ignored... like a gamble worth taking so those funds can be diverted to something else deemed more important like social justice murals in the train stations....remember the bridge that collapsed outside Minneapolis? The report of neglect on that was just crazy !
Thanks for remembering the I35W bridge collapse. Just a minor point: it actually happened right IN the center of Minneapolis, not outside of it. Right into the Mississippi River. A great example of how reality comes to smack us when we are not paying attention to maintenance.
My office was just on the other side of the river from the bridge. The lights flickered and the building shook like an earthquake when the bridge went down.
There were railroad tracks underneath the bridge. I personally saw tanker cars go into the river. I do not recall this ever being reported.
A large conference room faced the river and smooshed cars pulled out of the river and loaded onto flatbeds became a backdrop of my workday.
My former firm was involved in the reconstruction of that bridge. You are quite correct. Routine inspection by MNDOT, mandated by FHWA, would nave indicated the problem sufficiently in advance that the collapse would not nave occurred.
"A permanent civil servant putting in his/her time toward his/her pension made the decision."
Perhaps, but a bold assertion with no substantiation other than a purportedly educated opinion as far as can be seen here. Some actual evidence, please? If it is there it is certainly well and truly buried in the "bloated, personally unaccountable bureaucracy." That is why cabinet members are personally accountable for this, even if you and they think they get a pass.
I saw so many incompetent civil servants in my 45-year career that it would be impossible to document them. The commonly held belief in the US civil engine community is that if you don't think you can hold down a job in the private sector, go.work for the government. Government agencies are proof of the validity of the Pareto Principle, q.v.
This is why we do NOT have a functional government. We nave a bloated, ineffective, sclerotic government run by unaccountable civil servants, who work for the employer of last resort, the government. Sad, but true.
Libertarian dysphoria merges with liberal dysphoria. Freedom vs social justice. Masters of wealth weaponize this and neopoliticos are purchased. Trump is elected and SJW/DEI becomes a profit center. Could be the problem is human nature.
Everyone can do something, even if it is just going down the rabbit hole of understanding the complex origins and causes of social, political and organizational dysfunction, and how the commercial mass media's "sense making" system is dysfunctional.
The broken "sense making" system is actually a cultural problem with techno-economic disruption (and postmodern social conditions: suburban consumerism).
The old institutions that people placed trust in are fragile to disruption.
To build anti-fragile institutions and rebuild social trust requires that people become aware in ways that the legacy sense-making system is not capable of.
-----
Some social science on the problem of complexity as it relates to psychological, moral, spiritual and social and institutional dysfunction:
– Organisations sometimes select and promote the wrong individuals for managerial positions. These individuals may be incompetent, they may be manipulators and bullies. They are not the best people for the job and yet not only are they selected for positions of authority and responsibility, they are sometimes promoted repeatedly until their kind populate the highest levels of the organisational hierarchy. The purpose of this paper is to address this phenomenon by attempting to explain why it occurs and why organisational members tolerate such destructive practices. It concludes by proposing a cultural strategy to protect the organisation and its stakeholders from the ambitious machinations of the organisational sociopath.
Design/methodology/approach
– The authors develop an explanatory framework by attempting to combine elements of the theory of memetics with structuration theory. Memetic theory helps to analyse culture and communication of beliefs, ideas, and thoughts. Structuration theory can be used to identify motives and drives. A combination of these theoretical approaches can be used to identify the motives of organisational sociopaths. Such a tool is also useful for exploring the high level of organisation tolerance for sociopathic managers.
Findings
– Organisational tolerance and acceptance for sociopathic managerial behaviour appears to be a consequence of cultural and structural complexity. While this has been known for some time, few authors have posited an adequate range of explanations and solutions to protect stakeholders and prevent the sociopath from exploiting organisational weaknesses. Reduction of cultural and structural complexity may provide a partial solution. Transparency, communication of strong ethical values, promotion based on performance, directed cooperation, and rewards that reinforce high performing and acceptable behaviour are all necessary to protect against individuals with sociopathic tendencies.
Originality/value
– The authors provide a new cultural diagnostic tool by combining elements of memetic theory with elements of structuration theory. The subsequent framework can be used to protect organisations from becoming the unwitting victims of sociopaths seeking to realise and fulfil their needs and ambitions through a managerial career path.
The railroads are just cash cows that were developed when the federal government could just trample over little people. Contrast railroads with pipelines which are very difficult to get built because little people have a voice now for better or worse.
The President receives recommendations that supposedly are vetted by Cabinet secretaries before they reach his desk. The Cabinet Secretary assumes they are vetted by undersecretaries. The Undersecretary assumes the recommendation was .are by a competent permanent civil servant. Unfki, the permanent civil servant frequently is a time server who listens to industry representarives who say the proposed regulation will substantially increase costs without benefit to the public. So, the industry's self-interested recommendation is passed up.the chain of command to the President's desk without any real vetting. That's the way the system works.
Here’s a good article going back to George W Bush’s Administration who studied the use of pneumatic brakes on trains and declared they’d be a safety asset.
During the fracking boom in the Obama administration, despite the FAST act, the industry railed against the new regulations as it would impede the transport of fracked oil:
The article I’m quoting is referenced in my other response to you below:
“ An Associated Press review of the department’s rulemaking activities in Trump’s first year in office shows at least a dozen safety rules that were under development or already adopted have been repealed, withdrawn, delayed or put on the back burner. In most cases, those rules are opposed by powerful industries. And the political appointees running the agencies that write the rules often come from the industries they regulate.”—
You know, the AP is biased, & isn’t what it used to be. The article generalizes a lot; it would have been better if it had addressed each specific regulation, and its significance.
The one regulation that they spotlight, about electronically limiting truck speed, rang a bell with me. Differential speed is a bigger problem than just speeding. All things being equal, you are safer doing 80 on an empty road, than doing 50 in heavy traffic going 35.
Maybe the rubes in East Palestine, Ohio can hire Zelenskyy to lobby Congress and the Brandon Administration for some aid. He's done a pretty good job getting regular multi-billion-dollar aid packages for Ukraine. Maybe he can get them a few million or so. I know they're mostly Trump-voting deplorables and all, but the Azov Battalion being literal Nazis hasn't hurt the fundraising for Ukraine. Or if that fails, maybe they can get some illegal aliens bussed into their town, which should get them some DEI money to rebuild with (since "equity" requires that white people be left to their fate in the face of disasters, but with some brown faces in the mix, they'll be sure to garner more sympathy).
I remember a certain hurricane that broke a certain wall in NOLA and a certain president who bore all responsibility from the hurricane to the damage to the people who didn’t evacuate to the very heat they waited in. There was no shortage of blame. The politics isn’t new. Just the opportunity.
Over 200 people died in Mississippi from Katrina which is unheard of now for a hurricane…it was a monster. New Orleans actually didn’t get hit by Katrina, it was the poorly designed levees that failed. And at some point the federal government does have to step in and it took the Bush administration too long because we know now they were incompetent.
Yep. But Biden doesn’t have to be held to the same standard because you like him. I remember when you voted for him because he promised to end all the hurricanes, fires, and floods and unify the whole country and then the whole world. That’s working out nicely.
Lol, you voted for George W Bush! Bush killed twice as many Americans as Osama Bin Laden while shipping millions of jobs to China. Please stop voting. ;)
Mr. Kirn, I'm delighted to become a paid subscriber. This piece brought me in -- we live in Bozeman, I'm a former journalist, preoccupied with the media's abandonment of "the dimension of earthly occurrences" as you aptly put it. But I also follow Matt Taibbi, and America This Week is a favorite. Thank you for all you do.
I was there today. Frequent trains came rumbling through; I assume trying to get caught up. Most of the coverage is just noise establishing political positions. It makes me wonder how long it's been this bad without us really noticing. I wonder if anyone from any side with a corporate megaphone cares anything about the people they serve.
As you mentioned a couple of weeks ago on America this Week, who cares if the The NY Times, WaPo, etc. recant about Russiagate and have a “come to Jesus” moment.
They are all incapable of admitting their biases, and, frankly, I will NEVER believe another thing they say. EVER.
So their lack of coverage (or more accurately, their turning any criticism of the response/event into a Right-wing conspiracy) is exactly how they operate now. I expect nothing else from these rags. ZERO credibility.
FYI: El Gato Malo and Doomberg (both on Substack) each have pretty good pieces on the spill not being as rare, or catastrophic, as many are proclaiming.
One ominous observation I heard is that the large number of people who voted Trump in the region may account for the media silence. While cynical, it makes sense. Certain policy approaches and lots of rhetoric are openly used to otherize those who did not vote for the current "administration." Once the otherization reaches a certain potency, then some environmental disasters become more equal than others in the eyes of the corrupt media.
Ron and I stayed at the Murray in the 4th floor corner room. We thought of exactly what you wrote about concerning Livingston and the trains that rumble through the night.
We the people are still here. We are sitting at home calculating the deliberate harms done and wondering who is going to stop them. They seem unstoppable.
Everyone can do something, even if it is just going down the rabbit hole of understanding the complex origins and causes of social, political and organizational dysfunction, and how the commercial mass media's "sense making" system is dysfunctional.
The broken "sense making" system is actually a cultural problem with techno-economic disruption (and postmodern social conditions: suburban consumerism).
The old institutions that people placed trust in are fragile to disruption.
To build anti-fragile institutions and rebuild social trust requires that people become aware in ways that the legacy sense-making system is not capable of.
-----
Some social science on the problem of complexity as it relates to psychological, moral, spiritual and social and institutional dysfunction:
– Organisations sometimes select and promote the wrong individuals for managerial positions. These individuals may be incompetent, they may be manipulators and bullies. They are not the best people for the job and yet not only are they selected for positions of authority and responsibility, they are sometimes promoted repeatedly until their kind populate the highest levels of the organisational hierarchy. The purpose of this paper is to address this phenomenon by attempting to explain why it occurs and why organisational members tolerate such destructive practices. It concludes by proposing a cultural strategy to protect the organisation and its stakeholders from the ambitious machinations of the organisational sociopath.
Design/methodology/approach
– The authors develop an explanatory framework by attempting to combine elements of the theory of memetics with structuration theory. Memetic theory helps to analyse culture and communication of beliefs, ideas, and thoughts. Structuration theory can be used to identify motives and drives. A combination of these theoretical approaches can be used to identify the motives of organisational sociopaths. Such a tool is also useful for exploring the high level of organisation tolerance for sociopathic managers.
Findings
– Organisational tolerance and acceptance for sociopathic managerial behaviour appears to be a consequence of cultural and structural complexity. While this has been known for some time, few authors have posited an adequate range of explanations and solutions to protect stakeholders and prevent the sociopath from exploiting organisational weaknesses. Reduction of cultural and structural complexity may provide a partial solution. Transparency, communication of strong ethical values, promotion based on performance, directed cooperation, and rewards that reinforce high performing and acceptable behaviour are all necessary to protect against individuals with sociopathic tendencies.
Originality/value
– The authors provide a new cultural diagnostic tool by combining elements of memetic theory with elements of structuration theory. The subsequent framework can be used to protect organisations from becoming the unwitting victims of sociopaths seeking to realise and fulfil their needs and ambitions through a managerial career path.
Molecules are molecules and words are words and just so. But to be clear, the federal government and the deep state, deep pocket interests behind the federal government don't give a damn about the people.
Walter, you are a national treasure. Be well.
Great piece as I previously noted... Smoke on the water and fire in the sky. Our government is ....deplorable.
Your rage is fully warranted. After printing trillions ostensibly for infrastructure, this happens (because they wasted it on their boutique causes), and now they think they can get away blaming it on Trump. Won't even declare emergency. Parasitic government.
The people of East Palestine do not get so much as a hotel voucher.
Ukraine is lavished last week with *another* $9.5 billion.
Guess where the empire's priorities lie.
I think we should ask all residents to get on buses...to the Mexico US border...and declare asylum seekers...and I am not kidding or joking on any level. I am 100% serious.
There’s the irony... I know ex pats living in Mexico... they are pretty strict about who they take. Also, you have to sign a document saying you will not seek any employment for two years ( I think it’s two ) .
I think you're never allowed to own land either.
Sounds like a pretty good idea. Although, I'm not sure they'd want to be put up in fancy hotels with people getting stabbed, raped, and druggies everywhere. 😒
I would take my chances...maybe they will send them to NYC or Martha's Vineyard..heck maybe Florida will take them. I want to open my doors to a family.. problem is, where.I live isn't sustainable for most likely the income bracket of East Palestine. So if they come here, it wouldn't be affordable long-term.
Thank goodness Bidens decisions are not based on petty partisanship or Joe’s many decades long grudges....
Yes, the priorities lie with starting a hot war with Russia.
You nitwits are so easy to wind up! Islamofascists are going to kill you—we need some 18 year olds from East Palestine to volunteer to lose a leg in Iraq to quench our bloodlust…the toxic smoke won’t be able to kill too many brain cells because there just aren’t that many to kill. ;)
Gee wonder why Taibbi censored you
The Frenkleb0t-industrial-complex is a psychotic egregore, a mental sphincter that dribbles fetid mental excrement in the comments section.
The Frenkleb0t-industrial-complex is a psychotic egregore, a mental sphincter that dribbles fetid mental excrement in the comments section.
Wow. What a spectacular piece of writing. I share your mood, Mr. Kirn.
Remember when we were promised “unity”? The federal government certainly seems unified - but against the out-of-favor public.
He said he is the president of all people, no matter who they voted for, red or blue. as long as they voted for him of course.
❤️
Remember when you voted for George W Bush because you wanted to slaughter some innocent Muslims??
The Frenkleb0t-industrial-complex is a psychotic egregore, a mental sphincter that dribbles fetid mental excrement in the comments section.
Look at me mommy! I put on your makeup and now I’m pretty like you! Are you mad mommy?? Don’t hit me mommy!! Stop hitting me mommy!! I’ll wash it off mommy! Stop hitting me mommy!!
PSYCHOTIC BAZZ WHOLE TROLL
The Frenkleb0t-industrial-complex is a psychotic egregore, a mental sphincter that dribbles fetid mental excrement in the comments section.
Mommy, why were you wrestling those two men without any clothes on? Am I going to get two daddies now?
SEEK PSYCHIATRIC TREATMENT, ASAP. TR0LL
Psychotic troll.
I know you're not talking to me...
The Frenkleb0t-industrial-complex is a psychotic egregore, a mental sphincter that dribbles fetid mental excrement in the comments section.
It took over a week for the secretary of transportation to make any relevant comment let alone take any action. The "left" was once the proponent of environmental protection. Now it seems to ignore disasters like this one and the destruction of the Nordstream pipeline which released untold amounts of methane as a byproduct of foreign policy (which you noted in your podcast with Matt Taibbi). When Fox News takes the lead, unexpectedly, on this episode one is more and more convinced that "right" and "left" are terms which have completely lost definitional reliability, which appears to be the corporatist intention. One's terror is the result of deliberate confusion and obfuscation.
Yes. Exactly.
Let's get my politics up front . I'm a Trump Republican. However; I'm also a retired civil engineer who has a lot of experience with USG agencies and the railroads.
The Federal Railroad Administration is one of the worst of the agencies. It's "oversight" is a joke, irrespective of the party in power. I rwas that; in the Trump Administration, the FRA failed to enforce a requirement for improved braking technology. The absence of such technology may have contributed to the disaster
Trump's Transportation Secretary, Mitchell McConnell's wife, is not responsible for that decision. She probably never knew it was made. A permanent civil servant putting in his/her time toward his/her pension made the decision. I had the misfortune of dealing with dozens of such civil servants in my career as a private sector engineer. So neither Trump and Chao, nor Biden and Buttigieg are personally responsible. The bloated, personally unaccountable bureaucracy is responsible
So are the railroads. I lived near a large Pennstlvania Rail Road yard as a boy; and have worked on or near rail properties throughout my professional career. Spills of solid and
liquid hazardous materials have been routine as long as there gave been railroads, polluting surface water and groundwater. They usually are not as spectacular as East Palestine was
In order to increase their profitability to make themselves attractive to corporate and institutional investors (some of NS's largest investors are Bkackrock; Goldman Sachs; and JPMorgan Chase), railroads nationwide have reduced staffing in their Maintenance of Way Departments. The results are reduced track inspections; reduced track maintenance; reduced reconstruction of substandard trackage, and deraikments such as that in East Palestine and at other locations in the US over the past 10 days.
I am increasingly stunned by how many aspects of infrastructure maintenance seem to be ignored... like a gamble worth taking so those funds can be diverted to something else deemed more important like social justice murals in the train stations....remember the bridge that collapsed outside Minneapolis? The report of neglect on that was just crazy !
Thanks for remembering the I35W bridge collapse. Just a minor point: it actually happened right IN the center of Minneapolis, not outside of it. Right into the Mississippi River. A great example of how reality comes to smack us when we are not paying attention to maintenance.
My office was just on the other side of the river from the bridge. The lights flickered and the building shook like an earthquake when the bridge went down.
There were railroad tracks underneath the bridge. I personally saw tanker cars go into the river. I do not recall this ever being reported.
A large conference room faced the river and smooshed cars pulled out of the river and loaded onto flatbeds became a backdrop of my workday.
I never read anything about the railroad cars and I followed that story for awhile.
Thanks! I was on my way back to the city from Austin.. flew home to Florida the next day and then it happened the following day..
My former firm was involved in the reconstruction of that bridge. You are quite correct. Routine inspection by MNDOT, mandated by FHWA, would nave indicated the problem sufficiently in advance that the collapse would not nave occurred.
My Dad was in a nursing home a bit south of there... I drove over that Bridge two days before!! What was the name? Windotta? That was a bit unnerving!
"A permanent civil servant putting in his/her time toward his/her pension made the decision."
Perhaps, but a bold assertion with no substantiation other than a purportedly educated opinion as far as can be seen here. Some actual evidence, please? If it is there it is certainly well and truly buried in the "bloated, personally unaccountable bureaucracy." That is why cabinet members are personally accountable for this, even if you and they think they get a pass.
I saw so many incompetent civil servants in my 45-year career that it would be impossible to document them. The commonly held belief in the US civil engine community is that if you don't think you can hold down a job in the private sector, go.work for the government. Government agencies are proof of the validity of the Pareto Principle, q.v.
Certainly a valid principle, but the buck still stops at the top or we have no functional government.
This is why we do NOT have a functional government. We nave a bloated, ineffective, sclerotic government run by unaccountable civil servants, who work for the employer of last resort, the government. Sad, but true.
Libertarian dysphoria merges with liberal dysphoria. Freedom vs social justice. Masters of wealth weaponize this and neopoliticos are purchased. Trump is elected and SJW/DEI becomes a profit center. Could be the problem is human nature.
(duplicate)
re: when meaning (and trust) falls apart, society falls apart
https://meaningness.com/meaningness-history
Everyone can do something, even if it is just going down the rabbit hole of understanding the complex origins and causes of social, political and organizational dysfunction, and how the commercial mass media's "sense making" system is dysfunctional.
The broken "sense making" system is actually a cultural problem with techno-economic disruption (and postmodern social conditions: suburban consumerism).
The old institutions that people placed trust in are fragile to disruption.
To build anti-fragile institutions and rebuild social trust requires that people become aware in ways that the legacy sense-making system is not capable of.
-----
Some social science on the problem of complexity as it relates to psychological, moral, spiritual and social and institutional dysfunction:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242338489_Organisational_sociopaths_Rarely_challenged_often_promoted_Why
excerpt:
Abstract
Purpose
– Organisations sometimes select and promote the wrong individuals for managerial positions. These individuals may be incompetent, they may be manipulators and bullies. They are not the best people for the job and yet not only are they selected for positions of authority and responsibility, they are sometimes promoted repeatedly until their kind populate the highest levels of the organisational hierarchy. The purpose of this paper is to address this phenomenon by attempting to explain why it occurs and why organisational members tolerate such destructive practices. It concludes by proposing a cultural strategy to protect the organisation and its stakeholders from the ambitious machinations of the organisational sociopath.
Design/methodology/approach
– The authors develop an explanatory framework by attempting to combine elements of the theory of memetics with structuration theory. Memetic theory helps to analyse culture and communication of beliefs, ideas, and thoughts. Structuration theory can be used to identify motives and drives. A combination of these theoretical approaches can be used to identify the motives of organisational sociopaths. Such a tool is also useful for exploring the high level of organisation tolerance for sociopathic managers.
Findings
– Organisational tolerance and acceptance for sociopathic managerial behaviour appears to be a consequence of cultural and structural complexity. While this has been known for some time, few authors have posited an adequate range of explanations and solutions to protect stakeholders and prevent the sociopath from exploiting organisational weaknesses. Reduction of cultural and structural complexity may provide a partial solution. Transparency, communication of strong ethical values, promotion based on performance, directed cooperation, and rewards that reinforce high performing and acceptable behaviour are all necessary to protect against individuals with sociopathic tendencies.
Originality/value
– The authors provide a new cultural diagnostic tool by combining elements of memetic theory with elements of structuration theory. The subsequent framework can be used to protect organisations from becoming the unwitting victims of sociopaths seeking to realise and fulfil their needs and ambitions through a managerial career path.
...
The railroads are just cash cows that were developed when the federal government could just trample over little people. Contrast railroads with pipelines which are very difficult to get built because little people have a voice now for better or worse.
The Frenkleb0t-industrial-complex is a psychotic egregore, a mental sphincter that dribbles fetid mental excrement in the comments section.
Hi William,
As a Registered Architect and native Ohioan now living in Texas, I appreciate your comments.
I think I read somewhere that Trump had to sign off on this new brake decision to rescind it.
The President receives recommendations that supposedly are vetted by Cabinet secretaries before they reach his desk. The Cabinet Secretary assumes they are vetted by undersecretaries. The Undersecretary assumes the recommendation was .are by a competent permanent civil servant. Unfki, the permanent civil servant frequently is a time server who listens to industry representarives who say the proposed regulation will substantially increase costs without benefit to the public. So, the industry's self-interested recommendation is passed up.the chain of command to the President's desk without any real vetting. That's the way the system works.
Summary: corrupt lobbyists control DC
Prime Equity. Hedge funds or whatever. Railroads. Chemical industry. Oil industry.
The controlling factions of both major political parties are sold out to those kinds of corruption and more.
Reformers, such as Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Ron Paul, Tulsi Gabbard and many others are routinely stabbed in the back by corrupt political entities.
Voters are brainwashed. Meaningless "Controlled Opposition" narratives are pervasive.
Here’s a good article going back to George W Bush’s Administration who studied the use of pneumatic brakes on trains and declared they’d be a safety asset.
During the fracking boom in the Obama administration, despite the FAST act, the industry railed against the new regulations as it would impede the transport of fracked oil:
https://theintercept.com/2023/02/21/east-palestine-rail-safety-congress/
For a registered architect, you just made “a bold assertion with no substantiation “ re Trump . . ‘I think I read somewhere”. ? ? ?
The article I’m quoting is referenced in my other response to you below:
“ An Associated Press review of the department’s rulemaking activities in Trump’s first year in office shows at least a dozen safety rules that were under development or already adopted have been repealed, withdrawn, delayed or put on the back burner. In most cases, those rules are opposed by powerful industries. And the political appointees running the agencies that write the rules often come from the industries they regulate.”—
I owe you an apology for my tone.
You know, the AP is biased, & isn’t what it used to be. The article generalizes a lot; it would have been better if it had addressed each specific regulation, and its significance.
The one regulation that they spotlight, about electronically limiting truck speed, rang a bell with me. Differential speed is a bigger problem than just speeding. All things being equal, you are safer doing 80 on an empty road, than doing 50 in heavy traffic going 35.
Good luck on the internet.
Forgive me, that was a lazy reply on my part. I will look thru my tweets and RTs to find the article where I had read that.
Here ya go: https://apnews.com/article/wv-state-wire-north-america-donald-trump-us-news-ap-top-news-2e91c7211b4947de8837ebeda53080b9mp-us-news-ap-top-news-transportation-1936e77a11924c909880f1ef014c7ca7
mindless b0t
Maybe the rubes in East Palestine, Ohio can hire Zelenskyy to lobby Congress and the Brandon Administration for some aid. He's done a pretty good job getting regular multi-billion-dollar aid packages for Ukraine. Maybe he can get them a few million or so. I know they're mostly Trump-voting deplorables and all, but the Azov Battalion being literal Nazis hasn't hurt the fundraising for Ukraine. Or if that fails, maybe they can get some illegal aliens bussed into their town, which should get them some DEI money to rebuild with (since "equity" requires that white people be left to their fate in the face of disasters, but with some brown faces in the mix, they'll be sure to garner more sympathy).
I remember a certain hurricane that broke a certain wall in NOLA and a certain president who bore all responsibility from the hurricane to the damage to the people who didn’t evacuate to the very heat they waited in. There was no shortage of blame. The politics isn’t new. Just the opportunity.
Over 200 people died in Mississippi from Katrina which is unheard of now for a hurricane…it was a monster. New Orleans actually didn’t get hit by Katrina, it was the poorly designed levees that failed. And at some point the federal government does have to step in and it took the Bush administration too long because we know now they were incompetent.
Speaking of incompetent:
The Frenkleb0t-industrial-complex is a psychotic egregore, a mental sphincter that dribbles fetid mental excrement in the comments section.
Yep. But Biden doesn’t have to be held to the same standard because you like him. I remember when you voted for him because he promised to end all the hurricanes, fires, and floods and unify the whole country and then the whole world. That’s working out nicely.
Lol, you voted for George W Bush! Bush killed twice as many Americans as Osama Bin Laden while shipping millions of jobs to China. Please stop voting. ;)
SPEAKING OF INCOMPETENT AND INCOHERENT:
The Frenkleb0t-industrial-complex is a psychotic egregore, a mental sphincter that dribbles fetid mental excrement in the comments section.
🤯🤣🤘
Mr. Kirn, I'm delighted to become a paid subscriber. This piece brought me in -- we live in Bozeman, I'm a former journalist, preoccupied with the media's abandonment of "the dimension of earthly occurrences" as you aptly put it. But I also follow Matt Taibbi, and America This Week is a favorite. Thank you for all you do.
Taibbi got Gene Frenkle deleted from Substack. Taibbi is a hypocrite that promotes #fakenews. Kirn is Taibbi’s lil’ bitch.
SEEK PSYCHIATRIC TREATMENT, ASAP. TR0LL
The Frenkleb0t-industrial-complex is a psychotic egregore, a mental sphincter that dribbles fetid mental excrement in the comments section.
❤️
East Palestine detracts from The Narrative.
Therefore, it does not merit coverage.
Shhhh!
Hey! Pssst! Over here!
Check out these “spy” balloons!
Yep 👍
I was there today. Frequent trains came rumbling through; I assume trying to get caught up. Most of the coverage is just noise establishing political positions. It makes me wonder how long it's been this bad without us really noticing. I wonder if anyone from any side with a corporate megaphone cares anything about the people they serve.
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As you mentioned a couple of weeks ago on America this Week, who cares if the The NY Times, WaPo, etc. recant about Russiagate and have a “come to Jesus” moment.
They are all incapable of admitting their biases, and, frankly, I will NEVER believe another thing they say. EVER.
So their lack of coverage (or more accurately, their turning any criticism of the response/event into a Right-wing conspiracy) is exactly how they operate now. I expect nothing else from these rags. ZERO credibility.
FYI: El Gato Malo and Doomberg (both on Substack) each have pretty good pieces on the spill not being as rare, or catastrophic, as many are proclaiming.
I just wrote about NYT and that GLAAD article. The MSM has definitely disappointed us all the past few years.
One ominous observation I heard is that the large number of people who voted Trump in the region may account for the media silence. While cynical, it makes sense. Certain policy approaches and lots of rhetoric are openly used to otherize those who did not vote for the current "administration." Once the otherization reaches a certain potency, then some environmental disasters become more equal than others in the eyes of the corrupt media.
It’s true. So screwy.
Ron and I stayed at the Murray in the 4th floor corner room. We thought of exactly what you wrote about concerning Livingston and the trains that rumble through the night.
As usual you have nailed the crux of this event.
We the people are still here. We are sitting at home calculating the deliberate harms done and wondering who is going to stop them. They seem unstoppable.
re: when meaning (and trust) falls apart, society falls apart
https://meaningness.com/meaningness-history
Everyone can do something, even if it is just going down the rabbit hole of understanding the complex origins and causes of social, political and organizational dysfunction, and how the commercial mass media's "sense making" system is dysfunctional.
The broken "sense making" system is actually a cultural problem with techno-economic disruption (and postmodern social conditions: suburban consumerism).
The old institutions that people placed trust in are fragile to disruption.
To build anti-fragile institutions and rebuild social trust requires that people become aware in ways that the legacy sense-making system is not capable of.
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Some social science on the problem of complexity as it relates to psychological, moral, spiritual and social and institutional dysfunction:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242338489_Organisational_sociopaths_Rarely_challenged_often_promoted_Why
excerpt:
Abstract
Purpose
– Organisations sometimes select and promote the wrong individuals for managerial positions. These individuals may be incompetent, they may be manipulators and bullies. They are not the best people for the job and yet not only are they selected for positions of authority and responsibility, they are sometimes promoted repeatedly until their kind populate the highest levels of the organisational hierarchy. The purpose of this paper is to address this phenomenon by attempting to explain why it occurs and why organisational members tolerate such destructive practices. It concludes by proposing a cultural strategy to protect the organisation and its stakeholders from the ambitious machinations of the organisational sociopath.
Design/methodology/approach
– The authors develop an explanatory framework by attempting to combine elements of the theory of memetics with structuration theory. Memetic theory helps to analyse culture and communication of beliefs, ideas, and thoughts. Structuration theory can be used to identify motives and drives. A combination of these theoretical approaches can be used to identify the motives of organisational sociopaths. Such a tool is also useful for exploring the high level of organisation tolerance for sociopathic managers.
Findings
– Organisational tolerance and acceptance for sociopathic managerial behaviour appears to be a consequence of cultural and structural complexity. While this has been known for some time, few authors have posited an adequate range of explanations and solutions to protect stakeholders and prevent the sociopath from exploiting organisational weaknesses. Reduction of cultural and structural complexity may provide a partial solution. Transparency, communication of strong ethical values, promotion based on performance, directed cooperation, and rewards that reinforce high performing and acceptable behaviour are all necessary to protect against individuals with sociopathic tendencies.
Originality/value
– The authors provide a new cultural diagnostic tool by combining elements of memetic theory with elements of structuration theory. The subsequent framework can be used to protect organisations from becoming the unwitting victims of sociopaths seeking to realise and fulfil their needs and ambitions through a managerial career path.
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Mommy, I can read and write!! Please mommy, look at me and stop wrestling with that strange man!! Please mommy!
The Frenkleb0t-industrial-complex is a psychotic egregore, a mental sphincter that dribbles fetid mental excrement in the comments section.
SEEK PSYCHIATRIC TREATMENT, ASAP. TR0LL
Molecules are molecules and words are words and just so. But to be clear, the federal government and the deep state, deep pocket interests behind the federal government don't give a damn about the people.