The Bullet Train -- December 22, 2024

Locator: 44505BULLETTRAIN.

Before we do the "Bullet Train" stuff, here's a story I missed yesterday (or the day before, actually) and it's a huge story:

Now, back to the "Bullet Train" stuff.

This "AI stuff" is saving me a lot of time.  

Bullet Train Central is tracked here.

The most recent estimate to complete this project:

• March 15, 2024: $0.130 trillion -- new estimate for completed project.
  

Question: does Buttigieg and the DOT have any money left to fund the California bullet train.

Answer. Yes.

Link here. Date of the article: November 15, 2024.

At that time, Buttigieg and the DOT had $3.4 billion (?) to give away. 

Breitbart is reporting that California wants $0.5 billion of that $3.4 billion for the bullet train.

My hunch? California will get it. 

Does $0.5 billion = $500 million. I'm not good at math. Fact check me on that.

Wasn't the bullet train initially to cost less than $35 billion?

Whatever.

The current estimate: $100 billion.

$0.5 billion / $100 billion = 0.5% (needs to be fact checked).

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The Book Page: Re-Posting

 

America's Red Shift: Now Who's On The Wrong Side Of History

Essay by Charles R. Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books.

Claremont Review of Books, Fall 2024, p. 6.

Six-page essay on the Trump-Harris campaigns and outcome.

The essay leads up to Obama's famous "on the right side of history" speech in which he originally suggested that those on the right side of history will eventually win because it's the right side of history.

But, now, with the outcome of the 2024 presidential election he has changed his speech slightly. "The right side of history" is not a given to win out. For the "right side of history" to win out, "we must will it to win."

"The right side of history" is not a given. In fact, it may not even be the "right side of history."

His argument leads up to a very fun piece of writing, page 12:

Though he didn't use that demographic argument in his speech to the DNC in Chicago, Obama still looked forward confidently to building "a true Democratic majority." Someone ought to endow a prized and name it after Obama -- the Barack Obama Prize -- prize for being painfully out of touch with your own country. 

He (Obama) should receive the inaugural trophy. He could display it alongside the Nobel Prize he got in 2009 for bringing peace to the world. Trump and the MAGA Republicans are now in the process of assimilating working-class voters, including young black and Hispanics, supposedly elements that "true Democratic majority," into a new Trumpian movement that may form, in time, a new Republican majority party.

 

Consider Hispanic voters. Exit polls showed Trump winning about 55% of the Latino male vote. CNN reported a 42% swing toward the Republicans from 2016 to 2024. And it wasn't just en. Support for the Democrats among Latinas, according to CNN, dropped from a 44% advantage in 2016 to a 22-point advantage this year.

 

The Los Angeles Times interviewed some of Trump's Latino supporters. "Why am I for Trump?" asked Tomas Garcia, who supported him in 2016, 2020, and 2024. "Because I'm an American first of all." 

The70-year-old's great-grandparents emigrated from Mexico. "Hispanics are about the American dream, said Abraham Enriquez, 29, who was raised by the children of Mexican immigrant parents in west Texas.

"Trump being a billionaire from New York, with a beautiful family and a beautiful wife, as a young Hispanic man, that is the American dream, that is what you one day want to be like."

Michael Fienup, an economist who studies Hispanics, commented, "Latinos are hard-working, they're self -sufficient, they're entrepreneurial, they're patriotic, they're optimistic. Guess what? Those are fundamentally American characteristics."