Transportation

Who Needs Infrastructure?

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Last month I went to Haiti to help out with an IT project in Petit-Goâve, a medium-sized town about seventy kilometers west-southwest of Port-au-Prince, on the northern shore of the Tiburon Peninsula, opposite ÃŽle de la Gonâve on the Canal de Sud. The project’s objective is to create, or rather restore, a computer lab at “College” Harry Brakeman (actually a primary and secondary school, hereafter “CHB”), and provide greatly improved internet access, via wireless links, at five sites (including CHB) in Petit-Goâve owned by L’Eglise Methodiste d’Haiti (EMH). The epicenter of one of the larger aftershocks of the January 2010 earthquake was directly beneath Petit-Goâve.

Numerous ongoing projects for the EMH throughout Haiti are being funded by United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) and staffed by United Methodist Volunteers in Mission (UMVIM), but my personal involvement is not occurring as a result of direct involvement with any of those organizations. I have for many years been attending an informal Friday lunch group that for the past decade or so has included Clif Guy, who is the CIO of United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, generally known as “COR” throughout the Kansas City metropolitan area, in which it is by several measures the largest single church big enough to have its own IT department (larger than most church staffs altogether) and a CIO.

In mid-January I returned from a solitary and somewhat monastic sojourn in New Mexico and the trans-Pecos region of Texas to 1) get back to work at Sprint; 2) bury my just-deceased 18-year-old cat; and 3) talk to Clif about opportunities in Haiti, which he had mentioned several times over the previous year. Two months of frantic preparation later, which included among many other tasks the filling out of a “Mission Trip Notification of Death” to specify the disposition of my corpse, I was landing at Toussaint Louverture International Airport.

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Coal, Rails, and Ships

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…may not be the most glamorous segments of the world economy. But, in a very real sense, they underlie everything else.

Colombia, in partnership with China, is looking at a potential land-bridge railroad which could serve as an alternative to the Panama Canal. Ships arriving at a coastal terminus would offload their cargoes to the railroad, which would carry them 137 miles overland, and the process would be reversed at the other end.

The benefits of this “dry canal” for Atlantic-to-Pacific connection, and vice-versa, seem a bit questionable given the costs and delays of offloading and onloading containers and other freight–unless, of course, the Panama Canal reaches an extreme state of congestion and/or the canal fees are substantially increased. It appears, however, that one major motivating factor behind the project has to do with COAL. Columbia has substantial quantities of high-quality and easily-worked coal near the Caribbean end of the proposed route.

“Progressives” and establishment liberals have praised China’s progress in “green technology,” suggesting that the future energy supply for that country will come from solar, wind, and helpful leprechauns turning cranks while being supervised by wise unicorns. But if China’s leadership is serious about investing in a project like the Colombian land-bridge, then it’s pretty clear that they see a long-term future for coal as an energy source–clean or otherwise.

And I doubt it has escaped their attention that achieving/maintaining low electricity prices establishes a powerful competitive advantage in a whole range of manufacturing industries.

(link via Commonsense & Wonder)

Wisconsin Makes A Move On Illinois Business

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Our new Governor (Wisconsin) Scott Walker has signed legislation giving businesses that relocate to Wisconsin two years “free” – no corporate OR personal income taxes:

MADISON (WKOW) — Governor Scott Walker has signed a bill that gives income tax breaks for companies that relocate to Wisconsin.

The bill will forgive corporate and personal taxes for two years for companies that move to the state. The company could not have been located in Wisconsin for at least two years in order to qualify

I think they mean personal income taxes such as if you were running the company as a pass through like an LLC. I assume that is what they are talking about. Any way you slice it, this is fantastic news.

This got through the legislature with lightning speed, helped out by the fact that all three of our branches are Republican controlled now up here behind the cheddar curtain. I also read today that the public employee unions are getting ready for some very bad news for them in the near future.

We have just begun with the Walker administration, but I am very hopeful and happy by this stroke. Walker also sent back the Obama buck$ that would have started out the sham “high speed” rail network that would have been a boondoggle for the ages.

We may as well pick off what is left of the Illinois corpse before other states do.

Hopefully Walker will end up being a star like some other up and comers such as Mitch Daniels of Indiana.

A Gadsden Flag for Our Times

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Gadsden Flag, Don't Touch My Junk Version
Gadsden Flag, Don't Touch My Junk Version

Copyright © 2010 by Shannon Love and hereby placed in the public domain.

Inspired by this Charles Krauthammer essay [h/t Instapundit]:

Not quite the 18th-century elegance of “Don’t Tread on Me,” but the age of Twitter has a different cadence from the age of the musket. What the modern battle cry lacks in archaic charm, it makes up for in full-body syllabic punch.
 
Don’t touch my junk is the anthem of the modern man, the Tea Party patriot, the late-life libertarian, the midterm election voter.

Political correctness has never been about helping the downtrodden. It has been about turning people’s compassion and courtesy into a weapon against them. Political correctness has always been the bully’s cudgel. At long last, it has been pushed to its breaking point of absurdity.

As an aside, it is interesting what comes up when you google “Don’t Tread On Me”. I thought about using that one but “don’t touch my junk” wouldn’t have felt very sincere in that case.

Gales of November

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Last year, I wrote about the historic steamboat Delta Queen, whose withdrawal from passenger service was forced, on what appear to me to be very spurious grounds, by the federal government. One of the main perpetrators of this act was Congressman James Oberstar (D-MN), head of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

So I was especially pleased to see that Oberstar faces some serious competition in his race for re-election. This 18-term incumbent trails Republican candidate Chip Cravaack by only three points (42-45 percent). Quite an achievement on the part of the Cravaack campaign, given that Oberstar has something like a 10-to-1 money advantage.

There are plenty of reasons to support Cravaak over Oberstar in addition to the Delta Queen matter—indeed, some might say that the continued passenger operation of one steamboat is trivial in the context of the massive issues we face as a country. But the symbolism is important. In literally thousands of ways, the “progressive” Democrats have sought to restrict American freedoms, as the Lilliputians tied down Gulliver with threads. Your ability to choose your own light bulbs and shower heads, to have swing sets in your child’s schoolyard, to buy or sell pizza by the slice, to sell home-baked pies at a church sale, to have a transparent or translucent sunroof for your car, to decide for yourself whether or not to buy a Barbie doll for your daughter…all of these rights have already been constrained or are currently under attack. Not to mention the ever-tightening constraints on your ability to start your own business and make it succeed. Consciously or not, “progressives” seek to convert Americans from citizens into subjects, and the Delta Queen matter was simply one very visible symbol thereof.

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