An article by Raju Chebium and Maureen Groppe in the Indianapolis Star discusses the possibility of high speed rail in the Midwest. The federal government has set aside $8 billion to develop high speed rail in this country. This is a significant but insufficient amount of money for development of high speed rail in this country. The French, Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish are apparently far ahead of us in this technology. In our area, the primary corridor would be from Chicago through Lafayette and Indianapolis to Cincinnati.

From my limited perspective of one round trip from Lafayette to Chicago, the main challenge isn’t the potential speed of the train and the rail, but the congestion of the corridors. Our trip from Chicago to Lafayette took upwards of 5 hours because we were rarely going at anything like top speed and spent a lot of time sitting still on the tracks.

Gov. Daniels does not seem to be a fan of this:

“I would just observe that that wouldn’t go very far if the idea is to actually build some of these,” Gov. Mitch Daniels said after Congress passed the stimulus bill, which included the $8 billion. “I wouldn’t want Indiana to get left holding the bag — an enormous bag — for some system that’s put in place and then began losing money, which these things tend to do.”

His first point about how far the available money will go toward actually completing a project is certainly relevant. Even though it happened a century and a half ago, Indiana remains scarred by overly ambitious transportation projects that could not be funded to completion. (The Indiana Mammoth Internal Improvement act included turnpikes, railroads, and canals; none of which were completed has been one of the defining pieces of Indiana history.)

The Governor’s other point about whether the rail would be a profit center seems to miss the mark, however. How much money do our roads make for the government? None. They lose quite a bit of money. The relevant question is whether the cost/benefit ratio of rail outweigh the cost/benefit ratio of the roads or other transportation it would replace — including potentially such things as reduction in pollution and fuel consumption; and – if fuel consumption is reduced enough, potentially reduction in military expenditures necessary to maintain the oil supply.

At the end of the day, it seems to me that if Spain and France can manage high speed rail, so can we. Anyone with experience traveling in Europe know how well their train systems work and how they affect the overall effectiveness in transportation for those areas?

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has an article from the AP entitled “Republicans – Less Spending is Path to Prosperity.” It’s as if the scales fell from their eyes the moment President Obama was sworn in.

U.S. Republicans say the path to prosperity is not the excessive spending proposed by President Barack Obama but limited spending that holds down the growth of government, taxes and debt.

“We believe you create prosperity by having an affordable government that pursues its responsibilities without excessive costs, taxes or debt,” Sen. Judd Gregg said Saturday in the weekly Republican radio address.

After the past eight years, the Republicans simply lack all credibility in matters of fiscal discipline. The Democrats are articulating a rationale for why spending is necessary at the moment. If you don’t buy that rationale, that’s reasonable, but if fiscal austerity is the policy in which you believe, then vote for the Libertarians.

I recently finished The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. I mentioned the book in an earlier post, I think. In any case, it is about the late 19th, early 20th century Amazon explorer, Percy Fawcett. I enjoyed the book. It mixes a biography of Fawcett with the story of the author’s attempt to follow in his footsteps to some degree.

Fawcett made numerous trips into the Amazon before finally disappearing in 1925 at the age of 58 with his son and his son’s friend in an expedition where he was determined to find “The Lost City of Z” which may or may not have been the inspiration for the legend of El Dorado.

A couple of thoughts: First, the Amazon seems like an absolutely horrible place to be an explorer. I guess by the time Fawcett came along, all of the less daunting unmapped place on earth had been covered. He had to hack through a trackless mass of jungle with danger and disease always present. Pack animals did not last very long. Food was difficult for non-natives to locate. Fawcett himself seems to have had a freakish constitution. He rarely seemed to get sick while those with him were constantly being debilitated and dying because of various tropical ailments.

Second, I think maybe it was the radio that really eliminated the frontier. Sure, people were getting better and better at charting the previously uncharted places on earth. But, at the end of the day, I don’t think having maps or books or knowledge of a place was instrumental in removing the other-worldly mystery of those distant lands. Rather, it seems as if it may have been the almost instant communication that removed the romance.

Fawcett’s rival, Dr. Alexander Hamilton Rice, took a different approach to exploration from Fawcett. Where Fawcett was a minimally funded, individualist explorer. Rice had an enormous fortune to draw from, organized large scale expeditions, and used the newest available technology to explore the Amazon. Of note were his use of radios and airplanes. Daily dispatches from the Amazon really changed the game. Rather than having a guy disappear for two years and then stagger out of the jungle half-dead to tell his tale, you had day-to-day reports of progress and observations. The airplane was also, obviously, a game changer — instead of hacking away under the dense canopy, you could get a bird’s eye view of the Amazon.

But, in my mind, real-time communication is really what changed far off places from something other worldly into a real part of our world. Part of this notion has to do with my feeble impression of exploration — traveling from Indiana out to the Rocky Mountain West with my buddy Tom. (Known to folks around here as “T”). We started roaming Colorado and surrounding areas about 1994. Back then, there wasn’t wide cell phone availability — in any case, we didn’t have any. Our connection to home was Tom’s occasional call back to his folks at some random payphone. To some extent, when we got back to Indiana, it felt like we had been on the moon in terms of our contact with friends and family during the trip. By 1999, this communication cut off was eroded by the Internet. During our trip to Rocky Mountain National Park, I recall finding a library at nearby Estes Park with Internet access, and being able to report on our progress to Amy back in Indiana. (We still didn’t have cell phones.) Our trips to Yosemite in 2003 and to various parts of Colorado in 2007 were much different in terms of communication. Cell phones had us in touch with our wives almost daily. Heck, that trip in 2007, I was blogging my progress and briefly had cell phone reception on top of La Plata peak at 14,300 feet. The feeling of being cut off from friends and family back home had pretty much been eliminated.

Anyway, the Lost City of Z is a pretty good read if you like history, biography, and/or tales of exploration.

Evan Bayh is not feeling the love in the blogosphere. His latest is apparently a threat to kill a bill if it allows bankruptcy judges to cram down mortgages. This despite Indiana’s leading position in foreclosure rates. Speculation is that this has to do with Bayh’s cozy relationship with the banking industry.

My wife flagged this article by Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic entitled The Case Against Breast Feeding. She points out that the medical evidence that breast milk is superior to formula for infants is tenuous and marginal. This is as opposed to the popular literature which suggests that breast milk is the elixir of the Gods and that if you give your kid formula, you might as well be stuffing unfiltered Pall Malls in their gummy little mouths.

After a couple of hours, the basic pattern became obvious: the medical literature looks nothing like the popular literature. It shows that breast-feeding is probably, maybe, a little better; but it is far from the stampede of evidence that Sears describes. More like tiny, unsure baby steps: two forward, two back, with much meandering and bumping into walls.

All things being equal, it’s probably best to breast feed if you can. But not all can, and all things are rarely equal. Amy & I (mostly Amy) are sensitized to this issue because Amy is unable to breast feed because of a medical procedure years ago. (I’m not talking out of school here, she is very open with this bit of information.) On the upside, we were able to observe the social pressure related to breast feeding without being overly affected by it — no options mean no real pressure. New mothers are made to feel guilty in various and sundry ways if they decide not to breast feed, but the medical evidence does not support this level of moral approbation. (That’s right, I know 25-cent words like “approbation” — despite, I might add, being a formula fed child myself — and I’m not afraid to use ’em.)

In any case, it’s an interesting article and worth a read.

Kelly Soderlund has an article about writer A.J. Jacobs and his new book, “The Year of Living Biblically” in which he chronicles his attempt to live by every rule set forth in the bible. The article talks about, for example, his efforts to avoid menstruating women or sitting where they have sat as well as his having to purge mixed fiber clothing from his closet (keeping with the Biblical injunction against mixing wool & linen.)

This idea amuses me, not because I think the Bible lacks value as a spiritual guide; but because I’m annoyed by people who use the Bible as a pretext to indulge in their own prejudices. “We have to oppose the gays because the Bible commands it!” Yeah, well, the Bible commands a lot of crazy stuff. The Bible can be a guide to moral living, but there has to be some external guidance as well to help someone pick which Biblical commands are imperative and which ones are relics from a tribe of Bronze Age shepherds.

Someone around these parts mentioned this bit from “The Life of Brian” a few days ago, and the tea baggers partiers have been in the news lately, so it was on my mind.

All right… all right… but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order… what have the Romans done for us?

This morning, I caught a bit of some right-winger or another on the extremely liberal MSNBC network that features 3 hours per morning of former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough. (Damn liberal media.) Anyway, the speaker was suggesting that if government would just get out of the way and stop trying to fix our problems, then our problems would more or less go away. See, government was the problem. (There were no questions, while I was watching at least, on how this theory of government being the problem squares with the lack of regulatory oversight turning into the AIG led financial implosion.) So, anyway, government should do nothing “for our own good.”

Curv3ball at The Poor Man Institute captures some of this in the call for sacrifice from the common man.

Because we’re in a recession, it would be irresponsible – naive even – for Obama to refrain from exacting a pound of flesh from average Americans. How long can he continue to deny reality? After all, in down economic times, we “all” have to make sacrifices. Like, say, slashing social security, medicare and unemployment benefits. Or raising taxes on the middle class, lowering minimum wage and laying off police officers, firefighters and teachers. That’s just off the top of my head. It’s the responsible thing to do.

Fear not, though. Those sacrifices will make the sacrificees better in the long run – reinforce their moral fiber and, ultimately, lead to true happiness! Struggle is good for the soul and the spirit! Everyone should do it! Almost.

All of this came together in my mind to remind me of the great line from Cool Hand Luke:

Captain, Road Prison 36: You gonna get used to wearin’ them chains after a while, Luke. Don’t you never stop listenin’ to them clinking. ‘Cause they gonna remind you of what I been saying. For your own good.

Luke: Wish you’d stop bein’ so good to me, cap’n.

Update Speaking of AIG – how is this for chutzpah? It is suing the United States Government for the return of $306 million in tax payments. (h/t I Like Pie, Spot!)

I am currently reading The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth About Global Corruption by John Perkins about which Joe Queenan writes a brutal take down. It is a book I picked up at the airport, and I have some of the same reservations about the book expressed by Queenan.

In another forum and before I read Queenan’s review, I wrote:

The author strikes me as more than a bit self-aggrandizing and not necessarily reliable on all points. But, the book strikes me as reliable enough to get me riled up.

In particular, he seems to report pretty well on the con game run through World Bank and IMF getting third world countries to take on huge debt to finance projects that benefit local elites and foreign corporations and which get paid back by squeezing the poor and middle-class.