Leftism is all about harnessing the power of pixie dust and expeller pressed unicorn horn oil. I wish the laws of economics and of nature to be different, therefore they are. One way magical thinking manifests itself is the sun-dappled dream that we can get rid of fossil fuels, switch to electric vehicles, the changeover will be painless, and we won’t notice any change in our standard of living.

An electric car is, well, electric, and electric is easy because I can just plug in my Vitamix blender at home to make my artisanal kale smoothie and it just turns on and couldn’t be simpler. So having an electric car will be just as easy!

Michael Lind has a good article in Tablet outlining the difficulties in putting an electric car in every garage. Never mind how we’re going to “cleanly” produce all the electricity these vehicles would consume. Electric vehicles, and especially the batteries that power them, require the kinds of natural resources that don’t grow on trees.

But according to experts on global mineral production who belong to SoS Minerals, in a letter delivered to the British Committee on Climate Change:

The metal resource needed to make all cars and vans electric by 2050 and all sales to be purely battery electric [in the UK] by 2035. To replace all UK-based vehicles today with electric vehicles (not including the LGV and HGV fleets), assuming they use the most resource-frugal next-generation NMC 811 batteries, would take 207,900 tonnes cobalt, 264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate (LCE), at least 7,200 tonnes of neodymium and dysprosium, in addition to 2,362,500 tonnes copper. This represents, just under two times the total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and 12% of the world’s copper production during 2018. Even ensuring the annual supply of electric vehicles only, from 2035 as pledged, will require the UK to annually import the equivalent of the entire annual cobalt needs of European industry. …

Challenges of using ‘green energy’ to power electric cars: If wind farms are chosen to generate the power for the projected two billion cars at UK average usage, this requires the equivalent of a further years’ worth of total global copper supply and 10 years’ worth of global neodymium and dysprosium production to build the windfarms.

There is not enough cobalt, neodymium, or lithium being mined and refined in the entire world today for Britain to meet its green transition goals in the next generation. And Britain has only 67 million people. The United States has 330 million. The world has nearly 8 billion. Do the math.

Notes from, arguably, the worst retirement party ever.

Hand one to Fred Melo of the Pioneer Press – he’s done the unthnkable, for a Twin Cities mainstream media figure; actually reporting on the actual state of life on the “Vomit Comet” (AKA Green Line)..

A friend of the blog emailed re this story:

I’d rather double down on reminding people why the Green Line is so awful than be snarky. But, with all the urbanists subtweeting Fred Melo’s post about smoking/drinking on light rail, them tweeting that smoking is no big deal, not a safety issue, I kind of want to ask if smokers will be welcome again at bars/restaurants again. 

It’s a mostly smokeless smoke.

Our cities are a little like Charlie Brown.

Every time Lucy puts the ball on the ground, Charlie remembers all the times she’s pulled the ball away. And yet, he has faith; maybe this will be the first time.

Lucy’s back:

Let’s make sure we’re clear on this – the only “fans” of this idea are the members of the non-profit/industrial complex and the consultant class, who’ll benefit handsomely from it.

As they did from light rail, and the “urban reimagining” of which it is a part.

As they did from the Saint Paul Port Authority’s grandiose, costly, failed urban utopian visionmongering.

As they did from “Urban Renewal”, which did the opposite of renew urban life, replacing old downtowns with sterile, brutalist concrete canyons (see also – Downtown Saint Paul, from Minnesota to Jackson).

A friend of the blog emailed:

I94 was built to “revitalize” middle class Black neighborhood and poor white neighborhood. Historically, it is now said to have destroyed the Rondo neighborhood businesses. 
But, people were not defeated. Black businesses persisted. Businesses by Immigrants from Asian countries also moved in. Perhaps I94 worked. It revitalized!
How dare they. So the Green Line was built to “revitalize” marginalized neighborhoods of working class Americans (of all races, ethnicities).
It kind of worked-businesses closed or left to areas that were no longer on Green Line. Many Black owned, Asian American owned, and immigrant owned businesses left.
Any hope of retail that appealed to work class neighbors was squashed by Allianz Field construction. It was further solidified once the remaining businesses were allowed to be destroyed in the 2020 riots.
Yet, our elites must believe there are still too many of the wrong people lurking around the neighborhood. We need to be further revitalized out of the community. Maybe Bill McGuire and his soccer fans are scared of us. Thus, people like Councilmember Mitra Jalali and urbanist activists propose to once again destroy what communities have built around. 

In a city destroyed, over and over, by urban planning dilettantes, this is yet another fun project for the urban wonk class, which will be paid for literally by taxpayers, and figuratively by generations of the urban miserable yet unborn.

A friend and occasional commenter writes:

To the tune of Johnny Cash ‘How Highs the Water Momma?’

Let’s blow some money papa

700 Mil and climbing

It’s a billion here, a billion there

who gives a damn if people care

we’re not elected and that’s not fair

700 mil and climbing

Let’s blow some money papa

1.7 billion and climbing

The council’s broke, Walz is woke

We’ll spend enough money

To make the DFL Choke

In the end who’s going to care

1.7 bill and climbing

Almost writes itself…..That’s after just one cup of coffee

Craig (Redacted)

I haven’t recorded anything in a while. Might have to give this a shothave to give us a shot.

Given the damage popping up in that condo unit/converted grain silo, might have to come up with some lyrics adapted from “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”.

So the Southwest Light Rail – already estimated at an insane two billion dollars – is going to go 40% over budget, and 3-4 years late.

Cost overruns and delays have pushed the most expensive public works project in state history well above its original $2 billion budget. Last year, Met Council tapped a $200 million contingency fund from Hennepin County taxpayers, which is now mostly committed. The council has been unable to give an updated cost estimate for months.

“These changes have impacted both the time required [for Lunda McCrossan] to complete its work and the costs under the civil construction contract,” Metro Transit General Manager Wes Kooistra and project managers wrote in a memo to council members. “These changes will also delay the systems contractor, the start of revenue operations, and result in additional costs.”

Many of the changes are due to posh Kenwood NIMBYs who support light rail, but not in their backyards, forcing the line into a ruinously expensive tunnel. That tunnel – which should be called the “Met Council Provides Concierge Service To Posh Neighborhoods With DFL Clout” tunnel, although the plaques over the galleries would probably add another $50 Million – has been a known issue for long enough that it’s already been memory-holed from the Met Council narrative.

They don’t consider themselves NIMBYs, naturally:

“They called us NIMBYs, rich people who just wanted not to be bothered,” says Mary Pattock, former chair of the Cedar Isles Dean neighborhood board and longtime critic of the LRT routing. Echoing Rep. Hornstein, she says, “we told them the geology between the lakes was messy. We told them there was not room to build a tunnel safely. We told them you are going to run into problems you are not going to be able to solve. Now it’s all coming true.”

Of course, the fact that they’re building a tunnel to carry the train under the neighborhood is because of NIMBYism on the part of the whole, well-to-do, clout-enabled neighborhood.

“750 million over budget” is in today’s dollars, by the way. My fearless prediction: by the time the first train takes the first armed robber from Target Center to Eden Prairie, this train will have cost $3.2 Billion to build. I’m making a note to check on this in 2026. I’m feeling confident.

I’ll be talking with Senator Dave Osmek about this on the show tomorrow.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

An altimeter is an instrument which tells you high you are. Pilots rely on them to avoid obstructions on the ground, to maintain separation between aircraft at different altitudes, and to make smooth landings.

The traditional altimeter works on air pressure. Air pressure decreases the higher you go from the Earth. If you properly calibrate your pressure altimeter, it works fine. I flew with one for years.

Modern technology has moved on. The newest altimeters work on radar. They send a radar beam down from the airplane to reflect off the ground. They are much more precise because they’re measuring the actual distance, not the calculated distance (assuming the pressure calibration is correct).

More precise, that is, unless something interferes with the radar. “RaDAR” is actually an acronym for Radio Detection and Ranging. A radar wave is a radio wave operating on a certain radio frequency. A ground transmitter operating on a nearby frequency can cause interference, making the radar altimeter malfunction. On a bright, sunny day, not a huge problem. The pilot can see the ground and estimate altitude by experience. At night or in bad weather, losing your altimeter is a terrifying problem. Anything which makes a radar altimeter malfunction is a potential disaster.

Such as, for instance, 5G cell phone frequency, which is also a radio wave. 5G was planned to roll out Wednesday but has been halted because major airlines are canceling flights for fear of it.

This isn’t a new issue. We’ve known it was coming for years. Suddenly, it’s a problem? Suddenly, major airlines are complaining about how the rollout is dangerous? Why wasn’t this worked out ages ago?

Remind me, who’s in charge of transportation issues in the United States? And who’s his boss, the man where the buck stops?

Joe Doakes

The more overwhelmed with bureaucrats our government becomes, the more amateurish it gets.

Haven’t heard much about the southwest light rail line, have we?

There’s a reason for that. It’s hosed. Hosed perhaps beyond reasonable repair.And nobody in officialdom wants to talk about it – at least, not before the midterms:

The $2 billion Southwest Light Rail Transit Line the most expensive public works project ever undertaken in Minnesota. Besides that, it also holds the potential to be the state’s biggest boondoggle, a potential political scandal in the making in the midst of the 2022 election.

Fox 9 News reports the Met Council, the agency overseeing the project, has essentially clammed up, refusing to provide key construction updates on cost and completion date.

They don’t even have any idea when they will have any idea how bad it’s going to be:

An updated timeline and cost projection, once expected towards the end of 2021, will now come “sometime in 2022,” Trevor Roy, a project spokesman, told FOX 9. Met Council officials have long acknowledged that the rail line will exceed its original $2 billion budget and estimated 2023 opening. They are now changing tactics to renegotiate the project schedule after criticism from an outside evaluator.

Call me a cynic, but I think there’s a reason this story is coming out in January of an election year; so the media can say “we covered it! We’re not actually PR water carriers for the DFL!

I haven’t written here recently (sorry, Mitch!), mostly because I did a fair amount of traveling in August. I attended my high school reunion in the wilds of Wisconsin, then a week later headed east to a family wedding in the Hocking Hills region of Ohio (highly recommended, by the way).

In the course of my travels, I spent time in six different states — Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. Given that the howling over the dread Delta Variant has been in full effect for much of the summer, I was particularly interested in what I would see in my travels. Were people paying attention to the renewed demands for masking and social distancing? Were the entreaties of the Powers That Be having any effect?

Not a chance.

My high school reunion had over 100 attendees, a good result for a class with 144 surviving members. Classmates returned to my Wisconsin home town from California, Washington state, Colorado, Maryland, and New York, among other places. One classmate arrived masked, but took his mask off about 15 minutes into the festivities. The venue was a local brewery with a beer hall and the entire event was indoors. My masked classmate was the only person I saw wearing a mask all weekend, outside of some of the staff at the hotel. Social distancing? Not much of that, either — as you would expect at a high school reunion, it was hugs galore.

The following week was the family wedding; we took a convoluted path so we could pick up our college-age daughter, who attends school in Missouri. We stopped in Waterloo, Iowa, for lunch — not a mask in sight. We got gas in Hannibal, Missouri — no masks at all. Our overnight hotel was in downstate Illinois — again, no masks or social distancing in sight, and a full buffet breakfast available. We stopped for lunch in Indiana — again, no masks anywhere. We gassed up again on the Indiana/Ohio border, in a town that looked like nothing had changed since 1978. No masks. We reached our destination — no masks at the hotel. We had an out-of-town guest reception — saw every face in the place.

The wedding the following day was wonderful — joyous, raucous, with an open bar and food trucks from Columbus for the meal. There were probably 250 people in attendance; not a soul was wearing a mask. It was an outdoor event, but if social distancing was a factor, no one seemed to realize it. Nothing changed on the return trip. No mask? No problem!

Over this past weekend, we attended the Great Minnesota Grease Together. Everyone had to mask up on the shuttle buses, but once we were at the fair, mask wearing was about 1%, even in the queues for a Sweet Martha bucket before leaving the fairgrounds.

We are reminded daily the Delta Variant is still in full swing, an implacable foe, with future variants lined up like planes in a holding pattern at O’Hare; Mu is coming next, and all the other letters of the Greek alphabet are getting ready to ravage the countryside, so many that we’re likely to run out of letters eventually. Presumably another naming convention waits in the wings — perhaps future variants can be named after Kentucky Derby winners (the “Seattle Slew Variant” perhaps), assuming we can independently verify that neither the horses nor their jockeys ever used Ivermectin. As anyone with a television or a smart phone knows, the hectoring and self-congratulatory moral tutelage continue unabated, all of it fact-checked, verified, or otherwise given the J.D. Power award and a MacArthur Foundation genius grant.

But you know what? Even after a summer of harangues and a phalanx of Tik-Tok Cassandras, people are doing as they please, at least here in flyover land. 

Yes, yes, everything I’m presenting here is anecdotal, but current behaviors are easy to observe and if a skeptic made a similar sojourn, the skeptic would see the same things. There will remain a cohort of those who follow every word and every directive from Drs. Fauci, Osterholm and their colleagues. Most readers of this feature likely see social media posts featuring our bien pensant  betters dutifully wearing their masks and keeping a yardstick or two between them as they struggle to take a selfie. And that’s fine — let your freak flags fly!

In the end, though, it’s highly likely the Safety Dance is over, unless our betters are willing to force compliance. What’s been happening in Australia has given me pause, but mandates and lockdowns will be difficult to enforce. And our betters know it.

…being right all the time [1]. But someone’s got to do it.

The Southwest light rail line is way way way over budget, and not getting finished anywhere near its 2023 deadline.

#unexpectedly

By the way, all of you DFLers that moved to the south west metro; hope you’re enjoying what we went through in the Midway from about 2008 to 2014.

[1] i’m being facetious. Mostly.

Let those truckers roll:

President Joe Biden claimed on Wednesday that he once drove an 18-wheeler truck, but his remark—made during a visit to a Mack Truck factory in Lower Macungie Township, Pennsylvania—quickly garnered a skeptical reaction.

In audio recorded by local news channel WFMZ-TV, Biden can be heard off camera telling workers at Mack Truck Lehigh Valley Operations: “I used to drive an 18-wheeler, man […] I got to.”

This claim is, like many of the Leader of the Free World’s observations, unmoored from reality. Apparently back in 1973, Biden took a long ride with a truck driver, but there’s no evidence he ever drove the rig:

Zach Parkinson, director of RNC Research, also questioned the president’s claim, sharing a 1973 opinion piece written by Biden, who was then a first-term senator.

In that article, Biden talked about how he had ridden in a “47,000-pound cargo truck” on a 500-mile-plus trip from Delaware to Ohio.

“There is zero evidence that Biden ‘used to drive an 18 wheeler,'” Parkinson tweeted.

“The extent of Biden’s trucking experience is that he **rode in** a truck once, for one night in 1973 (he made sure to return home by plane though).”

Truck drivers and CB radios were a thing back in the 1970s and an advertising guy from Omaha named Bill Fries had a big hit single under the name C.W. McCall. The song “Convoy” made it to #1 on the country and the pop charts in the early part of 1976 and it led to a huge rise in sales for CB radios, which had been, up to that time, primarily a tool for truck drivers and other people in the transportation industry. The song was catchy and the trucker jargon lyrics were entertaining to hear coming through on the AM radio of your ’75 Cutlass:

Well, we rolled up Interstate 44
Like a rocket sled on rails
We tore up all of our swindle sheets
And left ’em settin’ on the scales

By the time we hit that Chi-town
Them bears was a-gettin’ smart
They’d brought up some reinforcements
From the Illinois National Guard

The amusing thing about Fries/ C.W. McCall is he was never a truck driver, either:

“I was never a truck driver, even though people think I must have been,” Fries says. “I wanted to sound authentic. I wanted to talk like people talk. If you want to talk to truckers, you have to sound like a trucker.”

Biden has been straining for authenticity for 50 years now. He’s truck driver, a tough guy from Scranton, friends with Corn Pop and God only knows what else. And he has access to the nuclear codes. 

Come on and join our convoy
Ain’t nothin’ gonna get in our way
We gonna roll this truckin’ convoy
‘Cross the USA

Sleep tight, everyone.

The Southwest Light Rail Line appears likely to go years and “hundreds of millions of dollars” over schedule and budget.

…what’s happening between Park Siding and Depot Street today is construction of a half-mile tunnel that will carry the Metropolitan Council’s Southwest LRT project through a pinch point in its 15-mile path from downtown to Eden Prairie. Complexities with water, underground debris, and construction methods seem poised to push the line’s opening deep into 2025 or 2026.

Ever since word started to leak out last fall that the Kenilworth tunnel construction was stuck in a sloppy mess of water and boulders, contractors and Met Council officials have known the line could not meet its opening estimates, and that tunnel costs could blow through the project’s contingency fund. But the agency insists even today that it cannot estimate the magnitude of delay nor additional cost.

But in midwinter, in a private call with government stakeholders, the Met Council did offer some specificity, [Twin Cities Business] has learned. At the time, the project was expected to be delayed by at least two years into late 2025, say individuals on that call, including state Rep. Frank Hornstein (DFL-Minneapolis), who chairs the state House Transportation Committee. Hornstein is a supporter of the project who frames himself as disappointed in its current state.

“We raised questions about all these problem areas. They were waived away. Every dire prediction came true, the ones about cost overruns, the ones about the tunnel, the millions given away to railroads in negotiations,” he said in a spring interview.

Who could have possibly predicted this?

Heck – who reported on the ghastly overruns when the bill was half what they’re talking now?

Today is the 17th anniversary of the opening of the Metro Transit Blue Line – the beginning (or re-beginning) of light rail transit in the Twin Cities.

So on this anniversary, let us remember the people who gave their lives – unwillingly and in many cases unwittingly – to further Big Minnesota obsession with feeling like a Big City.

The Blue Line has claimed 15 lives – eight pedestrians, three bikers, a man in a wheelchair, and three people in cars. There was also a stabbing death this past winter on the Blue Line, and two more murders at stations along the line. That’s an average of just one death per year.

The Green Line has taken eight victims in only five years – the first just six weeks after the train started operating, mostly pedestrians trying to navigate the badly-designed street-level crossings. The most recent was in the last couple years.

The Northstar line has five fatalities so far.

That’s 29 dead, so far. 29 lives sacrificed so that the Met Council, the various governments, and other people who love to play with the dials and levers of government can feel like they’re “running” a big city with all the trimmings. 

Let’s take a moment today to remember these innocent victims of government megalomania.

Mass transit.

Old and busted: “it’s about moving people”

New and Fresh: “It’s about smashing racism”.

The Met Council released its new plans for yet another extension to the “Blue Line”, which would push the rail line – whose usage has plummeted since Covid – all the way up to Oak Grove.

And it would appear that the motivating factor was…equity?

“As a Hennepin County Commissioner and North Minneapolis resident, I’m excited about the transformative benefits light rail projects can bring to communities,” said Irene Fernando, Hennepin County District 2 Commissioner and chair of the Regional Railroad Authority. “The new direction of the Blue Line Extension is positioned to serve among the most racially and economically diverse communities in Hennepin, while also connecting transit-reliant residents to the broader regional transit system. This will change the trajectory of what’s possible for so many of our neighbors — connecting students to education, patients to healthcare, and workers to jobs.

“To pursue this work equitably, we must also recognize that large-scale public investments can accelerate patterns of residential and economic displacement, and work together to ensure this investment benefits corridor residents, builds community wealth, and meaningfully addresses decades-long patterns of disinvestment,” Fernando said.

I’d urge commissioner Fernando to come to the Midway and breathe in all the “equity” that the Green Line has brought to my neighborhood. Come with a group.

I heard Met Council commissioner Charlie Zelle on MPR over the weekend tie the change in plans to…

…you guessed it…

…George Floyd.

Is “George Floyd” turning into a progressive branding gimmick?

(The MPR News site’s search feature being apparently nearly worthless, I can’t quite find the clip from yesterday. I’ll keep looking).

A friend of the blog emails:

https://www.startribune.com/biodiesel-not-electric-buses-may-join-metro-transit-fleet/600029359/

[The Strib notes that] “Biodiesel, not electric, buses may join Metro Transit fleet. “

Biodiesel? Made from animal fat?

That means I’ll need to eat more meat!

After almost three years of keto, it’s a tempting conclusion.

But I’ll haste to add that a key source of biodiesel is…

…er…

…the downstream leg of the human digestive function, ifyaknowwhatImean.

A friend of the blog emails:

So, the St Paul City Council unanimously told MNDOT to take away lanes in areas where POC live because of racism.

CM Mitra Jalali is really proud of the unanimous support. They’re really sticking it to those white supremacist racist highway planners by saying that these poor, mostly Black and Asian communities need to ride busses instead of cars. Wait a minute- what is our city council actually saying here?

It’s saying “we don’t care when you get somewhere – just don’t do it in a car”.

A friend of the blog emails:

Do I have this right? The pandemic has reduced commuter travel as employees and students work from home. The buses all say “essential travel only” and are not allowing the crowds they once had. Honestly, they probably don’t even have the crowds- fewer people are using the bus right now. I haven’t been on a bus lately, but I still get the texts about reduced service. Several times a day, buses aren’t running for all sorts of reasons.

Yet, despite all of this, Metro Transit employees were set to get a 2.5% raise and a $1500 bonus? The hospital where I work cancelled raises, eliminated CEU money, and cancelled the Holiday parties and meals because elective surgeries were cancelled for 2 months. Yet, these transit employees think their bonus and 2.5% raise are “crappy offers” and rejected the offer, voting for a strike?????

 I rarely use such language, but seriously, WTF is wrong with these people? I mean, look around- they ought to be happy with being employed, let alone a raise this year.

If Metro Transit struck now, who would know? 

Other than the people the DFL and their public employee union enablers want to keep miserable anyway? 

Today is the sixteenth anniversary of the opening of the Metro Transit Blue Line – the beginning (or re-beginning) of light rail transit in the Twin Cities.

So on this anniversary, let us remember the people who gave their lives – unwillingly and probably unwittingliy – to further Big Minnesota Left’s obsession with feeling like a Big City.

The Blue Line has claimed 15 lives – eight pedestrians, three bikers, a man in a wheelchair, and three people in cars. There was also a stabbing death this past winter on the Blue Line, and two more murders at stations along the line. That’s an average of just one death per year.

The Green Line has taken eight victims in only five years – the first just six weeks after the train started operating, mostly pedestrians trying to navigate the badly-designed street-level crossings. The most recent was less than a year ago. j

The Northstar line has five fatalities so far, the latest just last winter.

That’s 29 dead, so far. 29 lives sacrificed so that the Met Council, the various governments, and other people who love to play with the dials and levers of government can feel like they’re “running” a big city with all the trimmings.

Let’s take a moment today to remember these innocent victims of government megalomania.

Remember – this coming Wednesday is Transit Memorial Day – the day we commemorate the people who’ve given their lives to facilitate the Met Council’s dream of having one of the world’s 200 biggest toy train sets.

Stay tuned.

The bad news: they learned it by watching The Walking Dead.

I’ve noticed a serious uptick in incredibly dangerous, reckless driving since the onset of the epidemic.

Now, out on I94 between the Cities is one thing. But this includes a lot of episodes on Saint Paul’s narrow side streets.

Worst example? I was driving down Phalen Parkway, out toward the East Side a few weeks ago. Not long after I passed Olive street, moving about 40MPH, I saw a car way behind me, moving very fast, swerving between the oncoming and right lanes, doing at least 90mph (in a 40mph zone).

Worse yet, I saw a concrete median, and cars in the oncoming lane, Speed Racer was going to have to squeeze into the right lane, along with me, before we got to the median.

Part of me thought “just carry on, and let the moron either jam on the binders or smack into the median – before I remembered that “me and my new-ish used car” were also a viable option. I pulled over – and the moron (a twenty-something of Vibrant descent) swerved into the lane with probably ten feet to spare, jamming on the gas.

I followed him, hoping to get a license or at least be around to call in the crash report, but he swerved onto Frank Street, narrowly missing an oncoming car, and gunned it up the hill into the neighborhood. I lost him. I have to hope he didn’t kill anyone – yet.

So I’d been wondering when we’d start seeing stories like these all over the place.

As the Southwest News reports, city governments in the southwest metro are getting ready to try to deal with the plague that no DFL-dominated city government dare name; crime descending upon them via the light rail.

The article explains the basics.

I thought this bit here was particularly interesting (and I’ve added all emphasis):

Metro Transit communications and outreach manager Sam O’Connell echoed [Metropolitan Council Chair Charlie] Zelle’s sentiment that the increased disturbances on public transit are signs that the light rail, now 16 years old, has become a part of the community fabric. Addressing these problems will take a multi-pronged approach, she added.

“Part of this is just a maturation of the system,” she said. “I don’t know if there’s ever a silver bullet that will reduce all of this altogether.”

Catch that?

Crime, vandalism, blight, fear, predation – they aren’t signs of decay anymore.

They’re signs of “maturation” into the “community fabric”.

In some future edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, this quote may wind up as part of the definition of the phrase “Racism (classism, whatever) of low expectations”.

And probably of “moving the goalposts”.

One man stabbed to death in an incident on the Ventura Trolley (Blue LIne) by the Mall of America Wednesday night:

tro Transit police and Bloomington police were called to a Park & Ride just north of the Mall of America station shortly before 1 a.m. 
Metro Transit spokesperson Howie Padilla said video shows a fight between two men on the Blue Line ended after one of them pulled a knife. 

Will the city’s “Resiliency” Department handle this? Or will it be the Bikeability director?

Not sure the people who run these cities realize what “quality of life” problems are going to do to this city’s future.

Nobody needs more than one car. Nobody needs to drive a car more than once a month. There should be psychological profiles and strict background checks for all vehicle transfers, including loans to friends and rent a cars. A 6 gallon gas tank limit is plenty.

No wonder the Democrats and media are pushing the “impeachment effort” so hard; Warren is insane, and she’s the sanest of the bunch (among those who have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting nominated – sorry, A-Klo and whoever that flavor of the month from Hawaii was…).

Back in 2007 or so, James Lileks stopped by the NARN broadcast at Back to the Fifties – the classic-car show at the State Fairgrounds that used to be such a vibrant focus of life in the Midway before the same people that brought us Tony Soprano-style trash collection badgered the cruising hot rods out of existence.

Because “vibrancy”, to the new Urbanites, must exclude those who actually vibrate.

Anyway – while on the air, Lileks pointed to a 1967 Mustang Fastback, and proclaimed that “the electric car will never succeed until Detroit builds one that looks like that“.

Was Detroit tuned in that day?

I’ll just assume they were; Ford’s new battery car is going to be an electric version of the car that, along with the Model T and the F150, may be the marque’s most iconic vehicle – the Mustang:

Originally Ford was working on what it openly described as “a compliance car,” one built simply to meet incoming emissions rules in the US and Europe. But in 2017 it threw out those plans, putting together an internal skunk works called Team Edison with a brief to reimagine the project. Its goal was to design a BEV that could only be a Ford, and there’s little that’s more iconically Ford than the galloping pony.

Five models are on the way:

Between late 2020 and spring 2021, Ford will bring out a mix of rear- and all-wheel drive Mach-Es with either standard- or extended-range battery packs. The cheapest of these is the Select; $43,895 buys you a rear-driving one of these with the smaller pack, but you’ll have to wait until early 2021 to get one of those. That also applies to the $52,400 California Route 1, a RWD version with lower-drag 18-inch wheels and the long-range battery pack. All prices are before the IRS tax credit is taken into account; this will be $7,500 until Ford joins Tesla and General Motors in having sold 200,000 plug-ins, at which point it will begin to sunset. Ford expects this to happen at some point in 2021.

Maybe there’s hope? 

…and tried to warn you that this exact thing was inevitable?

(Points thumbs at self).

This guy.

The Vomit Comet (aka Green Line) is a rolling assault and robbery laboratory.

The FOX 9 Investigators revealed that aggravated assaults on the light rail system, those involving a weapon or causing serious injury, numbered 59 through July 31 of this year. That is more than the 52 aggravated assaults in all of 2018, and 41 aggravated assaults in 2017.
Robberies and thefts are also on the rise with 384 incidents through October 28 of this year. That’s more than the 330 incidents in all of 2018 and 374 incidents in 2017.
“Sadly, Metro Transit’s own data reveals a transit system in crisis with a record number of assaults, robberies, and other criminal activity taking place on trains and at light rail stations,” said [Republican representative Paul] Torkelson.

In 18 months of riding the Vomet Comet to work pretty much daily, I think I saw transit cops a dozen times – and two of those were responding to assaults that’d already happened; essentially, they were crime janitors. 

And that’s just crime on the trains; it doesn’t cover the spike in crime along the Green Line.  I’ll be working on getting those numbers together for the five years since the Vomit Comet started bringing fare-skipping thugs to the Midway.  It’s not gonna be pretty. ]