Daily Archives: 20 June 2024

That’s Not All

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Amid the press coverage of a variety of recent video clips showing Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s apparent physical and mental decline—standing motionless in the middle of a number of dignitaries swaying and bobbing to some music, wandering off in the middle of a parachute team demonstration, being taken by the wrist and led off the stage—there comes Biden’s Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s full throated and angry denunciation of the video clips as cheap fakes and deep fakes.

Among the press’ snark corps commentary ridiculing Jean-Pierre’s claim there were a few suggestions that were more serious.

The least among the more serious is Guy Benson’s unsubstantiated denial:

But it’s literal misinformation to pretend the videos themselves are fake. They are not.

Based on what evidence, Benson?

Some more serious questions include these:

Senator Mike Lee (R, UT):

Wait, exactly which videos we’ve all seen—of Biden freezing or looking lost—are deepfakes?

Stephen L Miller:

A reporter needs to genuinely ask her what she thinks a deep fake is[.]

This line of questioning badly lacking, however, which is all too typical of today’s cute sound bite-driven media. A reporter—a myriad of reporters—also need to ask (to get back to Benson’s failure from the right) for the specific data that shows the videos to be deep fakes, or cheap fakes, or in any way altered other than—perhaps—being clipped out of longer videos showing more of Biden’s behavior both before and after the clips in question.

Maybe the lack of calls for hard evidence—and Benson’s evidence-free claim—is of a piece with what passes for today’s journalism: sound bites don’t have room for facts.

A False Choice

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And a politically hard, but eminently straightforward alternative.

California’s regulators want to ban older diesel locomotives from operating in California after 2029, requiring only battery locomotives or some other form of net-zero emission locomotion process to be the motive force over freight trains (and passenger trains after 2030).

The Wall Street Journal‘s editors think that would ban diesel locomotives nation-wide, and in one sense they’re right.

Since locomotives can’t be swapped at the state border, the rules in practice would affect trains far beyond the left coast.

That offering is a false choice, though. There’s nothing in California’s proposed regulations that would stop rail freight shippers from simply ceasing to ship goods into California. California’s businesses could use their State government-mandated battery locomotives to go get the goods warehoused just outside the State’s border.

The transition to this new shipping paradigm would be expensive, but there would be clear winners, both during the transition and after. During the transition, there would be a proliferation of construction jobs as the warehouse would be built along with a net increase of jobs for warehouse operators. There would be more jobs building and then operating new transshipment facilities for unloading the trains and short-haul transportation of the goods to the warehouses.

Longer-term, warehouse operators would make money, short haul truckers would see a large increase in business and business opportunities, and railroads would save money by not having to gussy up all of their rail equipment to meet California’s requirements. Even California’s range-limited battery locomotives would gain by not having their range limits play such a major role in their operation.

The biggest winner of all would be the railroads, which would have successfully rescued themselves from under the boots of the California government.