California High-Speed Rail

Here is my reaction a letter to a letter from a friend bemoaning the cutbacks to the high-speed rail project in California...

Regarding California's high-speed rail (HSR), for years I've been reading lib/Dem blogs that were skewering the HSR project, in spite of being a Dem initiative.  I think the problem is that the plan was faulty.   Here's some commentary from 2008: 

Stops are death to a high-speed system...

This design breaks all three rules laid down by the French. First, instead of building the line on cheap rural land, the designers will run it through the heart of Modesto, Merced, Fresno, and Bakersfield - the urban areas, with the most expensive land in the San Joaquin Valley.

Second, instead of building the line where few overpasses are needed, the designers will run it through the most heavily developed area in the valley, with numerous cross-streets, each one of which has to be bridged.

Then there is the noise. The environmental impact report for this project blandly states that train noise will be "low" or "moderate" in the valley communities. But a 225-mph train going through the heart of the most heavily populated areas in the valley is sure to upset and annoy thousands of persons per trip. There will be 96 trips per day.

A passenger standing on the Merced platform, waiting for a local train, will be 23 feet away from the high-speed train as it comes through at 225 mph. In this case, it will not be a question of noise, but of whether the passenger will be blown off the platform.

There are some commonalities with other recent high speed transportation failures.  Noise limited the now defunct Concorde SST to flights over the ocean.  Maglev trains never caught on in part due to noise:

At more than 300km/h, a lot of energy is spent to overcome the air drag of the trains themselves. Issues also become noise, and the required straightness of the infrastructure. And the issue that with stops, decreasing travel time by increasing maximum speeds becomes marginal. Overall, speeds above 300km/h tend to become uneconomical, no matter the propulsion system.

Meanwhile, cost estimates for California's high-speed rail ballooned and the completion date was pushed back:

The California high-speed rail project has often been derided as a boondoggle, and with good reason. After narrowly winning a statewide vote in 2008 with low-balled cost estimates and exceedingly optimistic — some would say deceitful and fraudulent — assumptions, and not releasing the business plan until after the election, the proposal was quickly changed when reality set in and for years has borne little resemblance to the system promised to voters...  Cost estimates quickly ballooned from $40 billion or $45 billion to $98.5 billion, then down to $68.4 billion after abandoning end-to-end dedicated high-speed tracks in favor of sharing rails with freight and local trains at both ends of the system, thereby making a trip between Los Angeles and San Francisco in the mandated 2 hours and 40 minutes virtually impossible. The San Diego and Sacramento segments were soon placed on the back burner, despite promising voters there that they would have high-speed train service. Current cost estimates (2019) are around $79 billion, and the completion date has been pushed back by about a decade.

Estimates of the project’s ridership, which is critical to its viability, particularly since operating subsidies are prohibited, have dropped from as high as 117 million passengers a year to 36 million. That would still be more than the entire Amtrak system, which covers more than 500 destinations in 46 states and serves fewer than 32 million passengers per year. Amtrak’s high-speed Acela Express service, which serves a larger, denser market than the planned California system — including Boston, New York City and Washington, D.C. — has an annual ridership of just 3.4 million.

Even Gov. Gavin Newsom realized the hopelessness of the project when he used his State of the State address in February to “level about high-speed rail.”

“[L]et’s be real,” he said. “The project, as currently planned, would cost too much and take too long.”

There have been a number of failed/failing efforts to economically increase transportation speeds in our lifetimes, including the SST, maglev trains, and loops/hyperloops.

Public Discourse and Walled Gardens

 A recent post by Antonio Garcia-Martinez struck a chord with me -- The walls of perception, or why blocking is good.  Excerpt:

If you want an answer for the leading riddle of our time—why is it that in a media landscape where the individual consumer has never had more absolute control over who or what they read or watch are we more obsessed than ever with ‘content moderation’ and ‘misinformation’?—the answer is insufficient use of the block button. Every person you block is like a another brick in our frontier wall, defending you from the insane philosophies, inane prattlings, and bad-faith self-promotion of a world fracturing into mutually-hostile tribes no longer tethered to physical or cultural contours like political or linguistic borders. There’s no point in engaging with the foreign tribes, and you’re fooling yourself if you do.

I disagree with the last statement, but find Garcia-Martinez's observations about public discourse illuminating.  Suppose we follow his suggestion and try to create a space free from distractions?  The following questions arise:

• How concerned should we be about the possibility that foreign tribes get around our walls and obtain information which they use to discredit us in the public sphere?  Garcia-Martinez seems to say that this could be countered by more effective blocking, while ignoring the immediate consequences.  This seems reasonable with the caveat that it may not be possible to ignore the immediate consequences, depending upon one's employment status.  The old warning with regard to email seems relevant:  Anything you say or write may become publicly available. 
• Should one behave differently in the public sphere where foreign tribes are present?  The obvious answer would seem to be yes.  One can't and shouldn't want to withdraw from the public sphere entirely.  In the public sphere, it will be useful to be respectful to foreign tribes if conversation there is to be constructive.  In more private conversations, however, it can be more useful to speak openly and test heterodox views.

Let's consider these points in light of Martin Gurri's book, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.  As described by Matt Taibbi:

The thesis of The Revolt of the Public is that traditional centralized powers are losing — have lost — authority, in large part because of the demystifying effect of the Internet. The information explosion undermined the elite monopoly on truth, exposing long-concealed flaws. Many analysts had noted the disruptive power of the Internet, but what made Gurri unique is that he also predicted with depressingly humorous accuracy how traditional hierarchies would respond to this challenge: in a delusional, ham-fisted, authoritarian manner that would only confirm the worst suspicions of the public, accelerating the inevitable throw-the-bums-out campaigns. This assessment of the motive for rising public intransigence was not exactly welcomed, but either way, as Kling wrote, “Martin Gurri saw it coming.”

Gurri's book was originally published in 2014.  We're well into the process.  Personally, it's been about one year since I stopped reading any mainstream publication or viewing news/political commentary on a mainstream TV channel.  Over the course of that year, I've become more and more convinced of the wisdom of this decision.  From my admittedly unscientific perspective, the anti-authoritarian trends predicted by Gurri are accelerating, as the number of journalists moving from mainstream publications to Substack soars, while the mainstream media gets tied in increasingly absurd knots.   

JFK and the Unspeakable

Background

The purpose of this post is to provide a quick reference for the basis of my beliefs regarding the U.S. empire, the assassinations of JFK and RFK, and the U.S. equivalent to the Praetorian Guard that governs the empire from behind the scenes. I have written about this before in this venue: Being Woke to the Praetorian Guard - With Update.  That post covers my overall outlook quite well, but does not address the specifics of the JFK assassination.  The assassination always seemed suspicious to me, but I never had a clue as to the motivation.  After all, the conventional wisdom is that Kennedy was a Cold War hawk who escalated U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Three books provide in depth answers to this question:

• JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, by James Douglas
• The Devil's Chessboard : Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government, by David Talbot
• The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Crime, Conspiracy and Cover-Up - A New Investigation, by  Tim Tate and Brad Johnson

These books provide the big, coherent picture.  It starts in the 1930s with Dulles brothers work on Wall Street and the corridors of power in the budding empire.  World War II provides a striking contrast between JFK's heroism and the machinations of Allen Dulles as an operative in Switzerland.  Following the war, Allen Dulles with the CIA and his brother John Foster Dulles with the State Department moved decisively to take control of U.S. foreign policy during the Eisenhower administration.  CIA directed coups, assassinations, and general interference followed in Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Congo. Laos, Vietnam, and Indonesia.  

Meanwhile JFK was elected to the House of Representatives and then to the Senate.  As early as 1954 Senator Kennedy was skeptical of U.S. involvement in Vietnam:

I am frankly of the belief that no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, "an enemy of the people" which has the sympathy and covert support of the people. 

However, he became something of a cold warrior in the Senate during the 1950s and while campaigning for president in 1960.  Upon being elected president that year, he came to the office while both Allen Dulles at the CIA and J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI were at the peak of their powers.  

Assuming the Presidency

On February 3, 1961, less than a month following Kennedy's inauguration, Kennedy received the news of Patrice Lumumba's assassination in the Congo.  Here's a picture of Kennedy at the moment when he received the news:

The CIA instigated Bay of Pigs invasion followed in April 1961.  It proved to be a fiasco -- one which Kennedy failed to rescue by sending in U.S. air forces as had been hoped for by the CIA. The military-intelligence hostility to Castro would continue to frustrate Kennedy's attempts to defuse the Cold War.  The CIA made 6 attempts to assassinate Castro during Kennedy's presidency, partnering with organized crime in the process.  

Vietnam

Meanwhile, the military-intelligence apparatus was heavily involved in Laos and Vietnam and were pressing for increased U.S. military presence there.  As with Cuba, Kennedy was initially hesitant to push back too hard, and the U.S. involvement did increase moderately.  By the time Kennedy tried to pull back, it was too late [James K Galbraith quoting from Robert McNamara’s 1995 memoir In Retrospect, from Chapter 3 -- “The Fateful Fall of 1963: August 24–November 22, 1963”]:

A pivotal period of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, punctuated by three important events:

1. the overthrow and assassination of South Vietnam’s president Ngo Dinh Diem; 
2. President Kennedy’s decision on October 2 to begin the withdrawal of U.S. forces;
3. his assassination fifty days later. 

On the Diem assassination:  

In Saigon and Chicago (Chapter 5), Douglas reinforces the image of Kennedy losing grip on his government, especially in Saigon, where his ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge was pushing for a coup to oust Diem, while Kennedy wanted Lodge to use diplomacy.   

It’s quite apparent, in retrospect that Kennedy’s attempt at appeasement of conservative Republicans by appointing two of their own – Lodge in Vietnam and John McCone as head of the CIA, backfired in Kennedy’s face. 

On the decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Vietnam:

National Security Action Memorandum Number 263 (NSAM-263) was a national security directive approved on 11 October 1963 by United States President John F. Kennedy. The NSAM approved recommendations by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Maxwell Taylor. McNamara and Taylor's recommendations included an appraisal that "great progress" was being made in the Vietnam War against Viet Cong insurgents, that 1,000 military personnel could be withdrawn from South Vietnam by the end of 1963, and that a "major part of the U.S. military task can be completed by the end of 1965." 

This view is in contrast to the conventional wisdom. From James K Galbraith: Exit Strategy: In 1963, JFK ordered a complete withdrawal from Vietnam

Did John F. Kennedy give the order to withdraw from Vietnam?  Certainly, most Vietnam historians have said “no”—or would have if they considered the question worth posing. They have asserted continuity between Kennedy’s policy and Lyndon Johnson’s, while usually claiming that neither president liked the war and also that Kennedy especially had expressed to friends his desire to get out sometime after the 1964 election...

A more thorough treatment appeared in 1992, with the publication of John M. Newman’s JFK and Vietnam.1 Until his retirement in 1994 Newman was a major in the U.S. Army, an intelligence officer last stationed at Fort Meade, headquarters of the National Security Agency. As an historian, his specialty is deciphering declassified records...  Here is the chronology, according to Newman:

On October 2, 1963, Kennedy received the report of a mission to Saigon by McNamara and Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). The main recommendations, which appear in Section I(B) of the McNamara-Taylor report, were that a phased withdrawal be completed by the end of 1965...  At Kennedy’s instruction, Press Secretary Pierre Salinger made a public announcement that evening of McNamara’s recommended timetable for withdrawal...

On October 5, Kennedy made his formal decision...

On October 11, the White House issued NSAM 263... 

On November 1 there came the coup in Saigon and the assassination of Diem and Nhu. At a press conference on November 12, Kennedy publicly restated his Vietnam goals. They were “to intensify the struggle” and “to bring Americans out of there.” Victory, which had figured prominently in a similar statement on September 12, was no longer on the list...

The Honolulu Conference of senior cabinet and military officials on November 20–21 was called to review plans in the wake of the Saigon coup...

In Honolulu, McGeorge Bundy prepared a draft of what would eventually be NSAM 273. The plan was to present it to Kennedy after the meeting ended. Dated November 21, this draft reflected the change in military reporting.

 At Honolulu, a preliminary plan, known as CINCPAC OPLAN 34-63 and later implemented as OPLAN 34A, was prepared for presentation. This plan called for intensified sabotage raids against the North, employing Vietnamese commandos under U.S. control—a significant escalation.5 While JCS chief Taylor had approved preparation of this plan, it had not been shown to McNamara. Tab E of the meeting’s briefing book, also approved by Taylor and also not sent in advance to McNamara, showed that the withdrawal ordered by Kennedy in October was already being gutted, by the device of substituting for the withdrawal of full units that of individual soldiers who were being rotated out of Vietnam in any event.

The final version of NSAM 273, signed by Johnson on November 26, differs from the draft in several respects...   the thrust is unmistakable, and the restrictive reference to “Government of Vietnam resources” is now missing. Newman concludes that this change effectively provided new authority for U.S.–directed combat actions against North Vietnam. Planning for these actions began therewith, and we now know that an OPLAN 34A raid in August 1964 provoked the North Vietnamese retaliation against the destroyer Maddox, which became the first Gulf of Tonkin incident. And this in turn led to the confused incident a few nights later aboard the Turner Joy, to reports that it too had been attacked, and to Johnson’s overnight decision to seek congressional support for “retaliation” against North Vietnam. From this, of course, the larger war then flowed.

Go to the referenced link for this Galbraith article to see the arguments on the other side, including arguments made by Noam Chomsky.  Galbraith explains in detail how and why Chomsky is wrong and McNamara and Newman are correct: 

McNamara confirms one of Newman’s central claims: NSAM 273 changed policy.

Johnson's Vietnam War policy shifted suddenly and dramatically following Kennedy's assassination, in favor of plans drawn up by the military-intelligence command.

Correspondence with Khrushchev and Castro

In addition to differing with military-intelligence command regarding military intervention in Cuba and Vietnam, Kennedy had secretly begun conversations with both Castro and Khrushchev in an attempt to defuse the Cold War. 

A President for Peace: The deadly consequences of J.F.K.’s attempts at reconciliation, by James W. Douglass, 11/6/2013:

In the missile crisis, Kennedy turned toward peace. At the height of the terrifying conflict his own anti-Castro policies helped precipitate, he sought a way out. Kennedy chose a route his generals thought unforgiveable. He not only rejected their pressures to attack Cuba and the Soviet Union. Even worse, the president reached out to the enemy for help. That could be considered treason. Khrushchev saw it as a sign of hope.

The genesis of the Kennedy-Khrushchev turnaround during the missile crisis was their secret correspondence, which began over a year earlier. After their failed meeting in Vienna in June 1961, Khrushchev wrote a groundbreaking letter to the president, dated Sept. 29, 1961...   through their secret correspondence, the two men struggled to achieve a better understanding of each other and their differences. The Cuban missile crisis a year later was proof they had not resolved their conflicts. Yet it was thanks especially to the secret letters that each knew the other as a human being he could respect...

Once Kennedy and Khrushchev turned together in the missile crisis, they began conspiring for peace. The breakthrough was Kennedy’s address in June 1963 at American University. By introducing his vision of peace as a response to the Russians’ suffering in World War II, Kennedy bridged the gap with the enemy. Khrushchev later told the American diplomat W. Averell Harriman that it was “the greatest speech by any American president since Roosevelt.” ...

Kennedy’s announcement at the university of his unilateral cessation of atmospheric nuclear tests and his expressed hope for treaty negotiations in Moscow opened the door. Within six weeks, he and Khrushchev signed the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. It was a confirming sign of their joint decision to end the cold war.

Another sign was Nikita Khrushchev’s counsel to Fidel Castro that he should begin to work with John F. Kennedy. Castro had been furious with Khrushchev for withdrawing his missiles at the 11th hour of the crisis without consulting his Cuban ally, in return for only a promise from a capitalist. Khrushchev, however, wrote a peaceful, reconciling letter to Castro on Jan. 31, 1963, that corresponded to his Noah’s Ark letter to Kennedy. Castro accepted his invitation to come to the Soviet Union.

Castro made that visit to Khrushchev from May to June 1963. The two leaders traveled together around the Soviet Union. Castro said later that Khrushchev gave him a tutorial on their joint need to trust Kennedy. Day after day, Khrushchev read aloud to Castro his correspondence with Kennedy, emphasizing the hope for peace they now had by working with the U.S. president. 

Two Tracks on Cuba:

President Kennedy, perhaps shaken by the events of October 1962, looked for ways to defuse the situation and reach accommodation with Castro. On March 30, 1963, the State Dept. and Justice Dept. jointly announced their intent to ensure that Cuban exile groups conducting sabotage raids would no longer do so from U.S. soil. Faced with raids on training camps and loss of support, some of these groups relocated to other countries such as Nicaragua.

In September, following an interview of Castro by journalist Lisa Howard, Kennedy approved secret contacts between U.N. delegate William Attwood and Cuban Ambassador to the U.N. Carlos Lechuga. A preliminary meeting took place, and plans for more substantive talks in a neutral setting such as Mexico were proposed...

In the midst of these events, the CIA reactivated contacts with Rolando Cubela, code-named AMLASH, an apparently disgruntled Cuban government official interesting in overthrowing Castro. High-level CIA officer Desmond Fitzgerald, at this time head of the Special Affairs Staff, took the extraordinary step of meeting with Cubela directly, and representing himself as an emissary of Robert Kennedy (there is no indication RFK was informed of this). 

Conclusion

It's not easy writing about this subject.  The establishment has long since closed ranks on the idea that certain inconvenient truths should not be discussed.  After all, what does this say about the establishment and our so-called democracy if the CIA did indeed kill the president, because they disagreed with his military strategy as head of the empire, yet the mainstream news media and politicians have refused to acknowledge this?  Rather, using a bit of common sense and reviewing publicly available facts is considered to be irrational, conspiracy theorist behavior.  

I myself have been unsure of what to believe since the assassination took place when I was 11 years old.  It never made sense, but surely our government wouldn't do this and couldn't get away with it.  There were just too many stories and authoritative proclamations.  But in the age of the Internet, and after 58 years of reflection and review of various sources and eventually released government documents, a clear picture is discernible if one puts in extensive effort.

The straw that broke the camel's back, and triggered my research, was the obvious nonsense being reported by the mainstream media, and accepted uncritically by the public and politicians, regarding the alleged Trump-Russia collusion.  I retired 3 years ago and thus have had time to follow some of the details over the Internet, to a degree which would have been difficult to impossible 10 or 20 years ago.  The Steele Dossier was bogus, but came from former intelligence agents.  Joseph Mifsud was clearly a UK intelligence asset, but has been universally reported as an agent of the Kremlin.  Carter Page was working with the CIA, but this was turned around as not working with the CIA in the FISA application which authorized spying on him.  And on and on it goes -- wherever one looks in news reported from the intelligence agencies via mainstream media outlets. See also: Syria, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Xinjiang, Venezuela.

Recognizing the way in which the intelligence agencies work with the mainstream media provided insight into other major international events of my lifetime such as the following:

• Vietnam War
• Johnson presidency
• RFK assassination
• Nixon presidency
• Watergate
• Iranian revolution and transition to Reagan presidency
• Iran - contra affair
• Iraq 2003 War
• Trump-Russia collusion allegations
• Trump's failed attempts to withdraw troops from Syria and Afghanistan, and to reduce tensions with N. Korea and Russia

People have given their lives to speak the truth and make the world a better place.  Talking about these events is important, as I'm sure JFK, RFK, MLK, Nelson Mandela, and others would agree.