The Economist: “America’s transport infrastructure: Life in the slow lane”
America’s dependence on its cars is reinforced by a shortage of alternative forms of transport. Europe’s large economies and Japan routinely spend more than America on rail investments, in absolute not just relative terms, despite much smaller populations and land areas. America spends more building airports than Europe but its underdeveloped rail network shunts more short-haul traffic onto planes, leaving many of its airports perpetually overburdened. Plans to upgrade air-traffic-control technology to a modern satellite-guided system have faced repeated delays. The current plan is now threatened by proposed cuts to the budget of the Federal Aviation Administration.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that America needs to spend $20 billion more a year just to maintain its infrastructure at the present, inadequate, levels. Up to $80 billion a year in additional spending could be spent on projects which would show positive economic returns. Other reports go further. In 2005 Congress established the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission. In 2008 the commission reckoned that America needed at least $255 billion per year in transport spending over the next half-century to keep the system in good repair and make the needed upgrades. Current spending falls 60 percent short of that amount.
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A survey of Protestant pastors found 41 percent of them strongly disagreeing with the statement: “I believe global warming is real and manmade.”
That’s up from 27 percent in a similar survey in 2008.
Hmm. Maybe if I showed them this data from Grist’s Jess Zimmerman, pointing out that the last time CO2 levels in the earth’s atmosphere were this high was 3 million years ago during the Pliocene Epoch?
But alas, the same slice of Protestant clergy who don’t believe in climate change also don’t believe there ever was a Pliocene Epoch or a 3 million years ago.
Maybe I’ll take them to see Carbon Nation.
Richard Flory: “This Just In: Gays and Lesbians Attend Evangelical Colleges!”
Via Tony Jones, “Douglass Blvd. Christian Church votes for marriage equality and ends practice of signing marriage license.” The Louisville, Ky., church:
“… voted to end the practice of signing marriage licenses because they give legal benefits to heterosexual couples that are not available to homosexual couples. Until the church’s ministers may confer identical legal benefits on homosexual and heterosexual couples, they will perform only religious wedding ceremonies.”
Good advice from Ezra Klein: “I hew to a strict policy of not learning about wine, as I don’t get paid enough to develop a taste for it.”
Consumerist: “McDonald’s Hires 62,000 at Job Event, Turns Down 938,000”
So next time you hear some condescending, privileged jerk preaching resentment toward the poor — “Why don’t they just get a job flipping burgers?” — you can remind them that Mickey D’s has 20 applicants for every job opening.
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Church historian Martin Marty tries to make sense of “Why Some Religious Right Champion ‘Atlas Shrugged.'”
Give [Ayn] Rand in her writings credit … She made clear that if anyone would come after her, they had to deny all their impulses toward selflessness, take up their blinders and billfolds, and follow her.
Marty is confused that anyone could profess to be an admirer of Rand’s while also professing to be an adherent of the Christianity that she vilified and the tenets of which she urged her admirers to contradict.
Me too.
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Ross Douthat makes his “Case for Hell.”
Hell is logically necessary, Douthat argues, for reasons of simple fairness. Good people like himself have been working all day in the vineyard. They’ve been working really hard.
Would it be fair if a bunch of Johnny come latelies waltzed in just before quitting time and, without even really breaking a sweat, got paid the same wages as those who have worked all day? Of course not.
And to be perfectly fair, those latecomers who never put in a full day’s work shouldn’t just be paid less — they should be paid nothing and, instead, should be tortured forever and ever and ever without end.
Because that’s only fair.
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And since today marks five years since I met the Slacktivixen, a bit of lovely sappiness from Bright Eyes:
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