California should stop high-speed rail work now, cut the losses and move on | Opinion

Stop high-speed rail now, cut the losses

A headline from The Bee on Feb. 10: “Feds Skip $1.2 billion request from California High Speed Rail.”

According to the recent Bee article on HSR, the projected costs have quadrupled in a little over a decade, while the timeline for completion has been pushed back by many years. During that same period, California’s population growth has flat-lined, we went from a labor surplus to shortage, and self-driving cars went from prototypes to available for rides in San Francisco. HSR does not make sense anymore.

Even if it gets completed, chances are it will require heavy operational subsidies.We need our political leaders to make actually show leadership and stop this project. Cut our losses now or they will multiply and bleed the state of resources we need for other things.

By stopping the project we would accept several billion in losses, but that’s better then spending $100+ billion and it ultimately failing, which seems likely.

Crime, prison and the big picture

The Bee has received letters both lauding and criticizing DA Lisa Smittcamp. I don’t know her, but we should all care about the handling of crime and criminals.

Her stance is that we should keep criminals locked up for as long as possible, thus preventing crimes like the murder of Selma Police Officer Gonzalo Carrasco. Fine, but at what cost, including the gigantic costs of the prisons themselves? Do we collect every gun in America? That would prevent thousands of crimes. No. Americans won’t stand for that.

So what does it cost us to make longer sentences and make sure they are served to the last day? I have a friend who had porn on his computer, was caught, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to a year in prison. Fair enough. But that was 2013, and he’s still in prison. Ten years for a one year sentence.

I wrote a letter to Ms. Smittcamp describing the injustice of the situation and asking if there was anything she (or I) could do about it. She did not agree with me, offer a suggestion, or even answer my letter.

Prison punishes the criminal, but it’s not only the lost years in prison that punishes him/her. When returning to the outside, they are often unemployable. They may have to pay for their own parole. Their family may have moved on. They’ve been living with criminals for years. Have they reformed?

I do not believe we can blame Gov. Newsome for the early release of Officer Carrasco’s killer. Early release helps society. Get them back to family, to a job, to paying taxes as soon as possible. Should we punish the prison population for the sins of one man? Let’s look at the big picture.

End term limits, add earmarks, get ours

I hope the residents of Fresno will take a second and think about this: Term limits in politics are bad and earmarks are good. What?

When Congress spends money and our representatives cannot direct the money back to us by earmarking it, it goes somewhere else, it still gets spent, we pay it, they get it. Earmark it and bring California taxes home.

Once we didn’t have term limits in Fresno, but now we do — how’s that working? I’ve seen bad politicians go and I’ve seen good public servants have to go. Our city electeds are just here for the next office, we don’t have public servants that love Fresno and want to make it better, we have political pandering and bickering, lawsuits and streets falling apart, homeless people spread everywhere, crime on the rise and absolutely no traffic enforcement at all.

We should think about getting rid of term limits and let public servant serve and not give politicians a stepping stone.

We have term limits, every now and then we have elections!

Stop the ignorance and make Fresno proud again!

Make dyslexia testing mandatory

For the Fresno Unified School District, mandatory dyslexia testing is absolutely needed.

In the early 2000s my yougest daughter, while attending Kratt Elementary, reached the third grade, and while her teacher knew something was wrong, she was just shuffled off to another class where she sat for the reminder of the school year, which she failed. Neither the school nor the district made any attempt to assess or assist with the situation. Through our personal intervention we were able to discover the issue, but once identified, neither the school nor district provided any resources to help.

Fortunately, our daughter transferred to the Clovis Unified School District the next year, and while having to repeat the third grade, she was provided the assistance she needed to be successful in the classroom

‘Christian in name only’ is a thing now

Throughout history there have been different iterations of what Christians believe. Though the text of the Bible has not changed, the interpretation of the text has taken on some radically different tones.

Church leaders at one time believed Scripture dictated the Earth as being the center of the universe. American Christians in good standing from1619 to 1865 used Bible verses to rationalize slavery.

Today, there is a disturbingly large fraction of the Christian community which adheres to Christian nationalism, the idea being that since our founding fathers were Christian, we must be a Christian country. Therefore, anything promoting what they see as a national tone must be Christian.

(A number of our founding fathers were not Christian. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and James Monroe considered themselves Deists).

Christian nationalists would have you believe, framed in the teachings of Jesus, hailed for millennia as the Prince of Peace, ideas which include amassing guns and threatening those who do not believe as they do. There is no text to support this.

We are familiar with RINO, Republican In Name Only. Let me introduce ChrINO — Christian In Name Only. Christian Nationalists, in my mind, are ChrINOs.

Trump, rail disasters, and today’s suckers

Former President Trump is the undisputed king of chutzpah.

After gutting safety regulations for the rail industry during his administration, he had the audacity to hold a campaign event at the scene of a disaster made inevitable by his own recklessness and stupidity — all to the cheers of his oblivious supporters. Wow.

P.T. Barnum was right. There’s a sucker born every minute.

‘Dilbert’ creator and being ‘woked’

Let’s look at Mr. Adams’s quote. “If nearly half of all Blacks (according to Rasmussen) are not OK with white people ... That’s a hate group.” Well?

Three things:

1. Please note the ellipse, those three little dots. What was left out of the Washington Post quote?

2. If nearly half of the Black polled are “not OK with white people,” who are the racists? If pointing out nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with white people, why is Scott Adams the bigot? It appears to this writer that Rasmussen, WaPo and McClatchy writers are biased in what and how they “report.” (Note, “.. .entertaining extreme right-wing ideologies and conspiracy theories for several years ....”)

3. So, Scott Adams in not entitled to his opinion without being “woked” into oblivion? Who are you all to deny Adams his opinion? You, by your very “newspaper,” write opinion in almost every column, even the weather.

This story was originally published March 5, 2023 at 5:30 AM with the headline "California should stop high-speed rail work now, cut the losses and move on | Opinion."