Spiritual Derailment

I’m out of patience with my species. They won’t, they just WILL NOT stand against the lies. This might be excusable if the devil wanted his lies to look like truth. He does that sometimes when he’s weak, but what he really wants, is for you to recognize the lie and then uphold it regardless. That is a fast road to self-damnation, which is more valuable to the devil that merely mortal victories.

Trains keep derailing all over the country, including Thursday in Alabama. What’s going on?

h ttps://www.yahoo.com/news/trains-keep-derailing-over-country-000805788.html

By Trevor Hughes for USA Today, 9 March 2023

Good question. Trevor’s answer?

Trains are derailing all over the country. But it’s actually okay!

Blah blah statistics from 1980.

New legislation will fix the problem!

Yeah, I despised his lies too much to repeat them at length. Enjoy the extra two minutes I just saved you!

If people find Trevor convincing and informative then they love being lied to, and by knowingly accepting the lie, they damn themselves.

So then, what IS the truth behind all the trainwrecks?

How America’s Supply Chains Got Railroaded

h ttps://prospect.org/economy/how-americas-supply-chains-got-railroaded/

By Matthew Jinoo Buck, 4 February 2022

[In 2021], Union Pacific stopped service between the all-important shipping hubs of Los Angeles and Chicago for one week last July while the company reconfigured its operations. Union Pacific’s remaining facilities in Chicago couldn’t keep up with the volume, nor could Union Pacific find enough workers or equipment to handle the goods. Industry analyst Larry Gross told Trains.com that Union Pacific “sacrificed surge capacity” when it closed [a major yet redundant rail line two years previous]. “If you don’t have any additional capacity in your hip pocket, even moderate disruptions put you in a world of hurt.” Gross estimated that Union Pacific’s weeklong suspension of service would keep roughly 40,000 containers stranded on the West Coast.

Every other major railroad [also] suffered from supply chain snags in 2021….

But the freight railroads’ poor operational performance has not impaired their spectacular financial performance. If anything, the bottlenecks create more pricing power. Less than a week after his company reversed its 2019 decision and reopened Global 3, Union Pacific executive Rocker optimistically predicted on an earnings call that Union Pacific would be able to “take some pretty robust pricing on the market”—in other words, keep its prices high. The stock market shared Rocker’s optimism for all Class I railroads, whose stock prices rose in 2021, many by 20 percent or more.

THE RAIL SUPPLY CHAIN CRISIS was decades in the making, based on two fundamental sources—excessive consolidation and the railroads’ version of just-in-time, called precision scheduled railroading (PSR). In 1980, at the dawn of rail deregulation, there were 40 Class I railroads. Today, there are just seven. Of those seven, four have 83 percent to 90 percent of the freight railroading market. Wall Street took notice of railroads’ growing market power and pushed them to implement PSR, which meant running faster, longer trains, and skimping on service, spare capacity, systemwide resilience, and safety.

The driving force behind PSR’s widespread adoption was railroad executive E. Hunter Harrison and investor Bill Ackman, a notorious hedge fund manager.

Railroads suffered the same fate as every other industry in USA: gutted of equity by vulture capitalists. The devil is powerful and dangerous, no question, but he’s not creative even by mortal standards. “They’ll never figure out that my secret cunning plan, as always, is to steal, kill and destroy.”

A primary cause of railroads’ fragility came from decades of laying off labor. From the passage of the 1980 Staggers Act to 2019, total employment in the railroad industry fell from about 500,000 to roughly 135,000.

A deteriorating safety culture has also prompted laid-off railroad workers to rethink coming back to railroads that seem to view their safety as another cost to minimize in the name of efficiency and PSR. Workers overwhelmingly complain of being pushed to work faster and sacrifice safety for speed. Regan says that railroad managers rush workers into neglecting safety inspections and argues that thousands of workers have left the railroad industry out of concern for the railroads’ poor workplace safety. The Federal Railroad Administration, the primary safety regulator for the railroad industry, reports that, since 2012, Class I railroads had higher rates of train accidents or incidents, higher rates of yard switching accidents, higher rates of equipment defects, and more total fatalities, all while total Class I train miles were down roughly 40 percent.

While the East Palestine derailment was deliberately mishandled in order to poison Middle America, it’s also the inevitable result of the industry being plundered by the true ruling powers of the United States. Powers that have absolutely no respect for human life.

There is nothing that any of us here can do about PSR. To avoid spiritual derailment, however, it is not enough that you know you’re being lied to. The devil actually wants that. The lie must also be rejected and the best way to do that, is to uphold the truth and put the blame where it belongs.

Here, with “precision scheduled railroading” courtesy of Wall Street vultures.

By contrast, the politicians responding with “new legislation”? The media whore claiming “yes but this is normal”? They know it’s a lie but refuse to oppose it.

Clown World being an entire climate of intentionally blatant lies is dividing Western humanity into the people who see the lie and repeat it, the people who see the lie and refute it, and… a reluctant third category that is going to have its irresponsibly oblivious worldview uncomfortably squished.