Monday, September 14, 2020

Amtrak Finally Allows Bikes--And Charges More for Them Than for Passengers

 

For 25 years I have ridden the Amtrak's Keystone trains between Lancaster and Philadelphia, as well as regional trains between Washington DC and Boston.  Several times in those 25 years I have written to Amtrak to ask that bicycles be allowed on the trains. 

Amtrak refused.  Sure, they allowed bikes on a few regional trains with baggage cars, but No! was the main answer to "Can I take my bike."

Today, Amtrak began allowing bikes on the train: for a price.

In my case, the price for taking my bike with me on a train to Philadelphia from Lancaster is double the price for me!  My ticket, with the senior discount is $10.40. The bike cost is $20!  

That means I can visit Philadelphia for $20.80 round trip or I can bring my bike at a total cost of $60.80.  A bike with a normal adult fare makes the round trip $82.  

That's crazy.  Why should the bike cost $20 each way? Weight? My bikes weight 17 and 19 pounds each. A five-car passenger train with an electric locomotive weighs 2 million pounds.  Is the addition of 19 pounds a problem?

Space? Keystone trains have seats for 400 passengers and lately have had 20 or 30 passengers per train.  If one or two people per train take a bike, will it cause overcrowding? 

If I take a bike on New Jersey Transit, the Long Island Railroad, SEPTA, the Boston MTA, the Baltimore DC MARC system or any other regional train the cost for a bike is ZERO.  

Why is it $20 per trip on Amtrak?


Defenders of God Want Theocracy and Death

Defenders of God always have a good reason to kill

In eight weeks, millions of American Evangelicals and Catholics will vote to re-elect the most despicable person ever elected to public office in America. They will vote for a draft-dodging, lying criminal because they want to stop abortion in America completely and forever.  

They say they are doing this to defend life, but they really are defending God.  And nothing in the history of the world is more dangerous. 

They believe that life begins at conception and once the Chosen Sperm breaks into the Egg-of-the-Month the resulting zygote is a human life that must be protected. And to disrupt cell division is to end a human life. There can be no discussion, even a morning after pill is murder. 

If the abortion-is-murder militants were actually Pro-Life, they would cherish every child. But Pro-Life religious people who want to impose a theocracy in America to stop abortion hold every possible anti-life in regard to post-partum people. Pro-Life voters are against:

--Medical care for all

--Regulating guns used for mass murder, even of children in schools

--Environmental regulations that keep lead out of water and therefore out of children

--Air and water pollution regulations of all kinds

--Action on the effects of climate change

--Keeping together families of those begging for asylum at the border. Defenders of God take the Bible literally except for troublesome passages like "welcoming the stranger in your midst" and "caring for widows and orphans in their need."  

--Most sadly, they are worshipping a despicable liar who inverts the Beatitudes every day of his disgusting life. The Apostle Paul asked with Jewish sarcasm if we should sin more so we could get more grace.  But the pathetic Trump cultists cheer Trump's lies as long as he is "owning the libs." What a disgusting inversion of every every word of the Beatitudes. 

It is as if Paul wrote a second Book of Romans and urged the citizens of the eternal city to worship Nero--the Trump of the first century. 

MAGA looks back. Always back.  How far back?  Before Civil Rights. Before Voting Rights. Before Women's Rights. Before Gay Rights. In the mouth of Republican child molester Roy Moore and apostate pastor Doug Wilson, all the way back to slavery. The view of MAGA exalts denying rights to more and more and more people.

When the MAGA cult looks back before the Civil Rights Act, they want a time when lynching was acceptable, when people sent postcards from lynchings, when they cheered lynchings in groups of hundreds.  Jim Crow America killed thousands of innocent men by mob hanging and mutilation.  

The Evangelical Church in the American South endorsed Jim Crow and provided the Biblical justification for chattel slavery before that. There is nothing Pro-Life about slavery, Jim Crow and racism.  

A Defender of God can tell you life begins at sperm collision and vote to protect life for the entire nine months in the womb, but at the same time they do "God's will" with the unborn, they will do nothing to prevent the slaughter of first graders in school, nothing to protect poor kids from preventable disease and death, wave the Confederate flag, the flag of the failed state that enslaved millions, and worship a fat coward who lies every time his lips move. 

The only way to have a democratic country is to take power from the Defenders of God. If they have power, they will take away rights and eventually they will take human life without remorse.  


"Blindness" by Jose Saramago--terrifying look at society falling apart

  Blindness  reached out and grabbed me from the first page.  A very ordinary scene of cars waiting for a traffic introduces the horror to c...