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E. It is not, in any way, imaginative, strategic, creative, innovative, and in every other regard anything like what America is capable of; see Silicon Valley as an example of that. It will be bought off the shelves of other countries. By the time of its completion, it will be as obsolete as Amtrak is now. Break-throug...
F. Since it is not a private sector for-profit business like the air carriers, it will require enormous and permanent subsidies even as it serves too few people, and those are the members of the social/economic class that requires the least amount of government support.
$67 Billion! Holy cow! That's enough to buy over 2 million Priuses or 1.5 million Chevy Volts. Or use it to provide a 50% subsidy and double those numbers.
Getting that many fuel-efficient cars on the road would go much farther in reducing oil imports & meeting carbon-reduction targets than HSR would in 50 years (I'm guessing).
Not to mention all those jobs that would be created in this country to produce them.
Thank you for being well-informed and willing to express yourself.
If I may add, there is a broader context: The US is busy degrading the value of its currency through excessive debt. The effects of this process are currently evident at the grocery store and the gas pump. These costs are not going to go down in the near or long term. Peak oil has been passed. It is my maintenance that...
Plug your analysis behind this and you see why I characterize this project as nothing less than madness.
H.L. Mencken once observed that “complex problems have simple, easy to understand, wrong answers.” In the aftermath of the 2012 elections, both political parties seem poised to implement a simple, easy to understand, and disastrous solution to our nation’s complex immigration problem.
There is no disputing that immigration reform is urgently needed. The problem is that the framework for reform, long offered by the Democratic Party and now belatedly embraced by the leadership of the Republican Party in the aftermath of an electoral defeat, is essentially our existing policy on steroids. If we are eve...
A rational immigration policy would select immigrants based on their likelihood to succeed in a post-industrial 21st century economy. We must, therefore, end our current policy of chain migration that results in the admission of millions of people whose skills do not meet the needs of our economy. The system must be re...
A rational immigration policy must include a “stress test” that assesses the impact of immigration on American workers and makes adjustments accordingly. Certainly, during times of sustained high unemployment, U.S. immigration policies must have a mechanism for reducing the influx. The impact of perhaps tens of million...
A more rational immigration policy would also be a more affordable one – an important consideration for a nation with a $16 trillion accumulated debt that grows by upwards of $1 trillion annually. U.S. households headed by immigrants are 50 percent more likely to rely on some form of government assistance than those he...
Any tax revenues generated by immigrants who arrive here poorly educated and poorly skilled lag far behind the costs required for their education, health care, and housing. When the costs associated with means-tested benefits for their U.S. born children are factored in, the price tag for maintaining the current system...
Future flows of immigration must also be manageable. The sheer volume of today’s immigration flow – more than 1 million legal admissions each year and hundreds of thousands of guest workers – make the system virtually impossible to manage effectively. Only by reducing the influx, establishing clear criteria for admissi...
Finally, it must be moral. Americans must be confident that all laws will be enforced consistently, and not be held hostage to the political agenda of whatever administration holds office. As we have witnessed in the past several years, the integrity of our immigration policy can be undermined by a president who simply...
Unfortunately, the deal now being discussed in Washington is neither rational, affordable, manageable nor moral. Its centerpiece is a massive, expensive, and chaotic amnesty plan to be followed by the expansion of family chain migration to satisfy Democratic special interests, while piling on some additional skilled wo...
True "reform" means solving today's problems in a manner that prevents any recurrence down the line. Is anyone willing to provide this kind of leadership? After years of fruitless effort to truly reform our nation’s immigration policies, it seems the two parties may find agreement on one idea– a concept that is simple,...
A Q&A of the Week programme about participle clauses.
"When I was reading the news I found that I don't understand the sentence of "having given up hope of..." Does it mean that Mr Jones has to give up hope of...? Could you please elaborate the structure of this sentence?"
In this week's Question and Answer of the Week, Jean and Catherine answer a question from Kristy in Hong Kong.
Newsreader: Mr Jones saw lorry drivers fall asleep in their cabs, having given up hope of getting out of the queue during the night.
What does the phrase 'having given up hope' mean?
Learn a useful way to talk about cause and effect relationships between events that happened in the past.
And try to practise with Jean when Catherine asks her to join two sentences together with a participle clause.
A Pakistani judge has ruled there is not enough evidence to try a key suspect in an alleged airline bomb plot on terrorism charges.
He has moved the case of Rashid Rauf, a Briton, from an anti-terrorism court to a regular court, where he faces lesser charges such as forgery.
Pakistan has presented Mr Rauf as one of the ringleaders behind the alleged plan to blow up flights out of London.
The British authorities say they foiled it with Pakistan's help in August.
They say proceedings against suspects arrested in Britain will go ahead.
The arrest of Rashid Rauf in Pakistan triggered arrests in the United Kingdom of a number of suspects allegedly plotting to blow up transatlantic flights.
The Pakistani authorities described him as a key figure.
But an anti-terrorism court in Rawalpindi found no evidence that he had been involved in terrorist activities or that he belonged to a terrorist organisation.
As well as forgery charges, Mr Rauf has also been charged with carrying explosives.
But his lawyer says police evidence amounts only to bottles of hydrogen peroxide found in his possession.
Hydrogen peroxide is a disinfectant that can be used for bomb-making if other chemicals are added.
The BBC's Barbara Plett in Islamabad says the judge's decision has reinforced the already widespread scepticism there about the airliner plot.
Several commentators said the threat was deliberately exaggerated to bolster the anti-terror credentials of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and that it helped to demonise British Muslims of Pakistani origin.
The Crown Prosecution Service in the UK said the dropping of charges against Mr Rauf in Pakistan would "make no difference" to the case against the men charged in Britain.
In August, the British government requested the extradition of Mr Rauf, a Briton of Pakistani origin who returned to Pakistan four years ago, in connection with a 2002 murder.
Scotland Yard declined to discuss which murder case the request related to.
The government in Pakistan, which has no extradition treaty with the UK, said it was considering the request.
Rashid Rauf was arrested in Pakistan earlier that month over the alleged plot to blow up US-bound aircraft, Pakistan's foreign ministry said.
He has been described by Pakistan's government as a "key person" in the "suspected conspiracy".
The August arrests led to increased airport security around the world, causing major disruption.
Passengers on many flights were forbidden to take liquids aboard aircraft.
Life is full of seasons likewise many relationships are seasonal as well. No matter how much time and love we invest, some things have got to go.
Whether their love turns cold or they find somebody else, we can easily catch a lying partner. A dying romance is evident when their eyes do not look at you with admiration and their hugs feel forced. Once things become obvious, it’s a mistake to keep prolonging a dead relationship as it needs a grave. People can be mi...
If things haven’t worked out for you and you find yourself struggling to move on, here are some tips to get you back on track and remember, no one’s worthy to be harmed for.
KEEP YOUR DISTANCE — even if the relationship ended on a good note, if you still have emotional attachment with the person, it’s wise to not stay in touch. Cutting all ties and even blocking the person on all social media is a first step. It’s for your own peace of mind. We remain anxious when we keep looking back at s...
DESTROY THE MEMORY — sounds brutal, but we have to take measures to protect our own sanity. Just like how Geet from ‘Jab We Met’ suggested Aditya to burn the picture of his ex and flush it down the toilet, it’s an important step to discard things that remind you of him/her. Pictures, cards, letters, gifts: alt-control-...
DON’T TAKE THAT CALL — your ex will knock your door again. They always come back. In order to undo the silly, unending hamster wheel race, you got do things you could never do before – ignore. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, but if you don’t will to be out of this maze, then no one can help you. Don’t let them kee...
DECK YOURSELF UP — take care of yourself. Join a gym, be more active and socialise. Change your stinking outfit and take some time alone. Re-discover yourself. Find your agenda on this planet and follow your path. Stop wasting time crying over what hurt you and abandoned you. Heart breaks can be painful, but you have t...
TO EMBALM THE PAIN — take the help of nature, music, books, travel, art and prayer to repair yourself and the best balm ever is time. Just like Coldplay warned us all, “Nobody said it was easy”, our past and mistakes become our best teachers in life. If they never saw your worth, don’t go ahead and make the same mistak...
STOP LOOKING — most people hop into a new relationship hoping that it would fix the pain, but that is a nightmare formula. This delays your own internal healing. When people resort to a fling or a new relationship right after a breakup, without fixing themselves emotionally, chances are that the new found love will als...
“So many worthy books, so little space.” I type those words so often. I send them to publicists who fill my inbox with plugs for one title after another on publishers’ lists. I send them to reviewers eager to offer their thoughts on this or that author’s latest effort. I send them to authors themselves—you might be sur...
In the holiday spirit, now is a moment to mention an array of 2014 books across the non-fiction and fiction spectrum I wish we hadn’t missed—and to ask their authors to pay it forward, and single out a few books themselves. What recent work has caught their expert eye? What book, however old, helped them write the one ...
Dinaw Mengestu, who has expressed his interest in “adding to the complexity and levels of the immigrant narrative in America,” has done just that in All Our Names. The two voices that speak in his third novel raise haunting questions about identity, loyalty, and the mysteries of intimacy. A young Ethiopian arrives in U...
Dinaw Mengestu: There’s no particular category or genre for books that push against the conventional borders of what constitutes a novel, but I always find myself grateful and perhaps even a bit relieved to find books that resist easy categorization. This year, two particular favorites did just that: Teju Cole’s Everyd...
As for my own writing, I’m not sure what All Our Names would have looked like had I not had Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North on my nightstand, in my bag, on my desk. I must have reread it a half dozen times over the past few years, and on each occasion, even if I read only a few pages, I found something l...
Dinaw Mengestu teaches at Georgetown University and in the Brooklyn College MFA program.
Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators: How A Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution is a book perfectly matched to its subject. Isaacson briskly spins a wide web of biographies, tracing convergences among many restless minds. Those fruitful linkages helped fueled fast-paced progress....
Walter Isaacson: Two books I enjoyed this year: Steve Johnson's How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World, which tied right into the work I was doing on The Innovators, because it showed that creativity has historically been a collaborative endeavor, and Doris Kearns Goodwin's The Bully Pulpit; Theo...
A formative book for me in writing The Innovators was The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. He was an inventor, innovator, and information networker. It made me realize that we know the history of our American Revolution and the values it spawned, but we know little about the leaders and heroes of the Digital Revolut...
Dana Goldstein’s The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession is the product of just what the teaching corps needs more of: open-minded, well-informed, sympathetic scrutiny that doesn’t shrink from exposing systemic problems and doesn’t peddle faddish solutions either. From the push for universal ...
Dana Goldstein: One of the best books I read this year actually came out in 2013 during the hazy months when I was deep in the fog of finishing the first draft of my own book. Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces is a mash-up of history, policy, and polemic written by Radley Balko, a r...
One of the joys of writing The Teacher Wars was excavating yesterday’s social science on education—and discovering that some of it remains relevant today.
One of those works was Isolation in the School, written in 1900 by Ella Flagg Young, the first woman to lead a major urban school system—Chicago’s. She was also one of the first American intellectuals to conceptualize what we today call the “achievement gap” between poor and middle-class kids. During an era when poor c...
Dana Goldstein is a staff writer at The Marshall Project.
The last thing Wendy Lesser aims to do in Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books is to create “a museum of approved works.” As she thinks out loud—about character and plot, about novelty and authority, and more—she draws on an eclectic array of books that she loves not just for sentences she’s always eager to return...
Wendy Lesser: I’ve read three great new novels in 2014. The first of these was Yiyun Li’s Kinder Than Solitude, her second novel and her fourth work of fiction. This newcomer to English (she migrated here from China as a graduate student in epidemiology) writes better, more interesting prose than just about any of her ...
Strangely enough, Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know also reminded me of Conrad, but for completely different reasons, having to do with the layers of narrators (there are two) and the contemplative weave of politics and fiction. This ambitious first novel seems to pack into it everything the author knows...
The Italian writer Andrea Canobbio’s Three Light-Years is an intense, appealing, beautifully constructed novel about lives that took place before the narrator was born. I was so thrilled by this book that the minute I finished it, I ordered Canobbio’s older novel, The Natural Disorder of Things, which turned out to be ...
As for a work or works that inspired my own Why I Read: Those too are primarily novels, including the complete works of Charles Dickens, Henry James, Penelope Fitzgerald, Javier Marías, and Haruku Murakami, not to mention all the other authors whose achievements have penetrated my psyche over the years. I did reread E....
Wendy Lesser is the founder and editor of The Threepenny Review.
My mathematical childhood featured lots of Gardner, but the book I returned to the most was a contemporary one, Douglas Hofstadter’s 1979 Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, the first math book to win the Pulitzer Prize and probably the only one that ever will. GEB: EGB was the kind of book you could read aga...
Jordan Ellenberg is the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin.
In Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind, Sarah Wildman isn’t only on a quest to discover the fate in Nazi Germany of a young and brilliant woman whose moving letters she finds among her beloved grandfather’s papers after his death—though that quest is fascinating and suspenseful. She also draws...
Sarah Wildman: Especially in light of the news of the last weeks of 2014, I can’t stop thinking about Jesmyn Ward’s The Men We Reaped: A Memoir (out in paperback this year). Ward’s unsparing story of her own childhood and early adulthood is woven into a series of essays on the short, tragic, often violent, trajectories...
Midyear I was introduced to the marvelously dark The Girls From Corona Del Mar by Rufi Thorpe. The story tracks the tale of two girls, the choices they make around pregnancy, partnership, and education, and the ways in which the seeds of a childhood friendship produce vines that nearly choke each other out. Thorpe’s br...
The minute I picked up Molly Antopol’s The UnAmericans, I wanted to know this author of short stories about displaced Jews, in former Soviet States, in Israel, in this country. She has created a memorable collection of melancholic vignettes about identity, place, and coupling.
On a subject close to my own, in Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film, Glenn Kurtz is propelled by the unlikely discovery of a snippet of film, a family vacation movie taken in 1938 by his grandfather: It is the only extant reminder of an extinguished town. Kurtz’s masterful detective...
My own multi-year journey in pursuit of the love my grandfather left behind in Nazi-occupied Vienna was inspired, in no small part, by a different war, and a different part of Europe. Years ago, on an plane out of Madrid, I read Javier Cercas’ Soldiers of Salamis, the (fictionalized) story of a journalist who goes in s...
Sarah Wildman is a frequent contributor to Slate, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.
A chance encounter with a stranger on a train ride to London leads a young woman into a trail of deception, danger and murder.
Welcome back to the shady criminal underworld that has become the literary home of Southport-born Roberta Kray whose marriage to notorious gangster Reggie Kray gave her an authentic insight into London’s East End.
In her tenth sizzling thriller, Kray draws on both her unique perspective on crime and her ability to create tense, hard-hitting page-turners to deliver a white-knuckle journey into the heart of darkness.
Sadie Wise has finally tracked down her feckless husband Eddie who left her five years ago, taking every last penny out of their joint account. Now in a new relationship, all she cares about is getting Eddie to agree to sign the divorce papers so she can move on.
On the train to London to confront him, Sadie finds herself confiding the whole story to a stranger, Mona Farrell. In Sadie’s mind, it’s a brief encounter of no importance but in Mona’s troubled, twisted mind, it’s the basis of a promise.
Because Mona hates her father and, just as in the plot of Patricia Highsmith’s thriller Strangers on a Train, she tells Sadie that getting a total stranger to kill him would be the perfect murder. First, she will rid her new friend of her cheating husband and, in exchange, Sadie will kill her control- freak father.
Unnerved by the meeting with Mona, Sadie finds Eddie, persuades him to sign on the dotted line and is soon heading back north to her new love. But just a day later, she learns that Eddie was stabbed to death in his East End flat.
Now Mona is stalking Sadie, urging her to fulfil her side of their ‘deal’ and Sadie is under suspicion from the police. But the greatest danger might yet come from the criminal gangster family of Eddie’s girlfriend Kelly Gissing. They blame Sadie for Eddie’s death… and they want revenge.
Kray’s gritty foray into the shady criminal underworld positively crackles with tension and menace. Vivid, well-drawn characters, a tantalising plot, chilling intrigue and bags of action make this a number one choice for crime fiction fans.
Nurse practitioner Diane Gudmundson decided last August she could provide better care outside the public health system than within it.
Last August, Diane Gudmundson left the public health system, disillusioned with it. The nurse practitioner felt away from its constraints, she could deliver better patient care — even though it meant charging people directly.
It’s a feeling echoed by Donna Alden-Bugden, another nurse practitioner scaling back her work for the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority while building up a roster of private clients.
The two women are among a cohort of nurse practitioners, NPs for short, currently branching out into the private sphere, according to the chairwoman of the Nurse Practitioner Association of Manitoba.
"I would get this restless feeling like, ‘We should be doing more,’" said Gudmundson, who has more than two decades of nursing experience. "We could be doing better, we should be able to do different things."
Donna Alden-Bugden, a nurse practitioner, says the public is learning how using private practitioners can be more convenient and just as effective.
"These nurse practitioners are visionaries who have identified a client need that’s not fit by the traditional funding model," said Ashley Pylypowich, herself a practising NP. "They’ve developed new pathways to optimize client care."

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