People still love trains.  This week it was announced that China was assisting XpressWest to final start building a high speed line from Las Vegas into California. They would say Las Vegas to LA, but it never truly reaches LA. What was originally to be a line from Anaheim/Disneyland to Las Vegas has been truncated to Las Vegas to Victorville. People will have to drive out of LA to Victorville to then catch the train to Vegas. Regardless of the obvious issues, the project is supposed to start construction next September so it will give the long planned High Speed rail system from San Fran to LA competition regarding who will be first in the USA. 

Of course in this discussion we also have the Texas project. Having selected Dallas as one end of the service, Texas Central Railway is working with Japanese firms to make a service from Dallas to Houston. Only 240 miles, but they plan over 60 trains a day and they only have three stops stations. Like most High Speed projects they look towards 2020 to be completing the segment. 

In all this there is the South Central High-Speed corridor which is a Federally Designated High Speed rail are from San Antonio to Dallas, to Oklahoma City and then Tulsa. A branch goes from Dallas through Texarkana to Little-Rock. All well and good, but I would like a branch leading through Shreveport down to Alexandria and then maybe New Orleans. To me the Texas projects have the best chance to build something since there is still lots of open land between cities. XpressWest might have the next biggest since most of its route is desert. Only time will now tell.

For an entire decade I worked for Boeing without a security clearance. It wasn't required, I was never told what I was supporting when the security cleared people came to me for help on something. They would always give ambiguous questions and I had to give solid answers. In this I always remembered a story from a PhD working for North American Aviation. He was called to Edwards AFB in 1954 to advise on something. He was seated facing a huge curtain in a hangar at the base. People would come out from behind the curtain and ask him questions and he would answer them is good as he could. They would then go back behind the curtain, discuss it with others and then come back out with more questions for him. Twenty years later he learned that behind the curtain was the X-10, a top secret supersonic drone of the 1950s. He also never had a security clearance.

Many years later, while working for Boeing I was called to help fix a recurring problem with the Delta IV fuel tank. After reviewing the problem I told them what the obvious solution was (and its a simple one too). A few months later I was told they couldn't implement the solution because the tank in question already was being sold to the Japanese for their Ha2 launch vehicle. So we couldn't fix our problem without fixing the Japanese tank, and fixing the Japanese tank violated ITAR regulations.

I state this for a reason: I am regularly seeing job postings I can't apply too because the poster wants people with active security clearances. Not just can I get one, they want it active now. And because I haven't been working for three years I am viewed as unable to get a security clearance (some employers won't consider a person if they have been looking for work for more then 6 months). So instead, who do we find they have turned the keys to the kingdom. Outside of the Army nut presently siting in prison, and Edward Snowden who's now living comfortably in Russia, we now have this guy.  How can these people be getting top security access when they obviously have so many red flags.

In the old days even minor issues could get you thrown out. My dad saw a man removed from NAA in the 1950s when the investigators found out his father wasn't a US citizen. Turned out the engineer's father had given up his citizenship so he could volunteer for the Canadian Army in 1914. When the US entered the world War in 1917 he transferred to an American Army unit believing he would get his citizenship back. Instead his son ended up removed from his job forty years later because the proper paper work wasn't filed. Decades later a young woman my sister went to engineering school with, who was an excellent engineer, was denied security clearance when it came out she still had relatives living in Cuba. I was even warned the same when I was dating a young woman of Indian background that her having family in Indian would cause me problems with security clearance. 

And yet today people with far more potential problems get top secret clearance. The guy who set off this rant's wife is reported to have been carrying thumb drives with ITAR tech in it as she was boarding a plane to China. Are we checking the laptops or thumb drives of the H1B visa guest workers who we are now training in skills they didn't have in their home country. And after that, are we erasing the brains of these workers to remove the skills they learned to do here before they go back home.  What the hell is going on today.

A Puget Sound Newspaper reporter had an interesting take on Aerospace jobs flowing to Florida. The problem I have with the article. Well outside of the fact he suggests the new "Starliner" could be used for deep space exploration (the heat shield can't handle it) it makes the case that since Bezos company Blue Orion is setting up In Florida is stealing jobs from Kent Washington. The reality is Kent never truly had a space industry, they had a Boeing Division that drove the Boeing Space groups in California crazy with their solutions to problems we didn't have.  And according to this article the opening of the CST-100/ Strainer assembly facility at Florida is another loss for Kent. But CST-100 was being designed at Houston, not Kent. And the move to Florida (from Houston) had been in the works for three years.  And yes, Boeing built the first stage of the Saturn, in Louisiana.

Boeing Washington never wanted a Space Division and thus there was nothing at Kent to loose to Florida. In the same way the devastation of the Boeing Space divisions in California: from the selling of Rocketdyne, to the dumping of Delta onto ULA, to the final demise of Shuttle, they have effectively put Boeing out of the Space business. For me, one of the many Ex-Boeing engineers its just a matter of time before Boeing sells CST-100/Starliner to Lockheed or Northrup and goes back to just making commercial airliners.  What Boeing Washington just wants to do.

In an earlier post I commented about George Soros suddenly buying Coal now that the value of the stock had been reduced to nearly nothing by Soros's friends, President Obama and Al Gore. I further commented that people needed to be observant over who was going to buy the stocks that Al boasted he would make worthless in five years. I figured they would be front companies in foreign nations, fronts for various people in the environmental movement. Like the Canadian firm that was a front for Russia as Putin bought a significant portion of our Uranium reserves.

Instead these people don't even feel they need to hide it. Take the recent report of Tom Clarke who just bought another coal company who's stock is now worth less then 75% what it was before Barrack came to office. He did it openly, himself saying he would sell the coal at a 10% premium and use the extra cash to plant trees as a carbon off-set. Even the news people reporting this, stated there was no assurance the EPA would except the tree planting as enough of an action to off-set the carbon released. Or maybe that assurance has already been acquired. Just as perhaps this new coal company exec has been assured that he will find buyers for his higher cost coal in an economy where even Gasoline prices have dropped below $2.00 a gallon.  This is beginning to smell worse every day and its not a rotten egg smell caused by a sulfur release.