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Afternoon Links: Death to Bikeshare, #Woke 8 Year Olds, and Old Liberals

By Jim Swift

The Capital Bikeshare killer is here. Bike sharing programs are increasingly popular in big cities, and Washington was an early adopter with its Capital Bikeshare program. (The keys even look like little communist flags!) The program got started with millions in subsidies from the government, and is continually supported by D.C.-area governments. The system’s main inefficiency is the docking system and during big events it can’t easily handle demand surges without human help.

Enter LimeBike, which I tested along with Red Alert‘s Ron Meyer yesterday. Make no mistake: Limbike is here to kill Capital Bikeshare. Each bike has a lock built into the back wheel, so it doesn’t need a dock. You simply park it pretty much anywhere on the sidewalk. While LimeBike’s monthly fees are a bit higher than Bikeshare, its ease of use (via an app) is much better, and at $1 a ride, LimeBike is slightly cheaper on a per-ride basis for casual users. Each bike has a basket with a solar panel on it that powers the GPS and the lock, the front wheel also generates power, and the tires are airless, thus minimizing the need to be handled by employees. The best part? It’s all done without federal grant money or annual contributions from local governments.

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Still, competing with the government’s chosen player is . . . no fun. Will the government let LimeBike kill their investment? Probably not.

The Jonah Goldberg podcast! Most readers are familiar with National Review’s Jonah Goldberg. Yesterday, he released a new podcast called The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg. It’s well worth a listen, as Jonah “nervously gropes his way through the podcast universe like a blind pervert in a sex-robot warehouse.” Of course, you should also subscribe to our wonderful suite of podcasts, too.

Kids say the darndest things. The Washington Post Magazine has an interview with the region’s (minus Virginia, oddly) third-graders, to let them have a say on the state of the USA. Some favorites:

“I really liked Hillary Clinton because she’s a feminist, and my mom is a feminist and I want to be a feminist when I grow up.” “Girls can’t pass the gas without saying excuse me, but sometimes some boys don’t have to.” “I remember when I was 6 or 7 I went to camp and it was Father’s Day, and then one kid was there and his parents were gay and then there was another kid who just started teasing him. . . . Like, what’s wrong with it? It’s just a different way of love, you know?” “I think that some things should be free. . . . Like water should be free because, I mean, why do you have to pay to get water? I mean, you need it.” “I think I know why people immigrate. For example, in Russia, if you own something, the president of Russia is allowed to take it away from you.” “Sending away immigrants—that doesn’t help anything! They do most of our agricultural jobs and jobs that we don’t want to do, so when you send away that, you think that it’s a good thing, but when you actually do it you’re like, uh-oh, mistake.”

Maybe the people bragging on Twitter about their #woke 8-year-olds are actually telling the truth!

Kristol! Kristol! Kristol! Alex Burns has a fun read about the Acela train at the New York Times, and Bill Kristol makes an amusing cameo:

Mr. Kristol, no friend of the current White House, remains an Acela loyalist, and he has embraced the “Acela corridor” designation along with unfashionable labels like “establishment” and “globalist.” When a Trump supporter taunted him online earlier this summer, saying Mr. Kristol never made a crowd chant like the president, Mr. Kristol fired back on Twitter: “I’d normally be too modest to report this, but crowd WAS chanting ‘Kristol Kristol Kristol’ as I boarded Acela this a.m. at Union Station.” Mr. Kristol said his affection for the train was partly tongue-in-cheek, calling it “no great shakes.” He described the Acela’s atmosphere with a gentle irony some people reserve for friends and family. “If you haven’t ridden the Acela while trying to prevent your Dunkin’ Donuts coffee from spilling,” Mr. Kristol wrote in an email, “while also pretending to ignore nearby riders, who include three McKinsey consultants energetically discussing their spreadsheets, two Europeans vividly lamenting the state of America, and a lawyer sharply berating a junior associate for his failings, have you really lived life in the New York-D.C. corridor to the full?”

Most TWSers are Northeast Regional types, but Bill sure does love his Acela . . . and hate the Quiet Car.

Old liberals vs. young progressives. In college, my favorite local columnist in Saint Louis was Bill McLellan, who wrote a column at the Post Dispatch. He’s an old-school liberal, and over the years I was there, he taught me a lot about my temporary home town. Saint Louis has been in the news a lot lately post Ferguson on the subjects of policing, race, and crime. Here’s McClellan’s latest on the difference between old liberals and young progressives:

For some years, we continued on parallel tracks—liberals and progressives. But somewhere along the line, our tracks diverged. I thought about that during the recent unrest when progressives took to the streets to protest the acquittal of a former police officer who had been charged with murdering an alleged heroin dealer after a high-speed chase. Let me give you the liberal perspective. We believe that racism exists. We believe it’s institutionalized. That is, it’s part of our system. A black child who grows up in poverty in a gang-infested neighborhood has little chance to rise above his or her surroundings. That’s why we support all sorts of government programs—waste-laden though they may be—that are aimed at helping the poor. But that does not translate into demanding a conviction in a police-shooting just because the person who has been shot is black. Believe me, liberals are skeptical of authority. We do not take the Man’s word for things. In this case, there is a dash-cam videotape. It does not show everything, but it is instructive to the major issue. Was the suspect armed, or did the officer plant the gun that was later found in the suspect’s vehicle? In his ruling, the judge said he studied the videotape carefully and did not see any sign of the gun on the officer, who was not wearing a coat. That videotape is available to anybody with a computer. I am still skeptical, but a conviction requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Progressives seem to believe that skepticism ought to be sufficient for conviction.

As you can imagine, the column has not been going over well in progressive circles.

Baseball is back! It was only gone for a day, but it felt like forever. And tonight, the playoffs begin! Over at Tablet, I learned something interesting about Dodger Stadium: The parking lot for the stadium was once a Jewish cemetery. Here’s Aaron Katz:

As Los Angeles’s Jewish community continued to grow, new synagogues sprang up, as did new cemeteries. With the removal of the graves in the old cemetery, the Society subsequently sold the majority of the property to the city of Los Angeles, with the city using the property for various usages, including leasing it out as a rubbish dump. Between 1938 and 1941, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) built the Naval and Marine Corps Reserve Center, a historic art deco building that had served as the induction and training center for more than 20,000 sailors during World War II.

Indeed, when the Dodgers came west, they brought Sandy Koufax, the game’s most famous player of Jewish ancestry with them. There is a plaque on the site, that Katz reports will soon be replaced with a new one. If you’re out west for any of the games, it seems worth checking out.

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