RAND SIMBERG HAS A GOOD COLUMN on the X-Prize and suborbital flight over at TechCentralStation.

GORELICK UPDATE: Beldar’s Blog has been defending Jamie Gorelick, and there’s been a lot of back and forth. There are quite a few posts, but this one seems to link back to most of the others. You may also want to follow this technorati link, which references the original post by Dwight Meredith. Weirdly, though, it doesn’t include my post linking Dwight’s, meaning that I can’t promise that it’s not leaving something else out. Here’s the technorati cosmos for that post, but it doesn’t pick up on Beldar’s reference to it. Apparently, technorati is less comprehensive than I had thought. That’s not a criticism — after all, it’s free — but it’s worth remembering.

HERE’S AN EMAIL FROM BASRA that’s worth reading.

MESSAGE TO FRANK J.: Resistance is futile. You were warned.

UPDATE: Heh. Some people are just too good with Photoshop.

HERE’S A PHONED-IN BLOG ENTRY from powerless Oak Park, MI, dictated over the phone by Moe Freedman. Backup power for gas stations turns out to be important.

UPDATE: Reader Mike Doffing emails:

The biggest problem with having a generator around is not the generator itself but the hassle of storing dangerous (and slowly degrading) gasoline. Gas stations presumably don’t have that problem. How about the Bush administration announcing a plan to give a nice tax break to all stations who buy a generator. To make sure they keep it and not sell it, how about having the county inspectors who check the pumps for dispensing accuracy check on the generators as well. They can also check to make sure they have a hand siphon to solve the catch-22 problem of getting the initial gas to power the generator. There are a lot of registered voters sitting in those three hour gas lines.

Good point. Me, I want one of those tripower generators — natural gas, propane, or gasoline, whatever’s handy. . . .

RICH HAILEY HAS A LONG and rather good post on power systems and blackouts.

JUST GOT BACK from a visit to a former student’s startup video-game company. I played a beta version of the game, Hostile Intent. I wiped out a bunch of international terrorists who were holding a Chechen leader hostage, blocking a peace agreement with Russia. The game lets you do cool things like blow holes in the walls of buildings with C-4 or rocket launchers, which most games don’t. Here’s a video story about it. Pretty cool stuff.

I’ll be writing a bit more on this later. I’ve been meaning to pay more attention to the game world, which no doubt has more actual influence on the world than weblogs do.

ALGERIAN TOURIST UPDATE:

Algerian security forces and two helicopters have been seen near the border with Mali where 14 Europeans are being held hostage, sources told AFP in the Kidal region.

“I have seen dozens of armed Algerian soldiers, and two Algerian military helicopters near the border with Mali,” said an official who returned from the area.

Another source also confirmed the presence of Algerian troops and two helicopters in the Algerian town of Bordj Mokhtar, about 10 kilometers (six miles) from Mali.

I guess somebody thinks the negotations aren’t certain to pan out.

DANIEL DREZNER REPORTS THAT IT’S NOT JUST THE BBC: The foreign press in general seems hell-bent to make things sound chaotic.

COPYCAT SNIPER ATTACKS? Sheesh.

READER TIM MCCULLOCH wonders why no one is talking about a SCADA attack as the cause of the blackout. Beats me, though as I mentioned earlier, you don’t need terrorists to get a blackout on a hot August day.

UPDATE: Here’s the latest report I’ve seen on the inquiry into what happened:

MICHEHL GENT, PRESIDENT of the North American Electric Reliability Council, or NERC, said in a conference call with reporters that investigators had determined that a section of the power grid known as the Lake Erie loop experienced a “oscillating power phenomenon” that lasted nine or 10 seconds at the outset of Thursday’s outage.

That event — which saw a 300 megawatt eastward flow of electricity quickly reverse into a 500 megawatt flow to the west — caused other transmission lines and power plants on the grid to shut down as protection systems automatically disconnected them to prevent damaging equipment, he said. . . .

The Lake Erie loop, which runs from New York as far west as Detroit, then jogs northward into Canada before dropping back into the United State, has “been a problem for years,” Gent said, explaining that the locus of transmission lines south of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario makes it difficult to monitor and control the flow of electricity.

Bottom line: nobody knows anything yet. But elected officials are already making fools of themselves by blaming each other. Shut up, guys — at least until next week.

Meanwhile Nick Schulz is quoting Jose Ortega y Gasset:

As they do not see, behind the benefits of civilisation, marvels of invention and construction which can only be maintained by great effort and foresight, they imagine that their role is limited to demanding these benefits peremptorily, as if they were natural rights.

Indeed.

AMY LANGFIELD IS BLOGGING FIRSTHAND REPORTS FROM NEW YORK: Just scroll up from this link, which is to her account of being stuck on the subway. And Jeff Jarvis has loads of stuff.

UPDATE: Megan McArdle reports in on her long, barefoot walk through Manhattan.

BARRY DAUPHIN SAYS YOU CAN’T TRUST THE BBC IN A CRISIS:

I’m writing from a blackout area, but my power has recently come back on (Ypsilanti, MI). Last night while listening to my wind up radio, on comes the “authoritative” BBC voice. Their headline was that the power outage was causing “chaos” in several American cities. Well, there was no chaos in the Metro Detroit area. Listening for a few hours to the radio revealed no chaos in any American city. People calmly did what they needed to do. There’s very little, if any, panic. Seems like the BBC “sexed up” its journalism once again.

Is Andrew Gilligan reporting from NY or is this just the usual BBC?

It’s not clear that there’s anything terribly unusual about Andrew Gilligan’s reporting.

ROGER SIMON ADMINISTERS A SPANKING TO TIM NOAH, whom he’s accusing of trolling:

What is going on here couldn’t be more obvious—Noah is behaving like an Internet troll, looking for reactions (well… I guess he got one here). But it’s a little more than that because Slate is something of an online bully pulpit (Salon having more or less faded from view) and what Noah is doing riding the Arnold fad for all it’s worth. I doubt the writer himself really believes what he’s saying—or if he does he has simply convinced himself for the convenience of turning a non-issue into an issue. This is one of the ways “yellow journalism” happens and that’s what’s happening here.

Remind me not to get on Roger’s bad side.

BLOG MELA CELEBRATES 56 years of Indian independence. If you’re not familiar with the Indian sector of the Blogosphere, you ought to check it out!

ANDREW HOFER EMAILS:

1. I hear power is NOT back on Wall Street. It certainly isn’t here, two blocks up from Wall Street.

2. Corporate blogs used in emergency – Link

Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Mindles Dreck reports that streetlights fed by generators are probably responsible for the reports that power is back on Wall Street. He has more information, too.

THIS WALL STREET JOURNAL EDITORIAL IS ON POINT:

Everyone who recalls September 11 immediately thought of terrorism, and we can all be thankful it wasn’t the cause. But it’s somehow not reassuring to hear government officials refer to the event the way New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg did as a “natural occurrence.” Natural is what happens in nature, like a tornado, but a national power grid is a man-made operation.

The breadth of the energy disruption suggests that some major rethinking deserves to be done about the vulnerability of America’s power grid. If an accident can shut down an entire U.S. region for half a day, imagine what well-planned sabotage could do. The U.S. has grown complacent as the memory of California’s blackouts in 2000 has faded. But especially in the Northeast, the U.S. is still operating on an energy supply and with a load-sharing grid that has very little room for error.

Yes, and something needs to be done.

ADVANCE INTERNET SERVICES (including NJ.com, Nola.com, Cleveland.com, Masslive.com, etc.) has been using weblogs as a backup — their emergency page sends people to The Command Post, Buzzmachine, etc. for updates while they work to restore service.

Weblogs as distributed redundant news services. Why not?

Here’s an update from Patrick Brown in London, Ontario:

For what it’s worth, power is still off in my neighbourhood in London, Ontario, though it’s on at the university a 15 minute walk away (which is where I’m emailing you from). Parts of the city have had power since about 8 pm yesterday. We’re situated about halfway between Detroit and Toronto. The big news here is no news – no disasters, no looting. People spontaneously organized themselves in traffic. I drove right across the city (it’s a sprawling town of 330,000) at 5 pm yesterday and saw only politeness and efficient managing of intersections. I only saw a traffic cop at one intersection. Everywhere else, people took turns and were polite. Lots of reports to radio stations suggested people were getting along fine, helping each other. At one radio station in Kitchener, Ontario (an hour down the highway from here), the staff took batteries out of their cars and ran the station using them.

CBC is reporting traffic “chaos” in Toronto, but that’s CBC. One of their reporters in a live, on-the-scene report during rush hour, with a breathy, dramatic voice, allowed that things were so bad he “wouldn’t be surprised to see a fender-bender or a pedestrian being hit.” Oh, the humanity!!

Well, back to marking term papers for my summer course :- (

Grading term papers — now that is a disaster.

LET THIS serve as a warning to Frank J.

READER BROCK CUSICK emails that power is back on on Wall Street, as of just a few minutes ago. News reports still say Manhattan is largely without power, though. Here’s the latest from the Times, and here’s the Globe story.

Meanwhile reader Herbert Jacobi has some thoughts on what this means:

(more…)

MORE ARROGANT UNILATERALISM FROM THE FRENCH:

France is threatening to scupper the deal reached with Libya over compensation for the Lockerbie bombing.

It wants the same deal for victims of the UTA jet that was blown up over Africa in 1989.

If they do not get it, the French say they will stop the UN lifting sanctions against Libya – which is part of the agreement.

Get those losers off the Security Council. They’re nothing but trouble.

I’LL BET THERE’S MORE to this story:

Britain has expelled a Saudi diplomat, described as an intelligence officer, after allegations that he bribed a Metropolitan police officer.
Ali al-Shamarani is alleged to have paid PC Ghazi Ahmed Kassim, 52, to obtain confidential information from police computers about people with Middle Eastern connections living in the UK.

Hmm. More turning of the screws on the Saudis?

HERE ARE THE TOP TEN REASONS for the Northeastern blackout.

UPDATE: Suman Palit points to a lot of more serious reasons, and to an MIT report on electrical industry restructuring that suggests that it hasn’t gone very well.

MSNBC says there’s “serious looting” in Ottawa, but has no further details.

UPDATE: Grahame Young emails:

I’m in a hotel in the heart of downtown Ottawa right now. The laptop battery indicator estimates I have 50 minutes left. There’s been no sign of power being restored, and I have seen no sign of any looting going on in the downtown area (near the Parliament/Rideau Canal area).

I was out for a walk 45 minutes ago and there are a few people here and there enjoying the warm evening.

During rush hour, the citizenry of the city were amazingly adept at self-regulating traffic flow…or at least they were polite, waving each other through intersections, stopping to let pedestrians move about.

Anyway, I’m off to bed. If the power comes up before I fall asleep I’ll drop you a note.

Thanks, Grahame. Nicholas Packwood reports the looting in the east end of Ottawa. I don’t know how far that is from downtown.

NICHOLAS PACKWOOD EMAILS: “Power went back on in Toronto about five minutes ago ( 10:45 p.m. EST). CBC’s national broadcast is cutting in and out.”

UPDATE: Packwood sends more:

It turns out only parts of Toronto have power back and the Premiere (Governor) of Ontario has warned us to expect rolling black-outs over the next two days at least. Non-essential workers have been asked to stay home tomorrow.

Ok, that’s that. Let’s see if I can send this email before the power goes out again…

Folks, get a big, honking UPS. I need your reports. . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s one:

Our power in Long Beach, Nassau County, Long Island, NY came back on at about 10:30 PM.

My daughter was in Manhattan today, luckily just got off the subway when the power went off. She walked across the Williamsburg Bridge from downtown Chinatown) to Brooklyn and then went to a firehouse where my husband and I picked her up at about 9:00 PM.

Everything was very orderly, there were police at every important intersection, traffic in Brooklyn and Queens was moving very smoothly. During the afternoon we were listening to the NYC Fire Department transmissions and everything was going very well. The dispatchers do a wonderful job keeping in touch with all the fire companies. The most interesting thing we heard was that a woman on the Long Island Railroad train was having a baby and they dispatched a tower truck to the site. I think the train was on an overpass and they had to bring her out in the bucket.

Interesting.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s more:

When the power in New York City is restored it will take at least 6 hours for the subway system to be restored. There are approximately 900 miles of track in the system and every signal and every train has to be checked before service can be resumed.

People are standing in the street holding up destination signs and drivers are picking them up and taking them home.

Bars are giving away their tap beer, or are selling it at a very low price.

Circle Line, which operates sightseeing boats around Manhattan, put their boats into service to carry people across the Hudson River to New Jersey, free, I believe.

Most, or all, of the bridges and tunnels are open only one way – out of Manhattan.

Some restaurants are open and are feeding people for free.

There is some gouging going on by taxi cab drivers.

I have only heard of one looting report, 3 people arrested in Brooklyn.

If I sold backup generators, I’d try to be the first one across those bridges into Manhattan when they open. . .