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Archive for 2013
August 16, 2013
ENVIRONMENTAL TERRORISTS STRIKE AGAIN: Global scientific community condemns the recent destruction of field trials of Golden Rice in the Philippines.
TEN YEARS LATER, how have we avoided another mega-blackout?
While power didn’t go out until close to 4:00pm Eastern time that day, the roots of the massive chain reaction started two and a half hours earlier, when the Eastlake 5 power plant in northern Ohio lost one of its generators. Shortly thereafter, the power company’s energy management system went down, leaving them in the dark, so to speak, about other trouble that was brewing. Between 3:05 and 3:41, the company’s power-transmission lines—sagging from the August heat—came into contact with trees that should have been pruned. That sparked a massive short that further choked off the power supply to northern Ohio.
The result was a massive power surge as electricity from the interconnected grid tried to flood back into Ohio. The grid tripped off—as intended—to prevent overload damage. But then it sparked an irreversible surge-and-trip cascade across much of the Northeastern U.S. According to a report by a Canadian-U.S. task force, 265 power plants went down, many within a matter of minutes of each other.
So why haven’t we had a major power outage since then? For one thing, power companies are now forced to prune their trees thanks to the Energy Policy Act of 2005. But the other major factor is a technological advance. According to Matt Wakefield of the Electric Power Research Institute, most power transmission companies have now installed high-tech synchrophasors, which allow them to detect problems in transmission lines and reroute electricity around trouble spots. The synchophasors work by giving real-time feedback on power flows and voltage and transmitting the data back to power companies.
“While we will always have local and regional power outrages because of things like weather,” Wakefield says, “these synchrophasors mean that these rolling blackouts that can affect large regions of the country at once are much less likely.”
Nevertheless, those local and regional outages are growing increasingly common.
I’m still thinking about adding a whole-house backup generator. Kohler, or Generac?
A NICE ARTICLE ABOUT Brian Transeau and his fans. The new album is A Song Across Wires. It’s out today.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: “The amount of education loans outstanding has increased every quarter since the New York Fed began tracking the figure in 2003. They now account for almost 9% of all consumer debt, up from 3% a decade ago.”
Something that can’t go on forever, won’t.
ANOTHER FALSE STATEMENT: Obama on Jay Leno: “We don’t have a domestic spying program.” Well, it’s not a “domestic spying program,” it’s just a program that does a lot of domestic spying.
THE NEW PARANOIA: A GOVERNMENT AFRAID OF ITSELF. “The latest example is a crackdown on leaks that has the government crippled by a fear of its own employees. Washington is petrified of itself.”
STACY TABB’S BOONDOCK STUDIOS is having a sale.
DID JERRY SEINFELD foresee Facebook 12 years early?
ANDREW KLAVAN: What Egyptian Violence Says About Democracy. “Democracy is not magic. The Demo, remember, stands for people, who are deeply imperfect. Democracy is simply the best method we know of for preserving freedom. When accompanied by a simple and brilliant constitution that restricts government power, guarantees equality under the law and protects minority rights, democracy has been proven to preserve freedom for, oh, yea about 232 years or so. But when it doesn’t do what it’s meant to do, guess what? Democracy is no better than any other method of stomping on people. . . . What I see in Egypt today is a tragedy — a tragedy woven into the fabric of a nation with no good choices. I’m really sorry for the people there; I am. But I’m not sorry they tossed Morsi out.”
WHY THE GOP IS RIGHT NOT TO TRUST CNN AND NBC WITH DEBATES: Reader Matthew Sabian writes: “Speaking of the Candy Crowley debate fiasco, why does no one bring up the debates for the 2008 election where multiple undecided Republican voters turned out to be, well, decided Democrat partisans [most famously, Hillary’s general.] The incident with Crowley, or something similar, was inevitable after the farce of 2008.”
There’s no reason to treat opposition operatives as neutral journalists when they’re not.
UPDATE: Reader Josh Davis writes: “Also don’t forget Gwen Ifill moderating the 2008 VP debate when she had a book about Obama hitting store shelves a few months later.”
PERSONALIZED MEDICINE and George W. Bush’s heart attack. “Doctors who have stated that his cardiac work-up was unnecessary are doing what bad TV experts do all the time — speculating wildly without enough information. In Bush’s case they are completely wrong. . . . The lesson for all of us is that we could be next. If a role model for fitness in older people such Bush can have significant heart disease, so can we.”
I’ll be sure to drink some red wine tonight, just to be safe.
“SMART DIPLOMACY:” Spengler: America’s Problems In The Middle East Are Just Beginning. “America’s credibility in the Middle East, thanks to the delusions of both parties, is broken, and it cannot be repaired within the time frame required to forestall the next stage of violence. Egypt’s military and its Saudi backers are aghast at American stupidity. Israel is frustrated by America’s inability to understand that Egypt’s military is committed to upholding the peace treaty with Israel while the Muslim Brotherhood wants war. Both Israel and the Gulf States observe the utter fecklessness of Washington’s efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear weapons program.”
WALL STREET JOURNAL: Did The IRS Ever Stop Targeting?
“SMART DIPLOMACY:” Al-Sisi’s Hammer, Obama’s Nine-Iron?
What happened in Egypt yesterday and is continuing to happen today is sad, disheartening and about as completely unsurprising as any such event can be. . . . al-Sisi and associates believe in the “strong horse” theory of political legitimacy, and they are now in the process of applying that theory to Egyptian realities. Might doesn’t necessarily make right—that’s not at all how Islamic jurisprudence on such matters reads—but it’s good enough for government work failing other, gentler institutional alternatives. The Middle East lacks the warm, fuzzy affection for the underdog that many Americans take to be second nature. The dominant view of what is still a patriarchal, hierarchical and still clingingly pre-modern set of Muslim Middle Eastern societies is that the weak deserve whatever depredations they suffer. It’s a kind of ur-Social Darwinism that has been at work for many centuries before Darwin himself ever saw light of day.
As I also said before, I think Egypt’s military leaders are right about this. And I suspect they recognized that the longer they waited to crack down on the Muslim Brotherhood encampments the better prepared the MB would be to resist. And they have resisted, and are still doing so. Several score policemen are dead among the many hundreds of MB protestors in Cairo and around the country. So are hundreds of mostly innocent Copts, who have no recourse but to be on the wrong side of the Brotherhood’s murderous intolerance. Indeed, spending energy and resources to kill Coptic civilians and burn down their churches while Muslim police are bearing down on you with shotguns furnishes about the best example there can be of how MB fanaticism completely swamps its capacity for rational planning of any kind.
Read the whole thing. And note this: “I don’t trivialize the President’s priorities. His legacy, in his own words, is to win the House for the Democrats in the coming mid-term election. That’s what he cares about. He’s told us as much, and by now we had best be believing it. You may like it or not, but at least the man can do something about achieving that goal. There is very little he can do about the present state of political play in Egypt—very little indeed.”
It’s vitally important to the GOP that they frustrate him in this goal. Are they as focused at that as he is at achieving it? Or are they also spending “energy and resources” on unproductive fights?
MICHAEL TOTTEN: The Truth About Egypt.
SLATE: Let’s Stop Condescending to For-Profit College Students. “We snark at those who don’t reach ‘real college.’ But they’ve surmounted huge obstacles to get as far as they have.”
Plus this defense: “At least they pay taxes. Public schools filter them to fat cat board directors and retirement packages for the establishment ‘in group.’ All schools are for profit.”
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 99.
BULGER CASE JUROR STUNNED BY EXTENT OF U.S. GOVERNMENT CORRUPTION: “While the trial of Boston mobster James ‘Whitey’ Bulger showed that he committed horrific crimes, testimony from witnesses also revealed a stunning degree of corruption in the U.S. Department of Justice. . . . Janet Uhlar-Tinney, a pediatric nurse and fiction writer from Cape Cod, is one of the 12 jurors who convicted Bulger. She feels the trial was tainted because of government corruption, including an FBI agent who leaked to Bulger details of an investigation targeting the mobster and who eventually tipped him off that he was about to be indicted – causing the mob boss to go on the run for more than 16 years until he was captured in California in 2011.”
OUR SOUTHERN BORDER HAS NEVER BEEN MORE SECURE: Congressman ‘Shocked’ to Find Dead Body on Border Tour. “The trio of lawmakers were riding on border patrol boats along the dividing river as part of the last leg of a three-day border security tour when the convoy spotted the lifeless body of a Honduran man believed to have been killed in the ongoing Mexican drug wars.”