K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: NY School Principal Sends Parents A Guide Asking Them To Reflect On Their Whiteness.
Archive for 2021
February 17, 2021
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace Oddly Silent on Lincoln Project Implosion After Boosting Its Top Leaders.
ANDREW KLAVAN: Rush’s Monument: Let us all speak, and fearlessly.
MICHAEL WALSH: Rush Limbaugh, RIP.
OPEN THREAD: Disport yourselves.
WISCONSIN: Plaintiffs drop federal suit in Kyle Rittenhouse case. “Other possible suits in the Rittenhouse case are still pending. Earlier this month, attorneys for Huber’s family and Gaige Grosskreutz, 26, who was seriously injured in the shootings, filed notices of claim indicating they will sue the City of Kenosha and Kenosha County, alleging that law enforcement negligence contributed to the shootings.”
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Here’s how the Perseverance landing could pave the way for humans on Mars.
THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Prof. Marc Lamont Hill: Goal of Black Lives Matter is to “dismantle the Zionist project.”
Related: The Malignant Tradition of UC Irvine’s Hate-Israel Activists.
J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Rush Limbaugh Changed America.
WE’VE LEARNED A LOT ABOUT THE DOWNSIDES OF INFLAMMATION LATELY: How inflammatory signalling molecules contribute to carcinogenesis.
NEWS I HOPE YOU CAN’T USE: How to Stay Warm Without Power.
Of course, InstaPundit readers know how to run a furnace off an inverter.
More here.
WALL STREET JOURNAL: The Political Making of a Texas Power Outage: How bad energy policy led to rolling blackouts in the freezing Lone Star State.
Mr. Abbott blamed his state’s extensive power outages on generators freezing early Monday morning, noting “this includes the natural gas & coal generators.” But frigid temperatures and icy conditions have descended on most of the country. Why couldn’t Texas handle them while other states did?
The problem is Texas’s overreliance on wind power that has left the grid more vulnerable to bad weather. Half of wind turbines froze last week, causing wind’s share of electricity to plunge to 8% from 42%. Power prices in the wholesale market spiked, and grid regulators on Friday warned of rolling blackouts. Natural gas and coal generators ramped up to cover the supply gap but couldn’t meet the surging demand for electricity—which half of households rely on for heating—even as many families powered up their gas furnaces. Then some gas wells and pipelines froze.
In short, there wasn’t sufficient baseload power from coal and nuclear to support the grid. Baseload power is needed to stabilize grid frequency amid changes in demand and supply. When there’s not enough baseload power, the grid gets unbalanced and power sources can fail. The more the grid relies on intermittent renewables like wind and solar, the more baseload power is needed to back them up.
But politicians don’t care about grid reliability until the power goes out. And for three decades politicians from both parties have pushed subsidies for renewables that have made the grid less stable.
Start with the 1992 Energy Policy Act signed by George H.W. Bush, which created a production tax credit to boost the infant wind industry. Generators collect up to $25 per megawatt hour of power they produce regardless of market demand. The credit was supposed to expire in 1999, but nothing lasts longer than a temporary government program, as Ronald Reagan once quipped.
The renewables lobby found GOP allies in windy states like Texas, Oklahoma and Iowa. Former Enron CEO Ken Lay, who had made a big bet on wind, begged then Texas Gov. George W. Bush in 1998 to lobby Congress to extend the credit for five years. Congress has since extended it more than a dozen times, most recently in December.
Wind producers persuaded former Gov. Rick Perry to back a $5 billion network of transmission lines to connect turbines in western Texas to cities. This enabled them to build more turbines—and collect more tax credits. Because the Texas grid is often oversupplied, wind producers sometimes pay to off-load their power, though they still turn a profit with the tax credits.
Coal and nuclear are more strictly regulated and can’t compete, and many coal plants have shut down in Texas and elsewhere. Over the last decade about 100 gigawatts of coal power nationwide has been retired—enough to power 60 million homes. Many nuclear plants are scheduled to shut down, including large reactors in New York and Illinois this year.
We need more nice, reliable, environmentally friendly nuclear plants.
J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Rush Limbaugh Changed America.
Before Rush, talk radio was different. Talk radio was about cotton candy issues. Larry King on the Mutual Broadcast Network hosted an overnight parade of callers talking about pets, childhood memories, landscaping, and just how they were doing. Scores of local talk show hosts – like Perry Marshall at KDKA in Pittsburgh – entertained with friendly chat, the sweet cotton candy that dissolves away quick into meaninglessness.
That was radio B.R. – Before Rush.
Running the board at WPBR on this August debut day, I could tell immediately this new brand of talk was revolutionary. It was listening to Sgt. Pepper for the first time. It was the first ride on the looping coaster that defied gravity. It was bold and brash and, most of all, spoke to Americans about what America was. Rush spoke to what it means to be American, and what America means as an idea.
Rush was the “fairness doctrine” and mush mouth radio put out to pasture. On Saturday the week of Rush’s debut, I would produce a radio show called “Our Eyes” where the elderly called into the eye-doctor host to talk about vision issues.
That is the radio world Rush stepped into, on the same station in Palm Beach.
Before Fox News, before Drudge and the Blogosphere, Rush was America’s alternative news source, both quoting articles that he believed his massive audience needed to hear, and pushing back on what we would now call “fake news.” As Dan McLaughlin writes, “His death also marks the decisive end of another era: the post-Reagan, post–Cold War Right of the 1990s, in which he was a central figure.”
TO BE FAIR, THEY’RE ACTUALLY DOING THE AUSSIES A FAVOR:
I RAN ACROSS THIS OLD GEM TODAY: Ace: No Matter How Hard We Run, We Can Never Escape Our Childhood Breakfast Cereals. “I wanted to be an Apple Jacks kid. . . . Kaboom was for people — children, I mean — who had decided to give up on life.”
PRESIDENT-IN-WAITING HARRIS OFF TO BRILLIANT START: Harris and Her Spokeswoman Stumble on CNN, NBC Over Questions Regarding School Reopenings.
STAY CLASSY, PARTY OF TOLERANCE AND DIVERSITY: ‘Rest in Piss:’ The Left Celebrates Rush Limbaugh’s Death.
JOE BIDEN IS STILL AUDITIONING:
Biden is fitting into a position he has pursued for almost 30 years; he finally caught the car and now doesn’t know what to do with it. But Biden is no longer auditioning. He’s going to be held to account, perhaps not by an overly friendly media, but certainly by a pandemic-weary country wondering when their kids can go back to schools in districts that are friendly to the President. Biden can start acting like a President, or continue looking like a passive hostage to special-interest union groups and foreign adversaries.
His administration is shifting the goalposts at the whims of his decades-long donors. His press secretary only offers flailing talking points. And with the exception of a brief reemergence on Fox News today, there is no Donald Trump to serve as a distraction. The realization that Joe Biden is the same Joe Biden he’s been for 37 years in Washington is going to become more apparent.
But the press, both in their role as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and because they fear being locked in the closet, will do their damnedest to prop up the husk of the president: WaPo Fact Checker Glenn Kessler forgets the ‘first rule of holes’ after getting busted running cover for lying liar Joe Biden.
WAIT A MINUTE, TRUMP ‘LAUNCHED’ THE GOP CIVIL WAR? To hear an unidentified Washington Examiner headline writer tell it, that’s exactly what former President Donald Trump did by responding to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell denunciation on the Senate floor shortly after the second acquittal of the impeached 45th Chief Executive. “Trump Launches Republican Civil War With Attack on ‘Hack’ McConnell” is how the headline read.
Examiner White House Reporter, Rob Crilly, who wrote the news story thus headlined, put the issue slightly more deftly, saying in his lead that Trump merely “threatened” a civil war with his vintage OrangeManBad verbal stomping on McConnell.
So, to apply these two standards, we would have to rewrite the history books to say, for example, that President Abraham Lincoln either launched the Civil War or threatened to do so by re-supplying Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. The bloody four-year conflict that followed was not the started by the Confederates who first fired on the freshened facility, as we were all taught many years ago.
I DUNNO, THE CIA DOESN’T SEEM TO DEAL VERY EFFECTIVELY WITH THIS WORLD: How to Escape the Confines of Time and Space According to the CIA.
JAMES LILEKS: WARNING. UNFETTERED CONVERSATIONS ARE HAPPENING!
UNFETTERED CONVERSATIONS ARE HAPPENING DESPITE CONCERNS
There’s backstory to one of the piece’s authors, who strikes me as an utterly third-rate mind without any leavening agents such as intellectual humility or a sense of history beyond the early years of Nickelodeon. The idea that people are using a private means of communication that is — what’s the word? — PRIVATE, well, it just galls. Misinformation might be spread! No — it’s probably being spread! People are saying things and using words and there’s no one from Snopes or Politico to stop them and say “hold up now, let’s run that assertion past our panel of people whose vested devotion to a particular set of ideological concepts do not align with yours, but are considered True because they believe in all the Good Things.”
There’s a spirit of busybody bossy vengeance abroad in the land, and I hate it. And by “land” I mean that nowhere place that shapes the culture.
As Glenn Greenwald wrote on Sunday, “In other words, journalists, desperate for content, have flagged Clubhouse as a new frontier for their slimy work as voluntary hall monitors and speech police.”
REVIEW: Walther PDP.
JEN PSAKI AND THE IDENTITY DEFENSE:
As it turns out, this reflex is Psaki’s primary means of dispensing with questions to which she has no answers. When the GameStop story was dominating the news cycle, a reporter asked whether the White House was concerned about the stock-market activity and whether there had been conversations with the Securities and Exchange Commission on the subject.
“Well, I’m also happy to repeat that we have the first female Treasury secretary and a team that’s surrounding her and often questions about markets,” Psaki replied. “We’ll send [you] to them.”
No further explanation was forthcoming. We were meant to be contented with the irrelevant reminder that Treasury secretary Janet Yellen was selected for her post according to the eminently progressive criterion of her gender.
Just yesterday, taking questions from Twitter for a video response, Psaki did it again when one user inquired about what President Biden is doing for small businesses.
“First and foremost, he nominated a woman to lead the Small Business Administration, who formerly worked there,” she responded, as if the gender of the SBA chief has anything remotely to do with whether the administration has plans to address the concerns of small businesses.
In the meantime though, Psaki’s schtick is great fodder of America’s Newspaper of Record: Journalists Cheer As Jen Psaki Announces The Gulags Will Be Run By A Woman Of Color.
As CNN would say, (“(How Refreshing).”