PARTY OF THE PLUTOCRATS: Democrats enhanced IRS habit of targeting poor people, not millionaires.
Archive for 2023
January 5, 2023
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Who Is to Blame for the Hundreds of Russian Casualties at Makiivka?
THE GOOD NEWS IS THAT GAS PRICES MIGHT NOT RISE SO MUCH. THE BAD NEWS IS…: Oil Prices Fall on Concerns the Global Economy Is Weakening.
SADLY, THEY MEAN FOR PHARMA, NOT FOR THE CULTURE: 2023 A Big Year For Testosterone.
YOUR TURN, TVA: Apologies and acceptance from Duke Energy over recent rolling blackouts.
Bowman said they began to see a divergence between actual power demand and their forecast on the evening of Dec. 23, alerting them that their reserves would be tighter than expected on the DEC system, and saw the same divergence on the DEP system at 4 am on Dec. 24. The model was 10% below what the company actually needed. Between midnight and early Saturday morning, they lost around 1300 megawatts of power-generating capability due to equipment malfunction, a second failure.
Third, the purchase of power from out-of-state entities never materialized.
“The power that we purchased did not show up, therefore, we were confronted with the hard truth that our energy demand would soon be eclipsed by our capacity,” stated Bowman. “At that time, we made the only decision that we could. For the first time in our company’s history, we began rolling service disruptions.”
Sam Holeman, Duke Energy’s vice president of system planning and operations, said the Carolinas had experienced some of the coldest temperatures since the 1980s. He also stated that between midnight on Dec. 23 to 6 am on Dec. 24, Duke Energy’s operating reserves had been depleted and that load forecasting and predicting operational conditions in that run-up will be a central part of an inquiry by both the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC).
He said there wasn’t any more power to purchase at that point, and surrounding areas were faced with the same situation.
Company officials also say that the holidays did make the situation more complicated, and divergence would have been less if the cold weather did not occur during the holidays.
Duke Energy’s “nuclear fleet” was reliable during the storm, according to Preston Gillespie, Duke Energy’s executive vice president and chief generation officer. Still, he said, in a few cases, insulation and heat tracing did not prevent instrumentation lines from freezing which caused a reduction in generation.
He also said that solar generation performed as expected but was not available to meet the peak demand since the peak occurred before sunrise. This problem is concerning if another outage occurs during high demand periods that include several cloudy days.
The load reduction shedding tool, the automated system geared toward controlling the rolling blackouts, also failed, leaving customers in the dark for hours instead of 15-30 minutes, according to Scott Batson, senior vice president and chief distribution officer for Duke Energy.
At least they apologized. But actually, so did TVA, though I didn’t see it until I searched: Tennessee Valley Authority apologizes for rolling blackouts, vows investigation.
With much of Tennessee seeing low temperatures over the weekend, TVA had power issues that led it to demand local power companies reduce electricity load by 5% for two hours and 15 minutes on Friday and then 5% to 10% reductions on Saturday for five hours and 40 minutes.
Those mandatory rolling blackouts came as many Tennessee residents lost power for extended periods during the winter storm. . . .
TVA said in its statement that it takes full responsibility for the power loss. The company did not say what the issues were that led to the need for the blackouts, but the Memphis Commercial Appeal reported that TVA said during a weekend call with local power companies that it had issues with electricity supply, including losing natural gas plants, at least two coal power plants and issues with third-party plants scheduled to be available for additional supply when necessary.
The Tennessee Valley Authority is the largest public power corporation in the country, generating 90% of the state’s electric generating capacity and three-fifth of its power plants. It is federally owned and serves 10 million by providing electricity to 153 local power companies.
The top source of electricity generation in Tennessee is nuclear power plants, which provide 47% of the state’s electricity while 20% comes from natural gas and 18% from coal. All three of the TVA nuclear plants — Brown’s Ferry (Alabama) and Sequoyah and Watts Bar (Tennessee) — were generating power at 100% capacity during the cold snap, according to data from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Clearly we need more of those.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY, E.U. EDITION: EU crisis: When baking that baguette costs too much dough. “We can feel the crisis in Germany… it’s unbelievable, too much,’ the 54-year-old Aydil tells TRT World as he captures the mood of the country’s bakery sector, which is facing the most crippling crisis in its history. Rising wheat and energy prices – triggered by the Russia-Ukraine conflict – have pushed the bakery industry to the brink.”
Plus: “Almost to a one, there is deep anger at the EU commissioners and their individual governments’ handling – or not handling – any aspect of the crisis. Every article, every bakery was asking, ‘Where’s the government?'”
Where’s the government? Causing the crisis.
SOMEBODY REMIND GRANDPA NOT TO EAT THE BROWN STATINS: Biden Says ‘The World Is Not a Patch in Our Jeans.’
IT ALSO YELLS AT BABIES AND IS MEAN TO CATS: Wash Post: ‘Climate change puts more women at risk for domestic violence’.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: With Schools Ditching Merit for Diversity, Families of High Achievers Head for the Door.
Alex Shilkrut has deep roots in Manhattan, where he has lived for 16 years, works as a physician, and sends his daughter to a public elementary school for gifted students in coveted District 2.
It’s a good life. But Shilkrut regretfully says he may leave the city, as well as a job he likes in a Manhattan hospital, because of sweeping changes in October that ended selective admissions in most New York City middle schools.
These merit-based schools, which screened for students who met their high standards, will permanently switch to a lottery for admissions that will almost certainly enroll more blacks and Latinos in the pursuit of racial integration.
Shilkrut is one of many parents who are dismayed by the city’s dismantling of competitive education. He says he values diversity but is concerned that the expectation that academic rigor will be scaled back to accommodate a broad range of students in a lottery is what’s driving him and other parents to seek alternatives.
Although it’s too early to know how many students might leave the school system due to the enrollment changes, some parents say they may opt for private education at $50,000 a year and others plan to uproot their lives for the suburbs despite the burdens of such moves.
The selective schools were originally designed to keep high achievers in the public schools, and in the city, because the regular public schools were so awful.
HE DID. HE WORKED TO DESTROY IT: KJP Claims Biden Worked On Border Security Since “Day One”.
OBVIOUSLY. IT’S THE REASON WE’RE NOT VENEZUELA: 2nd Amendment Is A Blessing, Not A Curse.
MAKE HER A SENATOR? Kay LeClaire, non-binary art collective boss, accused of faking Native American heritage.
Note we never hear of these impersonations going the other way. And yet we’re supposed to believe in white privilege.
EVIL DOES NOT SLEEP: Soros Doubles Funding to Left-Wing Legal Group Working To Upend Supreme Court.
OH, DEAR LORD: What the Feds Are Teaching in Diversity Training.
THIS IS NOT A SURPRISE: NAACP fumbled its credibility completely.
GOOD NEWS: A note on Damar Hamlin.
IT’S INSANE, BUT I DID SAY REBELLIONS WOULD CROP UP: House Speaker election drama: 19 to 20 GOP Representatives refused to back Kevin McCarthy.
THERE’S A REASON i KEEP FIGHTING MY WEIGHT: Enough with “fatphobia”.
FAT* POLIS CRIES UNCLE: Colorado Dem Governor Jared Polis to Send Migrants to Chicago and NYC.
*Yes, I’ve battled my weight my whole life, and for various reasons, keep losing. But Fat is apparently the worst thing you can call the man who is destroying my beloved state-of-the-heart. So….
MAYBE HE SHOULD GIVE UP? Kevin McCarthy Loses Six Rounds of Voting (Updated).
January 4, 2023
The First Amendment protects not only speakers but also consumers, listeners and viewers. As the high court held in Virginia Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council (1976), when speakers are muzzled, their intended audience suffers a First Amendment violation too. Twitter users, even those who weren’t censored themselves, would therefore have standing to bring suit.
Suing federal agents would pre-empt the claim that there was no “state action.” The nub of the “nothingburger” argument is that the Twitter Files fail to show government “coercion” and Twitter therefore never became a state actor. That argument is wrong: A private party can become a state actor through voluntary joint action with the government, which the Twitter Files richly detail. But a class action against federal defendants would avoid the entire question. They’re obviously state actors.
And as the Supreme Court held in Norwood v. Harrison (1973), it is an “axiomatic” principle of constitutional law that the government “may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” That’s exactly what the Twitter Files show officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies doing—inducing and encouraging Twitter to censor constitutionally protected speech.
The plaintiffs wouldn’t have to prove Twitter was a state actor. It wouldn’t even matter if Twitter had rebuffed all the government’s censorship requests (which it didn’t). Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals made this point in Backpage.com v. Dart (2015): When a government official unconstitutionally attempts to induce a private company not to carry someone else’s speech, the official’s conduct “is actionable and can be enjoined” even if the company “ignores it.”
A class action would eliminate another roadblock. Some free-speech cases against social-media companies have been dismissed on the ground that the individual plaintiffs couldn’t show that the government had targeted them or their posts in particular. A class action escapes this difficulty. It might target the CDC’s successful effort to get Twitter to adopt policies banning posts arguing that children didn’t need Covid-19 vaccines or observing that the government’s own data show the shots don’t prevent infection or transmission. These policies denied all users important information and opinions and thereby violated the First Amendment rights of listeners as well as speakers regardless of whether the government was involved in a particular individual’s being censored.
If Twitter is no longer acting as a federal censorship field office, why wouldn’t such a class action by social-media users be moot like an individual lawsuit against the company? Because of Facebook, Google and other internet companies. As Matt Taibbi reported, “the government was in constant contact not just with Twitter, but with every major tech firm.” There’s no reason to think that has stopped. A class action against federal defendants would seek to halt all government efforts to use social-media companies to achieve the censorship the Constitution forbids.
The attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana have already jointly brought a similar lawsuit, and preliminary discovery has added more evidence of federal involvement in censorship at all major social-media companies.
Fight the power.