Quote of the Day

Richard Fernandez:

President Obama was right when he said that the coming years would be about fundamentally transforming things. Ironically Trump both understands and fails to articulate it. He claims people prefer him because he is “more competent” than his rivals. But he’s wrong. They are supporting him because he’s leading, however indirectly and uncertainly, a kind of rebellion against the status quo. The source of his appeal lies in his revolutionary aspects rather than his public administration qualities.
 
The spotlight is therefore in the right place. The tragedies unfolding in the world are for the moment a side-show. The real drama is the crisis of Western social democracy and the international security framework that has obtained since World War 2. People are still acting like it can be business as usual when in fact business is most unusual. The forces causing whole regions to implode or destabilize themselves are not the cause but the result of a revolutionary dynamic in the globalized world.

Worth reading in full.

You Can Drown in a Lake Whose Average Depth is 6 Inches

Where electrical power is concerned, it seems quite difficult for many people to grasp the importance of peak versus average demand and of  peak versus average supply.

A letter in today’s WSJ argues in favor of solar power, noting that “unlike large generation plants, enormous wind turbines and especially nuclear reactors, all of which require years of planning, personal and small industrial solar installations can be planned and installed in a month or so”  The writer says that utilities are seeing these installations diminish their income, and hence “understandably are fighting back by charging not just for electricity, but separately for connection to the grid.”  He argues that as utilities raise their connection charges to compensate for the newly disconnected, more and more people will think that utility power is a bad deal and will disconnect totally, which will “ultimately result in electric utilities holding sway only in urban or perpetually cloudy areas.”

What happens with solar will be largely dependent on the future improvements in battery or other energy storage technologies, but I think it is most unlikely that most people will be comfortable disconnecting from the grid totally.  With any economically-reasonable level of local storage, a run of bad weather is likely to result in running out of power totally, with very uncomfortable consequences.

What most people who invest heavily in solar are likely to do, IMO, is to maintain a backup grid connection for those exceptional cases.  The problem is that the exceptional conditions will occur for thousands of households and other sites at the same time over a broad area…requiring the utility’s generation and transmission facilities to be sized for these exceptional conditions, with capital expenditures made accordingly.

Continuing financial viability of the utilities will require these costs to be recovered, either via a connection fee (“readiness-to-serve charge”) or a very high kwh charge for these infrequent and difficult-to-handle customers.  But the solar people will argue vehemently against these charges, asserting that they represent nothing more than corporate greed and hostility to new technology, and are likely to gain considerable political support.

In this scenario, in those areas with substantial distributed solar power, the utilities will be driven into financial distress or will have to raise rates considerably on their non-solar customers…which in turn will encourage more people to invest in solar, but will create great economic pain from those people and businesses who cannot do this, and eventually result in the costs of the entire vast grid infrastructure and its maintenance being allocated against an ever-declining base.  This seems unlikely to end well.

Tales of Luna City: The Gonzalez/Gonzales Families

(A diversion, in the form of an excerpt explaining the background and history of Luna City, especially one of the most prominent and long-established local extended family. This is forming up to be one of my next books, hopefully finished by the end of the year.)

Final Cover with Lettering - smallerThe main farm-to-market county road, which skims past Luna City does not actually go into the heart of Luna, per se. The old McAllister house is there, of course, set back from the roadside in a lavish and well-tended garden set out in Victorian design – a lady tastefully withdrawing her immaculate skirt from the dirt of vulgar commerce and transportation. The house itself is set at a slight but perceptible angle from the roadway itself, which the cognoscenti know is proof that the house predates the road by any number of years. Miss Letty McAllister, whose family home this is – is now in her mid 90s, the oldest living inhabitant of Luna City, and the living repository of civic memory, public and private. It has been at least twenty years since Miss Letty has seen to maintaining the garden; one of the myriad Gonzalez-with-an-z family enterprises sees to that.

The sprawling and interrelated clans of Gonzales-with-an-s and the Gonzalez-with-a-z are acknowledged freely by all Luna-ites to be the oldest family in the area – their shifting residency within five or six miles of the place where the road between San Antonio and the coast crosses the river – where Luna City would come to be – predates the founding by at least a hundred and twenty years and possibly more. There are supposed to be records in the colonial archives in Madrid, Spain, of a royal grant to a Don Diego Manuel Hernando Ruiz y Gonzalez or Gonzales of a league and a labor of land in the area. In 1968, there was a careful archeological excavation made of the foundations of a small adobe brick building not far from the present-day main gate to the Wyler Lazy-W Ranch. The results were included in A Brief History of Luna City, since Dr. McAllister was privy to the reports of findings. It was judged to be a residence by the eminent archeologist from San Antonio who oversaw the dig – but a relatively comfortless and primitive one: two thick-walled rooms, sheltering humans in one and draft animals and goats in the other.

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America is in Play

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UPDATE: Tom Perkins has now published the defense of Carly Fiorina that she needed. He had to do it as a full page ad since they would not accept a response. This is the answer and puts her in place to catch the debris if Trump blows up.

“Not only did she save the company from the dire straits it was in, she laid the foundation for HP’s future growth,” reads the ad, which is signed by Tom Perkins, a member of the HP board during much of Fiorina’s tenure and the founder of California venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers. “I have no question that Carly is a transformational leader who uniquely has both vision and the expertise to implement it.”

Peggy Noonan has a column today that has lots of people talking.

I have been pessimistic about the future of the country for a while. Recently, I have been very pessimistic.

One of the arguments for the impossibility of an event is lack of previous failure. “It never failed before and thus can never fail ever”. The Washington Post’s editorial board invokes a variant of this logic to refute Donald Trump’s border policy, arguing there are so many illegal immigrants it is too expensive to deport them all, leaving no alternative but to accept more.

Naturally, the WaPo is certain they know what could happen.

A useful case study is California, whose economy accounts for about 13 percent of U.S. gross domestic product and whose 2.6 million undocumented workers include almost a tenth of the state’s workforce.

Well, guess what ? Peggy is talking to Hispanics.

Something is going on, some tectonic plates are moving in interesting ways. My friend Cesar works the deli counter at my neighborhood grocery store. He is Dominican, an immigrant, early 50s, and listens most mornings to a local Hispanic radio station, La Mega, on 97.9 FM. Their morning show is the popular “El Vacilón de la Mañana,” and after the first GOP debate, Cesar told me, they opened the lines to call-ins, asking listeners (mostly Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican) for their impressions. More than half called in to say they were for Mr. Trump. Their praise, Cesar told me a few weeks ago, dumbfounded the hosts. I later spoke to one of them, who identified himself as D.J. New Era. He backed Cesar’s story. “We were very surprised,” at the Trump support, he said. Why? “It’s a Latin-based market!”

What is going on ?

On the subject of elites, I spoke to Scott Miller, co-founder of the Sawyer Miller political-consulting firm, who is now a corporate consultant. He worked on the Ross Perot campaign in 1992 and knows something about outside challenges. He views the key political fact of our time as this: “Over 80% of the American people, across the board, believe an elite group of political incumbents, plus big business, big media, big banks, big unions and big special interests—the whole Washington political class—have rigged the system for the wealthy and connected.” It is “a remarkable moment,” he said. More than half of the American people believe “something has changed, our democracy is not like it used to be, people feel they no longer have a voice.”

I could not agree more. I keep recommending Angelo Codevilla’s essay in American Spectator. I even saved it on this blog because Spectator dropped it for a while. Now it seems to have become such a topic of conversation that it is back on their web site.

I have even been saying that we need a revolution, and maybe it is coming.

“It is accepted that primary schools have increasing numbers of pupils, which causes all manner of problems, but what is frequently not referred to is why we have such a boom in numbers.

“And the answer is unlimited immigration into this country. It hits some areas harder than others but there cannot be many primary schools in the country which have not been affected at all,” said Mr Nuttall, UKIP Education spokesman.

Wow ! That is Britain ! I will be in Britain in little more than a week and it will be interesting to have this conversation with my friends, a retired British Army physician and his wife. We will go to Belgium while avoiding the Chunnel to avoid rioting at Calais as “migrants” try to invade Britain though the Chunnel in search of the Dole.

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This might even be the start of the West trying to save itself from the predicted Suicide.

In 1964, as today, it is very easy to see how a thinking person might see the intellectual drift to the left as a move toward societal suicide. For liberalism is a cry for the supremacy of general good intentions over the practical application of common sense. Burnham said that liberals are often driven by “profound non-rational, often anti-rational sentiments and impulses.” Ideas like the welfare state and leniency on criminals to facilitate rehabilitation may have sounded good coming out of the mouth of a liberal, but they were disastrous in practice.

Burnham’s book, “Suicide of the West”, was in effect a warning that leftward drift would ultimately destroy all affluence and freedom in the world. Fortunately, many of the readers of his book heeded Burnham’s cry and helped stem the leftward movement of policy and ideas in America.

Is it ending ?

“At least, he has principles” they say repeatedly

It is possible that nobody outside the United Kingdom has noticed that we have been going through a very lengthy and painful process: the election of several party leaders. So far we have done with the Liberal-Democrats and with the Scottish Labour Party (in Scotland three of the main parties are now led by women so one can only wonder what John Knox would have made of that) and are still without a national Labour Party leader. Members of the Scottish Labour Party may have voted for their leader but they are also voting for the national one. Much to everybody’s astonishment the front runner by a long way is Jeremy Corbyn, a hitherto little known extreme left-wing MP, who still holds economic and political views that had been shown to be useless and harmful by the 1970s and cannot possibly be relevant to the modern Britain, who consistently supported the IRA and whose buddies in other countries are, without exception, tyrannical, bloodthirsty, Islamic fundamentalist, anti-Semitic and, in some exceptional cases, Holocaust deniers. In a couple of weeks he may well be the Leader of Her Majesty’s no longer loyal opposition. The mind boggles.

Ah yes, we are told by people who support him and others who hastily add that they do not, he has principles and that is very attractive in the modern unprincipled political world. Needless to say, many of the people who say this scream abuse at the very mention of Margaret Thatcher’s name and yet if ever there was a principled politician, it was she. On the other hand, as all politicians in democracies she also recognized that other people had other ideas and principles, even people in her own party, and their support, too, was necessary.

My own view is that just having principles is hardly sufficient. One needs to know what those principles are and, in the case of Jeremy Corbyn, they are devastating for this country and our Western allies. Let me just add that as a little known and long ago sidelined backbencher, Mr Corbyn has, until now, achieved nothing in his political career. He has made speeches and appeared a great deal on Russia Today and Press TV as well as public platforms that he shared with various terrorists and other jolly people listed above. One cannot help wondering how those principles will stand up to the realities of party leadership.

Here is my blog on the subject that might be of interest to American and other readers.