Don’t Mean Nothin’

(That’s a phrase from the Vietnam War era military, BTW.)

Another day, another mass-killing, inspired by fundamentalist Islam, and perpetuated by a killer prepared to explode himself with a bomb packed with ball-bearings, or nails, chunks of scrap metal, whatever … as long as he or she takes a bunch of infidels with him, thereby to enjoy eternity in the endless whorehouse that is the Islamic version of paradise. Another Bataclan, another Pulse nightclub, another Fort Hood, another San Bernardino, another Boston Marathon. Sometimes the program is varied with guns and plenty of ammunition. But mostly – bombs, calculated to splatter as much human flesh as far as possible. And there is another round of faces of the dead, the bloodied limbs of the injured, splashed over the internet and newspaper pages. Another round of flowers and candles and teddy bears piled up in impromptu memorials, another moment of silence, of services where members of the prominent ruling class assume somber expressions, the inevitable hash-tag and Book of Face filter (where one expresses sympathy and solidarity on the cheap on one’s page). And the inevitable footnote – where an assortment of media personalities and a selection of plummy-voiced representatives express pious dismay regarding the inevitable anti-Muslim backlash and claim that Islam is a religion of peace. (At this point, I suspect said representatives have their fingers crossed behind their backs, such is the degree of cynicism to which I have sunk since September 11, 2001.)

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WHAT HAPPENS AFTER YOU TURN IT UP TO “11”?

A conversation elsewhere brought up a topic that lets me get ahead of things and put down a marker for future reference. It was noted that the Democrats and their allies farther Left have had their outrage meters literally turned up to “11” [on a 1-10 scale] since the election. The first calls for Trump’s impeachment actually came from the Democrats as soon as he was nominated. And for that matter, during the General Election campaign, it was not restricted to Democrats. Republican Congress-critter Mike Coffman [CO-6] was running radio ads in English and Spanish promising to oppose Trump in everything he tried to do if Trump was elected.

That outrage got a boost when Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to the Supreme Court. But the increase was slightly muted because it was a case of a conservative Justice replacing the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia who died under questionable circumstances. It would not be a net change of the balance of the court.

Starting a few weeks ago, rumors started that Leftist supporting Justice Anthony Kennedy might retire. And the scale went at least a couple of notches higher. Then a week or so later people were reminded that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who dares not visit a medical school for fear that her resemblance to a cadaver might get her dissected by a doctor in training, has health problems. She has had colon cancer and recovered after surgery and radiation therapy. She has had pancreatic cancer; it is said that she recovered from that. And three years ago, she had to have a stent placed in her right coronary artery. That medical history in an 84-year-old woman is not encouraging. Leaving aside the jokes about doing a Supreme Court remake of the movie “Weekend at Bernies”, the odds of her reaching the end of Donald Trump’s term in office [and age 90] are not good.

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Planning for Failure

When I worked in the power industry everyone understood that the cost of a power outage was high, but it was impossible to put a precise value on it. There is the reputational damage, the specific costs of payouts to businesses and residences that are impacted (depending on your jurisdiction), the cost of restoring service (typically it is “all hands” in terms of available personnel and equipment), and finally the loss of trust by your all-important regulator when you come back later and ask for an inevitable price increase for your customers.

The other, more subtle, cost of outages is the fact that businesses and residents must plan for unreliable power sources, and invest in backup generation which includes fuel, testing, etc… I would call this “planning for failure”. Over time, this also causes businesses to consider exiting the grid entirely in one form or another when they are large and capable enough, causing the remaining fixed costs to be borne by the remaining customers.

Here in Portland right now we are dealing with a major outage, as a fire caused a power outage to over 2000 customers downtown near the Pearl district. This isn’t 2000 customers… most of these meters are large businesses and buildings and not individual houses. In practical terms, the downtown Target is probably closed, Powell’s bookstore (a major tourist attraction) is closed, and many, many other smaller businesses and restaurants. It would be similar to a power outage taking out most of River North in Chicago where I used to live.

Luckily I live in a building with a backup generator, and they have fuel for 3 days, so we likely will be unaffected. That’s what you get when you pay more for a recently built class A apartment rather than an older vintage walkup. But many, many folks are going to be impacted by this (it was over 90 degrees yesterday) and many restaurants are going to have to throw out their food on top of losing a couple of days’ worth of customers.

As we re-think electricity and the grid entirely it is important to consider reliability in the equation. I believe that many individuals and businesses just take power for granted until it isn’t there anymore. This challenge will likely be exacerbated by renewables and solar power… in this outage it is a distribution system failure, but intermittent generation of power is another variable in the reliability equation.

Cross posted at LITGM

Intellectuals and Totalitarian Dictators

Theodore Dalrymple reviews Paul Hollander’s book about the attraction felt by many intellectuals toward dictators and toward totalitarian systems of government.  There are certainly plenty of academics, writers, and journalists who have fallen and continue to fall into this pattern, with the objects of their affections including Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, and Hugo Chavez.

I’m reminded of something Aldous Huxley wrote:

In the field of politics the equivalent of a theorem is a perfectly disciplined army; of a sonnet or picture, a police state under a dictatorship. The Marxist calls himself scientific and to this claim the Fascist adds another: he is the poet–the scientific poet–of a new mythology. Both are justified in their pretensions; for each applies to human situations the procedures which have proved effective in the laboratory and the ivory tower. They simplify, they abstract, they eliminate all that, for their purposes, is irrelevant and ignore whatever they choose to regard an inessential; they impose a style, they compel the facts to verify a favorite hypothesis, they consign to the waste paper basket all that, to their mind, falls short of perfection…the dream of Order begets tyranny, the dream of Beauty, monsters and violence.

I haven’t seen any actual quantitative data demonstrating that intellectuals are more likely to support totalitarian dictators than are, say, bricklayers or physicians…maybe we just notice them more…but it does seem that way. At a bare minimum, I think it’s fair to say that intellectualism, as it has developed in the West over the past century, does not provide much of a shield against the totalitarian temptation.

Arthur Koestler, himself a former Communist, wrote about the mental world of the Closed System:

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