Turns out at least one city employee involved in the contract was all but handing the money to himself.
All the evidence indicates this is was almost certainly an inside job.
It certainly appears that at least one City of Austin employee colluded or communicated with friends and business associates to secure lucrative seven figure contracts.
Despite being grossly unqualified and totally inexperienced for the job.
It also seems like ICCS Academy is lying about a bunch of stuff on their bid submission.
Snip.
Believe it or not, the ICCS Academy bidding process raises even more red flags than P Squared Services.
There are two City of Austin employees listed as “authorized contacts” for Item 23.
Sandra Wirtanen
John Wesley Smith
This screenshot shows John Wesley Smith is the “Small Minority Business Resources” contact for this proposal.
Guess where John Wesley Smith used to work as the ‘Compliance Director’ before he started working for Austin city government?
ICCS Academy!
Can you imagine a bigger conflict of interest?
Maybe that’s why ICCS Academy yanked their website yesterday (link).
However, this snippet on DuckDuckGo still appears when you search for ‘John Wesley Smith ICCS Academy’
John Wesley Smith was the Compliance Director for ICCS Academy.
His bio states he also works as a “Small Business Counselor with the City of Austin”.
Snip.
QUESTION: Shouldn’t John Wesley Smith have immediately recused himself from the bidding and contract negotiation process for Item 23, due to his massive conflict of interest as the current / former Compliance Director for ICCS Academy?
Massive Conflict of Interest
Gee, I wonder how the other eight companies who submitted bid proposals for Item 23 feel about the former Compliance director of ICCS Academy overseeing the bidding process, and awarding a $7 million contract to his former colleagues?
John Wesley Smith was definitely the Compliance Director for ICCS Academy at one point in time.
Whether that was two weeks, two months or two years ago – it doesn’t matter.
John Wesley Smith should have removed himself from this project due to the awful optics and huge conflict of interest.
John Wesley Smith’s LinkedIn profile shows his current role with Austin city government is “Business Development Coordinator II”.
John Wesley Smith says he’s in charge of “negotiating contractual agreements for the City of Austin” and is “responsible for various minority/women procurements.”
Huh.
For the record, ICCS Academy is currently a registered vendor with the city of Austin.
However, all of their ‘certified commodities’ are in education, training and consulting.
So a training vendor gets picked to do homeless site cleanup despite no experience in the field because a (former?) employee works for the city and just happens to be able to throw business their way.
How convenient.
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you may remember that the entire reimagining police lunacy was all about social justice warriors saying time and time again “take money from the police and give it to us.” There’s an entire industry of social justice grifters (both in homelessness and every other social justice cause) whose entire existence is dedicated to making life for average citizens worse while sucking as much money as possible from taxpayers. You can bet that this is far from the first time such self-dealing has occurred, and I bet forensic audits of both city contracts and the “nonprofit” entities that receive them would reveal numerous example of quid pro quo kickbacks.
Again, kudos to Teddy Brosevelt (whoever he may be) for peeling back the lid of Austin’s social justice warrior corruption problem.
The Russian Collusion Hoax is now officially bunk, Budweiser’s self-inflicted freefall continues, blue city commercial real estate bites the moose, and a whole lot of shocked face to go around. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The Department of Justice and the FBI did not have “any actual evidence of collusion” between Russian officials and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and began their Crossfire Hurricane probe of Trump’s campaign based on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” according to a report released on Monday by special prosecutor John Durham.
Durham scolded federal law enforcement and counter-intelligence officials for failing to “uphold their important mission of strict fidelity to the law” as part of their investigation.
He wrote that at least one FBI agent criminally fabricated language in an email that was used to obtain a FISA surveillance order. And he accused FBI leaders of displaying a “serious lack of analytical rigor” and relying significantly on “investigative leads provided or funded (directly or indirectly) by Trump’s political opponents,” referring to staffers and allies of Hillary Clinton, then the Democratic presidential nominee, whose campaign funded the Steele dossier through its law firm Perkins Coie.
Compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, the dossier is an unverified collection of opposition research accusing then-candidate Trump and his campaign aides of collaborating with Kremlin officials. The FBI used the dossier to secure a FISA warrant to surveil Trump campaign aide Carter Page, though its central claims were subsequently disproven by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
The report notes that the FBI was quick to investigate Trump, while it proceeded cautiously with allegations against Clinton.
The 316-page report sent to Congress was nearly four years in the making. It concluded that neither federal law enforcement nor intelligence officials “appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” which the FBI “swiftly opened.”
The report accuses federal officials of acting “without appropriate objectivity or restraint.” Peter Strzok, then the FBI’s deputy assistant director for counterintelligence, opened the investigation “immediately” at the direction of Andrew McCabe, then the FBI’s deputy director. “Strzok, at a minimum, had pronounced hostile feelings toward Trump,” the report states.
It states that former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith “committed a criminal offense by fabricating language in an email that was material to the FBI obtaining a FISA surveillance order.”
Durham wrote that FBI officials continued to seek FISA surveillance while acknowledging that “they did not genuinely believe there was probable cause to believe that the target was knowingly engaged in clandestine intelligence activities on behalf of foreign power, or knowingly helping another person in such activities. And certain personnel disregarded significant exculpatory information that should have prompted investigative restraint and re-examination.”
“Based on the review of Crossfire Hurricane and related intelligence activities, we conclude that the Department and the FBI failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law in connection with certain events and activities described in this report,” Durham wrote.
“Gov. Newsom Announces California Budget Deficit Bigger than Projected.” Legal Insurrection has already used the “unexpectedly” here, so I’ll just note that Newsom is the far lefty a whole lot of Democratic Party power players want to substitute for Biden at the top of the ticket in 2024.
“NIH Renews Funds for ‘Bat Coronavirus’ Research despite Energy Department, FBI’s Lab-Leak Conclusion.” That’s like catching Mrs. O’Leary’s cow after she’s burned down Chicago, strapping lit fireworks to her body and letting her loose in the dynamite factory.
“Things are so bad, in fact, that 26 Empire State Buildings could fit into New York City’s empty office space, as occupancy in the city is hovering around 50% of prepandemic levels.”
“In San Francisco, the downtown area is experiencing its worst office vacancy crisis on record – with 31% of space available for lease or sublease, the SF Chronicle reports.”
Bud Light finds out there’s no bottom to their tranny pander pit. “Sales volumes of Bud Light fell by 23.6 percent in the week ended on May 6, according to retail scanner numbers cited by Beer Business Daily that are based on Nielsen IQ data. That’s a drop from the 23.3 percent slide Bud Light suffered in the final week of April.”
Finnish nuclear plant coming online drops spot energy prices by 75%.
Republican governors released a joint statement on Tuesday pledging to assist Texas in securing its border with Mexico.
In response to Gov. Greg Abbott’s request for assistance, twenty-four Republican governors committed to helping secure the 1,254-mile-border and commended the Texas Republican for the recent actions he was forced to take due to the failures of the Biden administration’s open-border policies, according to the Washington Examiner.
“The federal government’s response handling the expiration of Title 42 has represented a complete failure of the Biden Administration,” the joint statement reads. “While the federal government has abdicated its duties, Republican governors stand ready to protect the U.S.-Mexico border and keep families safe.”
“All states have suffered from the effects of deadly illegal drugs coming across the border, and every state is a border state due to the devastating influx of drugs in our communities. Republican governors are leading the way to address the border crisis by increasing fentanyl sentencing and increasing support for law enforcement interdiction of drugs, among other measures,” they continued.
“Texas Governor Greg Abbott has exemplified leadership at a critical time, leading the way with Operation Lone Star, and deploying the Texas Tactical Border Force to prevent illegal crossings and keep the border secure. We support the efforts to secure the border led by Governor Abbott.”
On Tuesday afternoon, Abbott sent an urgent request to all of the nation’s governors asking them to band together to defeat the invasion at the US/Mexico border, something he said impacts every community in the United States.
“The flood of illegal border activity invited by the Biden Administration flows directly across the southern border into Texas communities, but this crisis does not stop in our state. Emboldened Mexican drug cartels and other transnational criminal enterprises profit off this chaos, smuggling people and dangerous drugs like fentanyl into communities nationwide,” Abbott wrote.
“In the federal government’s absence, we, as Governors, must band together to combat President Biden’s ongoing border crisis and ensure the safety and security that all Americans deserve,” he requested.
While no Democratic governors responded to the letter, twenty-four Republicans pledged to help from states which include: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Jorge Mijares left Venezuela months ago — last November, he says. He’s been in Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande River from El Paso, for four weeks. But he planned to cross over Thursday night, as Title 42 immigration restrictions ended.
“I have the app,” said Mijares, 54. “I’m just waiting for it to tell me when to go.”
He’s not concerned about the Biden administration’s warnings against migration. After all, he has many friends who have made it across — safely.
There’s an app that tells you how to break U.S. immigration laws. Of course there is. Silly of me to be even slightly surprised. “The street finds its own uses for things” as the now-elderly cyberpunks used to say…
Twisted Sisiter’s Dee Snider is not down with your tranny madness. You submitted this with a better “we’re not going to take it” pun.
Speaking of tranny madness: Cross-dressing serial thief Samuel Brinton arrested as a fugitive from justice.
Remember Austin’s scheme to hand millions to the homeless industrial complex to clean up the mess they created, and the shady, recently-created “P Squared Services, LLC” they picked to give $1.7 million to?
That attracted so much attention that that particular piece of graft is now off the table:
Kudos to blogger Teddy Brosevelt (I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that’s a pseudonym) and Austin City Council member Mackenzie Kelly for killing this giant bucket of graft.
As the 88th Texas legislature regular session races toward sine die on May 29, here’s a quick update on two bills that caught my attention:
The senate is debating a bill to prevent banks from tracking firearms purchases. Good. We should not be letting the government set up a gun confiscation list, or banks a list to start banning law-abiding gun owners based on the goal of goosing their ESG scores.
A landmark local government preemption bill cleared its second hurdle Tuesday as House Bill (HB) 2127 was passed by the Texas Senate, with a few amendments.
Dubbed the “Texas Regulatory Consistency Act,” the bill prohibits municipalities from approving regulations that exceed state law in nine different sections of code: Agriculture, Business & Commerce, Finance, Insurance, Labor, Local Government, Natural Resources, Occupations, and Property.
The bill states that any regulation specifically enumerated in state code is regulatable by municipalities, and anything else is not, a strategy called “field preemption.” Up until this session, the state had opted for “conflict preemption,” a strategy of addressing specific policies adopted by localities after the fact.
It’s the difference between blasting with a shotgun and firing with a rifle.
HB 2127 allows individuals or associations in the county of potentially offending regulation to sue the locality for abridging this prohibition.
The bill, authored by Rep. Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock) and sponsored by Sen. Brandon Creighton (R-Conroe), was passed by the House about a month ago, where it received eight votes from Democrats in the lower chamber. From there, it moved to the Senate Business & Commerce Committee, where it passed six to two.
On Monday, the Senate passed its version with three amendments; Sen. Robert Nichols (R-Jacksonville) was the only GOP “nay” on the bill. The vote was the same on Tuesday’s final passage.
Those amendments include a “loser pays” provision, placing the burden of payment for a frivolous lawsuit with the person or group who brought the suit; a limitation that a suit may only be brought against the offending political subdivision, not individual elected officials of that locality who were liable to be sued under the House version; and the tacking on of a prohibition against local governments halting evictions.
Plaintiffs must provide three months’ notice to the locality of an impending suit, intended as a grace period within which the potential violation can be revoked.
That eviction language comes from Senate Bill (SB) 986, which appears to have stalled out in the lower chamber. That bill is aimed at what big cities in Texas tried to do — but were stopped by courts — in ordering eviction moratoriums during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Creighton said in a statement after the bill’s passage, “The Texas Regulatory Consistency Act, the most pro-business, pro-growth bill of the 88th session has passed the Senate.”
“HB 2127 gives Texas job creators the certainty they need to invest and expand by providing statewide consistency and ending the days of activist local officials creating a patchwork of regulation outside their jurisdiction. Local governments acting as lawmakers in a patchwork of varying anti-business ordinances result in job killing outcomes.”
Gov. Greg Abbott has backed the bill, shedding little doubt over whether he will sign it into law once it reaches his desk.
Snip.
With the bill passed in the upper chamber, it now moves back to the House, where the members must either accept the Senate version with its amendments or reject them and trigger a conference committee.
From there, it moves into the friendly embrace of Abbott, who’s been chomping at the bit to sign it into law.
The sooner this is signed into law, the sooner the madness consuming the local governments in Travis and Harris County can be reigned in.
It’s good to be a member of the Austin Homeless Industrial Complex. Not only do you get to rake off graft for luring drug-addicted transients to town, you also get to rake off graft to clean up the resulting mess.
Item #23 on this week’s Austin City Council agenda allocates another $20 million to the Homeless Industrial-Complex to clean up dozens of dangerous homeless encampments around the city.
Item 23 (link) says it’s critical for these camps to get cleaned up, since they pose “a great degree of health, safety, and fire risks.”
Austin Water also needs cleanup services on “environmentally sensitive areas of the wildlands” due to toxic waste and debris contaminating the watershed.
Snip.
One of the three companies who won this big fat $20 million contract – P Squared Services, LLC – is the most suspicious, sketchy and (almost certainly) fraudulent company I’ve encountered during my three years of reading through these absurd Austin City Council agenda items.
Just look at the 11 bids and financial docs for Item 23 (link).
You will shake your head in anger and disbelief, asking yourself:
How could Austin Finance be so incompetent, lazy and irresponsible?
Is something more sinister going on?
Is this a case of internal corruption or criminal behavior?
No sane person would make these decisions.
Nah. Austin City Council. Corrupt and incompetent is the default setting.
Meet P Squared Services, LLC
Major red flags pop up across the galaxy when you investigate this highly suspicious, brand new company called P Squared Services.
P Squared Services has:
No internet presence
No website
No clients
No experience
There’s overwhelming evidence that P Squared Services, LLC is almost certainly up to something nefarious and possibly illegal.
The major question is whether it’s an inside job and who made the final decision to funnel money to these frauds.
P Squared Services is a Texas Domestic Limited-Liability Company that was formed in Smithville on November 4, 2022.
The business address for P Squared Services is an exact match for the residential address of the two married co-owners:
Brandon Keith Pietsch
Kristina Dawn Pietsch
So the married co-owners of P Squared Services are running this mysterious business out of their HOUSE.
And this “business address” is actually a residential, single family home with zero visible equipment, tools or supplies for cleaning up industrial waste.
P Squared Services, LLC
607 Ash Street
Smithville, TX 78957
Let’s look at the google street view photos of their business headquarters / house.
See if you can notice:
Empty beer cans on front lawn
Tipped-over cooler by porch
Unfinished projects like doors and window screens that were never installed.
So they’re hiring someone to clean up a homeless camp whose house looks like a homeless camp.
The conclusion: “I’m almost positive that P Squared Services LLC is a fake, phony, money laundering scam.”
Indeed.
That seems to be the driving purpose behind all Austin homeless policies…
With all that’s going on, it’s easy to forget that China’s “Thousand Talents” program of systematic industrial espionage continues apace.
While China has attempted to steal trade secrets in semiconductors, aerospace and biotech, their espionage also has far more prosaic targets. Here’s the interrogation of a woman who stole the secret formula for the chemical lining inside a Coke can:
Dr. Xiaorong You, aka Shannon You, was just sentenced to serve 168 months in prison.
According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, You stole valuable trade secrets related to formulations for bisphenol-A-free (BPA-free) coatings for the inside of beverage cans. You was granted access to the trade secrets while working at The Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta, Georgia, and Eastman Chemical Company in Kingsport, Tennessee. The stolen trade secrets belonged to major chemical and coating companies, including Akzo-Nobel, BASF, Dow Chemical, PPG, Toyochem, Sherwin Williams, and Eastman Chemical Company, and cost nearly $120,000,000 to develop.
You stole the trade secrets to set up a new BPA-free coating company in China. You and her Chinese corporate partner, Weihai Jinhong Group received millions of dollars in Chinese government grants to support the new company. Documents and other evidence presented at trial, showed You’s intent to benefit not only Weihai Jinhong Group, but also the governments of China, the Chinese province of Shandong, and the Chinese city of Weihai, as well as her intent to benefit the Chinese Communist Party.
If China can steal something, they will steal something. Design your corporate security appropriately.
The decline of California under one-party Democrat rule has been one of the long-running themes of this blog. Today Victor Davis Hanson discusses how California’s wealthy destroyed the middle class with policies whose baleful effects they knew wouldn’t fall on them.
“The irony is that, as we created more wealth and more leisure, because of the very success of the middle class citizen, the middle class citizen and his central role in western government was forgotten.”
“California in the 1960s had the largest middle class in the United States. California had the finest educational system. California invented the idea of a modern freeway and a modern airport.”
“California had a state where two-thirds of the people lived with one-third of the precipitation, and yet they built the greatest transference of water with reservoirs and aqueducts the world had ever seen.”
“California had the most successful oil, timber and mineral industries in the world. They had some of the finest universities…Again this was a product of, both democratic governors and Republican governors.”
“However, today when we look at California, it’s got the highest number of homeless people in the United States. Half of all of America’s homeless live in California.”
“One-third of all the welfare recipients in the United States live in California. One-fifth of all Californians live below the poverty line.”
“California yet has the highest taxes in the country in the aggregate, the highest property taxes because of the enormous assessed evaluations…highest sales tax at over 10 to 11%, highest income tax at up to 13.2%.”
“The result of all of that that is is the middle class finds itself unable to pay and be competitive with other businesses in other states.”
“They look at all of these higher taxes, and they say themselves ‘I’m willing to pay it if I’m economically viable,’ but the regulations that the state creates fall heavily on the small farmer, the hardware store owner, the tire [store?] owner, but not necessarily on the Silicon Valley corporation that has an array of lawyers, or legal teams, or analysts, or economists, that find ways not to pay it.
“And so the middle class leaves, they vote with their feet they go to places where it’s more conducive for middle class livelihoods. We’ve lost somewhere between 8 and 12 million people of the middle class.”
At the same time, America has allowed in 20 million illegal aliens, half of which have ended up in California.
“We have not built an aqueduct in California in about 40 years. The schools that were rated in the top 10 percent of comparative state rankings are now in the bottom 10 percent. The airports are decrepit.”
“That the more taxes I pay, the worse schools I get.”
“In this period, there was about five trillion dollars in market capitalization that grew out of Silicon Valley alone. And we created sort of a medieval caste, a wealthy caste of Barons and Lords that were not subject to the consequences of their own ideology. So they had so much wealth they felt they were exempt from worries about taxation.”
“We created a very, very wealthy elite that was not subject to the consequences of their own ideology.”
Whether out of virtue signaling and guilt, or whether out of contrived political necessity, they made a political alliance with the very poor of California. And the poor said “Give us more entitlements, tax the middle class, transfer that money to us we need it.” And the wealthy said “Yes, we will open the borders. We’ll transfer money, but you have to vote for issues that we’re in favor of. And we’re in favor of them precisely because they don’t affect us.”
And of course, the left’s disdain for the middle class shows up in their language: They’re the “bitter clingers,” the “deplorables,” the “chumps and dregs of society.”
“Muscular labor was no longer essential to the American experiment. In other words, you could make have things made overseas in China or southeast Asia or Mexico. And the great middle class territory of the middle west of the United States—Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana—started to become hollowed out.”
“We’ve taken the middle class, the backbone of citizenship, and we’ve eroded it and destroyed it.”
The Biden family and its business associates created a complicated web of more than 20 companies, according to bank records obtained by the House Oversight Committee — a system, GOP lawmakers say, that was meant to conceal money received from foreign nationals.
Sixteen of the companies were limited liability companies formed during Joe Biden’s tenure as vice president, the committee said in a press conference on Wednesday. The Biden family, their business associates, and their companies received more than $10 million from foreign nationals’ and their related companies, the records show. These payments occurred both while Biden was in office as vice president and after his time in office ended.
In what Representative Nancy Mace called an act of “financial gymnastics,” many payments were routed from foreign companies to the Biden family’s business associates’ companies which then doled out payments to the Bidens in incremental payments to different bank accounts in an alleged attempt to hide the source of the funds.
At least nine Biden family members received payments, according to committee chairman James Comer. That includes Hunter Biden; James Biden; James Biden’s wife, Sara Jones Biden; the late Beau Biden’s wife, Hallie Biden; Hunter Biden’s ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle; Hunter Biden’s wife, Melissa Cohen; and “three children of the president’s son and the president’s brother.”
Much of the money came from Chinese nationals and companies with ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Multiple Biden family members received money after it passed through an associate’s account. Comer said of the countries the Biden family was influence peddling in, China is “the most reputable.”
The committee revealed Wednesday that records suggest the Biden family and its associates’ business dealings in Romania “bear clear indication of a scheme to peddle influence” from 2015 to 2017.
At the time, then-Vice President Biden spoke out against Romanian corruption while the Biden family received more than a million dollars from a company controlled by a Romanian national, Gabriel Popoviciu. Popoviciu, who has been accused of corruption, sent the money through a Biden family associate, according to the committee. Sixteen of the seventeen payments involved in the deal occurred while Biden was still in office. The money “stops flowing from the Romanian national soon after Joe Biden leaves the vice presidency,” Comer said.
The Bidens also received “millions of dollars from China,” with Comer saying it is “inconceivable that the president did not know” about the payments.
Comer said the information revealed Wednesday is the result of subpoenas to four different banks and stressed that the committee is still early in its investigation and believes there are as many as 12 banks with records relevant to its investigation.
Naturally, the mainstream media are doing their very best to ignore these revelations…
You might have noticed a meme floating around the media about how Britons could become “no better off than people living in Poland”. “If the UK continues with the same level of growth it has seen for the last decade,” writes Sam Ashworth-Hayes, “Poland will be richer than Britain in about 12 years’ time”:
It sounds like an absurd idea that in 2040 we might see complaints in the Polish press about a flood of British plumbers undercutting wages, or Brytyjski Skleps lining the rougher areas of Warsaw, but it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility.
This talking point has also appeared in the Telegraph, the Express and the Financial Times. It often comes with a sense of vague alarm and bewilderment. Poland? The post-communist place? Don’t they live entirely off vodka and potatoes? Don’t they have horses clippety-cloppeting down the streets selling women’s underwear pinched off a truck in Germany? Poland?
Having lived in Poland for nine years, I can say that I am not at all surprised by these projections. To be clear, that is all they are — projections. A lot can change in nine years, in Britain and in Poland.
Still, I think a lot of British people would be surprised by how much better things can be in the land of Lech Wałęsa and John Paul II. Equally, a lot of Polish people would be surprised by how much worse things can be in Britain — given that a lot of Poles of my acquaintance appear to think that getting rich in the U.K. is as easy as walking outside with a wheelbarrow and catching the banknotes that rain down from the sky.
Britain has had minimal economic growth for years. Poland has long been enjoying some of the highest economic growth in Europe. It even emerged from the pandemic better off than other European nations with, as Paweł Bukowski and Wojtek Paczos wrote for the LSE, “a relatively lax approach to economic lockdown and a bit of sheer luck”.
Institutions often seem to work better as well. I can generally visit a GP on the day I call. Britons often have to wait for more than a week. Maternal mortality is higher in the UK — and infant mortality is about the same, despite Britain being much richer overall. Actually, Polish life expectancy as whole is just a touch shorter than British life expectancy, despite the nation having a lot more smokers.
Polish kids have ranked higher on the PISA education rankings than British kids — ranking, indeed, the third highest in Europe in science and maths, and the fourth in reading comprehension. Poland is a more peaceful place than Britain, with murder and rape generally being rarer (granted, statistics in the latter case are famously difficult to trust). Terrorism, for reasons I leave to the reader, has been almost non-existent in Polish society.
Some Polish achievements are more difficult to quantify. In Britain, the 20th century was marked by a curious habit of ripping down beautiful buildings and constructing ugly ones. Poland, meanwhile, has been beautifully renovating and reconstructing many of its urban spaces, pursuing a philosophy of “preservation meets modernisation”. Warsaw and Kraków are famous enough, but travellers could also visit lovely towns and cities like Wrocław, Toruń and Gdańsk — or my own, Tarnowskie Góry.
Also, Poland seems to have actual conservatives who aren’t afraid to push for the right policies, instead of timid functionaries scared of their own shadow.
Last quarter, Disney+ lost 2.4 million subscribers. But this quarter is different! This quarter, Disney+ lost 4 million subscribers.
Related. “They got these ulterior motives, and you know, it’s about this this sort of political shit. And, yeah, I guess that’s part of it. But a lot of it is just these guys are just fucking stupid.”
Public Utility Commission (PUC) Chairman Peter Lake and Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) CEO Pablo Vegas sent a clear message to the Texas Legislature on Wednesday: tweak the electricity market so that natural gas generation can be supplemented, or continue to face problems in the summer heat.
I just have to pause here to note that “Pablo Vegas” sounds like an Anthony Weiner pseudonym.
“Operationally, the ERCOT grid is ready for this summer,” Lake said, unveiling the 2023 Seasonal Assessment of Resource Adequacy (SARA) report. “The reliability reforms that were put in place have been tested and continue to work. We’ve made the grid we’ve got as strong as possible using every tool available.”
The SARA report, as Lake stated, is an estimate of electricity demand and supply for certain scenarios based on past data, not a forecast of what is to come this summer.
It estimates peak demand to reach 82,739 megawatts (MW); for comparison, 1 MW can power about 200 homes during the peak demand hours of the late summer afternoon through evening. To cope with that demand, the state expects to have 97,000 MW of capacity available — two-thirds of which is thermal generation, combined with 13 percent from solar and 11 percent from wind.
However, Lake tinged the grid’s readiness with an omen.
“Data shows for the first time that peak demand this summer will exceed the amount we can generate from on-demand dispatchable power,” Lake warned. “There is no longer enough dispatchable generation to meet the demand of the ERCOT system. So, we will be relying on renewables to keep the lights on.”
The State of Texas is adding about 300,000 people per year, which means a larger and larger demand for electricity on the state’s largest power grid.
“In this new reality, our risk goes up as the sun goes down,” Lake added.
Vegas likened the situation to a car: the metaphorical vehicle — the physical grid itself — is up to par on maintenance, but it lacks the necessary fuel — the electricity supply — to power its full trip ahead.
Lake said that ERCOT’s dispatchable supply fleet only grew 1.5 percent from 2008 to 2022. During that time, its renewable footprint grew substantially with now more than 30,000 MW of wind power installed and more than 10,000 MW of solar.
The influx of renewables is driven primarily by the Production Tax Credit — a federal subsidy that pays renewable generators 2.6 cents per kilowatt-hour produced — which has given wind and now solar an advantage over thermal generation sources. ERCOT has 31,000 MW of solar generation in the queue along with 5,000 MW of wind.
In contrast, only 800 MW of dispatchable power has been added in the last year, according to Lake.
So thanks to renewables, blackouts may be in the future of Texans this summer.
The Biden administration is announcing a climate rule that would require most fossil fuel power plants to slash their greenhouse gas pollution 90 percent between 2035 and 2040 — or shut down.
The highly anticipated regulation being unveiled Thursday morning is just the latest step in President Joe Biden’s campaign to green the U.S. economy, an effort that has brought a counterattack from Republicans and coal-state Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin. That’s on top of efforts by Biden’s agencies to promote the use of electric cars, subsidize green energy sources like solar and wind and tighten regulations on products including gas stoves and dishwashers.
The draft power plant rule from the Environmental Protection Agency would break new ground by requiring steep pollution cuts from plants burning coal or natural gas, which together provide the lion’s share of the nation’s electricity. To justify the size of those cuts, the agency says fossil fuel plants could capture their greenhouse gas emissions before they hit the atmosphere — a long-debated technology that no power plant in the U.S. uses now.
As an alternative, utilities could hasten their decisions to shut down their aging coal plants, a trend that has already gathered speed in the past two decades. The rule allows plants that agree to close in the first half of the 2030s to avoid most or all of the pollution-reduction mandates.
Safe, reliable nuclear and fossil fuel powered energy is anathema to the Democratic Party because they can’t rake off enough graft from it. Unless you’re willing to let them shove their disasterous green energy programs down your throat, they want you deplorables sitting in the dark.
