Government in Action: Idiot Street Signs

March 11th, 2021

I’ve been watching entirely too many Top Gear/Grand Tour videos on YouTube. This one struck me as just barely justifiable for posting here as an example of idiot government regulation at work: a look at idiot street signs.

These are all from the UK. Feel free to share examples closer to home in the comments.

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Posted in Regulation, video | 2 Comments »

Texas Energy Outage Postmortem

March 10th, 2021

I finally had time to finish this postmortem post on the Texas winter storm energy grid crisis. I’ve got a ton of pieces to get through, so let’s dig in.

  • How the energy grid fell apart:

    Here were two problems, one short term and one long term—which exacerbated the short-term one.

    The short-term failure came at about 1 a.m. Monday when ERCOT should have seen the loads soaring due to plummeting temperatures, and arranged for more generation.

    Texas came very close to having a system-wide outage for the whole state (in the ERCOT area, about 85% of the state) due to not arranging for more generation.

    This tripped the grid, knocking some reliable thermal plants (gas and coal) offline. This was a failure of the grid operator (ERCOT) not the power plants.

    In the last four to five years, Texas lost a net of 3,000 megawatts of thermal out of a total installed capacity 73,000 megawatts today.

    We lost the thermal power because operators couldn’t see a return on investment due to be undercut by wind and solar, which is cheap for two reasons—it’s subsidized and it doesn’t have to pay for the costs of grid reliability by purchasing battery farms or contracting with gas peaker plants to produce power when needed, not when they can.

    Meanwhile, Texas has seen a growth of 20,000 megawatts of wind and solar over the same period to a total of 34,000 megawatts of installed capacity statewide, though they rarely perform anywhere close to capacity.

    Wind and solar, with state and federal subsidies, have pushed reliable thermal operators out of business or prevented new generation from being built as operators can’t make money off of the market.

  • More:

    Equipment failure turned out to be a big part of the problem.

    “Beginning around 11:00 p.m. [Sunday night], multiple generating units began tripping off-line in rapid progression due to the severe cold weather,” said Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations at ERCOT, the organization that manages the state’s electric grid.

    What does that mean? Equipment literally froze in the single digit temperatures and stopped working.

    Then, as reserves diminished, ERCOT asked transmission providers to turn off large industrial users that had previously agreed to be shut down. But the situation deteriorated quickly, requiring rotating outages that have lasted hours for many Texans.

    Electric generating plants did not properly winterize their equipment, said Dr. David Tuttle in the latest episode of the Y’all-itics political podcast. Tuttle is a research associate with the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.

    “There are things that can be done, but it will cost some money,” he added. “About every decade we have these long-sustained periods. And then, you know weatherization is supposed to happen, and then, it doesn’t because it costs money.”

  • “Yes, Green Energy Failures Helped Cause Texas Blackout Disaster.”

    As Texans reel from ongoing blackouts at the worst possible time, during a nationwide cold snap that has sent temperatures plummeting to single digits, the news has left people in other states wondering: How could this happen in Texas, the nation’s energy powerhouse?

    But policy experts have seen this moment coming for years. The only surprise is that the house of cards collapsed in the dead of winter, not the toasty Texas summers that usually shatter peak electricity demand records.

    The blackouts, which have left as many as 4 million Texans trapped in the cold, show the numerous chilling consequences of putting too many eggs in the renewable basket.

    Snip.

    On the whole, Texas is losing reliable generation and counting solely on wind and solar to keep up with its growing electricity demand. I wrote last summer about how ERCOT was failing to account for the increasing likelihood that an event combining record demand with low wind and solar generation would lead to blackouts. The only surprise was that such a situation occurred during a rare winter freeze and not during the predictable Texas summer heat waves.

    Yet ERCOT still should not have been surprised by this event, as its own long-term forecasts indicated it was possible, even in the winter. Although many wind turbines did freeze and total wind generation was at 2 percent of installed capacity Monday night, overall wind production at the time the blackouts began was roughly in line with ERCOT forecasts from the previous week.

    We knew solar would not produce anything during the night, when demand was peaking. Intermittency is not a technical problem but a fundamental reality when trying to generate electricity from wind and solar. This is a known and predictable problem, but Texas regulators fooled themselves into thinking that the risk of such low wind and solar production at the time it was needed most was not significant.

  • Could lawmakers have prevent the blackouts?

    “By Monday morning, half of Texas’ wind turbines were frozen solid, and wind generation bottomed out at 2 [percent] of installed capacity by Monday night,” said Jason Isaac, director of Life:Powered, a project of Texas Public Policy Foundation and a former state lawmaker.

    “Because of this massive gap in wind production and ERCOT’s delay, what should have been a series of brief rolling blackouts—inconvenient but manageable—instead turned into 4 million Texans left in the cold and without answers,” he continued. “To make matters worse, ERCOT shut down power at natural gas substations in the Permian, leading to further shortages.”

    Agricultural Commissioner Sid Miller has since said Texas should stop building wind turbines; focus on gas, coal, and oil; and called for the firing of Gov. Greg Abbott’s appointees to the Public Utility Commission—the government body that oversees ERCOT.

    But was this crisis foreseeable? Isaac says yes.

    “We’ve known for years that a weather event combining low wind and solar production and record demand could lead to blackouts,” he told Texas Scorecard. “This week, that event became a reality as new wind and solar generation failed to produce when it was needed the most, and it appears ERCOT fell asleep at the wheel.”

  • How the Texas outage started with bad policy:

    For years, Texas’ grid operator (ERCOT) has overestimated the ability to maintain a reliable grid without a sufficient supply buffer, known as a “reserve margin.” That margin is the difference between demand for electricity and what the grid can produce. When demand exceeds production, you get blackouts. That buffer has been shrinking because reliable sources of energy have been retired, few reliable plants have been constructed, and the grid is depending more and more on weather-dependent renewable energy that repeatedly fails to perform when we need it most.

    When wind and solar production predictably dropped as the winter storm hit, the buffer collapsed. ERCOT needed to execute a series of balancing measures that would have protected the grid. But it did not act soon enough, which caused many more gas and some coal power plants in the system to “trip.” (Think of it as a circuit breaker that triggers to prevent a fire or other emergency at your house when there is a system imbalance.) Other weather-related issues caused problems too but ERCOT’s failure to act sooner was a major factor.

    Usually, a system trip wouldn’t last long and we’d have power back in a few hours. But this time, many of the units that were tripped off the system had difficulty coming back online for a variety of reasons, including the fact that some were not designed to be taken off and put back on the system quickly, as well as other cold weather issues that exacerbated the problem.

    So when people blame ERCOT for not acting quickly, they’re right. And so are the people who say that both renewable energy and fossil energy plants are not generating what they should. But it doesn’t begin there. Our overdependence on unreliable energy that caused the razor thin reserve margins started the ball rolling years ago.

    Here’s the long story.

    Keeping the power on is a bit of a guessing game played out every day by the grid operator to make sure we have the right mix of energy getting on to the grid. There’s that buffer, the reserve margin, which ERCOT uses to give it some leeway in making moves. As with anything, the more reliable and predictable the source of energy, the better moves ERCOT can make.

    However, the race to add in renewables pushed out more reliable forms of energy and kept new reliable energy from being built. That resulted in the buffer in our electric grid being stripped out—going from more than a 20% surplus years ago to single digits in the last couple of years.

    Without that buffer, our system has become much more vulnerable to outages when we see extreme heat or extreme cold. The problem is made worse by the fact that renewables have grown to become a significant percentage of our fleet, making our power grid much more susceptible to weather-related shortages. That is because renewables do not show up when we need power the most (high heat, freezing cold, big storms, etc.)

  • Here’s an informative thread on how the Texas energy market is set up and how some of the system was offline when the worst hit:

    I think here he’s conflating a few different things; it’s unclear how much capacity was taken off line due to insufficient weatherization and how much was caused by ERCOT foolishly inducing blackouts in the gas-producing Permian Basin.

  • Chuck Devore:

  • More on how renewables helped create the crisis:

    Mitchell Rolling explains: “As you can see, the top three performing energy sources during the energy crisis in Texas were all fuel-based energy sources: nuclear, coal, and natural gas. On average, these three energy sources alone provided over 91 percent of all electricity generated throughout the energy emergency, as the graph below shows. Without these energy sources on the grid providing the bulk of electricity, the situation in Texas would have gone from bad to worse.”

  • More on the same theme:

    The massive blast of Siberia-like cold that is wreaking havoc across North America is proving that if we humans want to keep surviving frigid winters, we are going to have to keep burning natural gas — and lots of it — for decades to come.

    That cold reality contradicts the “electrify everything” scenario that’s being promoted by climate change activists, politicians, and academics. They claim that to avert the possibility of catastrophic climate change, we must stop burning hydrocarbons and convert all of our transportation, residential, commercial, and industrial systems so that they are powered solely on electricity, with most of that juice coming, of course, from forests of wind turbines and oceans of solar panels.

    But attempting to electrify everything would concentrate our energy risks on an electricity grid that is already breaking under the surge in demand caused by the crazy cold weather. Across America, countless people don’t have electricity. I’m one of them. Our power here in central Austin went out at about 3 am. I am writing this under a blanket, have multiple layers of clothes on, and am nervously watching my laptop’s battery indicator.

    This blizzard proves that attempting to electrify everything would be the opposite of anti-fragile. Rather than make our networks and critical systems more resilient and less vulnerable to disruptions caused by extreme weather, bad actors, falling trees, or simple negligence, electrifying everything would concentrate our dependence on a single network, the electric grid, and in doing so make nearly every aspect of our society prone to catastrophic failure if — or rather, when — a widespread or extended blackout occurs.

  • The truth about those frozen wind turbines:

    One of the most contested issues is the role wind generation has played. Prior to the onset of the storm last week, Texas led the nation in wind power generation and depended on the wind turbines in West-Central and Western Texas, along with a smaller number of turbines along the Gulf Coast, for about 25% of its electricity. As wind power has increased, coal-powered generation plants have been taken offline around the state. Texas has abundant coal, oil, and natural gas, and also has nuclear plants near Dallas and near Houston.

    Real-time data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows that wind power collapsed as the winter storm swept across the state.

    Snip.

    As the graph plainly shows, wind generation choked down but natural gas compensated. Coal and even nuclear power generation dipped. Solar generation has been negligible due to cloud cover and several inches of snow and ice.

    The cold has created extreme demand across the state. During most winter storms, the Panhandle, West Texas, and even North Texas around Dallas and above toward Paris may get cold but Central and South Texas could remain well above freezing. This has not happened during the current series of storms. The entire state is in a deep freeze, with snow appearing even on Galveston Island’s beach. Galveston averages lows of about 50 degrees and highs in the mid-60s during a typical February. It’s 37 degrees in Galveston as I write this, well below average. Austin has seen single-digit temperatures at night.

    To put all of this into some perspective, the storm that dumped more than six inches of ice and snow on Austin Sunday night would, by itself, have been a historic storm. It dropped more snow on the capital than any other storm since 1949. It was preceded by a major cold snap and has been followed by more extreme cold and then another ice and snow storm Tuesday night. Texas has not suffered a single historic winter storm over the past several days, but a series of them without any warming in between…

    Add to all of this, when Texas gets winter storms it usually doesn’t just get snow. Snow is fairly easy to deal with. Texas also gets ice, which can snap electric lines and break trees and tree branches, which also can fall on and break power lines. A tree in my yard is bent over by ice to the point that it looks like an invisible hand is holding it down. We can expect the ice to kill off millions of trees around the state. The ice layers also render most roads impassable. All of this is very unusual for Texas, but not unprecedented. The winter of 1836 was notably harsh; Santa Anna reportedly encountered deep snow as he marched his army toward San Antonio.

    Most winters, Austin will have a few cold days but no snow. Central Texas is known to go entire winters without anyone having to so much as scrape any frost off their car windshield. Austin has had two significant snowstorms in 2021, with the current one being historic by any measure.

    Piecing known information together, the wind turbines in Western Texas froze up starting Friday before the icy snowstorm hit, on Sunday night to Monday morning. This destabilized the Texas grid ahead of the worst of the storm. The storm produced the temperatures and precipitation the forecasts expected, but with weakened power generation and demand skyrocketing to heat millions of homes, homes which for the most part are not insulated against the current level of cold temperatures, the grid was set up to suffer mightily as it’s not hardened against extreme cold such as this once-in-a-century storm series is delivering.

  • In chart form:

  • What can clean energy advocates say when wind turbines freeze?

    Wind’s share has tripled to about 25% since 2010 and accounted for 42% of power last week before the freeze set in. About half of Texans rely on electric pumps for heating, which liberals want to mandate everywhere. But the pumps use a lot of power in frigid weather. So while wind turbines were freezing, demand for power was surging.

    California progressives long ago banished coal. But a heat wave last summer strained the state’s power grid as wind flagged and solar ebbed in the evenings. After imposing rolling blackouts, grid regulators resorted to importing coal power from Utah and running diesel emergency generators.

    Liberals claim that prices of renewables and fossil fuels are now comparable, which may be true due to subsidies, but they are no free lunch, as this week’s energy emergency shows. The Biden Administration’s plan to banish fossil fuels is a greater existential threat to Americans than climate change.

  • More on eliminating wind subsidies and the road forward:

    Decades of taxpayer-funded subsidies that favor unreliable wind power are crowding reliable energy sources out of the market, weakening the grid, and leading directly to the blackouts we experienced last week.

    It’s no surprise — in fact, Texas came close to seeing widespread blackouts in August 2019. Our reserve margin, the buffer of extra electricity between what Texans are using and what we can produce, has become steadily smaller in recent years. And without quick action by state leaders, it will only get worse.

    We should eliminate subsidies and tax breaks for energy companies — especially unreliable wind— to allow the free market to function smoothly. We must prioritize reliability and affordability in our electricity choices. Unfortunately, that’s not politically popular. But these are steps we can and must take for our state’s future.

  • Austin’s useless City Council being their usual useless selves: “Austin Energy’s biomass power plant in East Texas, which the city purchased in 2019 for $460 million, sat idle and produced no power during one of the worst winter energy crises in state history.” Well, at least it was providing Austinites jobs? Nope. It’s near Nacogdoches.
  • It did indeed suck to live without power for days on end.
  • A Texas Public Policy Foundation symposiums on the outage.
  • Heh:

    • Also, I got my electric bill for February and…it’s a totally normal February electric bill. It helps to have natural gas heat…

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    Posted in Austin, Regulation, Texas | 13 Comments »

    China Carries Out Giant Microsoft Hack

    March 9th, 2021

    This isn’t good:

    At least 30,000 organizations across the United States — including a significant number of small businesses, towns, cities and local governments — have over the past few days been hacked by an unusually aggressive Chinese cyber espionage unit that’s focused on stealing email from victim organizations, multiple sources tell KrebsOnSecurity. The espionage group is exploiting four newly-discovered flaws in Microsoft Exchange Server email software, and has seeded hundreds of thousands of victim organizations worldwide with tools that give the attackers total, remote control over affected systems.

    On March 2, Microsoft released emergency security updates to plug four security holes in Exchange Server versions 2013 through 2019 that hackers were actively using to siphon email communications from Internet-facing systems running Exchange.

    Microsoft said the Exchange flaws are being targeted by a previously unidentified Chinese hacking crew it dubbed “Hafnium,” and said the group had been conducting targeted attacks on email systems used by a range of industry sectors, including infectious disease researchers, law firms, higher education institutions, defense contractors, policy think tanks, and NGOs.

    In the three days since then, security experts say the same Chinese cyber espionage group has dramatically stepped up attacks on any vulnerable, unpatched Exchange servers worldwide.

    In each incident, the intruders have left behind a “web shell,” an easy-to-use, password-protected hacking tool that can be accessed over the Internet from any browser. The web shell gives the attackers administrative access to the victim’s computer servers.

    Speaking on condition of anonymity, two cybersecurity experts who’ve briefed U.S. national security advisors on the attack told KrebsOnSecurity the Chinese hacking group thought to be responsible has seized control over “hundreds of thousands” of Microsoft Exchange Servers worldwide — with each victim system representing approximately one organization that uses Exchange to process email.

    Microsoft’s initial advisory about the Exchange flaws credited Reston, Va. based Volexity for reporting the vulnerabilities. Volexity President Steven Adair said the company first saw attackers quietly exploiting the Exchange bugs on Jan. 6, 2021, a day when most of the world was glued to television coverage of the riot at the U.S. Capitol.

    But Adair said that over the past few days the hacking group has shifted into high gear, moving quickly to scan the Internet for Exchange servers that weren’t yet protected by the security updates Microsoft released Tuesday.

    “We’ve worked on dozens of cases so far where web shells were put on the victim system back on Feb. 28 [before Microsoft announced its patches], all the way up to today,” Adair said. “Even if you patched the same day Microsoft published its patches, there’s still a high chance there is a web shell on your server. The truth is, if you’re running Exchange and you haven’t patched this yet, there’s a very high chance that your organization is already compromised.”

    This is a huge problem, because Exchange is only used by just about every big business in America, not to mention numerous government agencies. It dominates the market so thoroughly that it’s hard to find market share reports on its competitors.

    This hack, of course, is the second big Chinese hack, following the office of Personnel and Management hack under the Obama Administration.

    Here’s a timeline of the hack. Evidently Chinese hackers exploited no less than four zero day exploits to pull off the hack.

    Internet security is hard, and no one in the Federal government (with the possible exception of DoD and certain three initial agencies) seems to take it seriously.

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    Posted in Crime | 3 Comments »

    Mike Rowe on “The Science Is Settled” And Cancel Culture

    March 8th, 2021

    Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame has some useful observations on the left throwing around “The Science Is Settled!” as a universal “get out of debate free” card:

    David J. Herdrich writes…

    Look, Mr Rowe, it’s easy to take a set of quotes and predictions of scientists out of context and situate your post in a narrative that says Covid and Climate Change are hoaxes or greatly exaggerated. But when put in the broader context of the science that has been done, and the broader context of what scientists have said, Covid and Climate Change are both serious threats that should not be downplayed.

    Hi David,

    I don’t see how I downplayed either issue. I agree that both are deadly serious, and that both demand our attention. But does that mean we should ignore the long list of predictions and claims that have turned out to be false? Pointing out misstatements from powerful people who shape policy is not taking things “out of context,” it’s holding people accountable. Hundreds of journalists, politicians, and scientists who spoke with great certainty about both issues turned out to be dead wrong. That doesn’t mean that science is not to be trusted – but it does mean we can no longer hope to persuade skeptical people by simply proclaiming, “because the science is settled!” Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. Point being, our current credibility crisis isn’t happening because powerful people were merely wrong about critical issues that affect us all – it’s happening because they were wrong, and certain, and unapologetic. That trifecta has had a devastating effect on the public trust, and for good reason. But this crisis of credibility is also happening because “cancel culture” is very real, as is the attack on free speech.

    As I type this, I see that Mr. Potato Head is no longer a male, and Dr. Suess is now a racist. Here in San Francisco, the school board has voted to remove no less than 44 names from the façade of public schools. Among them, Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Jefferson. These decisions, in my opinion, are all promulgated by people who share two qualities in equal measure – certainty and intolerance. They are certain of what they believe, and they are intolerant of those who disagree. If you revisit the sources I provided in my original post, you’ll see that combination appear over and over. It’s not a coincidence.

    Snip.

    I simply suggested the rise of certainty was correlated with the decline of humility, and Americans are starting to notice. Moreover, the onus is not on the American people to believe what our leaders and experts proclaim. They have a duty to persuade, not merely dismiss skeptics as “deniers.”

    But also, there’s an underlying hypocrisy at work here that transcends the business of being wrong, and a level of hubris that makes persuasion nearly impossible. Gavin Newsom’s future in politics is in real trouble today, not because of his policies, but because of his hypocrisy. Likewise, Andrew Cuomo’s words have come back to haunt him in a big way. “Believe all women?” Ok, let’s see if he means it. Al Gore scared the hell out millions of people by telling us the polar ice caps would be gone twenty years ago, and cited all kinds of scientific studies to support his claim. That doesn’t make him wrong about everything, but when he refuses to walk it back, it makes him fundamentally unpersuasive. But you seem to be arguing that anyone who dares to hold experts responsible for their own words, is “anti-science.” And you’re doing it with the same level of certainty we hear from guys like Newsom, Cuomo, Gore, and now, John Kerry.

    Snip.

    Today, I think we’re long on certainty and short on truth. Thus, we’re even shorter on credibility. But I think you’re mistaken to blame people for being skeptical. Their skepticism is more than justified, thanks to a long list of preposterous claims from our elected officials, a lack of humility among our experts, an assault on free speech in our universities, and a national press corps who makes no attempt to hide their bias. Throw in an assault on Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Suess and a few thousand statues of our founding fathers that are no longer appropriate, and perhaps you can start to see why people have begun to mistrust our institutions.

    As for “flattening the curve,” I was simply reminding people that we were all told a year ago – with great certainty – that the lockdowns would end when the curve was flattened. “Two weeks to flatten the curve!” Remember? A lot of scientists supported that promise, and millions of Americans trusted them. Well, the curve was flattened, but the lockdowns persisted. Pointing this out is not a criticism of science or scientists; it’s a criticism of certainty.

    Read the whole thing.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

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    Posted in Democrats, Global Warming, Social Justice Warriors | 7 Comments »

    Followup on a Water/Gas Valve Shutoff Tool

    March 7th, 2021

    Here’s another followup to my cheap prepper post.

    I did not have the Orbit 26097 Gas And Water Emergency Shut Off Tool when I wrote that post, but I already had it on order. Now that I have it it in hand, it seems like a well-built tool with a number of useful features:

  • A water shutoff valve
  • A gas shutoff valve
  • A manhole cover lift tool
  • A point on one end, so you could use it as an ice pick or such
  • A nicely rubberized grip
  • Finally, it’s hefty enough that if you had to use it as a weapon, you could put a real hurting on someone with it.

    • I tested both the water shutoff and manhole cover lift functions, and each worked fine. (Protip: Turn the water back on slowly because the back pressure can crack your pipes if you rush it.) And it sure looks like it works a lot better than fumbling with a big pair of pliers, especially in a plumbing emergency.

    If you don’t already have a water shutoff valve, this one is hard to beat for 10 bucks…

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    Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

    PSA: Mirrors Are Not Bullet Proof

    March 6th, 2021

    Feeling lazy today, so here’s a short Demolition Ranch video proving that, yes, mirror are not bullet proof:

    Since he goes out of his way to break a bunch of other superstitions, it makes me wonder why he didn’t release this on a Friday the 13th. It also reminds me of the time James “The Amazing” Randi broke as many superstitions as he could in a single event just to prove it was all hooey…

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    Posted in Guns, video | 1 Comment »

    LinkSwarm for March 5, 2021

    March 5th, 2021

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! More Democrats behaving badly, and Orange Man Bad simply refuses to abandon the spotlight…

  • Americans are in favor of confronting China over heinous human rights abuses, even if it means risking economic ties.
  • “Trump Eviscerates Biden’s Record in Blistering CPAC Speech.” Shotgun, meet barrel of pike. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Despite having the entire American political establishment against him, Trump’s agenda is more popular than ever. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • The Biden Administration is already a disaster:

    What has this desiccated, old weirdo achieved in his six weeks of semiconsciousness in the Oval Office? Well, there’s putting tens of thousands of Americans out of jobs, including union guys who voted for him. There’s telling the American people that their kids can’t go to school because public school teachers take priority over children because of science or something. There’s another war in the Middle East. Those are kind of accomplishments, but not really good ones.

    His administration had someone named “Ducklo” who was mean to women. He had another who wants to be a woman and who wants to let your little boys be surgically turned into women. And Neera Tanden’s confirmation was blocked because she was a woman and totally not because she was an inept loudmouth.

    If this is normalcy, what’s a freak show look like?

    Are you * voters starting to feel a bit of buyer’s remorse? Let me ask it another way. Everybody enjoying your $2,000 check? Oh well. On the upside, they impeached Trump…and failed. Again, after sucking up two weeks of the Senate’s calendar. So, what do you have to show for yourself, * voters?

    Failure.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • The Democrats’ pork laden “relief” bill includes massive health care subsidies for the rich:

    The massive coronavirus relief bill racing through Congress provides substantial new health-insurance subsidies to upper-income households. A 60-year-old couple with two kids making $200,000 would receive a subsidy of $12,000. In some parts of the country where premiums are high, families with incomes exceeding half a million dollars will qualify for thousands of dollars in subsidies to buy an ObamaCare plan. In contrast, a family of four making $40,000 receives an added benefit of just $1,600.

  • It also includes 25 weeks of paid leave for bureaucrats with children in closed schools. Meanwhile, parents with closed schools held hostage to teacher’s union who aren’t bureaucrats can drop dead.
  • The fall of Michael Madigan, America’s last machine boss:

    Newly minted as a committeeman, Madigan was sent to the 1970 Illinois Constitutional Convention as a delegate representing Daley’s interests. He voted for the most constricting “pension protection” clause in the nation, which guaranteed government-employee unions benefits the government couldn’t afford in exchange for their backing of the Democratic machine, tying the state to an anchor of massive debt in perpetuity. He also voted for changes in the property-tax system that would later make him a millionaire through his law firm, Madigan & Getzendanner, which specialized in appealing the tax assessments of the most valuable real estate in the Midwest and skimming off the reductions granted by political allies who heard the firm’s appeals.

    Later that year, Madigan was elected state representative for the 22nd House District of Illinois. He would go on to be reelected 25 times, eventually being elevated to House speaker after he was made gerrymanderer-in-chief following the 1980 Census. The redistricting process had been expected to hurt Democrats badly, but Madigan’s cartographical cunning staved off a political bloodbath and earned him the title of “political wizard” from the Chicago Tribune. Many representatives now owed their seats to his pen, and they elected him speaker in 1983.

    For all but two of the next 38 years, he would hold the speaker’s gavel, wielding parliamentary rules that gave him more power than any other legislative leader in the country. His one-man rule was finally merged with the party power structure in 1998, when he became chairman of the Democratic Party of Illinois. This made him a one-stop shop for special interests looking to pass or kill legislation. Commonwealth Edison, the state’s largest utility provider, last year was forced to pay a $200 million fine for attempting to bribe Madigan by providing no-work contracts and other perks to the speaker’s inner circle. Though he denied wrongdoing, the scandal ultimately hastened his downfall.

    The wreckage of Madigan’s decades-long reign is obvious. When he became speaker in 1983, Illinois had a perfect credit rating. Since 2013, it’s had the worst credit rating in the nation, just one notch above junk. The reason is that while Daley built his political army with federal money, Madigan built his with state money, specifically state debt. Political foot soldiers owed generous pensions, early retirements, and other perks to the speaker’s protection. His fingerprints are on nearly every bill that enhanced state pension benefits, borrowed money to cover their costs, or shorted contributions to the systems to avoid difficult choices over the course of his 50 years in power.

    The result of all those unsustainable promises is the most severe public-pension crisis in U.S. history, one with far-reaching implications for Illinois government. Since 2000, the state has cut spending on child welfare and other programs that help those in need by one-third after adjusting for inflation. Over the same time, spending on pensions and pension debt has increased 501 percent. The same story plays out at the local level, as Illinoisans are saddled with property-tax bills on par with their mortgages — bills that sap home equity out of once-prosperous Black communities, particularly — in exchange for sub-par services that get worse each year.

  • “Liberal elites are driving minority voters from Democratic Party“:

    If you haven’t read New York magazine’s interview with David Schor, an Obama campaign veteran and liberal data analyst, it’s worth your time.

    His post-mortem of the 2020 election shows how Democrats have increasingly become a party of college-educated whites, whose hard-left views aren’t fully shared by the black and Hispanic communities they claim to champion. His findings echo the concerns of older progressive analysts such as John Judis.

    Between the 2016 and 2020 elections, Schor finds, Democrats gained 7 percent among white college grads, but lost 2 percent of African Americans and 8 to 9 percent of Latinos, as well as about 5 percent of Asian Americans.

    Socialism and “defund the police” were the chief reasons, Schor says: “We raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of nonwhite voters disagreed with us on.”

    Even on immigration, “If you look at, for example, decriminalizing border crossings, that’s not something that a majority of Hispanic voters support,” Schor says.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Far-left Social Justice Warrior and Hillary Clinton toady Neera Tanden withdrew her nomination to become director of the Office of Management and Budget when it became apparent she didn’t have the votes to be confirmed.
  • Speaking of Biden nominations in trouble, Xavier “I Hate Nuns” Becerra’s nomination is no slam dunk either.
  • When I saw a headline on a deadly crash involving an SUV carrying 25 people, I went “Obviously it must have been full of illegal aliens.” Well, guess what?
  • Just as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis lifted coronavirus restrictions month before Texas, so too he’s way ahead of Texas Governor Greg Abbott in proposing concrete election integrity laws.
  • “Andrew Cuomo abused his power as Governor to sexually harass me, just as he had done with so many other women.” What, you’re saying it’s not perfectly normal for a governor to ask female aids to play strip poker?
  • Why is the media finally getting around to metooing Andrew Cuomo? To protect other Democratic governors from their disasterous coronavirus policies:

    In a just world not plagued by a fake and corrupt media, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) would be on the edge of resigning his office today, not over a handful of times he allegedly got aggressive with women, but over his sociopathic executive order that required nursing homes to accept patients still infected with the coronavirus.

    That, after all, is the real scandal here, the true scandal, an act so monstrous Cuomo knew he had to cover it up, which he did by falsely blaming the order on the Trump administration and then lying about just how many seniors died as a result.

    But instead of being pressured to resign over that, he’s being hit with perfectly-timed allegations of sexual misconduct, two involving former staffers, one involving a complete stranger he met at a wedding.

    As these things go, while his alleged behavior is inappropriate (especially in the workplace), it’s nothing compared to the credible allegations against His Fraudulency Joe Biden, which involve a full-blown sexual assault allegation. Biden got away with much, much worse, so…

    So what’s going on? Why is America’s corrupt media not at all interested in some 15,000 dead senior citizens while they tar and feather Cuomo over the allegations he made three left-wing women uncomfortable?

    The answer is obvious…

    Four other Democrat governors issued the same sociopathic nursing home order as Cuomo. Four other Democrats ordered infected coronavirus patients be admitted into nursing home facilities where 1) the most vulnerable live, and 2) they’re not set up to handle an infectious virus.

    What this means is that if the corrupt media were to do the right thing (like that will ever happen) and go after Cuomo over his deadly nursing home policy, it would open a Pandora’s Box against these four Democrat governors and the Democrat party as a whole, which is something our fake media will never do.

    Democrats must be protected at all costs, even if the cost is thousands and thousands of lives.

  • When a Cuomo marries a Kennedy.

    So welcoming was the Kennedy clan that the exes of either sex stayed on as friends. Andrew put a stop to that. For Kerry, that meant no more former boyfriends, not even those whom the Kennedys regarded as family. That was the word, and Andrew was dead serious about it. The new rule reinforced the doubts the family had had about Andrew from the start: he wasn’t fun; he didn’t get fun. He was, to put it mildly, a spoilsport. Unlike the Kennedys, too, he didn’t mask his ambition with charm, and no one, not even his in-laws, would stand in his way. And, as Andrew’s star at HUD rose, he seemed increasingly to regard those in-laws with disdain.

    He hated the gatherings in Hyannis; he always felt like the odd man out. The joshing around, the freewheeling talks—Andrew was just too tightly wound to join in. One night, as was typical, the family began singing songs, each member singing a favorite. “The Kennedys are terrible singers, but it’s one of the great joys,” explained Douglas Kennedy. “One time Joe [Jr.] is up there, and he sings ‘Danny Boy,’ and everyone is happy about it. Except Andrew. He’s on the couch with his arms folded, looking disgusted by the whole thing. Everyone is calling for someone else to sing a song. ‘Andrew, you sing,’ someone says. But he says, ‘No, I’m not Irish.’ So someone else says, ‘Sing something Italian.’ Andrew still won’t, so I sing ‘Volare.’”

    Andrew stopped going to Hyannis at one point, a family member recalled. But he made sure to be with the clan at any gathering covered by the media. Early on, the family noticed that at every visit to Arlington Cemetery to honor their father or uncle, Andrew situated himself just so. “He would always find the exact perfect place to stand so he could be in the newspaper the next day,” recalled a relative. “So if that meant grabbing [Ethel’s] hand and walking to the grave, or standing next to John or Caroline, he would get himself in the frame. That was his whole thrust.”

    His “thrust” seems to have changed a bit…

  • Pro-#BlackLivesMatter Portland city councilwoman Jo Ann Hardesty allegedly fled scene after hitting another car. Try to contain your shock. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Speaking of Hellhole Portland: “Defunded Police Were Too Busy With Shootings to Stop Antifa Rioters.”
  • Ninth Circuit Vacates California Magazine Ban Decision.” Good, though there’s still a chance for an en banc hearing.
  • Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy convicted of corruption and influence-peddling, and sentenced to a year in prison.
  • Why Arab armies suck:

    [Kenneth Pollack’s Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness] identifies key aspects of Arab culture relevant to the book: conformity, centralization of authority, deference to authority and passivity, group loyalty, manipulation of information, atomization of knowledge, personal courage, and ambivalence toward manual labor and technical work. One can see how these values and behaviors will negatively affect military performance, especially the most glaring problem for Arab armed forces: poor tactical leadership from junior officers. Consistently, these officers fail to show any initiative or creativity—they rarely if ever adapt quickly to changing circumstances in battle. This makes perfect sense, though, if one considers these soldiers were trained to conform and defer to authority. This stands in stark contrast to the Israeli military, whose soldiers were raised in the “Start-up Nation,” which encourages innovation from all ranks.

    The education system in Arab societies drilled in these values to the point that they became central to soldiers’ behavior. “Typical Arab educational practices relentlessly inculcated the values, preferences, and preferred behavior—the culture—of the wider society,” Pollack writes.

    Pollack also explains that Arab military programs are modeled on the educational methods of the larger society, reinforcing certain patterns of behavior and conditioning soldiers to act and think in “ways that reflect the values and priorities of the dominant culture.”

  • You didn’t really think that Google Chrome’s incognito mode would protect you, did you?
  • Fighting woke racists at Smith College.

    I was told on multiple occasions that discussing my personal thoughts and feelings about my skin color is a requirement of my job. I endured racially hostile comments, and was expected to participate in racially prejudicial behavior as a continued condition of my employment. I endured meetings in which another staff member violently banged his fist on the table, chanting “Rich, white women! Rich, white women!” in reference to Smith alumnae. I listened to my supervisor openly name preferred racial quotas for job openings in our department. I was given supplemental literature in which the world’s population was reduced to two categories — “dominant group members” and “subordinated group members” — based solely on characteristics like race.

    Every day, I watch my colleagues manage student conflict through the lens of race, projecting rigid assumptions and stereotypes on students, thereby reducing them to the color of their skin. I am asked to do the same, as well as to support a curriculum for students that teaches them to project those same stereotypes and assumptions onto themselves and others. I believe such a curriculum is dehumanizing, prevents authentic connection, and undermines the moral agency of young people who are just beginning to find their way in the world.

    Although I have spoken to many staff and faculty at the college who are deeply troubled by all of this, they are too terrified to speak out about it. This illustrates the deeply hostile and fearful culture that pervades Smith College.

  • “Baltimore HS Student Who Passed Only Three Courses in Four Years Ranks in Top Half of His Class.” It’s a real mystery why they have the highest VD rates in the country…
  • One thing both Democrats and Republicans agree on: John Kasich is a worthless pile of nothing.
  • Sad news: Austin-based movie theater chain The Alamo Drafthouse has filed for Chapter 11. That’s reorganization, so most theaters will stay open. A good thing, too, since I’ll probably see Godzilla vs. Kong there…
  • Papa Johns founder John Schnatter vindicated. Laundry Service “the branding company hired which was hired by Papa John’s to improve its image, was caught on a ‘hot mic’ brainstorming ways in which it could use comments made by Schnatter to damage his image.”
  • In Soviet Russia, guitar shreds you! (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • “Sanitizer”:

  • “Estimated 9 Billion Already Dead From Texas Mask Mandate Reversal.”
  • “Texas Governor Hailed As Conservative Hero For Ending Unconstitutional Mandates He Implemented.”
  • “G.I. Joe To Be Replaced With Genderless G.I. Pat.”
  • “Can You Find All 17 Instances Of Racism On This Page From A Dr. Seuss Book?”
  • “Report: Women In Hell Still Trying To Turn Up The Thermostat.”
  • “Lunchtime!”

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Waste and Fraud | 5 Comments »

    Texas County Judge, 3 Others Arrested on 150 Counts of Voter Fraud

    March 4th, 2021

    Here’s another example of that election fraud Democrat’s swear doesn’t exist:

    A Medina County justice of the peace and three others have been arrested on 150 counts of voter fraud after an investigation by the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) of Texas.

    Medina County is about 45 miles due west of San Antonio. Hondo is the county seat.

    Turning themselves into the Bandera County Sheriff’s Office, the charges stem from fraudulent voting practices during the 2018 primary in Medina County.

    Tomas Ramirez, the peace officer, has been charged along with Leonor Garza, Eva Martinez, and Mary Balderrama by a Bandera County grand jury.

    Party affiliations is somewhat hard to come by, since Ballotpedia doesn’t list Justice of the Peace elections for Medina County, but Tomas Ramirez, Justice of the Peace for Precinct 4, is a Republican.

    The charges range from engaging in organized election fraud to illegal voting to unlawfully assisting a mail ballot voter.

    Ramirez et al. aren’t the first individuals charged with voter fraud in the recent past. A number of voter fraud charges have been brought by the OAG’s Election Integrity Unit including against a San Antonio woman exposed by an undercover Project Veritas video back in October.

    Snip.

    The defendants are being tried in Bandera County because under Texas law, any voter fraud-related offense may be tried in a neighboring county.

    The OAG website states the office has successfully prosecuted 531 counts of voter fraud since 2004 — with 97 of them from 2018 alone.

    Currently, 234 election fraud investigations are still active.

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    Posted in Crime, Republicans, Texas | 1 Comment »

    Abbott FINALLY Lifts Wuhan Coronavirus Restrictions

    March 3rd, 2021

    A mere five months after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis lifted coronavirus restrictions on his state, Texas Governor Greg Abbott is finally doing the same:

    At a press conference in Lubbock, Governor Greg Abbott announced that he was issuing a new executive order that would rescind most of the regulations in his previous orders, including allowing all businesses to open to “100 percent” capacity and ending the statewide mask mandate beginning next Wednesday.

    “It is now time to open up Texas 100 percent. Every employee who wants to work should have that opportunity. Every business that wants to be open, should be open,” said Abbott.

    Abbott said that his executive order will allow county judges to impose other restrictions if COVID-19 hospitalizations rise above 15 percent in the state trauma service area that covers their county — though not with a penalty of jail time or fines with any mask mandates.

    COVID-19 hospitalizations have been on a sharp downward trend, with the most populous regions of the state falling below the 15 percent threshold during the recent statewide freeze.

    Currently only two trauma service areas are above that mark: the regions covering El Paso and Laredo.

    The governor’s last executive order related to the pandemic was issued in October and permitted some businesses to reopen at 75 and 50 percent capacity, as long as the same hospitalization metric was met.

    Here’s Abbott’s full order, which makes it clear that county judges may still impose certain lockdown conditions in certain circumstances, but: A.) No business limits below 50% capacity, B.) No limits on houses of worship, C.) No jail time for violating restrictions and D.) No mask penalties of any kind.

    Restrictions are lifted effective March 10.

    The big question is not why did Abbott lift what remained of the lockdown, but what took him so long. Here’s the coronavirus chart for Florida, which has been fully open since September 25, 2020:

    And here’s the same chart for Texas:

    Do anything about those charts suggest that Texas did any better than Florida? Texas had 2.67 million coronavirus cases and 44,353 deaths (for a population of 28,995,881), while Florida had 1.92 million cases and 31,134 deaths on population of 21,477,737. (Coronavirus numbers via Google, population numbers from here.) Take into account Florida’s higher elderly population and it seems that Texas has achieved no notable benefits for an additional five months of lockdown restrictions.

    It’s hardly any consolation that states run by Democratic governor’s are still stuck on stupid:

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    Posted in Regulation, Texas | 1 Comment »

    Legislator Proposes Renaming Austin Overpass “Steve Adler Public Restroom Highway”

    March 2nd, 2021

    Ever since Mayor Steve Adler and the Austin City Council repealed the public camping ban in 2019, Austin overpasses (and significant parts of the rest of the city) have been filled with drug-addicted transients trashing the place. Rep. Bryan Slaton has filed a bill to memorialize the fact:

    A new bill filed in the Texas House would designate the stretch of I-35 in downtown Austin from 4th Street to 11th Street “Steve Adler Public Restroom Highway” — after the city’s incumbent mayor.

    Rep. Bryan Slaton (R-Royse City), the author of the bill, told The Texan, “Liberal legacies deserve to be recognized. Since the legislature has made it clear it intends to rename some highways and bridges this session, I think it’s imperative that we start with a highway that truly recognizes the contributions of Mayor Adler.”

    “Texans who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, and with renaming the highway we will ensure that citizens of the Texas capital never forget the legacy of failed liberal policies.”

    Since its recission in July of 2019, Austin’s camping and laying policy has exacerbated its developing homeless problem. Tents and makeshift forts cropped up across the city, dotting its boulevards and crowding its underpasses.

    Months after the new policy’s establishment, Austin’s unsheltered homeless population grew by 45 percent while its sheltered population decreased by 11 percent.

    And shortly after its inception, the city faced a 14 percent violent crime increase involving homeless individuals whether as victims, suspects, or both.

    The policy came to a head last summer when a literal trash flood washed through a neighborhood, flooding back yards with garbage, needles, and feces.

    By and large, the city council and its mayor have maintained stubborn support for the policy that allows anyone to camp or lay on any public property — notably excepting Austin City Hall.

    Austin residents will get a chance to vote on reinstating the camping ban on May 1st.

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    Posted in Austin, Democrats, Texas | 4 Comments »

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