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Blogroll Additions

Sunday, March 14th, 2021

The Sunday after they’ve sucked an hour out of our lives seems like a good time to do a Blogroll update.

  • 357 Magnum: Solid gun and politics blog that’s been sending some traffic my way.
  • Austin Network: Good Austin news source, including a lot about the Austin City Council-created “Let’s make Austin bumsville” homeless crisis.
  • New Discourses: James Lindsey’s ongoing, in-depth dissection of social justice warrior thinking and tactics.
  • Not The Bee: I already had The Babylon Bee in my blogroll, but their non-satirical sister site is also proving an essential source as well.
  • The Texan: Daily Texas news source. Not free, but worth the modest monthly fee if you’re interested in Texas news and want to avoid subsidized the MSM.

    • I also pruned a few dead links or blogs that hadn’t been updated in three years…

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    Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

    Texas Energy Outage Postmortem

    Wednesday, 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 | 14 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for March 5, 2021

    Friday, 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 »

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

    Tuesday, 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 »

    Prepper Paul Martin’s After Action Report on the Texas Winter Storm

    Tuesday, February 23rd, 2021

    Paul Martin, a much more serious prepper than I, has an after action report on what went right and wrong in his own disaster preparations. Following winterization checklists and having good gear on hand were among the successes. On the other side of the ledger:

  • I need a better cold weather management plan for the tankless water heaters. This was our weakest point in our house. The drain lines would freeze up, requiring me to go out at all hours with a heat gun to thaw them out to get them back on line and to prevent damage. I was up between 3AM and 4 AM on the coldest nights, outside in the elements (temps between 10 to 15 degrees), working on them. Not fun.
  • I should have started working the checklist items sooner than I did. My original strategy was to do a few items on the list every night until the big event on Sunday night/Monday morning, when the snow fell and the temps really dropped. The problem came when the first ice storm on Thursday night/Friday morning took out a bunch of limbs around the house, requiring me to spend several hours cleaning that up instead of preparing for the bigger storm that was coming. Hindsight being 20/20, I should have burned a day of PTO and just done everything in the milder temps and when there was still food and ample supplies at the stores.
  • I should have cleaned out my gutters before the storm started. That’s going on the checklist. Leaves from the winds filled the gutters in the first storm, which then got backed up with rain, which in turn froze in place. Not good. Cleaner gutters drain quicker and collect less ice.

    • Plus some sobering thoughts:

    You’ve now seen our grid under stress. Cold snaps in 2011, 2018 and the worst cold on record in 2021, along with the boil water order of 2018, provide real world examples of what the local grid will do when it’s stressed. You are now on notice of the grid’s limitations. What if the next emergency isn’t in the cold, but in the 105 degree heat of a Texas summer? And what if the power is off for a week or more? What if the failure is caused by a cyber attack which not only shuts off the power but causes physical damage to the grid? By the way, don’t think this can’t happen:

    Texas’ power grid was “seconds and minutes” away from a catastrophic failure that could have left Texans in the dark for months, officials with the entity that operates the grid said Thursday.

    ******

    While generators rapidly dropped off the grid as the weather worsened, operators monitored the difference between the supply of power on the grid and the demand for that power. As supply dwindled and demand grew, the margin narrowed to more and more dangerous levels, forcing grid operators to enact emergency protocols to either increase supply or decrease demand.

    The worst case scenario: Demand for power outstrips the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down.

    If the grid had gone totally offline, the physical damage to power infrastructure from overwhelming the grid could have taken months to repair, said Bernadette Johnson, senior vice president of power and renewables at Enverus, an oil and gas software and information company headquartered in Austin.

    Things could have been much worse. They could be much worse in a future outage. Is your family ready for that? If your family isn’t ready, you will then be relying upon not only the grid operators but also your local elected officials to provide you with answers and solutions. Some of you may not be very keen on doing so after all of this.

    And that’s where much of our community’s struggle lies. As a community, we need to make sure that while we’re holding our government accountable that we’re also holding ourselves accountable. I get it: not everyone can afford to have a whole house generator. But a lot of people can afford less expensive options that would have made their lives a lot more comfortable and safer.

    Hence my cheap prepper supply list.

    I plead with you: make preparedness a priority for your family. If it means you have to take a smaller vacation or put off buying a nicer car for a year or so, do it. Many people can implement the step by step preparedness plan I have created in the Ready Citizen Manual which is absolutely free, which will quickly get you to a base line level of readiness enabling you to handle what we just went through.

    I don’t see things getting easier in the days ahead. Our economy is showing worrisome signs, our communities are still seething from the last election with no sign of abatement, our grids are vulnerable, and we’re still dealing with a pandemic for the foreseeable future. We now see how uncomfortable things can get. Take steps now to protect yourself and family from enduring that again.

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    Posted in Austin, Texas | 1 Comment »

    LinkSwarm for February 19, 2021

    Friday, February 19th, 2021

    It. Has. Been. A. Week!

    Regular readers know that Austin has been climbing out of a once in a century winter storm that froze our roads and wrecked our power grid. Right now it’s still 19°F, but it’s supposed to warm up to a balmy 39°F this afternoon…

  • Could be worse: ERCOT says that their quick thinking to impose rotating blackouts prevented the physical destruction of the Texas Interconnect Grid. That may even be true, but it’s sort of like a teenager saying “Thanks to my quick thinking, I only managed to burn down the garage and not the entire house!”
  • A list of every lie Joe Biden has told as President.
  • The Democrats’ minimum wage hike will help kill off the restaurant industry:

    Passage of this bill this year would lead to job losses and higher use of labor-reducing equipment and technology,” said Sean Kennedy, executive vice president for public affairs for the National Restaurant Association. “Nearly all restaurant operators say they will increase menu prices. But what is clear is that raising prices for consumers will not be enough for restaurants to absorb higher labor costs.”

  • The entire impeachment charade was a distraction from the Biden Administration’s hard left turn, including rejoining the Paris Climate agreement and stopping construction on the border wall. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • China is eating Biden’s lunch:

    But for the fact that he’s president — given his track record of having been wrong on every defense and foreign policy issue for almost five decades — it would be easy to ignore his assessment of China. This is a man who said in 2019, “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man.” He added, “I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.” Despite the difficulty of being wrong on both occasions Biden managed it.

    Focus for a moment on what he said about the conversation with Xi. It is natural that China would be spending billions on transportation given the size of the country and the billions who inhabit it. Whether it is true that China is spending billions on climate change is another matter. It has, for decades, been spending billions on coal-fired electricity generation plants and has only recently made noises about reducing pollution.

    But “climate change” is probably the last priority for China while it is spending far greater sums on its military and cyberwar capabilities. Xi was clearly trying to gull Biden into some sort of race to reduce greenhouse gas emissions so that we could strangle our economy while China doesn’t do the same to its own. China may well be trying to reduce pollution — Beijing is infamous for its barely breathable brown air — but how much it is really doing remains to be seen.

    Biden apparently wants to be known as the “climate change president.” If Xi can increase Biden’s desire to make climate change his top priority for legislation and regulation (which seems altogether likely in any event) China will be greatly advantaged by Biden’s concomitant reductions in spending on the U.S. military and intelligence communities.

    To say that Biden is soft on China only proves the speaker’s command of the obvious.

  • All the lies of Robinhood’s Vlad Tenev:

    What Tenev did not say, or explain, is why his company – which is merely a client-facing front of Citadel, which buys the bulk of Robinhood’s orderflow to use it perfectly legally in any way it sees fit – was so massively undercapitalized that the DTCC required several billion more in collateral to protect Robinhood’s own investors against the company’s predatory ways of seeking to capitalize on the gamification of investing making it nothing more (or less) than a trivial pursuit to millions of GenZ and millennial investors, a point which Michael Burry made so vividly.

    The #mainstreetrevolution is a myth. Zero commissions and gamified apps were designed to feed flows to the two most influential WS trading houses. A few HFs got hurt, but if retail is moving toward more trading and away from fundamentals, WS owns that game. #Stonks by design. https://t.co/Y4raF0jiM3
    — Cassandra (@michaeljburry) February 9, 2021

    Incidentally we know why Tenev did not mention it: it’s because Robinhood’s back office is a shambles of a shoestring operation, one which never anticipated either such a surge in trading not a multi-billion collateral requirement; had Robinhood been a true brokerage instead of pretending to be one, and run merely to open as many retail accounts as it could in the shortest amount of time, thus generating the most profit in the quickest amount of time to allow its sponsors a quick and profitable exit, it would actually have been on top of this.

  • “Why Russia Is Terrified of SpaceX — and Starlink”:

    SpaceX wants to bring fast satellite broadband internet to the world — and in particular, to internet users in far-flung, rural locations, where download speeds are low and prices are high.

    One of the first places in America to get SpaceX Starlink service was Alaska, the state with the lowest population density in the country — just one person per square mile. The company next extended service into Canada (population density: three people per square mile), followed last month by service in the UK — a big jump in concentration, with 650 people per square mile. (Even in the UK, there are plenty of isolated locations where internet service is expensive, slow — or both).

    SpaceX’s globe-spanning satellite constellation should be capable of providing 100 megabit-per-second internet service to anywhere by the end of this year. You can expect that a lot of countries, no matter how urbanized they are (or not), will be lining up to sign up for Starlink service. And the more countries Starlink signs up as customers, the better the prospects for the SpaceX subsidiary’s promised IPO.

    One country that most definitely does not want Starlink, however, is Russia.

    Snip.

    As Ars points out, “Russia is planning its own satellite Internet constellation, known as ‘Sphere.'” And in contrast to SpaceX’s Starlink, which is a privately funded and privately built communications system, the 600-satellite Sphere constellation will be a project built and run by the Russian state under the aegis of its Roscosmos space agency. And that could be a problem.

    Sphere, you see, is rumored to cost $20 billion to build, may not begin launching until 2024, and won’t be completed before 2030.

    Those numbers alone tell you Sphere will never be built, Starlink or no Starlink. Russia is a profoundly broke and profoundly broken country. Sphere is just the sort of prestige project Putin loves to announce to much fanfare, national greatness vaporware that either never gets built or else creeps out into the real world years (or even decades) late and in much-reduced form, like only ordering 100 T-14 Armata tanks.

  • Iranian fuel tanker convoy to Afghanistan goes boom.
  • After warning against “far right extremists” in the army, the FBI arrests…an ex-military left-wing radical.
  • Teacher’s unions have been letterbombing Virginia’s Democratic assembly delegates to keep schools closed.
  • Why does India have a so much lower rate of death from the Wuhan coronavirus?

  • Democrats are so focused on unity they introduced a bill to punish Donald Trump after he’s dead. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • The media want you to know that it’s Trump’s fault they couldn’t investigate such trivial scandals as Lincoln Project pedophiles, because how would they have time when Orange Man Bad?
  • Speaking of the Lincoln Project, founder Rick Wilson managed to pay off his mortgage early just as the John Weaver pedophilia scandal was breaking. How fortuitous!
  • Savage:

  • Back in The Before Time, The Long Long Ago, newspapers actually defended free speech.

    Back in 1977, the New York Times maintained that as long as Nazis did not engage in any illegality, they were “entitled” to the protection of the law, and then put the onus of maintaining peace on the Skokie residents:

    The argument that they will provoke violence simply by appearing on the streets of Skokie only emphasizes the obligation of the police to keep the peace—and gives an opportunity the people of Skokie to demonstrate their respect for the law.

    These days, the Times board will chase you out of the building for allowing anyone to voice an opinion that chafes against the brittle sensitivities of its writers. The paper employs full-time speech monitors to vet wrongthink.

  • The cancel mob comes for Baen Books. Book editors and writers kindly tell them to get stuffed.
  • Special for Black History Month:

  • Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg told employees they need to “inflict pain” on Apple because Apple won’t let Facebook steal every single bit of personal data from Apple devices.
  • “Bill Gates Bankrolling Educational Organization That Says Math is Racist.” “A conglomerate of 25 educational organizations called A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction asserts that asking students to find the correct answer is an ‘inherently racist practice.’ The organization’s website lists the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as its only donor.” How many fingers, Winston?
  • Who owns Jack Ryan?
  • “Sustainable”

  • If you have a warrant out for your arrest, maybe you shouldn’t apply for a gun carry permit. Especially not if you try to use the name “Barack Obama.”
  • “Secret Service Puts Finishing Touches On Biden’s Presidential Scooter, ‘Chair Force One.'”
  • “Democrats Vow To Follow The Science Of Whichever Union Donates The Most Money.”
  • “Journalists Cheer As Jen Psaki Announces The Gulags Will Be Run By A Woman Of Color.”
  • “Man Asks That You Respect His Preferred Adjectives.” “‘Here are the adjectives I identify with,’ Becker put on social media. ‘Cool, witty, handsome, innovative, fun.’ Please use one of these adjectives when describing me. It distresses me when people use adjectives I don’t identify as,’ Becker later explained. ‘Like “creepy,” “weird,” or “off-putting.” That’s basically denying my existence and trying to genocide me.'”
  • Dog on drums:

    (Hat tip: the Ace of Spades HQ pet thread.)

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    Posted in Austin, Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, unions | 3 Comments »

    Austin Winter Storm Update for February 18, 2021: What’s Open?

    Thursday, February 18th, 2021

    Update: I ventured out to the HEB at McNeil & 183 and the major roads are passable. HEB closes at 5, and the meat section was picked almost clean, but there was a lot of edible food available in various departments if you’re flexible.

    Things are slowly warming up, and the power situation seems to be improving:

    The Governor discussed the current power situation in Texas and what the state is doing to get more Texans back online. There still remains about 10,000 megawatts (MW) that are off the power grid in Texas. About 6,000 MW have been added to the Texas grid over the past day, which is equivalent to power for about 1.2 million households. In addition to the 6,000 MW restored to the grid, additional power generation from coal and other sources will continue to come online throughout tomorrow. Small natural gas generators should sporadically add megawatts over the next 24 hours to help bring electricity to thousands of Texans. There are still challenges with all sources of generation, resulting from mechanical difficulties, gas supply issues, and the effects of extreme winter weather conditions.

    Here’s the power outage map. Things seem to change very slowly on it…

    Those on City of Austin water are also on a boil notice, and some parts of the city evidently have no water.

    I thought I would focus on what’s open and what’s not:

  • First up HEB. There are reports of HEB shelves being picked clean, and the stores that are open are only open 12-5 PM. HEB will update the list of stores closed for the day at 10 AM.

    Update: Here’s the Austin-area HEB store closed list for today:

    #236 A7 – Wells Branch & 1825
    #045 A8 – Congress & Oltorf
    #225 A10 – Hwy 71 & 290
    #265 A14 – FM 1431 & 183
    #659 A16 – Hwy 183 & Lakeline
    #388 A20 – Parmer & McNeil
    #451 A24 – 620 & 2222
    #476 A25 – Parmer & I35
    #029 A29 – Bee Cave & 360
    #091 A12 – Riverside & S. Pleasant
    #183 A15 – Lamar & Rundberg
    Kyle
    Luling
    Leander
    Kingsland
    Elgin

    Very similar to yesterday’s list. Also, the Westgate Central Market is closed, but the North Lamar location is open from 10 AM to 6 PM.

  • Next up: Walmart. The situation here seems to have improved a bit. The Sam’s at 183 and Lakeline Mall Drive is open, as is the Walmart at Northcross, and the Sam’s at 290 West and Mopac, plus the Walmarts in Manor, Elgin and Buda. All other locations appear to be closed.(The Round Rock locations of both Walmart and Sam’s showed open yesterday, but closed today.)

    Update: The 183/Lakeline Mall and 290 West/Mopac Sam’s appears to be closed, but the ones at 183 at 360 and on South I-35 now appear to be open. The Palm Valley Walmart in Round Rock also appears to be open.

  • Supposedly Randall’s and Fiesta are open.
  • I heard reports that Dollar General is open, but can’t verify it.
  • A couple of lists of open Austin restaurants.
  • Update: A crowdsource list of what’s open or closed and what they have.
  • Update: The Big Lots at McNeil at 183 was open and had a pretty good selection of snacks, plus some staples and canned goods.

    • Friday it’s supposed to get into the 40s.

    Update: Good news!

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    Posted in Austin, Texas | 2 Comments »

    TPPF’s Chuck DeVore on Reasons Behind The Texas Blackouts

    Tuesday, February 16th, 2021

    Some brief background on why so many Texas households suddenly seem to be without power:

    Expect more on this subject in the near future.

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    Posted in Austin, Regulation, Texas | 9 Comments »

    It’s a Freaking Winter Wonderland in Austin This Morning

    Monday, February 15th, 2021

    7°F and a good four inches of snow on the ground (which probably feels like a foot to us).

    There’s an official disaster declaration and the city has pretty much shut down:

    The University of Texas at Austin is closed through 8 a.m. Wednesday.

    Austin Energy is performing rolling blackouts to conserve power. The electricity provider, which has more than 500,000 customers, instituted the measure as a “last resort to preserve the reliability of the electric system as a whole,” the city said in a statement. The outages typically last 10 to 40 minutes but were lasting longer than expected as of early morning Dec. 15, Austin Energy tweeted. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas has asked utilities around the state to use rotating outages to lessen the strain on the state’s power grid.

    Many flights are canceled. Austin-Bergstrom International Airport officials urged travelers to confirm their flight status if flying in the next 48 hours. The airport also announced that Security Checkpoint 1 is closed and all passengers will be screened through Security Checkpoint 2. According to FlightAware, 138 flights into or out of ABIA had been canceled as of 8 a.m. Feb. 15. In addition, many roads around the airport have been closed because of ice.

    The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the Texas Interconnect Grid, reports that the grid is near capacity and rolling blackouts may last some time. My power hasn’t gone out here since it was restored Friday morning.

    You don’t even need to tell Austin drivers to stay out of this stuff. If you look at the traffic cams, the roads are empty.

    Yesterday HEB reported that it was running out of items and closing early, and even if it’s open today, it’s on a reduced schedule. The local HEB phone number just rings, so I wouldn’t count on any of them being open.

    I imagine that almost all restaurants are closed (here’s an outdated list). No answer at the Jim’s and Denny’s locations I called. I even tried calling all three local Waffle Houses to see if any were open, and all three calls went to voicemail.

    Truly the end times are upon us.

    I’ll give you more first hand info when I walk the dogs later.

    Stay warm…

    Update: There are reportedly almost 2 million people without power across Texas this morning.

    Update 2: A whole lot of power outages all across Austin. This isn’t an outage map, it’s a bad Picasso painting:

    Update 3: Firefighters close East Parmer at Dessau due to too many stuck vehicles. (Hat tip: johnnyk20001.)

    Update 4: No Capital metro today.

    Update 5: It’s not just Austin. Houston-area households are suffering from a huge number of power outages.

    Update 6: A commenter asked about Dallas, so here’s Oncor’s outage map. But it’s even less useful than the Houston or Austin maps…

    Update 7: 4.4 million without power?

    Update 8: Pflugerville is under a boil water notice:

    Update 9: Lists of which Austin restaurants are open or closed.

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    Posted in Austin, Texas | 5 Comments »

    Zer0

    Saturday, February 13th, 2021

    The estimated Austin low temperature for Monday, February 15, is now 0°F:

    One good thing about Thursday’s ice storm is that maybe it snapped all the power lines its going to snap, and hopefully everyone will have power for the great temperature plunge. It will definitely be the coldest day I’ve experienced, even colder than two winter weeks I spent in Stavanger, Norway for a job.

    Really, if you live in central Texas stay the hell off the roads Monday if at all possible. Call in sick or use a vacation day. Drip your interior faucets to keep the pipes in your attic from freezing.

    Despite all this, I’ll still have to take the dogs out for a couple of walks, brief though they’ll be. I plan on having 4-5 layers of clothing on my torso. I’m thinking of crafting a makeshift scarf from an old shirt (since I own no scarves). I think the previous record for walking my dog was 17°F. I found it unpleasant, but my dog loved it.

    I know there’s very little that’s quite as exciting as blogging the weather, but it’s really occupying my attention.

    Now some thematic Smashing Pumpkins:

    (Now I’ve wasted entirely too much time trying to figure out who the bassist in that video is. She looks entirely too healthy to be D’arcy Wretzky…)

    Maybe they’ll revise the forecast up to 1°F tomorrow and I can share some U2…

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    Posted in Austin, Texas, video | 4 Comments »

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