Perhaps I’m a bit obsessed with the recent “Big Freeze” Texas winter blackout. So many things about it are wrong at so many levels. A good, short, technical article on the subject that pulls no punches. Everyone needs to understand this bit:

“Those that did get power also received shockingly high electricity bills, rising into the five figures. That’s the result of, in part, the state’s Public Utility Commission setting wildly high prices for energy producers in an effort to get more juice on the grid. The commission offered producers $9,000 per megawatt hour in an effort to entice more production as the grid began to sputter. In comparison, the study notes that prices preceding the freeze were $30 per megawatt hour. The sky-high prices stayed in place for days even after enough power plants started to come back online to meet demand, resulting in $16 billion in excessive charges to customers or roughly $1,700 per household in Texas. (The whole event cost ratepayers $47 billion, a bill electricity customers will be paying off for decades.)

To summarize: while people were freezing to death in their houses a massive ripoff was underway, to the tune of $1700 per Texas household. By the same people who caused the outage. From Gizmodo:

Why the Texas Grid Failed, According to Science

From The Atlantic. Long, but with some really good bits.

HOW AMERICA FRACTURED INTO FOUR PARTS

From Lithub.

Celebrate George Orwell’s birthday by reading his (scathing) 1940 review of Mein Kampf

Knowing the phrase “40 Acres and a Mule”, I always assumed that part of the Civil War reparations to freed slaves. I just looked this up on wiki today and learned that this was promised but never delivered.

Forty acres and a mule

It is getting tiring looking at all the ways the current Texas government is, what is the word, screwing the more urban (i.e. democratic) parts of the state. Of the $1 billion in Federal funds for hurricane relief for Hurricane Harvey, Houston gets — zero. Really, the place hit hardest by the hurricane gets nothing. So where does all of this money to, and why? Hard to say right now. Officials saying is all on the up and up, that they are using official HUD guidelines. I’m very skeptical.

Houston seethes over being frozen out of federal flood funds

Gregory Travis has done some interesting graphs comparing COVID-19 deaths and infections by county, splitting for Republican leaning and Democratic leaning counties. Not a perfect split, since many counties are close to 50%-50%, but even so, there are definite patterns.

I am very concerned about the unvaccinated in the approaching fall and winter. It could be much worse than the first wave, which occurred when COVID-19 wasn’t yet widespread and there were serious attempts to disrupt the spread. What will the reaction be when large numbers of willfully unvaccinated, who tend to oppose things like lockdowns anyway, start getting sick in large numbers?

From Twitter:

Texas Senate passes sweeping voting restrictions bill

Texas set to allow unlicensed handgun carry despite outcry

In much of the world, running for office as an opposition candidate can be dangerous. We aren’t talking about totalitarian countries, but ones that claim to be democracies. For anyone encouraging violence or threats or violence as part of the political system in the US, look around. Is this where you want to go, because this is where we are heading? You can easily find much worse examples than Mexico. I also heard the tally is nearly 100 assassinated.

Mayoral candidate killed in Mexico; 34 dead so far

My simple understanding of inflation is that it is bad for people in cash and good for people in debt. So if most Americans are heavily in debt, including their home mortgage, why don’t Americans love inflation? I mentioned this on social media a bunch of years ago and was pilloried (but without any facts to the contrary). Noahpinion takes on the subject.

Why do people hate inflation?