Muda69

Stop Trying To Create a Zero-Risk Society https://reason.com/2021/03/11/stop-trying-to-create-a-zero-risk-society-covid-19/ Those who view freedom and personal responsibility as sacrosanct principles realize that "a zero-risk society" is anathema to those two principles. And it is our children and grandchildren who will bear the brunt of a 300 percent debt-to-gdp future. Is that what we as Americans want to saddle them with?

Supposedly.

8 and 10-Year-Old Escorted Home by Firefighters After Neighbors Report Unsupervised Kids https://reason.com/2021/03/10/firefighters-unsupervised-kids-escorted-home-free-range-daniel-hansen/ Here! Here! I hope all these bill pass their respective state legislatures. Under the current environment my parents would have spent numerous stints in prison for the amount of times I was allowed to be out and about "unsupervised".

Biden Prepares to Strip College Students of Due-Process Rights https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/biden-prepares-to-strip-college-students-of-due-process-rights/

History. Mixing the legislative and judicial branches like that is not a good idea, IMHO. And again, the federal government should have no business deciding how a state decides what geographical areas its representatives represent. Without geographical districts who exactly would a member of the house of representatives represent? A call comes in from a state citizen and then a wheel is spun to decide what representative's office takes the call?

Biden Justice Department Sides Against Free Speech Advocates in Big First Amendment Case https://reason.com/2021/03/08/biden-justice-department-sides-against-free-speech-advocates-in-big-first-amendment-case/#comments As one of the comments to this story posits: "The basic premise of the Biden administration is that students in government schools have no freedom to speak in any way that reflects poorly on government schools, which is really just a necessary precursor for it to argue in the future that nobody has the right to criticize the government at all. Authoritarian incrementalism. Nobody that has been paying attention should be surprised by any of these positions." I'm not surprised at all.

So the IU student section chants that during a game vs. Eastern Michigan? And what exactly is the connection of "Hoosier Daddy" to Purdue University? I just don't find "Hoosier Daddy" the kind of pejorative that "IU Sucks" is.

H.R. 1 Is a Partisan Disgrace https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/h-r-1-is-a-partisan-disgrace/

Yep, I'll be shocked if Mr. Biden lasts as president through the end of 2021. The man's mental faculties are simply not up to the task.

Wind Power Is a Disaster in Texas, No Matter What Paul Krugman Says https://mises.org/wire/wind-power-disaster-texas-no-matter-what-paul-krugman-says In contrast to this dirty rotten lie from the right-wingers, Krugman instead explains: A bit later in the article Krugman admits that wind was involved as well, but minimizes its role in this way: Incidentally, there are literally no numbers in Krugman’s article (except for numerals referring to dates), which is a signal that he’s pulling a fast one on his readers. From his qualitative (not quantitative) description, most people would have assumed that when the unusually cold weather hit Texas last month, electricity generation from various sources was down across the board, but that it mostly fell from natural gas, while the drop in wind was insignificant. As I’ll show in the next section, this is utterly false. What Really Happened During Texas’s Power Crisis Had I not seen the analysis from my former colleagues at the Institute for Energy Research (see their articles here and here), I might have believed the spin that the Texas crisis was really a failure of fossil fuels rather than renewables. Yet as we’ll see, the actual numbers tell a much different story from what most Americans probably “learned” from the media discussion. The simplest way for me to communicate the relevant information is through three infographics, generated from the Energy Information Administration’s handy tool that shows the source mix for daily energy generation by state. Before showing the numbers, I need to make an important clarification: the demand for electricity soared to unprecedented levels during the freeze. In particular, on February 14, peak demand on the electric grid surpassed sixty-nine gigawatts, breaking the previous winter record of (almost) sixty-six gigawatts set in 2018. It was in the early hours of the following morning (February 15) that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) implemented rolling blackouts to prevent the entire grid from collapsing. So to be clear, the issue wasn’t that supply in an absolute sense fell, but rather that demand soared. (Texas typically uses more electricity in the summer to keep things cool, rather than in the winter to keep things warm.) With that context in place, here are the stats for electricity output from various sources on February 15, 2021: 2021.03_texas_feb_15_2021.png Already we see something interesting. Of the total amount of electricity delivered on this first day of blackouts, 65 percent came from natural gas, while only 6 percent came from wind and 2 percent from solar. But in fairness, maybe what guys like Krugman meant is that this is much lower than what we normally could expect from natural gas. (Remember Krugman had said that natural gas “normally supplies most of the state’s winter electricity.”) To test this possibility, we can look at the situation one year prior, on February 15, 2020: 2021.03_texas_feb_15_2020.png Now, this is interesting. A year earlier, during a normal mid-February day, natural gas “only” supplied 43 percent of the total electricity, whereas wind accounted for 28 percent and solar was the same at 2 percent. Remember how Krugman said wind was only a “small fraction” of Texas generation? Overall for the year 2020, wind produced 22 percent of Texas’s electricity, a higher share than coal. Yet besides the proportions, also look at the absolute quantity of electricity generated: on Feb. 15, 2020, natural gas produced 398,130 megawatt hours (compared to 759,708 MWh during the recent freeze), while wind produced 264,024 MWh (compared to 73,395 MWh during the freeze). To sum up, compared with the same date a year earlier, during the first day of the blackouts in Texas, electricity from natural gas was 91 percent higher, while electricity from wind was 72 percent lower. To reiterate the clarification I gave earlier, part of the confusion here is that electricity demand in February isn’t normally as high as it was because of the freeze. So to test whether natural gas is the culprit, we can compare the generation from various sources during the freeze to the situation back during the summer. For example, let’s look at how things stood on August 15, 2020: 2021.03_texas_aug_15_2020.png As our date occurred in the dog days of summer, total electric demand was higher in mid-August 2020 than on February 15, 2021. Furthermore, output from every source was lower during the freeze when compared with their performance the prior August 15. However, it seems odd to single out natural gas as the culprit, when it experienced the lowest percentage drop, and (on all dates) was the single biggest source. The following table summarizes electrical output from various sources on the three dates we have analyzed, and shows the change going from the earlier dates to the first day of the recent blackouts: 2021.03_texas_table.png As the table indicates, on all three dates natural gas was always the leader in electrical generation. During the freeze, it produced 91 percent more than it had the prior year during a more typical winter day. And although natural gas produced less electricity during the freeze than it had during the peak summer demand, it was only a 7 percent drop. In contrast, wind power during the freeze was down a whopping 72 percent compared to the previous year, and compared to the summer it was down 47 percent. Among all sources, the percentage difference between either the previous year or the previous summer was highest for natural gas. That is, the surge in natural gas output year over year was the biggest by far (with coal coming in second with a 54 percent surge), and compared with the summer load its drop was the smallest at 7 percent. Wind, in contrast, was the worst performer in both cases, if we measure in terms of the difference. That is, wind’s 72 percent drop in the year-over-year column was the biggest one, and its 47 percent drop in the column for summer to winter was also the biggest. In light of these statistics, it’s a bit odd for commentators to blame the Texas blackouts on natural gas while excusing wind. What They Mean: Wind Is the Ted Cruz of Electricity Now, in fairness, what the commentators blaming natural gas have in mind is that ERCOT’s emergency planning assumed that natural gas (and the other “thermal” electricity sources, namely coal and nuclear) could be called upon to fill the gap should there be record demand during a winter storm. If we measure in terms of the total capacity that was temporarily knocked out because of the freeze, then the culprits were thermal sources, rather than wind and solar. As Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor at Princeton tweeted out, “Main story continues to be the failure of … natural gas, coal, and nuclear plants … which ERCOT counts on to be there when needed.” He further specified, “Of about 70,000 MW of thermal plants in ERCOT, ~25–30,000 MW have been out since Sunday night. Huge problem.” And so we see what people mean when they say the Texas blackouts are the fault of natural gas, rather than wind: since no serious official ever expected wind to be any help during a crisis, it can hardly be blamed for not showing up when disaster struck. In effect, Krugman is arguing that wind power is the Ted Cruz of electricity. Conclusion When assessing blame for a disaster, it’s hard to know what the relevant counterfactual should be. Yes, had the (relatively) unregulated Texas power providers done a better job in winterizing their natural gas lines, things would have been better last February. But by the same token, had the federal government never implemented the wind production tax credit (PTC)—which subsidizes wind so heavily that it sometimes sells for a negative price in the Texas wholesale market—then there would have been more fossil fuel-generated capacity in Texas, which the numbers clearly show did better at providing electricity during the deep freeze. Normally the boosters of renewable energy point with pride to Texas, which has the most wind capacity of any state by far in absolute terms, and even has almost 25 percent of its official generating capacity consisting of wind. Yet when wind collapsed during the deep freeze, suddenly even its biggest fans admit that nobody ever thought it could do the same job as natural gas.

lol, first I have ever heard of a Bluffton University. First I thought "there is a university in Bluffton, Indiana?", only to find out it is in Ohio..................

I've always wondered about the inferiority complex Purdue fans seem to have regarding their public university counterparts from Bloomington. Like why does the crowd at Ross-Ade erupt with "IU Sucks" even they are not actually playing the Hoosiers? Could it be the five banners hanging in Assembly Hall versus the zero hanging in Mackey Arena? Why hasn't Purdue basketball ever been able to "get over the hump" and bring a men's national championship banner back to West Lafayette?

Sorry, I don't really take anything from Vox seriously. The leftist, progressive agenda from that organization is quite clear. DOOM! GLOOM! Animals running in the streets!

Sorry, these "independent commissions", whose members will most likely be appointed by politicians in Washington, will be anything but "independent". They will be as politically motivated as anything done at the state level.

Because it is.

https://www.indystar.com/story/sports/college/indiana/2021/03/08/indiana-ad-scott-dolson-rewards-tom-allen-new-contract-after-football-success/4626775001/ (Note: story is behind a paywall) I supposed with this increased compensation comes highly increased expectations. Can Mr. Allen deliver? And does this officially make IU a "football school"?

No, thank you.

https://www.wlfi.com/content/news/Senate-Bill-97-honors-the-amount-of-popcorn-produced-in-Indiana-573939401.html Nice to now the Indiana state legislature is debating and passing such weighty matters. Your tax dollars at work, fellow Hoosiers.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/h-r-1-is-a-partisan-assault-on-american-democracy/ Agreed. I heartily urge all Americans to contact their U.S. Senators and urge them to vote against the major usurpation of state power and authority.

Why Dr. Seuss Is Worth Defending https://reason.com/2021/03/08/dr-seuss-defend-cancel-culture-toronto-books-censorship/ They actually had it right the first time. But nonracism—the idea that skin color should be overlooked—has lost popularity among progressive activists, and anti-racism—the idea that skin color matters a great deal—is in vogue. The former is an egalitarian message at the heart of many Dr. Seuss books; the latter is a smokescreen for all sorts of policies that have very little to do with combating racism: like abolishing standardized tests or spending more time renaming schools than reopening them. There is certainly no obligation to read or teach Dr. Seuss, nor should Seuss defenders feel some moral or practical imperative to gloss over his imperfections. The man did draw racist caricatures, and some of his work can be read as a defense of Japanese internment. He was a flawed genius—but a genius nonetheless, and a towering figure in the world of children's literature. There is a disturbing trend among modern liberalism to seek to cast out all such flawed figures, which has the rest of us reasonably worried that no art or artist more than a few years old can possibly stand the test of time. (For another example of this, New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow recently accused Pepe Le Pew, the lovesick skunk from Looney Tunes, of perpetuating rape culture.) There's not really a law or policy that could fix this problem—though Sonny Bunch's proposal to release now unpublishable works into the public domain is an interesting one—and so much of the pro-Seuss grousing in nonliberal circles can feel as performative as the anti-Seuss extremism. Yet there's good reason in this case to regard the slippery slope with suspicion. The report that led to the cancellation of the six books also stipulates that The Cat in the Hat embodies a "racist tradition" and that Horton Hears a Who! "reinforces themes of white supremacy." I would not be surprised to find the entire Seuss canon under attack a few years from now. To quote the last lines of The Butter Battle Book, "Who's gonna drop it? Will you or will he?" (To which the narrator's grandpa replies: "Be patient. We'll see. We will see.") Waiting for the book burnings to begin...............................

But take this into account: https://globalsportmatters.com/health/2019/06/14/for-better-health-safety-of-athletes-which-playing-surface-is-best/

Yeah, and who is stuck repaying that "free" money? Primarily our children and grandchildren.

Wanted: IU donor to write check for Brad Stevens https://www.indystar.com/story/sports/columnists/gregg-doyel/2021/03/06/indiana-gap-grows-between-purdue-iu-basketball-archie-miller-falls-again/6843665002/ (Note: story is behind a paywall) Why did Mr. Miller and his coaching staff stop coaching? Or is it the players who have basically stopped listening?

A lot of kids could be covid-19 vaccinated for what it cost to build these extravagant high school turf fields. It's just a game played by children.

Kentucky Bill Would Make Insulting a Cop a Crime https://reason.com/2021/03/05/kentucky-bill-would-make-insulting-a-cop-a-crime/