Interesting Items 03/15

Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information.  Enjoy –

In this issue:

1.  Insanity
2.  Immanentize
3.  Texas
4.  Musk
5.  Blue Anon
6.  Salmon
7.  Bezos

1.  Insanity.  Question of the week:  What happens when an appreciable portion of the population of any nation goes insane?  It has been said that people go insane en masse and sober up one by one.  When that insanity expresses itself, generally really awful things happen.  The Japanese Empire 1930 – 1945 was described as mass insanity of an entire culture.  It took a world war and a pair of nuclear weapons to wake them up.  The Soviets used to describe their dissidents as insane, and deal with their opposition via psychiatric techniques (Soviet psychiatric techniques).  Over the weekend, Scott Adams described actual research into political partisanship that describes it as causing brain damage by rewiring the wetware.  A few writers have started describing the current split between the left and the right as mass insanity by the political left, seeded and enforced by the media and Big Tech.  Of course, the political left just doesn’t think those of us on the right are merely  but fundamentally evil, leading to their conclusion that the right must be destroyed.  Bottom line of all this is that we’re not going to be able to vote our way out of the current mess.  People are learning machines, and both sides have learned various things over the years.  Some of those conclusions have been counterproductive.  For example, what did the democrats learn after passage of O’BamaCare?  Conventional wisdom would be that passing something that large and far-reaching by a party-line vote would bring destruction to the party who passed it.  And the political reaction was severe, flipping democrat majorities in both houses of congress in the next couple elections.  But O’BamaCare hung around for a while.  So, the democrats learned that they could pass whatever they wanted to pass on a completely party-line basis.  While they would lose seats temporarily, they would get what they wanted.  They also learned that they didn’t have to do ANYTHING with Republicans.  The days of bipartisanship are over, and will be gone for a long, long time, as this sort of political action by the left will trigger a reaction by the right.  As the political world is a non-linear system, the reaction will not necessarily be in an opposite direction, proportionate in size, or even immediate.  A non-linear system will have a reaction in completely unexpected directions, completely unexpected magnitude(s), with completely unexpected timing.  The reaction to the 2020 election, Harris – Xiden EO’s, and democrat legislation out of their 10-seat House majority and 50-50 senate is building and inbound.  While I think it will come from the states, I can’t prove that as yet.

2.  Immanentize.  With the preceding as an introduction, we are on to one of the oddest phrases I have ever come across:  Immanentize the Eschaton!  I ran across it years ago and never understood it.  Unfortunately, today, with an insane political left whose religion is government, this becomes important.  First question:  What does it mean?

Wiki defines the phrase as:

In political theory and theology, to immanentize the eschaton means trying to bring about the eschaton (the final, heaven-like stage of history) in the immanent world. In all of these contexts, it means “trying to make that which belongs to the afterlife happen here and now (on Earth).

Basically, it is an attempt to construct Heaven on Earth, a profoundly, fundamentally religious goal.  This is what the left is up to.  This is why those of us who do not share their religious beliefs are evil, worse than heretics.  This is why there is no reasoning with them, no arguing, no other approach other than destroying their religious beliefs not unlike what we did to the Japanese in WWII.  Hopefully it won’t be nearly that bloody.  But sadly, it might.  The Smallest Minority a couple weeks ago published a piece describing the problem and where we are today dealing with it.  It is well worth your time to read.  I found the article via Bayou Renaissance Man, also a recommended new blog to follow. 

3.  Texas.  I continue to follow the analysis of what happened in Texas.  There were two good pieces last week.  The first in WUWT A Closer Look at What Happened in Texas During the Deep Freeze.  The second was in Zero Hedge.  Over the last decade, Texas has retired over 5,000 MW of electrical generation by coal.  It replaced that production with more than that from new windmills.  In Texas, wind produces the marginal, or last megawatt for the Texas energy grid, around 17% of the total used.  Nuclear produces the first megawatt, around 10% of the total.  Natural gas produces most of the rest.  When the cold snap hit, energy demand spiked while the windmills stopped turning.  Worse, Texas never freeze protected their natural gas wells and distribution network from the cold.  Why?  Because we have been preparing for the wrong climate disaster – extreme heat.  The actual impending climate problem, and the one last month in Texas was extreme cold.  Solution is rather easy, but you have to plan and prepare your infrastructure for it.  Natural gas wells and lines need to be freeze-protected like they are in the Dakotas, Alaska and elsewhere, though perhaps not to that extent.  The other lesson learned was the availability of fuel for electrical generation.  Coal and nuclear both store weeks to months of fuel on site, so generation is never fuel-limited.  Natural gas is supplied in real time.  When that supply is disrupted for whatever reason, there is no available fuel to continue to run the generation.  I do not know of any natural gas electrical generation plant that stores weeks to months of natural gas on site.  While I haven’t looked all that hard, the natural gas fired generation here in Alaska is all supplied in real time via pipeline.  Wind and solar are worse, as they dump whatever they are generating directly onto the grid.  Three lessons out of Texas would be to first plan for all climate disasters, rather than the current politically popular one.  Second, onsite fuel MUST be available to meet expected demand for an agreed-upon period of time.  Finally, your generation mix must be sufficiently robust to account for disruption of an entire sector of generation (wind, natural gas, solar, nuclear, coal, hydro). 

4.  Musk.  Elon Musk is planning big, building a new city in south Texas that he will call Starbase, Texas.  Musk’s test site near Boca Chica, TX is located in Cameron County, TX.  At this time, it is unclear whom will incorporate whom – Boca Chica or Starbase.  Either way, incorporation will be according to state and county regulations.  Musk has a test facility near McGregor and is planning on building a manufacturing facility near Austin.  I think they will find south Texas a friendlier and much less expensive location to build their new facility, as you can barge in large things.  Musk is building an infrastructure to go to Mars to stay.

5.  Blue Anon.  Not the Bee has become a fun site for conservatives.  It ran a piece last week on counters to Qanon and the LGBTQWTF world that have the Usual Suspects up in arms.  The counters are working well enough that they are being censored by Big Tech.  The first counter is the notion of Blue Anon, described in much the same way as Qanon has been described by the political left, media and Big Tech. 

It basically uses all the leftist conspiracy theories and hoaxes against them, infuriating them.  Goolag and the Urban Dictionary have censored the term from search results.  The other fun story out there has been a response to a recent push by the LGTBQWTF crowd demanding that straight men date trans women.  Those of us who don’t are instantly referred to as transphobes.  Solution?  Super straight, defined as a sexual preference (orientation) that will only date people of the opposite sex.  They even came up with their own little flag.  This also sent the Usual Suspects ballistic, as straights are NEVER allowed to select their own sexual preferences while anyone and everyone else apparently can.  Both tactics play nicely on a couple levels.  First, they effectively push back against the left’s ability to shape the language and therefore the cultural battlefield.  Both use the leftist technique to redefining terms and political labels.  The beauty of the word “super” is that it can be added to any other term or description out there, and if anyone can define their own sexual choices, why cannot the rest of us?  The other thing this does is bring Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals into play against the political left.  In this case they use ridicule (Rule 5), are an enjoyable tactic (Rule 6), maintain constant pressure on the opposition (Rule 10), and best of all force the left to play by its own rules (Rule 4). 

6.  Salmon.  While Alaska’s commercial fishermen continue to obstruct fish farming and in turn watch their market share ground into dust by the economic wheels of the global salmon marketplace, the rest of the world is not nearly so inclined not to participate.  Ran across a couple stories last week about underground fish farms, one raising salmon if Norway and the other raising trout in Russia.  The Norwegian operation uses a former mine that will produce up to 100,000 tons of salmon for commercial sale yearly.  This is about 1/6 of the total 2020 commercial salmon catch in the north Pacific.  The project will use 15 tunnels in an abandoned mine.  Would be ironic if the remediation solution to the Pebble Mine here in Alaska was an onshore fish farm producing more salmon for commercial sale than the entire Bristol Bay region produces. 

7.  Bezos.  Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space launch company has chosen a development path that will make whatever they are trying to do very problematic, very expensive, and very difficult.  Two weeks ago, they announced they were delaying the first launch of their big booster (50 tons to LEO) another two years.  While Blue Origin has multiple suborbital launches, they have yet to put anything into orbit.  Worse, they appear to be skipping the step of putting together corporate expertise necessary to allow them to blow up a bunch of rockets so they can learn how not to do that anymore, a tack NASA took with Shuttle.  I predict paperweights.

More later –

• AG