Sometimes whiteness is just whiteness.

The first time I visited Europe, which was pretty much in the interim between, the “tetra-ethyl lead in gasoline era” and the “AGW due to CO2 era,” which could be called the “acid rain era.”

Everywhere I visited in Europe, I was told that ancient stonework was being destroyed by acid rain which was caused by SO2 emissions.

Well, at least I could visualize the loss of detail on a gargoyle’s face (not that I could prove it was due to SO2 which is still more compelling than trying to associate CO2 with hurricanes).

Did you ever see the Dakota before they cleaned it up? Almost looked better all blackened with soot. More character that way. More soul, you could almost say.

(Steve, I didn’t say anything to contradict Jack D in this post, so it’s OK to approve it.)

When I was young, I remember seeing a LIFE magazine article about London going through the same process in the mid-1960s.

The before and after pictures were striking. Apparently, the application of a wax protective exterior coating on many old limestone buildings in earlier times had the effect of very efficiently capturing particles of soot from all the coal fires used for heating. Most buildings were jet black before the “big wash” but light colored after.

I can’t find that LIFE article online, but here are some before and after pictures of buildings in Manchester, which went through the same process around the same time.

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/incoming/gallery/blackened-buildings-manchester-before-clean-8727918

And, if I’m not mistaken, a couple of old churches in Lower Manhattan have been left in their blackened state, to the present day.

OT — Anonymous claims from a questionable web site — a poster claiming to be a 7th grade teacher at a US public school has held an AMA, one of his answers (about student stupidity) was:

Not the answer /pol/ would want to hear but all students of all races are equally stupid to an alarming degree. I vividly remember writing 5 paragraph essays quite frequently in middle school, and at a clip of once per month in high school. These students struggle to produce a single paragraph when they come up to our campus.
I am teaching the 7th grade this year specifically and more than one student is having this be his first year since the 4th grade. The families simply opted to pull students out for the last two full years and simply dropped them back into the mix this year. These students are so developmentally ****ed up I struggle to support them in the most basic ways.

Should we be concerned about this? Or the making our money worthless? Or the cutting off of our energy strength? Or the nuclear war? Or the crabs? I’m still thinking about those crabs.

Adding to previous:

When I say these students were pulled out of school for two years, they were not put into a homeschool program. They simply did nothing for two years, per their parents, and were dropped off at middle school at the start of this year.
It’s just exactly what you think. In the middle of these Jr. High School classes you have students who walk, talk, dress, and act like elementary school students. They are incredibly immature, babyish, often are incredibly set off or scared by other students, attempt to hug teachers/follow teachers around like lost ducks. It’s sad, they missed out on two years of personal growth.
Academically it’s a ****ing disaster. I’m talking not being able to add or subtract with double digit numbers that require carrying at age 12.
Our curriculum is pretty great, but our students completely lack the foundation they were meant to show up to middle school with and as a result they cannot do most anything.
The lessons assume that
>Students know what a perimeter is
>Students know how to add/subtract/multiply/divide fractions and decimals
>Students know how to multiply or divide whole digit numbers
which students just do not. We were in a training where the speaker said something akin to treating students content knowledge like swiss cheese, where students may have small gaps, but students today are hula hoops.
I firmly believe this will be the one of the last generations being exposed to this level of math curriculum. These students will grow up to be citizens who elect people promising to remove math from schools “because it’s unnecessary.”

The contrast in those old pictures between the black buildings and the pink people is quite striking.

Did Paris, London, Manchester, etc. give up on coal heating in the 1960s? If not—and I think not—why didn’t their buildings just turn black again? A new soot-resistant coating? And what did they eventually use in place of coal?

By the 1980s there was labor unrest in the UK over the diminishing prospects of coal miners, but having been there in the latter part of decade, I recall many homes still heated with coal.

I guess France went nuclear at some point. Was that the impetus for finally cleaning Paris’s architecture: “As of 1961, there won’t be any more coal soot, so let’s clean up!”? Does that mean French buildings are now all electrically heated? Germany relies (or relied) to significant extent on Russian gas, but when did that start? After the Cold War? During the Cold War? I can recall some late-1980s concern about acid rain from coal power emissions there (though little actual damage seemed to materialize), so I guess Germany was a coal power.

As recent events illuminate, energy sources are a huge but underdiscussed substrata to post-agricultural society. Today’s media relentlessly hype the supposed “green” energy revolution, but where the actual heat, electricity, and power that permit daily existence to continue come from is often kinda opaque, whether because the media don’t want us to know or because they just find the subject all sort of tedious, I don’t know.

I grew up in Bath England: a beautiful Georgian (C18) city. The buildings there were black with soot until they were all, it seemed suddenly, cleaned, at some time in the 70s I think. Bath stone is a honey coloured limestone. Some of these Georgian buildings had been replaced by modern shops etc. in the 60s, but that had become unthinkable by the 70s, perhaps due to a combination of profits from tourism and the influence of the poet John Betjeman.

Here’s some more evidence for Steve’s hypothesis: Paris has a “chief engineer for doctrine, expertise, and technical control” for lighting the city at night and bringing out the subtle beauty of the architecture.

When Jousse took his position in 1981, Paris at night looked little like it does now. As with Notre-Dame, the city’s famous monuments and buildings were mostly spotlit, and many others were not lit at all. Over the course of thirty years, Jousse and his associates relit Paris almost entirely—more than three hundred buildings, thirty-six bridges, the streets and boulevards—all with the goal of integrating them into the city, being as economical as possible, and creating beauty….

He delights in showing me how he hid many of the projectors so that the lights become part of the building, and the building part of the city. He doesn’t want to draw attention to the lighting, nor does he want the lighted building to stand out from the neighborhood. On the sidewalk across the Seine from Notre-Dame, at the end of a long row of green metal stalls—those fact, he delights in showing me how he hid many of the projectors so that the lights become part of the building, and the building part of the city…. at the end of a long row of green metal stalls—those of the famous bouquinistes, the booksellers, Jousse shows me how the first two stalls actually house no books, hiding two spotlights instead. Anyone walking past the bookstalls would never guess the light on the cathedral came from within them….

… the Louvre courtyard called the Cour Carrée, a small square with a circular fountain in the middle, and on the three stories of sandstone and windows the golden light of some 110,000 small (4.5-watt) lamps (“the same number as all the other lamps in Paris,” Jousse explains). “It’s very beautiful,” he says, this time more serious. “C’est magique.” The effect created is that rather than the lights shining on the building, the building seems to be emitting the light. “The picture is fantastic. The maintenance is also fantastic.” He laughs. The energy for this one courtyard alone costs one million euros per year.

Bogard, Paul. The End of Night. Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

why didn’t their buildings just turn black again?

They turned black over 200 years. They will turn black again if the future inhabitants can sustain the technology of coal mining.

I don’t think they did it right away, but they did phase in central heating in a big way in the two decades that followed. My impression was that the soot accumulation built up over decades, or even centuries, though the adoption, at some point, of the sticky wax coating made things much worse by accelerating the process. I don’t know when they started using the stuff.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/289137/central-heating-in-households-in-the-uk/

Malraux had long had an interest in old stonework by the time he got De Gaulle to whistle:

https://www.apollo-magazine.com/the-many-lives-of-andre-malraux/

In many cases the soot-covered versions are still more humane than what would replace them.

For the first time in my life, I understand Modern Architecture

Of course you’d choose a glass skyscraper over a Greasy Oily Black Building….

I stand corrected!!

” [….] save much of the world’s great old architecture from being torn down and replaced with dull modernist clean, lean, and mean skyscrapers made out of steel and glass”.

A lot of great old buildings were deliberately and consciously torn town around that time. I think the destruction was fuelled by an instinctive belief that the gods demand a burnt offering if we are to enjoy good fortune. They sensed agreed the god Progress demands sacrifices that really hurt.

Slum clearances and draining swamps are one thing but tearing down grand old buildings is another. I’m talking about the latter. The planning permission and paperwork might have been ultra-modern and technocratic but the desire to destroy something of value — in order to please Progress — was primitive and atavistic.

Couldn’t some of it also come from more efficient stoves that produce less soot?

Thanks for the link. The buildings pictured look better to me after cleaning, but a @wrathofgnon type would laud how the old methods produced buildings that continued to serve our aesthetic needs despite the unforeseeable challenge of being covered in coal soot, and having seen these photos I think I would agree.

One advantage of the nineteenth century rowouses by me, other than being just better than anything built in the 20th century, is that brick and the various limestones used look good even when dirty, whereas e.g. a concrete building looks awful once there is any rust showing or even when it gets wet in the rain, and a glass facade is nasty-looking unless regularly cleaned. (Courbusier would considere neverending glass cleaning a jobs program, a feature of his program, not a bug).

If you think about it, we probably couldn’t even wash the beautiful buildings today–think of the damage to the Potomac River of all that sut coming off those buildings. The Sierra Club would slap an injunction on that cleaning project right away.

Thanks for using the word conservative correctly, as a meaningless buzzword that causes you to make your happy face. Malraux was big fuckin commie. He did a thing, and everybody’s like, “Nice!” But on the synthetic left/right axis imposed for divide et impera polarization, on one opposing side it comes out, “Conservative!” I dunno what putative leftists call it. Intersectional?

Now they’ve discovered the diesel autos they all but mandated are leaving soot in their cities again. Who could have seen that coming?

One factor is that it was a time of technical advancement: we had better, and available in quantity, detergents; means of application (pumps, hoses, etc.); logistics capability; etc.

So even if the buildings become dirty again, we could easily enough clean them again.

Post 1989, Budapest found budget to do the same. Buildings that had been buried under centimeters of smog, particulate matter, car exhaust and dirt were cleaned and unveiled having been returned to their old splendor. The Hungarian parliament comes to mind.

Re: Culture but nonetheless OT, Meghan Daun pens Who Killed Creative Writing? on Substack, chronicling an episode of dysfunction in the NYC book world. iSteve-y excerpt below the fold.

Be nice if we could revitalize the old buildings in many of our cities in the Midwest and back East. Unfortunately, a certain segment of the population makes that all but impossible.

I remember the whole ‘cleaning controversy’ regarding the restoration of paintings. My memory of it is slightly different than the quoted material below, the primary criticism being of traditionalists’ horror faced with the vividness of color underneath the grime, certainly not as subtle a criticism as Gombrich’s. Presumably there isn’t the same concern with cleaning buildings, but I don’t know what the reaction would be to pressure washing the Parthenon in polluted Greece.

In his 1960 book Art and Illusion, Gombrich had already written about the cleaning controversy in the chapter about light and visual attitude.[7] There he opined that the need for brighter colours on old master paintings is mainly due to our culture’s aesthetics, especially after the success and dissemination of Impressionist painting.

Put it in simple words, we now like brighter colours.

In his Burlington article of February 1962, Gombrich asserted that assuming that all the finest painters used a glaze as a finish it would be wrong, if not in very few occasions such as to ‘remedy some accidental mishap’ to remove it. [8] He also underlined that there was a vast contingent of artists, art historians and art professionals who disagreed with the National Gallery’s restorations. In fact, he stated severely that ‘Surely when many independent observers agree that certain paintings now look stripped, harsh or incoherent after ‘cleaning’ it is not sufficient to reply or imply that since none of the original pigments can be shown to have been removed these critics must obviously be enamoured of dirt.’ Gombrich then criticised the governmental ‘committee culture’ and added that ‘Official bias will always favour ‘objective’ rules of procedure which exempt the restorer and his employers from the responsibility of agonizing decisions.’

There was a time when Manchester regularly cleaned its buildings long before that, but at some point they gave up due to how fast the blackness returned. Some credit is due to the much-reviled environmentalists as well for creating the conditions that allow the postmodern cleaning to stick.

Today’s media relentlessly hype the supposed “green” energy revolution, but where the actual heat, electricity, and power that permit daily existence to continue come from is often kinda opaque, whether because the media don’t want us to know or because they just find the subject all sort of tedious, I don’t know.

For the media this is a religious subject on which they apply no critical thinking. They just repeat the dogma. Experts on the subject like Michael Shellenberger can explain that the Green New Deal is talking about a program that will be impossible to institute for the foreseeable future. Fossil fuels and nuclear power generate 80% of our electricity.

Natural gas 38%
Coal 22%
Petroleum less than 1%
Nuclear energy 19%

Renewables:
Hydropower 6.3%
Wind energy 9.2%
Biomass 1.3%
Solar energy 2.8%
Geothermal power plants 0.4%

Hydropower is not popular with environmentalists because they don’t like dams, which interfere with the breeding of fish. Windmills, on the other hand, kill a lot of birds.

https://www.history.com/news/the-killer-fog-that-blanketed-london-60-years-ago

Following a government investigation, however, Parliament passed the Clean Air Act of 1956, which restricted the burning of coal in urban areas and authorized local councils to set up smoke-free zones. Homeowners received grants to convert from coal to alternative heating systems.

The transition away from coal as the city’s primary heating source toward gas, oil and electricity took years, and during that time deadly fogs periodically occurred, such as one that killed about 750 people in 1962. None of them, however, approached the scale of the 1952 Great Smog.

Wow. If that’s what coal did to their buildings, imagine what it did to their lungs.

Coal powered the industrial revolution so “hallelujah coal!”, but it’s a really dirty fuel. Cities were amazingly unpleasant with dirty noxious air.

Natural gas in contrast is pretty amazing stuff. Terrific energy density and cleanliness. Great for power and heating. (You could reform it into methanol if you wanted a liquid fuel for transportation.) If natural gas was endless you’d need do nothing else. People in Western nations are now breathing perhaps the cleanest air they have since people captured fire.

The French–smartly–acted like a serious nation that was going to insure its own energy needs and went nuclear. (If only they’d been as smart about the much more important issue of immigration.)

If anyone is seriously concerned about fossil fuel depletion or CO2 driven global warming, then you must have nukes as your reliable core, no matter how big you go with wind, hydro, solar, biomass, etc.

If anyone is seriously concerned about fossil fuel depletion or CO2 driven global warming, then you must have nukes as your reliable core, no matter how big you go with wind, hydro, solar, biomass, etc.

Energy abundance (nuclear, for example), and resource abundance generally, allow nations to be irresponsible with immigration and borders. Resource curse.

Meanwhile…Martha’s Vineyard….

Obama Calls Democrats ‘Buzzkills’ Who Make People ‘Walk On Eggshells’

Speaking with four of his former employees on the Pod Save America podcast, the former prez said that his fellow Democrats need to tone it down and understand that everyone makes mistakes, the Daily Mail reports.

C’mon man!

The “list of things I don’t know and won’t look up” is a non-starter, weak sauce. Be best!

Unlike the US and UK, France is a serious country.

Post request: Situation in Haiti

Many on the U.S. East Coast mark the destruction of Old Penn Station in Manhattan in 1963, and the unsuccessful attempts to save it in the years prior, as the birth of the architectural preservation movement in that region.

https://observer.com/2012/08/an-unfortunate-anniversary-50-years-ago-a-failed-fight-to-save-penn-station/

Can’t say much about Chicago or California.

Uranium mining is very bad for the environment because it requires enormous quantities of ore to be processed for even one fuel rod–thousands of tons..And nuclear power is not at all cheap, nor can nuclear power fuel surface transportation, create plastics, etc…Be very concerned about the steady decline of fossil fuel reserves…We are past peak production already..

Speaking of modernist ugly, the front page of today’s Miami Herald has a prime example of it.
How did DeSantis miss quashing this crap?

Did big European cities give up on coal around the time of the 1960s Great Scrubbing?

Short answer: yes.

As an example, the UK passed the Clean Air Act of 1956 which was designed to greatly reduce soot emissions in built-up urban areas, and they enlarged/extended those laws several times in the 1960s and later.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Air_Act_1956

For the media this is a religious subject on which they apply no critical thinking.

It is a religious subject for the media but the same is true for libertarians and conservatives that are rigid in their thinking and not wanting to face the reality of the situation.

If we were going to heavily invest in nuclear then that needed to be done 20 years ago and with massive Federal subsidies. Conservatives oppose such subsidies so it was never going to happen even if they had the political will. Conservatives take offense to the idea of spending 50 billion on Federal energy projects of any type. Part of their ideology requires promoting the belief that the Federal government can’t be of use in such matters.

Solar is a lot more efficient than it used to be and doesn’t have the same NIMBY problem as nuclear.

I think it is pretty clear that the US political system is incapable of building enough nuclear plants to replace carbon sources. Liberals find nuclear to be religiously offensive and conservatives have too much faith in the “free market” whereby state level utilities make their own decisions (and reject nuclear in favor of allowing energy prices to increase).

I don’t see a better option than mass investing in solar. In fact the “free market” will probably do that when more rivers dry up and existing dams actually shut down their turbines. But it might be prudent to make those investments before people run out of power.

Make Paris White Again? I love it!

New York traditional publishers are still important in the area of nonfiction, but in fiction, they’ve been irrelevant for over a decade now. Anyone with a story to tell can just self-publish.

The only viable alternative to fossil fuels seems to be nuclear power. For safety reasons, facilities would need to be controlled and run by the best possible people. I don’t like the idea of potential Chernobyls staffed by 80-IQ AA hires or fundamentalist Muslims looking for an opportunity to wreak havoc on their host nation. The more you look at future challenges, the more you realise you’re going to need white people in charge.

Yeah, but the “literature” of the guy criticizing them is as bad as their literature. This is the world we live in.

Unless you can get outside the atmosphere (which, you know, can be done) solar has its own extensive issues. Smaller scale nukes are already viable but power itself is out of fashion. Until that changes the status quo will muddle along.

That’s obviously a very stark contrast.

I wonder, however, whether some less comprehensive cleaning would have left some soot in the deeper areas while the cleaning would have removed it from the high spots, making the architect’s craft “pop” even more?

I suppose now there isn’t enough coal smoke in Paris or similar to adhere to facades anyway.

The only viable alternative to fossil fuels seems to be nuclear power.

Building a nuclear plant in the US takes about 20 years….and that is if you have the votes.

California will run out of power in the next 2-3 years.

That isn’t a practical alternative even if you somehow overcame the political resistance (which you won’t).

I don’t like the idea of potential Chernobyls staffed by 80-IQ AA hires or fundamentalist Muslims looking for an opportunity to wreak havoc on their host nation.

I don’t like the idea of anyone in California managing a nuclear plant. It’s a Wakanda faith based state that has actually banned guns for not having features that hadn’t been invented (double serial bullet shell requirement).

The old time coal fireplaces were just like small wood fireplaces, so you could see a lot of inefficiencies in the burn. Newer stoves utilize secondary combustion and other efficiency enhancing engineering upgrades so I imagine that while not being clean they’re not nearly as dirty as the old style.

Please do not use the term renewables, as if petrol was not plentiful.

Building a nuclear plant in the US takes about 20 years….and that is if you have the votes.

California will run out of power in the next 2-3 years.

That isn’t a practical alternative even if you somehow overcame the political resistance (which you won’t).

Would it help to deport illegal aliens and cancel residence visas? Would that reduce demand for energy?

“…doesn’t have the same NIMBY problem as nuclear.” Don’t have any large-scale solar installations going up around your area, do you?

nine New Francs, or \$1.80, a square metre

In 1962, the NYT was using metric units with Imperial orthography?

60 years on, this war has produced its own Joyce Kilmer:

Dane Partridge, a U.S. veteran, passed away Tuesday from injuries during a Russian attack in the Luhansk region, AP reports. He leaves behind five children.

Idaho man killed while fighting as volunteer soldier in Ukraine

Partridge was a Mormon. Kilmer was an Episcopalian who “swam the Tiber”, and also left five children fatherless.

If the outside of buildings were that bad, imagine the inside of peoples lungs. Maybe the soot provided a layer of protection against tobacco smoke.

Yes, I remember these buildings all being black. I believed they would always be black. And then eventually they were all honey-colored.

A good example would be the town of Haworth in Yorkshire, the grimy, open sewer mill town with freezing fog where the Bronte sisters lived and died of TB in the parsonage.

It was pretty much the same when I was a teenager.

Now it is a picturesque tourist trap.

I was under the impression that a lot of the cleaning was done with pressure washing, but maybe it really was hand-scrubbed.

We lived in San Diego in 1962 when I was six and my father went up to some sort of science conference in Los Angeles. When he came back, he was sick from the smog up there and had to lie down and stay in bed for a day. The increasing popularity of the environmental movement in the sixties was in reaction to real problems at that time and had broad based support. People living now may not be aware of the air pollution problem of that era and of the desire to reduce it because of the health problems it was starting to create. Environmentalism started to lose support only later when extremists took over the movement.

Not on topic but I thought you might find this interesting… There was a shooting in Harrisonburg VA last night in an apartment complex that is mixed student and locals… for James Madison University. This school is a large university where the student body is highly Northern VA… it is the fourth most desired university in Virginia for the Nova Soccer Moms.
Harrisonburg has a fairly rough “community”… but interestingly it is shrinking… it is being replaced by ? You guessed it… Beaners.
8 people were shot at what was described as a party… JMU has a large party culture… especially at the apartments that serve the student body.. This complex was mixed…
Details are emerging..
So a house party shooting… 8 people wounded not killed…
Sounds like some more community monkey business don’t it?

‘Did Paris, London, Manchester, etc. give up on coal heating in the 1960s? ‘

I know that when I visited London as a child in 1967, my grandmother — who lived there — mentioned that they were now required to burn coke instead of coal.

‘I don’t see a better option than mass investing in solar. In fact the “free market” will probably do that when more rivers dry up and existing dams actually shut down their turbines. But it might be prudent to make those investments before people run out of power.’

How well solar works depends on where you are, and the time of the year.

…and there is still a NIMBY problem. When I lived in Hawaii, people complained about the big solar array visible a mile or so down the hill.

And, I’ll point out, solar only works to some extent in Hawaii because (a) basically the sun shines all year around, (b) people never have a need for heating, and (c) conventional power is so spectacularly expensive that solar actually starts to make sense. Even then, the cost of the batteries and the need to periodically replace them made it a close call. In our place, the solar ran the lights and the refrigerator, propane did the stove and the shower, and there was no air conditioning.

Nuclear power. We need nuclear power. Either that, or admit you don’t actually care about global warming.

I really enjoyed that article. Thanks for sharing. One excerpt I really liked:

But these people on Twitter who ask for atonement from writers they’ve never met aren’t driven by morality; it’s all a purity test … These are the kinds of people who’d throw their friends under the bus the first chance they got. They’re soulless lemmings who have no poetry in their hearts.

Sadly, most (but not all) of the people I know who went into the arts are very much like this. They’ll happily defame their own families, who have typically encouraged or even funded their baffling artistic careers, in order to make it seem like they had some sort of traumatic childhood. After all, if you can’t claim the mantle of victimhood, what business do you have being in the arts today? So they make up stories about their oppressively religious parents or whatever simply because that’s what you do to fit in. “Soulless lemmings who have no poetry in their hearts” sums it up nicely.

Excellent points with facts here.

I recently received a free copy of The New Scientist magazine (published in the UK) as a subscription tout.

Nearly all the letters in that section from readers were from UK readers.

One in particular stood out to me. Commenting on a prior article in the publication (which I didn’t see) it lambasted the article’s discussion of considering zero carbon nuclear energy. The letter writer made outlandish claims that these “alternative sources” such as wind, solar, tidal, hydro, biomass, etc. all made nuke energy unworthy.

A typical nonfactual religious response.

None of these current energy sources can come close to replacing oil & gas. While I can’t lay my hands on a quick source, I have read long ago that the entire solar output from the sun to earth (most over oceans) isn’t sufficient to power the Earth’s energy needs even if 100% of that was captured for use.

Of course that would darken skies and kill life on earth as plants die off. But even if that were done, you wouldn’t come close. So these sun worshipers fail on a basic physics level. Oil/gas/coal simply capture eons of solar energy as captured by biomass and slowly squeezed down to hard, liquid or gaseous forms. Otherwise solar is limited to growing/burning biomass that isn’t very energy rich. Or direct capture, very sparse and weak per unit of area (when shining, which isn’t often due to rain/clouds,etc.)

Hydro is limited by altitude and rainfall. Biomass is just pre Oil and Gas, inefficient and carbon generating. Tidal is nice but the oceans are full of corrosive salt water and huge storms. So far no one has figured out how to do that over any long time period, since oceans destroy and eat everything not alive sitting in them. I’m not sure what the total energy potential is even if you can capture the gravitational benefits of tides.

So this publication is like all Woke science, fueling Eco religion (though not mainly their subject).

Clean nuclear power (such as the sun) can be captured here, now. But like other religions, some tenets are not permitted to be considered as they are evidently “heathen” ideas.

Germany and the EU is about to find out how practical “green energy” is this winter. Wear your sweaters!

Over the past 20 years, I have happily observed colorful buildings return to glory in a certain city in Eastern Europe. On each visit to my wife’s home town, I have noticed that the people there have continued to clean and restore beautiful buildings:

[MORE]

What was in that English air that turned those buildings Black.

The prob w/ nuclear isn’t the meltdowns, it’s the waste.

Las Vegas conservative Harry Reid shut down the only compromise plan for dealing with that, so the future is not megawatt plants but more like the remote-community bathtub reactors. The libertarian laugh-line of “Privatize Nukes” will be inadvertently realized (in contrast to everything else touted by corporate-escort libertarians).

Nuclear would be the dominant, clean, efficient, affordable energy NOW if not for:

1) Communist stoking of anti-nuclear protests in my country over my lifetime,

2) Oil interests also actively fighting and propagandizing against nuclear,

3) Dumb-ass, hippy, “Mary Moon” types constantly acting as Stalin’s useful idiots in their protests (oh, I saw them constantly in and around Boulder, Colorado in my time there!)

and 4) The superstitious idiocy of the general public, susceptible to all of the above.

I have to congratulate my “hero,” Elon Musk (my hero, thumb-in-cheek, only because he has fathered two children with Grimes) for cashing in and passing off electric cars as actual, feasible, realistic alternatives — when we are still in the stone age of energy.

The only time Musk’s Teslas, or any other glorified, heavy golf carts, will make any sense is in a time of nuclear-generated electricity. Until then, his cars are running on hydrocarbon fuels like all others. In fact, they are far less efficient, because they have to recharge their heavy, expensive, heavy batteries — very slowly — with electricity generated from…wait for it… oil and gas! (Oh, if you think any significant portion of that electricity comes from wind or solar…think again.)

What’s long surprised me is the Soviets rebuilding the Romanov palaces gutted by the Germans in WWII. It wasn’t for Western tourists.

I suspect Malraux’s project, more than anything else, was the tipping point that began to save much of the world’s great old architecture from being torn down.

Actually, the French have done it before. The reason Notre Dame Cathedral was saved and preserved was because, way back in the 19th Century, Victor Hugo took a liking to it and tried to get his contemporary French movers and shakers to restore it. The building was falling apart due to its age, but all those secular/anti-Church movements and revolutions in France during the 18th and 19th Centuries made them not care about a fussy old Catholic Church building.

So Hugo took it upon himself to use his literary skill to make a hit novel for the purpose of rallying people to saving it. And he did —-The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It galvanized people into saving the old church, and it still stands today as a result (although that suspicious fire from a few years ago destroyed a portion of it).

Furthermore, the French took all their old bones in a falling-apart graveyard and built the Catacombs of Paris out of it. And Napoleon’s tomb and the Louvre are magnificently-kept inside attractions.

So it seems the French seem to have a knack for preserving their history right, even if it takes a little coaxing.

Meanwhile, the Brits took an opposite route. After the Protestant Heresy, they destroyed shit tons of old monasteries and such.

How well will the recent wave of Mediterranean and African immigrants survive the winter?

What is the intersection between Mormons and Ukraine? Jews?

Based on a small sample I get the impression Mormons favor this particular war.

Is it wrong to think the black building looks better?

They certainly matter.

Buildings weren’t the only things that turned black during the coal era. The infamous Peppered Moth is a staple of every high school textbook showing how quickly and dramatically evolution can occur in response to environmental changes.

Contrary to popular wisdom, however, once you go black you can go back.

First one was Viollet-Le-Duc. He invented old building preservation and structured it in France with institutions of architects and inspectors who had the monopoly on those building. Private Owners accept the high fees because they benefit from Public money. Public owners have to conform to those architects instructions.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugène_Viollet-le-Duc

https://www.compagnie-acmh.fr/la-compagnie/qui-sommes-nous/

the entire solar output from the sun to earth (most over oceans) isn’t sufficient to power the Earth’s energy needs even if 100% of that was captured for use.

I thought this was obvious nonsense, so I looked it up, and it’s true. The sun emits 3.86 x 10^26 W, of which 1.75 x 10^17 W falls on the earth. Humans consume 7 Billion tonnes of oil equivalent of energy per year (if you ignore the equally large distribution losses). This works out at 9.4 x 10^18 W or about 50 times what the Earth receives from the sun.

Mormons watch a lot of Fox News and vote for Mitt Romney. Fox, like every other news channel, is pro-war, and Traitor Mitt is for it. Hence, they believe its a holy war.

That is Oradea, yes?

None of these current energy sources can come close to replacing oil & gas. While I can’t lay my hands on a quick source, I have read long ago that the entire solar output from the sun to earth (most over oceans) isn’t sufficient to power the Earth’s energy needs even if 100% of that was captured for use.

This is very, very, very, very much wrong–by about four orders of magnitude. (Think about it: thee sun is warm and the world is big.)

Human energy production/consumption is about 17 (think 20) terawatts, the total solar irradiance is something 170,000 terawatts.

The problem with solar is that the energy density is far lower compared to what humans do with power plants and engines. Peak solar–noon, equator, sea-level is something around 1000 watts/m**2. The average–day, night, angles–over a patch of the surface of the earth is about 300w/m**2.

I.e. to run a solar car you have to really strip it down and it’s still way underpowered. To build a a 1 gigawatt power plant you have to cover a square kilometer with 100% efficient solar cells–and then you only get your gigawatt at high noon, at the equator, on a clear day.

Solar makes a lot of sense where there is already human structure getting unused solar flux, right where there is human demand. I.e. solar on your roof where you can sell power back to the utility or charge your Tesla battery to charge your Tesla car overnight–makes sense. Solar shades for a business’s parking lot helping power the business–makes sense.

But end of the day you are going to need some base source of power for “the sun don’t shine and the wind don’t blow”.

You don’t want fossil fuels, then that’s nukes.

Terrific post. Thank you for linking to it. Loved this paragraph:

There is nothing more Basic MFA Bitch than saying Didion changed your life, but when I read the opening lines of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, it really did change my life because it changed my writing. It was as if I’d been handed a note that said: this isn’t about making people like you; it’s about making them feel alive alongside you.

I have read long ago that the entire solar output from the sun to earth (most over oceans) isn’t sufficient to power the Earth’s energy needs even if 100% of that was captured for use.

If you read that and it didn’t set off your BS detectors, then you have the scientific sense of an 8-year-old girl.

Look, you idiot. At a distance of 1 AU, a disk with the cross-sectional area of the Earth receives from the Sun a solar irradiance of 173,000 terawatts. A watt is one joule per second, so a terawatt is one trillion joules per second. Total annual human energy consumption is estimated to be about 580 million terajoules, so it is now just a simple matter of dividing 580 million by 173,000 to figure out how much time it would take (in seconds) for the Sun to supply the entirety of annual human energy requirements if 100% of it was captured.

The answer: 3352.6 seconds, i.e. roughly 56 minutes, or just under an hour.

This ought not be construed as me defending solar power or other green energy schemes (I don’t defend those at all). I am writing this to draw attention to a longstanding problem with HBDers—none worse than Mr. Sailer himself—who feel entitled to pontificate on matters of genetics and evolutionary theory and other things far outside their ken, when they can’t even handle basic physics.

And it’s not just that you obviously never bothered to do the calculation; it’s that you completely lack any instinctive feel for the natural world which would have told you that the claim is bullshit in the first place. Do you know how much energy the Sun puts out, dumbass? The little humans with their lumps of carbon and black goo are nowhere on the same scale. We would have to increase our power consumption well over 9,000 times to equal the energy that falls on the Earth from the Sun, which itself is only 1/2.2 billionth of what the Sun generates.

I would use this occasion to invite you to be a little humble the next time you feel like sounding off about the Real Science!™ of HBD, but such is the nature of Sailer’s Place that ineptitude has never deterred claims of scientific expertise.

Thankfully, Penn Station’s twin was located just across 8th Avenue in the form of the Farley Post Office. When that closed, it was converted into the new Moynihan Train Hall and opened in January 2021. Of course, it’s a long block west of where people want to go, but it’s something.

The restoration and cleaning of Chartres Cathedral has generated a lot of controversy. One bone of contention is that the cleaning of the Black Madonna has turned her white. Mon Dieu!
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/arts/design/chartres-cathedral-restoration-controversial.html

Nuclear power. We need nuclear power. Either that, or admit you don’t actually care about global warming.

It sounds like the problem is overpopulation. Maybe you should instead advocate for reducing the world population or at least limiting immigration. Rather than degrade the environment further.

OT: Will Madison burn? In an exurb, one Quantaze, father of Quantazia and Quanice, is shot dead in some hotel that probably hasn’t had its exterior washed in this century:

Madison family says loved one fatally shot by deputy in Windsor: ‘We still don’t know exactly what happened’

The girls’ mother’s name is Dante (bloody hell!), and they carry her surname. A veritable Tiananmen Square of red flags in this story.

The Deputy is on “administrative assignment”. The village only incorporated in 2015, so what that says about the police service… Before that, it was a “Town”, or civil township. Have you ever seen a Wisconsin town “hall”? Most are garage-barns with a plow and a pile of salt, with a break room where the “town meeting” is held once a year. It ain’t Vermont.

In Southern California, you can hide the solar panels out in the giant surrounding desert and not lose too much power in transmission. Other places will have more difficult tradeoffs.

There is an aerodynamics counterpart to this. You know those little sun, cloud, drop, and flake icons weather sites put next to the days of the week? Dark Sky has yet another, for places like Joplin, Mo.:

Don’t plan on Branson for the weekend!

Only a politician would refer to technology that only utilizes 10% of it’s potential and call it waste. Carter called it thus and put it under federal control, stifling the development of mechanisms that will capture and safely release the remaining 90% of the energy potential. It’s not waste, it’s energy storage!
That being said, the current fleet of nuclear reactors in the US have terrible efficiency (see above) and are dangerous. They need to be replaced by better, more efficient nuclear technology.

When I was young, I remember seeing a LIFE magazine article about London…

When I was young, I remember seeing a LIFE (or LOOK) magazine article about London, and was shocked to see young people wearing shorts emblazoned with the Union Jack. And thought, is that legal? Isn’t it disrespectful? We would never do that in America.

Now we see it here all the time.

Get this– the top post on Revolver news today:

How Fashion Was Used as Lethal Weapon to Successfully Destroy America

What would the Calvert family think of this? Or Francis Scott Key?

Unlike the US and UK, France is a serious country.

Aren’t a majority of babies born in France not French now?

Here’s another fatal police shooting from Wisconsin. OK, it was in 2004, but I bet you never even heard of it then. There’s not much cops can’t get away with if the victim is white.

The tipping point for cleanup in 1946 of the old soot-colored Detroit City Hall came when a crew of uniformed specialists drove up in a truck, mounted ladders, and sandblasted a lovely cream-toned rectangle, just a few yards in diagonal, on the blackened stone. Then in orderly manner they dismounted and disappeared, never to be identified. Detroiters had weeks to regard the beauty of the clean limestone, and the disturbing contrast, until it was decided to do the job officially and in full. The grotesque dark architecture raised the general morale when once again it gleamed with light.

https://photos.legendsofamerica.com/mi-more/ed14e1230

I don’t see a better option than mass investing in solar.

Problems:

1. intermittency

2. insoluble problem of inadequacy of battery tech

3. costs (money and environmental) of and mining of materials used in batteries (e.g., there is not enough lithium)

4. farm and mining machinery cannot operate on solar

Nobody “invests” in solar except to the extent that it is a boondoggle.

Fake news.

The peppered moth is supposed to be proof of the Darwinian mechanism of “survival of the fittest” or “natural selection,” but there are serious problems with this evolutionary icon.

1. The adaptation of a species to its environment and the variety that can be exhibited within a species do not explain Darwinian evolution of life.

Variety within a species is not evidence for transmutation from one kind of creature to another! Natural selection might sometimes account for different colors of peppered moths and different sizes of dogs and different shapes of beaks on a finch, but it cannot account for life coming into existence or a wolf becoming a whale or a reptile becoming a bird. No matter what an evolutionist might say about light- and dark-colored peppered moths, they are all still moths. In fact, they are still peppered moths. No new color was even produced, because the dark-colored moths already existed.

Adaptability of species is not evidence for Darwinian evolution, but it does fit perfectly into the biblical model of creation by an all-wise God who designed the creatures to adapt to changing environments on a fallen earth.

2. Kettlewell and others were guilty of doctoring the evidence.

The aforementioned photograph of moths resting on a tree trunk has influenced the thinking and philosophy of countless people, encouraging them to believe in Darwinian evolution. As it is said, “one picture is worth a thousand words.” The trouble is that it was a fake. It turns out that peppered moths don’t naturally rest on tree trunks. The moths were glued to the tree trunk!

“After more than fifty years it is now admitted that these moths do not rest on tree trunks; in fact, no one is sure where they rest. The well-known photograph of the black and white species together that appears in every high-school textbook was taken using two moths glued to a tree trunk” (Ian Taylor, In the Minds of Men, p. 168).

Jonathan Wells, Ph.D. in cell biology, gives further refutation to the peppered moth myth:

“Since 1980, evidence has accumulated showing that peppered moths do not normally rest on tree trunks. Finnish zoologist Kauri Mikkola reported an experiment in 1984 in which he used caged moths to assess normal resting places. Mikkola observed that ‘the normal resting place of the peppered moth is beneath small, more or less horizontal branches (but not on narrow twigs), probably high up in the canopies… In twenty-five years of field work, Cyril Clarke and his colleagues found only one peppered moth naturally perched on a tree trunk. …

“Manually positioned moths have also been used to make television nature documentaries. University of Massachusetts biologist Theodore Sargent told a Washington Times reporter in 1999 that he once glued some dead specimens on a tree trunk for a TV documentary about peppered moths (The Washington Times, Jan. 17, 1999). Staged photos may have been reasonable when biologists thought they were simulating the normal resting-places of peppered moths. By the late 1980s, however, the practice should have stopped. Yet according to Sargent, a lot of faked photographs have been made since then” (Wells, Icons of Evolution, pp. 149, 150, 151).

Wells concludes,

“Open almost any biology textbook dealing with evolution, and you’ll find the peppered moth presented as a classical demonstration of natural selection in action–complete with faked photos of moths on tree trunks. This is not science, but myth-making” (Icons of Evolution, p. 155).

https://www.wayoflife.org/reports/lying_evolutionary_art_peppered_moth.html

Unless you can get outside the atmosphere (which, you know, can be done) solar has its own extensive issues. Smaller scale nukes are already viable but power itself is out of fashion. Until that changes the status quo will muddle along.

Solar isn’t perfect and even though entire nuke plants that can basically be purchased on the market that doesn’t mean a US state can simply do it.

There is an application and regulatory process and lawyers know how to drag it out even further. There are in fact lawyers that are expects at dragging out such plans.

Solar and natural gas can be scaled rather quickly.

Nuclear power. We need nuclear power. Either that, or admit you don’t actually care about global warming.

Did you read anything I wrote?

Let me repeat
IT TAKES 20 YEARS TO BUILD A NUCLEAR PLANT IN THE US

Saying “I’m for nuclear” doesn’t change political and economic realities. Yes it would have been nice if the Democrats and Republicans started around a dozen plants 20 years ago but that did not happen. Both parties consist of ideologues that oppose such plants. Democrats don’t like nuclear power and Republicans don’t like large scale Federal energy projects.

Would I support the US government simply building plants in Nevada? Sure but it doesn’t work that way. They don’t have that type of authority and both parties would oppose such an idea.

China can stamp out nuke plants because they are an authoritarian government. It’s a trade-off. They can build whatever they want and they can also make people disappear.

Nuclear plants here face all kinds of rules and regulations. The last nuclear proposal in the US was cancelled:
https://www.fairewinds.org/nuclear-energy-education/duke-energy-to-cancel-proposed-levy-county-nuclear-plant

Widescale solar is the only option due to economic and political realities. If you want to propose some type moon shot nuclear project the go ahead. I guarantee that both parties will reject it. Democrats don’t like the idea of massively expanding nuclear and Republicans are certain that the “free market” can solve everything. Enough Republicans would balk at the price tag to where it wouldn’t pass. We don’t have a party that is capable of expanding nuclear power. That is the reality.

I am not anti-nuclear. In fact I have long been for nuclear expansion but it won’t be happening in this country. In fact we have unfinished plants that were abandoned after the 3 mile island scare.

That being said, the current fleet of nuclear reactors in the US have terrible efficiency (see above) and are dangerous. They need to be replaced by better, more efficient nuclear technology.

That process should have been started 20 years ago.

Diablo Canyon will be shutting down and the Democrats don’t have a replacement.

Not that the Republicans are any better.

We’ve had two pro-nuclear Republican presidents (GWB II, Trump) that were more interested in tax cuts for the wealthy than creating long term energy sources.

What we have is a ruling class that doesn’t give a flying F about energy prices. They want to reduce the population and not encourage families. Gavin Newsom knows full well that people will eventually flee California due to blackouts and thinks that is great. More Democrats going to other states and fewer people to deal with. It’s a win/win. Not like he and his pals will notice the difference since they will all have solar panels on their homes.

Get ready for a new level of inequality in California where the wealthy have their own independent solar systems while the poor swelter in the heat. Conservatives will tell us that’s just the fate of the free market gods. Sucks for them, let’s go watch football.

If we were going to heavily invest in nuclear then that needed to be done 20 years ago and with massive Federal subsidies.

No.

Japan builds nuclear plants in 46 months, Korea in 56 months.
South Korea is second-fastest nuclear plant-building country

Admit that your objective is not a reduction of greenhouse gasses.

What we have is a ruling class that doesn’t give a flying F about energy prices. They want to reduce the population and not encourage large families.

You destroyed your credibility with that statement. Rulers who want to reduce population do not mint 1.5 million new green cards every year, leave the border open to illegals, and subsidize black mothers.

That’s indeed very difficult (and painful, even) to believe.

I guess it means that we need all those annoying windmills after all, huh? Along with nukes I mean. I’m sort of agnostic about those two.

This his consistent with what I’ve read lurking at teachers forums for the last three years. It started before covid but that was the nail in the coffin.

And these are progressive teachers’ statements against interest. All the gimmicks and tech and liberalizing have just made things worse.

Hard to discern race with these weenies, but “Title 1” and “urban” sre tells.

The classroom behavior they describe is absolutely unrecognizable to anyone who attended schools in the 60s or even the 90s.

It’s now been over ten years since I last visited Rome and Florence. If they’ve scrubbed all the old palazzi clean and bright, I’d rather not know.

Three floors high! Compare with the height of the pedestrians.

IT TAKES 20 YEARS TO BUILD A NUCLEAR PLANT IN THE US

Well then, bunky, that needs to change.

Nuclear plants here face all kinds of rules and regulations.

Oh, so that’s why! Uhh…what did I say above? Oh yes, that needs to change.

Widescale solar is the only option due to economic and political realities.

LOL !

So, let me see… because the rules and regs — and the resulting absurd project times — currently make it impossible to do something that would be prudent, we should just go for something inefficient that can’t possibly meet our needs. That’s like saying because there’s a log lying across the road in front of us, we should turn around and drive another 20 miles to get to our destination, just because we don’t want to bother removing the damn log!

You could at least be honest and just admit you are an anti-nuclear shill here, because your idiotic, patently absurd reasoning just isn’t believable, and I believe I’ve seen you use it before.

… I have long been for nuclear expansion but it won’t be happening in this country.

Uhh… because dinglebrains like you keep advocating for the status quo and the powers that be?

Please spare us.

As for the Madonna, I imagine the original artist would prefer the restoration but either way the work is beautiful. Sometimes an unexpected patina complements a piece.

Yes, Oradea in Romanian, Nagyvárad in Hungarian.

the entire solar output from the sun to earth (most over oceans) isn’t sufficient to power the Earth’s energy needs even if 100% of that was captured for use.

I thought this was obvious nonsense, so I looked it up, and it’s true. The sun emits 3.86 x 10^26 W, of which 1.75 x 10^17 W falls on the earth. Humans consume 7 Billion tonnes of oil equivalent of energy per year (if you ignore the equally large distribution losses). This works out at 9.4 x 10^18 W or about 50 times what the Earth receives from the sun.

Uh … no.

If you do this calculation and get that answer your first thought should be “what did I do wrong?”.

People really should have some back of the envelope sense of the scope of the natural world. And simple thought experiments like “what does the sun heat, vs. what do people heat” ought to settle this–convincingly–in anyone’s mind. (And note the sun heats the earth relative to the nothingness of deep space, we do not.)

~~

Hint on the error: a watt==kg*m**2/s**3 — i.e. joules/second, energy per second.

~~

BTW, a more interesting question: If the sun went out, how long would we live?

If we were going to heavily invest in nuclear then that needed to be done 20 years ago and with massive Federal subsidies.

No.

Japan builds nuclear plants in 46 months, Korea in 56 months.
South Korea is second-fastest nuclear plant-building country

Completely different political situation.

The last nuclear plant to go online in the US was the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_Bar_Nuclear_Plant

It started in 1973 and finished in 2015.

As I mentioned earlier the last planned nuclear plant was cancelled. In fact over 200 planned plants have been cancelled:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cancelled_nuclear_reactors_in_the_United_States

Building a nuclear plant in the US is a regulatory nightmare. The lawyers can sandbag it for years which increases the costs. There is too much uncertainty in nuclear power for private utilities. Much safer to add natural gas which is what they have been doing.

Admit that your objective is not a reduction of greenhouse gasses.

Do tell exactly where in this thread I mentioned greenhouse gasses or climate change.

I said that a massive solar expansion is our best option. The Southwest is running out power.

Now retract your statement and admit that you imagined an argument I didn’t make.

Learn to maff, bro.

For someone calling himself “astrolabe,” you are especially embarrassing yourself here with your inability to calculate some basic facts about solar energy. So, sit up, pay attention, and let’s try to figure out where you’re fucking the dog on this.

I thought this was obvious nonsense, so I looked it up, and it’s true.

No, your first instinct was correct. It is obvious nonsense. Always go with your first instinct.

The sun emits 3.86 x 10^26 W, of which 1.75 x 10^17 W falls on the earth.

This much is true. The exact same figures are quoted in one of the Wikipedia pages I linked to above.

Humans consume 7 Billion tonnes of oil equivalent of energy per year (if you ignore the equally large distribution losses).

I don’t know where you pulled this figure from, but it looks just about right as well. If I’m reading you correctly, you are saying that the distribution losses are equal to the end use, so humans actually need to generate 14 billion tonnes of oil equivalent each year to meet their energy needs. The “tonne of oil equivalent” (note the metric spelling) is a somewhat unfamiliar unit outside the energy industry, so let’s convert that to something a little more friendly. There are plenty of good online unit converters (like this one, for instance), but even it doesn’t list the “tonne of oil equivalent” in its menu. Fortunately for us, we can just go to the Wikipedia page again. A tonne of oil equivalent is equal to 41.868 gigajoules, or 0.041868 terajoules. 14 billion multiplied by 0.041868 equals 586,152,000 terajoules—almost exactly the same as the 580 million figure I quoted above. I’m going to say that this is correct, too.

This works out at 9.4 x 10^18 W or about 50 times what the Earth receives from the sun.

I have no idea how you derived that number, but whatever you did, it’s wrong. I know it’s wrong because you are trying to convert a unit of energy (tonnes of oil equivalent) into a unit of power (W). Humans do not “consume” watts. The watt is just the name of you consuming one joule of energy per second, and you can’t consume a consumption; so, this doesn’t make any sense. If watts are what you’re after, then you would need to take your annual energy budget of 586,152,000 joules and divide it by the number of seconds in a year. 586,152,000 / (365*24*60*60) = 18.58 terawatts.

Eighteen and a half terawatts is the power rating of humanity. Or, four orders of magnitude lower than what the Earth receives from the Sun, just like AnotherDad said.

‘Did you read anything I wrote?’

No, I didn’t.

IT TAKES 20 YEARS TO BUILD A NUCLEAR PLANT IN THE US

Well then, bunky, that needs to change.

Wow a fascinating retort.

THINGS SHOULD BE DIFFERENT says BUZZ

Well that really cuts through all the government regulation, two party gridlock and state/federal overlap.

THINGS SHOULD BE DIFFERENT

Never thought of it that way.

So, let me see… because the rules and regs — and the resulting absurd project times — currently make it impossible to do something that would be prudent, we should just go for something inefficient that can’t possibly meet our needs.

I never said that solar can power the entire country. How do we get a single nuclear plant going? The last one in development was cancelled due to cost overruns. Democrats don’t like nuclear and Republicans don’t like Federally subsidized energy projects. By all means go out and change that reality. Show us how it is done.

Uhh… because dinglebrains like you keep advocating for the status quo and the powers that be?

No I’m a realist and I can find conversations from 20 years ago where people like you seemed to think that wearing a I LIKE NUKULAR button would change anything. We had two pro-nuclear presidents and they didn’t do sh-t. Both were more interested in tax cuts for the wealthy and GWB II liked warring.

The status quo is why I think solar is our only option. We have too much political gridlock for nuclear. Makes more sense to toss 50 billion at solar while you make your grand trip to Washington. Anti-Federal spending Republicans and anti-Nuclear Democrats will join hands and drag their feet while you call them “dinglebrains”. They don’t give a flying f-ck. Republicans will tell you that it isn’t affordable and Democrats will show pictures of meltdowns. That is the reality that you are facing and calling me names isn’t going to change it.

Trump was the last chance at nuclear power and locking down the border. He managed to fail at both. It’s going to be gridlock for at least a dozen years. How many plants do you think they would even get built? If magic unicorns somehow made them work together? 4 1 gigawatt plants? That would take 20 years after your grand trip to Washington where you part the seas. We could have 4 gigawatts of solar up well before then.

But go ahead and do your grand trip to Washington. Convince anti-nuclear Democrats and anti-Federal Republicans that they are all dinglebrains. Show us how it is done.

https://www.hobartpulp.com/web_features/alex-perez-on-the-iowa-s-writers-workshop-baseball-and-growing-up-cuban-american-in-america

iSteve-y baseball story:

I ended up at Iowa because my baseball career fizzled out and I needed something to do. I was a jock—with intellectual leanings—up until 22, when I wasn’t good enough to compete at the highest level anymore; the game, as they say, passed me by. Sports are great like that because you can’t reason with or lie to yourself about physical limitations. I was a good baseball player, until I wasn’t, and the shift happened overnight. I’d reached the limit of my God-given talent, and that was that. I remember the exact moment it happened, too. I was on deck waiting to face a guy throwing mid-90s, a real flamethrower. I’d seen the lower 90s, but this guy was a different animal. I thought: I got this, I’m a stud, I’ve been a stud all my life, but just in case, let’s be smart here and take the first pitch. Let’s see what this boy’s got. So I stepped into the box and took the first pitch…but I didn’t see the ball. I heard it hit the catcher’s mitt though. The game decided my fate: I couldn’t see—forget hit—a 95 mile per hour fastball, and so it was over.

LOL:

Being Hispanic, Junot Diaz, of course, was revelatory. You could write about fucked up Hispanic shit and white people would eat it up! If you’re out there, Junot, come back! Don’t let those angry ladies who begged you for blurbs run you out of the game. No seas pendejo. Would Yunior be such a little bitch…

At Iowa:

The rich, white people I met were cool, but rich, white people have changed a lot since then and are a lot less cool than they used to be…we’ll get to that later.

I began to feel like there was no place for a guy like me—someone writing masculine fiction—a few years after I left Iowa, around 2013/2014. The literary culture, as well as the culture at large, began to shift around that time. Before that, it was still a wonderful free-for-all.

It was obvious that what would later become wokeness—that prudish passive aggressiveness—was already lurking; the idiotic grievance language wasn’t around yet and rich whites weren’t pathologically obsessed with race and gender like they are now, but the seeds had already been planted.

Fast forward a few years and the buzz words arrived, as did the love affair with race and white guilt and all the other virtual signaling mumbo jumbo rich white people never shut up about. That’s how rich white people stopped being cool. Someone convinced them that being rich and white is bad and now writers and artists are walking on eggshells. It’s okay to be rich and white, elite whites! Don’t feel guilty!

The restoration and cleaning of Chartres Cathedral has generated a lot of controversy. One bone of contention is that the cleaning of the Black Madonna has turned her white. Mon Dieu!

As for the Madonna, I imagine the original artist would prefer the restoration but either way the work is beautiful. Sometimes an unexpected patina complements a piece.

Whatever happens, don’t confuse the Black Madonna with the Black Maria.

(Todd Rundgren can assist you with the pronunciation.)

I suspect part of the problem is demographics. 90-point IQ Hispanic kids are a larger and larger portion of our schools these days, and they’re very hard to teach because they’re so dumb.

In vaguely related news, as even more illegal immigrants are being dumped there daily, downtown Los Angeles is still a fetid third-world Bidenville, where the poor and the weak go to be victimized, fester in their own taint, and die:

I just drove through downtown L.A.
What is saw shocked me to the core.
3rd world conditions on *every* block. Tent cities. Filth. Drugs. People digging through, living in and eating trash. Broken lives everywhere.
This is not America.
See for yourself… pic.twitter.com/TjISz3rBIY

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) October 16, 2022

OT: Terror Granny’ arrested in Germany over alleged plot to restore Kaiser

The plot was foiled, unfortunately. Even mad Ludwig of Bavaria would be preferable to any of the leaders Germany has had lately.

We could have 4 gigawatts of solar up well before then.

But we don’t need to, because we have all the oil and gas we need. What’s your hurry? Is this some kind of emergency that requires you patching together a tapestry of inefficient fantasy panels?

Solar is a great little technology for the proper applications. I have seen it in use all my life, probably the first time when I saw panels on a Surveyor lunar lander in the 1960s. Solar is perfect for small, remote applications, but it is idiotic in the extreme for large-scale power grids.

You say let’s hurry up and put together your wet dream of solar panels when we could just use the oil and gas we have, which is far more efficient. In the meantime, we work on that “government of the people” idea and work to change those irrational politics you refer to.

You sound like a good German citizen circa 1943 or something, saying we can’t change the laws, so we should just keep putting people on the trains to the camps. That’s an analogy I know you can appreciate.

In the meantime, you are a troll, and this is the end of this discussion. Good bye.

Manhattan had coal boilerrooms in building impractical to retrofit until recently.

This 1995 article said 25% of NYC schools had coal boilers.

https://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/15/nyregion/time-stands-still-some-school-boiler-rooms-oil-vs-gas-heat-about-quarter-schools.html

Brunel Toussaint opened the two big doors at the front of the great steel furnace, feeling a sudden blast of heat on his face, and turned to dip his shovel into the pile of coal nearby.

Scooping up about 15 pounds’ worth, he swung his 60-year-old body around and emptied the contents onto the orange-red embers, making them momentarily sizzle. He then repeated the process 24 times before stepping over to the adjoining boiler to feed it, too.

It could have been a scene out of early industrial England, except for the wording on the metal plaques at the top of each furnace: “Installed by Daniel J. Rice, 1924, for the Board of Education, New York, N.Y.”

Seventy-one years later, as the first northeaster of the season bore down on the New York region yesterday, the two boilers labored as they always have, funneling heat to the classrooms of Junior High School 99 on East 100th Street in Manhattan.

But theirs is hardly a lonely existence.

Decades after oil and gas became the heating fuels of choice throughout the city and much of the industrialized world, about 320 city schools — more than 25 percent of the entire school system — continue to be warmed by coal-fired furnaces, each stoked by hand by workers like Brunel Toussaint. The schools burn about 3,200 truckloads of coal each winter, so much that the Board of Education has become one of the nation’s largest single consumers of anthracite, the grade of coal used primarily for heating.

The deadly London smog of 1952 was portrayed in Netflix’s “The Crown” to great effect.

In many a piece in the press on energy, fossil fuels, solar and what-have-you, I see energy and power (energy per unit time) getting conflated.

That’s not a mistake anyone with even a junior high school science education should be making. I find journalists are mostly pretty innumerate, and even more at sea when dealing with the most elementary concepts and measures of physics and the physical world.

I think it was the environmental scientist Vaclav Smil who once said something to the effect that no one who hasn’t fully graped the laws of thermodynamics should be talking about global warming. I wouldn’t go that far, but widespread understanding of the difference between a watt and a watt-second and some feel for numbers would certainly help.

Oh my goodness, those are real. I thought you were just making up some stereotypically Black names.

Also, this quote is gold:

Quanice McClain, another one of Campbell’s daughters, said they then learned Campbell was wanted on a warrant but she also said that doesn’t explain why he ended up dead.

“He just a Black man, he ain’t want to go to jail—just like everybody else,” Quanice said.

This isn’t new in America at all.

Novelist-adventurer and amazingly successful fraud, like a character out of an Evelyn Waugh novel.

He went to Indochina to loot temples, got caught, and successfully reinvented himself as an intellectuel engagé being persecuted by French colonial tyrants, and got himself released.

Then he wrote La Condition Humaine, a very good novel about the crushing of the CPC in Shanghai, and on the back of that got people to believe that he was a Comintern agent and had played an important role in China (he had once visited Hong Kong for a few days).

In Spain he did actually help to organize the Repulbican air force, but gave people the impression he was a pilot with Exupéry type stories of derring do.

Of course, he greatly exaggerated his record in WWII .

Later on he met Mao briefly and then published a ridiculous account of their conversation, in which Mao sounded suspiciously like Malraux, and when challenged about this by witnesses, claimed they had conversed in Hunanese dialect (Malraux didn’t speak Chinese of any type).

But he got away with all, and was even buried in the Pantheon.

I mean everything was red, white and blue. I had a pair of K2 “three” skis like these:

[MORE]

Sounds sorta like a Paddy Wagon

https://www.police1.com/national-law-enforcement-museum/articles/avoid-the-paddy-wagon-this-st-patricks-day-snC4NkSsxiW18QOq/

But I guess I see your point about the shorts. I don’t know when that started.

Consider the first sentence (“all races”). We have dumb kids, yes, but we’re cutting off possibilities for the smartest, and all education data suggests that there is marginal improvement to be gained through effort, so there is hope for even the Puerto Ricans if one cares and tries.

the “acid rain era.”

Everywhere I visited in Europe, I was told that ancient stonework was being destroyed by acid rain which was caused by SO2 emissions.

Yeah, what happened to that? It was supposed to wipe out every tree on the European continent. I can remember a European edition of Time magazine with a cover picture of a tree in a coffin to dramatize the narrative, but three decades on there’s more trees than ever. Fewer Europeans, but more trees.

Just another eco-apocalypse that never went through formality of actually occurring.

Novelist-adventurer and amazingly successful fraud, like a character out of an Evelyn Waugh novel.

Jackie Kennedy called Malraux “the most fascinating man I’ve ever met.”

In his account of his time as Trotsky’s (not very successful) bodyguard – “With Trotsky in Exile” – Jean van Heijenoort relates the time in Mexico when Trotsky and entourage jumped into the limousine and went for a picnic tour of the local peasant churches, where the altars were decorated with colorful peasant paintings of Madonnas etc executed on flattened tin gasoline and food cans.

The bodyguard was taken aback by the way Malraux assiduously went about stripping the altars of these works of art to take back with him to France.

https://en.id1lib.org/book/3403467/427565

The dialect of Hunan is called Xiang or Hsiang, It could help in vocabulary tests.

The book says that it was Andre Breton (the surrealist) who got over-excited by the sight of the tin votive paintings in a Mexican church, started stuffing them into his jacket and tried to pass it off as a revolutionary act of “anti-clericalism.”

Thanks for the link to the book. I went through some of it. All of them, Trotsky, Breton, Malraux and others described in it come across as thoroughly pretentious and unpleasant people.

My favorite little Fed John Johnson wrote:

I don’t see a better option than mass investing in solar.

There has to be a backup for night-time, cloudy days, etc. — meaning nuclear or fossil fuel.

So, you have to make the capital investment for nuclear or fossil fuel plants anyway.

Which makes solar economically infeasible.

Unless and until you get really good batteries (and batteries are not very nice to the environment, either — look up “cobalt”).

The Fed also wrote:

In fact the “free market” will probably do that when more rivers dry up and existing dams actually shut down their turbines.

Hydro is a minor contributor.

And if you are saying global warming will kill hydro, no, actually it will tend to produce more rain.

Abbie Hoffman used to wear an American flag shirt in the 1960s, and that was considered to be rebellious and disrespectful. Now, there are online clothing outlets devoted solely to flag apparel.

John Johnson wrote to Charles Erwin Wilson:

Building a nuclear plant in the US is a regulatory nightmare. The lawyers can sandbag it for years which increases the costs. There is too much uncertainty in nuclear power for private utilities. Much safer to add natural gas which is what they have been doing.

And that is therefore what they will continue to do.

JJ also wrote:

I said that a massive solar expansion is our best option. The Southwest is running out power.

Solar just does not provide dependable 24/7/365 power. There has to be nuclear or fossil-fuel backup.

Solar is just (very expensive) virtue signalling. It is not real technology.

Might as well propose hooking everyone’s Peloton bike up to the grid to generate power!

Yes, Breton, excuse me. I read that book in 1989 and should not in the age of the internet have trusted my memory.

The bodyguard had an interesting life later in America although Mexico ultimately did catch up with him. A lot of those comintern and NKVD types were real characters and had thoroughly mastered the art of survival, landing on their feet wherever they went. A few of those stories are recounted here.

https://peterkatel.com/trotsky-in-mexico/

You might want to check out the details of the shooting near JMU in Harrisonburg VA, Steve… it fits your theory of shootings exactly.. They arrested the shooter. Tyraef Flemming.
The local news has a picture of him… and as you guessed… National NBC and CBS does not. Given the name Tyraef… you might guess why.
The Washington Post has a five paragraph story about it… and doesn’t follow up with details… it says “someone is in custody” The Post tries very hard to ignore crime stories around the DC VA MD area.. because the person in custody usually doesn’t fit their world view..

I wonder if some the cleaning process is just environmental?

Remove most of the source [coal heating, power stations etc] and perhaps a lot of the soot is eventually washed away by rain?

Yeah, what happened to that?

The scaremongers decided to go with CO2 as the poison they will protect the weak minded from.

Why?
1. CO2 is not going away.
2. No-one can prove that CO2 does not cause hurricanes.
3. You can fool half of the people all of the time.

Thank you for this link, too.

I read a well illustrated biography of Trotsky a long time ago—my high school library, somewhat incongrously, had a copy and at that time I resolved to read Issac Deutscher’s massive “Prophet” biography of him, but never did get around to it. Trotsky represented a kind of purity and lost hope to campus leftists of those days, though, quite frankly, his record during the Russian revolution doesn’t seem to justify it. I suppose I have the time now, to read up, but perhaps the moment is past—my reasonably well read and informed kids have barely heard of him.

Malraux wrote permanent, great non-fiction works about art that remain classics. He was a good novelist & influential cultural figure, a raconteur of genius who frequently lied.

Umm, what kind of crabs? Some should be eradicated.

OT the Saint George Floyd family is attorney shopping to sue Kanye West for blasphemy and heresy.

West stated that the autopsy of Saint George found he died of a self administered Fentanyl overdose. Not by Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s shoulder.

Heresy and blasphemy must be eradicated

OT They’ve been telling us since the 1970s that they wanted less people.
https://gab.com/stkirsch/posts/109174783112334243

His representation came from a perverted version of Christian penitence — yes he did bad things during the revolution, but he’s different now. Also (more importantly) he let you be a Communist without being a Stalinist.

I’ve seen a few articles like this. I wonder if it’s more blame low black and brown school
achievement on anything and everything but their low IQs. Same old same old I’ve heard all my life

Interesting that the schools and teaching profession were so extremely enthusiastic about covid hoax lockdown.

On The Antiques Roadshow the specialist experts often mention, at the end of their quite interesting three-minute lecture, that a painting has become gunk-covered with time, and should properly be restored (for around $1,000.) I think the lesson is that restoration is not just for outdoor buildings and coal. This is a very interesting and engaging series and I recommend giving it a try if you are not familiar with it. Mrs. SafeNow and I BOTH enjoy it, which I can’t say about time-travel movies.

Perez had something of a Lefty Gomez experience. After striking out against fireballer Bob Feller on a called third strike, he told the umpire, “That last one sounded a little low.”

There has to be a backup for night-time, cloudy days, etc. — meaning nuclear or fossil fuel.

So, you have to make the capital investment for nuclear or fossil fuel plants anyway

I’m aware of the limitations of solar.

The grid in the Southwest is being stretched in summer during the daytime. That is where a massive solar expansion would be of use.

I’m all for investing in nuclear. But it isn’t going to happen with our two party system. Trump was our best chance and he was more interested in golfing and drinking diet coke.

Hydro is a minor contributor.

And if you are saying global warming will kill hydro, no, actually it will tend to produce more rain.

Hydro isn’t a minor contributor in the Southwest.

California/Arizona/Colorado/Nevada have all been waiting for that rain for years.

Lake Mead is at a record low.

https://apelectric.com/blog/lake-mead-continues-to-lose-water-jeopardizing-power-generation/

We could have 4 gigawatts of solar up well before then.

But we don’t need to, because we have all the oil and gas we need. What’s your hurry?

So you imagine yourself as an energy policy expert and you aren’t aware that Lake Mead is at a record low because the Colorado river is drying up?

Solar is perfect for small, remote applications, but it is idiotic in the extreme for large-scale power grids.

You are stuck in the 90s. Solar panels have improved their efficiency and don’t require those giant farms. The “free market” is currently favoring solar for new capacity:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50818

You sound like a good German citizen circa 1943 or something, saying we can’t change the laws, so we should just keep putting people on the trains to the camps.

There were no such laws on the books and the typical German citizen didn’t believe it was happening.

People have been making these same arguments about nuclear for years. It’s an endless loop because our two party ruling class simply isn’t interested. The Democrats are led by their feelings and Republicans serve the wealthy. The wealthy promote the idea that the “free market” can fix everything and dopey White men follow them like sheep. Trump was our last chance at nuclear expansion and he promoted tax cuts for the wealthy like a good little Republican.

Although greatly exaggerated, acid rain is a very real problem, although it has been reduced by about 50% over the past several decades. The culprits are oxides of sulfur and nitrogen released into the air by the burning of coal, diesel fuel and gasoline. Measures taken to reduce these oxides include:
1. Replacing some eastern coal with western coal, which is much lower in sulfur content,
2. The use of fluidized bed combustion in coal furnaces and wet scrubbers to remove sulfur from the waste stream,
3. The switch from coal to natural gas in electricity generation. Hydrogen sulfide and other acids have always been removed from natural gas at gas processing plants in the first stage of the process by an alkine absorption method (today being replaced by polymeric membranes),
4. The move toward low sulfur diesel fuel, and
5. Pollution control devices, such as catalytic converters on vehicles, which greatly reduce the quantity of nitrogen oxide emissions from cars.

As I stated above, the threat from acid rain, although real, was exaggerated. For example, most of the forest damage was done by insects, although greenies responded that one of the effects of acid rain was reducing the thickness of tree barks, making them more susceptible to insect attacks.

That’s indeed very difficult (and painful, even) to believe.

Don’t believe it, it’s totally wrong. Please see the information in my other replies on this thread.

They didn’t have to put flow restrictors on everybody’s faucets because squatemalens can police their own water usage.

The Russians are building mini-nukes on trucks for mobile power and on barges for places where there is no road access.

They had Siberia in mind but Wakanda on the Potomac might be a potential client. You guys on the left coast should look to China for your solution because in the ever-so-secret Pact that Xi and Putin signed (according to the Kagans and similar shites) your half of the country will belong to them.

https://thebarentsobserver.com/ru/node/95

This use of various forms of ‘desire’ in black lingo as somehow being relevant to incarceration is really interesting for those of us with no technical ability and thus an inclination to wonder about black psychology. I first saw it in an episode of The First 48 where a murder suspect being questioned thought it would be persuasive to tell the cop, “I ain’t even tryin’ to go to jail.”

‘It sounds like the problem is overpopulation. Maybe you should instead advocate for reducing the world population or at least limiting immigration. Rather than degrade the environment further.’

I do advocate for limiting immigration. In fact, I advocate halting it outright.

As to reducing the world’s population, were you volunteering? A population decline would be nice, and if we can make it happen without inhumanity, great. However, I see that as at best a very long term solution — not without unspeakable barbarity and/or totalitarianism on an unprecedented scale.

Meantime, nuclear power — lots of nuclear power. Practically speaking it is the only way to avoid degrading the environment further.

I would use this occasion to invite you to be a little humble the next time you feel like sounding off about the Real Science!™ of HBD, but such is the nature of Sailer’s Place that ineptitude has never deterred claims of scientific expertise.

My quick comment did set off some intelligent debate.

Your comment set off my Asshole Detector.

Lake Mead is at a record low.

So is Lake Shasta, and several others.

Not enough rain, or too many people.

Or both, perhaps.

fundamentalist Muslims looking for an opportunity to wreak havoc on their host nation.

The religious loons looking to wreak havoc on the West are not Muslim.

Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States on January 20, 2021.

Is there an evolutionary psychology angle to modern v classical architecture? A good analogy would be human faces: although there’s disagreement when judging the most attractive human faces, there are objective measures separating the least from the most attractive, with little disagreement. And these measures – primarily symmetry and sexual dimorphism – are rooted in human evolution.

I would argue architecture is the same, though our preference may be based on residual selection for other traits, as opposed to direct selection as is the case with physical attraction. Universal architectural preferences throughout time include ornamentation, a balance of consistency v difference (ie we like buildings of the same style but with each still having unique traits) and certain proportions. Just as postmodernism and its downstream philosophies have convinced us that there is no human nature, so too they have convinced us that there is no human aesthetic – I suppose this is a subset of human nature. So we have modern ‘art’, fat ugly Black women as models and drab, post-modern architecture.

In my hometown of Seattle, most of the core neighborhoods are made up of varying styles 1900-1910s era housing stock as the city was built out during the Klondike Gold Rush. The houses have ornamentation (buttresses, cedar shingles, cottage windows) and also a combination of consistent style and uniqueness (each house here is truly a ‘snowflake’). Sadly, the original housing stock is being steadily replaced with postmodern ‘boxes’ devoid of ornamentation and detail that all look the same and clash with the older homes. (Eventually the only nice thing we’ll have left is a 19th-century grid, plotted before cars and still good for Steve’s ‘pedestrianism’).

I hear cleaning of panels is a big issue that one’s not allowed to discuss. Can’t imagine a rain free desert helps.

One company pimping their cleaning system claims

Project managers are trying to maintain maximum production when running large-scale solar parks. However, getting the most out of a large-scale solar power plant is becoming increasingly difficult in harsh and dry locations. One of the most significant barriers to solar energy generation is soiling, accounting for up to 35% of panel outage. As a result, companies are looking at solar panel cleaning options with renewed interest.

Another Tipping point may be happening in Maine, where the Board of Licensure in Medicine is realizing that their bullshit charges around the covid scam may well end up destroying themselves rather than the appointed scapegoats.

Kunstler, batting 1000 of late, has it all.

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/american-inquisition/

As to reducing the world’s population, were you volunteering? A population decline would be nice, and if we can make it happen without inhumanity, great. However, I see that as at best a very long term solution — not without unspeakable barbarity and/or totalitarianism on an unprecedented scale.

I guess you’ve never heard of a “One-Child Policy” or a “Two-Child Policy.”

As to reducing the world’s population, were you volunteering? A population decline would be nice, and if we can make it happen without inhumanity, great. However, I see that as at best a very long term solution — not without unspeakable barbarity and/or totalitarianism on an unprecedented scale.

Voluntary population reduction would only cause further dysgenic reproduction in Whites.

Some intelligent White with a PhD in environmental science limits himself to one kid “for the earth” while some Nigerian has 10.

It’s stupid and should be a non-starter. The entire idea is based in gene denial.

The Russians are building mini-nukes on trucks for mobile power and on barges for places where there is no road access.

We already have those. We have mini nukes for remote areas and also small nukes in submarines and aircraft carriers.

The first nuclear reactor was built in America and was also a mini nuke.

Doesn’t change the political situation. California needs nukes more than anyone and they are instead building a 100 billion dollar bullet train that connects cow towns.

You guys on the left coast should look to China for your solution because in the ever-so-secret Pact that Xi and Putin signed (according to the Kagans and similar shites) your half of the country will belong to them.

What are you even talking about? Anyone that buys Californian land at this point is a fool. They are going to run out of water and power in the next 10 years unless they get a miracle amount of snowpack. Go have a look at pictures of Lake Mead.

The needed to add nuclear plants with desalination 20 years ago. It’s too late at this point. Massive areas of California will simply be abandoned. No more growing rice and almonds in the desert.

Jackie Kennedy called Malraux “the most fascinating man I’ve ever met.”

Says more about the “Camelot” era than about either of them!

Speaking of public dumb asses, Neil deGrasse Tyson, a Harvard-trained science and “science communicator” said, “Modern nukes don’t have the radiation problem … it’s a different kind of weapon than Hiroshima and Nagasaki … in the way that we used to have to worry about with fallout and all the rest of that. What you really have to worry about is being vaporized and after that, if you’re not vaporized, blown to bits by the shock wave. That’s a way bigger problem that you’re going to have.”.

“They’re tactical nukes — they’re just bigger versions of what a conventional attack would be …”

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/10/16/nukes-in-ukraine-no-probs-said-biden-ally/

I was at a gun show in deepest flyover country Saturday. I was kind of over dressed for the event. I was wearing a blue and white striped shirt with a button down collar.

Lot of camo. Saw a guy with an artificial leg that was camo.

The estate sues for defamation of a dead man. They must be monetizing his death.

The book says that it was Andre Breton (the surrealist) who got over-excited by the sight of the tin votive paintings in a Mexican church, started stuffing them into his jacket and tried to pass it off as a revolutionary act of “anti-clericalism.”

Now you make me feel guilty for wanting to take the Seasonal Missalette home, for the depiction of Mexican Talavera pottery on the cover.

Breton, who died in 1966, really calls to mind some ’70s pop star, but I can’t put my finger on whom– perhaps a pastiche of such figures:

California’s experience shows that it doesn’t take that much solar to shift your “net peak” hour to sunset, when in most places you are also often in a lull for wind. They’re running maybe 15% solar ober there and they have this problem bad.

The amount of reliable non-renewable capacity you need to meet that time-shifted and only slightly reduced peak is very high. And silly expensive – a lot of capital is tied up and idle for a very large portion of the time.

Or, you know, you can do what California did and order everyone to buy electric cars and then a week later order everyone to stop charging them.

Clever!

Abby Hoffman wore an American flag shirt as a guest on late night talk TV, but the image was masked. That was the manner of respect in th0se days. The flag shorts stuff may have been boosted in the first Rocky movie with the Black champ clowning in an Uncle Sam boxer’s outfit. Your not gonna lecture the Black champ, are you?

John Johnson wrote to me:

I’m aware of the limitations of solar.

The grid in the Southwest is being stretched in summer during the daytime. That is where a massive solar expansion would be of use.

We should explain to everyone who does not live in the Southwest that, from May through September, there is a very little rain and not even much cloudiness in a broad swath running from at least Arizona up to where I live in Sacramento.

And Arizona certainly needs extra power during summer in the daylight hours to power the AC units.

So I’ll grant you that solar may not be idiotic to handle the extra load in mid-day in Arizona.

But I grew up in the Midwest and, although the summer days can get pretty hot, there can be long periods of overcast and rainy days even in the summer, so solar just will not work in areas like that.

JJ also wrote:

[Dave[And if you are saying global warming will kill hydro, no, actually it will tend to produce more rain.

[JJ] Hydro isn’t a minor contributor in the Southwest.

California/Arizona/Colorado/Nevada have all been waiting for that rain for years.

Lake Mead is at a record low.

It’s a mistake to attribute that to global warming. There are huge annual and even decadal fluctuations in climate, quire aside from global warming.

Droughts, even very, very long droughts, happen naturally.

The reduction in acid rain led to farmers in my area discovering sulfur deficiencies in their soil tests. Fortunately, ammonium sulfate fertilizer (21-0-0), is 24% sulfur, but it’s a lot more expensive than urea nitrogen and makes the soil more acidic.

dumping limestone on the trees to neutralize the sulfuric acid….

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-controversially-still-bombards-forests-with-limestone-to-combat-acid-rain/a-17239231

In the 80s the Norwegians were very upset with Britain because our large coal-fired power stations in the north, like Drax, were supposedly causing acid rain in Norway.

One pol even wanted to stop sending the Christmas tree that is traditionally put up in Trafalgar Square.

The coal-fired stations were cleaned up at great expense and later mostly closed, but it turned out that the Norwegian acid rain was mostly caused by the diesel engines in Norwegian coastal shipping burning cheap and nasty high sulpher fuel.

Actually, in Arizona, the period from mid June through the end of September is the “monsoon” when we typically get half or so of our annual precipitation. Last year was a deluge and this year was better than average in many places throughout the state.

Traditionally, the common law recognized no cause of action for defaming a dead man.

But that is doubtlessly somehow a manifestation of White Privilege, so it will be summarily swept aside to allow some black guy to harass some other black guy with a lawsuit.

Progress!

I wonder how many of the “rich whites” he was interacting with were “fellow whites?”

Lake Mead is at a record low.

So is Lake Shasta, and several others.

Not enough rain, or too many people.

Or both, perhaps.

Not enough snowpack.

Urban use has actually remained consistent even though the population has grown.

California/Arizona/Colorado/Nevada have all been waiting for that rain for years

Lake Mead is at a record low.

It’s a mistake to attribute that to global warming. There are huge annual and even decadal fluctuations in climate, quire aside from global warming.

And where did I say it is must be global warming? Go ahead and hit Control-F and look for “global warming” and “Climate change” to see if I said either. You need to turn off Fox news. You are getting Fox brain where everything is viewed in two sides.

The reservoirs in the Southwest are at record lows and some of the dams on the Colorado could dead pool. It isn’t a one or two year anomaly.

Whether or not the cause is a natural period of drought or climate change doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t change the fact that we need a record amount of snowpack or there will be a shortage of power in the near future.

Hoover Dam could actually dead pool which at one time was unthinkable
https://www.ktnv.com/what-is-dead-pool-and-what-does-that-mean-for-the-hoover-dam

Makes more sense to roll out massive amounts of solar in the Southwest rather than wait for Democrats and Republicans to agree on a nuclear plan. They really don’t care and in fact when Newsom suggested extending the life of the Diablo Canyon plant he was rebuffed by his own environmental wing. I can’t stand the guy but he is at least starting to get the situation.

California’s experience shows that it doesn’t take that much solar to shift your “net peak” hour to sunset, when in most places you are also often in a lull for wind. They’re running maybe 15% solar ober there and they have this problem bad.

The problem is that there are too many people in California that turn on the AC in the summer and that problem actually pre-dates their solar investments.

They weren’t building power plants of any type and then had to start buying power from other states.

That is really the core problem and not indicative of them misunderstanding solar. Everyone knows the limitations of solar. But a massive investment would in fact reduce peak demand during the summer. California actually hasn’t invested enough in solar. They have some pretty big plants but the summers have gotten hotter and the drought is threatening the reliability of hydropower.

But this isn’t purely a problem of economics.

Solar and natural gas roll out a lot faster than politicians can argue. Natural gas is out and had creeping rates even before the current crisis. The plants go up pretty quickly but it was never a long term solution. This has been magnified by the Russian invasion but a divestment in natural gas was already occurring. Even 5 years ago my neighbors were cursing natural gas and replacing their appliances.

That leaves solar and yes it can be very useful when it comes to reducing demand during peak hours. California climate is moderate most of the year but in the sweltering summer people not only turn on AC but stay indoors and use other appliances.

What we will see is a situation where in fact people take themselves off the grid with solar. The wealthy will have their own solar panels and the poor will be expected to deal with higher bills. Democrats will pass more stupid bans and Republicans will tell us that the “free market” has spoken.

Or, you know, you can do what California did and order everyone to buy electric cars and then a week later order everyone to stop charging them.

They didn’t order everyone to buy electric cars.

The combustion car ban is dumb but doesn’t kick in for years and will probably be rescinded at the ballot. They don’t have enough electric cars to meet demand as it is.

It was just Gavin virtue signaling for his career but he changed his mind on running in 2024. I assume they found some pretty dirty on him. It is well known that he at least was cheating on his wife at the office.

‘…one child policy…’

(a) That was totalitarianism, (b) to what extent did it reduce China’s population? Has China’s population declined to — say — three hundred million?

In point of fact, outside of Black Africa, world population growth is slowing, stopping, or even reversing. It’s a pity that it rose so high to begin with, but I would argue there’s very little we can humanely do about that.

As to Black Africa, (a) don’t let ’em out, and (b) recolonize the place to establish nature preserves. I’d also advocate halting imports of food, vaccines, and drugs, but others might jib at that.

The reservoirs in the Southwest are at record lows and some of the dams on the Colorado could dead pool. It isn’t a one or two year anomaly.

Whether or not the cause is a natural period of drought or climate change doesn’t matter.

When you import massive numbers of new people, consumption of water and energy is going to increase.

But you go ahead and keep sticking your head in the sand about immigration.

Read up more on the Duck Curve.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve

A big solar deployment *can* shave some of the worst annual or decadal summer mid-afternoon peaks caused by hot conditions and heavy air-conditioning usage. I acknowledged that previously. But then you’re left with a significant number of not-quite-as-high-but-still-bad sunset peaks due to the Duck Curve effect. And you need lots of dispatchable capacity to meet those peaks.

The result is that you have to pay to build and maintain duplicative infrastructure – the solar farms and then the gas generators to back them up for the sunset peaks – and receive the meager benefit of avoiding some portion of turbine run-time and fuel costs and avoiding a small number of gas-fired “peaker” turbines which you’d keep in store for those unusually bad summer days. Net-net this is a big money loser and the main reason why California electricity costs are 50% to 75% higher than the prices you see in saner parts of the country.

For all I know there probably is some amount of solar capacity that *is* cost effective to install in Calif. and the SW to shave those really bad summer peaks, but it’s beyond clear that Calif. blew past that point a long time ago. I’d guess that cost-effective number is smaller than we’d naively assume.