Utopia, you are standing in it!

In July I wrote about a statement that the Department of English put on its webpage—a statement about social justice that, I thought, contravened the University of Chicago’s Kalven Principles by allowing an official unit of the University to espouse and adhere to ideological principles. (Kalven encourages individual faculty to state their views, but forbids the University, with a few narrow exceptions, from adhering to any political, moral or ideological principles.) Here’s the statement, which was not an expression of individual opinion but an official position of the faculty of the English department. There are no signatures, and no dissenters.

This, I thought, violated the Kalven dictum that the University must take no political positions lest it lead to a chilling of speech and quashing of free discourse—one of the pillars of the University of Chicago. Departmental statements are equivalent to official University statements because departments are not only official…

Having deliberately sidelined its reliable gas and nuclear plants, California is now stuck with sunshine and breezes. The results are as predictable as they were avoidable. Wind and solar obsessed policymakers have been begging the Feds to throw California a lifeline.

The Department of Energy has responded to the Californian government’s desperate pleas by declaring a state of emergency, thereby permitting the embattled state to fire up thousands of diesel generators and to even hook up to ships at harbour to get the benefit of the power they generate on board, too.

The Feds Just Threw a Lifeline to California During Energy Crisis
Townhall
Bronson Stocking
6 September 2020

The Department of Energy (DOE) announced on Sunday that Sec. Dan Brouillette, in response to an urgent request from the state of California,  issued a Section 202 (c) emergency order to help prevent California’s already-faltering power grid from being completely overwhelmed.

The Hornsdale Power Reserve is about to get an upgrade. The Hornsdale Power Reserve is a grid-sized battery build by Tesla in South Australia. It has a capacity of 100 MW and can deliver 129 MWh. I did a series on it back in March, starting with the claim that this battery could replace natural gas for peaking and gap-filling (which is not the case). The upgrade will add a capacity of 50 MW and it can deliver 64.5 MWh.

The pv-magazine article points out that the additional capacity will be put to use for frequency control and inertia. I could understand that, the main function of the original 100 MW battery is already frequency control and this service generated quite some money for its owner. There was also this claim (my emphasis):

ARENA, which contributed an AU$8 million grant toward the expansion, also believes the upgraded battery

California’s sweeping blackouts are a fair indication of what happens when sound engineering gets trumped by woolly-headed ideology. An obsession with intermittent wind and solar has left millions of Californians sweltering in the dark this summer.

With the blackout that struck in mid-August, officials blamed the “unexpected loss of a 470-megawatt power plant Saturday evening, as well as the loss of nearly 1,000 megawatts of wind power,” the San Jose Mercury News reported. In addition, cloud cover over the desert meant solar energy was in short supply. For more see: Renewable Energy Reckoning: Wind & Solar Power Obsession Leaves Millions of Californians Sweltering In The Dark 

Their witless politicos have doubled down on the delusion, meaning that the disaster has a long way to run, yet.

Cory Bernardi was, until recently, a Senator for South Australia – a State equally obsessed with wind and solar, so Cory knows…

Update September 13, 2020:  This reprint of a post two years ago shows nothing has changed, except for the worse.

It is often said that truth is the first casualty in the fog of war. That is especially true of the war against fossil fuels and smoke from wildfires. The forests are burning in California, Oregon and Washington, all of them steeped in liberal, progressive and post-modern ideology. There are human reasons that fires are out of control in those places, and it is not due to CO2 emissions. As we shall see, Zinke is right and Brown is wrong. Some truths the media are not telling you in their drive to blame global warming/climate change. Text below is excerpted from sources linked at the end.

1. The World and the US are not burning.

The geographic extent of this summer’s forest fires won’t come close to the aggregate record…

UPDATE: Over at his website, my Chicago colleague Brian Leiter, a philosopher and legal scholar, has a good take on Hume. An excerpt:

What’s bizarre about the mass delusion now gripping the Anglophone world, even outside the U.S., is that no one yet knows whether George Floyd was killed because he was Black, rather than poor, marginalized, and non-cooperative (which cops hate!), the factors that actually explain most police killings (race is largely an epiphenomenon).

And what’s even worse is that none of this has anything to do with Hume.

Hume was a man of his time in some ways, but we don’t read him to figure out whether we should invest in the slave trade.  We read him because he transcended his time, because he touched the fundamental questions about what it is to be a human being in the world:  what do we know, what…

Today appears to be Get Off My Lawn Day, for there are multiple acts of cancellation underway. I call them to your attention. Not that any of us can do anything about this, for, as I’ve said, wokeness is a one-way ratchet—at least for now. Nobody dares oppose these unhinged intitiatives for fear of being called a racist, and so the demands lumber over rationality like a big, dumb juggernaut.

According to the article below in the Torygraph—and echoed in the Daily Fail—the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) is undergoing a woke housecleaning, involving the cancellation of George Bernard Shaw, a call for changes in how English is used, and a call for halting the production of Restoration comedies. In general, the students are trying to “decolonise the curriculum” and enact “root and branch structural reform to end institutional racism at RADA.” (RADA has already admitted that…

Zut alors! Could it be, that this earlier version of an Agatha Christie novel is now on assorted streaming TV channels? Taking advantage of the fact that this story will return to theaters under the care of Sir Kenneth Branagh anon?

If I was a gambling man, I’d put money on the fact that this 1978 Christie adaptation, the second starring the great Peter Ustinov, was the one that inspired Branagh and the studio then-known at 20th century Fox to revive Hercule Poirot and this old-fashioned whodunit franchise.

“Murder on the Orient Express” is the most famous Dame Agatha title, at least as far as the big screen goes. It’s a good story to stuff with an all-star cast and introduce Christie’s obnoxious, all-seeing/all-knowing sleuth and gourmand, a “proof of concept” franchise opener.

That was good enough for Ustinov and director Sidney Lumet and Paramount back in 1974, and…