For the first time in many years, I decided to skip the shows in Billings, MT which start tomorrow.
That was our show venue.
Had it hit 24 hours later, the parking lot would have been filled with wall to wall RV’s and campers – including me.
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
Small wonder Britain is nearly bankrupt;
Energy firms will receive thousands of pounds a day per wind farm to turn off their turbines because the National Grid cannot use the power they are producing.
[…]
The first successful test shut down of wind farms took place three weeks ago. Scottish Power received £13,000 for closing down two farms for a little over an hour on 30 May at about five in the morning.
Whereas coal and gas power stations often pay the National Grid £15 to £20 per megawatt hour they do not supply, Scottish Power was paid £180 per megawatt hour during the test to switch off its turbines.
…’cause that ain’t how they do things in Texas!
During these negative price periods, suppliers are paying [Electric Reliability Council of Texas] to take their power. Consumers (at least at the wholesale level) are getting paid for using power, and the more power consumers use the more they get paid. These prices are a big anti-conservation incentive. You could, as a correspondent put it to me, build a giant toaster in West Texas and be paid by generators to operate it.
Infrequently, a power plant might choose to bid below the short term marginal price in order to stay in the market and avoid shutting down. It can be economically rational for operators of less responsive generation units to offer negative prices in order for it to avoid the costs of shutting down for just a few hours and then start up again when load increases – think coal-fueled or natural gas steam turbine. When energy load is very low, near zero or negative prices can result.
This isn’t the cast in West Texas. Instead, the negative prices appear to be the result of the large installed capacity of wind generation. Wind generators face very small costs of shutting down and starting back up, but they do face another cost when shutting down: loss of the Production Tax Credit and state Renewable Energy Credit revenue which depend upon generator output. It is economically rational for wind power producers to operate as long as the subsidy exceeds their operating costs plus the negative price they have to pay the market. Even if the market value of the power is zero or negative, the subsidies encourage wind power producers to keep churning the megawatts out.
The world is being run by crazy people.
h/t Larry
That’s Not A Bulldozer
It’s a socialist grocery cart.
Reader Tips
Mahalia Jackson is considered by many to be the greatest spiritual singer of the twentieth century. She wasn’t as flashy, for lack of a better word, as many other gospel singers; she could certainly belt out with the best of them, but when she did so there remained a fine, rock-solid sense of control as she seamlessly shifted between power notes and an almost conversational style of delivery.
Those hearing Jackson for the first time may well get the feeling that they’ve heard her before; although she refused throughout her life to sing anything but spiritual songs, many popular musical artists (including Aretha Franklin, who Jackson mentored) speak of the great influence her music had on them. From an archived radio broadcast, here’s Mahalia Jackson singing Move On Up A Little Higher.
The comments are open for you Reader Tips.
Day Of Reckoning
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.
What We Really Need Is Anarchy
With a strong federal bureaucrat as a leader.
“Tyranny rises in the name of the little guy”
Published This Month In The Journal Of The Blatantly Obvious
Parents of teenage boys now have evidence to back up the claim they could be eaten out of house and home with a U.S. study finding 14-17 year-old boys will eat a lunch of 2,000 calories given the chance.
“Listen up, you punked, chumped boobs”
We looked at Obama not through your rose colored hallucinations, but through the cold, clear spectacles of reality. None of what he’s done since has surprised us one bit. In fact, many of us, myself included, predicted it even before his coronation by people like you. Yes, it’s nice that after a year and a half of horrible examples, the truth about him is finally beginning to penetrate your skulls. But why, for the love of god, couldn’t you see it at the beginning, when it was no less obvious, but your understanding of it might have done some good?
Via Instapundit.
Reader Tips
Tonight’s featured amusement en route to the Reader Tips thread is a slinky, laid-back song about the daughter of a poor family who eats the poisonous plant phytolacca americana, aka pokeweed. To safely prepare polk salad, which was traditionally eaten only by impoverished folks in the rural southeastern United States but is now considered a traditional, if uncommonly eaten, southern food, one must gather only the young leaves, before they turn red, and repeatedly boil and rinse them to remove their toxicity.
As for the gators, well, that’s another matter altogether. Here’s uber-laid-back southern swamp-bluesman Tony Joe White (who also wrote Rainy Night in Georgia) performing a song most famously covered by Elvis Presley, called Polk Salad Annie.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
Energy and “the relentless application of logic”;
In the most reader-friendly and engaging way possible, Bryce provides the reader with data — the inescapable, remorseless facts about our current use of energy and our future energy needs. For instance, he points out that a single coal mine in western Kentucky – the 35th largest in America — produces the equivalent of 75 percent of all the raw energy produced by every wind turbine and solar panel and solar cell in the country on a daily basis.
More on Power Hungry here.
Scratch A Leftist
Find a snake pit of murderous anti-Semites.
Fenton Communications, which has offices in Washington, D.C., New York, and San Francisco, signed two contracts last year with Qatar to develop “a communications action plan for an 18-month campaign” aimed at delegitimizing Israel and generating international support for the Hamas-run Gaza strip, documents filed with the Department of Justice show. The campaign, known as the “Al Fakhoora Project,” has a very visible Web presence that boasts of rallying 10,000 activists “against the blockade on Gaza.”
[…]
Testimony one of the commandos released later described how the “activists” shot this commanding officer in the leg and stabbed him in the stomach before tossing him off the deck. Other “activists” on the lower deck then dragged the officer inside, taking a knife to expand the wound in his stomach. “They cut his ab muscles horizontally and by hand spilled his guts out,” the soldier said. “When they finished, they raised him up and walked him on the deck outside. He was conscious the whole time…. ”
California: Not Taxed Enough!
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Pet Loving Liberal Journalist Christie Keith, June 2009;
Under the bill, every California pet owner must obtain a license to keep a dog or cat who hasn’t been sterlized, a license that can be revoked if the owner violates a number of animal laws — not just big ones like animal cruelty and neglect, but little ones, like letting your dog stand next to your car in a beach parking beach without his leash on. If that happens, you can be forced to spay or neuter your pet, unless a veterinarian certifies that the animal would “suffer serious harm or death if surgically sterilized.” If a pet owner can’t afford that option or refuses to comply, the animals can be seized and sterilized or even killed at taxpayer expense.
Wishful Money Tree Journalist Barrie McKenna, June 2010;
Carliose Lane, 37, an animal licensing official for the City of Los Angeles, knows the city, and the state, are in a budget bind. But he can’t understand why he and the city’s entire team of animal fee collectors must pay the price with their jobs. Who, he wondered, will collect the money that pays for the city’s shelters and pet control operations after he’s laid off on July 1.
h/t Quentin
The Oil-Soaked Ducks Only Whetted Their Appetite
In related Stupid Headline News…
h/t Sammy
It’s Easy To Be Liberal
…when the 40 year old guy is escorting someone else’s teenage son to the prom.
(Related*.)
Reader Tips
The soundtrack to tonight’s Reader Tips thread comes from yet another strong and remarkable Saskatchewan woman. Born to a Scots Irish mother and a father of Norwegian stock, Roberta Joan Anderson and her family moved between a series of small towns in Alberta and Saskatchewan before finally settling down in Saskatoon, which she still considers her home town. Serious childhood health problems, including a near-fatal bout with scarlet fever and, later, temporary polio-induced paralysis, stoked her inner life and her creative talents; determined to become a folk singer, she left at the age of 21 for Toronto, where she met and was briefly married to a folk singer by the name of Chuck Mitchell, whose name she kept throughout her professional career.
Spotlit in the dark surrounds of Wembley Stadium, just her and her mountain dulcimer, here’s Joni Mitchell singing Carey.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
Home Again
Returning from over two weeks of dog shows between Colorado and Idaho, it seems my home province has decided to pour out the welcome mat…
The photo was taken south of Swift Current this morning. I’m lucky I didn’t decide to cross at Harlem.
It was still dry in Montana yesterday, but not for long.
(Click for larger version)
Dryer times at the Canyon Crest restaurant, overlooking the Snake River Canyon in Twin Falls, ID. Every few minutes a base jumper would parachute from the bridge.
Thanks, as always, to our intrepid team of guest bloggers. Work obligations have meant a lot of international travel so far this year, and SDA simply couldn’t continue without them. If you haven’t already, be sure to offer your thanks in the comments.
Normal posting will resume in the coming hours.
But Glenn Beck is the Crazy One
“They’re calling … they’re calling for him to actually be a dictator or acts like a dictator. No thank you. No thank you,” … “I get in hot water for showing how we are expanding government so much that if a wrong guy gets in, we will have a dictator. But MSNBC can literally demand that the president start being a dictator and there’s nothing.”
… scratch a progressive …
Cultural Sensitivity
John Oakley is seriously entertaining the question of whether Canadian judges should give those who commit “honour” killings a break because they have different “cultural practices” and may not be aware of our norms and laws; defence attorney Lawrence Ben-Eliezer thinks judges should take these differences into consideration because we have “multiculturalism”.
… read on.
Speaking of cultural sensitivity … an oldie.
Update: Cultural sensivity in Progressia is never a two-way-street.
Update 2: Wente
I Miss W
… nostalgia for the good old days of Katrina is about to kick in:
Eight days ago, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal ordered barges to begin vacuuming crude oil out of his state’s oil-soaked waters. Today, against the governor’s wishes, those barges sat idle, even as more oil flowed toward the Louisiana shore.
“It’s the most frustrating thing,” the Republican governor said today in Buras, La. “Literally, yesterday morning we found out that they were halting all of these barges.”