Links - 19th December 2019 (1)

Donald Trump isn’t to blame for this spate of mass shootings | Spectator USA - "The flagship news and current affairs program of the BBC wasn’t in any doubt about who to blame for America’s latest bout of mass shootings. Newsnight’s report began with footage of Donald Trump addressing the faithful at a rally...
O’Rourke described Trump as ‘stoking racism’ and claimed there’d been a rise in hate crimes in every year of his presidency... O’Rourke is referring to the number of reported hate crimes, which isn’t a robust measure because various American agencies have spent millions encouraging people to report hate crimes and making it easier to do so. To see whether the overall level has increased you need to look at whether unreported hate crimes have gone up or down in the same period. That exercise was carried out by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2018 which found that while reported hate crimes increased from 104,400 to 107,900 between 2016 and 2017, unreported hate crimes fell from 92,100 to 86,900, meaning the total number actually fell in the first year of Trump’s presidency. If you look at the past 10 years, the total level of hate crime is declining in the US, as is the amount of racism and anti-immigration sentiment, and Trump’s victory has done nothing to reverse that. Sociologists at the University of Pennsylvania published a study this year showing that Americans have become less inclined to express racist views since 2016, something true of Republican voters as well as Democrats, and a Gallup poll in June 2019 found 76 percent of Americans believe immigration is a good thing, the highest number to date. The same trends are visible in the UK: the population has become less racist and more pro-immigration since the Brexit vote. The liberal narrative about the toxic effect of the rise of far-right populism turns out to be nonsense. It’s incredibly hard to show that inflammatory rhetoric, whether on the right or the left, causes violent crime. All we know for sure is that violent crime across the world is declining, something painstakingly documented by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature."

The California Rule That Doomed PG&E: Inverse Condemnation - Bloomberg - "As PG&E Corp. hurtles toward bankruptcy, a once-obscure legal doctrine with an awkward name certainly bears a portion of the blame.Known as inverse condemnation, it holds California utilities responsible for wildfire damage caused by their equipment -- whether the companies acted negligently or not. The utilities spent most of last year pushing state legislators to change it, to no avail.Deadliest Wildfires In California History As Death Toll RisesDowned power lines lie on the ground during the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, on Nov. 13, 2018.Photographer: David Paul Morris/BloombergThe concept isn’t unique to California, but the way the state applies it is. Inverse condemnation usually applies to government agencies that damage private property while providing a public service. But courts in the Golden State have ruled that the doctrine also can be used against utilities, since they’re authorized by the state to provide a vital public service. That’s why California utilities can be held liable for damages from fires sparked by their equipment, even if they followed all of the state’s stringent safety rules. They can try to pass on those costs to ratepayers, but there’s no guarantee such efforts will get approved by the state’s California Public Utilities Commission."
Of course, it's sexier to only blame capitalism for the power cuts

How The Future Of California’s Power Grid Hangs On The Constitutionality Of ‘Inverse Condemnation’ - "The application of inverse condemnation to California utilities goes back to court decisions in the 1960s and ’70s. And for decades investor-owned utilities, like PG&E, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, were okay with the law, because the courts held that they could “socialize the burden” by hiking electricity rates enough to cover any unexpected costs, thus spreading the pain around evenly. When PG&E, for instance, had faith that regulators would let it socialize fire damage across its 16 million customers, it didn’t feel such a need to shut off power across a broad territory to lower the already remote likelihood of a fire breaking out. But a few years ago, the status quo changed... Among California’s investor-owned utilities, PG&E is most exposed, with half of its 70,000-square-mile territory in high-fire-risk zones, it has had three times more fires per mile of power lines than SCE or SDG&E... if the company can’t convince the court its rights have been violated? California lawmakers could come to the rescue and write a new interpretation of inverse condemnation, heeding the recommendation of this year’s Final Report of the Commission on Catastrophic Wildfire Cost and Recovery which found that:
“The current interpretation of inverse condemnation, holding utilities strictly liable for any wildfire caused by utility equipment regardless of standard of care or negligence, imperils the viability of the state’s utilities, customers’ access to affordable energy and clean water, and the state’s climate and clean energy goals; it also does not equitably socialize the costs of utility-caused wildfires.”"

California Republicans Propose Suspending Renewable Energy Mandate to Fund PG&E Infrastructure Upgrades - "Gallagher said last year 45 million metric tons of carbon was emitted by the wildfires. The year before it was 39 million metric tons. “That’s more than nine times California’s combined reductions achieved in 2016 and 2017,” Gallagher said. “We are literally losing when it comes to element policy. Why don’t we readjust this, because the power outages are the result.”Gallagher said that every dollar spent on the additional cost of renewable energy is one dollar that is not available to be spent on vegetation management, line insulation, “undergrounding” lines, and other grid-hardening measures.  “Dollars spent on forestry management have been found to do more to reduce carbon than other measures. Science shows that redirecting funding to forestry management gets us a better bang for our buck in carbon reduction,” said Gallagher.Gallagher said PG&E acknowledges that its infrastructure is so old, it can’t hold up to regular winds, much less high winds. They say it will take 10 years to complete all of the equipment and infrastructure upgrades. “That is totally unacceptable for the people and businesses of this state, to face 10 more years of power outages,” Gallagher said. “So, money needs to go into fast-tracking these upgrades.”Gallagher said PG&E is currently spending $2.4 billion annually on a legislative mandate to buy renewable power. At the same time, the company spent only $1.5 billion to update its century old infrastructure in 2017. “That’s a lot of money to put into infrastructure if we suspend the renewables mandates,” Gallagher said... Rather than discussing and debating the merits of such a temporary plan, Senate President pro Tempore Toni G. Atkins (D-San Diego) immediately issued a statement Tuesday refuting Nielsen’s and Gallagher’s plan"
The high cost of renewable energy

Power to almost 1 million Californians could be shut off over fire hazard - "A major electric provider in northern California began shutting off power to hundreds of thousands of customers to prevent power lines from sparking wildfires."
US infrastructure!

Larry Naritelli - California's mandated power outages make Teslas... - "California's mandated power outages make Teslas unusable. You can't make this up. It's reality."
And California's the future!

Why New York City Is On the Verge of Disaster - "Electrical blackouts are scary things. On July 13th of this year, New York City had a blackout that lasted for five hours. The subway stopped along several lines, people were trapped in elevators, Carnegie Hall and Broadway theaters shut down, and Jennifer Lopez was cut off in at her concert at Madison Square Garden.New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio blamed Con Edison, the New York utility that manages most electric power in the city. And why shouldn’t they? Just before the blackout, Con Ed president Tim Cawley embarrassingly said, “By any measure, we are the most reliable electric delivery system in the United States."The next weekend, it happened again, this time in Brooklyn... The storm was the immediate cause of the blackout, of course, but the storm took advantage of an electrical infrastructure weakened by years of poor investment choices. We know this because a few months after the storm, the Utility Workers of America, the union negotiating with Con Edison, released a report on the company’s operational practices, alleging that “Con Edison appears to operate its electric distribution system based on a policy of“run it until it fails.’” The details of Con Ed’s operations are ugly. The union noted a lack of redundancy in voltage equipment, smart meters paid for by the stimulus that were never turned on, and a lack of basic supplies. “Our members have worked on cable so old,” said the report, “that it has paper insulation, and on utility poles that were installed in the 1930s and remain in service today.”... The second big problem is the Hudson tunnel, the nation’s busiest railroad route, connecting New York City to New Jersey. The tunnel was built in 1910 and is on the verge of collapse. In 2009, as part of the stimulus, there was the money to rebuild what everyone knows is the most important piece of crumbling infrastructure in America. But then- New Jersey Governor Chris Christie killed it to attack Obama and promote himself as a Presidential candidate, Obama didn’t do anything about it, and Trump has refused to move forward on a new attempt. Concrete is falling apart in the remaining tube.In other words, a good chunk of New York’s transportation infrastructure could collapse, at any point... In 2011, an antitrust attorney did a report on how we overpay for government contracting. In service of ‘shrinking government,’ policymakers chose to set up a system where instead of hiring an engineer as a government employee for, say, $120,000 a year, they paid a consulting firm like Booz Allen $500,000 a year for a similar engineer. The resulting system is both more expensive and more bureaucratic... Most top tier management consulting is useless. It boils down to telling executives they should raise prices or avoid taxes in a fancy way, helping one faction in a corporation win an internal battle against another, or aiding a cowardly leader do something he or she knows she should do but is afraid of doing without outside validation. It’s highly overpaid make-work, which is why the movie Office Space resonated. This corruption wasn’t that bad until the 1990s, when Bill Clinton and Al Gore introduced their ‘reinventing government initiative,’ which transferred large amounts of government work to overpaid private contractors. They bragged the size of government didn’t grow, even as they were building a slothful, incompetent, and highly corrupt shadow government in place of the relatively functional public system they took over. This trend of offshoring wasn’t just Federal, but state-level as well. Twenty five years later we’re dealing with a government that can’t govern."

Anglo-Saxon studies group says it will change its name amid bigger complaints about where the field is going - "Anglo-Saxon studies “has always had problems, not unlike any other field,” independent scholar Mary Rambaran-Olm said this week. Yet “we seem to be one of the least equipped and slow to move ourselves into the 21st century with regard to tackling racism, sexism, inclusiveness, representation” and other issues, she added... ISAS -- whose members study the language, literature, history and culture of fifth- to 11th-century England -- chose its name upon its formation in the early 1980s. Yet it’s “long been recognized that the term 'Anglo-Saxonist' is problematic,” the advisory board said in its statement about the name change. “It has sometimes been used outside the field to describe those holding repugnant and racist views, and has contributed to a lack of diversity among those working on early medieval England and its intellectual and literary culture.”... Scholars' concerns go beyond ISAS. Last year, for example, saw a proposed boycott of the Western Michigan University Medieval Institute's International Congress on Medieval Studies, and a related push for more inclusive, self-critical sessions for the 2019 gathering.“Now is an urgent, contested time in medieval studies and in the world at large,” read an open letter of concern published by the BABEL Working Group, which supports the congress. “Responding to the field's evolution would mean acknowledging its heightened interest in the perspectives of scholars of color and creating space for these underrepresented voices.” The statement was signed by many individual scholars and along with the Medievalists of Color group.There was backlash to the letter: Richard Utz, chair of the School of Literature, Media and Communication at Georgia Institute of Technology, wrote in Inside Higher Ed that he supports diversity but rejected “the dotted line the letter of concern insinuates between the faculty of the Medieval Institute, on the one hand, and the racist neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, Va., on the other.” Scholars in a number of fields, including medieval studies, have said they're worried about the misappropriation of terms and symbols by white supremacist groups in recent years. And some of the “public interest (and some scholarship) is imbricated with some of the problematic traditions in the history of the reception of medievalia in postmedieval times (for example: nationalism, racism, toxic masculinity)”... Erik Wade, a visiting lecturer at Bonn, among others, has argued that the term 'Anglo-Saxon' has long been used to create and enforce racial hierarchies."
Liberalism infects another discipline
Somehow I've never seen complaints that academics in 'ethnic studies' are pre-dominantly 'ethnic'

The Poland Model—Promoting ‘Family Values’ With Cash Handouts - The Atlantic - "the program has proved intoxicating for large swaths of the population, one that helped garner PiS a decisive parliamentary victory in elections yesterday, winning over not just conservative Catholics, but an array of more unlikely fans, including leftists who felt that PiS, by favoring a model typically eschewed by right-wing parties, offered a compelling critique of a rigged system that left workers vulnerable to the predations of international and local elites.“They were listening to people like me; they were reading Thomas Piketty,” says Rafał Woś, a columnist for the socialist Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, referring to the French economist whose agenda-setting book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, argues that wealth could continue to concentrate in the hands of the rich. The book was endorsed by the PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczyński in 2015.The program’s design—free money, no strings attached—is similar to a universal basic income, and marks a sharp departure from the paternalistic attitude of previous governments, which viewed poor families as “incapable of being in charge of their own money”... The universality of the program has even won it grudging plaudits from some feminists"

The Secret to Cutting Government Waste: Savings by a Thousand Cuts - The Atlantic - "Such reviews routinely identify annually recurring savings totaling roughly 5 percent of total operating spending... By unscrewing the tiny light bulb behind the big plastic display that covers almost the entire front of most soda machines -- which serves no purpose but to make the can of Coke look more delicious -- Texas saved about $200,000 a year in energy costs... So there are many places to look to reduce costs without threatening public services. One cardinal rule: Look for how to do better rather than simply how to cut. Cuts are easy to find -- but they don't necessarily save money. Every state in the country could cut its budget by one-quarter or more overnight by eliminating Medicaid -- but taxpayer subsidies to hospitals for uncompensated care would skyrocket. Reducing governmental costs doesn't necessarily involve doing less; usually, it involves doing better. The biggest impediment to "doing better" is that those in government -- as well as advocates and critics -- tend to think in terms of programs and functions that can, or might have to be, cut. To most, that's what government consists of. But this view of government -- and of how to trim government budgets -- is reminiscent of an old New Yorker cartoon, in which a father tells his family, gathered around the kitchen table, "Because of the recession, we're going to have to let one of you go." No family, of course, would really approach a tight budget that way, but that's pretty much how most discussions of government cuts proceed -- cutting budget "line items" wholesale... It's an old adage: What gets measured gets done. And most budgets don't identify, track, and measure wasteful practices. That's why the waste occurs.What should be cut is what's not in the budget. Another rule of thumb is that most of these savings will not be found in particular agencies or administrative units. While some large standard departments like health, human services, corrections, and transportation are reliable producers of inefficiencies, the real savings come in government-wide functions that affect all departments and, as a result, tend to be budgeted by none. Personnel and procurement functions are always good places to look for improvements to save money (remember Rule No.1: improve performance, savings will follow); utility costs like energy and phones also tend to be neither well-monitored nor cheap. These are not what most people think of when they think of government waste and inefficiencies -- but they are where most of the money disappears, just like in most organizations and probably your own household budget... the first place to go is to public employees themselves -- the very people the public likes to imagine as lazy, stupid sinkholes for tax dollars. In fact, most public employees are conscientious and can tell you exactly how to make government work better and more efficiently. Unfortunately, in the current climate of disdain, they're rarely asked... Some might say that shows just how inefficient "government" is, but that misses the real point: Every human organization -- including governments and businesses -- has inefficiencies"