Another snowfall – Coping with a power crisis, Texas style – Ted Cruz and Greg Abbott — Ri Sol Ju, woman of mystery – Evening statistics
It’s been a rather uneventful day here, since I waited indoors and did various household chores until the falling wintry mix subsided. It produced about a half-inch of mixed snow and ice on the walkways, which I cleared in the afternoon. It may be asked why I bothered, since more snow will fall overnight. But the mingled snow and ice was just barely removable; whereas if I had left it alone it would have melted and refrozen overnight, making it much more difficult to clear away on the following day. Afterwards I went out for a bit; it was not overly cold and the snow and ice were not very slippery, at any rate for those who, like myself, were wearing hiking boots. Sometimes the sidewalks made for slow progress on account of the amount of slushy mix flung upon them by the snow plows that cleared the roads. Two more snowfalls are expected next week, but the temperatures will be warmer and the accumulation will probably not amount to much.
Conditions were much less uncomfortable here than they have been in Texas. Power has for the most part been restored after three days of continual outages, but many residents are still facing water disruptions. Ted Cruz has responded to the emergency by rushing south and west from the capital to aid his beleaguered fellow-Texans – except that he somehow overshot his destination by a few hundred miles and wound up in Cancun instead. And what a comfort it must be for those people coping without power, heat, light, or water to know that their Senator is safe and warm and comfortable basking on the sunlit beach and sampling the seafood and Mexican cuisine from the numerous restaurants along the Playa Tortugas!
Governor Abbott has been yet another tower of jello in this crisis. When millions of Texans were without power on Tuesday night, Abbott blamed reliance on renewable fuels (wind and solar) for the loss of power. He back-pedaled on this assertion later on, it was pointed out that nearly 70% of Texas’s power comes from fossil fuels. It is true that many of the wind turbines in Texas became inoperable as a result of the freezing temperatures, but that it is because they are not winterized to the same degree as they are in states with colder weather. Iowa, for example, gets about 40% of its power from wind turbines, and the state has not experienced any of the outages that the state far to its south is undergoing. But this lack of winterization applies to all of the other energy sources as well, which is why numerous power stations powered by oil and natural gas have failed likewise. So now Governor Abbott is blaming the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) for its failure to winterize its equipment. He has conveniently forgotten that such winterization was proposed before during his administration and was dropped after the state decided that it would be too costly. No matter; someone to blame must be found, and obviously that someone cannot be himself.
Ri Sol Ju, Kim Jong-Un’s wife, has made her first public appearance in over a year, attending a concert with her husband that commemorated the anniversary of the birth of Kim Jong Il. Her disappearance had led to numerous speculations about her state of health and even about whether she was still alive. It is possible that she was shielded from public exposure on account of pregnancy. No one can certain even about the number of children that this couple has. South Korea’s National Intelligence Service believes that there are three, but very little is known about them.
Today’s statistics as of 10:00 PM (yes, I collected them a little later than usual) – # of cases worldwide: 110,834,149; # of deaths worldwide: 2,452,511; # of cases U.S.: 28,523,524; # of deaths; U.S.: 505,309.