They -- being without question barbarians -- think that the purpose of government is to pile money and other valuables in places where it is easy to steal.

They've got a morality -- quite an involved one, and certainly a live and growing one -- which says that doing this is an active good.

Tom

"Just because you're on their floor doesn't mean they're on your floor."

or

"The guys at the top get the elevator, and we get the shaft."

At three decades' remove, I don't remember a lot about the book, though there were discussions of interlocking ownership, cartelism, and all the other business conspiracy stuff that raging lefty Adam Smith told us would happen. I believe there was some discussion of decentralization, but what the West recognizes as urban consumer society doesn't have enough individual air rights to run itself on solar, and anything else requires at least fuel, usually distribution, and probably both.

Guess I'll go to the library tomorrow.

Standing on our own two feet's what made this country strong.
Collectivism, so they say -- well, we'll show them the Christian way:
Get together Saturday to save old Atkins' farm!

(from memory, without title as I can't find A Song of Gods Gone Mad). I think Fred missed a point about the difference between community and government - but the communitarians don't seem to allow for people who don't have a community, or issues that are larger than a community. And some just don't seem capable of believing that a corporation could misbehave -- cf some of the remarks after Ford was acquitted of saving money by not explosion-proofing Pintos, thanks to wangling itself a rural jury.

Maybe it takes somebody like Teddy Roosevelt - someone who is running on the nominally-right-of-center ticket and therefore can't be tarred with leftism / attempted class warfare / ... - to put a chokechain on private greed. (I'm old enough to remember saying that no Democrat could have gotten away with going to China as Nixon did.) But where do you find such a person when the Republicans have made an art of running to the outside in primaries and the center in the general election? (Not that I approve of the DLC's claim that several leading presidential-candidate Democrats are too left to be elected; I'm just wondering if my ass can stand another hard roll or the country another four years of the Knights of Ni and their Shrubbery.)

(Graydon - note that "their" definition of government doesn't work without convincing a lot of people that "they" are right. Remember that the modern version of Lincoln's some/all dictum ends "...and that's usually enough".

Not coherent, just tired -- and wondering how many cabbies will lecture me about the insanity of the U. S. "health" "care" system during Torcon (only one at Conadian, but I'm told it gets conservative west of Ontario...).

"Their", well, no, they're not trying to convince people about their actual objectives; they're trying to appeal to utterly unquantified emotional idiocies long enough to get an unbreakable grip on power. None of them have actually got up and said that what they're after is to rob everyone in the US sufficently blind that no one can ever threaten their social position ever again; one must crunch the numbers and investigate actions to recognize this, and far too many people in the US are incapable of believing in a quantified argument over a moral one.

So I'd say the Grid works pretty well here. We were forced to have privatisation of our electrical companies too (being a US fiefdom) but luckily the Grid the Labour party introduced in the sixties is still coping.

Gov. Richardson of N. Mexico, I believe--remember him, he might be president one day . . .

That's logic, but it doesn't always work. For instance, certain people who breathe the same air as everyone else have been historically notable for lack of interest in clean air laws.

CHip, at the time of which Teresa speaks, Constantinople was Greek. The area now occupied by the nation of Greece was in those days the boonies of the Greek state, the Byzantine Empire, and indeed was one of the areas to which the aristocracy fled when the Fourth Crusaders sacked and occupied Constantinople. (see "Epirus, Despotate of")

A CBNWTTL (Corporate brown nosers who think they're Libertarians) posted this article in full to the comment section:

http://www.capitalism.net/articles/News%20Report%20California's%20Blackouts%20Caused%20by%20Demons.html

In short: If you think that power suppliers colluded and schemed, you're irrational and irresponsible and probably believe in demons, because the Invisible Hand makes everyone in a market play by the rules and inevitably produces an optimum outcome.

I like to think of academics like this bozo as our equivalent of Soviet-Era Professors of Marxist-Leninism. They've got charts, books of theory, cadres of ideology-drunk grad students writing papers based on the canon, and politicians who invite them to fancy catered meetings.

But when it comes to understanding the real world, thier utterly hopeless.

*they are* utterly helpless.

And yes, I'm at least an octoroon libertarian.

I was quite surprised that day the power went out in the political units which bordered on various Great Lakes, to turn on the TV set and be told of a massive power outage; the protective circuitry worked for the parts of the power grid providing the power for me. I am duly grateful for this. What I don;t understand is why the protective systems failed elsewhere.... past experience in the world of Nuclear Blast Effects models, and the sorts of clamping on power systems that can shield against -that- sort of instantaneous electromagnetic pulse and field change, make me rather contempuous of power systems and operator that/who, in the wake of The Great Northeast Power Failure of 1965, following which there were -supposed- to be over- and under- voltage change condition failure protections put into the grids to prevent outages from ever propagating again, with modern technology and equipment, couldn;'t be bothered with the oversight and review and maintenance and operational implementations consonance with preventing cascade failures.

It's not that the knowledge and technology is lacking, it's the the will and effort haven;t been implemented/maintained uniformly.

Again, the power stayed on -here- -- that means that the operational processes and procedure to prevent a cascade failure, -worked- here. They didn't work in all the places where the power grid went down, that weren't the immediate vicinty of where the "initiating event" or evens, occurred.

Um, there was a relatively recent explosion at one of the power generations facilities in eastern Massachusetts. It didn't take the grid down, even though some of the power production facilities, literally blew up at a major
substation.

http://www.seacoastonline.com/2001news/1_4_sb2.htm

"EVERETT, Mass. (AP) One of the severely burned workers in an Everett electrical substation explosion and fire died at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, while two co-workers remained in critical condition..... The electrical service to about 3,800 customers in the Everett area was initially affected; service to about 400 had been restored by midafternoon"

http://www.arlingtonelectric.org/

"But just three hours after the utility leaders left [Swift's] office, a cable failure at an NStar substation in Everett caused nearly 6,000 customers in East Arlington, Somerville, and parts of East Boston, Charlestown, and Chelsea to lose power for up to two hours, according to NStar spokesman Michael Durand"

Hmm, thinking about power distribution a bit more.... a lot of the power in this area comes in from Hydro Quebec. If suddenly a major transmission line went down, what would happen... I suppose it depends on what the load-shedding protocols are, regarding what would get cut off immediatel, if there were the sudden drop in energy availble, compared to kilowatt-hour consumption demand. The term "graceful degradation" applies to how the load;s supposed to get shed -- that is, there would be customers suddenly getting their power cut, but those wouldn't because the distribution system went into massive cascade failure, but rather, load-shedding of customers that the supply of energy were insufficient to service, dropped in favor of customers of higher priority to provide service to. In an efficient market, the dropped customers would be ones paying low rates which provided that when it came time for load dropping, they were subject to unscheduled service interruptions, voluntarily, or cutbacks in delivered power and curtailments.

The situation that e.g. Cleveland was in, with critical services not having working backup power, appalled me. There seems to have been a dual or triple failure there -- not just the breaker system failing, but there being a failure to have emergency power generators taking over, and the failure of planning/implementaton for their to be working emergency generators for the water system.... Perhaps old Cold War EMP protection clamping equipment with lots of heavy copper in it, ought to be dropped on some people's heads.... or maybe an old flywheel from one of the generators at MIT that got the power grid rebooted back in 1965 the last time this sort of failure happened.