For those wondering what the causes are of Texas blackouts, @JesseJenkins is doing a really good real time analysis of generator capacity and operation. (Short story: we have a natural gas problem in TX). A few additional thoughts to add:

1/ As Jesse notes, natural gas is somewhat unique in that it is both a power plant fuel and a home heating fuel. When cold weather comes, regulators bias in favor of heating rather than power generation.
2/ New England - a region that is both cold and has long been more reliant than others on natural gas for power generation - has had to grapple with this for a long time.
3/ In most of the country, the tightest times for power markets are during hot summer days when demand peaks to run all that AC. In New England, the tightest times are often cold winter days when supply gets constrained as the gas is redirected to heat
4/ Texas isn't used to planning for cold snaps, but they are gas-dependent on the power grid. So they are, in essence, acting like New England right now.
5/ So far, this is just what Jesse said but in more tweets. But there's also another factor at play that bears mention: reliability guidelines.
6/ If you are an electric distributor or provider with responsibility for a given electric control region, you are required to maintain exceptionally high reliability standards. Those include but are not limited to...
7/ ...making sure you can continue to meet demand if your largest single generator goes down and designing a system that provides electricity with 3 - 5 9s reliability (e.g., 99.9% - 99.999% online). See here for details: https://t.co/uWZXJm9jEB
8/ But our gas grid has no equivalent standard. Nor for that matter does our coal delivery infrastructure. That means that as grids become increasingly reliant on natural gas supply, the gas supply infrastructure becomes the reliability bottleneck.
9/ Texas is particularly exposed to this because it is a stand-alone grid. (The US "grid" is really 3 grids: Eastern, Western and Texas. AKA, ERCOT.) https://t.co/CnQcvbcOZW
10/ So while gas dependency + lower pipeline supply reliability standards have the potential to create problems everywhere, Texas' grid structure makes them uniquely vulnerable. The cold snap exposed that vulnerability.
11/ Anyway, that's all I got on this for now. But follow @JesseJenkins for continuing analysis on this week in TX. I definitely will! /fin

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Tomorrow, January 6th, MAGA chuds, Proud Boys, and white supremacists are planned to descend on Washington D.C. to contest the election. Among them will be NSC-131, a New England based neo-Nazi organization. Let's welcome them by saying hi to one of their members, Eddie Stuart!


Edward Stuart, from Chester, New Hampshire, has been a member of Nationalist Social Club (NSC) since the very beginning and is a staple participant in their actions. He is known in NSC chats as "Carl Jung" and is well connected in the New England Nazi scene.
2/


NSC-131 is a neo-Nazi group that was started in Massachusetts in early 2020 by Chris Hood. You can learn more about NSC and it's members in these threads:


Eddie describes his ideology as "Esoteric Hitlerism" which is an occult form of Nazism that literally worships Adolf Hitler as a god, or, specifically, as an incarnation of the Hindu God Vishnu. Here is Ed holding the RigVeda with some of his occult Nazi pals. Interesting Ed!
4/


Much of this ideological insight was gained from Eddie's Twitter, where he originally used his "Carl Jung" persona and reposts explicit neo-fascist content and racist memes. In one edited picture, Eddie can be seen at an NSC event in late June 2020 holding a Nazi Sonnenrad flag
5
Brief thread to debunk the repeated claims we hear about transmission not happening 'within school walls', infection in school children being 'a reflection of infection from the community', and 'primary school children less likely to get infected and contribute to transmission'.

I've heard a lot of scientists claim these three - including most recently the chief advisor to the CDC, where the claim that most transmission doesn't happen within the walls of schools. There is strong evidence to rebut this claim. Let's look at


Let's look at the trends of infection in different age groups in England first- as reported by the ONS. Being a random survey of infection in the community, this doesn't suffer from the biases of symptom-based testing, particularly important in children who are often asymptomatic

A few things to note:
1. The infection rates among primary & secondary school children closely follow school openings, closures & levels of attendance. E.g. We see a dip in infections following Oct half-term, followed by a rise after school reopening.


We see steep drops in both primary & secondary school groups after end of term (18th December), but these drops plateau out in primary school children, where attendance has been >20% after re-opening in January (by contrast with 2ndary schools where this is ~5%).

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