I am sending this to a number of folks we work with in the USFS and California State Parks.  This generator ban has a potentially high impact on public campgrounds as many public campgrounds have no electrical connections for RV's.  The danger is that with this ban, and without investment on public lands, public campgrounds will lose relevance to a lot of the recreating public.  The recent upsurge in interest by new demographics in camping in the outdoors will almost certainly be reversed.

For years -- and some of you are probably tired of hearing me on this -- I have been arguing that the #1 improvement that public campgrounds should be considering is electrification.  I fully understand that agencies like the USFS tend to have an immediate negative reaction to such proposals, fearing that it would over-develop the wilderness.  But I argue the opposite -- electrification would make campgrounds MORE rather than less natural.

The reason for that is generators.  The public does not want to be away from electricity altogether.  If nothing else, they rely on their phones for a myriad of things -- mapping, emergency communications, information about the recreation area, etc;  some have medical equipment that runs at night; and in many locations it is really uncomfortable to go without air conditioning.  But generators are noisy and an environmental mess.  It is for this reason that I have been an advocate for electrifying public campgrounds to return them to the quiet of nature without any significant changes in their viewscape (just an extra pedestal at every site).

With the potential ban on generators, the need for this sort of investment is even greater.  For all the reasons mentioned above, people simply will not come to the campgrounds in their RV without any option for electricity.  I am not sure how we would staff camp hosts for sites with no power when generators are banned.

I understand that many public agencies do not have the budget for this.  But our company has been providing private capital for exactly this sort of upgrade on public lands for years.  Most recently, we have upgraded 7 large TVA campgrounds from primitive to having power and water at every site.  In the process occupancy has risen from 40% to nearly 100% at all these campgrounds, so we get a solid return on the investment if given a long enough contract length. To do this sort of work, we don't need any guarantees or repayments systems such as those in the National Park Service.  All we need is sufficient time, generally 20 years, on the permit or contract to recoup the investment.

Many of you have permit or contract re-bids coming up in the next few years.  I encourage you to consider using this opportunity to try to attract private investment to some of the campgrounds you operate.  It does not have to be all of them -- there will always be room in the large portfolio of public campgrounds for a range of facilities from primitive to more developed.

Over the years I have seen a number of creative ways of doing this sort of thing, and I have worked with all of your agencies for years and understand your processes and restrictions.  Please let me know if I can be of help.

Fauci went on national TV this morning, subject to the usual adoring media attention and softball kid glove treatment, to discuss what has been labelled the Omicron variant (apparently selected because it is not the name of a Chinese leader and because it is an anagram for "moronic").  If Fauci were a real scientist he would have said something like this:

Respiratory viruses mutate all the time -- that is in fact why we have to create a new flu vaccine every year and why those vaccines often suck (because these mutations are hard to predict in advance).  We have known about the Omicron variant for like a week.  We have zero data on its transmissibility or the seriousness of its symptoms.  Since I don't believe anyone has died of it, we of course have no data on death rates, though preliminary reports form the South African virologists who first identified the variant are that most symptoms have been mild.

Our general expectation is that all respiratory viruses will mutate, and in general they mutate towards more transmissibility but less serious symptoms.  The history of COVID has seen a variety of variants, none of which have proven to be any more dangerous than the last.  Upticks recently in cases counts which have been blames on Delta are more likely just reflective of the seasonal pattern of this virus (all respiratory viruses show a seasonal pattern).

Looking back, most of the panic around the Delta variant was misplaced, as the variant appears to be --despite early overwrought fears -- no more deadly than other variants and no more or less transmissible to the vaccinated.  We shall observe Omicron over the coming weeks to see if any new responses are required as we develop actual data (rather than general fears) about the variant, but early hopes are that the virus may have mutated so much that it is less likely to send people to the hospital or to the grave.

Ha ha, as if.  What he actually said was this:

Regarding mandates, Fauci stated that lockdowns and a federal vaccination requirement should be the focus of overcoming the omicron variant.

“Everything is on the table,” responded Fauci during a separate media appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press.

He added, “This is a clarion call … If you’re not vaccinated, get vaccinated. If you’re fully vaccinated, get boosted. Get the children vaccinated also. We now have time. Thank goodness that the South Africans … were completely transparent.”

Fauci also appeared on CBS’ Face the Nation to discuss critics of his expertise dealing with COVID, including Republican Senator Ted Cruz. Apart from dubbing himself the face of science, Fauci diverted the conversation to the January 6 event at the Capitol to questionably stick it to Cruz.

Because most published studies on viral transmissibility and deadliness typically base their findings on one week of anecdotal data, as well as arguments about the political activities of Senators from Texas.  That's clearly science, and all you morons that do not have a house on Martha's Vineyard just need to obey.

One of the interesting things we have seen over the last 2 years is that there are a group of largely apolitical people who are ready on a moments notice to race to the scene of a protest or riot and join in and loot.  Similarly, there are political leaders today who jump at the slightest chance to layer more restrictions on their citizens at the slightest excuse.  This was a headline several days ago, when there was absolutely no way on Earth any of these politicians knew if this new variant was dangerous or not.

Update:  Wow, the NY Times is going soft.  I received this bit of rationality and reasonableness in my Times morning brief this morning, from David Leonhardt:

The public reaction to new Covid-19 variants has followed a familiar cycle. People tend to assume the worst about two different questions — whether the variant leads to faster transmission of the Covid virus and whether it causes more severe illness among infected people.

The first of those worries came true with the Alpha and Delta variants: Alpha was more contagious than the original version of the virus, and Delta was even more contagious than Alpha. But the second of the worries has largely not been borne out: With both Alpha and Delta, the percentage of Covid cases that led to hospitalization or death held fairly steady.

This pattern isn’t surprising, scientists say. Viruses often evolve in ways that help them flourish. Becoming more contagious allows a virus to do so; becoming more severe has the potential to do the opposite, because more of a virus’s hosts can die before they infect others.

It is too soon to know whether the Omicron variant will fit the pattern. But the very early evidence suggests that it may. Unfortunately, Omicron seems likely to be more contagious than Delta, including among vaccinated people. Fortunately, the evidence so far does not indicate that Omicron is causing more severe illness...

Absent new evidence, the rational assumption is that Covid is likely to remain overwhelmingly mild among the vaccinated (unless their health is already precarious). For most vaccinated people, Covid probably presents less risk than some everyday activities.

Good!  Almost two years too late, but it is good to see at least one corner of the media dialing down the panic knob.  Unfortunately, what you do not yet see in the high-profile media is them taking the obvious step -- if they really believe this, then why aren't they calling out political leaders for their rapid over-reactions to Omicron?

I had two reactions I don't see written very many places:

1. The law profession strikes me as a particularly confrontational profession, and with the exception of perhaps law enforcement and first responders, one in which it is almost impossible to shelter oneself from a wide variety of craziness.  So how is Yale Law possibly doing its job to train the next generation's best and brightest attorneys when they actively support the kind of mental and emotional fragility that led to the complaints?  If we take the complainers at their word, they are hiding under their bed because they got an email party invitation sponsored by a group they don't agree with.
2. Top attorneys frequently find themselves in high stakes negotiations where their opponents try to bluff and bully them.   On this dimension, the student who refused to be blackmailed by Yale appears to be the best prospective attorney of the bunch.  I would certainly hire him.

Of course, a more likely explanation for the over-reactions among a very small number of students to the email is that Progressives have discovered that feigning more extreme fragility than that of a fainting woman in a Victorian novel is a useful tool for exercising power because university authorities (and increasingly a broader range of authorities) will act as the useful idiots who can be manipulated by such claims.

Update:  Of course then I screwed something else up.  Some sort of problem with php vs. mysql versions.  Anyway, fixed now, hopefully

The difference between mere authoritarianism and totalitarianism is often hard to explain to people, and some want to use the terms interchangeably.  But I think this distinction is particularly important today, as we see the American Progressive Left tilting over from authoritarianism to totalitarianism.  The University of Chicago is actually helping us to learn the difference.

For the long answer on this distinction, I recommend the work of Hannah Arendt.  She has done more than anyone in really defining the terms and nature of totalitarianism.  The history of her reception in this country is an interesting one.  During the 1950s, in the midst of the Cold War and with the Nazi plague still fresh in everyone's mind, her work resonated with a lot of people.  But as we moved into the 60's and Marxists began gaining power in many universities, academia turned against her in large part because they didn't like how she equated Nazism and communism.  Out of favor by the 1980s in colleges that still wanted to whitewash Stalin, something interesting happened.  As the Berlin Wall fell and eastern European intellectuals began looking for a framework to describe their experience under communism, they rediscovered Hannah Arendt as someone whose work resonated with their own observations.

Anyway, shortcutting a lot of complexity, the way I describe the difference simply is that authoritarians just want compliance, while totalitarians want enthusiastic belief -- belief that is ramified down from politics to the smallest elements of daily life.

So in the current context of COVID, authoritarians don't give a crap if you believe in masks or not, they are happy if you wear them when they demand.  But totalitarians....

For the second year in a row, the University of Chicago forced students to sign a “Required COVID-19 Attestation,” a lengthy document that demands students click “I agree” to a number of statements and rules regarding COVID-19.

UChicago, which last year was named America’s “No. 1 free speech campus,” is openly defying its commitment to academic freedom because the attestation goes far beyond forced compliance to inane COVID mandates — it actually thought-polices students.

Failure to sign my university’s attestation by last Monday meant your student ID was deactivated and you were banned from all university facilities, barring you from attending class.

In order to attend class, students are forced to “agree” in writing to the assertion that “COVID-19 poses a serious public health risk.” Students like me must also “agree” to the claim that “my failure to follow the [COVID-19] requirements,” like wearing a cloth over my mouth, “may endanger myself and/or others.”

Similarly, students who receive a religious exemption from UChicago’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate are forced to sign their names below a statement reading, “I acknowledge that I may be placing myself and others at risk of serious illness should I contract a disease that could have been prevented through proper vaccination.”

Authoritarians demand you wear the mask.  Totalitarians demand that you love the mask.

Along with everyone in the country, we watched with horror though via direct line-of-sight from the penthouse hotel balcony of our wealthy investor.  What we did not know, but would learn over the following months, was how many friends we had that died that day, not surprising in retrospect given that my wife and I were both about a decade out of Harvard b-school and many of our college friends worked in the WTC.  Perhaps our closes friend who died was actually just in for a random training session, a dumb class he did not really even want to attend.  I have thought about that often since, and it has made me more likely to resist meetings and trips that are worthless but where there is pressure to show up (do the Germans have a word for that?)

The rest of the day we spent interacting with jittery people on the street who would literally flatten on the ground when a military jet flew low, something that happened a lot that day.  At one point a wall of humanity covered in dust made it to our part of the island, refugees who were in and around the buildings when they collapsed.  The scene that night in Manhattan was weird, like a post-apocalyptic Charlton Heston movie.  Never before or since in my lifetime has Manhattan ever been so quiet at night.  Everyone was leaving the island, and no one was being allowed to enter.  We finally found a place to eat on Broadway near Times Square, where a car would drive by maybe once every 5 minutes.

Fortunately for us we found a friend wandering around Central Park who lived out West too and had the last rent car in Manhattan.  We drove all the way across the country, though the first bit was the hardest.  Out of some weird security concern, we were told that cars were only be allowed to exit the island via one road, but they could not tell us which one it was.  We circumnavigated Manhattan getting this same response at each bridge and tunnel, until someone finally told us the only way out was up north via the GW bridge.  When we got to the Jersey side, it again looked like a zombie movie or something, with miles and miles of cars stopped coming into the city and empty roads going out.

[as a side-note to this, growing up in the 70's I was treated to any number of movies that portrayed Harlem as some kind of blighted no-go zone to be avoided by all white people -- but the Harlem of the 2001 was just another place, certainly not wildly prosperous but not necessarily to be avoided either, certainly better looking than the Robert Moses-destroyed Bronx.  I appreciated the opportunity to have my perceptions changed.  Though to be fair in the 1970's Central Park was portrayed as a no-go zone too and today is is one of my favorite urban spaced in the world].

The Ken Burns series on New York has a good add-on episode entirely dedicated to the WTC -- from conception to construction to destruction, with a high-wire crossing in the middle (if you have not seen the documentary Man on Wire about this, it is well worth the view).  I have spent time in the buildings, and I think they had a mixed legacy architecturally.  I thought the interiors sucked, with long waits for elevators and crappy views via too-small windows (the exception being Windows on the World, for a while the highest-grossing restaurant in the world and a place I was fortunate enough to experience once).  The exteriors worked for me as sculpture, and I thought they were beautiful especially from a boat on the water.

One other thing on a related note -- the ACLU is a long-time strong supporter of abortion rights.  As such, this position in their recent NYT editorial supporting forced vaccination seems counter-productive to their cause in the extreme: "we all have the fundamental right to bodily integrity and to make our own health care decisions. But these rights are not absolute. They do not include the right to inflict harm on others."  In the past, the absolute sanctity of one's body has been the bulwark in protecting abortion rights.  Other people's opinion on whether the fetus is a human life or not were declared irrelevant because "my body is sacred, period."  But if the body is no longer sacred if and when the government declares another human being is being harmed, how is that any different from the typical abortion opponents argument?

Well, the Phoenix light rail system has hit new levels of fail that even I could not have projected.  Here are the annual numbers updated for the most recent report:

Yes, I know that supporters will argue that the agency should get a "pass" due to COVID.  I am willing to do so for the bus system, but not for light rail.  Let me explain.

I have always been, perhaps unlikely for a libertarian, comfortable with some base level of public transportation.  Lack of mobility can be a huge barrier to upward mobility and I can support public transit systems in major cities as a sensible anti-poverty program.

What I oppose is the replacement of relatively inexpensive and tremendously flexible bus transit systems with light rail.  Light rail requires orders of magnitude more capital and operating cost per passenger (except perhaps in the absolute largest and densest cities, which does not include Phoenix).  Light rail is limited by time and money and necessity to only a few routes.  In almost no city outside the centers of the few largest cities (think Manhattan) has it ever been possible to develop a complete enough web for citizens to entirely give up a car.  And light rail is absolutely inflexible -- once capacity is added on one route (for literally billions of dollars) it can't be moved where busses can be shifted easily from route to route.  For example, on a days' notice we had bus routes going to the major local vaccination centers -- no way to do that with rail.

It has always seemed to me that light rail is a middle class boondoggle.  White professionals kind of like the trains whereas they won't ride busses.  The few light rail routes tend to follow middle class / professional commuting routes.  Light rail gets professionals from home to office (after which they use their car for other sorts of trips) but does little to provide mobility for the poor to the doctor, to the store, to support services, etc.  Worse, because light rail costs 10x or more per passenger than busses, the advent of light rail generally starves a transit agency of funds and causes them to cut back on busses to save money (because once the rail is laid, you can't really cut back on it).  Look at the chart above, despite years of light rail extensions, total transit ridership in Phoenix stalled after growing for over a decade.  Wealthy university students at ASU got a nice train to the downtown clubs, but the poor who depend on busses for basic mobility lost a lot of service and routes.

I will confess that I didn't anticipate a pandemic in my prior opposition to light rail, but it has been more proof of the light rail fail.  Busses that are not needed are parked, sidelining a modest capital investment.  But light rail is $2+ billion in capital investment lying dormant.  With the middle class eschewing transit during COVID, transit is returned to its core function of providing essential mobility to the poor.  But it can't do this as well as it used to because of the multi-billion dollar light rail capital albatross.

One provision that makes the law unique is the fact that private citizens will be allowed to sue providers and anyone involved in "facilitating coverage", which could mean people who drive others to the abortion clinic could be found liable in court to losses of at least $10,000. The ACLU says this provision "actively encourages private citizens to act as bounty hunters".

It is good to see the ACLU weighing in on the bad aspects of this enforcement mechanism, though it is telling we have never heard a peep out of them when this same private bounty hunting enforcement mechanism has been used in numerous California laws aimed at leftish goals (eg the dysfunctional ADA lawsuit mess and sue your boss laws, both of which substitute private bounty-hunting litigation for what normally would be state regulatory enforcement actions).

At least in the California laws, the litigant had to actually be a somewhat interested party (eg disabled or an employee of the firm).  Texas has unleashed the equivalent of Cuban block captains on their citizens.

This is a terrible precedent.  Conservatives who are really passionate about abortion may not be able to see it, but I can easily imagine this applied to all sorts of awful rules.  How about lawsuits for $10,000 for any parent that drives a kid to school that is not wearing a mask?  How about a $5,000 lawsuit by any citizen against someone who idles their car too long and thus destroys the planet?   Conservatives are handing the Left a gift with this enforcement precedent and we could all be suffering under it soon.

Update:  In case you wonder why they don't replicate