One thing that our wonderful modern life in the United States does? It insulates us and isolates us from reality.

Sometimes that’s good – because ignorance truly is bliss and I’m sorry but every so often we all need ways to not burden (or unburden) our minds and hearts of stuff. But for the most part, ignorance and isolation isn’t promoted as a successful long-term life-strategy.

The US is being hit by a pretty major winter storm. Temperatures here in Austin are in the teens overnight not getting above freezing during the day. I know to a lot of my northern friends sitting at sub-zero (Fahrenheit) temperatures right now, but for this area of the country this is unusually harsh.

What makes it worse? State-wide in Texas they had rolling blackouts yesterday and are predicting more for today. Why?

Burst water pipes at two coal-fired power plants forced them to shut down, triggering rolling power cuts across the state, the lieutenant governor said Wednesday.

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst said this is something that “should not happen.”

Dewhurst said he was told that water pipes at two plants, Oak Grove and Sand Hill, forced them to cut electricity production.

Natural gas power plants that should have provided backup had difficulty starting due to low pressure in the supply lines, also caused by the cold weather.

That’s right, it shouldn’t have happened. But it did. Why did it happen? Looks like some combination of accidents, technical reasons, and perhaps poor planning.

I’m not here to point fingers, but rather to point out. To point out just how fragile our modern system is. Look at the uprising in Egypt and how instantly all Internet access was cut off. I recall a couple of years ago I was teleconferencing with the home office in California when everything went down. Turns out that some vandals severed the network cables and took out entire towns of phone, Internet, you name it (except radio), all of those cables went through a single manhole and left cities without access to emergency services. Part of the design intent of the Internet is if something goes down it’ll continue to route around to find its destination, but we have too many single-point bottlenecks such that when they go down it is a major problem.

We take much for granted, because we’re blissfully ignorant and unaware of how everything works and is put together. How the very fabric of our society is that fragile and untenable. Redundancy and backup solutions are good, but even those can fail. In the end, we’re humans, living with human constructs… mistakes will be made, things will fail. Best we can do is be prepared not for if they will happen, but when they will happen.

Sorry folks.

Just not feeling it today.

Tragedy befell a family my family is friends with. We’re helping them through right now doing whatever we can. It’s just heavy, and well… I don’t feel like writing anything right now. Maybe later.

If it’s your thing, say a prayer for their family. If it’s not your thing, say a prayer anyways. Send some energy and strength through cosmic vibes or whatever. Me, I’ll be fine, but they need a lot of strength and support right now.

If you’ve ever wondered how to get hit by a car when walking down the street, here’s some helpful tips:

• Walk at night. Harder for cars to see you, tho you could see them due to their lights.
• Wear dark clothing. Harder for the cars to see you than if you wore light/white or even reflective clothing.
• Wear headphones with the music cranked up loud. Why should you listen for the sound of oncoming cars when Justin Bieber could be serenading you instead.
• Walk with the flow of traffic (in the USA, on the right-side of the road). If you walked facing traffic (left-side of the road), you’d be able to see oncoming cars and be able to move out of the way, and that’d be you know… like useful or some junk.
• Walk in the street, because cars are pesky things… if a couple of tons of steel come at you at a high rate of speed, physics be damned because you can just sue (if you survive).
• A sense that everyone else has to look out for you. Because taking responsibility for yourself is so uncool.

No, I didn’t hit anyone, but I had to run to the store late last night and nearly hit someone on a dark poorly-lit stretch of road because they were wearing almost black clothing, had large headphones (muff type, not earbuds) over their ears, walking on the right side of the road and on the road itself, and worst of all not facing traffic. A complete lack of awareness, and just a recipe for disaster.

It’s rare today to at least see people walking down the road facing traffic. When did we stop teaching this? And can we start again, please?