Tea at Trianon: The Canary is Singing

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, September 4, 2026

The Canary is Singing

From The Enterprise:

Virginia now hosts roughly 385 operating data center buildings, totaling on the order of 75 million gross square feet. Measured by square footage, that is about 5 times what Texas has, roughly 7 times California, roughly 7 times New York, and roughly 10 times Florida. Adjusted for population, the gap widens. Virginia has nearly 5 times as many data centers per resident as Texas, 6.2 times as many as California, 5.9 times as many as New York, and 8.5 times as many as Florida. Northern Virginia is the largest data center market in America and the largest in the world, and Loudoun, Prince William, and Fairfax counties alone account for roughly 80% of the Commonwealth’s inventory. Other states are still arguing from models of what might happen if a campus were to arrive. Virginia already has the record of what did happen after the campuses arrived in force and stayed.
The water claim is the one that travels fastest. Critics say the facilities will drain a community’s supply and then poison what remains with their discharge. A large share of Virginia’s data center buildings do not use meaningful quantities of water after the tanks are filled. About 40% are exclusively air- or dry-cooled, meaning they reject heat mechanically and consume almost no energy once the system is charged. Another 35% are hybrid, running dry through most of the year and switching to evaporative assistance only in the hottest stretches of summer. That leaves roughly 25% that depend on water. The phrase “data centers use water” treats those three machines as a single entity.
Virginia’s fleet consumes about 2.1 billion gallons of water a year, of which roughly 780 million gallons are discharged. The fair test is what the same land and the same 75 million square feet would demand as ordinary offices. Federal Energy Star benchmarking puts median office water use at about 14.48 gallons per square foot per year. Multiply that out, and you get roughly 1.086 billion gallons of annual use and roughly 619 million gallons of annual discharge. The data center stream is larger by volume, somewhere in the range of 16% to 26% depending on which assumptions you carry through the arithmetic. (Read more.)