May 7, 2026

CALIFORNIA: Experts stress energy independence as gas prices rise.

With so much of the state’s crude oil supply coming from other parts of the world, energy industry experts told lawmakers that regulations are to blame for rising energy prices and volatility.

“California’s petroleum system has been weakened by design,” Jodie Muller, the president and CEO of the Western States Petroleum Association, testified on Tuesday afternoon. “For years, state policies have pushed the refining sector to contraction, with predictable consequences – less in-state production, reduced resilience and higher costs for Californians.”

The current system has very little margin for error because of the declining number of oil refineries in the state, Muller told lawmakers.

“We are now at an inflection point,” Muller said. “Additional policy pressures risk pushing the remaining refineries past the breaking point. We are still seeing hostile legislation by your colleagues.”

Decline is a choice California seems happy to make.

Posted at 8:37 am by Stephen Green

YES:

Posted at 8:21 am by Stephen Green

IF THEY KEEP PUSHING, THE DAY WILL COME:

Posted at 7:50 am by Stephen Green

HEY, BIG SPENDER: Elon Musk’s Terafab chip factory in Texas could cost up to $119 billion, filing shows.

Musk, who’s also CEO of Tesla, is aiming for Terafab to be the “most epic chip-building effort ever — combining logic, memory and advanced packaging under one roof,” according to a post on X last month from SpaceX, which now owns artificial intelligence company xAI. Musk officially launched the project in March.

The chip complex outside Austin would be designed to manufacture chips for SpaceX, xAI and Tesla, and would be jointly built by those companies. Musk said in a post on X that xAI “will be dissolved as a separate company” and will be called SpaceXAI.

In April, Intel announced it will be joining the Terafab project to help “design, fabricate, and package ultra-high-performance chips at scale.” It’s the first major outside commitment for the capital-intensive foundry side of Intel’s business, which to date has only manufactured chips for its own products.

During Tesla’s first-quarter earnings call last month, Musk said Tesla plans to use Intel’s forthcoming 14A process to produce chips at the facility. Intel’s stock popped on the news and had its best month ever in April, more than doubling in value.

Intel has struggled with new fab processes for quite a few years now, and 14A — a leapfrog attempt to get to 1.4nm-class manufacturing — could be make or break for the company.

Here’s to hoping that an infusion of Musk-level capital helps do the trick.

One last thing: Oftentimes it seems like Musk’s commitment to American manufacturing is underappreciated.

Posted at 7:35 am by Stephen Green

IT’S A CRAZY THOUGHT, BUT JUST MAYBE.

Posted at 7:31 am by Glenn Reynolds

LOL, BULWARK:

Posted at 7:19 am by Stephen Green

PROPAGANDA, INDEED:

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

May 6, 2026

IT’S CALLED MORONWORLD.

Posted at 9:52 pm by Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THAT’S NICE. NOW EXPEL THEM, PROSECUTE THEM, AND SUE THEM.

Posted at 9:22 pm by Glenn Reynolds

NICK GILLESPIE IN 1995: Terrible Ted Turner.

As I suggested earlier, this may not be entirely the Goldbergs’ fault. They don’t help matters with ham-handed lines such as, “Half visionary, half crackpot, and allAmerican character, Ted Turner is a genuine original,” or “Using second-string producers, third-rate correspondents, and recycled network programming, [Turner] has gone about his task with a singleminded determination.”

But beyond the Goldbergs’ often labored prose, Turner himself seems capable of only the most banal thoughts and insights. In the 1980s he became convinced that he would be shot by an assassin, and told his then-mistress what he would say to his killer: “Thanks for not coming sooner.” At another point, he boasted to a reporter, “I want to set the all-time greatest personal achievement record, greater than Alexander Graham Bell or Thomas Edison, Napoleon or Alexander the Great.” Or consider this deep conversation Turner reports having had with Fidel Castro in 1982: “After three drinks with rum … I said [to Castro] ‘Are you interfering in Nicaragua and Angola?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, you are, too.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but we’re the United States. We’ve got every right to be there.’ And he said, ‘How come?’ I said, ‘Because we’re right, we’re capitalists. We’ve got a free country.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but what about people that don’t agree with that?’ I went back and scratched my head. I never even thought there was another side to the picture.”

The secret shame of Ted Turner may be that, like much of the programming for which he became famous, he just isn’t very smart or interesting. Indeed, by the end of Citizen Turner, the protagonist seems less reminiscent of Charles Foster Kane and more like another great fictional millionaire: Jay Gatsby. Turner, now in his fifties, has been spared Gatsby’s tragic fate. But just as Gatsby turned out to be less real than imagined, so too does Turner seem unmasked as more shallow than deep.

QED:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Does The Odyssey confirm that Christopher Nolan is camp?

We have Good Will Hunting himself, Matt Damon, as Nolan’s conception of Odysseus. All good there; I myself would have cast Michael Fassbender, but hey-ho. Damon rocks a beard of varying lengths and grayness, and wears an expression of becoming seriousness. At various points in the trailer, he makes it clear that he wants to go home. This is becoming a trait of Mr. Damon. He has also made this clear in Saving Private Ryan, The Martian, Interstellar (another Nolan jaunt) and Elysium. Looked at dispassionately, Mr. Damon is the actor who seems keenest to go anywhere, least of all Hollywood.

Well, he’s been lucky with The Odyssey. And the fact that he has slimmed down to near-skeletal proportions suggests that he has committed to the bit. As, indeed, has his co-star Robert Pattinson, playing the villainous suitor Antinous. I am a great admirer of Pattinson, who was the saving grace of Nolan’s solitary misfire Tenet, but I would suggest that no actor alive could deliver the line, “You’re pining for a daddy you didn’t even know, like some sniveling bastard”.

Spider-Man vs Batman (Pattinson vs Tom Holland): how could audiences possibly resist? But whatever happens, there is the suspicion that Sir Christopher has let loose after his earlier exercises in Sturm und Drang and offered audiences a film that they will want to see in some quantity. It’s budgeted at $250 million – some reports suggest that it ended up costing even more – which will make it by far the most expensive film of his career. Oppenheimer was a relatively cheap $100 million, and that featured the biggest bang of them all. Studio Universal no doubt hopes it is his biggest hit yet.

Speaking of camp: The Hollywood Reporter on The Odyssey: Everybody Using American Accents Is Definitely a Choice.

The Odyssey: Christopher Nolan‘s adaptation of Homer’s timeless epic set in ancient Greece. An operatic, fantastical tale of Odysseus, Telemachus, Antinous and Athena. “Not just a story,” as director Christopher Nolan declared at CinemaCon, “but the story.”

And also: Dude. Everybody sounds like they’re from Ohio.

On Tuesday, Universal dropped the latest and most footage-filled trailer yet (below) for the highly anticipated film. Fans are impressed by the film’s scope and compelling star-studded cast. They’re also a bit thrown by one choice: The characters sound American and use contemporary-sounding language — more Ithaca, New York, than Ithaca, Greece. At one point, Matt Damon’s Odysseus leads a battle charge by crying, “Let’s go!” Even stars Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson, who are English, sound American.

The choice is a striking departure from the unwritten Hollywood rule of characters in historical epics employing British accents — from The Ten Commandments to Ben-Hur to Gladiator to HBO’s Rome. Obviously, The Odyssey characters speaking the various dialects of Homeric Greek, Attic and Hellenistic Koine wouldn’t make for a very accessible film. But the modern British accent is traditionally considered universally pleasing and “just foreign enough” to convey a timeless quality (even though it’s only existed in its current form for 250 years or so).

The actors in ’50s Hollywood bible-themed epics such as The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur often spoke with transatlantic accents, since that was a popular choice in Hollywood ever since talkies came into vogue at the end of the 1920s. But I don’t recall Edward G. Robinson speaking with a British accent in The Ten Commandments: 

Or John Wayne in The Greatest Story Ever Told: 

I’m happy that Stanley Kubrick had his entirely American cast speaking with their regular accents in 1957’s Paths of Glory rather than having to endure a film of Inspector Clouseau-wannabes. I’m glad that David Lean avoided his mostly British actors doing Mr. Chekov impersonations in Dr. Zhivago. In the 2008 Tom Cruise movie Valkyrie, the director cast several supporting actors who had been in earlier WWII-themed movies such as Kenneth Branagh in 2000’s Conspiracy and Christian Berkel from 2004’s Downfall. Everybody spoke with his local accent except for the actor who played Hitler, who was dubbed by another actor with a terrifying Austrian accent. That seemed like a far better compromise than having Cruise and his supporting actors all sound like they had all stepped out of a Hogan’s Heroes episode.

Earlier: The Critical Drinker on The Odyssey — I Got A Bad Feeling About This One…

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll