VETERAN JOURNALIST AND JOURNALISM PROFESSOR W. JOSEPH CAMPBELL: NPR’s Uri Berliner Was Right. “Uri Berliner’s provocative recent essay lamenting ‘the absence of viewpoint diversity’ at NPR brought to mind the critiques of Liz Spayd, the little-remembered final public editor at the New York Times.”
Author Archive: Stephen Green
April 24, 2024
April 23, 2024
CHRIS QUEEN’S SIPPING TOUR CONTINUES: Adventures in Bourbonland, Part 2.
ALEX, I’LL TAKE “IDIOT RULINGS THAT WON’T STAND ON APPEAL” FOR $400: NYC Man Convicted Over Gunsmithing Hobby After Judge Says 2nd Amendment ‘Doesn’t Exist in This Courtroom.’ “Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So you can’t argue Second Amendment. This is New York.”
Jerry Seinfeld is finally a movie director with the upcoming premiere of his feature debut “Unfrosted.” Backed by Netflix, the star-studded comedy is a fictional account of the creation of Pop-Tarts toaster pastries. In a new interview with GQ magazine, Seinfeld reflected on his experience jumping into moviemaking for the first time so late in his career.
“It was totally new to me. I thought I had done some cool stuff, but it was nothing like the way these people work,” Seinfeld said. “They’re so dead serious! They don’t have any idea that the movie business is over. They have no idea.”
Asked to elaborate on a more serious note, Seinfeld continued: “Film doesn’t occupy the pinnacle in the social, cultural hierarchy that it did for most of our lives. When a movie came out, if it was good, we all went to see it. We all discussed it. We quoted lines and scenes we liked. Now we’re walking through a fire hose of water, just trying to see.”
So what, if anything, has replaced film? “Depression? Malaise? I would say confusion. Disorientation replaced the movie business,” he answered. “Everyone I know in show business, every day, is going, ‘What’s going on? How do you do this? What are we supposed to do now?’”
There’s no secret to good storytelling. Give audiences flawed but admirable heroes they can identify with, and then put them through hell on the way to victory.
It seems impossible that Hollywood can’t — or won’t — remember that simple lesson, but here we are.
IT HAD A REALLY GOOD RUN: After 48 years, Zilog is killing the classic standalone Z80 microprocessor chip. “Last week, chip manufacturer Zilog announced that after 48 years on the market, its line of standalone DIP (dual inline package) Z80 CPUs is coming to an end, ceasing sales on June 14, 2024. The 8-bit Z80 architecture debuted in 1976 and powered a small-business-PC revolution in conjunction with CP/M, also serving as the heart of the Nintendo Game Boy, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the Radio Shack TRS-80, the Pac-Man arcade game, and the TI-83 graphing calculator in various forms.”
The faster eZ80 — introduced more than 20 years ago — remains in production.
Incredible.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: It Always Starts with the Jews.
ACCOUNTABILITY: Israel’s Military Spy Chief Resigns Over Oct. 7 Hamas Attack.
HIDDEN COSTS: California’s Exploding Rooftop Solar Cost Shift.
Regardless of what is driving utility costs higher, their impact on rates is multiplied when customers install their own generation and buy fewer kilowatts-hours from the grid. That’s because those households – whether they are customers of the utility or of a community choice aggregator – contribute less towards all of the fixed costs in the system, such as vegetation management, grid hardening, distribution line undergrounding, EV charging stations, subsidies for low income customers, energy efficiency programs, and the poles and wires that we all rely on whether we are taking electricity off the grid or putting it onto the grid from our rooftop PV systems.
Since those fixed costs still need to be paid, rates go up, shifting costs onto the kWhs still being bought from the grid. This will be less true for systems registered after last April when compensation for new systems was made somewhat less generous, but that applies to almost none of the systems installed before 2024, which are the ones I am studying here.)
A decade ago, this was a small concern, because rooftop solar was barely a blip in the total supply picture. In 2014, the homes served by these three IOUs got less than 2% of their electricity off their roofs. Today they get about 20%. As fewer kWhs are sold from the grid, retail rates must rise even more in order to recover the fixed costs of the system.
The problem has become particularly acute in the last four years. During that time, solar capacity on houses has more than doubled at the same time that the utilities’ fixed costs have escalated dramatically due in large part to wildfires and the need for grid hardening against them.
So Sacramento and Washington have been subsidizing activity that will make supporting the electrical grid unaffordable while pushing for the electrification of virtually everything.
But wait, there’s more: California ‘throwing away’ wasted solar power may raise electricity prices. “In California, there are 47 gigawatts of solar power installed atop rooftops, equaling out to over a quarter of the state’s energy. However, during the middle of sunny spring days, the energy produced exceeds demand, meaning prices for electricity will go negative, and solar power is thrown away.”
I WASN’T CONSIDERING IT BUT THANK YOU: If You’re Considering Voting for RFK Jr., Think Again. “According to recently resurfaced writings and interviews, RFK Jr. has been a lifelong opponent of voter ID requirements. Materials that Fox News Digital reviewed show that Kennedy called voter ID laws ‘racially rancid’ and insisted that voter fraud was ‘non-existent.'”
BIDENOMICS: Luxury house sales remain strong while overall market slumps. “As CNBC reports, sales of luxury homes are increasing while the overall market experiences its downturn. Overall real estate sales fell 4% nationwide in the first quarter, according to Redfin. Yet, luxury real estate sales increased more than 2%, posting their best year-over-year gains in three years.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Psst…Merrick Garland — I Found Your Domestic Terrorists. “A good rule of thumb in 2024 America is to find out where any leftist protests are happening and steer clear of them, because that’s where the real potential for violence is. I’m not saying that they’re all violent, I’m just saying that large groups of entitled, permanently aggrieved leftists who have grown up in a world without consequences can be a bit powder keg-ish.”
PRIORITIES: Military Could Hit Troops With Courts-Martial For Refusing To Use Preferred Pronouns, Experts Say. “A 2020 Equal Opportunity law opened the door for commanders to subject someone who refuses to affirm a transgender servicemember’s so-called gender identity to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) for charges related to harassment, Capt. Thomas Wheatley, an assistant professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. Such a move would likely infringe on a servicemember’s constitutional rights to uphold their conscience, but it might not prevent leaders from employing more subtle ways of disciplining service members.”
If this goes into effect, it will serve the same “progressive” interest the military vaccine mandate did — drive more traditional warriors out of the service.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Recruiting crisis? What recruiting crisis?
HE’S BACK! (AND PROBABLY HOPING TO SCORE A PARDON): New York DA’s Trump Circus Has Found Its Clown.
DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA’S MARXIST ENCLAVES: I Used To Run Columbia’s Pro-Israel Group. This Anti-Semitism Is Nothing New.
The quad where I so fondly remember spending my days as an undergraduate is now home to a university-sanctioned encampment of hate, sequestering Columbia’s Jewish community into their dorm rooms — and even leaving campus entirely — in fear of their physical safety. New York Mayor Eric Adams’ offers to activate the NYPD to dispel the pro-Palestinian mob have fallen on deaf ears with university administrators, including President Minouche Shafik. Unfortunately, this unfolding chaos is just a new chapter of anti-Semitism that has long been embedded in the culture at Columbia and other elite universities nationwide.
As an American Jew, I was proud to serve as president of Columbia’s largest pro-Israel group, then known as LionPAC, during my junior year in 2010-2011. My tenure involved routinely responding to a variety of protests against the Jewish state. Mock “apartheid walls” and cardboard cutouts of Israeli tanks were erected on Low Steps. Holocaust deniers, hosted by Students for Justice in Palestine, spoke freely under the infinite confines of “academic freedom”. And students simply trying to walk to class were subjected to “die ins” on College Walk, where anti-Israel activists donning fake IDF uniforms and machine guns would pretend to slaughter Palestinians, who would lay lifeless on the ground for minutes on end. These charades were no surprise at a university that hosted one of the world’s most prolific Holocaust deniers, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and tenured Professor Joseph Massad, who called Hamas’ October 7th slaughter of innocent Israeli Jews a “stunning” and “astonishing” display of “Palestinian resistance”.
In other words, today’s protests are a natural manifestation of Columbia’s seemingly limitless tolerance for anti-Semitism.
The intimidation starts at the top: “In my experience, Columbia’s pro-Israel faculty have always eschewed public activism out of fear of professional exile or termination.”