“FAILURE MCFAILED STATE” SHOULD HAVE BEEN ONE OF THE INSCRIPTIONS: Gavin Newsom Asked the Internet to Submit Designs for a New Coin Honoring CA’s Innovations, and Hoo Boy…
Author Archive: Stephen Green
April 29, 2024
THE HIGHER EDUCATION IMPLOSION: Go State U! Why pay a premium for a ‘polarizing’ degree? “He imagines a hiring manager looking at resumes from a recent graduate of Columbia and a recent graduate of the University of the North Carolina. The Columbia graduate, the manager thinks, is ‘more likely to be coddled, more likely to hold strong political opinions that will distract from their work’ and ‘more likely to have benefited from grade inflation and perhaps dubious admissions policies.'”
All is proceeding as Glenn has foreseen.
THURSDAY IN INDIANA: 33 arrested at IU during protest in support of Palestine.
Today in New York:
It’s now been 20+ mins since 2 p.m. deadline to clear out the pro-Hamas encampment at Columbia has passed.
The university has not enforced the deadline and the pro-Hamas students remain. In fact, their numbers appear to have grown. pic.twitter.com/97KNPA81yy
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) April 29, 2024
Developing but, needless to say, you get more of what you tolerate.
IT’S CALLED “SCREAMS BEFORE SILENCE” AND IT’S THE MOST POWERFUL DOCUMENTARY I’VE SEEN SINCE I DON’T KNOW WHEN: Watch This… If You Dare… If You Can…
THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA still doesn’t understand root cause of Orion heat shield issue.
NASA officials previously said it is unlikely they will need to make changes to the heat shield already installed on the Orion spacecraft for Artemis II, but haven’t ruled it out. A redesign or modifications to the Orion heat shield on Artemis II would probably delay the mission by at least a year.
The charred material began flying off the heat shield in the first phase of the skip reentry. Engineers are looking at how the skip reentry profile affected the performance of the Orion heat shield. NASA wants to understand how the Orion heat shield would perform during each of the possible reentry trajectories for Artemis II.
“What we have the analysis teams off doing is saying, ‘OK, independent of what the constraints are going to be, what can we tolerate?” Kshatriya said.
Once officials understand the cause of the heat shield charring, engineers will determine what kind of trajectory Artemis II needs to fly on reentry to minimize risk to the crew. Then, managers will look at building what NASA calls flight rationale. Essentially, this is a process of convincing themselves the spacecraft is safe to fly.
“When we stitch it all together, we’ll either have flight rationale or we won’t,” Kshatriya said.
The heat shield worked during Artemis I reentry but didn’t burn off as expected. SLS is stacked and ready for Artemis II and Starship is coming along…
VICTORIA TAFT: Media Reports Shocking Trump NYC Witness Intimidation—And Then We Busted Them. “MSNBC and Joy Reid, hang your head. Deadline, where’s the correction? And this prosecutor-pushed and media-amplified deception could land former President Trump in Rikers.”
THAT’S NOT FUNNY! Jerry Seinfeld Blames ‘Extreme Left, ‘PC Crap’ for Comedy Decline.
Seinfeld, the director, star and co-writer of the new Netflix comedy “Unfrosted,” shared his complicated thoughts on humor for much of the conversation.
When host David Remnick asked him about mixing serious themes with comedy he couldn’t hold back.
“People always need [comedy] … they need it so badly and they don’t get it,” Seinfeld began. “It used to be you’d go home at the end of the day, ‘oh, ‘Cheers’ is on. Oh, ‘M*A*S*H*’ is on. Oh, ‘Mary Tyler Moore’ is on. ‘All in the Family’ is on.’ You just expected there will be some funny stuff on TV you can watch tonight.
“But guess what? Where is it? Where is it? This is the result of the extreme Left and PC crap and people worrying so much about offending other people.”
Reminder: “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.”
RABBI MICHAEL BARCLAY: How to End the Craziness on College Campuses. “Let’s be clear: I am not recommending that the JDL be reborn, or saying that violence is the answer. But we need to consider the situation we are all seeing today: College graduations being canceled, Jews being threatened and even killed (may Paul Kessler rest in peace), temples being vandalized, and a hatred of Jews that rivals anything the world has seen since Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The terrorism that ended up being the practice of the JDL by the 1980s is not the answer, but what is?”
FASTER, PLEASE: SpaceX making progress on Starship in-space refueling technologies.
Speaking to the NASA Advisory Council’s Human Exploration and Operations Committee April 26, Amit Kshatriya, NASA deputy associate administrator for the Moon to Mars Program, said SpaceX achieved one step towards refueling of Starship with a demonstration on the latest Starship test flight March 14.
During that flight, SpaceX performed an in-flight propellant transfer demonstration under a NASA Tipping Point contract awarded in 2020. SpaceX planned to transfer at least 10 metric tons of liquid oxygen from a header tank to the main tank within the Starship upper stage while in space.
While SpaceX said the day of the flight that it performed the demonstration, neither the company nor NASA provided any updates since then. At the advisory committee meeting, though, Kshatriya said the test appeared to go well.
“On Flight 3, they did an intertank transfer of cryogens, which was successful by all accounts,” he said, adding that analysis of the test is ongoing.
The next major milestone is a demonstration planned for 2025 where two Starships will dock in orbit, with one transferring propellants to the other.
Artemis depends on SpaceX perfecting orbital refueling and, more broadly, getting to the Moon (and Mars) with enough stuff to stay there depends on it, too.
BRYAN S. JUNG: Establishment Corruption in Big Art. “Art is the only unregulated business that I know of in the world outside of the illicit drug business since the public had to be protected from criminal abuses in the stock and real estate markets over a hundred years ago.”
INFLATION, ONCE SET LOOSE, IS DIFFICULT AND PAINFUL TO REIN BACK IN: ‘We expect Powell to make a hawkish pivot’—Fed meeting to headline busy week for global markets. “We expect Powell to make a hawkish pivot. At the minimum, he’ll likely indicate the median FOMC participant now expects ‘less’ cuts this year. In a more hawkish direction, he could hint at a chance of no cuts — or even suggest a hike might be on the table, though not the current baseline.”
SHE ACTUALLY DID THE TROPE: ‘Shoot the Dog’ Made Noem a Hollywood Villain.
SUPPLY AND DEMAND, HOW DO THEY WORK? Home Prices Stagnate in Florida and Texas as Supply Soars. “Housing supply is soaring because both states have been building a lot of homes, which is limiting home price growth. Buyer demand is also lackluster because many people are priced out.”
The former should help with the latter, no? But the author is “particularly interested in the issues of climate change, race and gender equality and housing affordability,” and might have missed Econ 1. And as Milton Friedman liked to say, “Everything we know in economics we teach in Econ 1, and everything else is made up.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Polls Are Usually Garbage, But There Is One Thing Worth Noting in 2024. “Trump has had the overwhelming numbers of the mainstream media aligned against him all along. They’ve always hated Republicans, but they super ultra mega hate Donald Trump. Until Elon Musk purchased Twitter and rebranded it with a gentleman’s club name, all of social media was working against Trump.”
UNEXPECTEDLY: California Fast-Food Chains Are Now Serving Sticker Shock.
Consumers picking up burgers, burritos and chicken sandwiches at chains in the Golden State are grappling with prices that for months have been rising at a faster clip than in other states, according to market-research firm Datassential.
Since September, when California moved to require large fast-food chains to bump up their minimum hourly pay to $20 in April, fast-food and fast-casual restaurants in California have increased prices by 10% overall, outpacing all other states, the firm found in an analysis of thousands of restaurants across 70 large chains.
Prices at Chick-fil-A, Domino’s, McDonald’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Jack in the Box, and other fast-food chains have increased since September, the firm found. Chipotle said in an investor call Wednesday that prices at its nearly 500 California restaurants climbed 6% to 7% during the first week of April compared with last year, playing out across its menu.
“The state isn’t making it easy,” Chipotle Chief Executive Brian Niccol said in an interview.
California raised the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $20 an hour in April, a 25% increase from the state’s broader $16 minimum wage. Supporters, including Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, said the law would improve wages and working conditions for hundreds of thousands of fast-food employees in the state.
About that last part: Fast food chains find a way around $20 minimum wage: Get rid of the workers.
Previously: California, Poverty Capital.
COMMUNISTS RUN OUT OF EVERYTHING: Long lines form and frustration grows as Cuba runs short of cash.
Long lines outside banks and ATMs in the capital, Havana, and beyond start forming early in the day as people seek cash for routine transactions like buying food and other essentials.
Experts say there are several reasons behind the shortage, all somehow related to Cuba’s deep economic crisis, one of the worst in decades.
Omar Everleny Pérez, a Cuban economist and university professor, says the main culprits are the government’s growing fiscal deficit, the nonexistence of banknotes with a denomination greater than 1,000 Cuban pesos (about $3 in the parallel market), stubbornly high inflation and the nonreturn of cash to banks.
“There is money, yes, but not in the banks,” said Pérez, adding that most of the cash is being held not by salaried workers, but by entrepreneurs and owners of small- and medium-size business who are more likely to collect cash from commercial transactions but are reluctant to return the money to the banks.
This, Pérez says, is either because they don’t trust the local banks or simply because they need the Cuban pesos to convert into foreign currency.
Most entrepreneurs and small business owners in Cuba have to import almost everything they sell or pay in foreign currency for the supplies needed to run their businesses. As a consequence, many end up hoarding Cuban pesos to later change into foreign currency on the informal market.
Converting those Cuban pesos to other currencies poses yet another challenge, as there are several, highly fluctuating exchange rates in the island.
For example, the official rate used by government industries and agencies is 24 pesos to the U.S. dollar, while for individuals, the rate is 120 pesos to the dollar. However, the dollar can fetch up to 350 Cuban pesos on the informal market.
So long as Washington is adding another trillion to our $35 trillion deficit every 100 days or so, we don’t have much room to chide Cuba.
DON’T GET COCKY: New CNN Poll Is a Bloodbath for Joe Biden.
April 24, 2024
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.”
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.”