April 23, 2024

IT’S COME TO THIS:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

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.”

Posted at 10:38 am by Stephen Green

QUESTION ASKED: What Happened To World War II Movies?

The year 2008 marked a curious transition in the national mood.

It was the year Barack Obama was elected president. [Pat] Buchanan published his contrarian “Churchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War,” claiming that the World Wars were partially the cause of the West’s decline. It was also the year Quentin Tarantino directed “Inglourious Basterds”—a brutal satire of how war films are used as a tool of warfare and propaganda.

Some combination of stress from the financial crash, Obama-era moral relativism and ascendant isolationism fundamentally changed the public’s desires for constant WWII entertainment. Maybe people felt it was backward-looking or stale or merely had their minds on the present.

As a result, the tone of the genre changed.

“The Pacific,” “Red Tails,” “Fury,” “Midway,” “Hacksaw Ridge,” “Dunkirk,” “Greyhound” and “Masters of the Air” all felt more detached, less passionate, or more cynical than their predecessors. The sweeping orchestras and valor of prior WWII projects were replaced with reflections on the horror of death and the meaninglessness of war.

This turn away from the valorization of WWII actually began in the previous decade, in large part thanks to Harvey Weinstein, who bankrolled big screen adaptations of a number of morally-questionable novels, which were invariably Oscar-bait given their sharp contrast with the industry’s summertime obsession with “blowed up real good” action movies. As I wrote in 2017 during Weinstein’s stunning fall from Hollywood superstardom:

2008’s The Reader is based on a bestselling, Oprah-approved German novel that attempts to wipe away German guilt for the Holocaust. It starred Kate Winslet as a sexy slimline version of Sgt. Schultz, who knew nothing – nothing! – while serving as a guard at a concentration camp, because she was illiterate (and apparently deaf as well). Regarding an earlier Weinstein WWII movie, as John Nolte wrote in 2010 at Big Hollywood, “For those of you who haven’t seen ‘The English Patient,’ just imagine what Satan would’ve done with ‘Casablanca:’”

This film’s appalling philosophy all comes together in the final act after Laszlo and Katharine’s wicked ways come home to roost and they find themselves stranded deep in the desert. He can walk the three days out but her ankle is broken. Having to leave her behind with only a few days’ supply of water and food, her mortality clock is ticking and after a series of complications back in civilization, our “hero” deliberately sells out the British — the West — to the Germans in order to secure the plane necessary to save Katharine. He gives the Nazis (the Nazis!) crucial maps. Afterwards, when he’s informed that this act likely caused the death of thousands of Allied soldiers and civilians, Laszlo’s reply is like something you would normally hear from a James Bond villain…

“Thousands of people die. They were just different people.”

….except that rather than be chilled and repulsed by this response, we’re supposed to put finger to chin and bask in the poetic profundity of it all.

Even Steven Spielberg, perhaps feeling guilty that Schindler’s List was a bit too on-the-nose, decided to get in on the act, in 1998’s Saving Private Ryan, as Mark Steyn noted:

Purporting to be a recreation of the US landings on Omaha Beach, Private Ryan is actually an elite commando raid by Hollywood and the Hamptons to seize the past. After the spectacular D-Day prologue, the film settles down, Tom Hanks and his men are dispatched to rescue Matt Damon (the elusive Private Ryan) and Spielberg finds himself in need of the odd line of dialogue. Endeavouring to justify their mission to his unit, Hanks’s sergeant muses that, in years to come when they look back on the war, they’ll figure that ‘maybe saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we managed to pull out of this whole godawful mess’. Once upon a time, defeating Hitler and his Axis hordes bent on world domination would have been considered ‘one decent thing’. Even soppy liberals figured that keeping a few million more Jews from going to the gas chambers was ‘one decent thing’. When fashions in victim groups changed, ending the Nazi persecution of pink-triangled gays was still ‘one decent thing’. But, for Spielberg, the one decent thing is getting one GI joe back to his picturesque farmhouse in Iowa.

Saving Private Ryan isn’t an anti-war film in the sense that, say, principled pictures like All Quiet on the Western Front are. Instead, as usual with Spielberg, it’s his take on his own childhood: it’s an anti-war-film film. As far as the real war’s concerned, it seems to be too much for him to comprehend. In a few coherent interviews, he’s suggested that the war was worth fighting because it produced the baby boomers. But it’s flattering him to pretend he has any view on the war one way or another: with his customary lack of imagination, he simply cannot conceive of a world where men are prepared, quietly and without fanfare, to die for their country. Perhaps he has a point: in a narcissistic Clinto-Spielbergian culture, it’s hard to see what would now drive the general populace to risk their lives.

In that sense, Saving Private Ryan is the antithesis of Casablanca: the problems of one human being are what count; it’s all those vast impersonal war aims that don’t amount to a hill of beans. You’d have more confidence in this general proposition if Spielberg weren’t so wretchedly inadequate at conjuring vivid human beings: Hanks’s unit is a perfunctory round-up of single-trait types – one Jew, one coward, all very unmemorable. The nearest to a real human being in the film is General Marshall, not just because he’s played by the sturdy Harve Presnell but because Marshall is an actual real human being and thus the director has something to latch on to. Otherwise, Spielberg’s approach to making drama is as impersonal as Ike moving pins around the map in the

“Thousands of people die. They were just different people.”

As for the aforementioned Zone of Interest, it’s a massively overrated WWII movie that merely served as the preamble for its director’s trainwreck Academy Award speech:

Let us—because it’s been a moment since this lion of cinema rose up and roared at Hollywood—recall [Jonathan] Glazer’s fiery words.

“Right now,” he said from the stage of the Dolby Theatre, “we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October—whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”

Some mirthless fusspots rushed to note that Glazer was awfully incoherent for a man who’d just won a very big award for writing a thinky film about Auschwitz called The Zone of Interest. Did he mean, they queried, that he and his two producers, who stood beside him, are themselves men who refute their Jewishness? Or merely that they refute the fact that their Jewishness had been hijacked by those who cheer on Israel’s military escapades? The meaning, the critics noted, was unclear.

Such nitpickery is missing the point. Glazer’s speech was stunning and brave because it demonstrated, like few addresses before it, and in front of 19.5 million viewers, the complete, total, and utter moral, spiritual, and intellectual bankruptcy of vast swaths of mainstream liberal Judaism.

In a few mumbly, stumbly sentences, Glazer laid out the credo shared by so many of our self-appointed intellectual and moral betters. In the beginning, goes this leftist theology, was “The Occupation,” the conflict’s cardinal sin, committed, alas, by the Jews. And The Occupation beget The Cycle of Violence, pitting the sons of Jacob against the sons of Ishmael, both righteous and both rightfully aggrieved and both, curses, capable of shedding blood. Israelis and Palestinians, in this telling, are coiled together like a big, bruised Ouroboros, with each fresh outrage prompting the snake to chomp just a bit further on its own tail. And to stop it, we need little more than for brave men and women to straighten the lapel of their tuxedos, smooth the hem of their dresses, put on a pin, and demand, politely but firmly, that the killing stop.

Interesting choice of pin, though:

Which answers in part the question posed by Tyler Hummel at Hollywood in Toto at the start of our post.

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll

THE ULTIMATE KINSLEY GAFFE: Democratic Minnesota Senator Nicole Mitchell arrested on suspicion of burglary.

Mitchell was arrested Monday morning in Detroit Lakes, Minn., for alleged burglary. The jail roster with the Becker County Sheriff’s Office indicates that Mitchell has been arrested for a first-degree burglary offense.

According to an official with the Detroit Lakes Police Department, a homeowner in the city called 911 at 4:45 a.m. Monday morning after discovering a person in their residence. Responding officers found the alleged burglar, made an arrest, and transported that person to the Becker County Sheriff’s Office. A jail official told Alpha News that Mitchell was still in custody as of early Monday afternoon.

Local news outlets in the Detroit Lakes area were the first to break the news of Mitchell’s arrest.

“Knowing very few details at this time, I am shocked by the news of Sen. Nicole Mitchell’s arrest for first-degree burglary. The public expects legislators to meet a high standard of conduct. As information comes out, we expect the consequences to meet the actions, both in the court of law, and in her role at the legislature,” Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson, R-East Grand Forks, said in a statement.

“Think of the Democratic Party as what it really is: a criminal organization masquerading as a political party,” Michael Walsh likes to say. Somebody appears to be taking that meme far too literally.

UPDATE: MN Dem State Senator Burgled Stepmom’s Home to Steal Father’s Effects. “So this was intentional and malicious,” former Minnesota resident Ed Morrissey writes. “Still, that’s not quite enough for first-degree burglary in Minnesota, as I noted yesterday. That usually applies when the burglar has a weapon or commits an assault. The indictment should be very, very interesting in this case. Stay tuned. Also: Democrats only had a one-seat majority in the state Senate. Mitchell’s sudden unavailability throws a wrench into their legislative agenda. That’s also worth watching.”

Posted at 10:22 am by Ed Driscoll

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.'”

Posted at 10:08 am by Stephen Green

THE JEWS WHO DIDN’T LEAVE EGYPT, and their modern analogs. “For American Jews, our addiction to being insiders is especially dangerous at this moment, because it means siding with people who don’t like Jews very much, and in some cases actively wish us harm. But it’s more than that, for everyone: When status becomes the reward for serving those in power, who in turn reduce the rest of the population to forms of abject powerlessness, then seeking it out becomes toxic.”

Posted at 9:52 am by Glenn Reynolds

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.”

Posted at 9:37 am by Stephen Green

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.”

Posted at 9:06 am by Stephen Green

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?

Posted at 8:35 am by Stephen Green

OH, COLUMBIA: Columbia Professors Declare Solidarity With Student Protesters and Call for Shafik’s Resignation. “A group of Columbia University professors held a rally Monday to express solidarity with the anti-Semitic students suspended for holding unauthorized protests on campus and to lambaste university president Minouche Shafik for cracking down on them.”

Related:

Posted at 8:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

IT’S AN ORGANIZED CAMPAIGN BY PEOPLE WHO HATE AMERICA. THAT’S NOT ME TALKING, THAT’S THEM.

Related: Why are tent cities springing up at elite colleges?

It’s an organized campaign by people who hate America.

Posted at 7:34 am by Glenn Reynolds

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.”

Posted at 7:33 am by Stephen Green