Navy Matters.

One of the characteristics of WWII, which made the defeat of Germany and Japan a foregone conclusion, was the vast industrial capacity of the US and the ability to convert that capacity to wartime production needs. In contrast, today we lack the sheer foundation of industry and, for a host of reasons, the ability to convert what we do have to wartime needs and to scale up the capacity that we do have.

Why, you ask, can’t we scale up and convert the industry that we do have to wartime needs? As an illustrative example, recall that in WWII, auto manufacturers were able to convert from cars to tanks, aircraft, and other equipment. Ford Motor Company, for example, produced B-24 bombers and M-4 tanks, among other items. Conversion to wartime production was possible, in large part, due to the fact that civilian automobiles and military vehicles and aircraft used, basically, the same equipment. An M-4 tank wasn’t that different from an automobile. Bombers and tanks used radial engines which were, themselves, just automobile engines in a different shape than an in-line car engine. And so on.

Now, consider a modern Abrams tank or a B-2/B-21 bomber as compared to a typical automobile. There’s no comparison and little similarity! Turbine engines have little in common with car engines. Advanced armors have little in common with automobile sheet metal. Exotic materials like titanium, composites, etc. have little in common with sheet metal and run of the mill steel and aluminum. Forming, welding, and manipulating exotic materials requires exotic skills. Stealth coatings have nothing in common with automobile paint. Micron tolerances have nothing in common with automobile level tolerances. And so on.

Yes, given years of time to retrain workers, revamp factories, master advanced production techniques, and so forth, we could convert but we aren’t going to have years of time in a war. If we can’t convert quickly, we aren’t going to convert at all.

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The Biden administration has used secretive flights to transport migrants into the U.S., adding to the massive influx at the southern border, a Center for Immigration Studies’ Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit discovered.

The center’s Todd Bensman first reported that the FOIA suit discovered that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) approved secretive flights that last year alone transported 320,000 illegal immigrants from foreign countries into at least 43 different U.S. airports.

“This administration is both importing voters and creating a national security threat from unvetted illegal immigrants,” Elon Musk posted on X while sharing a DailyMail.com story about the secretive flights.

“It is highly probable that the groundwork is being laid for something far worse than 9/11. Just a matter of time.”

The Foundry.

What has happened to the downtown of one of the most beautiful cities in America?

Well, the pandemic happened—and according to reports, foot traffic in the area has never really recovered. But more glaringly, crime happened. No, Union Square has never been, at least in my memory, a place you could mistake for Disneyland. But it was only in the 2020s that you heard regular stories of shoplifting, of an employee facing a machete-wielding man, of a mob bursting into luxury shop Louis Vuitton and grabbing goods, and of a car purposefully driving into Dior and thieves snatching items valued at $275,000.

Unsurprisingly, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, no disinterested party, pushed back on the idea that crime contributed to the decision by Macy’s, telling the San Francisco ABC affiliate that there had been a “significant decline in crime” between Nov. 20 and the end of the year. (Macy’s executives haven’t attributed the decision, which comes amid the closings of 150 Macy’s locations, to crime.) San Francisco put a heavy police presence in Union Square at the end of 2023 during holiday shopping.

But crime seems to be increasingly on San Franciscans’ minds. That’s not surprising, as residents have had to endure not one, but two pro-criminal George Soros prosecutors as district attorney: George Gascon from 2011 to 2019 and Chesa Boudin from 2020 to 2022. Crime got so bad in 2022 that the progressives in the city recalled Boudin from office.

Wikipedia.

My favorites:

USA Today.

Feb. 16 started like any typical Friday night. My husband and I decided to stay home, grill chicken and make a salad for dinner. At about 6:45 p.m., we heard some loud rumbling overhead.

We walked onto the back patio, and two police helicopters were overhead – shining lights all over our property, and a recording echoed, “Police. You are under arrest. Stay right there and I won’t shoot you.”

As I looked across the fence, a swarm of armed members of the Phoenix SWAT Team with a few dogs were circling our property. One of the guys said, “Yeah, there’s a jammer right here.” He picked it up. I leaned over the patio and asked, “What’s going on?”

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Think of it as evolution in action.

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When President Joe Biden delivers his State of the Union speech on Thursday, the audience will include 17 relatives of Americans held captive or murdered by Hamas terrorists in Israel.

A list published Monday by the Families of the American Hostages in Gaza coalition named relatives of six hostages still held captive, two released captives and two hostages who were killed.

The family members will be guests on Thursday evening of a bipartisan slate of members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Among the hosts are the speaker, Louisiana Republican Rep, Mike Johnson, and the minority leader, New York Democratic Rep. Hakeem Jeffries.

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As military units increasingly depend on wireless communications in the combat zone, the Ukraine War is providing examples of how patterns of cell phone use can be mapped and provide targets for guided missile attacks. Military field headquarters have long known that they must restrict their use of wireless devices and, if possible, route communications via wire to a location hundreds of meters from the headquarters. From that remote location wireless transmissions can be made. If the enemy locates the wireless transmission site and attacks it with a missile, casualties and damage are minimized. It’s been known that field headquarters using wireless communications, including cell phones, makes the headquarters a missile magnet. The war in Ukraine confirmed that. The Russians were often the target of these missile magnet attacks because the Ukrainians were more careful with their use of cell phones in the field.

Richard Epstein.

Now that the efforts to keep Donald Trump off the ballot were soundly rejected in the Supreme Court in Trump v. Anderson, the largest cloud over the former president’s re-election campaign is Jack Smith’s four-count indictment, which makes no reference to insurrection but alleges only “a conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 [2021] congressional proceeding” to certify the election of the next president.

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After the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a state has no power to kick a presidential candidate off a ballot, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said he planned to “revive legislation” to prevent anyone guilty of participating in an “insurrection” from running for president.

Yeah, well, the problem they have is that Trump hasn’t even been formally accused of ‘participating in an insurrection’, much less found guilty of doing so. That dog won’t hunt.

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The federal government has used taxpayer dollars to fund services for LGBTQ refugees in Latin America over the past couple of years, federal grants show.

The State Department and the Inter-American Foundation, an independent federal agency, funded a trio of grants between August 2021 and October 2023 aimed at bolstering Costa Rica’s status as a haven for LGBTQ asylum-seekers, funding a project to help LGBTQ refugee entrepreneurs as well as teaching gay and transgender refugees how to use computers. The three programs collectively received almost $300,000 in federal funds.

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U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officers (CBP) at the San Ysidro Port of Entry made a massive bust over the weekend, discovering more than $11 million of blue fentanyl pills concealed in a car on Sunday.

At the San Ysidro POE around 8PM on Sunday night, a K-9 unit encountered a “37-year-old man driving a 2008 sedan applying for admission into the United States from Mexico,” a release from Customs and Border Patrol revealed over the weekend.

The K-9 unit alerted for drugs near the glove compartment and the vehicle was referred for further inspection, at which point “CBP officers extracted a total of 100 packages containing blue pills concealed within the vehicle’s dashboard and within the front passenger seats”.

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Illicit Iranian oil sales have hit $90 billion under the Biden administration, with the proceeds helping Tehran’s regional terror proxies fund an unprecedented wave of attacks on Israel, American forces, and Western shipping vessels.

Tehran’s sales to China, its top importer, have consistently crossed more than 1 million barrels per day during the past several months, a signal that the Biden administration continues its softline approach toward enforcing sanctions on the regime’s oil exports.

“Iran has managed to sell $90 billion worth of U.S.-sanctioned oil, setting new export records in the process,” according to the latest figures published by United Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI), a watchdog group that monitors Tehran’s illicit oil trade. “Ongoing hesitance to enforce oil sanctions on Iran has proven to be a defining characteristic of the Biden Administration’s foreign policy.”

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Violent crime is going down in Venezuela just as the United States has been hit with a rash of high-profile violent crimes by illegal immigrants.

It’s not hard to figure out why.

The killing of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student in Athens, Georgia, has become the latest and most prominent case of an American being killed as a consequence of President Joe Biden’s open-border policies.

The man being held in connection with the killing of Riley is Jose Antonio Ibarra, a Venezuelan illegal immigrant who reportedly entered the United States in 2022. Since his arrival in the U.S., he appears to have spent his time breaking various other laws and behaving like a general menace to society. He has been arrested for various serious crimes and repeatedly released.

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Israel on Monday released recordings it said implicated two more employees with the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attacks.

The Jewish state posted on X two phone calls it said the staffers, both teachers, made during the massacre in which they referenced being inside Israel and taking female hostages.

“I’m inside. I’m inside with the Jews,” Mamduh Hasin Ahmed Alkali allegedly told a person on the other end of the line.

“Shut up, we have female captives. I caught one,” Yusef Zidan Suleiman al-Hawajara, another UNRWA teacher, can be heard saying in a phone call.

Alkali is part of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, while al-Hawajara is part of Hamas, according to an X post from Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy. Both allegedly operate in the groups’ military organizations. The Washington Free Beacon could not reach the individuals for comment.

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Using data compiled by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $25,000 annually before taxes.

Just as an accurate census is a prerequisite to funding American communities equitably, policymakers depend on economic indicators to shape economic policy. LISEP developed the True Rate of Unemployment to provide analysts and decision-makers with a more accurate measure of Americans’ financial well-being.

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In a country-wide counter-terrorism operation, Belgian police on Sunday raided four residences, arresting four Islamic State (IS) sympathizers previously flagged by state security. The authorities moved into action when it appeared that the group was actively planning a terrorist attack on a Brussels concert hall.

In a press release from the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang party, MP and chairman of the Interior Committee Ortwin Depoortere said the foiled attack “evokes painful memories of previous IS attacks,” specifically referring to the 2015 Bataclan massacre in Paris in which 89 concertgoers lost their lives. “That almost a decade later such a tragedy would happen again is alarming.”

Depoortere leveled further accusations at the disgraced former Justice Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne (centrist-liberal Open VLD) and his successor Paul Van Tigchelt (also Open VLD), under whose leadership Islamic radicalism had “been ignored for far too long.”

Yet another reminder that Islam is a terrorist movement.

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The US Supreme Court has ruled in a unanimous decision that former President Donald Trump will be allowed to remain on primary and general ballots in the 2024 US election, after several states removed the former president under the 14th Amendment.

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Take comfort from the fact that, no matter how bad it is in the U.S., Britain and Canada are far worse.

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Remember when, in the immediate aftermath of the Ukraine war, Russian oil immediately traded down to a discount of as much as 30% below spot Brent as the entire western world suddenly found itself locked out of access to the most valuable Russian export (which also meant that China and India were the only natural buyers left) and the price of Russian oil had to reflect the explicit plunge in demand?

Well, that’s no longer the case because in the two years since the start of the Ukraine conflict, it became apparent that Western sanctions were merely a theatrical publicity stunt as the alternative – strict enforcement – would have sent oil prices soaring and that would be unacceptable to a Biden administration terrified of losing the November elections if and when oil and gasoline prices surges.

And as fear of enforcement became a non-issue over time, so did the discount of Russian oil to Brent, which brings us to today, and Goldman’s “chart of the week” which illustrates the collapse in the discount on Russian crude oil close to zero relative to Brent, according to the bank’s estimates using the most recent customs data for December.

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A 15-year-old boy was critically injured in a shooting near Six Flags Over Georgia, a popular amusement park in suburban Atlanta, after police exchanged gunfire with a group of people, authorities said Sunday.

Cobb County Police Department officers were assisting with crowd control near the amusement park’s entrance on Saturday “after several fights had taken place” among people who were leaving the park, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said in a press release.

“At some point, multiple people began shooting, hitting an unoccupied CCPD marked patrol car,” the statement said. “As officers identified where the shots were coming from, they ran after people who had run into the woods. During the incident, one CCPD officer fired his weapon, hitting one minor.”

Authorities said the 15-year-old was taken to Grady Hospital and determined to be in critical condition.

Sailer’s Law says that a high ratio of wounded to fatalities indicates that the shooter was not white.

Coulter’s Law says that if they don’t mention the race of the shooter then the shooter was not white.

So there you have it.

UPDATE: Chaos At Georgia Six Flags As Violent Mob Invades – Ends In Shootout With Police

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New York City police officers discovered an explosive device in the back seat of an Uber but several anti-Israel protesters blocked traffic, keeping them from getting to it but leading to the protesters’ arrest.

The discovery was made Saturday afternoon by the Uber driver after dropping off a potential terrorist in Times Square for the Millions March for Palestine, the New York Post reported.

The explosive device was reported to police, leading to a response from the Emergency Services Unit and Bomb Squad, but protesters blocking traffic kept them from getting to the Uber at 42nd Street and 7th Avenue, according to the police report.

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Pretty soon we’ll have water fountains with WHITE ONLY signs.

That odd sound you hear is Orval Faubus cackling in his grave.

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The mainstream media for years downplayed and denied the border crisis. They largely avoided the term itself and sometimes outright derided it.

Then, in late January, the White House backed a border security bill and congressional Republicans killed the legislation, saying it was too weak. Suddenly, “border crisis” was in the headlines, and news outlets were suggesting Republicans didn’t care enough about the out-of-control illegal immigration.

NOW: Ahead of dueling visits to the southern border on Thursday by President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, who are once again facing off for the presidency in 2024, outlets leaned into the crisis. A New York Times liveblog about the border visits featured the word “crisis” 26 times.

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A recent study found that the majority of patients who suffered from long COVID during a time when vaccines and antiviral treatments were widely available were vaccinated.

Every day, in every way, I’m glad I never got vaccinated.

Good advice.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended. (Also available on Apple Podcasts.)

Since I liked yesterday’s post so much, I decided to do a show on the topic, but from a historical perspective. Since the end of the Cold War our ruling class has gone off the rails and it is not a coincidence. We have the combination of two factors that are at the heart of this sudden shift into madness. One is the generational changeover and the other is the end of the Cold War moral order.

The show is about that last bit. It turns out that “winning” the Cold War was the worst thing for the West. The Russians and to a lesser extent the Chinese came out of the experience of losing the great ideological war better than they would otherwise have been if not for the collapse of communism. China is the biggest economy on earth and Russia is a fully modern country of the 21st century.

Meanwhile, the post-Cold War experience for the West, especially America, has been a descent into madness. The inflection point is the 1992 election when the Boomers officially took over and began to shape the post-Cold War world. The trouble is they had no idea what they were doing. They did not understand why the West won the Cold War and lacked the historical understanding to see their own folly.

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Numerous xenophobes in Austria have been stereotyping immigrants by describing them as the gang-rapists of a 12-year-old girl.

Those offensive xenophobes are in fact reporters for major news outlets who describe an official police investigation, but we should not allow that to distract us from the fact that they are WAYCISTS, and must be punished accordingly.

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It’s no surprise to readers of this site that metals are often worth more than fiat currency. Gold, silver, and other precious metals are known for their value. But sometimes fiat currency can’t even compete with zinc.

The US penny, which is primarily made of zinc, costs roughly three cents to produce and is only worth one cent according to the federal government. This is the opposite of what has happened historically. Generally, governments produce currency that is worth far more than the cost of producing it. Imagine printing a one hundred dollar bill which costs far less than a hundred dollars in materials and printing costs. The profit from this is called seigniorage. With pennies, the US government is practicing reverse seigniorage.

This loss of money from producing pennies is one of the arguments for abolishing the US penny. There are other arguments against the penny such as the claim that it’s worth so little compared to the typical American wage that it makes no sense to denominate prices in pennies, would anyone argue that the United States needs a coin worth half a penny?

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Dr. Clarice Saba, an otorhinolaryngologist in Brazil, developed sudden hearing loss in her right ear a week after receiving her first dose of the COVID-19 adenovirus vaccine.

“I did all the exams and could not find any other reason other than because of the shots,” she told The Epoch Times.

Newsbusters.

John Hendrickson used most of his Atlantic magazine article on Tuesday criticizing No Labels. There was no big surprise in his critique of No Labels, “The Dangerous Confusion of No Labels,” which portrays that sort of party as confused, impractical, and even downright goofy.

Deep into the story, Hendrickson revealed something that should have been the main focus. The desperation of the Lincoln Project to keep a No Labels presidential ticket off 2024 ballots in the states to the extent of threatening to ruin the lives of individual members.

Let us take a look at what was buried many paragraphs down in the story but should have been right at the top due to what it revealed about the shockingly heinous nature of the Lincoln Project.

David Harsanyi.

The other day, Politico reporter Heidi Przybyla appeared on MSNBC’s “All In With Chris Hayes” to talk about the hysteria de jour, “Christian nationalism.”

Donald Trump, she explained, has surrounded himself with an “extremist element of conservative Christians” who are misrepresenting “so-called natural law” in their attempt to roll back abortion “rights” and other leftist policy preferences.

What makes “Christian nationalists” different, Politico’s Przybyla went on, was that they believe “our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority.”

As numerous critics have already pointed out, “Christian nationalism” sounds identical to the case for American liberty offered in the Declaration of Independence.

Then again, the idea that man has inalienable, universal rights goes back to ancient Greece, at least. The entire American project is contingent on accepting the notion that the state can’t give or take our God-given freedoms.