A NEW FILM FORTHCOMING FROM GLORIA GREENFIELD: The Fight Of Our Lives: Defeating The Ideological War Against The West.

PROCUREMENT BLUES: US dropped ball on Navy railgun development—now China is picking it up.

For nearly a decade, the US Navy’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) and various contractors worked to develop a railgun system for US ships. A prototype weapon was built by BAE Systems. Testing at the US Navy’s Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Virginia was deemed so successful that the Navy was planning to conduct more testing of the gun at sea aboard a Spearhead-class Joint High Speed Vessel (JHSV). The program promised to deliver a gun that could fire projectiles at speeds over Mach 7 with a range exceeding 100 miles. The 23-pound hypervelocity projectile designed for the railgun flying at Mach 7 has 32 megajoules of energy—roughly equivalent to the energy required to accelerate an object weighing 1,000 kilograms (1.1 US tons) to 252 meters per second (566 miles an hour).

But the program has been largely shelved because of the Department of Defense’s ongoing budget problems and the loss of interest at DOD’s Strategic Capabilities Office in funding further development. The continued “sequestration” of the DOD’s budget has forced the Navy and ONR to shift development focus away from the long-term goal of the railgun toward the more short-term goal of using the hypervelocity projectile (HPV) the railgun fires within more conventional US Navy gun systems.

China has clearly been watching the US program with interest, and the PLAN reportedly began working on its own electromagnetic gun system about five years ago, according to Dafeng Cao’s ex-PLAN officer source. Now the PLAN is preparing to take its tests to sea, making the 20-year old Haiyang Shan the first ship to ever be armed with a railgun.

If the Chinese beat us with our own orphaned technology it will be because Congress would rather grandstand than perform its primary duty to produce an annual budget.

L.A.’S HOMELESSNESS SURGED 75% IN SIX YEARS. HERE’S WHY THE CRISIS HAS BEEN DECADES IN THE MAKING:

Three out of four homeless people — 41,000 — live in cars, campers, tents and lean-tos, by far the biggest single group of unsheltered people in any U.S. city. If you took out Los Angeles, national homelessness would have dropped last year for the first time since the recession.

People left behind by the economic recovery can’t compete with young professionals who have bid rents up to record levels.

In another era, they might have found refuge in crumbling hotels and tenements. But many of those buildings were lost in the city’s post-recession spree of building, evictions and renovations.

The problem has only gotten worse since Mayor Eric Garcetti took office in 2013 and a liberal Democratic supermajority emerged in 2016 on the county Board of Supervisors.

Unexpectedly. And if you missed it last month, here’s California in a single headline: Anaheim to evict homeless to make way for flood-control project and preserve bike path.

The video in the post at Twitchy of ten speed-bicyclists in full spandex Lance Armstrong Tour de France gear and GoPro-equipped helmets videotaping themselves riding past an endless row of homeless tents is California in a single video:

Ayn Rand didn’t write The Return of the Primitive as a how-to guide.

TIT FOR TAT: Israel Begins Legalizing West Bank Outpost After Settler Killed There

The approval comes less than a month after Rabbi Raziel Shevach, the 35-year-old father of six children, was killed in a drive-by shooting at the outpost junction.

The proposal says the government plans to establish a legal settlement on privately owned Israeli land or state lands, the Times of Israel reported. It calls on the country’s defense minister to order the appropriate government bodies to study the legalities of making the outpost, also known as Havat Gilad, a legal settlement.

Prior to the vote, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the decision to change the status of the outpost would “facilitate orderly life there.” He said creating a new settlement would “for the murderers – exacting justice. To those who sanctify death, we will sanctify life. This is the essence of the government’s policy.”

Actions like this and taking Jerusalem off the negotiating table might — might — convince the Palestinian leadership that it’s time for honest peace negotiations.

JOEL KOTKIN: The three faces of the Democratic Party are coming to a head.

In deep blue “fortress cities” with large populations of educated global citizens, the causists views are widely accepted without question. But in much of the country — most importantly the Midwest — neither the oligarchs nor the zealots have much hold outside big city cores and college towns.

True Middle American populists — Bernie Sanders after all represents post-industrial retirement colony of Vermont — are increasingly marginalized in a party dominated by identity issue activists and the big money of the post-industrial hierarchy. The other factions’ agenda — free trade globalism, uncontrolled immigration, strident social liberalism and identity politics — are the very things that could help re-elect Trump.

To win and consolidate their gains, particularly amidst a now strong economy, Democrats need to find a way to recover their basic economic message — as they did under President Bill Clinton, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. They should focus on how to build sustained economic growth that would provide better opportunities for upward mobility for middle and working class voters, and in particular millennials. If they choose however to listen primarily to causists and oligarchs, they may win in the short run, given the ineptitude of their opponents, but may prove unable to sustain their ascendency over the longer term.

The problem is that all the energy comes from the nuts, and all the money comes from creepy oligarchs.