OUR HOLLOWED-OUT INDUSTRIAL BASE: The U.S. Can Afford a Bigger Military. We Just Can’t Build It.

When the Center for Strategic and International Studies simulated a war between the U.S. and China over Taiwan, the wargame ended with Taiwan still free, at grievous cost. The U.S. loses two aircraft carriers and up to 20 destroyers and cruisers; China sees more than 50 major surface warships sunk.

What looks like a draw, though, becomes a Chinese victory before long. As Eric Labs, a navy analyst for the Congressional Budget Office explains, China can replace lost ships far more quickly. In the past two years, its navy has grown by 17 cruisers and destroyers; it would take the U.S. six years to build the same number under current conditions, he said.

“In terms of industrial competition and shipbuilding, China is where the U.S. was in the early stages of World War II,” Labs said. In the U.S. now, “we just don’t have the industrial capacity to build warships…in large numbers very fast.”

Intensifying security challenges from the western Pacific to Ukraine to the Middle East have fueled debate over whether the U.S. can afford a bigger military. In fact, the more pressing question is whether it can build one—when its principal adversary possesses vast industrial capacity.

Congress’s bipartisan and decades-long neglect of the naval yards required to build, maintain, and repair our warships is damn-near criminal.

OLD AND BUSTED: “Give the People What They Want.”

The new hotness? Why publishers stopped caring about their readers.

It was easy to choose books for my young nieces and nephews this Christmas. First, I ruled out stories about boys who think they are girls, girls who dream of having their breasts removed and pet rabbits unhappy at being misgendered.

Then I rejected books telling toddlers how to be anti-racist and older children how to be allies to their black classmates. Feminist manuals on women who changed the world, all of which feature at least one woman who was actually male, went the same way as history books that divide the past into tales of victimized black people and evil white people. Worthy tomes about climate change, rising sea levels and Greta Thunberg were also discarded. By this point, with so few books remaining, the choice was all but made for me.

It turns out I am not alone in this book-selection method. Although publishers insist upon churning out fashionable woke thinking, the public is just not buying it. Take Page Boy, actor Elliot Page’s gender transition memoir. Page secured a whopping $3 million for the book but, according to the sales tracker BookScan, only 68,000 print copies have been sold. Readers, it seems, are less than enthusiastic. The same goes for Claudia Craven’s novel, Lucky Red. Only 3,500 copies of this “queer feminist western” have shifted, despite Craven receiving a $500,000 advance.

To be fair, publishers are definitely doing a service to the environment by publishing books that no one wants to read: Book Publishers Go Green To Reduce Their Carbon Footprint. In the United States alone, the publishing industry uses about 32 million trees annually to make books. On top of that, producing books emits over 40 million metric tons of C02 each year.

By knowing ahead of time that they’ll be releasing a book that no one will be buying, publishers can save many, many trees! (At least until the laws of economics finally catch up with them.)

HOLIDAY DEAL: KitchenAid Variable Speed Corded Hand Blender. #CommissonEarned

RON DESANTIS CALLS ON HARVARD PRESIDENT CLAUDINE GAY TO RESIGN: Audio via Hugh Hewitt.

HH: Yeah, that is, that is an unfortunate, that was just unfair, and that is going to end next year. Governor, I want to begin with a very straightforward question. I’m a graduate of Harvard College. You’re a graduate of Harvard Law School. I want the president of Harvard, President Gay, to resign based upon her testimony. Do you have a position on whether or not she ought to go?

RD: 100%, and I think what this has revealed is the rot and the sickness that’s been festering inside higher education for a long time. And you understand that, Hugh. A lot of your listeners do. But I think now the broader public is seeing this, and I think that they’re appalled by what was going on. And I would put in a plug for Florida and say how we’ve done it differently. If you look at how, say, Ben Sasse, who’s the president of the University of Florida has handled the post-October 7th matters, much different, moral clarity, things that you can be proud of. And we need universities that are going to serve a function of pursuing truth and preparing students to be citizens of the republic. They should not be these hotbeds of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. But that’s what they’ve become, and I think back to my time. And I joke when I’m out on the campaign trail speaking with Republican primary voters. I say listen, I’m one of the few people that have gone through both Harvard and Yale and came out more conservative than when I went in. That’s not easy to do. And everyone acknowledged, they all kind of get it. But back in my day, you would not have had, I think, this level of vitriol like you have now. It has gotten much worse.

HH: Governor, in 1996, the Congress passed something called the Solomon Amendment, which you may recall. It barred law schools that would not allow the ROTC to recruit there from receiving federal funds. Would you be in favor of cutting off, and notwithstanding any other law provision in the supplemental, cutting off funds to universities like Harvard, Penn and MIT that have not taken action against the anti-Semitic assaults that have occurred on their campus?

RD: 100%.

Maybe just cut federal funding off anyway. Why are these absurdly rich institutions getting federal aid? Or even tax exemptions? It’s not clear that they’re a net positive for society, and in fact they’re looking like a toxic industry.

CULTURE OF IMPUNITY: Defying presidents and Congress, the ATF, DEA, FBI and U.S. Marshals shroud their shootings in secrecy: Despite nearly 30 years of demands for transparency, the DOJ’s law enforcement agencies release little data about whom they shoot, why and when, and they rarely use body cameras.

To be fair, they can’t even be trusted about other people’s shootings: Massive errors in FBI’s Active Shooting Reports from 2014-2022 regarding cases where civilians stop attacks: Instead of 4.6%, the correct number is at least 35.7%. In 2022, it is at least 41.3%. Excluding gun-free zones, it averaged over 63.5%.

Also: FBI agent who shot a man while showing dance moves at Denver nightclub allowed to carry weapon again.

Related: FBI Hiding the Ball on Communications With Twitter.

RABBI MICHAEL BARCLAY: Winning the War Against Evil. “Someone once said that the power of Jewish holidays is that they are ‘meta-historical,’ meaning that they are based on a historical event and simultaneously have valuable lessons and teachings for us today. Nowhere is this clearer than in this year’s holiday of Hanukkah, which begins on Thursday evening, Dec. 7, and lasts for eight nights.”

JIM TREACHER: White House Interns Demand Gaza Ceasefire or Something.

Say what you want about Generation X, but at least when we were young, we understood that we didn’t matter. Nobody cared what we thought about anything, because we didn’t know anything. We were stupid, ignorant children, and we knew it.

* * * * * * * *

That was us. We sucked, and we knew it. In multiple languages. So what?, we shrugged.

But today’s kids have been raised to believe they’re winners. Stars. They’ve been on camera their whole lives. So when a few of them manage to nab a White House internship, they imagine it makes them important somehow.

But not important enough to sign their names, of course. They “can’t remain silent,” but they don’t want you to know who they are. Because then they’d be forced to stand behind their words. They’d need to deal with the consequences of their actions. They want to be big shots, without any of the accountability.

Fortunately, everybody’s laughing at these little idiots, and at the “journalist” who thought this was somehow a news story.

But there’s one person who’s not laughing at them, because he’s too far gone to react, otherwise he’d do as Noah Rothman suggests: Fire the Insurrectionary Interns.

The Biden White House has struggled to mollify the small number of weepy pencil pushers with whom they are surrounded because they cannot be appeased. They have profoundly misjudged their relative importance and do not understand their roles. Still, the administration has convinced itself they are representative of a broader constituency they cannot afford to alienate. That consideration doesn’t apply to this group of 40 youngins. They have served themselves up on a platter.

Fire the interns. If the courage of their convictions is so shallow that the 40 choose to remain anonymous, the administration should clear house. There is no shortage of eager and accomplished candidates willing to (key word) serve in the White House. By contrast, this crew isn’t satisfied with service. They want to be made martyrs. Who is Joe Biden to stand in their way?

The fact that they’re not walking the plank is today’s daily reminder that Biden isn’t in charge of his own White House. (But we know who very likely is, and his worldview aligns rather neatly with the disgruntled tikes running around the current (P)resident.)

THAT’S WHY THE MEDIA HAD TO WORK SO HARD TO ESTABLISH THEM: Adam Carolla: ‘Every Mainstream Media Narrative … Has Been Wrong.’

“Every mainstream media narrative of the last five years has been wrong, if you really think about it, or skewed or morphed into something,” Carolla said.

“Maybe you start with Russian collusion and the Steele Dossier. ‘There’s a tape. There’s a pee-pee tape,’” he continued of the debunked attacks on President Donald Trump. “And you roll it all the way through COVID or George Floyd or Kyle Rittenhouse .. Hunter Biden’s laptop.

“They’ve been wrong. And not wrong around the edges… there’s always wrong around the edges. They’ve been flat-out f***ing wrong about all of it,” Carolla said.

“If you were to talk to some of the people who reported it, they would be confused,” Dr. Pinsky added of journalists who cannot be shamed for their egregious errors.

They weren’t wrong. They lied.

WITH THE ACCENT ON “YET”: This Might Be Facebook’s Lowest Moment Yet.

WELL, GOOD: Israel Says It Has Killed Half of Hamas’s Battalion Commanders. “Israel has so far failed to assassinate the U.S.-designated terrorist group’s senior leadership, which includes Yahya Sinwar, leader of Hamas in Gaza, and Mohammed Deif, head of the group’s armed wing. But fighting is now coalescing around Khan Younis, one of Hamas’s strongholds in the southern strip, where the Israeli military says Sinwar and others could be hunkered down.”

WHY ARE THEY TAX-EXEMPT? Elite universities grew endowments by $65 billion while raking in taxpayer cash.

Related: Higher Ed Has Become a Threat to America: Our corrupt, radical universities feed every scourge from censorship and crime to antisemitism.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Leftists Are OK With Rape Because Islamophobia. “As all decent people know, there isn’t a rape ‘but’ clause. Ever.”

INTERFERENCE! Officials at the University of Michigan have canceled votes on two student government referenda regarding this Israel-Hamas conflict, citing ‘unprecedented’ election interference by pro-Palestinian students.

HMM: Saudi Arabia may wage oil ‘market share war’ against the US, reversing output cuts and unleashing a flood of supply, energy expert says.

Saudi Arabia is struggling to boost oil prices with production cuts and may soon make a dramatic reversal aimed at the US, according to energy expert Paul Sankey.

In an interview with Business Insider, he said Saudi Arabia may pivot to ramping up production to flush the market with a flood of supply in the first half of 2024. And that’s not to target emerging producers like Guyana or Brazil.

“You’ve got to attack the guy that’s making the marginal decision to drill or not — and that guy is Mr. Permian Basin,” Sankey said, referring to the US shale epicenter.

He later added, “I think to be specific, it’s a market share war.”

Saudi can and sometimes will play the market share card but all that oil will still be under the Permian Basin when prices come back up.

LOOK AT THIS COMMUNITY NOTE AND IT’S EASY TO SEE WHY THEY HATE ELON:

We’ve created close to 800,000 manufacturing jobs since I’ve taken office.

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) December 5, 2023

Haha you got fact checked.

— Melanie (@Imagecaptured) December 5, 2023

TRUMP WINS TOM FRIEDMAN’S VOTE: Well, if the New York Times columnist meant what he said on “Meet the Press” a while back in expressing his wish that for just one day America could be like China. Issues & Insights caught it.

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Is China Telling the Truth About the New Respiratory Outbreak?

GEORGE KORDA: Trump’s ‘vermin’ comment was vile, but Democrats should also stop dehumanizing opponents.

Meh, once you’ve called a guy Hitler, I don’t think you can complain about what he calls you back. There’s been no restraint in political language (aimed at the right) at least since the GWB era, and probably for longer. After all, Thomas Dewey was compared with Hitler, too.

THE PENN DEBACLE: After President’s Remarks on Antisemitism, Penn Should Consider Her Future, the State’s Governor Says.

A day after M. Elizabeth Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, testified at a congressional hearing about campus antisemitism, the state’s Democratic governor said she had “failed” to “speak and act with moral clarity” and made an implicit call for her removal.

In her remarks, Magill did not directly answer pointed questions about whether students’ calling for the genocide of Jews violated Penn’s code of conduct. Gov. Josh Shapiro told reporters on Wednesday that Magill’s evasiveness was “absolutely shameful” and “unacceptable,” adding that Penn’s Board of Trustees “has a serious decision they need to make.”

Shapiro, a nonvoting member of the board, urged the trustees to meet soon, though their next scheduled public meeting is not until February, according to the board’s website.

Magill testified on Tuesday alongside Sally Kornbluth and Claudine Gay, the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, respectively, at a hearing convened by the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce. The committee had demanded that the three leaders “answer for mishandling of antisemitic, violent protests” on their campuses amid the Israel-Hamas war, according to a news release.

Late on Wednesday, Magill issued a video statement about her comments. “In that moment, I was focused on our university’s longstanding policies, aligned with the U.S. Constitution, which say that speech alone is not punishable,” Magill said. “I was not focused on, but I should have been, the irrefutable fact that a call for genocide of Jewish people is a call for some of the most terrible violence human beings can perpetrate.”
Penn’s board chair did not respond immediately to requests for comment from The Chronicle. A Pennsylvania state senator on Wednesday called for Magill to resign, vowing not to support any state funding for the university until she does.

Everything is going swimmingly. Related: Harvard President Gay Traveled to Washington to Quell the Backlash. Her Testimony Only Made it Worse.

PRIVACY: Apple Confirms Governments Using Push Notifications to Surveil Users.

According to the report, [Sen. Ron] Wyden’s letter said a “tip” was the source of the information about the surveillance. A source familiar with the matter confirmed that both foreign and U.S. government agencies have been asking Apple and Google for metadata related to push notifications. The data is said to have been used to attempt to tie anonymous users of messaging apps to specific Apple or Google accounts.

Reuters’ source would not identify which governments were making the data requests but described them as “democracies allied to the United States.” They did not know how long the requests had been going on for.

Apple advises developers not to include sensitive data in notifications and to encrypt any data before adding it to a notification payload. However, this requires action on the developers’ part. Likewise, metadata (like which apps are sending notifications and how often) is not encrypted, potentially giving anyone with access to the information insight into users’ app usage.

Not a great look for a company that’s been using privacy as a big part of its sales pitch.

HE’S KIND TO LIMIT IT TO FINANCIAL MATTERS: James Comer to NBC host: ‘You’re financially illiterate.’

LIFTOFF!

Liftoff! pic.twitter.com/iBETMTpR7m

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 7, 2023

Some parts of America still work.

HMM: New Details Emerge About Bobby Kennedy and Epstein’s Pedo-Plane.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Ivory Tower’s Day of Reckoning. People are noticing how many institutions have been corrupted.

Related: Anti-Semitism Hearing Highlights Ivy League Hypocrisy on Free Speech: ‘In what world is a call for violence against Jews protected speech, but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?’

Establishment client groups get protection. Designated class enemies do not.

AT AMAZON, Shop Holiday Deals. #CommissionEarned