DICTATOR UPDATE: Zimbabwe’s 93 year old Robert Mugabe says he’ll stay in power.

He’s going to run for re-election — of course the election will be a sham.

“The majority of the people feel that there is no replacement, a successor who to them is acceptable, as acceptable as I am,” he added.

Mugabe, who has kept an iron grip on power since Zimbabwe declared independence in 1980, has repeatedly denied reports of health problems.

RELATED: Background from 2008.

DRILL BABY DRILL: The rig count increased this week, a small increase but still an increase. Right now there are 597 drilling rigs operating in the U.S.

U.S. crude inventories rose to 518.1 million barrels last week, the highest in weekly data going back to 1982, according to the Energy Information Administration.

There’ve been a couple of prior Instapundit posts about oil prices and U.S. frackers. I thought I’d add a comment. About three years ago a petroleum engineer and an engineer who does reservoir analysis independently told me they believed Texas drillers would “soon” be able to breakeven in the $40 to $45 a barrel range. They meant energy companies could drill new wells and make money in that price range. Improved technology and new techniques for using existing technology were reducing drilling and production costs. FWIW, one of the men was disputing estimates by “other experts” that frackers needed $60 a barrel to breakeven. Yes, they offered opinions –informed opinions– but this article indicates both gentlemen made good guesstimates.

YET ANOTHER COOL BOMBER PHOTO: The photo shows a USAF B1-B being escorted by a USN F/A-18E Super Hornet. The two planes are flying over the Philippine Sea (east and north of the Philippines). They aren’t over the South China Sea (west of the Philippines) — but they could be.

From the informative caption:

The B-1 is deployed in support of U.S. Pacific Command’s Continuous Bomber Presence (CBP) mission. In place since 2004, the CBP missions are conducted by U.S. Air Force bombers such as the B-1, B-52 Stratofortress and B-2 Spirit in order to provide non-stop stability and security in the Indo-Asia-Pacific region.

The photo credit goes to a USN lieutenant.

CARTEL WAR PHOTOS: A new batch of leaked photos purportedly show factions of the Sinaloa cartel preparing for a cartel civil war now that former senior commander Joaquin Guzman has been extradited to the U.S. The photo gallery also includes a section with pictures of Gulf cartel gunmen. I’m linking to the Houston Chronicle/San Antonio Express-News report. The Sinaloa photos are credited to Blog del Narco.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO ASSASSINATE: AFP reports North Korea prefers female assassins.

North Korean female assassins, armed with good looks and poison tools, are now the weapon of choice for a ruthless regime stalking its opponents, a high-profile defector told AFP on Thursday, after the latest apparent assassination.

Hardy male agents wielding guns or knives have been ditched in favour of their female counterparts, who strike fear into the hearts of enemies, said An Chan-Il, a North Korean defector and renowned critic of Pyongyang’s one-man rule.

“We are always mindful of young women accosting us for possible revenge killings,” An said.

MORE:

South Korean intelligence chiefs believe Kim Jong-Nam had toxins sprayed in his face as he walked through Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Two women have been arrested over the murder.

EVEN MORE:

“They can easily hide mini poison injectors made of plastic, either in lipsticks, cosmetics or under their clothes,” he said, adding that such plastic tools go undetected by airport security.

…”Good looks are essential but this is different from any beauty contest. A girl with a curvy body is not considered ideal to become an assassin who has to engage in physical contact with targets”, he said.

Wow. Sexism, lookism and Communism!

RETURN OF THE CVL?: Why the USN may build a few light aircraft carriers (CVLs).

BIRD FLU SAVAGES FOIE GRAS BUSINESS IN FRANCE: The H5N8 avian flu virus has forced French duck and foie gras producers to kill over three million poultry. Duck and goose liver pate is a gourmet food. It’s also a steady business. Almost 20 years ago I wrote a long column on disease threats to U.S. agriculture. There are a lot of them. Hoof and mouth disease (foot and mouth disease) worries U.S. cattle raisers, and for good reason.

PRINCE POTEMKIN WOULD APPROVE: Jim Dunnigan analyzes Russian aircraft carrier operations off Syria. He has numbers, including accident rates. War isn’t funny. Aircraft accidents aren’t funny. But if U.S. Navy carrier sailors want to snicker, as the world’s best they’ve earned the right.

RELATED: India’s having issues with its carrier aircraft. This analysis gets into the weeds, but it also involves Russian aircraft that don’t perform. It also mentions one of India’s major military problems: corruption in its procurement bureaucracy.

PREGNANT SEA MONSTER UPDATE: Relax. It’s a fossil. Of dinocephalosaurus, “which lived about 245 million years ago during the Triassic Period.” But of course you knew that.

VIDEO OF NORTH KOREAN MISSILE LAUNCH: The NorKs fired the missile from a transporter-erector launcher (TEL). Note North Korea calls this missile the Pukgukson-2, which translates as Polaris-2. FWIW, one of the first U.S. submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) was also named the Polaris.

BACKGROUND: First, a short history of the Pukgukson-1. Second, the U.S. Polaris A1 compared to India’s K-15.

BOMBER TRIFECTA: Stunning photo…courtesy U.S. Air Force and American taxpayers…Please forward the link to Tehran and Pyongyang.

BAILING OUT GREECE: The Greek government versus the IMF. It’s not quite a 2015 repeat.

Greece “significantly” beat its 2016 fiscal target, the European Commission said Monday, achieving a budget surplus before interest of 2.3 percent of gross domestic product, compared with a goal of 0.5 percent.

But note the “surplus before interest.”

AGE OF THE MOON UPDATE: The Moon is older than…well, older than earlier estimates…

DRUG SMUGGLING UPDATE: Marijuana disguised as limes. 4,000 pounds of fake limes. Two tons. You can’t make this stuff up. Well, I guess you could, but who’d believe you?

US Customs and Border Protection officers seized nearly two tons of marijuana packed in phony limes near the Texas-Mexico border last week, according to authorities.

The 3,947 pounds of weed came through a commercial shipment of key limes in Pharr, Texas, on Jan. 30, officials said.

The truck hauling the “produce” crossed the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge along the Texas-Mexico border near the Gulf of Mexico. Over 34,000 of the fake fruit packages were discovered by an imaging inspection system and narcotics K-9 team.

But fake fruit isn’t a new scheme.

This isn’t the first time smugglers tried to use fake produce to bring drugs into the United States. Last year, agents found 2,493 pounds of marijuana stuffed into fake carrots at the same border crossing.

THE U.S. ARMY MOVES BACK TO THE FUTURE: My latest Creators Syndicate column.

STRATEGY TO DESTROY NORTH KOREAN MISSILES: The U.S. and South Korea are conducting military exercises “to detect, defend, disrupt and destroy North Korea missiles…” Purveyors of Pentagonese have already dubbed it called 4D.

If UPI fact checkers did an internet search they’d discover that a “simultaneous strategic bombing strike” to destroy nuclear weapons isn’t a new concept. (Scroll through the essay to find the paragraph describing one.)

REAFFIRMING QUANTUM WEIRDNESS: Cool article, from Quanta. Spooky action at a distance, man.

Dig:

“Technically, this experiment is truly impressive,” said Nicolas Gisin, a quantum physicist at the University of Geneva who has studied this loophole around entanglement.

More:

The universe might be like a restaurant with 10 menu items, Friedman said. “You think you can order any of the 10, but then they tell you, ‘We’re out of chicken,’ and it turns out only five of the things are really on the menu. You still have the freedom to choose from the remaining five, but you were overcounting your degrees of freedom.” Similarly, he said, “there might be unknowns, constraints, boundary conditions, conservation laws that could end up limiting your choices in a very subtle way” when setting up an experiment, leading to seeming violations of local realism.

Wow:

In the first of a planned series of “cosmic Bell test” experiments, the team sent pairs of photons from the roof of Zeilinger’s lab in Vienna through the open windows of two other buildings and into optical modulators, tallying coincident detections as usual. But this time, they attempted to lower the chance that the modulator settings might somehow become correlated with the states of the photons in the moments before each measurement. They pointed a telescope out of each window, trained each telescope on a bright and conveniently located (but otherwise random) star, and, before each measurement, used the color of an incoming photon from each star to set the angle of the associated modulator. The colors of these photons were decided hundreds of years ago, when they left their stars, increasing the chance that they (and therefore the measurement settings) were independent of the states of the photons being measured.

And yet, the scientists found that the measurement outcomes still violated Bell’s upper limit, boosting their confidence that the polarized photons in the experiment exhibit spooky action at a distance after all.

So. Unentangle and read it.

A BUMP OF SORTS: Calling attention to the last Battle of the Bulge photo post and the invite to commenters to link to a photo they found particularly compelling. To reply to several commenters at once (to this post and several previous photo posts), recall that this series was a surprise to me. The webmaster did the research on his own and put the photos up without fanfare. I like the suggestion (made by several readers) that StrategyPage publish a photo series focusing on a different WW2 battle.

SECDEF’S PLANS FOR THE ARMY:

Loren Thompson in Forbes:

All four of the military services General Mattis oversees would get a boost, but the biggest beneficiary during President Trump’s tenure will be the service that is currently in the direst straits — the Army. That’s because the fixes the Army needs can be implemented more quickly than expanding the Navy’s fleet or fielding a new Air Force bomber. In fact, making the Army healthy again could be largely accomplished during Trump’s first term — which is a good thing since it is pivotal to deterring East-West war in Europe.

After two decades of fighting lightly-equipped insurgents in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has fallen behind near-peer adversaries — most notably Russia — in a wide array of capabilities including long-range fires (missiles and artillery), air defense, force protection, electronic warfare, and cybersecurity. The Army needed so much money to sustain the force structure and readiness demanded by a global war on terror that there wasn’t much left for replacing old equipment — especially after Congress capped spending in 2011.

Mattis’ plan, in three steps:

The Mattis campaign plan consists of three steps, aimed at quickly closing readiness gaps and then building up capability. Like I said, the Army benefits most in the near term because what it needs can be fielded fairly fast. Step One in the Mattis plan is to deliver to the White House by March 1 proposed changes to the 2017 budget fixing readiness shortfalls across the joint force. Readiness includes everything from training to maintenance to munitions stocks.

Step Two, delivered to the White House by May 1, would rewrite the 2018 military spending request for the fiscal year beginning October 1 to buy more munitions, invest in critical enablers, grow the size of the force, and fund demonstration of new capabilities. Step Three, based on a revised national defense strategy, would lay out a comprehensive military modernization program for the years 2019-2023. The revised strategy would include a new “force sizing construct” that would boost the size of all the services, but especially the Army.

Congress has already passed legislation to reverse the shrinkage of the Army that had cut the number of brigade combat teams by a third during the Obama years.

MATTIS A HIT IN JAPAN: South Korea, too.

KAROSHI: Japanese for “working to death.”

On Christmas evening, Dec. 25, 2015, newly hired Ms. Matsuri Takahashi, 24, threw herself from the top floor of the dormitory of Dentsu, Japan’s largest and most prestigious advertising firm.

Last September, the Mita Labor Standard Inspection Office announced the results of its investigation and ruled that Takahashi’s suicide was actually karoshi—death from overwork. And it was not the first time a Dentsu employee had succumbed in that way.

The incident was followed by the release of a Japanese government white paper which found that 93 people had committed suicide or attempted suicide due to overwork in 2015.

More:

Death from overwork and ceaseless overtime are closely related to the rise of what in Japan are known as burakku kigyo, loosely translated as “dark companies” or “evil corporations.” Generally the reference is to firms in which working hours are long and brutal, unpaid overtime is endemic, and harassment at work—including sexual harassment and bullying—is part of the workplace culture.

EVERYTHING TRUMP IS DOING ESTABLISHMENT DEMOCRATS SET IN MOTION:

On January 27, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer called Trump’s plan to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, “divisive and unnecessary.” But in 2006 Obama, Clinton, Biden, Schumer and 20 other Democrats in the Senate at the time voted in favor of the Secure Fence Act, which called for a physical barrier to be built along the U.S.-Mexico border. Bernie Sanders, who was a Representative in the House at the time, voted against the bill. The fence was never completed due to Congress failing to provide the necessary funding. President Trump’s recent executive order to build a physical wall along the U.S.-Mexico border cites that the order falls under the 2006 Secure Fence Act that Bush signed into law.

Ouch.

MY BULGE PHOTO SELECTIONS: I said I’d pick two from StrategyPage’s Battle of the Bulge commemorative series (which ended January 25). I selected three photos. In the comments section of this post commenters so inclined are invited to pick one photo they liked and say why. You may also include the photo link in the comment. (To review the series, use the Instapundit search tool and type in “Battle of the Bulge.” You should get the entire series as it appeared on Instapundit.)

My selections:

Most moving: Every Band Member a Rifleman. (The caption explains why. Small U.S. units delayed the initial German offensive.)

Best captures the effort and suffering of the individual U.S. soldier: Holding Germans Off All Night (The soldier’s face is a study in fatigue.)

Best photo history: Panzer Out of the Fight. (The photo captures the terrain and weather. The battle was a mobile battle. The photo has a German and a U.S. vehicle. The panzer is out of the battle. The American tank destroyer is still rolling.)

RELATED: The photo an Instapundit reader helped identify. There’s a thank you in the caption!

250,000 MORE PEOPLE COULD FLEE MOSUL: That’s the AFP headline, quoting UN sources. But the report adds the refugees would be “escaping” combat in the city. So this is good news, as long as Iraq and its allies have prepared for the refugee surge. Limiting civilian casualties has been one of the Iraqi government’s major political objectives since it began retaking cities held by the Islamic State. The goal was liberating Iraqi citizens, not killing them. That’s why ISIS places “human shields” (hostages) around key defensive positions. It’s a war crime but the Islamic State is a criminal organization.

ISIS fighters could hide in a civilian refugee surge. Fewer civilians in western Mosul should make it a bit easier to use the coalition’s firepower advantage — artillery and air strikes. However, the Islamic State will still have hostages. How many ISIS fighters remain in western Mosul? 3,000 to 5,000 seems to be the common estimate.

ENGLISH HAS THREE THOUSAND WORDS FOR BEING DRUNK: Look. This is BBC click bait. But it’s interesting click bait, especially for the ‘ramsquaddled’, ‘obfusticated’ and ‘sozzled’ and those as sloshed as a posh hooligan.