DEPLOYMENT: The Marines’ Version of the F-35 Flew More Than 100 Combat Sorties.

F-35Bs flew more than 100 combat sorties against the Taliban and ISIS while deployed aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Essex, said Lt. Col. Kyle Shoop, commander of Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 211.

“We overall supported more than 50 days of combat flying for over 1,200 flight hours,” Shoop told Task & Purpose. “We supported both Operation Freedom’s Sentinel up in the Afghanistan region as well as Operation Inherent Resolve over Syria/Iraq. We employed ordnance in both theaters on numerous days,” Shoop said. “Every single one of the pilots employed ordnance in theater. So, we were very busy.”

Good to know.

EURABIA: Swiss Punish Citizen Who Helped Syrian Christian Community Fight ISIS. “I do not regret what I did — fighting a terrorist organization. And if it happened in in Switzerland, I would be the first to commit myself to fight it.”

STRANGE NEW RESPECT: Harry Reid wishes for George W. Bush again ‘every day.’

HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS (CONT’D): Transgender Athletes Dominate at Connecticut Girls’ Track State Meet. “We all know the outcome of the race before it even starts.”

THIS IS CNN: Op-Ed Suggests Military Action If Trump Refuses To Concede.

UGH: Millions of utility customers’ passwords stored in plain text.

MEN MADE THEM MAKE THOSE CHOICES: Gender Pay Gap Results from Women Making Different Choices.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update.

SMILE, YOU’RE ON CANDID CAMERA: Yikes, are the airlines spying on you?

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Liberals Outraged Over ‘Green Book’ Oscar Win, Say the Film Supports Trump.

THE NEW COLONIALISM: How China Exports Repression to Africa. “China’s ‘techno-dystopian expansionism’ is undermining democracy in African countries.”

In the past two years, China has not only continued to develop its internal censorship network but has also begun exporting the model across the world.

In 2017, President Xi Jinping outlined his ambition of transforming China into a “cyber superpower” and presented the country as “a new option for other countries and nations that want to speed up their development while preserving their independence.”

By providing a mixture of training, technological infrastructure, and applying pressure to international companies, China is extending its control of information beyond its national borders.

The results have been far-reaching and, with a dramatic reduction in digital freedoms across the continent, several emerging democracies have been placed under threat.

As part of the trillion-dollar international development strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Chinese companies have been instrumental in providing artificial intelligence and facial recognition systems to African governments.

If it were a Western country oppressing poor Africans in this way, we’d be hearing a lot more about it. But Asians can’t be colonialists, because reasons.

UPDATE: Link was missing. Fixed now — sorry!

VIDEO: Fight to free 6 Citgo executives held in Venezuela intensifies amid new turmoil in the country.

Detaining oil executives when your ruined country needs every oil dollar it can muster is at least a new and creative way of eating your seed corn.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Academy Awards, Mueller, Schiff and Much, Much More. “This self-absorbed clown, Adam Schiff. Schiff has threatened to bring Mueller to testify before the House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI) to spill all the damning Trump secrets if the DOJ doesn’t release the entire report from the Mueller witch hunt.”

ENDGAME: After Venezuelan troops block aid, Maduro faces ‘diplomatic siege.’

Troops loyal to Maduro violently drove back aid convoys seeking to enter Venezuela on Saturday, leaving almost 300 wounded in clashes with security forces and at least three protesters dead near the Brazilian border.

Juan Guaido, recognized by most Western nations as Venezuela’s legitimate leader, urged foreign powers to consider “all options” in ousting Maduro, ahead of a meeting of the regional Lima Group of nations in Bogota on Monday that will be attended by U.S. Vice President Mike Pence.

Pence is set to announce “concrete steps” and “clear actions” at the meeting to address the crisis, a senior U.S. administration official said on Sunday, declining to provide details.

“What happened yesterday is not going to deter us from getting humanitarian aid into Venezuela,” the official said, speaking with reporters on condition of anonymity.

Socialism in a nutshell: You can get shot for trying to help people whose lives were ruined by socialists.

POTEMKIN FLEET: Despite Putin’s swagger, Russia struggles to modernize its navy.

President Vladimir Putin calls improving the Russian navy’s combat capabilities a priority.

The unfinished husks of three guided-missile frigates that have languished for three years at a Baltic shipyard show that is easier said than done.

Earmarked for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the frigates fell victim to sanctions imposed by Ukraine in 2014 after Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula, prompting Kiev to ban the sale of the Ukrainian-made engines needed to propel them.

With Moscow unable to quickly build replacement engines for the Admiral Grigorovich-class frigates, construction stopped. Russia is now cutting its losses and selling the three ships to India without engines.

Invading Ukraine was worse than just wrong; it was stupid.

IT’S ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: Giant Tortoise Feared Extinct Reappears After 113 Years. “As well as the Fernandina tortoise, another ‘giant’ species thought to be possibly extinct showed up this year—Wallace’s giant bee.”

I like tortoises, but those giant bees should be driven right back into extinction.

CORN, POPPED: Will 2020 Democrats Help Trump By Destroying Each Other?

Ed Kilgore in this piece repeats a bit of advice to the candidates from Steve Rosenthal: “Don’t try to stifle new ideas, new opinions, or new plans.” That’s encouragement to pitch the Green New Deal and other absurdities — not that this year’s crop of far-left candidates needs much prodding to do just that. Which might be exactly how to get more Trump.

But there’s also this: Trump’s Secret to Victory in 2020: Hispanic Voters.

Trump is making an aggressive play for Hispanic-American votes in Florida and beyond. Meanwhile, polls suggest Marist might have been onto something—and that Democrats should be worried that Hispanic voters could help reelect Trump and keep the Senate in Republican control. If so, it would be a cosmic twist of fate: A party that has staked its future on a belief that America’s demographic picture is changing decidedly in its favor could find itself losing to a man whose politics of fear should be driving precisely those voters into the Democrats’ waiting arms.

The second half of that graf is just silly. Illegals can’t vote (“Well…”), and legal immigrants are some of the fiercest critics of illegal immigration. And a big feature of Trump’s SOTU address was a push for less of the latter but more of the former. If Trump can continue to deliver on jobs and wages for legal immigrants, then it’s still “the economy, stupid.”

Going back to 2016, Trump won the White House largely by “stealing” white, blue-collar voters from Hillary Clinton in the Rust Belt. Since then, he’s pursued Hispanic and black voters more aggressively than any Republican since Reagan, and it isn’t even close.

The further left the Democrats push next year — and it looks like they’ll push very hard, indeed — the more secure the GOP base will become, aside from a very few remaining NeverTrump dead-enders. That would give Trump the liberty to spend more time and resources pursing voters which the Democrat nominee simply can’t afford to lose.

2020 is shaping up to be a fun, scrappy fight.

OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: Harris on Green New Deal Price Tag: ‘It’s Not About a Cost.’

She isn’t wrong. It’s about control.

LISTICLE: 6 Classic Songs That Seem Really Inappropriate (and Kind of Creepy) Today.

“China Girl,” which is explicitly antiracist, does not belong on this list.

SEEMS LEGIT: Jussie Smollett Tells ‘Empire’ Cast ‘I Swear to God, I Did Not Do This.’

PRIVACY: You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information. Then They Tell Facebook.

The social-media giant collects intensely personal information from many popular smartphone apps just seconds after users enter it, even if the user has no connection to Facebook, according to testing done by The Wall Street Journal. The apps often send the data without any prominent or specific disclosure, the testing showed.

It is already known that many smartphone apps send information to Facebook about when users open them, and sometimes what they do inside. Previously unreported is how at least 11 popular apps, totaling tens of millions of downloads, have also been sharing sensitive data entered by users. The findings alarmed some privacy experts who reviewed the Journal’s testing.

Facebook is under scrutiny from Washington and European regulators for how it treats the information of users and nonusers alike. It has been fined for allowing now defunct political-data firm Cambridge Analytica illicit access to users’ data and has drawn criticism for giving companies special access to user records well after it said it had walled off that information.

That’s it. Break ’em up.

FLASHBACK: Comey’s FBI Embraced American ISIS Terrorist, Helped Him Get DOJ Job.

SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: Leftist Thug Caught on Video Assaulting Conservative Berkeley Student While Fellow Students Laugh.

DEEP STATE: IRS analyst charged with leaking financial documents on Michael Cohen.

RED FLAG: US Air Force F-35s wrecked their enemies in mock air combat — even the new pilots were racking up kills against simulated near-peer threats.

During the intense fight, aggressor aircraft blinded many of the “blue” fourth-generation aircraft using electronic attack capabilities, such as those advanced adversaries might employ in battle.

“Even in this extremely challenging environment, the F-35 didn’t have many difficulties doing its job,” Col. Joshua Wood, 388th Operations Group commander, explained in a US Air Force statement summarizing the exercise results.

Novice F-35 pilots were able to step in and save more experienced friendly fourth-generation fighter pilots while racking up kills against simulated near-peer threats.

“My wingman was a brand new F-35A pilot, seven or eight flights out of training,” Wood said, recounting his experiences. “He gets on the radio and tells an experienced 3,000-hour pilot in a very capable fourth-generation aircraft. ‘Hey bud, you need to turn around. You’re about to die. There’s a threat off your nose.'”

That’s impressive, since more-experienced pilots in older jets typically outperform less-experienced pilots in newer jets.