DAS IST SCHRECKLICH: German Engineering Yields New Warship That Isn’t Fit for Sea.

Germany’s naval brass in 2005 dreamed up a warship that could ferry marines into combat anywhere in the world, go up against enemy ships and stay away from home ports for two years with a crew half the size of its predecessor’s.

First delivered for sea trials in 2016 after a series of delays, the 7,000-ton Baden-Württemberg frigate was determined last month to have an unexpected design flaw: It doesn’t really work.

Defense experts cite the warship’s buggy software and ill-considered arsenal—as well as what was until recently its noticeable list to starboard—as symptoms of deeper, more intractable problems: Shrinking military expertise and growing confusion among German leaders about what the country’s armed forces are for.

A litany of bungled infrastructure projects has tarred Germany’s reputation for engineering prowess. There is still no opening date for Berlin’s new €6 billion ($7.2 billion) airport, which is already 10 years behind schedule, and the redesign of Stuttgart’s railway station remains stalled more than a decade after work on the project started. Observers have blamed these mishaps on poor planning and project management, which also figured in major setbacks for several big military projects.

Undenkbar.

BUT OF COURSE: Facebook Bans Bestselling Author over ‘The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama.’

MICHAEL LEDEEN: We Need Regime Change in Iran.

That’s been a recurring theme today.

BY THE NUMBERS: Eugene Volokh dug deep into that “Nearly 40 Percent of Sex Offenders in Oregon Prisons Are Illegal Aliens” and writes:

Steve: Sorry to trouble you about this [No trouble at all! -S], but I’m not sure the statistic adds up. I looked at the linked-to Paula Bolyard item, https://pjmedia.com/trending/one-fifteen-oregon-prisoners-criminal-alien-nearly-half-convicted-sex-crimes/, and then in turn to the original source, https://docfnc.wordpress.com/2018/01/02/oregon-department-of-corrections-criminal-alien-report-december-2017/, and here’s what I found:

(1) The original source is writing not about illegal aliens, but about “criminal aliens.” I assume this is the same “criminal alien” as that described in 8 U.S.C. sec. 1252(a)(2)(C) — an alien, whether or not legally present, who is removable because he has committed a certain kind of crime. See Freeman v. Holder (8th Cir. 2010), https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=17372653859303192596, elaborating on this definition.

(2) The original source does report that 476 of Oregon prisoners were criminal aliens committed rape, sodomy, or sex abuse. But that is out of a total of 3738 total prisoners who committed those crimes; the ratio is about 12.7%, not the 39.32% that the PJMedia source reports.

By the way, it appears that the percentage of all Oregon inmates who are criminal aliens (6.6%) is quite close to the percentage of all Oregonians who are aliens (7%, see https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/distribution-by-citizenship-status/), though the percentage of Oregon inmate sex offenders who are criminal aliens does seem higher than that (though not by as much as the Bolyard item reports).

Paula has of course corrected the original story, although nearly 13% still seems high for the Pacific Northwest. More to come on this one, I’m afraid. But in the meantime, a big thanks to Eugene.

BREAKING: STRANGE WEATHER IS STRANGE. US cold snap was a freak of nature, quick analysis finds.

Consider this cold comfort: A quick study of the brutal American cold snap found that the Arctic blast really wasn’t global warming but a freak of nature.

Frigid weather like the two-week cold spell that began around Christmas is 15 times rarer than it was a century ago, according to a team of international scientists who does real-time analyses to see if extreme weather events are natural or more likely to happen because of climate change.

The cold snap that gripped the East Coast and Midwest region was a rarity that bucks the warming trend, said researcher Claudia Tebaldi of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the private organization Climate Central.

I’m so old, I can remember when climate change was going to cause more extreme weather events.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: S***hole countries, 5 White Guys, 702 Re-authorization and Much, Much More.

FORREST NABORS: Why The Time Is Ripe For A Free Iran.

If different types of political regimes are plants that grow, the soil is the people, and different types of soil determine what kind of political regime is possible in a given nation. The rise, prosperity, or fall of a political regime depends upon the customs and temper of a people that have developed since time immemorial and are not easily changed.

This important insight was once commonplace when the classical analysis of political regimes was the starting point in understanding nations’ politics, but political science in its modern form no longer teaches our young citizenry in this way. This is why you will not find many journalists or analysts in the media or government who can convincingly explain the prospects for democracy abroad.

The cost of this change in education is apparent in the last 15 years of American foreign policy. The Bush administration expected Western-style democracy to immediately take hold in Iraq after it toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein. The Obama administration expected the same following popular unrest during the Arab Spring. Noble though the goals of those administrations were, an intelligent citizen informed by Bernard Lewis’s “What Went Wrong” and educated in regime analysis could have foreseen that efforts to establish stable democracies in place of removed Arab tyrannies would encounter profound difficulties.

In Iran the case is different. Iranians are a great people well prepared for successful self-government and boast one of the oldest and most refined cultures in human history. Unlike Sunni Islam, their version of Islam always recognized the separation of mosque and state, a tradition that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini struggled to reconcile with his goal of preserving Islamic purity in modernity. He finally abandoned the attempt, but that tradition is still remembered by Shiites and has shaped the political principles that they hold today.

Read the whole thing.

A BILLION DOLLARS HERE AND A BILLION DOLLARS THERE AND YOU’RE STILL ONLY TALKING TWO SMALL SHIPS: New Navy Frigate Could Cost $950M Per Hull.

Speaking at the Surface Navy Association 2018 symposium, NAVSEA’s Regan Campbell said the new class of small surface combatant would set a so-called threshold requirement for a net average cost of $950 million for the second through 20th hulls in the FFG(X) next-generation frigate program following a downselect to a single shipbuilder in 2020. The lead ship in the class is expected to cost more than the $950-million average.

In comparison, a Flight IIA Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer (DDG-51) costs about $1.8 billion to build and equip with sensors and weapon systems.

That frigate number is also above the $588-million per-hull cost of the existing Lockheed Martin Freedom-class (LCS-1) and Austal USA Independence-class (LCS-2) Littoral Combat Ships slated for the Fiscal Year 2018 budget.

That had better be one capable frigate.

UM… THANKS? CIA Advised Americans on How to Photograph UFOs and Report Them.

TIN EAR: Pelosi Continues to Rip Tax Reform: Wage Increases and Bonuses Are ‘Crumbs,’ ‘So Pathetic.’

DEMOCRAT OPERATIVE WITH(OUT) A BYLINE: WaPo Reporter Placed On Leave After She’s Exposed Giving Secret Strategy Briefing At Soros Conference.

The Washington Post has placed national reporter Janell Ross on leave after she was exposed giving a strategy briefing at a secret strategy conference for left-wing donors, politicians and activists in November, according to a new report.

Ross was a featured speaker a conference funded by Democracy Alliance, a network of left-wing donors aligned with billionaire financier George Soros. Ross’s role at the conference, which was closed to reporters, was only revealed when the Washington Free Beacon obtained a copy of the conference agenda. She did not notify her employers before speaking at the left-wing summit, where she briefed attendees on “getting the economic narrative right” in future elections.

Nearly two months later, Ross has been placed on leave for secretly briefing the left-wing conference, CNN reports. Ross is not expected to return to the paper, according to the CNN report.

I suspect she won’t be without a byline for long.

WINTER IS HERE: War in Korea Would Be ‘Game of Thrones-Like,’ Top Marine Says.

Speaking to deployed Marines at a base in the Middle East while on a Christmas tour of deployed units, Gen. Robert Neller sought to temper their enthusiasm at the potential of a future ground fight.

“Ever been to Korea? Korea sucks,” he told the troops bluntly. “The people are wonderful; the country is tough.”

At a number of stops on the trip, Neller addressed the major threats outlined by the Defense Department: Russia, North Korea, Iran, China, and violent extremism. Among the four nations, he noted, North Korea is the only one that can be assessed to have both capability and intent to take violent action.

Some of the Marine Corps’ most physically demanding bilateral training takes place in South Korea, where troops are subjected to freezing winter conditions, terrain climbs, and long hard marches in the cold.

And the memory of Battle of Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War — nicknamed “the Frozen Chosin” — serves as proof of the toll the elements can take on a fighting force.

“It’s mountainous. Hot in the summer, cold in the winter. There’s hills, narrow passes, very difficult,” Neller said. “We have to think about how we fight.”

“It would be ‘Game of Thrones’-like,” he said. “And a lot of people would get hurt. I might be wrong, but it’s a very complicated issue.”

The terrain reduced US/ROK logistical and firepower advantages, helping to produce the stalemate which persists 65 years later.

FLASHBACK: 5 Key Elements You Need for a Kick-Ass Action Movie.

“Chinese audiences” is not one of them.

ON UNDER THE ROCKS: Mars hides thick sheets of ice just below the surface.

The newer Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mapped the surface in greater detail. Dundas and his colleagues used its pictures to locate exposed ice in small craters, glaciers and ice sheets. “The high-resolution data has greatly improved our understanding of various ice-related land forms,” he said.

These cliffs are “rare peeks into the subsurface of Mars, giving us access to an undisturbed slice through Mars’s ice in the mid-latitudes — a fantastic find!” said Susan Conway, a planetary scientist at the University of Nantes in France who was not involved with this research.

That will come in handy.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Hitting a Person Is Wrong, Even if the Person Is Harvey Weinstein.

HEALTH: He was 21 and fit. He tried to push through the flu — and it killed him.

Don’t mess around with the flu.

BIPARTISANSHIP: Republican and Democratic State Senators Admit Affair After They’re Allegedly Caught on Video.

THEY SHOULD RENAME IT THE SHARK-CLASS: US Navy’s next amphibious warship to get laser weapon.

METAPHOR ALERT: Penn Station’s new concourse is already falling apart.

PAUL RYAN: Without entitlement reform “we are hosed.”

Yep.

SIT UP STRAIGHT: British Airways to axe reclining seats on some flights.

CHANGE: Trump Clears Path for States to Require Employment for Medicaid.

The Trump Administration moved Thursday to allow states to impose work requirements on their Medicaid programs for the first time, the latest alteration of the nation’s health-care system through administrative action after Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare failed last year.

The change will allow states to craft programs that would require Medicaid recipients to prove they are working, training for a job, or volunteering in their communities, according to guidance issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

States aren’t forced to participate, and it looks like the work requirements are far from strict.

BUT OF COURSE: Twitter Security Engineer Says Company ‘More Than Happy’ to Give DOJ Trump’s DMs.

JIBRAN KHAN: ‘Raw Water’ Makes a Mockery of Human Suffering.

Tacitus and Ibn Khaldun wrote of decadent civilizations drinking themselves to death, but for our new leaders, that is passé. Instead, they have decided to rebel all the way and simply drink death in the name of health. Startups have rushed to feed this pathetic desire for novelty, each trying to outdo the other in ignorance. One of their leaders, Christopher Sanborn, has changed his name to Mukhande Singh, the better to grant his dirty water the legitimacy of exotic culture. His customers might be surprised to know that the ancient Indians practiced water treatment — using dreaded “chemicals,” no less. Likewise, Greek, Sanskrit, and Ancient Egyptian writings demonstrate that water purification was a public-health concern for classical civilizations, long before modern germ theory, and that methods of filtration and chemical treatment were commonplace in their time.

To put this absurdity in perspective, consider that in the world’s “Middle Income Countries,” per capita income ranges from just under $3 to $34 a day, and that “raw water” bottles in the US cost $36.99 each. Or, put another way, in order to ingest “raw water,” the cause of 20 percent of child deaths worldwide, rich Americans have taken to spending more than most people in the world earn in a week. In doing so, not only are they rejecting millennia of widely understood science, but they are putting their lives and the lives of those around them at risk, in order to indulge in a patronizing play-act of poverty that puts even so-called slum tourism to shame.

Not to be too cynical, but I’m guessing patronization is the thrill of it all.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Nebraska Considers Common-Sense Gun Deregulation As Other States Tighten Up.