UNDERSEA ARMS RACE: China is developing a warship of naval theorists’ dreams.

There are two concepts in circulation: one is a high-speed warship with much of its hull submerged but otherwise has a functional superstructure with defense weapons and radar, the other is almost completely submerged arsenal ship with two conning towers. The scale of the designs are significant; either ship would displace roughly about 20,000 tons at full load.

Reports claim there has been substantial design work and concept proofing for this underwater arsenal ship. Even on his deathbed, leading naval engineer Professor Dong Wei Cai continued to work on a key aspect of the arsenal ship design: the high-speed wave hydroplane.

For stealth operations, the arsenal ship would have most of its hull inherently submerged, with only the bridge and a few other parts of the ship above the waterline, reducing the radar cross section. But when traveling with a high-speed naval taskforce, the arsenal ship will sacrifice stealth to use its flat hull bottom to hydroplane at high speeds, cutting across the waves like a speedboat or amphibious armored vehicle.

The second design is more conventional, it is essentially a giant, conventionally propelled submarine with two conning towers stuffed with snorkels, periscopes, and communications antennae. Given its need to keep up with high-speed surface ships and its lack of high-speed endurance underwater, this arsenal ship design would operate similarly to WWII submarines; the majority of its voyage will take place on the surface, and will submerge only during combat and under attack.

China is going to have to get much better at silencing to make something like this work.

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Did Donald Trump Just Make the Planet Hotter?

BEGUN, THE DNC-CLINTON WAR HAS: Data Gurus to Hillary: The Numbers Didn’t Lose, You Did.

“Forgive the analogy,” John Hagner, currently a partner at Clarity Campaign Labs told The Daily Beast. “The DNC is farming and what the campaign does is cooking. It’s hard to blame the farmer if the souffle folds.”

Hagner, who previously worked as the National Field Director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said that his company was primarily focused on governor’s races in the 2016 cycle. And he pointed to one particular victory as proof that the DNC data itself was not the problem: the narrow election of Governor Roy Cooper in North Carolina, a state that Clinton lost.

“We worked out of the same pool the Clinton folks did,” Hagner continued. “The Clinton folks did the targeting themselves. The Clinton campaign did a lot right. The world ended up working out differently than they hoped.”

And:

In many of the post-mortems on the failed Democratic bid, Clinton’s campaign was accused of missing or simply not believing warning signs in the so-called Blue Wall, midwestern states like Wisconsin and Michigan that were reliably Democratic strongholds but went to Trump last year. This, in the minds of data gurus is an error in judgment from the campaign, not an error in the actual data that was available to them.

“There was absolutely a failure by the campaign,” Tom Bonier, the CEO of TargetSmart, told The Daily Beast. “That had nothing to do with the data they got. It was about the way they used that data.”
Bonier said that he was “honestly shocked” when he heard the comments from Clinton and said they were “frankly wrongheaded.”

“The reason why it was so surprising from a perspective of veracity was that it was so contrary to the truth,” he said.

That’s never been much of a hurdle for Clinton.

GOOD MORNING: Liz Sheld has your TGIF morning brief.

ANTHONY WATTS: In one graph, why the #ParisAgreement is useless.

Even if we DID stay in it, (and all the other countries too) that .05°C savings is likely to get lost in the noise, since global temperature measurements are rounded. For example, in the USA, NOAA rounds the high and low temperature to the nearest whole degree Fahrenheit (0.55°C, a value over ten times greater than the .05°C savings Paris offers):

From NOAA’s REQUIREMENTS AND STANDARDS FOR NWS CLIMATE OBSERVATIONS:

The observer will round the entered data to whole units Fahrenheit by rounding up all positively signed values between T.5ºF and T.9ºF inclusive, (i.e., + 66.5ºF to 67ºF), and rounding down positively signed values between T.1ºF and T.4ºF, inclusive. For sub-zero temperatures, special attention is given to –T.5ºF values, to round it down. This method is known as ‘round half up asymmetric.’ For all negatively signed values between -T.5ºF and –T.1ºF, inclusive you round down (i.e., -3.5ºF to -3ºF) to nearest integer. For negatively signed values between –T.6ºF and –T.9ºF, inclusive, the data is rounded up (i.e., -10.6ºF to -11ºF) to higher absolute value.

Source: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/directives/sym/pd01013002curr.pdf

For Global temperature, GHCN data for example, NOAA rounds to the nearest tenth of a degree C, (0.1°C) TWICE the value of .05°C savings Paris offers.

Even the best case scenario out of the Paris Climate Accord will get lost in the data rounding.

I put on my reading glasses and still couldn’t see any difference on the chart, but maybe you’ll have better luck.

BUT OF COURSE: The Guardian Defends ‘Blacks Only’ Spaces.

THIRST? What’s Fueling the US Whiskey Boom?

The craft beer movement is a major inspiration for the new wave of American whiskies. Sons of Liberty on Rhode Island make a whiskey using a dark toasty malt like you find in a stout. They’ve given it the none-more-American name of Uprising. Not to be outdone, Corsair make a Citra Double IPA whiskey that reeks of hops. It’s all about bringing out big flavors.

Whereas Scottish single malts tend to be aged for at least eight years (though legally only have to be aged for three) American whiskies age faster as the climate is hotter. Balcones Single Malt, winner of best American Single Malt at the World Whiskies Awards last year, is “yard-aged”- in other words left out in the baking heat of Texas where it matures extremely quickly.

One year in the heat of Texas equals about seven in rainy old Scotland. Quicker maturation time means American distillers can bring their products to market sooner therefore they are more responsive to trends.

Hot-aging feels almost like cheating, but I’m looking forward to sampling the results.

HE SEEMS NICE: ‘Jeopardy’ Champion—and Children’s Author—Ken Jennings the Latest to Bully Barron Trump.

THE ART OF THE DEAL? Trump Not Moving Embassy to Jerusalem to ‘Maximize the Chances’ of Peace Deal.

Strange to take that off the table before the negotiations begin.

REMINDER: Don’t mess with Ken White.

RENT-SEEKERS GOTTA SEEK RENTS: Nevada’s recreational marijuana sales expected to start in July could now be delayed after a group of alcohol distributors filed a legal challenge to a licensing deadline, arguing they have the first rights to distribute pot.

BREAKING: Gunshots and Explosions Heard at Resort World Manilla.

Video at the link.

THANKS, OBAMA: Global Terrorism Has Tripled Since 2011, Now at an All-Time High.

WELL, IT ISN’T AS THOUGH THE E.U. HAS THE MILITARY POWER TO FORCE ANY DEMANDS: Trump Reduces EU to Begging: ‘Please Don’t Change the Climate for the Worse’

MODERN JUSTICE: He didn’t give police his iPhone pass code, so he got 180 days in jail.

HMM: Trump administration moves to return Russian compounds in Maryland and New York.

President Barack Obama said Dec. 29 that the compounds were being “used by Russian personnel for intelligence-related purposes” and gave Russia 24 hours to vacate them. Separately, Obama expelled from the United States what he said were 35 Russian “intelligence operatives.”

Early last month, the Trump administration told the Russians that it would consider turning the properties back over to them if Moscow would lift its freeze, imposed in 2014 in retaliation for U.S. sanctions related to Ukraine, on construction of a new U.S. consulate on a certain parcel of land in St. Petersburg.

Two days later, the U.S. position changed. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at a meeting in Washington that the United States had dropped any linkage between the compounds and the consulate, according to several people with knowledge of the exchanges.

We’ve been getting a lot of stories from “several people with knowledge,” but they don’t always seem to have much knowledge.

THOMAS EDSALL: Has the Democratic Party Gotten Too Rich for Its Own Good?

In days past, a proposal to slam the rich to reward the working and middle classes meant hitting Republicans to benefit Democrats.

Even as recently as 1976, according to data from American National Election Studies, the most affluent voters, the top 5 percent, were solidly in the Republican camp, 77-23. Those in the bottom third of the income distribution were solidly Democratic, 64-36.

In other words, 41 years ago, the year Jimmy Carter won the presidency, the Sanders proposal would have made political sense.

But what about now?

In the 2016 election, the economic elite was essentially half Democratic, according to exit polls: Those in the top 10 percent of the income distribution voted 47 percent for Clinton and 46 percent for Trump. Half the voters Sanders would hit hardest are members of the party from which he sought the nomination.

The problem for the Democratic Party is that “them” has become “us.”

Democrats need to ask themselves how that happened.

NO. Lacy shorts for men are here.

RETAIL BLUES: RadioShack’s Tweets Offer a Bleak Look Into the Retailer’s Demise.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, RadioShack—which filed for bankruptcy twice in two years—closed over 1,000 stores, leaving just 70 corporate locations and 500 dealer stores in operation across the U.S. Throughout the weekend, the consumer electronics retailer announced a liquidation sale that played out on social media. Social media represents a new plot twist for America’s dying retailers: How do you toast a brand’s final days when the world is watching?

RadioShack opted for unadulterated bleakness. The company’s social media handle on Twitter shared photos that depicted the sale of store fixtures, $25 grab bags stuffed with items pieced at $5 apiece, and deeply discounted printers.

Just like Sears did, Radio Shack had the catalog business and associated customer database available to put together a first-rate online business before Amazon sold its first book.

Neither company’s management proved innovative enough to do so, and now both are failing.

FASTER, PLEASE: The US Strategy of Annihilation and Humiliation.

In his first interview as secretary of defense, James Mattis outlined the United States’ strategy. Mattis’ words carry weight because he is one of the few subordinates U.S. President Donald Trump seems to trust implicitly and to whom Trump has delegated significant responsibility. In the interview, Mattis said the war of attrition – pushing enemies out of their locations rather than destroying them completely – failed to produce the desired outcome. The U.S. will now fight a war of annihilation and humiliation against the enemy, which is not just IS but radical Islamism in general. Mattis expects the war to be a long fight, but he also expects to win.

Mattis pointed to the battles for Mosul and Tal Afar as models for how these tactics will be implemented in other places. In both cases, forces on the ground, some with U.S. help, have surrounded IS targets to try to prevent Islamic State militants from retreating and foreign fighters from leaving the battlefield to return home. The forces then advance and clear these cities block by block, a hard task that takes time. This is what Mattis described as annihilation. The Islamic State’s greatest strength on the battlefield has been its ability to retreat and regroup, and the goal of annihilation is to destroy that strength. But this strategy comes with a high price. Iraq sent its best trained and equipped fighters into Mosul first, and casualty rates were reportedly around 50 percent for some units.

Speed is an often overlooked force multiplier. The Marines used it to great battlefield (and propaganda) effect in Second Fallujah, but the battle to retake Mosul has been going on for months.

POLITICKING: Dems Make ‘Big Investment’ in Georgia to Turn Out Voters Who Stayed Home in 2016.

VLADIMIR PUTIN: There are many Syrian matters Turkey and Russia agree on.

“If we did not have the same view with Turkey on critical matters regarding Syria, neither would we have been able to establish a ceasefire nor would we have been able to establish de-escalation zones,” Putin said.

The Russian president said he discussed the S-400 missile defense system with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

“We have not yet produced these systems outside the country. We will discuss how and under what circumstances we will produce them with the Indian Prime Minister,” said Putin.

“Process, technology and personnel training requires great preparation. But there is nothing that is not possible. We will return again to discuss the shipment of these modern systems.”

The S-400 missile system is capable of destroying airborne targets as far as 250 miles away, and is recognized as one of the most capable Surface to Air Missile Systems.

It should also be noted that the S-400 was designed to beat NATO aircraft, and that none of Turkey’s Middle Eastern enemies (ISIS, the Kurds) posses any aircraft at all.

NEW YORK VALUES: Mr. Met Gives Fan the Finger, Employee Out as Team Mascot.

I HAD BEEN ASSURED COAL WAS DEAD: Coal market threatened by glut from over production.

Australian coal prices serve as a benchmark for Asia and soared over 130% to nearly $110 a tonne last year creating huge profits for producers. These high prices caused suppliers to ramp up production flooding the market and causing prices to plummet. Despite this, the Indonesian coal industry has several major producers which are still planning major production increases for the latter half of this year.

The main question is whether producers will continue to reinvest profits creating additional production capacity. It is a simple matter to put idle equipment to work or increasing the hours for a workforce. However, if major investments are made in new heavy equipment which is put into service there will have to be a major increase in output to offset the cost. This type of increase is what could drive an already over saturated market into a glut.

Some people think the threat of the market being over saturated is being blown out of proportion. Australian coal prices have fallen but that fall came from record highs where a correction was needed and demand in the area is increasing dramatically as well.

The War on Coal is over — and coal won.

WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? Solar-Powered California Warned to Unplug for August Eclipse.

State energy officials are warning residents to click off all lights they don’t need and unplug all electrical appliances when 62 percent of the sun disappears over Los Angeles during a partial solar eclipse that is expected that day.

Nobody is warning of blackouts. But then again, nobody knows what will happen.

“When the sun goes away, so does the energy that powers our renewable solar panels. If millions of Californians turn off appliances and power strips to unplug from the grid during the eclipse, we can let our hard-working sun take a break,” said Michael Picker, president of the California Public Utilities Commission.

Pre-modern societies trembled at unforeseeable eclipses, and in postmodern California it’s pretty much the same story.