EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: The U.S. Air Force Is in Serious Decline.

There are three sections to the report but the one on standards stands out:

From its founding in 1947 through the end of the Cold War, the Air Force placed a premium on building and sustaining a cadre of the most exceptional aviators in the world. Selection for flight school was based on performance during the accessions process and previous flight experience—criteria that sent those with the highest potential to excel to flight school. Screening for excellence continued through every phase of training beyond.

Washout rates for flight schools exceeded 20 percent in the 1980s, and the bar was high for every successive school beyond. But the drive for efficiencies in the 1990s and the initiative to improve racial diversity in the 2020s has made a mockery of the screening process. In 2021, just 0.27 percent of flight school candidates were eliminated because of performance. Screening beyond flight school is effectively non-existent, even for promotions.

Every Air Force captain without legal or ethical issues has been promoted to Major since 2017, which means even poor performers graduate and advance. Accessions, training, and promotion standards are at all-time lows, which places the big picture—the service’s ability to execute its wartime mission—into jeopardy.

Just as bad, low promotion standards and handing out pilot wings like participation trophies make the Air Force look unattractive to the best candidates, further reducing and diluting the pool of recruits.

CHANGE: Compromise Defense Bill Removes Restriction on Military Travel for Abortion.

MON DIEU! [VIP] Paris Can’t Get Enough of This Distinctly American Treat.

NOT A GREAT PAGE: Vivek Took a Page Out of the Democrats’ Playbook.

WELL, GOOD — BUT LET’S SEE WHAT HAPPENS IN THE SENATE: Some Democrats join Republicans in voting to strike down Biden’s EV mandate.

BREAKING: The Text of the Biden Impeachment Inquiry Resolution Has Been Released.

PERFECT: Woman who threw bowl of food at Chipotle worker sentenced to work 2 months in fast food job.

IT’S THE FEEL-GOOD HIT OF THE SEASON: Watch This Old Gaza Woman Fact-Check a Biased Reporter.

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.

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.”

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.”

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

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.

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

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.

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

THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA says SpaceX’s next Starship flight could test refueling tech.

“NASA and SpaceX are reviewing options for the demonstration to take place during an integrated flight test of Starship and the Super Heavy rocket,” Russell said in a statement. “However, no final decisions on timing have been made.”

Elon Musk, the company’s founder and CEO, said on November 19 that hardware for the next Super Heavy/Starship test should be ready in three to four weeks. That projection seems dubious because SpaceX hasn’t moved any pieces of the rocket to the launch pad for pre-flight testing, but a test flight early next year appears realistic.

Other factors that could play into the Starship launch schedule include tune-ups or fixes to resolve problems that occurred on the November 18 test flight and receiving a new launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration.

When SpaceX tries transferring 10 metric tons of propellant from tank to tank inside Starship, it will be at a scale never before attempted in space. But it’s a small fraction of the amount of fuel and oxidizer needed to fill a Starship spacecraft in orbit. The ship’s total propellant capacity is some 1,200 metric tons. After the tank-to-tank demonstration, SpaceX will attempt a ship-to-ship propellant transfer between two Starships linked together in Earth orbit.

“That’s really when we start maturing the systems, and when it really gets exciting for HLS, because those are the building blocks that we need, and, frankly, it’s never been done successfully in orbit,” said Lisa Watson-Morgan, NASA’s HLS program manager, in an interview with Ars last month.

Stay tuned…

INSANITY WRAP [VIP]: Man, These White House Interns Really Blow.“‘Never thought I’d miss the relationship between the interns and the president in the Clinton White House, but here we are.’ That’s the lead crazy on today’s Insanity Wrap, an entire week’s worth of the best bad news.”

Plus:

• Maybe it isn’t rape when it happens to Jews.
• Maybe both sides can lose in the WaPo labor dispute.
• Maybe this is the lawsuit for America’s soul.

So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: The Pilots Delivering Your Amazon Packages Are Ready to Strike.

THEIR CONCERN IS SELECTIVE: Where’s the Outcry from ‘Human Rights’ Groups Over Rape of Israeli Women by Hamas?

I’M NOT SURE THERE’S ANY EXPLAINING IT BUT THE STORY SURE IS WILD: Explaining The Sam Altman/OpenAI Thing. “The companies operating agreement – to investors – says – in writing: ‘It would be wise to view any investment in OpenAI in the spirit of a donation, with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI world.’ Documents like this – that were written by an actual lawyer – highlight the problems we are starting to see from the combined popularity of science fiction in Silicon Valley and widespread microdosing of hallucinogens.”

THE FIX WAS IN: Jim Jordan Makes a Stunning Claim About Fani Willis.

NOBODY IS: It sure looks like corporate America isn’t afraid of Joe Biden anymore.