KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: ChiComs Probably Can’t Wait to Have a Go at Woke US Military. “This is reminiscent of what’s going on in public education, where the public knows what’s happening, but the people in charge keep insisting that our eyes aren’t seeing what they see. Again, American leftists seem to think that none of us have access to the internet.”

CANCEL CULTURE IS ALL IN YOUR MIND: YouTube suspends Russell Brand’s revenues from his channel.

Do the allegations against him have any merit? I don’t know, but I do know that someone with millions of followers who doesn’t follow the official narrative on a variety of issues is being effectively silenced before any guilt has been established.

ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, I’D RATHER NOT BE IN PHILADELPHIA: How Bad Is Crime in Philadelphia? Bad Enough for a Cheesesteak Joint to Hire Armed Security.

THE HIGH PRICE OF STUPID DECISIONS: Russia already spent over US$167 billion on war against Ukraine.

The largest items of expenditure: ensuring military operations (US$51.3 billion), salaries of the servicemen (US$35.1 billion), compensation to the families of the dead (US$25.6 billion) and wounded (US$21 billion) and the cost of destroyed equipment (US$34 billion).

After the rapid fall of the ruble, the “cost” of the Russian soldier for the budget of the Russian Federation decreased significantly. If for 2022 the total payments per one serviceman were about US$200 per day, now it is about US$120 per day.

Also, with the fall of the ruble, the cost of compensation to the military in US dollars decreased significantly. If at the rate of 60 rubles/$ the cost of compensation to the family of the deceased in the Russian Federation was about US$110,000, now it is only about US$65,000. The amount of compensation to the wounded, respectively, decreased from US$45,000 to US$27,000.

However, the level of Russian losses in recent months has remained at a significantly higher level than last year, according to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Accordingly, Russia is forced to spend more on compensation to the families.

Ouch.

CLEANEST ELECTION IN HISTORY: Quantitative Analysis Shows Google Steered 6 Million Votes to Biden in 2020.

ANSWERING THE QUESTIONS NO ONE HAS ASKED SINCE AROUND 1991: Was the Yugo As Bad As Critics Said? Yes. “This was the first and only Yugoslavian car that made it to the U.S market. It was made by a company called Corvina Zastava, which literally means red flag.”

I’M NOT SAYING IT’S ALIENS…: A Mysterious Hidden Force Is Generating Water on The Moon.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: Fake Meat Is an Even Bigger Fraud Than I Thought. “Upside Foods, some employees say, lies about how their faux chicken is created. Why?”

I GUESS WE’LL FINALLY GET THOSE FOOD DESERTS EVERYONE WAS TALKING ABOUT: Just What Chicago Needs, Government-Owned Grocery Stores. “City officials contend that a city-run grocery store would be better because they wouldn’t have to worry about making money. And Mayor Brandon Johnson is enthusiastically embracing the idea.”

Of course he is.

ROBERT SPENCER: Rumors Are Flying That Fetterman Has Been Replaced With a Double – but They’re Missing the Biggest Oddity. “Twitter/X is full of detailed comparisons of still photos from each, with the slovenly socialist’s supporters deriding doubters as crazed conspiracy theorists going nuts over photos taken with different lighting or from different angles. Amid all the back-and-forth about whether there are now two Fettermans, however, the biggest part of the story has been missed, and that is this: when did this man become coherent?”

CHUTZPAH: Hunter Biden files lawsuit against IRS.

THE FIX WAS IN: Another FBI Informant in Biden Case Was ‘Shut Down’ Before 2020 Election.

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE IS STUCK LIKE THAT: Navy Puts The Kibosh On Digital Recruiting Program After Discovering Enlistees Aren’t Into Drag Queens. “Our digital outreach efforts will maintain the important distinction between Sailors’ official activities and their personal lives.”

Professionalism in the military, what will they think of next?

I HAVE A FRESH BATCH OF UNEXPECTEDLIES ALL READY TO GO FOR WHAT HAPPENS NEXT: Illinois Prepares to Enter the Brave New World of Cashless Bail.

BLUE CITY BLUES: More Tech Companies Cancelling San Francisco Conferences.

As a hilly, historical, picturesque city on the coast, San Francisco used to be tourist hot-spot and convention destination. But with social justice turning San Francisco into a crime and feces ridden hellhole, even local tech giants have decided it’s time to hold their conferences elsewhere.

First Red Hat and Meta (AKA Facebook) have cancelled San Francisco conventions.
…
Now Google has joined Red Hat and Meta in pulling their conference out of the city.

San Francisco isn’t really a big tech town, anyway.

J CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Cal Berkeley Law EXPOSED: Class Credit to Aid the Revolution.

Over a decade ago, Hans von Spakovsky and I published the “Every Single One” series here at PJ Media. It took a federal lawsuit by PJ Media to obtain the resumes of all the new Eric Holder-hired lawyers in the Civil Rights Division. We documented the radical progressive backgrounds of every single one of Holder’s new lawyers in the so-called neutral “civil service.”

The series exposed the “swamp” before the term swamp was fashionable. We had seen the problem up close when we both worked inside the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. Eventually, even the DOJ Inspector General urged the Obama administration to change course and hire a more ideologically diverse attorney pool.

Of course, the Obama administration ignored the suggestion because there was a fundamental transformation to complete. Now, we find ourselves in 2023, and the problem has only gotten worse.

A radicalized civil service is downstream from radicalized elite law schools.

Read the whole thing.

2024: Experts Predict Political Trouble for Biden as House Impeachment Inquiry Gets Going: ‘Once Pandora’s Box is Open, It Can’t be Shut.’

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: The Marines Need Help Finding A Lost Stealth Fighter and Nobody Can Stop Laughing.

YOU DON’T SAY: Reflecting sunlight to cool the planet will cause other global changes.

Now scientists at MIT have found that solar geoengineering would significantly change extratropical storm tracks — the zones in the middle and high latitudes where storms form year-round and are steered by the jet stream across the oceans and land. Extratropical storm tracks give rise to extratropical cyclones, and not their tropical cousins, hurricanes. The strength of extratropical storm tracks determines the severity and frequency of storms such as nor’easters in the United States.

The team considered an idealized scenario in which solar radiation was reflected enough to offset the warming that would occur if carbon dioxide were to quadruple in concentration. In a number of global climate models under this scenario, the strength of storm tracks in both the northern and southern hemispheres weakened significantly in response.

Weakened storm tracks would mean less powerful winter storms, but the team cautions that weaker storm tracks also lead to stagnant conditions, particularly in summer, and less wind to clear away air pollution. Changes in winds could also affect the circulation of ocean waters and, in turn, the stability of ice sheets.

“About half the world’s population lives in the extratropical regions where storm tracks dominate weather,” says Charles Gertler, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “Our results show that solar geoengineering will not simply reverse climate change. Instead, it has the potential itself to induce novel changes in climate.”

It’s only a matter of time before some over-eager world-saving progressive suggests Congress pass a law against unintended consquences.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Biden’s Border Blow-Up Is the Mess That Just Gets Messier. “The numbers we hear about coming over here illegally are getting to be like the federal spending numbers from the last couple of decades: they’re so big and so frequent that the news has a numbing effect after a while.”

DEMOCRATS. NEXT QUESTION? What happened to the great West Coast cities?

America’s urban woes aren’t limited to the West Coast, of course. But the decline there has generally been steeper than elsewhere. Why? How did such golden cities get so tarnished, so quickly? Unlike in the tragic case of the Midwest, the answer is not reliance on declining industries: tech, space, entertainment continue to show promise and could propel growth for decades. Instead, the damage has been remarkably self-inflicted, reflecting the reckless growth of a set of progressive dogmas, tough on police and permissive toward criminals and vagrants while imposing ever more burdens on what is left of the middle class.

The results of these policies are particularly evident in tech-rich San Francisco, where decades of tolerance for even extreme deviant behavior has helped create a city with more drug addicts than high school students; little wonder it ranked last in the US for efficiency in a recent WalletHub survey. In Southern California’s far more proletarian city of Los Angeles, a UN official last year compared conditions on downtown’s Skid Row to those in Syrian refugee camps. Like Los Angeles and San Francisco, Oakland, Portland and Seattle show some of the highest per capita rates of homelessness in the country.

This is Joel Kotkin so read the whole thing.

CRISIS BY DESIGN: Border Patrol Tells Illegals ‘They Can Do Whatever They Want’ After Drop Off.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: The world is struggling to make enough diesel.

The restricted supply has economic consequences. The surge in US futures has been driven in part by truckers snapping up the fuel.

“Diesel is the fuel of the 18-wheeler truck that moves products from factory to market, so when prices spike, those higher transportation costs get passed on to businesses and consumers,” said Clay Seigle, director of global oil service at Rapidan Energy Group.

While there has been growing hope that the US economy can avoid recession, “an energy price spike – whether in gasoline or diesel fuel prices – could undermine much of that progress,” he added. “This risk is not lost on anyone in Washington as election campaign season approaches.”

Soaring diesel prices may also push refineries to prioritize the fuel at the expense of making gasoline, he said.

We need more refinery capacity but we still haven’t recovered to pre-lockdown levels.

SHAKEDOWN: California Sues Big Oil for Causing Climate Change.

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: He Converted the Walmart Into a Drive-Thru. “It’s your much-needed break from the serious news and this week we have a latenight excavator joyride, how to get your lawsuit dismissed with complete prejudice, and Seattle Man’s unique drinking problem.”