KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: You Will Be Forced to Care — Gay Hockey Edition. “There is no level of capitulation that is satisfactory for those who want to be permanently aggrieved. It’s not just that we will be made to care, but that we’ll be made to care with rules that are ever-changing.”

I CERTAINLY HOPE NOT: A Catastrophic Mutating Event Will Strike the World in 2 Years, Report Says.

“The most striking finding that we’ve found,” WEF managing director Jeremy Jurgens said during a presentation highlighting the WEF Global Security Outlook Report 2023, “is that 93 percent of cyber leaders, and 86 percent of cyber business leaders, believe that the geopolitical instability makes a catastrophic cyber event likely in the next two years. This far exceeds anything that we’ve see in previous surveys.”

Add in the extreme unpredictability of these events—Jurgens cited a cyberattack recently aimed at shutting down Ukranian military abilities that unexpectedly also closed off parts of electricity production across Europe—and the global challenges are only growing.

“This is a global threat,” Jürgen Stock, Secretary-General of Interpol, said during the presentation. “It calls for a global response and enhanced and coordinated action.” He said the increased profits that the multiple bad “actors” reap from cybercrime should encourage world leaders to work together to make it a priority as they face “new sophisticated tools.”

It sounds a little too much like Robert Harris’ The Second Sleep.

HMM: Are ‘The Walls Closing In’ on Joe Biden? New Details Raise Questions.

FALLOUT: Punished By Western Sanctions, Russia’s Airlines Are Showing More Cracks And More Problems.

On January 9, a 4-year-old Airbus A320 operated by the Russian airline S7 was flying from the Siberian city of Bratsk to Moscow when it encountered a problem: Its toilet system malfunctioned. The flight was forced to divert to the city of Kazan for an unscheduled landing.

Four days earlier, a Red Wings airline passenger jet flying from Kazan to Yekaterinburg also was forced to turn around and returned to its departure airport after its landing gear failed to retract.

Two months before that, a top transport official in the Pacific coast region of Primorye sent a letter to the ministry for the development of the Far East and Arctic in Moscow: We need new passenger planes because our current planes won’t be able to fly anymore after this year.

The reason, according to the letter obtained by the news outlet RBK? The plane’s Canadian-built Pratt & Whitney engines couldn’t be repaired due to Western sanctions.

Also: Russia faces new sanctions on its energy exports – but this time China and India may not come to Putin’s rescue.

Russian fuels could instead find buyers in Singapore and Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates, then head to larger Asian markets from there, but not the big ones, he added.

Russian products could also flow to West Africa and Latin America, while Europe will likely start sourcing more of its diesel from the US and Asia in a “round of musical chairs,” Katona said.

Inconvenienced travelers and distorted commodities markets aren’t going to stop a war.

TRUMP: ‘We Are at the Brink of World War III.’

BREAKING: We Now Know Who Will Lead the RNC Going Into the 2024 Election.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Blue Origin plans to fly an all-FEMALE crew into space next year – led by Jeff Bezos’ girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez.

It’s a cute stunt, but when is Blue Origin going to get serious about launching payloads into orbit for money?

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: Get the Real Poop on His Late-Night Deposit at Joe’s Crab Shack. “This week we have the pooping perp, the sheriffs deputies who made Disney World a little too magical, and one of the worst places to hide your crack pipe. Plus, Florida Man has nothin’ on Washington Man.”

Don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code if you’ve been thinking of joining us.

GIVING: Colorado’s most famous nature photographer donates life work to public domain.

For the past eight months at his home in the Summit County hills, John Fielder spent most every morning and afternoon sifting through photographs tucked away for decades.

They were transparencies from his years of hauling heavy film equipment deep into Colorado’s backcountry. The transparencies needed paring down — duplicates in which the exposure and/or contrast wasn’t quite right. Fielder estimated copies to number around 150,000, with another 50,000 or so from his digital days after 2008.

The countless hours spent sifting, editing and scanning were “enough to whack me,” said Fielder, 72.

It was all for the sake of others.

The state’s most famous nature photographer has arranged the gift of a lifetime: his lifetime of work.

Have two of Fielder’s coffee table books and they’re stunning. This is a helluva gift.

TANKS, ANYWAY: Western Tanks for Ukraine Might Be Too Little, Too Late. “When we send so few tanks and on such a long timeline, Moscow is given the opportunity to adjust and adapt. Worse, the longer this war goes on, the more negative consequences develop.”

BREAKING: Watch the Paul Pelosi Attack Bodycam Footage.

FALLOUT: ‘In trying to make Ukraine a colony, Russia made itself very dependent on China.’

I’m sure China didn’t expect the war to go on like this. It didn’t expect the Ukrainians to fight back so hard. Nor did most Western observers. You know, when Mao opened up to Nixon in the 1970s, he did that because he was afraid that China would become too vulnerable to Russia.

Clearly, things have moved in the other direction. Russia may become so dependent on China that China would hold a lot of power over Russia. They’re going to depend on China for technology, for buying their oil, for many kinds of goods. Russia has become very, very dependent on China.

There’s a bit of an irony, frankly, that Putin claimed to be so concerned about NATO that he’s made himself almost entirely dependent on China.

Making itself a vassal of Communist China is not a good look for a country that purports to defend Christendom.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Another Wave of Joe Biden J-O-B-S Losses.

CRISIS BY DESIGN: Texas Sues Biden Administration Over Border. “Texas isn’t alone in this fight. The lawsuit filing itself shows that Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming have all signed onto the lawsuit.”

THE NEW SPACE RACE: DARPA and NASA plan orbital nuclear rocket test. “By using a nuclear thermal engine to heat a propellant to extremely high temperatures to generate thrust, a rocket could have over three times the efficiency of a conventional chemical-fueled one, which would reduce transit times and increase payload potential. For a crewed Mars mission, this would mean less radiation exposure, fewer detrimental effects from weightlessness, and less of a need for supplies or overly robust flight systems.”

Seventy years late is still better than never.

EVERYTHING IS PROBLEMATICAL: The AP Stylebook Now Has a Problem With the Word ‘The.’

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: ‘A perfect storm for the whole food system right now’: One of the world’s largest fertilizer companies warns that every country—even those in Europe—is facing a food crisis.

When natural gas prices surged last year after Russia invaded Ukraine, so did prices for fertilizer, which manufacturers such as Yara produce with ammonia and nitrogen obtained as a byproduct from natural gas. Fertilizer prices had already begun increasing in 2021 due to high energy costs and supply-chain issues.

Declining natural gas prices and weak demand among farmers have eased pressures somewhat over the past few months. Earlier this month, fertilizer prices fell to their lowest level in nearly two years in tandem with natural gas prices. But despite falling prices, Holsether insists that the global fertilizer market is precarious, and countries should shift from relying on Russian natural gas, to safeguard their agricultural industries.

“Putin has weaponized energy and they’re weaponizing food as well,” Holsether told the BBC at last week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “It’s the saying, ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.’”

Fertilizer prices remain high by historical standards, and the World Bank warned earlier this month that global supply is still tight due to the war, production cuts in Europe, and stricter export controls in China.

Trade is great. But putting US workers in competition with Third World wages hasn’t been great for them or for domestic manufacturing. And depending on potentially hostile and/or unstable regimes for vital inputs is just stupid.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN); Related: Looming food shortages is the next ‘slow-moving disaster’ to hit world. Not by accident.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Choose Your Weapon Wisely — It’s Judgement Day at the RNC. “By the end of today — maybe by the time you read this — we will know if the Republican National Committee (RNC) wants to get back to the business of winning elections or if it wants to leg hump the status quo because that’s what makes the D.C. types comfortable.”

NOT TO BE OUTDONE BY THE “PELOSI ACT”: Matt Gaetz To Introduce ‘PENCIL Act,’ Blocking Adam Schiff From Reviewing Classified Information. “The Daily Caller first obtained the legislation, which is titled the PENCIL Act after former President Donald Trump’s nickname of Schiff, ‘Pencil-Neck.’ PENCIL stands for ‘Preventing Extreme Negligence with Classified Information Licenses’ Resolution.”

THE COUNTRY IS IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Biden’s FCC Pick Is Part of Group Opposed to Anti-Human Trafficking Laws.

YES. Republicans Need a Tech ‘Manhattan Project’ to Win in 2024 and Beyond.

Democrats have been taught by their Big Tech partners that data is so supremely central to winning elections that traditional campaigning is often no longer even necessary. They’re right. As discussed above, it’s now possible to track and manage voters’ preferences at the individual level.

More valuable to us, this technology isn’t locked behind corporate NDAs. Modern data management and curation is generally available across the industry. These technologies are part of the standard tool kit for a data-oriented developer. In fact, with the advent of “Big Data” tools and distributed analytics, managing the election-relevant data of every single voter in the US is a comparatively small operation compared to the superhuman daunting task of years past.

Data is everything. All other tools for victory flow downstream from data quality. This is the Democrats’ secret sauce and we cannot win without first adequate, high-quality data.

The act of curating, enriching, and validating data from 50 states and 3200+ counties can be easily managed by state and county Republican clubs if provided with adequate tools. In the industry, this curation and enrichment is called Fusion Analysis, and it’s a component of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). A political party is also inherently an intel network… Let’s use it.

Read the whole thing.

“MODERATE JOE” WAS ALWAYS A LIE: Biden Makes First Move Toward a Radical National Rent Control Law.

LIKELY STORY: Paul Pelosi Body Cam Footage Stuck in Technology Black Hole at San Francisco Court (That’s Their Story).

KRUISER: The 2023 Oscar Nominations Remind Me of My Dysfunctional Relationship With Movies. “Maybe my whole reason for writing this was to come to the realization that I want to watch more movies. Perhaps that can be one way I shake things up in 2023. I would like to watch some off-the-beaten-path fare. Any suggestions from you, dear readers, would be greatly appreciated.”

IT’S LESS THAT WE SPEND TOO LITTLE AND MORE THAT WE DON’T SPEND WELL: The U.S. Military Is In Decline. Cutting Defense Spending Would Be A Disaster.