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Two keys -
Remember - The Biden administration would probably prefer if you forgot
that one of its first actions was to remove the Iranian-backed Houthis
from the U.S. list of global terrorist organizations.
If you want to get a good sense of how the Democratic nominee would
perform in the Oval Office, take a good look at the performance of the administration in which she’s currently vice president.

from https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/islamists-are-reenacting-the-exxon-valdez-oil-spill-and-the-green-crowd-couldnt-care-less/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=top-stories&utm_term=second

Islamists Are Reenacting the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill, and the Green Crowd Couldn’t Care Less

Flames and smoke rise from the Greek-flagged oil tanker Sounion, which
has been on fire since August 23, on the Red Sea, August 25, 2024.
Yemen's Houthis said they attacked the Sounion in the Red Sea.(Eunavfor Aspides/Reuters)
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By Jim Geraghty
August 26, 2024 9:17 AM
On the menu today: I can’t begrudge everyone for paying a lot of
attention to the U.S. presidential race, but there’s a lot going in the
world beyond Trump’s pouting and threatening to withdraw from the
remaining debate. The Houthis are reenacting the Exxon Valdez spill in
the Red Sea, to the yawns of environmentalists in the West; NASA can’t
get its astronauts down from the International Space Station; and the
U.S. Navy is quietly putting together plans to remove the crews from 17
Navy support ships “due to a lack of qualified mariners to operate the vessels.” If you want to get a good sense of how the Democratic nominee
would perform in the Oval Office, take a good look at the performance of
the administration in which she’s currently vice president.

It’s an Islamist Oil Spill; That Kind of Spill Is Completely Different

Do America’s environmentalists oppose the Houthis’ blowing up oil
tankers because it results in massive spills and a “severe ecological disaster,” or quietly support them because they represent attacks on the fossil-fuel industry?

It’s easy to wonder about the latter, as life stateside is full of
people who will give you grief about your Big Mac, your SUV, your gas
stove, and now your air conditioning. Meanwhile, these kidnapping, humanitarian-aid-obstructing, cholera-exacerbating Islamists who carried
out a “partial and limited reintroduction of slavery” are reenacting the Exxon Valdez spill, and you barely hear a peep from the green crowd.
It’s easy to conclude their movement is primarily focused upon hassling
you, not about protecting the Earth.

The current president of the United States — that’s Joe Biden if you’ve forgotten. I know it’s easy to forget when he only does one public event
per week — has not made any substantive remarks about the threat from
the Houthis since January. The Biden administration would probably
prefer if you forgot that one of its first actions was to remove the Iranian-backed Houthis from the U.S. list of global terrorist organizations.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller issued a statement Saturday:

The United States is gravely concerned by the Houthis’ attacks against
the oil tanker MT DELTA SOUNION. The Houthis’ continued attacks threaten
to spill a million barrels of oil into the Red Sea, an amount four times
the size of the Exxon Valdez disaster. While the crew has been
evacuated, the Houthis appear determined to sink the ship and its cargo
into the sea.

Through these attacks, the Houthis have made clear they are willing to
destroy the fishing industry and regional ecosystems that Yemenis and
other communities in the region rely on for their livelihoods, just as
they have undermined the delivery of vital humanitarian aid to the
region through their reckless attacks. We call on the Houthis to cease
these actions immediately and urge other nations to step forward to help
avert this environmental disaster.

Don’t get mad at Miller; issuing firmly worded statements is his job.
Get mad at everybody above him who’s supposed to create and carry out policies deterring and punishing these sorts of reckless attacks. (For
those wondering, the Exxon Valdez spilled 257,000 barrels, or roughly 17 Olympic-sized swimming pools, or 35,000 metric tons. The Greek-flagged
oil tanker Sounion is carrying 150,000 metric tons of crude oil.)

Way back in January, after some coalition airstrikes, President Biden said:

Today’s defensive action follows this extensive diplomatic campaign and Houthi rebels’ escalating attacks against commercial vessels. These
targeted strikes are a clear message that the United States and our
partners will not tolerate attacks on our personnel or allow hostile
actors to imperil freedom of navigation in one of the world’s most
critical commercial routes. I will not hesitate to direct further
measures to protect our people and the free flow of international
commerce as necessary.

Hey, how are those “further measures” doing? The only thing we’ve got going for us is that the Houthis don’t always check to see whose ships they’re attacking, and end up shooting ships carrying Russian oil and
Chinese goods, even though the terrorists pledged to spare ships from
those countries.

Oh, and hey, look who else is benefitting from the Houthis’ turning the
Red Sea shipping lanes into the site of the U.S. Navy’s “most intense combat since World War II”:

Freight companies operating between China and Europe are increasingly
turning to rail lines that run through Russia as Houthi rebel attacks on
ships travelling through the Suez Canal trigger delays and higher costs.
The volume of goods transported from China to Europe via the Eurasian
Rail Alliance (Era) — a Russian freight company which uses Russian rail
lines — has more than doubled since the Red Sea crisis began at the end
of last year.

We’re up against an axis of the devils that operates like an
international crime syndicate with protection rackets. If Biden insists
upon being president until January 20, is it too much to ask that he
comes out and talk about these sorts of things once in a while?

------------------

The ISS Is Like Hotel California: Check Out Any Time You Like, but . . .

Who’s having the worst 2024: the Chicago White Sox, Ivy League
presidents, the Kursk, Russia Regional Chamber of Commerce, or Boeing?

After this weekend, there’s a strong case for Boeing:

NASA announced Saturday that it will use SpaceX’s Dragon capsule to
bring home two astronauts stuck in space for months, because the agency
does not have confidence in Boeing’s troubled Starliner capsule.

“It was just too much risk for the crew,” said Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager.

The highly anticipated decision, one of the most consequential by the
space agency in years, is a devastating blow to Boeing, which had argued vehemently that Starliner was safe even though it suffered a series of
thruster problems and helium leaks as it brought NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore to the International Space Station in early June.

The decision means that the autonomous Starliner spacecraft will return
to Earth, likely in early September, without anyone on board and that
Williams and Wilmore will have their stay on the space station,
originally intended to last eight days, extended to about eight months —
the next Dragon return flight is scheduled for February.

Eight days? That’s the space equivalent of a three-hour tour. The ISS
has turned into Gilligan’s Space Station:

Boeing argued that its engineers understood the problems and said the
company “remains confident in the Starliner spacecraft and its ability
to return safely with crew.” NASA, however, could not get to a point
where its engineers felt they fully understood the problems, even after
running several ground tests, analyzing the data and even taking apart
hardware on the ground.

Reviews of the data led to “a lot of tense conversations,” said Ken Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations. That will require some fence-mending between the two sides, Bowersox suggested.

In a way, what we saw this weekend was the plan: Way back in 2014, NASA
decided to go with two private companies to create low-Earth orbit transportation, so that in case one company’s spacecraft failed, the
other company’s system would serve as a backup. Boeing was awarded a
$4.2 billion contract, while SpaceX was awarded a $2.6 billion contract.

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Still, having to rule that Boeing’s Starliner isn’t safe or reliable
enough is an embarrassment for both Boeing and NASA, and it’s not like
there weren’t warning signs: “The aerospace contractor projected the capsule would be ready to fly astronauts by the end of 2017. It turns
out the Crew Flight Test didn’t launch until June 5, 2024.” Because it
was a fixed-price contract, Boeing has had to pay for the $1.6 billion
in cost overruns.

NASA could argue that back in 2014, Boeing had a much more reliable
reputation. But some might ask whether the senior U.S. government
officials who are supposed to be looking over NASA’s shoulder were as attentive as they should have been.

More on
Red Sea

U.S. and U.K. Aircraft and Submarine Lay Waste to Houthi Strongpoints.
About Time
Code Pink and the Houthis Are Both on China’s Side
Obviously, Hit the Houthis
The National Space Council was established in 1989, was “not
operational” from 1993 to 2017, and was reestablished during the Trump administration; during the Trump years, the Council met eight times.

Since Biden took office, the National Space Council has held three
meetings. The chair of the Council is . . . Vice President Kamala
Harris, who pledged to put her “personal stamp” on it. Harris left the third meeting early, leaving her national-security adviser, Phil Gordon,
to moderate it.

Now, it’s not reasonable to expect Harris, in one of these roughly once-a-year meetings, to say to NASA administrators, “Hey, have you double-checked the Starliner’s thrusters and also checked for helium
leaks in the propulsion system? I’ve just got a bad gut feeling about
those systems.” After all, this is indeed literal rocket science. But it still bears pointing out that Harris’s role on the National Space
Council is about what cynics would expect: show up, give a speech, and
depart, leaving someone else to actually run the meeting.

Oh, and in those remarks, Harris said:

Last year, I issued a global challenge for all nations to join our
commitment not to conduct destructive, direct-ascent anti-satellite
missile testing. Since then, 36 other nations have joined us, and I
continue to urge more nations to do the same.

That sounds impressive at first, but only four countries have
demonstrated destructive direct-ascent anti-satellite missile
capability: the United States, India, China, and Russia. The U.S. has voluntarily agreed to a unilateral moratorium; India, China, and Russia
have refused. So Harris is bragging that a bunch of like-minded or
allied countries, like Canada and New Zealand, are promising to not do something that they likely don’t have the capability to do yet anyway,
and probably aren’t inclined to do, either. This is just about the
nicest way to describe a form of unilateral disarmament.

Elon Musk to the Rescue, Again

Hey, remember when Joe Biden mocked Elon Musk with his, “I am sick . . .
of Elon Musk and his rich buddies trying to buy this election” tweets,
back on July 17?

Four days later, how did Biden announce he wasn’t seeking another term?
Which social-media platform did he use?

And whose company is saving NASA’s bacon, when Boeing fell flat on its
face? Ah, that’s right, Elon Musk’s.

A Smaller U.S. Navy in a More Dangerous World

A moment ago, I mentioned that the Red Sea is site of the U.S. Navy’s
“most intense combat since World War II.” Earlier this month, Secretary
of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike
Group “to accelerate its transit to the Central Command area of responsibility” — that is, to move more quickly toward the Middle East
as a deterrent to Iran. No doubt the need to send a clear message to
Tehran is great, but as a consequence, “This decision left the western Pacific without an operational US carrier for the first time in years.”

And the U.S. fleet is about to get smaller:

Military Sealift Command has drafted a plan to remove the crews from 17
Navy support ships due to a lack of qualified mariners to operate the
vessels across the Navy, USNI News learned.

The MSC “force generation reset” identified two Lewis and Clark replenishment ships, one fleet oiler, a dozen Spearhead-class
Expeditionary Fast Transports (EPF) and two forward-deployed Navy
expeditionary sea bases that would enter an “extended maintenance”
period and have their crews retasked to other ships in the fleet, three
people familiar with the plan told USNI News Thursday.

Based on the crew requirements on the platforms, sideling all the ships
could reduce the civilian mariner demand for MSC by as many as 700 billets.

A defense official confirmed the basic outline of the plan to USNI News
on Thursday. Two sources identified the forward-deployed sea bases as
USS Lewis Puller (ESB-3), based in Bahrain in U.S. Central Command, and
USS Herschel “Woody” Williams (ESB-4), based in Naval Support Activity Souda Bay, Greece, and operated in U.S. European and Africa Command.

The U.S. currently has the smallest active-duty force it has had since
1940; the Biden administration inherited a military with 1,333,822
active-duty personnel in 2020 and now has one with 1,284,500 active-duty personnel, a decline of just under 50,000 personnel in one four-year span.

Back in February, our Luther Ray Abel did an in-depth dive into the
problems the U.S. military is having in recruitment. Yes, the perception
of a “woke military” and Covid-vaccine requirements were factors, but
what most civilians likely don’t realize is that our brave new world of electronic medical records is complicating recruitment — now a potential recruit’s complete medical history is transferred electronically. As
Luther described:

Any and every medication a young person has ever received a prescription
for, regardless of whether he actually ingested it or how long he took
it, can be grounds for rejection. Prescribed Ritalin for ADHD at 16 or
Zoloft for managed anxiety? Broke a bone snowboarding that’s since
healed? It might be a problem.

See, back in the day (pre-2022), the recruiter would often take a
recruit aside before sending the young man to MEPS and say some version
of the following: “You have no medical issues, okay? If the doctor who inspects you at MEPS asks if you’ve had surgery, you say ‘No, sir.’ If
he asks about the cut on your chest that suggests open-heart surgery,
you say it’s a birthmark. You’ve never drunk, smoked pot, or taken the Lord’s name in vain. You are the healthiest American ever beheld by
medical science — at least until he sees my next recruit. Good?” Practically every recruit has lied in some capacity to join the military because the standards are absurd, and the series of waivers and records requests to show proof of, and reasons for, treatment can feel never-ending.

An example: I didn’t lie and was shown the door my first time at MEPS
because I disclosed to the doctor there that I had been prescribed
orthotics (arch supports for the foot) years before — a minor detail
that hadn’t come up on the initial screening from the recruiter. Instead
of saying, “Oh, no problem,” he ushered me to the front desk and forbade
my return until the podiatrist had signed off on the orthotics I hadn’t
used in over two years. Months of paperwork later — including a visit to
the prescribing podiatrist that, even with a good insurance policy, cost
more than $50 — I was cleared to return to MEPS, face the doctor, and
pass through to receive a ship date for boot camp. Compare that instance
of bureaucratic hoop-jumping with today’s access to a full medication
list, and one can see the monumental burden the military has heaped on
the applicant and his recruiter. Gone are the days of sidestepping via
white lies to present a clean medical record while giving the military plausible deniability. They didn’t ask too intently, and recruits didn’t volunteer extraneous information. The system worked. . . .

What makes the Genesis situation all the more challenging is that the
military can’t very well publicize that the records update has harmed recruitment because then the brass would have to admit what anyone who’s served knows: Our 250 years of martial success have come about through bald-faced lies to a medical professional. There’s a proud tradition of patriotic fibs to serve one’s country: JFK, John Boucher, and Gerry
Barlow, for instance.

In fiscal year 2021, the U.S. Navy had 301 ships. (Remember the U.S. government’s fiscal year 2021 began in October 2020.) The U.S. Navy
currently has 293 ships, and the fleet is on pace to continue shrinking:
“The Navy projects that, under the Navy’s proposed FY2025 budget, the
total number of ships in the Navy would decline by a net 9 ships during
FY2025, from 296 ships at the start of FY2025 to 287 ships at the end of FY2025.”

Meanwhile:

DOD states that China’s navy “is the largest navy in the world with a battle force of over 370 platforms, including major surface combatants, submarines, ocean-going amphibious ships, mine warfare ships, aircraft carriers, and fleet auxiliaries. Notably, this figure does not include approximately 60 HOUBEI-class patrol combatants that carry anti-ship
cruise missiles (ASCM). The . . . overall battle force [of China’s navy]
is expected to grow to 395 ships by 2025 and 435 ships by 2030.”

Last Thursday night, Kamala Harris stood before the world and pledged,
“As vice president, I have confronted threats to our security,
negotiated with foreign leaders, strengthened our alliances and engaged
with our brave troops overseas. As commander in chief, I will ensure
America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”

Where’s she been?

ADDENDUM: As summer approaches its close, I see my latest thriller,
Dueling Six Demons, is already up to 62 reviews on Amazon — thanks to everyone for the five-star reviews. The four-star ones . . . eh, okay,
thanks, I guess. Three stars or less, keep your opinions to yourself! Seriously, the algorithms love reviews, and so giving your favorite
authors a review on Amazon or Goodreads is one of the biggest favors you
can do them.

Next Jolt
What Kamala Harris Didn’t Say

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