KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: What Will Hamas Do Without Its Friends the Democrats in Power? “Violence is the only language Hamas understands and responds to, as Israel is all too painfully aware. Its leaders grasp the none-too-subtly implied threat of it from Trump. That means they know that they’re on the clock and only have mere days left before Israel once again has a true ally in the United States.”

DECOUPLING: China’s Biggest Shipping Line Added to US Military Blacklist.

The US has blacklisted China’s largest shipping line and two shipbuilders over alleged links with the People’s Liberation Army, as Washington turns its attention to the country’s massive maritime sector.

Cosco Shipping Holdings Co. was named in a Federal Register filing on Tuesday, qualifying it as a Chinese military company as determined by the Pentagon, along with China State Shipbuilding Corp. and China Shipbuilding Trading Co. While the blacklist carries no specific penalties, it discourages US firms from dealing with those companies.

It also signals increased scrutiny of marine transport and shipbuilding as Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House. China has the world’s largest shipbuilding sector, producing more than half of merchant vessels globally, while the US industry has virtually collapsed over the last generation.

It’s criminal — and bipartisan — what Congress has allowed to happen to our shipbuilding, maintenance, Navy, and merchant marine.

FORMER GOV. PETE WILSON: California had a plan to store storm water, but Democrats blew it.

George Skelton’s question of why the state and federal governments don’t store more stormwater before it escapes to the sea is not a new one.

In the late 1990s, the federal and state governments did in fact forge a cooperative compact — called “Cal Fed” — to achieve what I said would be “water of sufficient quantity and quality to provide California’s needs for fish, farm and factory.” Both state and federal agencies were to budget and coordinate spending and permitting for agreed-upon projects to achieve that goal.

For some years there was such cooperation, particularly in the funding of conservation and environmental projects. But when year after year I included money in the state budget for surface collection and storage projects to bank against droughts, the money was removed by the Democratic majorities in the Legislature. When agricultural interests rightly complained that they were being cheated out of their fair share of projects, support for Cal Fed evaporated. The bargain had been broken.

Flashback: VDH in 2015 on how then-Gov. Jerry Brown was hamstrung by his own actions in the 1970s: How Jerry Brown Engineered California’s Drought.

YOU CAN TASTE THE FIRES IN THE BACK OF YOUR THROAT:’

Of course, there have been wildfires before. We’re accustomed to images of the Sepulveda Pass engulfed by flames. The specter of natural disaster has always lent Los Angeles an air of risk, a kind of sexiness.

There’s nothing sexy about right now. This is about the end of a place. In the future, the fires will be a demarcation. There will be the times before and after the disaster, and the one will be remembered as this happy, gauzy surreality that never was.

So far, the fires appear to have spared our house and all the things inside: photographs of my wife and me, bowls and pieces of jewelry that my wife has collected from around the world, the two knockoff paintings I bought in an alley in Shanghai, our children’s bedroom, documents, screens, kitchen appliances, books, lots of books filled with notes and scribblings from graduate school. All the unimportant things. If things get worse, I expect we’ll get a text from one of our neighbors.

No one knows what comes next. What Los Angeles will be. This is the city of unreality, and the city has always been comfortable in that unreal state—it has always felt at home in it. But now?

Now, everything feels dark and overwhelming. Los Angeles is cold and overcast and rainless. Everyone is asking where they’re supposed to go, and whether it’s safe to go home, and whether this street or building they used to know is still there. We are floating.

At Hollywood in Toto, Matt Morova explores “Why Blade Runner Ruled the ’80s:”

Even the violence we see in “Blade Runner” had been done before. Yet director Ridley Scott’s film rejuvenated and re-contextualized the archetype into something new and bold: A hardboiled detective in the future. It was revolutionary and disturbing, as all great art is.

2. Reagan’s 80s — The ’80s was the neon-glow decade. Think “Morning in America.” That “Shining City on the Hill.” Aerobics and health crazes (You think the latter is crazy now? Well, it all started in the ’80s).

We were collectively trying to shrug of inflation, malaise and the dirty hippy vibes of yore. It was slick, Miami Vice slick, with hot cars and hot babes and hot pants.

The Go-Gos and cocaine ruled … GO GO! The film’s dystopian vision couldn’t be more different.

Into that slick marketing campaign a shadow was born: Cyberpunk. A dark, dirty, grunge-y attack on corporate gloss.

Blade Runner was a dazzling preview of Los Angeles in 2019; like Pottersville in It’s a Wonderful Life, I wouldn’t want to live there, but it certainly would be intriguing to visit for a weekend. But the dystopian hellscape of Los Angeles in 2025 is far more terrifying than even Ridley Scott could have envisioned in the early 1980s.

And while it’s currently a hellscape, it’s soon to be purgatorial as well — “Gooder and Harder, California” has been a recurring headline here for several years, but L.A. citizens are going to see an entirely new level of Gooder and Harder in their efforts to rebuild:

BIDEN CANCELS TRIP TO ITALY, MEANT AS FINAL FOREIGN VISIT OF PRESIDENCY, AS FIRES RAGE IN CALIFORNIA:

President Joe Biden on Wednesday cancelled the final overseas trip of his presidency just hours before he was set to depart for Rome and the Vatican, choosing to remain in Washington to monitor the response to devastating fires raging in California.

Biden was scheduled to leave Thursday afternoon, after eulogizing former President Jimmy Carter at a memorial service in Washington, for the three-day trip to meet with Pope Francis and Italian President Sergio Mattarella and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. The trip was meant as a coda to the second Catholic U.S. president’s time in the White House and a final opportunity to showcase the strength of American alliances before he leaves office on Jan. 20.

While Team Biden obviously doesn’t want to generate optics reminiscent of Bush and Katrina, it also seems a bit silly. Biden is a withered husk of a figurehead. He’s not going to making any major decisions, and there’s nothing to be gained by him being in the White House. And after January 20th, other than pardoning Hunter, and maybe giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom to several elderly leftist grandees, no one will remember what a lame duck president did in his last days in office.

On the other hand, some things transcend optics for this profligate administration: Biden to Announce Final $500 Million in Ukraine Military Aid.

“IT IS A BITTER TRADEOFF”: An Open Letter to Special Envoy for Ukraine and Russia, General Keith Kellogg: The Strategic Realities of the War in Ukraine.

After 1,000 days of war, there seems to be no end in sight. Ukrainian forces have pushed into the Kursk Oblast, occupying the Sudzhansky Rayon and have a tentative grip on the territory, creating a bulge that must be defended, while serving as an occupying force. Russian forces batter relentlessly against entrenched Ukrainian defenders from Kupyarsk to Pokrovsk in the eastern Donbas. Although both sides put their hopes in fielding a new weapons system or missile will change the course of the war, it is a false hope: this is a war of attrition. Despite Russia’s often admired sophisticated concepts of war at the operational level, the Russian armed forces are incapable of applying them. Their leadership has neither the imagination, nor do their combat units have the training, to conduct sophisticated joint operations or combined arms maneuver. Russian forces have naturally, almost unconsciously, reverted to the model of war their grandfathers and great-great grandfathers understood: simple, straightforward, uncomplicated, unsophisticated infantry assaults backed by mass artillery strikes with the belief that enough men and steel thrown against the enemy will eventually break them. It has been the approach from the Masurian Lakes to Grozny. The Russians accept casualties at a rate that has astounded their enemies for over 100 years; the Russian soldier is capable of enduring atrocious conditions that would destroy the morale of any other army. New wrinkles have been introduced, with mostly indiscriminate rocket and missile attacks and the arrival of thousands of mercenaries from around the globe along with North Korean combat troops. Yet, the model of simple attrition is unchanged. The enemy inevitably wears down before the Russian steamroller wears down.

The Ukrainian armed forces have shown remarkable resilience and morale, adapting quickly, and fighting tenaciously, while continuously introducing and integrating new capabilities that are changing the tactical battlefield forever. And yet, like all those who have faced the Russian army for over a century, it is difficult to sustain units in combat as they suffer casualties and fewer and fewer replacements are available as the manpower pool shrinks. This affects front line unit morale and cohesiveness and wears on the national will.

Because neither side can achieve its goals, there must be a new approach to ending this war.

Much more at the link.

SHE’S A DEI MAYOR, SHE’S PROBABLY NEVER HAD ANYONE EXPRESS STRONG EXPECTATIONS OR CALL HER A FAILURE BEFORE:

WASHINGTON POST STILL LOOKING IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR: WaPo Seeks Advice on Trump Coverage from Katie Couric, Don Lemon, and Lyin’ Brian!

Finally, it’s quite funny to turn to Lyin’ Brian Williams for journalism advice, but he turned the focus back on Biden:

It was crushing to watch so many working journalists attempt to generate the words to accurately describe a visibly struggling and diminished president, seemingly unable to complete a sentence or a thought in his disastrous and final debate.

Say it with me: It is perhaps the ultimate irony that the electoral collapse of the Democratic Party in 2024 was triggered in large part by the man who ran to save the country and democracy — the same man who then tried to stay too long at the fair.

They’re all upset that the “democracy savers” lost an election. If you’re asking Brian Williams for journalism advice, it’s like asking Biden for advice on when to quit.

The WaPo and the rest of the DNC-MSM aren’t quite ready to admit the role they played in propping up the 21st century equivalent of a post-stroke Woodrow Wilson: The Biggest Media Story of Biden’s Presidency. They failed to cover the cognitive decline of the commander in chief until it served them to do so.

APPARENTLY HE’S NOT ALLOWED TO CALL IT SPACE PRON ANYMORE. THEY NEVER LET US HAVE ANY FUN:  Look! Up in the Sky Candy!

(In retrospect having Charlie Martin and I within relatively easy driving distance of each other again might be a bad, bad idea.  I don’t know if the world will survive. Oh, wait, that’s the world’s lookout!)

THEY’RE EVIL, BUT THEY’RE NOT COMPETENT: Anarchotyranny Runs Out of Water. “So yes, the ability of leftists to miss the point appears to be infinite. California has enormously expensive and intrusive government that can’t provide firefighters or water when your neighborhood burns down, which proves that Orange Man Bad.”

Related:

Also:

THEY’RE LOSING THEIR GRIP, AND IT’S DRIVING THEM NUTS:  At Long Last…