THE BARBARIANS INSIDE THE GATES: Meet the Harvard Law Students Defending Hamas.
Archive for 2023
October 10, 2023
TODAY IN HISTORY: Christians Save Western Civilization From Islam — to Hitler’s Regret. “In other words, the führer — who further accused Christianity of promoting ‘meekness and flabbiness’ — believed what many in the West continue to believe, particularly those whose worldview is colored by Hollywood: that, historically, Christianity only bred weak and feeble men, especially when compared to more ‘robust’ peoples, in this case, Muslims.”
VDH: They Kill, While Our Government Tweets and Deletes….
They Kill, While Our Government Tweets and Deletes….
If wild reports are true that the inhuman Hamas will execute dozens of civilian hostages, and if it is further accurate that there are rumored Americans among them—and if Americans then are to be executed by Hamas—aside from…
— Victor Davis Hanson (@VDHanson) October 9, 2023
BARBARIANS: Reports of the murder of babies at Kibbutz Kfar Aza. “I do wonder about the people who are jumping in to defend the honor of Hamas as if that’s a thing that exists.”
Related: “At first we were ecstatic”: Gaza’s FAFO moment and Iran’s strategic miscalculation.
LEFTIES NEVER SHUT UP AND THEY NEVER GIVE UP: The Israeli Terrorist Attack Should End the Gun Control Debate in the US…But It Won’t.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: New Chinese space telescope will ‘outdo Hubble’, researchers claim.
The spacecraft is called Xuntian, known as the Chinese Survey Space Telescope or the Chinese Space Station Telescope (CSST). The name “Xuntian” can be literally translated as “surveying the sky” or “survey of the heavens.”
Scheduled for launch next year, the bus-sized CSST houses a two-meter (6.6 foot) diameter primary mirror. This ultraviolet-optical space telescope is to co-orbit with the country’s Tiangong space station. It has a nominal mission lifetime of 10 years, but the observatory’s space duties could be extended.
Xuntian is designed to outdo NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. This large orbiting facility is to orbit near China’s space station where it can be overhauled from time to time by Chinese spacewalkers.
Lin Xiqiang, deputy director of the China Manned Space Agency, has stated that the Xuntian in-orbit observatory is expected to make breakthroughs in cosmology, dark matter and dark energy, the Milky Way galaxy and other neighboring galaxies, star formation and evolution and exoplanets.
That’s a tall order.
Lin said that the high-resolution telescope will take deep-field survey observations with an area of 17,500 square degrees, as well as make fine observations of different types of celestial bodies. Xuntian is endowed with a 2.5 billion pixel camera.
Impressive. Can’t wait to see the results. But it does make you wonder just how good Chinese spy satellites are.
“KEEP YOUR POWDER DRY – AND KEEP LOTS OF POWDER,” THE WISE MAN ONCE SAID: Joe Is Asleep, America. You’re on Your Own. “Half of America saw Hamas’s butchery, immediately thought of America’s open back door at the southern border, and bought more ammo. The other half donned their keffiyeh cloth, took selfies for TikTok, or considered making the Palestinian flag their social media avatars.”
There really are two Americas, and one of them is enabled by smooth-talkers like Barack Obama and his “one America” schtick.
PRIME DAY DEAL: Keurig K-Compact Coffee Maker. #CommissionEarned
OLD SCHOOL: Hamas fooled Israel’s advanced surveillance by doing all of its planning offline, retired US general says. “What Hamas did, what their leadership did, was apparently they moved off of the normal modern communications links that we take for granted every day, and went back to what you did in the 19th century: face-to-face meetings, they went and used couriers instead of going in and using the telephone or the cell phone.”
Human intel is more difficult and much more dangerous to collect than signals intel but there’s no replacing it.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Can I call it or what? “There must have been plenty of communications, of course, but maybe they used couriers, carrier pigeons or some other nonelectronic means. Electronic spying doesn’t get everything, and people tend to rely on it too much.”
FINLAND AND ESTONIA SEE LIKELY SABOTAGE IN DAMAGE TO PIPELINE AND TELECOMS CABLE: “The incident comes just over a year after the Nord Stream gas pipelines running between Germany and Russia in the Baltic Sea were damaged by explosions believed to be sabotage. The case remains unsolved.”
GREG BYRNES: Three Invasions and a Coup — From Weakness to Weakness. “As diplomatic historian Thomas A. Bailey said, ‘You cannot shoot your way a little bit into a war any more than you can go a little bit over Niagara Falls.’ And our foreign policy has engendered more than a little shooting at home and abroad.”
DAVID STROM: Enemies in Our Midst.
EDUCATION: Rosalinda wants to be an astronaut, but she doesn’t read very well.
In 2010, Harvard published a report that warned of a “cycle of academic failure” if Massachusetts did not get better at teaching kids to read, write McLaren and Martin. A panel named to study the issue issued five reports in 2019. The recommendations were not followed. “Teachers unions oppose state mandates on curriculum choices.”
Massachusetts, the “birthplace of public education,” lets schools do their own thing. Some schools “use instructional methods grounded in the science of how children learn to read, an approach which teaches kids to sound out words phonetically rather than guess, and helps them build a store of knowledge about the world early on, instead of skipping from topic to topic.” But nearly half use less-effective “balanced literacy” methods and low-quality curriculum.
“Poor children learning to read are now slightly better off going to school in Florida or Mississippi — states that got serious about early literacy years ago — than they are in Massachusetts,” they write.
With that much warning, you have to conclude that this is what Massachusetts educators want for their students.
I THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Analysis of 1918 flu pandemic victims’ remains contradicts belief that healthy young adults were particularly vulnerable.
SQUAD GOALS — NOT ANTI-WAR, MERELY ON THE OTHER SIDE: The House Members Who Flunked the Moral Test.
QED:
A sitting member of Congress @RashidaTlaib flying the Palestine flag outside her office…
Is she supporting the #HamasMassacre? pic.twitter.com/n8wACqJLzN
— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) October 10, 2023
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I can’t imagine the UAW is happy with this juxtaposition.
THE END OF WOMEN’S SPORTS: Top Two Positions in Women’s Cycling Tournament Dominated by Trans-Identified Men.
MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Is Everything Suddenly Going to Hell? Or Are People Just Starting to Notice?
PRIME BIG DEAL: iRobot Roomba j6+ Self-Emptying Robot Vacuum. #CommissionEarned
THAT’S A BIT DISAPPOINTING: Enteric-coated aspirin found as effective, but not safer, than regular aspirin.
WE’VE ALL BEEN AROUND LONG ENOUGH TO KNOW THE ANSWER TO THIS ONE: The Gruesome Murder of Jews Should be Easily Condemned by Democrats, RIGHT?
Some of Colorado’s political leaders, such as Governor Jared Polis, Attorney General Phil Weiser, and Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who are all Jewish, have taken to social media to express their mourning and outrage over the attack.
However, among the voices of sorrow and condemnation, one newly elected state representative stands out for his shocking support of the terrorists responsible for the vicious attack.
Representative Tim Hernandez, a Marxist who advocates for defunding the police, has not only expressed support for the Hamas attack but has also joined in the pro-Palestinian rally at the state Capitol.
…
So far the super majority of House Democrats have remained silent concerning Rep. Frizell’s call for a reprimand of Hernandez due to his extreme behavior.
No enemies to the left.
Update: Given the opportunity to clearly condemn the murder of innocents, Hernandez… well, see for yourself.
WOW.
Colorado State Rep @_timhernandez when asked if he would condemn Hamas slaughtering innocent women and children:
“What about it?”
pic.twitter.com/0O9qjajl8p— Sara Gonzales (@SaraGonzalesTX) October 10, 2023
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Roger Kimball: What’s Left of Biden Admin’s Foreign Policy?
“We unequivocally condemn the attack of Hamas terrorists and the loss of life that has incurred,” the X-post ran. “We urge all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks. Terror and violence solve nothing.”
“All sides”?
The post quickly disappeared in the face of widespread ridicule and outrage.
Then there was speculation about where the weapons came from.
A Hamas spokesman gave thanks to Iran for its support of the attack: perhaps the rockets, the cash, the guns.
Iran does seem flush these days.
How did that happen?
On Sept. 11 of this year, President Biden celebrated his new-found friendship with Iran by releasing $6 billion in frozen funds.
That can buy a lot of guns and ammunition.
President Biden went on to condemn the attack by Hamas.
And then they twisted the knife in the body of the story.
“’The Biden Administration denounces the terrible atrocities being committed with the six billion dollars President Biden gave Hamas [via Iran],’ said Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. ‘We are deeply saddened by the deaths caused by every missile purchased with money from the Biden administration.’”
Ouch.
Donald Trump was of the same mind, though characteristically he phrased his outrage more directly.
“Can you believe that Crooked Joe Biden is giving $6 Billion to the terrorist regime in Iran?” he wrote when the deal was announced.
“That money [will] be used for terrorism all over the Middle East, and, indeed, the World. … To pay for hostages will lead to kidnapping, ransom, and blackmail against Americans across the globe. I freed many dozens of our people from various unfriendly countries and never paid a dime!”
The situation in Israel is obviously fluid, and many questions remain.
High on the list of questions concerns the gigantic intelligence failure, in the United States as well as in Israel, that allowed such a large, coordinated attack to be planned and deployed without getting picked up.
Meanwhile, Mark Hemingway writes: The Specter Of Barack Obama’s Deeply Held Anti-Israel Ideology Hovers Over Israeli Attacks. “I hardly believe Obama is such a monster he secretly roots for atrocities in Israel, even if it seems he’s never met an antisemite he would willingly disown. Regardless, there’s no doubt that these horrifying nationwide terror attacks in Israel are Obama’s legacy, a result of his arrogant anti-American ideology put into practice. But after the weekend, even Democratic partisans are scrambling to distance themselves from the Biden and Obama administrations’ ill-advised cozying up to Iran. Now we need to follow through and make sure the Obama-Biden foreign policy legacy, and the dangerous ideology that motivated it, is rejected and held up for the failure that it is.”