THEY WERE USING YOU ALL ALONG: On Israel, Progressive Jews Feel Abandoned by Their Left-Wing Allies.

Progressive Jews who have spent years supporting racial equity, gay and transgender rights, abortion rights and other causes on the American left — including opposing Israeli policies in Gaza and the West Bank — are suddenly feeling abandoned by those who they long thought of as allies. This wartime shift represents a fundamental break within a liberal coalition that has long powered the Democratic Party.

In Los Angeles, Rabbi Sharon Brous, a well-known progressive activist who regularly criticizes the Israeli government, described from the pulpit her horror and feelings of “existential loneliness,” her voice breaking. “The clear message from many in the world, especially from our world — those who claim to care the most about justice and human dignity — is that these Israeli victims somehow deserved this terrible fate.”

In Atlanta, a Jewish mother involved in local politics wrote an open letter lamenting that her child’s progressive private school had not addressed the attacks in Israel with the same kind of empathy it showed after local killings of Asian Americans. “Our people are butchered, and no one speaks to it?” she wrote. “I don’t know if I’m seething or just sad.”

And as the Hamas attacks in Israel were still underway, leaders of the New Israel Fund, which supports progressive Israeli and Palestinian groups, fielded calls from a former American ally on the left demanding that the organization label Israel an “apartheid state” — even as they waited to learn if colleagues in another organization, hiding in Israeli bomb shelters, had been killed.

Many of the most inflammatory comments came on social media, from progressive groups that responded to the immediate aftermath of the massacre of Israeli civilians by skipping even a moment of mourning and instead moving immediately to try to justify the attack.

They are your enemies, they used you, and they had contempt for you, and now it shows. Conduct yourselves accordingly.

Related: Detroit Jews ‘Beyond Disappointed’ with Rashida Tlaib for Refusing to Forcefully Condemn Hamas Terrorism. Really? Really? Disappointed? Why would you ever have expected anything else from her? Time to pay more attention to who your alleged allies really are — and always were. And to treat your enemies as the enemies they are.

OPEN THREAD: Thank God it’s Friday. Only three more working days until Monday.

THE TOXIC INDUSTRY OF HIGHER EDUCATION: We law students aren’t surprised campuses are so pro-Hamas.

Those outside academia should know these students are likely shocked that wider society is not applauding their actions.

They don’t see these statements as particularly heterodox — in fact, the opposite.

Why?

Schools have, by their own design, become devoid of free inquiry and exchange, adopting instead a homogenous set of viewpoints, many of them extremely radical.

An elite American institution’s average student body is no longer a representative sample of adolescents with top GPAs and test scores.

For years, admissions offices across the country have deliberately prioritized passion for social justice and activism in potential applicants — to their detriment.

Yes, the admissions people have been actively selecting for crazy social-justice warriors.

Related: Why Did Harvard Students Cheer on Hamas? Perhaps its administrators should modify the school’s admissions process to ensure that students lacking a basic moral compass are rejected.

Mr. Kimche describes how “a collection of some 30 student groups” not only “failed to condemn this proto-genocide” perpetrated by Hamas, but “justified and celebrated it.” In recent months, Harvard administrators have bemoaned how the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action has threatened the preservation of diversity in the admissions process.

Perhaps its administrators should be more concerned with how to modify the school’s admissions process to ensure that students lacking a basic moral compass are rejected.

Instead of rewarded.

WHEN BUREAUCRATS WAGE WAR: SpaceX frustrated by Starship licensing delays.

WE ALL KNOW THE ANSWER: Stacy McCain: Why Is KiwiFarms.net ‘Harassment,’ But What Taylor Lorenz Does Is ‘Journalism’?

HMM: Major Study Claims to Identify The Root Cause of Obesity: Fructose.

THAT’LL BE THE DAY I GO BACK TO ANNANDALE: California Supervolcano: Caltech’s “Chilling” Discovery in Long Valley Caldera.

OUT: Worries about football injuries.

In: Marching band injuries strike a sour note in emergency rooms.

MICROBIOME NEWS: Deep dive into the gut unlocks new disease treatments.

STILL A FEW EV BUGS IN THE SYSTEM: Testing Our Lucid Air Resulted in a Loud Bang, Loss of Power, and Two Tow Trucks: What was supposed to be a fun and routine test of our Lucid resulted in an hours-long ordeal.

WORKS FOR ME: Ruy Teixeira: Time to Throw the Intersectional Left Under the Bus! “Similarly a recent Public Agenda Hidden Common Ground survey found 91 percent agreement with the statement: ‘All people deserve an equal opportunity to succeed, no matter their race or ethnicity.’ This is what people deeply believe in: equal opportunity not, unlike the intersectional left, equal outcomes.”

It’s pretty much always a mistake to listen to the “academics and activists.” At best they’re mostly idiots, at worst — and far too frequently — they’re basically monsters.

UPDATE: You know, following the drama at Harvard it seems like it would be a good time for some prankster to plaster the campus with those ISLAM IS RIGHT ABOUT WOMEN and ISLAM IS RIGHT ABOUT GAYS posters, and let the intersectional fun begin!

YOUR TERMS ARE ACCEPTABLE: No. Please. Don’t. Cher Threatens to Defect if Trump Wins.

BE PREPARED: First Alert 9120B Smoke Detectors. #CommissionEarned

HE THINKS HE CAN GET A LOWER PRICE BY INCREASING DEMAND IN A MARKET WHERE OIL SELLS FOR $88 BECAUSE HE’S AN IDIOT: Biden Hopes To Buy 6 Million Barrels Of Oil For The SPR At $79.

Suffering months of humiliating jeers about the dre state of the US SPR, which has been half-drained at a time when geopolitical risk is the highest it has been in years, the US Department of Energy announced that it wants to buy 6 million barrels of crude oil for the strategic petroleum reserve as part of efforts to refill it after a massive release last year of close to 200 million barrels.

The release was the result of a political attempt by the White House to bring retail fuel prices down ahead of the 2022 Midterm elections following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which at the time some warned would empty the strategic petroleum reserve at a time when it was better full. The outcome was partially successful as Democrats retained the Senate, the problem is that the SPR remains the emptiest it has been in 40 years.

This year, the Department of Energy has repeatedly said it wanted to start refilling the SPR but the price never seemed right, after the department set itself a range of between $68 and $72 per barrel for the refill push.

Then, idiotically, when oil prices did decline to the low $70s earlier this year (amid expectations that Biden will finally tip the US into a recession) the cartoonish amateurs at the Department of Energy headed by the incompetently cackling Jennifer Granholm…

… bought only a few million barrels for the SPR, which remains at a 40-year low.

The Biden Cabal really does hate this country.

DISNEY IS FAILING AT EVERYTHING: Disney is failing at Merchandise Star Wars by forgetting cool aspects.

JOE BIDEN’S RETURN TO DECENCY: January 6 Prisoner Passes 1,000 Days Jailed Without Trial, Shares Horror Stories of DC ‘Gulag.’

DID THEY HAVE S.U.V.s BACK THEN? Waves of change: How sea-levels and climate altered the marine ecosystems at the South Pole 390–385 million years ago.

ROUTINE BUT NEVER BORING: SpaceX aims to launch 144 missions next year.

“This year, we’re going to attempt to fly 100 flights,” Bill Gerstenmaier, the vice president of build and flight reliability at SpaceX, said on Wednesday (Oct. 18) during a hearing of the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Space and Science.

“As we look to next year, we want to increase that flight rate to about 12 flights per month, or 144 flights,” he added during the hearing, which was called “Promoting Safety, Innovation and Competitiveness in U.S. Commercial Human Space Activities.”

Hitting the century mark this year would require a significant ramp-up in launch cadence, from one mission every 3.9 days to one every 2.8 days.

But SpaceX is certainly capable of meeting that latter number. The company has launched two missions in a single day multiple times; this past March, for example, it sent two of its Falcon 9 rockets skyward less than 4.5 hours apart.

The reusable rockets never fail to impress, but maybe underappreciated are the human capital and infrastructure that make the high-speed cadence possible.

BIDEN’S “SMART DIPLOMACY” IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on the Chopping Block?

On the upside, that would remove a possible barrier to my favorite spacecraft design, the Orion Nuclear Spaceship.

MICROBIOME NEWS: Dietary supplement modifies gut microbiome—potential implications for bone marrow transplant patients.

I WILL NOT EAT THE BUGS: Eat Ze Bugs! Meat Giant Tyson Invests in Insect ‘Food’ for People.

BE PREPARED: LifeStraw Personal Water Filter for Hiking, Camping, Travel. #CommissionEarned

FOLLOW THE MONEY: Senators question NIH director nominee on drug costs, research ethics, COVID-19.

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: Soaking in a hot tub has the ‘same health benefits’ as going for a 30-minute jog, scientists reveal.

The sample size was tiny but I say why take chances running on busy streets?

DID YOU HEAR ABOUT BIDEN’S REAL MEETING WITH AN ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER? President Joe Biden has talked recently of a meeting he claims to have had with former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. The Lid’s Jeff Dunetz provides “the rest of the story,” as Paul Harvey once often said:

“Twice since the Israeli war with Hamas began, Joe Biden falsely claimed that he met with Golda Meir just before the 1967 Six-Day War. However, Biden’s story was a lie. Levi Eshkol was Prime Minister until Feb. 1969, when he had a fatal heart attack. Golda Meir became PM a month later, in March 1969, a year and 8 months after the Six-Day War. President Biden got his law degree in 1968 and was admitted to the Delaware Bar in 1969, almost two years after the Six-Day War.”

But Biden did actually meet with an Israeli Prime Minister, but it was not a pleasant meeting, as Dunetz explains.