HOW IT STARTED: Why Isn’t the President Angry?

Obama’s aloofness was practiced, which is why he needed to be instructed out of it. But Joe Biden’s detachment is something else. If his administration’s bottomless tolerance for disruptive and unsympathetic anti-Israel demonstrators and its lopsided fixation with policing the conduct of Israel’s war against a mutual adversary didn’t come off as blinkered before, it most certainly will now. Maintaining that myopia still would reflect a degree of indifference to our shared reality that Americans should not tolerate in our president.

Perhaps the president isn’t indifferent. Maybe he’s simply scared — not just for his own reelection prospects, tenuous though they may be, but of what acknowledging Hamas’s actions obliges him to do. That diagnosis would make sense. His administration has been plagued by fear; fear of Russian escalation if they gave Ukraine the tools to win its war rather than simply not lose, fear of what the Taliban would do if the U.S. blew through a self-set deadline to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan, fear of having to restore stability to a region rocked by Iranian-backed terrorist attacks on Americans and their allies. The White House projects weakness and intimidation, a posture that encourages our adversaries. America’s enemies do not understand where Biden’s lines are, and they will keep testing him until they find one. This must be it.

Biden has shown incalculable patience with Hamas’s dilatory tactics, but that patience should reach its end with the news that it was all a game. The president and the nation he leads have been soundly embarrassed. It’s incumbent on Biden to summon at least some of the rage his countrymen feel and act accordingly. Americans and the world are watching, Mr. President. It’s your move.

—Noah Rothman, NRO, April 11, 2024.

How it’s going: Biden snaps at Israeli reporter in latest terse moment with media: ‘Think you can keep from getting hit in the head by a camera behind you?’

Lame-duck President Biden rounded on an Israeli TV reporter Tuesday after the correspondent asked whether Biden believed an agreement to free dozens of hostages held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip is possible before he leaves office in January

“President Biden, do you think we can get a hostage deal by the end of your term?” Israel Channel 13’s Neria Kraus asked Biden, 81, ahead of his meeting with Isaac Herzog, president of the Jewish state.

“Do you think you can keep from getting hit in the head by a — a camera behind you?” snapped an irritated-looking Biden in response.

Kraus caught the moment on video and appeared to hold back laughter as Biden pivoted to his Oval Office meeting with Herzog, whom he hailed as “a personal friend.”

The New York Post today.

I am legitimately jealous of Joe Biden right now. He's got it made. Literal Senioritis, and he doesn't give a hoot.

And why should he? He still gets the free airy-plane rides, nobody really cares that he isn't doing anything, and he didn't lose an election. What's not to like? https://t.co/s9qRWnDaz9

— jimtreacher.substack.com (@jtLOL) November 12, 2024

Finally, with less than 70 days left in his administration, Biden found an issue involving Israel to be passionate about: being as crude and insulting to an Israeli reporter as he’s been throughout his career with American journalists — the vast majority of whom have been his party’s operatives with bylines.

BE PREPARED: Vantrue N2 Pro Uber Dual Dash Cam Infrared Night Vision. #CommissionEarned

EXILE ON MAIN STREET: Rolling Stone Validates Early Trump Staff Picks by Labeling Them THE WORST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD.

Hey, not everybody can be as respectable as Charles Manson and Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, you know.

[VIP] IF THEY CAN DO IT FOR YOU, THEY CAN DO IT TO YOU: The Lesson of Robespierre

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Mazda Recalls CX-90 and CX-70 SUVs Due to Several Software Issues.

AFTER ALL THOSE MONTHS SPENT NOT GETTING COCKY, NOW IS THE TIME TO GLOAT: Best Smug ‘Trump Can’t Win’ Videos.

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BEES: Well-lit cities keeping bees awake and ruining their love life, claims study.

Light pollution is making bees sleep-deprived and harming their mating waggle dance, a study has found.

Artificial light from vehicles, street lights, road signs and other sources are seeping into the natural world and increasingly disrupting the lives of insects and also animals.

A study of honey bees has found that exposure to light around the clock disrupts the internal body clock of the insects and causes them to sleep less.

Sleep deprivation has been linked to a worsening of the waggle dance which is essential to how the bees find a mate and breed.

The waggle dance is also an intricate communication system between the bees which informs hive mates about the location of food sources.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, compared groups of bees that enjoyed normal sleep in the dark with others that were subjected to continuous artificial light.

Gooder and harder, California – your bourgeois desire to want to be able to walk home at night in safety is how you get the Asian Murder Hornets. Or something far, far worse:

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD ONCE AGAIN DOING STRAIGHT UP REPORTAGE: Experts Confirm Batman: The Animated Series Was Pinnacle Of Human Civilization.

“The data doesn’t lie. It’s the objective truth that when Kevin Conroy landed the role of Batman for the animated series in 1992 that was the exact moment when human civilization reached its highest aspirations in art and culture,” said polymath genius Conrad Leopold Winston from his top-secret hi-tech lab staffed by a team of crack experts working around the clock to understand and prevent the demise of our species.

“Apathy will set in as humanity begins to realize that nothing it can come up with will ever approach the glory that is Batman: The Animated Series. We are fated to see civilization collapse as everyone stops trying. We can only look back with nostalgia. Humanity has no future,” he added with a sigh.

“It was a banger,” added fellow expert Gordon Cornellius Augustus while looking at still frames from the show with his electron microscope. “Absolutely everything lined up on this one. The show was sophisticated, despite the trappings of ostensibly being a simple after-school cartoon that caused children to procrastinate on their homework. Its mature tone and film noir aesthetics combined with stellar orchestrated music and expert-level writing which always remained faithful to the source material made Batman: The Animated Series stand out.”

Endorsed.

NEW SHERIFF ON THE WAY:

The Old Border Czar VS The New Border Czar pic.twitter.com/9Ie8JRsroR

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) November 12, 2024

NEWS YOU CAN USE: You may have seen on YouTube videos that are AI fever dream interpretations of say, what a Star Wars movie would have looked like if it had been made in the 1950s:

Here’s how those videos are made using AI and assembled on everyday video editing software:

HMM: 9mm vs. .45 ACP: The Debate That Seems To Never End.

CHANGE: Boeing’s head of quality for commercial planes, Elizabeth Lund, is retiring.

Lund has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s in mechanical and aerospace engineering. She rose steadily over a long career at Boeing and led various major jet programs, including the 777 and 747 programs, as well as the commercial airplanes supply chain.

In late 2021, she was appointed senior vice president and general manager of all airplane programs.

A month after the Alaska Airlines fuselage blowout, Lund was tapped to lead the quality organization after the Federal Aviation Administration gave Boeing 90 days to come up with a plan to fix its management of product quality.

Interviewed by the National Transportation Safety Board in June, Lund admitted that a major push in 2019 to cut the number of Boeing quality inspectors by Ernesto Gonzalez-Beltran, then head of quality at Commercial Airplanes, had been a mistake.

“We are undoing much of what was done there,” Lund told the NTSB. “We have undone it, and I don’t think that we appropriately controlled and looked at all the risks when they did it.”

Later that month, Lund made a misstep at a press briefing when she commented on details about the Alaska Airlines incident that had not previously been publicly disclosed. She was rebuked by the NTSB for breaking strict disclosure rules about ongoing accident investigations.

As a result, Boeing was sanctioned and its access to the NTSB’s investigative information on the incident was withdrawn.

It isn’t clear exactly why Lund is leaving but her new position can’t have been very fun or rewarding.

SEEMS A LITTLE INSURRECTION-Y: Election Denier Bob Casey Still Won’t Concede Senate Race.

READER FAVORITE: CRAFTSMAN Mechanic Tool Set, 104 Pieces. #CommissionEarned

HMM: Qatar denies expelling Hamas despite Biden administration claims.

The Qatari Foreign Ministry emphatically denied reports of Hamas’s expulsion from Doha, after U.S. officials said that Qatar demanded the Palestinian terrorist group depart.

“The media reports regarding the Hamas office in Doha is inaccurate,” the Qatari Foreign Ministry statement from Saturday reads. “The main goal of the office in Qatar is to be a channel of communication between the concerned parties.”

On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be much reason left for Hamas to stay*: Qatar ends mediation efforts between Israel and Hamas, citing lack of good-faith negotiations.

*Aside from their personal safety, of course.

INDEED:

Abolish the Department of Education. pic.twitter.com/TajM1qPNKW

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) November 11, 2024

Save this chart for the next time somebody mentions how much we spend per pupil because virtually none of the increase in school spending this century has gotten anywhere near the classrooms.

MSNBC LOSES OVER HALF OF ITS PRIMETIME AUDIENCE AS RATINGS TANK:

MSNBC once again beat CNN in the ratings game, but for all the wrong reasons.

New Nielsen ratings show the liberal network has lost more than half of its primetime audience since President-elect Donald Trump’s victory last week, a sea change that signals its viewers are discouraged and tired of the spin. Fox News reported that MSNBC saw a 54% ratings drop after averaging 1.1 million primetime viewers for most of October. That number stood at 736,000 on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of last week. The change comes as Fox News’s viewership climbed 61% in the same three-day period, a “Trump bump” that has executives elated.

MSNBC will likely claw some percentage of their audience back if they once again go full on into #resistance porn as they did from 2017-to early 2021. But in any case, a percentage of their audience might not be the only thing the cable channel loses going forward: Report: Comcast to Put MSNBC and Oprah Founded Oxygen Networks Up For Sale in Cable TV Sell Off.

Comcast, the media powerhouse behind NBCUniversal, is stirring up major buzz in the entertainment industry. The company recently announced that it’s considering a significant move: separating from several of its top cable networks, including MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo, and Oprah Winfrey’s Oxygen. This surprising revelation came from Comcast President Mike Cavanagh during the company’s third-quarter earnings call, and it has left media analysts and TV enthusiasts asking a ton of questions about the future of these beloved channels.

While Comcast’s broadcast network NBC and its streaming service Peacock will be spared from this proposed separation, it’s a clear signal that the cable TV world is shifting dramatically—and Comcast might be the next major company to embrace that change.

As John Nolte adds: Signs of the Collapse of Corporate Media Influence Are Everywhere.

Related:

Glorious. pic.twitter.com/cmDqKl9Dr9

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 12, 2024

LESSON #2 ON HOW TO MAINTAIN A GENUINELY NON-PARTISAN NON-PROFIT: Make sure your staff is actually politically diverse. It may sound like a no-brainer, but very few non-profits actually do this.

WELL, GOOD: Bystander CPR done within 10 minutes likely increases survival rates: Those who received care quickly had a 95 percent higher rate of surviving without significant brain damage.

QUESTION ASKED: Will Trump’s new cabinet be good for Israel?

Trump has pleased Jewish supporters with three early Cabinet-level appointments. Trump chose New York Representative and House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik to be his ambassador to the United Nations. There, Stefanik plans to advance “America First peace through strength leadership on the world stage.”

Stefanik has repeatedly spoken in support of Israel and Israeli hostages since October 7. However, she truly stood out and won many Jewish fans with her tough questioning of university presidents during the House’s campus antisemitism hearings last academic year. Given that Israel remains the United Nation’s idee fixe, and the institution remains awash in antisemitism, Stefanik should be well prepared for her new position.

Trump’s second appointment is also a New Yorker. Trump has tapped former New York Congressman Lee Zeldin, a Jewish Republican, to be his Environmental Protection Agency Administrator. Before New York’s Jewish Democrats — particularly the Orthodox — crossed over to vote for Trump this month, they voted for Zeldin when he ran for governor of New York as a voice of moderation, back in 2022. Zeldin posted on Twitter/X, “We will restore US energy dominance, revitalise our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI. We will do so while protecting access to clean air and water.”

The third Cabinet-level appointment, by far the biggest name so far, is reported to be Florida Senator Marco Rubio for Secretary of State. Rubio has represented Florida’s sizeable Jewish community in the Senate since his election in 2010. The New York Times characterised Rubio as “a foreign policy hawk, taking hard lines on China and Iran in particular.” Rubio is also knowledgeable about foreign policy, fluent in all the issues he would have to handle as Secretary. Finally, it’s worth noting that unlike others who could have been named as Trump’s Secretary of State, Rubio is not an isolationist and would immediately reverse Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s intense hostile-to-Israel energy. America’s allies abroad should be cheered by Rubio’s selection.

* * * * * * * *

There are still consequential positions like Secretary of Defense and Attorney General that remain unclaimed, but Trump is off to a strong start with his nominations. American Jews who supported Trump over concerns about antisemitism and Israel should feel comfortable that Trump sees them, and their concerns should be addressed by the incoming administration. Change is coming.

Worst. Hitler. Ever.

Related: Trump nominates Mike Huckabee for US ambassador to Israel.

PLEASE, STOP — THEY WON’T LET ME VOTE FOR HIM AGAIN: Trump’s National Security Team Is Pro-India, Pro-Israel, and Very Anti-China.

HMM: Study: Deaths from cardiovascular disease surge among adults 25-64 in rural areas.

FINGERS CROSSED: Cathie Wood predicts Trump policies will ‘turbocharge’ US economy more than Reagan Revolution.

 UNCOMMON KNOWLEDGE: The Three Historians: Niall Ferguson, Victor Davis Hanson, and Andrew Roberts (Video).

WELL, GOOD: Research monkeys still having a ball days after busting out of lab, police say.