KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Maybe Joe Biden Forgot He’s American. “I’ve long maintained that Democrats begin to believe their own lies after they’ve told them often enough. They have been peddling the ‘conservative domestic terror threat’ garbage for so long that they’re not very bothered by real terrorists. They’re living in a dark, twisted, land of make-believe.”

DON’T RENEW IT: A Powerful Tool US Spies Misused to Stalk Women Faces Its Potential Demise.

The federal law authorizing a vast amount of the United States government’s foreign intelligence collection is set to expire in two months, a deadline that threatens to mothball a notoriously extensive surveillance program currently eavesdropping on the phone calls, text messages, and emails of no fewer than a quarter million people overseas.

The US National Security Agency (NSA) relies heavily on the program, known as Section 702, to compel the cooperation of communications giants that oversee huge swaths of the internet’s traffic. The total number of communications intercepted under the 702 program each year, while likely beyond tally, ostensibly reaches into the high hundreds of millions, according to scraps of reportage declassified by the intelligence community over the past decade, and the secret surveillance court whose macroscopic oversight—even when brought to full bear against the program—scarcely takes issue with any quotidian abuses of its power.

As of now, members of Congress have introduced exactly zero bills to prevent 702 from sunsetting on January 1, 2024, even though many—perhaps a majority—view this intelligence “crown jewel” as fundamental to the national defense, a flawed but fixable law.

Mass surveillance is a great way to build dossiers on ordinary Americans but generally a lousy way to catch terrorists who — as we saw in Gaza last month — are smart enough to avoid it.

CHANGE: ‘I’ve Been a Left-Winger All My Life. Now I Realize How Naïve I Was.’

WITH HAMAS, THE HOSTAGES AND EXPLOSIVES ARE ALWAYS IN THE FIRST PLACE YOU LOOK: IDF reveals Hamas hostage, explosives center under Rantisi Hospital.

A video showed the basement of the hospital which showed a location disconnected from the rest of the hospital where the significant terror explosives and armaments were kept.

Hagari showed a motorcycle with a bullet hole inside it and items connected to one of the hostages in the vicinity of the motorcycle.

One of the chairs showed ropes and other items indicating that a hostage had been held there.

A baby bottle and other baby materials were found which the IDF said were connected to a hostage baby.

There were also improvised toilets, which Hagari said was infrastructure to hold hostages.

A list on a board marked the days since October 7, possibly indicating when the terrorists left, likely with hostages.

There’s really no such thing as a hospital where Hamas is in charge. There are places where medical care is provided but their most important function is providing human shields and opportunities for propaganda.

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: Guess What White People Are Being Blamed for Now?

GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: When Hollywood Did It Right: PREDATOR.

There is no doubt that it has become much more difficult to make relatively inexpensive “one quadrant” movies like PREDATOR in an era where the corporatized major studios only seem interested in movies that can generate a billion dollars in box office (and eight or ten sequels). But the problem is that those billion dollar franchises aren’t working the way they used to. Box office is down across the board, and the big titles like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Pixar and those from Marvel and DC are suffering badly. There are all kinds of reasons why, but I believe that one of the biggest reasons is that Hollywood has spent the last two decades trying to reinvent not just the wheel, but human nature altogether. Somewhere along the way, Hollywood decided that rough male talk is bad, that masculinity is toxic and that part of making ours a better world includes taking those things that appeal primarily to aggressive young men out of the movies they like and replacing them with “better”, woker things.

For instance…

I love how the men of Dutch’s platoon ruthlessly dunk on each other in that way only very close friends can do. Watch the scene on the helicopter as they’re being inserted into the LZ. I hate to break this to all of you non-men, but this is how young men, particularly aggressive Alpha Males, behave around one another when they are alone in an exclusively male “safe space”… in the parlance of our times. If you were in the target audience for PREDATOR, which is to say a young man who grew up in the years before the turn of the millennium, then it’s likely that you found this scene endearing because it’s exactly what you did with your guy friends when you hung out together.

But this kind of male behavior has been branded toxic by the broader culture and it has mostly disappeared from the action genre. Men, it has been decided, cannot be allowed to see other men behaving this way because if they do, well then they might want to emulate it, and we have determined as a culture that this kind of aggressive male behavior must be stamped out.

Of course, this behavioral morality sensor only ever seems to point in one direction. A scene where guys ruthlessly dunk on each other and which includes salty officially unapproved language like “faggot” and “pussy” would be branded toxic and unacceptable today… but women engaging in what is clearly unhealthy or even self-destructive social behavior in shows like SEX AND THE CITY, GIRLS, THE IDOL or EUPHORIA are more likely to be labeled “empowering” or described by critics as “a gritty depiction of the realities of modern dating.”

…Anything but “toxic”… that label, it seems, is one our culture has reserved exclusively for describing male behavior.

Girls are allowed to be girls in any way that they want… but boys are allowed to be boys only within tightly scripted cultural parameters. It seems to me that if Hollywood is serious about getting audiences back into theaters, one way to do that might be to let boys be boys again.

Read the whole thing.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Introducing the Biggest Damn Thing to Fly in Almost 100 Years.

FASTER, PLEASE: For the first time, gene-editing provides hints for lowering cholesterol.

IT ISN’T MUCH OF A DISGUISE: JP Sears Takes Message to Kids in New Children’s Book, Calls Disney the Devil ‘In Disguise.’

WE’LL SEE: Elon Musk started a price war that Tesla can’t win.

Under increasing pressure from new competition, Tesla spent the past year slashing the average price of its models by roughly 25%. The Model 3 fell from $48,000 to $44,380. The luxury Model S, meanwhile, plunged from a high of $130,000 to $96,380. The cars, as they say, have been priced to move.

It’s an unusual business strategy, to put it mildly. “I can’t think of another point in the history of automotive when a brand that wasn’t going out of business cut prices 20% a year,” Mark Schirmer, the director of communications at the research firm Cox Automotive, told me. Tesla is hoping that lower prices will drive up sales and slow the advance of the company’s rivals — maybe even scare some of them out of the market altogether.

But that’s not what’s happening. Lower prices are not translating into higher sales. The number of cars Tesla delivered to customers in the third quarter actually declined. Revenue is dropping, and the company’s once fat profit margins are getting squeezed — down to 17.9% in the third quarter, compared with 25.1% a year ago.

Even at a reduced 17.9%, Tesla’s profit margins are still quite fat in an industry that averages about 7.5%. Tesla would have to cut prices much deeper just to reduce profits to the industry average.

This is just sloppy reporting from Business Insider’s Linette Lopez, who left that key fact out of her story.

Lower profits won’t make shareholders happy but that’s no reason for scaremongering.

HE WON’T LEAVE UNTIL AND UNLESS THE CABAL THAT INSTALLED HIM TELLS HIM TO: So Many Democrats So Want to See Slow Joe Gone. “If Biden is salvageable, the Democrat-Media Complex will do what it can to push him across the finish line in just one more race.”

STAND DOWN: ‘Rogue’ star hurtling through the Milky Way won’t smash into our solar system after all.

#RESIST: What Oregon High School Boys Do to Tampon Dispenser in Their School Bathroom Reaches Legendary Status.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: The IRS released its 2024 tax brackets. Here’s how to see yours. “The tax agency on Thursday said it’s adjusting the tax brackets upwards by 5.4%, relying on a formula based on the consumer price index, which tracks the costs of a basket of goods and services typically bought by consumers. The 2024 limits come after the IRS last year expanded its tax brackets by a historically large 7%, reflecting last year’s high inflation.”

Since the IRS isn’t nearly keeping up with actual inflation, this amounts to a stealth tax hike.

I-10 DOWNTOWN IS OUT OF ACTION “INDEFINITELY”: What — Or Who — Caused That Devastating Freeway Fire in Los Angeles?

WHOSE TRUCK IS IT, ANYWAY? Tesla will sue you for $50,000 if you try to resell your Cybertruck in the first year.

Tesla added a section titled “For Cybertruck Only” to its Motor Vehicle Order Agreement, which laid out the new rules.

“You agree that you will not sell or otherwise attempt to sell the Vehicle within the first year following your Vehicle’s delivery date,” it says.

“Tesla may seek injunctive relief to prevent the transfer of title of the Vehicle or demand liquidated damages from you in the amount of $50,000 or the value received as consideration for the sale or transfer, whichever is greater. Tesla may also refuse to sell you any future vehicles,” it says.

But if a customer has a good reason to sell their Cybertruck, Tesla may agree to buy it back at the original price minus “$0.25/mile driven, reasonable wear and tear, and the cost to repair the Vehicle to Tesla’s Used Vehicle Cosmetic and Mechanical Standards.”

If Tesla does not want to purchase the vehicle, the company may then agree to let the customer sell it to someone else.

Plus: “Elon Musk said in an earnings call earlier this year that it would take a year to 18 months before the EV truck can become a significant cash-flow contributor, adding that he hoped production of the Cybertruck would reach a quarter of a million annually by 2025.”

That’s ambitious. The Ford F-150 is the bestselling vehicle of any kind in the US and Ford sold about 653,000 last year.

GO WOKE, GO BROKE: Disney’s New Woke Captain America Movie on the Verge of Crashing and Burning. “An anonymous 4chan user who claims to have been at a Los Angeles test screening—I won’t link to the post because I cannot verify the claim—says that the film is much more political than the Marvel series ‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,’ from which the film continues. He claims the plot revolves around politics, the president, and an election. And who goes to a Marvel Studios movie for that? The user also claims the president in the film is a Trump proxy and the story devolves into a January 6 metaphor.”

MOURNING JEZEBEL: The death of Jezebel is the end of an era of feminism. We’re worse off without it.

Actual Jezebel: “On the second business day of his presidency, Donald Trump, a man with two butt holes but no mouth, will reportedly sign orders advancing the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines.”

I’m not feeling worse off without Jezebel.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: San Francisco Goes Full Potemkin Village to Suck Up to Commie Xi Jinping. “The sad thing about this is that they’re putting on a show for other commies. The Potemkin Village shtick was a charade for Western visitors back in the day. Now San Francisco is putting on its Labor Day best to look good for the real commie pros.”

CHANGE: Gazans turn on Hamas as food shortage fuels disorder. “Palestinians arm themselves to collect bread and hurl rocks at terror group’s police.”

HMM: Who Killed Detroit Synagogue President Samantha Woll?

THE FED FEELS RESTLESS? TRY BUYING GROCERIES OR SELLING A HOUSE: Stubborn Core Inflation Helps Explain Some Fed Restlessness.

Compared with October of last year, the core CPI is projected to rise 4.1%. That would match the annual advance in September and snap a six-month stretch of slowing price growth.

While considerable progress has been made since hitting a multi-decade high a year ago, the pace of inflation remains elevated and above the Fed’s goal. Having paused tightening at consecutive meetings, leaving the benchmark rate at a 22-year high, policymakers are proceeding deliberately — and not ruling out further increases.

“If it becomes appropriate to tighten policy further, we will not hesitate to do so,” Chair Jerome Powell said Thursday. “We will continue to move carefully, however, allowing us to address both the risk of being misled by a few good months of data, and the risk of over-tightening.”

If they’d have risked over-tightening a couple of years ago, we might have been spared the worst of it.

WE KNOW: Alan Dershowitz Admits Barack Obama Has ‘Deep Hatred’ of Israel.

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY: He’s McLovin’ the High-Speed Police Chase.

GOOD: SpaceX Countersues Hiring Discrimination Lawsuit By DOJ.