SCALING UP IS HARD TO DO: Elon Musk talks Tesla: “We dug our own grave with the Cybertruck.”

JUST PLEASE STOP TALKING: Joe Biden: ‘I Can Understand Why’ People Believe Israel Bombed Gaza Hospital.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: The Battle for the Soul of Disney Is On. “Hope might have just reappeared in the form of activist investor Nelson Peltz.”

UM, NO: Roy Wood Jr. Compares ‘Daily Show’ Gig to Being a Marine. “Comedy Central continues to audition possible replacements for the low-rated Trevor Noah, who took over Stewart’s seat in 2015 but left the gig last year. It won’t be Wood nor Hasan Minhaj, the comedian reportedly at the top of the channel’s list until a New Yorker investigation found out Minhaj has a habit of making up harrowing stories out of whole cloth to promote a victimhood agenda.”

FAKE NEWS: Washington Post Stands by Totally Debunked Atrocity. “What would a decent paper do after getting raked over the coals for blowing such an important story?”

GOOD: Twitter’s Latest Test Puts Some New Users In Read-Only Mode Unless They Pay. “Elon Musk has a new plan to solve the spam and bot problem on X, formerly known as Twitter. That solution is called ‘Not a Bot’ and it involves an unverified user paying $1 per year to prove that they are indeed human. If the user pays, they will have the ability to tweet and share content from other accounts, as well as to “like,” reply to, and quote other posts. If the user doesn’t pay, however, their account will be relegated to read-only mode.”

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Biden’s ‘Hamas Helper’ Trip to Israel Was an Embarrassing Disaster. “Biden is giving money to Gaza. No matter how many times the Democrats and other leftists around the world deny it, Gaza IS Hamas, and vice-versa. The people of Gaza have chosen Hamas to be in charge and that’s not really a casual hook up type of relationship that is easy to break off. There is no demarcation point where Gaza ends and Hamas begins. It’s a distinction that’s made by leftists to whip college kids into a frenzy and justify funneling funds to terrorists.”

CAROL ROTH: America’s financial position is so bad it’s now a national security threat.

The IMF has come out explicitly and reinforced what its analysis has shown implicitly for quite some time: the current financial position of the U.S. is unsustainable. This shouldn’t be a surprise, as this has been echoed by analysis from the Treasury, the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) and just about anyone not detached from reality.

This unsustainability creates not only an economic security issue for the U.S., but a national security issue as well.

After exploding the already massive size of government another 40+% over the past four years, public debt to GDP is again at levels exceeding 120%. For context, the IMF and others have noted in the past that a sovereign balance sheet becomes unwieldy at around 70-80% debt to GDP.

If the U.S. were an emerging market, such a balance sheet would likely cause a currency crisis.

There’s a lot of ruin in a nation and Washington seems determined to find out exactly how much.

NOT A JOKE: A Liberal Jew and Conservative Catholic Walk Into a Bar.

TRUMP ON TRIAL: Judge In Trump’s Docs Case Hands Jack Smith’s Team Big Setback.

Smith and his prosecutors had requested to keep documents seized during the FBI’s August 2022 raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in a private facility outside of the Florida district where the case was filed, but U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, whom Trump appointed, refused to allow it.

Cannon ordered Smith to share the documents in a location convenient for Trump’s legal time, within the South Florida district.

“The parties are advised the production of classified discovery to defense counsel is deemed timely upon placement in an accredited facility in the Southern District of Florida, not in another federal district,” Cannon wrote. “It is the responsibility of the Office of the Special Counsel to make and carry out arrangements to deposit such discovery to defense counsel in this District.”

The ruling is another favorable to Trump as it builds on a previous decision over the summer denying Smith’s request to hide his list of 84 witnesses from Trump’s legal team. Smith had argued that Trump’s frequent critique of his court cases in public and on social media would prejudice or intimidate those witnesses who could see their names made public.

Related: The Left Is Coming to Terms With Failure to Lawfare Trump Out of the Race.

PAULA BOLYARD: Google Thinks We’re ‘Dangerous’ for Calling Out Anti-Semitism.

BAD IDEA: Nikki Haley and Why the U.S. Can’t Ship Anti-Semitic Palestinians Here.

CHANGE: Russia is scrapping its ratification of a key nuclear test ban. “Russia is withdrawing its ratification of a landmark deal designed to prohibit nuclear testing. The Russian state duma carried out the first in a series of votes today that will lead to the de-ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.”

THEY’RE CLOSING THE BARN DOOR AFTER SETTING THE HORSE LOOSE: Biden administration announces new sanctions against Hamas.

Meanwhile: Biden Announces $100 Million in Aid That Will Likely Go to Hamas.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: In Praise of GOP Chaos. “Democrats have already gone through their Great Sorting. Now it’s the Republicans’ turn.”

ENDORSED: Abolish TSA.

Compare the border situation to that of your local airport TSA checkpoint. In addition to ensuring that you wait in unreasonably long lines, you are sure to be frisked, scanned, and non-verbally assaulted if you so much as look at Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents the wrong way.

TSA screens over two million air travelers in the U.S. per day. That’s roughly 730 million per year. Before you even get to the checkpoint, you have to be able to show a photo ID if requested. To get that ID, you may have had to take a driving test, or a citizenship test, but at the very least, you have to have a permanent address and prove you are here legally. You need a photo ID to fly.

You have to be deemed safe to be around other passengers, so if you exhibit signs of drunkenness, drug abuse, hostility, or pose any other risk or threat to other passengers, you are singled out and “de-planed.” If your luggage is the wrong size or that shampoo bottle looks threatening, sorry, it’s not coming.

And this is for domestic travel. Entering the United States at an international airport entails much more scrutiny.

The only purpose the TSA serves is to acclimatize free people into submitting to mandatory government intrusions.

AT THE VERY LEAST, THEY SET THE STAGE, PAID THE ACTORS, AND RAISED THE CURTAIN: Did the Biden Admin Let the Attack on Israel Happen?

SPACE: Astronomers say new telescopes should take advantage of ‘Starship paradigm.’

In 2021, the National Academies released a once-in-a-decade review of the top astronomy and astrophysics priorities for the US science community. In this survey, known in shorthand as Astro2020, a distinguished panel of scientists laid out a roadmap for NASA to spend the bulk of the 2020s developing technologies and designs for the next series of “great observatories” that will follow the likes of Hubble, Chandra, James Webb, and the Roman Space Telescope scheduled for launch in 2027.

NASA’s policy is to follow the science community’s recommendations wherever possible. Sometime around the end of the decade, the thinking goes, NASA should be ready to officially kick off development of these new telescopes. First should be a large telescope called the Habitable Worlds Observatory, which would be comparable in size to Webb with a primary mirror around 6 meters (20 feet) across and a coronagraph or a starshade to blot out starlight, enabling direct observations of planets around other stars, or exoplanets. This is a capability not available on Webb.

The Habitable Worlds Observatory, with sensitivity to light in infrared, visible, and ultraviolet wavelengths, would be tasked with observing Earth-like exoplanets in search of worlds that have the makeup to support life. Later, NASA should launch similarly ambitious far-infrared and X-ray telescopes to study the formation of stars, black holes, and galaxies, scientists recommended in 2021.

But: “These big, new multibillion-dollar missions wouldn’t start launching until the 2040s.”

This is thrilling stuff but the 2040s are really pushing it for me.

ASHLEY MCCULLY: The Truth About Death Panels. “This in-depth article is not meant to state that Sarah Palin was right, nor is it aimed at vindicating the legacy media. To be honest, I have beef with both. Rather, it will show you that death panels have been around for a long time, in plain sight.”

WELCOME TO THE PARTY, PAL: Massachusetts Gov. Healey warns state nearly out of room to house new illegal immigrants. “Massachusetts, however, is not the only Democratic bastion to buckle under the weight of a migration surge. New York City, for its part, has sought to suspend its own ‘right-to-shelter’ mandate as it struggles to accommodate tens of thousands of illegal immigrants. More than 110,000 have arrived in the Big Apple over the past year, straining the city’s resources and forcing Democratic Mayor Eric Adams to pursue non-conventional housing options.”

NO. You Have the Right to Remain Confused: HHS and Federal Judges Want to Mandate Pronouns.

JEFF GOLDSTEIN: Tilting at Self Righteousness.

Just as I despised the Bush-era “war fighting” that cared more about optics than it did victory, I similarly despise the supposed “morality” of Israel giving evacuation warnings to a sovereign government that, as a matter of its own stated endgame, attacked Israeli civilians to facilitate the extermination of the Jews. As “pro-Palestinian” protesters in Western countries — in a remarkably transparent rebuke to the multicultural program supported by the global elite as a way to weaken wealthy Western nations while appearing benevolent — gather and chant “gas the Jews,” or “from the river to the sea,” it should be frighteningly obvious that the project of trying to reason and assimilate medieval tribal allegiances into propositional nations was and is a fools errand. It is not a “blessing of liberty” to enable the conditions for your own civilizational suicide because doing so grants you some temporary plaudits from those who, when the time is right, have every intention of wiping you out and subjugating those of you whom they don’t murder. In fact, its an astounding display of cultural arrogance and personal sanctimony — with the latter being a point of extraordinarly pride to those who, in different circumstances, would lecture us on the particular sin that impulse represents.

Here is the harsh truth as I see it: It’s time the West believes in its own civilizational exceptionalism — not market it like needy teens adopting the latest attitudes in order to finagle a seat at the “cool kids’” lunch table.

Israel has talked a good game, mobilized the reserves, and established a wartime coalition government. We’ll see if they deliver on the promise to end Hamas the way they must.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Love Him or Hate Him, Ron DeSantis Gets Things Done. “If Biden did have any leadership skills, sane people wouldn’t be dreading his trip to Israel. We know, however, that absolutely nothing good can come of the involvement of Biden and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken in a matter as delicate as the powder keg in the Middle East. It’s like handing a drunk the keys to sports car that’s had all of its lug nuts removed.”

FORMER? Former campus radicals now teach your children.

Academia has an extremism problem. The watchdog group Canary Mission has identified and created online profiles for more than 1,300 student radicals over the past decade. These radicals are among the worst of the worst.

As Canary Mission puts it, they “promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American college campuses.” While in college, they disrupted events sponsored by Jewish student groups, agitated for the release of convicted terrorists, accused the U.S. and Israel of settler colonialism, and called for the boycott, disinvestment, and sanction of Israel. Some of the campus radicals identified by Canary Mission wrote online things such as “Jews are our dogs” and, in Arabic, “may Allah obliterate the Jews.”

What do these hateful ideologues do after obtaining their diplomas? To find out, we searched for the career histories of a sample of 300 former campus radicals identified by Canary Mission. More than a quarter of them are in higher education, either as graduate instructors or as professors. One-tenth of them work in schools for younger children.

In total, 38% of the kinds of people who once marched around campus chanting about decolonization go on to teaching careers. This is more than double the 16% who pursue careers as activists in advocacy organizations. Teaching pays better and offers a larger captive audience.

The long march through the institutions is complete… but the countermarch has begun.

BUT HAMAS’S RAPIDLY ESTABLISHED NARRATIVE! Evidence Suggests Misfired Hamas Rocket Hit Gaza Hospital, Killing Hundreds.