BREAKING:

French journalist at major outlet confirms the beheading of babies at a kibutz in Israel at the hands of Hamas, saying she has seen images of the atrocities and has cross-checked them, and her colleagues saw the bodies as well.

Horrific https://t.co/SLcSASDpHE

— Alicia Smith (@Alicia_Smith19) October 10, 2023

Also:

This is the most newsworthy sounbite out of his press conference. Why won't Sullivan just say that we are refreezing the assets? https://t.co/R1KxW1NXVL

— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) October 10, 2023

If I had to guess, it’s because the White House is desperate not to let this little unpleasantness, or however they’re rationalizing it behind the scenes, derail their resurrection of Obama’s Iran Deal.

BUT DOES ANYONE CARE, BELIEVE, OR HEED WHAT HE SAYS? Biden Discusses Hamas in National Address.

I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE AND IT IS WEIRD: AI was told to design a robot that could walk. Within seconds, it generated a ‘small, squishy, and misshapen’ thing that spasms. “Kriegman said the researchers weren’t quite sure why the robot had this peculiar shape — and why it was filled with holes.”

THE BARBARIANS INSIDE THE GATES: Meet the Harvard Law Students Defending Hamas.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

THE END OF WOMEN’S SPORTS: Top Two Positions in Women’s Cycling Tournament Dominated by Trans-Identified Men.

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

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Don’t Be Fooled: RFK Jr. Is a Radical Leftist.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Nearly Half of Higher-Income Households Say They Are ‘More Reliant on Credit Cards Than Ever.’

A recent report from Moneywise cited a survey from the personal finance software company Quicken that found “32% of Americans earning at least $150,000 a year are currently living paycheck to paycheck.”

This seems extraordinary, but recent data published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York show a surge in borrowing, with credit card debt in the second quarter of 2023 eclipsing $1 trillion for the first time. Despite high interest rates, people of all income levels are turning to credit cards to make ends meet. The New York Times recently noted that more than two-thirds of U.S. families now have credit cards, and balances were up more than 16% compared to the previous year.

Somewhat surprisingly, it is higher-income households that report being more reliant on credit cards than ever.

“The Quicken survey found that 46% of higher-income groups are more dependent on their credit cards than they’ve ever been,” Moneywise reported, “compared to just 40% of middle- and 39% of lower-income groups.”

Meanwhile, a third of earners making more than $150,000 a year say they won’t be able to pay off their balance this year, a costly move considering that LendingTree reports that the average interest rate on a credit card currently stands at 24.45%.

“Bidenomics is working,” according to the White House — and I believe them.

NOBODY LISTENS TO BLINKEN. NOBODY: Blinken Asked Palestinian Authority to ‘Restore Calm’ as PA Justified Violence Against Israel.

Previously:

.@SecBlinken: “What Jake Sullivan said is right” when he said “the situation in the Middle East is more peaceful than ever” pic.twitter.com/5ZnGFFubb2

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) October 8, 2023

It might seem almost impossible that we’ve gone so quickly from Trump’s team of Mike Pompeo and Jared Kushner bringing peace through the Abraham Accords to today’s murderous chaos, but with this gang of Obama retreads in charge it was inevitable.

HMM: Disney caught by surprise by the return of activist investor Nelson Peltz.

“They were caught by surprise,” a person familiar with the matter told Yahoo Finance about Trian Fund Management Nelson Peltz’s latest activist attack on the bumbling media conglomerate.

A source familiar with Disney’s thinking refuted the notion.

With Disney shares plumbing fresh 52-week lows, billionaire Peltz is jumping back in the ring to duke it out with superstar CEO Bob Iger.

Peltz is seeking multiple board seats at Disney, including one for himself, the person familiar with the Trian CEO’s thinking said. The Wall Street Journal first reported news of Peltz’s move, which included boosting Trian’s stake in Disney.

The window for board nominations begins on Dec. 5 and continues to Jan. 4. But the situation at Disney is so concerning that Peltz didn’t see the need to wait until December, the person said.

Disney could use a big shakeup — and a lot less Iger.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: The Colonization of the West (Or Killers in Our Midst). “What is there to say when the chant evolves — as it must — from ‘Death to Israel’ to ‘Gas the Jews, f*** the Jews?’ Well, sane people would say that calling for the destruction of an entire people is wrong. Progressives, whether elites safe in their ivory towers or purple-haired Antifa sympathizers in the streets, either make excuses or endorsements depending on their individual level of brazenness.”

ROGER L SIMON: ‘You Don’t Make Peace With People Who Are Trying to Kill You.’

“Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday, according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group.

“Officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land and sea incursions—the most significant breach of Israel’s borders since the 1973 Yom Kippur War—those people said.” It goes on with more details worth reading, but, disturbingly, further down in the article, we find Secretary of State Anthony Blinken weirdly equivocating: “We have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship.”
Why?

At the minimum, Mr. Blinken may fear acknowledgement of Iran’s role that, with that mounting American death toll, might appear a casus belli for the United States to attack Iran.

More likely, he is concerned it would redound poorly on the Biden administration and on Mr. Blinken himself for their Iran policy that recently resulted in the released $6 billion in sanctions to the world’s greatest sponsor of terrorism.

The Biden Administration knew exactly who they were getting into bed with in Tehran and did so anyway. Rarely discussed (except by me, here) was Biden’s huge mistake in making the Palestinians a part of his hoped-for “mega-deal” Middle East peace process. That gave groups like Hamas (and their paymasters in Iran) an effective veto over the process — which they exercised in the most spectacularly brutal way imaginable.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Read the Room, Hamas—Israel Isn’t in the Mood for a Truce. “Hamas sympathizers throughout the world (looking at you, Germany) got to spend the weekend celebrating, but Israel is determined to make even the memories of those celebrations short-lived, as well it should.”

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:

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

Read the whole thing, but this part stands out:

Is it the mass mutilations, the rapes, the desecrations of corpses, the beheadings, the murdering of women, the elderly, and children, that so excites them all—as if they were gleefully watching sacrificial victims marched up to the top of an Aztec temple in ancient Tenochtitlán?

Or rather is their frenzy due to unspoken terror that Hamas at last has gone too far in its premodern savagery? There are now no more of its patrons with the power to call off the IDF. And so they may finally get the existential war that Hamas always for decades had bragged about and begged for.

A bit later last night:

The United Arab Emirates has warned the Assad regime in Syria not to intervene in the Hamas-Israel war or to allow attacks on Israel from Syrian soil, according to two sources briefed on the Emirati diplomatic effort https://t.co/MAbDR5pQvJ

— Sean Agnew (@seanagnew) October 9, 2023

Somebody just felt a really strong tug on his money leash. Hamas has gone too far for the Arab world, which ought to make them easy to isolate and destroy — but we have yet to see exactly how the Biden Cabal will screw things up.

Further, that is.

LINCOLN BROWN: The Ministry of Truth Fires Up the Afterburners. “It was wholly predictable that protestors would take to the streets to sing the praises of Hamas under the guise of supporting Palestine. We expected the young, ignorant, and indoctrinated, both on and off campuses, to begin a combination victory dance/rally. Of course, as the Squad’s narrative broke down and Biden’s handlers made fools of themselves trying to address the matter, the media showed up, saluted, and reported for duty.”

LAUGHING WOLF: Israel, Invasion, UCs, And Us.

Spare me the ‘good and innocent’ people of Gaza bit. I remember when they danced and celebrated the attacks of 9/11, and I’ve watched them do the same and gleefully take part in atrocities now. I’m sure there are some good and innocent people in Gaza, and I hope they got out per the advice of the Israeli government despite Hamas doing all they could to keep people from leaving.

Hamas has long used mosques, schools, and hospitals as cover. On the latter, a number of corporate media operations were well aware of them having facilities under a major hospital and refused to cover or acknowledge. They often shoot from beside such facilities so as to use them as human shields. So, when you see mosques and other facilities not only go boom, but then cook off from what was hidden inside, don’t be surprised and don’t fall for those wringing their hands hypocritically over such actions. They know what’s going on, they support it, and frankly most of them would love to see Israel gone and every Jew dead.

Human shields will no longer work for Hamas. The idea that it’s international partners (Iran, Qatar, etc.) would protect it is ill-founded. The idea that the useful idiots and fellow travelers (such as the Hamas Caucus in Congress) would save it isn’t happening. That the West Bank, Hezbollah, and others would rise up and join in is iffy, for all that a lot of posturing is going on. No doubt, the government of Iran (as opposed to the people of Iran) is doing all it can to take out the state of Israel, but I think they’ve miscalculated in this case. Israel can and should go in and destroy every last vestige of Hamas in Gaza, even if it takes out most of Gaza. Not a war crime, not a violation of the Rules of War given what has happened.

Frankly, Israel truly needs to take the gloves off.

Indeed.

Read the whole thing, which relates the Hamas War — or whatever it ends up being called — to Biden’s mess on our southern border.

JOE BIDEN DID THAT AGAIN, THIS TIME BY UNFREEZING $6 BILLION IN IRANIAN ASSETS: Oil Prices Spike Amidst Hamas Terrorist War on Israel.

THE PROBLEM WITH CABALS IS THAT EVERYONE AND NO ONE IS IN CHARGE: Is Anyone In Charge? White House MIA as Chaos Reigns.

SPOILER: THEY WON’T, NOT EVEN AFTER THE MURDER OF 250 OR SO YOUNG MUSIC FEST PARTYGOERS WHO PROBABLY THOUGHT OF THEMSELVES AS LIBERAL: If Democrats Don’t Want Blame For Appeasing Iran And Hamas, They Should Stop Doing It.