Bold prediction: the war will continue

Poll: 2 Years After Oct. 7, Majority Palestinians Say Hamas Was Right to Attack — 86% Deny Civilian Atrocities

According to the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research(PCPSR), 53 percent of Palestinians say Hamas’s decision to launch the October 7 assault was correct; support is strongest in the West Bank at 59 percent, while 44 percent in the Gaza Strip back the attack — a seven-point rise in Gaza since May.

The findings highlight persistent public support for Hamas’s October 7 attack despite exhaustive video evidence and forensic documentation showing terrorists moving house to house and butchering families — including women and children — during the rampage. Hamas terrorists themselves wore GoPro cameras, filming the massacres in real time and later releasing the footage as propaganda.

When asked directly whether Hamas committed the atrocities shown worldwide, 86 percent answered “no,” while just ten percent said “yes” — a sweeping denial more than two years after the massacre and after extensive eyewitness testimony, publicly verified footage, and official records documenting Hamas’s deliberate targeting of civilians.

Hamas’s political strength remains pronounced. If legislative elections were held today, 44 percent of likely voters say they would back Hamas compared to 30 percent for Fatah. In a hypothetical presidential contest, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal would crush Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, 63–27. Overall satisfaction with Hamas’s wartime performance stands at 60 percent — 66 percent in the West Bank and 51 percent in Gaza, according to the PCPSR poll.

When asked the most effective way to “end the occupation and build an independent state,” a plurality of Palestinian Arabs favor carrying out “armed struggle” as the best means of achieving their stated goals — far outpacing support for negotiations or “popular peaceful resistance.”

Nearly 70 percent of Palestinians say they oppose disarming Hamas even as a condition to permanently end the war — 87 percent in the West Bank and 55 percent in Gaza — a flat rejection of the central disarmament requirement in President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan, which mandates that Hamas give up its weapons in the next phase — a demand Hamas and Islamic Jihad have openly refused to accept.

A large majority — 68 percent — also rejects the entry of an armed Arab security force from Egypt, Jordan, or other regional states to oversee demilitarization and security, another core element of international “day-after” proposals.

Presented with a normalization-and-demilitarization formula, two-thirds opposed a political agreement that would end the war, end the “occupation,” establish a demilitarized Palestinian state, and normalize relations with Israel and neighboring Arab states; only 31 percent expressed support.

The findings are consistent with earlier surveys showing entrenched denial and rising radicalization among Palestinians — patterns reflected in Hamas’s conduct on the ground in recent days.

…. The results come from the latest PCPSR poll conducted in the West Bank and Gaza Strip between October 22 and 25, 2025, shortly after President Trump announced the end of the two-year Gaza war and the implementation of his ceasefire plan.

Cos Cob hitman: Jim Himes delivers death threat to Trump supporters

No more mr. nice guy. and sporting a totenkopf tattoo, no less

"She's going to do what she's going to do ... I would hope that people like Lindsey Graham might not go that path because it's a very, very dangerous path for this country to go down."

House won't sell? Fire your agent, hire a new one, and raise the price: that'll do it!

897 Lake Avenue, on the market since June 2024, had dropped its price from $5.995 million to $5.2 when the listing finally expired on September 15. It’s been brought back on today with a new agent and a new price, $5.450.

Well, maybe, but it certainly can’t be said that the former agent didn’t offer the public and GAR agents ample opportunity to view the house, and it was rejected. Will a higher price enhance its desirability? The new agent seems to think so, and perhaps he’s right. To quote that intrepid sailor, Lieut. Comdr. Quinton McHale, from whom all knowledge flowed, “its an idea so crazy, it just might work!” And oftentimes it did, at least on television.

Whew! We're saved!

David Strom asks

Is the Climate Grift Collapsing?

And then answers:

No, no it's not. We will spend years and decades beating back the insane climate policies and squeezing out the corruption in the climate alarmism NGO complex. We need to completely rewrite curricula, deregulate, fire a bunch of teachers, reclaim our science journals from insane people who disdain truth, and nuke the World Economic Forum and the United Nations. 

Still, peak climate is behind us. The peak was high, the damage done, and the cleanup will be as difficult as rooting out the Japanese soldiers hiding in the Pacific island caves, but the tide has turned. As with the trans hysteria, beating back the baddies will be a long and painful process, but we are winning. 

Bill Gates has been a key enabler of the climate grift, although hardly the most powerful proponent of it. Despite his reputation as an innovator, he is and always has been more inclined to ride a wave than create one. If he is calling off the climate catastrophe talk, you can be sure that he is merely voicing what many people in his orbit are thinking

Gates:

There’s a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this:

In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization. The evidence is all around us—just look at all the heat waves and storms caused by rising global temperatures. Nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature.

Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further.

Unfortunately, the doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.

It’s not too late to adopt a different view and adjust our strategies for dealing with climate change. Next month’s global climate summit in Brazil, known as COP30, is an excellent place to begin, especially because the summit’s Brazilian leadership is putting climate adaptation and human development high on the agenda.

Strom:

As I have written many times before, I am more in the Bjorn Lomberg camp than the full-blown "it can't be happening" crowd. I fully admit I don't know whether or to what extent human beings are impacting the climate, but I don't think that the hypothesis that we are is insane. 

What I do think is insane are the claims that The Science™ says we are doomed, or even particularly threatened. The data sucks and is manipulated, the models are ridiculous, and the science is following the money. 

And the money is HUGE. As in trillions of dollars a year, climate alarmism has been a gold rush for many and a power grab for everybody in the transnational elite. 

I don't trust any of it, but it will be interesting to see how it develops (Updated)

AI-powered Grokipedia goes live as Elon Musk takes on ‘Wokipedia’

“Grokipedia.com version 0.1 is now live. Version 1.0 will be 10X better, but even at 0.1 it’s better than Wikipedia imo,” Musk wrote in a post on X, his social media platform, on Monday.

Update:

So I picked a subject at random, off the top of my head: “InstaPundit” and compared results. Winner, by far, was Grokipedia. A full treatment that I, at least, saw as objective. Wikipedia’s treatment was brief and shallow. I’ll try it, and Google’s own AI search engine on more controversial subjects like global warming. I’ve already written about Google’s one-sided results that dismiss all and any critics of the doom theory (which Bill Gates just renounced yesterday, but that’s for another post); we’ll see, later, how the three compare when placed side-to-side.

(Another) Update

John Hinderaker reviews it, and his sentiments are about like mine:

Grokipedia

Wikipedia has long been a liberal bastion. It is useful for basic facts–in what year did Charles V die?–but on any politically controversial topic, its editors skew content to the left, and sometimes propagate outright misinformation.

Now Wikipedia has a competitor, Grokipedia. Grokipedia is a Grok product, and therefore part of the Elon Musk empire. I believe it is still in a beta version, but some are saying that it is already better than Wikipedia, and less biased. It would be great if it could put Wikipedia out of business.

My wife pointed out that there is a remarkably long article about Power Line on Grokipedia. From a quick look, it appears to be both relatively thorough and accurate.

So I plan to start using Grokipedia. It could develop into a really useful AI application.

It's not hard to imagine that 70% of Americans — 100% of Democrats — would agree with him


“Part of what we’re going to have to do is to start experimenting with new forms of journalism and how we use social media in ways that reaffirm facts and separate facts from opinion. We want diversity of opinion. We don’t want diversity of facts. That, I think, is one of the big tasks of social media. By the way, it will require some government regulatory constraints…”

Here’s an example of an Obama-approved “fact” dispenser hard at work, via John Hinderaker at PowerLine:

Believe Nothing You Read In the New York Times

Over the years, I have often written about embarrassing corrections in the New York Times. Partly because it is fun, but mostly because such corrections shed light on that paper’s persistent biases. Today’s paper had a good example, a correction of a front-page story on how Iowa voted for President Trump in the 2024 election, but Trump’s policies have devastated Iowa’s economy. (“In Trump-Friendly Iowa, the President’s Policies Have Hit Hard”) This is the correction:

An article on Monday about the impact that President Trump’s policies have had on Iowans included an outdated figure for the change in Iowa’s economic output in the first quarter of 2025. According to a revised estimate by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, it contracted at a 1.2 percent annual rate in the quarter; the bureau’s initial estimate was a “6.1 percent contraction.”

The claim that Iowa’s economy contracted by 6.1 percent in the first quarter was the centerpiece of the Times story. The correction destroyed the entire point of the article. But beyond that, a couple of things stand out.

First, President Trump was not even inaugurated until well into the first quarter, and his policies could hardly have had any perceptible effect on Iowa’s economic growth (or lack thereof) during that quarter. So the Times’ whole premise was deceptive.

Second, why was the Times talking about first quarter numbers on October 27? Weren’t second quarter numbers available by then? They were, indeed they were. The BEA came out with second quarter data, along with the revised numbers for the first quarter that the Times apparently missed, on September 26, a month before the Times published its anti-Trump piece: Iowa’s economy expanded by a robust annual rate of 3.7 percent in the second quarter. So the Times story could have had no purpose, but to mislead the paper’s readers.

Years ago, the people who run the New York Times decided to substitute liberal activism for competent reporting. It was, I think, a conscious choice. We have seen the results over and over: you should never trust anything that you read in the New York Times.

The Wuhan Flu panic offered so many examples of central governments disseminating “facts “ that they knew weren’t true; convinced, cowed or bullied, the public went along.

Here’s another truth dispenser:

Why is it always Democrats?

Leftist madness infected my Connecticut town council — now I’m at risk

By Andrew Fowler

“Nazi bootlickers” are running rampant in Milford, Conn. — and apparently I’m one of them.

That is, according to a local Democratic committee member who hurled invective at me and other Republican aldermen at a public meeting this month.

The accusation reflected a growing national sickness: The harsh political rhetoric that led to Charlie Kirk’s assassination is eating away at the roots of American politics — our local town councils.  

The ugliness exploded after our town’s elected GOP aldermen declined to approve Democratic nominee Toni Lombardi to temporarily fill a vacant seat on the board.  

At that, Nadine Padowicz — a member of the Milford Democrat Town Committee — slammed us as “homegrown Nazis,” simply for our affiliation with President Donald Trump.

In her remarks, Padowicz called Trump a “thug who is destroying our democracy” and said we Republicans “lick his boots.”

“You know what happens to Nazi bootlickers? They get kicked in the teeth,” she said threateningly.

Her words violated our town’s rules of public comment, which prohibit personal attacks and derogatory language.

Worse, they crippled the civic spirit that has historically bound neighbors together — even when we disagree.

The crowd’s reaction was just as disturbing: Attendees shouted and cheered their support of Padowicz’s insults.

The atmosphere grew so tense that police were called to intervene if necessary.

A keffiyeh-wearing local lingered in the hallways after the meeting, shouting “Shame!”

It was all in stark contrast to Milford’s slogan, “A Small City with a Big Heart.”

This episode in my hometown is a microcosm of a larger collapse in civility.

The same dehumanizing rhetoric that has infected national politics is now seeping into local government meetings and community life.

….