Hamas terrorists in Gaza launched a massive and highly coordinated attack on Israel with incursions by land, air and sea. From a thousand miles away, Iran was funding and coordinating it. There had to be a lot of cyber chatter preceding the attack.

Yet Israel was apparently caught by complete surprise.

The question being rightly asked is, how could Israel’s intel operations – one of the most sophisticated in the world – have been caught so off-guard?

The answer may be in Washington. The Biden administration has never gotten along with the Israeli government, nor did the Obama administration where Biden was Vice President. Biden and Obama have both seemed determined to let Iran – a terrorist state that has vowed to destroy Israel – get a nuclear bomb, and experts think that at any given moment they could have one in a matter of months.

And as is well known, Biden just gave Iran six billion dollars in exchange for American hostages that Iran had taken.

One common denominator that explains why previously successful societies implode is their descent into fantasies. A collective denial prevents even discussion of existential threats and their solutions.

Something like that is happening in the United States. Eight million illegal immigrants have entered the United States by the deliberate erasure of the southern border.

Apparently, the Biden administration sees some unstated advantage in destroying U.S. immigration law and welcoming in would-be new constituents.

Yet, the more the millions arrive, the more Joe Biden and his Homeland Security director Alejandro Mayorkas flat out lie that “the border is secure.”

They both live in a world of make-believe, passed off to the American people as reality.

Who was it who said of the Palestinians that they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity? You could say the same of the Republican Party.

By rights, the Democrats should be in disarray. The Biden administration has been a disaster, as pretty much everyone knows, regardless of what some loyalists may tell a pollster. And yet it is the Republicans who can’t get their act together.

Once again, they have bailed out the Democrats with an idiotic vote to oust Kevin McCarthy as Speaker. Only eight Republicans voted for Matt Gaetz’s motion, but of course every Democrat voted to get rid of McCarthy. Whatever their faults, the Democrats have party loyalty, and they know their self-interest when they see it. Unlike many Republicans.

Because while Democrats may be evil, they are not stupid. Like Gaetz Republicans.

[Last week, 9/20, Paul Goble told us about China’s plans to separate the Middle Volga from Russia.  We’ve long known about China’s plans to recapture Far Eastern Siberia.  Now, as Paul explains this week, China may have plans to control Russia’s entire Arctic.]

Moscow has long declared that China’s role in the development of the Northern Sea Route (NSR) is a central part of their strategic cooperation. Despite this, the Kremlin cannot be entirely comfortable with the recent extent of Beijing’s expanding activities in the Arctic Sea.

Nor can Moscow be at ease with the Chinese government’s increasing ties with Russian regional governments in the Far North and along the coast of the Arctic Sea.

If any country other than China did the same, Moscow almost certainly would denounce such actions as neo-colonialism. If any country other than Russia did so anywhere else in the world, the Russian government would make the same pronouncement.

Given the international sanctions regime, Russia has little choice but to allow China to take these steps. Such actions carry the risk that the Russian-Chinese alliance may begin to collapse, with ever-more Russians concerned that Moscow is losing out to Beijing.

There is a growing body of evidence that indicates the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership is in freefall. If true, this makes Xi Jinping more dangerous as it increases the likelihood of an attack against Taiwan.

It also means Xi’s regime, the CCP, is extremely vulnerable to pressure from America, and the rest of the free world, to evict them from power.

Xi and the CCP face a deeper problem than the lasting economic downturn in China and myriad of social problems the Chinese regime confronts—problems that cannot be papered over by Xi’s prominence at the BRICS meeting or at any other international fora.

The Chinese regime’s problems are multiple and are the result of a fundamental cause—communism. As such, the Communist Chinese regime is illegitimate and is in a lasting and insuperable legitimation crisis.

The leadership is in crisis for two major reasons: