Jts5665

For most academics, getting a job at MIT is a dream. Until October 7, it was for me. But in December, I resigned from my post because I could no longer deal with the pervasive antisemitism on MIT’s campus. 

How I got there is a story that is unique to me, but it’s also a story about what’s happening across American academia today. 

I was born in Mexico to a Jewish family. I immigrated to the States in the 1980s to obtain a master’s at Harvard, and then moved to Israel for my PhD in computer science from Hebrew University. In 1989, I started working as an assistant professor at MIT, and after a career in the financial industry, I returned in 2019 as a lecturer. 

As a computer scientist, I normally don’t have time for politics. But when Hamas invaded Israel on Saturday, October 7, brutally murdering 1,200 Israelis, I emailed the head of my department and urged her to issue a statement of support for Israelis and Jews. I assumed the reason was obvious. The university had sent statements before on various issues—such as a message condemning the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and another standing in solidarity with the Asian community amid a wave of hate crimes in 2021. 

On Monday, the head of my department and its office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) sent out a message titled “A time for community support of each other.” 

The message was riddled with equivocations, without mentioning the barbarity of Hamas’s attack, stating only that “we are deeply horrified by the violence against civilians and wish to express our deep concern for all those involved.” I was shocked that my institution—led by people who are meant to see the world rationally—could not simply condemn a brutal terrorist act.

That same day, the protests on campus started. Students chanted “Free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea” with fury and at times glee, like they were reciting catchy songs instead of slogans demanding the erasure of the Jewish people.

Even worse, faculty members started endorsing this behavior. One DEI officer at MIT liked an October 17 post on Twitter stating that “Israel doesn’t have a right to exist, it’s an illegitimate settler-colony like the US.” On October 18, a renowned faculty member in the neuroscience department accused Israel of committing “genocide” on Twitter. Then, the next day, she tweeted that her department was seeking a “diverse pool of candidates” for a tenure-track position in her department’s “inclusive community.” I remember thinking, with bitter irony, that Jewish academics need not apply. 

The following month, our faculty newsletter was almost entirely dedicated to the protests, with several professors parroting anti-Israel propaganda. One professor wrote an anonymous editorial “Thanking the Protesting Students” for “reminding us that organizing and voicing dissent—even when it is loud or uncomfortable—is in fact one of our ‘essential activities.’ ” In another editorial called “Standing Together Against Hate: From the River to the Sea, From Gaza to MIT,” linguistics professor Michel DeGraff wrote that the protesters calling for intifada “have given me hope for the future.”

The only voices in the newsletter standing up for Jews were Jewish. But we are too few to fight this battle.

Though I cringed as I read these faculty letters, and shuddered as I walked by protests on campus, nothing has hurt more than watching the Israeli and Jewish students—who comprise fewer than 6 percent of the MIT student body—suffer. 

On November 14, one of the Israeli PhD students in my department confided to me that he was taking a few weeks off from the semester to return to Israel—an active war zone—because he needed to escape the toxicity of MIT’s campus. This week, he told me he is considering leaving MIT without completing his PhD. 

I am truly in awe of emerging leaders like Talia Khan, an MIT graduate student, who boldly spoke in front of Congress one month ago, explaining how her peers told her the young people murdered at the Nova music festival in Israel on October 7 “deserved to die because they were partying on stolen land.” She has served as a powerful voice for the Jewish community, particularly when so many others have been silent. 

To the Israeli kids on campus, October 7 is not just some terrorist attack. Every single one of them knows a victim from that day—someone who was killed, or maimed, or had a loved one taken from them. They are now at the age where their friends back in Israel are fighting in Gaza. Meanwhile, their “peers” on MIT’s campus are labeling them “baby killers” responsible for “committing genocide.”

And despite all they’ve been through, the leadership at MIT has failed them. 

In December, MIT’s president Sally Kornbluth gave her infamous testimony in front of Congress. When Rep. Elise Stefanik asked Kornbluth if calling for the genocide of Jews violated MIT’s code of conduct, she said only if it is “targeted at individuals, not when making public statements.” She said that the chants of “intifada” could only be considered antisemitic depending “on the context.” 

I sent a series of emails to President Kornbluth long before this hearing, begging her to speak out in support of Jewish students. “They want to hear that the institute is with them,” I wrote. “They are suffering, as I am sure you know.” She was always prompt in responding, and she told me about her attempts to meet with Jewish students by attending dinner at our campus Hillel. I appreciated her for that. 

I don’t believe she is the problem. I think the problem at MIT—and across American academia—runs much deeper than the figureheads.

Students at MIT and other elite colleges have been radicalized by faculty members who have encouraged and even led the student body to become social justice warriors, supporting their highly progressive political beliefs. America’s brightest minds are being manipulated by a force they don’t even understand to adopt a narrow view of the world. That this is happening at a place where they’re meant to be exploring a wealth of ideas and have their thinking challenged shocks me.

This thinking has led to an illiberalism on MIT’s campus, where certain speakers have been canceled for having the wrong views. In fall of 2020, environmental scientist Dorian Abbot was uninvited from speaking at the university for expressing unfavorable ideas about affirmative action (even though his talk was about climate and life on other planets). But two years later, MIT’s Women’s & Gender Studies department and Coalition Against Apartheid co-hosted Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian poet who has said that Israelis have “an unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood.”

Over 65 percent of students from each MIT undergraduate class—or around 800 students—enroll in my Introduction to Algorithms course every year. When I looked at the names of the leaders of some of the most violent anti-Israel groups on our campus, I found a handful of my students on the list. Then I found out that one of my former teaching assistants—a bright young woman—was one of the organizers of the Coalition Against Apartheid and helped bring Mohammed El-Kurd to campus. 

I loved my job. But I realized there and then I could no longer train kids in algorithms, knowing they might one day spread this ideology even further through their advanced knowledge. I knew I could no longer be a part of a system that foments antisemitism. In late November, I sat on the ferry I used to take from MIT’s campus back home and decided that I should resign. I have worked hard throughout my professional life to have choices, so I have the luxury of acting on my principles. A few weeks later, on December 13, I handed in my resignation to the head of the department. 

My letter stated, in part: “I cannot continue teaching Algorithms to those who lack the most basic critical thinking skills or emotional intelligence. Nor can I teach those who condemn my Jewish identity or my support for Israel’s right to exist in peace with its neighbors.” 

My boss asked me to reconsider. But my mind was already made up. 

It has been one month since I’ve resigned, and for now, I’m spending a lot of time reflecting. I still have hope MIT can return to its roots—offering one of the best science and engineering educations in the world—and that the good forces can beat the bad. 

MIT’s mission is to train the next generation of leaders. But right now, I’m terrified of the thought that today’s students could lead anything in the future.

Mauricio Karchmer is a lecturer at MIT. His last day will be January 15. For another perspective on the crisis in higher education, read economist Kendrick Morales’s Free Press essay, “I Was Fired for Setting Academic Standards.”  

Become a Free Press subscriber today: 

Subscribe now

A new study finds that the data NOAA publishes lacks transparency that would allow the sources of the data to be verified. The cost figures are not adjusted for changes in wealth over time, which produces misleading results, and the agency is incorrectly attributing the trends to changes in climate.

Congressional negotiators are still debating the contents of a supplemental foreign aid package for Ukraine, Israel, Palestinian refugees and U.S. border-related efforts.

The Oversight Committee's account confirms previous reporting by Just the News and leaves unanswered questions about the White House ethics arrangement and Hunter Biden lawyer Kevin Morris.

In this modern-day miracle, an iPhone fell out of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 and survived with barely a scratch.

MARKET SHARE: U.S. crude oil falls 4% as Saudi price cut heightens global demand worries.

The sell-off comes after Saudi Aramco on Sunday sharply lowered the price of Arab Light Crude to Asian customers by $2 per barrel.

The Saudi price cut comes amid persistent market weakness due in large part to record U.S. crude production and softening demand in China. OPEC and its allies are cutting their production by 2.2 million barrels per day this quarter in an effort to balance the market.

“While it is possible that the price reduction was to maintain market share in the face of production cuts, the market is taking it as a clear sign that the economy is slowing. Maybe the landing might not be so soft,” Phil Flynn of The Price Futures Group wrote on Monday.

U.S. crude and Brent, the global benchmark, both ended the first week of 2024 more than 2% higher on mounting tensions in the Middle East, but supply and demand concerns have persistently overshadowed geopolitical risks in the market.

“The market seems to feel that geopolitical risk will not impact supply and if it does, demand is weak so it will not matter,” Flynn wrote.

The Saudis are trying to keep market share with lower prices which, in the short run, can hurt American producers with higher production costs. Longer run, the Permian Basin will still be there.

I have long been a critic of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who has devastated free speech in that country while assuming sweeping authoritarian powers.  Now, his administration has blocked the citizenship of Maria Kartasheva because she has a conviction in Russia.  The crime? Free speech. Kartasheva was convicted in Russia for criticizing the war in Ukraine. She was literally pulled out of a citizenship ceremony by Canadian officials and now fears deportation and incarceration in Russia.

It is essential that we spread the word on Kartasheva’s situation to put pressure on the government to make sure that she is not deported and to finish its review of the case to move forward with her citizenship.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada yanked the citizenship application after learning of the conviction under Putin’s draconian laws. She was charged with the wartime offense of disseminating “deliberately false information” about Russia forces.

She has not lived in Russia since 2019 and has lived in Ottawa as a tech worker. She is also the co-founder of a  grassroots activist group for democracy in Russia. In other words, she is everything that you would want in a new citizen. Indeed, unlike Trudeau, she knows the value of free speech and how easily it is lost to government agencies.

Notably, the charge was based on two blog posts that Kartasheva wrote and published in Canada.  

She expressed disgust at reports in March 2022 that Russian troops had killed Ukrainians in the town of Bucha. Not only did she write the blogs while living in Canada, she notified Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada about the charges and supplied the underlying papers to the government.

Nevertheless, her citizenship ceremony was scheduled only to have an official block her from becoming a citizen.

Oh, but it gets even worse.

According to a press report, Kartasheva “was arrested in absentia by a judge sanctioned by Canada, and then convicted and sentenced to eight years in jail by a Moscow court that is also under Canadian sanctions.”

That brings us to the final and most chilling aspect of this drama. The Canadian government informed Kartasheva that her conviction in Russia aligns with a Criminal Code offense in Canada relating to false information.

That’s right. Canada is concerned because it also has criminalized speech and Kartasheva has used free speech to spread what her government considered false or misleading information.

For example, Section 372(1) of the Criminal Code of Canada makes it unlawful for any person to convey, cause, or procure to be conveyed false information with the intent to alarm or injure anyone.

The government cracked down on Internet speech despite opposition from the public and pushed 2021 Bill C-36 to impose $70,000 fines for legal content deemed “likely to foment detestation or vilification.”

So this brave woman made it all the way to the West to live in freedom only to find that Canada also puts people in jail for voicing dissenting or opposing viewpoints. The problem is not that Kartasheva is fundamentally different from most Canadians. The problem is that Canada is legally not that different from Russia on free speech.

 

 

Fauci reveals 'drastic and systemic failures' during congressional testimony, Rep. Wenstrup says

First came the farmers’ protests in the Netherlands, then the Freedom Convoy in Canada. Now the farm protests have reached Germany.

The background is simple: On 15 November 2023, the Federal Constitutional Court declared the budgetary manipulations of the Scholz government unconstitutional, in one stroke depriving our rulers of 60 billion Euros for their doubtful Green projects. It was one crisis too many for the coalition, and in the end it may be the undoing of them. Desperate to save money anywhere, they announced in December their plans to abolish subsidies for agricultural diesel and impose the standard motor tax on previously exempt farm vehicles like tractors, provoking an immediate outcry among the people who produce our food.1 Farmers organised various protests before Christmas, including large demonstrations in Freiburg and Leipzig. There have been sporadic actions since, including a spontaneous protest last Friday at the dock of a ferry carrying Economics Minister Robert Habeck; the protesters prevented him from disembarking and the press are still whining about it. The farmers promised to return after the holidays for a week-long series of protests and traffic blockades, beginning today and culminating in a massive demonstration next Monday in Berlin.

Here is an overview of all the current actions. There are hundreds:

This could not come at a worse time for the people in charge. Scholz and company are already deeply unpopular; the Chancellor can no longer even show up for his own photo-ops without being dogged at every moment by angry detractors. According to the latest polls, the three coalition parties together have the support of only one in three Germans. A mere 34% believe the coalition will survive to the 2025 elections, and 64% want Scholz to resign the chancellorship in favour of Defence Minister Boris Pistorius.

The government, in short, are hanging by a thread and through their own mismanagement they continue to make everything worse. On 4 January, in a clear attempt to forestall the protests, they partly reversed themselves, binning their plans to tax agricultural vehicles entirely and announced that the diesel subsidies would be phased out in stages rather than all at once. At this point, though, it is like trying to force toothpaste back in a tube. Once an uprising has begun, concessions become nothing but an encouragement to protest even harder, especially when the immediate provocation itself was nothing but a symbol for much deeper and more widespread dissatisfaction:

[Brandenburg farmer] Harmut Noppe … feels betrayed by the austerity policy of the coalition. On the farm he founded shortly after reunification, the 62-year-old – together with six employees – grows various types of grain and oil seeds. … A total of 20 heavy agricultural machines are used in the daily work on the farm … The abolition of the agricultural diesel subsidy would result in considerable costs for the farmer.

Noppe explains [that] a farmer currently receives back from the government around 20 to 25 euros per hectare of cultivated land. If the payments were to be cancelled soon as planned, the average farm in the state of Brandenburg would incur additional costs of around 5,000 Euros per year. According to the state farmers’ association, the cuts could total more than 20 million Euros.

Most farmers are unable to pass on the increased costs to consumers, Noppe explains. Grain prices, for example, are often set by wholesalers … “There will certainly be farms for which the business is no longer profitable,” he surmises. It cannot be ruled out that some farmers could give up their businesses completely in the face of further restrictions.

Another problem is that the current federal government simply lacks expertise. “The government's decisions should be made on the basis of professional considerations,” Noppe says. “What the government are doing right now is pure ideology. They don’t know what they're talking about.” …

“The coalition are making policy for the urban population,” says Noppe. “They are not interested in rural areas. The population here is being completely left behind.” Instead of looking for solutions together, they continue to govern from the top down. This leads to disenchantment with politics – especially in rural areas, Noppe observes. “The people here agree that things can't go on like this.”

That’s from the Berliner Zeitung, which is often distinguished by its independent and thoughtful reporting. The same cannot be said of the rest of the German press, which has reacted with unhinged hysteria. Professional shithead Arno Frank, in a widely circulated piece for Der Spiegel, has denounced the protesters as a “motorised pitchfork mob” and “profiteers of the agricultural lobby”:

The farmer is an almost mystical figure, because he does not usually sit in the Bundestag, in important law firms or editorial offices. Unlike train drivers or doctors, farmers do not go on strike. They “take” their protest “to the streets” and literally spill their dung there like other people spill their hearts out. Then they – and everybody else - remembers how intimidating paramilitary vehicles like combine harvesters can be when they when they travel in convoys on the motorway or fogs up city centres with subsidised agricultural diesel …

[A] whiff of anarchy and revolt wafts through the land when the farmer gets really angry. It is as if there is a shadow army just waiting for the command to strike – even if it is only to prevent the private Robert Habeck from leaving a ferry …

Convincing the farmer, as a traditional keeper of the tried and tested, of the need for progressive change is no easy task. … What we will see over the next few days is the escalation of a communication problem. Problems are solved in meeting rooms, not on ferry docks or in marketplaces.

If you asked me to compose a parody Spiegel editorial denouncing the farmers from the perspective of a sheltered urban journalist who is personally terrified of tractors and harbours unusual fantasies about the violent tendencies of those who grow his vegetables, I doubt I could have done any better than this. It goes without saying, of course, that Frank does not have a problem with protesters in general, so long as they are the right kind. As recently as September he penned “The Supergluer,” a long and quite nauseating profile of the “thought leader” and lead Letzte Generation activist Lea Bonasera.

The dominant theme of press coverage is that the protests will be instrumentalised, perhaps even hijacked, by that legendary ideological beast known as “the extreme right.” This view is especially prevalent in state media. Thus, of many possible examples, NDR have brought in a “conflict researcher” named Felix Anderl to express his concern “that society and therefore also the farming community are experiencing a shift to the right,” tagesschau ask whether “the farmer protests are being hijacked by the right,” and RND report more decisively about “how right-wing extremists aim to hijack the farmers’ demonstrations.” Government politicians have adopted much the same line, with Robert Habeck, fresh from his ferry kerfuffle, claiming that “far-right parties such as the AfD are … clearly trying to instrumentalise farmers”; and our constitutional protectors warning that the protests will be infiltrated by extremists. As I type this, journalists are thick on the ground, eagerly reporting every last sighting of “extreme right-wing groups” at protests in Dresden, Cottbus, Munich and elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the farmers have reacted poorly to this framing. Joachim Rukwied, president of a Farmers’ Association in Baden-Württemburg, made headlines yesterday by screeching to Bild that “We don’t want any right-wing and other radical groups with revolutionary fantasies at our demos! We are democrats and political change takes place, if at all, through voting at the ballot box.” Other organisers have aired similar views on social media, apparently failing to recognise that all it takes to qualify as a right-wing extremist is dissatisfaction with the present political order of the Federal Republic, and that even the most right-thinking centrists among the protesters will be classified as unhinged fascists if they see any success at all.

In modern liberal politics, the protest is the subject of an entire mythology. You could almost say that it is a sacred ritual, as central to the performance of democracy as masking is to the performance of virus hygiene. In this mythology, protesters take to the streets to demand things like justice and change, and politicians hear their grievances and condescend to address them. In truth, we are treated to a great wealth of approved pseudo-protests, where the activists merely demand things that establishment politicians are already doing or hope to do soon. Our states and their journalist collaborators are deeply hostile to real, spontaneous activism against their policies; we saw this during Covid and in the coming week we will see it again.

As always, I think it’s important to moderate one’s expectations. Contrary to the mythology, protests by themselves generally aren’t mechanisms of political change, but real protests can be important barometers of popular sentiment, and they are one more problem that the German government must spend energy and resources to mitigate. The only thing that made the Green policies of the coalition minimally tolerable was the nearly unlimited spending capacity they inherited from the fake Covid emergency. Now that they don’t have that money, they find themselves widely despised beyond the upper middle-class urban ideologues whom they represent. And that is not nearly enough to govern.

Below is my column in The Hill on the Valley Forge speech of President Joe Biden kicking off his 2024 campaign. Biden’s claiming the mantle as the defender of democracy and free speech struck a discordant note with many civil libertarians given his record and the actions of many Democratic activists in this election.

Here is the column:

“This is like something out of a fairy tale, a bad fairy tale.”

That line, from the speech of President Joe Biden at Valley Forge this week, may have been the most accurate observation in the entire address kicking off Biden’s 2024 campaign.

The speech was a masterpiece of contradiction. Biden started by denouncing how Donald Trump’s campaign is only “about him” and “obsessed with the past.” He then spent virtually all of the speech obsessing about Trump and Jan. 6, 2021.

It was an early indication of the Orwellian character of the speech. Facing the lowest polling numbers of any modern president, Biden attempted a constructive substitution. “Democracy is on the ballot,” he said. So voters do not have to vote for him. When they see Biden, they should just read “democracy.”

That will require more than an act of substitution in the voting booth. It would require an act of willful blindness.

Biden spoke of how Democrats are fighting to protect the “right to vote.” Democratic activists and officials across the country are seeking to remove Trump from the ballot even though he is the most popular choice for the presidency right now.

In fact, dozens of Democratic officials have sought to remove 126 Republicans from Congress on the same basis. Even as Biden was telling citizens to vote Democrat to preserve democracy, a Democratic activist was seeking to remove a GOP congressman from the ballot in a nearby Pennsylvania district.

Biden’s speech would be more credible if he had joined principled Democratic politicians who have denounced this nationwide effort. As usual, he has remained silent as he did on court packing in the last election.

It would also have been a tad more convincing if his party were not preventing citizens from voting for anyone other than Biden in the primary. Florida called its Democratic primary for Biden and blocked opposing candidates, despite two-thirds of Democrats wanting an alternative to Biden. Faced with such polling numbers, the party establishment is so committed to democracy that it has decided voters cannot be trusted with a choice. North Carolina’s Democrats became the latest to bar anyone but Biden from the ballot.

Democratic officials are approaching democracy the way Henry Ford responded to calls for different color choices for the Model T. He pledged to provide “any color the customer wants, as long as it’s black.” In this election, voters can choose anyone they want, as long as it is Biden.

For millions of voters, democracy may be on the ballot but it is aspirational. If you vote for Biden, you might just get democracy back, but only after the election.

Even more galling was Biden’s claim to be the defender of free speech. As I have previously written, Biden has been the most anti-free speech president since John Adams. His administration has been unrelenting in pushing for censorship and blacklisting of those with opposing views.

The Biden censorship efforts have been described by one federal court as unprecedented in our history and a virtual “Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’” The Biden Administration has called for the censorship of even true statements that it deems misleading.

For Biden to run on free speech is about as convincing as Bill Clinton running on abstinence.

Biden hopes that voters will buy the “don’t vote for me, vote for democracy” line. However, it does not appear to be working thus far. Indeed, the Valley Forge speech was another example of “the sound of one hand clapping” with the same 40 percent or so that is clinging to Biden in the polls.

This time, however, he dropped the hellish red back drop from Philadelphia in 2022, when he denounced Trump supporters as enemies of the people. Instead, he did everything he could to channel the spirit of George Washington, short of appearing in a Continental uniform.

Of course, Washington was a unifying figure in his time. He did not declare all Tories to be traitors. Many Tories and former loyalists would ultimately join his cause. Biden portrayed the 74 million voters for Trump as virtual redcoats seeking the return of the monarchy.

The key to Washington’s success is that he was at Valley Forge. He lived through the deprivations imposed upon his men and defended democracy by refusing invitations to become a monarch. If Biden wants to assume the mantle of a Washington, he could start by supporting democracy, practicing it in both the primary and in general election by calling for voters to be given their choice of candidates.

Given his record, Biden’s effort to disguise himself as George Washington left him looking foolish in a uniform two sizes too big for his stature.

Biden has a consistent record of only supporting principles and positions that bring political benefits. While James Freeman Clarke once said that statesmen think of the next generation, Biden seems rarely to have thought beyond the next election.

Moreover, Biden’s effort to champion the Constitution was contradicted by a long line of decisions finding that he has violated the Constitution with impunity. This includes rulings that his administration has exceeded his authority and engaged in racial discrimination in federal programs. Indeed, Biden has often displayed a cavalier attitude toward such violations.

For example, the Biden administration was found to have violated the Constitution in its imposition of a nationwide eviction moratorium through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  Biden admitted that his White House counsel and most legal experts told him the move was unconstitutional. But he ignored their advice and went with that of Harvard University Professor Laurence Tribe, the one person who would tell him what he wanted to hear. It was, of course, then quickly found to be unconstitutional.

Biden showed the same disregard over the unconstitutionality of his effort to unilaterally forgive roughly half a trillion dollars in student debt.

Biden rarely allows principle to stand before politics.

That is why Biden is no Washington. It is not even clear that Biden makes a convincing Biden. His checkered history of violating the Constitution has left little real notion of what he values beyond the politically expedient.

The tragedy of Biden is not that he has not reached the heights of Washington. Few ever have. The tragedy is that we may never know if Biden could rise to meet his own Valley Forge challenge.

Jonathan Turley is the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University Law School.

Man, New York really churns out the most tolerant of humans, don't they?

WARNING: DEMOCRACY THREATENED BY ELECTIONS!

JUSTICE: Biden Administration Improperly Tried Ex-Congressman, Conviction Tossed.

DEMOCRATIC PARTY BRASS BECOMING INCREASINGLY ANGRY AT OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES: Biden campaign brings top journalists to Wilmington.

Two people with knowledge of the situation told Semafor that during meetings with reporters from outlets like The New York Times, the Washington Post, and others, campaign officials have invoked a coverage spreadsheet laying out areas where the team believes their reporting has fallen short.

In particular, campaign officials have chafed at some of the coverage of former President Donald Trump, feeling that outlets are too focused on his legal troubles and haven’t paid enough attention to some of his incendiary recent statements on the campaign trail. A source familiar told Semafor that with the exception of its recent meeting with the Times, the campaign meetings had been “substantive” and “productive,” and that Biden staffers were scheduled to meet in the coming days with political reporting teams from ABC, NBC, The Wall Street Journal, Fox, NPR, Reuters, Bloomberg, and others in Wilmington.

And of course, it’s worth nothing: If Donald Trump Did This, the Establishment Media’s Heads Would’ve Exploded.

This team knows that every aspect of the narrative must be controlled for them to have a shot at re-election. It’s creepy and un-American. If they’re this worried about bad press concerning Joe Biden, maybe Democrats shouldn’t have doubled down on this bad bet. The man is being led off by his wife at events, unable to comprehend his surroundings. If he can’t handle two events in one day without falling, bumbling, drooling, or looking lost, this endeavor isn’t worth entertaining. I don’t see Biden surviving a campaign season that isn’t handicapped by COVID procedures. Those are long over, and voters expect the president to have the stamina to do multiple events in various states for days on end until we all vote in November.

On that issue, no meeting could smooth over Biden falling or suffering a blown mental fuse a la Mitch McConnell on the stump.

This is the inevitable twilight years of a politician who at the peak of his power (and faculties) loved nothing more than insulting journalists and locking them in closets.

Exit quote:

Same energy https://t.co/QLlDO2EX7S pic.twitter.com/SVtFluReJg

— Matthew Foldi (@MatthewFoldi) January 8, 2024

WELL, THAT SUCKS. High blood pressure, cholesterol before age 55, even if treated, can boost heart disease risk.

FIGHT THE POWER: $77 million antisemitism lawsuit filed against McMaster University.

COLLUSION: Scientists at Center of ‘Lab Leak’ Controversy Met With NIH, Fauci.

FIGHT BACK TWICE AS HARD: The pro-Hamas riots in major cities, such as the vandalism of businesses, and the blockage of roads, are illegal and can be predicate acts for civil lawsuits under RICO and other federal laws. I have two lawyer friends (both of whom I met during my undergrad days at Brandeis!) who are eager to bring such lawsuits, but they need victims to step forward and contact them.

BELIEVABLE: Study shows dementia risk for older people with hearing difficulty could be reduced by use of hearing aids.

Oysters are now being grown on land to ensure a safer and more hygienic product. A news article describes how an oyster bar owner in southern Japan has created a farm on land where oysters are grown in tanks of seawater pumped from 2000 feet down in the ocean. The oyster bar owner did this […]

The post Oysters are now being grown on land appeared first on Liberty Unyielding.

RAFAH—On Saturday, December 30, our front door was busted down, and twenty masked men barged in and took my father, a widely respected and deeply learned imam here in Gaza.  

One dragged him by his head, and another grabbed him by his beard. My younger brother tried to intervene and reason with the kidnappers, but they beat him. I have a medical condition that makes it hard for me to breathe, so all I could do was watch as the horror unfolded.

I know that if Hamas kills my father, they’ll say that the Israeli army did it. But my father was very keen that even if he died, we should make known the despicable demands they made of him. It was his last request to us, literally as he was being carried out of the door, that should he die, we should publicize the real reason for his death, and it is this: 

He wouldn’t preach what Hamas told him to. He refused to tell Gazans that violent resistance, and obedience to Hamas, is the best way out of our current hell. 

This story starts before October 7, and even before 2007, when Hamas took control of Gaza. 

Our family has lived in Gaza for generations. Before 2007, my father worked for the Ministry of Islamic Affairs. After Hamas took over, they forced him out of his position. This was a hard time for my family; my father was the sole breadwinner. Finally, after three long years, he came back to work first as a mosque servant, then a mosque guard, then an employee of the ministry and finally, he was appointed as a mosque imam. (My father is known throughout the Gaza Strip. He has a doctorate in sharia from Cairo’s storied Al-Azhar University, and is well-respected by his peers.) 

For Hamas, being Muslim means supporting Hamas, and people who do not support Hamas aren’t Muslims. If you don’t abide by what Hamas tells you, you’ll lose your job or worse. To keep my father in line, ensuring that he would deliver only Hamas-approved Friday sermons and allow Hamas to use his mosque as a clandestine weapons depot, they arrested my brother and me at least ten times between 2016 and 2019. Sometimes they would speak politely, sometimes they would ask us to comply “for the sake of your sisters,” but always the threat of violence loomed in the background. And several times we were beaten and humiliated in front of our father. They beat him, too, once nearly blinding him.

He was forced to do things for Hamas; move money around, store things, keep their secrets.  

As an imam, my father keeps the keys to the mosque and is responsible for safeguarding large sums of money that Muslims give as zakat, the mandatory almsgiving of our faith. Hamas members would take advantage of his duties and use the mosque to stash money, weapons, and equipment.

Sometimes they’d bring a large, wrapped-up prayer rug, which they said had been donated—except my father wasn’t allowed to open the rugs; only special volunteers were allowed to open them or transport the rugs in and out. My father had to open and close the doors and allow the sacred space to be used as a warehouse for Hamas. What choice did he have? It’s a bitter truth that Hamas thinks of mosques as the property of their regime and that they store weapons there. 

Once there were big boxes that were marked as food aid. There wasn’t food inside, but something made of iron. 

The most egregious thing Hamas imposed on my father was the content of his Friday sermons. They instructed him to brainwash people with their politics, to stick with Hamas and with the “resistance,” and that it’s the only choice. That those who died fighting would be rewarded with 72 black-eyed virgins. Patience, jihad, all of that stuff. Hamas exploits our religion, pretending to be modern-day prophets, likening themselves to the companions of the prophet Muhammad.

Nobody told my father there was a plan to attack Israel on October 7. There’s just this constant overarching message within the mosques, Islamic classes, sermons, and lectures, that the “resistance”—meaning Hamas and only Hamas—is the only way to liberate Al-Aqsa and the only way to alleviate our suffering. 

They do all this brainwashing to make you think the cause of our suffering is Israel. But I see very clearly who causes our suffering. 

Whereas most aid in Gaza is only accessible to Hamas’s loyalists or those who toe the movement’s line, my father would collect and distribute zakat alms to those who actually needed it. Some congregants would donate food, furniture, and household goods; and many among Gaza’s neediest would come to my father, who would see that they were distributed fairly. My father also strove to give pious Muslims unbiased spiritual guidance, not the propaganda Hamas clerics deliver. 

We fled our homes in Gaza City on October 20, moving from place to place until settling at my sister’s home in Rafah several weeks ago. Her home was bombed as well, and now roughly forty people, including women and seniors, are sharing space in a building that is partly reduced to rubble.

Since the war, Hamas has put enormous pressure on imams to persuade the population that their only choice is “the resistance.” Schools and universities aren’t functioning; the one thing that draws people in is prayer. 

But now we have reached a time when nearly everyone in Gaza is saying Hamas caused the death of 20,000 people in Gaza and the injury of 50,000 more. So when the group demanded that my father go to a school where thousands of displaced persons are sheltering and urge them to stand with the “resistance”—to trust Hamas—he flat-out refused. My father knows the difference between right and wrong. He knew that refusing to act as a megaphone for Hamas could lead to his death, and yet he refused. He has a clear conscience. So does everyone who knows what really happened to him, and why. 

This time, it’s not like the prior wars. This time, people are telling the truth.  

Before October 7, people were afraid—and of course some people are still afraid—but ironically, when there is fighting, Hamas goes underground, and people can be more vocal about how Hamas has ruined our lives. People are starting to publicly violate the laws, rules, dictates, and orders of Hamas. They are openly cursing Hamas and its leaders in the streets and markets, and ignoring the directives of the few Hamas officials and police still above ground. They have caused so much damage, it’s undeniable. They’ve imposed themselves on our society, on my father, for too long. We’re all paying the price. People want freedom. We hope deeply that this war will end, and that Hamas will end with it. 

I don’t know where my father is. I don’t know if I will ever see him alive again. My hope in telling this story to the public, and putting my name to it, is to somehow offer my father a measure of protection. Hamas may wish to release him and show the world that they would never harm an admired mosque preacher. God alone knows the future, but what I know is that, under no circumstances, would my father want to become a propaganda tool.

Mr. Mushtaha shared his story with The Free Press as part of the ongoing series Voices from Gaza, our partnership with the Center for Peace Communications.

Become a Free Press subscriber today:

Subscribe now

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: SpaceX sues US labor board, claims agency structure is unconstitutional.

RACE CARD DECLINED: Claudine Gay Made a Career of Attacking Black Scholars. Don’t Defend Her for Being Black.

The demand that Gay resign stems from the utter lack of moral competency she displayed in her testimony before Congress, in which she said that calling for the genocide of Jews is only against Harvard rules in certain contexts. She also failed to condemn the Hamas atrocities against Israel in real time on October 7, another reason she should resign. There is also now evidence of serial plagiarism. And did I mention Gay has published no books—an unprecedented feat for a Harvard President, unless one travels back in time to the year 1773? . . .

Did you know that Claudine Gay during her Harvard career has repeatedly targeted and disrupted the careers of prominent Black male professors?

As Dean of the College, Gay terminated Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr. as Faculty Dean of the Winthrop House. Professor Sullivan, Jr., a graduate of Morehouse College and Harvard Law School, was the first Black faculty dean of a house in the history of Harvard College.

What was Professor Sullivan’s offense? Sullivan deigned to represent the disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein—an act of moral conscience, since all are entitled to legal representation in our legal system. Yet legal conscience mattered not to Claudine Gay, who terminated a race pioneer for doing his civic duty.

You may excuse this heartless termination as a one-off. You would be wrong. Economics Professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr. was next in the sights of Dean Gay. Fryer was a top Black professor at Harvard. After having overcome all sorts of hardship and childhood deprivation, Professor Fryer joined the faculty at Harvard to become the second-youngest professor ever to be awarded tenure at Harvard, and went on to blaze a trail of distinction, including winning the MacArthur Fellowship and the John Bates Clark Medal.

Yet when Fryer undertook research into the killings of unarmed Black men in Houston, Fryer’s research found no racial disparities. He made the mistake of undercutting the racial narrative that the Left has adopted, and as a result, Gay did her best to remove all of his academic privileges, coordinating a witch hunt against him. Fryer survived Gay’s crusade of discharge but Fryer’s lab was shut down, his reputation tarnished.

No one in good faith should defend President Gay because she is the first Black president of Harvard. Even if you don’t agree with me that our racial struggle is in our past, someone who has targeted Black male professors has waived any benefit of the “first Black” defense.

To be fair, no one in good faith is defending her.

New York City Major Eric Adams announced on Thursday that he is suing bus companies for over $700 million for busing undocumented persons to the state. This is truly a thing to behold. It is a frivolous lawsuit based on an absurd law motivated by raw hypocrisy. In the meantime, the Biden Administration has been flying migrants to outside the city but no lawsuit is expected.

New York City politicians have long heralded their status as a sanctuary city. Yet, it is now taking various methods to prevent migrants from seeking sanctuary by threatening anyone who brings them to the city.

The lawsuit will rely on New York Social Services Law § 149, which requires that “[a]ny person who knowingly brings, or causes to be brought, a needy person from out of state into this state for the purpose of making him a public charge…shall be obligated to convey such person out of state or support him at his own expense.”

Of course, these companies are not transporting people to make them a public charge. They are transporting these people because they or a third party paid the fare for transport. That statute expressly allows the commissioner of the New York City Department of Social Services (DSS) to sue to recover costs.

In seeking to impose crippling fines and damages on transportation companies, the lawsuit will likely be challenged as unconstitutional due to its vagueness, curtailment of interstate travel, and a host of other glaring problems.

This is clearly an effort to grind companies financially. It is doubtful that anyone in New York seriously believes that they can force bus or airline companies to pay for migrants coming to a self-proclaimed sanctuary city. It is a cynical effort to impose litigation costs on companies to get them to refuse to accept such contracts. Yet, how is a company supposed to determine if someone purchasing a ticket is a potential “public charge.”  Does that apply to anyone who is impoverished? What proof of support is needed from the passenger? Such inquiries could themselves violate legal and constitutional protections.

Transportation companies sell seats for transport.  They are not responsible for those who purchase the tickets for their ultimate support. They are not responsible for the costs that a traveler may impose on a given city. If that were the case, I would sue the airlines everytime they fly the Packers to Chicago to play football. (Now that I think about it ….hmmm)

 

 

The post Cartoon of the Day: Follow Their Leader appeared first on Liberty Unyielding.

When Jure Mur, a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, realized the replication of a published study he was working on as a “sanity check” wasn’t producing matching results, his first reaction was “annoyance,” he said. 

He assumed the mistake was his own, and he’d have to thoroughly check his work to find it. “Only after double- and triple-checking my code did I start suspecting an error in the original paper,” Mur told Retraction Watch. 

Mur emailed the authors of the article several times, but they never responded to him, he said. He next contacted the editors of The Lancet Public Health, which had published the original paper, “Association between hearing aid use and all-cause and cause-specific dementia: an analysis of the UK Biobank cohort,” in April 2023. 

In months of back-and-forth correspondence, seen by Retraction Watch, Mur explained the discrepancies he’d found, then submitted a comment article the editors declined to publish. 

The paper was retracted in December, but only after Mur pushed the editors to consider the implications of the authors’ response to his comment, which confirmed his findings and contradicted their original paper. 

“The end result is positive for the scientific community,” Mur said. But because the editors seemed to address the issue he raised only after he and his colleagues submitted a comment article, and “either did not read or did not understand the response to our comment,” he said the experience “made me doubt the integrity of the editorial process at the journal.” 

Given the high praise the article received when it was first published, the analysis should be corrected and republished, not just retracted, said Jan Blustein, a professor at New York University who studies hearing loss.  

“It was declared to be the final word, and it’s apparently not,” she said. 

The Lancet Public Health article made international headlines when it appeared, from Der Spiegel to CNN (also in Spanish) to The Daily Mail. (CNN has added an update about the retraction to their story and removed references to the study.) It has been cited 15 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

“In people with hearing loss,” the authors wrote, “hearing aid use is associated with a risk of dementia of a similar level to that of people without hearing loss.” They proposed “up to 8% of dementia cases could be prevented with proper hearing loss management.”

In a simultaneously published editorial–now also retracted–other researchers wrote that with the addition of the article’s data, “the evidence that hearing aids can be a powerful tool to reduce the risk of dementia in people with hearing loss is as good as possible without randomised controlled trials.”  

Mur and his colleagues intended to build on the article with a related analysis on the same UK Biobank data. But when he couldn’t replicate the main findings, Mur scrutinized the paper more deeply. 

In mid-May, Mur emailed the corresponding author, Dongshan Zhu of Shandong University in Jinan, China. He wrote that he “had some questions regarding your analysis” and asked whether he should direct them to Zhu or the first author of the paper. Mur followed up several times, but Zhu never responded, he said. 

Mur also emailed the editors of The Lancet Public Health in late May, asking if they would share any other authors’ email addresses they had. He explained that he’d been having trouble replicating some of the findings in the paper, and the corresponding author hadn’t responded to his emails. One of the editors supplied the email address for another author, Chengchao Zhou, also affiliated with Shandong University. Mur’s emails to Zhou went unanswered as well. 

At the editors’ suggestion, Mur sent another email to Zhu and Zhou in June asking if they would share their code, and copied the editors. After again getting no response, Mur sent the editors a document detailing the discrepancies between his replication attempt and the results in the paper. 

Most notably, he found that hearing aid use did not correspond to a lower rate of dementia for people with hearing loss, as the authors reported. He found the opposite: among people with hearing loss, the dementia rate was higher for those using hearing aids. In his email to the editors, Mur wrote: 

Without comparing the code to clean and analyse the data, it is difficult to draw firm conclusions about what is going on. But I think it’s worth trying to resolve it.

In July, Audrey Ceschia, editor in chief of The Lancet Public Health, responded. She wrote that the journal had been “notified of an error in the paper” and was currently working with the authors on a correction that “might also help resolving some of the discrepancies you’ve noticed.” She said she would share the correction when it was ready, and also suggested Mur could submit his findings to the journal’s correspondence section. 

Mur and a few colleagues submitted a comment article to the journal in October, formally explaining the differences in their findings and the published paper, with a link to a repository of their code. In mid-November Ceschia sent Mur the authors’ response (with code they provided), but wrote that the journal had “decided not to publish the exchange of letters.” 

The authors’ response noted they had “found some discrepancies between coding schemes” and described a new analysis they’d run on the data. They reported on “the relationship between self-reported hearing loss, hearing aid use and risk of dementia,” as they had in their original paper, as well as an additional analysis on people who had severe hearing loss as measured with a hearing test. 

In supplementary material, the authors presented results in line with what Mur and his colleagues found, but contradicting their originally published work: 

Using self-reported hearing loss (no severity information), we found that in people with hearing loss, both using and not using [hearing aids] was linked to an increased risk of all-cause dementia, with HR (95% CI) of (1.47, 1.33-1.63) and (1.17, 1.09-1.25) respectively, i.e., using [hearing aids] had even higher risk of dementia

Mur responded to the journal editors, pointing out that this result “is exactly what we found, reported, and submitted as a comment to the Lancet Public Health and is contrary to the findings published by Jiang et al. (2023). Only in some of the supplementary analyses that were not part of that original published paper, do the authors find a confirmation of their original claim.” 

He continued: 

In my understanding of scientific integrity, it should now be the authors to retract the article based on these new analyses, or at least publish a major correction which includes a reinterpretation of findings in light of the extended analyses. Since they apparently do not intend to do so, we would now expect the publisher to take action and at least publish our comment (if you don’t plan on retracting the paper either). Please also note that the manuscript is a comment, not a correspondence piece. You may recall that we tried to have a correspondence with the authors and only decided to write a comment after multiple attempts were not successful..

The next day, Anika Knuppel, senior editor at the journal, responded that the editors were “looking into this.” A few weeks later, in early December, Ceschia wrote: 

Please accept our profound thanks for prompting us to investigate the reliability of the paper by Fan Jiang et al. To summarise an extensive series of exchanges with the authors, they have now explained that they have discovered analytical errors in their work that render their findings and conclusions false and misleading. We have taken the decision to retract their paper and will publish the retraction notice next week. We are very grateful to you for bringing your concerns to us directly and we are pleased to be able to correct the scientific record in a timely manner.

On December 12, The Lancet Public Health editors published the following retraction notice: 

On Nov 27, 2023, we have been informed by the authors of the paper—Association between hearing aid use and all-cause and cause-specific dementia: an analysis of the UK Biobank cohort—published on April 13, 2023,1 that an error was introduced in the output format setting of their SAS codes (data for people with hearing loss using hearing aids and with hearing loss without using hearing aids were switched), leading to errors in their analysis which render their findings and conclusions false and misleading. These errors were identified by the authors following an exchange with scientists seeking to reproduce the authors’ findings. We are therefore retracting this Article.

We asked Zhu why he and his colleagues had not requested a retraction once their reanalysis found different results than their original paper. He responded: 

Thanks for your attention to our research.

If the output formats were not mis-defined, using self-reported hearing loss, people with hearing loss using HA had 34% higher risk of dementia, and people with hearing loss not using HA had 7% higher risk dementia [sic].

We believe there are two prominent bias [sic] when self-reported hearing loss was used, i.e., self-reported bias, and hearing loss severity bias.

In the next step, we will try to control for self-report bias and severity bias to see the effect of wearing hearing aids after bias control on reducing the risk of dementia, especially in people with severe hearing loss.

When we reached out to Ceschia and Knuppel, we heard back from a spokesperson for The Lancet. Regarding the authors’ response to Mur and colleagues’ comment, the spokesperson said: 

While acknowledging “some discrepancies between coding systems”, they argued that “The overall message of the study did not change.” In good faith, we accepted the authors’ explanation, and decided not to publish the exchange. In retrospect, we should have followed up the admitted discrepancies more assiduously and worked with the authors and Dr Mur to settle any outstanding uncertainties. Dr Mur rightly challenged our decision in an email on November 16. We immediately recognised the seriousness of his concerns and wrote again to the authors on November 22 asking them to further clarify their analyses, based on Dr Mur’s evidence and our own by now heightened unease. On November 24, the authors reported major errors in their paper, which rendered their findings and conclusions false and misleading. We moved quickly to retract the paper on December 12, 2023.

When the paper first appeared, it seemed to confirm a widely held belief – that hearing loss is associated with developing dementia, and using hearing aids can help to reduce risk – about which the scientific evidence has been mixed, Blustein, the hearing loss researcher, told Retraction Watch. In her view, public health messaging and media coverage of the question has been “misleading.” 

The findings were picked up quickly and disseminated among the community of people following the question of hearing loss and dementia, she said. “I don’t think people are necessarily aware of retractions.” 

The analysis should be corrected, and if The Lancet Public Health were to receive a new version, they should publish it, Blustein said. 

The UK Biobank dataset “is a very valuable data source,” she said. The dataset’s large size, long followup period, and information about potentially confounding factors made the article an important piece of evidence. “To throw away data because somebody miscoded it is a mistake.”

Blustein also felt that the retraction notice was unclear about what readers should take away from the study, and the lack of clarity was “another reason why the record is incomplete” without a replacement analysis. 

While the retraction notice was “technically correct,” Mur said, it did “obfuscate the fact that it was primarily my colleagues and I – not the journal or the authors of the original paper – who identified a problem and invested plenty of time and effort to have it rectified.” 

To other researchers trying to correct the record, he advised: 

Be prepared for an uphill battle. In our case, the editors were always courteous and quick to respond to our emails but notifying them of the discrepancies and detailing them in a short report was not sufficient. We still had to write and submit a paper before any substantial action by the journal was evident.

But putting forth the effort was important, he said, “simply because we knew the results were erroneous.” He continued: 

The study had been mentioned in several media articles, featured in an editorial by the journal, and hailed by some in the field as the most definitive evidence on the topic one can get without performing a clinical trial. You can’t let that stand if you know it to be false.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, subscribe to our free daily digest or paid weekly update, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or add us to your RSS reader. If you find a retraction that’s not in The Retraction Watch Database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.