Jts5665

DEFUND THE EPA: The EPA Gives Funds to a Group That Claims Palestine is a ‘Climate Justice Issue.’

Visitors to the Shendiaoshan Wild Animal Nature Reserve in Weihai City, China, caught a truly great moment on camera after a toddler dropped his croc into the chimpanzee enclosure.

You don't see this every day. A Chinese NYPD officer has been fired for allegedly spying on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.

Below is my column in the Hill on the approaching closing arguments in the Trump trial. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg appears to be launching his own school of abstract legal work in the Trump indictment. The key is to avoid any objective meaning.

Here is the column:

Abstract artist Jackson Pollock once said that his paintings have no objective meaning, so the best way for people to enjoy them is to stop looking for it.

For many of us, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has created a new school of abstract law where there is no need for objective meaning. The jury is simply supposed to enjoy it for what it is: a chance to convict Donald Trump.

Pollock was famous for his painting drips on large canvases. Bragg has achieved the same effect by regenerating a dead misdemeanor on falsifying business records as 34 felony counts. To achieve that extraordinary goal, he has alleged that the document violations (which expired long ago under the statute of limitations) were committed to hide some other crime.

Originally, Bragg vaguely referenced four crimes and there have been months of confusion as to what he was specifically alleging as his criminal theories. Even legal analysts on CNN and MSNBC have continued to question the specific allegations against Trump as we head into closing arguments.

As it stands, there are three crimes that have been referenced by prosecutors: state and federal election violations and taxation violations.

Bragg’s legal vision for non-objective indictments was greatly advanced by Judge Juan Merchan, who will allow the jury to reach different rulings on what crime is actually evident in Bragg’s paint splatters.

Merchan has ruled that the jurors can disagree on what actually occurred in terms of the second crime. This means there could be three groups of four jurors, with one believing that there was a conspiracy to conceal a state election violation, another believing there was a federal election violation (which Bragg cannot enforce), and a third believing there was a tax violation, respectively. Nonetheless, Merchan will treat that as a unanimous verdict.

In other words, they could look at the indictment and see vastly different shapes, but still send Trump to prison on their interpretations.

Moreover, Michael Cohen is the sole witness even to address the elements of any of these crimes. Cohen is a convicted serial perjurer and disbarred attorney who appears to have lied again during the trial. Even if they consider his testimony, there is no direct corroboration in evidence on Trump’s intent or knowledge. As a result, the prosecutors will rely on circumstantial evidence to support whichever interpretation the jurors will buy.

Faced with charges that can mean different things to different jurors, Trump’s team will have to focus on the spaces between the paint drips; the canvas itself.

All of this case is based on the payment for a non-disclosure agreement that is perfectly legal and indeed common in business and politics. The Trump team needs to stop dancing around the NDA.

The jury likely believes that Trump knew of the NDA and supported it. The defense has to emphasize the testimony of David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Inquirer, that he killed stories for a variety of celebrities and politicians, including Rahm Emmanuel and Arnold Schwarzenegger. He also said that he killed stories for Trump for years before he even thought of running for president.

They need to emphasize the testimony of multiple witnesses that Trump seemed to want to avoid embarrassment to his family. He was also the host of a popular television show and an international businessman. The payment of a couple hundred thousand to kill stories is considered a cost of doing business for most celebrities, particularly those who have television contracts with provisions allowing cancellation for scandals.

In the instructions, the court will tell the jurors that payments cannot be campaign contributions if they would have been made anyway regardless of the campaign.

They also need to point out other gaps. It was not Trump who listed payments as legal expenses or retainer payments. Witnesses said that payments to lawyers are routinely recorded as legal expenses.  Indeed, it is not clear how the money should have been denominated but the decision was being made by others in the Trump organization and by Cohen himself.

Moreover, on the characterization of payments as part of a “retainer,” the other party to that characterization was former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg. He is currently in prison in New York, but was not called by the prosecution. The prosecutors elected to rely entirely on Michael Cohen with various witnesses, including Cohen, referencing Weisselberg’s decision on how to pay the money.

That made the canvas itself largely Michael Cohen. All of this is held together by a witness who admitted that he has lied to banks, Congress, prosecutors, business associates, and virtually every creature that has ever walked or crawled on the face of the Earth. He also lied in front of the jury about the critical call where he said that he told Trump about the NDA payment.

The defense showed that that 96-second-long call was to Trump’s bodyguard, Keith Schiller, in late October 2016. It was preceded and followed by text messages that indicated that their conversation was actually about a teenager harassing Cohen.

Moreover, Cohen admitted to making millions by bashing Trump, and that he has a personal interest in his conviction.

You can throw paint on Cohen all day, but it will not cover up the fact that he is a pathological liar and grifter.

That is why I still believe that a hung jury might even be the most likely possibility. That may change when we see Judge Merchan’s final instructions. However, the only thing worse in New York than being a Trump supporter is being a chump. To rely solely on Cohen and not even call someone like Weisselberg is to play these jurors as chumps.

Pollock was doing more than just throwing paint at a canvas. As Pablo Picasso said, “there is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.” Bragg started with nothing and sold it as a legal abstraction.

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

I.

There’s been renewed debate around Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education recently, so I want to discuss one way I think about this question.

Education isn’t just about facts. But it’s partly about facts. Facts are easy to measure, and they’re a useful signpost for deeper understanding. If someone has never heard of Chaucer, Dickens, Melville, Twain, or Joyce, they probably haven’t learned to appreciate great literature. If someone can’t identify Washington, Lincoln, or either Roosevelt, they probably don’t understand the ebb and flow of American history. So what facts does the average American know?

In a 1999 poll, only 66% of Americans age 18-29 knew that the US won independence from Britain (as opposed to some other country). About 47% of Americans can name all three branches of government (executive, legislative, and judicial). 37% know the closest planet to the sun (Mercury). 58% know which gas causes most global warming (carbon dioxide). 44% know Auschwitz was the site of a concentration camp. Fewer than 50% (ie worse than chance) can correctly answer a true-false question about whether electrons are bigger than atoms.

These results are scattered across many polls, which makes them vulnerable to publication bias; I can’t find a good unified general knowledge survey of the whole population. But there’s a great survey of university students. Keeping in mind that this is a highly selected, extra-smart population, here are some data points:

• 85% know who wrote Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)

• 56% know the biggest planet (Jupiter)

• 44% know who rode on horseback in 1775 to warn that the British were coming (Paul Revere)

• 33% know what organ produces insulin (pancreas)

• 31% know the capital of Russia (Moscow)

• 30% know who discovered the Theory of Relativity (Einstein)

• 19% know what mountain range contains Mt. Everest (Himalayas)

• 19% know who wrote 1984 (George Orwell)

• 16% know what word the raven says in Poe’s “The Raven” (“Nevermore!”)

• 10% know the captain’s name in Moby Dick (Ahab)

• 7% know who discovered, in 1543, that the Earth orbits the sun (Copernicus)

• 4% know what Chinese religion was founded by Lao Tse (Taoism)

• <1% know what city the general Hannibal was from (Carthage)

Remember, these are university students, so the average person’s performance is worse.

Most of these are the kinds of facts that I would expect school to teach people. Some of them (eg the branches of government) are the foundations of whole subjects, facts that I would expect to get reviewed and built upon many times during a student’s career. If most people don’t remember them, there seems to be little hope that they remember basically anything from school. So what’s school even doing?

Maybe school is why at least a majority of people know the very basics - like that the US won independence from Britain, or that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet? I’m not sure this is true. Here are some other questions that got approximately the same level of correct answers as “Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet”:

• What is the name of the rubber object hit by hockey players? (Puck, 89%)

• What is the name of the comic strip character who eats spinach to increase his strength? (Popeye, 82% correct)

• What is the name of Dorothy’s dog in The Wizard of Oz? (Toto, 80% correct)

I don’t think any of these are taught in school. They’re absorbed by cultural osmosis. It seems equally likely that Romeo and Juliet could be absorbed the same way. Wasn’t there an Academy-Award-winning movie about Shakespeare writing Romeo and Juliet just a decade or so before this study came out? Sure, 19% of people know that Orwell wrote 1984 - but how many people know the 1984 Calendar Meme, or the “1984 was not an instruction manual!” joke, or have heard of the reality show Big Brother? Nobody learned those in school, so maybe they learned Orwell’s name the same place they learned about the other 1984-related stuff.

Okay, so school probably doesn’t do a great job teaching facts. But maybe it could still teach skills, right?

According to tests, fewer than 10% of Americans are “proficient” at PIIAC-defined numeracy skills, even though in theory you need to know algebra to graduate from most public schools.

I took a year of Spanish in middle school, and I cannot speak Spanish today to save my life; that year was completely wasted. Sure, I know things like “Hola!” and “Adios!”, but I also know things like “gringo” and “Yo quiero Taco Bell” - this is just cultural osmosis again.

So it seems most people forget almost all of what they learn in school, whether we’re talking about facts or skills. The remaining pro-school argument would be that even if they forget every specific thing, they retain some kind of scaffolding that makes it easier for them to learn and understand new things in the future; ie they keep some sort of overall concept of learning. This is a pretty god-of-the-gaps-ish hypothesis, and counterbalanced by all the kids who said school made them hate learning, or made them unable to learn in a non-fake/rote way, or that they can’t read books now because they’re too traumatized from years of being forced to read books that they hate.

II.

Step back a bit. Why should any of this be true? That is:

• Why would most students forget things that schools teach many times?

• Why would they remember it when it’s learned through cultural osmosis (eg Popeye, “yo quiero Taco Bell”)?

• Don’t children do okay on standardized tests? Why shouldn’t they remember that information later?

• If you can forget something that a professional teacher teaches you, and which you study intently for a high-stakes test on, then how do you remember anything at all?

Here’s the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve:

For our purposes, it’s a bit stylized - what does it mean to remember 20% of your American History lesson? The point is, you remember much less after some period of time.

The forgetting curve focuses on abstract, unconnected emotionless knowledge - you’ll remember the name of the man who killed your family for longer than it predicts - but it’s an okay approximation for the sorts of things you learn in school. I can’t find anything that investigates longer than a month, but probably after ten years or something it’s really low. So if you poll an adult on electrons ten years after their last high school science class, they’ll remember nothing.

So how come anyone remembers anything at all? Here’s the forgetting curve’s more optimistic cousin, the spaced repetition curve:

The optimistic take is that presumably you study the things you learn in class. If you’re lucky, your teacher next year reviews on them and builds on them. So you get dozens of well-spaced reviews, until you reach a point where it’s with you for life.

Okay, now we’re back to not understanding why only 19% of people know about the Himalayas.

I can’t find any great research for the forgetting and repetition curves over years or decades, but one spaced repetition site recommends the following schedule:

• Day 0: Initial learning

• Day 1: First repetition within 24 hours

• Day 6: Second repetition in about one week

• Day 14: Third repetition in about two weeks

• Day 30: Fourth repetition in about a month

• Day 66: Fifth repetition in about two months

• Day 150: Sixth repetition in about five months

• Day 360: Seventh repetition in about a year

7 repetitions usually suffice to remember information for life. Also notice that after the second repetition, the next interval can be calculated by multiplying the previous interval with a factor of around 2.2. This number is called the ease factor, and depending on your implementation, it is usually set between 2 and 2.5.

So either people didn’t get 7 optimally-spaced repetitions of the Himalayas in school, or this very optimistic website is wrong and seven repetitions don’t suffice to remember information “for life”. I’m betting it’s the latter - for example, I’ve forgotten the names of some of my college professors, even though I would have seen them almost daily for a year.

Suppose that no reasonable amount of repetition is enough to remember an abstract fact of this sort for more than a decade. Then it’s not surprising that people forget most of the facts they learn in school.

But suppose that once you learn something to a school-test-passing level, approximately once-yearly repetition is enough to make you remember it. That would explain why we remember things like Shakespeare’s name - just going about our everyday lives, we probably hear him talked about more than once a year.

How strong is this cultural repetition effect? In order to settle a bet, I asked ACX survey respondents whether they had thought about the Roman Empire in the past 24 hours. About 45% had done so. Although we can’t make any formal estimates, it seems most likely that most people in this distribution think about it at least once a week, and overwhelmingly many think about it at least once a month. So no matter how bad your history teacher was, you will never forget the Roman Empire.

(also, in the two weeks this post has been sitting in my draft folder, I’ve spotted three references to George Orwell, just while going about my everyday life.)

How often do people think about the Songhai Empire? I definitely learned about this one in 7th grade - it was part of the “It’s Very Important That All Of You Know That Africa’s History Existed And Was Very Glorious, Please Believe This” unit. But I forgot about its existence until it got featured in one of the Civ games - I think Civ V. After that I guess I played enough Civilization that it got imprinted in my memory for at least another few years. I think this is a better explanation for why most people remember things about Rome but not Songhai than how many hours their history teacher spent talking about each.

In this model, the reason smarter people remember more stuff than duller people is partly a differently-shaped forgetting curve. But mostly it’s that intellectuals put themselves in situations where they hear about things more often. If you remember that George Orwell wrote 1984, it’s probably because you read the newspaper or blogs or whatever and hear some government program described as “Orwellian”. But if you’re watching TikToks on your cell phone all day, maybe you don’t hear that, and then you join the 81% of college students who have forgotten that name.

(full list of things I remember about 1984: the author was George Orwell. There were three countries called Eurasia, Eastasia, and Oceania. Britain was part of Eurasia and called “Airstrip One”. Every so often the countries would shift alliances, and the government would lie and say “we have always been at war with Eastasia”. There was an evil totalitarian government with a possibly-fake leader named Big Brother, and a possibly-fake rebel with a Jewish-sounding name. It divided people into Inner Party, Outer Party, and proles. There was a language called “Newspeak” with neologisms like “doubleplusgood” that made it hard to question authority. There were characters named Winston and Julia. Winston sort of tried to be against the evil government; he got tortured through some horrifying thing involving rats; at the end he said he loved Big Brother and 2+2=5. Something was weird about Julia and maybe she was an agent of the evil government or something. I think these are all facts that I might encounter in the wild once every few years.)

III.

This model makes it hard for school to be useful. If school teaches you some fact, then either you’ll never encounter it again after school, in which case you’ll quickly forget it. Or you will encounter it again after school, in which case school was unnecessary; you would have learned it anyway.

Can we rescue some kind of value for school? One option might be that school starts a virtuous cycle by helping you learn something long enough that you can put yourself in situations where you can re-encounter it in the future. For example, consider reading. If you learn to read, you’ll probably read every day. Then you’ll remember how to read. But if you never learn to read, you might never try and never learn.

(this example is somewhat frustrated by the fact that many middle-class children learn to read before entering school - apparently you’ve got to teach them at two to keep up with the Joneses now. But at least it probably helps the lower-class kids.)

The same could be true of some kinds of math - even if only 10% of Americans have basic numeracy as defined by PIIAC, there are probably some kinds of sub-basic numeracy, like simple addition, which most people remember because they learned it in school and then kept using it forever.

Okay, so that maybe justifies up to fourth grade. Are there any examples from later schooling that could work like this?

You could imagine some equivalent where, for example, you need to know a certain amount about Roman history before you can enjoy books, movies, podcasts, etc on Roman history. But then once you know that amount, it’s a ratchet and you’ll keep learning more and reinforcing that knowledge. I think this is mostly false, considering how many things that people don’t learn about in school - eg coding, or cooking, or the history of their favorite fantasy world, or so on - they still manage to learn. Still, it’s a theory that you could have.

Otherwise - aside from being a place to warehouse children while their parents are away - I’m not sure how you rescue the usefulness of most schooling.

(on a purely theoretical basis, of course)

A nice Catholic W.

Hunter Biden wrote his father was so enamored with China's communist leader "they all most kissed," new evidence shows

“Trump’s repeated mischaracterization of these facts in widely distributed messages as an attempt to kill him, his family, and Secret Service agents has endangered law enforcement officers involved in the investigation and prosecution of this case and threatened the integrity of these proceedings,” prosecutors told Cannon. “A restriction prohibiting future similar statements does not restrict legitimate speech.”

According to prosecutors, there is a sting operation video showing Ma counting $50,000 given to him by an undercover FBI agent posing as a Chinese intelligence officer.

How fast can an entire fireworks factory set off all its stock?

TEETH FOR THE FOIA: No one has ever gone to jail for violating the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). And we wonder why politicians and career bureaucrats alike thumb their noses at the public’s right to know?

WE KNOW:  You are the carbon they want to reduce.

THE MASTERPIECE OF OUR TIME: On The Gulag Archipelago at fifty.

Western intellectuals usually supposed that Russian dissidents might suffer the sort of punishment that in their own countries is reserved for dangerous criminals. At worst, Westerners pictured conditions like those in tsarist Russia, long considered the model of an oppressive state. That is why Solzhenitsyn devotes so many passages to contrasting what passed for tyranny in nineteenth-century Russia with ordinary Soviet conditions.

Begin with numbers. Solzhenitsyn instructs: from 1876 to 1904—a period of mass strikes, peasant revolts, and terrorism claiming the lives of Tsar Alexander II and other top officials—“486 people were executed; in other words, about seventeen people per year for the whole country,” a figure that includes “ordinary, nonpolitical criminals!” During the 1905 revolution and its suppression, “executions rocketed upward, astounding Russian imaginations, calling forth tears from Tolstoy and indignation from [the writer Vladimir] Korolenko, and many, many others: from 1905 through 1908 2,200 persons were executed,” a number contemporaries described as an “epidemic of executions.”

By contrast, Soviet judicial killings—whether by shooting, forced starvation, or hard labor at forty degrees below zero—numbered in the tens of millions. Crucially, condemnation did not require individual guilt. As early as 1918, Solzhenitsyn points out, the Cheka (secret police) leader M. I. Latsis instructed revolutionary tribunals dispensing summary justice to disregard personal guilt or innocence and just ascertain the prisoner’s class origin: this “must determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning of the Red Terror.”

On this basis, over five million peasants (classed as “kulaks,” supposedly better off than their neighbors) were forcibly exiled to completely unsettled wastelands with no food or tools, where they were left to die. The same punishment later befell whole nationalities deemed potentially disloyal (such as ethnic Germans, Chechens, and Crimean Tatars) or dangerous because of the possibility of receiving subversive support from a foreign power (as in the case of Koreans and Poles). “The liquidation of the kulaks as a class” was followed by the deliberate starvation of millions of peasants. All food for a large area of what is now Ukraine was requisitioned, and even fishing in the rivers was prohibited, so that over the next few months inhabitants starved to death. Idealistic young Bolsheviks from the capital enforced the famine. In total, Stalin’s war on the countryside claimed more than ten million lives. As Solzhenitsyn makes clear, this crime is not nearly as well known among intellectuals as the Great Purges, which claimed fewer victims, because many purge victims were themselves intellectuals.

Arrests also took place by quotas assigned to local secret-police offices, which, if they knew what was good for them, petitioned to arrest still more. After World War II, captured Russian soldiers in German slave-labor camps were promptly transferred to Russian ones, as was anyone who had seen something of the Western world. Even soldiers who had fought their way out of German encirclement were arrested as traitors, simply because they had been behind German lines. Still more shocking, the Allies—who could not imagine why people would not want to return to their homeland—forcibly repatriated, often at bayonet point, over a million fugitives, some of whom committed suicide rather than face what they knew awaited them.

In his introduction Gary Saul Morson writes:

When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation appeared in 1973, its impact, the author recalled, was immediate: “Like matter enveloped by antimatter, it exploded instantaneously!” The first translations into Western languages in 1974—just fifty years ago—proved almost as sensational. No longer was it so easy to cherish a sentimental attachment to communism and the USSR. In France, where Marxism had remained fashionable, the book changed the course of intellectual life, and in America it helped counter the New Left celebration of Mao, Castro, and other disciples of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.

Which is why the American left hated Solzhenitsyn so, Tom Wolfe wrote in his 1976 article, “The Intelligent Co-Ed’s Guide to America:”

Solzhenitsyn’s tour of the United States in 1975 was like an enormous funeral procession that no one wanted to see. The White House wanted no part of him. The New York Times sought to bury his two major’ speeches, and only the moral pressure of a lone Times writer, Hilton Kramer, brought them any appreciable coverage at all. The major tele­vision networks declined to run the Solzhenitsyn interview that created such a stir in England earlier this year (it ran on some of the educa­tional channels).

And the literary world in general ignored him completely. In the huge unseen coffin that Solzhenitsyn towed behind him were not only the souls of the zeks who died in the Archipelago. No, the heartless bastard had also chucked in one of the last great visions: the intellec­tual as the Stainless Steel Socialist glistening against the bone heap of capitalism in its final, brutal, fascist phase. There was a bone heap, all right, and it was grisly beyond belief, but socialism, had created it.

Earlier: Why Isn’t Lenin As Condemned As Hitler?

MATT TAIBBI: FOIA Files: Garry Kasparov Resigns from Aspen Institute Commission, Compares it to Soviet Committee: “If I’m being honest…This type of approach was common practice in the USSR.” Leftists gonna leftist. If you let them.

Plus: Introducing the Censorship Files: What you can expect to find in Racket’s FOIA library, opening today. Why we targeted publicly-funded “anti-disinformation” programs, which are misnamed.

When you're down and troubled and radical leftism needs a helping hand, you can always be sure that MSNBC will be there.

REWARDING FASCISM: “So now we know what it takes to become a state: the murder of Jews. Rape, kill and kidnap Jews and seven months later, the leaders of Ireland, Spain and Norway will recognise your statehood. That’s the lesson of today’s coordinated spectacle of virtue-signalling in Dublin, Madrid and Oslo: pogroms work. The butchery of civilians gets results. Fascism has its rewards. This is ‘diplomacy’ at its most dangerous.”

The American Ornithological Society has banned the naming of birds after people and, in true Year Zero style, has set about renaming the 263 species already so tainted by their association with white men.

The post Then the Woke Came for the Birds appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

Remember back in November when the Hamas kids were going crazy for bin Laden on TikTok?

END SOCIALIST EXPLOITATION OF WORKERS!

Infamous for its starvation wages, Walmart just posted staggering first-quarter profits. The surge is a result of its strategic shift toward catering to affluent shoppers while its full-time workers continue to rely on Medicaid and food stamps. https://t.co/jScx1YdJ07

— Jacobin (@jacobin) May 20, 2024

UPDATE: A friend texts: “Free the Jacobin writers! Solidarity!”

NOW OUT: From Nellie Bowles, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History. #CommissionEarned

OH: Rashida Tlaib has paid $435,000 to firm of anti-Israel activist for terrorism-tied groups. “Tlaib, who often faces criticism from both Republicans and Democrats for her anti-Israel rhetoric and defense of a phrase calling for the destruction of the Jewish state, has delivered more than $435,000 in payments earmarked for “fundraising consulting” since 2020 from her campaign and leadership PAC to Unbought Power, according to Federal Election Commission filings. The Florida-based limited liability corporation is operated by Rasha Mubarak, a close ally of Tlaib’s who recently held key roles for terrorism-tied organizations in the United States.”

To some people (especially outside the United States), “neoliberalism” means free market policies.

I prefer “classical liberalism” since that is less likely to be confused with the reflexive statism of today’s American leftists.

That being said, if folks on the left criticize free markets and say that such policies represent neoliberalism, I feel compelled to respond.

That is why I criticized a vapid Joe Stiglitz column in the Washington Post last week. He both ignored real-world evidence and botched the timing of when pro-market policies were being pursued.

Regarding the latter, I showed last month that there’s been a significant erosion of economic liberty in the industrialized world since the turn of the century.

Now let’s look at the Economic Freedom of the World data for the United States. As you can see, economic liberty increased during the Reagan and Clinton years, but has since declined.

The bottom line is that if “neoliberalism” failed, then the failure should have happened during the last two decades of the 20th century.

Yet Stiglitz wanted readers to think that today’s economic problems are caused by free markets when policy has been moving in the wrong direction for about twenty years.

Stiglitz is not the only one guilty of this logical error.

In a column for the New York Times, David Leonhardt also claims neoliberalism has failed.

…the centrism that guided Washington… — alternately called the Washington Consensus or neoliberalism — was based on the idea that market economics had triumphed. By lowering trade barriers and ending the era of big government, the United States would both create prosperity for its own people and shape the world in its image… That hasn’t worked out. …neoliberalism failed to deliver. The notion that the old approach would bring prosperity, as Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, has said, “was a promise made but not kept.”

Leonhardt’s column is not as empty as Stiglitz’s (he makes relevant points, for instance, about the unpopularity of trade and immigration, as well as the failure to encourage China and Russia to liberalize).

But he also ignores the evidence that neoliberal (or “Washington Consensus“) economic policies worked when they actually were in effect.

The bottom line is that I’m still waiting for Stiglitz, Leonhardt, or anyone else to respond to my never-answered question. If neoliberalism doesn’t work, they should have lots of examples.

Needless to say, I won’t be holding my breath. The recipe for growth and prosperity is the same today as it was 100 years ago and 200 years ago.

P.S. When condemning pro-market policies, folks on the left also use terms like “free-market fundamentalist” or “zombie Reaganite.”

Yesterday we reported on one of the many problems with International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan’s request for arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defense minister. Namely, the fact that there is scant evidence of the “deliberate starvation” that forms the heart of the ICC’s case, and that Khan ignores abundant evidence that Hamas is hoarding food and medical supplies. 

Now, a new study published by the Hebrew University’s Institute of Biochemistry, Food Science, and Nutrition brings clarity to the contested question of food security in the Gaza strip. The working paper analyzed the adequacy of the food supply Israel has facilitated into Gaza since January. And the results are devastating to Khan’s case. 

The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, was conducted in conjunction with four other Israeli universities and the country’s ministry of health and found that “the quantity and quality of food delivered to Gaza have steadily improved and diversified since January 2024” and that “the food supply contains sufficient energy and protein for the population’s needs.” 

Specifically, the Israeli researchers found that on average, between January and April, 124 trucks carrying food and humanitarian aid entered Gaza per day. That adds up to 3,211 calories worth of nutrition per Gazan, per day. The World Health Organization standard for calorie consumption is 2,900 per day for average-sized men and 2,200 per day for average-sized women. 

“Contrary to claims that Israel has deliberately starved Gaza, Israel has gone to considerable lengths to facilitate food aid delivered to Gaza,” the authors write. 

One of those authors, Aron Troen, a professor of nutrition science and public health at Hebrew University, told The Free Press, “We wanted to understand what the reality was. To do so we obtained the registry of each and every truck that has entered Gaza through the two southern land routes from January to April.” 

Troen said that there were serious problems with a previous UN study on food security in Gaza, published in March, that claimed a famine was “imminent” in the northern part of the territory. For example, it did not examine the steps that Israel had taken to open humanitarian corridors and land routes into the territory. 

This raises an important question for Khan and the International Criminal Court. If it’s true, as World Food Program director Cindy McCain recently said, that there is a famine in northern Gaza, who is to blame? Israel has been allowing food to enter Gaza, but as I reported Tuesday, the Israelis have documented how that food is commandeered by Hamas and hoarded for its families. 

Troen said the group’s findings “raise significant questions about the failure of the international aid agencies to deliver the food and hold Hamas accountable for their disruption to distribution.” 

Perhaps Khan would have benefited from the insights in the new working paper. One Israeli defense official told The Free Press that his government is prepared to share the paper with the court’s investigators.

Eli Lake is a Free Press columnist. Follow him on Twitter at @EliLake and read his piece “Does Suing Colleges for Antisemitism Actually Work?”

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REWARDING THE FRAUD AT A SCIENCE FAIR.  HOPEFULLY THIS WILL NOT SURVIVE THE PUBLICITY IT IS ABOUT TO GET:  Exclusive: Scandal at America’s Top Science Fair.

THERE HAVE BEEN MANY REASONS OVER THE YEARS, MAYBE EVENTUALLY ONE WILL MAKE IT THROUGH THE PUBLIC’S HEAD:  The infected blood scandal should make us think twice about revering the NHS.

MATT TAIBBI:

Sources tell me at least two different active groups are working on political content moderation programs for the November election that tactically would go a step or two beyond what we observed with groups like Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, proposing not just deamplification or removals, but fakery, use of bots, and other “offensive” forms of manipulation.

If the recent rush of news stories about the horror of foreign-inspired AI deepfakes (“No one can stop them,” gasps the Washington Post) creating intolerable risk to the coming “AI election” sounds a bit off to you, you’re not alone. This is one of many potential threats pro-censorship groups are playing up in hopes of deploying more aggressive “counter-messaging” tools. Some early proposals along those lines are in the unpublished Twitter Files documents we’ve been working on. Again, more on this topic soon.

Also: beginning around the time we published the “Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex,” Racket in partnership with UndeadFOIA began issuing Freedom of Information requests in bulk. The goal was to identify inexcusably secret contractors of content-policing agencies like the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. The FOIA system is designed to exhaust citizens, but our idea was to match the irritating resolve of FOIA officers by pre-committing resources for inevitable court disputes, fights over production costs, etc. Thanks to UndeadFOIA’s great work, we now have a sizable library of documents about publicly-funded censorship programs (and a few private ones scooped up in official correspondence).

We’ll be releasing those, too, focusing on a few emails per batch, and publishing the rest in bulk. There’s so much material that a quick global summary here would be difficult, but suffice to say that the anti-disinformation/content control world is much bigger than I thought, enjoying cancer-like growth on campuses in particular, in the same way military research became primary sources of grants and took over universities in the fifties and sixties. Some of these FOIA documents are damning, some entertaining, some just interesting, but all of them belong to the public. We’re going to start the process of turning them over, hopefully today.

Turn on the lights and watch the roaches scatter. And stomp on any that don’t.