RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
November 26 to December 2, 2023 In RealClearInvestigations, Vince Bielski reports on a gathering storm in American public education: looming closures of many schools with many empty classrooms. The reality of hollowed-out districts, many of them urban, is emerging only now because it was masked by a historic windfall of federal pandemic education funding -- now expiring. The harm from these half-empty schools is inflicted directly on all students in a district. Without enough per-pupil state funding to cover their costs, they require financial subsidies to remain open and must force district-wide cutbacks in academic programs. In a groundswell of pressure, parents are protesting the closings. So are teachers. So are racial justice advocates, framing the issue as a matter of equality rather than wasteful spending. Some families resist switching to schools farther away. Others have sentimental ties to imperiled neighborhood schools going back generations. But many parents have had it with public schools. With test scores in decline since 2012, families are voting with their feet for safer and more nurturing environments at charters, micro, and home schools. In RealClearInvestigations, Ben Weingarten reports that the young American hostage released by Hamas during its ongoing ceasefire with Israel is a great-niece of a major Democratic party donor who paid handsomely for Hunter Biden’s art and won an appointment to a plum cultural post from President Biden: Elizabeth Hirsh Naftali's Biden connections went all but unmentioned as she advocated in a series of nationally televised interviews for the release of her 4-year-old grandniece, Abigail Mor Idan, a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen whose parents were murdered by marauding jihadists in southern Israel on Oct. 7. A senior administration official told RealClearInvestigations that in negotiations on the Israel-Hamas prisoner swap of recent days, “U.S. officials insisted that Abigail be included on an early list as well as the other two Americans in this category [of women and children].” President Biden "raised Abigail in nearly all of his phone calls with counterparts as well as with the Amir of Qatar on Saturday,” the official said. GOP House members have been investigating whether Hirsh Naftali’s shelling out for presidential son Hunter's pricey art -- pegged at up to $500,000 per painting -- was a quid pro quo for her appointment by the President to the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad. Even as they hail the girl's release, some Biden critics say the episode is another example of how his family’s financial dealings cast a shadow over his official actions by suggesting conflicts of interest. Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books NYC Service Cuts Due to Border Laxity, RCI
NYC Wrongful Convictions Cost $87M, RCI
Another $3.8B for Hudson Train Tunnel, RCI
Taking Shirts Off the Taxpayers' Backs, RCI
NY Judges Make $83K Over Avg. Governor, RCI Biden, Trump and the Beltway Files Show How Biden Admin Stifled Vax Info on YouTube, Daily Caller
Special Counsel Sought Info on Fans of Trump Tweets, Federalist
'Erratic' $40K Money Trail Traced From China to Biden's Account, Daily Mail
White House Accesses Trillions of Phone Records, Wired
The Biden-Backed Electric Bus Maker That Went Bust, Federalist
Trump Pardon for Drug Dealer Linked to the Kushners, New York Times
Hamas Backer Hosted Fundraiser for Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Daily Mail Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Israeli officials obtained Hamas’ battle plan for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it happened, documents, emails and interviews show. But Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out. The approximately 40-page document, which Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people: The translated document, which was reviewed by The New York Times, did not set a date for the attack, but described a methodical assault designed to overwhelm the fortifications around the Gaza Strip, take over Israeli cities and storm key military bases, including a division headquarters. Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision. The document called for a barrage of rockets at the outset of the attack, drones to knock out the security cameras and automated machine guns along the border, and gunmen to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, on motorcycles and on foot – all of which happened Oct. 7. A whistleblower has come forward with an explosive new trove of documents that describe an “anti-disinformation” effort that worked with the U.S. and British governments to suppress speech. The Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTIL, officially began as the volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans; but its tactics over time appear to have been absorbed into multiple official projects, including those of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This article, by journalists who broke the "Twitter Files" story about government censorship efforts on the social media platform, says the documents offer a comprehensive picture of the birth of the Censorship Industrial Complex: The whistleblower's documents describe everything from the genesis of modern digital censorship programs to the role of the military and intelligence agencies, partnerships with civil society organizations and commercial media, and the use of sock puppet accounts and other offensive techniques. "Lock your shit down," explains one document about creating "your spy disguise.” Another explains that while such activities overseas are "typically" done by "the CIA and NSA and the Department of Defense," censorship efforts "against Americans" have to be done using private partners because the government doesn't have the "legal authority." The whistleblower alleges that a leader of CTI League, a “former” British intelligence analyst, was “in the room” at the Obama White House in 2017 when she received the instructions to create a counter-disinformation project to stop a "repeat of 2016." U.S. soldiers balance launch tubes on their shoulders just a few inches from the head, then take aim and fire with rockets flying at 500 miles an hour. Each launch sends a shock wave whipping through every cell in the operator’s brain. For generations, this article reports, the military assumed that this kind of blast exposure was safe, even as evidence mounted that repetitive blasts may do serious and lasting harm: In recent years, Congress, pressed by veterans who were exposed to these shock waves, has ordered the military to set safety limits and start tracking troops’ exposure. In response, the Pentagon created a sprawling Warfighter Brain Health Initiative to study the issue, gather data and propose corrective strategies. And last year, for the first time, it set a threshold above which a weapon blast is considered hazardous. Despite the order, though, things have hardly changed on the ground. Training continues largely as it did before. Troops say they see little being done to limit or track blast exposure. And weapons like shoulder-fired rockets that are known to deliver a shock wave well above the safety threshold are still in wide use. The article reports that the disconnect fits a pattern that has been repeated for more than a decade: Top leaders talk of the importance of protecting troops’ brains, but the military fails to take practical steps to ensure safety. U.S. military outposts in Iraq and Syria are plagued by thefts of weapons and equipment, including guided-missile launch systems and drones, according to exclusive documents obtained by The Intercept. Experts say the arms have been used primarily as a check against Iran since the October outbreak of the conflict between Israel and Hamas. America's bases have come under regular rocket and drone attacks as part of an undeclared war between the U.S. and Iran and its surrogate militias. The criminal investigation documents obtained by The Intercept demonstrate that the U.S. cannot even secure its equipment, much less protect its troops: In February, military investigators were notified that 13 commercial drones, valued at about $162,500, were stolen from a U.S. facility in Erbil, Iraq, sometime last year. The agents identified no suspects, and no leads are mentioned in the file. A separate investigation discovered that “multiple sensitive weapons and equipment” including targeting sight and launcher units for Javelin missiles – a shoulder-fired guided missile that locks on its targets – were stolen at or en route to Forward Operating Base Union III in Baghdad, Iraq. The loss to the U.S. government was estimated at almost $480,000. Investigators found that “Iraqi criminal organizations and militia groups target convoys and containers for weapons and equipment,” the document stated. “Further there have been systemic issues with U.S. containers being pilfered by these groups and local nationals outside of [Operating Base] Union III [in Baghdad], due to the lack of security.” Instagram’s Reels video service fed a steady stream of salacious material to accounts set up by the Wall Street Journal to follow only young gymnasts, cheerleaders and other teen and preteen influencers active on the platform: The Journal set up the test accounts after observing that the thousands of followers of such young people’s accounts often include large numbers of adult men, and that many of the accounts who followed those children also had demonstrated interest in sex content related to both children and adults. The Journal also tested what the algorithm would recommend after its accounts followed some of those users as well, which produced more-disturbing content interspersed with ads. In a stream of videos recommended by Instagram, an ad for the dating app Bumble appeared between a video of someone stroking the face of a life-size latex doll and a video of a young girl with a digitally obscured face lifting up her shirt to expose her midriff. In another, a Pizza Hut commercial followed a video of a man lying on a bed with his arm around what the caption said was a 10-year-old girl. The company said the Journal’s tests produced a manufactured experience that doesn’t represent what billions of users see. The Journal notes, however, that it reported in June that algorithms run by Meta, which owns both Facebook and Instagram, connect large communities of users interested in pedophilic content. The Meta spokesman said a task force set up after the Journal’s article has expanded its automated systems for detecting users who behave suspiciously, taking down tens of thousands of such accounts each month. The company also is participating in a new industry coalition to share signs of potential child exploitation. | 