Subverting democracy and the fate of the Jews

 Jonathan Tobin at the Jewish World Review.

JT is on target.

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The last eight months have shaken the faith of many American Jews in the future of their community. The surge in antisemitism, especially on college campuses, has shattered any illusions we might have had about ensuring that Jew-hatred would be confined to the fever swamps of the far right and left in U.S. society. But as grievous as that threat to their safety may be — and the gravity of that peril cannot be overestimated — the Jewish community should also be pondering just how secure they can be in an America whose democratic norms and the rule of law can no longer be relied upon.

The prosecution and now the conviction of former President Donald Trump in a New York City courtroom on dubious charges and via a judicial process that is, at best, questionable, forces us to ask that question.

Breaking norms and precedents

To broach this topic and consider the consequences of a partisan prosecution of both a former president and the choice of the Republican Party for the 2024 election, one needn't be an admirer of Trump or even be planning to vote for him in November. Trump is a singular figure in American political history and has broken all sorts of precedents with his behavior and speech — before, during and after his presidency. But at this point, the same can be said of his opponents, who seem to believe that his allegedly unique awfulness not merely permits but obligates them to break rules and precedents in their efforts to stop him from governing while he was president, to prevent his re-election, and now, to thwart him from gaining a second term in 2024.

Any discussion of which side is worse in this debate can be attributed to the type of "whataboutism" that involves justifying things that shouldn't be justified. But suffice it to say that when he took office in 2017, he rejected the idea of having his administration pursue criminal charges against his opponents, in particular, his 2016 Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. In what for him was a relatively rare instance of rising above feuds, Trump rightly understood that following up on the irresponsible rhetoric about "locking her up" that was heard at his campaign rallies was the last thing the country needed, regardless of whether a partisan prosecutor could have resurrected charges about her violating the rules about the handling of classified information.

But his opponents, outraged at the thought of Trump sitting in the White House, did not reciprocate. They promoted the Russia collusion hoax — a conspiracy theory about Trump being a Russian agent for whom Moscow supposedly stole an election — for years and then impeached him on a partisan charge of withholding foreign aid to Ukraine. Silicon Valley oligarchs that control the virtual public square and major media outlets then conspired to suppress stories about corruption charges against the family of his 2020 opponent.

All of this was done because of the conviction that Trump was an opponent of democracy, though there was no evidence of any efforts on his part to behave in this manner while president. But his reaction to the 2020 vote seemed at least in part to confirm the claims that he was not prepared to accept an election loss. While he can be blamed for the events that led to the disgraceful Capitol Riot on Jan. 6, 2021, it was no insurrection, and, though he behaved recklessly and without grace, he peacefully left office that month.

It is possible that the Republican Party might have been prepared to choose an alternative to Trump in 2024, but once Democrats began efforts to confiscate his income, throw him off the ballot and then jail him on a raft of charges that were not just flimsy but politically motivated, the chances of the GOP moving on from him were over. Convinced — and not without reason — that what was going on was a campaign of lawfare, akin to the sorts of bills of attainder (in which the British parliament and crown had historically legislated against specific individuals) specifically prohibited by the U.S. Constitution, his party rallied around him.

Burning down democracy to save it

Undaunted by the idea that they were essentially burning down democracy to supposedly save it, Democratic prosecutors, cheered on by their party base, moved ahead. The most dubious of those charges was the case brought against him in a New York state court. In this instance, a prosecutor who had gained election by promising to jail Trump conjured up an unprecedented indictment involving not only murky legal theories but also a state trial on federal election law. It did involve a disgraceful (though not necessarily illegal) hush money payment by Trump to a former porn star. While designed to humiliate the ex-president, it was also conducted in such a blatantly unfair manner that it did nothing to undermine support for him. The pre-ordained guilty verdict is unlikely to be sustained in the appellate courts but, like the trial, it constitutes a form of election interference that both parties would denounce as the stuff of banana republics or President Vladimir Putin's Russian regime if it were happening elsewhere.

None of this represents a reason to vote for Trump or President Joe Biden. Still, the effort to imprison an American political leader, no matter how controversial, in this manner is a crossing of the Rubicon that could have devastating consequences going forward. At this point, it no longer matters who did what to whom first. The only thing to be considered is that Democrats are trying to imprison the leader of the GOP and that it is unlikely that Republicans will refrain from playing the same game in the future, especially if, as the polls currently indicate, they return to power in January 2025.

What does this have to do with the fate of American Jewry?

Like all Americans, Jews have a stake in the preservation of their country's democratic form of government. What made the United States a haven in the history of the Diaspora was its particular brand of constitutional democracy based on the ideal of equal justice under the law. That allowed Jews to ascend to leadership positions in virtually every sector of American society, secure in the belief that there were no religious tests to constrain them and that the rule of law protected them in a way it had never consistently done elsewhere. America wasn't a Jewish utopia, but it did provide an opportunity for freedom without requiring Jews to give up their identity, faith or interests.

On the surface, the Trump drama and the backlash it is causing may not seem to have anything to do with the Jews. But if the United States is, as it might be, on the verge of no longer being a place where we can count on the rule of law as well as one with a political culture in which the major parties will seek to jail each other's leaders, then even a cursory knowledge of Jewish history, would teach us that Jews will no longer be safe from persecution.

A surge in antisemitism

The post-Oct. 7 surge in antisemitism has already shaken confidence in the Jewish future. A form of left-wing Jew-hatred — rooted in toxic ideas like critical race theory and intersectionality — has created a new orthodoxy in academia by which Jews and Israel could be smeared and delegitimized as "white" oppressors and undeserving of rights. The willingness of mainstream corporate media outlets to normalize this new antisemitism remains deeply troubling. Their willingness to treat prejudicial canards about Zionism being a form of racism — a blatant lie that has its roots in Marxist and Soviet propaganda of the past — as something that decent people should agree to disagree about has resulted in Jews being marginalized, shunned and endangered.

If you add this factor of newly fashionable antisemitism to a toxic brew of political instability caused by the anti-Trump lawfare campaign, it's possible to imagine a scenario where the sort of Jew-hatred on college campuses spreads with unimaginable consequences. The strife at academic institutions, which is part of a broader battle over the future of America and the West, again illustrates that the Jews are always the canaries in the coal mine. We can't know where all this will end, but in an atmosphere of this sort of political strife, it isn't unreasonable to wonder about scenarios in which American Jews will be targeted in ways that seemed unimaginable not that long ago.

The only reason I can give for optimism is that I'm reasonably sure that the vast majority of Americans don't want any of this. They may be bifurcated in their politics and distrust people on the other side of the political aisle. But if there is anything that I've learned in my travels around the country in the last eight years, it is that most Americans don't want their politicians to be at each other's throats and oppose extremism of all kinds. The talk of "civil war," which was given full expression in a recent dystopian film of the same name, seems easy to imagine among the chattering and governing classes yet abhorrent to the overwhelming majority of people they hope to influence and rule.

The conviction of Trump on the most unreasonable and openly partisan charges against him may mean that there is no turning back. In spite of that, reasonable people must urge their political leaders to step back from the abyss. The surge in antisemitism is a warning to Jews and non-Jews alike that ideas essentially at war with American exceptionalism pose an immediate danger to our society. If we are now to add a new political norm whereby those who lose elections must fear prosecution, regardless of their actions, then it is entirely possible that the era when Jews could regard America as a safe place could well be over.

Laptop Deniers

 From Jonathan Turley.

JT is on target.

Know any chumps?

What is the moral of this story?

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Laptop Deniers in Delaware: The Media Shrugs as the Biden Laptop is Authenticated in Federal Court
Below is my column in Fox.com on the authentication of Hunter Biden’s laptop in the Delaware trial. The government has denounced the Russian disinformation claims as a “conspiracy theory” and put on evidence that there is no evidence of tampering with the laptop. The FBI declared the laptop to be “real” and “authentic” and the court agreed. It was introduced as evidence before many reporters who previously embraced the debunked “conspiracy theory.” As discussed below, Houdini’s elephant was just revealed on stage and most of the audience looked away.

Here is the column:

Watching the coverage this week out of Delaware was like finding oneself in a parallel universe. There were ABC, NBC, CBS, the Washington Post and other news outlets reporting matter-of-factly that the Hunter Biden laptop showed no evidence of tampering and was both real and authentic.

These are the same outlets, and some of the same reporters, who eagerly spread the false claims that the laptop was “Russian disinformation.”

Yet, what followed the testimony of FBI agent Erika Jensen was absolute crickets. There was no effort to track down the signatories of the now-debunked letter from former intelligence officials just before the election. In the letter, figures such as Leon Panetta, former CIA director in the Obama administration, claimed that the laptop had all the markings of a Russian disinformation effort by intelligence services. (Panetta continued to make the assertion even in late 2023 in pushing what the federal government is now calling a “conspiracy theory.”)

There was no attempt by the media to confront associates of the Biden campaign (including now Secretary of State Antony Blinken) who pushed a long effort to get former intelligence officials to sign a letter.

There was no attempt to question President Joe Biden, who made this false claim in the presidential election to deflect any questions about the evidence of corrupt influence peddling on the laptop.

Years ago, I wrote that the Biden campaign had pulled off the single greatest political trick in history. As I wrote back then, the key to this Houdini-esque trick was to get the media to invest in the deception like audience members called to the stage.

Houdini used to make his elephant Jennifer disappear on stage every night because he knew that the audience wanted her to disappear. They were part of the act. The Bidens made the media part of the act, and these reporters have to back the illusion or admit that they were part of the deception.

They are all laptop deniers, but they know that there are few who will call them to account for their conspiracy theory. Rather, it is social media where readers can see videos of leading media claiming that the laptop is the work of Russian intelligence.

In 2020, CBS News’ Lesley Stahl literally laughed mockingly at then-President Donald Trump when he raised the Hunter Biden laptop and what it revealed about the Bidens.

Figures like former Chief of Staff at the CIA and Department of Defense Jeremy Bash, who told MSNBC that the laptop “looked like Russian intelligence” and “walked like Russian intelligence.” He dismissed the relevance of the laptop before the election by declaring that “this effort by Rudy Giuliani and the New York Post and Steve Bannon to cook up supposed dirt on Joe Biden looks like a classic, Russian playbook disinformation campaign.”

Bash added that it made Trump an effective agent of Russian intelligence since he kept referencing the laptop: “[when] Rudy Giuliani suddenly comes forward with these mysteriously created emails, probably hacked through a Russian intelligence operation, we have to acknowledge the fact that the President of the United States is supporting, is condoning, is welcoming a Russian intelligence operation in 2020. … This is collusion in plain sight.”

Bash, like others behind the conspiracy theory, was later given an intelligence position by Biden.

The New York Times and The Washington Post both eventually verified Hunter Biden’s laptop after big tech dismissed the New York Post’s bombshell reporting during the 2020 presidential election. The Post reporting was famously censored by Twitter ahead of the 2020 election.

CNN’s Alex Marquardt told viewers, “We do know it is a very active Russian campaign.”

Indeed, the Washington Post has continued to suggest that this reporting was accurate. One of the leading purveyors of this false story was the Post’s Philip Bump, who slammed the New York Post for its now proven Hunter Biden laptop story.

In 2021, when media organizations were finally admitting that the laptop was authentic, Bump was still declaring that it was a “conspiracy theory.” Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Bump continued to suggest that “the laptop was seeded by Russian intelligence.”

After Bump had a meltdown in an interview when confronted over past false claims, I wrote a column about the litany of such false claims. The Post surprised many of us by issuing a statement that they stood by all of Bump’s reporting, including the laptop conspiracy theory. That was in August 2023.

Of course, this trick would not have been possible without the assistance of 50 former intelligence officials who were reportedly organized through Clinton campaign associates to issue the infamous letter.

These figures then continued to spread the false claim.

Former CIA Director John Brennan, one of the 50 who signed the letter, also claimed that the laptop bore “the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.”

James Clapper, a former director of National Intelligence and CNN analyst, said the laptop was “classic, textbook Soviet, Russian tradecraft at work.”

Members of Congress also repeated the false claims, including Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., who told the media not to join Giuliani as a “vehicle for Russian disinformation.”

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, insisted that the laptop was clearly “Kremlin propaganda.”

This long-debunked claim was even recently repeated in Congress by Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., who claimed that the laptop could not be authenticated even though it was just authenticated and introduced in a federal prosecution.

All of those who pushed what the U.S. government is now calling a false “conspiracy theory” have flourished in the wake of Biden’s victory. Intelligence officials like Bash received plum positions while others like Clapper were given media contracts. Schiff is expected to be elected to the Senate and is running, ironically enough, on his record with intelligence investigations of Trump.

Conversely, the New York Post and reporters like Miranda Devine have received no recognition for their work in disclosing the contents and defying attacks from politicians and media alike. While reporters were given a Pulitzer for reporting the now debunked Russian collusion story, Devine and others will never receive a Pulitzer for uncovering the true story behind the laptop.

Devine, the New York Post, and others simply refused to get in on the trick. As is often said, there are some facts simply “too good to check” in the media. The Hunter Biden laptop disappeared from the stage like Houdini’s elephant because the media wanted it to disappear.

The reappearance of the laptop in a Delaware courtroom might be awkward for most people, but not the media or intelligence officials or politicians who pushed the conspiracy theory. After all, they were all in on the trick. It was the voters who were played for chumps.

J6 Committee delayed Secret Service Driver From Refuting False Limo Story

 From Jonathan Turley.

JT is on target.

Moral of the story: Politics should not be left to politicians?

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Just the News is reporting that the January 6th Committee rebuffed repeated efforts from a Secret Service agent to refute the false story related by Cassidy Hutchinson alleging a violent episode with Trump in the presidential limousine during the Capitol riots. The J6 Committee staff repeatedly delayed the testimony of the agent to disprove the widely reported allegation.

Rep. Barry Loudermilk, the chairman of the House subcommittee that is investigating the Jan. 6 riot, has obtained a transcript of the driver’s interview that was conducted months after he first offered to testify. However, it turns out that committee staff were asked repeatedly by counsel for the agent to let him present evidence debunking the claim. Despite being reported by virtually every news outlet, the Committee slow walked his appearance as the story went viral.

The transcript of the driver’s testimony contains express objections by the lawyer that his client had offered to testify in July, August and September of 2022, but was “rebuffed” by the committee.

The account reaffirms a major criticism of the committee. After Democrats refused to allow the GOP to pick its members (as a long-accepted practice in the House), the Democrats selected two anti-Trump Republicans who did little to push for a full and fair display of witnesses and facts. The Committee was chaired by Rep. Benny Thompson, a Democrat, with Rep. Liz Cheney, as Vice Chairwoman.

Cheney and the committee members clearly knew that Hutchinson’s account was debunked by the very driver who allegedly struggled with Trump. Yet, they allowed the media to report the incident for months while rebuffing the requests of the driver. Loudermilk is quoted as saying “We’re talking about the driver of the limousine, and the head of the entire protective detail. They were brought in by the select committee to testify, but they weren’t brought in until November.”

The false account was given by Hutchinson in June of that year.

The Secret Service driver testified Trump never tried to reach for or grab the wheel of the SUV.

Notably, the transcript shows Cheney trying to explain the delay as due to the need for the Secret Service to produce all documents in the January 6 investigation.

Yet, she had no problem with making the false story public through Hutchinson before such supporting material was supplied. She also did not suggest any countervailing testimony or witnesses on the issue as the media ran with the account. Instead, Cheney publicly teased the claim that they had much more evidence of crimes against Trump, which never materialized. Cheney ended one hearing by calling for more officials to come forward and noting that Trump family members and former officials have now come forward with their own public “confessions.”

Many of us support the effort to bring greater transparency to what occurred on Jan. 6th and these hearings have offered a great deal of important new information. Indeed, it has proven gut-wrenching in the accounts of lawyers and staff trying to combat baseless theories and to protect the constitutional process.

Yet, the heavy-handed approach to framing the evidence by the Committee was both unnecessary and at times counterproductive. The strength of some of this evidence would not have been diminished by a more balanced committee or investigation.

We previously discussed the highly scripted and entirely one-sided presentation of evidence in the Committee. Indeed, witnesses were primarily used to present what Speaker Nancy Pelosi referred to as “the narrative” where their prior videotaped testimony was shown and they were given narrow follow-up questions. They at times seemed more like props than witnesses — called effectively to recite prior statements between well-crafted, impactful video clips. It had the feel of a news package, which may be the result of the decision to bring in a former ABC executive to produce the hearings.

That framing led to glaring omissions. The Committee routinely edited videotapes and crafted presentations to eliminate alternative explanations or opposing viewpoints like repeatedly editing out Trump telling his supporters to go to the Capitol peacefully.

What is striking was that offering a more balanced account, including allowing the Republicans to appoint their own members (in accordance with long-standing tradition), would not have lessened much of this stunning testimony. Yet, allowing Republicans to pick their members (yes, including Rep. Jim Jordan) would have prevented allegations of a highly choreographed show trial. It would have added credibility to the process.

If the Committee had a single member with a dissenting or even skeptical viewpoint, testimony on issues like the fight in the presidential limo could have been challenged before it was thrown before the world.

That was clearly not in the interests of the J6 Committee or the media, which eagerly spread this false account.

The Trump Conviction Presents a Target-Rich Environment for Appeal

 From Jonathan Turley.

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

JT is on target.

This Trump prosecution simply continues our Country's downtrend of respect for the Law and Freedom. This is no accident - too many voters share this lack of respect. The educational system shares much of the blame for this.

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Buzz Kill: The Trump Conviction Presents a Target-Rich Environment for Appeal.

Below is my column in the Hill on the most compelling grounds for an appeal in the Trump case after his conviction on 34 counts in Manhattan. There has been considerable criticism of the defense team and its strategy in the case, including some moves that may undermine appellate issues. However, after the instructions became public, I wrote a column that I thought the case was nearly un-winnable, even for those of us who previously saw a chance for a hung jury. Clarence Darrow would likely have lost with those instructions after the errors in the case by Judge Juan Merchan. At that point, it became a legal canned hunt. So the attention will now shift to the appellate courts. While it may be tough going initially in the New York court system for the former president, this case could well end up in the federal system and the United States Supreme Court. The thrill kill environment of last week may then dissipate as these glaring errors are presented in higher courts.

Here is the column:

The conviction of former President Donald Trump in Manhattan of 34 felonies produced citywide celebrations. This thrill-kill environment extended to the media, where former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace that it was “majestic day” and “a day to celebrate.” When I left the courthouse after watching the verdict come in, I was floored by the celebrations outside by both the public and some of the media.

The celebrants would be wise to think twice before mounting this trophy kill on the political wall. The Trump trial is a target-rich environment for an appeal, with multiple layers of reversible error, in my view.

I am less convinced by suggestions that the case could be challenged on the inability of Trump receiving a fair trial in a district that voted roughly 90 percent against him. The problem was not the jury, but the prosecutors and the judge.

Some of the most compelling problems can be divided into four groups.

The Judge

Acting Supreme Court justice Juan Merchan was handpicked for this case rather than randomly selected. This is only the latest in a litany of Trump cases where Merchan has meted out tough rulings against Trump and his organization. With any other defendant, there would likely be outrage over his selection. Merchan donated to President Biden. Even though the state bar cleared that violation based on the small size of the contribution, it later stressed that no such contributions were appropriate for a judge. We learned later that Merchan has contributed to a group to stop the GOP and Trump. Merchan’s daughter is also a Democratic organizer who has helped raise millions against Trump and the GOP and for the Democrats.

To his credit, CNN legal analyst Elie Honig has previously said that this case was legally dubious, uniquely targeted Trump and could not succeed outside of an anti-Trump district. On the judge, he recently challenged critics on the fairness of assigning a Biden donor who has earmarked donations for “resisting the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s radical right-wing legacy.” He asked “Would folks have been just fine with the judge staying on the case if he had donated a couple bucks to “Re-elect Donald Trump, MAGA forever!”? “Absolutely not.”

What is equally disturbing is the failure of Merchan to protect the rights of the defendant and what even critics admit were distinctly pro-prosecution rulings in the trial. It is not just the appearance of a conflict with Judge Merchan but a record of highly biased decisions. In watching Merchan in the courtroom, I was shocked by his rulings as at times incomprehensible and conflicted.

The Charges

A leading threshold issue will be the decision to allow Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to effectively try Trump for violations of federal law. The Justice Department declined any criminal charges against Trump under federal election law over the alleged “hush money” payments. The Federal Election Commission likewise found no basis for a civil fine. With no federal prosecution, Bragg decided to use an unprecedented criminal theory not only to zap a dead misdemeanor into life (after the expiration of the statute of limitation) but to allow him to try violations of not only federal election law but also federal taxation violations. In other words, the Justice Department would not prosecute federal violations, so Bragg effectively did it in state court.

Even when closing arguments were given, analysts on various networks admitted that they were unclear about what Bragg was alleging. The indictment claimed a violation under New York’s election law 17-152 that the falsification of business records were committed to further another crime as an unlawful means to influence the election. However, in a maddeningly circular theory, that other crime could be the falsification of business records. It could also be violations of federal election and taxation laws, which Trump was never charged with, let alone convicted of.

The Evidence

Judge Merchan allowed a torrent of immaterial and prejudicial evidence to be introduced into the trial by the prosecution. That included testimony from porn actress Stormy Daniels that went into details about having sex with Trump. She included a clear suggestion that Trump raped her. After this utterly disgraceful testimony, Merchan expressed regret but actually blamed the defense counsel, despite their prior objections to the testimony. He had previously chastised counsel for making continued objections, but now he criticized them for not continuing to make objections.

Merchan was equally conflicted in his other orders. For example, he allowed the prosecutors to introduce the plea agreement of Michael Cohen to federal election violations as well as the non-prosecution agreement of David Pecker on such violations. However, it was allowed only for the purposes of credibility and context. He issued an instruction that the jury could not consider the plea or the agreement to establish or impute the guilt of Trump.

The prosecutors then proceeded to expressly state that it was “a fact” that federal election violations occurred in this case and that Trump ordered those violations. They also solicited such statements from witnesses like Cohen. Merchan overruled the objections that the prosecutors were eviscerating his instruction. Merchan also barred the use of a legal expert, former FEC Chair Brad Smith, who was prepared to testify that such payments cannot be viewed as federal election violations and would not affect the election even if they were considered contributions, since they would not even have had to be reported until after the election.

Merchan is likely to be upheld in denying the expert, since the court retains the authority to state what the law is to the jury. The problem is that Merchan failed to do so. Worse still, he allowed the jury to hear the opposite in the repeated false claim that these payments were campaign contributions.

The Instructions

Even with all of the reversible errors, some of us held out hope that there might be a hung jury. That hope was largely smashed by Merchan in his instructions to the jury. The court largely used standard instructions in a case that was anything but standard. However, the instruction also allowed for doubt as to what the jury would ultimately find. When the verdict came in, we were still unsure what Trump was convicted of.

Merchan allowed the jury to find that the secondary offense was any of the three vaguely defined options. Even on the jury form, they did not have to specify which of the crimes were found. Under Merchan’s instruction, the jury could have split 4-4-4 on what occurred in the case. They could have seen a conspiracy to conceal a federal election violation, falsification of business records or taxation violations. We will never know. Worse yet, Trump will never know.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasized that the requirement of unanimity in criminal convictions is sacrosanct in our system. While there was unanimity that the business records were falsified to hide or further a second crime, there was no express finding of what that crime may have been. In some ways, Trump may have been fortunate by Merchan’s cavalier approach. Given that the jury convicted Trump across the board, they might have found all of three secondary crimes. The verdict form never asked for such specificity.

These are just a few of the appellate issues. There are other challenges, including but not limited to due process violations on the lack of specificity in the indictment, vagueness of the underlying state law and the lack of evidentiary foundation for key defenses like “the legitimate press function.” They are the reason why many of us view this case is likely to be reversed in either the state or federal systems. None of that is likely to dampen the thrill in this kill in Manhattan.

But if Biden wins the election before this conviction is overturned, history’s judgment will be deafening.

MDs on climate – what can go wrong?

 Medical Doctors espousing on Climate are outside their field. Here is "A Chemist in Langley" on topic.

I've seen other examples concerning firearms and economics where MDs have no idea what they are talking about.

Here is the link.

Here are some excerpts.

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Regular readers of this blog know of my ongoing disappointment with the MDs at the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE). No group has so consistently disappointed me with the variance between the reports they are capable of producing and their actual output. As I have detailed in previous blog posts, they have produced bad research on BC LNG, bad epidemiology, bad takes on projects like the Site C Dam and the Trans Mountain Expansion Project, and their biggest and ongoing bad work on natural gas flaring, fugitive emissions and the climate effects of natural gas.

Naturally this led me to approach their latest campaign: Fossil Fuel Ads Make Us Sick with a jaundiced eye. What I have determined is this campaign builds on the misinformation and bad epidemiology described above and then adds new bad angles and newer bad data. The crux of their campaign is that:

air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels is one of the leading causes of premature mortality in Canada

In a recent article in the National Observer: “Doctors know banning fossil fuel ads is a matter of life or death” they have added another questionable claim that:

fossil fuel air pollution is responsible for one in seven premature deaths in Canada

As is normal with the work by CAPE, there is always a sliver of truth in their articles and campaigns but invariably their campaign seem to be built on an incomplete (or simple misreading) of the the underlying research. That being said, now I need to support my claims with actual research. So let’s begin:

Let’s look at that claim that: “air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels is one of the leading causes of premature mortality in Canada”. Their claim links to a Health Canada report with the title: Health Impacts of Air Pollution in Canada: Estimates of morbidity and premature mortality outcomes – 2021 Report. Upon reading this report one thing becomes abundantly clear: the claim made by CAPE is not supported by (or even made in) the report.

Reading the Health Canada report I was most struck by the absence of any significant statements about fossil fuels. Specifically, the term “fossil fuels” appears only a single time in a discussion about the formation of nitrogen dioxide compounds. The report does indicate that fossil fuels are a leading cause of premature mortality in Canada.

The Health Canada report identifies “air pollution” as a major cause of premature mortality and then it goes on to discuss the causes of air pollution but in doing so it provides the data to point out that the burning of fossil fuels represents only a very minor cause of that air pollution.
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Yes, you read that right, the “Oil and Gas Industry” and “Transportation and Mobile Equipment” contributed 48,000 tonnes of PM2.5 to the national emission total…out of a total of 1,600,000 tonnes! Doing the math fossil fuels contributed approximately 3% of the total anthropogenic PM2.5. Notice that qualifier: “anthropogenic”. That is an incredibly important proviso because forest fires produce almost the same amount of PM2.5 as humans activities but are not included in the accounting in this report (“fires” in the report represents cooking fires) but absolutely affect human health.

Let them burn wood

 A good video by Tony Heller at realclimatescience.com.

TH is on target.

Here is the link.

Taiwan’s Housing Crisis: Another Government Failure

 From Alethios at substack.com

Here is the link. 

Here are some excerpts.

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The price of housing in Taipei has tripled in the last twenty years. Three-bedroom apartments out in New Taipei City routinely sell for 20x the median annual income, making housing significantly less affordable here than even San Francisco, Sydney, Vancouver, and London1. The result is a generation priced out of housing and a dramatic collapse in family creation.

Learning this was a great shock to me. Taipei seems to be covered in highrises, and with pragmatic and low-cost construction, I assumed houses would be small but reasonably affordable, as in Japan. Instead, dysfunctional urban planning has created one of the world's least affordable cities.
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Counterproductive Taxes

The government levies a range of property taxes. These taxes incentivize certain types of behaviour while disincentivising others. For example, Taiwan levies taxes on ‘amusement places’ like nightclubs, theatres, music venues, magic shows, and dance halls. The tax explains Taipei’s relative lack of these facilities, and also the abundance of bars, cafes, restaurants, and other gathering places that escape having to pay the tax.

The key taxes affecting the supply of residential property in Taiwan are land taxes, housing taxes, and taxes on the sale of housing.

When tax is charged on the value of the land (rather than what sits above it) it encourages landowners to make valuable investments in that site. An alternative approach is to tax the total ‘capital value’ of the property. This encourages the opposite - land banking of vacant lots, and smaller investments than otherwise to minimise the tax burden.

Taiwan’s approach is a mix of the two: a broad-based land value tax that generally encourages efficient use of land, but combined with a housing value tax that discourages housing in particular and allows for a lower land value tax rate. Further, an exemption is made in the land tax law for parking lots, agricultural warehouses, and cram schools9. In a country crying out for more housing, the net result of these laws is that housing is discouraged while vast swathes of premium real estate are wasted on surface parking lots and low-value commercial buildings.

It gets worse! An appropriately titled ‘special privileged tax rate’ for housing taxes is offered for owner-occupied properties. This deduction ranges from 66% to an 80% discount in New Taipei City. In terms of their contribution to the upkeep of the city, this effectively means those lucky enough to own their own home are subsidised by everybody else.

Taiwan also places a range of taxes on the creation of property. New property deeds are taxed at 4% of the value of the property. Partition of an existing property is charged 2% of the combined value. These taxes discourage capital investment in property (relative to other forms of investment like overseas capital markets) and discourage partition of property to enable more people to live in a given area of land.

In another misguided attempt to limit rising sales prices, housing sales are taxed at 6%. With supply/demand unaddressed, this only serves to reduce housing mobility. Instead of downsizing to a smaller apartment once the kids leave home, freeing up the home for a young family, these taxes encourage people to stay on, only to eventually hand the property down to their children once they’re too old to raise a family of their own.

Finally, the government levies a ‘Land Value Increment Tax’, essentially a capital gains tax on property, further discouraging people to sell, reduced investment in property relative to other investment vehicles untaxed in this way (e.g. discouraging badly needed refurbishment of older properties). However, it does allow the city government to capture some of the heightened property values caused by their regulatory regime.

The net effect of these taxes is to create a split society. Those who own property enjoy a range of special tax privileges (especially if they never sell), while the younger and less well-off are squeezed as more of society’s paper wealth becomes locked up in housing.

A great optical illusion

 

Restoring sight is possible now with optogenetics.

 Andrew Zaleski at the Jewish World Review

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As a child, Max Hodak learned to develop film in a darkroom with his grandfather who was almost blind.

Hodak's grandfather had retinitis pigmentosa, a congenital disease that affects one out of every 5,000 people - more than 2 million worldwide. Most people with the condition are born with their sight intact. Over time they lose peripheral vision first, then central vision, and finally their sight, sometimes as early as middle age.

"He clearly had this career and was a photographer, and I saw that," Hodak said of his grandfather, who became an aerospace engineer and briefly worked on heat shields for spacecraft. "But most of my memories as a kid was that he was pretty profoundly blind."

Possible solutions, though, are within reach. Science, a start-up company in Alameda, Calif., has designed a visual prosthesis called the Science Eye which could restore vision, albeit in a limited form, in people with retinitis pigmentosa. Hodak, its CEO, co-founded the startup after a stint at Elon Musk's company Neuralink. Other companies such as Paris-based biotechnology company GenSight Biologics and Bionic Sight in New York are also experimenting with methods to restore sight.

All are basing their work on a research tool in neuroscience called optogenetics, a form of gene therapy that delivers proteins called opsins via injection into the eye to boost the light sensitivity of cells in the retina, the layer of tissue at the rear of the eyeball.

Therapeutic optogenetic therapy for vision restoration certainly has promise, according to Anand Swaroop, a senior investigator at the National Eye Institute in Bethesda, Md., who has worked on inherited retinal degeneration for close to four decades. But there's still room for improvement.

"At least at this stage, it seems to be very good in cases where someone is completely blind," Swaroop said. "You should be able to find your way around. You're not going to bump into things, which is great. But you're not going to be distinguishing many different features."

• How optogenetics work

In normal vision, light enters the eye through the lens and forms an image on the retina. The retina itself is composed of several different types of cells, mainly photoreceptors. Photoreceptors are light-sensing cells shaped like rods and cones that contain opsins. Normally, photoreceptors convert light into electrical signals that travel to the retina's ganglion cells, which in turn transmit those electrical signals via the optic nerve into the brain. That's how you're reading the words on this page right now.

In retinitis pigmentosa, the rods and cones in the photoreceptors break down and ultimately die. First the peripheral vision goes, and people develop tunnel vision: They have to turn their whole head just to view the world around them. Many people with tunnel vision require a cane to assist in navigating the world (and to avoid bumping into things, like furniture). Blindness follows not long after. The breakdown of the photoreceptors, however, doesn't diminish the brain's ability to process electrical signals - and, critically, the ganglion cells remain intact.

Optogenetics seeks to circumvent the usual choreography by delivering opsin proteins directly to the ganglion cells, meaning they can be stimulated by light in order to send signals to the brain.

The Science Eye contains two elements. The first is an implant composed of a wireless power coil and an ultrathin, flexible micro-LED array that's applied directly over the retina - surgery that's more extensive compared to other eye procedures like repairing cataracts. According to Hodak, the array - prototypes of which are being tested in rabbits - provides eight times the resolution of an iPhone screen.

The second element is a pair of frameless glasses, similar in size and shape to regular prescription glasses, that contain miniature infrared cameras and inductive power coils.

Put it all together and the process looks like this:

Step 1

Inject opsins into the ganglion cells of the eye.

Step 2

Install the implant.

Step 3

The glasses activate the modified ganglion cells by wirelessly communicating information from the visual world; in turn, the new light-sensitive ganglion cells transmit that information through the optic nerve to the brain.

The eye isn't receiving an image anymore, but rather digital information. And the results?

"You should be able to walk across town to buy a sandwich without being hit by a car," Hodak said.

• More research into retinitis pigmentosa

Other companies are already helping to bring back vision in people with retinitis pigmentosa.

GenSight Biologics uses an optogenetics-plus-glasses approach to amplify light that genetically edited ganglion cells can decode. According to clinical trial results published in 2021 in the journal Nature Medicine, GenSight's method was able to help in locating objects on a table. That patient, a 58-year-old man, was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa at age 18.

Bionic Sight has firsthand experience with patients beginning to make distinctions between features. Its method involves a gene-therapy vector that transfers an opsin called Chronos via injection into the eyes of their patients to boost the light sensitivity of intact ganglion cells. For those with tunnel vision, the injection of the opsin seems to be enough.

For patients with more impaired vision, Bionic Sight pairs the optogenetic therapy with a pair of goggles containing a camera and a neurocoding device: The camera takes in images and converts them to code, which is then sent out as light pulses to activate the opsin in the genetically modified ganglion cells. So far Bionic Sight has treated 13 people, ranging from the very blind to patients with tunnel vision.

"It's really significantly helping," said Sheila Nirenberg, founder of Bionic Sight as well as a professor of computational neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medical College.

Consider the large letter "E" on the eye chart you might examine during a visit to the doctor's office. The visual acuity of a person who is nearly blind is 20/200: What someone with 20/20 vision is able to see at 200 feet away is only visible at 20 feet away to someone who is nearly blind.

Many of her patients with retinitis pigmentosa, Nirenberg said, can't see a letter like the big "E" from just two feet away. But one patient whose visual acuity was 20/150 - he had to stand 20 feet away from the chart in order to see the letters, whereas a normally-sighted person could stand 150 feet away and see the same letters - is now down to 20/40. Another patient was unable to distinguish the suits on playing cards. After receiving the opsin, the patient was not only able to tell the difference between clubs and diamonds, for instance, but he was also able to notice the differences in color.

Another challenge had him trying to spot differences between plastic fruits arranged in front of him. He was able to spot the stem of the apple to tell it apart from oranges and peaches. Finally, he was asked to walk a maze with black squares on the bottom - and made it through successfully.

"I can't explain to you how thrilling it is," Nirenberg said. "It's very hopeful."

One form of gene therapy for treating blindness has been available for over five years. Luxturna, a prescription approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2017, is for children and adults with a rare genetic mutation that impacts the retinal pigment epithelium, the membrane at the back of the retina on which the photoreceptors sit. The prescription adds in a functional version of the gene to create an epithelium more favorable to the photoreceptors.

"It might slow the progression of the disease," Hodak said. "But it does not regenerate any loss."

That, ultimately, is the goal of Science Eye. Clinical trials should begin, Hodak said, sometime in the next 18 months. The company is also looking at ways to use Science Eye to help people with dry age-related macular degeneration, which unfolds slightly differently compared with retinitis pigmentosa: Patients lose central, high-resolution vision first, and then their peripheral vision.

There are milestones to cross for every company using optogenetics to help people improve their eyesight. More patients enrolled in clinical trials should help refine both opsin delivery and the ability to improve light sensitivity in retinal cells. But Hodak predicts that over the next five years, there will be products on the market for people like his grandfather.

"You always have to be really careful with what you say to patients because they're holding on for any piece of hope," Hodak said. "But there's a lot of things on the horizon that are converging. It's not at a point where any one thing will fail and derail the whole field. Real progress is coming."

George Will at the Washington Post on universities’ prestige

 GW is on target.

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The leakage of universities’ prestige amid protests is most welcome

Do not emulate the Chicago politician who said he would not “cast asparagus” at opponents. Do cast aspersions at “elite” (just a synonym for “expensive”) institutions of what is still called, despite an ocean of contrary evidence, higher (than what?) education.

Parents paying $89,000 for a child’s year at Columbia University might be nonplussed about the university’s explanation of its recourse to remote learning: “Safety is our highest priority.” Clearly education is not.

Otherwise, the university, instead of flinching from firm measures to make the campus conducive to learning, would have expelled all students participating in the antisemitic encampment that panicked Columbia into prioritizing “safety.” Imagine how stern the institutional responses would be, nationwide, if the antisemitic and anti-American disruptors of education were violating really important norms by, say, using inappropriate pronouns.

Given academia’s nearly monochrome culture, most universities have many infantile adults. These are faculty members who have glided from kindergarten through postdoctoral fellowships (these often support surplus PhDs, who are being manufactured faster than the academic job market can absorb them). To such professors, the 99.9 percent of the world adjacent to campuses is as foreign as Mongolia.

Still, suppose you want to hire a recent college graduate for your business. Suppose one of your applicants attended Harvard while it was becoming an incubator of antisemitic agitations. And suppose the other applicant attended a large public university. The public university graduate is at least marginally less apt to be enthusiastic about Hamas, which aspires to complete the Holocaust.

Or suppose you seek a young doctor to join your medical practice. You might reasonably hesitate before hiring someone from UCLA’s medical school. There a recent pro-Hamas guest lecturer in a mandatory course on “Structural Racism and Health Equity” led students in a “Free Palestine” chant, directed them to get on their knees and touch the floor in a “prayer” to “mama earth,” and warned the future doctors against the “crapitalist lie” of “private property.”

The leakage of prestige from politicized universities is overdue and wholesome. Those schools that once were preeminent and now are punchlines might soon have a bruising rendezvous with real politics, which, unlike the sandbox radicalism of campus playgrounds, can be serious.

Government policies have encouraged the growth of universities’ endowments and funded their research, because institutions of higher education have hitherto been considered valuable contributors to the nation’s welfare. These policies can be changed if policymakers reassess the merits of an education sector that is hospitable to vicious extremism and adversarial toward U.S. national values. Wealthy private universities, echoing progressive clamors for more aggressive taxing of the rich, should not be surprised or scandalized if government heeds the clamors by turning its covetous gaze toward their endowments.

Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute has an explanation of the self-satisfied adolescents engaged in histrionic campus politics: Their clenched fists indicate that they have too much time on their hands. Hess notes that a recent survey of four-year college students found that 64 percent claim to put “a lot of effort” into school work. But fewer than a third of these toilers in the academic salt mines say they devote even two hours a day to studying.

In 1961, full-time students studied an average of about 40 hours per week; by 2003, the figure was 27 hours. It is likely fewer two decades later. Time-use data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that, from 2003 to 2014, full-time college students devoted an average of 2.8 hours a day to classroom instruction, homework and other educational activities.

Unsurprisingly, the decline of studiousness has coincided with rampant grade inflation. At Yale in the 2022-2023 academic year, only prodigies of underachievement managed to miss the bounty: Almost 80 percent of grades were A’s or A-minuses.

The decline in students’ academic efforts has also coincided with the rise of their performative politics. “Activism” — an interestingly contentless category — can fill the vacuums in the lives of bored students who are unchallenged by unexacting academic standards and who have been indoctrinated by teachers to think highly of themselves as political moralists.

Back at Columbia (which, when it was King’s College, gave the nation Alexander Hamilton), a revolutionary evicted from university housing is suffering for his idealism. The 27-year-old student in the School of Social Work says he now must find off-campus housing that will accommodate his emotional support rabbit.