RealClearInvestigations'
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January 21 to January 27, 2024 In RealClearInvestigations and on Substack, Lee Fang reports on Logically.AI, a British anti-misinformation firm with global reach and DNA from U.S. intelligence that is now a prime illustration of the growing sophistication of often indirect official clampdowns on disfavored speech: Logically.AI is fulfilling the aim of one of its top execs, Brian Murphy, ex-U.S. intelligence official, who envisions a vast public-private partnership to shape social media content. Murphy says government has an “ethical responsibility” to rein in harmful speech without being so “out in front” that the effort runs afoul of the Constitution. The use of Logically.AI’s technology in Britain and Canada has raised concerns as it seeks a stronger foothold in the United States. Logically.AI’s marketing materials suggest it saw its role during the pandemic in Britain as reaching well beyond fact-checking and veering into suppressing dissent. During 2021 elections in the U.K., Logically.AI monitored up to “one million pieces of harmful content,” according to a document reviewed by RealClearInvestigations. In 2022, Logically.AI helped Canadian law enforcement target the trucker-led “Freedom Convoy” against COVID-19 mandates. The company floated theories that the truckers were “likely influenced by foreign adversaries.” It is experimenting with AI-powered “natural language” bots that produce, in real-time, original arguments against “misinformation.” It has piloted programs for the Chicago police to use AI to analyze local rap music and predict violence. Questions swirl about the firm as it angles for a prominent role in the 2024 American presidential election. In RealClearInvestigations, Paul Sperry explores another apparent "sweetheart deal" negotiated by President Biden’s Justice Department: Charles "Chaz" Littlejohn, who stole confidential tax records of Donald Trump and some 7,500 other wealthy Americans, could face little or no jail time when he's sentenced next week. Prosecutors allowed the Booz Allen contractor to plead guilty to a single charge, though there are so many victims that the DOJ has sought permission notify victims online. Against the backdrop of prosecutions of Donald Trump and the DoJ's hesitant pursuit of Hunter Biden and alleged Biden family corruption, Littlejohn’s plea raises new questions about the politicization of justice. Littlejohn’s defense argues for leniency in part because he leaked to "reputable news organizations – the New York Times and ProPublica.” Their dozens of stories based on the tax files led to Democratic calls for more Trump investigations and taxes on the wealthy. The invasions of privacy are ongoing: Neither the Times nor ProPublica has returned the stolen returns. The defense divulged that a Times reporter suggested common cause with Littlejohn in writing to coax him to act: "because a certain person won’t disclose information that people absolutely need to see and have for decades. I appreciate you share this concern. … ” Democrat-connected Booz Allen has history of security problems, including the NSA leak of its contractor Edward Snowden. The Washington media have suppressed details about the case, describing Littlejohn only as an “IRS contractor” while telling their readers that his employer "wasn’t identified.” In RealClearInvestigations, Vince Bielski reports that as vast federal COVID aid to public schools expires, students are far from regaining the academic ground they lost during the pandemic, as administrators leave in place lower standards to allow students to get good grades and graduate even though they have learned much less. The lowered standards are driven by fears of a spike in dropout rates, especially among blacks and Latinos. They create the impression that schools have bounced back, but experts say that’s the wrong signal to send, creating complacency when urgency is needed. Why did massive federal funding fail to help students catch up? One answer: Many districts, facing staff shortages and high absenteeism, didn’t have the bandwidth to help students recover. But other districts didn’t see learning loss as a top priority. It was easier to spend the money on pay raises for staff and upgrading buildings. Students evidently have been losing more ground even after returning to classrooms, lacking the skills to keep up with a curriculum that keeps advancing. It’s as if many of the nation's 50 million public school students have fallen backward to a time before standards and accountability mattered very much. Tulane professor: “COVID triggered the lowering of standards, but there have been other concerns like equity in education and mental health that make it hard for districts to go back to pre-pandemic standards.” Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books 'Sue and Settle' Spending Explodes, RCI
$850M to New Buffalo Bills Stadium, RCI
COVID Loans Rack Up $257M in Losses, RCI
9/11 Dooms Pentagon's War on Spending, RCI
Postal EVs' Nothing-Special Delivery, RCI Biden, Trump and the Beltway GOP Says Jan. 6 Committee Deleted 117 ‘Critical' Files, Fox News
Ariz.: Audio Has GOP Honcho Trying to Bribe Kari Lake Not to Run, Daily Mail
Ariz. Votes Without Citizenship Proof Have 'Exploded', Federalist
NH: Fake Biden Robocall Tells Dems Not to Vote, NBC
Biden Border Crisis Set Historic Record in December, Daily Mail
DHS Both Warned of '20 Mail Ballots and Censored Skeptics, Just the News
Biden Judicial Nominee Helped Lead Anti-Police Nonprofit, Free Beacon
Two NC Counties Leave 'Zuckbucks’ Alliance, Just the News Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Public electric vehicles have a bad reputation – for good reason, this article reports. Those operated by companies in California, including ChargePoint, Electrify America, Blink and EVgo, don't work 20% to 30% of the time. One Oakland man told the Los Angeles Times that he decided against buying an EV after trying to find charging stations while testing driving a Mustang Mach-E. “I couldn’t count on finding a charger that’s functional or that doesn’t have a line of cars waiting because only one of four chargers is working,” Doug McCune said. “If I was comfortable with the charger situation, I would have bought the Mach-E.” He chose a Volvo plug-in hybrid instead. Quote: How did the state-subsidized public charger system end up so problematic? California's policies are at least partly to blame. The state chose not to require that charger companies meet performance standards as it doled out $1 billion in subsidies, grants and other assistance ... with billions more on the way. The article suggests that all the problems can be fixed with more regulation. If the government would just clamp down on industry everything will work out. But, as John Murawski reported for RCI, the challenges are much deeper: The sheer scale of a charging infrastructure means recruiting retailers and businesses to install and maintain chargers that are expected to lose money in the near future, with some likely to be written off as economic losses. In California, which is slated to ban sales of new gasoline-powered cars in just 12 years, government estimates indicate the state may need to install at least 20 electric chargers for every gas pump now in service to create a reliable, seamless network. Massive public subsidies will be a crucial part of this effort because private industry is not willing to take the financial risks of betting on an uncertain future. Government subsidies mean complying with recordkeeping and reporting mandates and making sure chargers are online 97% of the time, while bearing the financial risk of vandalism, mechanical malfunctions, daily fluctuations in electricity pricing, and cashflow unpredictability. In 2017, California detectives working a cold case got an idea: What if they ran DNA collected at the murder scene, for which no match had been found, through some cutting-edge technology, to see if it could be used to determine what the suspect might have looked like? The image Parabon NanoLabs produced, called a Snapshot Phenotype Report, wasn’t a photograph. It was a 3D rendering that bridges the uncanny valley between reality and science fiction; a representation of how the company’s algorithm predicted a person could look given genetic attributes found in the DNA sample. … In a controversial 2017 decision, the department published the predicted face in an attempt to solicit tips from the public. Then, in 2020, one of the detectives did something civil liberties experts say is even more problematic – and a violation of Parabon NanoLabs’ terms of service: He asked to have the rendering run through facial recognition software. For facial recognition experts and privacy advocates, the East Bay detective’s request, while dystopian, was also entirely predictable. It emphasizes, this article reports, the ways that, without oversight, law enforcement is able to mix and match technologies in unintended ways, using untested algorithms to single out suspects based on unknowable criteria. Lax laws and a ready supply led the National Drug Helpline to identify Oregon in 2021 as the state with America’s worst drug problems. The problem appears to be getting worse. The state’s largest city, Portland, recorded 137 fatal overdoses in the first half of 2023, compared with 2022’s 12-month total of 155. For all the havoc that Portland’s soft-on-crime policies and burgeoning homeless population have visited on the city, Naomi Schaefer Riley reports, few observers have noted their impact on young children. When abused or neglected, the kids are often hidden by their addict parents from other adults: Within a single ten-day period, three children under the age of four had overdosed and died after coming into contact with what the police said was fentanyl, “left unsecured in their homes.” Nonfatal overdoses also seem to be rising among kids, at least according to one social worker at a local hospital. … It’s not just the pills. Fentanyl fumes can harm children (and adults), as can touching the foil where it gets cooked. Kevin Dahlgren, who does homeless outreach in Portland, recently encountered a mother and her young child playing with fentanyl foil. “I told her not to let him play with that. It’s no different from ‘don’t play with a needle.’ ” Terrance Moses, founder of the homeless-outreach group Neighbors Helping Neighbors PDX, says that he has to wash his clothes after entering the homeless encampments—the fumes stay on you. In certain camps, he dons a hazmat suit. Although this news article is reported with clear disdain for its subject, it does mine “thousands of documents” secured by the Times to provide a good overview of how some conservatives came together to oppose the rise of diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the country. The details are not surprising – a small group saw DEI as dangerous, then communicated among themselves to sharpen their ideas, organize their efforts and raise money to support their work: Centered at the Claremont Institute, a California-based think tank with close ties to the Trump movement and to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, the group coalesced roughly three years ago around a sweeping ambition: to strike a killing blow against “the leftist social justice revolution” by eliminating “social justice education” from American schools. The documents – grant proposals, budgets, draft reports and correspondence, obtained through public-records requests – show how the activists formed a loose network of think tanks, political groups and Republican operatives in at least a dozen states. They sought funding from a range of right-leaning philanthropies and family foundations, and from one of the largest individual donors to Republican campaigns in the country. They exchanged model legislation, published a slew of public reports and coordinated with other conservative advocacy groups in states like Alabama, Maine, Tennessee and Texas. The article is most useful for identifying many of the key players in the anti-DEI movement – including the Claremont Institute, the Maine Policy Institute, the Jack Miller Family Foundation, the Taube Family Foundation and the Searle Freedom Trust. The article also suggests that some anti-DEI leaders are uncomfortable with homosexuality. If Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were alive today, would they be stealing Amazon packages? Probably, this article suggests. The vast number of packages transported across the country have moved criminal descendants of Wild West outlaws to revive one of the most mythic American crimes, the train heist: Some 20 million containers move through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach every year, including about 35 percent of all the imports into the United States from Asia. Once these steel boxes leave the relative security of a ship at port, they are loaded onto trains and trucks – and then things start disappearing. The Los Angeles basin is the country’s undisputed capital of cargo theft, the region with the most reported incidents of stuff stolen from trains and trucks and those interstitial spaces in the supply chain, like rail yards, warehouses, truck stops and parking lots. Cases of reported cargo theft in the United States have nearly doubled since 2019 … The most extreme type of modern train theft occurs when thieves cut the air-compression brake hoses that run between train cars, thereby triggering an emergency braking system. When that happens, the engineer stays in the cab and the conductor walks the length of the stopped train, trying to locate the source of the problem. (Thieves can also stop a train by decoupling some of its cars.) Of course, if a train is miles long, that walk takes a while. In the meantime, the pilferers unload. While noting that piracy is an age-old occupation, this article reports that ... ... the need to get packages to consumers quickly has reshaped the infrastructural landscape, changing the way freight moves around the world, through more warehouses, distribution centers, modes of transport, trucks, trains, planes, delivery drivers. This ever-quickening tangle has opened new vulnerabilities to be exploited by supply-chain thieves. | 