ibfoltz

[GBC @GBC_Press]

American actor Wallace Shawn:

"Hitler was kind enough to try to keep this secret. The Israelis are almost proud of it and aren't keeping it a secret, and this is diabolically evil. It couldn't be worse."

[Rania @umyaznemo]

Hala Ghorani schools the ignorant bigot Nancy Mace on head covering in religions. If I were in @NancyMace 's shoes, I'd want the earth to open and swallow me whole!

[GenXGirl @GenXGirl1994]

Sunday Morning “Did You Know”

Did you know Israeli scholar Oded Yinon wrote “A strategy for Israel” for the World Zionist Organization in the 1980s which outlined divide and conquer wars in the Middle East for Israel control?

And did you know Yinon’s strategy inspired “A Clean Break” (7-country strategy for Israel dominance) written by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser in 1996 while they were high ranking members of the Israel government under Netanyahu?

And finally, did you know Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser became high ranking members of the Bush administration in 2002 when the 9/11 narrative changed to blame Iraq for 9/11 in the lead up to the invasion in 2003?

[Abier @abierkhatib]

This Jewish kid is calling out the lies pushed on Jewish kids during those so-called Birthright trips.

Luckily, Jacob made it out of the brainwashing machine and is now one of the loudest voices against Zionism.

[The Heartlands Tribune @HeartlandsTrib]

A barrister quoted twelve words from a plaque at the Old Bailey. Seven months, three courts and four judges later, he faces two years in prison for it.

Rajiv Menon KC told a jury about the Old Bailey plaque that says: "The Right of Juries to give their Verdict according to their Convictions."

That's it. That's the crime.

His client was on trial for activism. The judge blocked evidence about why she did it. So Menon reminded the jury of their historic right to follow their conscience.

Now he's in court on Tuesday facing prison.

Here's the twist: the plaque commemorates a 1670 ruling that said NO judge can punish a jury for its verdict. The man who won that case? William Penn - who later founded Pennsylvania and wrote that right into the US Constitution.

Britain gave the world jury independence. Now it's prosecuting a lawyer for mentioning it.

Barristers are already changing their closing speeches because they're scared.

Three courts. Four judges. Seven months. All to silence a man who read twelve words off a wall.

If juries can't follow their conscience, what's the point of having them at all?

🔗 Read the full piece 👉: https://t.co/wTQBsmTxzP

What do you think? Is this justice? 👇

@DefendOurJuries @DefendourLawyer

[Zachary Foster @_ZachFoster]

A brilliant debunking of the question "does Israel have a right to exist" from @thematthewcooke. full clip: https://t.co/ryiPbMVG5t

[Mats Nilsson @mazzenilsson]

Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt's 1948 letter to the New York Times: They saw the creation of a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine at the expense of its indigenous Muslim and Christian population as a profound injustice and moral catastrophe.

Einstein and the other signatories explicitly compared Begin’s Herut (Freedom Party), born from the Irgun, to Nazis and Fascists, warning that their ideology of racial superiority and violent ethnic nationalism posed a grave danger to the moral and political future of the new state.

- - -
Full text of Einstein and Hannah Arendt's letter to the New York Times:
TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES
December 2, 1948
Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our time is the emergence in the newly created State of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.
The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections and to cement political ties with Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world could condone, even by silence, the appearance of such a party in Israel.
Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other fascist parties, they have been used to break strikes, and they have encouraged demoralization among labor. In their actions they have been marked by cruelty and contempt for human life.
During the recent past, they have systematically terrorized the Arab population, attacked Jewish settlements, and sabotaged the rescue of displaced Jews from Europe.
A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war and had even fought off Arab bands that wanted to use it as their base. On April 9 (1948), terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants — 240 men, women, and children — and kept a few of them alive to parade through the streets of Jerusalem.
Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent an apology to King Abdullah of Transjordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of it, widely publicized it, and invited foreign correspondents to view the corpses and the ravaged village.
The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party. Within the Jewish community they have attempted to institute a reign of terror, have beaten up Jews who opposed them, and have, by gangster methods, terrorized the population.
It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world could condone, even by silence, the appearance of such a party in Israel.
The undersigned therefore take this means of publicly presenting a warning to the American people concerning a danger to be found in the Freedom Party in Israel, a danger to which the leadership of Menachem Begin gives the greatest emphasis.
(Signed):
Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook, Rabbi Jessurun Cardozo, Irma Lindheim, and 22 other Jewish scholars, writers, and public figures.
(Published December 4, 1948, in The New York Times.)

[Brett Pike @ClassicLearner]

The public school system is not only designed to dumb you down, but to train you to be obedient to the children of the rich and powerful - who receive a different education in how to operate as the future ruling class.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Your brain has a circuit that doesn't know you live in a city. Its only job is to monitor whether birds are still singing. When they stop, something dangerous is nearby. When they continue, the coast is clear. This wiring predates primates. These kids are being sedated by the oldest safety signal in the mammalian nervous system.

The Max Planck Institute tested this in 2022 with 295 participants. Six minutes of birdsong reduced anxiety and paranoia with medium effect sizes. Six minutes of traffic noise increased depression by the same margin. The effect worked on people who had never left dense urban environments. Their bodies responded to a signal their conscious minds had never learned.

King's College London ran a larger study. 1,292 participants, real-time mood tracking through a phone app, 26,856 assessments over three years. Hearing or seeing birds improved mental wellbeing for up to eight hours afterward. The effect held for people diagnosed with depression. Trees, plants, and waterways didn't explain it. The birds themselves were the variable.

Now here's where Italy connects to Finland. 95% of parents in the Finnish city of Oulu let their babies nap outside starting at two weeks old. A 2008 study confirmed the children took longer, deeper naps outdoors. Parents reported letting them sleep in temperatures as low as -15°C. 66% said their babies were more active afterward compared to indoor naps. The practice started as a public health initiative from Nordic maternity clinics in the early 1900s and became cultural infrastructure.

The Italian kindergarten in this video is running the same program the Nordic countries have been running for a century. Outdoor naps, natural soundscapes, no white noise machines, no blackout curtains. Meanwhile, American kindergartens have been eliminating nap time entirely to squeeze in more instruction. A UMass study showed that children who skipped naps forgot 12% of what they learned that morning. The nap itself was the learning.

The irony is that the countries spending the least on sleep technology for children are producing the best sleep outcomes. No sound machines. No apps. Just birds.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Camus @newstart_2024]

What if the biggest “win” for families in the last 50 years was actually a trap?

Rory Sutherland dropped this on Alex O’Connor’s podcast: The two-income household started as a nice option. Both partners work, more money comes in. Feels great at first.

Then reality shifted. Governments got double the tax. Existing homeowners watched their property values soar. House prices rose to match two salaries.

Suddenly one income wasn’t enough anymore — even for high-earning singles like consultant surgeons. Families traded ~35 hours of free time per week for only modest gains in lifestyle.

What began as freedom quietly became an obligation. And it left single people and parents who want to raise their own kids at a real disadvantage.

This one stings because we sold it as pure progress.

Personally, it makes me question how many modern “upgrades” we’ve normalized without counting the real cost — especially lost time with family.

What’s something you once thought was clear progress that now feels like it came with a heavier price than we admitted?

[Glenn Meder @GlennMeder]

🧵 THREAD

1/ Your daughter posts something online.

She is 19. In college. Trying to figure out what she believes. She shares a political opinion that an algorithm flags as problematic.

You do not see it happen. No one notifies you. No one tells her.

But 72 hours later, her bank account is frozen. Her student loans are suspended. Her digital ID shows a compliance violation.

And there is nothing you can do to protect her.

[Reza Nasri @RezaNasri1]

The idea that every sovereign country near Israel must cap its conventional weapons, limit its defensive capabilities, restrict missile and fighter jet ranges, and even dismantle its own military industries—just so Israel can "feel safe"—is completely absurd.

Which other nation on Earth demands and receives this kind of privilege?

This exceptionalism is especially ridiculous coming from a regime with such an inherently aggressive posture and track record in the region.

[Abier @abierkhatib]

Zionists act like they’re entitled to special privileges—claiming only Israel has the right to exist. Fk that…

Matthew nailed it better.

[Mwatana for Human Rights @MwatanaEn]

The matter of the right to know the truth is one of the most urgent issues in the context of the ongoing conflict in Yemen. Years of conflict have produced a reality in which gross human rights violations intersect with systematic policies of concealment and denial.

#24 March
#International Day for the Right to the Truth Concerning Gross Human Rights Violations and for the Dignity of Victims

[Champagne Joshi @JoshWalkos]

This YouTuber, Benn Jordan discovered that a surveillance company named Flock Safety who currently has over 90K camera deployed throughout the US, is severely compromised. He found that many cameras are live-streaming directly to the open internet.

[𝐇𝐢𝐝𝐢𝐦𝐚, 𝐏𝐡.𝐃. @Realoilsheikh]

In the 1290s, it took 5-10 years for Islam to spread across Indonesia from island to island without any war, and people converted from Hinduism to Islam. Now the country has the largest Muslim population in the world. ❤️

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

I have waited years for someone to challenge this nonsense phrase on mainstream media. An indictment of the liberal PEP media that it took Tucker Carlson to do it. And he undeniably did it well.

[Abier @abierkhatib]

An interesting take from an anti-Zionist Jew in Israel.

[ibfoltz @IsmailFoltz]

@aaolomi Don't forget Turkiye, but they're calling for intervention there now, too.