Free Republic

When assembling a cabal, prudence dictates that one choose the participants with an eye toward circumspection. After all, a loudmouth is not the best repository for your darkest secrets.

People are getting dumber. That's not a judgment; it's a global fact. In a host of leading nations, IQ scores have started to decline. Though there are legitimate questions about the relationship between IQ and intelligence, and broad recognition that success depends as much on other virtues like grit, IQ tests in use throughout the world today really do seem to capture something meaningful and durable. Decades of research have shown that individual IQ scores predict things such as educational achievement and longevity. More broadly, the average IQ score of a country is linked to economic growth and scientific innovation....

Byron York seems baffled by the discovery in the Mueller report that the FBI was after General Michael Flynn long before the intercepts of his telephone conversations with Russian officials during the post-2016 election transition. By that time, Obama Administration higher-ups in the intelligence community were warning Trump that Flynn had suspicious intimate contacts with the Russians, possibly in violation of the Logan Act. As Byron writes: "Mueller strongly suggests something else was up. Obama administration intelligence officials "were surprised by Russia's decision not to retaliate in response to the sanctions," the report said. "When analyzing Russia's response, they became...

Rep. Matt Gatez (R-FL) on Wednesday filed a resolution to remove House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) from the Committee and revoke his security clearance. #BREAKING: Today I filed the “PENCIL Act,” expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that “Congressman Adam Schiff should be removed from the House Intelligence Committee and his security clearance immediately revoked.” pic.twitter.com/1FsMt6NUjr— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) April 11, 2019 Gatetz appeared on Fox News' "Tucker Carlson Tonight" to explain why he filed the resolution.“I have filed legislation today, sent to the House, that Adam Schiff needs to be removed from the Intelligence...

RUSH: Now, we’ve heard President Trump talk about treasonous things having happened in the investigation into him and collusion with Russia, and he has pretty much acknowledged that it traces back to the Obama administration. I made the point yesterday that the counterintelligence apparatus of the United States of America, the entire counterintelligence apparatus — this would be the FBI counterintel, the CIA, the NSA, the vaunted so-called intelligence agencies — were all repositioned and retooled for one express purpose, and that was to reverse the election results of 2016. And we know that much of this began even before...

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested that the US may be forced to downgrade its intelligence cooperation with Israel over the Jewish State's growing ties with China. Pompeo was asked about the the Israel-China ties, a rare sore spot in US-Israel relations under the Trump Administration, during an interview with Barak Ravid on Channel 13 News. "China broadly presents a real opportunity," he acknowledged. "They’re an economic powerhouse and there are lots of opportunities that countries have to do business with China. When China behaves transparently, when China is engaged in real economic transactions, we are untroubled. When China...

Secret Turkish intelligence documents obtained by Nordic Monitor have revealed the extent of pervasive profiling of unsuspecting citizens in Turkey and how irrelevant, incredibly vague and unspecified information led to the prosecution of tens of thousands of legitimate government critics and opponents.In a letter sent to the Istanbul 29th High Criminal Court on Sept. 26, 2017, classified as secret by the National Intelligence Organization (MIT), legal counsellor Ümit Ulvi Canik attached the intelligence notes kept by the agency on 31 defendants who were facing trial on charges of alleged terrorism. Canik signed the letter on behalf of intelligence chief Hakan Fidan.The 10-page classified document...

Inside the government, some officials called her “Wayward Storm.” Her real name was Monica Elfriede Witt, an exemplary Air Force counterintelligence agent who had studied Persian and carried out covert missions in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. But by mid-2013, Ms. Witt had become disillusioned with the government — why, exactly, remains a mystery — and had left the military. Thoughts of betrayal consumed her, federal prosecutors now say, until she finally acted on them at the Iranian Embassy in Kabul, where they say she “told all.”

There was a great deal of news this past week about President Trump’s audacious disregard for the advice and warnings from his own intelligence community experts. Perhaps there’s good reason for alarm. But I think there’s one shocking aspect — perhaps a larger story — that’s gone virtually unreported. It appears that anonymous intelligence officials are executing an operation against the sitting commander in chief. It might not qualify as all-out mutiny, but it’s also not all that far from one. Right under our noses, while still under investigation for allegedly orchestrating leaks and undermining candidate Trump in 2016, some...

Artificial intelligence (AI) may be poised to wipe out cervical cancer, after a study showed computer algorithms can detect pre-cancerous lesions far better than trained experts or conventional screening tests. . . . . . The AI technique, called automated visual evaluation, found precancerous cells with 91 per cent accuracy, according to a report published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. In comparison, a human expert review found 69 per cent of pre-cancers, while conventional laboratory tests such as Pap smears found 71 per cent. Among women aged 25 to 49, who face the highest risk of cervical...

We didn’t get to this yesterday but let’s do it now because it’s one of the funnier bits of spin to come out of Trump’s first two years. A few days ago his intel chiefs went before Congress for a hearing and either contradicted or qualified some of his biggest foreign-policy boasts. Is ISIS defeated? Well, they’ve lost almost all of their territory, said Dan Coats and Gina Haspel, but they still command thousands of fighters and we need to stay on top of the problem. Not a great talking point for Trump’s withdrawal from Syria. How about North...

The goal of education has always been to achieve critical thinking. Needless to say, this involves a two-step process: first, students learn a great deal about a topic, whether in history, science, art, or anything else; then students learn to arrange the information in new ways, to set one fact against another, to find new insights among this knowledge. Not anymore. Today's educators are in a hurry; they don't bother with the first step. They jump directly to step two. In this scenario, students who know nothing are expected to talk intelligently about it. What absurdity.Having just heard about X,...

ROBERT MUELLER’S BELTWAY COVER-UP By using the justice system as a political weapon, Mueller and his supporters in both parties are confirming what many Americans already believe: We are not all equal under one law. Past and present FBI officials who broke the law may be seen to have the largest stake in Mueller’s investigation continuing as long as possible. The inquiry has plenty of other constituencies as well. National security hawks are rightly worried that the abuses of foreign intelligence surveillance may jeopardize programs that are designed to keep Americans safe from terrorism. For the time being, Mueller’s probe...

Former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino’s explosive new book (with D.C. McAllister), Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump, spotlights the left’s broken trust with the American people and the blatant criminality of the Obama/Clinton Deep State. Since the moment Donald J. Trump and his wife Melania glided down the Trump Tower escalator into history, the Democrats and the allies in the Deep State have been committed to crushing him. For Trump, it was obvious that draining the swamp was never going to be easy because everything possible would be done to disguise and protect the illegal activities of...

Sinan Selen, a 46-year-old Istanbul-born counter-terrorism expert, will be the first Muslim to fill a top leadership position within Germany's intelligence community. Throughout his government career, Selen has been resolute in confronting Islamic fundamentalists in Germany. He also led efforts at the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) to monitor the Turkish nationalist Milli Görüs, an influential Islamist movement strongly opposed to Muslim integration into European society. The leadership changes at the BfV were spurred by a cellphone video that purportedly showed right-wing mobs attacking migrants over the murder of a German citizen in Chemnitz by...

If you don’t like the Left, you can probably come up with many reasons you believe they don’t measure up in their intellectual capabilities, some of those may be questionable. Over the years, the reason I have found most egregious and irrefutable rests with my involvement with this publication. Recently, I was working on background for a panel discussion on California propositions prior to the election. I found the director of the Public Policy Institute of California's Water Policy Center. PPIC is clearly a left-of-center think tank. I was researching information for a proposition to commit another $8.89 BILLION in...

People too often forget that IQ tests haven’t been around that long. Indeed, such psychological measures are only about a century old. Early versions appeared in France with the work of Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon in 1905. However, these tests didn’t become associated with genius until the measure moved from the Sorbonne in Paris to Stanford University in Northern California. There Professor Lewis M. Terman had it translated from French into English, and then standardized on sufficient numbers of children, to create what became known as the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale.... The result was a group of 1,528 extremely bright...

For this week's Big Ideas with Ben Weingarten podcast, my guest was Rich Higgins. Higgins, an expert in unconventional warfare and combatting terrorism with over 20 years experience at senior levels of the Defense Department, and early supporter of President Trump, served as director for strategic planning in President Trump's National Security Council (NSC). That all changed when a memo that he produced for President Trump warning of the political warfare he was to face internally from the Deep State, and externally from the media and like-minded interest groups in collusion with the administrative state, leaked out to the public....

South Korea's Army said Friday it has put a drone combat team in operation, a move to take advantage of the country's advanced ICT prowess. The unit is part of a new "ground intelligence unit" established under the wing of the Third ROK Army (TROKA), headquartered in Yongin, just south of Seoul. ROK is the acronym for South Korea's official name, the Republic of Korea. Army officials hope that the country's first drone battalion will help sharply enhance combat capabilities as a potential game changer in future warfare. "In the midst of rapidly changing strategic circumstances, the role and mission...

There is one constant throughout the past 100 years. Professors of education came up with ever more exotic schemes and nomenclatures for how education should be organized, even as these schemes confused students and destroyed achievement. Each scheme had a catchy name (Open Classroom, Life Adjustment, Multiculturalism, Constructivism, Common Core) and a phalanx of resistance-is-futile jargon. Somehow the proposals didn’t translate into gains. One might cynically conclude that the jargon was a goal in itself (to get a grant, to build a career, to impress ordinary citizens). You may even suspect that the larger purpose of all these schemes is...