Society's ChildS


Padlock

The only Palestinian children's rights organization closes following years-long Israeli campaign against it

Jeff Wright
Mondoweiss
Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00 UTC
Defense for Children International
© AFP / Abbas Momani via DCIPDefense for Children International – Palestine’s office door outside Ramallah after Israeli forces conducted a raid and declared the organization closed on August 18, 2022
"After 35 years of defending Palestinian children's rights, we are not able to overcome operational challenges resulting from Israel's targeted criminalization of Palestinian human rights organizations," said DCI-P General Director Khaled Quzmar.

Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCI-P) has ended its extraordinary work with the children of Palestine as a result of unending threats from the State of Israel. Despite having been designated by Israel as a terrorist organization in 2023, DCI-P had continued its groundbreaking work of investigating, documenting and exposing human rights violations against Palestinian children as well as providing legal services to children and holding both Israeli and Palestinian authorities accountable to principles of human rights as described in international law.

But in an announcement earlier this week, DCI-P's General Director Khaled Quzmar said, "After 35 years of defending Palestinian children's rights, we are not able to overcome operational challenges resulting from Israel's targeted criminalization of Palestinian human rights organizations."

Comment: Given the very high number of children whose bodies were buried in Gaza's rubble, and therefore not officially counted as dead, the 17,000 dead number is quite probably a vast underestimation of this horror.

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Star of David

Sea change: Among US adults, 'very unfavorable' opinion of Israel triples

Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge
Thu, 09 Apr 2026 21:09 UTC
Benjamin Netanyahu
Amid a major war on Iran waged in partnership with the United States, Israel's reputation among Americans has continued to deteriorate, with 60% of US adults viewing Israel unfavorably. That's a hefty 18-point increase from 2022, according to a new survey from Pew Research. Over the same stretch, Israel's "favorable" share cratered by 18 points.

While the top-line unfavorable rating is bad news for Israel, things are even worse when you look under the hood: The proportion of Americans who have a very unfavorable view of Israel now stands at 28% -- triple what it was in 2022.

Alongside his country's sagging standing with the US public, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also increasingly unpopular, as 59% of American adults have little or no trust that he will "do the right thing regarding world affairs," also a seven-point worsening from last year's finding.
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Wolf

Colorado doubles down with new assaults on the First Amendment

Jonathan Turley
jonathanturley.org
Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:49 UTC
colorado state flag
The state flag of Colorado
"It's our nature"

Colorado's tourism slogan, "it's our nature," has a menacing meaning for free speech advocates. Colorado is now arguably the most anti-free speech state in the union, pushing an array of measures attacking those with opposing social and political views. The irony is that the state has proved a bonanza for free speech with spectacular legal failures that reaffirmed rather than restricted the First Amendment. Now, the Democratic legislature and governor are back with new unconstitutional measures, including a requirement that lawyers not share information with federal immigration officials as a condition for filing with state courts.

Colorado legislators and judges have spent years attacking core free speech and associational rights. In the last election, the state attempted to strip President Donald Trump from the ballot with the support of a majority of its Democratic-controlled state supreme court. (The effort was later declared unconstitutional in a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court. Colorado could not even get any of the liberal justices to support its actions).
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Arrow Down

The Left is baffled - but still repulsed - by the white working class

Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00 UTC
Uncle Sam
© Soumyadip SinhaUncle Sam
Democrats can rebrand candidates, but they cannot hide a long record of condescension toward the very working-class voters they now need to win back.

After failing to win Congress and the presidency in 2024, the Democrats conducted an internal postmortem of what went wrong. While they predictably did not divulge the full results, everyone knew what they had found.

Their obsessions with the low side of 30/70 issues had especially alienated Democrats from white middle- and working-class voters. Yet middle-class whites still comprise about 40-50 percent of the population and are perhaps overrepresented in voter turnout.

Democrats realize that their fixations on biological males competing in women's sports, open borders and millions of illegal entries, radical green agendas, DEI-driven racial essentialism, and massive government entitlements rife with fraud have alienated the middle classes in general and white middle- and working-class voters in particular.

But since Democrat ideologues cannot shed their ideological straitjackets, they have instead tried to finesse the very problem that cost them the 2024 election.
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Robot

No real people were polled: AI is now fabricating what "the public thinks"


Zerohedge
Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:40 UTC
gay robot
The other day Axios ran a piece that cited "findings" that a majority of people trusted their doctors and nurses. Turns out, those "findings" were completely fabricated by a company called Aaru - using AI (causing Axios to issue an editor's note and 'clarification') Aaru uses something they call "silicon sampling," where large language models (the AI) can emulate humans at a fraction of the cost and time required for traditional polling, the NY Times reports.

Silicon sampling isn't polling. It is the outright fabrication of public opinion by machines - and major news outlets and research firms are now publishing those fabrications as legitimate findings.

This is not an isolated slip. The technology is being embraced by some of the biggest names in media, polling, and corporate research. Gallup has partnered with the startup Simile to create thousands of AI-generated "digital twins" that stand in for real people. Ipsos is working with Stanford to pioneer synthetic data for public opinion studies. CVS, whose venture arm invested in Simile, is already using these fabricated insights to shape customer strategy. And outlets like Axios are treating the output as news.
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Display

The dawn of the post-literate society

James Marriott
Cultural Capital
Fri, 19 Sep 2025 19:58 UTC
Book burning
© Unsplash/Lux Productions
And the end of civilisation
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book because there would be no one who wanted to read one.

— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
The age of print

It was one of the most important revolutions in modern history — and yet no blood was spilled, no bombs were thrown and no monarch was beheaded.

Perhaps no great social transformation has ever been carried out so quietly. This one took place in armchairs, in libraries, in coffee houses and in clubs.

What happened was this: in the middle of the eighteenth century huge numbers of ordinary people began to read.

For the first couple of centuries after the invention of the printing press, reading remained largely an elite pursuit. But by the beginning of the 1700s, the expansion of education and an explosion of cheap books began to diffuse reading rapidly down through the middle classes and even into the lower ranks of society. People alive at the time understood that something momentous was going on. Suddenly it seemed that everyone was reading everywhere: men, women, children, the rich, the poor. Reading began to be described as a "fever", an "epidemic", a "craze", a "madness". As the historian Tim Blanning writes, "conservatives were appalled and progressives were delighted, that it was a habit that knew no social boundaries."

Comment: Mentally delete Marriott's swipe at Candace Owens, Russell Brand and vax doubters, and he produces an excellent analysis at the dismal state of the majority of Western civilization.

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Family

Swipe left on civilization: How Silicon Valley is quietly destroying family formation

Alexander Muse
AmuseonX
Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00 UTC
Silicon Valley
For most of human history, courtship was bounded. A young man in 1955 did not survey every available woman within 500 miles before asking someone to dinner. He met her through friends, through church, through the slow friction of shared community life. That friction was not an obstacle to good matches. It was the mechanism through which realistic, durable partnerships were formed. It forced self-assessment. It embedded romantic decisions inside networks of social accountability. It surfaced character over time rather than photographs in an instant.

That entire architecture has been demolished, and the damage is now registering in the demographic record in ways that should alarm anyone who cares about the long-term health of this country. We have spent years worrying about algorithms shaping political discourse and teenage mental health. We have convened Senate hearings about TikTok. What we have not done, with anything approaching equivalent seriousness, is examine the algorithms reshaping the most fundamental human institution of all, the formation of committed partnerships that become families.
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No Entry

Library Director Fired After Refusing To Remove Hundreds Of LGBT Books From Kids' Section

Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge
Sat, 04 Apr 2026 15:13 UTC
Library with PRIDE books
When are these people going to learn to just leave the kids alone?

A Tennessee library board has voted 8-3 to remove its top librarian, Luanne James, after she refused to carry out an order to relocate hundreds of LGBT-themed books, Critical Race Theory (CRT) and feminist propaganda books from the children's section of six Rutherford County branch libraries.

James was initially ordered to relocate books containing far-left ideology from the juvenile/children's sections to the adult sections of libraries. The board cited concerns that the books promoted "gender confusion," contained LGBT themes/characters, sexual themes, feminist topics, DEI, social justice and related content.

Comment: A small victory for caring parents. Can this start a domino effect in more states?

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Star of David

Prominent New York synagogue hosts presentation on why U.S. Jews should support the ethnic cleansing of Gaza

Philip Weiss
Mondoweiss
Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00 UTC
2 rabbi
© ScreenshotRabbi Eliot Cosgrove, left, interviews Miryam Institute CEO Benjamin Anthony at the Park Avenue Synagogue • March 20, 2026
Benjamin Anthony's speech at New York's influential Park Avenue Synagogue, where he argued that U.S. Jews need to support ethnic cleansing in Gaza, illustrates how the American Jewish community has embraced Israeli racism and brutality.

The American press does its best not to cover savage Israeli views of Palestinians, but a leading New York synagogue gave an honored platform to those views ten days ago. It hosted an Israeli advocate with connections in its government who argued for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and said American Jews need to support that operation.

Benjamin Anthony said that all "Palestinian Arabs" in Gaza pose such a threat to Israel that the international community should use "muscular diplomacy" with Egypt so as force the population out of Gaza into an "enclave" in the Sinai peninsula.


Comment: The 'Art of the Lie': Premise - Structure - Relevance - Delivery

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Map

Hormuz Sees 15 Ships Transit In 24 Hours As Two Tankers With Qatari LNG Make Sudden U-Turn

Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge
Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:53 UTC
Map Hormuz ship traffic 2026
Map: Tanker Traffic Hormuz
President Trump on Sunday warned Tehran to "Open the Strait" and make a deal by the end of Tuesday, or the U.S. military would "blow everything up" and "take over the oil." Meanwhile, Iran rejected Trump's ultimatum to reopen the Hormuz chokepoint, saying it would only reopen the critical waterway once damage from the war is compensated.

There was some good news overnight after Iran's semi-official Fars News Agency reported that 15 vessels had passed through the Hormuz chokepoint over the last 24 hours. Still, that remains only a tiny fraction of pre-conflict tanker traffic.

Separately, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy warned that the waterway will "never return to its previous condition," particularly for the U.S. and Israeli-linked vessels, and added that it is completing preparations to enforce a new security order across the Persian Gulf.
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