Flaws in a Recent Lancet Study on Phone Use in Schools Five problems that call into question the authors’ conclusion that phone restrictions don’t improve mental health or academic performance Jon Haidt, Zach Rausch, and Alec McClean

https://www.afterbabel.com/p/lancet-study-flaws?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_

In this post, we show why the recent Lancet study’s assertions that restrictive phone policies in schools yield no benefits are unfounded. For example, the phone-policies in the ‘permissive’ vs ‘restrictive’ schools did not differ very much, their measure of academic performance was crude, and their measures of screen time were unreliable.

A recent study published in The Lancet (Goodyear et al., 2025) has generated news headlines suggesting that restricting phone use in schools has no effect on the wellbeing or academic performance of students. This contradicts several previous studies that did find such benefits.

In this post, we lay out several flaws in the design and interpretation of the Lancet study, and several oddities in the data that we believe render its “no benefit” conclusion unjustified.

The authors of the study claimed to have

[E]valuated the impact of school phone policies by comparing outcomes in adolescents who attended schools that restrict and permit phone use.

The word “impact” implies the ability to discern causality. The authors then assert that,

[T]here is no evidence that restrictive school policies are associated with overall phone and social media use or better mental wellbeing in adolescents

and conclude that

[T]here is no evidence to support that restrictive school phone policies, in their current forms, have a beneficial effect on adolescents’ mental health and wellbeing or related outcomes, indicating that the intentions of these policies to improve adolescent health, wellbeing, and educational engagement are not realised.

The authors note that they do find substantial associations between time spent using phones or social media and worsened mental health and wellbeing, physical activity and sleep, and attainment and disruptive behavior:

[T]he negative associations found between increasing time spent on phones/social media and worsened mental health and wellbeing do provide evidence on the need to address phone and social media use in adolescents, and school policies should be developed as part of a more holistic approach.

Jordanian top lawyer poses while trampling Israeli flag Occurring amid a surge in hatred of the Jewish state, the incident prompted an official protest by the foreign ministry in Jerusalem.

https://www.jns.org/jordanian-top-lawyer-poses-while-trampling-israeli-flag/?utm_campaign=Daily%20Syndicate%20

The deputy head of the Jordan Bar Association posed for photographs while standing on a sidewalk painting of the Israeli flag, triggering a protest by Jerusalem on Wednesday.

Walid Al-Adwan made the gesture in Amman during the inauguration of the Bar Association’s new offices on Monday, the Andalou news agency reported.

“Placing the Israeli flag on the entrance floor and declaring that ‘anyone entering must step on it’ is an act of incitement that is inconsistent with the spirit of the peace agreement between the two countries,” Oren Marmorstein, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson, wrote on X.

Israel, Marmorstein added, “expects the Jordanian government to condemn the incident and take measures to prevent such actions from recurring. The lack of condemnation from the Jordanian authorities is concerning.”

Israel’s foreign ministry conveyed “an official protest to the Jordanian embassy in Israel, emphasizing the need to ensure that such incidents do not happen again in the future,” Marmorstein wrote.

The outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023, has stoked hatred of Israel in Jordan.

An Israeli flag has been on display on the floor of the Professional Associations Complex in Amman for years, Andalou noted.

Jordan, whose population is at least 70% Palestinian, signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994. Often described as a cold peace, the relations between the two countries have failed to take off on a cultural level, remaining centered on the transport of goods and water, trade and security coordination.

Australian Parliament member: Never been a more important time to support Israel Australia is facing an “antisemitism crisis,” said lawmaker Andrew Wallace. Etgar Lefkovits

https://www.jns.org/australian-mp-there-has-never-been-a-more-important-time-to-support-israel/?utm_campaign=Daily%20Syndicate%20Emails&utm_

Australian lawmaker Andrew Wallace said on Wednesday that there has never been a more important time to support Israel and the Australian Jewish community.

Addressing the Australia-Israel Allies Caucus, which he chairs, at Parliament House in Canberra, Wallace said: “Australia is facing an antisemitism crisis, and it is incumbent upon all Australians—and especially those elected to lead the country—that we stand up, speak up and show up for Israel and the Jewish people.”

The remarks come after video footage emerged on Wednesday of two Australians nurses threatening to murder any Israelis under their care, and claiming to have already done so. Australia has seen a surge in antisemitic incidents over the last year, including the torching of two synagogues and vandalism of homes, vehicles and a childcare center.

“The world is watching—allies and competitors alike,” the lawmaker continued. “We must have each other’s backs in the fight against antisemitism.”

Jewish community leaders in Australia have attributed the sharp rise in antisemitic incidents amid Israel’s 15-month war with Hamas in Gaza to inaction or hostility on the part of the Labor-led government.

“The vast majority of Australians support Israel and are dismayed by the actions of the present Labor government in both their voting pattern in the United Nations, their public statements and their lack of action to quell the resurgence of antisemitism by criminal minorities in the country, ” Danny Lamm, former president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, told JNS on Thursday.

Wallace, who is part of a network of more than four dozen faith-based Israel caucuses in parliaments around the globe, said that it is “for such a time as this” that such alliances are needed.

Halftime at the Super Bowl I failed to understand all but a few words. by Larry Elder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/halftime-at-the-super-bowl/

President Donald Trump became the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl, and his presence was flashed on the jumbo screen. It’s always a crapshoot when a politician attends a spectacle like this. Attendees will let him or her know exactly how they feel. When the big screen showed him, fans cheered. But when the big screen showed the hyper-woke Trump critic Taylor Swift, fans booed.

So far, so good.

What to say about the halftime show performed by the popular rapper Kendrick Lamar? USA Today wrote: “The Grammy-winning rapper took the stage … for an exhilarating medley performance that paid homage to the Compton emcee’s eclectic catalog.”

“Exhilarating medley performance”? OK, call me biased, and I’m certainly not in his age demo. “Artists” like Lamar could not care less what I think. But I lean toward performers who can sing, dance, play an instrument or, heavens, do all three.

Nearly 50% of voters in a poll conducted by Darren Rovell gave the performance an F.

My nephew, Eric, loves rap. While driving and listening to a popular “song,” I said, “Eric, I don’t understand a word.” He proceeded to translate each line as it was recited.

“How many times did you have to listen before you were able to figure it out?” I said.

“Figure what out?” he said.

“The lyrics.”

“Once.”

So maybe it’s me. During Lamar’s performance, I failed to understand all but a few words. Before the game started, a couple of songs were performed before the national anthem. A beautiful, well-dressed woman used sign language for the hearing impaired. Where was she during Lamar’s performance for those of us who suffer from rap lyric comprehension impairment?

Why Elon Musk and DOGE Terrify Democrats And what their absolute meltdown tells you about the Left. by Derek Hunter

https://www.frontpagemag.com/why-elon-musk-and-doge-terrify-democrats/

You may have noticed the absolute meltdown of the left over the existence of Elon Musk and the DOGE team doing exactly what Donald Trump was elected to do. I phrased it that way because that’s exactly what is happening – someone is finally going through the government’s books and records to figure out what people do, how much it costs, where the rest of the money is going and whether or not we can live without it since we’re more than $36 trillion in debt. Why would anyone meltdown over that? There’s a very simple reason: Democrats cannot afford for the American people realizing how much government they can live without. More than that, they can’t have the public recognize how much the government was actually getting in their way and impeding their success. The public doing either of those two things would be the end of the Democratic Party.

Not one single person in the Democratic Party, either elected or in journalism, has commented positively on anything the Department of Government Efficiency has uncovered and ended so far, nothing. No matter how wasteful, no matter how absurd, no matter how insane or stupid, Democrats are angry that DOGE exists, not that we taxpayers are being ripped off. That tells you something.

The most amazing part of all of it is how these people, who’ve spent decades milking taxpayers for their pet causes, for money to fund organizations that employ their children and fund their campaigns, that hire and pay them exorbitant amounts of money for no-show or symbolic jobs when they retire, that use insider information that make them more successful at stock trading than people who do it for a living, have the audacity to refer to what Musk and the crew are doing as somehow motivated by “greed.”

Under what circumstances would the richest man in the world risk prison for a little more? He’s not Mr. Burns, he’s an OCD kind of guy obsessed with determining what is absolutely essential to the operations of something and eliminating everything else involved in its creation and production. Read Walter Isaacson’s biography of him, for crying out loud.

The “kids,” as the left likes to belittlingly call them, who work with him are not in it for the money, either. Most have founded companies, won massive investments in their ideas, and don’t need anything to be more successful than anyone whining about them. What they want, what they crave is a challenge.

Isn’t 46 Years Of Failure Enough? Time To Kill The Education Dept.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/14/isnt-46-years-of-failure-enough-time-to-kill-the-education-dept/

Americans who care deeply about education were treated to a rare sight on Thursday. In her testimony before Congress to be the head of the Department of Education, Linda McMahon openly and proudly outlined a plan to not just get rid of her job, but take the federal government out of the education business. We wish her luck.

In January, before Trump first bruited his idea to close the Education Department, I&I archly suggested that “The most successful secretary of Education will be the one who shuts it down.” Little did we know that President Donald Trump would propose just that, and let his pick to lead the department make the case for doing so to Congress.

“I’d like it to be closed immediately,” Trump said on Wednesday. “The Department of Education’s a big con job.”

He’s right. McMahon, that ultra-rare unusual appointee whose greatest desire is to close her department and put herself out of a job, outlined a day later why and how she’d do that.

While Trump’s criticism sounds harsh, in fact, even under his plan many pieces of the current Education Department would remain in place — but within other parts of government. The Ed Department has failed in its mission and needs to be dismantled, though that will require lawmakers’ approval.

“I will work with Congress to reorient the department to helping educators, not controlling them,” McMahon said, adding: “Defunding is not the goal here.” Defund, no; dismantle, yes.

McMahon noted in her questioning that, for instance, aid for disabled students would likely be better handled by the Department of Health and Human Services, rather than the Education Department. And she vowed more than once that Congress’ federal aid to low-income school districts and students would be maintained.

So does the department really need to be dismantled? You bet. And McMahon, former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment but also former head of the Small Business Administration in Trump’s previous four years in office, is just the woman to do the job.

The recent experience with COVID underscores why education is too important to be left to Big Government. Under President Joe Biden, the Ed Department presided over teacher-union-friendly school shutdowns and shoddy “remote learning” programs that caused literally millions of American school kids’ of every race and ethnicity to lose ground against previous generations.

‘Fact-checking was a sham industry’ Robby Soave on why we should welcome the demise of the misinformation ‘experts’.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/13/fact-checking-was-a-sham-industry/

One of Donald Trump’s first executive orders promises to bring an end to the American government’s censorship of social media. Although the First Amendment forbids the state from censoring citizens’ speech, federal agencies would previously get around this by pressuring the tech platforms to censor content on their behalf. Entire topics, such as the Covid lab-leak theory or the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, were branded ‘misinformation’ by the state and then scrubbed from social media. A whole ‘censorship industrial complex’ of self-appointed fact-checkers, disinformation experts and ‘pro-democracy’ NGOs emerged to help enforce the state’s diktats. But what happens next? Could the era of Big Tech censorship finally be on its way out?

Robby Soave – senior editor of Reason and co-host of Rising – returned to The Brendan O’Neill Show to discuss all this and more. What follows is an edited extract from the conversation. Listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: How are you feeling about the first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second presidency?

Robby Soave: I do find myself in a very unusual and frankly uncomfortable position of being happy with a lot of changes that are taking place in the government. I don’t know that I’ve ever been in that position in my entire life.

Initially, I wasn’t quite sure about Trump. We’ve already been through four years of Trump. Frankly, they weren’t that different from what you would have seen from any other Republican, or any other political figure. There was a lot of continuity in policies I don’t really like, so I was lukewarm for Trump running again this time. I thought he talked a good game on some stuff and was wild in other ways.

And then he came in and put Elon Musk in charge of cutting government waste. You’ve got a lot of the other tech titans who are, if not getting explicitly on board with Trump, becoming more favourable towards him. I don’t agree with everything he does by any stretch of the imagination, but there really does seem to be a desire to disempower the censors. That whole movement seems to be falling away.

O’Neill: One of Trump’s very good executive orders was on ‘ending federal censorship’. Do you think that ‘misinformation’ became a shield for what was essentially political censorship?

Help! The Establishment’s Fallen and Can’t Get Up! By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/02/help_the_establishment_s_fallen_and_can_t_get_up.html

The Senate’s confirmation hearings for President Trump’s political appointees have been gladiatorial spectacles.  Tulsi Gabbard; Kash Patel; and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. followed Pete Hegseth’s example in demonstrating fierce determination and an unwillingness to have their honor questioned by dishonorable Democrats.  

Gabbard told the Intelligence Committee that the Russia collusion hoax, the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, and her own experiences as a Biden regime surveillance target proved that the CIA and its sister agencies had become politicized weapons endangering the Republic.  Kennedy admonished Senator Bernie Sanders for being a bought-and-paid-for stooge of the pharmaceutical industry.  When Senator Adam Schiff (who should be a defendant, not a lawmaker) accused Patel of betraying law enforcement officers, the next director of the FBI stared back intently and reminded inveterate liar Schiff that those who police our streets know who has their backs.  

These types of hearings have gotten increasingly combative over the last thirty years, but this aggressive jousting between nominees and lawmakers is something new.  What we’re watching is not just rhetorical gamesmanship or made-for-TV fireworks meant to capture distracted Americans’ attention.  Like their boss in the White House — whose mug shot from the Fulton County Jailhouse in Atlanta, Georgia, two years ago only added to Trump’s legend as an everyman hero — these nominees have approached their confirmation hearings with a stoic seriousness befitting an administration whose every move conveys a simple message: “There’s a new sheriff in town.”  When Patel gave Schiff the “evil eye” and calmly asserted that his friends in blue had his six, I thought the corrupt California senator wet his pants.

Will the nominees be confirmed?  If the proceedings were done entirely in secret, they would not.  As more Americans have steadily realized, the U.S. Senate is not divided between Republicans and Democrats.  Almost all senators are stalwart members of the same Uniparty.  The Senate is a privileged chamber of egomaniacal “nobles” who work for the Intelligence Community, protect the permanent bureaucracy, and remain loyal only to their Establishment Club.  Most Senate “Republicans” oppose Trump and his nominees.  

The Spawn of Leviathan The Trump administration’s counterrevolution against the “treason of the agency clerks.” by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-spawn-of-leviathan/

For more than a century, our Constitutional rights and freedoms have been insidiously eroded by the progressives’ technocratic imperialism of government agencies. This virtual fourth branch of our government has usurped the powers of the other three legitimate ones that the Framers crafted to check and balance, and hold accountable the ambitions of nascent tyranny.

The dangers of regulatory hypertrophy have been recognized since Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835-40.

A century later, even the progressive Walter Lippman, in his 1937 book The Good Society, warned of the dangers of an expansive executive branch and its agencies unaccountable to the citizens: “It is evident that the more varied and comprehensive the regulation becomes, the more the state becomes a despotic power against the individual. For the fragment of control over the government which he exercises through his vote is in no effective sense proportionate to the authority exercised over him by the government.”

Pace Lippman, the return of Donald Trump to the presidency, and the growing resistance of the “forgotten citizens” exercising their right to vote, have put in the White House an administration that is leading a counterrevolution against the “treason of the agency clerks,” and their violations of our Constitutional rights. Trump and his aides are investigating agencies like the FBI and DOJ, along with other intrusive outfits such as the EEOC and EPA, and the corrupt globalist slush fund, the U.S. Agency for International Development––and demanding from them accountability to their new boss and we the people he serves.

Created in 1980, the Department of Education has been one of Leviathan’s most pernicious regulatory spawn, for the ordered liberty of a diverse free people depends on what Alan Bloom calls “education for freedom, particularly the freedom of the mind.”

So, it is important that Trump has also put on the chopping block the DOE, a particularly gross violator of the guardrails of federalism, state sovereignty, and the principles of localism, particularly important for K-12 schools, given the critical role of families, churches, and neighborhoods in education.

Moreover, the DOE has become ground zero for dubious pedagogical fads, and the politicizing of our schools, using taxpayer money to promote progressive and leftist ideological goals, while sacrificing its mission to teach the foundational skills necessary for creating informed citizens.

5 Trillion Reasons Why DOGE Should Have Access To Treasury’s Payment System

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/13/5-trillion-reasons-why-doge-should-have-access-to-treasurys-payment-system/

In the brief time when Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency team had access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, they discovered that the government’s bookkeeping is so sloppy they can’t say where checks are going or why. That the government sends money to people on “do not pay” lists. And that some $100 billion worth of entitlement money goes to people with no Social Security number or temporary ID.

“This is utterly insane and must be addressed immediately,” Musk posted on X after a federal judge blocked his access to the system.

Musk is right about this being insane. But just how insane isn’t obvious – until you realize that each year the federal government writes almost $5 trillion worth of checks for individuals. (It’s expected to be $4.8 trillion this fiscal year, and is on track to top $5.7 trillion by 2029.)

Today, more than two-thirds of all the money spent by the federal government are for what the government labels as “direct payments for individuals,” which it defines as “spending programs designed to transfer income (in cash or in kind) to individuals or families.”

This isn’t money to buy weapons, or build roads and bridges, or maintain national parks. It doesn’t pay salaries for government workers or soldiers, or fund Congress. It doesn’t fund NASA, or get shipped abroad as international aid. It doesn’t go toward securing the border. This is cash, taken out of Peter’s pocket and handed over to Paul.

Yes, it includes things such as food stamps and housing subsidies, but the vast bulk of it is made up of middle-class entitlements paid for by middle-class taxpayers (minus the federal government’s cut).

Up until 1945, these “direct payments” accounted for a small fraction of federal spending. But they then steadily rose as FDR’s New Deal programs started kicking in. They got another huge boost from Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and by 1972 ate up 40% of all federal spending, which was roughly where they stayed until Bill Clinton pushed it up to the 60% range. By the end of Barack Obama’s second term, as Obamacare was taking hold, payments for individuals topped 70% of all federal spending. They reached an all-time high of 72.2% of all federal spending in 2022 under Joe Biden.