Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of the National Institutes of Health discusses the need for a new revolution in scientific study.

At the root of the scientific revolution was the idea that there was not and should never be a scientific authority. For centuries, a small number of ecclesiastical powers had decided such questions as whether the moons of Jupiter move. The scientific revolution placed these questions in the hands of a lot of very smart scientists, including those with telescopes. Unfortunately, we find ourselves back in a situation today, as demonstrated a few years ago by the Covid lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination requirements, where a relatively small number of people—directors of government agencies like the National Institutes of Health, heads of international agencies like the World Health Organization, and editors of prestigious journals—have the power to say what is true or false in science. …

… “Make America Healthy Again” can be seen as a political slogan. But it can also be seen as a cry for help from the American people. We have huge chronic disease problems. We can solve them—but we can only solve them if we fix science, which suffers today from three great problems.

The first of these problems is the replication crisis. Scientists publish studies today; we hear about their findings on TV, in newspapers, and on podcasts; and we (and even our doctors) take them for granted. But then when other scientists ask the same questions and perform the same experiments, they do not come up with the same results. That means that a lot of the science we (and our doctors) take for granted is not actually true. …

… The second problem we need to address is scientific stagnation—the problem that for every dollar we spend on science today, we get far less scientific advancement than we did over the past five decades. …

… The third problem to be addressed is the fact that about one third of all NIH grant money goes to about 20 institutions, despite the fact that there are excellent scientists all across the country.

The post Seeking a second scientific ‘revolution’ appeared first on John Locke Foundation.

M.D. Kittle writes for the Federalist about an interesting new poll involving election integrity in the Buckeye State.

Ohio voters could decide in November whether they want to enshrine its photo ID law into the state constitution. A new poll suggests the voter verification protection is very popular in the Buckeye State — as it is throughout the country.

Last week, Ohio’s Republican-controlled state Senate easily passed (22-9) a joint resolution that would send a constitutional amendment ballot question to voters. Every Democrat voted against the measure. 

The resolution now moves to the GOP-led House, where it must pass with a three-fifths majority. Republicans have the votes, but some conservatives want to see photo ID for absentee ballots enshrined in Ohio’s constitution as well. That likely will have to be a battle for a different day.

Ohio’s photo ID law went into effect in 2023. The Buckeye State is among 10 states that exclusively require individuals to show photo ID to vote in elections, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Wisconsin voters last year overwhelmingly approved enshrining photo ID at the polls in their state constitution. 

Following Wednesday’s vote, Ohio Senate President Rob McColley told reporters that he expects the ballot question will receive overwhelming support, asserting it’s “the type of protection that voters want to see in the system.”

They sure do. 

Over the weekend, Honest Elections Project Action released a poll that found 86 percent of likely Ohio voters surveyed believe that photo ID should be required to vote at the polls. It’s a bipartisan issue, with photo ID backed by 99 percent of Republicans polled, 90 percent of independents, and 69 percent of Democrats. 

And the poll found 76 percent of respondents would vote for a constitutional amendment requiring voters to show photo ID — 54 percent strongly in favor. 

The post Like NC, Ohio likes the idea of placing voter ID in constitution appeared first on John Locke Foundation.

Jonathan Leaf writes for the Washington Free Beacon about a recently fired “60 Minutes” reporter.

A week ago, former 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley arrived for a meeting with his new boss, Nick Bilton, on the CBS News show at which they both work. Pelley took this as an opportunity to lecture and browbeat Bilton. In the meeting, which was recorded and leaked to the press, Pelley publicly accused those whom he works for as lacking credentials as journalists. Singling Bilton out, Pelley said that he had “slender qualifications” for the job of producing 60 Minutes. Necessarily, CBS fired Pelley the next day.

In his posture against Bilton, Pelley portrayed himself as possessing the journalistic credibility his new boss lacked. This is a little like Jeffrey Epstein calling out the NYPD’s Special Victims Unit for their lack of caring about underage girls.

I make this claim based on personal experience.

Let me explain. Ten years ago I received a phone call out of the blue. It was from a genuinely distinguished journalist, Irish-American investigative reporter and filmmaker Phelim McAleer. Phelim was calling me to ask if I wanted to collaborate on a piece of documentary theater. The project was inspired by the true story of Steven Donziger and his legal fight with the oil giant Chevron.

Seven years before, Pelley had presented a laudatory profile of Donziger on 60 Minutes. In Pelley’s accounting, Donziger was a brave and capable attorney who had exposed Chevron for the horrible damage that it had done to the virgin tropical forest of Ecuador and the indigenous people living there. …

… But in the following seven years another story was revealed. It turned out that Donziger had engaged in blackmail, pandering, fraud, conspiracy, and bribery. Moreover, it was shown that Chevron had reached prior agreements with the Ecuadorian government which absolved it of any responsibility for a future clean-up from the oil spills that were the subject of Donziger’s litigation.

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Editors at National Review Online assess a high-profile US Senate candidacy.

It’s hard to know what’s worse — Graham Platner’s pattern of deception, or the willful credulity of his supporters.

In a friendly interview with progressive host Chris Hayes meant to do damage control on the latest scandal involving abusive behavior toward ex-girlfriends, the socialist Senate candidate insisted, “I have been very open with the people of Maine.”

Like so many other things he says, this isn’t remotely true. The candidate claims to be a straight shooter who served his country honorably as a Marine, went through a rough period when he got back, put the past behind him, and emerged from it a better man. Yet there has been a steady stream of revelations that show his appalling behavior has continued more recently and that have consistently undermined his self-justifying explanations of his life story.

Platner has portrayed himself as just a regular “working class” oyster farmer and has relied on lies or omissions to obscure the fact that, in reality, he had a wealthy upbringing. As the Washington Free Beacon reported, he did not purchase his current house with “the support of the VA,” as he has claimed, but with a $200,000 loan from his dad, while the primary customer for his oysters is his mom’s restaurant. He claimed that he attended Hotchkiss, the elite private school in Connecticut, because his local school lacked accreditation. But when the Maine Monitor, a local publication, found that it was accredited well before he was of school age, the campaign claimed Platner “misspoke.”

Late last month, the New York Times reported that early in their marriage, Platner’s wife had caught him in sexting relationships with as many as a dozen women (his campaign put the number at “up to six.”) This happened in 2023 and 2024, months into his marriage. Asked by Hayes when it stopped, Platner responded with an answer that was as clear as lobster bisque: “It stopped when it was happening.” Huh? Even the most charitable interpretation of this conduct would place his reckless behavior in the year prior to launching his Senate campaign.

The post National Review probes Graham Platner’s ‘mendacity’ appeared first on John Locke Foundation.

Wesley Smith writes for National Review Online about a well-known bioethicist’s disturbing approach toward people.

The utilitarian bioethicist Peter Singer opposes human exceptionalism. Indeed, he contends that being human is irrelevant to determining moral value. What counts are capacities and the ability to suffer.

Singer advocates using the term “person” to identify individuals with the highest moral value. Since he believes that personhood is based on capacities, some humans are not persons — the unborn, infants, the profoundly cognitively disabled — while some animals are. This means that those animals matter more morally than the vulnerable humans he so casually depersonalizes.

It is thus unsurprising that Singer takes issue with Pope Leo’s encyclical on AI because of the document’s stalwart defense of universal human rights and its intense focus on the impact AI will have on humanity. …

… This text goes far beyond the parameters of Catholic dogma to focus on the weight-bearing foundations of our liberty based in universal human equality.

And that is precisely the philosophy that Singer criticizes. Sure, he appreciates the pope’s warnings about AI and its potentially deleterious impact on human activities such as work. But Singer objects to the document’s “anthropocentric” focus.

In this regard, he makes two specific complaints. First, the pope discounts the potential personhood of AI, and second, the encyclical doesn’t bring animals equally into the focus of concern. …

… Discriminating against humans is immoral because doing so is to treat equals as if they are unequal. Treating humans differently than AI or animals is not wrong because that properly treats unequals for what they are: unequal.

As to AI, how can something that is inanimate be granted any intrinsic moral worth? It is true that AI systems will have almost infinite monetary value. They are going to be worth trillions. But do we owe machines anything at all? Not any more than we do a hammer.

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The North Carolina State Board of Elections (SBE) has proposed changes to the recount process. I offered a public comment at an SBE hearing on June 8. The prepared text of that comment is below:

I am Andy Jackson with the John Locke Foundation. I support the proposed rules changes for recounts.

The changes to 0106 will make it easier for county boards to appoint unaffiliated or third-party members to the teams conducting recounts while maintaining the requirement that board members from both parties must agree to those appointments. They add an additional safeguard by requiring that at least one person from each major party be appointed to each team.

The proposal for 0107 officially streamlines the first machine recount by specifying when officials, in addition to bipartisan team members, may assist in the recount and by allowing election boards to delegate the declaration of the recount’s completion while assuring that a machine recount shall not be declared completed until the results have been reported to the State Board.

Along with other proposals, these changes will clarify and streamline the recount process, helping reinforce public confidence in the results of close elections in North Carolina.

Here is a link to the full text of the proposed recount rules and a review of them. Here is how you can provide a public comment to the SBE on the proposals through Tuesday, July 14, by any of the methods below:

• Online on the Public Comment Portal: Recount Rules
• Email: rulemaking.sboe@ncsbe.gov (Specify that you are commenting on the recount rules
• Mail: Attn: Rulemaking Coordinator, P.O. Box 27255, Raleigh, NC 27611-7255 (Specify that you are commenting on the recount rules.)

The post Public comment on proposed election recount rules appeared first on John Locke Foundation.

Nicholas Eberstadt and Patrick Norrick explore a challenge for the future of human flourishing.

Human beings are unique among living creatures in being able to alter their own fertility deliberately, imposing their own constantly changing choices and preferences on childbearing. We are now watching a revolutionary transformation of human birth choices play out around the world in a way that only science fiction writers could have imagined even a generation ago. Humanity is in the midst of a headlong global birth crash—a plunge underway all around the world, in rich and poor regions alike, very possibly presaging an indefinite global depopulation, with our “peak human” moment coming shockingly soon. For many decades, demographers assumed that the postwar drop in worldwide birth rates would lead to an eventual equilibrium, with childbearing converging in one region after another at a little over two births per woman, the level required for long-term replacement. No longer. Instead it is now apparent that are witnessing a spreading worldwide march into the terra incognita of prolonged sub-replacement fertility, with no hints yet of how far humanity’s birth rates will ultimately fall, or when—if ever—they will recover. …

… Our current global birth crash came in quietly, too—and its dimensions are already world-changing.

Consider what is happening in East Asia, the region at the vanguard of the global birth crash.

Back in 2010, East Asia’s total fertility rate was about the same as Europe’s then- 1.6 births per woman. That meant the region’s childbearing had already dropped very significantly, to about 25 percent below the level needed for long term population stability. But in the intervening years, births in East Asia have all but collapsed. By 2025, East Asia’s childbearing level averaged less than one birth per woman. …

… But East Asia has hardly cornered the market on jaw-dropping, super-low fertility. Far from it. As one spot on the map after another approaches, or crashes through, the one-birth-per-woman line, it becomes evident that East Asia is not an exception, but rather a leading indicator for the rest of humanity.

The post Assessing the worldwide birth ‘crash’ appeared first on John Locke Foundation.

Mark Schneider and Auditi Chakravarty assess the challenges associated with rising education technology costs.

US spending on K–12 education technology reached $30 billion in 2024; some estimates predict this number will double by 2033. Online learning platforms and devices are sold as tools that could pull students out of their decade-long, COVID-exacerbated learning slump. Yet student test scores continue to stagnate, fueling a growing backlash against education technology, which often comes in the form of cell phone bans and restrictions on screen time in school.

Ed tech skeptics have a point. After all, if we’re spending tens of billions of dollars on learning technology and students’ scores aren’t improving, what are we buying with all that money? Lurking behind this critique is a set of more unsettling and urgent questions: Why are so many students still struggling to read? Why does math proficiency remain out of reach for so many children? Why do schools keep adopting new programs and technologies when it is unclear whether they improve learning?

These are not pro- or anti-technology questions. They are evidence questions: What interventions help students learn, and under what conditions?

The problem is not that effective programs don’t exist. The problem is America lacks a reliable bridge between research and scale—one that moves proven tools to millions of students and keeps unproven ones out of schools. Too many products reach schools because they are well marketed, easy to buy, or offered by familiar vendors, not because they have been shown to improve learning. Meanwhile, too many evidence-backed ideas remain stuck in universities, labs, pilot programs, or philanthropy-funded demonstrations without a viable path to the students who need them.

We need a research and development (R&D) ecosystem that can identify innovations that work, help them improve, and guide their adoption by their evidence of impact. Technology and private enterprise are already part of American education. The challenge is to build an evidence system that helps schools, funders, and policymakers distinguish what works from what sells.

The post Getting the best bang for the buck with ed tech appeared first on John Locke Foundation.

Hal Brands explores the prospects for maintaining America’s artificial intelligence dominance.

“The future of American warfare is here, and it’s spelled AI,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared in early December. It wasn’t hyperbole.

Just weeks later, the midnight raid that snagged Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro was guided by artificial intelligence. The Pentagon reportedly used Anthropic’s Claude model, paired with Palantir’s command-and-control software, to map the physical and political landscape of that daring mission. …

… American success in the age of AI is not inevitable. It depends on the ability of the U.S. to adapt quickly and respond strategically to a transformative technology. …

… America’s lead at the technological frontier is sizable but insecure. The top U.S. AI models, produced by firms such as Anthropic and OpenAI, have been months ahead of Chinese rivals DeepSeek and others, not least because of America’s massive edge in computing power. That advantage, in turn, rests partly on an architecture of semiconductor export controls built to hold back Beijing.

But Chinese firms are striving to close that gap. …

… A second challenge: keeping the world from being conquered by Chinese AI. U.S. models are more advanced, but China’s cheaper, easier-to-adapt models are often more attractive in the Global South. Beijing aggressively exports these models as part of a larger tech bundle that features everything from hardware to financing. The U.S. could lose the fight for global market share — and global influence — even if its innovation remains unsurpassed. …

… The third challenge requires securing the global AI stack amid surging threats and disorder. The UAE and other Gulf states, which are making generational bets on AI, will require massive investments in hardening data centers and other infrastructure, by burying it or surrounding it with counter-drone and counter-missile defenses. The UAE’s deepening security ties with Israel and the U.S. look especially valuable in this light.

The post America’s chances of remaining world AI ‘superpower’ appeared first on John Locke Foundation.

Desmond Lachman writes about the latest challenges facing America’s central bank.

Mike Tyson famously said that everyone has a plan until they are punched in the face. We have to wonder whether the same might be said of Donald Trump and the new Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh’s plans for the Fed under new leadership.

While Trump and Warsh might want to have the Fed lower interest rates and reduce the size of the Fed’s bloated balance sheet, they are receiving two economic punches in the face that will force them to shelve those plans for another day. The first punch is coming from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The second is coming from the current U.S. bond market rout.

Start with the inflation shock coming from the Strait of Hormuz’s closure. Not only does 20 percent of the world’s oil and natural gas supply pass through that strait so too does 30 percent of the world’s seaborne fertilizer trade, 30 percent of the world’s helium supply, and 10 percent of the world’s aluminum production. Little wonder then that we have seen a 60 percent surge in international oil prices to around $100 a barrel and a more than 50 percent increase in world fertilizer prices.

As a result of the strait’s closure, we have already seen a more than 50 percent surge in gasoline prices from less than $3 a gallon to around $4.50 a gallon.

Meanwhile, diesel prices have increased by more than 60 percent. The current fertilizer shortage is bound to add a food price shock to the current energy price shock later this year. Meanwhile, a prolonged shortfall in helium supply could disrupt semiconductor production, which is all-important in today’s manufacturing.

The net result has been that consumer price inflation has already risen to 3.8 percent, nearly double the Fed’s 2 percent inflation target. Meanwhile, wholesale prices have jumped by 6 percent.

The post Assessing new challenges for the Fed appeared first on John Locke Foundation.