Tag: news

Trump Makes History As First Sitting US President To Enter North Korea; Announces Restart Of Nulear Talks

President Trump made history on Sunday by taking an unprecedented step – literally – onto North Korean soil, after which he held an extraordinary last-minute meeting with Kim Jong Un in which he announced that Washington and Pyongyang will relaunch stalled nuclear talks.

Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to cross the 1953 armistice line separating North and South Korea, then joined Kim side-by-side for a roughly 50-minute meeting in the heavily-fortified demilitarized zone.  It was their third since Trump took office, but none have yet yielded a nuclear deal.

Trump and Kim shook hands across a concrete slab forming the line between to the two nations at the DMZ, according to a reporter traveling with the president.

“Good to see again,” Kim said, according to a translator. He added he would have “never expected” Trump “at this place.”

Shortly after, Trump said “Good progress, good progress,” as he and Kim crossed back into South Korea. “Stepping across that line was a great honor,” Trump said, adding that he would invite Kim to visit the White House.

“I think it’s historic, it’s a great day for the world.”

Trump said the meeting was a victory, announcing that nuclear talks would resume “within weeks” and that the two countries were designating teams of officials to take the lead. He even invited Kim, who rarely leaves the country, to visit him at the White House.

Trump and Kim then met for less than 50 minutes at the Freedom House on the South Korean side of the DMZ, where the North Korean leader said he was “willing to put an end to the unfortunate past.” Kim credited the “excellent relations between the two of us” for the development.

“You hear the power of that voice” Trump said, adding that the North Korean leader “doesn’t do news conferences.” “Thus is a historic moment, the fact that we’re meeting,” he added.

Trump later told U.S. troops at Osan Air Base in Pyeongtaek, South Korea that he noticed that “many people … from Korea were literally in tears” when he crossed the DMZ. He also said sanctions against Pyongyang remain in place “but at some point during the negotiations things can happen” during brief remarks to reporters.

Sunday’s meeting with Kim came after bad weather blocked Trump’s attempt to make a surprise visit to the DMZ in  November 2017. Trump considered meeting Kim there in 2018 before deciding to hold the first summit between the two leaders in Singapore.

Trump in a tweet before leaving South Korea described his meeting with Kim as “wonderful,” adding that standing on North Korean soil was “an important statement for all.”

Trump recently said he received what he called a “beautiful letter” from Kim containing birthday greetings. In return, the president sent Kim a thank you note and letter.

* * *

Yet despite the fanfare, there were no signs that the U.S. and the North had made any concrete progress on denuclearization, the issue that has led to North Korea’s estrangement from the world.

Veteran nuclear negotiators and North Korea experts questioned whether Trump, by staging a high-profile photo-op absent nuclear concessions, was bestowing legitimacy on Kim and undermining global pressure to force the North to accept a denuclearization deal.

“We can only call it historic if it leads to something,” said Victor Cha, a former Asia director at the White House and an NBC News contributor.

* * *

The last minute meeting capped an unpredictable three days of diplomacy in which Trump, while in nearby Japan for the G-20 summit of world leaders, issued an invitation to Kim on Twitter to meet him in the DMZ. North Korea reacted positively, calling the proposal “interesting,” but did not confirm that Kim would accept until the last minute.

Even after Trump traveled by helicopter to the DMZ accompanied by a massive security contingent, U.S. officials had told NBC News they were unsure whether Kim would really show up.

President Donald Trump and South Korean President Moon Jae-in visit an observation post in the Joint Security Area (JSA) at Panmunjom in the DMZ.

And when he did, his handshake with Trump and their ensuing talks unfolded in chaotic fashion under overcast skies. Journalists jostled to capture the historic encounter and even White House officials accompanying the president seemed unsure what would happen next.

“This means that we can feel at ease,” Kim said of the meeting through a translator. “I believe that this will have a positive force on all of our discussions in the future.” In a nod to the unforeseen nature of their rendezvous in the DMZ, Kim told Trump that he “never expected” to see the president “at this place.”

Trump and South Korean President Moon Jae-in landed mid-afternoon in the DMZ and rushed to a vista overlooking North Korea. Sean Morrow, commander of the U.N. Security Battalion, briefed Trump about the security situation, gesturing toward North Korean territory.

Minutes later, Trump and Kim were side by side posing for photos and taking a step together over the line into North Korea. They then spoke briefly to reporters inside a nearby room before holding talks that Trump had predicted would last just a few minutes but went on for close to an hour. Both leaders predicted it would lead to better things to become between their two countries.

Of striking a nuclear deal, Trump said: “We’re not looking for speed, we’re looking to get it right.”

Trump had already made history previously, when he became the first U.S. president to meet a North Korean leader while in office, having met with Kim twice before. This marks the first meeting in the no-man’s-land between North and South since the end of the Korean War.

Trump’s last summit with Kim — in Hanoi, Vietnam, in February — collapsed abruptly, with a planned signing ceremony scrapped and Trump explaining to reporters that “sometimes you have to walk.” Back then, U.S. officials blamed the failure of negotiations on Kim’s insistence that all nuclear sanctions be lifted in exchange for only some concessions sought by the U.S. from Pyongyang related to its nuclear program.

But a senior Trump administration official told NBC News ahead of the meeting Sunday that the administration was hoping that even a handshake might jump-start negotiations at a lower level led by Stephen Biegun, the U.S. special representative for North Korea.

Those talks could then focus on making more substantive progress on the nuclear issues.

Indeed, Trump said after the meeting that Biegun and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo would be handling the relaunched nuclear talks between the countries.

And while Trump said that sanctions on the North would remain in place for now, he seemed to leave open the possibility that some could be removed during the talks, a shift from the longstanding U.S. position that all sanctions remain in place until a denuclearization deal is struck.

“At some point during the negotiation, things can happen,” Trump said.

Naturally, Trump critics, neocons, deepstaters and warhawks in Trump’s circle of trust sneered on the meeting, warning that such meetings plays into Kim’s hands, boosting him domestically and providing room for Pyongyang to continue to stall while it moves ahead with its nuclear program.

North Korea is believed to have dozens of nuclear warheads and the ability to mount them on missiles, but has yet to prove it can deliver those nuclear-tipped missiles successfully to distances as remote as the U.S. mainland. Yet Trump projected no sense of urgency on Sunday as he argued there was plenty of time to reach a deal with North Korea, echoing an argument he’d made about resolving the Iran nuclear issue the day before.

“I’m never in a rush,” Trump said. “If you’re in a rush, you get yourself in trouble.”

Both Trump and Kim offered invitations to the other to visit their capitals, with Trump saying, “I’ll invite him to the White House right now.” Kim said it would be a “great honor” if Trump visited Pyongyang.

Neither of those are likely to occur in the short term given the immense logistical and security challenges of arranging such a visit between countries that do not have diplomatic relations.

“We’ve had peace for two and a half years,” Trump said Sunday.

The president glossed over reports that Kim had ordered some of his negotiators executed following the failed Hanoi summit. Asked whether they were still alive, Trump said “I think they are,” adding that the main person the U.S. was familiar with was still living. “I would hope the rest are too,” Trump said. “I would really hope the rest are too. “

Earlier, standing with Moon at the Blue House, South Korea’s equivalent of the White House, Trump said that he and Kim “understand each other, I do believe.” He said that both he and Kim wanted to hold the meeting “from the beginning.”

“He understands me, and I believe I maybe understand him,” Trump said. “Sometimes that can lead to very good things.”

Moon, a liberal in South Korea’s political world who has pushed hard for more engagement with the North, had said ahead of the Trump-Kim meeting that he planned to let the two leaders meet privately, saying that “as for an inter-Korean dialogue, this will happen a later time.”

North Korea, after all, had publicly admonished South Korea for trying to mediate between it and the U.S. But in the end, Moon did join the U.S. and North Korean leaders for part of their meeting.

Former NBA star Dennis Rodman, who has played an unusual role in U.S.-North Korea diplomacy, wrote on Twitter that he was wishing “my friends” Trump and Kim “a very good meeting.” “Much love to you both and keep up the wonderful progress!” Rodman wrote, appending the hashtag: “#PEACEANDLOVE.”

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Jj4VIT Tyler Durden

A Wounded Erdogan Is A Dangerous Erdogan

Authored by Conn Hallinan via Counterpunch.org,

For the second time in a row, Turkish voters have rebuked President Recep Tayyir Erdogan’s handpicked candidate for the mayoralty of Istanbul, Turkey’s largest and wealthiest city. The secular Republican People’s Party (CHP) candidate, Ekrem Imamoglu, swamped Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) candidate Binali Yildirim in an election that many see as a report card on the President’s 17 years of power.

So what does the outcome of the election mean for the future of Turkey, and in particular, its powerful president? For starters, an internal political realignment, but also maybe a dangerous foreign policy adventure.

Erdogan and his Party have been weakened politically and financially by the loss of Istanbul, even though the President did his best to steer clear of the campaign over the past several weeks. Since it was Erdogan that pressured the Supreme Election Council into annulling the results of the March 31 vote, whether he likes it or not, he owns the outcome.

His opponents in the AKP are already smelling blood. Former Prime Minister Ahmet Dovutoglu, who Erdogan sidelined in 2016, has begun criticizing the President’s inner circle, including Berat Albayrak, his son-in-law and current Finance Minister. There are rumors that Dovutoglu and former deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan are considering forming a new party on the right.

Up until the March election that saw the AKP and its extreme nationalist alliance partner, the National Movement Party (MHP), lose control of most the major cities in the country, Erdogan had shown an almost instinctive grasp of what the majority of Turks wanted. But this time out the AKP seemed tone deaf. While Erdogan campaigned on the issue of terrorism, polls showed most Turks were more concerned with the disastrous state of the economy, rising inflation and growing joblessness.

The “terrorist threat” strategy—short hand for Turkey’s Kurdish minority—not only alienated conservative Kurds who reliably voted for the AKP, but forced the opposition into a united front. Parties ranging from the leftist Kurdish People’s Democratic Party and the Communist Party, to more conservative parties like the Good Party, withdrew their candidates from the Istanbul’s mayor’s race and lined up behind the CHP’s Imamoglu.

The AKP—long an electoral steamroller—ran a clumsy and ill-coordinated campaign. While the Yildirim tried to move to the center, Erdogan’s inner circle opted for a hard right program, even accusing Imamoglu of being a Greek (and closet Christian) because he hails from the Black Sea area of Trabzon that was a Greek center centuries ago. The charge backfired badly, and an area that in the past was overwhelming supportive of the AKP shifted to backing a native son. Some 2.5 million former residents of the Black Sea live in Istanbul, and it was clear which way they voted.

So what does the election outcome mean for Turkish politics? Well, for one, when the center and left unite they can beat Erdogan. But it also looks like there is going to be re-alignment on the right. In the March election, the extreme right MHP picked up some disgruntled AKP voters, and many AKP voters apparently stayed home, upset at the corruption and the anti-terrorist strategy of their party. It feels a lot like 2002, when the AKP came out of the political margins and vaulted over the rightwing Motherland and True Path parties to begin its 17 years of domination. How far all this goes and what the final outcome will be is not clear, but Erdogan has been weakened, and his opponents in the AKP are already sharpening their knives.

An Erdogan at bay, however, can be dangerous. When the AKP lost its majority in the 2015 general election, Erdogan reversed his attempt to peacefully resolve tensions with the Kurds and, instead, launched a war on Kurdish cities in the country’s southeast. While the war helped him to win back his majority in an election six months later, it alienated the Kurds and laid the groundwork for the AKP’s losses in the March 2019 election and the Istambul’s mayor’s race.

The fear is that Erdogan will look for a crisis that will resonate with Turkish nationalism, a strategy he has used in the past.

He tried to rally Turks behind overthrowing the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, but the war was never popular. Most Turks are not happy with the 3.7 million Syrian refugees currently camped in their country, nor with what increasingly appears to be a quagmire for the Turkish Army in Northern and Eastern Syria.

In general, Turkey’s foreign policy is a shambles.

Erdogan is trying to repair fences with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, because he desperately needs the investment that Gulf monarchs can bring to Turkey. But the price for that is a break with Iran and ending his support for the Muslim Brotherhood. While the Turkish President might be willing to dump the Brotherhood, Erdogan feels he needs Iran in his ongoing confrontation with the Kurds in Syria, and, at least at this point, he is unwilling to join Saudi Arabia’s jihad on Tehran.

In spite of the Turkish President’s efforts to normalize ties with Riyadh, Saudi Arabia recently issued a formal warning to Saudi real estate investors and tourists that Turkey is” inhospitable.” Saudi tourism is down 30 percent, and Turkish exports to Saudi Arabia are also off.

Erdogan is also wrangling with the US and NATO over Ankara’s purchase of the Russian S-400 anti-aircraft system, a disagreement that threatens further damage to the Turkish economy through US-imposed sanctions. There is even a demand by some Americans to expel Turkey from NATO, echoed by similar calls from the Turkish extreme right.

Talk of leaving NATO, however, is mostly Sturm und Drang. There is no Alliance procedure to expel a member, and current tensions with Moscow means NATO needs Turkey’s southern border with Russia, especially its control of the Black Sea’s outlet to the Mediterranean.

But a confrontation over Cyprus—and therefore with Greece—is by no means out of the question. This past May, Turkey announced that it was sending a ship to explore for natural gas in the sea off Cyprus, waters that are clearly within the island’s economic exploitation zone.

“History suggests that leaders who are losing their grip on power have incentives to organize a show of strength and unite their base behind an imminent foreign threat,” writes Greek investigative reporter Yiannis Baboulias in Foreign Policy.

“Erdogan has every reason to create hostilities with Greece—Turkey’s traditional adversary and Cyprus’s ally—to distract from his problems at home.”

Turkey has just finished large-scale naval exercises—code name “Sea Wolf”— in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean and, according to Baboulias, Turkish warplanes have been violating Greek airspace.

Cyprus, along with Israel and Egypt, has been trying to develop Cypriote offshore gas resources for almost a decade, but Turkey has routinely stymied their efforts. The European Union (EU) supports the right of Cyprus to develop the fields, and the EU’s foreign policy head, Federica Mogherini, called on Turkey to “respect the sovereign rights of Cyprus to its exclusive economic zone and refrain from such illegal actions.” While Mogherini pledged “full solidarity” with Cyprus, it is hard to see what the big trade organization could do in the event of a crisis.

Any friction with Cyprus is friction with Greece, and there is a distinct possibility that two NATO members could find themselves in a face off. Erdogan likes to create tensions and then negotiate from strength, a penchant he shares with US President Donald Trump. While it seems unlikely that it will come to that, in this case Turkish domestic considerations could play a role.

A dustup with Ankara’s traditional enemy, Greece, would put Erdogan’s opponents in the AKP on the defensive and divert Turks attention from the deepening economic crisis at home. It might also allow Erdogan to use the excuse of a foreign policy crisis to strengthen his already considerable executive powers and to divert to the military budget monies from cities the AKP no longer control.

Budget cuts could stymie efforts by the CHP and left parties to improve conditions in the cities and to pump badly needed funds into education. The AKP used Istanbul’s budget as a piggy bank for programs that benefited members of Erdogan’s family or generated kickbacks for the Party from construction firms and private contractors. Erdogan has already warned his opponents that they “won’t even be able to pay the salaries of their employees.”  The man may be down but he is hardly beaten. There are turbulent times ahead for Turkey.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2RMh7Wt Tyler Durden

How Biased Are We, Really?

Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, by Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Viking, 352 pages, $28

A famous song from Avenue Q, the celebrated Broadway puppet musical, nicely sums up what we’ve been told about racism for the last two decades or so: “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist.”

This notion, which escaped from the confines of academic social psychology and other fields in the 1990s, has dominated the national debate about racism ever since. When it comes to psychology’s treatment of the subject, that’s largely because of the runaway popularity of the implicit association test (IAT), a computerized quiz that supposedly reveals your level of unconscious bias against marginalized groups. It also reflects a broader infatuation with “social priming” research, which is centered on the idea that human behavior can be powerfully influenced by subtle cues, even ones we aren’t consciously aware that our mind has processed.

Social priming hit its stride at John Bargh’s New York University lab in the late 1990s (he’s now at Yale), while the IAT was introduced in 1998 by Anthony Greenwald of the University of Washington and Mahzarin Banaji, presently the chair of Harvard’s psychology department. The early years of the 21st century were very good for both: Social-priming researchers published some sexy, surprising findings, and the IAT quickly established itself as the way for sophisticated people to talk about race in America.

Implicit bias tells a compelling and straightforward story about why racially discriminatory outcomes in America persist: Many people think they’re racial egalitarians, but deep down they’re not. And their implicit bias manifests itself in countless ways, helping to reinforce America’s racial hierarchy by infecting everything from police conduct to real estate agents’ treatment of potential homeowners.

There is ample empirical evidence that implicit bias exists. Plus, you would expect it to exist, theoretically speaking—the human brain evolved to filter out the universe’s cacophony of information by quickly and often sloppily carving things up into categories, and it often then jumps to conclusions based on those categories. But there are many unanswered questions about what percentage of the discriminatory-outcome “pie” can be attributed to implicit bias. Many of the other potential culprits—ossified segregation patterns in housing and schooling, for example—can be explained entirely (or almost entirely) without any reference to implicit bias.

Making things even more complicated, the study of implicit bias has hit some serious roadblocks lately. The IAT, upon further review, doesn’t do a good job of predicting behavior, which was the main reason for its original appeal. (To be clear, that’s a separate question from whether implicit bias actually exists.) More broadly, the replication crisis presently rocking psychology—in which attempts to rerun various classic experiments are failing left and right, suggesting the initial results may have been false positives—has hit social priming particularly hard.

Onto this rather fraught landscape steps the Stanford psychologist Jennifer L. Eberhardt, a 2014 MacArthur “Genius Grant” winner for her work on racial bias. In Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, Eberhardt offers a tour of the modern study of race and racism. The book mixes summaries of empirical findings, reflections from her own life and work, and interviews with those who are, in one way or another, on the front line of American race relations, from a black police officer observing the effects of bigotry from within a department to Charlottesville counterprotesters trying to figure out how best to respond to explicit prejudice.

At its best, Biased unblinkingly explains the sheer complexity of solving tangled race-related problems in the United States. Many of its most insightful and useful parts don’t even come from social psychology. Eberhardt correctly highlights, for example, that the bail and plea-bargaining system is a disaster for those without money, who are disproportionately people of color. “Being behind bars for months awaiting trial can unravel a life” for someone without the means to get out on bail. That has the effect of coercing the poor into accepting plea deals on lesser charges, which in turn can “saddle them with a criminal conviction that has lifelong consequences, limiting where they can live, what jobs they can perform, their ability to vote, and their eligibility for college student loans.” And those convictions often bring some prison time anyway: “Black defendants are more likely than whites, Asians, or Latinos to be offered plea deals that require prison time, particularly for drug-related crimes. Blacks are also more likely to rely on the free public defender system, which puts them at a distinct disadvantage.” Simply hiring a private attorney, she explains, increases by about half the probability of defendants having the “primary charge against them reduced.”

Eberhardt also presents some difficult-to-refute findings about the role of implicit bias in the real world, including famous studies in which identical résumés are sent out with white- and black-sounding names (with the white ones getting far more callbacks) and another famous experiment in which a screen shielding performers’ identities during auditions led to more gender parity in previously male-dominated orchestra hiring. The results of these tight, elegant experiments suggest that implicit bias is at least part of the equation. And in some cases they offer clear partial solutions, such as shielding certain identifying information about job applicants and focusing more on tests of ability to perform the tasks required by a position.

But parts of Biased reflect forms of error and overreach that are presently rampant across social psychology. Much as John Bargh’s 2017 social-priming book Before You Know It didn’t even grapple with the existence of the replication crisis, for example, Eberhardt is simply too credulous about certain shaky-seeming social-priming claims. A neophyte reader wouldn’t come away with the sense that there had been any real debate over the IAT, let alone that its founders admitted in 2015 that it’s too statistically noisy to diagnose test takers at the individual level. Instead, she describes it as “more sensitive [than a survey] and designed to measure associations we don’t even know we have.”

Social psychology also has a habit of overextrapolating from rather thin experimental results, and Eberhardt occasionally falls victim to this in Biased. The most telling example comes when she describes an experiment where participants watched scenes from TV shows such as CSI and Grey’s Anatomy in which “characters [like] doctors, police officers, and scientists” had been edited out. Participants unfamiliar with the shows were then asked to rate the likability of the edited-out characters based on how the (still-visible) characters around them acted toward them, and based on transcripts of the show’s dialogue. Participants consistently “perceived the unseen black characters in these popular shows to be less liked and treated less positively than the unseen white ones,” she writes. The researchers further reported a correlation between exposure to the clips and high IAT scores. From this, Eberhardt extrapolates that “just as bias leaks out between the words of scripted dialogue, it seeps out of all of us in our everyday lives, in ways that are difficult to name and evaluate.”

The idea is that even when black characters are explicitly presented in a positive light, they can still trigger and spread implicit bias. But if you look at the study itself, it’s a real stretch to see how it could offer any evidence for such an alarming claim. For one thing, “favorable nonverbal response”—the sense that the other characters’ body language, gestures, and so on indicated positive feelings about the edited-out character—was the only category of six in which a statistically significant difference was noted between the treatment of black and white characters. And that difference was small (just 0.2 points on a six-point scale, or about a 3 percent difference in the perceived nonverbal treatment of fictional characters) and barely significant at that. When it came to perceptions of attractiveness, sociability, kindness, intelligence, and favorable verbal responses, no statistically significant differences were detected. Does one-for-six indicate an important finding, or is it just the inevitable result, statistically speaking, of testing a lot of different stuff?

The study also correlates real-life exposure to the (unedited) shows with high IAT scores—a strange finding when you think about it. We’re buffeted with huge amounts of information every day. Why would a single show we see maybe once a week be correlated meaningfully with implicit bias? It gets even more questionable when you consider that exposure to clips in another study appeared to lead to immediate increases in anti-black racism as measured by the IAT. So the scores are both jumping around in response to recent stimuli and correlated, in a longer-term way, with occasional exposure to those same stimuli?

Social psychology is only going to right its ship if social psychologists stare the problem straight in the face and are willing to discuss it openly. As informative and engaging as Biased is, when it comes to its treatment of its own discipline, it seems to suffer from a bit of—well, you know.

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How Biased Are We, Really?

Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, by Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Viking, 352 pages, $28

A famous song from Avenue Q, the celebrated Broadway puppet musical, nicely sums up what we’ve been told about racism for the last two decades or so: “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist.”

This notion, which escaped from the confines of academic social psychology and other fields in the 1990s, has dominated the national debate about racism ever since. When it comes to psychology’s treatment of the subject, that’s largely because of the runaway popularity of the implicit association test (IAT), a computerized quiz that supposedly reveals your level of unconscious bias against marginalized groups. It also reflects a broader infatuation with “social priming” research, which is centered on the idea that human behavior can be powerfully influenced by subtle cues, even ones we aren’t consciously aware that our mind has processed.

Social priming hit its stride at John Bargh’s New York University lab in the late 1990s (he’s now at Yale), while the IAT was introduced in 1998 by Anthony Greenwald of the University of Washington and Mahzarin Banaji, presently the chair of Harvard’s psychology department. The early years of the 21st century were very good for both: Social-priming researchers published some sexy, surprising findings, and the IAT quickly established itself as the way for sophisticated people to talk about race in America.

Implicit bias tells a compelling and straightforward story about why racially discriminatory outcomes in America persist: Many people think they’re racial egalitarians, but deep down they’re not. And their implicit bias manifests itself in countless ways, helping to reinforce America’s racial hierarchy by infecting everything from police conduct to real estate agents’ treatment of potential homeowners.

There is ample empirical evidence that implicit bias exists. Plus, you would expect it to exist, theoretically speaking—the human brain evolved to filter out the universe’s cacophony of information by quickly and often sloppily carving things up into categories, and it often then jumps to conclusions based on those categories. But there are many unanswered questions about what percentage of the discriminatory-outcome “pie” can be attributed to implicit bias. Many of the other potential culprits—ossified segregation patterns in housing and schooling, for example—can be explained entirely (or almost entirely) without any reference to implicit bias.

Making things even more complicated, the study of implicit bias has hit some serious roadblocks lately. The IAT, upon further review, doesn’t do a good job of predicting behavior, which was the main reason for its original appeal. (To be clear, that’s a separate question from whether implicit bias actually exists.) More broadly, the replication crisis presently rocking psychology—in which attempts to rerun various classic experiments are failing left and right, suggesting the initial results may have been false positives—has hit social priming particularly hard.

Onto this rather fraught landscape steps the Stanford psychologist Jennifer L. Eberhardt, a 2014 MacArthur “Genius Grant” winner for her work on racial bias. In Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, Eberhardt offers a tour of the modern study of race and racism. The book mixes summaries of empirical findings, reflections from her own life and work, and interviews with those who are, in one way or another, on the front line of American race relations, from a black police officer observing the effects of bigotry from within a department to Charlottesville counterprotesters trying to figure out how best to respond to explicit prejudice.

At its best, Biased unblinkingly explains the sheer complexity of solving tangled race-related problems in the United States. Many of its most insightful and useful parts don’t even come from social psychology. Eberhardt correctly highlights, for example, that the bail and plea-bargaining system is a disaster for those without money, who are disproportionately people of color. “Being behind bars for months awaiting trial can unravel a life” for someone without the means to get out on bail. That has the effect of coercing the poor into accepting plea deals on lesser charges, which in turn can “saddle them with a criminal conviction that has lifelong consequences, limiting where they can live, what jobs they can perform, their ability to vote, and their eligibility for college student loans.” And those convictions often bring some prison time anyway: “Black defendants are more likely than whites, Asians, or Latinos to be offered plea deals that require prison time, particularly for drug-related crimes. Blacks are also more likely to rely on the free public defender system, which puts them at a distinct disadvantage.” Simply hiring a private attorney, she explains, increases by about half the probability of defendants having the “primary charge against them reduced.”

Eberhardt also presents some difficult-to-refute findings about the role of implicit bias in the real world, including famous studies in which identical résumés are sent out with white- and black-sounding names (with the white ones getting far more callbacks) and another famous experiment in which a screen shielding performers’ identities during auditions led to more gender parity in previously male-dominated orchestra hiring. The results of these tight, elegant experiments suggest that implicit bias is at least part of the equation. And in some cases they offer clear partial solutions, such as shielding certain identifying information about job applicants and focusing more on tests of ability to perform the tasks required by a position.

But parts of Biased reflect forms of error and overreach that are presently rampant across social psychology. Much as John Bargh’s 2017 social-priming book Before You Know It didn’t even grapple with the existence of the replication crisis, for example, Eberhardt is simply too credulous about certain shaky-seeming social-priming claims. A neophyte reader wouldn’t come away with the sense that there had been any real debate over the IAT, let alone that its founders admitted in 2015 that it’s too statistically noisy to diagnose test takers at the individual level. Instead, she describes it as “more sensitive [than a survey] and designed to measure associations we don’t even know we have.”

Social psychology also has a habit of overextrapolating from rather thin experimental results, and Eberhardt occasionally falls victim to this in Biased. The most telling example comes when she describes an experiment where participants watched scenes from TV shows such as CSI and Grey’s Anatomy in which “characters [like] doctors, police officers, and scientists” had been edited out. Participants unfamiliar with the shows were then asked to rate the likability of the edited-out characters based on how the (still-visible) characters around them acted toward them, and based on transcripts of the show’s dialogue. Participants consistently “perceived the unseen black characters in these popular shows to be less liked and treated less positively than the unseen white ones,” she writes. The researchers further reported a correlation between exposure to the clips and high IAT scores. From this, Eberhardt extrapolates that “just as bias leaks out between the words of scripted dialogue, it seeps out of all of us in our everyday lives, in ways that are difficult to name and evaluate.”

The idea is that even when black characters are explicitly presented in a positive light, they can still trigger and spread implicit bias. But if you look at the study itself, it’s a real stretch to see how it could offer any evidence for such an alarming claim. For one thing, “favorable nonverbal response”—the sense that the other characters’ body language, gestures, and so on indicated positive feelings about the edited-out character—was the only category of six in which a statistically significant difference was noted between the treatment of black and white characters. And that difference was small (just 0.2 points on a six-point scale, or about a 3 percent difference in the perceived nonverbal treatment of fictional characters) and barely significant at that. When it came to perceptions of attractiveness, sociability, kindness, intelligence, and favorable verbal responses, no statistically significant differences were detected. Does one-for-six indicate an important finding, or is it just the inevitable result, statistically speaking, of testing a lot of different stuff?

The study also correlates real-life exposure to the (unedited) shows with high IAT scores—a strange finding when you think about it. We’re buffeted with huge amounts of information every day. Why would a single show we see maybe once a week be correlated meaningfully with implicit bias? It gets even more questionable when you consider that exposure to clips in another study appeared to lead to immediate increases in anti-black racism as measured by the IAT. So the scores are both jumping around in response to recent stimuli and correlated, in a longer-term way, with occasional exposure to those same stimuli?

Social psychology is only going to right its ship if social psychologists stare the problem straight in the face and are willing to discuss it openly. As informative and engaging as Biased is, when it comes to its treatment of its own discipline, it seems to suffer from a bit of—well, you know.

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For Americans, War Has Always Been A Spectator Sport

Authored by Nick Turse via TomDispatch.com,

From the Civil War to Vietnam, Americans have always been captivated by war’s spectacle…

Sometimes war sounds like the harsh crack of gunfire and sometimes like the whisper of the wind. This early morning – in al-Yarmouk on the southern edge of Libya’s capital, Tripoli – it was a mix of both.

All around, shops were shuttered and homes emptied, except for those in the hands of the militiamen who make up the army of the Government of National Accord (GNA), the UN-backed, internationally recognized government of Libyan Prime Minister Fayez al-Serraj. The war had slept in this morning and all was quiet until the rattle of a machine gun suddenly broke the calm.

A day earlier, I had spent hours on the roof of my hotel, listening to the basso profundo echo of artillery as dark torrents of smoke rose from explosions in this and several other outlying neighborhoods. The GNA was doing battle with the self-styled Libyan National Army of warlord Khalifa Haftar, a US citizen, former CIA asset, and longtime resident of Virginia, who was lauded by President Donald Trump in an April phone call. Watching the war from this perch brought me back to another time in my life when I wrote about war from a far greater distance—of both time and space—a war I covered decades after the fact, the one that Americans still call “Vietnam” but the Vietnamese know as “the American War.”

During the early years of US involvement there, watching the war from the hotels of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, was a rite of passage for American journalists and the signature line of unfortunate articles that often said far more about the state of war reporting than the state of the war. “On clear days patrons lunching in the ninth-floor restaurant in the Caravelle Hotel can watch Government planes dropping napalm on guerrillas across the Saigon River,” Hedrick Smith wrote in a December 1963 New York Times article.

As that war ground on, the pastime of hotel war-watching never seemed to end, despite a recognition of the practice for what it was. Musing about the spring of 1968 in his fever dream memoir, Dispatches, Esquire’s correspondent in Vietnam, Michael Herr, wrote:

“In the early evenings we’d do exactly what the correspondents did in those terrible stories that would circulate in 1964 and 1965, we’d stand on the roof of the Caravelle Hotel having drinks and watch the airstrikes across the river, so close that a good telephoto lens would pick up the markings on the planes. There were dozens of us up there, like aristocrats viewing Borodino from the heights, at least as detached about it as that even though many of us had been caught under those things from time to time.”

“IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT THERE WAS A WOMAN KILLED THERE BY OUR GUNS”

Today, few know much about Borodino—unless they remember it as the white-hot heart of the war sections of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace—a Napoleonic victory that proved so pyrrhic it would have been regarded as the French Emperor’s Waterloo, if the actual battle of that name hadn’t finally felled him. Still, even for those who don’t know Borodino from Bora Bora, Herr’s passage points to a grand tradition of detached war-watching. (Or, in the case of Ernest Hemingway’s famed Spanish Civil War coverage, war-listening: “The window of the hotel is open and, as you lie in bed, you hear the firing in the front line seventeen blocks away.”)

In fact, the classic American instance of war-as-spectator-sport occurred in 1861 in the initial major land battle of the Civil War, Bull Run (or, for those reading this below the Mason-Dixon line, the first battle of Manassas).

“On the hill beside me there was a crowd of civilians on horseback, and in all sorts of vehicles, with a few of the fairer, if not gentler sex,” wrote William Howard Russell who covered the battle for the London Times.

“The spectators were all excited, and a lady with opera glasses who was near me was quite beside herself when an unusually heavy discharge roused the current of her blood—‘That is splendid, Oh my! Is not that first rate? I guess we will be in Richmond tomorrow.’”

That woman would be sorely disappointed. US forces not only failed to defeat their Confederate foes and press on toward the capital of the secessionist South but fled, pell-mell, in ignominious retreat toward Washington. It was a routof the first order. Still, not one of the many spectators on the scene, including Congressman Alfred Ely of New York, taken prisoner by the 8th South Carolina Infantry, was killed.

But that isn’t to say that there were no civilian casualties at Bull Run.

Judith Carter Henry was as old as the imperiled republic at the time of the battle. Born in 1776, the widow of a US Navy officer, she was an invalid, confined to her bed, living with her daughter, Ellen, and a leased, enslaved woman named Lucy Griffith when Confederate snipers stormed her hilltop home and took up positions on the second floor.

“We ascended the hill near the Henry house, which was at that time filled with sharpshooters. I had scarcely gotten to the battery before I saw some of my horses fall and some of my men wounded by sharpshooters,” Captain James Ricketts, commander of Battery 1, First US Artillery, wrote in his official report.

“I turned my guns on that house and literally riddled it. It has been said that there was a woman killed there by our guns.”

Indeed, a 10-pound shell crashed through Judith Henry’s bedroom and tore off her foot. She died later that day, the first civilian death of America’s Civil War.

No one knows how many civilians died in the war between the states. No one thought to count. Maybe 50,000, including those who died from war-related disease, starvation, crossfire, riots, and other mishaps. By comparison, around 620,000 to 750,000 American soldiers died in the conflict—close to 1,000 of them at that initial battle at Bull Run.

“WHAT YOU SAW WAS THEM SHELLING MY HOME.”

A century later, US troops had traded their blue coats for olive fatigues and the wartime death tolls were inverted. More than 58,000 Americans lost their lives in Vietnam. Estimates of the Vietnamese civilian toll, on the other hand, hover around two million. Of course, we’ll never know the actual number, just as we’ll never know how many died in air strikes as reporters watched from the rooftop bar of Saigon’s Caravelle Hotel, just as I’ll never know how many—if any—lives were snuffed out as I scanned the southern edge of Tripoli and watched smoke from artillery shells and rockets billow into the sky.

That same afternoon in Libya’s capital, while taking a break from war watching, I met Salah Isaid and his two children. They were, like me, guests at the Victoria Hotel, although we were lodged there for very different reasons. When I mentioned having spent the previous hour on the roof as a suburb was being shelled hard, a glimmer of recognition flashed across Isaid’s face. “That’s Khalat Furjan,” he replied with a sad smile. “What you saw was them shelling my home.”

Isaid, his wife, and his two boys had found it difficult to escape the war zone, but finally made it to the safer north side of Tripoli, to this very hotel, in fact, a few weeks earlier. Worried that his house had been looted or destroyed, he tried several times to investigate only to be turned away at militia checkpoints. Now, he was homeless, jobless, and—even with the hotel’s special displaced-persons’ rate—rapidly burning through his savings. “I sold real estate, but who wants to buy a house in a war zone?” Isaid asked me with a wry smile that faded into a grimace.

My own experience as a reporter, in country after country, has more than confirmed his assessment. The “real estate” I saw in Tripoli’s war-ravaged suburbs was spectral, the civilian population having fled. Other than a car that had been hit by an air strike, the only vehicles were tanks or “technicals”—pickup trucks with machine guns or anti-aircraft weapons mounted in their beds. Many buildings had been peppered with machine-gun fire or battered by heavier ordnance. The sole residents now were GNA militiamen who had appropriated homes and shops as barracks and command posts.

Real estate, as Isaid well knows, is a losing proposition on a battlefront. After Judith Carter Henry’s hilltop home in Manassas Junction, Virginia, was blasted by artillery, its remains were either demolished by Confederate soldiers or burned down during the Second Battle of Bull Run, another staggering US defeat with even heavier casualties in August 1862. A photograph of Henry’s home, possibly taken in March 1862, months before that battle, already shows the house to be a crumpled ruin. (It wouldn’t be rebuilt until 1870.) Judith Henry was buried in a small plot next to her devastated home. “The Grave of Our Dear Mother Judith Henry” reads the tombstone there, which notes that she was 85 years old when “the explosion of shells in her dwelling” killed her.

One hundred and fifty years after Henry became the first civilian casualty of the Civil War, Libyans began dying in their own civil strife as revolutionaries, backed by US and NATO airpower, ended the 42-year rule of dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. Before the year was out, that war had already cost an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 lives. And the killing never ended as the country slid into permanent near-failed-state status. The current conflict, raging on Tripoli’s doorstep since April, has left more than 4,700 people dead or wounded, including at least 176 confirmed civilian casualties (which experts believe to be lower than the actual figure). All told, according to the United Nations, around 1.5 million people—roughly 24 percent of the country’s population—have been affected by the almost three-month-old conflict.

“Heavy shelling and airstrikes have become all too common since early April,” said Danielle Hannon-Burt, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross’s office in Tripoli.

“Fierce fighting in parts of Tripoli includes direct or indiscriminate attacks against civilians and their property. It also includes attacks against key electricity, water, and medical infrastructure essential for the survival of the civilian population, potentially putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk.”

In this century, it’s a story that has occurred repeatedly, each time with its own individual horrors, as the American war on terror spread from Afghanistan to Iraq and then on to other countries; as Russia fought in Georgia, Ukraine, and elsewhere; as bloodlettings have bloomed from the Democratic Republic of Congo to South Sudan, from Myanmar to Kashmir. War watchers like me and like those reporters atop the Caravelle decades ago are, of course, the lucky ones. We can sit on the rooftops of hotels and listen to the low rumble of homes being chewed up by artillery. We can make targeted runs into no-go zones to glimpse the destruction. We can visit schools transformed into shelters. We can speak to real estate agents who have morphed into war victims. Some of us, like Hedrick Smith, Michael Herr, or me, will then write about it—often from a safe distance and with the knowledge that, unlike Salah Isaid and most other civilian victims of such wars, we can always find an even safer place.

War has an all-consuming quality to it, which is at least part of what can make it so addictive for those blessed with the ability to escape it and so devastating to those trapped in it. A month of war had clearly worn Isaid down. He was slowly being crushed by it.

In the middle of our conversation, he pulled me aside and whispered so his boys couldn’t hear him, “When I go to bed at night, all I can think is ‘What is going on? What does war have to do with me?’” He shook his head disbelievingly. Some days, he told me, he gets into his car and weaves his way through the traffic on the side of the capital untouched by shelling but increasingly affected by the war. “I drive by myself. I don’t know where I’m going and don’t have any place to go. My life has stopped. This is the only way to keep moving, but I’m not going anywhere.”

I kept moving and left, of course. Isaid and his family remain in Tripoli – homeless, their lives upended, their futures uncertain – pinned under the heavy weight of war.

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Recreational Drug Use Surges Worldwide

The use of recreational drugs rose 30% between 2009 and 2017, according to new data from the United Nations World Drug Report, counting some 271 million people aged 15 to 64 in the study. 

Marijuana is the most popular drug, followed by opioids, amphetamines and cocaine, Bloomberg reports. 

The most popular drug globally continues to be cannabis, with an estimated 188 million people having used it in 2017, according to the study. Cannabis usage is most prevalent in North America, where there are an estimated 56.6 million users, followed by Asia with 54.2 million. –Bloomberg

Meanwhile, the global area under opium poppy cultivation is the second largest ever estimated, after a record high in 2017.

Stoned Israelis, Baked Jamaicans

According to the UN report, one-third of Israeli men aged 15-64 and 28.5% of Jamaican men in the same age range use marijuana at a greater frequency than the other countries studied. American men followed at 21.4%, while Canadians and New Zealanders came in at 19.1% and 18.6% respectively. 

The legalization of cannabis in some North American jurisdictions has contributed to a decline in seizures, which have slumped 77% since 2010, the study said.

Meanwhile, a record 693 tons of opiates was seized worldwide in 2017, a 5% increase from the previous year, as law enforcement efforts and international cooperation curtailed the global distribution of opium. –Bloomberg

Last week a Brazilian Air Force sergeant traveling with President Jair Bolsonaro’s entourage to the G20 in Japan was busted with 86 pounds of cocaine. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2IXA3yI Tyler Durden

40 Lessons To Teach Your Kids Before They Leave Home

Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper,

“Millennials” have been the butt of a million jokes about incompetence. The generation born between 1981 and 1996 is considered entitled, ultra-liberal, and naive about how life works. But maybe they’ve gotten a bad rap because what no one ever points out is that maybe the issue isn’t with these young people but with how they were raised. I know that my own millennial daughter is competent, frugal, and independent.

As a parent, the most important job I will ever hold is “mom” to my two daughters. And if I’m not teaching them the important life lessons they need to survive and thrive in this crazy world, I’m not doing a very good job at all. Of course, once they get out there, there are a million variables, but how they deal with those variables has a lot to do with whether they were raised to think independently or raised to wait for rescue.

While I raised girls, I think it’s essential that we teach our kids skills outside the typical gender roles. Boys need to know how to cook. Girls need to know how to fix things. Maybe it won’t be their lot in life to do things outside their traditional roles, but take it from someone who never planned to become a single mom, things don’t always go the way you expect.

As my younger daughter prepares to leave the nest (*mom sobbing*) I feel confident she’ll be just fine because I’ve taught her to the best of my ability the things she needs to know to be a successful adult.

The skills you teach your children while they’re your captive audience will see them through many things – not just everyday life but also through a potential disaster.

Everyday skills every young person should have

Here are the lessons that I think every parent needs to teach their child, whether you’re raising boys or girls. Before leaving the nest, they should be able to:

  1. Cook inexpensive, nutritious meals from scratch

  2. How to use up leftovers

  3. Get from point A to point B using public transit or under their own power

  4. Budget limited money so that the most important things are paid first

  5. Mend and repair items instead of replacing them

  6. Take a course in First Aid, CPR, and anything else applicable that is offered.  The more you know, the calmer you are able to remain during a crisis.

  7. Have a good basic First Aid kit and know how to use everything in it

  8. Know some home remedies for various common illnesses: teas for tummy aches, treatment for flu symptoms, how to soothe skin irritations, and how to care for a fever

  9. Drive.  Not only an automatic transmission but also a standard transmission

  10. Change a tire.  You don’t want your teenage daughter stranded on the side of the road at the mercy of whoever stops to help. My daughters were not allowed to drive the car until they demonstrated their ability to change the tire with the factory jack.

  11. Perform minor maintenance, like checking the oil and fluid levels, filling up the washer fluid, checking tire pressures and topping them up if needed, and changing the windshield wiper blades.

  12. Use basic tools for repairs

  13. Cook a healthy meal from scratch

  14. Cook a “company” meal – everyone needs one delicious meal that’s a little fancier they can cook when they have a guest

  15. Grocery shop within a budget and have healthy food for the week ahead

  16. Speaking of that, how to budget in general, so that they don’t have “too much month and not enough money”

  17. How to clean

  18. How to do laundry, including stain removal

  19. How to think for themselves and question authority

  20. How to budget for holidays and vacations

  21. How to manage their time to get necessary tasks accomplished by the deadlines

  22. How to tell the difference between a want and a need

  23. How to be frugal with utilities and consumable goods

  24. How to pay bills

  25. How to stay out of debt (not easy with the college credit card racket that you see on campuses across the country and rampant student loans)

  26. How to pay off debt if they have it

  27. How to keep safe: they need to have basic self-defense and weapons-handling skills.

  28. How to navigate with a paper map – not Google or their car’s GPS

  29. How to make extra money fast if an emergency arises

Emergency skills every young person should have

Some of the skills above will cross over into emergencies, like First Aid. Outside of the basics of everyday life, your kids leaving home should know:

  1. How to light a fire

  2. How to cook safely over an open fire

  3. How to keep warm when the power is out, whether that means safely operating an indoor propane heater, using the woodstove/fireplace, or bundling up in a tent and sleeping bags in the living room

  4. How to keep themselves fed when the power is out – they should have enough supplies on hand that they can stay fed at home for up to two weeks: cereal, powdered milk, granola bars, canned fruit, etc.

  5. How to deal with the most likely disasters in their area

  6. About the dangers of off-grid heating and cooking, such as the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning in unventilated rooms.

  7. How to purify water

  8. How to keep safe both at home and when they’re out. Be sure they know the difference between cover and concealment

  9. How to do laundry by hand and hang it to dry

  10. How to keep things sanitary without running water

  11. How to acquire food: foraging, fishing, gardening, hunting

It’s our job to make sure our kids are competent when they leave home.

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Antifa Mob Viciously Assaults Journalist Andy Ngo at Portland Rally

Andy Ngo, a photojournalist and editor at Quillette, landed in the emergency room after a mob of antifa activists attacked him on the streets of Portland during a Saturday afternoon demonstration.

The assailants wore black clothing and masks, and were engaged in a counter-protest against several right-wing groups, including the Proud Boys. Ngo is a well-known chronicler of antifa activity, and has criticized their illiberal tactics on Fox News. He attended the protest in this capacity—as a journalist, covering a notable public event.

According to Ngo, his attacker stole his camera equipment. But video footage recorded by another journalist, The Oregonian‘s Jim Ryan, clearly shows an antifa activist punching Ngo in the face. Others throw milkshakes at him:

Throwing milkshakes at right-wing politicians is a tactic of British progressive activists that recently traveled to this side of the Atlantic. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fla.) was hit with one earlier in June. The tactic has its defenders in mainstream left-of-center media as well: Vox‘s Carlos Maza tweeted “milkshake them all” after a British activist hurled a milkshake at Nigel Farage.

Portland police have claimed that some of the milkshakes thrown by the antifa activists on Saturday contained quick-dry cement. That may or may not be true. What is true is that an antifa mob beat up a journalist—one who is harshly critical of them, to be sure, but who posed no physical threat to them and was only there to document their activities—on a public street. This is indefensible, and yet there are tons of progressive-leaning people currently defending it, or at the very least rationalizing and making light of it.

Antifa, of course, rejects the notion that violence should only be used in response to a physical threat. The group believes that the very existence of far-right people, groups, and ideas is a kind of provocation that justifies violence—against the far-right, and against their enablers. (For more about the ideology, tactics, and goals of the movement, order my new book, Panic Attack; Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, which includes an entire chapter on antifa.)

I have reached out to Ngo for comment and will update this post if I hear back. A disoriented and clearly injured Ngo posted to his Twitter page here.

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Antifa Mob Viciously Assaults Journalist Andy Ngo at Portland Rally

Andy Ngo, a photojournalist and editor at Quillette, landed in the emergency room after a mob of antifa activists attacked him on the streets of Portland during a Saturday afternoon demonstration.

The assailants wore black clothing and masks, and were engaged in a counter-protest against several right-wing groups, including the Proud Boys. Ngo is a well-known chronicler of antifa activity, and has criticized their illiberal tactics on Fox News. He attended the protest in this capacity—as a journalist, covering a notable public event.

According to Ngo, his attacker stole his camera equipment. But video footage recorded by another journalist, The Oregonian‘s Jim Ryan, clearly shows an antifa activist punching Ngo in the face. Others throw milkshakes at him:

Throwing milkshakes at right-wing politicians is a tactic of British progressive activists that recently traveled to this side of the Atlantic. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fla.) was hit with one earlier in June. The tactic has its defenders in mainstream left-of-center media as well: Vox‘s Carlos Maza tweeted “milkshake them all” after a British activist hurled a milkshake at Nigel Farage.

Portland police have claimed that some of the milkshakes thrown by the antifa activists on Saturday contained quick-dry cement. That may or may not be true. What is true is that an antifa mob beat up a journalist—one who is harshly critical of them, to be sure, but who posed no physical threat to them and was only there to document their activities—on a public street. This is indefensible, and yet there are tons of progressive-leaning people currently defending it, or at the very least rationalizing and making light of it.

Antifa, of course, rejects the notion that violence should only be used in response to a physical threat. The group believes that the very existence of far-right people, groups, and ideas is a kind of provocation that justifies violence—against the far-right, and against their enablers. (For more about the ideology, tactics, and goals of the movement, order my new book, Panic Attack; Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, which includes an entire chapter on antifa.)

I have reached out to Ngo for comment and will update this post if I hear back. A disoriented and clearly injured Ngo posted to his Twitter page here.

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US Army Wants 500,000 Active Troops By 2020, Amid Threats Of War

The US Army wants 500,000 active duty military personnel by 2020, amid threats of war with Iran near the Strait of Hormuz and potential conflict with China across the South China Sea. The service’s recruiting goals, however, first reported by Army Times, is facing significant difficulties with unhealthy, ineligible millennials.

“It’s a difficult market because it’s a very healthy job market,” said Acting Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy. “This environment is as challenging as we’ve faced- 3.6% unemployment. We have no benchmark historically for the all-volunteer force.”

McCarthy told the Times that it would be difficult to reach the recruitment goal by year’s end.

“We are on target, but it’s close,” McCarthy said. “We, statistically, can make it, but we’re going to have to run through the finish line- undoubtedly a full sprint.”

McCarthy said Army officials are speaking with municipalities across the country to formulate a strategy to enhance recruitment at a local level.

Army officials are shocked that a soaring stock market, booming job market, and low unemployment hasn’t translated into higher recruiting numbers.

“That’s coupled with all the other factors we talk about all the time: obesity, mental health, challenges with law enforcement,” McCarthy said. “Things of that nature that would require waivers.”

McCarthy is expected to meet with trainers and NCOs at Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, Kentucky, next week to strategize how future recruitment programs can attract more millennials.

“You got to engage kids,” McCarthy said. “It’s the mentality that a recruiter needs to have to get someone to understand their story — why an opportunity to serve in the US Army would be a great thing.”

“It’s the lifeblood of our business, and it’s something, in particular in the last six months, I’ve tried to invest more of my time because the first 18 [months] has been predominately modernization and the budget,” he added.

President Trump’s “America first” foreign policy with interventionists John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, attempting to force regime change in Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and trying to kill a rising power, China, through economic warfare, has led to massive military spending, modernization efforts, and forced the service to increase active duty personnel amid the recent threats of war.

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