Month: June 2019

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.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2KKB0wx Tyler Durden

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.

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

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.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2XEvv8D Tyler Durden

Wikipedia Co-Founder Unveils “The Declaration Of Digital Independence”

Authored by Larry Sanger,

Humanity has been contemptuously used by vast digital empires. Thus it is now necessary to replace these empires with decentralized networks of independent individuals, as in the first decades of the Internet. As our participation has been voluntary, no one doubts our right to take this step. But if we are to persuade as many people as possible to join together and make reformed networks possible, we should declare our reasons for wanting to replace the old.

We declare that we have unalienable digital rights, rights that define how information that we individually own may or may not be treated by others, and that among these rights are free speech, privacy, and security. Since the proprietary, centralized architecture of the Internet at present has induced most of us to abandon these rights, however reluctantly or cynically, we ought to demand a new system that respects them properly. The difficulty and divisiveness of wholesale reform means that this task is not to be undertaken lightly. For years we have approved of and even celebrated enterprise as it has profited from our communication and labor without compensation to us. But it has become abundantly clear more recently that a callous, secretive, controlling, and exploitative animus guides the centralized networks of the Internet and the corporations behind them.

The long train of abuses we have suffered makes it our right, even our duty, to replace the old networks. To show what train of abuses we have suffered at the hands of these giant corporations, let these facts be submitted to a candid world.

They have practiced in-house moderation in keeping with their executives’ notions of what will maximize profit, rather than allowing moderation to be performed more democratically and by random members of the community.

They have banned, shadow-banned, throttled, and demonetized both users and content based on political considerations, exercising their enormous corporate power to influence elections globally.

They have adopted algorithms for user feeds that highlight the most controversial content, making civic discussion more emotional and irrational and making it possible for foreign powers to exercise an unmerited influence on elections globally.

They have required agreement to terms of service that are impossible for ordinary users to understand, and which are objectionably vague in ways that permit them to legally defend their exploitative practices.

They have marketed private data to advertisers in ways that no one would specifically assent to.

They have failed to provide clear ways to opt out of such marketing schemes.

They have subjected users to such terms and surveillance even when users pay them for products and services.

They have data-mined user content and behavior in sophisticated and disturbing ways, learning sometimes more about their users than their users know about themselves; they have profited from this hidden but personal information.

They have avoided using strong, end-to-end encryption when users have a right to expect total privacy, in order to retain access to user data.

They have amassed stunning quantities of user data while failing to follow sound information security practices, such as encryption; they have inadvertently or deliberately opened that data to both illegal attacks and government surveillance.

They have unfairly blocked accounts, posts, and means of funding on political or religious grounds, preferring the loyalty of some users over others.

They have sometimes been too ready to cooperate with despotic governments that both control information and surveil their people.

They have failed to provide adequate and desirable options that users may use to guide their own experience of their services, preferring to manipulate users for profit.

They have failed to provide users adequate tools for searching their own content, forcing users rather to employ interfaces insultingly inadequate for the purpose.

They have exploited users and volunteers who freely contribute data to their sites, by making such data available to others only via paid application program interfaces and privacy-violating terms of service, failing to make such freely-contributed data free and open source, and disallowing users to anonymize their data and opt out easily.

They have failed to provide adequate tools, and sometimes any tools, to export user data in a common data standard.

They have created artificial silos for their own profit; they have failed to provide means to incorporate similar content, served from elsewhere, as part of their interface, forcing users to stay within their networks and cutting them off from family, friends, and associates who use other networks.

They have profited from the content and activity of users, often without sharing any of these profits with the users.

They have treated users arrogantly as a fungible resource to be exploited and controlled rather than being treated respectfully, as free, independent, and diverse partners.

We have begged and pleaded, complained, and resorted to the law. The executives of the corporations must be familiar with these common complaints; but they acknowledge them publicly only rarely and grudgingly. The ill treatment continues, showing that most of such executives are not fit stewards of the public trust.

The most reliable guarantee of our privacy, security, and free speech is not in the form of any enterprise, organization, or government, but instead in the free agreement among free individuals to use common standards and protocols. The vast power wielded by social networks of the early 21st century, putting our digital rights in serious jeopardy, demonstrates that we must engineer new—but old-fashioned—decentralized networks that make such clearly dangerous concentrations of power impossible.

Therefore, we declare our support of the following principles.

Principles of Decentralized Social Networks

  1. We free individuals should be able to publish our data freely, without having to answer to any corporation.

  2. We declare that we legally own our own data; we possess both legal and moral rights to control our own data.

  3. Posts that appear on social networks should be able to be served, like email and blogs, from many independent services that we individually control, rather than from databases that corporations exclusively control or from any central repository.

  4. Just as no one has the right to eavesdrop on private conversations in homes without extraordinarily good reasons, so also the privacy rights of users must be preserved against criminal, corporate, and governmental monitoring; therefore, for private content, the protocols must support strong, end-to-end encryption and other good privacy practices.

  5. As is the case with the Internet domain name system, lists of available user feeds should be restricted by technical standards and protocols only, never according to user identity or content.

  6. Social media applications should make available data input by the user, at the user’s sole discretion, to be distributed by all other publishers according to common, global standards and protocols, just as are email and blogs, with no publisher being privileged by the network above another. Applications with idiosyncratic standards violate their users’ digital rights.

  7. Accordingly, social media applications should aggregate posts from multiple, independent data sources as determined by the user, and in an order determined by the user’s preferences.

  8. No corporation, or small group of corporations, should control the standards and protocols of decentralized networks, nor should there be a single brand, owner, proprietary software, or Internet location associated with them, as that would constitute centralization.

  9. Users should expect to be able to participate in the new networks, and to enjoy the rights above enumerated, without special technical skills. They should have very easy-to-use control over privacy, both fine- and coarse-grained, with the most private messages encrypted automatically, and using tools for controlling feeds and search results that are easy for non-technical people to use.

We hold that to embrace these principles is to return to the sounder and better practices of the earlier Internet and which were, after all, the foundation for the brilliant rise of the Internet. Anyone who opposes these principles opposes the Internet itself. Thus we pledge to code, design, and participate in newer and better networks that follow these principles, and to eschew the older, controlling, and soon to be outmoded networks.

We, therefore, the undersigned people of the Internet, do solemnly publish and declare that we will do all we can to create decentralized social networks; that as many of us as possible should distribute, discuss, and sign their names to this document; that we endorse the preceding statement of principles of decentralization; that we will judge social media companies by these principles; that we will demonstrate our solidarity to the cause by abandoning abusive networks if necessary; and that we, both users and developers, will advance the cause of a more decentralized Internet.

Sign the petition here…

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Vancouver Housing Unaffordability Due To Foreign Ownership, Chinese Funds, & Migrant Millionaires, Study Says

A new study has provided evidence linking unaffordable housing in Vancouver to foreign ownership, Chinese capital and millionaire migrants, according to the SCMP. 

A white paper published by Josh Gordon, an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University’s school of public policy, found a stunning 96% correlation between metro Vancouver municipalities’ price to income ratios and the proportion of their detached houses in which at least one owner was a non-resident. The correlation was called “unimpeachable” by a leading research who commented on the paper. 

In short, this means that the more that a Vancouver municipality was sought after by non-resident owners, the more unaffordable it became. 

Gordon said: “When I plugged the numbers in it blew my mind … I mean, holy smokes.”

His paper stated: “This is compelling evidence that when it comes to the extreme ‘decoupling’ [of prices from local incomes] seen in the Vancouver housing market, foreign ownership is the primary culprit.”

Vancouver has often been considered the world’s most unafforable housing, second only to Hong Kong. It has a price-to-income ratio for all housing of 12.6. Among detached houses, the ratio climbs to 25 to 30 to one, especially in areas popular with Chinese buyers, like the City of Vancouver, Richmond and West Vancouver.

Gordon’s paper was checked afterwards by University of British Columbia geography professor David Ley, who has studied Vancouver real estate unaffordability for decades. It was also checked by Andy Yan, director of the City Programme at Simon Fraser University.

Ley commented: “Such a high correlation is rarely seen in social science research … It indicates a very strong relationship. So it is the presence of non-resident buyers that is forcing up prices. But there’s a qualifier here because it forces up prices relative to incomes … we can more accurately say that non-resident demand shapes affordability.”

In the country’s condo market in 2016, the correlation between the unaffordability ratio and non-resident ownership was “strong” at 75%. His research shows that the correlation would rise to 88% if the single municipality of West Vancouver was discounted.

Yan commented that the study was “very straightforward” and said: “This puts together the story about the forces that are behind Vancouver real estate … [it] gives us a foundation and a direction, for how we [produce] effective housing policy. Key to that was understanding just how much Vancouver real estate is connected to the global economy, of which a large component is being driven by China.”

Gordon also sought out to investigate “satellite families” who live in Vancouver, but whose breadwinners earned money abroad. The study said: “[A] family with a low declared Canadian income might live in a multimillion-dollar mansion. This particular situation would represent ‘decoupling’ on steroids.”

Millionaire migration from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan is primarily responsible for the satellite family phenomenon. As the article notes, “Vancouver was long the world’s most popular destination city for such migrants under wealth-determined schemes, attracting them by the tens of thousands.”

Now, the country has “become a global test bed for affordability policies, with the introduction of a foreign buyers’ tax, a speculation and vacancy tax, and increased provincial property taxes.”

The average price of a detached house in metro Vancouver is now $1.2 million.

Gordon’s study was the result of Richard Wozny’s 2017 report, which concluded that local incomes could not support prices. Wozny examined 14 Vancouver municipalities and Gordon, who said his work was “testament to Richard Wozny’s instincts and character”, looked at the same municipalities during his study. 

Yan concluded: “These are proxies for foreign money at times when we don’t have direct measures of foreign money. So we have these various scholars, with various data sets, all pointing in the same direction. That is a call for action.”

And how bad has the market gotten in Vancouver? Just 2 weeks ago, we wrote that desperate developers in Vancouver were trying to woo millennials into buying using avocado toast and free wine. 

“It’s a slower, more competitive market,” according to Vancounver-based Wesgroup Properties VP Brad Jones, adding “The onus is on us to show we have the most attractive offering.” 

As we noted in April, the decline of Vancouver’s housing market has become worldwide news – with sales plummeting 46% over the past year to levels not seen since 1986. 

In late 2018, we wrote about how Chinese fentanyl kingpins had laundered over $5 billion through Vancouver homes since 2012.

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