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Good news at last: the world isn’t as horrific as you think
Training yourself how to put the news into perspective – practising ‘factfulness’ – will change your outlook for the better
Good news at last: the world isn’t as horrific as you think
Training yourself how to put the news into perspective – practising ‘factfulness’ – will change your outlook for the better
Things are bad, and it feels like they are getting worse, right? War, violence, natural disasters, corruption. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer; and we will soon run out of resources unless something drastic is done. That’s the picture most people in the west see in the media and carry around in their heads.
I call it the overdramatic worldview. It’s stressful and misleading. In fact, the vast majority of the world’s population live somewhere in the middle of the income scale. Perhaps they are not what we think of as middle class, but they are not living in extreme poverty. Their girls go to school, their children get vaccinated. Perhaps not on every single measure, or every single year, but step by step, year by year, the world is improving. In the past two centuries, life expectancy has more than doubled. Although the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress.
The overdramatic worldview draws people to the most negative answers. It is not caused simply by out-of-date knowledge. My experience, over decades of lecturing and testing, has finally brought me to see that the overdramatic worldview comes from the very way our brains work. The brain is a product of millions of years of evolution, and we are hard-wired with instincts that helped our ancestors to survive in small groups of hunters and gatherers. We crave sugar and fat, which used to be life-saving sources of energy when food was scarce. But today these cravings make obesity one of the biggest global health problems. In the same way, we are interested in gossip and dramatic stories, which used to be the only source of news and useful information. This craving for drama causes misconceptions and helps create an overdramatic worldview. …
DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY: We still need these dramatic instincts to give meaning to our world.
FBI warns Russians hacked hundreds of thousands of routers
The FBI warned on Friday that Russian computer hackers had compromised hundreds of thousands of home and office routers and could collect user information or shut down network traffic.
A man types on a computer keyboard in front of the displayed cyber code in this illustration picture taken on March 1, 2017.
The U.S. law enforcement agency urged the owners of many brands of routers to turn them off and on again and download updates from the manufacturer to protect themselves.
The warning followed a court order Wednesday that allowed the FBI to seize a website that the hackers planned to use to give instructions to the routers. Though that cut off malicious communications, it still left the routers infected, and Friday’s warning was aimed at cleaning up those machines.
Infections were detected in more than 50 countries, though the primary target for further actions was probably Ukraine, the site of many recent infections and a longtime cyberwarfare battleground.
In obtaining the court order, the Justice Department said the hackers involved were in a group called Sofacy that answered to the Russian government.
Sofacy, also known as APT28 and Fancy Bear, has been blamed for many of the most dramatic Russian hacks, including that of the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. …
Scampers off to check for updated firmware…
The Petty, Misleading Photos We Need To Stop Sharing
The nonstop political shitblizzard of the past three years has turned even the most thought-we-were-hinged among us completely insane. But of all the ways the internet has gotten exponentially worse in every possible direction, one extremely stupid trend has really caught fire in the past year, even among seemingly reasonable people. It’s finding DEEP, VIRAL MEANING in a single photo of a public figure’s facial expression or body language.
For example, at Barbara Bush’s funeral in April, a photo of Melania Trump cracking a smile while sitting next to Barack Obama went viral. This prompted not just the typical Trump insults, but also an array of extremely serious takes about what the photo MEANS.
Do NOT tweet this photo to @realDonaldTrump. He'll hate knowing that the first time Melania cracked a smile in years was during a quiet chat with Obama. pic.twitter.com/4JwBHGUcP5
— Bob Cesca (@bobcesca_go) April 21, 2018
Here’s a tweet with 15,000+ retweets jokingly asking people not to share the pic with Trump because it’s the “first time she’s smiled in years.” Another (10K likes) claims “Obama is a funny guy, but that’s a woman craving distance from a monster being reminded what dignity looks like.” And another asks “Have you ever, ever, EVER seen Melania smile like this, and look this relaxed, beside her own husband? Ever?”
Google “Melania smiling.” It takes 0.01 seconds. Here’s Melania smiling with Trump. Here’s another one. But whatever, that’s not that important.
Donald Trump sucks the maximum amount, and he should be made fun of at every possible opportunity. But these particular posts aren’t just standard Trump twitter insults; they’re Breitbart-esque grabs at virality that claim to be revealing some underlying fundamental truth. “Look at Melania’s face … only a woman impaled by the claws of Stockholm syndrome could exude such a mournful countenance. And her lone respite? Being near Obama once.” Or … she just kind of smiled for a second. As she’s done a bunch of other times. …
Trump’s Reckoning Arrives
The president’s unpredictability once worked to his advantage—but now, it is producing a mounting list of foreign-policy failures.
President Trump speaks America’s Shithole lies in Elkhart, Indiana, on May 10, 2018.
“Gradually and then suddenly.” That was how one of Ernest Hemingway’s characters described the process of going bankrupt. The phrase applies vividly to the accumulating failures of President Trump’s foreign-policy initiatives.
Donald Trump entered office with more scope for initiative in foreign policy than any of his recent predecessors.
In his campaign for president, Trump had disparaged almost every element of the past 70 years of U.S. global leadership: nato, free trade, European integration, support for democracy, the Iraq War, the Iran deal, suspicion of Russia, outreach to China. Trump’s election jolted almost every government into a frantic effort to understand what to expect. Other countries’ uncertainty enhanced Trump’s relative power—and so, perversely, did Trump’s policy ignorance and obnoxious behavior. After eight years under the accommodating Barack Obama, the United States suddenly turned a menacing face to the world. In the short run, that menace frightened other states into attempted appeasement of this unpredictable new president.
Trump also enjoyed greater material scope: a growing economy, federal finances that were less of a mess than usual, and a lower pace of combat operations than at any time since 9/11.
Through his first months in office, Trump threw his power about as if it were an infinite resource. He growled threats, issued commands, picked quarrels, and played favorites.
And then consequences began to arrive. …
Surging gas prices could fuel backlash against Trump
A huge jump in driving costs in recent months is likely to push a wave of economic anger across the nation — just in time for the midterm elections.
The increased cost of fuel is already wiping out a big chunk of the benefit Americans received from the GOP tax cuts.
President Donald Trump is hoping a wave of tax-cut-fueled economic euphoria will boost his approval ratings and his party’s political fortunes this fall. A sharp spike in gas prices could slam the brakes on all of that.
As Americans head out for traditional Memorial Day weekend road trips, they’ll confront gas prices of nearly $3 a gallon, the highest since 2014 and a 25 percent spike since last year.
The increased cost of fuel is already wiping out a big chunk of the benefit Americans received from the GOP tax cuts. And things could get worse as summer approaches following the administration’s standoff with Iran and a move by oil-producing nations to tighten supplies.
The result: The economic and political benefits Trump and the GOP hoped to reap from cutting tax rates could be swamped by higher pump prices that Americans face every time they hit the road.
“If you look at the benefits of what households are getting from lower rates, roughly one-third of that is wiped out if these higher gas prices are sustained,” said Ellen Zentner, chief U.S. economist at Morgan Stanley. “And when we drive down the street, every block we see glaring signs about how much gas costs that day and it’s all over the media. The tax cuts were a one-off. It’s a one-time level shift in your paycheck that you are not reminded of every day.” …
Dancing clean: the woman helping clubbers deal with consent in the post-#MeToo world
As Canada’s first ‘consent captain’, Tanille Geib helps revellers with flirting, dating and hooking up on the dancefloor.
Tanille Geib: ‘Whether it’s a stare or a physical touch or dancing too close, they can come to me.’
Most nights of the week, Tanille Geib can be found wandering through drunken crowds on a dance floor in the western Canadian city of Victoria.
She’s not a bartender or a bouncer – she’s there to help patrons navigate the sometimes murky world of flirting, dating and hooking up in the wake of the #MeToo movement.
Geib was hired by the Victoria Event Centre last month as a “consent captain” – a position believed to be the first of its kind in the country. The job joins a raft of other initiatives around the world aimed at fighting back against sexual harassment and assault – but also guiding those who are struggling to move forward.
“Since the #MeToo movement, we now know what sexual assault is, and we’re like, ‘OK, we really don’t want to do that any more,’” she said. “But then there’s this whole grey cloud area around what acting in consent and consensual relationships are.” …
A century on, why are we forgetting the deaths of 100 million?
The 1918 Spanish flu outbreak killed more people than both world wars. Don’t imagine such a thing could never happen again.
Flu victims in an American emergency hospital near Fort Riley, Kansas, in 1918.
This year marks a century since some women got the vote; a century since the end of the first world war; 50 years since the 1968 revolts; 70 since the founding of Israel and the NHS. All have been well marked. So it is striking that the centenary of one of the most devastating events in human history has been allowed to pass thus far with almost no public reflection of any kind.
This year is the 100th anniversary of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. Estimates about its impact vary. But when you read that a third of the entire global population probably caught the Spanish flu and that it killed between 50 and 100 million people in all corners of the globe – up to 5% of all human beings on the planet at the time – you get an inkling of its scale.
By the time the pandemic finally ended, it had killed around 25 times more people than any other flu outbreak in history. It killed possibly more people than the first and second world wars put together. As Laura Spinney puts it in her new book, Pale Rider – the best modern account of the Spanish flu crisis – “the flu resculpted human populations more radically than anything since the Black Death”. Think about that. Not the western front, not Hitler’s invasion of Russia, not Hiroshima. But the flu. …
Class act: the great Dalit fightback that started in the schoolroom
A network of free after-school coaching classes for Dalits is just one way that India’s lowest caste is raising its sights.
A group of children at Bhim Pathshala in Sona village near Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh.
When he was 14, Govind Gyan Chand started attending the large school near his village. In the first week, some upper-caste boys took him aside and asked him about his caste. He told them he was Dalit, considered the lowest caste in Indian society. When he left school for the day, the boys were waiting outside, and flogged him. “I don’t know why they did it,” he says. “All I know is the upper caste likes to torture us. I wanted to give up school – somehow I didn’t.”
Now 22, Chand divides his time between classes in college, working, and teaching English and maths to the Dalit children of his village. He is a volunteer for Bhim Pathshala, a network of free after-school coaching classes for Dalit children run by Bhim Army, an organisation that works for the education and rights of Dalits.
Every day, Chand teaches about 20 children between the ages of four and 15 in the courtyard of a temple in Sona village, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, an area that was in the news last year for violent caste riots.
A class at Bhim Pathshala in Sona village near Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh.
When he signed up to be a teacher for Bhim Pathshala two years ago, Chand had to read up on Dalit icons and the history of oppression of his people. The temple where the after-school classes are held is dedicated to Guru Ravidass, a 14th-century poet and saint revered by Dalits; when Chand arrives, the children call out “Jai Bhim”, a greeting used by Ambedkarites, followers of Dalit icon and social reformer Bhimrao Ambedkar. …
Air Force Uncovered LSD Use Among Airmen Guarding Nuclear Missiles
Fourteen airmen who have helped secure an Air Force missile base in Wyoming have been disciplined after investigators uncovered a drug ring operating there. Here, a mock-up of a Minuteman 3 nuclear missile is seen at F.E. Warren Air Force Base.
More than a dozen U.S. Air Force airmen were linked to a drug ring at a base that controls America’s nuclear missiles and have faced disciplinary actions – including courts martial, according to an investigation by The Associated Press.
Military investigators cracked the ring in 2016, after one of the service members made the mistake of posting drug-related material to social media.
Nearly half of the airmen were convicted of using or distributing LSD — which the Pentagon has stopped screening for in drug tests, the AP reported Thursday. Citing records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the news service reports that the drug ring operated at F.E. Warren Air Force Base, just outside of Cheyenne, Wyo.
The airmen took the drugs — which also included ecstasy, cocaine and marijuana — during their off-duty time, but at least one airman acknowledged that while under the influence of LSD, he wouldn’t have been able to respond properly if he had been suddenly called to duty. …
Good News, You Can Now Pray To Amazon (Literally)
Let’s face it, Amazon is the closest thing we have to God. Its omnipotence gives us the internet, Its omnipresence means It is always watching (and listening), and Its omniscience knows when we’re about to drunkenly buy self-published monster erotica, a trespass for which It won’t judge us, because we are Its children and It loves us — even though It privately thinks we need to get our shit together.
It turns out, however, that God and Amazon are now working together, thanks to a new Alexa skill from the Church of England. After downloading the skill, users in Britain can ask to hear a daily prayer, the Ten Commandments, or the Lord’s Prayer, as well as learn about where their local church is, what Christians believe, and who God is (to which Alexa probably responds “Jeff Bezos” before telling you not to give any money to the homeless).
It’s pretty creepy to hear your household devices start reciting scripture. Whenever this happens in the movies, it normally ends with a group called “the Resistance” hiding out in the ruins of a dystopic nightmare. They could probably make it sound more friendly by giving it a celebrity voice, like George Burns or Alanis Morissette or Morgan Freem- ohhh, we can’t make that joke anymore. …
Scientists discovered massive hidden canyons in Antarctica that could spell bad news for the rest of the planet
IN THE GROOVE
In the place where West and East Antarctic ice sheets meet is one of the least-explored regions on Earth. These penguins, while in Antarctica, are not in that region. We just thought they were cool looking.
Antarctica, the Earth’s landmass now most synonymous with bad news, has a new feature for us to worry about.
A team of scientists from the UK, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway just discovered three canyons hidden beneath hundreds of feet of ice in interior Antarctica. In a paper published this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, they write that the canyons are in the region where the East and West Antarctic Ice Sheets meet, and the deep subterranean grooves are channelizing ice flow into the sea as the two sheets come together.
“[If] climate conditions change in Antarctica, we might expect the ice in these troughs to flow a lot faster towards the sea. That makes them really important, and we simply didn’t know they existed before now,” Kate Winter, a researcher at Northumbria University in the UK and the lead author on the paper, told the BBC.
The Antarctic ice sheets are expected to keep thinning as the planet warms; it’s already happening to the ice shelves that skirt the rim of the sheets. If that happens, the resulting change in mass could trigger an acceleration of ice flow through these grooves, and could act as a feedback loop driving further ice-sheet disintegration, contributing the sea level rise. …
A new scientific expedition aims to find out whether the Loch Ness monster is real
ON THE HUNT
Not the real Nessie.
It sounds like the start of a low-budget thriller: A New Zealand scientist is traveling with his international research team to Scotland to investigate whether the Loch Ness monster is real, according to the Associated Press.
The expedition is led by University of Otago professor Neil Gemmell, who does not himself believe in the Loch Ness monster. He does, however, think water samples taken from the lake may result in the discovery of new bacteria and a deeper understanding of invasive species in the ecosystem. (Sure, whatever gets the trip approved, Neil 
.)
The plan is to take 300 water samples from the lake and analyze the DNA found floating around inside it. When organisms swim around the lake, they shed bits of skin, scales, feathers, urine, and feces, says Gemmell. By tracing the DNA found in those samples back to identifiable species, the team can decode what’s living in the lake.
This is far from the first excursion to investigate the fabled sea creature. The late Robert H. Rines, who died in 2009, spent his adult life trying to track Nessie, even recruiting a pair of dolphins (and reportedly a British intelligence agency). Pictures from a separate 1976 expedition show a totally normal, competent-looking group of people standing around on a boat looking for the creature. …
Turkmens warned over presidential toilet paper
Local police in Turkmenistan are inspecting toilets for evidence that locals have been using newspapers containing photographs of President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov to wipe themselves, it’s been reported.
You’d be hard pressed to find a Turkmen newspaper without a photograph of leader Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov
The regional police in the western region of Balkan have allegedly instructed community policing officers to check toilets in public places and private houses, and to find evidence of people using newspapers with pictures of the country’s president as tissue paper, Moscow-based news website Fergana.ru – known for its credible reporting on Turkmen affairs – reports.
Officers have been told to look for the Turkmen leader’s “soiled” pictures at landfill sites, as well as among garbage at waste collection points.
“There is a special janitor at each landfill site whose job is to inspect garbage, to look for soiled newspaper photos, to establish the house or flat of the newspaper subscriber and to report it to the police,” Fergana says.
It adds that people found guilty of “damaging” the president’s image will be issued with a warning. But, according to the Alternativnnyy Novosti Turkmenistana website, there are likely to be a huge number of issued warnings, as Turkmens – impoverished from an ongoing economic crisis – do not tend to spend their money on toilet paper. …
I SAVED YOU THE TROUBLE: Yes, there is plenty of Donald Trump Toilet Paper available for sale.
Elon Musk thinks you can crowdsource truth, but that’s not how the internet works
Putting reality up to a vote is no way to increase the public’s trust in the media.
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In the beginning, the reason for the internet’s existence was to connect people as vastly and as easily as possible. Its fatal flaw, perhaps, is that nobody thought about the horrible things people might do once those walls were broken down. One of the most disconcerting trends of the modern internet is the specific, reflexive ways that bad actors have learned to manipulate and dismiss inconvenient truths by using the culture, systems, and mechanics of the internet. In the four decades since the internet expanded beyond its military origins, a clear playbook has emerged for denying reality — and it’s one that is insidiously easy to use. That hasn’t been good for discourse or truth. Elon Musk, the tech mogul and Tesla CEO, might be about to make things worse.
Yesterday, Musk took issue with a negative article about Tesla, tweeting that “the holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth, but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them.”
In the resulting tweetstorm — which ricocheted around the internet like a bullet in a cartoon — Musk floated the idea of founding a crowdsourced site called Pravda, which would, in Musk’s words, let “the public […] rate the core truth of any article & track the credibility score over time of each journalist, editor & publication.”
Problem is journos are under constant pressure to get max clicks & earn advertising dollars or get fired. Tricky situation, as Tesla doesn’t advertise, but fossil fuel companies & gas/diesel car companies are among world’s biggest advertisers.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 23, 2018
Even if some of the public doesn’t care about the credibility score, the journalists, editors & publications will. It is how they define themselves.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 23, 2018
Many, including Musk’s biographer Ashlee Vance, noted that Musk seemed to have taken a page from President Donald Trump, in categorizing any negative news about him or his companies as “fake” — a trend that Trump started and popularized in order to discredit the entire American news media. (That, by the way, is one of the first things that autocrats seek to do after taking power.) …
A Bag Of Wet Socks Is Apparently Living In The White House Press Briefing Room
“The formerly wet bag of socks… has become crusty,” tweeted a reporter who thrice spotted the socks.
A mysterious bag of socks ― of an unknown degree of dampness ― has been reportedly wandering around the White House press briefing room.
Saagar Enjeti, whose Twitter handle is @esaagar, is a White House correspondent for The Daily Caller, and he tweeted an image of the socks on May 17.
The socks appeared dirty and enclosed in a plastic baggy.
SPOTTED in the White House briefing room. A bag of wet socks pic.twitter.com/uyN3O8mrSn
— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) May 17, 2018
Five days later, Enjeti was back in the briefing room and shared another snapshot of the socks. While the location of the socks in the room had shifted the second time around, they remained sealed what appeared to be the original bag.
UPDATE: The bag of wet socks are STILL in the White House briefing room pic.twitter.com/gPAVMhUIah
— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) May 22, 2018
Enjeti’s third spotting of the socks came a full week after the first, on May 24. The formerly “wet” socks were reportedly now “crusty.”
UPDATE #2: The formerly wet bag of socks in the White House briefing room has become crusty and moved approximately two inches in the last 2 days pic.twitter.com/RMU3yQuFIx
— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) May 24, 2018
The White House did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment on the sock saga.
Social media, however, has offered all the comments about the socks: …
Ed. No word on whether the socks are moving on their own.
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Never count your commemorative coins memorializing an upcoming peace summit before they hatch.
In shocking news, a friend and ex-business partner of Michael Cohen’s is going to cooperate with investigators. (The shocking part is Cohen had a friend.)
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
Chef and host of the Netflix series “Ugly Delicious” David Chang talks about how racism plays into food culture and explains why knowing the history of meals is important.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Thanks to Melania, the internet has changed and no one says mean things anymore. To prove it, Sam checks back in on her comments section to soak in all the Bee Bestness.
THANKS to TBS and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee for making this program available on YouTube.
Seth takes a closer look at the president canceling his summit with North Korea and pushing a baseless conspiracy theory about the Russia probe.
THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.
Several short clips of Max combined together.
FINALLY . . .
What the 4% of Americans who believe in lizard people can teach us about conspiracy theories
SCALY SITUATION
Hiding in plain sight.
The internet is full of wild-eyed insinuation. Seemingly accidental events are not actually accidental. A few powerful people have hatched plots to bring about certain outcomes, usually with the goal of benefitting the shadowy string-pullers. As Karl Popper noted in Conjectures and Refutations (1963), some people tend to attribute anything they dislike to the intentional design of a few influential “others.” While conspiracy theories have long existed, the internet has accelerated their circulation (like the circulation of all information).
Who believes in conspiracies, and what might these people have in common?
There are, of course, differences in the plausibility of any one conspiracy theory. In a 2013 poll, every second United States citizen questioned seemed convinced that there was some larger conspiracy at work in the assassination of the president John F Kennedy in 1963, while “only” 4% endorsed the notion that “shape-shifting reptilian people control our world by taking on human form and gaining power.” (Still a somewhat unnerving 12 million people.)
Despite these differences, one of the most robust findings in the research on conspiracy theories is that there is a commonality to conspiracy theorists, even if the theories themselves are different. For instance, people who believe in the shape-shifting reptilian are much more likely also to doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald acted as a lone wolf. Indeed, those who believe that Osama bin Laden was dead before the Navy Seals shot him are also more likely to consider it plausible that bin Laden is still alive. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?