Showing posts with label behavior. Show all posts
Showing posts with label behavior. Show all posts

4-Year-Old Boy Recommended For Counter-Terrorism Program After Saying 'Cooker Bomb' Instead Of 'Cucumber'

by Lenore Skenazy.  In Britain, the inmates are running the asylum. A 4-year-old boy who mispronounced the word "cucumber" as "cooker bomb" so freaked out his pre-school teachers that they recommended him for a de-radicalization program. This happened in Britain, where nursery staff clearly couldn't keep a stiff upper lip when faced with all the     ... MORE

America’s Gestapo: The FBI’s Reign Of Terror

by John W. Whitehead.  “Don’t Be a Puppet” is the message the FBI is sending young Americans. As part of the government’s so-called ongoing war on terror, the nation’s de facto secret police force is now recruiting students and teachers to spy on each other and report anyone who appears to have the potential to be “anti-government” or “extremist.”   ... MORE

Ray Williams: The Cult Of Ignorance In The United States: Anti-Intellectualism And The "Dumbing Down" Of America

The rise of the idiot in America.  There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture. It's the dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility. Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, says in an article    ... MORE

It’s Actually Easy To Force People To Be Evil

by Annalee Newitz.   We've known for a long time that people will do terrible things under orders—like hurt strangers. But why are we so easily persuaded to do things we wouldn't otherwise choose, even when nobody is holding guns to our heads? A new scientific experiment sheds light on this ancient ethical question. University College London neuroscientist ... MORE

The Stupid Things People Do When Society Breaks Down

by Brandon Smith. A frequent mistake that many people make when considering the concept of social or economic collapse is to imagine how people and groups will behave tomorrow based on how people behave today. It is, though, extremely difficult to predict human behavior in the face of terminal chaos. What we might expect, or what         ... MORE

Baylen Linnekin: Is Mexico's Soda Tax Really Working?

Less consumption, same obesity.    Mexico has become the most obese country in the world. In a purported effort to combat the problem, the country implemented a one-peso-per-liter excise tax on sugar-sweetened beverages in January 2014. That tax, supporters claim, is working. A 2015 working paper by University of Chicago Prof.   ... MORE

NY Values: Big Apple To Make It Legal To Pee In Public

by Sylvia Van Peebles.    Of all the things one could think of that New York City needs more of, public urination doesn't immediately come to mind. But New York's City Council, which is so far left it almost collides with the right, is about to make it happen thanks to it's Speaker, a Puerto Rican nationalist who supports terrorists and rejects the       ... MORE

Walter E Williams: Education Insanity

The problem is not money.       Some credit Albert Einstein, others credit Benjamin Franklin, with the observation that "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing year after year and expecting different results." Whomever we credit, he was absolutely right. A perfect example of that insanity is education in general and particularly black     ... MORE

Michael Thomsen: Legalizing Weed Isn’t Enough

Permit marijuana use in public.    Recreational marijuana use has been legal in Seattle since 2012, but I still felt like I was getting away with something when I walked into a dispensary there this fall. There was a bouncer waiting behind a roped-off entryway on the otherwise quiet Capitol Hill side street. He passed my driver’s license through a  ... MORE

Thomas Sowell: Moral Hazard

Incentives matter.    One of the things that makes it tough to figure out how much has to be charged for insurance is that people behave differently when they are insured from the way they behave when they are not insured. In other words, if one person out of 10,000 has his car set on fire, and it costs an average of $10,000 to restore the car to its  ... MORE

Which Of The 11 American Nations Do You Live In?

by Reid Wilson.     Red states and blue states? Flyover country and the coasts? How simplistic. Colin Woodard, a reporter at the Portland Press Herald and author of several books, says North America can be broken neatly into 11 separate nation-states, where dominant cultures explain our voting behaviors and attitudes toward everything from social  ... MORE

Thomas Sowell: Ignoring The Obvious

To know and not to do is not to know. A recent, widely publicized incident in which a policeman was called to a school classroom to deal with a disruptive student has provoked all sorts of comments on whether the policeman used "excessive force." What has received far less attention, though it is a far larger question, with more sweeping      ... MORE

Danny Vinik: Obama’s Effort To ‘Nudge’ America

Government using behavioral science to shape behavior.  For the past year, the Obama administration has been running an experiment: Is it possible to make policy more effective by using psychology on citizens? The nickname is “nudging”—the idea that policymakers can change people’s behavior just by presenting choices or information      ... MORE

Police Prosecutions Have Increased, But Not Convictions

by Scott Shackford.      I don't know that I would necessarily call it "good news" that we're seeing more police officers facing actual charges and trials for fatal shootings. Given, though, that there's been a notable increase in the number of people killed by police in recent years, a doubling in the frequency by which officers face trial in 2015     ... MORE

Walter E Williams: Who's Responsible?

What do we make of Hillary's observation?    Hillary Clinton told a mixed audience, "I mean, if we're honest, for a lot of well-meaning, open-minded white people, the sight of a young black man in a hoodie still evokes a twinge of fear". Before we get into the nuts and bolts of that observation, I'd like to ask a question. Would well-meaning,      ... MORE

Tweaking The Propaganda: Obama Administration To Deploy "Behavioral Science" To Pimp Gov't Programs

by Charlie Spiering.       A new executive order from President Obama directs all government agencies to use psychological science and data to help connect more Americans to government programs. The order instructs government agencies to use “behavioral science”— a tactic used by Obama’s political campaigns to harness data from their         ... MORE

Walter E Williams: Attack on Teachers

School violence is going to get worse.   As the new school year begins, you might like to be updated on some school happenings that will no doubt be repeated this academic year. After this update, I have some questions one might ask the black leadership. The ongoing and escalating assault on primary- and secondary-school teachers is not a       ... MORE

Walter E Williams: Culture and Social Pathology

"Greatest generation" failed to transmit moral values.    A civilized society's first line of defense is not the law, police and courts but customs, traditions, rules of etiquette and moral values. These behavioral norms — mostly transmitted by example, word of mouth and religious teachings — represent a body of wisdom distilled over the ages  ... MORE