provinceorstate:florida

Trump endorses guns for teachers to stop shootings - BBC News
▻http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43149694

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1024x576/p05yyt2s.jpg

US President Donald Trump has said arming teachers could prevent school shootings like that which left 17 people dead last week in Florida.

A staff member with a gun could end an attack “very quickly”, he said.

Au moins, c’est clair : alignement radical sur la position de la #NRA …

How the response to the shooting in Parkland compares to other recent massacres
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/02/20/how-the-response-to-the-shooting-in-parkland-compares-to-other-recen

You’ll notice that, as of this writing, the NRA hasn’t tweeted at all in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., nearly a week ago. The six-day hiatus is the longest the NRA’s account has gone without tweeting since early 2015, when the association tweeted far less regularly.

PS : @seenthis l’image ne passe pas en preview ?

Meehan Crist reviews ‘The Water Will Come’ by Jeff Goodell · LRB 22 February 2018
▻https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n04/meehan-crist/besides-ill-be-dead

This isn’t the first time in human history that global sea levels have risen dramatically in a short period of time. Archaeological evidence shows that when glaciers melted and sea levels rose at the end of the first Ice Age, humans living along coastlines packed up their communities and moved inland. But today’s coastal infrastructure is far less mobile. ‘There’s a terrible irony in the fact that it’s the very infrastructure of the Fossil Fuel Age – the housing and office developments on the coasts, the roads, the railroads, the tunnels, the airports – that makes us most vulnerable,’ Goodell writes. Major airports such as JFK and San Francisco International are likely to be underwater within a hundred years. The eastern coast of the UK will be altered for ever. Florida’s Turkey Point nuclear reactor, which sits perched on an exposed island in Biscayne Bay, is a disaster waiting to happen. Trillions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure and entire coastal economies have been built on land that will soon be flooded, and that’s without taking into account the road erosion, beach erosion and coming property collapse along coastlines, which could trigger economic plunges deeper than the Great Recession. Today, more than 145 million people around the world live three feet or less above sea level, many in poor countries in the global South. ‘As the waters rise,’ Goodell writes, ‘millions of these people will be displaced, many of them in poor countries, creating generations of climate refugees that will make today’s Syrian war refugee crisis look like a high school drama production.’ There is no longer any doubt that the rise in global sea levels will reshape human civilisation.

#climat #montée_des_eaux

After the Florida School Shooting, We Need to Talk About More Than Guns. Elders, Rise Up!
▻https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/after-the-florida-school-shooting-we-need-to-talk-about-more-than-gu

Information is still coming out about Nikolas Cruz (19), the boy who confessed to killing 17 of his former classmates and wounding 15 more in a Florida High School...

Jordan Jereb, the captain of...

Mass shooting statistics in the United States - Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/mass-shootings-in-america

https://dl.dropbox.com/s/xxso87pwtgrczbz/Capture%20d%E2%80%99%C3%A9cran%202018-02-16%20%C3%A0%2010.03.23.png?dl=0

The Parkland, Fla., school shooting is a developing story and information is incomplete.

The places change, the numbers change, but the choice of weapon remains the same. In the United States, people who want to kill a lot of other people most often do it with guns.

Related

The number of U.S. mass shootings depends on how you count

Public mass shootings account for a tiny fraction of the country’s gun deaths, but they are uniquely terrifying because they occur without warning in the most mundane places. Most of the victims are chosen not for what they have done but simply for where they happen to be.

There is no universally accepted definition of a public mass shooting, and this piece defines it narrowly. It looks at the 150 shootings in which four or more people were killed by a lone shooter (two shooters in a few cases). It does not include shootings tied to gang disputes or robberies that went awry, and it does not include shootings that took place exclusively in private homes. A broader definition would yield much higher numbers.

#états-unis #armes #armement #meurtre_de_masse #massacre

One Day After Florida School Shooter Kills 17, Oregon House Passes Gun Control Bill - Willamette Week

▻http://www.wweek.com/news/2018/02/15/one-day-after-florida-school-shooter-kills-17-oregon-house-passes-gun-control

http://www.wweek.com/resizer/CRkewYxQ0LeOz1zz8-Gsj55fdjo=/1200x0/filters:quality(100)/s3.amazonaws.com/arc-wordpress-client-uploads/wweek/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/15113627/5484319650_f42e53a99e_o.jpg

The day after a gunman killed 17 in a Florida high school, an emotional Oregon House of Representatives voted 37-23 to pass House Bill 4145, the so-called “boyfriend loophole” bill.

Current law allows police to take guns away from offenders convicted of domestic violence against their spouses. The bill would expand that power to allow police to take guns away from intimate partners (i.e. those not married to their victims) who have been convicted of domestic violence or are the subject of a stalking order

#états-unis #armes #armment

The Parkland massacre and the dysfunction of American society - World Socialist Web Site

▻https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/02/16/pers-f16.html

The Parkland massacre and the dysfunction of American society
16 February 2018

Wednesday’s school massacre in Parkland, Florida took the lives of 17 people. Fourteen were students, ranging in age from 14 to 18 years old: Alyssa Alhadeff, Martin Duque, Nicholas Dworet, Jaime Guttenberg, Luke Hoyer, Cara Loughran, Gina Montalto, Joaquin Oliver, Alaina Petty, Meadow Pollack, Helena Ramsay, Alex Schachter, Carmen Schentrup, and Peter Wang. Three were coaches: Chris Hixon, Aaron Feis, and Scott Beigel, who was also a biology teacher.

#états-unis #massacre #meurtres_de_masse #armes #armement

When Our Children Become Murderers
▻https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/when-our-children-become-murderers

Information is still coming out about Nikolas Cruz (19), the boy accused of killing 17 of his former classmates and wounding 15 more in a Florida High School

“He was definitely not accepted at...

Why I Teach a Course Called ’White Racism’
▻https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/why-i-teach-a-course-called-white-racism

The need for students to learn about racism in American society existed long before I began teaching a course called “White Racism” at Florida Gulf Coast University earlier this year.

I chose to...

California says will block crude oil from Trump offshore drilling plan
▻https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-drilling-offshore/california-says-it-will-ban-crude-from-trump-offshore-drilling-plan-idUSKBN

California will block the transportation through its state of petroleum from new offshore oil rigs, officials told Reuters on Wednesday, a move meant to hobble the Trump administration’s effort to vastly expand drilling in U.S. federal waters.

California’s plan to deny pipeline permits for transporting oil from new leases off the Pacific Coast is the most forceful step yet by coastal states trying to halt the biggest proposed expansion in decades of federal oil and gas leasing.

Officials in Florida, North and South Carolina, Delaware and Washington, have also warned drilling could despoil beaches, harm wildlife and hurt lucrative tourism industries.

“I am resolved that not a single drop from Trump’s new oil plan ever makes landfall in California,” Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, chair of the State Lands Commission and a Democratic candidate for governor, said in an emailed statement.

Alaska becomes latest state to request limits on U.S. offshore drilling
▻https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-drilling-offshore/alaska-becomes-latest-state-to-request-limits-on-u-s-offshore-drilling-idUS

Alaska Governor Bill Walker said on Tuesday he has asked U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to pare back a Trump administration plan for oil and gas leasing off the state’s coast.

While Walker supports offshore oil development, he said the Interior Department should focus on the most prospective areas off Alaska – the Beaufort and Chukchi seas in the Arctic and Cook Inlet in southern Alaska – and drop all others from the leasing plan.

In asking for proposed lease sales to be dropped, Walker, an independent, joins governors of several other coastal states after Zinke’s unexpected move to exempt Florida from the department’s plans soon after the initial announcement.

”Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is a partner with Alaska in many resource development projects, but a key threat in the effort to achieve a vibrant offshore program in Alaska is creating the false impression that there is an imminent attempt to foster development along our entire coast,” Walker said in a statement.

Proposed lease sales for other offshore regions in Alaska, in areas spanning the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska, should be removed from the plan, Walker said. The Interior Department should also maintain long-established buffers for Native Inupiat whalers and a traditional 25-mile no-leasing buffer along the Chukchi coast, the statement said.

La déliquescence sociale des États-Unis, par Olivier Raguenes (repris sur le Blog de Paul Jorion) medium.com - 15 Janvier 2018
▻https://www.pauljorion.com/blog/2018/01/16/la-deliquescence-sociale-des-etats-unis-par-olivier-raguenes
▻https://medium.com/@olivierraguenes/la-d%C3%A9liquescence-sociale-des-%C3%A9tats-unis-e3b0549be879

• L’espace médiatique consacré aux États-Unis, dans la presse du monde entier, est monopolisé par les polémiques causées par Donald Trump. Au-delà du caractère dangereux et imprévisible du personnage, son élection est un symptôme parmi d’autres d’une société en déliquescence. L’arbre incandescent Trump dissimule une forêt en flammes : celle de la société états-unienne. Un système social en lambeaux, des écoles délabrées, des ponts et des barrages qui ne tiennent plus qu’à un fil, des centres commerciaux qui ferment par centaines… différents pans de la société états-unienne sont fragilisés, notamment par les coupes budgétaires des administrations publiques.

• Il ne sera pas question ici d’envisager un effondrement des États-Unis à proprement parler, ni même de prétendre à un quelconque diagnostic de la misère sociale de certaines populations états-uniennes ; mais plutôt d’envisager plusieurs facettes d’un phénomène de décomposition sociale au cœur de la première puissance mondiale.

LE “CROWDFUNDING” COMME MODÈLE SOCIAL

• Le système social états-unien d’abord lancé par Truman puis réduit en cendres par Reagan, est un enjeu du débat politique entre Républicains et Démocrates depuis près d’un siècle. En 2008, le gouvernement fédéral démocrate avait fait de l’”Obamacare” un axe fort de sa politique sociale. Dès lors, les États-Uniens devaient bénéficier d’un système de couverture maladie efficace et ouvert à toutes et tous. Malheureusement inaboutie, cette réforme n’a pas réussi à répondre aux coûts de soin croissants des plus graves maladies, à commencer par les cancers. Les frais médicaux sont la première cause de faillite des ménages aux États-Unis nous indique le professeur de droit Daniel A. Austin. Pour faire face à la nécessité de soins quand le budget des malades est insuffisant, nombreux sont contraints de recourir au “crowdfunding” (ou financement participatif) pour payer leurs frais de santé. L’auteur Stephen Marche montre comment cette démarche est devenue un concours de popularité où les malades tentent dramatiquement de susciter l’identification des internautes afin de récolter de l’argent. Pourtant, près de 90% de ces tentatives ne lèvent pas les fonds nécessaires aux soins. Des entreprises comme GoFundMe ou YouCaring font de cette faille abyssale du système de santé un modèle économique en prélevant leur part sur les dons. Dans le même temps, l’administration Trump tente de détricoter les maigres avancées de l’Obamacare en renforçant cette dynamique mortifère. L’accès aux soins de santé devient un enjeu sanitaire majeur pour les classes populaires des États-Unis, et les inégalités sont exacerbées, aux dépens des minorités. D’autres secteurs publics sont dans une situation précaire dans le pays, à commencer par les écoles.

• La précarité des bâtiments scolaires a été soulevée par ces images partagées sur les réseaux sociaux, où l’on voit des élèves de Baltimore en classe par des températures glaciales, parfois inférieures à 6°C. C’est l’occasion d’une empoignade entre politiques, mais les raisons tiennent bien davantage aux budgets très restreints des infrastructures publiques aux États-Unis, et ce, peu importe la couleur du maire ou du gouverneur. La situation est bien plus grave qu’une panne de chauffage ponctuelle lors d’un événement météorologique extrême. Une commission menée par la structure gérant les écoles publiques de Baltimore a estimé que deux tiers des écoles de l’agglomération étaient dans un état “très précaire”, nécessitant pour plus de cinq milliards de dollars de travaux. Au-delà du cas devenu emblématique de Baltimore, ou encore de Detroit, les écoles publiques de l’ensemble du pays sont pour beaucoup délabrées. Plus de la moitié d’entre elles ont besoin de travaux pour revenir à un “bon état”. La réussite scolaire est pourtant liée à la qualité des infrastructures. Les familles aisées préfèrent inscrire leurs enfants dans le privé, quitte parfois à s’endetter pour le faire. Cette situation précaire ne date pas d’aujourd’hui, déjà en 1995 le gouvernement fédéral estimait nécessaires des investissements majeurs pour rétablir une école publique viable dans le pays. Depuis, face aux coupes des finances publiques, les budgets consacrés aux écoles n’ont pas retrouvé leur niveau d’avant la crise de 2008. Les citoyens de Baltimore ont pour l’instant lancé une campagne de financement participatif afin de garantir un service décent dans les écoles. Donald Trump a promis un investissement de plus de mille milliards de dollars dans les infrastructures considérées prioritaires, dont les écoles. Mais elles ne sont pas seules à être dans un état déplorable, le système des transports souffre aussi d’un manque de moyens.

INFRASTRUCTURES OBSOLÈTES ET HAUSSE DES COÛTS D’ENTRETIEN

• Le ministère des transports fédéral reconnaît sur son site un cruel manque d’investissement public et appelle à une vision à long terme du réseau de routes et de ponts. Au Massachusetts ou à Rhode Island, plus d’un pont sur deux est déficient ou obsolète. Le Colorado ne dispose plus d’un budget suffisant pour maintenir en état son système routier. Le problème des infrastructures aux États-Unis se pose déjà sur le plan de l’efficacité du réseau, le temps perdu dans les transports par les foyers états-uniens est important, ce coût financier est estimé à 3400$ par an et par ménage. Mais ce problème se pose aussi au sujet de la sécurité des usagers. Les infrastructures sont dans un état très précaire, un barrage a même menacé de céder en février 2017, nécessitant l’évacuation de 200 000 personnes en Californie. La force publique peine donc déjà à entretenir les réseaux existants pour assurer leurs usages habituels. Si les structures sont en plus dégradées, le coût devient alors insupportable. La récurrence accrue des épisodes météorologiques extrêmes cause des dégâts matériels importants. Aux États-Unis, le coût des événements “naturels”, rendus plus forts à cause du dérèglement climatique provoqué notamment par l’activité économique états-unienne, a atteint un record en 2017. Ces dégâts sont cent fois plus coûteux que dans les années 1980 ! Le Wall Street Journal présente comment les assureurs, face aux incendies qui sont de plus en plus fréquents, emploient leurs propres pompiers pour préserver les maisons les plus coûteuses. La lutte anti-incendie n’est alors plus publique, mais bien privée, et devient un facteur supplémentaire d’inégalité.

• L’approvisionnement en eau est un problème dans le Sud-Ouest des États-Unis. Le débit du fleuve Colorado a baissé de 19% depuis les années 1990, et les experts estiment qu’à l’avenir, il faudra s’attendre à des restrictions de consommation de l’ordre de 35%. L’activité agricole est concernée, les prélèvements lui sont vitaux mais affectent les réserves d’eau. Située dans le désert, une ville comme Las Vegas demeure l’un des pôles touristiques et médiatiques forts des États-Unis. La “capitale du jeu” est aujourd’hui une agglomération menacée par le dérèglement climatique à travers les sécheresses. Soumise à de réels problèmes d’approvisionnement en eau, les investissements de la ville se multiplient pour tenter de repousser le problème, en utilisant toujours davantage d’énergie pour pomper l’eau depuis des réserves éloignées. Pour l’instant, bien aidés par des épisodes pluvieux, les efforts pour limiter les prélèvements du lac Mead donnent des résultats positifs, mais jusqu’à quand ?

LE “RETAIL APOCALYPSE” OU LA DÉSERTION COMMERCIALE ET SOCIALE

• Un nouveau phénomène affecte les tissus économiques, sociaux et ruraux des États-Unis. Appelé “retail apocalypse”, il s’agit en fait de la fermeture par centaines de centres commerciaux à travers le pays, les fameux “malls”. En 2017, Business Insider estime à 9 000 le nombre d’enseignes disparues, en 2018 cet effondrement pourrait provoquer la fermeture de 12 000 magasins. L’impact social de ces fermetures est très lourd localement, la situation du comté de McDowell est à ce titre éclairante mais dramatique. Déjà, les communautés rurales avaient accueilli l’arrivée de grandes structures commerciales avec enthousiasme. Des enseignes comme Walmart représentaient pour eux des opportunités d’emplois inespérées. Malheureusement, les populations locales sont entrées dans un état de dépendance vis-à-vis de ces structures. Walmart remplace les commerces de proximité, fournit aux gens des salaires et tous leurs biens de consommation (notamment la nourriture), mais accapare le lien social entier d’une communauté. Un instituteur indique même : “qu’il n’y a plus d’endroit pour rester et discuter”. Ces structures endossent dans les territoires nord-américains un rôle de centralité. Si elles viennent à disparaître, le maillage territorial se décompose. De plus, une fois que Walmart a fermé, les impôts versés localement s’envolent, réduisant le budget des écoles de 10%. En quelques mois, les emplois directs y sont passés de trois cent à zéro.

• Les distributeurs sont des pourvoyeurs importants d’emplois aux États-Unis, la faillite de ces magasins représente donc une perte d’emplois considérable. Les femmes sont bien plus concernées que les hommes par ces suppressions de postes. Entre novembre 2016 et novembre 2017, 129 000 femmes ont perdu leur emploi dans la vente d’après les statistiques officielles du département du travail états-unien. Les hommes eux, ont assez largement l’opportunité de se tourner vers l’industrie.

• Les secteurs d’activité autrefois créateurs d’emplois se tournent désormais vers l’automatisation, à commencer par l’industrie pétrolière. Les nombreux emplois supprimés par les majors lors de l’épisode de bas prix du pétrole, n’ont pas été recréés suite à la hausse des cours, les industriels investissant très largement dans les machines pour assurer l’exploitation.

• La déception de nombreux électeurs de Trump en 2016 a été illustrée par l’élection d’un démocrate à la tête de l’État d’Alabama. Les électeurs blancs de l’État ont préféré rester chez eux plutôt que de soutenir le candidat républicain accusé d’agression sexuelle. A contrario, les populations afro-américaines se sont plutôt mobilisées pour faire élire un démocrate. Cette société est toujours aussi divisée. Les hommes blancs plutôt âgés qui se sont déplacés ont voté à 70% pour le candidat républicain quand les femmes afro-américaines ont voté à près de 98% pour le candidat démocrate. Plus généralement, cet État illustre les tensions raciales, mais aussi la misère rurale de nombreuses régions des États-Unis. Des représentants de l’Organisation des Nations Unies ont visité le pays et notamment l’Alabama pour enquêter sur la pauvreté dans les pays développés. Le rapporteur, le professeur de droit Philip Alston, a été suivi par le Guardian lors de son voyage à travers les États-Unis. Il dit avoir vu “l’échec d’une société”. Cette misère, particulièrement criante dans les États du Sud, se perçoit à l’aide de l’habitat, des infrastructures, de la culture, mais aussi à travers les données sanitaires.

DE L’ABANDON SANITAIRE ET SOCIAL

• L’ankylostomose, une maladie qui concerne d’habitude les pays les plus pauvres et qui avait été éradiquée dans les années 1980 des États-Unis, est réapparue depuis quelques années dans la “blackbelt”, en particulier dans l’Alabama. Les systèmes d’égouts et de traitement des eaux y sont très largement défaillants, les bactéries et les parasites prolifèrent. Là encore, les Afro-américains sont les principaux touchés, leur situation économique et sanitaire est parfois déplorable. Le docteur Peter Hotez estime que douze millions de personnes pourraient souffrir de maladies tropicales dans le Sud des États-Unis. La maladie de Lyme se développe de façon incontrôlée dans tout l’Est du pays, en région rurale. Un élément principal de cette prolifération est l’anéantissement de la grande faune sauvage depuis plusieurs siècles. Les victimes font face, comme en France, à un aveuglement des autorités sanitaires.

• La misère sociale affecte aussi des mégapoles à l’image plutôt riche. Ainsi à Los Angeles, le nombre de personnes sans domicile fixe a bondi de 25% en un an, concernant 55 000 personnes en 2017. Cette situation est aussi empirée par l’administration Trump, qui ne cesse d’amputer les budgets en faveur du logement des plus précaires. Les villes sont donc aussi concernées par ce phénomène de déclassement social. Le film The Florida Project aborde la problématique sociale des Millenials (ou Génération Y) États-uniens, en particulier celle des jeunes mères. Elles y apparaissent sans diplôme, sans emploi stable, sans source de revenus, sans contact avec leur famille, bref en rupture totale avec la société. Le lien social se limite pour elles à leur voisinage. Pourtant, la protagoniste vit aux portes de Disneyland, symbole de la puissance culturelle et de la vitalité économique états-unienne. Son seul contact avec l’administration a pour visée de lui retirer la garde de sa fille. Ce film met des visages sur cette dégradation sociale qui devient très prégnante aux États-Unis. Ceci dit, les personnes les plus en rupture avec la société états-unienne vivent majoritairement dans les milieux ruraux.

LE NAUFRAGE RURAL

• Le Wisconsin est à cet égard un exemple marquant. État rural très agricole, il est le lieu depuis plusieurs années d’un drame social. De nombreux hommes blancs relativement âgés s’y donnent la mort. En pleine crise agricole, en 1982, le taux de suicide des agriculteurs avait atteint un premier record. En 2016, ce taux est 50% supérieur ! Pis, en 2017 ce taux est deux fois supérieur à celui des militaires vétérans, et trois fois supérieur à l’ensemble de la population. Le psychologue Mike Rosmann parle des agriculteurs comme d’une “espèce en danger”. Plus la région est rurale, plus le nombre de suicides y est élevé. Le docteur John Frey livre son explication, selon lui les facteurs sociaux qui affectent la durée de vie (santé, salaire, lien social) empirent, il pointe aussi du doigt la “désintégration de la communauté”, estimant que “le suicide est un acte de colère”. Il assimile ce phénomène à une ”épidémie invisible”. Aux États-Unis, bien que contestée, la liberté d’acheter et de porter une arme est pour beaucoup fondamentale. Plutôt qu’un moyen de défense, c’est un outil d’auto-destruction puisque 60% des décès causés par les armes à feu sont des suicides. La pygargue à tête blanche, emblème de la force états-unienne, a du plomb dans l’aile. Au-delà du suicide par arme à feu, d’autres comportements individuels destructeurs se multiplient aux États-Unis.

• Le nombre d’overdoses générées par la surconsommation d’opioïdes a augmenté de 21% entre 2015 et 2016 aux États-Unis. Le nombre de décès causés par ce phénomène a été multiplié par six entre 2013 et 2016. Ce fléau qui concerne de plus en plus de jeunes adultes, bénéficie aux entreprises qui vendent ces produits. Et c’est là tout le paradoxe de ce pays : une minorité génère son profit aux dépens des classes populaires. Le New Yorker détaille la manière dont la famille Sackler s’enrichit de cette explosion de la consommation d’opioïdes.

• La conjugaison de la hausse des suicides en milieu rural et de la crise d’opioïdes, a fait reculer l’espérance de vie états-unienne pour la deuxième année consécutive. En 1974, Emmanuel Todd anticipait l’effondrement de l’URSS en se basant sur un certain nombre de facteurs, dont le recul de l’espérance de vie. Sa démarche a inspiré l’ingénieur Dmitry Orlov, qui a tenté de définir Les Cinq Stades de l’Effondrement en appliquant son raisonnement aux États-Unis. Plutôt que de considérer ses travaux comme prophétiques, il convient toutefois de réaliser que l’effondrement social est a minima partiel, et que les budgets alloués aux politiques sociales ne cessent de fondre. La presse anglo-saxonne grand public ne rejette plus la perspective d’un ”collapse”. Parmi les facteurs qui ont causé l’effondrement de plusieurs sociétés par le passé, les inégalités de revenus apparaissent déterminantes. Cela se traduit déjà pour l’espérance de vie aux États-Unis : dix ans d’écart séparent le quart le plus riche et le quart le plus pauvre de la population.

LE GOUFFRE DES INÉGALITÉS 

• Les inégalités aux États-Unis concernent la santé, l’accès aux services élémentaires, l’accès à l’emploi, la couleur de peau, le sexe… mais aussi les revenus. D’après le rapport mondial des inégalités 2018 coordonné notamment par Thomas Piketty, le pourcent le plus riche concentre aujourd’hui plus de 20% des richesses, contre moins de 11% en 1980. À l’inverse, la moitié la plus pauvre du pays représentait près de 21% des richesses en 1980 contre à peine 13% en 2016. Ces deux dynamiques opposées ne se retrouvent pas dans les pays d’Europe de l’Ouest, pourtant, en 1980 ces mesures statistiques donnaient des résultats très proches des deux côtés de l’Atlantique. Mais ce qui est plus intéressant encore, c’est d’observer la perception qu’ont les États-Uniens de cette répartition des richesses. Michael I. Norton et Dan Ariely montrent qu’aux yeux des cinq mille sondés de leur étude, les 20% les plus riches capteraient moins de 60% des richesses. Selon la logique du “winners take it all”, les 20% les plus fortunés représentent en fait près de 90% des richesses. Enfin, le ratio entre les revenus des dirigeants des entreprises et les salariés est passé de 20 en 1965 à près de 1000 au cours des années 2010 dans certains secteurs d’activité ! Dans son rapport annuel sur les risques, le Forum économique mondial alerte sur la hausse des inégalités dans plusieurs pays, dont les États-Unis. L’économiste Robert J. Gordon s’inquiète de la baisse du niveau de vie des ménages les plus pauvres des États-Unis. Mais il note aussi une certaine convergence entre les franges les plus pauvres des différentes communautés, une forme d’égalité relativement nouvelle entre Blancs, Hispaniques et Afro-américains face à la misère.

• Certes, le chômage est revenu à un taux historiquement bas et continue globalement à baisser, mais le taux de délinquance qui avait une évolution similaire jusqu’au milieu des années 2010, ne baisse plus. D’une part, de nombreux foyers sont toujours dans une situation de détresse financière, et d’autre part, les catégories les plus jeunes sont elles aussi étranglées par les prêts (études, logement, consommation). La réserve fédérale estime même que 38% des prêts étudiants ne sont pas remboursés, ce qui est une source de déséquilibre pour les banques. Le taux de chômage bas cache aussi la vague d’emplois à temps partiel qui a déferlé à partir de 2010. Près de six millions d’États-Uniens travaillant à temps partiel souhaitent passer à temps plein. Un quart des travailleurs à temps partiel serait en situation de pauvreté. Au-delà du salaire forcément réduit, certain⋅e⋅s employé⋅e⋅s à temps partiel perdent aussi leur couverture maladie. Incité⋅e⋅s par leurs employeurs à recourir à l’Obamacare avant l’élection de Donald Trump, qu’adviendra-t-il de ces populations quand le système entier aura été mis à sac ?

• Le soulman Sam Cooke chantait son espoir de jours meilleurs dans A Change Is Gonna Come en 1963, et fut (vraisemblablement) assassiné quelques années plus tard. Charles Bradley, l’un de ses héritiers sur le plan artistique, lui répondit dans Why Is It So Hard ? en 2011. Désabusé de sa condition d’Afro-américain aux États-Unis, Bradley chanta alors : “on dirait que rien ne va changer”. De nombreux Afro-américains sont encore considérés comme des citoyens de seconde zone, le mouvement Black Lives Matter a permis de mettre en avant les violences dont ils font l’objet. D’après le rapport sur les inégalités publié chaque année par l’Université des Standford, environ 25% des Hispaniques, des Afro-américains, et des Amérindiens sont pauvres, contre 10% seulement pour les communautés asiatique et blanche. Sur ce plan, il n’y a pas eu d’évolution significative depuis 1980 !

• Les discriminations et les traitements inégaux sont des composantes intrinsèques de la culture états-unienne. Cependant, des démarches existent pour tenter de renverser le paradigme racial. Aussi, le mouvement #MeToo permet de libérer la parole des femmes à travers le pays, ainsi que de faire trembler beaucoup d’hommes de pouvoir qui ont très largement abusé de leurs positions, parfois de manière criminelle.

VERS UN RETOUR À LA TERRE ?

• Plus qu’une période de crise, c’est une situation qui empire progressivement au cours des années. En matière sociale, les deux mandats de Barack Obama n’ont pas permis de réduire les inégalités géographiques, salariales, raciales, et sexuelles, ni même d’atténuer la tension entre policiers et communauté afro-américaine. Les politiques menées par Donald Trump ne permettront pas non plus de résoudre ces problèmes, ni de les mitiger. Même les classes moyennes, qui depuis l’essor du “American way of life” semblaient profiter d’une croissance économique régulière, sont en grande partie des perdants des évolutions du pays ces dernières années. Certains rejoignent la “classe moyenne supérieure”, mais la majorité rejoint de fait les classes populaires. Quelques privilégiés prétendent encore au “rêve américain”, mais la majorité vit quelque chose qui ressemble plutôt à une dystopie états-unienne.

• Alors, nombreux sont ceux à envisager un retour à la terre. Pour la deuxième fois au cours du dernier siècle, le nombre d’agriculteurs de moins de 35 ans a augmenté aux États-Unis en 2017, dont 69% de diplômés du supérieur. Ces jeunes promeuvent une agriculture plus résiliente, indépendante des pesticides et de l’agro-industrie. Ils ne remplacent en rien les agriculteurs plus âgés qui abandonnent leurs exploitations dans les milieux plus ruraux, mais ils offrent une nouvelle dynamique aux espaces périurbains. L’effondrement industriel de Detroit et sa renaissance par l’agriculture urbaine forment un exemple de transition difficile mais médiatisée et vectrice d’espoir. Les communautés abandonnées par les constructeurs automobiles, qui constituaient pendant le XXème siècle l’alpha et l’oméga de la “Motor Town”, dont de très nombreux Afro-américains, y ont réussi à développer une agriculture vivrière low-tech, résiliente et saine.

• Et si chacune et chacun trouvait sa place grâce à la terre ? Et si cette transition agro-écologique était le meilleur moyen de lutter contre les inégalités ? Et si finalement, Sam Cooke avait raison ?

Fire engulfs casino shuttle boat off Florida coast, 15 injured
▻https://www.reuters.com/article/us-florida-boat-fire/fire-engulfs-casino-shuttle-boat-off-florida-coast-15-injured-idUSKBN1F400N

http://www.tampabay.com/storyimage/HI/20180115/ARTICLE/301159824/EP/1/3/EP-301159824.jpg

At least 15 people were injured when a fire engulfed a boat off the coast of Florida on Sunday, causing the 50 people aboard to jump into the Gulf of Mexico and swim to shore, local officials said.

A preliminary investigation showed the fire broke out at about 4:17 p.m. EST from an apparent engine issue, said Shawn Whited, division chief with Pasco Fire Rescue.

“The captain of the boat said there was an issue with the engine. He said he noticed smoke coming form the engine room and turned the boat around,” Whited said.

The 60-foot shuttle boat was on its way to the Sun Cruz Casino boat, a little more than three miles away in international waters. It had only made it about 100 yards from where it originated in Port Richey, about 30 miles north of downtown Tampa.

Casino hors des eaux territoriales,…

About-Face Tweet on Florida Drilling May Backfire on U.S. Agency - Bloomberg
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-10/about-face-tweet-on-florida-drilling-may-backfire-on-u-s-agency

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke just handed offshore drilling foes ammunition for lawsuits by declaring the Florida coast off limits.

Zinke declared he would dial back a proposal to auction drilling rights in as much as 90 percent of U.S. coastal waters less than a week after the plan was unveiled. The decision, announced Tuesday in a tweet, appeared to circumvent a detailed process laid out in federal law and came without any detailed explanation to justify the changes.

“It’s politically unwise and legally unwise,” said Michael Livermore, an administrative law professor at the University of Virginia. "They have a draft out there, and there is a formal process for making changes to the draft. And they’re circumventing that."

Zinke’s declaration followed a meeting with one of the plan’s top Republican opponents, Florida Governor Rick Scott.
[…]
At least 11 governors have asked the Interior Department to leave their states out of any new leasing plan. Some of them responded to Zinke’s pronouncement by demanding meetings with the Interior secretary to argue against new offshore drilling near their shores.

“New York doesn’t want drilling off our coast either,” the state’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, said on Twitter. “Where do we sign up for a waiver?”

Representative Ted Lieu, a Democrat from California, said Zinke did “not justify discriminatory agency action in favor of Florida over other states” and offered “no evidence other governors can’t be trusted.”

Il y a 23 états côtiers aux É.-U. (dont 4 (hors Floride) sur le Golfe du Mexique pour lequel l’appel d’offres pour les permis d’exploration à déjà été publié.

The Spark - The Latest Editorial : Climate Change Bombs the World
►https://the-spark.net

The country has been hit by extreme weather yet again.

For two weeks, extreme cold swept over the eastern United States, from Minnesota with temperatures of 30 below zero, all the way down to Florida, where “frozen iguanas” were falling out of trees. This long cold snap culminated in a “bomb cyclone,” a winter storm that moved up the east coast, hitting Georgia with freezing rain and South Carolina with half a foot of snow before dumping several feet of snow on New England.

Some people (including, of course, Donald Trump) may say that “global warming” can’t be real if such cold weather reaches the American South. In fact, these extreme weather events, even the ones bringing unusually cold weather, can indeed be attributed to human-caused climate change.

Climatologists explain that while no single weather event can be attributed to climate change, the increase in the frequency of extreme weather events can be. And we’ve seen a very rapid increase in that frequency. Over the course of the last 30 years, the average number of “billion-dollar weather events” in the U.S. had been 5.5 per year. For the past five years, the average jumped up to 10.5. Last year? Fifteen! These events took place all over the country, from drought in the northern Plains states, to raging wildfires in California, to several extremely powerful hurricanes in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.

There are not only more extreme events, but the events themselves are more extreme. Higher average temperatures mean greater moisture in the air, which translates into heavier rain. Higher temperatures also mean higher sea levels and higher storm surges and more flooding. These changes in temperature and moisture also have an effect on the Jet Stream, making these air currents less stable and more “wobbly” – meaning that cold air can more easily spill down from the Arctic, while warmer air moves north and takes its place. And sure enough, while the Southeast has had record cold temperatures, Alaska has been experiencing record warm weather.

These changes in the Jet Stream also mean that weather patterns can “stall” in one place for longer – contributing to record rainfall and flooding when Hurricane Harvey stalled over Houston, for example, and unbroken drought and more extreme fires in the West.

While the earth’s climate has changed in the past, getting both warmer and colder than it is now, those changes used to happen over much longer periods of time – thousands or even tens of thousands of years. But today’s changes, brought on by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, have been squeezed into just over 100 years. That’s far more quickly than human societies are used to reacting – especially a society based on the production of profit above all else.

Changes that rapid demand rapid response and reorganization from a society – both to reverse the problem and to deal with the consequences of those changes. And there ARE things that can be done, right now, to decrease the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and start repairing the damage. But this capitalist system, and the people who run it, are not about to jeopardize the profit of their top corporations by completely rearranging how energy is produced, how transportation flows, where people live, how food is produced. It is not even going to rebuild homes and cities to be able to withstand these more extreme events that carry more risk to the general population. If profit will not be made, these corporations, and the governments that represent them, are completely uninterested.

And ordinary working people, with no other options and nowhere else to go, will be the ones to suffer disproportionally. Just ask the working class people of Houston, of Puerto Rico, of the fire-swept areas of California – and the frozen cities of South Carolina.

Capitalism is completely unequipped to deal with the climate change that it has brought about. If humanity is to survive – if life as we know it is to continue on this earth – it is up to the working class to sweep capitalism aside.

What Happens When We Let Tech Care For Our Aging Parents | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/digital-puppy-seniors-nursing-homes

Arlyn Anderson grasped her father’s hand and presented him with the choice. “A nursing home would be safer, Dad,” she told him, relaying the doctors’ advice. “It’s risky to live here alone—”

“No way,” Jim interjected. He frowned at his daughter, his brow furrowed under a lop of white hair. At 91, he wanted to remain in the woodsy Minnesota cottage he and his wife had built on the shore of Lake Minnetonka, where she had died in his arms just a year before. His pontoon—which he insisted he could still navigate just fine—bobbed out front.

Arlyn had moved from California back to Minnesota two decades earlier to be near her aging parents. Now, in 2013, she was fiftysomething, working as a personal coach, and finding that her father’s decline was all-consuming.

Her father—an inventor, pilot, sailor, and general Mr. Fix-It; “a genius,” Arlyn says—started experiencing bouts of paranoia in his mid-eighties, a sign of Alzheimer’s. The disease had progressed, often causing his thoughts to vanish mid-sentence. But Jim would rather risk living alone than be cloistered in an institution, he told Arlyn and her older sister, Layney. A nursing home certainly wasn’t what Arlyn wanted for him either. But the daily churn of diapers and cleanups, the carousel of in-home aides, and the compounding financial strain (she had already taken out a reverse mortgage on Jim’s cottage to pay the caretakers) forced her to consider the possibility.

Jim, slouched in his recliner, was determined to stay at home. “No way,” he repeated to his daughter, defiant. Her eyes welled up and she hugged him. “OK, Dad.” Arlyn’s house was a 40-minute drive from the cottage, and for months she had been relying on a patchwork of technology to keep tabs on her dad. She set an open laptop on the counter so she could chat with him on Skype. She installed two cameras, one in his kitchen and another in his bedroom, so she could check whether the caregiver had arrived, or God forbid, if her dad had fallen. So when she read in the newspaper about a new digi­tal eldercare service called CareCoach a few weeks after broaching the subject of the nursing home, it piqued her interest. For about $200 a month, a human-powered avatar would be available to watch over a homebound person 24 hours a day; Arlyn paid that same amount for just nine hours of in-home help. She signed up immediately.

More From the Magazine
Mara Hvistendahl

Inside China’s Vast New Experiment in Social Ranking
Nathan Hill

The Overwatch Videogame League Aims to Become the New NFL
Brian Castner

Exclusive: Tracing ISIS’ Weapons Supply Chain—Back to the US

A Google Nexus tablet arrived in the mail a week later. When Arlyn plugged it in, an animated German shepherd appeared onscreen, standing at attention on a digitized lawn. The brown dog looked cutesy and cartoonish, with a bubblegum-pink tongue and round, blue eyes.

She and Layney visited their dad later that week, tablet in hand. Following the instructions, Arlyn uploaded dozens of pictures to the service’s online portal: images of family members, Jim’s boat, and some of his inventions, like a computer terminal known as the Teleray and a seismic surveillance system used to detect footsteps during the Vietnam War. The setup complete, Arlyn clutched the tablet, summoning the nerve to introduce her dad to the dog. Her initial instinct that the service could be the perfect companion for a former technologist had splintered into needling doubts. Was she tricking him? Infantilizing him?

Tired of her sister’s waffling, Layney finally snatched the tablet and presented it to their dad, who was sitting in his armchair. “Here, Dad, we got you this.” The dog blinked its saucer eyes and then, in Google’s female text-to-speech voice, started to talk. Before Alzheimer’s had taken hold, Jim would have wanted to know exactly how the service worked. But in recent months he’d come to believe that TV characters were interacting with him: A show’s villain had shot a gun at him, he said; Katie Couric was his friend. When faced with an onscreen character that actually was talking to him, Jim readily chatted back.

Jim named his dog Pony. Arlyn perched the tablet upright on a table in Jim’s living room, where he could see it from the couch or his recliner. Within a week Jim and Pony had settled into a routine, exchanging pleasantries several times a day. Every 15 minutes or so Pony would wake up and look for Jim, calling his name if he was out of view. Sometimes Jim would “pet” the sleeping dog onscreen with his finger to rustle her awake. His touch would send an instantaneous alert to the human caretaker behind the avatar, prompting the CareCoach worker to launch the tablet’s audio and video stream. “How are you, Jim?” Pony would chirp. The dog reminded him which of his daughters or in-person caretakers would be visiting that day to do the tasks that an onscreen dog couldn’t: prepare meals, change Jim’s sheets, drive him to a senior center. “We’ll wait together,” Pony would say. Often she’d read poetry aloud, discuss the news, or watch TV with him. “You look handsome, Jim!” Pony remarked after watching him shave with his electric razor. “You look pretty,” he replied. Sometimes Pony would hold up a photo of Jim’s daughters or his inventions between her paws, prompting him to talk about his past. The dog complimented Jim’s red sweater and cheered him on when he struggled to buckle his watch in the morning. He reciprocated by petting the screen with his index finger, sending hearts floating up from the dog’s head. “I love you, Jim!” Pony told him a month after they first met—something CareCoach operators often tell the people they are monitoring. Jim turned to Arlyn and gloated, “She does! She thinks I’m real good!”

About 1,500 miles south of Lake Minnetonka, in Monterrey, Mexico, Rodrigo Rochin opens his laptop in his home office and logs in to the CareCoach dashboard to make his rounds. He talks baseball with a New Jersey man watching the Yankees; chats with a woman in South Carolina who calls him Peanut (she places a cookie in front of her tablet for him to “eat”); and greets Jim, one of his regulars, who sips coffee while looking out over a lake.

Rodrigo is 35 years old, the son of a surgeon. He’s a fan of the Spurs and the Cowboys, a former international business student, and a bit of an introvert, happy to retreat into his sparsely decorated home office each morning. He grew up crossing the border to attend school in McAllen, Texas, honing the English that he now uses to chat with elderly people in the United States. Rodrigo found CareCoach on an online freelancing platform and was hired in December 2012 as one of the company’s earliest contractors, role-playing 36 hours a week as one of the service’s avatars.

After watching her dad interact with Pony, Arlyn’s reservations about outsourcing her father’s companionship vanished.

In person, Rodrigo is soft-spoken, with wire spectacles and a beard. He lives with his wife and two basset hounds, Bob and Cleo, in Nuevo León’s capital city. But the people on the other side of the screen don’t know that. They don’t know his name—or, in the case of those like Jim who have dementia, that he even exists. It’s his job to be invisible. If Rodrigo’s clients ask where he’s from, he might say MIT (the CareCoach software was created by two graduates of the school), but if anyone asks where their pet actually is, he replies in character: “Here with you.”

Rodrigo is one of a dozen CareCoach employees in Latin America and the Philippines. The contractors check on the service’s seniors through the tablet’s camera a few times an hour. (When they do, the dog or cat avatar they embody appears to wake up.) To talk, they type into the dashboard and their words are voiced robotically through the tablet, designed to give their charges the impression that they’re chatting with a friendly pet. Like all the CareCoach workers, Rodrigo keeps meticulous notes on the people he watches over so he can coordinate their care with other workers and deepen his relationship with them over time—this person likes to listen to Adele, this one prefers Elvis, this woman likes to hear Bible verses while she cooks. In one client’s file, he wrote a note explaining that the correct response to “See you later, alligator” is “After a while, crocodile.” These logs are all available to the customer’s social workers or adult children, wherever they may live. Arlyn started checking Pony’s log between visits with her dad several times a week. “Jim says I’m a really nice person,” reads one early entry made during the Minnesota winter. “I told Jim that he was my best friend. I am so happy.”

After watching her dad interact with Pony, Arlyn’s reservations about outsourcing her father’s companionship vanished. Having Pony there eased her anxiety about leaving Jim alone, and the virtual dog’s small talk lightened the mood.

Pony was not only assisting Jim’s human caretakers but also inadvertently keeping an eye on them. Months before, in broken sentences, Jim had complained to Arlyn that his in-home aide had called him a bastard. Arlyn, desperate for help and unsure of her father’s recollection, gave her a second chance. Three weeks after arriving in the house, Pony woke up to see the same caretaker, impatient. “Come on, Jim!” the aide yelled. “Hurry up!” Alarmed, Pony asked why she was screaming and checked to see if Jim was OK. The pet—actually, Rodrigo—later reported the aide’s behavior to CareCoach’s CEO, Victor Wang, who emailed Arlyn about the incident. (The caretaker knew there was a human watching her through the tablet, Arlyn says, but may not have known the extent of the person’s contact with Jim’s family behind the scenes.) Arlyn fired the short-tempered aide and started searching for a replacement. Pony watched as she and Jim conducted the interviews and approved of the person Arlyn hired. “I got to meet her,” the pet wrote. “She seems really nice.”

Pony—friend and guard dog—would stay.
Grant Cornett

Victor Wang grew up feeding his Tama­got­chis and coding choose-your-own-­adventure games in QBasic on the family PC. His parents moved from Taiwan to suburban Vancouver, British Columbia, when Wang was a year old, and his grandmother, whom he called Lao Lao in Mandarin, would frequently call from Taiwan. After her husband died, Lao Lao would often tell Wang’s mom that she was lonely, pleading with her daughter to come to Taiwan to live with her. As she grew older, she threatened suicide. When Wang was 11, his mother moved back home for two years to care for her. He thinks of that time as the honey-­sandwich years, the food his overwhelmed father packed him each day for lunch. Wang missed his mother, he says, but adds, “I was never raised to be particularly expressive of my emotions.”

At 17, Wang left home to study mechanical engineering at the University of British Columbia. He joined the Canadian Army Reserve, serving as an engineer on a maintenance platoon while working on his undergraduate degree. But he scrapped his military future when, at 22, he was admitted to MIT’s master’s program in mechanical engineering. Wang wrote his dissertation on human-machine interaction, studying a robotic arm maneuvered by astronauts on the International Space Station. He was particularly intrigued by the prospect of harnessing tech to perform tasks from a distance: At an MIT entrepreneurship competition, he pitched the idea of training workers in India to remotely operate the buffers that sweep US factory floors.

In 2011, when he was 24, his grandmother was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, a disease that affects the areas of the brain associated with memory and movement. On Skype calls from his MIT apartment, Wang watched as his grandmother grew increasingly debilitated. After one call, a thought struck him: If he could tap remote labor to sweep far-off floors, why not use it to comfort Lao Lao and others like her?

Wang started researching the looming caretaker shortage in the US—between 2010 and 2030, the population of those older than 80 is projected to rise 79 percent, but the number of family caregivers available is expected to increase just 1 percent.

In 2012 Wang recruited his cofounder, a fellow MIT student working on her computer science doctorate named Shuo Deng, to build CareCoach’s technology. They agreed that AI speech technology was too rudimentary for an avatar capable of spontaneous conversation tailored to subtle mood and behavioral cues. For that, they would need humans.

Older people like Jim often don’t speak clearly or linearly, and those with dementia can’t be expected to troubleshoot a machine that misunderstands. “When you match someone not fully coherent with a device that’s not fully coherent, it’s a recipe for disaster,” Wang says. Pony, on the other hand, was an expert at deciphering Jim’s needs. Once, Pony noticed that Jim was holding onto furniture for support, as if he were dizzy. The pet persuaded him to sit down, then called Arlyn. Deng figures it’ll take about 20 years for AI to be able to master that kind of personal interaction and recognition. That said, the CareCoach system is already deploying some automated abilities. Five years ago, when Jim was introduced to Pony, the offshore workers behind the camera had to type every response; today CareCoach’s software creates roughly one out of every five sentences the pet speaks. Wang aims to standardize care by having the software manage more of the patients’ regular reminders—prodding them to take their medicine, urging them to eat well and stay hydrated. CareCoach workers are part free­wheeling raconteurs, part human natural-­language processors, listening to and deciphering their charges’ speech patterns or nudging the person back on track if they veer off topic. The company recently began recording conversations to better train its software in senior speech recognition.

CareCoach found its first customer in December 2012, and in 2014 Wang moved from Massachusetts to Silicon Valley, renting a tiny office space on a lusterless stretch of Millbrae near the San Francisco airport. Four employees congregate in one room with a view of the parking lot, while Wang and his wife, Brittany, a program manager he met at a gerontology conference, work in the foyer. Eight tablets with sleeping pets onscreen are lined up for testing before being shipped to their respective seniors. The avatars inhale and exhale, lending an eerie sense of life to their digital kennel.

CareCoach conveys the perceptiveness and emotional intelligence of the humans powering it but masquerades as an animated app.

Wang spends much of his time on the road, touting his product’s health benefits at medical conferences and in hospital executive suites. Onstage at a gerontology summit in San Francisco last summer, he deftly impersonated the strained, raspy voice of an elderly man talking to a CareCoach pet while Brittany stealthily cued the replies from her laptop in the audience. The company’s tablets are used by hospitals and health plans across Massachusetts, California, New York, South Carolina, Florida, and Washington state. Between corporate and individual customers, CareCoach’s avatars have interacted with hundreds of users in the US. “The goal,” Wang says, “is not to have a little family business that just breaks even.”

The fastest growth would come through hospital units and health plans specializing in high-need and elderly patients, and he makes the argument that his avatars cut health care costs. (A private room in a nursing home can run more than $7,500 a month.) Preliminary research has been promising, though limited. In a study conducted by Pace University at a Manhattan housing project and a Queens hospital, CareCoach’s avatars were found to reduce subjects’ loneliness, delirium, and falls. A health provider in Massachusetts was able to replace a man’s 11 weekly in-home nurse visits with a CareCoach tablet, which diligently reminded him to take his medications. (The man told nurses that the pet’s nagging reminded him of having his wife back in the house. “It’s kind of like a complaint, but he loves it at the same time,” the project’s lead says.) Still, the feelings aren’t always so cordial: In the Pace University study, some aggravated seniors with dementia lashed out and hit the tablet. In response, the onscreen pet sheds tears and tries to calm the person.

More troubling, perhaps, were the people who grew too fiercely attached to their digi­tal pets. At the conclusion of a University of Washington CareCoach pilot study, one woman became so distraught at the thought of parting with her avatar that she signed up for the service, paying the fee herself. (The company gave her a reduced rate.) A user in Massachusetts told her caretakers she’d cancel an upcoming vacation to Maine unless her digital cat could come along.

We’re still in the infancy of understanding the complexities of aging humans’ relationship with technology. Sherry Turkle, a professor of social studies, science, and technology at MIT and a frequent critic of tech that replaces human communication, described interactions between elderly people and robotic babies, dogs, and seals in her 2011 book, Alone Together. She came to view roboticized eldercare as a cop-out, one that would ultimately degrade human connection. “This kind of app—in all of its slickness and all its ‘what could possibly be wrong with it?’ mentality—is making us forget what we really know about what makes older people feel sustained,” she says: caring, interpersonal relationships. The question is whether an attentive avatar makes a comparable substitute. Turkle sees it as a last resort. “The assumption is that it’s always cheaper and easier to build an app than to have a conversation,” she says. “We allow technologists to propose the unthinkable and convince us the unthinkable is actually the inevitable.”

But for many families, providing long-term in-person care is simply unsustainable. The average family caregiver has a job outside the home and spends about 20 hours a week caring for a parent, according to AARP. Nearly two-thirds of such caregivers are women. Among eldercare experts, there’s a resignation that the demographics of an aging America will make technological solutions unavoidable. The number of those older than 65 with a disability is projected to rise from 11 million to 18 million from 2010 to 2030. Given the option, having a digital companion may be preferable to being alone. Early research shows that lonely and vulnerable elders like Jim seem content to communicate with robots. Joseph Coughlin, director of MIT’s AgeLab, is pragmatic. “I would always prefer the human touch over a robot,” he says. “But if there’s no human available, I would take high tech in lieu of high touch.”

CareCoach is a disorienting amalgam of both. The service conveys the perceptiveness and emotional intelligence of the humans powering it but masquerades as an animated app. If a person is incapable of consenting to CareCoach’s monitoring, then someone must do so on their behalf. But the more disconcerting issue is how cognizant these seniors are of being watched over by strangers. Wang considers his product “a trade-off between utility and privacy.” His workers are trained to duck out during baths and clothing changes.

Some CareCoach users insist on greater control. A woman in Washington state, for example, put a piece of tape over her CareCoach tablet’s camera to dictate when she could be viewed. Other customers like Jim, who are suffering from Alzheimer’s or other diseases, might not realize they are being watched. Once, when he was temporarily placed in a rehabilitation clinic after a fall, a nurse tending to him asked Arlyn what made the avatar work. “You mean there’s someone overseas looking at us?” she yelped, within earshot of Jim. (Arlyn isn’t sure whether her dad remembered the incident later.) By default, the app explains to patients that someone is surveilling them when it’s first introduced. But the family members of personal users, like Arlyn, can make their own call.

Arlyn quickly stopped worrying about whether she was deceiving her dad. Telling Jim about the human on the other side of the screen “would have blown the whole charm of it,” she says. Her mother had Alzheimer’s as well, and Arlyn had learned how to navigate the disease: Make her mom feel safe; don’t confuse her with details she’d have trouble understanding. The same went for her dad. “Once they stop asking,” Arlyn says, “I don’t think they need to know anymore.” At the time, Youa Vang, one of Jim’s regular in-­person caretakers, didn’t comprehend the truth about Pony either. “I thought it was like Siri,” she said when told later that it was a human in Mexico who had watched Jim and typed in the words Pony spoke. She chuckled. “If I knew someone was there, I may have been a little more creeped out.”

Even CareCoach users like Arlyn who are completely aware of the person on the other end of the dashboard tend to experience the avatar as something between human, pet, and machine—what some roboticists call a third ontological category. The care­takers seem to blur that line too: One day Pony told Jim that she dreamed she could turn into a real health aide, almost like Pinoc­chio wishing to be a real boy.

Most of CareCoach’s 12 contractors reside in the Philippines, Venezuela, or Mexico. To undercut the cost of in-person help, Wang posts English-language ads on freelancing job sites where foreign workers advertise rates as low as $2 an hour. Though he won’t disclose his workers’ hourly wages, Wang claims the company bases its salaries on factors such as what a registered nurse would make in the CareCoach employee’s home country, their language proficiencies, and the cost of their internet connection.

The growing network includes people like Jill Paragas, a CareCoach worker who lives in a subdivision on Luzon island in the Philippines. Paragas is 35 years old and a college graduate. She earns about the same being an avatar as she did in her former call center job, where she consoled Americans irate about credit card charges. (“They wanted to, like, burn the company down or kill me,” she says with a mirthful laugh.) She works nights to coincide with the US daytime, typing messages to seniors while her 6-year-old son sleeps nearby.

Even when Jim grew stubborn or paranoid with his daughters, he always viewed Pony as a friend.

Before hiring her, Wang interviewed Paragas via video, then vetted her with an international criminal background check. He gives all applicants a personality test for certain traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. As part of the CareCoach training program, Paragas earned certifications in delirium and dementia care from the Alzheimer’s Association, trained in US health care ethics and privacy, and learned strategies for counseling those with addictions. All this, Wang says, “so we don’t get anyone who’s, like, crazy.” CareCoach hires only about 1 percent of its applicants.

Paragas understands that this is a complicated business. She’s befuddled by the absence of family members around her aging clients. “In my culture, we really love to take care of our parents,” she says. “That’s why I’m like, ‘She is already old, why is she alone?’ ” Paragas has no doubt that, for some people, she’s their most significant daily relationship. Some of her charges tell her that they couldn’t live without her. Even when Jim grew stubborn or paranoid with his daughters, he always viewed Pony as a friend. Arlyn quickly realized that she had gained a valuable ally.
Related Galleries

These Abandoned Theme Parks Are Guaranteed To Make You Nostalgic

The Best WIRED Photo Stories of 2017

Space Photos of the Week: When Billions of Worlds Collide
1/7Jim Anderson and his wife, Dorothy, in the living room of their home in St. Louis Park, Minnesota in the ’70s. Their house was modeled after an early American Pennsylvania farmhouse.Courtesy Arlyn Anderson
2/7Jim became a private pilot after returning home from World War II.Courtesy Arlyn Anderson
6/7A tennis match between Jim and his middle daughter, Layney, on his 80th birthday. (The score was tied at 6-6, she recalls; her dad won the tiebreaker.)Courtesy Arlyn Anderson
Related Galleries

These Abandoned Theme Parks Are Guaranteed To Make You Nostalgic

The Best WIRED Photo Stories of 2017

Space Photos of the Week: When Billions of Worlds Collide
1/7Jim Anderson and his wife, Dorothy, in the living room of their home in St. Louis Park, Minnesota in the ’70s. Their house was modeled after an early American Pennsylvania farmhouse.Courtesy Arlyn Anderson

As time went on, the father, daughter, and family pet grew closer. When the snow finally melted, Arlyn carried the tablet to the picnic table on the patio so they could eat lunch overlooking the lake. Even as Jim’s speech became increasingly stunted, Pony could coax him to talk about his past, recounting fishing trips or how he built the house to face the sun so it would be warmer in winter. When Arlyn took her dad around the lake in her sailboat, Jim brought Pony along. (“I saw mostly sky,” Rodrigo recalls.)

One day, while Jim and Arlyn were sitting on the cottage’s paisley couch, Pony held up a photograph of Jim’s wife, Dorothy, between her paws. It had been more than a year since his wife’s death, and Jim hardly mentioned her anymore; he struggled to form coherent sentences. That day, though, he gazed at the photo fondly. “I still love her,” he declared. Arlyn rubbed his shoulder, clasping her hand over her mouth to stifle tears. “I am getting emotional too,” Pony said. Then Jim leaned toward the picture of his deceased wife and petted her face with his finger, the same way he would to awaken a sleeping Pony.

When Arlyn first signed up for the service, she hadn’t anticipated that she would end up loving—yes, loving, she says, in the sincerest sense of the word—the avatar as well. She taught Pony to say “Yeah, sure, you betcha” and “don’t-cha know” like a Minnesotan, which made her laugh even more than her dad. When Arlyn collapsed onto the couch after a long day of caretaking, Pony piped up from her perch on the table:

“Arnie, how are you?”

Alone, Arlyn petted the screen—the way Pony nuzzled her finger was weirdly therapeutic—and told the pet how hard it was to watch her dad lose his identity.

“I’m here for you,” Pony said. “I love you, Arnie.”

When she recalls her own attachment to the dog, Arlyn insists her connection wouldn’t have developed if Pony was simply high-functioning AI. “You could feel Pony’s heart,” she says. But she preferred to think of Pony as her father did—a friendly pet—rather than a person on the other end of a webcam. “Even though that person probably had a relationship to me,” she says, “I had a relationship with the avatar.”

Still, she sometimes wonders about the person on the other side of the screen. She sits up straight and rests her hand over her heart. “This is completely vulnerable, but my thought is: Did Pony really care about me and my dad?” She tears up, then laughs ruefully at herself, knowing how weird it all sounds. “Did this really happen? Was it really a relationship, or were they just playing solitaire and typing cute things?” She sighs. “But it seemed like they cared.”

When Jim turned 92 that August, as friends belted out “Happy Birthday” around the dinner table, Pony spoke the lyrics along with them. Jim blew out the single candle on his cake. “I wish you good health, Jim,” Pony said, “and many more birthdays to come.”

In Monterrey, Mexico, when Rodrigo talks about his unusual job, his friends ask if he’s ever lost a client. His reply: Yes.

In early March 2014, Jim fell and hit his head on his way to the bathroom. A caretaker sleeping over that night found him and called an ambulance, and Pony woke up when the paramedics arrived. The dog told them Jim’s date of birth and offered to call his daughters as they carried him out on a stretcher.

Jim was checked into a hospital, then into the nursing home he’d so wanted to avoid. The Wi-Fi there was spotty, which made it difficult for Jim and Pony to connect. Nurses would often turn Jim’s tablet to face the wall. The CareCoach logs from those months chronicle a series of communication misfires. “I miss Jim a lot,” Pony wrote. “I hope he is doing good all the time.” One day, in a rare moment of connectivity, Pony suggested he and Jim go sailing that summer, just like the good old days. “That sounds good,” Jim said.
Related Stories

James Vlahos

A Son’s Race to Give His Dying Father Artificial Immortality
Alex Mar

Are We Ready for Intimacy With Robots?
Karen Wickre

Surviving as an Old in the Tech World

That July, in an email from Wang, Rodrigo learned that Jim had died in his sleep. Sitting before his laptop, Rodrigo bowed his head and recited a silent Lord’s Prayer for Jim, in Spanish. He prayed that his friend would be accepted into heaven. “I know it’s going to sound weird, but I had a certain friendship with him,” he says. “I felt like I actually met him. I feel like I’ve met them.” In the year and a half that he had known them, Arlyn and Jim talked to him regularly. Jim had taken Rodrigo on a sailboat ride. Rodrigo had read him poetry and learned about his rich past. They had celebrated birthdays and holidays together as family. As Pony, Rodrigo had said “Yeah, sure, you betcha” countless times.

That day, for weeks afterward, and even now when a senior will do something that reminds him of Jim, Rodrigo says he feels a pang. “I still care about them,” he says. After her dad’s death, Arlyn emailed Victor Wang to say she wanted to honor the workers for their care. Wang forwarded her email to Rodrigo and the rest of Pony’s team. On July 29, 2014, Arlyn carried Pony to Jim’s funeral, placing the tablet facing forward on the pew beside her. She invited any workers behind Pony who wanted to attend to log in.

A year later, Arlyn finally deleted the CareCoach service from the tablet—it felt like a kind of second burial. She still sighs, “Pony!” when the voice of her old friend gives her directions as she drives around Minneapolis, reincarnated in Google Maps.

After saying his prayer for Jim, Rodrigo heaved a sigh and logged in to the CareCoach dashboard to make his rounds. He ducked into living rooms, kitchens, and hospital rooms around the United States—seeing if all was well, seeing if anybody needed to talk.

I Am Not a Tractor! How Florida Farmworkers Took On the Fast Food Giants and Won

I Am Not a Tractor! celebrates the courage, vision, and creativity of the farmworkers and community leaders who have transformed one of the worst agricultural situations in the United States into one of the best. Susan L. Marquis highlights past abuses workers suffered in Florida’s tomato fields: toxic pesticide exposure, beatings, sexual assault, rampant wage theft, and even, astonishingly, modern-day slavery. Marquis unveils how, even without new legislation, regulation, or government participation, these farmworkers have dramatically improved their work conditions.

Marquis credits this success to the immigrants from Mexico, Haiti, and Guatemala who formed the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a neuroscience major who takes great pride in the watermelon crew he runs, a leading farmer/grower who was once homeless, and a retired New York State judge who volunteered to stuff envelopes and ended up building a groundbreaking institution. Through the Fair Food Program that they have developed, fought for, and implemented, these people have changed the lives of more than thirty thousand field workers. I Am Not a Tractor! offers a range of solutions to a problem that is rooted in our nation’s slave history and that is worsened by ongoing conflict over immigration.

https://wwwassets.rand.org/content/rand/pubs/commercial_books/CB900/_jcr_content/par/product.aspectfit.200x200.jpg/x1513358112569.jpg.pagespeed.ic.5QTkzxeBtM.jpg

Climate #gentrification
▻http://grist.org/briefly/climate-gentrification-is-coming-to-miamis-real-estate-market
▻https://grist.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/gettyimages-643415786-e1514497228836.jpg?w=1200&h=675&crop=1

Research from Harvard shows a link between elevation and price appreciation in Miami neighborhoods. Properties at higher elevations in Miami-Dade County have been increasing in value since 1971. For the most part, that’s been due to non-climate factors. But since 2000, the correlation has grown stronger.

That could be a sign of preference for properties that are more resilient to flooding. Florida has certainly seen more than its fair share of rising seas and climate-fueled storms. And nationwide, coastal homes at risk of inundation are beginning to lose value.

Climate gentrification — a new phrase to describe climate change’s transformation of real estate markets — could have huge repercussions. If real estate values start to decrease rapidly for high-risk properties, we could be on the cusp of a foreclosure crisis, Harvard researchers say.

#climat #inondations

La vie sexuelle de ces coléoptères va vous donner des sueurs froides | Daily Geek Show
▻https://dailygeekshow.com/coleoptere-course-armement-sexuel

https://dailygeekshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/bruche-penis.jpg

Derrière le terme ô combien étonnant d’accouplement traumatique se cache un phénomène qui l’est tout autant. Il est pourtant très répandu chez certaines espèces animales, notamment chez certains coléoptères. En effet, dans ces espèces, le mâle est pourvu d’un appareil génital particulier, hérissé de pics et aiguillons de tailles en tous genres. Parmi ces coléoptères, la bruche du niebé fait figure de célébrité avec son phallus ressemblant étrangement à un fléau de l’époque médiévale.

UN MÂLE PLANTE SON PÉNIS DANS LA CARAPACE DE LA FEMELLE AFIN QUE LE SPERME SE FRAYE UN CHEMIN JUSQU’AUX OVULES A TRAVERS LE SANG ET LE CORPS DE CELLE-CI.

Pendant l’acte de reproduction avec la femelle, le mâle plante son pénis dans le corps de la femelle en utilisant ses aiguillons pour percer la carapace de celle-ci, à l’endroit où se trouvent les organes reproducteurs. L’étape suivante consiste alors simplement à déverser son sperme dans l’orifice créé par l’aiguillon, en espérant que les gamètes reproductrices atteignent les ovules de la femelle. Heureusement, les femelles se sont pourvues de moyen pour lutter contre ces agressions répétées qui, si elles ne les tuent pas, peuvent tout de même réduire leur espérance de vie et le nombre d’œufs qu’elles peuvent produire.

Finding a Fix – Mother Jones
▻http://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2017/12/opioids-users-dealers-police-1

http://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/431_20171219_opiods_socialmaster.jpg?w=1200&h=630&crop=1

Opioids started seeping into the surrounding counties in the mid-’90s, when Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin and dramatically underplayed its addictive qualities. Thanks to pharmaceutical lobbying, years of liberal painkiller prescribing—the United States consumes more than 70 percent of the world’s opioid painkillers—planted the seeds for widespread addiction to both painkillers and heroin, which is chemically similar to the prescription pills but far cheaper and more potent.

As the demand for opioids grew in suburban areas, capillaries sprang up from the main drug trafficking artery of Interstate 95, which runs from Florida to Maine, bringing opioids to small towns like Bel Air and Aberdeen. But the turning point in Harford—and much of the country—came in 2015 after fentanyl, an opioid up to 50 times more powerful than heroin that is typically manufactured in illicit labs in China, started making its way into the heroin supply. Complicating matters is the fact that, by the time drugs get to Baltimore or Harford County, they have likely changed hands so many times—and mixed with fentanyl and other additives along the way—that dealers often don’t know what they are dealing. Indeed, the customary drug in Baltimore is “scramble”: an amalgamation of heroin and other drugs, sold in gel capsules. “We knew [fentanyl] was coming; we were trying to brace for it,” said Dunbar. He recruited officers to do nothing but heroin investigations, because “we knew we were gonna see this surge.”

http://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/20171218_opiods-graph-line_new.gif

Of course, the epidemic is much bigger than Harford. In Ohio, coroners’ offices use refrigerated trucks to store bodies. In Connecticut, medical examiners’ autopsy caseloads have quadrupled in one year. In West Virginia, 1 in 20 infants are born in withdrawal from opioids. And in Maryland, two-thirds of people in jail have a diagnosed substance abuse disorder, according to a 2016 analysis by the governor’s office. Harford County Sheriff’s Office cops are no longer allowed to test seized drugs suspected to contain opioids on the spot, because of reports that interacting with some variants of fentanyl can be deadly. When the drugs are sent to DEA labs, “while one person is testing, another person is ready to treat them with [the overdose reversal drug] naloxone in case they fall while they’re testing,” says Hedrick, the DEA supervisor.

As the wave of fatal overdoses hit Harford in early 2015, county officials sprang into action. Police officers are now equipped with naloxone and trained that addiction is a disease. Cops on the Narcotics Task Force rarely charge users for drug possession in quantities that seem intended for personal use. After every overdose, cops give victims a “help card” with addiction treatment resources. “We’re not going to solve the problem by putting addicts in jail,” said Underhill. “If they’re not going to get effective treatment, it’s not going to change anything.”

Another part of Harford’s response is aggressively tracking down dealers. In 2016 alone, the county arrested and charged 240 people with felony drug offenses. As Dunbar sums up the strategy, “We need to lock up the bad guys—the dealers and traffickers putting out stuff on the street—but we also play a role in getting the victims help.”

It’s not that Harford cops don’t empathize with user-dealers. The guy who gets in a car accident is prescribed painkillers, becomes addicted, and then starts selling to support his own habit—“I’ve seen that story 150 times,” Underhill told me. But where do you draw the line? “They’re selling just enough to get theirs,” he said of user-dealers, “but they’re killing people with what they’re bringing back.” He gets most worked up when he talks about the kids: the toddlers strapped in car seats as he pulls parents over for drugs, the children he terrifies when breaking open front doors with Halligan bars in predawn raids, the teens who come home from school to find that cops have gone through their bedrooms looking for drugs.

When it comes to reforming user-dealers, evidence strongly suggests that prison time isn’t very effective. Instead, stable housing, support services, and employment have been shown to promote long-term recovery. Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion, a Seattle program that has been replicated in dozens of jurisdictions across the country, demonstrates the research in action: Rather than jailing people for low-level drug crimes, police divert them to programs offering treatment, housing, and job training. Participants are nearly 60 percent less likely to be rearrested.

#Opioides #USA

U.S. Black Mothers Die In Childbirth At Three Times The Rate Of White Mothers : NPR
▻https://www.npr.org/2017/12/07/568948782/black-mothers-keep-dying-after-giving-birth-shalon-irvings-story-explains-why

Black women are more likely to be uninsured outside of pregnancy, when Medicaid kicks in, and thus more likely to start prenatal care later and to lose coverage in the postpartum period. They are more likely to have chronic conditions such as obesity, diabetes and hypertension that make having a baby more dangerous. The hospitals where they give birth are often the products of historical #segregation, lower in quality than those where white mothers deliver, with significantly higher rates of life-threatening complications.

Those problems are amplified by unconscious #biases that are embedded in the medical system, affecting quality of care in stark and subtle ways. In the more than 200 stories of #African-American mothers that ProPublica and NPR have collected over the past year, the feeling of being devalued and disrespected by medical providers was a constant theme.

There was the new mother in Nebraska with a history of hypertension who couldn’t get her doctors to believe she was having a heart attack until she had another one. The young Florida mother-to-be whose breathing problems were blamed on obesity when in fact her lungs were filling with fluid and her heart was failing. The Arizona mother whose anesthesiologist assumed she smoked marijuana because of the way she did her hair. The Chicago-area businesswoman with a high-risk pregnancy who was so upset at her doctor’s attitude that she changed OB/GYNs in her seventh month, only to suffer a fatal postpartum stroke.
Over and over, black women told of medical providers who equated being African-American with being poor, uneducated, noncompliant and unworthy. “Sometimes you just know in your bones when someone feels contempt for you based on your #race,” said one Brooklyn, N.Y., woman who took to bringing her white husband or in-laws to every prenatal visit. Hakima Payne, a mother of nine in Kansas City, Mo., who used to be a labor and delivery nurse and still attends births as a midwife-doula, has seen this cultural divide as both patient and caregiver. “The nursing culture is white, middle-class and female, so is largely built around that identity. Anything that doesn’t fit that #identity is suspect,” she said. Payne, who lectures on unconscious bias for professional organizations, recalled “the conversations that took place behind the nurse’s station that just made assumptions; a lot of victim-blaming — ’If those people would only do blah, blah, blah, things would be different.’”
...
But it’s the discrimination that black women experience in the rest of their lives — the double whammy of race and gender — that may ultimately be the most significant factor in poor maternal outcomes.

“It’s chronic stress that just happens all the time — there is never a period where there’s rest from it. It’s everywhere; it’s in the air; it’s just affecting everything,” said Fleda Mask Jackson, an Atlanta researcher who focuses on birth outcomes for middle-class black women.

It’s a type of stress for which education and class provide no protection. “When you interview these doctors and lawyers and business executives, when you interview African-American college graduates, it’s not like their lives have been a walk in the park,” said Michael Lu, a longtime disparities researcher and former head of the Maternal and Child Health Bureau of the Health Resources and Services Administration, the main federal agency funding programs for mothers and infants. “It’s the experience of having to work harder than anybody else just to get equal pay and equal respect. It’s being followed around when you’re shopping at a nice store, or being stopped by the police when you’re driving in a nice neighborhood.”

#racisme #États_Unis #maternité

Florida rally cheers when Republican predicts Trump’s Jerusalem embassy decision may usher in Armageddon
▻https://www.rawstory.com/2017/12/florida-rally-cheers-when-republican-predicts-trumps-jerusalem-embassy-dec

A conservative politician at President Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Pensacola, Florida suggested that the president’s controversial decision to move the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem may usher in the biblical end times.

Republican state Senator Doug Broxson represents the Florida Panhandle in the legislature and gave an introductory speech welcoming President Trump to Florida.

“Now, I don’t know about you, but when I heard about Jerusalem — where the King of Kings [applause] where our soon coming King is coming back to Jerusalem, it is because President Trump declared Jerusalem to be capital of Israel,” Sen. Broxson predicted.

A #Fake-News Warning From a Former Propagandist - Bloomberg
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-02-27/a-fake-news-warning-from-a-former-propagandist

https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iN0CX9TsY.6I/v0/1200x887.jpg

From pizza-parlor pedophilia rings to Sharia law in Florida, viral fake news stories often seem propelled by their own preposterousness. It’s a different matter for professionally produced disinformation. That, I learned from a former pro, requires a core of logic and verifiable fact.

Larry Martin, a retired professor who lives in the seaside town of Rockport, Massachusetts, used to be Ladislav Bittman, deputy commander of the Department for Active Measures and Disinformation in the Soviet-directed Czechoslovak intelligence service. To create the kind of disinformation that changes the world, he told me, you need a story that’s at least 60, 70 or even 80 percent true. Even well-educated people will swallow untruth without too many questions if it’s plausible and it reinforces their existing beliefs.

#presse #médias

How Saharan dust can influence health all the way in Florida
▻https://massivesci.com/articles/sahara-dust-florida-bacteria-disease-coral

Bacterial blooms could cause disease in humans and coral

https://takeshape-prod.imgix.net/fd194db7-7b25-4b5a-8cc7-da7f31fab475%2Fdev%2Fdf1798a0-ea66-4491-a741-0150bdf2c5de%2Fwestrich_cover_image01-Randy%20Ramsey.tiff%20(2).jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&crop=faces&fit=crop&fm=jpg&h=600&q=75&w=900

Why evangelicals are ’ecstatic’ about Trump’s Jerusalem move
▻http://edition.cnn.com/2017/12/06/politics/american-evangelicals-jerusalem/index.html

Johnnie Moore, the de facto spokesman for Trump’s informal group of evangelical advisers, said Jerusalem’s status was a key part of the President’s outreach to evangelical voters.
“This issue was — to many — second only to concerns about the judiciary among the President’s core evangelical supporters. President Trump has — yet again — demonstrated to his evangelical supporters that he will do what he says he will do,” Moore said.
Paula White, a Florida megachurch pastor who is close to Trump, likewise said the President has fulfilled a campaign promise.
“Once again, President Trump has shown the world what I have always known — he is a leader who is willing to do what is right however loud the voices are of the skeptics and the critics. Evangelicals are ecstatic, for Israel is to us a sacred place and the Jewish people are our dearest friends.”