Nearly 30 percent of U.S. cancer deaths tied to smoking cigarettes

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/nearly-30-percent-of-cancer-deaths-tied-to-smoking/

By Ashley Welch CBS News October 24, 2016, 4:06 PM

A startling number of cancer deaths in the United States have one thing in common: they’re linked to smoking.

According to a new report published online today by JAMA Internal Medicine, more than 167,000 cancer deaths in the U.S. in 2014 — almost 29 percent — were attributable to cigarette smoking.

•••••

People living in the South, especially men, were disproportionately affected, with nearly 40 percent of male cancer deaths estimated to be connected to smoking in that region.

Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia had the highest estimated proportion of smoking-attributable cancer deaths in men.

The proportion was lowest in Utah, at nearly 22 percent, while it hit about 30 percent or more in every other state.

For women, the proportion ranged from 11 percent in Utah to 29 percent in Kentucky, and was at least 20 percent in every state except Utah, California, and Hawaii.

They also note that the study likely underestimated tobacco-related cancer deaths because only 12 cancers were included.

Overall, nine out of the top 10 worst states for smoking-attributable cancer deaths for men, and six of the top 10 states for women, were in the South.

•••••

Brain changes seen in kids after one season of football

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/brain-changes-seen-in-kids-after-one-season-of-football/

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay October 24, 2016

Just one season of competitive football may cause changes in some young players’ developing brains, even if they don’t get a concussion during play, a small study found.

Using imaging scans, researchers spotted “microstructural” changes in the white brain matter of 25 male athletes aged 8 to 13 after a season of football.

They also found that players experienced more significant brain changes if they took a greater number of hits and stronger hits to the head, said lead researcher Dr. Christopher Whitlow. He’s chief of neuroradiology at Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C.

“We’re seeing some associations between the amount of change in the brain and the amount of exposure to head impacts,” Whitlow said. “The more exposure they’ve had, the more change you see.”

However, Whitlow was quick to add that these changes are imperceptible to the naked eye, and future research might prove these changes harmless.

“Football is a very physical sport, so there are lots of changes in the body after a season of football,” he said. “Players have cuts and bruises, and after the season these go away. Perhaps the change we’re seeing is just another one of those physical manifestations of playing a season of football that will just go away.”

•••••

Whitlow said he and his colleagues were particularly concerned about the impacts to the head that don’t lead to a concussion. The brains of youth and high school football players are still undergoing rapid development, and repeated hits that don’t result in brain injury still might have an effect that adds up over time, the researchers said.

•••••

The researchers concluded that players with more exposure to head impacts displayed more changes to their white matter. The brain’s white matter is composed of millions of nerve fibers that act like communication cables, connecting various regions of the brain.

•••••

UN: Heat-trapping gas surges beyond milestone

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/un-weather-agency-heat-trapping-gas-surges-beyond-milestone/

Oct. 24, 2016

The World Meteorological Organization says heat-trapping gases in Earth’s atmosphere are growing faster than before, surging permanently beyond a troubling milestone.

The United Nations agency says global carbon dioxide levels, which first reached 400 parts per million last year, are likely to stay above that symbolic 400 milestone all year and for generations to come.

Carbon dioxide levels overall rise because of the burning of fossil fuels; they also fluctuate seasonally, peaking in May and dipping in September. Last month’s average level at a key Hawaii monitoring station was 401 parts per million, up from 313 in 1958.

•••••

Methane and other heat-trapping gases are also spiking. The WMO issues its annual greenhouse gas bulletin, using public data, before international climate talks.

'The atmosphere is being radicalized' by climate change

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/oct/24/the-atmosphere-is-being-radicalized-by-climate-change

Dana Nuccitelli
Oct. 24, 2016

Climate change’s impacts on extreme weather and society are becoming increasingly clear and undeniable. While we are making progress in solving the problem, we’re still moving too slowly, and one of the two political parties governing the world’s strongest superpower continues to deny the science. This led astrophysicist Katie Mack to make the following suggestion, related to a common refrain from Donald Trump and Republican Party leaders:

Maybe governments will actually listen if we stop saying "extreme weather" & "climate change" & just say the atmosphere is being radicalized

•••••

Global warming intensified Hurricane Matthew

Hurricane Matthew set a number of records. Its record-breaking rainfall and storm surge caused historic flooding and destructive winds along the coasts of Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia.

•••••
At Climate Progress, Joe Romm summarized the various ways in which global warming makes hurricanes like Matthew more intense:

Hotter sea surface and upper ocean temperatures fuel hurricanes, leading to more of the strongest (Category 4 and 5) storms.

Hotter ocean temperatures also cause more rapid intensification of hurricanes, and the most intense storms are those that undergo rapid intensification.

Global warming causes sea level rise, which creates larger storm surges and thus worse flooding.

Global warming also adds more water vapor to the atmosphere, which causes more intense rainfall and exacerbates flooding.

In short, global warming made Hurricane Matthew and its impacts more severe, and will lead to more such devastating hurricanes in the future.

Arctic sea ice is disappearing

According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, 2016 tied for the second-lowest annual Arctic sea ice minimum extent. However, that only accounts for the amount of ice on the surface of the ocean. The ice has also become thinner due to the warming oceans. As a result, we’ve lost about three-quarters of the volume of sea ice in the Arctic ocean in less than four decades,

•••••

That decline is well outside the range of natural variability over the past 1,500 years, and several studies have found that human-caused global warming is the primary driver of the disappearing Arctic sea ice.

Global temperatures keep shattering records

2014 was the hottest year since our measurements began, breaking the record set in 2010, which had broken the record set in 2005. A year later we saw the temperature record shattered once again in 2015, by more than a tenth of a degree Celsius. This year we’ll see the record broken once again, likely by an even larger margin.

•••••

The western USA is dry and burning

California is in the midst of a 5-year drought; its worst in over a millennium. 100% of the state is currently experiencing drought conditions, with over 20% of the state in “exceptional” drought – the most severe category.

The drought has created conditions ripe for severe wildfire seasons. Over the past 5 years, California has seen an average of more than 4,000 wildfires burning over 160,000 acres per year. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that global warming is the main culprit increasing the size of forest fires in the western US:

We demonstrate that human-caused climate change caused over half of the documented increases in fuel aridity since the 1970s and doubled the cumulative forest fire area since 1984. This analysis suggests that anthropogenic climate change will continue to chronically enhance the potential for western US forest fire activity while fuels are not limiting.

•••••

The only way to curb these impacts is to cut the carbon pollution that’s intensifying them. As any member of Alcoholics Anonymous knows, denying a problem doesn’t make it go away. Only by admitting we have a problem and taking steps to address it can we avoid a catastrophic outcome.

Bar Association declined to publish report calling Trump 'libel bully' because they feared he would sue

October 24, 2016, 09:56 pm
Report: Bar Association declined to publish report calling Trump 'libel bully'
By Lisa Hagen

A group of media lawyers from the American Bar Association commissioned a report on Donald Trump’s history of filing lawsuits, determining that the GOP presidential nominee is a “libel bully,” according to the New York Times.

But that report was never published because the association said it feared it would be sued by Trump, the GOP presidential nominee. The report discovered that the suits he filed never won in court.

“It is more than a little ironic that a publication dedicated to the exploration of First Amendment issues is subjected to censorship when it seeks to publish an article about threats to free speech,” said David J. Bodney, a former chairman of the media-law committee. Other former chairmen of the committee were also said they were dismayed by the association’s decision not to publish.

Susan Seager, a former journalist and First Amendment lawyer, compiled the study and researched seven lawsuits surrounding free speech that Trump or his companies filed. She said in an interview with the Times that the report is “based on court records.”

•••••

Global Temperature Just Short of Record in September, Says NOAA

By: Jeff Masters and Bob Henson , 10:25 PM GMT on October 18, 2016

September 2016 was Earth's second warmest September since record keeping began in 1880, said NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) on Tuesday. In the NOAA database, September 2016 came in 0.89°C (1.66°F) warmer than the 20th-century average for September, and just 0.04°C shy of the record set in September 2015. NASA reported the warmest September in its database, with September 2016 a mere 0.01°C above the previous record, set in September 2014.

September 2016 marked the end of a remarkable streak of 16 consecutive months in which NOAA’s global monthly temperature record was broken, the longest such streak since global temperature records began in 1880. Ocean-only temperatures this September were 0.04°C (0.07°F) cooler than the record warmth of September 2015, while land-only temperatures were 0.11°C (0.20°F) above the previous land-only record from September 2015. (Since most of Earth’s surface is covered by ocean, the land-plus-ocean reading is dominated by the ocean-only temperatures, thus keeping September 2016 just short of the land-plus-ocean record) For the lowest 8 km of the atmosphere, global satellite-measured temperatures in September 2016 were tied for warmest with 1998 for any September in the 38-year record, according to the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH).

With the powerful 2015-16 El Niño event having ended early in 2016, the impressive global warmth in recent months can mostly be attributed to the steady build-up of heat-trapping greenhouse gases due to human activities. NOAA’s global surface temperature for the year so far (January-September 2016) is an eye-opening 0.78°C (1.40°F) above the 20th-century average and 0.08°C (0.14°F) warmer than the previous January-to-September record, set in 2015 (see Figure 2 below).

Temperatures would have to plummet at an almost unthinkable pace between now and December in order to keep 2016 from becoming the warmest year in global record-keeping.

•••••

Hungry Humans Are Eating Wild Mammals Into Extinction

http://www.newser.com/story/232956/hungry-humans-are-eating-wild-mammals-into-extinction.html

By Michael Harthorne, Newser Staff
Posted Oct 22, 2016

Hungry humans are in danger of eating nearly a quarter of all endangered land mammals into extinction, according to a study published this week in Royal Society Open Science. Quartz reports that 301 species of land mammals—from bats and primates to rodents and big cats—are being hunted into extinction. And for the vast majority—285 species—the reason is food, not poaching or sport hunting. Some estimates claims more than a million metric tons of wild animal meat is collected in Africa every year. And approximately $200 million worth of wild animal meat is harvested yearly in the Brazilian Amazon, according to the Telegraph. "These species will continue to decline unless there is major global action to save them," the study's lead author, Bill Ripple, says.

The 285 species are found in poorer countries where protein is hard to find, with the most living in Madagascar, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Brazil. Researchers say tens of millions of people around the world rely on wild animals for meat. They lay out a series of solutions for what they call a "global crisis," Phys.org reports. Those include creating more protected land for wild animals, providing legal rights for sustainable hunting, swapping high-protein plants like soy and tubers for wild animal meat, and increasing access to education and family planning. Fifteen leading conservation scientists have signed on to the study.

Hacked Cameras, DVRs Powered Today’s Massive Internet Outage

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/10/hacked-cameras-dvrs-powered-todays-massive-internet-outage/

Oct. 21, 2016

A massive and sustained Internet attack that has caused outages and network congestion today for a large number of Web sites was launched with the help of hacked “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices, such as CCTV video cameras and digital video recorders, new data suggests.

Earlier today cyber criminals began training their attack cannons on Dyn, an Internet infrastructure company that provides critical technology services to some of the Internet’s top destinations. The attack began creating problems for Internet users reaching an array of sites, including Twitter, Amazon, Tumblr, Reddit, Spotify and Netflix.

•••••

At first, it was unclear who or what was behind the attack on Dyn. But over the past few hours, at least one computer security firm has come out saying the attack involved Mirai, the same malware strain that was used in the record 620 Gpbs attack on my site last month. At the end September 2016, the hacker responsible for creating the Mirai malware released the source code for it, effectively letting anyone build their own attack army using Mirai.

Mirai scours the Web for IoT devices protected by little more than factory-default usernames and passwords, and then enlists the devices in attacks that hurl junk traffic at an online target until it can no longer accommodate legitimate visitors or users.

According to researchers at security firm Flashpoint, today’s attack was launched at least in part by a Mirai-based botnet. Allison Nixon, director of research at Flashpoint, said the botnet used in today’s ongoing attack is built on the backs of hacked IoT devices — mainly compromised digital video recorders (DVRs) and IP cameras made by a Chinese hi-tech company called XiongMai Technologies. The components that XiongMai makes are sold downstream to vendors who then use it in their own products.

“It’s remarkable that virtually an entire company’s product line has just been turned into a botnet that is now attacking the United States,” Nixon said, noting that Flashpoint hasn’t ruled out the possibility of multiple botnets being involved in the attack on Dyn.

•••••

As I noted earlier this month in Europe to Push New Security Rules Amid IoT Mess, many of these products from XiongMai and other makers of inexpensive, mass-produced IoT devices are essentially unfixable, and will remain a danger to others unless and until they are completely unplugged from the Internet.

•••••

Flashpoint’s researchers said they scanned the Internet on Oct. 6 for systems that showed signs of running the vulnerable hardware, and found more than 515,000 of them were vulnerable to the flaws they discovered.

“I truly think this IoT infrastructure is very dangerous on the whole and does deserve attention from anyone who can take action,” Flashpoint’s Nixon said.

•••••


21
Oct 16
Hacked Cameras, DVRs Powered Today’s Massive Internet Outage

A massive and sustained Internet attack that has caused outages and network congestion today for a large number of Web sites was launched with the help of hacked “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices, such as CCTV video cameras and digital video recorders, new data suggests.

Earlier today cyber criminals began training their attack cannons on Dyn, an Internet infrastructure company that provides critical technology services to some of the Internet’s top destinations. The attack began creating problems for Internet users reaching an array of sites, including Twitter, Amazon, Tumblr, Reddit, Spotify and Netflix.
l3outage

A depiction of the outages caused by today’s attacks on Dyn, an Internet infrastructure company. Source: Downdetector.com.

At first, it was unclear who or what was behind the attack on Dyn. But over the past few hours, at least one computer security firm has come out saying the attack involved Mirai, the same malware strain that was used in the record 620 Gpbs attack on my site last month. At the end September 2016, the hacker responsible for creating the Mirai malware released the source code for it, effectively letting anyone build their own attack army using Mirai.

Mirai scours the Web for IoT devices protected by little more than factory-default usernames and passwords, and then enlists the devices in attacks that hurl junk traffic at an online target until it can no longer accommodate legitimate visitors or users.

According to researchers at security firm Flashpoint, today’s attack was launched at least in part by a Mirai-based botnet. Allison Nixon, director of research at Flashpoint, said the botnet used in today’s ongoing attack is built on the backs of hacked IoT devices — mainly compromised digital video recorders (DVRs) and IP cameras made by a Chinese hi-tech company called XiongMai Technologies. The components that XiongMai makes are sold downstream to vendors who then use it in their own products.

“It’s remarkable that virtually an entire company’s product line has just been turned into a botnet that is now attacking the United States,” Nixon said, noting that Flashpoint hasn’t ruled out the possibility of multiple botnets being involved in the attack on Dyn.

“At least one Mirai [control server] issued an attack command to hit Dyn,” Nixon said. “Some people are theorizing that there were multiple botnets involved here. What we can say is that we’ve seen a Mirai botnet participating in the attack.”

As I noted earlier this month in Europe to Push New Security Rules Amid IoT Mess, many of these products from XiongMai and other makers of inexpensive, mass-produced IoT devices are essentially unfixable, and will remain a danger to others unless and until they are completely unplugged from the Internet.

That’s because while many of these devices allow users to change the default usernames and passwords on a Web-based administration panel that ships with the products, those machines can still be reached via more obscure, less user-friendly communications services called “Telnet” and “SSH.”

Telnet and SSH are command-line, text-based interfaces that are typically accessed via a command prompt (e.g., in Microsoft Windows, a user could click Start, and in the search box type “cmd.exe” to launch a command prompt, and then type “telnet” to reach a username and password prompt at the target host).

“The issue with these particular devices is that a user cannot feasibly change this password,” Flashpoint’s Zach Wikholm told KrebsOnSecurity. “The password is hardcoded into the firmware, and the tools necessary to disable it are not present.

“The issue with these particular devices is that a user cannot feasibly change this password,” Flashpoint’s Zach Wikholm told KrebsOnSecurity. “The password is hardcoded into the firmware, and the tools necessary to disable it are not present. Even worse, the web interface is not aware that these credentials even exist.”

Flashpoint’s researchers said they scanned the Internet on Oct. 6 for systems that showed signs of running the vulnerable hardware, and found more than 515,000 of them were vulnerable to the flaws they discovered.

“I truly think this IoT infrastructure is very dangerous on the whole and does deserve attention from anyone who can take action,” Flashpoint’s Nixon said.

It’s unclear what it will take to get a handle on the security problems introduced by millions of insecure IoT devices that are ripe for being abused in these sorts of assaults.

As I noted in The Democratization of Censorship, to address the threat from the mass-proliferation of hardware devices such as Internet routers, DVRs and IP cameras that ship with default-insecure settings, we probably need an industry security association, with published standards that all members adhere to and are audited against periodically.

The wholesalers and retailers of these devices might then be encouraged to shift their focus toward buying and promoting connected devices which have this industry security association seal of approval. Consumers also would need to be educated to look for that seal of approval. Something like Underwriters Laboratories (UL), but for the Internet, perhaps.

Until then, these insecure IoT devices are going to stick around like a bad rash — unless and until there is a major, global effort to recall and remove vulnerable systems from the Internet. In my humble opinion, this global cleanup effort should be funded mainly by the companies that are dumping these cheap, poorly-secured hardware devices onto the market in an apparent bid to own the market. Well, they should be made to own the cleanup efforts as well.

Devices infected with Mirai are instructed to scour the Internet for IoT devices protected by more than 60 default usernames and passwords. The entire list of those passwords — and my best approximation of which firms are responsible for producing those hardware devices — can be found at my story, Who Makes the IoT Things Under Attack.

As long as we have Citizens United, the polluters are going to be in charge of our country

It was the supreme court justices who were nominated by Republican presidents who ruled for the Citizens United decision, making corporations people, and their political contributions speech.

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/oct/11/robert-f-kennedy-pollution-citizens-united-ge

Robert F Kennedy Jr
Robert F Kennedy Jr is president of Waterkeeper Alliance, a global movement for swimmable, drinkable and fishable water. He is also a US radio host, environmental activist and attorney specializing in environmental law.

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One of the things I’ve recognized in my 30 years of doing this work is that wherever you see large scale environmental injury, you’ll also see the subversion of democracy. You’ll see the corruption of public officials, and the capture of the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution – they become sock puppets for the industries they’re supposed to regulate.

You’ll see the disappearance of transparency in government, the corruption of the press and the diminishment of local control. I’ll give you an example: in the town where I live, Bedford, New York, somebody tried to build a quarry. We passed a zoning law to say, “Hey, you can’t do that” because it’s going to diminish everyone else’s property values. So yeah, you’re going to make that one guy rich, but all the rest of us are going to pay for it.

That law was upheld by the top appellate court in New York. In Kentucky and West Virginia, where I do a lot of my work, they don’t have those laws. Those laws have been abolished constitutionally so that there is no way for localities to object to mountaintop removal mining, for example. In North Carolina, laws have been abolished that would allow localities to object to factory farms in their backyard. And the agencies in these states are really just mouthpieces for the industries which they’re supposed to regulate.

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In North Carolina, Rick Dove, a 27-year veteran of the US marine corps [and one of the founding members of the Waterkeeper Alliance], owned a commercial fishing operation on the Neuse River. It was his dream job after he retired from the marines. Two years after he started that business, a billion fish died in the Neuse River with lesions on their bodies, and no one could explain why. Rick traced the pollution to the hog industry, which had happened below anybody’s radar. Why? Because the hog factories were placed in poor communities that had no voice, and no access to public office.

A [North Carolina] state senator named Wendell Murphy had looked at what happened to the chicken industry in this country. He’d seen how three men – Tyson, Pilgrim and Perdue – had put a million independent chicken farmers out of business and changed the chicken industry from an agricultural one to an industrial one. They would shoehorn up to a million birds into a single facility and keep them in tiny battery cages where they could not turn around, and then dose them with drugs and hormones and manipulate them with light and cause them to literally lay their guts out over a short and miserable life.

They made themselves billionaires. And Wendell Murphy said, “I can do that with hogs”. He passed laws that made it almost impossible for anyone to sue anyone who called themselves a hog farmer, even if it had nothing to do with farming. At that time, there were 28,000 independent hog farmers in the state, raising hogs sustainably, providing jobs. He put every hog farmer in the state out of business, except those who would sign a contract with him. That contract doomed those farmers to involuntary servitude. In 10 years, [the state] went from 28,000 hog farmers to 2,200 factories. And those factories were deliberately put in areas of the state with minority populations – blacks, Hispanics – where people wouldn’t complain.
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Polluters always choose the soft targets of poverty. Four out of every five toxic waste dumps in this country are in a black neighborhood. The largest toxic waste dump in America is in Emelle, Alabama, where a third of the population is in poverty. The highest concentration of toxic waste dumps in America is on Chicago’s South Side. The most contaminated zipcode in California is East LA.

Navajo youths have a thousand times the rate of sexual organ cancer as other Americans because the thousands of tons of uranium tailings that have been dumped on their reservation lands. In North Carolina, we now have an air force that flies over the state every day filming these industries because they can’t be photographed from the road.

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You’ll hear this a lot from the big polluters, the Koch brothers, from their indentured servants in Washington DC and their toadies on Fox News: “Oh we have to choose between economic prosperity on the one hand and environmental protection on the other.” That is a false choice. In 100% of situations, good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy.

We should be measuring our economy on how it produces jobs and how it preserves the value of the assets of our community. If, on the other hand, we want to do what the Koch brothers and the big polluters want us to do, which is to treat our country as if it were a business in liquidation, convert our natural resources to cash as quickly as possible, have a few years of pollution-based prosperity ... then we can generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous economy and make a few people billionaires by impoverishing the rest of us.

But our children are going to pay for our joy ride. And they’re going to pay for it with poor health and huge cleanup costs that are going to amplify and metastasize over time. Environmental injury is deficit spending. It’s a way of loading the costs of our generation’s prosperity onto the backs of our children. One of the things that I’ve done over the past three decades as an environmental advocate is to constantly go around and confront this argument that an investment in our environment is a diminishment of our nation’s wealth. But it’s not – it’s an investment in infrastructure. It’s the same as investing in telecommunications or road construction. It’s an investment we have to make if we’re going to ensure the economic vitality of future generations.

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I would get rid of Citizens United. Because for capitalism to work, you need democracy to work. And right now we don’t have democracy. We have what I would call a corporate kleptocracy, an oligarchy by the corporations and the wealthy. You can’t have a clean environment when you have that.

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As long as we have Citizens United, the polluters are going to be in charge of our country. And that’s going to happen every time we try and do something good for our children, or something sustainable. Our assets are going to be liquidated and turned into profit by the big shots who own our government.

•••••

What polluters do is make themselves rich by making everyone else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering quality of life for everyone else.

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How facts backfire

http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/

By Joe Keohane
July 11, 2010

It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.

“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”

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On its own, this might not be a problem: People ignorant of the facts could simply choose not to vote. But instead, it appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions. A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare — the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct — but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)

Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion. Kuklinski calls this sort of response the “I know I’m right” syndrome, and considers it a “potentially formidable problem” in a democratic system. “It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.”

What’s going on? How can we have things so wrong, and be so sure that we’re right? Part of the answer lies in the way our brains are wired. Generally, people tend to seek consistency. There is a substantial body of psychological research showing that people tend to interpret information with an eye toward reinforcing their preexisting views. If we believe something about the world, we are more likely to passively accept as truth any information that confirms our beliefs, and actively dismiss information that doesn’t. This is known as “motivated reasoning.”

•••••

It would be reassuring to think that political scientists and psychologists have come up with a way to counter this problem, but that would be getting ahead of ourselves. The persistence of political misperceptions remains a young field of inquiry. “It’s very much up in the air,” says Nyhan.

But researchers are working on it. One avenue may involve self-esteem. Nyhan worked on one study in which he showed that people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than people who had not. In other words, if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are.

There are also some cases where directness works. Kuklinski’s welfare study suggested that people will actually update their beliefs if you hit them “between the eyes” with bluntly presented, objective facts that contradict their preconceived ideas. He asked one group of participants what percentage of its budget they believed the federal government spent on welfare, and what percentage they believed the government should spend. Another group was given the same questions, but the second group was immediately told the correct percentage the government spends on welfare (1 percent). They were then asked, with that in mind, what the government should spend. Regardless of how wrong they had been before receiving the information, the second group indeed adjusted their answer to reflect the correct fact.

Kuklinski’s study, however, involved people getting information directly from researchers in a highly interactive way. When Nyhan attempted to deliver the correction in a more real-world fashion, via a news article, it backfired. Even if people do accept the new information, it might not stick over the long term, or it may just have no effect on their opinions.

•••••

And if you harbor the notion — popular on both sides of the aisle — that the solution is more education and a higher level of political sophistication in voters overall, well, that’s a start, but not the solution. A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong. Taber and Lodge found this alarming, because engaged, sophisticated thinkers are “the very folks on whom democratic theory relies most heavily.”

•••••

But keeping atop the news takes time and effort. And relentless self-questioning, as centuries of philosophers have shown, can be exhausting. Our brains are designed to create cognitive shortcuts — inference, intuition, and so forth — to avoid precisely that sort of discomfort while coping with the rush of information we receive on a daily basis. Without those shortcuts, few things would ever get done. Unfortunately, with them, we’re easily suckered by political falsehoods.

•••••

Global warming continues; 2016 will be the hottest year ever recorded

Conceivably, there could be a very big volcanic eruption or an asteroid strike to put enough particulate matter in the air, that would decrease temperatures enough to bring down the average enough to avoid this, but that is very unlikely.

John Abraham
Oct. 21, 2016

•••••

We have enough data this year to call 2016 as the hottest year ever record – and we have three more months left to go.

•••••

I have taken temperature data from NASA and superimposed my predictions for 2016 – it isn’t even close. And by the way, it doesn’t matter whose data you use (NASA, NOAA, JMA, Hadley Centre) the results are the same. 2016 is going to blow 2015 out of the water.

•••••

A few things to note. First, these temperatures are surface temperatures that are taken across the globe. But, you can measure temperatures elsewhere and see the same result. Most importantly, measurements in the oceans, where 93% of the extra heat is stored are the best proof of global warming.

•••••

You can measure sea level rise as the heated water expands, you can measure ice loss across the globe, you can measure temperatures in the lower part of the atmosphere. It doesn’t matter where; the story is the same.

What is the big deal? Well first of all, 2016 blows away 2015 which was previously the hottest year ever and that had beaten 2014 as the hottest year ever – call this a three-peat. Three records in a row and the last two are by large margins. Does this mean global warming all of a sudden has gotten worse?

No, surface temperatures fluctuate a lot – you can see that in the figure. Temperatures will go up or down from year to year without apparent reason. This is why we are interested in the long term trends. This is also why we are interested in looking at other measures of warming (especially in the oceans). All of our measurements agree with each other – we know the Earth was warming long before this set of records began falling in 2014.

One thing these temperatures can do is enable us to compare computer models with measurements. We’ve seen that models have done an excellent job of correctly predicting the rate of heating of the Earth. My own research shows that in the oceans, the models are slightly under-predicting the rate of heating.

•••••

In fact, the 2016 temperatures are above the average which means the models under-predicted the temperature of 2016.

Before we get too anxious, it is almost certain that 2017 will be cooler than 2016. In fact, we may not set another record for a few years. But just as a few hot years doesn’t prove global warming, a few cooler years wont disprove it. The long-term trend is clearer upwards through and the models are spot on.

All this aside, there are still things we can do to bend the arc of this curve. There are actions we can take as individuals and as collectives to reduce our emissions and our dependence on polluting fuels. That message is, and continues to be, the most important one.

But one thing we cannot do is deny facts.

[Unfortunately, humans do deny facts.]

Richard Branson: Trump said he would destroy those who wouldn't help him after he went bankrupt

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/10/21/1585388/-Richard-Branson-Trump-said-he-would-destroy-those-who-wouldn-t-help-him-after-going-bankrupt

By Leslie Salzillo
Friday Oct 21, 2016

Billionaire philanthropist, Virgin founder, and entrepreneur Richard Branson has used much of his wealth to help others—but one person he would never help is Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Branson published a piece on his Virgin.com blog about one of his encounters with Trump.

“Some years ago, Mr Trump invited me to lunch for a one-to-one meeting at his apartment in Manhattan. We had not met before and I accepted. Even before the starters arrived he began telling me about how he had asked a number of people for help after his latest bankruptcy and how five of them were unwilling to help. He told me he was going to spend the rest of his life destroying these five people.”

Branson says Trump spoke only of this revenge and Branson found that “very bizarre.” He was baffled as to why Trump invited him to lunch to tell him this. Branson wondered if Trump was going to ask Brannon for money—and if so, Brannon said he would be come the sixth person on Trump’s revenge list because that was not going to happen.

•••••

Branson said he also met with Hillary Clinton for a one-on-one lunch, and the contrast was stunning. Here is what Branson said about Clinton.

“Here we talked about education reform, the war on drugs, women’s rights, conflicts around the globe and the death penalty. She was a good listener as well as an eloquent speaker. As she understands well, the President of the United States needs to understand and be engaged with wider world issues, rather than be consumed by petty personal quarrels.”


•••••

Judge rejects riot charges for journalist Amy Goodman after oil pipeline protest

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/17/amy-goodman-north-dakota-oil-access-pipeline-protest-arrest-riot

Sam Levin
Oct. 17, 2016

A North Dakota judge rejected prosecutors’ “riot” charges against Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman for her reporting on the oil pipeline protests, a decision that advocates hailed as a major victory for freedom of the press.

After the award-winning broadcast journalist filmed security guards working for the Dakota access pipeline using dogs and pepper spray on protesters, authorities issued a warrant for Goodman’s arrest and alleged that she participated in a “riot”, a serious offense that could result in months in jail.

On Monday, judge John Grinsteiner ruled that the state lacked probable cause for the riot charge, blocking prosecutors from moving forward with the controversial prosecution.

“I feel vindicated. Most importantly, journalism is vindicated,” Goodman told reporters and supporters on a live Facebook video on Monday afternoon. “We have a right to report. It’s also critical that we are on the front lines. Today, the judge sided with … freedom of the press.”

The case stems from a 3 September report when Goodman traveled to the Native American-led protest against a controversial $3.8bn oil pipeline that the Standing Rock Sioux tribe says is threatening its water supply and cultural heritage.

Goodman’s dispatch on the use of dogs went viral and has since garnered 14m views on Facebook and also prompted coverage from many news outlets, including CBS, NBC, NPR and CNN.

The North Dakota state attorney’s office had originally charged the journalist with “criminal trespass”. But last week, prosecutors emailed Goodman’s attorney, admitting that there were “legal issues with proving the notice of trespassing requirements in the statute”, according to Democracy Now! Instead, the state said it would be seeking riot charges.

“If the prosecutor thought he was going to intimidate Amy, he severely misjudged the situation,” Reed Brody, one of Goodman’s lawyers, told the Guardian after the judge’s decision on Monday.

•••••

Depending on the specific charge, Goodman could have faced several months or up to a year if convicted, according to Brody.

The riot claim was particularly unusual and disturbing, the lawyer added.

•••••

Brody said he hoped the state would stop targeting Goodman and other journalists. “He tried one charge. He tried another. At a certain point, I would think it would become too embarrassing for him to pursue these charges.”

The case backfired on prosecutors by prompting many journalists to write about law enforcement’s questionable responses to protesters, he added.

“If he thought these charges were going to deflect media attention from the pipeline, then he really blew it.”

The Freedom of the Press Foundation noted that Goodman was arrested in 2008 for covering Minnesota protests at the Republican national convention. She later won $100,000 from the state in a first amendment lawsuit.

•••••

Documentary film-makers face decades in prison for taping oil pipeline protests

The fact that we have to learn about this from news media in another country, Britain, shows how much the U.S. media is controlled by the power elite.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/20/north-dakota-oil-pipeline-protest-film-makers-face-prison

Sam Levin
Oct. 20, 2016

Two documentary film-makers are facing decades in prison for recording US oil pipeline protests, with serious felony charges that first amendment advocates say are part of a growing number of attacks on freedom of the press.

The controversial prosecutions of Deia Schlosberg and Lindsey Grayzel are moving forward after a judge in North Dakota rejected “riot” charges filed against Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman for her high-profile reporting at the Dakota Access pipeline protests.

But authorities in other parts of North Dakota and in Washington state have continued to target other film-makers over their recent reporting on similar demonstrations, raising concerns that the lesser-known journalists are not getting the same kind of public support and national attention.

Schlosberg, a New York-based film-maker, is facing three felony conspiracy charges for filming protesters on 11 October at a TransCanada Keystone Pipeline site in Pembina County in North Dakota, with prosecutors alleging that she was “recruited to record the criminal activity”.

The 36-year-old – who produced a documentary called How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change – could face 45 years in prison.

•••••

Grayzel, an independent film-maker from Portland, Oregon, was also arrested and jailed on 11 October while filming at a separate pipeline protest in Skagit County, Washington. She and her cinematographer, Carl Davis, had their footage and equipment seized and were kept behind bars for a day.

The two were filming activist Ken Ward attempting to shut down the Trans Mountain pipeline, and they now face 30 years in prison for a felony burglary charge, a felony “criminal sabotage” charge and a misdemeanor trespass offense. There were a series of pipeline protests across the US on 11 October.

“Everyone needs to be afraid when our first amendment rights are in jeopardy,” Grayzel, 41, told the Guardian on Thursday before her criminal arraignment. “This is not just about me. This is not just about Carl. This is not about Amy Goodman … This is about the public’s right to know what is going on in this country.”

Free-speech advocates said that both cases are unusual and troubling given that prosecutors have admitted that the defendants were acting as film-makers and are still pursuing aggressive felony cases.

•••••

While it’s not uncommon for journalists to face arrest and misdemeanor charges for trespassing or disorderly conduct while reporting at controversial protests, conspiracy, burglary and sabotage offenses are rare for members of the media.

“It’s outrageous. It’s an assault on the first amendment,” said Neil Fox, one of Grayzel’s attorneys. “It’s shocking, but it is the kind of climate that we’re living in right now.”

Fox cast blame on the Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who has made vicious attacks on the media a cornerstone of his campaign. “This is certainly the result of the toxic language that Trump brings to the election.”

•••••

Washington prosecutors are relying on laws that were passed in the early 20th century to target labor rights’ protesters, Fox added. “There’s been a revival in the state of Washington of the use of these statutes against labor activists and against environmental activists.”

In Goodman’s case, a judge forced prosecutors to drop a serious “riot” charge, which was centered on Goodman’s viral coverage of the intense Native American-led protests. But prosecutors and sheriff’s officials said they may continue to pursue other charges against the critically acclaimed journalist.

In Schlosberg’s charges, North Dakota prosecutors have alleged that she was part of a conspiracy, claiming she traveled with protesters “with the objective of diverting the flow of oil”.

“I was surprised at the conspiracy charges. I never thought that would ever happen,” her attorney Robert Woods told the Guardian. “All she was doing was her job of being a journalist and covering the story.”

The rigging of our elections — legally, by Republicans

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/10/20/the-rigging-our-elections-legally/AwtrpqGTxvv1XyC9LXdBvI/story.html?s_campaign=email_BG_TodaysHeadline&s_campaign=

By David Daley October 20, 2016

The race for 2020 is on — and it’s about time. President Obama indicated Monday that his top political priority after leaving the White House would be redistricting reform. His former attorney general, Eric Holder, will coordinate the Democrats’ mega-million campaign to earn back a seat at the table when new legislative lines are drawn after the next census.

Obama intends to battle the gerrymanders that have produced GOP super-majorities in state legislatures even when Democratic candidates win a majority of votes — and which have tilted the congressional map so far in the Republicans’ favor that most nonpartisan analysts believe the House remains out of the Democrats’ reach even as polls show Donald Trump’s favorability cratering.

•••••

in 2010, savvy strategists based at the Republican State Leadership Committee executed a plan called REDMAP, short for Redistricting Majority Project, and forever changed the rules.

Their plan was so elegant that it’s amazing no one had hit on it before. Most district lines are crafted by state legislatures. Republicans spent $30 million on local state house races in blue and purple states like North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, with the goal of tipping state legislatures red — and then having complete control over the map-making process that would determine district lines for the next decade.

Republicans zeroed in on 107 seats in 16 states — and by winning those, and more, they took complete control over drawing 193 congressional districts. That’s a pretty good headstart in the fight for a 218-vote majority; the Democrats, by contrast, had complete control over just 44.

•••••

The lines provided the Republicans with a firewall in Congress that withstood Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection. Indeed, Democrats retook the Senate in 2012, but could not budge the House: Democratic House candidates won 1.4 million more votes nationwide than Republicans, but the GOP maintained a 234-201 majority.

The new district lines — crafted with the help of dazzling new computer technology and easily obtained data bases loaded with demographic information — corralled so many Democrats into so few seats in Pennsylvania, for example, that a near-100,000 edge in the popular vote nevertheless resulted in a 13-to-5 GOP edge in the congressional delegation. A 240,000 vote edge in Michigan still sent nine Republicans and just five Democrats to Washington. In Ohio, where Republicans captured almost 52 percent of the aggregate House vote, they netted themselves 12 of 16 seats.

•••••

Yes, 17 intelligence agencies really did say Russia was behind hacking

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/10/21/17-intelligence-agencies-russia-behind-hacking/92514592/

Eliza Collins , USA TODAY 2:45 p.m. EDT October 21, 2016

Donald Trump’s claim that the United States has "no idea" who is behind recent email hacks is just not true.

The fact-checking website Politifact says Hillary Clinton is correct when she says 17 federal intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia is behind the hacking.

•••••

Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement on behalf of the U.S. Intelligence Community. The USIC is made up of 16 agencies, in addition to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

"The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow—the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities."

•••••

Chicago police say officer didn't shoot suspect beating her, fearing scrutiny

Oct. 18, 2016

Chicago police say an officer who was attacked by a man allegedly high on PCP should have shot the man, but risked her life out of fear the shooting would be controversial, reports CBS Chicago.

Parta Huff, 28, was charged Friday with attempted murder of a police officer after admitting in court to the attack.

•••••

“A subject who was under the influence of PCP attacked the female officer, viciously pounded her head into the street as her partner was trying to get him off of her. This attack went on for several minutes,” Chicago Police Supt. Eddie Johnson said during a press conference Friday.

Body cam footage appears to show Huff holding on to the officers hair, as other officers attempt to subdue him. Huff admitted in court Friday that he slammed the officer’s head into the pavement. She lost consciousness during the incident.

•••••

Johnson said the officer should have shot her attacker, but chose not to so her family and department would not face the kind of intense public scrutiny experienced by other officers who have shot people.

“She looked at me and said she thought she was going to die, and she knew that she should shoot this guy, but she chose not to because she didn’t want her family or the department to have to go through the scrutiny the next day on national news,” Johnson said.

•••••

Megadrought 99 Percent Certain For Southwest by 2050 if Temperature Rise Continues, Study Says

https://www.wunderground.com/news/southwest-on-track-for-mega-drought-researchers-say

Eric Chaney
Published: October 18, 2016

Tree rings in the American Southwest provide evidence of megadroughts that hit the region hundreds of years ago.

According to a new study from Cornell University, these droughts have been linked to the demise of civilizations, and changing climate conditions virtually assure that another one is on its way.

If precipitation decreases, stays them same, or even increases slightly in the coming years, there’s a 99 percent chance of a megadrought hitting the region, the study says.

“This will be worse than anything seen during the last 2,000 years and would pose unprecedented challenges to water resources in the region,” Toby Ault, a professor of earth science at Cornell University and one of the authors of the study, told The Atlantic. “As we add greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere—and we haven’t put the brakes on stopping this — we are weighting the dice for megadrought conditions.”

Drought conditions come about when the natural "tug-of-war” between precipitation supply and evaporation becomes unbalanced, says a statement from Cornell. Higher temperatures lead to an “increase in atmospheric demand for moisture from the land surface will shift the soil moisture balance. If this happens, megadroughts will be far more likely for next millennium.”

In a business-as-usual world, the study says, rising temperatures alone are sufficient to drive megadrought risks to unprecedented levels.

University of Arizona professor and paleoclimatologist Jonathan Overpack, who invented the word megadrought in the 1990s, told The Atlantic the scenario laid out in the study, a “searing megadrought” by 2050, scares him.

“This isn’t like the drought of our grandfathers,” he said. “It’s a drought that everyone would agree would be devastating as all heck.”

Most research suggests it would be worse than any known drought in history, The Atlantic reports. Millions of trees would die, toxic dust storms would rage across the land, and agriculture would be all but impossible.

On the other hand, if regional warming remains below 2°C, megadrought risks will correspondingly remain below 66 percent for a wide range of precipitation changes.

“We found that megadrought risk depends strongly on temperature, which is somewhat good news,” Ault said in the Cornell release. “This means that an aggressive strategy for cutting greenhouse gas emissions could keep regional temperature changes from going beyond about 2 degrees Celsius.”

Adaptions to the region’s water policies - demand reduction, increased efficiency strategies, interbasin water transfers, shifts to groundwater reliance, increased surface irrigation - could also serve to offset some of the increase in atmospheric demand for moisture that higher temperatures will bring, the study says.

So there is light a the end of the tunnel.

“Megadrought risks are still likely to be higher in the future than they were in the past,” Ault said in the Cornell release. But, “efficient use of water resources in the drought-stricken American Southwest are likely to help that region thrive during a changing climate.”

Public Housing Isn't Wasted on the Poor

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-10-17/public-housing-isn-t-wasted-on-the-poor

Oct. 17, 2016

In the 1930s, when U.S. started to build public housing, it was focused in the inner cities, because that’s where lots of poor people lived and worked. In recent decades, public housing is more about giving poor people vouchers, which allows them to move into the suburbs. As a result, poverty in the U.S. is no longer mainly an urban phenomenon.

But some people label public housing a failure. Is that true? Does building places for poor people to live actually hurt them by concentrating poverty and allowing social ills such as drugs and crime to proliferate?

There’s reason to believe that the latter could happen. Many social problems have so-called network effects.

•••••

That’s the thinking behind initiatives like the Moving to Opportunity program, which gives incentives for poor people to relocate to higher-income neighborhoods. Research shows that Moving to Opportunity has had some success -- kids who participate in the program grow up less poor. It turns out that poverty isn’t just a function of individual characteristics like natural ability or personal preferences -- your likelihood of staying poor depends on who your neighbors are. Network effects matter.

But public housing isn’t just about where you live. It provides a material benefit to the people who receive it. That benefit allows poor folks to use their money for other things -- they can work fewer hours and spend more time with kids, they can feed their children more and better food, they can get more education and they can even start small businesses. These are all forms of investment, and investment pays off in terms of higher future income.

•••••

But there’s evidence to show that public housing really does benefit poor kids -- a lot. A new paper by a team of six economists studies the benefits that kids receive from their parents’ public housing.

This is a hard thing to study. If you just look at the correlation between public housing and life outcomes, you’ll think housing actually hurts poor people. But this is wrong, because of a selection effect -- poorer people are the ones who are more likely to receive the housing benefit in the first place. So the authors of this paper use a clever approach -- compare siblings within families, who live in public housing for different amounts of time. Now, once selection effects are controlled for, the effect of housing programs looks strongly positive:

The estimates imply that each additional year of voucher (during early childhood) housing increases female and male earnings [at age 26] by 4.7 and 2.6 percent, respectively, while an additional year of public housing increases female and male earnings [at age 26] by 4.9 and 5.1 percent, respectively.

The authors also find that public housing reduces the chance of incarceration later in life by a modest amount.

This is a large income benefit. According to this estimate, 10 years of public housing would raise a kid’s future income by about 50 percent! This means that the parents who get these housing benefits aren’t just wasting the money -- it really helps.

So while many people look at housing projects and see disaster areas, what they’re really just seeing is the negative effects of poverty itself. Both housing projects and the newer voucher system really make it easier for poor people to invest in their kids’ futures. Over time, these programs help the U.S.’s most destitute citizens the boost they need to climb out of their bad situations.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w22721.pdf

Childhood participation in assisted housing also reduces the likelihood of incarceration across all household race/ethnicity groups. Time spent in voucher-assisted or public housing is especially beneficial for females from non-Hispanic Black households, who experience substantial increases in expected earnings and lower incarceration rates.

A People’s History of Donald Trump's Business Busts and Countless Victims

I suggest reading the whole article at the following link, or preferably it at the bookstore. Very scary to think this person could become president of the U.S.

http://www.newsweek.com/2016/10/28/donald-trump-business-busts-victims-511034.html

By Kurt Eichenwald On 10/18/16

Dust swirled and jackhammers pounded outside the Bonwit Teller building in Manhattan as undocumented immigrants tore apart the façade. It was June 5, 1980, and a sense of bitterness hung over the work site that afternoon; paychecks were often weeks late, but since the Poles didn’t have legal status in the United States, there was little they could do about it.

The exterior they were destroying was an architectural masterpiece—bronze, platinum, hammered aluminum, glazed ceramic and tinted glass that shimmered like jewelry. Many New Yorkers had hoped the grandest portion would survive; curators from the Metropolitan Museum of Art had asked the developer to carefully remove the two bas-relief sculpture panels so they could be restored and put on public display. But that afternoon, the laborers, acting on orders from the developer, smashed the 50-year-old art deco panels into a rubble of stone, pebble and dirt.

The desecration horrified Manhattan’s art community, but the developer, a brash 34-year-old named Donald Trump, dismissed the criticism—pretending to be his own spokesman, “John Barron,” as he talked to reporters by phone. Saving the panels would have cost him $32,000 each, he said, and delayed work for a few days on his $100 million project, Trump Tower. Besides, he declared, he knew more than the curators—the panels had no artistic merit and little financial value.

This incident from long before Trump became a household name is an ideal exemplar for his business career, in which he has repeatedly left bitterness and ruin in his wake. His destructive behavior—spurred by recklessness, arrogance and an unslakable thirst for vengeance—has victimized cities, businesses, investors, partners, even members of his family.

•••••

To anyone who has watched Trump over the past four decades, none of this is a surprise. His presidential campaign is built on the claim that he’s a brilliant businessman worth $10 billion who turns every challenge into success, but Trump is none of those things. Instead, he was born into an exceedingly wealthy family and tried to build upon his father’s success with ever-riskier ventures, and by any rational measure, he failed again and again.

•••••

Donald Trump loves to put his name on buildings, but there are no hospital wings named for him. No museums have a piece of artwork with a plaque reading “A Gift of Donald J. Trump.” No buildings at the University of Pennsylvania bear his name, even though he constantly cites his graduation from its Wharton School as a sign of his intelligence. (Contrary to Trump’s suggestion, he attended the school for only two years as an undergraduate and did not obtain a degree from Wharton’s far more prestigious graduate business program.)

•••••

Trump regularly cheats at golf, even revising his scorecard after a match to transform defeat into victory, according to two people who have played with him. He persuaded an elderly couple who ran a Florida antique store to let him “try out” two valuable pieces, then refused to return or pay for them, according to someone close to the Trump family. He bought expensive jewelry at Bulgari on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, then colluded with the store to have empty boxes supposedly containing his purchase shipped out of state so he could dodge New York sales tax, court records show. After dragging a buddy through years of litigation, Trump told the man he had filed the suit only because he was angry the friend had not given him enough public credit for his success, according to a person who witnessed the conversation.

•••••

There are no names attached to those stories because the sources all know the Republican nominee strikes out viciously over any perceived criticism. They all asked to remain anonymous for fear that Trump would drag them to court or try to damage their careers. They know that is one of Trump’s greatest skills : bullying, threatening and suing anyone who criticizes him and cowing most of them into silence.

•••••

Trump knew the success of the Taj and the gambling houses he had previously built—the Trump Castle and the Trump Plaza—could mean the difference between Atlantic City’s rebirth or destruction. He also knew that lots of people would suffer along the way. “People will spend a tremendous amount of money in casinos, money that they would normally spend on buying a refrigerator or a new car,” Trump said. “Local businesses will suffer because they’ll lose dollars to the casino.” He was right. As he built his casinos, Atlantic City was ripped apart. Unemployment soared, hundreds of restaurants went out of business, and dry cleaners and specialty shops disappeared.

•••••

Three years later, Trump sold stock in his newly formed Trump Hotel and Casino Resorts, which owned all three of his Atlantic City casinos and another casino he had started in Indiana. He insisted the stock trade under the ticker DJT—his initials. As chairman of the company, Trump maintained a 41 percent stake, which was worth about $400 million when the stock hit its all-time high of $29.25 a share—less than a year after going public.

Under Trump’s leadership, however, the company was unprofitable every year, and by the end of his time as chairman, it had lost more than $1 billion. By 2004, the stock was selling for 65 cents a share, and the company fell into bankruptcy; people who had put their faith in the Trump name lost more than 90 percent of their investment. During the same time, those who owned funds based on the Standard & Poor’s 500 index more than doubled their money. Even in the greatest stock market ever, and in a business regularly described as a license to print money, Trump left only wreckage in his wake. And investors in Trump hotels saw nothing but losses.

On the other hand, Trump did just fine for himself. Even as his company’s stock price was collapsing and annual losses were piling up, filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission show that during his years as chairman, more than $60 million poured from the public company into Trump’s pockets.

This is the dirty secret behind Trump’s allegedly miraculous financial recovery. What he told the public was a fable: that he had fought his way back with perseverance and skill. In truth, he did it by snatching huge fistfuls of cash from a company that was wiping out the savings of millions of people.

•••••

By then, most of the smart money had given up on Trump. To get a new personal credit line, he could no longer rely on handshake deals or personal guarantees with Chase Manhattan, as he once had. Instead, financial records obtained by Newsweek show, in 2003 he turned to the Cayman Islands’ branch of UBS, the Swiss bank. For that loan, however, he had to put up a large number of assets as security, including a portion of his interest in Trump World Tower, all of his investments in a Paine Webber brokerage account, mortgage notes and numerous other securities and property. Soon almost all financial institutions were passing on his deals, other than Deutsche Bank—and in a few years, he would default on a $640 million construction loan from it. The stock and bond markets, where every investor who had ever placed faith in Trump lost money, were closed to him. A fund financed by the billionaire George Soros agreed to invest in a Trump development once — but only once. A private equity firm, Colony Capital, backed out of a Trump project, forcing the Trump Organization to self-finance. Wall Street and financial institutions worldwide all knew that, as a businessman, Trump was a disaster.

So Trump went in another direction , rebuilding his reputation on television. Beginning in 2004, around when his public company fell into bankruptcy, Trump began playing the role of a successful businessman on the NBC reality show The Apprentice. Unless it read the financial news religiously, the public could not know that this portrayal of Trump was a farce.

•••••