Pills That Stop Racism. A Real Study

We’ve become an extremely pill dependent society.  There are pills for weight loss, pills for hair loss, pills for heartburn, pills to negate the effects experienced by pills people have previously taken.  So much faith has been put into the power of medication a group of researchers now feel they’ve discovered a pill that will end a person’s racist tendencies.  I wonder if they could work on making a pill that would end researchers desire to do such studies and thinking we regular people actually believe what they say.  My extremely valuable insights are in italics.

According to the Press Association

Researchers from Oxford University released a new study in the international medical journal Psychopharmacology showing that taking propranolol reduces “implicit negative racial bias.”  Experimental psychologist Dr. Sylvia Terbeck, from Oxford University, who led the study published said: “Our results offer new evidence about the processes in the brain that shape implicit racial bias.

I wonder if they could discover evidence about the processes in the brain that causes someone to implicitly feel such a study is actually not worth the money paid to do it.

“Implicit racial bias can occur even in people with a sincere belief in equality. Given the key role that such implicit attitudes appear to play in discrimination against other ethnic groups and the widespread use of propranolol for medical purposes, our findings are also of considerable ethical interest.”

They’re kidding us, right?  I love the “even in people with a sincere belief in equality.”  What does this mean?  These participants believed everyone is equal but for having a brain that processes discrimination, they wouldn’t be against it.  I doubt it’s possible to invent a pill that would make this stuff believable.

Thirty-six white people were used in the study.  Half of them received propranolol and the other half got a placebo.  Researchers then used a feeling thermometer to rate how “warm” they felt toward different groups.  Each volunteer was asked to undertake a “racial Implicit Association Test” (IAT) one to two hours after taking propranolol or the placebo. 

They did an experiment where all 36 participants were white.  Interesting how they had an experiment about discrimination by discriminating.  (Sarcasm alert since an anti-sarcasm pill has yet to be invented.)  Hey, I guess with 36 white people they were able to gain knowledge about every aspect of discrimination in every race around the world.  Who knew that a planet with billions of people could have their behavior explained by 36 white people?  Experiments like this make me wonder just how hard being a researcher could possibly be.

The test involved categorizing positive and negative words, and pictures of black and white individuals on a computer screen.  They also found that there was no significant difference between the propranolol and placebo groups toward religious or sexual prejudice.

What about age discrimination, gender discrimination, ugly discrimination or ten-letters –in-the-last-name discrimination?  Does “no significant differences” mean these 36 white people hated everyone equally?  Is it me or is this a bit limiting?  Will there need to be a pill created for each type of discrimination?

“Man I hate white people.”

“But you’re white.”

“Oops, guess I accidentally took the self-hating race pill by mistake.”

“Here take the love white people pill and you should be okay.”

“Thanks.”

“The main finding of our study is that propranolol significantly reduced implicit but not explicit racial bias,” researchers concluded.

These researchers think we all have the IQ of a one celled animal.  What does this mean?  The participants would not think discriminatory thoughts but just acted discriminatorily?  Maybe the 36 white people were biased at a subconscious level against researchers doing senseless work.  I don’t know what’s worse.  People doing such research and thinking it has some value or the media running stories about it because they think it has some value.  Could someone please make a truth and reality pill for the researchers and media people responsible for bringing this to the public? 

Here is a link to the article

https://washington.cbslocal.com/2012/03/13/study-finds-heart-disease-drug-combats-racism/

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Collegiate Battle against Bottled Water

This is an actual article that was produced by Bloomberg News.  I would file this story under “Duh.”  It seems that college students at the Ivy League colleges have come to realize that you really don’t need to buy bottled water as you can drink water from a water fountain.  Wow!  What a revelation!  I really was never much of a bottled water person but it’s nice to know that now Ivy League students and others are grasping a concept I’ve had for decades.  My extremely valuable insights are in Italics as always.

Top colleges shunning bottled water

NEW YORK -- Bottled water is coming under attack on college campuses.

More than 90 schools, among them Brown and Harvard universities, are banning the sale or restricting the use of plastic water bottles, unnerving the $22 billion retail packaged-water industry in the United States.

It’s something to think about an industry is getting “unnerved.”  I suppose it easier than saying bottled water companies are pissed off at college students who have developed an attitude about their product.  They just may stop hiring non-bottled-water drinking college graduates.

Freshmen at colleges nationwide are being greeted with stainless-steel bottles in their welcome packs and encouraged to use hydration stations where free, filtered water is available. Brown, which once sold about 320,000 bottles of water a year in vending machines and campus stores, ended sales in dining halls in 2010. Harvard and Dartmouth College are installing hydration stations in new buildings to reduce trash.

The now have “Hydration stations?”  Wow!  When I went to college they were called water fountains.  My how things changed.

"The product just doesn't make common sense," said Sarah Alexander, 20, an environmental-studies major at Hanover, N.H.-based Dartmouth. "Companies are taking something that is freely accessible to everyone on the Dartmouth campus, packaging it in a non-reusable container and then selling it under the pretense that it is somehow better than tap water."

Sara Alexander gets an RMN Common Sense Award.  She has given me hope and faith in the current youth attending college.  There were many of us who felt the same way back in the 1970s when the bottled water started becoming popular.  Of course, at that time, it was considered trendy to waltz down the street and drinking water from a plastic bottle. 

In response to the growing movement, the water industry released a video on YouTube last month poking fun at "Ban the Bottle," an organization that advocates banning one-time-use plastic water bottles. The spot, which features "Star Wars"-like music and flashbacks of antiwar demonstrations, says bottled water is a safe, convenient product that is "one of the healthiest drinks on the shelf" and that its packaging is recyclable.

(Sarcasm Alert) I bet after watching that video college student around the country will say “What were we thinking?  Why would we want to drink tap water when we could actually shell out our hard earned cash for a plastic container of water?  Forget about having our own container for water.  We need to have the plastic bottle with the label.  Who cares if it's actually tapped water?  The illusion that you’re drinking iceberg water or spring water or water from the frozen parts of the planet Neptune is what’s really important.”

The bottling industry may be worried about losing brand loyalty from college kids, said Eric Meliton, an industry analyst with Frost & Sullivan.  College students are "on the go, they've got backpacks and they may not choose to use bottled water."

Someone needs to tell Eric Meliton there was a time before bottled water.  We all found a way to survive.  Maybe the world is starting to figure out their product isn’t really all that important.  Back in the day, we had water fountains and today they have hydration stations. It’s six of one and half a dozen of another.

Reducing or eliminating plastic bottled water saves students money and has the environmental benefit of reducing the need to truck bottles across the country, said Niles Barnes, project coordinator with the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.

Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education?  This is a real organization.  Isn’t there a fraternity that also does this?  After a college drinking party people can come up with the most amazing things.

Dartmouth is trying to "shift the student culture" about purchasing bottled water, said Rosi Kerr, the school's director of sustainability. Princeton University, in Princeton, N.J., promotes a "Drink Local" initiative to reduce bottle waste

Some departments at Cambridge, Mass.-based Harvard have banned the purchase of bottled water for meetings.

For meetings?  Can you imagine going to a meeting to give a talk and having someone at the door stop you and say “Drop the bottle of water and back away from it slowly.  You can come to the meeting but we’ve got people from the TSA at the door to screen anyone for any unauthorized attempt to smuggle in a bottle of water.  (The previous sentence was sarcasm but to some, it may actually be an idea.)

More than a dozen U.S. schools have campus-wide bans on the sale of plastic water bottles, Mr. Barnes said.

Can you imagine the listing on a student’s file that they were expelled due to smuggling in plastic bottles of water?  I suppose as long as alcohol etc isn’t banned college will still be tolerable.  I imagine that finding a cause to get emotional about on college campuses is probably difficult.  People know global warming is a hoax, OWS is not considered a virtual criminal organization so what’s left?  Ban the plastic bottles of water?  They have my backing and to show my support I’m going to get some water, in a glass, from the tap or should I say “hydration station?”

Here is a copy of the article
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-03-07/ivy-colleges-shunning-bottled-water-jab-at-22-billion-industry

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