Heroin screens take your sight

He is engaged in going blind

Perhaps you shouldn't worry so much that "digital heroin" - smartphones, tablets and like devices - can turn your kids into psychotic junkies.

The problem may be self-curing: 'Global epidemic of blindness' on the horizon, experts warn: Hours spent staring at screens 'will rob millions of their sight decades early'

Experts warn we face a global epidemic of blindness if we continue to spend hours you spend staring at a screen.

The high energy light emitted from digital screens is causing irreversible damage to our eyes by deteriorating the retinas.

Damage to the retinas - the light-sensitive layer at the back of the eye - is the biggest cause of central blindness.

And a new report warns 'it is now clearer than ever that we are facing a global epidemic' of sight loss - particularly for the millions of children who are exposed to digital screens earlier than ever.

Lead researcher Dr Celia Sanchez-Ramos said: 'It is paramount for adults and parents to act now and protect themselves from further damage.'

Read the whole thing. It's frightening.

According to Preventblindness.org,

While complaints of eye fatigue and discomfort are common among digital device users, these symptoms are not caused by the screen itself. Digital screens give off little or no harmful radiation (such as x-rays or UV rays). All levels of radiation from computer screens are below levels that can cause eye damage such as cataracts. 

Digital screens do exposure your eyes to blue light. Blue light exposure you get from screens is small compared to the amount of exposure from the sun.  And yet, there is concern over the long-term effects of screen exposure because of the close proximity of the screens and the length of time spent looking at them. According to a recent NEI-funded study, children’s eyes absorb more blue light than adults from digital device screens. ... 

Additionally, the study showed exposure to LED light from tablet screens favors the expression of genes that promote cell death and the enzymes involved in causing cell death. 

Parents, this is bad:
 

The NY Post reports that multitaskers are especially at risk.

Skip the multitasking: A 2016 study from the Vision Council found that 77 percent of people who experience digital eyestrain use two or more devices at a time.

But that's not all:

Even more alarming: You might be prematurely aging your eyes. “With the advent of cellphones, tablets and laptops, we’re seeing people in their 20s and 30s with eye issues that used to be exclusive to people in their 60s and 70s,” says Dr. Richard Norden of Ridgewood, NJ-based Norden Laser Eye Associates. “Screen time is absolutely the culprit.”

While eye-twitching and headaches can be reversed by taking a digital break, Norden has noticed his patients’ prescriptions can permanently worsen depending on how much time they spend with their devices. ...

“It used to be an old wives’ tale that staring too long at something, like a page while reading, would make you nearsighted,” he says. “But now that isn’t the case.”

The reason? Overuse of the ciliary muscle, an eye muscle that changes shape depending on whether you look at something up close or far away. “Lock” the muscle in one position for too long — what happens when you stare at a screen or read an old-fashioned book for hours — and it suffers.

That's in addition to the blue-light hazard.

Is there a way to filter out the blue light? Apparently so.

Dr Sanchez-Ramos has developed such a filter to make light less damaging.

'Reticare', which goes over your screen, converts harmful blue light to a gentler frequency more akin to sunshine.

Pressure on various European governments has led to a number of Spanish local authorities ruling that all schools under their jurisdiction must use protective screen filters.

I am not endorsing Reticare as I had not heard of it until now. But it can be found on Amazon to fit various devices. (Disclosure: I am not an Amazon partner so I do not make a cent from purchases made by clicking the link.)

But I think I'll get one each for my phone and tablet.

How "digital heroin" is destroying our future

Parents today buy their kids tablets or their own iPhones as babysitters and pacifiers. So it's no wonder that that "digital heroin" is turning kids into psychotic junkies.

Susan bought her 6-year-old son John an iPad when he was in first grade. “I thought, ‘Why not let him get a jump on things?’ ” she told me during a therapy session. John’s school had begun using the devices with younger and younger grades — and his technology teacher had raved about their educational benefits — so Susan wanted to do what was best for her sandy-haired boy who loved reading and playing baseball.

She started letting John play different educational games on his iPad. Eventually, he discovered Minecraft, which the technology teacher assured her was “just like electronic Lego.” Remembering how much fun she had as a child building and playing with the interlocking plastic blocks, Susan let her son Minecraft his afternoons away.

At first, Susan was quite pleased. John seemed engaged in creative play as he explored the cube-world of the game. She did notice that the game wasn’t quite like the Legos that she remembered — after all, she didn’t have to kill animals and find rare minerals to survive and get to the next level with her beloved old game. ...

Then, one night, she realized that something was seriously wrong. 

“I walked into his room to check on him. He was supposed to be sleeping — and I was just so frightened…”

She found him sitting up in his bed staring wide-eyed, his bloodshot eyes looking into the distance as his glowing iPad lay next to him. He seemed to be in a trance. Beside herself with panic, Susan had to shake the boy repeatedly to snap him out of it. Distraught, she could not understand how her once-healthy and happy little boy had become so addicted to the game that he wound up in a catatonic stupor. ...

We now know that those iPads, smartphones and Xboxes are a form of digital drug. Recent brain imaging research is showing that they affect the brain’s frontal cortex — which controls executive functioning, including impulse control — in exactly the same way that cocaine does. Technology is so hyper-arousing that it raises dopamine levels — the feel-good neurotransmitter most involved in the addiction dynamic — as much as sex.

Which goes a long way explaining why Millennials hate dealing with people.

Andy Puzder, CEO of Hardee's and Carl's Jr., told Business Insider in March that he's observed millennials' distaste for social interaction in his restaurants.

"Millennials like not seeing people," Puzder said. "I've been inside restaurants where we've installed ordering kiosks ... and I've actually seen young people waiting in line to use the kiosk where there's a person standing behind the counter, waiting on nobody."

One thing that young women complain about is how men their age are not as engaged (both in the marital sense and the social-business sense) as they are; in fact, the phenomenon has been called "men on strike." Yet while young men today are more likely to be unemployed or under-employed than men of any previous generation, it can't all be laid at the feet of the Obama part-time economy or an increasing perception among men that universities and society generally is becoming increasingly anti-male. A great deal of the blame lies with the fact that young men spend much more time entertaining themselves before a glowing screen than women do. 

You know who most tightly controls the time and type of activity their children spend online? Tech-industry workers and insiders, that's who. Maybe the rest of us should get a clue. 

Disclosure: The tech age did not even begin until my two oldest sons were well into school years. They were in college before the first iPhone came out. My daughter followed six years later, but she was still 14 when the first iPhone was released and did not even have a smart phone at all until college. So we dodged this bullet.

Update:
Study finds young men are playing video games instead of getting jobs. “Happiness has gone up for this group, despite employment percentages having fallen, and the percentage living with parents going up. And that’s different than for any other group.”

Digital heroin addiction worsening

I have used, though did not invent, the term "digital heroin" to refer to people's addiction the glowing-screen devices, especially smart phone and tablets, and especially by children. A mostly-complete page of my posts is here.

Comes now further, abject confirmation. From the Daily Mail, "Generation of child web addicts: Youngsters are becoming so obsessed with the internet they spend more time on YouTube than with friends as parents struggle to keep control of their online usage."

Children have become such screen addicts they are abandoning their friends and hobbies, a major report warns today.

Researchers found under-fives spend an hour and 16 minutes a day online. Their screen time rises to four hours and 16 minutes when gaming and television are included.

Youngsters aged 12 to 15 average nearly three hours a day on the web – plus two more hours watching TV. The study said YouTube was ‘a near permanent feature’ of many young lives, and seven in ten of those aged 12 to 15 took smartphones to bed.

It concluded: ‘Children were watching people on YouTube pursuing hobbies that they did not do themselves or had recently given up offline.’

A growing number of parents admitted to researchers that they had lost control of their children’s online habits.

Next is a report on Nashville's local Fox affiliate, "Study: Increased screen time in young children associated with developmental delays."

A new study from psychologists and doctors in Canada found increased screen time in young children can cause issues with children reaching developmental milestones.

Researchers studied 2,441 mothers and children with higher levels of screen time for children aged 24 and 36-months-old. Researchers then examined developmental milestone test results in the same children at 36 and 60-months-old.

The study found on average, 24-month-old children were watching 17 hours of television per week, 36-month-olds watched 25 hours per week, and 36-month-olds watched 11 hours per week. The totals reflect findings children on average in the U.S. watch to 2 hours and 19 minutes of screen time each day.

For each age group, children with increased screen times showed poorer performances on developmental testing when they reached the next age group. Developmental evaluations included communication, gross motor, fine motor, problem solving, and personal-social skills.

The totals are well above the recommended 1 hour per day of screen time watching high-quality programs. Researchers say about one quarter of children are not developmentally ready for school entry and the trend parallels an increase in screen time use by children.

Parents are using glowing screens as a sedative to pacify their children I have seen this in public too many times to count. But people, these thing are literally addictive, and when children (a) learn they will be given a screen to stop pitching a fit, and (b) they cannot help pitching the fit anyway because they literally are suffering from withdrawal symptoms, then the parent-child-screen interface becomes a self-reinforcing do loop.

My kids escaped this, fortunately. Our youngest was 14 when the first smart phone came out and none of them got a smart phone until they were in college (if then). But I have, no kidding, seen infants who cannot even walk yet with their very own smart phones - and now you can buy those phones especially built for small kids (more accurately, for parents of small kids who visually identify those phones with toys, as the makers intend them to do).

Yes, this is sadly real - just click here.

What is the tie-in to these kids' futures? Well, consider that researchers both in the US and Europe have discovered that IQ scores are getting lower, and the younger one is, the greater likelihood his/her IQ is lower than a generation before. And while glowing screens do not seem to explain all the fall, they are absolutely part of it.

Falling IQ scores may explain why politics has turned so nasty

Western IQ scores are falling. Is it computers or something else?

Parents, take this seriously!

More on digital heroin

I posted not long ago on how "digital heroin" - meaning computer screens, especially smart phones and tablets - is destroying our future. In short, they make you stupid.

Comes now this eminently sensible plea to parents, Can You Please Stop Buying Your 10-Year-Olds Smartphones?

They have the rest of their lives to text and read Drudge or troll Facebook. But they only have right now, this very minute, for the precious, fleeting moments of childhood that will vanish right before our eyes. Please stop taking that from them. Stop rushing them to grow up.

Do you know what they are looking at on those phones? Statistics say porn. And the girls who aren't actively looking for porn are being pressured by the boys to send pornographic images of themselves via cell phone. What is the rush to put this danger into their lives? If it's games they want to play, they can do that on a Kindle or on your iPad. A phone unlocks a whole world of danger they are not ready for.

Sexting has become a bigger worry for parents than smoking or alcohol, according to a poll reported in the Telegraph.

Research findings released by GDST (Girls' Day School Trust) show that over 50 percent of teachers know of pupils who engage in sexting, with a quarter of those aged 11.

This could have been avoided if only their parents had the foresight to delay giving these children phones—and I'm sure they wish now that they had.

My eldest had fought in Iraq as a US Marine and returned before the first iPhone came out. I did not allow smart phones for my second and third children until they were juniors in high school, and even then they got hand-me-downs as my wife or I upgraded. Today, one is today an Air Force physician and my daughter a chemical engineer.

No, parents, your children do not need and should not have these devices.

Fisher Price to make fortune off bad parenting

I posted a few days ago that this is a normal childhood:

This is not a normal childhood:

Sadly, this photo is not a joke: "Fisher Price Releases Exercise Bike for Screen-Addicted Toddlers"

The new version offers parents the ability to view their child’s progress through, what else, a smartphone app.

Of course. Read it and weep.

Glowing screens for children is so destructive of them that pediatric specialists call such devices "digital heroin" because they can turn kids into psychotic junkies.

And when you're not around the odds are high your sixth-grade or older child is using the smart phone you gave them for Christmas to surf porn sites.

And do not be surprised when you try to limit your child's screen time and he responds by just beating the crap out of you in a violent rage.

Maybe that's because Kids Connecting on Social Media Are Less Satisfied With Real Life. 

Why is Sunday for football?

Which is really just a way of asking what Sunday is for. Consider the NFL. Its ratings are falling and the league invents self-justifying reasons why. Do Colin Kaepernick, et. al. have a significant effect on viewing? Frankly, I doubt it, although some people have tuned out because of them for sure.

I have already explained that the reason ratings are falling is - Peyton Manning is not playing anymore. To elucidate further, I mean that there is no celebrity quarterback in the game now that Peyton retired. Tom Brady? Old and deflated by deflate-gate. Aaron Rodgers? Great quarterback. So what? Colin Kaepernick? Oh, wait, we already talked about him. And he's not a first-tier QB anyway. Games today are simply boring. (Update - In fact, the 10-23 evening game is being called "The Worst Game Ever.")

My 23-year-old daughter told me today that Millennials don't have the inclination to watch football or any other sport for three hours. To which I would add, "Unless their own kids are playing," which clearly none are yet. Millennials are far more likely to be glued to digital heroin than non-interactively observe what;s happening in some distant location.

As I type this, awaiting some time to pass before I must leave for my afternoon work, the Tennessee Titans are losing to the Colts in the second half. The Titans' season is 3-3 as of now. If they lose they return to losing-season status; if they win the gain winning-season status for the first time this year.

Does it make any difference to me which outcome occurs? No. Will my life improve if they go to 4-3? No. Will it be diminished if they to 3-4? No. Is there anyone whom I know who could answer affirmatively to any of those questions? No. So do I care whether they win or lose? Not in the slightest.

Yawn.

So again: what is Sunday for? This is not a question that particularly interests Jews or Muslims, of course, but since America has been a majority-Christian nation from the beginning (diminishing rapidly now) it has long been a question of interest here. Sunday is the Christian Sabbath, a concept we inherited from the Jews.

Jews honor Friday sundown to Saturday sundown as their Sabbath. Once the sun sets, Sabbath rules kick in and remain in effect for 24 hours. Generally, these are prohibitions of certain activities, mainly those of the workaday week, and their society of source was agricultural, not industrial. The command to honor the Sabbath springs from the Exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt and is found in the Ten Commandments, the heart of the Law of Moses.

Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.

Hence, the Sabbath was to be a day set aside with deliberation for purpose of honoring God and the commandments of God in the world.

The first Christians were almost all Jews and they kept the idea of the Sabbath, but not the day of the week. The use of Sunday as the Sabbath by Christians was a very early adoption, done because, of course, it was on a Sunday that Jesus was found to be resurrected from death. But through most of Christian history, the purpose of the Sunday Sabbath mirrored that of the Jewish Sabbath: to be a day distinct from the rest with a deliberate focus on the worship and work of God in the world.

That this orientation has been mostly abandoned in the US today hardly needs be said. And not just by "Nones" or other non-Christians. Probably the majority of American church goers are pretty much done with the Sabbath part of Sundays about noon.

That the ancient Jews often fell short in keeping the Sabbath is evident from reading the Jewish Scriptures (Old Testament). Take, for example, Isaiah 58, in which the prophet decries just going through the motions of faith while expecting the same results:

“Shout it aloud, do not hold back.
    Raise your voice like a trumpet.
Declare to my people their rebellion
    and to the descendants of Jacob their sins.
2 For day after day they seek me out;
    they seem eager to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that does what is right
    and has not forsaken the commands of its God.
They ask me for just decisions
    and seem eager for God to come near them.
3 ‘Why have we fasted,’ they say,
    ‘and you have not seen it?
Why have we humbled ourselves,
    and you have not noticed?’ 

“Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please
    and exploit all your workers.
4 Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife,
    and in striking each other with wicked fists.
You cannot fast as you do today
    and expect your voice to be heard on high.
5 Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
    only a day for people to humble themselves?
Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed
    and for lying in sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast,
    a day acceptable to the Lord? 

6 “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
    and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
    and break every yoke?
7 Is it not to share your food with the hungry
    and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
    and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
8 Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
    and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness will go before you,
    and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard.
9 Then you will call, and the Lord will answer;
    you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I. 

“If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
    with the pointing finger and malicious talk,
10 and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
    and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
    and your night will become like the noonday.
11 The Lord will guide you always;
    he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
    and will strengthen your frame.
You will be like a well-watered garden,
    like a spring whose waters never fail.
12 Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins
    and will raise up the age-old foundations;
you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls,
    Restorer of Streets with Dwellings. 

13 “If you keep your feet from breaking the Sabbath
    and from doing as you please on my holy day,
if you call the Sabbath a delight
    and the Lord’s holy day honorable,
and if you honor it by not going your own way
    and not doing as you please or speaking idle words,
14 then you will find your joy in the Lord,
    and I will cause you to ride in triumph on the heights of the land
    and to feast on the inheritance of your father Jacob.” 

For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

There are consequences from not keeping the Sabbath, and there are results if we do. It is results we want, not consequences, yes? "For the mouth of the Lord has spoken."

Digital heroin addicts revolt

Halifax cafe goes 'screen free,' sparks backlash on social media | CTV News

HALIFAX -- A popular Halifax cafe and bar found itself in a firestorm of caffeine-fuelled controversy Tuesday after declaring itself "screen free" after 5 p.m.

Lion and Bright cafe, in the city's hip north end, recently posted signs informing patrons of the rule, which requires work-related screens such as laptops and tablets to be put away during the evening.

"Close your screens, meet your neighbours! Lion & Bright is now screen free after 5 p.m. daily," the sign read in a photo posted to Facebook. An asterisk at the bottom of the sign said: "Includes Kindles, tablets, iPads, etc."

The rule sparked a debate online, and while a few people were receptive to the change, others declared it "pretentious."

A Twitter user named Simon Leither said: "Well, I know where I won't be going. I can manage my own device usage, be a social human being and engage with people on my own terms."

Addicts have to get their fix.

Ah, Millennials!

It seems that no one (including me) knows what to make of the young-adult generation, the "Millennials," the vanguard of whom are pushing into their mid-30s.

So let's see:

1. Millennials hate dealing with people.

Andy Puzder, CEO of Hardee's and Carl's Jr., told Business Insider in March that he's observed millennials' distaste for social interaction in his restaurants.

"Millennials like not seeing people," Puzder said. "I've been inside restaurants where we've installed ordering kiosks ... and I've actually seen young people waiting in line to use the kiosk where there's a person standing behind the counter, waiting on nobody."

Which is not very surprising when you consider that young people today are literally addicted to the "digital heroin" of interactive screens.

2. They are poor and don't have sex.

According to a report from the U.S. Census Bureau (PDF), they earn $2,000 less than their parents did at a comparable age, they are more likely to live in poverty, and they are more likely to live at home. ...

After several news outlets, including The Daily Beast, reported that rates of millennial sexual inactivity in early adulthood are surprisingly high, armchair social theorists came out in force to blame it on everything but the fact that nearly one-third of young adults are still living at home. ...

 The truth is that lower wages and poverty can account for so many of the things that older generations find so mystifying about millennials.

3. Younger Millennials rely on Facebook for getting news.

The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has released its annual news report, which finds that nearly twice as many U.S. citizens use social media as a weekly news source as did in 2013. And younger people are leading the charge: for the first time, social media topped TV as the main source of news for respondents aged 18-24 throughout the world.

And:

So far, social media giant Facebook (FB) is leading the race to become the front page for millennial readers, an audience prized by advertisers.

"Young people are getting news in greater proportion on Facebook than older people," said Amy Mitchell, director of journalism research for the Pew Research Center. "Most of the news they get from Facebook is incidental. They don't go there looking for news. They go there for some other reason: to chat, to check a status, to share something, to post a photo.

Which means that they are not trying to get news at all and what news they do learn is by accident. Which is closely related to --

4. They don't know anything. Notre Dame Prof. Patrick Daneen writes,

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture. ...

At best, they possess accidental knowledge, but otherwise are masters of systematic ignorance. It is not their “fault” for pervasive ignorance of western and American history, civilization, politics, art and literature. They have learned exactly what we have asked of them – to be like mayflies, alive by happenstance in a fleeting present.

Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.

Providence College Prof. Anthony Esolen describes what he and his peers are up against in “Exercises in Unreality: The Decline of Teaching Western Civilization.”

I now regularly meet students who have never heard the names of most English authors who lived before 1900. That includes Milton, Chaucer, Pope, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, and Yeats. Poetry has been largely abandoned. Their knowledge of English grammar is spotty at best and often nonexistent. That is because grammar, as its own subject worthy of systematic study, has been abandoned. 

4. They are totally mixed up about what they believe in.

Millennials support more gun control but oppose an assault-weapons ban. They’re blazingly optimistic, but they’re also terrified about how they’re going to pay the bills. They love President Obama despite opposing his two main legislative achievements. They’re the narcissist humanitarians. They tell marketers they care about sustainability and cruelty to animals, and yet their meat consumption is on a par with previous generations. They love socialism, so long as it doesn’t mean government taking over the economy or anything weird like that. They’re going to change the world, but they’re in no hurry to move out of the room over Mom’s garage.

You could say the millennials are nuanced, multifaceted and open to many modes of thought. Or you could get real and say that intellectually speaking, they’re a freaking mess.

5. Their emotions and feelings dictate what they believe and what choices they make.

In two national surveys conducted by Barna Research, one among adults and one among teenagers, people were asked if they believe that there are moral absolutes that are unchanging or that moral truth is relative to the circumstances. By a 3-to-1 margin (64% vs. 22%) adults said truth is always relative to the person and their situation. The perspective was even more lopsided among teenagers, 83% of whom said moral truth depends on the circumstances, and only 6% of whom said moral truth is absolute. ...

The surveys also asked people to indicate the basis on which they make their moral and ethical decisions. ... By far the most common basis for moral decision-making was doing whatever feels right or comfortable in a situation. Nearly four out of ten teens (38%) and three out of ten adults (31%) described that as their primary consideration.

And, "If anything can be said about millennials, it’s that we believe hard and with a fiery passion."

Why exactly passion should be equated with being right is not explained. Passion and intensity of belief is not a test of truth (but then, as above, the great majority of Americans don't believe there is truth in the first place). Therapist Stuart Schneiderman says,

The fact that you believe very strongly in something means that you believe in it very strongly. Nothing more. It also means that you have dispensed with liberality and the marketplace of ideas. It means that you have dispensed with pragmatic and rational thought. It also means that you are most likely wrong.

But when you don't know nuthin', how exactly do you engage in "pragmatic and rational thought"?

Update: There is, however, some good news after all: "The Myth of the Lazy Teen"

There’s been plenty of debate about teens and their social justice “slacktivism,” but how much truth is there to the claim that young people are only taking action with 140 characters or less? A new study from Barna shows that teens are actively engaged in service and volunteer projects and youth ministry is a primary channel through which they serve. 

Although technically today's teens are not Millennials but their successors.

Update: Now it is claimed that Millennials will bring the oil industry to its knees!

Social media drives you crazy

Social Media Is Driving Americans Insane.

It means literally, not figuratively. Yet another effect of digital heroin.

Getting your child a screen device for Christmas?

You still have time to take it back. Glowing screens can make violent children, and the younger you start them on such devices, the worse and more permanent the effects.

According to Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, author of the book Glow Kids,  young children exposed to too much screen time are at risk of developing an addiction “harder to kick than drugs.”

The results for Barbara’s son were horrific: Her sweet boy, who had a “big spirit” and loved animals, now only wanted to play inside on a device.

“He would refuse to do anything unless I would let him play his game,” she said. Barbara, who had discarded her TV 25 years ago, made the mistake of using the game as a bargaining tool.

Her son became increasingly explosive if she didn’t acquiesce. And then he got physical. It started with a push here, then a punch there. Frightened, she tried to take the device away. And that’s when it happened: “He beat the s–t out of me,” she told me.

When she tried to take his computer away, he attacked her “with a dazed look on his face — his eyes were not his.” She called the police. Shocked, they asked if the 9-year-old was on drugs.

The effects of these devices, especially interactive gaming, on the brain are "more powerful than morphine," and so-called "edu-games," those used in many classrooms, evoke the same syndrome.

There's a reason these devices have been nicknamed digital heroin.

A few good reads

Without (much) commentary of mine:

Los Angeles Times: "Why is liberal California the poverty capital of America?" Which makes me wonder whether Fox Butterfield is writing for the LAT now.

How Conservatives Are Being Destroyed by Facebook, Twitter and Google Without Even Realizing It

Is everything you think you know about depression wrong? By Johann Hari.

And that essay's counterpoint: Is everything Johann Hari knows about depression wrong?

On FB: How the economy screws Millennials, from everyone's favorite Bernie. Let me just say that the facts about Millennials' finances ring true. But he does not address the causes, perhaps because his solution is more of those same causes. The problem is that Millennials won't pick up on that.

Police: NorCal man kills mother over video game anger. This is tragic but also alarming in a unique way. First, it illustrates the genuine danger of online addiction, what more and more behavioral psychologists call "digital heroin." Second, this is a 28-year-old man still living in his parents' home. Was he employed at all? Seems doubtful.

Top 5 Dividend ETFs For 2018

Incredible ukelele skills. I have to say I agree.