A Blackwater World Order →

After more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s most profound legacy could be that it set the world order back to the Middle Ages.

While this is a slight exaggeration, a recent examination by Sean McFate, a former Army paratrooper who later served in Africa working for Dyncorp International and is now an associate professor at the National Defense University, suggests that the Pentagon’s dependence on contractors to help wage its wars has unleashed a new era of warfare in which a multitude of freshly founded private military companies are meeting the demand of an exploding global market for conflict.

“Now that the United States has opened the Pandora’s Box of mercenarianism,” McFate writes in The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What they Mean for World Order, “private warriors of all stripes are coming out of the shadows to engage in for-profit warfare.”

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In this period, before the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 ended decades of war and established for the first time territorially defined sovereign states, political authority in Europe was split among competing power brokers that rendered the monarchs equal players, if not weaker ones. The Holy Roman Emperor, the papacy, bishoprics, city-states, dukedoms, principalities, chivalric orders–all fought for their piece with hired free companies, or mercenary enterprises of knights-turned profiteers.

As progenitors of today’s private military companies (PMCs), free companies were “organized as legal corporations, selling their services to the highest or most powerful bidder for profit,” McFate writes. Their ranks “swelled with men from every corner of Europe” and beyond, going where the fighting was until it wasn’t clear whether these private armies were simply meeting the demand or creating it.

How Elementary School Teachers’ Biases Can Discourage Girls From Math and Science →

We know that women are underrepresented in math and science jobs. What we don’t know is why it happens.

There are various theories, and many of them focus on childhood. Parents and toy-makers discourage girls from studying math and science. So do their teachers. Girls lack role models in those fields, and grow up believing they wouldn’t do well in them.

All these factors surely play some role. A new study points to the influence of teachers’ unconscious biases, but it also highlights how powerful a little encouragement can be. Early educational experiences have a quantifiable effect on the math and science courses the students choose later, and eventually the jobs they get and the wages they earn...

Why Won't Japanese Workers Go on Vacation? →

Balance in everything, especially life and work. U.S. workers have been working longer hours (for less pay) for decades, a worrisome trend, which ultimately may help noone, as the Japanese case makes clear:

A fair body of evidence supports the idea that this overwork does not help—and may even cost—Japanese companies' profits. Workers' tendency to stay at the office just to seem like they're working actually drives down productivity numbers, and plummeting job satisfaction and skyrocketing fatigue also decrease the amount and quality of work done in the hours at the office.

A Forecast of Global Democratization Trends Through 2025 →

A lengthy, and academic, take on the prospects for democracy around the world. A very good read for anyone interested in dipping their toes into what goes on in the ivory tower or behind the closed doors of the defense establishment in the U.S. Very smart people, doing very careful analyses.

Above all else, these last two points—about 1) the resilience of existing democracies to the stress of the past several years and 2) the persistence and even deepening of pressures on many surviving authoritarian regimes—are what make me bullish about the prospects for democracy in next five to 10 years. In light of current trends in China and Russia, I have a hard time imagining both of those regimes surviving to 2025. Democratization might not follow, and if it does, it won’t necessarily stick, at least not right away. Neither regime can really get a whole lot more authoritarian than it is now, however, so the possibilities for change on this dimension are nearly all on the upside...

The Foolish, Historically Illiterate, Incredible Response to Obama's Prayer Breakfast Speech →

Now, Christianity did not "cause" slavery, anymore than Christianity "caused" the civil-rights movement. The interest in power is almost always accompanied by the need to sanctify that power. That is what the Muslims terrorists in ISIS are seeking to do today, and that is what Christian enslavers and Christian terrorists did for the lion's share of American history.

That this relatively mild, and correct, point cannot be made without the comments being dubbed, "the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime,” by a former Virginia governor gives you some sense of the limited tolerance for any honest conversation around racism in our politics. And it gives you something much more. My colleague Jim Fallows recently wrote about the need to, at once, infantilize and deify our military. Perhaps related to that is the need to infantilize and deify our history. Pointing out that Americans have done, on their own soil, in the name of their own God, something similar to what ISIS is doing now does not make ISIS any less barbaric, or any more correct. That is unless you view the entire discussion as a kind of religious one-upmanship, in which the goal is to prove that Christianity is "the awesomest."

Obama seemed to be going for something more—faith leavened by “some doubt.” If you are truly appalled by the brutality of ISIS, then a wise and essential step is understanding the lure of brutality, and recalling how easily your own society can be, and how often it has been, pulled over the brink.

Anti-Science Views Are a Bipartisan Problem →

"In the nearly 48 hours since President Obama, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul made their comments on vaccination, the issue has become a partisan sideshow...

...To stand against science in many places is to invite stigma and disdain...

In the quest for partisan advantage, everyone scrambles to clothe his or her beliefs in the guise of objectivity. The reality, however, is that our beliefs are nothing of the sort. We construct them outside the scope of scientific observation, with ideas that come to us through custom, experience, and education, and for which science gives little confirmation or support. 'We see what we want to see,' writes John Dewey in Human Nature and Conduct, 'We dwell upon favoring circumstances till they become weighted with reinforcing considerations.' In that environment, honest deliberation, he says, 'needs every possible help it can get against the twisting, exaggerating, and slighting tendency of passion and habit.'

Instead of trying to attack each other for our fealty to science—or lack thereof—let’s acknowledge the deep subjectivity of our views but try to use the tools and methods of science to help us inform and strengthen them; to challenge them, to sharpen them, and to try to root them in our shared reality."

Among New York Subway’s Millions of Riders, a Study Finds Many Mystery Microbes →

Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College released a study on Thursday that mapped DNA found in New York’s subway system — a crowded, largely subterranean behemoth that carries 5.5 million riders on an average weekday, and is filled with hundreds of species of bacteria (mostly harmless), the occasional spot of bubonic plague, and a universe of enigmas. Almost half of the DNA found on the system’s surfaces did not match any known organism and just 0.2 percent matched the human genome.

Bubonic plague?!

Run Fast, Die Young? →

For decades, we've been told that the more exercise you get, the better off you'll be. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, recommends at least two and a half hours of moderate-intensity exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous activity, making it clear that "more time equals more health benefits."

But less may be more, according to a study just published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. In fact, those who engage in light exercise may actually live longer than those who run longest, hardest, and most often.

So says Peter Schnohr at the Copenhagen City Heart Study, a long-running survey of the habits and health of residents of the Danish capital city. Since the 1970s, the study has reported time and again on the health benefits of jogging and other sorts of exercise. In a recent analysis, however, Schnohr and his team found that athletes who ran more than four hours a week, more than three times a week, or at a fast pace "appeared to lose many of the longevity benefits noted with [a] less strenuous dose of jogging," Schnohr writes.