Judicial defiance in Alabama: Same-sex marriages begin, but most counties refuse →

On the day that same-sex unions became legal in Alabama, local officials in dozens of counties on Monday defied a federal judge’s decision and refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, casting the state into judicial chaos.
Gay couples were able to get licenses in about a dozen places, including Birmingham, Huntsville and a few other counties where probate judges complied with the judge’s decision. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled early Monday that it would deny Alabama’s request to put the marriages on hold.

Which is itself curious. From the afore-linked article:

The court is months away from hearing arguments in a landmark case about whether states are free to ban such unions. But Thomas said a majority of the justices may have already made up their minds, as reflected by the court’s “indecorous” decision Monday morning allowing same-sex marriages to proceed in Alabama.

Will the United States End Up Like Greece? The Risks of the Trans-Pacific Partnership →

While this view has many adherents among respectable people in Washington, reality refuses to cooperate. Instead of skyrocketing, the interest rate on U.S. government debt has plummeted. The interest rate on 10-year Treasury bonds is less than 2 percent, a sharp contrast from the days of budget surpluses in the late 1990s, when it hovered in the 5- to 6-percent range. In short, the deficit hawks have been shown to be completely wrong.
But there is actually another way in which the United States could be like Greece, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership is directly connected...

This deal is not only important for the countries it includes but intended to be a pact that other countries will later join. The Obama administration decided not to include any language on currency values in the TPP. This will make it more difficult for the United States to take measures to get countries to stop propping up the dollar.

The result could be the persistence long into the future of large U.S. trade deficits, with the resulting loss of demand and millions of jobs. This drag on growth may not give us the same sort of cataclysmic downturn that Greece has seen, but it is a much more real concern than the possibility that no one will buy U.S. government debt.

HSBC files show how Swiss bank helped clients dodge taxes and hide millions →

HSBC’s Swiss banking arm helped wealthy customers dodge taxes and conceal millions of dollars of assets, doling out bundles of untraceable cash and advising clients on how to circumvent domestic tax authorities, according to a huge cache of leaked secret bank account files.
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The HSBC files, which cover the period 2005-2007, amount to the biggest banking leak in history, shedding light on some 30,000 accounts holding almost $120bn (£78bn) of assets.
The revelations will amplify calls for crackdowns on offshore tax havens and stoke political arguments in the US, Britain and elsewhere in Europe where exchequers are seen to be fighting a losing battle against fleet-footed and wealthy individuals in the globalised world.

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.