The Afghan Army lost more than 20,000 fighters and others last year largely because of desertions, discharges and deaths in combat, according to figures to be released Tuesday, casting further doubt on Afghanistan’s ability to maintain security without help from United States-led coalition forces.
The nearly 11 percent decline from January to November 2014, to roughly 169,000 uniformed and civilian members from 190,000, is now an issue of deep concern among some in the American military. For example, the former No. 2 American commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Joseph Anderson, called the rate of combat deaths unsustainable before he departed at the end of last year.
Concern over how soon Afghan forces will be ready to stand on their own is one reason that the Obama administration is weighing whether it should slow the withdrawal of American troops, the bulk of whom are supposed to be out by the end of 2016.
Ferguson’s True Criminals →
Per the Justice Department, the sheer disparate impact of Ferguson police actions is enough to prove racial bias. But actual prejudice also influenced police practices and behavior. The Justice Department records multiple instances in which officers used racial slurs—including “nigger”—against black residents, and it finds evidence of racial bias among city officials, including a series of emails sent by Ferguson officials using city accounts.
But while racial bias informed the actions of the Ferguson Police Department, the chief driver was city coffers. In 2013, for example, fines and forfeitures accounted for 20 percent of Ferguson’s $12.7 million operating budget. Or as the Justice Department writes, “City officials have consistently set maximizing revenue as the priority for Ferguson’s law enforcement activity.”
Officers weren’t protecting citizens as much as they were corralling potential offenders and sources of revenue, with a huge assist from the city municipal court...
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When I was in Ferguson, I talked to white residents who were baffled by the anger of their black neighbors. What was so bad about the city? they asked. Why are you so upset?
It’s not hard to grok. In Ferguson, if you are black, you live in the shadow of lawlessness and plunder, directed by city officials and enforced by the police. You work, and you pay taxes, and those taxes go to fund a system that stops you, arrests you, and steals from you.
Which is all to say that we shouldn’t ask why Ferguson rioted. We should ask why it didn’t happen sooner.
Cleveland’s Worst →
Here’s the problem: While most professions will tolerate poor performance, they won’t stand for damaging behavior. A cook who occasionally flubs his order might keep his job; a cook who contaminates food and poisons customers will almost certainly lose it. But modern American policing is different.
Officers hold great power and discretion, but that doesn’t seem to come with responsibility or accountability. In all but the most egregious cases, bad and destructive cops are virtually immune from the consequences of their actions, even when they lead to death or serious injury. What’s more, unlike the journalist shunned for fabulism or the lawyer disbarred for theft, the officer accused of brutality can expect the full support of his colleagues and superiors. Some of this is understandable: It’s often hard to know exactly what happened in a police-abuse case, and it makes sense to err on the side of the officer. But there are times when that choice is ludicrous—when an officer is clearly in the wrong, but the department stands with him anyway.
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More broadly, where are the actual good cops in all of this? Where are the men and women who have to deal with the fallout from the death of Rice? They exist, and of everyone in this drama, they should be the loudest voices for better training and accountability, if only because it helps them and their jobs. As always, they’re quiet. They may not like the Loehmanns and Garmbacks of the world, but right now they look awfully content to let the actions of such poorly suited officers speak for the whole.
The Democratization of Cyberattack →
When I was working with the Guardian on the Snowden documents, the one top-secret program the NSA desperately did not want us to expose was QUANTUM. This is the NSA's program for what is called packet injection--basically, a technology that allows the agency to hack into computers.
Turns out, though, that the NSA was not alone in its use of this technology. The Chinese government uses packet injection to attack computers. The cyberweapons manufacturer Hacking Team sells packet injection technology to any government willing to pay for it. Criminals use it. And there are hacker tools that give the capability to individuals as well.
All of these existed before I wrote about QUANTUM. By using its knowledge to attack others rather than to build up the internet's defenses, the NSA has worked to ensure that anyone can use packet injection to hack into computers...
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These are the stories you need to keep in mind when thinking about proposals to ensure that all communications systems can be eavesdropped on by government. Both the FBI's James Comey and UK Prime Minister David Cameron recently proposed limiting secure cryptography in favor of cryptography they can have access to.
But here's the problem: technological capabilities cannot distinguish based on morality, nationality, or legality; if the US government is able to use a backdoor in a communications system to spy on its enemies, the Chinese government can use the same backdoor to spy on its dissidents.
Even worse, modern computer technology is inherently democratizing. Today's NSA secrets become tomorrow's PhD theses and the next day's hacker tools. As long as we're all using the same computers, phones, social networking platforms, and computer networks, a vulnerability that allows us to spy also allows us to be spied upon.
John Oliver reports on the sorry state of US infrastructure →
Oliver says US dams are too old: “Like most Botox recipients and competitive cloggers, the age of the average dam is 52 years old, and probably has something deeply broken inside of it.” Bridges are falling apart: In 2014, the US Department of Transportation reported that 61,365 bridges in the US were structurally deficient, and roads nicked with potholes and cracks are not being repaved. Oliver reports that the US Highway Trust Fund is the single largest source of highway infrastructure funding, and it’s set to go bankrupt this summer unless Congress saves it.
This year, cash-strapped Russians will spend half their money on food alone →
A collapsing currency, shrinking economy, and rampant inflation make a bitter combination for ordinary Russians. What makes it even more unpalatable is what’s happening at the grocery store, where meat, fruit, vegetables, and other staples are increasingly scarce and expensive. Russia’s economic woes are literally hitting its people in the stomach.
Finding new food suppliers at home and in friendlier countries abroad to replace imports lost to western sanctions and counter-sanctions has been slow. (Russia banned a wide variety of food imports from the US, EU, and elsewhere in August, after the annexation of Crimea and ongoing violence in eastern Ukraine prompted western nations to slap sanctions on Russian companies and individuals.) The resulting shortages mean that food inflation will rise above 20% in the first half of this year, according to analysts at VTB Capital, a Russian investment bank...
The Plan to Map Illegal Fishing From Space →
Illicit fishing goes on every day at an industrial scale. But large commercial fishers are about to get a new set of overseers: conservationists—and soon the general public—armed with space-based reconnaissance of the global fleet.
Crews on big fishing boats deploy an impressive arsenal of technology—from advanced sonars to GPS navigation and mapping systems—as they chase down prey and trawl the seabed. These tools are so effective that roughly a third of the world’s fisheries are now overharvested, and more than three-quarters of the stocks that remain have hit their sustainable limits, according to the FAO. For some species, most of the catch is unreported, unregulated, or flat-out illegal.
What Is Money And How Is It Created? →
These should be two of the easiest questions to answer in economics; after all, money is the one thing that we all use in an economy—surely we know what it is, and where it comes from?
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...Only one person ever really ever did—and no, it wasn’t Ayn Rand. It was Augusto Graziani, an Italian Professor of Economics, who died early last year. He understood what money is because he posed and correctly answered a simple question: how does a monetary economy differ from one in which trade occurs by barter?
This ruled out gold being money, since gold is a commodity that anyone can produce for themselves with a bit of mining (and a lot of luck). So even though gold is really special and incredibly rare, it is in the end, a commodity: an economy using gold for trade is really a barter economy, not a monetary one.
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This gave Graziani three basic conditions that had to be met for something to be called “money”:
a) money has to be a token currency (otherwise it would give rise to barter and not to monetary exchanges);
b) money has to be accepted as a means of final settlement of the transaction (otherwise it would be credit and not money);
c) money must not grant privileges of seignorage to any agent making a payment.
Graziani saw only one way to satisfy those three conditions:
The only way to satisfy those three conditions is to have payments made by means of promises of a third agent, the typical third agent being nowadays a bank.
So money is fundamentally the promise of a bank to its customer, and a monetary payment is the transfer of that promise from one customer to another.