Why Pro-Lifers Should Sweat the Details of Abortion Penalties →

How, in his ideal, would Paul handle women who have abortions? Would they face the death penalty, as in Williamson’s utopia, or something lesser but indefinite, as in Ponnuru’s? The majority of women who have abortions are already mothers. Would removing them from their other children serve a pro-life purpose, when so much of pro-life reasoning points toward the importance of the mother-child relationship? What of the children left behind: foster care, orphanages? And the mothers in prison, bastions of rape and abuse, what about their lives? Does it seem sane or restorative to put Purvi Patel in prison for some 20 years because she either had a miscarriage or an abortion? Anti-abortion, in other words, is not necessarily “pro-life.” This is why policy details matter.
Plenty of Americans identify as pro-life, as recent polling work by Vox has shown. But their position is complicated, and rightly dogged by questions of penalties and alternatives. Paul’s mistake is to presume that discussions of abortion penalties issue only from those who are pro-choice. There are plenty of reasons for a pro-life person, like myself, to refuse to support candidates or legislation that favor responses to abortion that are just as anti-life as the thing itself.

The Big Chill: How Big Money Is Buying Off Criticism of Big Money →

So the presidents of universities, congregations, and think tanks, other nonprofits are now kissing wealthy posteriors as never before. 
But that money often comes with strings.
When Comcast, for example, finances a nonprofit like the International Center for Law and Economics, the Center supports Comcast’s proposed merger with Time Warner. 
When the Charles Koch Foundation pledges $1.5 million to Florida State University’s economics department, it stipulatesthat a Koch-appointed advisory committee will select professors and undertake annual evaluations. 
The Koch brothers now fund 350 programs at over 250 colleges and universities across America. You can bet that funding doesn’t underwrite research on inequality and environmental justice.
David Koch’s $23 million of donations to public television earned him positions on the boards of two prominent public-broadcasting stations. It also guaranteed that a documentary critical of the Kochs didn’t air.
As Ruby Lerner, president and founding director of Creative Capital, a grant making institution for the arts, told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, “self-censorship” practiced by public television “… raises issues about what public television means. They are in the middle of so much funding pressure.”

Nathan Wood: The Ferguson Consensus is Wrong: What Counterinsurgency in Iraq & Afghanistan Teaches Us About Police Militarization and Community Policing (Lawfare Research Paper Series) →

For interested readers: the latest installment of the Lawfare Research Paper Series.  In it, Harvard Law student Nathan Wood examines the phenomena of community policing, on the one hand, and police militarization, on the other—having in mind an emerging view that the former represents the necessary antidote to the latter.

Certainly an interesting an idea. And we may be at an inflection point, where enough on both sides of the spectrum would be interested to try it, that we may see a few different systems emerge.

In Syria's war, Alawites pay heavy price for loyalty to Bashar al-Assad →

In the Assad regime's heartland, dead officers are sent home in ambulances, while the corpses of ordinary soldiers are returned in undecorated pick-up trucks. 
Then come the press gangs: military recruiters raid houses to find replacements by force for the dwindling ranks of Syria's military. 
Sharing their sect with President Bashar al-Assad, Alawites have long been the core constituency for the Syrian regime. As the civil war drags into its fifth year, the minority sect is seen by opposition rebels as remaining unwaveringly loyal. 
But from inside the community, the picture looks very different: as their sons die in droves on the front lines, and economic privileges – subsidies and patronage – cease, Alawites increasingly feel they are tools and not the beneficiaries of the regime. 
In a series of exclusive interviews, Alawites from the coastal province of Latakia, the sect's heartland, have told the Telegraph of how they are now trapped between jihadists who consider them apostates, and a remote and corrupt regime that told them the war would be easy to win.

The North Charleston Shooting Illustrates How Broken Taillight Policing Can Lead to Tragedy →

The stats are just nuts. Here's a taste (much more in the article):

"Black men aren’t so lucky. For them, the odds of being stopped this way start at 30 percent and don’t reach the 10 percent mark until they’re in their 50s. (For black women, it starts at roughly 20 percent and declines to under 10 percent by age 40.) Indeed, a black man at 70 is more likely to be stopped for a minor offense and investigated than a white man in his 30s, despite a much lower chance of criminal activity..."

And the point:

"So we need to ask: Is this worth it? Does what we gain in crime control from investigatory stops justify the costs to individuals, families, and civic cohesion? Is it worth the extent to which these stops erode trust in police, discourage political participation, and create feelings of racial subordination? If it is, then we should carry on. But if we want to control crime without harming our society, then we need to rethink our approach. And although we don’t know how often violence happens in these stops, it’s a fact of numbers that when you expose huge quantities of people to regular, invasive police contact, this kind of tragedy is inevitable."

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Is Guilty on All 30 Counts in Boston Marathon Bombing →

The jury is already “death qualified”: That is, only those who said they were open to applying the death penalty were allowed to serve, while those who flatly opposed it were excluded. Many of those who were chosen said they were open to the argument either way. The question now is the degree to which a jury that so thoroughly embraced the government’s case might be inclined to accept the argument that Mr. Tsarnaev’s crimes were so heinous that he deserved to die.

Economics and Elections →

It's a wonder democracies function as well as they do:

...Voters have fairly short memories, and they judge economic policy not by long-term results but by recent growth. Over five years, the coalition’s record looks terrible. But over the past couple of quarters it looks pretty good, and that’s what matters politically.
In making these assertions, I’m not engaged in casual speculation — I’m drawing on a large body of political science research, mainly focused on presidential contests in the United States but clearly applicable elsewhere. This research debunks almost all the horse-race narratives beloved by political pundits — never mind who wins the news cycle, or who appeals to the supposed concerns of independent voters. What mainly matters is income growth immediately before the election. And I mean immediately: We’re talking about something less than a year, maybe less than half a year.
This is, if you think about it, a distressing result, because it says that there is little or no political reward for good policy...