On this Memorial Day let's honor those who gin up half-assed reasons to create fallen soldiers for next Memorial Day. http://t.co/p1eSpMSZsB
— Daniel Drezner (@dandrezner) May 25, 2015
Memorial Day (USA) is perhaps a good day to revisit a 2012 post listing some anti-war books, movies, and songs http://t.co/eOO6u4ATkr
— Will Moore (@WilHMoo) May 25, 2015
In a five page document, the department says that UAVs may not be used to monitor any activities protected by the First Amendment, such as peaceful protests and demonstrations. In addition, law enforcement must "seek a warrant in circumstances in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy," consistent with the Constitution.
Even in cases where the use of UAVs is allowed, it appears the Justice Department is keeping a close eye on the use of drones in the US. The guidelines say that the devices "may only be used in connection with properly authorized investigations and activities." And each agency will be responsible for maintaining detailed logs of all UAV missions.
The guidelines also call for yearly summaries to be submitted to the deputy attorney general for review. It also urges law enforcement to use the "least intrusive means to accomplish an operational need," suggesting that UAVs aren't right for all missions. In addition, among other rules, all pilots will have to be certified and information and documentation generated from UAV missions will have to adhere to existing privacy laws.
For nearly 350 years, anti-Catholic bias was a reliable and powerful presence in the political and religious culture of the United States. Today, when the Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, for example, insists that Muslim immigrants ‘want to use our freedoms to undermine… freedom’, it can be easy to forget that for most of US history, Catholicism, not Islam, was the bogeyman against which Americans defined themselves as a free, noble and (some have said) ‘chosen’ people.
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For most of US history, voters, ministers and lawmakers believed that there was something fundamentally un-American about Roman Catholics. They weren’t ‘free’ – and they couldn’t be free so long as they worshipped within the Church of Rome. Catholics were an element in US culture that had to be kept as far away as possible from the centres of political, military, economic and educational power. Letting such an intrinsically enslaved element ‘have its say’, so to speak, would constitute an existential challenge to the US, since at its core, the country was just an idea – the idea of freedom.
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The story of anti-Catholicism’s dramatic disappearance from the cultural landscape in the US (Dan Brown’s novels notwithstanding) is a complicated one. It would be a mistake, however, to see the story as proof that the destiny of the US is to become a place of complete religious tolerance. Americans no longer consider Catholicism to be a threat because the very idea of ‘freedom’ in the US has changed into something more compatible with the corporate approach to freedom that the Catholic Church has always insisted upon. The Catholic understanding of religious liberty and church-state relations has also changed, becoming more compatible with the US vision and the reality of religious pluralism.
But what hasn’t changed – at least not fundamentally – is a need in the US to oppose religious groups that don’t define freedom in modern liberalism’s terms. Indeed, this need has only expanded in recent years into parts of western Europe where concepts of freedom also contribute to national identity, but immigration has forced native-born people to confront the reality that some don’t understand freedom to be a matter of liberté and egalité.
When Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature came out in 2011, it made a huge splash. Its argument — that we're living through the most peaceful era in human history — was surprising to a lot of people, given the conflicts currently being fought all over the globe, but Pinker's data seemed extremely persuasive. According to his analysis, the rate of deaths from war has reached an astonishing historical low. His theory is very appealing. Who wouldn't want to believe that we are living in a safer world, and that the future will likely be even safer?
A key part of Pinker's work is the notion of the "long peace" — an idea that Pinker actually borrows from a historian, John Lewis Gaddis. It refers to the fact that in the past 70 years, wars between great powers have basically gone away. Because situations like the Cold War never escalated to direct conflict, we've managed to avoid the type of warfare that devastated societies in the early 20th century and, indeed, much of human history.
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Enter NYU professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is best known as the author of The Black Swan, a book on rare events. He thinks all of this is starry-eyed nonsense. In his opinion, proponents of the "war is declining" argument are over-interpreting evidence of a good trend in the same way people used to argue that the stock market could go up forever without crashes. He wrote a stinging critique of Pinker's work, which Pinker replied to, and then Taleb replied to again.
Taleb's new paper, co-authored with Delft University's Pasquale Cirillo, is the latest volley in that ongoing intellectual war. It's probably the most statistically sophisticated argument to date that war isn't declining — and that we're still every bit at risk of a major conflict as we always were...
Islamic State controls more than half of Syria’s territory after its westwards advance into the central city of Palmyra, a group monitoring the war said on Thursday.
The militant group, which already controlled wide tracts of land in Syria’s north and east, captured the ancient city late on Wednesday, the first time it has seized a large population center directly from Syrian pro-government forces.
Kansas Republicans have put forward a new policy initiative that's almost shocking in its clear intent to harm the interests of poor people. The provision, which takes effect July 1, will ban welfare recipients from taking out more than $25 in benefits a dayfrom an ATM.
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Taking out that money isn't free. Many banks charge substantial fees for withdrawals from Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) accounts to which TANF money is distributed. I called Intrust Bank in Wichita, which says it charges $2 per EBT transaction. Emprise Bank says it charges $1.50. In addition to that, Kansas itself charges $1 per ATM withdrawal. So taking the cheaper option, withdrawing $420 from Emprise under the new rules would mean $52.50 in fees. Effectively you'd be limited to taking out $380 a month if you didn't want to go over your monthly allowance, fees inclusive.
Assuming you could only take out $420 at a time before, that's a nearly 10 percent benefit cut. If you went with Intrust, it'd be a nearly 14 percent cut. Say what you will about benefit cuts, but usually the money all goes to the state. Here, most of it goes to banks. It's like if Congress slashed food stamps and decided to hand the savings over to Citigroup.
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Because of the one-a-day rule, you can't stack up these withdrawals. You just have to remember to go out, every day, and pull the money. And as Ehrenfreund notes, many banks don't have locations near poor areas where many TANF recipients live. That could mean daily trips to banks or ATMs a significant drive away, trips that have to be taken while juggling kids.
The president of the Boy Scouts of America, Robert Gates, said Thursday that the organization’s longstanding ban on participation by openly gay adults is no longer sustainable and called for change in order to prevent “the end of us as a national movement.”
In a speech in Atlanta to the Scouts’ national annual meeting, Gates referred to recent moves by Scout councils in New York City and elsewhere to defy the ban.
“The status quo in our movement’s membership standards cannot be sustained,” he said.
Gates said no change in the policy would be made at the national meeting. But he raised the possibility of revising the policy at some point soon so that local Scout organizations could decide on their own whether to allow gays as adult volunteers and paid staff.
Since 2008, the Svalbard seed vault and its guardians have been entrusted by the world’s governments with the safekeeping of the most prized varieties of crops on which human civilisation was raised. That morning, it contained the seeds of nearly 4,000 plant species – more than 720,000 individual plastic-sheathed samples. The site was built to be disaster-proof: 130 metres up the mountain in case of sea-level rise, earthquake resistant, and with a natural insulation of permafrost to ensure the contents were kept frozen for decades to come.
About 60% of Svalbard is glacial. There exist no signs that it was settled by humans before whalers and hunters built small communities along the coast, and coal was found. Nothing grows there apart from wildflowers and grass. But in the early 1980s, Nordic countries began using an abandoned mine shaft, down the hill from the vault, as a safe house for seeds. At a time when industrial-scale farming was perceived as a threat to crop diversity, it was the first experiment in using the permafrost as cold storage for seeds.
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Seed banks are vulnerable to near-misses and mishaps. That was the whole point of locating a disaster-proof back-up vault at Svalbard. But what if there was a bigger glitch – one that could not be fixed by borrowing a part from the local shop? There is now a growing body of opinion that the world’s faith, in Svalbard and the Crop Trust’s broader mission to create seed banks, is misplaced. Those who have worked with farmers in the field, especially in developing countries, which contain by far the greatest variety of plants, say that diversity cannot be boxed up and saved in a single container – no matter how secure it may be. Crops are always changing, pests and diseases are always adapting, and global warming will bring additional challenges that remain as yet unforeseen. In a perfect world, the solution would be as diverse and dynamic as plant life itself.