Waste not, harm not →

BLUNDERS in economic policymaking abound, but among the worst are energy subsidies. They stoke waste, squeeze other spending, enrich middlemen and help the comfortably-off more than the poor, who use little energy.
Include the cost of pollution and the bill is even higher. A new IMF working paper puts it at a stonking $5.3 trillion, or 6% of global GDP—more than all government spending on health care. The+ biggest subsidies are in the poorest countries (where they can reach 18% of GDP) and the lion’s share goes to coal, the dirtiest fuel, which no country taxes properly. By contrast, renewable energy subsidies (mostly in the rich world and not covered in the IMF paper) amount to a mere $120 billion, and would vanish if fossil fuels were taxed fully. The biggest subsidiser of fossil fuels is China at $2.3 trillion, followed by America ($700 billion), Russia ($335 billion), India ($277 billion) and Japan ($157 billion).

Justice Department releases guidelines on domestic drone use →

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 centuries, Americans saw the Catholic Church as a dangerous foreign enemy. Not any more. What changed? →

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.

This fascinating academic debate has huge implications for the future of world peace →

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 Half of Syrian Territory: Monitor →

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's shocking new law will take poor people’s money and give it to big banks →

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.