Alabama Poses a Greater Risk to Syrian Refugees Than Those Refugees Pose to Alabama →

The argument about whether to let refugees in or not would benefit from knowing what our current process is. There's already an extensive, invasive, and extremely onerous process refugees have to go through:

It takes anywhere from 18–24 months for a Syrian refugee to be cleared to live in the United States. First he or she must be registered with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. This agency interviews refugees, conducts background checks, takes their biometric data, and establishes whether they belong to one of roughly 45 “categories of concern” given their past lives and work history in Syria. Typically, the applicants are women and children. If anything looks amiss, they are pulled from consideration. Then the U.S. government begins its own vetting. The applicants are interviewed again, and their names and particulars are run through terrorism databases. They receive additional screening when they arrive in the United States and then again after their first year in the country.
This process has led to slightly more than 1,800 Syrians being admitted to the United States since 2011. None of them has landed in Alabama, but if that ever did happen, no one will ever have gone through a more painstaking and extensive vetting process where the reward was to live in Alabama.

 

What was behind ISIS’s attack on Paris, according to experts →

On Saturday, a theory began circulating about why the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, attacked Paris: Since the Islamic State's drive to gain and hold territory in Syria has suffered setbacks lately, perhaps the group was lashing out to kill people far beyond its borders to compensate.
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But the story is a bit more complicated, experts say...

Reign of the quiet king →

It's easy to forget how different the rest of the world can be, as well as how much of the present is an odd mix of tradition and contemporary ideology.

Nonetheless, under Sihamoni’s rule, the monarchy as a political institution has effectively ceased to exist.
After last year’s disputed elections, in what would turn out to be one of his biggest political tests, Sihamoni opened parliament despite the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party – which was boycotting the swearing-in – begging him not to do so.
But the process of de-politicising the monarchy began years earlier.
The power-sharing agreement between the royalist Funcipec party, led by Sihanouk’s second-born son, Prince Norodom Rannariddh, and the Cambodian People’s Party after the 1993 election set the stage for years of political wrangling.
By 2004, Prime Minister Hun Sen had made several threats to abolish the monarchy entirely.
“Anointing Sihamoni made the best of a bad situation,” said journalist Sebastian Strangio, author of the newly released Hun Sen’s Cambodia.
“It secured the monarchy’s survival into an uncertain future, but it also involved giving the CPP what it had always wanted – a figurehead king who would stay within the limits of the constitution."

Obamacare Not as Egalitarian as It Appears →

We can safely say that the policy is costing less than anticipated, perhaps 20 percent less, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate, and that it has reduced the number of Americans without insurance. But the numbers also suggest that by some measures, the Affordable Care Act has had only a limited impact on economic inequality. In fact, I view the policy as an object lesson in the complexity of reducing the harmful consequences of inequality in the United States.
The act has many parts, but let’s focus on the mandate, a core feature that requires those without insurance to buy it. It was intended to help millions of Americans who did not have health care coverage. Under the program, government subsidies are available for the needy, and there is clear evidence that the poorest people, who receive the largest subsidies, are better off under the health reform law.
In that sense, the program has been a success. But whether other individuals subject to the insurance mandate — those who qualify for lower subsidies or for none at all — are also better off is much harder to say, some recent research has found.

The rise and fall of the BRICS →

Just as the BRICS was overhyped for the past 15 years or so, I’d be wary of dismissing the grouping entirely. The New Development Bank is a tangible accomplishment. And the BRICS does share a genuine resentment about under-representation in traditional global governance structures. That resentment can animate the group’s purpose for a while.
But if the BRICS has lost Goldman Sachs and the D.C. think-tank community, then I think it’s safe to say that its Golden Age has ended.

Police Chiefs, Looking to Diversify Forces, Face Structural Hurdles →

Though the history of discrimination and segregation looms large over American policing, many police chiefs are eager to hire minorities yet face structural hurdles that make it hard to diversify their departments. Those issues vary by state and city, making any single solution particularly elusive.
In many cities, well-intentioned policies that were not meant to discriminate have become obstacles to hiring a diverse police force. In Inkster, Chief Riley found, a significant problem was something that seemed mundane: how training is paid for.
Other cities face rigid hiring processes that were intended to prevent elected leaders from handing out police jobs as patronage, but that now make it harder to shape the force to mirror the population.

FBI admits flaws in hair analysis over decades →

And not anything minor, either:

The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.
Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country’s largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.
The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the groups said under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions.
The FBI errors alone do not mean there was not other evidence of a convict’s guilt. Defendants and federal and state prosecutors in 46 states and the District are being notified to determine whether there are grounds for appeals. Four defendants were previously exonerated.

A clash between administrators and students at Yale went viral. Why that is unfortunate for all concerned. →

Viewed from the outside world, both the video and the op-ed can be distilled into that last sentence. It feeds into a narrative of free speech under assault on college campuses. And to put it gently, it’s a sentiment that did not instill much sympathy among most observers...
That said, I also find the outsize reaction to this campus contretemps — including my own tweet — to be troubling as well.
The problem is local knowledge. As Friedrich von Hayek observed 70 years ago, there is an awful lot of knowledge that is local in character, that cannot be culled from abstract principles or detached observers. What looks like free speech infringement at first glance can turn out to be something different the more one drills down. For one thing, the events of late last week were part of a larger chain of events at Yale beyond the e-mails that suggest a few obvious sources of frustration for minority students there in particular.
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An additional problem that affects the current generation of college students even more is that it is so easy for these contretemps to balloon so quickly into national debates. That’s extremely unfortunate. One of the purposes of college is to articulate stupid arguments in stupid ways and then learn, through interactions with fellow students and professors, exactly how stupid they are. Anyone who thinks that the current generation of college students is uniquely stupid is either an amnesiac or willfully ignorant. As a professor with 20 years of experience, I can assure you that college students have been saying stupid things since the invention of college students.