'Islam for Dummies': IS recruits have poor grasp of faith →

Nothing seems to be a good predictor of whether or not someone turns to extreme political violence, though there are a few interesting themes amongst those who do...

The jihadi employment form asked the recruits, on a scale of 1 to 3, to rate their knowledge of Islam. And the Islamic State applicants, herded into a hangar somewhere at the Syria-Turkey border, turned out to be overwhelmingly ignorant.
The extremist group could hardly have hoped for better.
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The findings address one of the most troubling questions about IS recruitment in the United States and Europe: Are disaffected people who understand Shariah more prone to radicalization? Or are those with little knowledge of Islam more susceptible to the group's radical ideas that promote violence?
The documents suggest the latter. The group preys on this religious ignorance, allowing extremists to impose a brand of Islam constructed to suit its goal of maximum territorial expansion and carnage as soon as recruits come under its sway.

The Scary Debate Over Secular Stagnation →

The immediate macroeconomic problem is how to cure the hangover from the housing bubble in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century – the still-incomplete recovery in the United States and the non-recovery in Europe. But even a straightforward success that restored the growth rate experienced in the 1990s would not restore the world as we thought we knew it.
Do we also suffer from Bernanke's global savings glut, produced by ill-coordinated national policies toward recovery? His prescription is reform that gives governments better incentives to pull together in harness. Or is it the hangover from Rogoff's supercycle of imprudent debt accumulation that can only be remedied by painful deleveraging while building an effective macroprudential regulatory framework to prevent a repeat performance? Or, as Krugman counsels, is the deeper problem our reluctance to use the full panoply of monetary policy and fiscal tools that Keynes and his disciples developed? Or, à la Summers, are our problems more fundamental, requiring a paradigm shift in the means and ends of economic policy?
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Finally, however, there are signs that economists (the smart ones, anyway) are learning that past shocks doesn't tell us much about future ones. They are instead painting possible "if these trends continue" scenarios of major transformations.

Thus, Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics speculates about a scenario in which wealth inequality brings about the end of the social democratic era that began at the start of the 20th century. Robert Gordon of Northwestern looks toward the likely end of the buoyant GDP growth brought on by the second industrial revolution in the late 19th century and Eric Brynjolfsson of MIT projects a future in which our principal economic problem is not scarcity, but finding useful and meaningful work to do.

Secure the Vote Today →

There may be a future for electronic voting, but right now there's too much uncertainty:

As Dan Wallach (a Computer Science professor at Rice and a world-recognized expert on voting systems) eloquently put it, election security is a national security issue. The computer security field has intensely studied the problem of conducting elections for more than a decade. From the very beginning of this effort, the computer experts have almost universally agreed: we can’t secure purely electronic voting systems. It may be surprising to outsiders, but computer scientists believe in paper ballots, either directly marked by the voter or created by a machine and placed in the ballot box.
Voting systems need to convince rational losers that they lost fairly. In order to do that, it is critical to both limit fraud and have the result be easily explained. It is impossible to prevent all fraud but we must ensure that the cost of fraud scales with the size: it should take 100 times more effort to change 100 votes compared with the effort associated with changing one vote. Any voting system in which fraud is constant—that is, in which changing 100 votes takes the same effort as changing one—must be viewed as critically flawed.

How eggs became a victory for the animal welfare movement →

...In recent years, there has been a veritable revolution in public attention to eggs and the chickens that produce them. In the past two years, nearly 200 U.S. companies – including every major grocery and fast-food chain – that together buy half of the 7 billion eggs laid monthly have pledged to use only cage-free eggs by 2025.
Grudgingly, the industry group that represents 95 percent of domestic egg producers says a cage-free future is a fait accompli.
The fast shift toward uncaged hens is a sign of Americans’ increasing concern about animals, even ones known more for clucking than cuteness. But it also amounts to one of the animal advocacy movement’s biggest victories in decades – one brought about by ballot measures, campaigns against companies, foodie culture and, above all, the power of the Internet.

‘They Will Kill Us’: Afghan Translators Plead for Delayed U.S. Visas →

Congress has dragged its feet on this for years, but now it may be a one-sided partisan problem...

Republican infighting, infused with nativist tones, has left in question whether a special visa program for translators and interpreters who assisted the military during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will be renewed, a potentially devastating blow to approximately 12,000 Afghans whose immigration applications are in limbo.
“We’ve really been trying to reinforce the fact to Afghans that we are committed to you, and this gives the enemy some propaganda to say, ‘Hey, these people really aren’t committed to you,’ ” said Brig. Gen. Charles H. Cleveland, spokesman for the American command in Afghanistan.
“It’s our credibility that is on the line,” he added.
Senator John McCain of Arizona, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a longtime champion of the visa program, was blunt. “People are going to die,” Mr. McCain said on the Senate floor, challenging a fellow Republican who was blocking more visas. “Don’t you understand the gravity of that?”

It's time to acknowledge the genocide of California's Indians →

I had no idea about this before reading this article. I'm always glad to learn history, even if the knowledge imposes moral burden.

Between 1846 and 1870, California’s Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000. Diseases, dislocation and starvation caused many of these deaths, but the near-annihilation of the California Indians was not the unavoidable result of two civilizations coming into contact for the first time. It was genocide, sanctioned and facilitated by California officials.
Neither the U.S. government nor the state of California has acknowledged that the California Indian catastrophe fits the two-part legal definition of genocide set forth by the United Nations Genocide Convention in 1948...
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The issue of genocide in California poses explosive political, economic and educational questions for the state, California’s tribes and individual California Indians. It is up to them — not academics like me — to determine the best way forward.
Will state officials tender public apologies, as Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush did in the 1980s for the relocation and internment of some 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II? Should state officials offer compensation, along the lines of the more than $1.6 billion Congress paid to 82,210 of these Japanese Americans and their heirs? Might California officials decrease or altogether eliminate their cut of California Indians’ annual gaming revenues ($7.3 billion in 2014) as a way of paying reparations? Should the state return control to California Indian communities of state lands where genocidal events took place? Should the state stop commemorating the supporters and perpetrators of this genocide, including Burnett, Kit Carson and John C. Frémont? Will the genocide against California Indians join the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust in public school curricula and public discourse?
These are crucial questions. What’s beyond doubt is that the state and the federal government should acknowledge the genocide that took place in California.

The Original Underclass: Poor white Americans’ current crisis shouldn’t have caught the rest of the country as off guard as it has →

Good essay review of a couple books which get past the stereotypes of the "white working class."

That flattering glow has faded away. Today, less privileged white Americans are considered to be in crisis, and the language of sociologists and pathologists predominates. Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 was published in 2012, and Robert D. Putnam’s Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis came out last year. From opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, they made the case that social breakdown among low-income whites was starting to mimic trends that had begun decades earlier among African Americans: Rates of out-of-wedlock births and male joblessness were rising sharply. Then came the stories about a surge in opiate addiction among white Americans, alongside shocking reports of rising mortality rates (including by suicide) among middle-aged whites. And then, of course, came the 2016 presidential campaign. The question was suddenly no longer why Democrats struggled to appeal to regular Americans. It was why so many regular Americans were drawn to a man like Donald Trump.
Equally jarring has been the shift in tone. A barely suppressed contempt has characterized much of the commentary about white woe, on both the left and the right...
The barely veiled implication, whichever version you consider, is that the people undergoing these travails deserve relatively little sympathy—that they maybe, kinda had this reckoning coming. Either they are layabouts drenched in self-pity or they are sad cases consumed with racial status anxiety and animus toward the nonwhites passing them on the ladder. Both interpretations are, in their own ways, strikingly ungenerous toward a huge number of fellow Americans.
They are also unsatisfying as explanations for what is happening out there. Williamson, for one, mischaracterizes the typical Trump voter. As exit polls show, the candidate’s base is not the truly bereft white underclass Williamson derides. Those Americans are, by and large, not voting at all, as I’m often reminded when reporting in places like Appalachia, where turnout rates are the lowest in the country. People voting for Trump are mostly a notch higher on the economic ladder—in a position to feel exactly the resentment that Williamson himself feels toward the shiftless needy. As for liberals’ diagnosis that a major public-health crisis is rooted in racial envy, it fails to square with, among other things, the fact that blacks and Hispanics have hardly been flourishing themselves. Yes, there’s an African American president, but by many metrics the Great Recession was even worse for minorities than for whites.
Two new books—one a provocative, deeply researched history and the other an affecting memoir—are well timed to help make better sense of the plight of struggling whites in the United States...

Baltimore mayor following DOJ report release: 'We have to heal our city' →

Baltimore police routinely violated the constitutional rights of residents by conducting unlawful stops and using excessive force, according to the findings of a long-anticipated Justice Department probe released Wednesday.
The practices overwhelmingly affected the city's black residents in low-income neighborhoods, according to the 163-page report. In often scathing language, the report identified systemic problems and cited detailed examples.
The investigators found that "supervisors have issued explicitly discriminatory orders, such as directing a shift to arrest 'all the black hoodies' in a neighborhood."
They also found that black residents were more likely to be stopped and searched as pedestrians and drivers even though police were more likely to find illegal guns, illicit drugs and other contraband on white residents.