The clock is ticking on a global shift to the far-right →

Racially-charged nationalist parties have grown across Europe and the Americas the past several years, to the point of gaining seats in legislatures and running for the highest offices. It's possible the current chaos is part of a short-term trend following the global financial meltdown from 2007/8:

One, political polarization and fractionalization rise. The middle hollows out, and parties on the far right benefit more than those on the far left. In fact, on average, the far right sees an increase in vote share of about 30 percent in the five years following a financial crisis.  
Two, governing becomes much harder, precisely because of this splintering. There are more political crises, and there’s more leadership turnover.
And three, social unrest — anti-government demonstrations, strikes, riots — increases. 
These patterns generally do not occur in the wake of normal recessions or major macroeconomic shocks that are not financial in nature. 
“People see financial crises as man-made disasters,” explains Moritz Schularick, an economics professor at the University of Bonn and study co-author. This means that afterward, there is a popular impulse to punish those thought to be responsible. 
The scapegoats are often minorities and elites...
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The one silver lining buried in this depressing study? Right-wing populism may already have peaked. The researchers find that the political effects they document diminish over time, generally reverting back to pre-crisis conditions about 10 years after a crisis.

World War Three, By Mistake →

Good commentary on the current problems with our nuclear weapons regime, from an expert, with some interesting (terrifying) history.

My book “Command and Control” explores how the systems devised to govern the use of nuclear weapons, like all complex technological systems, are inherently flawed. They are designed, built, installed, maintained, and operated by human beings. But the failure of a nuclear command-and-control system can have consequences far more serious than the crash of an online dating site from too much traffic or flight delays caused by a software glitch. Millions of people, perhaps hundreds of millions, could be annihilated inadvertently. “Command and Control” focusses on near-catastrophic errors and accidents in the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union that ended in 1991. The danger never went away. Today, the odds of a nuclear war being started by mistake are low—and yet the risk is growing, as the United States and Russia drift toward a new cold war. The other day, Senator John McCain called Vladimir Putin, the President of the Russian Federation, “a thug, a bully, and a murderer,” adding that anyone who “describes him as anything else is lying.” Other members of Congress have attacked Putin for trying to influence the Presidential election.  On Thursday, Putin warned that Russia would “strengthen the military potential of strategic nuclear forces,” and President-elect Donald Trump has responded with a vow to expand America’s nuclear arsenal.  “Let it be an arms race,” Trump told one of the co-hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.”
The harsh rhetoric on both sides increases the danger of miscalculations and mistakes, as do other factors. Close encounters between the military aircraft of the United States and Russia have become routine, creating the potential for an unintended conflict. Many of the nuclear-weapon systems on both sides are aging and obsolete. The personnel who operate those systems often suffer from poor morale and poor training. None of their senior officers has firsthand experience making decisions during an actual nuclear crisis. And today’s command-and-control systems must contend with threats that barely existed during the Cold War: malware, spyware, worms, bugs, viruses, corrupted firmware, logic bombs, Trojan horses, and all the other modern tools of cyber warfare. The greatest danger is posed not by any technological innovation but by a dilemma that has haunted nuclear strategy since the first detonation of an atomic bomb: How do you prevent a nuclear attack while preserving the ability to launch one?

Eight charts that show 2016 wasn't as bad as you think →

The world may be trending toward authoritarianism; hopefully that's temporary, as people push back against it. In the meantime, while the media played up the chaos, violent deaths (from war and crime) have fallen, global carbon emissions have flatlined, poverty's falling, etc.

2,000 selected for compulsory basic income trial - names to be revealed in late December →

The kind of well-thought-out, small-scale experiment we ought to be doing more of, to see how people actually behave.

Once the trial begins, recipients of the basic income will have to give up their basic unemployment allowance or labour market subsidy, but the basic income will not affect other benefits.
Officials are hoping that participants in the trial will be motivated to find temporary or part-time work. However they will also be observing other aspects of their behaviour in the job market.
...
The sample was drawn from a pool about 175,000 persons who make up the target population: in other words, people between the ages of 25 and 58 who are currently being paid a labour market subsidy or basic unemployment allowance in November 2016. The sample does not include unemployed who are still receiving the earnings-related unemployment allowance.
From this group, 2,000 names were chosen to receive 560 euros per month for two years, starting on January 1, 2017.

The Making of an American Terrorist →

How we describe these events, and how we characterize those who commit them matters. There seems to be a double-standard.

After the shootings, much of the media’s early reporting on Dear emphasized that he had no formal connection to anti-abortion groups or other right-wing activists. The New York Times called him a “gentle loner who occasionally unleashed violent acts towards neighbors and women he knew.” Buzzfeed described him as a “loner” who “never smiled.” Because he was white and American and acted alone, Dear did not fit the accepted definition of a terrorist: He was depicted simply as a crazy person, someone whose actions could not be anticipated or prevented. His violence, in short, was spurred by mental illness, not political ideology.
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When Muslim Americans commit acts of terrorism, we hold ISIS and Hezbollah and “radical Islam” accountable for their actions, even if they are mentally unstable, and even if there is no direct connection between them and the groups that inspired them. We call these terrorists “self-radicalized.” It is how we see Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013; and Omar Mateen, who went on a murderous rampage at the Pulse Night Club in Orlando last June; and Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, who killed 86 people and injured 434 at a celebration in Nice on Bastille Day. They did not go to a terrorist training camp, or join an organized cell, or attend an anti-Western madrassa. They learned to hate from a network of web sites and magazines and videotapes. Their madrassa was the media.
“That’s the way many terrorists today are radicalized now,” says Paul Gill, a professor of security and crime science at University College London. “They are not formally recruited or trained. Today’s terrorists go online and find the ideology that fits their personal grievance and passively consume the propaganda.”
Dear became radicalized in precisely the same way. But because the media he listened to advocated war in the name of a Christian god, and argued for an ideology considered “conservative,” he is portrayed as no one’s responsibility. In fact, as I learned from hours of speaking with Dear, the narratives he learned from Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones and Bill O’Reilly and countless far-right web sites meshed perfectly with his paranoid delusions, misogynist beliefs, and violent fantasies. The right-wing media didn’t just tell him what he wanted to hear. They brought authority and detail to a world he was convinced was tormenting him. They were his shelter and his inspiration, his only real community.

Stein's Recount Stunt Proves U.S. Has No Way To Verify National Elections

The details coming out of the Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania recounts are stunning. If they're what's normal, the United States has made election verification impossible (if not actually illegal!). This isn't good. Democratic elections only work when we, the people, can trust them. One way of trusting the system is knowing that we can always just count people's paper ballots again, by hand, with multiple people (preferably from each of the campaigns involved) watching. Without that, various forms of fraud are much more possible (and therefore likely).

There needs to be a process and fund for recounts, at the state and/or federal level. What the Stein-campaign's-funded recount proves is that states are not prepared for a recount, either logistically or legally. For all we know, as unlikely as it may be, there could have been systematic tampering in a few key locations, which, if investigated, could mean one or more of those states went to Clinton instead of Trump. Since we can't (reasonably) prove otherwise, trust in the democratic process drops, and all elections are more suspect going forward.

The Electoral College Should Do What It Wants →

Even in the unlikely event that anti-Trump activists were able to round up the 37 electors required to deny Trump a winning 270 vote threshold, that would merely throw the election to the House of Representatives, which will be controlled by Republicans, who would likely install Trump anyhow. They would become more directly accountable for their decision to enable Trump in the first place, and Trump’s administration would rightly be further tainted. But he would become president.
Should a House controlled by the same party as the person who won 270-plus electoral votes worth of states be unable to install that person into the presidency, it would be a history-making event, but it would also be evidence on its face that the “winner” was too great a threat to our system of government to be allowed to take office. His own party would have rejected him. This is impossible to imagine happening in an environment where his Republican vice president, the Republican Speaker of the House and the overwhelming majority of Republicans in the country support Trump.
To the extent that what’s under consideration would be the greatest show of Electoral College rebelliousness in U.S. history, it would be unprecedented. But the assumption that it would be corrosive to norms doesn’t follow from there. Unprecedented use of constitutional powers can firm up important norms, and in this case it would serve as a reminder to future presidential candidates: Yes, you might be able to win by violating all of the courtesies and standards our political system takes for granted, but even if you do, your presidency will run its course under a cloud. Impeachment is an important power until such time as it turns into a routine partisan cudgel. This is no different.

Pentagon buries evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste →

An extensive look at the lack of auditing inside the Pentagon...

The report, issued in January 2015, identified “a clear path” for the Defense Department to save $125 billion over five years. The plan would not have required layoffs of civil servants or reductions in military personnel. Instead, it would have streamlined the bureaucracy through attrition and early retirements, curtailed high-priced contractors and made better use of information technology.
The study was produced last year by the Defense Business Board, a federal advisory panel of corporate executives, and consultants from McKinsey and Company. Based on reams of personnel and cost data, their report revealed for the first time that the Pentagon was spending almost a quarter of its $580 billion budget on overhead and core business operations such as accounting, human resources, logistics and property management.
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In a confidential August 2014 memo, McKinsey noted that while the Defense Department was “the world’s largest corporate enterprise,” it had never “rigorously measured” the “cost-effectiveness, speed, agility or quality” of its business operations.
Nor did the Pentagon have even a remotely accurate idea of what it was paying for those operations, which McKinsey divided into five categories: human resources; health-care management; supply chain and logistics; acquisition and procurement; and financial-flow management.
McKinsey hazarded a guess: anywhere between $75 billion and $100 billion a year, or between 15 and 20 percent of the Pentagon’s annual expenses. “No one REALLY knows,” the memo added.
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But the McKinsey consultants had also collected data that exposed how the military services themselves were spending princely sums to hire hordes of defense contractors.
For example, the Army employed 199,661 full-time contractors, according to a confidential McKinsey report obtained by The Post. That alone exceeded the combined civil workforce for the Departments of State, Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development.
The average cost to the Army for each contractor that year: $189,188, including salary, benefits and other expenses.
The Navy was not much better. It had 197,093 contractors on its payroll. On average, each cost $170,865.
In comparison, the Air Force had 122,470 contractors. Each cost, on average, $186,142.