Jacobin Magazine: Populist Billionaires

The paradox at the heart of these populist right-wing movements is that while they are products of popular anger — and appear a rejection of the globalized, hyperconnected world extolled by the elite — it’s also segments of this elite that are helping power these movements.

These aren’t outliers. A study last year found that just ten wealthy donors made up more than half the donations for EU referendum campaigns, with pro-Brexit donors making up six of those ten. One of these donors was Peter Hargreaves, the founder of a financial services company, who donated £3.2 million to the Leave.EU campaign. [...]

This isn’t limited to the United Kingdom. In the Netherlands, the largest donor to Geert Wilders’ far right Dutch Freedom Party (PVV) is the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an American organization that funds various conservative and Islamophobic outlets, including Jihad Watch. The center gave the PVV €108,244 in 2015, the largest individual contribution in the Dutch political system in a single year, though it’s donated to the party over the course of a number of years, as well as paying for Wilders’s trips to the United States. [...]

All this at first seems counter-intuitive. After all, it’s generally assumed that xenophobic and anti-immigrant attitudes are the domain of the white working class, which goes to explain the success of Trump and Brexit among such voters. But data analyses like this one from Vox paint a more complicated picture. It suggests that the most active elite donors have significantly harsher anti-immigration and authoritarian views than others, including other wealthy people who aren’t political donors. 

None of this is to say that these movements and ideas are simply astroturfed. They’re not. Nor is it to say that the far right would be unsuccessful without the backing of big donors. A party founded by actual Nazis nearly won the Austrian elections despite the country’s public funding of elections, and Marine Le Pen had tremendous success despite the strict restrictions on French campaign finance laws (though she, too, comes from less than humble beginnings).

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Haaretz: Israeli Leftist Politics as Therapy

There are other arguments and considerations, very relevant ones, that can and should be made against this argument. But in the heat of debate, we tend not to notice that the human rights argument is inherently problematic even before being confronted by other arguments. And that’s because ending the occupation cannot be expected to lead to any improvement in the area of human rights. Just the opposite. The probable alternative – Hamas, or even the Palestinian Authority – would evidently be even worse for the Palestinians than Israeli military rule. So whoever wishes to make the case solely on the basis of human rights could easily end up substantiating the idea of perpetuating the occupation rather than ending it. Having already brought this conundrum up on occasion, mostly to the sort of people who strive to repress it, I’m familiar with the next step in the debate. But, they say to me, what the Palestinians do to the Palestinians is their business. If others end up committing even greater injustices, that doesn’t sanction the injustices we’re committing. We are responsible for our own actions, not for the actions of others, they say. [...]

Forgive me for returning to the same word again, but it truly seems the most apt: narcissism. Because the concerns of these people are limited to themselves and their consciences. For them, politics is basically a form of therapy. It’s all about the self and not others, about the self-portrait reflected in the mirror, not about responsibility toward other human beings, not about reality. It’s a decorative ornament bestowed by a “clear” conscience. In reality, it’s the manifestation of a yearning to be free from the political, from this complicated and unclean world, for the sake of personal purity. And the more attractive it strives to paint itself, the uglier it is. [...]

People who seek to cleanse their consciences at the expense of others’ suffering do not inspire respect. Especially when they adopt a pose of feeling sorry for those whom they’re quite prepared to sacrifice.

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Politico: When Nazis filled Madison Square Garden

Anxious to find precedents for the frightening and ultimately deadly white nationalist, “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, some media outlets have likened the images of the recent mayhem in Virginia to the chilling ones of the German-American Bundrally that filled Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939, with 22,000 hate-spewing American Nazis. [...]

“I don’t see much of a difference, quite frankly, between the Bund and these groups, in their public presence,” said Arnie Bernstein, the author of “Swastika Nation,” a history of the German American Bund. “The Bund had its storefronts in New York, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles — today’s groups are also hanging out in the public space, but in this case, they’re on the internet and anyone can access their ‘storefronts,’ or websites, and their philosophy, if you can call it that, is essentially the same.”

For the Bund, the unnerving 1939 Madison Square Garden rally was at once the organization’s high point and—as a result of the shock and revulsion it caused—its death knell. It’s too soon to know exactly what effect Charlottesville—which was smaller, but more violent than the Bund’s 1939 demonstration—will have on white nationalists or how the American public, which is still processing the horrific event, will ultimately respond to it. Will Charlottesville be the beginning of the end of this reborn generation of American Nazis? To foretell where we could be headed, you need to know how the Bund’s version of it all played out 78 years ago — and how this time is different. [...]

One year ahead of the outbreak of World War II, Berlin still hoped for good relations with Washington. The Reich refused to give Kuhn’s organization either financial or verbal support, lest it further alienate the Roosevelt administration, which had already made clear its extreme distaste for the Nazi ideology. Berlin went so far as to forbid German nationals in the United States from joining the German American Bund.

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CityLab: Charting the Planet's Path to 100% Renewable Energy

Drawing on earlier analyses, the researchers estimate how much energy storage capacity each nation would need to meet fluctuating supply and demand. To move to 100 percent renewable by 2050 (and 80 percent by 2030, the study’s other benchmark), no energy mix is quite the same: Sudan might rely heavily on rooftop solar panels, while Switzerland would depend on hydroelectric. The U.S. would lean on wind power. If these plans were fully deployed, 58 percent of the world’s energy would come from solar, 37 percent from wind, and the rest from hydroelectric, geothermal, tidal, and wave energy. Worldwide, all households, businesses, and governments would switch to electric appliances and heating systems—plus cars, trains, boats, planes, and heavy-duty vehicles.

That level of transformation sounds daunting, and incredibly costly: Jacobson and co-authors peg the upfront cost of installing nearly 50 terawatts’ worth of wind, water, and solar technologies around the world at an astounding $125 trillion.

But that’s cheap, considering the alternatives, they write. A massive transition among the 139 nations that ratified the Paris agreement may be the only way of meeting the ambitious goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees C. By 2050, decarbonized grids could also prevent nearly 5 million deaths to air pollution every year, estimate Jacobson et al., and save an annual $28 trillion from a changing climate’s catastrophic impacts to coastlines, fisheries, and agriculture, and deaths caused by heat, famine, drought, wildfires, and severe weather.

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The Conversation: Introducing ‘dark DNA’ – the phenomenon that could change how we think about evolution

But in some cases we’re faced with a mystery. Some animal genomes seem to be missing certain genes, ones that appear in other similar species and must be present to keep the animals alive. These apparently missing genes have been dubbed “dark DNA”. And its existence could change the way we think about evolution. [...]

The first clue was that, in several of the sand rat’s body tissues, we found the chemical products that the instructions from the “missing” genes would create. This would only be possible if the genes were present somewhere in the genome, indicating that they weren’t really missing but just hidden. [...]

This kind of dark DNA has previously been found in birds. Scientists have found that 274 genes are “missing” from currently sequenced bird genomes. These include the gene for leptin (a hormone that regulates energy balance), which scientists have been unable to find for many years. Once again, these genes have a very high GC content and their products are found in the birds’ body tissues, even though the genes appear to be missing from the genome sequences. [...]

So far, dark DNA seems to be present in two very diverse and distinct types of animal. But it’s still not clear how widespread it could be. Could all animal genomes contain dark DNA and, if not, what makes gerbils and birds so unique? The most exciting puzzle to solve will be working out what effect dark DNA has had on animal evolution.

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America Magazine: Making sense of the tension and contradictions in Kenya and Rwanda's elections

When the incumbent President Uhuru Kenyatta and his party (the Jubilee Party of Kenya) won the election with 54 percent of the vote, the leader of the opposition National Super Alliance, Raila Odinga, cried foul, claiming electronic “voter theft.” Protests followed and turned violent in Odinga-supporting areas. Mr. Odinga has decided to take the results to the Kenyan Supreme Court, despite the local and international observers’ conclusion that the election was basically free and fair.

In contrast, the elections in Rwanda on Aug. 4 passed almost without incident. The incumbent, Paul Kagame, was re-elected for a third seven-year term with a somewhat astonishing 98.8 percent against two other candidates. There was no electoral violence, no public disputing of the outcome and no overt signs of electoral fraud. Apart, that is, from one candidate for presidency, Diana Rwigara, having nude photos of herself leaked onto the internet, probably to discredit her. [...]

While many see the result as a sign of repression, supporters of Kagame see it as a sign that his no-nonsense approach to rebuilding a country that was devastated by the mid-1990s genocide has grassroots support. There may be truth in that: Under Kagame’s authoritarian rule, the country’s economy has boomed. Described as one of the fastest growing economies in the world, Rwanda has had a GDP growth rate of around 8 percent, has reduced poverty levels, invested in infrastructure and technology, and is rated by the World Bank as the second best country to do business in in Africa (56th in the world). It is also rated by Transparency International as the third least corrupt country on the continent, ranking 50th out of 176 countries worldwide in 2016. [...]

However this should offer no consolation to the deeply fragile, though perhaps more democratic, Kenya. The political chaos that marks Kenyan elections and the corruption of the country’s political process does no one any good, least of all the economy. Kenyans need to take the positive aspects of Kagame’s success—anticorruption measures and economic growth—to heart. If they do, it is likely that it will afford Kenya a more certain and long-term stability and prosperity.

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Scientific American: People Furthest Apart on Climate Views Are Often the Most Educated

Looking at a nationally representative survey of views on stem cell research, the Big Bang, human evolution, nanotechnology, genetically modified views and climate change, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that respondents with the most education and the highest scores on scientific literacy tests had the most polarized beliefs.

On climate change, the researchers found that political identity was a more important signal of where respondents stood than their academic acumen or scientific sophistication. [...]

This is a manifestation of what researchers call motivated reasoning: a phenomenon where people evaluate facts and figures with a goal in mind, often signaling allegiance to a political group. [...]

To bridge the divide on climate change, he explained, disentangling the issue from its political trappings and focusing on tangible economic concerns—like dealing with sea-level rise—would give public officials a means to tackle the issue without jeopardizing their bona fides among their constituents.

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The Washington Post: The imaginary immigrant (and Muslim) takeover

This chart comes from the 2013 Transatlantic Trends survey conducted by the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Survey respondents were asked to estimate the percentage of the population in their country that was born abroad. The light blue bars reflects these guesses. The dark blue bars, on the other hand, reflect the actual percent of each country’s population that was born abroad, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Perhaps reflecting our nickname as a “nation of immigrants,” Americans mistakenly thought that 42 percent of people in this country had been born abroad. The actual share was less than a third that size, at 13 percent. That put us roughly in line with Great Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden, though respondents in none of those other countries overestimated their immigrant population share as much as we did. [...]

In 2015, the Ipsos MORI Perils of Perception survey asked a similar question and found similar results: Nearly everywhere, people overestimated the share of immigrants walking among them. U.S. citizens’ guesstimate for the immigrant share was lower in this survey, though, at “only” 33 percent. [...]

That includes the United States, where respondents said they thought about 17 percent of the country was Muslim, whereas only about 1 percent actually is. The fact that Americans thought a sixth of the country practices Islam is especially striking when you consider that about half of Americans say they do not personally know a single Muslim person.

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Political Critique: V4 residents are confused about the EU and their place in it – and we have the data to prove it

In recent weeks, several polling institutes released their data on attitudes towards the EU in the V4 states. We collected some of them in an attempt to find common patterns and draw some conclusions – whether with success or not, judge for yourself.First, let’s have a look at the Eurobarometer data, collected several times a year by the EU itself. In general, respondents expressed trust in the EU: two separate surveys reported a rate of approval of between 46-30% and 57-35%. According to the first survey however, even the most EU-enthusiastic Hungarians are more anti rather than pro – but the region overall is nevertheless more optimistic about the union’s future than not. [...]

Back to Eurobarometer. Comparing the optimistic outlooks for the future to the respondents’ trust in their own governments seemingly confirms the slight dominance of EU-enthusiasm: the less a country trusts their government, the more they tend to trust the EU. Except the Czechs, who trust no one.

True though, that “trust” is pretty vague – and the surveys do enquire about attitudes more specifically, too. For example, the V4’s vast majority would support a common EU foreign policy (except for the Czechs, who are only mildly intrigued), and the support for a common security and defence policy is even stronger. [...]

So here’s a disappointingly banal conclusion: People are confused. The stark differences between polls attest to how unstable the political discourse – on the future of the EU, on refugees, etc. – is in the region. Domestic events, such as the mind-numbing hostility and ubiquity of anti-EU and anti-Soros propaganda in Hungary, or the sweeping wave of nation-wide anti-government protests in Poland, are also showing limited results.

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The New Yorker: An Intimate History of Antifa

In “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” published last week by Melville House, the historian Mark Bray presents the Battle of Cable Street as a potent symbol of how to stop Fascism: a strong, unified coalition outnumbered and humiliated Fascists to such an extent that their movement fizzled. For many members of contemporary anti-Fascist groups, the incident remains central to their mythology, a kind of North Star in the fight against Fascism and white supremacy across Europe and, increasingly, the United States. According to Bray, antifa (pronounced an-tee-fah) “can variously be described as a kind of ideology, an identity, a tendency or milieu, or an activity of self-defense.” It’s a leaderless, horizontal movement whose roots lie in various leftist causes—Communism, anarchism, Socialism, anti-racism. The movement’s profile has surged since antifa activists engaged in a wave of property destruction during Donald Trump’s Inauguration—when one masked figure famously punched the white supremacist Richard Spencer in the face—and ahead of a planned appearance, in February, by Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of California, Berkeley, which was cancelled. At the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a number of antifa activists, carrying sticks, blocked entrances to Emancipation Park, where white supremacists planned to gather. Fights broke out; some antifa activists reportedly sprayed chemicals and threw paint-filled balloons. Multiple clergy members credited activists with saving their lives. Fox News reported that a White House petition urging that antifa be labelled a terrorist organization had received more than a hundred thousand signatures. [...]

Many liberals who are broadly sympathetic to the goals of antifa criticize the movement for its illiberal tactics. In the latest issue of The Atlantic, Peter Beinart, citing a series of incidents in Portland, Oregon, writes, “The people preventing Republicans from safely assembling on the streets of Portland may consider themselves fierce opponents of the authoritarianism growing on the American right. In truth, however, they are its unlikeliest allies.” (Beinart’s piece is headlined “The Rise of the Violent Left.”) According to Bray, though, antifa activists believe that Fascists forfeit their rights to speak and assemble when they deny those same rights to others through violence and intimidation. For instance, last week, the North Dakota newspaper The Forum published a letter from Pearce Tefft in which he recalled a chilling exchange about free speech with his son, Peter, shortly before Peter headed to the rally in Charlottesville. “The thing about us fascists is, it’s not that we don’t believe in freedom of speech,” the younger Tefft reportedly said to his father. “You can say whatever you want. We’ll just throw you in an oven.” [...]

Part of antifa’s mission is to establish, as Bray puts it, “the historical continuity between different eras of far-right violence and the many forms of collective self-defense that it has necessitated across the globe over the past century.” To this end, the first half of his book is a somewhat rushed history of anti-Fascist groups. The progenitors of antifa, in this account, were the German and Italian leftists who, following the First World War, banded together to fight proto-Fascist gangs. In Italy, these leftists gathered under the banner of Arditi del Popolo (“the People’s Daring Ones”), while in Weimar Germany, groups like Antifaschistische Aktion, from which antifa takes its name, evolved from paramilitary factions of existing political parties. Bray moves swiftly to the failure of anti-Fascists in the Spanish Civil War, then races through the second half of the twentieth century. In the late seventies, the punk and hardcore scenes became the primary sites of open conflict between leftists and neo-Nazis; that milieu prefigures much of the style and strategy now associated with the anti-Fascist movement. In the Netherlands and Germany, a group of leftist squatters known as Autonomen pioneered the Black Bloc approach: wearing all-black outfits and masks to help participants evade prosecution and retaliation. Bray reaches the present with his description of “Pinstripe Fascists,” such as Geert Wilders, and the rise of new far-right parties and groups in both Europe and America. The book flits between countries and across decades; analysis is sparse. The message is that antifa will fight Fascists wherever they appear, and by any means necessary.

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Haaretz: Secular Residents Have Already Lost the Battle for Jerusalem

Today when residents say Barkat has divided Jerusalem, they mean that he has recently divided it into neighborhoods based on the identity of their residents: He has declared some of the neighborhoods Haredi, that is, ultra-Orthodox, and others pluralistic – meaning they’re intended for secular Jewish folk and adherents of religious Zionism.

Not that Barkat has forbidden secular people to live in Bayit Vegan or Ramot. He is simply allocating school buildings in those neighborhoods that until now had been part of the state-religious education system to the Haredim, and transferring students from national-religious families to schools in neighborhoods that under his plan are slated to remain “pluralistic,” where secular and national-religious citizens live in harmony. Because members of the secular and national-religious communities are capable of living together, whereas living with Haredim is a different matter.

For Haredim, coexistence actually means forcing the other side to adopt their way of life. It’s never a case of ultra-Orthodox allowing people who aren’t part of their community to go on pursuing their life as usual. The few secular people who still live in the Ramat Eshkol neighborhood (which on Barkat’s map is intended to be Haredi, although when it was built, after 1967, was anticipated to be a totally secular area) have already become habituated to shutting off their radios and televisions on Shabbat, and getting around on foot and not by car. Their behavior isn’t motivated by consideration for beliefs they don’t hold. The motivation is fear. Because spitting, cursing and stone throwing are not considered desecration of the Sabbath.

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Haaretz: Pro-Israel Group Moves Gala to Trump's Resort After Flurry of Cancellations Over Charlottesville Remarks

Over the past two weeks, almost 20 charities and organizations have canceled events they were planning to hold in the coming months at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump's resort in Florida, following his remarks on the violent events in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Yet one pro-Israeli organization has decided to swim against the tide: While everyone is getting out of Mar-a-Lago, The Truth About Israel called the resort and asked to book a gala event in February. The event will commemorate 45 years to the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. The speakers at the event will be former Israeli ambassador to Washington, Danny Ayalon, and three Republican members of Congress. [...]

Among the groups that canceled their events at Mar-a-Lago recently was American Friends of Magen David Adom, a charity supporting Israel's national emergency health services.

The group said in a press statement last week that the decision to move the event to another location was reached “after considerable deliberation,” without explaining what exactly prompted it. But the Palm Beach Post reported that the cancellation could be a result of Trump “crossing a red line” with his recent comments on the events in Charlottesville. The report quoted one philanthropist as saying “the tide has turned against Trump,” and that “when you get into the area of anti-Semitism, global anti-Semitism, it transcends all the other issues, like health care and immigration.”

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Politico: UK may decide Brexit vision isn’t achievable: Irish ex-PM

He said any upside for Ireland, in terms of jobs and firms that relocate from the U.K., would be far outweighed by disadvantages such as additional customs controls, bureaucratic burdens on business and disruption to pan-Irish agricultural markets. [...]

Asked about the recent flurry of position papers from the U.K. government, Bruton said: “They’re not about substance, they’re about procedure. The substance is what level of tariff you’re going to charge, will Britain pursue a cheap food policy? Will Britain automatically accept standards laid down by the EU and rulings laid down by the European Court of Justice? Those are the substantial questions and those have not been addressed yet.” [...]

“Whether the hard border occurs at the border, or 10 or 15 or 50 miles either side of the border, you are still going to have to have a system to check whether goods entering the European Union in Ireland from the U.K. meet EU standards of safety, meet EU standards of rules of origin, and have paid … all the relevant EU tariffs, which in some cases are very high indeed,” he said, speaking from Ireland earlier this week.

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Politico: Poland isolated as Macron steps up regional offensive

France has long tried to stem the number of foreign workers able to work in Western Europe for lower salaries while paying taxes in their home countries, calling it “social dumping.” Depicting the current system as a “betrayal” of EU values, Macron wants posted workers’ contracts limited to one year instead of two, and for similar jobs to get similar pay, something that would undermine the competitive advantage for employers who currently avoid paying high social charges in France. [...]

Out of 1.9 million such workers, about 420,000 are Poles, the highest number from any EU country, according to the European Commission. They largely work in building trades and seek employment in wealthy countries such as France, Austria and Germany. Even though such workers account for less than 1 percent of the EU’s workforce, they have become a target in many countries worried about low-wage competition from Central Europe. [...]

In Austria, Macron met with the prime ministers of Slovakia and the Czech Republic, seeking to undermine the common position on posted workers of the Visegrad Group, a bloc that also includes Poland and Hungary. He made progress, winning cautious backing for his reform plans from the Slovaks and the Czechs.

In return, Macron acknowledged both countries’ distaste for the EU program of allocating asylum seekers among member countries. [...]

Although France has turned a cold shoulder to Warsaw over concerns about rule of law, and Macron showed no interest in including Poland in this week’s regional tour, MP Pieyre-Alexandre Anglade, vice president of the French parliament’s European affairs commission, said that behind the scenes, Macron has close relations with President Andrzej Duda, with whom he has spoken three times since taking office.

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The Conversation: Ethnic religious communities may be the ‘No’ campaign’s secret weapon in same-sex marriage fight

At the 2016 federal election, two if not three seats went to the government on the back of an unexpected rise in the Christian Democratic Party’s primary vote. The preferences then flowed to the Liberals.

These seats had large numbers of voters with a Chinese background. They were hit with a massive Weibo social media campaign by evangelical Christians of Chinese ethnicity targeting fears over same-sex marriage and the Safe Schools program – and the impact was dramatic. [...]

About 2.5 million Christians living in Australia were born overseas. 500,000 have come from eastern and southern Europe, 160,000 from North Africa and the Middle East, 155,000 from the Americas, 400,000 from southeast Asia, 150,000 from northeast Asia, 130,000 from southern and central Asia, and 200,000 from sub-Saharan Africa. [...]

Looking at Australian citizens of voting age, there are about 8.5 million Christians, about 4.7 million secularists and non-believers, about 300,000 Buddhists, about 230,000 Muslims, 160,000 Hindus, and about 60,000 Jews. If 60% of the believing communities responded “No”, then same-sex marriage could fail. [...]

Looking at Australian citizens of voting age, there are about 8.5 million Christians, about 4.7 million secularists and non-believers, about 300,000 Buddhists, about 230,000 Muslims, 160,000 Hindus, and about 60,000 Jews. If 60% of the believing communities responded “No”, then same-sex marriage could fail.

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openDemocracy: Want to stop people buying plastic bottles? The solution's simpler than you think

The innovation was designed to make a dent in the huge number of plastic bottles bought by making it easier for people to refill their bottles while out and about. See where I'm going with this? It's a tap. A sandwich shop called Pure installed a public-access tap for drinkable water outside its doors in the hope people won't need to buy a bottle if they already have an empty one on them. [...]

Stupid as it sounds, I still feel shy, marching up to a counter and asking the server to fill a water bottle when I'm not a customer. I'm only admitting to this because I discovered that in a recent survey, 71 per cent of people admitted to feeling uncomfortable when asking for free tap water. A surprising 30 percent said they would still feel awkward asking for a free refill even if they had bought other food or drinks. [...]

We've seen some great breakthroughs recently that will help cut down on how much plastic we use - the increase in the use of recycled materials, the plastic bag charge, the pledge to ban microbeads. Support for these changes is strong and widespread: the challenge is simple, and people want to make a difference.

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Slate: Google Built a Fake City for Its Self-Driving Cars

A handful of the world’s most powerful companies are in a race to build the same technology: driverless cars. The one that does it first, but most importantly, best, stands to change the future of American cities forever. And now, after years of work, Google’s sister self-driving car project, Waymo, is gunning to take the lead. Both Waymo and Google are owned by the same parent company, Alphabet. [...]

“It is truly a city for robotic cars: All that matters is what’s on and directly abutting the asphalt,” writes the Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal, who was given access to the facility. Waymo engineers have reconstructed intersections that have proven difficult for their self-driving cars to maneuver in the past, like a two-lane roundabout they previously encountered in Austin, Texas. And like any good fake city, Castle has a full collection of props like bicycles, skateboards, plants, kids' toys, dummies, and of course, a lot of traffic cones, all of which are used to mock scenarios the robot cars might encounter in the real world. [...]

Waymo isn’t the only Silicon Valley company with virtual worlds for their robot cars to practice. Uber, which also has an ambitious self-driving car initiative, is hiring for multiple positions for its self-driving car project that describe building “games and 3D virtual environments” and “realistic worlds and situations.” The ride-sharing company has also tested its self-driving cars in real cities, like Pittsburgh, Tempe, and San Francisco. Uber is also in mired in a contentious court case with Waymo stemming from Uber’s acquisition of Otto, a self-driving truck startup. The founder of Otto, Anthony Levandowski, formerly worked as a top engineer leading Waymo’s self-driving car efforts and allegedly came on board at Uber with stolen trade secrets from Waymo.

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Business Insider: Former ECJ judge: Theresa May's pledge to end all ECJ jurisdiction 'shows just how ignorant she is'

He added: "If a business manufacturing goods in the UK wants to export goods to the EU, as hundreds of them do, then those goods must comply with EU standards. As a practical matter, if you're manufacturing wedding cakes, for example, and you have to comply with EU food standards, you don't want to have to create two sets of wedding cake. You want to create one set to come off the production line so the cakes can be consumed both in the UK and the EU. [...]

"We will not have truly left the European Union if we are not in control of our own laws," the prime minister declared in her keynote Lancaster House speech in January.

However, for Sir David, it is not just May's unrealistic promises regarding the ECJ that have left him frustrated, but signs that both she and the government don't fully understand its purpose and remit. "The ECJ does not have 'direct jurisdiction' in or over the UK," the former ECJ judge tells BI. [...]

He continues: "They [ministers] use expressions like the ECJ can 'enforce' EU law or can 'direct' the UK — but it can't do any such thing. All it can do is say what the law is. The great thing about EU law is it doesn't have any police and enforcement is entirely by consent."

He says the only exception to this is in the "very rare case" of the ECJ fining an EU member state for repeatedly failing to comply with EU law. "It's happened with Greece when it was dumping hospital waste in a stream in Crete. They were told to stop it and they didn't and eventually the Court imposed a penalty on them for every day they failed to deal with the dumping of waste," Sir David explained. "But that's a very remote thing from us [the UK]."

"It's just ignorant," he adds. "The idea that the ECJ is a body like the US Supreme Court that can strike down legislation of states is just false.

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Deutsche Welle: Muslims 'integrate' better into Germany than rest of Europe

A study of five European countries found that 60 percent of the 4.7 Muslims in Germany participated in the labor market with near identical employment relative to other Germans. The unemployment rate among Muslims is also improving, and slowly approaching the national average.

The study by Germany's Bertelsmann Foundation assessed self-identified Muslims' language skills, education, work, and social contacts in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, France and the United Kingdom. It did not include Muslims who arrived after 2010. [...]

Seventy-three percent of children born to Muslim parents in the Federal Republic grow up with German as their first language.

Though high school graduation rates are improving, there remains room for improvement. The study found that in France only 11 percent of Muslims do not graduate from high school, for instance, though in Germany, the number is 36 percent. [...]

For instance, when it comes to more devout Muslims, integration works much better in the UK. Yasmin El-Manouar, an Islam expert on behalf of Bertelsmannn and one of the study's authors, said Britain had created a "level playing field" for pious Muslims - female police officers in the UK have been able to wear a headscarf at work for the past 10 years. 

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Vox: The collapse of Venezuela, explained

Vox: We need to change how we bury the dead Vox

Vox: This timeline shows confederate monuments are about racial conflict

Bloomberg: Berlin is Becoming a Sponge City

MapPorn: Dutch provinces by GDP

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BoredPanda: Supermarket Removes All Foreign Food From Shelves To Make A Point About Racism, And Here’s The Result

When customers walked into Edeka supermarket in Hamburg recently, they were surprised to find that the shelves were almost empty, and the small handful of products that remained were all made in Germany. It seemed like the supermarket had simply forgotten to restock their produce until customers saw the mysterious signs left around the shop. “So empty is a shelf without foreigners,” read one sign at the cheese counter. “This shelf is quite boring without variety,” read another.

It turns out that Edeka, in a rather controversial move, had opted to solely sell German food for a day in order to make a powerful statement about racism and ethnic diversity. As a result, there were no Greek olives, no Spanish tomatoes, and very little of anything else that can normally be found in a typical modern household. “Edeka stands for diversity, and we produce a wide range of food in our assortment, which is produced in the different regions of Germany,” said an Edeka spokesman. “But it is together with products from other countries that we create the unique diversity that our customers value.”

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MapPorn: Forest area as percent of total land in Russia

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Slate: What Works in Afghanistan

The first is America’s legendary sponsorship of the Afghan mujahedeen who beat back the Soviet invasion between 1979 and 1988. This covert effort began with small amounts of support funneled through various middlemen (including Pakistan’s shadowy security apparatus) and grew into billions of dollars of money, sophisticated weapons (like Stinger missiles capable of shooting down Russian helicopters), and technical assistance. What made this effort so successful was its narrow goal—inflicting Soviet casualties in the context of the Cold War—and the simple truth that it’s easier to support an insurgency than a counterinsurgency, especially when that insurgency is playing on its home turf. However, after this insurgency pushed out the Soviets, the U.S. washed its hands of this support. Over time, parts of this rebel movement would evolve into al-Qaida and the Taliban, with major long-term repercussions for the U.S. [...]

This reflects a broader theory of counterinsurgency that it’s best done by indigenous security forces. To the extent that much of the current U.S.–Afghanistan strategy relies on supporting Afghan forces as they fight the Taliban and al-Qaida, this holds some promise. However, foreign forces cannot fight our wars; eventually interests diverge, or conflict emerges between client and patron. This may soon happen in Afghanistan, particularly if the Afghan government decides to reach a political settlement with the Taliban, and possibly with al-Qaida elements, even as the U.S. wants to continue fighting. [...]

Today, the Joint Special Operations Command machine continues its work across Afghanistan and Pakistan—doing the hard, bloody, dangerous work of counterterrorism with elite special operations troops or drones. This counterterrorism effort most closely aligns with our primary interest (as articulated by President George W. Bush, and President Barack Obama, as well as President Trump) of preventing another attack on the U.S. emanating from Afghanistan. Although this machine is small, it is costly; elite troops cost more, and are in shorter supply, than their conventional counterparts in the U.S. military. However, it is conceivable that the U.S. could continue to operate this counterterrorism machine indefinitely in Afghanistan, whether led by the military’s special operations command or an analogous agency within the U.S. intelligence community. This plan is not without risk though: Counterterrorism raids often risk alienating civilians, or inflicting civilian casualties, in ways that can create enemies or undermine local government partners, as has happened in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen during the past 16 years. Counterterrorism operations must be carefully calibrated and overseen in order to be effective—something that runs counter to Trump’s promise to take the gloves off and end White House micromanagement of warfighting.

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Jacobin Magazine: Assessing Trotsky

Though Le Blanc argues otherwise, there was only one version of permanent revolution — Trotsky’s. No one else adhered to Trotsky’s analysis of the coming Russian Revolution: that only workers could overthrow Tsarism and that as a result the democratic revolution in Russia would have to be a proletarian-socialist one, not a “bourgeois-democratic” one. [...]

In a nutshell, Trotsky thought he could persuade the party to adopt his domestic and foreign policies by majority vote only on condition that the leadership allow freewheeling democratic debate among rank-and-file party militants, not top-heavy bureaucratic “debate” dominated by business-as-usual apparatchiks who, collectively, Trotsky believed, had little interest in proactively building socialism at home, or working intelligently and conscientiously for socialist revolution abroad. [...]

Bukharin understood all too well that Stalin’s cure for the grain crisis was worse than the disease. Thus, a window of opportunity opened, ever so slightly to be sure and ever so briefly, to save the Russian Revolution from final destruction by mobilizing workers and peasants in its defense. Trotsky and the Left Opposition did everything in their power to slam this window shut.

Throughout 1928 Bukharin challenged Stalin’s predatory policies in the countryside, recognizing in them the risk of disaster. The Left Opposition did not.  Bukharin and his cohorts, Trotsky explained, in trying to placate the ostensibly kulak-led peasantry, were simply opening the way for capitalist restoration in agriculture and, eventually, in industry. This would be the greatest evil. Trotsky’s slogan of the day was: “With Stalin against Bukharin — yes; with Bukharin against Stalin — never!” [...]

Trotsky’s view of the Right Opposition as capitalist-roaders was fantasy. So was his view that Stalin was a centrist, perpetually tossed now to the right, now to left, and incapable of striking out on his own to become the head of a new ruling class. He never came to terms with his utterly mistaken appraisal of Stalin’s politics, itself founded on a profoundly erroneous analysis of the bureaucracy as a non-class phenomenon, a “caste.” This confounds Le Blanc’s assertion that Trotsky always admitted to errors of political judgment.

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Politico: Italy’s Northern League goes soft (on the euro)

Speaking to POLITICO last week, he didn’t attack the single currency or even the EU, instead saying “we want to give Europe one last chance, but in return we want to see real change, especially when it comes to Schengen and the Dublin treaty” — the two EU treaties that regulate cross-border movement in the bloc.

Libero, an Italian daily that follows the Northern League’s line, described Salvini’s comments (first reported in Brussels Playbook) as “a small shift in foreign policy,” with the party moving “from euro-nihilism to Euroskepticism.” It said that shift has become more marked since Marine Le Pen’s defeat in the French presidential election. [...]

In all three Berlusconi coalition governments, he has found a place for the Northern League and that will be the case again if talks to create a center-right bloc succeed. When the Northern League was in power in the past, it didn’t have a clear anti-euro line, which has emerged since Salvini took over the leadership. [...]

Salvini doesn’t just want to prop up the old warhorse Berlusconi. This admirer of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin wants to be prime minister — and he could achieve that ambition if his party gets more votes than Berlusconi’s. (The tycoon, who turns 81 next month, won’t be prime minister anyway, as a conviction for tax fraud means he cannot be elected to parliament). [...]

He has succeeded in turning the Northern League from an anti-migrant party that wanted to split from the poorer Italian south into a stronger force that campaigns against the euro (and still doesn’t like migrants), and has no qualms about forging ties with the likes of the neo-fascist Casa Pound activist group.

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The Guardian: Science envoy resigns over Trump – with a letter spelling out 'impeach'

Daniel Kammen, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a letter posted on his Twitter account that Trump had failed to condemn white supremacists and neo-Nazis, part of “a broader pattern of behavior that enables sexism and racism, and disregards the welfare of all Americans, the global community and the planet”. [...]

The science envoys serve as unpaid volunteers and engage with government and non-government science officials around the world. In his letter, Kammen also criticized Trump’s decision to leave the Paris Climate Accord. The first letters of each paragraph spell out the word “IMPEACH.” [...]

Similar to Kammen, members of the President’s committee on the arts and the humanities who resigned en masse last week used the first letter of each paragraph in their resignation letter to spell out “RESIST,” a rallying cry for Trump’s opponents. 

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The Guardian: Three reasons remainers should stop calling for a second referendum on Brexit

Opinion polls certainly show a small but clear majority for remain, and disappointment among Brexit voters too over issues including the fact that the NHS will not benefit from that promised £350m a week. But there needs to be a decent interval between the original and any new referendum. The general election massively qualified the plebiscite result. The British Election Study’s survey of 30,000 voters showed more than a third switching to vote Labour in protest at Theresa May’s initial choice of a Ukip-style hard Brexit and the way she refused to reach out to the 48% of voters who were not persuaded by the propaganda of the leave camp. [...]

In February 2014, Swiss voters decided to back EU immigration quotas. Their leaders bided their time and let the consequences of such a move sink in. More than a quarter of the Swiss population is foreign born, mainly from EU member states. The Swiss economy would collapse without access to European workers. Gradually a consensus emerged in the Swiss parliament to find a way of managing immigration with internal labour market controls that avoided direct discrimination against EU workers. This was acceptable to the European commission, and the status quo prior to the referendum was restored.

If the Swiss, with their quasi-religious belief in direct democracy, can allow their parliament quietly to sideline a populist vote so clearly against the national interest, at some stage the House of Commons can move away from the current veneration of a referendum result based mainly on lies as the final word on Britain’s relations with the EU27.

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Quartz: Why do Indians hate going to the gym?

Through a recent survey of 1.06 million people aged 20-35 years in Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Hyderabad, fitness aggregator Gympik found that only 30% reported having a gym or fitness centre membership. And even in this group, a mere 11% was regular for more than six months. [...]

For Ojha, this is because gyms are well aware that sticking to a fitness routine isn’t easy. On average, he said, only 15% of the people who have enrolled actually turn up to a gym. “Keeping this in mind, gyms over-subscribe their membership,” he explained, noting that a space that can handle 200 members a day would likely enroll 2,000 of them. [...]

But Gympik’s study reveals that a number of Indians now find hiring personal trainers a better alternative, despite the cost. Many others prefer convenient home workout videos. Moreover, a sizeable proportion is taking to other forms of exercise such as walking (30%), running (24%), cycling (11%), swimming (18%), and sports (18%).

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National Public Radio: 5 Truths About Trump Displayed In His Phoenix Rally

President Trump led an incendiary rally at which he ripped at cultural divides, played to white grievance, defended himself by stretching the truth or leaving out key facts, attacked members of his own party and the media, played the victim and threatened apocalyptic political consequences — all the while doing so by ignoring political norms and sensitivities. [...]

Played to white grievance. "They're trying to take away our culture," Trump said of activists calling for the removal of Confederate statues. "They're trying to take away our history. And our weak leaders, they do it overnight. These things have been there for 150 years, for 100 years. You go back to a university, and it's gone. Weak, weak people." [...]

Consider: There has been a usual pattern. Here's how it has gone — Trump says something attention-grabbing, outrageous or controversial. He gets lots of negative attention and criticism for it. Then, he adjusts and does something more on-script. The criticism dies down and people think maybe he is changing ("pivoting") and becoming more "presidential." And then he undercuts that with a tweet or rally soon after. [...]

Not loyal, except maybe to his family. Trump is all about Trump. Look at how he has dealt with his White House and administration. He nearly threw Attorney General Jeff Sessions under the bus, for example, threatening his job on Twitter — and Sessions was one of Trump's earliest supporters and was behind Trump when no one else in the Senate would back him.

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Quartz: Researchers have shown that politicians don’t let facts get in the way of their beliefs

Julian Christensen, a political science researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark, wasn’t particularly surprised to find that a politician’s prior belief affects how they interpret factual information—that much has been shown before. But he was taken back when he saw that politicians doubled down when they were given even more evidence that goes against their prior beliefs. “That was a surprise for us,” he says, adding, “It’s also kind of depressing.”

For the study, Christensen and a group of Danish researchers enrolled 954 Danish politicians from local government to participate in a series of experiments. At the heart of the study was a particularly thorny political debate: The role the private sector should play in the delivery of public services. While some politicians maintain that the public sector is the best supplier of public services, others argue that private contractors deliver services more efficiently. The politicians were randomly assigned to different groups. [...]

Despite this, the findings showed that when politicians were asked to evaluate the information, around 84% to 98% of politicians that received information that fit their prior belief interpreted the information they were given correctly. However, politicians who received information at odds with their beliefs correctly interpreted the information correctly only 38% to 61% of the time.

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Vox: Pope Francis is becoming the voice of compassion for the world's refugees

Monday the Vatican released a comprehensive policy document urging countries around the world to ban “arbitrary and collective expulsions” of refugees or migrants, and to expand the number of “safe and legal pathways” for migration.

The policy document, “Responding to Refugees and Migrants: Twenty Action Points,” was released by the Vatican’s section on Migrants and Refugees, a small department within the Vatican that Francis directly oversees. The document comes in anticipation of talks on immigration and migration at the United Nations scheduled for next year.

The memo also highlighted the importance of social and economic justice for those who have already migrated, including guaranteeing equal access to education for children. It also calls to prohibit “exploitation, forced labor, or trafficking” and guaranteeing the rights of undocumented workers who need to report abusive employers. Such stipulations reflect Francis’s well documented concern for workers’ issues more broadly.

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openDemocracy: Scandinavian Nazis on the march again

A majority of the demonstrating neo-Nazis in Kristiansand this summer were in fact not Norwegian, but Swedish. They were hard-core members of a violent neo-Nazi outfit which goes under the name of the Nordic Resistance Movement (Den Nordiska Motstandsbevegelsen, DNM). In Sweden, this movement has a particularly strong organization in the largely rural province of Dalarna. [...]

In Sweden and in Finland, members of this movement has been involved in murders of immigrants and anti-racist campaigners, and in murderous arson attacks on asylum reception centers. Key members of this movement are known to have undergone military training with Russian ultra-nationalist forces.  A joint investigation by Filter Media in Norway and Expo in Sweden found that among the Swedish neo-Nazis demonstrators in Kristiansand there were individuals with criminal records relating to violent assaults on police, immigrants and anti-racist activists. [...]

The neo-Nazi march in Kristiansand happened on the watch of a Progress Party Minister of Justice, Per-Willy Amundsen, who in his former days as an MP had a long and sustained record of whipping up popular sentiment against immigrants and Muslims in Norway. Six years ago, Amundsen, then an MP, went on record as approving a fellow party politician who had drawn an analogy between Islam and Nazism.  Amundsen is surrounded by cabinet ministers from his own party some of whom have in the course of the past four years been caught greeting well-known Norwegian right-wing extremists with a friendly ‘good night, and thank you’ on their open Facebook pages, and sharing Facebook posts from a British right-wing extremist organization, Britain First .

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Haaretz: Revealed: Nearly 3,500 Settlement Homes Built on Private Palestinian Land

There are 3,455 residential and public buildings built on private Palestinian lands in the West Bank, according to Civil Administration data. These illegal structures could be legalized under the expropriation law, whose validity is now being determined by the High Court of Justice in response to Palestinian petitions against the law. [...]

The law allows the state to expropriate Palestinian lands on which settlements or outposts were built “in good faith or at the state’s instruction,” and deny its owners the right to use those lands until there is a diplomatic resolution of the status of the territories. The measure provides a mechanism for compensating Palestinians whose lands are seized.

According to the Civil Administration, the 3,455 structures fall into three categories. The first includes 1,285 structures that are clearly private land. These are structures built during the past 20 years on land that was never defined as state land and all have had demolition orders issued against them. The second category comprises 1,048 structures that were built on private land that had earlier been erroneously designated state land. The third category contains 1,122 structures that were built more than 20 years ago, during a period when planning laws were barely enforced in the West Bank.[...]

Of the 1,285 structures built on clearly private land, 543 are built on what the Civil Administration calls “regularized private land,” meaning lands whose owners are known and whose ownership is formally registered. The other homes are built on lands recognized as private after aerial photos proved that these lands had been cultivated over the years, but there is no definitive registry of who was cultivating them. Cultivating land establishes ownership in the West Bank in accordance with the Ottoman-era laws that still prevail there.

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Politico: Viktor Orbán courts voters beyond ‘fortress Hungary’

Hungary’s parliament is selected using a mixed system, whereby some MPs are elected through single-member districts and others through party lists. Citizens in surrounding countries don’t have districts — but they may cast a vote for a party list. [...]

With Romania preparing to celebrate the centenary of its creation in its modern-day form, heightened tensions over minority language and cultural rights are dominating many conversations.

And with Romania’s presidential election and the European Parliament election coming up in 2019 — plus a lack of progress on raising living standards — there are fears that local politicians may resort to nationalist rhetoric as a political tactic. [...]

Fidesz works closely with some local Hungarian groups, and the government in Budapest funds a wide range of projects in the region, from language education and the arts to voter registration drives. Thus far, its efforts have paid off: In Hungary’s 2014 election, over 95 percent of votes cast by non-domestic citizens went to Fidesz. [...]

Each year, Orbán’s most important policy speech takes place not in Hungary, but across the border in Tusnádfürdő (Băile Tuşnad in Romanian) where Fidesz has been organizing a summer camp for the past 28 years. And when his party came to power in 2010, one of the first major policy changes Orbán implemented was extending citizenship to ethnic Hungarians in surrounding countries — a policy move that left-wing parties campaigned against during a 2004 referendum.

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The Conversation: Beyond bollards: protecting crowded places means not letting the exceptional become the norm

Terrorists have significantly changed their modus operandi in the new millennium. Until 2001, vehicle-borne devices targeting major financial or political centres used to be the hallmarks of international urban terrorism. These have more recently been superseded by person-borne devices – especially suicide attacks – and subsequently Fedayeen-style mass shootings, targeting of crowds with fast-moving vehicles, as well as low-tech, difficult-to-defend knife attacks. [...]

Many have advocated the use of crime-prevention ideas for dealing with the terrorist threat. These manipulate the built environment to reduce the attractiveness and physical access to target places while increasing the likelihood of being caught. In essence this means the mass use of security bollards and high-visibility policing.

While this might reassure many citizens, the emphasis on structures and deterrence models has limited use. Terrorists seeking martyrdom could simply move to other locations that are not as well defended. [...]

The fourth issue relates to aesthetics. Over recent decades, urban revitalisation has increasingly emphasised inclusivity, liveability and accessibility. These “quality of life” values sit uneasily beside concerns to “design out terrorism” as security becomes part of the design process. [...]

More broadly, counter-terrorism measures deployed in crowded public places must seek to balance security effectiveness with social and political acceptability. We live in dangerous times, but how we react to the risk of terrorism will have impacts on our public realm for many years. In many ways the threat to cities comes as much from our policy responses as the actual act of terrorism. Both have the potential to harm the freedom of movement and expression that define a vibrant city.

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FiveThirtyEight: How Big Is The Bannon Wing Of The Republican Party?

Before we delve into the numbers, let’s first define what we mean by the “Bannon wing.” Generally, we’re talking about a more populist, nationalist and isolationist brand of Republicanism. More specifically, Trump voters who are pro-police, against free trade, against the U.S. playing an active role (militarily and diplomatically) in the international community, strongly against illegal immigration, and in favor of more infrastructure spending. There are obviously other parts of Bannon’s agenda, but these are among the defining features that help separate it from other wings within the Republican Party. [...]

Among Trump voters, approximately 15 percent supported all five positions, including a B or better for their local police. So let’s call this 15 percent the “core Bannon” voter. This isn’t a particularly large group. On its own, for example, it’s not enough to win a Republican primary. But it’s certainly big enough that Trump needs its continued support in order to survive a serious primary challenge in 2020 (if one arises). Remember Trump won only 45 percent of the national primary vote in 2016. To put this 15 percent in some additional perspective, the percentage of Hillary Clinton voters who were Hispanic in the general election, an important part of her coalition, was about 12 percent. [...]

About 50 percent of all Trump voters fall into Group No. 1 — they want the U.S. to be less active on the world stage. The pull of this group shouldn’t be too surprising given that even Clinton was forced to come out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and Trump made a point during the primary campaign of (falsely) claiming that he always opposed the Iraq War.

Group No. 2, nationalist Bannon-ites, make up about 45 percent of Trump voters, people who want to identify and deport all immigrants in the country illegally and give their local police a grade of above average or better. Trump’s appeal clearly went beyond voters with hardline positions on policing and immigration — issues that represented the starkest contrast with Clinton. But cultural conservatives are a substantial portion of Trump’s coalition.

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The Atlantic: How to Repurpose a Bad Statue

When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, so did many of its statues, often in giddy, nighttime topplings—most notably, the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the ruthless Soviet secret police. These were often joyous, cathartic events, quick and tangible symbols of the end of a brutal and moribund regime, when everything else was changing far more slowly. In Moscow, the statues were then dragged to a grassy lot next to the brutalist Central House of Artists on an island in the middle of the Moscow River. For years, they lay there on the ground, a kind of graveyard of Lenins and Soviet crests and anonymous workers and peasants shorn of their pedestals. In recent years, the city of Moscow has turned them upright—and into an outdoor sculpture garden where the statues can be seen for the ghosts that they are. (I have walked past the garden many times, but found it hard to take interest in what were essentially tombstones with no graves beneath them: Unlike the long-overdue removal of Confederate statues, the removal of Soviet statues in Russia proved superficial and the celebration premature. The statues were yanked down, but the Soviet state didn’t really go anywhere; even the melody of the national anthem is the same.)

In 1997, Taiwan did a similar thing with the statues of nationalist dictator Chiang Kai-shek and his son, Chiang Jing-guo. Their likenesses were put into a green park on the bank of a lake, the Cihu Memorial Statues Park. Each statue has a description of where it originally stood. These parks deprive the statues of their context and their power; they may look like a brutal dictator, but here they are just stone.

There’s a reason statues can rouse such angry passions. They are designed to evoke emotion and memory in monumental terms. That’s the whole point. But they are not just symbols of what a society has decided is important. Often, they also serve as embodiments of the state, reminders of its presence even when one of its enforcers can’t be there. A statue can be an inanimate chunk of rock or metal in loco parentis. The Confederate statues, many of which went up well after the Civil War, were reminders of who was in charge, symbols not of an old master, but a new one: Jim Crow. Which is why statues can often become flashpoints of conflict, as they did in Eastern Ukraine in the wake of the Maidan revolution and Russian invasion of 2014. Ukrainians gleefully toppled Lenins all over their country, eager to shed their Soviet, Moscow-dominated past, and to move into the future. At the height of the Arab Spring, protestors in places like Syria defaced and brought down statues to the still-living dictators they couldn’t always topple.

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Jacobin Magazine: What Is Trump Country?

Over the past few decades, the top 10% of income earners in the US have appropriated from the bottom 90% an amount of wealth four times greater than the American government’s debt to foreign countries. The majority of Trump’s supporters are within this top decile. [...]

Exit polls are imperfect. But according to the exit data we have, Trump did poorly among voters making less than $50,000 a year (roughly the poorest half of US society); Clinton won this group by roughly 11%.

Trump’s gains appear to have come mostly from the top half of income earners. In 2008, Obama and McCain each received 49% of the vote from people making more than $50,000. In 2016, Trump bested Clinton by 4% in the $50,000–100,000 income bracket, by 1% in the $100,000–200,000 bracket, by 1% in the $200,000–250,000 bracket, and by 2% among those earning more than $250,000. [...]

In America, the top 10% amounts to around 30 million people. A 2% gain among this politically influential group would be immense, especially in an election where Trump lost the popular vote by three million. [...]

For their part, wealthy Trump supporters appear suspicious of the value system that emerged alongside neoliberalization, favoring instead an intransigent conservatism and a less financialized capitalism. These wealthy Trump supporters, who formed the base of his support, are citizens neither of Paris nor Pittsburgh. They live in counties like Putnam and Suffolk: they’re white Americans upset that other Americans are no longer working for them, Americans whose wealth, status, and power have ostensibly been attacked and eroded over the past few decades. And they want it back — with the help of Donald Trump.

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The New York Review of Books: What Makes a Terrorist?

Instead, it is better to think of radicalization as a phenomenon in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Multiple factors interact in complex ways that cause radicalization to emerge in individual people and groups. As with other complex systems, such as ecosystems, removing one factor does not cause the system to collapse but instead to evolve in ways that may be positive or negative. In the jihadist movement there have been many small tipping points, including the USSR invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, and the Syrian civil war of 2011—each of which mobilized a new generation of fighters.

Profiles of jihadists have evolved over the years. Generally, revolutionary movements attract different kinds of recruits at different stages in their development. Many of the founders and leaders of the modern jihadist movement were educated members of the upper-middle or upper classes. Even many early foot soldiers were of above-average socio-economic status. Research on recruits to jihadist groups using data from the 1970s to 2010 found that members of these groups were six times more likely than the general population to have a bachelor’s degree. In the Middle East, engineering schools are often the most competitive programs and only take the best and brightest students; jihadists were seventeen times more likely to have an engineering degree. [...]

But as ISIS’s goals continued to evolve so too did their recruits. Few women from Europe ventured to Syria in the early days of the conflict, but by 2014 one in seven European foreign fighters were women, and by 2016 that number had jumped to one in three. Women didn’t become more vulnerable to radicalization over that period—instead, they were targeted for radicalization. Until 2014, ISIS’s local insurgency demanded mostly young men of fighting capacity and thus had little need for women. In June 2014, ISIS declared its so-called Caliphate and shifted its focus to state-building. In order to legitimize that state, the immigration of women, children, and families was explicitly sought after. Once the women arrived they began recruiting female friends, family members, and strangers over the Internet to pull in more “lionesses,” as they were often called, leading to the jump seen in 2016.

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Vox: California has a climate problem, and its name is cars

The state’s pursuit of advanced energy has also yielded an employment bonanza. For every job in fossil fuels, the state boasts 8.5 jobs in renewable energy. And an innovation bonanza: California leads the 50 states in patents in most areas of clean energy.

Perhaps the most notable success of all is California’s incredible progress in becoming more energy-productive — that is, in squeezing more GDP out of every unit of energy consumed. It has recently become the most energy-productive major economy in the world. [...]

The culprit for the slowing decline is a spike in transportation emissions. There was a dip in transportation emissions starting around 2008, with the recession. And though vehicles have gotten more efficient and more hybrids and EVs are on the road since then, the number of vehicles and vehicle miles traveled (VMT) have begun rising again, overwhelming efficiency gains. [...]

The other solution to passenger vehicles is reducing commuting times by solving that housing crisis, and getting people out of their cars by increasing infill and density via building out proper public transportation systems (which themselves will need to be electrified). Unfortunately, cheap gasoline lately has meant a decline in per capita public transportation use in almost every major California city.

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SciShow Psych: Why Do We Talk to Ourselves?

Do you mumble to yourself while looking for your keys, or pump yourself up in the morning with a bathroom mirror pep talk? It may actually be helpful—but only if you do it right.

Vox: The racist history of US immigration policy (Jan 15, 2016)

Banning an entire racial or ethnic group from entering the US isn't new, and the data shows it. 

Vox's Alvin Chang explains. For his full interactive map of the data: http://www.vox.com/2016/1/4/10709366/...

It is immigrants, and their descendants, who largely make up today's US population. European immigrants were the first and largest group to arrive, and there were subsequent policies that made it much easier for people from those countries to come to the US. That said, a decent numbers of Canadian and Chinese immigrants also arrived early in this country's history, and over the years, different policies allowed greater numbers of Hispanics and Asians to immigrate.

Read the full article and view the interactive at: http://www.vox.com/2016/1/4/10709366/...

The New York Times: A Deal Breaker for Trump’s Supporters? Nope. Not This Time, Either.

It was a week of incessant tumult, when Mr. Trump tumbled into open warfare with some in his own party over his statements on the violence in Charlottesville, Va.; business executives abandoned his advisory councils; top military leaders pointedly made statements denouncing racism in a way he did not; and his embattled chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, stepped down. But around the country, Mr. Trump’s supporters — and, according to many polls, Republicans more broadly — agreed with his interpretation of a swirl of racially charged events and stood with him amid still more clatter and churn.

Sixty-seven percent of Republicans said they approved of the president’s response to the violence in Charlottesville last weekend, compared with just 10 percent of Democrats, according to a CBS News survey conducted over the past week.

It’s an indication of what now seems an almost immutable law of the Trump presidency. There are signs that Mr. Trump’s support among Republican leaders and some Republican voters is weakening. But in an increasingly tribal America, with people on the left and the right getting information from different sources and seeing the same facts in different ways, it reflects the way Mr. Trump has become in many ways both symbol and chief agitator of a divided nation.

Moral outrage at Mr. Trump’s response to Charlottesville continues to glow white hot, but it has a largely partisan tinge. [...]

Is there anything Mr. Trump could do that would change the minds of his supporters? For the most loyal, probably not. A recent Monmouth University poll found that, of the current 41 percent of Americans who approve of the job he is doing, 61 percent say they cannot see Mr. Trump doing anything that would make them disapprove of him. (A similar share of the other side says there is nothing Mr. Trump could do — other than resigning — to get them to like him.)

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Spiegel: Would-Be Reformer Saakashvili Cast Out of Ukraine

It soon became apparent, however, that political will in Ukraine wasn't quite so black and white. The new president was no rose revolutionary or staunch reformist, and he wasn't elected with 96 percent of the vote as Saakashvili had been in 2004. Poroshenko was a politician and businessman, a classic product of Ukraine's oligarchic system, in which every major business leader is also involved in politics. [...]

Saakashvili built a new, transparent customs terminal (which never went into operation), established a citizens' office (which had to close again temporarily) and tore down fences that had been illegally set up on beaches (they were put up again). He reduced the size of the civil service and sent armed investigators to the state-owned chemical plant OPZ. [...]

The real reason for the rift remains unclear. Saakashvili says that he had a long argument with Poroshenko during a March meeting in Malta. According to Saakashvili, Poroshenko demanded that he behave himself and stick to the rules, insisting that he criticize others and not just Poroshenko himself - and that if he did so, he could continue his career in Ukrainian politics and would get a seat in parliament. If he did not, though, according to Saakashvili's account, Poroshenko said "individual measures" would be taken, though he failed to elaborate.

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Vox: I've studied the history of Confederate memorials. Here's what to do about them.

But the story of the monuments is even stranger than many people realize. Few if any of the monuments went through any of the approval procedures that we now commonly apply to public art. Typically, groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), which claimed to represent local community sentiment (whether they did or did not), funded, erected, and dedicated the monuments. As a consequence, contemporaries, especially African Americans, who objected to the erection of monuments had no realistic opportunity to voice their opposition. [...]

A smaller number of monuments, like the one recently toppled in Durham, were indeed funded with public money — but an asterisk must be attached to the word “public.” In 1922, Confederate veterans in Durham persuaded the state legislature to allocate $5,000 of county taxes to fund the monument. No one asked black residents, who were denied the right to vote by Jim Crow laws, whether they supported spending their tax dollars on this public, political statement. [...]

It is hardly coincidence that the cluttering of the state’s landscape with Confederate monuments coincided with two major national cultural projects: first, the “reconciliation” of the North and the South, and second, the imposition of Jim Crow and white supremacy in the South. As part of the process of national reconciliation, white Northerners agreed to tolerate the commemoration of Confederates, and they contributed both moral support and funds to the veneration of a few Confederate figures in particular, especially Robert E. Lee. [...]

During the dedication speech, Carr praised Confederate soldiers not just for their wartime valor but also for their defense “of the Anglo Saxon race during the four years after the war” when “their courage and steadfastness saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South.” The “four years after the war” was a clear reference to the period in which the Ku Klux Klan, a white paramilitary organization terrorized blacks and white Republicans who threatened the traditional white hierarchy in the state. Then he boasted that “one hundred yards from where we stand” — and within months of Lee’s 1865 surrender — “I horse whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds because she had maligned and insulted a Southern lady.”

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