The Atlantic: The Hubris of Hezbollah

This matters because the next big war in the Middle East, between Hezbollah and Israel, will begin because Hezbollah has vastly increased the size and sophistication of its arms in Lebanon despite clear and consistent warnings from Israel and the international community not to do so. [...]

Washington and its allies often view Iran, Hezbollah’s sponsors, in a similar way—which is to say we often give them more credit for being master strategists than they deserve. Tehran is so patient, America’s Gulf Arab partners lament. Well, yes, but its slow, steady strategy to arm, train, and equip sectarian Shia militias across the Middle East is a recipe for sowing instability in its own neighborhood. The Iranian regime, which can be tactically very clever, is creating states in which it will always have powerful proxies and partners, but will never have the kind of peace in which the vast (and growing) arsenals of the region are not pointed at Tehran. [...]

After its humiliating defeat of Israel in 2006, and despite the steadily improving capabilities of the Lebanese military, Hezbollah convinced many Lebanese that only it could truly defend Lebanon from Israel. Never mind the fact that it was a wrong-headed Hezbollah raid into Israeli territory that kicked off the fighting. Similarly, a broad cross-section of Lebanon’s population—including much of its Christian community—buys into Hezbollah’s argument that Hezbollah and its arms also protect Lebanon from the crazed Sunni extremists it has been fighting in Syria and who threaten Lebanon. And there’s some truth to this! Hezbollah is indeed fighting crazed Sunni extremists in Syria. [...]

Blowback was inevitable. For the past several years, Israel has been warning Hezbollah, first indirectly and then publicly, about its “red lines” in Syria, which included the transfer of sophisticated weapons from Syria into Lebanon. Outgoing Israeli air force chief Amir Eshel later revealed Israel had struck Hezbollah arms caches and convoys in Syria over 100 times.

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The Atlantic: When Mormons Aspired to Be a ‘White and Delightsome’ People

One group, however, has taken a slightly different path: Mormons. While a majority of Mormons voted for Trump in the 2016 election, he fared far worse than previous Republican presidential candidates among the minority religious group. According to The Salt Lake Tribune, many in Mormon-heavy Utah doubted the president’s moral character and strength as a role model.

Like other religious groups, Mormons have a complicated history around race. Until a few decades ago, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints taught that they “shall be a white and a delightsome people,” a phrase taken from the Book of Mormon. Until the 1970s, the LDS Church also restricted black members’ participation in important rituals, and prohibited black men from becoming priests. [...]

Mueller: Politics of respectability is huge. Mormons engage in respectability campaigning that is not unlike a lot of black church-going communities in the early 20th century. They’re trying to present themselves to mainstream, white, partisan gatekeepers as pious, patriotic, family-oriented, hardworking, contributing to the society, and willing to fight for the American flag in war. But unlike black Americans, Mormons were more easily accepted because of their skin pigment. [...]

Mueller: When Mormons disavow their past, it’s not simply disavowing institutional history. It’s pointing out what’s wrong with past leaders. Because of continuing revelation—the Mormon belief that their leaders are speaking messages directly from God—it’s really hard to disavow the prophets. If you start disavowing the prophets of the past, that undercuts the whole premise that God provides revelations to his people in the present day.

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Vox: The world’s fastest-growing refugee crisis is taking place in Myanmar. Here’s why.

Entire villages have been burned to the ground. Women have been raped. Rohingya refugees report that soldiers shot at them as they fled. Along the border with Bangladesh, there are reports that the military has laid land mines to ensure those fleeing won’t return. Though independent observers have no access to the region, the Myanmar government now says 175 villages in the region — 30 percent of all Rohingya villages — are empty. [...]

Meanwhile, in a Facebook post on Sunday, Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the head of Myanmar’s military, was dismissive: “They have demanded recognition as Rohingya, which has never been an ethnic group in Myanmar.” [...]

The world has turned to Aung San Suu Kyi — a dissident turned political leader who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and was often likened to Nelson Mandela — for answers. Now that she has become Myanmar’s de facto top civilian leader, she’s being widely criticized for failing to speak out against the violence. She abruptly canceled a planned trip to New York for next week’s United Nations General Assembly as her critics grew louder. On Sunday, UN Secretary General António Guterres told the BBC, “She will have a chance to reverse the situation, if she does not reverse the situation now, the tragedy will be absolutely horrible.” He was referring to a speech she is expected to deliver on Tuesday. [...]

In Myanmar, even the word “Rohingya” itself is taboo: The country’s leaders do not use it, and some asked the international community not to use the name. Buddhist leaders instead refer to Rohingya as “Bengali” — in essence labeling them immigrants and foreigners from Bangladesh. They are not included among the 135 ethnic minorities officially recognized by the state. State leaders consider them foreign interlopers with no real ties to the country.

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Vox: What really happened in 2016, in 7 charts

Exit polls indicate that a majority of voters were persuaded by Clinton’s arguments that Trump was unqualified and temperamentally unsuited for the presidency, but a decent swathe of voters who agreed with her about that voted third party rather than for Trump’s opponent — ultimately denying Clinton the victory. [...]

Comparing exit polls from 2016 (left) to 2012 (right) we see that while Clinton did worse with voters overall than Barack Obama, she did gain 1 percentage point more of the white women’s vote — rising from 42 percent to 43 percent. Most white women, however, preferred Trump. And though Trump did no better with white men than Romney had, Clinton did considerably worse than Obama. [...]

Clinton, the first woman major party presidential nominee, won the votes of most American women. But this is entirely typical for a Democrat of any gender. Obama won women twice, John Kerry won women in 2004, and Al Gore won women in 2000. You have to go all the way back to Michael Dukakis in 1988 to find a Democrat losing the women’s vote. Conversely, Trump carried white women, just as every Republican Party nominee has done for generation or two. [...]

Conversely, there’s fairly strong evidence that James Comey’s October letter to Congress about the discovery of what turned out to have been new copies of already-reviewed emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop did swing national opinion enough to make a difference.

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Katoikos: A statesman without a state

Firstly, and by far most importantly, there’s Juncker’s outright rejection of the idea of a two-tire or multi-speed Europe, which has gained traction both among practitioners and in the academia. If he has his way, there will be no institutionalization of the core-periphery partition on the continent and no “second class” citizens of the EU.

Secondly, the transnationalization of the elections for the European Parliament would be unlocked via the introduction of continent-wide lists and strengthening of the Euro-parties, so that this body would truly represent the citizens’ European interests, just as their national interests are represented in their national parliaments or the Council of the European Union. [...]

The extraordinary about all of the above measures is that they do not require opening the Pandora’s box of treaty change. The EU constitutional make-up would continue to be a tertium genus, something between an intergovernmental organisation and a state. The Lisbon Treaty would continue to equally protect both those who dread more Europe and those who would relegate the nation-state to the past.

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Al Jazeera: Iraq top court rules to suspend Kurdish referendum

The Supreme Court declared the ruling on Monday, which calls for all preparations for the September 25 vote to be halted, following a review of multiple "requests to stop the referendum".

"The supreme court has issued the order to suspend organising the referendum set for September 25 ... until it examines the complaints it has received over this plebiscite being unconstitutional," it said in a statement. [...]

"What we see at the moment is that the Iraqi parliament is trying to use all the legal mechanisms that exist in this country and say that the referendum is against the constitution, which the Kurds have signed and helped write in 2005." [...]

"At this point, you have to remember that the background to all of this is a really sour relationship between Erbil and Baghdad for some time now, even though there has been some military cooperation in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS)."

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IFLScience: The Man Who Single-Handedly Saved Us All From Nuclear War Has Died

Back in 1983, he was a Lieutenant Colonel aged 44 in the Soviet Air Defense Forces. On September 26 of that year, he was stationed in a missile detection bunker near Moscow, and it was his job to look for any surprise intercontinental ballistic missile launches from any territory allied with the United States. If he did, it was potentially his role to authorize the launch of similarly destructive Soviet missiles, to ensure the principle of mutually assured destruction (MAD). [...]

That day in September, warning lights blared, and the computer system told him that five nuclear missiles were heading to the Soviet Union and would arrive in less than 20 minutes. That meant that the USSR had less than that to launch a counter-offensive that, if he did, would have destroyed Washington DC and would have likely triggered an all-out nuclear offensive on both sides.

The siren was furiously blaring, and the computer gave him the option to launch. Indeed, his superior officers thought that he should, but taking a look at the data, Petrov concluded that this was a mistake. Despite the fact that to many it looked like a genuine launch, it was more likely a satellite error.

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FiveThirtyEight: Trump’s Popularity Has Dipped Most In Red States

Although Trump is quite unpopular, the political map hasn’t changed much in the eight months since Trump won (not surprisingly). Compared to his standing nationally, Trump is still strong in key swing states.2 He has, however, experienced a disproportionate drop off in his popularity in red states, suggesting the president’s base isn’t as solid as it once was. [...]

Trump’s continued popularity in the Midwest (relatively speaking) is important because (i) there are a ton of Electoral College votes in those states, and (ii) it shows that Democrats still have a problem there. That may also mean that Clinton didn’t lose the election because she was uniquely unpopular in key swing states. (She likely didn’t lose Wisconsin, for example, because she didn’t campaign there, as some have argued.) Trump may just have outsized appeal in the Midwest. Or perhaps the region — which used to lean slightly more Democratic than the nation as a whole — has simply become more Republican-leaning relative to the country. That trend could have little to do with Clinton or Trump. [...]

But even if this polling is perfect, Trump still might not have lost ground, per se. Trump was able to win in 2016 in large part because he was able to win a decent share of the vote among people who held an unfavorable view of him. That group of voters — we’ve dubbed them “Reluctant Trump voters” — may have been more plentiful in red states.6 In deeply red Kentucky, for example, Trump lost among people who held an unfavorable view of him by just 40 percentage points. In deeply blue California, he lost this same group by 74 points.

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The Guardian: Would you Adam and Eve it? Why creation story is at heart of a new spiritual divide

A YouGov poll, commissioned by Newman University in Birmingham, has found that 72% of atheists polled believe that someone who is religious would not accept evolutionary science. In fact, only 19% of religious respondents in the poll rejected Darwinian thinking in favour of a literal reading of the Book of Genesis.

According to the research, nearly two-thirds of Britons – as well as nearly three-quarters of atheists – think Christians have to accept the assertion in Genesis that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. But just 16% of believers accept the creation myth – according to which, in the words of the questionnaire, “humans and other living things were created by God and have always existed in their current form”. Only 9% of all Britons reject evolutionary theory. [...]

“The number of mainstream Christians – certainly in this country – who have qualms about evolutionary theory is very small indeed,” said Williams. “But perceptions are different, and the presence of US-style fundamentalism in the popular imagination means that a growing number who know nothing of the actual history of intellectual discussion of these questions assume that all religious believers must be committed to combating scientific accounts of the universe’s beginnings.”

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