Vox: Paul Ryan’s long con

To understand the irony and duplicity of that statement, you need to understand Ryan’s career. After the profligacy of the George W. Bush years and the rise of the Tea Party, Ryan rocketed to the top ranks of his party by warning that mounting deficits under President Obama threatened the “most predictable economic crisis we have ever had in this country.” Absent the fiscal responsibility that would accompany Republican rule, we were facing nothing less than “the end of the American dream.” [...]

I was among the reporters who took Ryan’s reboot seriously. “To move us to surpluses,” I wrote of his 2010 proposal, “Ryan’s budget proposes reforms that are nothing short of violent. Medicare is privatized. Seniors get a voucher to buy private insurance, and the voucher’s growth is far slower than the expected growth of health-care costs. Medicaid is also privatized. The employer tax exclusion is fully eliminated, replaced by a tax credit that grows more slowly than medical costs.” [...]

But more important than the differences between Ryan and Trump are the similarities. Yes, Ryan is decorous and polite where Trump is confrontational and uncouth, but the say-anything brand of politics that so outrages Trump’s critics is no less present in Ryan’s recent history. How else can we read a politician who rose to power promising to reduce deficits only to increase them at every turn? Or a politician who raked in good press for promising anti-poverty policies that he subsequently refused to pass? [...]

In important ways, Trump is not a break from the Republican Party’s recent past but an acceleration of it. A party that acculturates itself, its base, and its media sphere to constant nonsense can hardly complain when other political entrepreneurs notice that nonsense sells and decide to begin marketing their own brand of flimflam.

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Vox: 2018 was by far the worst year on record for gun violence in schools

According to data from the US Naval Postgraduate School, there were 94 school gun violence incidents this year — a record high since 1970, which is as far back as the data goes, and 59 percent higher than the previous record of 59 in 2006. [...]

Separately, the project also tracks deaths. By this metric, 2018 was also the worst year on record. So far, 55 people, including the shooter, were killed in school gun violence. The second-worst annual death toll was 40 in 1993. (To put these numbers in context, there were nearly 39,000 gun deaths, including homicides and suicides, in the US in 2016.) [...]

But it doesn’t seem that 2018 was a particularly abnormal year for mass shootings, regardless of whether they happened on school grounds. The Gun Violence Archive’s data, visualized by Vox in map form, indicates that there have been 328 mass shootings so far in 2018, or nearly one a day, resulting in 365 killed and 1,301 wounded. That’s roughly in line with recent years going back to 2015, which have averaged about one mass shooting a day. (The Gun Violence Archive defines mass shootings as any incident in which four or more people were shot but not necessarily killed, excluding the shooter, in a similar time or place, which differs from some other groups’ definitions.)[...]

Second, the US has a ton of guns. It has far more than not just other developed nations but any other country, period. Estimated for 2017, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US was 120.5 guns per 100 residents, meaning there were more firearms than people. The world’s second-ranked country was Yemen, a quasi-failed state torn by civil war, where there were 52.8 guns per 100 residents, according to an analysis from the Small Arms Survey.

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Spiegel: Rough Road Ahead for the Merkel Dynasty

Indeed, after the campaign in recent weeks and after their speeches on Friday, nobody could say that the CDU did not have a clear alternative. And ultimately, it chose Kramp-Karrenbauer by the slim margin of 51.75 percent to 48.52 percent. Merkel had brought her to Berlin from her position as governor of the tiny state of Saarland in February of this year to prepare her for this moment. Now, AKK, as she is known, takes over from Merkel as the new leader of the party.

Kramp-Karrenbauer did not want to break with the course charted by Angela Merkel. Indeed, she took a page out of Gerhard Schröder's book, who at the end of the Helmut Kohl era promised that he didn't want to do everything differently, but he did intend to do some things better. In a party that has traditionally tended to shy away from taking risks and embarking on political experiments, her message proved more appealing than that of her rival. [...]

Her first task, however, is that of ensuring that the party doesn't split apart, which appears to be the main challenge facing her at the moment. The race between her and Merz was extremely close, with just 35 votes out of 999 separating the two. The fact that a woman has been chosen to replace a woman as the leader of a party that had been run by men for half a century shows just how fundamentally Merkel has modernized the CDU. But just as many feared that Merz was in it primarily to get revenge on Merkel for having cut short his political ambitions almost two decades ago, Kramp-Karrenbauer will now have to contend with those who contend that she represents the continuation of a Merkel dynasty. The chancellor, in any case, would seem to have taken a huge step toward choosing her own successor in the Chancellery.

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The New Yorker: Bullying Iran will not work

The delay accentuates the sensation that Brexit, and British politics, is now entering a black hole, in which anything is possible. May is not an enthralling figure. Her flaws are plain to see. But her strategy for steering the nation through its deepest and most complex political crisis of the past half-century has functioned until this moment. May took office in 2016, shortly after the U.K. unexpectedly voted to leave the E.U. Earlier this year, she began to reveal a series of messy compromises that would achieve Brexit but allow Britain to stay more or less entwined with its largest trading partner. Several ministers, including Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, and David Davis, the Brexit negotiator, resigned. But May’s plan, and her leadership, remained intact. Her Conservative government, which does not have a majority in Parliament, won every vote that it needed to, sometimes by a slim margin, and the mighty business progressed. That changed with the publication of May’s final deal, the result of eighteen months of agonizing negotiations with the E.U., on November 14th. Since then, the authority has been whooshing out of Downing Street like air from a balloon. In eleven years in office, Margaret Thatcher lost four votes in the House of Commons. Last Wednesday, in a prelude to the main event this week, May suffered three Brexit-related defeats in sixty-three minutes. [...]

The thing that pro-Brexit M.P.s really loathe about May’s deal is a protocol, known as “the Irish backstop,” that deals with the U.K.’s border with Ireland. The backstop, an insurance policy in case future negotiations break down, could leave Britain inside the E.U.’s customs union, theoretically forever. Although neither side wants this, Brexiteers have come to regard the backstop as inevitable, like millenarians contemplating an ill sign. “It will precede the breakup of the Union,” Dorries said in Parliament. She was followed by Angus MacNeil, of the Scottish National Party, who compared Brexit to a piece of Laurel and Hardy slapstick. “Crazy, silly, nuts, wacky, cuckoo, potty, daft, cracked, dippy, bonkers—the list goes on,” MacNeil said. “In Gaelic, I could say that it is gòrach, faoin, amaideach, caoicheil, air bhoil—the list again goes on.” Damian Green, a former Conservative minister who in 2017 briefly served as May’s de-facto deputy, was one of the few voices to support the Prime Minister. Green warned of the risks that would follow if Parliament voted down May’s agreement, including the danger of Britain leaving the E.U. next spring with no deal at all, a calamity that would threaten food supplies, crash the pound and bring about a prolonged recession. “I am afraid,” Green said. “I am afraid for my constituents and my country if no deal is where we find ourselves in March.” [...]

If May can’t change her deal, then something else will have to give. In recent weeks, as the Prime Minister’s problems have mounted, talk has increased of a general election or—more breathlessly—a second referendum on leaving the E.U. Both would come with their own complications, and both would require the support of the House of Commons, which is in short supply for anything at the moment. As things stand, the only part of Brexit written into Britain’s statute books is a time and a date: 11 p.m., March 29, 2019. Unless a plan is agreed to, the U.K. will crash out of the E.U. without a formal economic or diplomatic relationship of any kind—a previously unthinkable scenario that becomes more thinkable with each passing day. “The problem is that Brexit is everything but rationality,” the E.U. official told me. This afternoon, the pound fell to a twenty-month low against the dollar. May said that she would step up contingency planning for a no-deal Brexit as she plots her final, desperate negotiation. “If we will the ends, we must also will the means,” she told M.P.s. But Britain is a country that only knows what it doesn’t want. Without an end, there are no means. And there is no safety in sight.

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Politico: Belgium’s identity crisis isn’t about migration

The gamble Michel is making, therefore, isn’t so much about domestic policy as it is about Belgium’s credibility in Europe. It’s about choosing its camp: either among the cheerleaders of Europe and liberalism, like Emmanuel Macron, or among the populist opportunists, like Viktor Orbán and Sebastian Kurz. [...]

The road ahead is still uncertain. For now, he still holds the keys to Rue de la Loi 16, the official seat of the Belgian government. A new minority Cabinet will replace his old team. He’ll take his jet to Marrakech, where he’ll join other leaders in signing the U.N.’s Global Compact for Migration — the non-binding text that proved to be a bridge too far for his biggest coalition partner. [...]

It was a bold move, in 2014, for Michel, a Francophone liberal and part of a younger generation of Belgian politicians, to team up with the conservative Flemish nationalists. Their leader, Antwerp mayor Bart De Wever, who dreams about Flemish independence, was never an ideal partner for the federal government. [...]

In his four years as prime minister, Michel has made a show of his unconditional support for the European cause, for multilateralism, the U.N. and, of course, his close friendships with young leaders like Macron or Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Theirs is a club Michel wants to belong to.

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Politico: A weakened Merkel still gets her way

The scale of Kramp-Karrenbauer’s challenge in uniting the CDU is clear from the margin of her victory — she squeaked home with less than 52 percent of the vote in a run-off against Friedrich Merz, a veteran Merkel critic who wanted to shift the party to the right. Another right-winger, Health Minister Jens Spahn, was eliminated in the first round of voting but, at the age of 38, his influence is likely to grow in the years ahead. [...]

AKK has been portrayed as a mini-Merkel. But she is much more of a traditional CDU politician than the chancellor. A Catholic, she joined the party in her late teens and worked her way up through local and regional politics to become premier of Saarland, in Germany’s far west. She is socially conservative, opposed to gay marriage, and has taken a tougher line than Merkel on migration — the issue that has become a lightning rod for the chancellor’s critics.

She also advocates bringing back military service as part of a plan for young people to spend a year working for the benefit of society. Merkel abolished conscription — a decision she defended in Hamburg, to only a smattering of applause. [...]

Not only did the party choose Kramp-Karrenbauer as its leader, delegates also supported the new U.N. pact on migration — an accord that has been attacked by right-wingers across Europe.

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Vox: Leaving Baltimore behind

It’s called the Baltimore Housing Mobility Program (BRHP). It started in 2002, and has since moved more than 4,000 people out of the city. Some see it as a way to give low-income Baltimore residents new opportunities in neighborhoods that would otherwise be out of reach. [...]

Baltimore gets a lot of attention for its problems. In addition to its crime rate, nearly a quarter of its residents live in poverty. Baltimore and its surrounding suburbs are starkly segregated by race and class — a pattern set in motion by policymakers in the early 20th century that continues to this day.[...]

The vast majority of BRHP participants live in Baltimore, often in public housing, and always in neighborhoods with a great deal of poverty. Nearly all of them are black. They’re moving to “Opportunity Areas,” determined by the program through a mix of census data and other metrics. These areas have a lot more wealth, including job opportunities and resource-rich schools. Residents tend to be white.

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Quartz: Amazon and Microsoft claim AI can read human emotions. Experts say the science is shaky

“The problem is now AI is being applied in a lot of social contexts. Anthropology, psychology, and philosophy are all incredibly relevant, but this is not the training of people who come from a technical [computer science] background.” says Kate Crawford, co-founder of AI Now, distinguished research professor at NYU and principal researcher at Microsoft Research. “Essentially the narrowing of AI has produced a kind of guileless acceptance of particular strands of psychological literature that have been shown to be suspect.”

Crawford and the AI Now report refer to the system commonly used to codify facial expressions into seven core emotions, originating with psychologist Paul Ekman. His work studying facial expressions in communities separated from modern society suggests that facial expressions are universal. The idea of universal facial expressions is convenient for AI researchers, since much the artificial intelligence in use today must categorizes complex images or sounds. [...]

But the way emotions are expressed on the face could be much more contextual than previously believed—calling the validity of Ekman’s categories into question. ”A knitted brow may mean someone is angry, but in other contexts it means they are thinking, or squinting in bright light,” wrote psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett Barrett (paywall) in the Financial Times in 2017. “A hypothetical emotion-reading robot would need tremendous knowledge and context to guess someone’s emotional experiences.”

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statista: Where People Do And Don't Believe In Human Rights

A new Ipsos MORI poll of 23,249 adults in 28 countries has explored feelings about human rights across the world. One of its core findings is that 43 percent of people globally agree that everyone in their country enjoys the same basic human rights. When asked if there is such thing as human rights, opinion varied hugely by country, with a selection of countries polled visualized on the following infographic.

In Turkey, 92 percent of those polled said there is such thing as human rights while only five percent said there is not. 85 percent of Chinese respondents also agreed there is such thing as human rights, along with 80 percent of Americans. Interestingly, 29 percent of people in Poland say there is no such thing as human rights.

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