| | | | Fareed: Democracy Is Decaying. America Isn't immune | | Democracy is sliding around the globe, Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column. "The American system is stronger than most, but it is not immune to these forces of democratic decay."
"More than 20 years ago, in an essay in Foreign Affairs, I warned that the distinctive problem facing the world was 'illiberal democracy' — elected governments that systematically abused their power and restricted freedoms," Fareed notes. "I subsequently worried that America could head down this path. Most people dismissed the danger because American democracy, they said, was robust, with strong institutions that could weather any storm. Press freedom, after all, is guaranteed under the First Amendment. But consider Poland and Hungary, which not only have strong institutions of their own but also exist within the embrace of rule-based European Union institutions that have explicit constitutional protections for freedom of the press.
"'An institution,' Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, 'is the lengthened shadow of one man.' Institutions are collections of rules and norms agreed upon by human beings. If leaders attack, denigrate and abuse them, they will be weakened, and this, in turn, will weaken the character and quality of democracy."
| | America's gun problem isn't just an American problem, writes Jonah Shepp for New York Magazine. President Trump might warn about Mexican gangs bringing violence here, but the United States has a deadly export of its own.
"The National Rifle Association likes to call the Colt AR-15 'America's rifle': They and the many imitations manufactured since Colt's patents expired in 1977 are the most popular type of rifle in the US, with millions in circulation," Shepp writes.
"They're also pretty popular with Mexican drug cartels, as the Government Accountability Office noted in a 2016 report. According to data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, 73,684 firearms seized in Mexico and traced from 2009 to 2014 originated in the United States, over half of which were long guns.
"These represented 70 percent of the more than 100,000 firearms seized in Mexico and submitted to US authorities for tracing (not the total number of guns seized in Mexico during those years). The original owners of many of these weapons could not be traced."
| | Innovation Influencers CONTENT BY  With Chinese companies investing in Africa, 41% of business leaders in Africa now see China as the world's innovation champion. Find out how business executives see regional influence in innovation: explore GE's newly released 2018 Global Innovation Barometer. | | |
Another Mass Shooting, Another Fatuous Video Game Discussion
| | | It felt almost inevitable that President Trump and others would try to point a finger at video games in the wake of last week's Florida school shooting, suggests Katherine Cross in The Guardian. The problem with that line of thought? There's simply no evidence that "violent video games will turn anyone into a criminal or a mass shooter."
"One need only look to every other nation on earth, where video games are widely available but guns are, conspicuously, not. Though Germany and Australia are often bedeviled by similarly tedious debates about whether 'violent video games' should be banned, such games are still widely played in both nations and neither is plagued by the relentlessly frequent mass shootings that afflict the US. But both countries have dramatically tougher gun laws, and neither conceives of gun ownership as an inalienable right." | | Don't Hold Your Breath Over Team Trump's Parting Gift for Kim | | The White House announced the "largest ever" package of sanctions against North Korea on Friday, as Ivanka Trump began her trip to South Korea to attend the close of the Winter Olympics. The sanctions target shipping companies and vessels believed to be helping the country evade UN sanctions. But Mark Landler writes in The New York Times that it's "not clear how successfully the United States could enforce the new measures."
"Cutting off the illegal trade, analysts said, will require interdicting ships at sea, and North Korea could well regard a blockade or forced inspections of its vessels as an act of war."
"Illicit ship-to-ship transfers of oil and coal on the high seas have allowed North Korea to avoid the worst of the pressure from sanctions against its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. The smuggling has been linked to China and Russia, increasing tensions with the United States."
| | How Russia Could Create Chaos in November | | It's tempting to assume that Russian meddling in this year's midterms voting will take the form of altering vote tallies. But if the goal is to sow uncertainty in Americans' minds then there is a more effective approach, suggests Nicholas Weaver for Lawfare: "Simple strategies in deregistering voters could cause chaos in a very public manner."
"This could be achieved by targeting as many voter registration databases as possible. Consider what would happen if 10 to 20 percent of voters were randomly deregistered in the biggest Republican precincts in multiple House districts. The result would be long lines and voters giving up and walking away. That visual statement of interference is the objective. Imagine how the various echo chambers would react to such electoral chaos," Weaver writes.
The best way to defend against this vulnerability? "It's key to have a separate system that records every addition or deletion from the voter rolls, and a copy of the log should be put on write-only media (such as writable DVDs). Having a copy of this data available at each polling place, and using an independent system from the normal record book, would allow poll workers to quickly check and recover data in the event of an attack on registration records."
| | Olympics Price Tag? A Snip at About $10 million…Per Hour | | Residents of Pyeongchang will be saying goodbye to the Winter Olympics as they wrap up this weekend. They will also say farewell to their $109 million Olympic stadium, which will have been used a grand total of…four times, notes Zeeshan Aleem for Vox.
"The reason Pyeongchang plans to destroy the arena is pretty straightforward: The county it's situated in has about 40,000 people," Aleem notes.
"The spectacular impracticality of Pyeongchang's Olympic stadium isn't an outlier among Olympics venues — it's actually rather typical. And it's a powerful symbol of why fewer and fewer cities around the world want to host the Olympics."
"The drop-off is striking. The 2004 Games garnered bids from 12 cities around the world. For the 2020 Games, the pool shrank to five bidders. Then the 2022 Winter Olympics and 2024 Summer Olympics managed to get only two bidders each." | | | | | | |
