David Sterman and Nate Rosenblatt for New America: The Arab Spring and its aftermath created opportunities for jihadists to organize and mobilize on a wider scale than previously possible. Jihadists quickly organized in the aftermath of the Arab Spring of 2011, creating the foundations for ISIS’ mobilization of fighters en masse.
- Libya and Tunisia, where governments fell during the Arab Spring, produced more fighters per capita than Morocco and Algeria, where governments survived local protests. Eighteen of the top 20 provinces ISIS fighters came from in North Africa were in Libya or Tunisia.
- In Tunisia, ISIS built upon local Salafi-Jihadist recruiting networks such as Ansar al-Sharia, which took advantage of the post-Ben Ali environment of political openness to openly promote jihad.
- In Libya, jihadists were able to operate and recruit openly amid the patchwork of militias that emerged following Muammar Ghaddafi’s fall. More than half of Libyan ISIS fighters reported having prior experience in jihadist conflicts, almost entirely in Libya.
Most provinces in North Africa with high rates of ISIS fighter recruitment were economically and politically marginalized. They had high rates of underemployment, lack of political representation, and poor access to social services compared to their national contexts. The geographic origins of ISIS recruits from North Africa suggest the group took advantage of long-standing frustrations in marginalized communities to mobilize fighters.
Boston’s affordable housing crisis
Richard Kahlenberg for the Century Foundation: Massachusetts, like California, has two ingredients that contribute to a favorable climate for curtailing exclusionary zoning: a liberal population and a housing affordability crisis. In a study of housing affordability by Moody Analytics and U.S. News & World Report, Massachusetts ranked 44th of 50 states, making it one of the least affordable states in the country for housing.
The median price for single-family homes in the state exceeds $400,000. In Boston, the percentage of homes in the metropolitan area that cost $1 million has nearly doubled in five years. To keep up with demand, planning agencies in the state estimate that 435,000 new housing units need to be built by 2040.
As a coastal city, Boston is limited in its opportunity for growth on one side by the Atlantic Ocean, but researchers have recognized the region as having relatively high levels of exclusionary zoning. To its credit, Massachusetts passed an anti-snob-zoning law in 1969 that empowered the state to alter local zoning laws in communities where less than 10 percent of housing stock is deemed affordable. But exclusionary zoning remains a major problem. The Metropolitan Area Planning Council found that in the past 10 years, 200 of the state’s 351 cities and towns have not built any new multifamily housing.
Reformers see the housing affordability crisis as a major impetus for attacking exclusionary zoning. “The housing crisis in greater Boston has forced the issue,” says André Leroux, director of the Massachusetts Smart Growth Alliance, a public interest coalition of housing and environmental groups. “Tough issues do not get tackled until there is a crisis,” he says. He adds that the competition for Amazon’s second headquarters has fueled the conversation about the need for affordable housing.
California kills the golden goose liver
Ilya Shapiro and Reilly Stephens for the Cato Institute: As of 2012, California banned the sale of any product that “is the result of force feeding a bird for the purpose of enlarging the bird’s liver beyond normal size.” This rather clumsy description targeted foie gras.
Animal rights activists have long derided the foodstuff on the theory that the traditional method of production is a moral abomination. In 2005, they succeeded in passing a law that, after a seven-year delay, banned not only force-feeding within the state, but also the sale of any such product produced elsewhere. …
Congress has established uniform standards for poultry products, consistent with federal authority to normalize the flow of interstate commerce, and … California isn’t entitled to override this congressional judgment.
Reasonable people may disagree as to the ethics of food production, and each of us is entitled to consume or eschew what we wish. What we aren’t entitled to do is impose our idiosyncratic ethics on others. Foie gras is a safe, wholesome ingredient — though it may go straight to your hips — consumed by millions around the world. Some disapprove of that, just as some disapprove of animal products altogether.
Jello Biafra long ago warned that in Jerry Brown’s hippie utopia, the suede-denim secret police would force your children to meditate in school. Even he didn’t foresee the possibility of mandatory veganism, that’s where we’re headed if this law is allowed to stand.
In sum, the high court should review Association des Eleveurs de Canards et d’Oies du Quebec v. Becerra, because sometimes state power simply isn’t all it’s quacked up to be.
