Flying Ginsu weapon; targeting the Islamic State; anti-immigrant fervor, and more

The day after the last day of the Maduro dictatorship, the work of rebuilding the country will start. Venezuela’s new government will face the hard task of rebuilding the economy, securing the country, and maintaining the support of the people. Transforming Venezuela back into the stable, prosperous country it was just two decades ago should be a priority for the United States and will require active American support. If benign neglect helps to partly explain how Venezuela arrived at its present state, benign engagement will certainly be necessary to rebuild the country after Maduro.

Targeting the Islamic State, or why the military should invest in artificial intelligence (Hans Vreeland, War on the Rocks)
Some worry that AI will replace accountable human actors in the use of lethal force. Without checks and systems, that is a valid concern. With checks and systems, AI can aid accountable commanders who are confronted with hard moral decisions.

How anti-immigrant fervor built in the early twentieth century (Isaac Chotiner, New Yorker)
In his new book, “The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America,” the journalist Daniel Okrent looks back at how anti-immigrant fervor at the turn of the twentieth century built over the following decades. Specifically, he examines the intellectuals and scientists who, through the eugenics movement, offered ballast and respectability to conservative and progressive opponents of immigration alike. This complicated brew of racist anti-immigrant fervor culminated in the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act, of 1924, which set quotas for Southern and Eastern European immigrants and banned Asian immigrants for decades. Okrent’s history has obvious echoes today, but the distinct manner in which this debate played out, and the ideological mix of the different sides, offer the reader a startlingly contrast with the racist and demagogic rhetoric of today.

Appeals court rules Trump end of DACA was unlawful (Jacqueline Thomsen, The Hill)
A split federal appeals court on Friday ruled that President Trump’s decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was unlawful because “it was not adequately explained.”
The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia found that the administration’s termination of the program was “arbitrary and capricious,” in line with a prior ruling from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign is being boosted by Putin apologists (Lachlan Markay, Sam Stein, Daily Beast)
The Hawaii congresswoman is quickly becoming the top candidate for Democrats who think the Russian leader is misunderstood.

The U.S. system for “skilled” migrants is broken (Krishnadev Calamur, The Atlantic)
Obtaining an H-1B visa was always complicated. Now it’s even harder to get one.

What we learned investigating a network of Islamophobic Facebook pages (Alex Kasprak, Snopes)
Snopes traced at least 24 Facebook pages spreading anti-muslim vitriol and conspiracy theory back to one evangelical activist. Here’s why that matters.

Watch what happens when vaccinations drop by 10% (Roby Berman, Big Think)
Don’t believe a small reduction in immunization matters?

Venezuela’s collapse is the worst outside of war in decades, economists say (Anatoly Kurmanaev, New York Times)
Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves. But its oil output, once Latin America’s largest, has fallen faster in the past year than Iraq’s after the American invasion in 2003, according to data from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
Venezuela has lost a tenth of its population in the past two years as people fled, even trekking across mountains, setting off Latin America’s biggest ever refugee crisis.
Venezuela’s hyperinflation, expected to reach 10 million percent this year according to the I.M.F., is on track to become the longest period of runaway price rises since that in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1990s.
“This is essentially a total collapse in consumption,” said Sergi Lanau, deputy chief economist at the Institute of International Finance, a financial trade association.
The institute estimates that the drop in Venezuela’s economic output under Mr. Maduro has undergone the steepest decline by any country not at war since at least 1975.
By year’s end, Venezuela’s gross domestic product will have shrunk by 62 percent since the beginning of the recession in 2013, which coincided with Mr. Maduro coming to power, according to the finance institute’s estimates.