“Robin Hood” and Texas School District Borrowing Costs

The “Robin Hood” system of school financing in Texas takes property tax funds from wealthy school districts and gives them to poorer districts. This paper examines Permanent School Fund‐insured, school district debt and discovers that under the “Robin Hood” system, Texas school districts with either Aa or A1 underlying credit ratings have higher borrowing costs than districts with lower ratings. Also, the borrowing costs of Texas school districts with underlying credit ratings of Aa and A1 are higher than those for non‐Texas, privately insured school districts with the same ratings, while the borrowing costs of A and Baa‐rated Texas school districts are lower.     

Circle sentencing in Canada: A partnership of the community and the criminal justice system

Throughout North America, there has been an increasing interest in the development of alternative forums for dispute resolution that may more effectively address the needs of victims, offenders, and the community. Concurrent with this has been an attempt to alter the adversarial framework of the criminal justice system. This has included the development and implementation of case processing strategies premised on restorative justice and attempting to secure the participation of communities as partners in the resolution of disputes. One particularly innovative initiative is circle sentencing, which has been implemented in several communities in the Yukon, Canada. The procedure by which cases are processed in circle sentencing is outlined and the involvement of the offender, the victim, the community, and the territorial court are discussed.     

Fascism as Action through Time (Or How It Can Happen Here)

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how fascism may be identified by its actions, the stages through which a fascist rule takes power, and how to recognize it before it does so. The thesis is that a fascist takeover of a democratic government is rapid and unexpected. Its goal is a revolutionary reversal of representative government in the name of the people, while it accomplishes the opposite: a single-party corporate regime that replaces individual liberty with subtle, bureaucratic, and overt types of coercion. Rather than generate a generic definition of the many types of fascism, it is more useful to study how it affects the lives of ordinary people, the milieu out of which it develops, and what its precursors look like. Understanding fascism entails studying it from the point of view of those who lived under it and recorded their experiences, as well as from the analytic perspectives of social scientists. As Robert O. Paxton observes: “The fascist phenomenon was poorly understood at the beginning in part because it was unexpected.”¹Robert O. Paxton, “The Five Stages of Fascism,” in Fascism: Critical Concepts in Political Science, edited by Roger Griffin, vol. I (2004), Chapter 14, 305–26.View all notes We are facing the question again in 2017 with the surprise election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States by a minority of the popular vote and the evident support of the white nationalist milieu. Paxton proposes a five-stage theory for understanding fascism in its many varieties. A developmental sequence is proposed against which current events in the United States may be assessed.     

20世纪国际关系领域的基准时间:历史视角中的三次世界大战

基准时间是宏观历史过程中的临界点,标志着一连串的重大变革可能会在较长时间内延续。基准时间具有九条标准,可以分为一等基准时间、二等基准时间和三等基准时间。20世纪的基准时间主要包括三次世界大战(一战、二战和冷战),第二次世界大战前后发生的变革比第一次世界大战和冷战前后的变革都要来得更为深远。将20世纪的三个基准时间置于两个世纪的视角中加以审视,可以突出现代性革命,这种视角能够观察20世纪的三个基准时间在正在展开的"全球性变革"这一大的主题下是否会相互联接、是如何相互联接的。20世纪国际政治的关键事件,都应该被视为19世纪"全球性变革"所引发的发展态势和挑战的后期结果。     

The Popularity Costs of Economic Crisis under Electoral Authoritarianism: Evidence from Russia

While a large literature recognizes that economic crises threaten the stability of electoral autocracies, we know relatively little about how citizens form economic perceptions and how they attribute blame for worsening conditions in these regimes. To gain traction on these questions, I exploit subnational variation in economic performance across Russia's regions during a recent downturn, combining regionally representative surveys of more than 67,000 voting‐age respondents with data on growth and unemployment. Contrary to conventional wisdom that citizens are passive consumers of propaganda, I show that they extract objective economic information from personal experience and local conditions. Moreover, I find that they give greater weight to this information where regional party dominance makes economic performance a clearer indicator of the ruling party's competence and when they believe the media are biased. These results suggest limits on illiberal regimes' ability to exploit informational asymmetries to bolster popular support during economic downturns.     

As Clear as MUD: Characteristics,Objectives, and Strategies of the Opposition in Bolivarian Venezuela

Since President Hugo Chávez was first elected in 1998, the Venezuelan opposition seems to have alternated between institutional and extra‐institutional power strategies at different junctures. To help explain this pattern, this article constructs a novel theoretical framework from critical readings of both general theory and accounts of the Venezuelan opposition. It proposes that the strategies should be viewed as dialectical rather than discrete. On this basis, it finds that while the Venezuelan opposition has undergone important changes toward institutionalization in its composition, discursive emphasis, and strategic direction, close readings of opposition texts, interviews with opposition actors, and observations of street demonstrations all reveal continuity with previous rupturist and extra‐institutional tendencies. Both strategies therefore must be considered to achieve a fuller, more comprehensive vision of the Venezuelan opposition; this conclusion has important theoretical implications for the study of opposition in the wider region.     

A critique of some recent victim-centered theories of nonconsequentialism

Law and Philosophy - Recently, Gerhard Øverland and Alec Walen have developed novel and interesting theories of nonconsequentialism. Unlike other nonconsequentialist theories such as the...     

Sample Mining and Data Mining: Combined Real-Time and Retrospective Approaches for the Identification of Emerging Novel Psychoactive Substances

Novel psychoactive substances (NPS) are synthetic drugs that pose serious public health and safety concerns. A multitude of NPS have been identified in the United States, often implicated in forensic investigations. The most common and effective manner for identifying NPS is by use of mass spectrometry and the true utility lies within nontargeted acquisition techniques. During this study, a liquid chromatography quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (LC-QTOF-MS) assay was developed, validated, and implemented for forensic toxicology testing. A SCIEX TripleTOF™ 5600 + with SWATH^® acquisition was used. Resulting data were compared against an extensive library database containing more than 800 compounds. The LC-QTOF-MS assay was applied to the reanalysis of biological sample extracts to discover emergent NPS. More than 3,000 sample extracts were analyzed, and more than 20 emerging NPS were detected for the first time. Among these were isopropyl-U-47700, 3,4-methylenedioxy-U-47700, fluorofuranylfentanyl, N-methyl norfentanyl, 2F-deschloroketamine, 3,4-methylenedioxy-alpha-PHP, eutylone, and N-ethyl hexedrone.