Spencer Ackerman reports on how the US could have deployed mobile connectivity in Egypt:
When Hosni Mubarak shut down Egypt’s internet and cellphone communications, it seemed that all U.S. officials could do was ask him politely to change his mind. But the American military does have a second set of options, if it ever wants to force connectivity on a country against its ruler’s wishes.
The U.S. military has no shortage of devices — many of them classified — that could restore connectivity to a restive populace cut off from the outside world by its rulers.
(Photo: Egyptians take pictures with their cellphones of a burning police station set ablaze by rioters near the Sultan Hassan al-Rifai mosque in central Cairo on January 28, 2011. By Marco Longari/AFP/Getty Images.)
Paula Szuchman's applies economic theories to marriage:
The concept that’s had the most profound impact is loss aversion. Behavioral economists have shown that we hate to lose twice as much as we love to win, and when we sense we’re losing, we get irrational. Loss aversion has been partly blamed for Lehman Brothers’ failure to admit its losses early enough to save the company.
I’m vehemently averse to losing. But now I try to be aware of when I cross into loss-aversion mode during disagreements. Then I call a time-out.
And this interview with behavioral economist Colin Camerer is worth a read. The interviewer asks if there is any free riding in his household. The answer:
No. Here’s why: I am one of the world’s leading experts on psychology, the brain and strategic game theory. But my wife is a woman. So it’s a tie.
James Gibney reviewsArmed Humanitarians, by Nathan Hodge and the future of foreign aid funneled through the military:
The enduring legacy of our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan may well be better, but not more, armed humanitarianism, as when the Pentagon swiftly mobilized aid after Haiti’s earthquake last year and then withdrew once the immediate crisis eased, leaving the Haitians to make their own choices. As Hodge takes pains to show, in nation-building, less is often more.
The outcome of the power struggle in Egypt remains uncertain. But the outcome of the economic struggle is easy to foresee: whoever emerges with power – including Mubarak himself should he survive – will want to resume food subsidies to allay public discontent. Yet Egypt’s economy will be in even worse shape post-protests than before. No democracy in Egypt can survive without an early improvement in the bread situation. So how to pay? International help seems the obvious answer. Yes, reform will be needed in time. Bread is needed now. Which leads back to the first question for those Americans who urge democracy upon a food-short Egypt: How much would you be willing to see America contribute?
It’s no good wishing for a new form of government if you then deny that government the means of survival.
Robert Mackey notes an amusing trend in Tahrir Square:
As Mosa'ab Elshamy, an Egyptian blogger and activist in the square, explained on Friday, perhaps the most bizarre allegation is that the protesters are only staying for free fried chicken. "Pro-mubarak media said we're only staying at Tahrir because foreign powers are giving us KFC meals," he reported on Twitter. Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian journalist posted a link on her @monaeltahawy Twitter feed to this satirical video – uploaded to YouTube over the weekend with English subtitles – in which protesters eating in the square pretend that their food is all supplied by KFC (and that foreign powers pay them 100 euros a day).
As the Arab world democratizes, Beinart advises Israel to adapt:
For a long time, countries like Turkey and Egypt were ruled by men more interested in pleasing the United States than their own people, and as a result, they shielded Israel from their people’s anger. Now more of that anger will find its way into the corridors of power. The Israeli and American Jewish right will see this as further evidence that all the world hates Jews, and that Israel has no choice but to turn further in on itself. But that would be a terrible mistake.
More than ever in the months and years to come, Israelis and American Jews must distinguish hatred of Israel’s policies from hatred of Israel’s very existence. The Turkish government, after all, has maintained diplomatic ties with Israel even as it excoriates Israel’s policies in Gaza. ElBaradei this week reaffirmed Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel even as he negotiates the formation of a government that could well challenge Israel’s policy in Gaza.
Instead of trying to prop up a dying autocratic order, what Israel desperately needs is to begin competing for Middle Eastern public opinion, something American power and Arab tyranny have kept it from having to do.
I'm surprised to see that Claremont McKenna College has run afoul of FIRE, the non-profit that advocates for free speech on American campuses.
Claremont McKenna's (CMC's) policy on "Acceptable E-Mail Usage" provides that "[t]he College's system must not be used to create or transmit material that is derogatory, defamatory, obscene or offensive. Such material includes, but is not limited to, slurs, epithets or anything that might be construed as harassment or disparagement based on race, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, disability, or religious or political beliefs."
This policy is truly breathtaking in its reach. You can be punished for any e-mail that might be construed as disparaging on the basis of religious or political beliefs? Or any e-mail that is found derogatory or offensive by some unspecified standard? Given that e-mail is a widely used mode of communication among college students and faculty, this policy prohibits a large amount of core political and religious expression—the kind of expression that lies at the heart of the First Amendment and that is crucial to the open debate that should characterize a prestigious college like CMC.
When I attended Pomona College, which is right next door, I edited newspapers that appeared on both campuses, and received e-mail disparaging my political views on a weekly basis! Thank goodness none of my interlocutors were punished back then.
After an extremely successful debut, the new Los Angeles literary quarterly, Slake – previously mentioned here – has made it to issue number two. A brief excerpt from a piece about the city's Little Tokyo:
The trapezoid of land still stands in 2011, but it is of course filled with development, condominiums, and fabricated lofts spread like STDs—ugly but real and unavoidable—and a new public railway line. I do not know if the area has a name, if it had a name before the transition, but a decade ago I called it the Golden Trapezoid.
Roaming bums and eccentric, acid-damaged fine artists exchanged nods and plotted their murders quietly among the vacant lots, the few warehouses and factories either abandoned or clandestinely in use, and the shrugging, graffiti-soaked, out-of- service rail depots. Anyone could live or die in the Golden Trap. Red stains and no questions asked. Where packs of wild dogs dragged the rotting, skinned heads of pig and steer carcasses from back-alley cut shops as far away as the Grand Central Market and Chinatown for a safe haven to gnaw, and where, too, other wolves of esoteric passion found safe haven to shoot up in broad daylight.
I lived in a warehouse at the corner of Vignes and First, and down in my hollow you could still buy the company of a Mexican T-girl at Little Pedro’s, one of the only businesses in the GT, for $40. The Little Pedro’s building still stands, but its guts have long since departed. I am mentioning all of this because if I stepped out—I took what little food I ate and much of my grog in Little Tokyo—all the decrepit solitude and fragmented suffering of the Golden Trap went with me, every footstep to pavement, glass to lips, mist to mouth. The dim, explicit, and inescapable hollow bore deep in my sad, beautiful green eyes. I broke hearts with a single glance.
A "day of rage" called for by Syrian opposition members living abroad and scheduled for last Friday and Saturday came and went: the only mass presence detected on the streets of major cities in Syria was that of security forces. ...
Syria is definitely not Tunisia or Egypt.
True, the country suffers from the same problems of unemployment, inflation, corruption, nepotism and authoritarian rule, but structurally Syria is defined by additional facts that need to be taken into account.
Fact 1: Syria has a rather heterogeneous population divided along national, religious, sectarian, regional and socioeconomic lines. The ruling regime survives by manipulating mutual suspicions between these groups and their complex history.
Syria's ruling family, the Assads, come from the minority Alawite sect, which makes up less than 10% of the population. The elite striking units within the country's armed forces, especially the Republican Guard, have a membership drawn almost exclusively from the Alawite community. These units are tasked primarily with ensuring the survival of the ruling regime and have no other national agenda to speak of.
But Syrian President Bashar al-Assad did recently promise political reforms, so, if he keeps his word, the Tunisian revolution seems to have had some indirect influence in speeding up progress in Syria. Meanwhile, Naseem Tarawnah checks in on the situation in neighboring Jordan:
[U]nlike Egypt and Tunisia, the protests that took place in Jordan in the past few weeks, most of which have died down now, were not lead by the youth but rather by much older segments. Even in the few protests where I actually saw young people, typically in Amman, they were not playing the starring role we’re seeing youth play out in Egypt or Tunisia. Supporting roles at best, and often times completely absent in towns like Karak or Irbid. While they are part of the educated but unemployed group, it is a whole other generation that is out there making demands. This older crowd finds its origins in various entities, parties, interest groups and unions, most of which the depoliticized youth population generally do not belong to or care to associate with. I’d argue that had the youth genuinely partaken in these recent protests, we would have seen them last a lot longer, and triple in numbers. And so naturally I wonder, with all this in mind: if Tunisia wasn’t enough to do it, will Egypt be the spark for the youth in this country?
Lawrence Wright has a pretty damning report on Scientology, using Paul Haggis' departure (citing anti-gay sentiment in the Church) as a jumping off point:
But hadn’t certain derogatory references to homosexuality found in some editions of [Scientology founder L. Ron] Hubbard’s books been changed after his death?
[Scientology spokesman Tommy] Davis admitted that that was so, but he maintained that “the current editions are one-hundred-per-cent, absolutely fully verified as being according to what Mr. Hubbard wrote.” Davis said they were checked against Hubbard’s original dictation.
“The extent to which the references to homosexuality have changed are because of mistaken dictation?” I asked.
“No, because of the insertion, I guess, of somebody who was a bigot,” Davis replied.
“Somebody put the material in those—?”
“I can only imagine. . . . It wasn’t Mr. Hubbard,” Davis said, cutting me off.
“Who would’ve done it?”
“I have no idea.”
“Hmm.”
“I don’t think it really matters,” Davis said. “The point is that neither Mr. Hubbard nor the church has any opinion on the subject of anyone’s sexual orientation. . . .”
“Someone inserted words that were not his into literature that was propagated under his name, and that’s been corrected now?” I asked.
“Yeah, I can only assume that’s what happened,” Davis said.
After this exchange, I looked at some recent editions that the church had provided me with. On page 125 of “Dianetics,” a “sexual pervert” is defined as someone engaging in “homosexuality, lesbianism, sexual sadism, etc.” Apparently, the bigot’s handiwork was not fully excised.
As the uprising enters its third week, Al-Masry Al-Youm reports:
State administrative employee salaries and military and civilian pensions will be increased by 15 percent beginning in April, said the Egyptian government on Monday. Egyptian Finance Minister Samir Radwan told reporters that, for the first time ever, increases in pensions will be based on their total values.
Google Inc. executive Wael Ghonim has been released from government custody in Egypt after going missing during massive protests Jan. 28, the U.S. State Department said Monday. ... Mr. Ghonim, Google’s marketing manager for the region and a father of two, has helped run social-networking sites critical of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s government and became a rallying symbol for the demonstrators demanding the resignation of the long-time president.
2030 GMT: Human Rights Watch now says that at least 297 people have been killed since protests began in Egypt. Of those, at least 52 have been confirmed to have been killed in Alexandria.
1145 GMT: A symbolic funeral procession has taken place in Tahrir Square for Ahmed Mahmoud, the first journalist to die in the current conflict in Egypt. Mahmoud, who worked for the State-run newspaper Al Tawuun, was shot on 29 January by a sniper as he filmed, on his mobile phone, police beating protesters. He died six days later.
4:00pm While banks have reopened, schools and the stock exhange remain closed, the Egyptian Stock exchange will resume next Sunday
9:34pm Protesters set set up smoking and non-smoking areas in Tahrir Square - proof that they are a real community and that they don't plan on leaving anytime soon.
EA:
1627 GMT: Ahmed Maher, head of the April 6 Youth Movement, is indicating there may soon be a shift in tactics of protest, “Life getting back to normal and people going back to work make it seem as if those going and staying in Tahrir Square are going to a gathering in Hyde Park so we are currently discussing how to escalate matters further."
(Photo: An Egyptian anti-government demonstrator sleeps on the wheels of a military vehicle at Cairo's Tahrir square on February 6, 2011 on the 13th day of protests calling for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. By Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images)
Parmy Olson totals Egypt's bill. She looks beyond the immediate economic impact:
Foreign companies will hardly be falling over themselves to invest in a telecommunications infrastructure that could be shut down at a moment’s notice. Vodafone, for one, is already getting flak for caving into pressure to send pro-government text messages during the last few days of mass demonstrations against President Hosni Mubarak.
Reuel Marc Gerecht sharpens the view that the Muslim Brotherhood is not a grave threat:
The Brotherhood will undoubtedly be one of the big players, but it will have to compete for votes. And, as the Brotherhood’s aborted platform clearly reveals, the organization is going to have to do better than chanting, “Islam has all the answers,” the easy retort of men who know they don’t have to compete for power.
What we are likely to see in Egypt is not a repeat of Iran, where fundamentalists took undisputed power, but a repeat of Iraq, where Sunni religious parties did well initially but started to fade, divide and evolve as the powerful Sunni preference for laymen of no particular religious distinction comes to the foreground. Sunni Islam has no clerical hierarchy of the holy — it’s tailor-made for nasty arguments among men who dispute one another’s authority to know the righteous path. If the Brotherhood can be corralled by a democratic system, the global effect may not be insignificant.
In years past, University of Tenessee law professor Glenn Reynolds believed that American entrepreneurs facing an excessively complex regulatory landscape had legislators to blame – that there were too many laws, not too many lawyers.
But now my University of Tennessee colleague Ben Barton is making me think again. He's got a new book out from Cambridge University Press, "The Lawyer-Judge Bias in the American Legal System," and his thesis is that lawyers are not only a symptom of overly complex laws, but also their cause.
In particular, he notes that in America, pretty much all judges (except for a few justices of the Peace and such) are lawyers. And, after examining the work of judges in a number of different areas, he concludes that judges systematically rule in ways that favor lawyers, and that make the legal system more complex. (And legislators, mostly lawyers themselves, aren't much better).
It's a thorny problem. Filling the judiciary with non-lawyers would likely politicize the system, or at minimum introduce a lot of unpredictability. As Steve puts it in comments at The Volokh Conspiracy:
In all my years of handling arbitrations, I have yet to find a single client who wants their commercial dispute decided by a non-lawyer. Yes, several of the major arbitration forums have non-lawyers on their roster of arbitrators, but that doesn’t imply thoughtful participants with bargaining power want to use them. When two sophisticated parties make a deal they virtually always want disputes to be resolved by either a court or a lawyer/arbitrator, because the rule of law has value to them.
But what about those of us who aren't "sophisticated parties" with "bargaining power"? The rule of law has value to us – but that value diminishes quickly when we can't understand what the hell is going on, and finding out costs us so much money that we forgo certain opportunities entirely because we're priced out by the necessary attorney fees. That a legal system meets every last need of the typical Skadden client doesn't make it ideal for the rest of a country's citizens. I haven't any idea what the solution is to this problem. But I think that Professors Reynolds and Barton are correct that it is a problem.
The Bahrain Center for Human Rights accused the government of blocking access to a Facebook group calling for protests inspired by uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. The center's own website has been blocked for years, it said. Several prominent bloggers have also been arrested. Opposition activists in the small Persian Gulf island nation have been calling for a “day of rage” Feb. 14 against the ruling royal family. Bahraini authorities have taken economic measures to try to stave off the mounting anger, raising food subsidies.
For what it is worth, the application was signed by the attorney handling the application. So it's not so much Palin “forgetting to sign” but rather her attorney Thomas Van Flein not knowing the requirements for registration.
An attorney writes:
The truly pathetic thing about her unsigned trademark application is that it can be filed and signed electronically. It takes all of two minutes for a slow reader. Your trademark attorney fills out the form, send the filing notice to you, and you sign electronically by typing in your name in the space provided. On the bright side, this is typical of her failure to pay any attention to detail or choose intelligent/competent advisors.
Wikipedia and the other studies cited by yourself and readers note correlations between IQ and myopia, and general intelligence, and guess at some causes, but there is a known causal link, between excessive eye length (myopia), and IQ and education. The intervening variable is reading, and how it intersects with the mechanisms of how the eye uses its own activity in early development to regulate its optics.
In the first years of life, the focusing power of the lens and cornea, and the focal distance to the retina are only loosely linked (the whole eye is growing into early childhood, and modifying its size in smaller amounts thereafter). Rather than having genetically-set values for all its optical dimensions, the eye "measures" if it is in focus by several methods, and uses that measurement to control its growth. One measurement strategy uses the clear borders in the retinal image that result from good focus. High contrast borders drive the neurons in the retina briskly; uniform gray doesn't. Therefore, if there is a lot of activity in the retina, that indicates it is in focus, and the high activity is read out in several more steps of cell biology to stop further growth.
Unfortunately, reading interferes with this - if you focus on a page of text, the very center of gaze is in focus, but the rest isn't, it's just gray. I attach a jpg of the July 1987 cover of Science magazine (above) showing this effect in which the study I cite below appeared (featuring, in apparent precognition of the Tea Party movement, the US Constitution as the source of myopia...) With this limited activity, the eye doesn't send the signal to check its growth, and the eye continues to elongate, making the image focus fall short, in front of the retina. There's a bit more to the story, this being the childhood part, but the phenomenon itself is well worked out in several animals (not by requiring them to read, just by defocus or blur, Wallman below). For ophthalmologists, this phenomenon is called "form deprivation myopia" (or even "reading myopia"). Amount of education/reading correlates highly with myopia, prospective experiments between amount of reading and the progression of myopia have been done (Hepsen, below) and in those cases (as in China) where large groups have gone from illiterate to literate, myopia rises to western levels.
So, until contacts came on the scene, glasses for distant vision (not reading glasses) would be a good sign of educational level, not and accidental cultural convention! I have done work in this area, though I'm not at all the main authority.
John Hudson interviewed Gawker Media owner Nick Denton on his news habits:
I consume most of my news in email and (more recently) Facebook. I think Zuckerberg has created the personalized news engine we always dreamed of. ...
To follow the daily or hourly news cycle is the media equivalent of day-trading: it’s frenzied, pointless and usually unprofitable. I’d much rather read an item which just showed me the photos or documents. And if you’re going to write some text, take a position or explain something to me. Give me opinion or reference; just don’t pretend you’re providing news. That’s not news.
This is one of the reasons why personal blogs still feel so fresh and useful in the face of professional operations which update dozens of times per day. And I suspect it’s also one of the factors behind the Gawker redesign — Denton knows full well that much of what appears in the Gawker Media network falls broadly under his category of “fake news”, which is why he spends his morning firing off “irritable emails about headlines, photos, lame press releases masquerading as stories”. He doesn’t want that stuff to be the first material that a visitor to one of his websites sees, and so he’s redesigned things to be able to always feature a genuinely strong story rather than what happens to be the most recent thing posted.
Both posts explore getting news via Facebook (Denton) or Twitter (Salmon) and are definitely worth a read. I think I fall in line with Salmon on this one; my Facebook feed consists of mostly pictures and personal conversations, less often of the news-news sort. I think it's interesting neither of them mention RSS feeds, something I definitely rely on.
Daniel Williams of Human Rights Watch was detained by the Egyptian government for a day and a half. An important paragraph:
[I]n this and other cases, now being documented by Human Rights Watch, the army was clearly in charge of arbitrary and sometimes violent arrests, even if the beatings and torture had been “outsourced” to other agencies or thugs.
I've been trying to get a handle on the role of Egypt's military. Joshua Stacher's analysis:
Since January 28, the Mubarak regime has sought to encircle the protesters. Egypt's governing elites have used different parts of the regime to serve as arsonist and firefighter. Due to the regime's role in both lighting the fire and extinguishing it, protesters were effectively forced to flee from one wing of the regime to another. ... By politically encircling the protesters, the regime prevented the conflict from extending beyond its grasp. With the protesters caught between regime-engineered violence and regime-manufactured safety, the cabinet generals remained firmly in control of the situation.
The basic fasts: 1) The military profits handsomely from the current power structure. 2) Mubarak's unpopularity threatens to bring down the govenment and therefore put the military's spoils in jeopardy. 3) The military can't make Mubarak leave yet - otherwise power would transfer out of the military's hands. 4) The military can't crack down on the protesters because that would cause an internal rift - some members of the army would likely refuse to fire - which would risk mutiny. 5) For Egypt's veep, Omar Suleiman, to assume power he needs to either change the constitution or wait until the next election and rig the vote in his favor.
The private hostility and the public neutrality of the army makes sense if the military elite's main goal is to maintain its access to the treasury. The army is not neutral - it's tactical.
(Photo: A general view shows Egyptian anti government protesters praying at sunset on Cairo's Tahrir Square, on February 7, 2011, on the 14th days of protests calling for an end to President Hosni Mubarak's regime. By Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images)
Another day of chanting, worship, and celebration in the Protest City of Tahrir Square on Sunday, including a Christian prayer service, a wedding, and a concert. With the immediate threat of attack from the police or the pro-Mubarak "thugs" removed, the Square and its tents are taking on the appearance of long-term presence. Some, however, are wondering if that will lead to the changes desired by the protesters: one activists commented that Tahrir Square would soon be "the place that tourists visit before going to the Pyramids and Luxor".
When I blog here at The Daily Dish, I get a couple dozen emails a day from readers directing me to potential fodder. That's how I came across this post by Philip Giraldi, linked here on 31 January 2011 – as you can see, it's a relatively short post where Mr. Giraldi asserts three things: a) that Rand Paul's call to eliminate all foreign aid, including aid to Israel, was getting insufficient press attention considering how unusual it is for a US Senator to say such a thing; b) that Israel is wealthy enough that it doesn't need our aid; c) and that although Rand Paul has been attacked by the Israel lobby for his statement, President Obama's review of aid to Egypt would be a good time to examine all our foreign aid to that region.
I excerpted the assertions to that affect, and added only this by way of my own commentary: "It would be a good time to re-examine aid flowing to every region, which isn't to say that I want to eliminate all of it."
That's actually blogger code for this more involved thought process: I'd tentatively love to stop giving aid to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Colombia – especially stuff that flows through the DEA – but I actually don't know all that much even about the specific US aid recipients that make me uncomfortable, nor do I really know a lot about Israel's economy or aid to Israel, nor do I have particularly strong feelings about any of it, or a desire to read up on the subject for several hours. So rather than offer some half-cocked opinion about any of these countries, I'll excerpt this post that seems kinda interesting, especially about Rand Paul bringing a new voice to the Senate. And then I'll express my vague desire to look at these things more closely, which really is all I'm comfortable saying I think with confidence. Maybe I'll even get some interesting e-mail back that helps me better flesh out my thoughts.
This shows why it's good for the reader that bloggers aren't forced to make all their thinking explicit. What tedium would ensue! But it was necessary in this post due to the curious way Pejman Yousefzadeh has responded to my earlier, unremarkable item. It seems that the author I quoted, Mr. Giraldi, wrote a controversial letter to the University of Chicago alumni magazine back in 1999, when I was nineteen.
After quoting the letter, Yousefzadeh says this:
Given Giraldi’s plain and simple derangement, and the derangement that he excites in others, the question arises: Why did Conor Friedersdorf deem it necessary to throw Giraldi a favorable link, and to cite him as some kind of potential authority on the issue of foreign aid? Oh, to be sure, Friedersdorf cites Giraldi on foreign aid while at the same time assuring us that his decision to link to Giraldi’s post “isn’t to say that I want to eliminate all” foreign aid. But why is Giraldi allowed anywhere near the realm of polite conversation when it comes to this, or any other issue, given his insane views? Why is he given any semblance of respectability by a magazine like the Atlantic, which continues to maintain some respectability despite the determined efforts of the people associated with the Daily Dish to annihilate that respectability beyond salvaging?
He titles this post, "Philip Giraldi, Conor Friedersdorf, Andrew Sullivan, Anti-Semitism, and the Further Decline of the Atlantic."
As it happens, I disagree rather strongly with some of what Mr. Giraldi wrote 11 years ago in that letter to the editor. But that is beside the point. I've taken the time to lay all this out because I think what Mr. Yousefzadeh is doing here is just vile, and that he should be ashamed of himself. Unless he is a very stupid man, he knows full well that no blogger in the world, having found a short blog post to excerpt, goes searching through the archives of alumni magazines at institutions they didn't attend, just in case the person they're about to link maybe wrote something wrongheaded in the letters section over a decade prior.
Yet here he is condemning me because I failed to banish this man from the realm of polite conversation? And claiming that whole magazines fall based upon such failures?! What kind of incoherent, blinkered model of public discourse is he assuming? At best, his is a system whereby every blog post requires a tedious series of long archival searches – and wherein authors who write perfectly typical blog posts are denied links in a permanent blacklist because of other stuff they wrote in an obscure letter a decade prior. His is also a system where the explicit focus is on the writers and their prior work rather than ideas themselves. I don't think very much of his system, and the fact that literally no one in the blogosphere has adopted it makes me think that others don't either.
But I actually think it's much worse – that what he's trying to do is attack any writer who broaches the subject of American aid to Israel, even if neutrally passing along a blog post by another writer – as a rhetorical intimidation tactic. Well, I don't even think that we should withdraw all aid from Israel, but I'll be damned if I'm going to be intimidated out of covering cogent arguments on either side of the debate. There's nothing worse than an intellectual bully.
Matt Yglesias sometimes claims that conservatives care more about false charges of racism than racism itself. Well I care about racism a lot. At the same time, all my life I've loathed it when people cynically use racism or some variation in order to accrue power. And I don't think the two impulses are in tension with one another. This sort of thing is poison, and it ought to be called out whenever it shows itself. I hated it when it was a leftist college professor at Claremont McKenna College faking a hate crime. I hated it when it was a corrupt prosecutor targeting the Duke Lacross Team. I hated it when it was Rush Limbaugh calling various liberals racists. And I hate it when a poorly reasoned blog post tries to tarnish me with anti-Semitism through some bullshit, guilt-by-association tactic. Yousefzadeh seems to have some other factual quibbles with Giraldi's post, which is the sort of thing I'll always air when it comes in over the transom – I certainly don't fact check everything asserted in every blog post I link – but if your approach is to carelessly wield anti-Semitism like a cudgel, that will be my focus.
Most astonishing to me – though I don't know why it even surprises me any more – is that Jonah Goldberg and the insightful-at-article-length, indefensible-at-blog-post length Glenn Reynolds linked this nonsense. I'll just say with regard to Instapundit that if I regularly linked Dan Riehl, I'd be very uncomfortable with a standard that imputes responsibility to a blogger for anything written by the people he links!
A 48-year-old Afghan citizen and Guantanamo detainee, Awal Gul, died on Tuesday of an apparent heart attack. Gul, a father of 18 children, had been kept in a cage by the U.S. for more than 9 years -- since late 2001 when he was abducted in Afghanistan -- without ever having been charged with a crime. While the U.S. claims he was a Taliban commander, Gul has long insisted that he quit the Taliban a year before the 9/11 attack because, as his lawyer put it, "he was disgusted by the Taliban's growing penchant for corruption and abuse." His death means those conflicting claims will never be resolved; said his lawyer: "it is shame that the government will finally fly him home not in handcuffs and a hood, but in a casket." This episode illustrates that the U.S. Government's detention policy -- still -- amounts to imposing life sentences on people without bothering to prove they did anything wrong.
This episode also demonstrates the absurdity of those who claim that President Obama has been oh-so-eagerly trying to close Guantanamo only to be thwarted by a recalcitrant Congress. The Obama administration has sought to "close" the camp only in the most meaningless sense of that word: by moving its defining injustice -- indefinite, due-process-free detention -- a few thousand miles north onto U.S. soil. But the crux of the Guantanamo travesty -- indefinite detention -- is something the Obama administration has long planned to preserve, and that has nothing to do with what Congress has or has not done. Indeed, Gul was one of the 50 detainees designated by Obama for that repressive measure. Thus, had Gul survived, the Obama administration would have sought to keep him imprisoned indefinitely without any pretense of charging him with a crime -- neither in a military commission nor a real court. Instead, they would have simply continued the Bush/Cheney policy of imprisoning him indefinitely without any charges.
America is going to look back on this period with shame.
The Muslim Brotherhood has vowed that it won't field a candidate for the Egyptian presidency should Mubarak step down. Which makes Joshua Tucker ask:
[S]uch a "guarantee" raises a larger question: how does anyone actually hold opposition forces to promises made during a transition period? And this is especially crucial if we think that in order for someone like Mubarak to give up power, he has to be convinced that the opposition will honor promises it makes during negotiation to remove him from office (such as, for example, not to throw him in jail.) There is a large literature stemming from Latin American transitions on the importance of what came to be known as "pacts", or deals between the regime and the opposition during an actual transition. However, it remains an open question how exactly these "pacts" can be enforced at a later date.
I play a wind instrument, the oboe, and so I have spent years of my life wrestling with the challenge of manifesting one's breath to full potential. I recently learned that in our foundational tongues of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew the words for breath and spirit are one and the same: spiritus, pneuma, and ruach. Our breath embodies our spirit; compromised breath has profound consequences. Maybe you already knew this, but I wanted to send these thoughts your way in any event. Get well soon.
Graeme Wood's latest Cairo dispatch focuses on fissures in the opposition and the state of Tahrir square:
The situation among Egypt's protesters now shifts not by the minute or hour but by the day. With this new metabolism, the protest movement is having to deal with threats more subtle than flying bricks. Dissent and subversion are major preoccupations: There are signs of jitters, even paranoia. Foreigners now have to prove their identity as members of the press, and protesters identifying themselves as members of the movement's "security" team approach in the square to demand a reporter's identity documents. Until recently, this happened only on the outside.
And:
The men at the barricades have not had to repel a serious attack since Thursday night.
Since "Bloody Wednesday" (as the protesters now call it), they have worked out simple systems of communication to tell each other when there's a threat nearby (whistle for more help, bang metal when you think you see something, wave your hands above your head to tell the incoming crowd that the situation is controlled). Alarms went out twice that night -- both times when the army turned over the ignition of the tanks near the Egyptian Museum, presumably to inch a little closer to the square and encroach on the protesters' space. Both times, a crowd gathered to sit in front of the tanks. After the second time, a few protesters just decided to spend the night curled in among sprockets and treads of the tank, their bodies interlaced so that even a slight movement would grind up their bodies. At four in the morning, the protesters with their bodies in the tank were snoring. The tanks haven't been turned on since.
Even with the worries, an atmosphere of jubilation and tranquility rules the square.
(Photo: A young Egyptian anti-government demonstrator holds her national flag in Cairo's Tahrir square on February 7, 2011 on the 14th day of protests calling for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. By Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images)
I’ve long since tired of the notion that the only possible motivation that conservatives could possibly have for calling out the lunatic fringe within their movement is a desire to be loved by liberals and get invited to their cocktail parties. Going back at least to William F. Buckley, Jr.’s famous article casting the John Birch Society out of the legitimate conservative moment, it has been understood that letting the fringe define the cause hurts it. Buckley correctly reasoned that Birch founder Robert Welch’s crazy and outrageous conspiracy theories were tainting the legitimate anti-Communist movement.
Similarly, the psychotic rantings of Glenn Beck invite ridicule on the rest of us. Legitimate points are inevitably countered by comparisons with absurd variants by Beck, Coulter, Limbaugh, and others who make a living stoking the fears of the base. This is, at best, a distraction from the debate and, often, makes intelligent discussion of the issues next to impossible because they’ve been preemptively framed by the loudest, most shrill, most hyperbolic voices.
If we had listened to that argument in 2009, there never would have been a Tea Party movement. Republicans would have rolled over and played dead and gone along with the whole Obama/Pelosi/Reid agenda because it was not respectable to oppose Keynesian “stimulus” spending, cap-and-trade, nationalized health care, and so forth.
Now that “the loudest, most shrill, most hyperbolic voices” have succeeded in fomenting grassroots opposition, however, we are told that elected representatives must ignore the people who elected them and, instead, must heed those respectable voices who did nothing at all to help encourage the Tea Party movement.
It's sad indeed that conservatives like RSM doubt the ability of the right to compete in American politics without the Limbaughs, Becks, and Levins of the world. The way they talk you'd think conservatism never won a victory prior to the rise of talk radio, and that conservative and libertarian ideas are so weak that Americans will only go along with them if tricked by the most talented propagandists available. Where is their confidence? And what of their discernment? What's actually gone on in the United States since the year 2000? For almost eight years, the Bush Administration managed to keep the support of its base, despite pursuing all manner of idiotic policies. And they did so in large part by relying on sycophantic propagandists. Rush Limbaugh himself admitted to carrying water for Republicans during that era despite thinking they were taking the country in the wrong direction. And many pundits, especially on Fox News, behaved even worse. The way RSM talks, you'd think it was RINOs who were responsible for the idiocy of that administration. Was Tom Delay a RINO? How about Dick Cheney? Denny Hastert? The problem wasn't that DC turned people moderate – it turned them corrupt.
You'd think that experience would've chasten the conservative movement. The perils of a propagandistic echo chamber were aptly demonstrated, even before a weak GOP field gave us the awful McCain/Palin ticket, and the Democrats won a historic election. Some months later they passed the health care bill they'd been wanting for decades – and all this occured in the age of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh! As the conservative movement suffered loss after loss, its entertainers were never better off! Still, their apologists insist that the movement's fate is tied to theirs. And what evidence is offered? A tremendous policy achievement? That is never the metric the apologists site. (They'd have to keep quiet.) All they've got is the Tea Party, its very partial reliance on talk radio, and the fact that it managed to take back the House of Representatives for the GOP... during a midterm election when an incumbent Democrat was seen by many Americans as flailing through the worst economy in a generation.
This alone is enough to persuade Robert Stacy McCain that Limbaughs and Palins and Becks and Levins do more good than harm. He needs to actual policy achievement. Why are those who agree with him being such cheap dates?
Says Joyner:
Nobody’s arguing that the alternative to Beck-style lyin’ and cryin’ is to adopt the Democratic agenda. Rather, the alternative is to present a passionate, reasonable, and honest defense of conservative principles. I just prefer Ronald Reagan to Sarah Palin, George Will to Ann Coulter, and Bill Buckley to Glenn Beck.
One can be respectable and stand for fiscal responsibility and smaller government. Indeed, if one’s goal is to persuade those who don’t already agree, you’re much more likely to do it that way than with screaming loons.
Just so. It even happened once before, in 1979, when Bill Buckley and George Will helped Ronald Reagan win the presidency, The New York Times and the network news ruled the media, and Rush Limbaugh was working as director of promotions for the Kansas City Royals. Now the right has a guy like Mark Levin, once a respected man within the movement, whose squandered his reputation so he can attract listeners by making a spectacle of himself on the radio, and gone so far off the rails intellectually under the current incentive system that he is picking fights with Bill Kristol (going so far as to compare him to a Stalinist!) in order to defend Glenn Beck! I've got many disagreements with Kristol, but when he says that Beck "brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society," he's got a point.
I wish that either the conservatives who know better would stop ennabling these people (you'll never control Beck, but Limbaugh and Levin are deeply anxious about maintaining a veneer of respectability and lip service about their supposed brilliance among conservative intellectuals), or that the libertarians or even the liberaltarians would succeed in building their own coalition so that I don't have to care about the right anymore. Instead the future is looking like more big-spending, civil liberties destroying progressives, people so enamored with public employee unions that an efficient government becomes a third order priority. Or else civil liberties destroying movement conservatives who never deliver on promises to shrink government, demagogue any issue related to terrorism, and conduct foreign policy with a zeal for American aggression and empire that exceeds even the current administration's undeclared drone wars, assasination orders, and anti-drug operations in 86 countries.
Mubarak and the clique surrounding him have long treated Egypt as their fiefdom and its resources as spoils to be divided among them.
Under sweeping privatisation policies, they appropriated profitable public enterprises and vast areas of state-owned lands. A small group of businessmen seized public assets and acquired monopoly positions in strategic commodity markets such as iron and steel, cement and wood. While crony capitalism flourished, local industries that were once the backbone of the economy were left to decline. At the same time, private sector industries making environmentally hazardous products like ceramics, marble and fertilisers have expanded without effective regulation at a great cost to the health of the population.
Libertarian David Boaz is among the many writers reflecting on Ronald Reagan:
When we’re feeling positive, we remember that he used to say, “Libertarianism is the heart and soul of conservatism.” Other times, we call to mind his military interventionism, his encouragement of the then-new religious right (“I know you can’t endorse me, but I endorse you.”), and his failure to really reduce the size of government. But the more experience we have with later presidents, the better Reagan looks in retrospect.
He adds this apt criticism:
Edward H. Crane, the president of the Cato Institute, wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 1988 that Reagan never paid much attention to the people he appointed to important positions in his administrations in Sacramento and Washington, thus undercutting his own efforts to implement his goals and policies. He appointed a lieutenant governor of California he’d barely met. He promised to abolish the departments of Energy and Education, then appointed secretaries who had no interest in carrying out that mission. And most particularly, he chose George Bush as his vice president and then endorsed him for the presidency. Perhaps Ronald Reagan’s worst legacy is 12 years of Bush presidencies.
Doug Mataconis had a good post on Reagan too. Like Boaz and Mataconis, I tend to think he was a very good president compared to many others who've held that position, and that the right tends to go a bit overboard with the hagiography, whereas confronting the faults of a successful man prove instructive.
When Peter Schweitzer said he didn't have any sympathy for journalists being attacked in Egypt I reacted angrily. Little did I know that other pundits would discredit themselves with statements even more vile.
It is being breathlessly reported that the Egyptian army is rounding up foreign journalists. I mean even two New York Times reporters were detained. Now this is supposed to make us feel what exactly? Are we supposed to feel outrage? I don’t feel any outrage over it. Are we supposed to feel anger? I don’t feel any anger over this. Do we feel happy? Well – do we feel kinda going like nyah nyah nyah! [Only later when Fox News reporters were beatendid he point out he was only kidding.]
When he says stuff like this, I wonder what his partners in the conservative movement think. After all, National Review describes as "a friend and benefactor," he has a partnership with The Heritage Foundation, Human Events named him Man of the Year in 2007, he once received The Claremont Institute's Statesmanship Award, he's invited to give speeches at places like Hillsdale College, and he was celebrated last year at CPAC.
Under normal circumstances, the leaders of these organizations look down on people like Rush Limbaugh – people who mock American reporters when they're targeted by authoritarian thugs, people who regularly make frivolous accusations of racism, people who deliberately excacerbate the racial anxieties of Americans, people who mean-spiritedly mock the language of foreign visitors, people who used the Tuscon shooting to attack ideological adversaries, people who joke about speaking "a little Negro dialect," people who try to score points by mocking a man for having Parkinsons... this list could easily go on for paragraphs. But Rush Limbaugh has a large audience. Very high ratings indeed! So the wrongheadedness of his rhetoric doesn't matter. It's like in professional sports where an athlete performs exceptionally well and all else is forgiven. The conservative movement and its institutions are the fawning fanboys. Their moral compass goes haywire whenever the talk radio host comes up. If you asked, they'd tell you very earnestly that the ends don't justify the means, as a general proposition. But celebrating Rush Limbaugh? How quickly they abandon that philosophy.
Anyway, the account of the New York Times reporters that Limbaugh mocked is here.
I’ve read through this incomprehensible word salad three times and I still can’t figure out for the life of me what Palin is trying to say here. As with most of her comments on substantive issues, it seems like she’s just throwing talking points together in some kind of stream-of-consciousness chant, hoping that it will make sense when it all comes together.
Krugman cries out that "grain production is down — and it’s down substantially more when you take account of a growing world population":
You might ask why a production shortfall of 5 percent leads to a doubling of prices. Part of the answer is that some kinds of demand are growing faster than population — in particular, China is becoming a growing importer of feed to meet the demand for meat. But the main point is that the demand for grain is highly price-inelastic: it takes big price rises to induce people to consume less, yet collectively that’s what they must do given the shortfall in production.
Why is production down? Most of the decline in world wheat production, and about half of the total decline in grain production, has taken place in the former Soviet Union — mainly Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. And we know what that’s about: an incredible, unprecedented heat wave.
Julian Sanchez considers "how the analogy between sound judgment and balancing weights may constrain our thinking in unhealthy ways":
Perhaps the most obvious problem with balancing metaphors is that they suggest a relationship that is always, by necessity, zero sum: If one side rises, the other must fall in exact proportion. Also implicit in balancing talk is the idea that equilibrium is the ideal, and anything that upsets that balance is a change for the worse. That’s probably true if you’re walking a tightrope, but it clearly doesn’t hold in other cases. If you have a perfectly balanced investment portfolio and somebody gives you some shares of stock, the balance is upset (until you can shift some assets around), but you’re plainly better off—and would be better off even if for some reason you couldn’t trade off some of the stock to restore the optimal mix.
Scott Lucas takes stock of the situation in Egypt:
[There is] uncertainty surrounding political talks between the regime, led by Vice President Omar Suleiman, and the opposition. Government outlets were soon announcing that agreement had been reached on joint committees, including one for Constitutional reform, free media, and an end to the military emergency. Other signals cames from the opposition side: the Muslim Brotherhood, now acknowledged by the Government for the first time in more than 50 years, said it was not negotiating but only ensuring that the regime heard the opposition point of view; representatives of the Tahrir Square protesters insisted that the immediate departure of President Mubarak remained an essential precondition; and Mohamed ElBaradei, who has been named by opposition parties to present their position, said he had not even invited to the discussions, even though his representative was there.
Opposition sources later told media, including the BBC's Jon Leyne, that the talks had been limited to two points: constitutional changes and the procedure to implement them. That would fit the regime narrative that President Mubarak has to be replaced in an "orderly" process, involving Parliamentary approval of a replacement and a procedure for elections, rather than stepping down immediately. Given that the Parliament was dissolved last week by Mubarak, the time involved in even these limited steps would let the President enjoying his office desk for more months.
This is the process that the US, for all the confusion surrounding its position, is backing. President Obama used the occasion of American football's Super Bowl for a pre-game interview in which he got back to his Administration's mantra of "orderly transition".
The main image is from Reuters photojournalist Amr Abdallah Dalsh and the second one is from Reuters photojournalist Goran Tomasevic. If any thanks are due, I would appreciate a message to both of them for their hard work and dedication. They have been laying their lives on the line to help document these historical moments, and it is with that same enthusiasm for memorializing those vital turning points towards total liberation that I have used their photographs, to create this illustration.
I hope Reuters and Mr. Dalsh and Mr. Tomasevic will understand and allow for the free distribution of this graphic. I am not seeking any profits from this image, as all of my artwork (as seen on my flickr) is all licensed under Creative Commons, share and share alike.
Arianna Huffington, the cable talk show pundit, author and doyenne of the political left, will take control of all of AOL’s editorial content as president and editor in chief of a newly created Huffington Post Media Group. The arrangement will give her oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company’s other media enterprises like MapQuest and Moviefone.
Here's Arianna Huffington's thoughts on the deal – and a video interview the heads of both companies did with Kara Swisher.
What's my opinion? I suppose that I am agnostic. I'm not that familiar with the whole of AOL's media empire. But I'm very curious to see how this plays out, and hopeful that it will be a success. The same goes for The Daily and the merger between The Daily Beast and Newsweek (full disclosure: I've written for every enterprise named in this post save The Daily.) Everybody is trying to figure out what model is going to make money on the Web – it's an exciting time to be in media, and every venture is another data point. The most interesting part of Huffington's vision is being a player in local news. There are a lot of places that could use that.
Sheila Carapico considers what the news networks miss:
The wide-angle aerial view from television cameras trained down on Tahrir Square in central Cairo is unprecedented in the history of world revolutions. ... But what television has brought to the world is only a partial reality. There is only Tahrir; the huge metropolitan expanse of Cairo and the families at home in neighborhoods are beyond the frame, oddly irrelevant. The participants in the revolution are the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, not the equal numbers standing unpicturesque guard by night to ensure the safety of neighborhoods. TV shows a mass, not a massive group of individuals. This televised reality has become hugely controversial.
(Photo: Traffic and pedestrians move along a bridge leading to Tahrir Square February 6, 2011 in Cairo, Egypt.)
Jonah Lehrer reports on Mohan Srivastava, the man who cracked the code on scratch lottery tickets:
“The lottery corporations all insist that their games are safe because they are vetted by outside companies,” Srivastava says. “Well, they had an outside auditor approve the tic-tac-toe game. They said it couldn’t be broken. But it could.” Fundamentally, he believes that creating impregnable tickets is extremely difficult, if not impossible. “There is nothing random about the lottery,” he says. “In reality, everything about the game has been carefully designed to control payouts and entice the consumer.” Of course, these elaborate design elements mean that the ticket can be undesigned, that the algorithm can be reverse-engineered. The veneer of chance can be peeled away.
The best part is Srivastava did the math and realized he could make more money consulting than gaming the system.
Politicians seldom trademark their name but they might do so to prevent others from using it, for example, to sell shoddy, unapproved merchandise or "official" candidate memorabilia. A search for other political figures such as President Barack Obama and potential 2012 GOP presidential candidates Mike Huckabee, Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney do not show any pending trademark applications. It is a rarity, say trademark attorneys, for political figures to file such forms.
The Palins are facing a long road in the effort to trademark their names. "Generally one can trademark one's name," said Jeffrey S. Kravitz, a Los Angeles-based intellectual property attorney. "But, it is not easy."
It seems like signing your name is not something you would forget when your name is what you're trying to trademark, but she's a busy woman.
The application also says that the mark's "first use in commerce" was on January 1, 1996. That's the year she was elected to be mayor of Wasilla, and it seems a little odd to call the start of a political career (especially as a small-town mayor) a "first use in commerce," but this is Sarah Palin we're talking about.
This is actually the second Palin registration effort - the first one, in September of last year, was filed by Bristol. She, too, says she provides "motivational speaking services," but hers are "in the field of life choices." (More specifically, choices that might lead to becoming an unwed teenage mother right when your mom is running for office.)
Robert Gibbs was asked in a press conference about the shaky report of an assassination attempt on the Egyptian vice president. Marcy Wheeler finds Gibbs' response "fascinating":
You would think if Gibbs knew the allegation was false, he’d say so in no uncertain terms. If he didn’t know about it, he’d tell reporters he’d get back to them on it. But instead, “I’m not going to get into that question.”
Which is not dissimilar from the way Hillary used this alleged assassination attempt in Munich. In spite of the fact that only Fox has reported it in the US, the German diplomat who at one point seemed to confirm subsequently retracted it, and an Egyptian official has denied it, Hillary used the alleged assassination to support her case that stability is key in the transition to Egyptian “democracy.”
Lee Smith speculates over political intrigue on the Egypt side:
If Fox’s report is accurate, then Cairo’s denials are cause for serious concern. After all, had the Mubarak regime staged the operation as a pretext for a crackdown on opposition protesters, then it would be eager to get the news out to as many sources as possible. That they are hushing up the incident may suggest that the plot originated in the government’s security and military apparatus.
In a video shot on January 18, a defiant young Egyptian, Asmaa Mahfouz, praises the self-immolating protesters and challenges men to join her and others turning out to Tahrir Square:
The video is popularly credited with helping inspire fellow Egyptians by the thousands to participate in protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square, calling for an end of the 30-year authoritarian rule of Hosni Mubarak. The video is also credited with helping to inspire the Egyptian government to block Facebook. Whether it's accurate to credit this one video, and this one young woman, with all of that, I'll leave to activists in Egypt who know the history better than I. But at the very least, her powerful video captures the spirit of an important moment in history.
This is already the longest sick leave I've taken in ten years of blogging so it pains me to say I'm not quite 100 percent yet. My docs don't want me back in the thick of things until I regain my full energy levels, and although I really, really hoped to be fine by now, I can't force my body to rebound so quickly from something that turned pretty serious. And when you've had HIV for 17 years, you learn not to push your immune system too hard. Aaron has also put his foot down, which settles it.
Still, the worst is clearly over and I can't express how exhilarating it is to breathe freely and deeply again. This morning, after a session on the nebulizer, I opened the bathroom window and drew the cold damp air deep into my lungs. No drug beats oxygen.
My favorite poem about breathing, by the way, is very, very Catholic and some of you may find it a bit much, but Gerard Manley Hopkins' classic here is a linguistic treasure. Money quote:
Wild air, world-mothering air, Nestling me everywhere, That each eyelash or hair Girdles; goes home betwixt The fleeciest, frailest-flixed Snowflake; that’s fairly mixed With, riddles, and is rife In every least thing’s life; This needful, never spent, And nursing element; My more than meat and drink, My meal at every wink ...
For Hopkins, this was like the ubiquitous presence of the Blessed Virgin. For me right now, it's just a reminder of how blessed we are ... to breathe.
