Airborne elephant watch: Suck on what?

Image by Misty Vincent, Pictify.

Elephants may fly, and I really may have to forgive or otherwise learn to live with Thomas P. Friedman, describable today as Thomas L. Friedman, the Mystax Humilitatis, with his move in the following (my bold):

Today, Obama’s critics say he must do “something” about Syria. I get it. Chaos there can come around to bite us. If there is a policy that would fix Syria, or even just stop the killing there, in a way that was self-sustaining, at a cost we could tolerate and not detract from all the things we need to do at home to secure our own future, I’m for it.

But we should have learned some lessons from our recent experience in the Middle East: First, how little we understand about the social and political complexities of the countries there; second, that we can — at considerable cost — stop bad things [jump]

Airborne elephant watch: Egypt is still there, over to the left

Photo by Gregory Colbert.

Did I tell you? Did I tell you? Not here, perhaps, but over at BooMan's place, where the elevated tone often inspires me to non-snark: The "Egyptian military" consists of more than one phenomenon. The generals, who gladly threw Mubarak's person under the bus when he was no longer able to rule, continue to espouse his ideology, which [jump]

Mental equipment in Egypt

Image via Rocco Marc McDonald.

Via Twitter account of the great Lyse Doucet:

I think we should stop worrying about Egypt right now.

Bill and Coup

I swear that guy has a vuvuzela! Image by AP? via Channel 11 Atlanta.

Somebody I follow sent a Tweet around asking if there's ever been a good coup, or words to that effect, and I had one of those tip-of-the-tongue experiences: wasn't there... um... But I couldn't drag it out of the memory hole.

Until a couple of hours later, carrying some groceries through the rain, when it came to me: Egypt, back at the beginning in early 2011, when the military ultimately seemed serious about getting out of the business. No wonder I couldn't remember; the thesis seemed to be rewriting itself all day.

They were never serious to the point where you couldn't doubt it. They seemed to be particularly frightened of Morsi and anxious to undercut him any way they could: running him against a single "conservative" (Mubarak relic) candidate, dumping their own constitution on him. But Morsi invariably defeated them and they accepted their defeat fairly graciously.

This is a little of what folks always call "just semantics" (unless they're familiar with professional practice in that field, it which case they might call it "quibbling about words"), but since it's apparently a problem for the US State Department to know whether it's a coup or not, could we say it's just the Revolution, with the role of the army being to make a perimeter within which the real conversation can happen?

Officer says army is leaving, says they were there for protection but were unwanted. Cheering. pic.twitter.com/JZTYMilNKX
— Kareem Fahim (@kfahim) July 3, 2013

What a great motto for a military that would be!

Scare Quotes Alert

New York Times:

Egypt entered a perilous 48 hours on Monday when the military delivered an ultimatum to the country’s first democratically elected president, hundreds of thousands of protesters renewed calls to oust him from office and the president’s Islamists allies vowed to take to the streets to stop what they called “a military coup.”

Sorry, that's not a "military coup", that's a military coup. I'm not even condemning it, I just think it needs to be called by the right name.

The whole thing is pretty sad. It would have been so nice if Morsi had been able to succeed, in some degree, in establishing a general comfort level with constitutionality, and I thought Muslim Brothers' experience in providing social services would help. Power, as usual, corrupted. The MB insistence on writing the constitution on their own wasn't a good thing; they could have had a more Westminstery system, with some built-in instability, which makes it easier to get rid of an obnoxious Leader without tearing down the entire system, but that would have meant leaving doors open for all sorts of little parties.

As I always say with reference to Egypt it's up to the liberals, once again, to give the poor and struggling majority some reason to vote for them. Last time they were too involved with white-girl problems; maybe this time the visible presence of the People in the protests will make a difference.

Photo by AP via Huffington Post.

Airborne Elephant Watch: En route with the Secretary

Elephants fly away on love, from Etsy.

The "Islamist" Egyptian president didn't, as it turned out, throw any comedians into prison for the crime of insulting him (what's known in Shariah as lèse-majesté—oh, excuse me, I guess that's what you call it in Catholic; turns out Prophet Muhammad didn't [jump]

Airborne Elephant Watch: Egypt! (addendum)

Eggs Definitely Look Better with Mustaches. By Ben at LikeCool.com.

 Friedman manages to admit his error, sort of:

I was critical of Egypt’s new president, Mohamed Morsi, from the Muslim Brotherhood, for attending the Nonaligned Movement summit meeting in Iran. I argued that he was giving legitimacy to an Iranian regime that had crushed the very kind of democratic movement that brought Morsi to power. But Morsi surprised me, for the better, by using his visit to Tehran to call out the Iranian leadership for supporting Syria’s “oppressive” regime. The Iranians were livid. You can be sure that, on other days, Morsi will say and do things that will give us indigestion. We still need Egypt’s strategic support in the region. It still needs our economic aid. But a more democratic, Muslim Brotherhood-led Egypt will not behave like the automatic ally it was before. We’ll need a new kind of relationship. It will be complicated.

Or, in the more spaciously crazy terms of his blog, Really Tom Friedman:

So it’s complicated. Which is why, last week, when I said Mohammed Morsi was handing the keys to the revolution over to the mullahs at the used-revolution dealership and it turned out he was just getting valet parking at a brand-new restaurant called Pimp Slap the Islamic Republic, I was mistaken. What Morsi took Iran to task about, well, who can remember?

The soldiers have turned down the Sidi Touré and explained that the Egypt-Iran kerfuffle was over Syria. Which I knew already, but have put my fingers in my ears to avoid hearing again.

I guess he really got face on his egg, heh-heh.

Airborne Elephant Watch: Tehran!

Thomas P. Friedman (I don't know why I keep calling him that, his middle initial is L) leapt into it at the last minute yesterday as if terrified of missing an opportunity to be totally wrong, as he was, chiding Egypt's president Morsi for attending the meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Tehran:

Excuse me, President Morsi, but there is only one reason the Iranian regime wants to hold the meeting in Tehran and have heads of state like you attend, and that is to signal to Iran’s people that the world approves of their country’s clerical leadership and therefore they should never, ever, ever again think about launching a democracy movement — the exact same kind of democracy movement that brought you, Mr. Morsi, to power in Egypt.

Flying Elephants. By Tattoomaus78 at DeviantArt.

Because what Morsi signaled to Iran's people turned out to be quite different, more along the lines of the world disapproves of their country's clerical leadership and democracy movements of the kind that brought him to power are eminently praiseworthy, especially in Syria—the Iranian foreign minister walked out, while poor little president Ahmadinejad squirmed, I guess, on the dais next to the fulminating Egyptian.

“The Syrian people are fighting with courage, looking for freedom and human dignity,” Mr. Morsi said, suggesting that all parties at the gathering shared responsibility for the bloodshed. “We must all be fully aware that this will not stop unless we act.”

Mr. Morsi, pointedly, did not mention unrest in Bahrain, possibly to avoid offending Saudi Arabia, which has helped Bahrain’s monarchy suppress the uprising.

Then the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, noted that the Holocaust really did take place. Actually virtually all educated Iranians, including the country's 25,000 Jews, are aware of this; the purpose of mentioning it was to remind them that Ahmadinejad doesn't care whether people think he is educated or not—the nation's crude, embarrassing brother-in-law. Ban also scolded the leaders for inattention to human rights and for lack of transparency in their nuclear affairs, and a splendid time was had by all.

None of this will persuade Friedman, of course. He's so committed to working out his model of who's bad and who's good that he can't think about anything getting better. But Morsi is fast replacing old Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in my heart as favorite post-Islamist politician. His current démarche on the subject of Syria, cutting Iran in (as is self-evidently necessary) and therefore inevitably cutting the US out, seems like the first idea anybody has had about Syria that could lead to a reduction in the number of killings instead of a further increase.

And Friedman? Suck. On. That.

From The Garlic.

Découpage

Let's say about halfway through the natural course of the revolution the military steps in—not, according to them, as counterrevolution or more revolution, but as a kind of compromise between the two, an acceptance of the revolution and an effort to slow it down. The astonished old president, biting his lip purple, is put under arrest and charged with various crimes: murderous assault on the peaceful revolutionaries, massive corruption.

Elephant hang gliding. From Toys Period.

The military commissions a constitution, stages a couple of elections, for a parliament and a president. The most popular party wins, not the one the military likes, or the one the old president likes, or the ones (dozens, of course) the revolutionaries like, but the one ordinary people, not thinking too hard about it, incline to.

The military appears to be having second thoughts, being quite nervous about this winning party, which is sort of religious: they sack the constitution-writing committee, dismiss the new parliament, constitute a cabinet in which they play the principal roles, announce an emergency. The old president is convicted of murder, or something like it, but they drop the corruption charges.

The new president then calls the parliament into session, just to say hello, and appoints his own defense minister and what not, sending the semi-dictators into an unexpected elder statesmanship, all very politely. Younger officers (who have been complaining all along about waiting for promotions and witnessing corruption) join the cabinet. The semi-dictators don't even whine; they just do as they're told.

So what is the opposite of a coup?

One thing, Thomas P. Friedman's head must be exploding. No wonder he's on vacation. He could tell himself it's the education problem—with no decent schools, the Egyptians don't have a clue what's normal (i.e., what Thomas P. Friedman expects), so they're doing everything backwards. But don't worry, Tom, Bahrain's going according to plan!

Leaf Elephant. Atelier Pour Enfants.

Airborne Elephant Watch: London

The Olympics have not yet begun, but there's already a hot contender for this year's Thomas P. Friedman Award for best "Islam is scary" story composed exclusively of materials that can be found in an ordinary taxi.

From Roqoo Depot.

It's NPR's faith-based correspondent, Barbara Bradley Hagerty, for

Olympians' Dilemma: 'Starve My Soul' For Ramadan?

with the Olympics falling during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the 22-year-old athlete had to make a choice: be in top physical condition or maintain a primary tenet of his faith.

She didn't find any religious authorities to say that you had to fast (you can postpone it, as with pregnancy or sickness), or any Muslim athletes who would in fact be fasting, though she thought there must be some of those from the more conservative countries or in some of the less aerobic sports, so the amount of controversy she found on the issue would be exactly 0.0, but she filed the story anyhow.

Best of luck to Egyptian 10.000-meter open-water swimmer Mazen Aziz, who loses 11 pounds in a typical race!

Cheap shots and chasers 6/22

Look out, Tom! It's another one! From the Portland Mercury.

Eat your heart out, Friedman—those benighted North Africans who will never amount to anything because of their uncreative classrooms and rote learning, unlike the Singaporeans and South Koreans with their uncreative classrooms and rote learning, are going to save the world from global warming.

The Tunisian company Saphon Energy is selling a new approach to wind power using an ancient technology, with a four-foot circular sail on the top of a pole where it captures the kinetic energy of the wind that sways it back and forth. It's noiseless, and harmless to birds. Read the whole story at TPM and check out the company's website.





Now that retired pitcher Roger Clemens has been found not guilty of lying to Congress about his alleged use of steroids and HGH in his second trial (the first trial fell apart when prosecutors showed the jury inadmissible evidence), I wanted to take another look at this map, unearthed by bmaz at emptywheel a little while back, illustrating the bases covered in the FBI/Department of Justice investigation of Clemens in the four years they worked on the case, giving you a powerful sense of what an enormous elephant they constructed to pick up this little pea. "Any more questions," bmaz asked plaintively at the time, "why DOJ cannot get around to prosecuting banksters?" And that was when it still seemed likely they might get a conviction!

Still and all, it goes to show you: The arcs of the Department of Justice bend toward the moral universe, but they're too damn long.

What a difference a day makes! Before the elections, Antonis Samaras of Greece's New Democracy Party was such a Gloomy Gus, and now?

“Samaras today is completely different than what he was two weeks ago,” [hard-right politician George] Kirtsos said. “Two weeks ago, he was very negative about cooperating with Pasok.”

You have to read the Times story pretty carefully to find out why, but it's there all the same:

Critics say that Mr. Samaras destabilized Greece with his insistence on calling elections to replace the government led by Lucas Papademos, the technocratic prime minister whose mandate was to sign Greece’s second loan agreement.

“He just wanted to be prime minister,” said Thanos Veremis, a political historian who said he voted for New Democracy as a last resort. “It was pure ambition, pure and simple. Even in this state of collapse, he wanted to be Nero, playing his harp.”

Yes: after the May elections nobody wanted to ask Samaras to be prime minister and he had a great big sad. So they had to have another election—that's €47.9 million, cheaper than the €70.4 million they spent in May, but still a good bit for a bankrupt treasury to shell out. But hey, Antonis feels better now, so it's worth it, right? Thugs.

Being not evil

Saw this at Raw Story and it made me all sorts of heartwarmed:

Google has set out to save the world’s dying languages. In an alliance with scholars and linguists, the Internet powerhouse on Wednesday introduced an Endangered Languages Project website where people can find, share, and store information about dialects in danger of disappearing.

“People can share their knowledge and research directly through the site and help keep the content up-to-date,” project managers Clara Rivera Rodriguez and Jason Rissman said in a Google blog post.

“A diverse group of collaborators have already begun to contribute content ranging from 18th-century manuscripts to modern teaching tools like video and audio language samples and knowledge-sharing articles.”

 The story on Google's own official blog has some great videos: here.

Thar she trumpets!

From Beyond Dots.

Another elephant or two got off the ground in Egypt, where Juan Cole notes that an administrative court has struck down the assembly writing the new constitution on the grounds that it's stacked with conservatives and hence unrepresentative:

The court relied on a 1994 law stipulating that sitting judges and parliamentarians may not be involved in constitutional revisions, lest they misuse their position to give themselves more power.

Assuming the decision stands, this means the constitution will have to wait until after the presidential election next month, meaning that the new president will take power under the old Mubarak constitution, which could mean a lot of power indeed. That could be a matter of concern, especially since there's no predicting who that president will be (another court has declared that the ultraconservative Hazem Salah Abu Ismail is qualified to run even though his mother was a US citizen because nobody had officially informed the Egyptian government about it, but this decision could easily not survive).

I'd still keep arguing that it's not the end of the world if the Muslim Brotherhood dictates the constitution (their main goal seems to be to make the presidency weak); but it has to be heartening that liberals will be more involved, especially since they seem to be acting more effective at last:

Ahmad Baha’ al-Din Shaaban, founder of the Egyptian Socialist Party, said that the country’s leftists and secularists would continue to agitate for a fair constitution whether the ruling was upheld or not.

Leftists have been mounting street protests against the constituent assembly, and gradually everyone from the Coptic Christians to the traditional clergy of al-Azhar seminary to labor unions and secularists have dissociated themselves from it. The court’s decision is the right one, and most Egyptians are breathing a sigh of relief....

Polling does not find that most Egyptians are fundamentalists, and, indeed, there is evidence that they have become more secular in the past year. Mansour Moaddel’s polls find half of Egyptians now say they are Egyptians first and Muslims second, up from 8% only a few years ago.

Airborne Elephant Watch: Egypt again

Well, Egypt is a pretty big country, after all. And a lot of things happen there, especially just now. And today's Thomas Friedman surrogate mashing up the distinct and mutually hostile parties into one terrifying "Islamist" majority is the normally unpanicked Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, on Morning Edition:

The Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups in Egypt are flexing their growing political muscle. They control the legislative agenda in parliament, and in recent weeks introduced controversial proposals to curb social freedoms and legal rights.

Islamist lawmakers also handpicked a 100-member panel that began meeting this week to write a new constitution, which is widely expected to enshrine Islamic law.

Clouds 2 Elephant. Uncredited photo from The Magnifying Glass.

Only not exactly. As usual. Because the controversial proposals—the revival of traditional punishments like cutting thieves' hands off,  elimination of foreign language instruction [jump]

Airborne Elephant Watch: Egypt

Today's visitation from the things that go bump in Thomas P. Friedman's night is our old friend the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, whose officials are telling the Times that they have been telling their daughter organization Hamas to moderate its stances a bit and try to find more common ground with the atheist Fatah, by way of forming more of a common front in negotiations with Israel.

Elephant rope dancing. From Percy J. Billinghurst, A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals (London, 1901).

Brotherhood officials say that they are pulling back from their previous embrace of Hamas and its commitment to armed struggle against Israel in order to open new channels of communications with Fatah, which the Brotherhood had [jump]

Airborne Elephant Watch: Egypt

And it's time for another of our irregularly scheduled discussions of things that are undreamt of in Thomas Friedman's philosophy or, as his next book is likely to call them, Flying Elephants.

From Squidoo.com.

Today's case starts with the Egyptian minister of planning and international cooperation, and an old pal of Suzanne Mubarak's, Fayza Abul Naga, who is said to be the person mainly responsible [jump]

Airborne elephant watch forward

And this one from Turkey, where as you know the dread Islamists have been in power for ten years now, in the form of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi or AKP),  created out of the remnants of the Virtue Party and the Motherland Party. That is, they don't call themselves Islamist (unlike the Virtue element as it was before), but other people are glad to call them

"'Islamic,' 'Islamist,' 'mildly Islamist,' 'Islamic-oriented,' 'Islamic-leaning,' 'Islamic-based' or 'with an Islamic agenda,' and similar language is being used. These characterizations do not reflect the truth, and they sadden us,"

as former education minister Hüseyin Çelik remarked.

So how do they display their dread Islamic credentials? Are they banning alcohol?* Forcing women into purdah?

I'm not saying they're not oppressed, but they're not exactly veiled...

Chopping some of those thieves' hands off? Not exactly. Apparently [jump]

*Are you kidding? Turkey exported $68.4 million in beer alone in 2010—40% of it to Islam-ridden Iraq!

Airborne elephant watch

Google fetched this from someplace unsafe-looking called wn.com. Apologies for not crediting anybody. Forellenhof is the name of any number of hotels where Deutsch wird gesprochen and I suppose you can order trout—Forelle—from the Gasthof menu.

Yes, it's time to think once again about one of those news stories Thomas Friedman would not be able to imagine even in his most fevered vegetably-induced trance state: another prankish pachyderm sighted among the clouds, this time back in Tunisia, where they say elephant-gliding first got its start.

You can ignore the Times's Friedmanesque headline—"Tunisia Faces a Balancing Act of Democracy and Religion", like Religion, weighing in at 500 pounds, in this corner, and in the other, fresh from a championship bout in little Myanmar, you get the picture—and go straight to the story.

It turns out that the democracy and the religion are mostly struggling "ach! in einer Brust", in the same breast, and not really struggling, either, because they're actually fairly comfortable with it, that is a majority of Tunisians so far think of themselves as both little-d democrats and big-M Muslims at the same time and fail (of course they're not smoking whatever Tom is) to see any contradiction. Almost like Baptists, or somebody.

Not that everybody is entirely on board. There are your liberals, as usual, the ones who won the revolution but lost the election; and there are your Salafis, the ones who think that elections are not from God; and they tease each other a lot. The liberals are not listening to me, which is not that much of a surprise, and they're more worried about movie censorship than about breakfast for people who don't know where they're finding lunch, and if they want to start winning elections, they need to think about those priorities; and the Salafis are in my humble etc. kind of creepy. And somebody is really going to get hurt, I'm afraid. But most people won't, and things in general are going to keep chugging along. Try to enjoy it!

 

Airborne elephant watch

Alas, the Times and the BBC both headline their Egypt election stories with the announcement that "Islamists" have won.  Once again, that's just not exactly what happened, which is what you read in Al Jazeera or Voice of America: The Muslim Brotherhood–linked Freedom and Justice Party is the winner, with 47% of the seats in the People's Assembly, a "sweeping victory" but not a majority; their Islamist rivals Al-Nur finished second, with 29% of the seats, and the liberal Al-Wafd third, with about 7%—enough to enable them to form a majority coalition with the MB, if that's how things work out, which is no less likely than some kind of "Islamic front".

Reconstruction from the late 16th century of an automaton by Heron of Alexandria (10-70 C.E.), a mathematician of uncertain ethnicity who invented the steam engine. From here. When Hercules whacks the dragon on the head, the dragon shoots water in the hero's face.

Airborne elephant watch

Among those unpanicked by the Friedman Fear of Egypt's being overrun by Islamic fanatics, count the Google person turned revolutionary Wael Ghonim, currently on a well-deserved book tour; asked by NPR's Steve Inskeep if it didn't upset him that the Muslim Brotherhood had won the elections by working door to door while he and his fellow liberals were online, he replied something like, "Yes, perfect--we should learn from them."