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.
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]
Louisiana Republican Attorney General Buddy Caldwell told Think Progress how much he hates Obamacare:
I trust the government more than insurance companies. If the
government wants to put forth a policy where they will pay for
everything and you won’t have to go through an insurance policy, that’d be a whole lot better.
Hey, Buddy, where were you when your party needed you? That's such a great idea!*
*Scalia wouldn't even be able to call it unconstitutional. Wait, yes he would. But he'd feel funny about it.
The real Louisiana Red, Iverson Minter, 1932-2012. (He just passed away last month.)
In Eric Cantor's high school yearbook picture (h/t Kaili Joy Gray) he was already wearing his trademark sneer:
Doesn't it remind you of your mother saying, "Keep making that face and it's going to freeze that way." In Cantor's case it actually happened!*
*The yearbook quote is from Victor Herbert's 1905 hit Mlle. Modiste, text by Henry Blossom. You think young Eric might have been in a high school production, as the crotchety Uncle Henri? Sure wouldn't be where the sneer came from, though.
Non-cognitive Elites
Via Balloon Juice, that's what the National Organization for Marriage is recruitingfor the permanent campaign to keep marriage just like it is in the Bible, except with a couple of differences (for instance, nobody will be required to shtup his widowed older sister-in-law to provide her with sons to hold onto her share of the estate, as happened to poor Onan in Genesis 38:8-10*). NOM is looking for
a community of artists, athletes, writers, beauty queens and other glamorous non-cognitive elites...
John Cole thinks they mean stupid people, as in elites whose glamor is not connected to their cognitive capacities, but when I read it I think of Zombies!
*This story is really more outrageous than I remembered it, featuring YHWH at his inexplicably ill-tempered Kafka-father worst. Jacob's son Judah has a son called Er whom he marries off to a girl named Tamar, but when the kid commits some unspecified wickedness the Lord has him killed. Then Judah assigns the second brother, Onan, to provide Tamar with children, but the latter has obvious reasons for not wanting his dead brother to have heirs, so whenever he "goes in" to her he "spills his seed upon the ground". Whereupon the Lord has him killed as well. There's a third brother, Shelah, but Judah is beginning to see a discouraging pattern here, so he tells her the boy is too young and sends her back to her father's house to wait until he's older. Some time—possibly years—later, after Judah's own wife has died, he's on a sheep-shearing visit to Timnah when Tamar plants herself on the road disguised as a prostitute and tricks him into impregnating her. Not having recognized her, when he hears that his daughter-in-law has gotten pregnant he's about to have her executed when she proves to him that he's the father ("OMG, that babe on the road to Timnah was you?") and he has to take her and her twin boys in, though he does not lie with her a second time. The first twin, Perez, is the ancestor of King David, whose married life was likewise not exactly on the Santorum-approved model.
Quote from a campaign commercial (audio here: and you have to listen, there are errors in the transcript) by then candidate, now governor, Susana Martínez of New Mexico:
Criminals take advantage of weak laws by giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. As governor, that will not happen.
There's a lot of linguistic weirdness packed into a small space here. A straight parse of the first sentence suggests that the giving of licenses is a kind of technique for taking advantage of those unidentified laws, not the goal of it. And since her aim is to get rid of the laws that allow the DMV (i.e., not criminals) to give licenses to illegal immigrants, that's a very peculiar way to describe them.
But licenses for illegal immigrants are popular
in New Mexico, and the legislature has refused to dump them three
times. My guess would be that her story is just a spurious "problem"
like voter fraud; that there are fewer criminally-provided licenses in
illegal immigrant hands—since they can get legal ones—than there are New
Mexico teenagers with fake birthdates. The grammatical twisting,
though, makes it just all the harder to understand what she's up to,
you're too busy translating it to hear it critically.
But the best bit is the other sentence, with its illustration of
that special psychopathy of the Republican in authority, who has never
entirely made it out of that infantile phase where self and other blend
into one. After the election, she seems to be saying, the governor won't
exactly be her; the governor will simply be, and the situation will be different.
Best historical commentary that was never made: When Zhou Enlai said of the French Revolution that it was "too soon to say". It turns out, according to Chas Freeman, who was there, he was only talking about the upheavals of 1968. Freeman added that
the misinterpretation “was too delightful to set straight” at the time.
Which I totally understand. If I have a beef it's that he ended up telling the truth after all. It's still too soon!
I just learned from Wikipedia that the Latter-Day Saints hold the Garden of Eden to have been located in Jackson County, Missouri, right around Independence. After the Flood, when Noah's family ended up in Mesopotamia, they named the local rivers Tigris and Euphrates and whatnot to remind themselves of back home in America, as a later generation of Americans would name bits of the New World after Utica and Montevideo and Cairo.*
Title page of Basilius Besler's Hortus Eystettensis (1613). From the Chicago Botanic Garden website.
Also about the genius crank and sometime small-time rock idol David Rohl, who places it in eastern Iran, in the plain below the Caucasus near Tabriz, a more fragrant and evocative theory to this old helpless Orientalist (I normally manage to hold this disgracefully [jump]
*Which they obviously didn't, come to think of it; they named all these towns after places they had never been and of which they cannot have had any very precise ideas. I mean, not Plymouth or Boston perhaps, but Alexandria? Lebanon, PA?
That old Bain Capital (Wall Street Journal, via ThinkProgress) when Willard Mitt Romney was running it was such a sweet place to work, always thinking of the employees—especially the CEO. When they acquired a new company they'd issue special "high-risk" shares that you could dump in your IRA, where they would magically increase to as much as almost 600 times their original value, with any and all taxes deferred as the funds grew or as you reinvested them somewhere else:
So Willard himself in this way amassed an IRA of $100 million, which is some basket of eggs. But doesn't every silver lining have a cloud? Now if he wants to withdraw that money it counts as income, not capital gains, and he'll have to pay a top marginal tax rate of 35%—just like ordinary people have to do with their money! Talk about adding insult to injury, this is doing it at compound rates!
Just sickening what a job creator has to go through these days, isn't it? No wonder he's so anxious to reform the system.
ROMNEY: Well, if they are 45 years old and they show up and say I want insurance because I have heart disease, it’s like, ‘Hey guys. We can’t play the game like that. You’ve got to get insurance when you are well and then if you get ill, you are going to be covered. [...]
Hey, that's the individual mandate argument, isn't it? Well, no, it can't be, because Romney's against the individual mandate, except in Massachusetts, of course, where it's the coolest thing since sliced bread. No, this is the argument against insuring persons with pre-existing conditions. This is why they're against the individual mandate: because under that system if you don't get insurance you just have to pay a fine, whereas this way if you don't get insurance it kills you. It's the American way!
There was the strangest little panic swarm of emoprogs—I think—over at Kos this morning, around an extremely well-made guide by Armando to today's Supreme Court arguments. They all seemed to have just heard for the first time about the Republican theory of the individual health insurance mandate being unconstitutional because what part of the interstate commerce clause says government can force everybody to buy stuff? and to have been totally taken in by it, thunderstruck and terrorized.
Schrödingers Katze. By Niklas Pix Bodin, at Kunstnet.
It could be one of those beyond-left-and-right things I'm too old to understand, where there's some similarity that escapes me between bombing Afghan wedding parties and providing universal health insurance; but then they seemed to have a pretty weak understanding of the Constitution—one of them wrote,
Bill of Rights
Was not part of original Constitution. Any understanding of Congressional limits has to apply pre-amendment
under the apparent impression that the amendments were just added to confuse us; and another,
There has to be a rational basis for all laws. Unless a state or the federal government can articulate one, the law is unconstitutional
which is a remarkable theory indeed.
Anyhow, it struck me that this is another of those crypto-Heisenbergian cases where we may be observing things faster than they are actually happening, in ways that could tend to have unpredictable effects on the way they turn out.
Indeed, as the day wore on, it was fun to watch the interpretations bend, starting with this morning's inexplicable Times fluff piece on Randy Barnett, the originator of the most idiotic argument against the mandate (that Congress has no power to "regulate inactivity") biasing the punters in his favor (they're thinking, if Cheryl Gay Stolberg and Charlie Savage both take him seriously, won't Kennedy take him seriously too?). Through the afternoon, the pro-mandaters were sinking gradually into despair, as Kennedy seemed to vibrate, so to speak, at a Barnettian frequency, but by the end of the day Think Progress had found a classically sour liberal compromise between hope and rage: Kennedy was going to vote for the mandate, they figured, but for completely wrong reasons.
But the Times is still dubious as bedtime approaches, and wonders whether there's a plan B. My plan B is, we know it's constitutional for the government to force people to buy insurance if it's government-run insurance (unemployment, workmen's comp, Medicare, social security), so if Justice Kennedy really wants us to go with the German plan, that's fine with me. Bend that observer's paradox my way!
Welcome to your New York City Education Department, where they are
developing what you might call political correctness for clowns:
In an effort to eliminate potential "unpleasant emotions" among students, the New York Department of Education has placed a ban on mentions of "birthdays," "dinosaurs," "Halloween," and "dancing," in city-issued tests, the New York Post reports. (h/t Huffington Post)
This isn't your idea of eliminating test bias in favor of well-off white students, alas. This is just idiocy;
the mandate is meant to curb fear that references to those topics
might stir controversy among students. Dinosaurs, officials said, could
bring up evolution, Halloween could suggest paganism, and birthdays
might create animosity among students who are Jehovah's witnesses, since
they don't celebrate them.
CBS New York reports the word "poverty" is also not allowed,
as "words that suggest wealth" might cause some students to feel
excluded.... The department is also banning mentions of "divorce" and "disease," in
case students have loved ones who are separated or suffering from an
illness. "Slavery" is also flagged and "terrorism" is considered too
scary.
And in tertiary education news, remember the ransom extracted from college students
by the House Republicans last summer in return for allowing the
national debt ceiling to be raised? Eliminating subsidized loans for
graduate and professional students, and eliminating incentive programs
for graduates to pay their loans back on time?
Remember that they decided to change the calculation of eligibility for Pell grants so you only qualify for maximum aid with a family income of $23,000 or less, instead of $32,000? And so on up the line, disqualifying hundreds of thousands of students altogether? A-and a cap of 12 semesters per student? Remember the fixed rate on Stafford loans, 3.4% since 2007, is scheduled to go back up to 6.8% on July 1 if Congress doesn't do something.
All these disastrous changes are effective in July (h/t jonnym at Kos). Obama has always had great ideas for federal student loan programs, but they mostly depend on a congress that doesn't respond; meanwhile, though, Bloomberg informs us today that
With $67 billion of student loans in default, the Education
Department is turning to an army of private debt-collection
companies to put the squeeze on borrowers. Working on
commissions that totaled about $1 billion last year, these
government contractors face growing complaints that they are
violating federal laws by insisting on stiff payments, even when
borrowers’ incomes make them eligible for leniency.
This information needs to spread around. I can't believe Obama and most House members of both parties want to go into the election without doing something about this, but I guess the Tea Party caucus, now apparently the Santorum caucus, represents voters who don't think people ought to go to college.
Remember this?
Back when I was obsessed with John Boehner, and his inability to do his job, I meant to say but never did that what Obama really needs to do is find some procedural way of not needing him—like naming a Republican prime minister who could call on support for some modest legislation from Democrats and those Republicans susceptible to the idea of being sane—I bet Eric Cantor would gladly take the job, he's greedy and dishonest enough, but I'm imagining somebody kind of like Boehner but capable of keeping his word, one of those old Rotary Club–type Republicans, lovers of earmarks and little constituent favors and whiskey, who still believe in voters, conservative or whatever. You mean there aren't any?
Last week Richard Cohen retold a quaint story in the Washington Post: Rabbi saves x many Jewish lives from a tyrant by promising the tyrant that if he leaves these Jews alone the rabbi will teach the tyrant's dog to talk, within a year. Rebbitzin reproaches him: "How are you going to do that? We'll all be killed!" Rabbi replies, "Well, a lot of things could happen in a year; the tyrant could die, or I could die... Or maybe the dog could start talking?"
Dog that looks like a lawyer. From freethinker.co.uk, and you should check out the link because there's a story attached to it.
Now, you will note that the rabbi in this story does not propose to flush out the tyrant's underground Jew-murdering facilities with GBU-28s, or anything like that. But this is [jump]
If you're interested in the situation of the US education system, you need to read this: "a test you need to fail". It's short and sweet (really sweet) and says more in a few paragraphs than a dozen academic studies.
In Positive Economic Sign, Republicans Starting to Say Obama Wasn’t Born in US Again
I often confuse Andy Borowitz with the Onion and think once I've seen the headline I have the whole joke already, but this is not necessarily the case: this one just kept getting deeper.
Also, if you care about Chinese workers who make Apple products and Mike Daisey who reported on them for This American Life and then had to withdraw the report and Ira Glass sort of went Oprah on him on the air and... No, it actually doesn't matter whether you care about all of them as long as you've just heard about them, and you can even be fairly vague about that, then you should read the text of an interview between Ira Glass and Rumproast's Gil Mann that won't be going on the radio. (No, because it's imaginary.)
MosesZD in comments at Balloon Juice adverted to a 2007 story about the economist Rick Nevin, who argued on the basis of some incredibly persuasive data that the ups and downs of crime rates in the United States have had nothing to do with Rudolph Giuliani--it's all about lead poisoning, with the declining crime of the last couple of decades connected to the elimination of lead from automobile fuel. A more recent paper updating the data to nearly the present and the new frontier of lead abatement by replacing windows is here.
Schoolhouse Rocked by Avenger41. Fan art by Videl Gohan.
Something else I called attention to a while back (in mid-January) is the curious relationship developing on the US right between the Roman Catholic hierarchy and our ancient Know-Nothing community, which traditionally identified the Pope as Antichrist and Rome as the Scarlet Woman who rides that seven-headed beast in the book of Revelation.
Now the Times religion columnist, Samuel G. Freedman, has caught onto the same thing, with a very interesting nuance that has apparently been showing up in the primaries: while Evangelical Protestants have adopted Rick "Sanctum" Santorum as the standard-bearer of "religious" conservatism, Catholics haven't—Catholic Republicans are mostly voting for Romney. Freedman comments, primly,
Through a critical reading of the data, Mr. Santorum’s base of
evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics could be seen by
cynics as a coalition of zealots, held together by intolerance. By
another way of thinking, however, his candidacy offers proof of a
growing tolerance on the part of evangelical Christians, a willingness
to shed ancestral religious prejudices.
And then the Catholics who won't vote for Santorum are more tolerant still? (They are voting for somebody who believes God has plural wives, except, of course, for the Democrats, whose tolerance is not under discussion.) Forgive me, but if you think it's a big deal that evangelicals now recognize white Catholics as white people, I realize that wasn't always true, but color me less than impressed—I think Freedman's cynic idea works better.
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.
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]
We all like wind and solar, but you can’t drive a car with a windmill on it.
Actually gas is just as bad. We tried putting an oil refinery on top of our old car, but then there was no room for the dog. How about ammonia, though?
Bishop trivia:
The Bishop of Vienna from 1541 to 1552 was named Friedrich Nausea, a latinization of the original German family name, Grau (from grauen, to inspire dread, and cognate with the root of English gruesome). In 1551 he went to the Council of Trent, where he stood proudly for the congregation taking Holy Communion in both kinds and revocation of the rule of priestly celibacy, but died there without making it home. In 1897, they named a street in the Ottakring after him, Nauseagasse.
I can't blame you if you don't remember, but a couple of weeks ago I said something about how a movie about James O'Keeffe would have to be one of those teen implausible-schemes-for-getting-laid farces? This turns out to be so much truer than I could possibly have imagined! Down to the date-rape drugs and purloined panties to show the guys!
Click the link to get the full story, but I want to note that in his suit to prevent the publication of the emails documenting his antics, he alleges
The Information further includes proprietary ideas for future video work
and e-mail communication of a highly private nature including those
concerning Plaintiffs romantic relationships. Plaintiffs statements on
Twitter claim that the material is so provocative that it caused Andrew
Breitbart to suffer a fatal heart attack.
Attaturk got the scoop on this yesterday, the swine. My version has more emotional depth, though.
Our NYPD at work, insinuating itself into the company of some suspiciously pious college students with suspiciously healthy ideas of what to do for fun. From documents of the undercover surveillance of area Muslims put on line by AP, via ThinkProgress, the adventures of one intrepid agent.
Fiendish, those Muslims, aren't they, orchestrating and stuff?
I love how the agent's training seems to have made him aware that the number of times per day you pray is significant in Islam, but not what the actual number is.
I hadn't realized that Syrians in opposition to the murderous government are still bravely coming out for regularly scheduled Friday demonstrations, today's under the slogan "Damascus, here we come."
Protests in Tripoli, Syria. Photo by AFP from Dawn.
The protests are going on all over the country, in spite of snipers and helicopter buzzing, in the most dangerous and already beat up places as well as Damascus itself, where something like a thousand people are doing something like Occupying the capital tonight, according to the BBC, after marching up King Faisal Street chanting, "Peaceful, peaceful, God, Syria, Freedom."
The situation seems horrible beyond horrible. The number killed has now mounted up to 9100, as if Assad were directly competing against his father (the famous 10,000 butchered at Hama in 1982) for a record of some kind. I can't imagine anything from the outside that could help, further sanctions or (illegal) military action, although the kinds of support provided across the border from Turkey are surely a lot better than nothing. Assad yesterday said he would consider dumping the 1963 emergency laws and will put some of the thugs from Deraa, where the movement began just a year ago, on trial; and is said to have ordered the freeing of everyone arrested during the "recent events", whatever "recent" means, but that's just in the BBC as far as I can tell. The protestors are still getting arrested and shot at, and serious warfighting is going on as well.
The image above caught my eye as something that might startle Thomas P. Friedman: the Israeli and Iranian flags as the Syrian rebellion sees them, to be burned as practically interchangeable symbols of oppression.
Thers found a gorgeous case in a column by Thomas Sowell which starts off from an old newspaper column reminding him how good the persons of color had it back in Ronald Reagan's day:
One of the front-page headlines said: "White-Black Disparity in Income Narrowed in 80's, Census Shows."
The 1980s? Wasn't that the years of the Reagan administration, the "decade of greed," the era of "neglect" of the poor and minorities, if not "covert racism"? [jump]
I don't normally have a reason to mention television here, or even to watch it, but there is a lunatic soap opera that I sort of watch with my as yet somewhat teenaged daughter called Pretty Little Liars, featuring four high school girls dressed like society matrons (the skinny kind) who have been persecuted for some time by cell phone messages and other communications signed A, the pseudonym masking the identity of a cruel and demented supervillain who seems [jump]
I didn't realize that the Roman Catholic prohibition against contraception was any older than the creepy Victorian gimcrackery of the Immaculate Conception, but in fact the theological basis for it has been around forever. St. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa contra Gentiles, explains it thus:
God has care of everything according
to that which is good for it. Now it is good for everything to gain its
end, and evil for it to be diverted from its due end. But as in the
whole so also in the parts, our study should be that every part of man
and every act of his may attain its due end. Now though the
semen is superfluous [jump]
German chess bishop, 14th-15th c., British Museum. From the Game of Kings exhibition, Cloisters, 2011.
The story of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old Florida kid, African American of course, who was shot dead by a Neighborhood Watch vigilante on 26 February, gets more and more horrible and indefensible with each passing day: see this. You can ask Florida's attorney general to do something about it by signing here.
