…”if I had known I’d live this long, I would have taken better care of my teeth” a new meaning.
Big Pharaoh on Egypt
I used to read the English-language blog of Big Pharaoh, an Egyptian writer who would report on developments in his country. Then some years ago he closed down the blog, and until yesterday I was unaware that he’d opened it again sometime during the Mubarak brouhaha.
He doesn’t post so very often, but when he does it’s always an interesting window into some valuable inside information on the Egyptian situation. And so, I recommend Big Pharaoh’s take on what’s transpiring there now:
A small minority of the pro-Morsi supporters were indeed armed with light weapons ”“ which explains the number of policemen who were killed and injured during the operation ”“ and this only made the trigger happy police go on a far bigger killing spree making the death toll of innocent unarmed protesters outrageous and unacceptable to any sensible thinking human being.
…[I]n spite of all the problems pertaining to the two sit-ins, clearing it at the expense of such a huge number of innocent lives allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to claim victimhood and that’s a position the MB feels most comfortable in.
Please read the whole thing.
Obama, the unchecked president
This article by Donald Sensing was recommended by several commenters yesterday. It doesn’t say anything that hasn’t been said before, both here and elsewhere. But it says it very well and quite succinctly.
It’s a gloomy message. But it seems to be the truth, at least as I see it.
That doesn’t mean there might not be some black swans on the horizon that could make a big difference. But that possibility doesn’t change the persuasiveness of the picture painted by Sensing.
That’s the reason I dreaded the 2012 election even more than the 2008 one, and why I had a constantly upset stomach for the entire week before the election and the entire week after. I knew what Obama’s re-election would mean for this country and its people. And I knew Obama was very very likely to win.
But it’s not really Obama himself. It’s been said before, but I’ll say it again: he could never have gotten away with this and been re-elected had the American public not been ready to vote for a smooth-talking orator of little substance and almost no accomplishment, who contradicted himself and blamed others for his every failure while simultaneously pretending to take the high road. Part of this is the self-righteous kick they got out of voting for the first black president. But part of it is the dumbing-down of American culture, the paucity of critical thinking, and the full and eager cooperation of the MSM.
[NOTE: And this from Sarah Hoyt makes some good points as well, although I have a few quibbles with it. The first is that, even in the early days of Communism, it seemed to appeal to quite a few intellectuals, even before the huge leftist propaganda machine really got going. The second is that Great Britain and Israel are two other countries that do a lot of breast-beating and mea-culpa-ing, and educate their elites (at least to a certain extent) to be very critical of what their countries have done.]
Suicide bombs in breast implants?
This prospect is just another subset of the “bombs in body cavities” dilemma.
I agree with this:
The problem is another reason why we should be using behavioural analysis as the primary detection method to screen people at airports.
Michael Totten on Egypt
Michael Totten interviewed Eric Trager, an expert on Egypt, shortly before the recent violence erupted there. Trager said:
The military believes it not only has to remove Morsi, it has to decapitate the entire organization. Otherwise, the Brotherhood will re-emerge and perhaps kill the generals who removed it from power.
That’s what’s in Egypt’s future right now””–persistent civil strife between the military and its supporters on one side and the Brotherhood and its supporters on the other…
There’s likely to be a steady flow of violence, but it probably won’t be ubiquitous. It will consist in pockets around demonstration sites. It will be bad enough to disrupt life, and it will likely undermine a transition moving forward, but it probably won’t be as ugly as in Syria or Algeria…
When I was standing in Tahrir Square after Morsi was removed, a felt a certain amount of sadness because I knew that violence would be an inevitable and significant consequence. People in the square were very happy, but people in another square a few miles away people were mourning. They believe something has been stolen from them, and they intend to fight to get it back.
I think the Brotherhood won’t get it back. It’s highly unlikely that Morsi will see the light of day outside a courtroom. But it’s a fight that’s going to continue for a while, and it’s a fight that many of those celebrating in the square that evening didn’t think about.
Prescient.
Recipe for long life: wild quinoa and skunk meat?
Maybe it just seemed like 123 years.
You’ve come a long way, baby: beyond “I Want To Hold Your Hand”
The idea that hookup culture hurts both boys and girls, and both young men and young women, doesn’t seem strange or revolutionary to me; it seems obvious. But apparently it still needs highlighting, so I’ll highlight it by recommending this article.
Of course not all teens are doing this. But the ones who aren’t are bucking a strong trend towards what I’ve come to think of as the coarsening of American culture, which continues apace and shows no signs of slackening.
It’s everywhere, celebrated and promoted and rewarded in popular entertainment—and not just rap, but dance and movies and the internet in general where porn is ubiquitous and readily available and has been normed. And parents? They are either not present, or are fully into it themselves, or are unaware, or feel powerless to stop it.
The Beatles Wanted to Hold Your Hand. Many of their songs were about love. There are still a lot of songs about love—witness the popularity of Adele, for example. But rap music (and probably other genres and artists I can’t name; my finger is not exactly on the pulse of this stuff, but if you have teenagers you are likely to know more about it than I) sets a tone that that is usually sexually exploitative and empty, and this is true of both boys and girls, young men and women.
And yes, I know this does not exist in isolation. The left and feminists on the left are a big part of it. But it has also taken on a cultural life of its own and is additionally driven by the enormous profits to be made.
But hey, let’s stroll down memory lane:
[Hat tip: commenter “Artfldgr.”]
Obama oversteps the Constitution more than Nixon?
What’s more, at least when Nixon was around the press noticed and acted as a check on him. This was apparently due to no special reverence on their part for the Constitution, as we’ve since learned. It was because they hated Nixon.
They feel very differently about Obama. And at the same time, the American people know less and less about what the Constitution says or how it might be designed to protect them. So fewer alarms are being raised.
Kathleed Parker: Vote for Hillary!! Save the world!
Kathleen Parker writes in her WaPo column that we should support Hillary Clinton because it will save the world.
I kid you not:
Here’s a thought: She [Hillary Clinton] can save the world…
Let’s begin with a working (and provable) premise: Women, if allowed to be fully equal to men, will bring peace to the planet. This is not so far-fetched a notion. One, men have been at it for thousands of years, resulting in millions and millions of corpses. Two, countries where women are most oppressed and abused are also the least stable.
Three, as women become more empowered, especially financially, countries become more stable…
What does this have to do with Hillary? Quite a bit.
Rewinding the tape to 1995 at the U.N.’s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, then-first lady Hillary Clinton empowered women as never before with just a few words: “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all.”
So, why even wait for Hillary’s election, as the Nobel Committee did with Obama and his Peace Prize? Let’s give Hillary the Peace Prize now—not for her glorious work as Secretary of State, but for the work she will undoubtedly do as president.
Parker has fallen prey to the same fallacy that so many who support Obama keep stating, which is that a politician from some heretofore under-represented demographic group can, by sheer force of rhetoric, change the world. But the world is a great deal more resistant to change than that, as Parker ought to have observed by now.
If Parker actually thinks that the example of the election of Hillary Clinton will help liberate women in third world countries (for example, in the Arab world) well then, I have a bridge to sell Parker. You might say that of course she doesn’t really believe that. But if she’s anything like many of the liberal women I know she really, really does believe it. And she probably also believes that women are somehow morally better and more peaceful than men, a point on which I strongly disagree from personal observation.
Her economic argument is the most interesting one. It is indeed true that “as women become more empowered, especially financially, countries become more stable.” But that’s hardly something that magically comes from the election of a President Hillary Clinton. And which comes first, the stability or the economic empowerment? And do both result from other societal and cultural forces that represent deeper and more profound change within the countries themselves, if such changes are to last? At any rate, Clinton would have no power in those countries—no more than Obama did when he spoke to the Arab world in Cairo—and how’s that going these days?
But Parker isn’t interested in all that; she’s interested in promoting Clinton. And why Parker is considered a conservative, or a sort-of conservative, I’ll never know, except that she’s the type of birdbrained “conservative” that the MSM likes to trot out as an example of the genre.
Parker, by the way, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for her columns. And in 2008 she became famous for calling on Sarah Palin to resign from the Republican ticket because Palin was “clearly out of her league.” I guess Palin as veep would not have led to World Peace in quite the same inexorable way that President Hillary Clinton would, despite Palin’s similar credentials as a female.
[NOTE: On the topic of women in third-world countries and how to change their status, let’s look at Egypt. Back in the 50s, Nasser tried to effect just the sort of economic reform that I believe Parker is talking about as part of his imposition of a socialist welfare-state type economy. Same thing was true in Afghanistan when the Soviets were there. Since then, both countries have reverted to their cultural traditions to a large degree, Afghanistan even more than Egypt.]
Violence and fog in Egypt continues
Today the violence and killing in Egypt has continued in similar fashion to that of yesterday. The reports (for what they’re worth) are that the death toll is now over 500.
Here are some photos; I find that often the British newspapers are better for that sort of thing than our MSM is.
As for truth—well, here are some excerpts that might help you decide where it lies:
This is the horrifying moment an armoured police vehicle was pushed off a bridge by Egyptian protestors in a day of violence which left at least 343 people dead.
The van plunged off the 6th October Bridge before demonstrators attacked the wreckage yesterday. It is not known how many people were on board and how many people survived the fall, but bloodied men were seen lying around the van moments afterwards…
Witnesses said many of those killed were hit by snipers on surrounding rooftops. Heavily-armed police and troops reportedly opened fire with machine guns on thousands of demonstrators, including women and children…
The Muslim Brotherhood claimed over 2,000 people had been killed and thousands wounded in eight hours of continuous firing while Egyptian authorities said Mr Morsi’s supporters opened fire on security forces.
The exact death toll could not be confirmed but an AFP reporter counted at least 124 bodies in three separate locations around the camp in the capital, with many appearing to have died from gunshot wounds…
In a statement, the Brotherhood said: ‘The world cannot sit back and watch while innocent men, women and children are being indiscriminately slaughtered. The world must stand up to the military junta’s crime before it is too late.’…
Video footage from a camera on board an Army helicopter was released by officials who said it showed protesters firing on security forces.
Live TV footage on several channels appeared to show hooded Brotherhood gunmen brandishing what appeared to be small automatic rifles and firing them in the direction of security forces.
I trust neither side to report honestly on this. The Muslim Brotherhood (the “protest” side) in particular are highly motivated to provoke the violence and then use it for anti-government propaganda, in time-honored fashion. The government is hardly angelic, either. And the press is either clueless (sometimes for understandable “fog of war” reasons) and/or biased and part of the propaganda.
And photos? They each capture a moment in time, and show us the picture of what happened at that moment, but not what caused it or why or even in most cases who. Interesting but ultimately useless—except, again for propaganda.
And then there’s our own government:
The United States lead urgent calls for restraint warning that “the world is watching.”
Ah—“the world is watching.” For those who remember the 60s, like me, that should bring back memories. The man who said that to Egypt is named Josh Earnest, and he is a White House spokesman and deputy to Jay Carney. Earnest is too young (born in 1975) to remember the famous quote himself, but it occurred during the 1968 demonstrations and was shouted by antiwar protestors outside the Democratic Convention as they provoked police violence against them (not shooting or deaths, however) and the Chicago police willingly obliged by providing the press with the visuals, which were aired on TV in real time.
I have written about those 1968 Chicago demonstrations at some length here; you can also read up on their many complexities (of which we young people watching at the time were largely unaware) here. Suffice to say that in Chicago, the protest leaders (not necessarily the rank and file) purposely wanted to spark a violent police reaction and use it as propaganda. And so it came to pass.
In Egypt, they play for higher stakes. And although the whole world is watching, I’m not sure the world is caring all that much anymore, or at the very least the whole world hasn’t a clue what to do about it, if anything.
Remarks such as this one (from the earnest Mr. Earnest again, speaking for the White House) are almost laughable, although I suppose they must be uttered anyway:
We urge the government of Egypt and all parties in Egypt to refrain from violence and resolve their differences peacefully.
There are forces on the march in Egypt that are not going to become Quakers overnight, whatever we might say. Perhaps all this would have happened anyway without Obama’s intervention and encouragement of the toppling of Mubarak, but one wonders. And Obama cannot possibly say this was an unforeseeable result of getting rid of a strongman who held such forces in check; it was entirely foreseeable, and Obama has consistently supported a process that would predictably lead to it.
[ADDENDUM: Obama says, “We don’t take sides.”
Yeah, like when Mubarak was under threat?]
A cautionary tale for Wesley Clark
Power. Fame. Wealth.
They can make an older man (or woman) look mighty attractive. And youth? Well, youth is rather attractive already, at least physically.
General Wesley Clark is divorcing his wife after 46 years citing her ”˜general indignities’ despite facing claims he is having an affair with a woman half his age, MailOnline can reveal today.
In court papers seen by MailOnline, 68-year-old former NATO Supreme Commander blames his wife for the breakdown of his marriage, filing for divorce on the grounds of ”˜general indignities’.
Astonishingly, the court papers list Wesley Kanne Clark, Sr as the plaintiff and his wife, Gertrude Kingston Clark, as the defendant.
Not at all astonishing, actually, because as the article itself goes on to make clear, Arkansas does not have no-fault divorce. “General indignities” is Arkansas’ version of “irreconcilable differences,” and if it’s Clark who wants the divorce rather than his wife—as most definitely appears to be the case—then it is he who must become the plaintiff to get the ball, as it were, rolling.
Not a pretty story. But what divorce is? And I know nothing about the prior state of the Clark’s marriage, although an affair one of the worst ways to end it all. His wife is fairly attractive, too, especially as a woman of “a certain age.” Here they are in seemingly happier days:
And here’s Clark and his 30-year old girlfriend, Shauna Mei:
So, what’s my “cautionary tale” of the title? Simply this—the story of Rupert Murdoch and third wife Wendi Deng:
The parallels abound. Rupert married Wendi in 1999, 17 days after his divorce from second wife Anna, to whom he’d been married for 32 years and with whom he’d had three children. At the time of his third marriage Murdock was 68 and Deng 30, the exact ages Clark and Mei are at present. Deng had been born and raised in China; not just a pretty face, she had recently received an MBA from the Yale School of Management. Shauna was also born in China, like Wendi (although Shauna came here as an 8-year-old), and Shauna also has a degree in management (in addition to one in engineering).
Here’s a photo of Murdoch and his very attractive previous wife Anna:
I see a bit of a resemblance to Clark’s wife Gertrude, don’t you?
Well, time passes, and now Murdoch is 82 and Wendi 44, and he has recently filed for a divorce from her. The marriage was reportedly troubled for many years, but she is nevertheless said to have felt shocked and “blindsided” by his action (as Anna was reported to have been before her).
Murdoch’s divorce from Anna cost him the big, big, big bucks. When he wed Wendi there was a pre-nup to protect him, but there are some areas of possible expansion on that (such as child support; there are two children of the marriage), and Wendi has hired a big lawyer in an effort to get more than the agreed-on twenty million (which would be chicken feed for Murdoch).
So, what does this mean for Wesley Clark? Darned if I know, but the parallels simply leapt out at me when I saw his story.
The fog of Egypt
Today’s news is that between 100-150 people have been killed in two protest camps in Cairo as police attempted to clear them out.
When I saw the headlines, I immediately pictured a big tent city, and then government security forces coming in and opening fire on the unsuspecting crowd. Just as quickly, I realized that’s not necessarily what happened, and that furthermore we are unlikely to ever know what really happened, because those reporting on it are either biased and/or because it’s not always easy even for eyewitnesses to know what’s happening in such situations. The area is large; gunfire can come from different directions. Who fired first? And why?
Let’s take a look at CNN’s report:
The violence began with Egyptian security forces storming the two massive makeshift camps filled with Morsy supporters, bulldozing tents and escorting away hundreds of protesters.
Chaos ensued. Many protesters refused to leave, even in the face of bulldozers and surrounded by the injured and dead. “They said they’re prepared to die,” CNN’s Reza Sayah reported from Cairo.
“It’s an open war,” one protester told Sayah.
Along with smoke, bursts of rapid gunfire continued to fill the air. It was unclear who had the weapons, and who was shooting at whom. People could be heard wailing.
State TV reported that snipers from the Muslim Brotherhood — Morsy’s party — were exchanging gunfire with Egyptian security forces near a university building.
Several newspeople were killed or injured in the melee, as well.
That was not the only violence:
Morsy supporters besieged various churches in Sohag, setting fire to Saint George’s Church, a tour bus and a police car, Egypt’s state-run EgyNews reported.
Interior Ministry sources told CNN that Muslim Brotherhood supporters also attacked three police stations around Egypt.
Naguib Sawiris, an Egyptian billionaire who helped found the anti-Morsy Free Egyptian Party, said his party had video of Muslim Brotherhood members “shooting machine guns on civilians, on police. So anyone who wants to call this a peaceful demonstration would be wrong.”..
But Ahmed Mustafa, Muslim Brotherhood spokesman, told CNN from London that Sawiris was trying to misrepresent video of masked people with weapons…
The Interior Ministry said security forces did not use gunfire and instead were attacked by “terrorist elements” inside the camps.
“Egyptian security forces are committed to the utmost self-restraint in dealing with the protesters,” the ministry said.
Representatives of both sides insisted they oppose violence…
The government has accused the protesters of packing the sites with their children to use them as human shields.
The propaganda war is almost as hot (although not as bloody) and definitely as important as the actual war. And I challenge anyone to figure it out at this point. But I do know that deliberately provoking violence from security forces and then using the resultant casualties as propaganda as a common tactic. And I also know that violence and then the declaration of a state of emergency by the government is a common way for authorities to gain more power, especially if that state of emergency is continued indefinitely, as was done by Mubarak for thirty years.
Let’s look at how the WSJ covered the incident:
“This only has one name: terrorism,” said Hassan Mohamed, a 25-year-old Egyptian who supported the government’s crackdown on the sit-ins. He pointed to a factory that he said Brotherhood supporters had set on fire, the flames consuming the entire 10-story building. “They are terrorizing the city and they are terrorizing us.”
His comments exemplified the existential challenges consuming Egypt, in what has emerged as a neighbor-against-neighbor battle for the country’s political soul and whether it will become a secular or Islamic state.
“With our blood and with our soul we will sacrifice for Islam and bring Sisi down,” protesters screamed and clapped on the street, referring to the leader of the armed forces who orchestrated the coup against Mr. Morsi and his Brotherhood-dominated government following a massive popular uprising.
Civilians battling the Brotherhood supporters responded by chanting “the army and the people [are] one hand!”
One thing is fairly clear, which is that many of the Morsi supporters are ready and willing (perhaps even eager?) to die for the cause: “With our blood and with our soul we will sacrifice for Islam and bring Sisi down.” And so it is not difficult to imagine the instigation of violence could be on that side.
But the best and most accurate quote was probably this one, allegedly spoken by a soldier who blocked newspeople from going to one of the scenes:
“You can’t go in. We’re shooting at them, they’re shooting at us. Everyone is shooting at everyone,” the soldier said.
Indeed.