The Weather At Home & Journalists In Egypt-Two Tuesday Links

February 4, 2014February 11, 2014 / chr1 / 2 Comments

Alexis Madrigal At The Atlantic-Talking About The Weather: The Next Level:’

Some good weather links and a nod to climate science, but also climate science as a defining and organizing worldview for a healthy percentage of the readership, I imagine:

‘There are three general types of resources here. First, there are people and institutions that analyze the weather and tell us about them. The second category is unfiltered public weather data and imagery. And the last tranche of resources deliver forecasts or computer models on which forecasts are based.’

Joshua Hersh at the New Yorker: ‘Journalism Becomes A Crime In Egypt:’

‘For foreign journalists, who were tolerated under the Brotherhood but have never been viewed with great affection in Cairo, the steep decline in working conditions hit bottom in December, when the police busted down the door of an upscale hotel suite that served as the offices for Al Jazeera’s English-language channel and dragged away the staff.’

The democratically-elected/peaceful uprising vision of the Arab Spring would have been nice (inside every Egyptian is a freedom-desiring human waiting to get out and possibly build democratic institutions), but we’ve gone from Mubarrak to Al-Sisi most likely, and a deep-State still controlled by the military.

At what cost our current committments? How are we best able to secure and advance our interests?

What’s our strategy?

Quote by Jeanne Kirkpatrick:

In his essay Representative Government, John Stuart Mill identified three fundamental conditions which the Carter administration would do well to ponder. These are: “One, that the people should be willing to receive it [representative government]; two, that they should be willing and able to do what is necessary for its preservation; three, that they should be willing and able to fulfill the duties and discharge the functions which it imposes on them.”

-From Dictatorship And Double Standards.

From Abu Muqawama: ‘Mubarak And Me’…From Michael Totten: ‘The New Egyptian Underground’…Michael Totten At The American Interest: “A Leaner, Meaner Brotherhood”

The Greensburg Tornado on Doppler Radar…Tornadoes In Major Cities: Atlanta

From The Weather Channel: 3D Image Of The Tuscaloosa Tornado April 27th, 2011…Tornadoes! Some Links…The Greensburg Tornado on Doppler Radar…Tornadoes In Major Cities: Atlanta…From NOAA: Tornado Safety Guide…From CBS St. Louis: ‘UPDATED: Video of the Joplin Twister’

From Via Media: ‘Bambi Meets Godzilla In The Middle-East’

August 18, 2013 / chr1 / Leave a comment

Full post here.

‘The end of history, which AI founder Francis Fukuyama used to describe the historical implications of the Cold War, is to American political philosophy what the Second Coming is to Christians. In the end, almost all Americans devoutly believe, the liberal, market principles on which our country is built will triumph around the world’

and:

‘Meanwhile the President’s most ardent critics, both on the right and the left, believe that his biggest problem is that he isn’t exhibiting sufficient faith in the national credo. Since we know that liberal democracy is triumphing everywhere, if it isn’t working in Egypt it must be the President’s fault. There must have been some policy path, there must still be some policy path, by which the President can bring Egypt into the Promised Land.’

Worth reading.

It’s not a bad summation of the national credo.

I suspect Obama’s civil-rights alliance, the arc-of-history-bends-towards-justice thinking has placed him in an arguably more Left-of-Center, human rights advocacy position than even Jimmy Carter had placed himself.

It might be worth revisiting his Cairo Speech, as it’s clear Obama has a kind of global, universalist vision for the world and America’s role in it. Call him secularly universal, anti-imperial, non-nationalist, but it’s clearly a vision of process and democracy promotion. ‘Violent extremists’ is a curiously vague idea.

I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if Obama, like Carter before him, is not only on the human-rights circuit at some point in the future, but may still be pushing his Organizing For Action in some capacity here at home: A permanent civil-rights protest political machine with a particularly racial focus, perhaps aiming to unite the Left-Of-Center 60’s idealist coalitions under some vision of liberal managerialism.

Here’s a quote from Anne-Marie Slaughter, on liberal internationalism:

‘The central liberal internationalist premise is the value of a rules-based international order that restrains powerful states and thereby reassures their enemies and allies alike and allows weaker states to have sufficient voice in the system that they will not choose to exit’

Of course, a similarly human-rights focused policy didn’t turn out so well for U.S. in Iran, and here we are a few decades leader trying to strategize and stay ahead of the tide of Islamism and many other forces in the region.

As to foreign-policy, maybe we could return to some kind of realism, but that will take serious work, as the Republican party is quite split at the moment between pro-military nationalists, neo-cons, realists, the religious, pro-Israel right, all the way to the anti-Statist libertarian isolationists, with anti-war types among them.

Meanwhile, many decisions being made inside Egypt will likely affect our policy towards the region for generations to come.

What should we be doing, and why? What can we do? What’s already being done?

From Abu Muqawama: ‘Mubarak And Me’…From Michael Totten: ‘The New Egyptian Underground’…Michael Totten At The American Interest: “A Leaner, Meaner Brotherhood”

One problem with Fukuyama is the Hegelian collectivism and statism: Update And Repost- From YouTube: Leo Strauss On The Meno-More On The Fact/Value Distinction?’…

Michael Totten Interviews Eric Trager: ‘The Truth About Egypt’

August 16, 2013August 16, 2013 / chr1 / Leave a comment

Full post here.

‘The United States has done a very poor job managing perceptions in Egypt. The administration assumed if it wasn’t critical about Morsi’s behavior domestically, they’d win his cooperation on foreign policy. The problem is that Morsi was only willing to cooperate with us on foreign policy in the short run. The Muslim Brotherhood wants to consolidate power in Egypt and then create a global Islamic state. It’s a key part of their ideology and their rhetoric. They talk about it with me. They can’t be our partners.

Worse, by not speaking up and criticizing Morsi as he tried to create unchecked power for himself, it created the impression that the United States wanted to replace Mubarak with the Muslim Brotherhood. That’s extremely damaging in a place like Egypt with such tumultuous politics’

We didn’t support the Brotherhood. We failed to speak up and manage perceptions. In the future, the only way to address this problem will be to make sure we don’t put all our eggs in one basket. We have to spread our risk by making sure we engage everybody.’

What kind of chance does the idea of democracy and democratic process have in Egypt given the endemic poverty, the oppression, and the lack of readiness in most of the people for it?

Placed against the backdrop of a longer-term Islamist resurgence in the Middle-East, pushing against Arab nationalism, and the answer is not too much.

Such a vision of ideal and pure one voice, one vote democracy in the most stable of countries can become a vehicle for majoritarian rule, leading to a quid pro quo politics of corruption, patronage, and vote-buying.

In Egypt, the democratic process was merely a stalking horse for the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, and now the military has cracked back down hard on the Brotherhood, and it’s getting bloodier.

From Abu Muqawama: ‘Mubarak And Me’…From Michael Totten: ‘The New Egyptian Underground’…Michael Totten At The American Interest: “A Leaner, Meaner Brotherhood”