Month: February 2011

by Chris Bodenner

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.

WSJ:

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.

EA:

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.

AJE:

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)

by Patrick Appel

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.

by Chris Bodenner

Giant spider attacks! Packers win!

by Conor Friedersdorf

Together at last.

by Chris Bodenner

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.

by Conor Friedersdorf

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.

by Chris Bodenner

Another ripple, this time in Bahrain:

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.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

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.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

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 an accidental cultural convention! I have done work in this area, though I'm not at all the main authority.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Rich Lowry wants him to run. I wonder if this is the beginning of a movement movement.