The pursuit of truth in a time of diseased thought

Scalia’s Literary Dissent

By Micah Mattix 

If John Keats is right that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” Justice Antonin Scalia’s crafted dissent must be truer than Justice Anthony Kennedy’s flat majority opinion. His language is sharp and highly metaphorical as he argues that the majority opinion is “diseased,” leading not to order and health but to a cancerous chaos. Here are a few of his most literary lines:

The root error of the Court’s erroneous decisions, Scalia writes, is its “diseased” exaltation of its own role: 

“The Court’s errors on both points spring forth from the same diseased root: an exalted conception of the role of this institution in America.” 

This, in turn, has caused the Court to diminish the Constitution, viewing it, Scalia writes, as “a technicality of little interest”: 

“The Court is eager—hungry—to tell everyone its view of the legal question at the heart of this case. Standing in the way is an obstacle, a technicality of little interest to anyone but the people of We the People, who created it as a barrier against judges’ intrusion into their lives.”

Scalia extends his “diseased” metaphor as he examines, in his view, the Court’s superfluous decision to even hear the case, which he later characterizes as a “contrivance”:

“But wait, the reader wonders—Windsor won below, and so cured her injury, and the President was glad to see it. True, says the majority, but judicial review must march on regardless, lest we ‘undermine the clear dictate of the separation-of-powers principle that when an Act of Congress is alleged to conflict with the Constitution, it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.’” 

Thus, we have the image of a “diseased” court “healing” the healthy.

Trial by jury: the case for the defence

We should fight hard to defend the right to a jury trial, which remains the ‘lamp that shows that freedom lives’ 

by Luke Gittos

Top of Form

This week, the UK Ministry of Justice revealed plans to save £30 million by restricting the right to trial by jury in ‘minor cases’. The reforms would target offences currently referred to as ‘either way’, because the defendant has the right to choose between being tried by a jury in the Crown Court or by a magistrate in the Magistrates’ Court.

The reforms have been championed by the Magistrates’ Association and the ‘victims’ champion’ Louise Casey, a one-woman quango who in March 2010 was appointed by the New Labour government to represent the interests of victims in the criminal justice system. In November 2010, Casey called for identical restrictions to trial by jury in her report, Ending the Justice Waiting Game: A Plea For Common Sense, in which she derided ‘the administration of law that concerns itself with due process and the rights of offenders’. Speaking to The Times (London) this week, she said: ‘We should not view the right to a jury trial as being so sacrosanct that its exercise should be at the cost of victims of serious crime.’

Many have pointed out that Casey is just the latest in a long line of members of the English establishment who have sought to limit trial by jury. Lord Roskill’s 1986 report on trial by jury in cases involving serious fraud advocated abolishing juries in fraud trials to make the process more ‘expeditious’, despite finding no evidence that jurors were less capable of understanding fraud than judges were. The Runciman report in 1994 recommended abolishing the right to elect trial by jury for certain offences, saying that for many crimes the view of the jury was ‘unnecessary’. Jack Straw called the right to trial by jury ‘frankly eccentric’ in his failed bid to push his doomed Criminal Justice (Mode of Trial) Bill on to the statute book in 2003.

Putin's Enemies Have a Nasty Habit

Dying in Putin's Russia

By David Frum

On October 7, another critic, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in the lobby of her Moscow apartment building. Two years earlier, in July 2004, the U.S. journalist Paul Klebnikov was murdered as he emerged from the offices of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine. These killings and many others are linked to the deepest mystery of the Russian state. The mystery is the rise of Vladimir Putin.

In 1998, Vladimir Putin was named head of the Russian secret police, the KGB, now renamed the FSB. In August 1999, a desperately unpopular Boris Yeltsin named Putin prime minister of Russia--the fifth prime minister in less than 18 months. There seemed little reason to expect Putin to last any longer than his predecessors.

Then the bombs started going off. The first bomb hit a Moscow mall on August 31, 1999, killing one person and wounding 40. Five more bombs followed over the next 17 days, striking apartment buildings in Moscow and in southern Russia. Nearly 300 people were killed.

Prime Minister Putin blamed Chechen separatists, and ordered Russian troops to reconquer the province, which had won de facto independence in a bloody war from 1994 to 1996. This time, Russian arms won more success. Putin called a snap parliamentary election in December, 1999, and his supporters won the largest bloc of seats in Parliament.

On December 31, 1999, president Yeltsin resigned. Prime Minister Putin succeeded as acting president. He granted Yeltsin and his family immunity from prosecution on corruption charges and shifted Russia's next presidential election--originally scheduled for the fall of 2000--forward to March. Putin won handily.

Next he acted to reduce the power of the provinces, to renationalize private enterprise, and to close independent media outlets. Backed this time by the full power of the state and state-controlled media, Putin won 71 percent of the vote in the 2004 presidential election.

Despite Putin's enormous personal power, however, questions still linger about the means by which he won it. In addition to the six bombs that went off in September 1999, there was a seventh that did not detonate. On September 22, 1999, local police in the city of Ryazan discovered sacks of explosives in the basement of an apartment house. They found something else, too: a record at the local phone company of a phone call to one of the would-be bombers. The call originated at the FSB offices in Moscow.

After a two-day pause, the FSB explained that Ryazan police had stumbled across an FSB training exercise. The FSB took charge of the investigation, declared the sacks harmless, and quietly closed the case the week after Putin's election to the Russian presidency.

Standing up to the white-coated gods of fortune

Science has replaced Fortuna in fancying itself as the revealer of men's fates

By Brendan O’Neill

Fate is making a comeback. The idea that a human being’s fortunes are shaped by forces beyond his control is returning, zombie-like, from the graveyard of bad historical ideas. The notion that a man’s character and destiny are determined for him rather than by him is back in fashion, after 500-odd years of having been criticised and ridiculed by humanist thinkers.

Of course, we’re far too sophisticated these days actually to use the f-word, fate. We don’t talk about a god called Fortuna, as the Romans did, believing that this blind, mysterious creature decided people’s fates with the spin of a wheel. Unlike long-gone Norse communities we don’t believe in goddesses called Norns, who would attend the birth of every child to determine his or her future. No, today we use scientific terms to argue that people’s fortunes are determined by higher powers than their little, insignificant selves.

We use and abuse neuroscience to claim certain people are ‘born this way’. We claim evolutionary psychology explains why people behave and think the way they do. We use phrases like ‘weather of mass destruction’, in place of ‘gods’, to push the idea that mankind is a little thing battered by awesome, destiny-determining forces. Fate has been brought back from the dead and she’s been dolled up in pseudoscientific rags.

The intellectual challenge to the idea of fate was one of the most significant things about the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. There had always been an inkling of a belief within mankind that it was possible for individuals to at least influence their destiny, if not actually shape it. The Romans, for example, believed Fortuna would be kinder to brave, virtuous men. If you did good and took risks you had a better chance of being smiled upon by Fortuna. ‘Fortune favours the brave.’ But it wasn’t until the Renaissance that the idea that men could make their own fortunes really took hold. It’s then we see the emergence of the belief that by exercising his free will, a man can become master of his fate.

Making poor people poorer

Why do those concerned about low incomes never criticise sin taxes?

By Rob Lyons

The UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) has released a new report on the state of household finances. The Effects of Taxes and Benefits on Household Income, 2011/2012 contains many valuable nuggets of information and different commentators across the political spectrum have found something to gloat about.

So, for example, in a pointed prod at left-wing journalist Owen Jones, Toby Young in the Telegraph blogs about the fact that income inequality has fallen in recent years, to the point where one measure of inequality, the Gini coefficient, is now back to 1986 levels. On the other hand, left-leaning Twitter users have noted that tax takes a bigger slice of income for the poorest 20 per cent of the population (36.7 per cent of gross income) than it does for the top 20 per cent of earners (34.5 per cent of gross income). (See this snapshot from the report.)

How can that be? The difference comes from indirect taxes - that is, taxes on expenditure rather than income and property. On income taxes alone, the richest 20 per cent pay three-and-a-half times as much tax, as a proportion of income, than the poorest. Yet that progressive taxation is completely reversed by the effect of tax on spending. The biggest expenditure tax is value-added tax (VAT) at 20 per cent. For poorer people, over 10 per cent of their gross household income goes on VAT. So cutting VAT would be a big boost to lower-income groups.

But nearly seven per cent of gross income for poorer people goes on what might be loosely defined as ‘sin’ tax - that is, tax on boozing, smoking and driving. If you really wanted to help out households that are strapped for cash, you could start by reducing taxes that are justified as an attempt to change our bad habits. However, it seems unlikely that anti-poverty groups will have much to say on the matter. 

The law’s insane treatment of the mentally ill

Public trials ensure that court judgements are held to account by the people. So why are those deemed mentally ill being tried in secret?

By Luke Gittos

In 1843, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham said: ‘Publicity is the very soul of justice… It keeps the judge while trying, on trial.’ Bentham recognised that public justice – forcing courts to hear argument and make decisions in public – was the strongest safeguard against the arbitrary and tyrannical application of the law.

Last week in Britain, however, we saw the dark side of open justice. Ian Brady, the Moors murderer, argued before a mental health tribunal at Ashworth Hospital that he was not insane, and should be transferred to a prison where he would be able to starve himself to death. The court disagreed and kept Brady in compulsory treatment. Brady has spent the past 25 years at Ashworth, a secure hospital for people detained under the Mental Health Act.

Brady’s hearing provided a rare opportunity to witness what is normally a highly secretive process, which, taking place under the Mental Health Act, is used to determine whether a person should remain in compulsory treatment. Such tribunal proceedings have long been shrouded in secrecy. The hearings tend to take place in rooms at secure hospitals rather than in open courtrooms, and very strict controls are exerted on what information can be made available to the public.

Last year, however, a court ruled that Brady’s hearing should be held in public, with the proceedings broadcast to Manchester Civil Justice Centre through a live video uplink. Neither the press nor members of the public would be permitted inside the courtroom itself. The reasons the court thought it proper to hold this hearing in public will never be known, because the judge ruled that his rationale should be kept confidential.

Brady’s application before the tribunal was a challenge to the order which branded him a paranoid schizophrenic and saw him dispatched to Ashworth 25 years ago. He has since attempted to court attention by variously starving himself, writing bonkers letters and refusing to disclose the location of one his victims’ bodies – that of Keith Bennett. Having to sit through more of the geriatric Glaswegian’s nonsense must have been extremely difficult for the families of his victims, who complained about the extortionate cost (around £250,000) of publicising these proceedings.

Forward Guidance?

Nonsense! Central bankers have no choice.

by DETLEV SCHLICHTER

After two decades of serial bubble-blowing, the world’s central bankers have maneuvered themselves into a corner. They created a monster in the form of an unbalanced global economy and a bloated financial system, laden with debt, addicted to cheap money, and in need of constantly rising asset prices. Now the monster is in charge and the central bankers dare not stop feeding it.

The US Fed did, of course, make some noises to the effect that the flow of cheap money may at some point slow and then even stop. How credible these projections really are is far from certain. Markets seem to take them quite seriously indeed, but the more they sell off in response – and in particular, the more yields and risk premiums rise – the more difficult it will be for the Fed to follow through. – And by the way, if the jobless rate does fall to 6.7 percent, or to whatever magic number Ben Bernanke, in his unlimited wisdom, has ascertained as being safe for a policy ‘exit’, and if he then indeed does withdraw the punchbowl– will the unemployment rate then rise again? – We may have to deal with that question some other time. The focus today is the ECB and the Bank of England.

Policy paralysis is the new strategy

Both central banks had their monthly policy meetings yesterday and did – nothing. Although, when you read the papers you get the impression they did quite a lot. They seem to have unveiled some powerful new policy tool: forward guidance.

Both stated that they were committed to leaving policy rates at ultra-low levels for very long indeed. The ECB added that it might even lower rates further. The Bank of England additionally chided the UK bond market for paying too much attention to what Bernanke says, and for evidently not supporting the national recovery effort enough. This was, of course, an attempt by both central banks to distance themselves from the Fed’s loose talk of potentially turning off the monetary spigot. There is nothing surprising about this. Both central banks are standing with the back to the wall.

Turkey's sultan deplores the pharaoh's fall

The "right side of "history

By M K Bhadrakumar 

The army coup in Egypt has exposed the Sunni Arab states of the Persian Gulf, the European Union and the United States for unprincipled doublespeak.

The only country that took a clear-cut position right at the outset is Turkey, which in turn presages new fault lines in the politics of the Middle East. 

The autocratic Persian Gulf oligarchies rushed to celebrate the overthrow of the elected government under Mohamed Morsi by the Egyptian military. Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah dispatched his congratulatory cable to Cairo within hours of the announcement of Morsi's ouster. 

The sense of jubilation is palpable that the Muslim Brotherhood, which spearheads popular stirrings against the Persian Gulf regimes, has lost power in Egypt. For once, real politics surges, breaking through the facade that it is sectarian Sunni-Shi'ite strife that constitutes the Middle East's number one problem today.

As for the European and the American leaderships, they are afraid to call the coup by its real name because their own laws might otherwise prevent them from carrying on business as usual with Egypt's army chief Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi. 

Dealing with Sissi's regime in Cairo is an absolute must for the US' regional strategy because Israel's security is involved. By threatening to "suspend" the military aid, the Obama administration hopes to keep Sissi on tight leash. 

Erdogan's compass
Thus, it has been left to Turkey to call a spade a spade. Just when Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan has come under Western criticism for his autocratic tendencies, he takes to the podium to champion the cause of liberal democracy in Egypt. 

The statements from Ankara have been strongly condemnatory of the coup in Egypt. Foreign Minister Ahmed Davutoglu said,

A leader who came [to power] with the support of the people can only be removed through elections. It is unacceptable for democratically elected leaders, for whatever reason, to be toppled through illegal means, even a coup… Turkey will take sides with the Egyptian people.

One of the deputy chairmen and the spokesman of the ruling Justice and Development Party [AKP] Huseyin Celik spoke bluntly:

I curse the dirty coup in Egypt. I hope the broad masses who brought Morsi to power, will defend their votes… we have to applaud Morsi's unyielding stance. Blood will be shed if Morsi supporters clash with the military and anti-Morsi groups… Yet, we do not say Morsi and his supporters should just swallow this coup.

Erdogan himself took to the high ground to ridicule the European Union's double standard. He asked,

Isn't the West siding with democracy and making efforts to implement democracy in countries? This is a test of sincerity and the West failed the test again. There is no such thing as a 'democratic coup'. The European Union disregarded its own values once again by not calling the army's coup a coup… Morsi made mistakes; he can make mistakes. Is there anyone who did not make any mistake?

Charter Schools and Their Enemies

Why undermine institutions that have benefited thousands of city students?

by MARCUS A. WINTERS

Among the many educational reforms that New York mayor Michael Bloomberg adopted or expanded, charter schools—public schools that enjoy autonomy from many district restrictions, such as the salary schedule for teachers and the length of the school day—are perhaps the biggest success story. There were 14 charter schools in the city when Bloomberg took office. Today, 159 of them educate more than 48,000 students. Though charters operate in each of the five boroughs, they’re most heavily concentrated in areas with underperforming traditional public schools, such as Harlem and the South Bronx. Despite their rapid growth, the demand for charter school seats continues to exceed the supply. According to the New York City Charter School Center, nearly 53,000 students are currently on waiting lists.

Charter schools vary considerably in quality. Some are fabulous, some are good, a few are no better than the nearby traditional public schools from which they draw students, and a few may be worse. But empirical research leaves no doubt that the average student who attends a Gotham charter is much better off because of it. A study by economist Caroline Hoxby using a gold-standard random-assignment methodology found that students in the city’s charter schools made substantially better academic progress than they would have in a traditional public school. Margaret Raymond, the director of Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, conducted a separate analysis and confirmed Hoxby’s study. (It’s notable that other research of Raymond’s found far more mixed results in other states’ charters.)

Some critics contend that charter schools harm conventional public schools by robbing them of resources and their best students. But the success of charter students doesn’t come at the expense of kids who remain in the traditional schools, as my own research demonstrates. Was there a relationship, I wondered, between the percentage of students that a traditional New York City public school lost to the charter sector one year and that school’s academic performance the following year? Using data on individual students over time, I found that the more students a public school lost to charters, the better its remaining students performed—probably because the school now faced competition from charters for enrollment. Though that finding contradicts the narrative, propagated by the teachers’ unions, that charters threaten traditional public schools, it’s consistent with a wide body of research evaluating school-choice programs across the nation.

National Charter School Waitlist Numbers Approach One Million

Students are attempting to vote with their feet 

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) today released the results of a new survey estimating that public charter school waitlists across the nation approached one million names during the 2012-13 school year, up from 610,000 in 2011-12. The increased demand to attend a charter school now brings the waitlist figures to an estimated 920,007 nationally.

“With public charter school waitlists approaching one million names, it’s heartbreaking for too many families hoping to send their child to a high-quality public charter school,” said Nina Rees, NAPCS president and CEO. “Although the number of public charter schools is increasing rapidly – this year an additional 275,000 students enrolled in charter schools – this survey demonstrates that parental demand continues to outpace what is an already increasing supply.”

The survey also found that more than two-thirds of public charter schools – 67 percent – across the nation reported having children on their waitlist, with an average waiting list of 214 students. And, the survey found that more mature charter schools had longer waiting lists. Schools open for six or more years have an average waiting list of 238 students, while younger charter schools averaged 178 students. A record 29 charter schools reported waitlists of 2,000 students or more for the 2012-13 school year.

I have seen (and lived in) the future of American health care, and it does not work .

The Truth About SwedenCare

by Klaus Bernpaintner

As a Swede currently living in the United States, with actual experience of Swedencare, I must reply to the delusions propagated by professor Robert H. Frank in his June 15 article in the New York Times, titled “What Sweden Can Teach Us About Obamacare.”

It is surprising to read something so out of line with basic economic theory from an economics professor. But theory aside, it would have sufficed for professor Frank to have taken a field trip down to the nearest public emergency room to have his illusions irreparably shattered. The reality is that Swedish healthcare is the perfect illustration of the tragedy of central planning. It is expensive and — even worse — it kills innocent people.

Free universal healthcare came about in the 50s as part of the Social Democratic project to create the “People’s Home” (Folkhemmet). This grand effort also included free education on all levels, modern housing for the poor, mandatory government pension plans and more. Let us grant benefit of the doubt and assume that some of its proponents had good intentions; as so often, these intentions paved the road to a hellish destination.

It has taken awhile, but it is now becoming obvious even to the man on the street that every aspect of this project has been a disaster. He may not be able to connect the dots, but he can see that the system is definitely not working as advertised, and it is rapidly deteriorating.

Before the utopian project got under way, Sweden had some of the absolute lowest taxes in the civilized world and, not surprisingly, was ranked at the top in terms of standard of living. The project changed Sweden into a country with the second highest tax rate in the world (Denmark is higher), periods of rampant inflation, and a steadily deteriorating economy.

There is nothing economically mysterious about health care — it is just another service. Like any other it can be plentifully provided on a free market at affordable prices and constantly improving quality. But like everything else, it breaks down when the central planners get their hands on it, which they now have. To claim that the problems are due to a “market failure” in health care is like saying that there was a market failure in Soviet bread production.

Islam's civil war moves to Egypt

The question is not whether, but whose Islamism

By Spengler 

The vicious crosswind ripping through Egyptian politics comes from the great Sunni-Shi'ite civil war now enveloping the Muslim world from the Hindu Kush to the Mediterranean.

It took just two days for the interim government installed last week by Egypt's military to announce that Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States would provide emergency financing for the bankrupt Egyptian state. Egypt may not yet have a prime minister, but it does not really need a prime minister. It has a finance minister, though, and it badly needs a finance minister, especially one with a Rolodex in Riyadh. 

As the World Bulletin website reported July 6:

"The Finance Ministry has intensified its contacts [with Gulf states] to stand on the volume of financial aid announced," caretaker Finance Minister Fayyad Abdel Moneim told the Anadolu Agency in a phone interview Saturday. Abdel Moneim spoke of contacts with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Kuwait for urgent aid ... Defense Minister Abdel Fatah al-Sisi phoned Saudi Kind Abdullah bin Abdel Aziz and UAE President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nuhayyan yesterday on the latest developments in Egypt. King Abdullah was the first Arab and foreign leader to congratulate interim president Adly Mansour after his swearing-in ceremony. [1]

Meanwhile, Egypt's central bank governor, Hisham Ramez, was on a plane to Abu Dhabi July 7 "to drum up badly need financial support", the Financial Times reported. [2] The Saudis and the UAE had pledged, but not provided, US$8 billion in loans to Egypt, because the Saudi monarchy hates and fears the Muslim Brotherhood as its would-be grave-digger. With the brothers out of power, things might be different. The Saudi Gazette wrote July 6:

Egypt may be able to count on more aid from two other rich Gulf States. Egypt "is in a much better position now to receive aid from Saudi Arabia and the UAE", said Citigroup regional economist Farouk Soussa. "Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE have promised significant financial aid to Egypt. It is more likely that Egypt will receive it now." [3]

Snowden: towards an endgame

The ball is now in Russia's court

By Pepe Escobar

The working title of the Edward Snowden movie is still The Spy Who Remains in the Cold. Here's where we stand:

1.    Snowden could only fly out of Hong Kong because China allowed it.

2.    Snowden could only arrive in Moscow because Russia knew it - in co-operation with China. This is part of their strategic relationship, which includes the BRICS group (along with Brazil, India and South Africa) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. No official source though would ever confirm it.

3.    With the Latin American offers of asylum (Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua; even Uruguay would consider it), we're approaching the clincher: Moscow is now calculating whether - and how - to help Snowden reach his final destination while extracting maximum political capital out of Washington. 

Into this script comes roaring the coup-that-is-not-a-coup sub-plot in Egypt. Cynics' eyebrows will be raised that just as the Barack Obama administration was going mental over the National Security Agency (NSA) spy scandal a revo-coup-o-lution explodes in Egypt. New revelations about the extent of the NSA-centric Orwellian Panopticon keep on coming, but they have been totally downgraded by US corporate media; it's all Egypt all the time. After all, the Pentagon - to which the NSA is attached - owns the Egyptian military, something that even the New York Times had to acknowledge. [1] 

Yet they don't own Snowden. This has nothing to do with "terra". 

Meanwhile, the US intelligence gambit of intercepting a non-adversarial presidential plane spectacularly backfired in true Mad magazine Spy vs Spy fashion. Obama had said he would not "scramble fighter jets" to catch Snowden; of course not, just ground them. 

Austrian paper Die Presse revealed that the US Ambassador in Austria, William Eacho, was responsible for spreading the (false) information about Snowden being on board Bolivia President Evo Morales' Falcon out of Russia - leading to the denial of overflying rights in France, Spain, Portugal and Italy. [2] Eacho - a former CEO of a food distribution company with no diplomatic experience whatsoever - was appointed by Obama to go to Vienna in June 2009. Why? Because he was a top Obama fundraiser. 

Leviathan's Subcontractors

The veneer of a private sector is maintained as an ever more implausible façade for a hyper-regulated statism

by Mark Steyn

It took me years of living in the United States before I acclimated to certain uniquely American rituals. I noticed early, standing in the pick-up line at CVS or Rite Aid, that it took more time to collect a prescription than in any other country I've ever needed a bottle of pills in. But it was a while longer before I was sufficiently bored to start following the conversations of those two or three places ahead of me in line, as they argued over 78-cent co-pays, or suggested the clerk had perhaps transposed two of the insurance numbers, or explained that the problem might be due to their employer having recently switched from Blue Cross to Cigna . . . Filling a prescription in America is like going to a very fashionable nightclub: You can never be entirely certain the doorman will let you in.

It happened to a friend of mine the other day. Her monthly refill was denied late on a Friday afternoon so she had the weekend to prepare herself for the Monday-morning bad news that her health insurance had been canceled, without notification, and its cancellation backdated a couple of months just to add to the fun. Long story. They all are. Too long for this column, or indeed the average novella. Also very complicated. That's one of the advantages of the system. I confess, as a guest host for Rush Limbaugh on the radio, that my heart sinks a little whenever a caller wishes to explain the particular indignities heaped upon him by his health-care "provider," because generally it takes a good 20 minutes just to lay out the facts of the case, and even then it doesn't really make sense. I don't like to think I'm a total idiot. When an ISI guy from Islamabad expounds on the ever shifting tribal allegiances of North Waziristan, I'm on top of every nuance. When a London tax expert explains money laundering by Russian oligarchs through Guernsey and Nevis via Ireland and Cyprus, I can pretty much keep up. But when a victim of American health care starts trying to fill me in, round about 40 minutes in I have a strange urge to stab forks in my eyeballs. Except then, of course, I'd have to go to an American hospital.

Squaring circles

Close encounters of the low-tech kind

By Todd Gitlin 

Only Martians, by now, are unaware of the phone and online data scooped up by the National Security Agency (though if it turns out that they are aware, the NSA has surely picked up their signals and crunched their metadata). American high-tech surveillance is not, however, the only kind around. There's also the lower tech, up-close-and-personal kind that involves informers and sometimes government-instigated violence. 

Just how much of this is going on and in how coordinated a way no one out here in the spied-upon world knows. The lower-tech stuff gets reported, if at all, only one singular, isolated event at a time - look over here, look over there, now you see it, now you don't. What is known about such surveillance as well as the suborning of illegal acts by government agencies, including the FBI, in the name of counter-terrorism has not been put together by major news organizations in a way that would give us an overview of the phenomenon. (The ACLU has done by far the best job of compiling reports on spying on Americans of this sort.) 

Some intriguing bits about informers and agents provocateurs briefly made it into the public spotlight when Occupy Wall Street was riding high. But as always, dots need connecting. Here is a preliminary attempt to sort out some patterns behind what could be the next big story about government surveillance and provocation in America. 

Two stories from Occupy Wall Street
The first is about surveillance. The second is about provocation. 

On September 17, 2011, Plan A for the New York activists who came to be known as Occupy Wall Street was to march to the territory outside the bank headquarters of JPMorgan Chase. Once there, they discovered that the block was entirely fenced in. Many activists came to believe that the police had learned their initial destination from e-mail circulating beforehand. Whereupon they headed for nearby Zuccotti Park and a movement was born. 

The evening before May Day 2012, a rump Occupy group marched out of San Francisco's Dolores Park and into the Mission District, a neighborhood where not so many 1-percenters live, work, or shop. There, they proceeded to trash "mom and pop shops, local boutiques and businesses, and cars," according to Scott Rossi, a medic and eyewitness, who summed his feelings up this way afterward: "We were hijacked". The people "leading the march tonight," he added, were "clean cut, athletic, commanding, gravitas not borne of charisma but of testosterone and intimidation. They were decked out in outfits typically attributed to those in the 'black bloc' spectrum of tactics, yet their clothes were too new, and something was just off about them. They were very combative and nearly physically violent with the livestreamers on site, and got ignorant with me, a medic, when I intervened... I didn't recognize any of these people. Their eyes were too angry, their mouths were too severe. They felt 'military' if that makes sense. Something just wasn't right about them on too many levels".

He was quick to add, "I'm not one of those tin foil hat conspiracy theorists. I don't subscribe to those theories that Queen Elizabeth's Reptilian slave driver masters run the Fed. I've read up on agents provocateurs and plants and that sort of thing and I have to say that, without a doubt, I believe 100% that the people that started tonight's events in the Mission were exactly that". 

Taken aback, Occupy San Francisco condemned the sideshow: "We consider these acts of vandalism and violence a brutal assault on our community and the 99%". 

Where does such vandalism and violence come from? We don't know. There are actual activists who believe that they are doing good this way; and there are government infiltrators; and then there are double agents who don't know who they work for, ultimately, but like smashing things or blowing them up. By definition, masked trashers of windows in Oakland or elsewhere are anonymous. In anonymity, they - and the burners of flags and setters of bombs - magnify their power. They hijack the media spotlight. In this way, tiny groups - incendiary, sincere, fraudulent, whoever they are - seize levers that can move the entire world. 

The sting of the clueless bee
Who casts the first stone? Who smashes the first window? Who teaches bombers to build and plant actual or spurious bombs? The history of the secret police planting agents provocateurs in popular movements goes back at least to nineteenth century France and twentieth century Russia. In 1905, for example, the priest who led St Petersburg's revolution was some sort of double agent, as was the man who organized the assassination of the Czar's uncle, the Grand Duke. As it happens, the United States has its own surprisingly full history of such planted agents at work turning small groups or movements in directions that, for better or far more often worse, they weren't planning on going. 

The Princess and the Brotherhood

For nine decades, Egypt has fled modernity

By Mark Steyn

After midday prayers on Wednesday, just about the time the army were heading over to the presidential palace to evict Mohammed Morsi, the last king of Egypt was laying to rest his aunt, Princess Fawzia, who died in Alexandria on Tuesday at the grand old age of 91. She was born in 1921, a few months before the imperial civil servants of London and Paris invented the modern Middle East and the British protectorate of Egypt was upgraded to a kingdom, and seven years before Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood.

A long life reminds us of how short history is: Princess Fawzia outlived the Egyptian monarchy, and the Nasserist fascism and pan-Arabism that succeeded it, and the doomed “United Arab Republic” of Egypt and Syria, and the fetid third-of-a-century “stability” of the Mubarak kleptocracy. And she came within 24 hours of outliving the Muslim Brotherhood’s brief, disastrous grip on power. In the days before her death, it was reported that 14 million people took to the streets of Egypt’s cities to protest against Morsi (and Obama and his ambassador Anne Paterson). If so, that’s more than the population of the entire country in the year Princess Fawzia was born. The Mubarak era alone saw the citizenry double from 40 million to 80 million, a majority of which live on less than two dollars a day. The old pharaoh was toppled by his own baby boom, most of whom went for Morsi. The new pharaoh was toppled by his own stupidity. The Muslim Brotherhood waited 85 years for their moment and then blew it in nothing flat.

And so the “Arab Spring” ricochets from one half-witted plot twist to another. Morsi was supposedly “the first democratically elected leader” in Egypt’s history, but he was a one-man-one-vote-one-time guy. Across the Mediterranean in Turkey, Prime Minister Erdogan could have advised him “softly softly catchee monkey” — you neuter the army slowly, and Islamize incrementally, as Erdogan has done remorselessly over a decade. But Morsi the “democrat” prosecuted journalists who disrespected him, and now he sits in a military jail cell (next to Mubarak’s?). And so the first army coup in Egypt since King Farouk’s ejection in 1952 is hailed as a restoration of the idealistic goals of the “Facebook revolution,” although General Sisi apparently has plans to charge Morsi with “insulting the presidency.” That’s not a crime any self-respecting society would have on its books — and anyway the Egyptian presidency itself is an insult to presidencies. Morsi’s is the shortest reign of any of the five presidents, shorter even than the first, Mohamed Naguib, who was booted out by Nasser and whose obscurity is nicely caught by the title of his memoir, I Was an Egyptian President.

Egyptian nightmare for Erdogan

The scenes in Cairo and other Egyptian cities stand as a warning sign

By Victor Kotsev 

ISTANBUL- While the Turkish government spent much of the last couple of years branding itself as a paradigm for Egypt and other Arab Spring countries, the reverse is now taking place: Egypt is becoming the nightmare scenario for Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The violent phase of the protests in Istanbul, Ankara and other Turkish cities is over, for now, but the struggle to set their legacy has only just begun, and Erdogan would be well-advised to take a lesson from the mistakes of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. 

True, the danger of a military coup in Turkey at the moment is close to zero, if only because Erdogan has locked up an entire army college (some 330 officers) on charges of plotting against him. But the parallels between the two countries run far beyond the superficial. For the record, so too did Egyptian still-President Mohammed Morsi try to purge the army last year, although he only removed a few top generals. 

Most importantly, both countries are experimenting with moderate political Islam, and the experiments have produced mixed result as far as genuine democracy is concerned. It is true that Islamic radicals (extremists) and Islamic conservatives (moderates) are two very different species which have fought in the past, and it is also true that the Turkish government, in particular, has implemented a number of popular reforms. However, another fact is that the moderate Islamists' majoritarian understanding of democracy is radically different from that of more liberal constituencies present in both countries. 

The Turkish and the Egyptian governments - both democratically elected - have cracked down on the press, rolled back some civil liberties and planned to change the constitutions in ways many citizens found unacceptable. Enter Taksim square and Tahrir v. 2.0. 

The dangers of social friction become more acute as the economy declines. Egypt is in dire straits, while Turkey is currently widely lauded as an economic miracle, not only in the Middle East, but also in Europe. Erdogan deserves much of the credit for this, though the painful economic reforms executed by the previous government, which led to its downfall, also contributed. 

However, there is a growing financial bubble in Turkey. Whether it is fueled by hot Arab money or by Western investors seeking to escape the low returns in the US and Europe as well as the dangers of Greece and other countries offering higher yields, many analysts expect it to pop in the next year or two. What would happen then is anybody's guess. 

Turkey, similarly to Egypt, has experienced many military coups in the past decades, the most recent one in 1997. And while the danger has been neutralized for now, remnants of the deep state, where the military continues to be embedded, remain powerful. So when Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc threatened to unleash the army on the demonstrators some two weeks ago, he was playing with fire, just as the Egyptian authorities were forced to do when they sent the army to quash riots in the city of Port Said earlier this year. 

Portugal, Greece risk reawakening euro zone beast

A restless summer

A teetering Portuguese government has underlined the threat that the euro zone debt crisis, in hibernation for almost a year, may be about to reawaken.

From Greece to Cyprus, Slovenia to Spain and Italy, and now most pressingly Portugal, where the finance and foreign ministers resigned in the space of two days, a host of problems is stirring after 10 months of relative calm imposed by the European Central Bank.

Portuguese Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho told the nation in an address late on Tuesday that he did not accept the foreign minister's resignation and would try to go on governing.

If his government does end up collapsing, as is now more likely, it will raise immediate questions about Lisbon's ability to meet the terms of the 78-billion-euro bailout it agreed with the EU and International Monetary Fund in 2011.

Portugal had been held up as an example of a bailout country doing all the right things to get its economy back in shape. That reputation is now harder to sustain and even before this latest crisis, the International Monetary Fund reported last month that Lisbon's debt position was "very fragile".

Coming soon after the near-collapse of the Greek government, which has been given until Monday to show it can meet the demands of its own EU-IMF bailout, the euro zonemay be on the brink of falling back into full-on crisis.