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David Warren alerts us to the threat coming from Turkey.
The greatest threat to the world’s peace, at this moment, comes from a man named Recip Tayyip Erdogan. He is the prime minister of Turkey, at the head of the Justice and Development Party (“AK,” from the Turkish). A former mayor of Istanbul, he was arrested and jailed when he publicly recited Islamist verses (“the mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets are our bayonets,” etc.), in defiance of the old secularist, Ataturk constitution, which made it an offence to incite religious and racial fanaticism. …
… It was he who sent the “peace flotilla” to challenge Israel’s right to blockade Gaza (recognized under international law and explicitly by the U.N.). He made the inevitable violent result of that adventure into an anti-Israeli cause célèbre. He has now announced that the next peace flotilla will be accompanied by the Turkish navy.
This will put Israel in the position of either surrendering its right to defend itself, or firing on Turkish naval vessels. There is no way to overstate the gravity of this: Erdogan is manoeuvring to create a casus belli. …
… In other words, we are staring at the trigger for a genuine world war. With Recip Erdogan’s twitching finger on it.
David Goldman (Spengler) outlines the situation in Egypt.
Robert Musil’s Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften (“The Man Without Qualities”), one of the great novels of the past century, is a portrait of the Austrian early in 1914. The readers know that their silly world will come to a terrible end a few months later with the outbreak of war, but the protagonists do not. Musil published a first volume and spent the rest of his life trying to write a second, without success, for it is the sort of story that has no end except for the abyss.
Arab politics today has a Musil-like quality of unreality, for the conclusion will be the collapse of the Egyptian state. The misnamed “Arab Spring,” really a convulsion of a dying society, began with food shortages. Egypt imports half its caloric consumption, 45% of its people are illiterate, its university graduates are unemployable, its $10 billion a year tourism industry is shuttered for the duration, and its foreign exchange reserves are gradually disappearing. …
Roger Simon reports on the latest GOP debate.
They say it ain’t over ’til it’s over or the fat lady sings at least a dozen times, finally making all the high notes in Aida and La Traviata in succession. Nevertheless — after only his second debate — things do look pretty good for Rick Perry.
And consider before this Tampa debate he was already twelve points ahead of nearest rival Mitt Romney, according to its sponsor’s (CNN) own poll.
So it’s no surprise that most of Monday’s affair — which mostly reprised the same questions from last week’s Reagan Library debate (this all could get pretty tedious fast) — was a game of “Everybody on Rick” with the Texas governor, perhaps in deference to his state’s proximity to Mexico, as the designated piñata.
Well, not quite everybody. Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain declined to attack Perry. (I will try to explain that later.) But Jon Huntsman, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, and, of course, Romney did their best to slam Perry at every opportunity, sometimes remembering, seemingly as an afterthought, to throw in an unkind word for Barack Obama, as if the Texas governor and the not the president was the incumbent.
This week’s report on poverty in American must make the president wonder if he can ever get a break. Andrew Malcolm notes a study from the Heritage Foundation on the conditions of the poor.
… Forty percent live in apartments, less than 10% in mobile homes or trailers and about 50% live in standard one-family homes. In fact, 42% own their own home.
The vast majority are in good repair, with more living space per person than the average non-poor person in Britain, France or Sweden.
Ninety-six percent of poor parents say their children were never hungry during the year due to an inability to afford food.
Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning and 92% have a microwave.
One-third of poor households have a wide-screen plasma or LCD TV, 70% have a VCR and two-thirds have satellite/cable TV, the same proportion as own at least one DVD player.
Half of the poverty households have a personal computer and one-in-seven have two or more. …
John Tierney visited the Monitor Center at the Mariner’s Museum in Newport News.
Military secrecy was a bit lax during the Civil War, by today’s standards, but contractor deadlines were a lot tighter.
The technology that revolutionized naval warfare began with a five-sentence message delivered to The New York Times 150 years ago, on Aug. 9, 1861, and the information was not exactly classified. It was an advertisement placed by the Union Navy, to appear the following six days, under the heading “Iron-Clad Steam Vessels.”
“The Navy Department will receive offers from parties who are able to execute work of this kind,” the ad announced, describing its desire for a two-masted ship “either of iron or of wood and iron combined. The plans had to be submitted by early September, giving designers less than a month.
Less than six months later, a shipyard in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, launched not merely an ironclad but an entirely new kind of warship. The U.S.S. Monitor had no masts and no line of cannons. It was essentially a submarine beneath a revolving gun turret, something so tiny and bizarre-looking that many experts doubted the “cheese box on a raft” would float, much less fight.
But somehow it survived both the Navy bureaucracy and a broadside barrage to become one of the most celebrated ships in the world. Its designer and crew were the 19th-century celebrity equivalent of astronauts. Long after the ship sank in a storm off Cape Hatteras, N.C., the turret remained a cultural icon: an “armored tower” in Melville’s poetry, an image on book covers and film posters, a shape reproduced in items from toys to refrigerators.
Now the original turret, which was recovered from the ocean floor nine years ago and placed in a freshwater tank to protect it from corrosion, is on display again. It has been temporarily exposed to the air so that it can be scraped clean — very carefully, in front of museum visitors and a live webcam — by a team of researchers at the U.S.S. Monitor Center of the Mariners’ Museum here in Newport News. The team expects to have nearly all the barnacles and sediment removed by the end of this month, giving the public a new look at the dents from the Confederate cannonballs and shells that would have sunk any ordinary ship of its day. Then the turret will be submerged again in fresh water for 15 more years, until enough ocean salt has been removed from the metal to allow it to face the air permanently. …
A WSJ book review tells an amazing story of identical twins separated for almost 30 years
A Spanish mother gave birth to twin girls in 1973 at a hospital in Las Palmas, Canary Islands, but one of the babies was accidentally switched in the maternity unit. The mistake went undiscovered for nearly three decades. The mother assumed that she had given birth to fraternal twins (dizygotic, from two eggs) and not “identical” ones (monozygotic, two embryos developed from a single fertilized egg). The girl she named Begoña was her biological daughter; the baby named Beatriz was not.
As Nancy L. Segal relates in “Someone Else’s Twin,” her fascinating account of the switched-at-birth misstep and the painful family and legal entanglements that followed much later, an unexpected encounter in a clothing store was the tale’s turning point. A shop assistant mistook the 28-year-old Begoña for a person she knew named Delia. After Begoña explained who she was, the clerk—still struck by the resemblance—suggested that the two “doubles” meet each other. …
Popular Mechanics has the story on crowd counting mechanics.
On June 4, a huge crowd gathered in Hong Kong for a vigil to commemorate the 22nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. But just how huge? In some stories 77,000 people showed up. Another story, though, listed the attendance as nearly double that: 150,000.
There’s a reason for the disparity. The first figure—77,000—is a police estimate. The second is from the event’s coordinators, who probably had some motivation to pad their numbers. To find out which crowd size was correct, two professors—Paul Yip at the University of Hong Kong and Ray Watson at Melbourne University—ran the numbers. To fit 150,000 people into that space, they’d have to cram together at about one person per 2.7 square feet (four per square meter), so that estimate is unrealistic. That would be “mosh-pit density,” the researchers write in a new paper on crowd estimation techniques published in the journal Significance.
This story of competing head counts is not uncommon. Estimating large numbers is difficult even with the best of intention. If you count the number of jellybeans in a jar three times, you’ll probably have three different numbers, because people simply cannot count very large numbers without some error. Now, imagine trying to count a shifting mass of heads, some stooping to tie shoes, some sharing the same umbrella, some arriving late or leaving early. Plus, this is one field in which good intentions are rare. Crowd-size estimation is a murky science, positioned at the intersection of statistical precision and political sleight-of-hand, and plenty of people are motivated to either exaggerate or low-ball an event’s attendance.
“Almost everyone who has tried to make a crowd estimate has a vested interest in what the outcome of the estimate is,” Charles Seife says. Seife is a journalism professor at New York University who writes about math and physics. [Disclosure: I had a class with Seife at NYU.] His newest book Proofiness tackles the ways that people try to fool others (and sometimes fool themselves) with numbers. “Whenever you see a crowd estimate,” he says, “you have to wonder where it’s coming from.” Nevertheless, Seife says, if you do your math carefully, it is possible to count a large crowd to within a couple of tens of thousands. And researchers like Yip and Watson are now applying new strategies to find out whether it is indeed possible to get a more accurate count of a teeming mass of humanity. …
Christopher Hitchens in rare form.
The other night, I was having dinner with some friends in a fairly decent restaurant and was at the very peak of my form as a wit and raconteur. But just as, with infinite and exquisite tantalizations, I was approaching my punch line, the most incredible thing happened. A waiter appeared from nowhere, leaned right over my shoulder and into the middle of the conversation, seized my knife and fork, and started to cut up my food for me. Not content with this bizarre behavior, and without so much as a by-your-leave, he proceeded to distribute pieces of my entree onto the plates of the other diners.
No, he didn’t, actually. What he did instead was to interrupt the feast of reason and flow of soul that was our chat, lean across me, pick up the bottle of wine that was in the middle of the table, and pour it into everyone’s glass. And what I want to know is this: How did such a barbaric custom get itself established, and why on earth do we put up with it?
There are two main ways in which a restaurant can inflict bad service on a customer. The first is to keep you hanging about and make it hard to catch the eye of the staff. (“Why are they called waiters?” inquired my son when he was about 5. “It’s we who are doing all the waiting.”) The second way is to be too intrusive, with overlong recitations of the “specials” and too many oversolicitous inquiries. A cartoon in The New Yorker once showed a couple getting ready for bed, with the husband taking a call and keeping his hand over the receiver. “It’s the maitre d’ from the place we had dinner. He wants to know if everything is still all right.” …