For the record

I do not care about the Anthony Weiner scandal.

DO. NOT. CARE.

June 6

So much happened on this date in World War II: the Battle of Midway was ongoing in 1942, and in 1944 the D-Day invasion began.

We should all remember. Personally I watch either Midway or The Longest Day on DVD.

Istanbul or East Chicago?

With elections coming up in Turkey, slowly succumbing to an Islamist government, Claire Berlinski, citing a piece by Turkish columnist Yusuf Kanli, notes a sudden, massive increase in the numbers of registered voters:

Less than two weeks before the June 12 parliamentary elections, there is a glossy public opinion poll on my desk. Like many people, I do have an allergy against public opinion polls because of the bad reputation that whoever pays for them is presented with the results that would most please them. Of course that does not mean all the public opinion polls are crooked or faulty. Definitely there are companies in Turkey doing public opinion polls through scientific means and indeed objectively.
Another problem is, of course, the sudden increase in the number of eligible registered voters. This issue, which somehow escaped attention of all of us, was brought to the forefront by Bülent Tanla, a former politician and a pioneer of public opinion polls in Turkey. Only last year at the Sept. 12 referendum, the number of eligible registered voters was around 49 million and in 2007 it was 42 million and in 2002 it was 41.4 million. In 2010 and 2011, it all of a sudden reached 49 and 52 million, respectively. How? Are Turks multiplying like rabbits? Particularly, how have Turks multiplied by three additional million since September 2010, resulting in the number of eligible voters increasing from 49 million to 52 million? What has happened? Or, has someone placed in his pocket in advance some 10 percent of the vote in case of any emergency? It smells bad, does it not?

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Is a Middle East food crisis around the corner?

By now we're pretty much used to the crisis du jour out of the Middle East: Israel, oil, Islamism, corruption, tyranny, human rights, etc.  Now a piece in the Asia Times says we are facing another one: food.

I've been warning for months that Egypt, Syria, Tunisia and other Arab oil-importing countries face a total economic meltdown [citations omitted]. Now the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has confirmed my warnings.

[...]

The numbers thrown out by the IMF are stupefying. "In the current baseline scenario," wrote the IMF on May 27, "the external financing needs of the region's oil importers is projected to exceed $160 billion during 2011-13." That's almost three years' worth of Egypt's total annual imports as of 2010. As of 2010, the combined current account deficit (that is, external financing needs) of Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Morocco and Tunisia was about $15 billion a year.

What the IMF says, in effect, is that the oil-poor Arab economies - especially Egypt - are not only broke, but dysfunctional, incapable of earning more than a small fraction of their import bill. The disappearance of tourism is an important part of the problem, but shortages of fuel and other essentials have had cascading effects throughout these economies.

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Failure of government at its most basic level

The primary purpose of government under the social contract -- not the Constitution, but the theoretical social contract -- is to protect its citizens in their life, liberty and property from the predations of others, foreign and domestic, so that civilization may flourish.  Citizens voluntarily give up some of their liberty and ultimately some of their property to achieve this security. 

Alas, many have forgotten that most basic of principles.  Case in point, literally, is the case of Brown v. Plata, in which the Supreme Court ordered the release of some 46,000 convicted criminals from California prisons.  Because of what? Ultimately, prison overcrowding, which SCOTUS says in this case prevents a constitutionally adequate level of medical care. The pseudonymous Pajamas Media blogger Jack Dunphy explains in more detail.
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Barbarians

So says Prof. Glenn Reynolds, rightfully, about this story:

A senior Egyptian general admits that "virginity checks" were performed on women arrested at a demonstration this spring, the first such admission after previous denials by military authorities.
The allegations arose in an Amnesty International report, published weeks after the March 9 protest. It claimed female demonstrators were beaten, given electric shocks, strip-searched, threatened with prostitution charges and forced to submit to virginity checks.
At that time, Maj. Amr Imam said 17 women had been arrested but denied allegations of torture or "virginity tests."
But now a senior general who asked not to be identified said the virginity tests were conducted and defended the practice.

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A sign your government has become truly oppressive

It bans rare hamburgers. 

Nice going, North Carolina.  You've taken a great American tradition -- the warm, soft, juicy hambuger -- and turned it into a Canadian tradition -- a hockey puck.

We can also give a tip o' the hat to the trial lawyers on this one.

Jerks.