A job well done
So I haven’t been blogging about the Egyptian revolution because I haven’t really had time to say everything that I would want to say about it. It’s been an exciting time, reminiscent of 1989 and 1974, and yesterday was a great day of joy for lovers of freedom around the world. Now the harder work begins: holding the army to the promise of divestment of power and the end of the emergency rule. They’re talking the talk, but only time will show if they walk the walk; and the protesters may be forced to go back out, if the army reneges.
Still, one of the things which has been striking has been the decent nature of the protests; except for some violence which appears to have been triggered by the outgoing regime, they were mostly nonviolent; even Friday morning, when the crowd was outraged by Mubarak’s defiance, they resisted the temptation to riot. Christians protected Muslims during Muslim prayers, while Muslims protected Christians during Christian prayers; in Alexandria, order was preserved by an impromptu neighborhood watch. The whole thing carried the sense that these were people who deeply cared about their lives, about their friends and neighbors and country; that’s why it’s so strongly reminiscent of 1974.
And then there’s this, as reported by the New York Times:
In Tahrir Square thousand of volunteers who brought their own brooms or cleaning supplies, swept streets and scrubbed graffiti from nearby buildings. On the streets surrounding the square, the celebrations from the night before continued, spurred on by honking drivers.
I find this just unimaginable, and incredibly honorable.
Good job, people of Egypt. 
It’s all the fault of the miners
Part of the reading for class this week involves the historical evolution of western water law, from communal-equitable roots to the appropriation system.
It seems the prior appropriation system originally evolved among mid-nineteenth-century western miners: typically they were working under conditions where there was no effective government and no lawyers to tell them what the common law rules were, drafting rules which would work amongst themselves and prevent dispute settling at gunpoint. Riparian rights didn’t work because (a) nobody cared about the land adjoining the river, what they wanted was the ability to divert water and silt and then scour the silt; and (b) they were all squatters anyway, so could have no riparian rights.
The system they developed worked well as between them; it only became problematic when extended outside the mining context.
In most of the west, the primary push for that extension came from second- and third- wave settlers who homesteaded non-riparian parcels and saw no reason that the abundant waters in rivers shouldn’t be be available to help them put their new (free!) land to productive use.
Where the deaths will occur
According to this article, “scientists say that tens of thousands of smaller species that live in the tropics or on or near mountaintops are equally, if not more, vulnerable. These species, in habitats from the high plateaus of Africa to the jungles of Australia to the Sierra Nevada in the United States, are already experiencing climate pressures, and they will represent the bulk of the animals that could disappear.”
Ignoring for a moment my irritation at the vague and substantively meaningless phrase “scientists say”, the argument is that as temperatures change on mountains and climate zones move up along the mountainside, the climates at the top are cut off from one another … and so as the zone at the top gets smaller and smaller, the animals and plants there have nowhere to go, and will just die.
Some of this can probably be mitigated by transplantation, etc, but that will only work to a limited degree, and would likely encounter severe political (and administrative agency) opposition in the destination zones.
(This hadn’t occurred to me before; I’m somewhat embarassed by that).
There should be good propaganda value in this
Taliban militants in Afghanistan have set off a bomb in a bathhouse where people were bathing in preparation for Friday prayers.
It seems like there should be good propaganda value in attacking them for the utterly un-Islamic act of blowing up Muslims as they were preparing to go pray. This is somewhat like the situation we’d have if a bunch of Christian extremists were blowing up people as they queued to enter church on Sunday morning: perhaps a statement that those Muslims aren’t Muslim enough, but also an attack on Islam per se.
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