Here’s a fascinating little story. There’s been a battle royale up in Wisconsin over an effort to establish a big iron mining operation near Lake Superior, to be owned and operated by a company called Gogebic Taconite. The Republican legislature approved the mine in March over environmentalists’ objections. Some protests have been staged since the operation got started. But people started to get freaked out over the weekend when the company brought in what the Wisconsin State Journal calls “masked security guards who are toting semi-automatic rifles and wearing camouflaged uniforms.” Read More

Like many of you I’ve been using Twitter, among other sources, to follow and try to make sense of the on-going situation in Egypt. And yesterday I saw a tweet from a very knowledgable observer of Egyptian politics and culture (an Egyptian national living in Egypt, to be clear) write something that, quite simply, showed a really weak grasp of US politics. It made me realize once again how difficult it is for the vast majority of us to make sense at any deep level of what’s happening in a country like Egypt. And by ‘we’ in this case I think means me and virtually everyone else stateside who hasn’t either spent a good deal of time in Egypt or studied the country or at least the Arab Middle East in some depth. Read More