Motus Mentis

In a post-n-thread over at Ace of Spades HQ about computer time-sucks, Ace complains of something that afflicts me too. He calls it “tab hoarding“. It’s the result of skittering about the Web reading items that contain links, opening the links for a moment in a new tab, and going back to what you were reading before or on to something else. (It can also happen when something you read prompts you to go look something up, which leads to one or more new open tabs, which in turn suggest other avenues of inquiry…)

You don’t want to close the tabs, because you know there’s interesting stuff in there that you definitely want to load into your brain, and you tell yourself you’re sure to come back to them soon. And you don’t want to bookmark them, because you already have so many thousands of random bookmarks that finding anything in them is really not much different from poking around on the Internet itself, and because you will absolutely never remember to go back to them once they are off your screen.

So they sit there. In the course of a couple of hours online I can pile up several dozen, and if the computer gets rebooted, or the browser closed, I feel a sharp pang of loss, because I know that I will never finish reading about the Keystone LB-5 biplane or saltwater razor clams, and because I know also that the subject will soon come up in some contentious online discussion, thereby finding me at an avoidable disadvantage. Worse than that, most of the time I can’t even remember what all those tabs even were; all that is left is the certainty that they were of great, if unspecified, value, and are now lost.

I think all of this might indicate that I have some sort of problem.

As we’ve all heard by now, the astronaut Neil Armstrong died last week. For the 43 years following his moonwalk, an achievement that he could surely have parlayed into wealth and glittering fame, the self-effacing Armstrong chose instead to lived a quiet life of teaching and farming. (In contrast, the pathologically narcissistic Barack Obama — the President, by the way, who redefined NASA’s “foremost” mission to be Muslim outreach — chose to memorialize Mr. Armstrong with a picture of himself.)

The manned flight to the surface of the Moon and back was one of our people’s, and indeed mankind’s, greatest triumphs — but it might have gone otherwise. Here is the speech that William Safire had prepared for the President to read if that sorrowful circumstance had come to pass.

P.S. More on Neil Armstrong here.

As the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, once explained, “Democracy is like a train. We shall get out when we arrive at the station we want.”

That train seems to be moving along briskly in Egypt, where last week the democratically elected President, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi, ousted the Mubarak-era leadership of the armed forces, clearing the way for the ascension of the Ikhwan’s man, General Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi. As we noted here, this resolves the dissonance that has existed between the civilian government and the armed forces since the much-ballyhooed “Arab Spring” began to bloom in Egypt in early 2011.

Now, President Morsi seems to be nearing his station. In today’s NightWatch newsletter, John McCreary explains:

Egypt: President Mursi intervened to release a newspaper editor jailed for insulting the President him on Thursday, issuing a law for the first time since he assumed legislative powers earlier this month. President Mohammed Mursi’s ban on detention for journalists accused of publishing-related offenses overrides a court decision earlier in the day ordering newspaper editor Islam Afifi to remain in prison pending trial in September.

Comment: In this instance Mursi took action that the international media applauds. The plaudits will ignore that he acted in the same authoritarian fashion as Mubarak, overriding the existing law; legislating his own; and ignoring a decision of the courts who were ruling on the existing law.

His action betrays an inclination to undermine other institutions of government to burnish his public image as he sees fit, governing in precisely the same way as his predecessor. This is dictatorship, not democracy. When the ends justify the means, there is no need for elected government or a balance of power between branches of government. That is what Mursi demonstrated today.

Last year I wrote:

If you look at any vigorous society in its prime, you see a healthy balance between rights and privileges. When either grows too much at the expense of the other, a nation declines: on the one hand toward impotent mediocrity, on the other into tyranny.

This is the latter case. What we in the West see as a fundamental right — the freedom of the press — has in Egypt now become a privilege, to be granted or denied at the whim of the sovereign.