Thar she trumpets!

From Beyond Dots.

Another elephant or two got off the ground in Egypt, where Juan Cole notes that an administrative court has struck down the assembly writing the new constitution on the grounds that it's stacked with conservatives and hence unrepresentative:

The court relied on a 1994 law stipulating that sitting judges and parliamentarians may not be involved in constitutional revisions, lest they misuse their position to give themselves more power.

Assuming the decision stands, this means the constitution will have to wait until after the presidential election next month, meaning that the new president will take power under the old Mubarak constitution, which could mean a lot of power indeed. That could be a matter of concern, especially since there's no predicting who that president will be (another court has declared that the ultraconservative Hazem Salah Abu Ismail is qualified to run even though his mother was a US citizen because nobody had officially informed the Egyptian government about it, but this decision could easily not survive).

I'd still keep arguing that it's not the end of the world if the Muslim Brotherhood dictates the constitution (their main goal seems to be to make the presidency weak); but it has to be heartening that liberals will be more involved, especially since they seem to be acting more effective at last:

Ahmad Baha’ al-Din Shaaban, founder of the Egyptian Socialist Party, said that the country’s leftists and secularists would continue to agitate for a fair constitution whether the ruling was upheld or not.

Leftists have been mounting street protests against the constituent assembly, and gradually everyone from the Coptic Christians to the traditional clergy of al-Azhar seminary to labor unions and secularists have dissociated themselves from it. The court’s decision is the right one, and most Egyptians are breathing a sigh of relief....

Polling does not find that most Egyptians are fundamentalists, and, indeed, there is evidence that they have become more secular in the past year. Mansour Moaddel’s polls find half of Egyptians now say they are Egyptians first and Muslims second, up from 8% only a few years ago.

Psychopath Watch

Santorum Not Yet Toasted

At least, grammatically speaking. You read it here first:

“We made a decision over the weekend that while this presidential race for us is over, for me, and we will suspend our campaign today, we are not done fighting,” Mr. Santorum said as tears welled in the reddened eyes of his wife and the aides and friends who ringed the room.

That is "we are not done fighting" is the decision, and "the presidential race is over" is a kind of part of the environment, as in "we made a decision that while it's too cold to go to the beach, we are making a Rick Santorum sand sculpture."

It's a good example of how a thought expresses itself almost automatically in the form of a lie: a less twisted politician just says, "I'm not a quitter" as he or she is quitting, Santorum makes not quitting the subject of his announcement, while suggesting that the campaign just sort of quit on its own, when nobody was looking.

The likeness of Rick Santorum is demolished as the Democratic Women of Horry County secured the rights to demolish the Republican 2012 Primary Debate Sand Sculpture dubbed "Mount Myrtle," in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Steve Jessmore/Myrtle Beach Sun-News.

Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2012/01/24/2126449/snap-a-mcclatchy-photo-gallery.html?KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=515&width=910#storylink=cpy

Betcha David Brooks won't be reporting on this one:

Berkeley psychologists Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner ran several studies looking at whether social class (as measured by wealth, occupational prestige, and education) influences how much we care about the feelings of others. (Scientific American, via Huffington Post)

For instance,

luxury car drivers were more likely to cut off other motorists instead of waiting for their turn at the intersection. This was true for both men and women upper-class drivers, regardless of the time of day or the amount of traffic at the intersection. In a different study they found that luxury car drivers were also more likely to speed past a pedestrian trying to use a crosswalk, even after making eye contact with the pedestrian. 

And so on, through four more studies showing that "as people climb the social ladder, their compassionate feelings towards other people decline." Toward the end, the reporter asks, a little plaintively,

But why would wealth and status decrease our feelings of compassion for others? After all, it seems more likely that having few resources would lead to selfishness. Piff and his colleagues suspect that the answer may have something to do with how wealth and abundance give us a sense of freedom and independence from others. The less we have to rely on others, the less we may care about their feelings.

Or couldn't it just as easily be the other way around? I mean, the more psychopathic a person is to start with, the more likely to claw her-or-his way up that ladder?

From All about Eve.