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[ by Charles Cameron — whether it’s Arabic in America, or Welsh in, of all places, Wales! ]
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In the last couple of days, we’ve seen:

Shame on you Southwest Airlines – College Student Removed From Flight After Speaking Arabic on Plane, via @nytimes https://t.co/5nqbebg8Xu

— John Horgan (@Drjohnhorgan) April 19, 2016

and:

someone in an Aber Starbucks was allegedly told 'speak English or get out' when ordering in Welsh https://t.co/tLZRuPHoSI

— Elena Cresci (@elenacresci) April 20, 2016

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Not only is it inadvisable to speak foreign in the United States, apparently — it can also be a problem when foreign is both the local and your own native tongue!

[ by Charles Cameron — classification, impropriety, and a concept pretty much unique to Meister Eckhart ]
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First, here’s what I call a DoubleTweet, juxtaposing two tweets for the resonance between them — and juxtaposing two thoughts for the resonance between them is about as simple a way of demonstrating the whole being greater than the sum of its parts as I can think of.

Take 1, Obama is slippery with words:

In Playbook: Obama, re Hillary email: ‘There’s classified, and then there’s classified’: https://t.co/CTp8Hn8X5l pic.twitter.com/bvRdwxmwmj

— Mike Allen (@mikeallen) April 10, 2016

Take 2, the Europeans outbid and finesse him:

Best excuse ever for failing to respond to a terrorist threat that you were literally emailed about in advance. pic.twitter.com/vHASPbCSD7

— Gartenstein-Ross (@DaveedGR) April 15, 2016

I don’t actually know if you can outbid and finesse while playing Bridge, but you can in metaphor.

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There was also a DoubleQuote that sprang to mind, but Patti Brown got to it first, so I’ll just copy her tweet here:

.@POTUS "There's classified and then there's classified." .@billclinton ""It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is."

— Patti Brown (@pattibrown) April 12, 2016

Lawyers — the Clintons & POTUS.

Compare philosophers, poets, native speakers, natural language processors.

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Also worth taking into consideration here:

Mark Stout, War on the Rocks, Were Hillary Clinton’s emails classified? Where you stand depends on where you sit:

the uproar about the Clinton email server ignores the reality that, for very good reasons, the CIA and the State Department have different approaches to classification and classified information. These different approaches result from the different functions of the agencies.

Cory Bennett, The Hill, Clinton emails reveal murky world of ‘top secret’ documents:

The watchdog [IG] said it found a number of Clinton’s emails that currently contained “classified intelligence community information.” But the State Department has said it did not consider that language classified at the time those emails were sent.

Both sides can be correct, said several former officials.

And that’s enough hipbonish excitement for one post.

[ by Charles Cameron — two matters concerning naval intelligence ]
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Here’s a chewable DoubleTweet:

Amid Shocking Chinese Spy Case, Our Navy Can No Longer Be Trusted https://t.co/lk7LO1JhkO

— J. Scott Shipman (@jscottshipman) April 11, 2016

Correlate that with:

The Director of Naval Intelligence does not have a security clearance. Has "less access to secrets than an ensign." https://t.co/2yY0fmfKPE

— Michael Bayer (@mbayer1248) January 29, 2016

— and you just might glimpse what Carl Jung termed an “acausal connecting principle” or “acausal parallelism”.

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For dessert, how’s this for a serpent biting its own tail?

This is pretty nuts. The Director of Navy Intelligence can't even read his own reports. https://t.co/2yY0fmfKPE pic.twitter.com/hveL2eVnGK

— Michael Bayer (@mbayer1248) January 29, 2016

[ by Charles Cameron — Hillary Clinton hoist as the contrapuntal mind springs into action ]
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Hilary Clinton recently tweeted:

The top 25 hedge fund managers make more than all of the kindergarten teachers in America combined. That’s not acceptable.

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 26, 2016

That was March 26th this year.

I have a certain fondness for the Medici, who sponsored the Platonic Academy under Marsilio Ficino, and more or less gave us the Florentine Renaissance, and for Paul and Mary Conover Mellon, who sponsored the magnificant Bollingen Series of books, starting with Where the Two Came to Their Father: A Navaho War Ceremonial, Joseph Campbell‘s collaboration with Jeff King and Maud Oakes..

But then I’m also highly appreciative of St Francis, the poverello of Assisi.. go figure.

Thing is, Bernie Sanders had tweeted pretty much the same thing just a week earlier:

It's unacceptable that, last year, the top 25 hedge fund managers earned more income than 425,000 public school teachers.

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) March 19, 2016

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But hey, wait a minute, Hilary had also tweeted in June of 2015:

What's wrong with this picture? pic.twitter.com/GnytNmNS7A

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) June 13, 2015

— so now who has the “first mover” advantage? — plus she had graphics!

— and hold on, even that tweet drew an almost immediate tweet-back in refutation:

The fact that many of your major donors, and your son-in-law, are hedge fund managers? https://t.co/TA6ThYyTLc

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) June 13, 2015

— from the redoubtable Marc Andreessen, no less.

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Nor are those the only ways those tweets of hers can bounce back on the Clinton campaign. Here’s another:

The top 25 hedge fund managers make more than all of the kindergarten teachers in America combined. That’s not acceptable.

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 26, 2016

.@GoldmanSachs paid you more for a 20 minute speech than a Kindergarten teacher makes in 10 years. #ImNotWithHer https://t.co/GKIumiC1d1

— Xavier Pérez (@DOUBTMYPROGRESS) March 29, 2016

I suspect, btw, Xavier Perez swiped that from Kevin Tulppo on Facebook a couple of days before..

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I’m not really much of a political animal — feeling powerfully drawn to Justin Erik Halldór Smith‘s remark today —

some questions have complicated histories and there might be no right side to take

— but in this entire by turns provocative, hilarious, sad, infuriating, and by now deeply fatiguing campaign season thus far, there has only been one image giving me a sense of quiet delight in one of the candidates..

On the left, Bernie Sanders as a far younger man — I can vaguely recall being a far younger man myself — and on the right, the book he was about to read, or had just been reading..

Rimbaud, poetry. Ah, youth.

[ by Charles Cameron — Aung San Suu Kyi and U Thein Sein dance a quick pas de deux, but what comes next? ]
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Aung San Suu Kyi to Burma army: Deny me presidency and I'll become effective prime minister. https://t.co/hHHrj9EXkB pic.twitter.com/fW3WE76Nsr

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) April 6, 2016

and:

Thein Sein, the ex-president of Myanmar, became a Buddhist monk on Monday. https://t.co/331XDSPZrR pic.twitter.com/qqxMaR2e90

— Lion's Roar (@LionsRoar) April 5, 2016

Bear in mind, though:

U Thein Sein becoming a monk shouldn't be a surprise. Lots of men join a monastery for a time over the holidays; maybe I'll do it next year

— Thant Myint-U (@thantmyintu) April 4, 2016

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It will be instructive to see whether Aung San Suu Kyi, now that the elexctions are over and her power secxured, will at last begin to show signs of Buddhist abhorrance at the way her fellow Buddhists in Myanmar are treating the Rohingya minority. Here’s the gist of Peter Popham‘s recent exploration of that question:

Plenty of Burmese Buddhists are extremely prejudiced against Muslims. But is Aung San Suu Kyi? [ .. ]

It is true that she has never made a clear statement in support of the Rohingya, the persecuted Muslims of western Burma, tens of thousands of whom are stateless, homeless and without rights thanks to official Burmese government policy. She has lamented the violence in Arakan state but has refused to endorse the judgements of organisations such as Human Rights Watch, which have blamed Arakan’s Buddhists for the persecution of the Muslims. [ .. ]

Suu Kyi has been struggling to attain power in Burma for the past 28 years. She is vastly popular with her fellow countrymen, more than 90 per cent of whom are Buddhists, like her. But her enemies in the military regime have never stopped trying to blacken her name. Their favourite method was to say that she wasn’t properly Burmese because she had been married to an Englishman, had lived in the West for many years and produced two foreign sons. And by depicting her as foreign, they tried to lump her together with the Muslim minority who are also regarded by many Burmese Buddhists as aliens with no right to remain in the country.

My hunch is that Suu Kyi feared that if she spoke up for the Rohingya, it would make it easy for her enemies to repeat this argument – and if the Burmese masses fell for it, that could erode her standing and her chances of coming to power. So she has been sitting uncomfortably on the fence for the past five years. [ .. ]

Now she is coming to power with a solid parliamentary majority, perhaps she can relax and tell us what she really thinks.

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