zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — hidden humor in deep scholarship, ahoy! — with hat tips to JM Berger, Phillip Smyth, and Aaron Zelin ]
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I’ve noticed that JM Berger wrote an excellent book on American jihadis and has been keeping us seriously informed on a whole host of related topics including jihadist activity on the hidden gardens of the internet, but it’s only when he notices an AQ attempt to crowdsource suggestions for improving AQ’s social media presence, appropriates their hashtag and invites his buddies to add their own suggestions that his work at last catches the attention of a larger audience via Rachel Maddow:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Okay, lesson learned — it’s the “tainment” in edutainment that makes the “edu” suddently attractive.

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So here, for your edutainment and general entercation is a serious piece of writing by Phillip Smyth in his Hizbollah Cavalcade series on Jihadology, which will no doubt be of interest to some ZP readers — Hizballah Cavalcade: Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq’s Liwa’a Kafeel Zaynab:

Albeit, it was a rarity for groups like LAFA to make an official written statement over social media or on forums stating AAH was a supplier. Instead, the inference AAH was supplying fighters to the group could be made by looking at the AAH imagery for their dead, which was then reposted by LAFA.

However, starting at the end of May, 2013 a number of videos (posted to YouTube) explicitly claimed Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq’s fighters were in Syria. This differed from the more typical rolling of AAH personnel into the ranks of LAFA or other militias. While these videos were sporadic, they were the first piece of a trend which would culminate in the announcement of a unique organizational name for AAH’s force deployment in Syria.

Here’s a sampling of the wares displayed therein:

and here’s the pop-cultural ref that I missed when I first saw Smyth’s article:

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Foolish me: Smyth even had a dead giveaway footnote:

[5] See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UunQXXxAWY and “Have a nice day”.

[ by Charles Cameron — on skilled design, and on choosing to purchase influence, elegance or beauty ]
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There’s something very neat about this front page:

Okay, okay, Jeff Bezos has bought the Washington Post. But what intrigues me about this front page of today’s digital edition as it appeared on my screen this morning was the way a color photo of Bezos sneaks in (left) below a larger black and while photo of Katharine Graham (center) — while an ad for the China Daily (right) takes up a third of the real estate (right), to be read, mark you, on Bezos’ own Kindle.

So we have today’s future, to coin a phrase, with the “pivot to Asia” and the “pivot to Bezos” right there together — and the “pivot to digital” pretty much a done deal.

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The price of the Post was $250 million, and plenty of people have talked about what Bezos could have bought instead — and while we’re on the topic of neat design, I couldn’t help but notice that there’s a $250 million penthouse under construction in Monaco, described by HiConsumption as The World’s Most Expensive Penthouse, and that one of the numerous architectural illustrations provided also features a striking lesson on graphics:

What catches my eye here is the parallelism between the window with its center divider and balcony rail (left) with the geometry of the painting on the wall (right) — that’s a brilliant design choice, as the photographer well knows.

In my dreams I’d prefer my own choice of art-work, frankly — and if I only had $250 million to play with, I’d go for a small craftsman cottage in Pasadena, perhaps — with that luminous $250 million Cezanne to grace one of my walls…

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That — and the digital Post on Kindle, I suppose.

[ by Charles Cameron — how “first impressions count” applies to print media, an egregious case ]
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Both panels (above) are screenshots from the same WaPo post, at the same magnitude. FYI.

[ Charles Cameron — always on the lookout for signs of the dajjal — even in the New York Times ]
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Seriously, WTF?

Are you Presbyterian?

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I probably wouldn’t have take much notice of Ali Gharib’s tweet (upper panel, above) if I hadn’t just wandered off after reading a tweet from Habib Zahori:

#Kabul: Driver: People only talk about Qeyamat, judgment day, we live every second of our lives in Qeyamat.

— Habib Zahori (@habibzahori) August 3, 2013

to find out who he was, and run across his NYT piece, The Insidious Language of War, which looked interesting enough that I read it — leading me to the headlights quote (lower panel, above).

Okay, two one-eyed remarks in five minutes got me thinking…

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But as you may know, by now my mind is fully stocked with what Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria calls the “hooks and eyes of memory” — so a broken headlight in Kabul and mention of the Mullah’s missing eye brought me naturally to the celebrated image of Mullah Omar (below, upper panel)

and thence (lower panel) to the Dajjal — Islam’s version of the Antichrist.

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Thus, a sort of Six degrees of Kevin Bacon game brought me from a Daily Beast blogger via broken headlights to the Dajjal in three quick hops — and the result is what one might term a false positive…

It was fun while it lasted — I just wonder how many times NYPD officers ask drivers “Are you Amish?” Maybe a horse and buggy on Fifth Avenue would somewhat justify so inquisitive an inquiry.

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Sources:

Ali Gharib

Habib Zahori

Mullah Omar

Dajjal

[ by Charles Cameron — I’ll keep this one short and painless, since long would be painful ]
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Click for video.

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Problem: the Snowden / NSA business is of interest to me as a human being, but way outside my competence.

Solution: To get NSA wrong, trust @ggreenwald. To get it right, filter GG through @joshuafoust, @20committee, @marcambinder and his book Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry — then the conversation gets interesting!