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[ by Charles Cameron — time for some more surprises, this time in stone and jazz — plus an afterimage of WWI ]
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First, a master-class in the craft of the blues:

Second, the moon:

And third, because of the violence in Kenya, Pakistan, Syria … get me a globe and I’ll spin it… and because I’ve talked with you before of my friend Heathcote Williams and he mentioned this to his followers today, here are his meditations on World War I, prepared for its centenary next bloody year:

Neither he nor my father ever explained the war to me. It was just something that had happened to them. Something irrational that hung over them. A grisly cloud of spectral blood. A tumor that fogged the psyche. Something in their history that had spoiled both their lives.

And them’s the blues for this week: go well, stay well.

[ by Charles Cameron aka hipbonegamer — shall we file this under religion, or politics? ]
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Let’s see, now: religiously speaking, you can support a murderous dictator on a rampage against his own people, or the rebels who oppose him who take video selfies of themselves eating their deceased enemies’ hearts — or abstain from taking sides and let the two parties shoot and rape it out among themselves…

Sheikh Youself al-Qaradawi is an Egyptian cleric with a following in the tens of millions, while Roman Silantyev is a “religious expert and head of the Human Rights Center of the World Russian People’s Council” and staff member of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations.

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Sources:

• Top cleric Qaradawi calls for Jihad against Hezbollah, Assad in Syria
• Religious expert suggests to send the Russian volunteer corps to Syria

[ by Charles Cameron — a popular catch-phrase fumbled ]
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TE Lawrence was an original. The “second senior official” either has a poor memory for quotations, or wishes he were an original, sad in either case.

Hat-tip to the Small Wars Journal editors, who noted the combo — they referenced John Nagl, who borrowed his book title from Lawrence, while I prefer to attribute the spoon to Lawrence directly, but no matter.

What comes next? Chewing Qat with a spork?

[ by Charles Cameron — without access to joy, how shall we carry the burdens of despair? ]
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via Bill Murray likes

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DoubleQuotes are juxtapositions that have a powerful impact. Our minds and hearts are drawn naturally to seeing parallels and contradictions, making comparisons between ideas and creative leaps from one idea to another, and since this is a very basic human cognitive ability, I’ve developed my own DoubleQuotes format for presenting striking juxtapositions, and use it frequently in my posts here at Zenpundit. But I also collect strong examples of such juxtapositions when others make them, and call them DoubleQuotes in the Wild.

Today, I’d like to double up on my wild DoubleQuotes, and having offered you Jimi Hendrix (graffito juxtaposed with tree, above) to bring you joy, now offer you the poignant example from a Serbian Orthodox monk (Aleppo, Syria, then and now, below) to bring you sorrow:

Tragedy of the civil war in #Syria in two pictures which say more than many words. Photos of the #Aleppo market pic.twitter.com/SHL1t9oS3r

— Sava Janjic (@SavaJanjic) September 5, 2013

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Music, munitions — we may think them unequal combatants, yet as von Clausewitz puts it:

One might say that the physical seem little more than the wooden hilt, while the moral factors are the precious metal, the real weapon, the finely-honed blade.

— or in somewhat more recent terms, as Michael Herr noted in his book Dispatches:

Whenever one of us came back from an R&R we’d bring records, sounds were as precious as water: Hendrix, the Airplane, Frank Zappa and the Mothers, all the things that hadn’t even started when we’d left the States.

… sounds … as precious as water …

[by J. Scott Shipman]

American Caesar, Douglas MacArthur 188-1964, by William Manchester

Often on weekends my wife allows me to tag along as she takes in area estate sales. She’s interested in vintage furniture, and I hope for a decent collection of books. A sale we visited a couple months ago had very few books, but of those few was a hardback copy of American Caesar. I purchased the copy for $1 and mentioned to my wife, “I’ll get to this again someday…” as I’d first read Manchester’s classic biography of General Douglas MacArthur in the early 1980’s while stationed on my first submarine. “Someday” started on the car ride home (she was driving), and I must admit: American Caesar was even better thirty years later. Manchester is a masterful biographer, and equal to the task of such a larger-than-life subject.

MacArthur still evokes passion among admirers and detractors. One take-away from the second reading was just how well-read MacArthur and his father were. When MacArthur the elder died, he left over 4,000 books in his library—both seemed to possess an encyclopedic knowledge of history and warfare. Highly recommended.

PS: I visited the MacArthur Memorial, in Norfolk, Virginia, recently while in town for business and would recommend as well.