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[ by Charles Cameron — in which my doppelgänger Jon Schwartz of Tiny Revolution comes up with a few of my ideas before I’ve even woken up, see “background” below ]
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I’m posting this first pair of images with my friends Mike Sellers and Bryan Alexander in mind:

New logo for US spy satellite from National Reconnaissance Office is weirdly similar to anti-communist propaganda: pic.twitter.com/FbYlhAxioW

— Jon Schwarz (@tinyrevolution) December 7, 2013

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This pair, which i snarfed from the same source, is also of interest:

Side by side: article about how the FBI watches people via their webcams and section of '1984' about telescreens pic.twitter.com/BBlFBgD3wA

— Jon Schwarz (@tinyrevolution) December 7, 2013

Click here to see the twin texts at a more easily readable size.

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Okay, here’s some background, fished out of my personal mists of time with an assist or two from the Internet Archive:

On November 9, 2004, a certain Jonathan Schwartz had apparently read a post of mine about OSINT on the Online Journalism Review [now archived], followed me to another site where he found more of my writings — and blogged at A Tiny Revolution:

At this point I became… unsettled. Cameron’s view of the world is EXACTLY THE SAME AS MINE. I briefly asked myself: do I have a split personality, and does my other personality have a website of its own? It is possible that when I think I’m sleeping, I’m actually awake as “Charles Cameron,” busily saying the same things Jonathan Schwarz does? Or is it the other way around, and when Charles Cameron goes to sleep he transforms into “Jonathan Schwarz”? And… is either one of us a superhero?

I then discovered the strangest thing of all. It turns out that unbeknownst to me (or “me”), Cameron was already aware of this website, and had linked to it twice.

So I recommend Cameron’s site. I myself look forward to following it and his work. But he better not start hitting on my girlfriend, because she might like him exactly the same amount as me.

It seems Jonathan Schwartz is still tracking “side by side” quotes and images, just as I’m still tracking “DoubleQuotes”. And sometimes — as today, above — fragments of “his” life surface as half-remembered dreams in mind…

Or as Florence Nightingale once said:

Oh Jonathan my brother Jonathan, my love to thee was very great, passing the love of women

So it looks like your girlfriend is safe after all, Jon.

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One more from TinyRevolution before we go — not a DoubleQuote this time, but an intersection of two fields — and ZP readers already know how interested I am in the intersections of NatSec and Games —

NSA imagined a computer game that makes Palestinians mad by "distorting history" & "embellishing Israeli atrocities" pic.twitter.com/Y400HBU02A

— Jon Schwarz (@tinyrevolution) December 9, 2013

[ by Charles Cameron — on an impressive video, featuring Matt Levitt and Reuel Gerecht on Hezbollah ]
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Matthew Levitt‘s contribution to a recent panel at the International Soy Museum was a tour de force. Levitt, whose work as a CT analyst has included stints with both the FBI and Treasury, was discussing his most recent book, Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God — both the book and his talk are strongly recommended.

It is, however, his colleague Reuel Marc Gerecht‘s contribution to that session that I wish to highlight here, because [starting at 44.40] he made a point about Hezbollah from his own CT experience that he still finds it necessary to make in 2013, some two decades after his service with the CIA commenced in the 1990s:

One of the things I was struck by when I came into the Agency, and I was struck by it on the day that I left the Agency, which was: you almost never had officers either on the clandestine side or in the directorate of analysis, the Directorate of Intelligence, talk about God. You just didn’t have that many people sort of put it together and talk about what actually motivated people.

You know, there was almost an assumption out there, Oh, the Iranians were upset with us because of our dealing with the Shah etcetera, but the actual analysis of the Iranian complaint against the United States was distinctly secular. Even the analysis of the Hezbollah was distinctly secular. And it never made any sense, particularly if you started to have some exposure to these individuals, and you suddenly realized that no, their motivations aren’t secular usually, their motivations are actually deeply spiritual, they’re religious, they’re about God.

— and [starting 53.04]:

There is a profound reflex in the West to look at a group like Hezbollah, and to look at their Iranian sponsors, and to take God out of the equation. Don’t do that. We wouldn’t do it with al-Qaida. Don’t do it with these groups either. If you do that, if you neuter them of their religious belief, if you look at it as just an ethnic movement, if you look at it as just a sectarian movement, if you look at it as just the Shi’a getting even in Lebanon, then you’re making an atrocious analytical mistake, which will bushwhack you, I guarantee you, over and over again. You have to keep God in this equation…

The one bright spot in this dismal account of the secular mindset blinding itself to religious passion is Gerecht’s statement: “We wouldn’t do it with al-Qaida”.

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For more on the way our own worldviews can blind us to the worldviews of others, see my post on Gaidi Mtaani, together with the two follow ups to that post which I shall be posting here shortly.

[ by Charles Cameron — continuing my exploration of a pattern language of thoughts, both verbal and imagistic ]
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This is a ship-shipping ship, shipping shipping ships. pic.twitter.com/GqzTB866WK via @usmanm

— Nat. Maritime Museum (@NMMGreenwich) October 15, 2013

One of my favorite patterns derives from the nesting of Russian dolls inside Russian dolls, so it’s only appropriate to start with an example of what I can only call.. Matrioshka shipping!

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It’s my habit, as you may have seen, to collect certain “ways of thinking” in the miniature format provided by my Twitterstream. Whether you think of them as logical forms, patterns in a pattern language, or amuse-bouches for the mind, they are here to delight and instruct — and when you pile a whole lot of them up together, they can make you just a touch dizzy.

Today I’ll be bringing my collection up to date with two posts, Serpent logics: a ramble, and Serpent logics: the marathon. If you want a quick look at some of the neat patterns I’ve seen since I last posted on these topics, this post — Serpent logics: a ramble — is the one for you. If, after reading it, you want a gruelling, hilarious, insightful, insane, devious, extended course in this kind of pattern recognition — try Serpent logics: the marathon.

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Here’s one from today, tweeted as I was prepping this post — in a category I’ll simply call…

Counter-intuitive?

When the personal is not political. Indian-origin slave-owner in UK a Marxist-Communist. http://t.co/R0i8krpLE4

— Shivam Vij (@DilliDurAst) November 24, 2013

Admit it, that’s just a trifle mind-blowing, no? C’mon!

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Serpent Bites Tail:

Here’s a light-and-dark-hearted example of the ourobouros or serpent-bites-tail recursive patterm, with a hat tip to Allan Stairs:

What is the operation by which a self relates itself to its own self, transparently? Selfie.

— KimKierkegaardashian (@KimKierkegaard) September 18, 2013

Follow Kim Kierkegaardashian (@KimKierkegaard) on Twitter if you like mashups between the deepest of theologians and the shallowest of celebrities…

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I have no idea what category this one belongs in, so I’ll slip it in here. It’s from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, protecting our digital private parts:

It's great even NSA is using our Tor explainer. But they're violating our CC license by classifying it Top Secret. https://t.co/m1B2kzsr0W

— EFF (@EFF) October 4, 2013

Oh my! A Clash of Classifications!

The EFF even has it’s own playful-serious version of the NSA logo —

— as the DoubleQuote above — juxtaposing how the Agency views itself with how the EFF sees it — illustrates…

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DoubleQuotes in the Wild

The Wailing Wall in Jerusalm and Spain… pic.twitter.com/nNmm6cbGtp via @SonParecidos

— Kasper Ploegman (@Kasper_P) November 19, 2013

DoubleQuotes in the Wild is my on-going collection of paired juxtapositions that say more together than they do apart. It’s a beginning training in what F Scott Fitzgerald claimed was the “test of a first-rate intelligence” — “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”.

The example above comes from Parecidos Razonables, a blog that takes off from the Separated at Birth concept and specializes in double-takes of this sort, often satirical. One of their more celebrated examples:

Vladimir Putin y Perro #Rusia #Humor pic.twitter.com/UmPVPGF3Ea

— Parecidos Razonables (@SonParecidos) November 14, 2013

I’d have juxtaposed Vladimir Putin with Daniel Craig as James Bond myself, but that idea has already been taken — a Bond fan apparently photoshopped Putin’s face onto a poster of Bond in Casino Royale, and then “plastered” Moscow with his handiwork.

Apparently the Apparat, like Queen Victoria, was not amused. I’d have been flattered…

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While we’re on the subject of President Putin, here’s another category to consider…

Mixed games:

#Putin and #Rouhani's op-eds show they are playing strategic chess game. Yet, we continue to play darts.

— Ali H. Soufan (@Ali_H_Soufan) September 20, 2013

The op eds by Presidents Putin and Rouhani to which Soufan refers are Putin’s A Plea for Caution From Russia and Rouhani’s Why Iran seeks constructive engagement.

Ali Soufan, the author of Black Banners, is always worth paying attention to — and his tweet, above, clearly belongs with that Alasdair MacIntyre quote I’m so fond of [1, 2]:

Not one game is being played, but several, and, if the game metaphor may be stretched further, the problem about real life is that moving one’s knight to QB3 may always be replied to by a lob over the net

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Let’s close with some examples from the arts, the first with just a touch of Tibetan Buddhist flavor…

One of mine:

Re: his “Poppy Field” paintings, Mr. Zhang said: “If they are alive, they will love these works. But if they are dead, they will buy them.”

— hipbonegamer (@hipbonegamer) September 20, 2013

For further details, see Death and hallucination color new work by Chinese artist Zhang Huan after life-altering Tibet trip.

And the second, a pair of images — each in itself a sort of DoubleQuote in the Wild comparing the forms of birds and mechanical objects in a single photo — posted together today by Wm. Benzon under the title Conjunctions:

Birds and cranes, New Jersey and Lower Manhattan.

Birds and cranes, Brooklyn and Governors Island.

Magnificent — what a generous eye he has — many thanks, good Sir!

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Patterns? You might think of them as Jungian archetypes, Platonic ideas, Hofstadterian analogies — or Ayat, the same word used to describe the verses of the Qur’an, signs in the calligraphy of God:

Qur’an 41 (Fussilat), 53

We shall show them Our signs in the horizons and in themselves…

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And now, consider your options. Have you had enough of these damn patterns of mine — or would you like to try out for the marathon version?

[ by Charles Cameron — wanna know the very latest on those black banners from Khorasan? ]
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Here’s the scene that greeted four British recruits to the jihad on their arrival at a training camp in Pakistan in August 2011:

This wasn’t like the training camps of propaganda videos, with the black flag of al-Qaeda flying free in the wind. There were no racks of weapons waiting for recruits. And all the trainers had left for the religious festival of Eid.

They came home to the UK, where their families “berated” them, they were arrested, tried, found guilty and sentenced to 40 month terms in prison.

With jihad, as with so much else, you can’t always count on truth in advertising.

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And then there’s Omar Hammami.

Even Rusty Shackleford from My Pet Jawa — “a weblog comparing Muslims to Jawas and containing criticism and satire of Islamic traditions and beliefs” — can’t help but like Omar Hammami, aka Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, the American jihadist from Alabama who, as Wired puts it, “shoots the breeze” on Twitter “with the people whose job it is to study and even hunt people like him.” He does it with verve, even when ridiculing al-Shabab, the group he was put on the the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist List with a $5 million bounty for joining:

Shackleford commented, “I’ve actually become kinda fond of the guy — if that’s possible”.

Al-Shabab, however, appears to dislike him enough to have tried to assassinate him a couple of days ago, following up their failure with a major attack, results as yet unknown.

With jihad in foreign lands, apparently, you can’t even trust your fellow mujahidin to treat you better than your avowed enemies.

[ by Charles Cameron — light-hearted, but even so, redacted to avoid needless transparency ]
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