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[ by Charles Cameron — I’d be honored if JSB was battling LvB on the streets of Sacramento — but no, this is Beirut, Lord love ’em. Via PBS ]
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From the streets of Beirut, right about now:

and:

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Those are the semi-finalists. We’ll let you know when the Cup Final Winner is announced.

[ by Charles Cameron — avoiding a tough piece of necessary writing by dealing with something simpler that conveniently fell into my hand ]
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Why do I bother?

Recall that the more information you get, the more disproportionately higher the ratio of noise to signal. Say, a little bit of information, 50% noise; a lot, 99.9% noise.

Likewise, in any field, the higher the number of academic publications the higher the ratio of garbage.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) December 28, 2019

Well, you know Nassim Nicholas Taleb, he gave us the concept of black swans, very bright guy because he questions, questions, and the answers he gets from reality don’t always match with the expectations routinely offered in answer to the same questions.

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Well, Taleb‘s tweet cropped up in my feed within about a minute of Greg McMurry quoting the Oratorian priest Fr David Abernathy‘s tweeting a quotation from St Charbel, which seemed to convey a very similar notion, only expressed in terms of spiritual rather than secular ratios between loss and gain:

Their buildings rise, their morality sinks. Their worldly goods increase, their values diminish. Their speeches multiply, their prayers grow scarce…. An edifice based on man may well rise, but it ends up crushing him. St. Charbel pic.twitter.com/5iZChni2ia

— FrDavid AbernethyCO (@pghoratory) December 28, 2019

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I bother because seeing parallelisms and oppositions and taking note of them is one of the prime “moves” in creativity, and I want to be as primed to recognize such parallelisms, particularly when they cross disciplinary boundaries, as readily as possible.

Bonus point because both St Charbel and Nassim Nicholas Taleb are of Lebanese origin.

[ by Charles Cameron — season’s greetings ]
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https://www.facebook.com/rami.khal.7/videos/10157979313090319/
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I trust you can see and hear this video, or at least click through to Le Liban c’est ça aussi : une chorale musulmane qui chante Noël dans une église and watch it. It presents, as the post in French tells us, a Lebanese Shiite choir singing Christmas carols in a church, and with it I offer you my Christmas greetings on behalf of one and all at Zenpundit, greetings secular, sacred, Maccabean, Nazarene, Muslim, or at the mall.

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I’m, as you may know, in recovery from heart surgery and on kidney dialysis, and this year I received a very kind care package of renal-failure appropriate food from an anonymous source, so I’m reminded that while the mall, grocery store and food-laden table may not represent the “essence of Christmas” as my mother would have wished — the child born God to brighten our dark world — they can nonetheless represent generosity as well as commerce, a break in the relentless pursuit of dominance, human life as gift and giving.

On this day, therefore, of commercial, charitable and Christian celebration, we wish you all, according to your varied natures and our own perspectives, happiness this Christmas in the teeth of winter and the world.

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That Muslim voices are raised above in a Christian church in praise of the Christian nativity offers a glimpse of hope for mutual respect in the strife-and faith-torn Middle East — but such matters as the overlapping and interconnections of faiths are never simple, and by way or remembering something of the nuance, here’s a quick sentence from COL Pat Lang‘s post at Sic Semper Tyrannis yesterday, Christmas in Aleppo – Attention Joe Scarborough:

One of our German correspondents on SST informed us the other day that there are now some Christian members of Hizbullah, the Lebanese Shia militia. This would make sense because after the 2006 war against Israel Hizbullah assigned priority of its own reconstruction money to Christians in south Lebanon.

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To quote Charles Dickens:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity..

Best wishes & blessings to all..

[ by Charles Cameron — concerning garbage disposal, Arlo Guthrie, and Lebanon ]
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Color me speechless.

[ by Charles Cameron — with a sideward glance at the rights of dolphins and trees ]
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For your refreshment and edification:

— while:

I fully agree with Ohad Hatzofe who says in that second clip:

Birds and other aninmals, but especially flying animals, don’t know political boundaries, and if there are fences on the ground, to them it’s not a barrier, and we’re to protect them and to treat them as such. The birds are not Israeli birds or Lebanese birds, or European birds passing over our skies; these are this earth’s birds..

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Sigh:

We are asked to decide whether the world’s cetaceans have standing to bring suit in their own name under the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the National Environmental Protection Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. We hold that cetaceans do not have standing under these statutes.

— Judge William A. Fletcher

It looks as though it is past time for birds, dolphins and other creatures to have international legal standing of the kind suggested by Justice Douglas in his dissenting opinion, Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727 (1972):

The critical question of “standing” would be simplified and also put neatly in focus if we fashioned a federal rule that allowed environmental issues to be litigated before federal agencies or federal courts in the name of the inanimate object about to be despoiled, defaced, or invaded by roads and bulldozers and where injury is the subject of public outrage.

—and further discussed by Christopher Stone in what is perhaps the only law book I have found it a pleasure to read, Should Trees Have Standing?