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[ by Charles Cameron — at the intersection of drones and IRGC graphics ]
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Just a quick note that as of late September 2013, Iran has begun mass-production of the Shahed-129 drone, having first announced it in September of 2012. Iran claims the Shahed-129 can fly to the “heart of Israel“. For another post on the raised arm and rifle graphic, see Of the arm, fist and rifle.

Source:

Iran unveils attack drone dubbed Shahed-129

[ by Charles Cameron — Gezi Park and Westgate Mall through the lens of the Garden of Good and Evil ]
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Sheer madness, I know — but there’s a method to it.

I was watching Clint Eastwood‘s brilliantly funny film Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil last night, and noted with delight the symmtery between two of his Savannah characters — one a gentleman who walks an invisible dog through a park on a leash [upper panel, above], and the other a fellow who attaches house-flies on threads to his lapels, so that he can walk his pets to the nearby diner for breakfast [lower panel]…

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Here’s where the sheer madness comes in, and the method it encourages.

With symmetry still on a back burner in my mind, I was reading Michael Klare‘s post Planet Tahrir: The Coming Mass Demonstrations against Climate Change (Klare) on Juan Cole‘s blog this morning, and ran across this sentence:

on May 27th, a handful of environmental activists blocked bulldozers sent by the government to level Gezi Park, a tiny oasis of greenery in the heart of Istanbul, and prepare the way for the construction of an upscale mall.

An upscale mall.

Beth Gill‘s essay, Temples of Consumption: Shopping Malls as Secular Cathedrals details a central analogy of our time, and it’s only fitting that the desire to replace an “oasis of greenery” by building an “upscale mall” was what triggered the Gezi Park uprising, just as the destruction of an “upscale mall” in Nairobi, Kenya, was the recent target and mise-en-scene of al-Shabaab’s recent “martyrdom brigade” and their murderous rampage.

The symmetries and ratios of garden and mall, cathedral and mall, construction and destruction, paradise and consumption are thrown up for our consideration by this juxtaposition of Gezi and Westgate.

What can we learn from them?

[by Lynn Rees]

One of the daily gripes the Norman Conquest (or perhaps Marcus Furius Camillius) inflicts on me is how Latinite words in English have higher status than English’s own native proto-Germanic words. This often leaves English with one proto-Germanic word with a viscerally concrete meaning rooted in the core words native English-speakers learn as small children and one vaguer but fancier Latin word learned later in life and used to signal high falutiness.

One example of this fashion-induced duplication that annoys me is these two pairs:

• power in place of strength
• control in place of grip

Consider Rear Admiral Joseph Caldwell  (J.C.) Wylie, Jr., United States Navy (if you don’t know who J. C. Wylie is, Carl von Clausewitz was the Prussian Wylie). Wylie writes in his criminally neglected Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control:

The primary aim of the strategist in the conduct of war is some selected degree of control of the enemy for the strategist’s own purpose; this is achieved by control of the pattern of war; and this control of the pattern of war is had by manipulation of the center of gravity of war to the advantage of the strategist and the disadvantage of the opponent.

From this insight, I’ve come to think of the heart of strategy (an even hazier Greek word revived and latinized by the French) as a three-way interplay between:

• purpose: a sentiment about how conditions should change
• power: a possibility for how conditions could change
• control: a certainty that conditions will change

But the many meanings of power and control can be bent to serve hide how easily this three way interplay can be grasped. One possible rework uses more bedrock English:

• goal: how things should be
• strength: how things could be
• grip: how things will be

This lets strategy be physically grasped:

1. The mind thinks of a goal.
2. It tells its muscles to act to reach that goal.
3. The muscles try to grip some thing.
4. Depending on what the muscles grasp, their grip is tightened or loosened in the shape needed to grasp it.
5. The strength of the muscles may be too little or too much to first get and then keep the needed grip.
6. If the mind’s need to reach a goal is strong enough, it may have its muscles keep trying to get a grip despite lacking the needed strength.
7. If the mind’s need to reach a goal is weak enough, it may release its grip even if its muscles have enough strength to hold on.

 
History is packed with those with enough power strength to reach their goals but who could never get control a grip strong enough to reach them. Reach exceeded grasp.

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]

If you can see this, you may be fortunate.

zenpundit.com is experiencing some tech problems with excessive script executions that are eating bandwidth and it is difficult to sort out what is genuine traffic from the malicious bot crawling. As a result, the web host keeps shutting us down.

Lynn Rees has set up a fallback site “Zenpunditry” at WordPress which will feature posts until problems are resolved ( assuming our latest iteration this afternoon with the help desk has not succeeded). Or maybe we are good now. Who knows?

zenpundit.com on Facebook will also carry posts from either site so that is a good place to bookmark

In any event I’d like to apologize for the disruption to the readers and my co-bloggers for the inconvenience.

Keeping my fingers crossed……

[ by Charles Cameron — Slovenian electronic-industrial group Laibach tackles pone of Bach’s late, greatest works ]
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Here’s Glenn Gould playing Contrapunctus XIV from Johann Sebastian Bach‘s Art of Fugue, complete with the hum that seems to generate itself from his immersion in the music:

And here by way of comparison and contrast, is the Laibach — “music wing of the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) art collective” — interpretation of that same piece:

For my money, Laibach does a far more interesting job of “electronicizing” Bach than Wendy Carlos ever did, all those many years ago.

For my money too, there’s the complete Laibach Art of Fugue on CD on its way to me courtesy of Amazon.