zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — borrowing my title from Shakespeare, though Chaucer and Erasmus said it first ]
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You may or may not like John Kerry. You may or may not like Assad. You may or may not like Mother Teresa, or Michèle Duvalier and Papa Doc. Rumsfeld and or Saddam. GW Bush or Abdullah bin Abd al-Aziz Al Saud. But paired photos of someone you dislike with someone many of us loathe is a neat visual tactic in which the not-so-bad party of the first part is tarred by association with the way-more-evil party of the second.

Does it ever work the other way around, though? is the party of the second part ever redeemed through contact with the party of the first? or even relieved of a few tens or hundreds of thousand dollars for authentic, charitable purposes?

What would I know?

The simplest way in which the two images above can be seen as similar to one another is that each one features someone named Teresa. But that’s not the point.

And I do have to say, that restaurant in Damascus looks pleasant enough.

[ by Charles Cameron — fun and games — as if you’ll ever really catch me doing much else ]
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I like to do something a little special on Sundays, to keep Zen and his readers amused in the absence of legitimate work.

The “animated .gif” above is an illustration of something way above my head called the Banach–Tarski paradox. To my eye, it’s a brilliant illustration of the curious affair of the numbers one and two… or what I like to call more generally “dualities, contradictions and the nonduality“.

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But in case that mesmerizing graphic doesn’t do the trick, here’s a foolish conundrum for you to chew on. Is:

e-meter : lie detector :: Scientology : NSA :: clear : clearance

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[ by Charles Cameron — carrier pigeons, guilty, 1914, okay — dolphins, jury still out — but these storks and hawks, innocent I do believe ]
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Sources:

Sky News, Stork Held In Egypt On Suspicion Of Spying, 31 August, 2013

National Turk, Turks introduced hawks under suspicion of espionage, 27 July, 2013

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I can claim no responsibility for this DoubleQuote, which I would never have “caught” without Dan Trombly‘s keen eye as manifest in his tweet today:

Pro-intervention: Turkey has arrested a hawk for spying. Anti-intervention: Egypt, which recently detained a stork.

— Dan Trombly (@stcolumbia) August 31, 2013

For extra bite:

The stork story concludes with this delicious tid-bit:

In 2010, a series of shark attacks along Egypt’s Mediterranean coast were blamed on “GPS-controlled sharks” allegedly sent by Israeli security services into Sinai waters.

Jumping the shark?