zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — for whom death-matches between species have special Platonic significance ]
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You may remember my earlier post, Bobcat jumps shark, one in which I showed a video illustrating “ring form” — the ourobouros or serpent which bites its own tail.

Here’s another:

Australian diver Rick Trippe happened upon the most deadly double hickey ever given. Pucker up! https://t.co/7Uta5QjkG5

— N.A. Fisherman Scout (@NAFishClub) September 24, 2015

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It was these two quotes from to books by Haniel Long and Annie Dillard that set me firmly on the path of DoubleQuotes. I’ve quoted them before, but they bear repetition.

From Haniel Long’s Letter to Saint Augustine:

My friend Jens Jensen, who is an ornithologist, tells me that when he was a boy in Denmark he caught a big carp embedded in which, across the spinal vertebrae, were the talons of an osprey. Apparently years before, the fish hawk had dived for its prey, but had misjudged its size. The carp was too heavy for it to lift up out of the water, and so after a struggle the bird of prey was pulled under and drowned. The fish then lived as best it could with the great bird clamped to it, till time disintegrated the carcass, and freed it, all but the bony structure of the talon.

And from Annie Dillard‘s Teaching a Stone to Talk:

And once, says Ernest Seton Thompson–once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful airborne bones?

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My haiku-esque poem, my one-move recursive HipBone Game:

[ by Charles Cameron — politics and the pope — but you could go straight to Thomas Merton on contemplation, right at the end, and skip the rest ]
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After a busy week, I have seven or eight unfinished ZP pieces to polish up and post — here’s the first.

Skipped:

Sources:

Think Progress, Catholic Congressman Will Skip Papal Address To Congress, Cites Climate Change

Good magazine, Pope Francis to Skip Lunch With Congressmen, Will Eat With DC’s Homeless Community Instead

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Also skipped:

Alito, Breyer, Kagan, Scalia, and Thomas skip papal address to Congress

Notably absent were Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, all of whom are Catholic. Also absent were Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, who are Jewish.

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NPR saw fit to post The 10 Most Political Moments In Pope Francis’ Address To Congress:

Embracing John Kerry

A call to rise above polarization

A call for the country to open its arms to immigrants and refugees

A reminder on abortion

Strongly advocating for abolishing the death penalty

Poverty and the necessity of ‘distribution of wealth’

Business should be about ‘service to the common good’

Calling on Congress to act on climate change

Anti­war message and a call to stop arms trade

importance of family and marriage

Note also, from WaPo.. “The Jesuits refer to him as a mixture of a desert saint and Machiavelli.”

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As for myself, I particularly liked #2, the “call to rise above polarization”:

Francis warned against the “temptation” of “the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners. The contemporary world, with its open wounds which affect so many of our brothers and sisters, demands that we confront every form of polarization which would divide it into these two camps.” .. He also noted one his heroes, American Thomas Merton, whom Francis said had “the capacity for dialogue and openness to God.”

It is hard to say which party Pope Francis would chose under the rubric “Whoever is not with me is against me” now popular in Congress.

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And what, finally, of Thomas Merton himself? Who is this Trappist monk the Pope mentions?

I had the good fortune to correspond briefly with Fr Merton while I was still an undergraduate at Oxford in 1964, more than a half century ago, and he was kind enough to say of my letter “It makes me feel somehow I am in contact with the human race”. His response can be found in Road To Joy: The Letters Of Thomas Merton To New And Old Friends.

Here’s the voice of Thomas Merton, speaking of the central practice of his life — central, too, I would suggest, to the politics of this Pope:

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]

Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command by Sean Naylor

I just received a courtesy review copy of Relentless Strike from John at St. Martin’s Press. 

Increasingly viewed as a “must read” book in the defense community, Relentless Strike is also extremely controversial among its target audience because Naylor’s dissection of the rise of JSOC reveals operational details, TTP and names to a degree that many current and former “operators” view as too granular while others welcome the confirmation and credit of JSOC triumphs that would normally be shrouded in secrecy. David Axe of War is Boring opines that Naylor, an award winning journalist and author, “ …may know more about commandos than any other reporter on the planet” while Jack Murphy of SOFREP has a full interview of Sean Naylor here.

Flipping open to a page at random, I find discussion of a special operator attacked in Lebanon while under unofficial cover during circumstances that remain classified. Foiling an attempt to kidnap him, despite suffering a gunshot wound, the operator covered his tracks, eluded further detection and crossed several international borders before receiving medical care. This gives you some indication of the kind of book that is Relentless Strike.

Full review when I finish reading, but I suspect many readers of ZP will pick up a copy on their own.

[ a guest post by Melissa Roddy ]
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Tim Furnish recently taught a course on Jihad, Apocalypse and Terrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, and suggested to Melissa Roddy, one of his students, that she should submit this piece for our consideration. I’m happy to welcome Melissa as a guest poster here at Zenpundit. She has an intriguing suggestion to make regarding the frequent use of face coverings by IS members when they’re basically showing off their capacity for butchering those with whom they disagree. Your comments are welcome. — Charles Cameron

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While viewing photos of Islamic State (IS) jihadists recently, an irony suddenly came into sharp focus. If these exterminators are in fact true believers, why do they always hide their faces?

Of course the practical reason is to avoid identification by governments and military forces intent on vanquishing IS. But what does it say about their commitment to a mission that has included the slaughter and enslavement of anybody and everybody they please? In every gruesome image projected in Western media of “Jihadi John” and/or his cohorts slicing through the neck of some poor soul or mass murdering innocent men, women and children, the perpetrator portrays fierce pride beneath the safety of a ski mask.

Their masks may hide their faces, but they expose the doubt in their hearts. A true believer would have no fear. A true believer would show his face to the world to prove devout confidence that his mission is in service of and blessed by Allah. A true believer would have no fear of exposure. A true believer would be confident that Allah would clear any obstacle from his path. A true believer would want to strip anonymity from such acts, because to show his face would be a declaration of faith.

It is bloody clear, IS butchers hide behind their ski masks, because, despite their boasts of religious fervor, in their heart of hearts they know they are nothing more than power hungry, murderers, rapists and thieves, with no respect for Allah’s creation. They are exactly the opposite of righteous. Their masks demonstrate the fear that in death these monsters will face an eternity in Hell for being instruments of Shaitan wearing false masks of piety simply to satisfy their bloodlust.

[ by Charles Cameron — the AUMF and “wickedness” ]
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The essence of the insight that Horst Rittel and more recently Jeff Conklin bring to our attention under the rubric of “wicked problems” is the idea that what is viewed as a problem from one standpoint may be seen from another perspective as having a different emphasis, a different center of gravity — so that a move that solves a given problem from the first viewpoint may partially or wholly fail to solve it from that second perspective.

Add to that, the idea that the problem may itself morph as circumstances vary over time — as some interested parties drop out and others become interested, deadlines pass and new techniques and avenues of approach arise — and it becomes clear that the naive label “the problem” covers something far closer to an evolving and poorly defined entity than to one that is clearly defined and unchanging.

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Gregory Johnsen had a fine piece on the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) in Buzzfeed titled 60 Words And A War Without End: The Untold Story Of The Most Dangerous Sentence In U.S. History. Those sixty words say:

That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

In his extensive commentary on how those words have been interpreteted, he writes:

Unbound by time and unlimited by geography, the sentence has been stretched and expanded over the past decade, sprouting new meanings and interpretations as two successive administrations have each attempted to keep pace with an evolving threat while simultaneously maintaining the security of the homeland. In the process, what was initially thought to authorize force against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan has now been used to justify operations in several countries across multiple continents and, at least theoretically, could allow the president — any president — to strike anywhere at anytime. What was written in a few days of fear has now come to govern years of action.

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It seems to me somewhat naive as a general principle to think that words framing in a problem and or solution from one perspective, in one time, and under one set of circumstances, will necessarily “fit” it some later time, under changed circumstances and perhaps from a different perspective.

One could surely apply these words of Conklin’s in Wicked Problems & Social Complexity to the AUMF:

Moreover, the field is changing so fast that new options become available, and others drop into oblivion, almost every day.

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My question is: what do we do about the fluidity of change in a world of verbally-fixed laws? And I see that as an inevitable question arising in light of Lao Tzu‘s twin dicta which I have variously phrased or seen phrased as:

The pronounceable name isn’t the unpronounceable name

The flow that can be capped isn’t the overflowing flow

The quantity that can be counted is not the unaccountable quality

No way the way can be put into words

The problem that can be described isn’t our actual situation

the path that can be mapped is not the pathless path

and so forth.. or as Korzybski has it:

the map is not the territory