zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — i personally am better acquainted with “innocent until proven guilty”, but.. ]
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Contemplating this:

Nabokov's father was killed by assassins at a lecture and Vera made sure the same wouldn't happen to him pic.twitter.com/swSozOfGUA

— Gabe Habash (@gabehabash) May 20, 2016

in light of the Talmud:

“When someone comes to kill you, you must rise early and kill him first” -Babylonian Talmud: Berakoth 58
Judaism… http://t.co/PUGXcvPudK

— Conservatives (@ConservativAOLA) March 27, 2013

Obviously if Véra Nabokov intended to protect her husband, she intended to shoot his would-be assassin right before the assassination attempt, not right after it.

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If Someone Comes to Kill You, Rise Up and Kill Him First:

Several days before the horror of September 11, 2001, Israel’s Foreign Minister Shimon Peres spoke to Conservative rabbis in an international conference call. Responding to a concern expressed about Israel’s policy of preemptive targeted killings of suspected terrorist leaders and the inevitable collateral damage, Mr. Peres defended the practice, citing an oft-quoted rabbinic legal dictum, “Im ba l’hargekha, hashkem l’hargo,” “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him (first).” The uproar last July by Israel-bashers and, more credibly, by the Israeli Jewish public after the Israeli army bombed a Gaza apartment building, inadvertently killing fourteen civilians, including nine children, along with arch-terrorist Salah Shehada, again focused attention on the issue of collateral damage in the implementation of “Im ba l’hargekha.”

File under preemptive strikes, targeted killings, drones, Abdulrahman Al-Aulaqi, etc.

[ by Charles Cameron — a highest-intensity insult in the jihad among jihadists ]
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A significant article is announced:

New from me on al-Qaeda chief Aymen al-Zawarihi's last message and its intended Syrian audience. (Hint: Not Nusrah.) https://t.co/vWy7s5okzN

— Sam Heller (@AbuJamajem) May 20, 2016

Both Will McCants and Cole Bunzel have recommended this article, so you may already have seen it.

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Okay, I understand that there are various viewpoints, and hence various different people will make different choices as to which is the key paragraph here. For many, it will be Zawahiri‘s focus on al-Sham.

Indeed, Zawahiri’s new geographic focus happens to align itself with what Abu Musab al-Suri proposed in his Global Islamic Resistance Call — published, perhaps a tad presciently, more than a decade ago in 2004/5 — that (in J-P Filiu‘s phrase, Apocalypse in Islam, p. 189):

It is self-evident to him that the “country of Sham” — Greater Syria, including Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan — looms as the apocalyptic theater par excellence, and that al-Qaida’s strategic conception of global jihad must be reoriented to take into account this final clash.

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From my own POV, as someone whose interest is in movements in religious thought, this is the key paragraph:

Zawahri did deliver at least one message aimed at the jihadist base, affirming that the IS’s members are “Khawarij,” a historical Muslim sect of hyper-extremist deviants. Labeling the Islamic State group as such has been controversial within Salafi-jihadism — theorist Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi has resisted it — in part because it requires jihadists to act on the Prophet Muhammad’s prescription for dealing with the Khawarij: “qatl Ad,” or total extermination. Zawahri has now come down firmly on one side of this intra-jihadist debate.

On which topic, see also my November 2015 post here on Zenpundit: Is the Islamic State Islamic? The Yes and No of the matter, and this, from JM Berger in 2014:

Dear ISIS, if it takes 63 pages to explain why you are not Khawarij, you just might be Khawarij. pic.twitter.com/xfwSNt8peJ

— J.M. Berger (@intelwire) December 28, 2014

[ by Charles Cameron — on the rich visual similarities between two diagrams from widely separated topic areas ]
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I don’t think we always appreciate just how similar graph-based mappings are to one another — or why the HipBone-Sembl Games are therefore so closely analogous to so many other graph-based mappings of the world around us:

This particular pairing of images struck me today when Mike Walker tweeted it the Arpanet map in quoting a World Economic Forum post — and the memory it called up was another image I found, who knows where, quite a few years ago, of the workings of a washing machine.

We really have two tips of the iceberg of a hugely pervasive language of node-and-edge-based graphs here.

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Previous posts in this series:

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: preliminaries

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: two dazzlers

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: three

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: four

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: five

Related posts, overlapping with those above:

Graph-types 1: sample graphs and boards

Graph-types 2: towards a universal graphical mapping language

I expect there’s more but that’s what a quick scan brought up.

[ by Charles Cameron — the horror! the incongruity! ]
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To be fair, the Chronicle of Philanthropy carried this report because what happens to a MSF hospital in wartime is of appropriate interest to philanthropists.

The juxtaposition of journal title and topic, however, remains jarring — click on the link below and take a look at their page as it originally appeared, to see what I mean.

Sources:

Chronicle of Philanthropy, Report Examines Afghan Forces’ Role in Hospital Bombing

New York Times Magazine, Doctors With Enemies: Did AfghanForces Target the M.S.F. Hospital?

[ by Charles Cameron — where the blind spot of aphantasia meets the beauty of Avalokiteshvara ]
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Perhaps sadly, perhaps not, I suffer from aphantasia.

It’s a great relief, actually, to have found someone who doesn’t laugh at me when I say I can’t visualize — a researcher, no less, Prof. Adam Zeman, with a paper on the topic in Cortex.

I have tried on occasion to find metaphors for my condition. The best way to explain what does happen when someone asks me to visualize something is to say I can see it “as if painted in water on glass” — or “as if it’s behind me, out of sight, but I can remember roughly what it was like when I last looked.”

Sources:

Lion’s Roar, Developing Pure Perception Through Visualization

BBC Science news, Aphantasia: A life without mental images

University of Exeter, Can’t count sheep? You could have aphantasia

Adam Zeman, Lives without imagery – Congenital aphantasia