sisu

Kitchen magic

Tiny meeps the light fantastic in the countdown to supper at Goomp's this afternoon.

Carnival of the Cats -- the 71st -- is being hosted by Gir at Your Moosey Fate this week.

There is something that likes a wall

We had a great post ready to go about the man and the wall, and then it disappeared into cyberspace.  Gotta head out Down East now.  Maybe we can fill things in later on.  Gotta do a Cotillion post and Red State Rant before sundown too. Gak. We hate it when that happens. At least we've got our Friday Ark marbles lined up.

Mysterious stones trying to move up in the world.

Unexpected happenings, but no time to report.

Faith is like that

Since you didn't ask, a zygote is not a human being.  Once the embryo starts kicking and sucking its thumb and responding to outside stimuli, it's a different story. Before that, it's a bunch of inchoate cells that could be used by stem-cell scientists to infuse new hope and life into persons with a variety of horrific diseases. Just because a man and a woman have sex and a sperm finds its way into an egg and the thing implants itself in the lining of the womb doesn't mean we're talking about a sentient being. Not to mention artificially inseminated eggs in petri dishes, fergossake.  Sentience takes time. We're definitely not with GW on this, and we suspect his wife and his mom aren't either.  He may be a brilliant poker player, but he's no brain surgeon, let alone having a clue about reproductive science. Senate Republican leader Doc Bill Frist is probably closer to sound science and common sense on this one. It's all about emotion, though, so there will be no possibility of reasoned discourse.  You're either with 'em or against 'em.  Faith is like that.

Not that we'd ever vote for Frist for president or anything else.  As a medical student he murdered cats:

Frist is an animal lover who said his decision to become a doctor was clinched when he helped heal a friend's dog. But Frist now found himself forced to kill animals during medical research. And his new dilemma was finding enough animals to kill. Soon, he began lying to obtain more animals. He went to the animal shelters around Boston and promised he would care for the cats as pets. Then he killed them during experiments. "It was a heinous and dishonest thing to do,'" Frist wrote. "I was going a little crazy."

For us Frist is in the same class of amoral all-about-me types as Arnold Schwarzenegger, who as governor of California was all set last year to kill off stray cats and dogs in shelters early and often as a cost-saving measure. He quickly backtracked when the electorate balked, but by then he'd showed his cards, and it was too late. These people have no soul.

In the shadow of Henry VIII's hunting grounds

London's Hyde Park  (lower right) is just around the corner from the scene (inset, upper left) of dramatic police raids carried out earlier today, but you'd never know it from the otherwise excellent live TV coverage. Fortunately, Google Maps has a "hybrid" option, which allowed us to locate the areas named in cable and online coverage and then overlay street names (color) on the satellite photo for a bird's-eye view of the neighborhood. Henry VIII acquired Hyde Park from the monks of Westminster Abbey in 1536 for use as hunting grounds.  Creepy to think of Islamicist terrorists hatching their nefarious plots in its shadow.

"It's pretty good but not as good as those live California car chases," we half joked to Tuck this morning as FOXNews went on wall-to-wall, breaking-news alert -- via its UK sister network Sky News -- in the upscale Notting Hill area of West London, where armed police were moving in on some of the July 21 terrorist suspects. Our point was that the cables weren't showing us the big picture the way they do with  classic car-chase coverage [Thank you, OJ], where helicopter cameras fly over the action in real time, giving us the lay of the land. For safety or strategic reasons, helicopters may have been out of the question in London this morning, but a schematic map or two for perspective wouldn't have hurt. The Telegraph reports:

Police sources said a number of arrests had been made during today's operations, which began around 10am. The level of police precautions, which included snipers stationed behind parked cars, suggested detectives feared there might have been a suicide bomber or explosives involved.

At least one property had been under surveillance overnight, and witnesses described two properties being raided today -- one near Delgarno Gardens and one in the Tavistock Road area of Notting Hill, less than a mile away.

Tavistock Road runs close to Westbourne Park Tube station where the man who attempted to blow himself up on a train near Shepherd's Bush on July 21 got on to the network.

Schematic Google map of west London's Notting Hill area (slightly larger scale than hybrid map above) focuses on transportation routes, with built areas and open spaces simplified for clarity.  The contrast between Hyde Park as a photographic satellite image (top) -- dead ringer for a 19th-century landscape architect's plan -- and Hyde Park as a flat green shape (above) illustrates the power of maps, according to the mapmaker's intention, to convey different kinds of information.

Good schematic contextual maps showed up eventually on CNN. 'Still haven't seen anything but close-ups of police operations, eyewitness testimonials and on-the-scene reporters on FOXNews. Probably not good for business. "In your face" sells.  But for our viewing dollar, stepping back from time to time to lend a little perspective would improve the product. And we're not just talking about maps.

Speaking of breaking news and exciting coverage, FOXNews is just now reporting that a fourth bomb suspect was arrested in Rome. The ultimate humiliation for suicide-bomber wannabes:  To miss their target and then be caught in their own dens of iniquity by the infidel.  Nice police work.

Update:  Goomp comments re a previous Londoner who tailored his religion to suit his will:

Nearly 500 years did make a change in the landscape, but if one reflects on the life and times of Henry, there's really not that much difference in the way humans react to each other.

Off with their heads!

"Poverty didn't produce their terrorism"

"Behind the smiles, they had murder on their minds on what is believed to be their last fun day out before the London bombings," says the caption of this eerie image that shows two of the terrorists (middle and bottom right) whitewater rafting June 4 in North Wales.

"This is the revolt of the privileged, Islamic version. They have risen so far, so fast in the dizzying culture of the West that they have become enraged, disoriented and vulnerable to manipulation," writes David Ignatius [via Roger L. Simon], locating the London terrorists' self-absorption on the extreme end of a continuum they share with our own all-about-me student radicals of the Sixties:

When you read reports that the Muslim terrorists who bombed the London Underground may have gotten together for a pre-attack whitewater rafting trip in Wales, you realize that this is a very particular enemy -- and one that is recognizable to students of history . . .

People who were students in the 1960s will remember the phenomenon: The kids from elite public and private schools who went to college, felt guilty about their comfort amid a brutal world, and joined the Progressive Labor Party to ally with oppressed Third World workers. There is a cult aspect to this jihad – an extreme version of the logic that has always drawn disaffected kids to self-destructive behavior.

As Janet Daley wrote in the London Times the other day, "We have always known about the seductive power of death cults on the young." Austin Bay [again via Roger L. Simon] pegged "the 'rich kid' phenomenon" way back when:

These [Osama and a guest on a videotape gloating post 9/11] are rich kids -- poverty didn’t produce their terrorism. The self-absorbed bullies believe they’ve sucked America into an Afghan war that they and their Taliban pals will win. The visitor asserts Islam’s religious-political appeal is increasing.

Ignatius quotes a favorite saying of Osama & Company that echoes the mindset of those Sixties students: "Why should we accept that anybody knows better than us?":

The Islamic extremists are often described as "Salafists," and it's interesting to explore just what this says about their spiritual moorings. The Arabic word salaf means "past," and the Salafists are often said to be trying to re-create the pure values of the ancient ones who were the Prophet's companions.

According to Vincenzo Oliveti in his fine study of the Salafists, titled "Terror's Source," their religious teaching casts aside the traditional canon – the "Sunna" that make up Sunni Islam – in favor of a have-it-your-way smorgasbord. A favorite saying of the Salafists, according to Oliveti, is nahnu rijal wa hum rijal, which he translates loosely as "We are all men so why should we accept that anybody knows better than us?"

Reading those words, we thought of Ibsen.  If you read Roger L. Simon regularly [Doesn't everyone? --ed], you'll know why.

Not all cults -- in the sense of "an exclusive group of persons sharing an esoteric, usually artistic or intellectual interest" -- are bad.  It's the continuum thing again. Behind the smiles, the Discovery's Return to Flight crew had scientific progress on their minds as they posed prior to their Tuesday lift-off (NASA photo). As you no doubt know, on-shuttle cameras showed pieces of foam peeling off during launch, and the fleet has been grounded until further notice. But did you know (we didn't) that -- as Instapundit notes in a link to Mike's Noise -- "the foam that's causing the problems was reformulated for environmental reasons, which seems to have been a mistake." Indeed.

"With his customary brilliance, the British psychiatrist demonstrates how the Norwegian playwright was one of the key progenitors of post-modern cultural relativism," wrote Roger, referring to British psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple's City Journal tour de force on Henrik Ibsen's role in prefiguring the self-centered mindset that would be hatched in the Sixties and come home to roost in the last decades of the century when former student radicals took their places as card-carrying members of the trendsetting, left-leaning cultural elite. Writes Dalrymple:

The modernity of Ibsen's thought hardly needs further emphasis. The elevation of emotion over principle, of inclination over duty, of rights over responsibilities, of ego over the claims of others; the impatience with boundaries and the promotion of the self as the measure of all things: what could be more modern or gratifying to our current sensibility?

In Ibsen’s philosophy, everyone -- at least Nature’s aristocrats, for in fact Ibsen was no egalitarian or democrat -- must examine every question for himself and arrive at his own answer: for example, whether the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is historically true -- or at least historically true for him.

It's Bush's fault.

Cakes the Magnificent

Babe leans into the pet on a sultry afternoon yesterday.

We never knew anyone who loved to pet as much as Baby Cakes. Slow to rise, his purr is deep, dark and delicious, a rumble in your ear once he gets going. The Great Satan to small birds and mammals, Cakes The Magnificent to his peers as First Among Equals, to us he is just the sweetest boy ever was, a booful, fluffy pussycat (forget about those scars on our arm, souvenirs of the time we got caught in the crossfur between him and Lucie on her homeland turf Down East -- scroll down to comments for reference).

The only thing we have to fear . . .

There she goes again. Older but not wiser, Jane Fonda's cooking up a "pretty exciting" plan to grab the spotlight and try to relive her youth by undermining the nation's resolve in the face of an enemy that thrives on falteriing resolve. (AP photo)

"In the manner of clinical sociopaths, [terrorist groups] seem to 'smell fear' -- and to find in it, not any inspiration to show mercy or accept accommodation, but a compulsion to torment all the more vigorously those who exude it." writes war historian Caleb Carr in a provocative OnlineJournal article [via Arts & Letters Daily] that takes a fresh look at why the London bombings were pepetrated at this particular moment:

In all such cases of international criminal psychology, we have no choice but to move beyond police work and questions of political motive, and reach for the tools of the forensic psychologist -- most importantly, the art of profiling.

But it is not only or even primarily the killers and their tutors that must be so examined: Thorough profiling demands that we also study the victims, who in cases of terrorism are whole societies. The point is not to see those societies as they actually are, but as the planners of the outrage saw them.

"These questions will not be answered by focusing on the grievances by which the terrorists later claimed to have been propelled," notes Carr:

When the situation is viewed through this lens of victim profiling (never to be confused with "blaming the victim"), we can begin to see why al Qaeda's leaders and affiliates evidently began to think themselves capable of breaking an alliance that once withstood the assaults of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. For a widespread psychological phenomenon has gained strength in Britain in recent years, coming to a crescendo in the last few months [as blogged here the other day] . . . many Britons have subscribed to a new narrative of the post-9/11 world, one in which the U.K. is portrayed, not as a willing partner in the invasion of Afghanistan, nor as the author of much of the incorrect and/or deceptive intelligence that so rallied support in the West for invading Iraq, but rather as the largely innocent tool of a nefarious U.S.

Nations that experience collective psychological crises frequently attempt such reinventions, just as do individuals. By revising the facts surrounding irrationally violent incidents so that they themselves are somehow made responsible for them, victims often seek to exert some kind of control over if, when and how their tormentors will inflict their random cruelty. But what British citizens who have participated in this revision of the historical record do not realize -- just as Americans in 2001, Turks in 2003, and Spaniards in 2004 did not -- is that showing fear and self-disparagement in the face of al Qaeda's threats only marks the society in question as a suitable candidate for attack. Sociopaths revel most in assaulting terrified, submissive victims; and a Britain so concerned with avoiding attack that its ordinarily wise citizenry would give voice to the kind of simplistic thinking expressed in the media in recent months evidently fits that description to an extent irresistible to al Qaeda's minions within its borders.

In this light, the trigger for the London bombings was far less the presence of British troops in Iraq, and far more the media circus that surrounded protestors outside the G-8 summit, as well as the utterances of musical and other celebrities during the "Live 8" performances.

We love the way this guy's mind works.  He concludes:

As a branch of sociopaths, terrorist leaders possess their own deformed cravings for fame, which makes them particularly susceptible to the false realities projected by celebrities. And if al Qaeda or one of its cohorts indeed mistook the angry but deeply confused language recently bandied about Britain as final proof that that nation's will to fight terrorism had become mortally compromised, then we may well have our answer for why the London attack occurred when it did: The long-sought-after moment when a seemingly retreating Britain could be fully separated from the U.S. had finally arrived. It only required violent exploitation.

Speaking of "simplistic thinking" and "deformed cravings for fame," you've probably heard about useful idiot Jane Fonda's plan for a "pretty exciting" road trip "to call for an end to U.S. military operations in Iraq." Encouraged by her cluelessness, Osama & Company are probably working on some plans of their own.

"The benchmark of digital imaging excellence"

Two images cropped from the same photo . . . Remarkable how the puddy in the background -- Tiny, atop the table upper left -- is so much smaller than the one in the foreground -- Baby, upon the terrace, lower right. To the naked human eye they appeared to be the same size.

Did you know that while you're waiting for your Mac version of Photoshop to replace the Windows one -- order faxed last Thursday and not due to be shipped till the end of this week at the earliest -- you can download a FREE! 30-day tryout from Adobe?  No one told us when we ordered, but the gal we talked to today when we were trying to trace the shipment of said software said there was no problem, and it's true. We're soakin' in it (see above photos).

Pretty soon it will be second nature to us now, and we won't even speak of it.

"A bit of a deal-breaker, that"

"This is not a program, really. It’s a wraparound justification for a violence whose real end is the expiation of shame through massacre,” says BBC editor Mark Urban, cited by The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik as a voice in the wilderness among Britain's chattering classes. "The theory that the terrorist threat was exaggerated or that it wasn’t immediate . . . had become extremely powerful on the respectable [Huh? --ed] left," writes Gopnik. Momentarily mugged by the reality of 7/7 and 7/21, they managed to quickly regain their "senses," explaining away the London bombings as "inevitable payback for the war in Iraq" [Bush/Blair Lied, People Died]:

Against this argument is the view that the new kind of terrorism is essentially nihilist and apocalyptic, and that Iraq is only a kind of inchoate excuse. “After all, the African embassy bombings happened before Iraq,” Mark Urban, the diplomatic editor of the BBC program “Newsnight,” said. “The I.R.A. had a political arm, and a political goal, however unreal: they killed to get people to the table. What is there to negotiate with these people? An end to the American presence in Saudi Arabia? All right, we’ll consider it. The elimination of the State of Israel? Hmm, that may be a bit more difficult. The restoration of a universal Islamic caliphate? It may be a bit of a deal-breaker, that.

Jolly good, Mr. Urban. We couldn't agree with you more. There may be hope for Western Civ yet. Even as the more numerous head-in-the-sand staffers continue to guzzle the Kool-Aid, the Beeb shows itself capable of popping its head up from time to time to see what's really going on out there.  Notes Clive Davis:

As you may be aware, BBC2 starts a series on Al Qaeda tonight. That's presumably the same terror network that Adam Curtis's "The Power of Nightmares" insisted was a figment of our imagination.

The new series looks promising:

In the aftermath of 9/11 and the US-led invasion of Afghanistan much of al-Qaeda's infrastructure including its training camps were destroyed. Peter Taylor's three-part series examines the new al-Qaeda which has emerged and the threat it poses to the West. The first part, jihad.com explores how the internet has become the lifeblood of the new al-Qaeda.

The earlier documentary by Adam Curtis -- screened at Cannes last winter -- is "an influential [among useful idiots and fellow travelers] three-part BBC series that argued that Al Qaeda does not exist, except as a kind of collective hallucination on the part of American neoconservatives," notes Gopnik of The New Yorker.  For a well-informed review that sorts out the false from the true in the apparently compelling if flawed "The Power of Nightmares," check out Peter Bergen's take [via Clive Davis]. He's the author of Holy War, Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden.  You've probably seen him from time to time on the cable networks expertly commenting on all things Al Qaeda.

Update:  Happiness returns.  Just in time, you Instalanched me just in time, before you Instalanched me, my time was running low:

As one of my anthropology professors noted, cultures learn. Even a flatworm is smart enough to turn away from pain.

'Course any animal worth its salt is still here today at this end of the winnowing process of evolution because it was smart enough to turn away from pain. It just so happens we did a petri-dish experiment with some hapless planaria in our undergraduate days.  You sliced the poor things' heads halfway along the body down the middle, and each side regrew the missing head parts.

Border disputes

An interloper enters the realm of the Chelsea Grays, caught by the camera's eye slinking in like a tiger amongst the indoor potted plants summering at the edge of the terrace.

Constrained by their tethers out on the lawn east of the terrace, Tiny and Baby are on high alert, frustrated at not being able to take action to oust the unwanted visitor.

A moment of joy for the battle-scarred tom as he happens upon a catnip plant set out upon a table on the terrace this morning preparatory to being planted out front for maximum sun and good drainage.  The puddy grabs the entire plant, complete with soil ball, and wrestles it to the ground. Like night and day, the contrast between a predatory feline scouting out unfamiliar turf and a catnip-mellowed pussycat laid back and just enjoying being a cat.

Once the intruder had had his fill and moved on to other fields, Tiny and Baby moved back into the area for a full gathering of evidence -- meeping everything in sight -- and thorough analysis of future threats. Had they not been held back by their tethers, they would have quickly dispatched the evil doer beyond the pale.

Update: Mira of The Oubliette slips a Freudian question into the 70th Carnival of the Cats: "What does a cat want."