Otnemem

[Note:  “Otnemem” is Western Bulgarian dialect for “Who am I?”]

[Meta-note:  That's a joke.  If you came here to read about the fine film "Memento",
here is where you want to be:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/01/redismembering-memento.html  ]

This morning, under circumstances exactly the same as for “Die Vermessung der Welt”, I saw what turned out to be a quite good and little-known movie, this time not about math, but about … Hackers (German for ‘hackers’, and pronounced  “Häckers”).   To add spice to it all, the movie was both (mostly) set, and seen, in a “skiff”.

The title of the movie is “Who Am I – Kein System ist sicher” (…. ‘no system is safe’).  Now, that’s the German title.   As an English movie-title, “Who Am I” would mean something quite different, and uninteresting.   But:  German.   What to conclude?

In German, the title is clever.   At the simplest level, it has its English meaning:  for the hackers are all, like Anonymous, anonymous, daring you to divine their identity.   But additionally:  in German and any other language, computer commands for sophisticated programming languages written in English, retain their shape in other languages;  so, the Unix command   whoami, which gives back your username, is the same in German (and not “Wer bin ich”, unless you go to the trouble of writing a whole extra interface).   -- For a really good movie-title, the producers would simply have left it at that;  but for practical reasons, for a German audience, they felt they needed to show that it was indeed a German-language movie.

"Wer bist du?"   "Wer bist *du*?"

The film turns out to be much more trickily plotted, and carefully interwoven, than one expects.   After having gradually grown disgusted by the red-herring plotlets that lead nowhere, in “24” and others, I really appreciated this. 

Example:  The protagonist, a sort of Peter Parker character (and later seemingly not one, and later maybe sort of after all), is first seen in the company of a lone IC interrogator.   He has confessions to make (he says), but first he wants to do a David Copperfield, and tell us all about his tragic life.  (That ploy strikes one as either merely human, or -- taking matters one step meta -- a scheme to curry sympathy from his captors;  but actually, it turns out to be much more meta than that.  And I can tell you this much, without it being a spoiler, because you’ll never guess.  Though at the end, it all does make sense.)  He trots out a forgettable little metaphor about hacking/online-masquerading being like magic-tricks;  and performs a humble one, involving four cubes of sugar that become one cube, and then four again.   And that easily-dismissible interlude turns out to be a schema for the plot-surprise of the whole movie.  (Again, no spoiler:  I dare you to guess.)

His interrogator, and the audience’s principal representative of the IC,  is a woman (no longer quite young, though celibate and, in this case,  barren), like Carrie in “Homeland”, or the heroine of “Zero Dark Thirty” (and the threatened senior in the upcoming Bauerless “24”), along with many a more forgettable recent offering.   Now, I’m no particular fan of affirmativeAction-Movies, especially when they go so far as to distort old classics (recasting Dr Watson as a woman, or Sherlock as gay);  but in this case, not only is she entirely plausible in the role, but her gender ultimately plays a (quite unexpected) role  (and no, it isn’t some tired trumped-up love-interest)  in the tricky ending to the plot.

~

This just in!

Reaktionen nach Cyberangriff auf Bundestag, IT-Experten kritisieren mangelnden Schutz vor Hacker-Angriffen, NSA-Untersuchungsausschuss vernimmt Kanzleramt-Mitarbeiter, Juristen kritisieren Vorratsdatenspeicherung

http://www.tagesschau.de/multimedia/sendung/ts-8645.html

The movie could not be more timely.

~

Before even delving into the structure and execution of the film, certain basic ‘vital statistics’  tell in its favor.

* I’ve often knocked the prevalence of the “serial killer” as a central figure in movies.  Serial killers -- apart from being vanishingly rare in the actual landscape of crime, let alone of history and society as a whole -- are inherently uninteresting, since, being psychopaths, they fall outside the Christian calculation of morality:  a serial killer is not so much a real villain like Donald Trump or Richard the Third, as a mere Godzilla.

By contrast, hackers are increasingly prevalent, almost ubiquitous -- in post-industrial societies, almost everyone’s life has been effected, directly or indirectly, in multiple ways.  (My own, for example, by Chinese hackers, in the headlines just this morning.)   Most of them are reasonably complex people, with a sense of right and wrong -- though the sinful Superbia that can easily infect them as they exult in their expertise, can pervert them ever further from their initial path.  This movie follows a group of hackers  from the inside, neither romanticizing nor demonizing.

*  Unlike “24”, which grossly abused the trope, season after season, “Who Am I” features no moles, no Mr Big (the one character who seems as though he might fit that latter bill, is poignantly, almost comically deflated at the end).   People’s motivations for their sketchy actions are quite comprehensible, a mere tweak to the everyday;  no unmotivated treacheries serving as a diabolus ex machina to keep a wheezing plot going.

* While definitely a thriller, the movie does not rely on violence to supply the thrills.   The closest we get is a brief glimpse of three still images that show only edge of what seems a murder scene (but which turns out to be something else).   It would not need a rating more restrictive than PG-13 -- and indeed, in Germany, it was explicitly recommended for schoolchildren. (“Der Film wurde über die SchulKinoWochen für die Unterrichtsfächer Deutsch, Politik, Sozialkunde, Ethik, Informatik, Philosophie, und Psychologie ab der 8. Schulklasse als Unterricht im Kino vorgeschlagen.” -- Wikipedia.)

~

As in “War Games”, the jeune premier and his love interest Meet Cute;  a nerd, he tries to woo her with what mite he has to offer, hacking her school’s computer to improve her grade.   Later, another motif from that movie is borrowed -- using Visitor’s Pass status to penetrate a highly sensitive secure (not) facility.

The nod to the “Spiderman” movies is even more explicit:  the marginalized young man dreams of being a Superhero.   The actor actually looks like Peter Parker, and plays the part throughout -- never turning (implausibly) into someone like Spiderman;  which is why this movie, though fiction, is woven strictly from patches of reality, whereas “Spiderman” is mere fantasy, barely above the level of onanism.

[Fortzusetzen …]

Stochastic Rabbit Chromodynamics

I was sitting at ease on the back porch, in the gathering dusk, with a drink at my left hand, and a pencil in my right;  reading, as it happens, about Quantum Field Theory.  I mention this detail  merely by way of explaining how it came to be that I was wearing only my reading, and not my distance glasses.   Thus I was instrumentally impaired as regards the strange events that soon ensued,  rather like Particle Physicists before the advent of the Large Hadron Collider.

All at once, as if out of nowhere (in the image, as it were, of the quantum-mechanical Creation-Operator; though more specifically, through a hole in the hedge), there appeared a rabbit -- or rather, given the limitations of our equipment, a soft beige bunny-blur.   (Sort of a Heisenberg hare.)  "Gavagai!" I said to myself (**);  and stared.  -- On the other side (unseen), a mean dog is making horrible barking noises.  Bad, bad dog!

[**:  The translation of this manifold-ambiguous ejaculation, in these field-conditions, would indeed be, not “Lo! Rabbithood again”, but something like “Lo! A rabbit-instanton” or even “Behold, a rabbity-patch!”.]

Given these initial conditions, one would have predicted that the frightened rabbit would have continued to accelerate, streaking off out of view;  but no.  The bunny did not scuttle-and-run, but settled down peacefully on the spot.  Somehow, she seems to feel safe, here within the nice man’s hedged perimeter. 

The textbook, meanwhile, has yielded to the force of gravity, and subsided lifeless upon my lap.   I stare in the direction of the location of the bunny (to within experimental error).

Omigosh!  The bunny is washing her face with her furry pawsies!  Amid other cutenesses.

(Mind you, I can’t precisely see that, owing to the crude granularity of my present electro-optical apparatus, but can deduce it from certain fluctuations in the hare’s Hamiltonian, together with various interference-effects.

In much the same sense, our perception and positing of coffee-cups  is epistemologically inferential, and ultimately based on faith.

Since my vision of QFT is even dimmer than my myopic perception of distant objects, the bunny-blur is perfectly satisfying.)

Eventually the dog stops barking (go bury a bone, Fido), yet the bunny still placidly remains in place.  Contented, feeling secure.  The bunny can pick up my love-waves with her special tall antenna-ears.

Bunny, picking up signals

Eventually, having errands elsewhere, Miss Bunny goes hip-hoppity off,  leaving behind  a friend for life.

Veracity and Verifiability

A crisp, concise op-ed, in this morning’s NYTimes, “A Crisis at the Edge of Physics” by Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser (both professors of physics), states the case against (over-cantilevered or under-buttressed) speculation, not only for string theory (which has notoriously come in from a lot of pushback;  see Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics), but for supersymmetry generally.  The authors note that, as of even date, “no supersymmetric particles have been found” (perhaps they are hiding out in a back room, playing poker with the Higgs boson).  So far as that goes, not a problem;  plenty of propositions in math and science took centuries or even millennia to settle.  What disturbs the authors is that some champions of supersymmetry -- the jusqu’au-boutistes, we might call them -- may simply move the verificationist goalposts.

Some may choose to simply retune their models to predict supersymmetric particles at masses beyond the reach of the Large Hadron Collider’s power of detection -- and that of any foreseeable substitute.

If that were only a problem for one avenue at the forward fringes of physics, that would not be a problem for most of us  as we bustle about our daily chores.  Yet the authors further suggest that certain well-traveled avenues  are actually cul-de-sacs:

The standard model, despite the glory of its vindication, is also a dead end.  It offers no path forward to unite its vision of nature’s tiny building-blocks with … gravity.

What really bothers the authors is something that goes well beyond physics:  “the specter of an evidence-independent science”.   And that specter has been haunting the West for some time, and increasingly reaches into the headlines, as witness the countermovements to the theses of natural selection or of global climate change.

Not being a physicist, I have no right to comment;  but, at the margins, this:

(1) The larger cultural worry, is the dissociation of the notion of Truth überhaupt  from that of Evidence and Argument. In that perspective, we would deplore the demand to dissociate theory from experiment.

(2)  Yet -- Do not forget  Einstein’s classic crack in 1919, anent the possible negative results of an experiment purporting to validate or refute General Relativity:  “Da könnt’ mir halt der liebe Gott leid tun.  Die Theorie stimmt doch.”  (Informal translation:  "I'm right.  Bite me.")

Die Theorie stimmt doch!

The consensus of scientific history (for right reasons or wrong)  has been to applaud  those cheeky remarks .

Compare, re Feynman and Gell-mann’s joint article “Theory of the Fermi Interaction” (written in 1957, and subsequently published in Physical Review):

The V - A theory was in disagreement with more than a half dozen experimental results on beta-decay,  but it was so beautiful  that the authors proposed it anyway, suggesting that all those results were wrong.

-- Harald Fritzsch, introduction to Murray Gell-Mann: Selected Papers (2010), p. 5

~

Einstein was speaking of his theory of gravitation.  But similarly for particle physics:

The Standard Model … has been driven largely by certain powerful consistency requirements, hard to satisfy in such theories.  In order to appreciate something of the force behind these consistency requirements (which continue to drive the more modern speculative theories, such as string theory), we shall need to look at the structure of quantum field theory. … The theoretical requirements appear to be so tight  that it might seem almost incidental that these answers are actually in excellent agreement with experiment!

-- Roger Penrose,  The Road to Reality (2004), p. 655-6

~

Working the equations of physics to their long-reaching logical conclusions, continually leads to apparent absurdities:  negative energies or frequencies, unobserved particles, particles moving backwards in time, a Hobson’s choice between acausality or indefinitely-proliferating alternate universes, and miscellaneous infinities.  Some physicists shudder at such;  others grin and say “Bring ‘em on.”  (Unfortunately, the latter are the ones favored in the popular media -- the problem of Physics Porn.)  The problem is deciding when that is just the way Nature (inscrutably) actually works (in which case you have made a major discovery), and when it is merely absurd.  Will the Higgs boson turn out to have been more like the positron (born from the forehead of Dirac’s mathematics) and the pion (brain-born from Yukawa), eventually found in everyday space, or like the cute-sounding but still-missing photinos, squarks, and pentaquarks?

So here is the larger temptation -- the intellectual Occasion of Sin:

Beginning several decades ago, comparing the results of experimentally well-verified physics  with the predictions of the equations, scientists marveled at what was memorably dubbed “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics”, summed up by the epigram “the equations seem to give us more than we put into them;  they seem to be wiser than ourselves”.   But The Edge beckons when we start to conclude, that if our favorite equations predict something, it must be so (if only in the Multiverse) -- even if, to the guys in the lab, it doesn’t seem physically reasonable.

As Penrose puts it:

What is the physical justification in allowing oneself to be carried along by the elegance of some mathematical description  and then trying to regard that description as describing a ‘reality’?

-- Roger Penrose,  The Road to Reality (2004), p. 670

That question takes us back  to a very old debate -- as old as poetry :  What is the relation between Beauty and Truth?

In that essay, we concluded that, in a sense, ‘beauty’ (in a rather austere sense of crisp symmetric elegance, having more to do with the Parthenon than a Miss America pageant or a Rosebowl parade) does characterize any deep theory in the mathematicized sciences -- but only in retroscpect, after years and decades of its practitioners coming to appreciate its depth; the theory does not wear its beauty on its sleeve.

Thus, even in the case of the (relatively) well-behaved, now-long-familiar poster child of particle physics, QED:  Paul Dirac, the pioneer of QFT, wasn’t buying it.   In response to a 1936 experiment (by Shankland) which suggested (incorrectly, as it turns out) that energy need not be microscopically preserved,

Dirac immediately jumped at this opportunity to disown QED, claiming “because of its extreme complexity, most physicists will be glad to see the end of it.

-- Matthew Schwartz, Quantum Field Theory and the Standard Model (2014), p. 247

~

Taking physics on faith

Penrose again, concerning a couple of signature contributions by Richard Feynman -- probably the educated public’s favorite hip physicist since Einstein:

The path-integral approach is, it seems, almost wholly dependent upon a faith that the wildly divergent expressions that we are presented with (like the divergent series above) actually have a deeper ‘Platonic’ meaning  that we may not yet properly perceive.

-- Roger Penrose,  The Road to Reality (2004), p. 670

Even that archetypal renormalizable theory, QED, is not actually a finite theory, even after renormalization.  How can this be?  Renormalization refers to the removal of infinities from finite collections of Feynman graphs.  It does not tell us that the summation of all these resulting finite quantities is actually convertent. … In fact it is not finite, but has a ‘logarithmic divergence’.

-- Roger Penrose,  The Road to Reality (2004), p. 680

As for the next step beyond QED (which is part of the Standard Model), QFT:

Strictly speaking, quantum field theory … is mathematically inconsistent.

-- Roger Penrose,  The Road to Reality (2004), p. 610

~

But let us set aside quantum mechanics, that known maze of paradox, along with its ever-more-speculative successors.  Surely matters stand better in the case of classical mechanics and electromagnetism, along with their tool-of-all-work, the venerable Lagrangian, which dates back to the eighteenth century. 

Yet even here, Penrose demurs:

In modern attempts at fundamental physics, when some suggested new theory is put forward, it is almost invariably given in the form of some Lagrangian functional. … However, I must confess my unease … The choice of Lagrangian is often not unique, and sometimes rather contrived … Even the Lagrangian for free Maxwell theory … has no obvious physical significance. … Moreover, the ‘Maxwell Lagrangian’ does not work as a Lagrangian unless it is expressed in terms of a potential, although the actual value of the potential, A, is not a directly observable quantity. … In most situations, the Lagrangian density does not itself seem to have clear physical meaning.

-- Roger Penrose,  The Road to Reality (2004), p. 491

Nor is Penrose a professional maverick or skeptic.   After all, the book we’ve been quoting from clocks in at over a thousand pages, and is subtitled “A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe”;  you wouldn’t do that if you thought physics was a crock.

~

Simply as an assertion, the Weyl curvature hypothesis  is perhaps more like a claim for ‘an act of God’  than a physical theory.

-- Roger Penrose,  The Road to Reality (2004), p. 769

Rule of Thumb:

Physics advances by dint of Physicists’ Encyclicals.

These are almost never arrived at purely deductively;  neither do they come out of nowhere.

Schrödinger’s equation -- Feynman’s path-integrals -- the laws of thermodynamics:  inspired guesses, which awaited the mathematicians to tidy things up.

-- Not trying to debunk, here;  simply being historical.

(Feyerabend, too, was long  historical  in this sense, before he went over to the dark side.)

[July 2015]  Essay updated here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/07/veracity-verifiability-vindication.html
 

Cultural Literacy without tears (expanded)

We all want to be … well, we all wish to seem, culturally literate.  It can even be crucial to your career.  Recall that, in Agatha Christie’s classic Thirteen at Dinner (which of course you do recall, don’t you), the schemes of the murderer come unraveled when, at a dinner party, she ignorantly assumes that “the Judgement of Paris” alludes to the capital of France.

Das Urteil des Paris

(so hard to choose …)

But as one wise philosopher observed here, that’s way 2 much work.

Accordingly, we offer, gratis (free-will offerings  gratefully accepted),

Dr J’s  Han-D Cultural Literacy Cheat-Sheet

Bullet-proof lines  for use in social gatherings.  If someone mentions the following subjects, here is how you reply:

Beyoncé / Jay-Z / Justin Bieber /Rihanna / …  :   (groan)  “That’s so-o-o-o last-week…”

The Riemann Hypothesis: (pause thoughtfully;  then say, as though weighing each word)  “Basically,  a kind of Thinking Man’s  Poincaré Conjecture.”

Thomas Pynchon :  (casually)  “I’ve read his upcoming blockbuster in galleys -- Deadly Penguins.  Makes all his previous efforts look like juvenilia.”

Karl Marx:  (Do not introduce this name into polite conversation.  However, if some rascal does, coolly reply:)

“MmmMarx,  mmmmyes.  Intermittently interesting.  Have you read his film criticism?”

Hegel:  “Wa-ay overrated.  Nothing but Karl Marx doing a headstand.”

Professor G.W.F. Hegel

[Note:  This one’s tricky.  Since the name is pronounced HAY-g’l , you’ll need to somehow make clear that you are not talking about the current Secretary of Defense.]

Aristotle:  (If no-one ever slyly slips this name into conversation, then you are attending the wrong parties.)  “Personally, I prefer Plato.”

Plato:  (If someone angling for the attentions of the same girl or prospective employer drops “Plato” into the conversation as a sort of knight-to-bishop’s-three, you’ve got stiff competition.  Time to pull out all the stops.)

“ ‘Plato’;  realll-ly. -- Impossible to appreciate outside the context of the post-Heracliteans.”

(At that point, unmanned, your opponent will deflate and slink off.)

Of course, the best way to establish your up-to-the-minute literary-philosophical creds,  is to pipe up brightly:

Have you read the latest  from Dr Justice?

A wise-cracking two-fisted pre-Conciliar thriller,

Murphy on the Mount.

Available in

[print] [Kindle] [Nook]

Update 2015]

I often read the less well-known works of G.K. Chesterton, in the uniform Ignatius Press edition -- partly because they offer the nearly complete works;  partly because the physical production is exquisite -- crisp printing  and paper to die for;  partly because Ignatius is a Catholic press, which I am happy to support.  Indeed, further, I had rather hoped that their notational apparatus would be fuller and more scholarly than what is provided in by pop publishers:  but alas …

On page 119 of What I Saw in America (1922), GKC writes:

… he might be as wise as Socrates, and as splendid as Bayard, and yet be unfitted ….

Curious to see spicy arcana what the editor might add to the cursum vitae of that “chevalier sans peur et sans reproche” -- that preux (to use Bertie Wooster’s term) and parfit  gentle knight, whom you will have learned about  if only from reading Wodehouse, in case the thing was never whipped into you at Eton -- I checked the footnote.  In vain.

James Asheton Bayard (1767 - 1815) was an American politician and member of U.S. House of Representatives. …

.

Dr J comes out of the closet !

At a time when all the subcortical world is chattering about a creature which purportedly transitioned from what it was, to what is is not (and could never be) -- in bare defiance of Bishop Berkeley’s celebrated (if possibly apocryphal) dictum ("Everything is, what it is:  and not -- another thing...")-- and moreover harvesting accolades for doing so, 

we thought the moment opportune to announce our own chrysalidal Coming Out:   We have finally decided, publically to embrace  Our Inner Penguin !!

Fortunately, this process did not necessitate any unpleasant surgico-chemical interventions, but merely the doffing of the elbow-patched cardigan and academic tweeds, then donning a dinner-jacket.   Behold the results:

Dr Justice  in his native habitat

We await the media frenzy, paying cold cash to appear on the covers of magazines.

~

More surprising is the fact that, as we discovered only this morning,  our lawnmover is, actually and in point of fact, a penguin !!!

Those of you who have followed this blog, will have noticed our yearly celebration (annually reposted) of the triumphant vernal restarting -- upon first try!  -- of our ancient lawnmower, after its hibernation:

        Rites of Spring (iterum resartus)

What we have hitherto refrained from referring to, since we did not understand until just now, is that, as summer approaches, the d*mned thing frequently fails to start.

Eventually I noticed a correlation:  If the day is too hot and humid, the machine is listless;  if crisp, perky.    I tried it this morning, in the cool of the dawn:  it roared to life.  (Regretted to do something so noisy, early Sunday, but figured that the good folk were all away at early Mass.)

For this, there exists but one explanation:   My lawnmover is a penguin!

~

As expected, the media are swarming all over our driveway, trying to get the low-down on what has suddenly become the planet’s number one story.

Q:  So, what’s it like to be a penguin?

A:  Not so bad, providing you like fish.

Q:  What’s the best thing about being a penguin?

A:  Sliding on your tummy on the ice! Mmmm!  We call it belly-‘bogganing.

Q:  Are there any esoteric interconnections between penguins and snow-bunnies?

A:  Yes!  When a penguin is very happy, he sometimes becomes completely white, and thus cannot be perceived against the snowy background.  These are called “polar penguins”.   The (meta)physics of these beings  is not well understood, their study being still in its infancy.

Blindspot

[Below is an earlier post.  Significantly expanded and updated here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/09/blindspot-and-memento.html ]

NBC has announced a new series, “Blindspot”, about an amnesiac whose body is covered with recent tattoos, each of which is a cryptic clue.   Those of us who do not ourselves suffer from amnesia, will immediately recognize a ripoff and recycling of the movie “Memento”.  However, it’s none the worse for that:  the movie was intriguing, and well worth recycling.  Moreover, the concern with original plots is quite modern;  no-one from  Euripedes to Shakespeare ever gave it a thought;  rather the contrary.

"Look into my eyes ... *Eyes*, I said, dammit!"

The trailer is promising, though not without TV-typical doofusness, like the yokel horror of a cop in Times Square quavering “It’s …. alive …. !”  NYPD officers are actually considerably cooler than that, and more composed.  The series does add a very promising premise -- that one of the tattoos names a specific FBI agent;  who, however, has never met her.  “Complications ensue.”

A note on genre:

A movie  has to be tight.  A TV series  can roll on, and on.

To be trapped in the mindset of an amnesiac  is potentially suffocating.  “Memento” (as a movie) pulled it off;  but “Blindspot” wisely offers us  a second center of deixis.

Anyhow, for our essay on the memorable (!) movie, click here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/01/redismembering-memento.html ]

~

The girl, as the viewer will not be surprised to learn (this being, largely unlike “Memento”, straightforward mainstream entertainment), turns out to be a superspooky kickass-ninja special ops chick, who retains all her special superpowers, but who does not consciously remember her training, or who she is.  In this motif, “Blind Spot” is ripping off, not “Memento”, but “The Bourne Identity”.  In each case, when the hero is suddenly confronted with mortal danger, (s)he reacts instinctively, and with deadly force.

[Continued here.]

Tempest in a Coke Can

The last time a can of Diet Coke™ caused an international incident, was when then-Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, attempting a triumphal diplomatic tour, offended his English hosts:

We may wince when the blithering toff, or want-wit, as Shakespeare would say, arrives at the Brits’ home and throws his Cherry Coke Zero can in the prize rose bushes.

He came across like a wazzock, as The Daily Telegraph called him

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/07/word-of-day-wazzock.html

thus causing the British empire to tremble, and setting diplomacy back eight hundred years.

And now the liberal world is thrilling with indignation over the sad fate of a Muslim self-publicist, whom a stewardess served an opened can of Diet Coke, whereas she would have preferred it to be unopened (gasp -- No!);  and, perhaps modeling herself on the celebrated airborne Chinese dowager who had some complaint or other about the peanuts and practically hijacked the plane in protest, the Muslim woman decided to make a stink about it, and was rewarded with front-page treatment, complete with flattering photographs of herself (her face unveiled -- which would probably get her beheaded, were she ever to fall into the hands of ISIL).   The media lapped it up;  lips were pursed, heads shaken.

As so often, the readers are more perceptive than the reporter:

Interesting pattern here at the LA Times. Two breaking stories about the would-be Muslim terrorist killed by cops in Boston have vanished into relative obscurity: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-boston-terror-suspect-shooting-20150603-story.html + http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-boston-shooting-20150602-story.html Meanwhile, this story about Muslims as "victims" remains at the top of the website. Very interesting indeed...

---

Has anyone notice that no one has asked the stewardess what happened. Everything is based off the what the chaplain said happened?

It worked so well for Rolling Stones Magazine

---

Why all of a sudden now is everything all about Muslims?
Thousands of Christians are being killed in the Middle East and there is hardly ever any significant news coverage ......

-- http://www.latimes.com/travel/deals/la-trb-diet-coke-airline-apology-20150603-story.html#navtype=outfit

Global Primate Change

A beguilingly presented, but ultimately disturbing report, describes the burgeoning activity of a firm that manufactures meals consisting of ground-up insects (with spices added, to keep you from throwing up):

   http://www.medi1.com/player/player.php?i=6482095

This company is located in that capital of world cuisine,  France.

(This gives a whole new connotation to the celebrated Hôtel Grillon of Paris, whose menu soon may feature “Grillons grillés à la mode de Bangui”.  A new entree as well, for the "paleo diet".)

Best with ketchup ...

The presenters joked somewhat nervously about all this, adding that, after all, our planet already has so-and-so-many billions of mouths  (most of them well outside Europe though increasingly craning their necks in that direction) with billions more on the way.  So that demographically, the thing starts to look, not far-fetched, but inevitable.

And suddenly we are swept by the horror of it, worse by far than simply Hannibal ante portas  -- vast broiling locust-swarms, rolling towards the boreal, and bringing with them their own cuisine.

The criquets pélerins foretokening the criquets migratoires …