Metaphors are excellent ways to make abstract ideas more concrete by providing a visual image of what you are trying to convey. But I am a little puzzled by people who use this device to bring up mental images that are so utterly distasteful that one does not want to even contemplate the image, which seems to defeat the purpose of using metaphors.
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I am at present attending a conference held at a hotel in San Francisco. A day before my arrival, the organizers sent all the registrants an email saying that a “high profile” guest would be staying at the hotel for two days right in the middle of the conference and that there would be enhanced security due to that. All the doors except the main one would be closed and people would have to enter and exit through only the front doors and be subjected to security checks.
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Back in the day’s of my childhood, air travel was not the norm and cricketers used to travel to other countries by ship. Sri Lanka was fortunate in that it was a convenient port of call for ships that were traversing the Indian Ocean so those carrying the English, Australian, and West Indies teams would stop for a day in Colombo on their way to and from Australia. Unlike the other cricket playing nations, the West Indies team was not made up of players from a single nation but from a confederation of 15 English-speaking countries in the Caribbean.
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It turns out that NBC news anchor Brian Williams has been embellishing his stories about his experiences covering the invasion of Iraq, putting himself more in the center of the action and acting as if he was in more danger than was the case. Since I long ago gave up on expecting the major news networks to give us any, you know, actual news, the fate of highly paid news celebrities like Williams and their sponsors does not affect me in the least. But this issue does illustrate some interesting points.
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The organization Reporters Without Borders issues an annual ranking of nations on press freedoms and this year the US ranks 49th in the world out of 180. Five Scandinavian countries Finland, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, and Sweden take the top spots. El Salvador, the country once notorious for its death squads that abducted and murdered any critics, including journalists, of its dictatorship, now ranks above the US at #45.
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The murder of three Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina by an outspoken atheist has raised the issue of whether they were killed because of their religion by someone who seemed to hate religion.
It is taken for granted that when a member of the majority (whether it be ethnic or race or religion or any other defining characteristic) does something heinous, the perpetrator is not taken as representing the entire community and no one calls upon its members to explicitly denounce the acts. But when such an action is committed by a member of a minority community, then it is expected that all members of the minority, and especially its ‘leaders’ and celebrities, must explicitly denounce the acts or otherwise be suspected of condoning it.
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Radio Shack, the company that many hobbyists used to rely on for so many years to satisfy their needs, has like many other brick-and-mortar chain stores, been going through hard times recently, especially as more and more devices become black boxes and provide fewer opportunities to take apart and tinker with. Last week they announced that they were filing for bankruptcy and selling many of their stores to Sprint.
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The World Cup starts on Saturday and in the days leading up to the event, each team has been playing two warm up matches. There have been some surprises. Yesterday lowly Zimbabwe trounced Sri Lanka. Two days earlier, Zimbabwe restricted New Zealand to a low score of 157/7 in a game that was halted because of rain, suggesting that this is a team to watch.
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Glenn Greenwald gives us another story for the files “What goes around, comes around”:
The U.S. Government often warns of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks from adversaries, but it may have actually contributed to those capabilities in the case of Iran.
A top secret National Security Agency document from April 2013 reveals that the U.S. intelligence community is worried that the West’s campaign of aggressive and sophisticated cyberattacks enabled Iran to improve its own capabilities by studying and then replicating those tactics.
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