Digiscoping

Cropped version of yesterday's photo

The photo yesterday of "Young Blue Bird testing happiness" got our juices flowing for improving our setup for digiscoping, which is digital photography aided with a fieldscope.
    Yesterday's photo was made without a wide-angle eyepiece or an adapter to hold the camera in place. My wife just held her Coolpix P100 against the fieldscope eyepiece, where her eye would otherwise be, and shot.
    The vignetting (fading to black at the periphery) is the tip-off. I could have cropped (as I did for today's version, above) but didn't. I assume that the photo below (borrowed from Alastair Rae) was cropped, because he says that the photo, his "all-time favourite bird shot..., was taken by just hand-holding a Coolpix 995 directly to the telescope eyepiece."

Nesting Black Woodpeckers

It's such a better photo than either my wife or I have been able to take so far. Here's one I took last December:

Sorry, I hope my wife will be able to identify the birds for us
(I cropped this photo to achieve the "Alastair Rae look")

But maybe we haven't worked hard enough at it yet? Rae says that he's "been playing about with the painful art of digiscoping birds for a few years now," and he has "tried a variety of cameras and adapters."
    Here are a few more digiscoped photos, borrowed from Digiscoped.com:

Green Woodpecker

Green Woodpecker

Kestral

Eurasian Blackbird (?)

Eurasian Blackbird

Here's a digiscoping setup, with an adapter to hold the camera to the eyepiece of the fieldscope:

Looks like a Nikon ED82

Isn't this fun!

Young Blue Bird tests happiness

My wife took this photo an hour ago
with her Nikon Coolpix P100

From our bedroom, looking through a Nikon ED50 field scope, zoomed in. (See it with "vignetting" cropped out.)
    My wife had been observing the bird house for weeks as the parents checked out the site and finally selected it for their home. The mother laid five eggs, the eggs hatched, and the parents have been busy feeding their babies. Now the youngsters are preparing to fledge.

The parable of "I don't know"

Cancun Sunrise (July 6, 2011)

A friend of fifty-five years recently told me a little parable:

One day a prehistoric dad was asked by his son or daughter, "Why does the sun come up every day?"
    Did the dad frankly say, "I don't know"? I don't think so. Same as now, dads want to come off as knowing the answers.
    So, the prehistoric dad says: "God makes it come up."

    The parable explains, if not the meaning of God, at least the meaning of God-as-explanation. "God" is how some people avoid admitting that they don't know.

My friend, who was more fortunate than I in the religion department, added that:

God was never an issue in my life. I was not indoctrinated in any religious belief. Little of what I heard about God made any sense to me so I came to the conclusion early on that God is a figment of man's imagination. Without any encumbrance of indoctrination to overcome, and desiring to know things, I naturally gravitated toward science.

My daughter was similarly fortunate (or precocious). She has told me that she realized "as a kid" that God didn't exist.
    At least my own childhood exposure to religion didn't lead me to indoctrinate my children. My wife and I did, however, take them to church (an Episcopal mission in San Jose, California) and have them "confirmed." (And I even prevailed on a couple of friends to be named as their godfathers—one of them a recent convert to Judaism. Neither of them seems to have done either of our children any harm.)

So, let's enjoy the blossoming of my wife's Crinum Lily. I took about twenty-five photographs between 9:43 a.m. on June 30 and 7:30 this morning, when the sun, for whatever reason, was coming up:

June 30, 9:43 a.m.

July 1, 8:48 p.m.

July 2,  8:08 a.m.

July 2,  11:53 a.m.

July 2, 1:00 p.m.

July 2, 4:54 p.m. (1)

July 2, 4:54 p.m. (2)

July 2, 4:54 p.m. (3)

July 2, 7:02 p.m.

July 2,  7:03 p.m.

July 3,  7:31 a.m.

Again, from a bit to the right:

June 30, 9:43 a.m.

July 1, 8:41 p.m.

July 2, 8:08 a.m.

July 2, 8:09 a.m.

July 2, 9:28 a.m.

July 2, 11:53 a.m.

July 2, 1:00 p.m.

July 2, 4:55 p.m.

July 3, 7:30 a.m.

"Daughters of thy uncles and aunts"

The Holy Book

The writer whose letter to the editor provoked me on June 22 has responded to my request that he "possibly tell us a bit more about where he is coming from" when he complained about not making an "al-Qaida-linked" hit list.
    His reply was printed on p. 2 of the July 1 edition of The Chapel Hill Herald, under the title "Letter writer sets record straight":

Reader Morris Dean in a June 24 letter ("Hurley should give rest of the story" [the editor's title, not mine]) wonders whether my June 22 letter mocking Islamic terrorists ("Terrorists' hit list omission lamented") was motivated by some family military history [sic] event.
    No (though we do have various experiences and connections there).
    Instead, I like to think that taunts like mine might aid the national effort to separate the terrorists from the sea of Muslims in which they swim. It shouldn't be too difficult. Mohammed's OK of first-cousin marriages 14 centuries ago has ensured that we're not dealing with real high SAT scores here. I hope Mr. Dean continues to "criticize and occasionally ridicule Islamists" on his blog.

Uh, come again? Mr. Hurley seems to be saying that the Jihadists have descended through so many first cousins that they're less intelligent than Muslims who descended through fewer.
    First, though, it does seem that Muhammad did "OK" marriage to first cousins:

Allah says: “O Prophet! We have made lawful to thee the wives to whom thou hast paid their dowers; and those whom thy right hand possesses out of the captives of war whom Allah has assigned to thee; and daughters of thy paternal uncles and aunts, and daughters of thy maternal uncles and aunts, who migrated with thee; …”
    Allah has made marriage with first cousins lawful. There is no dispute about this in Islamic Law. Anyone who wishes to dispute with this is placing his own religion in serious danger. [http://en.islamtoday.net/node/1265]

    But getting back to what Mr. Hurley might be saying, does his apparent contention that terrorist Muslims will be less intelligent than other Muslims mean, for example, that if a Muslim's ancestors married enough first cousins, he'd be prone to believe things like, "If you blow up some infidels by detonating yourself, you'll go straight to Paradise"?
    And if his ancestors didn't marry quite so many, he might only believe things like, "If your daughter gets raped, you'd better have her stoned to death to preserve your family honor"?

But people marry their first cousins in other cultures, too. Doesn't Mr. Hurley's sort of eugenicist's approach imply that if a Christian's ancestors married enough first cousins, he'd be prone to believe things like, "Simply believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and you'll have eternal life"?
    And if his ancestors didn't marry quite so many, he might only believe things like, "The Bible is the literally revealed word of God"?

But what does that have to do with Mr. Hurley's taunting the terrorists in order to "aid the national effort to separate the terrorists from the sea of Muslims in which they swim"?
    Does he think that they're so much less intelligent than other Muslim swimmers that taunts will cause them to stop swimming and walk out of the sea so they can be arrested?
    Maybe someone will ask him.
_______________
July 6. I decided to ask him myself. My letter was published this morning.

Visit "Visitors"

"They visit on occasion. If I spot them, I may take a picture or two."
    Thus quietly announces the masthead of the blog "Visitors," referring to the entertaining squirrels that seem to come daily to the host's balcony. The first visits were recorded in September 2009, the most recent ones today.

Coal (September 21, 2009)

Youngster (September 23, 2009)

Bruiser (July 1, 2011)

"Visitors" is one of my current three favorite blogs to visit. I invite you, too, to visit "Visitors."

Ravnopolska's "Suite of Dances"

Moristotle recommends these short snippets on YouTube from his grandson's mother's "Suite of Dances," for solo harp.

Tango

 

Arabian Dance

Watch and listen soon, as they likely won't remain on YouTube long.

Culture comes of nature

Nature creates art, reflects Nature
(at the Honolulu Zoo, July 2010)

This morning I finished reading the concluding chapter of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's 2010 book, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. The chapter, titled "Living with Consciousness," sketches consciousness's contributions to the success of living organisms; that is, places it in evolutionary context.
    In earlier chapters, in which he lays out his theory of how the brain orchestrates consciousness and our sense of self—of being the felt protagonists of our lives—he frequently invoked evolutionary development, as, for example, in comparing the brains of mammals to identify the order in which the regions of the human brain developed and the order's implications for the role of the various regions in regulating homeostasis and conferring adaptive, or competititve advantage.
    The following passage jumped out at me as capturing my own developing sense of nature's creating not only biological organisms but in the course of time creating culture by virtue of having created organisms with brains capable of manifesting mind and eventually capable of devising repositories of collective learning. My personal sense is reflected, for example, in my caption for the July 2010 photograph from the Honolulu zoo.
    Damasio writes:

Nervous systems developed as managers of life and curators of biological value, assisted at first by unbrained dispositions but eventually by images, that is, minds. The emergence of mind produced spectacular improvements in life regulation for numerous species, even when images lacked fine detail and lasted only during the perceptual moment, entirely vanishing thereafter....
    Once self comes to mind, the game of life changes, albeit timidly at first. Images of the internal and external worlds can be organized in a cohesive way around the protoself [a theoretical entity in Damasio's theory of the sequence of brain/mind development] and become oriented by the homeostatic requirements of the organism....[pp. 286-287]

If nature can be regarded as indifferent, careless, and unconscionable, then human consciousness creates the possibility of questioning nature's ways. The emergence of human consciousness is associated with evolutionary developments in brain, behavior, and mind that ultimately lead to the creation of culture, a radical novelty in the sweep of natural history. The appearance of neurons, with its attending diversification of behavior and paving of the way into minds, constitutes a momentous event in the grand trajectory. But the appearance of conscious brains eventually capable of flexible self-reflection is the next momentous event. It is the opening of the way into a rebellious, albeit imperfect response to the dictates of a careless nature.
    ...The self that I envision as capable of rebelliousness is a recent development, on the order of thousands of years, a mere instant in evolutionary time. That self draws on features of the human brain acquired, in all likelihood, during the long period of the Pleistocene. It depends on the brain's capacity to hold expansive memory records not only of motor skills but also of facts and events—in particular, personal facts and events, those that make up the scaffolding of biography and personhood and individual identity...Last, it depends on the invention of external memory systems parallel to those held by each brain, by which I mean the pictorial representations offered by early painting, carvings, and sculpture, tools, jewelry, funerary architecture, and, long after the emergence of language, written records....[pp. 289-290]

Damasio's "Rebelliousness" (as in culture's rebelling against and trying to improve nature) I can't but read in the context of this blog's recent theme of a few individuals rebelling against certain aspects of popular (or majority) culture: religious beliefs and practices that rational people would think we could have outgrown, burdensome traditions that tether us to unprofitable pasts, adolescent politics that degrade our national business into playground bullying....
    It would seem that culture has a way yet to mature before the benefits of self's having come to mind can be realized by a collective majority of the organisms who possess a human brain.

Live, laugh, love

On our usual holiday sort of weekend outing to Costco this morning, we stopped by to see some friends' house and yard that we hadn't visited yet. The friends were away (as we knew), so we couldn't visit them, but everything was so inviting, it was as though they were there all the time.

House from the street side of our friends' picket fence
(all of the photos have been filtered artistically in Photoshop;
click to enlarge)

We guessed the cat was a member of our friends' household
(he or she seemed at home)

Don't fail to click on this one so you can read the words

I was just being myself at Costco, but maybe moreso because of the words.
    First stop was the optical shop, to get a new hard case for my glasses. The old case's lid no longer held to, and my glasses had slipped out onto the garage floor Friday evening (though I didn't notice it at the time and found them finally, after looking in all the usually suspected places, two or three times each, only as I was headed to my car to drive to the gym to look around the next-suspected place I might have left them).
    The optician looked out of sorts to me. "Why so glum, David? Having a bad day already?"
    He just shrugged. "So, what do you need?" he said, seeming not to want to dwell on whatever might be bothering him.
    I told him and he rummaged around in a drawer for a new hard case, finding three candidates. I selected the Van Heusen (Van Heusen? I thought they made dress shirts!) and turned in my Geoffrey Beene. He noticed that my glasses were a little crooked and offered to adjust them for me.
    I said, "I've tried to be very careful to always use both hands to take them off, but most of the time I'm unconscious." I told him what had happened in the garage and about looking all over for the glasses, about how my wife had said I'd probably just taken them off and put them down someplace, as usual not being aware of where.
    I laughed and told him what had happened almost first thing this morning. "Before my wife and Siegfried left for their walk, she told me they were going out by way of the garage and would I not lock the door into the house? I told her I wouldn't. But when I went out to the garage for something, I automatically locked the door when I came back in. Unconscious, you see."
    "That happens more and more," David said, "as we age."
    I thanked him and told him I hoped his day improved.
    "It already has," he said.

Since I had my camera, I'd brought it into Costco so I could take some pictures of their cut flowers. I took a few but there was barely enough light and the photos weren't nearly as beautiful as the flowers seemed to be (unlike photographs of living flowers, where the opposite often seems to be the case).
    As I was checking out (my wife had already gone back to the car), I hoped I'd see Jannine at customer service, which is by the exit.
    And there she was. I told her why I had my camera.
    "There's one more flower I'd like to take a picture of, Jannine, if I may?"
    She took my hand, which I'd laid on the counter. "Oh, I don't take good pictures," she said, looking even more fetching in her possibly false modesty.
    "I understand that you might not want your picture taken," I said. "Let me show you these." She was still holding my hand, so I operated the camera with my other one.
    "Oh, that's some friends' house," I said and explained what we'd done on the way to Costco. "Their cat...some shoes...Oh, and let me zoom in on that bench so you can read the words."
    "Live, laugh, love," she said.
    I squeezed her hand and said that I wasn't going to take her picture, I could see that she really didn't want me to, even if she were my favorite of Costco's flowers.
    "You've made my day," she said.

Day of the lilies

Nothing like a flower to relieve your mind for a time.

These Day Lilies adorn the earthen platform where
our fountain would otherwise hold center stage.

These Day Lilies are at the corner of our garden shed patio,
right below one of our bird feeders.
The tall rock to the left in the background
is actually a light fixture (but it's real rock).

These yellow Day Lilies are in the south corner of
our yard, beyond the raised planter I constructed the
first summer we lived in Mebane.

These "pumpkin" (or orange) Day Lilies grow
alongside the fence on the northern side of our back yard.
 The Japanese beetle seems to like them.

A fuzzy bee also relieves your mind. This one was the main reason I took this photograph of a Butterfly Bush blossom.

The Butterfly Bush grows fifteen feet from the fountain,
right outside our screened back porch.

July 28. My friend Kat comments today: "Your “fuzzy bee” isn’t—it’s a type of sphinx (hawk) moths, such as this one or this one…most likely a hummingbird moth."
    Thanks, Kat. I think you're right.

Moral indignation

Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) realized that population growth would have to end at some point, as its exponential tendency ran up against the linear growth of the food supply. Other factors were involved as well, like the amount of waste produced (including not only pig excrement fouling our drinking water, but also green-house gases raising global temperature).
    It occurred to me this morning that moral indignation might be another factor. Growing numbers of riled-up people are butting up against one another, their butting-up facilitated by 24/7 news.
    Of course, I've been feeling some moral indignation myself, to judge by some recent posts here—on al Qaeda, for example, or on eating animals. Not to mention a few on religion.

But my immediate provocations might have been a couple of items in local papers this morning. The first was a letter to the editor from a man indignant that he didn't make an "al-Qaida-linked" hit list:

Why didn't I make that list?
    Have my many letters to the editor expressing my contempt for the Islamists gone unnoticed? Does it count for nothing that I led the applause on our United flight when the pilot announced the killing of bin Laden?

    And he even tells "aspiring Muslim martyrs" where to find him and what inscription to look for on the "crusader T-shirt" he often wears. "I'll be expecting some loser yelling 'alla-hu akbar' or whatever," he says.
    A hit list was mentioned only in the third of three reports I found:

1. The New York Times, "Al Qaeda Urges Attacks in West" (June 3);
2. Kitat Konenut's New York blog, "Al Qaeda Urges American Muslims to Buy Guns for Terror Attacks" (June 6); and
3. newsmax.com, "Al-Qaida Website's Hit List Targets US Leaders" (June 17).

A friend might have been alluding to such a hit list when he emailed me in response to an "amusing conjecture" of mine. He had written:

I'm afraid you'll be taken to a beating by persons who will misconstrue what you argue. You're walking on a mine field.

    I wondered, however, why I would need to be misconstrued.

The other provocation was the front-page photograph of three boyishly proud-looking male adults that illustrated the article, "Men snag possible world-record catfish." They're shown with a 143-pound blue catfish across their laps.
    The pride was front-page news, and the article revealed the important information that one of the men will "get to talk junk to my brother and dad all year long."
    But there was no mention that the bottom-feeding catfish will never get to feed again.
_______________
June 24. As a result of a comment on this article, I submitted a letter to The Chapel Hill News yesterday. It was published this morning; the third comment on this post provides the letter's text.
    July 3. Mr. Hurley's response was printed on July 1. And I submitted a follow-up question this morning; its text is provided in the first comment of yesterday's post, "'Daughters of thy uncles and aunts'."

A matter of conscience

My opposition to eating animals probably doesn't rest "on moral grounds" but might be more appropriately termed "a matter of conscience." Opposition on moral grounds seems to imply that I would condemn as immoral anyone who doesn't oppose eating animals, and I don't do that.
    Some weeks ago, a friend actually raised this point, although I didn't realize it at the time (March 24). He commented: "Jim eats meat, Jack doesn't. Is Jack justified in believing that he is morally superior to Jim?"
    Rather than face the issue, I danced around it: "Is that a trick question? What do you mean by 'morally superior'?"
    I'm ready to face the question now, and answer plainly: "Jack is not justified in believing that he is morally superior to Jim."

I think that my opposition is better termed "conscientious objection." Moral grounds seems to imply that the grounds are ones on which most people stand, which is obviously not the case in America, where the vast majority of people are meat-eaters and don't seem to feel guilty about it. Moral condemnation seems appropriate to majorities, or to a recognized authority, not to a small minority of wackos.
    Conscientious objectors to engaging in war opt out because of their personal beliefs; they don't usually condemn others for not objecting. (And conscientious objectors have generally been regarded as wackos.)

Today, most people feel that slavery is morally wrong, but not that long ago most people seemed to approve of it. God even seems to have approved of it, according to the Old Testament. Those who didn't approve of it, if they didn't object simply because they felt themselves vulnerable to be enslaved, may have objected as a matter of conscience for other vulnerable people, having imagined how enslavement might feel and coming to empathize with them.
    It took more time for the "moral grounds" to form on which most people would stand to condemn slavery.

Similarly, we're all against cannibalism, or the eating of other members of our own species. I think there's a moral basis for our opposition to cannibalism in terms of what's generally accepted.
    Back in March, I thought that the moral basis for not eating humans might also apply to not eating other animals; "the basis for condemning eating animals might be quite similar, given the fact that we and they have a common ancestor." In other words, let's not only refrain from eating our close relatives, let's not eat any of our relatives.
    I thought of it as extending to cannibalism Richard Dawkins's observation that even monotheists are atheists with respect to most gods (Zeus and the like), and atheists just add one more god to the list. We're all a-cannibalistic with respect to eating human animals; vegetarians on moral grounds are just a-cannibalistic with respect to other animals as well.
    Apparently, I might have been trying to establish a basis for Jack to be morally superior to Jim. If so, I was wrong to do so.

At this moment in the history of the world, the fact of a common ancestor might persuade a few conscientious objectors not to eat animals, but it's nowhere near establishing enough ground to support a majority. Besides, as my wife pointed out, animals have a common ancestor with plants also!
    I think my conscientious objection must flow from something more in the nature of a feeling than of an intellectual concept like "having a common ancestor."
    More pertinent is the fact (now well established) that other animals are also intelligent and capable of suffering. I strongly empathize with other intelligent, suffering animals. As I've said elsewhere, other animals deserve to live as much as we do. At least as much, seeing as how they are the innocent victims of hunting, fishing, and factory farming, killing activities committed by human beings. My conscience asks, What gives us the right?

Father's Day health quiz

"Hey, Morris," my wife called from the dining room. She was reading the Parade insert in the morning's Times-News. "Are you listening?"
    I was, I assured her.
    "True or false," she read, "Eating red meat increases a man's risk for heart disease and diabetes"?
    The question of course made me think of Jim the Directrix, who has been tutoring me in the health benefits of the starch-centered, vegan diet promulgated by Dr. John McDougall. No way could this be false, if Jim (and McDougall) are right. But I thought it was probably true, anyway: "Uh, well, I guess it's...true?"

Sorry; I'm not going to tell you the answer provided. You can take the quiz yourself (there are ten questions altogether). It's by Joe Kita and can be found on the web. (The site will probably try to fob ads on you; sorry about that.)

Happy Father's Day, Jim. Please take the quiz, then let us know what you think.
_______________

Of course, whether the first quiz question is true or false, I oppose eating animals, on moral grounds; see New Ten Commandments #6 (which I see I need to revise to make more explicit what is entailed by treating other animals humanely).
    June 20: questioning "moral grounds."

A "good" Muslim

Ayman al-Zawahri was barely mentioned in yesterday's post, but the point of the quoted New York Times article was that he had just been named to succeed Osama bin Laden. What can we say about him?
    Scary dude. He is possibly driven by a fiercer hatred of the United States than was Bin Laden himself, or than Sayyid Qutb.
    Zawahri helped Bin Laden plan the 9/11 attacks. The Miami Herald reports today (in "Zawahri succeeds bin Laden as al Qaeda leader" that

His fanaticism and the depth of his hatred for the United States and Israel are likely to define al Qaeda's actions under Zawahri's tutelage. In a 2001 treatise that offered a glimpse of his violent thoughts, Zawahri set down al Qaeda's strategy: to inflict "as many casualties as possible" on the Americans.
    "Pursuing the Americans and Jews is not an impossible task," he wrote. "Killing them is not impossible, whether by a bullet, a knife stab, a bomb, or a strike with an iron bar."

"One dark tale from Mr. Zawahri’s past" was reported by Scott Shane in yesterday's New York Times (in his article, "Qaeda Selection of Its Chief Is Said to Reflect Its Flaws"). The tale is

recounted in Growing Up Bin Laden, a 2008 memoir by Bin Laden’s son Omar bin Laden. He describes an episode in Afghanistan in the 1990s when a friend—a teenage boy—was raped by several men in the camp where they lived. The men snapped photos of the abuse and circulated them as a joke.
    Mr. Zawahri was incensed by the photos, believing that the young man was guilty of homosexual activity, Omar bin Laden wrote. Mr. Zawahri had the teenager put on trial and condemned to death.
    “My friend was dragged into a room with Zawahri, who shot him in the head,” he wrote. The episode was a factor, he said, in his decision to break with his father and leave Afghanistan.

    As a good Muslim, Zawahri might have had his own daughter stoned to death for dishonoring him by being raped. It's hard to discern what honor he might have fancied he was avenging in the case of the teenage boy.
    Shane reported that Zawahri said last week, in a videotaped eulogy to Osama bin Laden, that "Today, praise God, America is not facing an individual, a group, or a faction. It is facing a nation than is in revolt, having risen from its lethargy to a renaissance of jihad."
    "Praise God"? The lunacy manifest here (as in the act of executing the victim of a rape) is all but incomprehensible to, say, Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902), the author of Psychopathia Sexualis: With Special Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct.
    Quaint phrase, "contrary sexual instinct." It might apply to Zawahri (and Qutb—remember his terror of teenage American girls?); Krafft-Ebing wrote:

While up to this time contrary sexual instinct has had but an anthropological, clinical, and forensic interest for science, now, as a result of the latest investigations, there is some thought of therapy in this incurable condition, which so heavily burdens its victims, socially, morally, and mentally. [Emphasis mine]

It occurs to me, though, that equally lunatic actions described in the Bible and the Qur'an (many of them attributed to God in the former and Allah in the latter) can be dismissed as merely "primitive" or "of an earlier time," before our race's average morality and cultural intelligence had advanced to its current state of almost being half-civilized.
    In other words, Zawahri is (as bin Laden and Qutb were) men planted firmly in a past the race hopes to have left behind.
    But it's not likely to be fully left behind until books like the Qur'an are no longer read believingly.

Today's Islamist oxymoron

Al Qaeda, according to The New York Times today (in "Bin Laden’s No. 2, Zawahri, Takes Control of Al Qaeda," by David Jolly and J. David Goodman), has announced that it will “seek with the aid of God to call for the religion of truth and incite the ummah to prepare and fight.” (Ummah is an Arabic word, in this context meaning the global community of Muslims.)
    If you're waiting for me to reveal the oxymoron, you weren't paying attention. Go back three sentences: "...aid of God...religion of truth," as though God and religion had anything to do with truth.
    It isn't clear whether the statement is cheap rhetoric to hoodwink (i.e., incite) gullible people or its author himself actually believes the pairing.

Sayyid Qutb, Bin Laden’s favorite philosopher, who spent most of 1949 in Greeley, Colorado, apparently terrified of women and fantasizing about American girls, made a similarly flawed pairing. He saw the sexuality of western teenage women as evidence of a spiritual banality that demanded the destruction of western civilization.
    In his 1951 book, The America I Have Seen: In the Scale of Human Values, Qutb wrote that

The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs—and she shows all this and does not hide it.

    As Sam Harris noted Tuesday in his blog, in the entry "On Spiritual Truths, "What a relief it must have been [to Qutb] to know [from studying his holy book] that the Creator of the universe intended these terrifying creatures to live as slaves to men."
_______________
See sequel: "A 'good' Muslim."