Stuff that I talk to my Psychiatrist about....

Being a Zen "Dharma-without- scriptures" Buddhist, means that I know things wordlessly. Which is a major, unresolvable paradox to those who don't see how there can be such a thing as Direct Transmission of the Dharma. And even less can those who are unacquainted with the Middle Way appreciate the uncertainty and the sovereign indifference in the mind of Zen Buddhists as to whether they've been "taught" the Dharma, or just somehow happen to know it, or, possibly even, are just making it up. It takes a degree of self-confidence akin almost to ego-mania to be a Zen Buddhist in America--and yet, essentially, the truest and most American ethical philosophy, American Transcendentalism, even without direct transmission of the Dharma, may be seen as Zen on Steroids. Whatever else we heirs of Emerson and Thoreau have in common, deepest kinship, with us, is absolute atomic individualism: Our souls alone--and the universe. Dost thou attend me?

In this, of course, American Transcendentalism is only sharpening the focus of a certain peculiarly Western European concept of the Responsible Individual Inner Self, whose sway is etiologically and geographically coterminous with sexual masochism--i.e., it exists only in Western Europe, English-speaking North America, Australia and New Zealand. Thou attend'st not.

And yes, this does suggest that this brightest Jewel in our Crown--of Plato/Socrates-derived Occidental Ethical Theory--our lovely, absolutely autonomous Inner Self, is for some, perhaps not a few, who are consciously subject to it, a deformative, relentless onus; something they must have lifted from them by violent (painful) sense and/or rôle deconstruction, or at least by partial paralysis of the central nervous system (complete paralysis, of course, being death), before they can engage in satisfyingly uninhibited sexual relations; or, presumably, satisfyingly uninhibited anything else. The fucking cowards. Dost thou hear?

Well so--whether I received this knowledge, along with ¿who knows? how much else, when Bill Weaver transmitted the Dharma to me directly that night of the full moon in Cancer 1972, or whether I've always known it, or just simply figured it out--a great part of my understanding of the Dharma, is about what I have always called [whenever it's been necessary to refer to it. Not often, because to the vast majority of people it's a space-alien, impossibly difficult concept] "Levels of Intelligence." I now know, since yesterday (doing some catch-up, Arahat/Boddhisattva-serendipitous reading) that the Boddhi faculty I'm employing in this perception is called, in Pali, Cetopariya -- The Power of Discernment of the Mind of Others. It's the third of the "sixfold path of supernatural knowledge or super-wisdom," or Chalabhinna, which supposedly is known to the "Third Type of Enlightened People," which I apparently am, "who enjoy eternal peace or Nirvana and have been liberated from the cycle of life and death by the forty methods of meditation and have gained miraculous psychic power and supernatural knowledge far beyond that of scientists. They have practiced meditation with the eight devices (kasina) until they have reached the fourth stage of absorption (one-pointedness of mind in each device. They are able to walk on water, fly in the air, or become visible [sic!] or invisible and can go anywhere within seconds. They perform many miraculous powers which we ordinary people [God bless 'em!] cannot understand...."

Now that all sounds like a kick in the pants indeed, and I 'd certainly claim to be able to do it if I could--but I can't. The only thing I absolutely can infallibly do is Discern the Mind of Others:

[I] by my own heart "investigate and discern the hearts of other men [and non-human beings]...passionate minds, minds free from passion; minds filled with hatred, minds free from hatred; infatuated minds, minds free from infatuation; intent minds, wandering minds; exhalted, unexhalted minds; concentrated, diffuse minds; free minds and unfree." And more than that, like I say, I directly, with my heart, perceive several Levels of Intelligence, in both human and non-human beings:

Level One, of course, is the Buddha Mind (as in Bill Weaver), which is not only capable of, and aware of, Enlightenment, but able to transmit it.

Level Two is me and my friends, capable of being Enlightened, but not capable of (and not interested particularly in) imparting Enlightenment--This level is attained, notably, by most humans, bonobo chimpanzees, domesticated dogs, some cats, horses, cattle, and cetaceans, and also by geese, parrots, goats, and, to my knowledge, some eight-legged creatures such as octopuses* and spiders**. I have even seen fish exhibit what I consider the principal characteristic of Second Level Buddha Mind: Awareness of Benevolence. I have seen pictures, for example, of a koi befriended by a golden Labrador retriever, rising to the surface to dote and be doted upon, with every sign of esteem and affection between the fish and the dog--plain as day to one who sees with his heart. Compassion, a sense of social and moral equality*** having nothing to do with physical size or social rank, self-respect and respect for the individuality of others, playfulness, and what, for want of a better word, I call "wuv" ["disinterested friendliness" plus delight] are the chief qualities of Second Level Buddha Mind. Most Second Level Buddha Mind human/non-human relationships--e.g., with cats and cattle--are non-verbal, but surprisingly many are verbal (on the human part, of course), and show considerable understanding on the part of the animal--e.g., of dogs, horses, cetaceans, and some birds--of human speech. Affectively, the relationship of human and non-human upon the Second Buddha Mind Level is the same as the social interaction among humans (dining, playing games, talking) at its most polite and most agreeable. It goes without saying that creatures of the Second Level ought never to kill, harm, or threaten one another (though they do, of course, incessantly).

The Third Level of Mind is that of creatures (and perhaps of certain kinds of men) who are aware of other entities besides themselves but who have no Awareness of Benevolence and are entirely without Compassion. Marsupials (judging by my limited acquaintance with kangaroos, opossums, wombats and koala bears), some insects, sharks, sheep, reptiles, most fish, and most felines belong in this category. Generally speaking, creatures of the Third Level of Intelligence ought, where possible, to be politely ignored and not treated as if they were, as they sometimes appear to be, creatures of the Second Level of Intelligence: it is useless and dangerous, for example, to pet a wombat or a platypus. Although, where creatures of the Third Level intrude, threaten or present an inconvenience, they may be slain or put out of the way with impunity.

The Fourth Level of Intelligence is that of most insects, bacteria, carnivorous reptiles, and venomous lizards and snakes without warning rattles--creatures incapable of thought with any other object than themselves. They should be killed wherever encountered--even hunted down and eliminated--lest they live to harm, or even just merely inconvenience, those of a Higher Level of Intelligence.

Looking back over this impromptu treatise, a couple of amendments seem be in order. Practicality suggests that the Second Level of Buddha Mind ought to be sub-divided into at least Levels 2.5 and 2.75--for other Second Level intelligences; it being understood that Level One, to whom all things are equal, would not make such discriminations; or probably would not.

There are certainly, as well, Levels of Intelligence of at least a Fifth and a Sixth order, pertaining to viruses and less complex bacteria, and before them to RNA molecules. But now, curiously, as we approach hypothetical Seventh and Eighth Levels of Life/Consciousness--i.e., of "mere matter," we are reminded that, according to the esoteric doctrine of all three of the True Religions, "Mind is Matter, and Matter Mind." This has always seemed a compellingly profound vision of the Universe, especially when we have been stoned on LSD and Hashish; but the harsh reduction of Victorian Commonsense, on the other hand,

What is matter? Never mind.

What is mind? No matter.

has always seemed too funny not to be true, no matter how stoned we were.

* I have seen, propriis cum occiis meis, in a television documentary (one of Alan Alda's noteworthy scientific specials), an octopus in a fish tank in a laboratory, playing ¡Gotcha! with its human keeper***, with all the wit and espièglerie and histrionic "wickedness" of a kitten. Therewith, suddenly, I understood why the idea of eating an octopus has always nauseated me; even though I crack the shells and dig out the succulent flesh of boiled crabs, shrimp, crayfish and lobsters, and consume it with gusto and without compunction.

** Even in the turpitude of earliest childhood, I have never killed a spider. And I have at times, even long before I had any understanding of the Middle Way, gone to considerable trouble to capture them (even wild and venomous "black widows") and carry them outdoors, rather than smush them and have done with them. Not out of superstition--I am not, and have never been the least bit superstitious--but because, fortunately, instinctively, I have always shrunk from harming anything I suspected of having an intelligence like my own; especially any intelligence smaller than myself.

¿And how is it that I alone have always been aware of the intelligence of spiders, while I have never known, or heard of, another human being who shared this awareness? To put it simply, I have always been aware that spiders were aware of me--and were aware of my being aware of them. Furthermore, the mutual awareness between me and spiders has a peculiar force (Perhaps only detectable by Cetopariyassins like myself and Paul Pelisson)--astonishing when you consider the disparity in our size--of mutual respect and appreciation. Most spiders are, of course, wild and wary, and seek to escape as soon as they notice my noticing them; but even these, in my understanding, are aware of me as an individual/person, whom they acknowledge as not wishing them any harm; while, for my part, I perceive in them also a characteristic personhood--rational, courageous, and, for want of a better word, curious.

And so, a little about this dharma-buddy antecedent of mine, Paul Pelisson. He was one of Nicolas Fouquet's men--he who wrote the preface for Molière's Les Fâcheux performed the first night of that fateful fête at Vaux-le-Vicomte, which brought down all of an envious young monarch's jealous and destructive wrath. A Protestant and loyal, he was imprisoned in the Bastille for his brilliant and inarguable defense of Fouquet against Louis XIV's bitter determination to ruin him. While imprisoned, he made fast friends with a curious and sympathetic spider--apparently the first man in history to do so--and rumor of this unexampled friendship began to circulate, eventually reaching the ear of the governor of the Bastille. The latter on visiting Pellisson in his cell, asked to see his "friend," and when the spider was induced to come forth, brushed it to the ground and crushed it beneath his high red heel (see portrait of Louis XIV, above), saying, "Prisoners are forbidden to have friends." At which Pelisson cried, "I had rather you had broken both my arms than crushed that spider!"

And, finally, from my own experience: A few weeks after I had graduated from the University of Oregon, in early October--the first frost had not yet come--I was sitting at a picnic table, late one afternoon, in the city park in Eugene that stretches beside the Willamette River, writing in my journal. I sat back a moment, reading over what I had just written, wondering whether to continue--and a little, gray spider, very similar to the "jump spider" shown above, whom I had observed for a few moments at the edge of the table, suddenly, deliberately, with an air of determination, "marched" up on the open page, and stood at the end of my last entry, looking up at me with an attitude of half defiant, half friendly salutation. "Hey," I said to him good-naturedly, "you're in my way." And I leaned forward and with a puff of breath blew him off the page. He stood a moment, then with even more marked insolence, climbed back on the page, and started towards his former station. I put my pen across his path--and he jumped on it. So, with exaggerated decisiveness, I lifted my pen, with my new companion on it, and set it down a little further than the distance from which he had first moved towards me. He jumped off--and marched (there's no other word for it) right back to his station in the middle of the page. I put my pen down in front of him; he jumped on; I carried him over to his first position; he jumped off and marched back to the middle of the page; I put my pen down; and so on--a dozen or more times: I was giving "rides" to a spider. In exactly the same spirit, and with exactly the same mutual delight, with which one gives "rides" to a small child.

Grand Bridge Day in Everett at Greg Donoho's Today

Wherever the hell Everett is--that's why I've got the map up--Still can't find it.  No matter, I know how to get there...I'm meeting Mildred and Helen at the Ala Moana shopping center, oceanside, at 8:00, where we'll all take the E Bus; ETA 9:00 chez Greg.  

Listening to ¡Tunes meanwhile--1954 (von Karajan, Schwarzkopf, Merriman) recording of Così Fan Tutte--hideous, unlistenable monophony, sounds like it was recorded in a barrel, ceding to the Ax/Ma 'Arpeggione' sonata, which is, of course, as I have said on another occasion,  purely heavenly.  I almost wonder what Rostropovich made of this in his heretofore 'definitive' version, recorded with Britten in 1968:  "weightier, more brooding," 'tis said to've been.  I'm sure it was that....  

Continuing to read Orieux' La Fontaine, I'm finding treasures, seemingly invented just for me.  The description of our hero's pro-forma duel with his wife's admirer is highest comedy, beyond the reach even of Poquelin-- who could never have imagined, or sustained, La Fontaine's utter unjealousness.  It turns out, after all, that La Fontaine and wife were on much better terms than the simplistic legend allows; the letters he wrote to her from Limousin are as fine and friendly, and generous, as any letters from a husband to a wife ever were--making us miss all the more the more his half of his correspondence with Racine.  And speaking of miracles, there is nothing in all the history of the elective affinities of genius more dazzling than the perfect understanding between the nearly old La Fontaine and the youthful Racine--whose 'Songe de Vaux' and 'Nymphes de la Seine' run together in my head, and whose several authors would have said that, in effect, they're supposed to.

So to my toilet.  I've a long day ahead of me:  An hour's bus ride, then six solid hours of bridging, and an hour's bus ride back.  I must be fresh, alert, and tout à fait dispos. 

Ah Beauty! Up Early, It Being (Thursday) Bridge Day at the Central Union Church

Checking the BBC News Online, I read of a fossil--newly discovered at the Daohugou fossil beds in Nincheng County, Inner Mongolia, in sediments which have been dated to around 168--152 million years ago--of Epidexipteryx, "a primitive flightless member of the avialae clade, which lived a little before Archaeopteryx....Phylogenetic analysis suggests that the species is a member of a 'bizarre lineage' known as scansoriopterygidae ('climbing wings')....Epidexipteryx [exhibits] an unexpected combination of characters seen in several different groups of theropods [the bipedal dinosaurs which are the ancestors of birds]....

"It had a fluffy, down-like covering and sprouted two pairs of enormously long, ribbon-like shafted tail feathers.  These were almost certainly used for display -- making it the oldest known species to possess these...The bizarre appearance...indicates that morphological disparity...close to the origin of birds is higher than previously assumed.  

"The absence of...limb feathers suggests that display feathers appeared before aerofoil feathers and flight ability...."

So:  ornamental display feathers before flight feathers.  The implications are staggering.  A question that occurs to me is Darwin's "abominable mystery," the origin of flowering plants. Flowers, as we know, appear quite suddenly in the fossil record 130 million years ago--although a group of geochemists from Stanford now claims to have fossil chemical evidence that flowers may have evolved during the Permian, 245 to 290 million years ago.  

'Tanyrate, what this does show is that scientists (of all people) are always and always making these assumptions about things, and then getting all flabbergasted when things turn out to be different from what they expected.  Might I suggest that a milder, less contentious attitude, with less vehement certitude about things they don't know anything about, and a greater tolerance for uncertainty--like, say, that of Jean de La Fontaine, would save our conscientious scientists from some of the rudeness of their disappointments and the ker-smashedness of their illusions--and, at the same time, be both more poetic and more scientific?

I'm reading, with trembling delight, Jean Orieux's 1975 biography of La Fontaine.  I'm just up to his being patronised by Nicolas Fouquet and the exquisite "Nymphes de Vaux."  I must say I'm a little disappointed in our subject's parenting--he, after all, had one of the world's greatest fathers (on a par with Cicero's, Montaigne's, or Milton's).  But the true story of how he got boreder and boreder with his pointy-nosed wife, and eventually just kind of lost track of her, has me in stitches.  

Meantime, for diversion, I'm also reading La Tsarine aux Pieds Nus, a silly over-written biography of Catherine I of Russia, and a very gritty, venereal-warts-and-all biography of Guy de Maupassant.  All delicious stuff.

Up Betimes

Listening to a Stamitz clarinet concerto--Had we not Mozart, this would be the model.  Never have I heard the clarinet written for more idiomatically: leaps, noodlings, and expressive cantabile.  

Up, as I say, betimes.  Perhaps too betimes.  I dreamt, just as I awoke, of Beethoven piano sonatas, of using them as a painless (well, not that painless) Gradus ad Parnassum...which morphed into a little Sylph-driven tutorial on how to clean the female-inner parts of my espresso machine:  running vinegar through it; then flushing with a little soda water, then plain water.   Woke, with scant moments to spare, having wickedly to piss; which accomplished, I set forthwith to, flushing, flushing, and re-flushing my precious espresso machine--drinking Darjeeling the while; which, when it is gone, I will replace with fresh-ground "Zaragosa" or Nicaraguan (I haven't decided which) coffee.

Now that my inner vie intime is on the table, I should like to expatiate on a couple of matters that have been in the news lately.  First: that Arabian dhow which sailed from Canton (Guangzhou) in the summer of 826 a.d., destined for Samara (Basra), laden with incredible T'ang dynasty treasures, and was wrecked off of Sumatra:  Among those salvaged treasures is a bowl (see picture), whose image, for some reason, enraptures me:  Plain, simple, cereal bowl that it is, like billions since made--somehow I am bewitched by its grace, purity and delicacy.  Something in me is so glad to see it still whole and flawless after so many cataclysmic centuries.

Now: speaking of other, much older bowls--as reported in the TimesOnline by the Science Editor, Jonathan Leake--archaeologists from University College London, and North Carolina State University have discovered ceramic bowls, plus tubes used to inhale drug fumes or powders, on the Caribbean island of Carriacou, dating from 100 to 400 b.c.  "The use of such paraphernalia for inhaling drugs is well-known but the age was a surprise."   

So far so good; but Mr. Leake thinks we need to know a little background on this surprising subject, so he gives us a gobbet of authoritative opinion from Richard Davenport-Hines, a former history lecturer at the London School of Economics (yes, they need them there, too), and author of The Pursuit of Oblivion, a global history of narcotics:  "[I believe that] humans have been using drugs for thousands of years....Drug use became widespread in many early agricultural-based societies simply [!] because it was the only way people could cope with spending long hours working in the fields, often in horrible conditions like baking sun." 

When they would so much rather have been playing cribbage in the shade!  But Mr. Leake thinks we should also understand that "many archaeologists [with knowledge of their subject, no doubt, exceeding even that of Mr. Davenport-Hines--but, still, which archaeologists?] believe [that is to say, they have no empirical evidence, but they think so] that religion and spiritual beliefs must also have played a part, with drugs being used to induce spiritual or trance-like states."  How--shall we say?--brilliantly intuitive!  Have these many dip-shit archaeologists ever heard of Occam's Razor [Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity]?  Maybe--but it's obviously never occurred to them that it could apply to any beliefs other than those of 14th Century Roman Catholicism.

Aus Deutschland

Call from Phil yesterday, and a nice long chat.  He told me about the Valery Gergiev symphony concert held yesterday, or rather, the day before, in the bombed-out government buildings in Tskhinvali, in tribute to the victims of the Georgian bombardment of Tskhinvali on August 8th.  Which, if Phil had not alerted me to, I would have known nothing about, from the scandalously disinformative Western media.  So I Googled it, and YouTubed it, and there it was:  Magnificent, noble pathos; utterly heart-breaking.  

Speaking of which (hearts), the Dick Cheney's coronary apparatus has been in the news lately. Last Wednesday the D. C. was admitted to and released from hospital because he'd been experiencing a recurrence of "Atrial Fibrillation, an abnormal rhythm involving the upper chambers of the heart."  Much to reflect on, right there.  "All hearts flutter from time to time. These arrhythmias are generally harmless and may have no discernible cause at all.  But those diagnosed with atrial fibrillation have hearts who upper chambers beat irregularly and too rapidly....Cheney, who has had four heart attacks dating back to age 37, was given electric-shock treatment to get his heart back on track."

Out Of Africa

A couple of items in the news lately:

     (1)   Analysis of tissues preserved by doctors in the colonial-era Belgian Congo shows that the most pervasive strain of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) began spreading among humans at some point between 1884 and 1924...

            The virus spread only very slowly at first but got a vital foothold thanks to urbanisation during the colonial era....It was transmitted through sex [prostitution] and then was taken farther afield through commerce.

             There are several theories that seek to explain how SIV entered humans....An infected chimpanzee bit a human, or a SIV-infected ape was butchered and sold for bushmeat* [WTF? my italics], and the virus entered the bloodstream through tiny cuts in the hand, according to these hypotheses.

     (2)   The World Health Organization has announced that a hitherto unknown viral haemorragic fever caused by a Ribonucleic Acid (RNA) virus has killed three people in Johannesburg, South Africa.  The first person to have died from the disease on September 13th (a female tour guide) [?] had become sick while in Zambia, and had afterwards been evacuated to South Africa.  The other two people who died of the unknown virus were a paramedic and a nurse, both of whom had treated the tour guide...It is said that infection can only occur through contacted with the blood, urine, or faeces of an infected victim.  

      A fourth, possible, victim of the new viral disease, Maria Mokubung, a cleaning woman at the hospital where the first three victims died, who had already been sick of another, unrelated disease, and whose contact with any of the previous victims is uncertain, was nonetheless buried as a potential victim of the new disease:  The coffin, covered in thick white plastic, remained in the hearse, while the bier where the coffin would in normal circumstances have been displayed, was draped in white and adorned with wreaths.  So careful were officials and undertakers to prevent possible contamination, that Mokibung's relatives were unable to perform the usual burial rite of bathing and dressing the body....

       The hearse was eventually opened at the cemetery and the coffin removed.  Seeing the plastic-sealed coffin for the first time, Mokubung's relatives screamed and wept.  Mokubung's eldest daughter, Lebohang, handed a thick colorful blanket to an undertaker who draped it over the coffin, which was then lowered into the ground.

       Lebohand dropped to the ground as she and two of her siblings tossed earth onto the coffin.

*  Bushmeat  = (calque from the French viande de brousse) the term commonly used for meat of terrestrial wild animals, killed for subsistence or commercial purposes throughout the humid tropics of the Americas, Asia, and Africa. However, originally the term was only used to describe the hunting of wild animals in West and Central Africa.  Oh my fucking god. 

     

I saw Eternity the other Night...It looked remarkably like the Kant-Laplace Nebular Hypothesis

Once Kant had floated the idea (in 1755 already!), nobody could think how else the sun and the planets could have come into being.  Then forty years later Pierre-Simon Laplace suggested a model based on Kant's original intuition which "explained" how the planets revolve around the sun in the same plane and in the same direction in which the sun rotates.  And there, for about a century, the matter rested.

So spake th'Omnipotent, and with his words

All seem'd well pleas'd; all seem'd, but were not all....

Mildly, James Clerk Maxwell, in his 1873 lecture on Molecules, suggested that Laplace's Mécanique Céleste did not well describe the non-accretion of matter in the rings of Saturn.  Other, lesser, later geniuses than Maxwell called this a "severe criticism" of the Kant-Laplace Nebular Hypothesis, and set about formulating very much more dynamic--indeed singularly catastrophic--models of the origin of the sun and the planets:  Thus the Jeans Tidal Theory, which proposed that the planets were created by the near collision of the sun and another very massive star.   For a while this seemed to hold, and then criticism mounted from several sources, and the dualistic (!) Jeans' theory gradually fell into disfavor, resulting in the return of a modified version of the nebular hypothesis in the early 1970's. Nowadays, the lunatic exuberance of catastrophism having somewhat abated, four cautious stages are generally proposed in the process of forming planets from nebular disk material:

1.   The dust component of the disk settles into the mean plane.

2.   Planetisimals, solid objects of dimension from hundreds of meters to a few kilometers are                     produced from the dust disk.

3.   The planetisimals collect together to form terrestrial planets and the cores of the major 

        planets.

4.   The cores of the major planets acquire gaseous envelopes from the gas components of the                       disk.

Ah, Men!

The item posted by the Stealth Bloggerette about guys dropping bowling balls from airplanes reminds me of a column I wrote in 1994 about... well, guys dropping bowling balls from airplanes.  Except the guys I wrote about weren't doing this for Scientific Reasons.  They had invented a sport called Car Bowling:

This is an exciting new sport that I found out about from an alert reader named Robert Grimm.  He referred me to a friend of his named Mark Luman, a pilot in Michigan, who informed me that what he and his pilot friends sometimes do, for recreation, is go up in airplanes and drop bowling balls on cars.

At this point, many of you women are thinking:  "They drop WHAT? On WHAT? From WHAT??  Whereas you men, because of your complex and psychic interplay, are thinking: "When can I do this?"

I have to admit that the idea of Car Bowling appealed to me. although I did have a couple of concerns, the main ones being:

1.  Are there motorists in those cars?

2.  Do the pilots wear rental shoes?

I am pleased to report that the answer to both questions is "no."  Luman told me that in Car Bowling, you use an unoccupied junk car, which you place on the runway of a private airport. Then you fly over in a small plane, going 80 to 90 miles per hour at an altitude of 20 to 50 feet, and attempt to hit the car with a bowling ball.  If you succeed, you get the sense of inner spritual gratification that comes from seeing what happens to a car that has been hit by a bowling ball.  But the beauty of Car Bowling is that even if you miss, you get a very positive result, from the male perspective.

"You cannot imagine," said Luman, "how far a bowling ball will bounce when it hits a hard surface at that speed.  It's amazing."

                                                                                                  ---Dave Barry

Bardot to Palin:

"I hope you lose these elections because that would be a victory for the world...By denying the responsibility of man in global warming, by advocating gun rights and making statements that are disconcertingly stupid, you are a disgrace to women and you alone represent a terrible threat, a true environmental catastrophe...[supporting Arctic oil exploration that could jeopardize delicate animal habitats and...dismissing measures to protect polar bears] shows your total lack of responsibility, your inability to protect or simply respect animal life.  [As for your depiction of yourself as a pitbull wearing lipstick, I] implore [you not to compare yourself to dogs.]  I know them well and I can assure you that no pitbull, no dog, or any other animal for that matter is as dangerous as you are."

What is odd is how close what Mme. Bardot says in 2nd person is to what Naomi Wolf has said about la Palin in 3rd person:  "What you are looking at when you look at Sarah "Evita" Palin:  the designated muse of the coming American police state...Rove and Cheney's rebranding of their fascist push:  She will help to establish a true and irreversible 'fear society' in this once free once proud nation.  For God's sake do not let her; do not let them."