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[ by Charles Cameron — it might be that “This is where politics becomes a blood sport” turns out to be my final entry in the sports metaphor stakes, or the title of a “best of” collection — anyhow, let’s get there ]
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Ari Melber:

Jason Johnson:

It’s good that they finally pulled out the sword of Damocles: if you don’t do this, we’re going to sn=end a subpoena ..

Hardball:

Some in Mueller’s Team See Report as More Damaging to Trump Than Barr Summary

Chris Matthews:

I can understand why Trump plays ball with Netanyahu ..

If that’s a game, Barr is going to be exposed ..

Mar-a-Lago:

CM:

Congressman, what do you make of this? Because I get the sense that Mar-a-Lago has become a highly priced kissing-booth. If you want to get to the President join this club, then you can get relations with this guy, you can meet him on the golf course, you can hang out with him at the first tee, the nineteenth hole, he can be your buddy just for the price of admission. It is a kissing-booth, =tell me the difference?

All In:

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Jane Coaston:

They can’t outrun whatever the facts are forever ..

Chris Hayes:

There’s also a strange expectations game that’s been played here ..

NYT, How Rupert Murdoch’s Empire of Influence Remade the World

NYT, 6 Takeaways From The Times’s Investigation Into Rupert Murdoch and His Family

Rachel Maddow:

Thin pickings yesterday, no doubt because I slept through much of my dialysis session..

And from today:

Stephanie Ruhle:

Adm. James Stavridis:

Craig Melvin:

Two more from my deaktop

O’Donnell 4/4/2019:

Kristan Peters-Hamlin:

There was a pass that was thrown to Congress by the Mueller team with adequate evidence for Congress to make the decision on obstruction, and there was an intercept by Bill Barr and he ran in the exact opposite direction ..

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And just a few from 4/5/2019:

Ari Melber:

If the agents did thoroughly go through those like 14 million files and Michael Cohen now finds a smoking gun or a gatling gun***** and those documents corroborate what Michael Cohen says, this could add rocket fuel to the investigations in DC, EDVA< & Southern District of New York. Possibly. Or it could be a nothingburger. All In Chris Hayes:

The thing that may be biting the most is the thing that brought us to the metaphor***** portion of the news .. and not the subtle kind ..

There’s this thing they do with him where he’s just a private citizen, he’s a taxpayer. It’s not like some metaphysical question about the private Trump and the public. He’s the President of the United States, and hoe doesn’t get to get out of that.

[ cf Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies ]

Jesse Eisinger:

Or as you said, Schrodinger’s Cat type of existence

The tax returns are not the Rosetta Stone that will let us know everything about every source of funding that he’s ever had. He’ll have overlapping LLCs and a Russian doll of corporate structures, no pun intended..

Barbara Boxer [re Joe Biden]:

Do we want the Mike Pence response where he’ll never go to lunch with a woman alone, and he won’t have a woman in his office without keeping a door open, I mean, is that where we’re headed?

Rachel Maddow:

This is a hill [Trump’s tax returns] and people will be willing to die on it ..

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I may have done enough of this metaphor chasing.. maybe do a “best of”.. maybe just taper off..

But this from someone on AM Joy, Sunday 4/7/2019 is too good***** to miss:

This is where politics becomes a blood sport ..

[ by Charles Cameron — chyrons, yes — but also a mini-essay on what happens when loose fingertips sink ops — and including a multi-math game physicists play ]
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IMO, defang is a great word — so I was delighted to hear the phrase, Mr. Trump’s attempts to defang the investigations…

Let’s get to work, there’s lots to cover:

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Chyrons:

We’ve had bombshells before — meet new bombshells.

A regular fight metaphor:

An extraordinary one – jumping on a grenade!

And this one’s good, from the Georgia voter suppression story:

Running? D’oh, must be a sports metaphor:

and two from the 11th hour with Bryan Williams:

sustained and secretive assault is quite fine!

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Words heard:

The Secretary of State in Georgia not only administered the election, he falsely accused the Democratic party of hacking to cover up his incompetence the weekend before the election, and he systematically harmed voters over a decade — he was not only the contestant, he was the score-keeper the referee. And there is no equitable system that allows that to be so. It’s not fair.

Rachel Maddow on Manafort, 2/19/2019:

And that fairly dire circumstance, the fact that sixty-nine and a half year old Paul Manafort is now looking down the twin barrels of a sentence from this Federal judge in Virginia and then another sentence from this Federal judge in DC, at’s, honestly is a crisis of his own making ..

And this — Neal Katyal called Trump Grandmaster Pinocchio. Now that’s certainly a Disney reference, but is it also a ref to hip hop — Grandmaster Flash — or chess — Kasparov?

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Headers:

Catfishing was a new one on me, but certainly striking! Apparently it goes with sextortion:

Members of the military happen to be particularly high-profile targets for scams like catfishing and sextortion. Recently, a group of inmates in South Carolina were busted for allegedly blackmailing 442 service members using fake personas on online dating services. Not only can these tactics hit service members’ wallets, they may also represent a security risk if the victims have access to sensitive information.

Okay, it has natsec implications, and is clearly a word I need to learn.

The catfishing, here, was by a NATO research org, red teaming to see what NATO soldiers, with a little prompting, might reveal on social media:

The phony Facebook pages looked just like the real thing. They were designed to mimic pages that service members use to connect. One appeared to be geared toward a large-scale, military exercise in Europe and was populated by a handful of accounts that appeared to be real service members.

In reality, both the pages and the accounts were created and operated by researchers at NATO’s Strategic Communications Center of Excellence, a research group that’s affiliated with NATO. They were acting as a “red team” on behalf of the military to test just how much they could influence soldiers’ real-world actions through social media manipulation.

The results indicated that soldiers did indeed tend to leak information that “bad actors” might appreciate and use against them, or against NATO forces more generally:

By the end of the exercise, the researchers identified 150 soldiers, found the locations of several battalions, tracked troop movements, and compelled service members to engage in “undesirable behavior,” including leaving their positions against orders.

And guess what? The Russians are aware of the same possibility, and have banned the use of smartphones and similar devices by their troops as a consequence:

That combo of articles comes to us via Michael Robinson, to whom I must once again offer my grateful thanks.

And one thing more: the NATO group issued a report, and its title intrigued me:

Cognitive security was another term that’s new to me — IBM / Watson defines it thus:

Cognitive security combines the strengths of artificial intelligence and human intelligence. Cognitive AI learns with each interaction to proactively detect and analyze threats, providing actionable insights to security analysts for making informed decisions – with speed and accuracy.

That’s as much a sales pitch as a definition, but still gives us a sense of where these terms are trending.. and there’s reading to be done:

Wired, NATO Group Catfished Soldiers to Prove a Point About Privacy

Guardian, Russia moves to mask its soldiers’ digital trail with smartphone ban

NATO Stratcom, Responding to Cognitive Security Challenges

IBM, Artificial intelligence for a smarter kind of cybersecurity

That’s our mini-essay for the day, and maybe the week!

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Now think on this:

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Game on!

Let’s end today’s snow-sweep with a game metaphor applied to physics, or maybe I should say the philosophy and practice of physics: it’s a game in which the rules — in this case, mathematical languages — change from move to move — from Natalie Wolchover‘s A Different Kind of Theory of Everything:

It happens again and again that, when there are many possible descriptions of a physical situation—all making equivalent predictions, yet all wildly different in premise—one will turn out to be preferable, because it extends to an underlying reality, seeming to account for more of the universe at once. And yet this new description might, in turn, have multiple formulations—and one of those alternatives may apply even more broadly. It’s as though physicists are playing a modified telephone game in which, with each whisper, the message is translated into a different language. The languages describe different scales or domains of the same reality but aren’t always related etymologically. In this modified game, the objective isn’t—or isn’t only—to seek a bedrock equation governing reality’s smallest bits. The existence of this branching, interconnected web of mathematical languages, each with its own associated picture of the world, is what needs to be understood.

That’s it!

[ by Charles Cameron — a third can destabilize two, but it can also ignore or deny them ]
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Here:

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I’ve written previously about ternary logic and games of three, which open up questions about alliances and trust, some of which President Trump might want to ponder next time he feels like wading into NATO or sidling up to Putin.

When the gameplay is equitable, there is no “third” — just a succession of “seconds” — or in strategic terms, repidly shifting alliances. When the “third” is a constant, at least for a while, he she or it is at times a peace-maker, at times the one to be bypassed by the other two players — andd as here, at times the one who doesn’t want to know!

Anyway, a worthy addition to my earlier posts:

Zenpundit, Spectacularly non-obvious, I: Elkus on strategy & games

Zenpundit, Spectacularly non-obvious, 2: threeness games

— and there re very likely others..

[ by Charles Cameron — given a choice between Stephen Miller and Will McCants.. ]
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The Saudi speech:

Trump will deliver Stephen Miller's speech on Islam at the Saudi 'Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology!' https://t.co/DLJ3yb1srh

— Shibley Telhami (@ShibleyTelhami) May 18, 2017

Trump speech on Islam in Saudi Arabia will be written by far-right anti-Muslim aide Stephen Miller https://t.co/p8I6yHWpOm by @MaxBlumenthal

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) May 18, 2017

"Tossing pronouncements on religion into that tinderbox could be a very bad idea."https://t.co/CxE21BLeri

— The Grey Man (@IntelOperator) May 17, 2017

My friendly advice for the poor speechwriter tasked with crafting Trump's upcoming speech on Islam https://t.co/6HemebAZ8i

— Will McCants (@will_mccants) May 18, 2017

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The NATO speech:

MORE NEWS: NATO-Skeptic Stephen Miller Is Writing Trump’s NATO Speech https://t.co/YN8XOa2pBR via @John_Hudson

— Hayes Brown (@HayesBrown) May 18, 2017

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The Israel speech:

So Stephen Miller is writing Trump's Saudi Speech, his Israel speech, AND his NATO speech. Should be…fine. https://t.co/wLK1FpoNZv

— Hayes Brown (@HayesBrown) May 18, 2017

Israel, where Trump wanted to land his helicopter atop Masada..

Trump couldn't land his helicopter on Israel's ancient fortress—so he canceled his visit, refusing to take cable car https://t.co/51lw5z8nPr pic.twitter.com/CIGUB9Bwx9

— Newsweek (@Newsweek) May 18, 2017

Unlike former presidents who have made the trip, such as George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Trump declined to land the helicopter at a base of the historic site and then take the cable car up, preferring to cancel the visit altogether.

It's fuckin Masada. Even IDF doesn't land choppers on the top. ihttps://t.co/MBzPQEUDq7

— manu saadia ? (@trekonomics) May 18, 2017

And the Western Wall is in the West Bank?

All in all, one might wish there were a Will McCants to proffer speechwriting advice — or, hey, write speeches — for Saudi, Israel, NATO, the vatican, onwards…

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Coda:

Trump to Give Speech on Islam While in Saudi Arabia https://t.co/PNryD8yDbe

— Blogs of War (@BlogsofWar) May 17, 2017

Maybe he'll give a speech on Christianity while in Vatican State? https://t.co/19OkvGgrBC

— hipbonegamer (@hipbonegamer) May 17, 2017