zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — a woman so lovely she’s pure spirit, carved in stone and overgrown by trees — great christina greer quote — rachel’s mille feuille mar-a-lago ]
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Here’s the TripleQuote:

To the left, the statue of an apsara or female dancer spirit peers out from a tangle of forest encroaching on abandoned Khmer temples.. Center, she looks to him, Khajuraho temple sculpture, India,mand right — look closer — tree.

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Craig Melvin, 4/12/2019:

There’s no daylight between him and the Attorney General ..
He wanted to show that he’s in lockstep with the Attorney General on this issue ..

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Nicolle Wallace, 4/12/2019:

Nicole: Three dominios have fallen in this story since late last night: the Washington Post reporting about his desire to release human beings into sanctuary cities as some sort of pawn in his political battle over immigration —

— Julia Ainsley and Courtney Kube, superb reporting on how he wants to use the military in effect as human toy soldiers to carry out his political goals on immigration .. and now Annie Karni and her colleagues reporting about the dangling of a pardon ..

Chuck Rosenberg: At least historically, pardons were always an act of Presidential compassion and mercy, that’s certainly how they were designed and intended….

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Erin Burnett 4/12/2019::

I heard those words, and I didn’t know if I was in 1967 or 2017..

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Not sure where, but war room *****

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DoubleQuote:

Bannon embraces Trump

Pope embraces Imam of Al Azhar

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MTP 4/12/2019:

You don’t want to replicate Trump; but you want to beat Trump .
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Ari Melber:

Let’s see if they have open arms

Tillerson:

When the President would say, Well here’s what I want to do, and here’s how I want to do it, and I’d have to say to him, Mr President, I understand what you want to do, but you can’t do it that way, it violates the law, it violates the treaty, you know — he got really frustrated..

Matt Miller:

When the DHS Director — who was willing to do a lot for Donald Trump — when Kirstjen Nielsen said, the one thing I can’t do is break the law, he fired her. And now you have him telling the new Acting DHS Director, It’s okay if you break the law. I want you to break the law, and if you do it, and if you go to jail, I’ll pardon you. So even this constraint, where you have officials that say, The one thing I can’t do is break the law, he’s trying to find away around that — and it’s about the most lawless thing you can imagine for a President..

Victoria DeFrancesco Soto:

They like his boldness, they like that he’s authentic, they like that he shoots from the hip. And he’s leveraging that, even to the detriment of our democracy.

Christina Greer:

Unfortunately, there are far too many Americans who look at these families at the birder, and they don’t see human beings. This is the consistent message that the President is giving his base, when he talks on Twitter, on television, calling them animals, calling them undeserving, saying the doors are closed. Even though he is the child of an immigrant, even though two of his three wives were immigrants, even though four of his five children are children of an immigrant, he doesn’t see these people at the border as of the same lineage as his family.

John Flannery:

I sort of think of them as nested Russian wacky dolls, you know, one supporting each other..

And what it looks like is, the Justice Department is so despoiled now that they’ve becpome a p[olitical arm of the West Wing ..

You can’t win an argument you don’t make, and we’re not making that argument..

Ari Melber:

You can’t win a legal argument you don’t make — is that sort of a court version of Michael Jordan, You miss 100% of the shot you don’t take?<

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Hardball:

Chris M:

If that’s not impeachable, I don’t know what is. A President of the United States using his authority to tell government senior officials, cabinet level people, to break the law, I’ll cover you.

Leon Panetta:

I think we’ve all gone down the rabbit-hole with Donald Trump into Wonderland, I have no idea what is going on here with the President, who acts like a punch-drunk fighter striking out in all directions ..

Richard Engel:

The Pope under attack, and look who’s leading the charge..

Bannon:

He’s constantly coming back and putting all the faults in the world on this populist nationalist movement..

CC comment — this is what really has Bannon exercised, not pedophilia, which is something that both left and right can agree on, and a terrific diversion from his real concern..

Bannon’s Institute:

Chris M:

He’s also building a monastery .. he is putting together a huge facility on a hilltop outside Rome .. It is an 800-room monastery .. and this is going to be the center of his movement ..

— but we’ll get to all that, after Richard Engel’s evening special tonight..

All In Chris Hayes:

That’s John Yoo, unbelievably enough now the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California —

— Berkeley.!– which a right-edge very bearded ‘vette-owning vet friend said could be nuked, no problem..

Apocalypse:

Jeff Biggers:

Coal is really like a fourth-string pitcher ..

Rachel Maddow:

on having her first taste of mille feuille on her b’day —

Rachel:

Apparently this is a whole category of dessert ..

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And ain’t this delicious, too? DoubleQuoting two brilliant women in science — fifty years in a single tweet:

Left: MIT computer scientist Katie Bouman w/stacks of hard drives of black hole image data.

Right: MIT computer scientist Margaret Hamilton w/the code she wrote that helped put a man on the moon.

(image credit @floragraham)#EHTblackhole #BlackHoleDay #BlackHole pic.twitter.com/Iv5PIc8IYd

— MIT CSAIL (@MIT_CSAIL) April 10, 2019

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ANd I’m done.

[ by Charles Cameron — Bannon goes to the Vatican, & the magic of advertising, a Renaissance perspective ]
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I’m announcing two new series, which may take a while to get u& the maginder way.

One has to do with Steve Bannon taking on Pope Francis:

while the second will examine the triangle, trinity, or threesome of magic, tech and commercials:

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Watch these spaces!

[ by Charles Cameron — a parallelism post, more than one about free speech and civility ]
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Lexington, VA, and Richmond, VA, the logos:

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A neatly observed opposition, more or less a natural DoubleQUote, between the Black Swan incident where a fellow customer assaulted Steve Bannon verbally in a bookstore and the restaurant incident where the owner of the Red Hen restaurant ejected Sarah Huckabee Sanders, saying her views did not conform to the ethic — or should that be ethos — of the restaurant:

THE OPPOSITE OF THE RED HEN: The owner of a Richmond book store asked a woman to leave after she confronted STEVE BANNON. “Bookshops are all about ideas & tolerating different opinions & not about verbally assaulting somebody, which is what was happening." https://t.co/hHn4wd4CQa

— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) July 8, 2018

Now from a purely amateur natural history perspective, in a match between a black swan and a red hen, muy money is on the swan every time, as I trust Nassim Nicholas Taleb would agree. And Nabokov too, for that matter.

From a popular consumer interest perspective, if the match is bookstore vs restaurant, restaurant wins hands down — but I’d go with bookstore, especially if it’s a used bookstore..

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As to civility vs freedom of expression, thank God I’m not a cop or a judge — I require both. And that’s certainly a paradox, and probably a koan our society will have to face one of these days.

Steve Bannon as a person I find intriguing to the point of sympathy, because he’s read many of the oddball authors I have, though my resulting observations come out of left field, and his out of right..

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But none of that is what ultimately draws me to this post, it’s the delicious double parallelism of red vs black, swan vs hen.

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I’ve been wondering, putting together this post, whether the bookstore is named for NN Taleb’s celebrated book, or for the wildly popular ballet film of thet name:

Btw, Vogelgesang is birdsong: hen cluck, swan song.

[ by Charles Cameron — unenthused by current prospects of nuclear war or power plant interferencer, putinesque america, american proto-fascism, etc — yet filled with joy and wonder ]
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I would like to do a zoom down in.

My daily reading doesn’t follow neat trails such that each article builds not just in general thrust but also in detail on the last — so please overlook the strange leaps I’ve taken here — all in a morning’s web-scan.

Enjoy the three individual essays I’ll quote, in other words, but don’t sweat the details.

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I’ll start with Africa, as explored in George Clooney and John Prendergast‘s major Foreign Affairs piece, The Key to Making Peace in Africa, available without a paywall — because they offer an unparalleled glimpse of the conflicting values that will define our common humanity, fail or fair:

JAMES AKENA / REUTERS Government troops and tanks are seen in the eastern Congolese town of Rumangabo, July 26, 2012.

Here are the matters to weigh in our scales, captured in two of Clooney and Prendergast’s four punchily effecrive lists:

Oil, gold, diamonds, cobalt, copper, and a variety of other mineral deposits and trafficked wildlife provide immense opportunity for those in power to line their own pockets

versus:

corrupt figures .. using their forces to bomb, burn, imprison, silence, torture, starve, impoverish, kill, and rape to maintain or gain power

That’s the basic comparison, the weighing in the scales that chraacterizes the Clooney / Prendergast piece.

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Next for a sideways extrapolation of the dark vision Gen. McCaffrey offers:

Reluctantly I have concluded that President Trump is a serious threat to US national security. He is refusing to protect vital US interests from active Russian attacks. It is apparent that he is for some unknown reason under the sway of Mr Putin.

— Barry R McCaffrey (@mccaffreyr3) March 16, 2018

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With a further zigzag away from McCaffrey and Putin, I’ll consider our local, USian situation in light of This is the Spanish Civil War by Jonathan Kirshner. We’re zooming in from African gazillions to mere Americo-Russian billions, financially speaking, and from out there to in here — though not yet within.

Franco arriving in San Sebastian in 1939

Comparing our Trumpian times with the beginnings of the Spanish Civil War, and with the decades-long reign of Generalissimo Franco that followed — an arguable comparison, surely — Kirshner writes:

The stakes here are not about partisan politics — Republicans now love him, but other than his plutocratic bona-fides, Trump is barely a Republican — rather, they are about what we are, and what we may become. The Trump Presidency is not normal, and it is dangerous to our democracy.

Again, the scales.

I hope it will be apparent that I am neither comparing America with Spain nor Russia, but simply offering one respected military man’s testament as a preamble to a differently focussed writer’s rant about Franco, in hope of providing a diffuse, impressionistic sense of alarm with an active sense of what the fractious breakdown of democratic and humane values can bring forth.

Steve Bannon‘s reading list, occut and radical — Julius Evola as much as Ivan Ilyin — still lurks in the background, and deserves a=n essay of its own.

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Zooming yet further in, leaping from the nation to the individual — and who knows how the many manages to integrates the one — or the one to evade the blandishments of the many, especially its witch hunts, scapegoating and madness of crowds — I find myself in a beautiful and utterly apolitical world:

Your Inconsolable Longing Has a Name. I have left off the final word of Jack Preston King‘s essay, and will present only his first paragraphs and images:

That Feeling You Can’t Name

My mother called it “the green lace.” Every spring there was a window of just a few days where the buds on all the trees had barely begun to flower, tiny leaf-tips pushed free of supple branches, and all of Nature was briefly sheathed in the most delicate green embroidery. As warming winds signaled “the green lace” was near, the years fell like calendar pages from my mother’s face. She stood taller. She would smile and laugh easily, but at the same time seemed ever on the verge of tears. The first day “the green lace” burst forth and draped the countryside, Mom would disappear in the family car to drive backroads alone, basking in the newborn spring, weeping freely as she drove. I never witnessed that last part in person, but I find it easy to imagine. My mother was not an emotionally expressive woman. But this emotion overcame her. She couldn’t control it, and more to the point, she didn’t want to control it. It was an eruption of the sacred, to be revered in seclusion, but never denied. She loved it privately, without having to define or justify the experience to anyone.

For me, this feeling descends in Fall. A few trees turn early, adding splashes of red and gold to my morning commute. Each evening when I arrive home from work, more grass has vanished beneath a thickening carpet of leaves. The sunlight slants, and afternoons golden. Then there’s always one day, usually in mid-October, when Autumn happens. The red maple in my front yard bursts overnight into flame. I step onto my porch and the air crisps just so. My heart wells as if someone I love with abandon has returned from a long absence. I ache with longing to merge with the trees and the air, the sunlight and sky.

Joy. Sehnsucht, King calls it.

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If you thought my leap from Africa to the US — or from Trump to Franco, Bannon to Evola, Evola to Ilyin — was a stretch too far, I invite you to cnsider how much greater a stretch the leap from outer to inner is. Yet that, in one sense, is the creative leap par excellence — the leap from exteriority to interiority..

I trust it is also a leap from darkness into dappled light.

[ by Charles Cameron — is the Dictionary of Occupational Titles ready for Steve Bannon? ]
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Now that both the White House and Breitbart have ejected him, there’s a question as to what employment Steve Bannon will find next. Luckily for us he’s already provided a somewhwat gnomic answer a while back, in conversation with Charlie Rose — as this DoubleQuote illustrates:

Boom!

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For further details, listen to Mick Jagger, lower panel above — or read his lyrics:

Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy
‘Cause summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy
Well what can a poor boy do
Except to sing for a rock ‘n’ roll band…

Watch out — Steve Bannon is going to sing! Robert Mueller will be all ears..