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[ by Charles Cameron — first, a taste of bach — then a superb paragraph from a friend on the east coast, describing the variant accounts of the coronavirus given by sources inside and outside the mainstream, and more ]
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Ah, for sheer pleasure while you read the rest:

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Our various explanations of the coronavirus:
From that friend on the east coast:

Concerning the coronavirus, the opinions of the experts I’ve read run the gamut: The coronavirus is exactly as the CDC and WHO have been telling us, is a genetically engineered bioweapon, is related to the 5G rollout, is the last precursor for a totalitarian world government, and is more deadly than we’ve been told or is less deadly than we’ve been told. It originated from horseshoe bats in Yunnan province, originated in a Wuhan biolab, originated in a wet market, or originated at Fort Detrick. Covid-19 is not one disease but a number of them incorrectly lumped together because they have similar symptoms which explains why there are such mixed success rates with various treatments. Viruses, including the coronavirus, are exosomes, which are secreted by exocytosis in most living cells, where their role is to render harmless toxic substances in the body. These exosomes/viruses are the result and not the cause of illness. Therefore, there is no proof that Covid-19 per se is contagious. Alternatively, it is highly contagious. And all of this doesn’t even touch upon the variety of expert opinions concerning how nation states should best handle this situation.

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And a head-grabbing headline:

I’ve run into many of these in my own explorations, and navigated them as best I can. One particular headline caught my attention by bringing the coronavirus, which presently preoccupies me, and terrorism, which I was similarly preoccupied with some time back:

That’s a pretty stunning headline about now — adding extreme human malice into the coronavirus mix. Let’s see where else hatred leads Tim Wilson — here are some of the other targets he’d discussed with an FBI informant / friend:

he was considering sites ranging from a nuclear plant and Islamic centers in Missouri to the Walmart headquarters or a synagogue in Arkansas

Oh — and:

at one point last year Wilson talked to an undercover FBI agent in graphic terms of an idea for shooting up a predominantly black elementary school

Islamic centers and a synagogue, a nuclear plant or Walmart HQ, or a prewdominantly black, get this, elementary school — quite a range of choices to point his hatred at — and then he choses a hospital.

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Variations everywhere!

[ by Charles Cameron — from tree-planting in the millions, via Tolkien’s ents in entmoot mode, to the Yukon, science-fiction time-travel, and a Greta Thunberg lookalike ]
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A couple, Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado and his wife, planted 20 million trees in 20 years. Some of their product is visible in this photographic DoubleQuote

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Simply and factually, two states of a hillside are connected by twenty years of planting, similarly but more personally, a photographer and his wife are connected by love and marriage nurtured by their lives together, more abstractly two nodes in a network are connected by edges, in each case, the connections in a network are the strength of that network..

And in this case, trees are the result of planting over time, and over time this marriage of two persons is no doubt deepened. They make a difference, and if a hundred thousand, scattered across the habitable globe, followed their example, the impact would be considerable.

Consider also that in the view of a German scientist whose ideas are, according to the Smithsonian, “shaking up the scientific world”. Anthropomorphosizing more than a little, the Smithsonian writer tells us:

Wise old mother trees feed their saplings with liquid sugar and warn the neighbors when danger approaches. Reckless youngsters take foolhardy risks with leaf-shedding, light-chasing and excessive drinking, and usually pay with their lives. Crown princes wait for the old monarchs to fall, so they can take their place in the full glory of sunlight. It’s all happening in the ultra-slow motion that is tree time, so that what we see is a freeze-frame of the action.

20,000 trees must have quite a conversation.

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Entmoot

Cue JRR Tolkien on the tree-like Ents, the ancient and wise guardians of trees and forests introduced in volume 2 of the Lord of the Rings:

Quickbeam, for example, guarded rowan trees and bore some resemblance to rowans: tall and slender, smooth-skinned, with ruddy lips and grey-green hair. Some ents, such as Treebeard, were like beech-trees or oaks. But there were other kinds. Some recalled the chestnut: brown-skinned Ents with large splayfingered hands, and short thick legs. Some recalled the ash: tall straight grey Ents with many-fingered hands and long legs; some the fir (the tallest Ents), and others the birch, … and the linden.

A gathering of the ents is called an Entmoot. Tolkien quotes Treebeard:

The ents have not troubled about the wars of men and wizards for a very long time. But now something is about to happen that has not happened for an age… Ent Moot. [ … ] Beech, oak, chestnut, ash… Good, good, good. Many have come. Now we must decide if the ents will go to war.

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By way of a bookend to this post, here’s a DoubleQuote in images of Greta Thunberg and a 1898 lookalike in a photo from the Yukon:

As usual, parallelisms promote speculation — in this case, the laughable, laudable conspiracy theory that Thunberg is a time traveler.

Conspiracy! Science fiction!

The suggestion is that Greta traveled back from our time, when she despaired of our efforts to reverse human-caused climate change, to the Yukon of 1898, where she set about reversing the problem at its time and place origin. Exactly why human-caused climate change should have started in the Yukon in 1898 is not clear, nor can we understand how, if she began her efforts at reversing the progressive wasting of earth by human impact back in 1898 and had had no notable impact on that process by now, as revealed in the 1898 and 2019 photos of Ms Thunberg.. that too is unclear.

Fabulation, however, is fabulpous by dedfinition — so we record this conspiracy here.

Readings:

HuffPost, Photo From 1898 Sparks Hilarious Theory That Greta Thunberg Is A Time-Traveler

Owen Sound Sun Times, Greta Thunberg look-alike in 1898 Yukon gold rush photo has sparked time-travel conspiracies

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Okay, here’s a suggestion:

Greta Thunberg — or the Entmoot , for that matter — might suggest we plant trees:

Plant for yourself:

But be warned

As we plant trees, we must avoid planting monocultures, and ensure we plant variety, as The Economist suggests.

[ by Charles Cameron — i don’t know about you, but wondrous strange stuff passes before my eyes daily, as in a dream — here’s a sampler ]
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First off, two graphics too good to miss:

From my friend Rabbi Lobel:

and via David Metcalfe:

I should probably stop there — the two of them are so stunning. But I need someplace to park some other recent items that caught my attention..

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Then, a chyron ouroboros so brief as to be stunning:

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And here are a couple of other tweeted ouroboroi —

Lying about lying. https://t.co/wk7ecqrOI2

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) August 29, 2019

And this one with the added distinction of coming from a Q-source:

You’ve been Q’d pic.twitter.com/aeZ58rbiUH

— Nancy Q Sutherland (@NancymkQ) July 30, 2019

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Best game as metaphor for politics meme:

Best folk religion image — Holy Child, Patron Saint of Gas Thieves

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BTW, does QAnon get it’s Q from Quelle, German for source and popularly abbreviated Q in New Testament studies, where it is the “hypothetical written collection of primarily Jesus’ sayings” (Wiki) on which Matthew and Luke draw for materials not found in Mark?

Or as I suggested to Ali Minai a day or two ago:

the letter Q is what you get when you try to construct a Moebius strip on a plane surface.

Don’t get me started on Borromean rings..

And is there a Q in that initial snake graphic, at the head of this post? Thus I bite my own tail..

{ by Charles Cameron — including off and on security clearances, Biden and personal space, Trump and groping, kissing, Sovereign Citizens, a billion dollar swindle, and a cruise named Conspira-Sea — and on and on ]
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So, Fox had a chyron gaffe —

— it’s worth a chuckle — now move along..

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Okay here’s enantiodromia:

Trump will put $100 billion into a slush fund so he doesn’t have to deal with budget cuts:

Republicans have spent a generation complaining about deficits, government spending and attacking a so-called “big government.” Yet, within just a few years the entire party has turned 180 degrees.

and a nice paradox:

If P gets things right then it lies in its tooth;
and if it speaks falsely, it’s telling the truth!

Where did I get that?

Geoffrey K. Pullum, an elementary proof of the undecidability of the halting problem

If it was Dr Seuss, I’m betting he’d have employed and enjoyed pee (male) and queue (female), which would have made youthful readers giggle and blush.

That’s Epimenides territory btw, as in “all Cretans are liars”.

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Getting back to news chyrons — I wasn’t awake to catch this when it showed up on Morning Joe, but a piece on RawStory pointed me to it:

Joe Scarborough:

Once again, we’re just looking through a glass darkly, and have no idea what Mueller

Tom Nichols (professor, Naval War College):

I would love to play poker with the president because he’s a walking bundle of tells.

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CNN Situation Room 4/1/2019:

Donald Trump: We’ll keep it closed for a long time. I’m not playing games.
Kellyanne Conway: It is certainly not a bluff.

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MTP 4/1/2019:

Jeh Johnson:

You don’t have to the the former Secretary of Homeland Security to know you can’t shut down a 1,900 mile border. It’s a little like decreeing that it should stop raining..

[ cf King Knut ]

[all of them Mexico?]

Jeh Johnson:

Cutting off aid is the exact wrong thing to do ..

Note the lovely symmetry there, equivalent to projection

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Ari Melber:

Neil Katyal:

You can’t be playing Ducks and Drakes and releasing selectively some quotes here and some quotes there..

Is, incidentally, I’m thinking sports metaphors, whistle-blower a sports reference, referee?

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Hardball:

Rep Steve Cohen:

This whole thing has been played out like a stall. Like when they used to play basketball without a 32 second, 30 second, 35 secondclock, a 35 second clock and they’re just holding the ball, and they’ve got the lead, they’ve got the lead and they’re holding the ball.

Chris Matthews:

That’s Dean Smith’s four corners offense, I know about it. Thanks for the basketball recap. .. This isn’t basketball at all, but there is a question of game-playing here ..*****

This was re Barr timing the release of the Mueller report (after his redactions) to April 15, when Congress wld be away from town on a 3 week break..

CM:

A picture’s worth a thousand words everybody. Natasha, you take this: if we get a New York Times top of the fold picture >of a whole page blacked out .. There isn’t going to be much white left on that page ..

Natasha Bertrand:

Is Donald Trump considered a third party because he wasn’t charged?

I just want to go back really quickly to the question of whether ethics and morals matter. If you’re a morally vacuous person, that makes you more susceptible to beinf blackmailed by a foreign country .. It’s a very big national security issue, and I think that that is the lens through which we have to view this ..

Jay Inslee:

Trump has been so inhumane to close the border to refugees, some of whom are climate refugees today, because of the drought..

First mention I’ve seen of climate refugees***** as a term — cf my poem Mourning the lost Ka’aba —

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All In:

Lachlan Markay:

A state-sponsored Saudi information warfare apparatus ..

a full spectrum of information warfare, essentially, against Jeff Bezos, the Washington Post and Amazon ..

Chris Hayes:

If it’s true, it’s as real and immediate a threat to free speech in the US as one can possinbbly imagine, if a foreign government that doesn’t like dissidents speaking out of turn so much that it murders themessentially attempts to blackmail and destroythe paper which covers is.

LM:

And not just the First Amendment, but we have to remember that Amazon right now is bidding on a ten billion dollar Pentagon cloud storage contract, here as well ..om there are tremendous national security implications

Ah, and golf:

There’s even a book about it —

— a book-length sports metaphor***** for the current presidency?

Author Rick Reilly describes the President as a “prolific cheater” ..

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Andrea:

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Okay.

Two major pieces on forms of the extreme associated with the right:

How Sovereign Citizens Helped Swindle $1 Billion From the Government They Disavow

And from that article, an aptly named car:

Mr. Morton’s sentencing was set for that June. But when the 11 a.m. hearing started, he didn’t show. Agents spotted him that afternoon outside a Domino’s in Hermosa Beach, a gray hood and sunglasses shrouding much of his face. He hopped in his white Ford Escape and headed south.

and an aptly named cruise:

Worth reading, and really worth knowing about the loosely-defined, quasi-religious Sovereign Citizens movement.

Also:

There are two forms of interest here — the vicious circle, a quintessential ouroboric concept, and the implied symmetry in “jihadists and the far-right not only reflect each other, but feed off each other”..

But the CSM piece I really want to direct your attention to is one written by blog-friend Ann Scott Tyson and quoting blog-friend JM Berger– — who was also quoted in the NYT SovCit piece above:

Christchurch brings global white supremacist threat into sharp relief

“This is a much bigger global challenge than it is a challenge just in New Zealand or just in the U.K., with Britain First, or just in the U.S. with the [Ku Klux] Klan and a range of other neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups,” says Seth Jones, director of the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “There’s a broader collective concern here.”

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This just in before I go.. another symmetry observed:

The cruel irony of Hussle’s murder is that he was the victim of the type of urban violence he had long tried to remedy: The day after his death, he was scheduled to participate in an LAPD anti-street-violence meeting.

[ by Charles Cameron — metaphor, that Owen Barfield thing that undergirds Tolkien, who gives us our hero myth at highest, truest pitch — see final section ]
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One for the arc archive:

There is not a word in the American lexicon for such gatherings—the semi-spontaneous assembly of people in the wake of tragedy, who are united by both grief and by anger, and whose public mourning serves to reaffirm their civic bond to one another. But we need such a word..

That’s an important point.

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Look, large events have — what do events do, transpired? no — eventuated, actuellement, actually, which is to say, right about now..

From MTP 3/25/2019:

Chuck Todd:

At this point it seems pretty clear that, while politically Democrats have been perhaps, if not check-mated, a pretty touch check on the chess board here, politically..

Chuck Todd:

None of us have read the Mueller report. None of us have got a single complete sentence of the Mueller report.

Jake Sherman:

It’s certain that Democrats run the risk of beating this drum too loud collusion on the collusion thing. The collusion angle, politically, was the singular focus of this investigation. That’s why it started.

Is this going to be like the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, buried in some warehouse in New Mexico?

If they find something, a hundred of them jump on it — it’s the bandwagon effect ..

The Beat, Ari Melber:

Ari: Is Barr departing from those preedents?

Preet:*****

He [Mueller] punts to Congress, and then Bill Barr runs on the field, takes the ball, runa in for a touchdown for the President..\

Holder:

I think Preet was wrong there..

Rossi:*****

Using a football analogy, that’s what Preet did, I want to use a basketball analogy. We have a jump-ball, we’re giving it to Bill Barr, who’s taking the ball, he already decided the possession arrow..

Preet, Holder, Rossi — a touch of Calvinball, one game becoming another?

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Let’s take a break:

Malcolm Gladwell, Thresholds of Violence

Thresholds are — in Latin — limina. Here a shooter threshold, a limen — a red line which, having been crossed, now shifts towards the susceptible:

The kid .. requires a finely elaborated script in order to carry out his attack .. : the effect of Harris and Klebold’s example was to make it possible for people with far higher thresholds — boys who would ordinarily never think of firing a weapon at their classmates — to join in the riot.

The caption to the illustration heading Gladwell‘s piece reads:

In the years since Columbine, school shootings changed; they became ritualized

That’s what my piece on Tarrant as a follower of Breivik was about.

Here too, from Gladwell, is a serpent that turns to bite its tail when SWAT arrives:

I would detonate when people were fleeing, just like the Boston bombings, and blow them up too. Then my plans were to enter and throw Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs and destroy everyone and then when the swat comes I would destroy myself.

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And serpentine sinuosity in the Mississippi at English Bend, the great river’s tail not quite bitten? Another border blurred, line receding…

The plane took off to the north, over Lake Pontchartrain, and looped back toward New Orleans. We picked up the Mississippi at English Turn, the sharp bend that brings the river almost full circle. Then we continued to follow the water as it wound its way into Plaquemines Parish.

Eh?

The control of nature? Good luck with that.

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Back to business — a rush of chyrons, with a couple of texts:

Booker to Ari:

I have had you on background in many of the rooms I’ve been in

There must be a lot of thoughts about who the umpire should be ..
the letter came from somebody who was already suspect and should have recused himself ..

Booker:

We’re seeing a lot of dots that seem to be directing us toward a real problem, a potential collusion that continues to seem tom be smoldering and that might result in a real fire..

Let’s look at the fact pattern ..

— that last is an interesting phrase —

Just a couple more from Sen Cory Booker to Ari Melber, then we’ll take a break.

Sen Booker:

This is a sacred constitutional moment for us ..

That’s an excellent quote***** for USian civil religion ..

A call to creaate what King calls “a more beloved community”

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Barfield on metaphor —

At a later stage in the evolution of consciousness, we find [the principle of living unity] operative in individual poets, enabling them . . . to intuit relationships which their fellows have forgotten-relationships which they must now express as metaphor. Reality, once self-evident, and therefore not conceptually experienced, but which can now only be reached by an effort of individual mind–this is what is contained in a true poetic metaphor; and every metaphor is “true” only in so far as it contains such a reality, or hints at it. The world, like Dionysus, is torn to pieces by pure intellect, but the poet is Zeus; he has swallowed the heart of the world; and he can reproduce it in a living body.

See here the relationship with Tolkien? with poetry, with HipBone Games?

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Out.