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 — I’m no longer captivated by chyrons, it seems — and for the next week weeks, it’ll be glass bead games at BrownPundits and my extended examination of advertising as magic here ]
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Mind-stuff.. mind-stuff that grabs my attention is what I’ll deliver here
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Baghdadi — not meditating — contemplating, perhaps — more mayhem?
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Another pattern to follow:
It was unclear whether the increase was the result of a shift of Taliban tactics, or just the greatly increased tempo of the war this year, as both sides pushed to improve their positions at the negotiating table.
One thinks — I tend to think — of negotiations as leaning away from warfare and violence and towards peace and reconciliation. My pattern language now needs to encompass negotiations as warfare and violence inducing as well as peace and reconciliation leaning.
For an analytic mind, boggling; for on the ground negotiators, something to bear in mind
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It’s like our scattered space debris, mind-stuff.
As Patanjali says: Yogas Chitta Vritti Nirodha — Great Silence quiets the mind-stuff..
Ah, well..
I’ll do a post on religions that offer analytic methods shortly..
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And on that topic —
I have always wondered — I haven’t been here always, but wot the hell, Archie, as Mehitabel would say — always wondered about the parallelism between koans, ie case law precedents in Chan and Zen Buddhist tradition, and case law precedents in Western jurisprudence>
The Zen koan comes from the Chinese kung-an, meaning a “public case,” as in a legal matter brought before a judge. There are numerous ways in which these koan could be related to law cases. Very straightforwardly, these are public records, the recorded sayings of the early Chan masters that have been passed down and commented upon, just as there may be public legal cases that have authority as precedent and have been commented upon. The koan encounter could be understood as a judgement by a master upon a student based upon the student’s understanding of the “case.” A third way in which the connection could be understood is that the koan tests the student’s understanding of the Dharma. Dharma has many meanings in Buddhism, but one of those meanings is “law.”
Wheee thanks, Jason!
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Nancy Pelosi’s “self-impeachable” is both a wonderful ouroboros and nonsense — a contradiction in terms. Trump’s “investigating the investigators” is far more (semantically) interesting. It’s a bit like that card game where you call out “War” or “Snap when you see both cards are the same..
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I’m keeping an eye out for security implications of climate chamnge, also “climate migrants” which may well become quite a phenomenon:
I certainly think that pic could be interpreted as illustrating the assembling and disassembling of thoughts (2nd Amendment, Don’t Tread on Me, Safety First etc) as a function of weaponizing them.
[ by Charles Camerom — no longer spending much time scanning for chyrons, but there’s still plenty of interest in my feed — note the great quote from A Man for All Seasons ]
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Unbelievable!
From Trump’s 2020 campaign manager:
Loved watching the crowd fill up for the 547th Rally in Green Bay. There has never been and probably never will be a movement like this again. Only God could deliver such a savior to our nation and only God could allow me to help. God bless America! pic.twitter.com/PBata3mB14
Stunning: Clint Watts offers an “life imitating art imitating life” (and I quote) instance on Meet the Press — a short, sharp overview of how Putin trolls the US electorate with malicious intent:
That interview was shot a while back, but is worth revisiting today. Omn May 1st, Watts spoke of a “war game” and it was in searching (unsuccessfully) for that clip that I stumbled on this one.
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Let’s follow that up with a tweet-repeated ouroboros chaser:
It's time to investigate the investigators in this miscarriage of justice: "Ohr’s revelation about his wife adds yet another example of people connected to the Clinton machine flooding the FBI with anti-Trump Russia research during the 2016 election."https://t.co/uevwv43rRV
The flase narrative got out of the gate long before the truth did ..A tic-tac-toe pin for all of the games played by Mnuchin, Barr and Trump ..
impeachment is an explosive undertaking and can ricochet in all sorts of complicated directions ..
Mehdi Hasan: The Democrats bring a knife tom a gun-fight, the Republicans bring a rocket-launcher ..
Charlotte Alter: Buttegeig speaks Democratic with a Republican accent..
Mike Barnickle (re Biden): It’s hideously early in the campaign. I mean, it’s not even spring training, forget the exhibition games that have yet toi be played. It’s very early, so he’s got a big bounce from name recogmnition ..
Rick Wilson: It’s an interesting play (for Dems). I think if they camn draw the arc from nationalism to populism to statism to authoritarianism to Trumpism, they’ve got something there ..
Flannery: We have a crime syndicate in the west wing ..
I think they could have hammered him and sickled him to death ..*****
Chris Matthews, incidentally, is on a roll comparing William Barr‘s situation to that of Roper in A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt. Thomas More reproves Roper for his infidelity with the words:
For Wales? Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. . . but for Wales!
That’s the same Will Roper to whom More addresses his celebrated speech:
nd when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”
Back in 1992, the last time Bill Barr was U.S. attorney general, iconic New York Times writer William Safire referred to him as “Coverup-General Barr” because of his role in burying evidence of then-President George H.W. Bush’s involvement in “Iraqgate” and “Iron-Contra.”
Figliuzzi described the dynamic between Mueller and Barr as one of “a boy scout” (Mueller) versus “a street fighter” (Barr). … “Mueller is a guy who plays by the rules, and he was playing by the rules in this report,” Figliuzzi told me. “He kind of trusts that the system will take care of itself, and he kicks his report over across the street to DOJ. That’s where things go south.”
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Another tweet:
One of the many things I heard Booker say tonight was "Love," in public, is "Justice." He spoke about the 2020 election being a "moral moment."#CoryBooker has risen enormously in my estimation, tonight.
Certainly a striking formulation, that — “Love, in public, is justice..” I heard that too, and had to chew on it, which is why I googled and found this tweet: the one thing this isn’t is conflict-avoidant.
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Okay, here’s a John Bolton triple:
Dexter Filkin‘s a must-read — but his current NYorker piece leads us back to two other striking Bolton headers:
Bolton is hardly my favorite, but drawing the attention of Filkins, Gourevitch and Robin wright is surely a mark of honor of some kind.
[ by Charles Cameron — this post has been lingering while I’ve been slowly adding elements, and with some Bach now firmly in place I think it’s past time to drop it into the slip-stream ]
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This one’s priceless in a Matrioshka, Through the Looking Glass kind of way:
I’m tired of chasing chyrons. If I see stunners, I may bring them here, but I’ll be concentrating on other things.
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I was surprised to overhear the words “perfect sacrifice” in a baseball commentary my room-mate was attendinmg to, but apparently the phrase fits in the context of bunts – what those are, I still don’t know – as well as they do in the context of the Eucharistic liturgy, often considered, eg by Pope John Paul II , as a perfect sacrifice of praise..
What can I say? My ears perked up.
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Three levels of beauty for your illumination:
Lidia Ksiazkiewicz
Lidia Ksiazkiewicz at her instrument:
Lidia Ksiazkiewicz plays Bach’s Fantasia in G major, BWV 572, on the great organ of Laon cathedral in 2012:
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This one’s an almost ouroboros — Chris Matthews on Hardball:
The Democrats don’t know how to play hardball>>
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From the poets — Walt Whitman:
both in and out of the game, and watching
Life, the game, yes. And Shakespeare:
The southern wind
Doth play the trumpet to his purposes,
And by his hollow whistling in the leaves
Foretells a tempest and a blustering day.
Marvelous. Those unexpected words can break through the strands of conventional thought that spin their deadly shroud about us every day.
Within a few hours of Joe Biden’s official presidential announcement, the Justice Democrats, the progressive group behind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s rise to power, brought out the flamethrower.
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So as you see, this is the sort of amount that would have made the first quarter of a chyrons series post a couple of weeks ago, and today it’s all I’ve collected in a week or so. I’m really cutting back on this game, and will be concentrating on other areas..
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Let’s close here with this trio:
That’s the rough number.
That’s just this last week.
And here’s the exact figure, if there’s no margin of error, which seems unlikely..
I’m leaving some terrorism screen-grabs for a later post.
[ by Charles Cameron — Oxford the memory, Edward Said the music critic, WB Yeats and his Tom O’Roughley, Townes Van Zandt in the song of David Broza.. Barr and Aaliyah — four-page letters, kisses .. plus FaallBack, & Wiz Khalifa on my watch [!!] ]
Minefield, yes —
— but also two sides on one stage, so two virtues in the music of ideas:
polyphony — many voices, and
counterpoint, the juxtaposition, clash and resolution of contrary points of view
For war and peace as symphonic, see Edward Said:
When you think about it, when you think about Jew and Palestinian not separately, but as part of a symphony, there is something magnificently imposing about it. A very rich, also very tragic, also in many ways desperate history of extremes – opposites in the Hegelian sense – that is yet to receive its due. So what you are faced with is a kind of sublime grandeur of a series of tragedies, of losses, of sacrifices, of pain that would take the brain of a Bach to figure out. It would require the imagination of someone like Edmund Burke to fathom.
Just a snippet — the first paragraph from the Guardian piece:
Lou Armour is a special needs teacher, an introspective man with a walking stick. If you passed him on the street you probably wouldn’t notice anything about him beyond his limp. But 35 years ago he yomped across the Falkland Islands and ran through a minefield under artillery fire on Mount Harriet. His section killed several Argentinians in a bloody battle and Armour found himself attending to a fatally wounded Argentinian soldier who spoke to him in English about visiting Oxford. He watched as the young man died.
Ah, Oxford.
That’s I’d say, is a very good start for this post.
As I said to Ali Minai, my view is that of WB Yeats in his poem Tom O’Roughley:
‘Though logic choppers rule the town,
And every man and maid and boy
Has marked a distant object down,
An aimless joy is a pure joy,’
Or so did Tom O’Roughley say
That saw the surges running by,
‘And wisdom is a butterfly
And not a gloomy bird of prey.
‘If little planned is little sinned
But little need the grave distres.
What’s dying but a second wind?
How but in zigzag wantonness
Could trumpeter Michael be so brave?’
Or something of that sort he said,
‘And if my dearest friend were dead
I’d dance a measure on his grave.’
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Back to the Mueller probe according to President Trump
:Many, many people were badly hurt by this scam, but more importantly, our country was hurt. Our country was hurt. And they are on artificial respirators right now. They are getting mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
— and back to “little pencil-neck Adam Schiff” aka “Adam Schitt”:
He’s got the smallest, thinnest neck I’ve ever seen. He is not a long-ball hitter, but I saw him today, ‘Well we don’t really know, there still could have been some Russia collusion.’
Sick, sick.. these are sick people and there has to be accountability because it is all lies and they know it’s lies ..
Well then:
That’s an unexpected and welcome follow-up ..
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And so to Trump:
Wildcard*****, a nice, slightly paradoxical example..
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I’m watching Hanna (Amazon), starring the skilled and lovely Esme Creed-Miles:
Life, she is full of variety, no?
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elshi & Ruhle:
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MTP 3/29/2019:
Again, trump, trump, trump..
Rep Jamie Raskin, his way with words:
Attorney General Barr writes letters like Agatha Christie novels, there are more and more mysteries built into each one ..
[Impeachment] it’s the people’s defense against a president who’s acting like a king ..
Katy Tur:
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The Beat, Ari Melber:
First, a stream of chyrons..
Aisha:
I’m dropping this four-page letter and enclosing it with a kiss..
Aside: the things we learn!!
Howard Fineman:
I think he’s part of the team..
Let me use a basketball analogy if you don’t mind.. You know how, at the end of a game when one team thinks it’s ahead and they spread the floor and start tossing the ball around to keep from getting fouled to stop the clock, that’s my interpretation [of Barr’s actions] here..
.. dozens of years of Yale Law School education, and we end at the freak-show tent ..
A pair:
Then there’s a quote from Obama’s Selma Bridge speech:
We are the people Langston Hughes wrote of who “build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how.” We are the people Emerson wrote of, “who for truth and honor’s sake stand fast and suffer long;” who are “never tired, so long as we can see far enough.”
That’s what America is. Not stock photos or airbrushed history, or feeble attempts to define some of us as more American than others.
Fallback, which I generally don’t like too much, but here —
— hunting and shooting a sleeping lion —
If you’re hunting to eat, that’s one thing ..
You want to impress me — go fight that lion with your bare hands, knuckles, teeth — and then come back and talk to me..
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
Best folk religion image — Holy Child, Patron Saint of Gas Thieves
