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[ by Charles Cameron — continuing my habit of collecting language, images included, which catch my attention — various forms of magical, alchemical and other evidence that life is but a dream — Calderón de la Barca, la vida es sueño ]
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King’s College To Wit by Thomas Howell Jones

Duel Day is a commemoration of the duel fought between the Duke of Wellington and the Earl of Winchilsea over the founding of King’s College London. The duel itself was fought on 21 March 1829 and the anniversary is celebrated annually around this date.

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Hardball, carnival barker, dueled with men over the honor of women :

Trump: Next Old Hickory or Carnival Barker?

He touches on the potential for letting Obamacare implode, possibly a hardball play with Congress. [ .. ]

While Old Hickory fought the British, whom he hated bitterly, and the Indians, whom white settlers wanted out of the way, dueled with men over the honor of women and rose from being a country lawyer to the president, Trump is a real estate developer turned reality TV star who doesn’t even have the backing of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Kanye plays 3-dumesonal chess with pop culture, Ari Melber, Fallback Friday, The Beat, 04/28/2018::

I sometimes see Kanye as literally playing 3-dimensional pop-culture chess [ .. ]

That’s a dangerous kind of bed of fire to walk on right now [ .. ]

It isn’t a game to play with words like this [ .. ]

So Kanya’s going to keep pushing forward, but he’s got an album to sell, so it’s a game thing [ .. ]

To me, Kanye plays 3-dimensional chess with pop culture. I’ve seen him make dramatic moves that look like he was in check mate, and then he was able to turn it round relatively [ .. ]

I’ve heard there are people behind the scenes, close to making that check mate he may not be able to recover from

eighth-dimensional chess master sorcery

Do Kanye West’s Politics Matter?

That Kanye West finds his ideas intriguing does not surprise me, however. Adams thinks that he, and he alone, truly gets Trump, and comprehends the eighth-dimensional chess master sorcery that accounts for Trump’s appeal. It’s a way to join a mob but also flatter yourself for transcending it. It reminds me very much of a rapper I used to think I knew.

Bargaining Chips, played like a fiddle:

As Two Koreas Talk Peace, Trump’s Bargaining Chips Slip Away

“The United States has been played beautifully, like a fiddle, because you had a different kind of a leader,” Mr. Trump said after meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany at the White House. “We’re not going to be played, O.K.? We’re going to hopefully make a deal; if we don’t, that’s fine.”

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I guess language play — and natsec rhyme — falls within the play & other interesting metaphors rubric:

“Escalate to de-escalate” is catchy, it rhymes, and it rolls off the tongue. Unfortunately, it is also wrong — but not for the reasons experts usually focus on.

Since Russia released its 2014 National Defense Strategy, and especially after the publication of America’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, U.S. officials, pundits, and national security wonks have used the phrase either to describe Russia’s strategy, or as a launching point to criticize that description. Buzz phrases like “escalate to de-escalate” tend to spread through officialdom where they are misunderstood and misused as quickly as they are shared. The problem with the term is not that Russia doesn’t have capacity or plans to use calculated escalation (nuclear or otherwise) to contain or terminate a conflict. It’s that such escalation is only one part of a larger strategic approach, and the focus on Moscow’s nuclear threshold risks missing the forest for the trees.

That’s from War on the Rocks, today, Time to Terminate Escalate to De-Escalate — It’s Escalation Control

A headline from War on the Rocks, Monday 30 April 2018:

DROPPING THE BALL IN THE WESTERN BALKANS: CAN THE WEST PICK IT UP AGAIN?

>>>

That would have been a game changer —
is hot-dogging on this thing ..

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Continuing right here. Every ten additional examples or so, I’ll post & tweet a reminder.

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Guest on Rachel Maddow, 05/01/2018:

FThe goalposts keep changing as to what collusion means.

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Mueller raised possibility of presidential subpoena in meeting with Trump’s legal teamMueller responded that he had another option if Trump declined: He could issue a subpoena for the president to appear before a grand jury, according to four people familiar with the encounter.

Mueller’s warning — the first time he is known to have mentioned a possible subpoena to Trump’s legal team — spurred a sharp retort from John Dowd, then the president’s lead lawyer.

“This isn’t some game,” Dowd said, according to two people with knowledge of his comments. “You are screwing with the work of the president of the United States.”

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Robert Mueller and Co. are playing hardball

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Nunes goes on Laura Ingraham's show, and essentially confirms our story that he doesn't read the documents from Justice. Despite giving him an opportunity to explain, Nunes instead acknowledges Gowdy role and says: "We can play process games all we want." https://t.co/lFRbXz90KP

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) May 5, 2018

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Never underestimate your ability to shoot yourself in the head..
non-denial denial .. non clarification clarification ..
lapdog..
enabled some of these dominos to start falling..
Rudy Giuliani is a loose cannon .. rolling around the Oval Office .. another loose cannon..
a fishing expedition .. a happy hunting ground out there..
four dimensional chess..
is he work horse or show horse..
everybody takes a victory lap ..
they are altogether so different, politics and wrestling..
the Olympics of making things up.. (Ari)
full court press ..
he opens the Pandora’s box just a little bit more.. Dateline
opening Pandora’s box: that is war ..
Giuliano’s cleaning up for Giuliano ..
Stormy playing herself (SNL, ourob)
lawyering involves adversarial combat ..
Amb Chris Hall: he might find a way to dodge the bullet that is pointing right at his head ..
behind the eight-ball
people in this morality play [Ari]
gloves are of .. the stakes are getting higher and the gloves are coming off
Gina Haspel, Iran, and Pay-to-Play with Michael Cohen
Yanked the ball back ..
Each show is separate show, each match is the wrestling card
a pretty good roadmap to a smoking gun .. [slate]
the tentacles of players..
he’s wrong it say it’s illegal .. you need a quid pro quo..
he’s always been a hard-charging associate
when the fish are hidden in the shadows ..
05/10/2018
Clint Watts “dancing round within their terms of service” ..
ignoring the elephant in the room to concentrate on the fleas on the fllorr.. Avenatti

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Giuliani: The special counsel so far seems to think that Comey is Moses, and I happen to think Comey is Judas..

I wouldn’t be an attorney if I did that, George — I wouldd be living in some kind of unreal fantasy world, that everybody tells the truth ..

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Giuliani’s FBI ‘Stormtroopers’ Smear Is the Key to Trump’s Authoritarian Mind-set

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Rachel:

When it came to the US breaking the Iran deal .. Effectively we are grabbing the ball off the field, popping it, and telling everybody we are about to tear gas the pitch. And so it seems unlikely that this game will keep going for long.

Amanpour:

I would describe pulling out of this deal [nuke deal] as possibly the greatest deliberate act of self-harm and self-sabotage in geo-strategic politics in the modern era.

George Will:

Judging by the number of times Pence announces himself “humbled,” he might seem proud of his humility, but that is impossible because he is conspicuously devout and pride is a sin.

Between those two Cabinet meetings, Pence and his retinue flew to Indiana for the purpose of walking out of an Indianapolis Colts football game, thereby demonstrating that football players kneeling during the national anthem are intolerable to someone of Pence’s refined sense of right and wrong.

[ by Charles Cameron — An important article, meaning one with which I largely, emphatically agree ]
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Let me repeat: Jessica Dawson‘s piece for Strategy Bridge is an important article, meaning one with which I largely, emphatically agree — a must-read.

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Prof Dawson writes:

There is a blind spot in U.S. joint doctrine that continually hinders operational planning and strategy development. This blind spot is a failure to account for critical relationships with a person’s conception of god and their community, and how these relationships impact the operational environment.

Let’s just say I was a contributing edtor at Lapido Media until its demise, writing to clue journos in to the religious significance of current events:

Lapido, Venerating Putin: Is Russia’s President the second Prince Vlad?

Lapido, ANALYSIS When laïcité destroys egalité and fraternité

Lapido is essentially countering the same blind spot at the level of journos, and hence the public conversation.

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I haven’t focused on the relationship with community, but I have written frequently on what von Clausewitz would call “morale” in contrast with men and materiel. Prof Dawson addresses this issue:

Understanding religion and society’s role in enabling a society’s use of military force is inherently more difficult than counting the number of weapons systems an enemy has at its disposal. That said, ignoring the people aspect of Clausewitz’s trinity results in an incomplete analysis.

Indeed, I’ve quoted von Clausewitz on the topic:

Essentially, war is fighting, for fighting is the only effective principle in the manifold activities designated as war. Fighting, in turn, is a trial of moral and physical forces through the medium of the latter. Naturally moral strength must not be excluded, for psychological forces exert a decisive in?uence on the elements involved in war.

and:

One might say that the physical seem little more than the wooden hilt, while the moral factors are the precious metal, the real weapons, the finely honed blade.

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And Prof Dawson is interested in “critical nodes” and the mapping of relationships, vide her title:

Relationships with God and Community as Critical Nodes in Center of Gravity Analysis

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This too is an area I am interested in, as evidenced by my borrowing one of my friend JM Berger‘s detailed maps in my post Quant and qualit in regards to “al wala’ wal bara’”:

That’s from JM’s ICCT paper, Countering Islamic State Messaging Through “Linkage-Based” Analysis

Indeed, my HipBone Games are played on graphs as boards, with conceptual moves at their nodes and connections along their edges, see my series On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: twelve &c.

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My specific focus, games aside, has been on notions of apocalypse as expectation, excitation, and exultation — in my view, the ultimate in what Tillich would call “ultimate concerns”.

As an Associate and sometime Principal Researcher with the late Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University, I have enjoyed years of friendship and collaboration with Richard Landes, Stephen O’Leary and other scholars, and contribuuted to the 2015 Boston conference, #GenerationCaliphate: Apocalyptic Hopes, Millennial Dreams and Global Jihad

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I could quote considerably more from Jessica Dawson’s piece, but having indicated some of the ways in which her and my own interests run in parallel, and why that causes me to offer her high praise, I’d like quickly to turn to two areas in which my own specialty in religious studies — new religious movements and apocalyptic — left me wishing for more, or to put it more exactly, for more recent references in her treatment of religious aspects.

Dr Dawson writes of ISIS’ men’s attitudes to their wives disposing of their husbands’ slaves:

This has little to do with the actual teachings of Islam

She also characterizes their actions thus:

They are granted authority and thus power over the people around them through the moral force of pseudo religious declarations.

Some ISIS fighters are no doubt more influenced by mundane considerations and some by religious — but there’s little doubt that those religious considerations are anything but “pseudo religious”. Will McCants‘ book, The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic Stat traces the history of ISIS’ theology from hadith locating the apocalypse in Dabiq through al-Zarqawi and al-Baghdadi to the loss of much of the group’s territory and the expansion of its reach via recruitment of individuals and cells in the west.. leaving little doubt of the “alternate legitimacy” of the group’s theological claims. Graeme Wood‘s Atlantic article, to which Prof Dawson refers us, is excellent but way shorter and necessarily less detailed.

On the Christian front, similarly, eschatology has a role to play, as Prof Dawson recognizes — but instead of referencing a 2005 piece, American Rapture, about the Left Behind series, she might have brought us up to datw with one or both of two excellent religious studies articles:

Julie Ingersoll, Why Trump’s evangelical supporters welcome his move on Jerusalem

Diana Butler Bass, For many evangelicals, Jerusalem is about prophecy, not politics

As their parallel titles suggest, Trump’s decision to move the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem — which received a fair amount of press at the time that may have mentioned such a move would please his evangelical base, but didn’t explore the theology behind such support in any detail — has profound eschatpological implications.

Julie Ingersoll’s book, Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction, is excellent in its focus on the “other side” of the ceontemporary evangelical right, ie Dominionism, whose founding father, RJ Rushdoony was a post-millennialist in contrast to La Haye and the Left Behind books — his followers expect the return of Christ after a thousand year reign of Christian principles, not next week, next month or in the next decade or so.

Sadly, the Dominionist and Dispensationalist (post-millennialist and pre-millennialist) strands in the contemporary Christian right have mixed and mingled, so that it is hard to keep track of who believed in which — or what!

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All the more reason to be grateful for Prof Dawson’s emphasis on the importance of religious knowledge in strategy and policy circles.

Let doctrine (theological) meet and inform doctrine (military)!

[ by Charles Cameron — a yakuza movie shimmering between American and Japanese ]
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Is strategy found here?

In the film, The Outsider, from which I have borrowed the koi quote above — which gives a riverine equivalent of the steady progress open to a pawn in the strict logic of chess — the outsider of the title played by Jared Leto is tatooed with a single koi fish moving up a waterfall, which the woman, enough said, tells him indicates that he is arrogant.

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She, Miyu, played by Shioli Kutsuna, has two koi fish —

The film invites your understanding, needlessly, by explaining.

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Ah well: how a brush pen readied on an ink-stone resembles a knife blade sharpened on a whet-stone.

[ by Charles Cameron — Cambridge Analytica and Guardian logos, HipBone Game boards ]
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A while back, I posted a series of pieces about the felicities of graph-based game-board design. This piece picks up from that series, with a bit of a refresher, and a pointer to the Cambridge Analytica logo.

First, the question arises of what graphs are. A graph, from a mathematical point of view, consists of nodes and edges: nodes are, in this diagram, the red circles, and edges are the lines connecting them:

We know a great deal about the mathematics of graphs, but they underlya vasst repertoire of modern systems, including — for an extreme. complex instance — the design of washing machines:

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Back at least to medieval times, graphs can be found with concepts assigned to their nodes and the reasons connecting those conceptts assigned to their edges. These thre show one Jewish (Kabbalistic) conceptual graph, one graph of the four elements and their relaations, and a Christian ttrinitarian graph:

I have usedsc similar conceptual graphs as the boards of my HipBone Games. SHown herear ethree of my boards, together with a spiffy board by my friend and colleagues Cath Styles for her Sembl games:

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All the above, to show you why all usees of graphs are potentially of interest to me, and why I am particularly interested in the Cambridge Analytica logo (left, below), which offers a graph in the shape of the human brain, and the logo the Guardian devised (right, below), to give visual continuity to their articles about Cambridge Analytica;

I think you can see how the Guardian logo would make a fine HipBone game board for teen Agatha Christie -type games.

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Hey, on complexity — which graphs and diagrams are better at than “linear” verbal explanations — there’s this — not a graph! — from another post of mine — wow!:

Shaping strategy — Constant turbulence and disruption

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Earlier in this series:

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: preliminaries

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: two dazzlers

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: three

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: four

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: five

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: six

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: seven

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: eight

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: nine

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: ten

On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: eleven

[ by Charles Cameron — a face-off between two impulsives, and thoughtful planning at a tabletop exercise ]
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How the hell can Un, with one star and no stripes, hope to trump Trump, with fifty stars and thirteen stripes backing him up?

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Or:

How the hell can Un, with maybe a dozen nukes, one of which might be a hydrogen bomb, and some untested missiles designed to reach anywhere in the continental US, hope to trump Trump, with a stockpile of 1,411 nuclear warheads deployed on 673 ICBMs, SLBMs, and strategic bombers [Wikipedis] and an impressive array of generals, admirals and such, one of whom — Gen. Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs — is positively pushing his way out of the photo-frame into at least simulated warfare with North Korea:

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The simulation in question was described, as far as is visible under a cloak of secrecy, in a recent NYT article titled U.S. Banks on Diplomacy With North Korea, but Moves Ahead on Military Plans:

A classified military exercise last week examined how American troops would mobilize and strike if ordered into a potential war on the Korean Peninsula, even as diplomatic overtures between the North and the Trump administration continue.

The war planning, known as a “tabletop exercise,” was held over several days in Hawaii. It included Gen. Mark A. Milley, the Army’s chief of staff, and Gen. Tony Thomas, the head of Special Operations Command.

Anything that occupies two generals “over several days” plus planning and debriefing is serious business — especially those two generals.

War with North Korea — Hawaii their nuclear targets.

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Oops, the NYT article also features some awkward questions commanders of the US battleforce would face:

How many conventional and Special Operations forces could be deployed, in phases, to target North Korean nuclear sites.

Whether the Army’s 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions could be charged with fighting in tunnels

Exhaustive plans to take down North Korea’s integrated air defenses, allowing American manned and unmanned aircraft into the reclusive country.

Plans for the morbid but necessary details of personnel recovery plans, such as if pilots are shot down, and the evacuation of the dead and wounded.

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And Un considers the very fact of the US President agreeing to meet with the dictator of N Korea, ie Donald Trump with himself, to be a clear and unequivocal demonstration of parity. As CNN puts it:

with the simple fact of the meeting, Kim has already achieved his objective: he’s at the table on the world stage, being taken seriously.

Or MSNBC, in a piece titled On North Korea, Trump gambles from a position of weakness:

Trump has agreed to give Kim Jong-un exactly what he wants. North Korean leaders have sought this kind of meeting for decades because it would necessarily elevate the rogue state: it would show the world that North Korea’s leader is being treated as an equal by the Leader of the Free World.

Equal? Mirror image?

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Nota bene:

China, Japan and Russia have cheered an impending meeting between United States President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as a “significant first step” towards the de-nuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

China, Japan and Russia, India, and obviously South Korea, are all actors with significant interesta in any US – North-Korean diplomacy — giving us a seven-node tug-of-war for our planners to map — and Donald Trump to intuitively grok.