zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — mostly about beauty — let’s start with apocalypse and end with the blossoms, eh? reverse engineering! ]
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Hey!

Putin’s apocalyptic blackmail

In the Orthodox tradition, the Book of Revelations has not been among the most important texts. Yet there is something positively apocalyptic about the recent speech of the Russian Orthodox Church’s most important convert, Russian President Vladimir Putin. A nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed cruise missile that could circumnavigate the planet avoiding US missile defenses! A nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed submarine drone! And, most of all, a hypersonic “meteorite” too fast for American interceptors, a mighty ognennyi shar, a great “ball of fire”! (Jerry Lee Lewis was not credited, but then Putin’s Russia is not known for overly scrupulous honoring of property rights.)

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Jerry Lee Lewis ? That’s a pop refeerence in an otherwise serious context. Let’s see..

Pop paradise:

Religion (Zen??) in games:

Following the massive initial success of Alto’s Adventure, the team released a major update that added a Zen Mode to the title in 2016, which removed obstacles to create a more relaxing experience for players who simply wanted to drift off into the game world. It was around that time that Cymet moved his family from Vancouver to Toronto to work more closely with the team at Snowman, and he said that the ordeal helped “give me a sense of groundedness in this emotion we’ve tried to capture with the game, of going outside your comfort zone and putting yourself somewhere completely new that’s beautiful and interesting, and trying to find the beauty there.”

IMO, and with ref to the above and to zen, seeking beauty leads to prettiness, whereas seeking truth leads to beauty.

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Placing that game art in a binary context:

Adorno:

Like many émigrés, Adorno was initially disoriented by US mass culture, which had not yet overrun Europe as it would after the war. This disorientation became a principled distrust. He claimed that capitalist popular culture – jazz, cinema, pop songs, and so on – manipulates us into living lives empty of true freedom, and serves only to distort our desires. Popular culture is not the spontaneous expression of the people, but a profit-driven industry – it robs us of our freedom and bends us to conform to its needs for profit.

Scruton:

When Metallica appeared at the 2014 Glastonbury festival there was a wake-up moment of this kind – the recognition that these guys, unlike so many who had performed there, actually had something to say. Yes, there are distinctions of quality, even in the realm of pop.

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Okay, and to close with authentic beauty, art, culture….

A brilliant DoubleQuote in a single tweet:

"I said to the almond tree, ‘Friend, speak to me of God,’ and the almond tree blossomed."
~ Nikos Kazantzakis
?Vincent Van Gogh pic.twitter.com/7yUOUTkXOd

— Moonbeam (@TreasuretheDays) March 3, 2018

Encouragingly, there are just such blossoms outside my window.

[ by Charles Cameron — if Paula White is Christian, must be the season of the witch ]
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Princess (Jared’s) Bride:

It seems that beauty allied with power can add up to (almost) royalty. Consider Princess Ivanka. From the LA Times, Ivanka Trump: Born to legitimize corruption and make the shoddy look cute:

She has the same magic touch with the multitudes of flesh-and-blood rogues who flock to her for redemption. It’s Ivanka who first brought Gen. Michael “Lied to the FBI” Flynn into the administration, according to the New Yorker; she praised him for his “amazing loyalty” and offered him his choice of positions at a transition-team meeting. One person present said, “It was like Princess Ivanka had laid the sword on Flynn’s shoulders and said, ‘Rise and go forth.'”

The laying on of that princess sword seems to be Ivanka’s favorite pastime. In 2006, when she was 25, she toured Moscow with Felix Sater, who in 1998 pleaded guilty to a $40-million stock fraud scheme run by the Russian mafia. She also collaborated with the Soviet-born businessman Tamir Sapir, whose top aide in 2004 pleaded guilty to a racketeering conspiracy with the Gambino crime family.

Redemption, did you get that?

And what a relief to get back to the Gambinos!

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War Games:

Sources:

NYT, U.S. Banks on Diplomacy With North Korea, but Moves Ahead on Military Plans

Twitter, Wargames with @avantgame – at Jewish Community Center

Comment:

Wow, I’m impressed. I’m not quite sure what Dr Jane McGonigal is up to with her war games, but the generals who participated in the table-top exercise in Hawaii simulating a war with North Korea might like to try them.. Gen. Mark A. Milley, the Army’s chief of staff, and Gen. Tony Thomas, the head of Special Operations Command.

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Immortal Trump?

Trump on China’s Xi consolidating power: ‘Maybe we’ll give that a shot some day’

In the closed-door remarks, a recording of which was obtained by CNN, Trump also praised China’s President Xi Jinping for recently consolidating power and extending his potential tenure, musing he wouldn’t mind making such a maneuver himself.
“He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great,” Trump said. “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day.”

The remarks, delivered inside the ballroom at his Mar-a-Lago estate during a lunch and fundraiser, were upbeat, lengthy, and peppered with jokes and laughter

That’s all fun and games. Wait till Xi Jinping goes full Mao:

Oh, ah — the immortality’s not just for Mao, it’s for all of us. ANd Lifton’s thesis is a meditation on the one and the many!

Lifton undertook his book to supply an ingredient which he felt was lacking in current accounts of the Cultural Revolution: namely the link between psychological phenomena and historical framework, between the feeling of individuals and the events taking place around them.

Briefly, Lifton argues that individuals relate to history and to other men by means of symbols. The symbols themselves vary in response to the historical context–different events make different symbols relevant. But their ultimate purpose is to give men a sense of connection with their past and future: to provide a sense of unity with other men and with history–a sense of immortality.

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Christian Today:

Trump adviser Paula White says send money to her for blessings – or face divine consequences

>onald Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White has told people to send her money – ideally their January salary – in order to receive blessings, or face divine consequences. [ .. ]

‘Right now I want you to click on that button, and I want you to honour God with his first fruits offering,’ she said in the video.

‘If God doesn’t divinely step in and intervene, I don’t know what you’re going to face – he does,’ she said. [ .. ]

Explaining the theory behind her appeal for cash, she said: ‘January is the beginning of a new year for us in the Western world. Let us give to God what belongs to him: the first hours of our day, the first month of the year, the first of our increase, the first in every area of our life. It’s devoted…The principle of first fruits is that when you give God the first, he governs the rest and redeems in.’

!!

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By way of explanation?

When I look over my shoulder What do you think I see?
Some other cat looking over His shoulder at me
And he’s strange, very very very strange

Must be the season of the Witch!

[ by Charles Cameron — continued from Playing politics and other games, &c ]
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I’ve been collecting gams and game metaphors applied to politics in Playing politics and other games, &c, but with additional examples surnning to 20 plus comments, and that particular post vanishing below a sea of more recent posts, it’s time to start afresh — hence this post.

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That’s hard to beat, but there are a couple of phrrases I’ve caught in passing..

MTP: “folks have been playing games with their words on this.” ie their attitudes to Trump firing Muellerl

John McLaughlin: “To assure the public there have been no games being played here..”

Chyron on MSNBC: “Blame game?”

New White House security clearance policy could put ‘bull’s eye’ on Kushner

“Alex van der Zwaan wasn’t on anyone’s Bingo card” — Rachel Maddow, 20 Feb 2018

Ari Melber m.06, ouroboros:

“If your bodyguard needs a bodyguard, things are getting heavy; if your lawyer needs a lawyer, things are going down.”

“Starting with that cat-and-mouse game.”

“A rapid set of dominos falling” Chris Hayes, All in, m.16 “A sort of domino effect, Gates tips onto Manafort, Manafor tips onto Trump.”

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It’s almost like a chess board, Mueller has a knight, Flynn .. they’re getting very close to check mate.” m.22

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‘Mueller is playing chess — Trump is playing Donkey Kong’:

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Special Counsel Robert Mueller has filed another indictment against Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, listing multiple charges of tax and bank fraud. The editors of The Masthead, The Atlantic’s premium membership program, dove deep into the workings of Manafort’s impact on U.S. politics in their special corruption issue.

[ by Charles Cameron — may you and I play always among the vertues and against the vices ]
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That we may discern the distance between the demonic and the sanctified, and play accordingly:

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I’m curious about the elongated chess board on which our demon slaughters the very mind of the prayerful monk.

Emily?

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Sources:

Emily Steiner, Twitter

Elizabeth Biggs, Twitter

The monk prays (above, sanctified), the devil slays the monk (below, demonic)

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Ha!

It is four hundred years since Caxton published this book. We may be sure that so pains»taking a man did the best he could with the spelling. The alphabet he employed was inadequate to represent the sounds of the English language, and he had no other guide than the spelling of the scribes, who represented, as well as they could, the pronunciations in use in the several counties in which they lived. In the course of two hundred and fifty years, coming down to the days of Addison and Pope, a considerable degree of uniformity had been obtained, both in pronunciation, by means of travel, and in spelling, by the desire of printers to have a standard orthography for each word, in order to save themselves the trouble of thinking and comparing various orthographies.

That’s from The Game of the Chesse: a Moral Treatise on the Duties of Life … Reprinted which I ran across while searching (via the keywords “moral” and “chesse” for this quote:

Meantime, the king and queen, for recreation’s sake, began to play together. It looked not unlike chesse, only it had other laws, for it was the vertues and vices one against another, where it might be ingeniously discovered with what plots the vices lay in wait for the vertues, and how to re-encounter them again. This was so properly and artificially performed that it were to be wished that we had the like game too.

That’s from The Chymical Marriage of Johann Valentin Andreae, first published in 1616, translated into English by Ezechiel Foxcroft in 1690.

Pray, play most assiduously.

[ by Charles Cameron — war games seeping into non-game so-called real life again ]
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^

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Russia Jammed Phones and GPS in Northern Europe During Massive Military Drills

A loss of GPS coverage in Norway and an outage in cellular and emergency cellular services in Latvia, both are part of a growing and worrying trend of reported electronic warfare, as well as cyber attacks, in and around NATO member states in Europe. The incidents both occurred during the largest Russian military exercises in years, suggesting that the Kremlin may have used these drills to more actively demonstrate its expanding hybrid warfighting techniques, all of which offer ways to harass the alliance and other countries with relatively little risk of setting off an actual conflict.

You got that?

both are part of a growing and worrying trend..

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How about this?

USAF Is Jamming GPS In The Western U.S. For Largest Ever Red Flag Air War Exercise

The year’s first iteration of the USAF’s premier set of aerial war games, known commonly as Red Flag, is kicking off today at Nellis Air Force Base just outside of Las Vegas, but this exercise will be different than any in the past. Not only is it the largest of its kind in the exercise’s 42 year history, but the USAF is going to blackout GPS over the sprawling Nevada Test and Training Range to challenge aircrews and their weaponry under realistic fighting conditions. The tactic will spill over throughout the region, with warnings being posted stating inconsistent GPS service could be experienced by aircrews flying throughout the western United States.

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And / or this?

This is Likely Why the Navy Is Causing a Massive and Mysterious GPS Outage in the Western US

iPcture a giant, invisible, upside-down cone rising up from the desert floor near Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake. It ranges over 500 miles in every direction, covers more than 500,000 square miles in total, and reaches up higher than any civilian aircraft can fly. Inside the cone, GPS-related systems fail to function.

That invisible cone will be a reality this month, at least intermittently, and the FAA is warning pilots that GPS-related systems may fail to work in the area over the next three and a half weeks

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Are both “part of a growing and worrying trend”?