zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — also lots from Friday March 22nd, more, and the Barr comment on Mueller Report breaks, March 24th ]
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Let’s start with the weirdest tweet ever:

That’s a crowd-sized tweet, y’see, and in the crowd-sized small print it says:

He didn’t tweet it, he actually said it.

Take a look at the same image full-sized — full photo-sized, here.

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Unpredictable weather:

Okay, that’s my excuse for a NASA DoubleQuote:

Here’s what Joshua Stevens of NASA Earth Observatory says in the caption:

Several communities west of Omaha (between the Elkhorn and Platte Rivers) either flooded or temporarily became islands as floodwaters encroached from both sides. One third of Offutt Air Force Base was inundated and 30 buildings were damaged, according to news reports. Rising flood waters forced people in dozens of communities to evacuate.

Wha??

Bob Dylan to the point:

A change in the weather is known to be extreme

You’re A Big Girl Now.

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Okay, down to mores serious business..

Frank Figliuzzi, former FBI Assistant Director for Counterintelligence, made a fascinating and provocative suggestion to Nicolle Wallace yesterday, and I’ll offer here my transcription and some comments:

To go back to this notion, and the clip of him {The President] saying the American people won’t accept this {Mueller results &c] because these are people who were not elected.. Let’s focus on that. Do you know what that sounds a lot like to most law enforcement officers, this notion that you can’t abide by anything by anyone who has not been elected? The Sovereign Citizen‘s movement.

These are people who, when they get pulled over by the police, shoot the police officer. Why? The police officers were not elected. They recognize only the sheriff. They don’t pay taxes, right? We are essentially seeing the President as a Sovereign Citizen, not recognizing the authority of anyone who wan’t elected. It’s a dangerous philosophy.

He’s going to go with that theme that only elected officials can decide his fate, and there’s going to be a substantial part of the American public that’s going to buy into that..

The Sovereign Citizen Movement was featured in this now-archived FBI page:

Sovereign citizens are anti-government extremists who believe that even though they physically reside in this country, they are separate or “sovereign” from the United States. As a result, they believe they don’t have to answer to any government authority, including courts, taxing entities, motor vehicle departments, or law enforcement.

This causes all kinds of problems—and crimes. For example, many sovereign citizens don’t pay their taxes. They hold illegal courts that issue warrants for judges and police officers. They clog up the court system with frivolous lawsuits and liens against public officials to harass them. And they use fake money orders, personal checks, and the like at government agencies, banks, and businesses.

That’s just the beginning. Not every action taken in the name of the sovereign citizen ideology is a crime, but the list of illegal actions committed by these groups, cells, and individuals is extensive (and puts them squarely on our radar). In addition to the above, sovereign citizens:

Commit murder and physical assault;

Threaten judges, law enforcement professionals, and government personnel;

Impersonate police officers and diplomats;

Use fake currency, passports, license plates, and driver’s licenses; and

Engineer various white-collar scams, including mortgage fraud and so-called “redemption” schemes.

Sovereign Citizenship, is very like a religion –n but the sort of religion where the dogma is loose, and each member pretty much defines their own version. Catholics might recognize this as cafeteria Catholicism, but Pentecostals with each one informed by individual inspiritation strikes me as a more apt comparative.

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Just caught this from late 2018:

Natasha Bertrand, The Eerie Parallels Between Trump and the Watergate ‘Road Map’
Lawmakers thought Nixon’s gathering of inside information about the Watergate probe from DOJ was an impeachable offense:

Nearly 45 years ago, the House Judiciary Committee concluded that President Richard Nixon’s contact with high-level Justice Department officials overseeing the Watergate investigation, detailed in a 62-page “road map” of evidence collected by prosecutors in 1972–73, amounted to an impeachable misuse of executive power.

A half century later, the FBI’s former top lawyer, Jim Baker—a close friend and associate of fired FBI Director James Comey—is laying out parallels, albeit subtly, to President Donald Trump’s interactions with the law-enforcement officials who have been investigating him and his campaign team since July 2016.

Parallels, subtly drawn: from a geometrical perspective, parallels are’t subtle, they’r exact — but parallels as a metaphor for similarities in patterning are all the better for subtlety.

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running (in an election), off the hook (wrt prosecution), — these are among the sports metaphors for politics that are so obvious, so basic that it’s barely worth noting them — and yet they’re bassic to more detailed metaphors we’re very interested in.

and then there are the images I catch,but not the sentences they’re embedded in, let alone the paragraphs.. %strike)Brennan saying “firestorm” at a moment when the TIVO or whatever captured the feed had a hiccup), deliberate or otherwise.. Joy of SM Joy’s “spiked the ball at the fifty yard line”*****, for instance, was a fleeting capture of an often repeated basic phrase, “spiked the ball” which would be better caught in a more detailed context..

A quick Melber chyron before I lose it, at 22:

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Hardball:

Chris Matthews: all these dots we are now to believe don’t connect ..
Chris Matthews: I could see the President announcing in two or three weeks, I split the double header. I got off collusion, all they’ve got me on is this argument about obstruction, by the way I’m allowed to obstruct if I’m innocent ..
should they feel they just skipped justice?
43 stars / constellation .. [ a nice para — transcript? ]
Chris Matthews: it’s the politburo ..
Chris Matthews:

The Democrats have been riding this camel for a lot of miles through the desert, waiting for an explosive report that would decide whether the President did something impeachable or not ..

All In, Chris Hayes:

Julia Ainsley:

And then this is the part I think is the most magical. At five o’clock, the congressional liaison at the Justice Department knew his job would be to go brief the committees, but they didn’t want to have any jealousy about who might get this first and how this might go down, so they dispersed a team to the Democrat and Republican side of both the House and the Senate Judiciary, to make sure that the letter .. was put down in front of those committees, all four, Republican and Democrat, Senate and House, Judiciary at the exact same time, five o’clock..

Neil Katyal:

And now Mueller is really like a relay racer, handing off the baton to other folks..

Anna Galliard:

Well, boy, it’s one of those moments where you have to walk & chew gum & juggle. & fight for the soul of democracy all at the same time ..

Carol Lam: a Japanese Tea ceremony .. [transcript?]

Rachel 3-22

51-2: chuck rosenberg: I think this is far too early for Mr Corsi to be dancing in the end-zone ..*****
@58 or 50?, katyal: lanes & batons ..
the mueller probe is officially over, and the torch has been handed to .. cf baton

MTP (3-22?)

brennan: I think Bob Mueller understands the firestorm that this report was, you know, going to be out into ..
nicolle w: andy mccabe .. [distorted] .. a tree house ..
ari m: he’s a wild-card here, who could ..
graphic of mueller investigation ..
nicolle: the earth could change under our feet ..
he had access to five-eyes intel ..
ari: i got the football and i might be passing lots of it by this weekend ..
katyal: we generally don’t have secret books in this country ..
meacham: will there be a MAGA pitchfork rebellion?

AM Joy 3-23:

sat am: malcolm nance: koresh-style . [transcript?]

AM Joy 3-24

and not dropped, like a nuclear bomb, on the white house, on friday ..

59 or 00: over on Earth II or Fox News ..

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Listen up:
Here’s the breaking news of Barr’s comments on & quotes from Mueller’s report, Sunday 3/24/2019, pm:

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Two comments summing up this remarkable day:

MSNBC, commentator unknown:

This is a very good day for the President, and they’ll be spiking the football from here to the election, likely..

Barr’s letter to Congress:

The Special Counsel states that ‘while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.’

[ by Charles Cameron — Richard Nixon, Roger Stone, defeat signaling itself as victory — and then there’s Sir Winston Churchill ]
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Back then or recently, we’ve all seen the victory sign that President Nixon gave before climbing into the presidential helicopter for his final departure from the White House and the presidency:

By now, we’ve all been shown Roger Stone‘s back, with Nixon‘s portrait tattooed on it, and know that Nixon was Stone’s hero, and that Stone played what Snopes calls a “consequential role” — though not enough to qualify him as an “advisor” — in Nixon’s re-election campaign, 1972.

And we’ve seen Roger Stone, just the other day, emerging from court and giving an exultant copy of that Nixon victory sign. It would be all too easy to juxtapose the two, and claim a DoubleQuote — while it also seems just a little strange not to note it..

Maybe this version of Stone‘s salute — surrounded and indeed haloed by Nixon memorabilia — is sufficiently different to cause some measure of surprise or delight.

I can’t hope for an in-drawn breath on this one — but a quiet chuckle from some of you, perhaps?

Or..

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Or how about the great original, Winston Churchill?

Howzzat for a DoubleQuote with Richard Nixon. Nixon’s sign is victory in defeat — Churchill’s is victory en route to Victory!

[ by Charles Cameron — well, three — what I read on FB, and what Chinese AI can now deduce about me ]
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First:

Carla Cahill‘s catch, I think, speaks for itself — the super blood wolf moon caught at exactly the right moment:

Carla writes:

Okay, I saw this jet coming, so I acted fast and got it along with the Blood, Wolf, Blue, Eclipse Moon!

The photographer’s gift is eternal alertness.

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Second:

This DoubleQuote response to the #tenyearchallrnge showing a dying coral reef, via John Kellden and March for Science:

Friend Marshall Massey contributed this example:

I somehow suspect the photographer of the coral reef — the Great Barrier Reef? — didn’t mark the exact few “leaves” of coral he photographed ten years earlier, and then returned to those exact few leaves ten years later — I imagine he may have returned to the same rough spot where he — or she, why do I suppose a he? — had taken her first shot, and found a similar spot to take the second.

Or were there in fact two photographers? The similarity of the two photos almost convinces me of a single photographer with his eye on the same exact sport for years — his or her wife, lover or friends bringing sandwiches every day for ten years, sleepless nights under a cold moon..

Except both photos were presumably taken by a diver or divers, underwater..

Ah, the human mind!

And the forest / mine pair — were they taken at the same spot, roughly the same spot — or close enough to make a point, maybe a few miles apart, with the second shot positioned to include the truck..?

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Third:

This was too rich to omit. Ali Minai wrote:

I don’t read or speak Urdu, so knowing Ali is an AI expert, I asked for translations from two AIs. FB’s in-house translator gave me:

It’s very short of the dead country.
The ironic is the same, yooo change.

Google Translate gave me:

History is very short of my country
Satyam is the same, the stars keep changing

Okay, those two give me state of the art, readily available AI capabilities. I then asked Ali how he would translate the couplet into English.. and gave my own best guess, sticking my neck out and working from similarities between the two AI versions:

History short-changes my native land —
ah, but truth’s the same, as changeable as the stars.

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Here’s Ali’s very gracious response:

Aha! Sense at last — English sense, that is.

I think this entire episode is a living, breathing testament to the state of the art in intelligence — artificial and embodied. Way to go, Ali Minai

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Chinese AI looking for vulnerabilities to exploit will now think I’m an Urdu speaker, because I commented on Ali Minai‘s Urdu post. And ZP’s version of WordPress couldn’t even render Ali’s couplet except as:

??? ??? ?? ??? ????? ?? ?? ?????
??? ??? ??? ????? ????? ???? ???

— which captures my own sentiment when I first saw Ali‘s post exactly..

All in all, a rich morning’s education!

[ by Charles Cameron — i continue in the opinion that limina, thresholds borders, have an archetypal importance that transcends and is embodied in individual cases ]
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With the Wall the dominating issue of the current US government shutdown, tracking the penumbra of borders is all the more important: things look very different when you squint at them.

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Previous posts in this topic area:

Zenpundit, Liminality II: the serious part

Zenpundit, The Korean border / no border dance

Zenpundit, Borders, limina and unity

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Alexis Madrigal, A Border Is Not a Wall:

Borders are an invention, and not even an especially old one. Predated by the printing press by a good 200 years, borders are constantly under revision. Even the zone of a border itself, the Supreme Court has held, extends far beyond the technical outline of a nation. Imagine a border as the human-made thing that it is, and it’s no longer surprising that it takes a multitude of forms: a line on a map, a fence, a bundle of legal agreements, a set of sensors, a room in an airport, a metaphor.

As Elia Zureik and Mark B. Salter explain in a book on policing, a controlled border creates the notion that domestic space is safe. Protecting “the border” safeguards the home, the family, and a way of life. This idea of safety is so potent that it has shut down the United States government.

But the border itself—the line on a map, or the gate at a crossing—isn’t what’s at issue; it’s the idea of the border, a membrane that defines a nation while maximizing its market power.

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Humanitarian concerns:

Dr John Sullivan‘s paper, Determining Reasonable and Proportional Use of Tear Gas offers a number of provocative insights, including the prohibition on the use of tear gases (CN> CS< CR), pepper spray (OC, capsicum), and sleeping gas on battlefields -- provocative since we normally think of battlefields as "worse" than peacetime situations, and thus that what's prohibited in wartime should be so a fortiori in times poof peace..

Here’s the border-specific instance / comment that caught my eye:

In the border control setting, the recent use of tear gas by CBP agents against migrants seeking asylum at the San Ysidro port of entry has been criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), among others. The cross-border issues are also controversial and Mexico has demanded an investigation into the use of nonlethal weapons in the Tijuana incident.

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In another post I hope will follow quickly on the heels of this one, I quote MSNBC host Bryan WIlliams telling Jon Meacham:

if you’re going to clear those better angels of yours fo takeoff, remember the air traffic controllers are working without salaries..

That’s an interesting juxtaposition if you think about it: angels and air traffic controllers f unction in two different above-earth atmospheres — heaven and sky, respectively — which used to be one at a time when myth and history were one, astrology and astronomy, alchemy and chemistry.

Might we say there’s now a border between heaven and sky? If so, that next post can be considered an entry in this series, too.

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Addendum, 1/15/2019:

An excellent set of photos under that title educates us via our visual sensibility on the history and variety of walls:

The current debate in the United States about building up and reinforcing the border wall with Mexico may have distinctly American roots, but the problems, and the controversial solutions, are global. Growing numbers of immigrants, terrorist activity, continued drug trafficking, and protracted wars have sparked the construction of temporary and permanent border barriers in many regions worldwide.

Recommended!

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Additional addendum:

Ha, yes!

[ by Charles Cameron — next in the long series beginning with sports and game metaphors, and extending to include miscellaneous memorable items — nb, includes a Tibhirine section, Jim Gant pls note ]
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Here’s a DoubleQuote in images of considerable interest, from David Metcalfe — with the esteemed William Dalrynple DoubleQuoting goddesses in Kerala:

“… when the goddesses visit each other, the sacrifice in the church is just like the one we have here…”

The Virgin Mary and goddess Bhagavati, sisters and goddesses – @DalrympleWill on Christianity in India:https://t.co/OZUfsJVTMf

Link courtesy of @hipbonegamer pic.twitter.com/gS6XIGGXHv

— David Metcalfe (@davidbmetcalfe) December 9, 2018

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Ancilliary to my interest in mapping complex realities..

My @tapestryconf talk is now in video form: A biased tour of the uncertainty visualization zoo. If you liked the version with just slides, you'll love (?) the version with me talking over slides 🙂 https://t.co/hSdczZlgKW

— Matthew Kay (@mjskay) December 7, 2018

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First “siege warfare” metaphor:

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Something to read alongside John Kiser‘s superb The Monks of Tibhirine: Faith, Love, and Terror in Algeria :

For what I mean by the "issues" in the Trappist monks case in #Algeria, see here: https://t.co/DIXBkV2cGs

— Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) December 9, 2018

For what I mean by the "issues" in the Trappist monks case in #Algeria, see here: https://t.co/DIXBkV2cGs

— Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) December 9, 2018

I would be most happy to publish any comments John Kiser has on Kyle Orton‘s blog post, Algeria’s ‘Years of Blood’: Not Quite What They Seem on ZP should he or Jim Gant notice this somewhat obscure entry..

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Good grief:

Irish woman who married ghost of 300-year-old pirate says they have split up https://t.co/yuDeiiGkKB via @theirishpost

— Hassan Hassan (@hxhassan) December 9, 2018

Key comment:

I will explain all in due course but for now all I want to say is be VERY careful when dabbling in spirituality, it’s not something to mess with.

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And how’s this?

Trump Channels the Worst of China to Beat China

A double ouroboros, methinks: the Worst of China to Beat China, arguably, and self-defeating, axiomatically, no?

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Venkatesh Rao, Quiver Doodles:

I don’t know if this is still true, but I once read about exploited workers in the ship-breaking industry who were worked so hard, and paid so little, they could not even afford to buy enough calories to sustain themselves. They were slowly starving to death. I call this phenomenon entropic ruin, a generalization of the idea of gambler’s ruin to open-ended games that can be non-zero-sum and need not involve gambling. In this case, it’s a deterministic death march. If you systematically consume fewer calories than you expend long term, you will die a premature death.

Via John Kellden

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Did Venkatesh mention “the idea of gambler’s ruin“? How about nuns’ ruin as a subset?

Two nuns allegedly stole $500,000 for trips to Las Vegas

We do know that they had a pattern of going on trips, we do know they had a pattern of going to casinos, and the reality is, they used the account as their personal account,” Marge Graf, an attorney representing St. James, told a group of parents at a meeting last Monday night, according to the Beach Reporter.”

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Mask dancers, Bhutan:

21 Breathtaking Photos Of Isolated Tribes From All Around The World

The dancers are gorgeous, but look to the left and see the monasteries perched on plateaus in a towering rock-face..

I’m pretty sure “isolated tribes” are of particular interest about now because of the evangelical boundary-pusher killed (martyred? now there’s a koan) because he hoped to bring the gospel to Andaman tribal peoples whose isolation is protected by the Indian government.. see my tweet:

"He reprimands himself for removing the arrow that was shot into his waterproof Bible. He should have kept it, he wrote. Instead, he handed it back to the boy who shot at him, then paddled away." https://t.co/cfett1cBRb
John Chau’s Death on North Sentinel Island ..

— hipbonegamer (@hipbonegamer) December 9, 2018

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A whole lot more..

This Nancy Pelosi chyron, for instance:

Which brings me to #2 below:

— with #3 also deserving a metaphor-mention..

And we might as well go for the revolt chyron here:

And that in turn allows for a splendid graphic with both metaphorical and real resonance..

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That should be enough. I’ll collect further items of interest in the comments section.