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[ by Charles Cameron — if Rich Pickings was 35 and maybe concluded was 34, this would be 35 in what’s clearly an ongoing series, though a bit less intense than it was? ]
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A delirious conspiracist DoubleQuote:

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Miscellanea:

The art of the dodge is a time-honored Washington tradition ..

[W]e all know who tends to fare the worst when the pitchforks come out .. [from Bloomberg: Billionaire Hedge Fund..]

[for the arc collection*****, from They Had It Coming]

But even before the molting, never in my wildest imaginings had I dared to dream that the arc of the moral universe could describe a 90-degree angle and smite down mine enemies with such a hammer fist of fire and fury that even I have had a moment of thinking, Could this be a bit too much?

From Ford Foundation, for sludge collection*****]:

The urge to change the world is normally thwarted by a near-insurmountable barricade of obstacles: failure of imagination, failure of courage, bad governments, bad planning, incompetence, corruption, fecklessness, the laws of nations, the laws of physics, the weight of history, inertia of all sorts, psychological unsuitability on the part of the would-be changer, the resistance of people who would lose from the change, the resistance of people who would benefit from it, the seduction of activities other than world-changing, lack of practical knowledge, lack of political skill, and lack of money. Lack of money is a stubborn obstacle, but not as hopelessly unyielding as some of the others..

[From:The Church’s life-and-death struggle with Santa Muerte]

A Mexico City strFrom eet vendor explained the appeal of Santa Muerte to us by saying: “She understands us because she is a battleaxe like us.”

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Melber 4/10/2019:

… also warned Trump he would be boxed in a canypn ..

[Chuck Schumer] The majority, by taking yet another step to erode that legacy, risks turning this body [the Senate] into a Coliseum of zero-sum in-fighting

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All IN Chris Hayes:

The Justice Department is going to serve as the Roy Cohn for this administration, and that the Attorney General and his deputy are consiglieres rather than representatives of the people of the United States.

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Rachel Maddow:

DoubleQuote, Rachel?

11th Hour, Bryan Wms:

Frank Figliuzzi:

What he [Barr] did today by invoking the spying connection was, he threw what I would call a flash-bang into the room.

Anyone who has been involved or associated with tactical teams or the military will know a flash-bang grenade is designed to disorient and distract, with a flash of light and a loud noise, but it’s not made to take our personnel.

What he did today was to toss a flash-bang grenade into the room at the behest of the President..

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Odds:

He [Barr] is a weapon, not a servant..

Two fighting chyrons:

and:

We shall see — yesterday it was Bannon vs Francis — now Benedict XVI?

And a terrific DoubleQuote!

[ by Charles Cameron — it might be that “This is where politics becomes a blood sport” turns out to be my final entry in the sports metaphor stakes, or the title of a “best of” collection — anyhow, let’s get there ]
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Ari Melber:

Jason Johnson:

It’s good that they finally pulled out the sword of Damocles: if you don’t do this, we’re going to sn=end a subpoena ..

Hardball:

Some in Mueller’s Team See Report as More Damaging to Trump Than Barr Summary

Chris Matthews:

I can understand why Trump plays ball with Netanyahu ..

If that’s a game, Barr is going to be exposed ..

Mar-a-Lago:

CM:

Congressman, what do you make of this? Because I get the sense that Mar-a-Lago has become a highly priced kissing-booth. If you want to get to the President join this club, then you can get relations with this guy, you can meet him on the golf course, you can hang out with him at the first tee, the nineteenth hole, he can be your buddy just for the price of admission. It is a kissing-booth, =tell me the difference?

All In:

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Jane Coaston:

They can’t outrun whatever the facts are forever ..

Chris Hayes:

There’s also a strange expectations game that’s been played here ..

NYT, How Rupert Murdoch’s Empire of Influence Remade the World

NYT, 6 Takeaways From The Times’s Investigation Into Rupert Murdoch and His Family

Rachel Maddow:

Thin pickings yesterday, no doubt because I slept through much of my dialysis session..

And from today:

Stephanie Ruhle:

Adm. James Stavridis:

Craig Melvin:

Two more from my deaktop

O’Donnell 4/4/2019:

Kristan Peters-Hamlin:

There was a pass that was thrown to Congress by the Mueller team with adequate evidence for Congress to make the decision on obstruction, and there was an intercept by Bill Barr and he ran in the exact opposite direction ..

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And just a few from 4/5/2019:

Ari Melber:

If the agents did thoroughly go through those like 14 million files and Michael Cohen now finds a smoking gun or a gatling gun***** and those documents corroborate what Michael Cohen says, this could add rocket fuel to the investigations in DC, EDVA< & Southern District of New York. Possibly. Or it could be a nothingburger. All In Chris Hayes:

The thing that may be biting the most is the thing that brought us to the metaphor***** portion of the news .. and not the subtle kind ..

There’s this thing they do with him where he’s just a private citizen, he’s a taxpayer. It’s not like some metaphysical question about the private Trump and the public. He’s the President of the United States, and hoe doesn’t get to get out of that.

[ cf Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies ]

Jesse Eisinger:

Or as you said, Schrodinger’s Cat type of existence

The tax returns are not the Rosetta Stone that will let us know everything about every source of funding that he’s ever had. He’ll have overlapping LLCs and a Russian doll of corporate structures, no pun intended..

Barbara Boxer [re Joe Biden]:

Do we want the Mike Pence response where he’ll never go to lunch with a woman alone, and he won’t have a woman in his office without keeping a door open, I mean, is that where we’re headed?

Rachel Maddow:

This is a hill [Trump’s tax returns] and people will be willing to die on it ..

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I may have done enough of this metaphor chasing.. maybe do a “best of”.. maybe just taper off..

But this from someone on AM Joy, Sunday 4/7/2019 is too good***** to miss:

This is where politics becomes a blood sport ..

[ by Charles Cameron — threes in knotting, braiding, math and bell ringing — in service to governance, and the recognition of pattern within complexity ]
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One is one and all alone and ever more shall be so..
Two is both duel and duet..
and three:

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Well, those are knots, of the Celtic variety. I cam across those images because Tony Judge pointed me to the animations in a piece he’d written, Exploring Representation of the Tao in 3D: Virtual reality clues to reconciling radical differences, global and otherwise? —

which gets me thinking about thinking in threes —

— which has been an interest of mine for some time, see below —

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And as is always the case with Judge‘s offerings, a plethora of his links called to me, and I wound up taking a look at his paper, Governance as “juggling” — Juggling as “governance”: Dynamics of braiding incommensurable insights for sustainable governance

— incommensurable insights is another topic of considerable interest to me —

— and that in turn brought me to this illustration of two instances of triple thinking about incommensurables from Australia — a triple helix and braiding:

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Which brings us in turn to Borromean Rings and Knots:

Now the question to consider with each and all of these illustrations of threeness is whether they trigger any thoughts about the juggling and hopefully braiding and balancing of incommensurable forces in governance.. okay?

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You’ll have noted that the braiding illustration from the Australian double illustration above is a representation of a juggling pattern. Wikimedia has dozens of such patterns with various numbers of balls, heights to which they are lobbed, &c, — and they’re fascinatingly eye-catching — mesmerizing, in fact.

Take a look at just three of them:

Selection of animations of 3-ball juggling patterns by one juggler
(derived from juggling patterns in Wikipedia)

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I mean:

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Wow, and okay:

Now if a pattern of juggling can be represented as a pattern of braiding, we have a comparable situation to Ada Countess of Lovelace‘s brilliant cross-disciplinary leap of insight that the logical patterns Charles Babbage used to program for his proto-computing Analytical Engine could be represented in the punched cards used by Jacquard looms in the production of patterned fabrics:

James Essinger, Jacquard’s Web

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Am I — is Tony Judge — are we — out on a limb?

Judge offers documentation of the mathematical side of things here:

As indicated by Burkard Polster (The Mathematics of Juggling [excerpt], Monash University, 2003), the diagram above-right shows what the trajectories of juggling the basic 3-ball pattern look like (viewed from above). The three trajectories form the most basic braid. Braids are recognized as important mathematical objects. It has been shown that every braid can be juggled in that sense (Polster, 2003; Matthew Macauley, Braids and Juggling Patterns, 2003; Satyan Devadoss and John Mugno, Juggling braids and links, The Mathematical Intelligencer, 29, 2007). The implications have been further discussed separately (Potential cognitive implications of toroidal helical movement, 2016; Category juggling reframed through visualization dynamics, 2016).

And again, let’s remember Tony Judge‘s reason for his interest in juggling and braiding in the first place:

“juggling” is widely used as a metaphor to describe the challenge of responding to conflicting priorities in governance

Judge has eighteen bibliographic supports for that assertion, including:

Trump Forced to Juggle Syria Response, Rage Over Mueller Probe (WSJ, 13 April 2018)

Trump juggling 75 pending lawsuits with a presidential campaign (CNBC, 27 October 2016)

The art of juggling political values and Trump (WaPo, 13 April 2018)

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Noting the correspondence between juggling — a circus-performer’s art — and braiding — not quite knitting, not quite knotting, and don’t those two words fit well together — an art associated with the decoration of hair and ribbons — I wondered whether there might not be a musical analog in counterpoint, and posted my inquiry on Twitter using this diagram of braiding:

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I was fortunate: Change-ringing, surely very speedily responded to my inquiry:

Change-ringing, surely

The art of change-ringing in British churches and among hand-bell ringers is indeed the classic example of highly constrained and patterned musical counterpoint, so I happily Googled away in search of a change-ringing pattern comparable to my braiding patternc[left side, below], and came across the pattern [right side] in a page on the Cambridge Surprise Minor changes:

Just Knecht, too, had some interesting observations & questions..

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Metaphor, analogy, parallelism — these are avenues into the creative process in general, and threeness analogies and metaphors interrupt our usual binary cognitive processing in a way that enhances our capacity to comprehend complexity.

I’m therefore offering this post to Ali Minai and Mike Sellers, in the hope that it will serve as a provocation to their already advanced thinking about systems dynamics. Tony Judge, obviously enough, it’s also a tribute to you…

Previous posts of mine with threeness as a topic include

Of games III: Rock, Paper, Tank

Numbers by the numbers: three / pt 1

Spectacularly non-obvious, I: Elkus on strategy & games

Spectacularly non-obvious, 2: threeness games

Numbers by the numbers: three .. in Congress

Spectacular illustration of a game of three

Threeness games — some back-up materials

{ 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 — including an intermezzo with Bach’s links with Mendelssohn — as usual, quite a diverse haul ]
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Nicolle:

There are cracks in the frenzied spin from the White House around the Barr summary of the as-yet-unreleased Mueller report. As the President tracks down axes to grind, consensus is building around Robert Mueller’s refused to exonerate the President in the obstruction of justice investigation ..

Joyce Vance:

We’ve seen all these dots out in the pubic domain, indications of obstruction, and apparently Mueller wasn’t able to connect them, and the question is, Why?

Ari:

You just can’t write a book-report for a book you haven’t read ..

Disclosure: You can. I have.

Here’s a weird sequence..

And if that isn’t weird enough..

Okay, a twinning once I get the transcript: chyrons “Dem grills” / “bip[artisan rebuke”

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A move I want to watch, and you may too: Hotel Mumbai:

Well, you know, ads intervene in even the best paid programming of mice and men .. and, you know, trailers are ads..

And BTW, the Roger Ebert reviewer wrote:

I watched and wrestled with Anthony Maras’ searing, startlingly confident debut “Hotel Mumbai,” where every fatal bullet fired out of the ruthless terrorists’ semi-automatic weapons hit me at my core.

That’s screen-to-viewer violence, as when the heaalights of a car sweeping up thr movie drive suddenly swerve and blind you..

Back to Hardball:

Regarding his work as a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, Chris Matthews describes

The most honest and moral man, who honored the call of the prophet

Matthews opening clip:

Jumping over the Barr — let’splay Hardball

Comey:

Chris Matthews, quoting him:

.. all the smoke, if you will, of a deal between the President’s people and the Russians, all the interactions between them, he said — imagine if Obama, in a parallel universe, had those kinds of relationships with the Iranians, would you think they might have investigated it?

Pause.

Trump, a brief essay in turning the other cheek hitting back:

One of the things you should do in terms of success: If somebody hits you, you’ve got to hit ’em back five times harder than they ever thought possible. You’ve got to get even. Get even. And the reason, the reason you do, is so important…The reason you do, you have to do it, because if they do that to you, you have to leave a telltale sign that they just can’t take advantage of you. It’s not so much for the person, which does make you feel good, to be honest with you, I’ve done it many times. But other people watch and you know they say, “Well, let’s leave Trump alone,” or “Let’s leave this one,” or “Doris, let’s leave her alone. They fight too hard.” I say it, and it’s so important. You have to, you have to hit back. You have to hit back.

Times two:

Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe it.

As a motto:

My motto is: Always get even. When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades.

Chris M:

He [DJT] goes after Adam Schiff .. says, He couldn’t hit a drive 50 yards..

I’m not sure, but today’s [3/29] DJT quote, “he’s not a long ball hitter” may belong here as a second shoe dropping? — or is it a different aport and different target?

Matthews, on healthcare:

Trump is walking right into that Gatling gun***** of defeat — why is he doing this?

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Okay game of glass beads players, HipBone-style — here’s the Bach-Mendelssohn graph for your consideration:

And –I’m missing one name, which may be in the video — Bach, Mendelssohn and the Saint Matthew Passion:

— a direct line, as I understand it, of teachers and pupils from Bach to Mendelssohn..

Fox inserts:

Matthews:

My morning doppelgänger Joe Scarborough ..

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Ok, a few loose quotes. I’m looking for Elizabeth Warren using the phrase “war of ideas” but the closest I could find was:

This is the fight of our lives. The fight to build an America that works for everyone, not just the wealthy and the well-connected. It won’t be easy. But united by our values, we can make big, structural change. We can raise our voices together until this fight is won.

Fight of our lives is as strong as fight metaphors get without adding details — Queensbury Rules boxing, Mixed Martial Arts in the Hexagon, a Jagger-style street-fighting man?

This one has been quoted often enough to fade into the woodwork:

The budget is a moral document.

A missing chyron — when people post videos of MSNBC shows, and probably other news channels too, they often leave off the last 5 minutes [sad face] — Green New Deal ignites firestorm ..

O’Donnell 3/28/2019:

.. the suspended animation as we wait for the actual Mueller report ..

Good one: suspended animation*****.

Unknown, 3/28 at 10.17:

Go to present day baseball, stay on the sidelines, stay out of it ..

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This is an oldie, but I saw it today and it’s a matter of concern for me as I deal with pain from amputations & neuropathy:

Patrick Radden Keefe, The Family That Built an Empire of Pain

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I’ll close with this tweet —

Congressman Adam Schiff, who spent two years knowingly and unlawfully lying and leaking, should be forced to resign from Congress!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 28, 2019

— and this speech in response to DJT’s attack by Adam Schiff —

— plus this in commentary, from Lawrence O’Donnell:

This is just Kabuki theater, they have no power to remove Adam Schiff from his position ..

Oiut.