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[ by Charles Cameron — or if not, a single sentence paragraph about politics that Levi-Strauss would have loved to diagram, plus Yikes ]
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Orin Kerr, writing in WaPo today for the Volokh Conspiracy, in a piece titled If I understand the history correctly… wrote:

If I understand the history correctly, in the late 1990s, the President was impeached for lying about a sexual affair by a House of Representatives led by a man who was also then hiding a sexual affair, who was supposed to be replaced by another Congressman who stepped down when forced to reveal that he too was having a sexual affair, which led to the election of a new Speaker of the House who now has been indicted for lying about payments covering up his sexual contact with a boy.

Yikes.

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I’ve provided the full text of the piece so you’ll get the links Prof. Kerr included.

What interests me here, though, is the elegant concision of the piece, with its four parallels and various antitheses or oppositions.

Consider:

It begins with a frame:

If I understand the history correctly,

It then offers its prime example of an errant politician:

in the late 1990s, the President was impeached for lying about a sexual affair

followed by its reversal, as the antagonist takes on the protagonist’s role:

by a House of Representatives led by a man who was also then hiding a sexual affair

followed by a third exemplar of political purity, his ascent to power aborted under parallel circumstances:

who was supposed to be replaced by another Congressman who stepped down when forced to reveal that he too was having a sexual affair,

and a fourth, parallel both by succession and similarity of (alleged) conduct:

which led to the election of a new Speaker of the House who now has been indicted for lying about payments covering up his sexual contact with a boy.

— with the frame closing on the one-word paragraph:

Yikes.

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Between the careful formality of “If I understand the history correctly” and the squeal of “Yikes” we see the distance this recital of, yes, historical events has taken our good professor: from mind to emotion, observation to morality, head to heart.

Bravo!

And the (non-partisan) moral of this story is?

[ by Charles Cameron — 4th & last in a bizarre series [1, 2, 3] — I must confess I prefer the NASA stars to the game world, but Wm. Blake’s world to all the rest ]
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My curiosity today leads me to compare two “represented” universes, each of them pretty much guaranteed — not that I place great credence in guarantees these days — to blow my mind or at least my socks off, and / or to quake my universe!

Here, to assist you in making your own comparison, are two text descriptions of the space photo (upper panel) and the game designs (lower):

My own feeling is that both are less awesome than their respective write-ups suggest: the NASA photo because it’s “awesomeness claim” is purely quantitative, whereas the universe is qualitative first and quantitative second; and the game images because they’re pale pastel imitations of our own world — fantastic, yes, but far from imaginative, to use the terminology Coleridge proposed.

Sources:

Joe Martino, NASA Has Released The Largest Picture Ever Taken. It Will Rock Your Universe

Raffi Khatchadourian, World Without End: Creating a full-scale digital cosmos

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To give us a sense of proportion — one that includes both qualitative and quantitative elements — here are some other images which, along with the ones from NASA and the game, give you a somewhat wider “range of universes” to consider — all of them in fact contained in the one we blog and read in:

The first pair shows two humanly-generated images, one by the visionary artist and poet William Blake, the other by the documentary photographer Dorothea Lange. Realism, meet mythic imagination.

The second pair — aha! — shows two desert sports: one almost archaic in its brutality, the other something akin to post-modern. In the upper panel we glimpse the Afghan national sport of Bukashi, in which the headless carcass of a goat is captured and carried to the goal by terrifying horsemen; in the lower, one of the robot jockeys who have replaced child-jockeys in the camel-racing of Dubai.

Sources:

William Blake, Jacob’s Ladder

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother

L Lukasz, “BUZKASHI” in Mazar-e Sharif

Avax News, Robots replace Child Jockeys

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But let’s be fair to the two first screenshots at the top of the page. Here are the respective videos of the NASA Andromeda megapicture and the Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky for you to consider on their merits —

— remember: there’s no accounting for tastes.. not even mine own.

[ by Charles Cameron — cognitive dissonance at the Draw-a-Prophet demo ]
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Here’s a DoubleQuote in the Wild which takes the form of a single image — I’ve “separated” the two halves to illustrate its nature as a DQ:

As the tweep from whom I took the image (whole, not separated) puts it:

The flag on your arm defeated the symbols on your chest DH – Anti-Islam protesters rally. http://t.co/BkIgYozzHC pic.twitter.com/YgOR5it1bs

— Daniel James (@MrDTJames) May 31, 2015

[ by Charles Cameron — for global perspective ]
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Hoffman and Reinares‘ The Evolution of the Global Terrorist Threat: From 9/11 to Osama bin Laden’s Death offers 700 pages of densely-packed information about global, ans they do mean global, terrorism since 9-11. Contributors include Peter Neumann, Paul Cruickshank, J-P Filiu, Seth Jones, Rohan Gunaranta, Ami Pedahzur, Thomas Hegghammer, C Christine Fair.

Ganor Boaz‘ Global Alert, which I just received, appears to offer its own definition of the topic, then take a refreshingly clean, unsentimental look at the field.

Both are recommended.

[ by Charles Cameron — two reasonably diferent ways of contextualizing the Tao Te Ching for the west ]
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Strange, eh?

I somewhat like Witter Bynner‘s non-literal take on the line in question: “to yield with life solves the insoluble”.

My own carefully ambiguous version: “Chinese meanings can slip through / into obstinate English translators”.

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Sources:

Taoistic Taoism Explained

Tao Te Ching (Dao De Jing) by Lao Tzu (Laozi), Chapter 43

Physicists solve quantum tunneling mystery