[ by Charles Cameron — President Donald Trump Legal Team Loses Ty Cobb (And His Mustache) | MTP Daily | MSNBC ]
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I just have to give you this DoubleQuote (visual) with verbal accompaniment taking the form of a ratio (a : b :: a* : b*) — and it’s politics, current affairs, natsec (Bolton) and law (Cobb), and even (very Shakespearean, this) exits and entrances…
And here’s the ratio, as expressed on MSNBC by Chuck Todd on Meet the Press Daily:
But seriously, Bolton is to Cobb as miniature golf is to the Masters — similar — but really — not really
That’s simply delicious.
Here’s the clip:
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If you’re me, trolling the online waves for DoubleQuotes, game metaphors and natsec, that’s a trifecta at the very least. And I just had to give it its own post.
As Chuck Todd put sit to Ari Melber:
Well, y’know, hey, you gotta entertain yourself somehoe, some days.
Fascinating post by B.J. Campbell, a stormwater hydrologist who crunches numbers for risk probabilities of flooding, who applies his tools to a simple (very simple) historical data set (hat tip Scholar’s Stage ):
….While we don’t have any good sources of data on how often zombies take over the world, we definitely have good sources of data on when the group of people on the piece of dirt we currently call the USA attempt to overthrow the ruling government. It’s happened twice since colonization. The first one, the American Revolution, succeeded. The second one, the Civil War, failed. But they are both qualifying events. Now we can do math.
Stepping through this, the average year for colony establishment is 1678, which is 340 years ago. Two qualifying events in 340 years is a 0.5882% annual chance of nationwide violent revolution against the ruling government. Do the same math as we did above with the floodplains, in precisely the same way, and we see a 37% chance that any American of average life expectancy will experience at least one nationwide violent revolution.
This is a bigger chance than your floodplain-bound home flooding during your mortgage.
Note, by using the American Revolution and the Civil War, Campbell has adopted an extremely conservative data position. Other events that would meet the threshold would include Bacon’s rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion and John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry. Possibly meriting inclusion would be Aaron Burr’s Conspiracy, Nat Turner’s Revolt and the Nullification Crisis.
….In 2010, 8.5 million tourists visited Syria, accounting for 14% of their entire GDP. Eight years later, they have almost half a million dead citizens, and ten million more displaced into Europe. They didn’t see this coming, because if they did, they would have fled sooner. Nobody notices the signs of impending doom unless they’re looking carefully.Further, the elites of a nation rarely take it on the chin. They can hop on a plane. The poor, disenfranchised, and defenseless experience the preponderance of the suffering, violence, and death. They’re the ones that should be worried. Pretend you’re someone with your eyes on the horizon. What would you be looking for, exactly? Increasing partisanship. Civil disorder. Coup rhetoric. A widening wealth gap. A further entrenching oligarchy. Dysfunctional governance. The rise of violent extremist ideologies such as Nazism and Communism. Violent street protests. People marching with masks and dressing like the Italian Blackshirts. Attempts at large scale political assassination. Any one of those might not necessarily be the canary in the coal mine, but all of them in aggregate might be alarming to someone with their eyes on the horizon. Someone with disproportionate faith in the state is naturally inclined to disregard these sorts of events as a cognitive bias, while someone with little faith in the state might take these signs to mean they should buy a few more boxes of ammunition.
Americans have been insulated from untoward events such as civil wars, famines, coups, epidemics and insurgencies for so long that they forget that such things are accepted as normal if distant risks by most people on Earth. Whether you wish to dispute Mr. Campbell’s odds or reasoning in his scenario the chances are and remain non-zero.
[ by Charles Cameron — a quick dip into the news, the Koreas, Gaza and Israel, Tijuana and San Diego ]
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At the Korean border, axes as weapons:
In 1976, American soldiers guarding the border between North and South Korea were given what seemed like a simple task: trim a poplar tree blocking the view of a United Nations command post within the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, that had separated the two countries since the end of the Korean War.
[ .. ]
But after 10 or 15 minutes, a North Korean officer ordered the tree-trimming to stop. When the Americans refused, the North Koreans sent for reinforcements.
“When they arrived … the North Koreans suddenly attacked, killing the two U.S. officers and injuring four Americans and four South Koreans,” Don Oberdorfer reported for The Washington Post. “Witnesses said the North Koreans used the axes intended for tree-trimming as their weapons.”
The poplar incident nearly started a second war between North Korea and the United States, which launched a massive military operation that involved hundreds of troops, B-52 bombers, fighter jets and an aircraft carrier. It was dubbed Operation Paul Bunyan, after the giant lumberjack of American folklore./>
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At the Israeli border, death is equal to life?
Say what you will about root causes and immediate ones — about incitement and militancy, about siege and control, about who did what first to whom — one thing is clear. More than a decade of deprivation and desperation, with little hope of relief, has led thousands of young Gazans to throw themselves into a protest that few, if any, think can actually achieve its stated goal: a return to the homes in what is now Israel that their forebears left behind in 1948.
In five weeks of protests, 46 people have been killed, and hundreds more have been badly wounded, according to the Gaza health ministry.
[ .. ]
“It doesn’t matter to me if they shoot me or not,” he said in a quiet moment inside his family’s tent. “Death or life — it’s the same thing.”
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After 3,000 miles, the American border:
A long, grueling journey gave way to what could be a long, uncertain asylum process Sunday as a caravan of immigrants finally reached the border between the United States and Mexico, setting up a dramatic moment and a test of President Trump’s anti-immigrant politics.
More than 150 migrants, part of a caravan that once numbered about 1,200 and headed north in March from Mexico’s border with Guatemala, were prepared to seek asylum from United States immigration officials.
But in what was likely to be one of many curves on the road, the migrants were told Sunday afternoon that the immigration officials could not process their claims, and they would have to spend the night on the Mexican side of the border.
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When I was yet a boy, I was sent out with a companion, both of us armed with .303 rifles dating back to World War Zero, to guard the grounds of our school, Wellington College, named for the Iron Duke, from Frank Mitchell aka “The Mad Axeman”, named for his murder rampage, who had escaped a couple of hours earlier from Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane, named for its location and inmates, whose grounds were near our own in the scrublands near Sandhurst, the British West Point, with some sort of common geist haunting the three establishments.
My mild afright patrolling for the Axeman — if I confronted him, should I cry out “Stand and deliver” or “Who goes there”?? — can hardly compare with the terror inspired by North Korean troops equipped with axes..
Nor can my six year term as a boarder at Wellington, where I was once beaten — four, I think, with a bamboo cane — for doing the Times crossword puzzle in preference to my maths homework, possibly compare with the sense of confinement experienced by the Gaza Palestinians..
San Diego beaches, however, I have some little experience of — that’s San Diego beach, US of A to the right of the border wall in the photo above; to the left of the wall, however, it’s Tijuana beach, Mexico — and as Rudyard Kipling might have said, “seldom, if ever, the twain shall meet”.
[ 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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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 :
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
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.
“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 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.”
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
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 ..
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 — continuing my habit of collecting language, images included, which catch my attention — various forms of self-eating & other alchemyteries, mythematics and magics — mathemystics, Pythagoras for one, Ramanujan too ]
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This one’s a particularly apt example of the ouroboros, as the phrase “comes back to bite him” is clearly derived from the verbal formulation “serpent bites tail”:
Kanye, an admirer of Trump’s way fo doing things, Ari Melber, Fallback Friday, The Beat, 04/28/2018:
Kanye West doesn’t really believe in anything except Kanya West
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That first allegation, btw, is either true of untrue, which is why it’s called an allegation, eh? Same with the second, butt it’s the first that’s orouboric.
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The Fifth Amendment protects persons from self-incrimination in these words::
nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself..
The right against self-incrimination is rooted in the Puritans’ refusal to cooperate with interrogators in 17th century England. They often were coerced or tortured into confessing their religious affiliation and were considered guilty if they remained silent. English law granted its citizens the right against self-incrimination in the mid-1600s, when a revolution established greater parliamentary power.
Puritans who fled religious persecution brought this idea with them to America
That’s the Puritan side of the matter, but they were of the opposite mind when interrogating Cavalier children:, inquiring (name of painting)
Were the Erik Wemple Blog anointed the chief scheduler for U.S. Journalism, we’d direct that all major scoops regarding President Trump hit the Internet between 9 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. on weeknights. Why? The better to uproot Sean Hannity’s nightly program, of course.
Because when news intrudes, the Fox News host exudes irritation. “I am told by my sources tonight that the New York Times is full of crap, that those are not — a lot of those questions are not the questions that the special counsel is asking,” said Hannity on Monday night after the newspaper published its scoop of 49 questions that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has formulated for Trump.
People might just remember another moment this past when Hannity dissed a breaking scoop from the New York Times, this time about how Trump in June 2017 had ordered Mueller’s firing. “At this hour, the New York Times is trying to distract you. They have a story that Trump wanted Mueller fired sometime last June, and our sources, and I’ve checked in with many of them, they’re not confirming that tonight.”
Later that night, Hannity was forced to confirm the news. “All right, so we have sources tonight just confirming to Ed Henry that, yeah, maybe Donald Trump wanted to fire the special counsel for conflict,” said the host on his Jan. 25 show. “Does he not have the right to raise those questions? You know, we’ll deal with this tomorrow night.”
[Sean Hannity cannot tweet his way out of journalistic corruption]
Well. At noon on Tuesday, Fox News host Melissa Francis told viewers of the show “Outnumbered,” “President Trump is reacting to the leak of dozens of questions special counsel Robert Mueller reportedly wants to ask him. Fox News has now obtained those questions after the New York Times first reported on them. … The questions were reportedly read to the president’s lawyer by Mueller’s team in March,” said Francis.
So: That makes two instances in which Hannity relied on his own sources to debunk the reporting of the New York Times, only to watch as his colleagues confirmed the paper’s findings. One more and we have a full-blown trend.
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
