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Punch counter punch

[ by Charles Cameron — a perfect two-snake pattern from the WaPo headline writers ]
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As patterns go, this one is hard to beat:

Source:

  • Washington Post, John Roberts counterpunches the counterpunching president

    • **

    As you may have gathered, the human propensity for patterning is an enduring interest of mine, and my collecting of such things as ouroboroi, parallelisms, paradoxes, moebius formats and mirrorings is effectively a small pattern language study after the example of Christopher Alexander‘s Pattern Language. Mine, drawing its materials from verbal and visual exemplars rather than architectural ones, perhaps reveals more about the workings of the human mind, aka consciousness.

    The “outer world” has yet to catch up with the significance of these studies..

    **

    At a time when my worldly goods in book form consisted of fifty or so over-thumbed, used science fiction paperbacks and one hardback — I no longer recall what it was — I won a minor poetry prize of $50 and decided it was better to splurge it on one thing I’d really treasure than to dribble it away, a coffee here, a sandwich there.. much though I like my coffees.

    Henbce, for about $45, I aacquired my copy of Alexander’s book — hardback #2!

    An I Ching for the West! Nobel-worthy! A Master’s Masterpiece!

    This entry was posted on Sunday, November 25th, 2018 at 7:09 pm and is filed under architecture, book, Charles Cameron, language, mirror, nobel, ouroboros, paradox, parallel, pattern language, Patterns, poetry, prize, Uncategorized, washington post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

    14 Responses to “Punch counter punch”

    1. Charles Cameron Says:
      November 26th, 2018 at 6:47 am

      How it works — from Intelligence, the Canadian crime series, series 1 episode 13, Dnte’s Inferno:

      It all adds up in the mind when you go to sleep aat night, right?

      Misc:
      .A New Indictment Looms in the Mueller Probe

      A far-right conspiracy theorist who landed in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s crosshairs

      All In Chris Hayes 11/26/2018:
      We’re just looking at shadows of shadows essentially ..
      i don’t know if they have another hand to play ..
      two or thgree moves ahead ..
      they are controlling the tempo of the battle ..
      .
      hardball, 11/28/2018
      pardon — it’s in the president’s arsenal — it’s one of the weapons he’s got –mis he going to jse it? — m2 ..
      .
      All In Chris Hayes:
      Rep Jackie Spier, I have no doubt in my mind that we will when the Mueller investigation is over, be able to put the dots all in a row and draw a line through them ..
      Chris Hayes: they are politically astute enough not to lob a huge molotov cocktail onto the hill ..
      .
      Rachel Maddow:
      a complete historical mirror ..
      .
      WAshington Monthly, The Watergate Road Map and Trump’s Future

      In fact, if we look at the Watergate Road Map list of crimes, it’s actually very easy to fill in examples for each that obviously or quite likely pertain to Trump.

      “Criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice, obstruct a criminal investigation, and commit perjury…making and causing to be made false statements and declarations, making offers of clemency and leniency, and obtaining information from the Justice Department to thwart its investigation.”

      also James Baker, What the Watergate ‘Road Map’ Reveals About Improper Contact Between the White House and the Justice Department has 7 or so points of parallelism as tabulated by Rachel Maddow 11/28/2018 around m 32.

    2. Charles Cameron Says:
      November 29th, 2018 at 4:44 pm

      I don’t believe Star Trek’s three-dimensional chess. I don’t believe most three-dimensional chess analogies. But Mueller? I’m prepared to believe his game:


      .
      It is the kind of fine print to which lawyers devote many billable hours crafting and reviewing. Rick Gates’s plea deal with special counsel Robert Mueller includes this line: “The defendant agrees not to reveal his cooperation, or any information derived therefrom, to any third party without prior consent of the Office.” The language of Paul Manafort’s cooperation deal is almost identical—with the exception of that sentence about disclosing information to third parties. “The absence of that gag order is not an oversight,” says Katya Jestin, a former federal prosecutor. “This could be part of a larger strategic play by Mueller. Which gives this a John le Carré aspect.” [ .. ]
      .
      “Andrew Weissmann is a chess player, for sure,” says Jestin, who is a former colleague of Weissmann, Mueller’s top adjutant.

      The stunning implications of the Manafort-Trump pipeline

      A defendant cannot simply pick and choose people he wants to talk to and thereafter claim that a conversation is privileged. And when Manafort entered into the cooperation agreement with the government, he ceased to have a common interest with other defendants, including the president, as a matter of law. As former U.S. attorney Chuck Rosenberg put it, having signed with the Yankees, he couldn’t give scouting reports to the Red Sox.

      Best game-changer instance thus far:


      .
      “If there’s contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence officials outside the norm, that’s not only big league bad, that’s a game changer,” Graham, R-S.C., said in an interview on “Good Morning America.”

    3. Charles Cameron Says:
      November 30th, 2018 at 6:42 am

    4. Charles Cameron Says:
      December 1st, 2018 at 7:43 am

      More:


      .

      I’m assuming a wrecking ball is a uh, form of weaponry.. And while we’re on the topic of wrecking, there’s this, from a ProPublica piece, An Atomwaffen Member Sketched a Map to Take the Neo-Nazis Down. What Path Officials Took Is a Mystery

      Woodward’s fellow Atomwaffen members cheered online when he was arrested, calling him a “one man gay jew wrecking crew.”

      .
      MTP 12/1/2018 .. would be a huge scandal without Trump blotting out the sun ..
      Last Word, Joyce.. it’s interesting, we see so much of the contours of the investigation, but we don’t know exactly where the pieces are on the chess board, or what rules they play ..

    5. Charles Cameron Says:
      December 1st, 2018 at 7:13 pm

      Astonishing, saddening — from the ProPublica piece quoted above:

      While Arthurs was taken to the county jail on homicide charges, police and FBI agents released Russell, who claimed that he used the explosives to power model rockets. An officer even drove Russell back to the murder scene so he could retrieve his car.
      .
      What happened next could well have been a disaster. Within hours, Russell acquired an AR-15-style assault rifle and a bolt-action hunting rifle. He loaded homemade body armor and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition into his car, and set off for the Florida Keys with another Atomwaffen member. He was eventually arrested by sheriff’s deputies in Monroe County. They were shocked by the weapons and ammunition they found in the car. There was no luggage. No food. Russell didn’t seem prepared for an extended trip, they said.
      .
      “When we found all the weapons, we were convinced that we had just stopped a mass shooting,” recalled Deanna Torres, one of the deputies who captured Russell, who would eventually plead guilty to federal explosives charges.

    6. Charles Cameron Says:
      December 2nd, 2018 at 4:52 am

      I’m not sure quite what’s happening here, but it’s clearly a plastics ouroboros:

      AH, the tweet has been deleted. Luckily I saved a screenshot:

      **
      .
      Is gambit a chess term originally, or usedot: elsewhere and then applied metaphorically to chess?

      Anyway:

      Shi Lim, who competed that year as Miss Singapore, told me, “The finalists were picked by Trump. He was really in charge. We called it the Trump card.”

      Definitely the best “Trump card” offering thus far..
      .
      meacham on 12/3/2012 morning joe:
      ,, the gathering storm of actual facts ..
      .
      ‘The most kind and considerate person I’ve ever known’: George H.W. Bush remembered by former presidents and other officials

      Obama praised the late Bush’s foreign policy as well, noting that Bush “had to land the plane” when the Berlin Wall came toppling down.
      .
      “You have chaos potentially in the former Soviet Union and Russia, and uncertainty in Europe,” Obama said. “All those things could have gone haywire at any point. And the restraint, the caution, the lack of spiking the football that they showed was, I think, an enormous achievement.”

      Lawrence O’Donnell, The Last Word, 12/3/2018:

      You make th point in your article that the filings that Robert Mueller intends to do in the Manafort case provide him with an opportunity to do what you call an end run around Matthew Whitaker, who has been installed by Donald Trump as the acting Attorney General..

      Peter Zeidenberg, USA Today,Mueller is building a conspiracy case that’s likely to ensnare Trump and his family

      This pleading could well provide Mueller the opportunity to do an “end run” around Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, who many fear would have the ability to deep-six Mueller’s report, and report directly to the court — and the public — the complete case against Manafort. After all, to establish that Manafort has lied, Mueller will have to lay out in detail what was asked, what Manafort said, and why it is that Mueller believes the responses to be false.

      In other words, the endgame is likely close at hand.

      Rep Eric Swalwell, The Last Word, 12/3/2018:

      I think the Mueller investigation, if you were comparing it with a chess match, has put the President in check, and the President is now making erratic moves that is exposing his position. As a former prosecutor I have seen this before. As you get close to the end of a case, or close to a verdict, defendants start acting very irresponsibly.

    7. Charles Cameron Says:
      December 4th, 2018 at 5:20 pm

      Today’s morning crop was too rich to keep in a comment. I’ve moved it. You’ll find it here.
      .
      BTW “inside baseball” was something I heard (as a political metaphor) the other day, but its use here on ZP dates back to May 2005 and PART I – A PREFACE TO A DISCUSSION OF RULE-SET THEORY

    8. Charles Cameron Says:
      December 6th, 2018 at 3:23 pm

      126//2018:re bipartisan resolution against mbs:

      to slep back at the trump administration ..

      **
      .
      code of the templaris:

      destiny deals out the cards. but we are the ones who play them ..

      **
      .

      When former US president George W. Bush said “His short game was lousy” in his eulogy for his father, I assume the meaning was widely understood, but I would like to know its precise meaning and if the expression has any particular connotations in this context.
      .
      It’s a golf expression, but I don’t know if it’s meant to be a metaphor in this case. Your short game is putting and medium-length drives, rather than long drives from the tee.

      **
      .

    9. Derek Says:
      December 6th, 2018 at 7:21 pm

      Hi Charles, rising to the Christopher Alexander ‘A Pattern Language’ bait, I too still have a treasured hard-bound edition with its companion ‘Timeless Way of Building’, both rather the worse for wear (having followed me around for a few decades) but enduring nonetheless as befits two such classics.
      .
      A propos the inside-outside / mirrored opposites / Ouroboric theme, I recently came across this paragraph in Ernest McClain’s ‘The Pythagorean Plato: Prelude to the Song Itself’, it’s a book about the uses Plato made of mathematical and musical, cosmological allegories in the Dialogues, I hope that’s enough context to gather McClain’s drift —
      .
      Platonists have always known that in Pythagorean ratio theory numbers function reciprocally as both multiples and submultiples of some basic unit (n and 1/n). The secret to Platonic mathematical riddles is that we must study reciprocals, compressed to one model octave. The game with reciprocals illustrates a theory of perception: qualities depend on sensation, which depend in turn upon a theory of “flesh, or the mortal part of the soul,” a dilemma which requires that we “assume the existence of sensation … and afterward turn back to examine what we have assumed” (Timaeus 61c,d). It is this turning back to criticize one’s initial assumptions which separates Plato from all philosophy developed from “first principles,” as Western philosophy tried repeatedly from Aristotle onwards. No assumption we can make about Plato’s tone-numbers makes any sense until we have “turned back to study them also from the opposite point of view.”
      .
      BTW a readable downloadable double-quotable PDF of the book can be found here: https://ernestmcclain.net/bibliography/ .. a real eye-opener for the Platonists in the agora.
      .
      Hoping the season finds you in good health ..

    10. Derek Says:
      December 6th, 2018 at 7:25 pm

      (Apologies for the botched formatting, I don’t see any way to redact & re-edit for paragraph breaks .. looks like them invisible breaks is all the breaks them is …)

    11. Charles Cameron Says:
      December 7th, 2018 at 2:06 am

      Thanks, Derek.
      .
      The workaround is to drop a period in between paras while in the posting or editing window (see above).editing

    12. Charles Cameron Says:
      December 8th, 2018 at 4:57 pm

      04 Harris/Murray/Peterson Discussion: London, 35.10:

      One thing that I at any rate am equally tired of is the claim that this has got to be a tennis game between the religious and the non-religious..

      **
      .
      MTP 12/7/2018
      Carol Lee, m33:

      It also makes that Don Junior Trump Tower meeting statement, any efforts to create some kind of false narrative there seem kind of “small ball”. This is actually very serious.

      m36:

      Do we have a Manchurian president?

      m57:

      This mixing of business and politics is as clear as when the Mississippi meets the Gulf of Mexico — it is unclear ..

      Ari Melber, 12/7/2018, m 03:

      I was reading this filing here moments ago, and it is a thrashing ..

      m 45:

      I’m going to punt on this one ..

      m 45/6 ((switching rivers in mid-stream??):

      The fox is going to ground, and Mueller is as close as he could be to ramming speed ..

      m 47:

      This is the Trojan Horse approach .. I can’t remember seeing a Trojan Horse strategy like this ..

      When you look at this filing for the Southern District of New York, it really hammers Michael Cohen ..

      Maya:

      he was holding out for a pardon and then felt he was being thrown under the bus ..

      .
      Maya:

      and then come in and try to play us ..

      Katyal:

      soaring language .. threat to democracy .. tywo to tango ..
      .
      I think there’s a second mnove on the chess board when you look at that filing today ..

      Hardball, 12/7/2018:

      and prosecutors talk like that, they hit this guy morally — that’s how i read this document, it wasn’t some cold, secular document ..
      .
      this is the biggest act of self-delusion since baghdad bob said they were winning the war ..
      .
      this was a two-by-four striking michael cohen over the head, repeatedly ..
      .
      good cop, bad cop ..
      .
      catch and kill

      Richard Blumenthal:

      the pieces of the mosaic, of the puzzle, are falling into place ..
      .
      they have over Michael Cohen ..
      .
      They have strategies kids on the street wouldn’t have ..

      John:

      I’ve always thought from the beginning this would be the third act in a three-part act [sic], one, here’s the equipment we put it in place, two, this is how we dispense it, and three, these are th Americans who betrayed their country and compromised us in foreign policy..

      it was almost like a sermon ..

      All In Chris Hayes > Velshi, m 21:

      they decided that richard nixon was an albatross ..

      **
      .
      Jordan Peterson:

      Take a higher dose!

      San Harris,

      Believe me, yes, I’ll play that game of poke with you all day long!

    13. Charles Cameron Says:
      December 11th, 2018 at 11:41 pm

      MTP 12/10/2018:
      political decisions get made on whether the hammer wkill drop or not ..
      Ari Melber:
      nobody wants to be the tour captain on the titanic ..
      Erin CNN:
      it’s not all mai-tais and yahtze around here ..
      i’m mot a magic wand, i can’t sprinkle magic dust ..
      he is his own worst enemy ..
      trump throwing his former fixer under the bus ..
      i’m sure there was a line to be henry viii’s sixth wife, but it didn’t work out that very well for any of them .. it’s a fool’s errand ..
      .
      **
      .
      The meeting turned into a bizarre public fight, on camera, in front of reporters.

      which leads to:

      Trump’s Reality Show in the Oval Office
      During a photo op that morphed into a bizarre spectacle, the president brawled with Democratic leaders over funding his border wall.

    14. Charles Cameron Says:
      December 14th, 2018 at 12:19 am

      The Beat, ari 12/12/2018
      it’s not uncommon for him to throw people under the bus for his own sake ..
      work can work — ourob from ad
      chyron: blanklessly ..
      hardball:

      in the case of PLayboy model karen Mcdougall, hoever, cohen coordinated with David Pecker of the national enquirer to purchase her story in orderto conceal in: a process known as “catch and kill”

      they don’t care what he does as long as ho’s going to punch their war backjj into thehe’s fighting ..
      is it a metaphor, or is it real?
      i think people would revolt ..
      someone who’s going to punch their way back into the hearts of the (mumbled) working class ..
      [ad] PCMatic, the People’s Militia ..
      12/13/2018 all in:

      trump is running out of alibis ..

      **
      .
      The meeting turned into a bizarre public fight, on camera, in front of reporters.
      .
      which leads to:
      .
      Trump’s Reality Show in the Oval Office
      .
      During a photo op that morphed into a bizarre spectacle, the president brawled with Democratic leaders over funding his border wall.
      .
      **
      .
      I’ll stop here, and continue my collecting in the comments section at Next notables, metaphors and bright ideas included

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