The urgent post-9/11 intelligence directive became: “Do more, do better, do it differently, and do it now.” In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing—a scant two months before Snowden’s first leaks—the FBI was accused of not doing enough to track suspected terrorist sympathizers (even though those suspicions had come from the Russian intelligence service formerly known as the KGB). Two events, two contradictory reactions by the American public: one demanding that the government take action to identify and defeat terrorist threats, the other wary and untrusting of that same government.

What It Takes: In Defense of the NSA | World Affairs Journal – November/December 2013.

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Burning Man 2013 : Truth is Beauty – YouTube – Posted 9/2/2013.

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When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

625. Ode on a Grecian Urn. John Keats. The Oxford Book of English Verse

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Truth IS beautiful.

Deception is what is ugly.

Those who promote fear and do so with deceit also on occasion promote the “black swan” theory, the idea that nature produces an improbable event — like life on earth, for example, or two schnooks setting off compression cooker bombs cruelly designed to cut the legs from beneath marathon runners.

The grim review of improvised explosive devices deployed to encourage the adoption of “Islamic values” — or to discourage and subjugate others in the name of Islam — suggests such events are less “black swans”, or “bolts out of the blue” — another trite analog that works — than whole flocks of malevolent black crows.

Sorry crows.

We know when Hitchcock isn’t maligning you, you’re actually playful creatures.

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In online chatyping, the subject of secrecy in Jihad / anti-Jihad activities and other spheres has come up, and I’ve playfully suggested the obvious: change computers and location, persona and voice.

Simple.

The day of the jackals has arrived.

Revert thoughts and data to paper — then burn the paper and rely on memory.

Some professions, say the performing arts, place premiums on memorization as the fundamental part of the craft.

Notably, in English literary arts, a part of the graduate examinations involve questions about who you know and what you know about them, but “who” and “them” may number among the thousands of characters of historic fictions.

In Arabic literature, I am guessing, the “who” and “them” may be the souls legend from earlier generations.

Indeed, my favorite correspondent on many subtopics Islamic suggests that operational code will only drill more deeply into remote corners of Islamic scripture, commentary, and law.  The scholars of interest (believing themselves ” . . . more powerful against the devil than one thousand worshipers”) would seem suspected of having their own communications, command, and control language subculture, and that in Arabic, within the depths of Arabic, and tucked away and harbored like precious and useful intellectual metal.

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Beginning with George Washington’s first State of the Union Address, in which he requested a secret fund for clandestine activities, intelligence has been an instrument to achieve the broad goals of the American people and the policies advanced by their duly elected representatives.

What It Takes: In Defense of the NSA | World Affairs Journal (as cited above)

Deception is easy.

Put on a mask and other elements of costume; alter the walk and the talk; step out of primary character and into some other creature; and work it for a while.

Truth is hard.

One has to live with it and in the company of others who challenge and entertain about the same observations and perceptions.  If, whatever it may be, proves relentlessly reliable and obstreperously valid — true! and whether we like it or not — it acquires a stability all its own and needs no help by way of arms, punishments, and threats.

The truth is not belief but a stubborn “is” and unmindful and uncaring of whatever human investment may be in it or not.

In the quotation section to the left of where you’re reading, you will find this from Maimonides:

“Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it.”

And I thought I was being original.

Be that as it may, the deceitful, I believe, persist in bending truth to will, the better to beatify and glorify themselves, to make themselves legend, eternally regarded — and that if not in greater social realities than their own heads and small and deeply isolated circles.

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In recent months also, I have read of lineage traced back to King David, an argument for the divine allocation of the right to rule over others.

No cyber or real space visit to a sanitarium was involved.

As a Jew, I have been gently but firmly reminded of God’s demands for animal sacrifice and the restoration of Judaism to literal Levitican standards.

Again, no cyber or real space visit to a sanitarium was involved.

If such beliefs, levers, and sentiments have been suspended by mind in the language cherished by some minds, in just how many heads do the same arrangements persist?

What was read?

What was heard?

What was consequently formulated (about royal bloodlines, say, or irrational obligations and rituals)?

While I believe the human capacity for language invention and the invention of language-congruent cultural behavior bounded only by the necessities of place and responses to them plus desire and its many facets, I believe also that symbolic arrangements in language may be mapped, comprehended, and remapped.  When that remapping has taken place in the natural development of a culture, and, say, “twerking” makes its way from youth novelty to something boring old grandmother used to do, we note the remarkable ability and flexibility English has for adaptive evolution; when force comes to erase or overlay a culture and its language, we think of that as cultural warfare and the prize is what is prised from the possession of the minds targeted.

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In Tim Shorrock’s Spies for Hire, the annual  budget cited for secret U.S. intelligence operations in their totality was $52 billion.

I hope there is some money in that green ocean for poets.

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Alfred Hitchcock’s”The Birds” in 1 minute, and 40 seconds. – YouTube – Posted 12/4/2006.

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