Oppenheim Arts & Letters

Janet Napolitano and Mohamed Elibiari

By the time I write about it (up here on the bloggerati's second row seat to history), it's old news, but these days, that doesn't make it any less interesting.  For this, just follow the URL's and enjoy the YouTube hosted video at the end.

Prelude

Homeland Security, Office of the Press Secretary.  "Secretary Napolitano Swears in Homeland Security Advisory Council Members."  Press release, October 15, 2010: http://www.dhs.gov/ynews/releases/pr_1287410106124.shtm

The Freedom and Justice Foundation (F&J).  "F&J's Regional Officials (North, Central & South Texas)": http://www.freeandjust.org/OurTeam.htm

Homeland Security.  "Homeland Security Advisory Council Members": http://www.dhs.gov/files/committees/editorial_0858.shtm#9

Main Course

Geller, Pamela.  "Mohamed Eligiary, Homeland Security Adviser, Allegedly Leaked Shopped Classified Info to Media, PS Director: "We Know He Has Accessed DPS Documents and Downloaded Them."  Atlas Shrugs, October 26, 2011: http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2011/10/mohamed-elibiary-homeland-security-adviser-allegedly-leaked-intel-shopped-classified-info-to-media-p.html

Here's Geller's one-two punch: "The Texas Department of Public Safety now says that Homeland Security Advisory Council member Mohamed Elibiary may have been given access to a sensitive database of state and local intelligence reports, and then allegedly shopped some of those materials to a media outlet. Who else is the devout Elibiary shopping sensitive intel to?"

Spencer, Robert.  "DHS Advisory Council member Mohamad Elibiary allegedly shopped sensitive intel reports to media for story on "Islamophobia".  Jihad Watch, October 27, 2011: http://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/10/dhs-advisory-council-member-mohamed-elibiary-allegedly-shopped-sensitive-intel-reports-to-media-for.html

According to Spencer, Elibiary "is a prominent "moderate," but he spoke at a 2004 conference in Dallas lauding the "Great Islamic Visionary" Ayatollah Khomeini. Subsequently, he had acrimonious discussions with Dallas Morning News columnist Rod Dreher, to whom he issued what looked to many, including Dreher himself, like a threat."

 And . . . just a part of the atmosphere in which this happens and really has nothing to do with Elibiary's clumsy accusations about Islamophobia in Texas governments -- Spencer says associates on the left have rejected the passed material outright, claiming, "But we looked at them and saw this was a partisan hatchet job that could blow back on us so we passed on it" -- here is a URL passed to me by one of the Lone Star state's civilian sentinels:

http://www.fiqhcouncil.org/node/67

The correspondent asks, "Remember what I wrote . . . re: the Brotherhood script in America being that Islam "looks like" our United States Constitution?"

In rudimentary chemistry, we may boil down a solution to precipitate out particles of interest; in social chemistry, the thing that may be boiled down and filtered is language; and with Islamist thought and its convolutions as well as its shot of taqqiya for license (to lie, mislead, obfuscate, etc. in the name of Muhammad's enterprise), one may isolate two planes that contribute to the dark mirror in language: the front stage and surface story (say about "the religion of peace" and denials of cultural inclusions, histories, and statements far to the contrary) and dark agreements, ambitions, and desires that accommodate and suit power in  the language reversing orientation of enthused or leveraged sub-surface cooperation, so that, say, those who may perceive America as an object for conquest may deride Americans as "Islamophobic" who impede their program (and let us not forget that in the middle east, such behavior positions Israel perpetually as the region's maurading force even as it contains itself and facilitates educational and trade activity in the forever Preoccupied Territories). 

 Now let's take ten minutes to hear how much cognizance and control Secretary of the U&.S. Department of Justice Janet Napolitano has as regards her bailiwick's Homeland Security portion (skip to 4:30 for the chat over Mohamed Elibiary):

Just Dessert

Those in the anti-Jihad as well as those of us of a moderate but cautious political bent have long asked as regards what may be "coming over the berm" the relatively straightforward questions, "who? how many?  how powerful?"

With off-the-cuff answers ranging from "stop worrying" (they, whoever they may be, are certainly just like ourselves) to some version of "get down in the bunker" (we're being invaded), more dedicated researchers than I have long dealt with "who is with Osama Bid Laden" or like questions for some time (see Daniel Pipes from 2005: http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2005/05/how-many-islamists), but the ambiguity remains because in the matter of blocking, containing, and diminishing threats to freedom posed by those who might promote a systematic theocratic barbarism, the "Muslim Brothers" -- the God Mob, as I like to say -- also promote and sustain two lives, only the first as supplicant as long as their more preferred path remains frustrated (for evidence of that, look over the manner in which Turkey's Erdogan has rearranged his state's foreign relations, military, and political landscapes).

Obama's Administration may survive the coming election season on the incompetence of its challengers, but with performances like the one given my Napolitano above as well as its long drift into ambiguity as regards its dealings with Muslim-majority states and Islamist fronts worldwide -- start with Al Shabaab's five years of resurgence in Somalia and then hover a while over Egypt and Libya and what Brotherhood accommodating processes may be happening in those troubled and partially poisoned springs -- it promotes a most imaginative but potentially accurate uncertainty: we don't know how well Homeland Security is working, whether it's really working for Americans who believe in the American Constitution and then so many practices flowing down from English common law and the western Judeo-Christian philosophies and precepts about the nature of God, of nature herself, and of the humanity of a common humanity, and then too we're uncertain as regards the present Administration's financial, political, and social entanglements.

Above: Napolitano's repetitive "I know nothing" helps none other than the Administration's most incisive and resourceful security critics and skeptics.

There is good news here, of course, and it's the same old common news we've gotten in association with terrorist-related FBI stings involving direct threats of violence: if there is an "opposition", as a Le Carre might put it, it's still so dumb that what it attempts still looks way out of place, in this instance like "a partisan hatchet job" looks to a presumably accountable and responsible media editor on the political left.

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Electronic Attention Deficit Disorder Revisited

I'd like to say, "I'm done with the Internet."

However, for writers, photographers, and musicians, not to mention everyone else chatyping online, one cannot be done with it: one may only corral or shape the character and stretches of time spent working on and uploading art, if any, and then time engaged n community with one's cohort, co-hobbyists, co-religionists, co-inhabitants of cyberspace.

And corraling and shaping time are what I'm doing.

More than "time online" may be involved here, although time online may include myriad endeavors, good and sinful or both at once, but in aggregate, they have this common feature: every page, every YouTube clip, each and every Facebook interaction, as advertisers well know, every single web search, fractures time if not slicing open presumptions about privacy, and if that, then that too.

After a while, one wants to get through the meal, not work on its enjoyable contributing parts across time: the shopping list, the shopping, the setting out, and the slicing and dicing and baking, braising, frying, and roasting.  That would be too much, and, well, one has to check one's e-mail, or the latest order in transit with UPS, or work one something at the desktop, including working on working.

The cut may go deeper.

There may be, for example, the movie you're about to watch shadowed by all the other potential movies Netflix suggests you watch.

And who has time to watch that movie anyway?

There are so many other things to do -- and we're doing them!

At our computers, or with computing devices, including phones, and online.

Let me not stop with this bleating about info-gluttony and the web's cornucopia:

It has been proven that sedentary lifestyles are an important cause of mortality, morbidity and disabilities.  According to preliminary results of a study from WHO on risk factors, sedentary lifestyles are one of the 10 fundamental causes of mortality and disability in the world.  Information from that organization reveals that approximately two million deaths can be attributed each year to lack of physical activity.  (From LatinSalud.com: http://en.latinsalud.com/articulos/00621.asp).

From Wikipedia:

A sedentary lifestyle and lack of physical activity can contribute to or be a risk factor for:

• Anxiety^[3][4][5]
• Cardiovascular disease^[6][7]
• Mortality in elderly men by 30% and double the risk in elderly women^[8]
• Deep vein thrombosis
• Depression^[3][5]
• Diabetes^[3]
• Colon cancer^[3]
• High blood pressure^[3][9]
• Obesity^[10][11]
• Osteoporosis^[3][12][13]
• Lipid disorders^[3]
• Kidney stones

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedentary_lifestyle

While here I'm working on scaring myself (oh: that translates to something like "helping others in similar straits"), ways forward may have their own razor wire, starting with turning the romantic's wan melancholia into something a little more positive and energizing so that for each mouse potato there is something "out there" to go out there too.

I'm fortunate to have some options with music plus a fine community of local musicians with whom to play -- in fact, I think music may yet be the thing that saves me from a completely dismal end -- but one needs more than that, and with age (and serious enough illness plus a kind of circular and silly psychology engaged in this), the challenge may rise some: out for a run, a jog, a walk?  How about a pony ride (AKA Mustang) to a decent restaurant and a decent meal where someone else has been paid to list, shop, assemble, slice, dice, bake, braise, fry, and roast? 

Now you talkin' my lingo.

That silly psychology: the more quiet the life, it seems the more one wants more quiet; the more one enjoys that good meal out, well, the more sojourns in restaurants one may want.

Sitting still and eating really well: the habit of either really can turn out deadly.

So here I set out two or three continuing problems and issues:

• 1) the natural subdividing of time associated with computers, really cool software, and virtual mind-to-mind opportunities for research and, clinically and formally speaking, engaging with others in something approaching the full suite of mankind's social activities and communicating behavior, all of which may make it difficult to spend three or four hours of a day in thrall to a book or a small project in the arts--we need to focus, and part of "focus" has to do with shutting out (and shutting down) distractions;
• 2) the development of physical lifestyles congruent with the overall investment in electronics for communicating, entertainment, and research, for whether watching market tickers in realtime while managing trades, or attending online events involving realtime chatyping or, coming to us hoi poloi real soon, group Skype, every hour may cheat one of responding to the necessity of enjoying the body in nature--God must bless those who golf, but there are many other things one may do as age climbs;
• and, as with all change, 3) the necessity of producing a higher level of energy or energized state to overcome an inertia defined by the introduction of multiple electronic devices and alterations in physical lifestyles enabled or inspired by them, and that to the effect that they serve us and our health and longevity a great deal more than we serve them!

Want to get away?

I do.

I'm going out for a walk.

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X <------> Affective Experience : Grammatical Hueristics

Thesis: whatever "X" may be, the affect set by it, directly or learned, sets in place a rule predicating next encounters in familiar "if-then" terms.

1. Earlier experiences stage later ones.

2. Earlier experiences may become indistinct in their integration with accumulating data, i.e., essentially forgotten.

Relevance: studies of beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, cognitive styles, apperception, perception, culture.

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Excerpt From a Note on My Ageing

Shared this morning with a correspondent:

 . . . but you have kept yourself from becoming part of an  . . . organization in which there would be many other social structures and "fish feeding" rewards (I'm thinking about how fish rise to the top of the tank when the owner scatters food on the water).

 Perhaps taking a good step back from the field would be best.

 

I've noticed that instead of churning out prints, songs, and short stories, or their equivalent for our communicating environment, I've been (love this old word) "posterbating" all over the place and on myriad topics.  Given my immediate circumstance, it's not really exhausting, but there gets to be a "what's the point" to it: my time on earth is passing; my cancer's not going away; I'm running down my reserves; and while I may be doing many things to attract interest, I'm not right now engaged in serving a paying client or audience.  I'm just back in the barracks looking over the news, typing an opinion, reading a book, tidying up, and on some evenings going out to get out and thanking God I have a gift in music for doing that.

 

This must be mentioned: having gone through some initial "man-oh-pause" and the onset of the CLL/SLL leukemia, I've come to understand the meaning of "reduced drive" (that other category is working fine, but the career-climbing thing is definitely off its feed): I understand, as a man might, the retirement concept.  There comes this day when we wish to put on nice clothes, go for a long drive, have a good supper our, and return home to a well kempt place with a den for serious hibernating.

 

I don't think I'm that far gone.

 

However, the urge to get a passport and fly out to Mogadishu to "witness" starvation and political chaos firsthand seems to me somebody else's property.  It's past 10 a.m., I'm wearing a robe, a now just warm cup of coffee beside the mouse -- very cool!  :)  I just don't have the "jones" for the commute and office, the campus and the kiddies, or the pursuit of magazine fame.

 

What I would like to do is settle into some creative composition process -- writing, music, photography -- and let the world pass by while I create new material.

 

I want to go back ten years, or more, but in the environment and with the resources I have today and on the schedule dictated by whatever mix of biology and circumstance happen to contain me.

 

You might have a snappy quick response (or denial) that age has nothing to do with the perception of whatever mission or work we have put on our own plates, but I think it does.

 

Even transitioning in my forties, I felt the earth a thing reaching up to grab my ankles and slow me down.

 

If we follow that metaphor, the last things to go will be my mouth, my ears, and my eyes.

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