NSA's Invasion of Privacy

Towers Of Babel: 

Why The NSA’s Stored Data Is Already Obsolete

By Winsip Custer, Commentary for CPW News Service

     Empires rise on the dominant language that has helped propel them to prominence.  The Greeks used Greek.  The Romans used Latin.  Spain used Spanish.  If there is a canonical language for the world today it is, thanks in part to the success of the British Empire, English. When the thirteen colonies beat England in the American Revolution and War of 1812,  then eclipsed the British Navy and essentially took over the policing of the empire Britain had created the English language’s dominance was guaranteed….for a while.

     In Saudi Arabia British Petroleum took a back seat to ARAMCO, the Arab American Oil Company.  Then came OPEC whose oil ministers generally speak English as well as Farsi.  In the Orient the British treaty with China was appropriated by New England Brahman opium trader, Caleb Cushing.  America's New England power elites controlled an ever widening empire that rode the shirt-tails of the British ships and canon power and their unique language. 

     Great Britain had its canonical authors with William Shakespeare at the top of the list, but a uniquely American list had emerged on this side of the Atlantic.  Among that list's leading gatekeepers is Yale’s Harold Bloom.  Bloom wrote in The Western Canon: “We are destroying all intellectual and aesthetic standards in the humanities and social sciences in the name of social justice. Our institutions show bad faith in this:  no quota are imposed upon brain surgeons or mathematicians.”

     That should be taken to mean that a quota system regarding the admission of students into the humanities and social science programs.   Those programs still make up the educational core that protects and defends the nation's prevailing myth. Science and mathematics are culture neutral.  The humanities are not. With the advent of the rise of applied sociology a very sophisticated and subtly propagandized image of the national myth can inform, transform and mesmerize the masses.   From the printed page to the silver screen to the high definition television panel we see the evolution of applied sociology in the manipulation of mass media that even in time of starvation and death, Joseph Goebbels believed in the mimicking Hollywood with a German language retelling of the British story of the Titanic that would seal the split hull of the sinking Nazi battleship. 

     In gatekeeping the American literary canon while proclaiming its demise, all from the basilica of Western power, enlightenment and secrecy, Yale University, Bloom reveals the real issue:  Language and storytelling protects the empire’s mythology.  Whoever controls the mythology controls the empire.  Mark Twain could appear to plumb the depths of the Connecticut Yankee's benevolence in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but he is still circumscribing the myth.  Abolitionists were not necessarily racial egalitarians.  Civil Wars may be fought on one premise, but be motivated by something altogether different.  Bostonian, George Luther Stearns, a "secret six" backer of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, stood to make a fortune from the sale of lead from his mines to the munitions manufacturers.

 

 

     Empires fade. They have definable life spans. The canon of each empire’s literature is determined by the dominant storytellers’ popularity….not necessarily among the masses who must earn their place among the power elites who define the canon and protect the dominant myth.  The canon is beatified by the empire’s academic and literary community, but they are always an extension of the elites' power and influence who use the language as a type of mystic defense of their privilege atop the societal heap.  Now we are told that nationalism is gone and a coming world order will replace it, but enforced with what weapons?  No, not new novels like Last of the Mohicans or Moby Dick or Blood Meridian.  With bullets and lead.  It has been widely reported that FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Administration has stockpiled over 1.4 billion hollow point bullets and shotgun shells that have essentially no use in a military theater.  Forbes Magazine carried Ralph Benko's article about it on March 3, 2013.  They are also stockpiling the bullets that are interchangeable with all NATO forces.  The failure of the U.S. to incorporate the defunct Soviet Union into a new paradigm when the essential reason for NATO's creation had evaporated, suggests that the new world order has at its core a fascist focus like that shared by the business plotters of the 1930's....Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, John Burroughs, Charlie Lindberg, Prescott Bush, John D. Rockefeller and others. 

     Harold Bloom laments the injustice imposed on the gatekeepers of the myth comparing them to brain surgeons and mathematicians who are not under the pressure to churn out the proper storyline to each new generation in a form that continues the dominant mythology.  In fact, science and mathematics use an entirely different language.  That language, as we shall see, is myth destroying, but the myth is being fiercely managed.  The brightest and best young writers are systematically managed away from or toward the desired properline according to their malleability.  As with Hunter S. Thompson, by the time they figure it out it's too late and their clarion criticism is always a swan song. 

     When science and mathematics fudge their analysis the scam may not be immediately apparent.  Wall Street hedge fund investor, Bernie Madoff, took thousands of investors into his confidence.    Some knew with only a few hours of mathematical analysis that Madoff was a pyramid sitter and ponzi schemer benefiting Madoff.  When the scheme was more widely exposed the losers were anxious not to be seen as greedy, money grubbing social climbers who got what they deserved by not listening to the voices of reason.

     On the other hand, when Nobel Prize winning economist, Robert C. Merton, son of Columbia University’s leading sociologist and “Father of Applied Sociology”, Robert K. "Merlin" Merton, was shown to be the author of the mathematical jargon that justified the “credit default swaps” or “derivatives” market that tanked the U.S. economy in 2008, the voo-doo nature of the mathematical language was not immediately verified by his own teacher, Paul Samuelson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Ronald Reagan's Budget Direct, David Stockman, deemed Merton's new language a freaky form of eco-Yiddish with an incomprehensible drawl. The mythical and mystical formulations were a fraud and a scam, but they protected the dominant irrational myth and were celebrated by the nation's Wall Street and Washington power brokers who used the mythology, as have all cultures, to protect those sitting atop the thrones and pyramids of power as they continue to wage their war on the gullible. 

     Alfred Nobel’s primary language was not English, but Swedish.  The organization he founded beatified Merton's mythology in every language.  That beatification was not based on the rational core of scientific and mathematical analysis and description, but upon the mythologized mumbo jumbo of the elite's own ghetto-ized power jargon.  Nobel's name invoked another universal language upon which civilizations also rise and fall:  Decibels and flying earth.  Shredded metal and explosive projectiles.  Where this language is invoked people join the chorus like children singing a Gregorian chant they have never heard.

    As empires expand they roll on the roads and rails of mythology and storytelling in the dominant language.  Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Jack London provided the storyline for the American myth even when their work is not beatified by Bloom.  Montezuma and Geronimo did likewise for their followers who used peyote and other herbs to help improve their receptivity, much as the China Traders used opium and an ever changing array of interpretation enhancers.   In each case the mythologizers were simultaneously riding the rails and laying them.  There were women writers as well.

     Harper Lee would write in the same state of Mississippi where William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams defined Southern literature and in the same hometown as Truman Capote.  Her To Kill a Mockingbird laid out the jagged edges of racial discrimination and class distinction just at the Civil Rights Movement was taking shape.  In New York she was befriended by the Browns whose connections to the literary and industrial power elites helped her to lose her Southern twang. They celebrated her literary accomplishments by adding her name to literature taught at Harvard, Dartmouth, Columbia, Brown and the other Ivy League citadels, but the elevation also derailed Lee's ambitions.  As quickly as she appeared to join the ranks of the beatified, she disappeared to Long Island, New York, not far from the Northeastern Sistine Chapel of the Canon’s American literary Vatican, Harold Bloom’s beloved Yale University. 

      Pearl S. Buck was also from the South and the East: West Virginia,  yes, but also the Far East.  Her parents had ridden the rails to the Pacific, sailed to China, where she experienced first-hand the sheathed spear point of American imperialism….sheathed in the soft covering of Americanized Christian evangelism.  Returning to America, The Good Earth in hand, she disassociated herself with the Presbyterian Church of which CIA Director, Allen Dulles, was a part as had been his cousin, Avery Dulles. Converting to Catholicism, Avery became the first U.S. Cardinal to skip the office of Bishop.  When the North Vietnamese Roman Catholic political families were exported to the South where they established their new order, Pearl Buck's concerns were validated. Avery's Dulles' cousin's political position had no obvious connection to his rapid ecclesiastical ascent except that the Church is masterful at assimilating the various dialects of all social classes and is not above the use of power politics to advance its own agenda.  If the earth was good, informed in part by the Gospel her father proclaimed, Buck believed we had no place in destroying it or its people however different they may appear in skin tone and eye shape. Power elites who gained their position and status by military prowess don’t like to hear this criticism, which clearly threatened Buck’s inclusion in the canon, though she did win a Noble prize from dynamite maker, Alfred Nobel.

     Harold Bloom, as previously noted, has been the primary contemporary vote counter for the beatified elements of the American literary canon.  Bloom would probably place Cormac McCarthy amid the literary scriptures, albeit, alongside the Lamentations.  Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men and The Road are clearly lamentations.  When placed side by side with Melville’s Moby Dick, which is always in the Canon, another lamentation, McCarthy demythologizes the great white whale.  It’s money and power that John Joel Glanton and Judge Holden are chasing like Ahab.  If Holden could back the naive preacher out of town as Glanton had actually done with Reverend John McCullough, a Presbyterian preacher in San Antonio, Texas, Pearl Buck would have been Judge Holden’s match.

     Not even Jack London, the Merlin of American machismo, could compare to Buck’s ability to turn the language into a literary and societal scalpel. London had a different agenda.  Hired by William Randolph Hearst to spin heartening tales of swashbuckling dominance over human competitors or savage environments, London’s palate for adventure both decried the place of Oakland, California’s poor and reveled in their abilities to adapt and survive.  London lubricated the rails of Leland Stanford’s railroad system.  His stories both drew people West along the Russell’s Pony Express route and since whatever rises converges, opened to him the good life atop the pyramid he seemed, like Hunter S. Thompson, to loathe.

     London, not unlike the hired literary gun of Lewis Lapham, Christopher Hitchens, seemed to be a lone corner man for the fight promoters working both sides of the ring.  He hated the pretensions of power and privilege and fought like a madman to win their approval.

     Writing for the Socialist Press, March 7, 1916, London said it clearly:  My final word is that liberty, freedom and independence are royal things that cannot be presented to or thrust upon races or classes.  If races or classes cannot rise up by the strength of their own brain and brawn, wrest from the world liberty, freedom and independence they never in time can come to these royal possessions---and if such royal things are kindly presented to them by superior individuals, on silver platters, they will know not what to do with them, and will be what they have always been in the past…inferior races and inferior classes.

     Jack London, of course, missed the fact that Leland Stanford like Henry Ford and other American industrialists, had often made their fortunes on government subsidized land allotments for rail routes, highways, ports all fortified by tax payer paid armies and naval protection.

     Jack London’s Oakland, California, the western terminus of Leland Standford’s Transcontinental Railroad, would become the future home of the Anglophile Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang that kick started the literary career of Hunter S. Thompson with  his book Hell's Angels.  London, and to a significant degree Thompson too,  celebrated the blue collar class, wrote to their deepest longings, while in reality betraying vast parts of them.  The Angels phalanxed San Francisco's societal elites defending the playground to the west and north that was as compartmentalized as the boroughs of Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia or New York.  Pearl Buck’s vision and sensibilities were not so myopic.

     Jack London’s wife asked him after he penned the preceding words “What will you call yourself now?  Revolutionist?  Socialist?  What?  London replied, “I am not anything I fear….I am all these things. Individuals disappoint me more and more.  And more and more I am turned to the land.”

     The land.  The good land.  Pearl Buck recognized it.  The Good Earth, from which we all come to use the tools of whatever language best serves us, but to what ends she questioned?  Leland Stanford was serving the New England power elites whose China trading ships lined the harbor at San Francisco and Oakland and the last leg of the railroad circling San Francisco Bay was handed to Stanford by the U.S. Army General who would insure that a Southern rail route from Savannah to San Diego, laid out in the 1850’s by Jefferson Davis, did not succeed.   Jack London’s macho seal hunting excursions to Alaska were child’s play compared to the slaughter of 600,000 dead Americans in a Civil War that hid beneath the high moral objective of the abolition of slavery the race to the Chinese opium, silk, spices, tea and other markets which our literary forefathers, the British, had previously mythologized.

     If the British royals had circumscribed their fortresses with deep motes, they insulated their culture with an education in the language of their trades, religious liturgies, politics and pastimes.  Aspiring authors from the lower ranks could ascend the power elites’ castles and pyramids, but Melville could not reveal that the great white whale was as specific as the opium from Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India that made Caleb Cushing, the Cabots, Lodges, Roosevelt’s, Delano’s, Russell’s and other who controlled the mythology, wealthy.  Some who made the ascent, like Sylvia Plath,  could not stomach the contradictions and without Buck's healthier ego simply checked out.

     When author Hunter S. Thompson was riding with the Hell’s Angels in Jack London’s Oakland across the bay from the city where Mark Twain said “the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco,” he knew that he was crossing the mote.   When he danced among the Red Woods in the Bohemian Grove or flew on Air Force One amid the journalists where he had been invited in like an honorary plebiscite sitting atop a Mayan or Incan pyramid to observe the secret rituals and sacrificial offerings, his education continued.  Before his death he would rip the lace curtains off of the windows of the empire's slaughter house.  He employed his significant skills to describe one who could see the horde on the bank including those  souls that the Hell’s Angels rejected as unworthy and as one who had learned the true identity of the castle dwellers beyond on Nob Hill or up the Napa Valley near London’s Valley of the Moon.  There was really not that much difference among them all.  The only difference was that their image was modified by the use of the prevailing language and the myth into which, like cotton candy at a carnival midway, the myth was spun into a colorful, eye-pleasing cocoon.

     Like Pearl Buck’s epiphany and London’s longing to be a part of the land which the language of science and mathematics now tells us is being rapidly degraded, Hunter Thompson shredded the cocoon when he wrote:

     We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world, a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us. No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we’ll kill you. Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush? They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us; they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them.

     If Thompson was correct we would expect that our most cherished beliefs have been a sham.  Had he figured it out and taken a Plath-like exit?  The center core of the power elites inner circle will tell us through simple observation.  In the wake of Hunter S. Thompson's epiphany they will have circled the wagons even more tightly around the prevailing myth.

     Yale's Harold Bloom will have endorsed a new university where the cocoon can be carefully reconstructed.  Not among Connecticut Yankees, but in the South where the first chief legal council to the KKK, Albert Pike, built the first temple of a movement that bifurcated the Free Masonry of George Washington and his friends and led it in a new direction that not even Nathan Bedford Forrest wished to follow.  Pike's movement had come from the homeland of the mother tongue where Germanic tribes blended with the Viking into the roots of the Norman dialects.  That Southern city would also be the eastern terminus of a Transcontinental Railroad that William Tecumseh Sherman had destroyed in order to guarantee that the Order's order flowed through the Cushing's and Russell's bank accounts like oil flowing through Cushing, Oklahoma.  Bloom's new project would likely be led with someone with connections to Blackwood's Magazine, the Edinburgh publication in the highlands of the Anglophile heartland and for which Pike had been a leading writer. The new Ralston University for which Bloom is a founding patron and where Stephen J. Blackwood is the new president in Savannah, Georgia fits the bill nicely.

     "Impossible," some will say.  Bloom's family is Orthodox Jewish.  Yes.  Askenazi Jewish. Likened to the Joseph tradition rather than to the Moses tradition.  The first builds pyramids the later dismantles them in favor of a legal system of justice, equality and freedom.  Had Cushing, Jefferson Davis and Judah P. Benjamin followed the Moses tradition along which George Washington was walking when he freed his slaves in 1799 there would have been no America Civil War and the world would be a much different place.  Utopia?  No, but better and the language we use to describe what it is we are would not be as cryptographic.

     While Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Robert Witt and others address the nation to allay fears that the National Security Agency’s data mining of American’s spoken and written languages is not violating our freedoms, history is laughing out loud.   The volumes of communication that are being sucked like a vacuum cleaner into massive storage banks is becoming as obsolete as Greek or Latin.  A new language may re-mythologize our perceptions, but the language of science and mathematics strips us naked and shows us for what we truly are…..creatures of the good mother earth to which we will all return and perhaps much more quickly than our myths recognize.