Reflections on a world with too much spying

Can people really tell the difference? Can you tell hot air from a cool breeze? In college there was a guy who used a pseudonym because of “them.” He was an avid Jack Chick Publishing reader. The pseudonym was D. Monte. He introduced my roomie / fellow theater major to Jack Chick. Ultimately I found the notion that pretty much anything that was NOT (this was Chick’s world view) King James Bible version only non-denominational Protestant and very, very anti-Communist, anti-Jew, anti-Muslim, anti-Catholic, anti-atheist and also general anti-fun (dancing would most certainly set him off as he hated any non-religious music) to be preposterous. Personally it was his contention that Dungeons & Dragons (and rock music) brought about actual demons, spells, etc that was so preposterous I couldn’t take much else what he pushed seriously. Mostly. He had a couple of anti-Catholic books for example. One about the alleged not much discussed history of Martin Luther and what he actually found vi

Here’s the rough draft of what occurred Memorial Day weekend. Small gathering, that is three people. Initially just two. My husband and his “friend” Lede Perez. One may note that to protect people I have on occasion changed their names for these kinds of accounts or omitted them completely if possible. This is not one of those times. She at best was doing something stupid, more likely was bribed, blackmailed, coerced, or the like into doing this on purpose. In order to understand how this works—and I note that generally speaking fictional television and film NEVER depicts this accurately…it’s as if it is verboten to do so…I’ve now seen it over and over again so often that it seems clear there’s someone training people in these kinds of things. Anyway, more background. My spouse is an immigrant with permanent residency. There are a few things that can get that yanked. There are many things that can slow the progress on the road to citizenship. He had a DUI back in 2021, and that will li

This is a PITA. I hate talking about it for several reasons. The first is obvious. One of the points of harassing people using strange methods and doing things that seem silly to others or that aren’t easily identifiable is to make the target seem crazy, mentally ill, delusional, etc. for discrediting purposes. This will also tend to most likely end the target up on a crank list. That is, they’ll be ignored by law enforcement in the future if the harassers decide to step up the means and severity of the harassment, rendering you more vulnerable to their b.s. Third involves the discussion of what must be classified technology or methods that intelligence services guard closely so as to disguise the tradecraft. By discussing it, you can wind up on yet someone else’s s-list, or at least I suspect so. And fourth is very much like Brandolini’s law. Part of the problem with being harassed by spies in what I refer to as Stasi zersetzung methods is that it is tiring, exhausting to recover from

“I remember the Secret Service being tougher.” “Me, too.” — The rubber, as they say, is starting to hit the road at last. Below is a surreal yet true anecdote. I cannot recall exactly what year it was. Bill Clinton was President, Rudolph Giuliani was Mayor of NYC. I worked at 1251 Avenue of the Americas as a consultant, probably environmental at that time, so pre-1999 but 1993 or after. For whatever reason I needed to go to the office on a weekend, possibly a Saturday. Seems likely I was on the D train so that’s a clue that it was after the move from the Village to Brooklyn, so likely after Summer 1995. The first thing I noticed was few if any people at all getting off at the 50th Street stop, maybe something odd about which doors opened and where. I went to one of those exits with the circular bars, where you can push out but not in. Then, like something out of a zombie film, no people at all in Rockefeller Center. And no cars. No cars on Sixth Avenue, known as Avenue of the Americas.