It’s Hump Day. I’ve had a bunch of repaired product to get out the door, and it was raining. Of course the fuckin’ mugwumps aren’t gonna give me a break, and instead are gonna make me channel T.W. Lee all day long.

Notions#

Notions…Funny thing, those notions. You get one, and next thing you know you’re going down a rabbit hole like riding an uncontrolled light cycle to the break of dawn. The more you read and explore, the more of the beautiful damned things you get. I miss independent bookstores. They were full of little memetic booby traps in pulp form that gave you notions. My most memorable was Report On Planet Three and Other Speculations by Arthur Clarke. Shockwave Rider by John Brunner was another. The latter one combined with Rodney Zaks’ book on 6502 Assembly and issues of the Apple ][ magazine Nibble inspired me to write up some logic bomb code for pranking an obnoxious classmate. That was the beginning.

Cybertek was another notion; a slightly darker one that could only come from an anti-authoritarian hacker straight out of Army Basic Training. Fort Sill helped hone that edge, complements of some C3I training, and issues of Signal Magazine at the library we had on post. All sorts of good stuff in that one, but not as good as West Point. If you had a Military ID you could get into the West Point Cadet Library and browse the stacks, but you couldn’t check any out. I loved the CIA declassified document collection on microfiche. So much stuff! This was all in the early 1990s before some of that stuff was on the Internet. I think a lot of it still isn’t online.

Enshittfication In Progress#

Substack has introduced an AI detection feature which as expected has attracted online trolls who have to act stupid and use it on everyone. Trolls have it easy these days. Last one I dealt with was back in 1992. Made the mistake of calling my voicemail, leaving an obnoxious message to my parents, and then trying the usual 111222333… answering machine hack sequence which didn’t work because it was a voicemail system. This was before Caller ID came into my exchange, but I still had his voice on tape. Played it to a few acquaintances who all said it was so-and-so. Apparently I wasn’t the first person he went and fucked with. I let it be known that “an investigation was in progress” to a few of the same acquaintances who I knew couldn’t keep their mouths shut. A day later the kid calls the voicemail again all protesting and declaring his innocence. Now the dude was 15 and lived with his Yuppie parents in Westchester County. I had a nice chat with him on the phone, asked him if he was familiar with Cybertek, to which he wasn’t. “No problem!” I told him, and offered him some free samples. Later on that night Necross Sinister and I drove to his parents’ rather nice upper middle class residence in my beat-up Dodge Aspen Station Wagon to give him his free zine samples. Necross wore a leather motorcycle jacket he had punked-up and was sporting a Mohawk. I was wearing my issued M65, and met Army grooming standards. We were friendly and non-threatening, but it still scared the shit out of the kid, and left him having to answer some questions his parents had about our visit. Found out six months later he got busted by the cops for hacking a doctor’s answering machine in an exchange with Caller ID, and changing the outgoing message to a Doctor Kevorkian joke. For what it’s worth, I never had any further problems with him. Now I’m not suggesting you collect OSINT with an aim for doing what I did to trolls back in the early 1990s. It was a different time back then, and online communities were more localized.

I joined Substack a few months back. A friend and fellow surviving IIRG member mentioned how he didn’t like Patreon, so I tossed up a mirror of my stuff on Substack as a courtesy. I’m composing stuff on either LibreOffice or via Google Docs. Actual article entry is then via cut-and-paste, so having 2 or 3 sites with the same content is no big deal. I could probably even write a script that does it automatically, but then the side-line would start to look like the day job and homie don’t play that.

Substack started out OK. I probably wouldn’t be here if I didn’t go there. It’s now gone full retard with that AI detection crap. AI is a tool, and only as good as the user. Crap will still be crap, but now you have a bunch of trolls and dilletantes making the platform go sideways into a telephone pole, just like some teen driver learning the hard way that the traction control on his WRX doesn’t work when road conditions are bad enough and speed is excessive for conditions. I would feel a little more bad for Substack users if it weren’t for the fact that most of them are normies wearing an ill-fitting weird suit like a cheap Halloween costume.

Early PSYOPS#

Back in the day, I had the privilege of access to a library that held a copy of the CIA declassified documents library on Microfiche. It was a PITA to find cool stuff. The index was hardcopy, in a three-ring binder. Still managed to pick up a few gems which I’ve been rediscovering now that collections have been digitized. Back then I was mostly interested in researching Iraq because of a good chance that I was gonna find myself there (didn’t happen), but I also used to follow interesting rabbit holes as they showed themselves. During one such expedition, I came across this one: Some Areas of Psychiatric Interest.

This is not an MK-ULTRA paper. It predates that program by seven months according to official accounts. The PSB report also remained classified until 1989, years after the Church Committee/Rockefeller Commission investigations brought MK-ULTRA to public light. What we got here is the equivalent of a patient zero; a report made by a consultant using open source information (before open source was a thing), and upchanneled to a bunch of government spooks who got a bright idea.