Until I meet an actual Philosopher King or King Solomon, then equity is just thumbs on scales. It’s basically Cyrano.

It’s basically bias dressed up as equity. The power is in who gets to choose whose voice is worthy of amplifying and whose voice is worth suppressing.

That’s what equity is.

That’s equality for authoritarians. Egalitarianism for folks who are afraid of losing control of their own power, or perceived power.

The old tail wagging the dog schtick.

No death camps, no pogroms, no journalists in reëducation camps, no killing fields, no yellow stars, no mobs disappearing people, no assassinations, no public beheading, no crucifixions, no public killings, no arms chopped off, no public burnings, and no more mass incarceration than normal, vanilla, everyday, America crimes against humanity.

Nothing except pride protests and defiant protests and not my president protests and pussy hat protests and rioters released and autonomy zones and favela encampments.

Trump sucked as the worst person in the world. He was all talk. I mean, Jan 6th was really disappointing for being literal Hitler! I mean, not even one single rifle, bomb, or even a fire or a Molotov cocktail.

“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.”

—Rudyard Kipling

The difference between you and me, probably, is that you have a coded right and wrong and I am stateless. To me, right and wrong are 100% POV, relative, and often related to power structures and grand agendas.

Any tyrant, to me, is a Nazi. Not just white guys.

To me, there can be African Nazis and there can be South Asian Nazis and Southeast Asian Nazis and there can be Pacific Islander Nazis and Mongolian Nazis and Middle Eastern Nazis (House of Saud), and Latin American Nazis. Also, Communist Nazis (Nationalsozialismus), etc.

Who gets to choose what is right and what is wrong? Who is right or wrong? Who the good Nazis are (are there good Nazis? The Nazis you know are better than the Nazis you don’t?)

The difference is that you believe that YOU get to choose. That you’re the beneficiary of the Book of Good and Bad. As I said, things that were forbidden only yesterday are beyond reproach today. Black Trans Women are Holy now (yes!) but for how long? Forever?

This strict concept of what’s absolutely good or bad can quickly be coöpted by the same people “you” ruled against the last time ’round. Right now, the terrorists are domestic white men; next time ’round it’s Mexicans, Muslims, Blacks, Jews, Gays.

It’s extremely easy for Very Powerful Tools and Very Powerful Weapons to be used against the Maker. The Patriot Act was a huge mistake. The Laws passed after 9/11 were inexcusable.

I guess I need to pop this in here as a de facto cliche trope:

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

If you carry a gun for your own safety beware of knowing how to protect yourself from having it taken away from you and used against you.

I am a gun owner and it’s never easy to prevent an attacker from disarming you and shooting your own face off.

It takes a lot of training and an insane amount of understanding as to the gravity of engaging in deadly force.

They fetishize their Siemens and their Bayers, they exhibit their superiority through moral virtue instead of their occult metaphysical obsession with Nature so, like any other way too homogenous culture, or addict, they just glom on to another addiction.

The Berlin I lived in was so actively contrite over Nazism that there were anti-Nazi docs on TV every day and restrictions of depictions everywhere.

The problem is that once Germany feels like it earned its way out of die Hundehütte, it’ll have no more fucks to give. It was happening when I was there back in 2008-2011 in the South. Rebuilding cities to pre-war, spec, erasing WW2, returning to the 15th-19th century if you’ll remember your history, it wasn’t only Jews but also anyone who was inconsistent with the German concept of itself, which is really inspired by a German Romantic and Naturphilosophie movement conceit of self which is really amusing.

This next time, maybe not about European Jews but surely about Muslims and immigrants and North Africans and Syrians and even, possibly Romanians and Eastern Europeans and Slavs and Africans. Who knows. Nazis who become anti-Nazis with such vigor are always to not be trusted.

Who decides what’s poison? Who decides?

Fighting book banning cannot only work if you get to fight the banning of just your books. Using the excuse of needing to dismantle the patriarchy isn’t a good enough reason if you’re pro free speech.

You don’t have to be pro free speech or liberty, you can say that civil rights and social justice trumps freedom, liberty, and freedom of speech, but be honest about it.

There are surely extremists the world over, including Christians, who put their Bible ahead of freedom, liberty, egalitarianism, or free speech, so you don’t have to pretend that you’re pro free speech.

You don’t even have to say that you’re actually pro-democracy. Why? Because democracy is a neutral medium. What the most people vote for goes. That doesn’t remotely guarantee enlightenment, humanist, liberal, socially just, values.

So many despotisms who have been liberated of their despot (through American interventionism) have used their democracy to vote in an extremist Mullah. True story. Has happened a bunch.

So, if you want to leverage some good old fashioned Cultural Revolutionary tough love until we reach some sort of progressive utopia, just be a lot more open, honest, transparent, and truthful as to your wants and needs. Be honest, freedom of speech and democracy never turns out right because of the entire popularity thing.

Right?

Life is exactly like high school and nothing’s ever changed. Same world. You’ll really just need to make us with extreme prejudice, by any means necessary.

In a country rife with black battle rifles, “there were guns back in the hotel room,” doesn’t really cut it. Nowadays, people actually believe that it was a truly armed insurrection and that 5 cops were killed in cold blood. The only person killed in cold blood was an “insurrectionist” herself. Social engineering FTW!

Colonize other worlds? Spread humanity into the stars? Living anywhere else besides another earth will suck as much as living in a submarine.

Ever meet a submariner? They’re a different species. At best, like living in an Antarctic research center.

Ever seen their stir-crazy? How badly they want to return stateside? Or to Argentina or Australia? Or, ever meet a Seaman or Sailor stuck on a warship for months and months.

That’s what offworlding will be like. Only deplorables will be sent to space. It’ll be like when your parents tell you your old dog lives upstate on a nice farm. “We sent them to a better place with such better opportunities,” will be code for either depopulation or deportation.

The phrase useful idiot has often been attributed to Vladimir Lenin, but he is not documented as ever having used the phrase. In a 1987 article for The New York Times, American journalist William Safire investigated the origin of the term, noting that a senior reference librarian at the Library of Congress had been unable to find the phrase in Lenin’s works and concluding that in the absence of new evidence, the term could not be attributed to Lenin.[3][4] Similarly, the Oxford English Dictionary in defining useful idiot says: “The phrase does not seem to reflect any expression used within the Soviet Union”.

The term appeared in a June 1948 New York Times article on contemporary Italian politics (“Communist shift is seen in Europe”), citing the centrist social democratic Italian paper L’Umanità. L’Umanità wrote that left-wing social democrats, who had entered into a popular front with the Italian Communist Party during the 1948 elections, would be given the option to either merge with the Communists or leave the alliance. The term was later used in a 1955 article in the American Federation of Labor News-Reporter to refer to Italians who supported Communist causes. Time first used the phrase in January 1958, writing that some Italian Christian Democrats considered social activist Danilo Dolci a “useful idiot” for Communist causes. It has since recurred in that periodical’s articles.

A similar term, useful innocents, appears in a 1946 Reader’s Digest article titled “Yugoslavia’s Tragic Lesson to the World”, written by Bogdan Raditsa. Raditsa had served the Yugoslav government-in-exile during World War II, supported Josip Broz Tito’s partisans (though not a Communist himself) and briefly served in Tito’s new Yugoslav government before leaving for New York. “In the Serbo-Croat language”, says Raditsa, “the communists have a phrase for true democrats who consent to collaborate with them for [the sake of] ‘democracy’. It is Korisne Budale, or Useful Innocents.” In his 1947 book, Planned Chaos, Austrian-American economist Ludwig von Mises writes that the term useful innocents was used by Communists for liberals, whom von Mises describes as “confused and misguided sympathizers”.

In 1959, Congressman Ed Derwinski of Illinois entered an editorial by the Chicago Daily Calumet into the Congressional record, referring to Americans who traveled to the Soviet Union to promote peace as “what Lenin calls useful idiots in the Communist game”. In 1961, American journalist Frank Gibney wrote that Lenin had coined the phrase useful idiot. Gibney wrote that the phrase was a good description of “Communist follower[s]” from Jean-Paul Sartre to left-wing socialists in Japan to members of the Chilean Popular Front. In a speech in 1965, Spruille Braden, an American diplomat who was stationed in a number of Latin American countries during the 1930s and 1940s and was later a lobbyist for the United Fruit Company, said the term was used by Joseph Stalin to refer to what Braden called “countless innocent although well-intentioned sentimentalists or idealists” who aided the Soviet agenda.

Writing in The New York Times in 1987, William Safire discussed the increasing use of the term useful idiot against “anybody insufficiently anti-Communist in the view of the phrase’s user”, including Congressmen who supported the anti-Contras Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the Dutch socialists. After President Ronald Reagan concluded negotiations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev over the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, conservative political leader Howard Phillips declared Reagan a “useful idiot for Soviet propaganda.”

When one was encouraged to both speak the culture of the lingua franca as well as maintaining and growing and building one’s own culture.

I guess there needs to be an entire FUBU subculture built and maintained, separate but equal. I guess there already is, right?

For example: Pence. The man’s an actual Nazi but the moment he “betrayed” the base, he was quickly relegated to the noose and, weirdly, embraced by the anti trumpers, who are like, “they wanted to hang him (pearl clutch)!” I mean, a minute earlier, and since he’s been an Indiana politician, the left has always wanted to hang Pence.

One needs to remember 2015-2021 as a Telenovela.

As a PADI Divemaster, I was trained never to approach a panicked scuba diver face-on because they will most likely rip off my mask and tear out my second stage and we’ll both drown.

And, even if I weren’t a trained Divemaster, everyone always shoots the messenger. Every time. I was all the shot all the time.

If that panicked diver threatens to bolt to the surface, risking decompression sickness (the bends) or a lung overexpansion injury, you’re supposed to stay beyond arm’s length and look at the eyes and look for panic. Try to calm from over an arm’s length.

Then, if they look like they’re going to bolt, come around the back and grab their tank tightly to prevent them from ascending too quickly, risking injury. But, be sure to keep your hoses and mask and self away from flailing arms and hands.

“This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. The broadcasters of your area in voluntary cooperation with the Federal, State, and local authorities have developed this system to keep you informed in the event of an emergency. If this had been an actual emergency, the Attention Signal you just heard would have been followed by official information, news, or instructions. This station (optional—insert station call sign) serves the area. This concludes this test of the Emergency Broadcast System.”

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

A double-standard arises when two or more people, groups, organizations, circumstances, or events are treated differently even though they should be treated the same way. Margaret Eichler, author of The Double Standard: A Feminist Critique of Feminist Social Science, explains that a double standard “implies that two things which are the same are measured by different standards”.

Applying different principles to similar situations may or may not indicate a double standard. To distinguish between the application of a double standard and a valid application of different standards toward circumstances that only appear to be the same, several factors must be examined.

One is the sameness of those circumstances—what are the parallels between those circumstances, and in what ways do they differ? Another is the philosophy or belief system informing which principles should be applied to those circumstances.

Different standards can be applied to situations that appear similar based on a qualifying truth or fact that, upon closer examination, renders those situations distinct (i.e. a physical reality, a moral obligation etc.). However, if similar-looking situations have been treated according to different principles and there is no truth, fact or principle that distinguishes those situations, then a double standard has been applied.

If correctly identified, a double standard is viewed negatively as it usually indicates the presence of hypocritical, biased and/or unfair attitudes leading to unjust behaviors.

2. For Herman and Chomsky, the acceptance of government policies by people in the USA on the basis of the partial picture of issues offered by the mass media, denying them access to alternative views which would lead them to oppose such policies. They present this as a propaganda model in which the mass media select material in relation to the values of those in power.

3. The concept found in Gramsci and Althusserian Marxism, in which the dominant class sustains its hegemony through engineering assent: see also ideological state apparatus.

4. (sociology) The notion associated with functionalism that society is dependent upon the engineering of a consensus: see also consensus; legitimation.

5. An allusion to the concept of ‘the engineering of consent’ defined in 1947, by the Austrian-American public relations pioneer Edward Bernays (1891–1995), as the art of manipulating people without them being aware of it. Bernays, a nephew of Freud, argued that people can be enticed to want things that they do not need if these are linked to their unconscious desires, a notion pursued by Dichter, the ‘father of motivation’.

Via Oxford Reference

This hasn’t actually happened at all. In any way that can be substantiated and this is a problem for the upcoming November 3rd, 2020, Presidential election because when you run a campaign that guarantees a Trump-led American holocaust and it doesn’t come, then there’s a pretty good chance that anything less than a complete redux of Nazi Germany writ large and led by authoritarian Donald Trump and his nefarious autocrats, people tend to breathe a sigh of relief.

Of course, what will happen now, is that the narrative will remain the same but it’ll be reframed as, “Trump didn’t enact his final solution during his first term because he wanted to be reëlected . . . just wait until his second term in office! He’ll take off his gloves and finally enact all of his totalitarian, authoritarian, and autocratic plans the moment everyone is fooled into voting for him. The moment he’s reinaugurated on January 20, 2021, he will release the winged monkeys and the purge will begin.” Or something like that.

So, I am pretty afraid that this cognitive dissonance—occurring when a person holds contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values, and is typically experienced as psychological stress when they participate in an action that goes against one or more of them—will collapse the unstable, extremely-fragile, house of cards, that has been built by the Democrats on a foundation that needs Trump to not simply be a bunga bunga Berlusconi or a vainglorious Mussolini but a fully-committed Hitler.

Here’s the thing: Trump has never been nor will ever be a true believer, an ideologue: he doesn’t believe in anything at all ever except wealth and power—probably only attention and the approval of his father—and that’s a nothing burger when it comes to ever becoming anything close to the True Antichrist.

If Americans feel like they’re being gas lighted (gas lit?), they’ll respond very aggressively against that, and this might very well drive American voters into the arms of Innocuous Hitler, Lame Hitler, Gelded Hitler. They will dismiss the entire anti-Trump, anyone but Trump, Trump is not my President, Resist, why not Biden, campaign as being a Godwin’s law (or Godwin’s rule of Hitler analogies) done on a National Political Stage:

“The theory that as any presidential discussion progresses, it becomes inevitable that Trump will eventually be compared to Adolf Hitler, regardless of the original topic.”

While the New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, CNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, Hulu, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and all the second-tier mainstream media outlets will get rich on DNC, Biden/Harris, and Super-PAC money, I wouldn’t put too much money on the chance of the Biden/Harris ticket winning this Fall. Americans really hate hypocrisy and hate being lied to and while Trump lies constantly and without cessation, he’s completely transparent about it, making him strangely transparent and authentic.

He is what he is, alas.

Americans always prefer flawed transparent than they like a savvy city slicker. While I don’t wish this on anyone—I don’t like either candidate at all—I call a Trump victory that will, oddly enough, be more definite than winning by strategic electoral votes, possibly even winning the popular vote.

The left, the Democrats, and the extremist radicals may see the success of their furious wars against white supremacy, against our “never my president” President, and against intolerance and bigotry; however, when the carpet bombings are complete and the B-52s are ridden hard and put away wet, they’d really better check all the tunnels because America is the least likely country to ever be shamed into doing anything outside of temporary appeasement. I am sure the American Revolutionaries were the most passive-aggressive opposition force that the Red Coats ever had to deal with. Acting all Loyal and Obedient to the King by day and conspiring to overthrow the English in the pubs at night.

I don’t think Americans give much more than just lip service to the right side of history. You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after we’ve tried everything else.

So, I am an oddball, someone who grew up watching Cosmos with Carl Sagan and NOVA on PBS and reading about relativity and being obsessed with Albert Einstein and knowing the taxonomic ranks of the animals of the world, recognizing that Hawaii, where I am from, Oahu, Honolulu, is both a global epicenter of science, technology, astronomy, marine science, anthropology, and whatnot, while still being a magical island that has never just given lip service to the reality of ghosts, gods, spirits, channeling, palm-reading, worship, respect for Madame Pele, our Goddess of Fire, and also respecting our God Maui, the god of the wind and sea. All these things live together. So, it’s really hard for me to ever really choose the kind of sides that ever dismiss anyone’s lifestyle, anyone’s beliefs, including third gender Hawaiians and the entire spectrum of people—including society’s most terrible.

As long as they don’t impinge on other people’s liberties, rights, and lifestyles. To the point where I would fight for the right of Nazis to be able to have a parade down Main Street—that’s what the First Amendment is all about, to me. Though, in 2020, it seems like I am alone in this.

Whataboutism is a cousin of this method. According to Wikipedia:

“Whataboutism, also known as whataboutery, is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent’s position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument.”

Ironically, it’s mostly used as a foil against conversations the debater dislikes the ramifications of. The most popular line of whataboutism is every variation of, “Trump did this and is a horrible person” with the counterargument being, “but Obama did that same thing during his two terms” and the reply, no matter whether there is proof, evidence, or proper refutation, whataboutism has become the de facto version of “I’m covering my ears like a kid. When your words mean nothing, I go la la la.” But dressed in academic gowns.

And it’s extremely popular during the Trump presidency because, over the course of at least the first administration, Godwin’s rule of Hitler analogies has evolved to include Godwin’s rule of Trump analogies. Everything has become a binary between “the right side of history” and whatever Trump and the Trump base believe in or care about. It’s an either/or.

While that might not make sense, initially, I guess you need to be in my head, because the next two things I think of, in parallel, are: are you a true believer, a believer in absolutisms and blacks and whites; or, are you a rhetorician, a debater, who knows how to use the phrase, “false equivalency,” to nuke the conversation through an attempt to completely dismiss and discredit a previously made comparison.

Wikipedia: “False equivalence is a logical fallacy in which an equivalence is drawn between two subjects based on flawed or false reasoning. This fallacy is categorized as a fallacy of inconsistency. A colloquial expression of false equivalency is “comparing apples and oranges.”

Thomas Patterson of the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University, “False equivalencies are developing on a grand scale as a result of relentlessly negative news. If everything and everyone is portrayed negatively, there’s a leveling effect that opens the door to charlatans. The press historically has helped citizens recognize the difference between the earnest politician and the pretender. Today’s news coverage blurs the distinction.”

One of the false equivalences that Wikipedia uses is:

“both Jesus Christ and Adolph Hitler have mustaches, but that does not make them the same” and “The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is no more harmful than when your neighbor drips some oil on the ground when changing his car’s oil.”

Those are very clear. It’s less clear to me when I readily compare the violence perpetrated by the extreme left, in the form of so-called Antifa with the extreme right, in the form of, let’s say, activist militias. To me, true believers—not the faithful, necessarily—are almost always dangerous and disruptive to entire systems. And, since they’re so passionate and zealous about the changes that they desire to massage into reality, they’re almost always willing to follow the most dangerous tenet, as beautifully written and spoken by Malcolm X:

“We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.”

To me, this amazing line in the sand can easily be adopted by any extremists because the above quote can be adopted by the left as easily as it can the right, the strong black descendant of slavery as readily as it can be used to fuel the passions of white men who march through town calling “you will not replace us” in unison.

Everyone has their own narrative and, as I always say, nobody sees Hitler in their own reflection in a mirror—not even Hitler.

Someone with a pistol has only a fraction of a second of fire superiority.

There are three or four things that come between you and shooting someone after you draw: fear, indecision, being overwhelmed, or just chickening out (not committing). Also, your gun can jam, you can have your gun on safe with a manual safety, your gun may not have a round racked, or your pistol may be out of battery. But it’s usually mental. Oh, and the number X reason why you can’t end up defending yourself with a firearm: deciding not to carry that day.

When it comes to that “only shoot until the threat is neutralized” it’s important to always take into consideration how the shooting will be perceived and that the shooting is never perceived as sociopathic, premeditated, brutal, or in bad faith.

That the shooting was both plausibly and probably a defensive act result based on a real-time spot-decision based on a calculus of survival and a real feeling of personal threat to one’s life.

As a result, you actually don’t need to already be beat-up or stabbed or attacked or raped or shot (or see an actual bowie knife or Colt .44 Magnum), but it doesn’t hurt.

But, you don’t even need to have hands-on you because the moment hands are on you, your firearm can be taken and used against you or you can lose the mobility required to defend yourself.

So, in the world of personal defense, there’s no requirement of parity: it’s not gun versus gun, knife versus knife, fist versus fist.

If you shoot someone, only shoot them in what’s called center mass. Center mass is, generally-speaking, the chest. About the size of a paper plate, at the center of the chest. Where all the vital organs are. The biggest, easiest, place to shoot where all the targets are vital towards supporting life. The goal is not to kill, the goal is to stop them from continuing the attack or assault. Since there’s not a bullet known⁠—even shotgun blasts, high-caliber bullets, or shotgun slugs that will physically throw anyone off their feet and into the wall behind them. That’s physically impossible.

While shooting someone in the chest again and again for as long as the attack continues is barbaric, it also doesn’t often always stop a committed attacker. Shock and pain don’t set in immediately.

If you just don’t like the cut of my jib and you decide to have a little poke at me for sport because that’s how you predate? I’ll shoot you the moment you get within 7 yards of me. And 21-feet, I was trained, is my bubble. That’s even further than social distancing which is only two yards, six feet.

It’s called the 21 Foot Rule: “by the time an individual determines a deadly threat, draws his firearm, and places two shots, an attacker has closed up to 21-feet between them.” Which reinforces a gun carrier’s idea that one should have their firearm drawn and ready if they’re approaching with a weapon, even a knife or any weapon, even fists if you’re small, old, a woman, or vulnerable.

Even though you might surely end up arrested for shooting someone with a pipe or a golf club or even a knife, people console (and empower or enable) themselves with sayings like “it’s better to be judged by twelve than to be carried by six.”

Most concealed carriers choose an inside-the-waistband (IWB) holster. There are so many types, made of leather, horsehide, Kydex, nylon, polymer, Cordura, and a lot of other materials, including hybrid, which includes a combination of a large oval of horsehide riveted to a form-fitted Kydex holster.

Most IWB holsters have some form of way to anchor the holster to the pant or belt, usually belt loops, snaps, and clips. Some ride high on the hip, some lie deeply canted, and some are surprisingly deep in the pants, under the beltline, called deep carry.

And they’re carried in different places on the belt, IWB: most popular is at the four or five-o’clock position (where the 12-o’clock position is right at the belt buckle, 3 o’clock is at the side, and 6-o’clock is the small of the back.

Amongst some very skinny and flat-tummied concealed carriers, people sometimes choose to appendix carry, which is carrying your gun either in the waistband or in an IWB holster tucked in at the 1-o’clock position, which is called AIWB, and playfully called MOD (muzzle on dick) carry.

Our pattern recognition isn’t necessarily a reliable narrator, though, so who even really knows whether I’ve been tapped, whether I am on some sort of quadruple-secret reserve retainer. There’s no evidence, anyway. Not even in my own mind to my own self.

I don’t have a handler. I don’t spend lonely nights on my shortwave transcribing number stations or perusing the classifieds or personals of the local broadsheet in search of secret messages. I neither drop nor do I pick.

It occurs to me all the time that I am a simple, non-elite, lonely, civilian with absolute zero intrigue, neither an unwitting dupe nor even anyone’s fool. To wit, I spent half a year collaborating with the only shadowy Muscovites in the history of the world who just happened to only be ambitious young cryptocurrency entrepreneurs.

Even earnest and surprisingly threatening accusations of being a stooge for Putin or a Russian agent couldn’t be further from the truth. If I were to ignore the patterns that I both see and hear all around me and through the persistent friendships of the people around me who have known me for as long as 25-years and no shorter than 15-years.

The Moldovan immigrant American who I call my fairy godmother (in ode to Mother Night), the Elliot School privateer diplomat free spirit who is always available by phone, except when he’s not, and the son of a handsome, fit, native son of McLean who is like a brother (they are all my brothers) who has never had much of a believable job and has never explicitly ever denied being a secret agent (though I guess I have never asked).

Though, if I were to think about all of it soberly and after a very restful night of sleep, I guess they could just be best friends instead of government-sponsored handlers. That makes much more sense.

So, the only two actual indicators that I am a spy are the clever little things that I have bought and issued to myself: the pistols and rifle and the camouflaged boonie caps and kit bags and operator wristwatches.

It’s all fancy dress. What a fool I’ve been. What a fool I am.

Just put your studies first and be blessed with at least a 130 IQ—more is better to a point—and some common sense, some situational awareness, and the gift of physicality—and be so average and normal and mediocre-looking that you have a God-given cloak of invisibility—and you’re most of the way there.

Think Cameron Frye instead of Ferris Bueller; actually, Ferris would be fine as a spy if he weren’t so attention-seeking because let’s be honest, Bueller was way more personality than prowess or beauty.

What every intelligence agency really wants for field officers is the little grey man. Smart, clever, possibly brilliant, but blessed with natural invisibility. Neither handsome nor ugly, neither well-dressed (with the strange exception of the homeless, who are de facto invisible because while you recognize their existence, you still avert your eyes and tend to not really look at them unless they’re sleeping on your stoop) nor especially unkempt (think Charlie Brown and not Schroeder or Pig-Pen—and for heaven’s sake, not Linus van Pelt—good grief!).

The grey man isn’t exclusive to spycraft anymore. Anyone smart who carries a gun concealed—even legally—aspires to not telegraph “I’m carrying a pistol on my right hip at 4-o’clock under my shirt in an inside the waistband holster” in exactly the same way that anyone who is undercover doesn’t want to telegraph “narc” or “spy” or “Fed” or “cop.”

While I’m no CIA Chief of Disguise, Jonna Mendez, everyone knows how to ID 80% of the kind of civilian American guy who legally carries a pistol concealed. Loose unbuttoned overshirt (they call it a cover garment), some form of cargo shorts or pants, some form of a tactical boot in tan or black, a thick leather or nylon gun belt, and probably a SUUNTO CORE watch, tacticool shades, and then there’s the undershirt with the Punisher skull logo. Paracord bracelets. A bag with molle or a velcro patch with a flag. And there are some nice khaki trousers out there but beware of buying anything from 5.11 Tactical except maybe your underwear. Even as an operator or as an assassin, the only thing more obvious than a 5.11 wardrobe is wearing an actual tuxedo.

Instead, buy all your tacticool gear at REI or Patagonia instead. The only difference between the sort of tacticool kit that shows your hand and an invisible wardrobe that turns you invisible is the label. Cover your performancewear with North Face labels and, all of a sudden, you’re a weak and harmless vegan hippy.

Here in DC, invisible is button-down Oxfords, khakis, blue blazers, Oxford shoes or penny loafers, jeans, New Balance sneakers, and even surprisingly elite college and law school sweatshirts. Dime-a-dozen. And a pair of eyeglasses, even with plain glass lenses, can obfuscate intent and easily obscure where you’re looking and what you’re looking at—or that you’re looking in the first place. Hell, when Washingtonians are off the clock, they pretty much only wear North Face and Patagonia with dibs and dabs of sports team, university, grad school, professional school, home town, and maybe the firm they work for (Booz, Deloitte, Ernst, Accenture).

That said, it’s a fine line, right, because, in too many cases as has come to light in the last decade, the Central Intelligence Agency oftentimes DBA Booz, Deloitte, Ernst, and Accenture, so maybe don’t push your luck, if I were you.

Sure, every spy of stage, screen, and story comes straight from the SAS or the Navy Seals. Even James Bond is a Veteran of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy. With broad backs, tall statures, and the bolt-upright esprit de corps beat into a man through training, you and everyone else can spot a military man at a million miles. Add to that a series of very unfortunate tattoos that come with the job and the thousand-yard stare that follows you home from active duty, vets and soldiers are terrible spies and are often used as operators that tap into tradecraft and spycraft instead of being actual spies and intelligence officers. For example, James Bond is an assassin. While it’s an ugly word, assassin, why else would he otherwise need a license to kill? Bond’s an operator. He does wet work.

I’m also told that each field agent keeps and maintains the same alias for the lifetime of their career, unlike in the movies. Not all intelligence agencies do it this way. Defense intelligence lets their assets make up their own names and lets them choose their own back story, within reason. There are a few rules of thumb, however.

The name should be racially and culturally apropos and the background story should be limited to an adjacent city or state. So, I was born in Jersey, spent some time in Manhattan, moved to Hawaii, and then spent the rest of my life in DC and Virginia, with a couple years in Berlin and Portland.

By this age, if I started a false name, would I go Northeast, Hawaii, West Coast, or play it safe by sticking with the Mid-Atlantic, where I’ve mostly been since 1988. And what name would I choose?

I have friends who always choose their false names based on obscure Generals from the Austro-Hungarian Empire from some time between 1867 and 1918.

By sticking to Austria-Hungary, their false names can mostly avoid recognition by even the sort of geeks who watch all the war docs the History Channel has to offer.

But they sometimes play into German Generals from WWI and WW2 and are sometimes questioned at Western European border crossings and they have the banter down pretty well and I like to imagine they handle it exactly the way Fletch probably would.

That said, all of the false names and backgrounds they bring to the field must be approved—they are all reviewed by the home office. I’m told, thanks to either the terrible education system endemic to America or the general sense of humor pervasive in the DIA, none of the obscure names of European war Generals have ever been rejected.

I guess even spies and operators need to have their fun.

What’s the harm.

It can’t be.

It’s gotta be some Yoda shit. I’m a pistol guy. It’s my platform. I aim, breathe, press, and fire. I keep my focus on the front sight and the target blurs into the distance and the rear notch, also out of focus, cups the lined-up sight line, most of it out of focus (the front sight isn’t anywhere near the bullseye down range) and yet I have gotten to the point where I can shoot through an entire 17+1 and end up with a single ragged hole.

There’s really no way that I have ever focused my eyes on the paper target down range and the stock sights I use are just imprecise guides. What really happens—what really must happen—is some form of magic involving an amalgam of years of familiarity and experience, muscle memory, yes, of course, but also something maybe much more basic, much more primal.

Science has proven that when you drive a car or truck, a boat and even a tractor-trailer or commercial jet, the physical body energetically grows and expands to encompass and become aware of what’s happening to the greater vehicle as though it was a direct extension of their own body. I’ve felt it happen. Take a second: so have you.

From your childhood bike to the U-Haul truck you could weave through downtown traffic and back right up to exactly where you need it. I think shooting works the same way. And I’m only including the mortals—the rest of us—not the trick shooters who can break the laws of physics, it almost seems. The trick and sharpshooters are swimming through some sort of otherworldly time-space alternate reality.

I have seen guys in the field make amazing shots, again and again. Against distant targets and moving targets alike. I’ve seen ground forces tag aircraft and helios with high powered rifles. While some did very well have optics and science and even apps that take the Coriolis effect into consideration, that wasn’t most of them. A few very elites were popping distant heads using only irons and just a second of their day, virtually an afterthought.

But, when all’s said and done, even after you’ve installed the best aftermarket trigger or the nicest fluff and buff trigger job, and have meditated and PT’d your resting heart rate to the 40s or 50s and have become mindful and centered, you still need to take the shot and send that 147 grain projectile thousands of meters—or wherever it needs to go—on your own, through those eyeglasses, and the fact that it hits steel every time is a damn miracle that can’t rightly be proven with experience, technology, science, optics, and talent.

To me, there’s some of The Force about it, still quite a lot of magic.

While the sad lonely man who lives alone is the most obvious version, men can have feelings of loneliness even when surrounded by family. There are different forms of loneliness.

Camaraderie is often readily accessible when you’re growing up if you’re the least interested in having mates. Of doing the minimum amount of work required to be a good friend. Or to at least be compelling, amusing, or simply around.

While there are conditions, attitudes, and fears that make it hard for some to make themselves open and vulnerable to friendships, given half an attempt and some shared interests—or even just proximity such as living in the same neighborhood, attending the same school, or even drinking at the same bar or lifting at the same gym—friends happen.

It’s generally pretty simple and passively rewarding. It’s just the way life is. Easily taken for granted.

What is loneliness? Is it being alone? Is it being with someone who treats you in such a way where you feel even lonelier than if you were flying solo? Is it the state of not having anyone to look out for you, make sure you’re healthy, and keep you safe? Or is it more about invisibility or losing personal agency? People can, and do, become invisible.

When you live a discreet life where you’re trained to feel comfortable alone, to feel safer and more self-reliant alone, when being alone makes you feel more self-reliant, ruggedly-independent, then it’s hard to know if and when alone by choice becomes left alone becomes isolation becomes loneliness.

Snipers and forward observers are alone and with a mission. So are some field agents. So many spies are extremely well compartmentalized. Some were hardwired to bifurcate at a minimum; others were trained and conditioned. I know sundry sociopaths and psychopaths and even they crave attention, at least, even if they never necessarily feel suicidal levels of loneliness. However, I bet that enough boredom might very well make even a sociopath suicidal.

And by suicide, I don’t mean topping yourself with a side-by-side in the mouth; rather, a slow-but-sure descent into madness, sadness, and despair, stemming from loneliness. Of even having the thought, “who would care whether I even lived or died—I mean, really.”

That kind of existential hopelessness that makes every cell of the body and all the hormones to desperately hunger for rest, in pursuit of entropy.

It was 1990 and we were only there long enough, was it, to swap the crew and to fuel up. I was catching a bargain charter from Germany to Nepal by way of Munich on the heels of the first days of Operation Desert Storm. While I flew over the still Soviet Union, there were entire fields of aircraft carcasses.

I was on that flight instead of in my seminars at university because the moment the West waged war on Islam and the Middle East everyone canceled their holidays to anywhere even vaguely Oriental, including trips to Nepal. Their loss was my gain.

From the desolate land seen from 30,000 feet to the ancient airfield and ramshackle refueling station, it occurred to me that maybe the Soviet Union was a paper tiger, about as threatening to the safety of the United States as Idaho or Wyoming.

I remembered thinking about how ravaged the CCCP was after losing 26 million Soviet citizens and 11 million soldiers during and as the direct result of World War II. And that’s after 20 million Soviets died at the hands of Joseph Stalin.

How many adult men could be manifested towards fighting the cold war after so many of the most virile young and middle-aged men were killed during the 30s through the 40s? Compare that to the modest, by comparison, 418,500 American lives that were lost. Half a million lives are no joke, surely, by anybody’s measure; however, 46 million Russian lives lost during the Soviet Empire is an order of magnitude greater. Is that 110 times more Russians dead than Americans?

Before the war, the USSR had a population of 190 million to America’s 130 million. Today, in comparison, America has a population that is double that of Russia without its satellite countries. 144.5 million Russians in 2017, compared to 327 million Americans. More women than men and a true post-war population growth failure.

Russia never recovered after World War II and yet we spent the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s shitting our pants and spending like literal drunken sailors on literal aircraft carriers over the threat of Communism, a land war, proxy wars, Soviet moles and spies, and the existential threat of thermonuclear war.

To me, the plausibility of Russia ever being enough of a present threat to drive America into the froths we found ourselves in during McCarthyism reminds me of an out-of-context Matthew 24:6, “you will hear about wars and reports of wars. Don’t be alarmed.” While Matthew meant actual wars; to me, rumors of wars are not enough proof to me that there were or are actual wars behind them.

I’ve felt this way long before watching The Fog of War or Wag the Dog. Way back on a desolate Siberian airfield I already felt that way. At only 20 years of age. Russia is an empty country filled with people who are as over war as their German and Japanese—and sometimes British—counterparts.

To this day, I conflate Matthew 24:6 with FDR’s “so, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance,” resulting in a mash-up such as “you will hear rumors of war but the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

It’s sort of my mantra, a reminder to my busy busy brain, that I intersperse with “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

The men and women who I have depended on to be the smartest, most sane, touchstones of my life have shown such hate, impatience, resentment, and susceptibility to even the least plausible of propaganda.

People have become so addled with fear that they have become as vulnerable to the worst of the 80s propaganda as they are the worst of 80s fashion.

While we only call them our adversary, pundits accuse Russia of invading us, attacking us, and even doing something compared to parachuting commandos into Washington and onto the White House lawn.

The same with North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran; Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. To say nothing of the sudden conversion of normal Americans who have suddenly and domestically been painted as either Communists or Nazis.

Even worse, maybe, is that it’s perfectly OK to dismiss our neighbors and fellow Americans as deplorable others who are not merely lost causes but dangerous, unpredictable, and irredeemable.

Unlike the McCarthyism of the late 40s and 50s, today’s anticommunism witch hunt is being led by the left instead of the right—an irony and history and obvious misdirection that everyone but I—or very few—are willing or able to recognize.

Then, you might get an email inviting you to their tony recruitment center out near Dulles. Or, rather, where to park your car near a bus stop. And, to leave all your electronics in your car before you wait for the bus. Then you jump on a bus with fifty other people from around the country. Then you wait in a room, then another room. Then you wait and read magazines and watch TV. Then they invite you in.

Did I mention that everyone who works at recruitment is smoking hot? Did I mention that the digs are accented in gold. That the digs are far from the austere Brutalism so omnipresent in downtown DC.

Then you’re called in with everyone. They play a movie about the OSS, the history of spycraft in America, and then ask you if anyone has been asking about you at the hotel, at the front desk. And if there are snoops, this is no joke: let them know. Who knows. There was a girl in the waiting room who was tearing articles from magazines. I am sure I should have reported her. I am sure she was a plant. I bet the snoops at the hotel were plants as well.

I bet we’ve been under the lens since well before planting it in this room, watching movies, listening to who you can tell (your wife) and who you can’t (everyone else) and how, if you aren’t married, you’ll probably marry someone in the same business. Like how celebrities marry other celebrities.

And they tell you how to avoid gotchas when you meet someone at a party, how to not tell anyone you’re being recruited into this world and to not lie or be too specific. With my luck, they say, you’ll tell someone you’re interviewing at The World Bank and the person you’re chatting with knows the recruiter there and would be happy to put a good word in. Be as boring as possible, they tell you, or be totally vague, they say, and then change the subject. To turn it around on them, make it about them, ask them about their life. People love talking about themselves (who else is going to really know what you’re going through who doesn’t have clearance? Nobody, really).

You’ll get low balled on salary but offered three hours of personal training every week, as much language study as you can eat, and any degree you’re willing to pursue. Also, an excellent retirement plan, a terrific credit union (Northwest Federal), and the opportunity to possibly make the ultimate sacrifice for your country and your fellow citizens.

They lost me on the low ball offer because I live in DC and Washington’s stupid expensive and there are companies that are willing to pay a lot more for my unique skill set.

In the modern world of information, money is generally the least interesting ransom. If you’ve ever wondered why the U.S. Secret Service doesn’t care about all the terrible things you’ll admit to, they only care about those things you’re so detached from that you’d rather lie to yourself than just get it off of your chest, consider stopping, and then move on (metanoia!). It’s because our secrets are our sickness, it’s because our secrets are our vulnerabilities.

These lies and secrets and denials add up like a pile of the M-80s of legend that have the equivalent bang of a quarter stick of dynamite: soon enough, there’s enough gunpowder piled up to blow up someone’s entire Jenga life.

And these men and women who keep too many glass balls in the air would do anything to anyone, including betrayal and treason. Assume all brothels, sensual massage parlors, champagne rooms, and even the lavs at nightclubs and bars, have eyes in them. Assume that anything that drops right in your lap without requiring quite a lot of discreet pursuit is not only a honeypot but a setup.

We live in the age of Jeffrey Epstein, where every single too good to be true opportunity is a Kodak moment that, at some crucial point, at some point in the future, if and when you become critical, essential, strategic, tactical, rich, connected, or powerful, those dusty digital files will be dug up and you’ll be at the mercy of someone or someones who are very much willing to blow up your entire world simply to get what they want, even if your entire life is only worth a very small and inconsequential throw away part of a greater plan.

That’s how bribery, blackmail, and coercion works—and the only cure is doing a controlled demolition of your own life before anyone else has an opportunity to do it for you.

To quote Baudelaire, “the devil’s best trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist.”

In the same way that a mother has taught her child that there are levels and volumes of voices appropriate to each situation—the inside voice and the outside voice, for example—men in politics have their private and public voices as well. And, as we have learned from the released American diplomatic cables, they can be quite contrary.

Another thing we’ve learned from the released cables is that American operatives and diplomats are far from ignorant cowboys in the same way that the Middle East subjects of many of those cables are not primitive and stuck in the 16th century either.

When you become lulled into a feeling of calm and safety by someone you perceive as a hapless fool, someone you can easily best in your spycraft, in your operations work, think again. Try to get as contextual as you can. Try to figure out whether someone so gullible or naive would have been able to attain such a position as to be interacting with you; additionally, would a man without guile be able to survive in a position such as this even with handlers and support and family and so forth?

Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were both well-educated and well-tested men. Decoys as hapless fools, indeed. Even Bill Clinton was even more cunning than his sweet Bubba demeanor conveyed. In many ways, we’ll never know how fierce Jimmy Carter was, though I daresay one doesn’t get stuff done by being nice and gracious only.

Want to know what the best chaff ever is to make sure that someone underestimates your power and influence? Start your bio off with “… was a peanut farmer in Georgia.” That’ll get them every time.

Thankfully, for cover’s sake, the private club with its cigars and drams of scotch, have been popularly replaced with athletic clubs, and late night drinking binges have been replaced by early to bed in order to fit in weekend mileage for upcoming races and marathons.

In fact, in the last 20-years, keeping up enough training to maintain the fitness required to be able to quickly run down someone and take him out with a well-placed bullet while still being able to maintain breath discipline is now possible.

Here in DC, keeping in practice with small arms and long weapons is a snap, even if you’re deep, well away from being able to drop into the range under the HQ. While DC gun laws are still pretty strict, Virginia is a veritable wonderland for gun enthusiasts. Enthusiast, not freak. If you drop by the range even a few times a week, it’s just good fun and healthy sport—burning off a little steam, a relaxing and cathartic pastime.

That said, since there is very little oversight in the world of moles and since moles very rarely are actually given orders, self-discipline is essential; even so, spy spread is not uncommon. In many ways, spycraft is an intellectual endeavor, requiring succinct writing and analytical skills. Journaling and observation.

When a spy gets a little heavy, one can easily make excuses, “I’ll blend in better if I am a little softer, just like everyone else,” or, “I might have gained some weight but I am still strong and can kick your ass.” Like every man getting older and fatter.

At the end of the day, however, training is essential because when the time comes when you’re activated as an operational asset, wouldn’t it be a pity to have a stroke or a heart attack in the middle of a maneuver.

That’s why I have recently returned to roads around my apartment; that’s why I have recently picked up a new pair of Nike Pegasus running shoes; and that’s why I have been keeping a journal of my mileage, my blood pressure, and my weight.

I have spent my entire life awaiting an opportunity to die for my country—Lord knows I don’t want to keel over dead of my own neglect well before I have an opportunity to serve.

Truth is, there aren’t nearly enough but there are still quite a few. There are upwards of 10,000 FBI agents domestically, 10,000 CIA operations officers worldwide, and who knows how many more operators there are in the DIA, NRO, NSA, Secret Service, ATF, and JSOC.

Let’s assume there are upwards of 50,000 operators in just the United States—well, that’s quite a lot. And I am not including, of course, any of their support staff, the eyes in the sky, the men and women who are the men and women behind these men and women.

I am just saying that while there are not nearly enough men and women to protect every man and woman, there are still more than you’d think, especially in areas as dense in intrigue as Washington, DC.

A dear friend, a friend of mine for over sixteen years, is one of the 10,000 I mentioned above, and he told me that one could “make” a spy in most of the lobbies of most of the hotels in Washington. Someone on a tail, someone learning how to tail, or someone who is simply a secondary or tertiary backup.

No, they’re not always out to get you and they’re oftentimes not authorized to use deadly force—they don’t have a license to kill—but they’re out there, even in the day of video cameras and technology and listening devices, online analysts and field operatives are still the most reliable way.

And, let me remind you that I am not even including the men and women who are spying, looking, and listening on behalf of other countries and private interests.

It’s a snap in Washington, where everyone is pretty much defined on what they do and where they work. In Washington, and much of the United States, people are pretty routine. It is pretty unlikely that upstanding citizens will vary from this routine very much in the course of their daily lives, especially when their livelihoods depend on it.

Berlin, however, is a city rife with artists, musicians, opportunists, and the unemployed. Even those Berliners who have good, reputable, jobs enjoy quite a lot of vacation and flexibility. To make it even harder, traveling around Berlin, Germany, and around the world is relatively cheap due to subsidized public transport and discount airlines.

Of course, added complexity comes from the richness of immigrant, expatriate, and tourist culture. The variety of languages spoken on a daily basis is dizzying. Berlin is an international, heterogeneous, city plopped in the middle of one of the most homogenous countries on the planet. Even Germans are confounded since they’re only good at discerning “German” and “not German.”

Sometimes, this is really all that is important, even when non-Germans are natural citizens of Germany. If you’re not ethnically German, you’ll probably never be accepted as German. Whatever the case may be, this holds little bearing in Berlin where difference is not simply tolerated but celebrated.

When it comes to coercion and blackmail, Berlin is tough. One cannot gain control over another operator simply by threatening to expose dirty laundry. While that may work in the rest of Germany, in Berlin, with its culture of exploration and experimentation, most of the usual secrets and fetishes are not simply embraced but promoted.

In Berlin, prostitution is legal, drugs are not a high priority, infidelity is uncommon but no reason for panic—most Berliners never marry and have children with more than one partner, which is pretty normal and accepted.

And, when it comes to antisocial activities, residents of Berlin are pretty low key. In a city with high unemployment but also generous social services, breaking with the generous-but-strict laws is neither amusing nor rewarding.

Generally speaking, the only Berliners who are considered to be a menace are the skinheads and white supremacists and they’re easy to identify—they fly their own flag, if you will, and are covered in tattoos—and generally politically and commercially unimportant and uninteresting. It will be interesting to see if I will be better able to tune my pattern recognition machine and maybe develop some better filters and more discernment.

Until then, I am going to err on the side of flagging false positives—I would much prefer to be a little paranoid than getting even one false negative, that’s for certain.

Our minds are unreliable pattern recognition engines. We perceive incompletely through our senses and our mind, in its dislike for ambiguity, always draws in the missing bits. What data does my mind use to finish its sketch? Well, it uses my situational understanding of things.

If I trust someone or am in love, my mind tends to dot all of my I’s with hearts and assume good intent, whether or not this is rational or provable. It is in fact possible to actively encourage people to trust you, if you’re a mole. There are two ways, one is through active participation and the other is through invisibility.

Invisibility is the easiest, but still a little tricky. It requires that you’re actively dull, unassuming while still being present and pleasant enough not to be the target of conjecture as to why you’re so reclusive.

Actively encouraging people to trust you is necessary if you’re going to ever integrate or ingratiate yourself into the community-at-large. A mole lives in the land of the sociopath and will quickly start being able to identify certain pathologies in social situations. However, that’s neither here nor there.

And by actively encouraging, I don’t mean getting people to like you. No, what is required is consistency, simplicity, repetition, routine, accessibility, affirmation, and mirroring.

Like I said before, the mind is a pattern-recognition machine. For example, our eyes are better at registering erratic movement than they are at noticing detail. This is to assure we will neither miss spotting prey nor predator. Our brain masks out any visual data it can account for based on past experience so it can focus its resources on something important. This is true for all the physical senses. What’s more, this is true for all the emotional senses as well.

We humans are a dizzyingly complex array of senses and nerve endings. We do not have the capacity to respond to everything all at once. The body constantly takes an inventory of its systems, both physically and mentally, and only flags on the abnormal or titillating.

It is too easy to become invisible to even the closest people in your life. It is frighteningly simple. Become predictable, a creature of habit, a man of few words, reassuring, loving, and routine. The only man our culture considers dangerous is the unpredictable man.

While this advice may be good for becoming the most trusted fellow in your community it is great for picking up on the people who have become completely invisible to you. Beware of the invisible men and women in your life—and they are everywhere in their sameness, plainness, in their age and sadness, in their difference or in their incompatibility.

By working hard to notice everything and training your mind to break its lethargy and current assumptions, you will become more able to enhance your situational awareness. You will also become more attuned to breaking your senses of some of their inconvenient shorthand.

This is only partially useful because then there is emotional perception. Listen to the people around you anew. Realize that you only ever know them for what they tell you, what you infer, what you assume, and what your personal experience with them has been in the past, all of which is completely unreliable. Most of which is the direct result of your brain brazenly sketching in the parts of your maps of these people based on some sort of impression you have of them from your interactions and personal feelings towards them: boss, love, mistress, wife, employee, staff, service worker, mother, child, etc.

The image that I find useful is the training exercise used to train rapid response teams to react to hostage situations. Under a hail of noise and in a busy hostile environment the shooter is required to quickly discern the hostage takers from the hostages. This exercise is used to develop perception, reaction, and response under fire. Since the difference between hostage and terrorist isn’t always clear, it is important to cue on more than just dress, color, posture, or movement. It is important to train your senses to make fewer assumptions and to spend a couple extra hundredths of a second to verify the target as friendly or foe before holding or squeezing off that round.

When it comes to getting made or making someone it comes down to whether or not you’re willing to spend that extra little amount of time verifying.

To quote Ronald Reagan, “Trust, but Verify.”

I tell most people I am a business man who does business. When that isn’t enough, I tell people I am in PR. I am lucky enough to have my own “virtual” company, can keep my own hours, have almost thirty employees spread around the world. When I share this, which isn’t very often, it confounds people—which is why I mostly keep it to myself.

Sometimes, after a few drinks or during dinner parties that are falling into dullness (or, if I am just feeling playful) I take my simple PR work further and discuss some aspects of my work that can ring of intrigue: online intelligence and operations. Simply put, this means that clients hire me to create, groom, improve, or repair their online persona.

Usually, most companies use online monitoring to track the course of their online brand perception, that’s all. My company has a rapid response operations component that is brilliant at engaging negative discussion online and either diluting it so completely that it effectively disappears or by doing a little bit of Judo and turning the negative attack into a net-positive. This all comes down to aggressive hearts and minds outreach and persuasion and needs to happen shamelessly, powerfully, professionally, and expertly.

Needless to say, the sort of clients who are not only interested in this sort of work but who can also pay our fees are the sort of clients who get a lot of attention anyway. Funnily enough, I always attract the attention of people who one might fancy being spies assigned to me on a reconnaissance detail. You know, just to make sure I am who and what I say I am, which is to say just a humble PR consultant who focuses exclusively on influencing, guiding, and responding to online conversation.

Half a year ago I took a client who is an oligarch and a businessman—or, rather, he was. This work was intriguing even to me as my job was to remove his brushes with International courts and his scrapes with the leaders of his former Soviet Union.

This was no easy game because while I am very good at what I do with online brand reputation management and repair (I am a cleaner), I knew that my work was being countermanded both by a communications team in Russia and by a wide assortment of articles and posts in the Russian press that made it a constant challenge to both gain ground and hold it in the search engines.

At the end of the day, however, my client disappeared under suspicious circumstances. While there is no confirmation that there was foul play—I mean, this could be a publicity stunt—the contract has been broken and the operation has been decommissioned.

You know what they say … you’re not in the big league until you have a client disappeared!

Not only was propaganda associated with Hitler’s Nazi Germany but it was also the term associated with communist imperialism. A Minister of Propaganda was generally perceived as both evil and nefarious. While undoubtedly effective in grooming culture and the populace and in crowd control, the perceived methods of a Ministry of Propaganda were considered cruel, manipulative, and the antithesis of American liberty and freedom.

In 1952, Bernays published Public Relations following-up to his 1928 book, Propaganda. Essentially, Bernays was able to rebrand and relaunch a military and wartime word associated with oppression into something that was perceived as being transparent and friendly—an opportunity for organizations, governments, and corporations to be able to better expose themselves to their members, citizens, and customers.

Before Propaganda became public relations, there were advertising, marketing, and publicity firms. It wasn’t until the work in psychoanalysis by Bernays’ uncle, Sigmund Freud, became popularized and utilized in professional communications and propaganda that modern propaganda was born. Or, at least, until public relations became a more acceptable euphemism for such a tarnished word.

Today, of course, even PR is considered tarnished and sleazy. PR is popularly called “spin” and the entire industry has been painted as using manipulative, calculating, and lethal campaign strategies on behalf of their clients. As a term, PR has been replaced by marketing and communications.

Even so—and whatever it may be called or labeled—public relations works, whether used in wartime or in times of peace; to placate a populace or to encourage consumerism; or to repair the reputation of an entire country or just as a way of removing the egg off of the face of an indiscreet CEO. In fact, if used judiciously and long-term, PR can and does groom entire cultures towards destinations both known and unknown, the consequences of which can often be anticipated and mostly planned for.

No doubt that PR is a compelling industry and effective whether or not anyone believes in it any more. Actually, the less people are guarded against the effect of messaging, communications, the media, PR, marketing, advertising, publicity, and sales (and they are beginning to collaborate more and more), the more effective these tools and methods become.

To quote Baudelaire, la plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas! Or, in English, the devil’s best trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist!

W made all the arrangements. W’s friend moved me into his former apartment. I never really thought about it, but I am here as a direct result of W’s time and energy and I am beholden to him.

Of course, I speak no German and have never had any passion or dream to move to Germany. That said, moving here does satiate a lifetime desire to expatriate to Europe. The vision was Paris, but Berlin is said to be the new Paris, the new New York, the new San Francisco.

I guess I moved from one Nation’s Capital to another, Bundeshauptstadt. From my first impression, Berlin might well be as saturated in international intrigue as it was twenty years ago. It rings of subtext and safe houses. It smells of statecraft and spycraft. All underground railroads seem to lead to Berlin. They call it multiculti but I think that maybe Berlin is a safehouse all its own.

It really doesn’t matter. The city is civilized and safe, the people are generous, and all the trains still run on time. Below the surface, however, there is something going on. I just received my residency papers and I will be required to perform 300 hours of language training and 50 hours of German integration training.

At the end of the day, I think the secret to becoming a Berliner is to receive the 300 plus 50 hours gladly and with a certain amount of civic and national pride. Otherwise, I fear, to not gladly integrate can result in some prejudice from both the government and her people.

Pride is excessive belief in one’s own abilities, that interferes with the individual’s recognition of the grace of God. It has been called the sin from which all others arise. Pride is also known as Vanity.
Envy is the desire for others’ traits, status, abilities, or situation.
Gluttony is an inordinate desire to consume more than that which one requires.
Lust is an inordinate craving for the pleasures of the body.
Anger is manifested in the individual who spurns love and opts instead for fury. It is also known as Wrath.
Greed is the desire for material wealth or gain, ignoring the realm of the spiritual. It is also called Avarice or Covetousness.
Sloth is the avoidance of physical or spiritual work.

I for one am especially vulnerable to pride. In addition to pride, most in Washington are vulnerable to lust, greed, and anger.

The most appropriate camouflage for not standing out in the Nation’s Capital is a pair of khakis, a blue button-down, a white undershirt, a pair of penny loafers, blue socks, a yellow tie, a black or brown belt, and a blue blazer with gold buttons.

Actually, if you’re on a budget, anything from the GAP, and if you’re financed, buy everything from Brooks Brothers, sailing and golf-supply stores.

Casual wear in Washington is just a variation on the theme. Remove the button down and replace it with a polo shirt—Lacoste is the current favorite but Ralph Lauren is always acceptable—dark colors during the Winter months and surprisingly bright colors during the summer, including pink and Carolina blue, to be worn over a white crew neck undershirt.

Options include trading out the leather belt for a cloth web belt and the khaki pants for a pair of golf shorts.

Hair should be maintained above the collar, over the ears, parted on the side, and natural—highlights and coloring are frowned upon.

The face should be clean-shaven. Glasses are acceptable—reading-glasses even preferable—but sunglasses need to be conservative and not sporty or wrap-around. Dark, wrap-around, sporty shades are a sure sign of a background in law-enforcement or a history of rigorous training in Fort Bragg or San Diego.

Timepieces should be analog and not any variation of G-Shock or rubber-banded dive watch. Dive watches can have stainless or leather bands. Breitling-type watches are currently very popular.

If a digital watch is preferred, make sure it is a commercial runner’s, cyclist’s, or diver’s watch, although it is important that there be a familiarization not just with running, biking, or diving but with the recreational communities of running, biking, or diving.

Never turn your head.

So these folks do what men and women do from the beginning of time. They go to bars, they go to whores, they get laid, they get soused, and they self-medicate to the best of their ability.

“The intelligence community comes to these bars,” he said, “and they just come and since they are normal men and women, they drink and are lonely and sad and have so many secrets.”

There is such a weakness in the psychology of discretion and loneliness wherein the general truth is, “nobody knows of your successes but only your failures.”

“I wanted to visit S, her husband, and her new baby, but I couldn’t,” M told me once. She lived in Brussels and he was free from his last tactical operation and had some time to travel, but couldn’t visit her because he was not M but was J. And national security could not condone this intentional stress on the fabric of reality. Better safe than sorry, as they say.

According to Huxley, it takes a village to raise a holy man. Holy men are very important portals to the other, but are useless when it comes to living life.

To quote R, a college chum, “everything is exactly the opposite of how I thought it to be.”

He stood up and started to walk away towards R, slowed down, and then turned towards me.

“The best place to hide anything, you know Chris, is in plain sight.”

“If it makes more sense to you,” W said after a while, “it is akin to sitting just outside of a playground and not having a kid of your own. Without a kid or a wife, the first thing you must be is a pervert or a kidnapper. What other reason is there for a grown man to spend his afternoon watching children at the park? There isn’t. Not to the parents and not to the cops.”

W sighed. We watched as R slowly approached us. R was still out of earshot.

“Even if we were sitting here on the bench. Together, we can sit shamelessly and pass the time looking and talking. If I were here alone, I would need to have a newspaper with me. I could of course sit for hours looking, with the paper folded on my lap or in my fist and that would be fine, but without the newspaper I am conspicuous and threatening. People recognize patterns. It is this talent that has allowed us to get where we are now, not the other stuff. We call this pattern recognition many things, but one of the things is creativity. True creativity is not just making something pretty. It is recognizing, revealing, and displaying lost patterns. A single adult male spending hours by himself people watching without any other activity, be it a paper, a radio, a notebook, or a camera, is a little creepy and quite possibly will draw attention to himself.”

We walked further and although I tried to look less obvious in my hungry desire to devour all the shapes and colors around me, it was to no avail.

“There is nothing wrong in walking around with an expensive camera dangling around your neck. You can look all you want—you don’t even have to take a single picture—but without the camera or a reporter’s notebook or a sketch pad, you are threatening. People don’t know what to make out of you.”

“Chris, do you have any shampoo I can borrow?” he asked.

“Sure. Let me grab it from my bathroom.”

Washington, DC, is different. Washington is a planned city. From the radial patterns of the avenues, to the manicured grounds of the Capitol. Washington was planned.