Showing posts with label my ordeal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label my ordeal. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 16, 2025
Sunday, November 9, 2025
YouTube caption glitches
YouTube has good language recognition software, so I'm not sure how these errors happened.
Friday, November 7, 2025
my magical mystery tour, illustrated
These two clips give a taste of what I went through:
I have journeyed across time and space, both in my dreams and in real life.
Wednesday, November 5, 2025
Don't get conned by Shell's immersion cooling oil for computers
Regular mineral oil works just fine and is much cheaper and safer. Don't be a sucker and fall for a fancy label. I used it on my experimental computer. If I remember right, I overclocked it to 5 GHz.
In 2021, I was handcuffed and interrogated by NSA special agents. But that was for something else.
I'd love to make a Beowulf cluster like this and see what it could do:
Friday, October 24, 2025
overcoming death anxiety
On a side note, if you've ever beaten a video game, you know more about computers than about 90% of people alive today. Yay us!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy4HA3vUv2c
Food for thought:
1) The worst-case scenario is that death is just a dreamless sleep. Most people would pick hell over oblivion. Some would even pick hell over heaven.
2) Realize that death is inevitable. It is the price we pay for the gift of life.
3) Imagine you could build an afterlife that would maximize happiness. You'd need to be flexible about your beliefs of heaven and hell because everybody dies and thus must all go to the same place.
4) Your afterlife needs dogs, because all dogs go to heaven or something.
5) Your afterlife needs to fair to kids somehow. Kids die early sometimes and have to go somewhere.
6) Your afterlife has to punish the right people somehow. And remember that kids will be around to see it.
7) Did I say dogs already? "Most dogs go to heaven" is unappealing for some reason.
8) Ask yourself how your afterlife would handle people with serious injuries or disabilities.
9) Does your afterlife allow the dead to communicate with the living? If so, how?
10) What is approximate location, temperature, season, and time of day for your afterlife? Is everybody there going to be OK with it?
might get your creative juices flowing. Even an extra strong marijuana edible might work. Be warned about this method. It can land you in a psychiatric hospital for days or weeks.
Some other suggested reading:
Some more suggested music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUQiUFZ5RDw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2msh0jut2Y
Thursday, October 23, 2025
My magical mystery tour
Starting on Friday, October 3rd, until the following Sunday, I had a mystical experience that started with me driving north as if pulled by a magnet and ended with me in a psychiatric ward for 17 days. I'm tempted to believe I was drugged, but the toxicology screen found nothing, and I didn't drink a drop of alcohol before, during, or after the experience.
During it, I was convinced I was experiencing a vision of the afterlife, though something told me that there are many afterlives and each one is heaven for one group and hell for another. Basically, heaven, hell, and real life are all happening at the same time, and everybody goes to real life, heaven, and hell, just for different lengths of time.
I saw it as heaven, as it was night, cool and quiet, and I was able to walk around unbothered and invincible. When I first heard dogs barking, I thought that maybe I was in hell, but then I remembered the movie All Dogs go to Heaven. If I wasn't drugged, then something definitely broke in my brain, at least temporarily. Every afterlife is fair because everybody dies. Some people experience hell in this life, while others experience heaven.
Turns out in my "heaven", there is no hunger, thirst, or pain. Just the quiet beauty of nature at night and occasional human interaction, mainly with the downtrodden. If it was from LSD, scopolamine, whatever, many people could experience it for themselves and find inner peace.
These music video sums up the situation well:
Friday, September 26, 2025
Wednesday, September 24, 2025
overkill
No joke - when I was in the Army, I got sent to an insane asylum for refusing to fill out a risk assessment form to peddle a stationary exercise bike.
military intelligence = oxymoron
Tuesday, September 23, 2025
Saturday, September 13, 2025
my experience in the so-called Intelligence Community, dramatized
Tuesday, September 2, 2025
My daily grind at NSA & related ramblings
I was an Army Arabic linguist assigned to them from 2018 to 2021. For most of it, I was on the night shift from 1500 (3 pm) to 0100 (1 am) 4 nights per week. It was good schedule as it got me out of a lot of Army bullwinkle like group PT. I'd come in, check my email, what the previous shift did, and any instructions they left for us. Then I'd spend the rest of time listening to intercepted audio clips called cuts. I'd usually listen to at least 100 per night. Many of my peers of similar rank and experience might listen to 10. If a cut had intel value, someone would transcribe it, and that transcription would get checked by someone else. Then it would go into a report which 50 people might read. Those people would be various higher ups in the military and government. Less 1% of the intercepted audio got checked and about 1% of that had any intel value. To help pass the time, I read the news, classified reports, NSA archives, and Wikipedia while I listened. I wasn't much of a transcriber, so I figured scanning as many cuts as possible was the best use of my time. It turns out I had the right idea. The odds of any cut being important were about the same, so the logical action was to just listen to as many as possible after some filtering. My approach was criticized a few times before I was vindicated.
It was a low stress job for the most part. No one was shooting at us, and we could pretend to be civilians in our free time. When I got off shift, I'd exercise on my own usually with a long walk around Barton Field on Fort Gordon. Then I'd go back to my barracks room, have a beer and a shot, and read the news or listen to music before going to be around 0400 and waking up around 1100. Excessive online training paperwork, and pointless classes were basically my only hassles. Even those get unbearable after a while. At NSA, I had to digitally sign umpteen digital agreements for access. Each one was many pages of legalese. My thinking was: I have to sign it to do this job, which trained hard for and am stuck in, and since there is no chance of modifying the agreement if I refuse any part of it, it doesn't matter if I read it or not. All these bureaucratic absurdities can drive people crazy and routinely do.
When I got there in 2018, I had to sit through about 100 hours of PowerPoint before I actually got to do the job I'd already spent 3,000 hours training for. This was around the time that I got completely burned out on speeches, lectures, sermons, etc. I never liked them to begin with, but now, they're intolerable.
The pandemic really messed up my schedule. My hours kept getting changed, and there were several multiweek stretches where I barely left my room. The gyms were closed for months, and a curfew prevented my nightly walks. For my details on how I flamed out, see my autobiography, which is also posted on this site.
The ending was painful, but I'm glad I made the journey. In high school, I wanted to be a military linguist, and I was able to do that just before the window of opportunity closed. Some people join the Army and get an early grave. I left with all the body parts I came in with and most of my sanity. The Army was not going to work out for me long-term for various reasons. The struggle to keep my weight down was tiresome enough.
If I was still with NSA or one of their contractors, I'd be sitting, reading, listening, and typing in front of a screen for 40 hours per week. The pay and working conditions are good, at least compared to most other jobs I've had, but I don't think I'd be happy doing it for decades. Basically, my job would be a minor role in helping America meddle in the Middle East. That's been going on my entire adult life with disastrous results. It was great to get paid to learn another language because that's something I do for fun anyway.
My code breaker application with them has been open for 4 years. Not sure how I did on the online tests, but I suppose it was good enough not to be rejected immediately. In the unlikely event they offered me that job or any other, I'd take it despite not wanting to move again or live in the DC metro area. When I ponder trends in US education, especially math, I wonder how NSA is going to fill its ranks. My guess is they will lower their standards since that's what the military and other large bureaucracies do.
The situation with AI reminds me of the way the Soviets lagged because their system depended on copying and stealing technology from the West rather than innovating. But at least they were stealing from educated, intelligent people. All the students today using AI to cheat aren't even doing that. AI can't come up with original ideas, only sloppy remixes.
My libertarian side is somewhat happy the dumbing down of everything will cause governments to fade into irrelevance.
Sunday, August 24, 2025
The not-so-secret NSA language school in Augusta, GA
The eight-foot-high steel fence around the place and the keycard activated, heavy-duty turnstiles are a clue. It's a soft target, hence its innocuous sounding name: Westgate Learning Center. Kerr Business College closed in 2009.
Defense Language Proficiency Testing is done here. The center is very crowded and busy on those days. The entrance and exit are the same. That's a handy chokepoint.
There is a Zen style garden and picnic area between the two parallel sections. That part was my favorite. It also has a splendid multilingual library.
Turning that place into a smoking hole in the ground would be easy for a madman with nothing to lose.
Tuesday, August 19, 2025
My NSA odyssey - recap after 4 years
This post will revisit some things I've discussed before. Below is a post with links to other one of relevance.
It's amusing that odyssey refers to a dangerous journey named after its sole survivor. That story has always spoken powerfully to me. About 4 years ago, I applied to be an NSA codebreaker after having spent the previous 2.5 years working for them as an Arabic linguist while in the Army. My application is still under consideration, though I doubt very much I'll ever get an offer for reasons I'll explain later.
In March of 2021, I suspected that NSA was spying on me and manipulating my electronics. I know for a fact they do this routinely because I watched them do it to others and read their reports about it. Later events confirmed that for me beyond a reasonable doubt. At first, I thought that perhaps they were trying to pacify and rehabilitate me or mold me into someone they found acceptable. Later, I concluded they were more likely trying silence, provoke, and discredit me. They've done such things before. See the case of William Binney for an example.
I'd take a job if they offered one, though I have little enthusiasm for it now. The traffic near NSA HQ in Fort Meade would give me cancer of the soul. I'm open to using my abilities for the good of national security under any kind of arrangement. At heart, I'm still a patriotic man mostly. I've returned to welding after 4 years of hiatus. It's figuratively and literally more constructive than anything I did at NSA, or even my life in general, though I am always open to other possibilities.
How odd it all turned out. I have all these exotic achievements under my belt: Eagle Scout, chemical engineering degree from a full scholarship, Peace Corps, Army, and NSA. If I was a smarter man, I'd have realized at a younger age that high achievement is often me with indifference, scorn, or jealousy. Schopenhauer had wise words on that:
Even so, I don't regret my efforts at pursuing greatness. You find what you look for. A better way of phrasing that is you go on a journey to get what you want and find what you need along the way.
There are times when I've pondered thoughts of revenge against my various tormentors. I try to remember that it's better to just move on and enjoy life. I have other, more important goals than getting even, becoming a father and homeowner chief among them. The truth always comes out in the end anyway, and the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice.
I don't like making threats or ultimatums, but I will note my abundant patience is finite. Hopefully it never runs out. In my experience, people won't leave you alone until you give them a compelling reason. I prefer to defeat my enemies by making them into friends.
The harassment has dropped off greatly since 2023. It mostly consists of my internet mysteriously getting jammed and an inexplicable number of YouTube ads about living with schizophrenia. It's all so tiresome. Whatever. If they're trying to break me, it's not going to work. I've been through a lot more than most.
Below is the strongest piece of evidence I have for what I've claimed. I made that video at my apartment in Augusta, Georgia in the spring of 2022. The same sequence of events happened every time I locked or unlocked my apartment door for weeks.
At this point, I just want to be a free spirit living peace.
Friday, August 1, 2025
Flight 93 was shot down by the US military - here's the proof - الكذب الكبير من امريكا
Below is a picture of Paige Brown. We worked together as Arabic linguists in section FGX3B23 at NSA. Not long after I met her in the summer of 2019, she came to me with a pained expression and asked, "is it OK to talk about classified information here?" Since we were almost at our desks inside the Whitelaw NSA building, I said yes. Then she said that Flight 93 was shot down by the US military. I wasn't surprised, but I also understood why a false narrative was propagated and why being told the truth pained her. I see no reason why she would lie or why the USAF instructor at Goodfellow AFB who told her would lie about it either. 24 years of lies is enough, and it is standard practice to declassify things after 25 years.
There was no heroic last stand by the passengers. This is all the more obvious when I remember how cowardly Americans were during COVID.
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There was no heroic last stand by the passengers. This is all the more obvious when I remember how cowardly Americans were during COVID.
I have been reluctant to publicize this information. My rationale is explained here:
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