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The Consultant
Deep Eddy
I opened the tear-away seal on the oversized FedEx mailer and shook it upside down. A single, personal check fell out. No envelope, no note, no nothing else. Just the check, which slid off the counter and fluttered down onto my sock feet.
I picked it up and examined it. "Seventy Five Thousand And 00/100." The "A" in "And" was sloppy: He'd accidentally written "D" and had to make an "A" out of it after the fact by drawing a line through the middle.
He'd scribbled "Consulting" on the
Thanks h
Walt, I try to read every piece you write here, first-time that I leave a comment.
Do I understand that right, they used your work primarily on the “bare knuckle”-website and then also recycled it through these semi-official russian propaganda channels? I always thought those were produced in the St.Petersburg troll factory.
It was back at that time, that I became aware of their ongoing maskirovka and info wars in Central Europe. And when one reads intensively about alleged Agent Marsalek in the FT, it’s quite scary to see, retrospectively, how effective their operations were. Basically by trial by error method with hired guns.
Thank you for your good work on this site!
It isn’t all produced in troll factories. And the recycling / creating of echo chambers using the semi-official channels is accurate, yes. You have someone savvy and educated write something that’s half-true, then you get it recycled on the semi-official outlets, then one of the official wires picks up pieces of it, then if you’re lucky, right-wing mainstream US media picks it up and/or some unsuspecting US politician shares it on social media, and then before long, no one knows where it came from in the first instance. The truth is, a lot of it comes, originally, from the bottom of a Deep Eddy bottle, figuratively or literally. That’s not to say all of it’s written by liars, or that it’s all lies. In fact, the “best” of it is half-true and written by some very smart people. That’s what makes it so formidable as counter-narrative.
Yeah, got it. You could see a prime example of this network effect, reflexivity and exponential feedback loop of disinformation last month with the nuke hysteria. The (internet) pen is now seemingly mightier than the sword. The final sounds in this specific echo chamber were these laughable hyperbolic clips/comments by “Podcaster Joe”. In contrast the ISW had to say: “Putin intensified his reflexive control campaign (…) by conducting an ostentatious ballistic missile strike (…)” and “Putin’s November 21 statement demonstrates that Moscow’s constant saber-rattling largely remains rhetorical.”
The NYT published a write up from an author who spent time getting his “news” from Rumble. I suppose it makes sense that people are happy to profit off anything and everything, but I will never understand how anyone can peddle non-stop hate and conspiracy. It has to be exhausting (as Candace Owens of all people attests).
We’re doomed, but not for the reasons that all these Rumble personalities claim. Education is the vaccine, but I guess we’ll have to accept ignorance and polio as a fact of life once again.
I was perusing my old emails and came across one of the Notes from Disgraceland essays published in May. I was searching for the essay on your site and didn’t find it to add a comment, but some of the points about fascism resonated now that we are looking down the barrel Trump’s return to the presidency.
Greatly appreciate your explanations of how RT and Sputnik function, as I have never even looked at either of those news sources- at least partially due to paranoia about being tracked, but mostly due to the fact that I figured they aren’t objective. There are one or two “news” sources that I peruse for entertainment purposes, but if I read something on one of these outlets that I think might be true- I at least cross check with a valid news source before considering it “news” instead of “entertainment”. Hard to believe that the leaders of our country aren’t doing the same!
I recall one of your posts (from several years ago) about something that occurred in 2016 involving two Albanian women and numerous gimlets that is obviously(?) related to what you disclosed about your Eastern European “colleague” in this monthly, as well as a previous monthly post. Your life sure seems to have had a wide variety of “high risk/high financial reward” chapters, but it also seems like you have made your “F You” money. In my experience, once one has made their F You money- one can truly live their life as they please.
I do have one question for you, H: if your Island was/is where I think it is- then wasn’t the drive home from the bar at Bonefish Grill a little too far?
🙂
You did not have to bother going to their websites. After the 2020 elections I occasionally would look at Infowars for relaxation. At the time they had a line about 2/3rds down the page above a section labelled “sponsored links” or something. I was surprised to find quite a few links to articles clearly labelled as being from Sputnik.
Great lore. Can you write up your history to be release post-humorously by a lawyer or something? You can encrypt it in your backend and they put in a hex and it automatically publishes. These are your best articles, combining the historical context to today events along with the long running thread of personal narrative building some extra tension.
I must be the slowest subscriber to this site because I have read everyone of your monthly letters and I still can’t quite piece together your background. I am really hoping you’ll write about how you made the jump to from whatever this all was to Wall Street guy.
I never said I was a “Wall Street guy.”
As the media, belatedly and finally, discloses more and more about the extent of Assad’s involvement in what is estimated to be at least a $10B captagon drug empire, Tulsi Gabbard is looking less and less like an acceptable choice.
H-Man, in the old days on the island, your submissions often wandered into pictures of flying insects on your porch and asking your readers for assistance in identifying the critters. Having a wicked tongue, you would often emasculate any poster in no uncertain terms and then have the audacity to send the subscription reminder.