Flying Monkey Morning Report

I have one hovering about to keep an eye on Twitter ...

It’s morning here on the Left Coast, and you know what that means. I pour a little cold brew out of the Takeya pitcher, add some lactose free half & half, and sit down to start my day.

First things first, I look at Signal to see if there are any immediate fires burning, have a look at a couple email in boxes, maybe even check my LinkedIn PMs. And then finally I check a room with a name that changes a couple times a week. This morning it’s called #FingeringLeadsToFisting, which I think has to do with a recent Ben Shapiro misadventure of some sort.

This is the place for those who watch Twitter and a few related writing venues, in the same manner that people used to turn up to be in the audience for Jerry Springer … and SOMETHING is up this morning, but it’s not clear what …

Attention Conservative Notice:

Gloating is perhaps my worst remaining character defect. This started as just some sly observations on people who don’t know much, but who are stuck attempting to get some engagement, but then it devolved into a serious SITREP on influence operations and counter-intel activity. Depending on your goals, you can skip either the first three sections, or the last three.

Participants & Ploys:

Scientology’s Dullest Tool is of course involved, but I see no signs of Probable Pissposting. There’s no recent activity from Captain Coprolite & Turdboy. There’s been no sign of Individual None for a good long while. There’s only a thin stream of activity in my Insane Clown Posse RSS feed.

There aren’t even signs someone is Filing A Conjunction yet, we’re still in the internet court parallel of discovery - Drama Recycling. People who don’t know anything that matters in late August of 2024 are pulling out old crap and waving it around, hoping someone will take the bait. There are some social media addicts who should know better and they’re tossing their own stale drama offerings into the scrum, presumably in hopes of shaking loose some information.

Bullshit Personas:

If your life has any of these misfeatures and you’re reading this for clues, go back to Informantspotting, which is a sort of catalog of failure modes and fuckups, but if I only get to say one thing that matters it would be.

Ignore Bullshit Personas

There is a cottage industry of creating, running, subverting, rebooting, etc various entities that never resolve to real people. Individual None is a curious example - it was a quintessential bullshit persona, then it got doxed in 2018, and now it’s been rebooted and its in the hands of someone much less schizotypal that the original operator. There are some other creatures of that vintage, they know seemingly everything about every player, every old episode, and they take up provocative positions. They’ve been annoying enough that their appearance will likely trigger a Wild Hunt.

And it completely, utterly does not matter which person or group of people has their hand up the sock puppet’s butt. If you assign a name to a bullshit persona, right or wrong, it’ll make fun of your poor investigative skills, treat your findings as a faildox, and roll it into the overall disinformation.

Overwatch:

This flying monkey person is a component of my Multifaceted Overwatch. They enjoy observing all the activity, so there are a collection of names and personas that interest them. I give them deep history on stuff, they bring me current news in exchange. The vast majority of what they see is 1) not well grounded in reality 2) potentially grounded in reality but not very interesting or 3) the tip of a larger iceberg that actually does matter, but the time spent watching closely would make it hard to know the bigger picture, just due to the scope.

A lot of what goes into performing overwatch for someone else is a mix of case officer duties and mental health counselor.

“What you see is a side effect of bigger issue X being in play right now.”

“I think that might be just a bunch of dots, when was the last time you ignored your phone for a whole entire weekend?”

“That does seem important but you being tagged is incidental, maybe just ask them quietly what’s going on, then sleep on what you are told.”

People who know they are under surveillance get a crick in their neck looking over their shoulder, and if they’re actively involved in an attempt at sense making, or worse participating in a conflict, they’ll get induced paranoia. I wrote Paranoia: Professional Or Pathological? as a guide for how to remain on the functional side of that line.

This is the views counter for this Substack. The red dots denote periods where I was feeling the beginnings of burnout, so I took a break of a week or more. For me this manifests as an uncharacteristically callous response to the suffering of others - laughing when I should be cringing.

Actual Interesting Stuff:

There are things on Twitter that kinda vaguely matter, or they’re notably funny, like this instance of NAFO bleeding into the real world, because OF COURSE the CIA is funding a bunch of bring damaged cartoon dogs.

And then there’s stuff like this …

But I look at the author’s recommended Substacks and I get a bad feeling about it.

Icebergs:

There are a couple icebergs in play right now.

Two months ago Julian Assange plead guilty to conspiracy and he’s been released back to Australia. The Wikileakers have all put on fresh Depends and they’re circulating, taking pot shots at DDoSecrets. Like the cartoon dogs bit above, there is a push to equate that little civil society org with the CIA. One has to wonder what sort of Kremlin Krap Wikileaks wants to dispense this election cycle.

There is a fairly obvious counter-intel campaign right now. Dmitry Simes and Scott Ritter got raided by the FBI. Yuri Shvets may not be the best source, so his interpretation is open to OUR interpretation, but the facts of the matter regarding the raids stand. MIOS: Iran’s PressTV had something to do with the arrest of Richard Medhurst, there’s another Brit that scampered off to Costa Rica to avoid the inevitable, and there’s a third high profile person all over the PressTV phone logs that’s about to get his time in the barrel.

Telegram Founder Pavel Durov Arrested wasn’t the best title for that piece; he intentionally came to France and surrendered. This has set off a snivelstorm from free speech absolutists, panicked shrieking from cryptocurrency grifters, and everybody who was OK using a platform that probably has Kremlin tentacles in it is a lot less OK with the potential that western governments may contrive to obtain similar access. This last bit, the western access, I don’t know that they COULD get more than they already have, but that is a point of concern for those who use the system.

As I was drafting this I just learned that the confluence of the scampered Brit and the Telegram arrest may “achieve visibility”, Daily Mail style. When you engage in Felony Stupidity, you might get to spend some time in cyberpillory before the bobbies finally catch up to you.

Finally, I got read into a couple other things, but ones where I have no history, so I’m not going to make a peep about them. But they’re similar in scope and impact to what I described here. Biden passing the baton to Harris has set off several geopolitical cascades, and this stuff is in support of a couple of them.

Conclusion:

I was just expecting to rustle some jimmies when I started, but looking back, this is a not entirely humor oriented post. I mean, people getting clapped in irons because they’re lying on behalf of a hostile foreign power IS sublime situational comedy, but there’s a serious IRL edge to it.

One super important thing I want to point out here - there was VERY LITTLE fact checking involved. The academic norm of attacking the message, rather than the messenger, is fine for above board academic exchanges. When the source is an influence operator working for a deadly enemy, you go right at THEM, and you don’t fact check their stuff, you demonetize it, or get it taken down entirely.

Now I’m going to go back to what I was doing, namely reviewing Trump Crony Erik Prince Facing Potential Federal Indictment. I do so hope this proves to be a substantial report.

And I’ll be on the lookout for those investigative journalism mavens at The Grayzone, who will no doubt be EXPOSING me as some sort of government agent. Let’s just hope they don’t find the Visitor’s Guide for this Substack …