Who knows, my God, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty?”
– Jack Kerouac

Updated (December 4)

To all those it concerns: Let me repeat the conclusion of my previous update, once more, in case it didn’t get through. Try the right way.  Try it. This isn’t moral advice. It is practical advice. When you continually feed a vortex of negative energy around someone who harbors a justified contempt for your behavior, but no malice toward any individual,  that energy will destroy all of you, not me.

Updated (December 3):

This blog is officially still in limbo. A friend is supposed to be helping me set up the new format it will use. That has got delayed.  I am no longer interacting with comments, I’m afraid. I have an assistant who posts anything I find interesting in my morning reading, but that is only a sideline of her main duty which is to help me with my business.  She doesn’t have the time to comment. Any political comments of mine are made at The Daily Bell, but I have started to reduce my comments there, as well. I don’t think it’s wise to interact with people whose identity I don’t know. Some incidents made me wary that IP addresses had been harvested by someone.. unknown to the rest of the kind editors.  I also do not believe in the existence of every conspiracy posited there. The factual history of Zionism, as the latest incarnation of European imperialism, post-Renaissance, is all I am prepared to discuss or competently evaluate.

I have commented recently at Veterans Today, where the authors are clearly described, but some of the material there also strikes me as unduly slanted. And I don’t know how/from whom the site receives its funding. [December 7: I have clarified from the editors at VT that the site is NOT funded, but survives on writers’ contributions and Google ads. It also runs an employment agency for vets. Kudos to VT for the courage and integrity to avoid funding that would compromise its clear and unequivocal voice].

Actually, I’ve stopping sending articles to the main alternative sites on the left and right, because of such questions and because, in my experience they are all gate-keeping at some level. As soon as a site grows, it’s drawn into one camp or other, which means it’s essentially retailing a certain amount of spin, if not intentionally, in effect. Ideology does that. No criticism is meant by this of any individual site or activist or writer. That is just an accurate observation about the nature of all organizations.

My great good fortune in life has been that I’ve been able to develop my thoughts largely free of organizations, on my own terms, except for the boundaries of good taste and the fear of provoking powerful people. Otherwise, I have no intellectual or professional allegiance to compromise my reasoning. I see no reason to undo that good fortune by posting/writing anywhere. I’d rather keep quiet. There are enough opinions out there, as it is…

[Note: I have altered this post, December 5, in the interests of not provoking any more cyber-attacks. I am not going to explain anymore, or the deletion will lose its point. I hope the alteration will show interested parties that my intentions are not at all personal or malicious.

Note (Added Nov. 3): I originally had another post following this one, with some email correspondence. I’ve deleted it because I don’t like it showing up at the top of a google search of my name. I’ve posted the emails instead further down on the blog, in the place of an article (deleted), with an explanation of the change. I’ll eventually move that post to one of my permanent pages (Lila at the DR or Media Control).

ORIGINAL POST

Some of you might have heard that Burning Platform (denial of service),  Naked Capitalism (denial of service), Lew Rockwell (credit card fraud, copyright violations). and Zerohedge (denial of service) have all been attacked quite recently. These are big blogs, so it’s to be expected. There are people out there who’d like everything to be swept under the rug.

But what could be behind the attacks on a small blog like mine? That’s what bothers me.  Who would think it worthwhile?

Yet, the attacks have gone on now for some three years. Obscene comments, stalking, flaming, web-libel, subtle threats, wiki deletions.

Fortunately, you know what they say about fish that can’t keep their mouths shut? They get caught. And over the three years, I’ve been able to catch a few fishy folk who lurked around this blog.

Fish one – the disgruntled Mr. T.R., whose history I’ve recounted at the tab Lila at The Daily Reckoning.

Fish Two – attacks on the book and on my articles and wiki page. I finally figured those were from cyber-vigilantes and assorted liberal blog mafias who disliked my blogging in support of 9-11, on extremist Zionism, and on the banking elites.

Fish Three –  emails [added: not published on this blog] seemingly related to my attribution problems with my former employer.

[Note 1 added: There were also emails and stalking set off by a post contributed to this blog by Douglas Valentine, on the CIA.

Note 2: I’ve deleted a section here that goes into this incident in more detail. I’m afraid of setting off the stalker, who, I should mention, is seems to be an ex-CIA operative. I’ve also deleted the links placed on my blog by a commenter, since that was what provoked him. The case cited in the comment link has since been resolved in the stalker’s operative’s favor….or so, it would seem, but, meanwhile, what court’s going to give me back my reputation, peace of mind, career, and privacy, all grossly violated by this man’s actions?

And  for what? For posting someone else’s piece on the CIA, a piece that was then reprinted widely on the net

That brings me to the last point I want to make – which is that female bloggers attract a very high number of threatening and sexually intimidating comments.

This ABC report from 2007 cites cases:

“Kathy Sierra, a software developer, gained a large following on her design blog. She never dreamed her benign postings would attract an online attacker.

“I started getting comments on my own blog that were really threatening like, ‘I’m going to slit your throat,'” Sierra said.

Then the threats became more personal. Her attacker posted a photo of Sierra in a muzzle as if she was being smothered, along with the words, “I dream of Kathy Sierra.”

“At the time, I thought, ‘This is something serious. This is not some kids. This is someone going to great lengths to frighten me,'” she said.

She shut down her blog, and in her final posting wrote, “I am afraid to leave my yard. I will never feel the same. I will never be the same.”

As more women enter the blogosphere, with sites running the gamut from professional advice to cooking recipes, they are increasingly being singled out as targets of threats and sexual harassment.

“Cyberharassing or stalking of a female blogger in particular will often be sexual harassment,” said Internet and privacy lawyer Parry Aftab. “They will often take her head and put it on someone else’s naked body. There may be threats to her children.”

Aftab runs Wired Safety.org, an organization that has handled thousands of cyberstalking cases. She advises women who are targets of online harassment that they not respond to threatening posts.

“The easiest thing to do is turn around and attack your attacker, but that is exactly what they want,” she said. “They will come at you more and more.”

True enough. It’s what I’ve learned.

Still, I’ve tried to put these unpleasant things behind me. I’ve tried to keep the conversation here courteous and free from personal attacks. Any criticism has always been directed at people for their public positions or professional performance. And I’ve only done that to support serious arguments, or in self-defense, to salvage my reputation from slander.

But it doesn’t seem to have helped.

Having failed to find anything wrong with my credentials or professional actions, my ‘enemies’ (I wish I could reassure them somehow!) hacked my personal email addresses in 2008. My blog was also hacked. Vague threats directed at me or my family showed up in the comments section whenever I blogged about certain subjects, even though I was obliged to comment on them by the nature and mandate of this blog.

In short, even though what I wrote wasn’t from malice, I was attacked by malicious people…..and, at the same time, by ignorant people who claimed I was “covering up.” I’ve described all this in posts on this blog.

But still, it’s not enough for someone. Strange things keep happening.

Today, again, I got a comment with a vague threat. Much too vague to go to the police. Not too vague to leave me in the dark.  It is, I think, the final straw. I can’t waste so much energy and time, and I can’t risk any hurt or danger to my family. I’ve decided to call it quits……for real, this time.

My blog will be taken over by a libertarian friend (s). There’ll be other people running it. It was time for me to leave this country anyway.

Let’s see how that goes. It could take a few days….or a few weeks. Until then – goodbye, good luck, and thanks very much for reading.