The tinfoil hat club

the journey of a thousand years begins with the first tinfoil hat.

it won't be a hat, and it won't be tinfoil. chances are, i myself will use a large cardboard box, and wallpaper it with aluminum foil. i don't know if actual tinfoil is even available anymore.

if you ever want to feel ridiculous, helpless, and humiliated, try blocking out electronic harassment with aluminum foil. i know, because i tried it.

in 2003 i lived through a period of three days of sleep deprivation, during which i finally became aware that i was hearing voices, and i changed my interpretation of where they were coming from - outside me, from human beings using unknown devices.

but when you are going through hell, you do desperate things to try to survive.

i was being hit with something that gave me a zapping sensation and made my muscles twitch. it woke me up over and over again. i was going insane trying to sleep.

believe it or not, i think some of the sleep deprivation might have been an accident. it was actually made worse by something else i was doing at the time. i need to mention this because it could happen to other people - it's in the topic of 'obscure nutritional dangers that nobody ever warned you about.' like salicylate sensitivity, which is helped by the feingold diet. i love to gather obscure troubleshooting information in the subject of alternative medicine / holistic health.

vitamin C, ascorbic acid, is added to fruit juice to replace the natural vitamin C destroyed during pasteurization. this synthetic ascorbic acid is added in amounts that are much higher than what you need.

for the chemical sensitive, even nutrient supplements can cause unwanted symptoms, at doses not normally considered toxic.

for instance, if you eat synthetic vitamin-enriched breakfast cereals, it can worsen nasal allergies, so that you sneeze and get sinus problems much more severely. (i read it someplace years ago, and i've observed it myself, but so far i can't find the place where i read that article.) if you stop eating artificially enriched breakfast cereals, and read the labels of your food, and avoid ALL vitamin-enriched foods, chances are that your nasal allergies might improve very quickly. it's worth a shot. (then again, it could be the wheat that causes these problems too - i don't do very well when i eat whole wheat or any wheat cereals at all - i become very badly mentally unfocused.)

B vitamins can cause involuntary tremors. your hands will start trembling if you take B vitamins if you're chemical-sensitive. it'll happen if you eat those chewy nutrient bars, those things that taste like sand mixed with glue. i wonder how many synthetic nutrient supplement users are diagnosed with parkinson's disease or something because their hands tremble - and they eat EVEN MORE vitamins to try to cure the disease? (a reminder: pesticides will also cause trembling in the hands, so if anybody sprays for bugs around the house, or if you've used flea spray on your pets, you'll have that symptom then too. it doesn't bother everybody, but some people can't metabolize poisons as well as other people can.)

well, let's imagine that you bought a package of lemonade juice boxes, the kind with the convenient little straws attached. they have 100% vitamin C added to each box. imagine that you got addicted to those things and started drinking about six of them over a period of a couple hours. after all, they're not really that big. then you go out and buy another package and just keep drinking these things. that's exactly what i did. i just thought they were really good. for some reason, once i started drinking them, i got a craving for more of them.

so i ended up getting about 600 - 1000% of the RDA of vitamin C, every day, over a few days. and nobody really knows much about the content of that synthetic ascorbic acid, either. my nutrition teacher in college - one of the only classes that i really, really enjoyed and felt was useful - said that she thought it came from mushrooms. anytime you extract a chemical from something, you carry along a little bit of contamination, maybe a molecule or two. if you're allergic to that kind of mushroom, you could conceivably have a reaction - although i don't think that's what happened. it's in the 'conceivable' category. anyway, mushroom allergy isn't important here. i was just pointing out, this ascorbic acid is either synthetic, or derived from something, and it might be contaminated with something from the source chemicals, or might not be exactly the same as 'natural' ascorbic acid in every way. this applies to ALL synthetic vitamins and minerals.

whatever it was, it caused a pretty bad reaction. first, insomnia. i've replicated this experiment more than once, and it always takes a day or two for me to figure out what's going on - if i buy fruit juice and it has artificial vitamin C, i'll get insomnia if i drink too much of it. you lie there, and you just can't sleep.

if something already has given you insomnia, then your response to electronic attacks is made that much worse. every zap twitches your already-restless legs; your mood is already irritable, so you get into fights and conflicts with the voices; your muscles are already wiggly and uncomfortable and hyperactive. i think that's what happened.

i noticed that something was really, really wrong when my entire body, from head to toe, got covered in itchy red hives, over every square inch of skin.

i forget what it was, but something reminded me that it might be vitamin C toxicity. i had already been observing nutritional phenomena for several years and was vaguely aware of it. i looked in my book - and bingo, too much vitamin C causes insomnia and skin rash.

i started drinking lots of water, and stopped drinking the boxes of lemonade, and the rash went away immediately. the acute, severe insomnia also went away - although my sleep has never been normal or healthy or uninterrupted since the attacks began - i always wake up many times for no reason, nowadays, and the sleep is never restful. and it isn't MERELY because of apnea either - they try to convince me that they're just being nice, and helping to wake me if i have apnea. it's not really that straightforward - it's complicated.

well, during those days of unbearable insomnia (i must have been unemployed at the time - i went through a lot of periods of unemployment back then) i tried to block out the attacks. this is the 'ridiculous and humiliating' part of the story.

i lay down on the bed and wrapped my entire body in aluminum foil. believe me, this is not something i really wanted to do for the fun of it. foil is poky and sharp-edged. it makes rustly noises and it's hot. i don't really find it comfortable to wear. in a very bitter way, it's almost funny - and yet, with the suffering i experienced, it's not funny at all. people really die because of electronic attacks, if only because they commit the 's-word' out of desperation. so i had to survive.

after the foil was wrapped around me, i lay there and tried to relax. i was very uncomfortable, and i still had insomnia. (as i have said, it was made worse by the fruit juice.) and yet, with the foil on, i still felt each zap. the foil did nothing at all. i was trying vaguely to use the faraday cage concept, but it didn't work. the foil wrap was just so shoddy, so full of random openings and spaces, and so thin. it wouldn't stay on, and i had to remain perfectly still. i knew nothing at all about the nature of the attack. what frequency? what medium - was it sonic, electromagnetic, or something unknown? what else would i need to know about its details, in order to absorb, scatter, reflect, refract - to do SOMETHING to alter that energy, to change where it was going, to attenuate it - i knew nothing.

it could make me angry to remember this, but... the guy i was dating at the time, he came over to my apartment and tried to sleep there, one night.

and HE TOO - i can't even tell this story and remain calm. it's very painful when you KNOW you've demonstrated that you're not the ONLY ONE experiencing the problem. he too lay there, and twitched every couple minutes, jerked awake with a kick, rolled over, woke up, dozed off, twitched, and woke up.

after trying to lie there, after maybe an hour, he got angry. he stood up very suddenly and shouted, 'something here is keeping me awake!' and he said he had to leave. he blamed it on me, for some mysterious reason, and seemed to think it was my fault. he thought that maybe i was wiggling the bed or something while lying next to him. he and i - were we talking about this problem? were we discussing it at the time? i don't remember the exact period when this occurred - i don't remember the extent to which i had yet 'broken down.' i don't remember quite how desperate i was, how many people i had yet begged for help, i don't recall whether i had yet gone to the mental hospital. i don't know whether i had explicitly said to him, 'somebody is zapping me with a device and waking me up.' but anyway, this demonstrated to me that it happened merely by trying to sleep in my apartment, and i wasn't the only one.

people do things to enforce the taboo, in themselves. his denial - i don't blame him for protecting himself. if people go into denial, if they become afraid, if they freak out or panic about it, i don't want to keep pushing. you just have to let it go. pushing people to freak out is NOT the method i want to use to convince people that electronic harassment is real.

well, anyway, the aluminum foil didn't help, at least not for that particular incident.

there are various ways to interact with waves. here's a web page that talks about it: http://www.tpub.com/content/neets/14182/css/14182_25.htm . just browse through some of the material listed here: http://www.tpub.com/content/neets/ . they also have stuff about nuclear energy there - i've skimmed through it before. start from this URL: www.tpub.com. if you get lost in that site, you end up on pages where they ask you to purchase a CD, which isn't the page you want to be on. unless you want to buy the CDs, of course. i guess if i had a lot of money and didn't want to waste time downloading all the stuff, i'd buy the CDs. it would be a convenient thing to have permanently on the computer.

that whole site is excellent. i love the 'schaum's outline' books because they make you do lots of exercises right away. this tpub.com website goes into more detailed explanations, and doesn't emphasize the 'doing problems' as much. but still it's very practical. they do have a question-and-answer section in the chapters.

there's another great way to learn all about waves, carrier signals, modulation, oscillators, filters, voices, sounds, transmitting information, etc.: you can download a demo of propellerheads' music program, Reason, from www.propellerheads.se. that's how i learned a lot of the stuff i know. you can turn dials and plug in cables and fiddle around with it, and it doesn't take up any space, and it's all on your computer, and if you're using only the demo, it's free. make sure you also download the instruction manual, the help files. if the government knew how instructive and useful propellerheads reason is, they would outlaw it. shh, don't tell them. i got it because i sincerely desire to write music - if i had free time, and wasn't worried about money, and wasn't struggling with one horrible disaster after another, and had my health, i'd be writing lots of music. i'm unbearably frustrated with the music i find out in the world - it doesn't express the spirit that i feel, the spirit i want to hear, the spirit i've heard in bits and pieces in various songs over the years. but that is why i got Reason. i recommend it for anyone who needs to learn about HOW they're hearing voices. it gives you some background so that you can at least vaguely understand what they're talking about, when you read about radio waves, and carrier frequencies, and modulation. the jargon words will be familiar.

anyway, there is something you CAN do with foil. you can block your cell phone. put your cellphone inside a foil-covered small box. it can be sloppy and imperfect. try to call your phone from another phone. it won't work. i was able to do this with my phone. maybe it won't work for all of them.

this is actually useful. blocking or reducing ambient, non-conscious, unintentional electromagnetic fields, even if they aren't directed at you personally, could be a helpful thing to do. 'electromagnetic hypersensitivity' is another 'branch,' another route taken, by people who are investigating these problems in general.

eleanor white (www.raven1.net) wrote that she refuses to talk about electromagnetic hypersensitivity because it directs the whole conversation the wrong way. it's like disinformation, arguing with people who distract you from the issue you're trying to talk about.

in my opinion, electromagnetic hypersensitivity IS a valid thing to research and talk about, but you must acknowledge BOTH sides of this phenomena. it isn't just outright disinformation, but it can be misleading. you need to acknowledge the overall big picture: that people react to UNINTENTIONAL or INTENTIONAL electromagnetic, sonic, or other phenomena. and they have both SHORT-TERM and LONG-TERM effects - you might get insomnia and hear voices, right this instant, and you might also be concerned about getting cancer or something, in the future.

please note, there are only certain things that cause cancer - we distinguish between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation, for instance - but i had to mention cancer because a lot of people are concerned that electrical power lines might cause cancer. based on what little i know, you aren't as likely to get cancer from many of the harassment attacks. that doesn't make them 'okay.' and i don't know much about it. harassment attacks DO cause permanent psychological damage, have permanently destructive effects on the pathways of people's lives, and permanently destroy relationships, cause job losses, waste money, and ruin human potential, and can trigger suicides and homicides - especially if they interact badly with drugs you're using or have used recently - or drugs somebody gave to you. those long-term effects are definitely real.

i must mention another phenomenon i experience. some of the voices i hear claim that they are observers, guardians, working to PROTECT people against the danger of committing suicide after antidepressant use. i have to acknowledge that. it's one of the many conflicting and controversial things that i must hear and understand every day. they don't always behave like enemies or attackers. they don't always behave like they want to hurt me. they often talk like they're trying to help.

however, this is a difficult and complicated issue. for one thing, you just need some SILENCE in order to relax, to think, to rest, to heal, to know yourself, to prepare for action - and you just CAN'T GET that badly needed silence. even though they're nice and they're trying to help, sometimes silent seclusion is the most helpful thing a person can get! you go to work all day long and have to interact and negotiate with people, you have to be friendly, you have to be polite, you have to take into consideration other people's needs - and then you come home and you just want nothing more than to be ALONE.

it's true, the particular content of the voices isn't always mean and cruel and evil. however, the sheer presence of voices AT ALL interrupts your individual thinking. you need to escape from it. this is especially true for introverted people, although it's probably true for everyone. that's why i'm not happy when i hear people saying that voices should be integrated as parts of the personality, or as friendly spirits trying to guide you. there are moments when you just don't want to be helped or guided by anybody at all, no matter how nice they might be. imagine how hard it is just to do ANYTHING if you hear voices constantly talking. you just can't concentrate.

and by the way, THIS IS IMPORTANT: if you hear a PARTICULAR PERSON'S voice, it DOESN'T MEAN that it's that person who is sitting out there pushing a button on a device and sending the voice to your head. 'they' are able to record one person's voice, transmit it to you, get your response, and transmit it back to the first person, and BOTH people in the conversation are helpless to control what's going on. it's a conversation that neither person chooses to participate in. you hear each other, and neither of you wants to hear the other. this happens to me ALL THE TIME. i hear nice people, friendly people, people i like, but i wish i could just be away from them for five minutes! that's true in ANY relationship. you can't know if it's really that person, or somebody else imitating them; you can't know if it's happening right this instant, or if it was pre-recorded at some earlier time. don't ever assume that the person you hear is the same one who's sitting out there pushing a button on some device. the person you hear might be just as much of a victim as you are. it's a war of disinformation.

so: things can be intentional or unintentional. someone could be shooting you with some device, or you could just be unlucky enough to live in a house that's right underneath a cell phone tower. both aspects of the problem are real. both need to be studied and talked about. both need solutions.

that's the reason why i'm serious about building a big foil-covered box, and sitting inside of it, to see what happens. if it can block your cell phone, then it's really able to reduce SOMETHING. i'll observe what i experience. does anything change? does anything improve? is anything reduced? do i feel better? it's cheap, it's easy, it's non-technical, it's simple, and it can be built in your home in a short period of time. you'll feel like an idiot, but you might be able to make useful observations.

there are devices for measuring electromagnetic fields. i've heard of a 'frequency counter' used by another victim - it was mentioned in somebody's blog when i did a casual survey of mind control weblogs. i myself own something called a CSD-18, which i purchased during that time period of hell - for a while, i believed that somebody had old-fashioned, conventional 'bugs' in my apartment, and the CSD-18 is made to detect bugs. i bought it from great southern security's website, back in a time when i still used credit cards, and i wasn't as poor as i am now. i could afford to get stuff like that. i was working for the temp agencies, employed in the bubble sectors of the economy - tech and manufacturing - the ones that do layoffs again and again every time the bubble bursts.

you could sit inside the box and use a detector to see what changes. that will be part of the testing. i'm postponing it for now - i have to get my house to be safer to live in. all my action energy is going into that. then i have to do some things to improve my physical health. the shielding project has to be delayed a bit.

shields will eventually be more effective, more affordable, more convenient, and more widely available, as the taboo breaks down, and as more people invest capital into building these things. eventually, it will be marketed and advertised so that victims can find it and buy it easily, instead of having to research obscure technical jargon that they don't know anything about.

i've imagined building something that could be kept in one place, a very small house or building, that was shielded, and i could just invite sufferers to go there and sleep or meditate there temporarily - you wouldn't have to actually buy a shield yourself and take it home. it could be cheaper for you to just rent out this little place or stay there as an act of charity, rather than purchasing the shields directly. you could go there to get work done without distraction. or you could spend time alone with a friend, a lover, a spouse - someone you want to know better, as a real person instead of a puppet. these safe houses are a high priority i have in mind, in my overall vision of what needs to be done and in what order.

why is effective shielding such an important priority in breaking the taboo?

because EVERYONE, including government employees, is vulnerable to electronic attacks. if you were a police officer, or a lawyer, or a detective, or a politician, would YOU feel comfortable publicly and openly talking about electronic harassment? what if someone attacked you, and your family, and your loved ones and friends, if you offended somebody, if you crossed the wrong person's path, if you made enemies? how can we ask the government to do anything to help us, when THEY are also victims? if you read the web pages of the very worst victims, they are most often people who used to work in the military or used to work in the NSA or some other government agency - former government employees seem to suffer even more dangerous and abusive attacks - i consider myself LUCKY when i read about some of the hell they've gone through. this is a war. everybody distrusts everybody else. you never know for certain the identity of your attackers. and government agents are just as vulnerable as the rest of us.

but yet, a lot of the victims who've written these web pages and blogs advocate that the government ought to do something to solve the problem. government agents are understandably reluctant to help you when they're too busy fearing for their own lives. do you ask them to sacrifice their own safety for you? i don't know how i feel asking other people to sacrifice themselves to protect me or help me. i would feel miserable if i asked somebody to go talk about electronic harassment publicly, and then i saw that person go home and get attacked, and his family and children got attacked, and his life was ruined because he tried to help me. this kind of thing seems especially likely to happen whenever the person talking is very knowledgeable about specific crimes committed by specific government agencies and individuals, and knows the exact details of the technology involved, and knows dates, times, places, and specific events, and openly 'betrays' the person or agency they used to work for. so now, i'm not sure what exactly the government SHOULD do about the phenomenon of electronic mind control attacks - that's a complicated issue and it overlaps with the 'are you a libertarian or an anarchist' question, and about asking people to risk themselves to help someone else. i haven't settled that whole thing yet.

it would have a huge impact if some important, famous politician openly talked about electronic mind control and harassment on mainstream television, for instance, since people believe what the authorities tell them on TV. i haven't seen politicians or government employees doing that. but they CAN.

i personally want to focus on the shields. there will be people who choose to talk about it on TV. the best way to help support those public figures is by making sure that, if they DO get attacked, somebody can help them to survive, by giving them someplace to hide when they need it.

people will feel better talking about it if they know that there's a safe place to run to when they get attacked.

there are conflicts in this area: what's to be done, in what order, and who's to do it? how dangerous is it? how much are you at risk if you speak out? what kinds of 'speaking out' are tolerated? what things can be done at the same time by different people? can some people 'talk about' the phenomena, while other people are actively 'doing something about' it by building shields and building these little safe houses? where does the money come from?

can people violate the taboo in the mainstream world, and meet real people locally? - i've imagined, for instance, putting up ads written on paper, and hanging them on various bulletin boards around town, the bulletin boards of local businesses, laundromats, etc., asking people to come in and talk and listen, asking for help and participation in projects. the ads would blatantly and openly violate the taboos, using the strongest language, the language that some people are debating about: phrases like 'mind control.' some people on the net were debating whether 'mind control' was a good phrase to use, because it has so many bad connotations and misleading stereotypes. sometimes it's best to just slap them with the worst possible taboo violation right away. hey everybody! someone's reading your mind and controlling you like a puppet! let's work together and do something about it! we're not going to be indirect about it. we're going to say the worst possible thing right at the beginning. MIND CONTROL: IT'S BAD. i laugh at that - i wouldn't literally use that exact sentence. but that's the general idea.

acknowledge that this phenomenon is here to stay - it's part of our past and our future. society and the human race aren't going to just drop dead in a big apocalypse right this very instant, and so, we have to face our problems. they're complicated and we don't know exactly what to do. but they're not going away. they said 'it's not going away, so get used to it.'

and even if you believe mind control hasn't begun YET, surely it's in the future. but i like to emphasize it's already here. it's not distant and vague and faraway. it's not merely possible or hypothetical. it's not just happening to someone else in a foreign country, in a rare, obscure scenario that hardly ever happens. it's happening all the time, here, right now, to YOU, in subtle ways that you haven't been taught how to notice.

your disclaimer is that when you join a group, your phenomena will change. new personas will be added to your voices. new types of attacks will begin. new phenomena will occur. it's overwhelming in the beginning for a short period of time. they will be very hostile and abusive as they 'get to know you.' you will be tested and questioned and tormented by suspicious, distrusting people who think the very worst of you from the beginning. you might get drugged and made into a puppet even worse than you were before. you'll hear people who assume you're guilty until proven innocent, inhuman until proven human, an untrustworthy rat whose sole purpose is to ruin everything, spread disinformation, and betray everybody. OF COURSE people will hesitate to join such a group! but you can't find them unless you invite them. but the disclaimer must say: we're not responsible for the things being done to you by those external people - it's not us. increasing your attacks is NOT what this group is explicitly intended to do. it is not our agenda. we don't yet have an easy way to prove exactly who is attacking you or how. something to the effect of: we still need your help and we ask that you stay with the group even though your phenomena are quite likely to get worse or change. people HAVE to be allowed to leave the group, and i don't want to keep everything 'secret.' i have read rumors about the terrible things that happen to 'perpetrators' who leave their stalker gangs. their own gang attacks them if they leave. i don't want anything like that to be part of this.

they've been saying something over and over again, and i find it a little bit amusing: every time i try to look into people's personalities, to wonder what 'types' they are, they're bombarding me with voices saying 'we're all peacemakers,' 'so-and-so is a peacemaker,' etc. that's like their name, rank, and serial number. everyone wants to appear non-threatening. everybody's innocent at shawshank. i think they're probably all Sixes.

in a group, people cooperate; people divide and specialize their labor and skills. sometimes they follow other people's instructions, and sometimes they make their own instructions. sometimes people do things they don't really like doing, because they're instructed to. the rules and responsibilities and goals will have to be clear and specific so that we know exactly what we're trying to do.

today's my day of rest. i'm worn out. i'm done with this essay for now.