Skip, Trace

As 2011 comes to a close, one can view this decade's banter in a single word: "terrorism."

A close friend received a call from an alarmed ex-boyfriend, whose parents were told by a "social worker" that she had a dispute with her father and was missing.  She had spoken to her father earlier that day.

A call back discovered that the call was made from Windsor Group.  They also called her father and grandmother.

Winsdor Group is a skip-tracing animal living in the depths of Richardson, Texas.  They have a dubious record, largely involving the impersonation of officials to extract information from people believed to be related to debts or items on a list of repossessions.  Merciless "investigators" target anyone discovered to be remotely related to their "case."  With a bit of investigation, one can find numerous horror stories posted online, including impersonations of law enforcement officers, calls to the workplace that have gotten people fired and other claims that family members were in immediate danger.

Online information regarding the location or siblings of an individual can be cataloged and discovered in various ways.  White Pages features not only names, but also connections to other people.  My friend was connected to her "grandfather" through the White Pages, and a Google search of her name found an article written some time ago featuring her and her ex-boyfriend and the local art scene.  The connection was made with no official documentation.  There are countless data trails for people who find themselves in any way "on the grid," even beyond social networking sites.

Her returned call spurred dozens of harassing calls from "Investigator Brandy" involving a stray "car."  It is speculated that the car may have been somehow connected to a deceased relative or the like, but the nonexistence of this character does not seem to deter their persistent masquerade.  We returned a more light-hearted and profane call, telling "Agent Brandy" that my friend had an underground garage filled with stolen cars, and threatening legal action.

So, one must ask--how can agencies like this exist?  Combining the Patriot Act with legislation such as NDAA and SOPA on the table, the recession of American civil rights, particularly privacy, continues at full throttle.  These new acts coincide almost perfectly with the Arab Spring, British riots, and the Occupy movement--causality can be inferred.  But what about civil rights that are already compromised without special laws?  The incident with "Inspector Brandy" demonstrates that the private sector--particularly businesses with the ability to withstand collateral damage from lawsuits--can already pursue information from individuals for little or no reason.

Considering the everyday breech of privacy sheds a different light on the controversial group Anonymous, which recently published a list of private information of congressmen, leading to some media controversy.  While such detailed information may lead to the harassment of public officials and their families, is this not directly reflected in the harassment of vague, confused acquaintances of people who may have some debt by collection agencies?  In both cases, a party is called to accountability through a form of psychologically abrasive surveillance and threats.  Perhaps a new address or phone number may provide exile for the rattled and threatened congressmen, but are these not the measures people move through to escape creditors and skip tracers who do the same thing?

Relativism in full swing, and consumer protection is a privilege.  Refunds for a failure to provide service must be acquired by a time-consuming argument with customer service representatives, while the funds in question sit in the possession of agents who provide no service. They enforce collection of questionable fees through vampiric and invasive tracking measures.  When the mechanism is reversed by hackers, there is suddenly an outcry.

Vulnerabilities lie in coercion that finds unrecognized targets.  Debt collectors rely on a form of  psychological warfare, and corporations use a system of aptly timed delays to sit on the precarious front of the time-currency continuum--alas, income is found by living in the present.  PayPal withholds payments for several days, and during "verification," several other transfers are made and money is withheld--the behavior of banks is similar.  Despite having several degrees, a university librarian in New England keeps his low-paying job because if he made any more, child support and debt collectors would consume the entirety of his income; if he had a better job, he could not make ends meet.  After spiraling into hopeless depression  and drinking himself to death on dozens of bottles of jug wine at his home on the shore, agencies attempt to collect his debt from beyond the grave by contacting his kin.  Perhaps corporations would save a dime if they stopped using call centers for necromancy or pestering the impoverished.

If they put a dime towards the debt each time they harassed someone, the debt would disappear more cheaply and efficiently.

You can't drain water from a stone--but if you can't extract a parking ticket from the impoverished, they go to prison.  Similarly, a person with bad credit is subject to a number of soft-warfare controls that make it less possible for them to repay anyone.  Thinking reasonably, a homeless or impoverished person owes nothing to anyone--the system does them no service.  It's a great irony when the parking tickets are used for nothing more than paying meter maids while the bridges fall into the bay.  Well, no one needs efficient transit when everybody (who is "worth" anything) has the God-given right to a vehicle!  Let the carbon profuse.

Do you find yourself sweating the details?  Do you find yourself wishing for a white Christmas?

If you are discovered and targeted by a crediting firm, it is simply business.  But if you discover and target a public official, it is suddenly cyber-terrorism, an egregious threat that must be countered by force.  In any case, I am not sure what the fuss is about--as it is believed in America, a touch of psychological strain has never killed anyone.

Sunday Best

"With all of my lore, I stand no wiser than I was before."

This is not skull-base surgery; this is not molecular biophysics.  While committing to memory every detail of a particular academic field, an increasing schism grows between the self and the whole.  The magnifying glass catches the pixel, not the image.  Upon reconsideration of a splintered lens, what can be seen?

Alas, an albuterol inhaler does little good in a field of methyl isocyanate--we succumb to that which we neglect.

Our society is clumped around metropolitan areas -- less than 3% of the total land area in the United States is urban.  The image of the superpower is that of a monumental front surrounded by miles of oblivion.  Such was the case for the Soviet Union, and in China, the glass is half-full.  So -- what demons exist in the rural outpost?  The U.S. is undergoing another period of recession, and therefore urban contraction; it may be time to revisit the derelict towns and that which exists therein.

The de facto truth can be best illuminated by first-hand accounts of the matter.  A surprising visit inspired me to record a few accounts from the backyard of the U.S., which is paradoxically distant from its urban core.

After the scrambled story she told me about being tossed through a kitchen in a scuffle with whomever else was staying where she was living--an incident resulting in a concussion and twenty staples to seal the wound--I decided to let her stay through Christmas at my residence.  She went on to elucidate the situation involving several characters stuffed into a home in Masontown, Pennsylvania, a small town beneath the shadow of the cooling towers of Hatfield's Ferry nuclear power plant. One, an aging, ailing Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon with an oxycodone issue, allowed his "daughter" (not by blood, of course), an obese diabetic we shall call "Marie," to stay at the house with her violent friends.  It was this bizarre creature who battered the skull of my hapless holiday visitor in a sort of sucker punch.

I recognized this character, "Marie."  I paid her a visit once (maybe I will explain later) at her fly-infested home in the middle of a large field.  She greeted my mother and I, sat down at a table, and with her pale, fleshy hands crushed an entire column of saltine crackers into tomato soup.  She countered the 114 g of carbohydrates and 2,250 mg of sodium with a singular shot of insulin that was injected, as a sort of appetizer, into her large, gelatinous arm.

My visitor then elucidated much more intrigue.  Her mother, a severe alcoholic that often enjoys weekends consuming two cases of beer each containing 30 cans (5.6 gallons in 48 hours), receives a fixed government income for Parkinson's disease.  Alcoholism gradually destroys hypothalamic mamillary bodies, the amygdala and the cerebellum--delirium tremens stem from the destruction of the latter, which would cause several forms of ataxia.  So, in a bizarre way, she likely receives SSI for alcohol damage which manifests itself in tremors.

Inappropriate diagnoses also affected Monsieur "Dragon" mentioned earlier, who suffered a stroke relating to medicinal complications combined with epilepsy prodromes--the source of his SSI wage.

Medical mistakes are a different topic entirely, and will be covered separately.  Let's just say that the quality of care precipitously drops in certain areas, but healthcare prices remain constant.

Disability fixed wages run at about $735/mo., and members of the house accompany them with food stamps, an additional  $200/mo. for food.  Together, that would be roughly $935/mo. to cover expenses, just $100 less than full-time minimum wage employment, and $300/mo. more than a full-time, independent student loan refund affords.  The people stuffed into  the Masontown home constantly bicker and attempt to pilfer each other's food stamps.  "Marie," in particular, consumes an alarming amount of the other residents' supplies--amounting to close to a thousand dollars in food products.  While she becomes yet more obese, the less aggressive grow thin.  The level of dysfunction caused by "Marie" and her unwelcome hoard can only be seen as absurd.

So, my visitor and I had a celebration that was nice and slow.  The only mishap was an attempt to use the oven, which, in burning debris left by the mice underneath, left the house with an overpowering and horrid odor, remedied only by the opening of all doors and windows.  Luckily (at least for us), this is a curiously autumnal December, and the air--previously saturated with mold spores, smoke and incinerated fur--was refreshed with an outdoor breeze.

The visitor recalled a similar incident, in which the bodies of a mouse and several cockroaches were found in the broiler at her old residence after the kitchen was engulfed in smoke.

The purpose is this to say, the statistics and archetypal clichés do not provide enough information to extrapolate details.  So, here is a blog that exposes disjointed fragments to redirect imaginations to the state of their neighbors.  The details may be distant (a good twenty miles or so?), but alas--they are part of the whole.