Codes, Ciphers and Cryptanalysis
Justin A. Day (pseudonym) with Jan Weeks published The Centerville Code forty-two years too late for me. It is a 10-13 year-old boy adventure book where the heroes require facility in cryptanalysis––the reading of codes. It is the type of story I read as a...
Denial – hide the truth
I add two caveats before I go on. Though I address the principals of denial and deception––deception, denial, deceit and misdirection––successively, linearity in deception, deception analysis and counter-deception should be, but most often are not, thought of as...
All deception is based on truth
A first rule of deception is truth. All deception works within the context of what is true. All deception works within the context of honesty. Deception is the deliberate attempt to manipulate the perceptions of the target[1]. This first principle, truth,...This Web Log is about…
The purpose of this web site is to make sense of liars whom I’ve lived and worked among, against, and for in my life. There are moments when I shake with rage at the memory of trust broken; as well I quiver with shame at the memory of breaking trust. We deceive...Featured Books
Thirteen Coats
Evgenii Belodubrovskii's Thirteen Coats is a recollection and meditation on Leningrad–St. Petersburg from his birth in 1941 on the eve of the German invasion to the present.
Russia's twentieth century traumas––two world wars and the long civil war that endured from the October Revolution in 1918 until Stalin's death in1953 (we can include the collectivization of agriculture, the Great Terror and Gulag as part of this long civil war).
Numbers empty tragedy of meaning. Stalin noted that one death is a tragedy, but ten thousand deaths is a statistic. If there is a big picture, perhaps it is contained within the pages of The Black Book of Communism that enumerates the tens of millions murdered in the name of that twentieth century religion of Communism.
If there is any sense to be made of the madness, it will be in the single individual story. Longevity tables suggest an American will on average live ninety-three years. Self-medicating trauma with alcohol, drugs and tobacco, my Russian male cohort has now been dead ten years, his statistical lifespan fifty-three years. Memorial is a Russian movement to tell the story of Russia's twentieth century tragedy one death and one story at a time. Here, perhaps, there is some hope for Russia's recovery rather than in longing for its 'Black Book' greatness.
More info →
