I see that The Artist Presently Known as Tuberculosis (hereafter "TAPKAT") and formerly known as redacted has lately experienced—and more importantly manifested—a meltdown in these precincts, apparent consequence of drawing conclusions about Stasi* monitoring of online opinions.

A couple of observations:

1. TAPKAT and I met for drinks at Vesuvio, the venerable North Beach beatnik bar, a couple of years ago, and he struck me as a pleasant, intelligent, and nondelusional individual.

2. TAPKAT says: "I still have no intention of disrupting the site though I admit I gave that impression and I'm sorry for that."

3. I observe: How could anyone take Your call. Be cool. Or be really busy and a jerk all at the same time. FWIW, I'm not working just now - I have all day to fuck with things and it won't all be here. How much free time do you have and is it worth it? as some kind of threat?

3a. Very easily.

4. I think that TAPKAT has behaved poorly, but on the basis of an admittedly abbreviated personal encounter I conclude that his overreaction was less an irrational than a hypersensitive (albeit technically clueless) allergic response to trends at large in the land. I personally don't agree that the correct response is to go to ground and attempt to erase one's electronic trail—I think that this is actually doing Big Brother's work for him—but it's early innings yet: our police state has only just struggled free of its chrysalis; its wings are still drying; we know not yet where it will fly or whom it will first devour.

5. TAPKAT's contributions were generally intelligent and civil, and it's too bad that for his own odd reasons he's joining other former comrades in self-exile (I do not, of course, wish to deprecate the principle of self-exile when it is invoked by certain pestiferous former participants of the sock-puppet or automated subroutine variety), but it's useful for the rest of us to mark that one more canary has keeled over.

I apologize for the promiscuous leaping from one metaphor to the next.

cordially,

*Stasi was an unofficial abbreviation for Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, the main security organization of the late and largely unlamented German Democratic Republic. Oddly enough, and highly appropriately, the term translates almost exactly to Department of Homeland Security. I will henceforth use Stasi, in tribute to the original authors, when I wish to discuss the junta's magnificent translation.

(Edit: extraaneous [sic] vowel)

cordially,