Yesterday I received a letter from a madman. It was actually more than a letter. It was an inch-thick packet of legal-sized paper. As best I could tell the papers, some of them photocopies of hand-written notes, covered the author’s twenty year battle with a worldwide conspiracy, which he calls the Wackenhut PSI Battle Unit (WPSIBU). Copies had been sent to Joint Chiefs of Staff, the General Secretary of NATO, senators, congressmen, heads of corporations, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim clerics, and newspaper editors galore. The WPSIBU conspirators, he explained, had already murdered his brother and had been torturing and for many years trying to kill him too.

It’s gratuitous to mock this poor fellow but the worldwide conspiracy he had conjured seems oddly inept. Though WPSIBU supposedly commands the most advanced secret technology in the world, it seems unable, despite years of…

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