I recently finished the Manhunt: Unabomber miniseries, and I mostly liked it a lot. I’m fascinated by the story and there have been other excellent explorations of the infamous investigation so I was ambivalent about how this one would come off. Getting really picky there are moments of writing and acting — mostly with supporting female characters — that are sometimes laughingly awkward and unbelievable. That said, the procedural aspects of the show are fascinating and I was especially excited that they included the actual C.I.A. mind-control experiments that Ted Kaczynski actually endured while a teenage prodigy at Harvard. Here’s a post from the Boing Boing site with the word…

When mass murderer Ted Kaczynski was a 16-year-old undergraduate student at Harvard, he took part in a behavioral engineering project run by the CIA. It was part of the US government’s illegal MKUltra project, which ruined the lives of many innocent and unwitting test subjects around the world.

The study was run by Dr. Henry Murray, who had each of his 22 subjects write an essay detailing their dreams and aspirations. The students were then taken to a room where electrodes were attached to them to monitor their vitals as they were subjected to extremely personal, stressful, and brutal critiques about the essays they had written. Following the psychological attacks, the participants were forced to watch the videos of themselves being verbally and psychologically assaulted multiple times. Kaczynski is claimed to have had the worst physiological reaction to being interrogated. These experiments, paired with his lack of social skills and memories of being bullied as a child, caused Kaczynski to suffer from horrible nightmares that eventually drove him to move into isolation outside Lincoln, Montana.

The June 2000 issue of The Atlantic has a good, very long, article about this terrible experiment.

You can watch Manhunt: Unabomber on Netflix. Here’s a “Dark Matters” segment about how the C.I.A. was responsible for the crimes of The Unabomber…

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Last night I stumbled across a piece at the ce399 Research Archive which pointed to a piece of William S. Burroughs’ writing from the mid-1980′s, and posited that the author might have predicted the new rise of global fascism. Here’s a look…

And what would the future look like if such groups actually exist and if they do combine and take over? An elitist World State very much along the lines laid down by the Nazis. At the top would be a theocracy trained in psychic control techniques implemented by computerized electronic devices that would render opposition psychologically impossible. Entry to this privileged class would be permitted only to those whose dedication to the world state was absolute and unquestioning. In short, you don’t get in by merit or ability but by being an all around one hundred percent shit. – The Adding Machine: Selected Essays. “Mind War” – William S. Burroughs (1985)

Read the whole article here, and then watch the illuminating documentary William S. Burroughs: A Man Within…

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I’ve blogged about Leonard Cohen’s use of LSD on this illuminated scroll before. Today as I was sorting stories for the Remnants Flipboard when I came across this bizarre report from Abel Danger about Leonard Cohen’s involvement with early CIA LSD experiments in the 1950′s. Here’s the word…

The man in the photo, taken at McGill University in 1951, is 17-year-old Leonard Cohen. He’s wearing a blindfold, and his ears, fingers and hands are encased in padded restraints which prevent movement and cut off all sensory stimulation. This is one of Dr. Donald Hebb’s famous/notorious sensory isolation experiments, for which student volunteers were paid the then-princely sum of $20 a day. Some of the volunteers were unable to stand this torture for more than a few hours. Some tore off the bandages and banged on the door of the isolation chamber, screaming and crying to be released.

Back in the 1980s, when I lived next door to him, Leonard Cohen once told me he enjoyed these experiments. He said he learned to dissociate, leave his body, and go on long voyages through the universe. The experience was so pleasant that later he volunteered to be placed in a flotation tank while on LSD. He enjoyed that, too.

We now know that D.O. Hebb’s sensory isolation experiments became the foundation for torture techniques used by the CIA etc. in its secret prisons around the planet. Hebb, a neurologist, had CIA clearance, and also allegedly experimented on small children, mainly orphans and aboriginal children who arrived in his laboratory courtesy of McGill and the RCMP. Having access to human guinea pigs made Hebb’s research that much more impressive. He also, of course, worked with rats and monkeys. It seems quite likely that his famous “rat” study on the effects of sensory isolation on IQ, would have been based on his experiments with children. McGill, at the time, was controlled by a network that included many British-trained, mind-controlled pedophiles with an interest in eugenics – and probably still is today.

I don’t have any proof that any of this is true or false, but it’s interesting to note that Cohen may be counted among early countercultural revolutionaries like Ken Kesey who were part of similar LSD experiments and went on to create groundbreaking works of art. Here’s the man himself speaking on the poetic mind…

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Today marks the birthday of environmentalist/philosopher/mathematician/Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. While not exactly a day for celebration, it is a day to look back at a time before the internet, before Katrina, before Wikileaks, when a new digital environment was being created even as the actual, natural environment continued to become even more embattled. People argued about what was happening back then. People raised their voices and formed organizations. Kaczynski wrote books and mailed bombs. The Wiki does a great job of breaking down Kaczynski’s path from math prodigy to victim of psychological abuse to anarcho-environmentalist bomber…

Kaczynski was born and raised in Evergreen Park, Illinois. While growing up in Evergreen Park he was a child prodigy, excelling academically from an early age. Kaczynski was accepted into Harvard University at the age of 16, where he earned an undergraduate degree. He subsequently earned a PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan. He became an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley in 1967 at age 25. He resigned two years later.

While at Harvard, Kaczynski was among the twenty-two Harvard undergraduates used as guinea pigs in ethically questionable experiments conducted by Henry Murray.[6] In the experiment each student received a code name. Kaczynski was given the code name “Lawful”. Among other purposes, Murray’s experiments were focused on measuring people’s reactions under extreme stress. The unwitting undergraduates were submitted to what Murray himself called “vehement, sweeping and personally abusive” attacks. Assaults to their egos, cherished ideas and beliefs were the tools used to cause high levels of stress and distress. These experiments were conducted at Harvard University from the fall of 1959 through the spring of 1962[7] and were part of the CIA-sponsored Project MKUltra experiments.[8]

In 1971, he moved to a remote cabin without electricity or running water, in Lincoln, Montana, where he lived as a recluse while learning survival skills in an attempt to become self-sufficient.[9] From 1978 to 1995, Kaczynski sent 16 bombs to targets including universities and airlines, killing three people and injuring 23. Kaczynski sent a letter to The New York Times on April 24, 1995 and promised “to desist from terrorism” if the Times or the Washington Post published his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future (also called the “Unabomber Manifesto”), in which he argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary to attract attention to the erosion of human freedom necessitated by modern technologies requiring large-scale organization.

Kaczynski’s manifesto is the first place you should look to find out more about the man and his message. Lesser known is his short story “Ship of Fools,” which is an allegory about a ship heading for a disaster while the passengers and crew continually squabble, intractably distracted by their greedy and selfish demands of one another. Here is a charming stop-motion-animation of the tale, enacted by Lego figures…

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