I left early this morning for a coffeehouse counter top where I like to write in the mornings. Dose on McGavock in Riverside Village in East Nashville has good coffee and a pretty elaborate cafe menu. If I’m hungry for something more than black coffee I usually just get a plain bagel with butter and jam. They make their own preserves and you should try the strawberry/orange spread they’re serving now that we’re getting into berry season. Anyway I was listening to Democracy Now and Amy Goodman was talking about a new very dire report about climate change and species extinction. It reminded me of this article I found this weekend. It talks about how the stories we tell ourselves about climate change increasingly cast eco-terrorists as sympathetic protagonists…

But that’s not the role that environmental radicals play in First Reformed, or in Richard Powers’ recent Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Overstory. The novel stretches over an array of characters, many of whom will eventually converge as activists fighting to save ancient forests in California in the 1990s — and engage in strategic acts of arson against a logging company, one of which results in a death. They are students and artists, veterans and engineers, pried out of regular society by loss, and set loose to make their way high up into the branches of a threatened redwood. In these stories, it’s the ecoterrorists who are at the center, and if it doesn’t feel quite right to describe them as the heroes, they’re certainly not the antagonists.

They are, instead, people grappling with the conviction that they are standing in the middle of a room, screaming about how the building is on fire, while everyone else goes about their business by weaving around the flames. These are not narratives for the world we used to live in, in which a crisis will be narrowly averted and the day saved. They’re narratives for a reality in which climate change has already started to disrupt the way we live, and in which acceptance of and anxiety about climate change has reached record highs. They’re narratives for a reality in which we may have already gone past the point of no return.

Here’s a great interview with actor Paul Bettany talking about playing Ted Kaczynski in the excellent series Manhunt: Unabomber…

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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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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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Sharp-dressed man

I pulled on a red hoodie sweatshirt and headed for an annual Halloween celebration at a house down the street from my apartment. This was a few years ago and even though it was after dark, I was wearing a pair of black sunglasses. Arriving a the fete, I found myself surrounded by monsters and minxes, fantastical creatures and numerous revelers in various stages of undress. Inevitably, an acquaintance inquired “Who are you?” As I pulled the slim book from my sweatshirt pocket I replied “I’m the Unabomber. Have you read my manifesto?”

This is another video that was recently gleaned from the net by our friends at FKTV.

Stay awake!

Watch this performance of my OccupySong at Occupy Congress in DC!