RIP Teddy.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-unabomber-ted-kaczynski-waged-a-17-year-reign-of-terror

Unabomber Is Dead: How Ted Kaczynski Waged a 17-Year Campaign of Terror

RE

Not to mention the annual total Killed by Cop or the collateral damage of the FSoA military.  Teddy K was different though due to his Manifesto.  It's the Philosophical underpinning that makes his death march unique.

RE

QuoteIt's the Philosophical underpinning that makes his death march unique.

From Counterpunch.

Word came this weekend that Ted Kaczynski was found dead in his cell at the Federal Medical Center Prison in Butner, North Carolina, an apparent suicide. In 1999, Cockburn and wrote this piece on Ted K.'s experience as a volunteer in CIA-sponsored mind control experiments while at Harvard. – JSC 

It turns out that Theodore Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber, was a volunteer in mind-control experiments sponsored by the CIA at Harvard in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Michael Mello, author of the recently published book, "The United States of America vs. Theodore John Kaczynski," notes that at some point in his Harvard years–1958 to 1962–Kaczynski agreed to be the subject of "a psychological experiment." Mello identifies the chief researcher for these only as a lieutenant colonel in World War II, working for the CIA's predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services. In fact, the man experimenting on the young Kaczynski was Dr. Henry Murray, who died in 1988.

Murray became preoccupied by psychoanalysis in the 1920s, drawn to it through a fascination with Herman Melville's "Moby Dick," which he gave to Sigmund Freud, who duly made the excited diagnosis that the whale was a father figure. After spending the 1930s developing personality theory, Murray was recruited to the OSS at the start of the war, applying his theories to the selection of agents and also presumably to interrogation.

As chairman of the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, Murray zealously pursued the CIA's efforts to carry forward experiments in mind control conducted by Nazi doctors in the concentration camps. The overall program was under the control of the late Sidney Gottlieb, head of the CIA's technical services division. Just as Harvard students were fed doses of LSD, psilocybin and other potions, so too were prisoners and many unwitting guinea pigs.

Sometimes the results were disastrous. A dram of LSD fed by Gottlieb himself to an unwitting U.S. army officer, Frank Olson, plunged Olson into escalating psychotic episodes, which culminated in Olson's fatal descent from an upper window in the Statler-Hilton in New York. Gottlieb was the object of a lawsuit not only by Olson's children but also by the sister of another man, Stanley Milton Glickman, whose life had disintegrated into psychosis after being unwittingly given a dose of LSD by Gottlieb.

What did Murray give Kaczynski? Did the experiment's long-term effects help tilt him into the Unabomber's homicidal rampages? The CIA's mind experiment program was vast. How many other human time bombs were thus primed? How many of them have exploded?

There are other human time bombs, primed in haste, ignorance or indifference to long-term consequences. Amid all the finger-pointing to causes prompting the recent wave of schoolyard killings, not nearly enough clamor has been raised about the fact that many of these teenagers suddenly exploding into mania were on a regimen of antidepressants. Eric Harris, one of the shooters at Columbine, was on Luvox. Kip Kinkel, who killed his parents and two students in Oregon, was on Prozac.

There are a number of other instances. Apropos possible linkage, Dr. Peter Breggin, author of books on Prozac and Ritalin, has said, "I have no doubt that Prozac can contribute to violence and suicide. I've seen many cases. In the recent clinical trial, 6% of the children became psychotic on Prozac. And manic psychosis can lead to violence."

A 15-year-old girl attending a ritzy liberal arts school in the Northeast told us that 80% of the kids in her class were on Prozac, Ritalin or Dexedrine. The pretext used by the school authorities is attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, with a diagnosis made on the basis of questions such as: "Do you find yourself daydreaming or looking out the window?"

Ritalin is being given to about 2 million American schoolchildren. A 1986 article by Richard Scarnati in the International Journal of the Addictions lists more than a hundred adverse reactions to Ritalin, including paranoid delusions, paranoid psychosis, amphetamine-like psychosis and terror.

Meanwhile, uncertainty reigns on the precise nature of the complaint that Ritalin is supposed to be treating. One panel reviewing the proceedings at a conference on ADHD last year even doubted whether the disorder is a "valid" diagnosis of a broad range of children's behavior, and said there was little evidence Ritalin did any good. In 1996, the Drug Enforcement Administration denounced the use of Ritalin and concluded that "the dramatic increase in the use of [Ritalin] in the 1990s should be viewed as a marker or warning to society."

Indeed. Land mines now litter the terrain of our society, waiting to explode.

Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His new book is The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink co-written with Joshua Frank. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net. Alexander Cockburn's Guillotined! and A Colossal Wreck are available from CounterPunch.

Apparently TK committed Seppuku.  How does an 81 year old guy with late stage cancer commit suicide inside a Federal Prison?

RE

Quote from: RE on Jun 12, 2023, 08:53 AMApparently TK committed Seppuku.  How does an 81 year old guy with late stage cancer commit suicide inside a Federal Prison?

RE

I don't know, and Jeffrey Epstein is not around to ask.

Crossposting this from another thread here because it's germane:

Quote from: Surly1 on Jun 18, 2023, 08:40 AMThe link below takes the reader to Albert Bates' blog and a remarkable re-examination of the life and times of Ted Kaszynski:

Eulogy for the Unabomber



After a discussion into the life of John Brown and an implicit comparison ("It took more than a century for people to come around in their thinking about John Brown," Bates examines the thought and writings of a man of extraordinary genius whose sense of human dignity was profoundly altered, at age 16, by being secretly made the subject of an MKULTRA mind control experiment while a child prodigy undergrad at Harvard.

Albert Bates:

QuoteIt took more than a century for people to come around in their thinking about John Brown. Ted Kaczynski's commentary, the manifesto he called Industrial Society and Its Future, stands by itself as a benchmark in collapseology. The manifesto is a critique of leftism and US ad-age politics, but it is also a deep-thought exercise on why people are sheep, the mechanics of manufactured consent, who is doing the manipulation and why, ultimately, there is likely no way out of our present dilemma apart from human extinction.

This article is long-- pack a lunch-- but it rewards the effort.

Bates:

QuoteWhen you see the disheveled arrest photos of Ted Kaczynski run beside the story of his suicide and the usual pablum about his bombing campaign without mention of MKULTRA, just remember, you are the cultural programming subject the Unabomber was warning about.

QuoteOh, I imagine everyone has a psychological underpinning to justify their killings.

Perhaps, but I am not aware of any other Serial Mass Bombers with a 35,000 word Manifesto explaining the rationale.

RE

Quote from: FarmGirl on Jun 18, 2023, 08:29 PMSo you are assigning value to sheer quantity?

No, quantity by itself is not sufficient, content is also an important factor.  TKs screed was an argument against industrialization and how people were destroying the planet.  The argument is basically correct.  His solution was to unilaterally declare war on the civilization.  AFAIK, he wasn't targeting individuals to kill, he was bombing establishments to begin the process of destroying the enemy, which in his analysis was the civilization.  The dead p0eople were what the FSoA Military calls "collateral damage".  We are perfectly OK with civilians getting terminated in a war as long as the overall cause is considered justified.

Now, clearly his methodology wasn't very effective and had a low probability of success, but in his MK Ultra addled brain it seemed to him like the best way to achieve the overall goal of destroying the civilization. Since he did not have the resources of the FSoA Military in terms of number of bombs and good delivery systems to wreak mayhem and destruction on the enemy, he had to settle for working by stealth and small scale over a long period of time.  He did not in the end succeed in winning his war of course, but he wasn't wrong about the nature of the enemy.

He did have some success in the sense that his campaign got him a lot of notoriety and a whole lot more people read his manifesto than otherwise might have been likely.  He got a whole lot more than 15 minutes of fame, he was in the news cycle for a solid couple of decades.  Also, simply labeling him a "murderer" isn't accurate, it would be more accurate to call him a terrorist or perhaps climate warrior if you want to throw a positive spin on it.  After all, one man's Terrorist is another man's Freedom Fighter, it just depends whose side you are on.

As we move forward down the Collapse Highway, I suspect there will be many more bombings of the infrastructure of industrial civilization, from banks to data centers to refineries and power plants.  Ted Koscynski was just ahead of his time, a preview of the world to come.

RE

Are you purposely missing the point or are you really unable to understand the concept?  I did not explain what is wrong with Industrial Civilization in 200 Words, in fact I wrote a lot more than the 35,000 pages TK did attempting to explain it all.  All I did in that response was explain Ted's motivation and methodology.  You also miss the point that who actually got sent to the Great Beyond was basically irrelevant, they were just people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  The people weren't the target, the civilization was.

Normal folks in fact do NOT agree on the premise, and up to TKs era and in fact onward to today nobody has come up with any action any more effective than Ted's bombing campaign.  Greta Thunberg hasn't been any more effective, neither has Extinction Rebellion. You can abhor violence, but historically speaking making any kind of major change in society has been accompanied by violence, a whole lot more generally speaking than Ted dished out.  Lotta killing and bombing went on from both sides in the fight over Slavery even before the War of Northern Aggression began  Prior to the American Revolution, quite a few large ships were scuttled and numerous innocent merchant sailors who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time there were sent to the Great Beyond.  They weren't targeted for murder, they were casualties of war.

I doubt TK expected his little bombing campaign to bring down Industrial Civilization. rather I think he viewed it more like Lexington & Concord, the "shot heard round the world" that initiated the FSoA Revolution.  He probably hoped others would follow his example and take up arms to destroy industrial civilization. That didn't happen, so he eventually ended up getting caught and receiving a life sentence rather then ending up as a hero of the revolution with statues of him erected in Central Park and High Schools named after him.  Ya can't win 'em all.  So it goes.

RE

What is a "nutter"?  I know of no such diagnosis in the DSM-V.  Since Ted did not pursue an insanity defense and was tried as sane, you can only accept the legal system's position that he was sane.  I think sane is the opposite of nutter, though I am not sure since I am not sure of the definition of nutter.

I already stipulated that he had a low probability for success, but low probability is not no probability.  Perhaps he kept on with it because he couldn't think of anything else to do with a greater probability for success.  Given that since then nobody else has come up with anything successful in changing the trajectory of industrial civilization, he may have been right about this.

Far as his intelligence goes, he was a child prodigy and mathematician, but being smart doesn't always lead to the best outcomes.  After all, Einstein, Feynman, Tesla and Oppenheimer were all real smart, and their thinking led to the development of the Atomic Bomb and the deaths of 100s of 1000s of innocent people.  So were they nutters also?

Anyhow, TK was not your run of the mill serial killer, the whole campaign was qualitatively different so you are missing the point if you can't see the difference between him and your typical postal.  The only thing similar is the outcome, some random dead people.  Otherwise, it is very different and quite a singular event in the history so far written of collapse.

RE

A nutter is someone lost in a reality of their own making.

And that just about covers all of us.

* astute viewer will notice I am able to hack into our toolbar and change editor icons.  That is a real image of the Mona Lisa I made from a high resolution photo.  I need to find the old Mona somewhere.  Still better than what we had.

I wouldn't make a definition for a word like "nutter".  It's a totally loaded term.  It would be like making a definition of an ass wipe or fuck wad.  You don't like TK because you don't like what he did.  So you use a name and concept designed to show your distaste.  Fair enough, but don't pretend you are making any kind of dispassionate analysis here.

I never said TK was better, only that he was different.  His methodology for bringing about change was clearly flawed, but I do understand how he got there after having his brain sand blasted by the FSoA black ops folks.  The fact he spent 20 years sending out mail bombs because he was generally pissed off at the civilization he was living in doesn't make any of what he wrote less true, nor does it make it more true.  It did get him more readers though.

Far as Heinberg's back to the land plan killing millions of people, that is a ridiculous argument.  Millions of people are going to die here no matter what.  Going back to the land is an attempt to save a few.  It probably won't succeed, but so far nobody has come up with anything better that isn't loaded up with hopium and skittle shitting unicorns.  That Fusion Tokamak costing billions isn't gonna save anybody, nor will Elon Musk & Jeff Bezos' rocket ships.

Now, if I had Elon & Jeff's kind of money, I wouldn't spend it building oversize Estes Rockets to nowhere.  I would build floating submersible Bubble towns from basalt reinforced cement & glass domes powered by a micro nuclear reactors and tidal generators with desalinization plants, air filtration and oxygen concentrators, hydroponic gardens and fish farms out in international waters.  Each bubble would house somewhere between 1000-10000 homo saps and could be directed following the wind and ocean currents anywhere on the globe.  They could be hooked together to make larger cities with resources and raw materials scavenged from the land masses they were parked near.

Upon completion of each module, open applications would be available to anyone interested in becoming a resident of that town.  At the first level there would be a competitive examination for each demographic segment from age 8 to 48.  Then Pass/Fail Physical, Medical and Psychological examinations.  Finally, all the applicants would have to agree to donate all their wealth and possessions to furthering the building of more bubbles if they are selected.  Then, assuming there are more successful applicant left than there are spots available, each age cohort would be separated out and divided into male and female pools, and a lottery held to get the final residents.  All would have to move aboard immediately, no waiting until the Zombies are attacking your McMansion.

So, my question for today is if you met the requirements, passed all the tests and won the lottery to board the first Bubble, would you do it?  Remember, you have to give up all your personal possessions and break all your ties with friends and family to do it.  Chances are few if any of them would also make the cut.

A second corollary question is if your 10 year old son or daughter got a spot on the ark but you, your wife and other children did not, would you let him/her go alone?

I realize this is major topic drift from TK, but that topic is beaten to death. 

RE

I don't think all murderers deserve to be denigrated or marked as insane.  I think if somebody had succeeded in murdering Adolf Hitler or Joe Stalin he or she would have been considered a hero, at least by most Amerikans.  I can think of quite a few people alive today I wouldn't cry for if somebody decided to buy them a ticket to the Great Beyond.  I just ask myself the question, "Would the world be a better place if this person was dead?".  If the answer comes up yes, whoever murdered that person probably had a solid reason for doing it.

"Back to the land" efforts made in earlier times did not come under the same circumstances as now, they were not particularly well planned or executed and you can't identify that as the cause of death.  The problems were political and economic, they went along with political purges and economic embargos and distribution problems.

Although it did not progress very far or last long enough, the Back to the Land movement here in the 60s & 70's didn't end up with millions of dead people, in fact I don't know of any deaths you could attribute directly to that.  The Amish have been pretty successful with their version of Back to the Land living.  You are conflating political and economic issues with the philosophical and practical ones in order to justify your conclusions.  Its a lousy argument.

Given your general attitude it's no surprise you wouldn't board one of the ocean towm bubbles.  Given the fact I came up with the idea and proposed it, it should be no surprise also I would jump at the chance.  I also would gladly send my 10 year old off on the adventure.  Obviously if he or she applied they want to go and it would give a good chance for at least one of my descendants to survive SHTF day.

RE

You are very conventional thinker and staying in the civilization is the conventional choice, which is why your response was so predictable.  Boarding a floating egg while society seems to be sorta functioning is the unconventinaol, risky choice, the kind Dr. Gonzo would have taken, like going to live with the Hell's Angels.  A conventional thinker like yourself would never do that.

Far as the 10 y/o goes most of them would not choose to go if their parents weren't also going, even if their parents encouraged them to go.  Most are still too attached and dependent on parents at that age.  Only very independent and self assured kids would do that, and if my kid had that kind of guts, I sure would not be the one to stand in the way.

RE

The fact I had a more comfortable early life than you and didn't busy myself braining raccoons with a Lousiana slugger is irrelevant, although I whacked my share of pidgeons , squirrels and rats with my wrist rocket slingshot in Rio and New York in the fun days of my privileged youth.  The big floating eggs are designed precisely to avoid having to live out in the bush practicing survival skills and BBQing roadkill.  I'm no Cody Lundin or Eustace Conway, and even in my best years after wilderness camps I doubt I would have lasted long living the full primitive.

On the other hand, I'm darn good at wiring up parts scavenged up from auto junkyards to keep my EV wheelchairs running and modifying them to take trailers and lift me off the ground if I fall.  I'm a good plumber and carpenter and I've done a decent amount of welding, though that isn't a real strong point and I would need to mess with the equipment more to get really good at it.  I'm an expert chemist and know how to recycle and build batteries, do extractions from plants to make basic medicines , cleaning agents and preservatives, poisons and anti-toxins.  I know medicine and anatomy and I could put in a trach tube or set a broken bone, extract a bullet and sew up a wound, and if no doctor was around I think I could remove an inflamed appendix without killing the patient.    Keeping it from getting infected would be the biggest problem if good antibiotics weren't available, but we should start off with a good stock and could  work on making more, though we would need a good biochem lab for that.  I've never run a nuclear reactor but the principles are pretty straightforward and tidal generators are right up my alley.  So I think I would have been a pretty handy person to have around in the floating town, particularly since I'm designing it. lol.  Of course, I am talking about the me before I was 50, not the me of today.

While I have never bred any of my own kids, I've taught thousands of them and I had a full year of experience as a 10 year old, lol.  I was perfectly capable at age 10 on evaluating what I wanted to do, and if I wanted to go on a roller coaaster I did even if my mom didn't want to go and didn't think it was a great idea for me either, I got on planes to fly alone to other countries and I lived away from home for full summer camps starting when I was 8.  I picked out the camps too from the ACA book listing all the approved ones, their amenities and what they specialized in.  I don't see this decision as all that much different, just it's permanent.  That would have made it more difficult, but frankly I wasn't all that attached to either of my parents.  I already lost one of them in the divorce anyhow, though I did get to go see him a couple of times a year.

Now, I wouldn't consider myself the average 10 y/o, but over the course of my life I worked with enough of them who I think were capable enough and independent enough to make such a decision.  I definitely would have wanted the opportunity myself, so I am sure there are other ones out there like me who also would like the opportunity.  They would have to take the battery of tests to evaluate their psychological ability to do this just like everyone else of course.

This kind of separation isn't that odd, the Brit upper class has been sending their kids off to Boarding School at 7 years old for generations.  The Russians and Chinese would go out to local elementary schools looking for athletically gifted children to live at their Olympic training facilities, and intelectually gifted children to train as scientists and engineers.  They were quite successful with both programs.

Unlike the Commies back in Mother Russia, I wouldn't forcibly remove the kids whether the parents or kids wanted it or not, I would give both of them Veto power.If kid wants to go but parents veto, no go.  If parents want the kid to go but kid vetoes, no go.  As I
 mentioned though, I sure wouldn't veto my kid's adventure, the kid would hate you for life, particularly if/when the lights do go out.  I'll pass on that.

RE