Uncle Ted

[RE]

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

[FarmGirl]

I don't know if I can agree with the idea that a serial killer creates a reign of terror among any but those naturally scared of their own shadow in the first place. I realize that the average American might be such a pussy when it comes to life, but it seems a bit unlikely. Sure, the semi-random nature of his violence probably has more of a fear factor to it than the average random drunk driver plowing through a crowd with their car, but those types of things easily cause as much or more death and destruction than Terrible Ted did.

[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

[K-Dog]

It'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.

[RE]

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

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[K-Dog]

Apparently 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.

[FarmGirl]

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

Oh, I imagine everyone has a psychological underpinning to justify their killings. I'm poor, lets kill someone and rob them. I'm rich, it's okay to run down and kill pedestrians. Etc etc.

So Teddy thought humans were bad. Join the club. That group includes all of us who have dealt with humans. Doesn't mean that knocking off a few here and a few there will make a difference.

[Surly1]

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

The 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:

It 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:

When 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.

[RE]

Oh, 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

[FarmGirl]

Oh, 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

So you are assigning value to sheer quantity? John M Greer is a voluminous writer, and as it turns out didn't know bubcuss about peak oil. Philosophical ramblings, meh, but when he touched a technical topic..ouch.

However, when it comes to random minor murderers, would it matter to you what the rational was if they randomly offed a friend or neighbor?

Murder#1. Computer store owner.
Nurder#2. Ad exec.
Murder#3. Timber Industry Lobbyst.

Can his viewpoint be boiled down to the reason why the world would be better place without these 3 people in it? Did any of these occupations suddenly find themselves bereft of college grads longing to get into the fields of small business owner, ad execs or timber lobbyists? Salaries suddenly double reflecting the danger of being in one of these professions, and corresponding lack of new meat because they were all scared?

Or are murderers pretty much murderers most of the time, regardless of their reasons, or the voluminous nature of expressing them?

[RE]

So 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

[FarmGirl]

So 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.

Certainly a worthy screed. And accurate.

The argument is basically correct.

Yup.

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 folks he killed didn't sound like establishments though...more like...just folks. Was this guy so far off the deep end that he figured killing a couple random people would bring down civilization?

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.

Well there it is. An addled brain. So 100-200 words as you've used to explain it, certainly didn't require him cranking out 30,000. When normal folks can agree right off the bat with the premise, he could stop there, and then try and figure out effective action rather than just some rando murders.

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.

Well, killing randos will certainly get you notoriety regardless of whether or not the screed was 200 words or 30,000. Or what it said. Sort of like well endowed famous female celebrities disrobing to catch your attention to their cause. When all is said and done, folks only pretended to listen, the disrobing being far more interesting.

He got a whole lot more than 15 minutes of fame, he was in the news cycle for a solid couple of decades.

So has Bundy, and the Columbine kids. No screed necessary if the point is just attention. And those 9/11 folks are guarenteed to be famous forever, but when it comes to mass murder, numbers seem to matter.

After all, one man's Terrorist is another man's Freedom Fighter, it just depends whose side you are on.

Quite true. George Washington being the perfect American example.

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

Oh, while Ted might be right in the same way peak oilers will be, bombings of infrastructure don't need to have a body count, and folks can respect that kind of protest better than murdering type folks. Get enough people involved doing this and things might actually begin to change.

Appeals court upholds 8-year sentence of Des Moines activist in Dakota Access Pipeline sabotage

[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

[FarmGirl]

Are you purposely missing the point or are you really unable to understand the concept? 

Depends on which particular concept you think I don't comprehend I suppose. You did mention more than one.

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.

Okay, so Ted was a nutter, he killed randos and thought that would cause a revolt bringing down civilization. Arguably, proving he was a nutter and making his manifesto the ramblings of such. Look, I didn't read his manifesto, I can only take your word and interpretation on what he wrote, or maybe meant, hence my questions.

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.

Okay, I can agree with this point. But I wouldn't believe a word of it coming from someone to whom knocking off some randos was a means to that end. Or convince others of the same. Now...if he was trying to figure out a delayed action lethal poison to dump into the upstate New York watershed feeding down to NYC....now THAT you can draw a straight line from a "civilization bad must die" angle.

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.

That is a reasonable extrapolation...but from the nutter perspective allowing room for a grandiose opinion of themselves. Over the years of his bombings, isn't such a smart person supposed to LEARN that their techniques were ineffective in real time and set about learning from that experience and doing better? And if they couldn't be bothered, isn't that just another piece of evidence of him being no such mastermind but just a usual run of the mill murdering nutter?

He probably hoped others would follow his example and take up arms to destroy industrial civilization.

And if he was as smart as his resume indicates, and WASN'T a nutter, he should have learned that he was failing and taken a more effective line of action. Having a tough time giving this guy credit for being anything other than a murdering nutter, even if his original claim was "civilization bad, something must be done" and we can both agree with that premise.

[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