The MKULTRA Evolutions | Hacker News Reader

The MKULTRA Evolutions

im1776.com

84 pointsLiminalFrame40 comments

The linked article seems to want us to believe that concern about global warming is part of a CIA mind control plot. I would skip it.

No doubt considerable effort has been spent muddying waters, and it's not an easy topic to research, but it might be better to take a look at John Marks' seminal work based on documents obtained under FOIA, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate - The CIA and Mind Control, available for free at https://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks.htm

The specific reference in the article is to "climate catastrophism." Anthropogenic climate change as a real and serious issue is not necessarily incompatible with the notion that particularly apocalyptic interpretations may be used as a means to further certain agendas or viewpoints like austerity and misanthropy (check out the recent work of Grimes as an excellent example).

Re: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32624123

https://www.cpecn.com/news/aspire-completes-worlds-largest-c...

> Aspire Food Group announced that it has completed construction of its alternative protein manufacturing facility, making London, Ont. home to the world’s largest cricket production facility. Aspire’s new plant will reportedly produce 9,000 metric tons of crickets every year for human and pet consumption. That’s about two billion insects to be distributed annually across Canada and throughout the United States. Aspire also reports that it already has orders for the next two years … showcases four first-of-a-kind newly developed technologies; an automated storage retrieval system (ASRS), a new type of HVAC system, a 5G IoT network and an AI solution that’s been recognized by UNESCO.

There are existing additives to products in-market today. Before buying your favorite snack, read the ingredients list of packaged food products.

If a celebrity's legacy is leveraged to endorse questionable products, is that effectively the retirement of that celebrity as product endorser?

>Before buying your favorite snack, read the ingredients list of packaged food products.

Prediction: just like with anything controversial (like GMOs in Europe, etc etc), it'll be labeled in a way that obfuscates the actual ingredient as not to jeopardize the all-important profits.

First hit on google: https://chapul.com/blogs/chapul-bars-latest-news/what-happen...

"What happens when Western food marketers blend novel food items, such as insect protein, with more commonly accepted ingredients? A recent study suggests that may be an effective strategy."

Origin laundering, lovely.. perhaps we need (or there is?) a de-obfuscator app that scans barcodes and maps to an ingredient list and supply chain analysis. As a bonus, it could sell advertising to competitive products desired by humans.

...so people that have been known to lie to Congress under oath will just send you the good and honest information if only you just file a FOIA request?

MKULTRA and all US-based human experimentation and study projects done both on their own citizen and foreigners from other (complicit) countries are quite a trip to read through. One would assume the government pouring so much money and man-effort into these researches would make ruthless individuals feel more justified in committing their overlooked, state-mandated crimes. Of course, being a sensitive, secretive and very speculative subject it's important not to take everything at face value, as there's an abundance of theories and the emotional impact can make one overlook logic. There's really a lot of interesting ones. Familiar with a certain Kaczynski?

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard...

There's a German documentary "The Net" from the early 2000s which starts out looking into Kaczynski's experiences with MKULTRA and winds up in a deep dive on the origins and influences of the early internet: https://youtu.be/Yn9BvNAUvcU

For those interested in the rabbit hole, you could do worse than start with the work of D.E.Cameron. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Ewen_Cameron

I recommend Errol Morris' docudrama involving MKULTRA, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormwood_(miniseries).

It goes into some speculation tying events to the Korean war.

This article seems to imply that the 1960s counterculture movement was astroturfed by the CIA, which is… certainly an opinion. The historical parts were interesting, but the unhinged conclusions make me doubt whether what I’m reading is accurate.

> This article seems to imply that the 1960s counterculture movement was astroturfed by the CIA, which is… certainly an opinion.

But... that actually happened? See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_for_Cultural_Freedom

Nevermind COINTELPRO where they literally infiltrated counterculture movements, although that was the FBI.

By “astroturfed” I mean that the U.S. counterculture movement was a creation of the CIA (or perhaps a byproduct of MKULTRA research; the article is unclear). The CIA did fund anti-communist front organizations and COINTELPRO was real.

Ah gotcha, I usually understand "astroturfing" to mean piggy-backing on already existing platforms.

Sorry for the confusion. In politics, “astroturf” means “fake grass-roots”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing

So the CIA made up a movement and then the FBI infiltrated those CIA-run movements? Huh?

You should look up what such terms mean first.

https://vinylwriters.com/weird-scenes-inside-the-canyon-laur...

> The following text is the first chapter of David McGowan‘s astonishing book “Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon‘ The very strange, but nevertheless true story of the dark underbelly of a 1960s hippie utopia, in which Laurel Canyon’s colorful characters – rock stars, hippies, murderers and politicos – happily coexisted alongside a covert military installation.

To draw an analogy with 1960s computers: manipulation engineering of human perception and sensory response has been scaled with market volume, miniaturized, refined, commoditized and widely dispersed. It would be logistically and politically simpler if there was one Big Bad that could be regulated or otherwise influenced, but like computers, the genies are out of many bottles, regardless of who opened them. In response to the public release and subsequent offensive use of such technology, we need more investment in defensive equivalents.

More recently: https://web.archive.org/web/20190227050755/https://www.bigge...

I’m somewhat familiar with this subject, having followed it for years. I read both parts of Schwab’s essay, but I think this one passage in particular gives away some of his bias and rationale:

> The noetic Gnosticism and transhumanist vision of Esalen, a religion of no religion, and divinity without the Divine, is the ultimate extrapolation of “self-actualization” as the actualization of desire. A virtual world of enthusiasm, artificially created and synthetically satisfied, shaping the body and mind into a deathless desiring-machine, transforming the image of man from a reflection of God, into the brood of the abyss.

Citation needed, Schwab. I’ve read the most significant and relevant literature on what you call noetic Gnosticism, transhumanism, and Esalen, and nowhere—anywhere—does it reflect this opinion or view. To actually get it this wrong, tells me you are coming at this from a religious, fundamentalist POV, similar to what we find with the John Birch Society and other Christian conservative fringe groups.

A good use of AI would be to visualize narrative supply chains, moving beyond textual etymology to infer and identify weasel words, ambiguities, conflations, misinterpretations, divergences, forks and outright manipulation of historically coherent narratives towards incoherent blind alley dead ends.

Schwab’s argument apparently has roots in the conspiracy theories of fundamentalist Christian Texe Marrs, Lyndon LaRouche, and Ed Dieckmann, Jr. These are not exactly reliable sources.

Article uses a real atrocity (MKULTRA experiments) as clickbait for a theory that CIA are mind controlling you with microwave rays.

Text is hard to follow. And other articles of same author leave me with little interest to invest more time. E.g.:

"[...] Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum (WEF) have all sorts of ideas about what it will involve, from a new, rent-based “circular economy” to beer made from recycled wastewater. But before you say cheers and dive headfirst into that delicious environmentally-friendly sludge — and before you sign over your firstborn to global-government-mandated gender reassignment therapy [...]"

https://im1776.com/2020/12/04/are-you-ready-for-the-great-re...

From part 1 of that series:

>This “state of exception” logic transformed scientific research in the US forever, setting a precedent that would eventually lead to the gain of function genetic therapy experiments associated with COVID-19.

Awful stuff. Shocking to those who think the government is there to help.

I guess it's great news that the government tells us that they stopped mkultra, and didn't continue their attempts at mind controlling the population. Phew.

> I guess it's great news that the government tells us that they stopped mkultra, and didn't continue their attempts at mind controlling the population. Phew.

Honestly, they probably did. And not out of the kindness of their hearts, either, but because the assumptions behind such programs were proven invalid. You can't actually program someone's mind like a computer with torture, hypnosis and LSD, it turns out the human brain doesn't work that way.

But if the last decade has proven anything, it's how little effort it can take to influence today's deeply networked population, and how effective it can be to convince the masses to reprogram themselves through stimulus and hyperreality. You don't need the Ludovico technique or subliminal messages when you can manufacture consent entirely through Facebook memes and shitposts.

Awful stuff. Super-helpful for my ideological pet-peeve, though, so I’m glad that I got an excuse to bring that up.

When I first found out about this project, I was shocked. I hadn't realise that governments had gone/are going to such lengths to manage their populations.

Look no further than the Orwell Ministry of Truth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministries_of_Nineteen_Eighty-... and the current administrations attempt at establishing one https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-department-of-home...

The Ministry of Truth was not a fact checking system. It was where the past was rewritten, with entire wars and alliances being erased, and required all previous documents to be destroyed and replaced. The point was that if no record of the past exists except for what is inside of our minds, the past is whatever we believe it to be. Hence 2 + 2 = 5, O'Brien raises his fingers and asks "How many fingers am I holding up?" and Winston eventually "remembers" the "wrong" number.

Fact checkers don't "rewrite" anything, they don't destroy previous articles of information, they don't have an army to go out and destroy old documents. Disinformation is a reasonable national security concern, it seems silly to think otherwise given that it's a very obvious and established weapon.

Indeed, comrade. Disinformation threatens the fatherland.

It just sounds to me like you should actually read 1984.

It sounds to me like you should read the user names of the people that you reply to.

Yeah so happy all of that weird manipulation stuff is over.

My pronouns are in my bio btw.

Lol

To be more explicit I’m not sure why nobody ever mentions the MASSIVE popularity of mk ultra inspired hypnosis porn pushing self feminization. There’s a ton of it on every porn platform.

And it originated on 4 chan, decades ago. Which felt at the time like a psy op. Fits the pattern of destabilisation methods used by the Russians and Chinese.

Citation needed

>hypnosis porn pushing self feminization.

what's hypnosis porn?

Victims of MKULTRA don't usually get high-level briefings about the program, but I was given glimpses of what those psychopaths were up to because, for one, my direct handler had a penchant for bragging. Also, although I was only a boy when they started on me, I had a central role in advancing the techniques used on me; my ability to resist their demands on my intellect was diminished by the controls they placed on me.

Some personal observations:

  - Don't believe anything about which division of which agency is up to what. The intelligence community is a shell game, and everyone of consequence has a license to compartmentalize, which means they lie about what they are doing and for whom, even to their colleagues and official superiors.

 - At some point in mid-1970s a large contingent of MKULTRA, perhaps the whole remnant, decamped from the Central Intelligence Agency. From what I can tell through my tiny peekhole, they lost none of their access to facilities and assets but lost all of their accountability.

 - The article is spot-on about how underappreciated the role of hypnosis is. In MKULTRA, psychology is not the science of the mind but the art of human control. Hypnosis offers the preferred leash where individuals are compelled to specific acts. I was told that the intelligence community intended to misdirect the entire academic community of psychology, distorting their research to detract attention from the proprietary techniques used by intelligence operatives; I don't know if they did.

- I've been subjected to a range of what is called torture. No one will admit it, but torture is just a recreation for the psychopath within. At most, it's a crude adjunct to clever manipulation. That said, there is nothing comparable physical pain so severe and widespread that it overwhelms your ability to retain a central identity. The desperation turns you sideways to time.

- Hypnosis doesn't scale for control of populations, but many of the refinements of instructions for hypnotics improved the handbooks of propaganda.

This conclusion to the article rings true: >"The essence of the matter is that America’s mind control saga is not confined to the annals of CIA history, or even CIA torture rooms. In psychiatry, in social science, in the entertainment business and in social media, MKULTRA is the fabric of our lives."

[edited for paragraphing]

I've often wondered how mind control techniques have been integrated by orgs like Google(Alphabet,Youtube). Considering that researchers long ago concluded that psychological torture is far more effective than physical, perhaps orgs like Google have created an environment ripe for continued research into mind control techniques.

Anyone have info on this?

Everything is a PsyOp

Any good MKULTRA program requires 1) Intensive, intimate surveillance 2) A drug.

Coincidentally, my cell phone just reminded me that it's time to get my health-injection...

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