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Comment by rr808 | Hacker News Reader

If you haven't read about MKUltra its worth a read too. Looks like the CIA helped to make LSD popular in the 60s https://www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-que...

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still not sure if it was related but in elementary school in the 90s I was put in a "gifted" program which involved, on at least one occasion, wearing headphones in a dimly-lit room and being tested with Zener cards. I've dug into local records and still to this day don't conclusively know what that was all about.

I've always wanted to pull out some Zener cards in the middle of a programming interview.

If a candidate is psychic, wouldn't that be good to know?

Actually... It can be a good trait for a candidate to call out obvious bullshit - for which a Zener-test is the perfect meta-test!

It also gives candidates a good story even if they don't get hired.

Amateur level.

You need to testing for Larges, not Mediums.

Bah bum hahaha thank you

ObGroan: Guh-rrrooaannn!

Same. I'd forgotten about it. For me this happened around 1970.

That was the first test. Those who responded went on to the next level, which is goat staring.

> I've dug into local records and still to this day don't conclusively know what that was all about.

Do you have episodes of unexplainable lost-time? Maybe try setting up a surveillance camera at home so you can see when they activate you.

There's no way that would work. Any security camera that you can set up is already back-doored.

only if its networked.

Naah. It's built-in at the camera factory.

For this kind of thing, an old closed circuit analog camera with VHS tapes is best.

Were you in NYC by chance?

nope—SD. but the phenomenon has been reported all over the country, as I've come to find out.

Was it part of an entry test for one of those 'genius' programs?

I've seen these programs discussed on 4chan and reddit -- try "GATE conspiracy"

I've seen those threads too, years after I made the connection myself (by playing The World Ends With You and seeing the Zener card symbols on the top screen, before I knew what they were).

some of the things listed there apply to my experience, and others don't. the whole thing leaves me with more questions than answers.

That was well covered in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. At least the "make LSD popular" part.

The classic work on this is "Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond" by Lee & Shain. The Chapter "In the Beginning There Was Madness" covers the crazy era of MK-ULTRA (and the Frank Olson case, in which the CIA fed LSD to MKULTRA collaborators in the biological warfare program, where Olson worked - he then had a breakdown of some sort and wanted to quit the program and perhaps go public, so the CIA hit him in the head with a hammer and threw him out of a high-rise (probably, anyway) and called it a suicide for several decades).

https://spyscape.com/article/frank-olson-the-cias-secret-que...

Something the post-Boomer generations have been talking about more and more: the fact that the "tune in, turn on" movement wasn't coming from inside the house, so to speak. The old leftists still get very defensive of their drug overuse, in spite of the fact that their "counterculture" had set back effective policy by generations. They had ceded the field to reactionaries and identitarians (both allies of capital, of course), the effects of which we're dealing with to this day.

The American security state - Pinkerton, etc - was created to deal with labor, and it was nearly-constantly trying to end-run around democratic oversight using whatever means it could: poisoning students with military-grade chemicals, allying with Luciano, squamming loins with notorious non-state actors (including actual Nazis), hiring squadrons of prostitutes, and on occasion - maybe, possibly - making some US citizens go away more permanently. Without even mentioning its adventures in the Americas at large. It's the height of schadenfreude we're living through a golden age of conspiracism without eyeballs on the horribly, horribly real historical conspiracies, who was behind them, and who continues to be.

I don't know a lot about Pinkertons, is there a good book or a documentary to find out more?

(Or any other "real conspiracies" for that matter.)

The Wikipedia article is a decent read [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)]

> squamming loins

?!?! I looked it up, but there are too many definitions... https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Squam Is that a synonym for "knocking boots" ?!

My guess is that OP did indeed mean "knocking boots" as a reference to Operation Paperclip, where the US government granted amnesty to a bunch of Nazi scientists in return for pivoting their research to US national security purposes.

edit: source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

when I was growing up "knocking boots" meant have sex? (there was a whole rap song with that title). Which is what I assumed "squamming loins" was some british english version of.

It’s a metaphor in the same sense as “strange bedfellows.”

Whoops. I had thought it to be merely some unfortunate onomatopoeia. It's awesome that the word has so many actual meanings, if informal ones. But yes, "a thing involving 'mutual loins' that sounds like 'squam'"

And now everybody's on antidepressants.

Yes yes, it's a good thing according to good medical authority. But still, it's crassly dystopian too. Maybe we can thank "old leftist drug overuse" for normalizing us over that hump.

> “tune in, turn on”

“Turn on, tune in, drop out”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_on,_tune_in,_drop_out

Just noting this because I wasn’t sure if this what was being referenced, so I looked it up . . .

> very defensive of their drug overuse, in spite of the fact that their "counterculture" had set back effective policy by generations

But did people dislike the hippies because of their drug use, or did they dislike drug use because of the hippies?

The former, there's quite well documented pre WW2 historical evidence of writers being shocked at seeing drug abuse first hand.

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