rigorousintuition.ca

Continued from here, minus the conflicting personalities.


There's surprisingly little here on the forum about Ted Kaczynski, which I find surprising--the thread above has just about all the external links the rest of the forum does w/r/t Kaczynski.

edit: FWIW it looks like the Florence Supermax prison that houses Kaczynski is the default holding pen for domestic terrorists in the US (RI link, among others). I have little to add w/r/t the LSD and psych experiments at Harvard... b/c I don't know much.

DOUBLE EDIT: LSD experimentation seems to be linked to one "L. Wilson Greene" in some respect, which invokes the "Dr. Greene" thing. Of course, this in no way serves to connect Harvard and the Murray Experiments to Greene.

Jeff wrote:From A Terrible Mistake:

"About the same time that Henry Beecher was poring over captured Nazi documents, Edgewood Arsenal scientific director, Dr L Wilson Greene, was developing his own thesis that LSD could well be a major advance toward 'non-violent war.' A significant step in reaching this conclusion was Dr Greene's review of a massive amount of Nazi files and documents, many of which have never seen the light of day in America."

The bulk of Greene's source material was a cache of Ahnenerbe papers, detailing experiments upon prisoners at Dachau, some of which employed hallucinogens such as mescaline. The documents had been hidden in a cave called Kleines Teufelslock, discovered by US troops in April '45 and studied for the next four years by Army intelligence.

RI Link

I wanted to compare this:

The Kaczynski family had worried about Ted since he was a boy. But his withdrawn and solitary behaviour was attributed to the fact that he was brilliant, says David:

"At one point as a teenager his IQ was measured in the 160 range which is well above genius".

Ted won a scholarship to Harvard at the age of 16.

David claims: "In retrospect I think it was probably a very unfortunate decision ... to send him away from home so early because I think he was only comfortable within the family nest".

Harvard was an alien environment for this working-class boy.

According to David: "When he sensed or felt rejection, his tendency was to withdraw. And apparently that's what he did at Harvard. No-one seems to remember him having any friendships there."

Indeed Ted's closest companion throughout his life seems to have been his younger brother David.

They even bought some land and shared holidays together in Montana.

Note the BS Lone Nut narrative (as posted here at RI, from a BBC Story) (RI Link and BBC Link)... also note the vaguest suggestion, unpursued, that snobbery was at play at Harvard. But now see, from the OP to the original thread:

What I do know is that my brother was a guinea pig in an unethical and psychologically damaging research project conducted at Harvard University where he attended college in the early 1960′s. While it is true that my brother suffers from paranoia, it is also true that he fell victim to a conspiracy of psychological researchers who used deceptive tactics to study the effects of emotional and psychological trauma on unwitting human subjects. My brother was harmed by psychologists who recognized - at least tangentially - that they were hurting him yet who made no attempt to undo or ameliorate the harm they’d caused to their young and vulnerable subject. Thus, it would be fair to say that my brother’s paranoia maintained a reference point in reality.

Interesting, and yet the point is made in Chase's work that Kaczynski's upbringing may have been 'dysfunctional'. But just how much so?

I came across a startling passage reading part 3 of Chase's Atlantic piece:

Lois Skillen, Kaczynski's high school counselor, is among those who believe that the Murray experiment could have been a turning point in Kaczynski's life. Ralph Meister, one of Turk Kaczynski's oldest friends and a retired psychologist who has known Ted Kaczynski since he was a small boy, also raises this possibility. So does one of Murray's own research associates. The TAT results certainly suggest that at the outset of the experiment Kaczynski was mentally healthy, but by the experiment's end, judging from Sally Johnson's comments, he was showing the first signs of emotional distress. As Kaczynski's college life continued, outwardly he seemed to be adjusting to Harvard. But inwardly he increasingly seethed. According to Sally Johnson, he began worrying about his health. He began having terrible nightmares. He started having fantasies about taking revenge against a society that he increasingly viewed as an evil force obsessed with imposing conformism through psychological controls.

These thoughts upset Kaczynski all the more because they exposed his ineffectuality. Johnson reported that he would become horribly angry with himself because he could not express this fury openly. "I never attempted to put any such fantasies into effect," she quoted from his writings, "because I was too strongly conditioned ... against any defiance of authority.... I could not have committed a crime of revenge even a relatively minor crime because ... my fear of being caught and punished was all out of proportion to the actual danger of being caught."

This raises the fascinating possibility that Kaczynski could have seen his decision to launch attacks on individuals as a kind of development in his personality, in other words, a demonstration of his overcoming this previous personality deficiency he associated with excessive conformity. I know WAY too little about the details of his case to make strong claims about it, but his retreat into solitude can at least preliminarily be read as a kind of resolution to the tension inherent in the realization that to live a morally meaningful life, one must have the courage to confront unjust authority. Because if one learns that one lacks the resources to confront authority, withdrawal from the milieu in which this conflict will arise again and again makes sense. It's a variant of the argument concerning whether personal spiritual growth that entails detachment and withdrawal from worldly affairs is really an abdication of responsibility or not. It puts that episode with the logging road in a new light. Even in retreat, he sees he cannot avoid the conflict. If it really was that incident which precipitated his bombings, we'd seem to have reason to believe this theme remained an important one for him.

[/pop psychologizing]

I'm confident a lot of people have had feelings very similar to those expressed by Kaczynski in the bolded passage. I know I damn sure have. And I'd even hazard that many could get on board with the idea that overcoming something like that is a positive personality development. Yet the actions for which Kaczynski is most well known don't really amount to a true overcoming of it, do they? Or do they? Ruinously misdirected, for sure.

I'm trying to get to the justifications people offer themselves for not taking more drastic action in the face of what they perceive to be clear and powerful injustices. I've long suspected that the aversion to drastic action (by which I don't necessarily mean violence, but which can certainly include it) results more from a conditioned conformity to norms of obedience to authority than it does from a belief that those drastic actions are unjustifiable themselves.

"Drastic actions", of course, can be thoughtful and proportional. Putting one's own life at risk to block oil extraction in the Niger Delta, for instance, would be an example of thoughtful and proportionate drastic action, IMO, even though it might well result in personal injury or a long period of detention in bad conditions [as it has and still does]. So too would damaging the equipment used for oil extraction if it could be determined that doing so would significantly slow down or otherwise hamper the extraction effort. Kidnapping oil company employees is pretty drastic too, though you'll get more arguments about the 'thoughtful and proportional' descriptors.

That Ted felt his actions were empowering, whether consciously or unconsciously, should be a given.

There are two important points that have not received enough focus: 1) Ted's forced isolation in the hospital for eight months, from the age of six months to 14 months, its impact on him, and whether this is where or how he was targeted for mk in his later life. 2) him being fired by David, his supervisor, for harassing a female employee who had rejected him, which occurred just before he went into isolation in Montana.

Link


FBI investigates Unabomber in '82 Tylenol deaths

By KAREN HAWKINS, Associated Press Karen Hawkins, Associated Press – 30 mins ago

CHICAGO – The FBI has requested a DNA sample from Unabomber Ted Kaczynski as part of its investigation of the 1982 Chicago-area Tylenol poisonings case that killed seven people, officials said Thursday.

Kaczynski, who's serving a life sentence in federal prison after pleading guilty in 1998 to setting 16 explosions that killed three people, has declined to voluntarily provide a DNA sample. Chicago FBI spokeswoman Cynthia Yates wouldn't comment on whether the agency would try to compel him to give one.

She said the FBI is pursuing DNA from "numerous individuals" in the investigation, but declined to give details on the others.

The U.S. Marshals Service is currently auctioning off items seized from Kaczynski's home. Ahead of that auction, he filed a motion asking California courts to order the government to keep certain items seized from his cabin in 1996, including journals that could prove his whereabouts in 1982 and other evidence that could clear him in the Tylenol case.

The Tylenol case involved the use of potassium cyanide and resulted in a mass recall. Kaczynski said he has "never even possessed any potassium cyanide."

In a space of three days beginning Sept. 29, 1982, seven people who took cyanide-laced Tylenol in Chicago and four suburbs died. The deaths triggered a national scare and a huge recall, and eventually led to the widespread adoption of tamperproof packaging for over-the-counter drugs.

In 2009, federal agents searched the Boston home of James W. Lewis, who served more than 12 years in prison for sending an extortion note to Tylenol maker Johnson & Johnson demanding $1 million to "stop the killing." Lewis has denied being involved in the poisonings.

No charges have ever been filed in the deaths.

Wow I remember that about the Tylenol. It was a massive story even in Australia.

I fully touched an unconscious fear in people I reckon, the idea that an everyday over the counter medecine most people used for convenience ... that it could kill you.

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The more I think about it, the less sense this makes. Was Kaczynski living in Chicago in 1982? Because that's the only way he would have had access to the various drugstores at which the Tylenol was sold. My recollection is that the person(s) involved, purchased the Tylenol, then added cyanide to it, and then replaced the bottle on the shelf, right?

This is just the frat boy FBI lighting their farts on fire trying to get some attention after the whole Osama media blitz. What better way to do it than to pin it on the guy you already got!

beeline wrote:.

The more I think about it, the less sense this makes. Was Kaczynski living in Chicago in 1982? Because that's the only way he would have had access to the various drugstores at which the Tylenol was sold. My recollection is that the person(s) involved, purchased the Tylenol, then added cyanide to it, and then replaced the bottle on the shelf, right?

I dunno. One thing I remember is the fear it generated. Even here in Australia, in the 80s, there were traces of it. Definitely terrorism in its own way.

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I was going to start a thread on the Tylenol Killer a few months ago, but kept it as a draft. So now that it's relevant...

Most consequential individual terrorist of all time?

Who remembers this? At the time, it dominated the US media for a fortnight.

From Wikipedia:

Chicago Tylenol murders

The Chicago Tylenol murders occurred when seven people died after taking pain-relief capsules that had been poisoned. The Tylenol poisonings, code-named TYMURS by the FBI, took place in the autumn of 1982 in the Chicago area of the United States. These poisonings involved Extra-Strength Tylenol medicine capsules which had been laced with potassium cyanide.[1] The incident led to reforms in the packaging of over-the-counter substances and to federal anti-tampering laws. The case remains unsolved and no suspects have been charged. A $100,000 reward, offered by Johnson & Johnson for the capture and conviction of the "Tylenol Killer," has never been claimed.

http://www.snopes.com/horrors/poison/tylenol.asp

No one has ever been charged with the Tylenol murders although James Lewis was convicted of attempting to extort $1 million from Johnson & Johnson after the fact. He served time and was paroled in October 1995 after serving a bit more than half of his 20-year sentence. A quote from a 1988 newspaper leads us to believe Lewis remains the prime suspect in the deaths:

"Mr. Lewis denied any responsibility for the poisonings, and investigators said they lacked evidence to file murder charges against him."

Lewis was originally scheduled to be paroled in 1989. His parole was turned down at the last minute:

A four-member panel of the [U.S. Parole] commission ordered Lewis, convicted in 1983, to serve his entire 20-year sentence, minus reductions for good behavior as required by law. The reductions bring his sentence to about 160 months and mean he would be released April 29, 1996. New information had apparently been presented to the commission whereupon it withdrew the earlier parole date. According to United Press International, the commission "did not reveal the nature of the new information."

Wikipedia notes that drug companies phased out capsules for many drugs as a result of the Tylenol murders, but that's the least of it. The packaging of pretty much every ingestable product changed. All those plastic tear-off seals on beverage bottles, jelly jars and other food products, as well as shampoos and whatnot -- none of which are likely to make a difference against a new syringe-armed killer -- constitute a billion-dollar industry created by tort-averse consumer products companies in reaction to the Tylenol case. You may tear off these seals several times in a day, and each of them is an unwitting acknowledgement of the Tylenol killer.

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I was gonna mention the change in packing but thought I'd wait and see who else noticed.

How much plastic is floating in the pacific cos of those few poisoned capsules?

very good documentary here:

The Net
http://documentarystorm.com/the-net/

More of a film essay – of the type pioneered by Orson Welles and Chris Marker – than a standard documentary, The Net: (The Unabomber, the LSD and the Internet) begins with the typical format and structure of a nonfiction film, and a single subject (the life and times of mail bomber Ted Kaczynski).

From that thematic springboard, The Net branches out omnidirectionally, segueing into a series of thematic riffs and variants on such marginally-related subjects as the history of cyberspace, terrorism, utopian ideals, LSD or the Central Intelligence Agency.

even get's into the Macy conferences

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macy_conferences

Starting at post #21, an amateur sleuth links together all the suggestive evidence that may link Kaczynski to the Tylenol murders. Not airtight, but surprisingly compelling.

Most probably it was Wilks who first pointed the finger at Ted casting blame on him as being responsible. There is absolutely no reason to suspect Ted had anything at all to do with the Tylenol murders and it is most unlikely imo that he committed these crimes, despite Wilks allegations. First, Ted was not known to be in Chicago at that time and secondly, these indiscriminate murders are not anything like his targeting specific individuals as the unibomber. It is also quite unbelieveable that the FBI did not have Ted's DNA, though Wilks gives a few good reasons why he believes they didn't on David's blog.

Ted, in bringing a suit to halt the sale of his possessions which he may need to defend himself,first brought this to public attention.