„People Machine“ and Simulacrum
A very interesting 2020 book titled “If Then – How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future” by Jill Lepore is about the Simulmatics Corporation, which was founded in 1959 in New York City. It offered a product called “People Machine” for election campaigns; comparable to what Cambridge Analytica did for the Trump campaign in 2016. The trail leads to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge; on the work of the political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool. He helped found Simulmatics Corporation and led the Cold War-era campaign to bring behavioral science to the defense industry, election campaigns, and commerce. Simulmatics insisted it had put John F. Kennedy in the White House by a razor-thin margin. “People Machine” worked according to the “if-then principle”. When A happens, B happens. Today we’re getting used to software like Palantir telling the police where crimes are most likely to happen, or Google knowing exactly what personality structure you have. Back then, software and computers were either completely foreign to most people, or they had only ever seen huge computing machines in a company, a university, on television or at a government agency. If the people machine was to be further developed, the researchers said, it could be used to predict human behavior, whether it is buying a particular washing machine, voting for a particular candidate or taking part in revolutionary uprisings. The company inspired a number of science fiction novels and films, such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “World on a Wire”, which in turn acted as an inspiration for the later film “The Matrix” from 1999.
The plot of “World on a Wire” takes place in an alternative reality set in the 1970s. At the “Institute for Cybernetics and Future Research (IKZ)” a supercomputer called Simulacron-1 was developed that is capable of simulating a small town. This simulation runs around the clock and is populated by “identity units” that lead roughly the same lives as normal living people and have consciousness. Except for a single “contact unit,” none of the simulated people know that their world is a simulation or simulacrum.
You can connect to the illusory world with a “contact circuit” and there are simulated people within the illusory world who want to escape into reality. The people at the research institute soon begin to wonder whether they themselves and their surroundings are perhaps just a simulation.
In 1952, the two American parties, Democrats and Republicans, were so similar that voters cared more about presidential candidates than political positions. Marketing, television and “left-versus-right” propaganda increasingly played an important role. In today’s situation, TV and the Internet dictate pretty much everything and the two parties accuse each other of completely betraying America and democracy. In 1952, during the presidential election, audiences first saw the UNIVAC computer, which appeared to be able to predict the election results.
A group of leading scientists were recruited around the idea of developing even better methods to simulate human behavior.
- Eugene Burdick, a psychologist in the new field of behavioral science from Stanford University, who served in World War II, continued his studies at Oxford University on a scholarship as a Rhodes Scholar, a protégé of the Anglo-American Guelph Empire. The British and American armed forces ran very successful and secret psychological warfare programs during the Second World War, which aroused interest in ever-new advances that required a number of civilian researchers who were not allowed to know that it was about psychological warfare, but rather worked in civil-sounding fields such as marketing, communications research or behavioral research. It was a manageable caste of leading scientists who worked, for example, at the “Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences,” which was created by the Ford Foundation in 1954.
- Harold Dwight Lasswell, one of the founders of Simulmatics, was a leading American political scientist and communications theorist. He was a graduate student at the University of Chicago and a professor of law at Yale University. He is known for his communication model that focuses on “Who (says) What (to) Whom (in) Which Channel (with) What Effect”. He is also known for his book on pathological psychological characteristics of leaders in politics and business, “Psychopathology and Politics,” as well as another book on politics. It reads like the blueprint for the world we live in today, with Facebook and algorithms and tailored election campaign advertising for even the smallest possible groups.
- Ithiel de Sola Pool was an outstanding researcher with ties to the US Department of Defense. He was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Pool’s later work with Simulmatics Corporation included contracts with the Department of Defense to predict insurgencies in Vietnam; he was also involved in Simulmatics’ efforts to predict where race riots would occur in the United States. Daniel Ellsberg would later say of Pool: “I considered him, without question, the most corrupt social scientist I had ever met.” At first he was denied access to secret material because he was suspected of being a secret communist. Later, students at MIT protested against him for his involvement in a computerized counterinsurgency program in the United States. The think tank RAND wanted pool for an ultra-secret group led by the National Security Council. His ancestors were rabbis and dated back to the Middle Ages in Spain. His father had communist connections, worked in New York and received a doctorate from the German Guelph University of Heidelberg.
- Project TROY was a research study on psychological warfare conducted for the State Department in the fall of 1950 by a group of scientists, including physicists, historians, and psychologists from Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the RAND Corporation. The TROY report to the Secretary of State, presented to Dean Acheson on February 1, 1951, contained various political warfare suggestions, including possible methods for minimizing the impact of Soviet jammers on Voice of America broadcasts. During World War II, the United States War Information Office (OWI) launched a large-scale information and propaganda campaign at home and abroad through radio broadcasts, newspapers, posters, photographs, films, and other media, but psychological warfare operations were carried out by military special forces. The purpose was to break the Stalinist system by increasing the number of input points in the system and creating complex and unpredictable situations that required action. In principle, Soviet citizens were informed about the harsh truth of the regime. The techniques used are similar to those used to deprogram members of a cult. One of TROY’s key researchers was Max Millikan, who earned his physics degree from Yale University. In 1935-36 he was a student at Cambridge University. Back at Yale in 1941, he received his doctorate in economics. In 1946, he joined the U.S. State Department as chief economist in the Intelligence Bureau’s Research Division for Europe. In 1947, he served on the President’s Commission on Foreign Aid as Assistant Executive Secretary and was Counselor to the United States House of Representatives. In 1949 he returned to academia, to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), where he was appointed associate professor. In 1951-52, he took a year’s leave to serve as deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
- Edward Geary Lansdale was an officer in the United States Air Force until he retired as a major general in 1963 before continuing his work at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Lansdale was a pioneer in clandestine operations and psychological warfare. In the early 1950s, Lansdale played a significant role in the suppression of the Huk rebellion in the Philippines. In 1954, he moved to Saigon and began the Saigon Military Mission, a covert intelligence operation created to sow discord in North Vietnam. Lansdale believed that the United States could win guerrilla wars by studying the psychology of the enemy – an approach that won the approval of the Kennedy and Johnson presidential administrations.
FORTRAN on IBM 704
The behavioral science and psychological warfare experts were allowed to work with the latest computers such as the IBM 704 and used a programming language called FORTRAN. It is considered the first high-level programming language ever actually implemented. The 704 was considered “pretty much the only computer that could handle complex mathematics” at the time. Neither the technology nor the programming language was sophisticated enough to simply answer complex questions about human behavior. You had to prepare your tasks step by step, break them down into individual parts and experiment. It took a while to get the IBM 704 to play chess reasonably well. For example, “social networks” were researched, which did not mean something like Facebook in the Internet era, but rather the relationships between individual people in the real world. Who does John Doe know very closely and whom does he know casually? Is his father a Republican voter? Does he have a close, positive relationship with his father? How does this affect risk perception? Does he like new and fashionable things? Such networks can be used to decide how a successful advertising campaign for a political candidate should be designed and whether the person is susceptible to socialist propaganda.
Hired first by the US Democratic Party National Committee in 1959 and then by the John F. Kennedy campaign in 1960, Simulmatics pioneered the use of computer simulation, pattern recognition and prediction in American political campaigns. You could divide the entire population into 480 categories. Certain opinions were also categorized. The difference to today is that it is now possible to differentiate much more precisely and more data is available because people are constantly using the Internet. In addition to Pool, there were researchers from MIT, Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and Columbia University in New York City. Alex Bernstein from IBM was also part of the group. John F. Kennedy won the 1960 US presidential election by the narrowest vote margin since the 1880s: 49.7% to Richard Nixon’s 49.5%. On election night, an IBM 7090 computer calculated that Kennedy would win based on early, relatively small amounts of data. You can see an IBM 7090 in the film “Dr. Strangelove” by Stanley Kubrick, where a crazed anti-communist US officer triggers the “Doomsday Machine”, an automated mechanism that manages a nuclear war without human input. Before Kennedy’s inauguration, a storm broke out when Harper’s Magazine published a shocking story: A top-secret computer called the People Machine, invented by mysterious men, had actually put Kennedy in office. Back then, the possibilities of psychometrics were not as great as they are today, but the technological revolution was taking place. In 1963, Simulmatics, commissioned by the Kennedy administration, simulated Venezuela’s entire economy to halt the advance of socialism and communism. A larger project to carry out such work across Latin America, mostly designed by Pool and known as Project Camelot, became so controversial that the next president, Lyndon B. Johnson, disbanded it. After 1965, Simulmatics conducted psychological research in Vietnam as part of a larger project to use computers to predict revolutions. Simulmatics used counterinsurgency tools in 1967 and 1968, when protests against racial injustice erupted on the streets of US cities such as Los Angeles, California, and Detroit, Michigan. Why was a company listed on the stock market run by private entrepreneurs allowed to carry out such delicate tasks? Because the scientists involved were embedded in the military-industrial complex.
Every significant uprising in the world, every war and every significant election could be analyzed retrospectively and compared with any existing computer predictions in order to “train” and improve the calculation models and algorithms. The Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces used IBM technology combined with a form of psychometrics for the bombing campaign against the Third Reich. Not only was it precisely managed where and how much was bombed, but also how this changed the morale of the German population. Psychologists evaluated information from the secret services, which prepared reports on the Germans’ willingness to continue supporting the war. With this psychometrics, the Americans were able to transfer the knowledge they had gained to the bombing campaign against Japan, including the first atomic bombing. After the war, the German IBM branch Dehomag was absorbed in by IBM and the occupiers. The punch card computers were used to rebuild the German economy. Many apartment blocks were bombed, but not the valuable factories in Germany, which were originally owned by US companies such as General Motors and Ford. The occupier’s secret services tracked down tons of Nazis in hiding and relatively quickly started a program to control the future neo-Nazi scene, both in terms of personnel and content. New right-wing extremist literature was circulated, which was based on the well-known conspiracy literature, which had long been controlled by the secret services, as well as on apologetics of the Third Reich. Databases and psychometrics made it possible to influence the political landscape of the next decades.
Science of Coercion
The author of “Science of Coercion” knows that psychological warfare is hidden behind scientific fields such as “communication research” and provides tons of names of researchers, institutions and programs. You can find out things from all sorts of openly accessible sources. This was is the price that the US paid for enabling greater levels of freedom. It’s better to literally flood people with bad books, shows and podcasts. People then have a feeling of freedom and the feeling that they have already achieved something through their media consumption. Certain works are (made) into bestsellers, whereupon imitators copy exactly this content. Finding real quality is becoming more and more like looking for a needle in a haystack. Paul Lazarsfeld’s Office of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, for example, popularized the idea of “narcotic media dysfunction”—a theory that suggests that to the extent that the media floods people with a particular issue, people become apathetic toward it. People choose consumption and opinions in place of action. This would lead to actual, physical social action being neglected. The more time is spent learning about current issues, the less time is available for organized actions. However, being informed and concerned is not a substitute for action. The basic misconception is:
“I have an opinion, so I did something.”
Although there is an increasing number of political messages, information and advertising through traditional and online media, genuine political participation continues to decline. People pay a lot of attention to the media, but there is an overestimation of messages that are often confusing and contradictory. To seek information that saves you time, saves you from making mistakes, increases your control and your ability to act. Information must be able to improve your actions. Counterintelligence must become a common skill and occupation. Otherwise, media is more like ballast. Many “conservative” activists don’t have time to live their values, have a marriage, have children, renovate a home. By saturating people with information, the media can breed ignorance, indifference and forgetfulness. After the death of George Floyd at the hands of four police officers, there was a flood of media reports, expressions of sympathy, analyses, comments and other forms of activism, but it was clear from the outset that nothing will change in the general situation. Neo-Nazis have been agitating for 75 years and conspiracy media has existed for 200 years without having had any significant positive effect. Hadley-Cantril’s Institute for International Social Research at Princeton made important contributions to propaganda psychology; to study public opinion; to apply psychology and psychological research to national policy, international understanding and communication; on developmental psychology; on the psychology of social movements; for measurement and scaling; to humanistic psychology; on the psychology of perception; and, fundamental to all of them, to the analysis of human behavior from a transactional standpoint. Cantril’s program at Princeton expanded in September 1940 when Nelson Rockefeller, FDR’s coordinator for inter-American affairs, asked the Princeton psychologist to “establish mechanisms which would measure public opinion in Latin America”. In 1955, together with Lloyd Free, he founded the Institute for International Social Research (IISR). The IISR was frequently asked by United States government agencies to conduct small samples of opinion polls abroad. In particular, Cantril led and Free conducted a poll in Cuba in 1960 that showed strong support for Fidel Castro, which was overlooked during the presidential transition between Eisenhower and Kennedy and only read after the Bay of Pigs Invasion fiasco.
The simulations
When the CIA abroad or the FBI at home planned an operation during the 1950s, the relevant profiles of the target persons, including an assessment of their personality structures, could be created with relatively little effort. The better the profile, the easier it is to determine which methods to successfully recruit the target person as a source, or to sabotage or intimidate them. If it was a larger operation against a group, it was no longer enough to create individual target profiles, but rather one had to assess how the group functions as an organism. Then the US political leadership demanded that the CIA overthrow governments in countries like Iran so that millions of different citizens there could be given new governments. What kind of target profile should you create for an entire country? How did the Iranians think and feel? Was it possible to gather enough people to overthrow the current government? What were the chances of success in the phase immediately after the fall? Will the new order soon collapse again? Is it possible to win the support of the rural population, the wealthier and more educated city dwellers and the privileged upper class? The best scientists were recruited, many of whom had already dominated the field of psychological warfare during World War II. The new objective was much more than just designing tailor-made propaganda for planned regime changes, but rather ushering in a new era of computer calculations. The different population groups were thoroughly studied and measured for hundreds of factors, such as trust in institutions, cultural values, paranoia, hostility towards outsiders, attitudes towards change, etc. Using a software program, coups could be digitally rehearsed using various variables, until the result was satisfactory and could be implemented to some extent in reality. If needed metrics were not available in the target population, appropriate action could be taken in the real world to alter the values in preparation for regime change. The software was also used afterwards, when a new government was installed, to stabilize the situation and reduce threats. The CIA was repeatedly accused of acting wildly during the Cold War, of launching botched actions and only discussing successes. Pulitzer Prize-winning Tim Weiner is particularly harsh in his judgment in his book “CIA – The Whole Story”. He evaluated 50,000 files; most of them come from the Secret Service and the rest from the White House and the State Department. What he doesn’t have on his radar is the fact that such large-scale operations were prepared for years by special, highly secret departments of scientists who researched the target country in every detail and understood the population there better than they understood themselves. Only after they were satisfied with their calculations did the CIA get the green light to put the plan into action. Of course, typical problems arose for the agents in the target country, which cannot be completely programmed into a computer simulation. The networks recruited by the CIA may be infiltrated by adversaries, agents may be observed unnoticed despite security measures, people involved may communicate via unsecured channels for some reason or suddenly switch sides, or an important agent forgets important secret files in his hotel room. A journalist like Tim Weiner can of course study the declassified CIA files decades later and interpret the respective coup operation as a bungling, but firstly, the secret service often succeeded in achieving its intended goal and secondly, Weiner does not understand the enormous preparatory work that was done by them scientist departments because there is significantly less information about their work. His criticisms of moderately to poorly qualified CIA personnel and the alcoholism of senior officials do not concern scientists either.
Universal tool
The 1960s saw many new civil movements, anti-war groups and radical activism with sympathies for the USSR and the supposed communist “freedom fighters”. The US upper class countered this primarily with moderate left-wing organizations, film propaganda by the “US Information Agency” and novels such as George Orwell’s “1984”. Under the banner of national security, the CIA ran Operation CHAOS to understand the phenomenon of radicalization and the many new socio-cultural trends. The criminal Charles Manson was observed by special doctors and given skills; whereupon he treated members of his small cult with LSD, the very drug that was being diligently experimented with in the CIA’s MKULTRA program. Manson’s followers committed the grotesque Tate-LaBianca murders and afterwards the government had to cover up all traces of the secret research. The journalist Tom O’Neill found secret correspondence in 200 old file boxes between the busy Dr. West and MKULTRA leader Sidney Gottlieb. West had always denied taking part in MKULTRA. Proposed projects included implanting false memories using drugs and hypnosis, inducing mental disorders, and altering a person’s beliefs and morals. Someone like Manson could be viewed early on by the CIA researchers in San Francisco as a chance find for an experimental study. Likewise, researchers could also determine what type of person they were interested in and then search the databases for suitable candidates. It is also conceivable that long-term projects were carried out with children from broken backgrounds, youth homes for those who were difficult to educate, etc., which were observed over decades. The terrorist Theodore Kaczynsky, who became known as the “Unabomber,” was studied at the university by Dr. Murray, who is said to have been involved with the MKULTRA program. LSD may also have been involved. Kaczynsky was highly intelligent and worked as a mathematician for a few years until he bought a lonely property with a small wooden hut in Montana, lived like a woodsman and from there sent parcel bombs to people who represented technological progress. In 1995, he sent a manifesto to the media entitled “Industrial Society and Its Future,” which argued that the “industrial revolution and its consequences have been a catastrophe for humanity.” A 2018 New Yorker magazine article emphasizes that Kaczynski remains viewed by many within the green anarchist and eco-extremist movements as a prophetic figure to this day. In prison, the notorious mafia criminal James “Whitey” Bulger agreed to take part in “medical research into the treatment of epilepsy” behind which the MKULTRA program was hidden and he was pumped full of LSD in exchange for a reduced sentence. There is suspicion that the CIA was well aware of Jim Jones’ People’s Temple cult, which fled from California to Guyana, where over 900 members drank poisoned soda and died. After some aspects of MKULTRA were exposed, the government reacted as one would expect; declared the program small, a failure and over, only to continue it under different names and better disguises. The knowledge gained from MKULTRA or CHAOS is still largely secret and one has to assume that the computer models have been improved with it. If the developers of the software noticed that they were missing certain data about American citizens and important mechanisms, a corresponding research assignment could be formulated, which could then be passed on to other authorities and carried out. It is bizarre that only in 2023 major public concerns were expressed about artificial intelligence in the form of new “chatbots” such as ChatGPT, which can be spoken to and write reports on command. The possibilities are almost unlimited: Individual activist groups can be mapped on the computer in order to clarify important questions for the profile, such as the expected further development of the organization in terms of influence and risk potential. You can experiment digitally to see what happens if the competence of the members and leadership increases, more members join, more money becomes available. What is the prospect of it connecting with similar groups? How can you exert influence so that the group remains isolated? If a computer simulation produces a worrying result, appropriate operations can be designed by ordinary human espionage to slow down the group. Parallel to projects such as Camelot and the increased use of computers and automated measurements of the personality structure of citizens, there was an increasing polarization in politics in the USA with the left-socialist and the right-wing conservative ideology. In the 1800s and even in the first half of the 20th century, the two major parties in the USA were not at all as ideologically positioned as they are today. In 1952, the Democrats and Republicans were so similar that voters cared more about presidential candidates than policy positions. Computer simulations can be constantly improved by new data flowing in and by refined mechanisms for representing human behavior; it’s like optimizing a running engine. During his 2015/2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump was supported by the data company Cambridge Analytica, which attracted too much attention by boasting about its abilities, and by the QAnon movement, which was adamant that Trump was part of a secret team from influential patriotic circles that was about to arrest prominent Democrats and “save” America. More and more citizens were horrified to discover that their relatives had become complete fanatics, no longer amenable to logic and counterarguments. In all likelihood, the movement was carefully observed and studied in order to identify which citizens, with which personality profiles, became radicalized and at what level of media consumption; to the point where they were willing to engage in risky and illegal acts and to isolate themselves from family and close friends. For years there were radical videos on the YouTube video platform from areas such as right-wing extremism and classic conspiracy ideology. Social media such as Facebook were also a playground for activists. A goldmine of information to understand how users think and behave.
The pioneers
During World War II, the United States employed a very large number of psychologists to better assess the Germans and Japanese. The scope of psychological warfare has long since encompassed more than just the creation of propaganda intended to intimidate, discourage and turn opposing state officials, soldiers and civilians against their leadership. The psychologists also had to make assessments of where the air force’s bombing of civilians was most likely to break the will of the population and how the new order should be built after the war. After 1945, the U.S. government sponsored more research at universities that was disguised as civilian with terms like “opinion research” and sociology. The TROY project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology led to the creation of the Center for International Studies (CENIS), funded by the Ford Foundation and the CIA. One of TROY’s key researchers was Max Millikan, who earned his physics degree from Yale University. In 1951-52 he served as deputy director of the CIA. The top secret “Project Camelot” began in 1964 at the Special Operations Research Office (SORO) at American University in Washington D.C. and was billed internally as a study to develop methods to anticipate and influence potential uprisings, civil wars and major societal changes. In many countries, the vast majority of people lived in poverty, were uneducated and therefore vulnerable to communist propaganda. How would a farmer in Chile react to a charismatic communist or conservative revolutionary? What would make such a revolutionary particularly attractive? How strongly could this farmer be influenced by the church to reject communist ideas? What circumstances would he accept and remain passive? A number of civilian researchers have been recruited in such countries to find answers that could ultimately be fed into a computer program. However, a few professors in South America noticed the military funding and imperialist motives behind the research contracts, causing the US Department of Defense to officially declare Project Camelot over after just around a year. The progenitor of Project Camelot was the Smithsonian Group for Psychology and Social Sciences at the Smithsonian Institution, with staff from the RAND Corporation, the Psychological Corporation, General Electric, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Smithsonian itself, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science as well as from top universities such as the University of Michigan, Vanderbilt, Princeton, Harvard, Yale and Northwestern. Princeton professor Harry Eckstein wrote about this in a report:
“There is virtually no limit to the research that can and should be conducted on the topic of internal war.”
Harry Eckstein, “The War Within: The Problem of Anticipation,” 1962.
The Smithsonian Group’s recommendations led to a wave of additional research programs. The scientists were supposed to do the preparatory work for coups so that the CIA could then implement the plans. Brazil’s populist president, João Goulart, was overthrown on April 1, 1964, shortly after promising the masses a program of land reform and industrial nationalization. In the Andes (in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia), multinational corporations interested in sugar, mining, and oil faced strong resistance from indigenous populations whose lands they sought to expropriate. This indigenous bloc has been targeted from a variety of directions, including population control programs and USAID assistance to national police and military forces. The Smithsonian group’s recommendations went to the Defense Science Board, which advanced the plan to create a massive database of social information. The information collected by researchers would be incorporated into a large computerized database containing useful information about foreign territories. SORO eventually planned to automate this system for autonomous data analysis and social instability prediction. For 10,000 years, the central question for empires has been how to exploit a people without things getting out of hand and the leadership being overthrown. The transitions were fluid between the declared intention of the Americans to protect foreign countries from the communists, and American ambitions to control client states or even colonies. What is even more devastating is that scientific techniques and computer programs could also be used in the USA itself and in Western European countries to manage citizens and protect the upper classes. The director of the Camelot Project, Rex Hopper, had himself predicted the possibility of a revolution in the United States that would result from the “emergence of a numerically significant, economically powerful, intellectually informed fringe group.” Camelot was seemingly terminated when details became public. SORO changed its name to the Center for Research on Social Systems (CRESS). Congress reaffirmed the importance of behavioral science research to national security and vowed to maintain funding for these projects. Code names for the new follow-up projects were, for example, “Project Simpatico” in Colombia and “Operation Task” in Peru. The computer program “POLITICA” was intended for Chile. At least forty groups of variables were measured, such as the population’s trust in institutions, cultural values, paranoia, hostility towards outsiders, attitudes towards change, etc. The resulting computer simulations were also intended to clarify detailed questions in advance, for example whether the situation in Chile would be stable if the old ruler Salvador Allende remained alive. The calculations showed that he should die. Many American files on the coup (Operation FUBELT) remain secret and the Americans naturally wanted to conceal their own role as best they could because simple logic and the computer simulations showed that the Chilean population did not like the idea that they were being taken advantage of. The new rule of Augusto Pinochet had to be supported by the CIA through training for his secret police and other computer simulations in order to best dose the harsh measures against opposition members and achieve the maximum desired effect. Communist states, on the other hand, persecuted every form of resistance, no matter how small, like the medieval Inquisition, and had no compunction about killing millions of people and putting millions more in labor camps. Accordingly, CIA operatives and American policymakers were willing to use a mix of high-tech and traditional secret police methods to eliminate left-wing rebels in Chile. As the CIA itself admitted in a report published in September 2000, it had maintained close contacts with the Pinochet regime and its secret police DINA for many years. Many details are still secret; particularly the CIA’s involvement in “Operation Condor” in the 1970s and 1980s, in which six right-wing South American governments carried out assassinations around the world. There is still debate today about how many people were murdered or “disappeared”. The NSA’s role in the whole thing is also nebulous. The described torture methods from Chile are the standard program that communists used around the world. As has become known through the testimony of former military personnel, many Argentine disappearances were dropped alive and naked from military aircraft over the open sea after being drugged. Every Wednesday a plane took off with ten to fifteen prisoners on board. Around 2,000 people are said to have died in two years as a result of these “death flights” (Vuelos de la muerte).
Cambridge Analytica
The company Cambridge Analytica (CA) suddenly became world famous, and in a negative sense. Initially it was said that with the help of powerful algorithms a significant contribution had been made to Donald Trump’s election campaign and Nigel Farage’s Brexit campaign. It later emerged that massive amounts of data from Facebook had been used. A press release said:
“We are thrilled that our revolutionary approach to data-driven communications is making such a fundamental contribution to the victory for Donald Trump.”
Psychometry is the scientific attempt to measure a person’s personality. The so-called Ocean Model is usually used in this context, i.e. measuring five personality traits: Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, consideration and willingness to cooperate as well as neuroticism. Many other attributes can be measured, including the level of narcissism, psychopathy, emotional instability, etc.
[Michal] Kosinski and his team are constantly refining the models. In 2012, Kosinski demonstrated that from an average of 68 Facebook likes a user has, it is possible to predict what skin color he has (95 percent accuracy), whether he is homosexual (88 percent probability), and whether he is a Democrat or Republican (85 percent). But it goes even further: intelligence, religious affiliation, alcohol, cigarette and drug consumption can be calculated. The data can even be used to determine whether a person’s parents stayed together until they turned 21 or not. How good a model is is determined by how well it can predict how a test subject will answer certain questions.
Kosinski believed that with more data he could analyze a person better than a close partner or even than that person could assess themselves. If you have enough data sets, you can search specifically, for example for undecided voters with certain attributes. Or you look for someone who is suitable for intelligence, terrorism or other things. Today it’s probably as easy as using an internet search engine. Conversely, the average citizen has no remotely comparable opportunity to scrutinize a politician running for election. You only get manipulative TV reports and election advertising for the political candidate, and nowhere in school are you taught how to assess other people professionally. At the end of 2014, Cambridge Analytica entered the US election campaign, initially as an advisor to Republican Ted Cruz. Cambridge was financed by the secretive US software billionaire Robert Mercer. The Mercer clan, like the billionaires Shillman and Rosenwald and other established circles, finances the so-called “new right” movement. The experts know that many young men in America feel left behind, don’t make enough money, appear too unattractive to women and are very angry. Many voters wanted to secure the border with Mexico and push back corrupt business bosses. And Donald Trump spoke exactly the words that voters wanted to hear during his election campaign.
“Trump acts like a perfectly opportunistic algorithm that only depends on audience reaction,”
said mathematician Cathy O’Neil. The election advertising that was sent via Facebook was not simply sent in a few modified versions to roughly defined groups of voters, as in Hillary Clinton’s campaign, but was automated and tailored to individuals and the smallest defined groups of voters. Alexander Nix of Cambridge Analytica boasted:
“We have psychograms of all U.S. adults – 220 million people.”
This may be an exaggeration, but it can also be quite close to reality. CA emerged from the British behavioral research and strategic communications company SCL Group. SCL founder Nigel Oakes attended the elite school Eton. His other qualification was a romantic relationship with Lady Helen Windsor, daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, and a great-granddaughter of Britain’s King George V. One of the former directors who worked with Oakes was Lord Ivar Mountbatten, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth II . and Prince Philip. Through his grandfather, Prince George of Battenberg, Ivar descends from the Guelph House of Hesse-Darmstadt. Lord Ivar is actually officially a geologist and farmer. So what was he doing at a data mining and psychometrics company? SCL boasted of “military disinformation campaigns” and successful election campaigns. In developing countries there was talk of “psy ops,” or psychological operations to influence public opinion and politics. SCL even claimed to be able to trigger coups, which would already be psychological warfare. Apparently SCL had the blessing of the British and American governments. Cambridge Analytica was an offshoot for the US and received money from hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. Mercer was hired by IBM Research in the fall of 1972 and worked at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York.
Mercer donates to the Republicans, while his colleague Simons donates mostly to the Democrats. After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, key participants continued with the company Emerdata Limited. On board are Rebekah Mercer, Alexander Nix and Johnson Chun Shun Ko from the Frontier Services Group, which goes back to Blackwater founder Erik Prince, who advised the Trump administration on Afghanistan and is a member of the conspiratorial Council for National Policy (CNP). , which manages almost the entire right-wing sphere in the USA. Alexander Nix also attended Eton, then studied art history and then worked for a long time as a financial analyst at the M&G Group before joining SCL. The members of the Ashburner Nix family have been bankers for several generations and once profited extensively from the British colony of India and the rule of the East India Company. Like Nigel Oakes, he appears to have used personal connections to his advantage, as he married Olympia Paus of the Wilhelmsen clan, whose great-grandfather was Count Peder Anker Wedel-Jarlsberg, the court steward for the Norwegian King Haakon VII. Jarlsberg was therefore the highest Noble of Norway outside the royal family and also had close connections to the Swedish royal family. King Haakon VII was born Prince Charles of Denmark; his father comes from the Oldenburg branch of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg and his mother in turn was Luise of Hesse-Kassel. In March 2018, it was revealed by whistleblower Christopher Wylie that Cambridge Analytica’s initial activities were based on a data set that parent company SCL had purchased in 2014 from a company called Global Science Research, founded by Aleksandr Kogan, who worked as a psychologist in Cambridge. Michal Kosinski from the Psychometrics Center at Cambridge University made important breakthroughs in analyzing Facebook data. Cambridge Analytica later used such Facebook data on a massive scale, which ultimately triggered the scandal. According to Alexander Nix, they had between 4,000 and 5,000 relevant data points about every American. Channel 4 News reporters in the UK posed as potential CA clients in a bid to influence an election in Sri Lanka. In front of a hidden camera, Nix boasted that in addition to psychometrics, classic methods could also be used, such as honey traps in the form of pretty Ukrainian women or bribery. In addition, the services of “Israeli companies” could be used to lure unwanted politicians into a trap. The CA company was closed and tons of reports circulated in the press, often supported by scientists, giving the impression that CA had completely exaggerated the possibilities of psychometrics and hardly played a significant role in the Trump election. CA had been involved in many projects worldwide and the key personnel continued seamlessly with successor companies such as Emerdata, Data Propria and Auspex International.
Palantir GOTHAM
A jihadist in the Arab region may not necessarily be listed in psychometric databases like a Western citizen, but experts use software and intelligent algorithms to know where uprisings are likely to occur, where attacks are likely to occur, etc. and the Iraq War provided unprecedented amounts of data to develop new devices and improve algorithms. The police in the USA benefited from this with intelligent software from Palantir Technologies, which was originally used in the Iraq War and Afghanistan was tested in a specially tailored version in order to use limited police resources as effectively as possible. Palantir Gotham is used by counterterrorism analysts in USIC and United States Department of Defense agencies, fraud investigators at the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, and cyber analysts at the Information Warfare Monitor. A
Shadow Dragon
A Michigan State Police contract obtained by The Intercept sheds new light on the increasing use of cutting-edge surveillance software that helps law enforcement agencies and companies monitor people’s social media and other website activity, create profiles and identify perpetrators and even predict crimes. The software, released by a company called ShadowDragon, allows police to pull data from social media and other internet sources, including Amazon, dating apps and the dark web, to help them identify people of interest and track their networks in real time can map. You have data archives spanning over a decade and probably also privileged access to social media networks. ShadowDragon even claims its software can help predict violence and unrest. The Michigan State Police purchased two OSINT intelligence tools from ShadowDragon to run on the Kaseware platform: SocialNet and OIMonitor. At the time of SocialNet’s founding, investigators still had to manually search social media networks for clues.
“What used to take us two months for a background check or investigation now takes between five and 15 minutes.”
Today, SocialNet says it pulls data from more than 120 social networks, websites and platforms, as well as the dark web, data dumps and RSS feeds. A full list of sources is not available, but a promotional video from the company and a listing on Maltego’s website give an indication of which sites fall within their surveillance network:
AOL Lifestream | Amazon | Ameba | Eagle | BabyCenter | BitChute | BlackPlanet | Blogger | Caught! Mugshots | Buzznet | Coconut oil | Company house | Crunchbase | Dailymotion | DeviantArt | Ebay | Etsy | Facebook | Flickr | square | Gave | GitHub | Goo | Google | Google+ | Gravatar | Hatena | Huffington Post | ICQ | IMVU | ImageShack | Imgur | Instagram | Instructables | Jugem | Kik |LinkedIn | LiveJournal | Livedoor | Mail.ru | Menuism | MeWe | MySpace | Naijapals | Netlog | OK Cupid | Okru | Company Olipro | Pandora | Pastebin | PayPal | PGP | Photo bucket | Pinterest | Plurk | POF | PornHub | QQ | Reddit | ReverbNation | Seesaa | Skype | SoundCloud | SourceForge | Spotify | Sprashivai | steam | Sudanese | Telegram | Tinder | TripAdvisor | Tumblr | Uplike | Vimeo | grapevine | Virus Total | VK | Voat | Weibo | Xing | Yahoo | Yelp | YouTube | Zillow
In a blog post from March 2019, an official referred to an “integration of Telegram monitoring,” which, together with WhatsApp, had become “a contact point” for certain users. The materials also demonstrate how SocialNet organizes information for the analyst, visually maps social network diagrams, and suggests connections between people of interest and their networks. Timelines can be created to sort through evidence. In one of the company’s case studies, they came across an old Foursquare account that someone had logged into 10 years ago at their mother’s house. The investigators were able to find him the next day. The Michigan State Police contract blacks out any mention of ShadowDragon, SocialNet, OIMonitor and Microsoft Azure in the contract shared with the public.
Civil War
The US has the best counterinsurgency experts, smart software like Palantir, intelligence agencies that are everywhere, and a reservoir of millions upon millions of men who are either active in the military or have been. Some right-wing extremists are increasingly talking online and offline about a possible civil war in the USA. The United States Marine Corps Reserve has been activated for possible domestic operations. This is likely a preparatory measure for possible unrest if Donald Trump fails again. The pro-Trump media interprets the directive to the Marine Corps the other way around; as if Trump would use the soldiers in an emergency to protect himself against a coup by Democrats. This wishful thinking has little to do with reality and the Marine Cops would be more likely to shoot Trump supporters. Alex Jones in particular stood out here once again, with hair-raising propaganda that could doom some of his fans:
“I spoke with a senior Trump confidant about what Trump would do if the deep state attempted an illegal coup. Trump said they would call in the Marines and surround the White House, then legally and legally prosecute the perpetrators of the criminal coup.”
Mike Adams from the Infowars environment, like Alex Jones, had repeatedly invoked the scenario of a civil war if Trump falls. Adams explained with pathos:
“We call on all legitimate, pro-American organizations and individuals to prepare to defend your president against an illegal coup attempt in the coming weeks or months.”
Anyone in the audience who is stupid enough to start shooting as soon as Trump is done will be wiped out by the US Marine Corps. Once the uprisings are suppressed, new laws or reinterpretations of existing laws are used to monitor and, if necessary, imprison militant patriots. Alex Jones warned about the police state infrastructure in America for 20 years before he suddenly switched to Trump’s course and claimed that the internment camps and enemy of the state databases were only intended for leftists in an emergency. According to his own statements, Alex Jones was recruited by a special unit of the US armed forces from Florida. In principle, Jones had been inciting his audience for months and driving them into a trap. No Marine Corps or other super force would come to the citizens’ aid. The Marine Corps reserve consists of around 40,000 soldiers, who could possibly be supported by the National Guard and (covertly) by special forces. Former Navy SEAL Andy Stumpf explained on the Joe Rogan podcast that the military has little sympathy for civilian militants. The Marine Corps was led by David Berger, who served in the Iraq War, as well as Gary L. Thomas, who was decorated for the “War on Islamic Terror” and Troy Black, also a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That these gentlemen should risk everything to keep Trump in office is a ridiculous idea. For years, media outlets like Infowars have conveyed to their audiences the fantasy that a powerful, patriotic force of officials was behind Trump and would dare to go to war with the left-wing Democrats. If the Infowars audience is stupid enough to shoot if Trump loses, the establishment can finally eliminate or lock up the Infowars audience.
Provisions of the PATRIOT ACT, passed shortly after 9/11, as well as the more recent FREEDOM ACT still apply. The USA PATRIOT Act is intended to simplify federal investigations into terrorist threats. For this purpose, certain laws, including those relating to fundamental rights, are restricted and supplemented or replaced by the following regulations:
- The requirement to appoint judges as supervisors of telephone or internet surveillance has been largely abolished, thereby significantly expanding the FBI’s wiretapping rights. Although the responsible judge must be informed of any surveillance, he is obliged to approve the corresponding interception. Telephone companies and Internet providers must disclose their data.
- House searches may be carried out without the knowledge of the person concerned.
- The decision as to whether an organization is classified as terrorist passes to the Ministry of Justice and Foreign Affairs.
- Foreigners may be deported for membership in a terrorist organization defined by the Ministry of Justice and Foreign Affairs.
- The FBI has the right to access bank customers’ financial information without evidence of a crime.
- The Foreign Intelligence Service (CIA), which, unlike the FBI, is not subject to extensive public control, is given the right to investigate domestically.
The provisions of the PATRIOT Act not only allow US authorities such as the FBI, the NSA or the CIA to access the servers of US companies without a court order. Foreign subsidiaries are also required by US law to provide access to their servers; even if local laws prohibit it. The Military Commissions Act is a U.S. federal law that regulates the legal status of so-called “unlawful enemy combatants.” It was passed by Congress on September 28, 2006 and signed by President George W. Bush on October 17, 2006, making it effective. Because of its restrictions on fundamental rights, the law was sharply criticized during its development phase. The law leaves it open, for example, after which time charges must be brought against a prisoner. Therefore, the law allows for indefinite detention without charge or trial. The detained person has no right to take any action against this treatment. The law is generally aimed at people who are not citizens of the USA. It is controversial among lawyers to what extent the law applies to US citizens. The principle applicability arises from the definition of “illegal enemy combatant”: According to Section 948a(1) of the Act, an “unlawful enemy combatant” is defined (among other things) as follows:
“a person who has participated in or intentionally and materially supported hostile activities against the United States or its allies […]”
According to the prevailing view, this formulation also applies to US citizens, which Congress has also explicitly confirmed. In addition, the term “hostile activities” is not defined in the law itself and can therefore be freely interpreted by the government (so-called general clause or indefinite legal term, colloquially also known as a rubber paragraph). Texas conspiracy media guru Alex Jones has warned for 20 years about internment camps disguised as mass shelters for Mexican migrants and FEMA emergency facilities. Elite international networks would destabilize the country by fomenting ideological fanaticism and through covert terror operations and would want to exploit the resulting unrest to imprison patriots and other “enemies of the state” critical of the government. Programs like REX-84 and Garden Plot, of course, involved the use of the military domestically. The FBI also kept lists like ADEX of “subversive” citizens who should be interned if necessary. Meanwhile, Alex Jones explains that he has only been exposed to propaganda from the political left for over 20 years. The camps and internment programs since President Ronald Reagan have actually been good, patriotic and conservative precautions against the plans of the left and the left-wing “deep state.” Reagan supposedly wanted to save America with the police state.
CHAOS
After 1945, many US soldiers came home and the US government immediately launched the “GI Bill” and, with the help of the upper class, an economic miracle that transformed the former soldiers into comfortable family men and employees. After a while they were no longer in fighting condition, but rather overweight fathers from too much beer and fast food. In the 1960s, the next generation came of age and was lured by the hippie movement, rock music, rejection of classic family values and a number of radical and revolutionary movements. The CIA conducted research on is-sues such as bigotry, social dropouts, violence, and new subversive groups, the FBI monitored the groups, and there were programs such as COINTELPRO and CHAOS to dismantle, discredit, and incite the new radical groups. Some young men could be recruited into the military in the 1960s and 1970s and burned to death in Vietnam, others simply had jobs and were not particularly fit for combat, and still others allowed themselves to be captured by radical ideological groups and organized crime. The hippie movement lured young men into the sphere of quick sex, drugs and pacifism. Around 20 years ago, the journalist Tom O’Neill was actually only supposed to write a detailed article about the famous Manson murders and had no background as an in-vestigative author. He soon realized that Manson had repeatedly violated his proba-tion, was being watched by CIA researchers, and was under constant surveillance on his ranch during the important phase of his cult. When the so-called Tate-LaBianca murders occurred, Manson’s posse should have been arrested immediately, but several months passed during which more murders may have occurred. During the trial, the prosecutor made it appear as if the uneducated and not particularly intelligent Man-son had programmed his mostly female cult members into killers on his own initiative. A great achievement for a nobody to create something that otherwise full-fledged secret services would deal with. After 20 years of working on the case, O’Neill pub-lished his book “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties.” The Soviet KGB, of course, tried various standard operations in the USA to disrupt soci-ety there and create tension: infiltrate, infiltrate, radicalize, incite, cause chaos and create pre-revolutionary moods. Against this background, it obviously didn’t take much convincing within the US authorities to take rigorous countermeasures and research the enemy’s programs. The legal situation actually stipulated that every citi-zen and therefore every secret Soviet agent enjoyed a high level of protection when it came to freedom of expression and other rights, and so there was often nothing left but covert, illegal operations. Charles Manson cultivated connections with influential musicians and actors, including the strange circle of Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate. For reasons that are never fully understood, Manson ordered his followers to enter Tate’s house and kill everyone in there. The fact that the very pregnant Sharon Tate was in there was simply a bad coincidence. Traces were left behind that were intended to lead the police on the wrong track and the plan was to use this provocation to start a race war (Helter Skelter) in the USA. The young women who killed for Manson were apparently under the influence of amphetamines, like Nazi troops in World War II or Islamic State fighters today, because the drug lowers compassion and creates a feeling of absolute, euphoric dominance. The Tate LaBianca murders received a lot of media attention and were seen as a turning point in which it became clear that behind the originally peaceful stoner hippie movement there was also malice and madness. While LSD was popular for a time, there were fewer problems in the cities that were the cen-ters of the hippie movement. But when he switched to amphetamines, a wave of vio-lence began. Later, in the 1990s, a larger wave began across the country with the more powerful form of amphetamines, known as “meth.” Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi put together his accusation: Manson was the guru and brainwashed his followers for his apocalyptic plans, although they were still guilty and therefore deserved the death penalty. Various people had to lie under oath and omit certain information so that Bugliosi’s simplified narrative became the generally accepted account, purged of any-thing that suggested secret research in the context with Manson. Actually, Bugliosi should have called two doctors named Smith as witnesses, because they had closely observed Manson and his “family” when he became a guru; about the free clinic for hippies in Haight Ashbury (San Francisco). The two could have confirmed that Manson was literally programming his girls with high amounts of LSD and his drivel. But the Smiths worked in connection with CIA research on LSD, speed, group behavior, vio-lence and mind manipulation. There was actually a large-scale cover-up operation in which documents disappeared and people played dumb. O’Neill could have published his book at this point, but then he came across Dr. West in the Haight Clinic, a very notorious figure from the secret program MKULTRA. One of the government research-ers even lived at the Manson Ranch for months. One of the two Smiths in the Haight became like a mentor to Manson, who was an obvious manipulative, narcissistic psy-chopath and also a bit schizo. Manson’s childhood was a disaster, from inadequate parents to sexual abuse to the countless government institutions he endured in his youth, which in itself provided interesting material for CIA research. Manson read (on Smith’s advice) the novel “Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert Heinlein, a science fiction story about a kind of Christ figure who leads a cult that kills a deer of enemies. Roger Smith was studying the connection between drugs and gang violence, of all things, and several researchers mingled with the freaks. The LSD immediately had an extreme effect on Manson, transforming him in his mind from a useless criminal to an enormously important person with a calling and purpose in life. The Amphetamine Research Project observed how many hippies and other members of the “countercul-ture” switched from LSD to amphetamines and became violent. David Smith (“Dr. Dave”) researched rats and LSD. Manson’s girls viewed him as a kind of Jesus. He had full sexual access to her and could even lend her to impress certain people. Only after he came into contact with the researchers and was constantly allowed to violate his probation conditions did he go from being a nobody to a successful pimp, guru and crime boss. Under the influence of LSD, he used a technique that drummed into his targets the need to get rid of and overcome their own ego. Experimental rats living in cramped, overcrowded conditions went crazy on amphetamines. The confined space increased the destructive effects of the amphetamines by a factor of four. The Calhoun study showed that crowding and overcrowding led to aggression and antisocial be-havior even without drugs. A kind of boss rat then keeps submissive males as assis-tants and females as a harem. So-called “Probers” were hypersexualized psychopathic rats who were afraid of the boss rat. The factors of confinement and overcrowding can be applied to society as a whole through urbanization, narrow apartments and settle-ments, narrow classrooms, office cubicles, but also through televisions, computers and cell phones. You find yourself in a tight bubble and are bombarded with stimuli. Youtube is a tool for something like this, Netflix, Amazon or video games. Add to that a lot of caffeine and Ritalin and you have a tricky mix. Psychedelic drugs make you more receptive to ideas, but sometimes also schizo, which means additional isolation and loneliness. With the Internet we have the paradoxical situation that one can experi-ence the effects of spatial confinement, apparent limitlessness, isolation and over-crowding at the same time. Just as pornography is not a suitable substitute for sex, just moving dots of light (pixels) on a screen, technology is not a substitute for a real social environment or real adventure. Researchers noticed that taking LSD together as a group was particularly beneficial in consolidating beliefs and triggering an enthusiasm for mysticism, which can also quickly turn into psychosis, depression and schizophre-nia. Although I use a lot of computers on a regular basis, I use them almost exclusively for reading and creating text. Video is only relevant because it is in such high demand and most people don’t read anything anymore. O’Neill found secret correspondence between Dr. West and MKULTRA leader Sidney Gottlieb. West had always denied taking part in MKULTRA. Proposed projects included implanting false memories using drugs and hypnosis, inducing mental disorders and changing beliefs and morals of a person. Hypnotist William Deanyer may have taught Manson hypnosis techniques. Deanyer had learned it in the Navy. Dr. West also edited Jack Ruby, who killed Lee Harvey Os-wald, the alleged lone gunman in the JFK assassination. Ruby went crazy after West started taking care of him. On the night of July 4, 1954, a three-year-old girl was raped and murdered in San Antonio, Texas. The urgent suspect was Jimmy Shaver from the nearby Lackland Air Force Base. He was found in the immediate vicinity of the body, shirtless, with scratches and blood, in a “trance-like state”. He stated that he had no memory of the incident. A witness stated that Shaver was visibly high on some sub-stance that evening. Before officers could take Shaver to the county jail, a sergeant from another county arrived with instructions from military police to take him into custody. At about 4 a.m., an Air Force marshal questioned Shaver, and two doctors examined him and agreed that he was not drunk. One later testified that he “probably wasn’t normal…he seemed very calm on the outside, which I wouldn’t have expected from him under the circumstances.” He was taken to the county jail and booked on rape and murder charges. Investigators questioned Shaver until morning. When his wife came to visit, he didn’t recognize her. He made his first statement at 10:30 a.m., insisting that another man was responsible for the murder: a stranger with blonde hair and tattoos. However, after the Air Force marshal returned to prison, Shaver signed a second statement accepting full responsibility for the act. Although he still didn’t re-member anything, he reasoned that he must have done it. Two months later, in Sep-tember, Shaver’s memories still hadn’t returned. The commander of the base hospital ordered a psychiatric examination, which was carried out by Dr. Louis Jolyon West, head of psychiatric services at the air base. It fell to West to decide whether Shaver was legally sane at the time of the murder. West was the one working on a MKULTRA sub-project. West was allowed to work on the defendant Shaver for two weeks, including hypnosis and drugs. Shaver ended up in the electric chair and maintained his inno-cence until the end. Had the jury known of West’s involvement in MKULTRA, it likely would have viewed Shaver’s statements, which West extracted from him under the influence of drugs and hypnosis, differently and not decided to convict. Shaver had apparently previously reported to the Air Force for a two-year, “experimental” treat-ment program for chronic migraines. The files on him have apparently disappeared. The American “Foundation for False Memory Syndrome” took advantage of the prob-lem of dissociative people and implausible memories to present the issue of “ritual abuse” as a ruse and witch hunt. You cannot simply convince a mentally and physically normal person to have false, highly traumatic memories of satanic abuse through a few therapy sessions. However, in dissociative people, memory distortions and pseu-do-memories can occur. Among the foundation’s founding members and advisory staff there are or were psychiatrists who can be proven to have once carried out mind control experiments for the CIA. Louis Jolyon West and Martin Orne are two of them. Martin Orne, for example, researched amnesia and dissociative states. West (the doc-tor from the Shaver case) had also carried out, among other things, a project on the explicit study of dissociative states for the CIA, the Top Secret MKULTRA Subproject No. 43, “Psychophysiological Studies on Hypnosis and Suggestibility” with a supplement “Studies on Dissociative States Conditions” in 1956. […] The CIA’s mind control insti-tutes also included John Hopkins, Harvard and Yale universities. FMSF advisor Paul McHugh also teaches at Johns Hopkins University.
Bleed out
The book “Bleeding Out” by Thomas Abt provides us with important research results, without of course putting forward or examining the thesis that the upper class delib-erately maintains a basic level of violence in the population. In the United States, the total annual cost of murder is an estimated $250 billion, or between $10 and $20 mil-lion per murder. This includes legal costs, hospitals, prisons, lost wages, increased in-surance costs, property devaluations in areas with high murder rates, etc. And that’s just the murders. Add to that all the costs of other violent crimes. The psychological stress drags an entire area down. Why risk going to school and learning a lot when there are gangsters there and you don’t expect to find a good job later anyway? Why build a business if it’s going to get robbed countless times? Or when customers stop coming because there are too many murders? Why not just celebrate endlessly be-cause you never know when life is over anyway? The encouragement of rap music and fantasies of glamour, power and wealth do the rest. Early exposure to violence is asso-ciated with severely limited opportunities for advancement, which in turn makes crime more attractive to make big money, which in turn keeps the police busy chasing after common criminals on the streets rather than catching big organized criminals. You can design and restrict the judiciary and the police from above in such a way that there is always a certain level of crime. You can simply ideologically justify “cozy jus-tice”, just like excessive harshness, without having to present a credible concept of permanently reducing crime. By focusing on the most important criminals and the most important places, you could significantly reduce violence and save a huge amount of money and productivity by being able to accurately measure and calculate who commits violent crime, when and where. If people weren’t crammed into small spaces in cities, a lot of violence could be prevented from the outset. With intelligent software like Palantir Gotham you can actually use psychometrics to specifically catch the intensive perpetrators. But the software could theoretically also be misused to cause the desired level of violence to occur. Before the modern social housing ghettos were created, it was actually clear that they would be a habitat for violence. The fact that drinking water in African-American social neighborhoods is now repeatedly con-taminated with lead, for example, may be intentional. Such widespread poisonings also occurred in African and predominantly Muslim countries of origin of refugees in the wake of the 2015 crisis. Then there was the complicity of the US authorities in the importation of cocaine into the USA. Cocaine was also processed into crack on a larger scale. Today there is a particularly pronounced crisis with opiate addiction and the stimulant meth. Gangs and smaller groups of organized crime and individual criminals ignore state laws and the state monopoly on violence, but also have to live with the consequences of vigilantism. Criminals try to deceive and cheat each other. Blood feuds arise that go back and forth again and again, one act of revenge follows the next, as in societies of very long ago. The collateral damage is enormous. Especially when it comes to children, some of whom are the next generation to become violent criminals. During the great refugee crisis in Germany there were a number of terrible sex crimes and murders by migrants and refugees. These perpetrators used ambush-like violence. There are now hardly any big headlines about such migrant crimes anymore. Instead, we learn about one massive child abuse network after another in Germany. Real orga-nized crime, a professional approach and shielding with secret service-like techniques and cover-up tactics. The estimated number of unreported cases is 4,000 incidents of abuse against children per day. There are estimates that the Muslim proportion will increase from around 5% to around 11% in Europe. Interestingly, this is almost exactly the proportion of African Americans in the US population. African Americans come from the brutal oppressive system of slavery. Many Muslims in Europe come from bru-tal Muslim dictatorships maintained by the Anglo-Americans and Russians. It is always assumed that the integration policy in Germany has failed and that isolated communi-ties have therefore formed. This isolation was probably desired from the very top and this meant that migrants practiced their own jurisdiction and their own forms of vio-lence. The book Bleeding Out explains that science knows exactly what factors come together and how a murder occurs. Murders occur in predictable locations, are com-mitted by identifiable people, and are triggered by behaviors that are very well re-searched. In 2015, half of U.S. murders by gun occurred in just 127 cities. More than a quarter of the murders occurred in 1,200 neighborhoods, representing about 1.5% of the U.S. population. In purely mathematical terms, the people from these neighbor-hoods would fit into an area 42 miles long and 42 miles wide. In Oakland, 60% of mur-ders occur through a network of around 1,000 to 2,000 people. So only 0.3% of the city’s population. The situation is similar in other large cities. Most gangs in the USA consist of a maximum of 30 men and are not particularly organized. Only around 5% of gang members commit really serious crimes. These intensive offenders had mostly experi-enced violence at an early age, were sexually abused and often lived with completely inadequate foster parents. In Boston, 70% of all shootings in a 30-year period occurred in just 5% of the city. Violence can certainly be controlled. Especially among Muslim intensive offenders with a migration background from war zones or at least dictator-ships, we usually see the typical risk factors: early experiences with extreme violence, sexual abuse, etc. Nevertheless, in Germany, isolated parallel societies were allowed to form in tightly packed large cities. A study of Chicago, where there are extremely high numbers of shootings among African Americans, showed that 63% of the shootings could have been predicted by the environment of the people involved. Small gangs insult each other online on social media, so-called cyber-banging. This can also be registered and measured by intelligent algorithms. Police officers are dependent on assessing other people as quickly and as accurately as possible. Profiling is something you learn not only in police school, but also on an ongoing basis while on duty. It may look like racism to some, but it’s mostly just profiling. If an African-American man drives around in certain areas wearing certain clothes at certain times, he makes him-self a suspect to the police. His skin color is just one of many factors and a Latino or white person would be just as suspicious. Middle-class African Americans don’t use counterfeit money like George Floyd, don’t drive a car under the influence of the drug meth, and don’t argue with the police why they don’t want to be arrested. The decent African Americans of the lower class support targeted police action against serious offenders. The upper class of the USA can control how many intensive care offenders can grow up. And how many harmless people are being prosecuted too severely. Many people are locked away for petty things and caught up in endless bureaucracy. Great pressure is being placed on police to make more arrests that result in convictions. Of course, the police then look for the easiest possible targets, namely people who are poorly educated and can’t afford real lawyers, people whose evidence can easily be found in their pockets or in their vehicles. People who allow themselves to be pro-voked into resisting state power in some way. Cheating by police officers, the planting of drugs and weapons, occurs again and again. And the judiciary often doesn’t even bother with a real trial, but instead gives the defendants the choice of accepting a lesser sentence or receiving an extreme sentence in a real trial. Police officers often feel the need to use deterrence. To show that we will take tough action against any form of gangster activity. When an African American dies at the hands of an African American, the African American community usually refuses to cooperate with the police to solve the crime. This is partly due to the risk of becoming a target through cooperation. African Americans are often victimized by other African Americans, but various organizations, the media, lobbyists, and influencers use sleazy activism to draw attention to white crimes against African Americans. If an African American dies at the hands of white police officers, there are major riots, orgies of violence and decla-rations of intent to dismantle the police. Research shows that police must use the right amount of force in the right form against specific targets in order to ensure safety. One cannot simply demand non-violence and express pious wishes. Four categories of people who are willing to shoot other people were described: those who want to join a gang through murder, those who are used to violence, those who experience violence and sexual violence early in childhood and then there are the few who are pure psy-chopaths and who really enjoy violence. This means that you can intervene in advance even with high-risk people or take measures to get them out of the criminal lifestyle. All of this research can also be applied to Muslim perpetrators of violence here, white violent perpetrators from the left or right spectrum. We see again and again, on sever-al continents, that dangerous people can grow up and often get away with serious crimes, while the police and justice system target comparatively harmless people. When police have a good, trusting relationship with community leaders, crime rates can often be dramatically reduced.
