http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/Bobby-Thomson-death-giants-dodgers-home-run-081710
Thomson's legendary HR is timeless
Bob Klapisch covers baseball for The Record in New Jersey and worked at the New York Post and New York Daily News. The author of five books, he was recently voted a top-five columnist in the country by the Associated Press Sports Editors.
Aug 18, 2010
You don’t have to be an old-timer to understand why Bobby Thomson’s home run still matters, almost 60 years after the fact. Then, as now, October was baseball’s gift to America and this one, a war between the Giants and Dodgers, was a beauty.
You think the walk-off is a modern-day invention? How about leaping into a waiting mob at home plate — you really believe Prince Fielder owns the patent?
Take a look at the grainy black-and-white video from Oct. 3, 1951, back from an era when fans got dressed up to watch a ballgame; men actually wore fedoras that day. Study the crowd, the cops, the players. The clothes and cigars might’ve been different, but the code of conduct hasn’t changed all that much when a home run rocks someone’s world.
Then, as now, there was elation and sorrow on the field, as Ralph Branca began that million-mile walk back to the dugout, Jackie Robinson standing behind him in a daze. The Giants’ screams were grown men’s substitute for tears, only a rung or two above primal. Everyone was at home plate, head-slapping, hugging, more hugging, a scene that could’ve been time-tunneled into any new-millennium ballpark.
Meanwhile, announcer Russ Hodges had stamped the "shot heard 'round the world" with this receipt:
"Branca throws. There's a long drive. It's going to be — I believe! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! Bobby Thomson hits into the lower deck of the left-field stands. The Giants win the pennant! And they're going crazy! They're going crazy! Oohhh-oohhh!"
This call is so rich, so honest, we’ve all memorized it. Even Hollywood loved it: In “The Godfather” Sonny Corleone was listening to this broadcast on his car radio when he was murdered at a toll booth.
Of course, Thomson’s home run off Branca wasn’t just historic, it was majestic. Shoot, it was surreal — so shocking that within seconds of the blast two spectators at the Polo Grounds suffered heart attacks. Within minutes, Dodgers fans were taking their revenge on Branca, hanging him in effigy from street lights and telephone poles.
So said the Wall Street Journal, whose description of The Game was affixed with a stunning asterisk: Thomson sent the Giants to the World Series not just on his skill and bat speed, but with help from his teammates in the dugout who were routinely stealing the Dodgers’ signs that day.
It took 50 years for the true story to come out, and even then no one was ready to confess to all of it. Before he died, Thomson cryptically told the newspaper, “Stealing signs is nothing to be proud of. Of course, the question is, did I take the signs that day?”
There were 21 surviving players interviewed in 2001, all of whom outlined the scheme that allowed the Giants not just to spy on Branca, but every pitcher they faced in the final 10 weeks of the season. Pitcher Al Gettel said, “Every hitter knew what was coming. Made a big difference.”
That might’ve explained how the Giants made such a dramatic comeback that summer, after having fallen 9 1/2 games out as late as Aug. 8. But they’d already begun working on an unique way to make things right, at least at the Polo Grounds. According to the Journal’s research, the Giants used a telescope to steal the opposing catcher’s signs from their own clubhouse, which was located 483 feet away in straight away center field, high above the wall.
That was one of the reasons the Polo Grounds were so unique; players exited the field through centerfield, not the first and third base dugouts as they do today. And that clubhouse peered directly in toward home plate. With a powerful telescope, a sharp-eyed player could see everything.
That responsibility belonged to Henry Schenz, a utility infielder who didn’t hit or play the field much. His job was to pilfer those signs. Once Schenz realized he could distinguish between the catcher’s index and middle fingers, “He asked each person if he wanted the signs,” said Monte Irvin. “I told him no. He said, 'You mean to tell me if a fat fastball is coming, you don’t want to know?' “
It was estimated that half the Giants actually declined Schenz’s offer, although no one was sure how Thomson voted on Oct. 3. But the system was nevertheless fool-proof. Schenz would relay a message to the ballpark’s scoreboard operator, Abraham Chadwick, who installed a bell and buzzer system in the bullpen and dugout telephones.
Chadwick would press a button and the phones would ring accordingly: one ring for a fastball, two for a breaking pitch. The tip would then be relayed to the batter by a pitcher sitting in the bullpen, which was directly in home plate’s line of sight. Crossed legs might mean a fastball, uncrossing them might be the breaking pitch.
It was too good to be true, too easy for the Giants not to have used it. But what of Thomson? Did he? Would he?
Thomson said in an ESPN interview, “The guys wanted to kill me when I took that first strike (from Branca).”
Was that because Thomson — and the rest of the Giants — knew it was coming?
The only certainty is what happened next, as Branca tried to power another fastball by Thomson, this one up and in. Thomson swung and said, “I saw a flash.”
It was the ball leaving the infield as if it’d been shot out of cannon, on its way over the wall, clear around the world. Somehow, somewhere, it’s still traveling.
Saturday, August 21, 2010
The Tillman Story — Just Gimme Some Truth!
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/08/17
Published on Tuesday, August 17, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
The Tillman Story — Just Gimme Some Truth!
by Rory O'Connor
Of the many lies George W. Bush told us about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, some were larger but none worse than that told about the death of Pat Tillman.
In 2004 - just after Bush's invasion of Iraq, ostensibly in search of those non-existent weapons of mass destruction - Tillman became a military-and media-manufactured symbol of duty, sacrifice, patriotism and heroism. But the truth about Tillman's life is much more complex, and his death ultimately far more heroic, than the convenient, self-serving lie served up by the military and then sent out by our ever-gullible media.
Tillman, a truly remarkable young man who walked away from a multi-million dollar contract as a professional football player to enlist as in the Army Rangers after the 9/11 attacks, is the subject of The Tillman Story, a moving documentary directed by Amir Bar-Lev that opens in theatres in New York and Los Angeles this week. Although the film rightly tells the story of Pat Tillman's remarkable life, it also focuses on a parallel "Tillman story," that of the struggle his family went through to learn the truth about Tillman's death from "friendly fire" and the ongoing cover-up of how and why our military and political leaders lied in order to exploit his heroism for propaganda purposes.
Tillman was on his second tour of duty when he was killed in Afghanistan - a victim of "fratricide," inadvertently killed by his own troops during an ill-fated expedition. Our leaders should have told the truth - namely, that Corporal Tillman's death was a senseless accident coupled with incompetence. Instead they lied - to all of us, but most despicably to his family - rewrote the details of his death, awarding Tillman a posthumous Silver Star, America's third-highest military decoration, and turned the tragedy into an opportunity to promote their endless and unpopular wars.
Why did they lie? No doubt it began because at the time of Tillman's death, in April 2004, the Bush war machine was roiled by a number of negative images that threatened to adversely affect public perception of the war in Iraq. Remember those haunting photographs and videos of the bodies of American contractors strung up in Fallujah? Can you ever forget the searing images depicting abuse by U.S. soldiers working as guards in the Abu Ghraib prison? Adding the news that American soldiers had gunned down a celebrated NFL star certainly wouldn't help the war effort... So Pat Tillman was recast, in death, as a war hero and lesson to us all.
The Tillman Story excels in teaching us other lessons, however - not only about Corporal Pat Tillman, but also about his remarkable family, led by his indefatigable mother Dannie. It shows the arduous journey his family undertook to find the truth about what happened and to have someone held accountable not only for their son's death but also for the added insult of its use as a propaganda tool. Handed a massive, confusing box of intelligence records - thousands of pages of documents about her son's death - Dannie Tillman patiently dug through the voluminous material to uncover the roots of a carefully coordinated cover-up. Her efforts, along with that of Tillman's father and other family members and friends, eventually forced a Congressional hearing into the matter. As the film dramatically demonstrates in its stunning climax, however, the ultimate fix was in... and although the many obvious lies and cover-ups can be tracked up to and even well beyond such military brass as the recently fired general Stanley McChrystal, in the end no one among the higher-ups was ever found blameworthy or even responsible for lying to the Tillman family and the nation.
In lieu of presenting a hagiography, Director Bar-Lev does an excellent job of humanizing Tillman and offering a multi-dimensional look at his actual character. Scenes with Tillman's family as they lovingly describe his character and his close, funny and frequently profane relationship with two brothers (the film is unfortunately and unfairly burdened with an "R" rating as a result) along with testimony from family friends and fellow soldiers paint a clear portrait of who Tillman really was - warts and all. As Bar-Lev points out, Pat Tillman was no "paragon of moral certitude; he was curious and tried to see things from every possible point of view." That impulse is what the director attempts to give back to his subject, after he had been dehumanized and exploited for political gain by America's leaders, aided and abetted as usual by the complicit cheerleaders of the national news media.
"I hope the story of Tillman tells us that heroism and humanity are not contradictory and heroism is complex," Bar-Lev told Documentary magazine. "‘Hero' is a problematic word that says a lot more about the people using it than the person they're speaking about....
"I knew there were myths around his death," Bar-Lev added, "but what began to intrigue me was when we found out there were equally as many myths about his life."
"Ultimately, what I would want to have happen is just the truth," Pat's youngest brother Richard told ESPN.com. "At the end of the day, Pat deserves the truth. This isn't about our family. This isn't about the Tillmans. This is about Pat Tillman. And he deserves the truth, period. He sacrificed so much for his country, and then the government turns around and uses him for propaganda. That is totally unacceptable."
I urge you to go see The Tillman Story, an insightful, powerful and truthful film that not only calls to task the entire chain of command but also questions our very notion of heroism itself - another topic in need of of some determined truth-telling!
Rory O'Connor's blog Media Is A Plural is accessible at www.roryoconnor.org.
Published on Tuesday, August 17, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
The Tillman Story — Just Gimme Some Truth!
by Rory O'Connor
Of the many lies George W. Bush told us about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, some were larger but none worse than that told about the death of Pat Tillman.
In 2004 - just after Bush's invasion of Iraq, ostensibly in search of those non-existent weapons of mass destruction - Tillman became a military-and media-manufactured symbol of duty, sacrifice, patriotism and heroism. But the truth about Tillman's life is much more complex, and his death ultimately far more heroic, than the convenient, self-serving lie served up by the military and then sent out by our ever-gullible media.
Tillman, a truly remarkable young man who walked away from a multi-million dollar contract as a professional football player to enlist as in the Army Rangers after the 9/11 attacks, is the subject of The Tillman Story, a moving documentary directed by Amir Bar-Lev that opens in theatres in New York and Los Angeles this week. Although the film rightly tells the story of Pat Tillman's remarkable life, it also focuses on a parallel "Tillman story," that of the struggle his family went through to learn the truth about Tillman's death from "friendly fire" and the ongoing cover-up of how and why our military and political leaders lied in order to exploit his heroism for propaganda purposes.
Tillman was on his second tour of duty when he was killed in Afghanistan - a victim of "fratricide," inadvertently killed by his own troops during an ill-fated expedition. Our leaders should have told the truth - namely, that Corporal Tillman's death was a senseless accident coupled with incompetence. Instead they lied - to all of us, but most despicably to his family - rewrote the details of his death, awarding Tillman a posthumous Silver Star, America's third-highest military decoration, and turned the tragedy into an opportunity to promote their endless and unpopular wars.
Why did they lie? No doubt it began because at the time of Tillman's death, in April 2004, the Bush war machine was roiled by a number of negative images that threatened to adversely affect public perception of the war in Iraq. Remember those haunting photographs and videos of the bodies of American contractors strung up in Fallujah? Can you ever forget the searing images depicting abuse by U.S. soldiers working as guards in the Abu Ghraib prison? Adding the news that American soldiers had gunned down a celebrated NFL star certainly wouldn't help the war effort... So Pat Tillman was recast, in death, as a war hero and lesson to us all.
The Tillman Story excels in teaching us other lessons, however - not only about Corporal Pat Tillman, but also about his remarkable family, led by his indefatigable mother Dannie. It shows the arduous journey his family undertook to find the truth about what happened and to have someone held accountable not only for their son's death but also for the added insult of its use as a propaganda tool. Handed a massive, confusing box of intelligence records - thousands of pages of documents about her son's death - Dannie Tillman patiently dug through the voluminous material to uncover the roots of a carefully coordinated cover-up. Her efforts, along with that of Tillman's father and other family members and friends, eventually forced a Congressional hearing into the matter. As the film dramatically demonstrates in its stunning climax, however, the ultimate fix was in... and although the many obvious lies and cover-ups can be tracked up to and even well beyond such military brass as the recently fired general Stanley McChrystal, in the end no one among the higher-ups was ever found blameworthy or even responsible for lying to the Tillman family and the nation.
In lieu of presenting a hagiography, Director Bar-Lev does an excellent job of humanizing Tillman and offering a multi-dimensional look at his actual character. Scenes with Tillman's family as they lovingly describe his character and his close, funny and frequently profane relationship with two brothers (the film is unfortunately and unfairly burdened with an "R" rating as a result) along with testimony from family friends and fellow soldiers paint a clear portrait of who Tillman really was - warts and all. As Bar-Lev points out, Pat Tillman was no "paragon of moral certitude; he was curious and tried to see things from every possible point of view." That impulse is what the director attempts to give back to his subject, after he had been dehumanized and exploited for political gain by America's leaders, aided and abetted as usual by the complicit cheerleaders of the national news media.
"I hope the story of Tillman tells us that heroism and humanity are not contradictory and heroism is complex," Bar-Lev told Documentary magazine. "‘Hero' is a problematic word that says a lot more about the people using it than the person they're speaking about....
"I knew there were myths around his death," Bar-Lev added, "but what began to intrigue me was when we found out there were equally as many myths about his life."
"Ultimately, what I would want to have happen is just the truth," Pat's youngest brother Richard told ESPN.com. "At the end of the day, Pat deserves the truth. This isn't about our family. This isn't about the Tillmans. This is about Pat Tillman. And he deserves the truth, period. He sacrificed so much for his country, and then the government turns around and uses him for propaganda. That is totally unacceptable."
I urge you to go see The Tillman Story, an insightful, powerful and truthful film that not only calls to task the entire chain of command but also questions our very notion of heroism itself - another topic in need of of some determined truth-telling!
Rory O'Connor's blog Media Is A Plural is accessible at www.roryoconnor.org.
The Most Popular Toy Ever Made Is Lego: Survey
http://www.fastcompany.com/1681192/lego-most-popular-toy-ever-made-survey-firebox
The Most Popular Toy Ever Made Is Lego: Survey
BY Kit Eaton
Fri Aug 13, 2010
If you grew up thinking Lego was the bomb, better than any other toy in your collection, turns out you're not alone: A new broad-ranging survey of over 3,000 folks has revealed it's the most popular toy ever manufactured, even more so than Barbie, Game Boys and a dozen other pretenders.
Firebox.com, an online toy and gizmo gift store, and toy news website Toyology.com just announced the results of their survey of over 3,000 adults aged 20 to 40. The clear winner of the title of most popular toy across all ages and sexes was Lego--it was the top choice for men, and the second choice for women (beaten by the inflatable wonder, Barbie herself). Firebox's MD Christian Robinson noted it wasn't really a surprising winner--being so "timeless and popular" across all ages, but also because it tallies with Firebox's own sales experience, which has Lego kits as very popular sellers.
Though Lego's patent recently expired, and a host of cheaper competitors have now burst onto the toy scene, it looks like Lego's crown is not going to slip any time soon--and it's success in a whole new generation is undoubtedly being given a boost by franchises like the Lego video game series. It's also likely to continue to sell as the people in the survey group buy toys for their children and grandchildren: That's because the survey revealed a strong preference (78% of women and 63% of men) for old-fashioned toys over more modern ones, with almost half the respondents noting they still owned toys they had when they were growing up. This kind of strong emotional connection will definitely color purchase decisions made when buying gifts for today's kids (no matter how much they clamor for a DS or PSP game).
To keep up with this news, follow me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.
After 34 Years and Many Diets, ‘Cathy’ Comic Strip to End
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/13/books/13arts-AFTER34YEARS_BRF.html
After 34 Years and Many Diets, ‘Cathy’ Comic Strip to End
PATRICIA COHEN
August 12, 2010
Readers who have been following the exploits of the slightly overweight, somewhat insecure and perpetually single comic strip character Cathy for 34 years will soon find themselves going through withdrawal. Cathy Guisewite, the strip’s creator, announced on Wednesday that she is ending the popular cartoon’s run, The Associated Press reported. Ms. Guisewite, 59, said that the autobiographical strip has been “the most astonishing form of therapy,” but that her “creative biological clock” was ticking, and she wants to try something else — although isn’t sure what. The urge to spend more time with her 18-year-old daughter and her parents was also a motivation, she said. Carried in about 700 newspapers, “Cathy” is syndicated by Universal Uclick. Although the cartoon Cathy, above, is often frustrated by her overly loving mother, in real life Ms. Guisewite credits her mother with first urging her to write and draw comics. The final strip is scheduled for Oct. 3, after the end of the swimsuit season.
A version of this brief appeared in print on August 13, 2010, on page C2 of the New York edition.
After 34 Years and Many Diets, ‘Cathy’ Comic Strip to End
PATRICIA COHEN
August 12, 2010
Readers who have been following the exploits of the slightly overweight, somewhat insecure and perpetually single comic strip character Cathy for 34 years will soon find themselves going through withdrawal. Cathy Guisewite, the strip’s creator, announced on Wednesday that she is ending the popular cartoon’s run, The Associated Press reported. Ms. Guisewite, 59, said that the autobiographical strip has been “the most astonishing form of therapy,” but that her “creative biological clock” was ticking, and she wants to try something else — although isn’t sure what. The urge to spend more time with her 18-year-old daughter and her parents was also a motivation, she said. Carried in about 700 newspapers, “Cathy” is syndicated by Universal Uclick. Although the cartoon Cathy, above, is often frustrated by her overly loving mother, in real life Ms. Guisewite credits her mother with first urging her to write and draw comics. The final strip is scheduled for Oct. 3, after the end of the swimsuit season.
A version of this brief appeared in print on August 13, 2010, on page C2 of the New York edition.
Hockey puck! Jack Kirby meets… Don Rickles?
http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/hockey_puck_jack_kirby_meets..._don_rickles/
Hockey puck! Jack Kirby meets… Don Rickles?
08.13.2010
Richard Metzger
Behold what is perhaps the most perplexing comic book cover of all time. In 1971, when Jack “King” Kirby left Marvel for DC Comics, he took over the Jimmy Olsen (“Superman’s Pal”) title. It’s hard to imagine a more dull comic franchise for the co-creator of Spider-man and the Fantastic Four to be assigned, but the story was that Kirby didn’t want to take anyone’s job when he arrived at DC, so Jimmy Olsen is what he got. And then he promptly turned it inside out, as should be obvious from this preposterous cover featuring, uh… Don Rickles??? That’s right HOCKEY PUCK, Don Rickles, who in this (and one more issue) is seen fighting off his alternate world doppelganger, “Goody Rickels.”
So weird. I mean, why Don Rickles and not… like Bob Newhart or Shelly Berman???
Uncle Fats' Tasty Meal of the Week
Flank Steak with Cucumber-Pepperoncini Relish
Pepperoncini peppers are yellow, wrinkled, and slightly spicy; we use both the chopped pickled pepper and pickling liquid to flavor the crunchy relish.
Yield: 4 servings (serving size: 3 ounces steak and 1/4 cup relish)
1 (1-pound) flank steak, trimmed
1 tablespoon bottled minced garlic
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
Cooking spray
1 tablespoon pickled pepperoncini pepper pickling liquid
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 pickled pepperoncini pepper, chopped
2 tablespoons chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
2 tablespoons crumbled feta cheese
1/2 English cucumber, quartered lengthwise and sliced (about 1 cup)
1. Preheat broiler.
2. Sprinkle both sides of flank steak evenly with garlic, salt, and 1/4 teaspoon black pepper. Place steak on a broiler pan coated with cooking spray; broil steak 5 minutes on each side or until desired degree of doneness. Place steak on a cutting board; cover and let stand 5 minutes. Uncover; cut steak diagonally across grain into thin slices.
3. Combine pepperoncini pickling liquid, olive oil, and mustard in a medium bowl, stirring well with a whisk. Add chopped pepperoncini pepper, parsley, cheese, and cucumber to oil mixture in bowl; toss well to combine. Serve steak with relish.
CALORIES 219 ; FAT 11.1g (sat 3.8g,mono 5.2g,poly 0.6g); CHOLESTEROL 46mg; CALCIUM 43mg; CARBOHYDRATE 2.4g; SODIUM 459mg; PROTEIN 24.9g; FIBER 0.6g; IRON 1.7mg
Cooking Light, MARCH 2009
Pepperoncini peppers are yellow, wrinkled, and slightly spicy; we use both the chopped pickled pepper and pickling liquid to flavor the crunchy relish.
Yield: 4 servings (serving size: 3 ounces steak and 1/4 cup relish)
1 (1-pound) flank steak, trimmed
1 tablespoon bottled minced garlic
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
Cooking spray
1 tablespoon pickled pepperoncini pepper pickling liquid
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 pickled pepperoncini pepper, chopped
2 tablespoons chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
2 tablespoons crumbled feta cheese
1/2 English cucumber, quartered lengthwise and sliced (about 1 cup)
1. Preheat broiler.
2. Sprinkle both sides of flank steak evenly with garlic, salt, and 1/4 teaspoon black pepper. Place steak on a broiler pan coated with cooking spray; broil steak 5 minutes on each side or until desired degree of doneness. Place steak on a cutting board; cover and let stand 5 minutes. Uncover; cut steak diagonally across grain into thin slices.
3. Combine pepperoncini pickling liquid, olive oil, and mustard in a medium bowl, stirring well with a whisk. Add chopped pepperoncini pepper, parsley, cheese, and cucumber to oil mixture in bowl; toss well to combine. Serve steak with relish.
CALORIES 219 ; FAT 11.1g (sat 3.8g,mono 5.2g,poly 0.6g); CHOLESTEROL 46mg; CALCIUM 43mg; CARBOHYDRATE 2.4g; SODIUM 459mg; PROTEIN 24.9g; FIBER 0.6g; IRON 1.7mg
Cooking Light, MARCH 2009
Great Quotes: The Sopranos
Paulie 'Walnuts' Gualtieri: Fuckin' Italian people. How did we miss out on this?
Salvatore 'Big Pussy' Bonpensiero: What?
Paulie 'Walnuts' Gualtieri: Fuckin' expresso, cappuccino. We invented this shit and all these other cocksuckers are gettin' rich off it.
Salvatore 'Big Pussy' Bonpensiero: Yeah, isn't it amazing?
Paulie 'Walnuts' Gualtieri: And it's not just the money. It's a pride thing. All our food: pizza, calzone, buffalo moozarell', olive oil. These fucks had nothin'. They ate pootsie before we gave them the gift of our cuisine. But this, this is the worst. This expresso shit.
Salvatore 'Big Pussy' Bonpensiero: Take it easy.
Salvatore 'Big Pussy' Bonpensiero: What?
Paulie 'Walnuts' Gualtieri: Fuckin' expresso, cappuccino. We invented this shit and all these other cocksuckers are gettin' rich off it.
Salvatore 'Big Pussy' Bonpensiero: Yeah, isn't it amazing?
Paulie 'Walnuts' Gualtieri: And it's not just the money. It's a pride thing. All our food: pizza, calzone, buffalo moozarell', olive oil. These fucks had nothin'. They ate pootsie before we gave them the gift of our cuisine. But this, this is the worst. This expresso shit.
Salvatore 'Big Pussy' Bonpensiero: Take it easy.
Study uncovers every possible Rubik's Cube solution
http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/plugged-in/study-uncovers-every-possible-rubik-s-cube-solution/1407748
Study uncovers every possible Rubik's Cube solution
August 12, 2010
WASHINGTON (AFP) – An international team of researchers using computer time lent to them by Google has found every way the popular Rubik's Cube puzzle can be solved, and showed it can always be solved in 20 moves or less.
The study is just the latest attempt by Rubik's enthusiasts to figure out the secrets of the cube, which has proven to be altogether far more complicated that its jaunty colors might suggest.
At the crux of the quest has been a bid to determine the lowest number of moves required to get the cube from any given muddled configuration to the color-aligned solution.
"Every solver of the Cube uses an algorithm, which is a sequence of steps for solving the Cube," said the team of mathematicians, who include Morley Davidson of Ohio's Kent State University, Google engineer John Dethridge, German math teacher Herbert Kociemba and Tomas Rokicki, a California programmer.
"There are many different algorithms, varying in complexity and number of moves required, but those that can be memorized by a mortal typically require more than forty moves."
One may suppose God would use a much more efficient algorithm, one that always uses the shortest sequence of moves; this is known as God's Algorithm. The number of moves this algorithm would take in the worst case is called God's Number. At long last, God's Number has been shown to be 20."
The research, published online, ends a 30-year search for the most efficient way to correctly align the 26 colored cubes that make up Erno Rubrik's 1974 invention.
"It took fifteen years after the introduction of the Cube to find the first position that provably requires 20 moves to solve," the team said. "It is appropriate that fifteen years after that, we prove that twenty moves suffice for all position."
Using computers lent to them by Google -- the company won't disclose how many or how powerful they are -- the team crunched through billions of Cube positions, solving each one over a period of "just a few weeks."
The study builds on the work of a veritable pantheon of Rubik's researchers, starting with Morwen Thistlethwaite who in 1981 showed 52 moves were sufficient to reach the solution from any given Cube position.
By May 1992, Michael Reid showed 39 moves was always sufficient, only to be undercut a mere day later by Dik Winter, who showed 37 moves would work.
Rubik's enthusiasm extends not only to God's number, but the speed with which the tricky puzzle can be solved.
The current world record holder is Dutch Erik Akkersdijk who successfully solved the puzzle in just 7.08 seconds.
Study uncovers every possible Rubik's Cube solution
August 12, 2010
WASHINGTON (AFP) – An international team of researchers using computer time lent to them by Google has found every way the popular Rubik's Cube puzzle can be solved, and showed it can always be solved in 20 moves or less.
The study is just the latest attempt by Rubik's enthusiasts to figure out the secrets of the cube, which has proven to be altogether far more complicated that its jaunty colors might suggest.
At the crux of the quest has been a bid to determine the lowest number of moves required to get the cube from any given muddled configuration to the color-aligned solution.
"Every solver of the Cube uses an algorithm, which is a sequence of steps for solving the Cube," said the team of mathematicians, who include Morley Davidson of Ohio's Kent State University, Google engineer John Dethridge, German math teacher Herbert Kociemba and Tomas Rokicki, a California programmer.
"There are many different algorithms, varying in complexity and number of moves required, but those that can be memorized by a mortal typically require more than forty moves."
One may suppose God would use a much more efficient algorithm, one that always uses the shortest sequence of moves; this is known as God's Algorithm. The number of moves this algorithm would take in the worst case is called God's Number. At long last, God's Number has been shown to be 20."
The research, published online, ends a 30-year search for the most efficient way to correctly align the 26 colored cubes that make up Erno Rubrik's 1974 invention.
"It took fifteen years after the introduction of the Cube to find the first position that provably requires 20 moves to solve," the team said. "It is appropriate that fifteen years after that, we prove that twenty moves suffice for all position."
Using computers lent to them by Google -- the company won't disclose how many or how powerful they are -- the team crunched through billions of Cube positions, solving each one over a period of "just a few weeks."
The study builds on the work of a veritable pantheon of Rubik's researchers, starting with Morwen Thistlethwaite who in 1981 showed 52 moves were sufficient to reach the solution from any given Cube position.
By May 1992, Michael Reid showed 39 moves was always sufficient, only to be undercut a mere day later by Dik Winter, who showed 37 moves would work.
Rubik's enthusiasm extends not only to God's number, but the speed with which the tricky puzzle can be solved.
The current world record holder is Dutch Erik Akkersdijk who successfully solved the puzzle in just 7.08 seconds.
YouTube Music Video of the Month: "XXXO" by M.I.A.
This video from M.I.A. proves she's one of the few musicians who doesn't need to change her game in the post-Gaga universe. Her other video for the song "Born Free" is pretty amazing too. Haven't heard the rest of her album MAYA but I'm guessing this is the first truly great album of the decade.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfbQ5mHWkOs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfbQ5mHWkOs
A Who’s Who of the Manson Family
http://www.feejeepress.com/whos-who-of-the-manson-family/
New Release!
A Who’s Who of the Manson Family
August 7, 2010
The Most Useful Manson Family Guide Available!
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Dark, terrifying, disturbing, and yet handy.
A Who’s Who of the Manson Family
Adam Gorightly, “crackpot historian” and author of the groundbreaking The Shadow Over Santa Susana: Black Magic, Mind Control & the Manson Family Mythos, and Shamus McFarland take on the daunting task of clarifying the multitude of seemingly endless nicknames, aliases and real names which spill out of the growing collection of various books chronicling The Charles Manson Family members and their bizarre activities, including murder. This mess of identities can leave the most astute reader baffled and confused as to who did what, when, where and why.
The terrifying saga is complicated enough without every character having six different names and no easy-to-use guide to clarify who is really who.
Who’s on first? Who’s on third? Who’s on acid?
A Who’s Who of The Manson Family cuts through the drug-sex-and-psycho maze to compile the definitive facebook of Manson Family characters as extensive as the available information allows.
Exclusively for Kindle by Feejee Press.
A Who’s Who of the Manson Family:
A Companion Soundtrack to the Book
by film composer Michael Montes!
WikiLeaks gets new host -- Swedish pirates
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latest-news/wikileaks-gets-new-host-swedish-pirates
August 17th, 2010
WikiLeaks gets new host -- Swedish pirates
AFP
STOCKHOLM — The whistleblower website WikiLeaks will place several new servers with the Swedish Pirate Party, the group which campaigns for more freedom on the Internet said Tuesday.
"The Pirate Party will provide bandwidth and hosting to WikiLeaks free of charge as part of its political mission," the party said in a statement.
It said the agreement was reached at a meeting in Stockholm at the weekend with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
"We welcome the help provided by the Pirate Party," Assange was quoted as saying in the statement. "Our organisations share many values and I am looking forward to future ways we can help each other improve the world."
WikiLeaks has provoked a media tempest and the ire of the Pentagon for releasing 76,000 classified US documents about the war in Afghanistan. It is set to release in a couple of weeks another 15,000 documents that are likely to be even more sensitive.
The Swedish Pirate Party, created in 2006 to campaign for more freedom on the Internet, scored a breakthrough in the 2009 European elections by taking 7.1 percent of the vote in the Scandinavian country.
The party is running in the parliamentary election slated for September 19, but opinion polls show its support has faded.
August 17th, 2010
WikiLeaks gets new host -- Swedish pirates
AFP
STOCKHOLM — The whistleblower website WikiLeaks will place several new servers with the Swedish Pirate Party, the group which campaigns for more freedom on the Internet said Tuesday.
"The Pirate Party will provide bandwidth and hosting to WikiLeaks free of charge as part of its political mission," the party said in a statement.
It said the agreement was reached at a meeting in Stockholm at the weekend with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
"We welcome the help provided by the Pirate Party," Assange was quoted as saying in the statement. "Our organisations share many values and I am looking forward to future ways we can help each other improve the world."
WikiLeaks has provoked a media tempest and the ire of the Pentagon for releasing 76,000 classified US documents about the war in Afghanistan. It is set to release in a couple of weeks another 15,000 documents that are likely to be even more sensitive.
The Swedish Pirate Party, created in 2006 to campaign for more freedom on the Internet, scored a breakthrough in the 2009 European elections by taking 7.1 percent of the vote in the Scandinavian country.
The party is running in the parliamentary election slated for September 19, but opinion polls show its support has faded.
Krispy Kreme Cheeseburger: Today, state fairs. Tomorrow?
http://www.csmonitor.com/Money/new-economy/2010/0817/Krispy-Kreme-Cheeseburger-Today-state-fairs.-Tomorrow
Krispy Kreme Cheeseburger: Today, state fairs. Tomorrow?
Krispy Kreme Cheeseburger sounds atrocious, but many who've tried it become fans. Will a restaurant chain pick it up?
Laurent Belsie / August 17, 2010
The Krispy Kreme cheeseburger – that's right, a cheeseburger between doughnut halves – reportedly got its start when a chef in Decatur, Ga., came up with the idea. The chef, Chandler Goff, named it the Luther Burger.
Then in 2006, an independent baseball team, the Gateway Grizzlies, began selling its own version at their baseball park in Sauget, Ill.
That's when the doughnut/burger combination began to attract all kinds of attention. Sports Illustrated, ESPN, CNN, and others reported on the Grizzlies' burger. Paula Deen, of TV cooking fame, added an egg to the Luther Burger and loved it.
Word began to spread.
Admittedly, the Krispy Kreme Cheeseburger (KKC) sounds atrocious to just about everyone who hasn't tried one. The doughnut is halved, then its cut sides are grilled and become the outside of the sandwich so that the sugary glaze makes mortal contact with the cheese and the meat.
Even if that sounds good, there are all kinds of objections from the eat-healthy crowd.
Nevertheless, the sweet 'n salty combination seems to be attracting a growing number of fans.
The KKC appeared at a Massachusetts fair in 2009 and is a feature at this year's Wisconsin State Fair, which ended Sunday, and Kentucky's state fair, which begins Thursday. [Editor's note: This sentence was changed to reflect the start date of Kentucky's state fair.]
The Machine Shed, a restaurant with a food concession at the Wisconsin State Fair, told the Milwaukee Journal it expected to sell about 3,500 Krispy Kreme cheeseburgers over the first three days of the fair. About a quarter of its customers were pitching in an extra buck for the side order of chocolate-covered bacon.
So it seems only a matter of time before restaurants begin to pick up on the idea.
Chef Goff's restaurant is now shuttered. But earlier this month, the blog A Hamburger Today reviewed a KKC at Rub BBQ in New York City: "The sweetness of the doughnut didn't overpower the deeply charred, moist patty combined with the toppings of sautéed onions, cheese, pickle chips, and chipotle aioli," wrote reviewer Robyn Lee.
According to the blog, Crave Shack in nearby Astoria, N.Y., offers its own version: the Crave Doughnut Burger.
Late last year, some news reports suggested that the Wendy's fast-food chain might be interested in buying Krispy Kreme, which could have made the KKC a quick national phenomenon. But no deal materialized.
Fans of healthful eating can breathe a sigh of relief – for the moment.
Artificial meat? Food for thought by 2050
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/16/artificial-meat-food-royal-society
Artificial meat? Food for thought by 2050
Leading scientists say meat grown in vats may be necessary to feed 9 billion people expected to be alive by middle of century
John Vidal, environment editor
The Guardian, Monday 16 August 2010
Artificial meat grown in vats may be needed if the 9 billion people expected to be alive in 2050 are to be adequately fed without destroying the earth, some of the world's leading scientists report today.
But a major academic assessment of future global food supplies, led by John Beddington, the UK government chief scientist, suggests that even with new technologies such as genetic modification and nanotechnology, hundreds of millions of people may still go hungry owing to a combination of climate change, water shortages and increasing food consumption.
In a set of 21 papers published by the Royal Society, the scientists from many disciplines and countries say that little more land is available for food production, but add that the challenge of increasing global food supplies by as much as 70% in the next 40 years is not insurmountable.
Although more than one in seven people do not have enough protein and energy in their diet today, many of the papers are optimistic.
A team of scientists at Rothamsted, the UK's largest agricultural research centre, suggests that extra carbon dioxide in the air from global warming, along with better fertilisers and chemicals to protect arable crops, could hugely increase yields and reduce water consumption.
"Plant breeders will probably be able to increase yields considerably in the CO2 enriched environments of the future … There is a large gap between achievable yields and those delivered ... but if this is closed then there is good prospect that crop production will increase by about 50% or more by 2050 without extra land", says the paper by Dr Keith Jaggard et al.
Several studies suggest farmers will be up against environmental limits by 2050, as industry and consumers compete for water. One group of US scientists suggests that feeding the 3 billion extra people could require twice as much water by then. This, says Professor Kenneth Strzepek of the University of Colorado, could mean an 18% reduction in worldwide water availability for food growing by 2050.
"The combined effect of these increasing demands can be dramatic in key hotspots [like] northern Africa, India, China and parts of Europe and the western US," he says.
Many low-tech ways are considered to effectively increase yields, such as reducing the 30-40% food waste that occurs both in rich and poor countries. If developing countries had better storage facilities and supermarkets and consumers in rich countries bought only what they needed, there would be far more food available.
But novel ways to increase food production will also be needed, say the scientists. Conventional animal breeding should be able to meet much of the anticipated doubling of demand for dairy and meat products in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, but this may not be enough.
Instead, says Dr Philip Thornton, a scientist with the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, two "wild cards" could transform global meat and milk production. "One is artificial meat, which is made in a giant vat, and the other is nanotechnology, which is expected to become more important as a vehicle for delivering medication to livestock."
Others identify unexpected hindrances to producing more food. One of the gloomiest assessments comes from a team of British and South African economists who say that a vast effort must be made in agricultural research to create a new green revolution, but that seven multinational corporations, led by Monsanto, now dominate the global technology field.
"These companies are accumulating intellectual property to an extent that the public and international institutions are disadvantaged. This represents a threat to the global commons in agricultural technology on which the green revolution has depended," says the paper by Professor Jenifer Piesse at King's College, London.
"It is probably not possible to generate sufficient food output or incomes in much of sub-Saharan Africa to feed the population at all adequately … For least developed countries there are prospects of productivity growth but those with very little capacity will be disadvantaged."
Other papers suggest a radical rethink of global food production is needed to reduce its dependence on oil. Up to 70% of the energy needed to grow and supply food at present is fossil-fuel based which in turn contributes to climate change.
"The need for action is urgent given the time required for investment in research to deliver new technologies to those that need them and for political and social change to take place," says the paper by Beddington.
"Major advances can be achieved with the concerted application of current technologies and the importance of investing in research sooner rather than later to enable the food system to cope with challenges in the coming decades," says the paper led by the population biologist Charles Godfray of Oxford University.
The 21 papers published today in a special open access edition of the philosophical transactions of the royalsociety.org are part of a UK government Foresight study on the future of the global food industry. The final report will be published later this year in advance of the UN climate talks in Cancun, Mexico.
Artificial meat? Food for thought by 2050
Leading scientists say meat grown in vats may be necessary to feed 9 billion people expected to be alive by middle of century
John Vidal, environment editor
The Guardian, Monday 16 August 2010
Artificial meat grown in vats may be needed if the 9 billion people expected to be alive in 2050 are to be adequately fed without destroying the earth, some of the world's leading scientists report today.
But a major academic assessment of future global food supplies, led by John Beddington, the UK government chief scientist, suggests that even with new technologies such as genetic modification and nanotechnology, hundreds of millions of people may still go hungry owing to a combination of climate change, water shortages and increasing food consumption.
In a set of 21 papers published by the Royal Society, the scientists from many disciplines and countries say that little more land is available for food production, but add that the challenge of increasing global food supplies by as much as 70% in the next 40 years is not insurmountable.
Although more than one in seven people do not have enough protein and energy in their diet today, many of the papers are optimistic.
A team of scientists at Rothamsted, the UK's largest agricultural research centre, suggests that extra carbon dioxide in the air from global warming, along with better fertilisers and chemicals to protect arable crops, could hugely increase yields and reduce water consumption.
"Plant breeders will probably be able to increase yields considerably in the CO2 enriched environments of the future … There is a large gap between achievable yields and those delivered ... but if this is closed then there is good prospect that crop production will increase by about 50% or more by 2050 without extra land", says the paper by Dr Keith Jaggard et al.
Several studies suggest farmers will be up against environmental limits by 2050, as industry and consumers compete for water. One group of US scientists suggests that feeding the 3 billion extra people could require twice as much water by then. This, says Professor Kenneth Strzepek of the University of Colorado, could mean an 18% reduction in worldwide water availability for food growing by 2050.
"The combined effect of these increasing demands can be dramatic in key hotspots [like] northern Africa, India, China and parts of Europe and the western US," he says.
Many low-tech ways are considered to effectively increase yields, such as reducing the 30-40% food waste that occurs both in rich and poor countries. If developing countries had better storage facilities and supermarkets and consumers in rich countries bought only what they needed, there would be far more food available.
But novel ways to increase food production will also be needed, say the scientists. Conventional animal breeding should be able to meet much of the anticipated doubling of demand for dairy and meat products in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, but this may not be enough.
Instead, says Dr Philip Thornton, a scientist with the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, two "wild cards" could transform global meat and milk production. "One is artificial meat, which is made in a giant vat, and the other is nanotechnology, which is expected to become more important as a vehicle for delivering medication to livestock."
Others identify unexpected hindrances to producing more food. One of the gloomiest assessments comes from a team of British and South African economists who say that a vast effort must be made in agricultural research to create a new green revolution, but that seven multinational corporations, led by Monsanto, now dominate the global technology field.
"These companies are accumulating intellectual property to an extent that the public and international institutions are disadvantaged. This represents a threat to the global commons in agricultural technology on which the green revolution has depended," says the paper by Professor Jenifer Piesse at King's College, London.
"It is probably not possible to generate sufficient food output or incomes in much of sub-Saharan Africa to feed the population at all adequately … For least developed countries there are prospects of productivity growth but those with very little capacity will be disadvantaged."
Other papers suggest a radical rethink of global food production is needed to reduce its dependence on oil. Up to 70% of the energy needed to grow and supply food at present is fossil-fuel based which in turn contributes to climate change.
"The need for action is urgent given the time required for investment in research to deliver new technologies to those that need them and for political and social change to take place," says the paper by Beddington.
"Major advances can be achieved with the concerted application of current technologies and the importance of investing in research sooner rather than later to enable the food system to cope with challenges in the coming decades," says the paper led by the population biologist Charles Godfray of Oxford University.
The 21 papers published today in a special open access edition of the philosophical transactions of the royalsociety.org are part of a UK government Foresight study on the future of the global food industry. The final report will be published later this year in advance of the UN climate talks in Cancun, Mexico.
Obama Warns Of Danger To Social Security -- from The GOP. Say What?
http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/weekly-address-obama-warns-danger-soc
In Weekly Address, Obama Warns Of Danger To Social Security -- from The GOP. Say What?
Susie Madrak
Sunday Aug 15, 2010
In Obama's weekly address, he warns about Republican leaders who want to privatize Social Security, saying he'd thought that the Wall Street crash would have put that debate to rest.
This is classic sleight of hand, and might be one of the most cynical political moves I've seen. Because, as you already know from reading C&L, the imminent threat to Social Security right now is from the administration -- and its pet Catfood Commission.
It's not as if this is a big secret to anyone who works in the District. But everyone's agreed to act as if it's otherwise, because activists believe pretending the current attack on Social Security is coming from the Republican leadership will create such an uproar that the administration will back off from their plans -- and not incidentally, get the base motivated to turn out for the mid-term elections.
It might work. But it seems to me that such a deeply dishonest strategy is not only an insult to the voters, it encourages the kind of "bipartisan", split-the-difference policies of the president, and has the potential to backfire in a major way.
And it raises another question: Namely, if bloggers sacrifice transparency to the strategic goals of the Democratic leadership, why should anyone listen to us -- about anything? What is our role? Is it our job to use dishonesty to help Democrats get elected? I thought that was what made us different from the right wing: We don't abuse the readers' trust:
But GOP leaders are not pressing for privatization. The idea proved so unpopular when President George W. Bush proposed it in 2004 that Congress, then led by Republicans, never took it up. The concept lives on in a budget proposal by Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.), the senior Republican on the House Budget Committee, but only a handful of GOP lawmakers have signed on to that measure. And, in the aftermath of the worst shock to the financial system since the Great Depression, many Republican lawmakers would just as soon see the idea forgotten.
Meanwhile, a coalition of 60 liberal groups and advocates for the elderly, including the AFL-CIO and MoveOn.org, are predicting a different threat to Social Security: the possibility that a bipartisan deficit commission created by Obama will propose slashing benefits to help dig the nation out of debt.
Coalition members plan to buttonhole lawmakers as they campaign for reelection this fall, demanding that they sign a pledge to oppose any cuts to program entitlements, such as raising the retirement age.
"Over the coming weeks and months, we're making sure every politician is put on notice: If you're looking to raise the retirement age, you should be looking to retire in November," said Nita Chaudhary, campaign director at MoveOn.org.
Such an effort could make the work of the deficit commission far more difficult. Commission members from both parties view Social Security as a prime opportunity for compromise -- far easier to address than, for example, an overhaul of the tax system -- and say they want to stabilize the program's finances.
But forging a bipartisan compromise is likely to require cost-cutting as well as higher taxes. House Republican Leader John Boehner (Ohio) and House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer (Md.) have both suggested raising the retirement age, and leading economists and budget experts have strongly advocated it as a cost-cutting solution. The commission is also studying less dramatic options, such as changing the way inflation is measured for the purpose of adjusting benefits and slowing the rate of increase in benefit payments for better-off retirees.
As an aside, you'll notice the Post reporters (having already accepted the Village wisdom) don't even mention any dispute as to whether Social Security cuts are, you know, actually needed.
In Weekly Address, Obama Warns Of Danger To Social Security -- from The GOP. Say What?
Susie Madrak
Sunday Aug 15, 2010
In Obama's weekly address, he warns about Republican leaders who want to privatize Social Security, saying he'd thought that the Wall Street crash would have put that debate to rest.
This is classic sleight of hand, and might be one of the most cynical political moves I've seen. Because, as you already know from reading C&L, the imminent threat to Social Security right now is from the administration -- and its pet Catfood Commission.
It's not as if this is a big secret to anyone who works in the District. But everyone's agreed to act as if it's otherwise, because activists believe pretending the current attack on Social Security is coming from the Republican leadership will create such an uproar that the administration will back off from their plans -- and not incidentally, get the base motivated to turn out for the mid-term elections.
It might work. But it seems to me that such a deeply dishonest strategy is not only an insult to the voters, it encourages the kind of "bipartisan", split-the-difference policies of the president, and has the potential to backfire in a major way.
And it raises another question: Namely, if bloggers sacrifice transparency to the strategic goals of the Democratic leadership, why should anyone listen to us -- about anything? What is our role? Is it our job to use dishonesty to help Democrats get elected? I thought that was what made us different from the right wing: We don't abuse the readers' trust:
But GOP leaders are not pressing for privatization. The idea proved so unpopular when President George W. Bush proposed it in 2004 that Congress, then led by Republicans, never took it up. The concept lives on in a budget proposal by Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.), the senior Republican on the House Budget Committee, but only a handful of GOP lawmakers have signed on to that measure. And, in the aftermath of the worst shock to the financial system since the Great Depression, many Republican lawmakers would just as soon see the idea forgotten.
Meanwhile, a coalition of 60 liberal groups and advocates for the elderly, including the AFL-CIO and MoveOn.org, are predicting a different threat to Social Security: the possibility that a bipartisan deficit commission created by Obama will propose slashing benefits to help dig the nation out of debt.
Coalition members plan to buttonhole lawmakers as they campaign for reelection this fall, demanding that they sign a pledge to oppose any cuts to program entitlements, such as raising the retirement age.
"Over the coming weeks and months, we're making sure every politician is put on notice: If you're looking to raise the retirement age, you should be looking to retire in November," said Nita Chaudhary, campaign director at MoveOn.org.
Such an effort could make the work of the deficit commission far more difficult. Commission members from both parties view Social Security as a prime opportunity for compromise -- far easier to address than, for example, an overhaul of the tax system -- and say they want to stabilize the program's finances.
But forging a bipartisan compromise is likely to require cost-cutting as well as higher taxes. House Republican Leader John Boehner (Ohio) and House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer (Md.) have both suggested raising the retirement age, and leading economists and budget experts have strongly advocated it as a cost-cutting solution. The commission is also studying less dramatic options, such as changing the way inflation is measured for the purpose of adjusting benefits and slowing the rate of increase in benefit payments for better-off retirees.
As an aside, you'll notice the Post reporters (having already accepted the Village wisdom) don't even mention any dispute as to whether Social Security cuts are, you know, actually needed.
White House condemns criticism from the left
http://wsws.org/articles/2010/aug2010/gibb-a13.shtml
White House condemns criticism from the left
By Patrick Martin
13 August 2010
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs denounced liberal critics of the Obama administration, in comments to The Hill, a daily publication covering Congress. He focused particularly on claims that Obama’s policies continued those of his Republican predecessor. “I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”
The press secretary dismissed what he called the “professional left” in terms that echoed Fox News. “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon,” Gibbs said. “That’s not reality. They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.”
The supposed targets of Gibbs’ ire, media pundits like Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow, and a handful of liberal Democrats in Congress, responded characteristically—that is, with a mixture of hand-wringing and cringing. Olberman and Maddow, who host television interview programs on MSNBC, complained about the tone of Gibbs’ remarks.
Congressman Kucinich responded with a declaration of absolute fealty to the Obama administration. “I think that Mr. Gibbs and the White House need to realize that liberals support the president,” he said, “but the criticism is really a measure of hopes that have not been realized and the intention to make sure they get realized while we have a president that we do want to support.”
He went on to argue: “To try to paint as out of the mainstream people who want a full employment economy, people who want peace, people who want to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, that is the mistake that Mr. Gibbs made.”
Just to make sure that no one mistook such comments for actual opposition, Kucinich declared that he would not, as in 2004 and 2008, mount a presidential campaign in 2012, challenging Obama in the Democratic primaries. Rather than oppose the White House, he told ABC News, “What we have to do is focus on coming together for the purposes of getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Kucinich did not explain how it was possible to “come together” for withdrawal from Afghanistan with an administration that is doing the exact opposite. While Kucinich claims to favor “getting out” of Afghanistan, the president he supports has tripled the number of US troops in that country, with a consequent rapid increase in both US/NATO casualties and deaths of innocent Afghan civilians.
Gibbs’ remarks were not an off-the-cuff outburst. As politico.com noted, these statements “came not in the heat of his daily briefing but in the cool of his West Wing office. In other words, Gibbs knew what he was doing. And so did Obama.”
With its vitriolic language, suggesting that to compare Obama to Bush and the Republicans is the product of mental illness or drug abuse, the Gibbs diatribe was a deliberate attempt to declare any criticism of Obama from the left illegitimate. The Obama administration would like to create the illusion that its only real opposition comes from the Republican Party and the ultra-right “Tea Party” elements.
It is noteworthy that no Obama official has used language like that employed by Gibbs against the right-wing critics of the administration, even the racist fringe, or the genuinely delusional elements who question Obama’s citizenship or portray him as born in Kenya, a socialist or secret Muslim.
The real target of the White House, however, is not the impotent liberalism of Olberman and Kucinich. It is the growing opposition to the Obama administration’s policies from below, from the broad masses of working people and youth who increasingly recognize that the vague promises of “hope” and “change” in which Obama wrapped his 2008 presidential campaign were a fraud.
Popular opposition to the Obama administration from the working class is driven by two central political developments: the ongoing economic slump, and the war in Afghanistan.
Millions of working people realize that the administration’s economic program has bailed out the banks and restored corporate profitability, but done nothing for the poor, the unemployed, workers who face wage freezes or outright cuts, or small businesses on the brink of bankruptcy. Administration officials arouse outrage every time they proclaim the strengthening economic “recovery,” when working people can look around them and see deepening depression.
In his foreign policy, Obama has chosen to escalate the war in Afghanistan, tripling the number of troops there to more than 100,000. But the most recent polls show a staggering 70 percent of the American people believe the war will turn out badly, with most of those favoring the withdrawal of US troops.
There is a distinct socio-economic divide in the sinking poll numbers for Obama. According to an analysis of Gallup polling numbers published Tuesday, support for the Obama administration is collapsing among working people while it remains essentially unchanged among the upper middle class and the financial aristocracy.
Between March 2009 and July 2010, Obama’s approval rating has fallen 24 percentage points among those with a household income of less than $50,000 a year. His approval rating has fallen 13 percentage points among those in the $50,000-$100,000 a year bracket, and 17 percentage points among those with incomes between $100,000 and $150,000 a year. But among those with incomes above $150,000 a year, the decline is minimal: a drop of only four percent.
These figures are symptomatic of the deepening class polarization in the United States, which must lead, sooner rather than later, to the emergence of a movement from below, which will come into direct conflict with the Obama administration, the entire US political establishment and the capitalist system that they defend.
White House condemns criticism from the left
By Patrick Martin
13 August 2010
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs denounced liberal critics of the Obama administration, in comments to The Hill, a daily publication covering Congress. He focused particularly on claims that Obama’s policies continued those of his Republican predecessor. “I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”
The press secretary dismissed what he called the “professional left” in terms that echoed Fox News. “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon,” Gibbs said. “That’s not reality. They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.”
The supposed targets of Gibbs’ ire, media pundits like Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow, and a handful of liberal Democrats in Congress, responded characteristically—that is, with a mixture of hand-wringing and cringing. Olberman and Maddow, who host television interview programs on MSNBC, complained about the tone of Gibbs’ remarks.
Congressman Kucinich responded with a declaration of absolute fealty to the Obama administration. “I think that Mr. Gibbs and the White House need to realize that liberals support the president,” he said, “but the criticism is really a measure of hopes that have not been realized and the intention to make sure they get realized while we have a president that we do want to support.”
He went on to argue: “To try to paint as out of the mainstream people who want a full employment economy, people who want peace, people who want to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, that is the mistake that Mr. Gibbs made.”
Just to make sure that no one mistook such comments for actual opposition, Kucinich declared that he would not, as in 2004 and 2008, mount a presidential campaign in 2012, challenging Obama in the Democratic primaries. Rather than oppose the White House, he told ABC News, “What we have to do is focus on coming together for the purposes of getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Kucinich did not explain how it was possible to “come together” for withdrawal from Afghanistan with an administration that is doing the exact opposite. While Kucinich claims to favor “getting out” of Afghanistan, the president he supports has tripled the number of US troops in that country, with a consequent rapid increase in both US/NATO casualties and deaths of innocent Afghan civilians.
Gibbs’ remarks were not an off-the-cuff outburst. As politico.com noted, these statements “came not in the heat of his daily briefing but in the cool of his West Wing office. In other words, Gibbs knew what he was doing. And so did Obama.”
With its vitriolic language, suggesting that to compare Obama to Bush and the Republicans is the product of mental illness or drug abuse, the Gibbs diatribe was a deliberate attempt to declare any criticism of Obama from the left illegitimate. The Obama administration would like to create the illusion that its only real opposition comes from the Republican Party and the ultra-right “Tea Party” elements.
It is noteworthy that no Obama official has used language like that employed by Gibbs against the right-wing critics of the administration, even the racist fringe, or the genuinely delusional elements who question Obama’s citizenship or portray him as born in Kenya, a socialist or secret Muslim.
The real target of the White House, however, is not the impotent liberalism of Olberman and Kucinich. It is the growing opposition to the Obama administration’s policies from below, from the broad masses of working people and youth who increasingly recognize that the vague promises of “hope” and “change” in which Obama wrapped his 2008 presidential campaign were a fraud.
Popular opposition to the Obama administration from the working class is driven by two central political developments: the ongoing economic slump, and the war in Afghanistan.
Millions of working people realize that the administration’s economic program has bailed out the banks and restored corporate profitability, but done nothing for the poor, the unemployed, workers who face wage freezes or outright cuts, or small businesses on the brink of bankruptcy. Administration officials arouse outrage every time they proclaim the strengthening economic “recovery,” when working people can look around them and see deepening depression.
In his foreign policy, Obama has chosen to escalate the war in Afghanistan, tripling the number of troops there to more than 100,000. But the most recent polls show a staggering 70 percent of the American people believe the war will turn out badly, with most of those favoring the withdrawal of US troops.
There is a distinct socio-economic divide in the sinking poll numbers for Obama. According to an analysis of Gallup polling numbers published Tuesday, support for the Obama administration is collapsing among working people while it remains essentially unchanged among the upper middle class and the financial aristocracy.
Between March 2009 and July 2010, Obama’s approval rating has fallen 24 percentage points among those with a household income of less than $50,000 a year. His approval rating has fallen 13 percentage points among those in the $50,000-$100,000 a year bracket, and 17 percentage points among those with incomes between $100,000 and $150,000 a year. But among those with incomes above $150,000 a year, the decline is minimal: a drop of only four percent.
These figures are symptomatic of the deepening class polarization in the United States, which must lead, sooner rather than later, to the emergence of a movement from below, which will come into direct conflict with the Obama administration, the entire US political establishment and the capitalist system that they defend.
Separation of Church and Hate
Separation of Church and Hate:
The Kate Mosque Solution
Greg Palast
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010
Since everyone seems to have an opinion about the mosque near Ground Zero (and President Obama has two), I'd like to ask you all a couple of questions:
Given that white Christian supremacist Tim McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building, shouldn't we ban white churches from Oklahoma?
As New York City's indigenous Lanape Natives died at Ground Zero by the thousands when overrun by Christian colonists, shouldn't we ban Christian churches from their sacred ground?
If a mosque near Ground Zero is bad, then why not ban all Muslims from downtown New York? For this to work, should we require all Muslims in the city to wear yellow crescents?
My office was in the WTC towers, which will now be rebuilt with all the upscale shops I remember. So, Mrs. Palin, are you saying it's OK for Muslims to shop at Ground Zero as long as they don't pray there?
The new tower will have the old one's Off-Track Betting windows and bars with after-work "happy hours." So here's a solution to make everyone happy: Why not camouflage the mosque as a place to gamble and get into your secretary's panties?
How about disguising it as a discount fashion shop: Kate Mosque? Or as a Disney retail outlet: Mickey Mosque?
Jamie Kilstein has suggested to me that we ban Burger Kings from Ground Zero in honor of the victims of heart disease. But Jamie, the BKs are memorials to remind us that in the eyes of God, all of us - no matter what religion - are just hamburger meat.
"O. Bin Laden" signed Glenn Beck's petition to ban mosques from Ground Zero. Al Qaeda sure as hell doesn't want Muslims and Christians worshipping in amicable proximity.
Several new Christian churches have been welcomed near Ground Zero ... in Hiroshima.
Am I being too kum-ba-yah by suggesting some of the money raised for the mosque go to building a synagogue in Saudi Arabia, rebuilding the Latin Church in Gaza burnt by Hamas kooks, rebuilding the Babri Masjid mosque burnt down by Hindi fascists, rebuild the Hindi temples destroyed by Sinhalese Buddhists, and for Christ's sake, build a bridge, not a wall, to share, not divide, Al-Aksa and the Dome of the Rock?
WWTJD? (What Would Thomas Jefferson Do?)
My own view? I don't want a mosque near Ground Zero; I want it right on top of Ground Zero, in the new tower, so when we go down again, we all go together.
Journalist Greg Palast was raised by Gil and Gladys Palast, two terror babies.
Collect the full set of Palast heresies at twitter.com/Greg_Palast
Post your offended responses on my Facebook page
And one last question:
Why is the Right Wing so upset the President is a Black Muslim foreigner?
After all, the last bunch of Presidents, white Christians all, screwed things up so badly, why not try something different?
Subscribe to Palast's investigative reports for BBC TV, The Guardian papers, Rolling Stone and more at http://www.gregpalast.com/.
The Kate Mosque Solution
Greg Palast
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010
Since everyone seems to have an opinion about the mosque near Ground Zero (and President Obama has two), I'd like to ask you all a couple of questions:
Given that white Christian supremacist Tim McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building, shouldn't we ban white churches from Oklahoma?
As New York City's indigenous Lanape Natives died at Ground Zero by the thousands when overrun by Christian colonists, shouldn't we ban Christian churches from their sacred ground?
If a mosque near Ground Zero is bad, then why not ban all Muslims from downtown New York? For this to work, should we require all Muslims in the city to wear yellow crescents?
My office was in the WTC towers, which will now be rebuilt with all the upscale shops I remember. So, Mrs. Palin, are you saying it's OK for Muslims to shop at Ground Zero as long as they don't pray there?
The new tower will have the old one's Off-Track Betting windows and bars with after-work "happy hours." So here's a solution to make everyone happy: Why not camouflage the mosque as a place to gamble and get into your secretary's panties?
How about disguising it as a discount fashion shop: Kate Mosque? Or as a Disney retail outlet: Mickey Mosque?
Jamie Kilstein has suggested to me that we ban Burger Kings from Ground Zero in honor of the victims of heart disease. But Jamie, the BKs are memorials to remind us that in the eyes of God, all of us - no matter what religion - are just hamburger meat.
"O. Bin Laden" signed Glenn Beck's petition to ban mosques from Ground Zero. Al Qaeda sure as hell doesn't want Muslims and Christians worshipping in amicable proximity.
Several new Christian churches have been welcomed near Ground Zero ... in Hiroshima.
Am I being too kum-ba-yah by suggesting some of the money raised for the mosque go to building a synagogue in Saudi Arabia, rebuilding the Latin Church in Gaza burnt by Hamas kooks, rebuilding the Babri Masjid mosque burnt down by Hindi fascists, rebuild the Hindi temples destroyed by Sinhalese Buddhists, and for Christ's sake, build a bridge, not a wall, to share, not divide, Al-Aksa and the Dome of the Rock?
WWTJD? (What Would Thomas Jefferson Do?)
My own view? I don't want a mosque near Ground Zero; I want it right on top of Ground Zero, in the new tower, so when we go down again, we all go together.
Journalist Greg Palast was raised by Gil and Gladys Palast, two terror babies.
Collect the full set of Palast heresies at twitter.com/Greg_Palast
Post your offended responses on my Facebook page
And one last question:
Why is the Right Wing so upset the President is a Black Muslim foreigner?
After all, the last bunch of Presidents, white Christians all, screwed things up so badly, why not try something different?
Subscribe to Palast's investigative reports for BBC TV, The Guardian papers, Rolling Stone and more at http://www.gregpalast.com/.
Friday, August 20, 2010
East Coast v. West Coast: the Pastrami Debate
http://diary.thepurplepassport.com/los-angeles/restaurants-los-angeles-cities/east-coast-v-west-coast-the-pastrami-debate
East Coast v. West Coast: the Pastrami Debate
July 31, 2010
LOS ANGELES, USA – In quibbles over whether New York or LA is the best urban turf in America, two topics are bound to come up: the quality of the nightlife, and the quality of the pastrami. New York clearly edges out LA as the city that never sleeps, but even though New York immigrants birthed the Jewish deli, some argue that the pastrami argument is less clear cut, the verdict hanging in the balance like a rosy slice at the blade of a meat carver. One venue in LA makes the decision of declaring New York the hands-down winner of Deli-dom less obvious: Canter’s Deli.
Canter’s Deli is a 75-years-old-and-still-kicking bastion of cured meats and Jewish deli kitsch that is both open 24 hours and serves to-die-for pastrami on rye (4,900 lbs. of the stuff per month!). All the Yiddish favorites are well represented here, from matzo ball soup to brisket and kishka, but there’s also plenty for the non-kosher-concerned set, from salads to seafood to belt-bursting breakfasts. They’re serious about deli authenticity here: they pickle their own pickles, craft their own knishes, and whip up their own potato salad and cole slaw. Plus, immediately upon entry, you’ll be confronted with the in-house bakery, which tempts you to eat dessert first with cookies, cakes, and breads baked fresh twice daily.
Yet aside from diehard pastrami seekers, few come here just for the food. The scene, especially late night, is the considerable draw. The hasn’t-been-revamped-since-the-’50's vibe draws droves of curious tourists, post-party hipsters, and a mishmosh of celebs both young and old. The haven’t-been-retrained-since-the-’50's staff disgruntles the locals, but there are still a fair number of regular devotees. (FYI, I could totally handle the brusque, get-what-you’re-given attitude, but speedier service would have been nice.)
Plus, it’s hard to ignore Canter’s hallowed spot in the halls of Los Angeles history. The restaurant’s past is not unlike the trajectory of many a Jewish immigrant: started in Jersey (yay Jersey!), moved west to LA’s Boyle Heights suburb, then found a permanent home on Fairfax Avenue. Murals in the parking lot chronicle the history of LA’s Jewish community, and true to its Jewish heritage, the deli is closed for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
Even the name of the adjoining cocktail lounge, the Kibitz Room, bears Yiddish influence, but this isn’t your bubbe’s watering hole. With a full bar and jamming local bands every night of the week, it’s been the launch pad for many a musical sensation, from The Wallflowers to Fiona Apple. In the hour just before close, the entertainment usually turns into an informal jam session, and players like Slash from Guns N’ Roses have been known to drop by and join in.
And so, with a scene that never sleeps and tasty pastrami piled a mile high, Canter’s really throws a wrench in New York’s claims of urban superiority. And now that the deli has added a location on the Strip in Las Vegas (Treasure Island), The LA/New York rivalry may have another contender added to the debate.
Canter’s Deli
419 N. Fairfax Ave.
Los Angeles, CA
323-651-2030
Here's Johnny, digitized
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/tv/la-et-0811-carson-20100811,0,272413.story
Here's Johnny, digitized: A searchable database created for Carson's 'Tonight Show'
The search tool for existing footage will be available for professional use, but many clips will also be posted for public viewing.
Matea Gold, Los Angeles Times
August 11, 2010
Johnny Carson is getting an upgrade for the YouTube era.
Carson Entertainment Group, which owns the archive of the late-night host's 30 years on "The Tonight Show," is set to announce Wednesday that it has digitized all 3,300 hours of existing footage from the program and created a searchable online database for producers and researchers.
The library will initially be available just for professional clip-licensing purposes, but the company also plans to release 50 full-format shows on DVD and post a rotating series of historic clips for public viewing on http://www.johnnycarson.com.
The project was spurred by Jeff Sotzing, Carson's nephew and president of Carson Entertainment, who said the continuing high demand for "Tonight Show" clips prompted him to seek a way to make the footage more accessible for both historic and commercial purposes.
"It's amazing to me that even being off the air for 18 years, there's still so much interest in this material," he said.
Carson remains a singular figure because he served as a cultural touchstone during his three decades on the air, said Rick Ludwin, NBC's executive vice president in charge of late-night series.
"That desk and that chair and the couch and the monologue and the band became as familiar as furniture in your own living room," he said. "When any motion picture or documentary wants to put something in historical perspective, they often want to have a Johnny Carson joke from that era."
That's in part because Carson's "Tonight Show" logged more than 22,000 guests during his tenure. "Everybody who was involved in public life seems to have appeared on that show," said David Bushman, television curator at the Paley Center for the Media.
And the wry host, who died in 2005 at age 79, was viewed as a bellwether of public opinion: His jokes about Watergate marked a turning point for President Nixon.
Carson did not originally own the rights to his show, but was eventually able to negotiate full ownership in 1980 during a protracted contract dispute with NBC. At the time, "The Tonight Show" generated almost a fifth of the network's profit from advertising revenue.
Before the digitization project, Carson Entertainment already had compiled a database listing the guests on each show and outlines of the topics of Carson's daily monologue. But if producers wanted to find a mention of a subject or a person, they often had to screen hours of footage, hoping to stumble upon the right reference.
Now a searchable transcript of each show will allow researchers to instantly pull up the corresponding clip by typing a name, key word or date.
"I think it's an extraordinary advancement in terms of using digital media in order to facilitate access of all different sorts," said Bushman, who recently searched the museum's Carson archives for a project on the late New York Mayor John Lindsay. "We had to do it the old-fashioned way. If we had had access to this, it would have been spectacular."
Modern-day television shows are routinely converted to digital now and posted online, but the ease of search varies. Most networks keep internal transcripts of interview programs and newscasts, indexed with the corresponding time code of the footage. Some go further: On MSNBC.com, visitors can view searchable transcripts alongside individual clips, synced to the video. But the comprehensiveness of the Carson library exceeds that of most archives, including that of the current "Tonight Show," which keeps transcripts of Jay Leno's monologues, but not guest appearances.
The digitization process took about nine months and was done by Deluxe Archive Solutions, which works with many Hollywood studios to preserve their film and television libraries.
The video footage was trucked securely from where it had been stored in an underground salt mine in Kansas to a facility in Burbank, where a high-speed "tape robot" transferred each tape to a digital format. Then a team of transcribers logged more than 1 million words of dialogue and tagged each show by key word, guest and musical number.
"We feel we're evangelists out there telling people this is what you are going to need to do in this new era of content consumption," said Tyler Leshney, vice president of Deluxe Archive Solutions. "People don't want to sift through two hours to find five minutes they're searching for."
The more searchable content, the more valuable it becomes, Leshney noted. Though researchers will have access to the Carson library for free, Carson Entertainment will charge a licensing fee to use each clip based on the type of project.
Not every moment of Carson's reign on "The Tonight Show" is available. The original videos from 1962 to 1972 were recorded over by NBC at the time, a common practice then because tape was so expensive, Ludwin said. All that is left from that era are some grainy black-and-white kinescope clips, taken by a film camera pointed at a television set.
But the digitization process helped unearth some original footage thought to be lost, including a famous 1973 clip of Carson pretending to eat dog food during a live Alpo commercial after the dog refused the meal, before thought to exist only in grainy kinescope.
Such moments have the makings of instant viral videos, but Deluxe Archive Solutions took several security measures to ensure that the clips can't be disseminated without permission, including embedding each with a large, yellow "Carson" watermark.
Sotzing said that Carson would have found the digitization project fascinating.
"He was a guy who loved technology and was always interested in watching old shows," he said. "And the ability to get this stuff immediately, he'd love that."
Here's Johnny, digitized: A searchable database created for Carson's 'Tonight Show'
The search tool for existing footage will be available for professional use, but many clips will also be posted for public viewing.
Matea Gold, Los Angeles Times
August 11, 2010
Johnny Carson is getting an upgrade for the YouTube era.
Carson Entertainment Group, which owns the archive of the late-night host's 30 years on "The Tonight Show," is set to announce Wednesday that it has digitized all 3,300 hours of existing footage from the program and created a searchable online database for producers and researchers.
The library will initially be available just for professional clip-licensing purposes, but the company also plans to release 50 full-format shows on DVD and post a rotating series of historic clips for public viewing on http://www.johnnycarson.com.
The project was spurred by Jeff Sotzing, Carson's nephew and president of Carson Entertainment, who said the continuing high demand for "Tonight Show" clips prompted him to seek a way to make the footage more accessible for both historic and commercial purposes.
"It's amazing to me that even being off the air for 18 years, there's still so much interest in this material," he said.
Carson remains a singular figure because he served as a cultural touchstone during his three decades on the air, said Rick Ludwin, NBC's executive vice president in charge of late-night series.
"That desk and that chair and the couch and the monologue and the band became as familiar as furniture in your own living room," he said. "When any motion picture or documentary wants to put something in historical perspective, they often want to have a Johnny Carson joke from that era."
That's in part because Carson's "Tonight Show" logged more than 22,000 guests during his tenure. "Everybody who was involved in public life seems to have appeared on that show," said David Bushman, television curator at the Paley Center for the Media.
And the wry host, who died in 2005 at age 79, was viewed as a bellwether of public opinion: His jokes about Watergate marked a turning point for President Nixon.
Carson did not originally own the rights to his show, but was eventually able to negotiate full ownership in 1980 during a protracted contract dispute with NBC. At the time, "The Tonight Show" generated almost a fifth of the network's profit from advertising revenue.
Before the digitization project, Carson Entertainment already had compiled a database listing the guests on each show and outlines of the topics of Carson's daily monologue. But if producers wanted to find a mention of a subject or a person, they often had to screen hours of footage, hoping to stumble upon the right reference.
Now a searchable transcript of each show will allow researchers to instantly pull up the corresponding clip by typing a name, key word or date.
"I think it's an extraordinary advancement in terms of using digital media in order to facilitate access of all different sorts," said Bushman, who recently searched the museum's Carson archives for a project on the late New York Mayor John Lindsay. "We had to do it the old-fashioned way. If we had had access to this, it would have been spectacular."
Modern-day television shows are routinely converted to digital now and posted online, but the ease of search varies. Most networks keep internal transcripts of interview programs and newscasts, indexed with the corresponding time code of the footage. Some go further: On MSNBC.com, visitors can view searchable transcripts alongside individual clips, synced to the video. But the comprehensiveness of the Carson library exceeds that of most archives, including that of the current "Tonight Show," which keeps transcripts of Jay Leno's monologues, but not guest appearances.
The digitization process took about nine months and was done by Deluxe Archive Solutions, which works with many Hollywood studios to preserve their film and television libraries.
The video footage was trucked securely from where it had been stored in an underground salt mine in Kansas to a facility in Burbank, where a high-speed "tape robot" transferred each tape to a digital format. Then a team of transcribers logged more than 1 million words of dialogue and tagged each show by key word, guest and musical number.
"We feel we're evangelists out there telling people this is what you are going to need to do in this new era of content consumption," said Tyler Leshney, vice president of Deluxe Archive Solutions. "People don't want to sift through two hours to find five minutes they're searching for."
The more searchable content, the more valuable it becomes, Leshney noted. Though researchers will have access to the Carson library for free, Carson Entertainment will charge a licensing fee to use each clip based on the type of project.
Not every moment of Carson's reign on "The Tonight Show" is available. The original videos from 1962 to 1972 were recorded over by NBC at the time, a common practice then because tape was so expensive, Ludwin said. All that is left from that era are some grainy black-and-white kinescope clips, taken by a film camera pointed at a television set.
But the digitization process helped unearth some original footage thought to be lost, including a famous 1973 clip of Carson pretending to eat dog food during a live Alpo commercial after the dog refused the meal, before thought to exist only in grainy kinescope.
Such moments have the makings of instant viral videos, but Deluxe Archive Solutions took several security measures to ensure that the clips can't be disseminated without permission, including embedding each with a large, yellow "Carson" watermark.
Sotzing said that Carson would have found the digitization project fascinating.
"He was a guy who loved technology and was always interested in watching old shows," he said. "And the ability to get this stuff immediately, he'd love that."
2001: A Space Odyssey
http://www.avclub.com/articles/2001-a-space-odyssey,43912/
Scenic Routes
2001: A Space Odyssey
Mike D'Angelo
August 9, 2010
As some of you have observed from time to time, this column has tended thus far to avoid the most notable scenes in cinema history—those iconic, oft-excerpted moments that even folks who haven’t seen the movie in question generally know well. For one thing, like most critics, I’m always eager to pimp lesser-known favorites, and it’s hard to imagine a better opportunity for persuasion than sitting readers down with a representative hunk of awesomeness. More than that, though, I’ve been concerned that there wouldn’t be a whole lot to say about scenes so familiar that most of you could play them in your head from memory. Is there any point to close analysis of something everybody’s seen a dozen times or more? Still, I continually find that even sequences I thought I knew backward hold some surprises when carefully examined, so I walked over to my DVD collection and grabbed the first all-time masterpiece I saw, which happened to be Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Its most iconic moment? Surely Keir Dullea demanding that Hal open the pod bay doors. So I watched it again. So should you.
Quick context for the handful of folks who don’t know precisely what’s going on here: HAL 9000, the ship’s computer—which demonstrates a level of artificial intelligence well beyond anything we’re likely to see for decades to come, much less the state of the art from nine years ago—has gone quietly bonkers, for reasons never made explicit in the movie. (Arthur C. Clarke lays it all out in the novel, written concurrently with the screenplay. A mistake, in my opinion.) Having already killed four of the five crew members, three of whom were in hibernation, he’s now denying re-entry to the ship’s last surviving human, Dullea, who went out in an auxiliary pod to retrieve his colleague’s body. HAL isn’t lying, incidentally—he did “hear” (via lip-reading) Dullea and the colleague planning to disconnect him and take manual control of the spacecraft. So it’s fair to interpret HAL’s behavior as an act of self-preservation.
Now what exactly has burned this particular scene into our collective cultural memory? It isn’t just the admittedly arresting notion of a crazy murderous computer, or we’d be seeing clips from 1977’s Demon Seed on TV every few months. (If you happen to see Demon Seed as an impressionable child, however, it’ll stay with you for the rest of your life. Trust me on this.) No, what makes this standoff so chilling is the maddeningly soothing tone of Douglas Rain as the voice of HAL. “I won’t argue with you any more,” Dullea snaps at one point, but the statement is redundant—there’s no arguing with an entity that’s so conversationally implacable. What’s more, HAL sounds exactly the same in this scene as he does in previous scenes in which he and the crew engage in meaningless chitchat. There’s no indication whatsoever, tonally, that by refusing to open the doors, he’s effectively pronouncing a death sentence, and when he decides there’s no further point in communication, he simply says “goodbye” and does the equivalent of hanging up on Dullea, without even the tiny satisfaction of an audible click.
However, that description contradicts one of the most common observations about 2001, which is that HAL seems more human than any of the human characters. I’ve always thought so myself, in fact, but had never really pondered why before. Prior to rewatching the film, which I hadn’t seen since the mid-’90s, I think I would have largely attributed this effect to the relative (and very likely deliberate, on Kubrick’s part) weakness of the film’s onscreen cast; if you look up reviews, you’ll find that Dullea and Gary Lockwood are frequently described with adjectives like “flat” and “wooden.” And it’s true that nobody’s ever gonna mistake them for James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, charisma-wise. But even in this brief scene, Dullea gives a totally credible performance—his frustration and mounting concern are evident in his facial expression and in the way his throat constricts as he realizes the gravity of his predicament. Meanwhile, HAL remains, well, robotic, in the sense that there’s no variability (at this point, anyway) in his carefully measured responses.
So I watched the scene again, a couple more times, trying to work out where this overwhelming impression was coming from, and it finally hit me. It’s the silence. Not the silence after HAL “hangs up,” but the initial silence, before he first responds. What makes the human beings in 2001 seem a bit less than fully human isn’t just the nature of the performances—it’s that every interaction among them is completely functional. We’re seeing people say and do whatever is required to achieve their objective at that particular moment, and nothing more. HAL, by contrast, demonstrates what we all recognize as neurosis. And while it’s mostly implied by his behavior, it does have one explicit manifestation: that refusal to answer Dullea’s summons for 43 seconds, followed by capitulation when it becomes clear that Dullea isn’t gonna shut up. That’s so human, it almost hurts. We’ve all been there, most likely on both sides. In fact, if a computer ever manages to pass the Turing test, it’ll surely be by replicating this sort of semi-rational evasion, rather than by saying something expressly intelligent or creative. It’s hard to conceive of a machine thinking “I don’t even want to deal with you right now. Oh, all right.”
Of course, when I say “silence,” I only mean that HAL isn’t yet speaking. Kubrick and his sound editor, Winston Ryder, achieve a magnificent atmosphere of unearthly estrangement in the sequence of shots that accompanies Dullea’s repeated efforts to get HAL’s attention, cutting from the ambient hum of the ship (which changes slightly in different areas) to the vague static and subtle whirring heard inside Dullea’s pod to the complete aural void of space, with each wall of sound, or lack thereof, punctuated by increasingly urgent cries of “Do you read me?” More than the groundbreaking special effects involving apparent weightlessness, or the previously unimagined depictions of the cosmos, it’s Kubrick’s clinical precision, perhaps best realized in this eerie montage, that inspires a sense of awe in me whenever I watch this movie. Which is true even though the phrase “clinical precision” sort of connotes “anti-human.” 2001 isn’t warm and fuzzy. But neither is infinity, and no movie has taken a greater swing at the infinite. And yet in the end, it’s still that placid twinge of irrationality that lingers most of all.
Also, the Discovery looks a giant Toblerone bar. Just thought I’d mention that.
The Most Interesting Man in the World
http://www.fastcompany.com/1674547/the-most-interesting-man-in-the-world-dos-equis
Why The Most Interesting Man in the World Moves More Units Than Old Spice Guy
Austin Carr
Mon Jul 26, 2010
The experienced actor behind Dos Equis' viral ad campaign on popularity, influence, and saving endangered Siberian tigers.
Consider for a moment the manly purr of Old Spice spokesman Isaiah Mustafa's "Hello, Ladies" salutation. It's seduced the country social media-style: 94 million views on YouTube, 630,0000 Facebook fans, and an estimated 1 billion aggregate impressions in just one week. But wait. It appears consumers may have been too distracted by his glorious swan dives and monocle smiles to remember the actual product he was hawking. Sales of Red Zone body wash have actually declined 7% according to a report by SymphonyIRI. (UPDATE: A spokesman for Old Spice claims Brandweek took SymphonyIRI's stat out of context. Citing Nielsen figures, the rep says OS body wash sales have actually increased 11% in the last 12 months.) And the towel-clad and deep-voiced Mustafa may have not even contributed to Old Spice's overall sales growth, which Ad Age chalks up to a high-value coupon campaign by the company. Both Nivea and Gillette saw similar if not higher growth during that period, and neither had the help of Mustafa--just coupons.
So did Mustafa's unprecedented popularity fail to translate into influence? Is there perhaps another equally viral ad campaign, one with a frontman who rivals Mustafa's dash and flair, that has helped move units?
Unfortunately for The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, there is: The Most Interesting Man in the World. Since he joined forces with Dos Equis in 2006, sales have shot up significantly every year, leaping 26% since January alone, Dos Equis brand manager Ryan V. Thompson recently told me. "We're now the fastest growing beer import in the country," he says.
Adding insult to injury, there's no question who would win a staring contest.
"The Most Interesting Man is well proven," explains Thompson. "He once went four days straight staring at himself in his own staring contest--he wins every time."
I decided to track down The Most Interesting Man in the World and speak with him about viral advertising for our chronicle of the social graph, The Influence Project. Why has The Most Interesting Man succeeded where Mustafa has failed?
"He's a man that has had life experience, and has been there, and done that, and beyond," says the also-pretty-damn interesting man who plays The Most Interesting Man in the World, Jonathan Goldsmith, deservedly in the third-person. "It's not just a slickness, but experience that means something."
According to Goldsmith, it is this infinite life experience that has given his character a depth, which is universally intriguing. "People ask me all the time for tips. How would you entertain? What advice would you have for meeting women? What does your home look like?" he says, pulling off the pitch-perfect hyperbole that only The World's Most Interesting Man could get away with. "If you're not interested, you will not be interesting. If you don't experience life, you won't be a participant--you'll just be a voyeur; you'll watch it go by like a parade you're not involved in."
Is there anything The Most Interesting Man in the World could learn, then, from The Man Your Man Could Smell Like? Would he ever try Old Spice Red Zone Body Wash After Hours?
"No, I don't think so," he says. "After tasting Old Spice, there are limitations [compared with Dos Equis]. I wish [Mustafa] well, and I thank him very much for following my training regime. He's looking very well as a physical specimen."
Breaking character for a moment, Goldsmith explains, "I think the campaign is so successful, because every man, including me, would like to be like him." He also credits the brilliant writers behind his clever lines and the company itself for keeping up the character. And this is a guy who knows characters. His credits read like a greatest hits collection of '70s and '80s television, with guest-starring roles in everything from Hawaii Five-O to Eight is Enough, CHiPs to Partners in Crime, St. Elsewhere to Trapper John M.D., Charlie's Angels to Highway to Heaven.... You get the picture. "Dos Equis is very wise to keep the mystique going," he says. "The Most Interesting Man is not just a talking head--he's not a conventional spokesman." Goldsmith even admitted that he was surprised Old Spice's campaign hadn't translated into sales.
There is one difference between him and the character he plays that he'd like to make clear, though. While The Most Interesting Man in the World uses his joie de vivre to sling beer, Goldsmith says he uses his celebrity now "to draw attention to [his] charities" which are of "vital importance" to him. He's heavily involved in several, including Free Arts for Abused Children, Stella Link (a socially conscious entertainment group), and the Sabre Foundation, an organization focused on saving endangered Siberian tigers. Seriously.
Review: PARANOIA: The Conspiracy Reader, Volume 1
Kenn Thomas
Haha! This volume brings popular conspiracy lit full circle: many moons ago a square-bound conspiracy journal called Critique turned itself into a newsstand magazine, presaging the age of conzines, immediately preceding the explosion of conspiracy sites on the internet. PARANOIA became among the last holdouts of the hardcopy zines and now has returned to that pre-zine, Critique like format.
It's a good move from a credibility standpoint. For some reason, a square bound journal gets more respect than a lowly magazine that fits folded in any back pocket. It is sad, though, that the newsstands have one less product reflecting interest in parapolitics. Also sad in that clearly editors Joan D'Arc and Al Hidell made this decision for economic reasons. The newsstand demand had lowered to the point that the magazine was no longer financially feasible. Although a more attractive package, this POD production means a more limited circulation and by no means guarantees to resolve the money issue. Encouragement should go out to as many people as possible to order this in the hope of more volumes to follow.
Even neophytes would benefit from the broad selection of topics: the moon hoax and the Masons; 9/11 and Bin Laden; alien intelligence, scientology, the Necromicon--and who hasn't wondered about the conspiracy that was Tiny Tim? The explication is pretty advanced, though, so readers more familiar with the material also come away from the volume satisfied that they've added to their knowledge warehouse, which in this format looks more like a library than a magazine stand.
Yes, all readers could argue with every single thing in this journal/book. I've recently come to question the research capabilities of Anthony Bragalia and so cast a wary eye at his contribution; I also wonder about the credibility of yet another JFK jailhouse confession from a Robert MacKenzie found here; and certainly harder questions could have been asked of rightist Christ debunker Acharya S. But that's sort of the point--almost anything said about the contents of PARANOIA The Conspiracy Reader Volume One leads so far from the binary boredom of MSNBC/FOX, left/right pre-occupations that, with luck, the reader will never find a way back into the box.
Haha! This volume brings popular conspiracy lit full circle: many moons ago a square-bound conspiracy journal called Critique turned itself into a newsstand magazine, presaging the age of conzines, immediately preceding the explosion of conspiracy sites on the internet. PARANOIA became among the last holdouts of the hardcopy zines and now has returned to that pre-zine, Critique like format.
It's a good move from a credibility standpoint. For some reason, a square bound journal gets more respect than a lowly magazine that fits folded in any back pocket. It is sad, though, that the newsstands have one less product reflecting interest in parapolitics. Also sad in that clearly editors Joan D'Arc and Al Hidell made this decision for economic reasons. The newsstand demand had lowered to the point that the magazine was no longer financially feasible. Although a more attractive package, this POD production means a more limited circulation and by no means guarantees to resolve the money issue. Encouragement should go out to as many people as possible to order this in the hope of more volumes to follow.
Even neophytes would benefit from the broad selection of topics: the moon hoax and the Masons; 9/11 and Bin Laden; alien intelligence, scientology, the Necromicon--and who hasn't wondered about the conspiracy that was Tiny Tim? The explication is pretty advanced, though, so readers more familiar with the material also come away from the volume satisfied that they've added to their knowledge warehouse, which in this format looks more like a library than a magazine stand.
Yes, all readers could argue with every single thing in this journal/book. I've recently come to question the research capabilities of Anthony Bragalia and so cast a wary eye at his contribution; I also wonder about the credibility of yet another JFK jailhouse confession from a Robert MacKenzie found here; and certainly harder questions could have been asked of rightist Christ debunker Acharya S. But that's sort of the point--almost anything said about the contents of PARANOIA The Conspiracy Reader Volume One leads so far from the binary boredom of MSNBC/FOX, left/right pre-occupations that, with luck, the reader will never find a way back into the box.
The Hidden Tragedy of the CIA's Experiments on Children
Wednesday 11 August 2010
H.P. Albarelli Jr. and Dr. Jeffrey S. Kaye, t r u t h o u t | Investigative Report
http://www.truth-out.org/the-hidden-tragedy-cias-experiments-children62208
Bobby is seven years old, but this is not the first time he has been subjected to electroshock. It's his third time. In all, over the next year, Bobby will experience eight electroshock sessions. Placed on the examining table, he is held down by two male attendants while the physician places a solution on his temples. Bobby struggles with the two men holding him down, but his efforts are useless. He cries out and tries to pull away. One of the attendants tries to force a thick wedge of rubber into his mouth. He turns his head sharply away and cries out, "Let me go, please. I don't want to be here. Please, let me go." Bobby's physician looks irritated and she tells him, "Come on now, Bobby, try to act like a big boy and be still and relax." Bobby turns his head away from the woman and opens his mouth for the wedge that will prevent him from biting through his tongue. He begins to cry silently, his small shoulders shaking and he stiffens his body against what he knows is coming.
Mary is only five years old. She sits on a small, straight-backed chair, moving her legs back and forth, humming the same four notes over and over and over. Her head, framed in a tangled mass of golden curls, moves up and down with each note. For the first three years of her life, Mary was thought to be a mostly normal child. Then, after she began behaving oddly, she had been handed off to a foster family. Her father and mother didn't want her any longer. She had become too strange for her father, whose alcoholism clouded any awareness of his young daughter. Mary's mother had never wanted her anyway and was happy to have her placed in another home. When the LSD Mary has been given begins to have its effects, she stops moving her head and legs and sits staring at the wall. She doesn't move at all. After about ten minutes, she looks at the nearby physician observing her, and says, "God isn't coming back today. He's too busy. He won't be back here for weeks."
From early 1940 to 1953, Dr. Lauretta Bender, a highly respected child neuropsychiatrist practicing at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, experimented extensively with electroshock therapy on children who had been diagnosed with "autistic schizophrenia." In all, it has been reported that Bender administered electroconvulsive therapy to at least 100 children ranging in age from three years old to 12 years, with some reports indicating the total may be twice that number. One source reports that, inclusive of Bender's work, electroconvulsive treatment was used on more than 500 children at Bellevue Hospital from 1942 to 1956, and then at Creedmoor State Hospital Children's Service from 1956 to 1969. Bender was a confident and dogmatic woman, who bristled at criticism, oftentimes refused to acknowledge reality even when it stood starkly before her.
Despite publicly claiming good results with electroshock treatment, privately Bender said she was seriously disappointed in the aftereffects and results shown by the subject children. Indeed, the condition of some of the children appeared to have only worsened. One six-year-old boy, after being shocked several times, went from being a shy, withdrawn child to acting increasingly aggressive and violent. Another child, a seven-year-old girl, following five electroshock sessions had become nearly catatonic.
Years later, another of Bender's young patients who became overly aggressive after about 20 treatments, now grown, was convicted in court as a "multiple murderer." Others, in adulthood, reportedly were in and of trouble and prison for a battery of petty and violent crimes. A 1954 scientific study of about 50 of Bender's young electroshock patients, conducted by two psychologists, found that nearly all were worse off after the "therapy" and that some had become suicidal after treatment. One of the children studied in 1954 was the son of well-known writer Jacqueline Susann, author of the bestselling novel "Valley of the Dolls." Susann's son, Guy, was diagnosed with autism shortly after birth and, when he was three years old, Dr. Bender convinced Susann and her husband that Guy could be successfully treated with electroshock therapy. Guy returned home from Bender's care a nearly lifeless child. Susann later told people that Bender had "destroyed" her son. Guy has been confined to institutions since his treatment.
To their credit, some of Dr. Bender's colleagues considered her use of electroshock on children "scandalous," but few colleagues spoke out against her, a situation still today common among those in the medical profession. Said Dr. Leon Eisenberg, a widely respected physician and true pioneer in the study of autistic children, "[Lauretta Bender] claimed that some of these children recovered [because of her use of shock treatment]. I once wrote a paper in which I referred to several studies by [Dr. E. R.] Clardy. He was at Rockwin State Hospital - the back up to Bellevue - and he described the arrival of these children. He considered them psychotic and perhaps worse off then before the treatment." (This writer could find no case where any of Bender's colleagues spoke out against her decidedly racist viewpoints. Bender made it quite clear that she felt that African-Americans were best characterized by their "capacity for laziness" and "ability to dance," both features, Bender claimed, of the "specific brain impulses" of African-Americans.)
About the same time Dr. Bender was conducting her electroshock experiments, she was also widely experimenting on autistic and schizophrenic children with what she termed other "treatment endeavors." These included use of a wide array of psycho-pharmaceutical agents, several provided to her by the Sandoz Chemical Co. in Basel, Switzerland, as well as Metrazol, sub-shock insulin therapy, amphetamines and anticonvulsants. Metrazol was a trade name for pentylenetetrazol, a drug used as a circulatory and respiratory stimulant. High doses cause convulsions, as discovered in 1934 by the Hungarian-American neurologist and psychiatrist Ladislas J. Meduna.
Metrazol had been used in convulsive therapy, but was never considered to be effective, and side effects such as seizures were difficult to avoid. The medical records of several patients who were confined at Vermont State Hospital, a public mental facility, reveal that Metrazol was administered to them by CIA contractor Dr. Robert Hyde on numerous occasions in order "to address overly aggressive behavior." One of these patients, Karen Wetmore, received the drug on a number of occasions for no discernible medical reason. During the same ten-year period in which Metrazol was used by the Vermont State Hospital, patient deaths skyrocketed. In 1982, the FDA revoked its approval of Metrazol.
Here it should be noted that, during the cold war years, CIA and Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) interrogators, working as part of projects Bluebird and Artichoke, sometimes injected large amounts of Metrazol into selected enemy or Communist agents for the purposes of severely frightening other suspected agents, by forcing them to observe the procedure. The almost immediate effects of Metrazol are shocking for many to witness: subjects will shake violently, twisting and turning. They typically arch, jerk and contort their bodies and grimace in pain. With Metrazol, as with electroshock, bone fractures - including broken necks and backs - and joint dislocations are not uncommon, unless strong sedatives are administered beforehand.
A November 1936 Time magazine article seriously questioned the benefits of Metrazol, citing "irreversible shock" as a "great danger." The article described a typical Metrazol injection as such: "A patient receives no food for four or five hours. Then about five cubic centimeters of the drug [Metrazol] are injected into his veins. In about half-a-minute he coughs, casts terrified glances around the room, twitches violently, utters a horse wail, freezes into rigidity with his mouth wide open, arms and legs stiff as boards. Then he goes into convulsions. In one or two minutes the convulsions are over and he gradually passes into a coma, which lasts about an hour. After a series of shocks, his mind may be swept clean of delusions.... A patient is seldom given more than 20 injections and if no improvement is noted after ten treatments, he is usually given up as hopeless."
The Army, the CIA and Metrazol
Army CIC interrogators working with the CIA at prisoner of war camps and safe house locations in post-war Germany on occasion used Metrazol, morphine, heroin and LSD on incarcerated subjects. According to former CIC officer Miles Hunt, several "safe houses and holding areas outside of Frankfurt near Oberursel" - a former Nazi interrogation center taken over by the US - were operated by a "special unit run by Capt. Malcolm S. Hilty, Maj. Mose Hart and Capt. Herbert Sensenig. The unit was especially notorious in its applications of interrogation methods [including the use of electroshock and Metrazol, mescaline, amphetamines and other drugs]." Said Hunt: "The unit took great pride in their nicknames, the 'Rough Boys' and the 'Kraut Gauntlet,' and didn't hold back with any drug or technique ... you name it, they used it." Added Hunt, "Sensenig was really disappointed when it was found that nothing had to be used on [former Reichsmarschall] Herman Goering, who was processed through the camp. Goering needed no inducement to talk."
Eventually, CIC interrogators working in Germany would be assisted in their use of interrogation drugs by several "former" Nazi scientists recruited by the CIA and US State Department as part of Project Paperclip. By early 1952, the CIC's Rough Boys would routinely use Metrazol during interrogations, as well as LSD, mescaline and conventional electroshock units.
Metrazol-like drugs are still used in interrogations today. According to reports from several former noncommissioned Army officers, who served on rendition-related security details in Turkey, Pakistan and Romania, drugs that produce effects quite similar to Metrazol are still used in 2010 by the Pentagon and CIA on enemy combatants and rendered subjects held at the many "black sites" maintained across the globe. Observed one former officer recently, "They would twist up like a pretzel, in unbelievable shapes and jerk and shake like crazy, their eyes nearly popping out of their heads."
In 2008, at the behest of US Sens. Carl Levin, Joe Biden and Chuck Hagel and in reaction to a March 2008 article in The Washington Post, the Pentagon initiated an Inspector General Report on the use of "mind-altering substances by DoD [Department of Defense] Personnel during Interrogations of Detainees and/or Prisoners Captured during the War on Terror." It is not known if the investigation has been completed. Among the more famous recent cases of the use of drugs upon prisoners concerns one-time alleged "enemy combatant" Jose Padilla, who had originally been accused of wanting to set off a "dirty bomb." The charge was later forced, but Padilla was held in solitary confinement for many months and forced to take LSD or other powerful drugs while held in the Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina.
The government has gone to great efforts to keep the public uninformed as regards use of drugs on prisoners. In an article by Carol Rosenberg for McClatchy News in July 2010, Rosenberg reported that, when covering the Guantanamo military commissions trials, when the question of "what psychotropic drugs were given another accused 9/11 conspirator, Ramzi bin al Shibh, the courtroom censor hits a white noise button so reporters viewing from a glass booth can't hear the names of the drugs. Under current Navy instructions for the use of human subjects in research, the undersecretary of the Navy is described as the authority in charge of research concerning "consciousness-altering drugs or mind-control techniques," while at the same time is also responsible for "inherently controversial topics" that might attract media interest or "challenge by interest groups."
Dr. Bender Discovers LSD
In 1955 and1956, Dr. Bender began hearing glowing accounts about the potential of LSD for producing remarkable results in children suffering mental disorders, including autism and schizophrenia. Bender's earlier work with electroshock therapy had brought her into contact with several other prominent physicians who, at the time, were covert contractors with the CIA's MK/ULTRA and Artichoke projects. Primary among these physicians were Drs. Harold A. Abramson, Paul Hoch, James B. Cattell, Joel Elkes, Max Fink, Harris Isbell and Alfred Hubbard. Some of these names may be familiar to readers. Dr. Abramson, a noted allergist who surreptitiously worked for both the US Army and CIA since the late 1940s, was the physician Frank Olson was taken to see, shortly before his murder in New York City in November 1953.
About a year earlier, Drs. Hoch and Cattell were responsible for injecting unwitting New York State Psychiatric Institute patient Harold Blauer with a massive dose of mescaline that killed him. Dr. Elkes was one of the earliest physicians in Europe to experiment with LSD, having requested samples of the drug from Sandoz Chemical Co. in 1949. Elkes was a close associate of Dr. Abraham Wikler, who worked closely with Dr. Harris Isbell at the now-closed Lexington, Kentucky, prison farm, where hundreds of already drug-addicted inmates were given heroin in exchange for their participation in LSD and mescaline experiments underwritten by the CIA and Pentagon. Elkes worked closely with the CIA, Pentagon and Britain's MI6 on drug experiments in England and the United States.
Dr. Fink, who was greatly admired by Bender, is considered the godfather of electroshock therapy in the United States. In the early 1950s and beyond, Fink was a fully cleared CIA Project Artichoke consultant. In 1951, CIA officials under the direction of Paul Gaynor and Morse Allen of the agency's Security Research Service (SRS) that oversaw Artichoke, worked closely with Fink in New York City in efforts to thoroughly explore the merits of electroshock techniques for interrogations. The CIA was especially interested in the use of standard electroshock machines in producing amnesia, inducing subjects to talk and making subjects more prone to hypnotic control. According to one CIA document, Fink told officials "an individual could gradually be reduced through the use to electroshock treatment to the vegetable level."
In addition to Fink, Bender also greatly admired the work of Dr. Lothar B. Kalinowsky, a psychiatrist who also consulted closely with the CIA on electroshock matters. Kalinowsky, who was part Jewish and had fled Germany in 1933, was Fink's close friend and, like Fink, was widely recognized as an expert on electroconvulsive therapy. Kalinowsky met with the CIA's Allen and Gaynor frequently and sometimes was accompanied by Dr. Fink at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where he worked closely with Dr. Hoch.
While it is clear from Dr. Bender's papers that she also considered the early LSD work of "Dr." Alfred M. Hubbard in Vancouver, Canada, to be "very substantial and beneficial," it is important to state here that Hubbard was not a physician nor did he have any formal medical training. Hubbard, a jovial character who sometimes worked with the FBI and CIA, was a strong proponent of the use of LSD. Despite the fact that he had no medical credentials and once served time in prison for smuggling, he hoodwinked the Sandoz Chemical Co. into supplying him such ample amounts of LSD that he dispersed so widely and abundantly that he earned the title "The Johnny Appleseed of LSD." Hubbard's use of LSD in allegedly curing alcoholism is still cited today. How Hubbard so easily passed as a physician is unknown. Even a 1961 paper published by New York Medical College, Department of Psychiatry, and authored by Dr. A.M. Freedman, cited Hubbard's LSD work with "children, primarily delinquents" to have been 85% successful."
Other physicians whom Dr. Bender consulted about the effects of LSD on children were Drs. Ronald A. Sandison, Thomas M. Ling and John Buckman. These three worked in England at both the Chelsea Clinic in London and Potwick Hospital in Worcestershire, outside of London. Sandison is credited with having been the first person to bring LSD into England, this in 1952 after he met Albert Hofmann in Basle, Switzerland, at the Sandoz Chemical laboratories. Hofmann handed Sandison a box of around 600 ampules, each containing 100 micrograms of LSD. Back in England, Sandison shared his psychedelic bounty with associates Drs. Ling and Buckman. Before the year was out, Sandison also turned Hubbard on to LSD, guiding Hubbard through his first trip. Sandison also began a new treatment program at the Gothic-looking Potwick facility that he dubbed Psycholytic Therapy. His program's patients were mostly schizophrenics. In 1958, an LSD treatment unit was established at Potwick. Over the years, it has been reported that the CIA, MI6 and the Macy Foundation secretly helped finance the unit. Dr. Elkes helped by raising about $75,000 for the unit's operation. For the next ten years the unit administered over 15,000 doses of LSD to about 900 patients.
Drs. Buckman and Ling worked closely with Sandison in the Potwick unit. In 1963, Buckman and Ling wrote in a publication, describing "good examples" of the use of LSD in psycholytic psychotherapy: "The patients' experiences under LSD have not supported Marx's dictum that Religion is the opium of the people but rather that there is a deep basic belief in a Supreme Being, whether the religion background be Christian, Jewish or Hindu."
Dr. Buckman also worked at London's Chelsea Clinic, often times treating adults and sometimes children. Buckman believed strongly that "frigidity" in women could be treated successfully with LSD. In 1967, he said of LSD: "Many therapists believe that a transcendental experience - a feeling that it is a good world and one is a part of it - is a curative experience in itself." According to several informed sources in the London, for years MI6, the British intelligence service and the CIA closely monitored the LSD work conducted by Sandison, Ling and Buckman.
Two Sisters, LSD and Dr. Buckman
Marion McGill, today an attorney and college professor in the western United States and her sister, Trudy, were sent in 1960 by their parents to be interviewed by Drs. Ling and Buckman at the Chelsea Clinic in London. At the time, Marion was 13 years old and her sister was 15. Marion says that both her mother and father were "quite taken with the benefits of LSD and thought that we would also benefit from the drug." Both parents had undergone a series of ten LSD "treatments" at the Chelsea clinic. Marion goes on:
"As a 13-year old at the time, my decision-making capacity was very limited. I was, by nature, fairly compliant and docile, rather eager to please my parents. I understood nothing of what was being suggested for me and my 15 year-old sister - namely that we participate in some sort of 'research' that both our parents had also participated in. Whether the word 'experiment' was used, I don't recall. The term 'LSD' was vaguely familiar, however, because my parents were 'taking' this drug as a form of 'quick therapy' - their term for it - that had been recommended by my uncle, a psychiatrist at a well known east coast medical school. Both parents needed therapy, in my view. While highly successful professionally, my father was a tightly wound, rather angry and insecure man, an accomplished academic, but an 'industrial strength narcissist,' as I later called him. My mother was a submissive, obedient, Catholic woman without much identity of her own, other than being a doctor's wife.
"My sister and I, however, were about as 'normal' as any two teenagers could be. We were at the top of our classes in school; both of us had lots of friends, participated in extra curricular activities. We didn't need 'therapy.' We were told we would get a day off from school after each overnight stay at the clinic for this LSD. It was perhaps the prospect of a day off from Catholic girls' school that persuaded us to do it. I wasn't aware of making a 'decision.' The purpose of this program was never explained. There were to be 10 sessions - once a week for 10 weeks. I believe they started in January 1960.
"The experiences at the clinic where the LSD was administered were quite strange. There was a brief 'interview' by Dr. John Buckman, asking banal questions about health issues (none), but providing no information about what to expect from the LSD. There was no mention, for example, of hallucinations or perceptual distortions or anything frightening. I was not informed of any persistent effects, such as nightmares. Certainly the possibility of lasting damage was not mentioned. The word 'experiment' was not used. There was, in other words, no informed consent whatsoever. I was not told that I could refuse to participate, that I could quit at any time (as provided in the Nuremberg Code). Since I was below the age of consent, my parents would have been the ones to agree to this. Indeed, they were the ones to suggest that we be used in these experiments. It would not otherwise have happened. But my parents would never discuss this in later years and never explained why they did it.
"During the 10 sessions, each of which involved an injection, my sister and I were kept in separate bedrooms, darkened rooms, usually with someone present in the room, but I don't know who the person was. Occasionally, my mother was also present. At times, I was so frightened by the hallucinations that I screamed and tried to escape from the room. I remember once actually reaching the hallway and being forcibly put back into the bedroom by my mother. I saw a wild array of images - nightmarish visions, occasionally provoking hysterical laughter, followed immediately by wracking sobs. I had no idea what was happening to me. It was terrifying.
"There was no effort to counsel us during or after each of these sessions. There was no 'debriefing,' no explanation of what was happening or why this was being done to us. Why I did not refuse to participate after I first experienced it, I don't know. But as an adult and later as a professional medical ethicist, I recognized this lack of resistance as a function of childhood itself. Most children who are victims of parental abuse do not know how to resist. They fear rejection by parents more than they fear the abuse, it seems. The 'power differential' is huge between parents and children and the dependence on parents is virtually absolute. We were also, living in London at the time, away from our friends. My sister and I had been told not to talk about what we were doing. We were Catholics, obedient to parents, etc. Our father was a doctor, after all - it was hard to grasp that he would do harm to us or that our mother would. Children just don't think this way initially. A child's dependency usually means trusting one's parents or caregivers.
"Although each individual session was often terrifying, any lasting effects of the LSD unfolded gradually. In the weeks immediately following the final session, I experienced frequent nightmares - visions of crawling insects, horrible masks, etc. I couldn't sleep. I was afraid to shut my eyes. I became afraid of the dark. My parents were dismissive and unsympathetic. Their attitude was, in some ways, more disturbing to me than the experiments themselves because it meant that my parents had known full well that the experience would very likely be frightening - and hadn't cared.
"I discovered that my parents were dishonest and unfeeling in ways that I could not comprehend. They told my sister and me never to talk about the LSD experiences, never to disclose what had happened in London. This further ruptured our relationship with them, a relationship that was, by then, permanently damaged. I was still dependent on them, however and so was my sister.
"Two years after these experiments, during her freshman year in college, my sister suffered a nervous breakdown. I don't know the extent to which the LSD may have precipitated this. But my parents' response to what was probably a mild breakdown from which my sister could have recovered, was coercive and drastic. She had been asking questions about the LSD at this time. She was angry about it. We both were. We talked about it together, but I was afraid to confront our parents. My sister was not. The angrier she became, the more she was 'diagnosed' as a 'psychiatric' case and the more medication she was given. To this day, my sister is heavily medicated. She never fully recovered from that first episode.
"Our parents responded to my sister's anger in a way that frightened me further. I also felt tremendous guilt for not being able to prevent the horrors that my sister endured. Once she was 'classified' as a psychiatric patient, she was lost. Everything that was done to her in the name of 'treatment' seemed to me to be a form of ongoing abuse and torture.
"The fact that our father was a prominent, internationally known and widely respected physician - and his brother, who had introduced us to this LSD horror, was a prominent, internationally known and widely respected psychiatrist - made it impossible to expose them or go against them. Their reputations were more important to them than the health and well being of my sister.
"My own response was simply to leave home. I never trusted my parents again after the London LSD experience. I discovered many other ways in which my father and my uncle lied, covered up, dissembled and eventually threatened me, in order to keep this story from being told.
"On a positive note, the experience informed my career choices in both human rights and medical ethics, but it also made me alert to the ways in which academic medicine was - and is - corrupted by the drug industry itself and by the continuing abuse of human subjects to further the development of drugs as weapons - both for interrogation potential and also, more subtle behavior control on a massive scale. My own experience also sensitized me to the special vulnerability of children and teenagers in the medical environment.
"Even when I subsequently confronted my father with the evidence that LSD had been tested by the CIA for use as a military weapon in the 1950s and 1960s, he dismissed his participation by saying that it was an 'enlightening experience, like visiting an art gallery.' When I pointed out that this was not my experience as a child, he dismissed it, including the presumption that I must be a 'conspiracy theorist' to propose such a thing. At the age of 91, he finally admitted that it had perhaps not been a very good idea to subject my sister and me to LSD.
"Dr. Buckman and Ling were knowing participants in ongoing intelligence-based work with mind altering drugs. I 'met' Buckman in London when I was 13, but encountered him again years later at the university medical school in the United States where he was on the faculty.
"I went to see Dr. Buckman in his office. I asked him what he thought about the ethics of using children in an LSD experiment. At first, he didn't seem to realize who I was. I identified myself as one of his 'subjects' and gave him my business card as a Medical Ethicist and lawyer. He was clearly shocked, stood up, refused to talk to me and told me to leave his office. Shortly thereafter, I received a phone call from my father. His brother, the psychiatrist and colleague of Dr. Buckman, had been alerted to my impromptu visit. Subsequently, both my uncle and my father threatened me, saying they would make sure I lost my university faculty position if I disclosed anything publicly about the LSD experiments in London.
"'You will never work in bioethics again,' they said.
"The response of all these men to the threat of disclosure indicates their lack of ethical scruples, their lack of empathy, their own pathology. I don't know what the exact term would be, but I suspect there is a form of psychological 'doubling' at work - the sort of thing that was described in [Robert Jay] Lifton's book, The Nazi Doctors who were able to ignore their Hippocratic oath to 'first, do no harm,' and to inflict unimaginable horrors on their fellow human beings.
"The loss of my sister has been a life long source of sorrow for me. I attribute it to the LSD and its cover up, whether the chemicals themselves 'caused' her disintegration or not. In law this is called a 'contributing cause.' I learned that people cover up the most awful things, not just within a family but within communities, within universities, within 'polite society.' There is probably no absolute barrier that will prevent these things from being done, but they have to be exposed and called out for what they are, whenever they occur."
Dr. Bender's LSD Experiments on Children
Shortly after deciding to initiate her own LSD experiments on children, Bender attended a conference sponsored by a CIA front group, the Josiah Macy Foundation. The conference focused on LSD research and featured Dr. Harold A. Abramson as a presenter. In 1960, Abramson conducted his own LSD experiments on a group of six children ranging in age from five to 14 years of age. A few short months after the Macy Foundation conference, Dr. Bender was notified that her planned LSD experiments would be partially and surreptitiously funded by the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology (SIHE), another CIA front group then located in Forest Hills, New York. The Society, headed by James L. Monroe, a former US Air Force officer who had worked on top-secret psychological warfare and propaganda projects, oversaw about 55 top-secret experiments underwritten by the CIA. These projects involved LSD, ESP, black magic, astrology, psychological warfare, media manipulation, and other subjects. Apparently, Bender's work with children and LSD raised some concerns at the CIA's Technical Services Division (TSD). A 1961 TSD memo written to Monroe questioned the "operational benefits of Dr. Bender's work as related to children and LSD," and requested to be kept "closely appraised of the possible links between Dr. Bender's project and those being conducted under separate MK/ULTRA funding at designated prisons in New York and elsewhere."
In 1960, Dr. Bender launched her first experiments with LSD and children. They were conducted within the Children's Unit, Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens, New York. The LSD she used was supplied by Dr. Rudolph P. Bircher of the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company. (Dr. Bircher also provided Bender with UML-491, also a Sandoz-produced product, very much like LSD but sometimes "dreamier" in effect and longer lasting.) Her initial group of young subjects consisted of 14 children diagnosed schizophrenic, all under the age of 11. (Because diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, autism, and other disorders have changed over the decades, one cannot assess what actual conditions these children really had.) There were 11 boys and three girls, ranging in age from six to ten years old.
Jean Marie is almost seven years old. She came here nearly a year ago after her parents abandoned her to the care of an aunt who had no interest in raising her. Marie, who prefers to be called Jean, is shy, withdrawn, and distrustful of most adults she encounters. There are reports she may have been sexually molested by her uncle ... Despite her withdrawn nature she smiles easily, and enjoys the company of other children. After receiving LSD on three occasions earlier this month, Marie ceased smiling at all and lost any interest in others her age ... In the past week, she seems to have become easily agitated and has lost any interest in reading, something she seemed to very much enjoy before treatment.
In a published report on her 196 LSD experiments with 14 "autistic schizophrenic" children, Bender states she initially gave each of the children 25 mcg. of LSD "intramuscularly while under continuous observation." She writes: "The two oldest boys, over ten years, near or in early puberty, reacted with disturbed anxious behavior. The oldest and most disturbed received Amytal sodium 150 mg. intramuscularly and returned to his usual behavior." Both boys were then excluded from the experiment.
The 12 remaining children were then given injections of 25 mcg. of LSD and then days later were each given 100 mcg. of LSD once a week. Bender's report states: "Then it was increased gradually to twice and three times a week as no untoward side-effects were noticed.... Finally, it was given daily and this continued for six weeks until the time of this report."
Bender's findings and conclusions concerning her LSD experiments indicated she found the use of the drug promising. Bender reported: "In general, they [the children] were happier; their mood was 'high' in the hours following the ingestion of the drug ... they have become more spontaneously playful with balls and balloons ... their color is rosy rather than blue or pale and they have gained weight." Bender concluded: "The use of these drugs [LSD, UML-401, UML-491] ... will give us more knowledge about both the basic schizophrenic process and the defensive autism in children and also about the reaction of these dilysergic acid derivatives as central and autonomic nervous system stimulants and serotonin antagonists. Hopefully these drugs will also contribute to our efforts to find better therapeutic agents for early childhood schizophrenia."
In an article published in 1970, Dr. Bender reported on the results of LSD dosing upon "two adolescent boys who were mildly schizophrenic." She reported that the boys experienced perceptual distortions. They thought the researchers were making faces at them, that their pencils were becoming "rubbery," and one boy reported the other boy's face had turned green. The boys began to complain that they were being experimented upon. Even so, Bender and her associate continued the two male adolescents on a regimen of 150 mcg. per day, in divided doses, of LSD. While one of the boys supposedly "benefited very much," Bender reported that he later returned to the hospital as "a disturbed adult schizophrenic." The other boy kept complaining that he was being experimented upon and they stopped giving him LSD, not because of the drug's effects itself, Bender explained, but "because of the boy's attitude towards it," which she attributed to "his own psychopathology."
Dr. Bender's LSD experiments continued into the late 1960s and, during that time, continued to include multiple experiments on children with UML-401, a little known LSD-type drug provided to her by the Sandoz Company, as well as UML-491, also a Sandoz product. Bender's reports on her LSD experiments give no indication of whether the parents or legal guardians of the subject children were aware of, or consented to, the experiments. Without doubt, parents or guardians were never informed that the CIA underwrote Bender's work. Over the years, there have been multiple reports that many of Bender's subject children were either "wards of the State" or orphans, but the available literature on the experiments reveals nothing on this. The same literature makes it obvious that the children had been confined to the Creedmoor State Hospital for long periods of time and that many, if discharged, needed "suitable homes or placements in the community." There is also no evidence that any follow-up studies were conducted on any of the children experimented upon by Dr. Bender. Today, Dr. Bender is best known and highly regarded in some circles as the creator of the Bender-Gestalt Test, which measures motor skills in children.
On Bender's use of LSD on children, Dr. Leon Eisenberg said years later: "She did all sorts of things. Lauretta Bender reached success in her career long before randomized controlled trials had even been heard of. She didn't see the need for trials of drugs because she was convinced she knew what worked." (See: "A History of Autism: Conversations with the Pioneers" by Adam Feinstein, Wiley-Blanchard, 2010.) Many other physicians speaking privately were far less diplomatic in condemning Bender's LSD work, but, still today, many are reluctant to criticize her, and, remarkably, many of the aging stalwarts of the arguable "virtues" and "potential" of LSD continue to cite her work with children as groundbreaking science.
Today, nearly 60 years beyond the horrors of Dr. Bender's CIA-sponsored experiments on children, few people are aware that they were conducted. For most people, regardless of their awareness of the experiments, it is difficult to fathom how intelligent, highly educated physicians and scientists could partake in such brutal, uncaring, unethical and illegal experiments on children. What was the basis of their motivation? Was it the quest for some sort of elusive medical grail? Was it for economic gain? Or was it simply the result of a misguided search for knowledge that appeared so infinitely important that any sense of compassion and respect for human rights and dignity was cast aside in the name of a higher goal or good - a search at times so exhilarating with the sense that one is at the precipice of a momentous discovery that any semblance of respect for humankind was thrown aside?
One can easily come to any and all these conclusions simply by reading the professional papers of such scientists and researchers. Not once do any of these papers express concern for the subjects at hand or denote any pangs of conscience at violating any oaths, codes and statutes regarding patient rights, human rights or human dignity. That America's most shameful period of human experimentation, the years 1950 through to about 1979, came on the heels of the making and adoption of the Nuremberg Codes only adds to the shame and hypocrisy. Today, human experimentation is still aggressively conducted by US government-sponsored and employed physicians and scientists regardless of those codes, which came directly out of the shocking madness of the Nazi era. That government-sponsored experimentation still occurs makes a mockery of any governmental efforts, however valid, to protect people from science run amok - and a nation that uses its young, its children, for such pursuits is a nation whose commitment to human rights and democratic principles should be seriously questioned and challenged.
(The names Marion McGill and that of her sister Trudy, are pseudonyms. Marion is a highly respected attorney and college professor, who asked that her real name not be used in this article. All other names in this article are real.)
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H.P. Albarelli Jr. and Dr. Jeffrey S. Kaye, t r u t h o u t | Investigative Report
http://www.truth-out.org/the-hidden-tragedy-cias-experiments-children62208
Bobby is seven years old, but this is not the first time he has been subjected to electroshock. It's his third time. In all, over the next year, Bobby will experience eight electroshock sessions. Placed on the examining table, he is held down by two male attendants while the physician places a solution on his temples. Bobby struggles with the two men holding him down, but his efforts are useless. He cries out and tries to pull away. One of the attendants tries to force a thick wedge of rubber into his mouth. He turns his head sharply away and cries out, "Let me go, please. I don't want to be here. Please, let me go." Bobby's physician looks irritated and she tells him, "Come on now, Bobby, try to act like a big boy and be still and relax." Bobby turns his head away from the woman and opens his mouth for the wedge that will prevent him from biting through his tongue. He begins to cry silently, his small shoulders shaking and he stiffens his body against what he knows is coming.
Mary is only five years old. She sits on a small, straight-backed chair, moving her legs back and forth, humming the same four notes over and over and over. Her head, framed in a tangled mass of golden curls, moves up and down with each note. For the first three years of her life, Mary was thought to be a mostly normal child. Then, after she began behaving oddly, she had been handed off to a foster family. Her father and mother didn't want her any longer. She had become too strange for her father, whose alcoholism clouded any awareness of his young daughter. Mary's mother had never wanted her anyway and was happy to have her placed in another home. When the LSD Mary has been given begins to have its effects, she stops moving her head and legs and sits staring at the wall. She doesn't move at all. After about ten minutes, she looks at the nearby physician observing her, and says, "God isn't coming back today. He's too busy. He won't be back here for weeks."
From early 1940 to 1953, Dr. Lauretta Bender, a highly respected child neuropsychiatrist practicing at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, experimented extensively with electroshock therapy on children who had been diagnosed with "autistic schizophrenia." In all, it has been reported that Bender administered electroconvulsive therapy to at least 100 children ranging in age from three years old to 12 years, with some reports indicating the total may be twice that number. One source reports that, inclusive of Bender's work, electroconvulsive treatment was used on more than 500 children at Bellevue Hospital from 1942 to 1956, and then at Creedmoor State Hospital Children's Service from 1956 to 1969. Bender was a confident and dogmatic woman, who bristled at criticism, oftentimes refused to acknowledge reality even when it stood starkly before her.
Despite publicly claiming good results with electroshock treatment, privately Bender said she was seriously disappointed in the aftereffects and results shown by the subject children. Indeed, the condition of some of the children appeared to have only worsened. One six-year-old boy, after being shocked several times, went from being a shy, withdrawn child to acting increasingly aggressive and violent. Another child, a seven-year-old girl, following five electroshock sessions had become nearly catatonic.
Years later, another of Bender's young patients who became overly aggressive after about 20 treatments, now grown, was convicted in court as a "multiple murderer." Others, in adulthood, reportedly were in and of trouble and prison for a battery of petty and violent crimes. A 1954 scientific study of about 50 of Bender's young electroshock patients, conducted by two psychologists, found that nearly all were worse off after the "therapy" and that some had become suicidal after treatment. One of the children studied in 1954 was the son of well-known writer Jacqueline Susann, author of the bestselling novel "Valley of the Dolls." Susann's son, Guy, was diagnosed with autism shortly after birth and, when he was three years old, Dr. Bender convinced Susann and her husband that Guy could be successfully treated with electroshock therapy. Guy returned home from Bender's care a nearly lifeless child. Susann later told people that Bender had "destroyed" her son. Guy has been confined to institutions since his treatment.
To their credit, some of Dr. Bender's colleagues considered her use of electroshock on children "scandalous," but few colleagues spoke out against her, a situation still today common among those in the medical profession. Said Dr. Leon Eisenberg, a widely respected physician and true pioneer in the study of autistic children, "[Lauretta Bender] claimed that some of these children recovered [because of her use of shock treatment]. I once wrote a paper in which I referred to several studies by [Dr. E. R.] Clardy. He was at Rockwin State Hospital - the back up to Bellevue - and he described the arrival of these children. He considered them psychotic and perhaps worse off then before the treatment." (This writer could find no case where any of Bender's colleagues spoke out against her decidedly racist viewpoints. Bender made it quite clear that she felt that African-Americans were best characterized by their "capacity for laziness" and "ability to dance," both features, Bender claimed, of the "specific brain impulses" of African-Americans.)
About the same time Dr. Bender was conducting her electroshock experiments, she was also widely experimenting on autistic and schizophrenic children with what she termed other "treatment endeavors." These included use of a wide array of psycho-pharmaceutical agents, several provided to her by the Sandoz Chemical Co. in Basel, Switzerland, as well as Metrazol, sub-shock insulin therapy, amphetamines and anticonvulsants. Metrazol was a trade name for pentylenetetrazol, a drug used as a circulatory and respiratory stimulant. High doses cause convulsions, as discovered in 1934 by the Hungarian-American neurologist and psychiatrist Ladislas J. Meduna.
Metrazol had been used in convulsive therapy, but was never considered to be effective, and side effects such as seizures were difficult to avoid. The medical records of several patients who were confined at Vermont State Hospital, a public mental facility, reveal that Metrazol was administered to them by CIA contractor Dr. Robert Hyde on numerous occasions in order "to address overly aggressive behavior." One of these patients, Karen Wetmore, received the drug on a number of occasions for no discernible medical reason. During the same ten-year period in which Metrazol was used by the Vermont State Hospital, patient deaths skyrocketed. In 1982, the FDA revoked its approval of Metrazol.
Here it should be noted that, during the cold war years, CIA and Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) interrogators, working as part of projects Bluebird and Artichoke, sometimes injected large amounts of Metrazol into selected enemy or Communist agents for the purposes of severely frightening other suspected agents, by forcing them to observe the procedure. The almost immediate effects of Metrazol are shocking for many to witness: subjects will shake violently, twisting and turning. They typically arch, jerk and contort their bodies and grimace in pain. With Metrazol, as with electroshock, bone fractures - including broken necks and backs - and joint dislocations are not uncommon, unless strong sedatives are administered beforehand.
A November 1936 Time magazine article seriously questioned the benefits of Metrazol, citing "irreversible shock" as a "great danger." The article described a typical Metrazol injection as such: "A patient receives no food for four or five hours. Then about five cubic centimeters of the drug [Metrazol] are injected into his veins. In about half-a-minute he coughs, casts terrified glances around the room, twitches violently, utters a horse wail, freezes into rigidity with his mouth wide open, arms and legs stiff as boards. Then he goes into convulsions. In one or two minutes the convulsions are over and he gradually passes into a coma, which lasts about an hour. After a series of shocks, his mind may be swept clean of delusions.... A patient is seldom given more than 20 injections and if no improvement is noted after ten treatments, he is usually given up as hopeless."
The Army, the CIA and Metrazol
Army CIC interrogators working with the CIA at prisoner of war camps and safe house locations in post-war Germany on occasion used Metrazol, morphine, heroin and LSD on incarcerated subjects. According to former CIC officer Miles Hunt, several "safe houses and holding areas outside of Frankfurt near Oberursel" - a former Nazi interrogation center taken over by the US - were operated by a "special unit run by Capt. Malcolm S. Hilty, Maj. Mose Hart and Capt. Herbert Sensenig. The unit was especially notorious in its applications of interrogation methods [including the use of electroshock and Metrazol, mescaline, amphetamines and other drugs]." Said Hunt: "The unit took great pride in their nicknames, the 'Rough Boys' and the 'Kraut Gauntlet,' and didn't hold back with any drug or technique ... you name it, they used it." Added Hunt, "Sensenig was really disappointed when it was found that nothing had to be used on [former Reichsmarschall] Herman Goering, who was processed through the camp. Goering needed no inducement to talk."
Eventually, CIC interrogators working in Germany would be assisted in their use of interrogation drugs by several "former" Nazi scientists recruited by the CIA and US State Department as part of Project Paperclip. By early 1952, the CIC's Rough Boys would routinely use Metrazol during interrogations, as well as LSD, mescaline and conventional electroshock units.
Metrazol-like drugs are still used in interrogations today. According to reports from several former noncommissioned Army officers, who served on rendition-related security details in Turkey, Pakistan and Romania, drugs that produce effects quite similar to Metrazol are still used in 2010 by the Pentagon and CIA on enemy combatants and rendered subjects held at the many "black sites" maintained across the globe. Observed one former officer recently, "They would twist up like a pretzel, in unbelievable shapes and jerk and shake like crazy, their eyes nearly popping out of their heads."
In 2008, at the behest of US Sens. Carl Levin, Joe Biden and Chuck Hagel and in reaction to a March 2008 article in The Washington Post, the Pentagon initiated an Inspector General Report on the use of "mind-altering substances by DoD [Department of Defense] Personnel during Interrogations of Detainees and/or Prisoners Captured during the War on Terror." It is not known if the investigation has been completed. Among the more famous recent cases of the use of drugs upon prisoners concerns one-time alleged "enemy combatant" Jose Padilla, who had originally been accused of wanting to set off a "dirty bomb." The charge was later forced, but Padilla was held in solitary confinement for many months and forced to take LSD or other powerful drugs while held in the Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina.
The government has gone to great efforts to keep the public uninformed as regards use of drugs on prisoners. In an article by Carol Rosenberg for McClatchy News in July 2010, Rosenberg reported that, when covering the Guantanamo military commissions trials, when the question of "what psychotropic drugs were given another accused 9/11 conspirator, Ramzi bin al Shibh, the courtroom censor hits a white noise button so reporters viewing from a glass booth can't hear the names of the drugs. Under current Navy instructions for the use of human subjects in research, the undersecretary of the Navy is described as the authority in charge of research concerning "consciousness-altering drugs or mind-control techniques," while at the same time is also responsible for "inherently controversial topics" that might attract media interest or "challenge by interest groups."
Dr. Bender Discovers LSD
In 1955 and1956, Dr. Bender began hearing glowing accounts about the potential of LSD for producing remarkable results in children suffering mental disorders, including autism and schizophrenia. Bender's earlier work with electroshock therapy had brought her into contact with several other prominent physicians who, at the time, were covert contractors with the CIA's MK/ULTRA and Artichoke projects. Primary among these physicians were Drs. Harold A. Abramson, Paul Hoch, James B. Cattell, Joel Elkes, Max Fink, Harris Isbell and Alfred Hubbard. Some of these names may be familiar to readers. Dr. Abramson, a noted allergist who surreptitiously worked for both the US Army and CIA since the late 1940s, was the physician Frank Olson was taken to see, shortly before his murder in New York City in November 1953.
About a year earlier, Drs. Hoch and Cattell were responsible for injecting unwitting New York State Psychiatric Institute patient Harold Blauer with a massive dose of mescaline that killed him. Dr. Elkes was one of the earliest physicians in Europe to experiment with LSD, having requested samples of the drug from Sandoz Chemical Co. in 1949. Elkes was a close associate of Dr. Abraham Wikler, who worked closely with Dr. Harris Isbell at the now-closed Lexington, Kentucky, prison farm, where hundreds of already drug-addicted inmates were given heroin in exchange for their participation in LSD and mescaline experiments underwritten by the CIA and Pentagon. Elkes worked closely with the CIA, Pentagon and Britain's MI6 on drug experiments in England and the United States.
Dr. Fink, who was greatly admired by Bender, is considered the godfather of electroshock therapy in the United States. In the early 1950s and beyond, Fink was a fully cleared CIA Project Artichoke consultant. In 1951, CIA officials under the direction of Paul Gaynor and Morse Allen of the agency's Security Research Service (SRS) that oversaw Artichoke, worked closely with Fink in New York City in efforts to thoroughly explore the merits of electroshock techniques for interrogations. The CIA was especially interested in the use of standard electroshock machines in producing amnesia, inducing subjects to talk and making subjects more prone to hypnotic control. According to one CIA document, Fink told officials "an individual could gradually be reduced through the use to electroshock treatment to the vegetable level."
In addition to Fink, Bender also greatly admired the work of Dr. Lothar B. Kalinowsky, a psychiatrist who also consulted closely with the CIA on electroshock matters. Kalinowsky, who was part Jewish and had fled Germany in 1933, was Fink's close friend and, like Fink, was widely recognized as an expert on electroconvulsive therapy. Kalinowsky met with the CIA's Allen and Gaynor frequently and sometimes was accompanied by Dr. Fink at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where he worked closely with Dr. Hoch.
While it is clear from Dr. Bender's papers that she also considered the early LSD work of "Dr." Alfred M. Hubbard in Vancouver, Canada, to be "very substantial and beneficial," it is important to state here that Hubbard was not a physician nor did he have any formal medical training. Hubbard, a jovial character who sometimes worked with the FBI and CIA, was a strong proponent of the use of LSD. Despite the fact that he had no medical credentials and once served time in prison for smuggling, he hoodwinked the Sandoz Chemical Co. into supplying him such ample amounts of LSD that he dispersed so widely and abundantly that he earned the title "The Johnny Appleseed of LSD." Hubbard's use of LSD in allegedly curing alcoholism is still cited today. How Hubbard so easily passed as a physician is unknown. Even a 1961 paper published by New York Medical College, Department of Psychiatry, and authored by Dr. A.M. Freedman, cited Hubbard's LSD work with "children, primarily delinquents" to have been 85% successful."
Other physicians whom Dr. Bender consulted about the effects of LSD on children were Drs. Ronald A. Sandison, Thomas M. Ling and John Buckman. These three worked in England at both the Chelsea Clinic in London and Potwick Hospital in Worcestershire, outside of London. Sandison is credited with having been the first person to bring LSD into England, this in 1952 after he met Albert Hofmann in Basle, Switzerland, at the Sandoz Chemical laboratories. Hofmann handed Sandison a box of around 600 ampules, each containing 100 micrograms of LSD. Back in England, Sandison shared his psychedelic bounty with associates Drs. Ling and Buckman. Before the year was out, Sandison also turned Hubbard on to LSD, guiding Hubbard through his first trip. Sandison also began a new treatment program at the Gothic-looking Potwick facility that he dubbed Psycholytic Therapy. His program's patients were mostly schizophrenics. In 1958, an LSD treatment unit was established at Potwick. Over the years, it has been reported that the CIA, MI6 and the Macy Foundation secretly helped finance the unit. Dr. Elkes helped by raising about $75,000 for the unit's operation. For the next ten years the unit administered over 15,000 doses of LSD to about 900 patients.
Drs. Buckman and Ling worked closely with Sandison in the Potwick unit. In 1963, Buckman and Ling wrote in a publication, describing "good examples" of the use of LSD in psycholytic psychotherapy: "The patients' experiences under LSD have not supported Marx's dictum that Religion is the opium of the people but rather that there is a deep basic belief in a Supreme Being, whether the religion background be Christian, Jewish or Hindu."
Dr. Buckman also worked at London's Chelsea Clinic, often times treating adults and sometimes children. Buckman believed strongly that "frigidity" in women could be treated successfully with LSD. In 1967, he said of LSD: "Many therapists believe that a transcendental experience - a feeling that it is a good world and one is a part of it - is a curative experience in itself." According to several informed sources in the London, for years MI6, the British intelligence service and the CIA closely monitored the LSD work conducted by Sandison, Ling and Buckman.
Two Sisters, LSD and Dr. Buckman
Marion McGill, today an attorney and college professor in the western United States and her sister, Trudy, were sent in 1960 by their parents to be interviewed by Drs. Ling and Buckman at the Chelsea Clinic in London. At the time, Marion was 13 years old and her sister was 15. Marion says that both her mother and father were "quite taken with the benefits of LSD and thought that we would also benefit from the drug." Both parents had undergone a series of ten LSD "treatments" at the Chelsea clinic. Marion goes on:
"As a 13-year old at the time, my decision-making capacity was very limited. I was, by nature, fairly compliant and docile, rather eager to please my parents. I understood nothing of what was being suggested for me and my 15 year-old sister - namely that we participate in some sort of 'research' that both our parents had also participated in. Whether the word 'experiment' was used, I don't recall. The term 'LSD' was vaguely familiar, however, because my parents were 'taking' this drug as a form of 'quick therapy' - their term for it - that had been recommended by my uncle, a psychiatrist at a well known east coast medical school. Both parents needed therapy, in my view. While highly successful professionally, my father was a tightly wound, rather angry and insecure man, an accomplished academic, but an 'industrial strength narcissist,' as I later called him. My mother was a submissive, obedient, Catholic woman without much identity of her own, other than being a doctor's wife.
"My sister and I, however, were about as 'normal' as any two teenagers could be. We were at the top of our classes in school; both of us had lots of friends, participated in extra curricular activities. We didn't need 'therapy.' We were told we would get a day off from school after each overnight stay at the clinic for this LSD. It was perhaps the prospect of a day off from Catholic girls' school that persuaded us to do it. I wasn't aware of making a 'decision.' The purpose of this program was never explained. There were to be 10 sessions - once a week for 10 weeks. I believe they started in January 1960.
"The experiences at the clinic where the LSD was administered were quite strange. There was a brief 'interview' by Dr. John Buckman, asking banal questions about health issues (none), but providing no information about what to expect from the LSD. There was no mention, for example, of hallucinations or perceptual distortions or anything frightening. I was not informed of any persistent effects, such as nightmares. Certainly the possibility of lasting damage was not mentioned. The word 'experiment' was not used. There was, in other words, no informed consent whatsoever. I was not told that I could refuse to participate, that I could quit at any time (as provided in the Nuremberg Code). Since I was below the age of consent, my parents would have been the ones to agree to this. Indeed, they were the ones to suggest that we be used in these experiments. It would not otherwise have happened. But my parents would never discuss this in later years and never explained why they did it.
"During the 10 sessions, each of which involved an injection, my sister and I were kept in separate bedrooms, darkened rooms, usually with someone present in the room, but I don't know who the person was. Occasionally, my mother was also present. At times, I was so frightened by the hallucinations that I screamed and tried to escape from the room. I remember once actually reaching the hallway and being forcibly put back into the bedroom by my mother. I saw a wild array of images - nightmarish visions, occasionally provoking hysterical laughter, followed immediately by wracking sobs. I had no idea what was happening to me. It was terrifying.
"There was no effort to counsel us during or after each of these sessions. There was no 'debriefing,' no explanation of what was happening or why this was being done to us. Why I did not refuse to participate after I first experienced it, I don't know. But as an adult and later as a professional medical ethicist, I recognized this lack of resistance as a function of childhood itself. Most children who are victims of parental abuse do not know how to resist. They fear rejection by parents more than they fear the abuse, it seems. The 'power differential' is huge between parents and children and the dependence on parents is virtually absolute. We were also, living in London at the time, away from our friends. My sister and I had been told not to talk about what we were doing. We were Catholics, obedient to parents, etc. Our father was a doctor, after all - it was hard to grasp that he would do harm to us or that our mother would. Children just don't think this way initially. A child's dependency usually means trusting one's parents or caregivers.
"Although each individual session was often terrifying, any lasting effects of the LSD unfolded gradually. In the weeks immediately following the final session, I experienced frequent nightmares - visions of crawling insects, horrible masks, etc. I couldn't sleep. I was afraid to shut my eyes. I became afraid of the dark. My parents were dismissive and unsympathetic. Their attitude was, in some ways, more disturbing to me than the experiments themselves because it meant that my parents had known full well that the experience would very likely be frightening - and hadn't cared.
"I discovered that my parents were dishonest and unfeeling in ways that I could not comprehend. They told my sister and me never to talk about the LSD experiences, never to disclose what had happened in London. This further ruptured our relationship with them, a relationship that was, by then, permanently damaged. I was still dependent on them, however and so was my sister.
"Two years after these experiments, during her freshman year in college, my sister suffered a nervous breakdown. I don't know the extent to which the LSD may have precipitated this. But my parents' response to what was probably a mild breakdown from which my sister could have recovered, was coercive and drastic. She had been asking questions about the LSD at this time. She was angry about it. We both were. We talked about it together, but I was afraid to confront our parents. My sister was not. The angrier she became, the more she was 'diagnosed' as a 'psychiatric' case and the more medication she was given. To this day, my sister is heavily medicated. She never fully recovered from that first episode.
"Our parents responded to my sister's anger in a way that frightened me further. I also felt tremendous guilt for not being able to prevent the horrors that my sister endured. Once she was 'classified' as a psychiatric patient, she was lost. Everything that was done to her in the name of 'treatment' seemed to me to be a form of ongoing abuse and torture.
"The fact that our father was a prominent, internationally known and widely respected physician - and his brother, who had introduced us to this LSD horror, was a prominent, internationally known and widely respected psychiatrist - made it impossible to expose them or go against them. Their reputations were more important to them than the health and well being of my sister.
"My own response was simply to leave home. I never trusted my parents again after the London LSD experience. I discovered many other ways in which my father and my uncle lied, covered up, dissembled and eventually threatened me, in order to keep this story from being told.
"On a positive note, the experience informed my career choices in both human rights and medical ethics, but it also made me alert to the ways in which academic medicine was - and is - corrupted by the drug industry itself and by the continuing abuse of human subjects to further the development of drugs as weapons - both for interrogation potential and also, more subtle behavior control on a massive scale. My own experience also sensitized me to the special vulnerability of children and teenagers in the medical environment.
"Even when I subsequently confronted my father with the evidence that LSD had been tested by the CIA for use as a military weapon in the 1950s and 1960s, he dismissed his participation by saying that it was an 'enlightening experience, like visiting an art gallery.' When I pointed out that this was not my experience as a child, he dismissed it, including the presumption that I must be a 'conspiracy theorist' to propose such a thing. At the age of 91, he finally admitted that it had perhaps not been a very good idea to subject my sister and me to LSD.
"Dr. Buckman and Ling were knowing participants in ongoing intelligence-based work with mind altering drugs. I 'met' Buckman in London when I was 13, but encountered him again years later at the university medical school in the United States where he was on the faculty.
"I went to see Dr. Buckman in his office. I asked him what he thought about the ethics of using children in an LSD experiment. At first, he didn't seem to realize who I was. I identified myself as one of his 'subjects' and gave him my business card as a Medical Ethicist and lawyer. He was clearly shocked, stood up, refused to talk to me and told me to leave his office. Shortly thereafter, I received a phone call from my father. His brother, the psychiatrist and colleague of Dr. Buckman, had been alerted to my impromptu visit. Subsequently, both my uncle and my father threatened me, saying they would make sure I lost my university faculty position if I disclosed anything publicly about the LSD experiments in London.
"'You will never work in bioethics again,' they said.
"The response of all these men to the threat of disclosure indicates their lack of ethical scruples, their lack of empathy, their own pathology. I don't know what the exact term would be, but I suspect there is a form of psychological 'doubling' at work - the sort of thing that was described in [Robert Jay] Lifton's book, The Nazi Doctors who were able to ignore their Hippocratic oath to 'first, do no harm,' and to inflict unimaginable horrors on their fellow human beings.
"The loss of my sister has been a life long source of sorrow for me. I attribute it to the LSD and its cover up, whether the chemicals themselves 'caused' her disintegration or not. In law this is called a 'contributing cause.' I learned that people cover up the most awful things, not just within a family but within communities, within universities, within 'polite society.' There is probably no absolute barrier that will prevent these things from being done, but they have to be exposed and called out for what they are, whenever they occur."
Dr. Bender's LSD Experiments on Children
Shortly after deciding to initiate her own LSD experiments on children, Bender attended a conference sponsored by a CIA front group, the Josiah Macy Foundation. The conference focused on LSD research and featured Dr. Harold A. Abramson as a presenter. In 1960, Abramson conducted his own LSD experiments on a group of six children ranging in age from five to 14 years of age. A few short months after the Macy Foundation conference, Dr. Bender was notified that her planned LSD experiments would be partially and surreptitiously funded by the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology (SIHE), another CIA front group then located in Forest Hills, New York. The Society, headed by James L. Monroe, a former US Air Force officer who had worked on top-secret psychological warfare and propaganda projects, oversaw about 55 top-secret experiments underwritten by the CIA. These projects involved LSD, ESP, black magic, astrology, psychological warfare, media manipulation, and other subjects. Apparently, Bender's work with children and LSD raised some concerns at the CIA's Technical Services Division (TSD). A 1961 TSD memo written to Monroe questioned the "operational benefits of Dr. Bender's work as related to children and LSD," and requested to be kept "closely appraised of the possible links between Dr. Bender's project and those being conducted under separate MK/ULTRA funding at designated prisons in New York and elsewhere."
In 1960, Dr. Bender launched her first experiments with LSD and children. They were conducted within the Children's Unit, Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens, New York. The LSD she used was supplied by Dr. Rudolph P. Bircher of the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company. (Dr. Bircher also provided Bender with UML-491, also a Sandoz-produced product, very much like LSD but sometimes "dreamier" in effect and longer lasting.) Her initial group of young subjects consisted of 14 children diagnosed schizophrenic, all under the age of 11. (Because diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, autism, and other disorders have changed over the decades, one cannot assess what actual conditions these children really had.) There were 11 boys and three girls, ranging in age from six to ten years old.
Jean Marie is almost seven years old. She came here nearly a year ago after her parents abandoned her to the care of an aunt who had no interest in raising her. Marie, who prefers to be called Jean, is shy, withdrawn, and distrustful of most adults she encounters. There are reports she may have been sexually molested by her uncle ... Despite her withdrawn nature she smiles easily, and enjoys the company of other children. After receiving LSD on three occasions earlier this month, Marie ceased smiling at all and lost any interest in others her age ... In the past week, she seems to have become easily agitated and has lost any interest in reading, something she seemed to very much enjoy before treatment.
In a published report on her 196 LSD experiments with 14 "autistic schizophrenic" children, Bender states she initially gave each of the children 25 mcg. of LSD "intramuscularly while under continuous observation." She writes: "The two oldest boys, over ten years, near or in early puberty, reacted with disturbed anxious behavior. The oldest and most disturbed received Amytal sodium 150 mg. intramuscularly and returned to his usual behavior." Both boys were then excluded from the experiment.
The 12 remaining children were then given injections of 25 mcg. of LSD and then days later were each given 100 mcg. of LSD once a week. Bender's report states: "Then it was increased gradually to twice and three times a week as no untoward side-effects were noticed.... Finally, it was given daily and this continued for six weeks until the time of this report."
Bender's findings and conclusions concerning her LSD experiments indicated she found the use of the drug promising. Bender reported: "In general, they [the children] were happier; their mood was 'high' in the hours following the ingestion of the drug ... they have become more spontaneously playful with balls and balloons ... their color is rosy rather than blue or pale and they have gained weight." Bender concluded: "The use of these drugs [LSD, UML-401, UML-491] ... will give us more knowledge about both the basic schizophrenic process and the defensive autism in children and also about the reaction of these dilysergic acid derivatives as central and autonomic nervous system stimulants and serotonin antagonists. Hopefully these drugs will also contribute to our efforts to find better therapeutic agents for early childhood schizophrenia."
In an article published in 1970, Dr. Bender reported on the results of LSD dosing upon "two adolescent boys who were mildly schizophrenic." She reported that the boys experienced perceptual distortions. They thought the researchers were making faces at them, that their pencils were becoming "rubbery," and one boy reported the other boy's face had turned green. The boys began to complain that they were being experimented upon. Even so, Bender and her associate continued the two male adolescents on a regimen of 150 mcg. per day, in divided doses, of LSD. While one of the boys supposedly "benefited very much," Bender reported that he later returned to the hospital as "a disturbed adult schizophrenic." The other boy kept complaining that he was being experimented upon and they stopped giving him LSD, not because of the drug's effects itself, Bender explained, but "because of the boy's attitude towards it," which she attributed to "his own psychopathology."
Dr. Bender's LSD experiments continued into the late 1960s and, during that time, continued to include multiple experiments on children with UML-401, a little known LSD-type drug provided to her by the Sandoz Company, as well as UML-491, also a Sandoz product. Bender's reports on her LSD experiments give no indication of whether the parents or legal guardians of the subject children were aware of, or consented to, the experiments. Without doubt, parents or guardians were never informed that the CIA underwrote Bender's work. Over the years, there have been multiple reports that many of Bender's subject children were either "wards of the State" or orphans, but the available literature on the experiments reveals nothing on this. The same literature makes it obvious that the children had been confined to the Creedmoor State Hospital for long periods of time and that many, if discharged, needed "suitable homes or placements in the community." There is also no evidence that any follow-up studies were conducted on any of the children experimented upon by Dr. Bender. Today, Dr. Bender is best known and highly regarded in some circles as the creator of the Bender-Gestalt Test, which measures motor skills in children.
On Bender's use of LSD on children, Dr. Leon Eisenberg said years later: "She did all sorts of things. Lauretta Bender reached success in her career long before randomized controlled trials had even been heard of. She didn't see the need for trials of drugs because she was convinced she knew what worked." (See: "A History of Autism: Conversations with the Pioneers" by Adam Feinstein, Wiley-Blanchard, 2010.) Many other physicians speaking privately were far less diplomatic in condemning Bender's LSD work, but, still today, many are reluctant to criticize her, and, remarkably, many of the aging stalwarts of the arguable "virtues" and "potential" of LSD continue to cite her work with children as groundbreaking science.
Today, nearly 60 years beyond the horrors of Dr. Bender's CIA-sponsored experiments on children, few people are aware that they were conducted. For most people, regardless of their awareness of the experiments, it is difficult to fathom how intelligent, highly educated physicians and scientists could partake in such brutal, uncaring, unethical and illegal experiments on children. What was the basis of their motivation? Was it the quest for some sort of elusive medical grail? Was it for economic gain? Or was it simply the result of a misguided search for knowledge that appeared so infinitely important that any sense of compassion and respect for human rights and dignity was cast aside in the name of a higher goal or good - a search at times so exhilarating with the sense that one is at the precipice of a momentous discovery that any semblance of respect for humankind was thrown aside?
One can easily come to any and all these conclusions simply by reading the professional papers of such scientists and researchers. Not once do any of these papers express concern for the subjects at hand or denote any pangs of conscience at violating any oaths, codes and statutes regarding patient rights, human rights or human dignity. That America's most shameful period of human experimentation, the years 1950 through to about 1979, came on the heels of the making and adoption of the Nuremberg Codes only adds to the shame and hypocrisy. Today, human experimentation is still aggressively conducted by US government-sponsored and employed physicians and scientists regardless of those codes, which came directly out of the shocking madness of the Nazi era. That government-sponsored experimentation still occurs makes a mockery of any governmental efforts, however valid, to protect people from science run amok - and a nation that uses its young, its children, for such pursuits is a nation whose commitment to human rights and democratic principles should be seriously questioned and challenged.
(The names Marion McGill and that of her sister Trudy, are pseudonyms. Marion is a highly respected attorney and college professor, who asked that her real name not be used in this article. All other names in this article are real.)
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