Lis­ten:
One seg­ment

Intro­duc­ing and/or updat­ing a num­ber of dif­fer­ent sto­ries, the pro­gram begins with dis­cus­sion of con­victed Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski’s vol­un­tary par­tic­i­pa­tion in a CIA “psy­cho­log­i­cal exper­i­ment” while a stu­dent at Harvard.

The exper­i­ment was admin­is­tered by Har­vard pro­fes­sor Henry Mur­ray (a for­mer mem­ber of the OSS, Amer­ica s World War II intel­li­gence ser­vice). It is not clear from the his­tor­i­cal record what exper­i­men­tal pro­ce­dure Kaczyn­ski under­went or what effect the exper­i­ment may have had on his sub­se­quent behav­ior. It should be noted that the pro­gram Kaczyn­ski vol­un­teered for was part of the CIA’s exten­sive mind-control research program.

One pos­si­bil­ity that sug­gests itself is the the­ory that Kaczyn­ski may have been placed under mind-control. If that was the case, then he may have been act­ing under mind-control when com­mit­ting the bomb­ings (or when admit­ting to hav­ing com­mit­ted them.)

Next, the dis­cus­sion turns to the Balkans war and the cred­i­bil­ity of some of the atroc­ity tales com­ing out of Kosovo. In attempt­ing to ver­ify many of the tales of mass mur­der and rape related by Koso­vars, inves­ti­ga­tors have found numer­ous instances of small-scale atroc­i­ties, com­mit­ted by Serbs on an ad hoc basis, but noth­ing like the sys­tem­atic mass-exterminations and “rape camps” that the pop­u­lar press has reported in the United States.

The pro­gram con­cludes with a look at a key devel­op­ment in the young life of the Euro, the cur­rency of the EMU. Past dis­cus­sion of the EMU has ana­lyzed the the­ory that the Euro would turn out to be a weak cur­rency. This pos­si­bil­ity derives from strict bud­getary lim­i­ta­tions placed on par­tic­i­pat­ing nations, in com­bi­na­tion with tra­di­tion­ally high Euro­pean spend­ing on social wel­fare pro­grams. A weak Euro could be dis­as­trous for the Amer­i­can man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor. By cre­at­ing a flight to the dol­lar among cur­rency spec­u­la­tors, a weak Euro could make the dol­lar unnat­u­rally strong, thus mak­ing Amer­i­can man­u­fac­tured exports pro­hib­i­tively high for con­sumers in for­eign countries.

Prospects for the Euro weak­ened con­sid­er­ably with an EU agree­ment to release Italy from bud­getary restric­tions required for EMU mem­ber­ship. With other large West­ern Euro­pean coun­tries strain­ing to meet the EMU’s bud­getary con­straints, the pos­si­bil­ity of a repeat of the Ital­ian sit­u­a­tion is one that must be seri­ously regarded. (Recorded on 7/11/99.)