Com­ment: The sto­ry below posits that James Holmes, the Auro­ra Col­orado “Dark Knight Shoot­er”, may have “hyp­no­tized him­self” ... Fur­ther details in the sto­ry sug­gest an obvi­ous han­dler.

http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-strangest-thing-youll-read-all-day.html

Sun­day, July 22, 2012

The strangest thing you’ll read all day about the Bat­man killer (Updat­ed)

Arguably, the post you are about to read is irre­spon­si­ble. Nev­er­the­less, I’ve been think­ing about the pos­si­bil­i­ty that accused “Bat­man” killer James Holmes has warped his mind by dab­bling in hyp­no­sis.

I keep mulling over the ABC News report of a video [link: http://abcnews.go.com/US/james-holmes-video-colorado-shooting-suspect-abc-news/story?id=16830653#.UAyJy6ODpw8%5D fea­tur­ing James, then 18, as he dis­cuss­es his inter­est in sci­ence:

In the video, he is stand­ing among his peers at a sci­ence camp held at Mira­mar Col­lege in San Diego talk­ing about “tem­po­ral illu­sions.”

“Over the course of the sum­mer I’ve been work­ing with a tem­po­ral illu­sion. It’s an illu­sion that allows you to change the past,” Holmes said in the video.
This is how he was explain­ing his men­tor’s shared inter­est in fan­ta­sy ver­sus real­i­ty in the video: “He also stud­ies sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ence, which is what takes places inside the mind as opposed to the exter­nal world. I’ve car­ried on his work in deal­ing with sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ence.”

The ABC New report is bad­ly writ­ten. It does not iden­ti­fy this “men­tor.”

(Update: The men­tor has now been iden­ti­fied. See below.)

Who­ev­er he is, his rec­om­men­da­tion must have had some pull — because this bizarre inter­est in chang­ing the past earned Holmes a major fed­er­al grant to study neu­ro­science at a high­ly com­pet­i­tive insti­tu­tion. I’ve heard that few­er than ten stu­dents each year get such a grant.

To the best of my knowl­edge, the only sci­en­tist who ever tried to do what Holmes pro­posed to do was a famous hyp­no­sis researcher named Mil­ton Erick­son.

* * *

Many years ago, while wan­der­ing with­out aim through a col­lege library, I ran across a fas­ci­nat­ing book by Erick­son called The Feb­ru­ary Man. In short and in sum, that book dis­cuss­es a tech­nique of using hyp­no­sis to cre­ate the illu­sion of a past that nev­er actu­al­ly occurred.

Although copies of the book are now rare and expen­sive, a sum­ma­ry may be found here [link: http://www.chuckholton.com/synopsis_feb_man.html%5D. I’m afraid that the pre­cis does not do the book jus­tice.

Basi­cal­ly, Erick­son was deal­ing with a young woman who need­ed to change her self-destruc­tive behav­ior. As the say­ing goes, “the child is father to man.” Thus, the hyp­nother­a­pist rea­soned that chang­ing the sub­jec­t’s past — through hyp­not­ic regres­sion — could change her present.

[Quote from the book]:

“In the third inter­view Erick­son spends five hours train­ing her in hyp­not­ic respon­sive­ness. He regress­es her to var­i­ous ages and neu­tral mem­o­ries, includ­ing their first inter­view, into which he “inter­po­lates” a brief hyp­not­ic episode that did not occur in the actu­al inter­view...

“When Erick­son has estab­lished var­i­ous regres­sions as a “gen­er­al back­ground for new, inter­po­lat­ed behav­ioral expe­ri­ences” he rous­es her “som­nam­bu­lis­ti­cal­ly in this regressed state.” Erick­son defines som­nam­bu­lis­tic trance as “a form of hyp­not­ic behav­ior always sig­nif­i­cant of a deep trance state. In this con­di­tion sub­jects behave and respond as if they were wide awake and may even deceive observers with their seem­ing wake­ful­ness.” In her wide-awake four-year-old state, he begins to talk to her and iden­ti­fies him­self as a friend of her dad­dy’s. After each episode of meet­ing Erick­son while regressed, she is instruct­ed to sleep hyp­not­i­cal­ly, then roused with the wrist cue for anoth­er meet­ing with him at a dif­fer­ent age. Final­ly, she receives “exten­sive posthyp­not­ic instruc­tions to ensure a com­pre­hen­sive amne­sia for all trance expe­ri­ences” and the ses­sion ends...

“In sub­se­quent ses­sions, “usu­al­ly of sev­er­al hours’ dura­tion,” Erick­son care­ful­ly inter­po­lates him­self into her regressed mem­o­ries, offer­ing per­spec­tive and “friend­ship, sym­pa­thy, inter­est, and objec­tiv­i­ty, there­by giv­ing him the oppor­tu­ni­ty to raise ques­tions con­cern­ing how she might lat­er eval­u­ate a giv­en expe­ri­ence.” “The con­sis­tent and con­tin­u­al rejec­tion she expe­ri­enced from her moth­er pre­sent­ed many oppor­tu­ni­ties to reor­ga­nize her emo­tions and under­stand­ing.” He offers ther­a­peu­tic reframes of trau­mat­ic events (she will be able to remem­ber her child­hood grief over a bro­ken chi­na doll when she her­self is a moth­er, and will be able to under­stand when her own daugh­ter is sad), per­spec­tive (a teenage humil­i­a­tion will one day be looked on as amus­ing), and weaves real hap­py mem­o­ries in with the Feb­ru­ary Man episodes to insure inte­gra­tion.”

* * *

Erick­son called him­self “the Feb­ru­ary Man” because he vis­it­ed the sub­ject dur­ing every Feb­ru­ary of her life.

The basic idea here is that all we retain of our past is our mem­o­ry of it. By using hyp­no­sis to alter those mem­o­ries, we can recre­ate who we are today. By chang­ing the past, we can change our iden­ti­ty.

Was Holmes propos­ing to car­ry on Erick­son’s work? I don’t know — but at the moment, that’s the only sen­si­ble inter­pre­ta­tion I can offer for Holmes’ words in that video. Under nor­mal cir­cum­stances, a stu­dent isn’t like­ly to get any major grants if he blath­ers on about “tem­po­ral illu­sions.” Even the SyFy chan­nel would­n’t con­sid­er that kind of thing to be sci­en­tif­ic. The mon­ey will come only if the stu­dent can cite respect­ed pre­vi­ous work.

With­in the field of hyp­nother­a­py, Erick­son was a giant; his name still car­ries great weight. Thus, I won­der if this mys­te­ri­ous “men­tor” had intro­duced the bright young­ster to the work of Mil­ton Erick­son, or per­haps to the work of a hyp­nother­a­pist who did sim­i­lar research. If so — and if Holmes decid­ed to car­ry out his own stud­ies — he prob­a­bly would have used him­self as a sub­ject.

It is com­mon for a hyp­nother­a­pist to use imagery drawn from pop­u­lar cul­ture.

Update: A friend to this blog informs me that the men­tor has been iden­ti­fied. From her com­ment:

“This is inter­est­ing: {link:http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-movie-shooting-james-holmes-20120722,0,2746583.story%5D. The guy that’s list­ed as Holmes’ men­tor in that “tem­po­ral illu­sions” video, John Jacob­son, repu­di­ates the idea that Holmes was “bril­liant” and says that he all but fired him from the research intern­ship pro­gram. He also talks about assign­ing Holmes the task of writ­ing com­put­er code for a rock-paper-scis­sors game–no men­tion of “tem­po­ral illu­sions” at all.

“... How­ev­er, in 2002, Jacob­son was sec­ond author of a paper enti­tled “Per­ceived Lumi­nance Depends on Tem­po­ral Con­text” [PDF link: http://papers.cnl.salk.edu/PDFs/Perceived%20Luminance%20Depends%20on%20Temporal%20Context%202004–3355.pdf%5D...”

Although Jacob­son may have con­sid­ered Holmes a medi­oc­rity, you can’t bull­shit your way into Phi Beta Kap­pa. The kid must have had some­thing going for him.

Just found this:

http://www.salon.com/2012/12/02/better_than_bourne_who_really_killed_nick_deak/

A long arti­cle about CIA bank­ing hous­es, “Gang­sters from Argenti­na and Macau, and a mur­der by an almost cer­tain­ly “pro­grammed” woman.

(excerpts)

On the morn­ing of Nov. 19, 1985, a wild-eyed and disheveled home­less woman entered the recep­tion room at the leg­endary Wall Street firm of Deak-Per­era. Car­ry­ing a back­pack with an alu­minum base­ball bat stick­ing out of the top, her face par­tial­ly hid­den by shocks of greasy, gray-streaked hair falling out from under a wool cap, she demand­ed to speak with the firm’s 80-year-old founder and pres­i­dent, Nicholas Deak.

The 44-year-old drifter’s name was Lois Lang. She had arrived at Port Author­i­ty that morn­ing, the final stop on a month-long cross-coun­try Grey­hound jour­ney that began in Seat­tle. Deak-Perera’s recep­tion­ist, Frances Laud­er, told the woman that Deak was out. Lang became agi­tat­ed and accused Laud­er of lying. Try­ing to defuse the sit­u­a­tion, the recep­tion­ist led the unkempt woman down the hall­way and showed her Deak’s emp­ty office. “I’ll be in touch,” Lang said, and left for a cof­fee shop around the cor­ner. From her seat by a win­dow, she kept close watch on 29 Broad­way, an art deco sky­scraper diag­o­nal from the Bowl­ing Green Bull.

Deak-Per­era had been head­quar­tered on the building’s 20th and 21st floors since the late 1960s. Nick Deak, known as “the James Bond of mon­ey,” found­ed the com­pa­ny in 1947 with the finan­cial back­ing of the CIA. For more than three decades the com­pa­ny had func­tioned as an unof­fi­cial arm of the intel­li­gence agency and was a key asset in the exe­cu­tion of U.S. Cold War for­eign pol­i­cy. From hum­ble begin­nings as a spook front and flower import busi­ness, the firm grew to become the largest cur­ren­cy and pre­cious met­als firm in the West­ern Hemi­sphere, if not the world. But on this day in Novem­ber, the offices were half-emp­ty and employ­ees few. Deak-Per­era had been dec­i­mat­ed the year before by a fed­er­al inves­ti­ga­tion into its ties to orga­nized crime syn­di­cates from Buenos Aires to Mani­la. Deak’s for­mer CIA asso­ciates did noth­ing to inter­fere with the pub­lic take­down. Deak-Per­era declared bank­rupt­cy in Decem­ber 1984, set­ting off pan­icked and some­times vio­lent runs on its offices in Latin Amer­i­ca and Asia.

Lois Lang had been watch­ing 29 Broad­way for two hours when a lim­ou­sine dropped off Deak and his son Leslie at the building’s revolv­ing-door rear entrance. They took the ele­va­tor to the 21st floor, where Laud­er informed Deak about the odd vis­i­tor. Deak mere­ly shrugged and was set­tling into his office when he heard a com­mo­tion in the recep­tion room. Lang had returned. Frances Laud­er let out a fear­ful “Oh—” short­ened by two bangs from a .38 revolver. The first bul­let missed. The sec­ond struck the sec­re­tary between the eyes and exit­ed out the back of her skull.
*
Deak, fit and trim at age 80, bound­ed out of his office. “What was that?” he shout­ed. Lang saw him and turned the cor­ner with pur­pose, aim­ing the pis­tol with both arms. When she had Deak in her sights, she froze, trans­fixed. “It was as if she’d final­ly found what she was look­ing for,” a wit­ness lat­er tes­ti­fied. Deak seized the pause to lunge and grab Lang’s throat with both hands, press­ing his body into hers. She fired once next to Deak’s ear and missed wide, before push­ing him away just enough to bring the gun into his body and land a shot above his heart. The bul­let ric­o­cheted off his col­lar­bone and shred­ded his organs.

Deak crum­bled onto the floor. “Now you’ve got yours,” said Lang. A wit­ness lat­er claimed she took out a cam­era and snapped pho­tographs of her victim’s expir­ing body. The bag lady then grabbed the banker by the legs, dragged him into his office, and shut the door.

She emerged short­ly and head­ed for the ele­va­tor bank, where three NYPD offi­cers had tak­en posi­tion. They shout­ed for Lang to freeze. When she reached for her .38, an offi­cer tack­led her to the floor. A sec­ond cop grabbed her arm as the first ham­mered her hand with the butt of his gun. As he jarred the revolver free, she turned into a cow­er­ing child — “like a fright­ened ani­mal,” one of the offi­cers lat­er tes­ti­fied.

“Please don’t hurt me,” Lang begged. “He told me I could car­ry the gun.”

*

As Kuhlmann trav­eled the world try­ing to repair rela­tion­ships, trace lost assets and solve the mys­tery of Deak’s mur­der, he descend­ed ever deep­er into a rab­bit hole. One of his stops was in Macau, where Deak’s office man­ag­er van­ished with­out a trace after the col­lapse. Kuhlmann entered the paper-strewn offices to find the manager’s girl­friend sit­ting at her boyfriend’s old desk. She opened a draw­er and pulled out a pho­to she’d found there: a grainy black-and-white snap­shot of Nicholas Deak, lying bleed­ing on his office floor, just min­utes from death. The pho­to, seem­ing­ly tak­en by Lang, had nev­er been made pub­lic. Short­ly there­after, two of Kuhlmann’s inves­ti­ga­tors report­ed that Lang had met with two Argen­tineans in Mia­mi before her bus trip to New York.
*
In oth­er words, the doc­tor who cared for Lang in San­ta Clara was a senior fig­ure at one of the CIA’s top insti­tu­tion­al grantees. He worked side-by-side with a self-iden­ti­fied CIA col­lab­o­ra­tor, and con­duct­ed research into the kind of drug-induced behav­ior mod­i­fi­ca­tion that the agency is known to have fund­ed.
*
By the ear­ly 1980s, Lang drift­ed north to her birth­place and spent her last free years lurk­ing around the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton cam­pus wear­ing a feath­ered Robin Hood cap. Occa­sion­al­ly she was arrest­ed and sent to one of the near­by men­tal hos­pi­tals before mak­ing her way back again. A local police offi­cer told the New York Times after her arrest in 1985 that Lang “usu­al­ly had mon­ey,” despite roam­ing “the [uni­ver­si­ty] cam­pus in unkempt clothes, usu­al­ly wear­ing a green felt Tyrolean-style hat.” Once the police found more than $800 in her pos­ses­sion.

As with Stan­ford, the uni­ver­si­ty employed a mil­i­tary-linked behav­ioral psy­chi­a­trist, Dr. Don­ald Dud­ley, who lat­er became infa­mous for car­ry­ing out exper­i­ments in behav­ior mod­i­fi­ca­tion. Dud­ley taught there from the 1960s through the ear­ly 1990s, and also worked at near­by men­tal insti­tu­tions where Lang was peri­od­i­cal­ly com­mit­ted. The land­mark law­suit that end­ed Dudley’s career revealed that Dudley’s hob­by was tak­ing patients brought to him for less­er men­tal ill­ness­es, pump­ing them full of drugs, hyp­no­tiz­ing them, and try­ing to turn them into killers.

We know this thanks to a suit brought by the fam­i­ly of Stephen Drum­mond, who entered Dudley’s care in 1989 for autism treat­ment. He was returned to his fam­i­ly in 1992 suf­fer­ing from severe cata­to­nia. Accord­ing to law­suit tes­ti­mo­ny, Dud­ley shot Drum­mond up with sodi­um amy­tal and hyp­no­tized him with the inten­tion of “eras­ing” a por­tion of his brain and turn­ing him into an assas­sin. When Drummond’s moth­er con­front­ed Dud­ley, the mad sci­en­tist threat­ened to have her killed, claim­ing he worked for the CIA. Dud­ley was arrest­ed soon after the con­fronta­tion in a local hotel where he had shacked up to “treat” a sui­ci­dal 15-year-old drifter. Dud­ley had giv­en the boy sodi­um amy­tal and sev­er­al oth­er drugs, hyp­no­tized him, and con­vinced him that he was part of a secret army of assas­sins. Police were called in when the boy threat­ened hotel staff with a .44 cal­iber hand­gun. Not long after, Dud­ley died in state cus­tody and his estate was forced to pay the largest psy­chother­a­py neg­li­gence law­suit in his­to­ry. Dur­ing the tri­al, it emerged that Dud­ley had pos­si­bly sub­ject­ed hun­dreds of vic­tims to sim­i­lar exper­i­ments. Lang was not men­tioned.
*
Here Kuhlmann paus­es for the first time.

“I know a few more things about them,” he said. “But this gets a lit­tle dicey. I don’t know how to play that game. I don’t want to be the next tar­get.”
*
“Lang and the Argen­tineans — it’s like a jig­saw puz­zle,” said Kuhlmann with a sigh. “You have to fill in the miss­ing 30 per­cent. That doesn’t work in a court of law.”

****************

Fas­ci­nat­ing, with lots of names and link­ages

A cross-over between Bor­mann Nazis from Argenti­na and Yamashita Gold in Macau?

Much more at link

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/neuroscientists-plant-false-memories-in-the-brain-0725.html

Neu­ro­sci­en­tists plant false mem­o­ries in the brain

MIT study also pin­points where the brain stores mem­o­ry traces, both false and authen­tic.
Anne Trafton, MIT News Office

July 25, 2013

The phe­nom­e­non of false mem­o­ry has been well-doc­u­ment­ed: In many court cas­es, defen­dants have been found guilty based on tes­ti­mo­ny from wit­ness­es and vic­tims who were sure of their rec­ol­lec­tions, but DNA evi­dence lat­er over­turned the con­vic­tion.

In a step toward under­stand­ing how these faulty mem­o­ries arise, MIT neu­ro­sci­en­tists have shown that they can plant false mem­o­ries in the brains of mice. They also found that many of the neu­ro­log­i­cal traces of these mem­o­ries are iden­ti­cal in nature to those of authen­tic mem­o­ries.

“Whether it’s a false or gen­uine mem­o­ry, the brain’s neur­al mech­a­nism under­ly­ing the recall of the mem­o­ry is the same,” says Susumu Tone­gawa, the Picow­er Pro­fes­sor of Biol­o­gy and Neu­ro­science and senior author of a paper describ­ing the find­ings in the July 25 edi­tion of Sci­ence.

The study also pro­vides fur­ther evi­dence that mem­o­ries are stored in net­works of neu­rons that form mem­o­ry traces for each expe­ri­ence we have — a phe­nom­e­non that Tonegawa’s lab first demon­strat­ed last year.

Neu­ro­sci­en­tists have long sought the loca­tion of these mem­o­ry traces, also called engrams. In the pair of stud­ies, Tone­gawa and col­leagues at MIT’s Picow­er Insti­tute for Learn­ing and Mem­o­ry showed that they could iden­ti­fy the cells that make up part of an engram for a spe­cif­ic mem­o­ry and reac­ti­vate it using a tech­nol­o­gy called opto­ge­net­ics.

Lead authors of the paper are grad­u­ate stu­dent Steve Ramirez and research sci­en­tist Xu Liu. Oth­er authors are tech­ni­cal assis­tant Pei-Ann Lin, research sci­en­tist Junghyup Suh, and post­docs Michele Pig­natel­li, Roger Redon­do and Tomas Ryan.

Seek­ing the engram

Episod­ic mem­o­ries — mem­o­ries of expe­ri­ences — are made of asso­ci­a­tions of sev­er­al ele­ments, includ­ing objects, space and time. These asso­ci­a­tions are encod­ed by chem­i­cal and phys­i­cal changes in neu­rons, as well as by mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the con­nec­tions between the neu­rons.

Where these engrams reside in the brain has been a long­stand­ing ques­tion in neu­ro­science. “Is the infor­ma­tion spread out in var­i­ous parts of the brain, or is there a par­tic­u­lar area of the brain in which this type of mem­o­ry is stored? This has been a very fun­da­men­tal ques­tion,” Tone­gawa says.

In the 1940s, Cana­di­an neu­ro­sur­geon Wilder Pen­field sug­gest­ed that episod­ic mem­o­ries are locat­ed in the brain’s tem­po­ral lobe. When Pen­field elec­tri­cal­ly stim­u­lat­ed cells in the tem­po­ral lobes of patients who were about to under­go surgery to treat epilep­tic seizures, the patients report­ed that spe­cif­ic mem­o­ries popped into mind. Lat­er stud­ies of the amne­si­ac patient known as “H.M.” con­firmed that the tem­po­ral lobe, includ­ing the area known as the hip­pocam­pus, is crit­i­cal for form­ing episod­ic mem­o­ries.

How­ev­er, these stud­ies did not prove that engrams are actu­al­ly stored in the hip­pocam­pus, Tone­gawa says. To make that case, sci­en­tists need­ed to show that acti­vat­ing spe­cif­ic groups of hip­pocam­pal cells is suf­fi­cient to pro­duce and recall mem­o­ries.

To achieve that, Tonegawa’s lab turned to opto­ge­net­ics, a new tech­nol­o­gy that allows cells to be selec­tive­ly turned on or off using light.

For this pair of stud­ies, the researchers engi­neered mouse hip­pocam­pal cells to express the gene for chan­nel­rhodopsin, a pro­tein that acti­vates neu­rons when stim­u­lat­ed by light. They also mod­i­fied the gene so that chan­nel­rhodopsin would be pro­duced when­ev­er the c‑fos gene, nec­es­sary for mem­o­ry for­ma­tion, was turned on.

In last year’s study, the researchers con­di­tioned these mice to fear a par­tic­u­lar cham­ber by deliv­er­ing a mild elec­tric shock. As this mem­o­ry was formed, the c‑fos gene was turned on, along with the engi­neered chan­nel­rhodopsin gene. This way, cells encod­ing the mem­o­ry trace were “labeled” with light-sen­si­tive pro­teins.

The next day, when the mice were put in a dif­fer­ent cham­ber they had nev­er seen before, they behaved nor­mal­ly. How­ev­er, when the researchers deliv­ered a pulse of light to the hip­pocam­pus, stim­u­lat­ing the mem­o­ry cells labeled with chan­nel­rhodopsin, the mice froze in fear as the pre­vi­ous day’s mem­o­ry was reac­ti­vat­ed.

“Com­pared to most stud­ies that treat the brain as a black box while try­ing to access it from the out­side in, this is like we are try­ing to study the brain from the inside out,” Liu says. “The tech­nol­o­gy we devel­oped for this study allows us to fine-dis­sect and even poten­tial­ly tin­ker with the mem­o­ry process by direct­ly con­trol­ling the brain cells.”

Incept­ing false mem­o­ries

That is exact­ly what the researchers did in the new study — explor­ing whether they could use these reac­ti­vat­ed engrams to plant false mem­o­ries in the mice’s brains.

First, the researchers placed the mice in a nov­el cham­ber, A, but did not deliv­er any shocks. As the mice explored this cham­ber, their mem­o­ry cells were labeled with chan­nel­rhodopsin. The next day, the mice were placed in a sec­ond, very dif­fer­ent cham­ber, B. After a while, the mice were giv­en a mild foot shock. At the same instant, the researchers used light to acti­vate the cells encod­ing the mem­o­ry of cham­ber A.

On the third day, the mice were placed back into cham­ber A, where they now froze in fear, even though they had nev­er been shocked there. A false mem­o­ry had been incept­ed: The mice feared the mem­o­ry of cham­ber A because when the shock was giv­en in cham­ber B, they were reliv­ing the mem­o­ry of being in cham­ber A.

More­over, that false mem­o­ry appeared to com­pete with a gen­uine mem­o­ry of cham­ber B, the researchers found. These mice also froze when placed in cham­ber B, but not as much as mice that had received a shock in cham­ber B with­out hav­ing the cham­ber A mem­o­ry acti­vat­ed.

The researchers then showed that imme­di­ate­ly after recall of the false mem­o­ry, lev­els of neur­al activ­i­ty were also ele­vat­ed in the amyg­dala, a fear cen­ter in the brain that receives mem­o­ry infor­ma­tion from the hip­pocam­pus, just as they are when the mice recall a gen­uine mem­o­ry.

These two papers rep­re­sent a major step for­ward in mem­o­ry research, says Howard Eichen­baum, a pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­o­gy and direc­tor of Boston University’s Cen­ter for Mem­o­ry and Brain.

“They iden­ti­fied a neur­al net­work asso­ci­at­ed with expe­ri­ence in an envi­ron­ment, attached a fear asso­ci­a­tion with it, then reac­ti­vat­ed the net­work to show that it sup­ports mem­o­ry expres­sion. That, to me, shows for the first time a true func­tion­al engram,” says Eichen­baum, who was not part of the research team.

The MIT team is now plan­ning fur­ther stud­ies of how mem­o­ries can be dis­tort­ed in the brain.

“Now that we can reac­ti­vate and change the con­tents of mem­o­ries in the brain, we can begin ask­ing ques­tions that were once the realm of phi­los­o­phy,” Ramirez says. “Are there mul­ti­ple con­di­tions that lead to the for­ma­tion of false mem­o­ries? Can false mem­o­ries for both plea­sur­able and aver­sive events be arti­fi­cial­ly cre­at­ed? What about false mem­o­ries for more than just con­texts — false mem­o­ries for objects, food or oth­er mice? These are the once seem­ing­ly sci-fi ques­tions that can now be exper­i­men­tal­ly tack­led in the lab.”

The research was fund­ed by the RIKEN Brain Sci­ence Insti­tute.

Dr. William J. Bryan was also involved in the Boston Stran­gler Case and was also a mem­ber of the Old Catholic Ortho­dox Church like David Fer­rie, who was also an hyp­no­tist and told to Judyth Vary Bak­er that he took part in the project of Mind Con­trol by the CIA

From a knowl­edge­able lis­ten­er (note that “TM” refers to Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion.

“I had NO IDEA that Ivan­ka and Kush­n­er were TMers! Total garbage puff piece from the Wapo on David Lynch’s char­i­ty event in DC is below. Lynch is hard­core TM. As always, I have NO prob­lem with med­i­ta­tion, an ancient and healthy prac­tice. TM is a total­ly dif­fer­ent ball of wax. Puffy arti­cles like these tend to con­flate the two. TM has been incred­i­bly effec­tive at mak­ing med­i­ta­tion syn­ony­mous with Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion. And TM is polit­i­cal as fuck, with a shock­ing­ly under­rat­ed impact on his­to­ry! Brought this up mul­ti­ple times over the years, but here is a quick recap. This all sounds crazy, but is all true.

-Mike Love of the Beach Boys was a big GHWB sup­port­er and TM acolyte. He helped to forge an alliance between the Mahar­ishi and the Bush­es dur­ing the 1980 pri­ma­ry where George ran against Rea­gan. Got a huge turnout for Bush, who won Iowa (home of TM), one of only 6 states Bush won. He did­n’t even win his “home” state of Texas! But he won Iowa. This decent show­ing in the pri­maries, espe­cial­ly his sur­prise win in Iowa, helped him get on the tick­et in the Fall

-Fast-for­ward 20 years to the 2000 elec­tion, with a NEW Bush run­ning for office. While the Nad­er cam­paign cer­tain­ly deserves the blame it received, a more over­looked aspect was the Mahar­ishi takeover of Per­ot’s Reform Par­ty. Per­ot stripped a LOT of sup­port from the GOP in 92 and 96, empow­er­ing Clin­ton’s two wins. In 2000, they did not have Per­ot, but Buchanan was their can­di­date, a Nazi with a fair­ly large base that turned out strong in the ’92 and ’96 pri­maries. Not in 2000! Buchanan spent his entire cam­paign bat­tling the Mahar­ishi folks, includ­ing in court, and nev­er real­ly ran a true cam­paign. A Buchanan cam­paign unhin­dered by the TM cult would EASILY have found 500 votes in Flori­da to pull away from GWB, mak­ing the “Nad­er effect” a non-fac­tor.

-2001–2002 TM shill John Gray begins fund­ing, with pal Khashog­gi (also a Trump pal), 911 Truth events.

TM, in effect, empow­ered TWENTY YEARS of Bush­es either in the Pres­i­den­tial or Vice-Pres­i­den­tial role (with GHWB real­ly call­ing the shots for most of Rea­gan’s term) AND helped cre­ate the asi­nine Truther move­ment. And now here we have the Trump brats in their thrall as well.

With the whole Trump crew, includ­ing The Don­ald, I have always won­dered about mind con­trol. Don­ald at times seems like his brain is torn between two war­ring mind con­trol fac­tions! Would prob­a­bly sound like “mad­ness to the uni­ti­tat­ed” as you like to say, Dave, but I’ve lis­tened to all your mind con­trol shows and they stick with me. That is why I was such a fan of Joss Whe­do­n’s Doll­house. I saw it as a quite like­ly dystopi­an vision of the future.

Com­bine mind con­trol tech with things like NSA leaks, and guys like R Cody Wil­son and their 3D print­ed guns. Is the notion of a future with eas­i­ly down­loaded and 3d print­ed mind con­trol tech avail­able to any­one REALLY that out­landish, con­sid­er­ing the “online trends” of today’s news cycles? But I digress... I was unaware that Sein­feld was a TM shill now. Fun­ny guy, but I always knew he was a fuck­ing douchebag...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/reliable-source/wp/2017/06/05/celebs-plus-jared-and-ivanka-turn-out-for-the-david-lynch-foundations-first-washington-fundraiser/?utm_term=.c6d5e2dc2618

The David Lynch Foun­da­tion — a non­prof­it start­ed by the “Twin Peaks” direc­tor aimed at spread­ing the use of Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion to poor chil­dren in urban areas, vet­er­ans and vic­tims of vio­lence — held its first D.C. fundrais­er, a celeb-stud­ded con­cert at the Kennedy Cen­ter that drew an audi­ence includ­ing first daughter/White House advis­er Ivan­ka Trump and her hus­band and fel­low West Winger, Jared Kush­n­er. Trump and Kush­n­er (who are prac­ti­tion­ers of TM) didn’t speak but sat game­ly lis­ten­ing to per­for­mances by the likes of come­di­ans Jer­ry Sein­feld, Jay Leno and Mar­garet Cho, actor Hugh Jack­man, and music by Ben Folds, Kesha, and Angelique Kid­jo.

No longer is TM seen as the exclu­sive ter­rain of crys­tal-bear­ing kooks — everyone’s doing it these days, Sein­feld assured us dur­ing the pre-show red car­pet inter­views. “Start­ing sev­en or eight years ago, there are very few top ath­letes or top busi­ness peo­ple who don’t have any med­i­ta­tion tech­nique,” said the com­ic, who began prac­tic­ing TM in 1972. “Every­body has some­thing now.” Sein­feld is now a huge evan­ge­list, and says he recent­ly got A‑list actor Tom Han­ks — who had con­fessed to Sein­feld that he want­ed to take a year off work to de-stress — “100 per­cent bet­ter” by get­ting him into TM.

NOTE: I was won­der­ing where TM’s revival was com­ing from (besides Lynch), con­sid­er­ing their guru bit the dust in ’08. Turns out it is par­tial­ly being fund­ed by Ray Dalio, head of Bridge­wa­ter Asso­ciates, the world’s biggest hedge fund! (Ptera, please chime in if you have any Bridge­wa­ter dirt). Here is an inter­est­ing arti­cle on TM’s rise on Wall Street... with the gory details of TM real­i­ty polite­ly pulled out. I looked for a Dalio/Trump con­nec­tion, but he appears to be most­ly crit­i­cal of him. But who knows? He was a McCain bundler in 2008. UPDATE: I dug a lit­tle deep­er. Here’s a fun fact: Bridge­wa­ter’s cor­po­rate coun­sel from 2010–2013? James Comey.

http://www.businessinsider.com/wall-street-trend-transcendental-meditation-2016–10

NOTE: Here is a great arti­cle on the cult atmos­phere at Bridge­wa­ter.

http://nymag.com/news/business/wallstreet/ray-dalio-2011–4/

...Dalio, a tall, gaunt 61-year-old man with a swoop of gray hair, is an adher­ent of “rad­i­cal trans­paren­cy,” a man­age­ment the­o­ry that calls for total hon­esty and account­abil­i­ty. He’s also a long­time prac­ti­tion­er of Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion and has built its pre­cepts on self-actu­al­iza­tion into Bridgewater’s office cul­ture. (He’s even brought in David Lynch, the film direc­tor and unof­fi­cial TM spokesman, to lead a sem­i­nar for his staff.) Dalio expects employ­ees to open­ly crit­i­cize not just the cafe­te­ria fare but also each oth­er; behind-the-back gos­sip is strict­ly pro­hib­it­ed. “Issue logs” track mis­takes rang­ing from sig­nif­i­cant (poor­ly exe­cut­ed trades) to small (one employ­ee is said to have been issue-logged for fail­ing to wash his hands after a trip to the bath­room) and can result in “drill­downs,” intense sessions—one insid­er com­pares them to a cross between a white-col­lar depo­si­tion and the Span­ish Inquisition—during which man­agers diag­nose prob­lems, iden­ti­fy respon­si­ble par­ties (“RPs,” in Dalios­peak), and issue blunt cor­rec­tives. Oth­er employ­ees can with­draw record­ings of these pro­ceed­ings from the firm’s “trans­paren­cy library.”

Should Bridge­wa­ter employ­ees need a refresh­er on the house rules, they can con­sult their copy of Prin­ci­ples, the 110-page man­i­festo Dalio has writ­ten to cod­i­fy his philoso­phies about life, work, and the pur­suit of great­ness. The book used to be giv­en to all Bridge­wa­ter employ­ees in paper form and is now dis­trib­uted via a cus­tom app. Dalio’s axioms are stud­ied with Tal­mu­dic inten­si­ty at the firm, and con­ver­sa­tions with employ­ees tend to be sprin­kled with com­pa­ny jar­gon: “ego-bar­ri­er,” “probe,” and the ulti­mate Bridge­wa­ter insult, “sub­op­ti­mal.”

“Empa­thy and kind­ness aren’t a top pri­or­i­ty there,” says a for­mer Bridge­wa­ter employ­ee. The firm’s cul­ture of absolute can­dor is designed to strip out emo­tion­al con­sid­er­a­tions and empha­size cold, Vul­can log­ic in all decision-making—the thin-skinned need not apply.

...“They’re just out there in Con­necti­cut, not real­ly part of the scene,” says one Gold­man Sachs employ­ee. “But they had a killer year, and with that big a fund …” The Gold­man­ite trails off. “What do they do? No, seri­ous­ly. Do you know?” Bridge­wa­ter makes it hard to answer that ques­tion. Like a lot of hedge funds, it requires its employ­ees to sign nondis­clo­sure agree­ments designed to keep trad­ing strate­gies under wraps. Even more than its peers, it cul­ti­vates a para­noia in its ranks, mon­i­tor­ing e‑mails and phone calls and keep­ing tabs on employ­ees via a net­work of over­head cam­eras. Most of the cur­rent and for­mer Bridge­wa­ter employ­ees con­tact­ed for this arti­cle, along with sev­er­al non­staffers who were afraid of anger­ing the firm, spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty. ’
’
...With noth­ing scan­dalous to spread around, finance-world gos­sips have been left to focus on what a strange, strange place Bridge­wa­ter is. When the blog Deal­break­er post­ed leaked excerpts from Prin­ci­ples last May, the indus­try got a win­dow into Dalio from his calls for his employ­ees to “humil­i­ate them­selves” in pur­suit of the truth and his com­par­i­son of the process of self-improve­ment to “when a pack of hye­nas takes down a young wilde­beest.” Dalio respond­ed by post­ing the full Prin­ci­ples on the Bridge­wa­ter web­site, but if he thought his ideas would be judged more kind­ly in con­text, he was mis­tak­en. “I’m sure our rep­u­ta­tion on the Street is that we’re com­plete­ly insane,” says a cur­rent Bridge­wa­ter employ­ee. An exec­u­tive recruiter who works with hedge funds con­firms that sus­pi­cion, describ­ing Bridge­wa­ter as a “bunch of fuck­ing nut­cas­es.”

...To Dalio’s defend­ers, though, there’s noth­ing that odd about how the place func­tions. “Sure, Bridge­wa­ter could be defined as cultish,” says an ex-employ­ee who has since decamped to Sil­i­con Val­ley. “But com­pa­nies like Google and Apple are also cults. Gold­man Sachs is a cult. If you’re cre­at­ing a strong cor­po­rate cul­ture, to some extent you’re cre­at­ing a cult.”

By hedge-fund stan­dards, Dalio’s lifestyle is almost monas­tic. He lives with his wife of 35-plus years in a 5,550-square-foot home that’s a flop­house com­pared to some of their Green­wich neigh­bors. (Investor king­pin Paul Tudor Jones III has a 13,000-square-foot man­sion near­by.) He dress­es casu­al­ly for work in but­ton-downs and rum­pled khakis. He bun­dled mon­ey for John McCain’s 2008 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign but has oth­er­wise expressed no inter­est in being a pow­er bro­ker. For­mer employ­ees speak of the char­i­ty dona­tions he makes in each staffer’s name dur­ing the hol­i­days, and some recalled his prac­tice of lend­ing out his vaca­tion homes.

Bridgewater’s insti­tu­tion­al clients, most of whom would invest with Gary Busey if it meant a 45 per­cent return, seem hap­py to over­look the hoopla sur­round­ing Prin­ci­ples. But accord­ing to peo­ple who know him, Dalio has been hurt by the sug­ges­tions that he’s basi­cal­ly run­ning a mind-con­trol oper­a­tion. After an arti­cle last month in Absolute Return + Alpha mag­a­zine lam­bast­ed Bridgewater’s cul­ture as “bru­tal” and “demor­al­iz­ing,” Dalio made an exceed­ing­ly rare TV appear­ance on CNBC’s Squawk Box. Part of the defense he gave was tactical—Dalio indi­cat­ed that the hype sur­round­ing Prin­ci­ples had made hir­ing more dif­fi­cult. But it also seems that Dalio might now be com­ing around to the idea that not all bat­tles are worth fight­ing, after all.

Last month, a slight­ly tweaked ver­sion of Prin­ci­ples appeared on Bridgewater’s web­site. The document’s revised title: Prin­ci­ples (That Might Be Right or Wrong, for You to Take or Leave).

NOTE: Kept think­ing I was through with this post, but the well gets deep­er! Here is the moth­er lode. Holy crap! This is a pro-Trump page DIRECT from the TM web­site, dis­cussing his sup­port for TM’s vet pro­grams, while he was cam­paign­ing in Iowa ( a state he almost won in the pri­maries and DID win in the gen­er­al elec­tion). Now, it’s hard to blame a stump­ing can­di­date for say­ing nice things about a pro­gram sup­port­ing vet­er­ans. But here we learn that Don­ald J. Trump, Jr. is ALSO a TM prac­ti­tion­er. This site has pic­tures of all this. A must-read.

http://trumpfairfield.com/TM/veterans/index.htm

NOTE: To wrap this all up, let’s con­nect a few more dots, shall we? TM leader John Hagelin was also involved with Ramtha fol­low­ers in mak­ing the pop­u­lar “What the Bleep?” movie, which spawned a series of clones dur­ing the last decade that essen­tial­ly pro­mul­gat­ed a mod­ern ver­sion of Nor­man Vin­cent Peale’s “Pow­er of Pos­i­tive Think­ing” cou­pled with pseu­do-sci­en­tif­ic mis­read­ings of quan­tum mechan­ics.

Nat­u­ral­ly, Peale being both a Nazi spy and the man who con­duct­ed Trump’s first wed­ding. Basi­cal­ly, “you cre­ate your own real­i­ty”. That trend was large­ly killed off, I sus­pect, by the ’08 glob­al reces­sion, because, let’s face it, folks stand­ing in unem­ploy­ment and bread lines aren’t exact­ly feel­ing the “YOU ARE THE MASTER OF YOUR OWN REALITY” notion that much. But it nev­er tru­ly goes away... and for folks like the Trumps, who live their lives with every­thing going their way, the phi­los­o­phy has a con­tin­ued appeal!

Got­ta run for now, but I will keep dig­ging on this con­nec­tion...

More of this to come,

Dave

More from the skilled lis­ten­er about Trump, TM, mind con­trol etc.

”
Check this shit out... this is from the pre­vi­ous­ly linked Trumpfairfield.com, which looks like it is a pro-Trump site run by TMers. Fair­field, Iowa, is the home of the Mahar­ishi School of Uni­ver­sal Man­age­ment and their head­quar­ters.

“Trump wins Amer­i­ca’s Most Enlight­ened Precincts sur­round­ing the “TM cap­i­tal” of the USA — Fair­field. Iowa”

http://trumpfairfield.com/caucus/index.htm

This is from their front page:

“Don­ald Trump for Pres­i­dent Shar­ing rides and infor­ma­tion about events to make Fair­field and Amer­i­ca rich again, using the pow­er of pos­i­tive con­scious­ness from near the cen­ter of the USA pop­u­la­tion.”

http://trumpfairfield.com/

Oooh, they also tossed in some Trutherism! Keep in mind, Trump has hint­ed at Trutherism. I haven’t gone down that rab­bit hole much, but I bet there is good stuff. I would also note that Anony­ous Scan­di­navia post­ed audio of Trump in the runup to the Vault 7 wik­ileaks release (see below for link).

“Bush’s donors booed when Trump told 9/11 Truth, but 66% of the vot­ers cheered. Trump: “The World Trade Cen­ter came down dur­ing his broth­er’s reign. Remem­ber that.”

Trump pre­dict­ed 9/11 bet­ter than the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion. (TM com­ment, not mine)

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/10/20/watch-morning-joe-hosts-stunned-reaction-to-donald-trumps-chillingly-accurate-prediction-made-in-book-months-before-911/

Here’s what Trump wrote in the book released 19 months before 9/11. He was push­ing Trutherism BEFORE 9/11! Holy fuck... Gee, this reminds me of anoth­er Nazi with amaz­ing pre­science on this event, William Pierce of the Nation­al Alliance.

“I real­ly am con­vinced we’re in dan­ger of the sort of ter­ror­ist attacks that will make the bomb­ing of the Trade Cen­ter look like kids play­ing with firecrackers….No sen­si­ble ana­lyst rejects this pos­si­bil­i­ty, and plen­ty of them, like me, are not won­der­ing if but when it will hap­pen.”

“One day we’re told that a shad­owy fig­ure with no fixed address named Osama bin-Laden is pub­lic ene­my num­ber one, and U.S. jet­fight­ers lay waste to his camp in Afghanistan….He escapes back under some rock, and a few news cycles lat­er it’s on to a new ene­my and new cri­sis.”

NOTE: Here is the audio Anony­mous pub­li­cized of Trump espous­ing Trutherism about “melt­ing steel” TWO DAYS AFTER 9/11. Keep in mind Hop­sick­er’s alle­ga­tions that Trump was help­ing Khashog­gi (Sau­di fun­der of 911 truth with his pal John Gray) hide from the law! Now we see Trump push­ing the truther script before the dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paign had even become a wide­spread thing. UPDATE: Well, this day keeps get­ting weird­er and weird­er! Googled Khashog­gi and Trump to see if I could get to the bot­tom of their rela­tion­ship... and it turns out Khashog­gi died yes­ter­day. Good night, evil man!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MXKuKS9i0Y

Here are a few more tid­bits on Trump/Khashoggi:

This obit has a pic­ture of Khashog­gi at the Trump/Marla Maples wed­ding... The main tie between them was Trump’s pur­chase of Khashog­gi’s opu­lent yacht for $28 mil­lion.

http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/saudi-arms-dealer-adnan-khashoggi-dies-aged-82/article18733560.ece

This is a GREAT arti­cle on the many, many times Trump has skat­ed. Fur­ther con­vinces me of my the­o­ry that Trump is a long­time FBI (or oth­er agency) asset. Quick men­tion of a neat lit­tle scam Trump and Khashog­gi were both involved in.

http://www.citypaper.com/blogs/the-news-hole/bcpnews-five-times-law-enforcers-could-have-arrested-donald-trump-but-didn-t-20170306-story.html

...2. The Emp­ty Box, 1986. In the 1980s it was a com­mon prac­tice to avoid state sales tax: You walk into the store and buy some­thing expen­sive, like jew­el­ry. To avoid the tax, in col­lu­sion with the mer­chant, you direct that an emp­ty box be shipped to an out-of-state address. Many, many mer­chants engaged in this shab­by scam, which gave them a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage over hon­est retail­ers; many were caught. Trump was a reg­u­lar at Bul­gari, a jew­el­ry store on Fifth Avenue. Like oth­er rich, famous peo­ple (Hen­ry Kissinger, Mary Tyler Moore, Frank Sina­tra), Trump par­took of the emp­ty box dis­count, skip­ping the state sales tax on some $65,000 worth of pur­chas­es. Once pinched, in 1986, he tes­ti­fied against the retail­er, avoid­ing a pros­e­cu­tion that would have jeop­ar­dized his New Jer­sey casi­no license.

Fas­ci­nat­ing­ly, infa­mous Sau­di arms deal­er and Iran-Con­tra fig­ure Adnan Khashog­gi was also one of the scam­mers. Khashog­gi lat­er sold his per­son­al ocean lin­er to Trump for use as a pri­vate yacht.”

BTW–David Cay John­ston wrote about this as well.

Best,

Dave

More about “Trumpen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion”

”
I wrote about this many years ago when the inci­dent first hap­pened, and most­ly for­got about it until now. Invin­ci­ble Ger­many is lit­er­al­ly a Goebbels con­cept and phrase. Quick sum­ma­ry: The Trump chil­dren are part of a mind con­trol cult that has an agen­da of cre­at­ing an “Invin­ci­ble Ger­many”. I do not think that is a “coin­ci­dence”.

UPDATE: After writ­ing about the David Lynch/Germany aspect of all this, I found some­thing new that is at the bot­tom of this piece: Trump worked to under­mine the Buchanan wing of the Reform Par­ty by attack­ing him and David Duke, while not crit­i­ciz­ing the TM wing. Also keep this in mind when one con­sid­ers Trump’s “who is he?” moment dur­ing the ’16 cam­paign when asked about David Duke. He knows EXACTLY who fuck­ing David Duke is...

...back to our reg­u­lar­ly sched­uled TM crazy bull­shit...

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/director-buys-berlin-mountain-david-gets-lynched-over-invincible-germany-meditation-center-plan-a-517873.html

...A crowd of star­ry-eyed film stu­dents and med­i­ta­tion devo­tees filled an audi­to­ri­um in Berlin Tues­day expect­ing to hear a lec­ture by David Lynch, the quirky but accom­plished Hol­ly­wood direc­tor. What they got, how­ev­er, was a sales pitch for a New Age uni­ver­si­ty that Lynch, the Oscar-nom­i­nat­ed direc­tor of movies like “The Ele­phant Man” and “Mull­hol­land Dri­ve,” wants to build on the Teufels­berg, Berlin’s high­est hill­top. Lynch does not speak Ger­man and the man he chose to relay his vision, his Ger­man guru Emanuel Schif­f­gens, described the pro­posed uni­ver­si­ty in terms sure to offend any Ger­man with any grasp of 20th cen­tu­ry his­to­ry.

“Invin­ci­ble Ger­many! Invin­ci­ble Ger­many! I want to hear you all say, invin­ci­ble Ger­many!” said Schif­f­gens to the audi­ence in Berlin’s Ura­nia the­ater. Reac­tion from the audi­ence was imme­di­ate — and over­whelm­ing­ly neg­a­tive. “That’s what Hitler want­ed!” shout­ed one man. Schif­f­gens’ response only made mat­ters worse: “Yes, but unfor­tu­nate­ly he did­n’t suc­ceed.”

NOTE: Here is video of this inci­dent...

https://vimeo.com/4201441

NOTE: More on the Teufels­berg man­made hill in Berlin... quite a his­to­ry! Angry local Luther­ans got pissed off about the cult’s plan to build a school at the hill, so the plan was squashed.

http://www.readersdigest.co.uk/travel-adventure/guide/secret-spies-berlins-devils-mountain

...Teufels­berg, ‘Devil’s Moun­tain’ in Ger­man, is an aban­doned NSA spy sta­tion just 30 min­utes out of the city cen­tre in Grunewald For­est.

Over the years it has served many pur­pos­es: Nazi col­lege, ski jump, espi­onage unit, Lynchi­an yoga school, etc. And like any oth­er site of sig­nif­i­cance in Berlin, Teufels­berg has been treat­ed to a pas­tel coat of paint from the city’s indus­tri­ous street artists.

In addi­tion to street art, Berlin is also a city syn­ony­mous with secre­cy. The Gestapo secret police brought ter­ror to the streets dur­ing Hitler’s reign and just a few years lat­er the Sovi­ets assem­bled a com­plex net­work of inform­ers in East Berlin known as the Stasi.

...Dur­ing the Cold War, the Stasi wasn’t the only organ­i­sa­tion spy­ing on the Ger­man cap­i­tal. In 1961 the NSA built the sophis­ti­cat­ed Teufels­berg lis­ten­ing sta­tion at the top of Devil’s Moun­tain, the high­est point in the city, to eaves­drop on the East­ern Bloc. Devil’s Moun­tain is actu­al­ly a man­made hill. It was formed from around 75 mil­lion cubic metres of rub­ble from a Nazi tech­ni­cal col­lege that was too stur­dy to demol­ish. The tor was ini­tial­ly used as a ski jump, with capac­i­ty for 5,000 spec­ta­tors, but it seems the US pre­ferred not to have so many civil­ians knock­ing about near their spy sta­tion and the alpine cen­tre was closed in 1969.

...For decades the beau­ti­ful radomes were used to pro­tect anten­nae and accen­tu­ate their sig­nal, as NSA work­ers lis­tened in on East Berlin. But when the Wall fell in 1989 the sta­tion was closed and a group of investors bought the area with plans to build hotels and apart­ments. How­ev­er, these con­struc­tion plans nev­er got off the ground and nei­ther did David Lynch’s attempt to build an ‘invin­ci­ble uni­ver­si­ty’ for the prac­tice of ‘tran­scen­den­tal med­i­ta­tion’ in 2007.
One of Lynch’s advo­cates mis­tak­en­ly used lan­guage evoca­tive of Adolf Hitler’s visions dur­ing a pub­lic lec­ture and the project was swift­ly canned.

NOTE: I had not seen this sto­ry before, but Raja Emmanuel Schif­f­gens had actu­al­ly been in the news five years pre­vi­ous for creepy behav­ior on behalf of TM, this time in Cos­ta Rica. They basi­cal­ly tried to cre­ate their own autonomous region in Cos­ta Rica on a native reser­va­tion! Fuck­ing ass­holes...

From AP:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.meditation.transcendental/2Nzu8q2r60o/osPvUFdEaawJ

SAN JOSE, Cos­ta Rica — Cos­ta Rica’s pres­i­dent has ordered the expul­sion of a group of for­eign­ers, appar­ent­ly linked to an Indi­an guru, after they paid mem­bers of an Indi­an reser­va­tion in return for the right to name a king, the
coun­try’s secu­ri­ty min­is­ter said Thurs­day.
The for­eign­ers, mem­bers of an orga­ni­za­tion called the Glob­al Coun­try for World Peace, alleged­ly offered each fam­i­ly dlrs 250 a month in return for the right to name the king of the Tala­man­ca reserve, 140 miles (230 kms) south of the cap­i­tal, San Jose.

A cer­e­mo­ny on June 23, which named one of the Indi­ans as the com­mu­ni­ty’s first king, caused unrest among many res­i­dents of the reserve. They then asked Cos­ta Rican offi­cials to step in. After ana­lyz­ing a report by the secu­ri­ty min­istry, Pres­i­dent Abel Pacheco decid­ed to expel Ger­man Emmanuel Schif­f­gens, the orga­ni­za­tion’s pre­sumed leader.

“The pres­i­dent reviewed the report and for him it was obvi­ous that they were pro­mot­ing an inde­pen­dent state with­in Cos­ta Rica, and we can’t tol­er­ate that,” Secu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Roge­lio Ramos said. In March last year, Schif­f­gens was list­ed as prime min­is­ter of the Nether­lands-based Glob­al Coun­try of World Peace, a “nation with­out bor­ders” found­ed by the Mahar­ishi Mahesh Yogi, a spir­i­tu­al leader with fol­low­ers around the world who was once guru to The Bea­t­les.

His fol­low­ers also have a large base and schools in Fair­field, Iowa. The Glob­al Coun­try’s “sov­er­eign ruler” is Raja Nad­er Raam, also known as Tony Nad­er, who the group’s web site cred­its with dis­cov­er­ing “the con­sti­tu­tion of the uni­verse.” Schif­f­gens has said that the group did noth­ing wrong, and only want­ed devel­op­ment for the remote, poor region in the moun­tains near the bor­der with Pana­ma.
Ramos accused the group of try­ing to “seduce the Indi­ans with large quan­ti­ties of mon­ey.”

Offi­cials did not release the num­ber of for­eign­ers who accom­pa­nied Schif­f­gens, or where they were from. He said all would be forced to leave the coun­try.

NOTE: The end game for the David Lynch Foun­da­tion is to get TM into schools. Sep­a­ra­tion of Church and State? Ah, for­get about it. Keep in mind, if I was from a right-wing church in the area of a school that was allow­ing TM to be taught, I would GO APESHIT if my church was not get­ting the same treat­ment. And they would be right. The same thing hap­pened with Sci­en­tol­ogy which has been relent­less in try­ing to get their pro­gram into LA schools, with occa­sion­al suc­cess! I don’t want ANY of them in pub­lic schools: no TM, no anti-gay Chris­tians, no $cien­tol­ogy, no sharia, NONE of it. Call me old-fash­ioned..

This anti-TM web­site (by an ex-mem­ber) has some more info on the TM/Lynch agen­da, includ­ing the Invin­ci­ble Ger­many con­cept... Bet­ter to read it at the site, as it has hyper­links to more good info on these top­ics. But here are the high­lights...

http://www.suggestibility.org/DavidLynch.shtml

...As the par­ent of a school-age child, how­ev­er, you only need to know three things about him:

He wants your child to learn TM.
He’ll pay for it.
He’s wants to do this with­in the author­i­ty and moral aus­pices of your child’s school.

The man has won­der­ful inten­tions. I know this because so did I when I was a TMer. He believes very deeply that TM will do won­der­ful things for your chil­dren.

And he has research to “prove” it. And lots of celebri­ty endorse­ments. And endorse­ments from edu­ca­tors. The prob­lem is that none of those celebri­ties and edu­ca­tors know what is behind the facade of the Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion orga­ni­za­tion. They only know what they’ve been told.

....What’s hap­pen­ing in the video is that Lynch is lend­ing his pres­tige to sup­port the “Raja of Ger­many” at a news con­fer­ence held to pro­mote the build­ing of a “Tow­er of Invin­ci­bil­i­ty” in Ger­many. The mere build­ing of such a tow­er will make Ger­many lit­er­al­ly invin­ci­ble against its ene­mies! Lynch believes this! Fur­ther­more he wants your chil­dren to believe it too! And some of them even­tu­al­ly will!

There’s more to the invin­ci­bil­i­ty thing though. In order to achieve invin­ci­bil­i­ty the Tow­er must be staffed with “yog­ic fly­ers”! David Lynch believes that the peo­ple in this video are lit­er­al­ly phys­i­cal­ly lev­i­tat­ing! (While the music is a bit whim­si­cal that video is not a joke — those guys do think that they are actu­al­ly lev­i­tat­ing!) Your kids will find out about lev­i­ta­tion in the TM Clubs. They won’t be taught how to “lev­i­tate” in the clubs but they will be indoc­tri­nat­ed via trance and sug­ges­tion so that it is some­thing that many of them will end up strong­ly want­i­ng to learn when they get old enough.

NOTE: These are the peo­ple who bounce around on mats while sit­ting on their ass­es and tell them it is “yog­ic fly­ing”... fun­ny as hell... if you can ignore the deep psy­cho­log­i­cal brain­wash­ing it takes to make peo­ple believe this.

„Pic­ture your child in that video some­time in the future! It’s high­ly pos­si­ble. Those are some­body’s chil­dren, and I guar­an­tee that these young peo­ple did­n’t learn in grade school like your kids will. They weren’t exposed to TM trance and sug­ges­tion indoc­tri­na­tion until after age 18, and they still end­ed up there! Grade-school kids don’t have much of a chance against the type of pow­er­ful indoc­tri­na­tion they’ll be exposed to for years in school.

Yes, I said Raja, as in “King.” Lynch believes that the guy in the Burg­er King crown and white sheets real­ly is the Raja of Ger­many! He’s “Raja of Ger­many for the Glob­al Coun­try of World Peace”, and is there­fore the spir­i­tu­al leader of all of Ger­many!

The guy in the Burg­er King crown in the video is “Raja Emanuel.” He is a sort of “assis­tant” Raja. He’s “only” the Raja of Ger­many instead of Raja of the entire world, but he’s still a “Raja.”

He went to a real live “Raja Train­ing Course” to attain this height. I’m dead seri­ous, a course that he paid a mil­lion dol­lars for in order to train to be a “Raja.” If you’ll replay the video above you’ll hear Lynch men­tion­ing the pow­er of the Raja Train­ing Course to the audi­ence. By the way, I’m sure that Emanuel Schif­f­gens was a fair­ly nor­mal guy too before Mahesh broke his mind and turned him into the blath­er­ing robot you see in the video.

..Lynch does­n’t just believe that these guys are lit­er­al­ly spir­i­tu­al kings. He believes in the entire TM fan­ta­sy uni­verse. Lynch is com­plete­ly unbe­liev­ably nuts! It takes noth­ing away from his being a great artist. And it’s noth­ing per­son­al, I was unbe­liev­ably nuts too. Lynch is a nice guy, I was a nice guy, it does­n’t mat­ter. Lynch is incred­i­bly bril­liant and cre­ative, I’m pret­ty smart but not remote­ly as cre­ative, it does­n’t mat­ter. We both put our pants on one leg at a time, we both have human psy­cholo­gies, which does mat­ter, and we were both just as help­less.

Lynch wants to teach your chil­dren to achieve the same delu­sion­al state he is in! For their own good, of course.

...Some facts

- The DLF tried to get into a school in San Rafael, Cal­i­for­nia. Unfor­tu­nate­ly for them one of the school’s par­ents, Gina Cate­na, was a for­mer ful­ly-involved TMer who knew every­thing found in this web site and more. Here’s her let­ter to the School Dis­trict. Even after that the prin­ci­pal and school dis­trict want­ed to con­tin­ue with the pro­gram! How­ev­er hav­ing got­ten wind of this the DLF with­drew their offer . I can only think it’s because Gina is very well known in the TMer com­mu­ni­ty and knows where the bod­ies are buried, and the DLF knew they were in for some bad pub­lic­i­ty.

- They will tell you that TM is a “sim­ple nat­ur­al relax­ation tech­nique.” That’s all they say about what your chil­dren will learn. This is “men­tal reser­va­tion again”, i.e. a decep­tion. The TM tech­nique is nev­er taught alone, it is only ever taught com­bined with instruc­tion in TM-the-reli­gion.

- This isn’t the first time that TMers have tried to insin­u­ate them­selves into pub­lic schools. They tried it in the 70’s. What Mahesh did was to recast TM reli­gious doc­trine in the guise of a “sci­ence”, which he dubbed the “Sci­ence of Cre­ative Intel­li­gence.” All of the dog­ma was still there, it was just enrobed in pseu­do­sci­en­tif­ic bab­ble. Since many peo­ple seem to think that any­thing that sounds like sci­ence is sci­ence, a lot of peo­ple fell for the “SCI” approach. How­ev­er, the Unit­ed States Dis­trict Court for the Dis­trict of New Jer­sey found that SCI is reli­gious doc­trine. Your kids will be learn­ing the exact same doc­trine.

- The DLF will have already pre­emp­tive­ly pre­pared the prin­ci­pal and the school dis­trict with defens­es against your objec­tions! The prin­ci­pal knows that you are com­ing, and has been prepped. You will have already (with­out know­ing exact­ly who you will turn out to be yet) been cast as “igno­rant” of what TM real­ly is. And you will have been cast as a bit of a reli­gious fanat­ic if you have reli­gious con­vic­tions (TMers don’t like the First Amend­ment much). In the art of rhetoric this strat­e­gy is called poi­son­ing the well. It will allow the prin­ci­pal and school dis­trict to ratio­nal­ize dis­miss­ing you out of hand with­out real­ly con­sid­er­ing the mer­its of your argu­ments. Remem­ber, the prin­ci­pal and the school dis­trict have already put them­selves out on a limb for this and they are very like­ly to fight you, as was the expe­ri­ence in San Rafael. When the par­ent meet­ing was called there the estab­lish­ment of a “TM Club” in school was pre­sent­ed to the par­ents as a fait accom­pli which they were being informed of, not being con­sult­ed on! It’s only because par­ents, includ­ing Gina, made them­selves informed and then stood their ground that it was stopped. Don’t be cowed. Even if the pro­gram gets ram­rod­ded in you can still fight it.

- You will be told that the DLF is giv­ing a “grant to the school”. This sounds great, except that the grant mon­ey does not go to the school. It goes to the TM orga­ni­za­tion.

- There have been no lon­gi­tu­di­nal stud­ies on the effect of this dis­so­cia­tive medi­a­tion tech­nique on the devel­op­ing psy­cholo­gies of chil­dren. The few stud­ies that have been done on chil­dren and youth con­sist of study sam­ples too small to be sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant.

- If the DLF has your school in their sights, or if they are already there, then you are not only deal­ing with a high­ly respect­ed and admired pub­lic fig­ure, you are also deal­ing with high­ly pol­ished full-time pro­fes­sion­al TMers who have ded­i­cat­ed their whole lives to this. They’ll fight you with some very slick “men­tal reser­va­tion”, and unless you know what they’re hid­ing it will be hard to counter them. I’d be hap­py to give you advice on coun­ter­ing their argu­ments. You can also write to Gina (the San Rafael mom) here. And you can vis­it her blog ” comingtolifestories.com.”

NOTE: I nev­er knew this until right now! Appar­ent­ly, TRUMP had flirt­ed with the idea of becom­ing the Reform Par­ty can­di­date in 2000. I don’t even remem­ber that. So once again, we find him close to the TM nexus. And in his state­ment announc­ing he was­n’t going to go for the nom­i­na­tion, he took a swipe at Pat Buchanan, David Duke (I’d also for­got­ten he was in the Reform mix that year as well!), and Leno­ra Fulani (who is part of the cult/party New Alliance con­sid­ered “left wing”, but whose only pur­pose has been to help draw votes from lib­er­al can­di­dates who opposed Giu­liani and Bloomberg, who open­ly sup­port the par­ty’s efforts... in case you are won­der­ing how the hell lib­er­al NYC ever had GOP may­ors).

While tak­ing shots at Buchanan, Duke, and Fulani is NOT a neg­a­tive in my view of Trump ( I agree with him on that) think about what he is affect­ing here. He is bash­ing those who were against John “What the Bleep” Hagelin who was the rep of the TM wing of the par­ty! His sen­tence ” ”The Reform Par­ty now includes a Klans­man, Mr. Duke, a neo-Nazi, Mr. Buchanan, and a com­mu­nist, Ms. Fulani,”. DOES NOT include “a crazy ass med­i­ta­tion cult”. Even 17 years ago, Trump was effec­tive­ly work­ing with the TM agen­da, which under­mined Buchanan... which would up elect­ing Bush as Buchanan could not pull votes from him in Flori­da. Pol­i­tics, man...

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/14/us/reform-bid-said-to-be-a-no-go-for-trump.html

...He said that although his book and his busi­ness­es had prob­a­bly ben­e­fit­ed from the expo­sure his cam­paign gen­er­at­ed, ”I did not launch my explorato­ry cam­paign for that rea­son.” Mr. Trump paint­ed a fair­ly dark pic­ture of the Reform Par­ty in his state­ment, not­ing the role of Mr. Buchanan, along with the roles of David Duke, a for­mer leader of the Ku Klux Klan, and Leno­ra Fulani, the for­mer stan­dard-bear­er of the New Alliance Par­ty and an advo­cate of Marx­ist-Lenin­ist pol­i­tics. ”The Reform Par­ty now includes a Klans­man, Mr. Duke, a neo-Nazi, Mr. Buchanan, and a com­mu­nist, Ms. Fulani,” he said in his state­ment. ”This is not com­pa­ny I wish to keep.”

Ain’t we got fun!

Best,

Dave

As a side note to the TM enter­tain­ment angle:

Howard Stern is also a well known advo­cate and decades long prac­ti­tion­er of TM.

When he inter­viewed Jer­ry Sein­feld they both dis­cussed their mutu­al appre­ci­a­tion for TM.

They are both cold-heart­ed ass­holes whose com­e­dy relies exclu­sive­ly on the vic­tim­iza­tion of weak peo­ple.

Jer­ry Sein­feld also prac­ticed Sci­en­tol­ogy for a few years.

If any of your lis­ten­ers have any his­to­ry of watch­ing the Howard Stern show from its infan­cy on local sta­tion WWOR chan­nel 9 in NYC, then lat­er on the cable E! net­work, you’ll see the advent of cam­eras every­where on his staff, and his demands that noth­ing be script­ed, and every­thing about every­one on the table as fod­der for his rat­ings at all times.

He would mock his staff into ner­vous break­downs on air, and reply those episodes over and over for more humil­i­a­tion. (Gary Del­l’A­bate “Baba Booey” , Scott The Engi­neer, Stut­ter­ing John Melen­dez, etc.)

Stern is infa­mous for demand­ing that every­one around him bring in their per­son­al sto­ries on his show to dri­ve con­flict between staff, con­flict between celebri­ties and all the while his style was to bring in his wife and par­ents into his par­a­digm.

Actress Dana Pla­to, from Dif­fer­ent Strokes, com­mit­ted sui­cide a day after her last inter­view with Howard Stern.

He encour­aged actu­al ring-fights between his staff, with bet­ting pools. (Stut­ter­ing John and Cab­bie)

He enabled alco­holics to drink them­selves in to uncon­scious­ness on the air and for his E! shows. (Hank the Angry Drunk­en Dwarf — even­tu­al­ly drank him­self to death)

He encour­aged and broad­cast crank-calls con­duct­ed dur­ing live emer­gen­cies on tele­vi­sion news where his fans would pre­tend to be at an emer­gency scene, call into a live news broad­cast then say “Baba Booey” as a ref­er­ence to Howard’s show. (Cap­tain Janks)

Howard would crack up as his fans con­tin­ued to make prank calls dur­ing emer­gency events.

This was what was chan­neled out of his cre­ative impuls­es.

Stern had no bound­aries and he cred­it­ed his suc­cess to his dai­ly prac­tice of TM, and active­ly advo­cat­ed it on the air and in his books.

This next July 5, 2021 Guardian UK arti­cle talks about how the Noto­ri­ous­ly right wing Coors fam­i­ly owns Coors beer was exper­i­ment­ing with a new form of sub­lim­i­nal adver­tis­ing to increase beer sales. Coors recent­ly launched a new adver­tis­ing cam­paign. The com­pa­ny was plan­ning to infil­trate people’s dreams to get them to buy, and pre­sum­ably drink, Coors beer.

Coors encour­aged peo­ple to watch a short online video before bed, then play an eight-hour “sound­scape” through the night. If suc­cess­ful, this “tar­get­ed dream incu­ba­tion” would trig­ger “refresh­ing dreams” of Coors, accord­ing to the com­pa­ny.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/jul/05/advertisers-targeted-dream-incubation?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Night­mare sce­nario: alarm as adver­tis­ers seek to plug into our dreams
After Coors sought to steer uncon­scious minds to thoughts of beer, sci­en­tists have called for curbs on ‘tar­get­ed dream incu­ba­tion’
Adam Gab­batt

When brew­ing giant Coors launched a new adver­tis­ing cam­paign ear­li­er this year, the for­mat came as a sur­prise to many. The com­pa­ny was plan­ning to infil­trate people’s dreams to get them to buy, and pre­sum­ably drink, Coors beer.

Coors encour­aged peo­ple to watch a short online video before bed, then play an eight-hour “sound­scape” through the night. If suc­cess­ful, this “tar­get­ed dream incu­ba­tion” would trig­ger “refresh­ing dreams” of Coors, accord­ing to the com­pa­ny.

It’s unclear how many peo­ple took part in the dream manip­u­la­tion – the top Google search result for “Coors dreams” is cur­rent­ly the song Dreams, per­formed by the Irish pop-rock band the Corrs – but experts warn that the Coors cam­paign is not just a gim­mick, and may have opened a door to a trou­bling future.

“They’re try­ing to push an addic­tive drug on peo­ple who are naive to what’s being done to them. I don’t know if it can get much worse than that,” Bob Stick­gold, a cog­ni­tive neu­ro­sci­en­tist and pro­fes­sor of psy­chi­a­try at Har­vard med­ical school, said of Coors’ efforts, which he believed could poten­tial­ly be repli­cat­ed by oth­er com­pa­nies.

“Any­thing you could imag­ine an adver­tis­ing cam­paign for, at all, could arguably be enhanced by weaponiz­ing sleep,” Stick­gold said.

Stick­gold was one of the co-authors of a recent open let­ter which sound­ed the alarm over com­pa­nies using tar­get­ed dream incu­ba­tion in June. The let­ter was signed by 35 sleep and dream researchers from around the world.
“TDI-adver­tis­ing is not some fun gim­mick, but a slip­pery slope with real con­se­quences,” the let­ter warned. “The poten­tial for mis­use of these tech­nolo­gies is as omi­nous as it is obvi­ous.”

The con­cept of dream incu­ba­tion – “tech­niques employed dur­ing wake­ful­ness to help a per­son dream about a spe­cif­ic top­ic” – has been around for thou­sands of years, accord­ing to researchers.

In the more recent past, Sal­vador Dalí was giv­en to the prac­tice of hold­ing a spoon while nap­ping, in an attempt to enhance his cre­ativ­i­ty. When Dalí began to fall into a deep­er slum­ber, and hope­ful­ly dream, the spoon would drop from his hand on to a pre-posi­tioned din­ner plate, wak­ing him up in a state where he could remem­ber the images or scenes he had – briefly – dreamt.

Over the past decade research has shown that people’s dreams can be more tar­get­ed, and that humans can be high­ly sus­cep­ti­ble to thoughts or ideas intro­duced while they sleep.

A 2014 study found that smok­ers exposed to the smell of cig­a­rettes and rot­ten eggs while they slept smoked 30% few­er cig­a­rettes dur­ing the fol­low­ing week, while Stick­gold said oth­er work had shown that racial bias can be reduced by tar­get­ed dream incu­ba­tion.

While much of the research so far has been aimed at pos­i­tive results, sci­en­tists fear the threat of dream adver­tis­ing is real, and in an increas­ing­ly wired world it is not like­ly to be lim­it­ed to will­ing par­tic­i­pa­tion.

“Some­thing like 30 mil­lion peo­ple have these lis­ten­ing, Alexa-type devices in their bed­room. And those devices can play any­thing they want when­ev­er they want and adver­tis­ers could buy adver­tis­ing time, [for adverts] they want played at 2.30 in the morn­ing,” Stick­gold said.

“You could have this sort of 1984 sit­u­a­tion where adver­tis­ers buy adver­tis­ing time on these devices, and nobody ever knows they’re hear­ing them.”

It wouldn’t be an entire­ly straight­for­ward process. To sell a project invol­un­tar­i­ly through dreams, the poten­tial adver­tis­ing cam­paign would have to be linked to adverts peo­ple see while they are awake.

Stick­gold said it could poten­tial­ly be done by play­ing a cer­tain sound every time a prod­uct – a Coors beer, or a Corrs album, for exam­ple – is seen dur­ing a tele­vi­sion or YouTube advert.

Replay­ing that sound while some­one is sleep­ing, poten­tial­ly through a home device, would, in the­o­ry, then trig­ger dreams about how nice it would be to drink a beer, or lis­ten to an Irish gui­tar and vio­lin-dri­ven musi­cal ensem­ble.

It’s a sober­ing thought, and in an effort to avoid such sce­nar­ios, the June let­ter called for stricter reg­u­la­tion on adver­tis­ing, to pre­vent prod­ucts being thrust into dreams. Stick­gold said the Fed­er­al Trade Com­mis­sion already restricts some sub­lim­i­nal adver­tis­ing, such as the flash­ing of words or images dur­ing films or TV shows, and would be able to inter­vene.

“One way we could go in the US is to get a rul­ing from the FTC, that any attempts to manip­u­late peo­ple while they’re sleep­ing, whether it’s specif­i­cal­ly through dream induc­tion, or through oth­er process­es of sleep-depen­dent learn­ing, would sim­i­lar­ly count as unfair trade process­es,” Stick­gold said.

The com­mis­sion is yet to com­ment on whether it will wade into the issue, even as researchers say some com­pa­nies are active­ly exam­in­ing the poten­tial to worm their way into dreams.

Our slum­ber may be safe for the moment, but sci­en­tists believe this is a real threat.

“We believe that proac­tive action and new pro­tec­tive poli­cies are urgent­ly need­ed,” Stick­gold and his fel­low sleep experts wrote.

“To keep adver­tis­ers from manip­u­lat­ing one of the last refuges of our already belea­guered con­scious and uncon­scious minds: our dreams.”